Year: 2020

Frank, a startup best known for helping college students secure and manage financial aid, is expanding into a new part of the edtech world. Namely, finding and taking online classes, with the company helping students deploy their financial aid money to open digital slots at more than 100 colleges.

As a company, Frank straddles the ground between consumer fintech, which helps regular people better manage their money, and edtech, the application of tech to the venerable business of learning. TechCrunch covered the company’s 2017-era Series A, and recently discussed the company when it raised $5 million earlier in the year.

According to its CEO, Charlie Javice, her company has grown by around a factor of three this year. And, with Javice telling TechCrunch that Frank’s new class-finding service — dubbed Classfinder — could become “a primary driver” for her startup in time, we decided to dig in a little.

Classfinder

Frank is teaming up with colleges to offer discounted classes, hoping to match its users with unfilled slots in classes that are already set to take place. And the startup will help its user base utilize financial aid to help pay for their selected classes, possibly helping folks take more credits without extra debt.

There are 125 schools offering classes on the platform today, out of a rotating cadre of over 350. The Classfinder website claims 7,520 courses up for selection as of today.

TechCrunch asked Javice if offering access to online classes was a deviation from Frank’s better-known effort to help more students get more financial assistance in their college pursuit. In the CEO’s view, Classfinder fits inside what she views as her company’s mission, namely higher-education affordability.

If Classfinder works as well as the company hopes, that could bear out, even if the new product does appear to be more an evolution of Frank’s product lineup than merely a continuation of its initial vision.

Provided the model works, it could net out to a win for all involved parties. Colleges have spare digital capacity for students, and lots of students don’t have money for school, so if Frank can help those same kids get financial aid and deploy it to discounted, accredited classes, no one loses.

TechCrunch was curious about transferring credits — would classes taken with Classfinder count at other schools? Per the company, yes, and Frank will help prepare the needed information. Of course, some colleges may balk, but for some students the system could be a way to boost college affordability while not sacrificing learning.

Digital education became the norm this year, to middling results. Amongst children, the move to online schooling has been widely panned. But for higher education, online instruction was already an evolved industry even before the pandemic. Perhaps it will become even more normal in time.

How large the addressable market is for taking one-off classes is unclear, though the success of Guild Education could point to a large pool of potential students. Guild, which became a unicorn in 2019 after raising a $157 million Series D, helps corporate employees take continuing education classes to help bolster their careers. Even as the world of online classes clutters up, Frank’s decision to focus on college instead of the broader life-long learning market means that it thinks higher ed isn’t disappearing as fast as some edtech enthusiasts might think.

We’ll check back in with Frank in a quarter or two to see how the new product is helping, or not, its growth trajectory. If it does, Frank could raise a Series B in the next few quarters. Chegg, a public edtech company that previously backed the company, is worth $11 billion as of today’s trading. So if Frank keeps growing, there should be money available to it.

Extra Crunch is excited to announce we’re renewing our Partner Perk with DocSend. Annual and two-year members of Extra Crunch that are new to DocSend can get up to 90% off an annual plan. 

DocSend is a secure document-sharing platform that not only lets you share your documents with ease, but it also provides you with real-time actionable analytics. Whether you’re a founder, executive or VC, DocSend’s unique blend of security and control can help communicate more efficiently as you strengthen your business relationships. Whether you’re sending out a pitch deck, completing due diligence or sharing investor updates and board packs, DocSend gives you a strategic advantage with page-by-page insights. You also can connect DocSend to Salesforce, Gmail, Outlook, IFTTT and Zapier to get even more out of the product. 

Surprise! Among Us is now available on the Nintendo Switch for $5.00. The Switch version features cross-platform play allowing PC, mobile, and Switch players to play a game together.

The hit game just launched on the gaming platform after becoming a surprise hit during the Covid-19 pandemic. Originally launched in 2018, the game found an eager audience during the early days of the Covid-19 audience and its popularity is still soaring.

There’s a good chance one of my kids is playing the game right now.

The news came from Nintendo’s latest Indie World Showcase where the gaming company highlights titles from smaller companies. The company left this title for the end of the presentation. And for good reason. Among Us is without question one of the hottest titles available right now, attracting gamers from all platforms. Prior to the election Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the game as a platform to drive voters to the polls and at one point, drew 435,000 concurrent viewers.

The game costs $5.00 and is now available as a digital purchase through Nintendo’s eShop.

Let’s preface this year’s predictions by acknowledging and admitting how hilariously wrong we were when this time last year we said that 2020 “showed promise.”

