Amazon announced this morning it would begin to sell its own brand of Covid-19 at-home tests to Amazon shoppers in the U.S. The test retails for $39.99 on the Amazon.com website and is available to any U.S. customer without a prescription. The Covid-19 PCR collection kit is shipped to the customer’s home via Amazon Prime, offering everything needed to perform a nasal swab. Customers will then return the collection tube with the swab inside via the included return box. Amazon says it will be able to provide results within 24 hours of receiving the sample at its lab.

The collection kit will be processed by Amazon’s in-house laboratory, which the company created during the pandemic as part of its in-house Covid-19 testing program for its frontline workers. To date, Amazon’s labs in the U.S. and U.K. have processed millions of tests from over 750,000 of its employees, the company says. With the new at-home kit, Amazon is expanding its U.S. lab’s capabilities to its retail shoppers.

Amazon says it’s using the more accurate PT-PCR method, which means you will have to wait for the lab to process your results. It also notes the kits have received Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Image Credits: Amazon

According to the Amazon.com listing for the new Amazon COVID-19 Test Collection Kit DTC, the kit will includes the swab, a collection tube with saline, a plastic bag with an absorbent pad, and the return box with shipping label. The return shipping is handled by UPS at no additional charge to the customer, and is sent to Amazon’s CAP accredited and CLIA-certified lab in Hebron, Kentucky. 

The kit additionally includes instructions on how to get your results via Amazon’s secure website, AmazonDx.com, and access to documents needed for testing verification. These tests will meet any requirements for testing when traveling within the US (except Hawaii), and when traveling from the U.S. to many international locations, Amazon says. And the kits are FSA and HSA eligible.

“Even as Covid-19 vaccinations continue, widespread access to reliable and affordable Covid-19 testing remains a critical tool in the fight against the spread of the virus, said Cem Sibay, the Amazon VP heading the company’s Covid-19 testing work. “The Amazon collection kit offers customers the convenience they’ve come to expect from Amazon.com by providing access to COVID-19 testing whenever and wherever they need it. The test collection kit provides highly accurate and timely results, helping customers feel more confident as they safely return to travel, work, college, and daily life,” Sibay added.

Google is making it possible to store digital versions of either Covid-19 test results or vaccination cards on users’ Android devices. The company on Wednesday announced it’s updating its Passes API, which will give developers at healthcare organizations, government agencies, and other organizations authorized by public health authorities the ability to create digital versions of tests and vaccination cards which can then be saved directly to the user’s device. The Passes API is typically used to store things like boarding passes, loyalty cards, gift cards, tickets and more to users’ Google Pay wallet. However, the Google Pay app in this case will not be required, Google says.

Instead, users without the Google Pay app will have the option to store the digital version of the Covid Card directly their device, where it’s accessible from a homescreen shortcut. Because Google is not retaining a copy of the card, anyone who needs to store the Covid Card on multiple devices will need to download it individually on each one from the healthcare provider or other organization’s app.

The cards themselves show the healthcare provider or organization’s logo and branding at the top, followed by the person’s name, date of birth, and other relevant information, like the vaccine manufacturer or date of shot or test. According to a support document, healthcare providers or organizations could alert users to the ability to download their card via email, text, or through a mobile website or app.

In an example photo, Google showed the Covid-19 Vaccination Card from Healthvana, a company that serves L.A. County, However, it didn’t provide any other information about which healthcare providers are interested in or planning to adopt the new technology.

The Passes API update doesn’t mean Android users can immediately create digital versions of their Covid vaccination cards — something people have been taking pictures of as a means of backup or, unfortunately in some cases, laminating it. (That’s not advised, however, as the card is meant to be used again for recording booster shots.)

Rather, the update is about giving developers the ability to begin building tools to export the data they have in their own systems about people’s Covid tests and vaccinations to a local digital card on Android devices. To what extent these digital cards will become broadly available to end users will depend on developer adoption.

For the feature to work, the Android device needs to run Android 5 or later and it will need to be Play Protect certified, which is a licensing program that ensures the device is running real Google apps. Users will also need to set a lock screen on their device for additional security.

Google says the update will initially roll out in the U.S., followed by other countries.

The U.S. is behind other markets in making digital version of vaccination cards possible. Today, the EU’s Covid certificate, which shows an individual’s vaccination status, test results or recovery status from Covid-19, went live. The certificate (EUDCC) will be recognized by all EU members, and will aid with cross-border travel. Israel released a vaccine passport earlier this year that allows vaccinated people to show their “green pass” at places that require vaccinations. Japan aims to have vaccination passports ready by the end of July for international travel.

In the U.S., only a few states have active vaccine certification apps. Many others have either outright banned vaccine passports — which has become a politically loaded term — or are considering doing so.

