Rising healthcare costs, an aging population, stifling regulations and the complexity of present-day technological offerings make the trillion-dollar healthcare industry ripe for disruption.

Not only are we finding new and innovative ways to get medical help, this global pandemic has led to explosive growth in telemedicine, digital devices and health-tracking apps — much of which needs a digital overhaul for doctors’ offices, insurance and the cumbersome HIPAA compliance.

While an infrastructure focus might not seem exciting, it is necessary to fix a broken, profit-driven system of paperwork and delays while the sick and suffering are saddled with mountains of debt.

Our current climate is the perfect illustration of just how critical new and innovative investments in the space truly are. It’s also a lucrative opportunity. According to Deloitte, healthcare infrastructure is expected to continue growing above pace into 2023.

But finding those disruptive technologies is the tricky part. In a recent survey, we asked VCs to evaluate the digital health sector; for today, we reached out to active investors to find out what they are seeing within the healthcare infrastructure landscape, what they are most interested in right now and where they think the industry is headed.

In this survey, we hear from:

Carl Byers, F-Prime CapitalArvind Gupta, SOSVMatt Brennan, General CatalystBilal Zuberi, Lux CapitalSundeep Peechu, Felicis VenturesBryan Roberts, Venrock

Carl Byers, F-Prime Capital

Data and automation are the most interesting themes to me right now. We are only beginning to see the efficiencies and new capabilities opened up by getting the data organized and applying modern techniques. I’m more excited about the practical impact of robotic process automation (RPA) than I am enamored with AI, though both are exciting. I’d point to Notable Health in San Mateo as a company that has a great use of both technologies. I think we are about to embark on a new era of open data in healthcare where we finally solve the longstanding quest for interoperability with privacy mediated by patients. This will require a new developer ecosystem to come about built on new protocols rather than tired, legacy models. The key is for there to be demand pull from new services like virtual primary care (e.g. Firefly) or at-home solutions (like Ro or LetsGetChecked), instead of just a regulatory push (though that also will be important).

I’m spending time on RPA and open data, which is the key to improving healthcare B2B/infrastructure (see above). I think all markets have been overheated from a valuation standpoint, but if you find the right company, the opportunity is vast. If healthcare today is roughly 2x too expensive, getting data flowing is key to eliminating most of that waste. RPA can attack the administrative bloat while data exchange will allow doctors and patients to finally shop for the best value without the worry that something will be lost clinically in the translation.

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

If you just read the headlines, you’d be excused for thinking that venture capital investment into financial-technology companies is at an all-time high.

Big deals this year like Plaid’s $5.3 billion dollar exit to Visa, Galileo’s $1.2 billion sale to SoFi, along with CreditKarma’s $7.1 billion deal with Intuit made for a tidy start to 2020. But despite the later-stages of fintech-focused startups seeing healthy amounts of liquidity, aggregate venture capital activity in the historically well-funded sector was light in the first quarter of 2020.

According to a new Q1 2020 report covering venture data from CB Insights, VC dollars invested in the sector fell to levels not seen since 2017, while venture deal volume in fintech fell to 2016 levels. There are any number of reasons for this pullback that you can fill in, including COVID-19 and its resulting economic impacts. But what’s even more interesting is where the money and deals did and did not go inside of the various fintech categories.

Indeed, fintech has become so complicated as a startup grouping, it’s nearly as diffuse as discussing “SaaS” companies as a cohort. Of course, fintech is a product focus while SaaS is a business model (there are fintechs that sell SaaS, to be clear), but the general point holds.

Let’s dig into the top-line data to better understand the fintech funding landscape in Q1 (TechCrunch recently spoke to VCs on their expectations for the sector today and in the future). After the high-level stuff, we’ll dig into a few notes concerning sub-sectors of particular interest, including wealth management and insurtech.

Fintech’s Q1 venture scorecard

As the healthcare industry moves to value-based care, physician practices and health networks need to shift the things they bill for. Now it’s about maxing out patient “care” rather than the number of procedures physicians can perform.

