Year: 2020

There’s a lot of chatter around what kind of stimulus is needed to save the economy and ensure financially vulnerable Americans can retain some degree of stability. Talks have included everything from long-term rent delays to a universal basic income (UBI). But if policymakers want to do more than just keep the floor from falling out and start laying the groundwork for an actual recovery, then they ought to be discussing a different UBI as well: Universal Basic Internet.

Just as the electrification of America brought the nation out of the Great Depression, the Wi-Fi-cation of the nation can ease us out of the COVID-19 collapse. Consider that in 1932, a mere 10% of rural Americans had electricity. As a result, a divide in opportunity emerged: On one hand, city-dwellers had the modern infrastructure required to enjoy a standard of living that would allow them to fully pursue the American Dream; on the other, millions of Americans were literally in the dark (or, at least, candle-lit dimness).

That’s why the electrification of American became a central plank of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Great Depression recovery plan. But his plan wasn’t just to turn the lights on, it was to empower communities by making them the owners of their newly generated electricity. So under FDR’s guidance, Congress created the Rural Electrification Administration (REA).

The REA didn’t just barge into rural towns, install electricity and leave. Instead, the REA took two critical steps to make it a truly transformative agency: (1) it employed and empowered community members and (2) it taught people how to make the most of their newfound light. On step one, the REA relied on local partners to organize cooperatives that would supply the labor to build their community’s own electricity system.

By engaging community members, the REA turned “users” into “owners” and, consequently, did much more for rural America than would have been possible under federal auspices alone. On step two, the REA launched an “electric circus” that sent REA staff to educate new electricity users on how best to operate equipment, perform chores, cook and, of course, stay safe. This “circus” was more like a civic service program that facilitated a knowledge transfer from those who knew electrified life to those being exposed to the possibilities generated by electricity for the first time.

If the Great Depression showed rural America had been left in the dark, COVID-19 has revealed the plight of the millions of Americans left offline. Forced to shelter in place, Americans have been reintroduced to the centrality of high-speed internet to learning, working and simply living. But there’s an expansive digital divide between those with high-speed internet and those left searching for access to affordable broadband. Approximately 28% of Americans in rural areas do not have access to or cannot afford broadband — the rate is 23% in urban areas.

The digital divide exists on a racial dimension as well — whites are more likely than blacks or Latinx residents to report having broadband access at home.

America needs Universal Basic Internet. Achieving UBI requires a coordinated federal effort that, like the REA, (1) involves local stakeholders as a way to increase employment and civic pride and (2) creates an “internet circus” of trainers to increase digital literacy around the nation. This approach to closing the digital divide will go a long way in helping the nation recover from the COVID collapse.

FDR was rightfully proud of the REA. He realized that the federal government had to get involved because the private sector had failed to provide an essential service for Americans.

He noted that it is particularly important that extensions of rural electrification be planned in such a way as to provide service on an area basis. The practice has been too frequent in the past for private utility companies to undertake to serve only the more prosperous and more populous rural sections. As a result, families in less favored and in sparsely settled sections were left unserved.

Sound familiar?

The government has delegated providing access to internet to the private sector for far too long. Only the “more prosperous” have been able to enjoy the full benefits of high-speed internet. The disparity in access can be explained by economics: It’s not cheap to ensure every American has the connectivity required to thrive. Way back in 2010, the National Broadband Plan estimated that closing the digital divide would take at least $24 billion. If the upfront costs weren’t daunting enough, the costs of building out a broadband network rise as the distance to reach end users increases; in other words, the least dense areas are the most expensive to serve. So it comes as no surprise that private actors have opted to instead service dense, urban areas.

That’s why the government must and can seize this crisis to close the digital divide. In the words of Rahm Emanuel, a crisis is “an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” House Democrats just released a $3 trillion stimulus plan — surely, there’s a couple billion to spend on a Universal Basic Internet plan.

