Year: 2020

Oxford University academics have launched a project to track government responses to the coronavirus pandemic.

The tool, called the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT), tracks 11 indicators to generate an index that compares the stringency of policy responses around the world.

Nation state responses to the COVID-19 pandemic continue to vary widely, both in timing and stringency. The UK, for example, only began imposing more stringent restrictions on Saturday, ordering bars and restaurants to close. Yet Denmark — a European country with fewer confirmed cases of COVID-19 — took similar steps around a week earlier.

The index, which is being made freely available, contains data from 73 countries at launch — including China, South Korea, Italy, UK and USA. The academics say it will continue to be updated throughout the crisis.

The idea is to help policymakers and researchers understand the impacts of different state interventions and identify triggers for implementing more or less strict measures during the public health crisis.

The range of government interventions being tracked for the index are: 1. school closure; 2. workplace closures; 3. public event cancellation; 4. public transport closure; 5. public information campaigns; 6. restriction on internal movement; 7. international travel controls; 8. fiscal measures; 9. monetary measures; 10. emergency investment in healthcare; 11. investment in vaccines.

The academics behind the project, from Oxford University’s Blavatnik School of Government, are relying on tracking publicly available information.

They caveat the effort by saying it obviously does not represent the fill picture, nor should it be interpreted as measuring “the appropriateness or effectiveness of a country’s response”.

Commenting in a statement, Thomas Hale, associate professor of global public policy at the School and lead for the project, said: “Our index cannot, of course, tell the full story, but we believe the data we have collected can help decision makers and public health professionals examine the robustness of government responses and provide a first step into understanding exactly what measures have been effective in certain contexts, and why.”

The OxCGRT can be found here — where project data and notes are also available for download.

Spotify this morning announced a series of new initiatives to address the COVID-19 health crisis across its platform. The company is launching a financial relief effort for those in the creative community who have been heavily impacted by the virus, which includes the addition of a public donations feature on its website. The company is also working to add a new feature that will allow artists to fundraise directly from their fans via their Spotify artist profile pages. Meanwhile, for listeners, Spotify is adding a COVID-19 news and information hub in its app to help keep users informed.

The new Spotify COVID-19 Music Relief Project will recommend verified organizations that are offering financial relief to those in the music community who are in need, worldwide. At launch, Spotify is partnering with MusiCares, PRS Foundation, and Help Musicians, and says it’s planning to add more partners in time.

The company says it will also match dollar-for-dollar the public donations made through the Spotify COVID-19 Music Relief page up to a total contribution of $10 million. Industry professionals in need of financial assistance will go to the partners’ sites for information to apply for relief funds.

“While streaming still gives artists a way to connect with their fans, so many other sources of revenue have been put on hold by this crisis,” notes the company on the Relief project’s page. “To play our part, we’re working with a growing list of organizations offering financial relief to creators around the world to find ways to support our community,” it says.

And though not yet launched, Spotify says it’s working to add a new fundraising feature for artists that will allow them to drive their fans to a fundraising destination of their own choice. This would allow artists to directly fundraise for other artists in need or another separate initiative of their own choosing. This feature will be optional for the artists to use and no changes to their profile pages will occur unless the artist wants to participate. And unlike the fundraising efforts on other sites, Spotify says it won’t take a cut of the funds.

Of course, offering personal fundraisers in a time of crisis can also be problematic, as there are a number of scammers now trying to capitalize on crisis with fake fundraisers. Artists, like anyone else, could fall for these scams and then rally their fans towards the cause — potentially redirecting money away from true relief organizations at a time when it’s critical.

This is worsened by the fact that personal fundraisers generally need vetting to ensure they in and of themselves aren’t scams or engaging in some kind of fraud. Even Facebook, operating at the scale it does, is warning users that it currently has fewer people on staff to review personal fundraisers due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. It says fundraisers may not even be able to be reviewed at all and if they are, they’ll take longer than usual. And yet Spotify is readily the rollout of fundraisers at this time when staffing reductions are in place? That’s concerning.

In addition, Spotify is adding a new feature to connect listeners with news and information about COVID-19. Through a new in-app hub, the company is pointing users to news and podcasts from the media, including ABC News, BBC World Service, CNN, Foreign Policy, and NPR.

And, like most companies, Spotify is also offering advertising space to governments and nonprofits for health information and PSAs.

The new COVID-19 Music Relief Project and COVID-19 hub are live today. Artists fundraisers are in the works.

