After visiting Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge several months ago to report on how it was built, I came back on the eve of it opening to the public to try out its first marquee attraction: flying the Millennium Falcon.

Well, I flew it, and it was good. Real good. This ride is for everyone who dreamed of piloting the Falcon more than they dreamed about holding a lightsaber. This ride is for every person that rode Star Tours shuttle and gripped the slightly up-turned handles wishing hard that they could fly it. It’s a quintessential part of the Star Wars universe made flesh.

It’s clever, incredibly well art-directed and absolutely smoothly operational. The ride offers a thrilling group experience that will foster shouting and interaction in the cockpit just as we’ve seen in the movies. It will very likely also breed some post-flight posturing or trash talking depending on how each individual performs their tasks.

The scene setting and queue for the Falcon is pitch perfect. You walk by the ship itself and through a queue that is populated with all of the artifacts of an active smuggling operation inside a well worn, lived in hangar. As you go through the line you are presented with multiple views of the falcon itself, making utilization of the 100 foot ship.

A cast member will hand you a boarding card with your preferred role on it, identified by color.

Eventually you enter the insanely familiar chiclet corridor and board the ship. The reveal of the hold with its Dejarik board (not functional but you can sit there and take pics) and a ton of other super accurate details is your next treat. This is where your colored boarding card gets handed in and you board a cockpit through one of two tunnels.

After a quick briefing from Hondo Ohnaka it’s time to enter the cockpit and, friends, the impact is real. It’s the cockpit as you imagined it, only right in your face and extremely tactile. I talked about this before but the toggles feel right, the levers feel right.

Technologically speaking, the Falcon is a beast of an operation.

In my piece previewing Galaxy’s Edge a few months ago, I mentioned some technical details about the way the ride works. It’s a simulator with multiple cockpits, loaded with 6 people in 2 batches at a time. There are two pilots, two gunners and two engineers. You share responsibility for how the Falcon completes its mission. You’ll always get home but the ship may be more or less damaged and each person gets a rating that translates into your ‘share’ of galactic credits.

Here’s some details from my earlier piece:

• The simulation is run on the Unreal engine and the mechanics are a much upgraded version of what powers Star Tours. Each cockpit has its own real‑time rendering system for a multi‑projection feedback hub across five screens that completely surround the cockpit seamlessly. Any decision you make as a member of the crew has to result in an action on screen, and it’s all real-time, so none of the major stuff is pre-rendered. While Disney itself was fairly cagey about what powers the ‘magic’ behind this system, Nvidia talked a bit about it last year.
• Each of the cockpits is powered by a single BOXX machine with 8 NVIDIA Quadro P6000 GPUs in a Quadro SLI configuration. They sync up with 5 super high res rear projectors that make up a seamless cockpit for the rider. The displays synchronize with each other and with the actions of the people in the cockpit.
• Gunners fire (synchronous fire from both gunners is needed to blow up an attacker) blasters, engineers put out fires or handle special operations like grappling and pilots try not to hit stuff (and engage the hyper drive). All of these actions are accomplished by strategically punching buttons or pulling levers during the flight. You are prompted to do each with audible instructions from Hondo as well as light up rings and buttons.
• The whole simulation sits on top of a custom version of Unreal Engine that supports an obvious ton of GPUs. The work that Disney did on the engine went back to Epic Games and will help to inform how their engine ends up handling multiple GPUs in the future.

In action, the work has paid off. This is an insanely involved simulator ride handling a bunch of inputs at once

I have to say, though, it tickles me pink that Disney spent billions building what reminds me a heck of a lot of a Star Wars version of Spaceteam.

Yes, you can play it in isolation, taking care of your role and that’s it, but just a couple minutes into my flight I was yelling at our (terrible) pilots to go left or right or up or down and the engineers were hollering at my fellow gunner and I to shoot things. If you let yourself get into it, you’re going to have a good time. And there are absolutely cases for multiple runs at this thing, it’s not a one-and-done ride. Different roles, different modes (there is a semi-secret manual gunnery mode you trigger right at the beginning of the ride if you’re quick) and what Disney promises are ongoing stories that will be installed in the ride make it a long term investment.

The controls are responsive, but not ‘twitch-style’. If you’ve played an advanced space simulator then you know that the scale of everything affects your sense of speed — that’s present here too. The Falcon isn’t a ship that goes snicker snack from one heading to another, it arcs and swerves. This makes moving up and down floatier than flying a tiny fighter might be, but it doesn’t take long to get used to it. I hit maybe 2-3 things on my pilot flight, where my earlier flight impacted maybe 15 or so times.

