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Airbnb has secured commitments of $1 billion for a syndicated term loan from institutional investors, it said.

The emergency cash injection comes as the coronavirus travel freeze continues to hammer vacation rentals, with holidaymakers locked down at home and global travel banned or heavily discouraged for public health reasons.

Neither the names of the parties to the Airbnb loan nor the terms have been disclosed but Reuters — citing several sources with knowledge of the matter — is reporting that private equity firms Silver Lake, Apollo Global Management, Sixth Street Partners, Oaktree Capital Management and Owl Rock are parties, with Silver Lake reportedly “one of the biggest players”. Though all the firms declined to comment.

Per Reuters’ sources, the loan is for five years — with an interest rate of 750 basis points over the Libor benchmark. The news agency was also told it was sold at a slight discount to the loan’s par value which would see investors earn a rate of around 12%. While the terms of the deal are first lien debt, meaning the listed creditors would be paid first if Airbnb were to default, per Reuters’ sources.

We’ve reached out to Airbnb for comment.

Earlier this month the vacation rentals giant announced an additional $1BN raise in debt and equity from two of the aforementioned private equity firms, Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners. Though at the time it said the funds would support its ongoing work to invest over the long term — couching the raise as strategic, rather than a bailout in troubled times.

The $1BN term loan looks more clearly targeted at dealing with immediate negative impacts caused by COVID-19. Although, once again, Airbnb’s statement seeks to paint an upbeat picture of travel in a post-pandemic future, without the company being able to specify exactly when such a time might arrive.

“I deeply appreciate the confidence and trust that so many have shown in our company even as every sector in travel is going through the storm of the pandemic. We know travel will return and rather than merely hunkering down, the support we have received will allow Airbnb to continue moving forward as we invest in our community,” said Airbnb co-founder and CEO, Brian Chesky, in a statement. “All of the actions we have taken over the last several weeks assure that Airbnb will emerge from the storm of the pandemic even stronger, regardless of how long the storm lasts.”

The cash injection will “ensure Airbnb can continue to invest in its company and community of hosts and guests in over 220 countries and regions around the world”, the company added.

In recent weeks Airbnb has faced anger from hosts faced with a wave of coronavirus cancelations and refunds, after it made a policy change last month to allow guests to be refunded in full for bookings over the coronavirus period. It later earmarked $250M to help hosts impacted by COVID-19 cancellations.

Some countries have also banned holiday rentals entirely during the pandemic — including the UK which recently clamped down after hosts had been found advertising ‘isolation retreats’.

There have also been reports of an increase in long term rental properties in some markets, such as London, as professional landlords operating on platforms like Airbnb look for an alternative revenue stream for empty vacation rentals that are now costing them money.

Should such switching take hold in markets where residential tenancy contracts can stretch for five or more years it could put a lasting lock-up on a chunk of properties which vacation rental platforms have been repurposing as moneyspinners up til now.

One thing is clear: The global travel crunch has put a major dent in Airbnb’s IPO hopes. Last September, the company told investors, employees, and the world it would begin to trade publicly in 2020. A couple of months late the coronavirus struck and Airbnb has seen its valuation crash vs a $35BN peak, back in 2019.

Per Reuters, last week’s $1BN bond deal included warrants for the two firms that can be exercised at an $18BN valuation — well below even the $26BN Airbnb cited as an internal valuation in early March.

Credit Kudos, a U.K. fintech using open banking to provide more accurate credit scoring, has raised £5 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is AlbionVC, which is joined by TriplePoint, Plug & Play Ventures, Ascension Ventures’ Fair by Design fund, and Entrepreneur First (EF). In addition, a number of fintech angels participated.

They are Christian Faes (LendInvest), Tom Stafford (DST Global Managing Partner), Charlie Delingpole (ComplyAdvantage and MarketInvoice), Will Neale (Grabyo and Fonix Mobile) and Daniel Gandesha (PropertyPartner).

Ed Lascelles, from AlbionVC, takes up a seat on the Credit Kudos board alongside the company’s co-founders Freddy Kelly (CEO) and Matt Schofield (CTO).

