Canva, an Australian headquartered business, has raised another $70 million to expand its graphic design platform. The round, which values the company at a massive $2.5 billion, brings its total raised to $166 million.

General Catalyst and Bond, Mary Meeker’s debut venture capital fund, have participated in the funding alongside existing backers Felicis Ventures and Blackbird Capital. Canva becomes Meeker’s first Bond-specific portfolio company.

“The Canva team are building their platform around three trends – content, community and commerce – that we’ve been observing in some of the world’s fastest growing companies,” Meeker, an investor in Slack, Airbnb and more, said in a statement. “With its global user base of more than 15 million monthly active users, Canva is a clear leader providing a platform that empowers users to create compelling, data-rich visuals and gain design fluency through collaboration and feedback.”

The news comes mere days after the provider of design and publishing tools acquired the free stock image providers Pexels and Pixabay and launched a new subscription service for its premium image marketplace, Photos Unlimited. The new capital, however, will be used to fuel another new product, Canva For Enterprise, which is tailored for larger brands and businesses seeking additional brand control and collaboration.

Founded in 2013, Canva counts 15 million users in 190 countries.

“We’ll be using this new funding to further cement Canva as the default tool in every workplace,” Canva co-founder and chief executive officer Melanie Perkins said in a statement. “We’ve seen incredible uptake from millions of people all around the world, with organizations of all sizes, from small businesses to Fortune 500s, using Canva every day.”

Pandora is rolling out new desktop apps for its streaming music listeners, starting with Mac. This morning, the company announced the launch of a native desktop app for Mac, with a Windows version to soon follow. The app supports keyboard controls, on-screen notifications for the music currently playing, and a way to control Pandora’s new “Modes” feature for customizing the music you hear on your Pandora stations.

Introduced just a couple of months ago, Pandora Modes switches up the classic listening experience by letting you tweak your stations to favor deep cuts, or crowd favorites, new releases, specific artists and more. The idea is to give users more control over how Pandora’s customization algorithms work, without requiring users built out their own playlists to get the same experience.

On the desktop app, switching modes is easy. From the Now Playing screen, you just click on one of the various options to tune your station, as you currently do on mobile.

Meanwhile, to use the keyboard controls feature, you need to enable Accessibility permissions in the Mac’s settings. You can then use your Mac keyboard to do things like play, pause, replay, skip, shuffle, or thumbs up or down the songs.

As your songs play, notifications appear on the screen when the app that detail the song title, artist, and album for whatever music is currently playing.

Overall, there’s nothing all that remarkable about the Pandora desktop — it’s a clean, simply designed native app that makes Pandora easier to use. But many people today prefer a native desktop app to a web browser experience — especially for features like the notifications, keyboard controls, and because you don’t have to dig around through a bunch of browser tabs to find Pandora as you work on other things in your browser.

 

However, as a Mac app for streaming music it begs comparisons to Apple’s iTunes. It offers a much different experience, with the latter also including a music library and download store, but a more limited radio experience that lacks the tuning offered by “Modes.” Pandora has also been integrating with parent company SiriusXM — both services include the data-powered Pandora NOW station, for example, and now Pandora Stories includes those from SiriusXM guests.

What is missing from the desktop app, however, are podcasts.

For Apple, Spotify, Pandora and others, podcasts have been a large and growing focus in recent months. Pandora launched a Podcast Genome Project, and today even features a number of podcasts sourced from SiriusXM’s talk shows. But these and others weren’t available when we searched. They’re also not showing above the “Featured Playlists” section in Browse, as they do on mobile. (We’ve asked Pandora about its plans on this front, and will update when the company has more info.)

Pandora says a Windows desktop app will also come soon, but didn’t provide an ETA.

 

Two months ago, when Sam Altman surprised the industry by stepping away from his post as the president of Y Combinator to become the CEO of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence-focused company, TechCrunch was told there was no plans to replace Altman.

Apparently, there were no immediate plans. This morning, the popular accelerator program and investment firm is announcing that it has promoted longtime partner Geoff Ralston to president.

