Year: 2020

ClassPass, the fitness platform that connects gym-goers with the right studio/fitness class, has today announced that it’s dusting off its shuttered video product in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. With some tweaks.

ClassPass studio partners will today be able to offer live streamed classes on the platform. ClassPass has set up a system that allows these partners to set their own prices, date and time, and share a link to the streaming platform of their choice for their class, whether it be Instagram Live, Facebook Live, YouTube, Twitch, etc.

CEO Fritz Lanman said that the company, which has raised more than $500 million, is well capitalized to weather the metaphorical storm. However, ClassPass’s success relies on the health of its 30,000 studio partners, 90 percent of whom have closed their physical locations indefinitely across 30 countries.

With the new offering, studios will be able to keep offering their classes to a market in which demand for live-streamed or at-home workouts is skyrocketing.

Moreover, ClassPass will not be generating any revenue from these live streamed classes until June 1. In other words, 100 percent of the revenue from these live streamed classes will go towards the studios and wellness partners.

ClassPass launched a live video streaming product in March of 2018. The product was a sizable investment from the company, which set up a full broadcasting studio in Brooklyn. ClassPass Live, as it was called, also required users to have a ClassPass Live subscription, which came with a heart rate monitor for users to track their progress.

ClassPass Live eventually shuttered as the company reorganized its priorities to focus on global expansion and its corporate program. However, thousands of workouts from that product (in both video and audio form) have remained on the app for subscribers as an on-demand workout from home option.

Those video and audio workouts are now available for free to anyone who is signed in to the ClassPass app. For the live streamed workouts from studio partners, ClassPass users will need to use their in-app credits to purchase those classes. That said, they do not have to be a subscriber — users can simply purchase credits a la carte in the app and use them towards classes.

Existing ClassPass users will notice that their credits have been rolled over since the coronavirus pandemic has been keeping folks at home.

So far, 500 studios have been onboarded to start providing live streamed workouts and classes.

Asked if this video business could become the permanent, primary business for the company, Lanman said that it’s possible, but unlikely.

“Frankly, we already did this experiment,” said Lanman. “When we did ClassPass Live, customers said this is incredible, high quality stuff. That it’s a great experience. But you cannot yet replicate the real world experience digitally. The ambience. The immersiveness (sic). The sense of community.”

He said that in the future, people will want some offline offerings across a variety of things.

“Our job as a platform company is not to take an overly prescriptive point of view as to what’s best for each individual customer,” said Lanman. “Our job is to give partners a choice around how they want to merchandize and curate different experiences across offline, video, audio, one to many, one to one, etc. And then, we need to allow customers to choose how they want to allocate their time and their budget between offline and digital.”

Alongside the launch of ClassPass’s live video workout product, the company is also introducing other initiatives to help the fitness industry during this pandemic.

The first is a Partner Relief Fund, which allows users to donate to their favorite studios right from within the app. Moreover, ClassPass will match all donations up to $1 million.

The company is also calling on governments across the globe, via a change.org petition, to offer immediate financial assistance, alongside rent, loan and tax relief, for fitness businesses in particular. Thus far, the petition has signatures from Joey Gonzalez (Barry’s Bootcamp CEO), Andy Stenzler (Rumble CEO), Travis Frenzel (Flywheel Sports CEO) and more.

ClassPass, the fitness platform that connects gym-goers with the right studio/fitness class, has today announced that it’s dusting off its shuttered video product in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. With some tweaks.

ClassPass studio partners will today be able to offer live streamed classes on the platform. ClassPass has set up a system that allows these partners to set their own prices, date and time, and share a link to the streaming platform of their choice for their class, whether it be Instagram Live, Facebook Live, YouTube, Twitch, etc.

CEO Fritz Lanman said that the company, which has raised more than $500 million, is well capitalized to weather the metaphorical storm. However, ClassPass’s success relies on the health of its 30,000 studio partners, 90 percent of whom have closed their physical locations indefinitely across 30 countries.

With the new offering, studios will be able to keep offering their classes to a market in which demand for live-streamed or at-home workouts is skyrocketing.

