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Tuesday 31 March 2020

Africa Roundup: Africa’s tech ecosystem responds to COVID-19

Africa Roundup: Africa’s tech ecosystem responds to COVID-19

In March, the virus gripping the world — COVID-19 — started to spread in Africa. In short order, actors across the continent’s tech ecosystem began to step up to stem the spread.

Early in March Africa’s coronavirus cases by country were in the single digits, but by mid-month those numbers had spiked leading the World Health Organization to sound an alarm.

“About 10 days ago we had 5 countries affected, now we’ve got 30,” WHO Regional Director Dr Matshidiso Moeti said at a press conference on March 19. “It’s has been an extremely rapid…evolution.” 

By the World Health Organization’s stats Tuesday there were 3671 COVID-19 cases in Sub-Saharan Africa and 87 confirmed deaths related to the virus — up from 463 cases and 8 deaths on March 18.

As the COVID-19 began to grow in major economies, governments and startups in Africa started measures to shift a greater volume of transactions toward digital payments and away from cash — which the World Health Organization flagged as a conduit for the spread of the coronavirus.

Africa’s leader in digital payment adoption — Kenya — turned to mobile-money as a public-health tool.

At the urging of the Central Bank and President Uhuru Kenyatta, the country’s largest telecom, Safaricom, implemented a fee-waiver on East Africa’s leading mobile-money product, M-Pesa, to reduce the physical exchange of currency.

The company announced that all person-to-person (P2P) transactions under 1,000 Kenyan Schillings (≈ $10) would be free for three months.

Kenya has one of the highest rates of digital finance adoption in the world — largely due to the dominance of M-Pesa  in the country — with 32 million of its 53 million population subscribed to mobile-money accounts, according to Kenya’s Communications Authority.

On March 20, Ghana’s central bank directed mobile money providers to waive fees on transactions of GH₵100 (≈ $18), with restrictions on transactions to withdraw cash from mobile-wallets.

Ghana’s monetary body also eased KYC requirements on mobile-money, allowing citizens to use existing mobile phone registrations to open accounts with the major digital payment providers, according to a March 18 Bank of Ghana release.

Growth in COVID-19 cases in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation of 200 million, prompted one of the country’s largest digital payments startups to act.

Lagos based venture Paga made fee adjustments, allowing merchants to accept payments from Paga customers for free — a measure “aimed to help slow the spread of the coronavirus by reducing cash handling in Nigeria,” according to a company release.

Africa turns to mobile payments as a tool to curb COVID-19

In March, Africa’s largest innovation incubator, CcHub, announced funding and engineering support to tech projects aimed at curbing COVID-19 and its social and economic impact.

The Lagos and Nairobi based organization posted an open application on its website to provide $5,000 to $100,000 funding blocks to companies with COVID-19 related projects.

CcHub’s CEO Bosun Tijani expressed concern for Africa’s ability to combat a coronavirus outbreak. “Quite a number of African countries, if they get to the level of Italy or the UK, I don’t think the system… is resilient enough to provide support to something like that,” Tijani said.

CcHub funds tech to curb COVID-19 on concerns of an Africa outbreak

Cape Town based crowdsolving startup Zindi — that uses AI and machine learning to tackle complex problems — opened a challenge to the 12,000 registered engineers on its platform.

The competition, sponsored by AI4D, tasks scientists to create models that can use data to predict the global spread of COVID-19 over the next three months. The challenge is open until April 19, solutions will be evaluated against future numbers and the winner will receive $5,000.

Zindi will also sponsor a hackathon in April to find solutions to coronavirus related problems.

Image Credits: Sam Masikini via Zindi

On the digital retail front, Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia announced measures it would take on its network to curb the spread of COVID-19.

The Nigeria headquartered operation — with online goods and services verticals in 11 African countries — said it would donate certified face masks to health ministries in Kenya, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Nigeria and Uganda, drawing on its supply networks outside Africa.

The company has also offered African governments use of of its last-mile delivery network for distribution of supplies to healthcare facilities and workers.

Jumia is reviewing additional assets it can offer the public sector. “If governments find it helpful we’re willing to do it,” CEO Sacha Poignonnec told TechCrunch.

Jumia adapts Pan-African e-commerce network in response to COVID-19

More Africa-related stories @TechCrunch

African tech around the ‘net



Investors tell Indian startups to ‘prepare for the worst’ as Covid-19 uncertainty continues

Investors tell Indian startups to ‘prepare for the worst’ as Covid-19 uncertainty continues

Just three months after capping what was the best year for Indian startups, having raised a record $14.5 billion in 2019, they are beginning to struggle to raise new capital as prominent investors urge them to “prepare for the worst”, cut spending and warn that it could be challenging to secure additional money for the next few months.

In an open letter to startup founders in India, ten global and local private equity and venture capitalist firms including Accel, Lightspeed, Sequoia Capital, and Matrix Partners cautioned that the current changes to the macro environment could make it difficult for a startup to close their next fundraising deal.

The firms, which included Kalaari Capital, SAIF Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners — some of the prominent names in India to back early-stage startups — asked founders to be prepared to not see their startups’ jump in the coming rounds and have a 12-18 month runway with what they raise.

“Assumptions from bull market financings or even from a few weeks ago do not apply. Many investors will move away from thinking about ‘growth at all costs’ to ‘reasonable growth with a path to profitability.’ Adjust your business plan and messaging accordingly,” they added.

Signs are beginning to emerge that investors are losing appetite to invest in the current scenario.

Indian startups participated in 79 deals to raise $496 million in March, down from $2.86 billion that they raised across 104 deals in February and $1.24 billion they raised from 93 deals in January this year, research firm Tracxn told TechCrunch. In March last year, Indian startups had raised $2.1 billion across 153 deals, the firm said.

New Delhi ordered a complete nation-wide lockdown for its 1.3 billion people for three weeks earlier this month in a bid to curtail the spread of COVID-19.

The lockdown, as you can imagine, has severely disrupted businesses of many startups, several founders told TechCrunch.

VCs warn coronavirus will impact fundraising for the next 2 quarters

Vivekananda Hallekere, co-founder and chief executive of mobility firm Bounce, said he is prepared for a 90-day slowdown in the business.

Founder of a Bangalore-based startup, which was in advanced stages to raise more than $100 million, said investors have called off the deal for now. He requested anonymity.

Deepinder Goyal, co-founder and chief executive of food delivery firm Zomato, said in January the startup would close a round of up to $600 million by the end of the month. Two months later, Zomato has only raised $150 million.

