Early this afternoon Shippo, a shipping software and services company, announced that it has closed a $30 million Series C. The funding round roughly doubles the capital that the firm has raised to-date, from a little over $29 million to just under $60 million.

The round, however, wasn’t put together recently. As is often the case with funding events, Shippo raised its capital a while back and is only announcing it now. According to its CEO, Laura Behrens Wu, her startup started raising its Series C in late Q4 2019, with the capital hitting its accounts the day after Christmas. So, Shippo started 2020 well capitalized, and should have a comfortable capital base heading into this year’s economic uncertainty.

The funding round was led by a new investor, D1 Capital Partners, and participated in by a number of prior investors including Uncork Capital (which led a 2014 Seed investment into the company), Union Square Ventures (which led the company’s Series A in 2016) and Bessemer (which led its 2017 Series B).

Growth, margins

Shippo sits between retailers and consumers, helping sellers ship goods to buyers quickly and, it promises, inexpensively. The startup works with nearly five dozen shipping partners around the world, and plugs into the merchant worlds of Amazon, Shopify, Wix and others.

Like a number of successful startups, Shippo is trying to take something that is complex, and make it simple while generating revenue along the way. There are a number of loose examples we can lean on. For example, Plaid took all the complexity of talking to different financial institutions and shoved it into an accessible API. Twilio did something similar for telephony. Stripe made payments simple for others to integrate. You get the idea. Shippo wants to the same for shipping.

So far its model has good momentum. Heading into its funding round the firm had doubled (“100% growth,” Behrens Wu) in the preceding year, the sort of expansion that investors covet. It’s never bad to raise on the back of aggressive growth, as Shippo’s Series C shows; the company’s new valuation is “slightly higher” than TechCrunch’s estimate of $150 million, according to its CEO.

And even more, Shippo’s hybrid software and sales model (it charges for access to its shipping software and generates revenue from select shipping spend) creates attractive economics. Shippo’s gross margins are right around 80%, according to the startup, putting the company in the middle-upper tier of SaaS firms. Its growth isn’t based on the upselling shipping by a few points at volume; Shippo does have venture-ready economics.

It might seem odd to stress that point, but after WeWork’s implosion, it’s worth checking to make sure that startups raising as if they have strong revenue quality actually do.

Shippo has big aspirations, as you’d expect. “When you think about shipping software,” Behrens Wu told TechCrunch during an interview, “most people, even in tech, can’t name a single shipping software company, but everyone can name one or two payment companies. Everyone knows PayPal, Stripe, maybe Adyen or Braintree.” She wants to make Shippo as well known for shipping as Stripe is for payments.

There was secular movement towards her vision even before the pandemic. Today, online shopping — the grist for Shippo’s mill — is even more important. And it’s likely to become even more so over time, if growth shown by Amazon and Shopify in recent quarters is any indication of what’s to come, which means that the market for Shippo’s services will grow in time, and it’s always easier to grow in an expanding market than to claw for share in a stagnant pool.

Finally, in addition to its new capital and raised valuation, Shippo also announced that it has hired Catherine Stewart, former chief business officer at WordPress juggernaut Automattic, to be its COO. If Shippo is hiring a COO now, then we expect to see a CFO added around the time of its Series D. And then we get to start annoying the company about its IPO timeline.

Shippo is one of the lucky startups that raised right before the world changed. Now it’s up to the startup to conserve cash while continuing to grow while the global economy struggles. Let’s see how it performs.

After raising $8 million in November to roll up top Amazon marketplace companies, the new Boston-based startup Perch has begun putting that money to work in its first few deals.

The brainchild of Chris Bell, formerly Wayfair’s head of logistics and a Bain & Co. principal, Perch is well-positioned to serve as unifier of a bevy of disparate products in one nest.

The company’s recent acquisitions include brands selling a sand anchor for beach umbrellas (Beachr), a waterproof apron for cooking, a hip sciatica brace (Bodymate) and other similar products that wouldn’t be out of place in a late-night infomercial or on the Home Shopping Network.

“We believe that the future of product R&D is entrepreneurs that are closest to the problems,” says Bell in an interview. “We look for products that are top three in their niche… [Their founders] want some liquidity and we can bring that onto our platform and add price optimization, ad-spend optimization and cross-geography marketing.”

