Year: 2020

We’re already entering into a healthcare crisis due to the global coronavirus pandemic, and creative solutions to address shortfalls in supplies, protective equipment and more are being developed to help where possible. A new startup, with a founding team including an emergency room doctor, a crisis response expert and a public health researcher is hoping that its novel approach can help address the impending lack of space that hospitals and health care facilities will encounter.

Jupe is a brand new venture launching today that has developed rapidly-deployable ‘Health’ rest, recovery and intensive care shelters for use in combatting the ongoing global COVID-19 crises. The company says that its mobile spaces can be produced at around 1/30th the cost of a standard hospital room, and shipped anywhere using existing logistics infrastructure.

The Jupe mobile shelters come in three distinct versions, including a Rest unit equipped with beds for providing medical professionals working on the front lines with a place to rest and sleep; a Care version that includes an off-grid solar power/battery-powered solution for isolation of patients who don’t require critical care; and a Plus option that is essentially a self-contained ICU for those patients that require critical care, including readings for use with ventilators and specialized personal protective equipment.

Founders Dr. Jeff Wilson (founder of modular hospitality housing company Kasita) and Cameron Blizzard, along with core advisors Dr. Esther Choo (who also led the #GetMePPE hashtag campaign for sourcing protective equipment for healthcare workers) have obviously moved quickly to get this initiative up and running, but they are already building some of their solutions in Texas. They’re starting with the simpler Rest and Care models, and will be working to produce the more sophisticated Jupe Plus mobile ICUs as soon as possible.

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In terms of portability, Jupe says that its solution can be flat-packed, and stacked for transport of up to 24 units at a time on a 40-foot flatbed trailer, towed by a heady duty pickup truck. It says it can load as many as 500,000 on just one cargo container ship for overseas transport, too. They use a common base or ‘chassis’ and readily available materials, and the company says that one person can install a single unit in just “minutes.”

While it will take time for Jupe to spin up its engineering and supply chain, the company’s founders note that based on current expert predictions about even a successfully flattened curve of COVID-19 spread, there will be a need for more critical care beds than are available for the foreseeable future in most regions. Originally, the company hadn’t planned to debut so soon, and was instead working on providing modular housing for people requiring shelter after natural disasters, or as an aid in anti-homelessness measures, but it has sped up its efforts to build and ship.

The company’s El Paso, Texas manufacturing facility are currently working on its first 24 prototype units, but it hopes to scale production in part by leveraging the available automotive manufacturing supply chain in the area. The Jupe units will sell for between $14,500 and $78,000 for the Rest and Care units respectively, with different configurations affecting the cost, and the ICUs will be available for $99,000 and above. Jupe tells me that it will be offering Health units at cost, with no margins, including cost of delivery – the team is working on a volunteer basis, and it’s been bootstrapped financially by the founders to date, with the startup seeking donations and additional investment as a means of continuing to fund operations and production.

Kimchuk, a medical and military electronics maker, has been hit by data-stealing ransomware, TechCrunch has learned.

The Danbury, Conn.-based manufacturer, which builds electronics for medical equipment, telecoms systems, and energy grids, also makes nuclear modules for the Navy, work that often requires security clearance.

Its systems were infected and knocked offline earlier this month by DoppelPaymer, a newer strain of ransomware that exfiltrates data out of an infected network before encrypting user files. If a victim doesn’t pay the ransom to decrypt their files, the DoppelPaymer group will begin publishing the contents of their victim’s network.

When the company did not pay, the hackers began publishing portions of Kimchuk’s network.

The files included the company’s payroll records, broker approvals, and purchase orders. None of the files we reviewed contained information marked as classified. But several documents contained order details of one of its customers’ nuclear divisions.

It isn’t known precisely when the ransomware attack happened. But a screenshot of a directory of stolen files seen by TechCrunch puts the most recent file at March 5, suggesting the attack happened on or around then.

TechCrunch contacted Kimchuk for comment. Kimchuk chief executive Jim Marquis responded to our email — without taking us off the email chain — instructing his human resources and operations chiefs to “not respond” to our email or questions.

“If he persists, state ‘no comment’,” Marquis wrote. “How did he learn of this?”

We followed up, asking Marquis if he wanted to provide a fuller statement. TechCrunch did not hear back.

Given the breach happened on a government supply chain, we contacted the Dept. of Defense. When reached, a spokesperson did not comment.

