Berlin-based agriTech startup Klim is in a hurry to get farmers adopting so-called ‘regenerative’ methods — which are touted as less harmful to soils and biodiversity than conventional farming — arguing this evolution offers the best chance to shrink the global carbon footprint of agriculture fast enough to tackle the climate crisis.

Its digital platform, launched in an early pilot phase in May last year, now has around 1,700 farmers signed up to get support to make a quicker switch away from conventional farming methods that are associated with denuded soils and broader environmental harms — not least climate change itself, with global food production responsible for a quarter of climate-heating greenhouse gas emissions, more than 80% of which comes from agriculture.

Klim’s product includes an app that supports farmers to transition to regenerative agricultural methods by helping them set goals and determine the best combination of techniques to apply to their farmland (such as which cover crops to sew for their soil type etc).

There’s a financial support side too. Farmers use the app to chronicle the progress of their transition, e.g. by taking photos of crop growth, as a way of proving they’re sticking with the program (Klim also uses satellite data for monitoring and says it also undertakes some site visits); and — if they do that — they can earn revenue payouts for carbon sequestered as their farm’s soil health improves, over the years, or as they undertake other environmentally focused interventions (such as restoring hedges, reforesting or planting flower strips to boost biodiversity).

The startup does not currently offer loans to farmers via its platform but it says it’s looking into it — likely in conjunction with agricultural banks, where the interest rate could be linked to their climate performance as an added incentive — saying it may expand to providing farmers with financial support to get going with regenerative methods too. (“There’s a lot of different angles and tools where you can help farmers make a better living if they are doing something that’s better for the planet,” it suggests, emphasizing: “That’s the whole point. You want to set the incentives so that sustainable agriculture makes more sense than unsustainable agriculture — and that’s the challenge we’re all working on.)

While Klim talks keenly of being on an environmental “mission”, it is a for-profit venture — so it’s also intending to monetize as it supports farmers to earn money for cultivating carbon sinks on their land.

Ecosystem services marketplace

Its business model involves taking a commission on the sale of carbon ‘insets’ (as opposed to offsets; the idea being they will be sold to entities to shrink emissions within their own supply chains) — creating a marketplace where farmers can sell what it bills as “ecosystem services”, meaning they can generate revenue off of practices that suck up more CO2 than if they’d continued farming without adopting a regenerative approach.

Buyers of farmers’ “ecosystem services” might be food companies or other entities looking to green their supply chain, as emissions reporting requirements step up. So the upshot is a farmer following the program gets paid for ‘farming carbon’, as it’s sometimes called — in addition to selling any actual crops/food they produce — and Klim gets its cut of any sequestered carbon or other ‘eco services’ they sell.

“It’s all an investment into the future,” says CEO and co-founder Dr Robert Gerlach. “We help the farmer to do that with a digital platform that gives the farmer a way to transition, it gives them the know-how to do it, and it gives them farm management tools to achieve that.”

The startup’s work doesn’t stop there. It’s also seeking to support farmers to transition to less environmentally damaging methods by working with food companies and retailers to raise their profile with consumers — with an eye on the extra value that might be squeezed out (i.e. via a higher price) for produce that can claim to have taken less of an toll on the planet prior to arriving on the plate vs conventionally farmed alternatives.

“We position the farmer in public with the consumer as a climate hero,” Gerlach tells TechCrunch. “We work with industry — especially the food industry — [which] needs to transform its supply chain. They need to reduce the emissions in their supply chain and they need to secure the yields in their supply chain even though there’s ever more frequent droughts.

“The only way they can achieve that is if they transition their supply chain to regenerative. But the food industry does not really have access, in some cases, to their own farmers — for example in the case of retail — or they do really know how to best actually transition their farmers and we then come in with our platform and help them to transition their farmers to regenerative agriculture.”

This includes a “Klim label” that can be put on food packaging — using a QR code to point consumers to information showcasing the farmer and their regenerative methods. “I can tell you that farmers love that consumers are learning about regenerative agriculture,” says Gerlach. “If a consumer appreciates that a farmer works in a climate-friendly way he’s probably also willing to pay more for that — and that gives farmers security that they can actually embark on the journey to transition because consumers will reward it.”

“Farmers are in some form of crisis of meaning,” he adds. “They see that their profitability is dropping over the last decades, they see that the regulatory requirements are rising and they see that in public they are often unjustly portrayed as climate sinners — and what they really want is to gain a sense of purpose in what they do; they want to feel that what they’re doing makes sense and is appreciated, especially by the consumer.”

Seed funding

The August 2020-founded startup has just closed a €6.5 million seed raise, led by Berlin-based food and green tech investor, Green Generation Fund to plough into further product dev and international expansion, as it races to get more farmers farming greener. Other investors in the round include biodiversity-focused fund Edaphon, early stage climate-focused VC Ponderosa and Silicon Valley-based agriculture impact fund Agfunder, with existing investors such as Ananda, FoodLabs and Wi Venture also joining the round.

In total, Klim has raised just shy of €8M since being founded — just two years ago. The latest cash injection is being put towards accelerating its mission to get as many farmers as possible tilling less, and sewing more, as quickly as possible. So while its early focus has been on its home turf it’s now shooting for internationalization.

Which markets it’ll be expanding into first are tbc but as it widens its net it will be going up against a broader crop of agriTech startups offering similar support for farmers to transform their methods — such as the likes of Danish startup Agreena; Regrow in the US; and Australian giant Indigo Agriculture, which has increased its focus on regenerative agriculture in recent years, to name three.

“Our mission and purpose is to get as many farmers to adopt regenerative practices or ‘carbon farming’ as fast as possible,” emphasizes Gerlach. “Only if we can get many farmers to transition a lot of their farmland to regenerative agriculture do we have a chance to achieve the 1.5 degree temperature targets.”

“There is a clear chance, we have as a planet, to achieve the 1.5 degree targets,” he also argues. “However it requires rapid action — and that’s the whole point for Klim.”

But what is regenerative agriculture?

A few things to note upfront here: There is no fixed definition for ‘regenerative agriculture’ — hence it can refer to a different bundle of techniques in different regions (in the US it’s often talked about in association with cattle farming, for example, which means it can have a chequered reputation among environmentalists). Moreover, in recent years, hype about claimed environmental benefits from making tweaks to existing agricultural processes has seen the buzzy badge of ‘regenerative’ keenly taken up by some of the biggest names in (junk) food production, from PepsiCo to McDonalds.

