Year: 2020

As investors get cautious about dealmaking in India amid the coronavirus outbreak and their appetite to fund early stage startups begins to evaporate, one venture capital fund is stepping up to make that void smaller.

WaterBridge Ventures, an investor that has cut some of the earliest checks in startups such as edtech firms Unacademy and Doubtnut, and Atlan, which helps enterprises better manage data, and Canadian online pharmacy PocketPills, has launched Fast Forward, a program with a committed $10 million from its second fund to finance Seed and pre-Series A rounds in more than a dozen startups.

Any early-stage startup can apply in Fast Forward by answering 10 questions, and WaterBridge partners will engage with them virtually and conclude whether they want to invest within 10 days, said Manish Kheterpal, founder and managing partner at the VC fund.

“Most young entrepreneurs in India have little to no experience. They have either just graduated, dropped out of college or are first time entrepreneurs. If we put a classic VC lens to evaluate these businesses, they don’t make the cut. Many of these young ideas have the potential to become game changing businesses with sensible and early guidance. We want to back some of those ideas,” said Kheterpal in an interview with TechCrunch.

The launch’s timing is also interesting. Kheterpal, a veteran investor, said WaterBridge began exploring the program last year and the coronavirus crises convinced him to launch it now as it could serve a greater purpose.

Several early-stage startups have told TechCrunch in recent weeks that they are finding it incredibly challenging to get in touch with some VCs in the country amid the coronavirus crises.

Founder of a social commerce startup who requested anonymity said that most VCs he has attempted to reach out are currently only engaging with founders they knew from prior to the outbreak.

“We think it’s exactly the right time to invest. History has shown us that some of the best firms have emerged from the crises,” said Kheterpal.

The startups that are selected in Fast Forward will have the capital in their bank account in 20 days. The check comes in two sizes: $135,000, aimed at startups that have not built the product yet, and $330,000 for those who have some semblance of the product but may not have started to generate revenue yet. WaterBridge Ventures will take 15% equity in the startup in return.

Fast Forward is open to investing in nearly every category, though it is avoiding at least two: Hardware manufacturing and real estate, two areas that have proven challenging for scale in the country.

Fast funding is not a new idea, though it’s yet to receive wider traction among VC funds. NFX, an investor in early-stage startups, launched a seed-funding initiative last month to invite founders in the U.S. to apply for seed funding of $1 million to $2 million in exchange for 15% of their company.

A lot of enterprise cybersecurity efforts focus on malicious hackers that work on behalf of larger organizations, be they criminal groups or state actors — and for good reason, since the majority of incidents these days come from phishing and other malicious techniques that originate outside the enterprise itself.

But there has also been a persistent, and now growing, focus also on “insider threats” — that is, breaches that start from within organizations themselves. And today a startup that specialises in this area is announcing a round of growth funding to expand its reach.

Dtex, which uses machine learning to monitor network activity within the perimeter and around all endpoints to detect unusual patterns or behaviour around passwords or data movement, is today announcing that it has raised $17.5 million in funding.

The round is being led by new investor Northgate Capital with Norwest Venture Partners and Four Rivers Group, both previous investors, also participating. Prior to this, the San Jose-based startup had raised $57.5 million, according to data from PitchBook, while CrunchBase puts the total raised at $40 million.

CEO Bahman Mahbod said the startup is not disclosing valuation except to say that it’s “very excited” about it.

For some context, the company works with hundreds of large enterprises, primarily in the financial, critical infrastructure, government and defence sectors. The plan is to now extend further into newer verticals where it’s started to see more activity more recently: pharmaceuticals, life sciences and manufacturing. Dtex says that over the past 12 months, 80% of its top customers have been increasing their level of engagement with the startup.