To those worried that the spending won’t generate enough of a return, the math makes clear that closing the digital divide will generate a digital dividend. There’s no easy to way to measure the impact of broadband access on the economy, but several studies indicate that this is exactly the sort of investment we should make in a time of crisis: some have estimated that doubling broadband speeds adds around 0.3% to GDP growth; others forecast that every broadband-related job generates between 2.5 and 4.0 additional jobs; and, yet another study determined that a 10 percentage point increase in broadband access could increase GDP per capita by $13,036. Simply put, there’s a high ROI — return on internet — associated with increasing broadband access.

President Lincoln, who guided the nation through its most trying times, stated that “[t]he legitimate object of government is to do for the community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot do as well for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.”

The digital divide is not a problem any American can solve alone. So, it’s time for the government to bring the “internet circus” to town after town and make sure that Universal Basic Internet becomes a reality.

It seems that we are in the middle of a mini acquisition spree for Kubernetes startups, specifically those that can help with Kubernetes security. In the latest development, Venafi, a vendor of certificate and key management for machine-to-machine connections, is acquiring Jetstack, a UK startup that helps enterprises migrate and work within Kubernetes and cloud-based ecosystems, which has also been behind the development of cert-manager, a popular, open source native Kubernetes certificate management controller.

Financial terms of the deal, which is expected to close in June of this year, have not been disclosed, but Jetstack has been working with Venafi to integrate its services and had a strategic investment from Venafi’s Machine Identity Protection Development Fund.

Venafi is part of the so-called “Silicon Slopes” cluster of startups in Utah. It has raised about $190 million from investors that include TCV, Silver Lake and Intel Capital and was last valued at $600 million. That was in 2018, when it raised $100 million, so now it’s likely Venafi is worth more, especially considering its customers, which include the top five U.S. health insurers; the top five U.S. airlines; the top four credit card issuers; three out of the top four accounting and consulting firms; four of the top five U.S., U.K., Australian and South African banks; and four of the top five U.S. retailers.

For the time being, the two organizations will continue to operate separately, and cert-manager — which has hundreds of contributors and millions of downloads — will continue on as before, with a public release of version 1 expected in the June-July timeframe.

The deal underscores not just how Kubernetes-based containers have quickly gained momentum and critical mass in the enterprise IT landscape, in particular around digital transformation; but specifically the need to provide better security services around that at speed and at scale. The deal comes just one day after VMware announced that it was acquiring Octarine, another Kubernetes security startup, to fold into Carbon Black (an acquisition it made last year).

“Nowadays, business success depends on how quickly you can respond to the market,” said Matt Barker, CEO and co-founder of Jetstack. “This reality led us to re-think how software is built and Kubernetes has given us the ideal platform to work from. However, putting speed before security is risky. By joining Venafi, Jetstack will give our customers a chance to build fast while acting securely.”

To be clear, Venafi had been offering Kubernetes integrations prior to this — and Venafi and Jetstack have worked together for two years. But acquiring Jetstack will give it direct, in-house expertise to speed up development and deployment of better tools to meet the challenges of a rapidly expanding landscape of machines and applications, all of which require unique certificates to connect securely.

“In the race to virtualize everything, businesses need faster application innovation and better security; both are mandatory,” said Jeff Hudson, CEO of Venafi, in a statement. “Most people see these requirements as opposing forces, but we don’t. We see a massive opportunity for innovation. This acquisition brings together two leaders who are already working together to accelerate the development process while simultaneously securing applications against attack, and there’s a lot more to do. Our mutual customers are urgently asking for more help to solve this problem because they know that speed wins, as long as you don’t crash.”

The crux of the issue is the sheer volume of machines that are being used in computing environments, thanks to the growth of Kubernetes clusters, cloud instances, microservices and more, with each machine requiring a unique identity to connect, communicate, and execute securely, Venafi notes, with disruptions or misfires in the system leaving holes for security breaches.

Jetstack’s approach to information security came by way of its expertise in Kubernetes, developing cert-mananger specifically so that its developer customers could easily create and maintain certificates for their networks.

