Year: 2020

More than six dozen startup founders, venture capitalists, and lobby groups in India have requested the government to grant them a “robust relief package” to help combat severe disruptions their businesses face due to the coronavirus outbreak.

In a joint letter to India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, startups requested the government to bankroll 50% of their workforce’s salaries for six months, provide interest-free loans from banks, waive rent for three months, and offer tax benefits among other things.

“Unfortunately, our startup companies across the nation are inherently young, less resilient, and most vulnerable. Many of them face likely devastation during this extraordinary economic downturn. At this dire moment, Indian startups need a robust relief package from the government, lest all our collective efforts of the past few years are in vain,” they wrote in a joint letter to the Prime Minister Narendra Modi late last month.

Among those who have signed the letter include Mohit Bhatnagar, a managing director at Sequoia Capital, which is advanced stages to close a fresh $1.3 billion fund for India and Southeast Asia, Gaurav Agarwal of online medicine store 1mg, Debjani Ghosh of industry body Nasscom, Karthik Reddy of Blume Ventures, Anand Lunia of India Quotient, Deepinder Goyal of Zomato, and Sriharsha Majety of Swiggy.

Some prominent startup founders and VCs including Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, and Ritesh Agarwal of Oyo, have also held a meeting with Piyush Goyal, the commerce minister in India, for a similar relief.

“We seek your urgent intervention to help ensure India’s startup ecosystem survives this crisis to emerge as a pillar of growth, employment and innovation to help drive India’s recovery. We need the startup ecosystem to survive in order to help the economy bounce back. We have enclosed herewith our submission for your kind consideration and we look forward to your support in this regard,” the joint letter reads.

The request for bailout comes amid a national lockdown in India that has disrupted countless businesses. New Delhi ordered a 21-day lockdown last month in a bid to curtail the spread of Covid-19.

Earlier this month, ten prominent VC and PE funds in India cautioned startups to brace for the “worst” months ahead.

“Assumptions from bull market financings or even from a few weeks ago do not apply. Many investors will move away from thinking about ‘growth at all costs’ to ‘reasonable growth with a path to profitability.’ Adjust your business plan and messaging accordingly,” they said.

As India, where the economy growth has been slowing for several quarters, scrambles to provide for its 1.3 billion citizens, the letter has drawn some criticism from industry figures.

“I can’t fathom how such a list gets made in a country of more than a billion people who are facing a crisis unlike any they’ve seen before. A significant majority of them daily wage earners who have no financial cushion or any idea where their next meal is going to come from. Let’s not even stray into health and the need for medical emergencies; just putting three square meals on the table a day is proving to be impossible for so many,” wrote Ashish K. Mishra in a column on The Morning Context.

“At this very moment, it is they who need the government’s support. Not fat cats with bloated, middling business models and venture capital funds whose begging bowls are now seemingly larger than their risk appetite,” he added.

Companies asking for a bailout is not limited to India. Oil giants have sought similar help from the U.S. President Donald Trump. But startups have largely been out of the picture. Brent Hoberman, chairman and co-founder of Founders Factory and Firstminute Capital, urged the UK government to provide some relief to startups last month. But the government has yet to do much about it, just ask Deliveroo, Graphcore and other big UK startups.

This afternoon, the law firm Fenwick & West hosted a virtual roundtable discussion with New York-based venture capitalists: Hadley Harris, a founding general partner with Eniac Ventures; Brad Svrluga, a cofounder and general partner of Primary Ventures; and Ellie Wheeler, a partner with Greylock.

Each investor is experiencing the coronavirus-driven lockdown in unique and even positive ways. Their professional experiences were very much in sync, however, and founders should know the bottom line is that they aren’t making brand-new bets at this very moment.

On the personal front, Wheeler is expecting her first child and said that being at home is helping prepare her the largely indoor life for all brand-new parents. Harris noted how nice it is to have lunch with his wife every day. Svrluga said that he has dined with his children for 31 consecutive nights, a treat he hasn’t enjoyed since the earliest days of his firstborn 12 years ago.

Professionally, things have been more of a struggle. First, all have been swamped in recent weeks, trying to assess which of their startups are the most at risk and which are worth salvaging and how to do this.

They are so busy, in fact, that none is writing checks right now to founders who might be trying to reach then for the first time. For his part, Harris takes particular issue with investors who’ve said throughout this crisis that they are still very open to pitches. “I’ve seen a lot of VCs talking about being open for business, and I’ve been pretty outspoken on Twitter that I think that’s largely bullshit and sends the wrong message to entrepreneurs.

