Tipping in the U.S. is a critical part of how the wheels turn in the service economy. One service area that’s been very overlooked, however, is the world of last-mile delivery — a service job that falls between the cracks when it comes to tipping because those who deliver products typically don’t work for the company that is selling you the product, leaving the responsibility and incentive for tipping up in the air.

Now a new startup called Drivr is launching to try to close that gap.

Drivr is a crowdsourced tipping platform that uses data science to map drivers to neighborhoods, and then creates tipping pools to collect monthly contributions from residents in those neighborhoods, with the sum then divided up among drivers serving those areas proportionately based on how many deliveries they’ve made there. Drivr has built apps for the two sides of its marketplace: residents to tip money, and drives to sign up and collect those tips, and it’s launching first in the city of Santa Cruz, CA, before looking to expand elsewhere in the U.S.

Drivr’s arrival (ho ho) comes as several other startups are also thinking about tipping and how to build a business out of it. They include Tiphaus from Seattle; Tipjar in the UK (which has raised around $4 million from angels and crowdfunding); 7shifts (which covers a wider range of services and has raised more than $130 million); EasyTip; and TipPot. Patreon, now valued at over $4 billion, is also honing in on the idea of customers voluntarily paying producers as part of the remuneration equation. Patreon’s focus is on creatives, but coincidentally also has a membership concept to it similar to Drivrs with its monthly contribution element.

Building a platform for collecting and distributing tips to last-mile delivery drivers is a long time coming, given how tipping has already become so commonplace in other service areas, including in the tech economy.

In the world of on-demand mobility services dominated by the likes of Uber and Lyft, tipping has already come and gone as a thorny issue.

Initially the leading company in the space, Uber, was reluctant to create a space for tipping, arguing that the price they were charging, and the payouts to drivers, already took tipping into account (it also conveniently helped reduce friction for paying for a service that was already potentially dancing on the edges of reasonable-meets-affordable for the majority of consumers). Drivers and customers took issue with that, since the lack of transparency felt a little exploitative rather than fair. Eventually in 2017 Uber caved in and created an option for tips. But that was not without problems: user behavior initially seemed inclined to leave tips out.

The challenges are even bigger for last-mile delivery drivers, who have a lot of pressure to deliver, so to speak.

A daily route often will include between 250 and 300 packages with a pay range of between $16 and $22 per hour of work. The number of packages per day — but not the pay rate — hikes up to 400 during holiday sales and made up sales holidays like Prime Day. Apart from the complexities of Amazon managing tipping for drivers it doesn’t employ, there is another disincentive: membership services like Prime have intentionally lowered the barrier to buying by including shipping charges — meaning somehow building in a tipping option would defeat the point of that as far as Amazon is concerned.

Drivr the concept is still in its early stages, and so is the startup, which to begin with is being primarily self-funded by $1 million from the co-founders Sol Lipman and Jacob Knobel themselves.

The pair have worked together for years, building a number of startups together, some of which got acquired by Aol and Yahoo — which are now the same company, Yahoo Inc., which also owns TechCrunch. (To be clear, that is not how I came into contact with the startup). Most recently, the pair worked together at Amazon on Ring, among other things, after Amazon acquired a startup called Owlcam where both had senior roles.

It was at Amazon, Lipman told me, that he started to thinking about the role that last-mile delivery drivers play in the e-commerce ecosystem. In short, drivers have it bad. On one hand, they are central both to the customer experience and more practically the completion of each transaction by way of delivering the product into the buyer’s hands. But on the other, drivers also work at arm’s length from the businesses themselves, since both Amazon and major delivery partners like FedEx do not on the whole directly employ all their last-mile carriers. (Flex and Wholefoods are examples of exceptions where Amazon does, and notably you can tip drivers for these services.)

One of the consequences is that drivers typically do not have a facility to take tips.

This is where Drivr comes in. Lipman’s theory is that because tipping has become a central part of how people in delivery roles are remunerated, when it’s not possible to do so, it impacts not just those drivers’ take-home pay, but their allegiance to staying at the job. As a result, attrition rates are appalling for delivery drivers. Estimates vary but one report estimated that 15.8% of drivers operating on the dispatch model typically leave their jobs within 30 days, and 35.4% are gone within 90 days. Drivr cites research that claims that only 10% stay for a year. Put simply, the pay for many of them is not worth the effort involved.

Initially, Drivr will operate its tips service by way of a pooled model: it uses algorithms and census data to determine “neighborhoods” around which it organizes both residents and the drivers who work in that area, and it will include in that data about where and how much drivers themselves work.

“We track their location and time spent in any given neighborhood. We take that data and fairly distribute tips based on that,” said Lipman.

Residents use an app to put money into a payment pot, which is divvied up and distributed amongst the drivers in the area being served. Drivers are paid out twice a month from the pot, and Drivr takes a 6% transaction fee as its cut.

