Year: 2020

Contactless transactions have become a major priority at a time when people all around the world are minimising their contact with others outside their households to slow down the often-insidious spread of the novel coronavirus. But if a lot of the consumer focus lately has been on things like payments or deliveries, that’s overlooking the fact that the “contactless” paradigm has been a big trend for years already. Today, a London-based startup building tools to enable virtual identity verification, not requiring in-person, face-to-face interactions, is announcing a big round of funding to expand its business and create an alternative to being the “identity verification” layer of the internet.

Onfido, which uses AI to “read” a person’s identity documents and then uses facial recognition and other datapoints to verify that a person says who she or he is online — customers for its tech include major banks, government bodies, and businesses doing recruitment: any organization running parts of its processes virtually — is today announcing that it has raised $100 million, money that it will be using to continue expanding its business and providing its take on solving a long-standing problem on the internet: verifying people are who they say they are, and doing so in a way that doesn’t compromise user’s privacy and security.
“Identity is broken and needs fixing,” Husayn Kassai, the CEO and co-founder, said in an internet. “That’s been a large part of our focus, and as time goes on, our processes in digitisation, privacy and security have been proven out in parallel with how the world is shifting.”
The round is being led by TPG Growth, the firm that has backed the likes of Airbnb and Uber (which both run the kinds of businesses that need the kind of identity verification services that Onfido builds) over the years with billions of dollars of investment.

Onfido is not disclosing its valuation with this round but Kassai confirmed that it is definitely an upround. Onfido has now raised $200 million in total, with its last round — $50 million almost exactly a year ago — including Microsoft, Salesforce and SBI (once a SoftBank affiliate, now apparently separate) among the investors.

Kassai said that he started raising this round in January, just as the novel coronavirus was kicking off in China and eventually everywhere else around the world, and the final stages of this deal were all done virtually. In that time, he said that business — already growing at a healthy clip — has picked up a new set of verticals that need to consider faster and safe ways to identify and verify users.

Onfido’s business up to now has largely been focused on helping rapidly scaling businesses like transportation-on-demand companies to help add on more drivers to their books while making sure they pass all their safety and other checks. More recently, organizations in healthcare, remittance and payments and non-profits verifying people who want to volunteer in relief efforts have emerged as key customers. These have respectively spiked 4x, 1.3x and 6x in recent weeks. The idea is that organizations using Onfido can speed up the time it takes to identify people to get them enrolled into healthcare services, or sending money, or helping those in need.

“About 750,000 people have volunteered to help the NHS in the UK,” he said, referring to the effort that the UK government set up to get more people to deliver medications and food, and help out hospitals in non-clinical capacities. “That’s great, but why wait for weeks to be verified? If you can sign up for a bank in moments why do you have to wait a week [or more] to help in a health crisis?”

While Onfido continues to build out this aspect of its business, Kassai said it is also working on trials of new kinds of identity and verification services that are still in development, ideas that have been considered for a while now but have taken on a new sense of urgency during the current pandemic. Specifically, there are trials underway for working on secure, virtual voting; helping to verify people for passport and visa applications remotely; and ways of doing contact tracing of users for those trying to track and contain outbreaks of the novel coronavirus, or whatever virus comes next on the horizon.

The idea with these, Kassai said, is that there needs to be a way of identifying users without requiring them to share personal or other sensitive details every time, and that’s where the company’s ambition in building an “identity layer” comes in: if a company like Onfido can verify a user once, and then discard the information, it can then simply have a record of the person and not require documents or other personal information each time.

This is the theory: there will be a number of regulated industries that will still have to hold on to personal information, but at a time when security breaches have chipped away at our various personal details and led to a vast wave on online crime — identity fraud is the most commonly committed crime in the US, Onfido points out, and one of the fastest growing in the world, with $2 trillion of related money laundering resulting from that — this could be a compelling idea to consider.

“Onfido’s use of AI to develop market leading tech is extraordinary,” said Mike Zappert Partner of TPG Growth, in a statement. “There is enormous demand for secure and simple identity verification and authentication across major sectors and we see Onfido becoming the new standard for digital access. Their team has done a remarkable job in a relatively short period of time, and we look forward to partnering with them to continue their momentum into new use cases and geographies.”

India’s push to digital payments in the last three years has seen tens of millions of people get comfortable with exchanging money online for the first time. A Bangalore-based startup that is attempting to bring a similar digitization to small businesses just got a nod from high profile investors.

