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Play2Pay raises $13M to convert mobile user engagement into bill payment
The gamification of payments is not a new concept.
A number of companies are attempting to combine gamification and payments in creative ways. And today, one such company, Play2Pay, has raised $13 million in a Series A round of funding.
The Miami-based startup has a straightforward mission. It wants to give consumers a way to reduce their bills — it claims by an average of 30%! — by playing games, watching videos and completing daily challenges, offers and surveys.
Play2Pay was bootstrapped for the first five years of its life, raising its first external capital in June of 2020 — a $7.5 million seed round from individual angel investors. Telesoft Partners led its Series A round, which included participation from Harbor Spring Capital and individual investors including former AT&T vice chairman Ralph de la Vega, former Reuters CEO Tom Glocer, Madison Dearborn Partners co-founder and senior advisor Jim Perry and Virtusa founder and former CEO, Kris Canekeratne.
The alternative payment platform says it brokers a “value exchange” between brands and consumers, converting attention and engagement into a currency, which can be redeemed for bill payment. Meanwhile, brands get a new way to promote their products and services.
Play2Pay founder and CEO Brian Boroff started the company in 2015 based on a vision that prepaid mobile phone users should have an alternative way to pay for their mobile phone service and that wireless carriers would adopt an ad-funded commercial model.
Today, the company claims to be positioned to be the world’s first “ad supported payment rail” directly integrated into payments platforms of major service providers and financial institutions. It also claims to be the only company that converts user engagement directly into bill payment.
Image Credits: Play2Pay
The “opt-in” offering is currently available to more than 100 million mobile subscribers across the United States, United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia through partnerships with telecom companies such as AT&T Mexico, Cricket in the U.S., TIM in Brazil, lndosat Ooredoo in Indonesia and U.K.-based Lycamobile.
The rewarding approach seems to be resonating with users. From June 2020 to June 2021, the startup saw its ARR (annual recurring revenue) spike by nearly 300%, according to Boroff, a telecom veteran.
Among the users engaged on the platform, about 25% generated revenue daily, he said. And service providers realized up to 17% revenue expansion as a result of subscriber engagement on the Play2Pay platform, according to Boroff.
“Our distribution model is B2B2C, with Tier-1 service providers worldwide directly integrating our bill payment capability. We’re growing our audience through promotion of the service to their customer base,” he told TechCrunch.
End users, he added, can share their targeting preferences in exchange for value, giving mobile app developers and brands more information when promoting their own products and services to Play2Pay’s audience.
The platform is free for service providers and merchants, meaning the payment does not have costs or fees from interchange, acquirers, chargebacks or gateways.
Instead, Play2Pay generates revenue from mobile app developers and brands. Those developers and brands pay to access Play2Pay’s mobile audience in order to promote their products and services. For example, a mobile gaming company might pay Play2Pay $100 for every user that downloads their app from the Play2Pay app and plays the game for a period of time (such as two hours). Through its technology and partner network, Play2Pay has attribution tracking to ensure that the end user and mobile gaming company both know how much progress has been made toward completing that goal. Other formats include watching videos, completing surveys and more conventional native advertising in some areas.
All of this revenue is aggregated by Play2Pay, the majority of which is passed on to the end user in the form of in-app currency. The balance goes to service providers such as its wireless carrier partners for promoting the Play2Pay platform and to Play2Pay for running the service and processing payment. Play2Pay collects all of the cash and pays out the various parties accordingly.
The company will use the new capital toward product development, hiring and partner engagement.
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Google alum startup Cartken and REEF Technology launch Miami’s first delivery robots
Self-driving and robotics startup Cartken has partnered with REEF Technology, a startup that operates parking lots and neighborhood hubs, to bring self-driving delivery robots to the streets of downtown Miami.
With this announcement, Cartken officially comes out of stealth mode. The company, founded by ex-Google engineers and colleagues behind the unrequited Bookbot, was formed to develop market-ready tech in self-driving, AI-powered robotics and delivery operations in 2019, but the team has kept operations under wraps until now. This is Cartken’s first large deployment of self-driving robots on sidewalks.
After a few test months, the REEF-branded electric-powered robots are now delivering dinner orders from REEF’s network of delivery-only kitchens to people located within a 3/4-mile radius in downtown Miami. The robots, which are insulated and thus can preserve the heat of a plate of spaghetti or other hot food, are pre-stationed at designated logistics hubs and dispatched with orders for delivery as the food is prepared.
