Month: March 2020

UK takeout marketplace Just Eat has announced a 30-day emergency support package for restaurants on its platform to help them through disruption caused by the coronavirus crisis.

From tomorrow (March 20) until April 19 the package — which Just Eat says is worth £10M+ — will see funds directed back to UK partner restaurants in the form of a commission rebate of one third (33%) on all commissions paid to Just Eat by restaurants; and via the removal of commissions across all collection orders which it intends to help reduce pressure on restaurants’ delivery operations, where collection is still available.

Just Eat also said it’s waiving all sign-up fees for new restaurants joining its platform (which must still meet its standard conditions, such as being registered with the relevant local authority as a food business and having the required hygiene rating); and relaxing any existing arrangements that may be in place with partners to enable them to work with delivery aggregators — “regardless of existing contractual terms”.

It added that it will continue to pay restaurants weekly, including the rebate now in place.

Currently Just Eat has around 35,700 restaurants on its platform in the UK, with delivery available to 95% of UK postcodes.

Commenting in a statement, Andrew Kenny, Just Eat’s UK MD, said:

These are some of the most challenging times the restaurants we work with have ever been through. We want to show our support and help them to keep their doors open, so they can focus on doing what they do best — delivering food to people across the UK every day. We know our Restaurant Partners are worried about their teams — from chefs to delivery drivers — and these measures will go some way to helping them maintain their operations and support their people.

The food delivery industry has a crucial role to play at this time of national crisis and it is only right that as the market leader in the UK Just Eat steps up to help our independent partners so they can keep delivering for the communities that need them.

In the UK and elsewhere there is rising concern about the economic impact of COVID-19 on the hospitality sector as people are told to stay away from social spaces.

On Monday the UK government advised people not to go to bars and restaurants or other social spaces in a bid to try to limit the spread of COVID-19. Although, unlike many other European countries, it has not yet issued strict quarantine measures such as ordering hospitality industry businesses to close their doors and citizens to work at home where possible.

On-demand food delivery remains one of the services that continues to operate even in locked down EU Member States. However with gig economy business models not typically offering platform workers an employment safety net of benefits such as sick pay the entire sector has come under fresh scrutiny for the legal status it assigns to delivery couriers, given the heightened risks posed to them by the novel coronavirus. In a nutshell it they need to self isolate they won’t be able to earn. 

In its press release today Just Eat said it’s working on other unspecified support initiatives for couriers, as well as for groups including the vulnerable and isolated, and frontline workers.

These will be announced in due course, it added. 

Although it also notes that the vast majority of orders placed through its network are delivered by restaurants with their own delivery capability. Its commission for such orders is a maximum of 14%, it added.

Some on-demand food delivery startups operating in Europe which do rely on gig workers to make deliveries have already announced emergency support funds to help platform workers who fall ill or need to self isolate during the COVID-19 crisis — including UK-based Deliveroo and Spain’s Glovo.

Although there has also been some criticism of how easy it is for couriers to access claimed support.

Source: Tech Crunch

With most new social media startups seeming to dial in on specific communities to thrive in a still Facebook-dominated sphere, some of the more broadly focused social investments from top VCs are going into online gaming.

The latest is Mainframe Industries, a Nordic game studio building a massively multiplayer online title. The team doesn’t have much to share of what their title will actually look like gameplay-wise, they’re just saying its a sandbox MMO designed for cloud streaming built on Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.

The startup, which has offices in Helsinki and Reykjavik, isn’t building cloud gaming tech but is instead building an MMO title that’s designed from the get-go for streaming platforms like Google Stadia or Microsoft xCloud that beam a title to a user’s device from a cloud-hosted GPU. What does being a cloud-native game entail? Mainly, it seems to mean that they’re creating a social title that is as fully playable on mobile as it is on PC/console.

Building a robust mobile game that meets console/PC gamers expectations has been one of the more tenuous pursuit of the past decade, and one that has more often than not led to watered-down experiences. Mainframe CEO Thor Gunnarsson acknowledges that titles have sometimes catered to the “lowest common denominator,” but he believes that as game-streaming advances lower technical barriers, his team can focus wholly on solving the user experience challenges.

A big focus seems to be leveraging cross-play with more consistent experiences on differently powered devices thanks to cloud streaming. Gunnarsson believes his company’s approach to what occurs on the “social layer” of the title will be what differentiates them the most, though he is mum on details regarding what that will look like in their eventual release.