“At Jetstack we help customers realize the benefits of Kubernetes and cloud native infrastructure, and we see transformative results to businesses firsthand,” said Matt Bates, CTO and co-founder of Jetstack, in a statement. “We developed cert-manager to make it easy for developers to scale Kubernetes with consistent, secure, and declared-as-code machine identity protection. The project has been a huge hit with the community and has been adopted far beyond our expectations. Our team is thrilled to join Venafi so we can accelerate our plans to bring machine identity protection to the cloud native stack, grow the community and contribute to a wider range of projects across the ecosystem.” Both Bates and Barker will report to Venafi’s Hudson and join the bigger company’s executive team.

Most companies don’t have the personnel to do AI well, so they turn to platform vendors like Adobe for help. Like other platforms, it has been building AI into its product set for several years now, but wanted to give marketers a set of tools that take advantage of some advanced AI capabilities out of the box.

Today, the company announced five pre-packaged AI solutions specifically designed to give marketers more intelligent insight. Amit Ahuja, VP of ecosystem development at Adobe, says even before the pandemic, customers were struggling to deal with the onslaught of data and how they could use it to understand their customers better.

“There is so much data coming in, and customers are struggling to leverage this data — and not just for the purpose of analytics and insights, which is a huge part of it, but also to do predictive optimization,” Ahuja explained.

What’s more, we’ve known for some time that when there is so much data, it becomes impossible to make sense of it manually. Given that AI deals best with tons of data, Adobe wanted to take advantage of that, while packaging some popular data scenarios in a way that makes it easy for marketers to get insights.

That data comes from the Adobe Experience Platform, which the is designed to pull data not only from Adobe products, but from a variety of enterprise sources to help marketers build a more complete picture of their customers and get answers to key questions.

Customer Insights AI helps users understand their customers better. Image Credit: Adobe

The company is announcing a total of five AI tools today, two of which are generally available with the remainder in Beta for now. For starters, Customer AI helps marketers understand why their customers do what they do. For instance, why they keep coming back or why they stopped. Attribution AI helps marketers understand how effective their strategies are, something that’s always important, but especially in this economy where effectively deploying spend is more important than ever.

The first of the Beta tools is Journey AI, which helps marketers decide the best channel to engage customers. Content and Commerce AI looks at the most effective way to deliver content and finally Leads AI looks at the visitors most likely to convert to customers.

These five are just a start, and the company plans to add new tools to the toolbox as customers look for additional insights from the data to help them improve their marketing outcomes.

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Tokyo are showcasing a new composite material with self-healing properties that take cues from lizard tails and starfish arms. MWCNTs-PBS — a composite of polyborosiloxane (PBS) and material multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) — is at the heart (so to speak) of the ‘Self-healing UI.’

When cut in two and places back together, the piece begin to reattach, and the seam disappears, as with the following GIF,

The above heart in one several different scenarios the team has created. In this instance, an on-board sensor is capable of detecting both when it has been cut and when those pieces have been rejoined. It goes to work when it detects the latter. The process isn’t nearly as speedy as the image makes it out to be, however, taking about six hours to fully heal.

Other proposed scenarios include robotic actuators and a “transformative soft controller,” which works thusly,

A single controller detects a finger press motion. Then two controllers were joined to form long touch buttons and worked as a piano keyboard. Next, two connected controllers wrapped around the user’s wrist, working as a wrist band slider device. When three friends came to play a video game, the controller was cut into four pieces and worked as half-sized gaming devices with three touch sensors. After use, the four pieces can be joined into the original two controllers for 6 h.

Other hopeful scenarios include a reusable arm cast that essentially molds itself around the damaged limb and heals itself into place. The team has recently reported its findings and plans to work with scientists in other disciplines to explore potential real world applications for the T-1000-style goo.

