Just three months after capping what was the best year for Indian startups, having raised a record $14.5 billion in 2019, they are beginning to struggle to raise new capital as prominent investors urge them to &prepare for the worst&, cut spending and warn that it could be challenging to secure additional money for the next few months.

In an open letter to startup founders in India, ten global and local private equity and venture capitalist firms including Accel, Lightspeed, Sequoia Capital, and Matrix Partners cautioned that the current changes to the macro environment could make it difficult for a startup to close their next fundraising deal.

The firms, which included Kalaari Capital, SAIF Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners — some of the prominent names in India to back early-stage startups — asked founders to be prepared to not see their startups& jump in the coming rounds and have a 12-18 month runway with what they raise.

&Assumptions from bull market financings or even from a few weeks ago do not apply. Many investors will move away from thinking about ‘growth at all costs& to ‘reasonable growth with a path to profitability.& Adjust your business plan and messaging accordingly,& they added.

Signs are beginning to emerge that investors are losing appetite to invest in the current scenario.

Indian startups participated in 79 deals to raise $496 million in March, down from $2.86 billion that they raised across 104 deals in February and $1.24 billion they raised from 93 deals in January this year, research firm Tracxn told TechCrunch. In March last year, Indian startups had raised $2.1 billion across 153 deals, the firm said.

New Delhi ordered a complete nation-wide lockdown for its 1.3 billion people for three weeks earlier this month in a bid to curtail the spread of COVID-19.

The lockdown, as you can imagine, has severely disrupted businesses of many startups, several founders told TechCrunch.

Vivekananda Hallekere, co-founder and chief executive of mobility firm Bounce, said he is prepared for a 90-day slowdown in the business.

Founder of a Bangalore-based startup, which was in advanced stages to raise more than $100 million, said investors have called off the deal for now. He requested anonymity.

Food delivery firm Zomato, which raised $150 million in January, said it would secure an additional $450 million by the end of the month. Two months later, that money is yet to arrive.

Many startups are already beginning to cut salaries of their employees and let go of some people to survive an environment that aforementioned VC firms have described as &uncharted territory.&

Travel and hotel booking service Ixigo said it had cut the pay of its top management team by 60% and rest of the employees by up to 30%. MakeMyTrip, the giant in this category, also cut salaries of its top management team.

Beauty products and cosmetics retailer Nykaa on Tuesday suspended operations and informed its partners that it would not be able to pay their dues on time.

Investors cautioned startup founders to not take a &wait and watch& approach and assume that there will be a delay in their &receivables,& customers would likely ask for price cuts for services, and contracts would not close at the last minute.

&Through the lockdown most businesses could see revenues going down to almost zero and even post that the recovery curve may be a ‘U& shaped one vs a ‘V& shaped one,& they said.

Therea joke* being reshared on chat apps that takes the form of a multiple-choice question — asking whothe leading force in workplace digital transformation? The red-lined punchline is not the CEO or CTO, but: C) COVID-19.

Therelikely more than a grain of truth underpinning the quip. The novel coronavirus is pushing a lot of metaphorical buttons right now. &Pause& buttons for people and industries, as large swathes of the worldpopulation face quarantine conditions that can resemble house arrest. The majority of offline social and economic activities are suddenly off limits.

Such major pauses in our modern lifestyle may even turn into a full reset, over time. The world as it was, where mobility of people has been all but taken for granted — regardless of the environmental costs of so much commuting and indulged wanderlust — may never return to &business as usual.&

If global leadership rises to the occasion, then the coronavirus crisis offers an opportunity to rethink how we structure our societies and economies — to make a shift toward lower carbon alternatives. After all, how many physical meetings do you really need when digital connectivity is accessible and reliable? As millions more office workers log onto the day job from home, that number suddenly seems vanishingly small.

COVID-19 is clearly strengthening the case for broadband to be a utility — as so much more activity is pushed online. Even social media seems to have a genuine community purpose during a moment of national crisis, when many people can only connect remotely, even with their nearest neighbours.

