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The 2-year-old Cambridge, Massachusetts startup is based out of at the (MIT) and had been working on developing technology for rapid diagnosis of diseases such as dengue and zika. Now, of course, E25Bio is turning its attention to creating early and accessible tests to diagnose the novel and rapidly-spreading coronavirus, which has caused a global pandemic.

Its goal is to be able to distribute more rapid, accurate and affordable detectors for coronavirus that can be distributed at scale across geographies. The startup plans to begin testing on human samples next week. The tests should be available for sale – at a cost of less than $30 – by late April depending on the regulatory timeline, according to a company spokesperson.

“We ultimately want to be able to have our tests at hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies (for at-home tests), however we are still exploring the details of potential distribution partnerships,” the spokesperson told me via email.

E25Bio’s rapid diagnostic tests use nanoparticle technology to capture virus or viral proteins secreted into the human body. They are based on technology developed by Dr. and Dr. Lee Gehrke, the Hermann von Helmholtz Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT.

“The same way a hormone is detected on a pregnancy test, our diagnostics provides doctors and patients with results in 15 minutes or less,” said Bosch, who serves as CTO of E25Bio.

Fast tracking

In the wake of the chaos, the recently announced it would fast track diagnostics for the virus through its (EUA), opening the door for both public and private institutions to attack the problem.

, co-founder and CEO of E25Bio, said the global public health system will require “a concentrated, unified strategy to better respond to the current pandemic.”

Khosla Ventures founder said that “in this time of crisis we need every effort to get testing at scale on the market.”

“We are excited about what E25Bio is capable of shipping in a short amount of time: a test that is significantly cheaper, more affordable, and available at-home for consumers without having to rely on primary medical services and can lessen the load on our healthcare systems,” he said in a written statement.

The new funding will go toward research and development, clinical studies and scaling the company’s launch for diagnostic tests upon receiving EUA approval. E25Bio had raised  a $2.3 million last August, according to Crunchbase.

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, a new backer, led the round, according to a statement from the company. Existing investors, including and , also participated. The last time Impossible Foods raised money was in May 2019, when it pulled $300 million for its Series E round.

The new round will be used to invest in research, scale up manufacturing, grow the company’s retail presence and presence in certain international markets, and popularize its pork and sausage products.

“Our mission is to replace the world’s most destructive technology–the use of animals in food production–by 2035,” CEO Patrick Brown said in a statement. “To do that, we need to double production every year, on average, for 15 years and double down on research and innovation. The market has its ups and downs, but the global demand for food is always there, and the urgency of our mission only grows.”

Impossible Foods competes in the plant-based alternative food space, which is growing in popularity. Impossible Burgers can be found at restaurants across the country, including at more than 7,000 Burger King locations. , which was well-received by investors when it went public last year, is the other well-known brand in the space.

Impossible Foods closed the Series F round last week amid the coronavirus pandemic, the company said. That’s a good thing, because stocks have been plunging and some investors have been cautioning that VC funding will slow down.

At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in October, Impossible Foods’ Brown said the company would look to raise more money and that it wouldn’t go public in the near future, and it appears to be sticking to that plan.

“With this latest round of fundraising, Impossible Foods has the resources to accelerate growth–and continue to thrive in a volatile macroeconomic environment, including the current COVID-19 pandemic,” Impossible Foods’ Chief Financial Officer David Lee said in a statement.

A slew of celebrities also participated in Impossible Foods’ latest round. Musical artists Jay-Z, will.i.am, Zedd, Jaden Smith and Katy Perry all participated, as did actress Mindy Kaling, The Daily Show host Trevor Noah, actor Kal Penn, tennis champion Serena Williams and co-founder Alexis Ohanian, among other stars.

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As such, it’s not entirely shocking when a real estate developer also becomes a tech company. Especially in the Bay Area, where housing costs and construction labor shortages are constraining supply. Case in point: . The San Mateo, California-based company has just closed a $97 million Series B round of funding that included $85 million in equity and $12 million in debt.

and Lennar Ventures (the arm of homebuilding giant ) led the round, which also included participation from , and . served as the debt provider.

Veev Group originated in 2008 as a traditional real estate developer and asset manager.

