Author: azeeadmin

Firefly Aerospace has signed an agreement with Spaceflight Inc. that provides Spaceflight with the majority of the payload capacity aboard a Firefly launch vehicle scheduled to take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California sometime in 2021. Spaceflight is a rideshare service provider for space-bound payloads, working with other companies to pool resources and combine spacecraft aboard one vehicle to defray the per-customer cost of a launch while maximizing use of the rocket’s payload capacity.

Firefly’s Alpha rocket, its first launch vehicle, will have a full payload capacity of 630 kilograms (around 1,400 lbs) to sun synchronous orbit, and Spaceflight will manage singing and integrating payloads from a number of customers to fill that capacity. This agreement also includes a provision that extends longer-term to future missions, with Spaceflight on board to help secure customers to join future Firefly Alpha launches as well.

Already, Spaceflight has emerged as a leading company in the rocket rideshare market, providing launch payload management services for 271 satellites across 29 different launches. Firefly is currently still in the testing phase for Alpha, but has made significant progress and continues its work despite the coronavirus pandemic, despite some setbacks including a fire on the test pad in January.

Firefly Aerospace still plans to fly Alpha for the first time later this year, with final acceptance testing of the vehicle’s first and second stages currently underway at the company’s Briggs, Texas facility. Should that initial test flight prove successful, the company should be in a good position to begin flying commercially in 2021.

As the pandemic pushes more investors towards examining opportunities in telemedicine, a VR startup building out a platform for remote treatment has closed on new funding.

XRHealth tells TechCrunch that they’ve raised $7 million in funding with backing from Bridges Israel, Flint Capital and 20/20 HealthCare Partners. The startup has raised $15 million to date, including a $4 million seed round complete in late 2018.

Telemedicine has long been seen as a particularly strong fit for VR tech, but adoption has been slow and uneven. Off-the-shelf consumer VR headsets have typically been difficult to use, and dedicated hardware has proven prohibitively expensive to develop.

As doctor’s offices across the country struggle to extensively adopt video conferencing software to meet with and treat patients during the COVID-19 crisis, it may seem like we are a very long way from a VR solution reaching any sort of mainstream appeal.

XRHealth founder Eran Orr has been aiming to position his company as the leading VR health software platform, courting developers to create content that can help people suffering from a variety of ailments. FDA_registered software offered by the company focuses on rehabilitation for back, shoulder and neck injuries; cognitive training; and stress relief. The team has also been exploring leveraging the social features of its platform to allow patients a way to join VR support groups moderated by physicians.

There is a separate web portal for medical professionals which offers quick insights into how patients are progressing through the software and where they are having challenges.

The software is pretty simple, but Orr is hopeful that his startup’s focus on simple exercises can help early patients alter their perception of VR tech.

“VR has been stigmatized as only being for gaming, one of our challenges is convincing the world that it can be helpful,” Orr tells TechCrunch. “By the end of the month we’ll have more than 500 trained clinicians operating our software.”

Consumer can rent the hardware directly from XRHealth. During the COVID-19 crisis, XRHealth is waiving rental fees and is working with insurance providers to waive co-pays so that people can gain access to the headset-based treatment for free. The startup currently ships Vive Focus and Pico Neo 2 headsets to patients, though the software is also compatible with Oculus hardware if patients already own VR hardware.

Philadelphia-based Fishtown Analytics, the company behind the popular open-source data engineering tool dbt, today announced that it has raised a $12.9 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with the firm’s general partner Martin Casada joining the company’s board.

“I wrote this blog post in early 2016, essentially saying that analysts needed to work in a fundamentally different way,” Fishtown founder and CEO Tristan Handy told me, when I asked him about how the product came to be. “They needed to work in a way that much more closely mirrored the way the software engineers work and software engineers have been figuring this shit out for years and data analysts are still like sending each other Microsoft Excel docs over email.”

The dbt open-source project forms the basis of this. It allows anyone who can write SQL queries to transform data and then load it into their preferred analytics tools. As such, it sits in-between data warehouses and the tools that load data into them on one end, and specialized analytics tools on the other.