Given this context, Google’s digital vaccination card is just that — a digital copy of a paper card. It’s not tied to any other government initiatives nor is it a “vaccine passport.”

A regulation underpinning a digital certification system for individuals in the European Union to verify their COVID-19 status via a common credential has gone into application today — on schedule.

From today, almost all EU Member States are now able to issue and verify digital certificates, per the Commission — with only a handful of (mostly) EEA countries still pending a step, according to its website.

A number of countries had started issuing certificates earlier. The regulation also allows for a six week phasing in period.

The Commission said more than 200 million certificates have been generated already.

The “EU Digital COVID Certificate” — which has gone through a few names since the idea was publicly floated back in January — is intended to help facilitate cross-border travel within the bloc by providing standardized and universally accepted certification.

EU citizens still have the right to free movement — even without the certificate — but having the common credential may help facilitate travel around the bloc, such as by exempting holders from needing to undergo COVID-19-related restrictions like quarantine.

Certificates can be issued to people within EU Member States who have been vaccinated against the coronavirus with a verified vaccine; who have previously had the disease (and therefore have antibodies); or to people who have had a recent negative test.

While it’s been called a “digital” certificate, a paper version can also be issued — which similarly contains a scannable QR code (albeit printed) — so there’s no requirement for individuals to have a mobile device to be able to use the certificate to help them travel.

Certificates are also issued free of charge.

The Commission has previously said that no personal data is “exchanged or retained” during the digital certificate verification process. Signature keys for the verification are stored on servers at a national level and only accessed — via a centralized gateway — at the point the certificate is scanned.

The EU rules for the digital certificate stipulate that Member States must refrain from imposing additional travel restrictions on holders — unless such steps are “necessary and proportionate” to safeguard public health.

The regulation is due to expire in a year’s time.

More information about the EU digital COVID certificate system can be found here.

ON this week’s episode of Found, we speak to Rob Schutz, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Ro. Ro recently raised $500 million, bringing its total raised to date to near $1 billion. The digital healthcare startup now does everything from telehealth primary care, to operating physical pharmacies, but it originally began life as Roman, a startup addressing men’s health, and specifically, erectile dysfunction.

Rob told us how a windy path from founding a daily deals site in the heady times of Groupon, to teaching at General Assembly, and being an early employee at Bark Box (now just ‘Bark’) led him to meeting up with co-founders Zachariah Reitano and Saman Rahmanian and setting up Roman in the first place. He also detailed how the company evolved, first to address women’s health as well, and eventually to providing much more broad-reaching remote primary care.

We talked about everything from managing the dynamics in a a founder triumvirate (including declarations of love), to dealing with the ongoing complications of a rebrand, to operating a business in an industry with dense regulatory requirements that vary considerably state to state.

We loved our time chatting with Rob, and we hope you love yours listening to the episode. And of course, we’d love if you can subscribe to Found in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts or in your podcast app of choice. Please leave us a review and let us know what you think, or send us direct feedback either on Twitter or via email at found@techcrunch.com. And please join us again next week for our next featured founder.

In the U.S, after you get vaccinated against COVID-19 you are given a small paper card issued by the CDC that is essentially the only evidence that you’ve received your shots. It might seem like a flimsy level of proof, one that you could easily lose, but replacing that paper copy with a digital one has become a political lightning rod in America.

In spite of that, many companies are attempting to attack the problem to produce a viable form of digital proof, sometimes called vaccine passports. For all intents and purposes, what many call a vaccine passport is simply proof you’ve been vaccinated that you can carry on your smartphone, rather than on a card in your wallet.

Some have argued against the digital approach for privacy reasons. Others have claimed it is a civil liberties issue, and some have pointed to equity issues related to not having equal access to appropriate technology or the internet.

That lack of consensus along with the open ethical questions, has led some states including Florida and Georgia to ban the use of electronic passport records, at least as far as requiring them to conduct state business or to create a centralized vaccination record keeping system. In Iowa, the governor signed a law last month that prohibits businesses and the state from requiring any proof to access services, whether the card is physical or digital.

These are just a few examples of the patchwork of state laws and executive orders that has resulted in even more complexity for companies trying to develop products to solve this problem. But not every state is banning digital vaccination records. Earlier this month, California opened a registration system to request a digital record of your vaccination and New York announced a system earlier this year to download proof of vaccination to your smartphone. More on these approaches later.

We spoke to several experts to get their take on moving your vaccine card to the digital world to find out how this could work in spite of the obvious friction.

Practical issues

According to Dr. Shira I. Doron from Tufts Medical Center in Boston, whose specialties include infectious diseases and hospital epidemiology, it’s not as simple a matter as may sound.