The startup has some big names supporting them in their quest. The startup announced today that they’ve closed an $8.1 million (€7.6M) Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Riot Games, Maki.vc, Play Ventures, Sisu Game Ventures and Crowberry Capital also participated in the round.

Andreessen Horowitz, already having bet big on Roblox’s $150 million Series G last month, has been quite active in placing bets on smaller gaming startups in the past year or so, most of which have been made by GP Andrew Chen.

Early last year, Chen directed a16z’s investment in Sandbox VR’s $68 million Series A, a startup aiming to make shared virtual reality experiences more common by building out physical retail locations in malls and shopping areas across the globe. This past August, Chen was also behind the firm’s investment in Singularity 6, another MMO gaming startup that’s looking to build a “virtual society.” Chen was also behind the investment in Mainframe Industries.

“We believe that cloud-native games are poised to revolutionize the entertainment industry in the coming years, yielding entirely new gameplay experiences and business models,” said Chen in a press release announcing the startup’s raise.

In some part, these investments highlight the belief of venture capitalists that online games like Fortnite may represent the future of social networks. They are also, however, platform bets that are rooted in early content plays, which can be notoriously difficult to pick winners in.

While Gunnarsson was quick to discuss how important he believed their title’s social platform would become, he was also just as quick to admit that building a great game was the most critical, “All of the platform stuff is ancillary to the prospect of creating a fun game, but we have really strong game design team.”

Games these days, particularly MMOs, are far from “finished” by launch. Gunnarsson plans to use this round of funding to reach a closed alpha of their title. He didn’t offer any timelines for launch as they’re only in pre-production now, but did say it certainly won’t be coming out this year.

Source: Tech Crunch

Neighborhood social networking app Nextdoor has introduced two new features, Help Maps and Groups, to give people a way to better support one another during the coronavirus outbreak. The Help Map offers a way to coordinate aid between those in need, like the elderly and at-risk, and those willing to offer some form of assistance — like running errands or dropping off supplies, for example. Groups, meanwhile, allows smaller groups to network outside of the main feed.

Nextdoor had already the technology for a map-based feature like the Help Map, as it today offers a map of real estate listings in its app and runs annual features, like the Halloween Treat Map or Holiday Cheer Map which shows which homes are decked out with Christmas lights or other holiday decorations.

The Help Maps works similarly, but instead of listing your house, you’re able to list the services you’re willing to provide.

After updating the Nextdoor app to the latest version, you’ll find the new “Help Map” option under the More menu. From here, you can choose to either view the map or click a button to offer help to your neighbors.

Members who add themselves to the map can then detail the errands they could run or the other sort of assistance they can provide — like offering a daily check-in phone call, delivering groceries, or fetching prescriptions.

Though most stores have begun offering special early morning hours for those at the most risk for COVID-19, limiting exposure by staying at home is the best option. The Help Map, therefore, isn’t just handy — it’s a potential life-saver.

Related to this, Nextdoor is also launching its Groups feature out of beta to users worldwide. Similar to Facebook Groups, Nextdoor’s Groups allow communities to organize around topics, interests, providing aid, or anything else. But unlike Facebook, which doesn’t have an official way to confirm who people are who they say or where they live, Nextdoor validates users by phone or postal mail.

On Nextdoor Groups, neighbors can organize either by their specific neighborhood alone, with other neighborhoods nearby, or on a city-wide basis.

During the beta, neighbors were already beginning to use the feature for COVID-19 topics, including ways to unite communities, ways for parents to help kids stay connected during school closures, and different hobbies that can be done while stuck at home.

Nextdoor usage grew as the coronavirus outbreak took off in the U.S. People turned to the app to share local news and information — like where toilet paper is available. The company said user engagement had grown by 80% in the last two weeks, particularly in hard-hit areas like Seattle and New York.

App downloads have grown, too, sending Nextdoor further up the App Store’s Top Free Charts. In February, Nextdoor was ranking in the mid-to-lower 200’s on the Top Free Chart and is now No. 168 as of Wednesday.

Conversations around COVID-19 on Nextdoor haven’t always been productive, however. Misinformation, bad health advice and more have spread on the app, which doesn’t have Facebook-sized resources for moderation.

“People on Nextdoor are freaking out about coronavirus,” said a recent BuzzFeed story. CNN also called the app a “hub of anxiety.” 