Dtex’s focus on “insider” threats sounds slightly sinister at first: is the implication here that people are more dishonest and nefarious these days and thus need to be policed and monitored much more closely for wrongdoing? The answer is no. There are no more dishonest people today than there ever have been, but there are a lot more opportunities to make mistakes that result in security breaches:

The working world has been on a long-term trend of becoming increasingly digitised in all of its interactions, and bringing on a lot more devices onto those networks. Across both “knowledge” and front-line workers, we now have a vastly larger number of devices being used to help workers do their jobs or just keep in touch with the company as they work, with many of them being brought by the workers themselves rather than being provisioned by the companies. There has also been a huge increase in cloud services,

And in the realm of “knowledge” workers, we’re seeing a lot more remote or peripatetic working, where people don’t have fixed desks and often work outside the office altogether — something that has skyrocketed in recent times with stay-at-home orders put in place to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 cases.

All of this translates into a much wider threat “horizon” within organizations themselves, before even considering the sophistication of external malicious hackers.

And the current state of business has exacerbated that. Mahbod tells us that Dtex is currently seeing spikes in unusual activity from the rise in home workers, who sometimes circumvent VPNs and other security controls, thus committing policy violations; as well as more problems arising from the fact that home networks have been compromised and that is leaving work networks, accessed from home, more vulnerable. These started, he said, with COVID-19 phishing attacks but have progressed to undetected malware from drive-by downloads.

And, inevitably, he added that there has been a rise in intentional data theft and accidental loss arising in cases where organizations have had to lay people off or run a round of furloughs, but might still result from negligence rather than intentional actions.

There are a number of other cybersecurity companies that provide ways to detect insider threats — they include CloudKnox and Obsidian Security, along with a number of larger and established vendors. But Mabhod says that Dtex “is the only company with ‘next-generation’ capabilities that are cloud-first, AI/ML baked-in, and enterprise scalable to millions of users and devices, which it sells as DMAP+.

“Effectively, Next-Gen Insider Threat solutions must replace legacy Insider Threat point solutions which were borne out of the UAM, DLP and UEBA spaces,” he said.

Those providing legacy approaches of that kind include Forcepoint with its SureView product and Proofpoint with its ObserveIT product. Interestingly, CyberX, which is currently in the process of getting acquired by Microsoft (according to reports and also our sources), also includes insider threats in its services.

This is one reason why investors have been interested.

“Dtex has built a highly scalable platform that utilizes a cloud-first, lightweight endpoint architecture, offering clients a number of use cases including insider threat prevention and business operations intelligence,” said Thorsten Claus, partner, Northgate Capital, in a statement. Northgate has a long list of enterprise startups in its portfolio that represent potential customers but also a track record of experience in assessing the problem at hand and building products to address it. “With Dtex, we have found a fast-growing, long-term, investible operation that is not just a band-aid collection of tools, which would be short-lived and replaced.”

Deep Render, a London startup and spin-out of Imperial College that is applying machine learning to image compression, has raised £1.6 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Pentech, with participation from Speedinvest.

Founded in mid-2017 by Arsalan Zafar and Chri Besenbruch, who met while studying Computer Science at Imperial College London, Deep Render wants to help solve the data consumption problem that is seeing internet connections choke, especially during peak periods exacerbated by the current lockdown happening in many countries.

Specifically, the startup is taking what it claims is an entirely new approach to image compression, noting that image and video data comprises more than 80% of internet traffic, driven by video-on-demand and live streaming.

“Our ‘Biological Compression’ technology rebuilds media compression from scratch by using the advances of the machine learning revolution and by mimicking the neural processes of the human eye,” explains Deep Render co-founder and CEO Chri Besenbruch.

“Our secret sauce, so to speak, is in the way the data is compressed and sent across the network. The traditional technology relies on various modules each connected to each other – but which don’t actually ‘talk’ to each other. An image is optimised for module one before moving to module two, and it’s then optimised for module two and so on. This not only causes delays, it can cause losses in data which can ultimately reduce the quality and accuracy of the resulting image. Plus, if one stage of optimisation doesn’t work, the other modules don’t know about it so can’t correct any mistakes”.

To remedy this, Besenbruch says Deep Render’s image compression technology replaces all of these individual components with one very large component that talks across its entire domain. This means that each step of compression logic is connected to the others in what’s known as an “end-to-end” training method.