In a way, Perch is tapping into a similar urge to give America’s huge population of tinkerers and inventors better access to market and a chance to monetize their ideas à la Quirky, the failed attempt by GE to turn gadget ideas into new product lines for GE. 

By contrast, Perch waits for the businesses to gain traction, then offers to buy the products from their owners and give them up to two years of participation in any upside that the product generates at certain milestones that Perch sets for the participating entrepreneurs.

“Three years ago I would not have started this business,” says Bell. “Amazon has made this a much more defensible place.” 

The Amazon marketplace remains somewhat of the Wild West, where intellectual property rights are often ignored and successful products are copied at lightning speed by vendors with access to the same commoditized supply chains. It’s really marketing muscle and an ability to get better margins through scale that creates winners, it seems, and Perch is using its technical know-how to get to the top. 

Acquisitions can range from $750,000 to $2 million upfront with the upside on the back end still to come, according to Bell. Financing this operation is a $4.5 million equity round and $3.5 million in debt financing by some of the nation’s leading venture firms. Perch won’t buy any company that’s doing less than $250,000 in revenue.

Spark Capital led the deal for Perch, with general partner Alex Finkelstein taking a seat on the company’s board of directors. Tectonic Ventures also participated. Finkelstein, who led Spark’s investment in Wayfair, was introduced to Bell through Wayfair’s chief operating officer. He immediately saw the potential in Perch’s pitch.

“If you look at it from a macro standpoint. Amazon is growing very quickly and the third-party marketplace is growing very quickly. Within the next year we’re going to have a large portfolio and it’ll do well in any environment,” Finkelstein said. 

Amazon’s third-party sellers are a $200 billion market and the largest single vendor is a $500 million seller, Bell noted, and that is an opportunity that a well-capitalized company can exploit.

“We’re going to be managing hundreds of micro-brands and the only way to do that is through a technology platform,” Bell said. “They’re generally niche products that are not big enough that Amazon Basics would come into that category. We’re competing in smaller categories, but even some of these niche categories are tens of millions to hundreds of millions in revenue.”

While Perch has seen some impacts from the economic shutdown caused by the government response to the COVID-19 epidemic, the company expects the shift in consumer behavior to be the wind beneath its wings, rather than against its branches.

“Medium-term it’s pushing more people to buy online,” says Bell. And Perch isn’t slowing its pace of acquisitions. “We made two acquisitions in March and we’re likely going to close another two in the next two weeks.”

Securitization is a critical function of the modern financial system. Banks “package” individual loans, say a mortgage or an auto loan, into a group with similar characteristics and sell them to other investors. That gets the debt off the originator’s balance sheet so that they can offer more loans, while also offering private investors alternative investment opportunities to buy up.

Despite the scale of the market — the trade association SIFMA’s research shows that the volume for asset-backed securities reached more than $300 billion in 2019 (excluding mortgages) — much of that structuring remains relatively ad hoc, with structuring agents and buyers constantly seeking each other out.

Much in the way that real estate and startup crowdsourcing platforms democratized access to those alternative investments, Cadence wants to expand access to securitized products while increasing the velocity of transactions for originators and lowering prices. Founder and CEO Nelson Chu said that “our job is to bring transparency and efficiency to this market and through all the various things that we do.” The company operates on top of the Ethereum blockchain network.

Founded in 2018 and launched publicly in 2019, the New York City-based capital markets startup has now structured $88 million in notes across 76 offerings and 12 originators according to the company. The firm’s public leaderboard shows that the largest originators were Sellers Funding with more than $23 million and Wall Street Funding with almost $26 million in transaction volume. Chu said that “I think we are the 21st largest structuring agent the United States in 2020 so far,” which is not a bad place to be for a young startup in a massive multi-trillion dollar market.

In addition to that $88 million volume processed on the company’s retail platform, Cadence also structured a $40 million whole business securitization with FAT Brands, the owner of restaurant chains like Fatburger and Yalla Mediterranean. The company notes that the structuring reduced the company’s interest costs by $2 million.

The company has hit a number of milestones over the past two years. It closed a seed round of $4 million in December led by Revel VC, with Revel’s Thomas Falk, Navtej S. Nandra, former President of E*Trade, and portfolio manager Oliver Wriedt joining the company’s board.

