YC startup Felix wants to replace antibiotics with programmable viruses

Right now the world is at war. But this is no ordinary war. It’s a fight with an organism so small we can only detect it through use of a microscope — and if we don’t stop it, it could kill millions of us in the next several decades. No, I’m not talking about COVID-19, though that organism is the one on everyone’s mind right now. I’m talking about antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

You see, more than 700,000 people died globally from bacterial infections last year — 35,000 of them in the U.S. If we do nothing, that number could grow to 10 million annually by 2050, according to a United Nations report.

The problem? Antibiotic overuse at the doctor’s office or in livestock and farming practices. We used a lot of drugs over time to kill off all the bad bacteria — but it only killed off most, not all, of the bad bacteria. And, as the famous line from Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park goes, “life finds a way.”

Enter Felix, a biotech startup in the latest Y Combinator batch that thinks it has a novel approach to keeping bacterial infections at bay – viruses.

Phage killing bacteria in a petri dish

It seems weird in a time of widespread concern over the corona virus to be looking at any virus in a good light but as co-founder Robert McBride explains it, Felix’s key technology allows him to target his virus to specific sites on bacteria. This not only kills off the bad bacteria but can also halt its ability to evolve and once more become resistant.

But the idea to use a virus to kill off bacteria is not necessarily new. Bacteriophages, or viruses that can “infect” bacteria, were first discovered by an English researcher in 1915 and commercialized phage therapy began in the U.S. in the 1940’s through Eli Lilly and Company. Right about then antibiotics came along and Western scientists just never seemed to explore the therapy further.

However, with too few new solutions being offered and the standard drug model not working effectively to combat the situation, McBride believes his company can put phage therapy back at the forefront.

Already Felix has tested its solution on an initial group of 10 people to demonstrate its approach.

Felix researcher helping cystic fibrosis patient Ella Balasa through phage therapy

“We can develop therapies in less time and for less money than traditional antibiotics because we are targeting orphan indications and we already know our therapy can work in humans,” McBride told TechCrunch. “We argue that our approach, which re-sensitizes bacteria to traditional antibiotics could be a first line therapy.”

Felix plans to deploy its treatment in those suffering from cystic fibrosis first as there is no cure for this disease, which tends to require a near constant stream of antibiotics to combat lung infections.

The next step will be to conduct a small clinical trial involving 30 people, then, as the scientific research and development model tends to go, a larger human trial before seeking FDA approval. But McBride hopes his viral solution will prove itself out in time to help the coming onslaught of antibiotic resistance.

“We know the antibiotic resistant challenge is large now and is only going to get worse,” McBride said. “We have an elegant technological solution to this challenge and we know our treatment can work. We want to contribute to a future in which these infections do not kill more than 10 million people a year, a future we can get excited about.”

https://ift.tt/2U6L1aK YC startup Felix wants to replace antibiotics with programmable viruses https://ift.tt/2wiCadd

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Under quarantine, media is actually social

The flood of status symbol content into Instagram Stories has run dry. No one is going out and doing anything cool right now, and if they are, they should be shamed for it. Beyond sharing video chat happy hour screenshots and quarantine dinner concoctions, our piece-by-piece biographies have ground to a halt. Oddly, what remains feels more social than social networks have in a long time.

With no source material, we’re doing it live. Coronavirus has absolved our desire to share the recent past. The drab days stuck inside blur into each other. The near future is so uncertain that there’s little impetus to make plans. Why schedule an event or get excited for a trip just to get your heartbroken if shelter-in-place orders are extended? We’re left firmly fixed in the present.

A house-arrest Houseparty, via StoicLeys

What is social media when there’s nothing to brag about? Many of us are discovering it’s a lot more fun. We had turned social media into a sport but spent the whole time staring at the scoreboard rather than embracing the joy of play.

But thankfully, there are no Like counts on Zoom.

Nothing permanent remains. That’s freed us from the external validation that too often rules our decision making. It’s stopped being about how this looks and started being about how this feels. Does it put me at peace, make me laugh, or abate the loneliness? Then do it. There’s no more FOMO because there’s nothing to miss by staying home to read, take a bath, or play board games. You do you.

Being social animals, what feels most natural is to connect. Not asynchronously through feeds of what we just did. But by coexisting concurrently. Professional enterprise technology for agenda-driven video calls has been subverted for meandering, motive-less togetherness. We’re doing what many of us spent our childhoods doing in basements and parking lots: just hanging out.

For evidence, just look at group video chat app Houseparty, where teens aimlessly chill with everyone’s face on screen at once. In Italy, which has tragically been on lock down since COVID-19’s rapid spread in the country, Houseparty wasn’t even in the top 1500 apps a month ago. Today it’s the #1 social app, and the #2 app overall second only to Zoom.

Houseparty topped all the charts on Monday, when Sensor Tower tells TechCrunch that Houseparty’s download rate was 323X higher than its average in February. It’s currently #1 in Portugal (up 371X) and Spain (up 592X) despite being absent from the chart a week earlier.

After binging through Netflix and beating the video games, all that’s left to entertain us is each other.

Undivided By Geography

If we’re all stuck at home, it doesn’t matter where that home is. We’ve been released from the confines of which friends are within a 20 minute drive or hour-long train. Just like students are saying they all go to Zoom University since every school’s classes moved online, we all now live in Zoom Town. All commutes have been reduced to how long it takes to generate an invite URL.

Nestled in San Francisco, even pals across the Bay in Berkeley felt far away before. But this week I had hour-long video calls with my favorite people who typically feel out of reach in Chicago and New York. I spent time with babies I hadn’t met in person. And I kept in closer touch with my parents on the other coast, which is more vital and urgent than ever before.

Playing board game Codenames over Zoom with friends in New York and North Carolina

Typically, our time is occupied by acquaintances of circumstance. The co-workers who share our office. The friends who happen to live in the neighborhood. But now we’re each building a virtual family completely of our choosing. The calculus has shifted from who is convenient or who invites us to the most exciting place, to who makes us feel most human.

