Tag: coronavirus

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Will edtech empower or erase the need for higher education?

The coronavirus has erased a large chunk of college’s value proposition: the on-campus experience.

Campuses are closed, sports have been paused and, understandably, students don’t want to pay the same tuition for a fraction of the services. As a result, enrollment is down across the country and university business models are under unrelenting pressure.

The entire athletics program at East Carolina University has been furloughed with pay cuts. Ohio Wesleyan University eliminated 18 majors and consolidated a number of programs to save $4 million a year. And Pennsylvania’s Kutztown University lost 1,000 students to online school within weeks of reopening its campus, sacrificing $3.5 million in room and board fees.

And that’s just in the last few weeks.

As universities struggle, edtech is being positioned as a solution for their largest problem: remote teaching. Coursera, a massive open online course (MOOC), created a campus product to help schools quickly offer digital coursework. Podium Education raised millions last month to offer universities for-credit tech programs. Eruditus brought on more than $100 million in the last few months to create programming for elite universities. In some ways, the growth is the story of edtech’s ongoing surge amid the coronavirus pandemic: Remote schooling has forced institutions to piece together third-party solutions to keep operations afloat.

However, while some startups are helping universities offer virtual programming overnight, professors on the ground are warning their institutions to think long-term about what kind of technologies are net positive to adopt.

It’s a stress test that could lead to a reckoning among edtech startups.

‘We’re talking about the next evolution of textbooks’

As the last eight months have taught us, Zoom-based school is a lackluster alternative to the in-person experience. College campuses, thus, are tasked with finding a more creative way to offer engaging virtual content to students who are stuck in their dorm rooms.

Coursera launched Coursera for Campus to help colleges bring on online courses (credit optional) with built-in exams; more than 3,700 schools across the world are using the software.

“Professors would really want super-high-quality branded content that has assessments built into it if they’re going to deliver that learning for credit,” CEO Jeff Maggioncalda said. “That’s not the kind of learning you can get on YouTube.”

For now, though, Maggioncalda says he doesn’t think the death of a physical college campus experience is the future. He’s betting that the product can help colleges save money on faculty costs and reinvest that same money into the campus.

“There will be schools that will continue to offer residential experience, and I think what they’re gonna find is, if your real value proposition is that residential experience, then lead into that heavily,” he said. “But make sure that you’ve got really good content and credentials that are available so that your students don’t have to sacrifice.”

Georgia Tech professor David Joyner says that MOOCs like Coursera “are good for outreach and access, but are not good for accreditation.” Instead, he thinks edtech needs to be built first and foremost for universities to be most effective.

Podium Education, for example, builds courses in partnership with universities to offer for-credit courses. The newly launched startup raised $12 million in October and works with more than 20 colleges. Eruditus, an edtech startup that raised over $100 million in September, creates courses in collaboration with more than 30 elite universities, including MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley, IIT and more.

Coursera, Podium and Eruditus are all signaling a future where universities could be getting a plug-and-play model of asynchronously taught curriculum.

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Moderna reports its COVID-19 vaccine is 94.5% effective in first data from Phase 3 trial

Following fast on the heels of Pfizer’s announcement of its COVID-19 vaccine efficacy, Moderna is also sharing positive results from its Phase 3 trial on Monday. The biotech company says that its COVID-19 vaccine candidate has shown efficacy of 94.5% in its first interim data analysis, which covers 95 confirmed COVID cases among its study participants, of which 90 were given the placebo, and only 5 received Moderna’s mRNA-based vaccine. Further, of 11 severe cases of COVID-19, none were found among those who received the actual vaccine candidate.

This is another very promising sign for the potential of having effective vaccines available to the public in some kind of significant volume at some point next year. As mentioned, it’s worth pointing out that this is just a first interim report, but it is data that comes from the safety board overseeing the trial appointed by the National Institutes of Health, which is an independent body not affiliated with Moderna, so it’s a reliable result that provides hope for continued and final analysis.

Moderna says that it will be submitting for an Emergency Use Authorization of its vaccine candidate based on the results within the coming weeks, looking to get approval from the FDA to use it in emergency circumstances ahead of a full and final approval. That EUA, should it be granted, will be based on data from 151 confirmed cases among the Phase 3 participant group (which included 30,000 participants in total), and data from follow-ups extending on average over two months after case confirmation.

All final data will also be submitted to the scientific community for independent peer review, which is a standard part of the ultimate vaccine trial and approval process.

Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine proves 90% effective in first results from Phase 3 clinical trial

Both these and Pfizer’s vaccine candidate, which it developed in partnership with BioNTech, are mRNA-based vaccines. These are relatively new in terms of human use, and differ from traditional vaccines in that they use messenger RNA to instruct a recipient’s cells to generate effective antibodies, without actually exposing them to any virus, whereas more traditional vaccines in general use typically use either small, safe doses of active or inactive virus in order to trigger a patient’s immune system to generate their own antibodies.

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Microsoft says hackers backed by Russia and North Korea targeted COVID-19 vaccine makers

Microsoft has revealed that hackers backed by Russia and North Korea have targeted pharmaceutical companies involved in the COVID-19 vaccine development efforts.

