Year: 2020

Despite the implications of its name, edtech platform Niche took nearly a decade-and-a-half to find its place within the world of the college search process.

The company started as College Prowler, selling informational books, which looked like a hybrid between CliffsNotes and a Zagat guide, about colleges. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and amassed millions in revenue, but then had to face the economic crisis of 2008 and figure out a new go-to-market strategy.

Today, and a few pivots later, Niche partners with college campuses and schools to provide information to prospective students. The focus is the same as in 2002, according to founder Luke Skurman, as it tries to make the college search process more clear and student-focused.

Think of Niche as a focused platform for students to review their college options without having to track multiple browser tabs and messy spreadsheets. It allows users to compare metrics like historic acceptance rate, cost and post-graduate earnings for each school, as well as topics like majors and campus life. Niche uses the data to grade each school, and it lists reviews and similar schools. Beyond a college by college look, Niche has ranking lists spanning topics like best dorms and most diverse colleges.

Skurman noted that, historically, April is a month when students make decisions about where to commit for college and squeeze in a visit before they put down their deposit.

“In the world we’re living in right now, that’s not possible,” he said. “Many colleges are trying to find new vendors and new solutions to help them for the fall 2021 to help them market.”

Beyond coronavirus’s impact, the founder noted that colleges should consider digital tours as a way to be “equitable and inclusive, because we recognize that a lot of families don’t have the means to be able to visit all these campuses across the country.”

Despite rocky days in the past, Niche went from zero to 1,400 clients in the past three years. In 2019, Niche increased its ARR more than 100% and client base by more than 60% year-over-year. Niche was cash-flow positive for the majority of the year.

The digitization of the college admissions experience brought similar growth to CampusReel, a startup that virtualizes tours for colleges through student-generated videos.

“Traditional visit days are essentially no longer options,” said Nick Freud, founder of CampusReel. “So colleges are scrambling to find a solution even if they can’t completely replace how you capture the look and the feel and the culture of a campus in a virtual setting.” Freud said that he’s seeing colleges start to supplement their marketing materials with video and student-generated content. He claims that CampusReel has tools to allow a college to post a profile in less than 15 minutes.

Optimal, another college rankings and review company, similarly offers information to students about schools. The platform has less of a data focus than Niche, and focuses more on reviews and lists. Optimal also connects students to coding schools and online bootcamps.

It’s this broad growth amid consumer-facing platforms for college searchers, coupled with a potential market of 40,000 schools, that led Niche to raise a $35 million Series C, it announced today. The round was led by Radian Capital, with additional participation from Salesforce Ventures. Existing investors Allen & Company LLC and Tim Armstrong participated, as well.

Niche’s new capital comes as the way schools do business changes by the day. With new cash in the bank, we’ll see see how a company born from adaptation fares in the coming months.

Tax policy is surely a complex beast, and depending on your political leanings, you probably have some strong feelings about how it should be implemented. Salesforce AI researchers are trying to build a model to bring artificial intelligence to bear on what will undoubtedly always be a highly political process.

Richard Socher, who heads up AI research at Salesforce, says the company is researching all kinds of solutions related to AI and business, and how it could improve the Salesforce product family; however, he also looks at how his team could use AI to solve a set of broader social issues beyond what it can do for the product line.

Socher says when you look at the biggest issues of our time, one of the largest is economic inequality, and how we could use policy to solve that. To that end, the company created a model it calls an AI economist that could look at various economic variables, a broad set of economic models and using the power of AI begin to demonstrate how various policies affect economic inequality versus productivity.

“We are using reinforcement learning to try to identify what’s optimal taxation,” Socher said. That involves building a model, one that’s fairly simple at first with some basic economic inputs like buying and selling resources and building houses to see how different scenarios affect inequality.

In a Q&A on the company website, Stephan Zheng, a member of the research team explained how this could work:

The AI Economist uses a collection of AI agents designed to simulate how real people might react to different taxes. In the simulation, each AI agent earns money by collecting and trading resources and building houses. The agents learn to maximize their utility (or happiness) by adjusting their movement, trading, and building behavior. One way to do this is to maximize income while minimizing effort, for example, making as high of an hourly wage as possible.

The modeling is designed to play to the strength of AI, by looking across a huge body of economic research and feeding all of that data into the AI economist to help build optimal models. This level of data would be impossible for even the most gifted economists to understand, but this is what AI is really good at, looking across a corpus of complex data and using all of that information to help humans make better decisions.

