Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Against a backdrop where the life-or-death consequences of biotechnology innovation are becoming increasingly apparent as the world races to develop vaccines and therapies to treat COVID-19, life sciences investor ARCH Venture Partners has raised $1.46 billion in funding to finance new tech development.

The two funds, ARCH Venture Fund X and ARCH Venture Fund X Overage, are the latest in the firm’s long line of investment vehicles dedicated to invest in early stage biotechnology companies.

“ARCH has always been driven to invest in great science to impact human health. There isn’t a better illustration of our principles than our all-in battle against COVID-19,” said co-founder and Managing Director Robert Nelsen in a statement. “The healthcare revolution will be accelerated by the changes that are happening now and we are excited to continue to invest aggressively in risk takers doing truly transformational science.”

ARCH portfolio companies Vir Biotechnology, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, VBI Vaccines, Brii Biosciences, and Sana Biotechnology are all working on COVID-19 therapeutics; while Quanterix is developing technology to support clinical testing and clinical trial development. Another company that ARCH has backed, Twist Biosciences, has gene editing tools that the company believes can support therapeutic and vaccine development; and Bellerophon, a developer of inhaled nitric oxide delivery technologies, received emergency access approval from the FDA as a treatment to help alleviate respiratory distress associated with COVID-19.

The firm’s Overage fund will be used to take larger stakes in later-stage companies that require more capital, the firm said.

“Our companies bring cutting-edge science, tools and talent to bear in developing medicines for a wide range of diseases and conditions faced by millions. With these two new funds, we are continuing that work with urgency and a deep sense of purpose,” managing director Kristina Burow said in a statement. “We invest at all levels, whether it’s fifty thousand dollars or hundreds of millions, so that each company and each technology has the best chance to advance and change the landscape.”

The two new funds are roughly the same size as ARCH’s last investment funds, which closed in 2016 with $1.1that billion, but are a big jump from the 2014 ARCH funds that raised $560 million in total capital commitments.

The increasing size of the ARCH funds is a reflection of a broader industry trend which has seen established funds significantly expand their capital under management, but also is indicative of the rising status of biotech investing in the startup landscape.

These days, it’s programmable biology, not software, that’s eating the world.

“ARCH remains committed to our mission of the last 35 years, advancing the most promising innovations from leading life science and physical sciences research to serve the worldwide community by addressing critical health and well-being challenges,” said Keith Crandell in a statement. “ARCH has been privileged to found, support and invest in groundbreaking new companies pursuing advancements in infectious disease, mental health, immunology, genomic and biological tools, data sciences and ways of reimagining diagnostics and therapies.”

Managing directors for the new fund include Robert Nelsen, Keith Crandell, Kristina Burow, Mark McDonnell, Steve Gillis and Paul Thurk.

Time spent in mobile apps has been surging, as people stuck at home due to the coronavirus outbreak have been turning to apps to do their shopping, manage their finances, find new exercises, work from home, and stay entertained. According to new data from App Annie, released today, Q1 2020 was the largest-ever quarter in terms of consumer spend on apps. In addition, the average weekly time spent in apps and games worldwide was up 20% year-over-year in the quarter, based on an analysis of Android devices.

This has translated to a record increase in consumer spending on the app stores.

In Q1 2020, consumers worldwide spent over $23.4 billion through the app stores — the largest-ever quarter, App Annie said.

iOS accounted for $15 billion of that figure and Google Play was $8.3 billion. Both of these figures were an increase of 5% year-over-year on their respective platforms.

Non-gaming apps accounted for 35% of consumer spend on iOS and 15% on Google Play. Meanwhile, consumers spent over $16.7 billion on games in the quarter.

The U.S. and China were the largest contributors to consumer spend on iOS and the U.S., Japan, and South Korea were the largest on Google Play.

Android users spent the most on Games, Social, and Entertainment apps, thanks especially to Disney+ and Twitch.

Meanwhile, iOS users spent the most on Games, Entertainment, and Photo and Video apps, with TikTok notably breaking into the top 5 by consumer spend on iOS in the quarter, at No. 3 behind Tinder and YouTube.