“What’s more, Deep Render trains its machine learning platform with the end goal in mind,” adds Besenbruch. “This has the benefit of both boosting the efficiency and accuracy of the linear functions and extending the software’s capability to model and perform non-linear functions. Think of it as a line and curve. An image, by its nature, has a lot of curvature from changes in tone, light, brightness and colour. By expanding the compression software’s ability to consider each of these curves means it’s also able to tell which images are more visually pleasing. As humans, we do this intuitively. We know when colour is a little off, or the landscape doesn’t look quite right. We don’t even realise we do this most of the time, but it plays a major role in how we assess images and videos”.

As a proof-of-concept, Deep Render carried out a fairly large-scale Amazon MTurk study, comprising of 5,000 participants, to test its image compression algorithm against BPG (a market standard for image compression, and part of the video compression standard H.265). When asked to compare perceptual quality over the CLIC-Vision dataset, over 95% of participants rated its images more visually pleasing, with Deep Render images being just half the file size.

“Our technological breakthrough represents the foundation for a new class of compression methods,” claims the Deep Render co-founder.

Asked to name direct competitors, Besenbruch says a past-competitor was Magic Pony, the image compression company bought by Twitter for a reported $150 million a year after being founded.

“Magic Pony was also looking at deep learning for solving the challenges of image and video compression,” he explains. “However, Magic Pony looked at improving the traditional compression pipeline via post and pre-processing steps using AI, and thus was ultimately still limited by its restrictions. Deep Render does not want to ‘improve’ the traditional compression pipeline; we are out to destroy it and rebuild it from its ashes”.

To that, Besenbruch says currently the only similar competitors to Deep Render are WaveOne based in Silicon Valley, and TuCodec based in Shanghai. “Deep Render is the European answer to the war about the future of compression technology. All three companies incorporated roughly at the same time,” he adds.

Countingup, the business current account that “automates” your accounting, has raised £4 million in self-described bridge funding. Leading the round is ING Ventures, with co-investment from Triple Point, CVentures, and BiG Start Ventures.

Founded by Tim Fouracre, who previously founded cloud accounting software Clear Books, and now boasting 20,000 business customers, Countingup’s long term vision is to be the one “financial hub” for the 1 million or so U.K.-based micro businesses.

Its initial ‘attack vector’ is to combine a business bank account with bookkeeping features to help automate the filing of accounts — a major time sink and pain-point for sole traders and small businesses.

Small businesses can open a Countingup business current account on their smartphone “in under 5 minutes,” which includes typical banking and accounting features. In addition, Countingup recently launched its “Accountant Hub,” a web-based accounting system that helps accountants manage and collaborate with their SME clients.

“If you are running a business then bookkeeping is a chore, wastes your time and is boring,” the Countingup up founder told me back in 2017. “Your bank surprises you with hidden fees and you’ve probably lost faith in their customer service. Countingup is making starting and running a business really simple… We’re doing that by combining accounting and banking into one simple smartphone app”.

In addition, Fouracre reckons Countingup’s solution will become even more relevant once HMRC’s Making Tax Digital (MTD) initiative kicks in. In future, the U.K. tax authority will require businesses to keep digital records and submit quarterly tax filings, which is exactly the type of task the fintech has been designed to automate.

“The [new] funds will be used to accelerate the banking and accounting roadmap to make it even easier and more efficient to digitally run a small business,” says Countingup, announcing its bridge round.

Queue statement from Benoît Legrand, ING’s Chief Innovation Officer and CEO of ING Ventures: “Countingup is a game-changer for small businesses. This fintech helps in reducing costs and complexity by combining accounting and banking into one digitally disruptive solution, a new approach that makes it so much easier to run a small business. We are proud to support Countingup in delivering that vision.”

Despite the worldwide impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, global smartwatch shipments continued to grow during the first three months of the year, driven by online sales, says a new report by research firm Strategy Analytics.

