Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Google today announced that it will temporarily roll back the changes it recently made to how its Chrome browser handles cookies in order to ensure that sites that perform essential services like banking, online grocery, government services and healthcare won’t become inaccessible to Chrome users during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

The new SameSite rules, which the company started rolling out to a growing number of Chrome users in recent months, are meant to make it harder for sites to access cookies from third-party sites and hence track a user’s online activity. These new rules are also meant to prevent cross-site request forgery attacks.

Under Google’s new guidance, developers have to explicitly allow their cookies to be read by third-party sites, otherwise, the browser will prevent these third-party sites from accessing them.

Since this is a pretty major change, Google gave developers quite a bit of time to adapt their applications to it. Still, not every site is ready yet and so the Chrome team decided to halt the gradual rollout and stop enforcing these new rules for the time being.

“While most of the web ecosystem was prepared for this change, we want to ensure stability for websites providing essential services including banking, online groceries, government services and healthcare that facilitate our daily life during this time,” writes Google Chrome engineering director Justin Schuh. “As we roll back enforcement, organizations, users and sites should see no disruption.”

A Google spokesperson also told us that the team saw some breakage in sites “that would not normally be considered essential, but with COVID-19 having become more important, we made this decision in an effort to ensure stability during this time.”

The company says it plans to resume its SameSite enforcement over the summer, though the exact timing isn’t yet clear.

The world’s population is aging, but the needs of elderly people are still being underserved. A United Nations report found that older people make up more than one-fifth of the population in 17 countries, and by 2100, a majority of the world’s population, or 61%, will be aged 60 and above.

One of the most urgent needs for families is caregiving, with demand outstripping the pool of qualified providers. This means many people in their thirties and forties are now part of the “sandwich generation,” juggling jobs and child care while looking after elderly relatives. This creates both an opportunity and challenge for tech startups and investors in almost every market around the world.

In Southeast Asia, Homage is addressing the issue with a platform that takes a curated approach to pairing caregivers and families, using a combination of in-person screening and its matching engine to make the process more efficient. Currently operating in Singapore and Malaysia, the startup announced earlier this year that it will use its Series B funding to expand into five new countries in the region.

Backed by investors, including HealthXCapital, Golden Gate Ventures and EV Ventures, Homage was co-founded in 2016 by chief executive officer Gillian Tee, who grew up in Singapore and was inspired by her family’s own experiences looking for caregivers. Tee says she wanted to build a platform that would make the process of matching caregivers and clients easier, and be scalable into different markets.

“It’s not the easiest space to be in, and I would say that you do need to want to be intentionally working in this space, rather than just falling into it. It goes hand in hand,” she told TechCrunch. “We found that there is a huge market opportunity, but why we’re doing it goes way beyond that.”

How Homage addresses the talent pool shortage

GM and Honda will jointly develop two new electric vehicles slated for 2024, the latest move by the two automakers to deepen their existing partnership.

Under the plan, the automakers will focus on their respective areas of expertise. Honda will design the exterior and interiors of the new electric vehicles. GM will contribute its new electric vehicle architecture and Ultium batteries. This new architecture, which GM unveiled last month to showcase its own EV plans, is capable of 19 different battery and drive unit configurations. The architecture includes large-format pouch battery cells manufactured as part of a joint venture between LG Chem and GM.

The vehicles, which will have a Honda nameplate, will incorporate GM’s OnStar safety and security services. GM’s hands-free advanced driver assistance technology known as Super Cruise will also be available in the new vehicles.

The vehicles will be produced at GM plants in North America. Sales are expected to begin in the 2024 model year in Honda’s U.S. and Canadian markets.

The aim is to pull the strengths of both companies to unlock economies of scale around electric vehicles, according to Rick Schostek, executive vice president of American Honda Motor Co.., who added that the two companies are already in discussions about further extending the partnership.

GM and Honda have worked together on projects before. The two automakers partnered on hydrogen fuel cells, electric vehicle batteries and are both invested in autonomous vehicle company Cruise .

The automakers formed a joint venture in 2017 to produce hydrogen fuel cell systems. A year later, the companies announced an agreement for Honda to use battery cells and modules from GM in electric vehicles built for the North American market.

GM acquired Cruise in 2016; Honda later committed $2.75 billion as part of an exclusive agreement with GM and its self-driving technology subsidiary Cruise to develop and produce a new kind of autonomous vehicle. Cruise Origin, an electric, self-driving and shared vehicle and the first product of that arrangement, was revealed January 21.