There are some aspects to the model that might only work well when and if Drivr scales. If a neighbohood only has take-up from one or two residents who are chipping in $10 per month, that makes for a very paltry pot to share amongst substantially more than one or two drivers. Like many other crowdsourced, efforts, there is a leap of faith and belief in the bigger goal.

“Similar to NextDoor, our strategy is to start hyperlocal and expand out regionally. We develop the neighborhood prior to launching it to Drivers to avoid empty neighborhoods,” Lipman said. “But, for Drivers, even a modest tip jar to start has value. Again, if 10% of customers tip $10/month, Driver pay will go up by 20%. This has a significant impact on Driver income. The alternative is just keep on doing nothing to show your support for drivers.”

There is also the fact that not every driver is great. Lipman said that in the future, the plan will be to let customers also use the app to tip specific drivers alongside tipping into the virtual tip jar.

There is potentially also going to be some confusion once you start to put another service delivery layer on top of the existing delivery model. People who are indeed having trouble with their deliveries might be inclined to think that Drivr is also acting as a go-between for that, just as they are for tips. Lipman notes that those having issues still need to contact Amazon (or the other relevant retailer) directly.

That does raise another question, which is whether Amazon or others will try to quash Drivr for inserting itself into the process.

Lipman’s response: Amazon and FedEx drivers don’t work for Amazon, but for the third-party companies that run deliveries for them. Meaning: Amazon technically doesn’t have a say.

“If there is a legitimate reason that a [service provider] doesn’t want our platform in service, we are open to feedback. However, we believe the opposite is true,” Lipman said. “Retailers like Amazon, and the delivery service providers, will love what we’re doing.  We are helping to get drivers paid more, which is the best way to address churn among last-mile drivers, and is their number one problem and cost center.” Doing some pre-launch homework, Lipman said that conversations with the service providers themselves found that “100% of them are supportive of the product and are encouraging their drivers to sign up.”

Want to tip for your Amazon delivery? Drivr is a new app for that by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

In the United States, much of commerce relies on moving goods on trucks to market. The way it works is a manufacturer calls a shipping broker with instructions like ‘I need to get a load of beer to Dallas by Friday.’ They agree on a price and the broker finds a trucker to deliver the goods. The financials can get complicated, and much of the work is still done by fax, phone and in spreadsheets.

Mvmnt is trying to bring some more sophisticated technology to bear on the process, while providing a full set of freight brokerage services. Today, the Chicago-based startup announced a $20 million Series A.

“We’re what’s called a Transportation Management System (TMS).You could just think about that as enterprise software for managing freight, and so when I say freight, we’re talking about domestic truckloads,” CEO and founder Michael Colin explained. The freight broker’s job is to negotiate a price with the shipper and then one with the trucker, both at a price point that allows them to make a profit as the party in the middle.

He says the TMS itself is not unique. There are other companies that have produced on-prem and cloud versions of this kind of software software. What makes him different, and what attracted top shelf investors to this midwest company, is providing what he calls a “brokerage in a box.”

“Ultimately what we do is provide not just industry parity software, but we also use that as a kind of distribution vehicle for other business services like freight factoring, financial services, insurance, phones, surety bonds – the idea is that we can take the entirety of this brokerage-in-a-box solution and distribute that to the long tail of this market,” he said.

Mvmnt transportation management system Image Credits: Mvmnt

In fact, the company is giving away the TMS software to brokerage companies, believing that the real money is in providing these other services, especially dealing with the financials and making sure everyone gets paid.

As an example, they will take over the freight factoring, which involves buying a trucker’s invoices at a discount, helping to get them paid quickly. “What that means is just somebody purchases your invoices at say 97 cents on the dollar, and then that company will then take over the invoice and handle the net-30 or net-60 payment terms [with the shipper],” he said. The trucker gets paid fast, even if it’s at a discount, and his company handles collecting the shipper’s fees.

It’s these financial services where the company makes its money, and Colin says they have plans to expand beyond freight factoring into other transportation industry financial services, using the TMS as a way to anchor the business. “We use the platform as a distribution vehicle for these financial services. We do the same thing with insurance. We’re eventually going do the same thing with payroll and commissions,” he said.

“And the idea is that for any type of financial flow in the transportation industry, we want to put ourselves in by being this kind of system of record and system of engagement for the middle man in all the transactions.”

The company has just over 30 employees and Colin says he’s hiring. When it comes to diversity, he says in his industry there is a culture gap between the freight people and the tech people, and when he thinks about diversity beyond the conventional ways of thinking about it, he needs people who can understand the world in which this company operates. That means being able to at least think about the end users and what they do as you create these products.

Today’s investment was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Equal Ventures, Abstract Ventures, M25 and industry angels.

The company launched in 2020, and relied on brokerage fees to get up and running, as the company developed the software that has became the core of the business. He got a $500,000 pre-seed investment in April 2021, and later scored a $4 million seed round from Equal Ventures, which is also participating in the A round, before closing the A round in May.