In fairness (almost) nobody saw a pandemic coming.

The pandemic is, and remains, a global disaster of epic proportions that’s forced billions of people into lockdown, left economies in tatters with companies (including startups) struggling to stay afloat. The mass shifting of people working from home brought security challenges with it, like how to protect your workforce when employees are working outside the security perimeter of their offices. But it’s forced us to find and solve solutions to some of the most complex challenges, like pulling off a secure election and securing the supply chain for the vaccines that will bring our lives back to some semblance of normality.

With 2020 wrapping up, much of the security headaches exposed by the pandemic will linger into the new year. This is what to expect.

Working from home has given hackers new avenues for attacks

The sudden lockdowns in March drove millions to work from home. But hackers quickly found new and interesting ways to target big companies by targeting the employees themselves. VPNs were a big target because of outstanding vulnerabilities that many companies didn’t bother to fix. Bugs in enterprise software left corporate networks open to attack. The flood of personal devices logging onto the network — and the influx of malware with it — introduced fresh havoc.

Sophos says that this mass decentralizing of the workforce has turned us all into our own IT departments. We have to patch our own computers, install security updates, and there’s no IT just down the hallway to ask if that’s a phishing email.

Companies are having to adjust to the cybersecurity challenges, since working from home is probably here to stay. Managed service providers, or outsourced IT departments, have a “huge opportunity to benefit from the work-from-home shift,” said Grayson Milbourne, security intelligence director at cybersecurity firm Webroot.

Ransomware has become more targeted and more difficult to escape

File-encrypting malware, or ransomware, is getting craftier and sneakier. Where traditional ransomware would encrypt and hold a victim’s files hostage in exchange for a ransom payout, the newer and more advanced strains first steal a victim’s files, encrypt the network and then threaten to publish the stolen files if the ransom isn’t paid.

This data-stealing ransomware makes escaping an attack far more difficult because a victim can’t just restore their systems from a backup (if there is one). CrowdStrike’s chief technology officer Michael Sentonas calls this new wave of ransomware “double extortion” because victims are forced to respond to the data breach as well.

The healthcare sector is under the closest guard because of the pandemic. Despite promises from some (but not all) ransomware groups that hospitals would not be deliberately targeted during the pandemic, medical practices were far from immune. 2020 saw several high profile attacks. A ransomware attack at Universal Health Services, one of the largest healthcare providers in the U.S., caused widespread disruption to its systems. Just last month U.S. Fertility confirmed a ransomware attack on its network.

These high-profile incidents are becoming more common because hackers are targeting their victims very carefully. These hyperfocused attacks require a lot more skill and effort but improve the hackers’ odds of landing a larger ransom — in some cases earning the hackers millions of dollars from a single attack.

“This coming year, these sophisticated cyberattacks will put enormous stress on the availability of services — in everything from rerouted healthcare services impacting patient care, to availability of online and mobile banking and finance platforms,” said Sentonas.

When large companies like Netflix or Amazon want to test the resilience of their systems, they use chaos engineering tools designed to help them simulate worst-case scenarios and find potential issues before they even happen. Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels introduced the company’s Chaos Engineering as a Service offering called AWS Fault Injection Simulator.

The name may lack a certain marketing panache, but Vogels said that the service is designed to help bring this capability to all companies. “We believe that chaos engineering is for everyone, not just shops running at Amazon or Netflix scale. And that’s why today I’m excited to pre-announce a new service built to simplify the process of running chaos experiments in the cloud ,” Vogels said.

As he explained, the goal of chaos engineering is to understand how your application responds to issues by injecting failures into your application, usually running these experiments against production systems. AWS Fault Injection Simulator offers a fully managed service to run these experiments on applications running on AWS hardware.

Image Credits: Amazon / Getty Images

“FIS makes it easy to run safe experiments. We built it to follow the typical chaos experimental workflow where you understand your steady state, set a hypothesis and inject faults into your application. When the experiment is over, FIS will tell you if your hypothesis was confirmed, and you can use the data collected by CloudWatch to decide where you need to make improvements,” he explained.

While the company was announcing the service today, Vogels indicated it won’t actually be available until some time next year.

It’s worth noting that there are other similar services out there by companies like Gremlin, who are already providing a broad Chaos Engineering Service as a Service offering.

When it first launched nearly three years ago, Fifth Wall had a vision of leveraging capital limited partners from across the real estate development and construction business to back the technologies the industry needed most.