Ultimately, the company hopes the model can help economists and policy makers set a more equitable tax system, however an individual government might define that.

“The objective that we chose here was productivity x equality, and we hope that that will help move the pure shareholder capitalism to a more equal stakeholder capitalism — and we hope that we find a more optimal point on the quality versus productivity spectrum,” Socher explained.

While Socher admits this is an early attempt, and they hope to layer on more complex inputs over time, he likens it to early genome research. It didn’t produce concrete results right away, but over time we have seen tools like CRISPR develop, and he hopes that this approach could have a similar impact on tax policy as they build on their initial research.

“We think we found a point, at least in our first simulated environments that is even more optimal than the most commonly used baselines for taxation,” he said.

NASA is going to test a new solar sail system to determine if it’s a viable alternative to propellant-based thrusters for maneuvering small satellites, and potentially for low-cost transportation of spacecraft set on deep-space missions. The agency has selected Illinois-based NanoAvionics to provide the spacecraft that will be used to test the solar sail system, the company announced today.

The mission, called NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System or ACS3, is headed by NASA’s Ames Research System, and will see a small satellite deployed to low Earth orbit equipped with a solar sail that unfurls to cover around 800 square feet – the size of a pretty large one bedroom apartment. The sail will work by actually propelling the spacecraft using not solar power, but the energy generated by photons from the sun striking the sail. This method results in very little force generated, but the accumulated power in a vacuum without the interference of friction means that eventually, a spacecraft using this method of propulsion can build up quite a head of steam.

NASA wants to develop this kind of propulsion system because they don’t require any propellant at all, which greatly decreases the cost of launch and operation. They could undertake long-duration missions like traveling the solar system as scientific scouts, and eventually take on even more complicated tasks like deep-space asteroid mining, where conventional fuel systems make the costs and logistics unfeasible.

Solar sail technology is not new, and NASA has flown a test solar sail before, in 2011, though a second demonstration flight called Sunjammer was cancelled prior to a flight test in 2014. Non-profit scientific organization The Planetary Society flew its own crowd-funded solar sail spacecraft last year, and demonstrated that it was able to raise the orbit of a small satellite using only the power of the sun.

Mojo Vision’s technology still felt early-stage when we met with them back at CES. But the demos we did see were enough to convince us that there really could be something to the California startup’s smart content lens technology.

Clearly we weren’t alone in that. The company just announced that it has raised more than $51 million as part of a Series B-1, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), along with Gradient Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Liberty Global, Struck Capital, Dolby Family Ventures, Motorola Solutions Venture Capital and others. The lofty raise puts its total funding at north of $159 million. The move also finds NEA’s venture partner Greg Papadopoulos joining Mojo’s board.

As expected, Mojo’s using the large raise to help productize its technology. The company says it is currently working with the FDA’s Breakthrough device Program to introduce early applications for the technology focused on the visually impaired.

“The unveiling of the details of our product development earlier this year has generated increased excitement and momentum around the potential of Mojo Lens,” Mojo CEO and co-founder Drew Perkins said in a statement. “This new round of funding brings more support and capital from strategic investors and companies to help us continue our breakthrough technology development. It gets us closer to bringing the benefits of Mojo Lens to people with vision impairments, to enterprises and eventually, consumers.”

Timing for the product is still an open question. For now it remains little more than a cool technology. But taking it for a test drive gives you a notion of how revolutionary if could be if the company makes it across the finish line. And now it’s got significantly more financial support to help it get there.

The coronavirus may be decimating some corners of the economy, but the impact on the digital music, as evidenced by the world’s biggest music streaming company, appears to be minimal. Today Spotify reported its earnings for Q1 with revenues of €1.848 billion ($2 billion at today’s rates) and an inching into a positive net income of $1 million. Monthly active users (not total subscribers) now stand at 286 million, with paid (premium) users at 130 million and ad-supported monthly active users at 163 million. Ad-supported are growing at a slightly higher rate at the moment, at 32% versus 31%, Spotify said.

Spotify beat analysts’ forecasts on both sales — they had on average been expecting revenues of $1.86 billion — and EPS, which had been forecast to be -$0.49.

The numbers underscore positive signals from the wider industry, which has seen a huge boost in streaming media services as more people are staying home and looking for ways to be entertained. Furthermore, earnings from at least one music label, Universal Music Group, also showed little impact from the coronavirus pandemic.