Hence the reports of people stuck at home flocking back to Facebook to sound off in the digital town square. Now that the actual high street is off limits, the vintage social network is experiencing a late second wind.

Facebook understands this sort of higher societal purpose already, of course. Which is why itbeen so proactive about building features that nudge users to &mark yourself safe& during extraordinary events like natural disasters, major accidents and terrorist attacks. (Or indeed, why it encouraged politicians to get into bed with its data platform in the first place — no matter the cost to democracy.)

In less fraught times, Facebook&purpose& can be loosely summed to &killing time.& But with ever more sinkholes being drilled by the attention economy, thata function under ferocious and sustained attack.

Over the years the tech giant has responded by engineering ways to rise back to the top of the social heap — including spying on and buying up competition, or directly cloning rival products. Itbeen pulling off this trick, by hook or by crook, for over a decade. Albeit, this time Facebook can&t take any credit for the traffic uptick; a pandemic is naturedark pattern design.

Whatmost interesting about this virally disrupted moment is how much of the digital technology thatbeen built out online over the past two decades could very well have been designed for living through just such a dystopia.

Seen through this lens, VR should be having a major moment. A face computer that swaps out the stuff your eyes can actually see with a choose-your-own-digital-adventure of virtual worlds to explore, all from the comfort of your living room? What problem are you fixing, VR? Well, the conceptual limits of human lockdown in the face of a pandemic quarantine right now, actually…

Virtual reality has never been a compelling proposition versus the rich and textured opportunity of real life, except within very narrow and niche bounds. Yet all of a sudden, here we all are — with our horizons drastically narrowed and real-life news thatceaselessly harrowing. So it might yet end up a wry punchline to another multiple choice joke: &My next vacation will be: A) Staycation, B) The spare room, C) VR escapism.&

Itvideoconferencing thatactually having the big moment, though. Turns out even a pandemic can&t make VR go viral. Instead, long-lapsed friendships are being rekindled over Zoom group chats or Google Hangouts. And Houseparty — a video chat app — has seen surging downloads as barflies seek out alternative night life with their usual watering-holes shuttered.

Bored celebs are TikToking. Impromptu concerts are being live-streamed from living rooms via Instagram and Facebook Live. All sorts of folks are managing social distancing, and the stress of being stuck at home alone (or with family), by distant socializing: signing up to remote book clubs and discos; joining virtual dance parties and exercise sessions from bedrooms; taking a few classes together; the quiet pub night with friends has morphed seamlessly into a bring-your-own-bottle group video chat.

This is not normal — but nor is it surprising. We&re living in the most extraordinary time. And it seems a very human response to mass disruption and physical separation (not to mention the trauma of an ongoing public health emergency thatkilling thousands of people a day) to reach for even a moving pixel of human comfort. Contactless human contact is better than none at all.

Yet the fact all these tools are already out there, ready and waiting for us to log on and start streaming, should send a dehumanizing chill down societybackbone.

It underlines quite how much consumer technology is being designed to reprogram how we connect with each other, individually and in groups, in order that uninvited third parties can cut a profit.

Back in the pre-COVID-19 era, a key concern being attached to social media was its ability to hook users and encourage passive feed consumption — replacing genuine human contact with voyeuristic screening of friends& lives. Studies have linked the tech to loneliness and depression. Now that we&re literally unable to go out and meet friends, the loss of human contact is real and stark. So being popular online in a pandemic really isn&t any kind of success metric.

Houseparty, for example, self-describes as a &face to face social network& — yet itquite the literal opposite; you&re foregoing face-to-face contact if you&re getting virtually together in app-wrapped form.

The implication of FacebookCOVID-19 traffic bump is that the companybusiness model thrives on societal disruption and mainstream misery. Which, frankly, we knew already. Data-driven adtech is another way of saying itbeen engineered to spray you with ad-flavored dissatisfaction by spying on what you get up to. The coronavirus just hammers the point home.

