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Techstars just released a 4-part original video series on entrepreneurship and mental health. Iâm featured in one of the four short (< 10 minute) videos.
If there was ever a moment in time that challenged our individual and collective mental health, itâs the Covid crisis. When Techstars began working on this project last year, the focus was on increasing awareness of the issues around mental health and entrepreneurship. There was no anticipation of the additional pressure the Covid crisis would put on â well â everyone, everywhere. The timing goal was simply to release it during Mental Health Month 2020.
Iâve spoken regularly since 2013 about my struggles with anxiety and depression. As a result of a depressive episode that I had, I decided that I wanted to try to lower the stigma, especially in entrepreneurship, around mental health issues. I personally no longer separate between physical health and mental health â they are both part of our existence as humans, something everyone struggles with at some level, and something everyone can work on, if they want.
Iâm officially DSM-5 300.3: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. If you know me, you know that Iâm a counter, arranger, and checker with some washing (mostly hands) tossed in for good measure. My magic number is 3.
Since I became public about this in 2013, Iâve met many entrepreneurs who have opened up to me about their own struggles. In some cases, Iâm the first person theyâve ever talked to because of the stigma associated with mental health issues, especially around leadership (e.g. a leader canât show weakness). Some of the people Iâve developed relationships with around this are much more visible and successful than I am, yet, very few people know that they struggle with mental health issues. While thatâs their choice, Iâm glad they feel safe talking to me and I hope itâs at least a little bit helpful to them.
My wife Amy Batchelor is front and center in this video. When I listen to her talk about her experience with me around these issues, I realize how incredibly lucky I am to have a partner who has supported me from the very beginning. I know how challenging I can be at times, and I donât think Iâd be here, at this point in my life, without Amy.
I also highlight my first business partner Dave Jilk in the video. Dave is still one of my closest friends and probably knows me better than anyone on Planet Earth other than Amy and my brother Daniel. Daveâs support of me during my first depressive episode â when we were partners at Feld Technologies â was profound to me. And his support during my depressive episode in 2013 (which is a story I tell in the video) was incredible.
Many of the organizations Iâm involved in are increasing their focus on mental health support. For example, one of the primary initiatives of Energize Colorado is mental health support for business people during the Covid crisis. And, thereâs a lot more coming in my world.
Techstars â thanks for making this a priority for entrepreneurs. And to my fellow participants in the video series â Andrea Perdomo and Matthew Helt â thank you for being brave enough to tell your stories. Finally, Tishin Donkersley, thank you for the foresight, motivation, and endless efforts to make this project come to life.
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London-based femtech hardware startup Astinno has picked up an Innovate UK grant worth £360k ($450k) to fund further testing of a wearable it’s developing for women experiencing a perimenopause symptom known as hot flushes.
The sensor-packed device, which it’s calling Grace, is being designed to detect the onset of a hot flush and apply cooling to a woman’s wrist to combat the reaction — in a process it likens to running your wrists under a cold tap.
The aim is for algorithmically triggered cooling to be done in a timely enough manner to prevent hot flushes from running their usual unpleasant and uncomfortable course. While the bracelet wearable itself is being designed to look like a chunky piece of statement jewellery.
The femtech category in general has attracted an influx of funding in recent years, as venture capitalists slowly catch up to the opportunities available in products and services catering to women’s health issues.
But it’s fair to say menopause remains a still under-addresed segment within the category. Although there are now signs that more attention is being paid to issues that affect many hundreds of millions of middle aged (and some younger) women around the world.
The team working on Grace has built several prototypes to date, per founder Peter Astbury. He says some limited user tested has also been done. But they’ve yet to robustly prove efficacy of the core tech — hence taking grant funding for more advanced testing. At this stage of development there’s also no timeline for when a product might be brought to market.
