Month: March 2020

Y Combinator’s Demo Day was a bit different this time around.

As concerns grew over the spread of COVID-19, Y Combinator shifted the event format away from the two-day gathering in San Francisco we’ve gotten used to, instead opting to have its entire class debut to invited investors and media via YC’s Demo Day website.

In a bit of a surprise twist, YC also moved Demo Day forward one week citing accelerated pacing from investors. Alas, this meant switching up its plan for each company to have a recorded pitch on the Demo Day website; instead, each company pitched via slides, a few paragraphs outlining what they’re doing and the traction they’re seeing, and team bios. It’s unclear so far how this new format — in combination with the rapidly evolving investment climate — will impact this class.

As we do with each class, we’ve collected our notes on each company based on information gathered from their pitches, websites and, in some cases, our earlier coverage of them.

To make things a bit easier to read, we’ve split things up by category rather than have it be one huge wall of text. These are the healthcare, biotech, fintech and nonprofit companies. You can find the other categories (such as B2B, consumer and robotics) here.

Healthcare and Biotech

Simple Stripes: Aims to make glucose testing cheaper and more accessible by making strips that can be read by any smartphone camera, rather than requiring a dedicated glucose meter. The company says it expects to submit its strips for FDA approval in June.

nplex biosciences: A faster, cheaper way to do the protein panels required in the development of new medications. The company says it has over $4 million in letters-of-intent in the works, including one from a major pharma company.

Healthlane: An app meant to help users in Africa communicate with their doctors, make appointments and track lab results. The company says it has already reached profitability, with a retention rate of 98%.

Breathe Well-being: A 16-week program meant to help users in India with chronic conditions (such as diabetes) in their efforts to lose weight. The company offers a one-on-one diabetes coach who helps the user with tracking things like weight/meals/activity and trains them in cognitive behavioral therapy techniques meant to reduce stress. Currently seeing an $11.2K MRR.

Dropprint Genomics: “Single cell genomics” software meant to reduce the time/financial cost of analyzing individual cell activity to enable better drug discovery. They’ve signed over $1 million in LOIs in two months.

Newman’s: A digital health clinic for men in Indonesia. They’re focusing on problems that are often seen as either embarrassing (hair loss, erectile dysfunction) or are often abandoned (quitting smoking) by making doctor visits easier, cheaper and more private by way of remote consultation. Find our previous coverage of Newman’s here.

Loop Health: Loop Health says that most health insurance in India covers “only hospital stays, not doctor visits.” They’re looking to improve this by offering unlimited access to their designated Loop Health clinics, along with app-based telemedicine.

Synapsica Healthcare: An “AI reporting assistant.” Currently focusing on spinal MRIs, the company says it saves radiologists 80% of their reporting time by automatically annotating measurements and characterizing disc degeneration. The company says it’s currently in a $100K pilot program with a radiology practice tapped by 250 chiropractic clinics.

Volumetric: Volumetric makes 3D bioprinters that create vascularized human tissue. Founded by two PhDs, Volumetric sells its photoactive tissue to pharmaceutical companies and scientists. It’s using the proceeds to move toward building bioprinters and bioinks that can generate functional tissue and even organs. Find our previous coverage of Volumetric here.

Ophelia: Ophelia replaces rehab with telemedicine for America’s 3 million opioid addicts. It lets patients do teleconferenced doctor visits, get prescribed and delivered medications like Buprenorphine and Naloxone, and access therapy without the stigma. The founder started the company after a longtime girlfriend died from opioid addiction, and Ophelia has now treated 40 patients.

Lilia: Claiming that “in the future, women will freeze their eggs upon graduation,” Lilia is an egg-freezing concierge service. The startup charges $500 for concierge, and gets another $500 when somebody is placed in a clinic. Lilia says its total addressable market is $33 billion.

Equator Therapeutics: Equator Therapeutics is developing a drug to help users burn calories without exercise. Founded by a duo of PhDs and a data scientist who worked at a company developing an anti-aging drug, Equator Therapeutics is targeting people dealing with obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Altay Therapeutics: Located inside the Bayer Collaborator in San Francisco, Altay Therapeutics has developed small molecule therapies that block disease-causing DNA-binding proteins (or transcriptional regulators). The company’s initial therapies are focused on arthritis, fibrosis, ulcerative colitis and liver cancer.

