Author: azeeadmin

When AbCellera won a $30 million contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop therapeutic countermeasures against viral outbreaks two years ago, it’s safe to assume that no one thought the technology would be so vitally important so soon.

The work AbCellera was doing was part of a high-priority initiative from DARPA’s Biological Technology Office called the Pandemic Prevention Platform which was designed to finance the development of technologies for pandemic response capable of developing countermeasures within sixty days of the isolation of a viral pathogen.

Now, as the company’s employees work feverishly with partners at one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies to develop therapies to treat the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, the necessity of these government-sponsored programs have been thrown into sharp relief.

It’s also clear to a number of investors that the government funding won’t be enough to fully develop AbCellera’s drug discovery platform to meet the challenges of the next potential disease outbreak and pandemic threat. That’s why the company has raised $105 million in a new round of financing.

“Drug development takes too long, fails too often, and costs too much. With the backing of visionary investors, we will double-down on our strategy of making long-term investments in technology and teams that are needed to put drug development on the fast track,” said Carl Hansen, Ph.D., CEO of AbCellera. “We’re building a modern operating system for drug developers to ensure the best science is translated quickly into new therapies for patients.” 

AbCellera’s technology has already been validated by DARPA, which provided some funding to develop and integrate technologies for viral culture and production, rapid human antibody discovery, protein engineering and delivery of nucleic acid-encoded antibodies as a way to protect against viral infection.

And the pharmaceutical giant, Eli Lilly, an investor in the company’s latest round of financing, is a believer in AbCellera’s technology as well. The two companies partnered in early March to co-develop antibodies for the treatment and prevention of COVID-19, according to a statement.

Within one week from receiving a blood sample from a U.S. patient infected with COVID-19 who recovered from the disease, AbCellera was able to screen over 5 million immunes cells — looking for ones that produced antibodies to neutralize the virus and help that patient recover.

That sample gave AbCellera the necessary genetic material to screen over 500 unique human antibody sequences, which was the largest panel of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies reported at the time.

The invention that AbCellera has leveraged to develop its antibody identification technology is a credit card-sized “lab on a chip”, which uses advanced sensors and machine learning to serially test multiple antibody-producing cells at a time. The hundreds of thousands of cells the company tests provide potential targets that can then be narrowed down to more specific mechanisms that disrupt a virus’ ability to infect a host.

Working with Eli Lilly, AbCellera has winnowed the potential number of targets from 500 to 20. Lilly, which has worked with AbCellera on other drugs as well, is now going to begin human trials on three or four of the antibodies that seem most promising.

“We always hope there’s just one antibody that’s really, really great, and we can devote our full manufacturing resources to that,” Dan Skovronsky, Lilly’s chief scientific officer, told Bloomberg back in April.

While AbCellera and Lilly are on the hunt for COVID-19 therapies, other investors in the company are already looking ahead to the next challenge. Those investors include new lead investor OrbiMed and previous investor DCVC Bio, along with an investor syndicate of new backers including Peter Thiel and Founders Fund, the University of Minnesota and Presight Capital. Viking Global Investors also particpated in the round.

The company said it would use the funding to invest in technologies that support and extend its antibody discovery technology.

“AbCellera is at the intersection of biology, technology, and AI, allowing it to make new antibody drug discovery advancements, which we previously couldn’t dream of, possible,” said John Hamer, Managing Partner, DCVC Bio, in a statement. “From developing therapeutics for neurological diseases to COVID-19 and everything in-between, AbCellera is transforming the antibody discovery process, delivering more possibilities in less time and with less expense. We continue to be enthusiastic supporters of its progress.” 

ChatableApps is launching its hearing assistance app on iOS today, with a wider Android release to follow shortly. Backed by Mark Cuban, and based on the work of auditory neural signal processing researcher Dr. Andy Simpson, the app removes background noise in near real-time so that one-to-one conversations can be heard more clearly.

And, unlike other solutions on the market, its makers say it works with any modern smartphone and standard earbuds. Early “pre-clinical” trials of the Chatable app claim to demonstrate that it matches or even surpasses the performance of some traditional hearing aids, with 86% of participants reporting that the ChatableApps’ “universal hearing aid” was better for conversation than their existing hearing aid.

When I covered the startup’s recent funding round, ChatableApps co-founder Brendan O’Driscoll told me the company’s technology and approach is “completely unique” because it doesn’t use noise filtering or other DSP techniques. “It’s actually a deep learning neural net approach to speech and noise separation that doesn’t apply filters to the original audio but rather it listens and re-prints a brand new audio stream in near real-time which is a mimic of just the vocal components of the original audio,” he said.

