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Matt Rogers went from Apple to Nest Labs and into many homes with the now-Google smart thermostat. He’s looking to get into your home again, this time to solve America’s food waste problem.

Chewie Labs

Matt Rogers has always liked to look at areas that are overlooked. 

Before he left Apple to start smart device company Nest Labs in 2010, for instance, no one thought twice about their home thermostat and took its technology for granted. Nest’s smart thermostat, which allows users to control their home’s heating from an app on their phone, ended up pioneering the way for the smart home revolution and changing the way people think about their energy use.

After Nest, Rogers began work on several philanthropic projects, many focusing on climate-related initiatives. In addition to co-founding Incite.org, he served as Chairman of Carbon180, an NGO focused on reducing carbon emissions, until September 2022, and he’s currently chairman of Advanced Energy Economy. 

What stuck out to Rogers through his environmental work was how much food is thrown away each year. With more than one-third of food in the United States being wasted and food being the single most abundant material found in landfills, Rogers felt there had to be a better way to prevent so much food from being thrown in the garbage.

“Waste is one of these areas that we’ve kind of taken for granted but doesn’t have to exist,” Rogers said. “It’s super important in the climate fight, people need to realize how bad it is that we throw food in the trash and it becomes methane in landfills.”

That’s how Rogers — along with Harry Tannenbaum, who Rogers worked with at Nest — came up with the idea for Mill, his latest venture that launched Tuesday focused on creating sustainable technology to help combat food waste.

Mill users put their food waste — including meat and dairy, items that aren’t normally able to be composted — into a new kitchen bin that dehydrates the food overnight, turning it into an odorless, coffee ground-like material the company calls food grounds. Once the bin fills up, which Rogers says takes about three weeks on average, its contents can be packaged up and sent back to Mill via mail. The company then repurposes the grounds into an ingredient for chicken feed and sends it to farms.

The start-up charges users a $33 monthly subscription fee to recycle their food scraps. It’s a system he hopes may help eliminate food waste from the American home.

“We’ve kind of gotten used to the way things are, but it doesn’t have to be that way,” Rogers said. “So when you come at it with fresh eyes, you actually end up building an entirely new system.”

During his time at Nest, Rogers said he found that systems need to be significantly easier to use and create a better overall user experience if people are going to change their daily habits. Nest made it easy for individuals to control the climate of their home from their smartphones. Mill now makes it easy for people to get rid of food waste and reduce their carbon footprint. It eliminates smelly food scraps going in the trash bin with minimal steps; it offers an alternative to composting, which often attracts fruit flies and requires more maintenance than Mill’s system. 

The bin can automatically dehydrate the waste every night, or users can program the bin to begin the dehydration process at times that best fit with their schedules. This is another lesson Rogers said he learned from Nest: while some people like to have their systems operate automatically, others like to have control.

Mill also includes some smart technology. An optional app lets users monitor their food waste from their phones and see how much they are putting into their bins. Rogers said making users aware of their waste habits — similar to how Nest makes them aware of their energy consumption habits — may help change purchasing behaviors over time, enabling them to save some money at the grocery store on food they don’t need to buy.

“If we start to think about things differently, actually, this is where individual actions can drive systemic change,” Rogers said. “That’s a really big deal.”

Ultimately, Rogers envisions Mill having the potential to reach beyond the household kitchen, to cities which have zero waste goals. 

“We’re in this for large-scale impact,” Rogers said. “We want to build a big business that also is good for the planet, and we want this to be for everyone.”

CNBC is now accepting nominations for the 2023 Disruptor 50 list – our 11th annual look at the most innovative venture-backed companies. Learn more about eligibility and how to submit an application by Friday, Feb. 17.

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Nintendo profit plunges 69% as it cuts forecast for sales of ageing Switch console

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Nintendo profit plunges 69% as it cuts forecast for sales of ageing Switch console

Mario poses at the “SUPER NINTENDO WORLD” welcome celebration at Universal Studios Hollywood on February 16, 2023 in Universal City, California.

Rodin Eckenroth | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Nintendo on Tuesday cut forecast for Switch sales for its fiscal year ending March 2025 as demand wanes for its ageing console.

The Japanese gaming giant said it now expects to sell 12.5 million units of the Switch over the course of the period. That’s down from a previous forecast of 13.5 million units.

Nintendo has been contending with fading demand for its flagship Switch console, which is now more than seven years old.

Investors are waiting for news surrounding a successor to the Switch, which they hope will re-energize Nintendo’s gaming business. In the past, the company said that the Switch successor will be announced in its current fiscal year, which ends in March 2025.

Nintendo also cut full fiscal year forecasts for sales and operating profit. The company said it now expects sales of 1.28 trillion yen versus a previous forecast of 1.35 trillion yen. The operating profit outlook for the period was slashed from 400 billion yen to 360 billion yen.

