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Even though this might seem to be the absolute worst time to try to round up funding for a restaurant-related startup, Allset is announcing that it’s raised an $8.25 million Series B.

It was not, to be clear, an easy process. CEO Stas Matviyenko (who founded the company with COO Anna Polishchuk) admitted that when he set out to fundraise, the goal was actually $12 million. And at one point, it looked like he might even raise more than that — but as he finalized the round in the week before widespread social distancing measures started to take effect around the United States (effectively ending dine-in options in some cities), he said, “A few investors just disappeared.”

Still, Matviyenko said he feels “lucky” to have closed out the round at all. And he pointed to signs that consumers and restaurants are still turning to Allset during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company started out with a focus on delivering a quick dining experience in restaurants, allowing diners to make a reservation, order ahead and then pay directly through the Allset app. Over time, Matviyenko said, the app also began to offer personalized, healthy recommendations at each restaurant.

At the same time, Allset has added takeout options — and most recently, a feature that allows restaurants to offer contactless takeout, akin to the contactless option offered by many restaurant delivery apps. In fact, Allset is waiving its 12 percent commission fee for restaurants offering this option. (It’s also been promoting usage by offering a daily $4 discount for takeout orders.)

Image Credits: Allset

And while Matviyenko said that orders dropped by around 60 percent as social distancing measures went into place, they’ve apparently they’ve bounced back (by 10 percent as Allset signed up new partners — usually in more residential neighborhoods, away from the office-heavy areas where the companies had previously focused. Matviyenko said the startup has added more than 200 new restaurants in the past couple weeks.

He also emphasized the distinction between AllSet and the various delivery apps. He didn’t rule out adding a delivery option to Allset in the future, but since delivery requires such an investment in logistics, he’d likely to do it by partnering with a company already working in this area. Conversely, he suggested that for most delivery apps, takeout is usually an afterthought (assuming they support it at all), while Allset is trying to offer “the best [takeout] experience” possible.

The new round brings Allset’s total funding to $16.6 million. It was led by led by EBRD (the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development), with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Greycroft, SMRK VC Fund and Inovo Venture Partners.

“The Allset team is building a great product and their effective execution yields strong unit economics with sustainable growth,” said EBRD’s Maria Barsuk in a statement. “We’re excited to partner with them in their next phase, as well as proud to support their efforts in serving local businesses and customers during this unprecedented time for the restaurant industry.”

GM today announced manufacturing details around building much-needed medical face masks. According to the company’s press release, it took the company less than seven days to go from nothing to producing the first production-made mask. The automotive giant said today in a released statement it expects to deliver 20,000 masks on April 8 and soon after, able to produce 50,000 masks a day once the production line is at full capacity.

These face masks are a vital piece of personal protective equipment (PPE) used by front-line healthcare staff to protect themselves against the virus-causing droplets that are spread by patients through coughing and sneezing in clinical settings.

GM turned to global partners to create this manufacturing line within a week. The company sourced material from GM’s existing supply chain and acquired manufacturing equipment from JR Automation in Holland, Michigan, and Esys Automation in Auburn Hills, Michigan. As the company’s press release says, GM even created an ISO Class 8-equivalent cleanroom in GM’s Warren manufacturing plant. GM and the UAW will seek two dozen volunteers to staff this new assembly line.

“The first people we called were those who work with fabric vehicle components,” said Karsten Garbe, GM plant director, Global Pre-Production Operations. “In a few days, the company’s seat belt and interior trim experts became experts in manufacturing face masks.”

While this team was creating a face mask assembly line, others within GM were working towards creating ventilators. Last Friday, March 27, President Donald Trump signed a presidential directive ordering GM to produce ventilators and to prioritize federal contracts. This came hours after the automaker announced plans to manufacture the critical medical equipment needed for patients suffering from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Other automakers joined the fight, as well. Ford and GE Healthcare licensed a ventilator design from Airon Corp and plan to produce as many as 50,000 of them at a Michigan factory by July as part of a broader effort to provide a critical medical device used to treat people with COVID-19. Under this partnership, Ford said it expects to produce 1,500 Airon ventilators by the end of April, 12,00 by the end of May, and 50,000 by July.

As companies get to grips with a wider (and, lately, more enforced) model of remote working, a startup that provides a platform to help track and manage all the devices that are accessing networked services — an essential component of cybersecurity policy — has raised a large round of growth funding. Axonius, a New York-based company that lets organizations manage and track the range of computing-based assets that are connecting to their networks — and then plug that data into some 100 different cybersecurity tools to analyse it — has picked up a Series C of $58 million, money it will use to continue investing in its technology (its R&D offices are in Tel Aviv, Israel) and expanding its business overall.

The round is being led by prolific enterprise investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, with previous backers OpenView, Bessemer Venture Partners, YL Ventures, Vertex, and WTI also participating in the round.

Dean Sysman, CEO and Co-Founder at Axonius, said in an interview that the company is not disclosing its valuation, but for some context, the company has now raised $95 million, and PitchBook noted that in its last round, a $20 million Series B in August 2019, it had a post-money valuation of $110 million.

The company has had a huge boost in business in the last year, however — especially right now, not a surprise for a company that helps enable secure remote working, at a time when many businesses have gone remote in an effort to follow government policies encouraging social distancing to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. As of this month, Axonius has seen customer growth increase 910% compared to a year ago.

Sysman said that this round had been in progress for some time ahead of the announcement being made, but the final stages of closing it were all done remotely last week, which has become something of a new normal in venture deals at the moment.

“We’ve all been staying at home for the last few weeks,” he said in an interview. “The crisis is not helping with deals. It’s making everything more complex for sure. But specifically for us there wasn’t a major difference in the process.”

Sysman said that he first thought of the idea for Axonius when at a previous organization — his experience includes several years with the Israeli Defense Forces, as well as time at a startup called Integrity Project, acquired by Mellanox — where he realised the organization itself, and all of its customers, never actually knew how many devices accessed their network, which is a crucial first step in being able to secure any network.

“Every CIO I met I would ask, do you know how many devices you have on your network? And the answer was either ‘I don’t know,’ or big range, which is just another way of saying, ‘I don’t know,'” Sysman said. “It’s not because they’re not doing their jobs but because it’s just a tough problem.”

Part of the reason, he added, is because IP addresses are not precise enough, and de-duplicating and correlating numbers is a gargantuan task, especially in the current climate of people using not just a multitude of work-provided devices, but a number of their own.