“We want to show how future-forward Miami can be,” Matt Lindenberger, REEF’s chief technology officer, told TechCrunch. “This is a great chance to show off the capabilities of the tech. The combination of us having a big presence in Miami, the fact that there are a lot of challenges around congestion as COVID subsides, still shows a really good environment where we can show how this tech can work.”
Lindenberg said Miami is a great place to start, but it’s just the beginning, with potential for the Cartken robots to be used for REEF’s other last-mile delivery businesses. Currently, only two restaurant delivery robots are operating in Miami, but Lindenberger said the company is planning to expand further into the city and outward into Fort Lauderdale, as well as other large metros the company operates in, such as Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles and eventually New York.
Lindenberger is hoping the presence of robots in the streets can act as a “force multiplier,” allowing them to scale while maintaining quality of service in a cost-effective way.
“We’re seeing an explosion in deliveries right now in a post-pandemic world and we foresee that to continue, so these types of no-contact, zero-emission automation techniques are really critical,” he said.
Cartken’s robots are powered by a combination of machine learning and rules-based programming to react to every situation that could occur, even if that just means safely stopping and asking for help, Christian Bersch, CEO of Cartken, told TechCrunch. REEF would have supervisors on site to remotely control the robot if needed, a caveat that was included in the 2017 legislation that allowed for the operation of self-driving delivery robots in Florida.
“The technology at the end of the day is very similar to that of a self-driving car,” said Bersch. “The robot is seeing the environment, planning around obstacles like pedestrians or lampposts. If there’s an unknown situation, someone can help the robot out safely because it can stop on a dime. But it’s important to also have that level of autonomy on the robot because it can react in a split second, faster than anybody remotely could, if something happens like someone jumps in front of it.”
REEF marks specific operating areas on the map for the robots and Cartken tweaks the configuration for the city, accounting for specific situations a robot might need to deal with, so that when the robots are given a delivery address, they can make moves and operate like any other delivery driver. Only this driver has an LTE connection and is constantly updating its location so REEF can integrate it into its fleet management capabilities.
Image Credits: REEF/Cartken
Eventually, Lindenberger said, they’re hoping to be able to offer the option for customers to choose robot delivery on the major food delivery platforms REEF works with like Postmates, UberEats, DoorDash or GrubHub. Customers would receive a text when the robot arrives so they could go outside and meet it. However, the tech is not quite there yet.
Currently the robots only make it street-level, and then the food is passed off to a human who delivers it directly to the door, which is a service that most customers prefer. Navigating into an apartment complex and to a customer’s unit is difficult for a robot to manage just yet, and many customers aren’t quite ready to interact directly with a robot.
“It’s an interim step, but this was a path for us to move forward quickly with the technology without having any other boundaries,” said Lindenberger. “Like with any new tech, you want to take it in steps. So a super important step which we’ve now taken and works very well is the ability to dispatch robots within a certain radius and know that they’re going to arrive there. That in and of itself is a huge step and it allows us to learn what kind of challenges you have in terms of that very last step. Then we can begin to work with Cartken to solve that last piece. It’s a big step just being able to do this automation.”
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LA-based Metropolis raises $41 million to upgrade parking infrastructure
Metropolis is a new Los Angeles-based startup that’s looking to compete with BMW-owned ParkMobile for a slice of the automated parking lot management market.
Upgrading parking with a computer vision-based system that recognizes cars as they enter and leave garages has been Metropolis’ mission since founder and chief executive Alex Israel first formed the business back in 2017.
Israel, a serial entrepreneur, has spent decades thinking about parking. His last company, ParkMe, was sold to Inrix back in 2015. And it was with those earnings and experience that Israel went back to the drawing board to develop a new kind of parking payment and management service.
Now, the company is ready for its closeup, announcing not only its launch, but $41 million in financing the company raised from investors, including the real estate managers Starwood and RXR Realty; Dick Costolo and Adam Bain’s 01 Advisors; Dragoneer; former Facebook employees Sam Lessin and Kevin Colleran’s Slow Ventures; Dan Doctoroff, the head of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs initiative; and NBA All Star and early-stage investor, Baron Davis. Global growth equity firm 3L led the round.
