Year: 2020

Hulu’s streaming service is available almost everywhere. But one significant platform it hadn’t yet launched on was Comcast’s set-top boxes. That changes today as Hulu announced its on-demand service will as of today be available on Comcast’s Xfinity Flex platform, with support for Xfinity X1’s platform planned for the weeks ahead.

Xfinity Flex is Comcast’s streaming device for broadband customers who would use it as an alternative to something like Roku, Apple TV, or Fire TV, for example. Because the box is newer, it doesn’t yet have the app catalog of its rivals. Hulu wasn’t the only major streaming service missing from Flex — Disney Plus isn’t yet available, and neither is Sling TV, Spotify, CBS All Access, and others.

However, Xfinity Flex customers will only have access to Hulu’s on-demand offering at launch (either ad-free or ad-supported), but not its live TV service.

First-time Hulu customers will also be able to personalize their experience through the Taste Picker feature, by adding favorites to “My Stuff,” and by using the Like and Dislike buttons Hulu rolled out last fall.

Neither Hulu or Comcast gave a specific time frame as to when the service was launching on Comcast’s Xfinity X1 platform, beyond “the coming weeks.”

But Comcast did say that Hulu will be integrated with its Xfinity Voice Remote, which will allow customers to say “Hulu” to launch the app or search for programs with voice commands.

Hulu programming will also be available throughout the X1 and Flex guide in the collections curated by Xfinity TV editors. Customers can also say things like “New on Hulu” or “Best of Hulu” to see the editors’ picks.

Last May, Disney took operational control of Hulu, though Comcast will retain its 33% stake until 2024 at which point either side can initiate a sale. The deal allows Comcast to still financially benefit from Hulu’s popularity in the years ahead, before its own streaming efforts via NBCU’s Peacock gain steam. It makes sense, then, that it would want Hulu on its own boxes a key part of that strategy.

Since Disney took over Hulu it has worked to fill in the gaps in Hulu’s platform support. Earlier this month, Hulu with Live TV arrived on PlayStation 4, for example, which previously only offered the on-demand service.

Comcast says Hulu subscribers can log in to Hulu now through the Flex app and new subscribers can sign up at hulu.com/start/xfinityflex.

It’s easy to think, as we find ourselves in the midst of a truly unprecedented situation, that the rules of building a successful business have suddenly changed. While the world may be topsy-turvy at the moment, keeping your customer at the center of your business strategy is more important than ever.

That means finding creative ways to engage with your customers and thinking deeply about what they need as the world changes before our eyes.

As a small example on a local level, Pandemonium Books and Games in Cambridge, Massachusetts has started offering same-day delivery to neighborhoods in the Boston area for a $5 fee and a $20 minimum purchase.

This is taking a difficult situation and finding a way to stay connected with customers, while keeping the business going through difficult times. It’s something that your most loyal customers will certainly remember when we return to some semblance of normalcy — and it’s just a great community service.

When you hear from leaders of the world’s most successful technology companies, whether it’s Jeff Bezos at Amazon or Marc Benioff at Salesforce, these two executives are constantly pushing their organizations to put the customer first.

At Amazon, that manifests itself in the company motto that it’s always Day 1. That motto means they never can become complacent and always place the customer first. In his 2016 Letter to Shareholders, Bezos described what he meant:

There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.

Benioff runs his company with a similar world view, and it’s no coincidence that both companies are so wildly successful. In his recent book, Trailblazer, Benioff wrote about the importance of relentless customer focus:

Nothing a company does is more essential than how it engages with customers. In a world where online portals are replacing customer service centers and algorithms are replacing humans on the front lines, companies like ours continually need to show that the personal connections our customers craved were still — and always would be — there.

In our current crisis, that focus becomes ever more important and universal. In his last interview before his death in January, Clayton Christensen, author of the seminal book Innovator’s Dilemma, told MIT Sloan Management Review that while these organizations had other things going for them, customer centricity was certainly a big factor in their success.

They have all built organizations that have put the customers, and their Job to Be Done, at the center. They also have demonstrated the ability to manage emergent strategy well. However, they also have been in the fortunate circumstance where their core businesses have been growing at phenomenal rates, and they have had the presence of the founder to help, to personally get involved in key strategic decisions.

While you don’t want to appear like you are taking advantage of a bad situation, there are ways you can help your customers by thinking of new ways engage and help them in a difficult time. Many companies are offering services for free for the next several months to help customers get through the financial uncertainty we are facing in the near term. Others are posting free content and access to other resources on websites.