“Despite the global uncertainty around COVID-19 in Q1, our business met or exceeded our forecast for all major metrics,” the company wrote in its introduction to shareholders. “For Q2 and the remainder of the year, our outlook for most of our key performance indicators has remained unchanged with the exception of revenue where a slowdown in advertising and significant changes in currency rates are having an impact.”

In other words, while overall numbers appear to be stable, that is not to say that there haven’t been pockets of impact for the company in specific markets and in specific product areas.

For example, Italy and Spain, two traditionally strong markets for the company, have been some of the hardest-hit by COVID-19 and its wider economic impacts, and in line with that, Spotify said it “saw a notable decline in Daily Active Users and consumption” in these markets that is now starting rebound and recover.

And listening patterns are also changing, it said, adding that “Every day now looks like the weekend.” (I know what they mean…)

Usage in Car, Wearable, and Web platforms have all dropped, but TV and Game Console use has grown more than 50% compared to a year ago. Ad-Supported MAU in the US via game consoles has been a top 2 or 3 platform in terms of consumption for the better part of the month, and connected device usage generally is up more than 40% among Ad-Supported users globally, it noted.

Listening time around activities like cooking, doing chores, family time, and relaxing at home have each been up double digits over the past few weeks, it said, adding that “Audio has also taken on a greater role in managing the stress and anxiety many are feeling in today’s unprecedented environment.”

In terms of subscriber numbers, free users continue to outpace those who pay monthly, and continue to be a springboard for upsetting to paid tiers, and seems to be an even stronger model in the current climate.

“The past few months have only strengthened our belief in the Freemium model,” the company noted. “As mentioned, we have seen strong growth in users, both new and returning. Historically, over 60% of our Premium users start as Ad-Supported users, so continuing to grow the top of the funnel is very healthy for our ecosystem. We also know that roughly 70% of churned users are back with Spotify within 45 days of leaving, which includes coming back through either our Premium or Ad-Supported experience. While our sincere hope is for some sense of ‘normalcy’ to return to people’s lives as quickly as possible, we do believe our model is uniquely positioned to not just weather this storm, but to come out the other side even stronger.”

Also of note: the company’s shift to making more of its own content — note here the big boost we’ve seen in its podcasting business — seems to be paying off dividends.

Gross margins, it pointed out, were at 25.5% and “exceeded our expectations and finished at the high end of our guidance range.” The reason, it said, was “the core royalty component due to product mix, offset somewhat by one-time reductions.” This will be impacted because of a slowdown in production at the current time.

The company announced at the start of this month (so not part of these earnings that end March 30) a new global licensing partnership with Warner Music Group that covers more markets. “We are pleased with the outcome, and as stated previously, do not believe the new deal will materially impact music economics. We look forward to working together with Warner to grow the music industry over the long term.”

The company has been fully working remotely for the last seven weeks, and unlike a number of other tech businesses it has not seen any layoffs so far. It did note that it would be reducing hiring, however, for the rest of 2020, reducing previous numbers by 30%.

More to come.

Is it feast or famine for food delivery startups during the coronavirus pandemic? The UK’s Deliveroo has confirmed it’s axing more than 350 staff — or around 15% of its global headcount.

Late yesterday the Telegraph reported that the London-based startup will be cutting 367 staff and furloughing a further 50 out of a total headcount of more than 2,500.

A Deliveroo spokesman blamed the cuts on the coronavirus crisis, saying the public health emergency has put pressure on the business to reduce long-term costs.

He did not confirm which types of roles are being eliminated nor the markets where the axe is falling.

“The extraordinary global health crisis we are living through has impacted nearly all businesses. As a result, like so many others, Deliveroo has had to examine how to overcome the challenges we all face, as well as ensure we are in the strongest position possible following the crisis,” the spokesman said in a statement.

“This requires us to look at how we operate in order to reduce long-term costs, which sadly means some roles are at risk of redundancy and others will be put on furlough. This has been extremely difficult for everyone at the company, and our absolute priority is to make sure those who are impacted are fully supported.”

The UK startup operates in 13 markets globally, mostly split between Europe and the Middle East and Asia.

Last year it saw a big jump in revenue for full-year 2018, after expanding into new markets, but its losses also widened — and that was before COVID-19 snowballed into a pandemic.

The highly infectious virus has derailed business as usual for all sorts of companies but, at first glance, meal delivery startups may have seemed positioned to benefit from nationwide quarantines that have people locked down at home.

