Category: UNCATEGORIZED

UK-based Fertifa has bagged a £1 million (~$1.3M) seed to plug into a fertility-focused workplace benefits platform. Passion Capital is investing in the round, along with some unnamed strategic angel investors.

The August 2019-founded startup sells bespoke reproductive health and fertility packages to UK employers to offer as workplace benefits to their staff — drawing on the use of technologies like telehealth to expand access to fertility support and cater to rising demand for reproductive health services.

Challenges conceiving can affect around one in seven couples, per the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).

In recent years fertility startups have been getting more investor attention as VC firms cotton on to growing market. Employers have also responded, with tech industry workplaces among those offering fertility ‘perks’ to staff. Although the access-to-services issue can be more acute in the US — given substantial costs involved in obtaining treatments like IVF.

In the UK the picture is a little different, given that the country’s taxpayer funded NHS does fund some fertility treatments — meaning IVF can be free for couples to access. Although how much support couples get can depend on where in the country they live, with some NHS trusts funding more rounds of IVF than others. There can also be access restrictions based on factors such as a woman’s age and the length of time trying to conceive.

This means UK couples can run out of free fertility support before they’ve been able to conceive — pushing them towards paying for private treatment. Hence Fertifa spotting an opportunity for a workplace benefits model around reproductive health services.

It signed up its first employers this spring and summer, and says it now has a portfolio of corporate clients with an employee pool from a few hundreds to >10,000 — although it isn’t breaking out customer numbers. Rather it says its services are available to around 700,000 UK employees at this point.

“At Fertifa we want to make fertility services more widely accessible to people,” says founder and CEO Tony Chen. “Some levels of fertility services can be provided by the NHS but every single NHS trust is different with eligibility, requirements and resources, and so unfortunately it can too often be reduced to a ‘postcode lottery’.

“We believe that everyone should have easy access to information, resources, education and services relating to fertility — and that working with workplaces is one way to start. With our efforts and partnerships we hope to normalise the conversations about fertility at work, just as other forms of health are openly discussed and provided for.”

Passion Capital partner Eileen Burbidge — who is joining Fertifa’s board (along with Passion’s Malin Posern) — has been public about her own use of IVF and takes a very personal interest in the fertility space.

“The unfortunate fact that over recent years, even though success rates have increased and of course more and more patients are exploring the benefits of IVF, NHS funding has been declining and the number of patients using the NHS for their first cycle has also been decreasing,” she tells TechCrunch.

“This doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s brilliant what we get from the NHS here in the UK, but there’s clearly a lot more which can be done to further increase accessibility and affordability — given less and less funding for the NHS in the face of increasing demand of both the NHS and private routes.”

Fertifa says its model is to provide direct care and support to employees — rather than being a broker or acting as part of a referral system. So it has two in-house clinicians at this stage (out of a team of 10-15 people). Although it also says it “partners” with clinicians and clinics across the UK. So it’s not doing everything in-house.

It offers what it bills as a “full range” of fertility and gynaecology services — from assisted reproductive technology such as IVF, IUI and more; fertility planning such as egg, sperm and embryo freezing to donor-assisted and third-party reproduction such as donor eggs and sperm; as well as surrogacy and adoption.

Its doctors, nurses and “fertility advocates” are there to provide a one-to-one care service to support patients throughout the process.

“We use technology in a number of ways and are ambitious about how it will help us to maintain an advantage over others in the sector and provide the best customer experience,” says Chen, noting it’s developed “a full end-to-end” app for patients to guide them through the various stages of their fertility journey.

“On the employer side we have a full employer portal as well which provides educational resources, support options and access to services for HR/People teams to use and share with their workforces. Additionally, we use telehealth to enable more efficient, convenient (particularly in the age of COVID-19 restrictions) and immediate consultations with clinicians and nurses. Finally, we are refining our machine learning algorithms to help drive more informed decision making for patients and clinicians alike.”