It’s an unsurprising choice for YC, an organization that employs roughly 60 people, many of who have been affiliated with it in one way or another for years. When its founders, Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, first looked for someone to lead the rocket ship they had built, they quickly identified Altman, who was part of the first class of Y Combinator and who later helped them advise YC startups.

Similarly, Graham has known Ralston for 20 years; they met at Yahoo, where both landed through acquisitions. Graham sold his company, Viaweb, a web-based application that allowed users to build and host their own online stores, to Yahoo in 1998. Ralston built RocketMail, one of the first web mail services, which in 1997 became Yahoo Mail.

Ralston later logged time as the CEO of a streaming music service, Lala Media, that sold to Apple in 2009. He then cofounded — with Graham — Imagine K12, an edtech accelerator that funded companies like ClassDojo among others before Ralston and Graham decided to merge it into YC in 2016. 

We talked with both Ralston and Altman last night about the appointment, and Ralston sounded very enthusiastic. “Following P.G. and Sam is a daunting but incredibly exciting prospect for me. I feel like I was made for this job.”

Slightly more surprising: as part of the announcement, Altman, who was named chairman of YC as he was transitioning out the door a few months ago, tells us now that he will no longer hold that title, that he will instead be an advisor and “available” to YC. He said that his heart now is really with OpenAI (more on that here). He also wants to give Ralston space, saying that “one thing that P.G. did for me was just make it very clear [to everyone] that I was in charge. My shoes aren’t as big to fill, but I want to do the same for Geoff.”

We asked Ralston last night if Altman had given him any advice — or shared horror stories. (“I didn’t shy away from the hard parts, but the good parts are really obvious, including YC’s impact and the quality of people we work with,” said Altman.)

We also asked if there was anything Ralston might want to change about YC straightaway, knowing the organization as well as he does. On this front, both men noted that they have worked closely for years (and known each other for 10), with Ralston adding that under his leadership, “The job should look much the same, So much of YC works incredibly well.”

As for the process involved in selecting Ralston, YC isn’t saying exactly. The broader point, apparently, is that he’s the right person for the job. “The whole partnership was excited about this,” said Altman. “A number of people could do the job [inside of YC]. I think Geoff will be exceptional.”

Ralston has personally invested in more than 100 companies, says YC. He’s also the longest tenured partner, along with Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, who joined YC in 2010.

Most recently, he helped scale YC’s free online program, Startup School. Below is one piece of related programming from last fall, with Ralston talking about fundraising fundamentals.

The Pentagon is one of the largest technology customers in the world, purchasing everything from F-35 planes (roughly $90 million each) to cloud services (the JEDI contract was $10 billion). Despite outlaying hundreds of billions of dollars for acquisitions though, the Defense Department has struggled to push nascent technologies from startups through its punishing procurement process.

The department launched the Defense Innovation Unit a few years back as a way to connect startups into the defense world. Now, the military has decided to work even earlier to ensure that the next generation of startups can equip the military with the latest technology.

Cambridge, MA-based MIT and the U.S. Air Force announced today that they are teaming up to launch a new accelerator focused on artificial intelligence applications, with the Air Force committed to investing $15 million per year into roughly ten MIT research projects per year. The accelerator will be called the MIT-Air Force AI Accelerator (clearly, the Pentagon hasn’t gotten better at naming things).

The accelerator will be housed on campus at MIT’s new computing college, which received a $1 billion commitment last year, including $350 million from Stephen A. Schwarzman. The college is expected to officially launch later this fall.

This will not be the Air Force’s first foray into accelerators. The service also built out an accelerator with TechStars that is directly targeted at solving the Air Force’s problems. It’s not yet clear whether the TechStars accelerator, which is also based in Boston, is being merged into the MIT accelerator or will remain a separate entity.

While MIT has had close relationships with the military going back decades, concerns have increased among some technologists about working on frontier tech like artificial intelligence and drones within a military context, especially an offensive military context. Last year, employees at Google blocked the tech giant from signing a cloud agreement with the Pentagon related to Project Maven, which would have applied AI and “algorithms” to battlefield applications.

