Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The Walt Disney Company just announced that its streaming service Disney+ has more than 50 million subscribers.

The service launched less than five months ago, and apparently had 28.6 million subscribers as of February 3.

These “paid subscriber” numbers include subscribers who are bringing in revenue for Disney but are not paying for the service themselves. (TechCrunch’s parent company Verizon is offering a year of free Disney+ to some customers.) It also includes 8 million subscribers in India, where Disney+ launched last week as part of Hotstar, a popular streaming service that Disney owns thanks to the acquisition of Fox.

While Disney has been relatively slow to release scripted streaming originals after the initial splash of “The Mandalorian,” it has been bringing its films like “Frozen 2,” “Onward” and the upcoming “Artemis Fowl” to the service at an accelerated pace, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting theatrical closures.

The service has also been expanding internationally, launching in eight Western European counties — the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Switzerland — in the past two weeks.

“We’re truly humbled that Disney+ is resonating with millions around the globe, and believe this bodes well for our continued expansion throughout Western Europe and into Japan and all of Latin America later this year,” said Kevin Mayer, the chairman of Disney’s direct-to-consumer and international business, in a statement.

In its latest earnings report, Netflix (which is far more global than Disney+ right now) said it has 167 million paid memberships worldwide.

The aerospace market is evolving quickly and merging with other segments of tech, making it an exciting space for both startups and investors — but the complications of the global pandemic are being felt by both.

Bessemer Venture Partners investor Tess Hatch has been helping guide companies in their portfolio through these strange times, and has been rolling with the punches herself.

Hatch recently spoke to us about the investment advice she’s been offering, which companies are being hit hardest and where opportunity still lies in the frontier tech world. (This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)

Pandemic preparation

TechCrunch: To start off with, I’m interested in how the virus is affecting things in the investment world. Have you made any official accommodations, like a change of strategy, or putting off key investments, things like that?

Tess Hatch: Of course, we’re advising startups on things to do, like their employee safety, and implementing working from home, and tools and tips and tricks that can help that. Especially when it comes to hardware companies — it’s kind of hard to work from home when you’re manufacturing.

We’re advising them to really watch their burn, because their top line is not going to hit where they expected it to hit, like a double or triple revenue, it’ll maybe stay the same. If it increases even a little bit, they’re winning. We’re having these individual company-to-company conversations, just advising them on getting through, hopefully just these next couple of quarters, but it could be next year plus.

There is the question of deals that we were looking at, at prices when this wasn’t an issue. And we’re looking at those prices now being kind of out of market. But we’re still taking new pitch meetings, new deals, we’re still busy, just doing it in the comfort of our pajamas rather than at the office.

So would you say that it has affected the frequency or the cadence of your investments, on a larger scale?

There’s really been like three partnership meetings since craziness happened. And the number of deals that we’ve talked about in the presentations we’ve had, those have remained the same, but ask that question in three more weeks, and I’m sure it I’ll have a better answer.

One of the funny things we’re talking about is that investors, one of their favorite things is to be able to predict how the future, at least the next year or two, is going to go. But this is one of the greatest times of uncertainty we’ve all lived through. So how are you approaching that when there’s so much that’s uncertain, but there’s so much that you need to know in order to effectively manage your portfolio, give advice and make sound investments?

Right now, it is shaking everything that we’ve believed in so strongly. However, we still are looking out, let’s say two to five-plus years. The real question is if this is going to be, with quarantining and lowering the curve, a little bit more under control by let’s say the summertime, or if this is going to be more than a couple of quarters, say a couple of years.

So the only thing we really can do if we can’t look out that much further, we can advise our companies perhaps to raise a bit of extra capital now while the water is shut off, but there’s still a little bit trickling from the showerhead… To be able to last, hopefully, just a couple of quarters but perhaps even a couple of years. I have not seen anything like this in my small career, but there are partners at the firm who have been here 20-plus years and this is new for them as well. It’s like you said, the uncertainty of just not knowing how long or how drastically this is affecting everything.