However, with many restaurants shuttering at least temporarily and home-bound customers concerned about economic uncertainty so likely to rein in discretionary spending grocery delivery looks to be emerging as the bigger winner.

A lot more people spending a lot more time at home appears to be a recipe for cooking more, rather than ordering lots of take out. Certainly in the short term. While the urban density and convenience-led demand that powered on-demand food delivery growth in the years prior to the coronavirus pandemic remains severely disrupted by the pandemic and its tricky requirement for social distancing.

Earlier this month CNBC reported on plummeting demand in the UK leaving delivery couriers struggling to earn enough money to live on.

How all this shakes out will depend on many factors, including how governments structure the lifting of lockdowns (in Spain, for example, the government has said it will let restaurants reopen for takeaway only, initially, which could help generate demand).

But the kind of mass appetite for fast food at the push of a button — which has led to years of frenzied competition in the on demand space — may be a longer term casualty of the pandemic.

With $13.6 million in funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a new  collaboration will pull together researchers at UCSF, Stanford and CZI-adjacent medical research nonprofit the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub to study the spread of COVID-19 in the Bay Area. The research team will conduct two separate large-scale studies over the course of nine months as part of the data-intensive public health effort, which seeks to answer some key questions about the virus that have eluded researchers.

For the first study, researchers will recruit 4,500 Bay Area residents who previously came up negative for the virus, testing them one time each month with both a serological test that detects antibodies and a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, which detects the presence of infection. Using viral genome data, the research teams hope to glean insight on the chain of transmission within the area as well as any evidence about how that the virus traveled into the community from outside the region.

The second study will examine COVID-19 infection among Bay Area healthcare workers, and the potential that an infection results in immunity from the virus—an area of current “significant knowledge gaps.” That research will follow 3,500 healthcare workers in the Bay Area who are negative for the virus, tracking them for three months of testing to determine infection trends among frontline health workers.

Both studies aim to collect data that can be translated directly into local public health policy.

“To reopen society in the Bay Area and keep healthcare workers safe, we need to first understand the epidemiology of this disease,” CZI co-founder Dr. Priscilla Chan said of the research.

Google today announced that it is making Meet, its video meeting tool for businesses that directly competes with the likes of Zoom, available for free to everyone. Until now, you could participate in a Meet call without being a paying user, but you needed a paid G Suite account to start calls.

You won’t be able to schedule free Meet calls right away, though. Google is opening up access to Meet to free users gradually, starting next week. It may take a few weeks before everybody has access to it.

After September, free accounts will be limited to meetings that don’t run longer than 60 minutes, but until then, you can chat for as long as you want. The only other real limit is that meetings can’t have more than 100 participants. You still get screen sharing, real-time captions and the new tiled layout the company introduced only a few days ago.

Users will need a Google account to participate in meetings, though, which isn’t likely to be a major barrier for most people, but it does add more friction than simply clicking on a Zoom link.

Google argues that in return, you get a safer platform, not just because it’s hard to guess meeting codes for Meet (which makes “Meet-bombing” a non-starter), but also because Meet runs in the browser and is hence less vulnerable to security threats.

“With COVID, video conferencing is really becoming an essential service and we have seen video conferencing usage really go up,” Smita Hashim, the Director of Product Management at Google Cloud, told me. Because the need for these tools continues to increase, Google decided to bring Meet to individual users now, though Hashim noted that some of this had been on the company’s roadmap before.

“We are accelerating what we are doing, given the crisis and given the need for video conferencing at this point,” she said. “We still have the Google Hangouts product but Google Meet availability we are accelerating. This is a newer product designed to scale to many more participants and that has features like closed captioning and those kinds of things.”

So for the time being, Hangouts for consumers and also Google Duo aren’t going away. But at least for consumer Hangouts, which has been on life support for a long time, this move may accelerate its deprecation.

Clearly, Google saw that Zoom caught on among consumers and that Microsoft announced plans for a consumer edition of Teams. Without a free and easily accessible version of Meet, Google wasn’t able to fully capitalize on what has become a breakout time for video conferencing tools, so it makes sense for the company to make a push to get this new edition out of the door as fast as possible.

“From a leadership perspective, the message was really: how can Google be more and more helpful,” Hashim said when I asked her what the discussion about this move was like inside the company. “That was the direction we got. So from our side, video conferencing is the product which is really hugely accelerated usage and Google Meet in particular. So that’s why we first launched the advanced features, then we did the safety controls and then we said, okay, let’s accelerate some of these other features, but we kept seeing that need so it felt like a very natural next step for us to take and make it available to all our users.”