In the announcement for this accelerator, MIT said that, “In addition to disaster relief and medical readiness, other possible research areas may include data management, maintenance and logistics, vehicle safety, and cyber resiliency.” It also highlighted that it hoped the projects entering the accelerator would be “addressing challenges that are important to both the Air Force and society more broadly.” Whether there are any limits on the types of projects that will be allowed on campus is not clear.

Ford Motor is laying off 7,000 salaried employees as part of CEO Jim Hackett’s restructuring plan to reduce bureaucracy, cut costs and turn the automaker into a more agile company prepared for a future that extends beyond its traditional business of producing and selling cars and trucks.

The cuts represent about 10 percent of the automaker’s salaried employees. Some buyouts and layoffs have already occurred, according to an email sent to employees by Hackett. The contents of the email were initially reported by the WSJ. TechCrunch has since reviewed the email.

Some 1,500 employees opted for voluntary buyouts, which occurred in November 2018, according to a spokesperson. Ford expects to complete the restructuring efforts expect by August globally. Cuts affecting Ford’s North American workforce will be complete by June, a Ford spokesperson told TechCrunch.

This cuts will result in annual savings of about $600 million, Hackett said in the email. “We also made significant progress in eliminating bureaucracy, speeding up decision making and driving empowerment as part of this redesign,” he wrote.

The layoffs were anticipated by employees. Ford informed employees last October that it would be restructuring the company, a move that would likely result in layoffs and voluntary buyouts.

The reorganization is part of a broader strategy to prepare for a future with autonomous vehicle technology, electrification and unconventional ownership models.

The restructuring plan is focused on making the company more agile and less bureaucratic. Each business went through a “Smart Redesign” process, according to Hackett’s email, which notes that 1,000 employees were involved in this activity.

Ford previously announced it would spend $11 billion to add 16 all-electric vehicles within its global portfolio of 40 electrified vehicles through 2022. At the heart of the company’s electrification effort is its Corktown project, a massive 1.2 million-square-foot space dedicated to its electric and autonomous vehicles businesses.

The goal of Corktown is to create a “mobility corridor” — Ford’s version of its own Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley — that ties hubs of research, testing and development in the academic hub of Ann Arbor to Ford’s Dearborn headquarters, and finally to Detroit.

Last year, Hackett revealed several other techcentric plans for the automaker that included the introduction of an open cloud-based platform for cities to use, a partnership with Qualcomm for Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything, or C-V2X, a term that means two-way communication with stoplights, signs and other city infrastructure. The company 

This week could mark a significant setback for Amazon’s facial recognition business if privacy and civil liberties advocates — and some shareholders — get their way.

Months earlier, shareholders tabled a resolution to limit the sale of Amazon’s facial recognition tech giant calls Rekognition to law enforcement and government agencies. It followed accusations of bias and inaccuracies with the technology, which they say can be used to racially discriminate against minorities. Rekognition, which runs image and video analysis of faces, has been sold to two states so far and Amazon has pitched Immigrations & Customs Enforcement. A second resolution will require an independent human and civil rights review of the technology.

Now the ACLU is backing the measures and calling on shareholders to pass the the resolutions.

“Amazon has stayed the course,” said Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU Washington, in a call Friday. “Amazon has heard repeatedly about the dangers to our democracy and vulnerable communities about this technology but they have refused to acknowledge those dangers let alone address them,” he said.

“Amazon has been so non-responsive to these concerns,” said Narayan, “even Amazon’s own shareholders have been forced to resort to putting these proposals addressing those concerns on the ballot.”

It’s the latest move in a concerted effort by dozens of shareholders and investment firms, tech experts and academics, and privacy and rights groups and organizations who have decried the use of the technology.

In a letter to be presented at Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting Wednesday, the ACLU will accuse Amazon of “failing to act responsibly” by refusing to stop the sale of the technology to the government.