Calling itself a “challenger credit bureau,” Credit Kudos is using open banking to replace what it calls “traditional, narrow methods” of credit assessment in order to make credit fairer and more accessible. As it stands, credit scores are typically a blackbox and based on very primitive assumptions about a person’s financial health.

By securely analysing bank account data via open banking, Credit Kudos says it enables lenders to make faster and more informed credit decisions, while also reducing defaults — and, crucially, at a significantly lower cost than less scalable methods of assessment.

“Traditionally, credit scores are calculated based on past borrowing history and a few other simple measures such as being on the electoral roll and frequency of credit applications,” explains co-founder and CEO Freddy Kelly. “These existing scores are a very weak signal of financial health as they don’t consider an individual’s day-to-day income and expenditure. Because of this, many borrowers are forced to pay higher interest rates or are rejected entirely”.

Kelly says that by using open banking data provided by customers when they apply for credit, Credit Kudos is able to create a far more accurate picture of someone’s financial health and creditworthiness. “We do this by analysing past banking transaction data alongside factors such as whether they repaid on time,” he says. “We have built a platform that allows lenders to integrate open banking data into their existing processes in order to make more accurate decisions and reach a far wider audience”.

An alumni of company builder program EF, last year the startup on-boarded over 50 new lenders ranging from FTSE100 firms to independent credit unions and community finance vendors. Most recently, Credit Kudos has partnered with a number of credit intermediaries including ClearScore, CarFinance 247, and Mojo Mortgages. This is seeing customers use their bank data to secure better offers across unsecured loans, car finance and mortgages.

Meanwhile, Kelly cites traditional credit reference agencies (CRAs) in the U.K., such as Experian, TransUnion and Equifax, as its main competitors. “Each of the existing CRAs provides a standardised credit dataset based on past borrowing behaviour, sometimes referred to as the FICO model,” he tells me. “However, Credit Kudos is the first regulated challenger in the market that is putting control in the hands of borrowers by allowing them to share their bank transaction data through open banking”.

To that end, Credit Kudos’ revenue model is simple enough. The fintech startup charges lenders a monthly fee for its data based on the volume of transactions they process.

French startup Slite has raised an $11 million Series A round led by Spark Capital with existing investors also participating. Slite is a sort of multiplayer Evernote. It lets you collect and organize documentation, create shared documents and build a company handbook.

Many companies struggle to keep a single source of truth when it comes to corporate policies, project documentation and product roadmaps. Services like Google Docs and Dropbox Paper have partly solved this issue by transforming documents into shareable links.

But it’s a mess as you have to grant access to the right people, share folders with your team and dig around multiple documents to find what you’re looking for.

A new category of tools have solved that issue by expanding beyond documents to create a knowledge base for your company. Confluence and Notion are particularly popular among tech companies for instance.

Slite wants to build a product that is as simple to use as Google Docs but as powerful as Confluence. Companies with hundreds or thousands of employees should be able to use it without ever feeling lost.

“[Slite] can be used by literally everyone in the company, by the engineering team of course, but also by the support team, operations team, marketing team, etc.” co-founder and CEO Christophe Pasquier told me.

A Slite document can contain text, tasks, tables and links to other documents. You can create a wiki-like experience for your most essential documents.

You can organize documents by channel, which lets you manage permissions easily. A channel can be your entire company, a department in particular or people working on a new project across multiple departments.

And because everything is centralized in the service, you can search across multiple documents and channels. You can also create templates that you can easily reuse across multiple meetings for instance. It could be useful for monthly reports as well.

When it comes to editing a document, multiple people can edit a document in real time. You can mention other team members to send them a notification, see previous versions of a document, create a link and share it on other services.

Slite has attracted 4,000 companies, including Airbnb, Spotify and WeTransfer. The startup had raised $4 million before today’s funding round and participated in Y Combinator a couple of years ago.

Google is offering financial support to local newsrooms hit by the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of its Google News Initiative.

The company isn’t disclosing the size of what it’s calling its Journalism Emergency Relief Fund, but in a blog post, Google VP of News Richard Gingras said the goal is to fund “thousands of small, medium and local news publishers globally,” through awards ranging from “low thousands of dollars for small hyper-local newsrooms to low tens of thousands for larger newsrooms, with variations per region.”