As Casada noted when I talked to him about the investment, data warehouses have now made it affordable for businesses to store all of their data before it is transformed. So what was traditionally “extract, transform, load” (ETL) has now become “extract, load, transform” (ELT). Andreessen Horowitz is already invested in Fivetran, which helps businesses move their data into their warehouses, so it makes sense for the firm to also tackle the other side of this business.

“Dbt is, as far as we can tell, the leading community for transformation and it’s a company we’ve been tracking for at least a year,” Casada said. He also argued that data analysts — unlike data scientists — are not really catered to as a group.

Before this round, Fishtown hadn’t raised a lot of money, even though it has been around for a few years now, except for a small SAFE round from Amplify.

But Handy argued that the company needed this time to prove that it was on to something and build a community. That community now consists of more than 1,700 companies that use the dbt project in some form and over 5,000 people in the dbt Slack community. Fishtown also now has over 250 dbt Cloud customers and the company signed up a number of big enterprise clients earlier this year. With that, the company needed to raise money to expand and also better service its current list of customers.

“We live in Philadelpha. The cost of living is low here and none of us really care to make a quadro-billion dollars, but we do want to answer the question of how do we best serve the community,” Handy said. “And for the first time, in the early part of the year, we were like, holy shit, we can’t keep up with all of the stuff that people need from us.”

The company plans to expand the team from 25 to 50 employees in 2020 and with those, the team plans to improve and expand the product, especially its IDE for data analysts, which Handy admitted could use a bit more polish.

Online coding bootcamp Lambda School is the latest startup to announce layoffs, writing in a blog post that it’s made the “difficult decision” to cut 19 staff from roles across the company.

The eight members of its executive team, including CEO and founder Austen Allred, are also taking a 15% pay cut, it said.

It’s not clear what proportion of the company has been hit by the layoffs — we’ve asked Lambda for more details and will update this report with any response.

Allred said the job cuts are partly linked to coronavirus-related uncertainty affecting the hiring and financial markets for the foreseeable future — given how Lambda’s model is linked to graduated students finding employment which pays well enough for income share agreement to kick in. (The school gives students the option to pay no tuition up front and instead pay 17% of their salary for two years, once they have a job that pays a minimum of $50,000 per annum.)

However Allred also writes that the headcount reduction is related to an executive decision to dial back growth goals for 2020 — in order to put increased focus on “quality and student experience”, as he puts it.

The Y Combinator-backed startup, which launched its first courses back in 2017, has fielded plenty of controversy over its model, including criticism from students over the quality of the teaching it provides.

It has also been the target of anonymous social media accounts which have characterized its model as exploitative and even a scam. And Allred himself has frequently taken to social media to defend against repeat accusations and attacks.

In one clear misstep, the school failed to properly register with California authorities — and was last year ordered to cease teaching until it had done so. It was later fined $75,000 by California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education.

Lambda has also been selling some of its income-sharing agreements (ISAs) to investors. The Verge reported in February the startup had quietly partnered with Edly — a digital marketplace that helps schools sell ISA to accredited investors. Wired reported in 2019 on an earlier sale.

Critics contend such sales undermine Lambda’s claim that its incentives align with students’ goals because it doesn’t make money on ISAs until students have been hired and are paying it back.

Although Allred was talking about the potential to sell ISAs “at the point of graduation” back in 2017 — when we asked about how it would raise enough capital to sustain the program. “We have a lot of interest in purchasing the income share agreements at the point of graduation, from investment funds and that kind of thing,” he said then, suggesting the startup was looking at a variety of ways of funding the business.

In the blog post yesterday announcing the round of job cuts, Allred does not refer directly to any of the criticism about the quality of the teaching it provides — but does appear to give tacit acknowledgement that it has at times been lacking.

“Lambda has always had a culture of ‘yes.’ Yes, try that new idea. Yes, run that experiment. Late last year, we realized that trying to do too much was actually holding Lambda School back – that we weren’t good enough at saying ‘no.’ As much as students want shiny new things, they need excellence. And excellence requires focus,” he writes.

“We’ve been moving in that direction since Q4 of last year. We talked in All Hands and at the retreat about making 2020 a time to optimize – to focus on quality and student experience.”