Mvmnt is driving freight brokerage into digital age by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

Electric vehicle maker Rivian announced its Q3 production and delivery numbers on Monday, revealing it made 7,363 of its R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV during the three-month period that ended on September 30. Rivian also said it delivered 6,584 vehicles during the same span.

The automaker is still backing its target of delivering 25,000 vehicles over the course of 2022, a goal which it set early in the year and which it reiterated again last quarter, after announcing that it produced 4,401 EVs and delivered 4,467 during that 90-day period, which ended on June 30.

In total across the first three quarters of 2022, Rivian has now produced 14,317 EVs, meaning it’ll have to make more than 10,000 during the final three months of the year to make its target. It has been ramping production significantly quarter-over-quarter, however, increasing production over 67% from Q2 to Q3 and 72% between the first two quarters. Attaining that 25,000 number by year’s end will require just under a 75% bump from where they’re at now, which is a stretch versus past performance, but not a huge one.

The company reports its full Q3 earnings sometime this month, though it hasn’t provided a specific date for those just yet. In Q2, it reported a loss of $1.71 billion and updated guidance to project a $5.45 billion total loss for the year as it continues to spend cash on production capacity.

Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe will be at TechCrunch Disrupt this year, so be sure to check out the event October 18-20 in SF or October 21 online.

Rivian made 7,363 of its EV pickups and SUVs in Q3 by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

Tesla unveiled its first actual prototype of its Optimus humanoid robot on Friday — an actual robot this time, by the strictest definition, instead of a rreal flesh and blood human clad in a weird suit. The robot performed some basic functions, including walking a little bit and then raising its hands — all for the first time without supports or a crane, according to Tesla founder Elon Musk.

The company may be taking its first early steps into humanoid robotics, but it has a lot riding on the business. Musk has said that the Optimus bot will eventually be more valuable “than the car business, worth more than FSD [Tesla’s add-on ‘Full Self-Driving’ feature which does no such thing].”

What was apparent at the event on Friday night is that Tesla is making the economically wise, but strategically questionable decision to yoke together the destinies of both Optimus and its Autopilot (and by extension, FSD) ambitions.

Tesla suggested that the reason it’s been able to move so quickly in the robotics world is that it has already laid a lot of the groundwork in its work attempting to develop autonomous driving for vehicles.

“Think about it. We’re just moving from wheels to our legs,” explained one of the company’s engineers. “So some of the components are pretty similar […] It’s exactly the same occupancy network. Now we’ll talk a little bit more details later with Autopilot team […] The only thing that changed really is the training data.”

It was a recurring theme throughout the presentation, with various presenters from Tesla (the company trotted out many, as is maybe to be expected for an event billed primarily as a recruiting exercise) bringing up how closely tied the two realms of research and development actually are.

In truth, what Tesla showed with its robot on stage at the event was a very brief demo that barely matched and definitely didn’t exceed a large number of humanoid robot demonstrations from other companies over the years, including most famously Boston Dynamics. And the linkage between FSD and Optimus is a tenuous one, at best.

The domain expertise, while reduced to a simple translation by Tesla’s presentation, is actually quite a complex one. Bipedal robots navigating pedestrian routes is a very different beast from autonomous vehicle routes, and oversimplifying the connection does a disservice to the immense existing body of research and development work on the subject.

Tesla’s presenters consistently transitioned relatively seamlessly between Optimus and its vehicles’ autonomous navigation capabilities. One of the key presenters for Optimus was Milan Kovac, the company’s Director of Autopilot Software Engineering, who handed off to fellow Autopilot director Ashok Elluswamy to dive further into Tesla vehicular Autopilot concerns.

It’s very clear that Tesla believes this is a linked challenge that will result in efficiencies the market will appreciate as it pursues both problems. The reality is that there remains a lot of convincing to do to actually articulate that the linkages are more than surface-deep.

Not to mention, Autopilot faces its own challenges in terms of public and regulatory skepticism and scrutiny. A robot you live with daily in close proximity doesn’t need that kind of potential risk.

Tesla may have turned its man-in-a-suite into a real robot with actual actuators and processors, but it still has a ways to go to make good on the promise that it’s a viable product with a sub-$20,000 price tag any of us will ever be able to purchase.

Tesla’s robot strategy is inextricably tied to its Autopilot strategy, for better or for worse by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

French startup Bump has signed a multi-year financing partnership with DIF Capital Partners in order to roll out more charging stations for electric vehicles and double down on growth in general.

It is an equity and quasi-equity $180 million deal that will be progressively unlocked from 2022 to 2030. Yesterday, ZePlug also announced a significant investment — but ZePlug focuses on a different market with partnerships with residential and office buildings.

Today’s news is extremely important because Bump operates with a capital intensive business model. The company has already created 300 charging stations and plans to ship another 2,000 charging stations by the end of 2023.

Bump funds and manages the installation of new charging stations so that there is no upfront cost for their partners. After that, the company handles maintenance and operation. It then takes a cut on kWh, which progressively covers the investment costs and creates some revenue for the company.