Some of this hype has — frankly — been unbelievable. Such as an unsubstantiated claim that if all the planet’s farmers switched to regenerative agriculture it could 100% reverse climate change. But while there’s a healthy dose of scepticism around what looks like very lurid greenwashing by certain vested interests (most notably those with an agenda to claim you can ‘green’ unsustainable livestock farming); there are more measured and/or pragmatic proponents — and plenty of soil scientists — who argue there is worthwhile substance here.

These more measured supporters argue that by applying regenerative agriculture methods broadly it can help restore soil health and improve biodiversity in a meaningful, impactful way — across millions (or well billions if you’re taking all farmed land on the planet) of hectares while still producing enough food to feed everyone in the world.

The claimed ‘regenerative’ transformation is done through the use of various soil-friendly (or, well, friendlier) methods — such as crop rotation and cover cropping, plus a reduction in mechanical tilling, along with promoting other beneficial activities like hedge restoration, reforesting etc — which, in turn, can allow farmers to avoid the conventionally heavy use of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides; chemicals that are absolutely bad for biodiversity (and probably human health too) and more broadly damaging to the environment and the long term security of food production as they denude the health of the top soil, killing off the organic matter (humus) that’s good at retaining water and taking up carbon.

Impoverished soils are a direct problem for farmers, of course, as they reduce the quality (and potentially the yield) of food that can be produced from land — as well as exacerbating the impact of climate-associated issues like droughts that can devastate crops (since poor soils dry out faster). So there’s a clear logic and interconnected web of potential benefits to be derived from adopting methods that can reduce some of the harms of conventional farming.

“Since the beginning of modern agriculture we have released around 500 Gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. And, for example, in Germany right now each hectare (100m x 100m) of farmland releases 0.7 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere through the destruction of [organic matter in soils]. So we need to get farmers to convert quickly and if you want them to convert quickly you need to understand what is preventing them from converting in the first place. And that was our starting point,” Gerlach explains.

“What’s really important is to know that we have reduced soil carbon over the last 100 years — globally, some studies say that we have lost 50% of soil carbon. If you look at some color-coded maps that show you where we have lost soil carbon and how much it looks pretty damn bad. Very red. So in order to build that up again you need decades — so you need to start now. And the more regenerative methods you use, the more confidence a farmer gains in using these methods, the more soil carbon you can actually build up.”

All that said, whether regenerative agriculture is — overall — net helpful or harmful for humanity when you consider the existential crisis of climate change facing all life on the planet and agriculture’s leading contributory role in fuelling the crisis through the release of greenhouse gases is a wider question. The answer is probably closest to ‘it depends’.

Thing is, if the buzzy term ends up greenwashing agriculture’s reputation to the extent that it acts as a barrier to the kind of wholesale transformation of global food production that’s needed to avoid catastrophic climate change — say by creating an excuse for food giants to continue industrial-scale livestock farming, rather than switching to deriving their products from low-carbon, plant-based (and/or other alternative) proteins (at least some of which are already being produced in abundance) — there’s an argument that the trend could end up doing more harm than good.

But, at the same time, we do face multiple sustainability crises in parallel. And the long term viability of agricultural food production is very evidently one of them — with no shortage of warnings that farmland simply won’t continue to produce if we continue to treat soils so poorly. So soil restoration looks like vital, necessary work in and of itself. Measures to stem biodiversity loss are also essential.

Additionally, if you take it as given that humanity won’t be saved from its need (and/or appetite) to eat certain proteins by some fancy new technology swooping in to enable a sudden mass low-carbon shift in food production that’s able to eliminate animal farming overnight (because the most potentially transformative, low carbon alternatives for growing and harvesting protein are still being developed and/or scaled up) — and also accept that we will need to rely on large scale, land-based agriculture for many more years to come (since plant-based nutrients constitute the bulk of many people’s diets right now and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future) — then some environmental improvement of agriculture is better than nothing, is the regenerative pragmatist’s argument.

Towards sustainable farming?

Discussing some of the environmental critiques of regenerative agriculture, Gerlach appears to entrench his support even further — straying towards backing a notion (which has, by the way, been heavily promoted by the meat industry) that even livestock farming could be made sustainable with the right interventions (and/or in certain contexts).

“Even cattle you can raise in a way where you have significantly reduced climate impact,” he argues. “And that in itself is an advantage. Of course we all know we need to transition the popular away from a predominantly meat-based diet but then you have a question that others need to answer… whether there should still be a role for animal husbandry at all or zero?

“But if you are in a space where you are raising cattle, for example, you can do so with significantly reduced climate impact. And there are scientific studies that claim you can even raise cattle in a climate positive way.”

He does not specify which scientific studies he’s referring to — but a five-month investigation into meat industry lobbying tactics conducted by DeSmog last year found suspiciously similar climatewashing claims featuring in its PR and lobbying. (DeSmog summarized its findings as follows: “Downplaying the impact of livestock farming on the climate; casting doubt on the efficacy of alternatives to meat to combat climate change; promoting the health benefits of meat while overlooking the industry’s environmental footprint; exaggerating the potential of agricultural innovations to reduce the livestock industry’s ecological impact.” So, yeah, uncanny.)

One thing is clear: The greenwashing pitfalls are real given how much meat industry cash is being sloshed around to try to deflect climate blame and derail change — but it’s also fair to say that so are the challenges of transitioning consumers to alternative proteins en masse fast.

Many consumers are unlikely to stomach a too-swift transition away from traditionally farmed meat — although if the full environmental costs of meat production were reflected in the price people paid then their diets might be rather swiftly reconfigured. (And we may well soon see this effect in practice, as the energy crisis drives food inflation that’s hitting meat producers especially hard — given that it’s such an inefficient way of producing protein for human consumption.)

Meat alternatives have traditionally been more expensive for consumers to buy but as that changes it’s likely a lot more people will find an appetite for textured vegetable proteins.

At the same time, food is of course cultural, personal and, at times, political — what we eat (or don’t) can often be incredibly polarizing. So while demand for plant-based diets is absolutely on the rise — especially among younger generations who understand the urgency of the climate emergency — societal tastes rarely change overnight. (Although, again, the cost of living crisis might just be the lever that flips the West to a predominantly plant-based diet.)