Here’s how Nintendo did in its fiscal second quarter ended Sept. 30 versus LSEG estimates:

  • Revenue: 276.7 billion Japanese yen ($1.8 billion), compared with 273.34 billion yen expected.
  • Net profit: 27.7 billion yen, versus 48.06 billion yen expected.

Revenue fell 17% year-on-year. Net profit plunged just over 69% versus the same period last year.

Super Mario, Zelda boost fading

The Switch is Nintendo’s second best-selling console in history, behind the Nintendo DS. Despite the recent fall in sales, Nintendo has prolonged the console’s appeal for an extended period of time since its launch in 2017 by relying on its recognizable characters.

In its last fiscal year, Nintendo managed to reinvigorate sales of the Switch thanks to the the success of the “Super Mario Bros. Movie” and the highly anticipated release of the “The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” game, which underscored the appeal of its iconic characters.

But that effect is fading.

On Tuesday, Nintendo noted the boost that the company received in the first half of its last fiscal year, but said “there were no such special factors in the first half of this fiscal year, and with Nintendo Switch now in its eighth year since launch, unit sales of both hardware and software decreased significantly year-on-year.”

Sales of the Switch totaled 4.72 units in the six months ended Sept. 30, compared with 6.84 million units in the same period of last year.

In the face of falling sales, Nintendo has tried to license out its intellectual property for use everywhere, from movies to theme parks. A new Super Mario movie is slated for release in 2026.

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Meta extends ban on new political ads past Election Day

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Meta extends ban on new political ads past Election Day

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg plans to visit South Korea, scheduling key meetings during the trip, according to a statement by Meta on Wednesday, which did not provide further details. Reportedly, Zuckerberg is anticipated to meet with Samsung Electronics chairman Jay Y. Lee later this month to discuss AI chip supply and other generative AI issues, as per the South Korean newspaper Seoul Economic Daily, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter.

Alex Wong | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Meta extended its ban on new political ads on Facebook and Instagram past Election Day in the U.S.

The social media giant announced the political ads policy update on Monday, extending its ban on new political ads past Tuesday, the original end date for the restriction period.

Meta did not specify the day it will lift the restriction, saying only that the ad blocking will continue “until later this week.” The company did not say why it extended the political advertising restriction period.

The company announced in August that any political ads that ran at least once before Oct. 29 would still be allowed to run on Meta’s services in the final week before Election Day. Other political ads will not be allowed to run.

Organization with eligible ads will have “limited editing capabilities” while the restriction is still in place, Meta said. Those advertisers will be allowed to make scheduling, budgeting and bidding-related changes to their political ads, Meta said.

Meta enacted the same policy in 2020. The company said the policy is in place because “we recognize there may not be enough time to contest new claims made in ads.”

Google-parent Alphabet announced a similar ad policy update last month, saying it would pause ads relating to U.S. elections from running in the U.S. after the last polls close on Tuesday. Alphabet said it would notify advertisers when it lifts the pause.

Nearly $1 billion has been spent on political ads over the last week, with the bulk of the money spent on down-ballot races throughout the U.S., according to data from advertising analytics firm AdImpact.

Watch: Tech still investing big in AI development despite few breakout products.

Tech still investing big in AI development despite few breakout products

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Jeff Bezos and OpenAI invest in robot startup Physical Intelligence at $2.4 billion valuation

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Jeff Bezos and OpenAI invest in robot startup Physical Intelligence at .4 billion valuation

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attends the 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, January 18, 2024 (L), and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, Britain, November 2, 2021.

Reuters

Physical Intelligence, a robot startup based in San Francisco, has raised $400 million at a $2.4 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed Monday to CNBC.

Investors included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, Thrive Capital and Lux Capital, a Physical Intelligence spokesperson said. Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital are also listed as investors on the company’s website.

Physical Intelligence’s new valuation is about six times that of its March seed round, which reportedly came in at $70 million with a $400 million valuation. Its current roster of employees includes alumni of Tesla, Google DeepMind and X.

The startup focuses on “bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world,” per its website, and it aims to do this by developing large-scale artificial intelligence models and algorithms to power robots. The startup spent the past eight months developing a “general-purpose” AI model for robots, the company wrote in a blog post. Physical Intelligence hopes that model will be the first step toward its ultimate goal of developing artificial general intelligence. AGI is a term used to describe AI technology that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks.

The news comes days after OpenAI launched a search feature within ChatGPT, its viral chatbot, that positions the AI startup to better compete with search engines like GoogleMicrosoft‘s Bing and Perplexity. Last month, OpenAI also closed its latest funding round at a valuation of $157 billion.

Physical Intelligence’s vision is that one day users can “simply ask robots to perform any task they want, just like they can ask large language models (LLMs) and chatbot assistants,” the startup wrote in the blog post. In case studies, Physical Intelligence details how its tech could allow a robot to do laundry, bus tables or assemble a box.

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