The technology giant said Friday that the attacks targeted seven companies in the U.S., Canada, France, India, and South Korea. But while it blocked the “majority” of the attacks, Microsoft acknowledged that some were successful.

Microsoft said it had notified the affected companies, but declined to name them.

“We think these attacks are unconscionable and should be condemned by all civilized society,” said Tom Burt, Microsoft’s customer security and trust chief, in a blog post.

The technology giant blamed the attacks on three distinct hacker groups. The Russian group, which Microsoft calls Strontium but is better known as APT28 or Fancy Bear, used password spraying attacks to target their victims, which often involves recycled or reused passwords. Fancy Bear may be best known for its disinformation and hacking operations in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, but the group has also been blamed for a string of other high-profile attacks against media outlets and businesses.

The other two groups are backed by the North Korean regime, one of which Microsoft calls Zinc but is better known as the Lazarus Group, which used targeted spearphishing emails disguised as recruiters in an effort to steal passwords from their victims. Lazarus was blamed for the Sony hack in 2016 and the WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017, as well as other malware-driven attacks.

But little is known about the other North Korea-backed hacker group, which Microsoft calls Cerium. Microsoft said the group also used targeted spearphishing emails masquerading as representatives from the World Health Organization, charged with coordinating the effort to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Microsoft spokesperson acknowledged it was the first time the company had referenced Cerium, but the company did not offer more.

This is the latest effort by hackers trying to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic for their own goals. Earlier this year, the FBI and Homeland Security warned that hackers would try to steal coronavirus vaccine research.

Today’s news coincides with the Paris Peace Forum, where Microsoft president Brad Smith will urge governments to do more to combat cyberattacks against the healthcare sector, particularly during the pandemic.

“Microsoft is calling on the world’s leaders to affirm that international law protects health care facilities and to take action to enforce the law,” Burt said. “We believe the law should be enforced not just when attacks originate from government agencies but also when they originate from criminal groups that governments enable to operate — or even facilitate — within their borders.”

FBI and DHS accuse Chinese hackers of targeting US COVID-19 research

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Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine proves 90% effective in first results from Phase 3 clinical trial

The COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech has shown to be effective blocking vaccine in 90 percent of participants in its Phase 3 clinical trial, the companies announced on Monday. That’s based on data analyzed by an external, independent committee assigned to check the results of the trial, and reflects only early results from the trial, and not the final verified result, but it’s still extremely promising news for progress towards a viable and more broadly available vaccine.

Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine candidate is an mRNA-based vaccine, which is a newer technology that many companies pursued for COVID-19 in part because it offers some advantages in pace of development and potential efficacy. These results from the test were based on an equable case total of 94 confirmed COVID-19 cases among study participants – passing the minimum threshold agreed to by the companies and the FDA of 62 confirmed cases for a proper, scientifically rigorous assessment.

The Phase 3 trial conducted by the companies included 43,358 participants, and Pfizer reports “no serious safety concerns have been observed” thus far in addition to the positive prevention rate. Based on this early data, individuals who receive the vaccine are protected at 28 days after first dose, and the vaccine uses a two-dose process.

There is still additional safety testing and continued studies to conduct, with the companies estimating that two full months of safety data (which is what the FDA requires for Emergency Use Authorization) will be available in the third week of this month. Participants will also be monitored for two full years after they receive their second and final dose in order to test for long-term effects. Pfizer still thinks that it can produce up to 50 million doses of its vaccine by the end of this year, and as many as 1.3 billion doses through 2021.

Full data from this trial still need to undergo peer-review by other researchers and scientific publications, but this is definitely the most promising and clearly positive news yet from the vaccine development front, and could mean that large-scale distribution of a vaccine begins even before the end of 2020 if all goes well.

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Europe urges e-commerce platforms to share data in fight against coronavirus scams

European lawmakers are pressing major e-commerce and media platforms to share more data with each other as a tool to fight rogue traders who are targeting consumers with coronavirus scams.

After the pandemic spread to the West, internet platforms were flooded with local ads for PPE of unknown and/or dubious quality and other dubious coronavirus offers — even after some of the firms banned such advertising.

The concern here is not only consumers being ripped off but the real risk of harm if people buy a product that does not offer the protection claimed against exposure to the virus or even get sold a bogus coronavirus “cure” when none in fact exists.

In a statement today, Didier Reynders, the EU commissioner for justice, said: “We know from our earlier experience that fraudsters see this pandemic as an opportunity to trick European consumers. We also know that working with the major online platforms is vital to protect consumers from their illegal practices. Today I encouraged the platforms to join forces and engage in a peer-to-peer exchange to further strengthen their response. We need to be even more agile during the second wave currently hitting Europe.”

The Commission said Reynders met with 11 online platforms today — including Amazon, Alibaba/AliExpress, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft/Bing, Rakuten and (TechCrunch’s parent entity) Verizon Media/Yahoo — to discuss new trends and business practices linked to the pandemic and push the tech companies to do more to head off a new wave of COVID-19 scams.

