Month: September 2020

When COVID-19 spread to the United States, the pandemic exposed two conflicting realities: a healthcare system that excels at high-cost, complex treatments, while failing to provide sufficient access at the local level.

That lack of access to public health infrastructure might be the country’s biggest challenge. It’s also created opportunities for healthcare startups, founders of Carbon Health and Color said Monday during TechCrunch Disrupt 2020, which kicked off today.

“When we think about making healthcare accessible, we tend to focus on the cost of care, which is definitely a big problem,” Othman Laraki, founder and CEO of Color, said during the Disrupt panel “Tech, test and treat: Healthcare startups in the COVID-19 era.”The other big side of making healthcare accessible is actually taking it to people where it’s part of their lives. I think oftentimes for underprivileged communities, etc. that sometimes the cost of care is a lesser problem compared to the access of it.”

Primary care startup Carbon Health and Color are already tackling that issue. And in Carbon Health’s case, the company’s business model to bring high-quality primary care to the local level gave it early insight into the spread of COVID.

Carbon Health has 25 primary care locations today. Co-founder and CEO Eren Bali noted that as early as February, the company started seeing patients coming to its clinics directly from Wuhan, China with COVID-like symptoms.

Carbon Health’s technology platform asks patients questions prior to their visit, which collects important data and assessing patients’ symptoms and problems ahead of time. Those early insights left Carbon Health with two options: shut down and wait for the COVID storm to pass or jump all in. Carbon Health chose the latter, Bali said.

Laraki and Bali’s comments Monday during TechCrunch Disrupt match up with their respective business models and growth trajectory. COVID has merely accelerated that development.

Earlier this week, Carbon Health launched a new pop-up clinic model. These clinics are now open in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. The company is adding more in the coming weeks, including a clinic in Detroit. Ultimately, 100 new COVID-19 testing sites will be added with a collective capacity to handle 100,000 patients per month across the country. Color is collaborating with Carbon Health at its clinics in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, as the pandemic swept into the U.S., Color built a platform to help ease the logistical and supply chain constraints around COVID testing. The company, which runs a large, automated testing lab out in the Bay Area, now processing 75% of the testing in the city.

Today, there are still limits to that hyperlocal level of healthcare. For instance, someone who needs surgery must go to a hospital, which might be hours away.

“It’s not that easy to push that to the edge,” Lariki said, using the surgery example. “But I think what’s happening now — and I think what’s going to happen in the next 10 years — is that we’re going to have really, truly edge-distributed healthcare.”

The idea is that technology will allow healthcare to be taken into communities in a more cost effective model, which will make it more accessible. “That’s something that really hasn’t existed in the U.S. so far and I think it is really starting to happen and it is fundamentally a technology problem,” Lariki added.

The pandemic has led to N95 masks quickly becoming one of the world’s most sought-after resources as essential workers burned through billions of them. New research could lead to an N95 that you can recharge rather than throw away — or even one that continuously tops itself up for maximum effectiveness.

The proposed system, from researchers at Technion-IIT in Israel and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India, is not one of decontamination, as you might expect. Instead, it focuses on another aspect of N95 masks that renders them less effective over time.

N95s use both mechanical filtering, in which particles are caught in a matrix of microscopic fibers, and electrostatic filtering, in which particles are attracted to surfaces that carry a static charge. It’s like the old trick where you rub a balloon on your head and it sticks — but at the scale of microns.

The combination of these two methods makes N95 masks very effective, but the electrostatic charge, like any charge, dissipates after a time as air and moisture pass over it. While decontamination via UV or high temperature may help keep the mechanical filter from becoming a tiny petri dish, they do nothing to restore the electrostatic charge that acted as a second barrier to entry.

In a paper published in the journal Phsyics of Fluids, Dov Levine and Shankar Ghosh (from Technion and Tata respectively) show that it’s possible to recharge an N95’s filter to the point where it was close to off-the-shelf levels of efficacy. All that’s needed is to place the filter between two plate electrodes and apply a strong electric field.