Even celebrities are getting into it. Rather than pristine portraits and flashy music videos, they’re appearing raw, with crappy lighting, on Facebook and Instagram Live. John Legend played piano for 100,000 people while his wife Chrissy Teigen sat on screen in a towel looking salty like she’s heard “All Of Me” far too many times. That’s more authentic than anything you’ll get on TV.

And without the traditional norms of who we are and aren’t supposed to call, there’s an opportunity to contact those we cared about in a different moment of our lives. The old college roommate, the high school buddy, the mentor who gave you you’re shot. If we have the emotional capacity in these trying times, there’s good to be done. Who do you know who’s single, lives alone, or resides in a city without a dense support network?

Reforging those connections not only surfaces prized memories we may have forgotten, but could help keep someone sane. For those who relied on work and play for social interaction, shelter-in-place is essentially solitary confinement. There’s a looming mental health crisis if we don’t check in on the isolated.

The crisis language of memes

It can be hard to muster the energy to seize these connections, though. We’re all drenched in angst about the health impacts of the virus and financial impacts of the response. I certainly spent a few mornings sleeping in just to make the days feel shorter. When all small talk leads to rehashing our fears, sometimes you don’t have anything to say.

Luckily we don’t have to say anything to communicate. We can share memes instead.

The internet’s response to COVID-19 has been an international outpour of gallow’s humor. From group chats to Instagram joke accounts to Reddit threads to Facebook groups like quarter-million member “Zoom Memes For Quaranteens”, we’re joining up to weather the crisis.

A nervous laugh is better than no laugh at all. Memes allow us to convert our creeping dread and stir craziness into something borderline productive. We can assume an anonymous voice, resharing what some unspecified other made without the vulnerability of self-attribution. We can dive into the creation of memes ourselves, killing time under house arrest in hopes of generating smiles for our generation. And with the feeds and Stories emptied, consuming memes offers a new medium of solidarity. We’re all in this hellscape together so we may as well make fun of it.

The web’s mental immune system has kicked into gear amidst the outbreak. Rather than wallowing in captivity, we’ve developed digital antibodies that are evolving to fight the solitude. We’re spicing up video chats with board games like Codenames. One-off livestreams have turned into wholly online music festivals to bring the sounds of New Orleans or Berlin to the world. Trolls and pranksters are finding ways to get their lulz too, Zoombombing webinars. And after a half-decade of techlash, our industry’s leaders are launching peer-to-peer social safety nets and ways to help small businesses survive until we can be patrons in person again.

Rather than scrounging for experiences to share, we’re inventing them from scratch with the only thing we’re left with us in quarantine: ourselves. When the infection waves pass, I hope this swell of creativity and in-the-moment togetherness stays strong. The best part of the internet isn’t showing off, it’s showing up.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2QQzudV Under quarantine, media is actually social Josh Constine https://ift.tt/3adk5vy
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Under quarantine, media is actually social

{rss:content:encoded} Under quarantine, media is actually social https://ift.tt/3adk5vy https://ift.tt/2QQzudV March 21, 2020 at 08:23PM

The flood of status symbol content into Instagram Stories has run dry. No one is going out and doing anything cool right now, and if they are, they should be shamed for it. Beyond sharing video chat happy hour screenshots and quarantine dinner concoctions, our piece-by-piece biographies have ground to a halt. Oddly, what remains feels more social than social networks have in a long time.

With no source material, we’re doing it live. Coronavirus has absolved our desire to share the recent past. The drab days stuck inside blur into each other. The near future is so uncertain that there’s little impetus to make plans. Why schedule an event or get excited for a trip just to get your heartbroken if shelter-in-place orders are extended? We’re left firmly fixed in the present.

A house-arrest Houseparty, via StoicLeys

What is social media when there’s nothing to brag about? Many of us are discovering it’s a lot more fun. We had turned social media into a sport but spent the whole time staring at the scoreboard rather than embracing the joy of play.

But thankfully, there are no Like counts on Zoom.

Nothing permanent remains. That’s freed us from the external validation that too often rules our decision making. It’s stopped being about how this looks and started being about how this feels. Does it put me at peace, make me laugh, or abate the loneliness? Then do it. There’s no more FOMO because there’s nothing to miss by staying home to read, take a bath, or play board games. You do you.

Being social animals, what feels most natural is to connect. Not asynchronously through feeds of what we just did. But by coexisting concurrently. Professional enterprise technology for agenda-driven video calls has been subverted for meandering, motive-less togetherness. We’re doing what many of us spent our childhoods doing in basements and parking lots: just hanging out.

For evidence, just look at group video chat app Houseparty, where teens aimlessly chill with everyone’s face on screen at once. In Italy, which has tragically been on lock down since COVID-19’s rapid spread in the country, Houseparty wasn’t even in the top 1500 apps a month ago. Today it’s the #1 social app, and the #2 app overall second only to Zoom.

Houseparty topped all the charts on Monday, when Sensor Tower tells TechCrunch that Houseparty’s download rate was 323X higher than its average in February. It’s currently #1 in Portugal (up 371X) and Spain (up 592X) despite being absent from the chart a week earlier.

After binging through Netflix and beating the video games, all that’s left to entertain us is each other.

Undivided By Geography

If we’re all stuck at home, it doesn’t matter where that home is. We’ve been released from the confines of which friends are within a 20 minute drive or hour-long train. Just like students are saying they all go to Zoom University since every school’s classes moved online, we all now live in Zoom Town. All commutes have been reduced to how long it takes to generate an invite URL.

Nestled in San Francisco, even pals across the Bay in Berkeley felt far away before. But this week I had hour-long video calls with my favorite people who typically feel out of reach in Chicago and New York. I spent time with babies I hadn’t met in person. And I kept in closer touch with my parents on the other coast, which is more vital and urgent than ever before.

Playing board game Codenames over Zoom with friends in New York and North Carolina

Typically, our time is occupied by acquaintances of circumstance. The co-workers who share our office. The friends who happen to live in the neighborhood. But now we’re each building a virtual family completely of our choosing. The calculus has shifted from who is convenient or who invites us to the most exciting place, to who makes us feel most human.