“We’re completely swamped right now in terms of bandwidth” because of the work required by existing portfolio companies. Bandwidth, he added, “is our biggest constraint, not money.”

None thinks that meeting founders exclusively remotely is natural or normal or conducive to deal-making — not for their firms, in any case.

Wheeler noted that while “some accelerators and seed funds that are prolific have been doing this in some way, shape or form for a bit,” for “a lot of firms,” it’s just awkward to contemplate funding someone they have never met in person.

“The first part of the diligence process is the same, that’s not hard,” said Wheeler. “It’s meeting the team, visiting [the startup’s workspace], meeting our team. How do you do that [online]?” she asked. “How do you mimic what you pick up from spending time together [both] casually and formally? I don’t think people have figured that out,” she said, adding, “The longer this goes on, we’ll have to.”

Each is far less interested in sectors that aren’t highly relevant to this new world. Wheeler observed that many of people have discovered in recent weeks that “distributed teams and remote work are actually more viable and sustainable than people thought they were,” suggesting that related software is of continued interest to Greylock.

Svrluga said Primary Ventures is paying attention to software that enables more seamless remote work, too.  Telecommuting “has been a culture positive event for the 18 people at my firm,” he said. “We’ve found ways to come together and have virtual lunches. ” Still, he continued, while we have “25% of the right tooling” for entirely distributed workforces — he noted that “Zoom is great, Slack is great” – –  he sees the “rest” as “missing.

Indeed, software that could fill in the “rest of what the in-office experience is like and the randomness of connection,” would be particularly interesting to him, from the sound of things.

Naturally, the three were asked — by Fenwick attorney Evan Bienstock, who moderated the discussion — about downsizing, which each had noted was an invariably part of lengthening a startup’s runway right now. (As Svrluga offered, even “where companies have the support of existing investors — [meaning we’re]. opening the round and adding capital through a variety of structures depending on the company) — [we’re] almost never doing that without some concurrent reductions in team size. It sucks. People are losing their jobs. But to continue to run teams with the same organizational structure as 60 days ago, [which was] the most favorable environment for building industries, you can’t do it.”)

Each suggested that for startups that have to cut, management teams should cut deeply to keep from having to do it a second time. No one wants to do it.  But “no CEO has ever told me, ‘Dammit, we cut too far,'” said Svrluga, who has been through two downturns in his career.  In contrast, “at least 30%” of the CEOs he has known admitted to not going far enough to insulate their business while also keeping its culture intact.

The latter piece is an especially fragile one, suggested Wheeler.  “It’s so hard to do [layoffs] well.” Being forced to do them remotely makes it that much worse. As she noted, “Maintaining culture after a remote [reduction in force], no one leaned how to do that [before this pandemic struck];  it’s really hard.” But the “second cut hurts way more,” she continued. “It’s the second [layoff] that really throws people.”

As for what’s next, the VCs all said that they’ll be receptive soon to new ideas after spending the last few weeks working through layoffs and burn rates and projected runways and the new stimulus package that they’re trying to find a way to make work for their startups. “It’s will probably be a gradual thing,” said Harris. “I’m not sure what next week holds but feel free to ping me in a month and I’ll let [founders] know if I think it’s opening up.”

Working from home is easy for some and difficult for others, but one place it’s downright impossible is the International Space Station. So pandemic or no pandemic, the latest crew had to get themselves up there. They’ve just had a successful launch and arrival, but only after a protracted quarantine period.

To be clear, ISS crews are always quarantined prior to launch to make sure they don’t bring the flu up from a chance encounter, but given the coronavirus situation, this was a special occasion. Quarantine started in April and not even the crew’s families were allowed to be confined with them. Only essential personnel were allowed at launch.

I’ve asked NASA for more details and any extra measures they’ve taken regarding the coronavirus for this or future missions.

Expedition 63 will relieve the current crew after about a week of overlap, during which no doubt the ISS begins to feel fairly crowded.

This crew is special in that among its duties will be to welcome the astronauts aboard the first Commercial Crew mission to the ISS, who will arrive on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. That mission too is currently on schedule for May despite the pandemic.

Every crew mission for years has been done using Russia’s venerable Soyuz spacecraft. These have been updated continually for decades, but still feature more than a little of what might best be described as “repeatedly flight proven” technology.