As a result of its latest additions, Nextdoor usage is likely to spike even further — and hopefully refocus some of its members’ mania on doing good and helping others, instead of inciting further panic.

The company, as of last fall’s close of its $170 million in growth funding, said it reached 247,000 neighborhoods across 10 countries. Today, it’s available in 260,000 across 11 countries.

Source: Tech Crunch

Bill Gates, newly free from his role on the Microsoft board, has taken to Reddit to answer the community’s questions about the pandemic, the government response, and what the world can do to be better prepared. Always candid but never cynical, Gates gives some heartening but realistic advice.

Worth noting at the outset is that Gates and the Foundation have been warning about and preparing for an epidemic of this type for years. His 2015 TED talk in particular is extremely prescient, and he wrote a detailed article (PDF) around then for the New England Journal of Medicine detailing the lessons we should learn from the Ebola outbreak. The Foundation also participated in the creation of the Center for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations in 2017. (A recent simulation with Johns Hopkins that has been getting attention for its eerie parallels to the present situation is not in fact a prediction or good comparison.)

You can read all his responses (and the thousands of questions and comments) at the AMA, of course, but the most interesting ones have been lightly edited and condensed below.

Q: What do you think about the current state of testing nationwide?

Gates: The testing in the US is not organized yet. In the next few weeks I hope the government fixes this by having a website you can go to to find out about home testing and kiosks. Things are a bit confused on this right now. In Seattle the U of W is providing thousands of tests per day but no one is connected to a national tracking system.

Q: Can the 18 month estimate for a vaccine be shortened?

Gates: This is a great question. There are over 6 different efforts going on to make a vaccine. Some use a new approach called RNA which is unproven. We will have to build lots of manufacturing for the different approaches knowing that some of them will not work. We will need literally billions of vaccines to protect the world. Vaccines require testing to make sure they are safe and effective. Some vaccines like the flu don’t for the elderly.

Source: Tech Crunch

Amid post-YC Demo Day discussions and online “coffee” catchups, there is a lingering sense of dread among VCs — particularly junior VCs — about their own job security.

Over the past few days, I have heard rumors — and they are just rumors, for now — about three recognizable venture firms and how they are beginning to rethink staffing in the year ahead amidst the novel coronavirus pandemic. Two of those firms are in active discussion about potential exits with specific individuals, while another is nearing a decision to eliminate seven investors at the associate, principal and venture partner levels due to massive declines in their own predicted returns.

We are actively reporting this; feel free to reach out to me or other staffers at TechCrunch if you have tips here.

Nonetheless, it seems almost inevitable that an industry that has massively expanded its partnerships and junior staffs in the bull market of the past few years would suddenly need to rethink the exorbitant costs of all that salary overhead.

There are a couple of considerations here based on what I have been told by VCs. The first is that the pace of investing will slow down, allowing investors more time to do due diligence, plan and use their staffs more effectively, thus requiring fewer folks to do sourcing, analysis and customer calls.

Let me give three examples of the kind of speed we saw before and how that is changing today.

Take the news that Sequoia let go of its investment in Finix a little while back. We had heard that one of the causes for why the firm seemed to accidentally invest in a direct competitor to one of its most valuable portfolio companies, Stripe, is that the deal got done so quickly (I heard 48-72 hours from someone in a position to know, but let’s say a week or two) that there was limited time for diligence or even I guess competitive mapping in the process.

Or take the news that Kleiner Perkins raised a new fund two weeks ago, just a year after raising its last early-stage fund, having spent the entire investible capital in all of twelve months. Investing an entire fund like this in one year requires a huge and energetic staff to pull off.

Or finally, take a seed-stage company I was talking to a few weeks ago that closed its seed round and then met a top investor just a few days later — and that investor actually wrote another, richer-valued seed check almost immediately after the meeting. Why? So that the second seed investor didn’t have to compete for the inevitable Series A bakeoff.

That speed required VCs to have the staff to be able to process deals and diligence in real-time since another firm could lock in a round in a matter of hours. But with what looks like an almost certain slowdown in investing in the coming months, how many staffers will VC firms need, particularly if they have weeks to make investment decisions instead of mere hours?

Another consideration on staffing from what I have gathered — and one that almost no VC is willing to talk on or even off the record about — is that GPs have to immediately start husbanding their management fees for what might be a tricky few years of cash flow.