For starters she says, states have not kept records in a consistent way. People have been getting vaccinated in all kinds of places from school gyms to pharmacies to stadiums, and it’s not clear if those records have made their way to people’s primary care physicians, assuming they even have one.

“[Vaccine passports could work] if [a system] had been rolled out that way [with central record keeping in mind] from December 15th [when we started vaccinating], but it was not. So, if somebody takes it on to go backwards and issue that kind of proof to people, maybe a system like that could work — and of course there are a lot of people that have taken issue with the ethics of that,” she said.

For her, it comes down to infection rates. As they drop with more people getting vaccinated, it could alleviate the need for any kind of proof at all because we would be safer simply because the infection rate fell below 10%. “I think that more ideally we get down to such a low infection rate and such high rate of vaccination that there is no longer a concern about people walking into a building,” she said.

Putting it in on the blockchain

If the infection rate remains higher than desirable, or certain entities like universities want to require it, how do we offer proof of vaccination beyond the paper card? Some people are pointing to the blockchain, but the approach isn’t without controversy. New York State is using IBM’s blockchain technology for its proof of vaccination called Excelsior Pass, but privacy advocates worry that doing so could expose people’s personal medical information.

The idea with the IBM approach is that you to go to your physician’s healthcare portal or some other place that has your vaccine records, and which has partnered with IBM. The portal will present you with a QR code which you can take a picture of with your phone and store in your phone’s digital wallet. The person then presents the QR code at a venue, which uses a companion scanning application to view it to see proof of vaccination (or a recent negative test). Finally the venue would verify the identity of that person with a secondary form of ID like a driver’s license.

The question then is why use the blockchain at all in this instance. IBM Global VP of Payer and Emerging Business Networks Eric Piscini, says that there are three main reasons. “The first is that the immutability of the blockchain is extremely important, and that’s [a big reason] why we use it. The second piece, which is also very important is the decentralization of that platform so that [all of the vaccine data] is not just in one place. It’s decentralized and managed by different parties. […] The third piece […] is the audit trail, and not just for me as a consumer, but as an [entity] that is trying to verify me,” he explained.

But are those reasons enough to justify its use? Steve Wilson, an analyst at Constellation Research, who specializes in end user privacy thinks the blockchain is an inappropriate technology to use for digital proof of vaccination. “Basically, I don’t see how blockchain adds anything to the digitizing of COVID vaccinations or tests. The purpose of blockchain is to crowd-source agreement on the ordering of some events, and logging that order in a shared record. What problem in vaccination management does that address,” he asked.

An open-source approach to the problem

When California released a digital vaccination record app last week, it went a different route, using an open-source framework called the Smart Health Cards Framework. The framework was developed by an organization called The Commons Project (TCP) along with a broad coalition of health and technology organizations including Oracle, Microsoft, Salesforce, Epic and others.

JP Pollack, co-founder of The Commons Project, Senior Researcher-in-Residence at Cornell Tech, and Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, says that since the government has made clear it won’t be compiling vaccine records in a central database, and because the vaccine administration system itself is so fragmented, it’s even more challenging to create digital records. His organization is working to create a solution to that problem.

“What we’re working on at The Commons Project is a steering group called the Vaccination Credential Initiative or VCI. And the purpose of that group is basically to design and advocate for a specification, someday hopefully a standard, that makes it so that all of those disparate issuers of vaccines can issue the same vaccine record in a signed and portable format,” he said.

That comes in the form of a Smart Health Card app that TCP has developed. “The additional layer that we have built is what turns [your vaccine] information into what we’re calling the Smart Health Card. And basically it’s all of the information that goes on your CDC card — so your name, your date of birth, the type of vaccine that you received, the dates of your doses, lot numbers and where you received it. All of those kinds of things get packaged up into this credential, and that credential is then signed by the issuer,” he said.

In addition to California, the state of Louisiana also went live with the The Commons Project solution this week, and Walmart recently announced that anyone that received their vaccine through them is now able to download a digital version of their vaccine record directly to the CommonHealth app (available on Android) or CommonPass app (available on iOS or Android). The company also hinted that other companies that have administered the vaccine would be following Walmart’s lead in the coming weeks and providing access to digital records through the same apps.

The approach doesn’t necessarily solve all of the criticisms around equitable access to technology, privacy or the ethics of being asked to show proof vaccination, but it does provide a means to deliver the information digitally for those that want it in an open way.

Regardless of the method your state chooses, if it indeed chooses any approach at all,  it will come with its own set of pros and cons. The paper CDC card, as Wilson points out, is similar in many ways to the “Yellow Card” vaccination record that people traveling overseas have been carrying for decades, and that has worked fine.

