Author: azeeadmin

Months into this global pandemic, many questions remain about whether and when companies of all sizes will return to their offices and what will be required of the move. The future is so unclear that even people steeped in the real estate industry don’t have all the answers — though they’re starting to make educated guesses around what will happen next.

A trove of new data being released tomorrow by the commercial real estate services giant CBRE underscores the somewhat schizophrenic situation employees will be facing. Based on CBRE’s studies of 200 companies across the globe that say they are returning to the office, 59% say they will provide face coverings for their employees, 28% percent plan to require face coverings at all times, 21% will allow visitors to the workplace in the early phases of reopening, and 13% will conduct screening of employees on-site at every facility.

Yet deciding on the exact right patchwork of social distancing measures is just one piece of the picture. Until a vaccine materializes that can eradicate COVID-19, organizing office spaces will be as challenging companies try striking a balance between employee safety and some semblance of normalcy. Indeed, the only certainty for many management teams is that they have to make some changes. Of the many questions CBRE posed in its survey, the most uniform answers centered on how many companies plan to establish space-use policies that reflect social distancing (80%) and how many plan to reconfigure their furniture layouts (60%).

Presumably, many will be ditching breakrooms and even cafeterias. Others will be trying to ensure that employees are stationed at least six feet apart. But expect many other changes, too, suggest venture investors who are focused on real estate and construction tech and who are right now focusing on which technologies will be most in demand in the coming months and years.

Among the most focused of these outfits is Fifth Wall Ventures and Brick and Mortar Ventures, two firms that have emerged on the scene in recent years and that are tracking closely what’s happening for both professional and personal reasons.

Darren Bechtel, for example, who announced Brick and Mortar’s $97.5 million debut venture fund just nine months ago, is working out of an Airstream trailer in the driveway of a rental property where he, his wife, and their young children are living because they both have work calls to make throughout the day.

While racing inside and out is far from ideal, Bechtel says, he’s not prepared to re-open Brick and Mortar’s Bay Area offices any time soon, even while California gradually reopens the state. “We’re in no rush; I’m erring on the side of being overly conservative.” (Virtual happy hours also help, he says.)

Brendan Wallace, cofounder of L.A.-based Fifth Wall, is similarly hesitant to force employees back to the office too soon and suggests it’s a decision he and cofounder Brad Greiwe wrestle with, even while they’ve been “optimistically surprised by how productive our team is in a work-remote environment.”

Part of both firms’ reluctance stems from knowing that their offices — like so many others — may need to be redesigned. In fact, though office design businesses aren’t venture-type bets, Wallace notes that the need now to consider employee movement flows should mean brisk business for those outfits.

More interesting to both investors are technologies that are scalable and also, in today’s environment, suddenly more compelling to building owners and managers and developers. Both Wallace and Bechtel mention advanced air purifiers and air handling units used to re-condition and circulate air as part of a heating, ventilating and air-conditioning, as one growing area of interest, for example.

Wallace also expects commercial spaces that were already adopting all kinds of smart technologies to install them much more aggressively, from sensors that can determine how many people are in a room or passed through a turnstile to facial recognition tech that help can keep points of physical contact to a minimum. He even imagines that more companies will embrace robots, to patrol buildings, and to clean them, too.

Businesses now “have to take on a responsibility for tenants that they didn’t have before,” says Wallace. And as they “look to retrofit [their spaces] more ambitiously, we want to be ahead of that.”

Bechtel, for his part, thinks the industry may see demand for either individual private offices or much larger conference rooms to accommodate new concerns around safety or personal health.

He also thinks now may be the moment for materials companies that produce, say, antimicrobial textiles. “People have been developing [related] greener materials for some time but there wasn’t demand for it,” he says.

Because Brick and Mortar ventures is largely focused on construction tech, it will also be looking more vigorously at ways construction firms can improve the safety of job sites and improve productivity as they are re-imaging spaces that need to be redone. That could mean everything from contact tracing to reality capture software (which creates 3D models out of photographs or laser scans). It could also mean a surge in demand for off-site, pre-fabricated construction.

“If you’re limited by how many people can work in the field, and you have to put in controls for people not working on top of each other, the question becomes: how can you do the work in a more controlled environment, with a next-gen HVAC system [to purify the air] and markings on the floor?” Says Bechtel, “People are now saying, ‘How much can we prepare off site?'”

