As Uber and Lyft reached their public-market nadir in mid-March, you would have been forgiven for thinking they were heading under. If the markets are somewhat efficient, why else would America’s top two ride-hailing companies shed two-thirds and three-quarters of their value, respectively, in just over a month?

As we know now, both companies quickly recovered and have since regained much of their former value. The two public firms have guided for a sharply unprofitable Q2 2020, but investors appear content to see their improving results as evidence that the worst is behind them.

Airbnb is another company that could be out of the worst of it and shared two data points lately that cast positive light on its operations. Three of the most famous American unicorns that were hit among the hardest by the pandemic, then, are coming back to a degree.

Today I want to parse the three companies’ public notes regarding their performance so we can track how their fortunes have changed. This will help us understand how much things have improved since their collective value reached all-time lows. And, it turns out that Uber and Lyft might have some good news for Airbnb shareholders.

Uber, Lyft

In mid-March, on the same day that Uber and Lyft shares came off their record lows, Uber told investors that “ride volume has gone down by as much as 60%-70% in recent days in the hardest-hit cities like Seattle,” but that it could get through “even in the worst-case scenario of rides down by 80% for the year” with enough cash to survive.

Enterprise automation startup JIFFY.ai announced today it has raised $18 million in Series A funding for product development and expansion into new markets around the world. The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Rebright Partners and W250 Venture Fund.

A roster of executives from tech companies also invested, including AssetMarket chief executive officer Charles Goldman; Costco chief financial officer Richard Galanti; Atlassian chief technology officer Sri Viswanath; former Nissan Motors chief information officer Tony Thomas; and former SunGard Wealth and Retirement chief operating officer Bob Ward.

JIFFY.ai, the brand name of Paanini, uses robotic process automation (RPA) and machine learning and artificial intelligence to help companies automate tasks that are usually performed manually, making operations more time and cost efficient. Its platform also includes a design studio for no-code application development, and a configurable analytics dashboard to monitor automated processes.

JIFFY.ai’s largest equity shareholder is its non-profit organization, Paanini Foundation, which was created to provide job training and placement programs for people whose positions are displaced because of RPA and other automation tech. According to a report last year from Gartner, RPA is the fastest growing enterprise software market, and the research firm also predicts that by 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of app development activity.

Co-founder and CEO Babu Sivadasan, who previously served as group president of Envestnet Retirement Solutions, told TechCrunch that Paanini Foundation “is an intrinsic part of who we are and our strategy, as the majority equity shareholder, the foundation will grow as the business grows.”

The foundation works with companies to retrain staff whose roles have been made redundant or changed because of automation and helps them find new job opportunities. “Our overall goal is to promote sustainable, compassionate entrepreneurship and our entire founding team are aligned around this core belief that we have a responsibility to give back to the community through our social programs and build a better workplace for tomorrow’s leaders,” said Sivadasan.

The company’s new funding will be used for its research and development operations and to scale its sales and marketing, with plans to expand in the United States, Europe and Southeast Asia.

JIFFY.ai’s clients include Southwest Airlines, which has used its platform to automate processes in revenue accounting, its supply chain and operating groups.

In a statement, Angela Marono, the airline’s managing director of business transformation, said, “JIFFY has been a strong partner since 2019 in helping us begin our automation journey—starting with RPA and moving towards achieving the full value of intelligent automation. This is an increasingly important part of our overall strategy as we embrace the rapid pace of change and desire to free up our people to focus on the highest value activities.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sivadasan said JIFFY.ai has seen more interest in its platform as large companies adapt to operating with a remote workforce, and need more help to make sure that their middle and back office processes are being done promptly and accurately.

For example, one of JIFFY.ai’s clients, an airline carrier, had to manage an influx of ticket cancellations, refunds and postponements.

“Staff shortages compounded with manual task errors led to significant backlog,” said Sivadasan. “Our platform was able to quickly automate thousands of hours of backlog by automating the processing of outbound requests, returns, cancellations, refunds, coupon and price management. The implementation processed nearly 90,000 transactions in a week, saving 2,000-plus hours of work. But this is not an isolated use case, many industries are facing difficulties adapting to the new world like this.”

Other RPA companies include Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere and UiPath, which reached a $7 billion valuation last year after raising $568 million.

When asked how JIFFY.ai differentiates from other RPA providers, Sivadasan said “legacy RPA providers focus on a narrow range of process automation, heavily focused on the front end and data entry, and selling bots which require extensive upkeep and management. Our platform allows enterprises to not only deploy and manage process automation centrally, but our customers can design applications with simple drag and drop setup, resulting in transformation of the processes, rather than simply extending the life of legacy technologies.”

He added that JIFFY.ai’s platform “is the only context-aware system on the market, capable of recognizing mistakes and discrepancies in documents like loans, claims and invoices, and resolving them through the system’s self-learning capabilities.”

In a press statement, Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing director at Nexus Venture Partners, said, “JIFFY.ai is set to make enterprises vastly more efficient and will enable use cases not possible before. We are thrilled to partner with Babu and team in their pursuit of delivering an end to end solution for next generation AI-powered automation and app development across a broad range of industries.”

Sramana Mitra: What was Ocrolus doing that was brilliant? Nick Adams: I can’t share all of that, but they’ve done a couple of things around how they structure their team both on a technology...

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According to a Research and Markets report, the global Database as a Service market is estimated to grow at 16% CAGR to reach $24.8 billion by 2025 from $12 billion in 2020. The recent market turmoil...

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Some audience questions answered by Sramana: – What are some startup ideas that frequently fail? – Are VC funded startups usually more or less successful than bootstrapped ones? –...

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Pamela York is Founder and CEO, Atasi Ventures, with a special focus on women entrepreneurs in healthcare.

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Sramana Mitra: I understand your positioning. It sounds like you are taking these areas where you have quite gifted people pursuing a certain track. You’re giving them a more well-rounded education....

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Online payments are often synonymous with card payments, but today a startup that’s built a profitable alternative, based around making and taking payments by way of a bank transfer, is announcing a round of funding amid a surge of growth.

Trustly, a startup from Sweden that has built a platform to make it as easy (and competitive) for merchants to accept bank transfers as it is to take card payments to complete online transactions, is today announcing that it has raised a significant round of funding from a group of investors led by BlackRock.

In an interview, Trustly’s CEO Oscar Berglund said the company and its investors are not disclosing the exact amount of the investment, but we understand from reliable sources that the deal values the company — which is profitable and had revenues of over $150 million last year — at over $1 billion, and that it will give BlackRock and others participating in the investment (including Aberdeen Standard Investments, funds managed by Neuberger Berman, the Investment Corporation of Dubai and RSIC) a minority share in the business.

For some further background, private equity group Nordic Capital essentially acquired Trustly in 2018 for €700 million ($794 million at today’s rates). This deal represents a partial exit. From what we understand the base valuation also rose with this transaction.

That’s both on the back of growth — both organic and also inorganic, as it merged with US rival PayWithMyBank, last year, to expand its network to touch 600 million consumers — and Trustly’s impressive list of customers. That list has more than 6,000 merchants today and also includes Facebook, where you can find its logo to let people buy ads and pay via Trustly; AT&T, which lets people pay bills using the network; Alibaba.com for making purchases in Europe; topping up PayPal accounts in a number of countries; and sending and receiving money via TransferWise.

This also essentially puts this investment in the hundred/hundreds of million/s range.

Trustly’s growth comes amid a bigger picture of how e-commerce is evolving as it continues to mature and become more ubiquitous — a trend that has been accelerated in the last several months as many have turned away from physically making purchases because of social distancing measures.

When many of us think of online payments, we usually associate the process with using credit or debit cards, or maybe logging into a mobile wallet to complete a transaction. But the reality is that payments are a much more fragmented business, with consumer and merchant preferences changing with each region and including a wider range of options than simply Visa, MasterCard, Amex, and PayPal or some other wallet.

Bank transfers as a method of payment are not at all common in some markets, especially those where cards have become ubiquitous. For example in the UK only about 5% of transactions online are made this way.

But in other markets, this is a very common and well-used route. In Austria, Estonia, Finland, the Netherlands and Poland, a majority of consumers prefer to pay via bank transfer — respectively the rates are 50%, 50%, 40%, 60%, 45%, Trustly tells me, basing its figures on a number of data sources including some of its payment partners, Adyen, PPRO, Global Data and Worldpay.

And Berglund said that the picture is a positive one for Trustly — and other companies that it competes with, including Klarna (another startup ‘unicorn’ from Sweden, as it happens) — because it seems that bank-based transfers as a payment method is on the rise.

There are multiple reasons for that shift. Perhaps most obviously, we’ve seen a lot of security issues around card usage, including too many stories of malicious hackers breaching businesses’ network security and stealing data and card numbers, and other kinds of card fraud. Even as more watertight procedures are put into place (such as mandatory chip-and-pin transactions in many countries), there remain loopholes and also general unease among consumers.

On top of that are changing tides in consumer-focused financial services. Specifically, thanks to the rise of mobile apps and a plethora of startups that have built “challenger banks” to provide more user-friendly banking, consumers today want and expect more control over their finances.

Using credit cards for many represents a departure from that, given that they are designed to help you spend more than you might actually have to spend, so that you can pay back in increments with interest. And, I’d argue, even debit cards can be a departure from transparency, since you are still not seeing your account balance in real time when you make purchases, and many people have overdrafts in place to again spend more than they actually have to spend.

“I think that bank transfers plays into the younger generation of millennials who just consciously don’t want to get into the debt trap, while also  being used to everything being done in real time,” Berglund said. 

If the story for end users — be they the consumers doing the buying or the merchants doing the selling — is all about transparency, easy user interfaces and simplification, it’s because the work under the hood remains very complex and fragmented. Such is the case here as well.

Trustly’s network, Berglund explained, is based around Trustly itself setting up its own business accounts across a wide range of banks around markets where it is active.

When a user elects to pay by bank transfer, it essentially goes through whatever interface his/her own bank uses when interacting with it directly, which then routes the payment through Trustly’s network to be paid into a merchant’s account.

The system is as secure as an individual’s own online banking interface, which typically will use two-factor authentication to complete a transaction, unlike most card transactions. Berglund says that for this reason, the company has not experienced any of the kinds of of breaches or frauds that you see in card payments.

In terms of Trustly’s business model, it is a customer of the banks, while the merchants are its customers: it charges a transaction fee to merchants who use the Trustly network to receive payments, and Berglund said that the percentage varies but is essentially lower than what they would pay for card-based transactions.

But because payments are complex, this is not the full story. In addition to working with merchants directly, Trustly also integrates with a number of third parties like Worldpay, PPRO, Rapyd and others that use these latter services to integrate a number of payment options through a single API (rather than multiple APIs or integrations) into their check-out stack.

And Berglund added that it’s looking like it might be taking on another new wave of customers going forward. Banks themselves are exploring ways of providing more services to merchants who bank with them, and so Trustly is talking to some of them to sell on Trustly’s product as part of that (but not as a white-label, but branded solution).

The reason it’s not replicated is the same reason it’s hard to build any financial service from the ground up: Trustly has put in place not just a banking network but the integrations around it, plus the customer service it provides to merchants around the business of payments. That makes it hard to replicate, he added. “You have a huge platform here in the middle of this business, not unlike the platforms that exist for card payments,” he said. “It’s a big system all in all.”

This is one [expletive deleted] tough time to be an early-stage startup founder. But giving up simply isn’t part of startup DNA. Instead, it’s time to do whatever it takes to catch the eyes and imagination of investors, media and other tech and business influencers. Here’s an easy way to begin. Apply to be a TC Top Pick at virtual Disrupt 2020.

What’s a TC Top Pick? It’s an early-stage startup that passed rigorous scrutiny by TechCrunch editors with an eye for innovation and potential. The fortunate few to earn that designation win a free Digital Startup Alley Package, tons of exposure to investors and media, plus a bunch of other bennies designed to help you survive and thrive — even in tough times.

Here’s how it works. You’re eligible to apply if your pre-Series A startup falls into one of the following categories.

Social Impact + Education, Space, Artificial Intelligence + Machine Learning, Biotech + Healthtech, Enterprise + SaaS, Fintech, Mobility, Retail + E-commerce, Robotics, Hardware + IOT, and Security + Privacy.

TechCrunch editors will choose up to three startups in each category. Each Top Pick receives a Digital Startup Package, which lets three people exhibit from anywhere in the world. And since everyone wants to know who made the grade as a Top Pick, you can expect lots of requests for 1:1 virtual demos and video meetings with investors, media, potential customers, folks interested in collaborating — you name it. And you’ll have months to pitch and network.

Here’s another giant advantage: TechCrunch will conduct a virtual video interview for each Top Pick startup and promote the videos across our social media platforms — driving traffic to your website. Your video will make an excellent conversation starter and long-term marketing tool.

We’re not done with all the Startup Alley exhibitor perks and opportunities. You get exclusive access to the Leading Voices Webinar series. You’ll hear the brightest industry minds discuss ways to adapt during and after this pandemic.

All that networking will be a lot easier and more efficient with CrunchMatch, TechCrunch’s AI-powered networking platform. It helps you find and connect with like-minded investors, founders and other startup influencers. Save time by networking only with people who can move your business forward.

Pour yourself something tasty, join the Pitchers and Pitches webinars and fine-tune your pitch with the TechCrunch editorial team that coaches the Startup Battlefield competitors.

Don’t let hard times drive your dream into a ditch. Do what it takes to place your startup in front of the influencers who can help you succeed. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Keep moving forward and apply to the TC Top Picks program.

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

A Swiss startup called HMCARE, spun out of the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, has raised a million Swiss Francs (equivalent to about $105 million) to commercialize its transparent and relatively eco-friendly surgical masks.

The founders were inspired by healthcare workers in the 2015 Ebola outbreak and at children’s hospitals around the world working closely with patients but unable to show their faces. Likewise parents and relatives of immunocompromised people who must make a human connection with two-thirds of their face covered.

There were technically transparent masks available, but they were just regular masks with a plastic window in them, which can fog up and isn’t breathable. Thierry Pelet, now CEO of the company, approached his EPFL colleagues with a prototype of a transparent mask material meeting the rigorous demands of a medical environment. It must permit air through but not viruses or bacteria, and so on.

The team worked with Swiss materials center Empa to create a new type of textile. Using biomass-derived transparent fibers placed 100 nanometers apart to form sheets and then triple-layered, they made a flexible, breathable material that’s also nearly transparent — a bit like lightly frosted glass. They call it the HelloMask.

The material can be made in bulk and formed into mask shapes just like normal cloth, but there is the matter of spinning up manufacturing for it. Fortunately, the world is desperate for masks, and the idea of a transparent one was clearly catnip for investors. HMCARE easily raised a million-franc seed round, the R&D work having been done using nonprofit donations and grants.

While the HelloMasks could launch as early as the start of 2021, they’ll be primarily for the medical community, though public availability is certainly a possibility.

We won’t sit here as we have for so many years with strong faces and encouraging words and pretend that we’re not tired.