Tambua Health: Tambua Health uses an “acoustic” stethoscope and proprietary software to provide advanced imaging for lung imaging without the radiation of an x-ray.

Abalone Bio: Founded by serial life sciences entrepreneurs, Abalone Bio is using libraries of yeast cells expressing billions of antibody variants to grow specific antibodies that can activate or inhibit a drug target. Using gene sequencing, machine learning and synthetic biology, the company makes recombinant protein versions of its antibodies and confirms their efficacy in human cell assays. The company’s initial targets are drugs for pain, inflammatory diseases, rare cancer and rare kidney disease.

Felix Biotechnology: Founded by the famous Yale University researcher Paul Turner, Felix Biotechnologies is developing treatments to address antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria and fungi. These pathogens cause more than 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths in the United States alone each year, according to the company. On average, someone in the U.S. dies from an antibiotic-resistant infection every 15 minutes. Researchers have warned that more people will die from antibiotic resistance than from cancer by the year 2050.

Genecis Bioindustries: Genecis Bioindustries is turning food waste into compostable plastics. Find our previous coverage on Genecis here.

Candid Health: Candid Health has developed automated billing software for the healthcare industry that follows up with insurance companies and automatically appeals denied claims. It takes a 5% cut of each payment.

Ochre Bio: Ochre says that most donated livers are discarded — despite there being a shortage — due to them containing too much fat for a successful transplant. They’re aiming to “rejuvenate livers outside the body” by finding ways to treat them prior to transplant.

Fintech

Facio: Brazil has a banking problem. An oligarchy of five banks manage the Brazilian market, and they’re slow, have terrible customer service, high APR and don’t serve SMBs. Facio wants to keep workers from falling victim to predatory debt and instead gain financial freedom with a low-priced payroll loan to employees. It integrates with the employer, deducting loans right from their payroll.

delt.ai: Delt.ai is a digital bank that handles payments, invoicing and corporate cards for poorly served SMEs and freelancers in Mexico. The startup is targeting the $50 billion+ market of business deposits in Mexico. Think of Delt.ai is a Brex or a Mercury, but focused on Latin America.

Nexu: Like many other personal financing operations in Latin America, car financing is an expensive, low-tech, arduous process. Nexu, a financing platform for Latin American car dealerships, uses dynamic credit scoring to give car buyers an approval with a turnaround of a few seconds. The founding team met as Wharton MBA candidates.

Fondeadora: Fondeadora is joining Mexico’s saturated fintech scene, with its alternative neobanking debit card. The company offers a fully mobile digital savings account run within its app. Fondeadora says it has 65,000 users and $6.5 million monthly transactions. Albo, another Mexico-focused debit card, currently owns the market share with 200,000 monthly active customers who are spending and making transactions in its platform and $26 million in capital raised. But the banking problem in Mexico is big enough that multiple startups can thrive. Out of the 130 million population of Mexico, 45% are underbanked, meaning they lack deep financial products designed to help them compound wealth through lending and savings features.

Jenfi: Loans money to small businesses in Asia — typically about $10,000 to $100,000 — based on the business’ revenue. We wrote about Jenfi previously here.

yBANQ: A collections and reconciliation system for large B2B companies in India. The company says it has found 18 customers since launching in late January, reaching a GMV of around $18K.

ZeFi: A savings account that converts USD deposits to/from “stablecoin” cryptocurrencies behind the scenes, with ZeFi lending these funds out to borrowers to gain interest.

Grain: Grain hooks your existing debit card to a “responsible” amount of credit (currently capped at $500, and based on your income/cash low), hopefully helping those with minimal/bad credit build up their credit report over time. In the three months since launch, the company says it has signed up 1,000 customers, and expects to make around $80 per customer per year.

CrowdForce: Lets local merchants in Africa act as bank branches, serving as an intermediary on transactions when a bank is too far away. The company says it made $70K in net revenue last month, making an average of $20 per year per customer.

Stark Bank: A banking API to handle B2B transactions for tech companies in Brazil. A little over a year after launch, the company says it’s seeing $12 million in monthly gross volume.