It’s not currently applying AI but says that over time its in-house medical experts will use artificial intelligence to aid decision-making — with the aim of reducing clinic visits, enhancing the patient experience and yielding better clinical pregnancy rates.

Chen points to the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority having already made its data publicly available on more than 100,000 couples and their treatment and outcomes — suggesting such data-sets will underpin the development of new predictive models for fertility.

“With additional insight and data sources could more accurately predict probability of success for a patient — or the best type of treatment for them,” he adds.

While Fertifa’s current focus is UK expansion — targeting workplaces of all sizes and scale — it’s also got its eye on scaling overseas down the line. Although it will of course face more competition at that point, with the likes of Y Combinator backed Carrot already offering global fertility benefits packages for employers.

“Fertility and reproductive health is important to people all over the world,” says Chen. “Globally one in four women experience a miscarriage, every LGBT+ individual requires support to become a parent, and everyone needs to be increasingly empowered to take control of their reproductive health through fertility preservation treatment.”

Reliance Jio Platforms, the telecom venture run by India’s richest man (Mukesh Ambani), had 405.6 million subscribers in the quarter that ended in September, becoming the first operator outside of China to cross 400 million subscribers in a single country market.

The Facebook and Google-backed telecom operator said its finances has improved, too, despite the pandemic. Its EBIDTA run-rate crossed $1 billion in the aforementioned quarter, while net profit jumped to $409 million. The average revenue it clocks per user now stands at Rs 145 $1.94), up from $1.88 from the quarter before. In the past two quarters, the company has expanded its workforce by 30,000 people, it said.

Jio Platforms also operates a range of services including JioTV, JioMusic, and JioMoney. Kiran Thomas, President of Reliance Industries (parent firm of Jio Platforms), said in an earnings call Friday that the company has proven that its services can be feasibly built in India, and the company plans to expand them outside of the country. However, he did not share a timeline for this expansion.

Reliance Industries, the most valuable firm in India, announced some more investments in its businesses, continuing its eye-catching funding spree at the height of a global pandemic.

The oil-to-retails giant announced that Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund will invest $1 billion in the company’s digital fibre business.

Abu Dhabi Authority and Saudi Arabia’s PIF are also an investor in Jio Platforms, which this year raised about $20 billion. A Reliance Jio spokesperson told TechCrunch that the investment announced today are separate and not part of the two firms’ previous deals.

More to follow…

If the projections are to be believed, the amount of money swirling around the space industry is poised to grow considerably over the next decade. Consider that the aviation giant Boeing estimates that the aerospace market will reach $3 trillion in market size between now and 2029.

It’s most certainly in Boeing’s best interest to produce a big number, but it’s also in line with other projections. Among the many areas of investment where Deloitte anticipates continued growth over the next decade, for example, is electric propulsion systems and aircraft, urban air mobility, and fully automated flight decks.

Some questions for investors center on how to make money off all this expected activity — and where. China has the fastest-growing aviation market globally. France and Germany have been boosting their defense budgets. Meanwhile, passenger traffic is rising in India, Japan, and the Middle East, which could create demand for all kinds of new aircraft.

Of course, many of these projects will require more time and money than make sense for some VCs, and even for those who lean in, there are challenges from supply-chain issues to profitability to potential capital constraints.

To dive into this vast space (ahem) and its promise, we’re thrilled to be talking with three savvy investors who think about little more and who will be sharing their researched perspectives on what’s coming — and what has been overhyped — at our TC Sessions: Space event coming up December 16-17.

If you want to understand which schools are producing some of the top talent, which regions of the world have the most advantages, and whether supersonic jets make any more sense this second time around (among many other things), you won’t want to miss this special conversation.

Joining us for this morning session on Wednesday, December 16, is Tess Hatch, a vice president at Bessemer Venture Partners who focuses largely on frontier technology and specifically on the commercialization of space, drones, autonomous vehicles, and the future of agriculture and food technology.