According to Alex Israel, the parking payment application is the foundation for a bigger business empire that hopes to reimagine parking spaces as hubs for a broad array of urban mobility services.
In this, the company’s goals aren’t dissimilar from the Florida-based startup, REEF, which has its own spin on what to do with the existing infrastructure and footprint created by urban parking spaces. And REEF’s $700 million round of funding from last year shows there’s a lot of money to be made — or at least spent — in a parking lot.
Unlike REEF, Metropolis will remain focused on mobility, according to Israel. “How does parking change over the next 20 years as mobility shifts?” he asked. And he’s hoping that Metropolis will provide an answer.
The company is hoping to use its latest funding to expand its footprint to more than 600 locations over the course of the next year. In all, Metropolis has raised $60 million since it was formed back in 2017.
While the computer vision and machine learning technology will serve as the company’s beachhead into parking lots, services like cleaning, charging, storage and logistics could all be part and parcel of the Metropolis offering going forward, Israel said. “We become the integrator [and] we also in some cases become the direct service provider,” Israel said.
The company already has 10,000 parking spots that it’s managing for big real estate owners, and Israel expects more property managers to flood to its service.
“[Big property owners] are not thinking about the infrastructure requirements that allow for the seamless access to these facilities,” Israel said. His technology can allow buildings to capture more value through other services like dynamic pricing and yield optimization as well.
“Metropolis is finding the highest and best use whether that be scooter charging, scooter storage, fleet storage, fleet logistics or sorting,” Israel said.
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Proving voicemail doesn’t have to be wack, the Slack-backed startup Yac raises $7.5 million
Yac, the Orlando, Florida-based startup that’s digitizing voice messages for remote offices, has raised $7.5 million in a new round of funding.
The company’s service has garnered enough attention to pick up a pretty sizable new round from investors led by GGV Capital and a return investment from the Slack Fund.
Apparently, reinventing voicemail is a multi-million-dollar endeavor.
“The future of meetings will be asynchronous, in your ears and hands-free,” says Pat Matthews, the chief executive and founder of Active Capital, when the company announced its seed round nearly a year ago.
Co-founded by Justin Mitchell, Hunter McKinley and Jordan Walker, Yac was spun out of the digital agency SoFriendly, and was developed as a pitch for Product Hunt’s Maker Festival. The voice messaging service won that startup competition at the event and attracted the interest of Boost VC and its founder, the third-generation venture capitalist Adam Draper.
About six months after that seed round, Yac received outreach from Slack thanks to a referral from another entrepreneur. Throughout their negotiations last year, the teams used Yac to conduct due diligence, according to Mitchell. At the time of the company’s August announcement that Slack had come on to finance the company, Yac had a bit over 5,000 users on its service; it charges per seat, in the same way Slack does.
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The big question on every startup’s mind for 2021
My big question for 2021, and the one that is on every startup’s mind, is how will a cataclysmic event such as a global pandemic show up in post-pandemic innovation? I think we’re in the early innings of seeing what “aha moments” have materialized into companies. And we won’t know the pandemic’s true impact on our psyches until the dust settles and we have an opportunity to reflect.
We do know it will be fascinating to watch. In 2020, innovators and investors were forced to stand still, and witness cracks, fractures and rubble in society in a way like never before. It was a humbling year that, for much of the tech community, was mostly spent inside, away and alone.
One reaction I’ve noticed so far — that isn’t necessarily new but comes with new weight — is a rush of innovation that focuses on reducing friction. Take trends like the rise of building in public or the unbundling of venture capital. Or remote work’s shift from enabling communication to now needing to enable passive and active collaboration. Apply the same idea to mental health, education and fitness. Heck, we’re even seeing people take the Y Combinator format and apply it to anything that makes sense, from helping operators turn into investors to helping employees try to turn their side gig into a full-time company.
While these movements didn’t begin because of the coronavirus, they all seem to have a huge, pandemic-sized asterisk next to it.
It would be easy to dismiss these movements as small and inconsequential. But, as my colleague and fellow Equity co-host Danny Crichton pointed out this week, “sometimes the most important changes in venture and startups more generally have come from lowering that last bit of friction to action.”
Lowering friction feels like the mantra with which we all need to enter 2021.
