Year: 2020

Y Combinator’s Demo Day was a bit different this time around.

As concerns grew over the spread of COVID-19, Y Combinator shifted the event format away from the two-day gathering in San Francisco we’ve gotten used to, instead opting to have its entire class debut to invited investors and media via YC’s Demo Day website simultaneously.

In a bit of a surprise twist, YC also moved Demo Day forward one week citing accelerated pacing from investors. Alas, this meant switching up its plan for each company to have a recorded pitch on the Demo Day website; instead, each company pitched via slides, a few paragraphs outlining what they’re doing and the traction they’re seeing, and team bios. It’s unclear so far how this new format — in combination with the rapidly evolving investment climate — will impact this class.

As we do with each class, we’ve collected our notes on each company based on information gathered from their pitches, websites, and, in some cases, our earlier coverage of them.

To make things a bit easier to read, we’ve split things up by category rather than have it be one huge wall of text. These are the B2B companies — those that primarily focus on selling to other businesses. You can find the other categories (such as hardware, AI, and consumer) here.

B2B Companies:

Alude: Property tech in Brazil is a hot market, with startups like Loft and unicorn QuintoAndar raising mega growth stage rounds. Alude wants to control the distribution channel with its simplified home leasing/buying process. Its system automates the process of background checks, document collection, insurance purchasing and online signing. This modernized tech is free for brokers, and the company plans to monetize by selling mortgage and insurance to customers.

Vori: Vori wants to be the operating system for the American grocery supply chain. Even in 2020, supermarkets still have an old school paper and pen ordering process with wholesale distributors. Vori acts as a B2B marketplace for supermarkets and distributors, helping stores produce inventory from vendors in a more efficient way. It says it has 24 active stores using its tech, and is also supporting over 150 distributors in Northern California. Vori acts also as a product discovery engine for supermarkets, helping them stay competitive with Whole Foods and Amazon.

Linkana: Linkana is compliance-driven procurement software in Latin America. There are 40,000 companies in Latin America that spend $60,000 yearly in procurement solutions, creating a $2.5 billion market opportunity. The four-person co-founding team has members who have worked together for nearly a decade.

Weav: Interviewing new candidates at work can be a time suck, and there isn’t a great way to organize and synthesize feedback from the team. Weav records and transcribes interviews for hiring teams so that companies can reach decisions faster and conduct fewer interviews. Led be an ex-Apple/Google/Microsoft team, Weav says it’s building state of the art NLP tools that leverage information retrieval, topic modeling and entity recognition.

ElectroNeek RPA: Everyone agrees that robots are the future of automation, but actually deploying the technology often requires a great deal of expertise. ElectroNeek is building a desktop and cloud-based interface designed to help streamline the automation process for IT employees and business professionals without a robotics background.

Reaktive: Aimed at creative professionals like animators, video editors and engineers, Reaktive is designed to replace desktop hardware with cloud-based solutions. The company claims its offering is 100x faster than traditional solutions, greatly reducing things like an eight-hour rendering job down to 45 seconds. The company has already closed $2.2 million in purchase orders from studios.

Eze: Eze is building a used smartphone market that functions like a commodities exchange. The system will update in real time with the fluctuating price of a wide range of different mobile devices. Devices will be sold to wholesalers in bulk, who turn around and sell them to retailers.

Oda: Aggregates real estate data from listing services and government records into a unified API. The company says it’s currently working with 4 pilot companies.

Okay: Hooks into tools like JIRA, GitHub, GCal, and Pagerduty to give engineering managers a dashboard to better understand how their teams are working and improve efficiency (by, for example, reducing meetings that might break up productivity). Charges $350 per manager.

Tajir: A marketplace to help small stores in Pakistan get inventory. The company says that currently nearly all distribution to “mom-and-pop” shops in Pakistan is done offline; Tajir brings the process into a mobile app with free next day delivery.

GuruHotel: A website and property management/booking system for hotels. Eight months after launch, they’re working with 26 hotels and seeing $20k a month in revenue. The base plan provides a basic hosting/booking engine in exchange for a 5% booking commission, while premium plans introduce other features, such as property management tools, for $350 to $499 a month in addition to commission.

