Y Combinator wants to bring more startups through its accelerator that can help with the COVID-19 crisis, and the firm is looking to expedite the pace of its application process so it can put money behind the efforts sooner.

The accelerator’s most recent batch “presented” just last week in a virtual demo day that was adjusted in light of the early outbreak. Just a week later, the situation has progressed substantially, and YC’s team says they are looking to bring in a new class of startups to tackle issues relating to the pandemic.

YC shared some of the new fields it was looking to invest in specifically, which include testing and diagnostics, treatments and vaccines, hospital equipment and monitoring/data infrastructure. Startups that fit the bill will be fast-tracked, funded and tossed into a remote program immediately.

YC is looking for companies that can be helpful, but at the same time it’s looking to invest in businesses that can remain viable post-crisis, the company says on its site:

For a startup to have an impact in time to address the current crisis, it will have to move faster than most people think is possible. This means the founders need to have domain expertise in the area; they also need to have a plan for how to have a significant impact globally in a short timeline. They also need to have a path to building a sustainable business after the crisis is over.

In addition to sharing details about funding new companies, YC also shared a website detailing some of the efforts to help being undertaken by their existing portfolio companies.

OfferUp, a top online and mobile marketplace app, announced this morning it’s raising $120 million in a new round of funding led by competing marketplace letgo’s majority investor, OLX Group, and others. As a part of the deal, OfferUp will also be acquiring letgo’s classified business, with OLX Group gaining a 40% stake in the newly combined entity.

Other investors in the new round include existing OfferUp backers Andreessen Horowitz and Warburg Pincus. The funds will be put toward continued growth, product innovation and monetization efforts, OfferUp says.

The round will close with the closing of the acquisition, which is expected to take place sometime in May. To date, OfferUp has raised $380 million.

The acquisition will see two of the largest third-party buying and selling marketplaces — outside of Craigslist, eBay and Facebook Marketplace, of course — become a more significant threat to the incumbents. Together, the new entity will have more than 20 million monthly active users across the U.S. For consumers, the deal means they’ll no longer have to list in as many apps when looking to unload some household items, electronics, furniture or whatever else they want to sell.

“My vision for OfferUp has always been to build a company that helps people connect and prosper,” said Nick Huzar, OfferUp CEO, in a statement about the acquisition. “We’re combining the complementary strengths of OfferUp and letgo in order to deliver an even better buying and selling experience for our communities. OLX Group has unparalleled expertise and clear success with growing online marketplace businesses, so they’ll be a great partner as we continue to build the widest, simplest, and most trustworthy experience for our customers.”

OfferUp also acknowledged that mid-pandemic is an odd time to announce such a deal — especially at a time when the COVID-19 outbreak is affecting its own employees, its partners, and the buying and selling community itself. And this will continue for some time.

However, Huzar positions the deal as one that will allow the business to grow, despite the current state of affairs.

“This news helps us to continue to innovate and grow, in spite of these challenging times, and continue to deliver on that promise,” Huzar noted, in a company blog post.

For now, the OfferUp and letgo apps will remain separate experiences and no disruptions to any sales will be made. Consumers will also be able to download both apps to iOS and Android devices for the time being, too.

But soon, both sets of users will gain access to a larger network of buyers and sellers, along with nationwide shipping options, and trust and safety problems. We understand this will involve allowing users of both sets of apps to see more posts and interact with more buyers and sellers — so some sort of merging of the two networks is at play here. There will be additional changes to improve the user experience for all users in the future, as well, but the company isn’t sharing details on that today.

Letgo is bringing to the table an app with more than 100 million worldwide downloads, so there is a potential to reactivate some of the lapsed users who aren’t currently shopping or selling on its marketplace today. The two apps were often neck-and-neck in terms of their app store category rankings, though on iPhone OfferUp has maintained a slight lead. (See App Store and Google Play charts below.)

However, letgo’s business outside of North America will be separately owned and operated as part of the OLX Group, the companies said.

“Letgo and OfferUp have always shared the same core vision for how large America’s secondhand economy can become — harnessing tech innovation to bring about an extraordinarily positive impact on consumers’ wallets and also on the environment,” said letgo co-founder Alec Oxenford. “Bringing our apps together moves us much closer to that vision,” he added.