That might sound surprising, given that VC firms would seem to be among the most stable employers; after all, management fees built into fund docs are guaranteed by a formula for typically ten years. However, there are a couple of nuances that makes these funds more complicated than they might appear.

First, it’s generally reported that management fees are 2% of assets per year. That means that a $100 million fund has access to $2 million to pay overhead expenses every year. That general rule is both true and not true. Those fees are generally front-weighted to the early side of a fund’s lifecycle. A fund may pay out 2% fees in Years 1-5, but then decline to less than 1% by year ten.

That’s why maintaining a firm’s level of management fees generally requires them to consistently raise VC dollars in order to maintain their cash flow. That could be challenging with a looming economic depression and a tougher LP fundraising environment. If the time between funds lengthens from one year to two or even three years, plus if fund sizes get smaller to boot, the amount of management fees will decline accordingly.

Third, and this is rarer, some funds have made loans or real estate investments using their management fee income as a way to boost the salary returns of the general partners. Those financial arrangements drastically limit the flexibility around management fees in an economic downturn, and that can cause more acute pain than might otherwise be publicly visible.

The thinking goes then that carefully managing expenses today can protect those fee streams further in the coming years, providing more stability for the firm at the cost of some early unhappy news today.

There are a couple of other reasons beyond those two, and from what I can tell from my talks with VC sources, most VCs seem to be in a wait-and-see mode. But the discussions are starting to happen at least, even if no decisions have seemingly been made, at least to my knowledge. Which means that it is important to have open lines of conversation and start to understand a firm’s financial context and what the next few months might look like as everyone processes the new economic reality.

Source: Tech Crunch

It’s been a bonkers week in the world with markets gyrating, companies fretting, investors tweeting and founders re-cutting their 2020 forecasts. But for one collection of startups, the past few days weren’t about work crises or the latest Slack share price. Instead, for Y Combinator’s Winter batch, it was Demo Day week.

TechCrunch has covered Y Combinator companies since time immemorial. And we’ve been present throughout a number of format changes over the years. We’ve been around for things like the old single-day events in the South Bay computer history museum, and we’ve been around for the SF era. Hell we were there for the two-stage concept.

But this year’s Demo Day brought with it something altogether new: No in-person pitches and demos. Yep, in response to COVID-19, Y Combinator made its demo day virtual, even scooting up its presentations by a full week. Obviously we tuned in en masse, writing a host of posts about the presenting companies (read them here, here, and here). We also caught up with CEO of Y Combinator, Michael Seibel, to here his take on what’s ahead for the accelerator.

Given the scale of change, however, we weren’t content with just those entries. So, we gathered the TechCrunch crew, hopped on a Zoom, invited in our friends until our Zoom account maxed out (we didn’t know that that was a thing; more capacity coming) to chat over observations and the most interesting startups. We didn’t even miss the usual slew of Y Combinator live tweets — for the most part.

Hit the jump and we’ve got the recording for you.

The Chat

Source: Tech Crunch

Kimberly Shenk has been focused for a while now on “clean” products that are made without harmful chemicals. In 2017, Shenk and friend Jaleh Bisharat launched NakedPoppy, a site that curates and sells cosmetics that have been vetted by chemists (including some of its own products).

Interestingly, as the young startup was announcing $4 million in seed funding last summer from Cowboy Ventures, among others, Shenk — who remains on the board of Naked Poppy — was splitting off to launch a second company. Called Novi, it hopes to address the same need that Shenk and Bisharat discovered, but it plans to go much broader.

Specifically, Novi is developing a  platform that it hopes will eventually become a go-to service for beauty brands, as well as a lot of other businesses that sell to the growing number of consumers who concerned about what, exactly, is in their homes. Think carpet sellers, medical device makers, developers of house cleaning products like detergents. If it needs to be formulated, Novi wants to assess it and give it its stamp of approval.

It’s not an easy thing to pull together, concedes Shenk, a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and MIT who spent several years as the head of Eventbrite’s data science operation. Just one of the many steps involved is building connections to far-flung and disparate raw suppliers, like makers of the surfactants used for cleansing, foaming, thickening, and other special effects in cosmetics. The reason: Novi will need to learn about and certify as safe their manufacturing processes.

It’s a major piece of the overall puzzle, and it’s harder than it might sound to nail down as many manufacturers are hesitant to share information that they view as proprietary.