Riot Security: An anti-phishing tool that automatically tests your employees with faux-phishing emails based on the most recently discovered phishing techniques. It starts at $200 a month for companies with under 50 employees, with the price shifting to custom scaling after that. The tool is currently in pilot tests with six companies, with an MRR of $1,000. Find our previous coverage of Riot Security here.

LabGrid:  A project-tracking and collaboration tool meant to help biotech companies and labs communicate more efficiently than they might over email.

Trimwire: Hooks into a company’s bank accounts and credit cards to automatically reduce monthly costs by flagging anomalies and hunting for potential savings on recurring expenses (such as forgotten subscriptions).

Upflow: Aiming to be the “Venmo of B2B,” Upflow focuses on getting unpaid invoices paid. It automatically sends customized emails and registered letters to unpaid accounts, updates designated team members when account status changes, and handles payments. They charge $50 per month for companies with fewer than 30 invoices per month, scaling it up to $225 per month for companies doing less than $3M annually. Find our previous coverage of Upflow here.

Explo: Explo is meant to let non-technical employees analyze large amounts of data without having to know how to write/run SQL queries, instead providing them with a point/click interface for generating reports. The team says it has over 400 companies on its waitlist.

Workbench: Workbench is developing a platform purpose-built for hardware companies for sourcing suppliers and storing information/specs about the components they use.

Jet Admin: A drag-and-drop tool for building internal tools without code, hopefully freeing up dev team resources. Connects to databases and services like Stripe/Google Analytics/Salesforce and allows teams to piece together tools by way of pre-built widgets. Free for indie developers, or $19 per user for teams with up to 10 members.

Battlecard: Trains your sales team on what to say to unhappy customers through simulation (complete with synthesized unhappy customer voice). Teams collaborate to write their “playbook” of responses for different situations, sharing the answers/phrasing they’ve found to work best. Roughly a month after launching, the company says it has already booked over $35k in annual recurring revenue.

SnackThis: Is a collaborative, browser-based tool for motion design. Imagine a remote team fine-tuning moving typography in a video, or the way an app moves from screen to screen. One of the co-founders previously sold his motion design-heavy company to GoPro for $80M.

Zeo Auto: Fleet management and tracking for companies with automative fleets in India, allowing them to do things like view current vehicle position, replay past trips, calculate fuel costs, etc. Compatible with over 50 different GPS devices. The company says it has onboarded 2,000 fleet owners, bringing 30,000 vehicles onto the platform.

Savvy: Built for companies unable to offer group insurance plans, Savvy lets them instead give employees a tax-free stipend to put toward an individual health plan of their choosing. The company says that it’s working with over 30 companies after launching two months ago, accounting for roughly $100K in ARR.

Flowdash: “Human-in-the-loop” operations are those that require a human at some point in a process to make a final call — think claims processing, or moderating user-flagged content. Flowdash helps human-in-the-loop teams build new tools with minimal coding, allowing them to integrate them into services like Slack or Gmail. Their base plan starts at $25 per user per month, increasing if you need things like analytics or on-prem deployment.

Dropee: Dropee helps independent retailers in Southeast Asia buy things in bulk from large brands, charging said brands $8 per store for insight on what is or isn’t selling. The company says it’s seeing over $40K in monthly revenue.

NUMI: Helps retailers and marketplaces in Africa import U.S. goods, handling the challenges involved with freight and customs. Currently in a pilot program with Carrefour, which they expect to account for over $500K per year in sales.

Pilot: Pilot handles payroll, benefits and compliance for hiring remote contractors. Companies pay $60 per contractor per month for Pilot to help treat contractors like full-time employees by offering benefits, stock options and expense reimbursements. With COVID-19 quarantines familiarizing more companies with remote work, there could be a big market for ensuring their retention and productivity by making them feel like part of the team.

SEND: SEND is a digital freight forwarder and customs broker for Africa that manages cargo shipping by air, truck, and sea. SEND optimizes routing for faster, more reliable deliveries by bringing documentation online and letting clients just deal with the one company instead of up to a dozen shipping vendors. SEND’s founders are brothers, and see an opportunity to be the Flexport of Africa by conquering the market before that $3.2 billion valuation startup can reach the continent.

