We should build security into the foundation of programs.

On March 26, 2020 — less than two weeks after the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a pandemic and one week after California became the first state in the U.S. to tell residents to stay home — MATTER startup member Clearstep and MATTER partner BayCare launched an online COVID-19 symptom screener.

The digital health startup and the Florida-based health system had connected earlier in 2020 at ACCESS, a MATTER program that helps industry partners connect to a curated group of startups through a series of one-on-one meetings. At the time, BayCare recognized that Clearstep’s digital triage and patient chat solution could improve how patients and providers navigate care and made plans to move forward together.

Then, COVID-19 changed everything.

In the wake of the pandemic, health systems began to focus on ways to keep patients out of hospitals who didn’t need to be there, but still provide guidance to the appropriate point of care for their needs. When BayCare was looking for a solution to help their patients navigate the questions brought up by COVID-19 — such as whether they should get tested, isolate themselves or go to the hospital — they remembered the startup they met through MATTER.

Derived from CDC guidelines and feedback from expert clinicians, Clearstep’s online screening tool gives people who are concerned about the virus a clear next step for care. Their screening tool also goes a step further than other COVID-19 screeners by incorporating clinical content used in more than 90 percent of nurse call centers in the country. In doing so, the solution ensures that individuals who report symptoms, but are deemed COVID-19 risk negative, are also pointed to their best next step for care.

To use the screening tool, users fill out a questionnaire and receive immediate triage results customized to connect them to the resources BayCare provides such as the emergency room, urgent care, or a telehealth visit through BayCare Anywhere.

Since the COVID-19 screening tool launched just under a month ago, it has been used more than 70,000 times by BayCare patients to identify the best next steps for care for symptomatic and concerned individuals.

“We saw incredible feedback from the users themselves almost immediately,” said Peter Garber, chief marketing and design officer at Clearstep. “In the past, the healthcare industry has lagged when it comes to user experience and design, so we knew we needed to nail it in a time when users are most concerned and fearful of what’s going on.”

“In the past, the healthcare industry has lagged when it comes to user experience and design, so we knew we needed to nail it in a time when users are most concerned and fearful of what’s going on.” —Peter Garber, CMO, Clearstep

How were BayCare and Clearstep able to move so quickly to deliver one of the first digital health solutions for COVID-19?

There are a few key ingredients.

BayCare has aggressive goals when it comes to innovation.

According to Craig Anderson — director of innovation at BayCare and co-founder of his own health tech company, HeadRehab LLC. — the health system has built a ‘buy, not build’ model. The innovation team’s mission is to find novel health tech solutions built by third party companies, identify how those solutions will benefit BayCare’s almost a million patients and nearly 6,000 providers, and work with them to quickly launch and scale solutions within the BayCare system.

That can sometimes involve partnering with large tech organizations, but according to Craig, they often choose to partner with smaller, more agile startups like Clearstep.

“Everything in innovation is about moving at speed.” said Craig, “A good idea now will, a year from now, probably still be a good idea, but won’t be considered innovative because by then it will be standard practice.”

“Everything in innovation is about moving at speed. A good idea now will, a year from now, probably still be a good idea, but won’t be considered innovative because by then it will be standard practice.” —Craig Anderson, Director of Innovation, BayCare

Craig’s team has nailed down a framework to work with startups like Clearstep — and to pivot quickly to solve the challenges COVID-19 presented to anxious customers.

“Whenever we have a time sensitive issue, especially one that’s affecting many or all our population, the C-suite will look to the innovation team to find solutions we’re aware of that BayCare may not be currently using,” said Craig. “What can we do that’s new to approach this problem differently, quicker and drive better results? Whether it’s COVID-19 or the hurricane season, innovation is asked to weigh in.”

BayCare found a complementary team in Clearstep.

When health systems look to partner with a startup, they look for both a solution that they believe in and a team they want to work with.

Clearstep checked both of those boxes for BayCare.

Launching a product quickly during an evolving crisis is no easy task, but Clearstep stepped up to the challenge. By the time BayCare reached out to work together on a COVID-19 solution, the Clearstep team had already realized that they were uniquely equipped to develop a powerful and comprehensive screener. They immediately jumped on the opportunity to work with BayCare and, nine days after Craig reached out, launched a solution.