We’re now several weeks into what is has become a very big dip for the global economy due to the coronavirus pandemic, but amidst that, we are seeing are some notable pockets of investment activity emerging that will help shape how the future startup landscape will look. Today one of the biggest venture capital firms in the world announced the closing of a huge fund, money that it will use in large part to help its portfolio businesses weather the storm.

Insight, the firm that has backed the likes of Twitter and Shopify and invests across a range of consumer and enterprise startups (400 in all), today announced that it has closed fund of $9.5 billion, money will be using support startups and “scale-ups” (larger and older startups that are still private) in the coming months. Investments will typically be between $10 million and $350 million, “although larger transactions are also possible,” the company said.

“First and foremost, we want to acknowledge the current climate and the hardships being felt across the globe,” said Jeff Horing, Insight Partners’ founder and MD, in a statement. “We are thankful and humbled by the support of our investors which enables us to continue to deliver world class resources during turbulent economic times. Fund XI gives us continued flexibility to provide the combination of capital and operating support that suits the different needs of every software company in a dynamic world.”

This fund, numbered XI, brought in a number of returning backers alongside new investors, and it is record-sized for the company. It also appears to have been oversubscribed, since back in November when it was launched the fund was estimated to be worth just over $7 billion. All the more impressive, too, that it closed just this week, at a time when many startups are starting to feel the pinch of a business downturn, and are either laying off staff or freezing hiring to curtail costs, leading investors to get a little shaky.

Insight’s fund is a signal of two themes. One is that there are, even now, some silver linings, where particular business areas are seeing huge surges of activity (videoconferencing to connect up all the people now sheltering-in-place at home; those helping keep food delivery operational; entertainment streaming companies; and those focusing on medical research or telehealth are just five categories seeing a positive impact. There are more.). This fund will help Insight invest in these opportunities to help these businesses grow to meet the demand.

The second theme is a little less upbeat but still important, and that is the fact that there are a number of very promising ideas out there that have already been backed by VC money, which will not survive the current economic crunch without some support. VC money will likely be used in a very targeted way to help in those situations, alongside more fiscal belt-tightening and other funding means (for example, loans that the US government will be issuing via the CARES act to help small businesses get through lean times brought by the coronavirus pandemic).

Indeed, a spokesperson said Insight will be “hyper-focused on supporting its portfolio companies” with ongoing and near-future funding.

We’ve reached out to see if we can get more detail on how new investments, versus reinvesting in existing portfolio companies, will figure in future funding, and we’re also asking if there are specific categories that are of particular interest at the moment. We’ll update this post as we learn more.

“Since our first investment 25 years ago, the global software ecosystem has matured even as it continues to innovate, spurring Insight’s own innovation in sourcing, and our data-driven partnership approach to working with ScaleUp companies as a minority or buyout investor,” said Managing Director Deven Parekh. “We are grateful that through economic cycles and unprecedented circumstances, Insight Partners remains a sought-after institutional platform for supporting next generation software companies.”

In a separate letter to investors, Horing and Parekh also noted the complicated climate of the moment — which includes not just the challenge of VCs raising funds right now amid a climate of LPs also feeling the crunch, but also the fact that not all startups will be able to rely on all their investors to support them through these challenging times. Tough decisions will need to be made at all levels.

The FDA has been working to adapt its policies and restrictions to respond to the growing need for unconventional solutions like shortages of medical equipment needed for treating COVID-19 patients. A group of doctors, engineers and medical researchers from UC Berkeley, UCSF and working hospitals has devised a creative solution to the ventilator shortage they’re hoping will meet FDA standards for emergency use authorization (EUA), working with readily available hardware and a stockpile of medical breathing equipment that’s resting mostly unused under our noses.

The group, which includes pulmonary care physicians, medical and engineering professors, and many more, is calling themselves the COVID-19 Ventilator Rapid Response Team, and together they’ve figured out a way to modify existing CPAP machines typically used to treat sleep apnea to act as the kinds of ventilators needed for intubation to keep severe COVID-19 patients breathing in the ICU.

Sleep apnea machines are not designed for continuous use with patients who can’t breathe on their own – they basically just ensure that a patient’s airway doesn’t become blocked during sleep, which maintains oxygen levels, and prevents unwanted wake-ups and snoring. The group behind this new CPAP modification has adapted the hardware using a tube that can be used for intubation, led by Dr. Ajay Dharia, a critical care physician focused on pulmonary issues in the ICUs at three Bay Area hospitals as well as an engineering graduate from UC Berkeley.