That was what prompted Sysman and his cofounders Ofri Shur and Avidor Bartov to build the algorithms that formed the basis of what Axonius is today. It’s not based on behavioural data as some cybersecurity systems are, but something that Sysman describes as “a deterministic algorithm that knows and builds a unique set of identifiers that can be based on anything, including timestamp, or cloud information. We try to use every piece of data we can.”

The resulting information becomes a very valuable asset in itself that can then be used across a number of other pieces of security software to search for inconsistencies in use (bringing in the behavioural aspect of cybersecurity) or other indicators of malicious activity — specifically following the company’s motto, “Know Your Assets, Identify Gaps, and Automate Security Policy Enforcement” — even as data itself may seem a little pedestrian on its own.

“We like to call ourselves the Toyota Camry of cybersecurity,” Sysman said. “It’s nothing exotic in a world of cutting-edge AI and advanced tech. However it’s a fundamental thing that people are struggling with, and it is what everyone needs. Just like the Camry.”

For now, Axonius is following the route of providing a platform that can interconnect with a number of other security products — currently numbering around 100 — rather than building those tools itself, or acquiring them to bring them in house. That could be one option for how potentially it might evolve over time, however.

For now, the idea of being agnostic to those specific tools and providing a platform just to identify and manage assets is a formula that has already seen a lot of traction with customers — which include companies like Schneider Electric, the New York Times, and Landmark Medical, among others — as well as investors.

“Any enterprise CISO’s top priority, with unwavering consistency, is asset discovery and management. You can’t protect a device if you don’t know it exists.” said Arsham Menarzadeh, general partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, in a statement. “Axonius integrates into any security and management product to show customers their full asset landscape and automate policy enforcement. Their integrated approach and remediation capabilities position them to become the operating system and single source of truth for security and IT teams. We’re excited to play a part in helping them scale.”

In December 2019, Extra Crunch spoke to a group of investors leading the charge in health tech to discuss where they saw the most opportunity in the space leading into 2020.

At the time, respondents highlighted startups in digital therapeutics, telehealth and mental health that were improving medical practitioner efficiency or streamlining the distribution of care, amongst a variety of other digital health markets that were garnering the most attention.

In the months since, the COVID-19 crisis has debilitated national healthcare systems and the global economy. Weaknesses in healthcare systems have become clearer than ever, while startups and capital providers have struggled to operate while wide swaths of the market effectively shut down.

Given significant volatility and the rapid changes seen in the worlds of healthcare, venture and startups broadly, we wanted to understand which inefficiencies might have been brought to light, what new opportunities might exist for founders looking to reduce friction in healthcare systems, how digital health startups have been impacted and how health tech investing as a whole has changed.

We asked several of the VCs who participated in our last digital health survey to update us on how COVID-19 is impacting digital health startups and broader healthcare systems around the world:

• Annie Case, Kleiner Perkins
• Kristin Baker Spohn, CRV
• Deena Shakir, Lux Capital
• Jennifer Hartt, Ben Franklin Technology Partners
• John Prendergass, Ben Franklin Technology Partners
• Bill Liao, SOSV

Annie Case, Kleiner Perkins

Our current unprecedented global crisis has put a spotlight on digital health. In the last few weeks alone, we have seen what feels like a decade’s worth of societal and regulatory changes that require digital health companies to step up and embrace new challenges and opportunities.

Let’s be real: Now isn’t the ideal time to launch a health tracker. For a majority of us, expectations have dramatically plummeted for step counts, workout minutes and other gamified metrics. But hardware launches will, for the most part, go on.

Fitbit eschewed its normal press event this time out — for increasingly good reason — instead opting to launch the Charge 4 by way of press release. The line is modest, in a wearable category that’s begun to be dominated by smartwatches, but it’s a cornerstone product that continues to do well for the soon-to-be Google-owned hardware company.

The biggest news here is built-in GPS — a big addition for the category — and Spotify control. The Spotify bit uses “Connect & Control,” requiring a premium account to play back music from playlists.

Better news for those stuck at home are a number of yoga and other workouts directly accessible through a Fitbit Premium account. That’s available as a 90-day trial for new users. Other news: on-board software updates include Active Zone Minutes, which provides more detailed workout requirements informed by the WHO and AMA, along with improved sleep measurements.

Lifestyle photo of Fitbit Charge 4

GPS is a nice addition, but nothing particularly groundbreaking here. At the very least, the update will pump a little fresh blood into what’s become a flagging category, as smartwatches (Fitbit’s included) have begun to increasingly suck the air out of the room for other wearables.

The Charge 4 will hit stores “in markets where they are still open” on April 13. It runs $150, or $170 for a special addition that includes some upgraded bands.

Even as the pandemic forces Niantic to shift the way its outdoor-friendly titles are played, the gaming company is charging ahead with its efforts to build out an augmented reality platform which allows users to interact with the real world.

Today, the studio behind Pokémon Go announced that it has acquired 6D.ai, a promising SF-based augmented reality startup focused on building software that allowed smartphone cameras to rapidly detect the 3D layouts of spaces around them.

The companies didn’t share terms of the deal.

Niantic’s bread-and-butter is mobile games, specifically Pokémon Go, but the company has raised nearly a half-billion dollars to do something more, building out a developer platform for augmented reality meant to rival what has been created by Facebook and Apple. Acquiring 6D.ai is an interesting step further there.

Niantic is a consumer games company and 6D.ai was primarily working with enterprise clients. While Niantic will be shutting down 6D.ai’s existing developer tools over the next month, a spokesperson tells TechCrunch that the tech will soon be integrated with the company’s Niantic Real World Platform to help developers “build AR experiences for all types of consumer and business applications, including enterprise.”

We profiled 6D.ai back in 2018 when they were fresh out of Oxford University’s Active Vision Lab. CEO Matt Miesnieks told us at the time how he hoped his startup could one day crowdsource 3D models of cities.

“One of the big things holding back engaging AR is for content to feel like it’s actually physically part of the world,” Miesnieks told TechCrunch. “To really make that effect possible, you need to have a 3D model of at least your room, if not the whole world.”

Both Apple and Facebook have made considerable investments in their augmented reality platforms, hoping to bring developers aboard and mount an early lead. Even cursory adoption of the technology has been slower than many in the tech industry have expected, and has, if anything, further isolated Apple and Facebook’s early advantages.

