Inside Planet 13, the world’s largest cannabis dispensary

Planet 13 is located blocks off the Las Vegas Strip and holds the title as the world’s largest cannabis dispensary. But it’s much more than just a storefront. There’s a lot to the 115,000-square-foot facility, including entertainment, restaurants and cannabis processing equipment where the company makes edibles and drinks. This is a destination, Vegas-style.

In this video we take a backstage tour into this cannabis superstore.

How the world’s largest cannabis dispensary avoids social media restrictions

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Ceros launches MarkUp, a design collaboration tool for live websites

When designers need to collaborate with other teams, they can currently turn to products like InVision and Zeplin. But Ceros creative director Jack Dixon said there’s a “pretty interesting gap in the market” — once you move beyond prototypes and start working with websites that are either live or in staging, the process starts to become fragmented, relying on screenshots and email/phone/Google Docs.

That’s why the company (which focuses on powering interactive content “experiences”) is launching a new product called MarkUp. The product was created by a team led by Greg DiNardo and Alex Bullington, who joined Ceros last August through the acquisition of their polling and market research startup Arbit.

Dixon, DiNardo and Bullington gave me a quick demo, showing off how users can mark areas of interest on a website, leave comments and tasks, then mark revisions as completed.

It all looked pretty simple and straightforward, but DiNardo suggested that it’s a real technical challenge — even more than he and Bullington had expected — to provide those kinds of features on top of a live site.

He added that the product’s simplicity was very much by design: “I don’t think we’re going to add a million features … The goal is honestly simplicity, something that graphic designers can kind of live in.”

Eventually, MarkUp could be used not just to solicit design feedback across teams, but also from the public at-large.

Ceros says MarkUp will function separately from the core Ceros Studio platform, but it will be available for free to Studio customers. In fact, it’s already being used by designers at the Huffington Post, Cushman & Wakefield and Informa.

“As of today we want to remove any friction or barrier to entry, so it’s 100 percent free to Ceros customers,” Dixon said. “Getting the  involvement of the broadest community and user bas is going to be critical for this. What we’re learning is that some of the enterprise clients might pay for bigger, more grown-up features [like white labeling]. We can figure out how to monetize later.”

Ceros raises $14M for its interactive content platform

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$100M rounds are down but not out in 2020

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

This morning we’re taking a look at mega-rounds: funding events of $100 million or more.

What’s fun about these rounds is that they experience less temporal lag than other venture financings. Generally speaking, the larger a venture round is, the faster it becomes public knowledge. This is why seed rounds are the laggiest of all startup rounds and as you progress up the Series ladder (from A to B to C to D), the rounds that you hear about are increasingly fresh.

If we wanted to take a look at 2020’s largest rounds to date, for example, instead of staring at an incomplete picture that might tell us nothing at all, we could get a reasonable handle on what’s going on in the very late-stages of private equity financings.

This morning we’re looking at $100 million and greater rounds from January, February and March (through the 23rd) for both 2019 and 2020. As you will see, the data shows us that the late-stage private market for startup investments is in better health than we might have expected. This is true despite spotting weaknesses in other parts of the global venture scene (China venture data remains very weak, for example).

The unicorn era, for better or for worse, appears to be still standing for now, despite the chaos that surrounds it.

$100 million or bust

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Equity Monday: What’s going on with $100M rounds?

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

Equity was busy last week, so catch up if you missed anything. We interviewed the CEO of Y Combinator, hosted a call with the TechCrunch staff digging into our favorite Demo Day companies, hosted Equity Monday on a Tuesday, held a call with Niko from General Catalyst, and hosted a guest — remotely! — on the regular Equity episode. It’s been busy.

This morning, however, was very nearly a repeat. The things that were bad last week are still bad this week. Still, there were a few things to go over:

• SoftBank’s epic plan to unlock value in itself, something that investors are cheering.
• Uber and Ola are halting rides in India’s capital, a move that we expect to see in more markets over time.
• Cazoo, a used car sales portal, raised $116 million, a round that caught our eye as it was huge and seemingly incongruous to the news cycle.

