Author: azeeadmin

Facilities management looks to be having a bit of a moment, amid the coronavirus pandemic.

VergeSense, a US startup which sells a ‘sensor as a system’ platform targeted at offices — supporting features such as real-time occupant counts and foot-traffic-triggered cleaning notifications — has closed a $9M strategic investment led by Allegion Ventures, a corporate VC fund of security giant Allegion.

JLL Spark, Metaprop, Y Combinator, Pathbreaker Ventures, and West Ventures also participated in the round, which brings the total funding raised by the 2017-founded startup to $10.6M including an earlier seed round.

VergeSense tells TechCrunch it’s seen accelerated demand in recent weeks as office owners and managers try to figure out how to make workspaces safe in the age of COVID-19 — claiming bookings are “on track” to be up 500% quarter over quarter. (Though it admits business did also take a hit earlier in the year, saying there was “aftershock” once the coronavirus hit.)

So while, prior to the pandemic, VergeSense customers likely wanted to encourage so called ‘workplace collisions’ — i.e. close encounters between office staff in the hopes of encouraging idea sharing and collaboration — right now the opposite is the case, with social distancing and looming limits on room occupancy rates looking like a must-have for any reopening offices.

Luckily for VergeSense, its machine learning platform and sensor packed hardware can derive useful measurements just the same.

It’s worked with customers to come up with relevant features, such as a new Social Distancing Score and daily occupancy reports. While it already had a Smart Cleaning Planner feature which it reckons will now be in high demand. It also envisages customers being able to plug into its open API to power features in their own office apps that could help to reassure staff it’s okay to come back in to work, such as indicating quiet zones or times where there are fewer office occupants on site.

Of course plenty of offices may remain closed for some considerable time or even for good — Twitter, for example, has told staff they can work remotely forever — with home working a viable job for much office work. But VergeSense and its investors believe the office will prevail in some form, but with smart sensor tech that can (for example) detect the distance between people becoming a basic requirement.

“I think it’s going to less overall office space,” says VergeSense co-founder Dan Ryan, discussing how he sees the office being changed by COVID-19. “A lot of customers are rethinking the need to have tonnes of smaller, regional offices. They’re thinking about still maintaining their big hubs but maybe what those hubs actually look like is different.

“Maybe post-COVID, instead of people coming into the office five days a week… for people that don’t necessarily need to be in the office to do their work everyday maybe three days a week or two days a week. And that probably means a different type of office, right. Different layout, different type of desks etc.”

“That trend was already in motion but a lot of companies were reluctant to experiment with remote work because they weren’t sure about the impact on productivity and that sort of thing, there was a lot of cultural friction associated with that. But now we all got thrust into that simultaneously and it’s happening all at once — and we think that’s going to stick,” he adds. “We’ve head that feedback consistently from basically all of our customers.”

“A lot of our existing customers are pulling forward adoption of the product. Usually the way we roll out is customers will do a couple of buildings to get started and it’ll be phased rollout plan from there. But now that the use-case for this data is more connected to safety and compliance, with COVID-19, around occupancy management — there’s CDC guidelines [related to building occupancy levels] — now to have a tool that can measure and report against that is viewed as more of a mission critical type thing.”

VergeSense is processing some 6 million sensor reports per day at this point for nearly 70 customers, including 40 FORTUNE 1000 companies. In total it says it provides its sensor hardware plus SaaS across 20 million sqft, 250 office buildings, and 15 countries.

“There’s an extreme bear case here — that the office is going to disappear,” Ryan adds. “That’s something that we don’t see happening because the office does have a purpose, rooted in — primarily — human social interaction and physical collaboration.

“As much as we love Zoom and the efficiency of that there is a lot that gets lost without that physical collaboration, connection, all the social elements that are built around work.”

VergeSense’s new funding will go on scaling up to meet the increased demand it’s seeing due to COVID and for scaling its software analytics platform.

It’s also going to be spending on product development, per Ryan, with alternative sensor hardware form factors in the works — including “smaller, better, faster” sensor hardware and “some additional data feeds”.

