Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The need for innovative solutions to address shortages in crucial medical equipment is greater than ever, and a new initiative from a global team of biomedical engineering experts is a perfect example. The team developed a way for resuscitation bags – common pieces of equipment carried by ambulances and paramedics around the world, and typically in strong supply at hospitals – to be repurposed as emergency ventilator hardware.

Georgia Tech and Emory University biomedical engineering professor Susan Margulies, who is an expert in ventilator-associated lung injuries, said in a press release that while it is “heartwarming” to see US manufacturers open-source designs of existing FDA-approved fit-for-purpose ventilators, there’s a need still for a “simple, low-cost design” that can boost the numbers of usable equipment without requiring a manufacturing line spinning up.

The device developed by the group of researchers adapts what’s called a “bag-valve-mask” or BVM for short, resulting in a piece of hardware the can simultaneously work for two patients at the same time. It can be made from stock sheet metal components and plastic gears, and works with common wall adapters or 12-volt car batteries for power sources, making them flexible for use in either permanent care facilities or temporary field hospitals.

Basically, the modification works by squeezing the bags automatically and mechanically, whereas they’d normally be squeezed manually by a paramedic to revive a patient. The mechanized squeezing can continue for days, turning them into a workable (if emergency use only) ventilator for continuous care for COVID-19 patients, when no other ventilator hardware is available.

This design is the result of a collaboration between Cranfield University in the UK, as well as Georgia Tech and Emory University. It’s already been prototyped, tested, and iterated upon, and the team behind the concept is now working to move the design to broader manufacturing in partnership with the Emory University Office of Technology.

The potential of this design is significant in areas where access to resources and modern manufacturing equipment/supply sources for ventilators and other, more complex solutions being developed aren’t as abundant. That’s been flagged as a huge areas of concern by the World Health Organization, as the COVID-19 pandemic has hit developed countries hard, overtaxing even their advanced and well-resourced healthcare systems. Other nations with less mature health systems and fewer resources available to frontline care workers will need alternative solutions to address the crisis.

Koch Industries announced today that it has closed on the acquisition of Infor, announced in February. The company never officially announced the purchase price, but sources indicated that it was close to $13 billion, putting it in line to be one of the top 10 enterprise acquisitions this year.

The company will remain an independent subsidiary of Koch, which tends to deal more in manufacturing than software. The goal is to use the resources of Koch to continue to build out the Infor product family with a focus on industry-specific solutions, according to the company.

At the time of the deal in February, CEO Kevin Samuelson certainly saw the potential of having a company with the financial resources of Koch backing his organization.

“As a subsidiary of a $110 billion+ revenue company that re-invests 90% of earnings back into its businesses, we will be in the unique position to drive digital transformation in the markets we serve,” Samuelson said.

As the company pointed out, Infor is helping customers move to the cloud, even in industries like manufacturing, distribution and finance that might otherwise be stuck on legacy systems. This transition to the cloud is becoming even more pressing as companies deal with the COVID-19 crisis and are forced to find creative ways to keep their businesses going, even when many employees can’t come into the office. Having access to applications in the cloud certainly helps ease that burden.

The company counts some of the largest organizations in the world as customers, including 17 of the top 20 global banks, 9 of the 10 largest global hotel brands and 7 of the top 10 global luxury brands

Infor was founded in 2002 and raised over $6 billion along the way, according to PitchBook. Its most recent investment before the acquisition was for $1.5 billion in January 2019.

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

If you can recall February, we dug into the question of AI startup gross margins. Venture shop a16z had published an interesting blog on the subject, arguing that it may be the case that AI-focused startups will enjoy strong gross margins, but perhaps not as strong as those posted by SaaS companies.

Modern software startups (SaaS companies) have some of the highest gross margins in business, delivering their digital services over the Internet at little cost. Their high-margin revenue has made them incredibly valuable to private and public investors alike. To see a16z draw a line for AI gross margins a little under SaaS, then, was notable. AI startups might earn long-term lower revenue multiples than SaaS firms, and, if so, they might need to adjust their valuation expectations.

Since that nerdy interlude, the world has fallen apart. The United States has accreted over 337,000 COVID-19 cases, the stock markets have fallen sharply and we’re somewhere between a bear market and a recession. Shit, as they say, has changed.