You’re given a score based on how you performed your role and how the whole flight performed. That translates into galactic credits that you can use in the Disney Play app for rewards. The Play App, as long as it has been logged into and opened, will get your score information from the ride automatically.

Cast members will then be able to see how you performed and tell you to “stay away from Hondo, he’s not going to be happy.” Or when you’re ordering a drink at the Cantina the barkeep might say “I see that you had a successful run on the Falcon for Hondo.”

We also got a bit of a video and audio “extra” after our second flight when we did better score wise than my first one. I’m not sure if that’s connected to score but I’m going to try to find out. Hondo was certainly more complimentary and there was a real story-based change between the two runs. We ‘did more’ in the second run and ‘came back with more stuff’ and those things felt connected and visual — it wasn’t just a random score-based level.

I’ll leave the contents of the flight itself to spoiler territory, but it involved the traditional flying in tight spots, asteroids, shooting down Tie Fighters and entering hyperspace. It was intense, felt like a good length and was very satisfying.

I’ll have more to come from Galaxy’s Edge in the next few days, stay tuned.

Brex, the fintech business that’s taken the startup world by storm with its sought after corporate card tailored for entrepreneurs, is raising millions in Series D funding less than a year after it launched, TechCrunch has learned.

Bloomberg reports Brex is raising at a $2 billion valuation, though sources tell TechCrunch the company is still in negotiations with both new and existing investors. Brex didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Kleiner Perkins is leading the round via former general partner Mood Rowghani, who left the storied venture capital fund last year to form Bond alongside Mary Meeker and Noah Knauf. As we’ve previously reported, the Bond crew is still in the process of allocating capital out of Kleiner’s billion-dollar Digital Growth Fund III.

Bond, which recently closed on $1.25 billion for its debut effort and made its first investment, is not participating in the round for Brex, sources confirm to TechCrunch. Bond declined to comment.

Brex, a graduate of Y Combinator’s winter 2017 cohort, has raised $182 million in VC funding, reaching a valuation of $1.1 billion in October 2018 three months after launching its corporate card for startups and less than a year after completing YC’s accelerator program.

Most recently, Brex attracted a $125 million Series C investment led by Greenoaks Capital, DST Global and IVP. The startup is also backed by PayPal founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, and VC firms such as Ribbit Capital, Oneway Ventures and Mindset Ventures, according to PitchBook.

The company’s pace of growth is unheard of, even in Silicon Valley where inflated valuations and outsized rounds are the norm. Why? Brex has tapped into a market dominated by legacy players in dire need of technological innovation and, of course, startup founders always need access to credit. That, coupled with the fact that it’s capitalized on YC’s network of hundreds of startup founders — i.e. Brex customers — has accelerated its path to a multi-billion-dollar price tag.

Brex doesn’t require any kind of personal guarantee or security deposit from its customers, allowing founders near-instant access to credit. More importantly, it gives entrepreneurs a credit limit that’s as much as 10 times higher than what they would receive elsewhere.

Investors may also be enticed by the fact the company doesn’t use third-party legacy technology, boasting a software platform that is built from scratch. On top of that, Brex simplifies a lot of the frustrating parts of the corporate expense process by providing companies with a consolidated look at their spending.

“We have a very similar effect of what Stripe had in the beginning, but much faster because Silicon Valley companies are very good at spending money but making money is harder,” Brex co-founder and chief executive officer Henrique Dubugras told me late last year.

Stripe, for context, was founded in 2010. Not until 2014 did the company raise its unicorn round, landing a valuation of $1.75 billion with an $80 million financing. Today, Stripe has raised a total of roughly $1 billion at a valuation north of $20 billion.

Dubugras and Brex co-founder Pedro Franceschi, 23-year-old entrepreneurs, relocated from Brazil to Stanford in the fall of 2016 to attend the university. They dropped out upon getting accepted into YC, which they applied to with a big dreams for a virtual reality startup called Beyond. Beyond quickly became Brex, a name in which Dubugras recently told TechCrunch was chosen because it was one of few four-letter word domains available.

Brex’s funding history

March 2017: Brex graduates Y Combinator

April 2017: $6.5M Series A | $25M valuation

April 2018: $50M Series B | $220M valuation

October 2018: $125M Series C | $1.1B valuation

May 2019: undisclosed Series D | ~$2B valuation

In April, Brex secured a $100 million debt financing from Barclays Investment Bank. At the time, Dubugras told TechCrunch the business would not seek out venture investment in the near future, though he did comment that the debt capital would allow for a significant premium when Brex did indeed decide to raise capital again.

