Year: 2020

Entrepreneur First (EF), the the London-headquartered company builder and “talent first” investor, unveiled its latest cohort of “deep tech” companies in a first virtual Demo Day, amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Presenting startups, in the format of a slick pre-recorded video, are made up of teams formed across EF’s three European locations: London, Berlin and Paris. In total, 25 new startups have been created across deep technology fields such as AI, biotechnology, machine learning and robotics.

They include companies tackling drug discovery using digital twin cells, environmental pollutant monitoring, and artificial brain development for robotics applications, to name just a few (that last one was a mouthful).

It’s also worth re-capping that EF stands out from the many other demo days in U.K. and beyond — seeing the investor backs individuals “pre-team, pre-idea” — meaning that the companies pitching generally only came into existence during the three programmes and perhaps may have never seen the light of day without the founders bashing heads at EF.

Cue statement from Matt Clifford, co-founder Entrepreneur First: “While the format of today’s Demo Day event may have changed, the focus remains the same – introducing the globally important companies of the future to the world’s best investors. Entrepreneur First believes that the best way for the most ambitious and talented people to fulfil their potential is to use their exceptional talent to build companies, transform lives and change the world. With the right support, one talented individual has the potential to fundamentally change the way an entire industry operates – which is perhaps even more important in this period of global upheaval”.

Meanwhile, here’s an interesting tidbit: According to a source, one of the pitching EF companies, Ochre Bio — which is developing gene therapies to treat donor livers outside of the body — made the unusual decision to join Silicon Valley’s YC accelerator in the middle of the EF programme where the founders met, so they’re effectively coming into Demo Day with half their round filled.

The full list of presenting team video pitch links (described in their own words)

Ambify
Environmental pollutant monitoring to protect health and wellbeing.
(London)

Augmize
Augmize automates actuarial reserving in commercial insurance with interpretable machine learning.
(London)

Better Dairy
Building the future of food, starting with animal-free dairy.
(London)

Flaime
Revolutionising cloud gaming with dynamically distributed interactive 3D content delivery.
(London)

Bleep
Bleep lets you create and remix your favourite TV Shows, for and on, the channels we all know and love.
(London)

CARV3D
We generate on demand, new examples of unique and believable digital humans which do not exist in the real world.
(London)

cheMastery
Building the infrastructure for chemistry.
(London)

Exogene
Fast discovery of safer immunotherapies.
(London)

Micrographia Bio
Engineering the chemical atlas for modern drug discovery.
(London)

my110
AI health coach transforming how we eat, exercise and recover.
(London)

Ochre Bio
Gene therapies to treat donor livers outside of the body.
(London)

Omnipresent
We take away the pain of operating global teams. Our clients can onboard employees anywhere in the world with a few mouse clicks.
(London)

Verchable
Building next generation video search using Computer Vision.
(London)

Volatile AI
Combining existing gas sensors with bio-inspired AI algorithms to monitor food aroma.
(London)

Cargoflip
An all-in-one platform to simplify international trade for businesses.
(Berlin)

ElementZero Biolabs
The next generation of tools for capturing genetic information.
(Berlin)

hier foods
An end-to-end procurement tool for regional food.
(Berlin)

Iskra
Low code, complete Machine Learning platform.
(Berlin)

Blendeez
Blendeez helps business users make CRM external and internal apps work together at scale with no technical skills.
(Paris)

Contreeb
We enable online shops and their consumers to balance their carbon footprint.
(Paris)

DeepLife
DeepLife creates digital twins of cell to accelerate drug discovery.
(Paris)

EyePick
EyePick builds a brain for robots to see, understand and act in the real-world.
(Paris)

Lynceus
Lynceus is building the world’s most reliable manufacturing quality prediction software.
(Paris)

Samp
Digital twins for industrial facilities – reliable knowledge for everyone.
(Paris)

X80 Security
Generating intelligent cyber defences through automatic threat simulation.
(Paris)

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) has a mission today, launching a specialized secure communications satellite for the U.S. Space Force. That’s the new space-focused arm of the U.S. military that was officially formed last year, in response to what the administration has characterized as a growing need to ensure America’s assets in space are properly defended.

The launch today is set to take off from Cape Canaveral in Florida, with a lift-off time set for 2:57 PM EDT (11:57 AM PDT). The rocket carrying the satellite is an Atlas V, and the mission looks good to proceed as of Thursday morning in terms of both weather and systems checks.