But after our first look at the world of AI margins, asking a number of VCs to weigh in on the matter, we wound up talking to one more VC, David Blumberg of Blumberg Capital, who had some interesting notes on the AI margin matter to share from his portfolio.

Since that conversation, TechCrunch covered Deepgram’s Series A, which brought the subject of AI startups and their margins back into our heads. So, before Q2 really gets under way, a little more on AI and COGS.

AI margins and the future

There are many things that are in short supply these days, but one of them is cognitive flexibility.

Humans are used to confronting the extreme complexity of our modern world with some mélange of data, modeling, heuristics, and “gut instinct.” We can’t know everything about everything, and so we have to truncate our perspective to order the chaos before us. In linear times, that process actually (mostly) works — the economy generally trends one way, and while models and instincts can be a bit off, they are fairly robust to reality.

The novel coronavirus presents us with a novel scenario — one we have never experienced before in the modern, globalized economy. No model and no gut is up to the challenge of evaluating exactly what is going on. Every way we see the world — quite literally everything — has to be rebuilt from scratch.

Take two of the most important leading indicators of economic health that were released last week in the United States: the latest unemployment insurance weekly claims which came out on Thursday, and the employment surveys for March which came out on Friday.

Here is Max Reyes at Bloomberg conveying the predictions of economists before the release of those insurance figures:

The median projection from economists surveyed by Bloomberg puts the figure at 3.5 million, slightly above the prior reading, which was already more than quadruple the previous record.

The real result was 6.6 million — off by a factor of two. Think of how many standard deviations away from the median you have to be to get a number like that.

The real kicker for me though came the next day. The unemployment figures (like many economic statistics) are tricky, for while they are announced the first Friday of each month, their survey period ends more than two weeks prior. So the “March” employment data really represents mid-February to mid-March. Normally, that discrepancy would only be discussed by a bunch of econometricians in a grad seminar, but given the gargantuan changes in the economy these days, that artifact of survey design is suddenly front and center.

Here is Eric Morath in the WSJ summing up the views of economists prior to the release of the statistics:

Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal through Monday forecast employers cut 10,000 workers from payrolls and the unemployment rate for March ticked up to 3.7% from 3.5%. Those benign numbers miss mass layoffs announced by restaurants, retailers, manufacturers and others because they occurred in the second half of March, after the survey period.

Morath at the end of a previous article gets at the challenge:

Possible outcomes for the March report are unusually wide. Surveyed economists are forecasting a range of employers adding 312,000 jobs to shedding 1.25 million. Some expect the unemployment rate to hold at a 50-year low, others project it will rise above 5%.

“No forecasting models are built to deal with the unique situation we have,” said Brad Hershbein, an economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “There’s tremendous uncertainty.”

And indeed, Hershbein was right, because the median was wildly off:

Payrolls decreased by 701,000 jobs in March, the Labor Department said Friday, as efforts to contain the virus disrupted the U.S. economy [and] The unemployment rate for March rose to 4.4% from 3.5% in February, the largest one-month increase in the rate since January 1975.

10,000 versus 701,000.

One of the hardest parts for experts — and the press — is how to convey the sheer level of uncertainty in the market these days. A range of +312,000 to -1.25M is not a range — it’s every possible reality under the sun (that said, the economist(s) who predicted hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the midst of a global pandemic should probably stop going to the dispensary and shelter in place).

In the startup world, the most common refrain I get from VCs is “I don’t know.” That’s actually healthy, as no one knows what the market is going to do next week, let alone three months or two years out. While there are a variety of scenarios that are reasonable, those scenarios are often so incompatible that it creates analysis paralysis.

Will travel pick up in two years due to pent-up demand, or will we see a long-term secular decline in exploring the world? Will retail be radioactive, or will the novel coronavirus clear away a bunch of deadwood shops and reset the retail landscape, making it among the most dynamic sectors of the economy this coming decade?

No one knows. All that data and all those models, heuristics, and instincts can give you some perspective, but they are just as likely to prevent you from seeing the new world as they are to help you understand it.

Dividends versus share buybacks

Cognitive inflexibility isn’t just a problem among experts — everyday consumers and retail investors are just as susceptible.

