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While usage of telehealth services have surged during the COVID-19 epidemic, there are some times when health professionals need to be around in person to conduct diagnostics tests. To help those telehealth companies bridge that gap is Axle Health, a company currently enrolled in the latest cohort from the Y Combinator accelerator.
“In terms of the professionals that we send in home, they’re phlebotomists, NAs, RVNs, and RNs as well,” said Axle co-founder Connor Hailey.
In a sad reflection of the times, most of the calls the company’s getting are COVID-19 related, Hailey said.
And while the company currently doesn’t accept insurance, many of the companies on the platform choose a price they want to charge their patients and then seek reimbursement from insurers from those costs, according to Hailey.
“There are very few patients that are paying cash. Our services in the home are what would come out of pocket,” Hailey said. Those fees vary by the licensure level of the visiting health care worker. An in-home COVID-19 test could be $40 and a phlebotomist providing a blood draw would cost about the same amount, said Hailey.
The company launched its service at the end of January and is seeking to expand its treatment options to more than just COVID-19 testing, but for now, it’s simply responding to market demand.
Hailey launched the business after spending a few years working at ZocDoc and then spending some time at Uber. What motivates Hailey and company co-founder Adam Stansell is providing similar concierge services at lower costs for a broader base of patients, Hailey said.
“The rich have access to in-home care can we make it economical enough so that we can bring it to everyone,” he said.
Anuvia Plant Nutrients has raised $103 million to commercialize its novel fertilizer technology.
The company, backed by investors like TPG ART, Pontifax Global Food and Agriculture Technology Fund, Generate Capital andPiva Capital, is now ready to roll out its tech, which is already used on roughly 1200 farms and is projected to be on 20 million acres of farmland by 2025.
Now led by longtime agriculture executive Amy Yoder, who represents the sixth generation of a Michigan farm family, Anuvia pitches its tech as a supplement for crops that can boost productivity by taking excrement, food waste and agricultural processing waste and converting that into useful fertilizer using a proprietary catalytic process.
By treating the waste with a specific blend of chemicals Yoder said Anuvia’s technology can control the release of nutrients as plants grow to make more productive crops and reduce leaching into soil, protecting groundwater and restoring carbon to the soil.
Anuvia is one of a growing number of agriculture technology companies trying to juice crop productivity and capture carbon to provide additional revenues from more abundant crops and carbon capture and storage. Other startups, including Pivot Bio, Indigo Agriculture, AgBiome, and Agrinos, are all developing other crop treatments that can purportedly boost agricultural production.
“Most of what I see would be very complimentary to us,” said Yoder. “Because we put the carbon back into the soil, because the nutrients are held in different way. You could utilize the pivot technology and the Anuvia technology. Those things when they could piggyback together could make really nice solutions in the longterm.”
The Winter Garden, Fla.-based company has a 1.2 million ton facility for production, but the company wants to build out additional capacity and continue developing new fertilizers to take to market, Yoder said.
Farmers using the product see increased yields of around five times their previous production levels and the product can be used on all the main row crops, according to Yoder.
That claim has been verified by Environmental Resources Management (ERM), a leading global environmental consulting firm, versus traditional fertilizer on corn, rice, and cotton.
Anuvia’s treatment can also reduce greenhouse gases on production by up to 32% compared to commercial fertilizers. Anuvia estimates that its products could provide emissions reductions equivalent to removing 30,000 cars from roads. If the company can get farmers to apply its treatment to the 90 million acres of corn in the U.s. that would reduce the equivalent emissions of 1.8 million cars, according to a statement.
“With the world’s population expected to hit 10 billion by 2050, we need technology-enabled, large-scale agriculture to meet this growing demand,” says Dr. Geoff Duyk, Founder and Managing Partner of Circularis and Anuvia Board Member. “Anuvia’s technology will help farms continue to feed the world, while also advancing the circular economy, increasing sustainability, and enhancing resource efficiency.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/23/anuvia-raises-103-million-to-commercialize-its-novel-fertilizer/
ConstellR, a SpaceTech startup with a technology that can monitors land surface temperatures from space, has raised a €1m pre-seed round led by FTTF, with the participation of strategic investor OHB Venture Capital, Baden-Württemberg’s state bank L-Bank and an undisclosed investor. The first system is due to go into orbit in December 2021. The company was a finalist for Hottest Ag/FoodTech Startup at the prestigious Europas Awards 2020.
