Battery startup Joule Case lands $500K after making key pivot due to the pandemic

Joule Case batteries. (Joule Case Photo)

Joule Case, an Idaho-based battery tech startup producing stackable energy storage units, landed more than $500,000 in funding.

The infusion of capital has helped the 5-year-old company shift from a sales plan that, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, was going to target events and music festivals. in the form of convertible notes.

Now the startup is focused on residential and backup-power customers. That includes food trucks, campers and RV owners, and people looking for home energy backup for solar power and in the case of electrical outages.

“In the day-to-day of trying to keep your business afloat or selling stuff, you have to be flexible and determined to make it happen,” said CEO James Wagoner.

The startup had grown to 12 employees, but had to lay off staff working specifically on the festival-related products. The company, which now has five full-time employees, is hiring for product development and sales aligned with the pivot.

In October, Joule Case was crowned Early-Stage Innovation of the Year from the Idaho Innovation Awards. Pictured are founders James Wagoner (second from left) and Alex Livingston (third from left). (Joule Case Photo)

Using lithium ion and lead acid batteries, Joule Case has created a stackable system that can be added or subtracted to depending on the amount and duration of energy needed. The batteries can replace polluting, noisy gas generators.

Joule Case products are available from the company as well as Camping World and Northern Tool, and the startup recently closed a deal to provide the batteries to a network of more than 500 electrical wholesale distributors.

The latest funding is in the form of convertible notes, debt that can be turned into equity in the future. Investors in the round include Keiretsu Forum and Park City Angels. Joule Case previously raised nearly $1 million from angel investors. The startup says it plans to pursue a Series A funding round in the near future.

As the push toward cleaner energy continues, Joule Case is part of a larger trend to establish the Pacific Northwest a major player in the growing battery tech sector.

There are numerous startups in the space, including Woodinville, Wash.-based Group14, which is using nanotechnology in battery science, and ESS, an Oregon-based manufacturer tackling grid energy storage. Lavle, a Seattle-area company developing batteries for marine and other uses plans, reported that it’s increasing its workforce by more than 50% through the end of the year. Seattle’s Zin Boats is making waves in its pitch to become the “Tesla of the sea.”

The region is also home to institutional battery expertise at the University of Washington and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and government agencies are purchasing batteries for transportation projects including Washington state’s plans to build the world’s largest hybrid-powered, auto-carrying ferries.

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This Seattle startup shifted to a 4-day work week due to the pandemic — here’s what happened

Volt CEO Dan Giuliani. (Volt Photo)

The pandemic is changing the way we think about work — not only where, but on what days.

Seattle startup Volt already shifted to a remote work policy in early March as COVID-19 began spreading across the U.S.

Then, after polling employees about the changing dynamics of a work-from-home lifestyle, Volt switched to a four-day work week.

The result? Higher job satisfaction and the same, if not higher, productivity levels.

“So let’s total this all up,” Volt CEO Dan Giuliani wrote in a blog post. “Less time working + more productivity = happier employees. It’s not rocket science, but it sure is music to my ears.”

After a six-week experiment, Volt permanently switched to its new “Flex Fridays” policy. The company, which sells a fitness training app platform, is giving employees Friday off as long as they do their best to “maintain the productivity levels of a typical five-day work week.”

“We removed 20% of the required time at work and not a single employee felt it decreased the overall level of company productivity,” Giuliani said. “That’s wild.”

Giuliani said the idea came about after he found himself more exhausted on Monday mornings and feeling like he was “wasting” Friday, which used to be a fun and energetic day when his 24-person team was in the office.

“There’s just something different about work and life in 2020,” he said. “Maybe it’s the Groundhog Day feeling of working from home or the accumulating stress of dealing with BOTH a global pandemic and an immensely fraught political climate at the same time. Or maybe there’s a fundamental difference in each hour of remote work as compared to the equivalent hour of work in the office.”

The CEO said he was previously a “four-day skeptic,” but not anymore.

Hi everyone ??

We recently shifted to a four-day work week at @VoltAthletics.

Time in the office went ??

Job satisfaction went ??

And even better… overall productivity went ?? too!

10/10 highly recommend. I wrote about it here: https://t.co/ywaRBEi28r

— Dan Giuliani (@DanGiuliani) August 26, 2020

The idea of a 4-day work week is not new, but has gained momentum this year due to the pandemic. Former presidential candidate and entrepreneur Andrew Yang is a big supporter, telling Business Insider earlier this month that the 4-day work week could be more important than ever.

Other companies such as TripAdvisor and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt moved to a temporary 4-day work week this year, NBC reported. The shift can also help companies save labor costs.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden in May suggested companies could shift to the 4-day work week to boost the domestic tourism industry.

Microsoft introduced a program called “Work Life Choice Challenge” last year in Japan, shutting down offices every Friday in August to give employees an extra day off each week. As time at work was cut, Microsoft saw productivity — measured by sales per employee — jump by 40% compared to the same period from the year before. Employees were not only encouraged to take an extra day off, they were told to keep meetings shorter (no longer than 30 minutes) and spend less time responding to email, communicating via a Microsoft messaging app instead.

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Headset raises $3.2M to grow marijuana data platform as cannabis sales surge amid pandemic

(Headset Image)

Seattle startup Headset just raised an additional $3.2 million as the 5-year-old company expands its business intelligence platform used by customers across the growing legal cannabis industry.

Headset is similar to market data services from firms such as Nielsen and IRI. The company operates data platforms for cannabis retailers and suppliers, as well as a tool to analyze cannabis market data.

Headset CEO Cy Scott. (Headset Photo)

“Our real-time market intelligence data helps cannabis operators, CPG companies, financial services and more navigate the competitive landscape, find opportunity and understand the cannabis consumer through our aggregated point-of-sale derived data which includes sales, inventory, pricing, demographics and basket analytics,” said CEO Cy Scott.

The fresh cash will be used to help Headset expand into other states and provinces where cannabis is legal, including markets where the company expects new laws to be enacted with the upcoming election.

Headset is riding a wave of increased consumer spend on marijuana amid the pandemic. State such as Colorado and Illinois are seeing record monthly sales as more people stay at home and pot shops stay open as they are considered “essential.”

Headset’s own research shows average sales of cannabis products in adult-use markets up 25% this year.

Scott described the latest Headset financing as a “small insider bridge round” as it gears up to raise its Series B round in 2021. Total funding to date for the 45-person company is just under $18 million. Investors include Poseidon Asset Management, AFI Capital Partners, Hypur Ventures, Salveo Capital, and others.

Scott started Headset in 2015 with Brian Wansolich and Scott Vickers; the three previously co-founded Leafly, a marijuana strain and dispensary resource platform that was acquired by Seattle-based marijuana investment firm Privateer Holdings in 2011.

Other Pacific Northwest cannabis startups are also raising cash. Bend, Ore.-based Dutchie just raised $35 million from the likes of former Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz and hip-hop star Snoop Dogg. Dutchie, which helps cannabis dispensaries facilitate online orders, has seen a 700% surge in sales volume during the pandemic.

In an interview with TechCrunch this past June, investor Karan Wadhera described the cannabis industry as “non-cyclical” and signaled optimism for cannabis investing after a rocky 2019.

