Technology

Global venture capital firm White Star Capital has closed a second fund of $180 million, money it plans to invest in &transatlantic& companies that need help to go international. The VC already has a presence in London, New York, and Montreal, and as part if its new fund is adding Paris and Tokyo to the list.

Oversubscribed from an initial target of $140 million, apparently, White Star says it will invest in around 20 new companies from the new fund, writing opening cheques of between $1 million and $6 million. White Starfirst fund of $70 million closed in 2015 and the VC has backed around 26 startups to date. Notably, the firm has already invested in eight companies from its second fund.

They span Seed to Series B and include fintech and insurtech companies Borrowell (Canada) and Clark (Germany), as well as &disruptive commerce& models Vention (Canada), Meero (France), and Butternut Box (U.K.). The fund has also invested in digital health companies Echo (U.K.) and Dialogue (Canada), as well as data-as-a-service company Unacast (US).

LPs in the new fund include institutional investors such as Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), Fonds de solidarité FTQ (FSTQ), the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), Korea Venture Investment Corporation (KVIC), Investissement Quebec, ARKEA Group, Mizuho Securities, Swen Capital Partners, Isomer Capital, Walter Financial, Clerville Investment Management, Temaris Capital, Simone Investments, and Portag3 Ventures. In addition, a number of multinational corporate groups have invested including Veolia, La Capitale, Corporate Groupe ADP, Ubisoft and Unisys Corporation through Canal Ventures.

In a call last week, White Star Capital Managing Partner and co-founder Eric Martineau-Fortin told me the VC will look to focus on three specific areas of investment. They are fintech, &disruptive commerce&, and algorithms and sensors.

Asked if most of the unbundling of various consumer financial services was now &done& and that we are now likely to see a next phase of consolidation, the VC didn&t disagree but pointed me to insurance, which is an industry still very much ripe for the picking. White Star has already made two insurtech investments and I got the impression it isn&t done yet.

The firm is also keeping an eye on how technologies like Blockchain is developing but Martineau-Fortin said he hasn&t been persuaded that the use cases were there quite yet.

More broadly, White Starnew fund will continue to seek out companies that use data as a competitive advantage and where the fund&operational experience and physical presence can help companies scale internationally&.

Meanwhile, to help beef up its own global presence, White Star Capital has recruited Matthieu Lattes, who was previously a VC specialist at Rothschild, as its new Partner in Paris. In addition, Shun Nagao has joined as a Venture Partner in Tokyo, and Lylan Masterman has been promoted to Partner in the VC firmoffice in New York.

Alongside Martineau-Fortin (who tells me he is partly relocating from New York to Paris to lead the firmpresence in France), the firmother personnel are Jean-Francois Marcoux (the former co-founder of mobile game publisher Ludia), and Christian Hernandez Gallardo (a former Facebook executive) who heads up White StarLondon operations.

Adds Martineau-Fortin: &Our growing team has extensive operational experience and we are passionate about supporting ambitious entrepreneurs with truly global ambitions. Internationalisation represents a huge opportunity for many high-growth companies and our global reach means we can support companies looking to scale outside of their home market. We become active partners to all the entrepreneurs we work with and the new fund will enable us to help even more companies realise their potential&.

Every year,Timemagazine gets swamped with pitches from thousands of companies, all convincedtheirproduct deserves to be included inTime&25 Best Inventions& list. This past December, the magazine reserved its cover for a Pixar-like, 11-inch armless robot namedJibo.

Jibo — a so-called &social robot& — is just the latest example of a clear phenomenon: A new generation of exponentially more intelligent and capable robots is on the way. In fact, they&re already everywhere we look: over our heads, in our cars and operating rooms, next to us on the assembly lines, in our military, and on the last mile.

And the prospect of exponentially more robots, crunching exponentially more data, necessitates not just a lot more computing power but also an entirely new product architecture.

An article written in 2015 by a former Pentagon robotics researcher looks more prescient by the day.