This is the sixth Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite being launched for the military, but the previous five have all been deployed under the U.S. Air Force because the Space Force only came into existence officially last year. The first five satellites were launched between 2010 and 2019, and together, all six will form a constellation that provides secure communications capabilities for military operations across air, land and sea.

This will be the 83rd launch of an Atlas V rocket, and the 11th in this particular configuration. The ULA, a joint venture formed by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, currently has a 100 percent mission success rate, with a total of 133 launches under its belt.

Delivery Hero has switched to cash-less, non-contact for deliveries in areas it defines as “high risk” for the transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to reduce personal contact between couriers and customers during the coronavirus pandemic. But it’s encouraging all customers to make the switch.

“By introducing contactless delivery, we can ensure that our service is safe and convenient for customers, riders and restaurants,” said CEO, Niklas Östberg, in a press release. “We now encourage customers to pay without cash everywhere, and decide when and how they want their order to be delivered. These are options designed to reduce interpersonal contact and make our customer journey even more secure.”

It has also implemented no-contact drop-offs in high risk areas and is asking restaurants to sanitize packages to further shrink the risk of spreading the virus.

While there is no evidence that people have become infected by eating food contaminated with the microscopic agent — SARS-CoV-2 is a respiratory virus; the primary transition route for infection appears to be via close contact with an infected person, when you might be more likely to breathe in tiny droplets that contain the virus, such as those expelled when someone coughs or sneezes — there could be a small risk posed by contaminated food packaging.

If, for example, an infected person, who had coughed into their hand, then touched a package which they gave to an uninfected person — who then touched their face without first washing their hands. Studies suggest the virus that causes COVID-19 can remain infectious for between several hours or days on certain surfaces.

To shrink the risk of such a scenario, Delivery Hero said it’s working closely with restaurant partners to ensure “the highest hygiene standards”.

The risk of infection via contaminated surfaces is reduced by everyone observing good hand hygiene — i.e. washing hands regularly and directly after touching things others may have touched — and by not touching their own face with unclean hands.

“Official health authorities around the world agree that there is a very limited chance of contracting COVID-19 through food,” said Delivery Hero today. “Neither the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), nor the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), have any reports of Coronavirus COVID-19 transmitted via food or food packaging. However, we are working closely with our restaurant partners to ensure that they continue to operate in a secure kitchen environment and carry out food preparation and packaging according to the highest hygiene standards.”

The company is also providing riders in “high risk” zones with hand sanitisers, masks and other safety materials — “where and when it is locally and culturally accepted”.

The Berlin -based takeaway platform operates across 44 markets in Europe, Asia, LatAm and the Middle East, operating under a variety of brand names.

We’ve asked which areas it’s defining as “high risk”.

In recent weeks a number of US and European food delivery startups have turned on a contactless delivery option to shrink the risks around COVID-19 during the epidemic. Delivery Hero said it started taking precautionary measures “as soon as the situation started to evolve in January”.

The company is using its rider app to communicate updates and “instruct on hygiene requirements, especially for pick-up and drop-off”. “By having direct access to new information, our riders can make informed decisions when on the road,” it added.

While many startups face a demand crunch during the epidemic as people dial back some of their regular activities, the opposite looks to be true for food delivery — as large-scale quarantine measures mean many people are eating more meals at home. Food delivery is also being actively being encouraged by some governments, such as the UK, as a convenient lever to keep more citizens locked down at home where they can’t spread the virus or increase their chance of exposure.

Delivery Hero said it’s responded to growing demand by implementing free delivery options in the majority of its markets — “to make online ordering accessible to as many people as possible”, as it puts it.

It said “several” of these options are “focused on when ordering from restaurants nearby” — in what looks like an attempt to streamline demand for restaurants and delivery workers by incentivizing local food orders.

In another support step for restaurants it’s offering more frequent payment cycles for some partners — “according to local need”. “For new restaurants joining our platform, we aim to onboard as fast as possible, in order to support them in maintaining order levels as well as provide more choice for our customers,” it added.

Zooming out, Delivery Hero said it’s closely liaising with local governments — and continuing to follow official health and safety guidelines provided in its different markets. And it gave examples of how some of its different brands are working on relief efforts related to COVID-19 around the world.

