In a message posted to its internal communications channel earlier this week, the massive startup accelerator Y Combinator said it will change the terms of its own PPP (the YC pro rata investment program) and investing in companies raising seed and Series A rounds on a case-by-case basis.

The company began a policy of investing in every seed and Series A round for its portfolio companies back in 2015.

Since then, it has taken a 7% stake in every company that raised a priced seed and Series A round, investing in more than 300 Y Combinator companies over nearly 500 rounds.

Under its new policy, the accelerator is reducing its investment size from 7% to 4% and is only investing on a case-by-case basis going forward.

The reason for the change is that the number of companies in its portfolio has gotten too large for it to invest and some of the limited partners who back the acceleratoroperations are balking at making commitments to the pro rata investment program.

&We have significantly exceeded the funds we raised for pro ratas, and the investors who support YC do not have the appetite to fund the pro rata program at the same scale,& the accelerator wrote in a post seen by TechCrunch. &In addition, processing hundreds of follow-on rounds per year has created significant operational complexities for YC that we did not anticipate. Said simply, investing in every round for every YC company requires more capital than we want to raise and manage. We always tell startups to stay small and manage their budgets carefully. In this instance, we failed to follow our own advice.&

For entrepreneurs who take investments from the accelerator, the change is pretty significant. On the acceleratorinternal messaging board they worried about the potential optics of having the accelerator not make a follow-on commitment.

YC addressed those concerns by saying it would not make an investment decision until a company had already received an initial term sheet from a lead investor.

The changes will take effect on May 8, 2020, the investor said.

&In the future, we will no longer invest automatically in every priced seed and Series A/B round. Instead, we will exercise pro rata rights on a case-by-case basis, like other investors on your cap table,& the accelerator wrote. &We&ve heard your feedback that YCpro rata allocation is bigger than what some of you would prefer. So for those investments we do make, we will reduce the size of our pro rata and simplify its calculation to be a flat 4% participation right in each priced round. To calculate the size of YCpro rata investment in your round, simply multiply the amount of capital you are raising by 4%. If our ownership right before the round is less than 4%, we will cap our investment in the round at our then-current ownership. Our intention is not to have a super pro-rata right.&

Even with the reduced investment size, YC said it would only make investments in roughly one-third of its portfolio.

&The YC Continuity team will manage these investment decisions and will work very hard to inform you within a day or two of receiving your materials,& the accelerator wrote. &We will honor any pending pro rata investments for term sheets signed before May 8. But we wanted to communicate this message broadly so that founders can plan accordingly.&

Media software maker Plex has released two new projects today from its internal R-D group, Plex Labs. One is an updated take on the classic Winamp player it calls Plexamp, and another is a dedicated app for Plex server administration. The projects are meant to appeal largely to Plex power users who take full advantage of Plexsoftware suite, which has grown over time from being only a home media solution to a one-stop shop for everything from live TV to streaming audio.

The first of the new apps, Plexamp, is actually a revamp of the first Plex Labs project released. In December 2017, Plex introduced its own music player, whose name Plexamp was a nod to the Winamp player it aimed to replace. The project, like others from Plex Labs, was built by Plex employees in their spare time.

The goal with the original Plexamp was to offer a small desktop player that could handle any music format. The app let you use media keys for playing, pausing and skipping tracks and it worked offline when the Plex server ran on your laptop. It also offered visualizations to accompany your music that pulled from the album art.

While the original app ran on Mac or Windows, the new release works across five platforms, now including iOS, Android and Linux.

The app itself has been completely redone, as well — rewritten from scratch, in fact. And ittied to Plexsubscription service, Plex Pass — meaning you&ll need to be a paying customer to use it.

The company explains the original version of Plexamp had issues around portability and licensing; it didn&t have an easy way to add functionality; and it was built with React, which tied it to the web.

To create the new Plexamp (version 3.0), Plex built an audio player library called TREBLE on top of a low-level commercial audio engine. TREBLE has been shipping in Plexcommercial applications, but this release brings it to Plexamp. The addition helped make the app portable across almost all desktop and mobile platforms, as was it being rewritten in React Native.

The new app provides features Plex Pass music listeners want, like gapless playback, high-quality resampling, Sweet Fades (Plex&smart& alternative to crossfades) soft transitions and pre-caching. Plex also added a few more effects, including one for voice boosting spoken word audio and another for silence compression.

But the app really sells itself to longtime Plex users, as Plexamp lets you go back to see your own &top personal charts& for what you&ve listened to the most in years past. (Sort of like a Plex version of Apple MusicReplay playlists).