Hatch brings a lot of expertise to the table. She studied aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan before earning her Master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics engineering from Stanford. She then continued on to Boeing, then SpaceX, where she worked with the government on integrating its payloads with the Falcon9 rocket.

We’ll also be joined by Mike Collett, the founder and managing partner of Promus Ventures, a venture firm with offices in Chicago, San Francisco and Luxembourg that invests in deep-tech software and hardware companies in the U.S., Europe and New Zealand.

Collett, a Vanderbilt grad, has been investing in software and hardware for more than 15 years, across areas such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, space, fintech, robotics, synthetic biology, computer vision and connected cars. Among Promus’s most recent investments is +Earth AI, a mineral exploration startup, and the spectrum mapping startup Aurora Insights.

Last but not least, Chris Boshuizen, an operating partner at the venture firm Data Collective (DCVC), will be joining us. Boshuizen previously co-founded and spent five years as the CTO of Planet Labs, a nearly 10-year-old company that was among the first of its kind to provide unprecedented daily, global mapping of Earth from space. He was also once a Space Mission Architect at NASA Ames Research Center,  and he co-created Phonesat, a spacecraft built solely out of a regular smartphone.

A native of Australia, Boshuizen has a PhD in physics from the University of Sydney and strong thoughts about what’s interesting out there right now. But we’re thrilled to welcome all three, and we’re excited to see you, too.

We’ve launched early-bird pricing, and $125 gets you access to all live sessions, plus video on demand. Don’t procrastinate. Buy your pass now before the early-bird reenters Earth’s atmosphere (and prices go up) on November 13 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

More ways to save: Go further together with early bird group tickets ($100) — bring four team members and get the fifth one free. We also offer discount passes for students ($50) and government, military and non-profits ($95). Looking for out-of-this-world exposure? An Early Stage Startup Exhibitor Package ($360) includes four tickets, digital exhibition space, a pitch session to attendees and the ability to generate leads. Bonus savings: Extra Crunch subscribers get an additional 20 percent discount.

The cloud infrastructure market kept growing at a brisk pace last quarter, as the pandemic continued to push more companies to the cloud with offices shut down in much of the world. This week the big three — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — all reported their numbers and as expected the news was good with Synergy Research reporting revenue growth of 33% year over year, up to almost $33 billion for the quarter.

Still, John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy was a bit taken aback that the market continued to grow as much as it did. “While we were fully expecting continued strong growth in the market, the scale of the growth in Q3 was a little surprising,” he said in a statement.

He added, “Total revenues were up by $2.5 billion from the previous quarter causing the year-on-year growth rate to nudge upwards, which is unusual for such a large market. It is quite clear that COVID-19 has provided an added boost to a market that was already developing rapidly.”

Per usual Amazon led the way with $11.6 billion in revenue, up from $10.8 billion last quarter. That’s up 29% year over year. Amazon continues to exhibit slowing growth in the cloud market, but because of its market share lead of 33%, a rate that has held fairly steady for some time, the growth is less important than the eye-popping revenue it continues to generate, almost double its closest rival Microsoft .

Speaking of Microsoft, Azure revenue was up 48% year over year, also slowing some, but good enough for a strong second place with 18% market share. Using Synergy’s total quarterly number of $33 billion, Microsoft came in at $5.9 billion in revenue for the quarter, up from $5.2 billion last quarter.

Finally Google announced cloud revenue of $3.4 billion, but that number includes all of its cloud revenue including G Suite and other software. Synergy reported that this was good for 9% or $2.98 billion, up from $2.7 billion last quarter, good for third place.

Alibaba and IBM were tied for fourth with 5% or around $1.65 billion each.

It’s worth noting that Canalys had similar numbers to Synergy with growth of 33% to $36.5 billion. They had the same market order with slightly different numbers with Amazon at 32%, Microsoft at 19% and Google at 7% and Alibaba in 4th place at 6%.