I already have hope that innovation will come from a more diverse set of people, whether it’s in a hacker house for undergraduate women or a student-founded service that matches undergraduate students to nonprofits. So, as we enter the new year — and bear with me here — I urge you to be optimistic.
The last year in tech hasn’t left people exhausted and hopeless, it’s left them energized and ready.
Maze, computer artwork. (Image Credits: Pasieka / Getty Images)
Will the second time be the charm for Qualtrics?
When SAP announced that Qualtrics was getting spun out in July, the full-circle moment made the Equity podcast crew jump to our mics with guesses around why. Now, months later, there’s a new S-1 filing, and more to color in. Alex Wilhelm broke down the Utah-based unicorn’s numbers, noting that it’s the second time Qualtrics has filed.
Will the second time be the charm that Qualtrics needs to actually go public this time around? I’ll let you make the call yourself once you sift through Alex’s analysis of the valuation and financials.
Blackboard Business Strategy Concept. (Image Credits: hanibaram / Getty Images)
Miami, Substack and Clubhouse
If those three words in a single subhed elicit a certain reaction from you, Danny Crichton has a bone to pick with you. He wrote a piece this week about tech’s cynicism around anything new, underscoring how Miami’s future as a tech hub, Substack’s future as a replacement for traditional journalism and Clubhouse’s future as a social media disruptor have come under fire as expected:
The cynicism of immediate perfection is one of the strange dynamics of startups in 2020. There is this expectation that a startup, with one or a few founders and a couple of employees, is somehow going to build a perfect product on day one that mitigates any potential problem even before it becomes one. Maybe these startups are just getting popularized too early, and the people who understand early product are getting subsumed by the wider masses who don’t understand the evolution of products?
Danny’s argument is to give these companies a little more grace to execute on a vision they themselves are not even close to scratching the surface of. When it comes to holding specific decision-makers and businesses to a certain standard, I prefer a more fluid conversation. But I do agree that writing off a business because it hasn’t done everything correctly from the start can hurt progress. It’s easy to be grumpy, but why not choose to be an optimist? Tell me your optimistic bets by responding to this newsletter or tweeting me @nmasc_.
Skyline of downtown Miami, Florida looking toward the Brickell neighborhood on Biscayne Bay. Brickell is one of the largest financial districts in the United States and also has many high-rise residential condominium and apartment towers. (Image Credits: John Coletti / Getty Images)
And some good news
Speaking of humbling moments and optimism, our own Sarah Perez wrote a piece this week about EarlyBird, an app that lets families and friends gift investments to children. While Acorns and Stash have similar offerings, EarlyBird is bringing a fresh UX play to financial literacy, freedom and education. There’s a ton of work left to be done, hurdles to deal with, and giant unicorns to compete with. EarlyBird, however, is only weeks old, so there’s much to watch out for.
VP Caleb Frankel, now EarlyBird COO, explained the early inspiration:
“This all started with a problem I experienced years ago when my beautiful baby niece was born. I found myself head over heels and spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on just the most ridiculous stuff — pretty much just junk gifts,” he says. “I wanted to have a larger impact in her life and something that she could really use when she grew up.”
Image Credits: oxygen (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Around TechCrunch
Attending CES 2021? TechCrunch wants to meet your startup
Gift Guide: Last-minute subscriptions to keep the gifts going all year
Across the week
Seen on Extra Crunch
How artificial intelligence will be used in 2021
On the diversity front, 2020 may prove a tipping point
The 2020 boom in climate tech SPACs
2021 will be a calmer year for semiconductors and chips (except for Intel)
Understanding Europe’s big push to rewrite the digital rulebook
Seen on TechCrunch
China lays out ‘rectification’ plan for Jack Ma’s fintech empire Ant
NSO used real people’s location data to pitch its contact-tracing tech, researchers say
India’s slow 2020 told through dollars and cents
An earnest review of a robotic cat pillow
@EquityPod
The Equity pod put together a 2021 predictions episode (with Chris Gates, our producer, making a guest appearance on the mic as well!). We talk about IPO candidates, San Francisco and the future of drugs.
2020 brought several million downloads to the podcast, and we’re super thankful to all of y’ all for tuning in. This year will be even bigger, better and, hey, maybe we’ll even get to make fun of each other in person too.