“Our brand HungerStation in Saudi Arabia is partnering with the Saudi Ministry of Health and Saudi Food & Drug Authority to provide hand sanitizers for people in need,” it said. “In the Czech Republic, our brand Damejidlo has also been selected as one of the Red Cross’ official partners, bringing food to senior citizens. As a part of a broader initiative to support their communities, our Latin American brand PedidosYa is giving up to 1,000 free lunches per day to people who are at the forefront of fighting the virus, such as employees in the health sector.”

Another area the company is ramping up to meet demand for food delivery in the time of the coronavirus is grocery store onboarding. Currently, customers across 21 markets in the MENA region, Asia-Pacific and Latin America can order groceries from supermarkets via the company’s local delivery apps, in addition to takeout meals.

“We have seen an increase in demand from our global customer community and to meet the growing need, we have accelerated the onboarding of grocery stores,” Delivery Hero said. “We have also increased delivery through our cloud stores, another way to secure that our customers have access to everyday necessities.”

It’s not clear what — if any — financial provision the company is making to support delivery riders who do not have a contract that includes sick pay.

We’ve asked and will update this report with any response.

“During these turbulent times, our immediate efforts go into securing the wellbeing of all Delivery Hero customers, riders and employees,” the company said. “We are monitoring the development of COVID-19 minute by minute and will implement further measures as necessary. Our thoughts are with everyone who has been affected by the spread of the virus and to all who go the extra mile to keep our communities safe, healthy and fed.”

Watchdogs have started to raise the issue that new working practices and online activity necessitated by the spread of the coronavirus pandemic are creating new sets of privacy, security and data protection challenges. Today a startup is announcing a growth round of funding to help online businesses navigate those issues better.

DataGuard, a Munich-based startup that provides “GDPR-as-a-service” — essentially a cloud-based platform to help those doing business online ensure that they are compliant with various regional regulations and best practices around privacy by analysing customers’ data processing activities, offering options and suggestions for improving privacy compliance, providing them with the ability to modify their IT infrastructure and internal processes to do so — has raised $20 million, money that it will be using to continue expanding its business across Europe and the Americas and to continue investing in building out its technology.

The funding is coming from a single investor, London’s One Peak, and is the first outside funding for the company. We’re asking but it looks like DataGuard is not disclosing its valuation with this round.

The news is coming at a critical time in the world of venture funding. We are seeing a mix of deals that either were closed or close to closing before the worst of the pandemic reared its ugly head (meaning: some deals are just going to be put on ice, Zoom meeting or not); or are being done specifically to help with business continuity in the wake of all the interruption of normal life (that is, the business is too interesting not to help prop it up); or are closing specifically because the startup has built something that is going to demonstrate just how useful it is in the months to come.

As with the strongest of funding rounds, DataGuard into a couple of those categories.

On one hand, it has demonstrated a demand for its services before any of this hit. Today, the startup provides privacy policy services both to small and medium businesses as well as larger enterprises, and it has picked up 1,000 customers since launching in 2017.

“Millions of companies are striving to comply with privacy regulation such as GDPR or CCPA,” said Thomas Regier, (pictured, left) who co-founded the company with Kivanc Semen (right), in a statement.

“We are excited to partner with One Peak to help many more organizations across the globe become and remain privacy compliant. Our Privacy-as-a-Service solution provides customers with access to a proprietary full-stack platform and services from a dedicated team of data privacy experts. This enables customers to gain insights into their data processing activities and to operationalize privacy and compliance across their entire organization.”

Regier tells us that the company was bootstrapped to 100 employees, which also underscores the company’s capital efficiency, also especially attractive at the moment.

On the other, the wholesale shift to more online and remote working, combined with a giant surge in online traffic caused by more people staying at home to reduce the number of new Covid-19 cases, is driving a lot more traffic and stress testing to websites, apps and other online services.

All that creates precisely the kind of environment where we might, for a period, overlook some of the trickier and more exacting aspects of privacy policies, but which are nonetheless important to keep intact, not least because malicious hackers could take advantage of vulnerable situations, or regulators eventually refocus and come back with heavy fines, or consumers respond with bad PR and more.

“We have a truly horizontal product that has the potential to become an integral part of the tech stack in enterprises and SMBs alike,” said Semen in a statement. “We will use the funding to deliver on our product roadmap. We will achieve this in two ways: By increasing automation levels through improvements of the machine learning capabilities in our privacy software suite and by speeding up our development of new product categories.”

