While most air travel continues to be ground to a halt, a German startup working on what it hopes will be a major breakthrough in flying has raised more funds to continue building its service. Lilium, which is designing an all-electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft that it plans to build into a taxi-style fleet to ferry passengers within and between cities, has picked up an additional $35 million in funding.

The capital is an extension to a $240 million round Lilium announced just in March of this year, and notably brings in a new, high profile investor to the startup’s cap table: Baillie Gifford, the storied Scottish VC that has backed the likes of Tesla and SpaceX, Spotify, and Airbnb, among others. (As we reported in March, the $240 million came from existing investors, which include the likes of Tencent, Atomico, Freigeist and LGT.)

Dr Remo Gerber, Lilium’s chief commercial officer, confirmed in an interview that Lilium is in talks to add more to the round. That would be in line with what sources told us last year, when we reported that Lilium was looking to raise more like $400 million-plus.

So far, it brings the total raised by Lilium to over $375 million, at a valuation that sources very close to the company confirm is now over $1 billion, making it one of the most highly capitalised, and most valuable, of the aviation hopefuls.

The extra funding is coming at a key time for Lilium, which is playing a long game but also facing a number of immediate-term challenges. After a technical stumble that saw an older prototype of the company’s burst into flames while some maintenance was being carried out, leading to a pause while the company figured out what happened, Gerber says that the company remains on track for its first commercial services, but those will not be for another five years, in 2025. (The plan is for these to be flown by humans, with autonomous “flying vehicles” coming online about a decade later.)

In the meantime, many are bracing themselves for a big hit to the global economy as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, which is slowing down or halting altogether a number of industries, including three key industries Lilium touches: aviation, manufacturing and travel.

Gerber said that this latest funding injection was both opportunistic: he pointed out that it’s great to have Baillie Gifford as an investor, but it also helps the company shore up its finances for whatever might come next in this period of uncertainty. “The two are not mutually exclusive,” he said. The company now employs 450 employees, and has seen no layoffs at a time when millions have lost jobs globally, and with many on the design side working at home, Lilium also has large spaces, he said, well equipped for socially-distanced manufacturing to handle the next phase of the company’s development.

In the meantime, there remain a number of would-be competitors who are also chasing the same opportunity in flying vehicles, aimed at replacing cars in traffic-clogged cities as well as trains and other vehicles both in congested commuter corridors and routes that are uneconomical for other forms of transport.

They include another German startup, Volocopter, which is also designing a new kind of flying taxi-style vehicle and service, and also closed a $94 million round in February; as well as Kitty Hawk, eHang, Joby and Uber, in addition to Blade and Skyryse, air taxi services of sorts that offer more conventional helicopters and other vessels in limited launches for those willing to spend the money. Kitty Hawk just last week ended its moonshot Flyer program to focus more resources and attention on its autonomous flying project, pointing to heightened activity in the space.

Safety issues and designing reliable and efficient vessels have been preoccupations not just for the companies building them, but for regulators. There are signs, however, that there may be more advances on that front too. In the UK for example, the UK government last month announced a new initiative to back more companies building new and novel forms of air transport, part of its bid to support innovative industries and build more sustainable modes of transport for the future.

Lilium sees opportunities both in the UK — buffered by Baillie Gifford’s backing out of Edinburgh in Scotland — as well as across Europe and beyond. “We are delighted to support the remarkable team at Lilium in their ambition of developing a new mode of transport,” said Michael Pye, Investment Manager at Baillie Gifford, in a statement. “While still at an early stage, we believe this technology could have profound and far-reaching benefits in a low-carbon future and we are excited to watch Lilium’s progress in the years ahead.”

The COVID-19 pandemic is taking a heavy toll on ride-hailing services, like Uber and Lyft. Grab, Southeast Asia’s largest ride-hailing company, has also been impacted, but the company has adapted by quickly transitioning many of its ride-hailing drivers to its on-demand delivery verticals and expanding services needed by customers during social distancing measures.

The company told TechCrunch that its ride-hailing drivers saw their incomes decrease by about a double-digit percentage in April 2020, compared to October 2019, in line with a double-digit drop in gross merchandise volume for Grab’s ride-hailing business in some markets. Between March and April, more than 149,000 Grab ride-hailing drivers switched to performing on-demand deliveries. In some markets, the transition was done very quickly. For example, in Malaysia, 18,000 drivers moved to delivery in a single day. The platform also saw an influx of new driver requests, many from people who had been laid off or furloughed, as well as merchants who needed a new way to make income.

