Year: 2019

Announcements that Apple has partnered with Aetna health insurance on a new app leveraging data from its Apple Watch and reports that Verily — one of the health-focused subsidiaries of Google‘s parent company — Alphabet, is developing a shoe that can detect weight and movement, indicate increasing momentum around using data from wearables for clinical health applications and treatments.

For venture capital investors, the movea from Apple and Alphabet to show new applications for wearable devices is a step in the right direction — and something that’s been long overdue.

“As a healthcare provider, we talk a lot about the important of preventative medicine, but the US healthcare system doesn’t have the right incentives in place to pay for it,” writes Cameron Sepah, an entrepreneur in residence at Trinity Ventures. “Since large employers largely pay for health care (outside of Medicaid and Medicare), they usually aren’t incentivized to pay for prevention, since employees don’t stay long enough for them to incur the long-term costs of health behaviors. So most startups in this space end up becoming an expendable wellness perk for companies. However, if an insurer like Aetna keeps its members long enough, there’s better alignment for disseminating this app.”

Sepah sees broader implications for the tie ups between health insurers and the tech companies making all sorts of devices to detect and diagnose conditions.

“Most patients relationship with their insurer is just getting paper bills/notifications in the mail, with terrible customer satisfaction (NPS) across the board,” Sepah wrote in an email. “But when there’s a way to build a closer relationship through a device that sits on your wrist, it opens possibilities to partner with other health tech startups that can notify patients when they are having mental health issues before they even recognize it (e.g. Mindstrong); or when they should get treatment for hypertension or sleep apnea (e.g. Cardiogram); or leverage their data into a digital chronic disease treatment program (e.g. Omada Health).”

Aetna isn’t the first insurer to tie Apple Watch data to their policies. In September 2018, John Hancock launched the Vitality program, which also gave users discounts on the latest Apple Watch if they linked it with John Hancock’s app. The company also gave out rewards if users changed their behavior around diet and exercise.

In a study conducted by Rand Europe of 400,000 people in the U.S., the U.K., and South Africa, research showed that users who wore an Apple Watch and participated in the Vitality benefits program averaged a 34 percent increase in physical activity compared to patients without the Apple Watch. It equated to roughly 5 extra days of working out per month.

“[It will] be interesting to see how CVS/Apple deal unfolds. Personalized health guidance based on a combination of individual medical records and real time wearable data is a huge and worthy goal,” wrote Greg Yap, a partner at the venture capital firm, Menlo Ventures . But, Yap wrote,I’m skeptical their first generation app will have enough data or training to deliver value to a broad population, but we’re likely to see some anecdotal benefits, and I find that worthwhile.”

Meanwhile the types of devices that record consumer health information are proliferating — thanks in no small part to Verily.

With the company reportedly working to co-develop shoes with sensors that monitor users’ movement and weight, according to CNBC, Verily is expanding its portfolio of connected devices for health monitoring and management. The company already has a watch that monitors certain patient data — including an FDA approved electrocardiogram — and is developing technologies to track diabetes-related eye disease in patients alongside smart lenses for cataract recovery.

If more data can be collected from wearable devices (or consumer behavior) and then monitored in a consistent fashion, tech companies ideally could suggest interventions faster and provide lower cost treatments to help avoid the need for urgent or emergency care.

These “top of the funnel” communications and monitoring services from tech companies could conceivably divert users and future healthcare patients into an alternative system that is potentially lower-cost with more of a focus on outcomes than on the volume of care and number of treatments prescribed.

Not all physicians are convinced that the use of persistent monitoring will result in better care. Dr. John Ioannidis, a celebrated professor from Stanford University, is skeptical about the utility of monitoring without a better understanding of what the data actually reveals.

“Information is good for you provided you know what it means. For much of that information we have no clue what it means. We have absolutely no idea what to do with it other than creating more anxiety,” Dr. Ioannidis said

The goal is to provide personalized guidance where machine learning can be used to identify problems and come up in concert with established therapeutic practices, according to investors who back life sciences starups.