Many startups are already beginning to cut salaries of their employees and let go of some people to survive an environment that aforementioned VC firms have described as “uncharted territory.”

Travel and hotel booking service Ixigo said it had cut the pay of its top management team by 60% and rest of the employees by up to 30%. MakeMyTrip, the giant in this category, also cut salaries of its top management team.

Beauty products and cosmetics retailer Nykaa on Tuesday suspended operations and informed its partners that it would not be able to pay their dues on time.

Investors cautioned startup founders to not take a “wait and watch” approach and assume that there will be a delay in their “receivables,” customers would likely ask for price cuts for services, and contracts would not close at the last minute.

“Through the lockdown most businesses could see revenues going down to almost zero and even post that the recovery curve may be a ‘U’ shaped one vs a ‘V’ shaped one,” they said.



Vericool raises $19.1 million for its plant-based packaging replacement for plastic coolers

Vericool raises $19.1 million for its plant-based packaging replacement for plastic coolers

Vericool, a Livermore, Calif.-based startup that’s replacing plastic coolers and packaging with plant-based products, has raised $19.1 million in a new round of financing.

The company’s stated goal is to replace traditional packaging materials like polystyrene with plant-based insulating packaging materials.

Its technology uses 100% recycled paper fibers and other plant-based materials, according to the company, and are curbside recyclable and compostable.

Investors in the round include Radicle Impact Partners, The Ecosystem Integrity Fund, ID8 Investments and AiiM Partners, according to a statement.

“We’re pleased to support Vericool because of the company’s track record of innovation, high-performance products, well-established patent portfolio and focus on environmental resilience. We are inspired by the company’s social justice commitment to address recidivism and provide workplace opportunity to formerly incarcerated individuals,” said Dan Skaff, managing partner of Radicle Impact Partners and Vericool’s new lead director. 



General Motors spins up global supply chain to make 50,000 face masks a day

General Motors spins up global supply chain to make 50,000 face masks a day

GM today announced manufacturing details around building much-needed medical face masks. According to the company’s press release, it took the company less than seven days to go from nothing to producing the first production-made mask. The automotive giant said today in a released statement it expects to deliver 20,000 masks on April 8 and soon after, able to produce 50,000 masks a day once the production line is at full capacity.

These face masks are a vital piece of personal protective equipment (PPE) used by front-line healthcare staff to protect themselves against the virus-causing droplets that are spread by patients through coughing and sneezing in clinical settings.

GM turned to global partners to create this manufacturing line within a week. The company sourced material from GM’s existing supply chain and acquired manufacturing equipment from JR Automation in Holland, Michigan, and Esys Automation in Auburn Hills, Michigan. As the company’s press release says, GM even created an ISO Class 8-equivalent cleanroom in GM’s Warren manufacturing plant. GM and the UAW will seek two dozen volunteers to staff this new assembly line.

“The first people we called were those who work with fabric vehicle components,” said Karsten Garbe, GM plant director, Global Pre-Production Operations. “In a few days, the company’s seat belt and interior trim experts became experts in manufacturing face masks.”

While this team was creating a face mask assembly line, others within GM were working towards creating ventilators. Last Friday, March 27, President Donald Trump signed a presidential directive ordering GM to produce ventilators and to prioritize federal contracts. This came hours after the automaker announced plans to manufacture the critical medical equipment needed for patients suffering from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Other automakers joined the fight, as well. Ford and GE Healthcare licensed a ventilator design from Airon Corp and plan to produce as many as 50,000 of them at a Michigan factory by July as part of a broader effort to provide a critical medical device used to treat people with COVID-19. Under this partnership, Ford said it expects to produce 1,500 Airon ventilators by the end of April, 12,00 by the end of May, and 50,000 by July.



Axonius nabs $58M for its cybersecurity-focused network asset management platform

Axonius nabs $58M for its cybersecurity-focused network asset management platform

As companies get to grips with a wider (and, lately, more enforced) model of remote working, a startup that provides a platform to help track and manage all the devices that are accessing networked services — an essential component of cybersecurity policy — has raised a large round of growth funding. Axonius, a New York-based company that provides a way for organizations to manage and track the range of computing-based assets that are connecting to their networks — and then plug in that data to 100 different cybersecurity tools to analyse it — has picked up a Series C of $58 million, money it will use to continue investing in its technology (its R&D offices are in Tel Aviv, Israel) and expanding its business overall.

The round is being led by prolific enterprise investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, with previous backers OpenView, Bessemer Venture Partners, YL Ventures, Vertex, and WTI also participating in the round.

Dean Sysman, CEO and Co-Founder at Axonius, said in an interview that the company is not disclosing its valuation, but for some context, the company has now raised $95 million, and PitchBook noted that in its last round, $20 million in August 2019, it had a post-money valuation of $110 million.

The company has had a huge boost in business in the last year, however — not a surprise for a company that helps enable secure remote working, at a time when many businesses have gone remote in an effort to follow government policies encouraging social distancing to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. As of this month, Axonius has seen customer growth increase 910% compared to a year ago.

Sysman said that this round had been in progress for some time ahead of the announcement being made, but the final stages of closing it were all done remotely last week, which has become something of a new normal in venture deals at the moment.

“We’ve all been staying at home for the last few weeks,” he said in an interview. “The crisis is not helping with deals. It’s making everything more complex for sure. But specifically for us there wasn’t a major difference in the process.”

Sysman said that he first thought of the idea for Axonius when at a previous organization — his experience includes several years with the Israeli Defense Force, as well as time at a startup called Integrity Project, acquired by Mellanox — where he realised the business itself, and all of its customers, never actually knew how many devices accessed their network, which is a crucial first step in being able to secure that network.

“Every CIO I met I would ask, do you know how many devices you have on your network? And the answer was either ‘I don’t know,’ or big range, which is just another way of saying, ‘I don’t know,'” Sysman said. “It’s not because they’re not doing their jobs but because it’s just a tough problem.” Part of the reason is because IP addresses are not precise enough, and de-duplicating and correlating numbers is gargantuan especially in the current climate of people using not just a multitude of work-provided devices, but a number of their own.

That was what prompted Sysman and his cofounders Ofri Shur and Avidor Bartov to build the algorithms that formed the basis of what Axonius is today. It’s not based on behavioural data as some cybersecurity systems are, but something that Sysman describes as “a deterministic algorithm that knows builds a unique set of identifiers that can be based on anything, including timestamp, or cloud information. We try to use every piece of data we can.”