Bamboo: An online brokerage for high-wealth individuals in Africa to buy securities from around the world. The company says it already has over 2,100 investors who have traded over $1.6 million on the platform since launching roughly five months ago, currently accounting for over $10,000 in monthly revenue.

Swipe: Pitching itself as “Brex for Africa,” Swipe gives African SMBs a credit card to help cover payroll and expenses. They onboard businesses by providing them with free expensing/billing tools, then offer credit accordingly. The company says it’s currently working with 30 companies, with $200K in credit deployed.

goDutch: A payments card for splitting costs amongst groups that often share bills, such as roommates. Focusing on India. Charges are put onto one card and deducted from each group member’s account automatically.

Paymobil: Uses stablecoin cryptocurrencies to transfer money across the globe through a Venmo-style app. The founder, Daniel Nordh, notes that he previously led consumer design at Coinbase.

Karat: Karat offers banking, loans and credit cards to influencers. By using data on their popularity to manage risk, Karat has achieved 40% APR on its loans with an average repayment time of 45 days. Thanks to its founders’ experience building influencer tools at Instagram and structuring debt at Goldman Sachs, it’s already signing up stars with over 10 million followers.

Homestead: Homestead helps home owners convert their garages into rental properties at no upfront cost. Homestead pays for all the construction, tenant search and management, and then splits the rent income with the home owner. A new California law allows the state’s 8 million garages to be rented out as living spaces, creating an enormous market opportunity. Homestead’s founders met at MIT’s graduate school of architecture and city planning, and the startup has already done $1 million in sales.

Benepass: Benepass offers a benefits card for startups and small businesses. Using the Benepass debit card, employees can pay for tax-advantaged benefits and wellness perks like flexible spending accounts, childcare, commuting, fitness and education while an app tracks their buying. Free for employers, Benepass has a 6% take rate but can save thousands on income and payroll taxes. With startups desperate to compete with tech giants for top talent, Benepass could ensure employees feel supported.

GAS POS: U.S. gas station owners are racing to upgrade outside pumps with EMV technology, a global standard for credit cards equipped with computer chips. GAS POS was founded to deliver a modern point-of-sale system that will help North America’s 180,000 gas stations comply with EMV and make transactions more secure. The company has several sources of revenue, a 3% fee on processed payments, SaaS free for equipment and an offer to customers to provide next-day funding.

YearEnd: YearEnd is building tax software for the paper rich, helping startup employees file their taxes while optimizing for their equity. The startup charges $330 per year for individual users and is hoping to sell to businesses that can add YearEnd as an employee benefit.

GIGI Benefits: India’s GIGI Benefits is looking to be the benefits provider for the nation’s gig economy workers. The business takes a page from companies like last year’s hottest Y Combinator startup, Catch, or the venture-backed Trupo, to provide things like health insurance and retirement investment accounts to gig economy workers.

Easyplan: Easyplan is the Qapital or Digit for India, allowing users to seamlessly save money for certain specific goals.

Haven: Haven is a next-gen platform for servicing home mortgages, offering more modern customer interfaces, better payment modeling for lenders and more.

WorkPay: WorkPay describes itself as “Gusto for Africa” — next-gen payroll and related services targeting small and medium businesses in the region.

Spenny: Spenny is a savings tool for Indian consumers that lets customers start banking money away by rounding up their purchases.

Kosh: Kosh is an algorithmically enhanced savings and investment platform for India, allowing those with good credit to effectively vouch for friends with limited credit to help them borrow.

Nonprofit

Potential: Potential is a nonprofit that wants to connect the formerly incarcerated to jobs and resources. The company works with detention centers and employment organizations to make a more friendly hiring environment.

Source: Tech Crunch

Y Combinator’s Demo Day was a bit different this time around.

As concerns grew over the spread of COVID-19, Y Combinator shifted the event format away from the two-day gathering in San Francisco we’ve gotten used to, instead opting to have its entire class debut to invited investors and media via YC’s Demo Day website.

In a bit of a surprise twist, YC also moved Demo Day forward one week, citing accelerated pacing from investors. Alas, this meant switching up its plan for each company to have a recorded pitch on the Demo Day website; instead, each company pitched via slides, a few paragraphs outlining what they’re doing and the traction they’re seeing, and team bios. It’s unclear so far how this new format — in combination with the rapidly evolving investment climate — will impact this class.