31 billion apps installed in Q1 2020

There were also 31 billion new app downloads in Q1 2020, up 15% from the fourth quarter of 2019. That’s notable, given that the fourth quarter usually sees a big boost in app installs from holiday sales of new phones, and Q1 managed to top that.

On Google Play, downloads were up 5% year-over-year to 22.5 billion while iOS downloads were up 15% year-over-year to over 9 billion.

Non-gaming apps on Google Play accounted for a majority (55%) of downloads and on iOS, they were 65% of downloads — an indication that people were looking for a variety of mobile apps to manage their newly stay-at-home and work-from-home lives, not just distractions.

The largest markets for Google Play downloads were India and Brazil, owing to their sizable populations and preference for lower-cost, Android devices. On iOS, China and the U.S. were the two largest markets by downloads and the main drivers of download growth for the quarter.

Mobile Games, Tools, and Entertainment were the largest categories for Google Play downloads while Games, Photo and Video, and Entertainment were the largest categories on iOS.

On both platforms, Games drove the most growth.

In Q1 2020, mobile game downloads grew 20% year-over-year to reach over 13 billion in the quarter. They were also up 30+% on a quarterly basis.

On Google Play, game downloads were up 25% to nearly 10 billion, year-over-year, and on iOS they were up 25% to top 3 billion in Q1.

Users downloaded Puzzle, Simulation, Action, Simulation and Arcade games in the quarter, but spent the most on Role Play, Action, and Strategy games, as is typical.

Other categories seeing strong downloads across both platforms included Heath & Fitness, Education, and Business. Health & Fitness was up 40% on Google Play and 30% on iOS, quarter-over-quarter. Education was up 35% on Google Play and 40% on iOS. And Business was up was up 30% on Google Play and 35% on iOS.

 

 

Virgin Orbit may be focusing its production efforts right now on making ventilators to support healthcare workers battling COVID-19, but it’s also still making moves to build out the infrastructure that will underpin its small satellite launch business. To that end, the new space company unveiled a new partnership with Oita Prefecture in Japan to build a new spaceport there from which to launch and land its horizontal take-off launch vehicle carrier aircraft.

Working in collaboration with ANA Holdings and the Space Port Japan Association, Virgin Orbit says it is currently targeting Oita Airport as the site for its next launch site – the first in Asia – with a plan to start flying missions from the new location as early as 2022.

There are still a number of steps that have to take place before the Oita airport becomes official – including performing a technical study in partnership with local government to determine the feasibility of using the proposed site. Already, Oita is home to facilities from a number of corporations including Toshiba, Nippon Steel, Canon, Sony, Daihatsu and more, but this would marks its first entry into the space industry, an area where Oita is hoping to encourage in future.

“We are eager to host the first horizontal takeoff and landing spaceport in Japan. We are also honored to be able to collaborate with brave technology companies solving global-level problems through their small satellites,” said Katsusada Hirose, Governor for the Oita Prefectural Government, in a press release. “We hope to foster a cluster of space industry in our prefecture, starting with our collaboration with Virgin Orbit.”

Virgin Orbit is looking to scale its efforts globally in a number of ways, even as it gears up for a first demonstration launch of its orbital small satellite delivery capabilities sometime later this year. The company announced plans to provide launch services from a forthcoming spaceport facility in Cornwall for the UK market, and it’s also looking at standing up a site in Guam.

The horizontal launch model that Virgin Orbit uses means that it can much more easily leverage traditional airport infrastructure and processes to set up launch sites, and doing so can provide domestic launch capabilities essentially on-demand for countries looking to add small satellite flight to their in-country housed services. That’s a big selling point, and Oita securing should be a considerable win and for Japan as the site of a first Virgin Orbit port across the whole continent.

T-Mobile this morning officially announced its exclusive partnership with the new streaming service, Quibi, set to launch on April 6. The service will be made available for free for a year to T-Mobile customers on its unlimited wireless family plans.

