Year: 2020

The student loan crisis has crescendoed to even worse heights. As universities shut down across the country due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and employment opportunities dim with the rapidly decelerating economy, today’s students and postgrads need better tools than ever to navigate their finances.

Unfortunately, student loans in the United States are extraordinarily complicated, with literally hundreds of variations on loan terms, repayment methods, and public interest forgiveness options. For borrowers, what are the best ways to minimize their total burden while staying within the rules?

Washington DC-based Savi wants to make student loan borrowers “savvy” to the best options available to them, and now it has even more capital to take on this pressing challenge. The company announced today that it has raised a $6 million Series A led by Nyca Partners, one of the most influential investing firms in the fintech space.

Finance startups often have misaligned incentives between users and their own revenue models — a financial health app may make quiet referral revenue by peddling new credit cards and loans, exactly what a user doesn’t need.

What makes Savi interesting is that the company was designed from the beginning to make sure that it always placed the interests of its users first. It’s organized as a public benefit corporation and founded by two idealistic founders who came together over improving the outcomes of the nation’s youth.

After graduating from Georgetown Law, Aaron Smith founded and spent four years running Young Invincibles, a youth-focused think tank and advocacy organization that was originally created to bring attention to youth issues during the health care reform discussions in the early years of the Obama administration. Meanwhile, Savi’s other co-founder Tobin Van Ostern worked on youth voter engagement for Obama’s first presidential campaign as the head of Students for Barack Obama before heading to the liberal Center for American Progress.

Savi co-founders Tobin Van Ostern and Aaron Smith. Photos courtesy of Savi.

Together, they decided to found Savi to bring their progressive mission orientation to helping young people around student debt. The student loan world, “it’s fairly complicated, and while obviously I think there needs to be continued improvement on the policy side, we needed solutions for student loan borrowers right now,” Smith explained. “And so that was sort of the impetus behind Savi — to use technology to create those kind of solutions.”

Savi ingests student loan data from users and then begins crunching the numbers to calculate the best options for repayment or forgiveness while taking into account the goals of its users.

While student lending is a trillion dollar plus market, Savi — owing to its progressive roots — has been particularly focused on offering its platform to users like social workers, teachers, and service workers. One of their largest partners is NEA, the largest teachers union in the United States with around 3 million members, and Savi is offered as a benefit to its members.

Organizations offer Savi’s student loan assessment tool to their employees and members to help them understand their financial picture. That tool is free for users, but from there, Savi charges a subscription to actively manage a user’s student loans, such as automating the process for filling out paperwork. Users can calculate their savings using Savi before committing to paying a subscription, ensuring that no user pays if Savi can’t help them save money. The company says that the average borrower sees $140 in savings per month and pays a $5-a-month subscription fee.

Given the typical employment of its users, Savi has a particular specialty on loan forgiveness, an option that many student loans offer for people in public-interest careers. Such options often have byzantine rules for eligibility though, and so Savi works to ensure that borrowers seeking forgiveness stay within the rules of their loan programs. Currently, the company handles more than 150 forgiveness and repayment options.

Similar to its assessment tools for organizations, Savi launched a new tool around COVID-19 to help people in health professions or who have been laid off as a result of the pandemic to figure out their student loan situations and find new programs for help. “We actually happen to have a pretty disproportionately high number of users that actually work on the COVID crisis,” Van Ostern explained.

Startups around managing student loans have been a popular area of investment for VCs. Yesterday, my colleague Alex Wilhelm noted that student loan platform Frank received a $5 million interim strategic round of funding, with edtech giant Chegg taking a board seat. I also covered Summer’s $10 million raise late last year, which, like Savi, is a public benefit corporation focused on minimizing the burden of student loan payments.

In addition to Nyca, Savi received funding from AlleyCorp, Temerity Capital, and 9Yards Capital along with Michelle Kang, Catherine Reynolds, and Sheila Lirio Marcelo.

GitHub today announced that all of its core features are now available for free to all users, including those that are on free accounts. That means free unlimited private repositories with unlimited collaborators for all, including teams that use the service for commercial projects, as well as up to 2,000 minutes per month of free access to GitHub Actions, the company’s automation and CI/CD platform.

Teams that want more advanced features like code owners or enterprise features like SAML support will still have to upgrade to a paid plan, but those now start at $4 per month and user for the Teams plans instead of the previous $9, with the Enterprise plan starting at $21 per month and user.

When I talked to him earlier this week, GitHub CEO Nat Friedman stressed that this move had long been on the roadmap and isn’t a limited promotion motivated by the current COVID-19 pandemic. “This is something we planned to do and have wanted to do for a long time — since essentially we did the acquisition — and getting to this point to do it took until now, when it became a high priority,” Friedman said. “But it’s definitely something that we wanted to do and, I mean, this is a big flippin’ deal.”

The company has obviously always taken a freemium approach to its pricing model, but since its acquisition by Microsoft, it started to expand the number of features in its free accounts. Not that long ago, one of the main reasons to pay for the lowest-tier personal GitHub account would’ve been to get access to private repositories, for example, but last January, the company decided to give access to unlimited private projects to all free users, though those were limited to three collaborators at a time.

“We’re switching GitHub from a pay-for-privacy model to pay-for-features, what’s typically called freemium — you may have heard of it,” Friedman said. “The way I think about it is we want every developer and team on earth to be able to use GitHub for their development, whether it’s private or public development.”

Right now, there are over 40 million developers on GitHub and Friedman says the team is projecting that it will get to 100 million by 2025.

“It’s a fundamental change to the business architecture of GitHub. That’s the thing we can think about internally,” said Friedman. “The thing that everyone else can think about is: they can just use GitHub now, for whatever reason. If you’re starting a startup or if you’re a team inside of a big company and you just want to use GitHub — no credit card required, no budget required — you can just set your team up.”

Friedman argues that the team didn’t make these changes because of competitive pressure from other players, though it’s worth mentioning that GitLab, for example, offers a competitive free plan with built-in CI/CD features, whereas Atlassian’s BitBucket now has a free offering now looks a bit limited in light of GitHub’s changes.

“This change makes us by far the best-priced and most accessible place for developers to create software,” he argues. More so than pretty much all our competitors, I think. So it wasn’t really competitively driven, it was much more informed by just going into more markets and seeing what folks were saying there.”

At their best, Satechi’s products sit somewhere between the silly and the sublime (practicality is nice, too, if you can manage). In spite of a profoundly uninspiring name, the USB-C Wireless Charging Dock for Apple AirPods fit the bill pretty nicely. There’s nothing about the product that specifically fits the company’s opportunistic pitch of “easy and convenient charging while working from home,” but for a select cross section of Apple enthusiasts, the strange little dock likely hits a perfect sweet spot.

The accessory follows in the footsteps of a similarly designed Apple Watch charging dock, essentially letting you plug a pair of AirPods directly into a USB-C port — be it a MacBook, iPad Pro or what have you. It’s a fun solution if you’re aesthetically skeeved out by wires, or are just constantly let down by Lightning cables, as many of us are.

The dock serves as a wireless charger and cradle, probably best used when your laptop is sitting on a desk rather than your actual lap. The product’s width also looks as though it will monopolize both ports on one side of your MacBook.

It’s compatible with both standard and Pro AirPods (assuming you’ve got a wireless charging case) and sports a matching little charging light to indicate that it’s working. The dock is available as a pre-order now. It’s set to start shipping in May, priced at $30 (or $25 during a limited time pre-order discount).

Corigin Ventures has traditionally invested in real estate startups using capital from its parent company, New York real estate developer Corigin’s private investment arm. The venture investment arm, founded in 2012, has its roots tied to property all over the east coast, from Miami multi-family residences to New York University student dorms. Thus, in the past, Corigin Ventures’ investments have reflected more of the same: portfolio companies include real estate startups Compass and Bowery Valuation.

Now, Corigin’s appetite is changing. Today, Corigin Ventures closed its first institutional fund to invest in seed startups at $36 million, and its first independent fund from Corigin. With new limited partners in the mix, Corigin is pushing an investment strategy that includes marketplace and consumer startups. The firm also hired a new partner, Aubrie Pagano .

With new capital in hand, Corigin is looking to write large checks and lead seed rounds. The firm’s partners will use the debut fund to write checks between $500,000 to $1 million for pre-seed and seed stage startups. Corigin will invest across 25 companies with this fund, at roughly six to ten deals a year, according to David Goldberg, general partner at Corigin Ventures.

In the past, Corigin Ventures has invested in non-real estate startups like Imperfect Foods, a grocery and food waste startup, and Core, a meditation startup. However now, the firm is markedly moving beyond its original focus with this step outside its parent company. Corigin is looking at startups tackling areas like alternative healthcare and blue collar needs. It’s a focus that Aubrie Pagano says is leaning into the experiences for “the everyday person who is in Des Moines, Iowa.”

“So much technology has been built for a desktop and an office,” Pagano said during an interview with TechCrunch.  “We’re thinking about where the 99% is for daily life experiences.”

Pagano is not new to investing and building out startups. In 2012, she launched Bow & Drape, a women’s clothing and personalization company. She scaled her company to be featured in over 350 department stores.

From there she went into investing, which started as a “side gig” before Pagano worked with XFactor Ventures, a firm focused on female founders.

Corigin’s first fund is being announced at a time when many venture capitalists are slowing down operations and doubling down on current investments in light of the pandemic and economic uncertainty.

Pagano says that Corigin has just finished communicating with portfolio companies on concerns and stresses they’re having during the pandemic. Now, Corigin is “looking at strategically supporting our own company.”

After, Pagano said, they will resume deal-making. Looking ahead, Paganon thinks that there will be new opportunities to join in on rounds that before might have been too competitive to join. “Sometimes the round moves so fast we don’t even have a chance to look at it,” Pagano said.

Now, she says, the slowing pace of the investor world means that new investors to the block can get a second look, and for startups that might just mean a second chance at a term sheet.

YouTube today is launching a new tool aimed at small businesses who need a simple, low-cost way to create videos, but may not have the creative experience or technical know-how required to do so. The YouTube Video Builder, as the new tool is simply called, has been in testing with a small group of customers for months but has been rushed to launch more publicly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic where in-person video shoots are no longer an option, and many small businesses are strapped for cash.

“We think Video Builder can help businesses of all sizes who need quick videos, especially now, when we’ve heard from many businesses that they need to update their messaging to customers quickly and easily,” said Ali Miller, Director, Product Management at YouTube Ads.

To gain access to the tool, the business will need only a Google Account that can be used to log into Google’s services, like Gmail and YouTube. If they don’t have one, they can link their non-Google email address to a Google account instead. And to save and publish the video, the business will need its own YouTube channel. 

Using the tool is fairly straightforward. The beta version of Video Builder can animate a business’s static assets — including images, text, and photos — which can be set to music from YouTube’s free audio library. Users can also select from a variety of layouts based on their messages and goals, says YouTube, and then customize their colors and fonts quickly to generate either a 6-second or 15-second video.

When finished, the video can be uploaded as Unlisted to the business’s YouTube Channel –unless the business wants the video ad visible to the public browsing the channel, in which case they can change the setting. The video can then be used wherever the business sees fit, including embedded on other websites or shared elsewhere on social media. And if the business chooses, they can run the videos as ads through Google Ads.

The tool is now one of many DIY solutions on the market for businesses looking to create their own video ads. Vimeo in February released an app that helps small businesses create professional social videos, for example. Last fall, Facetune maker Lightricks launched a full suite of apps for small businesses to use for their social media marketing campaigns. There also are dozens of video editing tools already on the market, including those from incumbents, like Adobe and Apple, as well as from others like Magisto, Canva, PicsArt and many more. Most of these specifically target small business owners with features like templates, easy editing tools, access to stock content and support for one-click multi-platform publishing, among other things.

In the case of YouTube’s Video Builder, the advantage is that the tool produces videos that are optimized for YouTube viewers and integrated with the Google Ads program.

Before today, Video Builder was tested by businesses that ranged from those with hundreds of employees like interior designing service Havenly and sandwich shop Which Wich to those with thousands, like grocer Central Market. In some cases, businesses wanted to alert customers to changing hours or new services, like pickup and delivery. In other cases, brands and agencies may want to use the tool for supplemental videos or experimentation with new concepts.