But it seems that in 2021 when approximately half the world’s population owns a smartphone, while two-thirds have some sort of mobile phone, smart or otherwise, it makes sense to make this record available in a digital form. For the many startups and large companies trying to solve that problem, they will have to do more than come up with a clever solution. They will also need to figure out how to convince individuals, businesses and governments that it makes sense to even offer this approach, and that may be the biggest hurdle of all.

Chaos and crisis are sisters, and none more so than when you dial for emergency help. A call to 911 in the United States and urgent numbers globally spins off a number of additional calls to emergency response teams, ambulances, hospitals and other actors who need to coordinate action to save your life. Theoretically, everyone should be working off the same data, but also theoretically, I should be able to eat ice cream without getting fat.

Israel-based Carbyne’s software platform coordinates these calls so that critical details — say, location or medical allergies — don’t get lost from the 911 call taker to the paramedic in the field.

Now, it’s taking a second scoop on its capital cone in the form of a $20 million new round, following a $25 million Series B that my colleague Ingrid Lunden reported on in January. The new funding was led by Global Medical Response, one of the world’s largest emergency medical providers who operates fleets of vehicles, trucks, helicopters and planes to get patients to hospital facilities expeditiously. GMR was founded in 2018 from a rollup of emergency services led by private equity giant KKR.

This new round was in the form of a convertible note that will convert into Carbyne’s next fundraise according to CEO and co-founder Amir Elichai. Also joining the round was Hanaco VC, Intercap VC, Elsted Capital and others. Elichai said that the round took about three weeks to fundraise and close, and was held to $20 million given the company’s earlier funding this year, which at the time we reported was “over $100 million” in valuation.

Carbyne and GMR have been partners since late 2020, and their ties are deepening. GMR COO Edward Van Horne will join Carbyne’s board of directors.

In addition to offering more advanced location services for emergency callers, Carbyne’s technology allows for callers to activate a video channel, giving emergency response personnel more live information about what’s happening. That’s critical in GMR’s business, where first responders need the most up-to-date information to increase their effectiveness.

“The ability to get smarter information, and to increase situational awareness to each case whatever it is, will give emergency medical services the ability to better triage and to make faster and smarter responses to events that occur within their jurisdiction,” Elichai explained. “So basically the entire ecosystem is becoming much more reliable and efficient, thanks to the Carbyne ecosystem that we’re putting together with GMR.”

My colleague wrote a great deep dive into the company in January, so read that for some background on the company’s founding and product and how it weathered the pandemic. A few more updates though in the past few months bear mentioning.

Elichai said that the company has doubled the recurring revenues of its business since the beginning of 2021, although wouldn’t provide those ever elusive absolute figures. The company has also expanded its employee base by 30% over the same period. Among the success stories is New Orleans, which is moving its emergency centers to Carbyne, as well as centers in Texas, Georgia and Florida. Elichai said that much of this transition was prompted by additional federal investment in 911 infrastructure appropriated in recent COVID-19 stimulus bills.

The company’s CTO and co-founder, Alex Dizengof, will move from Israel to the United States to start an R&D center.

Last week, the company announced a new “Ultra Emergency Network” that it is building with Israel Aerospace Industries that will allow phones to communicate emergency location information in post-disaster scenarios where commercial mobile services degrade or disappear entirely.

The company’s newest investment is in line with growing interest from venture capitalists in the disaster space, with more data, investments in communications infrastructure, and more dollars flowing into the space than ever before.

Beauty and wellness businesses have come roaring back to life with the decline of Covid-19 restrictions, and a startup that’s built a platform that caters to the many needs of small enterprises in the industry today is announcing a big round of funding to grow with them.

Fresha — a multipurpose commerce tool for independent wellness and beauty businesses such as hair, nail and skin salons, yoga instructors and more, based first and foremost around a completely free platform for those businesses to schedule bookings from customers — has picked up $100 million.

Fresha plans to use the funds to expand the list of countries where it operates, to grow the categories of companies that use its services (mental health practitioners is one example; fitness is another), and to build more services complementing what it already provides, helping customers do their work by providing them with more insights and data about what they do already. It will also be making acquisitions to expand its customer base.

General Atlantic is leading this Series C, with Huda Kattan, Michael Zeisser of FMZ Ventures, and Jonathan Green of Lugard Road Capital also participating, along with past investors Partech, Target Global and FJ Labs.

Fresha has raised $132 million to date, and it’s not disclosing its valuation. But as a point of reference, when it closed its Series B (as Shedul; the company rebranded in February 2020), it was valued at $105 million.

Chances are that figure is significantly higher now.

