Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Creatively was supposed to launch this summer, according to CEO Greg Gittrich. And then COVID-19 happened.

“We made the decision to fast-track the launch when the pandemic hit, because we felt like launching as a beta would really help the creative community,” Gittrich told me.

The startup was founded by Stacey Bendet and Joe Indriolo, who also serves as chief product officer. Indriolo told me that Creatively was designed to address a problem that Bendet had as founder and CEO of designer clothing company Alice + Olivia — finding the best freelance creative talent to work with.

“Finding creatives is really, really difficult,” he said. “At the same time, showcasing your work is also really difficult as a creative.”

And those problems are likely to get worse as social distancing forces more creative work and collaboration to happen remotely, and as a troubled economy means that more artists, designers, architects, filmmakers and other creative types are looking for work.

There are places where artists can post their work, but Indriolo argued that none of them allow the creative to control the presentation in the same way — not unless they’re building their own website.

Image Credits: Creatively

So Creatively says it’s designed to showcase photography, film, fashion design, branding, illustration, animation, CGI, app and web design, product development, interiors and architecture and emerging technologies.

Creative talent can upload their portfolio and arrange it as they choose. They can divide the work into different albums, and even nest albums within other albums in creative ways. (Indriolo showed me an architect’s album that allowed visitors to navigate their work by drilling down into specific regions and locations.)

Artists can also annotate the images and videos to explain their work, as well as listing their past jobs and their specific skills.

Brands and other potential employers can post job listings, which then get tagged with the artist who’s hired for the job, which in turn builds the artist’s résumé and portfolio. Brands can also search the site based on the skills they’re looking for, or based on who’s done work for another company that they admire.

The platform allows users to follow each other, but Indriolo said there’s an equal emphasis creating connections based on the work you’ve done and your past collaborations.

“We believe it’s a social platform, and that creatives will connect with one another … and find opportunities in a world that’s increasingly remote and global,” Gittrich added.

To get started, Creatively is working with schools like Parsons, Pratt, the Savannah College of Art and Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology to help their new graduates find work.

The platform is free for both businesses and individual creatives; the plan is to eventually start charging businesses to post jobs.

Graduation season is here, and to celebrate we are offering annual Extra Crunch memberships to students for half price. That’s a full year of Extra Crunch for only $50 (plus tax). To sweeten the deal, you’ll be grandfathered in at the discounted price for future years until you cancel. Take the summer to focus on getting ahead with Extra Crunch intelligence at your disposal. 

How to claim the discount:

• Use a .edu or university email address and send a message to our customer support team at extracrunch@techcrunch.com. Please let them know that you are seeking the student discount. 
• The team will respond within 24 hours with a unique link to claim your discount.

With Extra Crunch membership, students receive more than 100 exclusive articles delivered per month, including weekly investor surveys, market analysis and how-tos and interviews on fundraising, growth, monetization and other work topics. You also can browse and use TechCrunch.com more efficiently without the distraction of banner ads, and stay up-to-date through our Extra Crunch members-only newsletter.

Another benefit of Extra Crunch is discounts on events and services. If you have interest in attending TechCrunch events, you’ll be able to save 20% on tickets. Once you join, all you have to do is reach out to our customer service team to receive a discount code for any TechCrunch event. If you are interested in purchasing software or workplace tools, we have a series of benefits called Partner Perks that unlock discounts on AWS, Typeform, DocSend, Crunchbase and more.

Extra Crunch is currently available in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and select European countries. If you are outside of the supported regions, you will not be able to take advantage of this deal. 

In the midst of the day’s news chaos both political and business-oriented, you might have missed Wayfair’s big moment: In regular trading today, shares of the online home goods retailer shot 23% higher. It was an eye-catching gain during a period when the domestic economy is troubled, unemployment is rising and consumer spending is slowing.

Why did Wayfair shares rise so much in a single day? In a word, earnings. But there’s a bit more nuance to understand, so let’s talk about the company’s Q1 earnings report and what it can tell us about consumer spending trends in the COVID-19 era, because they just might impact a startup or two.

Q1 results

We’ll start with the basics: Wayfair reported Q1 revenue of $2.33 billion, up 19.8% from $1.94 billion in the year-ago quarter. The company’s gross profit rose a sharper 23.1% to $579.1 million, boosting Wayfair’s gross margins in the first quarter of this year.