In 2019, Brex has taken steps several steps toward maturation.Recently, it launched a rewards program for customers and closed its first notable acquisition of a blockchain startup called Elph. Shortly after, Brex released its second product, a credit card made specifically for ecommerce companies.

Its upcoming infusion of capital will likely be used to develop payment services tailored to Fortune 500 business, which Dubugras has said is part of Brex’s long term plan to disrupt the entire financial technology space.

Netflix’s chief content officer Ted Sarandos said the streaming service (which is spending billions of dollars on an ever-growing catalog of original content) will “rethink [its] whole investment in Georgia” if a recently-signed abortion law goes into effect.

Sarandos’ statement was first published in Variety. The industry publication said it reached out to the major studios for comment on the issue, and it contrasted his position with a lack of response from The Walt Disney Company, WarnerMedia, Sony Pictures Entertainment, NBCUniversal, Viacom, Fox and Amazon Studios.

“We have many women working on productions in Georgia, whose rights, along with millions of others, will be severely restricted by this law,” Sarandos said. “It’s why we will work with the ACLU and others to fight it in court. Given the legislation has not yet been implemented, we’ll continue to film there, while also supporting partners and artists who choose not to. Should it ever come into effect, we’d rethink our entire investment in Georgia.”

This comes the stars of two Netflix shows — Jason Bateman of “Ozark” and Alyssa Milano of “Insatiable” — have said they would stop filming in the state if the law takes effect.

Other filmmakers have taken the route of Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, who said they proceed with plans to film their Netflix movie “Hillbilly Elegy” in Georgia while making a donation to the ACLU to fight the anti-abortion legislation. (Howard and Grazer also said they will boycott the state if the law takes effect.)

The law in question, which was signed by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp on May 7, prohibits abortion after the detection of a fetal heartbeat — something that usually happens after six weeks of pregnancy. It’s widely seen as part of a larger effort aimed at getting the Supreme Court to overturn or weaken the abortion protections established in Roe v. Wade.

Thanks to state tax incentives, Georgia has become a hub for film and TV, with productions bringing the state an estimated $2.7 billion in revenue in 2017.

Fundraising 101: How to trigger FOMO among VCs

Our media columnist Eric Peckham talked to a variety of successful founders on how they generate FOMO (i.e. fear of missing out) among VCs during their fundraises. While having a great deck and story is key to startup success, clearly there is also a bit of the dark arts required to go from intro email to term sheet.

We focused on a two-week period and set all the meetings for Thursday and Friday. From 7am into the evening, back-to-back pitches at all the firms in one area then the next area. That’s because partner meetings are on Mondays, so the Thursday and Friday conversations would lead to pitching the whole partnership the following Monday. We had a 24-hour rule: if we didn’t hear back from a fund in 24 hours, we crossed them off the list.

and

According to this CEO, Sequoia and Benchmark are the best at throwing entrepreneurs off their process in order to get ahead of the competition. Sequoia will typically arrange meetings for the morning so they can invite you back for a second meeting with more partners that same afternoon; Benchmark’s partners are quick to travel to wherever you are in the world and sell you on working together (with a term sheet at the ready).

Q&A with J Crowley, Head of Product at Airbnb Lux, on what makes a great PM

Our editor Jordan Crook did a great interview with J Crowley of Airbnb Lux and formerly of Foursquare, and the two of them discussed the opportunities and challenges of being a PM, how to deal with failure, and how to be a leader on a product team.

At KubeCon last week in Barcelona, container security was a hot topic, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Palo Alto Networks announced today that it was buying container security startup, Twistlock for $410 million.

The company also announced it was buying serverless security startup, PureSec. It did not reveal the purchase price for this deal, but the pair of companies gives Palo Alto a set of tools for modern development approaches, as the meaning of securing applications and infrastructure changes.

Twistlock has raised a little over $63 million, according to Crunchbase data, so that price tag presumably gives its investors quite a nice rate of return, but Palo Alto probably sees what everyone else is seeing, and having a container security piece in its toolkit is going to be a highly valuable asset.

With a company like Twistlock in the fold, it not only gives them a container security platform, it’s also giving them the 120 employees with a lot of container security knowledge and 400 customers using that toolset, and that in itself may in some ways be even more valuable.