“Right now it’s primarily people counting but there’s a lot of interest in other data about the built environment beyond that — more environmental types of stuff,” he says of the additional data feeds it’s looking to add. “We’re more interested in other types of ambient data about the environment. What’s the air quality on this floor? Temperature, humidity. General environmental data that’s getting even more interest frankly from customers now.

“There is a fair amount of interest in wellness of buildings. Historically that’s been more of a nice to have thing. But now there’s huge interest in what is the air quality of this space — are the environmental conditions appropriate? I think the expectations from employees are going to be much higher. When you walk into an office building you want the air to be good, you want it to look nicer — and that’s why I think the acceleration [of smart spaces]; that’s a trend that was already in motion but people are going to double down and want it to accelerate even faster.”

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Rob Martens, president of Allegion Ventures, added: “In the midst of a world crisis, [the VergeSense team] have quickly positioned themselves to help senior business leaders ensure safer workspaces through social distancing, while at the same time still driving productivity, engagement and cost efficiency. VergeSense is on the leading edge of creating data-driven workspaces when it matters most to the global business community and their employees.”

When Apple added the ability to export transactions via spreadsheet to its credit card, Matthew hit up the folks at Copilot, asking whether they planned to support the feature. The answer was essentially “not yet, but soon.” This week, however, it’s finally official.

The makers of the personal finance tracking app announced that users can now import the Apple Card’s CSV spreadsheet into Copilot. The app will then go to work categorizing the transactions into topics, like transportation, subscription services, shops and restaurants.

Those who manually manage their expenses can consolidate the information into a single place, while the app removes any duplicates from the list. From there, it will create a historical balance and utilization rate for the Apple Card.

Removing as much friction as possible from a daunting subject like expenses is the bread and butter of apps like Copilot, and the Apple integration looks to be a stupidly easy way to keep charges organized in one convenient spot. Copilot’s chief competitor Mint already accepts spreadsheet imports, as do other apps, including Clarity Money, YNAB and Lunch Money.

Unfortunately, there’s no automated way to import the sheets at the moment, meaning you’ll have do it manually for each. Copilot founder Andres Ugarte says the company is working on a fully automated process. Per Urgate, “Apple Card support has been a top request from our users since we launched. This integration required extensive backend development to ensure that upon import, Copilot could seamlessly integrate Apple Card data with the rest of a user’s financial life. We wanted to ensure we weren’t cutting any corners, and that Apple Card transactions could take advantage of the same algorithmic categorization and analysis that Copilot uses for other financial institutions.”

In the same week that Facebook announced a redoubled effort to make a bigger mark in e-commerce, one of its long-time partners has closed a large round of funding. Ecwid, the startup that sells e-commerce tools directly and via third parties like Square and Wix, letting businesses build e-commerce experiences on their own websites and apps, as well as via Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, Google, and more, has raised $42 million from Morgan Stanley and PeakSpan Capital.

Notably, now San Diego-based Ecwid had only raised about $6.5 million since 2009, the year it was founded in Russia as a spinout of X-Cart, a previous company founded by the founder and CEO Ruslan Fazylev; and it’s already profitable. So rather than being used to operate, Fazylev said the funding enabled earlier outside investors — Russia’s Runa Capital, iTech from Latvia and the IT-park business incubator from Kazan — cash out, and gives Ecwid funds that it can use both for acquisitions and to continue expanding its platform organically.

Ecwid is in the stable of e-commerce companies that include the likes of Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce, which have seized on the growth of online shopping over the last decade and helped companies that are not digital by nature — specifically small and medium brick-and-mortar businesses — become a part of that digital economy. And to underscore that low barrier to entry, its pricing starts at free to enable shopping on a website covering 10 or fewer products. (Further priced tiers include the ability to integrate with Facebook and other sites, as well as sell more items, apply more analytics and so on.)