“In each project, we found new ways to improve the building process–always with the customer in mind,” said CEO and co-founder .

In 2017, Veev Group began to focus on prefabrication capabilities, and by 2018 it formally pivoted to what it describes as “a vertically integrated developer focused on building innovation.” (Note the company name changed in 2019 from Dragonfly Group to Veev.)

Over the years, Veev developed a proprietary panelized building system using materials such as steel frames, high-performance acrylic finishes and millwork, low-voltage lighting, and smart sensors. It uses a digital fabrication process, such as 3D design files fed to cold-formed steel and Computer Numerical Control machines, to design and produce new homes, specifically multifamily buildings and accessory dwelling units. Its current development pipeline totals more than 230 units (for lease and for sale) and 620,000 gross building square feet. The company is focused on building in the San Francisco Bay Area.

According to Haller, Veev recognized that the panelized system is more flexible in terms of design and site location than volumetric factory-built housing. Its lean manufacturing strategy (a 50,000-square-foot fabrication facility located in Union City) doesn’t require the capital investment that a large central factory does,  thus providing more flexibility during economic cycles, Haller maintains.

“We are in the midst of a shift from traditional to digital design/fab/build and currently have a mix of projects given the development lifecycle,” he wrote via email.

Meeting a critical need

Veev declined to share financials. Haller did note that it currently has separate LLCs for development projects, from which Veev Group has equity stakes in and generates development fees. It also has a separate entity which generates fees from its panel fabrication and general contracting business, owns the intellectual property and equipment, manages supply chain and operations, and invests in research and development.

The company plans to use its new capital primarily to accelerate the development of its panelized building system, as well as to generally scale the business. Haller told Crunchbase News Veev has doubled its team over the last 12 months.

For Zeev Ventures Founding Partner , the approach Veev is taking is critical for California and other high-cost markets.

, managing general partner of Lennar Ventures, said the housing sector is in “critical need of innovation across-the-board if we are to scale production.”

“Veev’s digital disruption of the design and fabrication process and acceleration of construction timelines will help us to meet market needs,” he said in a written statement.

We’ve written about other prefab builders, of course. The highest profile being , which has seen its share of bumps as of late despite . Another is North Carolina-based , which offers both a software and hardware platform in the construction industry. Prescient specializes in building prefab apartments, student housing, senior housing and hotels. It’s raised over its lifetime.

Interestingly, Haller also co-founded and is CEO of another real estate startup that raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Zeev Ventures in 2018.

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DoorDash said in its announcement that the number of shares on offer and a target price range for the transaction “have not yet been determined.”

The brief statement also adds that the IPO “is expected to take place after the SEC completes its review process, subject to market and other conditions.” In recent days, the U.S. stock market has experienced significant downward pressure amid concerns about the spreading SARS-CoV-2 virus and speculation about the scale of its impact on the global economy.

As of 2017, the SEC has granted smaller, high-growth companies a path to initially file their S-1 registration statements confidently, allowing for regulatory review without immediate exposure to scrutiny from the media and would-be public market investors. Confidentially filed S-1 documents are made public prior to IPO.

According to Crunchbase data, San Francisco-based DoorDash has raised in equity funding since its inception in 2013. Its last private market valuation was approximately $12.6 billion, post-money, earned in .

The include the likes of , , , , , the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund , and the .

DoorDash has never released a complete picture of its financials, which will be part of the IPO process. The company is not profitable and was expected to lose $450 million on revenue of between $900 million and $1 billion in 2019, according to from .

The company faces a number of labor disputes, as its “gig economy” workers are treated as independent contractors and are not eligible to receive benefits like health insurance. Earlier in February DoorDash was as it works through individual cases brought by 5,010 drivers for the platform who believed the company was in violation of California labor law.

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Tempo is the latest company to join the pack, announcing it raised $17.5 million for its Series A round and will start taking pre-orders for its system, which will start shipping this summer.

Providing live and on-demand strength and high intensity interval training classes, Tempo uses artificial intelligence to make home workouts more like personal training sessions.

The system’s sensors scan users movements and uses machine learning to prepare workouts for users based on their progress, according to a statement from the company. Tempo counts a user’s reps, recommends weights and gives real-time corrections for a user’s technique–key benefits of having a personal trainer without the steep hourly cost.

