Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The decade-old New Media Ventures investment fund, which backs startup businesses and non-profits developing technologies to improve access to government, said it is raising a “Crisis Innovation Fund” aiming to provide matching grants for startups advancing democracy and centering marginalized communities.

The fund will offer grants and investments of between $25,000 and $250,000 to entrepreneurs developing businesses and tech-enabled services focused on progressive causes, the fund said.

“COVID-19 will be one of the biggest economic, political, and cultural turning points of our lifetime — but what the future holds depends entirely on our collective actions in the coming months and years,” said Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, President, New Media Ventures, in a statement. “This is a moment of great uncertainty and fear, but also one of great altruism and entrepreneurialism. Our new Crisis Innovation Fund will resource the most promising COVID-19-relevant ideas that emerge from the 2020 Open Call.”

Focused on founders with direct experience of the problems facing people of color, LGBTQ, poor and vulnerable communities, as well as companies and organizations that are “shifting power, building movements and sparking civic engagement,” the NMV is opening up a rolling process for funding.

The annual open call to provide seed funding for organizations has previously resulted in $50 million in commitments over the organization’s ten-year history. Previous investments from the investor’s 85 strong roster of companies include nonprofit organizations and for-profit companies like: ActBlue Civics, TurboVote, Upworthy, Attentive.ly (acquired by Blackbaud), Crowdtangle (acquired by Facebook), and SumOfUs.

WorkClout, a graduate of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 cohort, announced today that it has shifted its focus from manufacturing automation to manufacturing performance support and has raised a $2.3 million seed round.

The funding was led by Spider Capital with participation from Y Combinator, Liquid 2, Soma Capital, Pioneer Fund, Mehta Ventures and several individual investors.

When the company launched last year, it was looking at helping customers drive operational efficiency in their processes, but WorkClout founder and CEO Arjun Patel says they were seeing that there was a ceiling in terms of how much efficiency they could squeeze out of work processes using software.

At that point, Patel decided to take a step back and do some research to figure out how WorkClout could best help manufacturing customers with its software-based solutions. After surveying 124 manufacturers, he says that he realized that these companies really needed help training front-line workers, an area he says is called performance support.

“We found that most of the companies were saying that employees are the biggest challenge that they have to face in terms of how to engage them better or how to empower them better, because ultimately they realize people, even if there is automation, are still the driving force for a lot of sectors,” Patel told TechCrunch.

Towards the end of last year, the company built a new tool to help customers train employees for complex front-line tasks. The workers might have a phone or tablet, which shows them how to complete each task, and gives them feedback as they move through a set of tasks. It also enables these workers to communicate with one another and with management about issues they are seeing on the line. Managers can monitor communication and see how workers are doing on a back-end system in the office.

“We gave them the ability to allow employees to capture and share critical information in real time on the factory floor, where the goal is to actually create standardized multimedia and training content for machines, processes and stations, allowing new and existing employees to get better insight into their work, and at the same time, allowing employees to communicate better about problems on the floor and reduce downtime,” he explained.

Patel recognizes that this is a difficult time to pivot, but says he believes it puts the company in a better position to succeed in the long term. He has cut the team from nine to five employees in an effort to run lean for the short term.

He hopes to begin hiring again in the fourth quarter this year or, at the latest, by Q1 next year. He plans to use that time to build out the product and prepare for a big go-to market push whenever the economy begins to rebound.

He sees this money giving him a long runway of 2.5 years with the company’s current burn and revenue rates, and that should give him enough time to wait out the current economic downturn.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

We’ve dug into churn twice in the last week from an expert and data-based perspective. We’ve also spent a good amount of time talking to venture capitalists about how they are approaching today’s turbulent market.

This morning we’re adding to both conversations by bringing Menlo Ventures‘ Matt Murphy into the discussion. Murphy spent 16 years at Kleiner Perkins before joining Menlo Ventures in 2015. TechCrunch spoke with Murphy late last week, working to understand how startups should plan for what could prove a difficult Q2 and how churn expectations should adapt as the economy changes.

In Murphy’s view, Q1 startup results are likely to come in a bit better than some expect considering the how the quarter finished from a macroeconomic perspective. Q2, however, is a different beast. Murphy expects B2B startup growth to slow, which could make the world much harder for the cohort of startups with less than 18 months of cash; fundraising off slowing growth as valuations broadly dip is not a recipe for an enjoyable capital cycle.

So let’s talk about how Q2 is going to impact startups and how young companies might respond. After we get through the nitty-gritty stuff, I pulled a bit more from our interview as a treat, exploring what the Menlo Ventures investor thinks about the recent Notion deal, and how the firm’s portfolio is set up heading into a possible recession.

Planning for a turbulent Q2

Autonomous electric transportation startup Einride has taken a key step in its mission to deploy autonomous cargo pods on roads for commercial operations. The Swedish startup demonstrated its technology in use with one person remotely operating two pods at once, which is a fundamental part of their vision of multiple pods ultimately being overseen by one person essentially operating as a traffic controller.