The Freiburg, Germany-based startup monitors the land via a constellation of 30 CubeSats with thermal infrared payloads. The data generated is used by farmers to reduce water and fertilizer usage, and could help them reduce existing monitoring costs by 97%, says the company. ConstellR has a patent-pending miniaturization architecture with ‘free-form optics’ and claims to be able to make it much cheaper to monitor the infrared part of the spectrum than traditional satellite systems.
Dr. Max Gulde, CEO, ConstellR, said: “Our mission is to monitor every single field on the planet every single day of the year and provide precision farming companies with highly accurate temperature data to safeguard the world’s food supply. With our strong financial and technology partners on board, I am looking forward to a time of quantum leaps in our constellation development to change agriculture on the global planetary scale.”
Tobias Schwind, Managing Partner at FTTF, Fraunhofer’s Technology Transfer Fund, said: “ConstellR’s unique technology and business case as well as its passionate team convinced us to make this exciting pre-seed investment.”
The onset of the pandemic has led to increased demand across customer income groups around the world for digital banking options. We’ve seen how digital banks like Zolve and Nubank have raised money in recent months to fill this need. This time, a startup from Africa has joined the party.
TymeBank, a South African digital bank, announced today that it has secured an R1.6 billion (~$109 million) investment from new investors in the UK and Philippines. The company made this known via a statement. This investment will be used to bolster TymeBank’s growth and drive its commercial expansion across the country.
However, this investment will come in two tranches. According to the company, R500 million ($34 million) has already been invested in the business, while the rest — R1.1 billion ($75 million) — will be invested over the next 12 to 15 months.
TymeBank offers a transactional bank account with zero or low monthly fees and a savings product. Most of its customers are onboarded via physical kiosks, usually in Pick n Pay and Boxer stores around the country. Since launching in February 2019, TymeBank has grown rapidly and now has about 2.8 million customers. The company says that it’s on track to reach 3 million by the end of next month.
The investors for this unnamed round include Apis Growth Fund II, a private equity fund managed by Apis Partners, and Gokongwei-owned JG Summit Holdings, one of the largest conglomerates in the Philippines. Both these investors are experienced in financial services in emerging markets; Apis, for instance, is a private equity asset manager that supports growth-stage financial services and financial infrastructure businesses.
It is noteworthy that this is one of the largest raises, if not the largest, for a digital bank on the continent. Tauriq Keraan, the CEO of TymeBank, considers this to be largely due to more investors buying into the importance of digital banking and also the company’s value propositions — the first which is improving access to underbanked and underserviced customers in South Africa, and the other, satisfying customer demand for low and transparent bank fees which is generally viewed as both costly and difficult to understand across the country.
“The establishments of digital banks in South Africa is in its infancy. Growth in this particular segment of financial services is only possible with investments from partners who understand and support the growth trajectory of digital banks,” he said.
With already existing shareholders like African Rainbow Capital (founded by South African billionaire Patrice Motsepe), TymeBank says these new investors will grow the company into a top tier retail bank in South Africa. The investment will also help the company expand its range of banking products and grow its lending portfolio. Diversification of offerings is key as well as TymeBank seeks to enhance its propositions in insurance and credit cards to its customers.
“As the controlling shareholder in TymeBank, African Rainbow Capital is delighted to have our new co-investors onboard. Equally important, Apis and the Gokongwei family invest in TymeBank at a time when significant uncertainty reigns globally and in South Africa as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Dr Patrice Motsepe, the majority owner of TymeBank and chairman of African Rainbow Capital. “The invested amount of R1.6 billion is no small feat both in terms of drawing investment into South Africa’s financial services sector as well as investing into a fledgling part of the sector in our country.”
TymeBank claims to onboard an average of 110,000 new customers per month. This makes it globally recognized for digital banking in emerging markets, and the plan is to reach 4 million customers next year. In terms of growth, TymeBank currently outpaces its competitors in Africa and can be argued to be one of the fastest-growing digital banks in the world at the moment. The company is the first bank in South Africa to be fully operated off a cloud-based infrastructure network and the first to be granted a commercial banking license in the country since 1999.
TymeBank isn’t indigenously South African though. It is a member of the Tyme group of companies headquartered in Singapore. The holding company, Tyme, focuses on designing, building, and operating digital banks for emerging markets. With its success in South Africa, Tyme is planning to launch operations in Asia and has entered into an agreement to launch a digital bank in the Philippines in the coming months.