“The real groundbreaking thing is helping people work out effectively and safely at home,” Tempo CEO Moawia Eldeeb said in an interview with Crunchbase News.  “And to be able to do that you need to train.”

The Tempo system’s predecessor, , was essentially the data collection process for the whole product, Eldeeb said. SmartSpot was in gyms for about three years, capturing more than 1 million sessions to feed Tempo’s AI.

Tempo’s system, like most other tech-enabled home fitness equipment, doesn’t come cheap. The price for the full station is $1,995 and the monthly content subscription is $39.

Connected fitness is a popular space that has received more than a billion dollars in VC funding overall. leads the pack, as it raised more than $994 million as a private company.

But what sets Tempo apart, Eldeeb said, is the personal training aspect. It’s not just watching a workout on a screen and mirroring the motions–Tempo will correct users if their form is wrong so they perform the moves safely and effectively.

“What’s the difference between having a VHS and dumbbells at home?” Eldeeb said of other connected fitness systems. “You’re packaging it in a nicer-looking design. But it’s the 21st century, it should be groundbreaking.”

During live classes, trainers also have dashboards where they can see how users are performing moves. If, say, 20 percent of the class is doing a move incorrectly, the trainer can alert the whole class.

Tempo pitched 10 investors for the Series A, and many actually came into the company’s office to try out the product, Eldeeb said. The company ended up with eight term sheets, and the investors Tempo ultimately picked were those the company felt were “in it for the long-haul” and had a passion for fitness.

,, and are among the company’s investors.

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The Series B financing brings the company’s total funding since its inception in late 2015 to $58 million. Other backers include , , , Thirty5 Venturers, and .

Because digital health platform is such a broad term, let’s break down what it means in this case. The Redwood City California-based startup claims it can give “members” a web-based in “75 minutes or less.”

The premise behind the company is to help identify health issues before they become worse, or as it claims: “To give individuals a deeper understanding of their own body and how it’s changing over time so they have more control over their own health.”

Indeed, most of us don’t even know we’re sick until symptoms start popping up to alert us. In some cases such as certain forms of cancer–it can already be too late. Q Bio says its platform can actually identify signs of disease at the earliest stages, before symptoms arise. If this is true, I’d say it’s revolutionary.

The way it works seems straightforward. Members register online and the company begins aggregating and digitizing their medical history. On exam day, members anonymously check in for a 75- to 90-minute exam. Two weeks later, a Q “expert” will review the results over a “secure” video chat in which members’ physicians are welcome to join.

With each additional visit, Q claims, its HIPAA-compliant platform gets more sensitive to surfacing anomalous changes in your body, then tailors the set of measurements gathered based on these anomalies and changing risk factors.

In summary, membership includes a fully comprehensive exam including a full body MRI, saliva, blood and urine analysis, a summary and a 30-minute telemedicine review of the health of each of your body’s systems. Health data is continuously updated for one year and stored in the company’s BioVault with lifetime access to review and share.

co-founder serves as Q Bio’s CEO. As part of this new round of funding, Andreessen Horowitz General Partner joins Q Bio’s board, along with from Khosla Ventures.

Background

Kaditz co-founded the company with his own misdiagnoses from over a decade ago in mind.

Since then, he said, he’s “imagined a day when everything about a person’s body could be quickly measured, shared and analyzed.”

“It took some time to figure out some of the scaling issues and to wait for certain technologies to be cheap enough and mature enough,” Kaditz told Crunchbase News. “Our technology allows us to gather more clinical information, more quantitatively, faster and cheaper than anything else and it will only get faster and less expensive over time. We allow for a separation of where you go to get your body measured and where your doctor actually is.”

Over the past few years, the company has stealthily worked on fine-tuning its imaging protocols to determine the “most clinically relevant set of biomarkers” to include in its platform. It has 25 employees, up from 17 a year ago.

a16z’s Pande in a written statement said that“Q Bio makes true preventive medicine possible today.”

“By measuring everything from blood to imaging and more in a longitudinal way, patients can have personalized baselines and physicians the data and power to understand, interpret and utilize this data to personalize care,” he added.

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