In addition, back in 2019, the company said that it also became the first digital asset company to launch a digital asset ticker on Bloomberg Terminal and also the first to join the Bloomberg App Portal. It also secured the first financial debt rating for a digital asset.

The company has a variety of revenue streams from different areas of its platform. It takes transaction fees on each deal, but also derives revenues from hosting data related to the performance of the underlying loans. Given the company’s technology stack, it has better and more verified data about how the underlying assets that back each security are performing, giving all investment holders a much more robust look at the health of their portfolio.

Longer term, Cadence’s goal is to move to a mostly SaaS model for originators and buyers. “We can be very, very beneficial to every single counterparty involved when we become that,” Chu said, adding “we essentially are Switzerland … because our incentives are all aligned.”

I asked about how the company is responding to the COVID-19 situation, and Chu said that as the world saw in the 2008 global financial crisis, “there are pockets of opportunity here that we continue to find, and we allow retail, accredited investors to get access to that.” Chu gave the example of game developers waiting on payments from Apple and Google who need short-term loans to cover costs.

In addition to Revel, other investors in the seed round included Morgan Creek Digital, Nimble Ventures, Argo, Tuesday Capital, Manatt, and Recharge Capital. R&R Venture Partners, a joint VC firm of former Citi chairman Richard D. Parsons and Clinique chairman Ronald S. Lauder, also participated.

CircleCI, an early adherent to the notion of continuous delivery when it launched in 2011, announced a $100 million Series E investment today. It comes on top of a $56 million round last July.

The round was led by IVP and Sapphire Ventures . Under the terms of the deal, Cack Wilhelm will be joining the CircleCI board. Jai Das from Sapphire will also be joining the board as an observer.

Today’s investment brings the total raised to $215 million, according to the company, with $156 million coming over the last 8 months. The company did not want to discuss its current valuation.

Circle CI CEO Jim Rose says with so much uncertainty because of COVID-19 he welcomes not only the money, but the quality of the firms and people involved in the investment.

“We’re really excited to get both IVP and Sapphire because they’ve seen all of it all the way through public and beyond. Given all of the nuttiness over the last few months obviously having cash on the balance sheet is extremely helpful, but the other part, too is that this a time when you want to have more brains around the table, not fewer. And so being able to get people to help out and just think about the problems that we’re encountering right now is really helpful,” Rose told TechCrunch .

Rose recognizes the huge challenge everyone is facing, but he sees this switch to remote workforces really driving the need for more automation, something his company is in a position to help DevOps teams with.

“What we’ve seen from a DevOps perspective is that this forced migration to remote-only for so many organizations has really driven the urgency for more automation in the DevOps pipeline,” he said.

He said this has led to a huge surge in usage on the platform in recent weeks, and today’s investment will at least partly go towards making sure there are enough resources in place to keep the platform stable whatever comes.

“When we think about money and we think about where we’re investing in the near term, we’re investing a lot in making sure that the platform is stable and available and supporting all of our customers as they go through this. You know this is a difficult time, a difficult transition and we’re trying to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to support our customers through that process,” Rose said.

Many companies at this stage of startup maturity begin to look ahead to an IPO, but Rose isn’t ready to discuss that, especially in the current economic climate. “We’re going to have to get folks to some kind of liquidity at some point, but I think right now our focus is on really investing in the platform and investing in our customers and then we’ll let the market clear out and figure out what the new normal looks like,” he said.

The company would consider making some acquisitions with its base of capital if the right opportunity came along. “We’re always evaluating and always looking around. One of the interesting things about our space is that it’s flooded with new and innovative approaches to point problems. There are a lot of companies that are interesting, so we’re definitely always looking around,” he said.

Sramana Mitra: You don’t need them to finish the product? Shruti Gandhi: No. One of our companies barely had a deck. Sramana Mitra: You want customer validation from their network. Then you want to...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 480th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, April 9, 2020, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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WorkClout, a graduate of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 cohort, announced today that it has shifted its focus from manufacturing automation to manufacturing performance support and has raised a $2.3 million seed round.