Plexamp 3.0 also introduces a feature that lets you build your own mixes by picking a set of artists. Plus it offers a more expansive list of stations, supports offline listening and improves its search functionality.

The new Recent Searches area, for example, will save your search results from across servers, as well as TIDAL and podcasts.And a new Recent Plays feature shows you the music you consciously chose to play, again including across all servers and TIDAL.

There are some little touches, too, that show the personal care that went into the appdesign — like the way Plexamp uses album art and a process called &UltraBlur& to give each artist and alum page its own look. Or how there are options for light and dark — and lighter and darker — themes.

The other big new release from Plex Labs is the new Plex Dash app.

This mobile and tablet app lets you keep a close eye on your personal media server, including a way to see all playbacks even across multiple servers, plus other administrative features.

With Plex Dash, you can edit your artwork, scan for new media, fix incorrect matches, check on server resource usage, tweak library settings and view server logs live.

Plex suggests you it run on the iPad you have mounted in the wall — like in your fancy media room, I guess — but for us poorer folks, it runs on your smartphone, too.

Ita power user tool, but one that will be welcomed for those fully immersed in a Plex-run home media setup. (And also a good way to respond to criticism that Plex is too focused today on its streaming and TV options, and not its core home media software customer base.)

Like Plexamp, the new Plex Dash requires a Plex Pass subscription and runs on iOS and Android.

The apps launched today are notable as they&re the first to arrive from Plex Labs since the original release of Plexamp in 2017 and because they require a subscription in order to work.

Plex at the end of 2019 said it had 15 million registered households using its service. Though the service is profitable, only a small percentage are paid subscribers. New apps with extra features, then, could convince more Plex users to upgrade.

Starting tomorrow, 777 supermarkets in California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Nevada will begin stocking the Impossible Foods plant-based meat substitute.

Fueling the increased distribution and a push to expand its product suite and geographic footprint domestically and internationally is a $500 million round of funding the company closed in March.

Some of that money is supporting the companydebut at stores like Albertsons, Jewel-Osco, Pavilions, Safeway and Vons.

In all, the company said it would be in nearly 1,000 grocery stores by tomorrow. That includes all Albertsons, Vons, Pavilions and GelsonMarkets in Southern California; all Safeway stores in Northern California and Nevada; Jewel-Osco stores in Chicago, eastern Iowa and northwest Indiana; Wegmans stores on the East Coast and Fairway markets in and around New York.

Since its debut in September, the company said it was the number one item sold at the locations it was available on the East and West coasts.

The company12-ounce packages are sold for somewhere between $8.99 and $9.99 and it plans to soon introduce the Impossible Burger at even more stores nationwide.

&We&ve always planned on a dramatic surge in retail for 2020 — but with more and more Americans& eating at home, we&ve received requests from retailers and consumers alike,& said Impossible Foods& president Dennis Woodside, in a statement. &Our existing retail partners have achieved record sales of Impossible Burger in recent weeks, and we are moving as quickly as possible to expand with retailers nationwide.&

Even as the company announced its expansion, it made moves to assuage any consumer concerns over the processes in place at its manufacturing facilities.

Impossible Foods said it had instituted mandatory work from home policies for all of its employees who can telecommute; restricted visitors to its facilities and those operated by co-manufacturers; banned all work-related travel; and implemented new sanitizing and disinfection procedures at its workplaces.

&Our No. 1 priority is the safety of our employees, customers and consumers,& Woodside said. &And we recognize our responsibility for the welfare of our community, including the entire San Francisco Bay Area, our global supplier and customer network, millions of customers, and billions of people who arerelying on food manufacturers to produce supplies in times of need.&

The company said it was proceeding with its research and development initiatives; accelerating the ramp of its production facilities; and moving to broadly commercialize its Impossible Sausage and Impossible Pork products.

Impossible Foods has raised $1.3 billion from investors, including Mirae Asset Global Investments, Khosla Ventures, Horizons Ventures and Temasek.

Therea potential climate-related crisis brewing in the beer industry and Province Brands has just raised $1.6 million for its technology that purports to be a solution.

The Canadian company, which has developed a way to make beer from any plant material, is pitching itself as a solution to the increasing shortages of barley and other grains caused by global climate change.

Ita pivot for the brand. When it launched, the company was taking its technology to cannabis brands as a way to brew beer made from bud. But when the bottom started falling out of the cannabis market, Province Brands switched the pitch to the broader brewery business.