Like solar panels, it can take 5, 10 or 15 years before a charging station becomes profitable. It’s an infrastructure company, meaning that it’s a long-term business.

Bump has two types of clients. It partners with retailers, malls, hotels and various companies that own parking space to roll out charging stations for anyone looking for a charging station.

It also works with logistics companies and other B2B clients that need to switch to electric vehicles. They get their own charging spots for their vehicles managed by Bump. Clients include StarService, TopChrono, Stuart, Europcar, Zity, Bolt and Marcel.

“I often compare our offering with Salesforce in the 2000s,” co-founder and CEO François Oudot told me. “You can either buy a server and a floppy disk, or you can pay a monthly subscription per user.”

And it’s true that switching to electric vehicles can be costly. You have to buy new cars and trucks — electric vehicles tend to be more expensive than gas vehicles. You then have to pay a construction company to install charging stations.

Vehicles aren’t supposed to be a core investment for logistics companies. Many companies choose to lease cars, and they would rather pay a bit more to charge their vehicles if they don’t have to do anything to manage their charging stations.

Bump itself works with big construction companies to install charging stations. They have their own software stack and a team that can remotely monitor charging stations. If it’s a hardware issue, third-party companies can also be contacted 24/7 in case they need to go there in person to fix something.

With today’s new funding, Bump plans to roll out 25,000 charging stations by 2030. The startup will also hire a hundred people.

Image Credits: Bump

EV charging operator Bump unlocks $180 million by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

The wheels of global commerce continue to turn, through wars, pandemics and economic downturns; and today a startup taking a new tech approach to improve the workings of one of the more antiquated aspects of that industry — shipping — is announcing a big round of funding to double down on growth.

Xeneta — a startup out of Oslo, Norway, that applies innovations in crowdsourcing to the fragmented and often murky world of shipping to build transparent data and analytics for the industry — has raised $80 million, money that it will be using to build out its datasets and customers across more global routes.

Xeneta has already amassed 300 million data points from “several hundred” of the world’s biggest shipping companies, which contribute and subsequently source source data from the Xeneta platform to figure out if they are paying market prices for their shipping on particular routes. And more than $40 billion in procurement sitting on the platform to date. This is all just the tip of the iceberg, however: Patrik Berglund, Xeneta’s CEO and co-founder, said in an interview with TechCrunch that combined procurement across air and sea (the two channels Xeneta covers today) totals between $600 million and $900 million depending on the season; and there are thousands more shipping companies and other shipping players out there.

“We believe we will have 1,000 of them on Xeneta in the near future,” he said. It has aimed for the biggest first: current customers include Electrolux, Unilever, Nestle, Zebra Technologies, Thyssenkrupp, Volvo, General Mills, Procter & Gamble, and John Deere.

The funding values Xeneta at $265 million, the company has confirmed.

Apax Digital, the growth equity arm of PE firm Apax, is leading the round, with Lugard Road Capital also participating. Lugard is an affiliate of a previous backer of the company, Luxor, and other existing investors include Creandum, Point Nine and Smedvig. Prior to this round, the company had raised around $55 million over a series of rounds starting in 2013.

Innovations in e-commerce and fintech have sped up how the world finds and pays for goods and services, but when it comes to getting items from A to B to turn the wheels of that ecosystem, the journey is a little less zippy: shipping remains a fragmented and — subject to economic, climate and social changes — often unpredictable ecosystem. 

There have been a number of tech startups emerging over the last several years targeting opportunities to bring more modern approaches to the antiquated and un-streamlined world of shipping. PayCargo is building new payment products; companies like sennder, Zencargo and Flexport have zeroed in on freight forwarding; Flock Freight is applying a carpooling ethos to trucking; Convoy is also applying a new touch to logistics; Fleetzero believes there’s mileage in electric freight ships; and so on.

Xeneta is in yet another distinct category of freight and shipping services: business intelligence for the companies working within the industry.

As Berglund explained it, it’s a somewhat ranging and unstructured market: for starters, you have thousands of small and big shipping companies and the partners they use to carry out their work, as well as hundreds of thousands of businesses using those services. Added to that, those interactions are often analogue and impacted by a multitude of factors that can affect pricing and overall operations. Those who are looking to book a shipping job might not know what the going price might be for a particular route, or whether it can be approached in a different way more cheaply. Those with space on freighters don’t know the best prices to offer potential customers. 

Xeneta’s breakthrough was to build a platform where all of those players could essentially share what prices they are paying at any given moment for a particular route. Its system then orders that data and applies analytics around it to model how pricing is moving, and what it might mean for related routes elsewhere.

As with other crowdsourced logistics platforms (Waze is an apt example here), the more data that is fed into the system, the more powerful it becomes. Today, Xeneta has most definitely crossed over into the self-feeding category in that regard, although earlier years when the company was just starting out were definitely more challenging.