Or, put simply, unlike traditional approaches to background noise removal — which attempt to label and remove unwanted sounds — ChatableApps’ AI, dubbed “VOXimity”, identifies the voice we want to hear, and creates a new, identical voice track which sounds (more or less) the same as the original but without any other background sounds. The technique is called end-to-end neural speech synthesis.

Meanwhile, ChatableApps CEO Giles Tongue, tells me the team has been racing to get the app released as quickly as possible, after realising it could help plug a gap for people unable to access a hearing clinic during the coronavirus crisis or unable to lipread due to the prevalence of face masks.

“Following successful pre-clinical trials, we have decided to launch immediately due to urgent demand from audiologists to help people struggling because of coronavirus,” he says. “With many unable to lipread due to face masks or unable to visit a hearing clinic in an emergency, our app provides a lifeline that will help people communicate”.

The app may also help manage social distancing. “You can place the phone next to the person talking, put in your Bluetooth buds, walk ten feet away and still be able to hear someone with perfect clarity,” adds Tongue.

Since we last covered the company, the team has also re-visited the ChatableApps pricing model. Previously the startup planned to offer a paid subscription version only, but now has a free, albeit somewhat limited, tier.

“The app is free to access, with the option to subscribe to unlock maximum voice amplification and reduction of background noise,” says the company. The full version is available for £9.99 ($12.99) per month, or £59.99 ($79.99) per year when paid annually.

ByteDance’s TikTok app, which has gained hundreds of millions of users in India with its short-form videos, is facing criticism in its biggest overseas market after disturbing videos surfaced on the platform.

Phrases such as BanTikTok, DeleteTikTok, and BlockTikTok have trended on Twitter in India in the past three weeks after numerous users expressed disgust over some videos that were circulating on Chinese giant ByteDance’s jewel app.

Users unearthed and shared numerous recent TikTok videos on Twitter that appeared to condone domestic violence, animal cruelty, racism, child abuse and objectification of women.

The backlash has resulted in millions of Indians giving the app a one-star rating on its Google Play Store listing and posting poor reviews that are critical of the app. The app’s overall rating tanked from 4.5 as of earlier this month to as low as 1.2 — until Google intervened.

A Google spokesperson said the company removed millions of negative TikTok reviews that users had left as a corrective action to curb spam abuse. After this correction, TikTok’s rating has recovered slightly to 1.6. At one time, the overall “sentiment” of the app that in part describes a user’s satisfaction with the app based on its reviews, dropped from 86% to 39%, mobile insight firm Apptopia told TechCrunch.

Outrages over an app is not a new phenomenon. In India itself, there have been a handful of cases including an incident when an alleged remark made by Snapchat co-founder upset many Indians, many of whom mistakenly deleted — and left poor ratings for — Snapdeal e-commerce app.

But the new incident, which snowballed after Faizal Siddiqui (a social media influencer) posted a spoof video of an acid attack (for which he has since apologized), has put TikTok’s content moderation efforts on spotlight in India, where its app reached 200 million users late last year.

Maneka Sanjay Gandhi, an Indian politician, argued that TikTok was not following the Indian government’s order after lapses in its content moderation efforts became apparent this month.

In a statement, a TikTok spokesperson said, “keeping people on TikTok safe is a top priority and we make it clear in our Term of Service and Community Guidelines that clearly outlines what is not acceptable on our platform. As per the policy, we do not allow content that risks safety of others, promotes physical harm or glorifies violence against women. The behaviour in question violates our guidelines and we have taken down content, suspended the account, and are working with law enforcement agencies as appropriate.”

But ByteDance did not reveal how many content moderators it had in India and how proactively it removes objectionable videos — or if it does. Last year, TikTok grappled with a similar issue when Madras High Court ordered Google and Apple to block the app in the country over porn and other illegal content. The ban was lifted weeks later.

Aircall has raised a $65 million Series C round (€60.2 million) with DTCP leading the round, Adam Street participating and existing investors eFounders, Draper Esprit, Balderton and NextWorld injecting more money in the company. Overall, Aircall has raised $106 million.

Aircall is building a software-as-a-service company around phone calls. You could use it to operate a call center and handle support requests or to improve the workflow of your sales team, for instance.

“We raised two years ago and we’ve done exactly what we wanted to do over the past two years by creating an executive team and a strong leadership,” co-founder and COO Jonathan Anguelov told me.