While it’s understood that some customers simply won’t have money to spend in the coming months, those that do will have different needs than they did before and you have to be ready to address them, whatever that means to your business.

This virus is going to force us to rethink about a lot of the ways we run our businesses, our society and our lives, but if you keep your customer at the center of all your decisions, even in the midst of such a crisis, you will be setting the foundation for a successful business whenever we return to normal.

Quantum Machines, a Tel Aviv-based startup that is building both hardware and software to operate quantum computers, today announced that it has raised a $17.5 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Israeli tech entrepreneur Avigdor Willenz, who, among other companies, co-founded Habana Labs and Anapurna Labs and sold them to Intel and Amazon respectively. and Harel Insurance investments.

TLV Partners and Battery Ventures also participated in this round. TLV Partners also led the company’s $5.5 million seed round in 2018, in which Battery Partners also participated.

“The race to commercial quantum computers is one of the most exciting technological challenges of our generation,” said Willenz. “Our goal at [Quantum Machines] is to make this happen faster than anticipated and establish ourselves as a key player in this emerging industry.”

The company says it will use the new funding to accelerate the adoption of its Quantum Orchestration Platform. This platform went live earlier this year. What makes it unique is that it’s a combination of custom hardware, which the company designed itself, and software tools that can be used to control virtually any quantum processor. To control a quantum processor, you also need a powerful classical computer, but traditional computers are ill-suited for this task, Quantum Machines argues, and it’ll take specialized hardware for classical computing to harness the power of quantum computing and run complex algorithms on these machines.

“The classical layers of the quantum computer are the real unmet need. They are the bottleneck,” Quantum Machines co-founder Itamar Sivan told me when the platform launch. “We were really looking into what is holding the industry back. What are the things that we can do today to drive this industry forward, but that will also enable faster progress in the future. Since most of the focus in the last years has been devoted to quantum processors, it was only natural that you know we take on this challenge.”

In light of growing concerns around COVID-19, Wheels has decided to pause its pedal-less e-bike operations until the end of March, the company announced today.

“After weighing the pros and cons, we’ve decided that the best course of action is to temporarily stop deploying bikes until the end of March and to revisit this then,” the company said in an announcement today. “To be clear, we strongly believe that micromobility in general, and Wheels in particular, is in a unique position to help our communities get through the current challenges. This temporary pause will help position us to deliver on that, and we will be announcing some exciting news on that front in the very near future.”

Wheels is not the first micromobility startup to pause operations during this pandemic. Yesterday, Lime paused its operations in a handful of markets, citing concerns about the coronavirus. Spin, on the other hand, has decided to keep operating because it sees its vehicles as a way to help people run their essential errands during San Francisco’s shelter-in-place order.

Wheels landed on its decision after coming to terms with the fact that while many riders said they prefer Wheels over public transportation or ride-sharing, it was important to protect its field team and “do everything we can to limit the spread of the virus,” the company said. Additionally, Wheels said it was concerned some riders weren’t using the vehicles for essential purposes.

At the end of the month, Wheels plans to revisit its decision and see what the next best steps are. In the meantime, Wheels will no longer be operating in  Los Angeles, San Diego, Miami, Orlando, Tallahassee, Dallas, Austin, Atlanta, Cleveland, Salt Lake City, Scottsdale, Tempe, Stockholm, Madrid, and Basel.

A new initiative from a Los Angeles investor is taking stock of venture firms and their ability to commit capital in an effort to match firms that are still open for business and cutting checks to startups that are fundraising in the age of COVID-19.

Laurent Grill, one of the investors at Luma Launch (which is the corporate investment arm of the film studio Luma Pictures), has been working in the Los Angeles venture community building and backing startups for about a decade. Over that time, Grill has put together a fairly impressive rolodex, and in these times of uncertainty he’s putting that rolodex to work.

Most startups are buckling in for a bumpy few months and making tough decisions about when, where and how to get the cash they need to keep their businesses going. While there have been a number of statements on Twitter from various investors about how they’re doing deals and open for business, Grill is making sure the community can be coordinated so companies no where to turn and investors can find businesses to back in an age of Zoom diligence.

He issued a call on LinkedIn, Twitter, and seemingly every other platform requesting that investors who are still cutting checks in the time of the coronavirus sign up (privately) to a list that Grill is managing. There’s also a list for startups that are looking for cash.

The matchmaking service is designed to save time and energy for entrepreneurs and investors who have to worry about keeping the lights on.