Kimchuk is the latest company to be hit by the DoppelPaymer ransomware. Earlier this month, Visser, a defense contractor and parts manufacturer — which has Tesla and SpaceX as customers — was also hit by DoppelPaymer and had files published online after the company declined to pay the ransom.

The DoppelPaymer ransomware group has been active since the middle of last year, drawing inspiration from other data-stealing ransomware, like Maze, said Brett Callow, a threat analyst and ransomware expert at security firm Emsisoft. But unlike the Maze, he said, DoppelPaymer’s ransom note does not say that data has been stolen. Instead, it’s only disclosed if the company goes to the ransomware’s website to pay.

“Ransomware incidents should be treated as data breaches until it can be established they are not,” said Callow.

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CRM has for years been primarily a story of software to manage customer contacts, data to help agents do their jobs, and tools to manage incoming requests and outreach strategies. Now to add to that we’re starting to see a new theme: apps to help agents track how they work and to work better.

Today comes the latest startup in that category, a Dutch company called Kaizo, which uses AI and gamification to provide feedback on agents’ work, tips on what to do differently, and tools to set and work to goals — all of which can be used remotely, in the cloud. Today, it is announcing $3 million in a seed round of funding co-led by Gradient — Google’s AI venture fund — and French VC Partech. 

And along with the seed round, Kaizo (which rebranded last week from its former name, Ticketless) is announcing that Christoph Auer-Welsbach, a former partner at IBM Ventures, is joining the company as a co-founder, alongside founder Dominik Blattner. 

Although this is just a seed round, it’s coming after a period of strong growth for the company. Kaizo has already 500 companies including Truecaller, SimpleSurance, Miro, CreditRepairCloud, Justpark, Festicket and Nmbrs are using its software, covering “thousands” of customer support agents, which use a mixture of free and paid tools that integrate with established CRM software from the likes of Salesforce, Zendesk and more.

Customer service might feel like the last thing on people’s minds at the moment, but it is actually timely and relevant to our current state in responding to and living with the coronavirus.

People are spending much more time at home, and are turning to the internet and remote services to get what they need, and in many cases are finding that their best-laid plans are now in freefall. Both of these are driving a lot of traffic to sites and primarily customer support centers, which are getting overwhelmed with people reaching out for help.

(And that’s before you consider how customer support teams might be impacted by coronavirus and the many mandates we’ve had to stay away from work.)

“In our current social climate, customer support is an integral part of a company’s stability and growth that has embraced remote work to meet the demands of a globalized customer-base,” said Dominik Blattner, founder of Kaizo, in a statement. “With the rise of support teams utilizing a digital workplace, providing standards to measure an agent’s performance has never been more important. KPIs provide these standards, quantifying the success, achievement and contribution of each team member.”

On a more general level, Kaizo is also changing the conversation around how to improve one’s productivity. There has been a larger push for “quantified self” platforms, which has very much played out both in workplaces and in our personal lives, but a lot of services to track performance have focused on both managers and employees leaning in with a lot of input. That means if they don’t set aside the time to do that, the platforms never quite work the way they should.

This is where the AI element of Kaizo plays a key role, by taking on the need to proactively report into a system.

“This is how we’re distinct,” Auer-Welsbach said in an interview. “Normally KPIs are top-down. They are about people setting goals and then reporting they’ve done something. This is a bottom-up approach. We’re not trying to change employees’ behaviour. We plug into whatever environment they are using, and then our tool monitors. The employee doesn’t have to report or measure anything. We track clicks on the CRM, ticketing, and more, and we analyse all that.” He notes that Kaizo is looking at up to 50 datapoints in its analysis.

“We’re excited about Kaizo’s novel approach to applying AI to existing ticket data from platforms like Zendesk and Salesforce to optimize the customer support workflow,” said Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Gradient Ventures, in a statement. “Using machine learning, Kaizo understands which behaviors in customer service tickets lead to better outcomes for customers and then guides agents to replicate that using ongoing game mechanics. Customer support and service platforms today are failing to leverage data in the right way to make the life of agents easier and more effective. The demand Kaizo has seen since they launched on the Zendesk Marketplace shows agents have been waiting for such a solution for some time.”

Kaizo is not the only startup to have identified the area of building new services to improve the performance of customer support teams. Assembled earlier this month also raised $3.1 million led by Stripe for what it describes as the “operating system” for customer support.

Cannabis giant Leafly cut 91 staffers this week in response to the coronavirus outbreak. The company said in a released statement that the workforce reduction allows the company to be financially self-sufficient while still being able to operate during the global pandemic.