Even celebrities are getting into it. Rather than pristine portraits and flashy music videos, they’re appearing raw, with crappy lighting, on Facebook and Instagram Live. John Legend played piano for 100,000 people while his wife Chrissy Teigen sat on screen in a towel looking salty like she’s heard “All Of Me” far too many times. That’s more authentic than anything you’ll get on TV.

And without the traditional norms of who we are and aren’t supposed to call, there’s an opportunity to contact those we cared about in a different moment of our lives. The old college roommate, the high school buddy, the mentor who gave you you’re shot. If we have the emotional capacity in these trying times, there’s good to be done. Who do you know who’s single, lives alone, or resides in a city without a dense support network?

Reforging those connections not only surfaces prized memories we may have forgotten, but could help keep someone sane. For those who relied on work and play for social interaction, shelter-in-place is essentially solitary confinement. There’s a looming mental health crisis if we don’t check in on the isolated.

The crisis language of memes

It can be hard to muster the energy to seize these connections, though. We’re all drenched in angst about the health impacts of the virus and financial impacts of the response. I certainly spent a few mornings sleeping in just to make the days feel shorter. When all small talk leads to rehashing our fears, sometimes you don’t have anything to say.

Luckily we don’t have to say anything to communicate. We can share memes instead.

The internet’s response to COVID-19 has been an international outpour of gallow’s humor. From group chats to Instagram joke accounts to Reddit threads to Facebook groups like quarter-million member “Zoom Memes For Quaranteens”, we’re joining up to weather the crisis.

A nervous laugh is better than no laugh at all. Memes allow us to convert our creeping dread and stir craziness into something borderline productive. We can assume an anonymous voice, resharing what some unspecified other made without the vulnerability of self-attribution. We can dive into the creation of memes ourselves, killing time under house arrest in hopes of generating smiles for our generation. And with the feeds and Stories emptied, consuming memes offers a new medium of solidarity. We’re all in this hellscape together so we may as well make fun of it.

The web’s mental immune system has kicked into gear amidst the outbreak. Rather than wallowing in captivity, we’ve developed digital antibodies that are evolving to fight the solitude. We’re spicing up video chats with board games like Codenames. One-off livestreams have turned into wholly online music festivals to bring the sounds of New Orleans or Berlin to the world. Trolls and pranksters are finding ways to get their lulz too, Zoombombing webinars. And after a half-decade of techlash, our industry’s leaders are launching peer-to-peer social safety nets and ways to help small businesses survive until we can be patrons in person again.

Rather than scrounging for experiences to share, we’re inventing them from scratch with the only thing we’re left with us in quarantine: ourselves. When the infection waves pass, I hope this swell of creativity and in-the-moment togetherness stays strong. The best part of the internet isn’t showing off, it’s showing up.

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This Week in Apps: Coronavirus special coverage, Apple tries to save AR with lidar and more

{rss:content:encoded} This Week in Apps: Coronavirus special coverage, Apple tries to save AR with lidar and more https://ift.tt/2J5AGWh https://ift.tt/33BBYli March 21, 2020 at 03:49PM

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s “State of Mobile” annual report. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.

This week we’re continuing to look at how the coronavirus outbreak is impacting the world of mobile applications. In particular, we have new data from App Annie that shows which app categories are gaining or losing as a result of the pandemic. We also take a look at other mobile news, including the new Android 11 preview, iPad’s new lidar, TikTok’s new advisory committee and more, as well as a few apps to help get you through this tough time.

Coronavirus Special Coverage

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are continuing to play out on app stores and across the industry. This week, we’re leading with these stories, followed by other news.

Android apps reviews slow down

Google this week warned Android developers that Play Store app review times will be much longer than normal due to the COVID-19 crisis. Developers should expect app reviews to take up to a week or even longer, the company informed its community by way of an alert on the Google Play Console.

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Twitter prioritizes blue-check verifications to confirm experts on Covid-19 and the novel coronavirus

At long last, here’s an actually useful purpose for Twitter’s blue-check verification mark: Twitter last night announced that it is mobilising the badge system to help surface and signal more authoritative and verified voices that can provide “credible updates” on the topic of the coronavirus, and made a general call out for people that are experts to get all of their information up to date — including associating the word addresses with their accounts — to speed up this process.

This is the latest move from Twitter in what has been an ongoing effort to clear its platform of false information and the harmful spread of it as the pandemic increasingly takes its grip on the world.

The blue check mark was always intended to help steer people to know when they looking at more authentic voices or the official accounts for high-profile people or organizations, although it’s also been a huge vanity metric for many people, and so has often had a taint of the more ridiculous side of Twitter (the one where people also obsess over like and retweet counts). So harnessing it for a truly useful purpose is a great move.

It’s also one that is linking up with other efforts online: yesterday Google launched an updated search experience that includes a carousel of Twitter accounts Tweeting information related to the pandemic. This will help Twitter and Google populate that in a more informative and dynamic way.

If you are an expert who would like to use Twitter to broadcast more effective messages to the public, please read on. And if you are an authority who is not affiliated with one of the authorities working on fighting and managing the coronavirus outbreak, hold tight as Twitter said it will also be working on how to more quickly verify you, too.

Twitter said it is working with global health authorities — these include organizations like the WHO, the CDC, state health authorities and recognized academic institutions — to identify not just these organizations’ own accounts but those of experts affiliated with them. While it has it has “already Verified hundreds of accounts,” there are many more to verify, but the process is being slowed down by people not having all of their information in order. (Essentially these are some of the usual requirements for verification, applied specifically now to coronavirus experts.)

Specifically, Twitter said that experts needed to make sure that the email address that a person has associated with their Twitter account is their work emails. Instructions on how to do that here.

Then, Twitter said that a person’s bio needs to include references and a link to the place where they are working, and ideally that the page they are linking to also includes a reference back to the Twitter account (if it’s a link to a bio page). Instructions on how to update your profile here.