Setu, a two-year-old startup, said on Wednesday that it has raised $15 million in its Series A financing round from Falcon Edge and Lightspeed Venture Partners U.S. Existing investors Lightspeed India Partners and Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund also participated in the round.

Setu is an API infrastructure provider that allows financial institutions such as banks to connect with companies and small businesses that want to provide financial services to their customers.

The idea is to connect small businesses such as a local cable TV operator or a neighborhood store that is already engaging with thousands of people to serve their customers better by offering formal financial services such as credit. Local kirana stores already have a great understanding of their customers and offer them informal credit. Could they work with financial institutions to formalize their services?

Setu, which means bridge in Sanskrit, today estimates that over a billion people in India need access to formal sachet-ized financial products and services. “Poor product design, high distribution costs, and legacy technology have been barriers to make this happen,” said Nikhil Kumar, co-founder of the startup.

The startup today offers open APIs across four categories — bills, savings, credit, and payments. Any developer can access its sandbox to build an application and go through a rigorous developer certification program to go live. This makes it easy for any company to acquire plug-and-play financial services and become a fintech player.

“We are big believers in Setu’s vision to build infrastructure that enables the large-scale distribution of, and access to, financial products. Sahil, Nikhil, and the Setu team have an exciting roadmap for the future of financial services in India and we’re proud to support their journey,” said Bejul Somaia, Managing Partner at Lightspeed India, in a statement.

More to follow…

Airbnb has secured commitments of $1 billion for a syndicated term loan from institutional investors, it said.

The emergency cash injection comes as the coronavirus travel freeze continues to hammer vacation rentals, with holidaymakers locked down at home and global travel banned or heavily discouraged for public health reasons.

Neither the names of the parties to the Airbnb loan nor the terms have been disclosed but Reuters — citing several sources with knowledge of the matter — is reporting that private equity firms Silver Lake, Apollo Global Management, Sixth Street Partners, Oaktree Capital Management and Owl Rock are parties, with Silver Lake reportedly “one of the biggest players”. Though all the firms declined to comment.

Per Reuters’ sources, the loan is for five years — with an interest rate of 750 basis points over the Libor benchmark. The news agency was also told it was sold at a slight discount to the loan’s par value which would see investors earn a rate of around 12%. While the terms of the deal are first lien debt, meaning the listed creditors would be paid first if Airbnb were to default, per Reuters’ sources.

We’ve reached out to Airbnb for comment.

Earlier this month the vacation rentals giant announced an additional $1BN raise in debt and equity from two of the aforementioned private equity firms, Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners. Though at the time it said the funds would support its ongoing work to invest over the long term — couching the raise as strategic, rather than a bailout in troubled times.

The $1BN term loan looks more clearly targeted at dealing with immediate negative impacts caused by COVID-19. Although, once again, Airbnb’s statement seeks to paint an upbeat picture of travel in a post-pandemic future, without the company being able to specify exactly when such a time might arrive.

“I deeply appreciate the confidence and trust that so many have shown in our company even as every sector in travel is going through the storm of the pandemic. We know travel will return and rather than merely hunkering down, the support we have received will allow Airbnb to continue moving forward as we invest in our community,” said Airbnb co-founder and CEO, Brian Chesky, in a statement. “All of the actions we have taken over the last several weeks assure that Airbnb will emerge from the storm of the pandemic even stronger, regardless of how long the storm lasts.”

The cash injection will “ensure Airbnb can continue to invest in its company and community of hosts and guests in over 220 countries and regions around the world”, the company added.

In recent weeks Airbnb has faced anger from hosts faced with a wave of coronavirus cancelations and refunds, after it made a policy change last month to allow guests to be refunded in full for bookings over the coronavirus period. It later earmarked $250M to help hosts impacted by COVID-19 cancellations.

Some countries have also banned holiday rentals entirely during the pandemic — including the UK which recently clamped down after hosts had been found advertising ‘isolation retreats’.

There have also been reports of an increase in long term rental properties in some markets, such as London, as professional landlords operating on platforms like Airbnb look for an alternative revenue stream for empty vacation rentals that are now costing them money.

Should such switching take hold in markets where residential tenancy contracts can stretch for five or more years it could put a lasting lock-up on a chunk of properties which vacation rental platforms have been repurposing as moneyspinners up til now.

One thing is clear: The global travel crunch has put a major dent in Airbnb’s IPO hopes. Last September, the company told investors, employees, and the world it would begin to trade publicly in 2020. A couple of months late the coronavirus struck and Airbnb has seen its valuation crash vs a $35BN peak, back in 2019.

