Just like in almost every other industry, therebeen a rash of layoffs among newer space startups and companies amid the novel coronavirus crisis. But Relativity Space has managed to avoid layoffs — and is even hiring, despite the global pandemic. Relativity CEO and founder Tim Ellis cites the companyfocus on large-scale 3D printing and its adoption of cloud-based tools and technologies as big reasons why his startup hasn&t felt the pinch.

Because Relativityforthcoming launch vehicle is almost entirely made up of 3D-printed parts, from the engines to the fuselage and everything in between, the company has been able to continue producing its prototypes essentially uninterrupted. Relativity has been classified an essential business, as have most companies operating in anything related to aerospace or defense, but Ellis said that they took steps very early to address the potential threat of COVID-19 and ensure the health and safety of their staff. As early as March 9, when the disease was really first starting to show up in the U.S. and before any formal restrictions or shelter-in-place orders were in effect, Relativity was recommending that employees work from home where possible.

&We&re able to do that, partially because with our automated printing technology we were able to have very, very few people in the factory and still keep printers running,& Ellis said in an interview. &We actually even have just one person now running several printers that are still actually printing — itliterally a single person operating, while a lot of the company has been able to make progress working from home for the last couple of weeks.&

Being able to run an entire production factory floor with just one person on-site is a tremendous competitive advantage in the current situation, and a way to ensure you&re also respecting employee health and safety. Ellis added that the company has already been operating between multiple locations, including teams at Cape Canaveral, Florida, as well as at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and at its headquarters in LA. Relativity also had a further distributed workforce with a few employees working remotely from locations across the U.S, and it focused early on ensuring that its design and development processes could work without requiring everyone to be centrally based.

&We&ve developed our own custom software tools to just streamline those workflows, that really helped,& Ellis said. &Also, just being more of a cloud-enabled company, while still complying with ITAR and security protocols, has been really, really advantageous as well.&

In addition to their focus on in-house software and cloud-based tools, Ellis credits the timing of their most recent round — a $140 million investment closed last October — as a reason they&re well-situated for enduring the COVID-19 crisis. He says that Relativity not only managed to avoid any layoffs, while sending out new offers, but they&re also still paying all employees, including hourly workers, their full regular wage. All of this stems from a business model that in retrospect, seems prescient, but that Ellis says actually just has significant advantages in todayglobal business climate by virtue of chance. Still, he does believe that some of Relativityresilience thus far signals some of the biggest lasting changes that will result from the coronavirus pandemic.

&What itreally going to change […] is the approach to global supply chain,& he said. &I think theregoing to be a big push to have more things made in America, and then less dependence on heavy globalization across supply chain. Thatone you thing we&ve always had with 3D printing — not only is it an automated technology, where we can have very few operators still making progress even during times like like this and printing some of the first-stage structures of our rocket — but on the supply chain side, just having simpler supply chains with fewer vendors and different types of manufacturing processes means itmuch less likely that we&ll see very significant supplier and supply chain interruptions.&

Meanwhile, while Ellis says that ultimately they can&t predict how the coronavirus crisis will impact their overall schedule in terms of planned launch activities, which includes flying their first 3D-printed vehicle in 2021, they anticipate being able to make plenty of progress through remote work and a production line that can easily comply with social isolation guidelines. Partner facility shutdowns, including the rocket engine test stand at Stennis, will definitely have an impact, but Relativityresilience could prove a model for manufacturing businesses of all stripes to emulate once this moment has passed.

Cloud Bigtable has long been Google Cloudfully managed NoSQL database for massive, petabyte-sized analytical and operational workloads. At $0.65 per hour and node, it was never a cheap service to run, especially because Google Cloud enforced a minimum of three nodes per cluster for production workloads. Today, however, it is changing that, and you can now run Bigtable production workloads on just a single node.

&We want Bigtable to be an excellent home for all of your key-value and wide-column use-cases, both large and small,& Google Cloud Bigtable product manager Sandy Ghai said in todayannouncement. &Thattrue whether you&re a developer just getting started, or an established enterprise looking for a landing place for your self-managed HBase or Cassandra clusters.&

With this, Google Cloud is now also enabling the ability to use replication for higher availability for these small clusters, as well as the ability to easily switch a one-node development instance to a one-node production instance as needed. In addition, the serviceSLA now also covers all Bigtable instances, no matter their size.