Fresha’s current range of services include a free-to-use platform for booking appointments; free software for managing accounts; a payments service that includes both a physical point of sale and digital interface; and a wider marketplace both to provide goods to the businesses (B2B); and for the businesses to sell goods to customers (B2C).

The London-based company has 50,000 business customers and 150,000 stylists and professionals in 120+ countries (mostly in the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe), with some 250 million appointments booked to date.

And while many businesses did have to curtail how they operated (and in some countries had to stop operating altogether) Fresha found that it was attracting a lot of new business in part because of its “free” model that meant customers didn’t have to pay to maintain a booking platform at a time when they weren’t taking bookings, but could use Fresha to generate revenues in other ways (such as through the sale of goods, vouchers for future services, and more.)

So in a year when you might have thought that a company based around providing services to industries that were hard hit by Covid would have also been hard-hit, in fact Fresha saw a 30x increase in card payment transactions versus the year before, and more than $12 billion worth of booking appointments made on its platform.

In a market that is very crowded with tech companies building platforms to book beauty (and other) services and to manage the business of independent retailers — they include giants like Lightspeed POS, as well as smaller players like Booksy (which also recently raised) and StyleSeat but also players like Square and PayPal, and many others — the core of Fresha’s offering is a booking platform built as a totally free product.

Why free? To attract more users to its other services (such as payments, which do come at a price), and because co-founders William Zeqiri (CEO) and Nick Miller (product chief) — pictured above, respectively left and right — think this the only way to build a business like this in a crowded market.

“We believe that software is a commodity,” said Zeqiri in an interview. “A lot of our competitors are beating each other on price to the bottom. We wanted to consolidate the supply side of the software, gather data about the businesses, how they use what they use.”

That data led, first, to identifying the need for and building out  single all the time and launch its B2B and B2C marketplaces, and the idea is that it will likely lead to more products as it continues to mature, whether its better analytics for its current customers so that they can better price or develop their services accordingly; or entirely new tools for new categories of users.

Meanwhile, the services that it already provides like payments have taken off like a shot, not least because they’ve served a need for any virtual transactions like selling vouchers or items.

Miller noted that while a lot of its customers actually interface with tech with a lot of reluctance — they are the essence of “physical” retailers when you think about it — they also found themselves having to use more digital services simply because of circumstances. “Looking back at what happened, tech adoption accelerated for our customers,” said Miller. He said that current customers usage for the point-of-sale systems and online payments is roughly equal.

Looking ahead, Fresha’s investor list is notable for its strategic mix and might shed some light on how it grows. Kattan, a “beauty influencer” and the founder of Huda Beauty, is investing by way of HB Investments, a strategic venture arm; while Zeisser’s FMZ focuses on “experience economy” investments today, but he himself has a long history working at tech companies building marketplaces, including years with Alibaba as head of its U.S. investment practice. These speak to areas where Fresha is likely interested in expanding its reach — more marketplace activity; and perhaps more social media angles and exposure for its customers at a time when social media really has become a key way for beauty and wellness businesses to market themselves.

“Fresha has emerged as a leader powering the beauty and wellness industry,” said Aaron Goldman, Global Co-head of financial services and MD at General Atlantic, in a statement. “William, Nick and the Fresha team have built a product that is resonating with the market and creating long-term value through the intersection of its payments, software and marketplace offerings. We are thrilled to be partnering with the company and believe Fresha has significant opportunity to further scale its innovative platform.”

“I’ve witnessed first-hand the positive impact Fresha has for beauty entrepreneurs,” added Kattan. “The company is a force for good in the growing community of beauty professionals around the globe, who are increasingly adopting a self-employed approach. By making top business software accessible without any subscription fees, Fresha lets professionals focus on what they do best — offering great experiences for their customers.”

As people live longer and longer and have long-term health issues like cancer and dementia, caring for elderly relatives is becoming a huge societal and political issue. Right now this care is antiquated and run by incumbents, many of which still run off paper and Excel. We are now seeing a new wave of startups turn up to tackle this space by applying Apple’s age-old model of owning the experience end-to-end and running everything on a platform.

The latest to join this race is UK startup Lifted, which has now raised $6.2 million in a Series A funding round led by Fuel Ventures. Also participating were existing investor 1818 Venture Capital as well as new investors Novit Ventures, Perivoli Innovations, the J.B. Ugland family office, and a number of Angels. This latest funding round takes the total raised by Lifted to $11.2M.

Lifted says its UK market is increasing and claims the number of people caring for adult loved ones has risen exponentially during the pandemic, with almost 1 in 2 people supporting people outside their household.

The startup is entering a perfect storm of increasing need, unpopular care homes, and the UK Government still without a long-term plan for social care.