Top banks around the world are reconsidering their dividends as they think through reserve requirements and their own lending needs. That doesn’t sit well with some investors:

A group of Hong Kong-based retail investors who own 2% of HSBC Holdings’ shares are demanding a scrip dividend [equity dividend] in place of the cash distribution that was canceled by the bank for the first time in 74 years under pressure from U.K. regulators, and are threatening to mobilize to force a special shareholders’ meeting.

Shoring up and maintaining faith in the banking system is absolutely critical for the long-term health of these finance stocks. So a short-term dividend could very well come at the cost of nothing less than the complete collapse in value of the underlying asset.

Yet, the signals of a dividend are so strong that banks are willing to overlook their own financial health in order to not send a bad signal to the market. Richard Henderson at the Financial Times writes this morning about the negative outlook for dividends in the futures markets:

Dividends are a marker of financial stability for listed companies that try to raise payouts year after year, and which are typically penalised by investors when they fail to do so. The steady growth of dividends contrasts with the recent explosive growth of share buybacks, which are seen as a more flexible way to hand money back, as programmes can be paused or scrapped without much fanfare.

“You don’t want to cut dividends because it’s a really bad signal,” said Mr Velis. “Once you’ve established your dividend you only cut in extreme circumstances.”

“You only cut in extreme circumstances.” But apparently a massive health emergency is not an extreme circumstance. Stability is so important in fact, that banking executives are plowing ahead as if nothing in the world has changed:

Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley chief James Gorman told CNBC that suspending dividends would be a “very poor thing to do” and would be “destabilising”, while Citigroup boss Mike Corbat told the same channel the bank’s dividend was “sound and we intend to keep paying it”.

In a linear world, such a heuristic probably makes sense — stable companies should have stable dividends. But given the current situation, you can see why companies might need to take a step back from shoveling cash out the door. And yet they don’t … locked into a model of the past and not thinking about how to navigate the future.

These are novel times, and we need to recognize the limitations of the heuristics, models and all the other cognitive apparatuses that we use to make sense of the world. And then we need to throw them away. This is not a time to double down on what we learned 15 years ago about how the economy functions. This is an opportunity to rebuild our way of thinking for the long haul.

The UK government is reportedly looking at a range of options to support the startup industry, possibly involving a co-investment model involving state-owned funds (via the British Business Bank) and private VC funds. Investors have been warning that typically loss-making, early-stage startups are at risk of collapse amid the coronavirus crisis. But the moves come far later than generous packages put together by Continental European governments to support their startup sectors.

Ministers understood to be keen to support the strong UK startup and innovation sector and options allegedly being considered include convertible loans, which could either be later repaid or turned into equity stakes owned by the state. This would require matched co-investment with VCs, ensuring only existing venture-backed startups would be eligible.

The FT reports that ministers want to do this on a case-by-case basis and only after companies have first sought fresh capital from private investors.

Also being considered is additional grant funding via InnovateUK, a government body providing support to innovative businesses, and an expansion of R&D tax credits.

However, the scale of any government intervention is expected to be far more modest than the government’s previously announced support for small, medium and large companies and their workers, given investors are normally deep-pocketed and tech startups typically employ far fewer people than traditional industries. By contrast, the French and German governments committed €4bn and €2bn in relief for their respective tech startup sectors.

The proposals under consideration include ones put forward by a number of significant players in the UK tech industry, who jointly launched a campaign over the weekend to pressure the government into creating a support package to aid startups struggling to deal with the COVID-19 crisis.

The move comes in the wake of moves by other European countries, such as France and Germany, which have announced significant initiatives.

The Save Our Startups (SOS) campaign published an open letter to British prime minister Boris Johnson warning the country could “lose a generation of startups and high growth businesses to COVID-19.”

It claims more than 30,000 startups employing some 330,000 people do not qualify for existing support measures and are therefore in jeopardy if new policies are not developed to help them.

The campaign was launched by crowdfunding platform Crowdcube and industry body Coadec, and is supported by leading tech figures including Brent Hoberman, the co-founder of Lastminute.com; Alex Chesterman, the cofounder of Zoopla, LoveFilm and Cazoo; and Arnaud Massenet, cofounder of Net-a-Porter.