“Staying on task towards fast development was a challenge,” said Bilal Naved, Clearstep’s chief operating officer. “We had to get adept at keeping every team aligned with one common vision and be willing to look at good ideas but say ‘ok, that’s part of v2 or v3.’”

According to Craig, Clearstep’s focus and drive impressed the BayCare team.

“Building something that a group of clinicians and senior leaders agree with quick enough and well enough that we have the confidence to launch it to our almost a million patients… that’s a rare combination to find,” said Craig.

“Building something that a group of clinicians and senior leaders agree with quick enough and well enough that we have the confidence to launch it to our almost a million patients… that’s a rare combination to find.” —Craig Anderson, Director of Innovation, BayCare

Since originally launching their screening tool, Clearstep and BayCare have improved and expanded their solution. They plan to continue to work together to solve the challenges COVID-19 presents, but also anticipate a longer partnership.

“While we were in the right place at the right time for the COVID-19 screening…it’s not just about us providing one solution [for BayCare],” said Bilal. “It’s an iterative process with them. Not just the product, but the process so that Clearstep can act as an agile arm to BayCare.”

Learn about corporate partnership or startup membership at MATTER.

It’s only a matter of time now before drones become a key component of everyday logistics infrastructure, but there are still significant barriers between where we are today and that future — particularly when it comes to regulation. Iris Automation is developing computer vision products that can help simplify the regulatory challenges involved in setting standards for pilotless flight, thanks to its detect-and-avoid technology that can run using a wide range of camera hardware. The company has raised a $13 million Series B funding round to improve and extend its tech, and to help provide demonstrations of its efficacy in partnership with regulators.

I spoke to Iris Automation CEO Jon Damush, and Iris Automation investor Tess Hatch, VP at Bessemer Venture Partners, about the round and the startup’s progress and goals. Damush, who took over as CEO earlier this year, talked about his experience at Boeing, his personal experience as a pilot and the impact on aviation of the advent of small, cheap and readily accessible electric motors, batteries and powerful computing modules, which have set the stage for an explosion in the commercial UAV industry.

“You’ve now shattered some of the barriers that have been in aerospace for the past 50 years, because you’re starting to really democratize the tools of production that allow people to make things that fly much easier than they could before,” Damush told me. “So with that, and the ability to take a human out of the cockpit, comes some interesting challenges — none more so than the regulatory environment.”

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and most airspace regulators around the world, essentially divide into two spheres regulations around commercial flight, Damush explains. The first is around operations — what are you going to do while in flight, and are you doing that the right way. The second, however, is about the pilot, and that’s a much trickier thing to adapt to pilotless aircraft.

“One of the biggest challenges is the part of the regulations called 91.113b, and what that part of the regs states is that given weather conditions that permit, it’s the pilot on the airplane that has the ultimate responsibility to see and avoid other aircraft. That’s not a separation standard that says you’ve got to be three miles away, or five miles away or a mile away — that is a last line of defense, that is a safety net, so that when all the other mitigations that lead to a safe flight from A to B fail, the pilot is there to make sure you don’t collide into somebody.”

Iris comes in here, with an optical camera-based obstacle avoidance system that uses computer vision to effectively replace this last line of defense when there isn’t a pilot to do so. And what this unlocks is a key limiting factor in today’s commercial drone regulatory environment: The ability to fly aircraft beyond visual line of sight. All that means is that drones can operate without having to guarantee that an operator has eyes on them at all times. When you first hear that, you imagine that this factors in mostly to long-distance flight, but Damush points out that it’s actually more about volume — removing the constraints of having to keep a drone within visual line of sight at all times means you can go from having one operator per drone, to one operator managing a fleet of drones, which is when the economies of scale of commercial drone transportation really start to make sense.