The resulting information becomes a very valuable asset in itself that can then be used across a number of other pieces of security software to search for inconsistencies in use (the behavioural aspect) or other indicators of malicious activity — specifically following the company’s motto, “Know Your Assets, Identify Gaps, and Automate Security Policy Enforcement” — even as data itself may seem a little pedestrian on its own.

“We like to call ourselves the Toyota Camry of cybersecurity,” Sysman said. “It’s nothing exotic in a world of cutting-edge AI and advanced tech. However it’s a fundamental thing that people are struggling with, and it is what everyone needs. Just like the Camry.”

It’s a formula that has definitely seen a lot of traction with customers — which include companies like Schneider Electric, the New York Times, and Landmark Medical, among others — as well as investors.

“Any enterprise CISO’s top priority, with unwavering consistency, is asset discovery and management. You can’t protect a device if you don’t know it exists.” said Arsham Menarzadeh, general partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, in a statement. “Axonius integrates into any security and management product to show customers their full asset landscape and automate policy enforcement. Their integrated approach and remediation capabilities position them to become the operating system and single source of truth for security and IT teams. We’re excited to play a part in helping them scale.”



Leading VCs discuss how COVID-19 has impacted the world of digital health

Leading VCs discuss how COVID-19 has impacted the world of digital health

In December 2019, Extra Crunch spoke to a group of investors leading the charge in health tech to discuss where they saw the most opportunity in the space leading into 2020.

At the time, respondents highlighted startups in digital therapeutics, telehealth and mental health that were improving medical practitioner efficiency or streamlining the distribution of care, amongst a variety of other digital health markets that were garnering the most attention.

Where top VCs are investing in digital health

In the months since, the COVID-19 crisis has debilitated national healthcare systems and the global economy. Weaknesses in healthcare systems have become clearer than ever, while startups and capital providers have struggled to operate while wide swaths of the market effectively shut down.

Given significant volatility and the rapid changes seen in the worlds of healthcare, venture and startups broadly, we wanted to understand which inefficiencies might have been brought to light, what new opportunities might exist for founders looking to reduce friction in healthcare systems, how digital health startups have been impacted and how health tech investing as a whole has changed.

We asked several of the VCs who participated in our last digital health survey to update us on how COVID-19 is impacting digital health startups and broader healthcare systems around the world:

Annie Case, Kleiner Perkins

Our current unprecedented global crisis has put a spotlight on digital health. In the last few weeks alone, we have seen what feels like a decade’s worth of societal and regulatory changes that require digital health companies to step up and embrace new challenges and opportunities.



Fitbit adds GPS and Spotify control for the Charge 4

Fitbit adds GPS and Spotify control for the Charge 4

Let’s be real: Now isn’t the ideal time to launch a health tracker. For a majority of us, expectations have dramatically plummeted for step counts, workout minutes and other gamified metrics. But hardware launches will, for the most part, go on.

Fitbit eschewed its normal press event this time out — for increasingly good reason — instead opting to launch the Charge 4 by way of press release. The line is modest, in a wearable category that’s begun to be dominated by smartwatches, but it’s a cornerstone product that continues to do well for the soon-to-be Google-owned hardware company.

The biggest news here is built-in GPS — a big addition for the category — and Spotify control. The Spotify bit uses “Connect & Control,” requiring a premium account to play back music from playlists.

Better news for those stuck at home are a number of yoga and other workouts directly accessible through a Fitbit Premium account. That’s available as a 90-day trial for new users. Other news: on-board software updates include Active Zone Minutes, which provides more detailed workout requirements informed by the WHO and AMA, along with improved sleep measurements.

Lifestyle photo of Fitbit Charge 4

GPS is a nice addition, but nothing particularly groundbreaking here. At the very least, the update will pump a little fresh blood into what’s become a flagging category, as smartwatches (Fitbit’s included) have begun to increasingly suck the air out of the room for other wearables.

The Charge 4 will hit stores “in markets where they are still open” on April 13. It runs $150, or $170 for a special addition that includes some upgraded bands.



Niantic squares up against Apple and Facebook with acquisition of AR startup 6D.ai

Even as the pandemic forces Niantic to shift the way its outdoor-friendly titles are played, the gaming company is charging ahead with its efforts to build out an augmented reality platform which allows users to interact with the real world.

Today, the studio behind Pokémon Go announced that it has acquired 6D.ai, a promising SF-based augmented reality startup focused on building software that allowed smartphone cameras to rapidly detect the 3D layouts of spaces around them.

The companies didn’t share terms of the deal.

Niantic’s bread-and-butter is mobile games, specifically Pokémon Go, but the company has raised nearly a half-billion dollars to do something more, building out a developer platform for augmented reality meant to rival what has been created by Facebook and Apple. Acquiring 6D.ai is an interesting step further there.

Niantic is a consumer games company and 6D.ai was primarily working with enterprise clients. While Niantic will be shutting down 6D.ai’s existing developer tools over the next month, a spokesperson tells TechCrunch that the tech will soon be integrated with the company’s Niantic Real World Platform to help developers “build AR experiences for all types of consumer and business applications, including enterprise.”

6D.ai is building AR tech that crowdsources a 3D mesh of the world

We profiled 6D.ai back in 2018 when they were fresh out of Oxford University’s Active Vision Lab. CEO Matt Miesnieks told us at the time how he hoped his startup could one day crowdsource 3D models of cities.

“One of the big things holding back engaging AR is for content to feel like it’s actually physically part of the world,” Miesnieks told TechCrunch. “To really make that effect possible, you need to have a 3D model of at least your room, if not the whole world.”

Both Apple and Facebook have made considerable investments in their augmented reality platforms, hoping to bring developers aboard and mount an early lead. Even cursory adoption of the technology has been slower than many in the tech industry have expected, and has, if anything, further isolated Apple and Facebook’s early advantages.

Niantic does host AR’s most popular consumer success story with Pokémon Go, a title which Niantic is still reportedly raking in cash from. Analytics firm SensorTower estimated that the 2016 title had its best year ever in 2019, pulling in some $900 million in revenue. The breakout success of “Go” has not been mirrored as dramatically in the early reception of the studio’s major launch of 2019, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

The ultimate question for Niantic is whether it’s in their best interest to aggressively compete on the tech platform side with acquisitions like these when the timeline of returns is so uncertain and their competitors can likely afford much longer bouts of uncertainty.

Building long-tail success after a breakout game

Following the acquisition, 6D.ai co-founder Victor Prisacariu will be joining Niantic’s London office with Miesnieks opting for an advisory role going forward. The startup had not fully disclosed its funding. Its seed round was led by Niko Bonatsos at General Catalyst and the startup also received funding from Oxford. Angel investors in 6D included Amitt Mahajan, Jacob Mullins and Greg Castle, among others.