Astinno and Morgan IAT, its commercial partner on the project, have been awarded the Innovate UK money via a publicly funded UK SMART grants scheme (the pair are getting match funding via the scheme, with the public body putting up 70% and Astinno and Morgan IAT funding the other 30% of their respective costs).
Loughborough University — Astbury’s alma mater — is also involved as a research party, and is being funded for 100% of its grant costs.
“Several prototypes have been created so far, mainly by myself having received electronics and design training as part of my degree at Loughborough University,” says Astbury. “Shortly after leaving university I also briefly worked with an electronics company who helped to refine some of the components within the Grace product.
“Morgan IAT has the crucial technical role of developing a number of prototypes in conjunction with Astinno. This includes both hardware and software development, building many more advanced prototypes that are being tested, refined and then tested again.
“We’re working with three researchers from Loughborough University which brings together industry leading expertise in menopause psychology and physiology. Based at the National Centre for Sports and Exercise Medicine, the researchers are using their fantastic lab facilities to test Grace, meaning that everything we’re doing is being validated by professional research. Once this step is complete, we’ll have more of an idea regarding product release time-frames.”
Astbury founded the startup last summer — but had begun work on the concept for Grace several years before, during his final year at Loughborough, back in 2016.
“As a member of Loughborough’s business incubator, ‘The Studio’, I was awarded an enterprise grant which helped to fund the business. I have also been putting my User Experience design skills and expertise to good use, contracting for start-ups and larger healthcare companies on a part-time basis to ‘bootstrap’ development,” he adds.
The idea for the wearable came after Astbury conducted user research by talking to women about their menopausal symptoms and hearing about their coping strategies for hot flushes and the night sweats that can be induced.
“A woman was telling me about her symptoms and how she coped with them until now. She would wake up ten to fifteen times each night due to her night sweats. Each time, she would go to the bathroom and run her wrists under cold water which helped the flush to subside. Looking into this method in more depth, it became clear that cooling an area of skin can indeed be extremely effective and there are lots of women that use this technique,” he explains.
“During a hot flush, your brain mistakenly thinks that you are becoming too warm and causes your body to lose heat. This results in sweating, a reddening of the skin and shortness of breath. The skin, however, acts like your body’s thermometer, passing information to your brain. By applying cooling to the skin at the right time, we’re harnessing the body’s natural temperature regulation system. The brain receives signals that you are cool and, in turn, the body reacts in a way that is directly opposite to a hot flush.”
“The real key to Grace is accurately and reliably pre-empting hot flushes (the automated nature of the bracelet) so that cooling can be applied at the earliest stage possible,” he adds. “We’re doing that using a specific line-up of sensor technology and algorithms all working together but I’m afraid the details of that can’t be disclosed publicly yet.”
Astbury says he was keen to get grant funding at this stage of product development to avoid dilution of the business, given VCs would require their chunk of equity.
“One of the best things about Innovate UK for a science-based start-up like Astinno is that it doesn’t contribute to the dilution of your business,” he notes. “By the end of a successful grant project, a company becomes a much more attractive investment from the perspective of both investors and the start-up. I have had discussions with multiple angels/VC’s and will maintain those relationships, however a grant was the best option for us at this stage.”
M17, the Taiwan-based live streaming entertainment startup, announced that it has raised a $26.5 million Series D. The round was led by Vertex Growth Fund, with participation from Stonebridge Korea Unicorn Venture Fund, Innoven Capital Singapore, Kaga Electronics and ASE Global Group.
The new funding will be used for growth in Japan, one of M17’s key markets, and expansion into the United States and other regions including the Middle East.
The company’s funding announcement said that more users are logging onto live streaming apps to stay entertained during the COVID-19 pandemic. It added that M17, whose products include live streaming app 17 Media and a talent agency called Unicorn Entertainment, has seen a record number of artists and users signing up over the past few months.
17 Media enables content creators to monetize through in-app gifts and social commerce. In January, the company said it had processed over $500 million worth of virtual gifts for 30,000 exclusive content creators.