“I spend a lot of time being angry — but I’m still hopeful. Gender bias in medicine is systemic,” says Carine Carmy, the fast-talking CEO and co-founder of Origin, during a condensed chat about her startup mission to make physical therapy for women and mothers accessible and affordable across the US, both online and through a network of physical clinics.

The unexpected arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic led the LA-based startup to rework and accelerate its original launch plan — shifting its first focus to getting a telehealth service up and running fast.

They launched a “virtual care” service at the end of last month — offering “non-invasive, affordable care for commonly overlooked health issues”, from painful sex to postpartum recovery, as they put it in a press release, all of which is currently being served up via socially distanced Zoom video chat, thanks to the coronavirus.

Early growth in visits is running at 100%, month over month, per Carmy.

“We had originally planned to spend more time with in person care and then actually launch our digital platform — telehealth — in 2021. But March hit and it was very clear that we were going to have to close our doors for some period of time. So we decided to accelerate, really dramatically, the launch of our virtual care,” she explains.

“We launched a telehealth product in 48 hours, we converted the majority of our visits for the next month in person online and we had really, really great feedback and customer response —  both in terms of adoption but repeat visits as well. And that gave us the confidence to really accelerate both the brand launch but also to be able to serve many more women with telehealth and then ultimately with other digital products down the line.”

Origin’s virtual care offering is nationwide in the sense of being available as a “touchpoint” to women across the U.S., though Carmy notes it’s only “in network” (i.e. accepted by some insurance providers) in California at this point. “That’s a goal of ours — to expand insurance coverage nationwide,” she says.

“We’re rapidly onboarding new providers across the country to be able to serve patients in a deeper way. Right now we offer one-on-one physical therapy online in California, and we’re offering health coaching in other states and are expanding our coverage in the coming weeks. We have folks lined up in New York and Texas and other states that we’re onboarding right now.”

The wider plan — coronavirus pandemic willing — is to start building out a network of physical clinics to go alongside the telehealth service, expanding out from the initial clinic in LA. She says the team is eyeing other locations in California to potentially open up later this year.

“Our model is both in person and online but obviously COVID has accelerated the online component,” Carmy tells TechCrunch. “But, at the core, physical therapy designed for women really means we were looking at women’s anatomy; the hormonal differences that affect women at unique stages in life; and often looking at the very prevalent but overlooked healthcare issues that women experience. So that’s the core of the care delivery that we’ve been tweaking with the team from a client experience perspective.

“That is going to stay the same but our goal is to build a network of practices across the country in partnership with the leading providers in each market. So we’re actually on track to open up San Francisco later this year… and have plans to expand within California and the country in person.”

On the tech side they’re focusing on building “customization around the care delivery experience” — which boils down to building a platform that serves the target female users with “the right education and fitness and exercise content”, as part of an overarching care delivery package.

Origin’s founder clinic is a long-standing LA business, called Bebé Physical Therapy. The team started working with this practice in late 2018, with a formal partnership following on last year. While the clinic’s original founder has left, the entire clinical team was retained — and Origin gained an existing loyal client base. (They say they’ve treated “thousands” of women in Los Angeles and have more than 250 referring providers, such as OB-GYNs, at this stage.)

“For us it was this really big moment of realizing there is this care delivery model that really works,” says Carmy, explaining the startup origin story. “The research shows that physical therapy is the first line of defense for every pelvic floor disorder. But there’s not enough access to these types of providers in a way that makes sense for the modern woman.”

“We really believe in building a clinical-first company,” she adds. “So for us it was really important to partner with really the best team in Los Angeles.”

Origin is angel funded at this stage, with the team taking an undisclosed amount of financing from investors including Assaf Wand, CEO and co-founder Hippo Insurance; Jenny Fleiss, co-founder of Rent the Runway; Josh Zad, founder & CEO of Alfred Inc.; and several others, including some individuals specifically focused on the healthcare space.

“Now profitability is sexy,” jokes Carmy, when asked about its approach to financing the business and whether it’s looking to go down a typical startup VC funding route or not. “For us, we’ve always wanted our locations to be profitable. I think it’s the most important thing to control your own destiny. Really focus on building a sustainable business from day one has been our goal.”