The streaming service, founded by Hollywood media mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, has been specifically built for on-the-go viewing on mobile devices. Its “shows” can be watched in 10 minutes or less and take advantage of the mobile device’s ability to be held different ways to enable seamless switching between portrait and landscape modes.

Thanks to Katzenberg’s industry connections, Quibi original content will feature A-Listers and other big names, including Jennifer Lopez, Chrissy Teigen, Chance the Rapper, Liam Hemsworth, Sophie Turner, Lena Waithe, Nicole Richie, Reese Witherspoon and others.

Typically, Quibi subscriptions are offered at $4.99 per month for its ad-supported plan or $7.99 per month for its ad-free option.

Quibi had confirmed last October that a deal with T-Mobile was in place, in statements made to various news outlets. But the details of the deal itself were not yet announced nor confirmed by T-Mobile at that time.

According to T-Mobile’s release, Magenta and ONE plans with taxes and fees included will be eligible for the free Quibi add-on, as will discounted First Responder, Military and Magenta Plus 55 plans, and small business customers with up to 12 lines.

T-Mobile customers can go to mytmobile.com now through July 7 to sign up, or they can use the T-Mobile Android or iOS app beginning on April 6 to add Quibi.

In addition, until April 3, T-Mobile customers who use the T-Mobile Tuesdays app for Android or iOS can get early access to three bonus episodes of the new Jennifer Lopez series, “Thanks a Million” when it launches on April 6. That means customers will have a total of 6 episodes to watch at launch. And on April 7, five people who enter the T-Mobile Tuesdays sweepstakes will win a free Google Pixel 4 XL.

“T-Mobile customers have always been ahead of the curve – streaming more data, watching more mobile video – so when we first heard about Quibi, we knew our customers would love it,” said Mike Sievert, President and CEO of T-Mobile, in a statement. “And, with more of us staying home right now, Quibi’s never been more needed. It comes on the scene with a totally different experience, made for mobile, quick to watch and as entertaining as anything you’ve ever seen!”

Teaming up with a mobile carrier to gain traction among customers for a streaming service is a viable strategy. Disney+ did it with Verizon, which ultimately accounted for 20% of its early customers.

However, Quibi isn’t Disney — it’s not a known brand with pent-up consumer demand for a streaming service. What’s more, its initial marketing no longer makes sense in the post-COVID-19 era.

Quibi has had to reposition its service in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak as something that works for at-home viewing. But in reality, the service had been intended to fill those empty moments in your on-the-go lifestyle — like riding the subway, standing in line, sitting in a waiting room before an appointment, and more. Now, with people stuck at home in government lockdowns and home quarantines, the minutes stretch out endlessly. There’s plenty of time to watch long-form content and the living room TV has more draw over the small phone screen. 

But ultimately, Quibi’s success may not come down to its technology, tricks, or episode length. It will come down the quality of its shows and their ability to capture an audience.

 

 

The global coronavirus pandemic has already caused a tremendous strain on healthcare resources around the world, and it’s leading to a shift in how healthcare is offered. Startup Forward, which debuted in 2016 and has since expanded its tech-focused primary care medical practice to locations in major cities across the U.S., is launching a new initiative called ‘Forward At Home’ that reflects those changes and adapts its care model accordingly.

Forward’s primary differentiator is its focus on what it terms a patient’s ‘baseline,’ which is established by an in-person visit they make when they join that employs a body scanner at a doctor’s office to take a number of readings and produce an interactive chart displayed on-screen in the doctor’s exam room. Forward founder and CEO Adrian Aoun, who previously led special projects at Google before building the health tech company, said that as the company has ramped its efforts to support patients during the COVID-19 pandemic, including through in-clinic and drive-through testing, it also wanted to address the ongoing need for care for non-COVID patients.