In fact, that round was such an oddity that we ran a search of big rounds this morning on the show instead of looking at some Seed financings. We’ll get back to Seed next week.

Looking ahead, there isn’t much to celebrate. We are stuck between earnings cycles and every conference has been cancelled or moved online. Oh, and SaaS valuations are falling. That said, we still expect to be exhausted by the evening every day of the week.

So, let’s stick together and do our best to help one another. I look forward to starting the week with a different topic for once; Equity Monday was effectively born on the doorstep of the COVID-19 world. But we won’t get there without collective action. We can all help.

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.

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Facebook Messenger provides governments, agencies with free developer tools to combat Covid-19

Big tech has been making a huge effort to mobilize its power to help people work better together to battle the ongoing coronavirus pandemic — whether it’s creating search and information portals or making sure the most authoritative voices are surfacing above the noise, or gathering compute power to supercharge research efforts to find vaccines.

Today, it is the turn of Facebook: the company announced a number of initiatives around Messenger, its messaging platform with 1.3 billion users, to help use the service to facilitate better communication around the coronavirus outbreak. It is now partnering with developers to provide free services to government and UN health organizations to create better information tools for people to use; and it’s launching a virtual (online) hackathon to see how developers can create messaging solutions to help promote some of the important aspects of fighting the  virus, such as social distancing and more general information services.

The moves come at a critical time. Facebook hasn’t had the best couple of years when it comes to public opinion — with many users increasingly concerned about their privacy and data protection on the platform, and getting more aware of how it can be used as a tool for manipulating public opinion. But for now, there’s been a stay put on that whole mess.

Facebook has identified and been working hard to battle misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic on its site, and it has also emerged as a helpful platform when it comes how ordinary people are using it to manage  communication during the coronavirus pandemic. Many communities are turning to Facebook, and other tools that it owns like WhatsApp, to coordinate communication to help those who are self-isolating, or simply people looking for advice as they start to figure out how to work, live, educate and take care of themselves in these unprecedented circumstances.

The distancing measures that are getting put in place in many cities and countries — which include things like closing schools, restaurants, theaters, and other places where people congregate, and extend also to fully locked-down quarantines with people staying in their homes — are an unprecedented disruption of our daily lives, and that’s putting a lot of focus on communication platforms like Messenger and the internet to keep us connected.

“As is common in any crisis, people are using digital channels like Messenger to stay connected and get information from trusted health authorities that are on the front lines fighting this global pandemic,” writes Stan Chudnovsky, the VP of Messenger.

While there is no charge to put such services on Messenger at the moment, developers might normally charge organizations to build these experiences, which could include bots with automated responses to questions, or guidance on how to use Messenger to broadcast information and updates more effectively, or how to switch from automated response bots to direct conversations with live people when needed: that is the part that Facebook has now negotiated to be done for no charge.

The services are already being used by UNICEF, Pakistan’s Ministry of National Health Services, Regulations & Coordination (NHSRC), and Argentina’s Ministry of Health, which is working with Botmaker.com to answer questions from the public about the coronavirus, including advice.

As for the hackathon, it’s being organised with Devpost, and while it may sound like fun, these are often amazing testbeds to surface innovation. Yes, you might think that the most important innovation right now has to be on the drug research side, but innovation in messaging is also of huge importance as we look for ways of both keeping people informed and calm.

“Participants will be encouraged to build both global and local solutions and will receive unique access to Messenger-related content, including Facebook Live tutorials with product experts and a range of educational materials to support innovation,” Chudnovsky notes. Winners will get mentoring from Facebook engineers to help make these solutions a reality. They’ll also receive invitations to attend F8 2021, including flights and accommodations, and will be given the opportunity to participate in the F8 hackathon, he added.