&The cannabis industry was overvalued from an equities perspective for years,& says Province Brands& co-founder Dooma Wendschuh. &Starting in mid-2019 we started to see that crash… this is an industry that is very capital intensive… it requires a tremendous amount of investment to set up these facilities.&

As the market became less about the puff and more about the pass, Province decided to reach out to its investor base and raise a Canadian $2.2 million convertible note.

&We didn&t want investors to take a bath on it if that could be avoided,& says Wendschuh.

Province Brands& last funding was its Series B in 2019 when the Company raised CAD $5 million at a CAD $70 million pre-money valuation, the company said in a statement.

&Closing this round quickly highlights the attractiveness of Province Brands& technology, IP, and market opportunities,& said Wendschuh.

The money which came from previous institutional and angel investors will be used to continue marketing its technology more broadly to brewers impacted by rising prices for beer staples like barley and to launch its own branded hemp lager into the market.

The companyCambridge Bay Canadian Hemp Lager will be the first beer brewed from hemp, according to a statement from Province Brands. Made of only hemp, hops, water and yeast, the beverage contains no THC, CBD or phytocannabinoids and can legally be sold wherever alcohol is sold, the company said.

&The technology we created to brew beer from cannabis would allow us to brew beer from any non-starch plant material,& Wendschuh said. &This could be transformative for beer companies where the price of barley has gone through the roof.&

In some cases barley is too expensive for large-scale beer production, Wendschuh noted.

&Funds raised will help us complete Phase 1 construction of our 123,000-square-foot brewing facility and will enable us to receive additional licensing from Health Canada,& said Province Brands& co-founder Jennifer Thomas. The company received its research and development license from Health Canada in late 2019.

Province Brands is already working with some bigger name liquor companies on making beer substitutes from their feedstocks. In one case, the company is working with an undisclosed tequila manufacturer on a beer made from agave.

It is notable that the transaction closed in less than two months at a time when capital markets have been challenging.

Savvy, a healthcare cooperative, has just raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Indie.vc.

Established as a cooperative that shares profits with its users, Savvy connects patients with healthcare companies and other providers looking to better serve people through products and services. Patients can take paid gigs that include tasks like interviews, focus groups and user testing.

Savvy is set up as a multi-stakeholder cooperative. Those stakeholders are divided into four classes: patients, Savvy employees, founders and investors. Up until now, Savvy has been entirely bootstrapped and sustained by its revenue, Savvy CEO Jen Horonjeff told TechCrunch via email.

&But as more and more companies are seeing that patient insights are critical to help their healthcare solutions find product-market fit, we need to scale up our operations to meet the demand,& she said. &This financing will allow us to expand our offerings, support more companies and, in turn, improve the lives of countless more patients.&

Cooperatives can oftentimes face trouble raising venture funding. Thatbecause their business models don&t generally align with the incentives of traditional venture capitalists, Horonjeff previously told me.

&I have to say a lot of investors are, first of all, not curious,& she said. &And those that are curious — and we&ve gone down the path with people like that — think we&re this cool new thing, but just don&t understand how itgoing to jive with the rest of their fund. So there aren&t great mechanisms in place to kind of bridge the gap between what people know and what the new economy could look like.&

For Indie.vc, which already takes a non-traditional approach to venture capital, co-ops fit into the firmvision. Indie.vc, which aims to be the last investment its founders need to take, is geared toward startups with founders who value preserving nationality and ownership.

As Indie.vc founder Bryce Roberts said in a statement, &Savvy represents everything we&d like to see in the future of impact business — shared ownership, diverse perspectives, and aligned incentives, tackling one of the largest industries on the planet.&

Many have been understandably concerned that, amid corporate bailouts, a $1,200 check won&t be enough to survive several more weeks of lockdown. But the stimulus check is, at very least, better than nothing, particularly for the more than 22 million Americans have filed jobless claims in the last month alone.

But actually getting the check is easier said than done. There have been a number of roadblocks for many Americans. Many students are ineligible. Same goes for many elderly and disabled people. Immigrants without a social security number, too. There have been a variety of delays, as well, including the Presidentunprecedented mandate that his signature appear on paper check.

For millions of Americans, a &glitch& will further delay matters. The deposit, planned for yesterday, was delayed for &several million& people who used popular services like H-R Block, Jackson Hewitt and TurboTax to file their taxes last year, according to The Washington Post. The issue? The IRS didn&t have their direct deposit information on file.

Those checking their stimulus status via the IRS&Get My Payment& tool this week were greeted with a perplexing &Payment Status Not Available& message. No additional information was provided.

The IRS says itcurrently working to resolve the issues that have led to the delay.