But the pragmatist’s view of regenerative agriculture is still that it’s a necessary evolutionary step on the road to reforming food systems, and that — by promoting the use of less environmentally harmful methods, even for heavily polluting industries such as dairy farming — it can at least help shrink the emissions toll of some major climate sinners in the meanwhile.

Gerlach also suggests that, unlike in the US, the predominant application for regenerative agriculture in Europe is plant-based farming in any case. And he says Klim’s platform does not currently include any livestock farmers — although it is supporting some farmers who are producing animal feed (such as grass for dairy cows) — so it is attached to the supply chain of animal-derived foods. And as it begins to scale uptake of its platform via international expansion there is a question over whether or not it will end up feeling pressure to open up to livestock farmers too.

Reduction and transition

“We are agnostic. We are working with industries that are purely plant-based. And we are also working with the dairy industry — who need to reduce their emissions significantly,” says Gerlach of where Klim stands now. “Regenerative agriculture can play a huge role in reducing the emissions of also of industries that are in the dairy industry. And any reduction of emissions right now that we can achieve is a good thing.”

“It would be a mistake to say regenerative is cattle — because it simply isn’t,” he also asserts. “We are currently rewarding only agricultural methods — for example the cover crop, the catch crop — so plant-based methods. That’s — at the moment — what we do.”

On the question of whether there is any tension between an approach that’s focused on encouraging a reduction in emissions, whatever the farmer is doing — and claims therefore to be “climate-positive” — but which isn’t supporting farmers to make a full-fat transition to low carbon agriculture (i.e. if they’re doing a type of farming that sustains high carbon livestock farming), Gerlach argues that both reduction and transition need to happen in parallel. He also suggests there are signs this is already happening, such as around dairy with the rise of plant-based milks and vegan cheeses.

“Right now — at least in the most developed countries — there is a clear transition away from dairy-based products. If you go to the supermarket now and compare the milk shelves to ten years ago, currently you have over half a milk and almost nothing dairy based. That goes on in parallel,” he argues. “And at the same time what you already have right now and still have you need to reduce the impact — so you’re absolutely right; you need to tackle both things: Transition and reduction in parallel. Only then do you have a chance to achieve the climate targets.”

But isn’t there a risk that regenerative agriculture — by allowing farmers to apply an environmentally friendly sounding label to small changes in their methods rather than transformative leaps — it could actually slow the transition to low carbon food production that’s critically needed if we’re to avert climate disaster?

“May I ask the question in return?” he responds. “Imagine you have a large company that is considering to reduce the emissions from their dairy production by 50%. Would you tell them not to do it because they should rather go out of business or would you help them to reduce the emissions?”

We counter by pointing out there’s another option: Provide support to those farmers to transition away from dairy to plant-based agriculture. “Well, you will have to offer both things,” Gerlach suggests. “Our role is actually to enable the transition to regenerative agriculture — and to that role we are, in a way, bound. So I think both things happen but the transition of moving from a meat-based to a plant-based economy is one that is driven by the consumer.”

He also argues — quite rightly — that climate change won’t have one simple ‘panacea’ fix. Change is certainly needed wholesale, everywhere, root and branch, across every industry and sector.

However that shouldn’t be used as an excuse to sustain the unsustainable — and risk delaying an already dangerously overdue transition to sustainable food production. There are already plenty of viable low carbon protein alternatives that can take the place of animal-derived proteins on the plate. (Vegetarian food is not some fancy new invention, after all; large swathes of the developing world have long consumed a predominantly plant-based diet.)

So there’s undoubtedly a balance to be struck here between hand-holding farmers and consumers and express-fixing an industrialized food system that’s dragging us down the path to climate disaster at top speed.

Gerlach makes another point that if one region were to make a too radically sudden switch away from livestock farming or producing animal-derived proteins it could just drive demand for the same food to produced elsewhere but less sustainably — i.e. to cater to ongoing consumer demand which local farmers have stopped serving — with the risk of an overall net negative for the climate as emissions are ‘outsourced’, rather than shrunk.

So yes, there are certainly complex and intertwined impacts to consider. But, also, with the right policy nudges and incentives, there should be ways to mitigate such risks and create appetite for locally produced low carbon alternatives. (Such as, for example, by championing homegrown ‘true climate’ farming heroes.)

Collective action

“If you’re totally rational about it, the question you ask is precisely the right one: Where do you have the biggest climate impact?” Gerlach concedes. “If you now say dairy industry you should not reduce your emissions you should go out of business — or if you should say you should slowly reduce your production, because consumer demand does it, and what you still produce — or need to produce — you should reduce your emissions? I personally believe in a combination.

“The question you ask — whether you slow down a transition — of course it’s a justified question. I personally don’t think you do. I think the transition towards a plant-based diet is such a strong movement right now nothing will slow that down and, if anything, regenerative agriculture will accelerate it.

“Why? Because regenerative agriculture has another benefit: With regenerative agriculture I regenerate the soil, I improve the nutrition availability in the soil, and I improve the nutrition density of the vegetarian food — the plant-based food — that I generate so I make it a higher quality. So actually you increase the demand for regeneratively sourced plant-based food which should actually drive the ‘from red to green’ transition even faster.”

“You have to always look at the reality of where we are now — and where we need to be in 10, and 20 and 50 years,” he also argues, suggesting that regenerative agriculture has an inescapable role to play in climate action as part of a cross-cutting collective. “I know that currently everything in the food sector is about alternative proteins and meat. It would not be fair to reduce regenerative agriculture to cattle raising and therefore compare it to meat alternatives… It would be misleading.

“Even if you would assume we could raise protein and perhaps even other nutritions completely in the factory right now and even if you assume we can do so with an energy balance that is better than natural farming, which most people actually doubt, you would still need to create a roadmap to feed 8BN people this way. And on that roadmap there’s clearly a role for agriculture. If anybody tells you in the next 10 or 20 years there’s a case for feeding 8BN people without agriculture then I don’t know what to say anymore. So if you accept that you need agriculture to feed 8BN people at least in the next 20 years — and, I wager, much longer; permanently — then you also need to accept that reducing the climate emissions from this form of natural agriculture is a good thing.”