We’re tired because we’ve spent yet another week mourning our Black brothers and sisters who died unjust deaths. We’re tired because we spent half of that week holding the hands of White allies as they were reminded that racism still exists and that it is, indeed, sad. We’re tired because we’re a broken record, telling firms and companies what they can do to fight racism and rarely getting the action they so emotionally promise they care about. We’re tired of holding back anger and sadness as we talk about these issues, knowing our industry isn’t even doing the bare minimum to support Black investors. On top of advising allies, mourning lives lost and working full time jobs, we also raised over $100,000. And we’re tired of racism.

Last week, BLCK VC hosted We Won’t Wait, a day of action where we called on venture firms to discuss, donate and diversify. We asked these firms to discuss Venture’s role in combating institutional racism, to donate to nonprofits that promote racial equity and to release their data on the diversity of their investment teams and portfolio founders. These are the first steps. If you haven’t done these, you’re likely not ready for “Office Hours.” So before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s address why these steps aren’t straightforward or sufficient.

Discuss. It took nationwide uprisings for many VC firms to discuss how they could combat institutional racism. Yet, 80% of firms don’t have one Black investment professional who can identify with what we go through in both our professional and personal lives. BLCK VC held its own discussion to share that perspective, centered on the experiences of Black investors and entrepreneurs.

During this discussion, Terri Burns of GV said, “when a Black person is murdered yet again by police, it is not correct to say that the system has failed, because the system was designed that way.” It is clear that systemic racism leads to the maltreatment, dehumanization and unjustified deaths of Black people across the country. Van Jones of Drive Capital drew a fitting analogy: “Being Black is like being in lane eight with a weight vest and cement boots.” Sounds uncomfortable. But that’s how every Black person in America feels stepping out of bed everyday. For Black founders, discrimination by VCs is par for the course. Elise Smith is not alone when she puts on her daily armor to allow herself to show up in the White-dominated industries of venture capital and Silicon Valley tech.

But we’re not going to repeat what they said. Because you can watch the video, and you can do the research, and you can understand the problem on your own. Truthfully, we have no interest in explaining the problem to White VCs again and again when so many of my brothers and sisters have already spoken on it. If you’d like to know why institutional racism made venture capital so homogeneous and exclusive and racist, please see here, here, here, here and here.

What we are interested in explaining is that these are just examples of what Black investors and entrepreneurs deal with everyday. For almost every Black person in tech, these examples are not only relatable, they are commonplace. These are not the stories that shock and surprise the Black community, these are the stories of the everyday. We didn’t talk about the times we heard the N-word from your colleagues or the times they said our natural hair and beards were unprofessional. We talked about the systems.

There are so many more stories and experiences out there besides what was shared by those seven voices, so please think about what perspectives are missing when you have your discussions. Not just your discussion about racism, but your discussions about the future of venture capital, and about aerospace investing, and about COVID-19 and D2C businesses, and about hiring, and about mentoring and about golf. Black voices are so often left out of the conversations where relationships are built and investment decisions are made, but discussions that lack a Black perspective are incomplete.

Donate. Many VC firms and investors spoke last week about donating their time and resources to Black entrepreneurs and investors — what an interesting way to talk about your job. Please do not donate your time or your money to Black investors or entrepreneurs.

Invest in Black founders because they’re some of the best entrepreneurs. Invest in them because they understand an issue that you do not. Invest in them for the same reason you invest in all of your entrepreneurs — because they’re good. When you frame what you’re doing as a donation, it not only demeans what these entrepreneurs are doing and perpetuates some of the most racist aspects of venture capital, but it also prevents you from understanding that you’re bad at your job. Yes, if you don’t have a diverse pipeline or a diverse portfolio you are bad at your job. Making a separate space and separate fund for Black entrepreneurs removes firms from the responsibility they have to search for, invest in and support Black founders.

If you would like to donate money, donate money to nonprofits that fight institutional racism. If you would like to donate time, volunteer. If you would like to become a better investor, figure out why your pipeline is so homogeneous and fix it.