The effort to engineer a state of the art spacecraft for crewed missions has lasted several years, coming down to SpaceX and rival Boeing in the home stretch. But while both have suffered repeated delays, Boeing has had numerous other failures that have pushed its launch out towards the end of the year and perhaps beyond. SpaceX, on the other hand, is ready to go.

The first commercial crew mission, whether it’s next month or a little later, will be the culmination of years of competition, and the first time a crew has gone to orbit in an American-made spacecraft since the Shuttle was retired. (Virgin Galactic has piloted its spacecraft to the edge of space but its human-rated craft is not an orbital vehicle.)

If all goes well, NASA’s Chris Cassidy and Roscosmos’s Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner will welcome the historic mission to the ISS soon.

Facebook today is launching a new feature called “Quiet Mode” that will allow you to minimize distractions by muting the app’s push notifications for a time frame you specify. The company announced the change as an update on its COVID Newsroom post, describing it as a way for users to set boundaries around how they spend their time on Facebook as they adjust to new routines and to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Facebook, you can either turn on or off Quiet Mode as needed or you can schedule to it run automatically at designated times. For example, if you work from home from 9 AM to 5 PM, you could set Quiet Mode to automatically run during your workday to reduce your temptation to waste time in the app.

If you try to launch Facebook during Quiet Mode, the app will remind you that you’ve set this time aside with the goal of limiting your time in the app, the company explains.

The controls for Quiet Mode will be found in a new section on Facebook where you can view other data about your time spent on Facebook’s platform. Here, you’ll be able to browse charts that show you the time you’ve spent on Facebook on a daily basis, a comparison of your daytime versus nighttime use, and another chart that lets you see how many times you opened the Facebook app each day.

Facebook introduced its first “time spent” charts back in 2018, but their appearance has changed to better match the style of this new “Your Time on Facebook” section, rolling out today. Facebook has also now added more analysis, including new week-over-week trends, the time of day charges, and the chart displaying the number of visits.

In addition, this section will include an option to enable a weekly report that will let you know how you’re managing your time. It will also link to the Activity Log of your own interactions across Facebook, including your reactions, comments and posts. And it will link out to other features that were previously buried in the Settings, including your News Feed Preferences and Notification Settings.

The former is where you designate which people you see first on your News Feed, which to Snooze, which to Unfollow and so on. The Notification Settings section, meanwhile, lets you turn on or off the push notifications and emails for specific updates from Facebook, like new comments, friend requests, tags, birthdays and more.

These aren’t new features, but they’ve been relocated here to make the new section more of a one-stop-shop for managing your time on Facebook.

Today’s changes are the latest in a series of efforts Facebook has made in recent years focused on users’ “digital well-being.”

The digital well-being movement pushes forward the idea that our smartphones and applications weren’t built with the mental health needs of their users in mind, but were rather designed to maximize the time we spend staring at screens. Users, having become aware of the addictiveness of our mobile devices, began to feel more negatively about screen time and their time-wasting apps.

Fearing backlash, tech companies — including Facebook, as well as the OS makers, Google and Apple — introduced more digital well-being features into their platforms. This includes the now built-in screen time controls that allow users to track and limit their time spent on phones and even the time spent in individual apps, like Facebook.

One iOS feature, in particular, may have posed a particular threat to Facebook: a new option introduced in iOS 12 that allowed users to more easily turn off app notifications right from the push notification itself. Apple even demoed how this could be used to silence Facebook’s notifications easily — an effort to redirect this growing negative user sentiment to specific apps on its iOS platform, rather than toward the platform that allowed apps to spam users with alerts in the first place.

Facebook’s response to this iOS feature, belatedly, is today’s launch of Quiet Mode. Instead of having its app notifications turned off entirely from the home screen of an iPhone, the option gives Facebook users more nuanced control. But it also means that Facebook retains permission to push its notifications during the hours Quiet Mode doesn’t run.

Facebook confirms Quiet Mode was in testing with a small percentage of Facebook users prior to today’s launch. It’s the same feature that reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong had spotted in March, in fact.

The feature is now rolling out to more people globally on iOS and will continue to do so over the next month or so, Facebook says. The rollout on Android will begin with testing in May and a broader release in June.