Till next week,
Natasha Mascarenhas
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Biden’s infrastructure plans could boost startups
As President-elect Joe Biden readies his transition team and sets the agenda for his first 100 days in office, startups can expect to see some movement on long-stalled infrastructure initiatives that could mean big boosts to their business.
Infrastructure is high on the list of priorities of the incoming Biden Administration as the former vice president hopes to make good on his campaign promise to “build back better.”
American infrastructure has been crumbling for decades without significant investment from the federal government, and much of what will be replaced will also be upgraded with new technology, according to people familiar with the Biden plan.
That means tech companies focused on next-generation telecommunications and utility infrastructure, transportation, housing and construction tech around energy efficiency could see new dollars pour in over the next four years.
“Infrastructure and build out of the clean energy economy … doesn’t necessarily mean large wind or large solar projects. It could mean advanced metering … it can be new engine technologies,” said Dan Goldman, a managing partner at Clean Energy Ventures. “We think that that can be a huge opportunity for job creation … not only putting people back to work but putting people back to work in high quality jobs.”
And there’s a willingness to encourage these infrastructure projects in less partisan ways in states like Massachusetts, Virginia and Florida, which are actively building out electric vehicle infrastructure and renewable energy projects, Goldman said.
While the federal government will ultimately be distributing the cash, startups can expect to see the spending actually come from municipalities and state governments, which often have a better understanding of local needs and where the money should go.
Next-generation energy infrastructure
The electrification of everything — a component of any zero-carbon movement — requires significant upgrades to existing power infrastructure. That means everything from systems management technologies to distribution facilities to ways to store power that can be moved on to the grid.
“Without that infrastructure investment it gets quite challenging,” said Abe Yokell, a co-founder and managing partner of Congruent Ventures.
He pointed to large-scale energy storage technologies as one solution, but management systems for utilities will be another area of interest.
Those infrastructure initiatives will likely mean good things for battery companies like Form Energy, which signed its first major contract with Great River Energy earlier this year; or Antora and Malta, which store energy as heat; or Quidnet, which has a pumped hydroelectric play for large-scale energy storage by pumping water into the gaps between rocks underground that creates pressure and can force water back up through a generator.
Other large-scale energy storage companies working on developing and installing batteries could benefit as well. That means good things for Tesla, which has a few major battery installs under its belt, and Fluence, which manages and operates big install projects.
Natel Energy, another startup working on energy storage (and generation) using hydropower, could also find its technology in the mix, according to company founder, Gia Schneider.
Schneider sees three potential pitches for her company’s technologies. “Climate change is water change,” she said. “We have a bucket in energy, a bucket of stuff in environmental and a bucket of stuff in working lands.”
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Papa raises $18 million to expand its business connecting older adults with virtual and in-person companions
The Miami-based startup Papa has raised an additional $18 million as it looks to expand its business connecting elderly Americans and families with physical and virtual companions, which the company calls “pals.”
The company’s services are already available in 17 states and Papa is going to expand to another four states in the next few months, according to chief executive Andrew Parker.
Parker launched the business after reaching out on Facebook to find someone who could serve as a pal for his own grandfather in Florida.
After realizing that there was a need among elderly residents across the state for companionship and assistance that differed from the kind of in-person care that would typically be provided by a caregiver, Parker launched the service. The kinds of companionship Papa’s employees offer range from helping with everyday tasks — including transportation, light household chores, advising with health benefits and doctor’s appointments, and grocery delivery — to just conversation.
With the social isolation brought on by responses to the COVID-19 pandemic there are even more reasons for the company’s service, Parker said. Roughly half of adults consider themselves lonely, and social isolation increases the risk of death by 29%, according to statistics provided by the company.
“We created Papa with the singular goal of supporting older adults and their families throughout the aging journey,” said Parker, in a statement. “The COVID-19 pandemic has unfortunately only intensified circumstances leading to loneliness and isolation, and we’re honored to be able to offer solutions to help families during this difficult time.”
Papa’s pals go through a stringent vetting process, according to Parker, and only about 8% of all applicants become pals.
These pals get paid an hourly rate of around $15 per hour and have the opportunity to receive bonuses and other incentives, and are now available for virtual and in-person sessions with the older adults they’re matched with.