Moreover, ClassPass will not be generating any revenue from these live streamed classes until June 1. In other words, 100 percent of the revenue from these live streamed classes will go towards the studios and wellness partners.

ClassPass launched a live video streaming product in March of 2018. The product was a sizable investment from the company, which set up a full broadcasting studio in Brooklyn. ClassPass Live, as it was called, also required users to have a ClassPass Live subscription, which came with a heart rate monitor for users to track their progress.

ClassPass Live eventually shuttered as the company reorganized its priorities to focus on global expansion and its corporate program. However, thousands of workouts from that product (in both video and audio form) have remained on the app for subscribers as an on-demand workout from home option.

Those video and audio workouts are now available for free to anyone who is signed in to the ClassPass app. For the live streamed workouts from studio partners, ClassPass users will need to use their in-app credits to purchase those classes. That said, they do not have to be a subscriber — users can simply purchase credits a la carte in the app and use them towards classes.

Existing ClassPass users will notice that their credits have been rolled over since the coronavirus pandemic has been keeping folks at home.

So far, 500 studios have been onboarded to start providing live streamed workouts and classes.

Asked if this video business could become the permanent, primary business for the company, Lanman said that it’s possible, but unlikely.

“Frankly, we already did this experiment,” said Lanman. “When we did ClassPass Live, customers said this is incredible, high quality stuff. That it’s a great experience. But you cannot yet replicate the real world experience digitally. The ambience. The immersiveness (sic). The sense of community.”

He said that in the future, people will want some offline offerings across a variety of things.

“Our job as a platform company is not to take an overly prescriptive point of view as to what’s best for each individual customer,” said Lanman. “Our job is to give partners a choice around how they want to merchandize and curate different experiences across offline, video, audio, one to many, one to one, etc. And then, we need to allow customers to choose how they want to allocate their time and their budget between offline and digital.”

Alongside the launch of ClassPass’s live video workout product, the company is also introducing other initiatives to help the fitness industry during this pandemic.

The first is a Partner Relief Fund, which allows users to donate to their favorite studios right from within the app. Moreover, ClassPass will match all donations up to $1 million.

The company is also calling on governments across the globe, via a change.org petition, to offer immediate financial assistance, alongside rent, loan and tax relief, for fitness businesses in particular. Thus far, the petition has signatures from Joey Gonzalez (Barry’s Bootcamp CEO), Andy Stenzler (Rumble CEO), Travis Frenzel (Flywheel Sports CEO) and more.

A new initiative by the Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School could provide a new kind of signal for those studying the spread of the coronavirus pandemic across the U.S. The ‘Covid Near You’ map developed by researchers at both organizations, asks individuals to self-report any potential COVID-19 symptoms, as well as if they’ve taken a test, and then maps that activity on a rolling two week basis.

This isn’t a map of confirmed COVID-19 cases – other sources for that information already exist, including Google’s coronavirus map, which uses case numbers and figures provided by the World Health Organization (WHO), and the John Hopkins coronavirus resource center map. These are useful resources, but only reflect confirmed cases based on approved testing, which, especially in the U.S., is limited by testing availability and drastically under-represents the actual spread according to most experts.

New ways of tracking the spread of the virus are needed in order to supplement testing efforts, and while self-reported symptoms are hardly a reliable indicator of actual COVID-19 spread, they are a potential signal or leading indicator that, combined with other data included confirmed cases, can help researchers and medical professionals focus their efforts and gauge the effectiveness of strategies like social distancing meant to slow or stop the spread.

Another recent project, Kinsa’s U.S. health weather map, also relies on crowdsourced data to try to provide a different view of the potential spread of COVID-19. Their information is body temperature, as recorded by their connected smart thermometer hardware, however, which provides a reliable measure of one of the most common symptoms of COVID-19 patients.

Like the ‘Covid Near You’ map, Kinsa’s is not a reliable indicator of confirmed COVID-19 cases, but it is a strong signal that can provide information not available when relying on certified testing. Taken together, self-reported symptoms (especially as more people self-report using this new map), temperature data tied to geolocation, and confirmed cases could provide a much more complete picture of where hotspots are occurring, and the patterns of spread beyond those communities known to be most affected, and those that could be next in the chain of transmission.