Facebook today is launching a new feature called “Quiet Mode” that will allow you to minimize distractions by muting the app’s push notifications for a time frame you specify. The company announced the change as an update on its COVID Newsroom post, describing it as a way for users to set boundaries around how they spend their time on Facebook as they adjust to new routines and to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Facebook, you can either turn on or off Quiet Mode as needed or you can schedule to it run automatically at designated times. For example, if you work from home from 9 AM to 5 PM, you could set Quiet Mode to automatically run during your workday to reduce your temptation to waste time in the app.

If you try to launch Facebook during Quiet Mode, the app will remind you that you’ve set this time aside with the goal of limiting your time in the app, the company explains.

The controls for Quiet Mode will be found in a new section on Facebook where you can view other data about your time spent on Facebook’s platform. Here, you’ll be able to browse charts that show you the time you’ve spent on Facebook on a daily basis, a comparison of your daytime versus nighttime use, and another chart that lets you see how many times you opened the Facebook app each day.

Facebook introduced its first “time spent” charts back in 2018, but their appearance has changed to better match the style of this new “Your Time on Facebook” section, rolling out today. Facebook has also now added more analysis, including new week-over-week trends, the time of day charges, and the chart displaying the number of visits.

In addition, this section will include an option to enable a weekly report that will let you know how you’re managing your time. It will also link to the Activity Log of your own interactions across Facebook, including your reactions, comments and posts. And it will link out to other features that were previously buried in the Settings, including your News Feed Preferences and Notification Settings.

The former is where you designate which people you see first on your News Feed, which to Snooze, which to Unfollow and so on. The Notification Settings section, meanwhile, lets you turn on or off the push notifications and emails for specific updates from Facebook, like new comments, friend requests, tags, birthdays and more.

These aren’t new features, but they’ve been relocated here to make the new section more of a one-stop-shop for managing your time on Facebook.

Today’s changes are the latest in a series of efforts Facebook has made in recent years focused on users’ “digital well-being.”

The digital well-being movement pushes forward the idea that our smartphones and applications weren’t built with the mental health needs of their users in mind, but were rather designed to maximize the time we spend staring at screens. Users, having become aware of the addictiveness of our mobile devices, began to feel more negatively about screen time and their time-wasting apps.

Fearing backlash, tech companies — including Facebook, as well as the OS makers, Google and Apple — introduced more digital well-being features into their platforms. This includes the now built-in screen time controls that allow users to track and limit their time spent on phones and even the time spent in individual apps, like Facebook.

One iOS feature, in particular, may have posed a particular threat to Facebook: a new option introduced in iOS 12 that allowed users to more easily turn off app notifications right from the push notification itself. Apple even demoed how this could be used to silence Facebook’s notifications easily — an effort to redirect this growing negative user sentiment to specific apps on its iOS platform, rather than toward the platform that allowed apps to spam users with alerts in the first place.

Facebook’s response to this iOS feature, belatedly, is today’s launch of Quiet Mode. Instead of having its app notifications turned off entirely from the home screen of an iPhone, the option gives Facebook users more nuanced control. But it also means that Facebook retains permission to push its notifications during the hours Quiet Mode doesn’t run.

Facebook confirms Quiet Mode was in testing with a small percentage of Facebook users prior to today’s launch. It’s the same feature that reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong had spotted in March, in fact.

The feature is now rolling out to more people globally on iOS and will continue to do so over the next month or so, Facebook says. The rollout on Android will begin with testing in May and a broader release in June.

Starship Technologies has launched a robot food delivery service in Tempe, Arizona, as part of the autonomous delivery startup’s expansion plans following a $40 million funding round announced last August.

Starship Technologies, which launched in 2014 by Skype co-founders, Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, has been ramping up commercial services in the past year, including a plan to expand to 100 universities by late summer 2021.

Now, with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing traditional restaurants to close and placing more pressure on gig economy workers, Starship Technologies has an opportunity to accelerate that growth.

Tempe isn’t the only new areas added amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Starship added a grocery delivery service in Washington D.C in late March and expanded to Irvine, Calif. It also expanded its service area in Milton Keynes, U.K., where it has been operating since 2018. The company said it plans to add more cities in the coming weeks.

“The demand for contactless delivery has expanded exponentially in recent weeks,” Ryan Tuohy, who heads up business development at Starship Technologies, said in a statement. “We’re looking forward to serving the Tempe community as more people are looking for ways to support local businesses while spending more time at home. Our robots are doing autonomous deliveries in five countries and we’re grateful that our robots can make life a little bit easier for everyone.”