No doubt that much of this tech and its adoption will depend on how long it takes for a vaccine that can eradicate COVID-19 to materialize. Should a vaccine come faster than expected, already cash-strapped businesses may view major changes to their physical spaces as less of a priority. It’s human nature to quickly forget.

“We’re just 75 days in,” notes Wallace. “There’s still a a lot of information that needs to come to light,” he adds, noting that on a very fundamental level, no one yet knows if people will even return to their offices en masse or instead continue to work remotely. “What happens on the office side, I don’t know, I’m just being honest,” he says.

Nevertheless, as economies re-open, businesses, universities and other institutions will need to have a plan of attack to prevent the virus’s spread, and some will presumably lead to permanent changes.

The investors hope so. Right now, Wallace says, “Buildings are dumb. For the most part, they just exist to keep heat and air conditioning in.” Wallaces hopes that if anything good comes out of this situation, it’s buildings that are made smarter and safer — and  can adapt to health risks like this one.

Months into this global pandemic, many questions remain about whether and when companies of all sizes will return to their offices and what will be required of the move. The future is so unclear that even people steeped in the real estate industry don’t have all the answers — though they’re starting to make educated guesses around what will happen next.

A trove of new data being released tomorrow by the commercial real estate services giant CBRE underscores the somewhat schizophrenic situation employees will be facing. Based on CBRE’s studies of 200 companies across the globe that say they are returning to the office, 59% say they will provide face coverings for their employees, 28% percent plan to require face coverings at all times, 21% will allow visitors to the workplace in the early phases of reopening, and 13% will conduct screening of employees on-site at every facility.

Yet deciding on the exact right patchwork of social distancing measures is just one piece of the picture. Until a vaccine materializes that can eradicate COVID-19, organizing office spaces will be as challenging companies try striking a balance between employee safety and some semblance of normalcy. Indeed, the only certainty for many management teams is that they have to make some changes. Of the many questions CBRE posed in its survey, the most uniform answers centered on how many companies plan to establish space-use policies that reflect social distancing (80%) and how many plan to reconfigure their furniture layouts (60%).

Presumably, many will be ditching breakrooms and even cafeterias. Others will be trying to ensure that employees are stationed at least six feet apart. But expect many other changes, too, suggest venture investors who are focused on real estate and construction tech and who are right now focusing on which technologies will be most in demand in the coming months and years.

Among the most focused of these outfits is Fifth Wall Ventures and Brick and Mortar Ventures, two firms that have emerged on the scene in recent years and that are tracking closely what’s happening for both professional and personal reasons.

Darren Bechtel, for example, who announced Brick and Mortar’s $97.5 million debut venture fund just nine months ago, is working out of an Airstream trailer in the driveway of a rental property where he, his wife, and their young children are living because they both have work calls to make throughout the day.

While racing inside and out is far from ideal, Bechtel says, he’s not prepared to re-open Brick and Mortar’s Bay Area offices any time soon, even while California gradually reopens the state. “We’re in no rush; I’m erring on the side of being overly conservative.” (Virtual happy hours also help, he says.)

Brendan Wallace, cofounder of L.A.-based Fifth Wall, is similarly hesitant to force employees back to the office too soon and suggests it’s a decision he and cofounder Brad Greiwe wrestle with, even while they’ve been “optimistically surprised by how productive our team is in a work-remote environment.”

Part of both firms’ reluctance stems from knowing that their offices — like so many others — may need to be redesigned. In fact, though office design businesses aren’t venture-type bets, Wallace notes that the need now to consider employee movement flows should mean brisk business for those outfits.

More interesting to both investors are technologies that are scalable and also, in today’s environment, suddenly more compelling to building owners and managers and developers. Both Wallace and Bechtel mention advanced air purifiers and air handling units used to re-condition and circulate air as part of a heating, ventilating and air-conditioning, as one growing area of interest, for example.

Wallace also expects commercial spaces that were already adopting all kinds of smart technologies to install them much more aggressively, from sensors that can determine how many people are in a room or passed through a turnstile to facial recognition tech that help can keep points of physical contact to a minimum. He even imagines that more companies will embrace robots, to patrol buildings, and to clean them, too.

Businesses now “have to take on a responsibility for tenants that they didn’t have before,” says Wallace. And as they “look to retrofit [their spaces] more ambitiously, we want to be ahead of that.”