“I don’t believe that with artificial proteins alone we can now achieve the 1.5 degrees temperature target,” he adds. “I don’t believe that we could scale up alternative proteins in the next five years to feed 8BN people so that we don’t need agriculture at all anymore and that we achieve the 1.5 degree target. That I don’t believe. If it’s possible then I would be very happy because I’m most of all concerned about the climate. But I don’t think it’s possible. So the simple answer is — if that hypothesis is true then you need agriculture and if you need agriculture then it is a good thing to reduce the emissions in agriculture.”

Few would likely argue with Gerlach on the ‘moonshot’ artificial proteins point. But there may be more debate about whether the gentler, more incremental transition allowed for by regenerative proponents can really hope to shrink carbon emissions fast enough for us to avoid suffering major climate harms.

Clearly it will take massive uptake of regenerative methods — whole continents of farmers switching, not just a few villages’ worth of farms — to stand any chance of having the scale of impact requires. But Gerlach’s point is that if every industry takes up the baton to phase down emissions in collective parallel there’s reason for hope.

“If we want to have any realistic chance of achieving the 1.5 degree temperature targets we need to A) stop dreaming about some far away, not ready technologies that will never be able to scale up to achieve that goal. B) we need to be able to reduce emissions in all sectors, massively, not only in food production — in industrial production, in home energy use, everywhere. And we need to capture as much CO2 from the atmosphere in the form of negative emissions and store as much as we can in soils, in biomass, or elsewhere,” he argues.

“It’s a combination of all the technologies that are available — each one of them pushed like crazy. And only if we all work together, and if we all say it’s better to actually make an impact now, even though not perfect, than to say it’s not perfect and therefore I rather don’t do anything at all — only then do we have a chance.”

Seen from that perspective, ‘climate sinning’ famers doing their bit to go greener can form a meaningful piece of a ‘climate-positive’ collective action patchwork. Or, well, that’s the hope.

Klim harvests $6.6M seed to get more farmers growing greener by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

GPS in its many regional flavors has become a ubiquitous feature in phones, smart watches, cars and other connected devices, but for all the location-based features that it helps enable (mapping being the most obvious) it has a lot of shortcomings: it can be slow and inaccurate, it can contribute to faster battery drain, and as people are discovering, it can be manipulated or exploited in unintended and alarming ways.

Today, a UK startup called FocalPoint that’s building software to improve GPS’s operations, accuracy and security is announcing a round of funding to continue building out its tech — which today works up to 4G and will in future also work with 5G and WiFi — and to roll out the first commercial deployments of its system with early customers. Use cases for the tech include more accurate location for smartphone apps for navigation or location tracking (for example for running and other sports); to help companies with their navigation services (for example for transportation or fleet management); and for better GPS security overall.

Based in Cambridge and founded as a spinout from Cambridge University, FocalPoint has raised £15 million ($17 million), part of a Series C round that it expects to total £23 million ($26 million) when fully completed. Molten Ventures (FKA Draper Esprit) — which led a £6 million Series B in 2021– and Gresham House are the two investors in so far. Ramsey Faragher, the CTO and founder, said that the other investors, which include a major U.S. automotive brand that is a strategic investor, will be closing in the coming weeks.

FocalPoint about a year ago had another notable business development that is helping put the startup on potential customers’ radar: last September, it appointed Scott Pomerantz as its CEO. Described as a “living legend in GPS” Pomerantz previously founded Global Locate, one of the first companies to bring GPS to the mass market, with its tech used by Apple and others. That startup eventually got acquired by Broadcom.

Speaking of Apple, FocalPoint’s focus on better GPS is coming at a timely moment. Just yesterday, the iPhone giant announced its newest Apple Watch models, featuring much more accurate GPS using a multi band approach on devices touting newly extended battery life. It is a signal of the priority that device makers are putting on improving GPS, and investments that they would be willing to make to do so, and thus the opportunity for startups offering new and more effective approaches to crack the market.

As Faragher explained to TC, GPS development to date has largely been based around chipsets embedded in the devices using it, which has meant that improving services by and large have depended on new versions of that hardware. That’s a big hill to climb, however, when considering the embedded market of legacy chips and the process of rolling out next-generation hardware: There were 1.8 billion GPS chipsets shipped as of 2019, with the total projected to grow to 2.8 billion by 2029. Smartphones account for the bulk of those numbers, but autonomy, road and drone devices are growing the fastest.

Along with that, GPS relies on using one or another of two radio bands; typically one produces better positioning than the other but it does so at a cost of draining battery life in the process.

FocalPoint is working on a software-based solution, Faragher said, which he said means that the chipsets themselves do not necessarily need to be swapped out or upgraded to implement its faster approach.

It’s working on algorithms, he said, which are aimed at understanding the directions of satellite signals, using this to gain better understanding of exact location of a device — a process that not only improves the accuracy of a location, but helps to identify when a signal is potentially getting spoofed to appear in one place when it’s actually somewhere else. This is carried out using the band that is less battery-intensive, which previously had been deemed to have poorer positioning performance. “The higher performing signal has always been more computationally intensive,” he said, which is why it impacts batter life. “We can make the lower quality, lower-battery-intensive signal better.”

There are other approaches aiming for the same outcome, but Faragher said they have been too costly and clunky.

“Only military antennas have been able to detect movement like this before,” he said, with those antennas coming in the form, of satellite dishes that are the size of a dinner plate and cost around $10,000 each — a big expense when hundreds need to be used across a wider mobile network. “What we are offering is a military-grade feature for the cost of software upgrade,” he said. “We synthesize expensive antennae.” this could help reduce the cost of other components and this resonates. End expense off a component
There are two different frequencies used by satellites, more computationally intensive for the higher performing signal. So we can make the lower quality battery use signal better than then more expensive signal.

Companies that have worked with FocalPoint to test how its software works are a key to where the company is aiming its business: the startup partnered with Google and its Android team to test how its software could improve location of users for its mapping software in a trial that the two companies ran in London.

“We demonstrated to Google that before using our technology, it couldn’t use the lower quality GPS band for its in-house mapping technology,” he said. That in-house tech is what Google would use for any navigation service, including for Google Maps as well as its devices. He said that Google’s approach, which looks at how signals bounce off buildings to figure out location, is useful with the higher GPS signal but not the lower one, therefore being a stronger drain on battery life. “We could make that lower band work.”

Faragher would not comment on whether it was working with Google, or any other specific companies, during the interview.