SpaceX’s first operational Crew Dragon astronaut mission include a JAXA astronaut

SpaceX’s first operational Crew Dragon astronaut mission include a JAXA astronaut

SpaceX is readying for its first flight with astronauts on board – Demo-2, which is technically the last demonstration mission that is required before the Crew Dragon capsule is officially certified to start flying regular missions. Demo-2’s mission scope has been adjusted somewhat so that astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will be actually doing some shift work on the International Space Station, but Crew-1 is the official first operational mission of the SpaceX human-rated spacecraft, and now we know a few more details about who that will carry.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has announced that JAXA astronaut Noguchi Soichi will be on the first Crew Dragon mission once it officially is declared operational, and the agency said on Tuesday that Noguchi has begun training for his trip to the ISS. Noguchi has been to the ISS twice previously on other missions, including between 2009 and 2010 on via a Russian Soyuz launch, and during 2005 when he actually flew aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in order to help assemble part of the station.

SpaceX and NASA are currently readying for Demo-1, which as mentioned will be crewed by two NASA astronauts. That should take place sometime in mid to late May if the schedule holds to current timing plans. Once that’s complete, Crew-1, which is intended to have a complement of four people on board, should begin sometime in the later half of 2020.

Crew-1 will include NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover, as well as newly announced addition Shannon Walker, who was announced as a new member on the team on Tuesday by NASA.



DataStax launches Kubernetes operator for open source Cassandra database

DataStax launches Kubernetes operator for open source Cassandra database

Today, DataStax, the commercial company behind the open source Apache Cassandra project, announced an open source Kubernetes operator developed by the company to run a cloud native version of the database.

When Sam Ramji, chief strategy officer at DataStax, came over from Google last year, the first thing he did was take the pulse of customers, partners and community members around Kubernetes and Cassandra, and they found there was surprisingly limited support.

While some companies had built Kubernetes support themselves, DataStax lacked one to call its own. Given that Kubernetes was born inside Google, and the company has widely embraced the notion of containerization in general, Ramji wanted there to be an operator specifically designed by the company to give customers a general starting point with Kubernetes.

“What’s special about the Kube operator that we’re offering to the community as an opinion — one of many — is that we have done the work to generalize the operator to Cassandra wherever it might be implemented,” Ramji told TechCrunch.

Ramji says that most companies that have created their own Kubernetes operators tend to specialize for their own particular requirements, which is fine, but as the company built on top of Cassandra, they wanted to come up with a general version that could appeal broader range of use cases.

In Kubernetes, the operator is how the DevOps team packages, manages and deploys an application, giving it the instructions it needs to run correctly. DataStax has created this operator specifically to run Cassandra with a broad set of assumptions.

Cassandra is a powerful database because it stays running when many others fall down. As such it is used by companies as varied as Apple, eBay and Netflix to run their key services. This new Kubernetes implementation will enable anyone who wishes to run Cassandra as a containerized application, helping push it into a modern development realm.

The company also announced a free help service for engineers trying to cope with increased usage on their databases due to COVID-19. They are calling the program, “Keep calm and Cassandra on.” The engineers charged with keeping systems like Cassandra running are called Site Reliability Engineers or SREs.

“The new service is completely free SRE-to-SRE support calls. So our SREs are taking calls from Apache Cassandra users anywhere in the world, no matter what version they’re using if they’re trying to figure out how to keep it up to stand up to the increased demand,” Ramji explained.

DataStax was founded in 2010 and has raised over $190 million, according to PitchBook data.

DataStax Lands $106M In Series E Funding



Bay Area effort to feed hospital workers partners with Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen

Bay Area effort to feed hospital workers partners with Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen

An effort I’ve been following in the Bay Area to deliver meals to front-line hospital clinicians dealing with the results of COVID-19 is announcing a big new partnership today that should give it a national stage. Frontline Foods is partnering up with World Central Kitchen to scale up its ad-hoc efforts across the US.

World Central Kitchen is a not-for-profit organization founded by chef José Andrés in 2010 that has made headlines over and over again as it has provided food and disaster relief in countries around the world after disasters like Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, the Camp Fires in California and most recently COVID-19-affected cruise passengers in Japan and Oakland.

Frontline Foods is an open-sourced effort to deliver meals to hospital staff from local restaurants impacted by loss of clientele due to coronavirus prevention measures. The equation is a brilliantly simple one. Restaurants have far less customers, hospital staff are moving at incredible speed and unable to score a great meal on the fly.

The #SFhospitalmeals experiment evolved into a full clinician meal program, as launched here by Frank Barbieri and Sydney Gessel, along with Ryan Sarver, who I spoke to via email about the program — one of several similar efforts that collectively became Frontline Foods.

“Frank was texting with a mutual friend of ours, Sydney Gessel, who is a registered nurse in the Emergency Department at UCSF Mission Bay. He asked her, ‘How can I help’ and she essentially replied ‘pizza.’ Nurses are pulling 16-hour shifts, are stressed, tired, no time to cook at home, restaurants are closed and the simple act of feeding themselves was going by the wayside,” Sarver said. “At the same time, restaurants were starting to face the reality of shelter-in-place and the dire results of what it meant for them and their teams. We called up a local pizza spot that night and had a bunch of pizzas delivered to her unit. The restaurant and the clinicians were both ecstatic and we realized there was an opportunity to try to do more of this.”

After a couple of dry runs and a tweet for donors, the project ended up expanding to 7 hospitals and raising an eventual $350k over the past few weeks.

Ryan and Frank and other volunteers like Chris Consentino outlined a spec for the project and reached out to a number of restaurants and started plugging them into spreadsheets that matched restaurants to units in need across a few Bay Area hospitals.

Frontline Foods, as a federation that now has multiple chapters across the US, has 150 volunteers in 12 cities and has raised a combined $700,000. In SF it has delivered 4,375 meals to 6 local hospitals. It currently has the ability to deliver another 12,000 meals in SF. Current hospitals served in the bay include UCSF Mission Bay, UCSF Parnassus, SFGH, Kaiser Geary, CPMC Van Ness and CPMC Davies.

Once they saw that there were more groups in the bay and across the US that had started similar ‘connect restaurants to COVID-19 clinicians’ efforts, they began to see the need to build out a standard.

“We decided ‘open sourcing’ the process and tools we were using would help other people start their own programs and allow us to learn from others groups,” Sarver said. “We eventually launched a Slack to help the other cities coordinate. In less than a week we now have 180 volunteers in the Slack, over a dozen cities launched, have raised $700k, and delivered 7,000+ meals.”