Prior to this deal, OfferUp had seen a number of executive departures, including the exit of Engineering lead and VP Peter Wilson in 2017, VP of Product Chloe Harford in 2018, VP of Employee Experience Deb Nielsen in 2018, subsequent VP of Employee Experience Sarah Bilton in 2019, and Chief Experience Officer Jerry Howe in January 2020. CFO Rodrigo Brumana has also left, which was previously unreported. The company’s interim CFO is Chief Growth Officer Ian Fliflet, and OfferUp is actively hiring for a new CFO, we’re told.

Huzar characterizes these changes as part of the challenges with growing a startup and getting the right people into place.

“As the company grows up, so must leaders and so must the culture. I think a lot of times when you’re scaling businesses…you go through evolutions where leaders really need to evolve and change,” he says. “If you look to Bill Carr, for example, our COO, you know he helped build out Amazon Video from nothing to over 2,000 employees. We had nobody in the halls of OfferUp that had seen that scale before,” Huzar added.

There’s some admiration for Amazon’s culture, as well.

“There are clearly things that Amazon has done very well — like their ability to innovate at scale is unbelievable,” Huzar says. “We do think people [who] come out of Amazon have great startup DNA. They’re very scrappy. They dive deep into the business and understand things. They can think big. There’s a lot of value I think from that business that I really appreciate,” he added.

OfferUp also just hired former ChannelAdvisor VP Mark Vandegrift as head of e-commerce this month, as the company focuses on growth and scale.

But not all employees have been on board with these exec shakeups. More than a handful of employee reviews on Glassdoor and chatter on networking app Blind speak to various company culture issues, women being treated inequitably, negative office politics, and attrition — including among senior management.

In addition to the COVID-19 crisis, OfferUp may have needed to merge to scale and compete with the marketplace giants. User growth was slowing, for instance — the userbase was 42 million annual users in 2018 that only grew to 44 million in 2019. Presumably, slower revenue growth had followed. (Huzar declined to speak to current revenue and valuation.)

A combination of OfferUp and letgo could help to strengthen numbers outside of coastal cities, like Seattle, L.A., and Miami, where OfferUp was historically strong. Letgo was stronger in other parts of the country, like the Midwest, Huzar says. OfferUp will also bring its shipping business to letgo, which could be particularly helpful now as people are looking to sell household items for extra cash.

The deal is still subject to regulatory approval. If given, the combined businesses will be operated by OfferUp, headquartered in Bellevue, Wash. Huzar will continue to be CEO of OfferUp and chairman of the board. Oxenford, meanwhile, will join the board and serve as a senior advisor to OLX Group and Prosus.

Because the deal is still in the process of closing, the companies can’t speak to any team changes, including potential layoffs as a result of overlapping positions or other redundancies, we’re told.

Updated 3/25/20, 4:00 PM ET with additional quotes and background, following Huzar interview. 

Sramana Mitra: There’s a lot of stuff that you said that we can double-click down on. Can you talk us through a case study of a company that you’ve invested that found significant go-to market...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 478th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, March 26, 2020, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/4 p.m. CET/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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According to a recent report, the global market for Big Data and Business Analytics is expected to grow 15% annually to $512.04 billion by 2026 from $171.39 billion in 2018. Alteryx (NYSE: AYX) is a...

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Chris Nguyen: There are trends that are happening today that provide value for LogDNA. One is the amount of data is growing exponentially. It is huge. Trend number two is that data is fragmented....

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Meet Imatag, a French startup that has been working on a watermarking product. Watermarking is nothing new, but the company has found a way to mark images even if they are resized, cropped, edited or compressed.

Many photographers and brands watermark their photos so that you can see who’s the original source when the photo gets re-uploaded around the web and on social networks. But it’s not perfect. If you put a tiny logo in a corner, you can just crop the photo to leave the logo out of the photo.

Stock photo databases, such as Getty and Shutterstock, put a gigantic logo in the middle of the photo so that’s it’s literally unusable if you don’t have the right licensing rights.