For today’s public launch, customers will be able to use the tool via the desktop, after gaining beta access. The tool itself is only available in English but the videos it creates can be in any language. YouTube believes it will be able to accommodate all those who sign up, we’re told.

Miller says the tool was initially developed to help businesses quickly and easily create video ads for YouTube.

“While we’ve accelerated the development of the tool to help businesses keep in touch with their consumers, as they are sheltering in place, we still believe it will be helpful to those that want to get started with video creation on YouTube to reach new consumers,” she added.

The new tool is now one of several services for businesses that YouTube has launched in recent months, following last May’s debut of Bumper Machine, a fast way to adapt existing videos into short 6-second clips using machine learning. It also recently added new partners to the YouTube Video Directory, which include firms offering a range of services, including lower-cost video editing.

YouTube Video Builder is free to access, after signing up here. 

BenevolentAI, a startup which has raised $292 million to apply AI to create drugs faster, today says it has uncovered an already approved drug as a potential treatment for COVID-19, after it applied its AI platform and team to the problem. The revelation, which has now appeared in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has already entered clinical trials with a major pharmaceutical company, could offer a glimmer of hope to a world locked-down by the pandemic.

In February, BenevolentAI set up a specialist scientific team and launched an investigation using its drug discovery platform.

Baroness Joanna Shields, CEO of BenevolentAI, explained: “In response to the COVID-19 global health emergency, we turned our AI drug discovery and development platform toward understanding the body’s response to this novel infectious disease.”

Key to their approach was that “rather than focusing solely on drugs that could affect the virus directly, we explored ways to inhibit the cellular processes that the virus uses to infect human cells,” she said.

The idea was to identify approved drugs that could potentially stop the progression of COVID-19, inhibit the “cytokine storm” and reduce the inflammatory damage associated with this disease.

Diseases such as covid-19 and influenza can be fatal due to an overreaction of the body’s immune system called a cytokine storm.

Cytokines are small proteins released by many different cells in the body, including those of the immune system where they coordinate the body’s response against infection and trigger inflammation.

The body’s response to infection goes into overdrive when SARS-CoV-2 – the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic – enters the lungs, triggering an immune response, and attracting immune cells to the region to attack the virus. This resulting in localized inflammation. Some people experience worse symptoms than others at this point. But in some people, excessive or uncontrolled levels of cytokines are released which then activate more immune cells, resulting in ‘hyperinflammation’ which can seriously harm or even kill the person.

BenevolentAI’s team fed everything they knew about COVID-19, and the drugs that could inhibit the cellular processes that the virus uses, into their platform.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Peter Richardson, BenevolentAI’s VP of Pharmacology, explained how the discovery came about.

“Using the BenevolentAI Knowledge Graph there were two processes. One was finding the connections, and the regulators,” he said.

“It’s incredibly, incredibly difficult to hold in your head what’s irrelevant, all the time, without having the Knowledge Graph to show you the basic points. It’s really good at showing the basic interactions that are so important in understanding a biological process. Cellular tracking is an amazingly complicated thing to process.”

But, he said, the BenevolentAI platform handled the information with aplomb: “This took an hour for the platform to process.”

The next process was for the human team to find possible drugs to inhibit regulators. These were then fed into the Knowledge Graph. Richardson said this “took roughly half an hour to process.”

The result was that they identified baricitinib as a potential drug with both anti-viral and anti-cytokine properties, with 90 minutes of computing time, inside three days of additional human work.

Benevolent’s research findings were published in The Lancet in early February and again twice in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal. These proposed baricitinib as a potential treatment with both anti-viral and anti-inflammatory properties for COVID-19 patients admitted to hospital prior to the development of critical lung damage.

By March, investigator-led studies began recruiting and treating infected patients with baricitinib. Today, Eli Lilly and the US National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) have announced that the drug will now begin it’s first large randomized trial in COVID-19 patients.

Baricitinib, sold as a prescription drug called Olumiant, is an already approved drug developed by Eli Lilly and Incyte for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.

The randomized trial announced by Eli Lilly with NIAID will investigate the efficacy and safety of baricitinib as a potential treatment for patients with serious COVID-19 infections.