So far, Grill has racked up responses from a lot of the roughly 400 investors he’s sent an email to for the initial list he’s putting together.

Luma Launch, as Grill is the first to admit, won’t be among the investors looking at new deals in the near term. As a corporate venture arm, the firm has to manage the portfolio of investments that are already on its balance sheet. That’s a strong list of companies including The Wave, Community, Lensabl and others that are well-situated to make it through the crisis, but corporate venture is often constrained as their parent companies look internally and new investments aren’t on the short-term horizon.

However, the network that Grill has amassed (although he’s loath to talk about it) includes a number of top investors at some of the largest funds and they’re all privately telling him that they’re open for business.

Even if Grill isn’t investing, he still wants Luma Launch to play the role in the community that he hoped it always would. “Luma Launch can be that support mechanism that we have been trying to be since day one,” says Grill. “If we can help support entrepreneurs both here in LA and around the country to connect with relevant investors then we’re all going to be better in the long run.”

In times of uncertainty, it’s best to have a clear and honest understanding of what’s happening in the market, not just performative assurances, says Grill.

“I want to create an ecosystem where everyone can recognize that people are trying to be active,” he says. That’s when I made the public post… I think someone needs to step up and open this up to the general community and the tech community as a whole to help decipher the noise.”

That said, the matchmaking service that Grill hopes to build won’t be open to every company, just the companies that have already raised at least a seed round of funding. For entrepreneurs just getting their businesses off the ground, Grill advises that they focus on building their product and customer base before tapping venture investment.

For established businesses that need additional support, the door remains open. “If you have the capability of helping someone you have the responsibility to help someone,” Grill says.

Facebook today officially rolled out its sweeping desktop redesign that offers dark mode, tabbed homescreen, and a cleaner profile. Facebook tells TechCrunch that “starting today, the majority of people on Facebook will have access to the new desktop design” which it announced at last year’s F8 conference. Users can opt-in to turn on the redesign before it becomes the default for everyone later this year.

To activate the Facebook.com redesign, go to the Settings Menu -> “See New Facebook”. To disable it, users can return and hit “Switch to Classic Facebook”.

The redesign offers streamlined navigation through tabs for Groups, Marketplace, Watch and more atop the home screen. The home page and transitions also load more quickly. Larger fonts and more sensible layouts make getting around easier on the eyes.

Facebok is also making it faster to create Events, Pages, Groups, and ads. You’ll actually be able to see a preview of what these things look like on mobile before you share them.

Most noticibly, Facebook’s new design brings dark mode. It’s designed to minimize screen glare while maintaining contrast so you don’t blast your eyes with a white background while in a dim room.

Facebook is in the challenging position of actually still being popular 16 years after its launch. That means the desktop site has built up a ton of cruft as the company ships features that appeal to only subsets of its users. While on mobile, most of that extra stuff is shoved in a navigation drawer, on desktop it’s all laid out and can overwhelm our senses. While most Facebooking happens on mobile now, keeping the hardcore desktop users who create tons of content for the social network happy is critical to its longevity and its ad views.

Remote Year wants to help people travel around the world and keep their job while doing so. The Chicago startup relies on the idea that “great work can be done anywhere.” And to prove it, it brings people to 12 cities in 12 months, all while they’re working full time jobs. Think co-working spaces in Ljubljana, code from bungalows in Thailand, and workshops from rooftops in Istanbul.

Needless to say, Remote Year’s core business relies on wanderlust, disposable income, and the ability to travel. 

Citing the COVID-19 pandemic, founder Greg Caplan told TechCrunch that Remote Year has laid off 50% of its staff. The layoff impacted roughly 50 roles on the sales, marketing, and product side, and comes less than six months after the company raised a $5 million capital investment from LightBank, which brought its total funding to a total of $17 million, according to Crunchbase data. 

“The borders sort of froze up with the virus and a lot of our folks decided not to travel and go home,” Caplan told TechCrunch. “Half of our revenue dried off in a couple of days, and there’s no end in sight when this situation may change.”

The startup says it still has runway from its last capital investment. Layoffs are expected to more largely hit the tech travel industry due to the global pandemic and people staying inside. Earlier this week, travel savings startup Service shut down operations, citing the pandemic and economic downturn. 

Remote Year charges between $2,000 and $3,000 a month for its travel programs per person. This includes travel to and between destinations, private rooms and activities. Caplan said that Remote Year staff has always been a distributed team, and by nature of industry, it was “monitoring” COVID-19 for over a month before the onslaught of cancellations and news.