That mandate and opportunity to provide analogue SMBs a route to the next generation of shopping has taken on a new dimension in the last few months. Authorities in many jurisdictions have closed down brick-and-mortar establishments and offices, and restricted day-to-day movement and contact between people in an attempt to slow down the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In other words, if e-commerce has been a long-term growth opportunity with upside for those that cared to invest in it, overnight it became a must-have for any small business that wanted to continue to operate through and after this health crisis.

Just as we’ve seen that trend play out for Shopify (whose share price has been on a roll), Fazylev said that Ecwid, too, has had a big boost. Ironically all that activity started after it closed the round (which was raised before COVID-19 really hit).

“The moment we signed the term sheet, things started to go really crazy,” he said. “Overnight, demand tripled because SMBs were under immense pressure to transition to online ordering. We at Ecwid are not worried about the Walmarts of the world but about the small guys and making it super easy for them. And so demand went through the roof.” Transaction volume between March and April grew by 50% and to meet demand.

Even before that, Ecwid was an under-the-radar success, which is why PeakSpan and Morgan Stanley came knocking.  Even if it’s not the 300% growth of the last couple of months, 2019 saw sign-ups double on the platform with a Net Promoter Score of above 60. (Fazylev said Ecwid lives and dies by its Net Promoter Score so he’s especially proud of this above-average figure.)

And in addition to its direct-to-SMB offering, it white labels through a number of popular channels like Wix, GoDaddy and Square. Together, there are some 1.5 million SMBs across 175 countries (and 54 languages) using its e-commerce rails. This might actually have been one reason why it wasn’t a part of the Facebook Shops news: it’s quietly enabling an army of competitors. But to be very clear, when I asked about the omission, Fazylev said he was stumped by it himself.

PeakSpan Capital Co-Founder and Managing Partner Phil Dur, and Pete Chung, Managing Director and Head of Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, are both joining the board as part of this round.

“Covid-19 is reinforcing what we already knew: e-commerce is vital, and it’s available to even the smallest of merchants now with Ecwid’s free tools that even novice Internet users can adopt quickly,” said Dur, in a statement. “We have been watching Ecwid for many years.The company’s impressive capital efficiency and very strong long-term market opportunity made it an easy decision for us to partner with them during this next phase of growth.”

“Ecwid is truly helping its customers make the most of e-commerce enablement at a time when their traditional retail businesses have been disrupted so dramatically,” said Chung, in a statement. “Ruslan is an e-commerce visionary who has built a team and beloved solution that allows any mom-and-pop shop to embrace the online world,  dramatically expanding their revenue and market potential.”

As segments of the country begin the process of reopening, many antsy Americans are no doubt itching to travel during the Memorial Day weekend. With the holiday fast approaching the TSA is outlining new security measures for those flying during the pandemic.

Some have already been in place amid limited flight schedules and for the most part, the rules are similar to those that have been implemented across most of the country. Agents will encourage travels to practice social distancing and wear facial protection, for instance.

Many others are simply in place to expedite the process as much as possible and help avoid contact between agents and passengers. Travelers will be required to keep boarding passes on their person, rather than handing them to the TSA officer doing the checking. They’ll have to scan it themselves and then hold it up for the agent to see.

Food needs to be placed in a clear plastic bag, separated from the rest of their carry on luggage, so the TSA doesn’t have to rifle through their belongs. There’s also an exception for hand sanitizer now. Per the agency,

In response to COVID-19, TSA is allowing one liquid hand sanitizer container, up to 12 ounces per passenger, in carry-on bags. Passengers are required to remove the hand sanitizer from the carry-on bag before being submitted for X-ray screening. If a bag is found to contain a prohibited item, passengers may be directed to return to the divestiture table outside of security with their carry-on bags to remove the item and dispose of the item.

The changes are fairly simple, but frankly, traveling sounds like a nightmare at the moment. In addition to all of the concerns around sitting in an enclosed flying metal tube with passengers that may be infected with a highly contagious virus, security may well be a giant pain, even with relatively reduced travel numbers. There are a number of extra security steps, a focus on social distancing and reduction in available security lanes.

You’ve heard it before, but unless you absolutely need to travel, consider staying at home for the sake of yourself and others.

