Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Starting today, some U.S. Facebook users will see a new pop-up on the app asking them to fill-out a survey about COVID-19. The survey, from Carnegie Mellon University’s Delphi epidemiological research center, is one of many new symptom mapping projects that seek to anticipate where the next wave of the virus will hit as COVID-19 sweeps through populations the world over.

As if often the case in research, the challenge for these symptom mapping efforts is attracting a large enough sample of respondents to paint a statistically meaningful picture. Carnegie Mellon’s research effort will get a big leg up from Facebook, which may promote similar surveys in different parts of the world if this one goes well.

While some other projects require users to download an app or find their way to an obscure web portal, Facebook’s promotion of the Carnegie Mellon survey means it can instantly reach a portion of users from the largest pool of online users any social network has ever collected. Facebook declined to provide details on how many users will be seeing the new prompt, but even a sub-section of Facebook’s U.S. users over the age of 18 would likely be massive from a data collection standpoint.

Many U.S. symptom tracking projects launched as the virus exploded over the last month, including a new app from Pinterest’s co-founder and others from research institutes like Harvard and New York’s Weill Cornell Medicine. The idea is that tracking self-reported symptoms could provide geographical insights that bolster the limited testing data available now.

While users might be understandably wary of a research effort promoted by Facebook given its recently fairly notorious record on user privacy, the company’s knowledge of who you are won’t be linked to the university’s data, which will be examined in aggregate. According to Facebook’s announcement, the survey data collected will aid public health planning around resource allocation and eventually “when, where and how to reopen parts of society.”

The company announced the effort along with an expanded set of disease prevention maps which the company will make available to researchers as part of its “Data for Good” initiative.

“Our real focus is on democratizing mental healthcare,” says SonderMind co-founder chief executive, Mark Frank.

His company, founded back in 2017, is having a moment. With the restrictions and economic stresses caused by the government’s efforts to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic in the US, demand for mental health services is soaring. And it’s compounding what was already a mental health crisis in the US. 

A 2019 article from Bloomberg Businessweek laid out the scope of the problem in stark terms. In 2017, 47,000 people died by suicide in the US and there were 1.4 million suicide attempts — a suicide rate that’s the country’s highest since World War II, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Drug overdoses, another measure of the nation’s anguish, killed 70,000 people in 2017. Another 7% of U.S. adults reported suffering at least one major depressive episode in 2018.

Taken together, the data points to a tremendous health problem. One that the current healthcare system is only now grappling with.

SonderMind’s chief executive sees his company as part of the solution.

Most mental health practitioners don’t operate within a healthcare network or take insurance, which means that the only folks with access to care are the ones that can afford the high price of therapy. SonderMind changes that equation by offering practitioners a toolkit and back office services so they can bill insurance providers and take care of the operational side of running a healthcare practice. It also acts as a funnel, gauging the needs of potential patients and connecting them to the therapists that are best suited to provide them the care they need. That lets practitioners focus on seeing patients, the company said.

The company currently counts 500 providers on its marketplace, which operates in Colorado, Arizona, and Texas, and has raised $27 million in its latest round of financing to extend its services to other parts of the US.

The San Francisco-based investment firm General Catalyst led the financing which also included additional new investors F-Prime Capital and participation from previous investors like the Kickstart Seed Fund, Diōko Ventures (managed by FCA Venture Partners) and Jonathan Bush. 

“This financing provides the fuel to support our growth objectives and advance our mission to make behavioral health more accessible, approachable and utilized by building a modern marketplace that holds great appeal to both clinician and patient,” said Mark Frank, co-founder and chief executive officer of SonderMind, in a statement.

The investment extends General Catalyst’s funding into healthcare services in recent years and represents a continued emphasis on healthcare services for the firm. “Healthcare is obviously a really important thesis for GC as a whole,” says Holly Maloney Burbeck, a managing director at General Catalyst. “This is going to be one of the largest value drivers for VC this decade.”