Niantic does host AR’s most popular consumer success story with Pokémon Go, a title which Niantic is still reportedly raking in cash from. Analytics firm SensorTower estimated that the 2016 title had its best year ever in 2019, pulling in some $900 million in revenue. The breakout success of “Go” has not been mirrored as dramatically in the early reception of the studio’s major launch of 2019, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

The ultimate question for Niantic is whether it’s in their best interest to aggressively compete on the tech platform side with acquisitions like these when the timeline of returns is so uncertain and their competitors can likely afford much longer bouts of uncertainty.

Following the acquisition, 6D.ai co-founder Victor Prisacariu will be joining Niantic’s London office with Miesnieks opting for an advisory role going forward. The startup had not fully disclosed its funding. Its seed round was led by Niko Bonatsos at General Catalyst and the startup also received funding from Oxford. Angel investors in 6D included Amitt Mahajan, Jacob Mullins and Greg Castle, among others.

SpaceX is readying for its first flight with astronauts on board – Demo-2, which is technically the last demonstration mission that is required before the Crew Dragon capsule is officially certified to start flying regular missions. Demo-2’s mission scope has been adjusted somewhat so that astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will be actually doing some shift work on the International Space Station, but Crew-1 is the official first operational mission of the SpaceX human-rated spacecraft, and now we know a few more details about who that will carry.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has announced that JAXA astronaut Noguchi Soichi will be on the first Crew Dragon mission once it officially is declared operational, and the agency said on Tuesday that Noguchi has begun training for his trip to the ISS. Noguchi has been to the ISS twice previously on other missions, including between 2009 and 2010 on via a Russian Soyuz launch, and during 2005 when he actually flew aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in order to help assemble part of the station.

SpaceX and NASA are currently readying for Demo-1, which as mentioned will be crewed by two NASA astronauts. That should take place sometime in mid to late May if the schedule holds to current timing plans. Once that’s complete, Crew-1, which is intended to have a complement of four people on board, should begin sometime in the later half of 2020.

Crew-1 will include NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover, as well as newly announced addition Shannon Walker, who was announced as a new member on the team on Tuesday by NASA.

Today, DataStax, the commercial company behind the open source Apache Cassandra project, announced an open source Kubernetes operator developed by the company to run a cloud native version of the database.

When Sam Ramji, chief strategy officer at DataStax, came over from Google last year, the first thing he did was take the pulse of customers, partners and community members around Kubernetes and Cassandra, and they found there was surprisingly limited support.

While some companies had built Kubernetes support themselves, DataStax lacked one to call its own. Given that Kubernetes was born inside Google, and the company has widely embraced the notion of containerization in general, Ramji wanted there to be an operator specifically designed by the company to give customers a general starting point with Kubernetes.

“What’s special about the Kube operator that we’re offering to the community as an opinion — one of many — is that we have done the work to generalize the operator to Cassandra wherever it might be implemented,” Ramji told TechCrunch.

Ramji says that most companies that have created their own Kubernetes operators tend to specialize for their own particular requirements, which is fine, but as the company built on top of Cassandra, they wanted to come up with a general version that could appeal broader range of use cases.

In Kubernetes, the operator is how the DevOps team packages, manages and deploys an application, giving it the instructions it needs to run correctly. DataStax has created this operator specifically to run Cassandra with a broad set of assumptions.

Cassandra is a powerful database because it stays running when many others fall down. As such it is used by companies as varied as Apple, eBay and Netflix to run their key services. This new Kubernetes implementation will enable anyone who wishes to run Cassandra as a containerized application, helping push it into a modern development realm.

The company also announced a free help service for engineers trying to cope with increased usage on their databases due to COVID-19. They are calling the program, “Keep calm and Cassandra on.” The engineers charged with keeping systems like Cassandra running are called Site Reliability Engineers or SREs.

“The new service is completely free SRE-to-SRE support calls. So our SREs are taking calls from Apache Cassandra users anywhere in the world, no matter what version they’re using if they’re trying to figure out how to keep it up to stand up to the increased demand,” Ramji explained.

DataStax was founded in 2010 and has raised over $190 million, according to PitchBook data.

An effort I’ve been following in the Bay Area to deliver meals to front-line hospital clinicians dealing with the results of COVID-19 is announcing a big new partnership today that should give it a national stage. Frontline Foods is partnering up with World Central Kitchen to scale up its ad-hoc efforts across the US.

World Central Kitchen is a not-for-profit organization founded by chef José Andrés in 2010 that has made headlines over and over again as it has provided food and disaster relief in countries around the world after disasters like Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, the Camp Fires in California and most recently COVID-19-affected cruise passengers in Japan and Oakland.

Frontline Foods is an open-sourced effort to deliver meals to hospital staff from local restaurants impacted by loss of clientele due to coronavirus prevention measures. The equation is a brilliantly simple one. Restaurants have far less customers, hospital staff are moving at incredible speed and unable to score a great meal on the fly.

The #SFhospitalmeals experiment evolved into a full clinician meal program, as launched here by Frank Barbieri and Sydney Gessel, along with Ryan Sarver, who I spoke to via email about the program — one of several similar efforts that collectively became Frontline Foods.

“Frank was texting with a mutual friend of ours, Sydney Gessel, who is a registered nurse in the Emergency Department at UCSF Mission Bay. He asked her, ‘How can I help’ and she essentially replied ‘pizza.’ Nurses are pulling 16-hour shifts, are stressed, tired, no time to cook at home, restaurants are closed and the simple act of feeding themselves was going by the wayside,” Sarver said. “At the same time, restaurants were starting to face the reality of shelter-in-place and the dire results of what it meant for them and their teams. We called up a local pizza spot that night and had a bunch of pizzas delivered to her unit. The restaurant and the clinicians were both ecstatic and we realized there was an opportunity to try to do more of this.”

After a couple of dry runs and a tweet for donors, the project ended up expanding to 7 hospitals and raising an eventual $350k over the past few weeks.

Ryan and Frank and other volunteers like Chris Consentino outlined a spec for the project and reached out to a number of restaurants and started plugging them into spreadsheets that matched restaurants to units in need across a few Bay Area hospitals.

Frontline Foods, as a federation that now has multiple chapters across the US, has 150 volunteers in 12 cities and has raised a combined $700,000. In SF it has delivered 4,375 meals to 6 local hospitals. It currently has the ability to deliver another 12,000 meals in SF. Current hospitals served in the bay include UCSF Mission Bay, UCSF Parnassus, SFGH, Kaiser Geary, CPMC Van Ness and CPMC Davies.

Once they saw that there were more groups in the bay and across the US that had started similar ‘connect restaurants to COVID-19 clinicians’ efforts, they began to see the need to build out a standard.