Bechtel, for his part, thinks the industry may see demand for either individual private offices or much larger conference rooms to accommodate new concerns around safety or personal health.

He also thinks now may be the moment for materials companies that produce, say, antimicrobial textiles. “People have been developing [related] greener materials for some time but there wasn’t demand for it,” he says.

Because Brick and Mortar ventures is largely focused on construction tech, it will also be looking more vigorously at ways construction firms can improve the safety of job sites and improve productivity as they are re-imaging spaces that need to be redone. That could mean everything from contact tracing to reality capture software (which creates 3D models out of photographs or laser scans). It could also mean a surge in demand for off-site, pre-fabricated construction.

“If you’re limited by how many people can work in the field, and you have to put in controls for people not working on top of each other, the question becomes: how can you do the work in a more controlled environment, with a next-gen HVAC system [to purify the air] and markings on the floor?” Says Bechtel, “People are now saying, ‘How much can we prepare off site?'”

No doubt that much of this tech and its adoption will depend on how long it takes for a vaccine that can eradicate COVID-19 to materialize. Should a vaccine come faster than expected, already cash-strapped businesses may view major changes to their physical spaces as less of a priority. It’s human nature to quickly forget.

“We’re just 75 days in,” notes Wallace. “There’s still a a lot of information that needs to come to light,” he adds, noting that on a very fundamental level, no one yet knows if people will even return to their offices en masse or instead continue to work remotely. “What happens on the office side, I don’t know, I’m just being honest,” he says.

Nevertheless, as economies re-open, businesses, universities and other institutions will need to have a plan of attack to prevent the virus’s spread, and some will presumably lead to permanent changes.

The investors hope so. Right now, Wallace says, “Buildings are dumb. For the most part, they just exist to keep heat and air conditioning in.” Wallaces hopes that if anything good comes out of this situation, it’s buildings that are made smarter and safer — and  can adapt to health risks like this one.

Opera’s Africa fintech startup OPay remains committed to building a multi-service super app in Nigeria as the foundation to expand on the continent.

OPay also continues to operate ORide for limited passenger service — though the company is shifting the motorcycle ride-hail operation toward logistics businesses.

These were some of the updates offered by Opera’s Derrick Nueman, a VP of Investor Relations and advisor to OPay.

He spoke to TechCrunch amid a flurry of recent reporting questioning OPay’s Nigeria strategy and speculating on its departure from certain verticals.

This is playing out in the context of fierce competition among fintech and mobility companies in the West African country. Nigeria is home to the continent’s largest economy, biggest population and is the top destination for VC to African startups, as of 2019.

Opera launched the OPay mobile money platform in Lagos in 2018 on the popularity of its internet search engine in Africa. A year later, the Norway-based, Chinese-owned company sent jitters through Nigeria’s startup world when it rallied investors to back OPay with $170 million in VC. The financing haul amounted to nearly one-fifth of all venture funding raised for African startups the previous year.

Opera tapped its capital to go work building a large suite of internet-based commercial products in Nigeria using OPay as the financial utility.

In a 2019 prospectus, Opera referred to this multi-product strategy as creating “Africa’s super app.” Pursuing that platform put OPay in competition with dozens of local startups — such as payment firm Paga and logistics venture Max.ng — without deep pocketed corporate parents.

Opera remains committed to the super app strategy, according to Derrick Nueman. He referred to OPay as “the glue that holds it all together and within there you can offer all sorts of products.”

Nueman compared the approach to other multi-service internet services models such as Grab or Gojek.

“It’s taking what has worked in Asia and and ascribing it to Africa and that to my knowledge is still the plan,” he said.

Opera has tested a number of services verticals in Nigeria. So many it’s been a bit difficult to keep track. A few — such as OBus — have already been jettisoned. Nueman confirmed a list of five current product offerings around Opay in Nigeria:

• OMall, a B2C e-commerce app
• OTrade, a B2B e-commerce platform
• OExpress, a logistics delivery service
• OFood, for restaurant delivery; and
• ORide, a motorcycle ride-hail service

OPay — whose Nigerian country manager is Iniabasi Akpan — is also moving into device sales with Olla, a mobile phone line pre-loaded with its apps.

On ORide in particular, there’s been some speculation the motorcycle ride-hail service will continue, particularly after the Nigeria’s Lagos State severely restricted two wheeled, on-demand passenger services early this year. Nigerian outlet TechCabal reported this week ORide was selling off some of its fleet.