“We have about 20,000 potential Papa pals apply a month,” said Parker. In the company’s early days it only accepted college students to work as pals, but now the company is accepting a broader range of potential employees, with assistants ranging from 18 to 45 years old. The average age, Parker said, is 29.
Papa monitors and manages all virtual interactions between the company’s employees and their charges, flagging issues that may be raised in discussions, like depression and potential problems getting access to food or medications. The monitoring is designed to ensure that meal plans, therapists or medication can be made available to the company’s charges, said Parker.
Now that there’s $18 million more in financing for the company to work with, thanks to new lead investor Comcast Ventures and other backers — including Canaan, Initialized Capital, Sound Ventures, Pivotal Ventures, the founders of Flatiron Health and their investment group Operator Partners, along with Behance founder, Scott Belsky — Papa is focused on developing new products and expanding the scope of its services.
The company has raised $31 million to date and expects to be operating in all 50 states by January 2021. The company’s companion services are available to members through health plans and as an employer benefit.
“Papa is enabling a growing number of older Americans to age at home, while reducing the cost of care for health plans and creating meaningful jobs for companion care professionals,” said Fatima Husain, principal at Comcast Ventures, in a statement. “
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Decrypted: Tesla’s ransomware near miss, Palantir’s S-1 risk factors
Another busy week in cybersecurity.
In case you missed it: A widely used messaging app used by over a million protesters has several major security flaws; a little-known loophole has let the DMV sell driver’s licenses and Social Security records to private investigators; and the U.S. government is suing to reclaim over $2.5 million in cryptocurrency stolen by North Korean hackers from two major exchanges.
But this week we are focusing on how a Tesla employee foiled a ransomware attack, and, ahead of Palantir’s debut on the stock market, how much of a risk factor is the company’s public image?
THE BIG PICTURE
Russian charged with attempted Tesla ransomware attack
$1 million. That’s how much a Tesla employee would have netted if they accepted a bribe from a Russian operative to install malware on Tesla’s Gigafactory network in Nevada. Instead, the employee told the FBI and the Russian was arrested.
The Justice Department charged the 27-year-old Russian, Egor Igorevich, weeks later as he tried to flee the United States. According to the indictment, his plan was to ask the employee to deliberately deploy ransomware on the Gigafactory’s network, grinding the network to a halt for a ransom of several million dollars. The would-be insider threat is likely the first of its kind, one ransomware expert told Wired, as financially driven hackers continue to up their game.
Tesla founder Elon Musk tweeted earlier this week confirming that Tesla was the target of the failed attack.
The attack, if carried out, could have been devastating. The indictment said that the malware was designed to extract data from the network before locking its files. This data-stealing ransomware is an increasing trend. These hacker groups not only encrypt a victim’s files but also exfiltrate the data to their servers. The hackers typically threaten to publish the victim’s files if the ransom isn’t paid.
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Relativity Space’s focus on 3D printing and cloud-based software helps it weather the COVID-19 storm
Just like in almost every other industry, there’s been a rash of layoffs among newer space startups and companies amid the novel coronavirus crisis. But Relativity Space has managed to avoid layoffs — and is even hiring, despite the global pandemic. Relativity CEO and founder Tim Ellis cites the company’s focus on large-scale 3D printing and its adoption of cloud-based tools and technologies as big reasons why his startup hasn’t felt the pinch.
Because Relativity’s forthcoming launch vehicle is almost entirely made up of 3D-printed parts, from the engines to the fuselage and everything in between, the company has been able to continue producing its prototypes essentially uninterrupted. Relativity has been classified an essential business, as have most companies operating in anything related to aerospace or defense, but Ellis said that they took steps very early to address the potential threat of COVID-19 and ensure the health and safety of their staff. As early as March 9, when the disease was really first starting to show up in the U.S. and before any formal restrictions or shelter-in-place orders were in effect, Relativity was recommending that employees work from home where possible.
“We’re able to do that, partially because with our automated printing technology we were able to have very, very few people in the factory and still keep printers running,” Ellis said in an interview. “We actually even have just one person now running several printers that are still actually printing — it’s literally a single person operating, while a lot of the company has been able to make progress working from home for the last couple of weeks.”