The global cannabis market is expected to reach $42.7 billion by 2024, according to a January report from Arcview Market Research.

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Live music, big deals, and the rise of ‘Just Chatting’: Pandemic takes Twitch further beyond gaming

Canceled vacations and closed-down cities have fueled an uneven but dramatic rise in the overall audience for live-streaming platforms. Many of the big games on Twitch saw significant drops in their viewership, but other programming like live chats, art, music, and other creative endeavors has risen in both profile and popularity.

These are some of the big takeaways from the July 2020 “State of the Stream” report, as published by the Tel Aviv-based streamer service provider StreamElements, with data by the analytics platform Arsenal.gg. The streaming market has seen a big boost in overall popularity during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, with home audiences turning to live-streamed content for extra human contact in a socially-distanced world, but July’s numbers have a few extra surprises.

In a post-Mixer world, Facebook Gaming and Amazon-owned Twitch have both risen to new heights. Twitch has capitalized on a big audience spike in April to expand its total viewership to more than 1.5 billion hours watched, a 67% increase from this time last year. Facebook Gaming’s viewership jumped from 109 million hours to 345 million in the same time frame. While Twitch is still the undisputed leader here, Facebook has staked out a chunk of the market and doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere.

Source: StreamElements/Arsenal.gg. Note the different scales of the charts.

Notably, this comes after a few of the streamers who were left without platforms after Mixer’s sudden closure have found new homes. Michael “Shroud” Grezesiek signed an exclusive agreement with Twitch a couple of weeks ago, returning to his former platform, which seems to be the general trend among former big-ticket names on Mixer; the notable exception here is Cory “Gothalion” Michael, who switched to a deal with Facebook Gaming in June. Another high-profile deal came from the rapper Logic, who retired from music in July in favor of focusing on new fatherhood, family, and — oh yeah — a reportedly seven-figure exclusivity contract to stream on Twitch. At time of writing, he mostly seems to play Call of Duty.

While video game-based content is still a massive driver of content on livestreams, most of the big games on Twitch saw significant drops in their overall audience from June to July. League of Legends, Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto V, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare all saw their viewership decline, while Valve Software’s Counter-Strike saw a 47% drop, from 72 million hours watched to 38 million.

Minecraft saw a significant increase, however, as did Blizzard’s World of Warcraft; the latter can possibly be attributed to popular community streamers being given access to the beta test servers for the upcoming new expansion, Shadowlands, as well as a major update in World of Warcraft Classic that reintroduces the war against the insect hordes of the Ahn’Qiraj.

It should be emphasized here, however, that this is the July report. August was a big month for games streaming thanks to the Aug. 4 debut of Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout on PS4 and PC, a goofy minigame-fueled battle royale for up to 60 players at once. Games like this have traditionally been huge in the streaming market – for example, Ninja built much of his audience off of the battle royale mode in Fortnite – and Fall Guys has not been an exception, with many big streamers like Timothy “TimTheTateman” Betar flocking to it in the last few weeks. It’s likely that its success will help create a different picture when the August data comes out.

The overall winner among Twitch’s content categories, however, is Just Chatting, its catch-all label for everything from candid conversation to unscripted reality shows, which increased its viewership 6% to 176 million hours watched in July. This continues a gradual climb for Just Chatting content, which began its reign at the top of the Twitch charts back in December 2019, with “just” 80 million hours watched, and has continued to solidify that lead.

Popular streamers for July featured Felix “xQcOW” Lengyel, who took the #1 spot for the first time in 2020. Two big jumps in popularity came from Bruno “NOBRU” Goes at #8, a Brazilian streamer who has focused on a mobile game called Garena Free Fire that’s popular among Asian and Latin American audiences, and Jens “TheRealKnossi” Knossalla, a German streamer who leapt up the charts to steal the #2 spot for the month with a livestreamed event he called Angelcamp 2020. Somehow, Knossalla managed to drag a bunch of European streamers with him into the woods for a professionally-produced fishing trip/reality show and it wasn’t a setup for a horror movie.

The top 10 streamers, as measured by hours of content viewed, in July of 2020. (Source: StreamElements/Arsenal.gg)

Beyond business as usual, Twitch made several big moves in July to diversify the content it offers. The Music & Performing Arts category is on a slow but steady rise, hitting an all-time high in May of 2020. It accounted for 17.6 million hours watched in July, a 387% increase from July of 2019, and a couple of major artists have signed on to the platform.

Mike Shinoda of the popular rap-metal band Linkin Park became a Twitch partner in July after spending much of the pandemic livestreaming his creative process, writing music and making art. On July 10, the result was Shinoda’s second solo album, Dropped Frames, Vol. 1, made “with the assistance” of his fans on Twitch.

Finally, the Art category has been running on Twitch since 2018, and has seen steady growth across the course of 2020.

Much of this is driven by the Bob Ross channel, which streams ad-supported marathons of Ross’s old show The Joy of Painting. Twitch users watched 753,000 hours of Bob Ross over the course of July–sometimes you just need to chill out in front of some happy little trees, I suppose–which is more than the next six most popular Art channels put together.

The next most popular channel, Darkar Company, a Spanish-speaking artist who also plays Fortnite, only drew 264,000 hours. Even so, the Art category nearly doubled its overall share of the Twitch audience in July, from 3.5 million hours watched to 6.5 million.

The aforementioned Fall Guys is likely to be a big driver of hours watched in August’s streaming numbers, but much of the story of Twitch and Facebook’s respective meteoric rise seems to go back to the COVID-19 pandemic. Everyone’s been stuck inside all summer, movie theaters have been shut, TV has been in repeats, and even professional sports were gone for a while.

It’s easy to conclude that livestreaming has simply leapt into that gap, as was clearly the case earlier this year, but the viewership numbers are high enough at this point that it’s difficult to imagine them ever going back down to pre-pandemic numbers. With streamers becoming major spokes in many video games’ marketing campaigns and media companies like Nickelodeon opting to debut exclusive content via Twitch instead of cable TV, these are strange, unpredictable days for the overall streaming market.

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REI looks to sell brand new Seattle-area HQ as pandemic forces retailer to rethink remote work

REI was set to move more than 1,000 employees into a brand new headquarters complex built on an 8-acre site surrounded by parks and wilderness just east of Seattle in Bellevue, Wash., this summer. And then the pandemic hit.

Now the outdoor retailer is looking to sell its buildings and land in Bellevue’s Spring District, a surprising decision that reflects the rapid shift to remote work.

REI said it will move to a less centralized headquarters approach that spans multiple locations across the Seattle region. The company enacted a nearly 100% work-from-home policy for HQ staff in early March.

“The dramatic events of 2020 have challenged us to reexamine and rethink every aspect of our business and many of the assumptions of the past. That includes where and how we work,” REI President and CEO Eric Artz told employees in a video call today. “As a result, our new experience of ‘headquarters’ will be very different than the one we imagined more than four years ago.”

“Our old preferences have been debunked during the pandemic,” said Zillow Chief People Officer Dan Spaulding.

Artz said that having a distributed workforce “will have immediate, positive impacts on our ability to attract and retain a diverse and highly skilled workforce.”

REI said a sale of its Spring District buildings will also help the company financially with a “positive return on investment.” It made several cost-cutting moves this year, including layoffs and salary reductions.