Lifted app

In contrast to a raft of agencies and freelancers, Lifted directly employs its care workforce and uses its platform to “gamify and improve the experience of carers to make them perform better in people’s lives and also to restore respect to the caring profession” with its Care Management Platform, says the company.

Lifted has also acquired the ‘Live Better With Dementia’ website and launched the Lifted Dementia Hub, an online community with a marketplace of products.

Rachael Crook co-founded Lifted with Sam Cohen. She says she was inspired to get into the sector when, at the age of 24, she had to care for her mother, who was diagnosed with dementia at age 56.

Rachael Crook, Lifted CEO sold me at an interview: “I was in that position much younger than most people. And it seemed abundantly clear to me that it was an experience that was hugely emotionally important to me, and financially expensive, was really convoluted and frustrating. It made an already really difficult time, more difficult. My mum brought me up to really fight for the underdog and I felt like the carers themselves were getting a really poor deal. And yet, it’s a huge colossal market. The care market is set to double in the next 20 years, and for the next 10 years, we will look to compete against traditional care companies. We want to transform the care experience. This is a product that is worth four and a half times your mortgage. And yet, it’s predominantly bought in a really antiquated way with paper and pen systems. It’s really hard to keep up to date with your loved ones’ care. We’re also competing against new entrants.”

She added: “In 12 months, we have tripled revenue, launched the first App in the world to offer free care advice, and cut Carer churn to half the industry average, all while maintaining exclusively 5-star reviews on Trustpilot.”

Mark Pearson, Managing Partner of Fuel Ventures said: “Rachael, Sam and their team have delivered exceptional growth in the past year. They have a unique vision of the future for care and their model is delivering clear results for both sides of the marketplace.”

Welcome back to the week, and welcome back to The Exchange. Robinhood has yet to file its IPO, so we’re looking at other companies in the meantime. Today it’s Babylon Health, a British healthtech company that is pursuing a U.S. listing via a blank-check company, or SPAC.

You have questions. I have questions. We’ll get to some answers.

But before we do, we wanted to note that Anna and I are looking into the AI startup market tomorrow morning. If you are a VC with notes regarding the current pace of investment into the sector or thoughts on where customer traction is highest, let us know. If you are a founder building an AI-powered startup, we’d also like to hear from you about what you are seeing. Use the subject line “AI startups,” please.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. 

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

With that out of the way, let’s get into Babylon Health. We’ll kick off with a short riff on its fundraising history, talk about its product, and then dive into its numbers and, bracing ourselves for impact, its projections.

The larger context this morning is that we’re doing legwork ahead of what could be a super active Q3 2021 IPO cycle. Kanzhun, a Chinese company, has also filed for a U.S. listing. Toss in Robinhood whenever it gets off its duff and gives us its own filing, and we’re being promised a good time.

Babylon Health

Per Crunchbase data, Babylon has raised north of $600 million as a private company. Its funding, however, has not come from sources that we tend to discuss here at TechCrunch. Instead, the company raised some money from more traditional investors like Hoxton Ventures and Kinnevik, but the bulk of its capital was raised from the Saudi Arabian “Public Investment Fund,” or PIF. The PIF led a $550 million round into the British healthtech company back in August 2019.

PitchBook has the round cut into two parts, the larger, first portion of which valued the company at $1.9 billion on a post-money basis.

That figure brings us to the SPAC deal that Babylon is now pursuing. The company’s new equity value after its SPAC deal will land around $4.2 billion, with Babylon sitting on around $540 million in cash after the deal is completed. The company will sport a lower, $3.6 billion enterprise valuation after its merger with SPAC Alkuri.

The medical industry is sitting on a huge trove of data, but in many cases it can be a challenge to realize the value of it because that data is unstructured and in disparate places.

Today, a startup called Mendel, which has built an AI platform both to ingest and bring order to that body of information, is announcing $18 million in funding to continue its growth and to build out what it describes as a “clinical data marketplace” for people not just to organize, but also to share and exchange that data for research purposes. It’s also going to be using the funding to hire more talent — technical and support — for its two offices, in San Jose, CA and Cairo, Egypt.

The Series A round is being led by DCM, with OliveTree and MTVLP, and previous backers Launch Capital, SOSV, Bootstrap Labs and Chairman of UCSF Health Hub Mark Goldstein also participating.

The funding comes on the heels of what Mendel says is a surge of interest among research and pharmaceutical companies in sourcing better data to gain a better understanding of longer-term patient care and progress, in particular across wider groups of users, not just at a time when it has been more challenging to observe people and run trials, but in light of the understanding that using AI to leverage much bigger data sets can produce better insights.

This can be important, for example, in proactive identifying symptoms of particular ailments or the pathology of a disease, but also recurring and more typical responses to specific treatment courses.