Itinteresting to see Google Cloud make this push for bringing smaller workloads onto Bigtable, especially given the organizationcurrent focus on large enterprise customers and their specific needs. But the company that only needs a single node today could easily be the one that needs massive clusters in the future and Bigtableminimums have always represented somewhat of a barrier to entry for smaller companies — and once a company places its bets on a given database service, itnot likely to switch anytime time.

Last month, it was reported that digital locker service Movies Anywhere was working to launch a movie-sharing feature called &Screen Pass.& At the time, the feature was only available in limited, private beta testing with a plan to fully roll it out late summer or early fall. But as a result of increased demand from consumers stuck at home under government lockdowns and quarantines, Movies Anywhere has rushed to launch the sharing feature into an open, public beta.

The Movies Anywhere app today allows consumers to access their purchased movies from across a range of services, including iTunes, Vudu, Prime Video, YouTube, Xfinity, and many others. Today, the app is jointly operated by Disney, Universal, WB, Sony Pictures, and 20th Century Fox. An earlier 2014 version of the service was called Disney Movies Anywhere, but it later migrated to a new platform in 2017 and the app was rebuilt to serve the expanded group of operating partners. The two are related efforts, but much different businesses.

Movies Anywhere had been developing the movie-sharing feature with plans for a later launch. But the overwhelmingly positive response to its testing encouraged the company to move up the launch even further.

Screen Pass will allow Movies Anywhere users to loan out only 3 movies per month to family and friends. The movies can then be watched across the Movies Anywhere platform.

To share the title, you can view eligible titles from a new section under &My Movies& in the app, then click the Screen Pass icon on the title you want to share and provide the details. Movies can be sent out over text, email, or message and the recipient has a week to accept the share.

The shared movie will effectively work like a movie rental, as recipients will have a limited time to watch — in this case, up to 14 days. Once the movie is started, recipients have 72 hours to finish watching. But unlike a rental, itfree to share a movie and free to watch.

Only some titles will be &Screen Pass-eligible& at launch and they aren&t able to be saved for offline viewing. Only purchased movies can be downloaded, the company says. To use the feature, the Movies Anywhere account will also need to belong to a U.S. resident.

Screen Pass is currently supported on a range of popular movies, including &The Fate of the Furious (F8),& &Tombstone,& &Logan,& &Wonder Woman,& &Trolls,& &The Lego Movie,& &Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,& &Groundhog Day,& &Rushmore,& the &Harry Potter& movies, &Jason Bourne,& &Elf,& &Sing,& &Role Models,& &Bad Moms,& &Happy Feet,& &Ready Player One,& &Speed,& &The Karate Kid,& &Back to the Future,& and others. In total, around 80% of movies available in Movies Anywhere are Screen Pass-eligible, or over 6,000 titles.

Users who want to join the public beta test can sign up using this link. Users can also accept a Screen Pass from a current beta participant, which then opts them into the beta testing group, too.

The company does not have a planned commercial launch date yet for the feature.

Update, 4/7/20, 3:12 PM ET: Screen Pass now works on Roku; during the private beta it did not. We&ve corrected this.

With women-specific health needs long ignored by tech giants, FLEX, the tampon replacement, raised $4 million and Nurx, the birth control delivery web platform, raised $5.3 million in 2016 (and went on to raise $93.4 million). Both companies became one of the top 10 companies out of more than 100 to raise the most money during their Demo Days at Y Combinator that year. By March 2017, it was reported that femtech companies had raised $1.1 billion since 2014, and the growth has only continued.

We spoke to CEOs and founders Gina Bartasi of Kindbody, Jill Angelo of Gennev, Kate Torgersen of Milk Stork, Molly Hayward of Cora and Liz Klinger of Lioness about how their companies have evolved from first entering the space and feeling like an island to now — a community of women changing the world for women.

&Investors would say, ‘Well, what lets the air out of the balloon? What can derail the business?,'& CEO and founder of the New York-based tech-enabled fertility company Kindbody, Gina Bartasi said. &And I would say, ‘Well, I guess if women went back to the old way of having children and they didn&t go to graduate school and they didn&t go to med school or business school and they started having babies again in their early 20s — then, thatwhat would cause the fertility world to come crashing into the ground.&&

She flatly says thathighly unlikely. Kindbody is Bartasithird fertility startup. She launched them all after going through her own fertility journey.