REI has been headquartered in Kent, Wash., since 1988 and announced its intention to move to Bellevue in 2016. The co-op planned to “embed the outdoors into our campus” with green space throughout, open-air meeting locations, and more.

REI has 161 retail locations in 39 states. It reported $3.12 billion in sales last year. Its stores closed temporarily in March.

Artz said the company has outperformed its initial revenue expectations during the pandemic. Camping is surging in popularity as Americans are vacationing closer to home.

Facebook has leased more than 500,000 square feet in the Spring District, a new development with 3 million square feet of office space. The social media giant announced last week that it will allow employees to work from home until July 2021 as COVID-19 continues to spread throughout the U.S.

GeekWire reported last week that the absence of large tech employers in downtown Seattle is causing a crisis for many small business owners who rely on office workers to purchase lunch, drinks and other services.

Team, I want to share the news below that I just shared with our headquarters teams

The essence of being a co-op is that we see our work, our business and our purpose differently. We exist to create meaningful and positive impact for the outdoors and for our community. And we have the courage to take the uncommon path to get there.

Today I’m making an announcement in that spirit.

We have made the decision to pursue a sale of our buildings and land in Bellevue’s Spring District—and, with that sale, to step toward a new model for our headquarters that will better serve the way we live, work and act as a force for positive change.

The dramatic events of 2020 have challenged us to reexamine and rethink every aspect of our business and many of the assumptions of the past. That includes where and how we work.

We’ve been expanding our mobile work capabilities for the past several years in preparation for our planned headquarters move. Our progress was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic—we learned that the more distributed way of working we previously thought untenable will instead unlock incredible potential.

As a result, our new experience of “headquarters” will be very different than the one we imagined more than four years ago.

Rather than a single location, our “headquarters” will span multiple satellites across the greater Seattle area.

Remote working will move from a temporary solve to a more engrained, supported, and normalized model for many of our headquarters employees.

And while our home will remain in Seattle, it will be more feasible for more of our headquarters employees to have the flexibility to live and work outside of the Puget Sound region.

This will have immediate, positive impacts on our ability to attract and retain a diverse and highly skilled workforce, as we continue to navigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Our members, our business, and our positive impact on society will also benefit from this transaction.

The sale of our property would bring a positive return on our investment—and with it the ability to invest a portion of that unlocked capital in ways that align with our strategic vision and our four measures of success—our impact on our employees, our members, our business and society.

These dollars would also play an important role in stabilizing our business through the ongoing impacts of current disruptions. As we’ve discussed, we’re outperforming our initial revenue expectations for how we would manage through COVID-19, but the pandemic is far from over, and it’s important and prudent that we make sure the co-op is prepared for the near-certainty of additional disruptions ahead.

The rapid innovation we’ve done in response to the COVID-19 crisis has been inspiring, but it’s also made clear the areas where we have opportunities to improve and to better meet our customers’ changing needs and expectations across our offerings and our omnichannel capabilities. We have important work to do in this space and this sale would provide financial security to help accelerate those efforts.

We know that REI’s financial stability has a direct impact on our ability to continue to support our nonprofit partners, whose work to connect people of all races, genders, ages and abilities to the outdoors matters now more than ever. The proceeds from a sale would also help us accelerate progress toward reducing our carbon footprint.

We’ll be providing more detail on all of this in the coming weeks and months, but here are the important things for you to hear and take away:

We are actively working to find a satellite location on the Eastside.We are also working to secure a satellite location in the south Puget Sound.We are looking to extend our Georgetown lease.

In the meantime, we know that county and state guidance will continue to limit our headquarters experience for at least the remainder of 2020. And we expect the majority of our headquarters team will work from home through the end of this year and into 2021. We would still have workspaces for those whose work requires them to be physically present.

And, in the months and years ahead, this multi-location model and increased focus on remote working makes working from locations beyond the Seattle area more feasible for more employees.

With that said, I recognize working from home, and in multiple locations, brings with it, not only increased flexibility, but its own set of unique challenges.

If you’re like me, you miss the sense of community.

You miss hallway conversations.

You miss in-person work-sessions.

You miss our incredible cultural moments, like Anderson Awards.

This is a huge part of what COVID-19 has taken away. But I am confident we can solve for all of that and more through innovation, collaboration and imagination.

We will have more answers and more detail in the next 60-90 days as work toward the completion of a potential sale.

It’s important that you know this has been a challenging decision. I know it’s going to land differently with everyone, and I want to thank the teams that poured a great deal of time and passion into this project. And I am confident that the sale of the Spring District campus would have a positive impact on REI’s future—and yours.

This year has shown us our home is not a building. Our home is wherever we find ourselves doing our best work, pursuing our outdoor passions, serving our communities. Serving each other.

That is what we will build around as we move forward—and as we accelerate into what’s next.

Thank you for having the courage to step into this moment. I look forward to the work ahead.

Eric

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Zillow to allow 90% of employees to work from home indefinitely as pandemic ‘debunks’ old ways

Zillow’s downtown Seattle offices in the Russell Investments Center, left, as seen from the nearby Pike Place Market. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)

Zillow Group introduced a new policy on Wednesday allowing about 90% of its employees the option of working from home, at least some of the time, indefinitely. It significantly extends a move the company made at the end of April in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The new plan was spelled out in a blog post from Dan Spaulding, the Seattle-based real estate company’s chief people officer, in which he said the company always planned to be “responsive to changing conditions.” Three months ago, Zillow was one of the first companies to announce an extended WFH option, enabling approximately 5,400 employees to go remote through the end of 2020.

“This is a drastic change from where we started the year,” Spaulding wrote. “We have historically discouraged employees from working from home, preferring face time and in-office collaboration versus virtual exchanges.

“Our old preferences have been debunked during the pandemic,” he added.

That sentiment echoes what Zillow CEO Rich Barton said back in April on Twitter and follows what many companies are learning about the potential for worker collaboration and productivity during the ongoing health crisis.

Today we let our team know they have flexibility to work from home (or anywhere) through the end of 2020. My personal opinions about WFH have been turned upside down over the past 2 months. I expect this will have a lasting influence on the future of work … and home. Stay safe.

— Rich Barton (@Rich_Barton) April 25, 2020

Zillow Group is based in downtown Seattle at the Russell Investments Center building and has nine additional offices. Spaulding said that the offices “will be there for individuals and teams to enable productivity and collaboration — but they won’t be the only place where those things happen.”

Since closing offices in March, the company has onboarded approximately 500 new employees digitally, through a new virtual program.

Zillow’s move comes after tech giants such as Amazon told eligible workers to stay home until January and Google told workers they can WFH until next summer.

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Most Seattle tech companies are actively hiring despite the pandemic, analysis shows

Data from the Seattle Startup Hiring Tracker shows that about 42% of Seattle tech companies increased headcount month-over-month; 35% remained stable; and 23% decreased. (Image via Adam Shoenfeld)

Even with the ongoing economic and health crisis, a majority of Seattle’s tech companies are still hiring.

Adam Schoenfeld.

That’s one takeaway from the Seattle Startup Hiring Tracker, a new list that longtime entrepreneur Adam Schoenfeld recently launched.