In March this year EU Member States’ consumer protection authorities adopted a common position on the issue. The Commission and a pan-EU network of consumer protection enforcers has been in regular contact with the 11 platforms since then to push for a coordinated response to the threat posed by coronavirus scams.

The Commission claims the action has resulted in the platforms reporting the removal of “hundreds of millions” of illegal offers and ads. It also says they have confirmed what it describes as “a steady decline” in new coronavirus-related listings, without offering more detailed data.

In Europe, tighter regulations over what e-commerce platforms sell are coming down the pipe.

Next month regional lawmakers are set to unveil a package of legislation that will propose updates to existing e-commerce rules and aim to increase their legal responsibilities, including around illegal content and dangerous products.

Europe to limit how big tech can push its own services and use third-party data

In a speech last week, Commission EVP Margrethe Vestager, who heads up the bloc’s digital policy, said the Digital Services Act (DSA) will require platforms to take more responsibility for dealing with illegal content and dangerous products, including by standardizing processes for reporting illegal content and dealing with reports and complaints related to content.

A second legislative package that’s also due next month — the Digital Markets Act — will introduce additional rules for a sub-set of platforms considered to hold a dominant market position. This could include requirements that they make data available to rivals, with the aim of fostering competition in digital markets.

MEPs have also pushed for a “know your business customer” principle to be included in the DSA.

Simultaneously, the Commission has been pressing for social media platforms to open up about what it described in June as a coronavirus “infodemic” — in a bid to crack down on COVID-19-related disinformation.

Today the Commission gave an update on actions taken in the month of September by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and TikTok to combat coronavirus disinformation — publishing its third set of monitoring reports. Thierry Breton, commissioner for the internal market, said more needs to be done there too.

“Viral spreading of disinformation related to the pandemic puts our citizens’ health and safety at risk. We need even stronger collaboration with online platforms in the coming weeks to fight disinformation effectively,” he said in a statement. 

The platforms are signatories of the EU’s (non-legally binding) Code of Practice on disinformation.

Legally binding transparency rules for platforms on tackling content such as illegal hate speech look set to be part of the DSA package. Though it remains to be seen how the fuzzier issue of “harmful content” (such as disinformation attached to a public health crisis) will be tackled.

A European Democracy Action Plan to address the disinformation issue is also slated before the end of the year.

In a pointed remark accompanying the Commission’s latest monitoring reports today, Vera Jourová, VP for values and transparency, said: “Platforms must step up their efforts to become more transparent and accountable. We need a better framework to help them do the right thing.”

Tech giants must open up about the coronavirus ‘infodemic’, say EU lawmakers

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Booming edtech M&A activity brings consolidation to a fragmented sector

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to force teachers, students and parents to adopt new technologies, edtech’s total addressable market has massively grown in the last several months. The shift has urged venture capitalists to pour money into the sector accordingly, ushering a number of startups into the unicorn club.

But maturation doesn’t just mean bigger checks and high-flying unicorns — it also brings exits.

Edtech M&A activity is buzzier than usual: In the last week, Course Hero, a startup that sells Netflix-like subscriptions to students looking for learning and teaching content, bought Symbolab, an artificial intelligence-powered calculator. Saga Education, a tutoring nonprofit backed by Comcast, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others, acquired math software platform Woot Math. We also saw PowerSchool, which sells a suite of software services to manage schools, scoop up Hoonuit, a data management and analytics tool for educators. Finally, K-12 curriculum company Discovery Education bought K-5 science and stem curriculum upstart Mystery Science.

It’s a lot of news in a short period of time. Luckily, these consolidations offer some directional guidance regarding where some edtech businesses think the future of their industry is headed.

Smart content as a competitive advantage

Content, to an extent, is commoditized. If you can find a free tutorial on Youtube or Khan Academy, buy a subscription to an edtech platform that offers the same solution? The commodification of education is good for end-users and is often why startups have a freemium model as a customer acquisition strategy. To convert free users into paying subscribers, edtech startups need to offer differentiated and targeted content.

Edtech exits show a need for better plumbing

The Course Hero and Mystery Science deals show us that edtech businesses are hungry for personalized, targeted content. Course Hero’s acquisition of Symbolab was essentially a deal for more than a decade’s worth of data that captured which math questions students found hardest.

Symbolab is a math calculator that is set to answer over 1 billion questions this year. With each answer, Symbolab adds information to its algorithm regarding students’ most common pain points and confusion. Course Hero, in contrast, is a broader service that focuses on Q&A from a variety of subjects. CEO Andrew Grauer says Symbolab’s algorithm isn’t something that Course Hero, which has been operating since 2006, can drum up overnight. That’s precisely why he “decided to buy, instead of build.”

“It made a lot of sense to move fast enough so it wouldn’t take up multiple years to get this technology,” Grauer said. The deal was made as big companies get in the Q&A game too, he noted. Google acquired homework helper app Socratic in 2019 and Microsoft built Microsoft Solver in the same year.

Discovery Education, a curriculum provider for K-12 classrooms, acquired San Francisco-based K-5 STEM curriculum provider, Mystery Science. Discovery Education has launched a series of other products focused on science education, including Discovery Education Experience, the Science Techbook series and STEM Connect.  However, Mystery Science is largely focused on offering a creative digital solution to science education. The programming, a mix of videos, prompts and projects, cover a range of questions such as, “Where do rivers flow?” and “Could a volcano pop up where you live?” for young students.