That summer, Gill Pratt, who oversaw robotics technology as a manager of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), said robot capabilities had crossed a key threshold. Improvements in electric energy storage and the exponential growth of computation power and data storage, he argued, had enabled robots to learn and make decisions informed by the experiences of other robots.

His expectation back then Robots would multiply like rabbits because they were no longer simple-minded, single-purposed machines. And as robots learn more and more, Pratt argued, more people will have uses for them.

Today, thatexactly what we&re seeing. Demand for robotics is increasingly broad-based. Everybody seems to want them.

To get a sense of this growth, consider: In 2014, the Boston Consulting Group forecast the global market for robotics would reach $67 billion over the coming decade. Justthree years later, BCG last June revised that dollar figure upward & by another $20 billion.

The DARPA horse

Dollars rise as use cases expand

Industry has for decades been a core consumer of robotics. Today,the majorityof the worldrobots are still used in factories.

Whatdifferent is that those robots are a lot smaller, more perceptive and more collaborative than their predecessors. And the flood of venture capital into the space ensures we&ll be seeing a lot more of them in our distribution centers and warehouses in coming years.

Consider that between 2016 and 2017, venture capital investments in industrial robotsmore than tripled, from $402 million to $1.2 billion. Five years ago, startups in this same space raised just $195 million.

Also interesting about this current robotics explosion is that companies from a wide swath of other industries, from retailers to hotels, are embracing the benefits of smarter machines. Theinsurance industry, for example, has begun using artificial intelligence tools like machine vision and natural language processing to handle claims.

These expanding use cases help explain why Boston Consulting Group now expects the commercial robotics market to grow to $23 billion by 2025—34 percent higher than originally predicted.

Itconsumers, though, who account for the biggest spike in demand. BCGprojections of the consumer marketsize rose by156 percent. Many prominent firms, includingAndreessen Horowitz,Fenox Venture CapitalandSequoia, have noticed and have invested in educational and &entertainment robots.&

As we speak, therea fierce race to develop self-driving automotive technology. Autonomous vehicle startups raised $3 billion in 2017, more than three times the prior yeartake. Robot teachers and companions are attracting attention, too.

And we can&t forget drones. Beyond their many commercial applications, particularly in security, personal drones are an increasingly popular gadget. Chinese drone maker DJI alone has raised more than $100 million from US venture capital firms.

(Photo by Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Intelligence at the edge

At their core, robots create a lot of data. In fact, thatthe onlywaythey work. And several trends in robotics will increase demand for more processors and an entirely new product architecture.

The coming wave of robots will need to hear more, see more and feel more. Each of those capabilities necessitates its own sensors, such as microphones, cameras and, to a lesser extent, touchscreen displays. And each ofthoserequires its own processors.

Then therethe software underlying robotic capabilities. We believe AI, computer vision, natural language processing and blockchain will be the key enabling forces here.

Robots will also have a greater need to communicate — both via the cloud, and without access to it. After all, many, if not most, of todayrobots are only as effective as their internet connections. And we expect the growing number and sophistication of robots will place enormous strain on network bandwidth, turning smart robots into slow ones.

With all of this activity, itclear that the robot revolution is only just beginning.

Podcasts are television for the earbud generation.

And podcasts have been around for a surprisingly long time. If you&re one of the folks who got hooked on podcasts around 2014, when Sarah Koenig and other producers from This American Life launched the wildly popular Serial podcast, you might think that ita brand new medium. But podcasts — audio thatpackaged and syndicated over RSS — have been aroundsince the early 2000s.

And although many podcasters make money, typically through sponsorships, the podcasting industry (such as it is) hasn&t received much in the way of venture funding until quite recently. 2017 was a pivotal year for venture investment in the industry.

A venture-ready industry

In the chart below, we plot deal and dollar volume for venture rounds raised by companies that are either in Crunchbase&s href="https://www.crunchbase.com/search/organizations/field/organizations/categories/podcast">podcast categoryor use the word &podcast& in their descriptions: