The COVID-19 crisis is touching all aspects of society, including how we work. In response, many companies are considering asking some percentage of their workforce to work remotely until the crisis abates.

If your organization doesn’t have a great deal of experience with remote work, there are a number of key things to think about as you set up a program. You are going to be under time constraints when it comes to enacting an action plan, so think about ways to leverage the tools, procedures and technologies you already have in place. You won’t have the luxury of conducting a six-month study.

We spoke to a few people who have been looking at the remote working space for more than a decade and asked about the issues companies should bear in mind when a large number of employees suddenly need to work from home.

The lay of the land

Alan Lepofsky, currently VP of Salesforce Quip, has studied the remote work market for more than a decade. He says there are three main pieces to building a remote working strategy. First, managers need to evaluate which tools they’ll be using to allow employees to continue collaborating when they aren’t together.

Oribi, an Israeli startup promising to democratize web analytics, is now launching in the United States.

While we’ve written about a wide range of new or new-ish analytics companies, founder and CEO Iris Shoor said that most of them aren’t built for Oribi’s customers.

“A lot of companies are more focused on the high end,” Shoor told me. “Usually these solutions are very much based on a lot of technical resources and integrations — these are the Mixpanels and Heap Analytics and Adobe Marketing Clouds.”

She said that Oribi, on the other hand, is designed for small and medium businesses that don’t have large technical teams: “They have digital marketing strategies that are worth a few hundred thousand dollars a month, they have very large activity, but they don’t have a team for it. And I would say that all of them are using Google Analytics.”

Shoor described Oribi as designed specifically “to compete with Google Analytics” by allowing everyone on the team to get the data they need without requiring developers to write new code for every event they want to track.

In fact, if you use Oribi’s plugins for platforms like WordPress and Shopify, there’s no coding at all involved in the process. Apparently, that’s because Oribi is already tracking every major event in the customer journey. It also allows the team to define the conversion goals that they want to focus on — again, with no coding required.

Shoor contrasted Oribi with analytics platforms that simply provide “more and more data” but don’t help customers understand what to do with that data.

“We’ve created something that is much more clean,” she said. “We give them insights of what’s working; in the background, we create all these different queries and correlations about which part of the funnels are broken and where they can optimize.”

There are big businesses using Oribi already — including Audi, Sony and Crowne Plaza — but the company is now turning its attention to U.S. customers. Shoor said Oribi isn’t opening an office in the United States right away, but there are plans to do so in the next year.

Startup accelerator Y Combinator announced today that it has moved its demo day online, citing a “growing concern over COVID-19,” or coronavirus. The demo day has historically drawn crowds of Silicon Valley elite, journalists and both national and international venture capitalists to watch more than 100 startups come out to the world. 

“While we won’t be able to recreate every aspect of Demo Day, we’ll try our best to create an amazing experience for our founders and investors,” Y Combinator said in a blog post. Y Combinator’s 30th annual demo day will be pre-recorded and released to investors on Monday March 23, per the post.

Thanks to a mix of history and glamour, demo day is the culminating day of a YC startup’s accelerator experience. It’s a big audience full of check writers and fast typers, and at the least, they’ll get a tweet or a couple of sign-ups. The move to remote, in some way, dims that excitement. 

Brianne Kimmel, the founder of Work Life Ventures, noted that as investor demand for YC companies has grown, “the dozen or so breakout companies get funded weeks before demo day.” Kimmel attended YC’s 2016 Winter batch, and attended the past four demo days as an investor.

“While the entire early stage ecosystem comes together at YC demo day — many investors are there to network and support the companies they’ve backed well before the founder presents on stage,” Kimmel said. Many other major tech events are being cancelled as well, including SXSW.

Kimmel invested in Tandem before demo day last year, and has already invested in Accord, a project management platform, ahead of this year’s demo day.

Beyond digital presentations, YC has said it will “provide additional written background information on each company and access to their decks.” It also will provide software to help investors and founders arrange one-on-one meetings. 

Seth Bannon, a founding investor at Fifty Years and previous YC graduate (S12), said “the face to face human element is incredibly important, as founders try to gauge if they want to partner with an investor for the next tens years and vice versa.”

“At Demo Day you can have hundreds of those quick face to face interactions in hours. That said, I think this is the right decision for YC,” Bannon told TechCrunch. “The safety of founders and the broader community is most important. Good on them for making a really tough decision.”

Chris Woodward, the CEO of Handle (YC W19), said that “while not being able to meet investors in person at demo day could be seen as a blow to the current batches by some people, I see it as a potential opportunity for them to set longer meetings with investors post demo day.”

Other tech conferences have cancelled or moved operations online in an effort to protect against the new coronavirus. Earlier today, Jason Lemkin’s SaaStr postponed its annual conference to September 2020. Another accelerator, 500 Startups, will be live-streaming its separate demo day. YC’s decision to post pre-recorded videos is an attempt to bring deal access to investors, without shutting down all operations.

“For 15 years, startup investors have supported every new batch of YC companies, and we know the same will be true for this batch,” the post said. 

If you’re an early-stage startup founder with a big vision and even bigger dreams, join us and more than 10,000 other like-minded startuppers at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2020 on September 14-16. Silicon Valley’s premier early-stage startup extravaganza focuses on founders, investors and startup experts determined to disrupt and reshape technology.

Attending is awesome, but attending and exhibiting at Disrupt — for free — is even better. What magic is this? No hocus-pocus required. Simply apply to our TC Top Picks program. Applying is also free, and it’s easy to do. However, earning that coveted Top Pick designation — not so easy.

TechCrunch editors have a keen eye for the qualities that translate into serious startup success. They’ll thoroughly review every application and then choose up to five stellar startups for each of the following categories: AI, Biotech + Healthtech, Enterprise/SaaS, Fintech, Mobility, Retail + E-commerce, Robotics + Hardware IOT, Security/Privacy, Social Impact + Education, Space.

Pro tip: Keep the phrase “up to five” in mind. If the editors feel only three startups fit the bill for any given category, they’ll stop at three.

Now that you know how to apply, let’s talk about why you should apply. Every Top Pick startup receives a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package. As a Top Pick VIP, you’ll strut your impressive stuff for a full day in a prime location in Startup Alley, our exhibition floor. The package also includes three complimentary Founder passes to Disrupt SF 2020 — bring your crew and make the most of your time at the show.

Thousands of people, including investors and tech media, pour through Startup Alley, and everyone wants to know who made the Top Pick cut. You’ll reap invaluable exposure to potential customers, partners, mentors and again…investors. Who doesn’t love investors?

Here’s what Francisco Serra-Martins, founder of Australia-based Sonder Designs, says about his Top Pick experience:

“Being a TC Top Pick at Disrupt San Francisco not only helped us close out an additional $1 million investment for our seed round, it was an incredible opportunity to introduce our technology to an international community and to engage with the San Francisco startup ecosystem.”

One of the most exciting parts of earning a Top Pick designation is the media exposure. Hundreds of top media outlets attend Disrupt, and they’re all looking for great stories. And, drum roll please, your media experience also includes being interviewed by a TechCrunch editor live on the Showcase Stage.

We record the interview, edit the video and blast it across our social media networks. It’s a valuable marketing tool that you can use long after Disrupt ends.

Intrigued? Want to know more? Check out who we chose as TC Top Picks at Disrupt SF 2019.

TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2020 takes place on September 14-16 at Moscone West. Take a chance and apply to be a TC Top Pick. If you’re not quite there yet, that’s OK. Come to Disrupt and learn from the best minds in the startup ecosystem. Buy an early-bird ticket here and save up to $1,800.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Postmates announced today it would be adding a “non-contact delivery option,” for those concerned about COVID-19 exposure from workers bringing them food. Instacart set up something similar earlier this week, announcing sales were 10x higher this week over last due to coronavirus concerns and rolling out the “leave it at my door” option for customers concerned about coronavirus.

This flu-like virus has already infected nearly 100,000 people worldwide, killing thousands, including one man so far in the Bay Area, the hub of Silicon Valley and the startup world.

Similar services started offering this contactless option in China last month, where COVID-19 took a stronghold and started spreading from Wuhan. The majority of stores in the area had closed shop, leaving delivery as most people’s only option. The contactless measure seemed aimed at keeping everyone safe and minimizing exposure.

While plenty of customers have praised this effort, not everyone is pleased, believing this move is just passing the buck to low-wage workers.

Postmates counters this argument, telling TechCrunch the move is beneficial to both customers and couriers. “Community health and safety is paramount at Postmates, and we have shared precautionary CDC guidance with our Postmates,” a Postmates spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Customers have an option to designate the drop-off of item without contact; and we’ll continue to encourage employees, merchants and consumers to follow preventative measures. While we are operating with business as usual, we are tracking the situation closely and will help provide the resources necessary to mitigate increased risks.”

Instacart mentioned similar sentiment, telling Techcrunch, “Our goal is to continue to work with and serve the entire Instacart community safely, while also ensuring our customers have access to uninterrupted delivery and pickup services for the groceries and household essentials they need.”

For those who like this option and want to use it, just order as normal on Postmates. You’ll then be prompted to select your delivery preference before checking out. The option is similar with your Instacart order.

While we’ve so far only heard this option is being offered by these two delivery startups, we’re likely going to see more contactless rollouts as coronavirus fears continue to change our shopping habits in the next couple of months.

Extra Crunch is now past its first birthday. Over the past year, we’ve learned a lot, made some changes and generally found our groove.

Toward the end of 2019, former TechCrunch writer Alex Wilhelm returned to the publication to help grow Extra Crunch, though he still writes for the main site as well. His daily columns dig into the financial side of the startup world and have resonated deeply with our audience, so I wanted to talk to him about what he’s doing and why more people might want to read his work.

Normally, we’d run a Q&A like this on Extra Crunch, but we’ve removed the paywall so everyone can learn a bit about how we approach our work at TechCrunch so we can better serve our audience of founders, operators, tech fans and investors.

Read on for an unvarnished look at our process, from two of our own. Cheers!

Chatting with Alex

Walter Thompson: I’d like to introduce you to readers. What is your daily column about?

Alex Wilhelm: I’m always trying to figure out what’s going on and why. And I think that one thing that the news media does traditionally quite well, is to present everyone with a set of facts.

But one thing that the news has always been hesitant to do is tell people why they might care or why things are happening, because they don’t want to lose their journalistic status. I don’t share that perspective. And so my morning column is essentially me thinking out loud about markets, trends and news events that I’m trying to piece together into themes and narratives to help explain the world around me on topics that I find interesting. It’s really just a process of thinking out loud, trying to learn, and put the LEGOs together to make something a bit larger than the parts themselves.

Who should be reading your daily column? Is it just for Silicon Valley insiders?

It’s designed to help people who want to be more on the inside. I’m writing for the people in the world of technology, and the financial world that encompasses startups, to better understand where they work and how their jobs function inside the context of business.

If you work for a startup — you know, seed through late-stage — it probably is something that you might want to read, because you’ll better understand who’s doing well, and business models, where money is going, how exits are happening, what your options might be worth and maybe we’ll talk about the company you work for. So if you’re in that area, I would read it, but if you’re not, it’s probably wildly esoteric and not tailored for you.

Do you think your column could help someone become a better founder, or are you offering more specialized knowledge?

If founders wanted to understand more about the world around them, it is a useful read.

You can certainly build a company with blinders on and just run straight forward. And if everything goes well, you’ll look like a genius. But if you did want to kind of maybe look around a bit more — I cover transportation, fintech and venture trends, and you know, the Chinese market and stock market trades — I try to bring all this stuff in to explain what’s going on. If you wanted a broader view, I hope that my column will help. If it doesn’t, I’m failing.

Any interest in using what you’ve learned writing about startups to found your own company?

I worked for a bunch of startups. I worked for a startup in Chicago during college. Then I also worked for a startup in Portland and I founded a company with some friends called Contenture. TechCrunch covered us back in the day when I was in college, and the dissolution of that startup got me into writing. So I guess I rephrase your question, “am I willing to go back into building companies?” And the answer is no.

I love what I do. And I’m very, very lucky to get to do it. And this is the job that I want. So at least today, no. Maybe down the road as my perspectives, you know, change maybe, but I love writing. I get to write about stuff that I find fascinating.

Use discount code ALEX at checkout to save 25% off the price of an annual or two-year Extra Crunch subscription.

If you’re a founder who’s looking at the novel coronavirus, a possible recession, real uncertainty in public markets and more VCs who are demanding profitability, is this a good time to launch a startup? Or is this a bad time? Or is it just as dodgy as it ever was?

It’s a really good question. I’ve been talking with many people about this, in particular, Elizabeth Yin, who was breaking down the two-tiered founder world — how some people can raise infinite money and some people are kind of starving.

I think it’s a pretty good time to found a company because even if the fundraising market does change and become a bit more stiff and strict, it will be nothing compared to how bad it was in 2008. And nothing as bad as it was 2000 and 2001. So there’s going to be more capital and more risk tolerance. And sure, maybe you won’t be quite as fantastic, but it’ll still be good.

And that means that you have the fuel to build whatever it is that you think is going to change the world if it’s a good idea. I would get out there and go do it. “Good companies are born in bad times” as a theme isn’t wrong. They’re also founded in good times. But if you’ve got a really good idea and a solid team in mind, I don’t think the macro conditions should change the way you think about building a business.

Is there anything you wanted to add before we wrap up? We’re doing this interview for readers who aren’t already Extra Crunch subscribers. Why do you think they should sign up?

Extra Crunch is a grand experiment, and one that’s been a real pleasure to get to be a small part of. I want to thank everyone who’s come along for the ride so far. And if you haven’t yet, come over to try it.

TechCrunch as an organization is now doing three things at once. We’ve always done news and events. And now we’re doing something a little bit different at the same time. So thank you for everyone who’s taking this up with us. And we’re going to earn everyone else’s support and time as soon as we can.

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 476th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, March 12, 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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Short-form video service Quibi is announcing its full launch lineup today — exactly once month before launch.

True to its name (which stands for “quick bites”), Quibi will focus on short videos that you can watch on your phone. Its content will include “movies in chapters” (longer, scripted stories broken into chapters that are between seven and 10 minutes long), as well as unscripted shows, documentaries and daily hits of news/entertainment/inspiration.

The company, which is astoundingly well-funded and led by longtime Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, says there will be 50 shows live at launch, including:

“Most Dangerous Game,” a dystopian action thriller starring Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz“Survive,” a drama starring Sophie Turner about the aftermath of a plane crash, based on a novel by Alex Morel“Chrissy’s Court,” in which Chrissy Teigen presides over small-claims court“Murder House Flip,” in which homeowners try to renovate homes that are infamous for murders committed inside“Thanks a Million,” a reality series where celebrities (including executive producer Jennifer Lopez) give $100,000 to regular people who must them pay it forward“Last Night’s Last Night,” Entertainment Weekly’s daily recap of late-night shows“The Replay by ESPN,” offering daily episodes covering sports news

Quibi says it will release a total of 8,500 episodes across 175 shows in its first year.

Using the company’s “Turnstyle” technology, viewers will be able to switch seamlessly between watching videos in portrait and landscape mode. In fact, some shows are designed specifically to offer different-but-complementary viewing experiences in different viewing modes.

The service will cost $4.99 per month with ads or $7.99 per month without ads. Quibi is also announcing today that it’s offering a 90-day free trial — but you’ll need to sign up on the Quibi website before the official launch on April 6.

If a player picks up an item in an online video game, who owns that item? The player, or the company that made the game?

In most cases, the answer is probably closer to the latter. The item may be in the player’s digital inventory, but the company can take it away as they please, prevent the player from selling or giving it away, etc.

Horizon Blockchain Games is trying to shift up the idea of ownership in games (starting with their own title), and they’ve raised another $5 million to get it done.

Horizon is working down two paths in parallel here: On one path, they’re building an Ethereum-powered platform called Arcadeum for handling in-game items — establishing who owns any specific instance of an item, and allowing that item to be verifiably traded, sold or given from player to player. Once an item is in a player’s possession, it’s theirs to use, trade or sell as they please; Horizon can’t just take it away. In time, they’ll open up this platform for other developers to build upon.

On the other path, the company is building out its own game — a digital trading card game called SkyWeaver — meant to thrive in its own right while simultaneously showcasing the platform.

SkyWeaver is a fantasy-heavy trading card game perhaps most easily compared to Blizzard’s Hearthstone. It’s free-to-play, and cross-platform across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android.

Players in SkyWeaver battle each other using the cards they’ve obtained through buying, earning or trading. There are currently around 500 different cards in all, and each card comes in two different flavors: silver and gold.

ANY card in the game can be purchased in its base “silver” form for $2 — a move the team tells me is meant to level the playing field by enabling anyone with a couple bucks to obtain the cards the playerbase deems most powerful. Meanwhile, a card’s “gold” variant — which changes the card only in appearance, not ability or usefulness — must be earned via competition or bought from other players on the open market. While silver cards can always be bought for $2, gold card values are meant to vary more wildly by rarity/demand.