Quibi, the short-form, mobile-focused video service that Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg first hinted at in 2017, officially launched on Monday.

After years of star-studded content announcements, not to mention $1.75 billion in funding, it might have been impossible for Quibi to live up to expectations. And indeed, it divided the hosts of the Original Content podcast.

None of us was totally won over, but Anthony and Jordan saw something to admire in Quibi’s ambition, and thought there was promise the initial lineup of shows — particularly the reality programs like “Chrissy’s Court” and “Punk’d,” which actually seem to benefit from the constraints of the short episode format.

There are some interesting scripted titles too, but even the shows we liked — particularly the Liam Hemsworth thriller “Most Dangerous Game” — felt like they’d better on a bigger screen, with a more traditional running time.

Darrell, meanwhile, enjoyed some of the content, but he was more convinced that the whole enterprise is a massive folly. In his view, the only way to make Quibi work is to take a looser approach to length and to bring the app to other devices.

You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

And if you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
0:27 “Star Trek: Picard” listener response
6:04 Quibi first impressions

The UK government, like a number of other countries around the world such as the US, has stepped up its pace in providing relief in the form of loans for businesses being impacted by the coronavirus health crisis and the related shutdown that we’ve seen across the economy and life as we knew it. But startups in the UK are increasingly getting worried that they are being left behind.

An open letter to the Chancellor published today and signed by the UK’s biggest “scale-ups” — later-stage, highly valued, but still venture-backed (and often loss-making) startups such as Deliveroo, Benevolent AI, Citymapper, Graphcore and Bulb — urged the UK government to make room to provide lending options to companies like theirs.

They are specifically calling for a special taskforce to be created to consider how to build lending schemes for companies like theirs, as well as to alter the rules on the three big schemes that have already been announced to accommodate them, and give them the same access as other businesses.

The letter, which we’re publishing in full below, is not the first cry for help. Earlier this week, another initiative called SOS (Save Our Startups), also published an open letter also asking for access to the same lending schemes that other businesses are getting. SOS includes dozens of smaller startups and a number of the VCs that back them.

The crux of the matter has been that startups backed with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from VCs to scale their growth have not been built or planned with profitability as a short-term or even medium-term goal. Many of them have so far eschewed public listings (and subsequent credit ratings, for starters) for longer in part because of the large amount of money available to them these days through the private markets — venture capital, family offices, private equity, and so on — to grow.

All of that is predicated, however, on the continued health of the wider economy and consumer demand that helped nurture their businesses in the first place. The current public health crisis has thrown that model into disarray, and has meant that the growth these companies had expected will simply not be coming in the form that they expected, if it comes at all. VCs might pick up some of the slack — the biggest of these are still raising, and have in their hands already, huge funds and will step up to support their most promising portfolio companies. But we don’t know how long the effects of the coronavirus will linger, and most likely these startups, like other businesses, will need more.

Countries like France and Germany have accounted for this business disparity. They have created special provisions for lending to startups in response to the COVID-19 economic and social upheaval, and respectively there have been programs backed with $4.3 billion and $2.2 billion in government money put into place. But the three main UK initiatives that have been announced — Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme, the Covid Corporate Financing Facility, and the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme — have basic requirements that effectively rule out scaled-up startups from applying.

These include provisions around having established credit ratings for public companies (as in the case of the bigger loan schemes), or financing that is too small (as in the case of the smaller loan schemes), or the scaled-up companies have annual revenues that are too high (both the CBILS and CLBILS schemes have respective turnover thresholds of £45 million and £500 million).

In the meantime, the UK government has made small moves to encourage startups to continue building in a more focused way — for example, last week it announced £50 million in grants to businesses that are building better “resiliency” products to help companies better weather crises like this in the future. But for companies that regularly see revenues (and corresponding expenses and losses) in the tens and hundreds of millions, grants in the tens of thousands of dollars are like putting drops of water into the ocean.