Canalys sees continued growth ahead, especially as hybrid cloud begins to merge with newer technologies like 5G and edge computing. “All three [providers] are collaborating with mobile operators to deploy their cloud stacks at the edge in the operators’ data centers. These are part of holistic initiatives to profit from 5G services among business customers, as well as transform the mobile operators’ IT infrastructure,” Canalysis analyst Blake Murray said in a statement.

While the pure growth continues to move steadily downward over time, this is expected in a market that’s maturing like cloud infrastructure, but as companies continue to shift workloads more rapidly to the cloud during the pandemic, and find new use cases like 5G and edge computing, the market could continue to generate substantial revenue well into the future.

Coronavirus cases in the United States are reaching new peaks. E-commerce is continuing to boom. And B8ta, a San Francisco startup which is betting on the future of physical retailers, is doubling down on its in-person footprint.

B8ta offers shelf space to unique digital products, such as electric skateboards or a coffee alarm clock, on behalf of brands that want a physical presence. Today, the company acquired a 1-year old company doing the same for direct to consumer businesses, Re:store.

Backed by Sequoia and SPC, Re:store has a three-story physical location in Maiden Lane in San Francisco and hosts products ranging from beauty, to consumer electronics to lifestyle products. It also has a community co-working space.

“The pandemic has emphasized the need for brands to be flexible with their product mix and distribution,” says Selene Cruz, CEO of Re:store. “Some products do well in these times, and brands in a retail-as-a-service model can adapt their offering a lot faster than those in a traditional wholesale model that relies on buying cycles.”

It’s the high-touch startups that are expected to struggle during this time, as rising virus rates threaten the global economy. But, as today’s deal shows, both B8ta and Re:store are bullish on in-person shopping long term.

In fact, in March, B8ta CEO and co-founder Vibhu Nordy penned an extensive Twitter thread in favor of keeping his startups’ stores open, noting that closures would require the company to lose millions and send tens of thousands of employees home. B8ta’s entire value proposition is based on high-touch interactions, and a world in which consumers want to try and experience their products before they buy them.

“I feel like we’ve lived through three lifetimes since I wrote that thread back in March,” Nordy said, noting that it’s been an “extremely difficult year” for the company. However, the Re:store acquisition comes off of new momentum he’s seen since B8ta was able to safely reopen its stores in May.

“We launched more brands last quarter than any other in our history,” Nordy said. “The traditional retail model and traditional real estate model has completely collapsed and brands are looking for something better.” To note, Macy’s, which has backed B8ta, narrowly dodged bankruptcy by securing a $4.5 billion lifeline in financing to temper down sales.

B8ta’s Re:store acquisition is a response to a rebound among physical retailers, one that favors an experience instead of a catalog of aisles. A focus on creative in-person experiences versus department stores is an acceleration of a pre-pandemic trend. As direct-to-consumer investors told us in late March, companies can’t depend on a few channels for customer acquisition. As the field gets crowded, brands are looking to stand out, and stores like B8ta and Re:store could help them do that.

To balance out some of B8ta’s bullishness, Nordy did note that “on the shopping side, visitation is way down but sales have almost come back to where they were pre-pandemic.” In other words, people are buying B8ta products online without the physical presence, which means that online platforms are still a preference for consumers.

Yesterday’s earnings deluge made plain that tech shares are not rocketing higher as 2020 comes to a close. Indeed, in pre-market trading this morning, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are all down.

Alphabet is the only member of the Big Five that is worth more today than yesterday. Strong advertising and cloud results helped the search giant post a return-to-form quarter. But in most other reports there were signs of weakness or underperformance compared to expectations that could undermine the relentlessly bullish attitude tech shares have enjoyed for several months.

---

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

---

The tailwinds that lifted much of tech this year remain. Every CEO I speak to still thinks that the COVID-19 bump to digital services demand has room to run, and that the digital transformation’s acceleration that has been a regular point of optimism for VCs, founders and public company leaders, will continue.