Brokrete: Brokrete, a delivery marketplace app, was developed to connect contractors with available concrete suppliers with the most competitive price. The startup’s founders are aiming to capture a piece of what they describe as a $120 billion market opportunity. They’ve already made some headway, by first demoing the app with contractors and then launching its product in December. The company began in the Canadian marketplace and is expanding to Houston this spring.

Paneau: The founders of Paneau are aiming to create a new way for businesses to advertise to ride-hailing customers by placing interactive tablets inside Uber and Lyft vehicles. The tablet can be used by riders to make purchases and even re-route the car. Paneau is already generating revenue — some $11,000 a month — by charging $0.96 cents per trip.

Bego: Bego has created an app focused on the Latam market that uses machine learning to predict future locations of cargo delivery and helps match truckers to customers in an effort to reduce the number of “empty miles.” For now, the startup has one route — Mexico City to Nuevo Laredo — where 42% of all cargo in Mexico is moved.

99minutos: This Latam startup is focused on last-mile delivery for e-commerce purchases. The startup has a wide geographic footprint of 19 cities across two countries with 15,000 deliveries daily and plans to expand to Colombia and Peru later this year. 99Minutos is now launching delivery with electric vehicles and in Mexico is the last-mile delivery partner for Amazon, MercadoLibre and Walmart.

Farm Theory: Farm theory buys the “ugly” yet fresh and fit-for-consumption vegetables from Indian farmers and then sells and delivers the produce directly to restaurants in India. The vegetable delivery service says it can save restaurants up to 30%.

HYPHY: As advertising matures alongside user-generated social media content, HYPHY is aiming to create a market for consumers to sell their photos and videos directly to brands. The marketplace is a way for brands to source media more quickly for advertising or marketing campaigns.

Zaam: Zaam is building a platform to simplify B2B onboarding, reducing complexity and pushing customers through the tiring process of data and document requests through automating as much as possible. The startup says they have hit $120M ARR in the past two months.

HireSweet: HireSweet is building a hiring platform that pushes recruiters towards ideal candidates that may not explicitly be looking for a new job. The platform analyzes behavior like who is updating their LinkedIn, adding to open source projects on Github, or nearing a vesting cliff. The team earned $150K in MRR last month. Find our previous coverage of HireSweet here.

Stryve: Stryve wants the hiring process to pivot to video, replacing phone screeners with video chat questionnaires. The team bills the platform to cut down on endless scheduling back-and-forth’s and boost turnaround.

Paragon: Paragon is a low-code API builder, helping speed up the time to build APIs, API-based interactions and integrations

Syndetic: “Shopify for data,” Syndetic is a platform that lets organizations make their static datasets more dynamic and useful

Cadence: Cadence is a platform for meetings that should have been emails. The early access platform is focused on eliminating meetings related to sharing project updates. It does this by integrating with task management tools and letting employees easily share on Slack what they’ve been working on, who they’ve been working with, and what’s on the docket.

Zynq: Zynq is building an enterprise calendar tool that helps companies schedule meetings more efficiently across the board. The service helps slot meetings to appropriately sized meeting rooms at opportune times so that companies don’t feel like they’re outgrowing their offices too quickly.

Castodia: Castodia hooks your databases into Google Sheets, ensuring that the information there is always up to date and users aren’t stuck manually importing CSV files time and time again.

Onetool: Onetool is building an all-in-one platform that allows startups to subscribe and save, paying for a single subscription while using a variety of vendors to meet their needs. The company hopes its platform can boost discoverability of new SaaS tools and simplify the lives of founders who are having to manage so many subscription services.

Dashworks: Dashworks is aiming to build a search tool that bring together all of the information from your various collaboration tools and databases. The platform relies on deep integrations across a wide variety of apps and boasts customers including Zapier, Stanford and Armory.

Laserfocus: Laserfocus is creating an app that layers onto your CRM and allows salespeople to quickly work their way through calls, emails and meetings with potential clients. The app wants to re-bundle the tasks currently separated across a handful of apps and cut down on distractions for salespeople who are eager to gather information about potential clients.