Frontline is looking to leverage WCK’s experience in raising money and preparing food for disasters over the last 10 years. WCK’s help as a fiscal sponsor will also give Frontline Foods the ability to utilize its 501c3 status to accept donations. The side of this that is bolstering local restaurants and creating a pipeline between them and groups of people in need of food — fueled by donations — is what Frontline is hoping to bring to the table.

The group boasts a diverse set of skills from technology and design to community management, food & beverage and non-profits. They’re distributed across the US, Canada and Australia as well. It’s nearly all being run on Slack and Zoom calls as well, and most of the group has never met one another.

“We open sourced the process and tools, which at the time was some Google Docs and Google Sheets,” said Sarver. “In the week since, we have spun up a product and engineering team of volunteers who are designing and building more automated systems. Some of it is custom built and but much of it is going to be built on Coda for the backend tools, documentation and automation.”

Many of the cities that are now a part of the Frontline Foods project were home to efforts that started in parallel. After reaching out and realizing that they were aligned, there was a drive to create a new umbrella that used a shared mission and shared systems to make them more effective.

Frontline is reaching out to local, independent restaurants in the areas where it operates or having them apply via a form, and word has spread through the restaurant community. Many of them, even without previous take-out or delivery experience, are figuring out how to package and deliver meals through Frontline’s pipeline. In return, they get a pipeline of predictable business at a time when they are not seeing much predictability at all.

The restaurant industry has been hit incredibly hard by COVID-19, and there is a real danger that an entire generation of independent food providers will just be wiped out. Many are adapting at speed to a life of takeout, or marketplaces, or safe delivery — but any additional help is welcome. And the double-ended benefit that results from the Frontline Foods (and WCK) project is a fantastic way to deliver that help.

“World Central Kitchen is a team of food first responders, mobilizing with the urgency of now to get meals to those who need them most. We are proud that this alliance with Frontline Foods will help activate even more restaurants and kitchens to feed our brave medical professionals on the front lines, in order to make a meaningful impact in the fight to keep everyone fed, and to support the distressed restaurant industry,” World Central Kitchen CEO Nate Mook said in a release today.

Frontline Foods and WCK are taking no fees from these transactions. Along with the WCK partnership, Frontline is also launching a national donation-matching program with a $200,000 matching grant from top donors.

“This is an unprecedented crisis (I’ve used that a lot, but it is) — the hospitals and clinicians have never seen anything like this,” said Sarver via email. “And for the 11 million people employed by restaurants in the US, they face a very uncertain future. Every dollar of a donation goes directly into the pockets of these restaurants to make the food that goes to our clinicians. If you can, please consider a donation.”

You can donate on Frontline Foods website here.



Cnvrg.io launches a free version of its data science platform

Cnvrg.io launches a free version of its data science platform

Data science platform cnvrg.io today announced the launch of the free community version of its data science platform. Dubbed ‘CORE,’ this version includes most — but not all — of the standard feature in cnvrg’s main commercial offering. It’s an end-to-end solution for building, managing and automating basic ML models with limitations in the free version that mostly center around the production capabilities of the paid premium version and working with larger teams of data scientists.

As the company’s CEO Yochay Ettun told me, CORE users will be able to use the platform either on-premise or in the cloud, using Nvidia-optimized containers that run on a Kubernetes cluster. Because of this, it natively handles hybrid- and multi-cloud deployments that can automatically scale up and down as needed — and adding new AI frameworks is simply a matter of spinning up new containers, all of which are managed from the platform’s web-based dashboard.

Ettun describes CORE as a ‘lightweight version’ of the original platform but still hews closely to the platform’s original mission. “As was our vision from the very start, cnvrg.io wants to help data scientists do what they do best – build high impact AI,” he said. “With the growing technical complexity of the AI field, the data science community has strayed from the core of what makes data science such a captivating profession — the algorithms. Today’s reality is that data scientists are spending 80 percent of their time on non-data science tasks, and 65 percent of models don’t make it to production. Cnvrg.io CORE is an opportunity to open its end-to-end solution to the community to help data scientists and engineers focus less on technical complexity and DevOps, and more on the core of data science — solving complex problems.”

This has very much been the company’s direction from the outset and as Ettun noted in a blog post from a few days ago, many data scientists today try to build their own stack by using open-source tools. They want to remain agile and able to customize their tools to their needs, after all. But he also argues that data scientists are usually hired to build machine learning models, not to build and manage data science platforms.

While other platforms like H2O.ai, for example, are betting on open source and the flexibility that comes with that, cnvrg.io’s focus is squarely on ease of use. Unlike those tools, Jerusalem-based cnvrg.io, which has raised about $8 million so far, doesn’t have the advantage of the free marketing that comes with open source, so it makes sense for the company to now launch this free self-service version

It’s worth noting that while cnvrg.io features plenty of graphical tools for managing date ingestion flows, models and clusters, it’s very much a code-first platform. With that, Ettun tells me that the ideal user is a data scientist, data engineer or a student passionate about machine learning. “As a code-first platform, users with experience and savvy in the data science field will be able to leverage cnvrg CORE features to produce high impact models,” he said. “As our product is built around getting more models to production, users that are deploying their models to real-world applications will see the most value.”

 



Family-friendly Spotify Kids app launches in the U.S., Canada and France

Family-friendly Spotify Kids app launches in the U.S., Canada and France

Last fall, Spotify debuted a standalone Kids application, aimed at bringing kid-friendly music and stories to Spotify Premium Family subscribers, initially in Ireland. Today, that app is being made available broadly in the U.S. Canada and France, the company announced on Tuesday. The Kids app is still considered a “beta” as it arrives in these new markets, Spotify says. However, it’s been expanded with more songs, stories and other content since the original beta tests began.

The app is largely designed to boost sign-ups for Spotify’s top-tier subscription, the $14.99 (USD) per month Premium Family plan. This plan offers up to 6 people in the same household access to Spotify’s on-demand, ad-free music streaming service, each with their own personalized account. It also includes other exclusive features like Family Mixes, as well as parental controls, and now, the Spotify Kids application.

Spotify has long since realized its one-size-fits-all strategy didn’t work for families. It needed to build a unique experience separate from its flagship app in order to best cater to children — and to abide by the regulations around data collection and consent with regard to apps aimed at kids.

