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Trade My Spin is building a business around used Peloton gear

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Trade My Spin is building a business around used Peloton equipment

Peloton has had one of the tumultuous half-decades in tech. The home fitness company has experienced a few of the industry’s biggest ups and downs in a dizzying sequence. This is the story of a high-profile startup that became the main focus of a cult following amongst influencers and fitness fanatics. A worldwide pandemic catapulted the brand to unprecedented heights before overinvestment, product recalls, mass layoffs, and executive departures brought it back all the way down to earth.

Peloton is within the red in mid-2024, but not out of the business. The company avoided a major liquidity crisis with a massive debt refinancing in late May. That marked the top of a month that also saw a 15% staff cut and the departure of CEO Barry McCarthy a little over two years after he took over from founder John Foley.

Peloton’s unique rollercoaster ride has had a wide selection of negative effects. Excitement peaked at the peak of the pandemic, but because the world began to reopen, sales fell. Some who got hooked at the peak of social distancing have remained loyal to the brand. But many others have lost that bond. Some churn is inevitable with any fitness offering, but those numbers have undoubtedly been exacerbated by the reopening of gyms and other alternative exercise options.

As a result, a lot of unused, expensive fitness equipment is taking over space in homes across America; they’re now “coat racks,” as a coworker recently dubbed her Peloton bike. A fast search of Facebook Marketplace reveals row after row of exercise bikes routinely priced around $300 to $500—a fraction of the worth of a latest model (around $1,500). For many once-enthusiastic owners, the equipment has turn into a pain. But for a pair of East Coast entrepreneurs, it’s a chance.

This Change my spin The origin story begins humbly, when current CEO Ari Kimmelfeld began on the lookout for a good deal on a used Peloton bike. As good as the costs were on Facebook and Craigslist, in comparison with buying latest from the manufacturer, the experience had its own problems.

“Buying something that big was a huge inconvenience,” Kimmelfeld, who was then working at Ernst & Young’s strategy consulting arm EY-Parthenon, tells TechCrunch. “Five hundred dollars was a lot of money, and meeting up with a stranger and giving him money for a piece of equipment that you can’t really test. And I live in New York. Moving something like that from a Brooklyn apartment to Manhattan is tough. And there are no guarantees.”

Local logistics

Change my spin

Kimmelfeld began piloting what would turn into Trade My Spin last yr by collecting and selling used Peloton gear. The offering was essentially DIY logistics, removing the friction of shopping for and selling used exercise equipment. It was a conversation with Joey Benjamini that transformed the one-man operation into a profitable business.

Benjamini has built a logistics network based on cooperation with contractors Collectible classicsHis Pennsylvania-based classic automotive dealership relies on drivers to deliver vehicles sold primarily through the used-car marketplace Bring a Trailer.

“Logistics is the most complicated and important part of this business—and the biggest barrier to entry,” Benjamini tells TechCrunch. “We have a database of 1099 vendors who deliver for us. We’re constantly growing a network of drivers who know our company and our processes. Once a driver is trained, we send them out to pick up the bikes. It’s very simple.”

The latest team began working on the Trade My Spin website before looking for funding. The site stays easy, whilst the inventory has expanded to incorporate Peloton treadmills, rowers and a number of accessories. The Buy button displays a bustling marketplace for the service, while Sell displays a form for the equipment you would like to sell. With the positioning up and running, the young company raised a small amount of seed money to scale operations.

Interview with Peloton

The startup has also had multiple conversations with Peloton since its official launch in March. Trade My Spin’s primary focus within the conversations is that its relationship is symbiotic, not parasitic. At first glance, it’s easy to see why Peloton is likely to be hostile toward the corporate.

Seen as a zero-sum game, every used bike sold represents a potential lack of a latest bike sale. While it’s true that keeping bikes in circulation is a net positive on the sustainability front, Peloton shareholders are undoubtedly trying to the sales figure for change.