When it comes to product, Aircall wants to differentiate itself from traditional call center solutions thanks to integrations with third-party services. For instance, you could see your call information in your CRM to see if somebody on your team has already followed up on a lead. Or you could initiate a phone call from Zendesk if there’s an urgent support request.

More recently, the company has launched integrations with Chorus.ai and Gong for demanding customers operating call center. With those integrations, you can get transcriptions and analyze the sentiment of the conversation.

Over the past two years, Aircall has quadrupled its revenue and doubled the number of employees. While the company originally started in France, most of its revenue comes from the U.S. now. Aircall targets small and medium companies, from 10 to 1,000 people.

While the startup didn’t want to share information on its annual recurring revenue (ARR), Aircall says that its ARR is currently above the total cash burn of the past couple of years. Given that they raised $29 million and didn’t use all the money, that gives you an idea.

The company started reaching out to investors in January and ended up closing the round during the coronavirus outbreak. “We have done more than 3x on the valuation compared to the previous round,” Anguelov said

There are around 320 persons working for the company now. With today’s funding round, the company plans to expand with more developers, a bigger sales team and a new office in Australia.

Ola Electric, the EV business that spun out of the ride-hailing giant Ola last year, has acquired an Amsterdam-based electric scooter startup as the Indian firm looks to locally produce and launch its own line of two wheelers as soon as this year.

The Indian firm said Wednesday it had acquired Etergo, a Dutch firm that has built a scooter that uses swappable, high energy battery that delivers a range of up to 240 km (149 miles).

Ola did not reveal the terms of the deal, but Etergo was valued at around $90 million in its previous financing round, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The six-year-old startup had raised €20.3 million from the market before its acquisition today, according to Crunchbase.

The Indian firm, which gained the unicorn status last year when it raised $300 million, said it plans to launch its electric two wheeler in India next year, though TechCrunch understands that the company is internally hoping to reach the milestone by end of this year.

“This acquisition will further bolster Ola Electric’s strong engineering and design capabilities with the Etergo team’s extensive vehicle development experience with leading automotive companies like Tesla, General Motors, Ferrari, Jaguar, and BMW. Etergo’s team will continue to be based out of Amsterdam as they join Ola Electric,” it said in a statement.

More to follow…

Drones are being deployed in the fight to curb COVID-19 in the U.S.

Novant Health and California based UAV delivery startup Zipline have launched distribution of personal protective gear and medical equipment in North Carolina.

Novant is a non-profit healthcare provider with a network in the Southeastern United States.

Through the partnership, Zipline’s drones will make 32 mile flights on two routes between Novant Health’s emergency drone fulfillment center in Kannapolis to the company’s medical center in Huntersville, North Carolina — where front line healthcare workers are treating coronavirus patients.

Zipline and Novant are touting the arrangement as the first authorized long-range drone logistics delivery flight program in the U.S. The program has gained approvals by the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority and North Carolina’s Department of Transportation — though the FAA offered TechCrunch nuanced guidance on how it classifies the undertaking.

This story behind the Novant, Zipline UAV collaboration has a twist: the capabilities for the U.S. operation were developed primarily in Africa. Zipline has a test facility in the San Francisco area, but spent several years configuring its drone delivery model in Rwanda and Ghana.

Co-founded in 2014 by Americans Keller Rinaudo, Keenan Wyrobek and Will Hetzler, Zipline designs its own UAVs, launch and landing systems and logistics software for distribution of critical medical supplies.

The company turned to East Africa in 2016, entering a partnership with the government of Rwanda to test and deploy its drone service in that country.  Zipline went live with UAV distribution of life saving medical supplies in Rwanda in late 2016, claiming the first national drone-delivery program at scale in the world.

The company expanded to Ghana in 2016, where in addition to delivering blood and vaccines by drone, it now distributes COVID-19 related medication and lab samples.

Based on its Africa operations, Zipline was selected by regulators to participate in medical drone delivery testing in the U.S. in 2016, in coordination with the FAA.

The company’s Africa business also led to its pandemic response partnership with Novant Health. The North Carolina based company was in discussion with Zipline on UAV delivery before the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., but the crisis spurred both parties to speed things up, according to Hank Capps, a Senior Vice President at Novant.

That included some improvisation. For its current launch site the operation is using space donated by a local NASCAR competition team, Stewart-Haas Racing.

According to Capps, the current collaboration using drones to deliver medical supplies from that site could grow beyond the 32 mile route Zipline and Novant began flights on last Friday.