“Existing GPS technologies are no longer fit for purpose and we’re proud to continue our support for FocalPoint in its mission to revolutionise the accuracy of GPS and other global navigation satellite systems and in doing so, solve the issues faced by business and consumers with imprecise and unsafe receivers,” said David Cummings, a venture partner with Molten Ventures, in a statement. “We’ve been impressed with how the team has continued to build and expand since its Series B funding round last year, and are thrilled to support FocalPoint in this next exciting chapter for the company”.

UK’s FocalPoint raises $17M for its software-based approach to repairing the flaws of GPS by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Cloud storage is expensive (especially in this economy), but many companies often over-provision, cutting their full return on investment. Lucidity was created to help them manage block storage more efficiently with a set of automated tools. The startup announced today that is has raised $5.3 million in seed funding. The round was led by AlphaWave Investments with participation from Beenext, Blume, Bold Capital and NuVentures.

The company previously raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding last year led by Beenext.

Lucidity says its “NoOps” (or completely automated) orchestration layer can make a company’s cloud block storage 70% cheaper and 10x faster, without any code changes. It handles storage provisioning while getting rid of potential downtime during surge web traffic.

Lucidity was founded last year by Vatsal Rastogi, whose former roles include working as a developer at Microsoft Azure and with Indian online food delivery unicorn Swiggy, and Nitin Bhaduria, former head of sales at Tracxn.

Bhaduria says that many companies flocked to the cloud in the wake of the pandemic, but used a “lift and shift” approach, meaning that they moved data and apps without modifications. While this was the quickest approach, it resulted in over-provisioning and other issues that hurt ROI. It also made it harder for companies that had previously stored data in on-premise servers to transition to a cloud-first approach.

Lucidity’s customers are typically enterprise and upper mid-market companies that “cloud transient,” or in the process of shifting their data from on-premise servers to the cloud.

Lucidity founders Vatsal Rastogi and Nitin Bhaduria

But companies often end up dealing with new challenges after the move. For example, many over-provision their cloud storage in the hopes of ensuring zero downtime, but still face storage outages two to three times a year, plus a shortage of trained cloud professionals.

“Think of it as a house move to a place with more affordable rent. However, once you shift, you realize your furniture dimensions are not specified for your new home,” Bhaduria said. “The neighborhood school schedule is different and you face a longer commute to work. In other words, to accrue the benefits of more affordable rent, you will have to put in some sizable investments and time to redecorate your house and dynamically plan your daily schedule and commute.”

He added that Lucidity’s software can be onboarded in 15 minutes and DevOps teams never have to configure storage again.

Bhaduria gave a couple use cases that show how Lucidity works. The first is a retail and food distribution Fortune 500 company that moved to the cloud four years ago, but didn’t get the ROI promised by public cloud providers. As a result, its cloud storage was over-provisioned, but still experienced downtime during web traffic surges.

Lucidity’s orchestration layer discovered that 80% of its cloud storage was over-provisioned and used as a buffer. The company then used Lucidity’s Auto-scaler tool to reduce this buffer to 20%, which cut their storage costs by almost 77%. Lucidity’s dynamic provisioning and capacity management features also helped prevent downtime during surge traffic.

The second example is a Series C-stage customer data management and data intelligence startup that needed to figure out the right size to provision their storage while preventing service outages due to full cloud storage, but without using resource-intensive DevOps to continuously manage its storage size based on changing workloads. Lucidity was able to automate most of these tasks with its dynamic storage provisioning feature, and its Auto-scaler is helping the company maintain a utilization of 75% to 80%.

Lucidity has a “pay-as-you-use” monetization model, which means customers pay a flat management fee for the data that its software manages. It is currently at early revenue stage and its clients include more than 10 enterprises at different stages of the product deployment lifecycle.

The startup’s new funding will be used on its go-to-market strategy in the United States, where Bhaduria said it is seeing significant traction. Lucidity has offices in New York, Bangalore and Abu Dhabi.

In a statement, Beenext managing partner Dirk van Quaquebeke said, “Lucidity positions themselves at the interesting intersection of what I call cloud transient where large enterprises transition from on-prem to cloud and there is a lot of slack to be captured in terms of value. Lucidity is building something that will have a very strong GTM fit in a market that is extremely large and global in nature.”

Lucidity keeps cloud block storage neat, tidy and cost-efficient by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

The Philippines’ e-commerce market now has a gross merchandise volume of $12 billion, a 132% increase from 2020, and is expected to reach $26 billion in GMV by 2025. This obviously good news for online sellers, but it also means more shipping headaches, especially for smaller sellers that need to drop off packages at couriers’ warehouses.

Shipmates wants to save them time and money by consolidating several couriers into one platform. Online sellers can book couriers through its app, who then come to their location and pick up packages. The startup, a Y Combinator and Iterative alum, announced today it has raised $2.2 million in seed funding. The round included Cathexis Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, Taurus Ventures, Capital X and Sketchnote Partners.

Shipmates founders David Marquez and Josh Supan

Founded in July 2021 by CEO Josh Supan and CTO David Marquez, Shipmates’ goal is to become the go-to shipping tool for online merchants in Philippines, while bolstering the country’s shipping infrastructure. Its platform allows online sellers to compare rates between different couriers and book standard or multiple orders.

The platform is currently integrated with 9 courier companies, and the founders say its the only aggregator in the Philippines that has both on-demand and standard couriers.

Supan and Marquez are childhood friends who started an e-commerce enabler in 2017. Supan told TechCrunch they “pivoted from that when we saw that the problem of the merchants wasn’t getting online, it was shipping their online orders.”

Shipmates’ target customers are small- to mid-sized online sellers whose typical basket sizes range from $20 to $50. Supan explained that the shipping process in the Philippines is still manual because couriers aren’t connected to e-commerce platforms, and rely on business owners to physically drop off packages at a hub or warehouse.

As a result, many online sellers need a day to send out orders. Shipmates, however, reduces that process to less than 10 minutes, Supan said. The platform also automates waybills and address validations.

Shipmates monetizes by charging 30 cents for every order booked through its platform. Supan says its revenue has been growing 30% month-over-month since launching its platform last December.

Shipmates makes order fulfillment less tedious for the Philippines’ online sellers by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

There’s a large education gap in Vietnam between urban centers, which have access to more resources, and the smaller cities and rural areas where 80% of students live. Edupia, an online learning platform, is bridging that divide with its live classes and private tutoring. The startup announced today it has raised a $14 million Series A led by Jungle Ventures with participation from eWTP Capital (a venture fund under Alibaba and Ant Financial) and ThinkZone Ventures. This brings Edupia’s total funding to $16 million.