Mystery Science CEO and founder Keith Schact explained how his product focuses on kids and educators, while Discovery Education focuses on educators and districts, making the deal feel like a “natural marriage.” Even as edtech goes directly to consumers, Schact remains bullish on the role that institutions play in true adoption of technology.

“You can go straight to teachers and get a certain market share,” he said. “But the institutions still do have a big role.” The founder likened the dynamic to the state of media: With the rise of blogs, you can publish directly and reach an engaged audience, but writers who want a bigger positioning tend to join larger platforms to grow their overall reach. Edtech is the same, in that some startups need an official sign-off from schools before they can reach venture-scale returns.

According to a source familiar with the transaction, Mystery Science was sold for $175 million after only raising $4 million in venture financing.

Using data management and analytics to improve student outcomes

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Cough-scrutinizing AI shows major promise as an early warning system for COVID-19

Asymptomatic spread of COVID-19 is a huge contributor to the pandemic, but of course if there are no symptoms, how can anyone tell they should isolate or get a test? MIT research has found that hidden in the sound of coughs is a pattern that subtly, but reliably, marks a person as likely to be in the early stages of infection. It could make for a much-needed early warning system for the virus.

The sound of one’s cough can be very revealing, as doctors have known for many years. AI models have been built to detect conditions like pneumonia, asthma, and even neuromuscular diseases, all of which alter how a person coughs in different ways.

Before the pandemic, researcher Brian Subirana had shown that coughs may even help predict Alzheimer’s — mirroring results from IBM research published just a week ago. More recently, Subirana thought if the AI was capable of telling so much from so little, perhaps COVID-19 might be something it could suss out as well. In fact, he isn’t the first to think so.

NWU researchers develop a throat-worn wearable that could offer early warnings for COVID-19 patients

He and his team set up a site where people could contribute coughs, and ended up assembling “the largest research cough dataset that we know of.” Thousands of samples were used to train up the AI model, which they document in an open access IEEE journal.

The model seems to have detected subtle patterns in vocal strength, sentiment, lung and respiratory performance, and muscular degradation, to the point where it was able to identify 100 percent of coughs by asymptomatic COVID-19 carriers and 98.5 percent of symptomatic ones, with a specificity of 83 and 94 percent respectively, meaning it doesn’t have large numbers of false positives or negatives.

“We think this shows that the way you produce sound, changes when you have COVID, even if you’re asymptomatic,” said Subirana of the surprising finding. However he cautioned that although the system was good at detecting non-healthy coughs, it should not be used as a diagnosis tool for people with symptoms but unsure of the underlying cause.

I asked Subirana for a bit more clarity on this point.

“The tool is detecting features that allow it to discriminate the subjects that have COVID from the ones that don’t,” he wrote in an email. “Previous research has shown you can pick up other conditions too. One could design a system that would discriminate between many conditions but our focus was on picking out COVID from the rest.”

For the statistics-minded out there, the incredibly high success rate may raise some red flags. Machine learning models are great at a lot of things, but 100 percent isn’t a number you see a lot, and when you do you start thinking of other ways it might have been produced by accident. No doubt the findings will need to be proven on other datasets and verified by other researchers, but it’s also possible that there’s simply a reliable tell in COVID-induced coughs that a computer listening system can hear quite easily.

The team is collaborating with several hospitals to build a more diverse dataset, but is also working with a private company to put together an app to distribute the tool for wider use, if it can get FDA approval.

FluSense system tracks sickness trends by autonomously monitoring public spaces

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Teachers are leaving schools. Will they come to startups next?

It wasn’t the lingering exhaustion that made Christine Huang, a New York public school teacher, leave the profession. Or the low pay. Or the fact that she rarely had time to spend with her kids after the school day due to workload demands.

Instead, Huang left teaching after seven years because of how New York City handled the coronavirus pandemic in schools.

“Honestly, I have no confidence in the city,” she says. Tensions between educators and NYC officials grew over the past few weeks, as school openings were delayed twice and staffing shortages continue. In late September, the union representing NYC’s principals called on the state to take control of the situation, slamming Mayor de Blasio for his inability to offer clear guidance.

Now, schools are open and the number of positive coronavirus cases are surprisingly low. Still, Huang says there’s a lack of grace given to teachers in this time.

Huang wanted the flexibility to work from home to take care of her kids who could no longer get daycare. But her school said that, while kids have the choice on whether or not to come into class, teachers do not. She gave her notice days later.

There are more than 3 million public school teachers in the United States. Over the years, thousands have left the system due to low pay and rigid hours. But the coronavirus is a different kind of stress test. As schools seesaw between open and closed, some teachers are left without direction, feeling undervalued and underutilized. The confusion could usher numbers of other teachers out of the field, and massively change the teacher economy as we know it.

Teacher departures are a loss for public schools, but an opportunity for startups racing to win a share of the changing teacher economy. Companies don’t have the same pressures as entire school districts, and thus are able to give teachers a way to teach on more flexible hours. As for salaries, edtech benefits from going directly to consumers, making money less of a budget challenge and more of a sell to parents’ wallets.