Imatag takes a different approach. When you mark a photo, individual pixels are modified all around the image so that you can’t notice it when you compare it with the original shot. When you modify a photo, some pixels will be modified, but not all. This way, you can always find the watermark again.

“It’s not a good idea to modify colors directly. You have to start with grayscale analysis and that’s what we do,” co-founder and CEO Mathieu Desoubeaux. “We apply psychovisual masks to make sure that you can’t see it with human eyes.”

Imatag assigns a signature with each photo that it processes. By following the same process, you can just compare the signatures of multiple shots to see if they come from the similar source.

The startup goes one step further and offers a service for multiple use cases. With Imatag Monitor, the company monitors your images on the web to see where they appear.

Some clients use it to fight back against illegal use, such as photo agencies. But brands also use it to see if product shots appear on social networks for instance. They don’t want to refrain people from sharing those photos, but they want to monitor the response to a new product.

Imatag also works with smartphone manufacturers or car makers so that they can identify leaks before an official announcement. When you send photos of a new smartphone to various retailers, you can tag them with Imatag. This way, you can trace back the source of a leak in case your product shots start leaking.

Imatag lets you integrate their watermarking technology in your image flow if you’re dealing with a high volume of photos. Companies who don’t work with a lot of images can just use Imatag’s website directly.

Startups continue to find new ways to contribute to ongoing efforts to fight the global spread of COVID-19 during the current global coronavirus pandemic, and personal health hardware-maker Oura is no exception. The smart ring startup is working with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) on a new study to see if its device can help detect early physiological signs that might indicate the onset of COVID-19.

This study will include two parts: Around 2,000 frontline healthcare professionals will get Oura rings to wear during the study. The rings track a user’s body temperature continuously, as well as their sleep patterns, heart rate and activity levels. Fever is a common and early symptom that could indicate COVID-19, and a continuously updated body temperature reading could detect fever very early. That’s not enough to confirm a case of COVID-19, of course, but the purpose of the study is to determine whether the range of readings Oura’s ring tracks might, taken together and with other signals, be useful in some kind of early detection effort.

There’s good reason why researches believe that Oura could be used in early detection: An Oura user in Finland claims the ring alerted him to the fact that he was ill before he was displaying any overt symptoms of the virus, prompting him to get tested (relatively easy in that country). Test results confirmed that while asymptomatic, he had indeed contracted COVID-19. As a result, UCSF researcher Dr. Ashley Mason hypothesizes that the Oura ring could anticipate COVID-19 onset by as many as two to three days before the onset of more obvious symptoms, like coughing.

Being able to detect the presence of the virus in an individual early is key to global containment efforts, but even more important when it comes to frontline healthcare workers. The earlier a frontline responder is diagnosed, the less chance that they expose their colleagues or others they’re working around in close quarters.

In addition to the Oura rings being provided to study participants, the plan is to expand it to include Oura’s general user population, meaning its more than 150,000 global users can opt in to participate and add to the overall pool of available information with their ring’s readings and daily symptom surveys. For existing Oura users, it’s a relatively low-lift way to contribute to the global effort to combat the pandemic — without even leaving the house.

For much of the history of enterprise technology, companies tended to buy from a single vendor because it made managing the entire affair much easier while giving them a “single throat to choke” when something went wrong. On the flip side, it also put customers at the mercy of said vendor — and it wasn’t always pretty.

As we move deeper into the cloud model, many IT pros are looking for more flexibility than they had in the past, avoiding the vendor lock-in from the previous generation of enterprise tech, and what being beholden to a single vendor could mean for the bottom line and their own flexibility.

This is something that comes up frequently in discussions about moving workloads from one cloud to another, and is sometimes referred to as a multi-cloud approach. Customers are loath to leave their workloads in the hands of one vendor again and repeat the mistakes of the past. They are looking to have the same flexibility on the infrastructure side that they are getting in the SaaS world, where companies tend to purchase best-of-breed from multiple vendors.

That means, they want the freedom to move workloads between clouds, but that’s not always as easy a prospect as it might seem, and it’s an area where startups could help lead the way.

What’s the problem?

What’s stopping customers from just moving data and applications between clouds? It turns out that there is a complex interlinking of public cloud APIs that help the applications and data work in tandem. If you want to pull out of one public cloud, it’s not a simple matter of just migrating to the next one.