Espressive, a four-year-old startup from former ServiceNow employees, is working to build a better chatbot to reduce calls to company help desks. Today, the company announced a $30 million Series B investment.

Insight Partners led the round with help from Series A lead investor General Catalyst along with Wing Venture Capital. Under the terms of today’s agreement, Insight founder and managing director Jeff Horing will be joining the Espressive Board. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $53 million, according to the company.

Company founder and CEO Pat Calhoun says that when he was at ServiceNow he observed that, in many companies, employees often got frustrated looking for answers to basic questions. That resulted in a call to a Help Desk requiring human intervention to answer the question.

He believed that there was a way to automate this with AI-driven chatbots, and he founded Espressive to develop a solution. “Our job is to help employees get immediate answers to their questions or solutions or resolutions to their issues, so that they can get back to work,” he said.

They do that by providing a very narrowly focused natural language processing (NLP) engine to understand the question and find answers quickly, while using machine learning to improve on those answers over time.

“We’re not trying to solve every problem that NLP can address. We’re going after a very specific set of use cases which is really around employee language, and as a result, we’ve really tuned our engine to have the highest accuracy possible in the industry,” Calhoun told TechCrunch.

He says what they’ve done to increase accuracy is combine the NLP with image recognition technology. “What we’ve done is we’ve built our NLP engine on top of some image recognition architecture that’s really designed for a high degree of accuracy and essentially breaks down the phrase to understand the true meaning behind the phrase,” he said.

The solution is designed to provide a single immediate answer. If, for some reason, it can’t understand a request, it will open a help ticket automatically and route it to a human to resolve, but they try to keep that to a minimum. He says that when they deploy their solution, they tune it to the individual customers’ buzzwords and terminology.

So far they have been able to reduce help desk calls by 40% to 60% across customers with around 85% employee participation, which shows that they are using the tool and it’s providing the answers they need. In fact, the product understands 750 million employee phrases out of the box.

The company was founded in 2016. It currently has 65 employees and 35 customers, but with the new funding, both of those numbers should increase.

Just in time for our collective house arrests, Google has unveiled a redesigned version of Podcasts. The revamped version of the app is centered around discovery, broken up into three primary tabs.

There’s Home, which features your current feeds; Explore, which offers up popular and curated shows; and Activity, which offers a deeper dive into listening habits. Honestly, though, the big news here is that the app is finally landing in the iOS App Store.

Launched last summer, the app quickly became the top podcasting app on Android, because, well, Google. There’s been some limited cross-platform availability by way of a browser. Obviously, native app support is much more appealing for iPhone and iPad owners looking to see what kind of alternative Google is offering to Apple’s own popular Podcasts app.

Users’ listening habits on the app will be syncable across platforms by way of the Google Podcasts for Web. The iOS version is available for download starting today. The Android update, meanwhile, will be rolling out to users this week.

In a prime example of why President Trump shouldn’t be endorsing any unproven potential treatments for the novel coronavirus behind the current global pandemic, a new small-scale study by researchers in China indicates that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine actually isn’t any more effective than standard, existing best practice for conventional care of patients with the virus.

The study, which included 30 patients with a control of 15 who received no treatment, with the other half being treated with hydroxychloroquine, showed that there was a statistically insignificant difference in the number of patients who tested negative for the drug after a week. During the study, those who received conventional treatment were provided anti-virals that are currently recommended for use in China, including Iopinavir and ritonavir, and after a week, 13 of the 15 control patients showed no sign of the virus, while 14 of the 15 who were treated with hydroxychloroquine showed the same.

An earlier small-scale study of 30 patients by French researchers published last week had shown indication that hydroxychloroquine used alone was effective in reducing the duration and severity of COVID-19, while using it in combination with an antibiotic called azithromycin increased its effectiveness. The study has been criticized by some for its methods – which is the entire purpose of scientific study and medical research, wherein people submit their studies for peer review prior to publication, and then other researchers challenge their assumptions, results and findings.