Per Reuters, last week’s $1BN bond deal included warrants for the two firms that can be exercised at an $18BN valuation — well below even the $26BN Airbnb cited as an internal valuation in early March.

Credit Kudos, a U.K. fintech using open banking to provide more accurate credit scoring, has raised £5 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is AlbionVC, which is joined by TriplePoint, Plug & Play Ventures, Ascension Ventures’ Fair by Design fund, and Entrepreneur First (EF). In addition, a number of fintech angels participated.

They are Christian Faes (LendInvest), Tom Stafford (DST Global Managing Partner), Charlie Delingpole (ComplyAdvantage and MarketInvoice), Will Neale (Grabyo and Fonix Mobile) and Daniel Gandesha (PropertyPartner).

Ed Lascelles, from AlbionVC, takes up a seat on the Credit Kudos board alongside the company’s co-founders Freddy Kelly (CEO) and Matt Schofield (CTO).

Calling itself a “challenger credit bureau,” Credit Kudos is using open banking to replace what it calls “traditional, narrow methods” of credit assessment in order to make credit fairer and more accessible. As it stands, credit scores are typically a blackbox and based on very primitive assumptions about a person’s financial health.

By securely analysing bank account data via open banking, Credit Kudos says it enables lenders to make faster and more informed credit decisions, while also reducing defaults — and, crucially, at a significantly lower cost than less scalable methods of assessment.

“Traditionally, credit scores are calculated based on past borrowing history and a few other simple measures such as being on the electoral roll and frequency of credit applications,” explains co-founder and CEO Freddy Kelly. “These existing scores are a very weak signal of financial health as they don’t consider an individual’s day-to-day income and expenditure. Because of this, many borrowers are forced to pay higher interest rates or are rejected entirely”.

Kelly says that by using open banking data provided by customers when they apply for credit, Credit Kudos is able to create a far more accurate picture of someone’s financial health and creditworthiness. “We do this by analysing past banking transaction data alongside factors such as whether they repaid on time,” he says. “We have built a platform that allows lenders to integrate open banking data into their existing processes in order to make more accurate decisions and reach a far wider audience”.

An alumni of company builder program EF, last year the startup on-boarded over 50 new lenders ranging from FTSE100 firms to independent credit unions and community finance vendors. Most recently, Credit Kudos has partnered with a number of credit intermediaries including ClearScore, CarFinance 247, and Mojo Mortgages. This is seeing customers use their bank data to secure better offers across unsecured loans, car finance and mortgages.

Meanwhile, Kelly cites traditional credit reference agencies (CRAs) in the U.K., such as Experian, TransUnion and Equifax, as its main competitors. “Each of the existing CRAs provides a standardised credit dataset based on past borrowing behaviour, sometimes referred to as the FICO model,” he tells me. “However, Credit Kudos is the first regulated challenger in the market that is putting control in the hands of borrowers by allowing them to share their bank transaction data through open banking”.

To that end, Credit Kudos’ revenue model is simple enough. The fintech startup charges lenders a monthly fee for its data based on the volume of transactions they process.

French startup Slite has raised an $11 million Series A round led by Spark Capital with existing investors also participating. Slite is a sort of multiplayer Evernote. It lets you collect and organize documentation, create shared documents and build a company handbook.

Many companies struggle to keep a single source of truth when it comes to corporate policies, project documentation and product roadmaps. Services like Google Docs and Dropbox Paper have partly solved this issue by transforming documents into shareable links.

But it’s a mess as you have to grant access to the right people, share folders with your team and dig around multiple documents to find what you’re looking for.

A new category of tools have solved that issue by expanding beyond documents to create a knowledge base for your company. Confluence and Notion are particularly popular among tech companies for instance.

Slite wants to build a product that is as simple to use as Google Docs but as powerful as Confluence. Companies with hundreds or thousands of employees should be able to use it without ever feeling lost.

“[Slite] can be used by literally everyone in the company, by the engineering team of course, but also by the support team, operations team, marketing team, etc.” co-founder and CEO Christophe Pasquier told me.

A Slite document can contain text, tasks, tables and links to other documents. You can create a wiki-like experience for your most essential documents.

You can organize documents by channel, which lets you manage permissions easily. A channel can be your entire company, a department in particular or people working on a new project across multiple departments.