While bricks-and-mortar clinics where women can go for personal, physical, and potentially very intimate therapy are clearly a vital component of such a service, Carmy argues there’s plenty of good work that can be done virtually to support women with their health issues.

She says one major component to tackle when targeting women’s health is simply awareness and education — given how relatively overlooked the area is. And of course there’s no barrier to imparting knowledge over a Zoom call (albeit that particular videoconferencing tool’s platform’s security is something the Origin team may want to take a closer look at).

“So much of what we offer can be done remotely,” says Carmy. “And I think, especially if you’re a busy working mother, to be able to come into the clinic every week is not always feasible. So we do think you can actually achieve better outcomes and better adherence if we have continuous care online and in person.”

“A lot of patients are coming to us with issues that have never been named before,” she adds. “So some of the core value we offer is actually providing medical valuation — there’s a medical diagnosis and there’s a plan and there’s something we can do about it,” she adds.

“How women understand what’s going on with their bodies. And that’s not just in one session — that’s really over time, increasing body awareness and knowledge that women have so that they can also take care of themselves better in the future. That happens in every visit and can happen online.”

Carmy has a background in digital marketing but a very personal interest in women’s health after suffering painful sex during her twenties. She recounts the frustration of having to see multiple doctors before finally being able to get effective treatment for the problem.

While her long time friend and co-founder, Nona Farahnik Yadegar, suffered similar health issues after delivering her son — which led her to the Bebé Physical Therapy practice. Inspired, the friends joined forces to set up Origin, enlisting the help of Farahnik Yadegar’s husband, David, as their third co-founder.

“Pregnancy and postpartum, particularly postpartum, women’s needs are fundamentally ignored after they deliver,” Carmy continues. “We’re expected to just kind of ‘snap back’ — which is this huge fallacy which creates a whole set of other emotional issues and challenges as we try to live our lives.

“There’s a huge need. There’s a historical gender bias in medicine — but there has to be a way to solve this.”

It looks like a timely moment to build such a platform, with telehealth seeing a huge demand spike as a result of the coronavirus. While femtech, as a category, is now well established — commanding an increased share of attention from VCs who have historically lagged on understanding the opportunities for products and services that cater to women’s health (given their own gender bias problem).

Where women’s health is concerned the penny of opportunity does seem to be dropping. Not just for businesses narrowly focused on fertility, either, but for founders who are thinking far more holistically about women’s issues and well-being (including very overlooked yet universal transitions such as the menopause).

The Origin team’s decision to accelerate launching their telehealth platform actually occurred before a COVID-19 triggered shift in US regulations — which has nonetheless helped their accessibility mission by opening up digital healthcare platforms for insurance coverage, including for physical therapy.

“My hope is that this continues, even beyond whatever crisis period we’re in right now,” says Carmy, noting how physical therapy was one of the last areas to be covered for telehealth.

Origin contends that its approach to women’s health and physical therapy prevents and treats conditions that costs the system “billions of dollars across maternity and MSK” — by reducing unnecessary surgeries; improving musculoskeletal outcomes; and also by supporting women at work, thereby reducing absenteeism and promoting postpartum return.

“We’ve systemically ignored many parts of women’s bodies. There’s so much more research on erectile dysfunction than there is on female sexual pain,” Carmy adds, discussing why the insurance industry has also historically failed to pay proper attention to women’s health. (She notes, for example, that the Bebé Physical Therapy practice is an exception in Southern California in accepting insurance for this type of therapy.)

“If the medical community is telling you, through their actions, by only getting one visit six-weeks postpartum or by me needing to see six doctors to figure out what’s wrong with my pelvic floor, which is a large part of my body,  even I think that this is maybe ‘normal’ or not an issue.