DataGuard is one of a number of startups that have emerged to help businesses navigate the waters of privacy regulations, which are usually not the core competencies of the companies but have become an essential part of how they can (and should) do business online.

Others include OneTrust, which also helps companies provide and run better data protection policies; and InCountry, which is specifically focused on providing services to help companies understand and comply with data protection policies that vary across different regions. OneTrust last year passed a $1 billion valuation, speaking to the huge opportunity and demand in this space.

OnePeak believes that DataGuard’s take on the proposition is one of the more effective and efficient, one reason it’s backed the team. “We are incredibly excited to back DataGuard’s world-class founding team,” says David Klein, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at One Peak, in a statement. “We are convinced that DataGuard’s cutting-edge software suite combined with its comprehensive service offering provides both enterprises and SMBs with an end-to-end solution that fulfils their data privacy needs across the board.”

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank that now counts over 4 million account holders, has lost its CTO, TechCrunch has learned.

According to multiple sources, Meri Williams, who joined the fast-growing fintech in September 2018 to much fanfare, announced internally that she was departing, saying that she wanted to voluntarily help with cost-cutting measures. However, it is worth noting that Williams had already cut back her involvement with Monzo and had been consulting for other tech companies. One source told TechCrunch she was most recently only working one day per week for Monzo.

Meanwhile, it is not clear who is taking up Williams CTO responsibilities, especially as previous CTO and Monzo co-founder Jonas Huckestein (pictured right, with Meri Williams) is thought to be on paternity leave. Monzo declined to comment.

Prior to holding the CTO role at Monzo, Williams worked at print and design company MOO — an early darling of the London startup ecosystem — and was brought to the bank for her experience “growing complex engineering organisations and managing fast-moving teams,” according to a press release issued at the time of her hire. Before working at MOO, she was Head of Engineering at M&S Digital and previously worked for the U.K.’s Government Digital Service.

MX Player, the on-demand video streaming service owned by India’s conglomerate Times Internet, is expanding to more than half a dozen new international markets including the U.S. and the UK to supply more entertainment content to millions of people trapped in their homes.

The Singapore-headquartered on-demand video streaming service, which raised $111 million in a round led by Tencent last year, said it has expanded to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Bangladesh, and Nepal in addition to the U.S. and the UK.

Like in India, MX Player will offer its catalog at no charge to users in the international markets and monetize through ads, Karan Bedi, chief executive of the service, told TechCrunch in an interview.

The streaming service, which has amassed over 175 million monthly active users, is offering locally relevant content in each market, Bedi said. This is notably different from Disney’s Hotstar expansion into international markets, where it has largely aimed to cater to the Indian diaspora.

MX Player is not currently offering any originally produced titles in any international markets — instead offering movies and shows it has licensed from global and local studios — but the streamer plans to change that in the coming future, said Bedi.

Even as the expansion comes at a time when the world is grappling with containing and fighting the coronavirus outbreak, Bedi said MX Player had been testing the service in several markets for a few months.

“We believe in meeting this rapidly rising demand from discerning entertainment lovers with stories that strike a chord. To that end, we have collaborated with some of the best talent and content partners globally who will help bring us a step closer to becoming the go-to destination for entertainment across the world,” said Nakul Kapur, Business Head for International markets at MX Player, in a statement.

In India, MX Player has also bundled free music streaming (through Gaana, another property owned by Times Internet) and has introduced in-app casual games. Bedi said the company is working on bringing these additional services to international markets.

More to follow…

Early this morning, Fast, a startup building platform-agnostic login and checkout services, announced that Stripe has led a $20 million investment into its business. Prior investors Index Ventures and Susa Ventures took part in the round. Susa previously participated in the company’s late-2019 round that Index led.

Coming in late March, the new capital is a quick-follow to Fast’s November seed round. Such a rapid-fire deal would have felt right at home in mid-2019; to see two consecutive rounds in less than a half-year in 2020, in contrast, feels aggressive, though that’s more a testament to how the market has changed than Fast’s ability to attract capital.

Fast was founded by Domm Holland, a serial entrepreneur, and Allison Barr Allen, best known for her time at Uber. Holland is the company’s CEO while Barr Allen has taken on Fast’s COO role.

As the venture capital market cools in the face of a global economic slowdown, let’s take a minute to unpack what Fast does to better understand why Stripe led its Series A so quickly after its preceding venture round.