The rest of Wayfair’s income statement is less attractive. The company’s operating costs, including customer service, merchant fees, advertising and a bucket of costs it calls “selling, operations, technology, general and administrative,” came to $841.2 million. That figure is far larger than reported gross profit, meaning that Wayfair’s losses for the period were large.

The company’s operating loss in Q1 2020 rose to $284.5 million (+42.4%), and its net loss totaled a slightly worse $285.9 million. Its operating cash burn also rose sharply — over 215% — to $256.3 million in the period. Wayfair closed Q1 with more than $624 million in cash, meaning that it was still well-capitalized at the end of the period.

Why did shares of Wayfair rise when its losses popped as much as they did? The expectations game, essentially.

The Indian government has said that its contact tracing app Aarogya Setu “by design” fetches the location data of its 90 million users and allows them to view the concentration of people who have tested positive for the coronavirus in their vicinity.

New Delhi issued the statement after France-based security researcher Baptiste Robert found what he argues are design flaws and privacy issues.

The government said it has always disclosed that it fetches users’ location data, a feature that critics say falls short of the privacy protections offered by similar technologies, including the joint project run by Apple and Google.

Aarogya Setu’s privacy policy says the app — in addition to collecting location data of a user at the time of registration — also “continuously collects your location data and stores securely on your mobile device, a record of all the places you have been at 15-minute intervals.” The app uploads this data to its server along with the user’s digital ID if they test positive for COVID-19, or self-declare seeing symptoms that indicate that they might be infected with the infectious disease, it says.

Collecting location data is a complicated subject, regardless of the good intention of its developers and operators. On Monday, Google and Apple banned the use of location tracking on their coronavirus tracing technology.

While some developers have argued that they need access to location data to track how outbreaks move and identify hotspots, privacy advocates have cautioned that if this data ever gets exposed, it could ostracize those who are affected.

Robert’s other concern is that Aarogya Setu, which was launched early last month, allows anyone to view the concentration of people in 500 meters to up to 10 kilometers who are either suspicious they have coronavirus, or are certain that they have the disease. He told TechCrunch that he was able to develop a script and view similar data for any nook and cranny of the world’s second most populous nation.

He said the government, which introduced a nationwide lockdown in late March, could have kept the radius limited to 500 meters.

In response, New Delhi said that its system is designed in a way that would prevent any script from making bulk requests. Additionally, it said, “getting data for multiple latitude and longitude this way is no different from asking several people of their location’s COVID-19 statistics.”

“All this information is already public for all locations and hence does not compromise on any personal or sensitive data,” the response said.

Some people argued today that at a crisis like this, when thousands of people are dying, these “flaws” were the least of their concerns and that the app served a much greater purpose. But Aarogya Setu, which has amassed 90 million monthly active people in less than 35 days, has also ruffled some feathers for the way it is being scaled up. New Delhi said earlier this month that all government and private sector employees need to have this app installed on their smartphones.

On Tuesday, local authority in Noida city, home to more than 640,000 people, on the outskirts of Delhi, said those who did not have Aarogya Setu app installed on their phone would be fined or sent to prison.

Like other accelerators, Techstars, a network of more than 40 corporate and geographically targeted startup bootcamps, has had to bring its marquee demo day events online.

Over the last two weeks of April, industry-focused accelerators working with startups building businesses around mobility technologies (broadly) and the future of the home joined programs in Abu Dhabi, Bangalore, Berlin, Boston, Boulder and Chicago to present their cohorts.

Each group had roughly 10 companies pitching businesses that ran the gamut from early-childhood education to capturing precious metals from the waste streams of mining operations. There were language companies, security companies, marketing companies and even a maker of a modular sous vide product for home chefs.

The ideas were as creative as they were varied, and while all seemed promising, about two concepts from each batch stood out above the rest.

What follows is our completely unscientific picks of the top companies that pitched at each of these virtual Techstars demo days. In late May or early June, expect to see our roundup of the next batch of top picks from the their next round of demo days.

Hub71

Techstars’ inaugural cohort for its accelerator run in conjunction with Abu Dhabi-based technology incubator Hub71 included a number of novel businesses spanning climate, security, retail, healthcare and property tech. Standouts in this batch included Sia Secure and Aumet (with an honorable mention for the novel bio-based plastic processing and reuse technology developer, Poliloop).

Ensuring that a company’s information assets and technologies are protected remains a tall order for many a chief information security officer (or CISO). Cybercriminals can be both persistent and creative.