Iris has made progress toward making this a reality, working with the FAA this year as part of its integrated pilot program to demonstrate the system in two different use cases. It also released the second version of its Casia system, which can handle significantly longer-range object detection. Hatch pointed out that these were key reasons why Bessemer upped its stake with this follow-on investment, and when I asked if COVID-19 has had any impact on industry appetite or confidence in the commercial drone market, she said that has been a significant factor, and it’s also changing the nature of the industry.

“The two largest industries [right now] are agriculture and public safety enforcement,” Hatch told me. “And public safety enforcement was not one of those last year, it was agriculture, construction and energy. That’s definitely become a really important vertical for the drone industry — one could imagine someone having a heart attack or an allergic reaction, an ambulance takes on average 14 minutes to get to that person, when a drone can be dispatched and deliver an AED or an epi pen within minutes, saving that person’s life. So I really hope that tailwind continues post COVID.”

This Series B round includes investment from Bee Partners, OCA Ventures and new strategic investors Sony Innovation Fund and Verizon Ventures (disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Verizon Media Group, though we have no involvement, direct or otherwise, with their venture arm). Damush pointed out that Sony provides great potential strategic value because it develops so much of the imaging sensor stack used in the drone industry, and Sony also develops drones itself. For its part, Verizon offers key partner potential on the connectivity front, which is invaluable for managing large-scale drone operations.

As cyberthreats continue to multiply, startups with tools to protect data are in high demand. But companies are now facing the growing complexity of managing security across their various data sources.

San Diego-based Ubiq Security believes APIs could play a key role in simplifying this task. The company hopes to encourage more developers and enterprises to build security directly into applications rather than looking for other services to plug the holes.

“How do you take the messy and complicated world of encryption and distill it down to a consumable, bite-sized chunk?” Ubiq CEO Wias Issa asked. “We built an entirely API-based platform that enables any developer of any skill set to be able to integrate encryption directly into an application without having any prior cryptography experience.”

Issa is a security veteran and said companies have generally been focused on security for their data storage systems. When they start layering applications on top, many developers find they haven’t built security into those products. In addition, the underlying storage is becoming a thicket of legacy and cloud-based solutions.

“You could have an Oracle database, an SQL Server, AWS storage, and then a Snowflake data warehouse,” Issa said. “You’ve got to go buy five or six different tools to do encryption on each one of those because they’re all structured differently.”

Even when encryption is included in the application, it can be poorly designed. Issa said cryptographic errors have typically been among the top three vulnerabilities in software applications over the past decade.

“When you’re a developer in 2020, you’re expected to know multiple languages, do front end, back end, full-stack development,” Issa said. “And on top of that, someone comes along and says, ‘Hey, can you do cryptography?’ And so the developer thinks, ‘How do I just get past this so I can go back to building a fantastic product and focusing on my day job?’ So key management is an area where developers either don’t understand it or don’t want to deal with it because it’s so complicated and so burdensome and, frankly, it’s very expensive to do.”

To cut through those challenges, Ubiq’s API-based developer platform lets developers simply include three lines of code that make two API calls. By handling encryption at the application layer with an API, the security works across all underlying storage systems as well.

“The application will handle all the encryption and decryption and simply hand the data in an encrypted state to the storage layer,” Issa said. “That allows them to not only have a better security posture but improve their threat model and reduce the overall time it takes to roll out an encryption plan.”

Customers can then use a dashboard to monitor their encryption and adjust policies without having to update code or even know the developer jargon. This, in turn, simplifies the management of encryption keys.

Lessons from the government

Among its more notable customers, Ubiq announced this year that it had signed deals with the United States Army and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. While government buyers have their particular issues, in this case the military and civilian systems faced many of the same obstacles large enterprises encounter.

“The government is struggling with digital transformation,” Issa said. “They’re stuck on all these legacy systems, and they’re not able to innovate as fast as the adversaries. So you’re seeing the likes of Iran and Syria and China and Russia and other Eastern Bloc countries start to build these offensive cyber capabilities. All you need is an internet connection, a bunch of skilled, dedicated resources, and now an entire country’s military cyber capability can rapidly grow. We don’t want that to outpace the United States.”