Two years ago, M17 planned to list on the New York Stock Exchange, but cancelled its IPO in June 2018 and decided to continue raising private funding.
In a statement, Vertex Growth managing director Tam Hock Chuan said, “We are impressed by M17’s market leading position and continued strong growth in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. With M17’s unique value proposition and battle-hardened management team, the company is well prepared for its next phase of growth.”
UK fintech startup Modulr has raised £18.9 million ($23.2 million) from new lead investors Highland Europe with participation from existing investors including Frog Capital and Blenheim Chalcot
The company, founded in 2016, will use the funding to scale its offering in the wholesale and commerical payments market which it estimates moves $120 trillion each year. Modulr helps clients manage payments and payroll accounts in real time via an API.Â
"The market is vast and the sheer level of opportunity is immense, our traction has been great in last three years but we are barely scratching the surface in terms of the market," Myles Stephenson, CEO and cofounder of Modulr, told Business Insider in an interview. "We get even more excited about helping to create a shift in the market."
The market shift in question is likened to recent changes in cloud computing adoption by Stephenson. Where a few years ago people might question the need to use AWS or another service over a server, now companies are beginning to look beyond banks to manage payments.
Modulr's specific target is what it estimates to be a $2.7 trillion market of administrative costs paid by small businesses to banks which use legacy payments systems. These incumbent processes are often manual, cumbersome, and inefficient, according to Stephenson.Â
"Banks are adapting now but we've had a nice, clean opportunity to build from the ground up," Stephenson added. "That's the benefit of starting this way and we have the freedom to work without restrictions from legacy systems."
Modulr began fundraising at the end of last year before closing the round in mid-March. It follows on from a £10 million BCR grant (part of the banking competition remedies' fund to support alternative business banking offerings in the UK).Â
The London-based company has grown rapidly in the past year, going from 45 employees mid-2019 to more than 180 now.
The funding will be used to continue deepening the company's UK presence and also to begin expansion into Europe, having registered for an electronic money license (EMI) from the ECB and set up an office in Dublin.Â
Modulr says it has processed more than £25 billion worth of payments through its partner clients including Sage, Liberis, Salary Finance and Iwoca.
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Wednesday.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk reportedly made the case directly to President Trump in a phone call last month that restarting Tesla production would pose little risk to workers. Musk told Trump he wanted to open by May 1 and that doing so wouldn't pose a "significant risk" to workers, The Washington Post reported.Uber has reportedly offered to buy GrubHub as it leans on food delivery to make up for coronavirus losses. Shares of GrubHub skyrocketed more than 30% after Bloomberg reported the potential acquisition talks by Uber.Apple employees will start returning to the company's offices soon even as other tech giants are letting staff continue working from home. Apple is starting to bring employees back to work at its global offices, according to Bloomberg. A group of states is demanding Amazon and Whole Foods reveal how many of their employees have the coronavirus. An unknown number of Amazon and Whole Foods workers have contracted the coronavirus in recent months. State officials want to know the exact number.Facebook agreed to pay $52 million to moderators who developed PTSD while helping the company police toxic content on its platform. Content moderators who endured stressful conditions on the job will receive at least $1,000 each under a proposed settlement, The Verge reported.Waymo said Tuesday that it has raised another roughly $750 million for its self-driving technology, expanding the size of its first external investment round to $3 billion. Waymo CEO John Krafcik told Axios the pandemic has underscored how fully self-driving technology can provide safe and hygienic personal mobility and delivery services.Twitter has told employees they can work from home permanently. Twitter employees were also told that the company's offices wouldn't be reopened until September at the earliest.Instagram is making it easier to delete comments and block people to crack down on harassment. The Facebook-owned app is making it easier to block multiple people at once, letting users pin comments on posts, and introducing tools to restrict who can tag users.TikTok is putting steep restrictions on how brands can use music in their videos to preserve the 'authenticity' of the platform. Brands will only have access to a collection of royalty-free music â that is, TikTok soundtracks that are licensed for commercial use.The 'Hamilton' movie is coming to Disney Plus in July, more than a year before it was expected to hit theaters. It was set for theatrical release next October, but it's now the latest movie to get an early Disney Plus release.Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.