The demonstration saw an operator oversee and remotely control the two driverless pods using a steering wheel controller and a surround view display using a number of monitors. The system demo shows how a pod can request that an operator take over manual control if it encounters an issue it can’t address via its onboard automated driving computer.

It’s a clever and practical way to bridge the gap between manually driven vehicles and fully autonomous transportation, while still changing the economics of fleet logistics. With a one-to-many model, Einride would be able to offer trucking companies big advantages in terms of costs and efficiencies, increasing the number of miles that can be driven without boosting headcount requirements. Plus, the electric drivetrains of the vehicles will add up to big fuel and ecological advantages when it comes to day-to-day operations.

Einride also says that its platform has the potential to change the dynamics of the profession of trucker, since it can provide comfortable, remote operations centers that replace long weeks on the road away form home. This could open up the industry to more potential employees and recruits, which is a crucial need since trucking has typically required more new drivers than the market could supply in the U.S. over the pas few years.

Einride’s demonstration included complex maneuvers including parking and pulling out from a busy transportation hub, and shows in practice the potential of their tech. The company announced a commercial trial with Coca-Cola’s official European bottling and distribution partner at the end of last year, and is continuing to work towards broad commercialization.

After a sharp Monday rally seemingly built on optimism that the impact of the global pandemic may have reached its zenith in Europe — and indeed that the United States might see a lower infection and mortality peak than some anticipated — shares once again rose this morning.

Here’s how the day looks a few minutes into the start of trading today, on this holiday-shortened week:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average: rose 886.67 at the open, or 3.91%, to 23,566.66
• S&P 500: climbed to 85.46, or 3.21%, to 2,749.14
• Nasdaq Composite: scaled 207.20, or 2.62%, to 8,120.44

Shares of SaaS and cloud companies, as measured by the Bessemer cloud index, were XXXX to start the day as well.

While the value of equities remain depressed from recent highs, yesterday’s close and today’s open have scrubbed quite a lot of red ink from the domestic market. However, volatility has been the only certainty for stock markets in recent weeks, so a few days’ trading should not be read as a longterm directional shift. Tomorrow could bring a selloff if the news turns.

Investors are hoping for a quick containment of COVID-19 and a rapid return to work, boosted by massive Federal stimulus and aid. It isn’t clear how realistic that scenario is, given rising unemployment and many states pursuing more weeks of shutdowns, and months of social distancing. How to value an economy that will either return to form slowly, or a bit more quickly than slowly, is hard. But, traders appear more sunny than not as they bid for shares today.

Earnings are next. Q1 2020 results are likely going to matter less than forecasts, so how companies talk about the future that investors are currently betting on and against will set the tone moving forward. Today, sitting between the start of the quarter, new unemployment claims data, and the real onset of earnings means that we’re in something of an information vacuum. And into such a lack of substance all sorts of optimism can blow.

Still, better positive thinking than negative, perhaps.

Just days after SoftBank announced that it would not consummate its $3 billion tender offer for WeWork shares that would have bought out some of the equity held by the company’s co-founder Adam Neumann along with venture capital firms like Benchmark and many individual company employees, the company is now retaliating, suing SoftBank over alleged breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty.

In a press statement this morning, the Special Committee of WeWork’s board said that it “regrets the fact that SoftBank continues to put its own interests ahead of those of WeWork’s minority stockholders.” WeWork’s Special Committee argues that SoftBank already received the benefits of the contract it signed last year, which included board control provisions. It’s demanding that SoftBank either complete the transaction, or offer cash to cover damages related to its scuttling of the deal.

Under the terms of the tender offer proposed in November last year, SoftBank would buy upwards of $3 billion in shares from existing shareholders with the transaction closing at the beginning of April. As part of the terms of that contract, the co-working company and SoftBank agreed to a set of performance milestones that WeWork agreed to meet in exchange for the secondary liquidity. Such terms are customary in most financial transactions.

SoftBank in its statement last week said that WeWork failed to meet a number of those performance requirements, and said that it was within its rights under the tender offer contract to walk away from the deal. WeWork’s financials have been rocked by the global pandemic of novel coronavirus, which has seen the company’s co-working facilities mostly closed worldwide as part of public health mandates for social distancing.

Given the disagreement between the parties, a lawsuit was all but inevitable.

SoftBank is WeWork’s largest shareholder, and if the tender offer had been completed, the Japanese telecom conglomerate would have owned roughly 80% of the co-working company.

The lawsuit was filed in Delaware Chancery Court. WeWork is more formally known as The We Company.

With in-person classes canceled, we’re about to start our online versions of Hacking for Defense and Hacking for Oceans (and here). The classes are built on the Lean Startup methodology: customer discovery, agile engineering and the business/mission model canvas. So how do our students get out of the building to do customer discovery when they can’t leave home? How do startups do it?