General Catalyst already had a robust portfolio of healthcare focused companies — including Livongo, OM1, and Oscar Health

For Maloney Burbeck, the investment in SonderMind grew out of the firm’s exposure to mental health investment through another portfolio company, Mindstrong Health. “Mindstrong forced us to explore… access to care and finding care,” says Maloney Burbeck. 

The General Catalyst investor sees the investment in SonderMind as also helping to open doors for more people to join the profession.

“It helps people to start their business for sure. It helps more people pursue it as a career path,” she said. And that’s good for a country where more mental health professionals and better access to care are desperately needed. 

Airbnb said Monday that it has raised $1 billion in debt and equity from private equity firms Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners, even as the online rental marketplace has seen its business plummet due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus, has prompted governments to issue stay at home orders that triggered a wave of cancellations in the travel and hospitality industries.

“While the current environment is clearly a difficult one for the hospitality industry, the desire to travel and have authentic experiences is fundamental and enduring,” Silver Lake Co-CEO and Managing Partner Egon Durban said in a statement. “Airbnb’s diverse, global, and resilient business model is particularly well suited to prosper as the world inevitably recovers and we all get back out to experience it.”

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky acknowledged Monday that while the desire to connect and travel has been reinforced during this time, the “way it manifests will evolve as the world changes.”

The expectation of this evolution has spurred Airbnb to direct its attention and new funds towards three core products: hosts, long-term stays and Airbnb experiences.

Last month, Airbnb said it would direct $250 million to help hosts who have been impacted by COVID-19. The funds will be used to pay a host 25% of what they would normally receive through their cancellation policy if a guest cancels a reservation due to COVID-19 between March 14 and May 31. Airbnb said this policy applies retroactively to all cancellations during that period.

The move was an attempt by Airbnb to make amends to its hosts who complained that the company’s policy would allow guests to cancel reservations and receive a full refund. That policy, which is still active, lets guests who booked reservations on or before March 14 that begin anytime on or before May 31 to cancel and receive a standard refund or travel credit.

Looks like things haven’t gone completely smoothly with Quibi‘s launch.

The issue appears to have been resolved, but the Quibi customer support account tweeted this afternoon that “some users may be experiencing problems with the Quibi app,” only to add an hour later that “Users should once again be able to use the Quibi app normally. Thank you for your patience.”

It’s not clear how widespread the outage was, but according to The Verge, one staffer saw an error screen and was unable to browse the app, while another was another to create an account. The app seems to be working normally as I write this shortly after 4pm Eastern.

If nothing else, it’s a reminder that reliably delivering streaming video is hard, even for a startup that’s raised $1.75 billion. Heck, even Disney experienced widespread streaming issues when it launched Disney+ in November. (It all worked out fine.)

A quick catch-up for those of you still wondering what Quibi even is: It’s a short-form video service founded by Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and led by CEO Meg Whitman (previously CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and eBay).

The app is launching with nearly 50 shows today, all of them created specifically for mobile, with episodes that are less than 10 minutes long. After a 90-day free trial, it’ll cost you $4.99 with ads or $7.99 per month without ads.

Stocks rallied Monday, with all major indices snapping back into positive territories as investors seized on any positive developments in the fight to mitigate the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus.

The stock market is, of course, not the economy. And this is likely a dead cat bounce — a temporary recovery after a big fall. The question is how many dead cat bounces will we see in the coming weeks?

And while the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic is continuing that didn’t stop investors from grasping at data from John Hopkins University that suggests the number of new COVID-19 cases is slowing. The institution’s coronavirus map, which has become a go-to source, showed 25,200 new cases rising on March 31, then rising to 33,300 new cases by April 3. Those numbers dropped to 28,200 new cases April 4, per its data; other trackers have posted slightly different results.

Today’s rally will be tested in the days and weeks to come as COVID-19 cases continue and eventually hit a peak before plateauing. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, has warned that cases, and deaths, will likely surge in the next week.

