Stoke Space, a company that’s developing a fully reusable rocket, has unveiled a new tool to let hardware companies track the design, testing and integration of parts. The new tool, Fusion, is targeting an unsexy but essential aspect of the hardware workflow.

It’s a solution born out of “ubiquitous pain in the industry,” Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa said in a recent interview. The current parts tracking status quo is marked by cumbersome, balkanized solutions built on piles of paperwork and spreadsheets. Many of the existing tools are not optimized “for boots on the ground,” but for finance or procurement teams, or even the C-suite, Lapsa explained.

In contrast, Fusion is designed to optimize simple inventory transactions and parts organization, and it will continue to track parts through their lifespan: as they are built into larger assemblies and go through testing. In an extreme example, such as hardware failures, Fusion will help teams connect anomalous data to the exact serial numbers of the parts involved.

Image credit: Stoke Space

“If you think about aerospace in general, there’s a need and a desire to be able to understand the part pedigree of every single part number and serial number that’s in an assembly,” Lapsa said. “So not only do you understand the configuration, you understand the history of all of those parts dating back to forever.”

While Lapsa clarified that Fusion is the result of an organic in-house need for better parts management – designing a fully reusable rocket is complicated, after all – turning it into a sell-able product was a decision that the Stoke team made early on. It’s a notable example of a rocket startup generating pathways for revenue while their vehicle is still under development.

Fusion offers particular relevance to startups. Many existing tools are designed for production runs – not the fast-moving research and development environment that many hardware startups find themselves, Lapsa added. In these environments, speed and accuracy are paramount.

Brent Bradbury, Stoke’s head of software, echoed these comments.

“The parts are changing, the people are changing, the processes are changing,” he said. “This lets us capture all that as it happens without a whole lot of extra work.”

Companies at the forefront of AI would naturally like to stay at the forefront, so it’s no surprise they want to stay close to smaller startups that are putting some of their newest advancements to work.

Last month, for example, Neo, a startup accelerator founded by Silicon Valley investor Ali Partovi, announced that OpenAI and Microsoft have offered to provide free software and advice to companies in a new track focused on artificial intelligence.

Now, another Bay Area outfit — House Fund, which invests in startups with ties to UC Berkeley — says it is launching an AI accelerator and that, similarly, OpenAI, Microsoft, Databricks, and Google’s Gradient Ventures are offering participating startups free and early access to tech from their companies, along with mentorship from top AI founders and executives at these companies.

We talked with House Fund founder Jeremy Fiance over the weekend to get a bit more color about the program, which will replace a broader-based accelerator program House Fund has run and whose alums include an additive manufacturing software company, Dyndrite, and the managed app development platform Chowbotics, whose most recent round in January brought the company’s total funding to more than $60 million.

For founders interested in learning more, the new AI accelerator program runs for two months, kicking off in early July and ending in early September. Six or so companies will be accepted, with the early application deadline coming up next week on April 13th. (The final application deadline is on June 1.) As for the time commitment involved across those two months, every startup could have a different experience, says Fiance. “We’re there when you need us, and we’re good at staying out of the way.”

There will be the requisite kickoff retreat to spark the program and founders to get to know one another. Candidates who are accepted will also have access to some of UC Berkeley’s renowned AI professors, including Michael Jordan, Ion Stoica, and Trevor Darrell. And they can opt into dinners and events in collaboration with these various constituents.

As for some of the financial dynamics, every startup that goes through the program will receive a $1 million investment on a $10 million post-money SAFE note. Importantly, too, as with the House Fund’s venture dollars, its AI accelerator is seeking startups that have at least one Berkeley-affiliated founder on the co-founding team. That includes alumni, faculty, PhDs, postdocs, staff, students, dropouts, and other affiliates.

There is no demo day. Instead, says Fiance, founders will receive “directed, personal introductions” to the VCs who best fit with their startups.

Given the buzz over AI, the new program could supercharge House Fund, the venture organization, which is already growing fast. Fiance launched it in 2016 with just $6 million and it now manages $300 million in assets, including on behalf of Berkeley Endowment Management Company and the University of California.

At the same time, the competition out there is fierce and growing more so by the day.