That early vision resonated so well, that the firm has grown from managing one fund of $212 million to holding roughly $1.2 billion in assets under management. It has also come to the realization that the investment vehicles they’re currently managing have one huge blind spot — climate-related technologies.

With that deficit in mind, the firm has set out to raise a new climate-focused investment vehicle with at least a $200 million target, and has brought on a new partner to help invest that capital.

Today, the firm announced that Greg Smithies, a former partner at BMW iVentures and longtime investor in climate-related technologies, would be joining the firm to help Tyson Woeste invest Fifth Wall’s newly raised capital.

Real estate tech investment firm Fifth Wall ‘s newest partner, Greg Smithies. Image Credit: Fifth Wall

“A year ago, real estate investors began asking questions around climate and sustainability,” said Fifth Wall co-founder Brendan Wallace . These questions were motivated by three main concerns from commercial and residential property developers.

The first concern stemmed from the financial investors that typically finance these projects demanding that developers pay closer attention to low-carbon or no-carbon real estate developments. Regulators became a second pain point as elected officials in hubs like New York and Los Angeles began to enact carbon neutrality laws mandating the decarbonization of real estate. And finally, the customers who rent and buy space among real estate developers had their own demands around decarbonization, Wallace said.

And the technologies that are being deployed have a far more technical bent than some of the firm’s existing portfolio was used to.

That’s why Smithies, a former employee at Neuralink and the Boring Company and most recently in charge of climate investing at BMW iVentures has joined the firm.

“What excites me about this space is that there’s so much low hanging fruit. And there’s $260 trillion worth of buildings,” Smithies said. “The vast majority of those are nowhere up to modern codes. We’re going to have a much bigger opportunity by focusing on some not-so-sexy stuff.”

Decarbonizing real estate can also make a huge difference in the fight against global climate change. “Real estate consumes 40% of all energy. The global economy happens indoors,” said Wallace. “Real estate will be the biggest spender on climate tech for no other reason than its contribution to the carbon problem.” 

As 2020 comes to a close, some parts of the startup world are completing a loop, ending the year where they began.

Startup valuations, for example, as seen in the Silicon Valley area are effectively back to where they were at the start of the year. According to a report from Fenwick & West examining data through October in the San Francisco Bay area, the percentage of startups that raised up rounds (rounds priced higher than preceding investments) came within spitting distance of its pre-COVID levels.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

There are other positive signs in the data for startup bulls.

Median and average price increases for startup valuations in the Valley have both crested their 2019 averages. The gains have proven especially sharp amongst software startups, which managed somewhat epic valuation gains in October; Fenwick’s data, something we’ve covered before on The Exchange, lags the calendar month somewhat.

This morning, let’s take a break from IPOs to look at startup health in the region still generally heralded as its promised land.

Revenge of the bulls

As optimism for business conditions — tech-focused startups in particular — improved in Q3, startup valuations kicked off Q4 on a strong note.

In October, Silicon Valley startup investments that were priced up from their preceding deal rose to 79%. That’s down from what Fenwick reports as 2019’s average, but a dip from 83% to 79% is not much. Notably, startups in the region managed to reach an up-round percentage of rounds in the mid-to-high-seventies over the summer, but during those months down rounds were 11% to 17% of the total.

Google Photos is rolling out a series of updates to its Memories feature, which surfaces your best photos from years past. Over the next month, Memories will be expanded to include 3D Cinematic photos, updated collage designs, and new types of Memories, the company says. These “new types” of Memories may include those of the most important people in your life or your favorite things — like sunsets, activities such as baking or hiking, or whatever else seems to matter most to you, based on the photos you upload.

Google notes that you can hide specific people or time periods in the app if there are parts of your photo history you don’t want to see resurfaced in Memories. You can also toggle off the option to be notified about Memories, if this is not a feature you like.

Image Credits: Google

The new types of Memories come following a challenging year where users have been stuck at home due to the pandemic, and often have found diversion and entertainment in a different set of activities. Instead of going to large gatherings, like concerts or parties, or flying to new destinations, many people have stayed closer to home and spent their time with families. The new Memories will help to surface some of these “favorite activities” we engaged in during a year when people may not have taken as many personal photos as before.

Google Photos’ new 3D Cinematic images, meanwhile, are being created using machine learning which predicts the image’s depth to produce a 3D representation of the scene. This will work even if the original photo didn’t include depth information from the camera, Google notes. The feature then animates a virtual camera for a smooth panning effect, the results of which are meant to make reliving your memories feel more vivid.