“I think startups like Omada, Livongo, Lark, Vida, Virta, and others, can work and are already working on this overall vision of combining real time and personal historical data to deliver personalized guidance. But to be successful, startups need to be more narrowly focused and deliver improved outcomes and financial benefits right away,” according to Yap.

Remember that egg that became Instagram’s most-liked post? It used its recently-acquired fame to shed light on mental health and the pressures of social media.

The account now has 10 million followers — its record photo has over 52 million likes — and it put that audience to use with a 30-second video that aired on Hulu around the Super Bowl. The account had teased a major revealed in recent weeks, and it proved to be the short spot with Hulu that promotes mental health awareness, particularly around the context of using social media.

“Recently I’ve started to crack… the pressure of social media is getting to me,” the video reads as the egg’s shell begins to crack before breaking into pieces.

“If you’re struggling too, talk to someone,” the egg says before it is resurrected with a full shell once again.

The video closes with a link to the Mental Health America website.

The video received praise from Mental Health America and many others on Twitter, but plenty of its Instagram followers expected more or don’t have a Hulu account, according to comments.

At the same time, the creators of the account — three advertising executives in South London — revealed background on the project, the egg is called “Eugene,” in an interview with the New York Times.

The trio — Chris Godfrey, Alissa Khan-Whelan and C.J. Brown — explained that they had been approached by Hulu, which had paid to develop the video which aims to take advantage of the hype and online chatter around the Super Bowl to raise its message. Given that the account is followed by a large number of children, as its creators acknowledged in the interview, a positive message like this rather than a commercial sell-out is a pleasant surprise, particularly when it is estimated that brand deals could fetch $10 million.

Hulu is the first to get a crack at the egg, but it remains to be seen if its appeal to brands will endure and whether its future messaging and partners will also be health-related.

The technology sector awards women and same-sex couples the most comprehensive fertility benefit packages, according to a survey by FertilityIQ, an online platform for fertility patients to review doctors and research treatments.

The company asked 30,000 in vitro fertilisation (IVF) patients across industries about their employers’ — or their spouse’s employer’s’ — 2019 fertility treatment policy, and allocated points based on their support for IVF procedures and egg freezing, among other services.

Silicon Valley semiconductor business Analog Devices and eBay led the ranking. The two companies offer employees unlimited IVF cycles with no pre-authorization requirement, meaning employees do not need permission from insurance providers before seeking certain medical services. Pre-authorization has historically impacted lesbian, gay or unpartnered employees from accessing care quickly or at all, FertilityIQ co-founder Jake Anderson explained

Spotify, Adobe, Lyft, Facebook and Pinterest were amongst the highest-ranked technology businesses, too.

“I think a lot of people see the tech sector as being unenlightened when it comes to family values but it’s still the sector that makes the fertility benefits the most widely acceptable,” Anderson, a former consumer internet investor at Sequoia Capital, told TechCrunch.

FertilityIQ’s fertility benefits survey results.

Despite an initial outpouring of skepticism, Facebook and Apple became leaders in the fertility benefit category when they began paying for their female employees to freeze their eggs in 2014. Since then, smaller firms have opted to beef up those benefits to stay competitive with their much larger and richer counterparts.

“The Lyfts, the Airbnbs and the Ubers of the world, who clearly need to compete for those companies for talent, have effectively matched those companies dollar-for-dollar despite a much smaller war-chest,” Anderson said. “These companies that are worth 1/1000th of these bigger companies are effectively going toe-to-toe to offer whatever women need.”

Anderson and his wife, FertilityIQ co-founder Deborah Anderson, noticed improved benefits in 2018 from companies implicated by the #MeToo movement, such as Vice Media, Under Armour and Uber.

“Silicon Valley is notorious for talent moving around on you but it’s probably not coincidental that some of the companies that were in the spotlight in the #MeToo movement have added really generous benefits,” Deborah Anderson told TechCrunch.