We previously wrote about Mendel back in 2017 when the company had received a seed round of $2 million to better match cancer patients with the various clinical trials that are regularly being run: the idea was that certain trials address specific types of cancers and types of patients, and those who are willing to try newer approaches will be better or worse suited to each of these.

It turned out, however, that Mendel discovered a problem in the data that it would have needed to enable its matching algorithms to work, said Dr. Karim Galil, Mendel’s CEO and founder.

“As we were trying to build the trial business, we discovered a more basic problem that hadn’t been solved,” he said in an interview. “It was the reading and understanding medical records of a patient. If you can’t do that you can’t do trial matching.”

So the startup decided to become an R&D shop for at least three years to solve that problem before doing anything with trials, he continued.

Although there are today many AI companies that are parsing unstructured information in order to extract better insights, Mendel is what you might think of as part of the guard of tech companies that are building out specific AI knowledge bases for distinct verticals or areas of expertise. (Another example from another vertical is Eigen, working in the legal and finance industries, while Google’s DeepMind is another major AI player looking at ways of better harnessing data in the sphere of medicine.)

The issue of “reading” natural language is more nuanced than you might think in the world of medicine. Gali compared it to the phrase “I’m going to leave you” in English, which could just as easily mean someone is departing, say, a room, as someone is walking out of a relationship. The “true” answer — and as we humans know even truth can be elusive — can only start to be found in the context.

The same goes for doctors and their observation notes, Galil said. “There is a lot hidden between the lines, and problems can be specific to a person,” or to a situation.

That has proven to be a lucrative area to tackle.

Mendel uses a mix of computer vision and natural language processing built by teams with extensive experience in both clinical environments and in building AI algorithms and currently provides tools to automate clinical data abstraction, OCR, special tools to redact and remove personal identifiable information automatically to share records, search engines to search clinical data, and — yes — an engine to enable better matching of people to clinical trials. Customers include pharmaceutical and life science companies, real-world data and real-world evidence (RWD and RWE) providers and research groups.

And to underscore just how much there is still left to do in the world of medicine, along with this funding round, Mendel is announcing a partnership with eFax, an online faxing solution used by a huge number of healthcare providers. Faxing is totally antiquated in some parts of the world now — I’m not even sure that people the age of my children (tweens) even know what a “fax” is — but they remain one of the most-used ways to transfer documents and information between people in the worlds of healthcare and medicine, with 90% of the industry using them today. The partnership with Mendel will mean that those eFaxes will now be “read” and digitized and ingested into wider platforms to tap that data in a more useful way.

“There is huge potential for the global healthcare industry to leverage AI,” said Mendel board member and partner at DCM, Kyle Lui, in a statement. “Mendel has created a unique and seamless solution for healthcare organizations to automatically make sense of their clinical data using AI. We look forward to continuing to work with the team on this next stage of growth.”

A technical system underpinning the European Union’s plan for a pan-EU ‘digital pass’ for verifying COVID-19 vaccination or test status across the region has gone live today, with a handful of EU Member States connected to the gateway and more expected to follow ahead of a July 1 full launch.

The idea for the EU’s COVID-19 digital certificate is to offer a single system for securely verifying EU citizens’ COVID-19 status — whether vaccination; a recent negative test; or proof of recovery from the virus — as they cross borders within the bloc to help facilitate safer travel.

The digital pass relies upon QR codes and digital signatures — verified using public key cryptography — to prevent falsification. Paper-based certificates can also be used by those who do have access to a device.

Member States that have passed technical tests and are ready to do so can start issuing and verifying certificates on a voluntary basis, the Commission said today — with seven countries (Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Croatia and Poland) intending to do so at this point.

Other countries have decided to launch the EU Digital COVID Certificate only when all functions are deployed nationwide, it added. Further details about Member States’ status on activating the system are available via this webpage.

Since 10 May, 22 EU countries have tested the gateway successfully, according to the Commission, which wants maximum update of the system by 1 July — when the associated regulation will apply.

Although it’s allowed a “phasing-in period” of six weeks for the issuance of certificates for Member States that need additional time to get everything hooked up. That means it’s possible the tardiest implementations could happen when summer is all but over. (An earlier goal of EU lawmakers that everything would be up and running everywhere by June always looked ambitious.)

The Commission says no personal data is “exchanged or retained” during the COVID-19 digital certificate verification process, noting that the signature keys for the verification are stored on servers at a national level. These keys can be accessed — via the gateway — by national verification apps or systems all across the EU.

The Commission has also developed reference software and apps for the issuance, storage and verification of certificates — which it’s published on GitHub — to support the rollout by EU Member States. The Commission said 12 Member States have made use of this code so far.