There’s Outschool, which allows teachers to lead small-group classes on subjects such as algebra, beginner reading or even mindfulness for kids; Varsity Tutor, which connects educators to K-12 students in need of extra help; and companies such as Swing and Prisma that focus on pod-based learning taught by teachers.

The startups all have different versions of the same pitch: they can offer teachers more money, and flexibility, than the status quo.

Underpaid and overworked teachers

There’s a large geographic discrepancy in pay among teachers. Salaries are decided on a state-by-state and district-by-district level. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, a teacher who works in Mississippi makes an average of $45,574 annually, while a teacher in New York makes an average of $82,282 annually.

Although cost of living factors impacts teacher salaries like any other profession, data shows that teachers are underpaid as a profession. According to a study from the Economic Policy Institute, teachers earn 19% less than similarly skilled and educated professionals. A 2018 study by the Department of Education shows that full-time public school teachers are earning less on average, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than they earned in 1990.

The variance of salaries among teachers means that there’s room, and a need, for rebalancing. Startups, looking to get a slice of the teacher economy, suddenly can form an entire pitch around these discrepancies. What if a company can help a Mississippi teacher make a wage similar to a New York teacher?

light bulb flickering on and off

Image: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Reach Capital is a venture capital firm whose partners invest in education technology companies. Jennifer Carolan, co-founder of the firm, who also worked in the Chicago Public School system for years, sees coronavirus as an accelerator, not a trigger, for the departure of teachers.

“We have a system and education system where teachers are underpaid, overworked, and you don’t have the flexibility that has become so important for workers now,” she said. “All these things have caused teachers to seek opportunity outside of the traditional schooling system.”

Carolan, who penned an op-ed about teachers leaving the public school system, says that new pathways for teachers are emerging out of the homeschooling tech sector. One of her investments, Outschool, has helped teachers earn tens of millions this year alone, as the total addressable market for what it means to be “homeschooled” changed overnight.

Gig economy powered by startups

Education technology services have created a teacher gig economy over the past few years. Learning platforms, with unprecedented demand, must attract teachers to their service with one of two deal sweeteners: higher wages or more flexible hours.

Outschool is a platform that sells small-group classes led by teachers on a large expanse of topics, from Taylor Swift Spanish class to engineering lessons through Lego challenges. In the past year, teachers on Outschool have made more than $40 million in aggregate, up from $4 million in total earnings the year prior.

CEO Amir Nathoo estimates that teachers are able to make between $40 to $60 per hour, up from an average of $30 per hour in earnings in traditional public schools. Outschool itself has surged over 2,000% in new bookings, and recently turned its first profit.

Outschool makes more money if teachers join the platform full-time: teachers pocket 70% of the price they set for classes, while Outschool gets the other 30% of income. But, Nathoo views the platform as more of a supplement to traditional education. Instead of scaling revenue by convincing teachers to come on full-time, the CEO is growing by adding more part-time teachers to the platform.

The company has added 10,000 vetted teachers to its platform, up from 1,000 in March.

Outschool competitor Varsity Tutors is taking a different approach entirely, focusing less on hyperscaling its teacher base and more on slow, gradual growth. In August, Varsity Tutors launched a homeschooling offering meant to replace traditional school. It onboarded 120 full-time educators, who came from public schools and charter schools, with competitive salaries. It has no specific plans to hire more full-time teachers.

Brian Galvin, chief academic officer at Varsity Tutors, said that teachers came seeking more flexibility in hours. On the platform, teachers instruct for five to six hours per day, in blocks that they choose, and can build schedules around caregiver obligations or other jobs.

Varsity Tutors’ strategy is one version of pod-based learning, which gained traction a few months ago as an alternative to traditional schooling. Swing Education, a startup that used to help schools hire substitute teachers, pivoted to help connect those same teachers to full-time pod gigs. Prisma is another alternative school that trains former educators, from public and private schools, to become learning coaches.

Pod-based learning, which can in some cases cost thousands a week, was popular among wealthy families and even led to bidding wars for best teacher talent. It also was met with criticism, suggesting the product wasn’t built with most students in mind.

Can learning pods scale, or are they widening edtech’s digital divide?

The reality of next job

A tech-savvy future where students can learn through the touch of a button, and where teachers can rack in higher earnings, is edtech’s goal. But that path is not accessible for all.

Some tutoring startups could create a digital divide among students who can pay for software and those who can’t. If teachers leave public schools, low-income students are left behind and high-income students are able to pay their way into supplemental learning.

Still, some don’t think it’s the job of public school teachers, the vast majority of which are female, to work for a broken system. In fact, some say that the whole concept of villainizing public school teachers for leaving the system comes with ingrained sexism that women have to settle for less. In this framework, startups are both a bridge to a better future for teachers and a symptom of failures from the public educational systems.

Huang, now on the job hunt, says that the opportunities that edtech companies are creating aren’t built for traditional teachers, even though they’re billed as such. So far, she has applied to curriculum design jobs at educational content website BrainPop, digital learning platform Newsela, math program company Zearn and Q&A content host Mystery.org.