Cards in SkyWeaver are stored in a player’s Arcadeum wallet on the blockchain — though, for the sake of simplicity, most of the complexities of the blockchain are hidden away behind the scenes. If a player wants to handle things themselves, cards can be transferred to any other Ethereum-based wallet.

SkyWeaver has been in private beta since around July of last year. Horizon’s Chief Architect Peter Kieltyka tells me the game currently has around 12,000 users, with another 92,000 on the wait list.

Horizon first raised $3.75 million in a seed round last year; they’re categorizing this round as an extension of that one. The round is led by returning investors Initialized Capital, and backed by Golden Ventures, DCG, Polychain, CMT Digital, Regah Ventures and ConsenSys.

The company says that SkyWeaver should roll into an open, public beta later this year.

As the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, spreads around the world, many companies are asking their staff to work from home. The boom in working remotely may prove temporary — even if the trend behind it is not — but having more staff operating away from traditional offices is having an impact on the tools that many companies use to coordinate and communicate while apart.

Switching to a remote-work setup isn’t easy. Smartsheet’s Mark Mader told TechCrunch that the “challenge of remote work isn’t just about physical location,” continuing to say that it is “also about the need for people to feel connected and stay informed.” That means intelligent tooling, and smart workplaces norms and practices. (Mader also stressed low-code and no-code tooling as a possible way to empower remote workers).

The remote-work boom was recently highlighted in Zoom’s earnings report. Its results bested expectations, and in its earnings call, the company said that it was seeing rising demand for its product in the wake of COVID-19, even if most of that rising usage was for its free service. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said that in light of the spread of the coronavirus, many companies had quickly come to understand the need for a tool like Zoom. The CEO added that he expects more companies to deploy remote work tooling like his video service in the future.

Zoom’s CFO Kelly Steckelberg added that while her company has seen an “uptick in usage,” it is mostly “on the free side.” Conversions to paid products, if they occur, are something we’ll learn about it in three months.

But Zoom is just one company among many that builds tools or provides services that can facilitate remote work. TechCrunch wanted to know if other, smaller companies are seeing similar usage gains, and, perhaps, revenue gains as well. During our coverage of the Zoom earnings cycle, TechCrunch asked startups building remote work friendly tooling to write in with what they were seeing in their analytics. Was usage rising? If so, where? A good number of companies, startups and the more mature alike wrote in.

We’ve discussed Bootstrapping Using Services extensively over the years. Ecwid CEO Ruslan Fazlyev used eLance (not Upwork) to source service projects, then built, first a platform+services business...

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Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch the line of questioning a little bit and ask you for some insights into the broader space of cyber insurance. Can you identify where there are open problems and...

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During this week’s roundtable, we had an extensive discussion on Positioning. Pebble Distributed Ledger Technology Our entrepreneur pitch was by Deepansh Singe from Kerala, India. He pitched Pebble...

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

Stocks are set to fall further today, likely forcing shares in SaaS and cloud companies down yet again. After two wild trading weeks, the high-flying tech category is off over 9% from recent highs before the bell this morning, putting it close to correction territory. (A correction is usually defined as a decline in value of 10% or more from recent highs.)

With today’s expected declines, SaaS companies are likely set to close out Friday close to or in a formal correction. Even more notably the Bessemer cloud index, which tracks public SaaS companies, is worth less today — even before fresh declines — than it was last July. That implies that SaaS companies have not only given up recent gains; they’ve shed all their progress since last Summer.

But the news isn’t all bad. Even while all the companies that Bessemer’s handy have grown since their mid-2019 size, Bessemer is reporting a slightly expansion in the value of SaaS revenue since that date. It’s an odd moment that we’d best unpack.

Let’s observe the market data, and examine a few public SaaS companies to see its impacts. For startups, today’s dive is an attempt to understand how public market investors are valuing recurring revenue. It’s something worth grokking if you have a pricing event coming up this year. Let’s go!

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

This week was packed with news, most of it pretty bad. But Zoom did well, so there’s that. Happily we had our dynamic pairing, Alex “Have I Died” Wilhelm and Danny “Good Hair” Crichton on hand to parse through it all. (A reminder that Equity now hits your podcast app twice a week, so peep us Monday mornings!)

So what was on the docket? A host of things, starting with a big new early-stage fund:

Kleiner has more money, again. About a year after raising a $600 million vehicle, Kleiner Perkins raised a new, larger fund. Now flush with $700 million, the longstanding venture group has more money to play with than it has in recent memory. For early-stage deals, that is.Atrium shut down after raising $75 million. Investors got some of their money back, but the company had to lay off its 100 employees. The lesson here is that famous backers and tenured founders can’t will something into existence that doesn’t work.OYO is laying people off. Again. The major SoftBank Vision Fund-backed Indian hotel brand was supposed to be a massive hit. Now, with novel coronavirus and other challenges, it and global tourism are hitting snags.We also poked at the Robinhood downtime that came during a period of sharp trading swings. The company has a lot of work to do to recover user trust, and continue to grow into its valuation. (More on that here.)Zoom was the day’s good news, posting strong earnings (here), possibly indicating that remote-work companies are seeing demand for their products.

We closed on a pair of posts from Danny based on AngelList and DocSend data that shows how signaling risk for startups has changed over the years, and how many pre-seed investors the average founder talks to during their first fundraise.

That’s all from your friendly, local Equity crew. More soon!

According to a recent Research and Markets report, the global cloud-based contact center market is estimated to grow at 25% CAGR to $49.12 billion by 2025 from $13.17 billion in 2019. Five9 (Nasdaq:...

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Sramana Mitra: Estonia has made huge progress in building a startup ecosystem. Can you talk a little bit about what has enabled that? What are the highlights of the ecosystem? Lauri Kinkar: We have...

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Convert Group, a startup based in Athens that offers a SaaS to help FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) brands understand how they are performing across e-commerce, has raised €1.2 million in seed funding.

The investment comes from Uni.fund, which is backed by the EquiFund investment platform (an initiative created by cooperation between the Hellenic Republic and EIF). It is the first time the otherwise bootstrapped company has taken external funding since being founded in 2014 and initially offering e-commerce consultancy.

The startup’s core product — dubbed “eRetail Audit” — is described as an online platform that provides e-commerce market share data for “sell-out” consumer products (in value, units and volume). It does this by partnering with various large e-commerce platforms and stores — in data-for-data deals — in order to then be able to serve up real-time aggregated data to its own FMCG brand clients.

Rather than compete with marketing insight giants Nielsen and IQVIA, it has signed strategic partnerships as another route to market based on revenue sharing — which is pretty scrappy for an operation hailing from Greece.

“As strange as it may seem, e-commerce market share [data] for FMCGs in value, volume or units was virtually non-existent across the world,” Convert Group founder and CEO Panayotis Gezerlis tells me. “Companies like Nielsen, IRI, and IQVIA only had solutions for the traditional retail ecosystem and were not prepared for the meteoric speed FMCG online sales were increasing. We created a platform called eRetail Audit that connects to the online retailer in real-time, on a data-for-data free model, and we managed to grab online sales in extreme accuracy and detail, per SKU with basket-level aggregation and marketing data.”

To that end, Convert Group claims to have grabbed the entire Greece market, one year since pivoting from consultancy to a SaaS model (a move Gezerlis attributes to Convert Group’s first employee, Elena Chailazopoulou, who is now deputy CEO and Product Innovation Director and holds equal shares in the startup).

Two years later, Convert Group expanded to Italy and Spain and has annual contracts that include 10 out of the 15 biggest FMCG manufacturers such as L’Oreal, P&G, Unilever, J&J, The Coca-Cola Company, Nestle, RB, GSK, Henkel, Bayer, Heineken, Barilla, Colgate Palmolive, Piere Fabre, Abbott and others. This has also seen the startup partner with “hundreds” of online retailers including dominant players Carrefour and Ahold Delhaize.

Meanwhile, in November 2019, the company launched “eRetail Content,” which lets brands design their “perfect digital shelf presence” for products sold online. The SaaS offers three layers to e-commerce businesses: e-commerce product content distribution from manufacturers to online retailers (photos, videos, ingredients, SEO optimised descriptions, characteristics, searchable terms & category suggestions); e-commerce content compliance & availability monitoring by manufacturers; and onsite and off-site tracking of e-commerce activations by manufacturers & online retailers such as newsletters, social media posts, onsite display banners and Google AdWords text ads.