Now, a group of 46 of these professionals is taking the wraps off a syndicate that allows them to compare notes and war stories and will see them advising — and making small financial bets on — some of the nascent cyber security startups whose tools can potentially keep the bad guys at bay.

Called Silicon Valley CISO Investments or SVCI, the idea is to identify these startups, fund them, advise them on pitfalls to avoid, and introduce them to potential customers, including their own employers in some cases. In fact, one of newest bets, Orca Security, an Israeli cloud security firm that focuses on giving enterprises better visibility into their multi-cloud deployments, just announced its Series A round today, with participation from the group.

To learn more about how the whole thing operates, we talked yesterday with two of the founding members of the syndicate: former Splunk CISO Joel Fulton, who has more recently cofounded a stealth startup, and Oren Yunger, who is today a full-time investor with GGV Capital but previously worked as the CISO of two Israel-based companies.

They’d previously come together for a working group focused on helping early-stage executives to address security well before the point where they typically hire a head of security. As Fulton explains it, the more each CISO contributed to the project, the more they appreciated the strength of their collective insights, so decided to form this investing syndicate.

SVCI is invite-only, and members must be recommended by others in the group. “We prefer quality over quantity,” Fulton says. Even so, it’s growing fast. While the group began last fall with eight individuals, it now has 46 members, including the chief security officer of ServiceMax, Al Ghous; David Tsao, who is the vice president of security engineering at Marqueta; and Jonathan Jaffe, who is the head of information security at People.ai.

How it’s all supposed to work: one team of people will act as scouts, another will focus on due diligence. These roles change over time. “We had to have forced volunteerism” at the outset, jokes Fulton. “You don’t have to dedicate 10 hours a week” to SVCI,” adds Yunger, “but you have to be included in the conversation. There are no passive members.”

After settling on roughly 40 companies per quarter, the group winnows down their favorites to four, who present to the group. The companies can have just raised money or be about to raise again, but they have to be willing to leave a small portion of one of these rounds open to SVCI, should its members opt in.

If the startup gets the green-light, the group will contribute roughly $200,000, no matter the number of SVCI members who want to participate in the deal, which is entirely optional for each person. (The capital is bundled into special purpose vehicles so the startup isn’t stuck with potentially dozens of people on its cap table.)

It’s a small amount, obviously, just enough to form a relationship with a startup that the group wants to help —  and that it thinks will make the group look smart as it works to establish its reputation.

It’s also just enough to form potential conflicts of interest on both sides of the table. You might imagine that Yunger’s ties to GGV could translate into signaling risk for a startup whose Series A doesn’t involve GGV, for example, though Yunger insists this shouldn’t be a concern, saying the two operations are “mutually exclusive.”

Companies might also be concerned about revealing too much about their products to a room full of security pros from big companies that could potentially replicate their offerings.

Fulton says that SVCI first filters out startups that “have an unreasonable expectation” of privacy, and that when it does invite companies to lay out what they do to the group, founders can “stay mum” on certain things, as well as drop out of the process at any time.

There is always the risk, too, that members of the group will promote to the employers startups in which they have an interest for their own gain, but Fulton says that to avoid it, all members agree to work within their companies’ conflict of interest policies and to disclose financial stakes where they exist.

In the meantime, none of the members is exclusively committed to working with SVCI or funneling deal flow its way. Some have and will continue to advise other venture outfits that are focused on cybersecurity startups.

In fact, in addition to seeing what’s bubbling up in their world, many advantages to members of SVCI are largely personal.

Yunger notes that while everyone “has a day job,” it’s a “really nice mesh of people” to be more tightly connected with, from execs at Fortune 500 companies to those at largely privately held outfits.

Fulton echoes the sentiment, saying the “interconnectedness” it provides is “greater than a Slack channel.” Besides, he adds, there is intellectual strength in numbers. “I love learning how CISOs who don’t think like me do think and stealing from tools from their toolboxes.”

In addition to Orca, SVCI has so far made two other investments. One remains in stealth mode. The other is Tonic, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based synthetic data provider created by former Palantir and Microsoft engineers and that has raised roughly $2 million in seed funding to date.

Ensuring that a company’s information assets and technologies are protected remains a tall order for many a chief information security officer (or CISO). Cybercriminals can be both persistent and creative.

Now, a group of 46 of these professionals is taking the wraps off a syndicate that allows them to compare notes and war stories and will see them advising — and making small financial bets on — some of the nascent cyber security startups whose tools can potentially keep the bad guys at bay.