And accounts that are looking for verification, it goes without saying, have to follow the official Twitter Rules (which cover things like no harassment, impersonation accounts and so on), and specifically as it relates to coronavirus and Covid-19, Twitter’s guidance for that.

Twitter had, predictably, what looked like hundreds of responses to its Tweets on this subject, both from people simply saying, “Hey, what about me? Can I get verified today for my birthday?!” and those saying they also should be verified because of their authoritative position on Covid-19. Going about how to do the latter with accuracy will be a much bigger challenge that Twitter is still working out. “We’re also considering a way to take public suggestions, but first are reviewing the suggestions we have from global public health authorities and partners,” it concluded.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Twitter prioritizes blue-check verifications to confirm experts on Covid-19 and the novel coronavirus Ingrid Lunden https://ift.tt/2Uo2oCU
via IFTTT

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Google launches Covid-19 page and search portal with safety tips, official stats and more, US-only for now

{rss:content:encoded} Google launches Covid-19 page and search portal with safety tips, official stats and more, US-only for now https://ift.tt/33yyb8v https://ift.tt/3a9zj4V March 21, 2020 at 01:11PM

Google says Coronavirus has become its biggest search topic by a country mile this year, and to continue its efforts to harness that attention in the best possible way, late on Friday the company launched a new information portal dedicated to the pandemic as well as an improved search experience for desktop and mobile.

The search experience, Google says, was updated in response to “people’s information needs expanding,” while the new information portal also provides the basic, most useful information (for example around symptoms), plus a lot of links and on-site options to explore further.

Something notably absent on Google’s page or search experience are any links to conversation forums or places to hear and talk to other average people. Google has never been particularly successful in its many efforts to break into social media and this underscores that, while also helping it steer away from the fact that many of these forums are not always well managed. I would imagine that more tools for direct communication, such as the Google Hangouts product, and possibly others in that same category, might well be added or linked to as well over time.

Let’s dive into some more details.

The new search experience now not only includes search results but also a number of additional links to “authoritative information” from health authorities and updated data and visualisations.

“This new format organizes the search results page to help people easily navigate information and resources, and it will also make it possible to add more information over time as it becomes available,” Emily Moxley, Google’s product manager for search, writes in a blog post.

The search experience now also includes links to a Twitter carousel featuring accounts from civic organizations local to you, and also a new “most common questions” section related to the pandemic from the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This is rolling out first in the US in English and Google said it would be adding more languages and regions soon.

Meanwhile, the portal — also available first for the US — features tips on staying healthy and advice for those who are concerned; links to further official resources; links to more localised resources; links to fundraising efforts; the latest statistics; and an overview of all of Google’s own work (for example, the specific efforts it’s making for educators). We have asked the company when and if it plans to cover other regions beyond the US, and we’ll update this as we learn more.

This is an important move for Google. The internet has figured as critical platform from the earliest days of the Novel Coronavirus emerging out of China, but it hasn’t all been positive.

On one hand, there has been a ton of misinformation spread around about the virus, and the internet overall (plus specific sites like Google’s search and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter) has played a huge role in being responsible for disseminating the majority of that bad news. (Not all those searches and clicks lead to the right information, or good data, unfortunately.)

On the other hand, it’s also been an indispensable resource: in countries where health services have already become overwhelmed by the influx of people seeking help, official online portals (like this one) are serving a very important role in triaging inbound requests before people resort to physically getting themselves into the system (if they need to). And the internet is the main place people will turn in the days and weeks ahead as they are asked to socially isolate themselves to slow down the spread of the pandemic, serving its role in providing information, but hopefully also some diversion and enrichment.

Google’s site is bringing together as many of the positive and legitimate strands of information as it can.

The main page focuses on the most important basics: an brief overview of the virus, a list of the most common symptoms, a list of most common things you can do to prevent getting infected or spreading the infection and a (very brief, for now) section on treatments.

From this, it goes on to more detailed links to videos and other resources for specific interests such as advice for the elderly, a map-based data overview to monitor what is going on elsewhere; and then resources for further help for topics that are coming up a lot, such as advice for people working from home, or for how to set up self-isolation, online education advice, cooking resources and more. Relief efforts so far only has one link, to the Solidarity Response Fund started by the UN Foundation, which has had a donation of $50 million from Google. \

There are a number of other relief and fundraising efforts underway, including those to help fund the race for research to improve the medical tools and medicine we have to fight this. I think the idea is that all of these sections will grow and evolve as the situation evolves.

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Healthcare startups Nurx and Carbon Health ship at-home COVID-19 test sample kits

Efforts to get at-home test kits for the COVID-19 coronavirus are ramping up quickly, and two more health industry startups are bringing their own products to market, with both Carbon Health and Nurx starting shipping of their own in-home sample collection kits.

Both of these new offerings are the same in terms of approach to testing: They deliver swab-based sample collection hardware that people can use at home to collect a mucus sample which they then ship back using including safety approved, projective packaging to be tested by one of the existing FDA-approved commercial labs across the country.

These tests follow the PCR-based method, which tests for the genetic presence of the COVID-19 virus in a patient. These have a high degree of accuracy, at least when performed in a controlled setting and administered by a medical professional, and are the same tests that are available via drive-through testing stations being set up by state agencies.

At-home use is relatively new to market, and could introduce some potential for error in the collection part of the process, but both Caron Health and Nurx are offering consultation with medical professionals to help ensure that samples are collected properly, and that results, when available, are correctly interpreted and provided with guidance on next steps for those taking the tests.

None of these tests are free – the Carbon Health test costs $167.50, and the Nurx test costs $181, including shipping and assessment. These are in line with other offerings, including the one from Everlywell we covered earlier this week, which retails for $135. These are described as essentially at-cost prices, and all parties say they are subject to coverage by FSA or HSA money, or potentially by insurers depending on a person’s plan.