Russell Cohen, Grab’s regional head of operations, told Extra Crunch that to redeploy driver capacity to delivery verticals, the company worked with governments in its eight markets to understand how different COVID-19 responses, including stay-at-home orders, affected on-demand logistics. Anticipating shifts in consumer behavior, it also started adding new services that will continue after the pandemic.

Quickly moving driver capacity from ride-hailing to on-demand delivery

Grab currently has about nine million “micro-entrepreneurs,” or what it calls the drivers, delivery, merchants and agents on its platform. Cohen says the company began to see an effect on ride-hailing and transportation patterns in January and February as flights out of China, and air travel in general, began to decrease. Then COVID-19 started to have a material impact on its ride-hailing business in March, with a sharp drop after countries began implementing stay-at-home orders.

Bolt, a rival to Uber and others providing on-demand ridesharing, scooters and other transportation services across some 150 cities in Europe and Africa, is today announcing another capital raise as it weathers a difficult market climate where, because of COVID-19, many are staying in place and avoiding modes of transport that put them into contact with others.

The Estonia-based company is today announcing that it has picked up an additional €100 million ($109 million) in equity funding. Bolt also confirmed that is now valued at €1.7 billion (or nearly $1.9 billion at today’s rates).

The investment is coming from a single investor, Naya Capital Management, which was also a major backer of the company in its last round, a $67 million Series C in July 2019. Technically this would make this latest round a Series D although we are checking that detail with the company.

The funding is one more example of how investors are continuing to support their most promising, and/or most capitalised, portfolio companies as they face drastic losses of business during the COVID-19 pandemic, which can only be more complicated for a startup built on a business model that — even in the best of times — is very capital-intensive.

Before this round, in April we’d been hearing that Bolt was running out of runway and that they were in discussion also with the Estonian government — a big supporter of the country’s tech industry — to underwrite debt in the company. We have also asked Bolt if it raised any debt funding and will update this as we learn more.

Bolt — which says it has 30 million users in over 35 countries globally — has now raised over €300 million, with other investors including Nordic Ninja — a new fund out of Helsinki backed by a number of Japanese LPs to invest in Northern European startups (Bolt is based out of Tallinn) — Creandum, G Squared, Invenfin (a fund out of South Africa backed by investment holding company Remgro) and Superangel, a fund out of Estonia that has been backing the startup since its earliest days, as well as Didi (and, by association, SoftBank and Uber), Daimler, Korelya Capital and Spring Capital.

Formerly known as Taxify, Bolt rebranded last year as it expanded beyond private car rides into other areas like electric scooters and food delivery — and the plan will be to use this funding to expand all three business areas in the coming months, along with newer product categories like Business Delivery in-city same-day courier services and Bolt Protect for people to continue to use its ride-hailing services by kitting out cars with plastic sheeting between driver and passenger seats.

Uber, Bolt’s publicly traded business rival, has laid bare just how painful the pandemic has been for business. The company has laid off nearly 7,000 employees in recent weeks, and while we currently have little visibility of the impact on the contractors it engages to move people, food and other items in its network, its next quarterly earnings (which will cover the full brunt of the pandemic) should more clearly spell out the drop-off in overall business.

Bolt doesn’t go into the details of that situation itself, except to acknowledge that business is not as usual.

“Even though the crisis has temporarily changed how we move, the long-term trends that drive on-demand mobility such as declining personal car ownership or the shift towards greener transportation continue to grow,” said Markus Villig, CEO and co-founder, in a statement. “We are happy to be backed by investors that look past the typical Silicon Valley hype and support our long term view. I am more confident than ever that our efficiency and localisation are a fundamental advantage in the on-demand industry. These enable us to continue offering affordable transportation to millions of customers and the best earnings for our partners in the post-COVID world.”

A lot of people have talked about how fundraising has become more complicated now. Not only are people not able to meet in person and get more embedded in evaluating an opportunity, but many are unable to see what the future will hold in terms of market demand and the overall economy.