A new app called CatchUp might be useful for anyone who’s struggling to keep up with the latest headlines, podcasts and Netflix shows.

CatchUp is the latest offering from Mammoth Media, the startup behind chat fiction app Yarn and social polling app Wishbone. Founder and CEO Benoit Vatere told me that the product started out as a book summary app called Booknotes, but early users kept asking, “Why don’t you summarize more than books?”

So that’s exactly what CatchUp does, recapping the latest news and entertainment topics. The summaries should feel pretty familiar to anyone who’s watched videos on mobile social app — they’re vertically-oriented, broken up into slides, accompanied by text captions and last for just a few minutes.

Vatere told me that the topics are chosen based on what’s trending, either in Mammoth’s apps or more broadly in social media.

For example, when I opened CatchUp morning, I watched a video laying out the basic info around the big topic one everyone’s mind — the coronavirus pandemic. Then I moved onto something lighter, a video breaking down the different streaming services available now.

It sounds like the CatchUp team is moving quickly. Vatere said they should be responsive to trends, creating new videos in just a day or two. At the same time, he said the app should offer a mix of news-y videos that will eventually disappear (“too much content kills retention in the app”) alongside more evergreen content.

He emphasized that this is very much an initial version of the app, and that the CatchUp team plans to iterate based on what users respond to. It’s English-only for now but could eventually add other languages. The company’s plans also include introducing monetization later on, starting with advertising and then eventually adding in-app purchases and subscriptions.

Vatere also suggested that while a CatchUp summary should stand on its own, it could also encourage deeper engagement.

“If you’re thinking, everybody is talking about ‘Love is Blind,’ what is this … you can listen for two minutes and understand the dynamic, understand what’s happening,” he said. “Then if it sounds really interesting to you, you can watch it. But if not, now you understand what’s being said.”

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

How quickly our world has changed. In late February, TechCrunch covered the news that TripActions, a unicorn four times over, had secured a $500 million credit line to help it scale its corporate travel-focused business; however, it became known yesterday that TripActions is undergoing stiff layoffs after the corporate travel market transformed from growing to moribund in light of the global outbreak of COVID-19.

Many aspects of the public market are now different: public companies are pulling guidance; the Olympics is postponed; domestic life has been overturned by lockdowns and social distancing recommendations; and at the heart of what this publication covers, the venture capital scene has changed as well — not that you could tell from reading Twitter, mind. VCs love to tweet that they are still writing checks, and in some cases, it’s even true.

Inside the investor community, however, there’s some calling bullshit on the idea that the venture capital market is matching anything like its prior pace of business. Here’s Gil Debner from Angular Ventures:

And fintech angel Sheel Mohnot:

Founders are feeling the pinch. To better understand what the fundraising market is like for entrepreneurs today, TechCrunch asked founders to write in with fundraising stories. Below, we’ve compiled a fair number.

Many people asked to remain anonymous so most anecdotes are shielded. Normally, I wouldn’t grant such broad protections. But we’re all learning together, and I’m not after any particular point, so we can be generous. (Write in if you have your own story, and we may include it in a future piece.)

Deals and dreams

What founders sent in ran the gamut, but mostly fell into two camps:

1. Deals were kaput and few (if any) investors are writing checks.
2. While the investing market had slowed, it was still moving some, if only a little.

As a final programming note, I’ve mostly kept original formatting from the notes that were sent in; in some cases, very light edits have been made.

Deals are dead

For many across the world, online retail services like Amazon have become a lifeline, as the COVID-19 pandemic forces self- and government-imposed isolation. Warehouse employees and gig workers have become a key frontline in the effort to socially distance, all while risking their health to do so.

At last count, workers at at least six Amazon facilities have tested positive for COVID-19, spanning much of the country east of the Rockies. The first case cropped up in a Queens, NY facility, followed by Kentucky, Florida, Texas, Michigan and Oklahoma. Other facilities in the aforementioned states, including one in Staten Island — NYC’s largest fulfillment center — have also cropped up. As with all of these of these stories, this very much feels like the tip of the spear, as the virus continues to gain traction.

Asked what precautions the company is tacking to both support workers and curb the spread, an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch, “We are supporting the individuals, following guidelines from local officials, and are taking extreme measures to ensure the safety of all the employees at our sites.”

Individuals who test positive will be sent home for a paid 14-day quarantine. Amazon says it’s also ramped up the rates with which it cleans facilities, including everything from touchscreens to door handles.