Trump is obviously not a scientist or medical professional, and yet he has been touting the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine during the White House’s daily coronavirus task force press briefings, and on Twitter, including when he called for them to be “put in use IMMEDIATELY” on March 21. The drug can be lethal in doses that exceed physician’s guidance, however, and a Phoenix-area couple subsequently self-medicated with a form of chloroquine used for cleaning aquariums, citing the President’s information about it as the cause of their decision to take it.

White House task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci has attempted to dissuade anyone from reading too much into what amount to scattered and early scientific research results, but Fauci seems to be falling out of favor with Trump and has not appeared on recent task force briefings.

The bottom line is that all of these potential treatments require, as Fauci has said, proper large-scale clinical trials before any definitive statements can be made about their efficacy against the coronavirus one way or the other. Relying on small scale investigations means that you will see variances in results, which is why you do large-scale testing with proper controls to arrive at more consistent and verifiable research.

Medical professionals around the world are working tirelessly to research various forms of treatment, and to launch exactly these kinds of clinical trials, but they will take time to produce results – and then corroborating research will need to be conducted to show that their results are repeatable and reliable. Meanwhile, treatment using unproven methods will continue due to the severe and life-threatening nature of this disease, which has encouraged the FDA to allow case-by-case use of methods without formal approval on compassionate and investigatory grounds. That said, no one (least of all the President), should be pointing to these as proven solutions before public health agencies have actually done the work to certify them as such.

The coronavirus demand crunch has taken another bite: Palo Alto-based corporate travel-focused unicorn, TripActions, reportedly laid off hundreds of staff yesterday.

Per this post on Blind — written by someone with a verified TripActions email address — the company fired 350 people. Business Insider reported the same figure yesterday. While the Wall Street Journal said the layoffs amount to between one-quarter to one-fifth of the startup’s total staff, citing a person familiar with the situation.

In an email to CrunchBase News TripActions confirmed it has axed jobs in response to the COVID-19 global health crisis — saying it has “cut back on all non-essential spend”. Although it did not confirm exactly how many employees it has fired.

“[We] made the very difficult decision to reduce our global workforce in line with the current climate,” TripActions wrote in the statement. “We look forward to when the strength of the global economy and business travel inevitably return and we can hire back our colleagues to rejoin us in our mission to make business travel effortless for our customers and users.”

“This global health crisis is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in our lifetimes, and our hearts go out to everyone impacted around the world, including our own customers, partners, suppliers and employees,” it added. “The coronavirus has had [a] wide-reaching effect on the global economy. Every business has been impacted including TripActions. While we were fortunate to have recently raised funding and secured debt financing, we are taking appropriate steps in our business to ensure we are here for our customers and their travelers long into the future.”

Per the post on Blind, TripActions is providing one week of severance to sacked staff and medical cover until end of month. “With [the coronavirus pandemic] going on you think they would do better,” the OP wrote. The layoffs were made by Zoom call, they also said.

We’ve reached out to TripActions for comment.

Travel startups are facing an unprecedented nuclear winter as demand has fallen off a cliff globally — with little prospect of a substantial change to the freeze on most business travel in the coming months as rates of COVID-19 infections continue to grow exponentially outside China.

However TripActions is one of the highest valued and best financed of such startups — securing a $500M credit facility for a new corporate product only last month, when we noted Crunchbase had more than $480M in tracked equity funding for the company, including a $250M Series D TripActions raised in June from investors including a16z, Group 11, Lightspeed and Zeev Ventures.

Ahead of making the layoffs the company had already paused all hiring, per one former technical sourcer for the company writing on LinkedIn.

Swedish telehealth startup Kry has launched a tool for healthcare professionals to conduct remote consultations during the coronavirus pandemic. Calls for EU citizens to self isolate to reduce the spread of COVID-19 is driving major demand for video appointments, it said.

The platform — Care Connect by Kry — is launching in Europe, with ten languages supported initially, but will shortly be opening up worldwide. CEO and co-founder, Johannes Schildt, told us it’ll be launching in North America within a matter of “days”. 