Smart thermometer maker Kinsa has been working on building accurate, predictive models of how seasonal illnesses like the flu travel in and among communities — and its fever map is finding new utility as the novel coronavirus pandemic grows globally. While Kinsa’s US Health Weather Map has no way of tracking the spread of COVID-19 specifically, as it looks only at fevers tied to geographic data, it could provide easy-to-grasp early indicators of the positive effects of social distancing and isolation measures at the community level.

At the time that Kinsa’s health weather map was covered in the New York Times in February, the company had around a million thermometers in market in the U.S., but it had experienced a significant increase in order volume of as many as 10,000 units per day in the week prior to its publication. That means that the company’s analytics are based on a very large data set relative to the total U.S. population. Kinsa founder and CEO Inder Singh told me this allowed them to achieve an unprecedented level of accuracy and granularity in flu forecasting down to the community level, working in partnership with Oregon State University Assistant Professor Ben Dalziel.

“We showed that the core hypothesis for why I started the company is real — and the core hypothesis was you need real-time, medically accurate, geolocated data that’s taken from people who’ve just fallen ill to detect outbreaks and predict the spread of illness,” Singh said. “What we did with our data is we punched it into Ben’s existing, first-principle models on infectious disease spread. And we were able to show that on September 15, we could predict the entire rest of cold and flu season with hyper-accuracy in terms of the peaks and the valleys — all the way out to the rest of flu season, i.e. 20 weeks out on a hyperlocal basis.”

Prior to this, there have been efforts to track and predict flu transmission, but the “state-of-the-art” to date has been predictions at the national or multi-state level — even trends in individual states, let alone within communities, was out of reach. And in terms of lead time, the best achievable was essentially three weeks out, rather than multiple months, as is possible with Kinsa and Dalziel’s model.

Even without the extraordinary circumstances presented by the global COVID-19 pandemic, what Singh, Dalziel and Kinsa have been able to accomplish is a major step forward in tech-enabled seasonal illness tracking and mitigation. But Kinsa also turned on a feature of their health weather map called “atypical illness levels” a month ago, and that could prove an important leading indicator in shedding more light on the transmission of COVID-19 across the U.S. — and the impact of key mitigation strategies like social distancing.

“We’re taking our real-time illness signal, and we’re subtracting out the expectation,” Singh says, explaining how the new view works. “So what you’re left with is atypical illness. In other words, a cluster of fevers that you would not expect from normal cold and flu time. So, presumably, that is COVID-19; I cannot definitively say it’s COVID-19, but what I can say is that it’s an unusual outbreak. It could be an anomalous flu, a strain that’s totally unexpected. It could be something else, but at least a portion of that is almost certainly going to be COVID-19.”

In the example above, Singh says that the spike in fevers coincides with reports of Miami residents and tourists ignoring guidance around recommended distancing. The steep drop-off, however, follows after more extreme measures, including beach closures and other isolation tactics were adopted in the area. Singh says that they’re regularly seeing that areas where residents are ignoring social distancing best practices are seeing spikes, and that as soon as those are implemented, via lock-downs and other measures, within five days of those aggressive actions, you begin to see downward dips in the curve.

Kinsa’s data has the advantage of being real-time and continually updated by its users. That provides it with a time advantage over other indicators, like the results of increased testing programs for COVID-19, in terms of providing some indication of the more immediate effects of social distancing and isolation strategies. One of the criticisms that has appeared relative to these tactics is that the numbers continue to grow for confirmed cases — but experts expect those cases to grow as we expand the availability of testing and identify new cases of community transmission, even though social distancing is having a positive impact.

As Singh pointed out, Kinsa’s data is strictly about fever-range temperatures, not confirmed COVID-19 cases. But fever is a key and early symptom of COVID-19 in those who are symptomatic, and Kinsa’s existing work on predicting the prevalence of fevers related to cold and flu strongly indicate that what we’re looking at is in fact, at least to a significant degree, COVID-19 spread.

While some have balked at other discussions around using location data to track the spread of the outbreak, Singh says that they’re only interested in two things: geographic coordinates and temperature. They don’t want any personal identification details that they can tie to either of those signals, so it truly an anonymous aggregation project.