Edupia currently has a total of 5 million users, with 400,000 paying students. Tran Duc Hung, who founded the company in 2018 as an English self-learning platform, said Edupia is on track to exceed its $100 million revenue target in the next three years. Most of its users are in Vietnam, but Edupia is also expanding into other Southeast Asian markets like Indonesia, Thailand and Myanmar, and adding more subjects, including math and coding

Before founding Edupia, Hung spent 10 years as director of digital services at Viettel, the largest telco in Vietnam. While there, he saw how digitization was transforming many aspects of daily life, including e-commerce, finance, healthcare and education. At the same time, Hung tells TechCrunch, he also observed the gap between the educational resources available in larger, wealthier cities, like private language centers, and other areas of Vietnam, especially in English. Hung, whose family includes many teachers, saw an opportunity to launch an online platform to make English education accessible to every K-12 student.

Edupia founder Tran Duc Hung standing against a desk Image Credits: Edupia

As Edupia’s self-learning business gained traction, the team saw demand for more ways to engage with students and started live classes in March 2021. Hung said Edupia will run both business models at the same time, with self-learning serving as the first contact point for users before they upgrade to classes and tutoring.

Parents and students find Edupia through several channels, including its online marketing campaigns, school partnerships, word-of-mouth referrals and key opinion leader (KOL) marketing. Edupia reaches all provinces through its national sales team, and it was also the first company in the market to create a network of thousands of micro-KOLs (aka influencers) in different industries.

While there are many English-learning apps available, Hung said Edupia does not compete directly with them because it seeks to give students a similar experience to offline learning centers, with teachers who assign homework, evaluate students’ progress and organize online activities to increase engagement. Edupia’s closest competitors are therefore offline learning centers, but unlike brick-and-mortar schools, it was able to scale quickly across Vietnam’s 64 provinces. Each 60 students are assigned to a learning group, and each teacher can manage up to 2,000 students across the country.

Part of Edupia’s new capital will be used to upgrade its tutoring platform. The company also plans to hire for C-level positions and senior managers as it scales, and ramp up its international expansion.

Edupia raises Series A to close the education gap in Vietnam by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Today TechCrunch hosted a special TechCrunch Live event focused on the great city of Minneapolis. Three local companies competed in a pitch-off, and I’m pleased to report the winner.

NXgenPort won the pitch competition, and will be fast tracked into the Battlefield 200 where the company will get free exhibition space at TechCrunch Disrupt this coming October.

NXgenPort is in the early stages of building an implantable chemo-port that features added sensors and remote connectivity functions. The company says this will provide patients and doctors with a new level of care through early infection detection, remote patient monitoring, leading to unrivaled peace of mind. The judges were impressed by NXgenPort’s CEO and co-founder Cathy Skinner, saying, in part, her pitch was well-polished and made it easy to understand the complex nature of the company’s device and business model.

The company has a small, but impressive, team with Skinner at the helm, and Rosanne Welcher, PhD, as the COO, and M Ali Mohamed, MD, PhD, leading engineering and research.

Two other companies participated in the Minneapolis pitch-off: Axon Athletics, which is building a mental health platform for student athletes, and Kyros Care, a digital platform for substance recovery services.

Editor’s note: This event just concluded. The video of the pitch-off was not available in time for publication, but will be added at a later time.

NXgenPort wins the TechCrunch Live Minneapolis Pitch Off by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch

Ever looked at your Apple Watch and thought “Dang, I just wish I could play the classic 1996 first-person shooter Quake on this thing!”

… No? OK. But now you can!

Developer Tomas “MyOwnClone” Vymazal was able to get Quake up and running on the watch; while Vymazal notes that existing open source Mac/iOS ports helped a ton here, clever tricks went into making things like the gyroscope and the digital crown work with the nearly 30-year-old game engine. Even just getting the game’s audio to play friendly with the watch’s tiny built-in speaker took some workarounds.

Is it practical? Ehhh. Is it playable? Technically!

If you’re looking to play the wonderfully hacky port for yourself, Vymazal was kind enough to put the project up on GitHub for others to tinker with. A few catches, there: You’ll need to compile the code yourself and, because Quake’s art/levels/etc. assets aren’t open source, you’ll need to track down your own copy of those too.

Fortunately, Vymazal also uploaded a two-minute video to give you the (wonderfully ridiculous) gist of it:

Twenty-six years later, Quake gets ported to … Apple Watch? by Greg Kumparak originally published on TechCrunch

Today was more than hectic. With Y Combinator’s Demo Day taking place during an Apple event, we’ve been hammering away here at TechCrunch all day. You were also likely very busy, doing whatever it is you do for work and trying to stay up to date on the news.

So sit back and let me spin our regular yarn about how Apple’s latest product event impacted — or did not in any way affect — its share price.

Investor reaction

It’s a staple of our Apple event coverage here at TechCrunch to not merely cover the hardware and software news, but also vet reaction from inside our own team, our community, other press outlets, and even competitors when Cupertino drops new gear. We also take a look at market reaction.

Today, instead of doing a tick-by-tick rundown, we are comparing Apple’s share price performance to its main rivals, namely other large U.S. technology concerns. Here’s the chart:

Image Credits: YCharts

As you can see from this image, Apple managed to post the worst one-day share price change — measured in percentage terms — of the Big Five.

Now, you could easily argue that one day’s trading during a period of market evolution is not really news. Fair! But of the major companies above, only Apple had an event that detailed the products it will sell through the upcoming holiday period. So should we read into the above dataset? Probably not.

At issue is the fact that it doesn’t seem that investors care much what Apple announces. The company constantly drops new gear and its shares simply do not seem to react much, if at all. In fact, I’ve kept this mini-series running at TechCrunch all this time to make a meta-point about share prices and products.

It’s almost odd to say it, but short of something truly shockingly bad, I doubt that Apple could release something that gets investors interested. Perhaps this is because Apple is incredibly consistent with product refreshes. But, still, you might think that investors cared about how enticing new Apple hardware looked — you know, since that is one vector by which consumers will buy or not buy the new gear.