Last week US regulators relaxed rules around the use of telehealth platforms for delivering a broader range of healthcare services — opening up the market for remote consultations during the coronavirus crisis.

“We are working extremely hard at all levels because this is time critical,” said Schildt. “We want to get this out there as soon as we possibly can. Today we’re launching it in Europe, we’re aiming to have it available within days in the US and Canada.”

The web-based platform for healthcare professionals to carry out encrypted video consultations does not require a Kry account. Instead doctors sign up (and in) with an email address and are able to send a one-time SMS link to a patient’s mobile phone number — which the patient then clicks on to begin a video consultation with the doctor from their smartphone.

Kry says the clinician’s email will never be shared with the patient. 

“We have been doing this for a long time but now it’s more important than ever that you have as many as possible of the current consultations now happening in physical locations are moved to digital,” said Schildt. “It’s for all clinicians, for anyone that’s run their own practice — to enable them to move their consultations to video in an easy way.”

He said Kry has seen demand for its commercial video-chat-with-a-doctor roughly doubling in recent weeks as Europeans seek alternatives for accessing primary care during the coronavirus crisis.   

“We’ve seen a big increase in demand… from patients. But a lot of that is also not driven by COVID-19 specific things — it’s everything else,” he told TechCrunch. “Obviously you have a new virus that is spreading but you also have a lack of access to GP practices and traditional healthcare — because a lot of traditional primary care is closing down. So you still have a lot of people that have urinary track infections, eye infections, skin conditions and other things that we can help with.

“So we see a big uplift in all symptoms. What’s also very encouraging to see is that we see a big uplift in older patients… understanding the benefits of digital healthcare. Usually when we’re launching in new markets the first cohort is the young and slightly more tech savvy population.”

Schildt said Kry is recruiting clinicians “all across Europe” to cope with increased demand. 

“We’re getting a lot of senior, retired clinicians,” he told us. “We’re unlocking a lot of underused talent so we now have a lot of retired doctors joining and helping out. And they should obviously not be in an intensive care unit or at the primary healthcare center where they risk getting the disease because they are old and might be fragile but they’re usually very, very senior doctors. 

“We’re also getting a lot of doctors who are on parental leave or part time sick leave and so on. So it’s a massive exercise for us now across all our European markets.”

The 2015-founded startup has served up some 1.6 million digital doctors appointments across Europe at this stage. It said it will offer training to doctors signing up to Care Connect on how to carry out remote consultations — given many may be doing so for the first time.

While the intent with Care Connect is to support heavily burdened public healthcare services during the coronavirus pandemic, there’s clearly scope for Kry to turn the platform into an additional revenue-generating service in future — once some of the doctors it onboards now for free have become comfortable using it.

Although Schildt emphasizes that’s not why they’ve scrambled to get the product out there right now. 

“We’re building this because we feel a huge responsibility to help out,” he said. “I think that everybody has a responsibility to help out. And what we can do of course in the market that we’re in we are working super hard on all levels and we’re working very closely with different governments in the markets that we’re in — but this is also a way for us to help out in the markets where we currently don’t have our own medical staff.

“So this is a solution that could be helpful in Spain, Italy, and in other markets around the globe.”

Kry has more products to help fight COVID-19 in the pipeline — and has already launched a symptom-checker for the disease within its existing apps for patients (aka Kry, or Livi) in all its European markets. It’s also doing some home-monitoring partnerships for patients who are in quarantine, per Schildt.

He won’t be drawn on what else it’s working on — noting it’s “working very closely with some of the European governments”. “In some of those cases they have specifically asked us not to be specific about what we’re doing,” he said. 

Asked about how else it’s using symptom data generated by use of its services, he said it’s sharing aggregated data with existing paying customers, such as the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).

He also told us European governments are keen to get access to data that might help them track how the coronavirus is spreading.

“Obviously this is really interesting data — at an aggregated level — as we can see where you have symptoms starting to spread. And obviously as a big partner to some of the largest payers of healthcare in the world — [e.g.] European governments — we are monitoring this very closely together with them,” said Schildt.