According to Opera’s Derrick Nueman, ORide still offers limited ride-hail taxi service. “On the passenger side, it continues to operate where it can.” Many of motorcycles are being transitioned to other functions within OPay. “What they’ve done is redirected a bunch of their drivers to do things like delivery and logistics,” said Nueman.

Several of ORide’s competitors — such as Max .ng and Gokada — have also shifted away from passenger transit and toward delivery logistics in response to regulatory restrictions on motorcycle taxis.

Opera still plans on taking its super app model on the road in Africa, according to Nueman. “OPay continues to look into other markets. The idea is to take what’s worked in Nigeria and export it,” he said.

In a 2019 release, Opera named Ghana, South Africa and Kenya as potential growth markets.

On timing for expansion, Nueman said it depends on obtaining proper licenses and then, gauging shifting variables related to COVID-19 in Africa.

The economic impact of the global pandemic has cast uncertainty over the continent’s largest economies and tech hubs — such as Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa — where lockdown measures have restricted startup revenues and operations.

By several accounts, Nigeria is either already in or headed for another recession due to the slowdown in economic activity and drop in global demand for oil.

On OPay’s plans to weather a stormy economic environment in its primary market, Opera’s Nueman points to the company’s VC coffers.

“At a high level, if you don’t need capital, or your well funded, you’re ahead of the game,” he said.

Nueman also highlighted the growth of OPay’s payment volume. “Between January and April…the offline and online transaction volume increased by 44%. So even in the lockdown, it’s doing really well.”

Where does this put Opera’s Africa venture in Nigeria’s competitive startup landscape? Traction with payment volume is obviously a good sign for the company. Still, recession and restricted movement could make business as difficult for OPay in Nigeria as its competitors.

Having more capital — and ability to endure a higher burn-rate — places OPay in a strong position vis-a-vis other startups. But it will take more time to determine if OPay can align its super app products to local consumer preferences as well (or better) than offerings by local tech companies.

As has been proven in other markets, all the VC in the world won’t necessarily buy product market fit.

Opera’s Africa fintech startup OPay remains committed to building a multi-service super app in Nigeria as the foundation to expand on the continent.

OPay also continues to operate ORide for limited passenger service — though the company is shifting the motorcycle ride-hail operation toward logistics businesses.

These were some of the updates offered by Opera’s Derrick Nueman, a VP of Investor Relations and advisor to OPay.

He spoke to TechCrunch amid a flurry of recent reporting questioning OPay’s Nigeria strategy and speculating on its departure from certain verticals.

This is playing out in the context of fierce competition among fintech and mobility companies in the West African country. Nigeria is home to the continent’s largest economy, biggest population and is the top destination for VC to African startups, as of 2019.

Opera launched the OPay mobile money platform in Lagos in 2018 on the popularity of its internet search engine in Africa. A year later, the Norway-based, Chinese-owned company sent jitters through Nigeria’s startup world when it rallied investors to back OPay with $170 million in VC. The financing haul amounted to nearly one-fifth of all venture funding raised for African startups the previous year.

Opera tapped its capital to go work building a large suite of internet-based commercial products in Nigeria using OPay as the financial utility.

In a 2019 prospectus, Opera referred to this multi-product strategy as creating “Africa’s super app.” Pursuing that platform put OPay in competition with dozens of local startups — such as payment firm Paga and logistics venture Max.ng — without deep pocketed corporate parents.

Opera remains committed to the super app strategy, according to Derrick Nueman. He referred to OPay as “the glue that holds it all together and within there you can offer all sorts of products.”

Nueman compared the approach to other multi-service internet services models such as Grab or Gojek.

“It’s taking what has worked in Asia and and ascribing it to Africa and that to my knowledge is still the plan,” he said.

Opera has tested a number of services verticals in Nigeria. So many it’s been a bit difficult to keep track. A few — such as OBus — have already been jettisoned. Nueman confirmed a list of five current product offerings around Opay in Nigeria:

• OMall, a B2C e-commerce app
• OTrade, a B2B e-commerce platform
• OExpress, a logistics delivery service
• OFood, for restaurant delivery; and
• ORide, a motorcycle ride-hail service

OPay — whose Nigerian country manager is Iniabasi Akpan — is also moving into device sales with Olla, a mobile phone line pre-loaded with its apps.