In this move to a more high-touch, rapid communication world where doctors need to take (and document) every step to ensure that their patients stay on their medication, come in for their routine check-ups and receive follow ups on their initial visits, a service like Stellar Health that provides a checklist for practitioners looks really attractive to investors.

Indeed, the company is announcing a $10 million investment led by Point72 Ventures, with participation from previous investors Primary Venture Partners.

The two-year-old company did not say in a statement when the round closed, but it has been expanding significantly without the infusion of additional capital. It already is selling services in networks across 11 states. The new money will take the company’s operations to more states around the country and double the size of its team, according to a statement. By the end of 2020, Stellar Health expects to have customers managing care for at least 100,000 patients through its platform, according to a statement. 

“Stellar Health has the potential to transform healthcare by increasing the number of providers who successfully adopt value-based care models,” said Sri Chandrasekar, partner at Point72 Ventures. “They have developed a sophisticated and intuitive platform to drive VBC in the U.S. and we are excited to help them build on that momentum.”

Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) recently reported its first quarter results that failed to impress the market. But as social interactions go virtual and ad markets begin to recover, the stock is beginning to...

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Sketchfab is enabling multiplayer mode today with a new Sketchfab for Teams feature. The startup lets you share 3D models with other people in your company so that they can view, edit and download models. It could be particularly useful for companies working on augmented reality products, video games or even e-commerce websites with 3D configurators or visualizations.

Sketchfab has been working for years on a 3D model viewer for web browsers. It now works really well on both desktop and mobile. You can also import and export 3D models in many different file formats in order to reuse them in your favorite tool or engine — Sketchfab can convert files for you. That’s why 3D artists have been using the platform to share their work but also to sell 3D models, just like on a stock photography site.

The new team feature is essentially a sort of Google Drive specifically tailored for 3D — instead of opening spreadsheets and documents, you open 3D models. For instance, people working in marketing or communications could use 3D models to showcase products.

Even if your company uses a cloud storage system, such as Dropbox or Google Drive, to share files across the organization, people who are not 3D designers don’t necessarily want to use Blender to check if it’s the right file. Combining a shared drive with Sketchfab’s viewing and sharing tools becomes a compelling use case.

Like traditional cloud storage systems, you can manage permissions on a file-by-file basis. For instance, you could allow someone in your company to edit a 3D model while the rest of the team can only view the item. It works pretty much like the sharing menu in Google Docs.

You can also use Sketchfab for Teams with external collaborators. You can invite contractors to upload 3D models to your Sketchfab account or, if you’re a 3D designer, you can share 3D assets with a client to let them review your work. And if you want to share your 3D assets publicly, you can embed models on your website or use it in a 3D configurator.

The other advantage of switching to Sketchfab for Teams is that you get a central repository for all your 3D files. You can search, filter your assets by polycount, format and size, inspect 3D models in your browser and convert assets to multiple file formats.

Sketchfab recently launched another feature that could become quite popular on e-commerce website. The company added an AR button in its viewer, which lets you use your iPhone or Android phone to view a 3D object at scale through your camera before buying it.

Thanks to recent iOS and Android updates, you don’t need to install an app. It leverages the USDZ and glTF file formats that are natively supported by iOS and Android, respectively.

The company is launching Sketchfab for Teams with clients paying for the Enterprise plan. Eventually, the startup plans to roll it out to customers with a more limited feature set (Premium and Business customers).

Krishna Rangasayee, founder and CEO, at SiMa.ai, has 30 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. He decided to put that experience to work in a startup and launched SiMa.ai last year with the goal of building an ultra low-power software and chip solution for machine learning at the edge.

Today he announced a $30 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital with help from Amplify Partners, Wing Venture Capital and +ND Capital. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $40 million, according to the company.

Rangasayee says in his years as a chip executive he saw a gap in the machine learning market for embedded devices running at the edge and he decided to start the company to solve that issue.

“While the majority of the market was serviced by traditional computing, machine learning was beginning to make an impact and it was really amazing. I wanted to build a company that would bring machine learning at significant scale to help the problems with embedded markets,” he told TechCrunch.

The company is trying to focus on efficiency, which it says will make the solution more environmentally friendly by using less power. “Our solution can scale high performance at the lowest power efficiency, and that translates to the highest frames per second per watt. We have built out an architecture and a software solution that is at a minimum 30x better than anybody else on the frames per second,” he explained.