“Local news is a vital resource for keeping people and communities connected in the best of times,” Gingras said. “Today, it plays an even greater function in reporting on local lockdowns or shelter at home orders, school and park closures, and data about how COVID-19 is affecting daily life. But that role is being challenged as the news industry deals with job cuts, furloughs and cutbacks as a result of the economic downturn prompted by COVID-19.”

Applications for funding open now. They will be open for two weeks, at 11:59pm Pacific time on April 29.

Gingras also said Google.org will be donating $1 million total to two organizations supporting journalists, the International Center for Journalists and the Columbia Journalism School’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.

The Google News Initiative (a broader effort to support journalism with an initial $300 million in funding) previously announced that it would be spending $6.5 million to support fact checkers and nonprofits that are working to fight coronavirus-related misinformation, funding that’s already led to tools like the COVID-19 Case Mapper.

Facebook has also said it’s committing $100 million ($25 million in grant funding for local coverage, plus $75 million in marketing) to support local news organizations in response to the current crisis.

More than 150 e-commerce and delivery companies globally use an Indian logistics startup’s service to work out the optimum way before they ship items to their customers. That startup, Noida-based FarEye, has raised $25 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprint in international markets.

M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, led the seven-year-old startup’s Series D financing round. Eight Roads Ventures, Honeywell Ventures, and existing investor SAIF Partners participated in the round, which pushes FarEye’s total raise-to-date to $40 million.

FarEye helps companies orchestrate, track, and optimize their logistics operations. Say you order a pizza from Domino’s, the eatery uses FarEye’s service, which integrates into the system it is using, to quickly inform the customer how long they need to wait for the food to reach them.

Behind the scenes, FarEye is helping Domino’s evaluate a plethora of moving pieces. How many delivery people are in the vicinity? Can it bundle a few orders? What’s the maximum number of items one can carry? How experienced is the delivery person? What’s the best route to reach the customer? And, would the restaurant need the same number of delivery people the following day?, explained Kushal Nahata, co-founder and chief executive of FarEye, in an interview with TechCrunch .

“The level of digitization that logistics firms have made over the years remains minimal. The amount of visibility they have over their own delivery network is minimal. Forget what a customer should expect,” said Nahata, explaining the challenges the industry faces.

FarEye is addressing this by parsing through more than a billion data points to pick the optimum solution. In the past one year, it has fine-tuned its algorithm to handle last-mile and long-haul deliveries to offer a full-suite of services to its clients.

The startup said it is already handling more than 10 million transactions a day. The more transactions it processes, the better its algorithm becomes, he said.

FarEye today has clients across several categories including transportation and logistics, retail (which includes grocery, furniture, and fashion), and FMCG in 20 nations. Some of these clients include Walmart, FedEx, DHL, Amway, Domino’s, Bluedart, Future Group, and J&J. Nahata said the startup will use the fresh capital to improve its predictive tech and grow its footprint in the United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific region.

“We are solving certain problems for our customers today, but I feel we can solve much larger problems and help digitize the entire supply chain network,” he said.

As the coronavirus pandemic jeopardises grocery and e-commerce firms’ ability to timely deliver items to customers, FarEye said it is making Serve, one of its services that focuses on enabling movement of everyday essentials, free for any firm to use.

“The global pandemic has accelerated the need for enterprises to scale their supply chain operations efficiently to meet the rising share of online deliveries. FarEye’s highly configurable last-mile and long-haul logistics platform has been validated by leading global enterprises across the 3PL, retail and manufacturing categories,” said Shweta Bhatia, a partner at Eight Roads Ventures, in a statement.

Ooni (nee Uuni), has been around for a few years now, but its latest oven, the Koda 16, launched in March. Just like everyone else, I’ve been cooped up at home for weeks with nothing but all of the projects I would get around to one day.

At the top of my list was learning how to make decent pizza at home (we don’t have many decent pizzaiolo’s in my town). I’d been hearing about the Ooni oven for a while — mostly via Neven Mrgan’s great Instagram feed — so I spring for the Koda 13” and started firing some pies.