“What I’m finding is that a lot of edtech companies don’t seem to value our skills as teachers,” she said. “They’re not looking for teachers, they’re looking for coders.”

8 edtech investors talk re-skilling, digital universities, ISAs and other post-pandemic trends

Edtech has been forced to meet increasing demand for services in a relatively short time. But the scalability could inherently clash with what teachers came to the profession to do. Suddenly, their work becomes optimized for venture-scale returns, not general education. Huang feels the tension in her job interviews, where she feels like recruiters don’t pay attention to creativity, knowledge and human skills needed for managing students. She has created 30 different versions of her resume.

The lack of suitable jobs made Huang decide to go on childcare leave instead of quitting the education system entirely, in case she needs to return to the traditional field. She hopes that is not the case, but isn’t optimistic just yet.

“I haven’t gotten a whole lot of interviews, because people see my resume; they see that I’m a teacher, and they automatically write me off,” she said.

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin (opens in a new window)

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Sidekick Health scores $20M for its gamified digital care platform

Nordic digital therapeutics company, Sidekick Health, has closed a $20 million Series A led by pan-European VC Wellington Partners and healthcare focused VC Asabys Partners. Existing investors, Novator and Frumtak Ventures, also participated in the oversubscribed round.

The 2014-founded startup has built a gamified digital care platform that targets chronic and lifestyle disease management via digital nudges from a helmet-wearing cartoon helper — pushing patients toward relevant information to support more beneficial lifestyle choices (e.g. taking regular exercise, or cutting down on smoking), as well as offering help with patient treatment management, such as via digital reminders for taking medication and remote patient monitoring for clinicians.

Sidekick Health’s platform addresses multiple therapeutic areas — offering what’s described as ‘evidence-based’, custom gamified digital therapeutics packages for conditions including diabetes, ulcerative colitis and smoking cessation.

This year it’s also branched out to offer support for patients with COVID-19 — an acute (rather than chronic) condition, albeit one that’s created huge and pressing challenges for healthcare providers.

The pandemic is of course more generally driving demand for digital care and remote patient monitoring as healthcare providers look for tools to help manage patients off-site — providing another tailwind for Sidekick Health’s business.

And while its gamification approach might seem more immediately suited to younger, app-savvy users, since launching the platform it says it’s worked with patients who are teenagers all the way up to people well over 80 — and now believes there are few limits on who can tap in to its digital care, assuming it can nail designing for easy access. Its software is designed to be accessible via (and integrate with) a range of connected devices.

“Our market, digital heath in general and our part of it, which you can either call digital care or digital therapeutics, has been fast growing over the past few years,” says CEO and co-founder Dr Tryggvi Thorgeirsson. “Obviously with the pandemic the whole trend has just been accelerated. That means accelerated adoption by more or less all the stakeholders in the market. And maybe especially by payers and providers.

“If you look at providers — like hospitals, clinicians — they have of course by necessity had to increase their use of digital health tools due to the pandemic. So the market was very fast growing already but with the pandemic it has really accelerated. So our customer base has been growing quite sharply now in the past six to 12 months.”

Sidekick Health doesn’t break out customer numbers but says it’s working with “several” of the top global pharma companies at this stage. While the platform reaches around 30,000 patients across different therapeutic areas via its b2b customers — with Europe it’s biggest market so far.

The new funding is going towards “further growth”, per Thorgeirsson — “both in terms of expanding the product but also accelerating our growth in both Europe and into the US market”. “We’re investing funds into the growth instead of aiming for profitability at this point,” he adds. 

New conditions he says it’s set to expand into “over the next few months” include heart failure; oncology (supporting patients with different types of cancer); and a number of metabolic conditions.

Within two years he says he wants it to be able to address over 20 different types of chronic illness (plus “a few acute ones like COVID-19”). 

Thorgeirsson also notes that people who are dealing with chronic conditions often suffer from multiple conditions — so being flexible enough to manage patients with comorbidity has been a strong focus for the clinician-founded startup.

“Most of our work is in chronic, lifestyle-related conditions… but when COVID-19 hit we saw that all of this functionality we had built for chronic diseases in our view was quite fitting for COVID-19 as well,” he says, explaining that the platform has been used to support coronavirus patients with educational videos on symptoms and “how to cope with the anxieties of being in home isolation”, as well as offering a reporting conduit to clinical staff to remotely monitor COVID-19 patients.”

“We felt all of these [features] were relevant also for this acute condition, so here in our home country, Iceland, we offered help and were picked up by the national authorities to support with a nationwide program to remotely monitor and support patients with COVID-19. So it definitely can apply in certain acute conditions as well,” he adds.

In addition to expanding the range of conditions the platform can address, the Series A funding will go on more clinical research aimed at validating its approach.

Recent research it’s published includes a random control trial comparing full standard care for type 2 diabetes vs the same full standard care plus its platform on top. (On that study, Thorgeirsson says the addition of the digital tool in the care pathway led to “a very significant drop in average blood glucose” which “translates to about 16% less risk of death and about 30% less risk of serious complications like amputation and blindness”.)