National authorities in respective EU countries are in charge of issuing the COVID-19 digital certificate to individuals — with various potential routes for citizens to obtain one, such as from a COVID-19 test centre or from their local health authority or directly via a national eHealth portal.

Commenting on the gateway launch in a statement, Stella Kyriakides, the EU’s commissioner for health and food safety, urged Member States to get on and complete their implementations.

“The EU Digital COVID Certificate shows the value added of effective e-health solutions for our citizens,” she said. “It is important that during the coming weeks, all Member States fully finalise their national systems to issue, store and verify certificates, so the system is functioning in time for the holiday season. EU citizens are looking forward to travelling again, and they want to do so safely. Having an EU certificate is a crucial step on the way.”

Also touching on the COVID-19 digital certification launch today, Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said the system will only be in place for one year — presumably that’s assuming the pandemic is actually over by summer 2022.

“The EU certificate is a prime example of digital tools that represent our values,” she said, in a speech addressing the 2021 Digital Assembly. “The EU values privacy. No personal data will be exchanged or retained. The EU is inclusive. Whoever is not vaccinated, can get a digital certificate for test or recovery. Whoever does not have a smartphone, can get it on paper. With the certificate, we want to help people to move freely in times of pandemic. This is why it will only be in place for one year. Europe is a front-runner here and can set standards at the global level.”

In the speech, the Commission’s president also trailed another incoming digital proposal which she said would provide Europeans with a trusted online ID they could use to interact with regional governments and businesses without being forced to hand over more data than is strictly necessary.

“We want to offer to Europeans a new digital identity. An identity that ensures trust and protects users online. We are about to present our proposal,” she said. “It will allow everyone to control their identity online, and to interact with governments and businesses, across the EU. Nobody should be forced to give more data away, than is necessary for the purpose at hand. To book a hotel room online, no-one needs to know where I am from and who my friends are. With our proposal, we are offering an alternative to the models of big online platforms. We believe in a human-centred digital transition.”

Zenyum, a startup that wants to make cosmetic dentistry more affordable, announced today it has raised a $40 million Series B. This includes $25 million from L Catterton, a private equity firm focused on consumer brands. The round’s other participants were Sequoia Capital India (Zenyum is an alum of its Surge accelerator program), RTP Global, Partech, TNB Aura, Seeds Capital and FEBE Ventures. L Catteron Asia’s head of growth investments, Anjana Sasidharan, will join Zenyum’s board.

This brings Zenyum’s total raised so far to $56 million, including a $13.6 million Series A announced in November 2019. In a press statement, Sasidharan said, “Zenyum’s differentiated business model gives it a strong competitive advantage, and we are excited to partner with the founder management team to help them realize their growth ambitions.” Other dental-related investments in L Catteron’s portfolio include Ideal Image, ClearChoice, dentalcorp, OdontoCompany, Espaçolaser and 98point6.

Founded in 2018, the company’s products now include ZenyumSonic electric toothbrushes; Zenyum Clear, or transparent 3D-printed aligners; and ZenyumClear Plus for more complex teeth realignment cases.

Founder and chief executive officer Julian Artopé told TechCrunch that ZenyumClear aligners can be up to 70% cheaper than other braces, including traditional metal braces, lingual braces and other clear aligners like Invisalign, depending on the condition of a patients’ teeth and what they want to achieve. Zenyum Clear costs $2,400 SGD (about $1,816 USD), while ZenyumClear Plus ranges from $3,300 to $3,900 SGD (about $2,497 to $2,951 USD).

The company is able to reduce the cost of its invisible braces by combining a network of dental partners with a technology stack that allows providers to monitor patients’ progress while reducing the number of clinic visits they need to make.

First, potential customers send a photo of their teeth to Zenyum to determine if ZenyumClear or ZenyumClear Plus will work for them. If so, they have an in-person consultation with a dentists, including an X-ray and 3D scan. This costs between $120 to $170 SGD, which is paid to the clinic. After their invisible braces are ready, the patient returns to the dentist for a fitting. Then dentists can monitor the progress of their patient’s teeth through Zenyum’s app, only asking them to make another in-person visit if necessary.

ZenyumClear is currently available in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Macau, Vietnam, Thailand and Taiwan, with more markets planned.

Sequoia India principal Pieter Kemps told TechCrunch, “There are 300M customers in Zenyum’s core markets—Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan—who have increased disposable income for beauty. We believe spend on invisible braces will grow significantly from the current penetration, but what it requires is strong execution on a complex product to become the preferred choice for consumers. That is where Zenyum shines: excellent execution, leading to new products, best-in-class NPS, fast growth, and strong economics. This Series B is a testament to that, and of the belief in the large opportunity down the road.”