“We can see in real time, more or less, where you have different symptoms that are trending — and we already, before you had the big COVID-19 outbreak, you could see that viral infections and upper respiratory infections started to trend in a bit unusual way compared to last year. And that data we’re also sharing with our main [healthcare customers, including the UK’s NHS] to help their staff understand demand.”

France’s Ministry of State for Digital Affairs Cédric O and public investment bank Bpifrance announced a comprehensive support plan for startups this morning. Some French startups are going to face revenue issues as well as funding issues in the coming months.

The French government wants to temporarily bridge that gap with refinancing and liquidity measures — overall it represents $4.3 billion (€4 billion).

“Startups represent a growing part the economy — especially when it comes to jobs,” Cédric O said in a statement. “They are also working on innovative products and services that have been particularly useful during the lockdown, such as telemedicine appointments, remote work solutions or deliveries.”

France has already announced a widespread economic support plan. French companies that are facing revenue issues can skip tax payments as well as rent and utility bills. The French government is mobilizing $320 billion (€300 billion) in liquidity support, which should make it much easier to get a loan as the government is backing loans.

More importantly, if your company has to stop its operations, France has a short-time working scheme to avoid layoffs. Employees receive 84% to 100% of their salary — the government will reimburse companies.

And yet, startups are always on the verge of bankruptcy. That’s why the French government is going one step further with a startup-focused support plan with additional measures.

First, startups that were in the process of raising a new funding round will be able to raise a bridge round through Bpifrance’s PIA (Programme d’Investissements d’Avenir). Some VC firms might retract terms sheets, others might slow down their investment pace. Bpifrance is putting $86.7 million (€80 million) on the table. Private investors will co-invest as much as $86.7 million (€80 million) as well.

Second, the government is detailing liquidity support measures for startups. Just like other companies, they can borrow money as part of the $320 billion (€300 billion) liquidity scheme. For startups, they can borrow as much as two years of payroll for employees based in France or 25% of annual revenue — whichever is higher. This should represent $2.2 billion (€2 billion).

Third, startups can get tax returns more quickly, and in particular VAT returns and tax returns on research and development investments (crédit d'impôt recherche). This represents a liquidity injection of $1.6 billion (€1.5 billion).

Fourth, Bpifrance is speeding up public support payments. It is going to transfer $270 million (€250 million) ahead of schedule.

A new study from Italian researchers suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which is the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic currently causing a global health crisis, is relatively slow to mutate – meaning that any effective vaccine that is developed to prevent people from getting infected should be broadly effective across geographically separated populations, and over a relatively long period of time.

The research, conducted by two independent teams working separate from one another, including scientists at the “Lazzaro Spallanzani” National Institute for Infectious Diseases (IRCCS) in Rome and the Forensic Division of the Department of Biomedical Sciences and Public Health (DSBSP) at Ancona University Hospital, performed genetic sequencing tests using tech developed by Thermo Fisher Scientific on samples of the virus taken from Italian patients. They then compared these samples to a reference genome that was sequenced from a sample of the virus taken from the original Wuhan outbreak some two months prior.

The differences between the two virus samples was very small, speaking in terms of genetic variation – only five new variants appeared in the later Italian samples, which is an early indication that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus remains fairly stable even over the course of a long train of transmission across multiple individuals and populations.

This is heartening news, especially given that other coronaviruses can be quick to mutate. Consider the standard seasonal flu: it essentially constantly mutates, which is why each year a new flu vaccine is developed, with researchers essentially racing the clock to anticipate which newly mutated strains will pose the greatest threat in each flu season, adapting the inoculation and urging the public to get their updated shot.

Other viruses either mutate very slowly, or don’t mutate at all, and the coronavirus that leads to COVID-19 appears to be among the former. In addition to this Italian study, work done by John Hopkins University and other health science researchers around the world have supported this view. An endeavor by a UK consortium to more comprehensively track mutations over time should provide an even clearer view.

As far as the COVID-19 pandemic goes, this new support for the theory that the virus behind it is a slow-moving one in terms of its genetic makeup is very good news indeed. Any vaccine is still likely at least a year way, but this research at least suggests that when it does arrive, it’ll be effective broadly, and for at least a few years at a time.