As the coronavirus pandemic has disrupted the nature of businesses and the way we work, it’s making even more clear how important communication is when it comes to effective collaboration.

I’ve been reflecting on this a lot, particularly with regard to building great relationships between founders and investors, because we’ve recently closed a number of new deals and are continuing to meet new founders. As this new reality has caused me to re-evaluate my “typical” post-investment playbook, it begs the question: What does building a productive relationship post-close look like now and in more ordinary times?

I always tell founders that as a board member, my goal is to earn the right to be their first phone call in good times and especially bad, and that I also want to be able to proactively pitch both in times of crisis and when it’s business as usual. I know that there’s a fine line between an investor being helpful and being a tax, though, but this onboarding can help reduce the risk that it’s the latter. This is a two-way street, of course, but the better established this process is, the faster valuable contributions can happen.

Here’s where I’d start.

The first 30 days

Forming a new board and onboarding investors is similar to launching a team, and there’s plenty of research that shows that the way you approach this launch period is important for long-term success.

First, you’ll want to align with investors on update and sync cadence — and start implementing it. It’s a good idea to plan on regular email updates on a monthly basis leading up to the first board meeting, with the goal of getting new board member(s) up to speed so they can provide value and be helpful.

I appreciate seeing high-level metric updates as well as a few bullets on what is going well and what is not, and what is top of mind for the CEO. This might include new executives joining the ranks, new marketing activities or product planning and updates on key KPIs. For big milestones like a major launch or impactful competitive moves, or in extraordinary circumstances, like the coronavirus pandemic, it’s good hygiene to do more ad hoc updates.

The winners of the Webby Awards were announced earlier this week, and anyone visiting the Webby website to browse the winning work might have noticed that it’s gotten a fresh look.

The awards’ executive director Claire Graves told me that while the existing gallery was already “a source of inspiration for anyone who wants to create award-winning digital work,” the site was last redesigned five years ago. So it was time to rethink things, resulting in the launch of a new Webby Gallery + Index

After all, the Webbys are continually expanding into new categories like podcasts — as Graves put it, “We’ve expanded as the internet has expanded honor things that are created on the internet” — and she wanted the gallery to fully showcase all that work.

The gallery also presents a tour of internet history, since much of the winning work (like a digital ad campaign) might not be available anywhere else online. So rather than just presenting the winners from a specific year, Graves wanted visitors to be able to see how digital advertising and other creative work has evolved over the time.

The new gallery was created by branding and design agency Basic (naturally, a Webby winner itself), whose CEO Matt Faulk described the awards as “the pinnacle of what we do.” He added that his goal for the project was to turn the gallery into “a more robust research tool and define a new kind of design language and system for the Webbys brand.”

So the new site supports things like listening to podcasts and playing games, while also making it easy to browse by category, to search for all the work by a specific brand or company and to filter based on things like year (it goes back to the first Webby Awards in 1997) and award level.

Not every winning work is currently viewable in the gallery, but Graves said her team is talking to past winners and the larger Webby community about filling in the gaps.

“We want this to be the one real resource to connect the dots between those media types, to see what’s best across the breadth of the internet,” she said.

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

There’s a famous old post going around Twitter this week by entrepreneur and developer David Heinemeier Hansson (@DHH). DHH is a critic of certain elements of the startup world, especially wild valuations. This entry from him is, in my view, a classic of the genre.

The post in question is titled “Facebook is not worth $33,000,000,000,” and was written back in 2010.

You can already imagine who might find the post irksome — namely folks who are in the business of putting capital into high-growth companies. This sort of snark, though not precisely recent, is a good example of how posts like the Facebook entry are read on Twitter.

If you take a moment to actually read DHH’s blog, however, you’ll find that the first part of his argument is that selling a minute slice of a company at a high price, thus “revaluing” the company at a new, stratospheric valuation, is a little silly. DHH didn’t like that by selling a few percentage points of itself, Facebook’s worth was pegged at $33 billion. We’ve seen some similarly-small-dollar, high-valuation rounds recently that could be scooted into the same bucket.