“We find that the total charge deposited on the masks depends strongly on the charging time… with the pristine value almost reattained after a 60 min charge at 1000 V,” write the researchers in their paper.

It’s unlikely that health care workers are going to be disassembling their masks after every shift, though. While a service and special mask type could (and if it’s effective, should) be established to do this, the team also explored the possibility of a mask with a built-in battery that recharges itself constantly:

A solution that can help replenish the lost charge on the masks in real time would be desirable. In this section, we provide a proof-of-concept method of keeping the masks charged, which comes as a logical extension of our recharging method.

We tested a technique by which the filter material maintains its charge and thus its filtration efficiency… Since the currents required are extremely small, a large battery is not required, and it is possible that a small compact and practical solution may be feasible.

The image above shows a prototype, which the team found to work quite well.

Of course it’s not quite ready for deployment; IEEE Spectrum asked Peter Tsai, the creator of the N95 mask, for his opinion on it. He suggested that the team’s method for testing filtration efficacy is “likely questionable” but didn’t take issue with the rest of the study.

Though it won’t be in hospitals tomorrow or next week, the team notes that “crucially, our method can be performed using readily available equipment and materials and so can be employed both in urban and rural settings.” So once it’s thoroughly tested it’s possible these rechargeable masks could start showing up everywhere. Let’s hope so.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly looking into claims that Nikola Corp. is involved in an alleged “intricate fraud,” the latest development in a controversy that erupted last week just days after GM took an 11% stake in the newly public company.

Bloomberg reported Monday that the U.S. agency was examining the company to assess the merits of accusations made by short-seller Hindenburg Research. The Bloomberg report, which was based on unnamed sources, sent Nikola shares down more than 9% in after-hours trading.

Nikola’s statement, which was sent to TechCrunch, doesn’t answer the question of whether the SEC is in fact investigating the matter. The company said that on September 11, Nikola’s legal counsel “proactively contacted and briefed” the SEC regarding its “concerns pertaining to the Hindenburg report.”

“Nikola welcomes the SEC’s involvement in this matter,” the company added in the statement. TechCrunch has reached out to the SEC for confirmation that the agency is investigating the matter.

While this saga between Hindenburg Research and Nikola began last week, questions have swirled in recent months over some of electric automaker’s past claims. The Hindenburg report, which was released September 10, caused Nikola shares to fall and its founder to take to Twitter in an effort to allay concerns. Hindenburg Research’s report raised questions about the validity of Nikola’s claims over the years, as well as accusations of nepotism.

Nikola issued Monday a carefully worded, point-by-point rebuttal that attempts to disprove Hindenburg Research’s report. Following each of the points that Nikola denies or explains, the company placed this statement: “These allegations by the short seller are false and misleading, and designed to manipulate the market to profit from a manufactured decline in Nikola’s stock price.”

“Nikola believes that the Hindenburg report, and the opportunistic timing of its publication shortly after announcement of Nikola’s partnership with General Motors Co. and the resulting positive share price reaction, was designed to provide a false impression to investors and to negatively manipulate the market in order to financially benefit short sellers, including Hindenburg itself,” Nikola said in its rebuttal issued Monday.

Despite Nikola’s lengthy report — and in some cases because of it — criticisms have arisen over the company’s previous promotional tactics, specifically surrounding its first hydrogen electric semi truck prototype, the Nikola One.

In the middle of a pandemic, Airtable, the low-code startup, has actually had an excellent year. Just the other day, the company announced it had raised $185 million on a whopping $2.585 billion valuation. It also announced some new features that take it from the realm of pure no-code, and deeper into low-code territory, which allows users to extend the product in new ways.

Airtable CEO and co-founder Howie Liu was a guest today at TechCrunch Disrupt, where he was interviewed by TechCrunch News Editor Frederic Lardinois.