It is also joined by organizations including The Entrepreneurs Network, Draper Esprit, Virgin Startups, Vala Capital, Innovate Finance, UK Business Angels Association (UKBAA), EISA, Tech London Advocates, Capital Enterprise and Seedrs .

Jeff Lynn, executive chairman and co-founder of Seedrs, who was a signatory to the letter, commented: “The growth of the startup ecosystem has been one of the great successes of the UK economy over the past decade. All that work is now threatened by COVID-19, and that’s why it is essential that the government step in to help at this precarious time–just as the French and German governments are doing. The Save Our Startups campaign sets out three sensible and crucial requests that will make all the difference in ensuring that our startups can continue to be European and world leaders in the decade ahead. I am very pleased that Seedrs and Coadec, both of which I co-founded and chair, are Founding Partners of the campaign, and I hope everyone in the ecosystem will sign onto it.”

The open letter said: “These businesses are making a huge contribution to the economy but are often yet to make a profit because they are investing in their people, technology and bringing innovative products and services to market. They are highly unlikely to qualify for the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS), which was introduced to provide financial support for SMEs during this pandemic.”

The letter points out that the French and German Governments have already worked to craft support for startups.

Save Our Startups has a three-point proposal for the government, calling on it to:

• Provide an equity-based liquidity package suitable to save startups at risk. While CBILS covers a proportion of UK businesses, the majority of startups and high-growth companies will be excluded and as a result, unsupported.

• Fast track payments to startups from public funding schemes – in particular, R&D tax credits and Innovate UK funding grants. Private sector liquidity has taken a major hit during the crisis with angels and micro-funds unable to provide startups and high growth businesses with bridging money.

• Change EIS, SEIS and VCTs to stimulate private equity investment into startup and high growth businesses, since many startups are losing access to debt or equity support.

However, some investors are cool on the idea, pointing out that the government could end up owning stakes in companies that would not otherwise have raised private-sector money, and that there should be a natural falling-off of weaker companies at a time of public crisis.

Investor Robin Klein of Localglobe commented on Twitter that: “The UK Govt has done an incredible job supporting the startup ecosystem” but he called the SOS campaign a “knee jerk” reaction and although he was “100% in favour of rapid BBB and other govt support” this would be through established tools.”

Luke Lang, cofounder of Crowdcube, which initiated the campaign with Coadec, commented: “Other European countries have raced to rescue its startup and tech communities, with French and German Governments committing €6bn in funding. The UK is sluggish by comparison, and further delays are unforgivable and threaten thousands of promising startup and high-growth businesses with huge potential.”

The full letter by Save Our Startups can be read here. And the list of signatories is below:

Darren Westlake — cofounder and chief executive, Crowdcube
Luke Lang — cofounder, Crowdcube
Brent Hoberman — cofounder and chairman, Founders Factory; previously cofounder, Lastminute.com
Alex Chesterman — founder and chief executive, Cazoo; previously cofounder, LoveFilm and Zoopla
Arnaud Massenet — cofounder, Net-a-Porter
Mike Muller — cofounder, ARM
Anthony Fletcher — chief executive, Graze
Tania Boler — founder, Elvie
Doug Monro — cofounder and chief executive, Adzuna
/> Jeff Lynn — cofounder and executive chairman, Seedrs
Saurav Chopra — cofounder and chief executive, Perkbox
Daniel Korski — founder and chief executive, PUBLIC
David Dunn — chair, UK Tech Cluster Group
Philip Salter — founder, The Entrepreneurs Network
Andrew Tibbitts — chief operating officer, TechHub
Charlotte Crosswell — chief executive, Innovate Finance
Jenny Tooth OBE — chief executive, UKBAA
Jonathan Sibilia — partner, Draper Esprit
Dom Hallas — executive director, The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec)
John Spindler — cofounder and chief executive, Capital Enterprise
Mark Brownridge — director general, EIS Association
Natasha Guerra — cofounder, Runway East
Andy Fishburn — managing director, Virgin Startup
Russ Shaw — founder, Tech London Advocates
Alex Davies — founder and chief executive, Wealth Club
Bruce Davies — director, UK Crowdfunding Association
Andrew Roughan — managing director, Plexal
Jasper Smith — founder, Vala Capital
Gaby Hersham — founder, Huckletree
Carlos Silva — cofounder, Seedrs
Robert Walsh — managing partner, Q Ventures

Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week.