The funding was led by Spider Capital with participation from Y Combinator, Liquid 2, Soma Capital, Pioneer Fund, Mehta Ventures and several individual investors.

When the company launched last year, it was looking at helping customers drive operational efficiency in their processes, but WorkClout founder and CEO Arjun Patel says they were seeing that there was a ceiling in terms of how much efficiency they could squeeze out of work processes using software.

At that point, Patel decided to take a step back and do some research to figure out how WorkClout could best help manufacturing customers with its software-based solutions. After surveying 124 manufacturers, he says that he realized that these companies really needed help training front-line workers, an area he says is called performance support.

“We found that most of the companies were saying that employees are the biggest challenge that they have to face in terms of how to engage them better or how to empower them better, because ultimately they realize people, even if there is automation, are still the driving force for a lot of sectors,” Patel told TechCrunch.

Towards the end of last year, the company built a new tool to help customers train employees for complex front-line tasks. The workers might have a phone or tablet, which shows them how to complete each task, and gives them feedback as they move through a set of tasks. It also enables these workers to communicate with one another and with management about issues they are seeing on the line. Managers can monitor communication and see how workers are doing on a back-end system in the office.

“We gave them the ability to allow employees to capture and share critical information in real time on the factory floor, where the goal is to actually create standardized multimedia and training content for machines, processes and stations, allowing new and existing employees to get better insight into their work, and at the same time, allowing employees to communicate better about problems on the floor and reduce downtime,” he explained.

Patel recognizes that this is a difficult time to pivot, but says he believes it puts the company in a better position to succeed in the long term. He has cut the team from nine to five employees in an effort to run lean for the short term.

He hopes to begin hiring again in the fourth quarter this year or, at the latest, by Q1 next year. He plans to use that time to build out the product and prepare for a big go-to market push whenever the economy begins to rebound.

He sees this money giving him a long runway of 2.5 years with the company’s current burn and revenue rates, and that should give him enough time to wait out the current economic downturn.

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

We’ve dug into churn twice in the last week from an expert and data-based perspective. We’ve also spent a good amount of time talking to venture capitalists about how they are approaching today’s turbulent market.

This morning we’re adding to both conversations by bringing Menlo Ventures‘ Matt Murphy into the discussion. Murphy spent 16 years at Kleiner Perkins before joining Menlo Ventures in 2015. TechCrunch spoke with Murphy late last week, working to understand how startups should plan for what could prove a difficult Q2 and how churn expectations should adapt as the economy changes.

In Murphy’s view, Q1 startup results are likely to come in a bit better than some expect considering the how the quarter finished from a macroeconomic perspective. Q2, however, is a different beast. Murphy expects B2B startup growth to slow, which could make the world much harder for the cohort of startups with less than 18 months of cash; fundraising off slowing growth as valuations broadly dip is not a recipe for an enjoyable capital cycle.

So let’s talk about how Q2 is going to impact startups and how young companies might respond. After we get through the nitty-gritty stuff, I pulled a bit more from our interview as a treat, exploring what the Menlo Ventures investor thinks about the recent Notion deal, and how the firm’s portfolio is set up heading into a possible recession.

Planning for a turbulent Q2

With in-person classes canceled, we’re about to start our online versions of Hacking for Defense and Hacking for Oceans (and here). The classes are built on the Lean Startup methodology: customer discovery, agile engineering and the business/mission model canvas. So how do our students get out of the building to do customer discovery when they can’t leave home? How do startups do it?

Reminder: What’s the point of talking to customers?

Talking to customers seems like a simple idea, but most founders find it’s one of the hardest things they have to do. Entrepreneurs innately believe they understand a customer’s problem and just need to spend their time building a solution. We now have a half-century of data to say that’s wrong. To build products people want and will really use, founders first need to validate the problem/need, then understand whether their solution solves that problem (i.e. finding product-market fit).

Finally, to have a better chance of a viable enterprise, they need to test all the other hypotheses in their business/mission model (pricing, demand creation, revenue, costs, etc.).

The key principles of customer development are:

There are no facts inside the building, so get the heck outside.All you have are a series of untested hypotheses.You can test your hypotheses with a series of experiments with potential customers.

Now with sheltering-in-place the new normal, we’ll add a fourth principle:

According to a recent Market Study Report, the global digital transformation market is expected to grow at 24% CAGR to $2.2 billion by 2025. Digital transformation refers to the application of...