And because everything is centralized in the service, you can search across multiple documents and channels. You can also create templates that you can easily reuse across multiple meetings for instance. It could be useful for monthly reports as well.

When it comes to editing a document, multiple people can edit a document in real time. You can mention other team members to send them a notification, see previous versions of a document, create a link and share it on other services.

Slite has attracted 4,000 companies, including Airbnb, Spotify and WeTransfer. The startup had raised $4 million before today’s funding round and participated in Y Combinator a couple of years ago.

Google is offering financial support to local newsrooms hit by the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of its Google News Initiative.

The company isn’t disclosing the size of what it’s calling its Journalism Emergency Relief Fund, but in a blog post, Google VP of News Richard Gingras said the goal is to fund “thousands of small, medium and local news publishers globally,” through awards ranging from “low thousands of dollars for small hyper-local newsrooms to low tens of thousands for larger newsrooms, with variations per region.”

“Local news is a vital resource for keeping people and communities connected in the best of times,” Gingras said. “Today, it plays an even greater function in reporting on local lockdowns or shelter at home orders, school and park closures, and data about how COVID-19 is affecting daily life. But that role is being challenged as the news industry deals with job cuts, furloughs and cutbacks as a result of the economic downturn prompted by COVID-19.”

Applications for funding open now. They will be open for two weeks, at 11:59pm Pacific time on April 29.

Gingras also said Google.org will be donating $1 million total to two organizations supporting journalists, the International Center for Journalists and the Columbia Journalism School’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.

The Google News Initiative (a broader effort to support journalism with an initial $300 million in funding) previously announced that it would be spending $6.5 million to support fact checkers and nonprofits that are working to fight coronavirus-related misinformation, funding that’s already led to tools like the COVID-19 Case Mapper.

Facebook has also said it’s committing $100 million ($25 million in grant funding for local coverage, plus $75 million in marketing) to support local news organizations in response to the current crisis.

More than 150 e-commerce and delivery companies globally use an Indian logistics startup’s service to work out the optimum way before they ship items to their customers. That startup, Noida-based FarEye, has raised $25 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprint in international markets.

M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, led the seven-year-old startup’s Series D financing round. Eight Roads Ventures, Honeywell Ventures, and existing investor SAIF Partners participated in the round, which pushes FarEye’s total raise-to-date to $40 million.

FarEye helps companies orchestrate, track, and optimize their logistics operations. Say you order a pizza from Domino’s, the eatery uses FarEye’s service, which integrates into the system it is using, to quickly inform the customer how long they need to wait for the food to reach them.

Behind the scenes, FarEye is helping Domino’s evaluate a plethora of moving pieces. How many delivery people are in the vicinity? Can it bundle a few orders? What’s the maximum number of items one can carry? How experienced is the delivery person? What’s the best route to reach the customer? And, would the restaurant need the same number of delivery people the following day?, explained Kushal Nahata, co-founder and chief executive of FarEye, in an interview with TechCrunch .

“The level of digitization that logistics firms have made over the years remains minimal. The amount of visibility they have over their own delivery network is minimal. Forget what a customer should expect,” said Nahata, explaining the challenges the industry faces.

FarEye is addressing this by parsing through more than a billion data points to pick the optimum solution. In the past one year, it has fine-tuned its algorithm to handle last-mile and long-haul deliveries to offer a full-suite of services to its clients.

The startup said it is already handling more than 10 million transactions a day. The more transactions it processes, the better its algorithm becomes, he said.

FarEye today has clients across several categories including transportation and logistics, retail (which includes grocery, furniture, and fashion), and FMCG in 20 nations. Some of these clients include Walmart, FedEx, DHL, Amway, Domino’s, Bluedart, Future Group, and J&J. Nahata said the startup will use the fresh capital to improve its predictive tech and grow its footprint in the United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific region.

“We are solving certain problems for our customers today, but I feel we can solve much larger problems and help digitize the entire supply chain network,” he said.

As the coronavirus pandemic jeopardises grocery and e-commerce firms’ ability to timely deliver items to customers, FarEye said it is making Serve, one of its services that focuses on enabling movement of everyday essentials, free for any firm to use.

“The global pandemic has accelerated the need for enterprises to scale their supply chain operations efficiently to meet the rising share of online deliveries. FarEye’s highly configurable last-mile and long-haul logistics platform has been validated by leading global enterprises across the 3PL, retail and manufacturing categories,” said Shweta Bhatia, a partner at Eight Roads Ventures, in a statement.