TrueNorth: To help fix inefficiencies in the fragmented trucking industry, TrueNorth offers a software solution for independent truckers. Think of it as an operating system, but for trucks, to help with everything from fuel and maintenance, to route optimization and load tracking.

Taiv: Taiv wants to help your local neighborhood sports bar better monetize the commercials you see on those in-bar TVs. Charging $4,200 a year per location, Taiv lets businesses replace live commercials with business advertisements about specials or deals. Find our previous coverage of Taiv here.

Humanly: Humanly wants to automate job candidate screening for companies that typically receive a high volume of applications. The company says its tech helps keep screening consistent, while removing bias. Customers include Farmers Insurance, Feather and Grin.

BuildPlane: BuildPlane has designed a next generation toolkit for commercial construction management. The company’s software tracks document requests, manages change orders, handles subcontractor billing and payments, and requests for quotes and pricing. It’s an industry category that has already produced billion-dollar businesses like Procore and PlanGrid.

SINAI: SINAI Technologies is a next generation software platform that lets organizations plan their carbon emissions strategy: it tracks different departments and processes within a company and then gives recommendations on where to reduce carbon emissions to meet internal and external goals. Find our previous coverage of SINAI here.

Logarithm Labs: Logarithm Labs is a project management service for chip designers covering data pipelines, scripting interfaces, and portals and dashboards to parse, structure, and analyze data generated in chip design work

Snapboard: Snapboard provides software tools to create dashboards, visualizations, and applications without code. Find our previous coverage of Snapboard here.

Slingshow: Slingshow is a download-free video recording and delivery application for customer service and complaint resolution. All a customer has to do is take a video of their problem with an explanation and send it off via Slingshow to explain a problem and get help.

Pulley: Pulley is a next generation cap table management tool. Private companies can use it to issue employee & investor equity and maintain ownership records as a company scales. Like Carta, it has a free tier for smaller startups. Unlike Carta, its focus is first (and currently only) on serving founders rather than investors. The founder is a repeat entrepreneur who sold a previous company to Microsoft.

Rosebud AI: Welcome to the dystopian future of corporate spokesmodeling campaigns. Rosebud.ai creates digital avatars and models for any occasion. Companies can filter by demographic, age, and style.

Termii: Termii is a multi-channel marketing and communications service, providing APIs for SMS and user verification for African businesses.

Able Jobs: Able Jobs trains candidates in India on the skillsets companies need most so that businesses can hire better candidates more quickly. They did 130 placements in February

Skypher: Skypher automates the security questionnaire development-and-response process.

Terusama: Taking logistics management all the way to the dockside, Terusama provides scheduling software for freight pickup and digital sign ins for haulers.

Mistro: Mistro lets employers provide benefits and perks to remote teams in over 200 countries. They can offer health insurance, co-working space, development classes, food, IT equipment and more that workers pay for through a Mistro credit card. Teams around the world are embracing remote work due to coronavirus. That trend could last, creating a big market for whoever can help companies attract the best work-from-homers.

United Auto Workers called on the Big Three automakers — GM, Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles — to shut down factories in the U.S. for two weeks over concerns about the spread of COVID-19, a disease caused by the coronavirus.

The UAW also issued a statement Tuesday confirming that a worker at GM’s Warren Technical Center has tested positive for COVID-19.

“Our thoughts are with our member and their family, coworkers and friends at GM’s Warren Technical Center, who rightfully are worried about their loved one’s health and their exposure to Coronavirus,” UAW vice president Terry Dittes said in a written statement. “It is important that our members are quarantined in accordance with U.S. Government Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines. The UAW is working with GM to inform any members who should be in quarantine.”

The statement from the UAW comes just two days since the auto workers union formed a task force with GM, Ford and FCA that is aimed at protecting workers and limiting the spread of COVID-19. The task force is made up of UAW President Rory Gamble along with leaders from the three automakers, a group that includes GM Chairman and CEO Mary Barra,  Ford Executive Chairman Bill Ford, Ford President and CEO Jim Hackett and FCA CEO Michael Manley.

The task force was formed to coordinate efforts to prevent the spread of the disease and will take a wide range of actions that include enhanced visitor screening and increased cleaning and sanitizing of common areas and touch points. Safety protocols for people with potential exposure, as well as those who exhibit flu-like symptoms, will also be developed.