That’s left a lot of the activity at the moment spread between startups that are seeing a lot of business lift precisely because of present circumstances; startups that have businesses that are continuing to enjoy a lot of trade despite present circumstances; and startups that are strong enough (or already so highly capitalised) that investors want to support them to make sure they don’t go under. More typically, startups that are securing funding are falling into more than one of the above categories, as is the case with Bolt.

“We are delighted to have the opportunity to invest in Bolt at this stage in the company’s growth story,” Masroor Siddiqui, managing partner, CIO and founder of Naya Capital Management, said in a statement. “Under Markus’ leadership, Bolt has established itself as one of the most competitive and innovative players in global mobility. We believe that Bolt is helping drive a fundamental change in how consumers interact with the transport infrastructure of their cities and look forward to the company’s continued execution on its strategic vision.”

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Yesterday afternoon, Vroom, an online car buying service, filed to go public. Based on its SEC filing, Vroom is a highly-successful private company in fundraising terms that has attracted over $700 million during its life as a startup. T. Rowe Price, AutoNation, Durable Capital Partners, General Catalyst and other investors fueled the firm during its youth according to Crunchbase data.

Vroom most recently raised $254 million in December 2019, a Series H round that valued the company at around $1.5 billion. From its mid-2013 Series A to today, Vroom has tried to accelerate from the startup world to the grown-up domain of the public markets. How did it do?

Finding out is our goal this morning. We’re also curious why the firm would pursue an IPO today; public offerings tend to shun volatile, uncertain periods. So let’s dig into the numbers and do a bit of a unicorn check-up.

What does a private, car-focused e-commerce company worth $1.5 billion look like under the hood?

Un-profits

TechCrunch dug into Vroom’s market last year, writing that the company “looks a lot like Carvana and Shift,” and noting that in 2018 the company had “laid off 25-50% of its staff as it exited several markets.” Vroom was therefore a bit early to the waves of unicorn layoffs that we’ve seen in 2020.

I raise the layoffs as they imply that the company might be in reasonable financial shape; what did the cuts buy the company in terms of profitability?

Earlier today news broke that Uber is pursuing an acquisition of Grubhub. The global ride-hailing giant is worth a multiple of the American food delivery service, making the tie-up financially feasible, provided that a palatable price can be found for both parties.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news; you can read TechCrunch’s coverage of the deal here.

The deal could shake up the large, if generally unprofitable American food delivery market, a space contested by Uber’s Uber Eats service, Grubhub, DoorDash and Postmates. The combination could create the largest food delivery entity in terms of sales, changing leadership in its market and perhaps reducing competition.

Let’s unpack the deal in terms of its cost, why Uber has to pay in stock, how large a combined Uber Eats/Grubhub entity would be compared to its competition and why adjusted EBITDA helps us understand how this acquisition could give Uber’s bottom line a shot in the arm.

An all-stock purchase?

In normal times, this deal would likely be a mix of cash and stock. However, in 2020, with Uber’s market position being what it is, it’s likely that this would be an all-equity transaction. Why? Because Uber needs to conserve cash at nearly all costs. Its only historically profitable division (ride-hailing generates heavily adjusted profits) is in the tank, with ride volumes down as far as 80% in April, compared to its year-ago period.

Waymo has added an additional $800 million to the $2.25 billion funding round that it first announced in March, bringing the total size of the financing (its first from investors outside of Alphabet) to $3 billion. The extension comes from new investors including those managed by T. Rowe Price, Perry Creek Capital, Fidelity Management and Research Company and others.

The extension, like the original round itself, will be used by Waymo to invest in its workforce, product development and operating its Waymo One ride-hailing service, as well as its Waymo Via cargo and goods transportation service.

Waymo’s move to bring in external funding is seen as a way for the autonomous driving company to inject fresh capital into its program, as well as bring on new strategic partners, like Magna and AutoNation, which participated in the previously announced tranche. While the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a temporary setback when it comes to its testing and service deployment programs, Waymo notes in a new blog post from CEO John Krafcik that the crisis actually underscores the need for its technology.

“COVID-19 has underscored how fully self-driving technology can provide safe and hygienic personal mobility and delivery services,” Kracik notes in the post. “We’re grateful these partners share our mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to get where they’re going.”