Ooni (nee Uuni), has been around for a few years now, but its latest oven, the Koda 16, launched in March. Just like everyone else, I’ve been cooped up at home for weeks with nothing but all of the projects I would get around to one day.

At the top of my list was learning how to make decent pizza at home (we don’t have many decent pizzaiolo’s in my town). I’d been hearing about the Ooni oven for a while — mostly via Neven Mrgan’s great Instagram feed — so I spring for the Koda 13” and started firing some pies.

I was immediately enamored with the eye popping results. Chewy, crispy, well cooked Neopolitain-style pizza within 30 minutes of taking it out of the box. And I’m not exaggerating. After a couple of pizza launching disasters (this is not as easy as it looks, people), I was eating the product of my own hands and the Ooni’s 800+ degree baking surface. While not even an advanced amateur chef, I have always had somewhat of an aversion to single-use gadgets. Technique always wins, right?

The problem with that thinking is that it is really impossible to cook true Neopolitain pizza at home in the US because our ovens just don’t get hot enough. A ton of experimental dough situations have resulted in a few workable New York style pizza recipes for 500 degree ovens. But for thinner crusts there is zero substitute for that true 800-1000 degree cooking environment.

The Ooni delivers that in under 20 minutes attached to a bog standard propane tank. It’s brilliant.

Ooni co-founder Kristian Tapaninaho started messing around with building a decent pizza oven in 2010. He got into making home pies and realized that there was pretty much no way to do it other than building a large, expensive oven in his back yard. He began prototyping what became the company’s original oven in 2012, and he says that the original oven’s design stemmed from a super simple yet super obvious (in hindsight) design constraint: what could they ship affordably?

Due to shipping restrictions, it had to be under 10kg and had to fit in a certain footprint. Everything piece of design work on the first oven stemmed from those constraints. Why, for instance, does the Ooni oven have 3 legs? Because the 4th one would have put them over weight.

Within those constraints, the original oven took shape — delivering that super high-heat surface with a simple wood-fired unit that more than doubled its original funding goal on Kickstarter. Kristian and co-founder Darina Garland defined this high-heat, high results at-home outdoor pizza oven market at scale, along with other later entrants like Roccbox.

I had a bit of a chat with Kristian about how Ooni was doing lately, with the specter of coronavirus and the new business realities that have resulted.

“This COVID-19 situation began for us in mid January as our suppliers started informing us that they were delaying return to work from Chinese New Year,” Kristian said. “At the time the worry was if we’d have enough supply for the summer which is of course peak season for us. As our supply chain was restarting, it was clear that we’d have similar lockdowns in our main markets as well. Overall, however, we started the year at a strong inventory position which helped buffer any interruptions.”

He says that Ooni was lucky given that the initial production run of the Ooni 16 was already in warehouses by the time things got really hairy in Edinburgh and the surrounding areas. And the team was fairly ready for the new challenge of stay-at-home work.

“Much of our team comms already happened over Slack so the team’s been really quite well setup for working from home,” he told me. “We have great relationships with our 3rd party logistics providers and while they’ve been incredibly busy, they’ve been able to maintain a good level of service, at least in the grand scheme of things.”

In addition, Ooni has just launched the Fyra, an updated version of the original Ooni 3. It’s a wood pellet powered design that offers a similar “get up and go” quick pizza path. The wood brings an additional smoky flavor, of course. At 23 pounds, it’s a super portable wood version of the gas stoves I’ve been playing with.

Yeah, but how does it work?

Once Kristian saw that I was playing with my Ooni 13 he offered to send the newly launched 16″ model over to play with. I jumped at the chance to make a bigger pie.

My experiences with the Ooni ovens so far have been nothing short of revelatory. Though I’ve pondered indoor options like the Breville Smart Oven, I knew in my heart that I wanted that brilliant taste that comes from live fire and the high heat that would let me enjoy super thin crust pizzas. I’ve now fired over three dozen pizzas in the Ooni and am coming to know it a bit better. Its recovery time, rotation needs and cooking characteristics. I have never used a more enjoyable cooking utensil.

I’ve tried a few dough recipes, because I know I’ll get questions about it, but I’ve used two to good effect. Ooni’s own recommended dough (though I hydrate a bit more) and this Peter Reinhart recipe, recommended to me by Richie Nakano.