The 91 employees represented 39% of the company’s workforce and came from all departments within the company. In January, the company cut 54 employees (18% of its workforce at the time). Then in February, the company closed its operation in Germany.

Since its launch in 2010, Leafly has become a leading source of cannabis information for consumers, retailers, and brands alike. The company is a wholly independent company after spinning out from Privateer Holdings in 2019. The company is lead by Tim Leslie, a former Amazon executive. The three founders, Cy Scott, Scott Vickers, Brian Wansolich, left to start Headset, a startup focused on providing the cannabis industry with advanced analytics.

“We’re heartbroken to have to let so many talented people go in such an uncertain time,” said CEO Tim Leslie in a released statement. “Although Leafly continues to grow and rapidly deploy pickup and delivery services for retailers and brands across North America, COVID-19 has rocked global financial markets and put further capital investments we were expecting on pause. This workforce reduction will allow us to be financially self-sufficient so we can continue to help consumers and patients learn about and order cannabis online while providing cannabis retailers and brands the services they need during this global crisis.

The company says that the financial crisis caused by Covid-19 put committed investments into Leafly on hold; thus, the company turned to job cuts to ensure the company can operate without outside investments.

After the cuts, Leafly Holdings employs 143 employees, with half focusing on the company’s online ordering technology. The company says it will continue to focus on content and building tools for retailers and brands.

Open science platform and publisher Frontiers wants to make sure that efforts by researchers to pursue science-based solutions to the global coronavirus pandemic, and learn more about the virus and the COVID-19 disease it causes, find the funding they need. They launched a new portal to do just that, which is updated daily, and lists open funding calls, including the grant type, deadline, organization behind it, and specific area it supports.

Sources include governments, non-profits, and commercial companies, and the listings link directly to the calls for easy application. This dashboard presents one fo the best organized ways for anyone with a research project related to COVID-19 to find an appropriate funding source, with all relevant top-line information presented up front.

For anyone looking to supplement their existing knowledge of ongoing coronavirus and COVID-19 research, Frontiers is also offering a portal called the ‘Coronavirus Knowledge Hub,’ which includes links to the top research on SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 symptoms, treatments, transmission and much more.

It’s crucial right now that research not go unfunded, since there’s a global urgency around the investigation into, and development of, potential solutions and treatments around COVID-19. There’s still a lot we just don’t know about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, even leaving aside the many potential treatments under development – basic research about its genetic makeup, mutation patterns and durability are still pictures we need filled in to develop lasting and effective methods of prevention and protection.

A resource like this, which connects the dots between this work and available sources of funding, is incredibly valuable. Potential funders should get in touch with Frontiers via their submission form if they have a way to get much-needed resources to scientists working on this problem.

Yaguara, a Denver-based startup that wants to help e-commerce companies understand their customers better to deliver more meaningful experiences, announced a $7.2 million seed investment today.

The round was led by Foundation Capital with participation from Gradient Ventures, Rainfall Ventures and Zelkova. It also had help from some e-commerce heavy hitters including Warby Parker, Harry’s and Allbirds.

Yaguara CEO Jonathan Smalley was working at an agency building specialized cloud tools for online businesses when he recognized there was a need to pull data together into a single place and help companies understand their customer’s behavior better.

“Yaguara is based on integrating data and having all their data in the right place. For us, it started with several dozen tools from performance marketing to your actual e-commerce data to your fulfillment and unit economic data — bringing that all into one place letting them see their data in real time.”

“Then our platform serves predictive and prescriptive insights and recommendations to individual users across your teams, so they can drive specific outcomes across the organization based on that unified data set,” Smalley explained.

They build that data set by connecting to a variety of popular tools to help understand what’s happening across the customer lifecycle, whether that’s customer acquisition through Facebook or Google ads or understanding shopping cart abandonment data or how often the customer has returned to buy again, all of which help build a better picture of the customer.

While this may sound like a customer data platform (CDP), Smalley says it’s actually more than that. While the CDP provides the pipeline to your data sources like Yaguara, it doesn’t stop there. He says it reduces the complexity of helping front-line marketing personnel access and query that data without having to know SQL or R or have a technical intermediary to understand the data.

While the company is young it already has 250 e-commerce customers using the platform. With the new infusion of cash, it should be able to bring in more employees, build more data connectors and continue working to build out the platform.

The hospitality and travel industry may be reeling, but Airbnb is still doing what it can to support the global effort to fight the spread of the coronavirus causing a worldwide pandemic. The company announced today that it will provide “free or subsidized housing” for 100,000 people working as frontline healthcare, relief for first response professionals focused on stemming the COVID-19 crisis.