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Updated FDA COVID-19 testing guidelines specifically disallows at-home sample colllection

While a number of companies who currently offer at-home medical and health diagnostics had rushed to produce kits that would allow for self sample collection by people who passed a screening and believed they might have contracted the new coronavirus, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has updated its Emergency Use Authorization guidelines to private labs that specifically bar the use of at-home sample collection. This means startups including Everlywell, Carbon Health and Nurx will have to immediately discontinue their testing programs in light of the clarified rules.

The FDA issued the updated guidance on March 21, and though some of the companies had already begun to ship their sample collection kits to people, and even begun to receive samples back to their diagnostic laboratory partners, even any samples in-hand will not be tested, and will instead be destroyed in order to compel with the FDA’s request. Carbon Health is continuing testing at its physical clinics, and notified TechCrunch of this update on Sunday evening, and an individual who ordered the Carbon Health test and sent back their sample provided the following email explaining the decision and what happens next:

We have been working hard to provide our patients every opportunity for COVID-19 testing and treatment, including exploring different avenues for testing.

This evening, we were notified by our lab partner, Curative Inc, that the 3/21/2020 FDA update for COVID-19 testing clarified that at-home sample collection is not covered under the EUA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Emergency Use Authorization). Carbon Health is discontinuing distribution of the at-home sample collection kits effective immediately.

Based on this update by the FDA, we sincerely regret to inform you that you will not get a test result. If you have already shipped your kit back, the specimen will be destroyed by Curative, Inc using standard biohazard disposal. If you have not received your kit yet, please discard it upon receipt.

Please schedule an in-clinic visit at a Carbon Health clinic near you, if possible, to be tested using our traditional specimen collection by a clinician. The turn-around time for results is about 3-5 days from time of specimen collection.

Our goal was to facilitate at home specimen collection in order to keep patients safely in their homes while also providing another avenue for patients to be tested. This is a very dynamic time and we are working tirelessly to work with new partners to expand COVID-19 testing for our communities, as soon as possible. We are truly sorry for the frustration and inconvenience this has caused.

All three of the companies we spoke to that were working to distribute these tests had partnered with labs that were approved under the FDA emergency guidelines to perform COVID-19 diagnostics, and it was the understanding of all parties that at-home self collection via swab kits was included in the authorization. All three also said they were offering their tests at-cost, and seeking ways to defray even that cost to consumers through potential healthcare agency partnerships. Each also offered telehealth consultations for both the sample-gathering process, as well as for delivery of the results.

The FDA’s goal with its emergency use authorization is to enable testing without sticking to its usual qualification process, but it must always balance accuracy and safety. It did grant emergency use approval to Cepheid’s rapid point-of-care test last Friday, as well, which should expand availability of tests on-site in locations like hospitals and emergency medical care clinics, but this updated rule means that at-home tests will not, in the near-term, be a path towards expanding testing coverage in the U.S.

Another startup, Scanwell, has developed an in-home test that includes the diagnostics, using a serological test that looks for the presence of antibodies in a person’s blood. This is still pending FDA approval, and the company is seeking that under the emergency use authorization, with an anticipated approval process time of around six to eight weeks.

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Enable raises $13M to help distributors, manufacturers and retailers manage rebates

Enable, a U.K. startup that has developed a cloud-based “rebate management solution” to help distributors, manufacturers and retailers manage rebates, is announcing $13 million in Series A funding.

The round is led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Sierra Ventures. As part of the investment, Menlo Ventures’ Steve Sloane has joined the Enable board.

Founded by long term business partners Andrew Butt and Denys Shortt in 2015 but launched fully in 2017, Enable makes it easy for distributors to track, manage, and optimise rebates. Rebate incentives offered by suppliers are a common industry practice, while the rebates offered are increasingly relied on by distributors to turn a profit.

However, the agreements put in place and the tracking and validating of qualifying terms has created a back office headache and many wasted hours on behalf of parties involved. Enable has set out to digitise the whole process and in turn bring suppliers and distributors more closely aligned.