Before we jump into today’s show, don’t forget that the long-form Equity that we’ve done for more than three years still drops on Friday. Last week’s was a particular delight, so make sure you’re caught up. Ready? Let’s go.

This weekend was busy, with Quibi launching, folks in the UK attacking 5G towers and Skype trying to steal some of Zoom’s thunder. News was dominated, as always, by COVID-19, this time leading to a stock market bump as some data from the disease appeared to take a short breather with — depending on which tracker you favor — fewer folks contracting the infection in the last 24 hours than the day prior; investors are hunting for any positive signal to trade on, and that appears to have been enough.

What’s coming up this week? Not earnings, or at least not the sort of earnings reports that we care about. Instead, we’re keeping eyes peeled for Q1 VC data and economic information from the United States. Here in the States Friday is off, remember, so this is a short week.

Next, two venture rounds:

• Valispace, a Germany-based startup that also has folks in Portugal, raised €2.2M recently led by JOIN Capital. The startup calls itself “Github for hardware,” which TechCrunch summarized as a “collaboration platform for engineers, allowing them to develop better satellites, planes, rockets, nuclear fusion reactors, cars and medical devices” with a browser-based app.
• And Vertical Future just raised £1.1M. It’s doing vertical farming, a topic that I’ve read about every few years but now appears to really be a thing! That’s exciting. Vertical Future raised a bigger round last year, and is generating food today in production sites.

Finally, we close with a question: How many more startups are going to die this year, compared to 2019, and what do their deaths mean for staff and investors alike? Will the end of so-called “tourist” money harm young companies or will it merely cull the silly?

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

When Ginni Rometty indicated that she was stepping down as IBM CEO at the end of January, the company announced that Arvind Krishna would be taking over, while Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst would become president. To fill his role, Red Hat announced today that long-time executive Paul Cormier has been named president and CEO.

Cormier would seem to be a logical choice to run Red Hat, having been with the company since 2001. He joined as its VP of engineering and has seen the company grow from a small startup to a multi-billion dollar company.

Cormier spoke about the historical arc he has witnessed in his years at Red Hat. “Looking back to when I joined, we were in a different position and facing different issues, but the spirit was the same. We were on a mission to convince the world that open source was real, safe and enterprise-grade,” Cormier said in an email to employees about his promotion.

Former CEO Whitehurst certainly sees this as a sensible transition. “After working with him closely for more than a decade, I can confidently say that Paul was the natural choice to lead Red Hat. Having been the driving force behind Red Hat’s product strategy for nearly two decades, he’s been intimately involved in setting the company’s direction and uniquely understands how to help customers and partners make the most out of their cloud strategy,” he said in a statement.

In a Q&A with Cormier on the company website, he talked about the kind of changes he expects to see under his leadership in the next five years of the company. “There’s a term that we use today, ‘applications run the business.’ In five years, I see it becoming the case for the majority of enterprises. And with that, the infrastructure underpinning these applications will be even more critical. Management and security are paramount — and this isn’t just one environment. It’s bare metal and hypervisors to public and private clouds. It’s Linux, VMs, containers, microservices and more,” he said.

When IBM bought Red Hat in 2018 for $34 billion, there was widespread speculation that Whitehurst would eventually take over in an executive position there. Now that that has happened, Cormier will step into run Red Hat.

While Red Hat is under the IBM umbrella, it continues to operate as a separate company with its own executive structure, but that vision that Cormier outlined is in line with how it will fit within the IBM family as it tries to make its mark on the shifting cloud and enterprise open source markets.

Internet of things satellite connectivity startup Myriota has raises a $19.3 million Series B funding round, led by Hostplus and Main Sequence Ventures, with additional funding from Boeing, former Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull, Singtel Innov8 and others. The company has now raised $37 million in Funding, and has four satellites on orbit already, with a plan to expand that to 25 by 2022 with the help of this new funding.

Myriota provides low-cost, power efficient direct satellite connectivity for IoT uses, including industrial applications like equipment monitoring and measurement of environmental measures like groundwater levels. The Adelaide-based company has developed its own proprietary low-over iOT communications technology, that claims big advantages over existing solutions in terms of battery life, security, scalability and cost.