Heading into earnings season, you might have expected Uber and Lyft to suffer.

After all, global travel slowed toward the end of Q1, so how could these companies have done well? Continuing the same line of thinking, given that they are both unprofitable and are valued more on growth than trailing earnings, with growth slowing would there be much to celebrate?

The answer was a resounding “yes.” Uber and Lyft both rallied toward the end of last week following their successive earnings reports.

Today, let’s go back and remind ourselves how Uber and Lyft performed against Q1 expectations and what they said about the hits they took in March (Q1) and early April (Q2). Then we’ll ask ourselves why their shares rallied despite telling investors that their businesses had begun to fall sharply in the COVID-19 world.

(And, no, the answer to everything isn’t Uber Eats. More on that at the end.)

Expectations

Lyft reported earnings first, telling investors its Q1 results on May 6. Here’s how they stacked up:

• Lyft lost $1.31 per share against revenue of $955.7 million in Q1.
• The firm missed expectations on profit (-$0.64 expected), and beat on revenue ($897.9 million expected).

Uber reported the next day. Here are its top-line numbers from May 7:

• Uber lost $1.70 per share in Q1 against revenue of $3.54 billion in Q1.
• The firm missed expectations on profit (-$0.83 expected), and beat slightly on revenue ($3.51 billion expected).

Ahead of its earnings report today, shares of Uber rose around 11%, buoyed by a set of financial results and promises about the future from Lyft that were rated highly by investors. That optimism lapped over the edges onto Uber.

Today after the bell, however, the global ride-hailing giant reported its own financial results. Analysts had anticipated a loss of $0.83 per share against $3.51 billion in revenue, though top line estimates varied from $2.31 billion to $4.33 billion — an unusually large range driven by COVID-19-led uncertainty.

Uber reported a Q1 per-share loss of $1.70 and revenues of $3.54 billion, making for a mixed set of results when compared to expectations. The company lost a staggering $2.94 billion in the quarter counting all costs, a figure that even for Uber feels excessively large.

Here are the key numbers from Uber’s earnings report, starting with platform spend and working our way down to profitability and how much cash the firm was left with at the end of Q1 2020:

• Gross bookings (the value of goods and services sold on Uber’s platform) rose 8% compared to Q1 2019 to $15.8 billion.
• Ride-hailing gross bookings fell some, while Uber’s food delivery service saw gross sales growth of 54%.
• Uber’s revenue grew 14% from $3.1 billion to $3.51 billion in the quarter on a year-over-year basis.
• Uber’s net loss of $2.94 billion was worse than its other profit metrics, including its adjusted EBITDA for the quarter which came to a loss of$612 million. (Recall that it is adjusted EBITDA that Uber had previously promised to push into positive territory in Q4 of this year before COVID-19 upended its market.)
• Uber wrapped Q1 with $9 billion in cash and equivalents, and the firm’s operations burned $463 million in cash in the first quarter.

Got all of that? The headline from Uber’s quarter is that its ride-hailing business shrank and Uber Eats, its food delivery service, grew like hell. Here are the numbers for the latter:

• Gross bookings of $4.68 billion, up from $3.07 billion in the year-ago quarter, or 52%
• GAAP revenue of $819 million, up from $536 million in the year-ago quarter, or 53%
• Adjusted net revenue of $527 million, up from $239 million in the year-ago quarter, or 121%
• Resulting adjusted EBITDA of a $313 million loss, worse than its year-ago result of $309 million

This is mostly bullish. Huge bookings gains are good, big GAAP revenue gains are good, the adjusted net revenue gains are very good, and, for Uber, not losing more money as it scales — heavily adjusted losses for Uber Eats were effectively flat on a year-over-year basis — is good.

The company will need to lose less money over all, however, as its business is struggling more in Q2 than it did in Q1. We’ll know more during its impending earnings call.

Uber about 14% of its staff this week, and led an investment in Lime, a scooter company into which it intends to offload its own micromobility efforts.

Shares of Uber are off about 2% in after-hours trading. More shortly from its call.

Ahead of its earnings report today, shares of Uber rose around 11%, buoyed by a set of financial results and promises about the future from Lyft that were rated highly by investors. That optimism lapped over the edges onto Uber.

Today after the bell, however, the global ride-hailing giant reported its own financial results. Analysts had anticipated a loss of $0.83 per share against $3.51 billion in revenue, though top line estimates varied from $2.31 billion to $4.33 billion — an unusually large range driven by COVID-19-led uncertainty.

Uber reported a Q1 per-share loss of $1.70 and revenues of $3.54 billion, making for a mixed set of results when compared to expectations. The company lost a staggering $2.94 billion in the quarter counting all costs, a figure that even for Uber feels excessively large.

Here are the key numbers from Uber’s earnings report, starting with platform spend and working our way down to profitability and how much cash the firm was left with at the end of Q1 2020:

• Gross bookings (the value of goods and services sold on Uber’s platform) rose 8% compared to Q1 2019 to $15.8 billion.
• Ride-hailing gross bookings fell some, while Uber’s food delivery service saw gross sales growth of 54%.
• Uber’s revenue grew 14% from $3.1 billion to $3.51 billion in the quarter on a year-over-year basis.
• Uber’s net loss of $2.94 billion was worse than its other profit metrics, including its adjusted EBITDA for the quarter which came to a loss of$612 million. (Recall that it is adjusted EBITDA that Uber had previously promised to push into positive territory in Q4 of this year before COVID-19 upended its market.)
• Uber wrapped Q1 with $9 billion in cash and equivalents, and the firm’s operations burned $463 million in cash in the first quarter.

Got all of that? The headline from Uber’s quarter is that its ride-hailing business shrank and Uber Eats, its food delivery service, grew like hell. Here are the numbers for the latter:

• Gross bookings of $4.68 billion, up from $3.07 billion in the year-ago quarter, or 52%
• GAAP revenue of $819 million, up from $536 million in the year-ago quarter, or 53%
• Adjusted net revenue of $527 million, up from $239 million in the year-ago quarter, or 121%
• Resulting adjusted EBITDA of a $313 million loss, worse than its year-ago result of $309 million

This is mostly bullish. Huge bookings gains are good, big GAAP revenue gains are good, the adjusted net revenue gains are very good, and, for Uber, not losing more money as it scales — heavily adjusted losses for Uber Eats were effectively flat on a year-over-year basis — is good.

The company will need to lose less money over all, however, as its business is struggling more in Q2 than it did in Q1. We’ll know more during its impending earnings call.

Uber about 14% of its staff this week, and led an investment in Lime, a scooter company into which it intends to offload its own micromobility efforts.

Shares of Uber are off about 2% in after-hours trading. More shortly from its call.

Google is facing anger from the German startup ecosystem for refusing to restructure ad payments linked to travel and transport bookings that were subsequently wiped out by the coronavirus crisis.

TechCrunch has seen a letter addressed to Google that’s co-signed by eight travel industry startups in which the tech giant is asked for flexibility in how it enforces payment terms around these earlier ad auctions.

“By selectively enforcing strict payment terms on larger partners — especially from the travel and transportation industry — for its services provided to market those products, Google is opting out of sharing the responsibility to do right by consumers,” writes Christian Miele, the president of the German Startups Association — on behalf of the CEOs of Dreamlines, FlixBus, GetYourGuide, Homelike, HomeToGo, Omio, Tourlane and Trivago, who are co-signatories to the letter.

The eight startups represent €75M+ ($80M+) in ad revenues for Google in Q1 2020, per the letter.

The startups go on to call on Google to “share the burden”, noting that “leading companies from Germany and around the world have gone to unprecedented lengths for consumers” — such as issuing no-questions-asked refunds as a result of what it calls the “current extraordinary global situation”.

Globally, the travel industry has been decimated by the coronavirus crisis with demand evaporating almost overnight and no realistic prospect of the sector recovering until at least next year — plunging travel startups into a nuclear winter.

At specific issue here is the startups say Google is demanding payment for ads attached to bookings they subsequently refunded. Such as, for example, Easter trips and tours booked earlier in the year before the pandemic had taken hold in Europe.

This means the startups are now on the hook for substantial payments to Google for bookings that did not convert into revenue for their own businesses.

“The conflict is with the advertising dollars that we paid to Google for customers that could never be converted,” explains GetYourGuide CEO Johannes Reck . “People typically book two to three weeks out when they book for transport, hotel. It’s a little bit closer for experiences but particularly in the pre-Easter season… there are lots of booking volumes that come through Google and are then booked.