“The number of women I’ve talked to who assume that leaking or incontinence is just something that happens to all women after they give birth and can’t be dealt with… So I think we’ve normalized what is probably one of the largest healthcare issues in the country. That is maybe not an acute issue causing a tonne of surgeries but it really is if you look at pelvic organ prolapse.

“One in two adult women experience some level of prolapse and surgery is still perceived to be ‘the option’. And even with surgery you need physical therapy so…”

There’s respected science underpinning physical therapy as an effective treatment for a range of women’s health issues (Carmy, for example, points to this Stanford study on pelvic floor dysfunction). But, at the same time, the historic failure of the medical research community to focus on women’s health issues means there’s an ongoing paucity of data — which is something Origin hopes to be able to treat in time.

“We’re one of the only practices, we’re seeing thousands of visits a months, so we’re able to actually have a very large population that, hopefully in partnership with a research institution, we can actually show the real value of what’s being done — especially from a prevention stand point,” says Carmy.

“I think that’s where healthcare is going,” she adds, on the dual-sided — online, offline — nature of the business: In person physical therapy supplemented by ongoing online care, where therapists treat patients in their homes (and can even, therefore get a peek at extra environmental context, by getting eyes on a patient’s surroundings, that might be useful for further customizing physical treatments).

“In the future we’re not going to call it ‘telehealth’ we’re going to call it healthcare… It’s really just the future of care delivery.”

Another healthcare trend that’s clearly signalled by a startup like Origin is that women are increasingly rejecting a male-skewed status quo within medicine — and making it their own business to take better care of women. 

Years from now, people will look back on the COVID-19 pandemic as a watershed moment for society and the global economy.

Wearing a mask might be as common as owning a phone; telework, telemedicine and online education will be more of a norm than a backup plan; and for the global economy, the cloud will have transformed the underlying infrastructure of businesses and entire industries.

COVID-19 is a turning point for the cloud and cloud company founders. For its computing power and as a delivery model of software, the cloud has been embraced as a solution to many challenges that businesses face during today’s economic downturn and recovery. Not only is the cloud industry more resilient than other industries, but the cloud model offers businesses a promising future in the age of social distancing and beyond.

We believe that once founders find shelter in the cloud, they’ll never go back.

Cloud’s resiliency amid historic volatility

Over the past decade, there’s been a massive market shift from on-premises to cloud, as 94% of enterprises use at least one cloud service today. 2020 was already a milestone year for the cloud industry, as aggregate SaaS and IaaS run-rate revenue each crossed $100 billion, and the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index (^EMCLOUD) market cap crossed $1 trillion in early February. Yet in a matter of days, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread, fear tore through financial markets.

In early March, public markets experienced the steepest crash in history with volatility we haven’t seen since the Great Recession. The cloud index market cap dropped to ~$750 million and cloud multiples returned close to their historical averages of ~7x while the VIX volatility index spiked to the mid-80s. Both at global highs in February 2020, the ^EMCLOUD and the S&P 500 traded off by roughly 35% by mid-March. Over the next two months, though, the ^EMCLOUD recouped those losses, charging to a new all-time high on May 7.

The cloud index has continued its rise since then, and as of the close on May 11 has a market cap above $1.2 trillion and has returned to the lofty 12x forward run rate revenue multiples from 2019. Similar to Adobe in 2012, we expect many enterprises to transition over to the cloud model, and the index will continue to expand. As we predicted in this year’s State of the Cloud 2020, by 2025 we expect the cloud to penetrate 50% of enterprise software.

Austin-based company Homeward was founded by a former real estate agent with a deceptively simple premise.

Homeward, which has just raised $20 million in equity funding from Adams Street Partners and another $85 million in debt from undisclosed lenders, pitches a plan where the company will loan money to would-be homebuyers equal to the amount of their home equity so these buyers can make an all-cash offer to purchase their next home. The company also makes a “floor-price” guarantee on the existing home if the owners aren’t able to sell the property for full market value.

