Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Tyto Care, the provider of a home health diagnostic device and telemedicine consultation app, said it has raised $50 million in a new round of funding.

The round was led by Insight Partners, Olive Tree Ventures, and Qualcomm Ventures, according to a statement and brings the startup’s total capital raised to over $105 million.

The funding comes just as Tyto has seen a dramatic surge in demand brought by the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Tyto Care’s toolkit is being used as a telehealth diagnostic solution that was already seeing three times sales growth in 2019 alone.

Last year, the company inked a deal with Best Buy and works with most of the major telemedicine providers including American Well, Teladoc, and others.

Previous investors Orbimed, Echo Health, Qure, Teuza and others also participated in the new financing, the company said in a statement.

With the financing, Tyto Care is well positioned to both buy and build new tools based on its existing diagnostics platform as well as expand its home health testing kit into new areas.

Companies like Scanwell Health, are providing at-home diagnostic tests for things like urinary tract infections, and Tyto Care chief executive Dedi Gilad definitely sees options for new products around different kinds of at-home tests, the Tyto Care founder said in an interview.

All of this new capital comes with surging demand where Tyto Care’s telehealth technology is being used by every hospital in Israel to provide remote examinations of quarantined and isolated patients infected with COVID-19. Other hospital networks are also turning to the company’s diagnostics tools for similar applications, the company said.

The remote medical exams can protect health providers from exposure to SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and enables uninfected patients to get an examination of their basic health remotely, without needing to go to a medical facility.

“Over the past two years, Tyto Care has increased momentum faster than ever before and is playing a leading role in changing how people receive healthcare. Telehealth is heeding the call of the COVID-19 pandemic and we are proud that our unique solution is aiding health systems and consumers around the world in the fight against the virus,” said Gilad, in a statement. “This new funding comes at a pivotal moment in the evolution of telehealth and will enable us to continue to transform the global healthcare industry with the best virtual care solutions.”

Last valued at $5 billion, restaurant management platform Toast has joined the sweep of startups laying off employees due to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Toast reduced the size of its staff by 50% through layoffs and furloughs, according to a blog post from Toast’s CEO, Chris Comparato. It also reduced executive pays across the board, frozen hiring, halted bonuses, and pulled back offers.

The company’s flagship product helps restaurants process payments and handle orders through a mix of hardware and software. Think handheld ordering pads, self-service kiosks, and display systems for kitchens. It also connects businesses to food delivery services like Grubhub.

Toast sits on the bridge between two industries in the spotlight, for better or worse, right now: restaurants and fintech. But restaurants have been hit hard as eateries were forced to close down due to state mandates, or to simply promote social distancing. As a result, fintech companies that help restaurants work better and depend on foot traffic are seeing less transaction volume.

Comparato, in the blog post, cited how restaurant revenue broadly took a huge hit in March, which naturally trickled down to Toast’s operations.

“With limited visibility into how quickly the industry may recover, and facing slower than anticipated growth, we now find ourselves in the unenviable position of reducing our headcount,” he wrote. He noted that before the pandemic hit, Toast revenue grew 109 percent in 2019. In an interview with Crunchbase News in February, chief financial officer Tim Barash said that the company’s goal in the next few years is to go public.

The Toast employees laid off were offered a “severance package, benefits coverage, mental health support, and an extended window during which they can purchase vested stock options,” the blog post detailed. Toast is also developing a program to help those laid off or furloughed look for new roles, a move that mimics other efforts we’ve seen across the startup world.

Investors in Toast include TCV, Tiger Global Management, Bessemer Venture Partners and T. Rowe Price Associates.

As the world locks down borders and capital flows to brace for the impact of coronavirus, Brazilian startups continue to attract international attention. Three large acquisition deals dominated the Latin American tech headlines this month, all coming from the region’s largest country. As investments have waned, these deals offer hope for some increased liquidity in Latin America’s startup ecosystem. 

At the beginning of the month, Brazilian real estate leader Grupo ZAP was acquired by OLX Brasil for $640 million, solidifying the classifieds platform’s position in the local property market. The deal will enable OLX to offer its customers more than 12 million listings from 40,000 agencies and individuals. 