Uber, for example, now pays for its employees to complete two IVF cycles but still requires pre-authorization.

One in 7 Americans struggle with infertility and the rate of IVF procedures only continues to increase, with the latest data indicating a 15 percent year-over-year growth rate. IVF costs roughly $22,000 per cycle, per FertilityIQ’s survey, a cost which has similarly increased 15 percent since 2015.

That’s a whole lot of cash for a fertility patient to dole out. If companies foot the bill, they’ll have a better shot at retaining talent.

“Best we can tell, there is no question that employees that get this benefit and use it are more loyal and more likely to stick around,” Jake Anderson said. “The company that helps you build your family is the company that you remain committed to.”

Bud, the U.K. fintech that helps banks connect their apps and data to other fintech companies and financial service providers, has closed over $20 million in further funding.

The Series A round sees the company pick up backing from a number of banks: HSBC (which, via First Direct, it also counts as a customer), Goldman Sachs, ANZ, Investec’s INVC fund, and InnoCells (the corporate venture arm of Banco Sabadell).

Others participating include Lord Fink (the former chief executive of hedge fund Man Group), and 9Yards Capital (the VC firm to which George Osborne is an advisor).

Originally launched back in 2016 as a consumer app that wanted to make various financial services accessible from a single aggregated interface, the London-based startup has since pivoted to a tech platform it offers to banks to help them remain more competitive in the Open Banking/PSD2 era. Its tech lets banks create new apps and services that enable customers to manage all of their financial products within a single app.

Essentially, Bud acts as the tech layer that intelligently connects bank account data to third-party financial services, including those provided by fintechs and more traditional financial providers, as well as doing a lot of the other heavy-lifting required to create new consumer experiences from bank data.

“The work we have done with First Direct… is a showcase of features and functionalities made possible by new regulation, data science and relevant connections to fintech and banking services,” Bud CTO and co-founder George Dunning tells me.

“We have built a number of data enrichment features using transactional data to make people’s lives that little bit easier. Connection and aggregation of people’s accounts is the standard now, so we focussed on things like increasing financial literacy. ‘Smart Balance’ is a feature that shows users what they can safely spend and ‘Goals’ help them plan ahead. Our advanced regular payment finder filters and tracks bill payments and if you can save money Bud connects you to a service that will make it happen”.

Many of these features are powered by Bud’s ability to use data to detect patterns and behaviours. “Something as simple as detecting if someone is going abroad and helping them get insurance for their trip using one of our partners from within the app is much better than if you do it the traditional way,” says Dunning.

Other than HSBC-owned First Direct, the Bud co-founder isn’t able to disclose any of the company’s other bank customers. “We are working with a handful of banks across the industry, using open banking and our marketplace of services to solve problems for their customers which couldn’t be solved before now,” he says.

On the fintech and financial services side, Bud currently works with 85 different companies. These include fintechs Wealthify and PensionBee to more established companies like Hiscox and AJ Bell.

One other partner Dunning can talk about is the U.K. government, which Bud is working with as part of the Rent Recognition Challenge to create new solutions for people wishing to get on the housing ladder. “First-time buyers have it harder now than ever before. Work we are just finalising with The Treasury uses rent payments to help people grow their credit history to buy a home,” he says.

Meanwhile, Bud says the new capital will support the expansion of the Bud team, as the company moves to double its headcount creating what it claims will be the “largest team dedicated to Open Banking in the world”. Its current headcount is 62.

Cue statement from Raman Bhatia, Head of digital bank at HSBC Retail Banking and Wealth Management: “Since the start of our partnership with Bud back in 2017, we’ve been impressed with the team’s approach to innovation. They have helped to shape our approach to open banking, working with us to deliver services that makes banking easier for our customers. They stand out as motivated by their mission to help people have a better relationship with financial services”.

Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, Slingshot Aeropsace, SpaceX and Virgin Orbit have raised billions of dollars to create new vehicles to launch payloads into space, but as the private space industry develops in the U.S. investors are beginning to back enabling technologies boost the next wave of innovation.

Whether it’s satellite manufacturers, new propulsion systems for satellites, antennae for data transmission or actually building out the networks themselves, the new space race will be building the next generation of services that the increasing access to space provides.

Last year, investors put at least $2.3 billion into companies angling for their own corner of outer space.

By 2040, Morgan Stanley estimates that the space economy to be worth more than $1 trillion in 2040 — as well as for SpaceX to double, or even quintuple, its valuation — “are significantly tied to the developments related to satellite broadband.”

For the moment, the next wave is still focused on terrestrial applications.

Already, landmark deals are being signed to provide new space-based internet networking services like the agreement between the startup company Astranis and Pacific Dataport to provide high-speed, lower-cost broadband services to Alaska.

With only around $14 million in financing, Astranis has managed to sign its first deal to provide high speed internet to Alaskans by 2020, while OneWeb (which has raised over $1.7 billion) expects its networks to come online by 2022. SpaceX will launch the first Starlink satellites this year, with service coming online in the following years.

Astranis’ decision to work directly with a single customer rather than deploying a massive network points to the fact that companies can start generating real revenues relatively quickly — without the need for global ambitions off the bat.

Indeed, some space investors note that there are significant questions that remain unanswered for both SpaceX and OneWeb .

In a blog post earlier this month, Josephine Millward, the head of research at London-based space investment firm Seraphim Capital wrote:

After years of development, OneWeb and SpaceX will begin to deploy their Low Earth Orbit (LEO) mega-constellations in 2019, albeit their full constellation targets will take several more years. Both are planning global coverage to provide internet broadband to the billions of unconnected. Crucially both still need to define their “go-to-market” strategy and solve the ground segment element of their proposition ahead of commercial roll-out.

Astranis’ satellite-based service is expected to triple the amount of capacity that’s available to Alaskans for internet services and, with a price tag worth tens of millions of dollars, represents the largest contract signed by an early stage startup in the space business to date.

But networking services aren’t the only space-based applications that will gain additional traction in 2019. Using satellite imagery for data analysis, already a big pitch from companies like Satellogic and Planet — and newer companies like Capella Space and Iceye — is an industry that will come into its own, according to Seraphim Capital’s Chief Executive Mark Boggett. Meanwhile, companies like Cloud Constellation are pitching satellite-based data storage as inherently safer than their earthbound cloud computing counterparts.

“These satellite networks are now in place and they’re gathering massive amounts of data,”  says Boggett. “What we’re going to start seeing is companies start using this data.”

Boggett says stay tuned for big fundraising rounds across the board, not only in the satellite networks themselves, but in the services that enable them to refine their data collection techniques and increase the efficiency and power of their transmission capabilities.

These would be what Boggett calls “downlinking” companies and companies that manage satellite mobility in space. Startups like Kymeta, Bridgesat, Ansur, RBC Signals and the Japanese startup Infostellar are all focused on downlinking — taking data from satellites and transmitting it to receivers on earth so the information can be used effectively, or optimizing data collection and transmissions in space.

It’s a market that’s attracted the attention of one of the largest tech companies in the world — Amazon . Viewing the data collection business as an extension of its cloud services, late last year Amazon partnered with Lockheed Martin to announce a base station as a service business called Amazon Base Station (no one accused them of being branding geniuses).

“Customers said that we have so much data in space with so many applications that want to use that data. Why don’t you make it easier,” said Amazon Web Services’ chief executive, Andy Jassy, at the time of the new service’s launch.

Propulsion technologies for satellites once they’re in space are another potential area for increased investment in 2019, according to investors.

Companies like Momentus, which raised $8.3 million in November; Tesseract, a European startup developing propulsion technologies; and Phase Four, the El Segundo, Calif.-based developer of a plasma-based propulsion system, are all bringing products to market.