“We held the cash from these bookings and then the entire lockdown happened. Naturally what we did it after the lockdown happened is that we refunded all of the customers which were pretty significant amounts of money but which was obviously the right thing to do because they couldn’t travel — they had to stay at home.”

Reck says that when GetYourGuide went back to Google — to ask for at least a discount on the payments or else for them to be restructured so the business would not need to pay until travel picks up again — Google point blank refused.

“Google said A) we’re not going to participate in the cancellations at all — that’s all your thing to do, your customers, basically. Despite the fact that [they] can track every single customer. They know exactly which customers came from Google. And B) we’re also not restructuring the payment terms — so you have to pay immediately, within thirty days,” Reck told TechCrunch.

“That’s obviously terrible because all of our employees are on short term labor programs right now.”

“To me it’s inexplicable that we have to carry the full burden while the most profitable company in the world that has received more than €500M from us last year doesn’t want to do that,” he added. “That to me is just wrong.”

We reached out to Google to ask about the payments but at the time of writing the company had not responded.

Google’s parent entity, Alphabet, reported earnings yesterday, disclosing a significant slowdown in its ad business in March. However it still reported $41.16BN in revenue for the quarter — beating analyst estimates. Earnings per share did not do as well as expected, though, coming in under expectations at $9.87 in per-share income.

Ads remain the primary money engine for Alphabet, with Google generating the bulk of its revenue and profit, which are in turn largely generated by ad incomes. So the tech giant is exposed to the coronavirus crisis, as marketing budgets are put to the torch — though its multi-billions in revenue make it considerably less exposed than startups that advertise on its platform.

Aside from the raw impact of an unprecedented crisis hammering these smaller businesses, there’s a specific political dimension to the startups’ complaint — given they are in receipt of financial aid from the German government which is providing funds to support wage bills during the coronavirus crisis.

So now there’s the prospect of taxpayer funding flowing into Google’s coffers — instead of helping startups retain staff.

“We’re currently getting governmental credit and now the governmental credit would basically need to be paid out to Google to fund advertisment bills for customers that could never be legally converted, so we are pretty outraged,” said Reck.

The German government laid out further details of a separate €2BN financial support program today, which is specifically intended for VC-backed startups and SMEs — and is slated to start delivering support funds next month.

Though, again, the startups’ concern is the intended relief won’t help them unless Google agrees to defer the ad payments.

Asked whether GetYourGuide might need to make staff redundant if Google refuses to restructure the payments, Reck said: “So far we have not. And for the eight companies that sent the letter I think the situation is different. Ultimately we would get governmental credit — and that governmental credit would be used to pay Google.”

He also pointed out that other tech giants have been flexible over similar payments.

“It’s really striking because they are very isolated,” he said of Google. “Facebook, Microsoft, every other company was very forthcoming with travel and transportation companies in this pandemic. They all say pay whenever you’re ready to pay — don’t worry about us, get through it first. Facebook even gave additional ad discounts for the future when we want to reboot.

“So to me it’s staggering because the group of companies that wrote the letter spent more than half a billion dollars last year on Google. And still they’re not willing to do anything for us.

“At the end of the day Google needs to step up to their responsibility,” Reck added. “If you’re even benefitting from people losing jobs in this pandemic I think that’s just completely wrong.”

Discussing the matter in a telephone call with TechCrunch, Thomas Jarzombek, commissioner of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy for the Digital Industry and Start-ups, told us the German government raised the issue of the ad payments in a call with Google yesterday. He said Google told it it would be dealing with such requests on a “case-by-case” basis, which Jarzombek described as a concern — given the lack of transparency around its decisions.

“In Germany there are a lot of companies behaving in some kind of social manner to support the ones that are not that strong financially,” said Jarzombek. “When we look at Google it’s obvious that this is one of the financially strongest companies in the world. And what I’m more concerned about in that case is that Google told us they will decide ‘case by case’ whom they will help out.”

He said the issue is one that’s likely to affect startups more than “traditional” types of businesses which are likely to be spending less on Google ads.

“For these digital startups the amount they’re spending on ads on Google and on Facebook is maybe the biggest share of their cost position,” he added. “So to be honest we are afraid that this can be a disadvantage for them.”