He goes on to list a number of internal decisions related to this claimed shift of focus — to quality and away from quantity — including pausing new EU program enrollments; pausing new Android enrollments; and putting a hold on a cybersecurity program.

Other changes he said the startup has made “over the last several months” include reducing its admissions targets; ending new enrollments in the UX program; ending new enrollments for dedicated international cohorts; and restructuring the Hiring Solutions and Outcomes teams to “more effectively support students in their job search”.

The layoffs are part of an internal reorganization to “support these new, more focused priorities”, per Allred.

“Today is a sad day, and people will react in different ways. However you react, those emotions are real, and they matter. This was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made in my life,” he also writes.

“I want to publicly say thank you to everyone who has worked at Lambda for what you’ve contributed. I know you’ve given parts of who you are to Lambda, and to our students. You are part of our journey. You are the reason we are here. Thank you.”

Facebook announced the launch of Messenger Kids in more than 70 new countries and new features that will gradually roll out in different markets. As schools around the world remain closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the new features are designed to let kids increase their contacts on the app under parental supervision.

The first new feature, called Supervised Friending, will launch today in the United States before other countries. Prior to Supervised Friending, kids needed to have their parents approve each of their Messenger Kids contacts. Supervised Friending lets parents turn on an option that allows their children to accept, reject, add and remove contacts. Parents are notified through Messenger and allowed to override any approvals through the Parent Dashboard.

The second new feature allows parents to approve other adults, like teachers, to add their kids to group chats. The third feature, now available in the U.S., Canada and Latin America, allows parents to make their child’s profile name and photo visible to a circle of users that includes friends of their kids’ contacts and their parents, children of parents’ Facebook friends who also have Messenger Kids, and the children of people parents invite to download the app.

In its announcement, Facebook said the new features were developed with its Youth Advisors, an advisory group made up of child development, media and online safety experts. In February, the company introduced new tools and features that give parents more control over their children’s activity on Messenger Kids, including an activity log that makes it easier to see who they are chatting with and what they are sharing. But, as TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez noted, Facebook’s privacy policy still gives the company plenty of room to collect personal data.

Africa focused payment startup PalmPay will waive transfer fees in Nigeria and offer direct payouts to customers who have contracted COVID-19 in the West African country.

The venture — that launched in 2019 backed by China’s Transsion —  has created the PalmPay Support Fund. The initiative will start with 100 million Naira (≈ $300K) and offer individual payments of 100,000 Naira (≈ $250) to PalmPay customers who have contracted the coronavirus.

The startup will expand the fund’s value by providing a matching gift per customer transaction for at least on month. PalmPay will also extend the fund to offer grants to organizations working on coronavirus mitigation and assistance efforts in Nigeria.

On the structure of the initiative — and adding a matching function — PalmPay aims to create interactivity with its clients on coronavirus relief efforts. “We want to provide relief…and get our customers feeling that they’re adding something to it as well,” PalmPay CEO Greg Reeve told TechCrunch on a call.

The company has created a page on its app for applications and funds dispersal. PalmPay is working with Nigeria’s Center for Disease Control on a verification process to confirm those who apply have tested positive for COVID-19, according to Reeve.

PalmPay’s initiative comes as COVID-19 has hit Africa’s largest economies and the continent’s fintech platforms have been mobilized as tools to stem the spread.

Early in March, Africa’s coronavirus numbers by country were in the single digits, but by mid-month those numbers had spiked, leading the World Health Organization’s Regional Director Dr Matshidiso Moeti to sound an alarm.

By WHO stats Tuesday there were 14,922 COVID-19 cases in Africa and 702 confirmed virus related deaths, up from 345 cases and 7 deaths on March 18.

Countries such as South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria — which happen to be Africa’s top tech hubs — have imposed social distancing and lockdown practices.

Governments and startups on the continent have also turned to measures to shift a greater volume of financial transactions to digital payments and away from cash — which the World Health Organization flagged as a conduit for the coronavirus.