Phase Four, which is in the middle of raising a new round right now, has actually inked its first supply deals with Capella Space and Tyvak, a division of the startup Terran Orbital, for its thrusters.

“It is an infrastructure arms race to get things efficiently built and deployed into space,” says M. Umair Siddiqui, the chief technology officer at Phase Four. “Now the next companies are racing to own who can manufacture the hardware that is going to generate the revenue in space.”

Bird’s electric scooters were on full display at the Upfront Summit in Malibu last week, a two-day event that brings together the likes of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Washington, DC’s elite. 

Not only were a dozen or so brand spanking new scooters available to ride throughout the event but Upfront general partner Mark Suster, an investor in the startup, was seen riding a Bird on stage to the tune of Chamillionaire’s ‘Ridin’ Dirty.’ Plus, Bird founder and chief executive officer Travis VanderZanden was on site to mingle with attendees before closing the summit with a fireside chat with Suster himself.

The pair hit on a number of topics, including the unit economics, safety and seasonality of the scooter business. Neither confirmed Bird’s latest raise; the startup is said to be in the process of securing another $300 million at a $2.3 billion valuation, according to PitchBook. In a 12-month period, the company brought in more than $250 million at a roughly $1 billion valuation.

On unit economics: When Bird bursted onto the scene in 2017, VanderZanden knew he had to move quickly to beat copycats, he explained. Operating under Reid Hoffman’s ‘Blitzscaling’ philosophy, he dispersed hundreds of Alibaba-imported electric scooters that were, well, pretty shitty.

“Those things were fragile,” VanderZanden told Suster. “Clearly the unit economics didn’t work on those scooters but that was a test anyway … Once we knew people liked riding them, we quickly scrambled and started creating our own scooters. Bird Zero is the first iteration of that. What we see on the unit economics of those, it’s like night and day.”

The company unveiled Bird Zero, in October, equipped with a digital screen to display riders’ speed, a tougher exterior and improved battery life.

“2018 was about scaling,” he said. “2019 is about really focusing on the unit economics of the business.”

On seasonality: Some have critiqued Bird for poor unit economics, while others have pointed out that the success of the business is heavily dependent on…weather. No one wants to ride a Bird in the snow, slashing its revenue potential in the cold months. VanderZanden said he’s not concerned with seasonality and revealed Bird operates on a $100 million revenue run rate even in the winter. He did not, however, clarify if that run rate is based on fourth quarter 2018 projections — when Bird introduced Bird Zero — or 2018 annual revenue.

“Obviously, there is seasonality in the scooters business, there’s no doubt about that,” he said. “Yes, it’s slower in December but this market is so big, even in our slow [weeks] most companies would love to have that in their worst [month] … We used to say when we’re heading into the holiday season that the Birds would migrate south but it turns out the logistics are really expensive, so the Birds hibernate. That’s a lesson we learned.”

On safety: In the year or so that scooters hit the mainstream in the U.S., there were casualties. Moreover, many — kids included — realized just how easy it is to get away with scootering sans helmet, while others rode throughout the night. Bird, to keep children off scooters, at least, requires customers to provide a driver’s license when they sign up. Given the number of issues that have arisen as scooters become increasingly popular, improved safety measures are bound to be in the news in the year ahead.

“Safety has to be prioritized over growth,” VanderZanden said. 

On electric bikes: Bird is one of few scooter businesses that doesn’t offer bikes. With all the capital its raised, will Bird make the leap? VanderZanden seemed lukewarm toward the prospect.

“Yeah, we think about it,” he said. “We [aren’t] religious [about] scooters per se, we just think it’s the thing people like the most so that’s where we started and we think that’s the best thing to do now. We get excited about micromobility generally… We are open and looking at all sorts of different short-range electric vehicles in the future.”