Grupo Zap merged with the property rental platform VivaReal in December 2017, becoming the de facto largest real estate portal in the country. While the brands have operated separately, they jointly receive more than 40 million visits per month to help Brazilians find properties for rental and purchase. The acquisition is still under review from Brazil’s antitrust agency, CADE, and will be finalized later this year.

Meanwhile, Peixe Urbano reported its intention to acquired Grow Mobility, the alternative mobility company created from the merger between Mexico’s Grin and Brazil’s Yellow. Peixe will own the majority share in the e-scooter and bike-share startup, which has recently struggled to turn a profit. After leaving 14 cities in February, Grin Mobility is only active in Brazil’s three largest cities today, as well as in a few countries around Latin America, despite a promising partnership with Rappi in 2019. Grow Mobility raised $150 million in January 2019 when Grin and Yellow merged and seemed to be one of the fastest-growing startups at the time; however, this deal is rumored to be a total write-off for the startup’s investors. 

Finally, a Swedish cloud communications platform called Sinch AB announced it would acquire Movile’s strategic communications company, Wavy, for $68.3 million (BRL$554 million) and more than 1.5 million shares in the publicly traded company. Movile is one of Brazil’s largest tech businesses, a telecommunications company striving to become the region’s Tencent. Wavy is Brazil’s second-largest messaging provider and also operates in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Paraguay, relaying more than 13 billion messages per year. Sinch will use the acquisition to grow into the Latin American market, where Wavy currently employs over 260 people across nine offices in the region. At the time of purchase, Wavy was growing at 200% year-on-year, hinting at strong growth for the new business over the coming years.

Movile also announced the arrival of a new CEO, Patrick Hruby, in the last week of March. His predecessor, Fabricio Bloisi, co-founder and CEO since 1998, will take a seat as board president and will continue to act as CEO of iFood. Hruby previously spent five months as an Executive in Residence at Movile, where he worked closely on operations with all Movile companies: iFood, MovilePay, PlayKids, Sympla, Wavy and Zoop. Movile is one of Brazil’s least-known unicorns, quietly building a mobile empire for the region with a goal of impacting over one billion people.

Credijusto raises $100M to support SMEs in need

The Mexican credit provider, Credijusto, announced in mid-March that it had received $100 million in debt from Credit Suisse to help the startup extend more loans to SMEs affected by the economic impact of the coronavirus. Small businesses in Mexico already struggle to access financing from banks, and the current economic projections will likely cause financial institutions to hold off on risky investments for the foreseeable future. 

Meanwhile, this credit crunch has caused a surge of interest in Credijusto’s products: online small-business loans. The startup uses an algorithm to rapidly calculate risk and interest rates, providing much-needed liquidity for SMEs struggling in the face of financial turmoil. Credijusto also recently raised a $100 million debt vehicle from Goldman Sachs, alongside a $42 million Series B equity round from Goldman and Point72 Ventures in September 2019. 

Cornershop, iFood: Keeping up with coronavirus delivery demands

While in the U.S., Instacart and Amazon are scrambling to keep up with the boom in delivery orders, Latin American delivery giants Cornershop and iFood face similar challenges. Mexican-Chilean delivery app Cornershop, which was acquired by Uber last year for $450 million, revealed they had just nine months of operating capital left as they face unprecedented order volume. 

Despite the large acquisition deal, Cornershop’s case remains under review by the Mexican antitrust organization, COFECE, which blocked their previous $225 million acquisition offer from Walmart. Cornershop’s co-founder and CEO Oskar Hjertonsson took to Twitter to share the challenges his company is facing as demand for grocery delivery surges due to coronavirus concerns. He notes that grocery delivery has become an essential service in many areas with severe quarantines, yet with the acquisition still in question, Cornershop does not have the resources to serve the current demand. 

Two Mexican regulators are currently fighting over the jurisdiction to review this case, which has been going on for more than six months without a resolution. Cornershop has been at the mercy of Mexican officials since June 2018, when they first announced their Walmart acquisition. On Twitter, Hjertonsson urges Mexican officials to move forward on the decision as soon as possible to capitalize on an opportunity to help millions of Latin Americans who are currently in lockdown, as well as bringing in the resources needed to protect their delivery staff.