Called Silicon Valley CISO Investments or SVCI, the idea is to identify these startups, fund them, advise them on pitfalls to avoid, and introduce them to potential customers, including their own employers in some cases. In fact, one of newest bets, Orca Security, an Israeli cloud security firm that focuses on giving enterprises better visibility into their multi-cloud deployments, just announced its Series A round today, with participation from the group.

To learn more about how the whole thing operates, we talked yesterday with two of the founding members of the syndicate: former Splunk CISO Joel Fulton, who has more recently cofounded a stealth startup, and Oren Yunger, who is today a full-time investor with GGV Capital but previously worked as the CISO of two Israel-based companies.

They’d previously come together for a working group focused on helping early-stage executives to address security well before the point where they typically hire a head of security. As Fulton explains it, the more each CISO contributed to the project, the more they appreciated the strength of their collective insights, so decided to form this investing syndicate.

SVCI is invite-only, and members must be recommended by others in the group. “We prefer quality over quantity,” Fulton says. Even so, it’s growing fast. While the group began last fall with eight individuals, it now has 46 members, including the chief security officer of ServiceMax, Al Ghous; David Tsao, who is the vice president of security engineering at Marqueta; and Jonathan Jaffe, who is the head of information security at People.ai.

How it’s all supposed to work: one team of people will act as scouts, another will focus on due diligence. These roles change over time. “We had to have forced volunteerism” at the outset, jokes Fulton. “You don’t have to dedicate 10 hours a week” to SVCI,” adds Yunger, “but you have to be included in the conversation. There are no passive members.”

After settling on roughly 40 companies per quarter, the group winnows down their favorites to four, who present to the group. The companies can have just raised money or be about to raise again, but they have to be willing to leave a small portion of one of these rounds open to SVCI, should its members opt in.

If the startup gets the green-light, the group will contribute roughly $200,000, no matter the number of SVCI members who want to participate in the deal, which is entirely optional for each person. (The capital is bundled into special purpose vehicles so the startup isn’t stuck with potentially dozens of people on its cap table.)

It’s a small amount, obviously, just enough to form a relationship with a startup that the group wants to help —  and that it thinks will make the group look smart as it works to establish its reputation.

It’s also just enough to form potential conflicts of interest on both sides of the table. You might imagine that Yunger’s ties to GGV could translate into signaling risk for a startup whose Series A doesn’t involve GGV, for example, though Yunger insists this shouldn’t be a concern, saying the two operations are “mutually exclusive.”

Companies might also be concerned about revealing too much about their products to a room full of security pros from big companies that could potentially replicate their offerings.

Fulton says that SVCI first filters out startups that “have an unreasonable expectation” of privacy, and that when it does invite companies to lay out what they do to the group, founders can “stay mum” on certain things, as well as drop out of the process at any time.

There is always the risk, too, that members of the group will promote to the employers startups in which they have an interest for their own gain, but Fulton says that to avoid it, all members agree to work within their companies’ conflict of interest policies and to disclose financial stakes where they exist.

In the meantime, none of the members is exclusively committed to working with SVCI or funneling deal flow its way. Some have and will continue to advise other venture outfits that are focused on cybersecurity startups.

In fact, in addition to seeing what’s bubbling up in their world, many advantages to members of SVCI are largely personal.

Yunger notes that while everyone “has a day job,” it’s a “really nice mesh of people” to be more tightly connected with, from execs at Fortune 500 companies to those at largely privately held outfits.

Fulton echoes the sentiment, saying the “interconnectedness” it provides is “greater than a Slack channel.” Besides, he adds, there is intellectual strength in numbers. “I love learning how CISOs who don’t think like me do think and stealing from tools from their toolboxes.”

In addition to Orca, SVCI has so far made two other investments. One remains in stealth mode. The other is Tonic, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based synthetic data provider created by former Palantir and Microsoft engineers and that has raised roughly $2 million in seed funding to date.

Virgin Galactic today revealed a new partnership with NASA, in pursuit of the goal of developing a high speed vehicle for point-to-point travel across Earth. NASA has been pursuing development of high mach air travel itself, with the development of its Supersonic X-59 low-boon supersonic test plane built by Lockheed Martin, but this new partnership agreement with Virgin Galactic and its subsidiary The Spaceship Company specifically seeks to figure out a sustainable way to apply high-speed transportation technologies to civil and commercial aviation.