The autonomous robots, which can carry up to 20 pounds, could find a new customer base as people seek out ways to get groceries and food without having to visit in person. Users place their order via the Starship Deliveries app and drop a pin where they want the delivery sent. The robot’s progress can be watched via an interactive map. Once the robot arrives, users receive an alert, and can then meet and unlock it through the app. The robots, which can cross streets, climb curbs, travel at night and operate in both rain and snow, are monitored remotely by Starship. Human operators can take control of the robots if needed.

In Tempe, the delivery service will initially employ more than 30 autonomous, on-demand robots between 10:30 a.m. and 8:30 p.m. daily in a geofenced area that includes several restaurants and a residential area. The service area is located about two miles from Arizona State University. Local residents are able to use the app to order from three restaurants, including Fate Brewing Company, Tempe City Tacos and Venezia’s Pizza of “Breaking Bad” fame.

Starship Technologies said it will expand the Tempe service area and add more restaurants and grocery stores soon.

And while COVID-19 has caused universities to close, Starship said it is continuing delivery services on multiple college campuses across the U.S. where international and grad students are residing.

It’s a brutal time for marijuana startups. I’m hearing some are raising at 1/5th of their 2019 valuation amidst rampant competition, tall taxes, and slow legalization. The struggles for marijuana’s best-known startup, delivery service Eaze, continue as today it’s losing one of its top partners. $75 million-funded weed brand empire Caliva has dropped Eaze in favor of launching its own delivery system.

By partnering with Hypur banking to solve the marijuana payments legality issue, Caliva will be able to accept contactless mobile payments unlike Eaze that usually requires customers pay in cash. Caliva buyers won’t have to worry about trips to the ATM, especially now during COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders, which the startup expects will boost their average order volume. Combined with verticalizing delivery in-house plus its retail and wholesale operations, Caliva hopes it can grow its margins and survive this long winter for weed startups.

“Our mission at Caliva has always been to provide safe and easy access to plant-based solutions for health, happiness and healing,” said Caliva CEO Dennis O’Malley. “Together with Hypur, we are proud to offer our customers safe, compliant and convenient cashless payment options to improve and modernize their purchasing experience.” It hasn’t been so easy for Eaze, though.

Back in January, we reported that Eaze was in trouble, having suffered unannounced layoffs and executive departures. It burned cash on billboards, and never launched the services of a startup it acquired. There were questions about data security, and weed brands dropped Eaze due to delayed payments. It was almost out of money and in danger of vaporizing. It luckily managed to secure a $15 million bridge round to keep it alive plus a $20 million Series D in February just before the COVID hit the fan, though I dread to think of the terms of that funding.

The plan for Eaze was to verticalize, buying and developing brands that it could sell through its existing delivery service to up its margins. Now it’s seeing former partner Caliva do the reverse, launching a delivery service to sell its own Fun Uncle, Deli, and Caliva brands as well as distribute other vape, edible, and flower brands like Dosist and Kiva. Its menu breadth to attract customers and in-house brands to drive profits could be a winning combo. After limited pilots in SoCal, Caliva delivery is launching in LA and the Bay Area.

Unfortunately, traditional payment processors usually refuse to work with marijuana companies for fear of legal repercussions. That’s why most delivery services can’t accept credit or debit cards, or do so through sketchy legal workarounds that have led payment providers to be sued. Others like CanPay only offer ACH transfers, while Square only works with CBD sellers. “We spent time researching and evaluating all platforms that accept cannabis payments in the U.S., and found that Hypur has the best security, compliance and consumer experience” O’Malley tells me.

400-person Caliva is now trying to raise a Series B, but may experience tough headwinds with shelter-in-place orders in effect in states where marijuana is legal. Stiff taxes on marijuana have meanwhile helped the black market continue to thrive, as California’s $3.1 billion in legal 2019 sales were overshadowed by an estimated $8.7 billion in illegal sales. Faster delivery and simpler payments could help. But enthusiasm for the industry has dwindled following the initial flood of entrants sought to exploit the end of prohibition. Is the Green Rush over?

Assent Compliance, a company that helps large manufacturers like GE and Rolls Royce manage complex supply chains through an online data exchange, announced a new tool this week that lets any company, whether they’re a customer or not, upload bills of materials and see on a map where COVID-19 is having an impact on their supply chain.

