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Zac Estrada is a reporter covering transportation, technology and policy. A former reporter for The Verge and Jalopnik, his work has also appeared in Automobile Magazine, Autoweek, Pacific Standard, Boston.com and BLAC Detroit. A native of Southern California, he is a graduate of Northeastern University in Boston. You can find him on Twitter at @zacestrada.
Residents of Santa Monica will be able to have their food delivered by robotaxi next year.
Boston-based advanced driverless company Motional announced Thursday it would collaborate with Uber Technologies on a program to deliver meal kits to customers using a fleet of modified autonomous-capable Hyundai cars. Motional is also planning to launch its robotaxi service in Las Vegas sometime in 2022.
When the delivery service first rolls out though, the tech won’t work with any Santa Monica restaurant within a given delivery radius. Rather, customers who want food delivered by a robotaxi will go through the Uber app, where they will find an option to select a Motional vehicle with a curated selection of meal kits.
A Motional spokesperson told dot.LA it would announce more details of the contents of the kits that are also part of the Uber partnership.
While the company called the program “an expansion into driverless delivery,” Motional confirmed to dot.LA it does not have a permit with the California Department of Motor Vehicles to operate vehicles on public roads without a driver. As a result, all of their delivery robotaxis will have a human operator inside.
In a post on the Motional website on Thursday, President and CEO Karl Iagnemma cited the rapid growth of delivery services — roughly doubling since the start of the Covid-19 spread and pandemic-instigated shutdowns in March 2020 — as the company’s reason for getting into the space. Iagnemma predicts the driverless food delivery service market to exceed $115 billion by 2030.
The robotaxi announcement is Motional’s latest announcement about its Santa Monica hub. In August, the company announced it would significantly expand its Santa Monica operations after moving to a larger space to accommodate staff and the anticipation of vehicle testing on public roads. The company said then there would be more than 100 employees at the Santa Monica location by the end of 2021.
Founded in 2020, the young company has been making significant moves apart from expanding staff and testing. Hyundai, which has its American operations in Fountain Valley, will play a significant role in testing vehicles for future autonomous or driverless testing and implementation for ride-hailing services.
It sealed the deal with the automaker last March when it was announced Hyundai’s all-electric Ioniq 5 small SUVs would be fitted with the tech company’s light detection and ranging (LiDAR) and other equipment necessary for detecting road objects.
While Motional has been testing the Ioniq 5 in other markets, the Santa Monica Uber program will be the first time it will be deployed for public use, ahead of a fully driverless ride-hailing pilot program in Las Vegas set to start in 2022.
The $40,925 Ioniq 5 also just went on sale to the U.S. public; the first vehicle was delivered to an L.A. resident on Wednesday.
Zac Estrada is a reporter covering transportation, technology and policy. A former reporter for The Verge and Jalopnik, his work has also appeared in Automobile Magazine, Autoweek, Pacific Standard, Boston.com and BLAC Detroit. A native of Southern California, he is a graduate of Northeastern University in Boston. You can find him on Twitter at @zacestrada.
Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
According to PledgeLA’s annual report, the Los Angeles venture capital and tech scene is still very much an all-boys club.
From an analysis of more than 6,300 investment transactions made in 2021 the L.A. venture capital report found that the percentage of funding going to white male founders increased to 53% of the whole (that's an increase of 7% over the prior year). Meanwhile, Black founders saw a 5% decrease. The data also highlights how Black and Latino founders are the most underfunded group over the last three years. Asian founders saw a dip in funding in 2021, but still received 24% of the funding– more than double what Black or Latino founders received.
The third annual report also shows that PledgeLA venture capital firms who are committed to making investments on companies led by traditionally underrepresented founders were 1.75 times more likely to fund women and 10 times more likely to fund Black founders.
Graph from PledgeLA's report indicating how much funding each group received over the course of three years. (2019, 2020, 2021)
Courtesy of PledgeLA
Vamos Ventures Founding Partner Marcos Gonzalez says there are a couple of reasons why we are seeing a decrease of funding being allocated toward diverse founders.
“Generally speaking, when you have economic uncertainty, if you're an asset owner, you're going to think twice about putting more capital into the market,” says Gonzalez.