It’s a somewhat fair point.

But what struck me this morning while re-reading the DHH piece was that his second two points are useful rubrics for framing the modern, post-unicorn era. DHH wrote that profits matter, companies are ultimately valued on them, and that companies that don’t scale financial results as they add customers (or users) aren’t great.

With the regulations around telehealth changing rapidly amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, an opioid treatment platform with a digital component is finally finding a strong market foothold after facing a mountain of regulatory hurdles.

Boulder Care was founded by Stephanie Papes, a former associate at Apple Tree Partners. She first became interested in opioid treatment after facilitating the firm’s financing round with an organization called CleanSlate Addiction Centers, which focused on in-person treatment for opioid and alcohol addiction.

There are several options when it comes to opioid addiction treatment. A common one is replacement therapy via methadone, an opioid, which relieves the symptoms of withdrawal while blocking the high that comes from use of heroine and other narcotic pain relievers. There’s also in-patient treatment, which usually comes with strict rules around the use of drugs and sometimes even legal addictive substances like nicotine, with a very low tolerance policy for relapses.

In-patient treatment is usually expensive and not often covered by insurance, and asks patients to go cold turkey. Methadone, on the other hand, requires patients to come to a clinic at least once every day. Not only does that make it difficult to live a normal life, but these clinics are often targeted by drug dealers to poach clients.

Boulder Care looks at a different approach that uses a combination of telehealth services and a prescription drug called Buprenorphine (brand name: Suboxone).

Alongside a greater risk of contracting COVID-19, and having a more severe experience of the disease than those without addiction, addicts are also at a greater risk of overdose or continued use of opioids due to social distancing and increased anxiety and stress, two huge contributing factors to addiction, according to an article published by Harvard.

Boulder Care uses telehealth to offer patients a comprehensive recovery plan, including clinician support (for medical and medication needs), a peer coach (who has lived experience with addiction and can help talk through challenges and issues) and a care advocate (who helps with administrative needs around care and insurance coverage).

“It’s not 100% abstinence only right away,” said Papes. “It’s a journey, and every incremental step and savings for the health system is good for the individual. The work that we do, just by building that trust with our participants, telling them ‘we value you, whether or not you’re using substances, and we’re not going to kick you out of the program for having an unexpected test result on your on your drug test or telling us that you use methamphetamine.’ There are a lot of policies in some of these programs that just continue to put people in harm’s way. So residential facilities will say you can’t be here for your heroin addiction if you’re smoking cigarettes, and they’ll truly discharge you from the program if you smoke. It’s not beneficial for anyone. So, we have this clinical philosophy, it’s really important, and it’s all about unconditional support.”

One of the big challenges for Boulder Care and opioid treatment organizations across the country is the regulatory limits on prescribing Buprenorphine. Buprenorphine is an opioid partial agonist, which means it produces euphoric effects and respiratory depression at low to moderate doses. However, these effects are much weaker than a full opioid agonist like heroine or methadone.

Buprenorphine also greatly weakens the effects of withdrawal, allowing patients to try and stabilize their life and achieve a healthier lifestyle.

Unlike methodone, Buprenorphine can be prescribed by a doctor for use at home, rather than making a trip to a clinic, where patients must be examined and drug tested before they can take their dose. However, there are regulatory limits on doctors around the number of people they can prescribe Buprenorphine to in a given time period, and doctors must also pay to get training and a license to prescribe the drug.

According to Papes, this means 80 percent of the country who could benefit from a Buprenorphine prescription can’t get it. In fact, a HuffPost analysis showed that even if all the doctors who are licensed to prescribe Buprenorphine did so at the maximum rate in 2012, more than half of Americans suffering from opioid addiction still couldn’t get access to the drug.

Part of the reason that prescribing Buprenorphine has such strict limitations comes down to stigma, with many believing in the long-held misconception that replacing one drug for another isn’t the answer, and that abstinence is simply a challenge of mental willpower, negating the fact that addiction is a disease.