Schoenfeld, who co-founded Simply Measured and is now VP of strategy at Drift, was looking for ways to help the local startup community as the pandemic changed how we interact with each other. Questions about hiring and culture kept coming up on his podcast, so he thought a hiring tracker might come in handy, particularly now.

The tracker pulls data from various online sources (company websites, job boards, LinkedIn, etc.) and includes tech-oriented companies headquartered in the Seattle area or with core operations in the city. It’s not a job board and companies don’t pay to be listed.

The latest update published today shows 67% of the 348 companies tracked with open roles, and 2,620 total roles across the region. About 42% of the companies increased headcount month-over-month; 35% remained stable; and 23% decreased.

The list does not include tech juggernauts Microsoft (1,394 open jobs) and Amazon (7,506 open jobs).

Schoenfeld noted that there are differences in job openings based on the stage of the company. For example, the rate of hiring is slower at early-stage startups. About a third of Seattle tech companies with less than 100 employees increased headcount last month.

“As a job seeker in the startup market, you’ll see a lot of opportunities listed, but you may need some patience in the current environment,” Schoenfeld said.

But there are still startups such as Ally, which just won Startup of the Year at the GeekWire Awards, and others including DemandStar, Shelf Engine, OctoML, Cabana, and Athira Pharma that are hiring rapidly.

And many of the more well-known, well-established companies “appear unfazed by the pandemic,” Schoenfeld said.

“It’s hard to know if they are winners *because* of the pandemic or if the winners just continue winning *despite* the pandemic,” he noted. “The cohort of public companies like Redfin, Avalara, and Smartsheet continue to grow fast and have dozens of open roles. It’s the same story with private unicorns like OfferUp, Remitly, Outreach, Icertis, Convoy, and Auth0.”

OfferUp, Remitly, Outreach, and Auth0 all landed hefty investment rounds this year. Even with the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, venture capitalists are pouring money into Pacific Northwest tech companies at unprecedented levels, significantly outpacing the number of deals and dollars invested in the first half of 2018 and 2019, according to a recent GeekWire analysis.

The hiring tracker data aligns with GeekWire’s previous reporting in May when we highlighted various Seattle-area startups and larger companies that were hiring despite widespread layoffs across the industry. Nearly 50,000 U.S. tech workers have been laid off since March 11, according to the Layoffs.fyi tracker, as companies cut costs to make up for slowing revenue amid the pandemic.

It also matches with anecdotal feedback from a recent survey of Seattle-area chief financial officers. A majority of the execs surveyed expect their businesses to fully recover from the downturn after experiencing temporary setbacks and uncertainty at the beginning of the pandemic.

Seattle may be an outlier compared to the rest of the country. Tech job postings on Indeed fared better than overall postings in April and May, but are now performing worse, down 36% below last year’s level during the week of July 24. Indeed also noted a wider difference in overall postings vs. tech roles in non-tech hubs, as “tech companies may be pushing for centralization in major hubs rather than dispersion.”

More from Indeed’s blog post:

“With fewer tech job postings and increased job seeker interest, in the field, competition for sector jobs is heating up. Companies are back in the driver’s seat, which could reduce tech worker bargaining power. In addition, benefits like unlimited time off and well-stocked snack bars could go on the chopping block. At the same time though, substantial geographic diversification of the tech workforce could occur if the sector widely adopts permanent remote work. Unless that happens, jobs may continue to concentrate in the major tech hubs, tightening the hold of places like Silicon Valley on this strategic part of the economy.”

Glassdoor reported that tech industry job openings fell 15% from June 22 to July 6, the biggest drop of any industry. “Tech had better weathered the earlier months of the crisis, but is now experiencing a more substantial slowdown,” Glassdoor noted.

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JetClosing raises $8.5M as pandemic highlights demand for digital title and escrow service

JetClosing CEO Dan Greenshields. (JetClosing Photo)

Social distancing rules due to the COVID-19 pandemic are driving up demand for JetClosing‘s digital home closing service.

The startup just landed $8.5 million in a Series B round from existing investors. Funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates led the round; Pioneer Square Labs and Trilogy Equity also invested again. Total funding to date is $35 million.

Founded in 2016 and spun out of Pioneer Square Labs in Seattle, JetClosing digitizes the home closing process for buyers, sellers, and realtors, removing paper forms and bringing everything to the cloud. The company charges a flat escrow fee to both sides for each transaction and makes additional revenue on issuing owners and lenders title insurance policies. It also helps homeowners refinance.

JetClosing is part of a growing trend in real estate to shift the homebuying experience online — one that has accelerated due to the global health crisis. Redfin reported today that nearly half of people who bought a home in the past year made an offer on a property hadn’t seen in person, up from 28% in 2019.

JetClosing CEO Daniel Greenshields said people are now “dependent” on digital tools to skip in-person meetings and complete home transactions from anywhere in the world.

Order activity on the company’s platform increased 124% from April to July. This month there have been a record number of new orders — half for home purchases, and half for refinancing.

Greenshields added that the pandemic has accelerated adoption of digital notary services, a key feature of the company’s offering.

JetClosing uses machine learning, serverless computing, and other technology to digitize the closing process. Its competitors — incumbent title and escrow services — can do the same job, but JetClosing does it faster, cheaper, on mobile, and with more transparency, according to the company.

Real estate agents using JetClosing can provide real-time notifications and messaging to homebuyers about the progress of a close. JetClosing can deliver seller proceeds in 60 minutes. The company also offers its own property title scoring system called JetScore, similar to a FICO score for credit services, and recently partnered with CertifID to bolster its fraud and security protections.

JetClosing is now licensed to operate in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington.

The company’s largest competitors are firms such as Rainier Title and Chicago Title, which is owned by Fidelity.

The 83-person startup landed a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan between $1 to $2 million, GeekWire reported earlier this month. It made some “tough staffing decisions” at the onset of the pandemic, Greenshields said, but is now hiring again and plans to open a new office in the coming months.

Greenshields previously spent nearly 15 years helping run ShareBuilder, a company now owned by Capital One which digitized and sped up the process of buying stocks, bonds, mutual funds, 401(K) plans, and more.

JetClosing is one of several startups in the Seattle region building tech for the real estate industry. Others include Flyhomes, Knock, Remarkably, Pro.com, Porch, MoxiWorks, IMPREV, Faira, Picket Homes, Modus, and more — not to mention industry giants such as Zillow Group and Redfin.

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Amazon’s online grocery sales triple in Q2 as more people get food delivered amid pandemic

A Whole Foods Market store in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper)

Amazon saw online grocery sales triple year-over-year during the second quarter as more customers get their groceries delivered versus going to a physical store amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amazon revealed the growth rate as part of its second quarter earnings report. The Seattle-based company blew past analyst expectations, reporting $88.9 billion in revenue and $5.2 billion in profits, despite spending $4 billion on COVID-19 initiatives.

Customers are relying on Amazon for online shopping as physical stores are closed or operating under social distancing mandates due to the health crisis.

Amazon, which owns Whole Foods, said it increased grocery delivery capacity by more than 160% and tripled grocery pickup locations during the second quarter.

“We’re reaching more customers with our grocery offerings,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said on a call with analysts Thursday. 