“We decided ‘open sourcing’ the process and tools we were using would help other people start their own programs and allow us to learn from others groups,” Sarver said. “We eventually launched a Slack to help the other cities coordinate. In less than a week we now have 180 volunteers in the Slack, over a dozen cities launched, have raised $700k, and delivered 7,000+ meals.”

Frontline is looking to leverage WCK’s experience in raising money and preparing food for disasters over the last 10 years. WCK’s help as a fiscal sponsor will also give Frontline Foods the ability to utilize its 501c3 status to accept donations. The side of this that is bolstering local restaurants and creating a pipeline between them and groups of people in need of food — fueled by donations — is what Frontline is hoping to bring to the table.

The group boasts a diverse set of skills from technology and design to community management, food & beverage and non-profits. They’re distributed across the US, Canada and Australia as well. It’s nearly all being run on Slack and Zoom calls as well, and most of the group has never met one another.

“We open sourced the process and tools, which at the time was some Google Docs and Google Sheets,” said Sarver. “In the week since, we have spun up a product and engineering team of volunteers who are designing and building more automated systems. Some of it is custom built and but much of it is going to be built on Coda for the backend tools, documentation and automation.”

Many of the cities that are now a part of the Frontline Foods project were home to efforts that started in parallel. After reaching out and realizing that they were aligned, there was a drive to create a new umbrella that used a shared mission and shared systems to make them more effective.

Frontline is reaching out to local, independent restaurants in the areas where it operates or having them apply via a form, and word has spread through the restaurant community. Many of them, even without previous take-out or delivery experience, are figuring out how to package and deliver meals through Frontline’s pipeline. In return, they get a pipeline of predictable business at a time when they are not seeing much predictability at all.

The restaurant industry has been hit incredibly hard by COVID-19, and there is a real danger that an entire generation of independent food providers will just be wiped out. Many are adapting at speed to a life of takeout, or marketplaces, or safe delivery — but any additional help is welcome. And the double-ended benefit that results from the Frontline Foods (and WCK) project is a fantastic way to deliver that help.

“World Central Kitchen is a team of food first responders, mobilizing with the urgency of now to get meals to those who need them most. We are proud that this alliance with Frontline Foods will help activate even more restaurants and kitchens to feed our brave medical professionals on the front lines, in order to make a meaningful impact in the fight to keep everyone fed, and to support the distressed restaurant industry,” World Central Kitchen CEO Nate Mook said in a release today.

Frontline Foods and WCK are taking no fees from these transactions. Along with the WCK partnership, Frontline is also launching a national donation-matching program with a $200,000 matching grant from top donors.

“This is an unprecedented crisis (I’ve used that a lot, but it is) — the hospitals and clinicians have never seen anything like this,” said Sarver via email. “And for the 11 million people employed by restaurants in the US, they face a very uncertain future. Every dollar of a donation goes directly into the pockets of these restaurants to make the food that goes to our clinicians. If you can, please consider a donation.”

You can donate on Frontline Foods website here.

Data science platform cnvrg.io today announced the launch of the free community version of its data science platform. Dubbed ‘CORE,’ this version includes most — but not all — of the standard feature in cnvrg’s main commercial offering. It’s an end-to-end solution for building, managing and automating basic ML models with limitations in the free version that mostly center around the production capabilities of the paid premium version and working with larger teams of data scientists.

As the company’s CEO Yochay Ettun told me, CORE users will be able to use the platform either on-premise or in the cloud, using Nvidia-optimized containers that run on a Kubernetes cluster. Because of this, it natively handles hybrid- and multi-cloud deployments that can automatically scale up and down as needed — and adding new AI frameworks is simply a matter of spinning up new containers, all of which are managed from the platform’s web-based dashboard.

Ettun describes CORE as a ‘lightweight version’ of the original platform but still hews closely to the platform’s original mission. “As was our vision from the very start, cnvrg.io wants to help data scientists do what they do best – build high impact AI,” he said. “With the growing technical complexity of the AI field, the data science community has strayed from the core of what makes data science such a captivating profession — the algorithms. Today’s reality is that data scientists are spending 80 percent of their time on non-data science tasks, and 65 percent of models don’t make it to production. Cnvrg.io CORE is an opportunity to open its end-to-end solution to the community to help data scientists and engineers focus less on technical complexity and DevOps, and more on the core of data science — solving complex problems.”

This has very much been the company’s direction from the outset and as Ettun noted in a blog post from a few days ago, many data scientists today try to build their own stack by using open-source tools. They want to remain agile and able to customize their tools to their needs, after all. But he also argues that data scientists are usually hired to build machine learning models, not to build and manage data science platforms.

While other platforms like H2O.ai, for example, are betting on open source and the flexibility that comes with that, cnvrg.io’s focus is squarely on ease of use. Unlike those tools, Jerusalem-based cnvrg.io, which has raised about $8 million so far, doesn’t have the advantage of the free marketing that comes with open source, so it makes sense for the company to now launch this free self-service version

It’s worth noting that while cnvrg.io features plenty of graphical tools for managing date ingestion flows, models and clusters, it’s very much a code-first platform. With that, Ettun tells me that the ideal user is a data scientist, data engineer or a student passionate about machine learning. “As a code-first platform, users with experience and savvy in the data science field will be able to leverage cnvrg CORE features to produce high impact models,” he said. “As our product is built around getting more models to production, users that are deploying their models to real-world applications will see the most value.”

Last fall, Spotify debuted a standalone Kids application, aimed at bringing kid-friendly music and stories to Spotify Premium Family subscribers, initially in Ireland. Today, that app is being made available broadly in the U.S. Canada and France, the company announced on Tuesday. The Kids app is still considered a “beta” as it arrives in these new markets, Spotify says. However, it’s been expanded with more songs, stories and other content since the original beta tests began.

The app is largely designed to boost sign-ups for Spotify’s top-tier subscription, the $14.99 (USD) per month Premium Family plan. This plan offers up to 6 people in the same household access to Spotify’s on-demand, ad-free music streaming service, each with their own personalized account. It also includes other exclusive features like Family Mixes, as well as parental controls, and now, the Spotify Kids application.

Spotify has long since realized its one-size-fits-all strategy didn’t work for families. It needed to build a unique experience separate from its flagship app in order to best cater to children — and to abide by the regulations around data collection and consent with regard to apps aimed at kids.

Spotify designed the Kids app from the ground up with the needs of both parents and kids in mind. For parents, it offers peace of mind that children won’t accidentally encounter inappropriate lyrics, for example, or songs with more adult themes. To ensure this remains the case, Spotify editors hand-curate the content on the Kids app by following a set of guidelines about what’s inappropriate for children. It doesn’t utilize algorithms to make selections about what’s included, the way the spinoff app YouTube Kids does.

