NASA has chosen a new lunar surface delivery partner from its list of Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) vendors to actually transport stuff on its behalf & MojaveMasten Space Systems, which is being tapped by the agency to take eight payloads, including non science and tech instruments, to the MoonSouth Pole in 2022.

Masten is the fourth company awarded a lunar delivery contract under CLPS, after NASA announced that three other companies would be tasked with taking payloads back in May, 2019. Those included Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, as well as Orbit Beyond. Orbit Beyond later dropped out of its contract, though Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines are still aiming to deliver their payloads using landers they&ve created sometime next year.

The new Masten contract, like the others in the CLOPS program, is part of NASAArtemis program, which seeks to return human tot he surface of the Moon, and set up permanent scientific exploration there, with the ultimate aim of using it as a stepping stone to taking humans to Mars and potentially beyond. NASA has focused on public-private partnerships like those formed through the CLPS program to assist it in making its Moon and Mars missions possible, and bringing commercial interests along for the ride.

Mastencontract is a $75.9 million award, that specifies end-to-end delevirey of the payloads, as well as their integration with the companyXL-1 lander. They&re also required to land on the Moon and operate for at least 12 days post-landing. The specific instruments that XL-1 will carry include tools for measuring and mapping the lunar surface temperature, as well as radiation, and the presence of hydrogen and other gases that could indicate the presence of water.

The XL-1 lander developed by Masten is an evolution of lander designs that took part in, and won the NASA Centennial Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander X-Prize Challenge in 2009. Masten has also developed and flown a number of vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) rockets on behalf of NASA, including the Xaero test vehicle.

As more companies find their workflows upended by remote work in the pandemic crisis, there are plenty of SaaS startups aiming to sell them a new path to streamlining processes. Tonkean is an SF startup selling a no-code automation platform to do just that, and itin the fortunate position of just having closed a hefty Series A.

The company closed a $24 million round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Tonkean team tells TechCrunch. LightspeedRaviraj Jain is joining Tonkeanboard. The company has raised just over $31 million to date.

Their software is a robotic automation and management platform catered toward ops that integrates with a bunch of data sources and allows customers to set up their own customizations. These customizations can help with routing tasks to the right person, automating follow-ups or moving data between systems. The software is meant to enable nearly endless customizations, but a big focus seems to be on stripping repeatable tasks from the workflows of ops teams or taking care of early steps in those processes.

&The future of enterprise software is adaptive and personalized,& CEO Sagi Eliyahu told TechCrunch in an interview.

The company frames its tech as &human-in-the-loop robotic process automation,& essentially using its no-code platform to allow the people completing tasks manually to create the automation processes for letting bots take over. The visual drag-and-drop workflow of creating these processes seems to be a big selling point. New customers can also shop around for functionality via templates added by other customers.

RPA has been a hot area in recent years, with players like Automation Anywhere and UIPath achieving sky-high private valuations. As the big players in the space focus on courting bigger and bigger clients, Tonkeantighter focus on streamlining workflows for operations teams could give them an inroad, even as they look to scale during uncertain times.

Latin Americaleading legacy food delivery company iFood and Delivery Hero-owned Domicilios.com are merging in a bid to take on the food startup Rappi on its home turf.

The price of the transaction was undisclosed, but will result in iFood holding a 51% equity stake in the partnership, while Delivery Hero will hold the remaining 49%.

Domicilios, the Colombian online food ordering startup, raised $47.7 million before it exited to Berlin-headquartered Delivery Hero for an undisclosed price in 2014. And while iFood has operations in Colombia and Mexico in addition to Brazil, it hasn&t achieved the same kind of market penetration outside of its home country — where it serves 147,000+ restaurants registered in more than 1,000 cities.

iFood says the combined companies will have the largest geographic presence in Colombia, with more than 12,000 restaurants in more than 30 cities across the country. With the merger, iFood inches closer to overtaking the top-spot in the Colombian market, behind the Bogota-based billion-dollar-valued hometown hero, Rappi.

Rappi has raised a total of $1.4 billion in funding over eight rounds, including a $1 billion injection from SoftBank in 2019 that marked the largest single investment into a Latin American startup. Despite that capital, Rappi was hit with a wave of layoffs in January 2020, cutting 6% of staff, amounting to roughly 300 employees.

We&re not certain whether the layoffs had any effect on the companyvaluation, which has been estimated at $3.5 billion.

Since its launch, Rappi has expanded its delivery portfolio to pharmaceuticals, banking services and furniture, in addition to groceries and restaurant delivery. Investors in the Latin American market speculate that Rappi is burning money as it battles Uber Eats and Didi (also both heavily backed by SoftBank)

iFood hopes the acquisition will boost business growth for restaurant and delivery partners in the region, while generating more competitive delivery products and services for Colombians.

iFood prides itself on business intelligence and management solutions, and is backed by Movile Group and Just Eat, a leading global hybrid marketplace for online food delivery.

The coronavirus pandemic is expected to hit Brazilian retailers and restaurants hard, as zero-tech restaurants are forced to enable digital delivery to stay in business. In response, iFood announced a $9.8 million fund to help sustain restaurants within its network.

LinkedIn has no plans to make COVID-related layoffs until at least the end of June 2020, the professional network has confirmed to TechCrunch. This announcements comes after Salesforce CEO Marc Benioffpledge last month to have no significant layoffs for the next 90 days.