But that doesn’t mean all tech companies will benefit or post outsize results. Those facts don’t imply that pandemic-induced friction won’t add up.

It’s not only the biggest companies that are treading water. We’re seeing valuations pause in tech’s hottest category — SaaS and cloud — despite continued growth in its constituent companies. The combined sentiment-and-share change could dampen enthusiasm for startup shares, perhaps undercutting some of the hype and FOMO that we keep hearing is driving private valuations higher.

Are we seeing a change in tech’s temperature while the weather changes? Let’s take a look.

Good news, bad news

Starting with the biggest tech companies, Alphabet’s results were pretty good. The company’s YouTube and cloud segments outperformed expectations, helping the company best expectations.

From there, things get choppier. Apple beat expectations, but its shares fell after investors were less than impressed with its aggregate results. Microsoft posted good calendar Q3 earnings including strong Azure performance, but its guidance left investors underwhelmed and its shares also fell. Facebook beat expectations in the quarter, but rising costs seemed to dampen investor sentiment. It lost a little ground after earnings. Amazon’s Q3 was hot, but its Q4 should reduce operating income due to COVID-19 costs. It also lost ground after reporting.

From that malaise we turn to the SaaS and cloud world. Redpoint’s Jamin Ball is doing his usual roundups, one of which we’re borrowing this morning. Here’s his digest of SaaS and cloud earnings thus far:

Takeaways? Every SaaS and cloud company crushed Q3, but Q4 is looking a bit more dicey. Beats look slim, some companies are declining to project, and aside from an outlier or twom the numbers look slimmer overall.

Mobile news organization NowThis is announcing a bit of counter-programming for next week’s presidential election — it’s partnering with meditation app Calm to create a livestream for anyone who needs relief from stress of Election Day news.

Not that NowThis is exactly avoiding that news, but this livestream (combining breathing exercises and other meditative activities with peaceful nature footage from all 50 states) should offer a brief respite from obsessively checking results.

It will go live at 5:30pm Eastern on Election Day on NowThis’ Facebook and YouTube pages, and it will run through the following day.

“As the leading news brand for young people, NowThis often covers important news of the day with hope and optimism,” said NowThis Chief Content Officer Tina Exarhos in a statement. “With voters across the country experiencing a uniquely stressful election, NowThis is excited to partner with Calm to add counter-programming to our coverage, providing a respite for audiences as Election Day comes to a close.”

NowThis is part of Group Nine Media, which also includes Thrillist, TheDodo and Seeker.

Calm, meanwhile, is reportedly looking to raise more funding to take advantage to take advantage of growing interest in meditation and mindfulness apps. Plus, it’s already been moving beyond apps with a celebrity-filled show for HBO Max.

China was the first major global smartphone markets to rebound from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Stringent lockdown measures were able to help the country recover from the virus relatively quickly during the first wave, as sales started to return well ahead of other areas.

In Q3, however, things have taken begun to decline again. New numbers from Canalys point to an 8% drop between quarters — and a 15% drop, year-over-year. The firm chalks much of the slow down to longtime market leader Huawei’s on-going issues with the U.S. government. The problems had a kind of cascading effect that served to impact the number two companies, Vivo and Oppo.

“Huawei was forced to restrict its smartphone shipments following the August 17 US sanctions which caused a void in channels in Q3 that its peers were not equipped to fill. Huawei is facing its most serious challenge since taking the lead in 2016,” analyst Mo Jia said in a release. “If the position of the US administration does not change, Huawei will attempt to pivot its business strategy, to focus on building the [Harmony] OS and software ecosystem, as the Chinese government is eager to nurture home-grown alternatives to global platforms.”

