Peter Reinhardt spent the last decade as CEO at Segment helping to build the customer data platform, selling it to Twilio for $3.2 billion along the way. Today, Reinhardt announced he was leaving Twilio to be full-time CEO at Charm Industrial, a carbon mitigation startup he co-founded in 2018. Reinhardt expressed mixed emotions about leaving, […]
$100 million for mealworms
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down and focus on a single topic, or theme. This week we’re talking agtech, a surprisingly cool bit of the technology startup world. But Chris and Danny and Natasha and Alex were not alone in their quest to take a look into agtech, we brought along TechCrunch climate editor Jon Shieber for the ride.
With his help we got through a number of pretty damn interesting things, including:
SESO Labor raising $4.5 million to help farms secure the labor they need, and navigate the American immigration system.
Gridware is building early-detection sensors for power grid failures and wildfires
Like corporate financial accounting, the power grid never draws headlines when things are going well. No journalist writes “The power remains on,” or discusses the extensive work it takes to maintain the grid. Instead, it takes a record-breaking ice wave to knock out power to one of the largest states in America for it to start garnering front-page coverage, or perhaps massive wildfires in America’s most populous state like the Camp Fire in California in 2018.
Power grids are going to be in the news more and more in the coming years as global climate change intensifies storm activity and grids come under increasingly harsh strain. As my colleague Jon Shieber wrote yesterday, “Whether it’s heavily regulated markets like California or a free market like Texas, current policy can’t stop the weather from wreaking havoc and putting people’s lives at risk.” The grid is at the center of one
There is quite a bit to get to this week, so let’s charge forward.
Email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, opinions or tips. You also can send a direct message to me at Twitter @kirstenkorosec.
Micromobbin’
The spike in electric bike sales was one of the rosier outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, new legislation introduced this past week by U.S. representatives Jimmy Panetta (D-CA) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) could push sales even higher. The Electric Bicycle Incentive Kickstart for the Environment (E-BIKE) Act proposes creating a consumer tax credit that would cover 30% of the cost of an electric bicycle up to a $1,500 credit. The proposed bill applies to new electric bicycles that cost less than $8,000 and is fully refundable, allowing lower-income workers to claim the credit, according to Panetta’s announcement.