On ORide in particular, there’s been some speculation the motorcycle ride-hail service will continue, particularly after the Nigeria’s Lagos State severely restricted two wheeled, on-demand passenger services early this year. Nigerian outlet TechCabal reported this week ORide was selling off some of its fleet.

According to Opera’s Derrick Nueman, ORide still offers limited ride-hail taxi service. “On the passenger side, it continues to operate where it can.” Many of motorcycles are being transitioned to other functions within OPay. “What they’ve done is redirected a bunch of their drivers to do things like delivery and logistics,” said Nueman.

Several of ORide’s competitors — such as Max .ng and Gokada — have also shifted away from passenger transit and toward delivery logistics in response to regulatory restrictions on motorcycle taxis.

Opera still plans on taking its super app model on the road in Africa, according to Nueman. “OPay continues to look into other markets. The idea is to take what’s worked in Nigeria and export it,” he said.

In a 2019 release, Opera named Ghana, South Africa and Kenya as potential growth markets.

On timing for expansion, Nueman said it depends on obtaining proper licenses and then, gauging shifting variables related to COVID-19 in Africa.

The economic impact of the global pandemic has cast uncertainty over the continent’s largest economies and tech hubs — such as Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa — where lockdown measures have restricted startup revenues and operations.

By several accounts, Nigeria is either already in or headed for another recession due to the slowdown in economic activity and drop in global demand for oil.

On OPay’s plans to weather a stormy economic environment in its primary market, Opera’s Nueman points to the company’s VC coffers.

“At a high level, if you don’t need capital, or your well funded, you’re ahead of the game,” he said.

Nueman also highlighted the growth of OPay’s payment volume. “Between January and April…the offline and online transaction volume increased by 44%. So even in the lockdown, it’s doing really well.”

Where does this put Opera’s Africa venture in Nigeria’s competitive startup landscape? Traction with payment volume is obviously a good sign for the company. Still, recession and restricted movement could make business as difficult for OPay in Nigeria as its competitors.

Having more capital — and ability to endure a higher burn-rate — places OPay in a strong position vis-a-vis other startups. But it will take more time to determine if OPay can align its super app products to local consumer preferences as well (or better) than offerings by local tech companies.

As has been proven in other markets, all the VC in the world won’t necessarily buy product market fit.

The Luckin saga continues as the Chinese coffee challenger seeks solutions to the undesirable consequences of a $310 million fraud. On Tuesday, the company announced sacking chief operating officer Liu Jian, the alleged mastermind behind the fraud, and chief executive officer Qian Zhiya, a rare female leader of a Chinese internet firm. Despite the scandal, the company is reportedly on an expansion spree, opening ten outlets per day in the second quarter.

Another recent endeavor of the coffee delivery startup offers a reminder that the NASDAQ-traded company not only aims to take on Starbucks but also has its eyes locked on hundreds of thousands of convenience stores, as stated early in its IPO prospectus. On Thursday, the coffee chain announced a one-week sales campaign (in Chinese) to promote its line of lifestyle products, which range from beauty masks and hand soap to Apple Airpods and Beats headphones. Most of the non-beverage merchandise is third-party, except for a small collection of Luckin-branded items such as coffee mugs.

Luckin began touting lifestyle merchandise in the third quarter of 2019 and has been gradually broadening the variety of its offering. These items are easily discoverable on the app by tapping the “Trendy Items” (潮品) icon placed right next to the entry to the coffee menu. The share of Luckin’s non-beverage items, which also include packaged snacks, climbed from 14% of total revenue to 23% between Q3 2018 and Q3 2019.

It may seem odd that a coffee chain is selling sanitized wipes and trash bags, but the approach could point to a long-standing strategy in the internet business in China: To quickly build up a user base through a competitive product and monetize later through a peripheral but lucrative business.

Heavily subsidized coffee has been Luckin’s engine of user acquisition. Its lifestyle products currently come with deep discounts as well, so the question is whether they will comprise the company’s cash cow when the perks are gone. After all, why would consumers shop for daily essentials from a coffee ordering app when dozens of larger ecommerce outfits offer greater selection and more mature logistics management?

Luckin received an unexpected boost on the heels of its accounting fraud. With patriotic drinkers rallying around the home-grown coffee brand and thrifty consumers rushing to redeem coupons before a potential business collapse, Luckin’s daily active users shot up 12-fold to 4.4 million when the scandal came to light in early April, according to data provided by third-party analytics firm Aurora Mobile. The growth was short-lived, and its DAU has fallen and hovers below 1.5 million as of this writing.