“This technology fundamentally alters the balance of power between government and individuals, arming governments with unprecedented power to track, control, and harm people,” said the letter, shared with TechCrunch. “It would enable police to instantaneously and automatically determine the identities and locations of people going about their daily lives, allowing government agencies to routinely track their own residents. Associated software may even display dangerous and likely inaccurate information to police about a person’s emotions or state of mind.”

“As shown by a long history of other surveillance technologies, face surveillance is certain to be disproportionately aimed at immigrants, religious minorities, people of color, activists, and other vulnerable communities,” the letter added.

“Without shareholder action, Amazon may soon become known more for its role in facilitating pervasive government surveillance than for its consumer retail operations,” it read.

Facial recognition has become one of the most hot button topics in privacy in years. Amazon Rekognition, its cloud-based facial recognition system, remains in its infancy yet one of the most prominent and available systems available. But critics say the technology is flawed. Exactly a year prior to this week’s shareholder meeting, the ALCU first raised “profound” concerns with Rekognition and its installation at airports, public places and by police. Since then, the technology was shown to struggle to detect people of color. In its tests, the system struggled to match 28 congresspeople who were falsely matched in a mugshot database who had been previously arrested.

But there has been pushback — even from government. Several municipalities have rolled out surveillance-curtailing laws and ordnances in the past year. San Francisco last week became the first major U.S. city government to ban the use of facial recognition.

“Amazon leadership has failed to recognize these issues,” said the ACLU’s letter to be presented Wednesday. “This failure will lead to real-life harm.”

The ACLU said shareholders “have the power to protect Amazon from its own failed judgment.”

Amazon has pushed back against the claims by arguing that the technology is accurate — largely by criticizing how the ACLU conducted its tests using Rekognition.

Amazon did not comment when reached prior to publication.

Read more:

• San Francisco passes city government ban on facial recognition tech
• Amazon facial recognition software raises privacy concerns with the ACLU
• Amazon shareholders want it to stop selling facial recognition to law enforcement
• Lawmakers say Amazon’s facial recognition software may be racially biased and harm free expression

America is the land of free trade … precisely until it is not. Through a thicket of laws and regulations, the U.S. government has broad control over what can get exported to whom, particularly in areas with sensitive technology or national security concerns. In general, those restrictions are loose, which is why startups mostly haven’t had to think about export laws.

That open world is rapidly closing though, and startups could well be the most harmed given that they have limited resources to handle these sorts of bureaucratic processes and the potential large penalty fines.

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order requiring that the Department of Commerce initiate a review of regulations and enforcement practices to ensure that U.S. entities (people and companies) don’t provide “information and communications technology or services” to a “foreign adversary.” That term was read as describing China, although nothing in the order prevents its expansion to cover other countries in the future.

Berlin!

TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin will be in December. Disrupt Berlin is where you’ll find the renowned Startup Battlefield competition, hundreds of startups in Startup Alley, Workshops and legendary networking at our After Parties…

As part of our tour to promote Disrupt, you can come and pitch your tech startup to TechCrunch Editor-at-large Mike Butcher, in this “office hours” style event for Founders.

Sign up here for the meetup this Wednesday evening.

See you there!

Facebook this morning announced a new initiative focused on using its data and technologies to help nonprofit organizations and universities working in public health better map the spread of infectious diseases around the world. Specifically, the company is introducing three new maps: population density maps with demographic estimates, movement maps, and network coverage maps. These, says Facebook, will help the health partners to understand where people live, how they’re moving, and if they have connectivity — all factors that can aid in determining how to respond to outbreaks, and where supplies should be delivered.

As Facebook explained, health organizations rely on information like this when planning public health campaigns. But much of the information they rely on is outdated, like older census data. In addition, information from more remote communities can be scarce.

By combining the new maps with other public health data, Facebook believes organizations will be better equipped to address epidemics.

The new high-resolution population density maps will estimate the number of people living within 30-meter grid tiles, and provide insights on demographics, including the number of children under five, the number of women of reproductive age, as well as young and elderly populations. These maps aren’t built using Facebook data, but are instead built by using Facebook’s A.I. capabilities with satellite imagery and census information.