And just last week, Convert Group announced its third product: a data marketplace for e-commerce, or as Gezerlis calls it, “the SimilarWeb of transactional e-commerce data.” It is initially targeting the consumer healthcare industry and key account data for online pharmacies, but will soon expand to more e-commerce verticals such as online grocery and online beauty products.

ChatableApps, a U.K. startup commercialising the work of auditory neural signal processing researcher Dr. Andy Simpson, has quietly picked up seed money from Mark Cuban. The company has built a smartphone app that provides hearing assistance by removing background noise in near real-time.

Alongside Simpson, the company’s co-founders are Brendan O’Driscoll, Aidan Sliney and George Boyle — the original team behind the music discovery app Soundwave (acquired by Spotify) — and later joined by CEO Giles Tongue, formerly of wearable tech startup NURVV, who has been tasked with taking the business forward.

“Dr Andy Simpson is our CSO [chief science officer] and inventor,” Tongue tells me. “He brings together the auditory neuroscience, auditory perception, neural signal processing and artificial Intelligence, is an AI maverick and contrarian thinker, and this unusual intersection are what has led to the creation of our proprietary ground up neuroscience-led AI. His prolific research had over 400 citations before he went into stealth mode.”

Since then, the team has been busy (although largely flying under the radar). Chatable’s hearing assistant app is available in the Play Store in open beta but is still considered “pre-launch.”

“We’re in a constant cycle of pre-clinical validation, which is going amazingly,” says Tongue. “We’ve heard ‘life changing,’ and had tears in the eyes… of early adopters.”

Chatable’s O’Driscoll says the company’s technology and approach is “completely unique” because it doesn’t use noise filtering or other DSP techniques. “It’s actually a deep learning neural net approach to speech and noise separation that doesn’t apply filters to the original audio but rather it listens and re-prints a brand new audio stream in near real-time which is a mimic of just the vocal components of the original audio,” he tells me.

Describing Chatable as a “click and go” universal hearing aid, O’Driscoll says the app has been engineered to work on any modern day £100 smartphone and with regular ear buds. “The app produces a clear and loud voice so is easy for the user to hear a conversation, and features two sliders, one to turn up volume, the other to control background noise,” he explains.

More broadly, Tongue believes the “global hearing epidemic” is the biggest health issue at scale that AI can solve, and that Chatable has an opportunity to help millions of people in a life changing way. According to the World Health Organisation there are 466 million people with disabling hearing loss. “I believe Chatable has the power to be the first app able to address a global health epidemic using an everyday smartphone,” he says.

Meanwhile, Chatable plans to generate revenue on a subscription basis, charging £9.99 per month. This is certainly designed to ensure the startup is sustainable and can continue to invest in its product for the long term. (For example, an iPhone version of the app is currently in private beta. However, I hope the price can be brought down over time so that it becomes truly affordable to everybody that needs it.)

Spindrift, maker of fizzy soda and sparkling water, has raised $29.8 million in a funding round, per an SEC filing. The Charlestown, Mass. company was founded by Bill Creelman and has raised $70 million in known venture capital funding to date, per Crunchbase data.

The company did not immediately respond to request for comment. 

Previous investors in the fizzy drink company include Almanac Insights, KarpReilly, Prolong Ventures, VMG Partners and more. Spindrift, founded in 2010, is up against big players, like the beloved and decades-old LaCroix, another sparkling water brand. Spindrift differentiates itself by emphasizing “real fruit” in its drinks. Think cucumbers from Michigan, strawberries from California and Alfonso mangoes from India. A day prior to the filing, Spindrift launched its pineapple flavor. 

(In a quick aside looped up with a word we haven’t heard in a while: The company also offered a Golden Pineapple sweepstakes, where 13 winners will get a year’s-supply of free Spindrift and a custom mini-fridge). 

Now, it’s worth mentioning that in San Francisco’s Marina district is another fruit-infused direct to consumer brand, sans the bubbles. Hint, founded in 2005 by Kara Goldin, has raised $26.5 million to date from The Perkins Fund and Verlinvest to produce naturally flavored fruit-essence water. 

Today, Spindrift raised more than Hint’s total funding in one fell swoop, and both brands, alongside the age-old LaCroix, are synonymous with startup culture and recycling bins. And that tells us that at least according to investors, the future of water is far from, ahem, drying up.