There’s no doubt about the potential efficacy of Buprenorphine. In 1995, France allowed any doctor to prescribe Buprenorphine without special licensing or training. About 10x the number of addicted patients began receiving medication-assisted treatments, cutting overdoses by nearly 80 percent in four years, according to the Atlantic.

Another requirement around the prescription of Buprenorphine is that the patient had to have at least one in-person visit with the doctor before they could get access to the medication.

That visit could be someone coming into a clinic or facility seeking to change their own life proactively. It could also be at the emergency room when someone is brought in for an overdose.

“It’s very challenging when someone has a tiny window in which they’re feeling like they’re ready for change, and you have to coordinate with another facility in order to get them into your care,” explained Papes.

During this national health emergency, that requirement has been waived, allowing for doctors to prescribe this medication without an in-person meeting with the patient. This is a huge boost for Boulder Care, which runs its business entirely via telehealth.

Since the start of March 2020, the company has seen 130% week-over-week increase in weekly inquiries from potential patients, and new patient enrollments is up 32%. During COVID-19, any patient who is uninsured or under-insured can get services from Boulder for free.

Boulder recently partnered with Premera Blue Cross, an insurance plan in the Pacific Northwest, to provide zero cost share options for virtual substance use disorder treatment, which will give 2.3 million customers access to Boulder Care through at least June 30. Cost shares will be waived for all patients seeking medically necessary telehealth treatment.

Alongside revamping the way patients receive treatment for substance use disorders, Boulder is also looking to change the payment model. Traditionally, the healthcare system remunerates providers based on admissions (and often, readmissions) without focusing on outcomes. Meanwhile, outpatient fee-for-service reimburses for clinical visits and drug-testing, rather than peer recovery coaching, 24/7 text messaging and same-day access, a few of the things that contribute to successful outcomes outside of clinical treatment.

Boulder partners with paying entities for ‘bundled’ services, charging a flat rate per patient without focusing on the volume of procedures. The hope, according to Papes, is to “realign incentives and tie payment to accountability for meaningful outcomes.”

Boulder Care has raised more than $10 million with investment from Tusk Venture Partners, who led the Series A, among others.

Daniel Graf has had a long career in the tech industry. From founding his own startup in the mid-2000s to working at Google, then Twitter, and finally Uber, the tech business has made him extremely wealthy.

But after leaving Uber, he wasn’t necessarily interested in working at another business… At least, not until he spent an afternoon in the spring of 2019 with an old friend, General Catalyst managing director Hemant Taneja, walking in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood and hearing Taneja talk about a new startup called Mindstrong.

Taneja told Graf that by the fall of that year, he’d be working at Mindstrong… and Taneja was right.

“I was intrigued by healthtech previously,” said Graf.  “The problem always was…and  it sounds a little too money oriented.. but if there’s no clear visibility around who pays who in a startup, the startup isn’t going to work,” and that was always his issue with healthcare businesses. 

NEW YORK, NY – MAY 21: Daniel Graf accepts a Webby award for Google Maps for Iphone at the 17th Annual Webby Awards at Cipriani Wall Street on May 21, 2013 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for The Webby Awards)

With Mindstrong, which announced today that it has raised $100 million in new financing, the issue of who pays is clear.

So Graf joined the company in November as chief executive, taking over from Paul Dagum, who remains with Mindstrong as its chief scientific officer.

“Daniel joined the company as it was moving from pure R&D into being something commercially available,” said Taneja, in an email. “In healthcare, it’s increasingly important to understand how to build for the consumer and that’s where Daniel’s experience and background comes in. Paul remains a core part of the team because none of this happens without the science.”

The company, which has developed a digital platform for providing therapy to patients with severe mental illnesses ranging from schizophrenia to obsessive compulsive disorders, is looking to tackle a problem that costs the American healthcare system $20 billion per month, Graf said.

Unlike companies like Headspace and Calm that have focused on the mental wellness market for the mass consumer, Mindstrong is focused on people with severe mental health conditions, said Graf. That means people who are either bipolar, schizophrenic or have major depressive disorder.