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Modulr, the U.K. fintech that offers ‘Payments as a Service’ as an alternative to commercial and wholesale transaction banking, has secured £18.9 million in growth funding. Leading the round is Highland Europe, with participation from existing investors including Frog Capital.
Modulr says the injection of capital will be used to further develop the payments platform and expand into new products and markets, including European expansion. It brings the total raised by the company to just over £43 million, not including a £10 million grant from the Capability and Innovation Fund (pdf).
“We are solving the problem of relationship and technical access to commercial and wholesale transaction banking,” co-founder and CEO Myles Stephenson tells TechCrunch. “We’re providing a complete alternative to using a bank for payments: technology, regulatory permissions and direct access to the payment schemes”.
Last year, this saw Modulr became one of only a few non-banks to gain direct access to Faster Payments and Bacs, the two main U.K. bank payments schemes. The fintech is also a “principal” issuing member of Visa.
“We see ourselves as the plumbing layer behind the scenes – delivering the payments infrastructure that enables other businesses to automate payment flows and reconciliation, embed payment flows within their platform and build entirely new payment services for their customers,” adds Stephenson.
To date, businesses across lending, fintech, alternative banking, accounting, travel and more have processed over £25 billion in payments through the Modulr platform, which counts Revolut as one of its largest customers. Other partner clients including Sage, Liberis, Salary Finance and Iwoca.
In terms of competition, Stephenson says Modulr is typically replacing “the payment services provide by a bank combined with a technology service such as Bottomline Technologies”. (Although, of course, there are other modern payments as a service providers, including challenger bank Starling).
“What we think makes us stand out is our sole focus on being a B2B and infrastructure provider with access to, and trust of, key regulators and payment networks/schemes,” he adds. “This means we have the same level of access to payment schemes as a bank provides, but backed by our resilient, reliable and powerful API platform”.
Slack is back online after an outage that lasted about two and a half hours on Tuesday evening.
At 7:26 p.m. PT, the workplace messaging app said "We have fully restored service and everyone should be able to connect to Slack now." Slack didn't say what caused the outage.
Slack first reported issues at 4:53 pm PT, saying at the time that "users have reported general performance issues such message sending failures and timeouts." At 5:02 pm PT, Slack updated the status and said "Users are unable to connect to Slack. We are investigating and will provide an update shortly."Â
More than 5,000 users reported having issues connecting to Slack shortly before Slack confirmed the issues, according to Downdetector.
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Employees around the globe at organizations including Business Insider rely on Slack to communicate, organize tasks, and share information. During the outage, Downdetector's live outage map showed a concentration of Slack outage reports in the west coast of the United States, in Japan, and in Australia.Â
The timing of this outage came when many people around the world are working remotely to try and mitigate the spread of the coronavirus. Slack has rarely had outages that last this long. An outage on July 29, 2019, lasted about an hour.
Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email atÂ
Apple employees will soon resume work at the company's major offices, according to a new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Apple is said to be bringing employees back in stages over the next few months. The move signals that Apple is taking a different approach than other major tech firms like Facebook and Google.
Facebook will begin reopening its offices in early July but will permit employees to work remotely for the rest of the year. Google has told employees that they'll likely be working from home for rest of the year, but that those who need to return to the office can do so in June or July.
For Apple, the first phase of returning to work will entail bringing back employees who can't work from home or are experiencing issues doing so, according to Bloomberg. That stage has reportedly already begun and will continue through the end of May and early June. More employees are said to be returning in July during Apple's second phase.
An Apple spokesperson declined to comment.