A survey from RBC Capital Markets in April found an “accelerated secular shift to online grocery shopping” driven by the pandemic, with companies including Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart benefitting.

“We believe that online grocery shopping may now be coming a habitual practice among shoppers,” RBC analyst Mark Mahaney wrote.

Amazon doesn’t break out online grocery sales in its financial statements. Its physical store category, which primarily includes sales from Whole Foods, saw revenue drop 13% to $3.8 billion during Q2. But sales from customers who buy groceries for delivery or pickup from Whole Foods are included in Amazon’s online sales category, which was up 49% to $45.9 billion.

Amazon reported today that across delivery, pickup, and in-store shopping, Whole Foods sales grew year-over-year.

RBC said Amazon’s online grocery arm could produce $70 billion in gross merchandise volume by 2023 — more than 3X from 2019 — becoming a material portion of its total revenue.

The New York Times reported in April that orders for Amazon groceries were as much as 50 times higher than normal. The company was struggling to fulfill orders, with some customers reporting extended delays or no open delivery windows for weeks.

The spike in online grocery purchasing could help Amazon boost its Prime membership base. Amazon requires a $119/year Prime membership to access its 2-hour Prime Now delivery service and Amazon Fresh.

This past October, Amazon made grocery delivery a built-in benefit of Prime membership — no longer charging an extra $15 per month, or $180 per year, for Amazon Fresh delivery on top of the $119 annual Prime fee.

Olsavsky said existing Prime member renewal rates improved and the Prime member growth rate accelerated both in the U.S. and worldwide during the second quarter. 

Amazon’s online grocery arm also includes its AmazonFresh Pickup service. The company also offers BOPIS (Buy Online PIckup in Store) at Whole Foods, which it acquired for $13.7 billion three years ago.

Aiding Amazon’s grocery delivery efforts is the company’s huge investment in its delivery network that is enabling 1-day delivery promises for Prime members.

Amazon’s other grocery-related initiatives includes its growing footprint of Amazon Go stores that feature cashier-less technology; the company is now selling that tech to other businesses. Amazon is also preparing to open its own grocery store in Woodland Hills, Calif., which is currently being used to fulfill delivery orders. And the company recently unveiled its first smart grocery cart earlier this month.

Groceries are an estimated $678 billion U.S. market that is increasingly going digital. Research firm eMarketer estimates that U.S. food and beverage e-commerce sales will grow 23.4% to more than $32 billion this year, making it “both the fastest-growing and least penetrated ecommerce category.” Those projections came before the COVID-19 crisis.

Amazon in May expanded online use of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits program, allowing more people to use SNAP benefits to buy groceries online.

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Zillow to allow 90% of employees to work from home indefinitely as pandemic ‘debunks’ old ways

Zillow’s downtown Seattle offices in the Russell Investments Center, left, as seen from the nearby Pike Place Market. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)

Zillow Group introduced a new policy on Wednesday allowing about 90% of its employees the option of working from home, at least some of the time, indefinitely. It significantly extends a move the company made at the end of April in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The new plan was spelled out in a blog post from Dan Spaulding, the Seattle-based real estate company’s chief people officer, in which he said the company always planned to be “responsive to changing conditions.” Three months ago, Zillow was one of the first companies to announce an extended WFH option, enabling approximately 5,400 employees to go remote through the end of 2020.

“This is a drastic change from where we started the year,” Spaulding wrote. “We have historically discouraged employees from working from home, preferring face time and in-office collaboration versus virtual exchanges.

“Our old preferences have been debunked during the pandemic,” he added.

That sentiment echoes what Zillow CEO Rich Barton said back in April on Twitter and follows what many companies are learning about the potential for worker collaboration and productivity during the ongoing health crisis.

Today we let our team know they have flexibility to work from home (or anywhere) through the end of 2020. My personal opinions about WFH have been turned upside down over the past 2 months. I expect this will have a lasting influence on the future of work … and home. Stay safe.

— Rich Barton (@Rich_Barton) April 25, 2020

Zillow Group is based in downtown Seattle at the Russell Investments Center building and has nine additional offices. Spaulding said that the offices “will be there for individuals and teams to enable productivity and collaboration — but they won’t be the only place where those things happen.”

Since closing offices in March, the company has onboarded approximately 500 new employees digitally, through a new virtual program.

Zillow’s move comes after tech giants such as Amazon told eligible workers to stay home until January and Google told workers they can WFH until next summer.

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Amazon’s online grocery sales triple in Q2 as more people get food delivered amid pandemic

A Whole Foods Market store in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper)

Amazon saw online grocery sales triple year-over-year during the second quarter as more customers get their groceries delivered versus going to a physical store amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amazon revealed the growth rate as part of its second quarter earnings report. The Seattle-based company blew past analyst expectations, reporting $88.9 billion in revenue and $5.2 billion in profits, despite spending $4 billion on COVID-19 initiatives.

Customers are relying on Amazon for online shopping as physical stores are closed or operating under social distancing mandates due to the health crisis.

Amazon, which owns Whole Foods, said it increased grocery delivery capacity by more than 160% and tripled grocery pickup locations during the second quarter.

“We’re reaching more customers with our grocery offerings,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said on a call with analysts Thursday. 

A survey from RBC Capital Markets in April found an “accelerated secular shift to online grocery shopping” driven by the pandemic, with companies including Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart benefitting.

“We believe that online grocery shopping may now be coming a habitual practice among shoppers,” RBC analyst Mark Mahaney wrote.

Amazon doesn’t break out online grocery sales in its financial statements. Its physical store category, which primarily includes sales from Whole Foods, saw revenue drop 13% to $3.8 billion during Q2. But sales from customers who buy groceries for delivery or pickup from Whole Foods are included in Amazon’s online sales category, which was up 49% to $45.9 billion.

Amazon reported today that across delivery, pickup, and in-store shopping, Whole Foods sales grew year-over-year.

RBC said Amazon’s online grocery arm could produce $70 billion in gross merchandise volume by 2023 — more than 3X from 2019 — becoming a material portion of its total revenue.

The New York Times reported in April that orders for Amazon groceries were as much as 50 times higher than normal. The company was struggling to fulfill orders, with some customers reporting extended delays or no open delivery windows for weeks.

The spike in online grocery purchasing could help Amazon boost its Prime membership base. Amazon requires a $119/year Prime membership to access its 2-hour Prime Now delivery service and Amazon Fresh.

This past October, Amazon made grocery delivery a built-in benefit of Prime membership — no longer charging an extra $15 per month, or $180 per year, for Amazon Fresh delivery on top of the $119 annual Prime fee.

Olsavsky said existing Prime member renewal rates improved and the Prime member growth rate accelerated both in the U.S. and worldwide during the second quarter. 

Amazon’s online grocery arm also includes its AmazonFresh Pickup service. The company also offers BOPIS (Buy Online PIckup in Store) at Whole Foods, which it acquired for $13.7 billion three years ago.

Aiding Amazon’s grocery delivery efforts is the company’s huge investment in its delivery network that is enabling 1-day delivery promises for Prime members.