The math changes, nonetheless, while you consider that Peloton’s ultimate goal is to be a content company that sells equipment, not the opposite way around. Rather than simply selling used bikes as a missed sale on a latest one, Trade My Spin claims that each bike taken out of circulation is one less subscription to Peloton’s class content platform.

“Every bike we take is from someone who isn’t using it,” Benjamini says. “If someone isn’t using the bike, they’re not using the subscription. Peloton is a subscription service. It’s $44 a month. Every time we flip a bike—and we’ve flipped thousands of bikes—they make $500 a year.”

The relationship would little doubt have been different had Peloton been more proactive about moving its own used gear. Ultimately, Trade My Spin stepped in to fill this underserved gap out there.

New turn

Trade My Spin Founders (LR): Ari Kimmelfeld, Joey Benjamini

Trade My Spin has built a logistics network that permits for same-day or next-day delivery in most major cities within the continental U.S. More distant locations can take as much as five days to satisfy an order, which is still faster than the three to 5 days it takes Peloton to process an order.

In the short term, expansion includes adding more fitness equipment to Trade My Spin’s buying and selling options. In the long term, the corporate desires to leverage its growing network of contractors to incorporate buying and selling all forms of bulky items. Trade My Spin will likely need an extra round of funding to attain this.

“We want to transform,” Benjamini says. “We’re going from where we are now and building a large-scale market for large items with logistics. That’s the game plan, and no one else is going to do it. There’s a barrier to entry and a moat around the business when it comes to drivers.”

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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OpenAI accidentally deleted potential evidence in NY Times copyright lawsuit (update)

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OpenAI logo with spiraling pastel colors (Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch)

Lawyers for The New York Times and Daily News, who’re suing OpenAI for allegedly copying their work to coach artificial intelligence models without permission, say OpenAI engineers accidentally deleted potentially relevant data.

Earlier this fall, OpenAI agreed to offer two virtual machines in order that advisors to The Times and Daily News could seek for copyrighted content in their AI training kits. (Virtual machines are software-based computers that exist inside one other computer’s operating system and are sometimes used for testing purposes, backing up data, and running applications.) letterlawyers for the publishers say they and the experts they hired have spent greater than 150 hours since November 1 combing through OpenAI training data.

However, on November 14, OpenAI engineers deleted all publisher search data stored on one among the virtual machines, in keeping with the above-mentioned letter, which was filed late Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

OpenAI tried to get better the information – and was mostly successful. However, since the folder structure and filenames were “irretrievably” lost, the recovered data “cannot be used to determine where the news authors’ copied articles were used to build the (OpenAI) models,” the letter says.

“The news plaintiffs were forced to recreate their work from scratch, using significant man-hours and computer processing time,” lawyers for The Times and the Daily News wrote. “The plaintiffs of the news learned only yesterday that the recovered data was useless and that the work of experts and lawyers, which took a whole week, had to be repeated, which is why this supplementary letter is being filed today.”

The plaintiffs’ attorney explains that they don’t have any reason to consider the removal was intentional. However, they are saying the incident highlights that OpenAI “is in the best position to search its own datasets” for potentially infringing content using its own tools.

An OpenAI spokesman declined to make an announcement.

However, late Friday, November 22, OpenAI’s lawyer filed a motion answer to a letter sent Wednesday by attorneys to The Times and Daily News. In their response, OpenAI’s lawyers unequivocally denied that OpenAI had deleted any evidence and as a substitute suggested that the plaintiffs were guilty for a system misconfiguration that led to the technical problem.

“Plaintiffs requested that one of several machines provided by OpenAI be reconfigured to search training datasets,” OpenAI’s attorney wrote. “Implementation of plaintiffs’ requested change, however, resulted in the deletion of the folder structure and certain file names from one hard drive – a drive that was intended to serve as a temporary cache… In any event, there is no reason to believe that any files were actually lost.”