Torgersen started her first-of-its-kind breast milk shipping service after a four-day work trip during which she had to pump and fly home in her carry-on bag two gallons of breast milk for her eight-month-old fraternal twins.

These options didn&t exist before, and even where there was demand, it wasn&t recognized enough.

&Itbeen really amazing over the last four or five years that we&ve been around to see the different areas of womenlives sort of being addressed through commerce, through business, through business solutions — everything from fertility to breastfeeding and sexual wellness, pleasure, all of these things,& Hayward, who founded Cora, the period and bladder care brand, said.

Femtech isn&t just for women

There is, however, some gray area in femtech. Fertility, for example, has always been a mainstay in the space. Kindbody is actually Bartasithird fertility startup, but she notes fertility is not solely a womenhealth concern.

&Remember that 50% of all fertility issues are male-related,& she says. &It does directly affect them and they don&t talk about it. Women do. She adds that they&re seeing a rise in same-sex couples leveraging Kindbody rather than adopting.

Womensexual health and wellness brands sometimes are excluded (primarily from those outside of it) or are criticized for being included. For example, CB Insights, the market intelligence company used by many investors, routinely shares data on its own idea of femtech.

&For the most part, Lioness and pretty much anything sexual-pleasure-related is not on those maps,& Liz Klinger, the CEO and co-founder of Lioness, the worldfirst smart vibrator brand, shared with TechCrunch.

We reached out to the insights company for an updated femtech map. There isn&t one pleasure-centered (or even pleasure-adjacent) womenhealth startup on the most up to date map for womenhealth startups. For a site that touts itself as &loved by the smartest companies& for sharing &insights on probability, not punditry,& it is interesting that the $30 billion sex tech industry didn&t make it on this map. The only place we did find womenpleasure brands was on a market map for &ValentineDay& tech in 2020.

Source: CB Insights

In talking to some former and current employees, Klinger discovered rumors about potential reasons for the exclusion.

&I heard that there is a bit of pushback, both a combination of personal and also that some of their larger clients are Fortune 500.& They don&t think itrelevant to those clients.

As these challenges are seemingly par for the course for companies focused on womensexual pleasure, Klinger noted the most pleasant surprise in fundraising was how black and white it was when it came to who was going to invest and who wasn&t.

Bartasi pointed to undeniable macroeconomic trends that have emerged since she entered the space in 2008 with her first company Fertility Authority, making fundraising easier now than in the past (in addition to her second company, Progyny, being valued at nearly $2 billion before coronavirus).

&Heterosexual couples are waiting to have children and waiting to get married, and more and more same-sex couples are having children, which is relatively new,& says Bartasi. &Same-sex couples five and 10 years ago potentially adopted, but today they&re going through fertility at a rapid clip.&

She also notes the number of single women who are making the decision to freeze their eggs, opting against the traditional marriage-then-baby route.

Jill Angelo, CEO and founder of Gennev, the first-ever online clinic for women in menopause, also highlights mainstream media and the conversation around women shifting in general.

&You&ve got J. Lo doing the Super Bowl Halftime Show at 50-plus. You&ve got Laura Dern and Renée Zellweger, 50-plus, winning Oscars at the top of their game in their careers. You&ve got Gwyneth Paltrow talking about menopause on Goop.&

Education is instrumental to femtechgrowth

While companies in the space point to a diverse set of challenges with fundraising, each CEO discussed how essential it is to educate investors around womenhealthcare.

&It felt like — in my pitches — I was educating more than pitching, because it was a space people just didn&t know about,& Angelo recalls about when she first started raising money for Gennev in 2015.

This highlights the glaring gap in our education system in reference to health and sexual reproduction.

&What you&re trained on is how not to get pregnant, not how to get pregnant,& Bartasi pointed out. &And really, what nobody knows, even with the most fertile woman and fertile man having sex when sheovulating and when they&re supposed to, the chances of natural conception every month are only 20%. Itnot 50% or 60%.&

Molly HaywardCora was launched as a social impact initiative to provide organic feminine products to women and girls who did not have access to them. Their inability to obtain the products caused them to miss school, the result being they would fall behind the boys.

&You have to do a lot more work as an entrepreneur to explain the experience, how broken it is and why therean opportunity to change that,& Hayward says.

Similarly, Klinger found that those who presumably were the least aware of pleasure were the most interested.