As we do with each class, we’ve collected our notes on each company based on information gathered from their pitches, websites and, in some cases, our earlier coverage of them.

To make things a bit easier to read, we’ve split things up by category rather than have it be one huge wall of text. These are the companies that are working on hardware, robotics, AI, machine learning or tools for developers. You can find the other categories (such as biotech, consumer, and fintech) here.

AI and Machine Learning

Datasaur: A tool meant to help humans label machine data data sets more accurately and efficiently through things like auto-correct, auto-suggest and keyboard hotkeys. It’s free for individual labelers, $100 per month for teams of up to 20 labelers, with custom pricing for larger teams.

1build: Automatic, data-driven job cost estimates for construction companies. You upload your plans, and 1build says it can prepare accurate bids “in minutes.” The company projects a revenue run rate of over $600,000, and says it has completed estimates for mega companies like Amazon, Starbucks and 7-Eleven.

Handl: An API for turning paper documents — including handwritten ones — into structured data ready to be plunked into a database or CRM. While the company says that around 85% of its processing is handled by their AI, it’s backed by humans to validate data when the AI’s confidence is low. Nine months after launch, the company is seeing an ARR of $0.9 million.

Zumo Labs: Uses game engines to generate pre-labeled training data for computer vision systems. By synthesizing the data rather than collecting it from photos/videos of the real world, the company says it can create massive data sets faster, cheaper and without privacy issues.

Teleo: Retrofits existing construction equipment to allow operators to control them remotely. The company says it has built a “fully functional teleoperated loader” since being founded three months ago, and plans to charge construction companies a flat monthly fee per vehicle. The company’s co-founders were previously head of Hardware Engineering and director of Product Manager at Lyft, with both having worked on Google’s Street View team.

Menten AI: Menten AI says it’s using “quantum computing and machine learning” combined with synthetic biology to design new protein-based drugs.

Turing Labs Inc.: Automated, simulated testing of different formulas for consumer goods like soaps and deodorant. Home products and cosmetics can be months of work for R&D labs. Turing has built an AI engine that helps with this process — much like the AI engines used in drug discovery — cutting down the time to days. It’s already working with some of the biggest CPG companies in the world. You can find our previous coverage on Turing here.

Segmed: Segmed is building data sets for AI-driven medical research. Rather than requiring each and every researcher to individually partner with hospitals and imaging facilities, Segmed partners with these organizations (currently over 50) and standardizes, labels and anonymizes the data.

Ardis AI: Ardis AI wants to build the foundation of artificial general intelligence — technology that read and comprehend text like a human. By combining neural networks, symbolic reasoning and new natural language processing techniques, Ardis AI can serve companies that don’t want to hire teams to do data extraction and labeling.

Agnoris: Agnoris analyzes a restaurant’s point-of-sale data to recommend changes to pricing, delivery menus and staffing. For $3,600 per year per restaurant location, Agnoris claims to be able to raise profits by 20%. The company started after the founder opened a restaurant that was packed yet losing money, so it built machine learning tools to improve margins and now it’s selling that software to all eateries.

Froglabs: Froglabs provides weather forecasting AI to businesses for predicting solar and wind energy production, delivery delays, staffing shortages, sales demand and food availability. By ingesting petabytes of weather data, it can save companies money by ensuring their logistics aren’t disrupted. Founded by a long-time Googler who started its Project Loon internet-beaming weather balloons, it’s now signing up e-commerce, retail, rideshare, restaurant and event businesses.

PillarPlus: PillarPlus is a platform that automates the blueprint-designing phase of a building project. It takes a design from an architect or contractor and maps out mechanical, fire, electrical and plumbing details, and estimates the bill of materials and project cost, steps that otherwise take months of work.

Glisten: Glisten uses computer vision and machine learning technologies to develop better, more consistent data sets for e-commerce companies. Its first product is an AI-based tool to populate and enrich sparse product data. Find our previous coverage of Glisten here.

nextmv: Nextmv gives its customers the ability to create their own logistics algorithms automatically — allowing businesses to optimize fleets and manage routes internally.