Already, the FDA has issued guidance stating that healthcare facilities and professionals should consider use of breathing devices not designed for use as ventilators in case of urgent need, so the Ventilator Rapid Response Team already has some leeway in its approach. It’s still seeking an emergency authorization from the agency, however, because it would like to work with suppliers and manufacturers at scale to start producing large quantifies of the modifications required.

It’s also enlisting the help of any individuals or organizations that are looking to donate CPAP or sleep apnea machines that aren’t currently in use to assist with the supply of the base hardware needed to make the modified ventilators. Anyone interested in that can check out their website at https://www.ventilatorsos.com for more info.

The German pension and insurance industry was a laggard in the word of online a few years ago, but in recent times it’s quickly caught up. There’s further evidence of this trend with the news that Xpension (trading as xbAV), an online platform for pensions and life insurance, has raised €25m in its Series C financing round. This will take its total funding to date to more than €50m.

The financing round was led by HPE Growth, a growth capital fund. Existing investors Cinco Capital, led by Lars Hinrichs (founder of XING and chairman of Xpension), and Armada Investment, led by Daniel S. Aegerter (founder of Tradex) also participated.

The new funding will be used to scale up Xpension’s corporate pension and life insurance SaaS platform in Germany; expand the offering into private pensions and life insurance and corporate health insurance; and prepare a rollout into other European countries. The company has also launched a video platform for agents to speak to clients, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To date, Xpension has attracted more than 40 life insurers, 11,000 insurance agents and 3,000 SMEs onto its platform.

Martin Bockelmann, CEO & Founder commented: “After several years of intensive R&D and broad-based user acquisition, this partnership with HPE Growth allows us to unleash the full potential of our platform in Germany and abroad.”

Tim van Delden, Partner at HPE Growth, said: “The move online of the €2.5 trillion global pension and life insurance industry is a huge topic. A SaaS platform like Xpension – which connects life insurers, agents and their corporate and private customers to buy and manage policies – will be a game-changer.”

Speaking to TechCrunch, Hinrichs, the active Chariman and largest private shareholder, said: “We target not just occupational pensions but the entire segment, which is worth 700 billion Euros in premiums a year. German pensions are the leading pensions segment in Europe. And we are taking advantage of the recent changes in pension policy.”

It would appear that Xpension is in a strong position to potentially open up to end-consumers who don’t have pensions at some point, as have similar US platforms, or even to leverage its position to build its own insurance company at some point.

Google uses its ad-tracking data to provide a glimpse at how the world is responding to coronavirus, the CDC changes its tune on face masks and Apple accidentally reveals that AirTags are coming. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 3, 2020.

1. Google is now publishing coronavirus mobility reports, feeding off users’ location history

Google is giving the world a clearer look of exactly how much it knows about people everywhere — using the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to repackage its persistent tracking of where users go and what they do as a public good in the midst of a pandemic.

In a blog post, the tech giant announced the publication of what it’s calling COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports, an in-house analysis of the much more granular location data it maps and tracks to fuel its ad-targeting, product development and wider commercial strategy, now used to showcase aggregated changes in population movements around the world.

2. CDC is expected to tell Americans to wear cloth masks, save medical masks for health workers

On Thursday, the White House said that it will likely adjust previous guidelines that discouraged non-health workers from wearing face masks. The change would be issued as “guidance” from the CDC, but according to President Trump, it will not be mandatory.

3. Apple accidentally confirms the existence of an unreleased product, AirTags

In a video tutorial about resetting an iPhone to factory settings, at around the 1:43 mark, you can see an option for “Enable Offline Finding” is shown, and beneath that, the text references AirTags by name. AirTags are believed to be small tracking tiles with Bluetooth connectivity that can be used to find lost items — just like Tile.

4. In the wake of COVID-19, UK puts up £20M in grants to develop resilience tech for critical industries

The idea is to introduce new technologies and processes that will support existing businesses and organizations, not to use the funding to build new startups from scratch.

5. The pendulum will swing away from founder friendly venture raises

TechCrunch recently spoke with a half-dozen venture capitalists, asking after how their world has changed and how they are approaching dealmaking in the new reality. One common note was that startup valuations are declining. And past valuation adjustments, there’s going to be more change. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. SpaceX’s latest Starship prototype fails under pressure testing

That headline might sound familiar: SpaceX’s first prototype, the Mk1, was also destroyed during pressure testing of its fuel tank, and the next full-scale prototype under development, SN1, was also destroyed during a pressure test in late February.