Gamble said Tuesday that UAW leadership requested Sunday during the first task force meeting with GM, Ford and FCA a two-week shutdown of operations. The companies, however, were not willing to implement this request, Gamble wrote, adding that they asked for 48 hours to put together a plan to safeguard workers.

Automakers including Volkswagen, Daimler and Ford have suspended operations in factories throughout Europe as COVID-19 continues to spread. Ford said Tuesday it will temporarily shut down vehicle and engine production at its factories in Europe, which includes facilities in Cologne and Saarlouis in Germany, and Craiova, Romania. Production will stop on Thursday. Ford’s assembly and engine facility in Valencia,  Spain has been closed since Monday, after three workers were confirmed with the coronavirus over the past weekend.

Daimler Group announced Tuesday it will suspend the majority of its production in Europe, as well as work in selected administrative departments, for an initial period of two weeks.

Meanwhile, Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Calif., remains open even as most San Francisco Bay Area residents are under a shelter-in-place order by local officials. The order includes the closure of all non-essential businesses. The Los Angeles Times, which was the first to report the status of the Tesla factory, was told by an Alameda spokesperson that it was considered exempted by the order and considered an essential business. The spokesperson couldn’t explain why it was deemed essential, a category that includes hospitals, grocery stores and pharmacies.

U.S. government officials are currently in discussion with a number of tech companies, including Facebook and Google, around how data from cell phones might provide methods for combatting the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, according to a new Washington Post report. The talks also include health experts tracking the pandemic and its transmission, and one possible way in which said data could be useful is through aggregated, anonymized location data, per the report’s sources.

Location data taken from the smartphones of Americans could help public health experts track and map the general spread of the infection, the group has theorized, though of course the prospect of any kind of location tracking is bound to leave people uncomfortable, especially when it’s done at scale and involves not only private companies with which they have a business relationship, but also the government.

These efforts, however, would be strictly aimed at helping organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) get an overview of patterns, decoupled from any individual user identity. The Post’s sources stress that this would not involve the generation of any kind of government database, and would instead focus on anodized, aggregated data to inform modelling of the COVID-19 transmission and spread.

Already, we’ve seen unprecedented collaboration among some of the largest tech companies in the world on matters related to the coronavirus pandemic. Virtually every large tech company that operates a product involved in information dissemination came together on Monday to issue a statement about working closely together in order to fight the spread of fraud and disinformation about the virus.

The White House has also been consulting with tech companies around the virus and the U.S. response, including via a meeting last week that included Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has been in regular contact with the current administration as his company is increasingly playing a central and important role in how people are dealing with essentially global guidelines of isolation, social distancing, quarantine and even shelter-in-place orders.

Earlier this week, an open letter co-signed by a lengthy list of epidemiologists, excecutives, physicians and academics also sought to outline what tech companies could contribute to the ongoing effort to stem the COVID-19 pandemic, and one of the measures suggested (directed at mobile OS providers Apple and Google specifically) is an “opt-in, privacy preserving OS feature to support contact tracing” for individuals who might have been exposed to someone with the virus.

Of course, regardless of assurances to the contrary, it’s natural to be suspicious of any widespread effort to collect personal data. Especially when it’s historically been the case that in times of extreme duress, people have made trade-offs about personal freedoms and protections that have subsequently backfired. The New York Times also reported this week on an initiative to track the location data of people who have contracted the virus using an existing, previously undisclosed database of cellphone data from Israeli cellphone selfie providers and their customers.

Still, there’s good reason not to instantly dismiss the idea of trying to find some kind of privacy-protecting way of harnessing the information available to tech companies, since it does seem like a way to potentially provide a lot of benefit – particularly when it comes to measuring the impact of social distancing measures currently in place.

Earlier today, TechCrunch caught up with Chris Sugden, a managing partner at Edison Partners, to talk about the current fundraising market, what’s next for SaaS startups and if there’s any good news to be found in today’s market.

As the stock market continues to gyrate (more up than down), and the unicorn exit market looks increasingly moribund, understanding how private investors are putting capital to work today and over the next few quarters is critical for startup founders. A host of startups that would have normally raised in Q1 of this year did not. The fundraising market they encounter the rest of the year will help determine their business trajectory.