Huawei dropped 18% in Mainland China, year-over-year. Vivo and Oppo posted similar declines at 13 and 18%, respectively. Xiaomi was able to make up ground at third place, gaining 19% y-o-y per the figures. Apple, meanwhile, remained relatively stead, in spite of the delated launch of the iPhone 12. Huawei’s continued struggles could provide a vacuum for the competition to fill.

Analyst Nicole Peng notes that the arrival of the 5G handset put the U.S. company in a strong position, looking forward, “iPhone 12 series will be a game changer for Apple in Mainland China. As most smartphones in China are now 5G-capable, Apple is closing a critical gap, and pent-up demand for its new 5G-enabled family will be strong.”

Here’s an example of ad targeting that’s actually good for public health: In a campaign encouraging people to wear masks, the Illinois state government has been focusing its digital ad dollars on the counties with highest COVID risk.

To achieve this, the government’s been working with Civis Analytics, the data science company founded by Dan Wagner, who was previously chief analytics officer for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. The campaign kicked off in August, but the state is now sharing more details about its work, including a map that shows the week-by-week risk assessment that it used for targeting.

Crystal Son, Civis’ director of healthcare analytics, explained that every week, her team pulls together the latest county-level COVID data for Governor J.B. Pritzker’s team, who then use that data to determine where ad dollars for the It Only Works If You Wear It ad campaign should be spent.

Cameron Mock, chief of staff at the Governor’s Office of Management and Budget, said in a statement that the government is using “a one-of-a-kind formula to concentrate media dollars in the areas with the most risk.”

Mock continued, “The risk-based formula uses trends of cases and mobility on the county level to designate higher, medium and lower risk counties. It then uses a pro rata share to dedicate the most dollars to the highest risk areas.”

This formula divides counties into five tiers, with Tier 1 being the highest risk and Tier 5 being the lowest. Tiers 4 and 5 will still receive a baseline level of ad spend, but Tier 3 counties will see more spending and Tiers 1 and 2 receive the maximum amount.

While the mask campaign isn’t limited to online advertising, the formula is only being used on the digital side because it’s more difficult to adjust funding for more traditional ad channels on a week-by-week basis.

“Each county has unique and changing circumstances due to the virus, so we designed this campaign to respond to the on-the-ground situation in all 102 counties in Illinois,” said Alex Hann, deputy press secretary to Governor Pritzker, in a statement. “As an area’s risk increases, so too will its concentration of public health messaging. As the pandemic continues and another wave of coronavirus looms, the state of Illinois will continue to listen to scientists and follow the data to keep our residents safe.”

Son said she’s not aware of any other campaign responding to COVID-19 that uses a similar model to prioritize spending in the highest-risk geographies. Is it working? While this data doesn’t show the effects of a specific campaign, according to Carnegie Mellon University, 89% of Illinois residents wear masks — currently the 15th-highest usage rate in the U.S.

In the future, Son said she’s hopeful that we’ll see other organizations adopt “a much more customized communications approach” for healthcare.

“We still have the habit in healthcare of treating groups of people as if they are homogenous, as if they all act the same think the same,” she said. “There are widespread applications beyond mask-wearing for more tailored approaches.”

The UK’s ICO has reduced the size of a data breach penalty for hotel business Marriott — dropping it to £14.4 million (~$23.8M) in a final penalty notice down from the £99M ($123M) figure that the watchdog initially said it would levy in July 2019.

The fine relates to a data breach suffered by the hotel giant that dates back to 2014 (involving the network of Starwood hotels, which it had acquired in 2015) — but which wasn’t discovered until November 2018.

The personal data involved in the breach differed between individuals but the ICO said it may have included names, email addresses, phone numbers, unencrypted passport numbers, arrival/departure information, guests’ VIP status and loyalty programme membership number.

Globally, some 339 million guest records were affected but fewer individuals are thought to have been compromised owing to some of the records being duplicates. The breach is thought to have affected around 30 million users across the EU, per an earlier ICO estimate.