While Latino founders did see a jump in investments from 8% in 2020 to 9% in 2021, PledgeLA’s report also examined trends in founder investments from 2019 to 2021 and found that women and founders of color saw a drop in overall investments. In 2020, women founders only received 19% of funding, a number which decreased to 15% in 2021.
One way to mitigate some of these disparities, Gonzalez says, is by creating relationships with MBA students at firms across the city that will lead to eventual hires.
“They're going to show up with different networks than the established folks at that firm,” he says, adding that once these new hires hold positions at VC firms, it will lead to firms being more comfortable with investing in more diverse founders that they wouldn’t have looked into otherwise.
“There's a lot of talented resources in this demographic (Latino and underrepresented founders) that's going to generate real innovative solutions and a lot of wealth,” Gonzalez says, “And that's where we're putting our money.”
Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, Anthemis Group Managing Director Vinay Singh talks about empowering creators, payments in media and how being a VC is similar to being a producer.
Anthemis is a platform for broad financial change and runs everything from a venture studio, to a SPAC, and everything in between. Singh’s focus is on leading seed and Series A investments out of the Anthemis $150M early stage fund. It also recently expanded to Los Angeles—a move Singh says was in part driven by the number of portfolio companies it oversees that are based here.
“We blinked and we have 10 or more portfolio companies here,” he said, “It's a great place to build consumer fintech companies, but also, you know, regular fintech companies; also a great place to build any company.”
Singh focuses on early-stage investments, but the firm sees itself as a platform providing everything from consulting and media expertise to support for academic work through its Anthemis Institute.
“The vision is really the kind of full-stack evolution of financial services and being able to be a part of that at every level,” he said.
Singh is also a partner at production studio Archer Gray, where he leads the studio’s venture arm. There, he’s helped the company produce 15 movies, including titles like “Lost Girls” and “Inez & Doug & Kira.”
Singh said there are many similarities between investing and producing: both require someone to understand where an industry is going and what people will want years down the line.
“Part of our job is a little bit to be fortune tellers— to understand kind of where the zeitgeist is, and where it's going,” he said. “Whether you're producing a movie or backing a company, it'll be somewhere between years and a decade until they really, maybe, see the light of day.”
At Archer Gray, Singh found himself “as the kind of conduit between the creatives and the money.” That meant figuring out how to structure deals and find the financing that would keep productions running. It also gave him an insight into a new corner of the changing creator economy.
”Increasingly, during that time, the money was coming less and less from Wall Street and more and more from technology platforms,” including crowdfunding powerhouses Indiegogo and Kickstarter.
At Archer Gray, he found that a major limitation was access to capital, especially as content creation became more democratized. The problem was the same for any industry in which people exist outside of traditional workforces—whether in Hollywood, independent professionals or the gig economy.
“Everything from, kind of, how they file their taxes to how they access capital to grow their business has been hard, like it's been a struggle always,” he said.
Those entrepreneurs often require technology tools to help set up their businesses and also new structures for accessing capital.That leads back to his work raising capital for fintech startups at Anthemis.
“It's really hard to make a living as a starving artist, no matter how talented you are,” Singh said. “With the focus on the gig economy and the focus on the creator economy, I think there's a lot of new interesting solutions.”
Anthemis has been particularly interested in the notion that the internet’s next iteration will allow creators to more directly control their products and have direct access to their audiences.
“In order for this to be ready for primetime,” he said, “you have to build the infrastructure. We have to build the kind of scaffolding that's going to support all the different types of businesses.”
Singh and his team are also interested in virtual economies like Roblox, and exploring financial instruments outside of traditional currency, such as blockchain-based ownership structures. That’s an evolution he sees playing out right now, which is bound to undergo more experimentation and more failure before the community arrives at a good structure.
“I think what we're probably going to find is that to have a truly decentralized economy,” he said, “you have to have some centralized regulatory kind of constraints on it to make sure that it can, you know, withstand turbulence and withstand, you know, everything from inadvertent problems to actual financial crime and attack. And I'm not sure we're there yet.”
“There is an emotional intelligence that's really important around innovation,” she said.
dot.LA reporter Kristin Snyder contributed to this post.