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This morning, Utah-based SaaS startup Podium announced that it has closed a $125 million Series C led by Y Combinator’s Continuity fund, with participation from Sapphire Ventures and Alkeon, and Recruit Co. Ltd. Prior investors IVP, GV, Summit, and Accel also took part in the funding event.

The new capital values Podium at around $1.5 billion, and brings the company’s known capital raised to just under $218 million.

Notably, the venture round wasn’t put together back in Q4 2019 only to be announced now. Instead, according to Podium CEO Eric Rea, discussions began in mid-February, resulting in multiple term sheets. The startup signed the winning contract toward the end of the month, and both YC and Sapphire followed through with the money. Rea praised the pair of investors in a call, citing their “integrity” for following through with the deals sans chicanery despite the U.S. economy falling off a cliff after terms were reached.

The Podium round, then, is one of the last put together before disruptions stemming from COVID-19 shook the domestic economy and stock market. Let’s explore, then, why Podium was able to raise the money before the crisis, and what it’s up to now that the world has changed.

Growth

Podium’s software service that provides messaging tools for small business has grown rapidly, allowing the company to both attract capital and expand its offerings. As TechCrunch reported in March, the company has expanded into payments, allowing its SMB-skewing customer base to more quickly accept payment for goods and services.

Since launch, Podium’s payments transaction volume has been around twice what the company expected, the CEO told TechCrunch. Asked if payments would constitute a small, secondary revenue stream or a more material income that could rival its more traditional SaaS offerings, Rea placed it in the second category.

Podium’s growth is worth writing down in aggregate, based on both our prior reporting and new information from the company. Here’s the growth that the startup’s new payments revenue is now helping to continue:

$12 million ARR around the time of its $32 million May, 2017 Series A$30 million ARR around the end of 2017$50 million ARR around the time of its $60 million November 2018 Series BExpected to reach $60 million ARR by the end of 2018 (unclear if it met that timetable)$100 million ARR around the end of 2019 (as previously projected; confirmed this week by TechCrunch)

Past giving a valuation peg and confirming that it met its 2019 goal of reaching $100 million ARR (plus or minus a month is our read of the achievement), Podium didn’t share more. So, we don’t know precisely how large it is today. But we do know that investors paid less than a 15x revenue multiple for the firm.

That almost feels cheap in a pre-COVID-19 mindset. Now, in the new reality, it seems like a fair price.

So, what’s ahead for one of Silicon Slopes’ brightest lights? Free stuff, it turns out.

Plans

Along with its fundraising announcement, Podium told TechCrunch that it is rolling out a free tier of its service, called Podium Starter. The company is doing what a number of tech firms are, namely offering parts of their technology at zero cost to people and businesses that might need it; here’s Boston’s Drift doing something along similar lines, for example. Podium Starter’s wait list is live today, with the startup promising to offer the service to “every local business in the United States” in time.

But before Podium put together a free tier to help the suddenly flailing economy, it was seeing big growth; Rea told TechCrunch that the first few months of 2020 were record-setting. Then, of course, things changed for the economy. So where does that leave Podium, which has a big footprint with small businesses?

The company is upbeat, noting that as many individuals are avoiding face-to-face communication, messaging tooling fits the moment. As does its payments service, as folks don’t want to exchange money in person. What will happen to the firm’s growth rate, of course, isn’t clear. It seems doubtful that the startup will continue to grow as it did before while the economy remains depressed.

But, no dip is forever, and Podium has never had more money than it does right now. That should help it survive the downturn. We’ll check back with the company in a few months when it may have new data to share.

Sramana Mitra: What was Waveform going to do in 2006? Sina Khanifar: We graduated college and were trying to figure out which up and coming industry we could get started in. My dad had just come back...

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Primary healthcare platform One Medical is one of the most funded on-demand healthcare companies. On January 31, it went public on NASDAQ under the ticker ONEM and has recently reported quarterly...

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Sina started tinkering with bootstrapped entrepreneurship way back in college. It has paid off. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you...

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Yapily, one of a number of fintech startups that offer an opening banking API to let enterprises, such as financial service providers and merchants, connect to banks, has raised $13 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Lakestar, which is also a backer of fintech unicorn Revolut.