Instead of being a fully on-demand product, Spotify Kids offers playlists for little ones focused around categories like Movies, TV, Stories, or various activities, like “Learn” or “Party,” among others. As kids grow older, they may also want to follow their favorite artists in the app.

The app can also be customized by age range. For younger kids, there’s character-based artwork and content aimed at the preschool set like singalongs or lullabies. Older kids will see a more detailed experience and have access to more popular tracks that are also age-appropriate.

The programmed playlists in Spotify Kids are curated by editors hailing from some of the most well-known brands in kids’ entertainment — including Nickelodeon, Disney, Discovery Kids, Universal Pictures, and others. They know what kids want and also what sells to the parents who pay.

Since its launch in Ireland, Spotify Kids has rolled out to Sweden, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.

It has also added more content since its original debut, says Spotify.

“We heard loud and clear that both parents and kids are craving more content in the app, so we’ve been increasing the number of tracks available. We’ve also heard from parents that they want even more control of the content, so we are working on some exciting new features,” noted Spotify’s Chief Premium Business Officer Alex Norström, in a statement.

The company isn’t yet going into detail about the upcoming additions, but says they’ll be focused on giving parents more control over the child’s experience. Typically, that would mean letting parents make more specific choices about what’s being streamed. But since parental controls are already available, it could mean letting parents pick specific songs or perhaps, block them. Time will tell.

Today the Spotify Kids app has over 8,000 songs in its catalog — 30% more than when it first arrived in Ireland, and growing.

It also has more local content, with 50% of the catalog in the app localized by market. Its collection of kid-friendly audiobooks and stories has grown as well, and the app now offers over 60 hours of stories, including fairy tales, classics, short stories, and stories from Disney Music Group.

In response to user feedback, there’s also now more bedtime content like lullabies, calming music and sounds, and bedtime stories. (And yes, this finally means that Spotify parents will stop having their year-end Spotify Wrapped ruined by lullabies.)

In the U.S., Spotify Kids launches today with over 125 playlists (approximately 8,000 tracks.) In addition to mainstream kids’ music, the catalog includes Spanish-language, Country, Christian, Motown, and Soul Dance Party playlists. There’s also a Trolls World Tour playlist and another for Frozen.

In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, there’s also a new global playlist called “Wash Your Hands” which includes songs that teach kids to wash hands and to cough and sneeze properly. This includes the new song from Pinkfong “Wash Your Hands with Baby Shark.”

And to aid parents now educating children at home, there’s a “Learning” playlist hub where you’ll find songs about the ABC’s, counting, science and more.

The app is available today in the U.S., Canada, and France on iOS and Android. The app is a free download, but requires a Spotify Premium Family membership.

If you can’t stop them, power them. That’s the strategy behind Snapchat App Stories, which launches today to let users show off their ephemeral content in other apps too. The first partners will let you post Stories to your dating profile in Hily, share them alongside [music] videos in Triller, watch them while screensharing in Squad, or give people a peek at your life in augmented reality network Octi. Developers can now sign up to add Stories to their apps.

Snapchat’s Stories format has been widely cloned, most famously by Instagram and Facebook, but with versions in various states of development for YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, SoundCloud, and more. Snapchat hopes to retain some grip on Stories and dissuade more copycats by letting developers bake the original version into their apps rather than building a bootleg attempt from scratch.

If you need Snapchat to share Stories to popular apps, that could boost content production plus subsequent viewership and ad impressions inside of Snapchat, remind people to shoot Stories, and make sure having a Snapchat account stays relevant. “We definitely think there’s a potential for monetization in App Stories but not yet” Snap’s VP of partnerships Ben Schwerin tells me. For now, Snapchat isn’t injecting ads into alongside Stories into other apps, though that’s clearly the plan.

“There are certain platforms out there that have decided they want to invest in building their own Stories product and their own camera, but it’s not a trivial thing to do. It takes resources and time. We think we think we can help developers do that” Schwerin explains. “Getting more people oput there, regardless of age or where they live, comfortable using Stories probably makes them more likely to be able to pick up and enjoy Snapchat.”

Snapchat initially announced the plan for App Stories at its Partner Summit exactly a year ago. Unfortunately, its second annual developer conference that was set for this week was cancelled due to coronavirus.

Though advertising spend may be reduced, at least the app has experienced an increase in usage while everyone shelters in place. That includes third-party apps built on its Snap Kit platform that lets developers piggyback on Snapchat’s login, Bitmoji, and camera effects.

“We continue to see incredible growth from established apps like Reddit and Spotify and TikTok, and from startups that are really building from the ground up on Snap Kit like Yolo” Schwerin reveals. People are spending more time at home and less time with friends. We’re seeing increased usage of Snapchat.”

Snap Kit has allowed Snapchat to rally would-be copycats into a legion of allies as it fights to stave off the Facebook empire. That strategy combined with a high-performance rebuild of its Android app led Snapchat’s share price to grow from $11.36 a year ago to a recent high of $18.98 before coronavirus dragged almost all the way back down.

Now, when people shoot a photo or video in the Snapchat camera, they’ll get options to share it not just to their Story or Snap Map and the crowdsourced community Stories, but also to their Story within other apps integrated with Snap Kit. Users will see options to syndicate their Story to products equipped with App Stories where they’re already logged in.

Unlike on Snapchat where Stories disappear after 24 hours, with they default to a 7-day expiration in other App Stories. That relieves users of having to constantly post ephemeral Snaps to keep their dating or social app profiles stocked with biographical content.

In Hily, Snapchat Stories partially replaces the homegrown version it’d spun up in the meantime to show potential dates off-the-cuff looks at people’s lives. In Triller, users can tap on a content creator’s profile pic to see biographical Stories instead of just their polished music videos. In Squad, users can co-watch Stories amongst other things to screenshare. And in Octi, users can see someone’s Snapchat Story amongst other hidden content revealed by its augmented reality camera.

For Snapchat to gain momentum it needs two things: a constant influx of new users, eager to use its augmented reality camera and Bitmoji wherever they’re available, and more impressions to monetize with ads after Instagram stole the Stories use case for untold millions of older users. App Stories could help with both.

EV startup Damon Motorcycles has acquired the IP of Mission Motors, raised $3 million in funding and announced a special production run of its debut model.