Virgin Galactic thinks that it will be able to get a head start on this project specifically because of the work it’s done to date on developing, engineering and flight-testing its existent vehicles, which include the WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft, and the SpaceShipTwo winged spacecraft that launches from the carrier to reach the edge of space. The design of the company’s system uses traditional runways for take-off and landing, while the rocket-propelled SpaceShipTwo skims the outer edge of Earth’s atmosphere at the boundary of space to provide its commercial tourist passengers with a trip that includes stunning views and a few minutes of weightlessness.

In fact, Virgin Galactic’s technology does seem like a good fit for point-to-point high-speed travel. Perhaps best popularized by SpaceX and one of their many ambitious plans for their forthcoming Starship, point-to-point envisions traveling between two places on Earth at very high speeds either extremely high up in the atmosphere (much higher than current commercial planes go) or even potentially through space. The advantages of doing this are that you can go much faster as the atmosphere thins and friction and air resistance lower. The International Space Station, for instance, performs a full orbit around Earth once every 90 minutes.

A trip from NYC to Shanghai using Starship would take just 40 minutes, SpaceX has said, rather than the 16 hours it takes today. Virgin Galactic and NASA aren’t yet near the stage where they’re talking about trip times, but for comparison’s sake, consider that SpaceShipTwo travels at a top speed of around 4,000 km/h (nearly 2,500 mph), while a Boeing 747 maxes out at about 988 km/h (just under 615 mph).

The new partnership between Virgin Galactic and NASA was formed under a Space Act Agreement, which is a type of agreement that NASA uses to work with organizations it deems able to help it fulfill its various goals, missions and program directives. It’s early yet to imagine what this will look like exactly, but Virgin Galactic says in a press release that it will be “seeking to develop a vehicle for the next-generation of safe and efficient high speed air travel, with a focus on customer experience and environmental responsibility,” and that it will be doing so in cooperation with its “industry partners.”

NASA is indeed working with actor Tom Cruise on a film to be shot in space – aboard the International Space Station (ISS) it turns out. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine confirmed the news, which was detailed in an earlier report, via a tweet today. The ISS setting is a new detail to the plan, which was first reported by Deadline, and which also named SpaceX as a potential partner on the film project, which is said to be in an early preparatory phase.

NASA has previously talked about how it would like to open the ISS to more commercial ventures, and offering it as a filming location is definitely one way to do that. Bridenstine notes that including scientific endeavours like the floating orbital platform in popular media serves as a way “to inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists” that can help the agency achieve its goals.

SpaceX will presumably take part as Cruise ride to the ISS (assuming the actor is actually going to be the one heading there to film on site, but I have a hard time imagining Cruise would pass that up). The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule which is set for a final demonstration mission later this month to establish its ability to carry humans to and from the ISS, with a crew launch of two NASA astronauts.

NASA and SpaceX have planned to make part of the Crew Dragon’s passenger capacity available to commercial entities: The spacecraft can carry up to seven passengers, but NASA will only ever book four of those seats, according to the agency’s plans. The idea is that commercial bookings can help the agency offset the cost of launches further still.

Paying for an actor (or two?) and a film set to take a trip to the ISS will definitely help with sharing the cost of gas for the ride. No word yet on when this will actually take place, or how set in stone the plans are, however. SpaceX has previously announced that it will be offering private tourist flights aboard Crew Dragon, with the current plan to start those either late next year, or in 2022.

A month ago, we asked several venture capitalists if they planned to change the way they invest or lead rounds during COVID-19 — most said no, but they noted that valuations were coming down and founders in their portfolio companies were responding to the crisis.

Northzone’s Paul Murphy predicted fewer FOMO rounds because investors will “take more time to get to know and diligence the business… and it might also take a bit more time to close deals,” adding that he would “continue to lead rounds and back great founders.” But, as other investors call their bluffs, firms are looking for tangible ways to show they are open for business.

First Round Capital 

At least that was the case with First Round Capital. On Friday, the seed-stage firm announced that when it leads a first round in a company, it will always take pro rata in the next outside-led venture round with a commitment of up to $3 million.

Pro rata is a clause in an investment agreement that gives the investor a right to participate in future financings. If investors don’t invest in a company’s pro rata, that might negatively signal they don’t believe in the company’s future. I asked Brett Berson, a partner at First Round, to offer more context about the announcement.

“The question ‘is your investor taking their pro rata’ is not necessarily a checkbox answer,” Berson said. “And I think in a time of maximum uncertainty, what a given investor was doing 12 months ago might not be what he or she is doing today.”