He also raised the spectre of competition — saying the concern is Google’s case by case decisions may be less favorable for startups that are “in some kind of competition” with the tech giant.

“There are other companies that are in competition with all these Google verticals… and it may be in these ‘case by case’ decisions Google will not be very kind to them,” he suggested. “So this kind of procedure is completely intransparent to us — and also to the companies.”

In recent years Google has faced substantial antitrust scrutiny and enforcement in Europe, related its dominant position in the search market — with the European Commission levying a number of fines, including related to Google Shopping and search ad brokering.

The Commission has also previously said it has received a number of complaints about the tech giant’s activities in other verticals — including travel search — though so far without launching a formal probe.

Jarzombek told us the German government has not currently raised the issue of Google’s selective response to ad payment restructuring with the Commission, as it’s not yet clear how the company will respond to the calls for a rethink — saying it’s waiting for a “final response” from Google to its concerns.

But he emphasized he remains concerned about the lack of transparency around Google’s processes, reiterating: “The procedure is intransparent for us and also intransparent for the startups.”

Asked if GetYourGuide has any competition concerns related to Google’s response towards the travel startup sector, Reck told us: “We’ve just been a very happy Google partner up to this point. We’ve done tremendous work with them. Antitrust is mostly regarding flights and hotels — it’s not experiences. And we have always had a very good relationship with them which is why I’m so absolutely baffled that in the worst hour of our company history they currently completely changed behavior and become so aggressive.”

While there may be no legal requirement for Google to amend contractual terms around the payments, even during a pandemic, Reck says the bigger point is simply about doing the right thing.

After all, this is a company that used to attach itself to the motto ‘do no evil’.

“Google never wants to give in on any of these things — out of principle. But I think their principle here is just misguiding them into a completely wrong direction because according to their principle we should never have refunded customers and then everything would be fine. But that doesn’t follow the logic of a pandemic where everyone has to stay at home,” said Reck.

“I don’t even want to get into the legal argument on this because I think just morally it’s wrong,” he added. “As [one of] the most profitable organizations in the world you cannot charge startups who are furloughing their employees and put them on short term labor programs and who are basically now getting subsidized by the government — those subsidies can’t flow back into Google.”

While human travel has become severely restricted in recent months, the movement of goods has remained a constant priority — and in some cases, has become even more urgent. Today, a startup out of Switzerland that builds hardware and operates a logistics network designed to transport one item in particular — pharmaceuticals — is announcing a significant round to fuel its growth.

SkyCell — a designer of “smart containters” powered by software to maintain constant conditions for drugs that need to be kept at strict temperatures, humidity levels, and levels of vibration, which are in turn used to transport pharmaceuticals around the globe on behalf of drug companies — is today announcing. that it has raised $62 million in growth funding.

This latest round is being led by healthcare investor MVM Partners, with participation also from family offices, a Swiss insurance company that declined to be named, as well as previous investors the Swiss Entrepreneurs Fund (managed by Credit Suisse and UBS), and the BCGE Bank’s growth fund.

The company was founded in 2012 Switzerland when Richard Ettl and Nico Ros were tasked to design a storage facility for one of the big Swiss pharma giants. The exec charged with overseeing the project brainstormed that the work they were putting in could potentially be applied to transportation containers, and thus SkyCell was born.

Today, Ettl (who is the CEO, while Ros is the CTO), said in an interview that the company now works with eight of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies and has been in validation trials with a further seven. These use SkyCell’s network of some 22,000 air freight pallets to move their products around the world.

The new capital will be used to expand that reach further, specifically in the U.S. and Asia, and to double its fleet to become the biggest pharmaceutical transportation company globally. With 30 of the 50 biggest-selling drugs in the world being temperature sensitive (and some generics for one of the biggest-selling, the arthritis medication Humira, now also coming out), this makes for a huge opportunity.

And unsurprisingly, several of SkyCell’s customers are working on COVID-19 medications, Ettl said, either to help ease symptoms or potentially to vaccinate or eradicate the virus, and so it’s standing at the ready to play a role in getting drugs to where they need to be.

“We are well positioned in case there is a vaccine developed. Out of the six pharma companies developing these right now, four of them are our customers, so there is a high likelihood we would transport something,” Ettl said.