Developers have been moving to containers quickly over the last several years, and as with so many rapidly growing technologies, the security hasn’t necessarily kept up with the development of containerization in general. Companies like Twistlock and Aqua Security have been trying to build tools to change that. Both companies had a big presence at KubeCon last week.

Company CTO John Morello says his company works with the cloud native community to help define security standards, then builds that into the application. “Within Twistlock, we have literally 500 plus checks that cover the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks for Linux, for Docker, for Kubernetes and gives you that visibility. So you can see what the configuration state of your environment is, but we also give you a preventative capability. So if the environment is configured insecurely, then we won’t allow the application to be deployed,” Morello told TechCrunch in an interview at KubeCon last week.

Twistlock, which was founded 2015, got into the container security quite early, but the founders saw that this new way of developing software would require a new way of securing it. That’s partly because of the ephemeral nature of containers, but more because containerization brings with it a high level of automation, and when no humans are touching the process, it’s easier for hackers to insert themselves without anyone knowing it.

The company’s most recent funding round was a $33 million Series C investment last summer. As for PureSec, it had raised $10 million, according to Crunchbase.

Varjo‘s VR headset was the best VR headset I had ever demoed; its dual display design with a micro-OLED sweet spot enabled insanely high-resolution views without requiring a supercomputer to power it. The company is looking to inject a bit more into the real world with its new developer kit that it announced today at the Augmented World Expo.

The XR-1, as it is being called, takes the headset and mounts a pair of cameras to the front plate, piping in high-def outside imagery which it can inject real-time rendered content into, leveraging the high-end GPU your headset is connected to.

While devices like the Magic Leap One and HoloLens 2 focus on building nearly transparent display structures that allow users to see the real-world with simulated imagery, pass-through mixed reality sends everything through external camera sensors, cutting the world off from a user’s naked eye but presenting a more precisely-blended version of AR.

The Finnish startup has raised over $45 million in funding.

Transparent waveguide displays unsurprisingly have some shortcoming compared to static screens, something Varjo maintains makes their solution better for customers seeking out the highest quality imagery.

“The XR-1 can show mixed reality with true-to-life fidelity you can only achieve using video-pass- through. Lifelike mixed reality is quite literally impossible to achieve with optical-see-through systems like HoloLens,” Varjo co-founder Urho Konttori said in a statement.

Alongside the XR-1’s release, Varjo is also detailing a deepening partnership with Volvo, which has now invested directly into the company. Volvo is utilizing the headset to help test new vehicle types and interfaces inside a partially rendered environment.

Apple’s 2017 purchase of Vrvana showcased that there was some interest in showcasing how this passthrough mixed reality headset solution could bolster the technology, though Apple has already been investing heavily in pass-through mixed reality just on its iPhones rather than headsets.

The XR-1 camera module is working with two 12-megapixel cameras piping what they see to your eyes in less than 15 milliseconds.

Varjo is a much more expensive solution than the already pricey options from Magic Leap and HoloLens, the XR-1 will likely see less usage on factory floors dues to its form factor and is more likely suited for design and visualization needs. Given the base of the headset is the VR-1, needless to say it won’t be too difficult to switch between modes.

The company has yet to detail how much the XR-1 will retail for when it launches sometime in the second-half of this year, but the VR-1 retails for $5,995 so chances are it will be a tad costly.

Let’s go beyond the high-level fundraising advice that fills VC blogs. If you have a compelling business and have educated yourself on crafting a pitch deck and getting warm intros to VCs, there are still specific questions about the strategy to follow for your fundraise.

How can you make your round “hot” and trigger a fear of missing out (FOMO) among investors? How can you fundraise faster to reduce the distraction it has on running your business?

Unsurprisingly, I’ve noticed that experienced founders tend to be more systematic in the tactics they employ to raise capital. So I asked several who have raised tens (or hundreds) of millions in VC funding to share specific strategies for raising money on their terms. Here’s their advice.

(The three high-profile CEOs who agreed to share their specific playbooks requested anonymity so VCs don’t know which is theirs. I’ve nicknamed them Founder A, Founder B, and Founder C.)

Have additional fundraising tactics to share? Email me at eric.peckham@techcrunch.com.

Table of Contents

• You need to create a market for your shares
• The one month fundraise
• Thursday/Friday meetings
• The bicoastal month
• Early relationship building
• Organize your pitch better
• Research each VC’s style
• You’re not just being judged on your startup
• The money is already yours

You need to create a market for your shares

“You’re trying to make a market for your equity. In order to make a market, you need multiple people lining up at the same time.”