One big question around these types of tests is how much supply will be available. Nasopharyngeal swabs used for the in-person type of testing are already reportedly in short supply in some regions, and testing needs are only growing. Carbon is using different swabs to collect a simple saliva sample, which it notes are not in as short supply as the nasopharyngeal version. Other types of tests, including a ‘serological’ one being developed by startup Scanwell, instead work by analyzing a patient’s blood, and could provide some relief for the swab-based tests, especially now that the FDA has expanded its emergency guidance to include their use.

Nurx, which also offers at-home HPV screening, says that it will have 10,000 kits available to patients “over the coming weeks,” and hopes to expand to cover “over 100,000 patients” in the “near future.” Carbon Health CEO and co-founder Eren Bali tells me that it should ramp to around “10,000 per day capacity in about two weeks” through its medical device partner Curative Inc, and that it can do 50 per day today, with an estimated increase to 150 per day by Monday and 1,000 per day by end of week.

All of these tests are gated by a screening and assessment questionnaire, and the round trip time is likely to take a few days even with round-trip shipping due to testing times. It may seem like a lot of these are popping up, but these startups at least have proven track records in healthcare services, and there will be a need for very widespread testing in order for any broad attempt to flatten the curve of the virus to prove successful, so expect more of these providers to come on line.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Healthcare startups Nurx and Carbon Health ship at-home COVID-19 test sample kits https://ift.tt/3dhlG5r

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Hospital droid Diligent Robotics raises $10M to assist nurses

28% of a nurse’s time is wasted on low-skilled tasks like fetching medical tools. We need them focused on the complex and compassionate work of treating patients, especially amid the coronavirus outbreak. Diligent Robotics wants to give them a helper droid that can run errands for them around the hospital. The startup’s bot Moxi is equipped with a flexible arm, gripper hand, and full mobility so it can hunt down lightweight medical resources, navigate a clinic’s hallways, and drop them off for the nurse.

With the world facing a critical shortage of medical care professionals, Moxi could help health care centers use their staffs as efficiently as possible. And since robots can’t be infected by COVID-19, they’re one less potential carrier interacting with vulnerable populations.

Today, Diligent Robotics announces its $10 million Series A that will help it scale up to deliver “more robots to more hospitals” CEO Andrea Thomaz tells me. “We’ve been designing our product, Moxi, side by side with hospital customers because we don’t just want to give them an automation solution for their materials management problems. We want to give them a robot that frontline staff are delighted to work with and feels like a part of the team.”

The round led by DNX Ventures brings Diligent Robotics to $15.75 million in total funding that’s propelled it to the fifth generation of its Moxi robot. It currently has two deployed in Dallas, TX but is already working with two of the three top hospital networks in the U.S. ““As the current pandemic and circumstance has shown, the real heroes are our healthcare providers” says Q Motiwala, partner at DNX Ventures. The new cash from DNX, True Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures, Next Coast Ventures, Grit Ventures, E14 Fund, and Promus Ventures will help Diligent Robotics expand Moxi’s use cases and seamlessly complement nurses’ workflows to help alleviate the talent crunch.

Thomaz came up with the idea for a hospital droid after doing her Ph.D. in social robotics at the MIT Media lab. Her co-founder and CTO Vivien Chu had done a masters at UPenn on how to give robots a sense of touch, and then came to work with Thomaz at Georgia Tech. They were inspired by a study revealing how nurses spent so much time acting as hosptial gofers, so in 2016 they applied for and won a National Science Foundation grant of $750,000 that funded a six-month sprint to build a prototype of Moxi.

Since then, 18-person Diligent Robotics has worked with hundreds of nurses to learn about exactly what they need from an autonomous assistant. “Today you will go about your day, and you probably won’t interact with any robots….we want to change that” Thomaz tells me. “The only way you can really bring robots out of the warehouses, off of the factory floors, is to build a robot that can work in our dynamic and messy everyday human environments.” The startup’s intention isn’t to full replace humans, which it doesn’t think is possible, but to let them focus on the most human elements of their jobs.

Moxi is about the size of a human but designed to look like an 80s movie robot so as not to engender and uncanny valley cyborg weirdness. Its head and eyes can move to signal intent, like which direction it’s about to move in, while sounds let it communicate with nurses and acknowledge their commands. A moving pillar lets it adjust its height while its gripper hand and arm can pick and put down smaller pieces of hospital equipment. Its round shape and courteous navigation makes sure it can politely share crowded hallways and travel via elevator.

Diligent Robotics’ solution engineers work with hospitals to teach Moxi how to get around and what they need. The company hopes to eventually build the ability to learn and adapt right into the bot so nurses can teach it new tasks on the fly. “The team continues to demonstrate unmatched robotics-specific innovation by combining social intelligence and human-guided learning capabilities” says True Ventures partner and Diligent board member Rohit Sharma.

Hospitals pay an upfront fee to buy Moxi robots, and then there’s a monthly fee for the software, services, and maintenance. Thomaz admits that “Hospitals are naturally risk-averse, and can be wary to take up new technology” so the startup is taking a slow and steady approach to deployment so it can convince buyers that Moxi is worth the learning curve.

Diligent Robotics will be competing with companies like Aethon’s TUG bot for pulling laundry and pharmacy carts. Other players in the hospital tech space include Xenex’s machine that disinfects rooms with light, and surgical bots like those from Johnson & Johnson’s Auris and Intuitive Surgical.

Diligent Robotics hopes to differentiate itself by building social intelligence into Moxi so it feels more like an intern than a gadget. “Time again, we hear from our hospital partners that Moxi not only returns time back to their day but also brings a smile to their face” says Thomaz. The company wants to evolve Moxi for other dull, dirty, or dangerous service jobs.

Eventually, Diligent Robotics hopes to bring Moxi into people’s homes. “While we don’t see robots replacing the companionship and the human connection, we do dream of a time that robots could making nursing homes more pleasant by offsetting the often staggering numbers of caretakers to bed ratios (as bad as 30:1)” Thomaz concludes. That way, Moxi could “help people age with dignity and hold onto their independence for as long as possible.”

https://ift.tt/33xYU4W Hospital droid Diligent Robotics raises $10M to assist nurses https://ift.tt/2Wyvjqy

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Crowd-lending platform October hits pause on loan repayments

French startup October wants to reduce the pressure on small and medium companies going through the Coronavirus crisis. In order to give them some headroom, companies that have borrowed money on October won’t have to pay back their loans for the next three months.