&Our investors are from traditionally conservative places like Thailand — where sex toys are illegal — and Texas. Once I figured out people were looking for pleasure and education, it was a lot easier to figure out who to talk to.&

As education is at the core of activism, the extra legwork doesn&t come without at least some sense of reward.

&When I am explaining this and people are actually listening and paying attention — regardless of whether they&re going to make an investment or not — the fact that I&ve had this conversation with them, I do walk away feeling we&re raising awareness and normalizing breastfeeding,& Torgersen shared.

The mother of three hopes that as more people become educated on breastfeeding, it will make other mothers& lives easier.

In 2020, women are the majority of the U.S. workforce

As nearly half the labor force is women and more than half of all management positions are women, companies looking to retain employees have to accommodate womenhealth needs in ways they haven&t in the past. Femtech is on the front lines of providing not only solutions but data and information that hasn&t been available (or even established) elsewhere.

This is how Milk Stork had its big break quickly after launch. &Our first press release actually hit with Fortune and within 10 days we were contacted by one of the largest consulting firms in the world wanting to bring us in as a benefit for their North American employees,& Torgersen said.

She credits moms and predominantly female-staffed human resources departments. &What I think is truly amazing is that it was moms who are raising awareness. They were using Milk Stork on the retail side and then asking their employers to reimburse them for it or to provide it as a benefit for the other women at their company.&

Within a month, Torgersenteam put together an enterprise solution to offer Milk Stork as a benefit, something that wasn&t fully established at their launch. &The experiences women in femtech are solving have been invisible for so long.&

Bartasi discussed how doctors will share learnings within a practice about their patients to better understand trends in terms of medication, prescriptions and outcome. Kindbody is making these learnings more available to patients than ever before.

&We actually have predictive algorithms that the patient sees. Itcompletely transparent. You enter your age, your pregnancy history, what your ovarian reserve is — which is tested through our blood work — and itgoing to generate your chances of success. How many eggs you&re predicted to get. Theredata that allows for total transparency, which increases the confidence and the trust between patient and the doctor.&

KlingerLioness is centered on never-before-seen data tracking orgasms, and for those who don&t see the value in simply learning more about pleasure, she pointed out medical uses for the information available using the vibrator.

&For some people, italso tracking how certain medications or certain conditions might be affecting their pleasure and vice versa.& This can be extremely helpful as womensexual performance anxiety goes largely undiscussed.

Gennev, on the other hand, released the first-ever menopausal assessment, and itavailable for everyone. &Thereno ‘what to expect when you&re expecting& for menopause,& Angelo says.

Using the data from the questionnaire, they&re providing that. &We&re creating that roadmap and using technology to predict and help them see where they&re headed in the journey and where they&re at right now.&

Gennev has also already begun working on solutions for our new normal of sheltering in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this month, the company launched HealthFix, an initiative to provide remote access to doctors, in addition to what their telemedicine membership already offered.

&We&re expanding our HealthFix membership to go beyond just working with health coaches and behavioral changes in life to manage menopause to also include the doctors, our OB-GYN,& Angelo says.

&We have a team of 25 of them, and so that means you&ll have your medical team, your coach and your doctor all in one via a regular membership thataffordable, so that we&re not just for the top 1% of the 1%, but for every woman.&

Right now, it feels like the future of a lot of things has been paused, but even with discussions on the new normal beginning to start, rest assured the consistent growth in femtech will only continue following years of neglect.

&Competition is good when you&re in a space that people know nothing about because it raises the profile for everybody,& Angelo shared, a sentiment echoed by each CEO we spoke to.

And of the competition, Bartasi said, &The camaraderie and the lifting off of each other is remarkable and a testament to this group of women where we all do really share in opportunity and in helping each other.&

The proof is in the numbers. Femtech raised nearly $750 million in 2019, and itfounded by women who want healthcare experiences they desire but didn&t find. And, because womanhood isn&t an insular experience, there is room and demand for a diverse set of solutions, as women continue to take up more spaces in which they&ve historically only been a minority.

A payments processor used by local governments to collect court fines and utility bill payments from residents across Arkansas and Oklahoma mistakenly left exposed on its website a cache of data, representing years of transactions.

Security researcher Ashot Oganesyan found a cache of database files in a public and unprotected web directory on the website of payment processor nCourt, which runs the two payment sites courtpay.org and utilitypay.org. The directory contained backup database files storing at least three years& worth of transactions up to and including November 2019.