Amazon has secured rights to premiere seven Indian movies that were initially scheduled for a theatrical release directly on its Prime Video on-demand streaming service in a move that has prompted two major movie theater chains to express “extreme displeasure” and “disappointment.”

The e-commerce giant, which is reportedly in talks to buy AMC theater chain, said on Friday that it will release these movies, which include “Gulabo Sitabo” starring Indian legend Amitabh Bachchan and Ayushmann Khurrana, and “Shakuntala Devi” featuring Vidya Balan as lead, over the next three months starting with May.

Prime Video subscribers won’t have to pay an additional fee to access these movies, which span five Indian languages, the company said. Other “highly anticipated” titles are Tamil drama “Ponmagal Vandhal”, “Penguin” (Tamil and Telugu), “Law” (Kannada), “French Biryani” (Kannada), and “Sufiyum Sujatayum” (Malayalam).

The move comes as India maintains a nationwide lockdown that has left more than 9,500 theaters and other public places shut.

PVR and INOX, two large theater chains in India that together run about 1,500 screens in the country, said they were alarmed and concerned by the move.

“Such acts, though isolated, vitiate the atmosphere of mutual partnership and paint these content producers as fair-weather friends rather than all-weather life-long partners. Needless to say, INOX will be constrained to examine its options, and reserves all rights, including taking retributive measures, in dealing with such fair-weather friends,” said INOX in a statement.

Amazon, which began selling movie tickets in India last year, has been attempting to challenge, in INOX’s words, “age old, windowing-pattern.” In the last one and a half year, the shopping giant has struck deals with movie studios to narrow the window for a movie’s theatrical release to its debut on a streaming service to a few weeks, down from two to three months in India.

INOX and PVR are not alone. Last month, AMC Theaters said it will no longer screen films made by Universal Pictures, which released “Trolls World Tour” directly to streaming.

Amazon, which bundles Prime Video in its $13-a-year Prime subscription plan in India, said it is providing these movies a platform that reaches 4,000 towns and cities in more than 200 countries and territories. The company has not disclosed how many Prime Video subscribers it has amassed in India, or elsewhere. Amazon Prime Video competes with Disney’s Hotstar, Netflix, and more than three dozen other services in India.

Gaurav Gandhi, Director and Country General Manager of Amazon Prime Video India, said in a statement that “Indian audiences have been eagerly awaiting the release of these 7 highly anticipated films and we are delighted that Amazon Prime Video will now be premiering these movies for our customers – who can enjoy watching these from the safety and comfort of their homes and on a screen of their choice.”

It appears that Amazon hasn’t had to spend a ton to acquire rights for these titles. In an interview with Huffington Post India, Ronnie Lahiri, co-producer of “Gulabo Sitabo” said “it wasn’t like we got insane money from Amazon” though he called the deal a “win-win.”

“We’re facing a once-in-a-lifetime phenomena, not seen since World War 2. These are the times when things change. Initially, people have apprehensions but one has to adapt. That’s how human civilisations have prospered. The minute we stop adapting, we’re done. Instead of waiting for the situation to get better, you tackle it with other alternatives,” he said.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest contract semiconductor foundry, said today that it plans to build an advanced chip foundry in Arizona with support from the state and the United States federal government.

The announcement follows a Wall Street Journal report earlier this week that White House officials were in talks with TSMC and Intel to build foundries in the U.S., as part of its effort to reduce reliance on chip factories in Asia. Based in Hsinchu, Taiwan, TSMC provides chip components for many of the world’s largest semiconductor companies and its U.S. clients include Apple and Qualcomm.

The plant, scheduled to start production of chips in 2024, will enable TSMC’s American customers to fabricate their semiconductor products domestically. It will use the company’s 5-nanometer technology and is expected to create 1,600 jobs and have the capacity to produce 20,000 wafers a month.

The U.S.-China trade war, national security concerns, geopolitical unrest and the COVID-19 pandemic have all underscored the shortfalls of relying on foundries located abroad and international supply chains.

The U.S. government has reportedly been in talks with TSMC for months, though one sticking point for the company was the high cost of building a new foundry. TSMC chairman Mark Liu told the New York Times in October that the project would require major subsidies because it is more expensive to operate a factory in the U.S. in Taiwan.