I was immediately enamored with the eye popping results. Chewy, crispy, well cooked Neopolitain-style pizza within 30 minutes of taking it out of the box. And I’m not exaggerating. After a couple of pizza launching disasters (this is not as easy as it looks, people), I was eating the product of my own hands and the Ooni’s 800+ degree baking surface. While not even an advanced amateur chef, I have always had somewhat of an aversion to single-use gadgets. Technique always wins, right?

The problem with that thinking is that it is really impossible to cook true Neopolitain pizza at home in the US because our ovens just don’t get hot enough. A ton of experimental dough situations have resulted in a few workable New York style pizza recipes for 500 degree ovens. But for thinner crusts there is zero substitute for that true 800-1000 degree cooking environment.

The Ooni delivers that in under 20 minutes attached to a bog standard propane tank. It’s brilliant.

Ooni co-founder Kristian Tapaninaho started messing around with building a decent pizza oven in 2010. He got into making home pies and realized that there was pretty much no way to do it other than building a large, expensive oven in his back yard. He began prototyping what became the company’s original oven in 2012, and he says that the original oven’s design stemmed from a super simple yet super obvious (in hindsight) design constraint: what could they ship affordably?

Due to shipping restrictions, it had to be under 10kg and had to fit in a certain footprint. Everything piece of design work on the first oven stemmed from those constraints. Why, for instance, does the Ooni oven have 3 legs? Because the 4th one would have put them over weight.

Within those constraints, the original oven took shape — delivering that super high-heat surface with a simple wood-fired unit that more than doubled its original funding goal on Kickstarter. Kristian and co-founder Darina Garland defined this high-heat, high results at-home outdoor pizza oven market at scale, along with other later entrants like Roccbox.

I had a bit of a chat with Kristian about how Ooni was doing lately, with the specter of coronavirus and the new business realities that have resulted.

“This COVID-19 situation began for us in mid January as our suppliers started informing us that they were delaying return to work from Chinese New Year,” Kristian said. “At the time the worry was if we’d have enough supply for the summer which is of course peak season for us. As our supply chain was restarting, it was clear that we’d have similar lockdowns in our main markets as well. Overall, however, we started the year at a strong inventory position which helped buffer any interruptions.”

He says that Ooni was lucky given that the initial production run of the Ooni 16 was already in warehouses by the time things got really hairy in Edinburgh and the surrounding areas. And the team was fairly ready for the new challenge of stay-at-home work.

“Much of our team comms already happened over Slack so the team’s been really quite well setup for working from home,” he told me. “We have great relationships with our 3rd party logistics providers and while they’ve been incredibly busy, they’ve been able to maintain a good level of service, at least in the grand scheme of things.”

In addition, Ooni has just launched the Fyra, an updated version of the original Ooni 3. It’s a wood pellet powered design that offers a similar “get up and go” quick pizza path. The wood brings an additional smoky flavor, of course. At 23 pounds, it’s a super portable wood version of the gas stoves I’ve been playing with.

Yeah, but how does it work?

Once Kristian saw that I was playing with my Ooni 13 he offered to send the newly launched 16″ model over to play with. I jumped at the chance to make a bigger pie.

My experiences with the Ooni ovens so far have been nothing short of revelatory. Though I’ve pondered indoor options like the Breville Smart Oven, I knew in my heart that I wanted that brilliant taste that comes from live fire and the high heat that would let me enjoy super thin crust pizzas. I’ve now fired over three dozen pizzas in the Ooni and am coming to know it a bit better. Its recovery time, rotation needs and cooking characteristics. I have never used a more enjoyable cooking utensil.

I’ve tried a few dough recipes, because I know I’ll get questions about it, but I’ve used two to good effect. Ooni’s own recommended dough (though I hydrate a bit more) and this Peter Reinhart recipe, recommended to me by Richie Nakano.