“One of the things we’re going to be using this funding for is to vastly increase our medical and science operations — so launching multiple studies into multiple therapeutic areas,” he tells TechCrunch. “Every condition has different aspects that we do focus on. With cardio and metabolic conditions it’s things like improving weight control, blood glucose, cardiovascular risk factors. Whereas in others it might be more focusing on quality of life or fatigue or anxiety or depression.

“This summer we did feasibility testing with patients with heart failure. And we saw really exciting first indications that we significantly improved one of the main symptoms [shortness of breath]. We saw very significant improvement in those symptoms… We even had a case where the remote patient monitoring of the heart allowed the clinicians to pick up a silent ‘heart attack’ — and led to an immediate hospitalization of a patient.

“So in general what I’m excited about is to see the breadth of the applicability. We started out in the cardiovascular space but over the past two years have been really fast expanding into a bunch of new conditions.”

Sidekick Health co-founders, Dr Sam Oddsson and Dr Tryggvi Thorgeirsson (Photo credit: Sidekick Health)

The startup operates a b2b2c model in partnership with pharmaceuticals companies and healthcare providers who then offer the software to patients — recently inking deals with US pharma giant pfizer and German giant Bayer, with more touted in the pipeline.

A line on its website refers to the added “value” its platform can deliver for its business customers. Asked what that means in practice Thorgeirsson argues that digital therapeutics offers “multiple value levers” to pharma partners.

One key point to note here is that digital care/therapeutics tools continue to face regulatory barriers to being directly reimbursed by healthcare payers in many markets. So such businesses typically need to find alternative routes to market.

Working with big pharma is one option. Although some digital health startups are, conversely, aiming to more directly disrupt the pharmaceutical industry — i.e. by offering an alternative to taking drugs (such as in areas like sleep disorders). However Sidekick Health sees its platform as a treatment complement that can augment traditional drug therapies for a wide range of conditions. (While, on the flip side, it says it believes its chosen b2bc route is the best way to get its digital therapeutics in front of as many patients as possible.) 

“Improving patient outcomes has a direct financial benefit for our pharma customers,” says Thorgeirsson, discussing the value proposition Sidekick Health offers its b2b partners. “If you have a drug that might have cost anywhere between $1-$3 billion [to bring to market] and if we can then help improve the efficacy of treatment for patients that are receiving that therapy by adding our digital companion to that drug that has a direct financial benefit in terms of competitive standing for our pharma partners.

“Also when our pharma partners discuss reimbursement for their drug with payers improved patient outcomes of course are key — so it’s the improved patient outcomes, it’s the improved medication adherence (we know that’s a huge problem; about 300,000 people die every year due to lack of medication adherence which is something that we help with); and then of course very interesting insights from real world data that we are able to gather as well.”

The potential for data generated by digital therapeutics to be used to extend the life of existing drug patents also “comes into the discussion” here, per Thorgeirsson — when we ask whether part of its ‘value add’ is the potential to extend the profitable shelf-life of existing drugs by injecting new life into pharmaceutical patents via bolting on a novel digital companion.

“That is one of the things that is extremely exciting in our space — working much more closely with pharmaceutical companies creating combinations of molecule plus digital,” he confirms. “In some cases, yes, this can potentially expand exclusivity or patents. So that’s absolutely a really interesting part of what we see happening in the market.

“This combination where the molecule can impact certain areas of the disease and we impact others — and the combination is more powerful than either alone.”

Drug development and/or finding new applications for existing medications is another area where Sidekick Health reckons that data derived from its platform will be able to aid pharma outcomes.

“The way we see it is that any new drug that’s being developed, in the not too distant future, most likely will have a digital companion when they go to market,” says CMO Gulli Arnason. “[It’s about] getting in early and launching something with a pharmaceutical company that’s augmented by a digital companion — as well as a more defensive play, around margins and patents. So these two areas are extremely important for pharmaceutical companies.”

As for the healthcare payer market, that’s “still maturing” in its response to digital therapeutics, as Thorgeirsson puts it. (Again, though, the coronavirus pandemic is kicking open doors as societies hurry to adopt digital tools to scale to meet the spike in demand for remote care.)

“What we feel is important also is that current value levers which are not dependent on direct reimbursements from payers because we know that the payer market is still maturing — really interesting things happening there but still kind of developing,” he adds.

On the competitive landscape, Thorgeirsson argues that Sidekick’s platform-play is relatively rare — and sets the business apart from digital therapeutics startups with a more niche focus. (One platform competitor he does name-check is France’s Voluntis; a business that’s been working on ’embedding connectivity into therapeutics’ for considerably longer, though with less of a focus on gamification.)

“There are companies that focus more narrowly on certain elements — like only on medication adherence or only on one or two specific conditions but we have this different approach where we believe it’s absolutely key to have a platform approach. And that’s really both when you look at the patient side — patients might have two or more conditions, they might have obesity, type 2 diabetes and smoke, and you don’t want one solution per condition; you want a platform that can tackle all of them,” he suggests, adding: “In general we don’t see strong competition when you combine the gamification, the outcomes that we’re showing and the platform approach.”