Apple, like many companies, has shifted to work-from-home arrangements during the pandemic. But the company's secretive culture around new products has reportedly made it difficult for some employees to continue working remotely. The division within Apple tasked with working on new hardware projects, like augmented reality glasses, has reportedly slowed, reports Bloomberg.Â
Apple workers also struggled to access internal systems and to understand which tasks they're allowed to perform remotely, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Apple has launched several products in recent weeks while many states in the US were under lockdown and stay-at-home orders, including the iPhone SE, a new MacBook Pro, and a refreshed iPad Pro. It will also hold its Worldwide Developers Conference virtually for the first time in June.Â
Are you an Apple employee planning to return to work? If so, we want to hear from you. Contact this reporter atÂ
Elon Musk told President Donald Trump during a phone call last month that Tesla should be able to resume manufacturing at its factory in Fremont, California, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
During a call with Trump and other chief executives last month, Tesla's CEO praised the president and made the case for reopening the plant by May 1 or sooner, saying "I do not think it represents a significant risk," according to The Washington Post.
Trump said he agreed with Musk 100%, The Washington Post reported.
The factory has become the source of a heated showdown between Musk and local officials after he confirmed Monday that Tesla had restarted production in defiance of local orders and challenged authorities to arrest him.
"If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me," Musk tweeted.
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An Alameda County official sent Tesla a letter Monday ordering it to stop operations as workers returned to the factory, as first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, but the factory has remained in operation and officials have yet to take further action.
Trump weighed in publicly on the controversy earlier Tuesday, siding with Musk.
"California should let Tesla & @elonmusk open the plant, NOW," Trump tweeted. "It can be done Fast & Safely!"
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Musk has been extremely critical of state and local shelter-in-place orders meant to curb the spread of COVID-19, calling them "fascist" and saying they are "fundamentally a violation of the Constitution."
Tesla has attempted to restart its operations on multiple occasions in recent weeks despite local orders, and sued Alameda County over the order on Saturday.
Of all the ways that Facebook has influenced the world, one of the lesser-known â but arguably one of the most important â is an organization called Open Compute Project that is reimagining data center hardware, making it more efficient and less costly, and giving those designs away for free.
On Tuesday, OCP announced that Google had been granted a board seat, joining Microsoft, Facebook, Intel, Rackspace, and one of the most famous computer network engineers of all-time, Andy Bechtolsheim. Bechtolsheim is founder of Arista Networks (also involved in OCP) and is also known for his time at Cisco and for his many angel investments (especially the early one in Google that turned him into a billionaire).Â
Last month, OCP announced that it was on track to become its own $5.3 billion industry in 2020 and grow to $11.8 billion by 2023, in terms of the amount of money spent on OCP-designed hardware by companies that are not members of its board (meaning not cloud giants Microsoft, Facebook or Rackspace).
"OCP now has more than 150 ready-made products built on top of its open specifications," he said. "Our focus is now to ensure a robust supply chain for the entire market from enterprise, telco and hyperscale [Internet companies]."
There's a lot of incredible things about that statement. For one, OCP is not itself a hardware manufacturer like a Dell, Cisco, HP or IBM. It's a consortium that includes hardware manufacturers but that is driven, at its heart, by the hardware users like Facebook, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Alibaba, AT&T, Deutsche Telecom, and Google.
But it's still creating a complete alternative ecosystem for enterprises, telecoms, and internet companies: Any organization that still runs its own servers (and that's most large organizations) can opt in to use OCP-designed hardware instead of equipment from brand-name suppliers.
In addition to certifying that OCP products follow its designs (like other open organizations do), OCP has certified 127 software products to run on OCP hardware. And it has certified 27 "bundled" products, which refers to multiple OCP hardware or software products working together.