On Bird Platform: Last year, Bird began selling its electric scooters to entrepreneurs and small business owners, who can then rent them out as part of a service called Bird Platform. VanderZanden said the service has opened Bird up to tons of new markets.

“From early on at Bird, we had people asking ‘hey, how do we take Bird to my city,'” he said. “We thought why don’t we empower the local entrepreneurs to take Bird to their market… Now we have people from 77 countries from around the world that are interested in taking Bird to their market, which is exciting because there is no way we as a company could get there in the short-term. This is a way to bring Bird to the world.”

On growth: Given the number of stories on Bird and its competitors in the tech press, it’s easy to forget that most of the startups in the space have launched in the last year or so. VanderZanden took a moment to remind the venture capitalists in the audience that in that time, Bird has expanded to 100 cities. Impressive, yes, but let’s remember the manner in which Bird introduced scooter fleets to new markets. The company showed up unannounced in Santa Monica, for example, a decision that resulted in a lawsuit in the startup’s own hometown.

“It’s pretty incredible that 100 cities have opened their arms and embraced electric scooters,” VanderZanden said.

On Bird’s future: VanderZanden explained that despite a long-held interest in transportation — his mother was a public school bus driver for 30 years — he’s only recently come to understand the industry’s most urgent needs. He plans to put more energy in transportation infrastructure in 2019 as a result.

“The deeper I get into transportation, the more I realize we don’t need autonomous vehicles, we need tunnels, all we need are more bike lanes,” he said.

Another year, another batch of Super Bowl commercials from tech giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

In fact, Amazon will have different ads focusing on different areas of the business: one highlighting products that won’t be taking advantage of its voice-powered assistant Alexa, and another previewing “Hanna,” an upcoming show on Amazon Prime.

Microsoft, meanwhile, is highlighting some of the ways technology can actually make people’s lives better — perhaps as a corrective to the ongoing backlash against the tech industry.

There will be star-studded spots from somewhat less ubiquitous companies too, with Bumble enlisting Serena Williams to deliver a message of empowerment and Squarespace depicting Idris Elba’s attempts to build his own website.

This year, we’ve also got commercials from non-tech companies like Pringles that place voice assistants and robots front-and-center. And while there are plenty of car commercials, I tried to stick to the ones that actually focused on new tech.

I’ve rounded up the tech-related ads that were released before the game below. Some companies are holding back until the actual Super Bowl, so if necessary, I’ll update this post after the game.

Amazon Alexa

Amazon Prime/”Hanna”

Audi

Bumble

Expensify

Google

Michelob Ultra

Microsoft

Pringles

Squarespace

TurboTax (teaser)

Early-stage startups throughout much of the U.S. are able to raise larger sums today than any other point in at least a decade, and there are more early-stage rounds than ever, both in North America and globally. (Note: “Early-stage” is defined here as Series A and Series B rounds, plus smaller rounds from several other round types, including equity crowdfunding and convertible notes.)

In analysis published earlier this week, we found that the nationwide average early-stage deal grew more than 20 percent between 2017 and 2018. We quantified that companies on the coasts raise more than their inland counterparts and found some indications that the Midwest lags the rest of the nation.

To find this and more, we aggregated round size data for more than 30,000 early-stage venture rounds struck with U.S.-based companies between the start of 2008 and the end of 2018. We segmented the data by the U.S. Census Bureau’s map of regions and “divisions” (basically, subregions by a different label), took the mean (average) early-stage deal size for each calendar quarter and displayed each region against the national average.

Below, you can see how early-stage rounds around the country compare to the national average. To make it easier to see trends, we display a two-period simple moving average line alongside individual data points.

Although the average has certainly crept up, part of that is attributable to a newer trend in companies raising huge sums of money. In the report, we indicated that many of the largest early-stage rounds were raised by companies in the West and Northeast. But startups in these regions don’t hold a monopoly on raising lots of money from venture capitalists.