The study will begin in the US in late April with planned expansion to additional sites in Europe and Asia, with the results being expected within the next two months. This new trial joins a Canadian government randomised trial already underway assessing baricitinib as a potential treatment.

Commenting, Shields said: “We are pleased that Eli Lilly is progressing baricitinib to clinical testing for COVID-19 patients. While we wait for a vaccine to be developed, there is an immediate need for medicines that can prevent life-threatening respiratory and other serious complications of COVID-19 infections.”

Daniel Skovronsky, M.D., Ph.D., Lilly’s chief scientific officer and president of Lilly Research Laboratories said: “Lilly is moving at top speed and using all available resources to help fight this pandemic. Developing potential therapeutic medicines for COVID-19 is part of our vital and humanitarian mission.”

Professor Justin Stebbing from Imperial College, London, who has been collaborating on this work between Eli Lilly and BenevolentAI, also commented, saying: “There are no specific therapeutic agents for any coronavirus infections – we rely on quarantine, isolation and public health policies to prevent disease spread, and on supportive care measures for those who become ill. What we lack is a specific agent to treat the infected and, optimally, decrease viral shedding and subsequent transmission. The results of such trials will be central to clinical care as the outbreak continues and we anticipate that this treatment will improve mortality and reduce the pressure on hospitals and ICU’s worldwide. This research is notable for its incredible speed from computer to bench and bedside within a few months.”

Commenting, Richardson added: “If you turned the BenevolentAI 250-person team and turned all of them into 65-year old ex-pharmacology teachers, it would have taken probably a year to come up with this treatment. Instead, it took my three colleagues working so two hours a day, and myself working full time, three days to come up with this. We’ve gone from computer to bedside, as it were, in two months.”

With corporations across the world taking a closer look at the effects their operations have on global climate change, investors are backing a crop of software and services that are cropping up to pull back the curtain on those climate impacts.

The latest of these to raise capital is The Climate Service, which just closed on $3.82 million in its most recent round of funding.

Interestingly, in addition to the traditional mix of venture investment firms and angel investors, the Durham, North Carolina-based company also picked up a commitment from the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants.

Institutional capital including Persei Venture and Synovia Capital also joined the round. management in the data analytics sector.

The company said it would use the cash to expand the scope of its climate scenarios, risks, and asset classes monitored by its software service.

The Climate Service bases its models and pricing of climate risk on the framework developed by the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, which is used by over 1,000 organizations around the world, according to the company.

“Investors, markets, and regulators are increasingly requiring businesses to measure their exposure to climate change-related risk. As a result, we designed this fundraising round to enable TCS to respond to the demands of industries under pressure to understand, quantify, and manage climate risk,” said David L. Jadow of Persei Venture. “We forecast significant continued growth for TCS, and we are proud to support the company’s vision and mission to embed climate risk into global decision-making.”

As we find ourselves tumbling toward a global financial crisis, every business is taking a second and third look at expenses going out the door to make sure they really, truly need them. Based on more than a decade of experience processing billions of dollars in expense reports for the top startups in Silicon Valley, here are the high-level keys to keeping costs low and managing expenses: hire people you trust, keep policies light and flexible, and invest in experiences that bring your team together. On the tactical side, get your travel policies in order (you know, when travel is a thing again), give everyone a smart corporate card and be honest about what really matters. These should all start way before the point of scouring spreadsheets for savings — and as a startup, you have a chance to get it right out of the gates. Invest now so you don’t have to cut later. 

Quick background on me: I started programming when I was six and spent the early days of my tech career building 3D graphics engines for video games. Eventually, I ended up working at Red Swoosh, a startup that Akamai bought just in time for the world to descend into the 2008 recession. Since then, I’ve been focused on relieving the world’s frustrations one expense report at a time. I’ve come to see how more than a million companies handle billions of dollars in expenses, and I’m here to give you some of the best expense-management tips I’ve picked up along the way. 

Hire people you trust

Rule zero of expense management is to hire people you trust. If you trust your team, you don’t need to micromanage expenses. If you don’t trust your team, no amount of micromanaging expenses will matter. Expense tools aren’t lie detectors or mind readers; they exist primarily to catch mistakes, not criminals.

Keep policies light and flexible