“But monitoring it and talking about it was very different [from] what has unfolded in the last seven days,” Caplan said. 

To help the employees that were laid off, Caplan looked inward. Remote Year has always had a three-person team that connects people to remote jobs. That team will be helping its former colleagues through 1:1 coaching, resume interviews, interview preparation, and contract negotiations. He urges other founders to do whatever they can to “humanize this” global pandemic, and reach out if needed. 

“We’ve actually heard from a couple other companies that want our help finding remote jobs for employees” Caplan said. “We’re not sure what that means for our business, but we’re going to think about how we can help.”

 

U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn addressed the ongoing work of the agency in terms of its work on potential treatments and vaccines for the COVID-19 coronavirus currently spreading globally. Despite a claim early in Thursday’s White House briefing on the pandemic by President Donald Trump that one proposed treatment, anti-malarial chloroquine, had already been approved by the FDA for COVID-19 treatment, Hahn said that in fact the agency is currently looking at wide-spread clinical trials of the drug, but it is not yet approved for that use.

“In the short term, we’re looking at drugs that are already approved for other indications,” Dr. Hahn said. “Many Americans have read studies and heard media reports about this drug chloroquine, which is an anti-malarial drug. It’s already approved, as the President said, for the treatment of malaria [Trump had not said this, but had instead said it was now approved for COVID-19] as well as an arthritis condition. That’s a drug that the President has directed us to take a closer look at, as to whether an expanded use approach to that could be done to actually see if that benefits patients. And again, we want to do that in the setting of a clinical trial, a large pragmatic clinical trial to actually gather that information and answer the question that needs to be answered.”

Another potential treatment which has shown signs of possible positive effect, remdesivir, was also cited by trump as being very “near” approval for use by the FDA. Hahn clarified that in fact, while remdesivir is currently undergoing clinical trials, it’s following the normal FDA process for approval for clinical medical therapeutic use in the U.S. He did say he was declined to comment on ongoing commercial arrangements with remdesivir maker Gilead when asked when we might expect the drug to be available commercially.

Hahn also highlighted another experimental treatment possibility that the FDA is investing: Using plasma derived from blood taken from coronavirus patients who have recovered, and injecting that into other patients in an attempt to potentially jump start their own immune response.

“There’s a cross agency effort about something called convalescent plasma,” he said. “This is a pretty exciting area. And again, this is something that we have given assistance to other countries with as this crisis has developed, so FDA has been working for some time on this. If you’ve been exposed to coronavirus and you’re better, you don’t have the virus in your blood. We could collect the blood now this is a possible treatment. This is not a proven treatment, I just want to emphasize that, [but we would] collect the blood, concentrate that and have the ability, once it’s pathogen free, that is virus free, be able to give that to other patients and the immunoglobulins, the immune response could potentially provide a benefit to patients.”

All of the treatments currently approved for use by the FDA to treat other ailments are available to medical professionals in case of “compassionate use,” Hahn said. This provision allows a practitioner to use these medications on COVID-19 patients, even though they aren’t technically cleared specifically to do so, in extreme cases. The benefit of this compassionate use model is that doctors who take advantage of that are then required to share back all patient info regarding administration and response to the drug, which helps inform ongoing trials and regulatory efforts.

Numerous clinical studies have been conducted globally regarding the performance of chloroquine and remdesivir since the beginning of the pandemic. Most recently a French study that included use of a chloroquine variant called hydroxychloroquine found that it performed particularly well in tandem with an antibiotic known as azithromycin. Still, Hahn said that even if a drug is already approved for other use, it’s crucial for the safe deployment of any therapeutic treatment that researchers determine the right does to protect a patient’s health.

Glossier NYC, in normal times, is typically visited by more than 2,000 people every day, with lines of people from all over the world curling out the door. And when you enter, it’s tempting to touch, well, everything.

The walls are adorned with flowers, mirrors and giant versions of the makeup company’s flagship product: Boy Brow. Makeup is sold on communal tables, where customers are encouraged to try products. Emily Weiss, the founder of the unicorn startup, calls customer meetups as she sees them: community events.

And, of course, in the store, there are also a few sinks to wash off your makeup (and your hands).

The challenge of running a startup that has a high physical component has become one of the big themes in the world of tech in the last several weeks. Indeed, as companies like Google, Facebook and Zoom do their parts to help people stay connected during the novel coronavirus pandemic, and research for cures, another story has taken shape in a different area of the tech world: startups and larger tech companies with “high touch” models — not just based on customer relationships but literally business models with strong physical components — are facing a world of challenges at a time when people are being asked to stay indoors, and stay away from each other.

