Year: 2020

Stackery, a 4-year old Portland startup, wants to help development teams deliver serverless resources on AWS more easily, and today it announced several enhancements to the platform.

With serverless applications, the development team outlines a set of trigger events and the cloud infrastructure vendor — in this case AWS — provides the exact amount of required resources to run the event and no more. This frees developers from having to worry about provisioning the proper amount of resources to run the application.

“Stackery is a secure serverless platform for AWS. We’re geared toward teams who are moving from laptop through production, and [we provide the tools] that they need to design, develop, and then deliver modern applications for those teams,” Stackery CEO Tim Zonca told TechCrunch.

In general, the product helps create a virtual whiteboard, where development teams can build serverless applications in a highly visual way, then it helps with testing and deployment of the app on AWS. Zonca says that the updates they are announcing today focus on building in security and governance into the platform, while offering a full set of continuous delivery tools in a modern git-driven delivery system.

“We realized that we could fill in some of the gaps [for developers] and help them take what we have developed as a set of best practices around securely delivering applications over the course of the last year, and just bake them into the product, so that those teams don’t have to think about those practices in a serverless world,” Zonca explained.

For starters, they are offering a code review for known vulnerabilities as they pop the application into their git repository, whether that’s Bitbucket, GitLab or GitHub. “We’ve introduced the ability to audit function code for known vulnerabilities, and we do this by just using common tooling out there,” he said.

The company is also helping test that code, which gets a bit tricky when ephemeral serverless infrastructure is involved. “We allow people to automate the spinning up of temporary ephemeral testing environments, and then help them plug in the automation for their system testing or integration testing or unit testing, and even provide an environment associated with this pull request for humans to go in and actually log on and do usability testing,” Zonca said.

When an application has passed all the testing, and is ready to be deployed to staging or production environments, Stackery can automatically promote that change set. Companies can then choose to do a final review before deployment or simply allow it to deploy automatically once the application passes all the contingencies the team set up.

Stackery was founded in 2016. It has raised $7.4 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Four months after breaking ground, the Lucid Motors factory in Arizona sits  — its new roof and sign emblazoned on its side— waiting for construction to resume.

The electric vehicle company released Tuesday new photos of the factory located off Interstate 10 between Phoenix and Tucson. Construction was “well ahead of schedule” when Gov. Doug Ducey imposed a stay-at-home order due to COVID 19, according to Peter Hochholdinger, the vice president of manufacturing who was hired away last year from a similar post at Tesla. The factory will produce the Air, the company’s first electric vehicle.

Despite the pause in construction, Lucid Motors doesn’t expect a significant delay in its completion even with current events, Hochholdinger said. Construction crews were able to finish the roof as well as most of the siding on the building. Tooling and machinery for the factory was “well underway” before the current crisis, according to the company.

Lucid Motors’ latest timeline was to start production of the Air, beginning in late 2020. The company did not adjust its production timeline, despite the COVID-19 related closure.

Shipments from suppliers have already started, according to Lucid Motors. The company said some of these shipments are expected to be received later this month.  Lucid Motors indicated that move-in activities are expected to start in May.

The Arizona factory, once it opens, will be the culmination of more than decades-long pursuit. Lucid Motors was founded 11 years ago with a different name and mission. The company, called  Atieva at the time, was focused on developing electric car battery technology. It then shifted to producing electric cars and changed its name in 2016.

The company seemed to have momentum at the time. Lucid Motors had successfully raised money, unveiled the Air, announced plans to build a $700 million factory in Arizona, signed a deal with Samsung SDI to supply it with lithium-ion batteries and moved into spacious new digs. However, building a factory is expensive, and the company fell silent for nearly a year as it sought funding to produce the Air.

In 2018, Lucid Motors secured $1 billion in funding from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Lucid said at the time that the $1 billion in funding would be used to complete engineering development and testing of the Lucid Air, construct its factory in Arizona, begin the global rollout of its retail strategy starting in North America and enter production.

Google is reportedly on the verge of stepping up their hardware game in a way that follows the example set by Apple, with custom-designed silicon powering future smartphones. Axios reports that Google is readying its own in-house processors for use in future Pixel devices, including both phones and eventually Chromebooks, too.

Google’s efforts around its own first-party hardware have been somewhat of a mixed success, with some generations of Pixel smartphone earning high praise, including for its work around camera software and photo processing. But it has used standard Qualcomm processors to date, whereas Apple has long designed its own custom processor (the A-series) for its iPhone, providing the Mac-maker an edge when it comes to performance tailor-made for its OS and applications.

The Axios report says that Google’s in-house chip is code-named ‘Whitechapel,’ and that it was made in collaboration with Samsung and uses that company’s 5-nanometer process. It includes an 8-core ARM-based processor, as well as dedicated on-chip resources for machine learning and Google Assistant.

Google has already taken delivery of the first working prototypes of this processor, but it’s said to be at least a year before they’ll be used in actual shipping Pixel phones, which means we likely have at least one more generation of Pixel that will include a third-party processor. The report says that this will eventually make its way to Chromebooks, too, if all goes to plan, but that that will take longer.

Rumors have circulated for years now that Apple would eventually move its own Mac line to in-house, ARM-based processors, especially as the power and performance capabilities of its A-series chips has scaled and surpassed those of its Intel equivalents. ARM-based Chromebooks already exist, so that could make for an easier transition on the Google side – provided the Google chips can live up to expectations.

Kumu Holdings, a live streaming startup based in the Philippines, announced today it has raised about $5 million in Series A funding, earmarked for new features and growing its operations.

The round was led by Openspace Ventures, an early investor in Go-Jek, with participation from Kickstart Ventures, media conglomerate ABS-CBN, Gobi-Core Philippine Fund, and returning investors Summit Media and Foxmont Capital Partners.

With much of the country under COVID-19 lockdown or curfew orders, Kumu says usage of media and entertainment apps has increased. To address demand, the startup has launched new features over the past month to allow organizations like churches and industry groups to hold online events.

Kumu says it now has three million registered users and about 25,000 live streams broadcast each day, with average daily usage of about one hour.

Founded two years ago by Roland Ros and Rexy Josh Dorado, Kumu aspires to be a “super app” for Filipinos around the world, integrating live streaming, video chats and gaming, with plans to add online payments and e-commerce functions, too. Kumu’s upcoming features include a live commerce platform that allows users to buy items during live streams, giving content creators an additional source of revenue.

More than half a dozen volunteers have banded together in India to launch a crowdsourced tool to help people in the nation identify and locate nearby grocery stores, pharmacies, and cash machines as New Delhi extends the nationwide lockdown to May 3.

The service, called Covidmaps, allows people to locate operational grocery stores, pharmacies, cash machines in their vicinity and find up-to-date details such as when the store opens and closes, the items it has in stock, and whether the store relies on a queuing system.

It relies on people to add new stores, explained Phani Kishan, one of the founding members of Covidmaps, in an interview with TechCrunch. Users are also tasked with updating details about different stores.

India ordered a 21-day nationwide lockdown last month that has restricted people’s movement and shut most stores in a bid to contain the spread of the coronavirus. On Tuesday, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi extended the lockdown to May 3.

Kishan said seven people are today collaborating on Covidmaps, all of whom are working on it as a side project. At his day job, he works at Swiggy, India’s largest food delivery startup.

The service has already amassed more than 50,000 visitors, including some from outside of India. Covidmaps is currently seeing most traction in Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, and Vancouver.

“People in Delhi and other places are also beginning to participate. But it takes some time before there are enough stores listed in a vicinity before the service gets popular there,” said Kishan, who said he is hopeful people outside India would find it useful, too.

Kishan said that some services in India such as startup Dunzo has also started to use Covidmaps as their delivery personnel try to find stores in different localities to serve customers.

On Monday, Google unveiled Nearby Spot on Maps that allows users to find some stores in their vicinity. The company sources this information when a person uses Google Pay to complete a transaction at a store. Kishan said Google had provided free credit to Covidmaps so that it can use Maps Platform.

As the coronavirus crisis continues, hiring data is emerging that paints a mixed picture for U.K. tech, which, in the preceding months and years has been stuck on a growth trajectory of up and to the right. That appears to have changed almost over night.

According to numbers shared exclusively with TechCrunch from job sites Adzuna (which also powers the U.K. government’s “Find a job” service and provides data to No. 10) and WorkinStartups, tech hiring activity amongst 100 of the U.K.’s top tech companies has fallen 31% in the last month. Furthermore, over 25,000 job vacancies across the tech sector as a whole have been lost between March and April.

In addition, more than 50% of those companies have dialled back on hiring, while a number of unicorns have furloughed staff. The result is that there are now thought to be 38 job seekers on average per available job — the most competitive for each vacancy U.K. tech has been since the 2008 financial crisis.

“The biggest takeaway from the data for me, is the fact that the majority of tech companies across Europe are extremely anxious about the current economic climate and even those with ‘war chests’ of VC cash or unicorn status are laying off or furloughing employees, as well as simply not posting new vacancies,” Adzuna co-founder Andrew Hunter tells me.

In terms of the speed at which the hiring picture appears to be changing, Hunter uses the Lenin quote “there are decades when nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen,” and says the world is moving at “500 miles an hour at the moment”.

“Yes, I am surprised at how quickly the job market picture has changed in the last few weeks,” he adds. “U.K unemployment might well double this month and the number of open vacancies have halved. The compound effect of this is going to hurt”.

The study also shows significant variation in hiring behaviour company by company. For example, according to the data, Airbnb, Google, and Facebook have all evidently scaled back European hiring efforts. Other scale-ups, such as Habito, Treatwell, and Carwow appear to have paused recruitment altogether, likely reflecting the challenges that proptech and mobility is currently facing.

Two fintech unicorn outliers are TransferWise with 45 live vacancies, and Revolut with 324 live vacancies, as the two companies seem to be hiring at the same or similar levels to pre-coronavirus crisis. Unsurprisingly, subscription delivery services Gousto, Hellofresh and Oddbox are all scaling up efforts to bring on new employees after likely seeing an uptick in product demand. Amazon (1,000+ live vacancies), and Deliveroo (100+ live vacancies), have also ramped up hiring.

“My sense is that larger companies like Monzo… have furloughed staff with the view that it’s better to take action now, rather than suffer death by a thousand cuts over the coming months or be forced to take more drastic action in the summer,” says Hunter.

“The vast majority of sub 100 staff tech companies are in a very different situation. This is ‘survive or die’ territory for them – hiring freezes and furloughing are a necessity, not a luxury. Fundamentally, the complete uncertainty around how long this will last means any startup with any doubt around their funding position for the next 6-12 months is going on the offensive. Battening down the hatches and pausing non-core innovation appears to be the M.O. for the moment”.

According to the study, marketing, social media and I.T. sales jobs in tech companies have been the hardest hit, with advertised vacancies dropping over 60% month-on-month. Unsurprisingly, tech companies operating within the hospitality and travel sectors have, in the majority of cases, all but paused recruitment, according to the data.

In contrast, Engineering jobs have weathered the storm the best, with hiring for C++, Java, Ruby and PHP developers down only 20%.

“I think there are a few different factors at play and this is driving the decision making,” says Hunter. “What’s your cash runway, are you able to control your burn rate, what is the likelihood that your sector will bounce back in the next 3-6 months? etc. So funding and cash discipline certainly plays a part. If I was running a travel booking startup right now, even if I had a healthy looking bank balance, I would be planning for the worst”.

Meanwhile, Hunter points out that nobody really knows when the crisis will be over, forcing VCs, CEOs and founders to “hedge” as best as they can, and try to plan for the recovery and the likely upside that will come with it.

“This will not be a v-shaped economic recovery, but those that can be well positioned for the start of the economic comeback will likely grow the fastest and gain the most market share. That’s why we’re still seeing those who haven’t seen much immediate impact on their 1-2 year plan push on and try and take advantage of the opportunities potentially available. I think it was Ayrton Senna who said ‘You can not overtake 15 cars in sunny weather…. but you can when it’s raining'”.

Greater availability of African genomic data could lead to medical breakthroughs for the continent’s 1.2 billion people.

That’s the driving proposition of 54gene — a U.S. and Nigeria based startup — that collects African genetic code for use in health research and drug development.

The company has closed a $15 million Series A round, in part, to address a deficiency in these processes.

“As of the time we launched, less then 3% of all genome wide association studies globally had been conducted in Africa. There was a lack of data coming from Africans…and the diaspora,” 54gene founder and CEO Dr. Abasi Ene-Bong said.

“We are trying to address the gap that currently exists in precision medicine for people of the African continent,” he told TechCrunch on a call from Lagos.

New York based Adjuvant Capital led the round 54gene will now deploy toward that goal. Founded in 2019 by Ene-Bong, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with a biobank facility in Lagos that holds capacity for 60,000 samples. The startup has an engineering team and a proprietary platform to catalog and analyze the genetic data.

54gene also has over 300 researchers, clinicians and geneticists across the continent and a research lab in Nigeria.

With the $15 million — which brings total VC to $19.5 million — the startup will expand its biobank capabilities to 200,000 samples, with a longer term goal to manage up to 500,000. 54gene is also boosting its lab capabilities. “With this funding we are about to expand that lab so we can process actual genetic data for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people,” said Ene-Bong.

54gene plans to hire across the organization, from seeking a new VP of finance to adding additional scientists.

The company recruits research participants in Africa through studies at venues, such as hospitals, to take genetic samples via swab or blood tests. “Participants have to give us their informed consent before any testing,” explained Ene-Bong.

Adjuvant Capital Managing Partner Jenny Yip confirmed the VC firm’s lead on the $15 million investment. In addition to funds from Adjuvant — which itself is backed by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Novartis — 54gene is a 2019 Y Combinator alum and received follow on funding from the Silicon Valley accelerator.

The company has a longer time horizon to income, but the primary path to revenues is paid co-development of drugs and medicine working with pharmaceutical companies. “When the drug is in the market…and approved medicine [54gene] and the pharma company will share revenues,” said Ene-Bong.

When it comes to life-saving treatments in Africa, big pharma has faced criticism going back decades. The primary point of friction: the industry’s insistence on strict IP enforcement and high-margin prices for HIV-Aids related treatments on the continent. This has led to legal battles between pharma companies and the government of South Africa over that country allowing production of cheaper generic versions of those drugs.

On the value of Africa’s pharmaceutical industry, McKinsey and Company research estimates it at roughly $14 billion, and grossly under its potential — given an addressable market of some percentage of 1.2 billion people for new drugs.

For its part, 54gene’s CEO Abasi Ene-Bong is clear the company is a for-profit entity, but aims to balance money-making motives (and those of pharma partners) with advancing health in Africa.

The startup plans to exert leverage over the pricing process through its practice of co-developing drugs.

“When you are a service provider to big pharma you can’t really make such a request. But when you are a development partner you co-own a significant stake of what’s being developed and have more of a say,” said Ene-Bong.

The startup is unable to disclose any current big pharma partners or which health issues in Africa it’s aiming genetic research toward tackling.

“I can say we will prioritize diseases that affect Africans disproportionately,” Ene-Bong said.

One obvious ailment in need of more effective prevention and treatment is malaria — with 92% of the world’s 219 million cases occurring in Africa, according to WHO data.

54gene has also turned its capabilities to COVID-19, which has spiked in Africa since mid-March. The company has re-positioned itself to do testing for the virus in Nigeria’s public health facilities and plans to offer coronavirus screening in its Lagos lab soon.

“We hope that when given approval, we can do more than 3000 tests a day,” said Ene-Bong

Reddit announced an update to its policy for political advertising that will require campaigns to leave comments open on ads for the first 24 hours. The platform also launched a new subreddit, r/RedditPoliticalAds, that will include information about advertisers, targeting, impressions and spending by each campaign.

In a post, Reddit said “we will strongly encourage political advertisers to use this opportunity to engage directly with users in the comments.” The new subreddit will also list all political ad campaigns on Reddit going back to January 1, 2019.

The company said that the latest update and new subreddit are meant to give users a “chance to engage directly and transparently with political advertisers around important political issues, and provide a line of sight into the campaigns and political organizations seeking your attention.”

Reddit’s ad policy already banned deceptive ads and required political ads to be manually reviewed for messaging and creative content. The platform only allows ads from within the United States, at the federal level, which means ads for state and local campaigns are not allowed.

In response to a user who asked if there are measures in place to prevent advertisers from increasing the size of their campaign to reach more users after the 24-hour open comment period is over, Reddit said “that activity will trigger a re-review of the ad and it would result in rejection.”

Political advertising policy updates by social platforms ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election have ranged from Facebook’s refusal to ban or fact-check political ads despite harsh criticism of the platform’s inaction during the 2016 election, to Google’s limits on demographic targeting and Twitter’s outright ban on political ads.

In an interview with Politico, Ben Lee, Reddit vice president and general counsel, suggested that Reddit is unlikely to adopt a policy like Twitter’s, saying that “just getting rid of political ads doesn’t strike me as the right approach in this context.”

Instead, he said Reddit’s update is “basically about two things that are pretty important to us: One is encouraging conversation around political ads and the second is transparency.”

Mighty Jaxx, which makes licensed collectibles, has raised 4.5 million Singapore dollars (about $3.2 million) in funding for MightyVerse, its platform for tech-enabled figures. Led by the investment arm of KB Financial Group, one of South Korea’s largest banks, the round also included participation from Greycroft Partners’ gaming fund GC VR Gaming Tracker Fund and returning investor SG Innovate.

This brings Mighty Jaxx’s total pre-Series A funding to about $4.7 million, with part of the new capital also earmarked to develop products from its new licensing deals with Hasbro and Nickelodeon.

Founded in 2012, Mighty Jaxx’s other licensing deals including partnerships with Cartoon Network, Warner Brothers, DC Comics, Looney Tunes and Sesame Street. It raised its first round of funding last July to develop MightyVerse. Products integrated with the platform have already launched, and Mighty Jaxx’s goal is to ship five million units this year, with its next big release, a collaboration with Toei Animation’s popular anime “One Piece,” to take place within the next two months.

The development of MightyVerse was incubated when Mighty Jaxx took part in Ubisoft’s Entrepreneurs’ Lab last year. Jackson Aw, founder and CEO of Mighty Jaxx, told TechCrunch that MightyVerse’s technology will help authenticate collectible figures, which can go for huge prices on the secondary market, by integrating technology during the manufacturing stage. The platform will also eventually include a social network for collectors.

MightyVerse collectibles are able to store information and digital assets, gamifying the collecting experience, Aw added. For example, when collectors buy a figure, “they will be able to unlock digital rewards hidden throughout the game, allowing us to create an incredibly immersive game experience in both the digital and physical worlds through the MightyVerse.”

Aw said the COVID-19 pandemic impacted Mighty Jaxx’s manufacturing and logistics, especially when factories closed in China, but partnerships with factories in other countries and companies like DHL have helped mitigate the impact, allowing its operations to return to “a level for optimum efficiency.”

The coronavirus pandemic, which has forced billions of people to stay home, has led to a surge in new downloads of several consumer and enterprise focused apps in the west. But in India, the biggest open market globally, things have taken a slightly different turn.

Daily downloads for several popular apps including TikTok, WhatsApp, Truecaller, Helo, Vmate, Facebook, Google Pay, and Paytm have either remained unchanged in the last three months or taken a dip, according to a TechCrunch analysis of figures provided by research firm Apptopia.

Additionally, several popular apps that offer in-app purchases have seen their revenue dramatically drop in the last four weeks as most companies in India recommended employees to work from home and New Delhi imposed a 21-day nationwide lockdown.

TikTok was downloaded 20.2 million times in India in a 31-day period ending April 12, down from 21.6 million times it was downloaded in the month of January, for instance. During the same period, WhatsApp’s download plummeted to 12 million from 17 million; Hotstar fell from 9.8 million to 3 million; and ByteDance’s Helo dropped from 10.5 million to 7.5 million.

For most of February, TikTok saw more than 700,000 downloads a day in India, peaking at 891,000. In the last one week, volume of daily downloads of the app has fallen below 450,000. WhatsApp’s figure has dropped from about 650,000 to below 250,000, according to Apptopia .

Aarogya Setu, an app launched by the Indian government to help people know if they have been in the vicinity of someone who has tested positive for coronavirus, is currently topping the chart in India with more than 780,000 downloads a day.

Tinder clocked $319,102 in in-app revenue on the App Store and Google Play Store in India between March 13 to April 12, down from $547,103 in January. Netflix’s in-app revenue fell from $285,562 to $192,154 during the same period. LinkedIn and YouTube also observed a decline.

One app that has seen its in-app revenue improve noticeably is Hotstar, which went from $173,253 to $329,675. Disney launched Disney+ atop Hotstar in India earlier this month.

Grocery delivery apps BigBasket, which raised $60 million last week, and Grofers have surged considerably, while Amazon, Flipkart, and Snapdeal that have halted taking non-essential orders in recent weeks have seen a decline in volume of daily downloads and active users on Android in India, according to marketing research firm SimilarWeb.

Zoom, a popular video chat app, has seen its daily downloads surge to over 500,000 in recent weeks, up from about 9,000 in early February. Ludo King, a popular game in Asian markets, has seen its daily download figure jump from about 150,000 in early February to over 450,000 in India in recent days.

As people stay at home, desktop usage has also increased in India, a mobile-first nation with nearly half a billion smartphone users.

“India has consistently seen mobile web browsing account for the heavy majority compared to the desktop, however from February to March, desktop usage increased its share of total visits to the top 100 sites by 1.6%. While this may seem small, it is 1.6% of 31.32 billion visits, so it is still rather significant,” a SimilarWeb representative told TechCrunch.