“We take the pain away with our fully automated platform which becomes the system of record for all B2B deals, and the calculator of granular deal earnings,” explains Enable’s Andrew Butt. This includes a breakdown by product, location, day, supplier, and customer and the reconciliation of sales and purchase transactions pertaining to those deals.

“The complexity of these deals has also massively increased,” says Butt. “For distributors to survive, they must take full control of these deals and ensure that money is not being left on the table, yet until now there has been a lack of software that is designed around the distributor”.

In addition, he says that Enable is also allowing customers to create more targeted and better deals that “increase sales and profit, improve cash flow, and strengthen relationships” with suppliers. “We do this by identifying opportunities in the exiting deals and spotting where new deals can be created,” he adds.

Butt says the opportunity is huge, too, with Manufacturers issuing more than $1 trillion in rebates each year. Noteworthy, until now the company has been largely and in the last two years has on-boarded more than 2,000 trading partners processed rebates on more than $30 billion in sales. Customers include Rexel, Travis Perkins, and Wolseley, as well as other distributors, buying groups, and retailers from across the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

Adds Butt: “Our competitors focus on manufacturers and rebates payable – we’ve flipped the model on its head and deal with distributors and rebates receivable, which is more tricky to manage because distributors deal with a higher number and diversity of products compared to manufacturers. Also, it’s more important as rebates are now more than 100% of the profit for distributors across many verticals”.

More broadly, Butt frames Enable as a “collaborative platform” where manufacturers and distributors come together in a shared ecosystem to do better deals. “It’s like a ‘Dropbox for deals’,” he says. “[In contrast,] our competitors provide a traditional ‘private’ installation of their solution, totally segregated for each customer”.

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Global Savings Group acquires French cashback company iGraal for €123.5M

Germany’s Global Savings Group (GSG), the e-commerce content company, has acquired French cashback company iGraal for €123.5 million in a mixture of cash and stock.

Specifically, the deal was reached with iGraal’s majority owner M6 Group, and consists of €35 million in cash and the remaining made up of an exchange of shares. The acquisition is said to be one of the largest in the cashback and loyalty space in recent years, with iGraal considered the leading digital cashback player in France.

“In 2019, GSG and iGraal jointly saw more than six million members using its loyalty tools and connected advertisers to around 400 million consumers,” says GSG. “The deal makes GSG the largest rewards, savings and shopping content platform in Europe”.

As a result of the acquisition, Munich-based GSG says it expects to have more than half a billion shopping-related touchpoints and to facilitate over 40 million transactions to its merchant partners in 2020. (Coronavirus world recession permitting.)

It is also talking up the data is has access too, saying that the additional user interactions provide GSG with valuable new insights into the shopping behaviour of millions of consumers worldwide and will enable it to build an “even smarter” advertising platform for its partners.

In combination, iGraal and GSG say the two companies intend to expand their cashback and loyalty solutions into new European markets and significantly increase its member base and reach. Despite strong investments and market expansion, GSG expects to stay profitable also in 2020,” adds the company.

Meanwhile, the acquisition of iGraal follows GSG buying Pouch, the U.K.-based money-saving browser extension, in January 2019. This saw the Pouch team join GSG, and Pouch founders Ben Corrigan, Jonny Plein, and Vikram Simha becoming Pouch “Global Product Leads” at GSG.

Launched publicly in September 2016, Pouch is best known for its shopping tool that automatically alerts buyers to working voucher codes as they visit over 3,000 U.K. e-commerce sites. The Pouch browser extension is available for Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

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Lilium raises another $240M to design, test and and run an electric aircraft taxi service

Long and short distance travel have all but stopped for many people at the moment. But looking forward to a time when that may no longer be the case, a company designing flying taxis is today announcing a large round of funding to help continue developing its product.

Lilium, a Munich-based startup that is designing and building vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft with speeds of up to 100 km/h that it plans eventually to run in its own taxi fleet, has closed a funding round of “over” $240 million — money that it plans to use to keep developing its aircraft, and to start building manufacturing facilities to produce more of them, for an expected launch date of 2025.

“We’re working to deliver a brand new form of emissions-free transport,” said a spokesperson. “Doing something like that takes significant time and investment, but the outcome is a valuable business and a chance to have a genuinely positive impact on the way we travel.”

This latest investment was an inside round (involving existing, not new, investors) and it closed last month. It was led by Tencent, with participation from other previous backers that included Atomico, Freigeist and LGT. The valuation is not being disclosed, but the company confirms that it is significantly higher than it was in its Series B in 2017. (For some more context, PitchBook estimates that last year the company was valued at around $470 million.)

The news today caps off some challenging recent months for the company, even before the Coronavirus took hold of the world and cast a dark shadow on any kind of travel.

Last October, we reported that several sources said that Lilium, which employs 400 people, was looking to raise between $400 million and $500 million, a round that it had been working on for some months. In the end, the lower amount the company is putting out today is $160 million less than the lower end of that range, but from what we’ve been told, this is not far from what the company was actually aiming to raise. Still, that combined with the fact that there are no new investors in the raise might imply some challenges there.

(It is, nevertheless, one of the biggest fundraises to date for a startup in the “flying vehicle” space. (Volocopter, which is also designing a new kind of flying taxi-style vehicle and service, closed a $94 million round in February.) Lilium has now raised more than $340 million to date.)

“This additional funding underscores the deep confidence our investors have in both our physical product and our business case. We’re very pleased to be able to complete an internal round with them, having benefited greatly from their support and guidance over the past few years,” said Christopher Delbrück, Lilium’s CFO, in a statement. “The new funds will enable us to take big strides towards our shared goal of delivering regional air mobility as early as 2025.”

But raising money has not been the only challenge. At the beginning of this month, the older of Lilium’s two prototypes burst into flames while some maintenance was being carried out. The model was close to being retired, but testing on the second, newer model has nonetheless been paused until the company can determine the cause of the accident with the first aircraft.

“Our second demonstrator aircraft was fortunately undamaged in the fire and will begin flight testing once we’ve understood the cause of the fire in the first aircraft,” a spokesperson said.

The market for aircraft-based taxi services — be they electric, autonomous, or both — is still very nascent. There are no approved aircraft yet on the market (indeed, the regulations for what these would even look like haven’t even been created), and, as a result, there are no services yet in place, either.

But the opportunity of building fast services that could mitigate current traffic congestion, while also reducing carbon emissions, is potentially massive, and so we are seeing a lot of activity and investment from many corners as companies hope their takes on solving that challenge are the ones to hit the mark.

Lilium’s would-be rivals include not just fellow German startup Volocopter, but also Kitty Hawk, eHang, Joby and Uber, in addition to Blade and Skyryse, air taxi services of sorts that offer more conventional helicopters and other vessels in limited launches for those willing to spend the money.

It’s not clear how much of this will fare in the months and years ahead, in particular at a tricky time for travel and the wider economy. But for now, Lilium’s work so far — it was founded in 2015 by Daniel Wiegand (CEO), Sebastian Born, Matthias Meiner and Patrick Nathen — has been promising enough for its investors to continue backing it for the long haul.

“At Tencent we’re committed to supporting technologies that we believe have the potential to tackle the greatest challenges facing our world,” said David Wallerstein, Chief eXploration Officer at Tencent, in a statement. “Over the last few years we’ve had the opportunity to see the professionalism and dynamism with which Lilium are approaching their mission and we’re honored to be supporting them as they take the next steps on their journey.”

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With kids and adults staying at home, are virtual worlds ready for primetime?

We’ve been diligently following the development of virtual worlds, also known as the “metaverse,” on TechCrunch.

Hanging out within the virtual worlds of games has become more popular in recent years with the growth of platforms like Roblox and open-world games like Fortnite, but it still isn’t a mainstream way to socialize outside of the young-adult demographic.

Three weeks ago, TechCrunch media columnist Eric Peckham published an in-depth report that positioned virtual worlds as the next era of social media. In an eight-part series, he looked at the history of virtual worlds and why games are already social networks, why social networks want more gaming, what the next few years looks like for the industry and why isn’t it mainstream already, how these virtual worlds will lead to healthier social relations, what the future of virtual economies will be and which companies are poised for success in this new market.

Given all that has changed in just the last three weeks — who would have thought that large swaths of the knowledge economy would suddenly find themselves entirely interacting virtually? — I wanted to get a sense of what the rising popularity of virtual worlds looks like in the midst of the outbreak of novel coronavirus. Eric and I had a call to discuss this and decided to share our conversation publicly.

Danny Crichton: So let’s talk about timing a bit. You wrote this eight-article series around virtual worlds and then all of a sudden post-publication there is this massive event — the novel coronavirus pandemic — causing a large portion of the human population to stay at home and interact only online. What’s happening now in the space?

Eric Peckham: I wrote my series on the multiverse because I was already seeing a surge of interest, both in terms of consumer demand for open-world MMO games and in terms of social media giants like Facebook and Snap trying to incorporate virtual worlds and social games into their platforms. Large companies are planning for virtual worlds in a way that is actionable and not just a futuristic vision. Over the last couple of years there has also been a lot of VC investment into a handful of startups focused on building next-generation virtual worlds for people to spend time in, virtual worlds with complex societies shaped by users’ contributions.

Talking to founders and investors in the gaming space, there has been a huge increase in usage over the last few weeks as more people hang out at home playing games, whether it’s on the adult side or the kid side.

Most of these next-generation virtual worlds are still in private beta but already popular platforms like Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite are getting substantially more use than normal. A large portion of people stuck at home are escaping via the virtual worlds of games.

You wrote this whole analysis before you knew the extent of the pandemic — how has the outlook changed for this industry?

This accelerates the timeline of virtual worlds being a mainstream place to hang out and socialize in daily life. I think people will be at home for multiple months, not just a couple of weeks, and it’s going to change people’s perspectives on socializing and working from home.

That’s a really powerful cultural shift. It’s getting more people beyond the core gaming community excited about spending time in virtual worlds and hanging out with their friends there.

We have seen this most heavily with the youngest generation of internet users. The majority of kids 9-12 years old are users of Minecraft and Roblox who hang out there with friends after school. We’ll see that expand to older demographics more quickly than it was going to before.

One of the complaints that I’ve seen on Twitter is that even though we have one of the largest global human lockdowns of all time, all the VR headsets are basically gone. Is VR a key component of virtual worlds?

Well, you don’t need VR headsets in order to spend meaningful time with others in a virtual space. Hundreds of millions of people already do it through their mobile phones and through PCs and consoles.

This is at the heart of the gaming industry: creating virtual worlds for people to spend time in, both pursuing the mission of whatever a game is designed for but also interacting with others. Among the most popular mobile and PC games last year were massively multiplayer online (MMO) games.

Talking about gaming, one facet of the story that I thought was particularly interesting was the fact that gaming was still not that high in terms of market penetration in the population.

More than two billion people play video games in the context of a year. There’s incredible market penetration in that sense. But, at least for the data I’ve seen for the U.S., the percent of the population who play games on a given day is still much lower than the percent of the population who use social media on a given day.

The more that games become virtual worlds for socializing and hanging out beyond just the mission of the gameplay, the more who will turn to virtual worlds as a social and entertainment outlet when they have five minutes free to do something on their phone. Social media fills these small moments in life. MMO games right now don’t because they are so oriented around the gameplay, which takes time and uninterrupted focus. Virtual worlds in the vein of those on Roblox where you just hang out and explore with friends compete for that time with Instagram more directly.

Theater chains like Regal and AMC announced this week that they are entirely shutting down to wait out the pandemic. Is that going to affect these virtual world companies?

I think they are separate parts of media. Cinema attendance has been declining quite substantially for years, and the way the industry has made up for that is trying to turn cinemas into these premium experiences and increasing ticket prices. Kids are just as likely, if not more likely, to play a game together on a Friday night as they are to go to the cinema. Cinemas are less culturally relevant to young people than they once were.

We’ve seen a massive experiment in work from home, which is a form of virtual world, or at least, a virtual workplace. When it comes to popularizing virtual worlds, is it going to come from the entertainment side or the more productivity-oriented platforms?

It will come from the entertainment side, and from younger people using it to socialize, in part because there’s less fear around cultural etiquette compared to people meeting in a business setting who are worried about a virtual world context not feeling as professional. Over time, as virtual worlds become pervasive in our social lives they will become more natural places to chat with people about business as well.

As more and more people are working online and interacting virtually, a big question is how you get beyond Zoom calls or the technology that’s currently in the market for virtual conferences to something that feels more like walking around and chatting with people in person. It’s tough to do without the ability to walk around a virtual space. You can’t have those unplanned small group or one-on-one interactions with people you don’t know if you’re just boxes within a Zoom call or some other broadcast. It will be interesting to see what develops around virtual business conferences that stems from virtual world technology. I’ve seen a few teams exploring this.

Last question here, but we are looking at a major recession in the economy, and so how does the landscape of people earning money from virtual worlds change with coronavirus?

The second-to-last article in my series is about the virtual economies around virtual worlds. Any virtual world inherently has commerce and people have already been making real-world money from games and from early virtual worlds like Second Life.

Both people staying home amid the coronavirus and the recession that we seem to be entering are pressures that will push more people to look online for ways to make money. That will only increase the activity of virtual economies around some of these worlds, whether those are formally built into the game or they’re happening in a gray or black market around the games (which is more common).

Thanks, Eric.

A multiverse, not the metaverse

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Voi, the European e-scooter rentals startup, ‘pauses’ operations in several countries

Following similar moves by Lime, Bird, Tier and others, Voi Technology, the European e-scooter rentals and so-called micro-mobility startup, says it has “paused” operations in several countries due to the Coronvirus pandemic. This sees the company suspend operations in all but nine key cities.

In a short statement issued to media on Friday, Voi said it had regrettably been “forced” to pause operations in the majority of cities it operates in, with only a handful of its largest cities being serviced.

The cities where Voi is continuing to operate in are: Copenhagen, Helsinki, Gothenburg, Stockholm and Oslo in the Nordics, and Berlin, Hamburg, Nuremberg and Munich in Germany.

More broadly, the Coronavirus outbreak is a major blow to e-scooter companies as cities around the world are restricting movement and social distancing and isolation is, to varying degrees, being practiced. This is seeing many companies putting in place work-from-home policies and negating the need for daily commutes, where e-scooters are often favoured. The world economy is also taking a hit and therefore recreational spending and travel is on an escalating downwards trend too.

More broadly, the business plans of e-scooter rental startups factor in seasonal demand and sources told me a few months ago that runway across the industry was based on deep enough pockets and operational smarts to get through Winter and be in a strong position to capitalise on peak Spring and Summer season demand. Coronavirus inevitably means “Winter” could now last for a very long time indeed.

The rest of the statement from Voi — which raised $85 million in Series B funding in November — follows below:

In the cities we keep open we will drastically reduce our fleet size but will continue to serve our communities and wherever possible we will keep capacity at important hubs, like major transport interchanges and hospitals.

We have been forced to make this hard decision as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. People are working from home and no longer visiting restaurants, pubs, theatres and friends and consequently have stopped using Voi e-scooters to get around.

We plan to kick start our operations again when the situation allows.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Voi, the European e-scooter rentals startup, ‘pauses’ operations in several countries https://ift.tt/3debv1A

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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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