To stave off cash shortages and closures, businesses are taking a variety of approaches, and rethinking how they run their businesses, to keep going. In some countries, governments are stepping in to keep businesses from collapsing, while some startups are hoping that their investors will continue to support them as the pandemic continues to spread.

In other cases, startups are quietly coming together to compare notes on how best to tackle legal and other hurdles in an unprecedented environment. (So quietly, in fact, that they didn’t want to talk about this on the record.) When is the right time to talk to insurance companies? How do you negotiate with them and will you ever get anything out of those discussions? What recourse does a company have for forfeiting some payments that are coming due? How do you handle headcount if you lack the liquidity to survive a big dip in your business? What are the best practices for running a business in a reduced or altered form?

“This has been the most difficult five continuous days in all of my team’s careers,” Vibhu Norby, the CEO and founder of b8ta — a chain of retail stores that act as a marketplace between consumers and lots of different hardware and other companies, letting potential buyers try out products before buying — said in an interview. “We don’t have any other business other than our physical one, that’s all we do. But we have an amazing team and there are things that we’re doing that are useful, but there is no playbook for this.”

It’s not all doom and gloom. With people home-bound and spending a significantly higher amount of time online, tech companies that innately support social distancing are getting a huge boost in purchasing. Think in particular e-commerce delivery services such as online grocers, and Amazon. Some are finding that they’ve had to curtail services to be able to meet demand. Others like streaming services are seeing giant spikes in their traffic.

(Haven’t) been there, (haven’t) done that

The trajectory of impact on startups has been a wide one, starting earliest with major events. Conferences and expositions have become something of a cornerstone of how startups come together and do business in a global economy. While we clearly have tech hubs where face-to-face contact is as easy as grabbing a coffee, events become a place where you can catch people from many other corners, or even those who don’t regularly come out of the woodwork.

All of that has changed this year, with just about every major confab this year (so far) getting cancelled. CES, at the beginning of January, just made it through; RSA surprisingly went ahead last month. But many events have been taken off the table: MWC in Barcelona, SXSW in Austin, events from Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, E3, GDC and so many more.

People love to complain about how conferences and expositions are a noisy mess, but the fact of the matter remains that they have no rival when it comes to meeting people and doing deals at scale.

The events themselves are tech businesses in their own right, marketplaces that generate billions of dollars in revenues, and connecting hundreds of thousands people for potential B2B sales. “This is going to impact our business for sure,” one exec at a startup (who didn’t want to be named) told TechCrunch when the huge mobile confab in Barcelona was cancelled over coronavirus fears. “MWC is a major event for us…the largest source of qualified sales leads on our calendar. No other event comes close.”

If events businesses were the first wave of “high touch” tech outfits to be impacted by coronavirus, following closely behind has been the transportation and tourism industries — connected to the events business but also far exceeding it in scope.

People have chosen, been requested and sometimes been forced, to stop moving around in an attempt to mitigate the spread of the virus — creating a significant knock-on effect not just for transportation companies, but also the wider tourism industry, “The biggest nuclear winter in online travel,” as one founder put it last week. As people increasingly stay put, Airbnb this week extended its own extenuating circumstances refund policy so that people can rebook already reserved stays that were supposed to happen in the next month.

Transportation, of course, hasn’t only seen restriction for long-distance travel, or even for the carriage of just humans. Uber and Lyft have both cut back on rides, specifically shared, carpool-style services, in an attempt to “flatten the curve” to reduce the frequency of new cases brought on by too much contact, and food delivery services have introduced “contactless” delivery to minimise contact with customers, especially with those who might be infected and are quarantining at home.

“The health and wellbeing of our couriers and customers is our top priority and we think these practices will help give some peace-of-mind to our fleet, while also decreasing the interaction and contact between both parties,” a spokesman for Glovo, a European delivery startup, said last week when the measures were introduced.

But the impact extends beyond obvious sectors like transportation and tourism. Take makeup, for instance.

While Glossier does a majority of its sales online, it temporarily closed its retail locations last week to limit customer interactions. In some ways makeup is innately an industry that requires you (or someone else) to touch your face. Glossier is brainstorming ways to stay in contact with customers, such as FaceTime consultations and Slack groups.

Per Glossier, it hasn’t yet received questions from customers on how to handle the aspect of makeup application in a time when we are told to not touch our faces. It is, however, telling people to wash their hands.