What does Fast do?

Let’s explain Fast’s product by way of analogy. You and I read the news, and we buy things online. Logging into news services is a colossal pain in the backside, and if you’re buying something other than on Amazon, you probably have to relog. Which is irksome and slow and generally annoying.

Fast, per its name, wants to make logging in far quicker, and also wants to help you check out at online stores more simply, and, as before, rapidly. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Domm Holland said that Fast wants “to be the intermediary for all consumer interactions,” which he broke down as a “fancy way of saying we want to give you one-click login, one-click payments, one-click data everywhere.”

In short, Fast wants to be your profile for signing into services and buying goods online, everywhere that it can be. You can now begin to see why Stripe led the company’s Series A. If Stripe has built a way for lots of digital stores and businesses to accept payments, Fast wants to build the equivalent consumer solution for the other side of those transactions.

Notably, Fast wants to be a platform, allowing other companies to bring its service to other niches; my example of media before wasn’t idle, it was an example that I chewed over with Holland and Fast’s CEO Barr Allen during a call discussing how the company’s service might be used in the future.

At this point you’re probably wondering how Fast works in practice. Holland explained the process to TechCrunch using online shopping as the example. According to the CEO, the first time a user sees a Fast checkout button while buying a good or service, they are able to click it, at which point they’ll be prompted with a “short, optimized checkout form” that asks for five pieces of information (email, name, phone number, address and credit card information). After the user finishes inputting those details, Fast wraps the transaction and saves the consumer’s information. Per Holland, those credentials are stored so that the next time that same user sees a Fast button, they can power through the sale rapidly, because the company already knows who they are and how they pay. (Note: You’ll have to relog if you change devices, natch.)

You can see how the more places Fast is available the more useful it becomes; picking up money from Stripe then has advantages for Fast, as its new benefactor is integrated around the Web, a footprint that its new investment might be able to leverage to gain distribution of its own. And the deal bakes Stripe’s service even more deeply into a payment gateway of sorts that has ambitions to be work across the internet. (Fast makes money on a spread between the payment cost it charges its customers and what it pays Stripe.)

Today versus the future

Today, however, Fast’s login product is in-market, while its payments service has yet to see a wide rollout. With 20 million new dollars, however, we expect to see the firm’s checkout service in-market quickly. Indeed, the startup noted in a release that it intends to use its new capital to “accelerate the global rollout of Fast Checkout” and grow it staff.

Jumping from a $2.5 million raise to a $20 million investment in a few months is quick; Fast should have all the capital it could possibly need to build its vision for the next year. This brings us to our final point. Namely that if Fast succeeds, and its payments-and-login service does take off, it could provide a reasonable bulwark against whole-scale consumption of digital identity by major tech companies, and the siloing of identity amongst media companies that we see today.

Long have I dreamed of having a central login for my media accounts. Fast could, in theory, power such a service. That is, if no one snaps up the company first. On that point, Index’s Jan Hammer, the investor who led the company’s seed round, cited the company’s independence as a net-plus for Fast, saying that “many merchants would tell you they don’t trust Amazon, and many shoppers would admit that they don’t trust Google to store their credit cards because they both have different agendas.” There we agree. 

More when we see Fast around the Web.

Since its inception, Cape Town based crowdsolving startup Zindi has been building a database of data scientists across Africa.

It now has 12,000 registered on its its platform that uses AI and machine learning to tackle complex problems and will offer them cash-prizes to find solutions to curb COVID-19.

Zindi has an open challenge focused on stemming the spread and havoc of coronavirus and will introduce a hackathon in April. The current competition, sponsored by AI4D, tasks scientists to create models that can use data to predict the global spread of COVID-19 over the next three months.

The challenge is open until April 19, solutions will be evaluated against future numbers and the winner will receive $5000.

The competition fits with Zindi’s business model of building a platform that can aggregate pressing private or public-sector challenges and match the solution seekers to problem solvers.

Founded in 2018, the early-stage venture allows companies, NGOs or government institutions to host online competitions around data oriented issues.

Zindi’s model has gained the attention of some notable corporate names in and outside of Africa. Those who have hosted competitions include Microsoft, IBM and Liquid Telecom. Public sector actors — such as the government of South Africa and UNICEF — have also tapped Zindi for challenges as varied as traffic safety and disruptions in agriculture.