Here, we wanted to highlight some of the biggest early-stage rounds struck by Midwestern and Southern companies. After all, the coasts tend to dominate the media’s conversation concerning tech. So, here’s some love for the middle of the country, and its biggest deals:

The five biggest early-stage VC rounds raised by Southern startups in 2018 and January 2019

1. Hailing from Atlanta, Knock, a company aiming to help homeowners streamline the process of trading up for a new house, raised $400 million in Series B funding in a deal announced on January 15, 2019. Crunchbase News covered the transaction, which was led by Foundry Group and was composed of an undisclosed blend of equity and debt.
2. Viela Bio, based in Gaithersburg, Maryland (which, by the Census Bureau’s definition, is in the South), is a clinical-stage therapeutics company developing novel molecules for treating severe inflammation and autoimmune disorders. The company announced $282.2 million in Series A venture funding in February 2018. Viela Bio was spun out of biopharmaceutical conglomerate AstraZeneca.
3. Another company entering the home-flipping market is Austin-based Bungalo, which announced $250 million in Series A funding back in September 2018. Austin-based financial services company Amherst Holdings and its real estate investment subsidiary were the sole sources of capital on the deal.
4. Another Atlanta company, Bakkt, raised $182.5 million in a Series A round announced on December 31, 2018. A number of blockchain-focused investors participated in the round, alongside Microsoft’s early-stage VC arm M12 and the Boston Consulting Group.
5. Crunchbase News broke the story of Raleigh, NC-based gene editing company Precision BioSciences’s $110 million Series B round based on an SEC filing spotted back in June 2018. The company formally announced the round several weeks after the initial filing. The round was led by ArrowMark Partners, which was joined by nearly two dozen other new and prior investors that participated in the round.

The five biggest early-stage VC rounds raised by Midwestern startups in 2018 and January 2019

1. Bind, a Minneapolis-based “on-demand” health insurance company, raised $60 million in a Series A round in February 2018. The company offers a core plan to cover the basics, plus the option to purchase coverage for, say, a surgery, only when that coverage is needed.
2. Sollis Therapeutics, based in Columbus, Ohio, is developing non-opioid pain treatments. The pharmaceutical company raised $50 million in a Series A round announced in April 2018. Opioid overdoses killed 200 Americans per day in 2017. With nearly 33 deaths for every 100,000 people, Ohio is one of the states worst-affected by the surge in opioid abuse.
3. Detroit-based sneaker and streetwear marketplace company StockX copped $44 million in Series B funding back in September 2018. Battery Ventures and GV co-led the round.
4. Clearcover, a Chicago-based auto insurance marketplace platform, raised $43 million in a Series B round. Crunchbase News covered the transaction, which was led by Cox Enterprises. Local firm Lightbank and angel ring Hyde Park Angels participated in the round.
5. TradingView, also based in Chicago, raised $37 million in Series B funding announced in May 2018. The company builds data analysis and social networking tools for financial market participants.

It’s true that the Bay Area is responsible for a huge chunk of the supergiant venture market, but it by no means accounts for all of it. The above should lay to rest the idea that there’s no tech in between EWR and SFO.

I’m flying back to the USA today, and as an infrastructure aficionado, it’s nice to be going home, but I’m dreading the disappointment. I just spent two weeks in Singapore and Thailand; last year I spent time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen; and compared to modern Asia, so much American infrastructure is now so contemptible that it’s hard not to wince when I see it.

The USA is nine times wealthier than Thailand, per capita, but I’d far rather ride Bangkok’s SkyTrain than deal with NYC’s subway nowadays. I’d much prefer to fly into Don Muang, Bangkok’s ancient second-tier airport — which was actually closed for years, before being reopened to handle domestic flights and low-cost airlines — than the hostile nightmare that is LAX. And those are America’s two primary gateway cities!