Spotify designed the Kids app from the ground up with the needs of both parents and kids in mind. For parents, it offers peace of mind that children won’t accidentally encounter inappropriate lyrics, for example, or songs with more adult themes. To ensure this remains the case, Spotify editors hand-curate the content on the Kids app by following a set of guidelines about what’s inappropriate for children. It doesn’t utilize algorithms to make selections about what’s included, the way the spinoff app YouTube Kids does.

Instead of being a fully on-demand product, Spotify Kids offers playlists for little ones focused around categories like Movies, TV, Stories, or various activities, like “Learn” or “Party,” among others. As kids grow older, they may also want to follow their favorite artists in the app.

The app can also be customized by age range. For younger kids, there’s character-based artwork and content aimed at the preschool set like singalongs or lullabies. Older kids will see a more detailed experience and have access to more popular tracks that are also age-appropriate.

The programmed playlists in Spotify Kids are curated by editors hailing from some of the most well-known brands in kids’ entertainment — including Nickelodeon, Disney, Discovery Kids, Universal Pictures, and others. They know what kids want and also what sells to the parents who pay.

Since its launch in Ireland, Spotify Kids has rolled out to Sweden, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.

It has also added more content since its original debut, says Spotify.

“We heard loud and clear that both parents and kids are craving more content in the app, so we’ve been increasing the number of tracks available. We’ve also heard from parents that they want even more control of the content, so we are working on some exciting new features,” noted Spotify’s Chief Premium Business Officer Alex Norström, in a statement.

The company isn’t yet going into detail about the upcoming additions, but says they’ll be focused on giving parents more control over the child’s experience. Typically, that would mean letting parents make more specific choices about what’s being streamed. But since parental controls are already available, it could mean letting parents pick specific songs or perhaps, block them. Time will tell.

Today the Spotify Kids app has over 8,000 songs in its catalog — 30% more than when it first arrived in Ireland, and growing.

It also has more local content, with 50% of the catalog in the app localized by market. Its collection of kid-friendly audiobooks and stories has grown as well, and the app now offers over 60 hours of stories, including fairy tales, classics, short stories, and stories from Disney Music Group.

In response to user feedback, there’s also now more bedtime content like lullabies, calming music and sounds, and bedtime stories. (And yes, this finally means that Spotify parents will stop having their year-end Spotify Wrapped ruined by lullabies.)

In the U.S., Spotify Kids launches today with over 125 playlists (approximately 8,000 tracks.) In addition to mainstream kids’ music, the catalog includes Spanish-language, Country, Christian, Motown, and Soul Dance Party playlists. There’s also a Trolls World Tour playlist and another for Frozen.

In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, there’s also a new global playlist called “Wash Your Hands” which includes songs that teach kids to wash hands and to cough and sneeze properly. This includes the new song from Pinkfong “Wash Your Hands with Baby Shark.”

And to aid parents now educating children at home, there’s a “Learning” playlist hub where you’ll find songs about the ABC’s, counting, science and more.

The app is available today in the U.S., Canada, and France on iOS and Android. The app is a free download, but requires a Spotify Premium Family membership.

 



Snapchat preempts clones, syndicates Stories to other apps

Snapchat preempts clones, syndicates Stories to other apps

If you can’t stop them, power them. That’s the strategy behind Snapchat App Stories, which launches today to let users show off their ephemeral content in other apps too. The first partners will let you post Stories to your dating profile in Hily, share them alongside [music] videos in Triller, watch them while screensharing in Squad, or give people a peek at your life in augmented reality network Octi.

Snapchat’s Stories format has been widely cloned, most famously by Instagram and Facebook, but with versions in various states of development for YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, SoundCloud, and more. Snapchat hopes to retain some grip on Stories and dissuade more copycats by letting developers bake the original version into their apps rather than building a bootleg attempt from scratch.

If you need Snapchat to share Stories to popular apps, that could boost content production plus subsequent viewership and ad impressions inside of Snapchat, remind people to shoot Stories, and make sure having a Snapchat account stays relevant. “We definitely think there’s a potential for monetization in App Stories but not yet” Snap’s VP of partnerships Ben Schwerin tells me. For now, Snapchat isn’t injecting ads into alongside Stories into other apps, though that’s clearly the plan.

“There are certain platforms out there that have decided they want to invest in building their own Stories product and their own camera, but it’s not a trivial thing to do. It takes resources and time. We think we think we can help developers do that” Schwerin explains. “Getting more people oput there, regardless of age or where they live, comfortable using Stories probably makes them more likely to be able to pick up and enjoy Snapchat.”

Snapchat initially announced the plan for App Stories at its Partner Summit exactly a year ago. Unfortunately, its second annual developer conference that was set for this week was cancelled due to coronavirus.

Though advertising spend may be reduced, at least the app has experienced an increase in usage while everyone shelters in place. That includes third-party apps built on its Snap Kit platform that lets developers piggyback on Snapchat’s login, Bitmoji, and camera effects.

“We continue to see incredible growth from established apps like Reddit and Spotify and TikTok, and from startups that are really building from the ground up on Snap Kit like Yolo” Schwerin reveals. People are spending more time at home and less time with friends. We’re seeing increased usage of Snapchat.”

Snap Kit has allowed Snapchat to rally would-be copycats into a legion of allies as it fights to stave off the Facebook empire. That strategy combined with a high-performance rebuild of its Android app led Snapchat’s share price to grow from $11.36 a year ago to a recent high of $18.98 before coronavirus dragged almost all the way back down.

For Snapchat to gain momentum it needs two things: a constant influx of new users, eager to use its augmented reality camera and Bitmoji wherever they’re available, and more impressions to monetize with ads after Instagram stole the Stories use case for untold millions of older users. App Stories could help with both.

Now, when people shoot a photo or video in the Snapchat camera, they’ll get options to share it not just to their Story or Snap Map and the crowdsourced community Stories, but also to their Story within other apps integrated with Snap Kit. Users will see options to syndicate their Story to products equipped with App Stories where they’re already logged in.

Unlike on Snapchat where Stories disappear after 24 hours, with they default to a 7-day expiration in other App Stories. That relieves users of having to constantly post ephemeral Snaps to keep their dating or social app profiles stocked with biographical content.



Damon Motorcycles makes acquisition, raises $3M and extends pre-orders

Damon Motorcycles makes acquisition, raises $3M and extends pre-orders

EV startup Damon Motorcycles has acquired the IP of Mission Motors, raised $3 million in funding and announced a special production run of its debut model.

The Vancouver-based venture unveiled the 200 mph Hypersport in January and began taking pre-orders for the e-moto, with a base price of $24,995. Damon has positioned its EV entry as an ultra-fast, smart and safe motorcycle.

