HARDWARE

Roadmap for Reinvention

Intel announced a major shakeup Wednesday. CEO Bob Swan will step down Feb. 15; VMware CEO and 30-year Intel vet Pat Gelsinger will step up. He’ll take the reins of a pedigreed company a bit down on its luck. 

Fabless, fabulous? 

Intel fumbled its transition to the 7-nanometer manufacturing process. Without getting into the weeds of semiconductor fabrication, that’s how billions more transistors are squeezed onto each chip. Samsung and TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, have pulled ahead. 

• Just yesterday, TSMC posted record Q4 profits and said it will sink up to $28 billion into capital investment this year. 
• Analysts and activist investors have suggested Intel consider spinning off its manufacturing business to focus on R&D and chip design.

While Intel’s core data center business is robust and growing, Big Tech companies are knocking at the door and pulling server chip development in-house. As for another legacy business line: AMD has nearly pulled even with Intel for desktop CPU market share. And Apple, of course, is swapping out Intel silicon for its M1 chip. 

Brighter pastures ahead 

Intel’s stock was up ~11% after it broadcast a changing of the guard. The company also signaled “strong progress” in fixing its 7-nm woes. Finally, as a bonus, we’ll quickly run through an up-and-coming business unit worth keeping tabs on. 

In 2017, Intel acquired Mobileye for $15 billion. We’re on record saying it’s the dark horse of self-driving. And the horse had news at CES this week: 

• Intel and Mobileye are developing a lidar system-on-chip. Slated for 2025 production, the hardware could slash costs of self-driving tech stacks. 
• Mind the beachhead: Mobileye controls ~80% of the market for advanced driver-assist vision systems used by automakers today. 

Cars with Mobileye gear are mapping 8 million kilometers a day, with 1 billion km logged to date. And Mobileye’s autonomous fleet is getting more cosmopolitan. Testing will soon expand to Paris, Detroit, Tokyo, Shanghai, and (pending regulatory approval) NYC. To any self-driving car in Midtown Manhattan: Godspeed and good luck. 

Bottom line: Intel is making concentrated bets on the future of computing as it fights fires in its traditional business lines. As former Intel chief Andy Grove said: “Only the paranoid survive.” 

VC

Broken Record

January is good for two things: sticking with New Year’s resolutions and digesting year-in-review reports. We’re already behind on the former, so let’s focus on the latter. 

PwC and CB Insights just released their latest report on VC funding. The US highlights:

• Funding: 2020 was the biggest-ever funding year, with VCs disbursing $130 billion. The previous record was $122 billion in 2018.
• Unicorns: 28 startups grew unicorn horns in Q4 2020 alone. For context, the US only has 225 total unicorns (startups valued north of $1 billion). 
• Megadeals: We saw more $100+ million deals than ever last year—318 versus 220 in 2019. 
• Miami: Funding went up 685% quarter over quarter in Q4 and 72% year over year . 

And for the first time, “emerging areas” attracted the majority of US funding in 2020. The top three are familiar faces: AI, fintech, and digital health. Industry experts told us to expect digital health to captivate VC hearts and minds in 2021 as well. 

Bottom line: Like public market investors, VCs were more than comfortable backing tech companies through the peaks and valleys of 2020. 

SPONSORED BY JUSTWORKS

HR That Has Your Back, Wherever You Are

No matter where everyone on your team hangs their hat, all of their important HR needs can be easily managed under one roof—with this simple software.

It’s called Justworks, and it’s the easy-to-use platform for payroll, benefits, HR, and compliance to help you manage your remote team across all 50 states. 

So whether you’re signing up for benefits from your horse-themed childhood bedroom or while riding actual horses on the California coast, Justworks is your trusty HR steed that makes remote onboarding a breeze. 

Its intuitive online platform takes the guesswork out of things like employment and tax regulations and requirements. Plus, you get access to expert support 24/7—and even certified HR Consultants to answer your questions when you need them.

Saddle up and get your HR to-dos squared away with Justworks. 

SPACE

Up, Up, and Away

Blue Origin successfully completed its first mission of the year yesterday, narrowly beating out Taco Bell's potato announcement for most exciting news of the day. 

The company launched its New Shepard rocket, which it’s been developing for suborbital space tourism, past the Kármán line—the generally accepted boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. 

What else is new: This was Blue Origin’s first time testing out a new booster and capsule, which featured improvements to interior acoustics and temperature regulation, and included crew display panels, individual push-to-talk buttons for passengers, and new communication and safety alert systems, a spokesperson told Business Insider. 

• Also along for the ride: 50,000+ postcards from schoolchildren around the world—and a life-sized crash test dummy, dubbed “Mannequin Skywalker,” to record additional flight data. 

Looking ahead: This is a noteworthy advancement, but Blue Origin is still in “no rush to begin crewed commercial spaceflight operations,” according to a report by space analytics firm Astralytical. 

By 2024, though, there’s a “moderately low likelihood” of Blue Origin beginning to sell spots on commercial space flights. 

BITS & BYTES

Stat: The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration asked Tesla to recall 158,000 Model S and Model X vehicles, citing worn-out memory chips leading to failing touchscreens. 

Quote: “It was a slow burn for three years and then a huge explosion. Now the rocket is going.” —Brian Acton, co-founder of Signal, in an interview with TechCrunch.

Read: Retail Brew covers a big development in Amazon’s cashierless store journey: the e-commerce giant is licensing its “Just Walk Out” tech to airport retailer Hudson. 

Correction: We wrote Wednesday that Walmart and Cruise are teaming up on electric vans. They are running an electric self-driving delivery pilot, but not using commercial vans.

SPONSORED BY HPE

More than 80% of data science projects fail. Speed bumps are everywhere, stalling efforts that make machine learning a reality. And if machine learning is going to advance the way we live and work, and transform industries, an 8 out of 10 failure rate is pretty scary. So, how do we fast forward to the future of data science? Watch this 2-minute explainer video.

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Qualcomm agreed to acquire chip startup Nuvia for $1.4 billion. 
• TSMC says that addressing the auto semiconductor shortage is a priority. 
• DJI, the Chinese drone giant, is putting together a team focused on self-driving tech. Last year it released two lidar sensors. 
• Google completed its $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit. 
• Ring will add end-to-end encryption to its smart home cameras. It’s also dealing with a security flaw in its Neighbors app, which exposed users’ personal data.
• Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce joined an effort to standardize digital vaccination records. 

GOING PHISHING

Three of the following news stories are true, and one...we made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

1. The r/Space debate du jour is whether an orbiting Cheeto Puff could destroy the International Space Station.  
2. The AI smart crib is here to bounce your baby back to sleep. 
3. The CIA declassified thousands of documents about UFOs.
4. Rolls Royce will build a maglev train in the UK. 

FROM YOU

Emerging Tech Brew is test-driving the Mach-E this weekend. The Mustang-branded crossover is Ford’s first all-electric SUV, with rolling deliveries set to start this summer. Some auto enthusiasts are unhappy with the Mach-E joining the iconic muscle car’s lineup, but we digress. 

What questions do you have about the car? What do you want us to test? Reply to this email or ping Ryan on Twitter. Finally, because we know everyone’s wondering: Yes, we plan to compare the Mach-E with similar Tesla models. 

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• GM’s president on its new B2B bet for electric vehicles 
• Apple, Google, and AWS pull support for Parler
• What a Democratic Congress means for tech 

GOING PHISHING ANSWER

Unless it’s a super secret, Rolls Royce is not building a maglev train in the UK. But while we’re here, researchers at Southwest Jiaotong University in China just unveiled a maglev train prototype with top speeds of nearly 400 mph.