The Vancouver-based venture unveiled the 200 mph Hypersport in January and began taking pre-orders for the e-moto, with a base price of $24,995. Damon has positioned its EV entry as an ultra-fast, smart and safe motorcycle.

In addition to its go-straight-to-jail top-speed, the Hypersport boasts 200 miles of highway range, 147 ft-lbs of torque, charges to 80% in 20 minutes and weighs less than 500 pounds, Damon CEO Jay Giraud told TechCrunch earlier this year.

These features, along with digitally controlled riding-modes, are just part of Damon’s signature. The seed-stage startup has also engineered the cloud-connected Hypersport with proprietary safety and ergonomics technology that provide adjustable riding positions and blind-spot detection.

Image Credits: Damon Motorcycles

Damon packed a lot into its latest announcement and shared some insight on appealing to the elusive millennial market and weathering the economic tremors of the COVID-19 crisis.

On the acquisition, the startup purchased the IP of Mission Motors, a now defunct San Francisco e-motorcycle venture that powered down in 2015. Though Mission’s EV development outran its capital, the company’s motorcycles achieved a number of performance benchmarks and captured the attention of Jay Leno.

Mission Motors was also one of first e-moto companies to roll into the competition arena, fielding an entry in the famed Isle of Man TT race in 2009.

Damon will draw on Mission’s product and racing tech, including the company’s full stack development for EV drive-trains and battery power.

“There are certain bits of that we’re going to roll into the commercialized Hypersport,” Damon COO Derek Derek Dorresteyn told Techcrunch on a call with CEO Jay Giraud.

“Specifically, we’re using the motor development that they had as a platform to advance our motor design…We’re looking at achieving 12 newton-meters per kilogram of torque output from an electric motor,” Dorresteyn said.

Giraud explained that could translate to Damon producing an electric motorcycle with roughly 160 kilowatts of power, 200 horsepower and 200 ft-lbs of torque. That would outdo one of the fastest production e-motorcycles, Energica’s EGO, with 145 horsepower and 159 ft-lbs of torque.

Energica’s Ego, Image Credits: TechCrunch

On funding, Damon Motors now has $3 million in additional capital, raised at the pre-seed level from undisclosed angel investors.

The startup will use the backing on product development and accelerating time to market, Giraud said.

Damon’s founder also noted that the company was on track to fill its initial target of 1000 pre-orders for both its Hypersport standard and Premiere models. As such, the startup will extend orders on a limited run, $34,995 Hypersport Premiere founder edition in two different color-schemes: Arctic Sun and Midnight Sun.

Damon is highlighting the demographics of those placing deposits on its Hypersport e-motorcycles.

“Half the people ordering are under the age of 40,” said Giraud. “It really speaks to product market fit.”

The ability to draw millennials to motorcycle purchases is significant, given they’ve been the hardest market segment to crack. Young buyers used to be a mainstay of the industry, but the last 10 years have seen sharp declines in motorcycle ownership by everyone under 40, according to Motorcycle Industry Council stats.

Damon believes its proprietary tech and plans for a direct-to-consumer sales and service model can attract affluent younger buyers and the Tesla crowd to its fast and safe motorcycles.

Though TechCrunch hasn’t yet ridden a Hypersport, the two-wheeler’s specs offer unique features compared to any current production gas or electric motorcycle. On safety, Damon’s CoPilot system uses sensors, radar and cameras to track moving objects around the motorcycle and alert riders to danger.

Image Credits: Damon Motorcycles

The startup’s debut EV also brings smart ergonomics in Damon’s patented Shift system that allows riders to electronically adjust the motorcycle’s windscreen, seat, foot-pegs and handlebars to different riding positions and conditions.

Even with the demand Damon has seen for the Hypersport, it still faces a stagnant motorcycle market that has become crowded with EV competitors.

Harley Davidson introduced its all electric LiveWire in 2019, becoming the first of the big gas manufacturers to offer a street-legal e-moto for sale in the U.S.

Harley’s entry followed several failed electric motorcycle startups — including Mission Motors — and put it in the market with existing EV ventures, such as Italy’s Energica and U.S. startup Zero  — which launched its $19,000, 120 mph SR/F in 2019.

On top of strong competition in the e-moto space, there’s a growing uncertainty on the buying appetite for motorcycles of any kind that could exist for the remainder of 2020, and potentially beyond, given the COVID-19 pandemic gripping the world.

As of this week, Harley Davidson had halted all motorcycle production due the coronavirus and Energica confirmed to TechCrunch it had shutdown all operations per a decree of the Italian government.

Zero Motorcycles — located in Scott’s Valley, California — is still producing motorcycles “following the standard health orders of the CDC”, according to a company spokesperson.

Damon’s leadership believes the company can power through whatever lies ahead. The company has a global supply-chain across Europe, Asia and North America, but builds its battery packs and assembles its motorcycles in Canada.

“There are real challenges to get anyone to do anything today. We don’t expect that to be true forever,” COO Derek Dorresteyn said of supply-chain and meeting production demand. 

CEO Jay Giraud believes the current situation with COVID-19 will likely create an economic slump that could drag on longer than the 2008 Great Recession.

On how Damon Motorcycles will manage, “Like every core startup in the world, we’re gonna have to raise a lot of money no matter what. But we’re in a good place right now,” he said.

Disney said on Tuesday that it will launch its streaming service, Disney+, in India on April 3. The service, available globally in about a dozen markets, will launch in India on Hotstar, one of the most popular on-demand streaming services in the country that is also owned by Disney.

The company said it is raising the yearly subscription price of the combined entity, Disney+Hotstar, to Rs 1,499 ($20), up from  Rs 999 ($13.2). TechCrunch reported last year that Disney+ will launch in India in 2020 and will increase its subscription cost.

Hotstar, which claimed to have amassed 300 million monthly active users during the cricket season in India last year, would continue to offer an ad-supported service that it will offer to users without a charge. But it is increasing the cost of all its premium tiers.

More to follow…

Xiaomi ended 2019 on a high, reporting a 27.1% year-over-year jump in the fourth-quarter revenue aided by overseas expansion, beating analysts’ estimation. 

The Chinese giant said sales in the fourth quarter jumped to 56.5 billion yuan ($8 billion), up from 44.42 billion yuan in the same quarter a year before.

In the fourth quarter of 2019, Xiaomi’s net profit was RMB 2.3 billion ($320 million), up 26.5% YoY. Refinitiv I/B/E/S had estimated Xiaomi’s Q4 2019 revenue to be $7.83 billion and the net income at $264 million, it told TechCrunch. 