At the same time, Brazil’s largest food delivery company, iFood, announced the launch of a new fund to help small restaurants survive the economic tumult brought on by the coronavirus. The food industry has been one of the hardest-hit by the pandemic, as many restaurants live on small margins. To combat this trend, iFood launched a $9.8 million fund that will support small restaurants within the iFood network. 

The company also announced that it would speed up receipt processing during April and May, helping small businesses receive their payments within seven days without extra cost. This measure will inject an additional $117 million into the Brazilian restaurant market. Finally, iFood seeks to support its restaurant partners by returning all fees they receive for delivery during the coronavirus epidemic. Realizing that restaurants must rely on delivery orders to survive this period, iFood has extended these measures to over 120,000 restaurant partners in 1,000 cities across Brazil. 

News and Notes: Vai.Car, ClassPass, Superlogica and NotCo

Despite public health and economic concerns about COVID-19, the Latin American startup ecosystem remained active this month, with startups raising large rounds from local and international firms alike. Brazil’s car rental startup Vai.car raised $85 million from the Brazilian investment platform XP Investimentos, which IPO’d at the end of 2019. The startup targets a young market by enabling medium-term car rentals that are delivered to the user’s door and unlocked with face recognition technology. Vai.car also partners with Uber and 99 to help drivers access vehicles from their fleet of more than 25,000 cars.

U.S. gym-sharing platform Classpass expanded aggressively into Latin America this month through the acquisition of Chile’s Muvpass and Argentina’s Clickypass. These platforms work similarly to Classpass, allowing users to access a network of gyms and fitness classes across the country. Classpass launched in Brazil in December 2019 and became the first unicorn of the decade, with a $285 million Series E in early 2020. 

The Brazilian payments management platform Superlogica raised a $63.5 million round from U.S. private equity firm Warburg Pincus in mid-March. Superlogica helps companies manage recurring payments using a subscription model powered by artificial intelligence. The startup currently serves customers in more than 45,000 rental properties around the country.

Chilean plant-based food tech startup, The Not Company, announced a partnership with Burger King to create a vegan Whopper across the United States. The RebelWhopper is made of plant-based meat and features NotCo’s signature NotMayo, a mayonnaise made without animal products, which rapidly became a household name in Chile. The Not Company raised $30 million from Bezos Ventures and other investors in 2019 and has continued to expand rapidly into Argentina and Brazil over the past year. 

The past six weeks have been characterized by global uncertainty about the future of the economy and international relations as COVID-19 has made its way into every country in the world. However, deal flow in Latin America was still strong in March, bringing large deals and several acquisitions, especially in Brazil, even as the country refuses to lock down to prevent the spread of the pandemic. Notably, despite travel restrictions, many of the deals this month were led by foreign VCs, hinting at a potential for quicker feedback loops in the region as investors disburse capital without traveling first. 

It is hard to see today what the new normal will be globally, and specifically in venture and tech in Latin America. Almost every country has closed its borders, some more forcefully than others, and many are waiting out the pandemic in some level of quarantine. Just Mexico and Brazil, the region’s largest economies, remain adamant about keeping their cities running normally, even encouraging their citizens to visit bars, restaurants and museums as their neighbors shutter businesses. Time will tell how this decision will affect startups and investments, as well as their citizens and political stability, across the region.

Activant Capital, a seven-year-old, Greenwich, Ct.-based growth equity firm that’s still making a name for itself, has managed to secure $255 million in fresh capital commitments, despite that the U.S. economy appears to be headed into a recession.

It’s something of a coup for founder Steve Sarracino. It also begs the question: who is Steve Sarracino, and why are people trusting him and his 10-person firm with their investing dollars?

To find out more, we reached him last week at his home, where  — like a lot of us — his young children whooped and hollered in the background. Amid the din, he explained his trajectory to date: Wharton. Summer internship at McKinsey. A gig as a vice president at the private equity firm American Capital, where he cut his teeth working on buyouts. He also recounted joining a small venture and private equity firm in San Francisco called Serent Capital that was cofounded by two former McKinsey partners.