Part of the obstacle here is systems that run across tangled legacy and cloud infrastructure and mix structured and unstructured data and a wide range of coding languages. While there have been big gains in terms of protecting the underlying storage, Issa said attackers have increasingly focused on vulnerabilities in the applications.

“Encryption is something that everybody knows they need to do, but applying it without tripping over yourself is hard to do,” Issa said. “They turned to us because they’ve got all these disparate data types and they have all these unique types of storage. The problem is how to apply a uniform encryption strategy across all those diverse datasets.”

Issa said the emergence of the API economy has made such solutions far more accepted among big enterprises. They see APIs in general as a faster, more efficient way to build in functionality. Issa said applying that philosophy to security seemed like a natural evolution that not only eases the task but improves overall security.

“One of the other traditional challenges with encryption is when you deploy it somewhere and it breaks something,” he said. “And then you can’t deploy it in some sectors because the system is old. So you just apply it in two areas and then realize you’ve only applied encryption to 30% of your infrastructure. We enable a much more uniform approach.”

Ubiq got a boost earlier this month with a $6.4 million seed round. Okapi Venture Capital led the round, which included investment from TenOneTen Ventures, Cove Fund, DLA Piper Venture, Volta Global, and Alexandria Venture Investments. Ubiq plans to use the money for product development, building relationships with developers, and marketing.

“Our core focus is going to be on growing the platform, getting customer input, and making sure that we’re making the changes that our customers are asking for so we can run a very resilient, useful platform,” he said.

Balto, which is developing a conversational AI platform for call centers, today announced the close of a $10 million round. A spokesperson said the capital will enable Balto to triple the size of its go-to-market team while bolstering product development.

With customer representatives increasingly required to work from home in Manila, the U.S., and elsewhere, companies are turning to AI to bridge resulting gaps in service. The solutions aren’t perfect — humans are needed even when chatbots are deployed — but COVID-19 has accelerated the need for AI-powered contact center messaging.

Balto’s AI listens to both sides of a conversation and visually prompts agents what to say next. A smart checklist feature reminds agents of the prescribed conversational flow, with Balto automatically checking each point off a list. Balto also offers voice-trigged dynamic prompts, including rebuttals, compliance statements, and product knowledge. Notifications give agents feedback on keywords, soft skills, and other habits, while reminders can be delivered via digital sticky notes, along with team leaderboard rankings.

On the backend, Balto offers a range of management features, including an agent performance dashboard that swiftly converts all customer calls into data. This data funnels into a portal that shows metrics for agent and team performance, as well as snippets of call transcripts. An accompanying win rate analysis tool analyzes the effectiveness of phrases across different agents, while a trend analysis feature shows agent, customer, and competitor trends in real time. Balto also offers a playbook designer managers can use to send winning phrases, important points, reminders, and more to agents’ machines.

Balto says it encrypts all data in transit and at rest. The thin client, which starts when agents begin a call and sits to the side of agents’ screens, is designed to work with any system that relies on headsets plugged into a computer to place calls.

There’s no shortage of competition in the AI-driven call center analytics space. Gong offers an intelligence platform for enterprise sales teams and recently nabbed $200 million in funding at a $2.2 billion valuation. Observe.ai snagged $26 million in December for AI that monitors and coaches call center agents. AI call center startups Cogito and CallMiner have also staked claims alongside more established players like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

But Balto says business has been booming during the pandemic, with the addition of customers like Empire Today, eHealth, and National General Insurance. Balto claims it has seen a 90-second average improvement in handle time and a 35% increase in conversion rates.

“COVID-19 has ripped the carpet out from under sales managers across the country,” Balto CEO and cofounder Marc Bernstein told VentureBeat via email. “Balto provides the real-time call guidance they need to empower agents and sales executives to work remotely. It’s like having a coach at your side during every call to help agents say the right thing at the right time … Customers are seeing 35% higher sales conversion rates, 75% faster ramp time for new agents. One customer said their close rate was up 132%. We’re ready to roll out to new enterprises, and this funding will pave that path.”

Sierra Ventures led today’s series A, with participation from Jump Capital, OCA Ventures, Cultivation Capital, and others. The round brings the company’s total raised to over $14 million.