The pizzas that result are bursting with umami. The oven enables that potent combination of cheese, sauce and randomly distributed carbonization that combines into the perfect bite. Your pie goes in somewhat pedestrian — whitish dough, red sauce, hunks of fresh mozzarella — and you see it come to life right in front of your eyes.  Within 60-90 seconds, you’ve transmogrified the simple ingredients into a hot endocrine rush of savory, chewy flavor.

As I mentioned before, the setup is insanely simple. Flip out the legs, put it on an outdoor surface with some support and attach a propane tank. An instant of lighting knob work and you’re free to step away. Fifteen minutes later and you’ve got a cooking environment to die for. The flip down legs make the 13” model super great for taking camping or anywhere you want to go to create your own pizza party. Ooni even sells a carrying case.

The design of the oven’s upper shell means that all of the heat is redirected inwards, letting the baking surface reach 850 degrees easily in the center, up to 1000 degrees near the back. The Koda 16 has such an incredibly roomy cooking surface that it is easy to see to the sides and around your pizza a bit to tell how the crust is rising and how the leoparding is coming along. Spinning your pie mid-cook is such an important part of this kind of oven and the bigger mouth is smashing for this.

Heck I even cooked steak in it, to mouth watering results.

“Our core message has always been ‘great restaurant quality pizza at home’ and while the situation is what it is, more people spending more time at home looking for great home cooking options has been strong for our online sales,” Kristian said when I asked him about whether more people were discovering Ooni now. “Pizza making is a great way to have fun family time together. It’s about those shared experiences that bring people together.”

This mirrors my experiences so far. I’m not precisely ‘good’ at this yet, but I’m plugging away and the Ooni makes even my misses delicious. This weekend I was even confident enough to hold a socially distanced pizza pick-up party. Friends and family put in their orders and I fired a dozen pies of all kinds. Though I couldn’t hug them, I could safely hand them a freshly fired pizza and to most Italians like me, that’s probably better.

In my mind, the Ooni Koda pulls off a rare trifecta of kitchen gadgets: It retains the joy and energy of live flame, delivers completely on its core premise and still remains incredibly easy to use. Highly recommend.

 

Online consignment company The RealReal is the latest tech company to lay off and furlough employees amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In the company’s quarterly earnings report today, The RealReal announced layoffs affecting 10% of its workforce and furloughs impacting 15% of employees.

By doing so, The RealReal says it will be able to reduce its operating expenses by about $70 million. In a press release, The RealReal said these changes are designed to “support its employees through the pandemic and ensure the team is well positioned for a strong restart on the other side of this health crisis.”

Those furloughed include employees in The RealReal’s e-commerce centers, retail stores, luxury consignment offices, sales organization and headquarters. The RealReal has also instituted a hiring freeze and reduced the salaries of executives.

The RealReal, which has been a public company for a little under one year, joins the growing number of tech companies that have made personnel changes in the wake of the coronavirus.

“Given the unknown duration of the pandemic, we’ve focused on reducing operating expenses and preserving liquidity to weather the near-term challenges and ensure we are well positioned to capitalize on the significant opportunity in front of us,” The RealReal CEO Julie Wainwright said in a statement. “I am confident the strength of our balance sheet, customer satisfaction, healthy traffic trends, and buyer and consignor repeat rates, along with continuing progress in technology initiatives that support efficiently scaling our operations, will position us to bounce back quickly once the economy stabilizes.”

 

It’s hard enough in the first place having to drive an astronomically expensive rover around a planet millions of miles away. Doing it from home seems like a pretty big ask — but it turns out NASA’s Curiosity team is up to it.

The space agency posted today about how the team has adapted to the unprecedented situation of having to manage an important, ongoing mission involving hundreds of people, without any of those people meeting in person.

“We’re usually all in one room, sharing screens, images and data,” said team lead Alicia Allbaugh. Now they’re not only in separate rooms, but on different schedules and computing setups. “I probably monitor about 15 chat channels at all times. You’re juggling more than you normally would.”

Naturally there are video calls, too — sometimes several at once. Processes previously accomplished on high-performance workstations are now being done on laptops and web services. But while the added complexity makes the planning process less efficient, the results are still rolling in.