Still, Novi thinks it can persuade them to be more forthcoming by touting an AI-driven platform that it says can ingest and manage manufacturers’ proprietary data at scale — and make it easier, in turn, for consumer companies that are focused on using vetted ingredients and chemicals to find them. Indeed, where Novi will really shine, suggests Shenk, is in data management.

Investors who know her think seem to think she has what it takes. Brian Rothenberg, a partner at Defy Partners who helped scale Eventbrite across six years before he joined the world of venture capital, just led a $1.5 million seed round for Novi. (“We see a groundswell of consumer consciousness in this area,” Rothenberg said in an emailed statement to us.)

The startup further has the backing of Eventbrite cofounders Kevin and Julia Hartz.

Also working in its favor: Novi says it’s already working with a large beauty retailer that likes the results it has seen as a customer of Novi’s software-as-a-service. (Shenk declines to name the outfit, but she says another reason she had to split off from Naked Poppy was the high likelihood that Novi would be working with competitors to the company.)

It’s certainly progress, considering that Novi is still fairly nascent, with a team of just four people as it ramps up.

In addition to Shenk, it’s run by Bisharat, who remains CEO of Naked Poppy but is also a cofounder of Novi and a board member; an engineer; and a chemist who previously worked for another “clean” beauty company, called Beautycounter.

Source: Tech Crunch

Dish-owned TV streaming service Sling TV announced today it’s making a selection of its content available to stream for free, no credit card or account required. The free offering includes breaking news and live events from ABC News Live, movies and kids content for families, and other lifestyle and entertainment programming. The new service arrives at a time when a significant number of Americans are stuck at home due to the COVID-19 outbreak. But Sling TV isn’t just hoping for a little good press — it’s also marketing its paid service to the free users by promoting content that’s labeled as being only available to subscribers.

“Stay in & SLING,” as the free service is called, now includes thousands of shows and movies without the need to sign up.

This includes a selection of older shows like “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Forensic Files,” “Kitchen Nightmares,” “Black Sails,” “Third Rock from the Sun,” “Roseanne,” “Grounded for Life,” “Hunter,” “Grace Under Fire,” “Shameless,” “21 Jump Street,” and others, plus a small selection of free live TV channels led by ABC News Live.

The movie section is organized by category, including Horror, Action, Drama, and Popular. In the latter, you’ll find mostly older films and unknown titles.

The free kids’ content section is a little more promising with free episodes and seasons from shows like “Teen Titans Go!,” “Adventure Time,” “DC Super Hero Girls,” “Total Dramarama,” “Justice League Action,” “LEGO Ninjago,” “Bob the Builder,” and others.

There are also rows featuring free comedy standup specials, free true crime shows, free popular shows (e.g. “Rick and Morty,” “Impractical Jokers,” Samurai Jack,” and more), plus a section with “get a free taste” shows. This latter row is a selection of single free episodes from better-known shows like “Power,” “Vida,” “American Gods,” “The White Queen,” “Party Down,” and more hailing from Starz.

All this free content offered is sandwiched in between much more enticing paid fare — like rows featuring sports, news, and entertainment programs, each with big, yellow “Subscribe” buttons overtop the image thumbnail. So if you want to watch shows like “Friends,” “Sportscenter,” “Anderson Cooper 360,” or movies you’re more likely to have heard of, you’d have to pay. There’s also a giant ad for Sling TV at the top of the screen.

This setup is because Sling TV’s free tier isn’t something it just came up with to capitalize on the health crisis. Sling TV has offered a free selection in the past, in order to draw in potential subscribers. However, its free tier last year had included access to more than 100 hours of free shows and movies. The newly rebranded and relaunched free tier is larger, with thousands of movies and shows included.

Sling TV, however, is positioning the free service primarily as a way to help U.S. consumers keep up with the news during the coronavirus outbreak.

“To stay informed in these uncertain times, Americans need access to news from reputable sources,” said Warren Schlichting, Sling TV’s group president, in a statement. “With many Americans finding themselves staying at home, we have an opportunity to use our platform to help them deal with this rapidly evolving situation,” he said.

Sling TV had been in a rough situation before the COVID-19 crisis, with regard to subscribers, it’s worth noting.

The company reported its first-ever decline in Sling TV subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2019, with a drop of 94,000 customers to end the year with 2.59 million total subscribers. The decline is likely due to a number of factors, including price hikes, increased competition from rivals like Hulu with Live TV and YouTube TV, and new subscription services like Disney+ and Apple TV+ that are eating into consumers’ limited entertainment budgets.