Here are the day’s results:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average: up 7.59%, or 1,597.21 points, to close at 22.649.74
• S&P 500: rose 6.95%, or 172.86 points, to close at 2,661.51
• Nasdaq composite: popped 7.33%, or 540.15 points, to close at 7,913.24

There were other indirect COVID-19 fundamentals such as new sales guidance or analyst notes that also moved certain stocks.

E-commerce stocks, including eBay and Amazon saw positive movement. Online retailer Wayfair was perhaps the biggest mover in this category. The company’s shares opened 36% higher after reporting its gross revenue growth rate more than doubled at the end of March. Wayfair shares closed up 41.7% to $71.50.

Music streaming company Spotify saw shares decline more than 4% after Raymond James downgraded the stock from “strong buy” to “market perform,” citing that COVID-19 was causing less engagement and fewer downloads as users spend more time indoors. Spotify shares did manage to bounce back during the day and ended up closing up nearly 0.33% to $122.52.

Shares of SaaS companies rallied on the day as well, with the Bessemer cloud index rising 6.79% on the day; shares of SaaS companies, modern software firms, have enjoyed strong revenue multiples in recent years. They have tracked the broader indices down, however, and remain in bear-market territory.

Looking ahead, we’re entering earnings season during a period of intense economic uncertainty; how the stock market performs in the future will at least partially depend on how companies performed in Q1 2020, and what they project for the future. Get ready.

While a number of startups have been hard hit by efforts to curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus, refurbishing firm Back Market is showing increased growth globally.

The Paris -based startup encourages customers to send in their old devices so they can be refurbished and resold into the e-commerce secondhand market. The growth achieved in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis is partly due to increased laptop sales as people seek better devices to work remotely.

For people who are unsure whether refurbished products are reliable, Back Market permits customers to send in old devices, exchange them for newer versions and pay the difference. CEO Thibaud Hug de Larauze said this payback service is currently possible only in France, but starting in Q2, it will be available in other markets.

Founded in 2014, Back Market has raised a total of €48 million in funding over two rounds, most recently a Series B in June 2018. The company is profitable and reportedly still has money to spend from its last funding round.

“We don’t release the gross merchandise volume, but it’s a three-digit growth rate,” Hug de Larauze told TechCrunch. “We saw an increase in demand for laptops, printers and other devices needed for working at home. Demand for refurbished phones is going down as people seek to get the first necessity items, like food for their situation.”

Over the past two weeks, Back Market saw skyrocketing demand from Italy, a nation with a high coronavirus death toll where citizens were warned they would be confined to their homes for four weeks.

Another factor that helped the platform’s growth: Smartphone brands like Apple and Samsung closed their retail stores, a move that turned Back Market into a major supply channel. While offline retailers and carriers are shut down in Europe, Hug de Larauze says Chinese offline retailers and refurbishing factories are starting to get back to work.

TechCrunch confirmed today that BounceX (the firm is rebranding this year) has executed layoffs and salary cuts in the wake of recent COVID-19-led economic disruptions.

Many startups are undergoing staff cuts as the domestic and global economies slow, making individual reductions less newsworthy as the layoff tally rises. However, as BounceX is a company we’ve recently highlighted for its growth and capital efficiency, its own cuts are worth noting.

Reductions

TechCrunch was tipped concerning the BounceX staff cuts and salary reductions earlier today, events that the company confirmed this afternoon. Our original tipster pegged the cuts at around 20% of staff, with pay cuts for the rest of its denizens.

The company confirmed the existence of salary cuts and layoffs, but did not affirm our figures. Here’s BounceX on its hard day; the firm confirmed pay cuts via a spokesperson separately from this comment:

COVID-19 has hit our client base really hard, especially if they had significant retail presence. In order to accommodate clients and help stabilize our business & their businesses, we made the immensely difficult decision to move forward with a reduction in force. While we expected over 30% growth this year and adding 150 new roles by year end, we were forced to consolidate roles in order to do everything we could to take care of as many of our people as possible and continue to help our clients get through this.

It is not a surprise that BounceX was planning revenue growth and 150 new roles; the company recently crossed the $100 million ARR threshold, an event that TechCrunch covered as part of our long-running series focused on companies that reach the revenue threshold.