“If people aren’t leaving their homes, and frankly, you don’t really want them to leave their homes unless you need them to, you have to figure out how to do all that remotely,” Aoun said in an interview, referring to Forward’s comprehensive biometric data gathering process. “So we’ve we’ve implemented a bunch of different things as rapidly as possible. The first is, how do we collect some biometrics – so we put together a kit that has a bunch of sensors in it that we actually mail to you. This includes an EKG, a connected thermometer, connected blood pressure cuff and a pulse oximeter.”

This approach provides a whole new level of remote care, over and above what’s typically defined as “telemedicine,” which generally amounts to little more than video calls with doctors, Aoun points out. Forward’s approach includes automated vitals monitoring for alerting a doctor if a patient needs intervention, and a patient has access to all their own data in the app as well. The Forward At Home product also take their exam room smart display and brings it to their mobile devices, presenting it for shared consultation between doctor and patient during viral visits, which are available 24/7 to Forward members.

At launch, the service also includes home visits to collect urine and blood samples, as an added measure designed specifically to help patients adhere to CDC and health agency guidelines around self-isolation while also getting a detailed and thorough level of care. Aoun says that this part of the offering doesn’t make sense at scale, and will likely revert to in-clinic visits once the COVID-19 crisis passes.

The rest of the model, though spurred into deployment because of the coronavirus conditions, and the need to limit the number of people going in to medical facilities and hospital all across the country unless they absolutely need to, is here to stay, however. Aoun says that Forward’s goal has always been to address the need for tech-friendly, advanced and comprehensive primary care for everyone, but that it took an approach similar to Tesla’s by addressing the top end of the market first in order to be able to fund development of more broadly available services later on.

Meanwhile, the need to shift as much care as possible to in-home is pressing, and evidence from countries around the world is increasingly pointing to how important that is to stopping the spread.

“The big thing to flatten the curve, the whole point of it, is that the hospitals are going to be overrun,” Aoun said. “So you want to take as many cases as you can, where they don’t actually have to be in the ICU, and treat them outside of the ICU – that’s your first principle. Then your second principle is, and China kind of discovered this early […] they started moving to getting people out of the hospitals, as much as possible for a second reason, which is not that the hospitals are overloaded, but that the hospitals are one of the fastest ways to spread COVID-19.”

That’s a perspective also supported by lessons shared from Italian medical professionals in their effort to deal with the COVID-19 situation there, which has essentially decimated large parts of their medical facility infrastructure.

Forward is also still continuing the other work it’s doing to address COVID-19 needs, including providing its risk assessment screening tool to all, as well as offering testing via clinics and drive-throughs to members, as well as mental health support. It’s also looking to expand its drive-through testing to new sites across the U.S. The Forward At Home initiative, meanwhile, will help ensure that clients who have other pressing health needs aren’t left behind while the effort to combat COVID-19 continues.

Celularity, the venture-backed developer of novel cell therapies for cancer treatments, has received an initial clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to begin early-stage clinical trials on a potential treatment for COVID-19.

The company, which has raised at least $290 million to date (according to Crunchbase), uses “Natural Killer” (NK) cell therapies to boost the immune system’s disease-fighting response.

For Celularity, those NK cells are derived from stem cells cultivated from placental tissue, which hospitals typically treat as medical waste.

Backed by the venture investment firm Section 32, and strategic investors including Celgene, now a division of Bristol Myers; United Therapeutics, a biomedical technology developer; Human Longevity, the troubled venture-backed startup founded by genomics J. Craig Venter; and Sorrento Therapeutics, a publicly traded biomedical company; Celularity was pursuing a number of applications of the novel cell therapy, but its initial focus was on cancer treatments.

The real breakthrough for the company, and one of the reasons why it’s attracted so much capital, is that its cell therapies don’t need to be cultivated from a patient donor — a lengthy and expensive process. Celularity is able to produce NK cells and store them, so that they can be ready for transfusion when they’re needed.

With the the FDA’s clearance, Celularity is going to begin a small, 86-person trial to test the efficacy of its CYNK-001 immunotherapy to treat COVID-19 infected adults, the company said.

There are at least two studies underway in China that are also testing whether Natural Killer cells can be used to treat COVID-19.