Xiaomi said its cash reserves had improved and it planned to continue to invest in international regions such as India, its biggest overseas market. Xiaomi executives said on a conference call with reporters that they hope that the 21-day lockdown imposed by New Delhi earlier this month to contain the spread of the coronavirus outbreak, which has put an absolute halt to purchase of non-essential goods, would “show signs of recovery” in two to three months.

The company said overseas demand for its products will “undoubtedly” be affected by the coronavirus outbreak, but it currently believes the impact is manageable. It cautioned, however, that its advertisement business could be potentially impacted if its customers decrease their budgets. Xiaomi said its production was already up to 80% of its capacity.

Xiaomi said the gross profit margin from the smartphone business, its biggest revenue source, had increased from 6.1% in Q4 2018 to 7.8% in Q4 2019. The company’s Android-based MIUI operating system now has 309.6 million monthly active users, up from 292 million in September last year. Of the 309.6 million MIUI users, 109 million live in mainland China, it said.

“Despite headwinds from the Sino-US trade war and global economic downturn, Xiaomi stood out in 2019 with a commendable set of results as our revenue exceeded RMB200 billion for the first time,” said Lei Jun, Xiaomi founder and chief executive.

“While the entire world is still under the dark shadows of COVID-19, we have maintained our keen focus on efficiency to tide over this economic ‘black swan’ with everyone. At Xiaomi, we firmly believe that our long-term business success is underpinned by technological innovations, and to that effect, we plan to invest RMB50.0 billion in the next five years, as we relentlessly focus on technological innovation and user experience to grow our loyal Mi Fan base,” he added.

More to follow…

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank with over 4 million account holders, is taking a number of precautionary steps to help see it through the current coronavirus downturn, including voluntary furloughs and its CEO forgoing a salary, TechCrunch understands.

In an internal company-wide memo issued by co-founder and CEO Tom Blomfield, he tells the bank’s over 1,500 staff that he won’t be taking a salary for the next twelve months, and that the senior management team and board have volunteered to take a 25% cut in salary, as have other “Monzonaughts” within the company.

In addition, a limited number of Monzo’s U.K. employees are being offered voluntary furloughing for two months, as part of the scheme rolled out by the U.K. government to protect jobs during the coronavirus lockdown, which is already impacting many companies — not just Monzo — including several other fintechs I know of. Furlough ensures that employees still get paid even when work has decreased and that when things hopefully return to normal there is a job to come back to.

Although well capitalised, like other banks and fintechs, Monzo has seen customer card spend reduce at home and (of course) abroad, meaning it is seeing less revenue from interchange fees. New account signups have also slowed, as has customer support requests. It therefore makes sense to utilise the furlough scheme to help protect jobs in the future when demand picks up again. By making it voluntary, it also means staff with kids to home school or loved ones to take care of, can use the option to hopefully make their lives easier for the time being.

Specifically, I understand Monzo is accepting up to 175 furlough applications in customer support, and up to 120 applications from other parts of the business.

Meanwhile, it’s not clear if other U.K. challenger banks are also using the government’s furlough scheme. I’ve asked Starling and Revolut, for example, but have yet to hear back. As already mentioned, the scheme is available to U.K. companies right across the board and several startups, including fintechs, have already applied furloughing as a pre-cautionary measure.

Lastly, it should be stressed that none of the above should impact customers at Monzo, which, as a digital bank, is pretty well-positioned to operate during lockdown and with all staff already working from home. It is also a fully licensed bank, with customer deposits up to £85,000 protected as part of the U.K. government’s deposit protection scheme.

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp is relinquishing his role as a board director and switching to board observer — where he says he’ll focus on product strategy for the ride hailing giant.

Camp made the announcement in a short Medium post in which he writes of his decade at Uber: “I’ve learned a lot, and realized that I’m most helpful when focused on product strategy & design, and this is where I’d like to focus going forward.”

“I will continue to work with Dara [Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO] and the product and technology leadership teams to brainstorm new ideas, iterate on plans and designs, and continue to innovate at scale,” he adds. “We have a strong and diverse team in place, and I’m confident everyone will navigate well during these turbulent times.”

The Canadian billionaire entrepreneur signs off by saying he’s looking forward to helping Uber “brainstorm the next big idea”.

Camp hasn’t been short of ideas over his career in tech. He’s the co-founder of the web 2.0 recommendation engine, StumbleUpon. He’s also founded a startup studio and incubator, Expa Studios and Expa Labs — which has spawned startups like Haus, which is pushing an alternative model for home ownership. More recently he’s been been building Eco: A crypto currency with an energy efficiency twist.

Meanwhile, Uber’s other co-founder, Travis Kalanick, left the company board entirely at the end of last year — having been forced out of the CEO role in 2017 following a shareholder revolt by prominent investors at the height of controversy around Uber’s toxic workplace culture.

At the time, Camp said the culture controversy at Uber had left him “upset and deeply reflective“. And he backed replacing Kalanick as CEO — helping to bring in Khosrowshahi, who remains at Uber’s helm.

Ryan Graves — Uber’s first employee and first CEO — also left the board last year, shortly after the IPO.

We’ve reached out to Uber for comment on the latest board change.

D-Wave, the Canadian quantum computing company, today announced that it is giving anyone who is working on responses to the COVID-19 free access to its Leap 2 quantum computing cloud service. The offer isn’t only valid to those focusing on new drugs but open to any research or team working on any aspect of how to solve the current crisis, be that logistics, modeling the spread of the virus or working on novel diagnostics.

One thing that makes the D-Wave program unique is that the company also managed to pull in a number of partners that are already working with it on other projects. These include Volkswagen, DENSO, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, MDR, Menten AI, Sigma-i Tohoku University, Ludwig Maximilian University and OTI Lumionics. These partners will provide engineering expertise to teams that are using Leap 2 for developing solutions to the Covid-19 crisis.

As D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz told me, this project started taking shape about a week and a half ago. In our conversation, he stressed that teams working with Leap 2 will get a commercial license, so there is no need to open source their solutions and won’t have a one-minute per month limit, which are typically the standard restrictions for using D-Wave’s cloud service.

“When we launched leap 2 on February 26th with our hybrid solver service, we launched a quantum computing capability that is now able to solve fairly large problems — large scale problems — problems at the scale of solving real-world production problems,” Baratz told me. “And so we said: look, if nothing else, this could be another tool that could be useful to those working on trying to come up with solutions to the pandemic. And so we should make it available.”

He acknowledged that there is no guarantee that the teams that will get access to its systems will come up with any workable solutions. “But what we do know is that we would be remiss if we didn’t make this tool available,” he said.