Airbnb’s effort will work by allowing Hosts on its platform to opt-in to making their space available, with any fees that Airbnb would normally charge for using its platform waived for those who participate. The program will include new protocols around cleanliness that are designed to keep spaces safe for those workers who use it, and Airbnb will be working with the Red Cross, the International Rescue Committee, the International Medical Corps and other non-profit groups to help allocated space where it’s needed most.

Already, Airbnb had been operating smaller scale programs in both Italy and France to address the crises there, with 6,000 hosts across both countries making their spaces available. This extended program was partly the result of many requests from hosts to the platform about how they could volunteer their spaces and help with the effort, and Airbnb will be making it possible for hosts to offer their spaces for free if they want – though even those who still want to participate but keep a stay charge in place won’t be charged any fees by Airbnb itself.

The advanced cleaning protocols that Airbnb has put in place are developed to align with guidance from leading national health authorities, including the CDC in the U.S., and Airbnb says they will evolve as updated guidance becomes available. Some of the enhanced rules to help try to ensure safety include guidance that there should be a minimum of 72 hours between stays, as well as maintaining proper social distancing between hosts and any guests.

Airbnb also has a fund established for those who want to provide monetary support, with 100 percent of all proceeds going to nonprofits working on COVID-19 relief. These funds will help further subsidize housing costs for any responders in the case of hosts making housing available at a fee.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

This morning we’re taking a look at Slack’s customer growth in the current moment compared to what we know about it historically. What we’d like to know is whether Slack’s current boom in customer growth is unprecedented for its business or if the company is merely returning to prior levels of logo growth.

As with any modern software (SaaS) business, Slack’s revenue growth doesn’t only come from net-new customer adds; Slack also grows its top line by selling more of its service to folks who already have a paid account. Think of it like this: Slack can add revenue by selling new customer Alex And Friends Ltd. a ten seat license or it can add revenue by selling Alex Actually Has No Friends Inc. another 5,000 seats to its existing account. We’re looking at the first case today.

Recently Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield updated the world on its his company’s reported growth. Slack told the world via an SEC filing that it had added 7,000 net new customers in its current quarter, ahead of the preceding few quarters in which it had added around 5,000. Last night, in a thread worth reading if you want to better understand what it’s like to run a company in chaotic times, Butterfield noted that the figure had risen to 9,000.

Of course, we’re only seeing part of Slack’s accelerated growth in light of the remote work push being made in the face of rising COVID-19 infections; Slack is also selling more of its service to existing customers, per the CEO. But let’s go find what we can about these net customer adds and see if Slack is setting new records or just getting its groove back. At the end, we’ll tie this all back to the growth in demand that remote work startups have seen in recent weeks.

Earlier this year, personalized news aggregation app Flipboard expanded into local news. The feature brought local news, sports, real estate, weather, transportation news and more to 23 cities across the U.S. Today, Flipboard is bringing local news to 12 more U.S. metros and is adding critical coronavirus local coverage to all of the 35 supported locales.

The 12 new metros include the following:  Baltimore, Charlotte, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Orlando, Raleigh, Salt Lake City, St. Louis, and Tampa Bay.

They join the 23 cities that were already supported:  Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver and Washington, D.C.

To offer local news in its app, Flipboard works with area partners, big and small, like The Plain Dealer’s Cleveland.com, the Detroit Free Press, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It’s now added local news service Patch and ProPublica, including its Local Reporting Network partners and its collaborative journalism project Electionland, to the list of partners.

Patch alone is putting out over 200 local coronavirus stories per day. Meanwhile, the ProPublica Local Reporting Network funds and jointly publishes yearlong investigative projects with 23 local news organizations across the U.S. The Electionland initiative reports on problems that disenfranchise eligible voters like misinformation, changing voting laws and rules, voter harassment, equipment failures, and long lines at the polls.

To determine if a user should be shown local news, based on a user’s IP address — not a precise location — the app may recommend stories relevant to local audiences. It will also offer the Local sections inside the Explore tab in the Flipboard app. Once added, users can then browse their local news alongside other content they’re interested in, across a variety of topics.

At present, there are two main areas of interest to news readers — the COVID-19 outbreak and the 2020 Election, both of which are now offered in the local sections. In addition to understanding the current state of the pandemic on a global and national level, Flipboard readers in the supported areas will be able to track how the COVID-19 outbreak is impacting where they live. This could include coverage of things like local ordinances, school closings, shelter-in-place laws, number of cases and deaths, testing resources, and more.