Existing investors HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, and LocalGlobe also participated. Yapily last disclosed $5.4 million in seed funding in May 2019, and counts the likes of Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise chairman and co-founder), Ott Kaukver (Twilio’s CTO), Roberto Nicastro (UniCredit’s former deputy CEO) and Frank Strauss (Former CEO of Deutsche Postbank) as angel backers.

Founded in mid 2017 by ex-Goldman Sachs employee Stefano Vaccino, Yapily’s open banking platform makes it easier for various service providers to connect to banks. Specifically, it provides a way to retrieve financial data and initiate payments via a “single secure API” that in turn connects to each supported bank’s open API.

Customers are said to include Fortune 500 companies and fast growth fintechs, including Intuit QuickBooks, where Yapily’s API is used by the accounting software provider to help SMEs access insights and financial information from bank accounts in the U.K., France, and Ireland. Another customer of Yapily is GoCardless, the London fintech that makes it easy to offer customers the option to pay by direct debit.

More broadly, Yapily’s platform can be used by anything from accountancy firms, companies in the payment space, to crypto currency providers, digital wealth applications and e-commerce companies.

To that end, the open banking fintech says it will use the investment to “drive open banking adoption by organisations across Europe,” noting that more than 6,000 banks will be affected by the PSD2 (European open banking) deadline. This means that most European countries are set to release open banking-style APIs publicly in 2020, which Yapily hopes to benefit from.

Quibi, the much-hyped mobile app promising to deliver “quick bites” of video entertainment, is finally here.

The company has been in the headlines for more than two years, thanks to the involvement of founder Jeffrey Katzenberg (who previously co-founded DreamWorks Animation) and CEO Meg Whitman (previously the CEO of eBay and Hewlett Packard Enterprise).

Plus, it’s raised a whopping $1.75 billion to fund a star-studded content slate from filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Lena Waithe and Catherine Hardwick.

Quibi is launching with nearly 50 shows today. The initial lineup includes “Chrissy’s Court” (in which Chrissy Teigen presides over small claims court), “Shape of Pasta” (a food and travel show starring chef Evan Funke), “Most Dangerous Game” (a dystopian thriller starring Liam Hemsworth) and “Survive” (a scripted plane crash drama starring Sophie Turner). All the episodes are less than 10 minutes in length, and can be viewed in either portrait or landscape mode.

Quibi says it will be delivering more than 25 new episodes every day, including segments of what the company is calling Daily Essentials — news and entertainment shows like “Last Night’s Late Night” from Entertainment Weekly and “The Replay” from ESPN.

The service will cost $4.99 with ads or $7.99 per month without ads. Quibi is also offering a 90-day free trial if you sign up before the end of April.

In a briefing with reporters last week, CTO Rob Post acknowledged that it’s been a long, expensive road to launch. But he said that given the heavy investment in content, “There was no room for [Chief Product Officer Tom Conrad] and I to deliver a minimum viable product.” Instead, they had to build something that was fully polished.

While Quibi has been building up to this for months, with a big presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show, Super Bowl ads and more, the world has changed, with a global pandemic making this a strange time to launch any product.

People are certainly looking for distraction and escape right now. But the app is designed for viewing while you’re on-the-go, whether that’s walking around, waiting in line or sitting in the backseat of a car — all moments that are happening considerably less often as huge swaths of the population are advised to shelter in place and maintain social distance.

Still, Post argued that there’s a need for the kind of entertainment that Quibi is offering.

“I’m looking to take small breaks more than ever before to stand up, walk around, go outside,” he said. “Our use cases are these in-between moments. Now more than ever, that use case is still present.”

And of course, these restrictions have also created challenges for Quibi’s launch and content production.

“That’s meant all kinds of things,” Conrad said. “Our Daily Essentials, which were all set to be produced in studios in New York and L.A. each day, in most instances are being shot in people’s homes … Everybody from the production team to postproduction houses to the engineering and marketing organizations are trying to adapt to this moment.”

Quibi has already been showing off is Turnstyle technology, which allows for a seamless transition back-and-forth between portrait and landscape modes. (Apparently Quibi’s filmmakers have to deliver two edits of each episode, one optimized for each orientation.) Last week, the company gave reporters access to the full app.