Initially, the company covered just one route — from a port in Norway to a port China. But getting its first customers to make the leap to provide data for that one passage to prove Xeneta’s value turned out to be a winner: Berglund said that things quickly picked up as those customers input more data, and others started to as well, in order to get better insights into how much they were paying, what routes they were using and so on. The data now is based on a 70/30 split between sea and air shipping (it doesn’t cover ground routes at this point) and the data feed is active enough that when you visit Xeneta’s site, you see it passing ticker-style as it gets updated, more like a stock exchange. Interestingly, it seems that those who are submitting data are less concerned about the competitive aspect of divulging their own data to would-be rivals: the value gained from knowing the bigger picture seems to outweigh this fact.

The company, interestingly, isn’t in the business of booking shipping routes, nor does it want to be, Berglund said.

“My background is in freight forwarding,” he said, and so he knows the benefit of being someone that can provide that group with more data to do the job better. “Whether its a new digital freight forwarder, or a legacy player, they are all in need of better data to run their businesses more efficiently.” He added that 95% of the market still mainly uses Excel spreadsheets to parse historical and current data.

“I’m just flabbergasted that they still use that, and fax machines.”

And just to be clear, it’s not the only one that has realized the potential of offering more intelligence tools to this eventually modernizing industry. Others like Freightview are also building tools to make it easier for those booking shipping to get a sense of market pricing.

“Buyers and sellers of freight have been flying blind in a complex and opaque market. Xeneta’s world-leading dataset and cutting-edge platform provide unique access to granular real-time information and insight, enabling data-driven freight sales and purchases,” said Mark Beith, a partner at Apax Digital, in a statement. “This delivers compelling value for their blue-chip customer base – not just in sales or procurement, but also in budgeting and reporting, and increasingly in ESG monitoring. We’re thrilled to partner with Patrik and the Xeneta team and help deliver their vision.” Beith is joining Xeneta’s board with this round.

Xeneta makes a splash with $80M on a $265M valuation to scale its crowdsourced sea and air freight analytics by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

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Building products for future needs with Bling Capital and Shift on TechCrunch Live by Matt Burns originally published on TechCrunch

Aero Technologies, which describes itself as a “next-generation air travel company” which currently operates on a limited number of routes in the U.S. and Europe, today announced that it has raised $65 million, with $50 million of those as a Series B funding round co-led by Albacore Capital Group and $15 million in convertible notes. Expa and Keyframe Capital, as well as new investor Capital One Ventures also participated in this route. The company, which previously raised a $20 series A round in 2021, now has a valuation of $300 million.

The company operates a fleet of 16-seat Embrear 135 regional jets and 13-seat Legacy 600 planes (the business version of the Embrear 145) and unlike most of its competitors in this space, the company focuses exclusively on the leisure market. In the U.S., that currently means flights from Los Angeles and San Francisco to destinations like Aspen, Los Cabos and Sun Valley, white the company’s European base is London, with flights to Obiza, Mykonos and Nice. The company, which uses private terminals at the airport it serves, will adjust its schedule based on customer demand (and the seasons) as it expands its fleet in the coming months.

Image Credits: Aero

A typical one-way trip from San Francisco to Los Cabos will set you back about $2,300. That’s significantly more than for a first-class seat on a domestic airline but also significantly more affordable than a private jet charter. The average fare across the company’s network is about $1,700.

“You get 80% of the value of a private for 20% of the cost,” Aero CEO Uma Subramanian told me. “Our customers don’t fit a demographic segmentation so much — they really fit a needs-based segmentation. They tend to be premium travelers who are solving for the experience. They are looking for a seamless experience, they’re looking for convenience and they’re their premium customer with premium expectations.”

Subramanian noted that its business in Europe has seen quite a bit of growth in recent months, in part because of the overall travel chaos across the continent, with its flights from London to Ibiza and Mykonos often at capacity. In the U.S., Los Angeles to Aspan and Los Cabos are currently its most popular routes.

Aero CEO Uma Subramanian

“I think we truly have product market fit in that sense that people are just really excited about the product,” Subramanian said. “I think air travel is something that people love to think about and this product is radically better than the alternatives, right? I think once something’s radically better and the company is viable and you can have a materially better experience, the product kind of sells itself.”

She added that word of mouth has been a major driver for its business, in addition to the partnerships the company has fostered with high-end members clubs and hotel chains. Interestingly, she also noted that the Albacore Capital team, which now co-led its Series B round, got to know the company as customers before becoming investors.

“Aviation is not for the faint of heart,” Subramanian said. “It’s a space where typically you have to be willing to make a capital-intensive bet for long. So it was not a crypto raise — it was tough. Sometimes I wish that were crypto raise, but it was about finding the right investors. It was a longish process, but we got investors that are really excited about the business and long on the sector and long on the product.”

The company plans to use the new funding to expand into new markets. Since Aero tends to own its jets, that’s obviously a large part of its costs. Subramanian wouldn’t say which routes the company was planning to add but she did stress that the company is long on the L.A. market. Since Aero doesn’t have a lot of fixed costs on the ground side, it can also quickly change up its routes as needed. And while other operators are struggling to find enough pilots, Aero’s model of direct flights that always return to base at night allows it to attract pilots who aren’t looking for the typical airline lifestyle.