“There is no possible way to reverse engineer a geographic signal to an individual — it’s not possible to do it,” he told me. “This is the right equation to both protect people’s privacy and expose the data that society and communities need.”

For the purposes of tracking atypical illness, Kinsa isn’t currently able to get quite as granular as it is with its standard observed illness map, because it requires a higher degree of sophistication. But the company is eager to expand its data set with additional thermometers in the market. The Kinsa hardware is already out of stock everywhere, as are most health-related devices, but Singh says they’re pressing ahead with suppliers on sourcing more despite increased component costs across the board. Singh is also eager to work with other smart thermometer makers, either by inputting their data into his model, or by making the Kinsa app compatible with any Bluetooth thermometer that uses the standard connection interface for wireless thermometer hardware.

Currently, Kinsa is working on evolving the atypical illness view to include things like a visual indicator of how fast illness levels are dropping, and how fast they should be dropping in order to effectively break the chain of transmission, as a way to further help inform the public on the impact of their own choices and actions. Despite the widespread agreement by health agencies, researchers and medical professionals, advice to stay home and separated from others definitely presents a challenge for everyone — especially when the official numbers released daily are so dire. Kinsa’s tracker should provide a ray of hope, and a clear sign that each individual contribution matters.

Over-the-top live TV streaming service fuboTV announced today it plans to merge with the virtual entertainment technology company, FaceBank Group. The proposed merger would retain the name fuboTV for the combined company, consisting of fuboTV’s direct-to-consumer live TV streaming platform and FaceBank’s technology IP in sports, movies and live performances.

FaceBank is not a household name, but is a developer of hyper-realistic digital humans — including those of celebrities and consumers — for use in emerging technologies, like VR and AR, as well as in live entertainment, interactive, media, social networking and AI-driven applications.

You may remember the company from its creation of the hologram of Michael Jackson at The Billboard Music Awards in 2014, when it was then called Pulse Evolution. It also created a virtual Tupac in 2012, and owns the rights to develop digital representations of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe and others. The company has also worked to create virtual creatures and characters in movies like “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” “Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith,” “Transformers,” “Benjamin Button” and more, per its website.

According to the proposed merger agreement, the plan is to create a leading digital entertainment company that combines fuboTV with FaceBank’s IP in order to create a content delivery platform for both traditional and “future-form IP.”

That is to say, you’ll be able to stream your live TV and these virtual/digital human performances on one platform, it seems.

FuboTV also says it plans to leverage FaceBank’s IP sharing relationships with leading celebrities and other digital technologies to enhance its sports and entertainment offerings.

“The business combination of FaceBank Group and fuboTV accelerates our ability to build a category-defining company and supports our goal to provide consumers with a technology-driven cable TV replacement service for the whole family,” said fuboTV CEO David Gandler, in a statement. “With our growing businesses in the U.S., and recent beta launches in Canada and Europe, fuboTV is well-positioned to achieve its goal of becoming a world-leading live TV streaming platform for premium sports, news and entertainment content. In the current COVID-19 environment, stay-at-home stocks make perfect sense – we plan to accelerate our timing to uplist to a major exchange as soon as practicable. We look forward to working with John and his team of creative visionaries,” he added.

“As a tech-driven IP company, FaceBank was looking to find the perfect delivery platform for its celebrity and consumer-driven content, with a dynamic user interface that could support the global consumers’ rapidly evolving practices of content consumption,” added FaceBank founders John Textor and Alex Bafer. “David and his team have a clear vision of the future and fuboTV’s technology is second to none among the disruptor class of content delivery – a perfect match for FaceBank Group,” their statement read.

FaceBank also says it took out a secured revolving line of credit of $100 million, the first $10 million of which will be provided to fuboTV on April 1 or the closing date of the merger, whichever is later.

The merger will allow fuboTV to continue its international expansion, by way of FaceBank Group’s Nexway — an e-commerce and payment platform live in 180 countries, the company says.

FuboTV was founded in 2015, first as a soccer streaming service, then later expanded into more sports and entertainment. It competes with YouTube TV, Hulu with Live TV, AT&T TV Now and, before its shutdown, PlayStation Vue.