Judging from a few hours of exploration, Quibi is indeed as polished as Post and Conrad promised, making it easy to swipe through and browse the day’s offerings. Turnstyle also works smoothly, with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it transition every time I rotate my phone.

I quickly noticed, however, that I was torn between the two viewing modes. Portrait mode was more comfortable, particularly when I was watching a full seven- or eight-minute episode, but landscape mode looked much more cinematic, and often included imagery that had been cropped out of the more narrow, vertical footage.

In addition, the focus on a smartphone app — rather than an experience for the browser, tablet or connected-TV — made for a clumsy experience anytime I tried to watch with someone else. (The whole point is to focus on the mobile viewing experience, but Conrad said, “If there’s appetite for Quibi in the living room or on tablets, we certainly will follow that interest as the data reveals.”)

As for the content itself, my favorite show was probably “Most Dangerous Game,” which kicks off with a tantalizingly bleak introduction (the premise will be familiar to viewers of the classic film of the same name). I also enjoyed “Shape of Pasta,” which includes plenty of mouth-watering pasta footage, and”Chrissy’s Court” — Teigen is always delightful, and I liked seeing a courtroom reality show that leans more into humor than drama.

At CES, Whitman positioned Quibi as the first platform to truly take advantage of the new creative opportunities that mobile phones offer to filmmakers. She also emphasized that in contrast to free video platforms like YouTube, Quibi will offer “Hollywood-quality content.”

“[YouTube] is the most ubiquitous, democratized, incredibly creative platform,” Whitman told us. “But they make content for hundreds of dollars a minute. We make it for $100,000 a minute.”

The production value is certainly evident — most of the shows I watched look significantly more expensive that what you’ll find on YouTube. What’s missing so far, however, is any real sense of the creative breakthrough that Whitman was hinting at. Instead, Quibi delivers well-produced, moderately entertaining shows that can be watched when you’ve got a few minutes to spare. They’re fine, but rarely more than that.

Maybe that will be enough for most viewers, particularly during the trial period. The challenge will be convincing those viewers to stick around and pay a subscription fee. To do that, I suspect Quibi will need a breakout show, or something that really takes advantage of the phone in a new way. We’ll see if that arrives in the months to come.

 

This feature by Jonathan Shieber on TechCrunch covers the highlights and loopholes of the new guidance on SBA loans rolled out to keep small businesses afloat. For this week’s posts, click on...

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In the time of COVID-19, much of what transpires from the science world to the general public relates to the virus, and understandably so. But other domains, even within medical research, are still active — and as usual, there are tons of interesting (and heartening) stories out there that shouldn’t be lost in the furious activity of coronavirus coverage. This last week brought good news for several medical conditions as well as some innovations that could improve weather reporting and maybe save a few lives in Cambodia.

Ultrasound and AI promise better diagnosis of arrhythmia

Arrhythmia is a relatively common condition in which the heart beats at an abnormal rate, causing a variety of effects, including, potentially, death. Detecting it is done using an electrocardiogram, and while the technique is sound and widely used, it has its limitations: first, it relies heavily on an expert interpreting the signal, and second, even an expert’s diagnosis doesn’t give a good idea of what the issue looks like in that particular heart. Knowing exactly where the flaw is makes treatment much easier.

Ultrasound is used for internal imaging in lots of ways, but two recent studies establish it as perhaps the next major step in arrhythmia treatment. Researchers at Columbia University used a form of ultrasound monitoring called Electromechanical Wave Imaging to create 3D animations of the patient’s heart as it beat, which helped specialists predict 96% of arrhythmia locations compared with 71% when using the ECG. The two could be used together to provide a more accurate picture of the heart’s condition before undergoing treatment.

Another approach from Stanford applies deep learning techniques to ultrasound imagery and shows that an AI agent can recognize the parts of the heart and record the efficiency with which it is moving blood with accuracy comparable to experts. As with other medical imagery AIs, this isn’t about replacing a doctor but augmenting them; an automated system can help triage and prioritize effectively, suggest things the doctor might have missed or provide an impartial concurrence with their opinion. The code and data set of EchoNet are available for download and inspection.