Shipments grew 20% annually to reach 13.7 million units in the first quarter of 2020, up from 11.4 million units in the previous quarter. Apple Watch stayed in the top position, with 55% global market share, followed in second place by Samsung. Garmin rose to third place.

“Smartwatches are selling well through online retail channels, while many consumers have been using smartwatches to monitor their health and fitness during virus lockdown,” wrote Strategy Analytics senior analyst Steven Waltzer.

In the first quarter of 2020, 7.6 million Apple Watches shipped, a 23% increase from the 6.2 million shipped during the same period one year ago. Apple Watch’s market share grew from 54% to 55%.

Samsung shipped 1.9 million smartwatches, compared to 1.7 million last year, while its market share went down from 15% to 14%. Waltzer writes that Samsung’s smartwatch growth was slowed by the coronavirus lockdown in South Korea and new competition from rivals like Garmin .

Garmin took the number three position for the first time in two years, shipping 1.1 million smartwatches in the first quarter, a 38% increase from 800,000 a year ago. This grew Garmin’s share of the global smartwatch market from 7% to 8%, thanks to new models like the Venu with OLED color touchscreen.

Strategy Analytics expects global smartwatch shipments to slow in the second quarter of 2020 because of the pandemic, but recover during the second half of the year, as stores reopen and some consumers turn to smartwatches to help them monitor their health.

“Smartwatches continue to have excellent long-term prospects, as younger and older people will become more health-conscious in a post-virus world,” wrote analyst Woody Oh. “Smartwatches can monitor vital health signs, such as oxygen levels, and consumers may find comfort in having a virtual health assistant strapped to their wrist.”

Nigerian startup Helium Health sits in a good position during a difficult period, according to its co-founder.

The Lagos based healthtech venture is in the black, has batted away acquisition offers, and just raised a $10 million Series A round, CEO Adegoke Olubusi told TechCrunch.

The startup offers a product suit that digitizes data, formalizes monetization and enables telemedicine for health care systems in Nigeria, Liberia, and Ghana.

Helium plans to use the latest funding round to hire and expand to North and East Africa, including Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Morocco, Olubusi confirmed on a call.

He co-founded the startup in 2016 — with Dimeji Sofowora and Tito Ovia — to bring better delivery of medical services in Nigeria and broader Africa.

“It’s really about tackling three core problems that we see in the healthcare sector in Africa: inefficiency, fragmentation and a lack of data,” said Olubusi.

When he and co-founders Sofowora and Oviato set out doing research for Helium, they noted a data desert on medical info across the continent’s healthcare infrastructure.

“We figured out very quickly that that is a long term problem to solve. And the best way to get the data and access to it is to give simple technology to the providers and let them use it to make their lives more efficient.”

Helium Health has since developed several core product areas for healthcare entities with application for providers, payment, patients, and partners.

It offers tech solutions and developer resources for administration, medical records and financial management. Helium Health has digital payment and credit products for hospitals and insurance providers.

As part of the latest financing, the startup is launching several new products — such as the MyHelium Patient app to facilitate appointments and information sharing between healthcare providers and citizens.

Helium also accelerated deployment of a telemedicine platform in response to the coronavirus hitting Nigeria and the lockdowns that ensued.

“In the last three weeks since we launched we’ve had roughly 360 hospitals sign up, and they’ve had thousands of [online] visits already,” Olubusi said.

Helium Health generates revenues by charging percentages and fees on its products, services and accompanying transactions. Current clients include several hospitals in the West Africa region, such as Paelon Memorial in Lagos.

Helium Health’s model got the attention of the startup’s $10 million Series A backers and Silicon Valley accelerator Y-Combinator — which accepted the startup into its spring 2017 batch.

Global Ventures and Africa Healthcare Masterfund co-led the investment with participation that included Tencent and additional Y-Combinator support.

Global Ventures General Partner Noor Sweid confirmed the Dubai based fund’s co-lead of the round and that the firm will take a Helium Health board seat.