The directory was left exposed for at least five months, according to data from BinaryEdge, which scans the internet for exposed systems and databases.

Oganesyan reported the exposure to the payments processor, and the open directory was closed on Monday.

But TechCrunch learned Tuesday that the database files have been posted to a widely known hacking forum. Although we did not download the data from the forum, the posting — which was published prior to this article — listed the correct number of records in each database, suggesting the posting is genuine.

TechCrunch reviewed the exposed databases and found 79,000 transaction records on courtpay.org, and 64,000 records for utilitypay.org. We verified the data by cross-referencing names and addresses against public records.

Both sets of databases contained a payeename, postal address, email address and phone number. Each record also contained the payment card type, the first and last four-digits of the payeecard number and the cardexpiry date.

Some records also contained dates of birth, and partial bank account numbers when a checking account was used.

Although the payment data was partially masked, none of the data was encrypted, despite a claim on nCourtwebsite that &all tracked data, including account number and expiration date, is obscured so that the data cannot be decrypted without the corresponding decryption keys.&

When reached, nCourtchief information officer Terry Chism said the company was &aggressively gathering facts& about the security lapse, which he said affected a &legacy& system called GovPSA.

&Upon learning the legacy GovPSA data may have been accessed, we moved the data offline,& he said. &We have also engaged a third-party forensic investigation firm which is currently conducting a forensic investigation to verify the scope and impact of this suspected data security incident on the legacy GovPSA data and how it occurred. If we confirm that a breach has occurred, we will evaluate the legal notification obligations to individuals whose personal information may be impacted and will notify all affected persons and regulators consistent with our legal obligations to do so.&

But that leaves its customers — largely local governments and municipalities — in the dark. One of nCourtcustomers, a city in Arkansas with a population of about 30,000, told TechCrunch that they have not yet been informed of a security lapse.

Chism declined to comment further, or answer our questions — including why the data was not encrypted.

A startup that has framed itself as an Instagram for websites is now squaring up against Shopify as it nabs new funding from Googleventure capital arm.

Brooklyn-based Universe has just closed a $10 million Series A from GV. The funding round was well in the works before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold stateside; nevertheless, CEO Joseph Cohen definitely sounded relieved to have everything signed.

&Hopefully, it&ll take some weight off their shoulders that may have been there otherwise,& said GV general partner M.G. Siegler, who led the deal and is taking a seat on their board.

When the team launched out of YC two years ago, the initial aim was to be the go-to short link for young people and creatives to stick in their Instagram bios. The mobile app allowed users to create very basic landing pages, allowing them to type up some text, toss up photos and arrange their creation across a couple of web pages.

As the startup matures and looks to home in on a more robust business model, they&re now looking to build an incredibly low-friction commerce platform. Users can add a shopping &block& to their site, add a photo, description and price and then start accepting orders.

&We&ve gone from a landing page builder to a full-fledged website builder,& Cohen told TechCrunch in an interview.

Universe is going after what Cohen calls &very small businesses.& This could be an artist selling prints, a yoga instructor charging for Zoom classes or one of their latest customers, a farmer selling live bait. &These are people who don&t work at desks,& Cohen says.

Shopify has been one of the biggest tech success stories of the past several years, but Cohen sees weaknesses for Universe to capitalize on. Shopify is &complex and not mobile-first,& he says. Universe not only doesn&t require a developer to implement, it doesn&t seem to require someone thatparticularly tech-savvy.

The price of simplicity for the end user is a hefty cut for Universe. At launch, the company isn&t taking a percentage for the first $1,000 of a customerrevenue, but will take a 10% slice thereafter, a number thatnotably multiples higher than the rates of competitors.

Cohen acknowledges that if a business succeeds, this can be a significant expense for them, one that might push them to another platform. He say that he wants to figure out a model that can help his startup &grow and scale& with their customers, but he didn&t offer up any details on what that might look like.

The team is still working with free and paid &pro& tiers that offer advanced features like analytics. Commerce features will be available for both tiers.

Universe has raised $17 million to date. Other investors include Javelin Venture Partners, General Catalyst and Greylock Partners.

We chatted with GVM.G. Siegler about closing this deal and how his role as an investor has shifted since the current crisis took hold. You can read that interview on Extra Crunch.