Other business leaders such as Bank of AmericaCEO Brian Moynihan and Morgan StanleyCEO James Gorman have also agreed to pause any potential layoffs until the end of 2020.

Layoffs are trickling down to all industries, starting in the hospitality and travel industry and moving to recruitment startups and scooter companies. Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, which serves as a social media platform for professionals and recruiters alike, is thus poised to be a critical connector for those laid off.

So as job security remains on everyonemind, LinkedInpromise to not have any layoffs will quell some of that fear within the organization, at least in the near future. LinkedIn has approximately 16,000 full-time employees across 30 cities in the world.

Regardless of how healthy LinkedIn may appear from this news, itnot immune from making specific cost-saving measures as the economy struggles. The company, reports The Information, has &paused most of its hiring as it figures out business planning.& It had more the 1 million job applicants last year, according to the piece.

Update: LinkedIn has clarified that it has no plans to lay off staff for COVID-19 related businesses. It has not pledged or promised this. The story has been updated to reflect this.

Startups big and small, across all industries, are affected by the novel coronavirus pandemic. From Etsy to MongoDB, from Twilio to Foursquare, these companies are looking for ways to capitalize and ultimately thrive in what has become a survivalist landscape.

These companies also happen to be portfolio companies of one Albert Wenger.

We&re excited to have Union Square Ventures& Managing Director Albert Wenger join us for a live discussion on the impacts of COVID-19 on the firm, the advice heoffering to his portfolio companies and adaptation strategies for the broader startup ecosystem.

Wenger has been vocal about how startups should approach PPP loans, and has an interesting perspective on this weeknews of Foursquaremerger with Factual. We&re amped to hear more from him on both topics, and plenty more.

Before he began his investment career, Wenger was an entrepreneur himself, co-founding five (FIVE!) companies, including a management consulting firm, a hosted data analytics company, a technology subsidiary for Telebanc and DailyLit (a service for reading books by email or RSS). Wenger also served as president of Del.icio.us prior to and through its sale to Yahoo.

We have a handful of questions we&d like to ask, but Wenger has graciously offered to answer questions from the audience, as well. So come prepared!

The chat will begin tomorrow (Thursday, April 9) at 12pm EDT/9am PDT and go for about an hour.

We look forward to seeing you there! Sign up here to add the call details to your calendar.

Motherly CEO Jill Koziol admits that it was a tough pitch when she and her co-founder Liz Tenety first tried to get investors on-board in 2015.

&We wanted to create a brand first and foremost,& Koziol told me. &We did not want to go and build a media company or a [direct-to-consumer] company or Facebook for moms — because, spoiler alert, itcalled Facebook.&

Instead, she described Motherly as a company that sits at the &intersection& of all three approaches. It started out by publishing motherhood-themed content on its website and on social media (and more recently in podcast form), which in turn encouraged the audience of 30 million unique users to start &engaging with us and with each other.&

Now that therea big audience and a real community, the company is getting ready to launch the Motherly Store. And itannouncing that it has raised $5.4 million in Series A funding.

Koziol described her approach as building a trusted brand &thatwoman-centered — not baby-centered — and expert-driven,& then using that brand to sell products. She said Motherly has reversed the strategy of direct-to-consumer startups that sell products, then add content and community to support those commerce goals.

&Everyone says we did all the hard stuff first,& Koziol said. &We&re showing the world that motherhood is not niche,that you can build a brand through content and then create the natural extensions out of that.&

Image Credits: Motherly

The Series A funding was led by 8VC, with participation from Founders Fund, Muse Capital, AET and AmplifyHer Ventures.

&We&re long on millennial moms, and Motherly has demonstrated a unique ability to be at the center of this hyper-engaged market already,& AmplifyHerMeghan Cross told me via email. &Its content has organically sparked a vibrant conversation, and commerce is the logical extension.&

Koziol, meanwhile, said that Motherly was able to build this audience with &virtually& no marketing spend. That sounds particularly difficult given all the other parenting and motherhood-themed content already online, but Koziol said that she and Tenety (a former Washington Post editor) are both millennial mothers themselves, and they realized that &in media brands across the board, motherhood was treated as cartoonish … everything was very baby-centered.&

She argued Motherly has succeeded so far because itaimed at a more educated and more diverse group of women, who are more likely to continue working after they have children.

And as Motherly moves into commerce, she said that will include both company-branded products (Sounds True is publishing the startupsecond book, &The Motherly Guide to Becoming Mama: Redefining the Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum Journey&), as well as a Motherly Store, which will offer a curated selection of products for moms, largely from smaller, direct-to-consumer brands.

Koziol suggested that these brands will benefit from access to Motherlyaudience (particularly as advertising costs have grown to unsustainable heights for many D2C brands), while moms will benefit from having a &credible& source that can help &narrow down those choices.&

Of course, the landscape for media, commerce and parenting have all changed dramatically in the past few weeks thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. But Koziol noted that as a &100% work from home company,& Motherly was better-prepared for this shift.

More broadly, she suggested that moms are going to need more help and support than ever — which Motherly is trying to provide, for example by offering its online birth class for free.

&This woman in our audience has been layering roles on for years,& Koziol said. &And what we are now seeing, in addition to carrying the mental load of parenthood disproportionately and being a full-time bread winner, you&re layering full-time child-care and homeschooling. These are three different jobs.&