In this and other cases, OpenAI maintains that training models using publicly available data – including articles from The Times and Daily News – are permissible. In other words, by creating models like GPT-4o that “learn” from billions of examples of e-books, essays, and other materials to generate human-sounding text, OpenAI believes there isn’t a licensing or other payment required for examples – even when he makes money from these models.

With this in mind, OpenAI has signed licensing agreements with a growing number of recent publishers, including the Associated Press, Business Insider owner Axel Springer, the Financial Times, People’s parent company Dotdash Meredith and News Corp. OpenAI declined to offer the terms of those agreements. offers are public, but one among its content partners, Dotdash, is apparently earns at the least $16 million a 12 months.

OpenAI has not confirmed or denied that it has trained its AI systems on any copyrighted works without permission.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Sequoia increases its 2020 fund by 25%

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Sequoia, venture capital, startups, VC

Sequoia says no going out, no problem.

According to data from the Silicon Valley enterprise capital giant, the worth of its Sequoia Capital US Venture XVII fund increased by 24.6% in June at the top of 12 months. Pitchbookwho analyzed data from the University of California Regents Fund.

Sequoia’s margin is notable since the fund hasn’t had any exits yet. This can be a positive development for the 2020 fund vintage, on condition that after the uncertain valuations of 2020 and 2021, this yr’s funds usually are not expected to perform well for any VC. The mismatch is probably going resulting from high AI valuations giving risks a way of an economic recovery that has yet to bear fruit in other sectors. Sequoia is an investor in high-growth artificial intelligence corporations including OpenAI, Glean and Harvey, amongst others.

Sequoia has raised over $800 million for Fund XVII, which closed in 2022.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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Revolut will introduce mortgage loans, smart ATMs and business lending products

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Revolutthe London-based fintech unicorn shared several elements of the corporate’s 2025 roadmap at a company event in London on Friday. One of the corporate’s important goals for next yr will be to introduce an AI-enabled assistant that will help its 50 million customers navigate financial apps, manage money and customize software.

Considering that artificial intelligence is at the middle of everyone’s attention, this move shouldn’t be surprising. But an AI assistant could actually help differentiate Revolut from traditional banking services, which have been slower to adapt to latest technologies.

When Revolut launched its app almost 10 years ago, many individuals discovered the concept of debit cards with real-time payment notifications. Users may lock the cardboard from the app.

Many banks now can help you control your card using your phone. However, they’re unlikely to supply AI features that might be useful yet.

In addition to the AI ​​assistant, Revolut announced that it will introduce branded ATMs to the market. These will end in money being spent (obviously), but in addition cards – which could encourage latest sign-ups.

Revolut said it plans so as to add facial recognition features to its ATMs in the longer term, which could help with authentication without using the same old card and PIN protocol. It will be interesting to see the way it implements this technology in a way that complies with European Union data protection regulations, which require explicit consent to make use of biometric data for identification purposes.

According to the corporate, Revolut ATMs will start appearing in Spain in early 2025.

Revolut has had a banking license in Europe for a while, which implies it may offer lending products to its retail customers. It already offers bank cards and personal loans in some countries.

Now the corporate plans to expand into mortgage loans – some of the popular lending products in Europe – with an emphasis on speed. If it’s an easy request, customers should generally expect immediate approval and a final offer inside one business day. However, mortgages are rarely easy, so it will be interesting to see if Revolut overpromises.

It appears that the mortgage market rollout will be slow. Revolut said it was starting in Lithuania, with Ireland and France expected to follow suit. Although all these premieres are scheduled for 2025.

Finally, Revolut intends to expand its business offering in Europe with its first loan products and savings accounts. In the payments space, it will enable business customers to supply “buy now, pay later” payment options.

Revolut will introduce Revolut kiosks with biometric payments especially for restaurants and stores.

If all these features seem overwhelming, it’s because Revolut is consistently committed to product development, rolling out latest features quickly. And 2025 looks no different.

This article was originally published on : techcrunch.com
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