The path of the startup’s CEO —  Adegoke Olubusi — to tech founder passed through the U.S. and traditional corporate roles. He went to Maryland in 2014 to complete an advanced degree in engineering at Johns Hopkins University, then did a stint at Goldman Sachs before landing positions in big tech with eBay and PayPal.

Olubusi found work with big corporates less than stimulating and gravitated to forming his own company and returning to Nigeria.

“When I was at eBay and Goldman I was really bored and I wanted to do something more challenging,” he said. “We thought, ‘why don’t we pick a problem that is a long-term problem in Africa,'” Olubusi explained.

The founder believes the products Helium Health creates can improve the poor health care stats in countries such as Nigeria — which stands as Africa’s largest economy and most populous nation.

Nigeria also ranked 142nd out of 195 countries on health performance indicators in The Lancet’s 2018 Healthcare Access and Quality Index.

On the dismal stats, “We need more properly run hospitals, and we need more profitable hospitals, health systems and health care providers,” said Olubusi.

Better monetization and organization of hospitals could lure more doctors back to African countries, he believes.

“Half my family are doctors but none of them practice in Nigeria. Everyone’s practicing all over the place, but Nigeria,” Olubusi said.

The founder also sees a more digitized and data driven health care sector as something that can draw more entrepreneurs to African healthtech. Compared to dominant sectors, such as fintech, health related startups in Africa gain a small percentage of the continent’s annual VC haul — only 9.3% by Partech’s 2019 stats.

“There are people who want to invest in the market but they can’t…and founders can’t really tackle a healthcare problem because they don’t know what’s going on,” he said.

As for his venture, Olubusi expects growth even given the precarious economic outlook COVID-19 is creating for countries, such as Nigeria — which is expected to enter recession this year.

The coronavirus and lockdowns are shining a light on the country’s healthcare inadequacies (according to Helium Health’s CEO) that people can’t ignore, including the elite.

“This is the first time they can’t get on their jet and leave so they have to go to the hospitals we have. The system was neglected for the last few decades because people had that [previous] option,” said Olubusi.

“I’m hoping this coronavirus crisis will be a period that forces everyone to rethink what we’re doing [on healthcare].”

That could lead to more business for Helium Health.

The startup doesn’t release financial information but has positive net income. “We do generate revenues in millions of dollars and are profitable,” Olubusi said.

Helium Health has received acquisition offers, but declined them, according to its CEO. Olubusi and team intend to grow the venture to the point where it can list on a major global exchange.

“We know this is the kind of business we can take public, without having to sell,” he said.

Sinclair Broadcast Group has agreed to pay a $48 million fine to the Federal Communications Communication to close investigations related to its attempted merger with Tribune Media. The FCC said in its announcement that this is the largest civil penalty paid by a broadcaster in the agency’s history. It added that Sinclair will also have to “abide by a strict compliance plan in order to close three open investigations.”

The merger, which was valued at $3.9 billion and would have created one of the largest broadcasters in the United States, was called off by Tribune in August 2018. Tribune also filed a lawsuit accusing Sinclair of breaching contract and misleading regulators “in a misguided and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to retain control over stations that it was obligated to sell.”

In today’s announcement, the FCC said its agreement with Sinclair was related to investigations into the company’s disclosure of information related to the acquisition of Tribune-owned stations, its failure to identify sponsored content it produced for broadcast, and “whether the company has met its obligations to negotiate retransmission consent agreements in good faith.”

In today’s FCC statement, chairman Ajit Pai, who was critical of the deal before it was scrapped, said “Sinclair’s conduct during its attempt to merge with Tribune was completely unacceptable. Today’s penalty, along with the failure of the Sinclair/Tribune transaction, should serve as a cautionary tale to other licensees seeking Commission approval of a transaction in the future.”

He also added that the FCC would not revoke licenses granted to the conservative-leaning broadcaster. “On the other hand, I disagree with those who, for transparently political reasons, demand we revoke Sinclair’s licenses,” Pai said. “While they don’t like what they perceive to be the broadcaster’s viewpoints, the First Amendment still applies around here.”