The pizzas that result are bursting with umami. The oven enables that potent combination of cheese, sauce and randomly distributed carbonization that combines into the perfect bite. Your pie goes in somewhat pedestrian — whitish dough, red sauce, hunks of fresh mozzarella — and you see it come to life right in front of your eyes.  Within 60-90 seconds, you’ve transmogrified the simple ingredients into a hot endocrine rush of savory, chewy flavor.

As I mentioned before, the setup is insanely simple. Flip out the legs, put it on an outdoor surface with some support and attach a propane tank. An instant of lighting knob work and you’re free to step away. Fifteen minutes later and you’ve got a cooking environment to die for. The flip down legs make the 13” model super great for taking camping or anywhere you want to go to create your own pizza party. Ooni even sells a carrying case.

The design of the oven’s upper shell means that all of the heat is redirected inwards, letting the baking surface reach 850 degrees easily in the center, up to 1000 degrees near the back. The Koda 16 has such an incredibly roomy cooking surface that it is easy to see to the sides and around your pizza a bit to tell how the crust is rising and how the leoparding is coming along. Spinning your pie mid-cook is such an important part of this kind of oven and the bigger mouth is smashing for this.

Heck I even cooked steak in it, to mouth watering results.

“Our core message has always been ‘great restaurant quality pizza at home’ and while the situation is what it is, more people spending more time at home looking for great home cooking options has been strong for our online sales,” Kristian said when I asked him about whether more people were discovering Ooni now. “Pizza making is a great way to have fun family time together. It’s about those shared experiences that bring people together.”

This mirrors my experiences so far. I’m not precisely ‘good’ at this yet, but I’m plugging away and the Ooni makes even my misses delicious. This weekend I was even confident enough to hold a socially distanced pizza pick-up party. Friends and family put in their orders and I fired a dozen pies of all kinds. Though I couldn’t hug them, I could safely hand them a freshly fired pizza and to most Italians like me, that’s probably better.

In my mind, the Ooni Koda pulls off a rare trifecta of kitchen gadgets: It retains the joy and energy of live flame, delivers completely on its core premise and still remains incredibly easy to use. Highly recommend.

 

Online consignment company The RealReal is the latest tech company to lay off and furlough employees amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In the company’s quarterly earnings report today, The RealReal announced layoffs affecting 10% of its workforce and furloughs impacting 15% of employees.

By doing so, The RealReal says it will be able to reduce its operating expenses by about $70 million. In a press release, The RealReal said these changes are designed to “support its employees through the pandemic and ensure the team is well positioned for a strong restart on the other side of this health crisis.”

Those furloughed include employees in The RealReal’s e-commerce centers, retail stores, luxury consignment offices, sales organization and headquarters. The RealReal has also instituted a hiring freeze and reduced the salaries of executives.

The RealReal, which has been a public company for a little under one year, joins the growing number of tech companies that have made personnel changes in the wake of the coronavirus.

“Given the unknown duration of the pandemic, we’ve focused on reducing operating expenses and preserving liquidity to weather the near-term challenges and ensure we are well positioned to capitalize on the significant opportunity in front of us,” The RealReal CEO Julie Wainwright said in a statement. “I am confident the strength of our balance sheet, customer satisfaction, healthy traffic trends, and buyer and consignor repeat rates, along with continuing progress in technology initiatives that support efficiently scaling our operations, will position us to bounce back quickly once the economy stabilizes.”

 

It’s hard enough in the first place having to drive an astronomically expensive rover around a planet millions of miles away. Doing it from home seems like a pretty big ask — but it turns out NASA’s Curiosity team is up to it.

The space agency posted today about how the team has adapted to the unprecedented situation of having to manage an important, ongoing mission involving hundreds of people, without any of those people meeting in person.

“We’re usually all in one room, sharing screens, images and data,” said team lead Alicia Allbaugh. Now they’re not only in separate rooms, but on different schedules and computing setups. “I probably monitor about 15 chat channels at all times. You’re juggling more than you normally would.”

Naturally there are video calls, too — sometimes several at once. Processes previously accomplished on high-performance workstations are now being done on laptops and web services. But while the added complexity makes the planning process less efficient, the results are still rolling in.

In mid-March, the Jet Propulsion Lab offices in Pasadena, CA, had already been totally emptied of staff and work was suspended elsewhere. But Curiosity was still trucking. It drove up to a rock, drilled a sample, and sent confirmation back to the team — just as it would if they were all working as normal. And the work continues.

“Mars isn’t standing still for us; we’re still exploring,” said Allbaugh.