Visual One: Movement-detecting security cameras can bring up a lot of false positives: there’s motion, yes, but not necessarily anything harmful. Visual One has built an AI platform that integrates with home security cameras to “read” the specific movements that they detect. Owners can create customised alerts so they get notifications only for what they care about. The company’s software can check for furniture-destroying pets, package-lifting thieves, the death-defying antics of toddlers and more. Find our previous coverage of Visual One here.

PostEra: “Medicinal chemistry-as-a-service” is the idea here: PostEra’s platform can design and synthesize molecules faster and at a lower cost than the typical R&D lab, speeding up the research time it takes to test new combinations in the drug discovery process.

Hardware and Robotics

Cyberdontics: Robotics have already revolutionized surgery, courtesy of companies like da Vinci-maker, Intuitive. Cyberdontics is aimed at doing the same for oral surgery, beginning with crowns — one of the more expensive and time-intensive procedures. The company says its robot is capable of performing the generally two-hour procedure in 15 minutes, charging a mere $140 for the job.

Avion: Focused on inhabitants of difficult to reach areas in Africa, Avion is building a drone-based delivery system. The plans consist of medium and long-range medical drones tied to a centralized hub. The drones are hybrid and autonomous with vertical take-off capabilities, able to take 5-kg payloads as far as 150 kms.

SOMATIC: Industrial bathroom cleaning is a prime “dull”/“dirty” candidate to be replaced by automation. Somatic builds large robots that are trained to clean restrooms via VR. The system sprays and wipes down surfaces and is capable of opening doors and riding up and down in the elevator. Find our previous coverage of SOMATIC here.

RoboTire: Anyone who’s ever sat in a service shop waiting room knows how time-intensive the process can be. RoboTire promises to cut the wait time from 60 minutes down to 10 for a set of four tires. The company has begun piloting the technology in locations around the U.S. Find our previous coverage of RoboTire here.

Morphle: Designed to replace outdated analog microscopes, Morphle’s system uses robotic automation to improve imaging. The startup processes higher-resolution images than far pricier systems and with a much smaller failure rate. Morphle has begun selling its system to labs in India.

Daedalus: Founded by an early engineer at OpenAI, Daedalus is building autonomous software to allow industrial robots to operate without human programming, beginning with CNC machines. The company projects that it can improve productivity in the metal machining market by 5x.

Exosonic, Inc.: Exosonic makes supersonic commercial aircraft that don’t have to produce a loud sonic boom, so they can be flown over land. Its goal is a plane that can fly from SF to NYC in three hours. The CEO worked on NASA’s low-boom X-59 aircraft while at Lockheed Martin. Exosonic now has letters of intent from a major airline and two Department of Defense groups, plus a $300,000 U.S. Air Force contract.

Nimbus: Founded by a serial entrepreneur and based in Ann Arbor, Mich., Nimbus is developing the next-generation vehicle platform for urban transportation. Founder Lihang Nong previously launched the fuel-injection systems developer PicoSpray and is now looking to answer the question, “Can a vehicle be several times more space and energy efficient than today’s cars while actually being more comfortable to ride in?”

UrbanKisaan: UrbanKisaan is a vertical farming operation based in India that delivers fresh produce subscriptions to households. Its farms of stacked-up hydroponic tables can be located near cities with just 1% of the land usage of traditional agriculture, and there are no pesticides necessary. In a market with a growing middle class seeking healthy foods, delivering from farm-to-door could let UrbanKisaan control quality and its margins.

Talyn Air: Two former SpaceX engineers have developed a long-range electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for passengers and cargo. The startup has created an electric fixed-wing aircraft that is caught mid-air with a custom winged drone during take offs and landings, an approach that its founders say give this aircraft three times the range of its competitors, at 350 miles.

Developer Tools

BuildBuddy: Two ex-Googlers want to provide a “Google-style development environment” to all by building an open-source UI/feature set on top of Google’s Bazel software. The company says that their solution speeds up build times by up to 10x. It’s free for independent developers, with the price scaling from $4 per user to $49 per user depending on the size of the team and the features required.

Dataline: Meant to let websites gather analytics data from users who are using ad-blocking tools. Claiming that most ad-blocker users care mostly about display ads or cross-site tracking, the company says that first-party analytics gets hit as “collateral damage.” By acting as a “smart proxy” that runs on a sub-domain, Dataline avoids most ad-blocking systems (for now, presumably.)