Though OpenAI has offered to partner with House Fund, for example, the San Francisco-based company announced its own accelerator back in November. Called Converge, the cohort was to be made up of 10 or so founders who received $1 million each and admission to five weeks of office hours, workshops and other events that ended and that received their funding from the OpenAI Startup Fund.

Y Combinator, the biggest accelerator in the world, is also oozing with AI startups right now, all of them part of a winter class that will be talking directly with investors this week via demo days that are taking place tomorrow, April 5th, and on Thursday.

In a major blow to shared micromobility companies Lime, Dott and Tier, Paris has voted to ban rental e-scooters from their streets. Many in the industry fear the move in Paris, where free-floating scooters initially took off in 2018, will have ripple effects in other cities.

Paris has been one of the most heavily regulated e-scooter markets, something companies have pointed to as an example of how they can play nice with cities. Yet despite limiting scooter top speeds to as slow as 10 kilometers per hour (about 6 miles per hour) and requiring riders to use dedicated parking areas or pay fines, Paris has become the first city to completely reverse its policy on offering contracts to shared micromobility companies.

In a referendum Sunday organized by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, Paris residents voted 89% against keeping shared e-scooters in the city. The three companies that pay for contracts to operate in the City of Light will have to pull their fleets — a total of 15,000 e-scooters — out of the city by September 1.

Hidalgo, who originally welcomed shared e-scooters to Paris, has pushed for Paris to become a more livable 15-minute city and has spearheaded policies that reclaim parking spots from cars to create new bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly areas. However, shared scooters have gotten a lot of pushback from many city residents who often complain about reckless driving and clutter on sidewalks.

Hidalgo said Sunday that scooters are the cause of a lot of accidents and that the business model was too expensive to be sustainable, with a 10 minute ride costing about €5. She also said free-floating scooters aren’t as climate friendly as she’d want. At the start of the year, TechCrunch deep dived into scooter usage in Paris, and found through a variety of studies that while e-scooters are incredibly popular, they mostly replace walking or public transit, rather than car usage.

That doesn’t mean they didn’t replace any car trips. One study from 2019 found 7% of kilometers covered by scooters replace car and personal taxi trips, a number that has likely grown over the years. But 7% is not nothing, says Hélène Chartier, director of urban planning at C40, a global network of mayors taking urgent climate change action. Chartier previously served as an advisor to Hidalgo.

“As part of a mobility package that Paris would offer as an alternative to cars, [shared e-scooters] could have been an option,” said Chartier. “Without all of the other problems, they could have said, Ok why not? But if you add the accidents, if you add the difficulty on the public space, at some point you need to say this is not the main solution. We should invest more in bikes, e-bikes, walking.”

Low voter turnout

David Zipper, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government, tweeted that he wasn’t surprised to see Paris vote against shared e-scooters, but he didn’t expect such a large margin. That sentiment has been mirrored by scooter advocates and the companies themselves.

Dott, Lime and Tier said in a joint statement that the low voter turnout affected the results of the referendum. Only 103,084 people turned out to vote, which is about 7.5% of registered Paris voters. They blamed restrictive rules, a limited number of polling stations (and thus long lines that dissuade young voters) and no electronic voting, saying the combination “heavily skewed toward order age groups, which has widened the gap between pros and cons.”

Additionally, the companies said the referendum was held the same day of the Paris marathon, and that only Paris residents were allowed to vote, leaving out those who live just outside the city but commute in.

The operators offered free rides to customers who voted Sunday and relied on social media influencers to try to get young users to vote, efforts that seem to have gone in vain. Parisians reported there were a high proportion of older voters in the queues.

The referendum isn’t binding, so Hidalgo can still make the unlikely decision to keep scooters in the city based on the low voter turnout. The numbers clearly show that scooters are popular. Lime has previously told TechCrunch that 90% of its fleet in Paris is used everyday. In 2021, over 1.2 million scooter riders, 85% of whom were Parisian residents, took a total of 10 million rides across Lime, Dott and Tier. That’s around 27,000 rides per day.

The ban will not have an effect on the e-bikes offered by shared micromobility companies, which will remain in the city. Similarly privately owned scooters are not affected by the ban, of which 700,000 were sold in France last year, according to transport ministry figures.

Micromobility in limbo: Takeaways from Paris and LA