Leap is currently available in the U.S., Canada, Japan and 32 countries in Europe. That’s also where D-Wave’s partners are active and where researchers will be able to make free use of its systems.

Chinese e-commerce firm Pinduoduo said on Tuesday it had raised $1.1 billion in a private share placement that will enable its further expansion and allow it to capture “additional opportunities” during the times of uncertainty.

The Nasdaq-listed firm said some of its long-term investors financed the deal. The investors were granted newly issued Class A ordinary shares of Pinduoduo representing approximately 2.8% of the company’s total outstanding shares.

The capital raise comes weeks after the Shanghai-based company said it was bracing for losses due to the coronavirus outbreak. The firm’s fourth-quarter revenue growth fell short of expectations.

Pinduoduo, which competes with giant Alibaba, has grown rapidly in recent years after gamifying the shopping experience that allows customers to team up to buy anything from smartphones to fruits.

But the firm’s marketing — promotions and discount coupons — has also widened its losses. In Q4 2019, Pinduoduo reported a loss of about $250 million on revenue of $1.5 billion.

“Pinduoduo surpassed 1 trillion yuan in annual gross merchandise value (GMV) in less than five years, and we are confident that we will see robust growth beyond our current 585 million user base,” said David Liu, VP of Strategy at Pinduoduo, said in a statement.

“The extra funding gives us the strategic flexibility to capture opportunities to further benefit our users, as we bring interactive experiences, such as our new live-streaming features, and wider variety of value-for-money products to them,” he added.

As with e-commerce firms in other parts of the world, Pinduoduo in recent months has focused on fulfilling low-cost protective gear and everyday essentials over everything else.

French startup Qarnot has raised a $6.5 million (€6 million) funding round. The company manufactures heaters and boilers with a special trick — they pack computers as computers tend to generate a lot of heat. Qarnot then lets companies leverage that computing power by running tasks on those unusual servers.

Banque des Territoires, Caisse des Dépôts, Engie Rassembleur d'Énergies, A/O PropTech and Groupe Casino are participating in today’s funding round.

When you design a data center, you transform electricity into computing resources and heat. Data centers always have to find clever new ways to get rid of heat with powerful cooling mechanisms.

Qarnot is designing alternative data centers by taking advantage of heat instead of fighting heat. The company first started with computing heaters, an electrical heater with a server. The company sells those devices to construction companies looking for heaters for their new buildings.

People living or working in those buildings can then control heating directly on the heaters or through a mobile app. Nearly 1,000 social housing units are heated by Qarnot.

At the other end of the equation, companies such as BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Natixis rent those servers for their own needs. Illumination Mac Guff is also using the platform to generate 3D models for animated movies.

Heating suffers from seasonality. That’s why Qarnot has also designed scalable boiler systems. Those boilers pack CPU servers or a mix of CPU and GPU servers. Qarnot has also set up a joint venture with Groupe Casino to heat warehouses with computer racks.

The Los Angeles-based digital challenger bank, HMBradley, opened its virtual doors to the public today, allowing the thousands of waitlisted would-be users to set up direct deposits and collect their sign-up bonuses.

The company is offering banking customers an up to 3% return on their savings based on the percentage they save of their quarterly deposits.

HMBradley also set up a new feature which allows users to save towards specific goals.

Backed by PayPal founder Max Levchin’s HVF Labs, along with Walkabout Ventures, Mucker Capital, Index Ventures, and Accomplice, to the tune of $3.5 million, HMBradley was designed to benefit savers, the company said.

Account holders with balances up to $100,000 can receive up to 3% annual percentage yields on their accounts. These account holders qualify by receiving one direct deposit and saving at least 5% of the total amount deposited in an account monthly.

HMBradley accounts are held through Hatch Bank, which is FDIC insured.

To qualify for the 3 percent rate, customers need to save over 20 percent of their income, account holders who save between 15 percent and 20 percent receive 2 percent of their cash per year, and those saving less than 15 percent but more than ten percent receive a 1 percent APY.

“We want to empower and protect every consumer financially to show them that a bank can be on their side, regardless of how much money they make,” said Zach Bruhnke, co-founder and CEO of HMBradley, in a statement.

Account holders have access to 55,000 fee-free ATMs around the country, mobile check deposit and around-the-clock support, the company said.

The company’s MasterCard comes with all of the standard features including zero liability protection and an ability to set up travel, fraud alerts, and cancel cards all through an online portal, the company said.

Facebook has diverted from its policy of not fact-checking politicians in order to prevent the spread of potentially harmful coronavirus misinformation from Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Facebook made the decisive choice to remove a video shared by Bolsonaro on Sunday where he claimed that “hydroxychloroquine is working in all places.” That’s despite the drug still undergoing testing to determine its effectiveness for treating COVID-19, which researchers and health authorities have not confirmed.

“We remove content on Facebook and Instagram that violates our Community Standards, which do not allow misinformation that could lead to physical harm” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. Facebook specifically prohibits false claims regarding cure, treatments, the availability of essential services, and the location or intensity of contagion outbreaks.

BBC News Brazil first reported the takedown today in Portuguese. In the removed video, Bolsonaro had been speaking to a street vendor, and the President claimed “They want to work”, in contrast to the World Health Organization’s recommendation that people practice social distancing. He followed up that “That medicine there, hydroxychloroquine, is working in all places.”

If people wrongly believe there’s an widely-effective treatment for COVID-19, they may be more reckless about going out in public, attending work, or refusing to stay in isolation. That could cause the virus to spread more quickly, defeat efforts to flatten the curve, and overrun health care systems.

This why Twitter removed two of Bolsonaro’s tweets on Sunday, as well as one from Rudy Giuliani, in order to stop the distribution of misinformation. But to date, Facebook has generally avoided acting as an arbiter of truth regarding the veracity of claims by politicians. It notoriously refuses to send blatant misinformation in political ads, including those from Donald Trump, to fact-checkers.

Last week, though, Facebook laid out that COVID-19 misinformation “that could contribute to imminent physical harm” would be directly and immediately removed as it’s done about other outbreaks since 2018, while less urgent conspiracy theories that don’t lead straight to physical harm are sent to fact-checkers that can then have the Facebook reach of those posts demoted.

Now the question is whether Facebook would be willing to apply this enforcement to Trump, who’s been criticized for spreading misinformation about the severity of the outbreak, potential treatments, and the risk of sending people back to work. Facebook is known to fear backlash from conservative politicians and citizens who’ve developed a false narrative that it discriminates against or censors their posts.