That offer has attracted the attention of venture investors like Adams Street Partners, Javelin Venture Partners and LiveOak Venture Partners, which have invested $20 million in equity into the new startup, the company said. Homeward also said it has received another $85 million in debt financing from undisclosed lenders.

For the buyers who who use Homeward’s all-cash offer, there’s the promise of an average discount between 2 percent and 5 percent, which at least makes up for the 2 percent-to-3 percent convenience fee that the company charges for its services. Homeward also makes money off of the rent it charges to homeowners on their new home before they’re able to close a deal on the old one.

“Most of our customers are seeing discounts that exceed the cost of their fee that gets tacked back on the home,” said Homeward chief executive and founder, Tim Heyl. “Depending on the services that they use for homeward they will see discounts that would drive down the fees that they would have otherwise paid.” 

Homeward compares its services to institutional buyers, who can charge up to 9 percent of the home sale price and may force homebuyers to work with an exclusive agent provided by the institution.

The benefit, the company says, is that would-be home buyers (through Homeward) can make an all cash pitch to sellers which often results in a discount on the asking price — and the new owners can move in faster — all while having someone else manage the process of selling their old home.

“We are focused on building the future real estate agent and putting the client relationship at the center of that experience,” said Heyl. 

A former broker himself, Heyl said that the company’s willingness to work with real estate brokers rather than replace them was another significant differentiator for the company.

“Homeward is focused very specifically on helping the real estate agent deliver a home buying experience… homeowner wants to move but they don’t want to list their house til they know where they’re going,” said Heyl. “The real estate agent will refer the customer to Homeward… we gather that data and run it through our models and we approve or deny the customers.”

With the new cash, Homeward is looking to expand in the existing markets it’s working in: Colorado, Georgia and Texas, with an eye toward national expansion down the line.

To date, Homeward has raised $24 million in equity and $106 million in debt.

“We’re being very selective at the moment, but Homeward stood out.” said Jeffrey Diehl, a managing partner at Adams Street Partners, in a statement. “The company’s growth is impressive, the leaders have deep industry experience, and their traction with agent partners has been much better than expected.”

By working with real estate agents instead of trying to circumvent them, Homeward has a built in sales channel for its services. Roughly 43 percent of home buyers have an existing home to sell before they buy their next house, according to data from Zillow cited by the company. The need to sell a home before buying the next one slows down the process and hits the bottom line of real estate agencies that depend on turnover.

Homeward works with agents to register clients for Homeward’s service so they can be approved for a loan by the company.

“Working with Homeward, my clients got approved and made a winning offer within days.” said Grant Rothberg, a top real-estate agent in Houston, in a statement provided by the company. “They were able to move into their new home first, then take their time to sell their old home, ultimately earning them $40,000 more than low-ball ibuyer offers.”

Google Cloud today announced the next step in its partnership with VMware: the Google Cloud VMware Engine. This fully managed service provides businesses with a full VMware Cloud Foundation stack on Google Cloud to help businesses easily migrate their existing VMware-based environments to Google’s infrastructure. Cloud Foundation is VMware’s stack for hybrid and private cloud deployments

Given Google Cloud’s focus on enterprise customers, it’s no surprise that the company continues to bet on partnerships with the likes of VMware to attract more of these companies’ workloads. Less than a year ago, Google announced that VMware Cloud Foundation would come to Google Cloud and that it would start supporting VMware workloads. Then, last November, Google Cloud acquired CloudSimple, a company that specialized in running VMware environments and that Google had already partnered with for its original VMware deployments. The company describes today’s announcement as the third step in this journey.

VMware Engine provides users with all of the standard Cloud Foundation components: vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T and HCX. With this, Google Cloud General Manager June Yang notes in today’s announcement, businesses can quickly stand up their own software-defined data center in the Google Cloud.

“Google Cloud VMware Engine is designed to minimize your operational burden, so you can focus on your business,” she notes. “We take care of the lifecycle of the VMware software stack and manage all related infrastructure and upgrades. Customers can continue to leverage IT management tools and third-party services consistent with their on-premises environment.”