Still, Sling TV is far from the only streamer looking to win viewership by marketing to homebound Americans during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Disney just released “Frozen 2” on its service, Disney+, a full three months ahead of schedule. Hulu released the first three episodes of “Little Fires Everywhere” early, as well. And NBCU is finally breaking the theatrical window to release “The Invisible Man” and other movies on-demand.

The Sling TV free experience is available through the Sling app for Roku, Amazon or Android devices or via the web using a Chrome, Safari, or Microsoft Edge browser.

Source: Tech Crunch

In a volatile trading session that saw the White House signal intentions to release the largest stimulus package since the great recession of 2008, American stocks made up for yesterday’s losses with major indices rising sharply.

The return to gains was welcome after stocks posted huge losses to begin the week, tripping the market’s circuit breakers for the third time in the current period of trading tied to the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

The response to the White House’s plan to stem economic fallout from the virus is receiving — today at least — good marks.

Part of the plan includes providing American’s with direct financial aid in the form of cash. Other governmental action will provide emergency paid medical leave pay, though American will still lag sharply behind the rest of the world when it comes to worker care. How a few weeks of paid leave will hold up against a patchwork, but increasingly broad national quarantine isn’t clear at this time. One of the country’s leading political parties was opposed to a more permanent fix.

The US government is not alone in its stimulus plans. The UK announced a nearly $400 billion package today, for example. Many other governments have executed other packages, and central banks are doing their bit as well.

While the government response is massive, markets and investors may need more assurances.

Today at the bell the scorecard read as follows:

• Dow Jones Industrial Average: climbed 4.93%, or 994.50, to close at 21,183.02
• S&P 500: rose nearly 6%, or 142.67 points to close at 2,528.80
• Nasdaq Composite: was up 430.19 points, or 6.23%, to close at 7,334.78

Each index remains far below its recent highs, and all three are still in bear-market territory.

Individual Performance

Shares of Slack, the popular workplace app that got hit after its guidance was a bit light, rallied today. Uber and Lyft, hit hard in recent weeks as the world has slowly ground to a halt, fell today.

SaaS shares rallied as a group, but failed to make up much ground compared to their recent highs; they remain sharply depressed from prior levels. Cryptos have rallied some in the last 24 hours as well, but, like with most assets, remain far under preceding highs and other local maxima.

In short, while today’s trading was more than welcome, it was just lukewarm comfort after Monday’s epic selloff. And with the US COVID-19 tallies rising, it isn’t clear if tomorrow is going to follow Tuesday’s direction. After all, this rally came after a meltdown.

Source: Tech Crunch

Pharma giant Pfizer announced on Tuesday that it’s working with BioNTech, a German company working on new kinds of immunotherapy treatments, on a potential COVID-19 vaccine. The joint effort, confirmed Tuesday via a signed letter of intent, will see both partners work together on a a messenger RNA-based vaccine that will seek to prevent people from contracting the new coronavirus.

It’s worth a reminder that any vaccine is going to take, at minimum, between a year and 18 months to develop and certify for general. human use, so don’t think that this is going to result in any kind of short-term solution. But the collaboration does bring together one of the largest and most established players in the realm of pharmaceutical biotech, along with a younger company working at the forefront of mRNA-based immune therapies.

These therapies don’t use samples of the virus itself, as typical vaccines do (in either dead or weakened form, to jump-start the body’s natural defences). Instead, they rely on RNA to kickstart the production of proteins similar enough to the virus that they trigger the body’s development of antibodies effective against the actual target.

This collaboration should result in a clinical test that could kick off as early as April. Both parties aren’t starting from scratch in terms of their work on mRNA-based vaccines: they began working together on R&D to create treatments for the flu starting in 2018.

While work on the collaborative effort begins immediately, across teams located in both the U.S. and German, the two partners still have to hammer out details including financial terms and commercialization of whatever results. The fact that they’re willing to begin working before the ink is dry on those details should give you some idea of the urgency felt behind the project.

This isn’t the only mRNA-based potential COVID-19 vaccine in development: Earlier this week, Moderna announced that they’d already begun human clinical trials of their own coronavirus immunotherapy, after fast-tracking its development in partnership with the National Institutes of Health.

Source: Tech Crunch