Indeed, in February, when BounceX shared the milestone, the firm also announced a rebrand, stating that it would change its name to Wunderkind. As you can read from the name, BounceX was feeling good at the time, looking to the future, proud of its growth and track record of efficient capital use.

As TechCrunch wrote at the time:

Wunderkind has been super efficient to date, with [CEO Ryan] Urban telling TechCrunch that “the amount of equity [his company has] actually put to work is probably sub-$35 million,” with less than $50 million in equity capital raised. The company also has debt lines that it can use, the CEO noted.

Given its history of conservative capital management, it doesn’t seem likely that BounceX is in existential danger after its layoffs. The company’s debt line — though we don’t know anything about its covenants — could provide more cushion. But its quick turnaround in fortunes shows how fast things can change.

The impact of COVID-19 on BounceX shows that no company, no matter how successful they were in February, is safe in April. Heck, TripActions was crowing about a huge new debt facility it secured right before COVID-19; the firm has since pared staff as well.

A new COVID-19 vaccine candidate is entering Phase 1 clinical human testing today, after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) accepted an application from Inovio Pharmaceuticals under the regulator’s Investigational New Drug program. Inovio plans to inject its first volunteer test subject with the INO-4800 DNA vaccine candidate it has developed, following promising results from preclinical studies performed on animals that did indicate increased immune response.

The Inovio DNA vaccine candidate works by injecting a specifically engineered plasmid (a small, independent genetic structure) into a patient so that their cells can produce a desired, targeted antibody to fight off a specific infection. DNA vaccines, while available and approved for a variety of animal infections in veterinary medicine, have not yet been approved for human use.

That said, Inovio’s work isn’t starting from scratch: The company previously completed a Phase 1 study for a DNA vaccine candidate for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), where it showed promising results and a high level of antibodies produced in subjects that persisted for an extended period of time.

Inovio has been able to scale up quickly, developing and producing “thousands of doses” of INO-4800 in just a few short weeks in order to support its Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials. The company has done so in part thanks to backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as funding from other non-profits and organizations. If clinical trials are succeeding, Inovio says that it will be able to have up to one million doses of the vaccine ready by end of year, for use both in additional trials and for potential emergency use pending authorization.

This is the second vaccine to undertake Phase 1 clinical testing on human subjects: Moderna began its trial in mid-March. Inovio’s trial will be made up of 40 volunteers, all health adults selected via screening conducted at either Philadelphia’s Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Center for Pharmaceutical Research in Kansas City. It’ll span the next several weeks, and the company expects data around the immune responses from test subjects as well as info pertaining to the safety of the treatment for humans, to be available by late this summer.

Any broad clearance or approval for use is still likely at least a year to 18 months away, but the pace with which human trials are beginning is already still exceptional, so hopefully we won’t have to wait too much longer than that.

It has the simplest name but the sort of shadowy overtones that national security writers lust after.

Team Telecom, a mostly informal working committee of the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice (along with affiliated agencies) has for years been quietly tasked with evaluating and maintaining the security of America telecom infrastructure in concert with the FCC. Its primary objective as far as we have been able to ascertain is to monitor the ownership of key telecom assets to ensure they don’t fall into the hands of suspect nations (think China, Russia, etc).

Last year, Mark Harris over on Extra Crunch here took an in-depth look at the extreme delays companies can experience going through a Team Telecom review, which in the case of China Mobile’s expansion into the U.S., extended up to seven years before the Team rejected the Chinese bid for market entry.

That informal arrangement is disappearing, as the administration over the weekend published a new executive order formally instantiating Team Telecom as a legal process for reviewing applications for telecom licenses, deals, and other requests made to the FCC.

Under a newly-christened “Committee for the Assessment of Foreign Participation in the United States Telecommunications Services Sector” (CAFPUSTSS?), the Committee will be charged with assisting “the FCC in its public interest review of national security and law enforcement concerns that may be raised by foreign participation in the United States telecommunications services sector.”