The novel coronavirus can live on a number of surfaces for an extended period. Per the New England Journal of medicine, “SARS-CoV-2 was more stable on plastic and stainless steel than on copper and cardboard, and viable virus was detected up to 72 hours after application to these surfaces.” Scary numbers, to be sure, but the detectable levels is greatly reduced over that time. So, you know, keep washing your hands, but don’t freak out.

In a recent open letter to Amazon staff, CEO Jeff Bezos noted, “My own time and thinking is now wholly focused on COVID-19 and on how Amazon can best play its role. I want you to know Amazon will continue to do its part, and we won’t stop looking for new opportunities to help.”

Among the few important victories for workers is the long awaited and hard fought for arrival of PTO for those working more than 20 hours. COVID undoubtedly moved the needle on that one.

The stock markets are having a very rough month, but interest in stock trading apps is skyrocketing, according to data from industry trackers and companies themselves.

Across the board from speculative stock trading apps from startups like Robinhood to savings-focused investment applications like Acorns and established companies like Etrade, would-be investors are turning to trading even as the markets are at their most volatile.

Following precipitous declines over the past week, stocks were roaring back today, with major market indices posting their biggest gains since the financial crisis of 2008.

Over the same period the stock trading startup, Robinhood, which had suffered early outages as the markets began their wild swings, recorded some of its biggest growth numbers of the year.

According to data supplied by Robinhood, the company has already seen roughly ten times the net deposits for the month versus its monthly average in the fourth quarter of 2019. Daily trading volume is also up more than three times the monthly trading volumes the company recorded in the fourth quarter of 2019.

App Annie data over the period indicates that downloads haven’t slowed since Robinhood’s early month outages either.

Robinhood may be one beneficiary of the markets’ movement, but it’s hardly the only one.

New customer growth at Acorns hit a new high of 9,800 signups last Thursday — a day that stock markets recorded their second-worst day of trading since 1987.  That 9,800 sign up figure is about 45 percent more than the company normally records. In total, the company recently hit a milestone of 7 million signups.

That surge in interest shows that far from being scared off from the market, users of the tradings apps are showing some confidence in the longterm health of the markets.

“The market is down 30 percent,” said Noah Kerner, the chief executive officer of Acorns. “It’s on sale.”

Kerner said that now is the time when investors may see the biggest gains from getting into the market. “Every downturn in history has ended in an upturn,” Kerner said. Pulling your money out of the market now means you lock in losses. Last time I checked, nobody likes losses.”

The emphasis that President Trump places on the markets may also be playing a role in increasing awareness among everyday Americans, according to Kerner.

“The President and Administration have brought a lot of focus on economics and the markets more generally. You have a lot of products in fintech, especially ours, that have prioritized financial education — and spreading information in simple, digestible ways,” he said. “The message is out there that the market is on sale and people are engaging with it.”

Some of the largest names in stock trading are also enjoying new boosts in downloads and activity. Etrade, for instance, is showing a surge of interest from new investors, at least according to App Annie data.

 

After a confusing trip to the store to purchase an air filter back in 2012, two N.C. State University students, Thad Tarkington and Kevin Barry, came up with the idea to make this routine home maintenance purchase a subscription-based business. The following year, their startup FilterEasy had a few hundred subscribers. Fast forward to now, and that service — now called SecondNature — has grown its customer base to hundreds of thousands by expanding beyond its original direct-to-consumer model to also include industry partnerships.

Today, the N.C. Triangle-area company is announcing it’s closed on $16.4 million in Series C funding from new and existing investors, including strategic investor, MANN+HUMMEL, through its corporate venture group.

Other investors in the round include IDEA Fund Partners, Multiplier Capital, Lead Edge Capital, Arsenal Growth, One Better Ventures, Bonaventure Capital, NC State’s investor network WIN, and UNC’s investor network CAN.

SecondNature began its life solving a common homeowner problem: helping people to remember to change the home’s air filter. Often, this is a forgotten task as there’s no built-in reminder or alerting system to signal when the filter’s time is up, unlike some other household products. Your smoke alarms blare when batteries are low. Lightbulbs go dark when it’s time for a change. But air filters just sit there, quietly collecting more dust as your air quality worsens and your energy bill climbs.

Tarkington says the idea to put air filters on subscription not only made sense as a way to remind the homeowners to make the swap, but the model worked for retailers as well.