“Right now we plan to expand it geographically within our footprint, which is fairly large within North Carolina, South Florida, and Virginia,” he told TechCrunch on a call.

That, of course, will depend on regulatory approval. The FAA granted Novant Health permission to operate the current program — which the FAA classifies as a distribution vs. delivery operation — through a 107 waiver. This rolls up into the evolving federal code on operation of unmanned aircraft in the U.S. and allows Novant and Zipline to operate “until Oct. 31, 2020, or until all COVID-related restrictions on travel, business and mass gatherings for North Carolina are lifted, whichever occurs first,” according to the FAA. The U.S. regulatory body also stipulated that “Part 107 is a waiver, not a drone licence.”

The FAA offered cautious confirmation that the Zipline, Novant partnership is the first approved long range unmanned delivery service in the United States.

“I am not aware of any that are flying routes as far as what they are doing in North Carolina, but I try to be careful when talking about firsts,” an FAA spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Last month UPS and CVS announced a shorter range drone delivery program of prescription drugs to a retirement village in Florida.

The arrangement between Zipline and Novant is not for financial gain — according to both parties — but still supports Zipline’s profitability thesis advanced by co-founder Keller Renaudo.

“Healthcare logistics is a $70 billion global industry, and it’s still only serving a golden billion on the planet,” he told me in a 2016 interview.

On a recent call, Renaudo noted the startup is generating income on operations to serve that market, through the company doesn’t release financial data.

“At the distribution centers that have been operating for more than a year, Zipline is making money on the deliveries that we do,” he said.

Renaudo pointed to the more favorable margins of autonomous delivery using small, electric powered UAVs versus large internal combustion vehicles.

“I think that these kinds of services are going to operate, much more profitably than traditional logistic services,” he said.

Zipline sold investors on that value proposition. The company has raised (a reported) $233 million in VC from backers including Andreeson Horowitz and Goldman Sachs. Zipline intends to expand its drone delivery business in the U.S. and anywhere in the world it finds demand, according to its CEO.  

In addition to partners such as Novant Health, Zipline has caught the attention of big logistics providers, such as UPS — which has supported (and studied) the startup’s Africa operations back to 2016.

The Zipline, Novant partnership on UAV delivery of medical supplies in the U.S. is a high-point for the thesis that Africa’s tech ecosystem — which has become a hotbed for VC and startups — can produce innovation with global application.

The presidents of Rwanda and Ghana  — Paul Kagame and Nana Akufo-Addo — were instrumental in supporting Zipline’s partnerships in their countries. Other nations on the continent, such as Kenya, South Africa, and Zambia, continue to advance commercial drone testing and novel approaches to regulating the sector.

For all the talk that COVID-19 may force an isolationist shift across countries, the Zipline, Novant Health partnership is very much a globally incubated solution — applied locally in the U.S. — to an international problem.

The program combines a medical drone delivery startup founded in San Francisco with a model tested in Africa to an American healthcare venture in North Carolina, with a little help from a NASCAR race team. This could reflect the unique application of tech and partnerships to come in the fight against COVID-19.

In a blog post, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai gave an overview of the company’s plan to return its workforce to some semblance of normalcy—or at least a new normal.

Google will begin opening some of its office buildings in various cities starting on July 6, allowing a small amount of its employees who need a physical workspace “the opportunity to return on a limited, rotating basis.” The idea is to rotate employees in for a day every few weeks to keep facilities at only around 10 percent occupancy.

If all goes well in its initial efforts, Google will scale that 10 percent up to 30 percent around September “which would mean most people who want to come in could do so on a limited basis, while still prioritizing those who need to come in” according to Pichai.

In contrast with bold shifts to all-remote work from companies like Facebook and Twitter, Google’s top executive eschewed sweeping statements about the future of its workforce in favor of encouraging employees who are interested in relocating to speak with their managers and to review guidelines around taxes and health coverage.

Pichai predicted that Googlers will have “more flexibility and choice” in how they work, while still waxing nostalgic about the company’s iconic office complexes, long a symbol of what makes work in the tech sector distinct from more traditional jobs.

“Our campuses are designed to enable collaboration and community—in fact, some of our greatest innovations were the result of chance encounters in the office—and it’s clear this is something many of us don’t want to lose,” Pichai wrote.

“At the same time, we are very familiar with distributed work as we have many offices around the world and open-minded about the lessons we’ll learn through this period.”