Walmart’s last-mile delivery service business, Walmart GoLocal, has topped 1 million deliveries in its first year, the retailer today revealed. The company offered a brief update on the state of its newer delivery business during its Q2 earnings call on Tuesday, where it noted that GoLocal had been growing its support of local merchants’ delivery operations and was also now on track to reach 5,000 pickup locations by the end of the year.

Announced in August 2021, GoLocal is Walmart’s attempt to leverage its own delivery platform to service the needs of other merchants, both large and small. Merchants can use the service for a variety of deliveries, including scheduled and unscheduled deliveries, and even same-day. The service itself is powered by those Walmart had developed for its own delivery needs, including its in-house Express Delivery service, which promises delivery in two hours or less. GoLocal deliveries, however, aren’t handled by Walmart’s own staff, but rather gig workers sourced through Walmart’s Spark Driver program — the same program that supports Walmart’s same-day delivery operations.

Over time, the retail giant aims to grow GoLocal into a larger business as more merchants shift to e-commerce. It’s also one of multiple initiatives underway designed to help Walmart generate additional revenue by meeting the needs of other retailers. Last year, for instance, Walmart announced it would sell its own e-commerce technologies to other retailers.

“We continue to sign up larger-scale customers, and we’re making strides on the bigger unlock, which are small and medium-sized businesses,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon told investors, speaking about GoLocal’s growth. “Our technology and expertise will help so many of these businesses grow while contributing to our operating margins over time,” he said.

Little more was shared about the operation, like its contributions to Walmart’s bottom line, for example. But the exec did say the service was receiving “strong” client satisfaction scores and was continuing to sign up larger-scale businesses.

“We’re making strides on the bigger unlock, which are small and medium-sized businesses,” McMillon added. “Our technology and expertise will help so many of these businesses grow while contributing to our operating margins over time.”

The update follows recent news that Walmart entered into a deal with EV startup Canoo to buy 4,500 all-electric delivery vehicles to help it deliver online orders initially in the Dallas-Fort Worth area as well as help serve the retailer’s GoLocal delivery service business, it said at the time. In addition to helping Walmart achieve its own business goals, the deal also helped the retailer from a competitive standpoint as it could stop Canoo from selling its electric vans to Walmart rival Amazon. 

Walmart beat analysts’ expectations in its fiscal second quarter, driving shares up by over 5%. Driven by demand for groceries and other daily essentials as well as higher prices due to inflation and support from higher-income shoppers, Walmart pulled in $152.86 billion in revenue versus the $150.81 billion Wall Street had forecast.

Earnings per share were $1.77 versus $1.62 expected. Net income also grew to $5.15 billion, up from $4.28 billion in the year-ago quarter.

Uber is testing adding train and coach travel to its app in the UK so customers can book longer distance ground travel via a fully integrated tie-up with Berlin-based multimodal travel platform, Omio.

The latter has built up its own consumer facing apps for booking intercity and international travel, across a wide variety of supported transport options, over almost a decade of operations. But, in recent years, it’s been ploughing resource into building out a b2b line — making its inventory available to partners via APIs so they can add transport booking options to their own apps and platforms.

Uber isn’t the first such tie up for Omio, per founder and CEO Naren Shaam. But he tells TechCrunch it’s the first partner to get full access to its ground transport inventory — which covers more than 1,000 transportation providers across 37 countries at this point.

“Uber is the first partner that is both at this scale but also the first that gets access to our full ticketing API so you actually are, as a customer, able to do everything within the Uber app — so it is the first with respect to this product that we’re offering,” he says.

Omio’s earlier b2b partnerships include some transport providers themselves, such as UK-based LNER, as well as the travel search engine Kayak and smartphone maker Huawei, among others.

The ride hailing giant is also the biggest b2b partner Omio has signed up so far: Shaam says the tie-up will put its inventory in front of the circa 5 million+ customers Uber claims in the UK market.

And while Omio’s own app includes non-ground transport options (like ferries and even flights) he says its platform remains strongest in inventory terms for booking train and coach/bus travel — hence why it’s starting there with Uber. Although Shaam hints there could be more to come. “This is the beginning of our partnership; it will expand — beyond just geography,” he suggests, noting that Omio’s b2b partners can “pick and choose” from its full inventory range of supported transport models to offer their own customers.

“It is very clear to me that we’re never going to have 100% of all the eyeballs in the wall using only Omio so very much the company is evolving into a more data company — where the data and our inventory becomes a core asset,” he adds, discussing its ramping up of focus on b2b alongside what he couches as a nicely scaling b2c business of its own.

“We spent years building very unique inventory… so actually during the pandemic… we realized that what we built — the core of the asset — is unique inventory that is very hard to access anywhere so we started building a team for b2b.”