Image Credits: Google

As Google Photos creates new Cinematic Photos, you’ll be alerted through a notification. The new image will appear in the recent highlights section at the top of the photo grid. You can then share that photo with friends or family, or send it as a video.

You may have already spotted the new collage designs, which began to roll out to some Google Photos users earlier in December.

Image Credits: Google

The collages let you create almost scrapbook-like designs with your photos — but instead of using paper and decorations, Google Photos will design the layouts using A.I. This includes picking the background to match the selection of photos, finding similar colors, and then using those to accent the font and the background of the collage, the company says.

All features will finish rolling out over the next month, Google notes. You’ll need an updated version of the Google Photos app to see the enhancements.

Ready to explore an incredible range of space technology from the comfort of your own home or office? TC Sessions: Space 2020 starts tomorrow, December 16, and we’re here to point out just some of the events, presentations and fireside chats waiting for you on day one.

You’ll hear from and engage with the world’s top space experts, founders, scientists, engineers and investors across public, private and defense sectors. You’ll learn where and how to access the funds to fuel your dreams and launch your startup.

You can still buy a pass here before prices increase tomorrow, and we also offer discounts for groups, students and active military/government employees. Note: Expo Ticket holders can only access the exhibition area and the breakout sessions (both live stream and VOD). Want to upgrade your pass to access all the main stage presentations? Shoot us an email at events@techcrunch.com for assistance.

Strap in and get ready for lift off, folks. Like the OSIRIS-Rex, we’re going puff a bit of nitrogen gas at the agenda and blow a sampling of the day’s events into your consciousness (yes, we puffed, but we did not inhale). You’ll find a complete listing of all the sessions in the event agenda.

Asteroid Rocks and Moon Landings: From robots scooping rocks from the surface of galaxy-traveling asteroids, to preparing for the return of humans to the surface of the Moon, we’ll cover all aspects of scientific and civil exploration of the solar system. Lisa Callahan, Vice President & General Manager of Commercial Civil Space, Lockheed Martin Space.

From Space Rock Returns to Financial Returns – An Investor Panel: Some investors spend a lot of their time looking to the stars for the next venture capital opportunity. It’s a market unlike any other, but does that change the math on equity-based investment? Don’t forget to submit your questions for the panel. Chris Boshuizen (Data Collective DCVC), Mike Collett (Promus Ventures) and Tess Hatch (Bessemer Venture Partners)

Fast Money — Working with the Army to Operationalize Science for Transformational Overmatch: Learn about DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory and the xTech Program of prize competitions that accelerate innovative solutions that can help solve Army challenges. Peter Khooshabeh (DEVCOM, ARL West) and Ashley Kowalski (The Aerospace Corporation).

Founders in Focus: We sit down with the founders poised to be the next big disruptors in the space industry. Here we chat with Will Edwards, CEO of Firehawk Aerospace, a custom rocket engine design and manufacturing company.

You’ve had just a tiny taste of what to expect on day one. We’ve initiated the launch sequence and we’re in the final countdown. Buy a pass today before prices increase tonight, join us at TC Sessions: Space 2020 and set your coordinates for out-of-this-world opportunity.

Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Space 2020? Click here to talk with us about available opportunities.

AWS today launched CloudShell, a new, fully-featured web-based shell environment, based on Amazon Linux 2, for developers who want to be able to use some of their favorite command-line tools — and scripts — right inside the AWS Console.

CloudShell, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels explained in his announcement today, is a new browser-based service that will give developers access to a Linux console. When uses start a new CloudShell session, it will automatically be pre-configured to have the same API permissions as your user in the AWS Console.

Image Credits: AWS

“This means you don’t have to manage multiple profiles or API credentials for different test and production environments like you would normally have if you worked in a terminal,” Vogels said. “With these credentials automatically forwarded, it is simple to start a new CloudShell session and use the pre-installed AWS tools right away.”

All of the usual AWS command-line tools will also be pre-installed and ready to go, in addition to Bash, Python, Node.js, PowerShell, VIM, git and more. That also means you’ll be able to install your own favorite tools, too. The OS won’t persist between sessions, so if you break something, you can just restart, but you will get up to 1GB of persistent storage to work with.

Image Credits: AWS

Users can have up to 10 concurrent shells running in each region for free. Developers who need more will have to request an increase.

The new service is now available in AWS’s US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions, with more to follow.

It’s worth noting that AWS competitors Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure already offer similar services as well — and Google also calls it Cloud Shell, but with a space between the two words.