Liu said that the original vision that has stayed pretty steady since the company launched in 2013 was to democratize software creation. “We believe that more people in the world should become software builders, not just software users, and pretty much the whole time that we’ve been working on this company we’ve been charting our course towards that end goal,” he said.

But something changed recently, where Liu saw people who needed to do a bit more with the tool than that original vision allowed.

“So, the biggest shift that’s happening today with our fundraise and our launch announcement is that we’re going from being a no-code product, a purely no-code solution where you don’t have to use code, but neither can you use code to extend the product to now being a low-code solution, and one that also has a lot more extensibility with other features like automation, allowing people to build logic into Airtable without any technical knowledge,” he said.

In addition, the company, with 200,00 customers, has created a marketplace where users can share applications they’ve built. As the pandemic has taken hold, Liu says that he’s seen a shift in the types of deals he’s been seeing. That’s partly due to small businesses, which were once his company’s bread and butter, suffering more economic pain as a result of COVID.

But he has seen larger enterprise customers fill the void, and it’s not too big a stretch to think that the new extensibility features could be a nod to these more lucrative customers, who may require a bit more power than a pure no-code solution would provide.

“On the enterprise side of our business we’ve seen, for instance this summer, a 5x increase in enterprise deal closing velocity from the prior summer period, and this incredible appetite from enterprise signings with dozens of six figure deals, some seven figure deals and thousands of new paid customers overall,” he said.

In spite of this great success, the upward trend of the business and the fat valuation, Liu was in no mood to talk about an IPO. In his view, there is plenty of time for that, and in spite of being a seven-year-old company with great momentum, he says he’s simply not thinking about it.

Nor did he express any interest in being acquired, and he says that his investors weren’t putting any pressure on him to exit.

“It’s always been about finding investors who are really committed and aligned to the long term goals and approach that we have to this business that matters more to us than the actual valuation numbers or any other kind of technical aspects of the round,” he said.

Tech and Hollywood don’t cross-pollinate that often, but when it comes to Franklin Leonard’s way of looking at things, maybe they should.

Leonard is best known as the creator of the Black List, a curated collection of the most underrated screenplays of the year. What began as a side project in 2005 is now a full-fledged hit-making machine. Four of the last 13 Best Picture winners came from the list. Overall, 54 movies from the Black List went on to win Oscars and over 300 have been nominated. And according to box office numbers, films from the list rake in more revenue, too.

In a conversation at our virtual TechCrunch Disrupt 2020 stage, Leonard expanded on the philosophy behind his efforts and why elevating the work of creators isn’t a zero-sum game.

Opening the gate

Hollywood and venture capital have both been slow to the revelation that finding overlooked talent benefits everyone — not just the people lower on the food chain.

“It’s in the industry’s interest to find the people — to sort of go out into the field full of haystacks and find the needles to see if there might be something we can do with them,” Leonard said.

“It’s a problem-solving thing. The first problem was how do we identify the good stuff within the industry? The second question was how do we identify the good scripts and the good writers at scale throughout the world?”

In Leonard’s view, to find answers to those questions doesn’t mean taking on the role of a gatekeeper. The Black List doesn’t identify undiscovered scripts and wall them off, reaping the profits. Instead, it amplifies the good stuff that’s already out there and helps creators get connected to the side of the industry that doles out resources.

“I think the thing that I’m most proud of is that we’ve been able to create an ecosystem whereby we are not asking more of the writers than the opportunity to share the good news of their good work,” Leonard said.

“We don’t have our hand in their pocket, we’re not democratizing access to us. We’re democratizing access to everyone who may make a film and be interested in finding a good writer, you now have the opportunity to go work with them entirely devoid of relationship with us if you prefer not to have one.

“That is the fundamental nature of our ethos and actually that is both an ethical approach for me, but it’s also a business approach because I believe that we do add value post that decision but I want to be engaged with partners who believe that we add that value and partner with us because we add that value — not because they owe us something.”

That perspective is ethically solid, but it’s also robust from a market perspective. Leonard sees the Black List as a tool that stepped in and streamlined a process where the existing system was failing.