Before we dive into our Q&A on all that, a short note on Edison Partners . Edison is a growth equity firm, which, according to Sugden, means that its checks range from $5 million to $30 million, with a “sweet spot” between $10 million and $15 million. Regarding stage, Sugden said that Edison looks to put capital into companies with between $8 million and $20 million in revenue, noting that the larger companies stretch his firm’s check size to the max.

About 75% of the firm’s investments are in software-as-a-service companies (SaaS), with the other 25% going into other types of startups. According to the investor, the average growth in Q4 2019 of the firm’s 12 investments from its ninth fund was about 100%, compared to the year-ago period.

So, Sugden is an active investor at a firm that has been around for a few decades with a good-sized account from which to invest. Let’s dig into how he sees the market shaking out.

Fundraising in 2020

The following excerpts come from TechCrunch’s chat with Sugden, which we’ve grouped and edited for clarity. We’ve peeled back the conversation, allowing us to pull out the parts that felt the most useful for startups. We start with his view of the 2020 venture capital market.

As a way to try to ease some of the pressure and low ratings gig workers may face from panicked customers, Instacart has made some changes to its app. The first is that shopper ratings won’t affect their access to orders during the pandemic. Instacart will also forgive all ratings under five stars.

Instacart, in a blog post, said it made this change based on feedback from shoppers.

Shoppers can also cancel batches leading up until they arrive at the store. And if a customer’s entire order is out of stock, Instacart will automatically cancel the order and notify the customer, so that the shopper does not have to contact the support team.

“We’re continuing to see a surge in demand across our platform as consumers increasingly rely on Instacart as an essential service to get the fresh groceries and household goods they need,” an Instacart spokesperson said in a statement. “As part of this growth, we’ve built new product features and increased flexibility for shoppers to help them continue delivering for customers during this busy time. We have more shoppers on the platform than ever before and we have the capacity for more people to join Instacart as a flexible earnings opportunity to pick, pack, and deliver groceries. As customer demand continues, our team is working around the clock to best serve shoppers so they can continue being household heroes for families across North America.”

Lastly, Instacart now allows shoppers to use Apple Pay or Google Pay to checkout, and is working with its retail partners to introduce item caps to prevent customers from ordering more than the in-store purchase limits.

These product changes come a few days after Instacart announced it would offer up to two weeks of pay for any shopper who is diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed in quarantine by a public health authority. In California, some gig workers would rather companies like Instacart, DoorDash and Uber make them W2 employees and offer them benefits like health care, paid sick leave, disability leave and more. Last week, Gig Workers Rising called on California legislators to enforce the new AB-5 law that would ensure companies classify workers as W2 employees instead of independent contractors. It’s worth noting that Instacart is one of the companies working to combat AB5 in a proposed ballot initiative.

“…The occupational accident insurance provisions included in the measure would cover drivers the same as workers compensation insurance covers W2 employees,” a spokesperson for the Protect App-Based Drivers & Services Act told TechCrunch in a statement. “It would cover medical expenses and disability payments for drivers who became ill on the job, either from Coronavirus or another illness. The flexibility, the minimum wage guarantee, the health insurance and the insurance coverage make the ballot measure more imperative now than ever.”

It has only been nine days since I wrote an overview of the state of VC investing during the rise of the novel coronavirus pandemic.

And what a week it has been: The markets have triggered circuit breakers for an unprecedented third time, a global economic depression seems in the offing and the Trump administration is now proposing upwards of $1 trillion in fiscal stimulus on top of the Fed’s hundreds of billions of dollars in quantitative easing.

My God, there is so much news.

Given how much has changed in just the past few days, I wanted to revisit my original advice and go over what is still true, what has turned out to be wrong and what is trending one way or the other as events unfold.

Let’s get started.

As I have said ad nauseam this year, VCs are in a hyper-competitive market like we have never seen before. There are more VCs, VC firms and VC dollars in more geos worldwide prowling for the next startup than ever.

The coronavirus outbreak has not changed this basic thesis in the market.