It’s an option facilitated by the boom in fintech that’s occurred in Africa over the last decade. By several estimates, the continent is home to the largest share of the world’s unbanked population and has a sizable number of underbanked consumers and SMEs.

But because of that opportunity, fintech startups now receive the majority of VC funding annually in Africa, according to recent data.

Increasingly, Nigeria has become the focal point for digital finance development on the continent, boasting Africa’s largest economy and population (200 million).

The country has multiple new digital-payments entrants — see Chippercash — and several firmly rooted later-stage fintech players, such as Paga and recently confirmed unicorn Interswitch.

PalmPay launched in Nigeria last year on the back of one of Africa’s largest 2019 seed-rounds — $40 million led by Transsion. In addition to a lot of capital, the investment came with an additional competitive advantage for the startup. Through its Tecno brand, Transsion is the largest seller of smartphones in Africa and PalmPay now comes preinstalled on all Tecno devices.

While PalmPay reamins in the race to capture fintech market share in Nigeria, for now the startup looks to weather the COVID-19 crisis in the country. Like most of Nigeria — and much of the world — PalmPay’s staff are on lockdown and working from home, according to the company’s CEO.

Commercial times in the country could be tough into the next year. Nigeria has already seen a reduction in economic activity as a result of COVID-19, and as a major oil producer, the country will face an additional economic blow due to the drop in demand the pandemic has dealt to petroleum markets.

A trend that could come out of the crisis that benefits fintech players, according to PalmPay CEO Greg Reeve, is greater digital finance adoption in Nigeria. In the past, the country has shown a cash-is-king reluctance by parts of the population to use mobile payments and lagged Africa’s digital finance leaders Kenya and South Africa.

The current health crisis could shift consumer habits in Nigeria, according to Reeve. “We’ve seen an increased use in our service, whilst people aren’t able to move around,” he said.

“There is a natural uptake right now for services like mobile money and I think when people start to use it, they’ll continue to use it when the COVID-19 ceases.”

Vivaldi, the browser launched by former Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner, has long positioned itself as a highly customizable alternative to Chrome and Firefox for power users. Today, the team is launching version 3.0 of its desktop browser, with built-in tracker and ad blockers, and it’s bringing its Android browser out of beta.

I’ve long been a fan of Vivaldi, but the company was relatively late to the tracking protection game. Now, it’s doubling down on this, by integrating a blocklist powered by DuckDuckGo’s Tracker Radar.

Like competing browsers, Vivaldi offers three blocking levels that users can easily toggle on and off for individual websites. Those blocking levels are relatively blunt, though, with the options to either block trackers, block trackers and ads or disable blocking. Competitors like Edge offer slightly more nuanced options for blocking trackers, though I would expect Vivaldi to adopt a similar scheme over time.

For the most part, the Vivaldi team always said that it would delegate ad blocking to extensions, though it added the option to block highly intrusive ads in the middle of last year. And while the company still notes that blocking trackers provides enough privacy protection, with today’s update, it now also gives users the option to block virtually all ads without the need to download any extensions (as a Chromium-based browser, Vivaldi supports all Chrome extensions).

Also new in the desktop version is a clock. Yes. A clock. That may sound like a weird feature, given that your desktop of choice surely features a clock, but like all things Vivaldi, you can a) remove it and b) there is actually some usefulness here as you can, for example, set up timers if you’re into Pomodoro or similar productivity techniques. And because it is Vivaldi, you can set all kinds of custom alarms and countdown timers, too.

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As for the mobile version, which is now generally available for Android 5 and higher, the most important fact is probably that it exists, given how most users expect to be able to easily sync their bookmarks, passwords and browsing history between mobile and desktop. As with other browsers, you can choose what you want to sync.

Like the desktop version, Vivaldi for Android now also features a tracking and ad blocker. There’s also a built-in screenshot tool and support for Vivaldi notes, which also sync between devices.

The mobile browser isn’t quite as flexible as the desktop version, with its plethora of options, but that’s probably not what you’re looking for in a mobile browser anyway. But having a stable mobile browser that can accompany the desktop version is a big deal for Vivaldi and may give users who were on the sidelines a reason to take another look at it.