Like its Team Telecom forerunner, the Committee will be made up of the heads of Justice, Defense, and Homeland Security, with the Attorney General playing the role of chair. Applications to the Committee will be referred to the U.S. government’s highest-ranking intelligence officer, the Director of National Intelligence, for analysis.

Unlike in the past where the timeline for reviews was anything but standardized, the executive order provides for a 120-day adjudication process, with a 90-day extension if the Committee has additional concerns and goes through a secondary review.

In a brief press statement, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said, “I applaud the President for formalizing Team Telecom review and establishing a process that will allow the Executive Branch to provide its expert input to the FCC in a timely manner.” The FCC intends to finish its own rulemaking around Team Telecom, a process which was first proposed at the tail end of the Obama administration and has been on-going ever since.

These reforms to Team Telecom are in line with similar reforms made to CFIUS, the Committee for Foreign Investment in the United States, which were finalized at the beginning of this year after Congress passed a reform bill in 2018.

While the new rules will provide some certainty to areas of telecom like fiber optic cable expansion and wireless services, expect the new rules to be used to put even more restrictions of countries like China hoping to get a slice of the U.S. infrastructure market. Indeed, in the FCC’s statement today, the agency said “As we demonstrated last year in rejecting the China Mobile application, this FCC will not hesitate to act to protect our networks from foreign threats.”

The COVID-19 outbreak has closed schools across most of the U.S., impacting over 55 million students who are now learning at home. That’s created an increased demand for homeschool resources. Today, National Geographic is responding to that need with the launch of a new online hub, NatGeo@Home, which pulls together all of National Geographic’s family-friendly educational content into a one-stop shop for parents and teachers alike.

The free digital resource combines the educational content from the National Geographic Society with those from National Geographic Kids, and other tools and services. This includes access to the National Geographic Society’s Learn at Home portal, where you’ll find educational content like articles, lessons, videos, other online activities, and more.

The content on the site, aimed at K-12 students, is organized by grade and tagged as either “read,” “watch,” or “play,” depending on whether it’s an article, video or activity. There are also lesson plans available which parents and teachers can favorite to save to their library, if signed in.

The new site is also home to the Explorer Classroom, which offers live video talks from conservationists, scientists, filmmakers, explorers, and other experts, that will air weekdays at 2 PM EDT. The talks will cover topics like wildlife, ocean conversation, photography, space exploration and more.

In addition to the educational resources, the portal offers families advice and information about how to navigate online learning and talking to kids about COVID-19. Some of its recent stories include a how-to on working from home with kids and a Coronavirus 101 explainer for parents who need help in better understanding the complicated health crisis themselves so they can answer questions from their children.

The portal will also be featured as a part of #DisneyMagicMoments, Disney’s new family website that pulls together stories, videos, and activities from across Disney’s properties, including Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel, and National Geographic.

“Juggling your work life and your kid’s school life is hard enough. When those two worlds collide, as they have for so many families, it adds so many layers of challenges,” said Rachel Buchholz, editor in chief and vice president of National Geographic Kids, in a statement about the launch. “That’s why our goal here is to keep kids of all ages educated, entertained, and inspired, helping them become global stewards of the future,” she added.

Disney is not the only organization to have launched a set of homeschool resources in recent days. Children’s media nonprofit Common Sense just last week debuted Wide Open School, a comprehensive collection of resources for parents and teachers that included age-appropriate educational activities as well as daily schedules. National Geographic was one of the partners in that effort.

Apple, a Wide Open School partner, also launched the Apple Education Learning Series, a collection of videos designed to help schools and educators make the most of remote learning using Apple devices. And Comcast made nearly 2,000 hours of educational programming available to Xfinity subscribers, also in partnership with Common Sense.

In NatGeo’s case, its educational content was already being used by a number of educators across the U.S. to supplement classroom learning before the COVID-19 outbreak, so it makes sense for the organization to step up to fill the gaps in homeschool curriculums, as well.

NatGeo@Home is currently available for free, though that could change at some point in the future when schools re-open.