It’s there were the story arc changes a bit. Sarracino says he got himself fired from that last job, and that he found himself in 2009 with “literally no job [prospects]” and “nothing to do.” Worried about losing any momentum he had begun to gather, he talked with mentors who told him if he wanted to stick with investing, he’d better start doing one deal at a time and hope these turned out.

They did. In fact, by 2015, Sarracino persuaded investors to commit $75 million to Activant’s debut fund. Its second fund closed with $129 million in 2017.

He called it a “super interesting way to start the firm,” and also a “long process,” but today, Activant sits between venture and growth deals, with a 15-year investing horizon and a concentrated approach to taking stakes in companies, many of which happen to center around e-commerce infrastructure and payments.

One of these is Bolt, a young San Francisco-based company that’s trying to build a more seamless checkout process for online retailers that compete with Amazon and, toward that end, integrates with shopping carts used by customers of Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento, for example. It last year closed on $68 million in Series B funding led by Activant and Tribe Capital and has raised $90 million altogether.

A more recent check went to Deliverr, a San Francisco-based logistics and fulfillment company that promises its customers fast delivery by renting warehouse space around the country versus using centralized warehouse model the company closed on $40 million in Series C funding earlier this year led by Activant. (Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen also joined the round.)

Activant has also in recent months backed Finix, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based payments infrastructure company whose Series B round Sequoia Capital led but later backed out of, citing a conflict of interest. (As we reported last month, Sequoia simply walked away from its $21 million investment in Finix because of its ties to the powerful payments company Stripe, which might not have liked the tie-up.)

Without specifying how much Activant has invested in each of these companies, Sarracino said last week that checks from the firm typically range from $25 million to $65 million, though the team has gone “as low as $15 million.” He said Activant — which also backed the predictive analytics company Celect before it sold last year to Nike —  will also occasionally write $3 million or $4 million checks into young startups that are too early-stage for the outfit but that it wants to track closely.

Asked how big a stake it wants for its checks, Sarracino insisted that it doesn’t think in terms of targets. It instead “targets returns.” He also said he doesn’t care who else is involved in a company before Activant finds it. Though somewhat hard to believe, he tells us that when the firm is discussing deals, no one on the team is allowed to bring up who invested in a company previously because he doesn’t want a particular brand (or lack thereof) to influence Activant’s decision-making.

As for its newest fund, even while it’s roughly twice the size of its last vehicle, Sarracino said the plan is to continue to make three to four investments each year and that the portfolio will feature just eight or nine portfolio companies when all is said and done.

Before we parted ways, we had to ask about fundraising in the age of Covid-19. We wondered if perhaps the firm closed its newest fund earlier this year, before the spread of coronavirus turned the U.S. economy upside down, and was just announcing it belatedly.

He said it closed on March 31, and that commitments to Activant’s newest efforts came from North American and European “foundations, endowments, family offices that donate incredibly amounts of money . . .”

He said that to “hold this thing together through March was a testament to our business.”

He sounded relieved. He also sounded like right now, he sees Activant’s mission – – beyond making money —  as helping small- and medium-size businesses bounce back from the brink, where many are hanging on by their fingernails at the moment. Indeed, he said the firm is actively looking for more infrastructure plays toward that end.

“More than ever, we can’t allow the SMB world to get hollowed out here by Amazon. I do think making their e-commerce businesses more robust [through bets like Deliverr and Bolt]  can help get them back.”

NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program is all about making high-risk, high-reward bets on unique — and sometimes eyebrow-raising — ideas for space exploration and observation. This year’s grants total $7M and include one of the most realistic projects yet. It might even get made!

NIAC awards are split into three tiers: Phase I, II, and III. Roughly speaking, the first are given $125K and 9 months basically to show their concept isn’t bunk. The second are given $500K and two years to show how it might actually work. And the third get $2 million to develop the concept into a real project.

It speaks to the, shall we say, open-mindedness of the NIAC program that until this year there have only been two total recipients of Phase III awards, the rest having fallen by the wayside as impractical or theoretically unsound. This year brings the third, a project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory we first noted among 2018’s NIAC selections.

Artist’s concept of how the resulting image might look.