Company co-founder Matt Whitteker, says the Ottawa startup focuses on supply chain data management, which means it has the data and the tooling to develop a data-driven supply chain map based on WHO data identifying COVID hotspots. He believes that his is the only company to have done this.

“We’re the only ones that have taken supply chain data and applied it to this particular pandemic. And it’s something that’s really native to our platform. We have all that data on hand — we have location data for suppliers. So it’s just a matter of applying that with third party data sources (like the WHO data), and then extracting valuable business intelligence from it,” he said.

If you want to participate, you simply go to the company website and fill out a form. A customer success employee will contact you and walk you through the process of uploading your data to the platform. Once they have your data, they generate a map showing the parts of the world where your supply chain is most likely to be disrupted, identifying the level of risk based on your individual data.

The company captures supply chain data as part of the act of doing business with 1000 customers and 500,000 suppliers currently on their platform. “When companies are manufacturing products they have what’s called a bill of materials, kind of like a recipe. And companies upload their bill of materials that basically outlines all their parts, components and commodities, and who they get them from, which basically represents their supply chain,” Whitteker explained.

After the company uploads the bill of materials, Assent opens a portal for the companies to exchange data, which might be tax forms, proof of sourcing or any kind of information and documentation the manufacturer needs to comply with legal and regulatory rules around procurement of a given part.

They decided to start building the COVID-19 map application when they recognized that this was going to have the biggest supply chain disruption the world has seen since World War II. It took about a month to build it. It went into Beta last week with customers and over 350 signed up in the first two hours. This week, they made the tool generally available to anyone, even non-customers, for free.

The company was founded in 2016 and raised $220 million, according to Whitteker.

Seeqc, a startup that is part of a relatively new class of quantum computing companies that is looking at how to best use classical computing to manage quantum processors, today announced that it has raised $5 million from M Ventures, the strategic corporate venture capital arm of Merck, the German pharmaceutical giant. Merck will be a strategic partner for Seeqc and help it to develop its R&D efforts to develop useful application-specific quantum computers.

With this, New York State-based Seeqc has now raised a total of $11 million, including a recent $6.8 million seed round that included BlueYard Capital, Cambium, NewLab and the Partnership Fund for New York City.

Since developing new pharmaceuticals is an obvious use case for quantum computing, it makes sense that large pharmaceutical companies are trying to get ahead of their competitors by making strategic investments in companies like Seeqc.

The company is a spin-out of Hypres, a company that specializes in building superconductor integrated circuits. Hypres itself had raised about $100 million in total and notes that much of the work it did on building its solutions are now part of Seeqc.

As a company spokesperson told me, the idea behind Seeqc is to bring today’s room-sized quantum computers down to a more manageable scale. It’s doing so by combining its (and Hypres’) expertise in building superconductors with a hybrid approach to combines analog and digital. This includes digital qubit control and readout, together with the company’s own proprietary chip technology that integrates classical and quantum circuits into a hybrid system (and by default, quantum computers are hybrid systems that need a classical computer to control them).

The company argues that co-locating the classical compute with the quantum processor is critical to achieving the best performance. And since it owns and operates its own fab to build these chips, Seeqc also believes that it is one of the few companies that has the right infrastructure and expertise in place to design, test and build these superconductors.

“The ‘brute force’ or labware approach to quantum computing contemplates building machines with thousands or even millions of qubits requiring multiple analog cables and, in some cases, complex CMOS readout/control for each qubit, but that doesn’t scale effectively as the industry strives to deliver business-applicable solutions,” said John Levy, co-chief executive officer at Seeqc. “With Seeqc’s hybrid approach, we utilize the power of quantum computers in a digital system-on-a-chip environment, offering greater control, cost reduction and with a massive reduction in energy, introducing a more viable path to commercial scalability.”

The company believes that its approach can cut the cost of today’s large-scale quantum computers to 1/400th. All of this, of course, is still a while out and for now, the company will use the new funding to build a small-scale version of its system.

“We’re excited to be working with a world leading team and fab on one of the most pressing issues in modern quantum computing,” says Owen Lozman, Vice President at M Ventures. “We recognize that scaling the current generations of superconducting quantum computers beyond the noisy intermediate-scale quantum era will require fundamental changes in qubit control and wiring. Building on deep expertise in single flux quantum technologies, Seeqc has a clear, and importantly cost-efficient, pathway towards addressing existing challenges and disrupting analog, microwave-controlled architectures.”