Amazon’s other grocery-related initiatives includes its growing footprint of Amazon Go stores that feature cashier-less technology; the company is now selling that tech to other businesses. Amazon is also preparing to open its own grocery store in Woodland Hills, Calif., which is currently being used to fulfill delivery orders. And the company recently unveiled its first smart grocery cart earlier this month.

Groceries are an estimated $678 billion U.S. market that is increasingly going digital. Research firm eMarketer estimates that U.S. food and beverage e-commerce sales will grow 23.4% to more than $32 billion this year, making it “both the fastest-growing and least penetrated ecommerce category.” Those projections came before the COVID-19 crisis.

Amazon in May expanded online use of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits program, allowing more people to use SNAP benefits to buy groceries online.

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JetClosing raises $8.5M as pandemic highlights demand for digital title and escrow service

JetClosing CEO Dan Greenshields. (JetClosing Photo)

Social distancing rules due to the COVID-19 pandemic are driving up demand for JetClosing‘s digital home closing service.

The startup just landed $8.5 million in a Series B round from existing investors. Funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates led the round; Pioneer Square Labs and Trilogy Equity also invested again. Total funding to date is $35 million.

Founded in 2016 and spun out of Pioneer Square Labs in Seattle, JetClosing digitizes the home closing process for buyers, sellers, and realtors, removing paper forms and bringing everything to the cloud. The company charges a flat escrow fee to both sides for each transaction and makes additional revenue on issuing owners and lenders title insurance policies. It also helps homeowners refinance.

JetClosing is part of a growing trend in real estate to shift the homebuying experience online — one that has accelerated due to the global health crisis. Redfin reported today that nearly half of people who bought a home in the past year made an offer on a property hadn’t seen in person, up from 28% in 2019.

JetClosing CEO Daniel Greenshields said people are now “dependent” on digital tools to skip in-person meetings and complete home transactions from anywhere in the world.

Order activity on the company’s platform increased 124% from April to July. This month there have been a record number of new orders — half for home purchases, and half for refinancing.

Greenshields added that the pandemic has accelerated adoption of digital notary services, a key feature of the company’s offering.

JetClosing uses machine learning, serverless computing, and other technology to digitize the closing process. Its competitors — incumbent title and escrow services — can do the same job, but JetClosing does it faster, cheaper, on mobile, and with more transparency, according to the company.

Real estate agents using JetClosing can provide real-time notifications and messaging to homebuyers about the progress of a close. JetClosing can deliver seller proceeds in 60 minutes. The company also offers its own property title scoring system called JetScore, similar to a FICO score for credit services, and recently partnered with CertifID to bolster its fraud and security protections.

JetClosing is now licensed to operate in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington.

The company’s largest competitors are firms such as Rainier Title and Chicago Title, which is owned by Fidelity.

The 83-person startup landed a Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan between $1 to $2 million, GeekWire reported earlier this month. It made some “tough staffing decisions” at the onset of the pandemic, Greenshields said, but is now hiring again and plans to open a new office in the coming months.

Greenshields previously spent nearly 15 years helping run ShareBuilder, a company now owned by Capital One which digitized and sped up the process of buying stocks, bonds, mutual funds, 401(K) plans, and more.

JetClosing is one of several startups in the Seattle region building tech for the real estate industry. Others include Flyhomes, Knock, Remarkably, Pro.com, Porch, MoxiWorks, IMPREV, Faira, Picket Homes, Modus, and more — not to mention industry giants such as Zillow Group and Redfin.

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Pandemic threatens dominance of ‘superstar’ tech cities, creating new uncertainty for innovation hubs

Downtown Seattle and Mount Rainier as viewed from the top observation deck of the Space Needle. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)

The seemingly unstoppable trend of tech companies and talent concentrating in a few cities hit a brick wall in March. As the first-known U.S. cases of the coronavirus emerged in Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area, tech companies pioneered a nationwide shift to remote work.

Six months into the pandemic, some of those companies will never go back to the office in full force.

Meanwhile, the cities where tech has driven population spikes and surging home prices are confronting sudden budget shortfalls and scrambling to adjust. Seattle and San Francisco — home to the largest and most valuable tech companies in the country — are considering new business and wealth taxes to make up for the lost revenue.

City officials are charging the tech industry with funding recovery efforts, while business advocates sound familiar alarm bells about jobs leaving town.

It’s an old story with a new twist: a global experiment in the benefits and shortfalls of remote work. Could the pandemic really decentralize tech opportunity away from just a few cities? If so, what does it mean for the future of the tech industry in America? City officials and urban experts are watching the trend closely, but they’re divided over the implications.

In addition to infecting nearly 4 million people and killing at least 145,000 people in the US alone, the coronavirus has blown a major hole in the budgets of cities across the country. In Seattle, the shortfall is estimated to be around $400 million this year. San Francisco is scrambling to plug a $1.7 billion budget deficit over the next two years.

Both cities are considering taxes that target big business and wealthy executives to fill their gaps.

The Seattle City Council passed legislation earlier this month that taxes the top salaries at the highest paying companies in the city to fund coronavirus relief programs right away and affordable housing down the line.

Amazon has been a recurring focus of Seattle’s tax debate. (GeekWire Photo / Monica Nickelsburg)

In San Francisco, voters will be asked to decide on a number of new taxes this November that affect the tech industry, including a CEO tax on executives earning at least 100 times the median income of their average worker. Another proposal would tax stock-based compensation. Changes to the city’s payroll and gross receipts taxes are also under consideration.

The business communities in both tech hubs warn the taxes will push out jobs and hurt companies already struggling to weather the economic storm brought on by the pandemic.

Seattle Metro Chamber of Commerce vice president Mark McIntyre said the payroll tax will “stunt economic recovery, push high-paying jobs out of the city, further toxify the relationship between city government” in a statement.

Leila Kirske — who was speaking in her capacity as an Alliance for Pioneer Square Board member, and works as CFO of 98point6 — warned that “so many of the jobs lost will not come back.”

“Taxing those that remain will not make this community healthy again,” she said in a statement accompanying McIntyre’s, part of a round-up circulated by Seattle’s “No Tax on Jobs” campaign.

Jennifer Stojkovic, executive director of the tech advocacy group sf.citi, was more blunt in her prediction.

Sf.citi executive director Jennifer Stojkovic. (Sf.citi Photo)

“Tech’s going to leave,” she said in an interview with GeekWire. “There’s no way around it. We’re in this unprecedented time where companies are having huge downturns, and they are being hit with new taxes, and they don’t know if they are going to be able to afford this tax burden. In addition to the downturn that they are facing, and these layoffs, and thousands of jobs that have been lost, they have all their employees who have been working remotely since March, and they’re doing it.”

Though the pandemic adds a level of uncertainty that feels unprecedented, this isn’t the first time the business community has threatened lost jobs amid a tax battle — and the research paints a more complicated picture than the rhetoric.

Tech industry concentration in just a few cities ultimately comes down to talent. The U.S. has a shortage of engineers, data analysts, and other knowledge workers needed to power the technology industry. Those workers tend to gravitate toward places like Seattle or San Francisco, West Coast cities with plenty of amenities and like-minded people. Companies tend to cluster around those talent bases and value the knowledge exchange that occurs when workers bounce between startups and large tech firms.

The pandemic does not appear to be significantly changing that underlying trend — at least not yet.