With this new funding, it also hopes to expand headcount, adding 50 percent more employees over the course of the next two years, with a focus on expanding globally to provider service to more international markets. It’s also going to concentrate on building out product to enable real-time reporting across all its offerings.

Already, Myriota has begun its expansion plans with a new acquisition of assets from another space tech company, Canada’s exactEarth. The company has purchased four satellites on orbit from the company, and brought on new employees as well as six ground stations located in new international locations, including in Canada, the U.S., Norway, Singapore, Panama and Antarctica.

In total, Myriota has a goal of building out a constellation of 50 IoT satellites to provide global scale and service.

Fintech startup Lydia is the dominating mobile payment app in France with most of its 3.3 million users in its home country. That’s why the startup has been working hard over the past ten days to ship a feature that was originally planned for this summer — donations to charities and hospitals.

Starting today, Lydia users can choose between 17 charities and send money to those charities using the familiar Lydia payment flow. It works like sending money to your friends and family.

Donations start at €0.50 and those are one-off payments — you can’t set up recurring payments or round up transactions for instance.

Lydia recently introduced “the market”, a marketplace of financial products, such as small credit lines, phone insurance and free credit on home insurance and utility bills. The market menu was buried under the profile tab. The company is now surfacing that screen in its own tab right next to your accounts and transaction history. You can find donations as a new button in the market.

There’s another way to donate. On the payment screen, when you tap a sum and hit next, in addition to the usual list of recipients, you can choose to send money to a charity from there as well. This feature is live on Android and will be available soon on iOS — iOS users have to go through the market for now.

The startup has selected 17 charities for now, but that list could grow over time. You’ll find public hospitals (Paris, Nantes, Strasbourg, Grenoble, Lille and Nice), charities focused on health as well as general public interest charities (Fondation de France, Fondation 101, Médecins du Monde, Epic, Action contre la Faim, La Croix Rouge française, La Fondation Abbé Pierre, La Ligue Nationale contre le Cancer, Réseau Entourage and La Maison des Femmes de Saint-Denis).

If you’re not a Lydia user, you can still use Lydia’s payment flow in your web browser with a credit or debit card. (But nothing is stopping you from donating directly on the charity websites of course.)

If you want to give a large sum of money and deduct part of your donation from your income taxes, you’ll have to ask charities directly. Lydia can’t give you a tax form directly as it only acts as an intermediary.

Eventually, Lydia will deduct processing fees from your donations before handing them over to charities. But the company is waving fees until June 30 due to the coronavirus crisis.

Uber is resuming some services in India as it looks to help other firms deliver grocery and other essential items in select parts of the country, nearly two weeks after New Delhi ordered a three-week lockdown for its 1.3 billion people.

The American firm said on Monday that it has partnered with Flipkart to deliver everyday essentials in Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. The announcement comes days after Uber inked a similar deal with online grocer BigBasket and Kolkata-headquartered chain Spencer’s Retail.

Prabhjeet Singh, director of operations and head of cities for Uber India and South Asia, said the partnerships will allow Uber to help companies reach the last-mile destinations. The company executives have said that they are open to engaging with more firms that need help with logistics.

“The partnership helps keep the economy running and enables Indians to stay at home in line with government guidelines for containing Covid-19, as well as creates earning opportunities for driver,” he added.

Uber said it will not charge any commission on these transactions and drivers, who typically have to let go as much as 25 percent of their earning to the ride-hailing firm, will keep 100% of the billed amounts.

BigBasket will use Uber’s service to serve customers in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chandigarh and Noida, it said late last week.

The move will help both Flipkart and BigBasket that have more than half a million inventories stuck at their warehouses because of shortage of delivery workers.

“This partnership is to help move essential supplies from our sellers/vendors to customers in the shortest possible span of time,” said Rajneesh Kumar, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Flipkart, in a statement.

Uber and its chief rival in India, Ola, suspended their operations in the country last month ahead of the lockdown enforced by the government in a bid to contain the spread of the infectious disease.

Uber said it was also working with state authorities in India to pilot what it calls ‘Uber Essential’ to resume rides for people who need to urgently travel within a city.

More to follow…