He added that achieving that efficiency required them to build a chip from scratch because there isn’t a solution available off the shelf today that could achieve that.

So far the company has attracted 20 early design partners, who are testing what they’ve built. He hopes to have the chip designed and the software solution in Beta in the Q4 timeframe this year, and is shooting for chip production by Q2 in 2021.

He recognizes that it’s hard to raise this kind of money in the current environment and he’s grateful to the investors, and the design partners who believe in his vision. The timing could actually work in the company’s favor because it can hunker down and build product while navigating through the current economic malaise.

Perhaps by 2021 when the product is in production, the market and the economy will be in better shape and the company will be ready to deliver.

UpKeep, a mobile-first platform for maintenance and operations collaboration, has today announced the close of a $36 million Series B financing round. The round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors Emergence Capital, Battery Ventures, Y Combinator, Mucker Capital and Fundersclub.

UpKeep was founded by Ryan Chan. Chan worked at Trisep Corporation, a chemical manufacturing company, before founding UpKeep and saw first-hand how plant maintenance was handled. Despite the fact that the plant had purchased software for facilities maintenance and operations, most of the data was written down on pen and paper before being input into the system because that software was desktop only.

The idea for UpKeep was born.

UpKeep meets maintenance workers where they are, which could be just about anywhere.

With any maintenance job, from changing a lightbulb in an office building to repairing a complicated piece of machinery on the floor of a manufacturing plant, there are usually three parties involved: the requester, the facilities manager, and the technician.

Before UpKeep, the requester would either send an email to the facilities manager or perhaps use some other software to let them know of the problem. The facilities manager would prioritize the various requests of the day and send out technicians to resolve them.

Technicians have to log plenty of information when they’re out on the job, but this usually involved writing this info down on paper and then returning to a desk to input the data into the system.

With UpKeep, the requester can use the app itself to notify the facilities manager of problems, or send an email that flows directly into the UpKeep system. Facilities managers use UpKeep to prioritize and assign issues to their team of technicians, who then receive the work orders right on UpKeep.

Instead of logging information on paper, these technicians can take pictures of the problem and note the parts they need or other details of the job right in the app. No duplication of effort.

UpKeep operates on a freemium model, allowing technicians to manage their own work for free. Collaborative use of the product across an organization costs on a per user on both an annual or monthly basis. The company offers various tiers, from a Starter Plan ($35/month/user) to an Enterprise Plan ($180/month/user).

Higher tier plans offer more in-depth reporting and analysis around the work that gets done. Chan explained that these reports are not necessarily about tracking people, though.

“Yes, we track technicians and it’s a tool to manage work done by people,” said Chan. “But a manufacturing facility really cares much more about the equipment. They can use UpKeep to manage things like how many hours of downtime a piece of equipment has, etc. It’s more targeted toward the actual asset and the equipment versus the person completing their work.”

[gallery ids="1987338,1987340"]

Chan said that around 80 percent of the company’s 400,000 users are on the free version of the app. Some brands on the app include Unilever, Siemens, DHL, McDonald’s, and Jet.com. Chan said UpKeep saw a 206 percent increase in revenue in 2019.

Important to the company’s future, UpKeep is working with OSHA and a group called SQF (Safe Quality Food) to offer templates around best practices during the pandemic. Now, maintenance workers and facilities staffs have a whole new checklist around sanitation and safety that many businesses are just getting up to speed on. UpKeep is working to make these new practices easier to adopt by providing those checklists directly to facilities managers.

This latest funding round brings UpKeep’s total funding to $48.8 million.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a couple of other use cases. Give me a use case that is online. Let’s do an e-commerce use case. Debjani Deb: Let’s take an e-commerce vendor. You are shopping on Overstock....

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Unicorns are companies with a billion dollar plus market cap. Learn about the many myths around unicorns and understand how bootstrapping can prepare you to go to venture capital firms. Understanding...

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In this challenging environment, unified communication and collaboration cloud solutions are key for productive customer, partner, and internal interactions. Cloud-based communication services...