OCP is now working on the most critical piece, lining up support contracts that cater to various industries like enterprise or telco or the massive internet companies known today as "hyperscale," Bullock said. (Enterprises often won't buy stuff unless they know they'll be able to get timely support if something breaks.) Having a comprehensive, open system that includes hardware, software, and support is a huge deal in an industry that has for so long been dominated by vendors with proprietary tech like Cisco, IBM, HP, Dell, VMware, and so on.
OCP was launched by Facebook back in 2011 to create what is known as open source hardware for the data center industry. Back then Facebook was (and still is) growing so exponentially that it was expensive and environmentally wasteful for the company to buy computer servers, storage, network gear, and all the associated equipment that goes with that stuff (like the racks that hold the gear) from traditional vendors.
Facebook wasn't the only company creating its own hardware (and still isn't). Google famously built a lot of its own hardware and so does Amazon Web Services.
But what Facebook did that was so revolutionary was that it decided to share those designs with the world for free via OCP. Anyone could take the designs, use them, and modify them, and OCP had even lined up contract manufacturers to build the stuff to order.
Hardware engineers became fascinated â even obsessed â with OCP. For the first time, engineers could work together across companies to solve engineering problems and share their work with others, much like software engineers do with open source projects, without worrying about getting fired for sharing intellectual property.
And OCP grew wildly. It became its own separate entity from Facebook, although Facebook is still heavily involved and influential. Facebook's head of hardware engineering, Mark Roenigk (the former COO of Rackspace) is OCP's president and chairman of the board. Other Facebook hardware engineers lead six of OCP's more than two dozen projects. Microsoft engineers lead seven of them, Google leads two, and a variety of other engineers from other companies lead the rest.
But CEO Bullock tells Business Insider that OCP has deliberately structured itself so that no one member can become too powerful, not even Facebook.
"Today OCP has 200 members throughout the world: We structure the community to ensure balance on company representation so that each tiered member has limited leadership positions they can run for," he said (leadership is elected). "All board members have one vote and a chair position is elected from the board members each year to facilitate board discussions."
It is interesting to note that there are some big names that are not members of OCP. Apple was secretly involved for a while and may still be, but isn't in leadership roles or speaking publicly about it. The other big internet name that is notably absent from the group is Amazon. Amazon is also building a lot of its own hardware but for now is keeping its designs to itself.
Even so, Bullock believes that whether those companies are members or not, OCP's presence has made industry-wide hardware design faster, cheaper, and greener. Even if a company isn't an official member, Bullock says, "the degree of collaboration in the industry is dramatically higher than it was before OCP became active."
Are you an Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services insider with insight to share? Contact Julie Bort via email at
When you think of voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, the words “emotional” and “expressive” probably don’t come to mind. Instead, there’s that recognizably flat and polite voice, devoid of all affect — which is fine for an assistant, but isn’t going to work if you want to use synthetic voices in games, movies and other storytelling media.
That’s why a startup called Sonantic is trying to create AI that can convincingly cry and convey “deep human emotion.” The U.K.-based startup announced last month that it has raised €2.3 million in funding led by EQT Ventures, and today it’s releasing a video that shows off what its technology is capable of.
You can judge the results for yourself in the video below; Sonantic says all the voices were created by its technology. Personally, I’m not sure I’d say the performances were interchangeable with a talented human voice actor — but they’re certainly more impressive than anything synthetic that I’ve heard before.
Sonantic’s actual product is an audio editor that it’s already testing with game makers. The editor includes a variety of different voice models, and co-founder and CEO Zeena Qureshi said those models are based on and developed with actual voice actors, who then get to share in the profits.
“We delve into the details of voice, the nuances of breath,” Qureshi said. “That voice itself needs to tell a story.”
Co-founder and CTO John Flynn added that game studios are an obvious starting point, as they often need to record tens of thousands of lines of dialogue. This could allow them to iterate more quickly, he said, to alter voices for different in-game circumstances (like when a character is running and should sound like they’re out of breath) and to avoid voice strain when characters are supposed to do things like cry or shout.
