Technology

Enterprise software startups are changing how they infiltrate companies, and investors are taking note.

Last week, I chatted with Lerer Hippeau‘s Ben Lerer after his firm had just led a seed round in Air, a digital asset management platform. I used the opportunity to pick his brain about what hesearching for in early-stage investments and which trends he believes are shaking up enterprise software.

Below is a chunk of our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

TechCrunch: What kinds of things are you looking at recently? Anything notable?

Ben Lerer: The market is always shifting, but 40,000 feet up, nothing has changed in that we&re always just focused on investing in people. But, beyond people, therecertainly been various areas of opportunity that over the years we have had different kinds of focus on. One that I&ve been most focused on traditionally has been a category that would&ve been called direct-to-consumer brands. Now you would probably just call it &future of consumer& or &future of retail.& Now, I think direct-to-consumer is not the entire pie but just a piece of the pie. So generally my focus is doing consumer deals and then sometimes I focus on deals that are not necessarily consumer, but they&re SaaS businesses, often SaaS businesses that my consumer companies are current or potential customers of.

After a superb unbeaten run in the group stages, the Women in Blue now look like favourites to win the T20 World Cup. But to reach the final they'll have to beat their bogey team - don't miss a moment by reading our India vs England live stream guide below.

England have a long history of being a thorn in India's side when it comes to T20 World

GM revealed Wednesday a new electric architecture that will be the foundation of the automakerfuture EV plans and support a wide range of products across its brands, including compact cars, work trucks, large premium SUVs, performance vehicles and a new Bolt EUV crossover that will come to market next summer.

This modular architecture, called &Ultium,& will be capable of 19 different battery and drive unit configurations, 400-volt and 800-volt packs with storage ranging from 50 kWh to 200 kWh, and front-, rear- and all-wheel drive configurations.

GMfocus on making this EV architecture modular underlines the automakerdesire to electrify a wide variety of its business lines, from the Cruise Origin autonomous taxi and compact Chevrolet Bolt EUV to the GMC HUMMER electric truck and SUV and the newly-announced Cadillac Lyriq SUV. GM also showed a variety of electric vehicles that had not yet been announced or revealed in public on Wednesday, to show how this modularity will be exploited further out in their product plan, including a massive Cadillac flagship sedan called Celestiq .

The Celestiq will be hand-built in the Detroit area, GM President Mark Reuss said, joining a large electric SUV in Cadillacfuture lineup. A pair of future Buick crossovers showed that brandstyling moving in decidedly Tesla -inspired direction, while a mid-sized Chevrolet crossover hinted at a more affordable option in GMotherwise premium-focused future EV lineup.

Using a single architecture for such a wide variety of vehicles provides much-needed scale and capital-efficiency to what has been a small-volume and profitability-challenged EV market. GM sees this scale driving reductions in the cost and complexity of its battery packs, eliminating 80% of the pack wiring compared to the current Chevrolet Bolt and enabling it to drive battery cell costs below the $100/kWh level.

At the heart of the new modular architecture, will be large-format pouch battery cells manufactured as part of a joint manufacturing venture between LG Chem and GM. The companies announced in December plans to mass produce battery cells for GMelectric vehicles at a plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

While the automaker has used LG Chem as a lithium-ion and electronics supplier for at least a decade, the joint venture marks a shift that aims to accelerate the automakerability to win in the electric vehicle space.

GMrelationship with LG Chem has produced a new Nickel Cobalt Manganese Aluminium (NCMA) battery cell, which the automaker says will have the lowest cobalt content of any large-format pouch cell. The flat, rectangular pouch cells allow GM to stack batteries vertically, enabling more packaging flexibility and interior space than the cylindrical cells favored by Tesla, Rivian and others.

GM and LG Chem will break ground on the new $2.3 billion joint venture plant this spring, where they will have annual production capacity of 30 gigawatt hours of these cells with room to expand. The two firms said they will work together to eventually drive all cobalt and nickel out of its cell chemistries, develop electrolyte additives that heal cell degradation and explore solid-state cell options.

The initial wave of electric vehicles from GM will be led by an updated version of the Chevrolet Bolt later this year, followed by a Bolt EUV crossover next summer that will be the first vehicle outside of the Cadillac brand to feature the hands-free SuperCruise driver assistance system. GM will reveal two new premium electric SUVs later this year, the GMC HUMMER EV that will begin production in 2021 and the Cadillac Lyriq which will follow it to market in 2022.

GMnew EV architecture enables Level 2 and DC fast charging, with up to 100 miles of range available in the first 10 minutes of charging. But rather than launching its own in-house fast-charging network, GM is aggregating public charger networks like Chargepoint and EVgo into its myChevrolet mobile app and enabling in-app payment at EVgo chargers. GM is also partnering with Qmerit to provide accredited home charger installation because 80% of EV customers charge at home, the company said.

Just a few weeks back at CES, Google gave a sneak peek of a feature that would let your Android devices read entire web pages aloud to you — perfect for when you don&t have a hand free to scroll but still need to catch up on some text, or for when you just don&t feel like looking at your screen anymore. You&d say, &Hey Google, read this page,& and they&d spin up Google Assistantneural networks to generate a pretty dang spot-on reading of it.

Today that feature starts rolling out to all Android users.

A few interesting bits:

• It&ll highlight the text and auto scroll the page as it reads, helping you to keep track of where the reading has gotten in a story. Google had mentioned this feature as a possibility before, but they weren&t certain it would be ready for launch. Itin!
• You can tweak the read speed if the defaults are too slow/fast for you. Perfect for those people who listen to podcasts at 3x or whatever.
• It can translate! If the page you&re asking assistant to read is in a language that isn&t your default, it can automatically translate more than 40 languages into your language of choice.
• If you&re a webmaster and for some reason don&t want Assistant ever reading a page out loud (like if it contains sensitive information and you don&t want the feature somehow being triggered accidentally), they&ve built a &No page read aloud& HTML meta tag that will disable it on a page-by-page basis.

Google says this feature should work on just about every modern Android phone going back to Android 5 (Lollipop).

HPE has announced that it will deliver the world's fastest exascale supercomputer for the US Department of Energy's (DOE) National Security Administration (NNSA).

The new supercomputer, which can reach a record-breaking speed of two exaflops, has been named El Capitan by the DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The supercomputer is