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Debjani talks about hyper-personalization use cases based on her company’s customer DNA modeling technology. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to you as well as to ZineOne....

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Hummingbird Bioscience, a startup focused on developing new treatments for cancer and other diseases, announced today it has added $6 million to its previously announced Series B, bringing the round’s total to $25 million.

The extension was led by SK Holdings, and included participation from returning investors including Heritas Capital and SEEDS Capital, the investment arm of Enterprise Singapore, a government agency that supports small- to medium-sized businesses.

This brings Hummingbird Bioscience’s total raised so far to $65 million. The company says it extended its Series B because the round was oversubscribed. The new funding will be used to take treatments Hummingbird Bioscience is developing to clinical trials more quickly, and expand research and development for its early stage pipeline.

Heritas Capital Management executive director and CEO Chik Wai Chiew said in a press statement that “Heritas Capital is pleased to continue our backing of the Hummingbird team since leading its Series A extended round. Even as the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a slow-down in investing, we are mindful that backing innovative biotech companies, especially players such as Hummingbird, to develop cures for addressing patients’ needs remains our priority.”

The company published data earlier this year on two antibodies, both oncology treatments, and expects to make regulatory submissions to start Phase 1 studies in the second half of this year.

Hummingbird Bioscience has offices in Singapore, Houston and South San Francisco and strategic collaborations with Cancer Research United Kingdom and Amgen. It was previously awarded a product development grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

JobHopin, a Vietnam-based startup building an automated job-recruitment platform for Southeast Asia, announced today that it has closed a $2.45 million Series A. This brings JobHopin’s total raised so far to more than $3 million, from investors including SEMA Translink, KK Fund, Mynavi Corporation, Edulab Capital Partners, NKC Asia and Canaan Capital.

Founded in 2017 by CEO Kevin Tung Nguyen, JobHopin’s matching platform, called Bunny, uses machine learning to pair candidates with jobs. The company says there are about 60 million knowledge economy workers in Southeast Asia, and about 108 million job placements a year, but many positions take more than a month to fill on average, because many companies still do pre-screening work manually.

Bunny standardizes the language used in job descriptions and resumes for better data analysis, which is then used for to find promising candidates for open positions.

JobHopin also has a database of more than 1.4 million job candidates derived from online databases and 2,000 enterprise clients in Vietnam, and provides real-time market data analysis of salaries, talent supply (or the number of people qualified to fill certain roles) and hiring demand. Those features can be integrated into services like online education platforms, testing services and third-party job portals.

In a press statement, EduLab Capital Partners Liam Pisano said, “We are excited to now be part of the JobHopin story and lend our support. This is a company that is connecting the growing Vietnamese economy to a talented workforce, while finding ways to help the jobseeker improve their profile and bridge the skills gap.”

This feature from TechCrunch covers the highlights of the recent temporary, conditional relief for smaller companies and startups affected by COVID-19 to pursue crowdfunding offerings. For this...

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“I just think change unfairly favors the startup, the nimble small company,” says Roelof Botha.

The Sequoia partner, whose portfolio includes Unity, 23andMe, Instagram, Instacart, Xoom and YouTube, says he’s hopeful about the opportunities this pandemic has created for companies across a variety of sectors, including healthcare, cloud computing, social and others.

We spoke for an hour with Botha about several topics, including how user behavior is rapidly evolving, trends he’s seeing, his outlook on economic recovery, how he’s evaluating new investments and how fundraising itself is changing. Fun fact: Sequoia has made 10 investments over Zoom since the coronavirus pandemic forced us to stay at home.

The full conversation was broadcast on YouTube, and the embed appears below.

Side note: Extra Crunch Live is our new virtual speaker series for Extra Crunch members. Folks can ask their own questions live during the chat, with guests that include Aileen Lee, Kirsten Green, Mark Cuban and many, many more. You can check out the schedule here.

Below, you’ll find a lightly edited transcript of our recent chat with Botha. Enjoy!