Reminder: What’s the point of talking to customers?

Talking to customers seems like a simple idea, but most founders find it’s one of the hardest things they have to do. Entrepreneurs innately believe they understand a customer’s problem and just need to spend their time building a solution. We now have a half-century of data to say that’s wrong. To build products people want and will really use, founders first need to validate the problem/need, then understand whether their solution solves that problem (i.e. finding product-market fit).

Finally, to have a better chance of a viable enterprise, they need to test all the other hypotheses in their business/mission model (pricing, demand creation, revenue, costs, etc.).

The key principles of customer development are:

1. There are no facts inside the building, so get the heck outside.
2. All you have are a series of untested hypotheses.
3. You can test your hypotheses with a series of experiments with potential customers.

Now with sheltering-in-place the new normal, we’ll add a fourth principle:

Austin-based SourceDay, which sells supply chain management software, said it raised $12.5 million in its latest round of financing.

The company developed software to manage the relationship between companies and the businesses they source raw materials from as part of their direct spending needs.

Baird Capital led the round with participation from existing investors including Silverton Partners, ATX Ventures and Draper Associates, the company said.

For companies dealing the supply chain shocks caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain management tools are more important than ever, according to the company.

“As businesses face unprecedented times, they are seeking faster answers to bigger challenges,” said Joanna Arras, Principal at Baird Capital and SourceDay’s newest board member, said in a statement. “More than ever, companies need resilient and agile supply chains. Poor supply chain visibility and inefficient collaboration will be crippling during this time of rapidly shifting demand. Baird Capital is proud to invest in SourceDay to help companies face these challenges head-on.”

The company counts over 6,000 manufacturers, distributors and suppliers among its customer base and said it would use the financing to further develop tools that can aid customers in their mitigation of supply chain risks.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is exposing the ways that outdated supply chain practices make manufacturers vulnerable,” said Tom Kieley, CEO, SourceDay, in a statement.

SourceDay is coming off a record-breaking year that saw the company add thousands of new customers and bringing the total amount of spending processed on its platform to over $66 billion. It now counts over 50 employees on staff since its launch in 2013.

Mozilla is launching version 75 of its Firefox browser today. As always, there are plenty of bug fixes and changes for developers who write web apps, but the marquee feature of this update is a refreshed address bar. Given how often you likely use the address bar — though these days it’s often more of a search bar than URL bar — that’s prime real estate in any browser and the kind of feature where users will quickly notice any changes.

Today’s update brings three major changes to the Firefox address bar. The one you’ll notice immediately is that when you click into the address bar it’ll open a list of your most visited site. If you have that site already open in a tab, that’ll get highlighted in the list and you can jump right to that tab with a shortcut (though that’s something I didn’t quite see in the preview releases yet). This list of most-visited sites is the same you see in Firefox’s new tab page and you can manage it from there, too.

When you start a search in the address bar, Firefox now also makes the autocompleted queries a bit easier to read. That’s a minor but welcome change.

With the redesign, the address bar is also getting a bit of a refreshed look and you’ll likely notice that it’s a bit larger, too. For the most part, though, it’s not a radical change.

As the Firefox team also announced today, Mozilla believes that it doesn’t need to make any changes to its 2020 release schedule for the time being, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. So while Google has decided to skip a version with its Chrome release schedule, you’re unlikely to see any changes to how Mozilla releases Firefox. But the team did take note of what today’s users are doing with their browser and has prioritized fixing issues with in-browser video conferencing systems, for example.

“Going forward, we will continue to examine all new features and planned changes with closer attention paid to backwards compatibility, and their potential for any user-facing issues,” the team writes today.

Healthcare security startup CyberMDX has raised $20 million in its latest round of fundraising, the company confirmed Tuesday.

The New York-based security company works primarily to secure medical devices and improve hospital network security through its cyber intelligence platform, which manages a hospital’s network-connected assets and devices, and monitors threats in real-time.

CyberMDX has become one of the more established cybersecurity startups in the medical space, despite being founded only four years ago. Its research arm has already identified a number of vulnerabilities in widely used medical devices, including an infusion pump and a networking protocol used in anesthesia and respiratory machines, prompting Homeland Security to send out an alert.

The $20 million raise was led by Europe’s largest insurance and risk management provider Sham, a division of Relyens Group, with participation from existing investors Pitango Venture Capital and Qure Ventures.

CyberMDX said it’ll use the $20 million to roll out its platform across new geographies and markets.

The funding could not have come at a more crucial time. With thousands of hospitals and medical facilities across the world feeling the strain from the coronavirus pandemic, CyberMDX wants its platform to help ease their burdens.

“Nowadays, in light of COVID-19 and unprecedented events, we see it as part of our mission to support the healthcare community in its challenging time,” said CyberMDX co-founder and chief executive Amir Magner.