The “solar gravitational lens” project involves observing the way light coming from distant explanets is bent around our sun. The result, as the team has spent the last two years reinforcing the theory behind, is the ability to create high-resolution images of extremely distant and dark objects. So instead of having a single pixel or two showing us a planet in a neighboring star system, we could get a million pixels — an incredibly detailed picture.

“As this mission is the only way to view a potentially habitable exoplanet in detail, we are already seeing the significant public interest and enthusiasm that could motivate the needed government and private funding,” the researchers write.

Several of the Phase II projects are similarly interesting. One proposes to mine ice-rich lunar soil in permanently dark areas using power collected from permanently bright areas only a few hundred meters up in tall “Sunflower” towers. Another is a concept vehicle for exploring vents on the Saturn’s watery moon Enceladus. One we also saw in 2018 aims to offload heavy life support systems onto a sort of buddy robot that would follow astronauts around.

The Phase Is are a little less consistent: antimatter propulsion, extreme solar sails, and others that aren’t so much unrealistic as the science is yet to come on them.

The full list of NIAC awards is here — they make for very interesting reading, even those on the fringe. They’re created by big brains and vetted by experts, after all.

Jack Dorsey announced in a series of tweets today that he is shifting $1 billion in his Square equity to create a fund dedicated to COVID-19 relief. The Twitter and Square CEO is calling the fund Start Small and posting a tally of disbursements and recipients in a public spreadsheet.

Dorsey said in his announcement that the new initiative will shift the focus to other causes at some point.

The first Start Small contribution listed is $100,000 to America’s Food Fund — an effort led by Leonardo DiCaprio and Laurene Powell Jobs dedicated to providing meals to vulnerable populations disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Other top backers of America’s Food Fund include Oprah Winfrey ($1 million) and Apple ($5 million), according to the organization’s GoFundMe page.

That’s what we know so far from a tweet posted Tuesday afternoon by the American tech entrepreneur who co-founded and leads not one, but two publicly listed companies.

There’s still a lot to learn about Dorsey’s new initiative, including how it will be managed, whether it will make investments (along with donations) and how to apply for funding. TechCrunch has asked Square for additional details and will update this post when we hear back.

American equities closed down today, with the major domestic indices all losing ground after a wild trading cycle. After starting the day up sharply higher after strong Monday gains, those gains were erased as the day closed. It was a day of confusing movement; the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite, to pick an example, had a range on the day of more than 3%, despite closing off just a tenth of that figure.

Divining the correct reason for movement in the stock market is a fool’s errand most days. Today, however, it isn’t hard to point to at least part of the reason for the reversed gains: a possibly record-setting one-day domestic death toll from COVID-19. Per collected data, deaths for the day as of the time of writing came to 1,690, with several high-infection states yet to report.

Here are the day’s results:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA): -26.13, -0.12%
• S&P 500: -4.27, -0.116%
• Nasdaq Composite: -25.98, -0.33%

Shares of SaaS and cloud companies dropped more sharply, with the Bessemer cloud index falling 1.88% on the day. Oil also fell, with WTI crude dropping more than 7% as of the time of writing.

Are you a bit sandblasted by all the volatility? Let’s update you on how the major indices have performed since their recent highs:

• DJIA change from 52 week highs: -23.4%
• S&P 500 change from 52 week highs: -21.63%
• Nasdaq Composite change from 52 week highs: -19.83%

And for good measure, the Bessemer cloud index is off 24.09% from recent highs. So everything is in bear market territory at the moment — even after Monday’s huge gains — except for the Nasdaq Composite, which remains merely in deep correction. Not great news for anyone with a 401k balance, but the numbers were worse on Friday.

Today the market tried to go up again and failed. Let’s see what tomorrow’s COVID-19 data shows us. It just may drive the markets yet again.

A number of startups over the years have promised to re-invent email only to have fallen short. Even Google’s radical re-imagining, the Inbox app, finally closed up shop last year. Today, another company is announcing its plans to build a better inbox. Edison Software is preparing to launch OnMail, a new email service that lets you control who enters your inbox. This is handled through a new blocking feature called Permission Control. The service is also introducing a number of other enhancements, like automatic read receipt and tracker blocking, large attachment support, fast delivery, and more.