The differences in fundraising based on stage

When you’re listening to a seed-stage company, it’s often about the story. The founders paint a vision of the future. That’s part of what I love about my job, by the way. You’re sitting there and you’re trying to imagine what the world is going to look like one day and whether this company is on the right side of history. Or is it implausible that this will happen? It’s so much fun to sit there and think about that. At the seed stage, it’s about the story.

As you get to a Series A or Series B stage, the company will definitely start to have some metrics: usage numbers, early adoption numbers. If it’s an enterprise company, what are people willing to pay for your product? You start to get a sense of the metrics that back up the story. If the metrics don’t support the story, then you start to wonder if that company makes sense. In the long run, you need to have financials that flow from the metrics. But that’s typically at a Series C or later stage. And clearly, by the time a company goes public, you need to have connected story to metrics to financials.

Editor’s note: Get this weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use every Saturday morning by email (7am PT). Subscribe here.

A specific type of small startup has a window to raise crowdfunding in a somewhat less regulated way than normally required in the U.S., based on a temporary set of rule changes by the Securities and Exchange Commission announced this week. Excited yet?

The new terms are generally geared towards the millions of mom-and-pop businesses that were the intended recipients of the PPP grants, who did not actually receive those grants as needed, as Jon Shieber covered on TechCrunch this week. However, this grim fall-back measure to stave off disaster for a key part of the economy is also a way for small startups to start creating jobs a little faster, potentially. One of the main adjustments: if you’re looking to raise between $107,000 and $250,000, you don’t need to have your financial statements reviewed first by an outside auditor. Instead, the SEC says you just need “[f]inancial statements of the issuer and certain information from the issuer’s Federal income tax returns, both certified by the principal executive officer.”

The catch is you still have to follow a long list of other do’s and don’ts provided by the SEC, such as being in business least six months prior, and clear disclosures to investors about your financial reliance on this “relief.” The temporary permissiveness is set to expire by August 31.

Investors bet big on robotic automation during the pandemic

Automation will happen at an even more foundational level than one might guess as supply chains try to resolve huge new types of kinks. Here’s how Shahin Farshchi of Lux Capital describes it, in a sample from one of our investor surveys on Extra Crunch this week.

COVID-19 revealed that our just-in-time manufacturing and logistics infrastructure cannot react to unexpected change. We expect the best practices of tech companies: rapidly adopting new tools and quickly iterating on their products and processes to become common in the realm of manufacturing and logistics. Engineers will be handed credit cards to try the latest tools, building on open source will be widely embraced, and making bets on products from startups will become the norm in this industry which has its roots in the industrial revolution.

Where are the opportunities? Here’s DCVC’s Kelly Chen:

Despite the storm, we are optimistic about a number of things:

As the crisis spotlighted, global supply chains are a delicate balance of factors that can easily be disrupted. In addition to growing labor costs, regulatory uncertainty, and higher international shipping costs, we believe companies will increasingly innovate on domestic manufacturing channels. “Bring manufacturing home” is a cry reverberating across many industries in many countries.Online commodity retail is finally getting a kick in the tail. Last year, 4% of groceries were ordered online. In a recent large survey after COVID-19, a third of respondents ordered groceries online, many for the first time. The traditional two-day delivery will benefit, but we think momentum will shift to micro-fulfillment, where large hubs will service distributed local warehouses that are much closer to the customer, auto-fulfilling orders within hours.Separate from fulfillment, we believe the hundreds of thousands of new manual delivery jobs will endure. We predict it will be years before tech allows for scalable automated door-to-door delivery.As employers explore tech to automate labor in tough times, they find that humans are incredibly difficult to replace. At DCVC, we like tech that automates the kind of tasks that could never be done at human scale — things that scale the value of human skills, not replace them.

We also published a survey on media startup investing this week, and another on gaming technology infrastructure.

The benefits of a commercial real estate collapse in SF

Full-time CTO and long-time TechCrunch columnist Jon Evans has a fun muse for any reader who is looking to stay in the Bay Area and also pay less for housing. What is going to happen to all of the commercial real estate that is getting rendered obsolete as many companies go big on remote? Presumably a lot more housing stock. Here’s a taste of the full thing over on TechCrunch:

Consider San Francisco, everyone’s favorite overpriced, overcrowded, inequality poster child. It has roughly 150 million square feet of combined office and retail space at the moment. If the COVID-19 lockdown-then-recession eventually eats 20% of that — which is plausible between the retailpocalypse and what I will christen the “officepocalypse,” i.e. the revealed cost savings of working from home — that’s 30 million square feet of empty space.