October works with small companies in France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Germany who need a credit line. One of the company’s key advantages compared to borrowing money from a bank is that it’s much faster. You can apply to a credit line and get an answer just a few days later. Usually, companies pay back their loans over time with monthly repayments over three months to seven years.

October evaluates risk before handing out loans. It works with many institutional partners to raise funds and deploy capital in those loans. Some retail customers also invest on October directly on a company-by-company basis.

But many small European companies that have borrowed money on October won’t generate revenue for a little while. They could face cash flow issues and they could have issues repaying those loans.

That’s why October has decided with its institutional partners that it is postponing all outstanding loans for the next three months. Companies won’t have to pay a huge sum of money after that, October is also postponing the end date of the loans by three months.

October then asked retail investors to vote whether they are in favor or against postponing loans. 99.42% of retail investors who voted followed October’s move.

October is also waving its own fees for the next three months, but companies will still have to pay interests on outstanding capital.

This way, fewer companies should go bankrupt over the next three months. It should minimize the impact of the current economic crisis on the overall default rate of October loans.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Crowd-lending platform October hits pause on loan repayments https://ift.tt/33wJUEy

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Instagram founder launches gift card site for quarantined restaurants

Coronavirus quarantines are hurting local businesses, but Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger wants to help them keep revenue rolling in. Krieger and his wife Kaitlyn this week launched SaveOurFaves, a directory of Bay Area restaurants selling gift certificates to offset lost income amidst ‘shelter in place’ orders across the region. Users can search for restaurants or browse by neighborhood, and then click through to buy gift certificates straight from the eateries with no added fee from SaveOurFaves.

“We’re no longer going out because of COVID-19 (San Francisco is under a “shelter in place” ordinance), so we started buying gift cards to help support our favorite cafes and restaurants during this unpredictable time” write the Kriegers. “SaveOurFaves is our simple way to make it easier for people to help local businesses.”

For now the plan is for SaveOurFaves to focus on the San Francisco Bay Area that the Kriegers call home. It’s currently listing 700 restaurants and coffee shops, and getting 50 submissions per day. Similar sites for other locations are quickly popping up, including Help Main Street in New York, and Give Local and Rally For Restaurants that provide directories for multiple cities.

“It’s been heart-wrenching”

The Kriegers got the idea for SaveOurFaves after a call with Zack Schwab, Mike’s sister’s partner and co-owner of SF restaurant The Snug. “How long could he keep the restaurant afloat with sales plunging?” Kaitlyn tells me. The couple says there are 12,000 small businesses that employ more than 350,000 people in SF alone. The problem was too big to fix with one-off donations.

But then they saw an Instagram post about how NYC restaurant Atomix was asking their community to support them through gift cards, and set out to build SaveOurFaves with Kaitlyn doing design while Mike coded. They crawled the web for a list of local restaurants, and hired people through Fiverr to hunt down their gift card links. Next they want to open source the code and expand the site to include other types of businesses.

“I’ve lived in the Bay Area for over 15 years, and one of the reasons I fell in love with it was the vibrant community of shops, restaurants, cafés, and other businesses” Mike tells me. “It’s been heart-wrenching to see the immediate effect that the shutdown has had on the people working at these places. While there’s no one single thing that will solve the problem, I’m hopeful SaveOurFaves is one of many initiatives to help.”

AUSTIN, TX – MARCH 11: Josh Constine, Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom speak onstage at Interactive Keynote: Instagram Founders Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger with Josh Constine during the 2019 SXSW Conference and Festivals at Austin Convention Center on March 11, 2019 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Chris Saucedo/Getty Images for SXSW)

Krieger and his co-founder Kevin Systrom resigned from Instagram and Facebook in November 2018 following tensions regarding Insta’s dwindling autonomy. The pair told me they plan to start something new together during a talk at SXSW a year ago, but are still exploring opportunities. That’s given Krieger the time to build out SaveOurFaves with his wife.

Restaurants need all the help they can get. “This is like armageddon” SF restaurant China Live’s chef and owner Geroge Chen told Eater’s Luke Tsai, referring to the three-week shelter-in-place order issued in across California.

While restaurants can still offer delivery and take-out, higher-end spots with large dining rooms or that usually only offer dine-in are being hit hard. China Live cut its workforce from 200 to 20. Oakland’s Brown Sugar Kitchen laid of its whole staff of 50 except for three full-timers. The SF Mission’s Prubechu went from 20 to employees to just 5 managers who also took pay cuts, according to Eater.

Brown Sugar Kitch and Prubechu are now two of the many restaurants listed on SaveOurFaves. If users discover one of their favorite haunts is missing, they can submit them via a form to have them added or to have SaveOurFaves reach out to recommend selling gift certificates. The site even recommends how restaurants can contact their point-of-sale provider like Square or Toast to start selling gift certificates, or make their own gift cards on GiftUp or GiftFly.

More ways to help

SaveOurFaves is just one of many efforts spearheaded by local techies to address the health crisis and the subsequent financial fallout of social distancing. Crypto startup MobileCoin‘s Joshua Goldbard helped create The Safety Net Fund, which has raised $145,000 to provide living expense grants to Bay Area artists who’ve lost income due to event cancellations. Investor Ryan Sarver of Redpoint Ventures and friends are running an #SFHospitalMeals program where people can donate $1000 to buy meals from local restaurants for hospital staff of SF’s emergency rooms and intensive care units. You can click through those links to donate.

The Kriegers hope the government will do more too. That includes “Big, immediate, and lasting cash transfers to Americans” as well as zero-interest loans for small businesses that need representation in the conversations about stimulus efforts. “We are also advocating for a reduction in prison & jail density, because those populations are exceptionally vulnerable to a pandemic like this” Kaitlyn tells me.

The Safety Net Fund

In the private sector, they support the idea from Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Peter Eckersley for Apple, Google, and other mobile operating system vendors to create an opt-in, privacy-preserving feature for contact tracing. That could notify people if they’ve been near someone who tested positive for the virus. And when the crisis subsides, the couple note that we’ll need ways to smoothly reconnect people with stable jobs.

“There’s been a lot of talk about ‘flattening the curve’ of the coronavirus outbreak — slowing the spread to reduce the burden on our healthcare system” Mike concludes. “We hope SaveOurFaves will help ‘flatten the curve’ of lost income for restaurants — giving them the resources to make ends meet and preserve the livelihood of wage earners during this difficult time.”

from Social – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/SaveOurFaves.png?w=680 Instagram founder launches gift card site for quarantined restaurants Josh Constine https://ift.tt/2xQWeUc
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Tinder waives Passport fee to help users connect virtually around the world

Dating may be proving next to impossible for many during this era of mass social distancing, but Tinder’s hoping to leverage an existing feature to help bring people closer together. Virtually, at least.

The dating app is waving fees for Passport, a feature designed to let premium users connect with people outside of their dating radius. The offer kicks in next week for all users and runs through April 30. Tinder is hoping that it will be adopted for virtual socializing beyond dating.

Our hope is that you use the Passport feature to virtually transport yourself out of self-quarantine to anywhere in the world. You can check in on folks in their hometown, college town, or sister city, and find those across the world who are going through the same things. If nothing else, you can learn how to say “hey” in another language.

Users can “visit” one location at a time. The move comes as competing services like Hinge, The League and Tinder’s parent company Match.com have turned to video chats to help maintain some sense of normalcy for people looking to socialize through dating.

“Within dating apps, users can still be active by matching and messaging without actually meeting up in-person,” App Annie writes in a recent trend report. “The gamification of ‘swiping’ in dating apps slots into this behavior to find avenues to pass time and entertain, so we could expect to see a level of resiliency there.”

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/39TsSCL Tinder waives Passport fee to help users connect virtually around the world Brian Heater https://ift.tt/2U7PxWH
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Coterie raises $8.5M to build ‘commercial insurance as a service’

Ohio-based Coterie, a startup working on in the commercial insurance space, has announced today it has raised $8.5 million Series A. The company had previously raised a little over $3 million in early investments, bringing its equity capital raised to nearly $12 million to date; the firm also told TechCrunch that it has raised $2.5 million in available venture debt as part of its current round.

In an uncertain market, Coterie is better capitalized than it ever has been, thanks to Intercept, and The Hartford, and Hippo, which led its latest round.

Coterie operates in insurtech, a space we’ve covered extensively in recent months. But it’s not MetroMile or Lemonade, both of which selling consumer insurance. Nor is it akin to The Zebra, Policy Genius, Gabi, or Insurify, helping consumers link to third-party insurance products. It’s closest private market comp, looking at our recent coverage, is Briza, which produces APIs linking small businesses to small business insurance products.

But what Coterie does is slightly different if we’re grokking its model correctly: It offers what it calls “commercial insurance as a service,” according to an interview with TechCrunch. Let’s explore.

Model

In a call with TechCrunch about its latest funding event, Coterie explained that, using APIs, it connects “places that have some commercial insurance requirement, or service customers who need commercial insurance, and we simply pass that information into our system and we quote and bind automatically.”

While Coterie does partner with external insurance entities (more on that in a second), it handles a lot of the work in-house: “We actually have the underwriting control, so we don’t we don’t ship it off to 10 different carriers. We actually say yes, we will bind this policy, or no, we won’t,” said Coterie CEO David McFarland, adding that “most of the time we have a pretty broad appetite so we can write a good bit of business.”

Helping it in this process are some partners in the insurance market that help with “the licenses and the capital requirements,” the company said.

What makes Coterie interesting isn’t that is a digital take on a previously paper business, but that it’s product allows it to insure freelancers (Coterie partners with freelance marketplaces, allowing it access to a potential customer base and helping the marketplace itself provide insured providers) for even small increments of time; that’s something that wasn’t economically attractive under old models, if even possible.

According to the firm, it offers general and professional liability insurance, along with business owners policies. Coterie has eyes on various types of data to power its model (and make good policy pricing choices), highlighting information like business payment flows to vet company health, to pick an example.

Coterie only started selling its products in September of 2019, but noted to TechCrunch that it saw “pretty good growth” from from the jump, and “pretty steady growth” since then. But as Coterie noted in our call, insurance is a somewhat low-margin business, meaning that policy growth, while good, needs to be pretty steep for the gross margin generated to stack up too high.

But with $8.5 million in new equity capital and total access to over $10 million in funds, the startup now has more money than ever to pursue its model. And if it’s like the rest of the insurtech space, it has a good shot at quick growth.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Coterie raises $8.5M to build ‘commercial insurance as a service’ https://ift.tt/3dg8sGj

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Scanwell aims to launch at-home 15-minute coronavirus test, but it still needs FDA approval

At-home diagnostics startup Scanwell, which produces smartphone-based testing for UTIs, is working on getting at-home testing for the novel coronavirus into the hands of U.S. residents. The technology, which was developed by Chinese diagnostic technology company INNOVITA and has already been approved by China’s equivalent of the FDA and used by “millions” in China, can be taken at home in 15 minutes with the guidance of a medical professional via telehealth, and produces results in just hours.

Scanwell’s test will require FDA clearance, but the company tells me that it’s in the process of securing approval through the FDA’s accelerated emergency certification program. The FDA guidance says that this approval process should take 6-8 weeks (though that “could be faster,” Scanwell says), and Scanwell is aiming to be ready to go with shipping these as soon as it receives that approval. While the U.S. drug regulatory agency previously had only included PCR tests in its protocols, it updated that guidance to include serological tests earlier this week. Scanwell further says they “don’t anticipate any issues with FDA approval.”

The test that Scanwell is aiming to launch uses what’s called a ‘serological’ technique, which looks for antibodies in a patient’s blood. These are only present if someone has been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, since as of right now researchers haven’t found any evidence that natural antibodies to this particular virus exist without exposure. By contrast, the types of tests that are currently in use in the U.S. are “PCR” tests, which use a molecular-based approach to determine if the virus is present genetically in a mucus sample.

The PCR type of test is technically more accurate than the serological variety, but the serological version is much easier to administer, and produces results more quickly. It’s also still very accurate on the whole, and is much cheaper to produce than the PCR version. Plus, it could help expand efforts beyond testing only the most severe cases with symptoms present, and do a much better job of illuminating the full extent of the presence of the virus, including among people with mild cases who have already recovered at home, and those who are asymptomatic but carrying the virus with the possibility of infecting others.

Also, while other, PCR-based at-home testing options already exist, like one from Everlywell that will start going out on Monday, require round-tripping test samples, adding time, complexity and cost and relying on testing materials like swabs that are in short supply globally.

Once the test is available, people deemed eligible via Scanwell’s screening process in their Scanwell Health app will be sent the test via next-day delivery. They’ll be guided by telehealth partner Lemonade’s licensed doctors and nurse practitioners, and they’ll then receive results and further guidance about those results via the app within a few hours. The whole testing process will cost $70, which Scanwell says just covers its costs (it’s also looking at ways to provide free service to those who need it), and will be deployed first in Washington, California and New York, as well as other areas depending on the severity of their coronavirus situation.

That the tests will take potentially 6-8 weeks to come to market seems like a long time, given the current state of the rapidly evolving COVID-19 situation and testing. But we’ll likely still be very much in need of testing options at that time, especially ones that can serve people who aren’t necessarily meeting the criteria for other available testing resources.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Scanwell aims to launch at-home 15-minute coronavirus test, but it still needs FDA approval https://ift.tt/3bba4iG

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Raising in a recession

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week’s episode was a testament to making do, as we’ve had to cancel some trips, juggle a few guests, and get up and running as a podcast that have guests dial in without losing our stride. So, this week Danny and Natasha and Alex were joined by Unshackled VC’s Manan Mehta.

And it went pretty ok, aside from a hiccup or two, expect Equity to still feature guests as often as it makes sense, even if we’re currently locked out of our own studio. Anyhoo, a combo of local recording, remote video setups, and Chris handling the dials meant that we were able to talk over all the good stuff:

• Hashicorp raises $175 million at a $5 billion valuation. It was nice to see a round so large take place when the rest of the sky in tech was busy falling onto itself.
• Deepgram raises $12 million. Alex covered this company’s funding, winding up pretty excited about the technology itself.
• Edtech startup Teachable exits after good GMV growth. Nice exit for this New York City-based startup, and we chatted about the early-stage edtech market, which was good fun.
• VC firms offer group therapy for founders due to the COVID-19 outbreak. It marks another data point in the small, but growing, cohort of venture capitalists thinking about mental health services beyond an investment opportunity.
• Remote Year, which helps you work while traveling the world, lays off 50% of staff. It’s one of an incoming flurry of layoffs we’re expecting to see from travel-related startups.
• Danny advised founders to announce their rounds now to reassure their employees and customers that they are ready for the coming recession
• And finally, what’s up with Airbnb’s direct listing timing? We tried to sort that out before we ran short of time.

All told there were some laughs, and we spent a good few minutes before mentioning COVID-19. It was good fun to have the crew on for a classic Equity episode, and a big thanks to Manan for coming aboard under less-than-optimal circumstances.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 AM PT and Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Raising in a recession https://ift.tt/3a6qadr

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Claimer raises seed backing to make it easier for UK startups to claim R&D tax credits

Claimer, a London-based startup that makes it easy for companies to claim R&D tax credits in the U.K., has raised £300,000 in seed funding.

Backing the already revenue-generating company is Ben Holmes (who was previously at Index Ventures), Nick Telson and Andrew Webster (the founders of DesignMyNight, which recently exited), Rupert Loman (founder of Gamer Network), and TrueSight Ventures.

Founded by Adam McCann in January 2018 and then launched in April 2019, Claimer streamlines the process of claiming R&D tax credits, which is a U.K. government subsidy popular with tech startups that is designed to encourage innovation. The startup claims its product is approximately 10x faster and up to 6x cheaper than using a tax consultant.

“Claimer is fixing the R&D tax relief space with tech,” McCann tells me. “If you’re not familiar with the scheme, it’s run by HMRC and allows U.K. businesses to claim back up to 33% of their research & development costs as a cash payment in any industry, such as software and hardware development, manufacturing, textiles, biotechnology, foodtech, and many others.

“Most accountants don’t have the in-house expertise to process claims, so they refer clients to R&D tax specialists. For many companies, the process is slow, expensive, and frustrating, because these specialists charge very high fees, often taking weeks to process claims”.

In contrast, McCann says Claimer’s platform makes it easy for businesses to reliably complete their R&D relief claims without any prior tax knowledge. After you upload a claim to the platform — which includes the ability to pull numbers from your accounting software — Claimer’s in-house tax specialists check and optimise it before it is submitted to HMRC.

“We’ve processed claims ranging from £1,000 to over £2 million with a 100% success rate (i.e. no rejections or reductions). Our customers have also awarded us 5 stars on TrustPilot,” he adds.

To that end, Claimer’s success is aligned with that of its customers. The startup charges a fee of 5% or less of the saving/credit received in R&D tax credits, capped to £10,000. McCann says this is much less than the typical uncapped 20-30% usually charged by specialists, “often with undesirable terms such as multi-year lock-in contracts, hidden costs, and large minimum fees”.

Meanwhile, Claimer plans to use the seed funding to grow its engineering team and build version two of the product, which McCann says will utilise open data and machine learning, making it possible for claims to be created automatically.

“And yes, we’ll be claiming R&D tax credits for developing our R&D tax credits platform,” quips the Claimer founder.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Claimer raises seed backing to make it easier for UK startups to claim R&D tax credits https://ift.tt/3de3jhS

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