This podcast is produced by L.A. Venture. The views and opinions expressed in the show are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of dot.LA or its newsroom.
Click the link above to hear the full episode, and subscribe to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
People are back to dining out after a steep drop-off in reservations during the pandemic. According to data from OpenTable, the number of reservations made on the app in August and September was higher than the same period of time in 2019.
As writer Amanda Mull recently noted for “The Atlantic,” a large part of this demand has been propelled by the reservation app Resy, an OpenTable competitor that “emerged with a simple proposition: It would show users what was available only at buzzy, well-regarded restaurants, and it would let them join a digital waitlist to maybe, just maybe, get called up for a tough-to-grab table if someone else canceled.”
But what if instead of ever having to worry about reserving a table at your favorite restaurant, you could own it instead? That’s the proposition behind NFTable, a Los Angeles-based startup co-founded by CEO Jordan Udko.
NFTable plays on the ever-alluring concept of being exclusive. Having your spot. Being on the list. The way it works is that NFTable partners with a dining establishment to create an NFT that corresponds to a specific table at said restaurant. In some cases the NFT is also coupled with unique properties— some restaurants opt to throw in complimentary drinks. NFTable then auctions off the NFT on its proprietary private auction platform. For now, those eligible to bid are existing customers at the restaurants who are invited via emails from the establishment.
One of the first adopters of this new technology is Angelini Ristorante & Bar, an upscale Italian-American eatery in the Pacific Palisades run by Amici Restaurant Group.
To start, Angelini Ristorante partnered with NFTable to auction off a 7:00 p.m Friday night reservation at one of its tables. Udko tells dot.LA, the NFT sold for 130 Sol — a cryptocurrency that translates to roughly $4,250. NFTable received 25% of the sale with the rest going toAngelini Ristorante. According to Amici Group operations manager Alessandro Silvestri, the restaurant donated its proceeds to charity. If the NFT is resold on a secondary market, NFTable gets an additional 7.5% of the sale, Udko says.
Silvestri says Angelini partnered with NFTable because Udko and his family were longtime customers at Angelini Ristorante’s sister restaurant, Amici Brentwood.
“The idea seemed solid and it was pretty revolutionary,” Silvestri says. “So we decided that we could help them push the project forward, and they could help us with the revenue.”
The prospect of owning your own restaurant table is, according to Udko, especially appealing as wait times for restaurants continue to soar.
“I think [calling it] season tickets for a restaurant is a great analogy,” Udko adds. He envisions NFTable not just as a utility for fine dining restaurants, but any place with a wait. “Any restaurant that has more demand than and supply is a potential utilizer of the product,” Udko says.
So what happens if the NFT owner doesn’t show up to claim their table?
To circumvent restaurants losing money on tables that are left vacant by the NFT holder, Udko says they can put a 15-minute “grace period” in place. If the NFT holder doesn’t alert the restaurant they aren’t coming or are a no-show for their reservation, the establishment can give the table to another guest.
Like all other NFT products, NFTables are tradable as well. In other words, if someone buys a table at one restaurant and later decides they don’t want it anymore, they can list their NFT to be auctioned off on the same platform.
There’s also the option of temporarily transferring ownership of the table to a friend using a temporary password system.
For now, Angelini Ristorante plans to stick with just one NFT-reserved table since it’s a relatively compact establishment. “I want to be clear that our first priority is our regular customers, especially the locals, so they will always have a kind of preferential channel,” Silvestri says. The limited usage is in part due to the fact that not everyone is on board with this new technology.
“We received emails back with a lot of compliments, and they said, ‘oh, this is so brilliant, it's a genius idea, who is behind it?’” Silvestri says. “And some others were like, ‘oh, this is disgusting, now that you are doing these things your business will go upside down.’”
Still, Silvestri remains optimistic about the new arrangement adding that it doesn't change much, in terms of day-to-day operations. “What we are doing is being innovative,” Silvestri says. “Maybe cryptocurrency will be the biggest flop of the 21st century, or maybe one day we’ll forget about U.S. dollars and we’ll all use coins or blockchain or whatever.”
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
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