Edison is already home to the popular third-party email app, Edison Mail.

Edison Mail is designed to work with your existing email, like your Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, or iCloud email, for example, among others. OnMail, however, is a new email service where users will be assigned their own email account at @onmail.com when the product debuts later this summer.

At launch, the web version of OnMail will work in a number of browsers. It will also work in the existing Edison Mail apps for Mac, iOS, and Android.

The biggest idea behind OnMail is to create a better spam and blocking system.

Though Gmail, Outlook.com, and others today do a fairly decent job at automatically filtering out obvious spam and phishing attempts, our inboxes still remain clogged with invasive messages — newsletters, promotions, shopping catalogs, and so on. We may have even signed up for these at some point. We may have even tried to unsubscribe, but can’t get the messages to stop.

In other cases, there are people with our email address who we’d rather cut off.

The last time Gmail took on this “clogged inbox” problem was in 2013 when it unveiled a redesigned inbox that separated promotions, updates, and emails from your social media sites into separate tabs. OnMail’s premise is that we should be able to just ban these emails entirely from our inbox, not just relocate them.

OnMail’s “Permission Control” feature allows users to accept or decline a specific email address from being able to place mail in your inbox. This is a stronger feature than Edison Mail’s “Block Sender” or “Unsubscribe” as a declined sender’s future emails will never hit your inbox — well, at least not in a way that’s visible to you.

In technical terms, declined senders are being routed to a folder called “Blocked.” But this folder isn’t displayed anywhere in the user interface. The blocked emails won’t get pulled up in Search, either. It really feels like the unwanted mail is gone. This is all done without any notification to the sender — whether that’s a human or an automated mailing list.

If you ever want to receive emails from the blocked senders again, the only way to do so will be by reviewing a list of those senders you’ve banned from within your Contacts section and make the change. You can’t just dig into a spam folder to resurface them.

In another update that puts the needs of the receiver above those of the sender, OnMail will remove all information sent from any invisible tracking pixels.

Today, most savvy email users know to disable images in their Gmail or other mail apps that allow it, so their email opens are not tracked. But OnMail promises to remove this tracking without the need to disable the images.

“We view pixel tracking as this horrific invasion of privacy and this is why we block all read receipts,” noted Edison Co-Founder and CEO, Mikael Berner. “The sender will never know that you opened their email,” he says.

Other promised features include an improved Search experience with easy filtering tools, support for large attachments, enhanced speed of delivery, and more.

Edison says it’s been working to develop OnMail for over two years, after realizing how broken email remains.

Today, U.S. adults still spend over 5 hours per day in our inboxes and feel like they’ve lost control. Tracking pixels and targeted ads are now common to the email experience. And searching for anything specific requires complicated syntax. (Google only recently addressed this too, by adding filters to Gmail search — but just for G Suite users for now.)

It may be hard for people who have set up shop for 10 or 20 years in the same inbox to make a switch. But there’s always a new generation of email users to target — just like Gmail once did.

And now that Gmail has won the market with over 1.5 billion active users, its innovations have slowed. Every now and then Gmail throws a bone — as with 2018’s debut of Smart Compose, for example — but it largely considered the email problem solved. A little fresh competition is just the thing it needs.

“We’ve invested years as a company working to bring back happiness to the inbox,” said Berner, in a statement. “OnMail is built from the ground up to change mail. Nobody should fear giving out their address or have to create multiple accounts to escape an overcrowded mailbox,” he said.

OnMail’s premise sounds interesting. However, its software is not yet live so none of its claims can be tested at this time. But based on Edison’s history with its Edison Mail app, it has a good handle on design and understanding what features email users need.

Currently, OnMail is open only to sign-ups for those who want to claim their spot on its platform first. Like Gmail once did, OnMail will send out invites when the service becomes available.

Sony has revealed the design of the PlayStation 5‘s controller – a follow-on to its popular DualShock line that takes on a new name for a new generation: DualSense.

The DualSense controller is kitted out in black and white, and looks like a futuristic, plastic armor-plated robot companion more than a gamepad in some ways. It’s still recognizably a product of the DualShock legacy, however, and has the same familiar button layout as previous PlayStation controllers. The DualSense incorporates haptic feedback, however, for what Sony says will be a heightened sense of immersion in gaming.