Zillow compared web traffic to for-sale listings in urban, suburban, and rural areas in April 2019 and April 2020 and saw no significant change.

“The data do not provide any early evidence for an overall shift in search behavior away from urban cores,” Zillow said in its report.

Of course, that was early on in the pandemic, before some companies announced long-term plans to keep workers remote.

A survey by Blind of 4,400 Bay Area tech workers found about two-thirds would consider moving if they had the option to work remotely, Business Insider reports. But only 18% said they would consider moving out of California.

Some experts predict a slight deconcentration of tech within the municipal boundaries of cities like San Francisco and Seattle but don’t expect those jobs to travel far from the tech hubs where they were formed.  Companies might shift to towns surrounding those metros, like Bellevue, Wash., where they can still tap the talent pool that gravitates to premier cities. In San Francisco’s case, Stojkovic expects some tech companies and workers to move to the Seattle area, which offers many similar amenities but a relatively lower cost of living.

Richard Florida speaking at the 2018 Cascadia Innovation Cooridor Conference in Vancouver, B.C. (Cascadia Innovation Corridor Photo / Matt Borck)

Richard Florida, a distinguished urbanist and professor at the University of Toronto, told GeekWire that he does not expect U.S. tech hubs to decentralize in any significant way.

“San Francisco and Seattle will be just fine,” he said. “I do not see a massive relocation of large corporations or startups anywhere outside of the handful of superstar metros that have dominated this for the better part of two decades. I think that remote work is a different story. I think more workers in the tech community and elsewhere will work remotely, not all, but I think more will. My bigger point is, if San Francisco, New York, and Seattle went away you might as well just write off America’s high tech innovation capacity.”

The pandemic is the latest in a long list of catastrophes that have supposedly foretold the death of cities. For centuries, crises have led to grim forecasts about the end of cities and so far, no calamity has been more powerful than the trend of urbanization. Cities have weathered pandemics, hurricanes, bombings, recessions, and depressions before and rebounded each time.

 If San Francisco, New York, and Seattle went away you might as well just write off America’s high tech innovation capacity.

But there is one factor that makes our current moment different: remote work. Tech leaders are realizing that many jobs can be done just as efficiently from home, which could allow them to pay lower salaries in less expensive cities. A University of Chicago report published in June estimates 37% of U.S. jobs can be done entirely remotely.

Microsoft and Amazon were among the first to shift their tech workers remote when coronavirus cases began emerging in the Seattle area. Other tech companies up and down the West Coast quickly followed suit. In the months that followed, several announced new, permanent work from home policies.

Twitter and Square will allow employees to work from home indefinitely, even after the pandemic subsides. Facebook expects about 50% of its workforce to be remote in the next 5-10 years. Other companies are giving up their physical offices altogether.

“We’re not in a boom or bust binary anymore,” said Stojkovic of Silicon Valley’s tendency to pendulum swing. “There’s a third option and that’s pivoting to remote work. That’s the X-factor that we have at play and it will change everything. It will change what the path to recovery looks like because some companies will never go back.”

Stojkovic mentioned rumors that Uber, a member company of sf.citi, could relocate its headquarters to Dallas amid the tax battle in San Francisco. But the difficulty that states like Texas, have had containing the coronavirus could make tech workers less likely to relocate, according to Florida.

“Who in their right mind would move a company to Texas?” he said. “Texas has shown that it is incapable of governing itself. Great, maybe if Elon Musk wants to put a battery factory there, but the red states have shown that they’re incapable of providing a stable and healthy environment for people. Good luck attracting people to Texas.”

Instead, he predicts companies will set up smaller, premium headquarters in major tech hubs with remote workers distributed in nearby regions. These “high-end boutique” headquarters will continue to be in superstars cities, Florida said. “The headquarters is going to be like a brand enhancement.”

But even if America’s tech hubs remain relatively concentrated, they are not immune to global political and economic forces that are evolving rapidly. An increasingly burdensome U.S. immigration system and the nation’s difficulty containing the coronavirus could push entrepreneurs and engineers who would have moved to American tech hubs to consider cities in other countries, according to Florida.

“The real fear,” he said, “is that this climate makes people not come to U.S. cities at all.”

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Mobile auto repair startup Wrench ‘thriving’ amid pandemic, especially with work on fleet vehicles

(Wrench Photo)

Wrench, the mobile vehicle maintenance and repair startup, has been cranking on business during the coronavirus pandemic as more customers are seizing on what was already a contactless service.

“Wrench has been thriving amid the pandemic,” Ed Peterson, CEO of the 4-year-old company, told GeekWire. “We’re seeing significant growth in services and repairs for fleet vehicles, specifically.”

Seattle-based Wrench has seen a 300% year-over-year increase in revenue for its repair business tied to fleet vehicles, driven by a high demand in recent months among delivery vehicles and those who operate them.

On Tuesday, the company announced a new partnership with Tirescanner, an online tire retailer and mobile tire installation service, to offer that service to fleet operators. Wrench technicians will gain access to a nationwide network of mobile tire vans, providing next-day install scheduling of any brand or tire for most vehicles.

Wrench CEO Ed Petersen. (Wrench Photo)

Wrench employs “mobile mechanics” around the country that come to the customer to do repair jobs without a physical shop or dealership. Repairs can be done anywhere from an office parking lot to a downtown parking garage to a customer’s driveway. The company raised $20 million for its tech-fueled platform in November.

Casey Willis, co-founder and VP of business development for Wrench, said tires have been a constant pain point.

“Fleet managers can’t afford to have vehicles out of service for days, especially during this difficult time when fleet operations are essential to the health and safety of consumers,” Willis said in a news release.

Peterson believes that mobile car repair and maintenance will become a permanent habit after the pandemic and that a “culture of convenience” has completely turned entire industries on their heads. It’s what Wrench is aiming to do with vehicle repair.

“Even before the pandemic, our fleet business was growing because businesses are rapidly responding to this culture of convenience and are having to compete with consumer expectations of two-day delivery,” Peterson said. He added that new car sales have taken a hit and consumers are either buying used cars or looking to repair over replace, which translates to needing more maintenance and repair services.

Customers book a service call through the company’s app and Wrench is pushing automation further with over 40% of its jobs going through its fully automated process. The company diagnoses, prices and schedules follow-up services without ever seeing the vehicle and over 85% of repairs and services are completed on the first stop without ever seeing the vehicle, Peterson said.

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Tasso raises $17M for self-sample blood test; CEO says pandemic increases demand for at-home tests

(Tasso Photo)

Seattle startup Tasso closed a $17 million investment round to help grow its at-home blood collection platform.

The company’s blood sample device, called Tasso OnDemand, lets people take their own blood at home and mail it to a lab directly rather than go to a clinic. This allows for more frequent testing to monitor a drug’s effects on the blood, for example, and also lets people submit samples without going into a physical office.

Tasso was started by Dr. Ben Casavant and Dr. Erwin Berthier, who both received doctorates in biomedical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The coronavirus pandemic has underscored the surging demand for more diagnostic solutions that are patient-friendly and can be deployed easily at home,” Casavant, the company’s CEO, said in a statement. “The Tasso OnDemand devices are enabling people to be tested for COVID-19 and many other routine diagnostic applications, from anywhere at any time.”