But with startups accounting for some 30,000 businesses and some 300,000 workers in the UK, and significant sums towards the country’s GDP and operations, it seems like a big problem to ignore for too long.

[letter follows below]

Dear Chancellor,

We greatly appreciate the significant steps that you have taken to help British businesses through the COVID-19 crisis. But as founders and CEOs of leading UK companies we are concerned that unless urgent changes are made to the current schemes then the high-growth UK tech sector will be put at risk.

As innovative companies we build technology and systems that transform sectors. For customers, we drive costs down, standards up and for society we create whole new categories of products and services. We are vital to productivity, clean growth and UK exports.

But unfortunately, the COVID-19 lending schemes you have put in place benefit established firms and do not help companies of the future such as ours.

The businesses we run serve millions of customers across the UK, and overseas. We are stepping up to help the country at this difficult time by helping tens of thousands of small businesses to continue operating, helping vulnerable customers get essential services and using innovative technology to give the NHS better tools to tackle the pandemic.

The high-growth tech sector has introduced innovative new products that have improved the lives of millions of customers in the UK and many more around the world. We have created huge numbers of high skilled jobs and we export across the globe.

Our sector will be crucial to helping the UK economy bounce back quickly after the pandemic. The UK tech community is a world class engine for innovation and growth, however, it has not yet received Government support, unlike our competitors in France and Germany.

Our companies have all invested in technology and growth rather than short term profitability, which means that we are currently unable to access the schemes which have been designed with longer-established businesses in mind. The current schemes that you have put in place – the Covid Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF), the Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CLBILS) and the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) – are not accessible to our businesses.

We are therefore writing to ask you to urgently set up a taskforce meeting of leading tech businesses to work with you and your officials to find a way for high-growth tech companies to be able to access the lending schemes you have already established or new schemes if necessary.

As you said in your Budget speech earlier this year, to help Britain’s businesses lead the next generation of high productivity industries, we need to invest in the technologies of the future. The high-growth tech sector has a vital role to play in the future success of the UK economy, and we urge you to work with us to ensure that it is helped through the crisis and that the UK is still the best place in the world to build a tech company.

Confirmed Signatories

Ali Parsa, Babylon

Joanna Shields, BenevolentAI

Peter Smith, Blockchain

Hayden Wood, Bulb

Azmat Yusuf, Citymapper

Poppy Gustafsson, Darktrace

Will Shu, Deliveroo

Marc Warner, Faculty

Stan Boland, Five AI

Hiroki Takeuchi, GoCardless

Nigel Toon, Graphcore

Herman Narula, Improbable

All major indices rose Wednesday, led by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which increased 3.44% to close above 23,000 for the first time since March 13.

Investors seemed heartened by comments made by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, who said Wednesday that the U.S. death count from COVID-19 is lower than initially modeled thanks. He warned that the death count will continue to climb even as new cases slow.

The action Wednesday followed rallies earlier this week. Still, it should be noted that the Dow Jones Industrial Average still closed below yesterday’s high of 23,537.44, suggesting that this could be a bear market run.

Here’s the breakdown at closing:

• Dow Jones rose 3.44%, or 779.71 points, to close at 23,433.57
• S&P 500 increased 3.41%, or 90.57, to close at 2,749.98
• NASDAQ popped 2.58%, or 203.64 points, to close at 8,090.90

Equities were also buoyed by oil prices and news that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, whose policies fueled concerns about higher taxes, was dropping out of the race.

The transportation saw a bump today. Uber rose 4.66% to close at $26.94. That’s still more than 34.7% below this year’s high of $41.27 reached in February. Meanwhile, Lyft also saw shares rise 7.78% to close at $29.64. Again, it’s the same story as Uber. Lyft’s share price is still off — about 45% — from the year-to-date highs.

Among today’s leaders were airlines, which have been one of the harder hit industries in this COVID-19 era. United led the pack with a 12.38% bump to close at $27.51, followed by American Airlines and Delta, which rose 109.% and 4.4% respectively. Tesla had a volatile day that ended nearly where it began, with a 0.62% increase to close at $548.84.