At the same time, Flynn comes from the world of movie post-production, and he suggested that the technology applies to many industries beyond gaming. The goal isn’t to replace actors, but instead to explore new kinds of storytelling opportunities.
“Look how much CGI technology has supported live-action films,” he said. “It’s not an either-or. A new technology allows you to tell new stories in a fantastic way.”
Sonantic also put me in touch with Arabella Day, one of the actors who helped develop the initial voice models. Day remembered spending hours recording different lines, then finally getting a phone call from Flynn, who proceeded to play her a synthesized version of her own voice.
“I said to him, ‘Is that me? Did I record that?’ ” she recalled.
She described the work with Sonantic as “a real partnership,” one in which she provides new recordings and feedback to continually improve the model (apparently her latest work involves American accents). She said the company wanted her to be comfortable with how her voice might be used, even asking her if there were any companies she wanted to blacklist.
“As an actor, I’m not at all thinking that the future of acting is AI,” Day said. “I’m hoping this is one component of what I’m doing, an extra possible edge that I have.”
At the same time, she said that there are “legitimate” concerns in many fields about AI replacing human workers.
“If it’s going to be the future of entertainment, I want to be a part of it,” she said. “But I want to be a part of it and work with it.”
Airbnb-backed Zeus Living is laying off 73 employees, or almost 50% of the company, CEO Kulveer Taggar said in a blog post on Tuesday. The news comes less than two months after Zeus laid off about 80 people, or one-third of the company at the time, in late March.
Taggar laid out the reasons for the cuts in the blog post, explaining that the coronavirus will continue to challenge business travel, leading to projected revenue that's 55% percent of the company's original expectations. The company will also have fewer homes in its portfolio and has decided to return the PPP loan it applied for.
Zeus Living rents furnished properties for stays of longer than 30 days in six metro-areas around the country, including New York, catering specifically to business travelers. The company has direct partnerships with other companies, like scooter startup Bird, which use Zeus as a replacement for extended-stay hotels for employees.
Last month, Business Insider reported that Zeus was telling landlords that it wouldn't pay April and May rent and was asking landlords to switch from leases to revenue-share agreement.
"I'm very sorry," Taggar wrote in the blog post. "This is a decision I hoped we wouldn't have to make and is not how I wanted us to part ways. Zeus has been built not by the founders but by the sheer will, determination, and grit of remarkable people I care about and call my friends. I'm honored to have had the privilege of working, building, and learning alongside you and will forever be grateful."Â
Last week, Bloomberg reported that Zeus had raised $15 million in equity and debt at a $110 million valuation, almost half of its $205 million valuation when it last raised money in December. Existing investors CEAS Investments I, Initialized Capital Management and Soros Fund Management all participated in the down round.Â
Airbnb, which invested in the company's last round, was absent. Last week, Airbnb laid off 25% of its staff, or 1900 people, as the coronavirus has put almost all business and corporate travel on hold.Â
Zeus has not yet responded to a request for comment on the fundraising.Â
In the post, Taggar outlined the exit package: which includes severance, one month of health insurance, paid out vacation days (legally required in California, where Zeus is based), and employees keeping their laptops.Â
"As an early-stage company fighting for longevity, we did everything we could to provide those being laid off with the most robust severance package possible," Taggar wrote. "We wish we could have done more to reflect your true value."
Zeus has not yet responded to a request for more details on the severance package.
Layoffs have hit the short-term rental world hard, with Lyric, also backed, by Airbnb, laying off 20% of its employees, and Sonder, laying off 33% of its staff, or 400 people.Â
Apple has begun reopening some retail stores in the United States, marking the first time the tech giant has opened US stores since closing all locations outside of China indefinitely in March.
The company is beginning with 5 stores in Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, and South Carolina. Apple is encouraging customers to purchase items online when possible, and said that the focus of its open stores will be on providing customer service and support through the Genius Bar.