If converted to housing, this could increase the city’s total housing stock by well over 10%. That would drive prices and rents, already pressured by the recession, way down — while presumably still remaining simultaneously profitable, since current prices are so high. Needless to say this conversion would also create a lot of jobs. (Although, in some cases, no conversion will be required.)

The rebirth of the vertical B2B marketplace startup

It was one of those seemingly guaranteed winners of the dot-com bubble, that got torched along with most other ideas around back then. Today, marketplaces for businesses in complex supply chains are back in vogue, Shieber writes for Extra Crunch this week. The original thesis was that “thousands of small businesses were making specialized products consumed by larger businesses in huge industries, but the reach of smaller players was limited by their dependence on a sales structure built on conferences and personal interactions.”

The opportunity has been clarified over the course of the past decade.

The first sign of life for the directory model came with the success of GoodRX back in 2011. The company proved that when information about pricing in a previously opaque industry becomes available, it can unleash a torrent of new demand.

“GoodRX did this to huge success,” said Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, who invested in Knowde, a marketplace that follows a similar model. “The idea of crawling the public internet and creating structured data and winning SEO or doing SEO for the first time for something so you get a lot of traffic from buyers so you have something to offer sellers so you can get the sellers to cooperate with you… that playbook can be taken to many different industries.”

Across the week

TechCrunch:

This early Facebook investor wants to find smart students a job at the next Facebook

We need more video games that are social platforms first, games second

Tech for good during COVID-19: Sky-high gifts, extra help and chips

Data shows which tech roles might be most vulnerable amid layoffs

Latin America Roundup: Big rounds, big mergers and a $3.8M pandemic fund from Nubank

Extra Crunch:

AR is the answer to plummeting retail sales during lockdown

TechCrunch’s top 16 picks from Techstars April virtual demo days

Longtime VC Todd Chaffee of IVP says late-stage scene is now ‘M&A world’

As private investment cools, enterprise startups may try tapping corporate dollars

The great unicorn retreat

Around TechCrunch

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#EquityPod

From Alex Wilhelm:

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

Every week we write this post with some opening line akin to wow, what a week, huh? This is yet another one of those weeks. Perhaps this is just life now, and every week will stretch before us, similar to what Gandalf said after killing that Balrog, that “every day was as long as the life age of the Earth.”

Anyhoo, we recorded Equity to try and make a little sense of the week as there was a lot going on. So, Natasha, Danny, and Alex once again gathered to parse it all. Here’s a rough digest of the topics from this episode:

Techstars’ virtual demo days. Natasha and Alex are listening in to as many Techstars  virtual demo confabs as they can along with other TC staff, pulling out favorites as we go. Today we dug into what is working, and what isn’t with virtual demo days.While VC Twitter might make it seem like every firm is open for business, that is not the reality. We talk about signaling risk, external signs a firm is investing, and throw pro rata chat around in between.Peanut, a social network for women, raised $12 million and that is the good news we needed this week. Think of it as a better, cleaner and more intimate version of your favorite Facebook group. About 1.6 million are on the platform.Every Mother raised a small sum to bring safety and community to pre and post natal workouts for mothers.Robinhood’s Series F. The new Robinhood  round values the company at around $8.3 billion, a huge number but one that wasn’t as high as we might have expected, given how much its valuation used to grow between new funding events.Airbnb cut 1,900 people in a devastating round of layoffs for the travel and hospitality company. We discuss o-founder and CEO Brian Chesky’s detailed blogpost about the cuts, and whether it is better to be a public or a private company during this pandemic.Uber cut staff this week, and pumped money into a massive Lime downround that may see it offload its own micromobility business onto the smaller company. Not a good week for Uber, not a good week for Lime.

We didn’t get to chat API funding rounds or the unicorn retreat, or even really riff on earnings. There’s so much going on! But, we’ll be back Monday morning so sit tight.