Diversify. Let’s circle back to an important statistic: More than 80% of venture capital firms don’t have a single Black investor. This statistic is interesting because, as much as it’s about industry trends, it’s really about the failings of individual firms. Most firms don’t have a diverse investing staff. They don’t have a diverse investing staff because they don’t understand the value of racial diversity. They don’t understand the value of racial diversity because there are no diverse investors to force them to think about diversity. Rinse. Repeat.

The single most important part of diversifying a VC firm and diversifying VC broadly is tracking the lack of diversity. Most firms do not routinely track data on their investor, deal pipeline, event or investment diversity. As a result, they rarely think about racial diversity. This is where we ask firms to start. Yes, mentorship can be helpful, office hours can be helpful, but if you’re not tracking your firm’s diversity metrics, they will not improve.

What now? Okay, you’ve discussed racism with your partners, you’ve donated money to nonprofits and you (hopefully) started tracking the diversity of your firm. Now what? Racism resolved? Probably not.

Hopefully these conversations made you realize where your firm’s specific shortcomings are, and you have to address those. Most firms will realize they have a pipeline problem, so start there. Do all of your events, dinners and programs have Black representation? When you’re trying to fill an investor role, did you post the job on your website and in different Black online communities? Did your final round of candidates reflect the diversity of our country? Did you support the diverse investors you already employ so they don’t feel disadvantaged, under-advocated and left out? When you’re trying to write new checks, did you utilize Black scouts and consider businesses that don’t address you directly?

When you’ve done all of that, ask yourself this: When the protests quiet down, and articles about racial oppression aren’t at the top of your timeline, what will you be doing? Don’t let it just be office hours. Don’t let the enormity of the work ahead paralyze you against taking action now. Your actions matter. Your inaction matters.

The resilience of the Black community is unparalleled. That resilience means that no matter how tired we are, we will still fight to change this country and to change this industry. It means that no matter how many times we don’t want to advise allies, we will. And it means that no matter how many times we face oppression and mourn for our brothers and sisters, we will still rise to the challenges. And while the stories of overt racism and microaggressions will continue, so too will our drive to move forward and our action to break down barriers. We will continue to build a home for ourselves in this industry. We will continue to work to ensure that Black Lives Matter.

Verizon has Apple's AirPods Pro noise-cancelling earbuds back in stock for $30 off, bringing their price tag down to $219.99. 

That's among the best deals we've seen for the AirPods Pro, which were released in October 2019. Just note that the $30 discount applies at the checkout stage. 

Apple's AirPods Pro have a shorter stem than Apple's original AirPods, and they have an in-ear design with customizable rubber tips for a significantly better fit. With that said, they're not as "in-ear" as some other in-ear earphones — they still feel like they rest in the ear and don't feel like an ear plug. If you've ever struggled with AirPods sticking in your ears, the AirPods Pro are the remedy. 

They have improved audio quality over the standard AirPods, and they reduce ambient sound with active noise cancellation. A wireless charging case keeps 24 hours of battery charge, and the AirPods Pro themselves have about a four to five hour battery life, which isn't especially impressive, but it's not bad, either. A five-minute charge in the charging case gives them an hour of battery life, so Apple claims. 

Crystal Cox/Business Insider

One of the welcome improvements in the AirPods Pro over the standard AirPods is their IPX4 water resistance, which makes them better suited for sweaty workouts or when you're caught out in the rain. 

The AirPods Pro connect to devices via Bluetooth, and they're compatible with Android and Windows devices, along with the usual range of Apple devices, like iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers. With that said, Android and Windows users won't get some of the extra functionality that Apple reserves for its patrons, like quick and automatic pairing, as well as the Find My AirPods feature that lets you track a misplaced AirPod. 

Apple's AirPods Pro come highly recommended, at least for Apple device users. Android users can still enjoy the AirPods Pro, but they'd do well to check out Sony's WF-1000XM3 wireless earbuds for a more Android-friendly experience. The WF-1000XM3 are going for $178 right now at Best buy, which is about $50 off their regular price. Read the Sony WF-1000XM3 review here.