The platform approach aligns Sidekick Health with the needs of its target business partners.

“Our business partners have the same [priorities],” argues Thorgeirsson. “They have a portfolio of therapeutic areas that they address and they really don’t want one vendor per therapeutic area but a platform that can tackle across the spectrum. And when it come to the platform breadth we don’t really see a large number of competitors with that size of a platform.”

Commenting on the Series A in a statement, Dr Regina Hodits, managing partner at VC firm Wellington, said: “At Wellington, we are all about improving healthcare for all stakeholders, patients, practitioners, and payors alike. Sidekick’s team has done a remarkable job of creating a product platform with the potential to achieve this aim on a global scale. We are very excited to support the company with their plans for significant growth.”

“We are impressed by the way this team has been able to put together a technology platform delivering evidence-based therapeutic programs, that are effective, adaptive but also valuable for their commercial partners,” added Josep LI. Sanfeliu, managing partner and co-founder of Asabys, in another supporting statement.

Leading VCs discuss how COVID-19 has impacted the world of digital health

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TravelPerk launches an API for COVID-19 restrictions

About a month after outting an open API platform for its customers to augment their apps, business trip SaaS startup TravelPerk has launched a standalone API product aimed at helping the wider travel industry provide up-to-date information on travel restrictions and risks related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The TravelSafe API is a monthly subscription product that lets travel providers integrate pandemic-related information on point to point restrictions between destinations during the booking process — with the service pulling data from official sources and local governmental websites that TravelPerk says is cross referenced by its own customer care agents.

It’s also calculating the risk level for travel to a particular country which it says is based on real-time analysis of the reproductive rate of the epidemic (R0).

The API launch follows TravelPerk’s acquisition of risk management startup Albatross in July, as the pandemic has pushed it to build out its travel risk management offerings.

Travel startups have of course been among the hardest hit by the pandemic, with the virus decimating demand for international trips and wiping out huge swathes of the business travel market. And, while domestic staycationing does appear to have offset some of the vacation-related demand crunch, it’s still a tough outlook for business tips — as scores of information workers Zoom into meetings from home.

TravelPerk’s response to the COVID-19 demand shock has been to focus on product development — and today’s launch of a subscription API looks like an attempt to find a business opportunity amid the travel crisis, while also offering a service it hopes will support the wider industry to reboot stalled demand.

The API has also been developed out of necessity, with TravelPerk initially putting the service together for its own customers, as it sought to provide them with the reassurance they needed to make a booking.

Now it’s opening access to the wider ecosystem of airlines, travel agents and booking platforms as a standalone product available via monthly subscription (without the need to lock into a contract).

“Access to TravelSafe is not dependent upon being a pre-existing TravelPerk customer. The TravelSafe API is a standalone product available to any company,” confirms CEO and co-founder Avi Meir. “We built this technology for our own platform initially, because we knew that in such an uncertain time our customers and travelers really needed accurate, up-to-date information. However, we quickly realised that this same need exists across the sector and that what we’d built for ourselves could be really valuable across the travel industry.”

“Our goal is to become the most open travel management platform, and this is the first step towards us building an ecosystem of travel services that lets other travel companies, and the industry as a whole, benefit from our technology investments,” he adds.

Meir says TravelPerk is expecting the strongest demand to come from mid-sized travel management companies — given the “developer-friendly” nature of the product (he touts ease and speed of integration as big draws) — and also because the content is “unique to TravelSafe and updated in real-time”. (That said, when we ask about the risk scoring element he confirms the information the TravelSafe API offers is “an aggregation of the best data and information available, rather than our subjective assessment”.)

“This is vital given the pace of change in the travel industry at the moment,” he adds.

Keeping travel guidance up-to-date with a highly volatile pandemic that’s complicated by a lack of access to data (and/or good quality data) about how the virus is spreading in different regions is clearly a major challenge.

Nonetheless Meir reckons technology can help an inherently uncertain situation via tools that collate and surface the best of the information that’s out there. (He also disputes there’s any tension in a travel company offering risk assessment advice on travel, arguing its incentives are aligned with ensuring safe travel.)

“We cannot improve the quality or the accuracy of the data that exists on Covid-19 globally, but we can make it much easier for travelers to access and understand the information that is available,” says Meir. “Currently, travelers are really struggling to find clear, digestible, and accurate information on the rules that apply to them. People often have to read multiple articles and go to many different sources just to understand what the local guidelines are, the risk-level, whether they must quarantine upon return and so on.

“To solve this problem, we invested in developing advanced information processing tools, automated daily updates of risk levels using R-rates computation, and internal tools to facilitate the checking and updating of this data by our policy analysts. This allows the TravelSafe API to offer safe, concise, and accurate information even amongst so much change and uncertainty.”

Asked about TravelPerk’s own API-based platform — following the launch last month — he describes the market response as “phenomenal”. “Since we launched three weeks ago, we saw 50 new partners reach out to begin building integrations, one full integration with Payhawk went live, and a number of other partners coming close to finishing their integration and getting ready to go live with the platform,” he says, adding: “We’re really pleased with both the level of interest so far and how easy our partners have found it to use the API.”