In a statement, Sinclair Broadcast Group president and CEO Chris Ripley said that the company is “pleased with the resolution announced today by the FCC and to be moving forward. We thank the FCC staff for their diligence in reaching this resolution. Sinclair is committed to continue to interact constructively with all of its regulators to ensure full compliance with applicable laws, rules and regulations.”

Some of you may recall the South Korean app Zepeto that went viral among Gen Z users a year and a half ago. The app, which renders selfies into animated avatars and lets people adorn their computer-generated manifestations with virtual items, appears to have sustained its relevance. It has amassed 150 million registered users, the company told TechCrunch recently, although its number of monthly active users, which is a better metric to gauge an app’s performance, hovers around 10 million.

China is by far the largest market for Zepeto, locally known as Zaizai (崽崽), an affectionate nickname for children. “Zaizai aspires to develop into a comprehensive ecosystem while also offering robust content across China,” affirmed CEO Daewook Kim.

The app could benefit from its pedigreed background. It’s developed by the selfie app Snow, of which parent company Naver also owns the Asian messaging giant Line.

It’s not uncommon for a popular photo-editing tool to fade out as people move onto the next trending alternative, either because the new player arrives with more impressive visual capabilities or its marketing stunt creates a spell on many — or both. As such, apps that are disposable and serve utility purposes often have to think hard about retaining their users or engage aggressively to monetize them while the going is still good.

Zepeto did both.

The app includes a social networking function where users can interact anonymously through their avatars in virtual spaces akin to The Sims. The challenge with that, of course, is building a big enough network that lures people to keep returning.

Zepeto also comprises of a series of mini games that are evocative of what Lee described as peaceful exploration people are enjoying in red-hot Animal Crossing.

In other words, the business is ripe for selling virtual items. Indeed, the leader in this category of business, Tencent, once generated the bulk of its income from the items it sold to decorate users’ virtual profiles and spaces, a business modeled on the South Korean internet pioneer Cyworld. That was before Tencent earned a wider global reputation by building WeChat and operating blockbuster video games.

Zepeto has so far generated some $10 million from 600 million pieces of virtual items sold. It stepped up the effort recently by launching a creative marketplace where third-party artists can offer their virtual lines of clothes and accessories. Called Zepeto Studio, the store clocked around $700,000 in sales in its first month. Many add-ons are branded — a common strategy for photo-enhancement apps — so you can sport things like virtual Nike apparel.

“We’ve partnered with global brands like Disney and Nike, as well as celebrities like BTS. We hope to continue to bring exciting partnerships to Zaizai Studio as well as better service to our creators,” said Rudy Lee, head of Zepeto’s global business, adding that the Studio feature for China is scheduled to launch mid-May.

If enough people keep using Zepeto, the third-party store can be a lucrative pursuit for designers. Among Zepeto’s 60,000 registered artists, the highest-paid creator pocketed some $9,000 in sales in the first month.

But as numbers grow, Zepeto is also getting cautious about keeping its marketplace civil. The firm maintains an internal moderation team that weeds out “political messaging, hate speech, or discriminatory messaging on the virtual clothes,” said Lee. The rule is particularly pertinent to its development in China where the flow of information is strictly controlled.

Another way to survive as a utility tool is to piggyback off another app’s success. We have written about the way PicsArt, a photo-editing app that rivals VSCO, managed to stay in the game by supporting TikTok-inspired stickers. Zepeto has taken notice. Many of its users are now sharing their animated avatars on Douyin, the Chinese edition of TikTok, observed Lee.

A glimpse at Lyft’s stock price Wednesday, which soared as much as 16.77% after first-quarter earnings were reported, suggested all was well in the ride-hailing company’s world.

In this COVID 19-era, “well” is a relative term. Lyft’s net losses did dramatically improve from the year-ago quarter (a loss of $398 million versus $1.1 billion in Q1 2019). However, Lyft was clear in its earnings call: COVID-19 had a profound impact on its customers and its business and the future was uncertain.