In today’s announcement, TSMC said “U.S. adoption of forward-looking investment policies to enable a globally competitive environment for a leading edge semiconductor technology operation in the U.S. will be crucial to the success of this project.”

The company expects to spend about $12 billion between 2021 and 2029 on the project, with construction slated to begin next year.

TSMC already operates a foundry in Camas, Washington, and has design centers in Austin, Texas and San Jose, California.

For the past two years the founding team of Immunai had been working stealthily to develop a new technology to map the immune system of any patient.

Founded by Noam Solomon, a Harvard and MIT-educated postdoctoral researcher, and former Palantir engineer, Luis Voloch, Immunai was born from the two men’s interest in computational biology and systems engineering. When the two were introduced to Ansuman Satpathy, a professor of cancer immunology at Stanford University, and Danny Wells, who works as a data scientist at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy the path forward for the company became clear.

“Together we said we bring the understanding of all the technology and machine learning that needs to be brought into the work and Ansu and Danny bring the single-cell biology,” said Solomon. 

Now as the company unveils itself and the $20 million in financing it has received from investors including Viola Ventures and TLV Partners, it’s going to be making a hiring push and expanding its already robust research and development activities. 

Immunai already boasts clinical partnerships with over ten medical centers and commercial partnerships with several biopharma companies, according to the company. And the team has already published peer-reviewed work on the origin of tumor-fighting T cells following PD-1 blockade, Immunai said.

“We are implementing a complicated engineering pipeline. We wanted to scale to hundreds of patients and thousands of samples,” said Wells. “Right now, in the world of cancer therapy, there are new drugs coming on the market that are called checkpoint inhibitors. [We’re] trying to understand how these molecules are working and find new combinations and new targets. We need to see the immune system in full granularity.”

That’s what Immunai’s combination of hardware and software allows researchers to do, said Wells. “It’s a vertically integrated platform for single cell profiling,” he said. “We go even further to figure out what the biology is there and figure that out in a new combination design for the trial.”

Cell therapies and cancer immunotherapies are changing the practice of medicine and offering new treatments for conditions, but given how complex the immune system is, the developers of those therapies have few insights into how their treatments will effect the immune system. Given the diversity of individual patients variations in products can significantly change the way a patient will respond to the treatment, the company said.

Immunai has the potential to change the way these treatments are developed by using single-cell technologies to profile cells by generating over a terabyte of data from an individual blood sample. The company’s proprietary database and machine learnings tools map incoming data to different cell types and create profiles of immune responses based on differentiated elements. Finally, the database of immune profiles supports the disvovery of biomarkers that can then be monitored for potential changes.

“Our mission is to map the immune system with neural networks and transfer learning techniques informed by deep immunology knowledge,” said Voloch, in a statement. “We developed the tools and knowhow to help every immuno-oncology and cell therapy researcher excel at their job. This helps increase the speed in which drugs are developed and brought to market by elucidating their mechanisms of action and resistance.”

Pharmaceutical companies are already aware of the transformational potential of the technology, according to Solomon. The company is already in the process of finalizing a seven-figure contract from a Fortune 100 company, according to Solomon. 

One of the company’s earliest research coups was using research to show the way that immune systems function when anti-PD1 molecules are introduced. Typically the presence of PD-1 means that t-cell production is being suppressed. What the research from ImmuneAI revealed was that the response wasn’t happening with T-cells within the tumor. There were new t-cells that were migrating to the tumor to fight it off, according to Wells.

“This whole approach that we have around looking at all of these indications — we believe that the right way and most powerful way to study these diseases is to look at the immune system from the top down,” said Voloch, in an interview. “Looking at all of these different scenarios. From the top, you see these patterns than wouldn’t be available otherwise.” 

“The first Asian Jew in fake space” — that’s how Josh Burstein introduced himself to me when we hopped on the phone earlier this week.

The fake space in question is the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS), where NASA has been periodically isolating teams of astronauts to study how they respond to the stresses of space exploration — and where Burstein was stationed last year. Now he’s releasing a 37-minute documentary special about that experience, called “Spacedrop.”

The special lives up to its tagline: “How to space quarantine.” For two weeks, Burstein and an international team of scientists led by Michaela Musilova treated a habitat on the slopes of Mauna Loa as if it was a real habitat on the Moon or Mars — spending most of their time inside, and only leaving to explore the landscape beyond its walls after donning breathing equipment that approximates a real spacesuit.