In addition to free access to Google Meet for everyone, Google is also launching a new edition of G Suite, dubbed G Suite Essentials. This new edition, which is meant for small teams and includes access to Google Drive, Docs, Sheet, Slides and, of course, Meet, will be available for free until September 30. After that, Google will start charging, but as Hashim told me, the company hasn’t decided on pricing yet.

For enterprise users, Google is also adding a few perks through September 30. These include free access to advanced Meet features for all G Suite customers, including the ability to live stream to up to 100,000 viewers within their domains, as well as free additional Meet licenses without the need for an amended contract, and free G Suite Essentials for enterprise customers.

Google also used today’s announcement to share a few new stats around Meet. As of last week, Meet’s daily meeting participants surpassed 100 million, for example, and with that, Meet now plays host to 3 billion minutes of video meetings. Daily peak usage is up 30x since January. That’s a lot of time spent in meetings.

European VC firm Atomico announced this week that it has hired Sasha Astafyeva as a new investment partner.

Astafyeva previously spent three years as a principal at Felix Capital . In her new role, she’ll lead “sourcing, due diligence, and management” of consumer tech companies, according to a company statement.

Originally from Ukraine, Astafyeva was previously head of business intelligence and strategy at Lyst, a London-based online fashion marketplace. She has also worked at online real estate marketplace VivaReal as the company’s VP of finance and business intelligence and did a stint at Dafiti, a Latin American online fashion company.

We caught up with Astafyeva for a conversation that spanned the coronavirus crisis’ impact on her area of interest, new trends during and potentially after lockdown and how it feels to be a consumer-focused investor in turbulent times.

TechCrunch: Congratulations on joining Atomico as a partner. However, isn’t this a terrible time to be a consumer-focused VC, given that we are facing the worst downturn in many of our lifetimes?

Sasha Astafyeva: Thank you for the congratulations, first of all! I’m very excited to join the team and help lead our consumer-focused efforts. It is absolutely an interesting time to join as we find ourselves in a world with highly elevated levels of uncertainty, tremendous economic hardships across the world and varying, and often fast-changing, responses of countries to this new reality. I think that we are only seeing the beginning of this and time will tell what our new reality will look like.

However, I would respectfully challenge the idea that it’s a terrible time to be a consumer-focused investor today. There are sectors of the consumer space that have been resilient and have even thrived, in the current environment, and speaking in a more macro way, I do think that there will be a trickle-down impact to other sectors of the economy beyond consumer as we continue to see the full effects of the current crisis. The task becomes for all of us, not only consumer investors but investors in general, to think about long-term impacts of the current situation we find ourselves in and adjust accordingly.

In its first-quarter earnings report today, Samsung said it expects the COVID-19 pandemic to continue impacting its business for the rest of the year, cutting into sales for smartphones and TVs, but increasing demand for PCs, servers and memory chips as people continue to work or study from home.

Samsung’s results for the first-quarter of 2020 was in line with the guidance it released earlier this month. Operating profit was 6.45 trillion Korean won (about $5.3 billion). Revenue fell about 7.6% from the previous quarter to 55.33 trillion won, due to a seasonal drop in demand for displays and consumer electronics, and the impact of the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused more than 3 million confirmed cases around the world and more than 217,000 deaths, and resulted in shelter-in-place orders in countries around the world and a global recession.

Samsung said that because the pandemic’s impact through the second half of 2020 remains uncertain, it plans to make flexible investments and adjust its product mix to adapt. Because it expects competition among manufacturers to increase as they try to recover from a weak first half, Samsung said it will continue to launch premium products like a new foldable and Note devices, and expand 5G to more mass-market smartphones.

Samsung’s display panel business saw a decline in earnings during the first quarter due to weak seasonality and lower sales in China during COVID-19 shutdowns, and it expects demand to continue being impacted by the pandemic and postponement of major sporting events like the Summer Olympics.

On the other hand, Samsung expects to see solid performance in its memory business as remote work, online education, online shopping and streaming entertainment services continue putting more demands on cloud providers and data centers. As a result, Samsung will speed up its transition to 1Z-nm DRAM and 6th-generation V-NAND flash memory.

Samsung also said it plans to offset store and plant closures around the world through flexible supply networks, improving its online sales capabilities, and tailoring promotions and logistics for different market.