From the get-go, the ground transport tie-up via Omio’s API will enable UK Uber users to book international trains if they’re so inclined.

Albeit actually getting out of the country and into France may prove more challenging — given recent post-Brexit travel chaos hitting holidaymakers at borders and in airports (related to post-pandemic staffing issues), not to mention ongoing pay-related train strikes over the summer… (Shaam confirms Omio has seen some of that disruption in its UK data, with users switching to shorter distance travel, for example, but he says he expects such changes to be temporary.)

Commenting on the tie-up in a statement, Andrew Brem, general manager of Uber UK, said: “We’re excited to launch our new travel offering this summer, allowing a seamless door-to-door travel experience across the UK. Partnering with Omio will accelerate our efforts to become the go-to travel app for our UK users”.

Trips booked via Uber’s app using Omio’s API generate a commission for Omio — a portion of which it passes back to Uber for bringing it the custom. (The commission split isn’t being disclosed.) It’s also generating revenue from Uber by licensing its tech.

For its part, Uber has been long been expanding its core ride hailing platform by integrating additional functionality — targeting becoming an urban convenience hub (aka a ‘super app’) where you can book everything from dinner and a movie as well as order a ride to get there.

So adding longer distance ground transport adds another string to that play and could help it tack on last mile ride hailing journeys at either end of a train trip, say. Or (re)capture some revenue from users who may be switching from ride hailing to cheaper rail or coach options if they can be persuaded to make those bookings in its app.

Challenges for Uber to turn a profit also remain. Reporting Q2 earnings yesterday it still couldn’t claim that — but it did generate another quarter of free cash flow and was rewarded by investors bumping its share price on another positive signal that suggests it can at least self fund so won’t literally burn itself out of cash.

Returning to the Omio tie-up, Shaam says ground transport booking functionality provided by its API will be added to Uber’s app in phases with a basic set of features at launch today — which he expects Uber to build out over the coming months.

“It’s a new product for Uber and while we have a lot of knowledge over time building long distance ground transport Uber focuses mainly on inner city public transport and the use cases are very different. Long distance you have multiple fare class, cancelation, a reservation system, seat reservation etc — very different product than just a ride hailing product — so it is going to be in phases where they add multiple products.

“So the first one will be in your ‘transit tab’ — where you can search from, say, London to Manchester or Oxford or even Heathrow Express, or London to Paris on Eurostar, and you can fully transact on the Uber transit product long distance train or bus.”

“The full extent of the basic aspects of the product should be there in the first instance, I think — I do believe the add ons come as they bring the Uber magic to life,” he adds.

But will Uber users — who typically use the app for booking a quick cab trip or a hot meal — really think to use its platform for a less spur-of-the-moment purchase like a train or bus trip to another city or region?

Responding to that, Shaam points to “high overlap”, in terms of customers, despite the two products being built for very different use cases — while also playing up some “complementary” segmentation between these respective customer bases (noting for example that Uber has a higher share of business travellers among its users). So the suggestion is there’s enough similarity and difference between their platforms for the tie-up to drive new business for both of them.

Shaam won’t be drawn into sharing any internal estimates for how many Uber customers it expects to pick up but he does say they’re hoping  the tie-up will help Omio substantially increase its penetration of the UK market — which he confirms is not one of its bigger markets currently.

Asked if Uber will be rolling the transport booking feature out to other markets — such as the US — he also sounds hopeful, while affirming that today’s launch is a bit of a test to see how users take to it. So how far this long(er) distance travel booking feature flies within Uber’s digital real estate remains to be seen.

“The partnership, hopefully, is not limited to the UK but it is a new product for Uber and they need to launch in one market, test and then hopefully depending on the success of that — for both sides — we intend very much to scale it,” he adds.

Omio has generally emerged from the COVID-19 travel freeze and pandemic disruption in upbeat mood — announcing an $80M Series E top up to its funding in June and reporting rebounding demand which Shaam reiterates again now. He remains on bullish form, talking up the scale of the mobile booking opportunity yet to be captured when it comes to the kind of intercity/longer haul travel demand Omio has made it its mission to service.

“One of the bets we made during the pandemic is a massive shift from kiosk [based-booking] to mobile because of what happened with COVID-19,” he says. “For me it’s a surprise that 50%+ of the entire rail industry still sells its tickets at a kiosk. If you actually look at it, both hotels and airlines are higher basket — higher average basket — slightly even more complex experience and no one I speak to can remember ever booking a flight outside of the Internet or in the offline world so it’s very much still an industry that is significantly offline and that whole thing will come to mobile — because of the simplicity of the way train products work (per geography).

“Most of it I think will become mobile and our own data shows that 80% of all our tickets are sold on the phone. Incredible when you compare it to other travel segments. So for me it’s a natural trend that’s happening which has been accelerated by COVID-19 — so this is something we can bet on quite comfortably; a switch to mobile will be accelerated with more products and more service links.”

