HealthJoy, a platform that helps employees get the most use out of their benefits, launched its revamped user interface and technology stack today. The startup told TechCrunch that usage has doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the new platform, called HealthJoy 2.0, has been in the works for two years, it is now helping the company handle increased demand for services, including telemedicine.

Launched in 2014, HealthJoy now has more than 500 employers on its platform. It has raised a total of $53 million so far, including a $30 million Series C announced in February.

The new interface includes features that tell users expected wait times for services like its inbox and healthcare concierge, and a new benefits wallet. Last month, HealthJoy also added features to address the pandemic, including help to get testing, online consultations and a guide to nearby in-network healthcare facilities with low wait times.

Co-founder and CEO Justin Holland told TechCrunch that the platform “initially saw a huge spike in telemedicine visits as awareness of the virus grew and people started looking for ways to avoid physically visiting a doctor’s office. Usage for telemedicine has stabilized in the last couple of weeks and is now only a little bit above our baseline.”

He added that HealthJoy is now encouraging more employees to use the HealthJoy Employee Assistance Program (EAP), which helps them find services like mental health counseling, financial planning and child and elder care assistance.

“We’ve seen a corresponding spike in EAP utilization as people are seeking help,” he said.

HealthJoy 2.0’s improvements, which moves more processing away from local clients to the cloud and includes an updated CRM and dashboard for employers, will also make it easier for the company to implement new features in the future.

Other health benefit engagement platforms include Collective Health, League and Lumity. Holland said that HealthJoy 2.0 will help the startup better compete by “allowing for greater integration with partners, a larger collection of APIs and easier integration with third-party data.”

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: Rendezvous Online with Sramana Mitra 2.25.20

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Today Opera Event, an influencer software service, announced that it closed a $5 million Series A. The Oakland-based startup raised the capital from new lead investor Antera, with prior investors Atlas Ventures, Everblue, and Konvoy Ventures coming along.

According to Crunchbase data, Opera Event had raised at least $1.2 million before this new round.

Opera Event is starting with a focus on influencers in the esports market, a business that founder Brandon Byrne knows well. Byrne previously worked for former esports organization Curse and served as the CFO of Team Liquid; Team Liquid is an active esports organization with players in a number of games, including League of Legends and Starcraft 2.

The startup wants to help esports teams monetize, a likely welcome effort given the industry’s historical issues with revenue generation, and reward micro-influencer fans. How it intends to do that is its core software service, one that Byrne expects will in time work for other verticals and influencer sets. Let’s explore.

Opera Event in practice

It’s perhaps best to explain what Opera Event does with a hypothetical example, built off notes from an interview with Opera Event’s Byrne. Let’s say that Alex Wilhelm Super Awesome Esports (AWSAE) is a small Starcraft 2 team — it’s just big enough to attract some sponsorship, but not as much as the team would like. However, AWSAE’s Starcraft 2 players have dedicated fans, many of whom also stream on Twitch and maintain a presence on Twitter.

By using Opera Event, AWSAE’s fans that stream can join the team’s commercial world, adding its sponsors to their Twitch pages, tweeting out the same campaigns and more. Opera Event sits between the team, its community and capital sources (brands), helping make everything click. It’s a situation that works well for Alex Wilhelm Super Awesome Esports. With its community streaming under its commercial banner, its demonstrable in-market impact (tweet impressions, minutes engaged on Twitch, etc) grows sharply. Its associate small streamers and fans get to take part in in the team’s world, and can be rewarded with things like social follows and other bits of love — all while brands can better deploy capital. (Opera Event calls this “the ability to engage and manage content creators efficiently and at scale.”)

Now AWSAE can get bigger sponsors as it can offer a bigger audience, it can share revenues or provide other succor to its fanbase, and brands can get their whatnot in front of more viewers at once.

One team that Byrne detailed had about 39 members doing around 50 million engaged minutes each month on Twitch. Using his startups software to create two affiliate programs, the same team grew to over 3,000 influencers that generated north of 450 million minutes per month of viewership. The latter set of figures are far more commercially viable.

The aggregation of small streamers is more than adding up views, it turns out. Byrne told TechCrunch that smaller esports streamers have better click through rates than the entertainment categories giants, which could help team fans and other community members that sign up as part of their Opera Event network have outsized impact on sponsor results.

Opera Event takes a material cut of deals it lands through its sales team (25% to 30% per the company) and a small cut for deals that flow through its platform but originated elsewhere (2% to 3%). The model generated around $1.8 million for the startup in 2019, and Opera Event hopes to reach $9 million in revenue this year.

Particularly important in today’s changed market, Byrne told TechCrunch that Opera Event is a quarter away from breaking even. That should keep the company safe during a downturn.

In time, Opera Event wants to add more niches to its stable. Its founder mentioned yoga as an example. Where there are influencers big and small, the startup wants to show up and help facilitate influencer commerce and collaboration.

Earlier this week, we kicked off our Extra Crunch Live series with an interesting chat with Cowboy’s Aileen Lee and Ted Wang. Today, we will be back at 3 p.m. PST/6 p.m. EST/10 p.m. GMT with a new guest: Charles Hudson, the general partner of Precursor Ventures.

Extra Crunch members will find an AddEvent link below to drop the details directly into their calendar and folks who want to participate directly can hit up the Zoom link (also below). We’ll ask as many audience questions as we can, so please make them sharp — no pitches, please.

Charles Hudson founded Precursor Ventures to invest in pre-seed and seed-stage companies. Earlier this year, the firm filed paperwork to put together a $40 million third fund after previously raising two main funds and one $10 million “opportunity” fund.

As we await hard and accurate numbers on how COVID-19 is impacting fundraising, we’ll ask Hudson to walk us through the changes he has seen and will cover some basics: The best way to pitch him, what his to-do list looks like these days and if the pandemic has made Precursor newly bullish or bearish on certain sectors.

Then, we’ll get much nerdier: Will we see the number of party rounds fall further now that it’s harder to gather investors in real life? Do you think we’ll see pre-seed raises ask for more ownership terms? And what is the latest with the wacky world of early-stage valuations?

There’s a lot to talk about. And we haven’t even mentioned YC’s pro rata change yet.

After Hudson, we have a stacked lineup of Extra Crunch live guests, including Mitch and Freada Kapor, Mark Cuban, Roelof Botha and Kirsten Green, with more to be announced soon.

You can find information below with details for joining today’s discussion, as well as an AddEvent link to put the details directly onto your calendar.

Sign up for Extra Crunch to get access to all these episodes where you can view the talks live, participate in the Q&A with industry leaders and watch later on-demand if you can’t make the live timing. You can also see the chat via YouTube below. Talk soon!

Details

Real-time voice transcription service Otter.ai is adding new functionality that will aid home school students and work-from-home employees alike. The company today is introducing an integration with Zoom in order to provide “Live Video Meeting Notes” — meaning, the ability to record and view a live, interactive transcript directly from a video conference.

The feature is also designed to work even if the meeting participant is using a headset or earbuds, the company says.

To access the Live Video Meeting Notes, meeting participants can open the Otter.ai Live Transcript from the LIVE menu at the top of the Zoom window, then log into Otter.ai. However, they won’t need to remember to start or stop the live transcript — that happens automatically. The Otter live transcripts will also be available through the Zoom app on mobile.

When the meeting wraps, users can also refer back to the transcript to highlight, comment and add photos to their meeting notes.

The feature is available for Otter for Teams and Zoom Pro subscribers or higher. The meeting host will need to have an Otter for Teams subscription, which is $20 per seat per month, with a minimum of 3 seats, based on the annual plan. Interested customers can trial the service for free for 2 months using the code “OTTER_RELIEF.”

The ability to access a transcription of the online meeting comes at a time when all business that can be managed virtually by home workers has been moved out of the office, amid the coronavirus pandemic. This, in turn, has seen the use of video conferencing apps skyrocket.

Otter.ai, too, has felt the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on its business.

According to Otter.ai CEO and founder Sam Liang, Otter usage with Zoom meetings has increased by more than 5X in the past few weeks and the company has seen more sign-ups from remote workers and students engaged in distance learning.

Besides being a useful tool for those attending web conferencing meetings, Otter’s transcripts can help people catch up with meetings they missed — a more common occurrence these days, as workers juggle their jobs, health, parenting, and home school teaching duties simultaneously.

To date, Otter has transcribed more than 25 million meetings, totaling over 750 million transcribed meeting minutes. While the company doesn’t disclose its user numbers or revenue, Liang told TechCrunch Otter.ai’s annual revenue run rate has doubled in less than four months since the end of 2019. The company is not yet profitable, but features like this new Zoom integration may help to push free users to paid plans.

“Virtual meetings have skyrocketed during the COVID-19 outbreak as organizations recognize that high quality voice meeting notes are a critical tool for employee productivity when collaborating within an office or in any virtual meeting,” said Liang, in a statement about the new integration.

The launch comes on the heels of Otter.ai’s existing partnership with Zoom, which allowed the video conferencing solution to license Otter’s voice transcription technology to offer post-meeting transcription. These transcriptions, however, would only be available an hour or two after the meeting wrapped, without any way to view the transcript being written live, in-real time, as today’s new integration allows. It also didn’t offer any way to interact with the transcript, such as highlighting or leaving comments.

In addition, the post-meeting transcription service was only aimed at Zoom Business users, while the new features are offered to Zoom Pro users.

Otter.ai says the new Zoom feature set is only one of several video conferencing integrations it has in the works, but didn’t provide details on what other services may be supported in the future.

The startup earlier this year raised another $10 million in funding from new strategic investor NTT DOCOMO. To date, Otter.ai has raised $23 million from Fusion Fund, GGV Capital, Draper Dragon Fund, Duke University Innovation Fund, Harris Barton Asset Management, Slow Ventures, Horizons Ventures and others.

Correction, 4/23/20, 3:16 PM: Otter has transcribed over 750M minutes, not 250M as previously stated. The article has been updated to correct this.

482nd Roundtable For Entrepreneurs Starting NOW: Live Tweeting By @1Mby1M Today’s 482nd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, April 23, at 8 a.m. PDT/11...

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Sramana Mitra: Why don’t we step through the journey.  Neal Taparia: When we started working on it full-time, I had mentioned that we benefited from a lot of organic growth. What was really...

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Today’s 482nd FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, April 23 at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join....

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

Today we’re taking a look at a bit of data on the European venture capital scene in Q1. As with our looks at other locales like Silicon Valley and other bits of the United States, we’re taking stock of what happened in the first quarter. Q1 2020 includes pre-COVID-19 results, though as some European countries began to lock-down before the United States, there may be more pandemic-impact in the following results than we’ve seen domestically thus far.

Today’s grip of data is via the folks over at PitchBook, who compiled a venture-focused dig through the continent’s first three months of the year. Let’s parse the top numbers, make a comparison or two and then look to what’s next.

Q1: An ok quarter

Despite COVID-19, China’s broad shuttering and an aged bull market deep, Europe’s venture capital activity in Q1 2020 was mostly fine. It wasn’t great, and there were some less-than-winsome results that could be chalked up to the pandemic, but the first quarter provided an alright start to the year.

Miro is a company in the right place at the right time. The makers of a digital whiteboard are seeing usage surge right now as businesses move from the workplace and physical whiteboards. Today, the company announced a hefty $50 million Series B.

Iconiq Capital led the round with help from Accel and a slew of individual investors. Today’s investment brings the total raised to around $75 million, according to the company. Among the company’s angel investors was basketball star Steph Curry, and Dutch investor Bas Godska, one of the most prolific Western investors in Eastern Europe.

What’s attracting this level of investment is that this is a product made for a moment when workers are forced to stay home. One of the primary complaints about working at home is the inability to sit in the same room with colleagues and brainstorm around a whiteboard. This reproduces that to an extent.

What’s more, Miro isn’t simply light-weight add-in like you might find built into a collaboration tool like Zoom or Microsoft Teams; it’s more of a platform play designed to integrate with many different enterprise tools, much like Slack does for communications.

Miro co-founder and CEO Andrey Khusid said the company planned the platform idea from its earliest days. “The concept from day one was building something for real-time collaboration and the platform thing is very important because we expect that people will build on top of our product,” Khusid told TechCrunch.

That means that people can build integrations to other common tools and customize the base tool to meet the needs of an individual team or organization. It’s an approach that seems to be working as the company reports it’s profitable with more than 21,000 customers including 80% of the Fortune 100. Customers include Netflix, Salesforce, PwC, Spotify, Expedia and Deloitte.

Khusid says usage has been skyrocketing among both business and educational customers as the pandemic has forced millions of people to work at home. He says that has been a challenge for his engineering team to keep up with the demand, but one that the company has been able to meet to this point.

The startup just passed the 300 employee mark this week, and it will continue to hire with this new influx of money. Khusid expects to have another 150 employees before the end of the year to keep up with increasing demand for the product.

“We understand that we need to come out strong from this situation. The company is growing much faster than we expected, so we need to have a very strong team to maintain the growth at the same pace after the crisis ends.”

While the Covid-19 lock downs have hurt the global economy significantly, there are certain industries that are seeing strong growth. One surprising beneficiary is streaming service provider Netflix...

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The new “normal” offers new opportunities. That’s the thinking behind a new pre-seed funding program from Heartcore Capital . The European consumer-focused VC usually invests in startups at seed and Series A, but recognising that many potential founders are in lockdown and with time of their hands, is moving to the top of the funnel with the launch of a pre-seed fellowship programme.

Specifically, entrepreneurs interested in starting a consumer technology company during lockdown can apply for a pre-seed investment of €100,000 per founder to finance development of a prototype. The entire investment process will be conducted online and begins via a simple web form, followed by Zoom conversations with the investment team.

“Heartcore is offering €100,000 per founder for a 7% equity stake per company – to reflect that a larger founding team will also mean a larger initial cost base,” explains the VC. “The investment instrument is a convertible note. The company does not need to be founded yet, nor is an idea required to apply. All companies must operate within consumer technology (B2C/B2B2C) and be based in Europe”.

More broadly, the goal of Fellowship financing is to “build a prototype, with a view to raising a seed round when normal life resumes”.

To find out more, I caught up with Heartcore Capital General Partner Max Niederhofer, where we discussed the program’s inception, who it competes with, and startup opportunities after lockdown.

TechCrunch: How did the idea of the fellowship come about or was Heartcore working on a pre-seed model before the coronavirus crisis hit (I gather it might be the latter)?

Max Niederhofer: Heartcore has been investing from inception to Series A since we got started in 2007. Half of the investments in the last twelve months have been in a team and a plan, often pre-product. But many of these were sizeable funding rounds where there was already a fully fleshed out idea, already a larger team, already a company.

This is different. We sat down two weeks ago, after we had worked to make sure that our portfolio is well funded, and after closing the three deals we had in the pipe from pre-lockdown. And we asked ourselves: what if this lasts longer? Is there an instrument that we could come up with that is tailored to this situation, that lives the Heartcore ethos of “no fear, no greed” and puts founders’ needs first.

Everyone seems to be examining their life right now, including their life’s work. We know some exceptional people have lost their jobs. Others might have more time to think about the big idea they’ve been mulling over for a while. What can we offer them to get going right now, rather than having to wait until normal life resumes?

Will the fellowship continue to be open to applications if/when lockdown restrictions are lifted across Europe?

The intention is to keep it open through 2020, potentially into 2021, depending on how long it takes to resume “normal life.” We will see what happens this year, whether the offering resonates with entrepreneurs, and we will adjust accordingly.

There’s certainly a possibility that this becomes part of our operating model going forward. But like any startup, we will iterate it to make sure that it’s something that makes sense for founders given the overall fundraising environment.

Arguably, with the maturity of remote working tools, a period of lockdown is a good opportunity for a small team to build an MVP or have a prolonged period of product development without worrying too much about go-to market. Is that your thinking?

That is certainly part of it. This is a great time for focused product work. But we also think it’s a great time to launch prototypes, get people using them, and collect feedback. App downloads are significantly up. The willingness to try new things is high.

More than that, however, we think that founding teams will want to be ready to raise larger seed financing when restrictions are lifted. We want to put them in a position to do so.

Which funding sources or other programs do you think the Heartcore fellowship most closely competes with?

It’s like Y Combinator for people who can’t leave their house.

You’re targeting companies within consumer technology (B2C/B2B2C) that are based in Europe. Within this definition, what type of products or sectors do you think have the best opportunity to be founded in the current crisis and (hopefully) as we come out of it?

The crisis serves as an accelerant to some of the secular trends we’ve been seeing anyway, e.g. the convergence of online and offline. Of course everyone is talking about the “digital only” companies right now, but we invest in B2C and marketplaces across the entire consumer spend spectrum: in health, food, finance, insurance, real estate, mobility, travel, retail/ecommerce, education, media/entertainment, and of course consumer productivity tools.

We are also happily counter-cyclical: we definitely want to speak with founders in the travel sector. We believe travel will rebound in a big way and that online travel companies will disproportionately benefit.

We are big believers in technology’s potential to give people superpowers, but also to help them become more human by addressing our common desires to belong, to stay safe and protect others, to have fun and work on something meaningful.

OneDegree, the Hong Kong-based insurance technology startup, launched its first product today, a line of medical plans for pets called Pawfect Care. The company will introduce other products, including cyber insurance and medical coverage for humans, all available completely online, over the next 12 months.

Founded in 2016, OneDegree raised $30 million in Series A funding last year, and its investors include BitRock Capital, Cyperport Macro Fund and Cathay Ventures.

Co-founder and CEO Alvin Kwock told TechCrunch that it took OneDegree two years to launch Pawfect Care because of the stringent regulatory approval process required to get an insurance license in Hong Kong.

The first two virtual insurance licenses issued by Hong Kong’s Insurance Authority went to companies owned by existing insurance providers (Sun Life’s Bow Tie and Asia Insurance’s Avo), in an effort to encourage more legacy players to go digital. OneDegree was the first independent insurance company to start online to be granted a license.

OneDegree will gradually launch cyber and human medical insurance plans over the next year. Kwock said the COVID-19 pandemic has created a “paradigm shift,” because face-to-face activities have declined dramatically, and the Insurance Authority is now issuing new virtual insurance licenses and allowing more products to be sold online.

The company decided to start with pet insurance because the company estimates that even though there are about half a million pet dogs and cats in Hong Kong, only about 3% of them have medical insurance despite the high cost of veterinary care. OneDegree lets customers buy and manage policies and file claims through a mobile app. It says that about 90% of approved claims will be paid within two working days.

In response to the pandemic, Pawfect Care’s pet insurance includes coverage of medical costs related to COVID-19. OneDegree emphasizes that there have only been a few known cases of pets testing positive for the virus so far and no evidence of them acting as carriers so far, but added the coverage for customers’ peace of mind.

Challenger bank Bunq has revamped joint accounts to give you more flexibility. If you’re a premium users (ie not just a Bunq Travel customer), you can create a sub-account with someone else who’s not a premium user for €2.99 per month. Bunq also lets you create multiple sub-accounts, meaning that you can have an account with your partner, another one with your kid, etc.

The feature is called Bunq +1 and is different from traditional Bunq sub-accounts. With Bunq +1, you can invite someone who isn’t already a Bunq user and share an account with them. They don’t have to pay €7.99 for a Bunq Premium subscription. The main Bunq account holder pays €2.99 per month for each +1 account.

After that, you can both deposit money, view transactions and spend money. Each user gets their own Bunq card. This feature can be particularly useful for parents who want to manage allowance on Bunq. The parent could instantly transfer money from their main account to the +1 account — they can view transactions at all time. The kid could spend money with a Bunq card.

If you’re trying to share an account with an existing Bunq Premium user, you can create a sub-account and share it. Each user will have a full-fledged Bunq account with their own personal account. They’ll also have a shared sub-account with its own IBAN.

Of course, you both have to pay €7.99 per month for a Bunq Premium subscription. Bunq Premium users can create up to 25 sub-accounts for free.

Business customers can also leverage Bunq +1 to hand out corporate cards to their employee. Each employee could have their own +1 account with their own card. Businesses could then manage expenses and top up accounts.

French startup Doctolib is sharing some metrics on its video consultation feature. While the startup first started as a way to help doctors manage appointments and let them accept online appointments, the company has been taking advantage of its huge community of health professionals to add video consultations on top of that.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, users have booked 2.5 million online appointments in France and Germany. More than 31,000 physicians offer video consultations and 872,000 patients have used the service at least once over the past five weeks.

Usually, Doctolib charges practitioners a monthly fee to access the service and use it to replace their calendar. Practitioners can choose to pay an additional €79 per month ($90) on top of their standard Doctolib plan to start accepting remote appointments.

During the epidemic, the startup has chosen to waive video consultation subscription fees. It’s the right thing to do, but it’s also a great way to convince more practitioners to start accepting remote appointments.

The result is explosive growth. Doctolib jumped from 1,000 to 100,000 video consultations per day in just a month. The good news is that it isn’t just for young people — 28% of users who book an online appointment are 55 years old and beyond.

Those appointments comply with France’s national healthcare system. Patients get reimbursed just like a normal appointment. But there are some legal restrictions. Usually, you can’t book a remote appointment and get reimbursed if the doctor doesn’t know you already.

But that restriction has been lifted during the lockdown. Let’s see if the momentum will hold when the national healthcare system puts back some limits on video consultations.

While some U.S. investors might have taken comfort from China’s rebound, we still find ourselves in the early innings of this period of uncertainty.

Some epidemiologists have estimated that COVID-19 cases will peak in April, but PitchBook reports that dealmaking was down -26% in March, compared to February’s weekly average. The decline is likely to continue in coming weeks — many of the deals that closed last month were initiated before the pandemic, and there is a lag between when deals are made and when they are announced.

However, there’s still hope. A recent report concluded that because valuations are lower and there’s less competition for deals, “the best-performing vintages tend to be those that invest at the nadir of a downturn and into the early stage of recovery.” There are countless examples from the 2008 recession, including many highly valued VC-backed businesses such as WhatsApp, Venmo, Groupon, Uber, Slack and Square. Other early-stage VCs seem to have arrived at a similar conclusion.

Also, early-stage investing seems more resilient. During the last recession, angel and seed activity increased 34% as interest in the stage boomed during a period of prolonged growth.

Furthermore, there is still capital to be deployed in categories that interested investors before the pandemic, which may set the new order in a post-COVID-19 world. According to data provider Preqin Ltd., VC dry powder rose for a seventh consecutive year to roughly $276 billion in 2019, and another $21 billion were raised last quarter. And looking at the deals on the early-stage side that were made year to date, especially in March, the vertical categories that garnered the most funding were enterprise SaaS, fintech, life sciences, healthcare IT, edtech and cybersecurity.

That said, if VCs have the capital to deploy and are able to overcome the obstacle of “having never met in person,” here are six investment trends that could emerge when the pandemic is over.

1. Future of work: promoting intimacy and trust

Since first uploading a YouTube teaser video of its tech five years ago, Magic Leap’s presence in the augmented reality industry has been controversial.

Some have lauded the team’s ambitions, while others I’ve talked to say the company’s posturing has dissuaded investors from taking chances on other AR hardware startups, which has hampered the industry’s advance.

Regardless of its impact, Magic Leap carries outsized weight, leading one to question what would happen to other AR companies if the company’s situation worsened.

The company announced layoffs today, with reports indicating that it is dismissing around 1,000 employees — about half of the company. Magic Leap’s added news of a major pivot to enterprise makes it seem like that wasn’t its primary strategy over the past year. From my perspective, the company looks like it is on a path to a fire sale and will be dependent on executing a dramatic turnaround, which grows tougher under current economic conditions.

Magic Leap has few users, so a theoretical shutdown would likely have a lesser impact than other unicorn flare-outs; still, losing a company on the forefront of a technology lauded by many as the next ubiquitous platform will certainly impact others that are striving to bring this tech to market.

The impact for startups moving forward would be nuanced. Without a substantial software suite of its own, Magic Leap relied heavily on developer partnerships, though in recent months many of those seemed to promote enterprise use cases. AR/VR startups are already in a rough position, and one less developer platform could force more companies to de-prioritize headset-based platforms and shift their focus to mobile.

Ask any woman and she will tell you that most of her bras do not fit her optimally. In fact, a majority of women end up wearing the wrong size. A large part of the problem is that sizing is standardized, unlike women’s bodies. With every passing year, more people are also shopping online, meaning fewer opportunities to actually try on bras — a trend that’s only accelerating given the shutdown the world is experiencing right now.

One particular problem, and a widespread one, according to entrepreneurs Jaclyn Fu and Lia Winograd, is that bras are generally too big for small-chested women. It’s the reason the former co-workers came together to found Pepper, a three-year-old, Denver-based startup that’s expressly focused on creating bras that fit smaller cup sizes.

As Fu explains it, most bra companies use a size, say 36C, then apply that same design to other bra sizes, like a 32A. While the step is logistically sound — applying a standard base design to other sizes — it doesn’t translate well into actual fit.

“It means a person who is a 32A is wearing a design that was intended for a 36C, causing fit issues like cup gaps,” says Fu.

Usually, women try to resolve the problem by tightening their bra straps or changing sizes, but Pepper’s solution is to create its own, smaller cup molds from a factory in Medellin, Colombia, where Winograd grew up.

Fu made the first prototype for Pepper based on her own chest size. Since then, she’s gone to customers’ houses to conduct fittings and research. Beyond cup size, Pepper also addresses underwire woes, making its products less curved and shorter to follow the natural size of a smaller-chested woman.

To increase customer engagement, Pepper started virtual one-to-one fit sessions for customers who are buying a bra online for the first time, and like other companies has a “fit quiz” for people to take online, too.

Pepper now sells a wide variety of sizes, all the way from from 30A to 38B, and prices range from $48 to $54.

Pepper certainly isn’t the only startup trying to fit into the bra industry. Companies like Kala, SlickChicks and ThirdLove all tout comfort and inclusivity in sizing and fitting.

The biggest of the three is ThirdLove, a San Francisco DTC bra and underwear company that has raised $68.6 million in known venture capital to date, per Crunchbase. ThirdLove brands itself as a brand that sells a “bra for every body” with inclusive sizes, and is now expanding into retail, international markets and swim and athletic wear. The company was last valued at more than $750 million.

It’s unclear how many new brands the market can support, or that can survive this pandemic. Even companies with meaningful market share and fresh capital are struggling to stay afloat as shoppers reduce their spend right now. Earlier this month, ThirdLove laid off 30% of its staff, citing COVID-19’s impact on business.

Even still, Pepper’s founders remain optimistic. Pepper’s Kickstarter $10,000 launch campaign — staged in 2017 — was separately funded in less than 10 hours, Fu notes.

The success of that campaign just helped the company secure $2 million in seed funding from investors, including Precursor Ventures, New York University Innovation Fund and Denver Angels. Others participating include the co-founder of MyFitnessPal, Albert Lee.

Fu adds that the company, which employs three people, is “close to profitability” on a $3 million revenue run rate. In 2019, most of its sales came directly from consumers on their site — a good sign that its growth ties to user loyalty versus relying on partnerships with retailers.

The nuance of buying a bra has long been an in-person ordeal. But now, because of COVID-19’s spread and the resulting shut down of many brick-and-mortar stores, those who need a new bra might have to turn online for the very first time. It’s an opportunity for companies like Pepper to prove that they can master fit without measuring tape and a changing room.

The tech industry (and the world at large) is not experiencing temporary anxiety — the uncertainty we’re all coping with is the new normal.

Sudden shifts in behavior have made some startups targeting slow-moving, old-school industries more relevant than they could have imagined, such as those in telehealth, distance learning and remote work. Most, however are seeing massive decreases in revenue, forcing them to cut costs and even lay off teams to slash burn rates. Other startups simply won’t be here in three to six months.

Cowboy Ventures founder and managing partner Aileen Lee, who coined the term “unicorn,” says tech companies going through scenario planning need to begin thinking long-term.

“We’ve spent the last month scenario planning with our portfolio companies, and in most cases, we’ll have conversations about what these scenarios can include,” said Lee. “And when we look at the planning around those scenarios, they often don’t feel conservative enough. Most entrepreneurs are optimists, and we are, too! But it seems safer to have more conservative plans [and start expecting] that this is going to impact us for longer and be worse than we expected.”

Lee and Cowboy Ventures partner Ted Wang joined TechCrunch on Tuesday for our first episode of Extra Crunch Live, a virtual speaker series for Extra Crunch members. In a live Q&A that included questions from myself and the Extra Crunch audience, Wang and Lee covered a wide range of topics, including PPP loans, advice for business leaders around layoffs, the right time to seek funding and the right firms from which to seek that funding, how to pitch during a downturn and which sectors in particular Cowboy is interested in financing right now.

You can check out the best insights from the call, or catch up on the full conversation via the YouTube embed below.

We have several outstanding guests, including Charles Hudson, Mitch and Freada Kapor, Mark Cuban, Roelof Botha, Hunter Walk and Kirsten Green, joining us on Extra Crunch Live over the next few weeks. Sign up for Extra Crunch to get access to all of them.