7. 27 TV show recommendations from TechCrunch while you’re stuck at home

I didn’t manage to get my recommendations to Matt Burns in time (sorry Matt!), but I will say that Star Trek — whether it’s the original series or the latest spinoff, “Picard” — is the best comfort viewing, now more than ever.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Last week, we spoke to the Head of Emergent BioSolutions’ Therapeutics Business Unit Dr. Laura Saward about her company’s work developing plasma-based potential treatments for COVID-19. Now, the company announced that it has received $14.5 million in funding from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), to speed the development of one of its treatment candidates.

Emergent BioSolutions has been working to develop two different kinds of plasma-based treatments for use in treating patients who have already contracted the coronavirus and subsequently the COVID-19 respiratory disease that it leads to. The company is developing one treatment based on horse-derived plasma, which has benefits in terms of being able to be produced in large volumes, and human-derived plasma, which is less likely to trigger a negative immune response in patients.

In both cases, the strategy is based on the concept of using convalescent plasma as a way to develop ‘hyperimmune’ treatment products that can boost the immune response of a target patient. It’s similar to other potential uses of convalescent plasma being investigated by researchers and health organizations, but unlike a direct transfusion approach, Emergent is looking to essentially stack the deck by creating a plasma-based solution that contains many different kinds of antibodies to fight off the virus, in set amounts to produce predictably effective results.

The pharmatech company had already been working to develop both these solutions, and was working to expedite their development, validation and testing by leveraging prior experience bringing similar treatments to market. Now, however, it’s getting an additional $14.5 million form BARDA, which is earmarked specifically for accelerating the development of the human-plasma based program. The plan is to develop it using donations from patients who have already recovered from COVID-19, and already the company has begun screening and collection efforts to get that donated blood.

Next, Emergent BioSolutions’ test candidate will be included in a clinical study with the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases, which the agency is preparing for the purposes of assessing potential treatments.

Bustle Digital Group, owner of a portfolio of digital media properties including Bustle itself, says it laid off two dozen staffers today. That includes eliminating the entire staff of The Outline, a culture site that it acquired a year ago.

In a statement, a BDG spokesperson said the company will continue to host The Outline’s archives, and that founder Josh Topolsky will be “exploring alternative path’s forward” for its future.

“The unprecedented impact of COVID-19 has forced us to make some tough business decisions,” a BDG spokesperson said. “Most staff will be taking temporary tiered salary reductions and unfortunately, we have eliminated two dozen positions across the company.”

Topolsky (former editor in chief of Engadget and founder of The Verge) founded The Outline in 2016. The site shifted its publication model over time, laying off its writers while maintaining an editorial team who continued to publish freelance content. It was then acquired by Bustle, and Topolsky went on to launch the tech news site Input under the BDG umbrella.

“[I] am tremendously proud of all the weird, funny, interesting, and brilliant stuff we put into the universe, and all the talented writers we were able to publish,” The Outline’s executive editor Leah Finnegan tweeted this morning. “[T]hank you for reading, and [I] hope you will remember what we did fondly.”

BDG, meanwhile, was founded by CEO Bryan Goldberg (pictured above) in 2013. In the past few years, it hasn’t just acquired The Outline, but also Elite Daily, Mic, Nylon and Gawker. In many cases, the deals came after layoffs or other turmoil.

We’re entering what’s likely to be a brutal few months (or longer) for the media industry, as the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic pullback in advertising. The layoffs have already started, while BuzzFeed is trying to avoid them by cutting employee pay.

It’s a tough fundraising environment out there, but one of the few glimmers of hope lies in the enterprise and SaaS markets. Critical customer problems + recurring revenues is probably where you want to be right now to weather out the storm that’s hitting the startup world these days.

That’s why we are excited to bring prolific enterprise seed investor Jonathan Lehr onto TechCrunch for a live conference call this coming Monday, April 6 at 2pm EDT.

For Extra Crunch members, the Zoom dial-in information is posted below. For TechCrunch readers, we will have a YouTube livestream ready to go to join.

Lehr is the co-founder and general partner of Work-Bench, one of the premier enterprise seed investors headquartered in New York City. The firm has invested in such notable startups as Tamr, Cockroach Labs, Backtrace, Socure, and x.ai.

In addition, he’s also the founder and showrunner of the wildly popular NY Enterprise Technology Meetup, where founders and customers come together monthly to talk shop about all things enterprise.

I’ll be hosting the call with my fellow Equity podcast partner Alex Wilhelm, and we and you are going to pepper Jon with all kinds of questions around what the seed stage looks like for enterprise startups these days. Is now the time to start a company in the space? How are the dynamics of seed investing changing? What verticals within enterprise are hottest today, and going to be hottest tomorrow? Plus, we will be moderating questions from the audience, so be prepared.

Join us!

Dial-in information