And yes, the film does spend a few minutes on the parallels between a simulated space quarantine and our current coronavirus-imposed, stay-at-home world.

Burstein acknowledged that the situations are very different — for one thing, HI-SEAS was a much briefer quarantine. And while he spent time in both the special and our interview talking about the amazing feeling of stepping outside after quarantine ended and “hearing the spokes of a bicycle, seeing the color green, everything came back in Technicolor,” it seems unlikely that the rest of us will get an equally quick and satisfying return to normalcy.

“We’re not going to burst out of quarantine running,” he said. “It’s going to be more of a slow burn.”

Still, he believes there are lessons people can learn from his experience, like the importance of “successfully managing expectations.” And he hopes “Spacedrop” helps to illustrate the importance of space exploration, even at a time of global crisis, and as we head into what’s likely to be a global recession.

After all, he noted that space education and research isn’t just about “running into Boba Fett,” but also has real benefits for science and technology here on Earth. And one of the big themes of the documentary is international cooperation.

“The one thing that Democrats and Republicans agree on is that space is cool,” Burstein said, adding that the International Space Station is the one place “where Americans and Russians are in constant collaboration and have a strong relationship.”

And even though it’s a documentary (a word that Burstein shied away from in our interview), it’s very far from being self-serious or dull. Instead, there are plenty of jokes about cabin fever, body odor and the disappointing state of space cuisine.

After all, Burstein — a non-scientist, non-astronaut, whose résumé includes stints with the Obama campaign and as Charlie Sheen’s social media manager — is admirably realistic about his own role on the mission. He cheerfully described himself as a “redshirt,” and the special makes sure to point out that his first job in a spacesuit involves taking out the trash.

How did Burstein get invited to participate? He told me he “cold-called NASA” and convinced them to let him join in and film the experience. After all, communication and education are an important part of space exploration.

As for whether he’d consider making joining a trip to the real Moon or Mars, he said he’s willing — but maybe not on those first missions: “I would totally go on a leisure trip to the Moon and eat at the Sbarro in the moonbase food court.”

“Spacedrop” is coming to Amazon Prime Video soon, and in the meantime is live on Vimeo.

Sony has developed an interesting new hybrid technology: An image sensor with AI processing system built into the hardware, making it a single integrated system. The benefits and applications for this are potentially enormous as imagery and code continue to merge.

The idea is fairly simple in concept. You take a traditional CMOS image sensor like you’d find in any phone or camera today, and stack it on top of a logic chip that’s built not just for pulling pixels off the sensor but for operating a machine learning model that extracts information from those pixels.

The result is a single electronic assembly that can do a great deal of interesting processing on a photo before that photo is ever sent elsewhere, like a main logic board, GPU, or the cloud.

To be clear, image sensors already have companion processors that do the usual work of sorting pixels, compressing them into a JPEG, and so on. But they’re very focused on performing a handful of common tasks very quickly.

The Sony chip, as the company explains it, is capable of more sophisticated processes and outputs. For instance, if the exposure is of a dog in a field, the chip could immediately analyze it for objects, and instead of sending on the full image, simply report “dog,” “grass,” and anything else it recognizes.

It could also perform essentially improvisational edits, such as cropping out everything in the photo but parts it recognizes and has been told to report — only the flowers, but never the stems, say.

The benefit of such a system is that it can discard all kinds of unnecessary or unwanted data before that data ever goes into the main device’s storage or processing pipeline. That means less processor power is used, for one thing, but it may also be safer and more secure.

Cameras in public places could preemptively blur faces or license plates. Smart home devices could recognize individuals without ever saving or sending any image data. Multiple exposures could be merged to form heat or frequency maps of the camera’s field of view.

You might expect a higher power draw or latency from a chip with integrated AI processes, but companies like Xnor (recently acquired by Apple) have shown that such tasks can be performed very quickly and at extremely low cost.

While more complex processing would still be the purview of larger, more powerful chips, this kind of first pass is able to produce a huge variety of valuable data and, properly designed, could prove to be more robust against attacks or abuse.

Right now Sony’s “Intelligent Vision Sensor” is still only a prototype, available to order for testing but not production. But as Sony is one of the leading image sensor providers in the world, this is likely to find its way into quite a few devices in one form or another.