Mobile app- vs kiosk-based booking can woo travellers by helping them beat (at least some of) the queues, he suggests, or avoid unfriendly user interfaces on outdated ticket office machines that might not even support the user’s local language and aren’t often upgraded.

You could say Omio’s vision for its travel business, post-pandemic, is ‘onward, upward and outward’ — with a strategy to spread its utility far and wide by integrating into all sorts of other apps (or super apps) that travellers might want to use to get where they need to go. And Shaam confirms it has further b2b partnerships in the works.

“The goal of our b2b business is very much like a SaaS,” he adds. “You plug in once and then it — hopefully — adds annual recurring revenue and we just add more partners in different verticals… to parallel industries and give them a piece of our revenue so the economics is also attractive for anyone that wants to sell transport but wouldn’t necessarily want to, or have the capital to… put in the effort to rebuild 1,000 integrations in 37 countries because it’s a single API, less than one second latency. You plug into Omio and then you’re plugged into our entire ecosystem.”

Dan Lewis launched Convoy in 2015 into an established industry dominated by several legacy businesses. Now worth $3.8 billion, the company is a leader in bringing digital services to trucking and freight. We’re thrilled to have him on TechCrunch Live this week, along with Chris Howard, founding partner at Fuel Capital, which invested in Convoy’s seed round.

As you’ll hear, in 2014 and 2015, freight was ready for reinvention. Uber was becoming a verb, and the trucking industry needed a digital solution to connect the different parts of the industry. Convoy launched at the right time, CEO Chris Howard told me. Starting in 2014 wireless carriers started offering free smartphones, and once truckers got their hands on these devices, the industry quickly started to change.

We hope you can join the live event on Wednesday, August 3, at 12:00 pm PDT. Register here, and apply for Pitch Practice using this form. 

Originally, Arianna Huffington and legendary investor Mamoon Hamid were going to speak on the importance of employee wellness. But there was a family emergency, and we wish everyone all the best.

TechCrunch Live records live every Wednesday at noon Pacific. Join the event here. It’s free, and attendees have the opportunity to ask guests questions, participate in Pitch Practice and network with other attendees. The show streams live on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, but only viewers on Grip get access to the additional features.

Chartering a private plane is never going to be cheap, no matter how many startups have promised to make it more affordable over the years. But that doesn’t mean it can’t become cheaper. AeroVanti Air Club, which is announcing a $9.75 million Series A fundraising round led by Network1 Financial Securities, is betting on the rather distinct Piaggio P.180 Avanti turboprop (you can see where the company name comes from), to offer lower hourly rates for its club members.

Membership fees start at $1,000 per month for an individual membership, $1,500 per month for a family membership and $2,500 for corporate memberships. Hourly rates start at $2,495, about half of what even the most affordable WheelsUp flight will set you back. There are no repositioning fees.

In addition to the nine P.180s that make up the core of its fleet, the company also has three Learjet 31s, one Gulfstream G3 and an MD 600N helicopter. Having a helicopter in its fleet is also a bit unusual, but AeroVanti CEO and founder Patrick Britton-Harr notes that it will allow the company to fly passengers from Miami to the Florida Keys or from Boston to Martha’s Vineyard.

The P.180 is an interesting choice. The Italy-built plane with its distinct stabilizers at the nose can seat seven passengers and fly at up to 370 miles per hour. That’s slower than most jets, something worth keeping in mind for a service where you pay by the hour, but comparable to other two-engine turboprops. Britton-Harr, who is a pilot himself and also the CEO of AMS Onsite and Coastal Laboratories, says that his family actually first bought a Piaggio for private use.

Image Credits: AeroVanti

“It’s safe. It’s light. It’s fuel-efficient and has a remarkable range,” he told me when I asked him why he chose this plane. “It has one-third the carbon footprint as its competitors while out-performing them. It’s one of the fastest planes in its class, beating out the King Air 350 and 360, and is 115 mph faster than the Super King Air 200 — though it’s powered by the same engines. It’s also incredibly fun to fly.”

Back in March, AeroVanti acquired Marjet Aviation, a small single-aircraft operator based out of Arizona, for its Part 135 certificate. This, the company says, helped it upgrade its operations and expand its personnel and pilot roster.

“We’re in growth mode,” Britton-Harr said. “This raise will fund maintenance centers so we can become a full MRO [maintenance, repair, and overhaul center]. We’re also building out our customer service team, expanding our fleet once again, and looking at some strategic M&A activity.”

He noted that the company’s members currently include NFL players, C-Suite executives and the occasional family traveling to Disney World. “What they do have in common is an appreciation for value. You have several options when it comes to flying privately. But we’re the only one who can get you there safer, faster, flying 10,000 feet higher with all the amenities and luxury you expect from charter aviation for half the price,” he said.

The private aviation market got a boost during the early pandemic and that demand is still holding steady. Once you’ve had a taste of private aviation, that United first-class seat from Newark to Miami probably suddenly doesn’t seem that great anymore, especially given the overall turmoil in the airline industry right now.