“I’m just a big believer in tides that raise all boats and opportunities where there are radical inefficiencies in the marketplace. And to be clear there are massive ones in entertainment,” Leonard said. He argues that the Black List hasn’t “disrupted” the industry so much as transformed it.

“… Disruption has this association with winners and losers and in many ways everybody has the potential to win with the Black List,” Leonard said. “Writers, industry professionals, the Black List itself. And that’s because the market has failed to operate at anywhere close to efficiency.”

Flipping the power dynamic

While the tech industry hasn’t fully grappled with the rising tide bit, the idea of opportunities in inefficiency is very core to how the tech industry sees itself. But there are key differences between how something like the Black List elevates creators and how tech platforms have gone about their own version of democratization.

“I think there’s a fair amount of ego. Like, we build the platform and these folks are taking advantage of it and they’re using it and we did this amazing thing by giving them the platform, but what could they possibly have to tell us about our business? And you know, I think that’s just a mistake. I think that you know, the pride goes before the fall always. ” Leonard said.

But even as social media companies flipped traditional industries upside down, they’ve maintained the economics of keeping wealth and power concentrated at the very top. In Leonard’s view, the people at the bottom do most of the work and a few at the top extract disproportionate value from their work. “I don’t believe that that’s an optimum model,” Leonard said.

“Look, if you’re running a major platform right now and you look around your boardroom, you look around your senior staff meetings and you don’t see people that look like the world, you really have two choices. You can either figure it out fast or you can continue to do exactly what you’re doing… and someone will then replace you either because you’re fired or because another company will take your market share.”

On a long enough timeline, Leonard believes that power imbalance will right itself because the people creating the content, powering the platforms, inspiring the trends — they ultimately wield the true power.

“If you guys aren’t listening to us, we’re gonna take our talents to Miami — to use a basketball analogy — and build our own thing. And we’re gonna come back with a great deal more power,” Leonard said. “We’re then gonna win a championship and we’re gonna be able to dictate terms to you.

“I have a great deal of faith not because I think the people are gonna get it and change their behavior, but because if they don’t they’re going to get beaten. I know the talent that exists that is capable of beating them, and suffice it to say, it’s coming.”

Tech and Hollywood don’t cross-pollinate that often, but when it comes to Franklin Leonard’s way of looking at things, maybe they should.

Leonard is best known as the creator of the Black List, a curated collection of the most underrated screenplays of the year. What began as a side project in 2005 is now a full-fledged hit-making machine. Four of the last 13 Best Picture winners came from the list. Overall, 54 movies from the Black List went on to win Oscars and over 300 have been nominated. And according to box office numbers, films from the list rake in more revenue, too.

In a conversation at our virtual TechCrunch Disrupt 2020 stage, Leonard expanded on the philosophy behind his efforts and why elevating the work of creators isn’t a zero-sum game.

Opening the gate

Hollywood and venture capital have both been slow to the revelation that finding overlooked talent benefits everyone — not just the people lower on the food chain.

“It’s in the industry’s interest to find the people — to sort of go out into the field full of haystacks and find the needles to see if there might be something we can do with them,” Leonard said.

“It’s a problem-solving thing. The first problem was how do we identify the good stuff within the industry? The second question was how do we identify the good scripts and the good writers at scale throughout the world?”

In Leonard’s view, to find answers to those questions doesn’t mean taking on the role of a gatekeeper. The Black List doesn’t identify undiscovered scripts and wall them off, reaping the profits. Instead, it amplifies the good stuff that’s already out there and helps creators get connected to the side of the industry that doles out resources.

“I think the thing that I’m most proud of is that we’ve been able to create an ecosystem whereby we are not asking more of the writers than the opportunity to share the good news of their good work,” Leonard said.

“We don’t have our hand in their pocket, we’re not democratizing access to us. We’re democratizing access to everyone who may make a film and be interested in finding a good writer, you now have the opportunity to go work with them entirely devoid of relationship with us if you prefer not to have one.