As China continues to handle the fallout of the novel coronavirus that first originated in Wuhan in Hubei province in early-to-mid December, the Chinese Communist Party announced today that it would rescind the press credentials for certain journalists working at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and would further demand operating details from Time magazine and Voice of America.

Those journalists would be limited from working in China, including in Hong Kong, where mass protests last year fueled by a growing democracy and independence movement has brought increasingly critical global attention onto the Beijing government.

China had previously kicked out three reporters from the Wall Street Journal in mid-February, for what it claimed was an insensitive headline in the newspaper’s opinion pages. The Journal’s opinion section operates outside of its newsroom.

China’s suppression of external dissent is also being mirrored with regard to its own citizens. While there was a bit of an open window for discussion as the government attempted to moderate blowback over its response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, internet censors according to the New York Times are now once again clamping down hard on negative conversations and adding additional reinforcements to police online discussions:

Little is known about the group, formally part of the Cybersecurity Defense Bureau, which has long policed hacking and online fraud. But occasional government releases offer clues. In 2016, the 50-million person region of Guangxi said it had almost 1,200 internet police officers. The goal was to have one internet police officer for every 10,000 people in the region, a sign of the force’s ambitions.

The U.S. and China have been locked in a trade war over the past few years, but the looming global depression has placed ever more acute pressure on a relationship that has frayed since China’s turn toward authoritarianism under President Xi Jinping and the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States.

Last week, the U.S. State Department issued its annual human rights report, which particularly singled out China as among the worst offenders globally. In a paragraph that should win an award for semicolon usage, the department wrote that:

Significant human rights issues included: arbitrary or unlawful killings by the government; forced disappearances by the government; torture by the government; arbitrary detention by the government; harsh and life-threatening prison and detention conditions; political prisoners; arbitrary interference with privacy; substantial problems with the independence of the judiciary; physical attacks on and criminal prosecution of journalists, lawyers, writers, bloggers, dissidents, petitioners, and others as well as their family members; censorship and site blocking; interference with the rights of peaceful assembly and freedom of association, including overly restrictive laws that apply to foreign and domestic nongovernmental organizations (NGOs); severe restrictions of religious freedom; substantial restrictions on freedom of movement (for travel within the country and overseas); refoulement of asylum seekers to North Korea, where they have a well-founded fear of persecution; the inability of citizens to choose their government; corruption; a coercive birth-limitation policy that in some cases included forced sterilization or abortions; trafficking in persons; and severe restrictions on labor rights, including a ban on workers organizing or joining unions of their own choosing; and child labor.

The U.S. government is moving to lift restrictions on telemedicine services and expand coverage to all Americans, even as many providers say they’re struggling to meet existing demand.

The expansion covers roughly 62 million Medicare beneficiaries who are among the most vulnerable to the novel coronavirus.

“This action is a part of our broader effort to ensure that government requirements, [and] rules and regulations don’t get in the way of patient care during an emergency,” said Seema Verma in a press conference at the White House on Tuesday.

With the announcement, telemedicine services are now being expanded beyond just the rural areas and brief visits that were previously covered, Verma said. “These services can be provided in a variety of settings including nursing homes, hospital outpatient departments, and more.”

The new agreements also relax restrictions around HIPAA compliance so that doctors can use their own phones. Furthermore, the government said it would be using discretion when it comes to collecting co-pays to further reduce the costs of telemedicine services, according to Verma.

These relaxed rules will ultimately help patients who need care that’s unrelated to an infection with the novel coronavirus. COVID-19 patients are currently being treated at several hospitals around the country and the new guidelines ensure that other patients won’t run the risk of infection.

“With our new telehealth benefits, this person who’s not really… who’s at risk for the coronavirus, doesn’t have to venture outside their home, they can talk to their doctor via Skype and they don’t have to risk exposure to the virus and they can experience that from the comfort of their own home,” said Verma.

Even without the government’s urging, telemedicine services have seen demand spike, according to a report on CNBC.

American Well, Doctor on Demand and 98point6 are all struggling to keep up with new patients as networks suffer and the push to staff-up increases.

That demand will only increase as the government encourages private insurance companies “to expand their telehealth benefits and make it clear to providers and their members what they cover,” as Verma said in her statement to reporters.