Cortex: Many modern online software applications are powered by countless independent, purpose-focused tools — or “microservices.” Cortex monitors your app’s microservices to automatically flag the right person (hooking into Datadog/Slack/PagerDuty/etc.) when one breaks.

apitracker: Even if your website seems to be loading fine, the APIs you use to make it work might be having trouble, breaking things in not so obvious ways. Apitracker… tracks your APIs. It monitors the APIs you use, alerting you when one of them starts to fail and providing insights into their overall performance.

Freshpaint: Freshpaint’s “autotrack” system collects all pageviews/clicks/etc. across your site, allowing you to push it into tools like Google Analytics/Facebook Pixel etc. retroactively without requiring your dev team to make manual trackers for each event. The base plan is free for sites with fewer than 3,000 users and $300 for sites with up to 50,000 monthly users, after which point the pricing shifts to custom packaging.

Datree: Datree allows companies to set up rules and security policies for their codebase, and ensures those rules are followed before any code is merged. Charging $28 per developer (noting that it’s free for independent/open source projects), they’ve pulled in ~$230K in revenue to date. Find our previous coverage of Datree here. 

fly.io: Deploys your app on servers that are physically closer to your users, decreasing latency and improving the user experience. If your app grows more popular in a certain city, Fly detects that and scales resources accordingly.

Sweeps: Sweeps claims that they can make your website 40% faster with one line of code, by more intelligently loading all of the third-party tools that a website is using. The team says that their tech not only improves speed but does so while improving SEO.

Orbiter: Orbiter is an automatic real-time monitoring and alert system integrated with Slack to ensure better customer service and revenue management.

Release: Product releases can be tricky. Release provides a staging management toolkit — it builds a staging environment each time there’s a pull request, allowing for faster/more collaborative development cycles.

Signadot: Signadot is monitoring and management software for the microservices that modern startups rely on to power their own applications and services, hopefully flagging issues before they become apparent to the end user.

Raycast: Raycast is a universal command bar for developers and many of the tools they use. Users can integrate apps including Jira, GitHub or Slack and take a Superhuman-like approach to completing forms and tasks. The team is pitching the tool as a way to help engineers get their non-engineering work done quickly.

Cotter: Cotter is building a phone number-based login platform that authenticates a user’s device in a workflow that the company’s founders say has the convenience of SMS-based OTP without the security issues. The startup is aiming to target customers in developing countries where email is less utilized and less convenient as a login.

ditto: Ditto’s founders are hoping to create the Figma for words, helping teams plan out more thoughtfully the copy they use to describe their products and workflows. The collaboration tool created by Stanford roommates Jolena Ma and Jessica Ouyang currently has 80+ different companies represented among their users.

Scout: A continuous integration and deployment toolkit for machine learning experiments inside a GitHub workflow.

ToDesktop: ToDesktop has designed a service to automate all of your desktop application publishing needs. It works with Windows, Mac and Linux and provides native installers, auto-updates, code signing and crash reports without the need for any infrastructure or configurations for developers.

DeepSource: DeepSource is a code review tool that allows developers to check for bug risks, anti-patterns, performance issues and security flaws in Python and Go.

Flowbot: Flowbot is a natural language, autocomplete search tool for coding in Python. It lets Python developers type in plain English when they can’t remember the exact function they’re thinking of, with Flowbot digging through documentation and considering the context to find the code it thinks you’re looking for.

PostHog: PostHog is a software service that lets developers understand how their users are actually working with their products. It’s a product analytics toolkit for open-source programmers.

Source: Tech Crunch

One of the defining characteristics of the European Union has been its strong policy of taking an open approach when it comes to borders in the region: the EU may be a collection of individual countries, but it works as one, and so when you travel from one to the other as an EU citizen, you can move as freely as you do within your own country. Now, in the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic, all that is changing. Today the EU announced new measures to limit movement between borders within the EU, with the restrictions initially covering 30 days.

After that, Russia, which shares a border with various countries in the EU, also announced its own border closure.

We have already had a number of border closures within the EU and the wider region — in keeping with the global response to movement, and specifically in response to outbreaks that starter earlier (for example, Italy has had travel restrictions in place for weeks at this point). The aim with today’s announcement — laid out in a press briefing — however, is to bring about a more coordinated approach across the region.