“It’s a product that’s not really well-suited for retail because they’re large, they take a lot of space, and they’re easily damaged,” he says. “And generally, you have thousands of different sizes, so a retailer can only serve a certain percentage of the market.”

The founders soon left college and began to work full-time on the company. They later participated in The Iron Yard accelerator and raised $1.2 million in seed funding in 2015.

While the startup’s customer base of homeowners steadily grew, SecondNature found that it needed more channels than just direct-to-consumer (D2C) alone to increase sales. In the years that followed, the company began working with industry partners, including HVAC companies, real estate agents, utility companies, and commercial properties. These categories have contributed to customer growth, but D2C remains the largest so far, given its head start.

MANN+HUMMEL’s recent investment signals where SecondNature is headed next. The company no longer considers itself just an easier way to get your air filters. Instead, it’s now positioning itself as a “home wellness” brand that will eventually encompass a range of products that homeowners need to replace on a recurring basis.

For starters, this includes SecondNature’s newest product line: water filters.

“As we started growing, we found that people really appreciated the convenience of [our business],” says Tarkington. Plus, people were starting to talk about other things, like how filters helped with allergies and created a healthier home environment, he notes.

“We saw this big trend towards personal care — like what we put in or on our bodies,” Tarkington explains. “We spend a lot of time in our homes — so our indoor air quality and what we are drinking, from a water quality perspective, has become very important.”

It made sense, then, to expand the concept of a “healthy home” to also include water filtration.

In Q2 2020, SecondNature will launch its first two products in this water filtration space, which will include filters for your refrigerator water. One will be focused on improving the taste, quality and clarity of the water, while the other will be more about filtering out harmful particles from local water systems.

Going forward, the company plans to embrace anything that improves your home’s health, Tarkington says.

In the more immediate future, however, SecondNature may benefit from increased interest in home health products in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. For example, SecondNature’s MERV 13-rated “catch all” filter can reduce the odds of you catching the flu or a viral infection when someone in your home is sick. That’s because it’s able to catch about 87% of droplet nuclei that pass through. (To be clear, this is not a COVID-19 preventative, it’s about risk reduction — like washing your hands or sneezing into your elbow, for example.)

While some area’s of SecondNature’s business has been significantly impacted by COVID-19 — like commercial properties where rent may longer be coming in, Tarkington says overall, business is good.

“Generally, demand for the product has gone up – due to the nature of it,” he says.

It’s worth clarifying, though, that SecondNature isn’t aiming to market towards consumer fears due to the outbreak. Instead, it’s trying to help. The team has coordinated with hospitals to get them donated filtration media for masks, and is now actively using its manufacturing facility and supply chain to get masks to hospitals in need. It has materials to produce around 800,000 masks on hand, and plans to produce up to 2 million masks per month as long as it has the materials.

COVID-19 isn’t just impacting its production line, but also how the business operates. The company today has around 150 employees, two-thirds who work in fulfillment and distribution. To address the threat of COVID-19, SecondNature reorganized its two warehouses (in Ardmore, OK. and Wilson, N.C.) to keep staff separated — including by creating additional break rooms. It’s also working to ensure all processes stay clean and sanitary. A dedicated team is focused on cleaning the facility, including by wiping down doors and handles and other surfaces.

SecondNature’s additional funding will go towards expanding the businesses and hiring to support its plans for new products, including forthcoming first-party products it has now in R&D. As for what those may be, specifically, Tarkington hints they’ll focus on products where the company can “innovate and make a product better or a process better — maybe more environmentally-friendly.”

To date, SecondNature has raised $18.4 million.

A new type of test developed by UK researchers from the Brunel University London, Lancaster University and the University of Surrey can provide COVID-19 detection in as little as 30 minutes, using hand-held hardware that costs as little as £100 (around $120 USD) with individual swab sample kits that cost around $5 per person. The test is based on existing technology that has been used in the Philippines for testing viral spread in chickens, but it’s been adapted by researchers for use with COVID-19 in humans, and the team is now working on ramping mass production.

This test would obviously need approval by local health regulatory bodies like the FDA before it goes into active use in any specific geography, but the researchers behind the project are “confident it will respond well,” and say they could even make it available for use “within a few weeks.” The hardware itself is battery-operated and connects to a smartphone application to display diagnostic results and works with nasal or throat swabs, without requiring that samples be round-tripped to a lab.