Automakers also saw shares rise. GM shares rose 8.59% to close at $23.13, while Ford increased 6.59% to $5.03 and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles closed up 3.15% to $7.86 a share.

NASA has chosen a new lunar surface delivery partner from its list of Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) vendors to actually transport stuff on its behalf – Mojave’s Masten Space Systems, which is being tapped by the agency to take eight payloads, including non science and tech instruments, to the Moon’s South Pole in 2022.

Masten is the fourth company awarded a lunar delivery contract under CLPS, after NASA announced that three other companies would be tasked with taking payloads back in May, 2019. Those included Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, as well as Orbit Beyond. Orbit Beyond later dropped out of its contract, though Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines are still aiming to deliver their payloads using landers they’ve created sometime next year.

The new Masten contract, like the others in the CLOPS program, is part of NASA’s Artemis program, which seeks to return human tot he surface of the Moon, and set up permanent scientific exploration there, with the ultimate aim of using it as a stepping stone to taking humans to Mars and potentially beyond. NASA has focused on public-private partnerships like those formed through the CLPS program to assist it in making its Moon and Mars missions possible, and bringing commercial interests along for the ride.

Masten’s contract is a $75.9 million award, that specifies end-to-end delevirey of the payloads, as well as their integration with the company’s XL-1 lander. They’re also required to land on the Moon and operate for at least 12 days post-landing. The specific instruments that XL-1 will carry include tools for measuring and mapping the lunar surface temperature, as well as radiation, and the presence of hydrogen and other gases that could indicate the presence of water.

The XL-1 lander developed by Masten is an evolution of lander designs that took part in, and won the NASA Centennial Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X-Prize Challenge in 2009. Masten has also developed and flown a number of vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) rockets on behalf of NASA, including the Xaero test vehicle.

Latin America’s leading legacy food delivery company iFood and Delivery Hero-owned Domicilios.com are merging in a bid to take on the food startup Rappi on its home turf.

The price of the transaction was undisclosed, but will result in iFood holding a 51% equity stake in the partnership, while Delivery Hero will hold the remaining 49%.

Domicilios, the Colombian online food ordering startup, raised $47.7 million before it exited to Berlin-headquartered Delivery Hero for an undisclosed price in 2014. And while iFood’s has operations in Colombia and Mexico in addition to Brazil, it hasn’t achieved the same kind of market penetration outside of its home country — where it serves +147,000 restaurants registered in over 1,000 cities.

iFood says the combined companies will have the largest geographic presence in Colombia with more than 12,000 restaurants in more than 30 cities across the country. With the merger, iFood inches closer to overtaking the top-spot in the Colombian market, behind the Bogota-based billion-dollar-valued hometown hero, Rappi. 

Rappi has raised a total of $1.4B in funding over 8 rounds, including a $1 billion injection from SoftBank in 2019 that marked the largest single investment into a Latin American startup. Despite that capital, Rappi was hit with a wave of layoffs in January 2020, cutting 6% of staff amounting to roughly 300 employees. 

We’re not certain whether the layoffs had any effect on the company’s valuation, which has been estimated at $3.5 billion. 

Since its launch, Rappi has expanded its delivery portfolio to pharmaceuticals, banking services, and furniture in addition to groceries and restaurant delivery. Investors in the Latin American market speculate that Rappi is burning money as it battles UberEats and Didi (also both heavily backed by SoftBank) 

iFood hopes the acquisition will boost business growth for restaurant and delivery partners in the region, while generating more competitive delivery products and services for Colombians. 

iFood prides itself on business intelligence and management solutions, and is backed by Movile Group and Just Eat, a leading global hybrid marketplace for online food delivery.

The coronavirus pandemic is expected to hit Brazilian retailers and restaurants hard, as zero-tech restaurants are forced to enable digital delivery to stay in business. In response, iFood announced a $9.8 million fund to help sustain restaurants within its network. 