That advice from Atrium CEO Justin Khan (a co-founder of companies like Twitch and former partner at Y Combinator) was reiterated by all the entrepreneurs I interviewed. Fundraising should be a sprint, not a marathon, otherwise the loss of momentum will make it more difficult.

Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company under Alphabet, is bringing its self-driving trucks back to Arizona.

The company’s autonomous Chysler Pacifica hybrid vehicles, which are used in its Waymo One ride-hailing service, are a common sight on public streets in Chandler and other suburbs of Phoenix . But its self-driving Class 8 big rig trucks haven’t been in Arizona for more than year.

Waymo integrated its self-driving system into Class 8 trucks and began testing them in Arizona in August 2017. The company stopped testing its trucks on Arizona roads sometime later that year.

Those early Arizona tests were aimed at gathering initial information about driving trucks in the region, according to Waymo. This new round of testing is at a more advanced stage in the program’s development.

Testing will be conducted on freeways around the metro Phoenix area and will expand over time, according to Waymo. The company wouldn’t share details of how many autonomous trucks it has in its total fleet, how many will be in Arizona or when it will broaden its testing area outside of metro Phoenix.

The company said it will be testing with both empty trucks and with freight. However, the freight will be for testing purposes only and not part of a commercial business.

The self-driving trucks have two trained safety drivers who can takeover if needed.

Waymo has been testing its self-driving trucks in a handful of locations in the U.S., including Arizona, in the San Francisco area and Atlanta. In 2018, the company announced planned to use its self-driving trucks to deliver freight bound for Google’s data centers in Atlanta.

Waymo self-driving trucks will be sharing Arizona freeways with at least one other company — TuSimple, which runs an autonomous route (with safety drivers) between Tucson and Phoenix along Interstate 10.

Startups are often associated with the benefits and toys provided in their offices. Foosball tables! Free food! Dog friendly! But what if the future of startups was less about physical office space and more about remote-first work environments? What if, in fact, the most compelling aspect of a startup work environment is that the employees don’t have to go to one?

A remote-first company model has been Seeq’s strategy since our founding in 2013. We have raised $35 million and grown to more than 100 employees around the globe. Remote-first is clearly working for us and may be the best model for other software companies as well.

So, who is Seeq and what’s been the key to making the remote-first model work for us?  And why did we do it in the first place?

Seeq is a remote-first startup – i.e. it was founded with the intention of not having a physical headquarters or offices, and still operates that way – that is developing an advanced analytics application that enables process engineers and subject matter experts in oil & gas, pharmaceuticals, utilities, and other process manufacturing industries to investigate and publish insights from the massive amounts of sensor data they generate and store.

To succeed, we needed to build a team quickly with two skill sets: 1) software development expertise, including machine learning, AI, data visualization, open source, agile development processes, cloud, etc. and 2) deep domain expertise in the industries we target.

Which means there is no one location where we can hire all the employees we need: Silicon Valley for software, Houston for oil & gas, New Jersey for fine chemicals, Seattle for cloud expertise, water utilizes across the country, and so forth. But being remote-first gives has made recruiting and hiring these high-demand roles easier much easier than if we were collocated.

Image via Seeq Corporation

Job postings on remote-specific web sites like FlexJobs, Remote.co and Remote OK typically draw hundreds of applicants in a matter of days. This enables Seeq to hire great employees who might not call Seattle, Houston or Silicon Valley home – and is particularly attractive to employees with location-dependent spouses or employees who simply want to work where they want to live.

But a remote-first strategy and hiring quality employees for the skills you need is not enough: succeeding as a remote-first company requires a plan and execution around the “3 C’s of remote-first”.

The three requirements to remote-first success are the three C’s: communication, commitment and culture.

Ahead of LGBTQ Pride Month, Lyft is adding gender-neutral pronouns to its rider app. Now, riders can select from the following:

• They/them/theirs
• She/her/hers
• He/him/his
• My pronoun isn’t listed
• Prefer not to say

Drivers will be able to see your preferred pronoun, but they will not be able to share theirs. Moving forward, you can expect Lyft to start addressing you and referring to you by your preferred pronouns.

This helps to create space for those to share their pronouns and normalize the practice. Lyft is also partnering with the National Center for Transgender Equality to support drivers looking to change their names with educational and financial resources.