For now, he said SkyCell has been involved in helping to transport “supportive” medications related to the outbreak, such as flu shots to make sure people are not falling ill with other viral infections at the same time.

SkyCell is not disclosing its valuation but we understand that it’s in the many hundreds of millions of dollars. The company had raised some $36 million in equity and debt before this, bringing the total outside funding now to $98 million.

In a market that’s estimated to be worth some $2.8 billion annually and growing at a rate of between 15% and 20% each year, there are a number of freight businesses that focus on the transportation of pharmaceuticals. They include not only freight companies but airlines themselves, which often buy in containers from third parties. (And for some more context, one of its competitors, Envirotainer, was acquired for over $1 billion in 2918; while another, CSafe, has raised significantly more funding.)

But there was virtually no innovation in the market, and most pharmaceutical companies factored in failure rates of between 4% and 12% depending on where the drugs were headed.

One key differentiator with SkyCell has been its containers, which are able to withstand temperatures as high as 60 degrees Celsius or as low as negative 10 degrees Celsius, and have tracking on them to better monitor their movements from A to B.

These came to the market at a time when incumbents were only able to (and some still are only able to) guarantee insulation for temperatures as high as 40 degrees, which was not as pressing an issue in the past as it is today, in part because of rising temperatures around the globe, and in part because of the growing sophistication of pharmaceuticals.

“We’ve found that the number of days where [one has to consider] temperature extremes has been going up,” Ettl said. “Last year, we had 30 days where it was warmer than 40 degrees Celsius across our network of countries.”

On top of the containers themselves, SkyCell has built a software platform that taps into the kind of big data analytics that are now part and parcel of how modern companies in the logistics industry work today, in order to optimise movement and best routing for packages.

The conditions it considers include not only the obvious ones around temperature, humidity and vibration, but distance and time of travel, as well as overall carbon emissions. SkyCell claims that its failure rate comes out at less than 0.1%, with CO2 emissions reduced by almost half on a typical shipment.

Together, the hardware and software are covered by some 100 patents, the company says.

This week in space was pretty active, with some startup news – including timing for a historic first – as well as scientific discoveries and innovation in the time of lockdown.

Who better than NASA to demonstrate how science can get done remotely, since the agency is used to conducting experiments from millions of miles away.

SpaceX will launch its historic first astronaut mission on May 27

SpaceX and NASA are now targeting a specific date and time for their first ever astronaut launch, the final demonstration mission in the Commercial Crew program before SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is fully certified for regular transport of human passengers to the International Space Station. The launch will happen on May 27, at 4:32 PM EDT if all stays on target.

First in-space satellite life extension was a success

The first-ever mission to use a dedicated vehicle to extend the life of a satellite on orbit worked as planned. Northrop Grumman’s first Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV-1) has successfully changed the orbit of an Intelsat spacecraft, extending its useful life another five years.

NASA’s daring Mars sample return plan explained

Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA plans to bring back a piece of Mars with its next robotic rover mission to the red planet, and now it’s explained how it proposes to do that. It’s a mission that will involve many firsts, including the first-ever spacecraft launch from the surface of Mars.

And Perseverance… perseveres

The Mars rover for that sample collection mission is called ‘Perseverance,’ and NASA is persevering wits plans to launch that mission, with preparations continuing despite the COVID-19 pandemic. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine went into a bit more detail in a new interview about what work continues, along with why and how.

Meanwhile another rover adapts to WFH life

Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA’s current Mars rover, Curiosity, is operating actively despite work-from-home restrictions – with NASA engineers actually running the rover on the red planet from their home office setups. Rover was already remotely operated, so moving from the control room to the living room isn’t that much of an additional stretch.

New Earth-sized temperate exoplanet found

It hits the sweet spot for both size and temperature, but we still have a lot to learn about new exoplanet Kepler-1649c before we can say for certain whether it has all the conditions that would enable life. Chief among those is the composition of its atmosphere, but the discovery of the planet on its own is still cause for scientific celebration.

The first private space cargo mission has a landing site and launch date

Intuitive Machines is set to be the first private company to send a lunar lander to the Moon, as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. The launch will aim for a spot in the Moon’s largest valley, and carry instruments that will provide valuable info and testing for our own human return to the lunar surface in 2024.