Google is also working with third-party providers like NetApp, Veeam, Zerto, Cohesity and Dell Technologies to ensure that their solutions work on Google’s platform, too.

“As customers look to simplify their cloud migration journey, we’re committed to build cloud services to help customers benefit from the increased agility and efficiency of running VMware workloads on Google Cloud,” said Bob Black, Dell Technologies Global Lead Alliance Principal at Deloitte Consulting. “By combining Google Cloud’s technology and Deloitte’s business transformation experience, we can enable our joint customers to accelerate their cloud migration, unify operations, and benefit from innovative Google Cloud services as they look to modernize applications.””

NVIDIA announced today that its NVIDIA A100, the first of its GPUs based on its Ampere architecture, is now in full production and has begun shipping to its customers globally. Ampere is a big generational jump in NVIDIA’s GPU architecture design, providing what the company says is the “largest leap in performance to date” across all eight generations of its graphics hardware.

Specifically, the A100 can improve performance on AI training and inference as much as 20x relative to prior NVIDIA data center GPUs, and it offers advantages across just about any kind of GPU-intensive data center workloads, including data analytics, protein modelling and other scientific computing uses, and cloud-based graphics rendering.

The A100 GPU can also be scaled either up or down depending on the needs, meaning that you can use a single unit to handle as many as seven separate tasks with partitioning, and you can combine them to work together as one large, virtual GPU to tackle the toughest training tasks for AI applications. The ‘Multi-instance GPU’ partitioning feature in particular is novel to this generation, and really helps emphasize the ability of the A100 to provide the most value for cost for clients of all sizes, since one could theoretically replace up to seven discrete GPUs in a data center if you’re already finding you have some headroom on your usage needs.

Alongside the production and shipping announcement, NVIDIA is also announcing that a number of customers are already adopting the A100 for use in their supercomputers and data centers, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and just about every significant cloud provider that exists.

NVIDIA also announced the DGX A100 system, which combines eight of the A100 GPUs linked together using NVIDIA’s NVLink. That’s also available immediately directly from NVIDIA, and from its approved resale partners.

As COVID-19 swept across the globe, no sector lay untouched, but perhaps no industry was more disrupted than transportation.

Airlines slashed routes, public transit use plummeted, ridership on Uber, Lyft and other ride-hailing platforms dropped and shared scooter companies pulled products from city streets. Meanwhile, e-bike sales bloomed and on-demand delivery, including services using autonomous robots, exploded.

Transportation companies have been forced to adapt — quickly — to this new reality. Uber, for example, found itself in a position where it felt both right to lay off thousands of employees as it planned to inject $170 million into micromobility startup Lime.

The upshot: Along with the pain, crises can also be a catalyst for innovation. TechCrunch spoke to seven venture capitalists about how COVID-19 affected their portfolio and investment strategy, and asked their advice for startup founders as well as where they think the next and overlooked hot opportunity will be:

• Ernestine Fu, Alsop Louie Partners
• Stonly Baptiste & Shaun Abrahamson, Urban.us
• Rob Coneybeer, Shasta Ventures
• Shahin Farshchi, Lux Capital
• Kate Schox, Trucks VC
• Jeff Peters, Autotech Ventures

Ernestine Fu, Alsop Louie Partners

How has COVID-19 impacted your investment strategy? 

Early-stage venture capital is about investing in the steady growth and potential of a business over time. We’re in it for the long term, and the economy will eventually rebound. We’re preserving dry powder for existing investments, but at the same time, I’m reminded that some of the best venture-backed businesses were founded and funded during recessionary times (e.g. Google, Salesforce, Instagram). So we’re keeping our eyes open for promising young startups too.

What is your advice to startups in your portfolio right now?

COVID-19 is an existential event in all of our lives and businesses. Stay positive and be empathetic — protect your employees and communicate often, maintain the financial health of your business and know you need to adapt to the change that will continue to happen.