Its investigation found there were failures by Marriott to put “appropriate technical or organisational measures in place to protect people’s data” — as required by the pan-EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) . (The penalty only covers the portion of the breach that dates from 25 May 2018 — when the GDPR came into effect.)

Commenting in a statement, the UK’s information commissioner Elizabeth Denham said: “Millions of people’s data was affected by Marriott’s failure; thousands contacted a helpline and others may have had to take action to protect their personal data because the company they trusted it with had not. When a business fails to look after customers’ data, the impact is not just a possible fine, what matters most is the public whose data they had a duty to protect.”

A Marriott spokesperson told us the company “deeply regrets” the incident, adding in a statement: “Marriott remains committed to the privacy and security of its guests’ information and continues to make significant investments in security measures for its systems. The ICO recognises the steps taken by Marriott following discovery of the incident to promptly inform and protect the interests of its guests.”

The hotel giant also confirmed it does not intend to appeal the ICO’s decision (while not making any admission of liability).

The penalty had to be signed off by other EU data protection authorities, under the GDPR’s one-stop-shop mechanism for cross-border cases. And the ICO confirmed it completed the Article 60 process prior to the issuing of the penalty.

One interesting element here is the difference between the initial penalty proposed by the ICO and the final fine.

The GDPR framework greatly increased the potential size of penalties for data breaches, up to a maximum of £20M or 4% of an entity’s global annual turnover (whichever is greater). Prior to that data protection rules existed in the region but could be easily ignored, given puny penalties. The GDPR was supposed to change that.

However, almost 2.5 years since the framework begun being applied, large fines remain rare — with a backlog of major cross-border cases still awaiting decisions.

Regulations may also be concerned about being able to make large sums stick if companies appeal.

The ICO’s initial penalty for the Marriott breach would have been one of the largest fines issued under the GDPR. Today’s haircut revises that. The first figure proposed represented around 3% of the company’s 2018 revenue (circa $3.6BN) — but that’s now shrunk to around 0.6%.

It follows a very similar episode at the ICO over a BA data breach. In July 2019 the regulator said it intended to fine the airliner £183.39M ($230M) for a 2018 data breach that affected some 500,000 customers. But earlier this month it issued a final penalty to BA of just £20M ($25.8M).

In both cases the impact of the coronavirus appears to be playing some part in explaining why the ICO has reduced the size of the penalties. Although the pandemic might be something of a useful scapegoat given the substantial size of the reductions involved. (The regulator has also used it to ‘pause’ any action over major adtech complaints, for example.)

All the ICO has to say vis-a-vis Marriott’s penalty haircut is that it “considered representations from Marriott, the steps Marriott took to mitigate the effects of the incident and the economic impact of COVID-19 on their business before setting a final penalty”.

On the reduction in the size of the penalty Marriott told us it reflects “extensive mitigating measures” it put in place following the security incident — noting that it established a dedicated website to provide information to concerned guests; opened a dedicated helpline; and sent “millions” of email notifications to individuals whose information was involved in the breach. It also said it offered guests the opportunity to sign up for a personal information monitoring service where it was available.

The ICO similarly took representations from BA after issuing its initial intention to fine — and ended up making a small discount as a result, per our report, though we reported that the lion’s share of the BA reduction was due to revising how much blame it had placed on the airline for the breach.

Asked for a view on the ICO’s penalty haircuts, Tim Turner, a UK based data protection trainer and consultant, agreed that the coronavirus looks like a handy scapegoat.

“I’m not accusing the ICO of feeding misunderstanding but the impression that these reduced fines are down to the pandemic is very helpful to them,” he told TechCrunch. “They plainly miscalculated both the BA and Marriott fines by a huge margin, and they don’t really deny it. The notices just skate over that on the basis that the original mistake has been rectified so it doesn’t matter.

“The ICO were proposing fines way beyond anything in the EU on the basis of a draft, unpublished procedure. They ought to account for that rather than letting everyone think this is a big COVID-19 discount.”