“Understanding the decisions state and local governments make and their impact on the community is not only important, but gives people a greater connection to their local leaders and the media,” said Marci McCue, VP of Content and Communications at Flipboard. “For instance, as a local resident you may want coverage from national newspapers about the coronavirus outbreak, but even more importantly is a local source that tells you where you can get tested and measures local leaders are taking that impact your daily life,” she noted.

The addition of coronavirus special coverage at a local level, aggregated from across publishers, means readers will be able to track stories without having to hop around different sites or apps from area newspapers or broadcasters.

For Flipboard’s business, adding local news allows advertisers to target against user interests, which may now include a city’s metro region as one of those interests.

Flipboard’s mobile app today reaches 145 million users per month. Local news is available in the supported metros across both iOS and Android.

Huawei has unveiled new flagship phones today, the P40, P40 Pro and P40 Pro+. These are beautiful phones with great specs. But it would only take you a few minutes to realize that there’s something odd with them. There is no Gmail, no Google Maps and no Google Play Store.

Last year, the U.S. government restricted U.S. firms from maintaining a business relationship with Huawei. Even though Huawei can only release Google-free phones, the company isn’t standing still. It is still releasing flagship phones at a normal pace. Some day, Huawei might be able to leverage Google’s services again, after all.

Huawei uses the open-source version of Android without all of the core features that are tied to Google services. The company has its own store of apps and tries to compensate the lack of Google apps with Huawei-branded apps.

In China, Google services are blocked by the Great Firewall anyway. But if you don’t live in China, I wouldn’t recommend buying a P40 phone. A phone without Android or iOS leads to a ton of limitations.

But let’s talk about the new phones anyway as Huawei has released some interesting phones in the past. Like previous devices in the P series, Huawei has packed some impressive camera sensors in the device.

On the P40 Pro and P40 Pro+, the display is curved around all four edges, including the top and bottom edges of the device. Last year’s P30 featured a teardrop notch at the center of the device. This year, Huawei relies on a new hole-punch design in the top left corner. In some ways, it reminds me of recent Samsung phones.

There are three different devices — the P40, the P40 Pro and the P40 Pro+. Huawei has yet to talk about pricing and availability. The P40 has a 6.1-inch display while the two “pro” models have a 6.58-inch display. That display has a 90 Hz refresh rate.

As always, Huawei offers plenty of colorful options for the back of the device. Some finishes are matte just like on the iPhone 11 Pro. You can also get a black or white matte ceramic back on the P40 Pro+.

It is powered by Huawei’s own system on a chip, the Kirin 990, and it works on 5G networks. Compared to last year, the CPU is 23% faster and the GPU is 39% on that new system on a chip.

When it comes to cameras, the P40 Pro+ has four different camera modules and a time-of-flight sensor — an ultra-wide lens (18mm), a normal lens (23mm), a 3x lens (80mm) and a super periscope lens with a 10x optical zoom. That last camera is the equivalent of a 240mm lens.

The Huawei P40 Pro has three different camera modules and a time-of-flight sensor. In addition to the ultra-wide and normal lens, there’s a 5x camera lens (125mm equivalent).

The Huawei P40 has three camera modules — ultra-wide (17mm), normal (23mm) and 3x zoom (80mm). The main camera sensor produces 50-megapixel photos.

Smartphone cameras also require a ton of software processing to produce good shots. While I haven’t been able to play with the P40 devices due to the lockdown in Europe, Huawei is usually a bit too heavy-handed with post-processing. If you use your camera with the Master AI setting, colors are too saturated.

But Huawei says that you can expect improvements across the board when it comes to image processing — better HDR processing, better night mode, better hardware and software image stabilization, better portrait photography, etc. The P40 also tries to eliminate reflection from windows in post-processing.

The company has also added a new mode called AI Best Moment. Your phone automatically recognizes when it should capture a photo — it can be when everybody is jumping at the same time or when a basketball player is going for the slam dunk.

As you can see, Huawei has a long list of big numbers to prove that the P40 Pro+ is faster and better than the P30 Pro. Just like Samsung’s Galaxy S20 Ultra, it feels a bit like excesses. Sure, it’s good to see that smartphone manufacturers can always pack more powerful components year after year.

But the smartphone industry is at a turning point. It is no longer a race for better specs. Manufacturers have to prove that there are new use cases to justify buying new models. Manufacturers with a clear focus and vision will stand out of the crowd.