And here we are. Yet again looking at what appears to be mostly noise when it comes to hoped-for signal from the investing set. I suppose we’ll have to wait for later results to be published before we can truly decide if investors give the latest iPhone and Apple Watches a positive review.

Investors shrug, once again, at Apple’s latest deluge of product news by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

It’s Apple event day, which means new hardware galore. New iPhones! New Apple Watches! New AirPods! Didn’t have time to tune in live? Don’t sweat it — we’ve summed up the most important parts for easy skimming.

New iPhones

Apple came out swingin’ with not one, not two, but four new iPhones: iPhone 14, iPhone 14 Plus, iPhone 14 Pro, and iPhone 14 Pro Max.

The iPhone 14 will have a 6.1″ display, while the iPhone 14 Plus display will come in at 6.7″. Both will run the A15 Bionic chip first seen in last year’s iPhone 13 Pro. There’s a 12MP rear camera (which Apple now refers to as the “main” camera) with a larger sensor on the back, while the 12MP front facing camera is getting a fancy new auto-focus system for better/faster selfies.

iPhone 14 will start at $799, while the iPhone 14 Plus starts at $899. Pre-orders start September 9th; the iPhone 14 will ship starting September 16th, while the iPhone 14 Plus will ship starting October 7th.

Notably, both models will drop the physical SIM tray in the US — they’ll be eSIM only, preventing your SIM card from being popped into a different phone if it’s lost or stolen.

Like those models, the iPhone Pro and iPhone Pro Max will come in at 6.1″ and 6.7″ respectively. So what’s different?

• Both Pro models will run on an all new chip, the aptly named A16 Bionic.
• Apple has shifted the front-facing camera notch away from the edge and into the display itself with a design it calls the “dynamic island”, which is meant to let the pill-shaped camera cutout sort of blend into darker elements of the interface like so:

• For the first time in an iPhone, the Pro models will have always-on displays.
• 2000 nit outdoor brightness for greatly improved outdoor visibility.
• The rear side of the phone has 3 lenses: a 48 megapixel main camera, a 12MP telephoto lens, and a 12MP ultra-wide lens that Apple says is capable of much sharper shots than before.

iPhone 14 Pro will start at $999, while iPhone 14 Pro Max will start at $1099. Both go up for pre-order on September 9th and start shipping on September 16th.

As for the reason behind the “Far Out”/space theming of the event: iPhones are getting emergency satellite connectivity. Should you end up in danger in a spot with no wifi/cell connectivity, these new iPhones will be able to connect to satellites to send compressed emergency messages and alerts. Apple says the satellite service will be included for free for two years, but hasn’t yet mentioned cost after that.

New Apple Watches

At a glance, the Apple Watch Series 8 looks a whole lot like the Series 7 that came before it. Under the hood, though, it’s got a few new tricks:

• A pair of temperature sensors can track changes to your body temperature over time. This can, for example, help wearers more accurately track ovulation cycles.
• More capable sensor suite that can detect if you’re in a car crash and begin the process of contacting emergency services.

Apple Watch Series 8 will start at $399 for the GPS model, or $499 for the GPS + Cellular model. It’ll ship starting September 16th.

For the last few weeks, rumors have suggested Apple was working on a more rugged Watch tuned for athletes. Sure enough, today they announced Apple Watch Ultra. Here’s what’s different:

• A dedicated “action button” that lets you do things like instantly start your workout, or mark the next segment of a race.
• A larger digital crown meant to be usable while wearing gloves
• It’s louder, thanks to a second speaker — and its got a built in 86db siren mode for situations where you need someone to be able to find you, fast.
• Improved compass functionality to keep you heading in the right direction, allowing you to track direction/distance to custom-set waypoints.
• A quick-toggle “night mode” that shifts the screen to red to limit how much your eyes need to constantly readjust in a dark environment.
• 36 hours of battery life (or 60 hours of battery life on a “new battery optimization setting coming this fall”)
• It’s certified for “recreational scuba”, allowing you to take it down to 130 ft underwater
• New sports-focused bands, like a woven “Alpine” loop for climbers and an “Ocean” loop meant to fit over a wet suit.

Apple Watch Ultra will start at $799; shipping begins on September 23rd.

New AirPods Pro

Image Credits: Apple

Three years after the launch of AirPods Pro, version two is here. So what’s new?

• A new, low distortion audio driver and amplifier for improved sound
• If you’ve got an iPhone with a true-depth camera, you’ll be able to use it to make a “personalized spatial audio profile” based on the shape of your ear.
• Touch-based controls on the stem, instead of the squeeze-based controls of V1.
• Noise cancellation which is now, according to Apple, twice as effective.
• Up to 6 hours of listening time per charge, with up to 30 hours of additional charge in the carrying case.
• There’s a speaker built-in to the bottom of the case that can be triggered to help you find it when it slips into your couch
• The charging case can now be charged with an Apple Watch charger, in addition to a lightning cable.

The new AirPods Pro Series 2 will sell for $249 starting on September 23rd.

Here’s everything Apple announced today at its “Far Out” iPhone event by Greg Kumparak originally published on TechCrunch

In addition to the regular iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus, Apple is updating its pro lineup today as well. The biggest change in iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max design is at the top of the screen. The company is dropping the notch and replacing it with what the company calls the “Dynamic Island”.

The body is still made out of stainless steel and the display features a ceramic shield. There’s an all new deep purple color in addition to black, silver and gold. They still come in two sizes with a 6.1-inch and 6.7-inch displays.

The TrueDepth camera has been updated and is now smaller. In particular, the proximity sensor is now behind the screen. That’s why Apple chose to drop the notch in favor of a pill-shaped cutout. That cutout is dynamic, it expands to show you controls and content. It can show that your AirPods are connected, or that your phone is now on mute. If you’re playing music and going back to the lock screen, you can see a tiny album art and waveform next to the cutout.

App developers will be able to take advantage of the Dynamic Island for live activities. For instance, if there’s a Lyft driver on their way or if you started a timer, you can see the current status next to the speaker at the top of the screen.

The display has been updated and is brighter than before. But the most important change is that it can remain always on. When you’re not using your phone, the screen will be dimmed and the refresh rate will be lowered. It can go to as low as 1Hz (one refresh per second).

The iPhone 14 Pro uses a new system on a chip, the A16 Bionic with a 6-core CPU and 16 billion transistors. There are two high-performance cores and four high-efficiency cores. Apple uses a 4 nanometer process. The A16 Bionic can compute 17 trillion operations per second. The display engine has been updated, which enables the always-on display.