“It is impossible to accurately predict the duration and depth of the economic downturn we face,” Lyft CFO Brian Roberts said during an earnings call Wednesday afternoon. “Our business may be impacted for an extended period of time. So we must be prepared to adapt accordingly.”

The difficulty of predicting what will happen has hamstrung thousands of companies trying to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. Last month, Lyft withdrew its previously provided revenue and adjusted EBITDA guidance for full year 2020 because of the vast unknowns.

“Given this fluidity, it is impossible for us to predict with any certainty our results,” Roberts said. After the requisite warnings, Roberts did eventually provide an outlook for the second quarter — and it isn’t pretty. The outlook focused on adjusted EBITDA, which doesn’t give the most complete financial picture. It provides enough to understand that even with considerable cost-cutting measures, Lyft will suffer losses nearly four times wider than the first quarter.

Roberts said Lyft can manage to keep its second quarter adjusted EBITDA loss under $360 million if rides on its rideshare platform remain at April levels — which were down 75% year-over-year — for the remainder of the quarter. Lyft reported Wednesday an adjusted EBITDA loss of $85.2 million in the first quarter.

There are some early signs of a recovery. Ridership in the week ended May 3 was up 21% from the lows experienced in mid-April, according to Lyft. However, Lyft can’t afford to simply hope rideshare will return. It has to — and already has — enact a plan that will allow it to navigate the pandemic and come out as a survivor. In other words, Lyft will be judged at how well can stem the losses and find new revenue streams.

Work to cut costs has already started.

The company put together an aggressive plan to strengthen its financial position, Lyft co-founder and CEO Logan Green said during the earnings call. Lyft reduced its more than 5,000-person workforce by 17% and furloughed nearly another 300. Lyft also initiated a three-month pay reduction for all salaried employees, ranging from 10% for its most non-hourly team members, up to 30% for its senior leadership team and board members.

“Every other expense line is being scrutinized and no stone will be left unturned,” Green said.

The company expects to be able to cut its annualized fixed costs by $300 million by the end of the year. The reductions are based on its original expectations for 2020. Lyft has also ended rider coupons once ridership began to decline in mid-March and paused adding new drivers in nearly all markets.

“This reduces costs we incur associated with onboarding new drivers and helps protect utilization and earnings opportunities for existing drivers during this time of lower ride demand,” Green said.

Lyft reduced its 2020 capital expenditure plan by $250 million. And its sought out cost savings on the insurance front. (The company’s primary auto insurance policies expire at the end of September; Roberts said they’re considering the best options to reduce future volatility, as well as lower overall costs.)

The company is also shifting attention and resources to projects that executives believe will improve its unit economics. Finding those revenue streams will be tricky. Lyft has already provided a few clues of where it’s headed.

The company will continue with its Essential Deliveries pilot that launched April 15. The initiative lets government agencies, local non-profits, businesses and healthcare organizations request on-demand delivery of meals, groceries, life-sustaining medical supplies, hygiene products and home necessities.

Green said the company will evaluate any future opportunities based on how it performs. But he quickly added “that we have no interest in launching a consumer food delivery service. And so, we will not be doing that.”

Green also seemed cautiously optimistic about a new lost cost product called “Wait and Save,” that allows Lyft optimize the marketplace and be more efficient with matching drivers and riders.

A number of popular apps including Spotify, Tinder, Pinterest and TikTok were fielding user iOS crash reports Wednesday evening, the result of an apparent issues with Facebook’s SDK according to a lengthy GitHub thread on the topic.

Downdetector logged tens of thousands of user crash reports on Spotify between 3:30 and 5:30 pm PT, the time where the bulk of reports seem to have been issued across a number of popular apps. User crash reports appeared to be dying down as of publication time.

Users had reported that their apps were shutting down immediately after launch.

For plenty of users, this will likely be news to them that many of their favorite apps are immediately connecting to Facebook servers at launch. Developers at tech companies rely on Facebook’s SDK for advertising insights in additions to the company’s login portal. Users impacted by the issue didn’t have to be utilizing Facebook login for the issue to affect them.

We’re reached out to Facebook for comment on the issue and will update with details.