“That is the fundamental nature of our ethos and actually that is both an ethical approach for me, but it’s also a business approach because I believe that we do add value post that decision but I want to be engaged with partners who believe that we add that value and partner with us because we add that value — not because they owe us something.”

That perspective is ethically solid, but it’s also robust from a market perspective. Leonard sees the Black List as a tool that stepped in and streamlined a process where the existing system was failing.

“I’m just a big believer in tides that raise all boats and opportunities where there are radical inefficiencies in the marketplace. And to be clear there are massive ones in entertainment,” Leonard said. He argues that the Black List hasn’t “disrupted” the industry so much as transformed it.

“… Disruption has this association with winners and losers and in many ways everybody has the potential to win with the Black List,” Leonard said. “Writers, industry professionals, the Black List itself. And that’s because the market has failed to operate at anywhere close to efficiency.”

Flipping the power dynamic

While the tech industry hasn’t fully grappled with the rising tide bit, the idea of opportunities in inefficiency is very core to how the tech industry sees itself. But there are key differences between how something like the Black List elevates creators and how tech platforms have gone about their own version of democratization.

“I think there’s a fair amount of ego. Like, we build the platform and these folks are taking advantage of it and they’re using it and we did this amazing thing by giving them the platform, but what could they possibly have to tell us about our business? And you know, I think that’s just a mistake. I think that you know, the pride goes before the fall always. ” Leonard said.

But even as social media companies flipped traditional industries upside down, they’ve maintained the economics of keeping wealth and power concentrated at the very top. In Leonard’s view, the people at the bottom do most of the work and a few at the top extract disproportionate value from their work. “I don’t believe that that’s an optimum model,” Leonard said.

“Look, if you’re running a major platform right now and you look around your boardroom, you look around your senior staff meetings and you don’t see people that look like the world, you really have two choices. You can either figure it out fast or you can continue to do exactly what you’re doing… and someone will then replace you either because you’re fired or because another company will take your market share.”

On a long enough timeline, Leonard believes that power imbalance will right itself because the people creating the content, powering the platforms, inspiring the trends — they ultimately wield the true power.

“If you guys aren’t listening to us, we’re gonna take our talents to Miami — to use a basketball analogy — and build our own thing. And we’re gonna come back with a great deal more power,” Leonard said. “We’re then gonna win a championship and we’re gonna be able to dictate terms to you.

“I have a great deal of faith not because I think the people are gonna get it and change their behavior, but because if they don’t they’re going to get beaten. I know the talent that exists that is capable of beating them, and suffice it to say, it’s coming.”

A former Facebook data scientist dropped a detailed, damning memo on her last day there, calling the social network out for what she describes as an arbitrary, slow, and generally inadequate response to fake accounts and activity affecting politics worldwide.

BuzzFeed News acquired the full memo and has published excerpts in this report, which is well worth reading in its entirety.

Zhang was reportedly fired earlier in September for, as she describes it, ongoing disagreement with management about the company’s priorities and response to widespread manipulation.

In the 6,600-word memo, Zhang describes a system where the focus is very much on ordinary spam — which is of course a major problem for the platform — while “coordinated inauthentic behavior” (CIB) attempting to influence elections is not awarded as much priority or resources. Unless it’s politically expedient, for example if a botnet needs to be rolled up before testimony in Congress or pressure from the press.

As the memo reported by BuzzFeed News reads:

It’s an open secret within the civic integrity space that Facebook’s short-term decisions are largely motivated by PR and the potential for negative attention… It’s why I’ve seen priorities of escalations shoot up when others start threatening to go to the press, and why I was informed by a leader in my organization that my civic work was not impactful under the rationale that if the problems were meaningful they would have attracted attention, became a press fire, and convinced the company to devote more attention to the space.