“Our measures to contain the Coronavirus outbreak will be effective only if we coordinate on the European level,” said EU president Ursula von der Leyen in a statement. She added that the travel ban does not extend to everyone: emergency medical professionals and other essential goods and services will continue to move across borders, as will citizens of the respective countries coming home, and those making their way home through a country. “We have to take exceptional measures to protect the health of our citizens. But let’s make sure goods and essential services continue to flow in our internal market. This is the only way to prevent shortages of medical equipment or food. It’s not only an economic issue: our single market is a key instrument of European solidarity. I am in discussion with all Member States so that we confront this challenge together, as a Union.”

Russia, meanwhile, had closed off borders with specific countries such as Iran (which has been one of the worst-hit countries globally) and Poland, and now it is closing off its border to all international travel until the beginning of May (for now), with the exception of Russian nationals, airline professionals, diplomats and a few other specific categories.

Border closures are coming into effect the world over in an effort to stem the infection rate of the novel coronavirus, with the UK yesterday announcing more restrictions on travel, and Canada raising its walls earlier today. (The UK is not included in the EU measures, given its exit from the European Union; but it has followed suit regardless on its own steam and via its own policies.)

Many of these measures are coming in the wake of a serious curtailment of travel anyway — a trend that has had a severe impact already on airlines and other companies in the travel and tourism industries.

The impact on tech in Europe (and indeed, globally) has been a palpable chilling effect. Apart from the direct hit that travel, tourism and related startups are feeling, overall it has meant a drastic wave of event cancellations, meetings and overall activity. There has, of course, remained a commitment to continue business as usual, or at least try to, and that will hopefully be a reality in the medium term, even if for now, it’s wheels down, wheels down.

Source: Tech Crunch

Uber Eats said Monday it will waive delivery fees for all orders from independently owned restaurants on the app as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread and causes cities to shutter all non-essential businesses.

Restaurants throughout the U.S. are facing economic headwinds as city and state officials take steps to stop the spread of COVID-19, a disease caused by novel coronavirus. Denver Mayor Michael Hancock ordered Monday the closure of all restaurants and bars except for delivery and carryout service for the next two months. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti ordered all restaurants in the city to close, except for delivery and takeout until at least March 31. New York City has directed all bars and restaurants to close. Restaurants in NYC can still deliver food.

There are more than 100,000 local restaurants on the Uber Eats app, according to the company.

“As more people stay home, local restaurants need your business more than ever. That’s why we’re waiving the Delivery Fee for all orders from every independent restaurant on Uber Eats—more than 100,000 local restaurants on the app,” the company said in an email Monday morning.

Customers can find the independent restaurants by looking for the EAT LOCAL banner in the app. Delivery Fees will be automatically waived on all applicable orders.

Uber Eats is also taking precautions to limit the spread of COVID-19, including the option of contactless deliveries and working to provide drivers with sanitization materials. The company added that “as always, your food items aren’t touched once they’ve been packed by the restaurant.”

Uber Eats said it will support its delivery people and drivers with financial assistance in the event of a COVID-19 diagnosis or exposure that prevents them from working and is committing more than 300,000 free meals on Uber Eats to healthcare workers and first responders in the U.S. and Canada.

Source: Tech Crunch

Service, a tool that helped you get compensation when there are flight delays and find lower hotel rates after you’ve already booked, today said it would shut down its service.

The company, which launched in 2015, says it faced a fundraising round that collapsed two weeks ago and was in the middle of an acquisition that collapsed on Friday. It cites the current economic downturn and COVID-19 as the reason for both of these events.

Service will shut down later this week, on Friday, March 20. It’ll try to refund subscribers (pending its cash position), route all pending claims directly to existing users and delete all personal information from its customers within the next 30 days.

It’s worth noting that Service founder and CEO Michael Schneider also notes that since it was founded, the company never turned a profit, even though it recovered over $4,000,000 for its customers.

“Despite partnerships with major brands such as KAYAK and Microsoft, we have never turned a profit, despite a focus on revenue growth and cost cutting through software automation,” Schneider writes. “We were in the middle of a fundraise when it collapsed two weeks ago, and then we were in the middle of an acquisition that collapsed last Friday due to everything going on with COVID-19 and the economy.”