Being able to run an entire production factory floor with just one person on-site is a tremendous competitive advantage in the current situation, and a way to ensure you’re also respecting employee health and safety. Ellis added that the company has already been operating between multiple locations, including teams at Cape Canaveral, Florida, as well as at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and at its headquarters in LA. Relativity also had a further distributed workforce with a few employees working remotely from locations across the U.S, and it focused early on ensuring that its design and development processes could work without requiring everyone to be centrally based.
“We’ve developed our own custom software tools to just streamline those workflows, that really helped,” Ellis said. “Also, just being more of a cloud-enabled company, while still complying with ITAR and security protocols, has been really, really advantageous as well.”
In addition to their focus on in-house software and cloud-based tools, Ellis credits the timing of their most recent round — a $140 million investment closed last October — as a reason they’re well-situated for enduring the COVID-19 crisis. He says that Relativity not only managed to avoid any layoffs, while sending out new offers, but they’re also still paying all employees, including hourly workers, their full regular wage. All of this stems from a business model that in retrospect, seems prescient, but that Ellis says actually just has significant advantages in today’s global business climate by virtue of chance. Still, he does believe that some of Relativity’s resilience thus far signals some of the biggest lasting changes that will result from the coronavirus pandemic.
“What it’s really going to change […] is the approach to global supply chain,” he said. “I think there’s going to be a big push to have more things made in America, and then less dependence on heavy globalization across supply chain. That’s one you thing we’ve always had with 3D printing — not only is it an automated technology, where we can have very few operators still making progress even during times like like this and printing some of the first-stage structures of our rocket — but on the supply chain side, just having simpler supply chains with fewer vendors and different types of manufacturing processes means it’s much less likely that we’ll see very significant supplier and supply chain interruptions.”
Meanwhile, while Ellis says that ultimately they can’t predict how the coronavirus crisis will impact their overall schedule in terms of planned launch activities, which includes flying their first 3D-printed vehicle in 2021, they anticipate being able to make plenty of progress through remote work and a production line that can easily comply with social isolation guidelines. Partner facility shutdowns, including the rocket engine test stand at Stennis, will definitely have an impact, but Relativity’s resilience could prove a model for manufacturing businesses of all stripes to emulate once this moment has passed.
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Men’s at-home health startup Vault takes in $30 million from Tiger Capital
Vault, an at-home healthcare practice specializing in men’s medicine has announced the raise of $30 million in funding from Tiger Capital Group, Declaration Capital and Redesign Health to reach more potential patients and expand to more areas beyond New York, Florida, Tennessee and Texas, where it currently offers treatments.
Founder and CEO Jason Feldman, who formerly headed Amazon’s Prime Video Direct and Global Innovation teams before launching Vault last summer, told TechCrunch his startup aims to bring specialized medicine into men’s homes to give them “a better body, better sex and a better brain.”
He tells TechCrunch he started the company after noticing how many of his male friends seemed embarrassed about medical conditions or simply didn’t know they could do something about it.
Vault operates on the assumption men face certain barriers to going to the doctor for things like hormonal imbalance and erectile dysfunction. The startup tries to remove these barriers by making it easy to book at-home appointments and get a work-up with a nurse practitioner.
“I want to de-stigmatize men’s health.” Feldman told TechCrunch. “You tell a guy to go see the doctor about his heart health and he likely won’t but you tell him you’ll bring him a doctor to help his penis and it’s a different story.”
Like many new concierge medical services that have popped up in the last few years, Vault does not take insurance, instead signing patients up via membership for $133 to $300 per month, depending on the type of service you sign up for. Compare that to Forward, which caters to both men and women and offers unlimited in-office visits and testing for $149/month or Roman, a men’s “digital clinic,” which offers free online evaluations, $15 doctor’s visits and prescription medications for similar services to Vault like erectile dysfunction, hair loss and testosterone support — although Roman requires patients see a physical doctor of their choosing within the last three years before they’re able to get prescriptions via digital services.
But Feldman doesn’t think his startup is anything like what’s out there right now, claiming it as the first national men’s healthcare provider. Vault offers specialty packages like testosterone therapy or the “sex kit” for an increased sex drive or stronger erections, something that sometimes diminishes as men age.
So far, Feldman has signed up over 500 medical practitioners to come to various home locations and has hired a chief medical officer to ensure medical standards are being met. He now plans to use the new funding to open up operations in 42 cities across the U.S. and work on spreading the word to all men nationwide that Vault is here for them.
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