Let’s move to the camera system. There are still three independent sensors, but with some updates. The iPhone 14 Pro has a 48 megapixel camera with a quad-pixel sensor. It is a 65% larger sensor compared to the iPhone 13 Pro. It also features a new 24 millimeter focal length.

There are now four modes when you shoot a photo — an ultra-wide mode, 1x mode, 2x mode and 3x mode. But there’s a trick. The 2x mode is not optical. The company uses the 1x sensor and keeping the middle of the photo for a 2x zoom. The new ultra-wide camera is a 13mm camera in focal length. It has an aperture of f/2.2 with a macro photography mode.

Of course, there are also software improvements. The new Photonic Engine means better low-light performance. When it comes to video, there’s a new action mode for improved stabilization (no gimbal required) and new cinematic modes. It now supports up to 4K resolution and 30 frames per second. You can also choose to shoot in 24 frames per second now.

Like with the regular iPhone 14, Pro models gets a new emergency SOS via satellite feature. Here’s what I wrote about the feature in my separate post about the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus:

As long as you’re outside with a clear view of the sky, you can send a message to emergency services.

On your phone, you can see where satellites are and how to point it at them. Once connected, you need to send and receive enough information to get help. Apple has created a custom, short-text compression algorithm. It can take from 15 seconds to a few minutes to send a message. You can also select standard answers from a list of preconfigured messages to speed up the conversation.

Even if you don’t need help, you can still use this satellite-powered feature to update your location in the Find My app. It can be useful if you’re on a long hike for instance.

The iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max will cost $999 and $1,099 respectively with 128GB of storage. These new models will be available on September 16th. Pre-orders start on September 9th.

This is the iPhone 14 Pro by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

Apple introduced the iPhone 14 at a press event today. The new phone draws inspiration from the iPhone 13 with sharp aluminum edges, rounded corners, a glass back, the familiar notch at the top of the device and a Lightning port.

The biggest change in the lineup is that the company isn’t updating the iPhone 13 mini. Instead, the company is releasing the iPhone 14 in two sizes — the iPhone 14 and the iPhone 14 Plus. They have a 6.1-inch and 6.7-inch display respectively. If you like small phones, there’s no new device for you. But if you want a big iPhone without buying a Pro model, the iPhone 14 Plus is for you.

“iPhone 14 also has an updated internal design that improves thermal performance,” VP of iPhone Product Marketing Kaiann Drance said. For instance, you can play games for longer sessions.

Apple uses the A15 Bionic system on a chip for the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus. It’s the same system on a chip that you can find in the iPhone 13 lineup.

On the back of the device, there’s a new main camera with a larger sensor and faster aperture (f/1.5). It features sensor-shift optical image stabilization. Apple says you can expect a 49% improvement in low-light performance.

On the front, there’s a new TrueDepth camera with a faster f/1.9 aperture. The selfie camera also has autofocus for the first time, which should help with keeping faces sharp.

Camera is a big focus of the iPhone 14. Apple also says that the image processing algorithm has been improved with deep fusion happening earlier in the pipeline. With video, there’s a new advanced stabilization mode. It’s called action mode, and it uses the full sensor to stabilize the video without any extra hardware — no gimbal required.

Image Credits: Apple

In the U.S., Apple is dropping the SIM tray. Instead, customers will have to switch to eSIM. Apple said specifically that this is a change for customers in the U.S. International iPhone models should still have a SIM tray.

Like with the Apple Watch Series 8, the iPhone 14 has new sensors that can detect a car crash. It can help you call emergency services more quickly. And if you’re in the middle of nowhere and don’t have Wi-Fi or cell service, the iPhone can still help you with emergency SOS via satellite. As long as you’re outside with a clear view of the sky, you can send a message to emergency services.

On your phone, you can see where satellites are and how to point it at them. Once connected, you need to send and receive enough information to get help. Apple has created a custom, short-text compression algorithm. It can take from 15 seconds to a few minutes to send a message. You can also select standard answers from a list of preconfigured messages to speed up the conversation.

Even if you don’t need help, you can still use this satellite-powered feature to update your location in the Find My app. It can be useful if you’re on a long hike for instance.

The iPhone 14 will start at $799 while the iPhone 14 Plus starts at $899. Preorders start on September 9. The iPhone 14 will be available on September 16 while the iPhone 14 Plus will be available on October 7.

Image Credits: Screenshot/Apple

Apple unveils the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

In addition to the Apple Watch Series 8, Apple unveiled a brand new Apple Watch model at its press conference. The Apple Watch Ultra has been specifically designed for intense sports tracking. It is a larger model with better battery life. It also has a different body that should resist extreme weather conditions.

The case is made of aerospace titanium and is 49mm in size. It is much larger than typical watches, and also larger than existing Apple Watch models. The screen is completely flat and is made of sapphire crystal, which should increase sturdiness. It still has the familiar crown but there’s an additional action button to quickly access a range of features. For instance, you can use the button to mark a segment without having to fiddle with the screen. Buttons have been designed to be accessible even when you’re wearing gloves.

Cellular is a standard feature of all Apple Watch Ultra models and this new model has improved multi-band GPS. The battery life can reach 36 hours of battery life. There will be a new battery optimization feature as well coming later this fall. With this setting on, you can reach 60 hours of battery life.

Users will also experience a new “Wayfinder” watch face that features a lot of information, including a compass in the dial. There are multiple new bands coming with this new watch as well. The alpine loop is a nylon loop with two layers. There’s the rugged ocean loop that works well with high-speed water sports, and the lightweight trail loop.

The speaker is quite loud and can be used and brand new ways. For instance, you can use the action button to launch an 86db alert when you need assistance. The microphone has also been improved for windy situations.

The Apple Watch Ultra also is WR-100 water resistant — and it has an automatic built-in depth gauge. It’s also EN13319 certified, which means you can use it as a dive computer.

With this model, it’s clear that Apple wants to compete with Garmin and Polar. Many sports enthusiasts have been saying that the battery life on the regular Apple Watch is simply not good enough. That changes with the Apple Watch Ultra.

But it’s not going to be a cheap model. The Apple Watch Ultra costs $799. It is available to pre-order today and it will ship on September 23rd.

Apple introduces the Apple Watch Ultra by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch