Described by Sequoia Capital as the black swan event of 2020, the long-term economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic on startups is still to be seen. However, one effect which is sure to disrupt the MO of many early-stage startups is the cancellation of events and conferences.

According to Forbes, more than 35.3 million people who were planning to attend an event have been forced to change their plans in recent months. And while some might lament being forced to leave their Metallica T-shirts and 2020 Summer Olympics flags in the cupboard, many startup founders are biting their nails at the prospect of lost leads and connections from events and conferences.

The silver lining: Forcing founders to wean themselves off conferences and events as a “go-to” business development tactic might not be a bad thing in the long run.

Based on my experience, many early-stage startups waste lots of time and resources doing the rounds at events without clear aims, using up lots of the founder’s time, without driving much business value. At an early stage in a startup’s journey, every tactic used needs to drive real ROI and ultimately be driving new business opportunities.

So let’s look at why missing out on events might not be the end of the world, and how startups can focus their time, energy and resources on more scalable and consistent lead-gen activities.

What’s my beef with startup events and conferences?

Startups across the nation and around the world are looking for ways to relieve shortages of much-needed personal protective equipment and sanitizers used to halt the spread of COVID-19.

While some of the largest privately held technology companies, like SpaceX and Tesla, have shifted to manufacturing ventilators, smaller companies are also trying to pitch in and relieve scarcity locally.

Supplies have been difficult to come by in some of the areas hardest hit by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, and the shortfalls have been made worse by a lack of coordination from the federal government. In some instances local governments have been bidding for supplies against each other and the federal government to acquire needed personal protective equipment.

On Sunday, New York’s Governor Mario Cuomo pleaded with local governments to not engage in a bidding war. In fact, Kentucky was outbid by the federal government for personal protective equipment.

“FEMA came out and bought it all out from under us,” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear told a local newspaper. “It is a challenge that the federal government says, ‘States, you need to go and find your supply chain,’ and then the federal government ends up buying from that supply chain.”

Against this backdrop local startups and maker spaces are stepping up to do what they can to fill the gap.

Alcohol brands are turning their attention to making hand sanitizer to distribute in communities experiencing shortages. 3D-printing companies are working on new ways to manufacture personal protective equipment and swabs for COVID-19 testing. And one fast fashion retail startup is teaching its tailors and seamstresses how to make cloth masks for consumer protection.

AirCo, a New York-based startup that developed a process to use captured carbon dioxide to make liquor, shifted its efforts to making hand sanitizer for donations in communities in New York City.

Now, new alcohol brands Bev and Endless West are joining the manufacturing push.

Endless West announced this morning that it would shift production away from its distillery to begin making hand sanitizers. The World Health Organization approved their sanitizers, which the company will produce in its warehouse in San Francisco.

The two-ounce bottles will be donated to local restaurants and bars that remain open for delivery, so that employees can use them and distribute them to customers. Bulk quantities will be distributed to healthcare organizations and facilities that need them.

Endless West also put out a call for other companies to provide supplies to hospitals and health organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“We felt it was imperative to do our part and dedicate what resources we have to assist with shortages in the healthcare and food & beverage industries who keep the engine running and provide such important functions in this time of immense need throughout the community,” said Alec Lee, CEO of Endless West, in a statement.

Los Angeles-based Bev is no different.

“As an alcoholic beverage company, Bev is very lucky in that we are licensed to purchase ethanol directly from our suppliers, who are doing their part by discounting the product to anyone licensed to purchase it,” said Bev chief executive, Alix Peabody. “Community underscores everything we do here at Bev, and as such, we will be producing hand sanitizer and distributing it free of charge to the homeless and elderly communities here in Venice, populations who largely have insufficient access to healthcare and essential goods like sanitizer.”

Hand sanitizer is one sorely needed item in short supply, but there are others — including face masks, surgical masks, face shields, swabs and ventilator equipment that other startups are now switching gears to produce.

In Canada, INKSmith, a startup that was making design and tech tools accessible for kids, has now moved to making face shields and is hiring up to 100 new employees to meet demand.

“I think in the short term, we’re going to scale up to meet the needs of the province soon. After that, we’re going to meet the demands of Canada,” INKSmith CEO Jeremy Hedges told the Canadian news outlet Global News.

3D-printing companies like Massachusetts-based Markforged and Formlabs are both making personal protective equipment like face shields, as well as nasal swabs to use for COVID-19 testing.

Markforged is pushing ahead with a number of efforts to focus some of the benefits of 3D printing on the immediate problem of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers most exposed to COVID-19.

“We have about 20 people working on this pretty much as much as they can,” said Markforged chief executive, Gregory Mark. “We break it up into three different programs. The first stage is prototyping validation and getting first pass to doctors. The second is clinical trials and the third is production. We are in clinical trials with two. One is the nasal swab and two is the face shield.”

The ability to spin up manufacturing more quickly than traditional production lines using 3D printing means that both companies are in some ways better positioned to address a thousandfold increase in demand for supplies that no one anticipated.

“3D printing is the fastest way to make anything in the world up to a certain number of days, weeks, months or years,” says Mark. “As soon as we get the green light from hospitals, 10,000 printers around the world can be printing face shields and nose swabs.”

Formlabs, which already has a robust business supplying custom-printed surgical-grade healthcare products, is pushing to bring its swabs to market quickly.

“Not only can we help in the development of the swabs, but we can manufacture them ourselves,” says Formlabs chief product officer, David Lakatos.

Swabs for testing are in short supply in part because there are only a few manufacturers in the world who made them — and one of those primary manufacturers is in Italy, which means supplies and staff are in short supply. “There’s a shortage of them and nobody was expecting that we would need to test millions of people in short order,” says Lakatos.

Formlabs is also working on another piece of personal protective equipment — looking at converting snorkeling masks into respirators and face masks. “Our goal is to make one that is reusable,” says Lakatos. “A patient can use it as a respirator and you can put it in an autoclave and reuse it.”

In Brooklyn, Voodoo Manufacturing has repurposed its 5,000-square-foot facility to mass-produce personal protective equipment. The company has set up a website, CombatingCovid.com, where organizations in need of supplies can place orders. Voodoo aims to print at least 2,500 protective face shields weekly and can scale to larger production volumes based on demand, the company said.

Finally, Resonance, the fast fashion startup launched by the founder of FirstMark Capital, Lawrence Lenihan, is using its factory in the Dominican Republic to make face masks for consumers on the island and beyond.

“To contribute to the Dominican health efforts, Resonance is acting to utilize their resources to manufacture safety masks for distribution to local hospitals, nursing homes, and other high-risk facilities as quickly as possible. They have provided user-friendly instructions and material and will pay their sewers who can to make these masks from the security of their homes,” a spokesperson for the company wrote in an email. “Resonance is currently working to share this downloadable platform and simple instructions to their website, so anyone in the world can contribute to their own local communities.”

All of these efforts — and countless others too numerous to mention — point to the ways small companies are hoping to do something to help their communities stay safe and healthy in the midst of this global outbreak.

But many of these extreme measures may not have been necessary had governments around the world actively coordinated their response and engaged in better preparation before the situation became so dire.

There are a litany of errors that governments made — and are still making — in their efforts to respond to the pandemic, even as the private sector steps in and steps up to address them.

Today 500 Startups hosted a virtual demo day for its 26th batch of startups, a group of companies that TechCrunch covered back in February.

500 is not the only accelerator that moved its traditional investor pitch event online; Y Combinator made a similar move after efforts to flatten the spread of COVID-19 required changes that made its traditional demo day setup temporarily impossible.

In addition to hosting a few dozen startup pitches today, 500 also explained changes to its own format and provided notes on the current state of the venture market.

Regarding how 500 Startups is shaking up how it handles its accelerator, the group intends to pivot to a rolling-admissions setup that will give participants more flexibility; the group will still hold two demo days each year — TechCrunch has more on the changes here.

Regarding the venture market, 500 Startups said venture capital’s investment pace could slow for several months. This seems likely, given how the economy has taken body blows in recent weeks as huge swaths of the world’s economy shut down. What advice did 500 have in the face of the new world? What you’d expect: startups should cut burn and focus on customers.

Got all that? OK, let’s talk about our favorite companies from the current 500 cohort.

Our faves

Several months ago, we surveyed more than 20 leading real estate VCs to learn about what was exciting them most in the real estate tech sector and hear their opinions on proptech trends like co-working, flexible office space and remote office space.

Since we published our survey, COVID-19 has flipped the real estate sector on its head as more companies move toward mandatory remote work, retail businesses are forced to temporarily shut their doors and high-traffic properties thin out. Suddenly, the traditionally predictable world of real estate is more chaotic and unclear than ever.

What are the short and long-term impacts of pandemic-induced volatility? Does this open up opportunities for proptech startups or shutter them? What does this mean from an investing point of view? We asked several of the VCs that participated in our last survey to update us on how COVID-19 is impacting real estate startups, non-proptech companies in general and the broader real estate market overall:

Christopher Yip, RET Ventures

Despite its banner year in 2019, proptech will not be immune to the pressures venture-backed companies face in a market pullback, and we are preparing ourselves and our portfolio companies for a bumpy year.

Google, Amazon and Microsoft are the landlords. Amidst the coronavirus economic crisis, startups need a break from paying rent. They’re in a cash crunch. Revenue has stopped flowing in, capital markets like venture debt are hesitant and startups and small-to-medium sized businesses are at risk of either having to lay off huge numbers of employees and/or shut down.

Meanwhile, the tech giants are cash rich. Their success this decade means they’re able to weather the storm for a few months. Their customers cannot.

Cloud infrastructure costs area amongst many startups’ top expense besides payroll. The option to pay these cloud bills later could save some from going out of business or axing huge parts of their staff. Both would hurt the tech industry, the economy and the individuals laid off. But most worryingly for the giants, it could destroy their customer base.

The mass layoffs have already begun. Soon we’re sure to start hearing about sizable companies shutting down, upended by COVID-19. But there’s still an opportunity to stop a larger bloodbath from ensuing.

That’s why I have a proposal: cloud relief.

The platform giants should let startups and small businesses defer their cloud infrastructure payments for three to six months until they can pay them back in installments. Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, these companies’ additional infrastructure products, and other platform providers should let customers pause payment until the worst of the first wave of the COVID-19 economic disruption passes. Profitable SaaS providers like Salesforce could give customers an extension too.

There are plenty of altruistic reasons to do this. They have the resources to help businesses in need. We all need to support each other in these tough times. This could protect tons of families. Some of these startups are providing important services to the public and even discounting them, thereby ramping up their bills while decreasing revenue.

Then there are the PR reasons. After years of techlash and anti-trust scrutiny, here’s the chance for the giants to prove their size can be beneficial to the world. Recruiters could use it as a talking point. “We’re the company that helped save Silicon Valley.” There’s an explanation for them squirreling away so much cash: the rainy day has finally arrived.

But the capitalistic truth and the story they could sell to Wall Street is that it’s not good for our business if our customers go out of business. Look at what happened to infrastructure providers in the dot-com crash. When tons of startups vaporized, so did the profits for those selling them hosting and tools. Any government stimulus for businesses would be better spent by them paying employees than paying the cloud companies that aren’t in danger. Saving one future Netflix from shutting down could cover any short-term loss from helping 100 other businesses.

This isn’t a handout. These startups will still owe the money. They’d just be able to pay it a little later, spread out over their monthly bills for a year or so. Once mass shelter-in-place orders subside, businesses can operate at least a little closer to normal, investors can get less cautious and customers will have the cash they need to pay their dues. Plus interest, if necessary.

Meanwhile, they’ll be locked in and loyal customers for the foreseeable future. Cloud vendors could gate the deferment to only customers that have been with them for X amount of months or that have already spent Y amount on the platform. The vendors also could offer the deferment on the condition that customers add a year or more to their existing contracts. Founders will remember who gave them the benefit of the doubt.

Consider it a marketing expense. Platforms often offer discounts or free trials to new customers. Now it’s existing customers that need a reprieve. Instead of airport ads, the giants could spend the money ensuring they’ll still have plenty of developers building atop them by the end of 2020.

Beyond deferred payment, platforms could just push the due date on all outstanding bills to three or six months from now. Alternatively, they could offer a deep discount such as 50% off for three months if they didn’t want to deal with accruing debt and then servicing it. Customers with multi-year contracts could offered the opportunity to downgrade or renegotiate their contracts without penalties. Any of these might require giving sales quota forgiveness to their account executives.

It would likely be far too complicated and risky to accept equity in lieu of cash, a cut of revenue going forward or to provide loans or credit lines to customers. The clearest and simplest solution is to let startups skip a few payments, then pay more every month later until they clear their debt. When asked for comment or about whether they’re considering payment deferment options, Microsoft declined, and Amazon and Google did not respond.

To be clear, administering payment deferment won’t be simple or free. There are sure to be holes that cloud economists can poke in this proposal, but my goal is to get the conversation started. It could require the giants to change their earnings guidance. Rewriting deals with significantly sized customers will take work on both ends, and there’s a chance of breach of contract disputes. Giants would face the threat of customers recklessly using cloud resources before shutting down or skipping town.

Most taxing would be determining and enforcing the criteria of who’s eligible. The vendors would need to lay out which customers are too big so they don’t accidentally give a cloud-intensive but healthy media company a deferment they don’t need. Businesses that get questionably excluded could make a stink in public. Executing on the plan will require staff when giants are stretched thin trying to handle logistics disruptions, misinformation and accelerating work-from-home usage.

Still, this is the moment when the fortunate need to lend a hand to the vulnerable. Not a hand out, but a hand up. Companies with billions in cash in their coffers could save those struggling to pay salaries. All the fundraisers and info centers and hackathons are great, but this is how the tech giants can live up to their lofty mission statements.

We all live in the cloud now. Don’t evict us. #CloudRelief

—

Thanks to Falon Fatemi, Corey Quinn, Ilya Fushman, Jason Kim, Ilya Sukhar and Michael Campbell for their ideas and feedback on this proposal.

We’re already entering into a healthcare crisis due to the global coronavirus pandemic, and creative solutions to address shortfalls in supplies, protective equipment and more are being developed to help where possible. A new startup — with a founding team that includes an emergency room doctor, a crisis response expert and a public health researcher — is hoping that its novel approach can help address the impending lack of space that hospitals and healthcare facilities will encounter.

Jupe is a brand new venture launching today that has developed rapidly deployable “Health” rest, recovery and intensive care shelters for use in combating the ongoing global COVID-19 crises. The company says that its mobile spaces can be produced at around 1/30th the cost of a standard hospital room, and shipped anywhere using existing logistics infrastructure.

The Jupe mobile shelters come in three distinct versions, including a Rest unit equipped with beds for providing a place to rest and sleep for medical professionals working on the front lines; a Care version that includes an off-grid solar power/battery-powered solution for isolation of patients who don’t require critical care; and a Plus option that is essentially a self-contained ICU for those patients that require critical care, including readings for use with ventilators and specialized personal protective equipment.

Founders Dr. Jeff Wilson (founder of modular hospitality housing company Kasita) and Cameron Blizzard, along with core advisor Dr. Esther Choo (who also led the #GetMePPE hashtag campaign for sourcing protective equipment for healthcare workers), have obviously moved quickly to get this initiative up and running, but they are already building some of their solutions in Texas. They’re starting with the simpler Rest and Care models, and will be working to produce the more sophisticated Jupe Plus mobile ICUs as soon as possible.

[gallery ids="1966012,1966011,1966010,1966009,1966008,1966007,1966006"]

In terms of portability, Jupe says that its solution can be flat-packed and stacked for transport of up to 24 units at a time on a 40-foot flatbed trailer, towed by a heavy-duty pickup truck. It says it can load as many as 500,000 on just one cargo container ship for overseas transport, too. They use a common base or “chassis” and readily available materials, and the company says that one person can install a single unit in just “minutes.”

While it will take time for Jupe to spin up its engineering and supply chain, the company’s founders note that based on current expert predictions about even a successfully flattened curve of COVID-19 spread, there will be a need for more critical care beds than are available for the foreseeable future in most regions. Originally, the company hadn’t planned to debut so soon, and was instead working on providing modular housing for people requiring shelter after natural disasters, or as an aid in anti-homelessness measures, but it has sped up its efforts to build and ship.

The company’s El Paso, Texas manufacturing facility is currently working on its first 24 prototype units, but it hopes to scale production in part by leveraging the available automotive manufacturing supply chain in the area. The Jupe units will sell for between $14,500 and $78,000 for the Rest and Care units respectively, with different configurations affecting the cost, and the ICUs will be available for $99,000 and above. Jupe tells me that it will be offering Health units at cost, with no margins, including cost of delivery — the team is working on a volunteer basis; it has been bootstrapped financially by the founders to date, with the startup seeking donations and additional investment as a means of continuing to fund operations and production.

CRM has for years been primarily a story of software to manage customer contacts, data to help agents do their jobs, and tools to manage incoming requests and outreach strategies. Now to add to that we’re starting to see a new theme: apps to help agents track how they work and to work better.

Today comes the latest startup in that category, a Dutch company called Kaizo, which uses AI and gamification to provide feedback on agents’ work, tips on what to do differently, and tools to set and work to goals — all of which can be used remotely, in the cloud. Today, it is announcing $3 million in a seed round of funding co-led by Gradient — Google’s AI venture fund — and French VC Partech. 

And along with the seed round, Kaizo (which rebranded last week from its former name, Ticketless) is announcing that Christoph Auer-Welsbach, a former partner at IBM Ventures, is joining the company as a co-founder, alongside founder Dominik Blattner. 

Although this is just a seed round, it’s coming after a period of strong growth for the company. Kaizo has already 500 companies including Truecaller, SimpleSurance, Miro, CreditRepairCloud, Justpark, Festicket and Nmbrs are using its software, covering “thousands” of customer support agents, which use a mixture of free and paid tools that integrate with established CRM software from the likes of Salesforce, Zendesk and more.

Customer service, and the idea of gamifying it to motivate employees, might feel like the last thing on people’s minds at the moment, but it is actually timely and relevant to our current state in responding to and living with the coronavirus.

People are spending much more time at home, and are turning to the internet and remote services to get what they need, and in many cases are finding that their best-laid plans are now in freefall. Both of these are driving a lot of traffic to sites and primarily customer support centers, which are getting overwhelmed with people reaching out for help.

And that’s before you consider how customer support teams might be impacted by coronavirus and the many mandates we’ve had to stay away from work, and the stresses they may be under.

“In our current social climate, customer support is an integral part of a company’s stability and growth that has embraced remote work to meet the demands of a globalized customer-base,” said Dominik Blattner, founder of Kaizo, in a statement. “With the rise of support teams utilizing a digital workplace, providing standards to measure an agent’s performance has never been more important. KPIs provide these standards, quantifying the success, achievement and contribution of each team member.”

On a more general level, Kaizo is also changing the conversation around how to improve one’s productivity. There has been a larger push for “quantified self” platforms, which has very much played out both in workplaces and in our personal lives, but a lot of services to track performance have focused on both managers and employees leaning in with a lot of input. That means if they don’t set aside the time to do that, the platforms never quite work the way they should.

This is where the AI element of Kaizo plays a key role, by taking on the need to proactively report into a system.

“This is how we’re distinct,” Auer-Welsbach said in an interview. “Normally KPIs are top-down. They are about people setting goals and then reporting they’ve done something. This is a bottom-up approach. We’re not trying to change employees’ behaviour. We plug into whatever environment they are using, and then our tool monitors. The employee doesn’t have to report or measure anything. We track clicks on the CRM, ticketing, and more, and we analyse all that.” He notes that Kaizo is looking at up to 50 datapoints in its analysis.

“We’re excited about Kaizo’s novel approach to applying AI to existing ticket data from platforms like Zendesk and Salesforce to optimize the customer support workflow,” said Darian Shirazi, General Partner at Gradient Ventures, in a statement. “Using machine learning, Kaizo understands which behaviors in customer service tickets lead to better outcomes for customers and then guides agents to replicate that using ongoing game mechanics. Customer support and service platforms today are failing to leverage data in the right way to make the life of agents easier and more effective. The demand Kaizo has seen since they launched on the Zendesk Marketplace shows agents have been waiting for such a solution for some time.”

Kaizo is not the only startup to have identified the area of building new services to improve the performance of customer support teams. Assembled earlier this month also raised $3.1 million led by Stripe for what it describes as the “operating system” for customer support.

Today’s 478th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, March 26, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/4 p.m. CET/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. PASSWORD:...

___

This is a fascinating story of a subscription service for high-quality meat being delivered to consumer homes. Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where...

___

Entrepreneur First (EF), the the London-headquartered company builder and “talent first” investor, unveiled its latest cohort of “deep tech” companies in a first virtual Demo Day, amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Presenting startups, in the format of a slick pre-recorded video, are made up of teams formed across EF’s three European locations: London, Berlin and Paris. In total, 25 new startups have been created across deep technology fields such as AI, biotechnology, machine learning and robotics.

They include companies tackling drug discovery using digital twin cells, environmental pollutant monitoring, and artificial brain development for robotics applications, to name just a few (that last one was a mouthful).

It’s also worth re-capping that EF stands out from the many other demo days in U.K. and beyond — seeing the investor backs individuals “pre-team, pre-idea” — meaning that the companies pitching generally only came into existence during the three programmes and perhaps may have never seen the light of day without the founders bashing heads at EF.

Cue statement from Matt Clifford, co-founder Entrepreneur First: “While the format of today’s Demo Day event may have changed, the focus remains the same – introducing the globally important companies of the future to the world’s best investors. Entrepreneur First believes that the best way for the most ambitious and talented people to fulfil their potential is to use their exceptional talent to build companies, transform lives and change the world. With the right support, one talented individual has the potential to fundamentally change the way an entire industry operates – which is perhaps even more important in this period of global upheaval”.

Meanwhile, here’s an interesting tidbit: According to a source, one of the pitching EF companies, Ochre Bio — which is developing gene therapies to treat donor livers outside of the body — made the unusual decision to join Silicon Valley’s YC accelerator in the middle of the EF programme where the founders met, so they’re effectively coming into Demo Day with half their round filled.

The full list of presenting team video pitch links (described in their own words)

Ambify
Environmental pollutant monitoring to protect health and wellbeing.
(London)

Augmize
Augmize automates actuarial reserving in commercial insurance with interpretable machine learning.
(London)

Better Dairy
Building the future of food, starting with animal-free dairy.
(London)

Flaime
Revolutionising cloud gaming with dynamically distributed interactive 3D content delivery.
(London)

Bleep
Bleep lets you create and remix your favourite TV Shows, for and on, the channels we all know and love.
(London)

CARV3D
We generate on demand, new examples of unique and believable digital humans which do not exist in the real world.
(London)

cheMastery
Building the infrastructure for chemistry.
(London)

Exogene
Fast discovery of safer immunotherapies.
(London)

Micrographia Bio
Engineering the chemical atlas for modern drug discovery.
(London)

my110
AI health coach transforming how we eat, exercise and recover.
(London)

Ochre Bio
Gene therapies to treat donor livers outside of the body.
(London)

Omnipresent
We take away the pain of operating global teams. Our clients can onboard employees anywhere in the world with a few mouse clicks.
(London)

Verchable
Building next generation video search using Computer Vision.
(London)

Volatile AI
Combining existing gas sensors with bio-inspired AI algorithms to monitor food aroma.
(London)

Cargoflip
An all-in-one platform to simplify international trade for businesses.
(Berlin)

ElementZero Biolabs
The next generation of tools for capturing genetic information.
(Berlin)

hier foods
An end-to-end procurement tool for regional food.
(Berlin)

Iskra
Low code, complete Machine Learning platform.
(Berlin)

Blendeez
Blendeez helps business users make CRM external and internal apps work together at scale with no technical skills.
(Paris)

Contreeb
We enable online shops and their consumers to balance their carbon footprint.
(Paris)

DeepLife
DeepLife creates digital twins of cell to accelerate drug discovery.
(Paris)

EyePick
EyePick builds a brain for robots to see, understand and act in the real-world.
(Paris)

Lynceus
Lynceus is building the world’s most reliable manufacturing quality prediction software.
(Paris)

Samp
Digital twins for industrial facilities – reliable knowledge for everyone.
(Paris)

X80 Security
Generating intelligent cyber defences through automatic threat simulation.
(Paris)

SendBird has built a highly successful business with a chat API, but the company never intended to stop there, and today it announced it was adding voice and video capabilities to its communications platform.

“We’re creating more of an interaction platform to allow not just text messaging, but also voice calling and video recording capabilities on top of our platform. So it becomes a more comprehensive offering,” CEO and co-founder John Kim told TechCrunch.

The new tools are built on an IP-based delivery system, so it doesn’t touch telephony, according to Kim. That should help give it some differentiation from another popular communications platform, Twilio.

Kim says that his company is currently number one in the chat API space, delivering 100 million interactions per month. This involves primarily powering chat in on-demand services like ride hailing and food delivery, and also online marketplaces and communities. More recently, Kim says he is seeing an uptick in digital health applications, something that is bound to continue as telehealth options abound as a practical way to get medical advice during the COVID-19 crisis.

Adding voice and video will definitely add to the resources required to deliver these services, but Kim says they have built the platform to handle it. “One of the things that clearly differentiate us from the rest of the market was our ability to scale. So we haven’t had any issues from the technical side of things with the increasing demand,” he said.

The company plans to bill for these services by the minute, which Kim says is an industry best practice for voice and video. SendBird lets developers add these capabilities with just a couple of lines of code, offering a similar value proposition to companies like Plaid (recently sold to MasterCard), Twilio and Stripe. It saves developers from having to build these capabilities themselves.

The company was founded in 2013, and was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2016 cohort. The company has over 200 employees today and has raised over $120 million, according to PitchBook data. Pitchbook pegged the company’s valuation at more than $287 million as of last May when it announced a $50 million Series B extension that brought the total Series B to $102 million.

According to a Markets and Markets report, the global tax management market is expected to grow at 12% CAGR to reach $27 billion by 2024 from $15.5 billion in 2019. Seattle, Washington-based Avalara...

___

Watchdogs have started to raise the issue that new working practices and online activity necessitated by the spread of the coronavirus pandemic are creating new sets of privacy, security and data protection challenges. Today a startup is announcing a growth round of funding to help online businesses navigate those issues better.

DataGuard, a Munich-based startup that provides “GDPR-as-a-service,” is essentially a cloud-based platform to help those doing business online ensure they are compliant with various regional regulations and best practices around privacy by analysing customers’ data processing activities. It offers options and suggestions for improving privacy compliance, providing them with the ability to modify their IT infrastructure and internal processes to do so. The company has raised $20 million, money it will be using to continue expanding its business across Europe and the Americas and to continue investing in building out its technology.

The funding is coming from a single investor, London’s One Peak, and is the first outside funding for the company. We’re asking but it looks like DataGuard is not disclosing its valuation with this round.

The news is coming at a critical time in the world of venture funding. We are seeing a mix of deals that either were closed or close to closing before the worst of the pandemic reared its ugly head (meaning: some deals are just going to be put on ice, Zoom meeting or not); or are being done specifically to help with business continuity in the wake of all the interruption of normal life (that is, the business is too interesting not to help prop it up); or are closing specifically because the startup has built something that is going to demonstrate just how useful it is in the months to come.

As with the strongest of funding rounds, DataGuard into a couple of those categories.

On one hand, it has demonstrated a demand for its services before any of this hit. Today, the startup provides privacy policy services both to small and medium businesses as well as larger enterprises, and it has picked up 1,000 customers since launching in 2017.

“Millions of companies are striving to comply with privacy regulation such as GDPR or CCPA,” said Thomas Regier, (pictured, left) who co-founded the company with Kivanc Semen (right), in a statement.

“We are excited to partner with One Peak to help many more organizations across the globe become and remain privacy compliant. Our Privacy-as-a-Service solution provides customers with access to a proprietary full-stack platform and services from a dedicated team of data privacy experts. This enables customers to gain insights into their data processing activities and to operationalize privacy and compliance across their entire organization.”

Regier tells us that the company was bootstrapped to 100 employees, which also underscores the company’s capital efficiency, also especially attractive at the moment.

On the other, the wholesale shift to more online and remote working, combined with a giant surge in online traffic caused by more people staying at home to reduce the number of new Covid-19 cases, is driving a lot more traffic and stress testing to websites, apps and other online services.

All that creates precisely the kind of environment where we might, for a period, overlook some of the trickier and more exacting aspects of privacy policies, but which are nonetheless important to keep intact, not least because malicious hackers could take advantage of vulnerable situations, or regulators eventually refocus and come back with heavy fines, or consumers respond with bad PR and more.

“We have a truly horizontal product that has the potential to become an integral part of the tech stack in enterprises and SMBs alike,” said Semen in a statement. “We will use the funding to deliver on our product roadmap. We will achieve this in two ways: By increasing automation levels through improvements of the machine learning capabilities in our privacy software suite and by speeding up our development of new product categories.”

DataGuard is one of a number of startups that have emerged to help businesses navigate the waters of privacy regulations, which are usually not the core competencies of the companies but have become an essential part of how they can (and should) do business online.

Others include OneTrust, which also helps companies provide and run better data protection policies; and InCountry, which is specifically focused on providing services to help companies understand and comply with data protection policies that vary across different regions. OneTrust last year passed a $1 billion valuation, speaking to the huge opportunity and demand in this space.

OnePeak believes that DataGuard’s take on the proposition is one of the more effective and efficient, one reason it’s backed the team. “We are incredibly excited to back DataGuard’s world-class founding team,” says David Klein, co-founder and managing partner at One Peak, in a statement. “We are convinced that DataGuard’s cutting-edge software suite combined with its comprehensive service offering provides both enterprises and SMBs with an end-to-end solution that fulfils their data privacy needs across the board.”

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank that now counts over 4 million account holders, has lost its CTO, TechCrunch has learned.

According to multiple sources, Meri Williams, who joined the fast-growing fintech in September 2018 to much fanfare, announced internally that she was departing, saying that she wanted to voluntarily help with cost-cutting measures. However, it is worth noting that Williams had already cut back her involvement with Monzo and had been consulting for other tech companies. One source told TechCrunch she was most recently only working one day per week for Monzo.

Meanwhile, it is not clear who is taking up Williams CTO responsibilities, especially as previous CTO and Monzo co-founder Jonas Huckestein (pictured right, with Meri Williams) is thought to be on paternity leave. Monzo declined to comment.

Prior to holding the CTO role at Monzo, Williams worked at print and design company MOO — an early darling of the London startup ecosystem — and was brought to the bank for her experience “growing complex engineering organisations and managing fast-moving teams,” according to a press release issued at the time of her hire. Before working at MOO, she was Head of Engineering at M&S Digital and previously worked for the U.K.’s Government Digital Service.

Early this morning, Fast, a startup building platform-agnostic login and checkout services, announced that Stripe has led a $20 million investment into its business. Prior investors Index Ventures and Susa Ventures took part in the round. Susa previously participated in the company’s late-2019 round that Index led.

Coming in late March, the new capital is a quick-follow to Fast’s November seed round. Such a rapid-fire deal would have felt right at home in mid-2019; to see two consecutive rounds in less than a half-year in 2020, in contrast, feels aggressive, though that’s more a testament to how the market has changed than Fast’s ability to attract capital.

Fast was founded by Domm Holland, a serial entrepreneur, and Allison Barr Allen, best known for her time at Uber. Holland is the company’s CEO while Barr Allen has taken on Fast’s COO role.

As the venture capital market cools in the face of a global economic slowdown, let’s take a minute to unpack what Fast does to better understand why Stripe led its Series A so quickly after its preceding venture round.

What does Fast do?

Let’s explain Fast’s product by way of analogy. You and I read the news, and we buy things online. Logging into news services is a colossal pain in the backside, and if you’re buying something other than on Amazon, you probably have to re-login, which is irksome and slow and generally annoying.

Fast, per its name, wants to make logging in far quicker, and also wants to help you check out at online stores more simply, and, as before, rapidly. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Domm Holland said that Fast wants “to be the intermediary for all consumer interactions,” which he broke down as a “fancy way of saying we want to give you one-click login, one-click payments, one-click data everywhere.”

In short, Fast wants to be your profile for signing into services and buying goods online, everywhere that it can be. You can now begin to see why Stripe led the company’s Series A. If Stripe has built a way for lots of digital stores and businesses to accept payments, Fast wants to build the equivalent consumer solution for the other side of those transactions.

Notably, Fast wants to be a platform, allowing other companies to bring its service to other niches; my example of media before wasn’t idle, it was an example that I chewed over with Holland and Fast’s CEO Barr Allen during a call discussing how the company’s service might be used in the future.

At this point you’re probably wondering how Fast works in practice. Holland explained the process to TechCrunch using online shopping as the example. According to the CEO, the first time a user sees a Fast checkout button while buying a good or service, they are able to click it, at which point they’ll be prompted with a “short, optimized checkout form” that asks for five pieces of information (email, name, phone number, address and credit card information). After the user finishes inputting those details, Fast wraps the transaction and saves the consumer’s information. Per Holland, those credentials are stored so that the next time that same user sees a Fast button, they can power through the sale rapidly, because the company already knows who they are and how they pay. (Note: You’ll have to relog if you change devices, natch.)

You can see how the more places Fast is available the more useful it becomes; picking up money from Stripe then has advantages for Fast, as its new benefactor is integrated around the Web, a footprint that its new investment might be able to leverage to gain distribution of its own. And the deal bakes Stripe’s service even more deeply into a payment gateway of sorts that has ambitions to be work across the internet. (Fast makes money on a spread between the payment cost it charges its customers and what it pays Stripe.)

Today versus the future

Today, however, Fast’s login product is in-market, while its payments service has yet to see a wide rollout. With 20 million new dollars, however, we expect to see the firm’s checkout service in-market quickly. Indeed, the startup noted in a release that it intends to use its new capital to “accelerate the global rollout of Fast Checkout” and grow it staff.

Jumping from a $2.5 million raise to a $20 million investment in a few months is quick; Fast should have all the capital it could possibly need to build its vision for the next year. This brings us to our final point. Namely that if Fast succeeds, and its payments-and-login service does take off, it could provide a reasonable bulwark against whole-scale consumption of digital identity by major tech companies, and the siloing of identity amongst media companies that we see today.

Long have I dreamed of having a central login for my media accounts. Fast could, in theory, power such a service. That is, if no one snaps up the company first. On that point, Index’s Jan Hammer, the investor who led the company’s seed round, cited the company’s independence as a net-plus for Fast, saying that “many merchants would tell you they don’t trust Amazon, and many shoppers would admit that they don’t trust Google to store their credit cards because they both have different agendas.” There we agree. 

More when we see Fast around the Web.

When Eliot Buchanan tried to use his credit card to pay his Harvard tuition bill, the payment was rejected because the university said it doesn’t accept credit. Realizing the same problem exists for thousands of different transactions like board, rent and vendor payments, he launched Plastiq. Plastiq helps people use credit cards to pay, or get paid, for anything. 

Plastiq today announced that it has raised $75 million in venture capital in a Series D round led by B Capital Group. Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, Accomplice and Top Tier Capital Partners also participated in the round. The round brings the company’s total known venture capital raised to more than $140 million.

To use Plastiq, users enter their credit card information on Plastiq’s platform. In return, Plastiq will charge you a 2.5% fee and get your bills paid. While Plastiq was started with consumers in mind, SMBs have now accounted for 90% of the revenue, according to Buchanan. The new financing round will invest in building out features to give SMBs faster services around payments and processing. 

Plastiq provides a way for SMBs and consumers to pay their bills and make sure they have reliable cash flow. For example, restaurants sometimes have a drop in revenue due to seasonality or, as we’re experiencing now with COVID-19, pandemic lockdowns. Or tourism companies for cities that are struggling to attract visitors. Those companies still need cash flow, and using Plastiq’s service, they can use credit cards to pay suppliers even in an off season. 

There is no shortage of competition from other companies also trying to solve pain points in small-business cash flow. According to Buchanan, Plastiq’s biggest competitors are traditional lenders, as well as companies like Kabbage and Fundbox. Similar claims could be made about Brex, which offers a credit card for startups to access capital faster. 

Kabbage provides funding to SMBs through automated business loans. The SoftBank-backed company landed $200 million in a revolving credit line back in July, fresh off of landing strong partnerships with banks and giants like Alibaba to access more customers. Kabbage loans out roughly $2-3 billion to SMBs every year. 

Plastiq, according to its release, is also on track to make more than $2 billion in transactions. But unlike Kabagge, Plastiq doesn’t issue loans or credit, it just unlocks a payment opportunity.

“SMBs don’t need to be burdened with additional debt or additional loans,” Buchanan said. “So rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, let’s use a behavior they have already earned.” 

Buchanan would not disclose Plastiq’s current valuation or revenue, but he did say that it’s not too far away from $100 million in revenue run rate. The company’s revenue has grown 150% from 2018 to 2019. 

The company also noted that it has surpassed “well over 1 million users,” up 150% in unique new users from 2018 to 2019.

In terms of profitability, Buchanan said that “we could be profitable if we wanted to be,” noting that Plastiq’s revenue and margins could lead them toward profitability if they wanted to focus less on growth. But he added they don’t plan to “slow down” the growth engine any time soon — especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Because the Series D round closed at the end of 2019, Buchanan said the pandemic did not impact the deal. However, the company had planned to time the announcement with tax season. Now, as small businesses struggle to secure capital and stay afloat due to lockdowns across the country, Plastiq’s new raise feels more fitting. 

“Our customers are more thankful for solutions like ours as traditional sources of lending are drying up and not as easy to access” Buchanan said. “Hopefully, we can measure how many businesses make it through this because of us.” 

The 140-person company is currently hiring across product and engineering roles.

As efforts to flatten the spread of COVID-19 pushes employees from their offices, remote work is undergoing a surge in popularity.

Well-known remote-work-friendly companies like Zoom have seen a rise in usage, while Slack has already reported that it is successfully converting new users into paying customers, which is pushing up its growth rate.

The pandemic is creating economic and social upheaval, but for a specific cohort of software companies that help distributed teams work together, it’s proven useful in business terms. But even before the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, execs from a standout project management company swung by TechCrunch HQ to chat with the Equity crew about their business and growth: Monday.com. 

What does an interview with Monday.com’s Eran Zinman (co-founder and CTO) and Roy Mann (CEO) have to do with COVID-19? Well, if remote-productivity-friendly services Slack and Zoom are seeing usage spikes amidst the changes, Monday.com is likely benefiting from similar gains. And during our chat with the company’s brass, the pair told TechCrunch that their company had crossed the $130 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) mark by mid-February. Add in a COVID-19 usage boost and perhaps Monday.com (which doesn’t have a free tier) is seeing its growth accelerate.

Previously, Monday.com announced that it had reached the $120 million ARR mark, and TechCrunch had inducted it into the $100 million ARR club earlier this year.

Revenue expansion was not our only topic. We also chatted with the pair of execs about customer acquisition costs and how to a run a SaaS business without terrifying burn. The Monday.com crew had more news up their sleeve, like when they expect the unicorn to become cash-flow positive. 

We’ve excised a larger-than-usual chunk of the interview for sharing, as there’s a lot to take in:

After the jump, we dig a bit deeper into the obvious IPO candidate

Four years ago, mathematician Vlad Voroninski saw an opportunity to remove some of the bottlenecks in the development of autonomous vehicle technology thanks to breakthroughs in deep learning.

Now, Helm.ai, the startup he co-founded in 2016 with Tudor Achim, is coming out of stealth with an announcement that it has raised $13 million in a seed round that includes investment from A.Capital Ventures, Amplo, Binnacle Partners, Sound Ventures, Fontinalis Partners and SV Angel. More than a dozen angel investors also participated, including Berggruen Holdings founder Nicolas Berggruen, Quora co-founders Charlie Cheever and Adam D’Angelo, professional NBA player Kevin Durant, Gen. David Petraeus, Matician co-founder and CEO Navneet Dalal, Quiet Capital managing partner Lee Linden and Robinhood co-founder Vladimir Tenev, among others.

Helm.ai will put the $13 million in seed funding toward advanced engineering and R&D and hiring more employees, as well as locking in and fulfilling deals with customers.

Helm.ai is focused solely on the software. It isn’t building the compute platform or sensors that are also required in a self-driving vehicle. Instead, it is agnostic to those variables. In the most basic terms, Helm.ai is creating software that tries to understand sensor data as well as a human would, in order to be able to drive, Voroninski said.

That aim doesn’t sound different from other companies. It’s Helm.ai’s approach to software that is noteworthy. Autonomous vehicle developers often rely on a combination of simulation and on-road testing, along with reams of data sets that have been annotated by humans, to train and improve the so-called “brain” of the self-driving vehicle.

Helm.ai says it has developed software that can skip those steps, which expedites the timeline and reduces costs. The startup uses an unsupervised learning approach to develop software that can train neural networks without the need for large-scale fleet data, simulation or annotation.

“There’s this very long tail end and an endless sea of corner cases to go through when developing AI software for autonomous vehicles, Voroninski explained. “What really matters is the unit of efficiency of how much does it cost to solve any given corner case, and how quickly can you do it? And so that’s the part that we really innovated on.”

Voroninski first became interested in autonomous driving at UCLA, where he learned about the technology from his undergrad adviser who had participated in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a driverless car competition in the U.S. funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And while Voroninski turned his attention to applied mathematics for the next decade — earning a PhD in math at UC Berkeley and then joining the faculty in the MIT mathematics department — he knew he’d eventually come back to autonomous vehicles. 

By 2016, Voroninski said breakthroughs in deep learning created opportunities to jump in. Voroninski left MIT and Sift Security, a cybersecurity startup later acquired by Netskope, to start Helm.ai with Achim in November 2016.

“We identified some key challenges that we felt like weren’t being addressed with the traditional approaches,” Voroninski said. “We built some prototypes early on that made us believe that we can actually take this all the way.”

Helm.ai is still a small team of about 15 people. Its business aim is to license its software for two use cases — Level 2 (and a newer term called Level 2+) advanced driver assistance systems found in passenger vehicles and Level 4 autonomous vehicle fleets.

Helm.ai does have customers, some of which have gone beyond the pilot phase, Voroninski said, adding that he couldn’t name them.

Since our agency opened in 2012, we’ve learned a lot about how to build quality links through content marketing.

The industry has evolved for a variety of reasons, including Google’s algorithm updates and the state of digital media. We’ve had to change along with them.

Over the years, we’ve completely revamped the way we develop content ideas, report on results, identify pitch targets — everything except for our core belief: a combination of content marketing and digital PR is the best way to build top-tier links.

I want to share three of our biggest insights from our experiences adapting so you don’t have to start from scratch or wonder which of your processes needs an update.

Instead, you can get to building the best backlinks you can.

Building the best links requires original research