Tasso has pilot programs with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Cedars-Sinai, and others. It is working with Fred Hutch to test for COVID-19 antibodies in serum as part of a study, with samples being mailed back from patients who don’t need to come into a clinic.

The 8-year-old company and Techstars grad developed its platform using $13.1 million of grant funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the National Institute of Health (NIH).

Quest and LabCorp dominate the diagnostics industry, which a number of startups have tried to disrupt through at-home or direct-to-consumer testing. EverlyWell, a startup that received funding through “Shark Tank” and offers a menu of health tests based on samples collected at home, has drawn scrutiny from experts over its accuracy. EveryWell sells an FDA-approved COVID-19 at-home test.

Other competitors include Scanwell, Thriva, WellnessFX, Baze, myLAB, LetsGetChecked, and more. A pair of Portland startup vets recently launched Reperio Health, a subscription service that will deliver a kit containing devices for testing health metrics.

Hambrecht Ducera Growth Ventures led the Series A round, which included participation from Foresite Capital, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, Vertical Venture Partners, Techstars, and Cedars-Sinai. Elizabeth Hambrecht, partner at Hambrecht Ducera Growth Ventures, has joined Tasso’s board.

“With its talented team and proven technology platform, Tasso is poised to transform the traditional, painful, in-person blood draw process, which has been the standard of care for the past six decades,” Hambrecht said in a statement.

To date, Tasso has raised $38.6 million to date in grants, private investments, and co-development collaborations. It previously raised a $6.1 million round in March 2019.

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LinkedIn cuts 960 jobs, or 6% of workforce, as demand dips for hiring software due to pandemic

LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky. (LinkedIn Photo)

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is laying off 6% of its employee base as fewer companies use its platform due to a reduced need for hiring amid the pandemic.

The cuts affect 6% of the company’s workforce, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky wrote in a note to employees.

“LinkedIn is not immune to the effects of the global pandemic,” he wrote. “Our Talent Solutions business continues to be impacted as fewer companies, including ours, need to hire at the same volume they did previously.”

San Francisco, Calif.-based LinkedIn has adapted over the past few months during the economic crisis, rolling out virtual event products and other new features. Roslansky cited a “record numbers of hours spent learning on the platform” and “strong member engagement,” but the company still was forced to cut staff.

The layoffs affected the company’s Global Sales and Talent Acquisition organizations. Roslansky, who replaced Jeff Weiner last month, said there are no other layoffs planned.

“In GSO and GTO, there are roles that are no longer needed as we adjust to the reduced demand in our internal hiring and for our talent products globally,” he wrote.

LinkedIn is offering laid off employees a minimum of 10 weeks severance pay, 12 months of health insurance, tech equipment, and more. It will also look to place affected workers in newly-created roles across the company.

“This is painful to go through as an organization, but a company with a vision as bold as ours will have to make difficult decisions,” Roslansky wrote. “And since our vision is more important than it ever has been given all that’s going on in the world, I’m confident we’ll emerge more resilient and stronger than ever.”

Microsoft paid $26.2 billion to acquire LinkedIn in 2016.

The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant made major cuts to its MSN editorial team earlier this month and has slashed jobs across the company as part of its annual fiscal year-end business review. Its fiscal year ends June 30, and it’s common for Microsoft to restructure some of its operations in conjunction with the annual milestone. Overall, the cutbacks this year appear much smaller than the thousands of employees laid off by the company in some years past.

While the pandemic has forced hundreds of tech startups to trim staff, giants such as Microsoft and Amazon have mostly avoided large layoffs thus far.

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GeekWire Awards: Flyhomes CEO Tushar Garg on leading a real estate startup through the pandemic

FlyHomes founders Stephen Lane and Tushar Garg. (FlyHomes Photo)

It should’ve been a banner year for FlyHomes.

As 2019 drew to a close, the real estate startup had $141 million in fresh funding to fuel the expansion of its novel home-buying service beyond Seattle to Portland, Boston, and Los Angeles. Then, three weeks after announcing the expansion, the first-known U.S. coronavirus case was discovered in Flyhomes’ backyard.

The U.S. real estate market froze as the full scope of the coronavirus crisis came into focus, a nerve-wracking jolt for Flyhomes, which was sitting on several homes the startup purchased on behalf of clients.

Flyhomes buys houses directly with cash and then holds onto them until its buyer clients secure financing. The goal is to present its customers as the equivalent of cash buyers, helping them gain an edge in competitive markets.

Despite the uncertainty that marred the initial weeks of the pandemic, FlyHomes managed to close deals on all of the homes it purchased. Since then, the Seattle real estate market has stabilized for the most part, according to Flyhomes CEO Tushar Garg.

“What we’re seeing right now is a high demand in the buying market, less inventory, and we’re not anticipating that to change anytime soon,” Garg said.

We caught up with Garg to hear his perspective on leadership, the real estate market, and more as part of a special GeekWire Podcast series highlighting finalists for the upcoming GeekWire Awards, a live virtual event at 4 p.m. on Thursday, July 23. Garg is one of five finalists for Startup CEO of the Year.

Listen above and read edited highlights from the conversation below.

On the real estate market: “The real estate market did go on a pause as soon as COVID hit just because you couldn’t show the house safely, you couldn’t buy the house safely, and it wasn’t an essential service. But then soon after, real estate became an essential service and the company and the industry adapted to showing the houses in a safe way. We found that everything else can be done online. What’s been really fascinating is that in the short run, the market did slow down and the inventory was much lower, and the inventory is actually starting to catch back up in all the markets right now.”

“But in the long run, to a large extent, the idea of having a house has become further accentuated in this situation, where a lot of people who have started to work from home and are looking for more space. Traditionally, in the U.S., the housing market has had a great shortage of stock. The housing inventory is far less than the number of buyers and that’s why we’ve seen competitive markets across the U.S. for a long time. With COVID hitting [and] the inventory drop, the number of buyers actually remained the same. So what we’re seeing right now is a high demand in the buying market, less inventory, and we’re not anticipating that to change anytime soon.”

On leadership: “It’s the story of resilience and dealing with crisis and how do you navigate and come out the other side? In those moments when things look dark, I think you have to appreciate it as an opportunity to create and be innovative. And normally something good comes out of it. Every crisis is an opportunity to innovate and become better for the future. It’s really hard to see that while you’re living through the crisis.”

On the pandemic’s long-term impact: “Work from home, I think, it’s definitely going to become a big trend and that will have its own implications on where people live. Now it’s hard to know. There are so many things that also hold us to where we are, so not everything changes. Schools being one big factor, where a lot of the families have schools, communities, families, and friends, nobody can predict exactly how it’s gonna happen. Of course, you see the reports on all dimensions where people are moving, and we see that in the customer base as well, where many customers are looking to move to further out areas, even in the Seattle area.”

“But then there are many folks who are just worried about the uncertainty in the economy at the moment and holding out [on] buying a home. My feeling on this is just like most things, there will be change, and it will get accelerated. Work from home or becoming remote-first will become more of a trend, and its implications for the housing markets are going to be interesting, but also there’s a lot of factors that hold us to our homes and the places we live. So I don’t anticipate it to change super dramatically in that direction.”

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