It’s a much larger population than most Americans think and they face a critical problem in their ability to receive adequate care, Graf said.

“1 in 5 adults experience mental illness, 1 in 25 experience serious mental illness, and the pandemic is making these numbers worse. Meanwhile, more than 60% of US counties don’t have a single practicing psychiatrist,” said Joe Lonsdale, the founder of 8VC, and investor in the latest Mindstrong Health round, in a statement.  

Dagum, Mindstrong Health’s founder has been working on the issue of how to provide better access and monitor for indications of potential episodes of distress since 2013. The company’s technology provides a range of monitoring and measurement tools using digital biomarkers that are currently being validated through clinical trials, according to Graf.

“We’re passively measuring the usage of the phone and the timing of the keyboard strokes to measure how [a patient] is doing,” Graf said. These smartphone interactions can provide data around mental acuity and emotional valence, according to Graf — and can provide signs that someone might be having problems.

The company also provides access to therapists via phone and video consultations or text-based asynchronous communications, based on user preference.

“Think of us more as a virtual hospital… our care pathways are super complex for this population,” said Graf. “We’re not aware of other startups working with this population. These folks, the best you get right now is the county mental health.”

Mindstrong’s Series C raise included participation from new and existing investors, including General Catalyst, ARCH Ventures, Optum Ventures, Foresite Capital, 8VC, What If Ventures and Bezos Expeditions, along with other, undisclosed investors.  

And while mental health is the company’s current focus, the platform for care delivery that the company is building has broader implications for the industry, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic, according to General Catalyst managing director, Taneja.

“I expect that we’ll see discoveries in biomarker tech like Mindstrong’s that could be applied horizontally across almost any area of healthcare,” Taneja said in an email. “Because healthcare is so broad and varied, going vertical like Mindstrong is makes a lot of sense. There’s opportunity to become a successful and very impactful company by staying narrowly focused and solving some really hard problems for even a smaller part of the overall population.”

Compared to other tech firms, enterprise companies have held up well during the pandemic.

If anything, the problems enterprises were facing prior to the economic downturn have become even more pronounced; if you were thinking about moving to the cloud or just dabbling in it, you’re probably accelerating that motion. If you were trying to move off of legacy systems, that has become even more imperative. And if you were attempting to modernize processes and workflows, whether engineer- and developer-related, or across other parts of the organization, chances are good that you are giving that a much closer look.

We won’t be locked down forever and employees will eventually return to offices, but it’s likely that many companies will take the lessons they learned during this era and put them to work inside their organizations. Startups are uniquely positioned to help companies solve these new modern kinds of problems, much more so than a legacy vendor (which could be itself trying to update its approach).

Venture capitalists certainly understand all of these dynamics and are always dutifully searching for startups that could help companies shift to a digital future more quickly.

We spoke to 11 of them to take their pulse and learn more about the trends that are exciting them, what they look for in an investment opportunity and which parts of the enterprise are ripe for startups to impact:

• Max Gazor, CRV
• Navin Chadda, Mayfield
• Matt Murphy, Menlo Venture Capital
• Soma Somasagar, Madrona Ventures
• Jon Lehr, Work-Bench
• Steve Herrod, General Catalyst
• Jai Das, Sapphire Ventures
• Max Gazor,  CRV
• Ed Sim, Boldstart Ventures
• Martin Cassado, Andreessen Horowitz
• Vassant Natarajan, Accel

Max Gazor, CRV

What trends are you most excited about in the enterprise from an investing perspective?

It’s abundantly clear that cloud software markets are bigger than most people anticipated. We continue to invest heavily there as we have been doing for the last decade.

Specifically, the most exciting trend right now in enterprise is low-code software development. I’m on the board of Airtable, where I led the Series A and co-led the Series B investments, so I see first hand how this will play out. We are heading toward a future where hundreds of millions of people will be empowered to compose software that fits their own needs. Imagine the productivity and transformation that will unlock in the world! It may be one of the largest market opportunities we have seen since cloud computing.