In addition to its go-straight-to-jail top-speed, the Hypersport boasts 200 miles of highway range, 147 ft-lbs of torque, charges to 80% in 20 minutes and weighs less than 500 pounds, Damon CEO Jay Giraud told TechCrunch earlier this year.

These features, along with digitally controlled riding-modes, are just part of Damon’s signature. The seed-stage startup has also engineered the cloud-connected Hypersport with proprietary safety and ergonomics technology that provide adjustable riding positions and blind-spot detection.

Damon Motorcycles

Image Credits: Damon Motorcycles

Damon packed a lot into its latest announcement and shared some insight on appealing to the elusive millennial market and weathering the economic tremors of the COVID-19 crisis.

On the acquisition, the startup purchased the IP of Mission Motors, a now defunct San Francisco e-motorcycle venture that powered down in 2015. Though Mission’s EV development outran its capital, the company’s motorcycles achieved a number of performance benchmarks and captured the attention of Jay Leno.

Mission Motors was also one of first e-moto companies to roll into the competition arena, fielding an entry in the famed Isle of Man TT race in 2009.

Damon will draw on Mission’s product and racing tech, including the company’s full stack development for EV drive-trains and battery power.

“There are certain bits of that we’re going to roll into the commercialized Hypersport,” Damon COO Derek Derek Dorresteyn told Techcrunch on a call with CEO Jay Giraud.

“Specifically, we’re using the motor development that they had as a platform to advance our motor design…We’re looking at achieving 12 newton-meters per kilogram of torque output from an electric motor,” Dorresteyn said.

Giraud explained that could translate to Damon producing an electric motorcycle with roughly 160 kilowatts of power, 200 horsepower and 200 ft-lbs of torque. That would outdo one of the fastest production e-motorcycles, Energica’s EGO, with 145 horsepower and 159 ft-lbs of torque.

Energica’s Ego, Image Credits: TechCrunch

On funding, Damon Motors now has $3 million in additional capital, raised at the pre-seed level from undisclosed angel investors.

The startup will use the backing on product development and accelerating time to market, Giraud said.

Damon’s founder also noted that the company was on track to fill its initial target of 1000 pre-orders for both its Hypersport standard and Premiere models. As such, the startup will extend orders on a limited run, $34,995 Hypersport Premiere founder edition in two different color-schemes: Arctic Sun and Midnight Sun.

Damon is highlighting the demographics of those placing deposits on its Hypersport e-motorcycles.

“Half the people ordering are under the age of 40,” said Giraud. “It really speaks to product market fit.”

The ability to draw millennials to motorcycle purchases is significant, given they’ve been the hardest market segment to crack. Young buyers used to be a mainstay of the industry, but the last 10 years have seen sharp declines in motorcycle ownership by everyone under 40, according to Motorcycle Industry Council stats.

Damon believes its proprietary tech and plans for a direct-to-consumer sales and service model can attract affluent younger buyers and the Tesla crowd to its fast and safe motorcycles.

Though TechCrunch hasn’t yet ridden a Hypersport, the two-wheeler’s specs offer unique features compared to any current production gas or electric motorcycle. On safety, Damon’s CoPilot system uses sensors, radar and cameras to track moving objects around the motorcycle and alert riders to danger.

Damon Motorcycles Hypersport Sensors

Image Credits: Damon Motorcycles

The startup’s debut EV also brings smart ergonomics in Damon’s patented Shift system that allows riders to electronically adjust the motorcycle’s windscreen, seat, foot-pegs and handlebars to different riding positions and conditions.

Even with the demand Damon has seen for the Hypersport, it still faces a stagnant motorcycle market that has become crowded with EV competitors.

Harley Davidson introduced its all electric LiveWire in 2019, becoming the first of the big gas manufacturers to offer a street-legal e-moto for sale in the U.S.

Harley’s entry followed several failed electric motorcycle startups — including Mission Motors — and put it in the market with existing EV ventures, such as Italy’s Energica and U.S. startup Zero  — which launched its $19,000, 120 mph SR/F in 2019.

On top of strong competition in the e-moto space, there’s a growing uncertainty on the buying appetite for motorcycles of any kind that could exist for the remainder of 2020, and potentially beyond, given the COVID-19 pandemic gripping the world.

As of this week, Harley Davidson had halted all motorcycle production due the coronavirus and Energica confirmed to TechCrunch it had shutdown all operations per a decree of the Italian government.

Zero Motorcycles — located in Scott’s Valley, California — is still producing motorcycles “following the standard health orders of the CDC”, according to a company spokesperson.

Damon’s leadership believes the company can power through whatever lies ahead. The company has a global supply-chain across Europe, Asia and North America, but builds its battery packs and assembles its motorcycles in Canada.

“There are real challenges to get anyone to do anything today. We don’t expect that to be true forever,” COO Derek Dorresteyn said of supply-chain and meeting production demand. 

CEO Jay Giraud believes the current situation with COVID-19 will likely create an economic slump that could drag on longer than the 2008 Great Recession.

On how Damon Motorcycles will manage, “Like every core startup in the world, we’re gonna have to raise a lot of money no matter what. But we’re in a good place right now,” he said.

Talking to Zero Motorcycles’ CEO and taking home the 2020 SR/F



Disney+ to launch in India on April 3

Disney+ to launch in India on April 3

Disney said on Tuesday that it will launch its streaming service, Disney+, in India on April 3. The service, available globally in about a dozen markets, will launch in India on Hotstar, one of the most popular on-demand streaming services in the country that is also owned by Disney.

The company said it is raising the yearly subscription cost of the combined entity, Disney+Hotstar, to Rs 1,499 ($20), up from Rs 999 ($13.2) that it previously charged for its most premium content on Hotstar. TechCrunch reported last year that Disney+ will launch in India in 2020 and will increase its subscription cost.

Hotstar, which claimed to have amassed 300 million monthly active users during the cricket season in India last year, would continue to offer an ad-supported service that it will offer to users without a charge. But it is increasing the cost of both of its premium tiers.

Disney is also offering a yearly tier that costs Rs 399 ($5.3) that will include movies from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, access to live sporting events and a wide catalog of movies and shows, and original shows produced by Hotstar. It will not include Disney+ Originals.

The $20 yearly subscription tier will offer over 100 series and 250 superhero and animated titles, including Disney+ Originals and shows from HBO, Fox, and Showtime, the company said. It will also include access to everything that Disney+Hotstar customers are availing at $5.3 tier.