Out of the box, there’s no other browser that will give you the kind of flexibility Vivaldi does.

Worldwide, there are numerous efforts underway to create a vaccine for COVID-19. Without one, we are likely to see some form of social distancing in place for the foreseeable future. And experts like Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, think it’ll take at least a year before we’ll have a vaccine that can be approved for public use. MigVax, an Israeli startup that’s affiliated with the Migal Galilee Research Institute, thinks it can speed up this process by quite a bit, in part, because it had already worked on building a framework for the Infectious Bronchitis Virus, a coronavirus that infects chickens, and that has proven to be safe in animals.

I think everybody is currently skeptical when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines, and in Israel alone there are multiple efforts underway, but crowdfunding platform OurCrowd is putting $12 million into MigVax to help the team accelerate its efforts to develop an oral vaccine.

“The experiments we have carried out so far show that because the vaccine does not include the virus itself, it will be safe to use in immune-suppressed recipients, and has fewer chances of side effects,” said David Zigdon, CEO of the Migal Galilee Research Institute. “It uses a protein vector that can form and secrete a chimeric soluble protein which carries the viral antigen into tissue and causes the production of antibodies against the virus by the immune system. We are now working to adjust our generic vaccine system to COVID-19. Using a fermentation process, MigVax aims to have the material ready for clinical trials within a few months.”

MigVax argues that its approach would offer significant advantages in manufacturing and cost because it uses bacterial fermentation to produce the vaccine, a process that’s generally well understood and commonly used today. “We are already in talks with major strategic partners able to manufacture at high volume and distribute globally,” the company tells us.

“We are humbled by the opportunity to invest in this company, which means so much to so many people,” said OurCrowd CEO Jon Medved today. “The race for a COVID-19 vaccine is about saving countless lives, and we are grateful to be able to support this important effort.”

When I last talked to Medved earlier this year, shortly before COVID-19 was officially deemed a pandemic, he was already thinking about how his existing portfolio companies could play a role in fighting the disease. No doubt, though, whoever manages to first develop a safe vaccine also stands to gain financially, and that’s not something most VC firms would turn down, so it’s no surprise that we now see funding for startups in this space, too.

Facebook has agreed to block access to certain anti-government content to users in Vietnam, following months of having its services throttled there, reportedly by state-owned telecoms.

Reuters, citing sources within the company, reported that Vietnam requested earlier in the year that Facebook restrict a variety of content it deemed illegal, such as posts critical of the government. When the social network balked, the country used its control over local internet providers to slow Facebook traffic to unusable levels.

An explanation at the time that the slowdown was owing to maintenance of undersea cables likely did not convince many, since it was specific to Facebook (and related properties Messenger and Instagram).

All things being equal, Facebook has shown in the past that it would prefer to keep discourse open. But all things are not equal and in this case millions of users were unable to access its services — and consequently, it must be said, unable to be advertised to.

The slowdown lasted some 7 weeks, from mid-February to early April, when Facebook conceded to the government’s demands.

One Reuters source said that “once we committed to restricting more content… the servers were turned back online by the telecommunications operators.”

Facebook offered the following statement confirming general, though not specific, aspects of the story reported by Reuters:

The Vietnamese government has instructed us to restrict access to content which it has deemed to be illegal in Vietnam. We believe freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, and work hard to protect and defend this important civil liberty around the world. However, we have taken this action to ensure our services remain available and usable for millions of people in Vietnam, who rely on them every day.

Facebook is no stranger to government requests both to restrict and to hand over data. Although the company inspects these requests and sometimes challenges them, it’s Facebook’s stated policy to comply with local law — even if that means (as it often does) complicity with government censorship practices.

The justification usually offered (as here) is that people in a country with such restrictions are better served with an incomplete set of Facebook’s communications tools rather than none at all.

Facebook has enjoyed unparalleled reach in India for more than a decade. But as China’s fast-growing ByteDance emerges as a formidable competitor in what has become the world’s second largest internet market, the American giant has found the horse it wants to bet on. 

Facebook announced today it has invested $5.7 billion in India’s Reliance Jio telecom operator with more than 350 million subscribers. 

More to follow…