Overall, the focus of my organization – and most of Facebook – was on large-scale problems, an approach which fixated us on spam. The civic aspect was discounted because of its small volume, its disproportionate impact ignored.

I’ve asked Facebook for comment on the memo, including the following specific claims reportedly made by Zhang:

• Large scale political manipulation returned in Honduras weeks after Facebook made attempts to stop it
• Her report of coordinated manipulation campaigns in Azerbaijan was not investigated for a year afterwards
• More than 10 million fake reactions and accounts were removed from the US and Brazil 2018 elections and never disclosed
• A major political influence campaign in Delhi, India this February was never reported
• Some 672,000 accounts were removed this spring from COVID-related misinformation campaigns in Spain and the U.S., also never disclosed
• Whether to pursue a misinformation campaign at all is often left to mid-level employees like Zhang, who claimed she had “no oversight whatsoever”
• Zhang’s push to dedicate more resources to civic platform problems led to her dismissal

The memo states outright what many have suspected is the case all along: That Facebook “projects an image of strength and competence… but the reality is that many of our actions are slapdash and haphazard accidents.” Not only that, but that the picture of Facebook’s efforts to combat this sort of thing is highly tailored by the company itself and not, it seems, in any way a complete or accurate one.

This post will be updated if we receive any substantial comment from Facebook.

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt 2020, leaders from three quantum computing startups joined TechCrunch editor Frederic Lardinois to discuss the future of the technology. IonQ CEO and president Peter Chapman suggested we could be as little as five years away from a desktop quantum computer, but not everyone agreed on that optimistic timeline.

“I think within the next several years, five years or so, you’ll start to see [desktop quantum machines]. Our goal is to get to a rack-mounted quantum computer,” Chapman said.

But that seemed a tad optimistic to Alan Baratz, CEO at D-Wave Systems. He says that when it comes to developing the super-conducting technology that his company is building, it requires a special kind of rather large quantum refrigeration unit called a dilution fridge, and that unit would make a five-year goal of having a desktop quantum PC highly unlikely.

Itamar Sivan, CEO at Quantum Machines, too, believes we have a lot of steps to go before we see that kind of technology, and a lot of hurdles to overcome to make that happen.

“This challenge is not within a specific, singular problem about finding the right material or solving some very specific equation, or anything. It’s really a challenge, which is multidisciplinary to be solved here,” Sivan said.

Chapman also sees a day when we could have edge quantum machines, for instance on a military plane, that couldn’t access quantum machines from the cloud efficiently.

“You know, you can’t rely on a system which is sitting in a cloud. So it needs to be on the plane itself. If you’re going to apply quantum to military applications, then you’re going to need edge-deployed quantum computers,” he said.

One thing worth mentioning is that IonQ’s approach to quantum is very different from D-Wave’s and Quantum Machines’ .

IonQ relies on technology pioneered in atomic clocks for its form of quantum computing. Quantum Machines doesn’t build quantum processors. Instead, it builds the hardware and software layer to control these machines, which are reaching a point where that can’t be done with classical computers anymore.

D-Wave, on the other hand, uses a concept called quantum annealing, which allows it to create thousands of qubits, but at the cost of higher error rates.

As the technology develops further in the coming decades, these companies believe they are offering value by giving customers a starting point into this powerful form of computing, which when harnessed will change the way we think of computing in a classical sense. But Sivan says there are many steps to get there.

“This is a huge challenge that would also require focused and highly specialized teams that specialize in each layer of the quantum computing stack,” he said. One way to help solve that is by partnering broadly to help solve some of these fundamental problems, and working with the cloud companies to bring quantum computing, however they choose to build it today, to a wider audience.

“In this regard, I think that this year we’ve seen some very interesting partnerships form which are essential for this to happen. We’ve seen companies like IonQ and D-Wave, and others partnering with cloud providers who deliver their own quantum computers through other companies’ cloud service,” Sivan said. And he said his company would be announcing some partnerships of its own in the coming weeks.