The ability to apply Africa’s data science expertise, to solve problems around a complex health crisis such as COVID-19 is what Zindi was meant for, Lee explained to TechCrunch on a call from Cape Town.

“As an online platform, Zindi is well-positioned to mobilize data scientists at scale, across Africa and around the world, from the safety of their homes,” she said.

Lee explained that perception leads many to believe Africa is the victim or source of epidemics and disease. “We wanted to show Africa can actually also contribute to the solution for the globe.”

With COVID-19, Zindi is being employed to alleviate a problem that is also impacting its founder, staff and the world.

Lee spoke to TechCrunch while sheltering in place in Cape Town, as South Africa went into lockdown Friday due to coronavirus. Zindi’s founder explained she also has in-laws in New York and family in San Francisco living under similar circumstances due to the global spread of COVID-19.

Lee believes the startup’s competitions can produce solutions that nations in Africa could tap as the coronavirus spreads. “The government of Kenya just started a task force where they’re including companies from the ICT sector. So I think there could be interest,” she said.

Starting April, Zindi will launch six weekend hackathons focused on COVID-19.

That could be timely given the trend of COVID-19 in Africa. The continent’s cases by country were in the single digits in early March, but those numbers spiked last week — prompting the World Health Organization’s Regional Director Dr Matshidiso Moeti to sound an alarm on the rapid evolution of the virus on the continent.

By the WHO’s stats Wednesday there were 1691 COVID-19 cases in Sub-Saharan Africa and 29 confirmed deaths related to the virus — up from 463 cases and 10 deaths last Wednesday.

The trajectory of the coronavirus in Africa has prompted countries and startups, such as Zindi, to include the continent’s tech sector as part of a broader response. Central banks and fintech companies in Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya have employed measures to encourage more mobile-money usage, vs. cash — which the World Health Organization flagged as a conduit for the spread of the virus.

The continent’s largest incubator, CcHub, launched a fund and open call for tech projects aimed at curbing COVID-19 and its social and economic impact.

Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia has offered African governments use of its last-mile delivery network for distribution of supplies to healthcare facilities and workers.

Zindi’s CEO Celina Lee anticipates the startup’s COVID-19 related competitions can provide additional means for policy-makers to combat the spread of the virus.

“The one that’s open right now should hopefully go into informing governments to be able to anticipate the spread of the disease and to more accurately predict the high risk areas in a country,” she said.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that the company’s factory in Buffalo, New York will open “as soon as humanly possible” to produce ventilators that are in short supply due to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

His comments, which were made Wednesday via Twitter, follows previous statements by the CEO outlining plans to either donate ventilators or work to increase production of the critical piece of medical equipment needed for patients who are hospitalized with COVID-19, a respiratory disease caused by coronavirus. COVID-19 attacks the lungs and can cause acute respiratory distress syndrome and pneumonia. And since there is no clinically proven treatment yet, ventilators are relied upon to help people breathe and fight the disease. There are about 160,000 ventilators in the United States and another 12,700 in the National Strategic Supply, the NYT reported.

Last week, Tesla said in a statement it would suspend production at its Fremont, Calif. factory, where it assembles its electric vehicles, and its Buffalo, N.Y gigafactory, except for “those parts and supplies necessary for service, infrastructure and critical supply chains.”

It isn’t clear based on Musk’s statements when the Buffalo plant would reopen or how long it would take to convert a portion of its factory, which is used to produce solar panels. Musk didn’t say if this was part of a possible collaboration with Medtronic .

Medtronic CEO Omar Ishrak told CNBC on Wednesday that it is increasing capacity of its critical care ventilators and partnering with others such as Tesla. He said Medtronic is open sourcing one its lower end ventilators in less acute situations for others to, to make as quickly as they can. These lower end ventilators, which are easier to produce because there are fewer components, can be used as an intermediary step in critical care.

Tesla is one of several automakers, including GM, Ford and FCA that has pledged support to either donate supplies or offer resources to make more ventilators. Earlier this week, Ford said it is working with GE Healthcare to expand production capacity of a ventilator.

GM is working with Ventec Life Systems to help increase production of respiratory care products such as ventilators. Ventec will use GM’s logistics, purchasing and manufacturing expertise to build more ventilators. The companies did not provide further details such as when production might be able to ramp up or how many ventilators would be produced.