“With the success of Hotstar, we ushered in a new era for premium video streaming in India. Today, as we unveil Disney+ Hotstar, we take yet another momentous step in staying committed to our promise of delivering high-quality impactful stories for India that have not only entertained but also made a difference in people’s lives, a promise that is even more meaningful in challenging times such as this. We hope the power of Disney’s storytelling, delivered through Hotstar’s technology, will help our viewers find moments of comfort, happiness and inspiration during these difficult times,” Uday Shankar, President of The Walt Disney Company APAC and Chairman, Star & Disney India, said in a statement.

More to follow…



Xiaomi reports Q4 revenue jump, beats estimates

Xiaomi reports Q4 revenue jump, beats estimates

Xiaomi ended 2019 on a high, reporting a 27.1% year-over-year jump in the fourth-quarter revenue aided by overseas expansion, beating analysts’ estimation. 

The Chinese giant said sales in the fourth quarter jumped to 56.5 billion yuan ($8 billion), up from 44.42 billion yuan in the same quarter a year before.

In the fourth quarter of 2019, Xiaomi’s net profit was RMB 2.3 billion ($320 million), up 26.5% YoY. Refinitiv I/B/E/S had estimated Xiaomi’s Q4 2019 revenue to be $7.83 billion and the net income at $264 million, it told TechCrunch. 

Xiaomi said its cash reserves had improved and it planned to continue to invest in international regions such as India, its biggest overseas market. Xiaomi executives said on a conference call with reporters that they hope that the 21-day lockdown imposed by New Delhi earlier this month to contain the spread of the coronavirus outbreak, which has put an absolute halt to purchase of non-essential goods, would “show signs of recovery” in two to three months.

The company said overseas demand for its products will “undoubtedly” be affected by the coronavirus outbreak, but it currently believes the impact is manageable. It cautioned, however, that its advertisement business could be potentially impacted if its customers decrease their budgets. Xiaomi said its production was already up to 80% of its capacity.

Xiaomi said the gross profit margin from the smartphone business, its biggest revenue source, had increased from 6.1% in Q4 2018 to 7.8% in Q4 2019. The company’s Android-based MIUI operating system now has 309.6 million monthly active users, up from 292 million in September last year. Of the 309.6 million MIUI users, 109 million live in mainland China, it said.

“Despite headwinds from the Sino-US trade war and global economic downturn, Xiaomi stood out in 2019 with a commendable set of results as our revenue exceeded RMB200 billion for the first time,” said Lei Jun, Xiaomi founder and chief executive.

“While the entire world is still under the dark shadows of COVID-19, we have maintained our keen focus on efficiency to tide over this economic ‘black swan’ with everyone. At Xiaomi, we firmly believe that our long-term business success is underpinned by technological innovations, and to that effect, we plan to invest RMB50.0 billion in the next five years, as we relentlessly focus on technological innovation and user experience to grow our loyal Mi Fan base,” he added.

More to follow…



Monzo CEO won’t take salary for 12 months after limited number of staff offered voluntary furlough

Monzo CEO won’t take salary for 12 months after limited number of staff offered voluntary furlough

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank with over 4 million account holders, is taking a number of precautionary steps to help see it through the current coronavirus downturn, including voluntary furloughs and its CEO forgoing a salary, TechCrunch understands.

In an internal company-wide memo issued by co-founder and CEO Tom Blomfield, he tells the bank’s over 1,500 staff that he won’t be taking a salary for the next twelve months, and that the senior management team and board have volunteered to take a 25% cut in salary, as have other “Monzonaughts” within the company.

In addition, a limited number of Monzo’s U.K. employees are being offered voluntary furloughing for two months, as part of the scheme rolled out by the U.K. government to protect jobs during the coronavirus lockdown, which is already impacting many companies — not just Monzo — including several other fintechs I know of. Furlough ensures that employees still get paid even when work has decreased and that when things hopefully return to normal there is a job to come back to.

Although well capitalised, like other banks and fintechs, Monzo has seen customer card spend reduce at home and (of course) abroad, meaning it is seeing less revenue from interchange fees. New account signups have also slowed, as has customer support requests. It therefore makes sense to utilise the furlough scheme to help protect jobs in the future when demand picks up again. By making it voluntary, it also means staff with kids to home school or loved ones to take care of, can use the option to hopefully make their lives easier for the time being.

Specifically, I understand Monzo is accepting up to 175 furlough applications in customer support, and up to 120 applications from other parts of the business.

Meanwhile, it’s not clear if other U.K. challenger banks are also using the government’s furlough scheme. I’ve asked Starling and Revolut, for example, but have yet to hear back. As already mentioned, the scheme is available to U.K. companies right across the board and several startups, including fintechs, have already applied furloughing as a pre-cautionary measure.

Lastly, it should be stressed that none of the above should impact customers at Monzo, which, as a digital bank, is pretty well-positioned to operate during lockdown and with all staff already working from home. It is also a fully licensed bank, with customer deposits up to £85,000 protected as part of the U.K. government’s deposit protection scheme.



Uber co-founder Garrett Camp steps back from board director role

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp steps back from board director role

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp is relinquishing his role as a board director and switching to board observer — where he says he’ll focus on product strategy for the ride hailing giant.

Camp made the announcement in a short Medium post in which he writes of his decade at Uber: “I’ve learned a lot, and realized that I’m most helpful when focused on product strategy & design, and this is where I’d like to focus going forward.”

“I will continue to work with Dara [Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO] and the product and technology leadership teams to brainstorm new ideas, iterate on plans and designs, and continue to innovate at scale,” he adds. “We have a strong and diverse team in place, and I’m confident everyone will navigate well during these turbulent times.”

The Canadian billionaire entrepreneur signs off by saying he’s looking forward to helping Uber “brainstorm the next big idea”.

Camp hasn’t been short of ideas over his career in tech. He’s the co-founder of the web 2.0 recommendation engine, StumbleUpon. He’s also founded a startup studio and incubator, Expa Studios and Expa Labs — which has spawned startups like Haus, which is pushing an alternative model for home ownership. More recently he’s been been building Eco: A crypto currency with an energy efficiency twist.

Meanwhile, Uber’s other co-founder, Travis Kalanick, left the company board entirely at the end of last year — having been forced out of the CEO role in 2017 following a shareholder revolt by prominent investors at the height of controversy around Uber’s toxic workplace culture.

At the time, Camp said the culture controversy at Uber had left him “upset and deeply reflective“. And he backed replacing Kalanick as CEO — helping to bring in Khosrowshahi, who remains at Uber’s helm.

Ryan Graves — Uber’s first employee and first CEO — also left the board last year, shortly after the IPO.

We’ve reached out to Uber for comment on the latest board change.



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