Seeqc is, of course, not the only startup working on more efficient quantum control schemes. Quantum Machines, for example, also recently raised quite a bit of venture capital for its hardware/software quantum orchestration platform that also includes a custom processor, though that company’s overall approach is quite different from Seeqc’s.

I’ve been infected with the novel coronavirus for at least three weeks.

It started with my partner coughing and feeling very tired. A couple of days later, I started showing the same symptoms.

As a medical professional, he was required to get tested and I followed suit within days. We both tested positive and have been recovering at home since.

The symptoms have been up and down over the past two weeks. After the first few days, the mild cough gave way to an unrelenting one and the feeling of being tired gave way to being completely drained at all hours. My partner completely lost his sense of smell.

A week into having COVID-19, we thought we’d turned a corner, only for more symptoms to manifest. The virus had made its way to my GI tract, adding nausea and an inability to keep my head up without throwing up. Today, two weeks after the first bouts of coughing, we both feel significantly better, but continue to self-isolate as instructed.

Luckily for both of us, we have now been symptom-free for 72 hours, and the symptoms we did have were relatively mild throughout. The experience of getting tested — mandated for my partner to be able to go back to working at the hospital — could not have been easier. I showed up at the hospital and was greeted by a doctor and two nurses. They took a sample and advised me on how best to self-isolate for the next few weeks. The whole thing took less than 15 minutes, and it was only 24 hours later that I got the call confirming that I had tested positive.

My employer has been supportive throughout. They’ve connected me to support services, offered a number of leave options if I were to take time off to deal with the virus, constantly checked in on my prognosis and even sent a work-from-home toolkit complete with a giant monitor, keyboard and mouse. Throughout the self-isolation period, I have been able to work from home — a relatively seamless transition given that my job has long enabled me to work from home when needed. If I needed further healthcare, I can count on the many telehealth options available through my insurance.

What all this cemented is how incredibly fortunate I am, unlike the millions of Americans now losing their jobs. While others have been unable to get tested, my entire testing experience was painless. I have the luxury of being able to work from home. I’m quarantined with my partner and my puppy, so I haven’t gotten lonely. Because I’m still getting my paycheck, I don’t have to worry about making the next rent payment. I’m able to have grocery and takeout deliveries left at my doorstep. If I were to take a turn for the worse, a major hospital is just down the street.

This epidemic has laid bare the incredible differences in privilege within our society, including within tech. Long celebrated as representing the future of work, today thousands of gig workers have lost their main source of income, with no paycheck to count on and no option to work from home. Others, from delivery to warehouse workers, have no choice but to work, even at increased risk of contracting the disease themselves. Thousands in the Bay Area who live alone now risk being completely socially isolated as we continue to be on lockdown, while others with kids and large families now worry about taking care of their children while also working full-time jobs.

Not to mention that the homeless of our cities have no way to self-isolate even if they wanted to. Crowded homeless shelters — to the extent they were available — are no longer an option.

This is a moment where all of us in tech have to come together to help even the scales. Thousands of tech workers are already donating their time and resources, but more can be done:

• Now is the time to max out our employee match programs to make every dollar we give count more.
• Donations are needed by Frontline Foods, an effort that started in the Bay Area to provide front-line workers with food and is now scaling globally. More generally food banks are seeing an exponential rise in the demand for their services, with Second Harvest being one to flag in the Bay Area.
• If you know a co-worker with kids, offer to babysit over video for an hour or two. This can be as simple as playing a game on Houseparty together if they’re 12 or older, or helping them with a lesson their parents have found particularly hard to get through.
• A lot of us are anxious about getting the virus, so you can only imagine how the elderly and those with underlying health conditions feel. Give your grandparent a call, or donate your time and resources to organizations like Meals on Wheels to make sure they’re getting the nutrition they need to get through this.
• Many local businesses may close because of the pandemic. Support them by ordering takeout and other delivery services. If you prefer to donate directly, many cities have created funds to provide relief to impacted small businesses, like the Silicon Valley Strong Fund in San Jose.

For the foreseeable future, my only visits to the outside world will be — with mask and gloves on — to walk my dog around the corner. I’ll have plenty of time to reflect on how lucky I am, and the privilege guilt will follow. I’m guessing I’m not alone. Let’s channel our guilt into something good.

The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of his employer.