NK cells are a type of white blood cell that are part of the body’s immune system. Unlike t-cells, which target particular pathogens, NK cells typically work to support the immune system by identifying and destroying cells in the body that appear to be stressed, either from an infection or a mutation.

The therapy seems to be successful in treating certain types of cancer, and the company’s researchers speculate that it can provide similar results in stopping the ability of the novel coronavirus which causes COVID-19 to spread throughout the body.

However, there are some potential roadblocks and risks to pursuing the NK therapy. Chiefly, COVID-19 is deadly in part because it can push the immune system into overdrive. The “cytokine storm” that results from the infection means that the body starts attacking healthy cells in the lungs which leads to organ failure and death. If that’s the case, then boosting the immune response to COVID-19 might be dangerous for patients.

There’s also the possibility that NK cells might not be able to detect which cells are infected with the coronavirus which causes COVID-19, rendering the therapy ineffective.

“Studies have established that there is robust activation of NK cells during viral infection regardless of the virus class,” said Celularity’s Chief Scientific Officer, Xiaokui Zhang, in a statement. “These functions suggest that CYNK-001 could provide a benefit to COVID-19 patients in terms of limiting SARS-CoV-2 replication and disease progression by eliminating the infected cells.”

Amazon has detailed someone  measures its taking to prevent any further spread of COVID-19 at its warehouse facilities in the U.S. and Europe, according to Reuters, including taking temperature checks and distributing facemasks to employees at Amazon warehouses and Whole Foods stores. The commerce giant has seen a dramatic increase in demand as countries and regions globally have ordered lock-down and varying degrees of self-isolation and quarantine measures, and has also seen confirmed cases of COVID-19 among warehouse workers across the U.S.

Amazon has already described some precautions it’s been taking, including mandatory paid 14-day quarantines for employees who test positive, as well as increased cleaning and sanitization efforts of families and infrastructure. The new measures to be introduced next week include taking temperatures of employees at the entrances to warehouses, with any individuals wth a fever of more than 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit to be sent home, where they’ll have to have three consecutive days without fever to return to work. Employees will also be provided with surgical masks starting next week, the company says, once it receives shipments of orders of “millions” placed a few weeks ago.

In addition to these measures, Amazon will also be using machine-learning powered software to monitor footage from cameras in and around buildings to ensure that employees are maintaining the safe, recommended distances from one another during shifts.

There have been a number of employee actions in response to Amazon’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, including a walkout at the company’s Staten Island warehouse, which led to the firing of the worker who led the action. Employees at a Detroit Amazon warehouse are also planning a walkout to protest what they cite as dangerous working conditions.

Meanwhile, Amazon is also staffing up to deal with the increased need for warehouse and fulfilment employees. The company previously announced a plan to hire as many as 100,000 new workers to handle the uptick, and told Reuters on Wednesday that it has already hired 80,000 since making that goal.

Social entrepreneurship pioneer Jim Fruchterman has launched a new nonprofit, Tech Matters, with $1.7 million in backing from corporate and foundation sources, including Twilio, Okta, Working Capital, Facebook and Schmidt Futures.

Tech Matters is Fruchterman’s new vehicle to address what he sees as a crippling weakness in the social good sector: the failure to use technology the way technologically savvy for-profits do. 

“The social change sector has huge problems and is 10-20 years behind the times. People are finally waking up to the fact that if they really want to do social good at scale that’s going to involve software and data technology,” says Fruchterman. “The mission is to bring the benefits of technology to all of humanity, not the richest 5% of it.”

In order to have the broadest possible impact, Tech Matters is aiming for wins at the technology systems level that can benefit multiple organizations facing similar challenges. 

The firm’s first partnership is with Child Helpline International, which is working with Tech Matters to create a common platform for 170 groups around the world providing hotlines for children facing crises such as drug and sexual abuse. Twilio.org, the social good arm of Twilio, is providing $300,000 to support the project, as well as Twilio’s Flex contact center platform.