In mid-March, the Jet Propulsion Lab offices in Pasadena, CA, had already been totally emptied of staff and work was suspended elsewhere. But Curiosity was still trucking. It drove up to a rock, drilled a sample, and sent confirmation back to the team — just as it would if they were all working as normal. And the work continues.

“Mars isn’t standing still for us; we’re still exploring,” said Allbaugh.

Adriel is a South Korean startup bringing automated ad tools to small businesses — and in recent months, it’s been expanding into the United States and the United Kingdom.

This might seem like exactly the wrong time to be growing an ad-buying platform, since we’re at the beginning of what’s likely to be a tremendous pullback in ad spend due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, co-founder and CEO Sophie Eom told me via email that ad spend on Adriel increased by 7% in February, then by 6% in March, and she estimated that spend will be up by 8% in April.

“We all know that businesses are struggling from the uncertainty of the economic situations with COVID-19,” Eom said. “And most are hesitant about hiring agencies for their marketing and advertising efforts due to the high costs — in addition to the fact that many corporates don’t have enough knowledge about the right marketing processes.”

So why is Adriel still seeing growth? She argued, “We see that even in the midst of tough times, many startups and entrepreneurs are not giving up their businesses. In fact, they are shifting their focus and investments into more digital to reach their customers.”

As part of its response to COVID-19, the company is also donating ads to support small business customers in San Francisco area.

Adriel’s technology automatically generates creative materials and suggests keywords for ads, as well as managing the targeting. But there’s also a human team that reviews campaigns and suggests ways to improve. The company does not require retainers or contracts, but charges a 19% fee on ad spend.

I first spoke to Eom at the end of 2019, when she was first expanding Adriel into the U.S. In some ways, it felt like a familiar pitch — I’ve written about companies like AdEspresso (acquired by HootSuite) and Smartly.io (which sold a majority stake to Providence Equity Partners last year), which also said they were optimizing or automating small business advertising. Plus, Facebook itself has launched an automated ad builder.

Eom suggested that while there are tools that sound superficially similar, there’s nothing quite like Adriel (which was part of Facebook’s Namsam Lab Korea incubator), with its multi-platform support for managing Facebook, Google and Instagram ad campaigns in one place, and with its focus on the true “long tail” of advertisers — she said the average Adriel client spends a relatively modes $1,000 per month on digital advertising.

“We’re not merely a self-service tool either,” she said. “We support and assist our clients in getting their ad placed, making their campaign more successful. We use technology to make all these processes more affordable for more business owners.”

She added that Adriel has launched 7,200 campaigns for nearly 20,000 business accounts.

If you’re looking at footage from your Nest Cam and the quality seems a bit lower than normal: it’s not your eyes.

In an email to users, Google says it is temporarily lowering the video quality of Nest Cams in an effort to limit how much bandwidth each camera uses and, in turn, “conserve internet resources”. The adjustment is rolling out over the next few days, and Google says anyone who has their quality settings adjusted will get a notification in the Nest app.

It’s the latest in a series of moves made by tech companies in an effort to keep the Internet stable through the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. More people are at home during the day than ever before, video calling for work and school, or streaming content to pass the time — and that all requires bandwidth. Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube have each taken steps to limit the strain they might be adding to the network, while Sony has been capping PlayStation game download speeds.

While Nest cameras aren’t inherently using more bandwidth right now than they otherwise might, each camera already used a good amount of bandwidth day to day. A Nest Cam IQ, for example, uses roughly 400GB of data per month at its highest settings; cutting this down to medium high shaves that down to 300GB.

Google confirmed their plans with TechCrunch, with a Google spokesperson adding:

“To answer the global call to prioritize internet bandwidth for learning and working, in the next few days we’re going to be making a few changes. We believe these changes have the potential to help make it easier for communities to keep up with school, work, and everything in between.”

While they’re automatically making the change on behalf of the user (a move some owners are complaining is an overstep), Google notes that you’re able to bump your cameras back up to their highest settings should you see fit. They’re not capping the quality, instead just lowering settings by default — so if you’ve got a camera in a setting where every pixel counts, know that you’re going to need to adjust accordingly.