The ultimate goal of all three companies is to eventually build a universal quantum computer, one that can achieve the goal of providing true quantum power. “We can and should continue marching toward universal quantum to get to the point where we can do things that just can’t be done classically,” Baratz said. But he and the others recognize we are still in the very early stages of reaching that end game.

After 17 years, Palantir is getting closer and closer to its public debut later this month. We’ve been covering different facets of the company’s direct listing process including concerns about its governance and how insiders are accelerating the sale of their shares as the public markets date looms closer.

Now, we have several major updates from the company, courtesy of a third amended filing of the company’s S-1 to the SEC this afternoon.

The first news is that Palantir finally has a chief accountant. Jeffrey Buckley, who was formerly Chief Accounting Officer at gaming giant Zynga, will join the company later this week in an equivalent position to handle the company’s books and ensure that its processes are in order.

Concerns about Palantir’s audit quality have been percolating since the company’s board of directors has only recently put together the governance committee required to manage the company’s records. As we noted a few weeks ago, Palantir has admitted in its recent SEC filings that it won’t have an independent board audit committee until well after it publicly trades.

When it comes to insiders and their intentions to buy and sell, it’s becoming clear that more and more of them are heading toward the exit. In its filing this afternoon, Founders Fund has increased its targeted number of shares for registration by roughly 8%, or roughy 2 million shares in the company.

Furthermore, the company has clarified a couple of components of its unique governance.

First, the company’s three founders, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen, and Peter Thiel, will not be allowed to hedge their stakes in the company given their active employment with Palantir. Buried in a section on the voting rights of the company’s founders, Palantir added a phrase “… however, the Company has implemented a policy that will limit or prohibit hedging by directors, officers and employees of the Company…” That policy has previously existed, but the company’s latest filing makes it clear that the policy applies to the founders as well. If one of the three were to leave though, they theoretically could hedge their position, barring any contract signed upon their departure.

Second, Palantir has a three-class convoluted governance structure that includes a special “Class F” share that will give founders Karp, Cohen, and Thiel almost unilateral voting control over the company in perpetuity. Such an arrangement is unique — most tech companies going public today have two classes of shares, one class that holds one vote per share, and one class that holds ten votes per share. Palantir’s Class F shares have a variable number of votes that always give the three founders 49.999999% voting power in the company.

In its amended filing this afternoon, Palantir clarified that some of Thiel’s shares will be considered “Designated Founders’ Excluded Shares,” which will not be considered Class F shares. That will allow Thiel to vote those shares separately, increasing his overall voting power in Palantir.

Minutia perhaps, but critical to a company that has been in the limelight so much over the past decade and is a constant lightning rod for commentary from the commentariat. The NYSE has approved Palantir’s prospectus, which means further changes to its documents outside of pricing are not likely to be forthcoming. The company is still expected to start trading its direct listing around September 23.

What market selloff?

Despite last week’s market declines, two big IPOs are rolling ahead this week, with Snowflake and JFrog both boosting their IPO price ranges this morning. The jump in expected pricing means each IPO will likely raise more capital, valuing the firms more richly than their initial ranges made clear.

Snowflake’s first IPO range valued it comfortably north of $24 billion and its IPO detailed that both Berkshire Hathaway and Salesforce Ventures were going to pour capital into the big-data company. JFrog’s developer-derived profits and strong growth gave it a valuation of around $3 billion, far above its final private price.

Those figures are are now passé. This morning, let’s quickly calculate new valuations for both companies and dig into why they are managing to attract such strong investor demand.

JFrog and Snowflake’s new IPO price intervals

Starting with JFrog, the company’s preceding IPO price interval of $33 to $37 per share valued it between $2.92 billion to $3.28 billion, not counting equity reserved for its underwriting banks. The company is now targeting a $39 to $41 per-share price range, a steep gain from its preceding target.

JFrog still intends to sell eight million shares, giving the company a $312 million to $328 million gross raise, before counting other shares that are being sold by existing shareholders and reserved equity for underwriters.