With the current downturn in travel, we’ll likely see more travel startups collapse. Margins are notoriously low in this business and a lot of companies depend on what is essentially affiliate marketing revenue. Since the travel industry is currently in a tailspin, that source of revenue is quickly dwindling for this class of startups.

Service had raised a total of $5.1 million since it was founded. Investors include Founders Fund, which led its seed round, as well as Menlo Ventures, Maveron, Xfund, Flight Ventures and others. The company last raised a convertible note last September.

“I remain proud of what we accomplished over the last nearly five years, and I’m grateful to our investors, employees, and customers for all their support. While I regret not succeeding in building a sustainable long term business, I am proud that we tried, and that we made people’s lives a bit easier around customer service,” writes Schneider.

Source: Tech Crunch

The first step to combating climate change for businesses is for them to understand their contributions to it. That’s where the new Y Combinator graduate, SINAI Technologies, comes in.

Founded by Maria Fujihara, a 16-year veteran of the sustainability industry whose previous work had been around the technical adaptation of LEED certification tools, SINAI is the culmination of her years of working to adapt certification tools to international markets and five years spent researching carbon emissions profiles — most recently at Singularity University .

“When I started the company, I started to do carbon offsets,” Fujihara said. “For the past three years companies and governments have been calculating their carbon emissions and they know their carbon footprint and they know their carbon inventory and they’ve been using their carbon inventory to buy carbon credits.”

The market is mature enough for more companies to get involved, she said. “Emissions have only increased in the past six years and not decreased at all,” said Fujihara. “We’re not thinking of mitigation solutions.”

Companies have been focusing on understanding their measurements, but not identifying how to mitigate those emissions through different policies — or even what areas of the business to target, Fujihara said.

“Once we understand their business as user scenarios we can reduce emissions in their value chain,” she said.

The SINAI service automates different reporting and data around emissions for companies to monitor in an easy format. “It’s kind of like doing financial analysis, but doing the environmental analysis in addition,” said Fujihara. “We allow them to do this year-by-year, if not quarter-by-quarter.”

Right now the company is focused on five industries: manufacturing, transportation, apparel and retail, food and beverage and real estate. 

“The building blocks of a carbon journey are: create carbon emissions inventories (footprint), build a low-carbon scenario by selecting options that will reduce emissions, set up a carbon reduction target (science-based or not), calculate their carbon budget, analyze potential carbon taxes, define an optimal carbon price and finally, do external scenario analysis (based on national or international policies compliance),” the company said in a statement. 

Joining Fujihara is Alain Rodriguez, one of the first 20 engineers at Uber who is now focused on the climate issue.

“Basically, we combine climate finance methodologies, to manage emissions reductions and costs related to the implementation of low-carbon technologies (ultimately, this is what a carbon price means for a company). Our inter-dependent modules allow us to onboard companies at any moment of their carbon journey and provide value on every single step,” SINAI said in a statement. 

Source: Tech Crunch

The U.K. government is advising citizens and residents against all travel to the U.S. in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

In a brief statement, the U.K. Foreign Office said it is “advising against all but essential travel to the USA,” a day after the U.S. government expanded its list of countries whose nationals are effectively banned from entering the U.S. to include the United Kingdom and Ireland.

The announcement by the U.K. authorities follows a move by the Trump administration to impose restrictions on foreign travelers entering the U.S. in an effort to help stem the number of infections of the coronavirus strain, COVID-19, which last week was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

The Trump administration initially initially spared the U.K. and Ireland from its 30-day European travel ban, which included France, Spain, and Italy — all of which this week saw massive increases in the number of citizens infected with the virus. But a day later, the U.K. and Ireland was also added to the list, with an effective ban on all U.K. and Irish travelers entering the U.S. beginning Monday night.

The Foreign Office said the restrictions go into effect immediately as of Sunday.

U.S. citizens — including dual citizens — and lawful permanent residents are exempt from the ban, but may be asked to self-isolate upon arrival for 14 days out of caution.

A Foreign Office spokesperson told TechCrunch by phone that despite one report, U.S. travelers will not be banned from entering the U.K. in response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Source: Tech Crunch