Haptic feedback should be an improvement over the relatively general and non-specific rumble vibration of current generation controllers, and Sony has also added more tactile response thanks to new L2 and R2 “adaptive triggers” that provide different kinds of tensions response when performing in-game actions, like “drawing a bow to shoot an arrow,” the company says.

The resulting physical design is a bit chunkier than the DualShock 4, with more room needed inside the case for that adaptive trigger tech. Still, Sony said that it has redesigned the component angles to produce a controller that feels a lot lighter in the hand than it looks.

This controller also does away with the dedicated “Share” button, but replaces it with a “Create” button that sounds like it should offer similar features and much more, though Sony isn’t yet ready to tip its hand as to exactly what that entails and promises more details to follow.

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Meanwhile, there’s a new built-in mic array for voice chat without any headset required – though it sounds like this is intended primarily as a ‘you have it in case you need it’ feature than a dedicated input, since Sony is still advocating use of a headset for longer play sessions.

From a pure looks perspective, Sony clearly decided it wanted to go a bit more bold than its standard all-black look for the first version of a new controller it ships with a console. The two-tone, Stormtrooper palette is complemented by a new light bar that lines both sides of the central touchpad.

Personally, I love this look – and the USB-C port that you can spy at the top of the controller for charging. I don’t even know if I’m all that interested in a new generation of console, but the controller alone might convince me to upgrade.

Pretty much everyone is getting socked by the Covid-19 shutdown. Among the latest to say so in a public way is Away, the trendy, five-year-old, New York-based travel brand that has raised roughly $180 million from investors over the years, including a $100 million round last year that pegged the company’s valuation at $1.4 billion — nearly three times what it was valued a year earlier.

With travel down nearly 100 percent as the coronavirus makes its way across the U.S. and world, the company has seen sales of its product fall off a cliff, say company founders Steph Korey and Jen Rubio in a new Medium post. Specifically, they disclosed today, sales of their luggage, bags, and interior organizers have fallen by more than 90 percent over the past few weeks.

The company, which began as a direct-to-consumer brand, first took steps to reduce its burn rate by shuttering its now ten retail stores, while paying its retail teams “during what we hoped would be short-term closures.”

Unsurprisingly, given that human capital is typically a company’s biggest cost center, that strategy go far enough, so the company is having to furlough “about half” of its team and it’s laying off another 10%, it says.

Say Korey and Rubio in their post, “This was a devastating decision and one we considered only as a last resort. The pride we once had in the creation of so many opportunities for people is now fear, frustration, and concern for a large number of people who didn’t deserve this outcome. Many of these are people we personally hired, and many more are friends.”

The founders are also suspending their own salaries, they add, and they say senior leadership at the company has agreed to reduced salaries.

Away is doing this exactly the right way, by the way.

Rubio and Korey say those laid off will receive a minimum of eight weeks of severance and will see their healthcare coverage through the end of June.

The company says it has also waived the vesting cliff on equity and extended the exercise period of stock options so affected employees don’t have to make decisions surrounding their equity while they are figuring out how next steps for themselves.

They also note that owing to government assistance, its furloughed employees — many of whom work in customer support — should continue to receive 100% of their wages and benefits until they can resume work full time.

Away was described by some former employees as having a toxic culture owing in part to CEO Korey’s management style in The Verge late last year.  Korey apologized and stepped aside as a result, but weeks later she announced through the New York Times that, on second thought, she wasn’t going to give up her role at the company, a role she currently shares with Stuart Haselden, who joined the company from Lululemon Athletica.

Whether to two continue to share this role is another question and one that presumably depends on how long the current downturn lasts.

But Away is smart to do everything in its power for employees whom it can no longer pay and to get ahead of employee leaks about the layoffs by posting the news itself to Medium.

It’s not the first, of course. Last week, as one example, the CEO of Minted, Mariam Naficy, also posted on Medium her letter to employees about layoffs at the company and precisely what former staffers could expect in the way of severance.  Still, it’s savvy, it’s compassionate, and it certainly stands in contrast to how other startups have handled layoffs — and how they will be remembered for their management style because of it.