Today, most of those 170 hotlines are either iffy hacks running on a computer somewhere or dependent on a volunteer, a phone and a pad of paper. The new platform will enable volunteers to track inbound messaging via sms, voice, WhatsApp, and WeChat.

“It is super compelling to be able to help 170 helplines with one partnership,” says Erin Reilly, Twilio’s chief social impact officer. “Tech Matters has the technical expertise and staff to build this. We are confident they can execute and we are honored to play a small part.”

Tech Matters is in many ways a continuation of what Fruchterman started in 1989 with his first nonprofit, the Palo Alto-based Benetech.

Fruchterman, a Caltech engineering grad, MacArthur Fellow and successful entrepreneur, set up Benetech to raise capital, much the same way venture firms do, to support technologically sophisticated approaches to social problems, especially in the disabilities and human rights fields.

Benetech’s biggest success was to win the U.S. Department of Education’s contract for Bookshare, the federal program that funds reading materials for the blind. Benetech won the contract by digitizing the materials that were formerly cassette tapes and Braille books, which in turn reduced costs, improved the service to readers, and expanded services. In 2017, Benetech won the five-year, $42.5 million contract for the third time. 

Fruchterman handed leadership of Benetech to Betsy Beauman in 2018 and left to start work on Tech Matters. Asked what’s different this time, Fruchterman says Tech Matters is structured so that he can concentrate on helping figure out systems solutions that have broad relevance to the social sector, as well as provide consulting to nonprofits pondering technology investments.

“At Benetech, raising money to support an 80-person team and a $15 million budget took 80% of my time,” he says. “Now fund raising is more like 20% and I am liberated to actually do the advising I want to do. Basically I provide free consulting, though more often it’s free anti-consulting, because most of my job is talking to people out of bad tech ideas.” 

Fruchterman is also writing a book to help get his message out as broadly as possible to nonprofits. “One chapter I’m itching to write,” he says, is “The Five Bad Tech for Good Ideas,” which everybody tries first, like the app nobody will download, the blockchain as your first significant database project, the One True List and so on.”

With the COVID-19 crisis now raging, Fruchterman is especially eager to take on a close cousin to the crisis text hotline project. “My dream even before the pandemic was to work with some of the cloud companies to create a fully functional crisis contact center in a box solution. The idea is that we could quickly provision solutions that would allow a new hotline to turn on in hours or a day at most.”

Additional backers of Tech Matters include EcoAgriculture Partners, FJC, the Hitz Family Foundation, the Peery Foundation, the Ray and Dagmar Dolby Fund.

In this world, there is no such thing as perfect security.

Every app or service you use — even the websites you visit — have security bugs. Companies go through repeated rounds of testing, code reviews and audits — sometimes even bringing in third-parties. Bugs get missed — that’s life, and it happens — but when they are uncovered, companies can get hacked.

That’s where a bug bounty comes into play. A bug bounty is an open-door policy to anyone who finds a bug or a security flaw; they are critical for channeling those vulnerabilities back to your development team so they can be fixed before bad actors can exploit them.

Bug bounties are an extension of your internal testing process and incentivize hackers to report bugs and issues and get paid for their work rather than dropping details of a vulnerability out of the blue (aka a “zero-day”) for anyone else to take advantage of.

Bug bounties are a win-win, but paying hackers for bugs is only one part of the process. As is usually the case where security meets startup culture, getting the right system in place early is best.

Why you need a vulnerability disclosure program

A bug bounty is just a small part of the overall bug-hunting and remediating process.

Facebook Messenger is finally getting desktop apps almost 9 years after its debut. After seeing over a 100% increase in desktop browser audio and video calling, Messenger today releases its Mac and Windows desktop apps. They bring the same features as the browser version, but make it easier to keep your chat threads handy than having Messenger buried in one of many tabs.

Facebook originally announced the Messenger desktop apps at its F8 conference a year ago. But given the conference is cancelled due to coronavirus this year and users clearly wanted the desktop apps now, it made sense to launch them without a big press event.