There are other tests already approved for use that use similar methods for on-site testing, including kits and machines from Cepheid and Mesa Biotech. These require expensive dedicated table-top micro-labs, however, which is installed in dedicated healthcare facilities including hospitals. This test from UK scientists has the advantage of running on inexpensive hardware, with testing capabilities for up to six people at once, which can be deployed in doctor’s offices, hospitals and even potentially workplaces and homes for truly widespread, accessible testing.

Some frontline, rapid results tests are already in use in the EU and China, but these are generally serological tests that rely on the presence of antibodies, whereas this group’s diagnostics are molecular, so it can detect the presence of viral DNA even before antibodies are present. This equipment could even potentially be used to detect the virus in asymptomatic individuals who are self-isolating at home, the group notes, which would go a long way to scoping out the portion of the population that’s not currently a priority for other testing methods, but that could provide valuable insight into the true extend of silent, community-based transmission of the coronavirus.

Twaice, the Munich-based startup that has built analytics software to help with battery management in electric vehicles and other devices, has raised €11 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is European early-stage venture capital firm Creandum, with participation from existing investors Cherry Ventures, UVC Partners and Speedinvest, which backed the company’s earlier seed round.

Already used in trucks, cars, e-scooters and stationary power storage, the Twaice software creates a “digital twin” of battery systems by utilising sensor data, and physical and data-driven battery models. From here it claims to be able to analyse and make accurate real-time predictions about the “health status” of an energy storage system.

Use-cases include closing the loop between product development and application, as well as new possibilities such as predictive maintenance and extending a product’s warranty.

Twaice says the increasing popularity of lithium-ion batteries within the energy market is also accelerating its growth. “Stationary storage units, for example, are used to avoid increased grid fees or to stabilize the grid,” explains the startup. “However, due to their cost and complexity, batteries are especially challenging regarding significant test scopes during development, a lack of transparency about their condition, and remaining lifetime during operation”.

Meanwhile, Peter Specht, Principal at Creandum, says that the battery market is at an “inflection point,” driven by rapid electrification in the mobility and energy sectors. “Twaice predictive analytics solution unlocks a tremendous amount of value along the full battery lifecycle,” he says. “We were impressed by the deep battery expertise of the team, the sophistication of their analytics platform and rapidly growing customer demand. We’re thrilled to support the team along their journey to further scale and expand to new markets”.

Humio, a startup that has built a modern unlimited logging solution, announced a $20 million Series B investment today.

Dell Technologies Capital led the round with participation from previous investor Accel. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $32 million, according to the company.

Humio co-founder and CEO Geeta Schmidt says the startup wanted to build a solution that would allow companies to log everything, while reducing the overall cost associated with doing that, a tough problem due to the resource and data volume involved. The company deals with customers who are processing multiple terabytes of data per day.

“We really wanted to build an infrastructure where it’s easy to log everything and answer anything in real time. So we built an index-free logging solution which allows you to ask […] ad hoc questions over large volumes of data,” Schmidt told TechCrunch.

They are able to ingest so much data by using streaming technology, says company EVP of sales Morten Gram. “We have this real time streaming engine that makes it possible for customers to monitor whatever they know they want to be looking at. So they can build dashboards and alerts for these [metrics] that will be running in real time,” Gram explained.

What’s more, because the solution enables companies to log everything, rather than pick and choose what to log, they can ask questions about things they might not know, such as an on-going security incident or a major outage, and trace the answer from the data in the logs as the incident is happening.

Perhaps more importantly, the company has come up with technology to reduce the cost associated with processing and storing such high volumes of data. “We have thought a lot about trying to do a lot more with a lot less resources. And so, for example, one of our customers, who moved from a competitor, has gone from 80 servers to 14 doing the same volumes of data,” she said.

Deepak Jeevankumer, managing director and lead investor at Dell Technologies Capital, says that his firm recognized that Humio was solving these issues in a creative and modern way.

“Humio’s team has created a new log analysis architecture for the microservices age. This can support real-time analysis at full-speed ingest, while decreasing cost of storage and analysis by at least an order of magnitude,” he explained. “In a short-period of time, Humio has won the confidence of many Fortune 500 customers who have shifted their log platforms to Humio from legacy, decade-old architectures that do not scale for the cloud world.”

The company’s customers include Netlify, Bloomberg, HP Aruba and Michigan State University. It offers on-prem, cloud and hosted SaaS products. Today, the company also announced it was introducing an unlimited ingest plan for hosted SaaS customers.