Already, some health plans are responding. In New York, two health plans, CDPHP and MVP HealthCare, are offering members no-cost access to telemedicine services.

“As the public contends with coronavirus COVID-19, it’s essential that communities and businesses like ours collaborate to tackle this issue in innovative ways,” said MVP Health Care’s president and CEO, Christopher Del Vecchio, in a statement. “Together with CDPHP, we’re leveraging technology during a challenging time to support the health and safety of the communities we serve. This program is a game-changer for anyone in need of virtual ER triage.”

New startups in the market are doing their part to ensure care as well. Holmdel, N.J.-based Beam Health is offering its telemedicine service to independent physicians in the U.S. for free, the company said yesterday.

Beam doesn’t actually provide the services itself. Instead, it aggregates telemedicine companies and gives consumers their choice of providers. The company is making the service available for free for 90 days to independent doctors’ offices in the U.S.

“Virtual is where it’s at, especially during the rise of this contagious disease,” said Dr. Susan Fedewa, owner of 98point6 Emergicenter in Lansing, Mich., in a statement. “We’re using Beam to continue to provide care to people and hopefully keep the well away from the sick. Especially at times like this, people tend to panic and seek care.”

I know, I know, don’t start a podcast just because you’re bored. Let’s be real though, the COVID-19 situation is going to be the event that launches a million podcasts, as we’re all stuck at home with hours to prattle on about things into he void.

Zencastr, one of the better tools for remote podcasters, announced today that it will be waiving the limits for those on its Hobbyist tier. That includes a dropping limits on hours and and the number of participants. The policy will remain in place until the 1st of July. Hopefully we’ll be able to, you know, go outside by then.

I’ve listed Zencastr in a few of my podcasting guides as a great podcast-specific alternative to virtual conferencing platforms like Skype and Zoom. Among the features is the ability to automatically record and upload individual tracks — a terrific feature when it comes time to edit the thing together.

Waymo said Tuesday it is pausing operations of Waymo One, a service in the Phoenix area that allows the public to hail rides in self-driving vehicles with trained human safety operators behind the wheel, in in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Waymo is also halting testing on public roads in California.

However, Waymo will keep some operations up and running, notably its truly driverless vehicles, which don’t require a human safety driver, according to an announcement on its website Tuesday. These driverless vehicles are used in the Phoenix area as part of Waymo’s early rider program that lets vetted members of the public to hail a ride.

Both the Waymo early rider program and Waymo One service use self-driving Chrysler  Pacifica minivans to shuttle Phoenix residents in a geofenced area that covers several suburbs, including Chandler and Tempe. Until last fall, all of these “self-driving rides” had a human safety driver behind the wheel.

In October, Waymo started to invite members of its early rider program to take driverless rides with no human safety operator behind the wheel.

Waymo says that it has stepped up efforts to clean its driverless vehicles. The vehicles will be cleaned and sanitized several times throughout the day. The company said it has also added sanitizing products to every Waymo car for rider use.

Here’s the entire statement:

In the interest of the health and safety of our riders and the entire Waymo community, we’re pausing our Waymo One service with trained drivers in Metro Phoenix for now as we continue to watch COVID-19 developments. We’ve also paused driving in California in line with local guidance. 

Our fully driverless operations in Phoenix will continue for now within our early rider program, along with our local delivery and trucking efforts.

We can carry out driverless, delivery, and trucking services for our riders and partners while respecting the important social distancing and hygiene guidelines shared by the CDC and local authorities. Removing the human driver holds great promise for not only for making our roads safer, but for helping our riders stay healthy in these uncertain times.

We’ll continue to monitor COVID-19 developments carefully, and we’ll reach out to our riders if there are any further service changes. Until then, our Rider Support team will be available to answer any questions. 

Stay healthy and thanks from all of us at Waymo.

The move follows guidance from the federal government to take special efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19. It also comes after at least one incident of a human safety driver in a Waymo One vehicle refusing to pick up someone at Intel’s campus in Chandler, Arizona because they had heard a case of COVID-19 had been reported.

Waymo’s partnership with UPS, which involves delivery trips and truck testing outside of California will continue.