There’s also Revel, which is a marketplace for women over 50 to host and attend small gatherings and stay connected. Given the age group and social aspect of the company, Revel has cancelled all in-person Revel events through at least the end of March.

“The decision to cancel in-person events has an immediate business impact for us,” the co-founders wrote in an email to TechCrunch.

Revel is working on a speaker series over Zoom, virtual walks where members can be connected via FaceTime or audio to go on walks together, and happy hours. The list goes on with book clubs and writing groups.

Similarly, London startup Jolt built a business around a concept of “pay-monthly” business classes that had a strong in-person component: not only was the idea to learn in a physical classroom, but those involved got opportunities to network with other students before and after courses, participate in breakout sessions, work in partner groups with other students and access presentations.

Now with those in-person classes on hold, Jolt has moved up the launch of “Jolt Remote,” an online version that it had previously planned to ship in 2021, which aims to preserve all the dynamics of the startup’s previous, offline efforts. “The company felt it necessary to expedite its rollout in order to keep their students safe, and to reduce the need for their education to be disrupted in the wake of COVID-19,” a spokesperson said.

Jolt‘s teachers will continue to work as they always did, she continued. But instead of their students meeting up in Jolt campuses, they’ll now be able to access the courses virtually.

While Revel’s shifts are likely to have an impact on its bottom line, they said, it was the right decision. Few startups and investors have even started to point at the new innovation that will come out of this pandemic as a bittersweet externality.

Revel, while it only operates in the Bay Area, has more than 200 members from geographies as far as South Africa. They’re planning to join the upcoming virtual gatherings.

The founders say it is helping Revel to build virtual capabilities that they will be able to use in the future when geographic distance, illness or other factors isolate members who need connection.

It’s helping an in-person company think what it means to be in-person.

The big social networks take steps to ensure that they’re providing accurate information for public health, Charter refuses to allow employees to work from home and Microsoft Teams sees a big spike in popularity. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 19, 2020.

1. Facebook will put a new coronavirus info center on top of the News Feed

In an effort to disseminate trustworthy health information on COVID-19, Facebook will roll out its own coronavirus information center — a central hub where the company will collect information from sources like the CDC and WHO.

Meanwhile, Twitter updated its safety policy to prohibit tweets that “could place people at a higher risk of transmitting COVID-19.” The new policy bans tweets denying expert guidance on the virus, encouraging “fake or ineffective treatments, preventions and diagnostic techniques,” as well as tweets that mislead users by pretending to be from health authorities or experts.

2. Charter staff told to report to offices despite positive coronavirus tests

The phone and internet giant, which owns the Spectrum brand, has doubled down in the past week on its policy of disallowing its 15,000 office-based employees to work from home, prompting one engineer to quit over fears he would contract the illness. Dozens of other Charter employees have contacted TechCrunch in the past few days with concerns about their current working conditions.

3. Microsoft Teams jets to 44M DAUs, announces new features as remote work booms

Microsoft’s Team product is a Slack competitor and a likely beneficiary of the COVID-19 remote work boom. The new figure represents a huge gain on the number Microsoft shared in November 2019, when the product had 20 million DAUs.

4. Home diagnostics startup Everlywell is launching an at-home coronavirus test sample kit

Everlywell’s test kit includes swab-based collection equipment, as well as shipping materials that ensure safe transport of a person’s sample, which is then tested by labs certified for COVID-19 testing under the FDA Emergency Use Authorization.

5. The 20 best startups from Y Combinator’s W20 Demo Day

With world events overtaking the tech industry’s preference for coffee meetings and in-person events, Y Combinator skipped its famous two-day live Demo Day and went for a radical experiment: no demos at all, but instead a long list of the nearly 200 startups in its Winter 2020 batch, with links to their sites and one-page slides. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Ada raises $44M Series B to improve its chatbot customer service platform

“Although AI gets thrown around a lot in the enterprise, we are focused on companies offering solutions that are driving real business value, and Ada is doing exactly that,” said Accel partner Ben Fletcher. “Ada is breaking through the crowded market of chatbots to define a new category of automated customer experience that can manage far greater customer inquiry volumes while delivering some of the strongest customer satisfaction scores we’ve seen.”

7. COVID-19 updates

While the Daily Crunch has been packed with headlines about the global pandemic, there’s still plenty of news that I’m leaving out. So if you want to stay fully up-to-date, visit our hub for COVID-19 coverage.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.