Startups big and small, across all industries, are affected by the novel coronavirus pandemic. From Etsy to MongoDB, from Twilio to Foursquare, these companies are looking for ways to capitalize and ultimately thrive in what has become a survivalist landscape.

These companies also happen to be portfolio companies of one, Albert Wenger .

We’re excited to have Union Square Ventures’ Managing Director Albert Wenger join us for a live discussion on the impacts of COVID-19 on the firm, the advice he’s offering to his portfolio companies, and adaptation strategies for the broader startup ecosystem.

Wenger has been vocal about how startups should approach PPP loans, and has an interesting perspective on this week’s news of Foursquare merging with Factual. We’re amped to hear more from him on both topics and plenty more.

Before he began his investment career, Wenger was an entrepreneur himself, cofounding five (FIVE!) companies, including a management consulting firm, a hosted data analytics company, a technology subsidiary for Telebanc, and DailyLit (a service for reading books by email or RSS). Wenger also served as President of Del.icio.us prior to and through its sale to Yahoo.

We have a handful of questions we’d like to ask, but Wenger has graciously offered to answer questions from the audience, as well. So come prepared!

The chat will begin tomorrow (Thursday, April 9) at 12pm EDT/9am PDT and go for about an hour.

We look forward to seeing you there! Sign up here to add the call details to your calendar.

As more companies find their workflows upended by remote work in the pandemic crisis, there are plenty of SaaS startups aiming to sell them a new path to streamlining processes. Tonkean is an SF startup selling a no-code automation platform to do just that, and it’s in the fortunate position of just having closed a hefty Series A.

The company closed a $24 million round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tonkean’s team tells TechCrunch. Lightspeed’s Raviraj Jain is joining Tonkean’s board. The company has raised just over $31 million to date.

Their software is a robotic automation and management platform catered towards ops that integrates with a bunch of data sources and allows customers to set up their own customizations. These customizations can help with routing tasks to the right person, automating follow-ups or moving data between systems. The software is meant to enable nearly endless customizations but a big focus seems to be on stripping repeatable tasks from the workflows of ops teams or taking care of early steps in those processes.

“The future of enterprise software is adaptive and personalized,” CEO Sagi Eliyahu told TechCrunch in an interview.

The company frames its tech as “human-in-the-loop robotic process automation,” essentially using its no-code platform to allow the people completing tasks manually to create the automation processes for letting bots take over. The visual drag-and-drop workflow of creating these processes seems to be a big selling point. New customers can also shop around for functionality via templates added by other customers.

RPA has been a hot area in recent years with players like Automation Anywhere and UIPath achieving sky high private valuations. As the big players in the space focus on courting bigger and bigger clients, Tonkean’s tighter focus on streamlining workflows for operations teams could give them an inroad, even as they look to scale during uncertain times.

LinkedIn has pledged to making no COVID-related layoffs until at least June 2020, the professional network has confirmed to TechCrunch. While the promise is only until the end of the fiscal year, it follows the lead of Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s claim last month to have no significant layoffs for the next 90 days.

Other business leaders such as Bank of America’s CEO Brian Moynihan and Morgan Stanley’s CEO James Gorman have also agreed to pause any potential layoffs until the end of 2020.

Layoffs are trickling down to all industries, starting in the hospitality and travel industry and moving to recruitment startups and scooter companies. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, which serves as a social media platform for professionals and recruiters alike, is thus poised to be a critical connector for those laid off.

So as job security remains on everyone’s mind, LinkedIn’s promise to not have any layoffs will quell some of that fear within the organization, at least in the near future. LinkedIn has approximately 16,000 full-time employees across 30 cities in the world.

Regardless of how healthy LinkedIn may appear from this news, it’s not immune from making specific cost-saving measures as the economy struggles. The company, reports The Information, has “paused most of its hiring as it figures out business planning.” It had more the 1 million job applicants last year, according to the piece.