Apple also said each store will implement safety procedures that involve social distancing, conduct temperature checks, and require customers to wear face coverings before entering.
"As local guidance varies around the US there may be slight modifications to our procedures," Apple said in a statement. "As always, our thoughts are with everyone affected by COVID-19 and those working around the clock to treat, study and contain its spread."
Do you work at an Apple Store that has recently reopened or is planning to reopen? If so, we want to hear from you. Contact this reporter at
The move comes after Apple began reopening stores in South Korea, Australia, and Austria following its unprecedented decision to temporarily close all stores outside of China in March to prevent the spread of COVID-19. New cases in those countries have decreased dramatically, in part because of early response and widespread testing, and retail and public life has started to reopen.Â
In the US, cases continue to increase, with more than 80,000 people dead, though outbreak rates vary and new reported cases have started to decline in several states, including Alaska and Idaho, according to an analysis by The New York Times. That said, much of the country still struggles with limited testing capacity. Alabama, where Apple is opening one store, has seen an increase in new cases of COVID-19, according to The Times' analysis.
Coronavirus-prevention measures in the US have also had a dramatic effect on the economy, with unemployment surging to 14.7% as the country lost a record 20.5 million jobs. In response, a number of states have eased lockdown measures and begun reopening certain parts of the economy, despite rates of COVID-19. Such states include Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Kansas, and Missouri among others.
Apple has not yet said when it will reopen stores in other parts of the country. Apple's stores in Georgia, which was among the first states to reopen and where the tech giant has six retail locations, remain temporarily closed. Â Â
The company's stores and the staff that run them are the company's face to the general public, from informing customers about new and existing products to facilitating customer support. Apple has been asking some staff to work remotely from home in support roles as stores have remained closed.Â
Apple has also launched several new products during the several weeks that most of its global stores remained closed, including the iPhone SE and new iPad Pro.Â
Here's a running list of the Apple retail stores in the US that have opened so far, according to Apple's website.Â
Alon Gilady, CEO of RenovAI, told me his startup is trying to solve the problem that many of us face when we’re moving into a new home — we aren’t interior designers, but we can’t afford to hire real designers, either.
Apparently Gilady’s co-founder and vice president of products, Alon Chelben, had this issue himself when he moved into a new apartment and tried to use DIY design applications, only to be disappointed by the “very ugly” results.
“He thought to himself, ‘I cannot design,’ ” Gilady said. “From that idea, we realized that there’s an opportunity here.”
While there are other online design services, Gilady said most of them are focused on creating 3D visualizations, or on connecting customers with human designers.
RenovAI (which is part of the current class of startups at Alchemist Accelerator) can also create visualizations, but its focus is on building AI tools that understand the principles of good design. And while the team started out by thinking of the consumer problem, they decided that the best path to market was by working with retailers.
RenovAI’s products can design an entire space based on a customer’s specifications and taste. There’s also RenovAI Scout, which recommends a specific product based on your taste and current room design; and Complete the Look, which recommends items that complement what you’re already buying.
But what does it mean for an AI to understand good design? Gilady said the team has trained its algorithms on “thousands of different floor plans” to understand the rules of how a room should be laid out, and also broken down design into 16 different “substyles.”
“Our picture recommendation engine goes through the images to understand the relations between the items, the color, the palette, the texture and material,” he said. “It does a statistical analysis to understand how things are matching each other, how to create the design rules of every substyle.”
RenovAI already has pilots with online furniture retailers like Made.com and Mobly. And Gilady said that there’s plenty of opportunity for growth, even during the COVID-19 pandemic, as plenty of people are stuck at home and wanting to make improvements.
“I think more and more retailers and mom-and-pop shops are paying more attention to online,” he said. “[They know] that if they offer a more fun and seamless experience online, in the long run, it’s a bigger opportunity and we can reach more customers.”
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