Pichai still expects that the majority of Google’s workforce will be mostly working from home through 2020. To help Googlers adapt to the different needs of a home office, the company will allocate $1,000 in expenses to help employees buy furniture and home office equipment.

As a portion of employees do return to the office, Pichai warned that the company’s physical spaces will “will look and feel different than when you left” as Google implements necessary precautions to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

Walmart is continuing its foray into fashion e-commerce, announcing a strategic partnership with fashion resale marketplace thredUP to list a large number of the items on Walmart’s digital storefront.

With this partnership over 750,000 items from threadUP will be available on walmart.com/thredup, starting today.

Notably, only clothing items and shoes marked as “new” or “like new” will be listed, though accessories and handbags marked as “gently used” will also be available, Walmart says. The companies didn’t share details of the partnership’s revenue share model.

ThreadUP’s marketplace, which bills itself as the web’s largest consignment and thrift store, allows people to buy and sell secondhand women’s and children’s apparel. Rather than simply connecting sellers with buyers, sellers send a bunch of items directly to thredUP which then inspects them and returns ones they don’t want and photographs and lists the items they do on its marketplace. When an item sells, thredUP handles shipping the item and paying out sellers.

This partnership brings Walmart access to sales of a new slew of fashion brands. The retailer has added over 1,000 fashion brands to its site over the past several years, the company notes. This isn’t thredUP’s first major partnership with an existing physical retailer, the company has previously partnered with both Macy’s and JCPenney on pilot programs of in-store rollouts of curated item selections.

One of the biggest benefits of the partnership will be the ability to score free shipping on orders over Walmart’s $35 threshold as well as the ability to  return items for free at Walmart stores.

ThredUP has raised over $305 million from investors including Goldman Sachs Investment Partners, Irving Investors and Redpoint. The company shared that they had closed $175 million in funding  this past August. Last year, CEO James Reinhart told TechCrunch that the team had grown to 1,200 employees and was on track to process their 100 millionth item by year’s end.

Delman, a Jakarta-based data management startup, has raised $1.6 million in seed funding. The round was led by Intudo Ventures, with participation from Prasetia Dwidharma Ventures and Qlue Performa Indonesia, and will be used to establish a research and development center and hire software engineers and data scientists.

Delman was founded in 2018 by chief executive officer Surya Halim, chief product officer Raymond Christopher and chief technology officer Theo Budiyanto, who were classmates at the University of California, Berkeley. After graduation, they worked at tech companies in Silicon Valley, including Google and Splunk, before deciding to focus on the Indonesian market.

Originally launched as an end-to-end big data analytics provider, Delman shifted its focus to data preparation and management after talking to clients in Indonesia, said Halim. Many companies said they had budgeted for expensive data analytics solution, but then realized their data was not ready for analysis because it was spread across multiple formats. Delman’s mission is to make it easier for data engineers and scientists to do their jobs by cleaning up and preparing data.

Halim says many large companies in Indonesia typically spend up to $200,000 to clean and warehouse data, but Delman gives them a more cost-efficient and faster alternative.

“We have the capability to do analytics and data visualization for clients, but there are so many established companies that already do that, which is why we shifted our business model to something more niche and needed,” said Halim. “It also enables us to open our door to partner with everyone doing data analytics services.”

While newer companies and startups have cleaner datasets, Halim said many older Indonesian companies, especially ones with branches in multiple cities, often have large amounts of data spread across pen-and-paper ledgers, Excel spreadsheets and other software. The data may also have code, keywords and typos that need to be corrected.

“It’s easier for a new company, because everything is already standardized,” Halim said, “But if a company that was established in the 1970s wants to unify previous generations of data to integrate it into their system and keep notes on what customer behavior is like in order to compete with up-and-coming companies, then they need to have a data-driven policy.”

Delman is industry-agnostic and its clients range from large corporations and consulting firms to government agencies. Its customers have included PWC and Qlue. Halim said that the startup plans to expand into other Southeast Asian markets and expects that as COVID-19 changes the way people work, companies will want to invest more heavily in their IT infrastructure and make their databases easier to access outside of a central location.

In a press statement, Intudo Ventures founding partner Eddy Chan said, “By combining a highly localized approach with global technical expertise, Delman is providing Indonesian businesses with Indonesian-developed big data solutions, ultimately leading to better outcomes for end-users. Since meeting the Delman founding team in Silicon Valley in 2017, we have witnessed their growth as a management team, and are excited to continue to support them in their entrepreneurial journey ahead.”