So imagine what it’s like coming to America from wealthy Asian nations, and their gleaming, polished, metronomically reliable subways, trains, and airports. I don’t think Americans understand just how that comparison has become a quiet ongoing national humiliation. If they did, sheer national (and civic) pride would make them want to do something about it. Instead there’s a learned helplessness about most American infrastructure nowadays, a wrong but certain belief that it’s unrealistic to dream of anything better.

It’s not just those two cities. Compare Boston’s T to, say, Taipei, or San Francisco’s mishmash of messed-up systems — Muni, where I have waited 45 minutes for a T-Third; CalTrain, which only runs every 90 minutes on weekends; BART, which squandered millions on its useless white-elephant Millbrae station — to Shenzhen. And it’s not just age; Paris’s metro was inaugurated in 1900, but its well-maintained system continues to run excellently and expand continuously.

Americans still tend to think of themselves as an example to other nations. Ha. I assure you, over the last few years nobody has flown from Seoul or Taipei or Tokyo or Singapore or Hong Kong or Shenzhen into Newark Airport; taken the AirTrain to the NJ Transit station; waited for the rattling, decrepit train into the city; walked through the repellent ugliness of Penn Station to the subway; waited for its ever-increasing delays; ridden to their destination; and finally emerged into New York City — the nation’s alpha city! — still thinking of the USA as anything other than a counterexample, or maybe a cautionary tale.

This goes beyond transport infrastructure. Airport security measures are much more sensible in Asia. Payments are increasingly separately structured, and better, too — in many places, credit cards (which already barely exist as a concept in China) are beginning to slowly wither away, replaced by Alipay and to a lesser extent WeChat Pay. (Not least because an ever-growing proportion of the tourist population is Chinese rather than Western, nowadays.)

That’s admittedly an example of leapfrogging, not decay, and American infrastructure does still have some bright spots. American roads are mostly still superb. Lyft and Uber are much better than their Southeast Asian equivalent Grab, which, whenever I checked it during this latest trip, was invariably both slower and more expensive than a taxi (never mind a tuk-tuk) despite the infamous Thai taxi mafias. International mobile connectivity is excellent and user-friendly and reasonably priced, at least if you’re on T-Mobile like me, and as an added bonus, due to a technical quirk, mobile data roaming bypasses China’s Great Firewall.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the state of much of America’s infrastructure is appalling on its face, and even moreso when compared to nations which are on paper nowhere near as rich. The money other nations spend on urban infrastructure (don’t even get me started on intercity trains) is instead siphoned off to somewhere else. It makes the USA — still by far the wealthiest country in the world! — seem like an dying empire, one beginning to visibly crack and crumble as it is slowly hollowed out from within.

What happened? A cascading series of failures of imagination; failures to invest in the future; paralyzed or ideologically blinkered or simply idiotic governance; and, perhaps most of all, cost disease. (It frequently costs a whopping 4x as much per mile to build a subway in the USA as it costs in, say, Paris or Seoul. Sometimes even more.) What can be done? I’m pretty sure the first step is for Americans to believe that something can be done. Clearly it can. Just look across the Pacific.

Sony Pictures is taking audiences back to Punxsutawney… this time in virtual reality.

Whether it’s an abomination and a perversion of one of the best movies in the Bill Murray oeuvre or a great way to immerse a viewer in one of the most perfectly realized worlds brought to the silver screen (I unrepentantly love Groundhog Day) is TBD. That’s for players to decide.

In Groundhog Day: Like Father Like Son players embody Phil Connors Jr., the son of Groundhog Day’s central character.

For anyone not familiar with the film, Bill Murray’s character was forced to relive the same day until he made all of the right choices to change the trajectory of his life.

In the sequel, his kid faces the same dilemma, reliving the same day over and over until, as Sony’s messaging puts it, “he learns the true value of friends and family.”

Published and produced by Sony Pictures Virtual Reality, the VR Groundhog Day sequel is co-produced by MWM Immersive, the division of Madison Wells Media — which also made Chained: A Victorian Nightmare — and developed by Tequila Works, the Madrid-based video game developer behind Deadlight and RiME.