The deal follows several other consolidations in online streaming and media, including Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox, Viacom’s purchase of pluto.tv and Fox Corp.’s acquisition of Tubi. For smaller streamers, it’s difficult to keep up with the rising costs of programming amid competition from larger competitors, like Disney (Hulu’s majority owner) and Google (which runs YouTube TV).

The boards of directors of both companies and the major stockholders of fuboTV have approved the transaction, which is anticipated to close during the first quarter of 2020, subject to the satisfaction of certain closing conditions, the companies said.

SouSmile is a direct to consumer dental company based in São Paulo. SouSmile has raised $10 million in Series A funding from Global Founders Capital, Kaszek Ventures and Canary, bringing the company’s total funding to $11.4 million. The two-year-old startup sells an invisible aligner and whitening gels through five retail stores in shopping malls across São Paulo and Rio. 

SouSmile is a new option for Brazilians hoping to get started on orthodontic work. The process consists of an evaluation by a licensed dentist that includes a panoramic X-ray, 3D scan and a clinical exam. Then, the company approves customers for treatment. SouSmile’s follow-up process includes bimonthly appointments, and costs approximately $1,000, which co-founder Michael Ruah says is 60% cheaper than comparable treatments, and can be paid in installments. Treatment is fast, taking between three to nine months. 

Ruah anticipates that the coronavirus pandemic will have a negative short-term revenue impact for the company, as they anticipate less foot traffic in retail stores over the coming weeks, possibly months. He hopes that because the business is still young, macro indicators won’t have a huge impact on the bottom line in the medium-to-long term. Ruah says that the most important thing is that SouSmile employees and customers are safe and healthy at this point. 

Why is Brazil a good market for a D2C dental startup?

With 2 million orthodontic cases per year, highly populous Brazil is one of the largest dental markets globally, yet the penetration of invisible aligners is less than 2% due to prohibitive prices. Ruah compares this to the 40% penetration in the U.S. for adults, citing Invisalign’s numbers. There’s still a dent to be made, as SouSmile says it saw more than 10,000 bookings last year. 

Ruah also cites a cultural reason as to why Brazil is a smart market for a product like this: Brazilians care a lot about both beauty and their oral health. “Brazilians brush their teeth three times a day. They’ll go out for lunch, they’ll come back to the office and brush their teeth. Everybody has their toothbrush and toothpaste with them all the time,” he explains. 

Branding: Cosmetic versus health

SmileDirectClub raised nearly $440 million at a $3.2 billion valuation before going public in 2019. The teeth-straightening company built its brand by leveraging the celebrity beauty angle with Instagram influencer campaigns that marketed the visual results of its product. While SouSmile hopes to see big numbers like its U.S.-based predecessor, it wants to take more of a healthcare-first approach to its branding, rather than cosmetic.

SouSmile is up against some big challenges. Physical retail costs are expensive. Manufacturing is hard, and the company doesn’t appear to be particularly tech-enabled, relying mainly on physical retail presence for customer acquisition. 

SouSmile isn’t the only Latin American startup working on an anti-braces dental solution, either. Moons, a Mexican invisible aligner startup that just launched out of Y Combinator, may have a head start. Moons delivers a similar product as SouSmile for around the same cost, and is also using 3D printing to manufacture its aligners. Moons is targeting the Latin America market with $5 million in funding and the Y Combinator stamp of approval. Moons has already opened 18 locations across Mexico and Colombia. 

But Brazilian tech can operate like a separate ecosystem apart from adjacent Spanish-speaking Latin America due to country regulations, language barriers and shipping complications. Consumer startups that can deliver products that improve the daily lives of Brazil’s massive middle class are the ones that succeed, and SouSmile now has the capital to shoot its shot. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that MarkUp would only be free to Ceros customers.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Matt Carbonara was recorded in March 2020. Matt...

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

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

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

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

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

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

$100 million or bust

Elly Truesdell is Partner at Almanac Insights, a fund focused on food related investments. We have a fascinating conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The markets are down right now, and it might be a good time to scan for some worthy investments among cloud stocks. FinTech company Q2 Holdings (NYSE: QTWO) qualifies for this list with an average...

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