Movement maps, meanwhile, track aggregate data about Facebook users’ movements via their mobile phones (when location services are enabled). At scale, health partners can combine this with other data to predict where other outbreaks may occur next.

And network coverage maps help to show where people can be reached with online messages — like those alerting to vaccination days or other health-related communications.

Of course, it’s hard to not overlook the irony involved with Facebook data and tech being used to help with outbreaks that, in some cases, it had a hand in creating. The company for years allowed the spread of vaccine misinformation to spread across its network. Irresponsibly, it also allowed Facebook Pages and Groups that promoted vaccine skepticism or outright false claims to rank at the top of Facebook searches for related terms, like “vaccines.”

After time passed, it’s not surprising to find this spread of misinformation on Facebook and elsewhere resulted in measles outbreaks in the U.S. and abroad — a disease that had been eliminated as a major U.S. public health threat around 20 years ago. And despite repeated debunkings of false claims about the link between measles and autism by scientists, Facebook users — now feeling equipped by the internet to be experts on anything they can type into a search box — continued to spread misinformation at scale.

Once looped into the anti-vax communities, Facebook’s algorithms only further ensconced the skeptics into a world where only their opinions were correct, and they were surrounded by others who felt the same. This deepened their beliefs.

Today, the World Health Organization says vaccine hesitancy is now one of the biggest threats in global public health, citing the 30 percent increase in measles cases worldwide.

Facebook only recently announced a plan to curb the spread of misinformation on its platforms. But the health crisis it helped create by way of inattention is already well underway.

Of course, vaccine-preventable diseases are only one of many crises and potential crises in public health, along with threats like Ebola, antimicrobial resistance, influenza, dengue, HIV and many others. Access to more data can help health organizations across many areas.

This is not the first time Facebook has tapped its large data stores or other technologies to aid nonprofits and other researchers. The company has also provided aid organizations with anonymized location data for users in areas affected by disasters — including where people were marking themselves as safe, and where they were fleeing. In another humanitarian-related effort, Facebook has been working with A.I. to create population density maps, including most recently the one showing whole population of Africa.

“Epidemics pose a growing threat to lives and livelihoods,” said Vanessa Candeias, Head of Shaping the Future of Health and Healthcare at the World Economic Forum, in a Facebook announcement about the new maps. “Mitigating their risk and impact requires every tool in the toolbox.”

It’s been more than a year since T-Mobile and Sprint formally announced a merger agreement. This morning, members of FCC leadership have issued statements voicing their support for the $26 billion proposal.

Ajit Pai was first out with a statement, suggesting that the pricey consolidation of two of the Unites States’ largest carriers would help accelerate his longstanding desire to provide more internet coverage to rural areas.

“Demonstrating that 5G will indeed benefit rural Americans,” Pai wrote, “T-Mobile and Sprint have promised that their network would cover at least two-thirds of our nation’s rural population with highs peed, mid-band 5G, which could improve the economy and quality of life in many small towns across the country.”

The FCC Chairman went on to suggest that the merger “is in the public interest,” adding that he would recommend fellow members of the commission’s leadership approve it. Commissioner Brendan Carr followed soon after with his own statement of approval, suggesting that a merger would actually increase competition among by consolidating it.

“I support the combination of T-Mobile and Sprint because Americans across the country will see more competition and an accelerated buildout of fast, 5G services,” the Commissioner writes. “The proposed transaction will strengthen competition in the U.S. wireless market and provide mobile and in-home broadband access to communities that demand better coverage and more choices.”

A number of ground rules have been laid out for approval. In a bid for approval, Sprint has promised to sell off prepaid brand, Boost Mobile. “[W]e have committed to divest Sprint’s Boost pre-paid business to a third party following the closing of the merger,” T-Mobile CEO John Legere said in a blog post following the statements of support. “We’ll work to find a serious, credible, financially capable and independent buyer for all the assets needed to run – and grow – the business, and we’ll make sure that buyer has attractive wholesale arrangements.”