Daily Crunch - Scaled Robotics wins the Startup Battlefield

Happy Thursday

Hello from Disrupt Berlin, where we’ve just named the winner at our latest Startup Battlefield! We’ve also got news about Conductor leaving WeWork, Google releasing data on top searches and VW investing in a lidar startup. Here’s your Daily Crunch for December 12, 2019.

And the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin 2019 is… Scaled Robotics

At the very beginning, there were 14 startups. After two days of fierce competition, we have a winner.

Scaled Robotics has designed a robot that can produce 3D progress maps of construction sites in minutes, precise enough to detect that a beam is just a centimeter or two off. Supervisors can then use the software to check things like which pieces are in place on which floor, whether they have been placed within the required tolerances or if there are safety issues like too much detritus on the ground in work areas.

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How the fastest restaurants have evolved to make your life easier.

Sponsored by Adyen

Today’s quickest restaurants offer customers a higher level of service thanks to the newest innovations in payments. Check out the tools they’re using to make checkout an easy, flexible, and fun part of the newest customer experiences.

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Conductor execs buy their company back from WeWork

It’s been less than two years since WeWork announced the acquisition of SEO and content marketing company Conductor, but those two years have been bumpy, to say the least. So it’s no surprise that Conductor is being sold — not to another company, but to its own CEO and co-founder Seth Besmertnik, COO Selina Eizik and investor Jason Finger (managing partner of The Finger Group and founder of Seamless).

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‘Disney Plus’ was Google’s top US trending search term in 2019

In the U.S., Disney’s new streaming service “Disney Plus” was the biggest search trend of 2019, followed by Cameron Boyce, Nipsey Hussle, Hurricane Dorian, Antonio Brown, Luke Perry, Avengers: Endgame, Game of Thrones, iPhone 11 and Jussie Smollet.

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Aeva snags VW investment with smaller, longer-range lidar

Lidar startup Aeva has deepened its relationship with VW Group. It’s also worth noting that this is the only lidar company that Porsche SE — a majority voting shareholder of the Volkswagen Group — has made an investment in to date.

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Bill.com’s IPO pricing is good news for unprofitable startups

Following the WeWork IPO mess, concerns arose that growth-oriented companies might struggle to drum up investor interest when going public. Bill.com’s offering makes it plain that not all loss-making companies are equal.

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Robinhood lets you invest as little as 1 cent in any stock

Robinhood is launching fractional share trading this week. This lets you buy 0.000001 shares, rounded to the nearest penny, or just $1 of any stock, with zero fee.

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Chatbots spotlight machine learning’s trillion-dollar potential

NDS Cognitive Labs CEO Gustavo Parés argues that chatbots provide significant evidence for AI’s positive impact on both business growth and employment markets. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

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