The fact we have so many high-tech tools on tap for forging digital connections might feel like amazing serendipity in this crisis — a freemium bonanza for coping with terrible global trauma. But such bounty points to a horrible flip side: Itthe attention economy thatinfectious and insidious. Before &normal life& plunged off a cliff, all this sticky tech was labelled &everyday use;& not &break out in a global emergency.&

Itnever been clearer how these attention-hogging apps and services are designed to disrupt and monetize us; to embed themselves in our friendships and relationships in a way thatsubtly dehumanizing; re-routing emotion and connections; nudging us to swap in-person socializing for virtualized fuzz designed to be data-mined and monetized by the same middlemen who&ve inserted themselves unasked into our private and social lives.

Captured and recompiled in this way, human connection is reduced to a series of dilute and/or meaningless transactions; the platforms deploying armies of engineers to knob-twiddle and pull strings to maximize ad opportunities, no matter the personal cost.

Italso no accident we&re seeing more of the vast and intrusive underpinnings of surveillance capitalism emerge, as the COVID-19 emergency rolls back some of the obfuscation thatused to shield these business models from mainstream view in more normal times. The trackers are rushing to seize and colonize an opportunistic purpose.

Tech and ad giants are falling over themselves to get involved with offering data or apps for COVID-19 tracking. They&re already in the mass surveillance business, so therelikely never felt like a better moment than the present pandemic for the big data lobby to press the lie that individuals don&t care about privacy, as governments cry out for tools and resources to help save lives.

First the people-tracking platforms dressed up attacks on human agency as &relevant ads.& Now the data industrial complex is spinning police-state levels of mass surveillance as pandemic-busting corporate social responsibility. How quick the wheel turns.

But platforms should be careful what they wish for. Populations that find themselves under house arrest with their phones playing snitch might be just as quick to round on high-tech gaolers as they&ve been to sign up for a friendly video chat in these strange and unprecedented times.

Oh, and Zoom (and others) — more people might actually read your &privacy policy& now they&ve got so much time to mess about online. And that really is a risk.

*Source is a private Twitter account called @MBA_ish

Vericool, a Livermore, Calif.-based startup thatreplacing plastic coolers and packaging with plant-based products, has raised $19.1 million in a new round of financing.

The companystated goal is to replace traditional packaging materials like polystyrene with plant-based insulating packaging materials.

Its technology uses 100% recycled paper fibers and other plant-based materials, according to the company, and are curbside recyclable and compostable.

Investors in the round include Radicle Impact Partners,The Ecosystem Integrity Fund,ID8 InvestmentsandAiiM Partners, according to a statement.

&We&re pleased to support Vericool because of the companytrack record of innovation, high-performance products, well-established patent portfolio and focus on environmental resilience. We are inspired by the companysocial justice commitment to address recidivism and provide workplace opportunity to formerly incarcerated individuals,& said Dan Skaff, managing partner of Radicle Impact Partners and Vericoolnew lead director.

Marriott has confirmed a second data breach in three years — this time involving the personal information on 5.2 million guests.

The hotel giant said Tuesday it discovered in late February the breach of an unspecified property system at a franchise hotel. The hackers obtained the login details of two employees, a hotel statement said, and broke in weeks earlier during mid-January.

Marriott said it has &no reason& to believe payment data was stolen, but warned that names, addresses, phone numbers, loyalty member data, dates of birth and other travel information — such as linked airline loyalty numbers and room preferences — were taken in the breach.

Starwood, a subsidiary of Marriott, said in 2018 its central reservation system was hacked, exposing the personal data and guest records on 383 million guests. The data included five million unencrypted passport numbers and eight million credit card records.

It prompted a swift response from European authorities, which issued Marriott with a fine of $123 million in the wake of the breach.

Xerox announced today that it would be dropping its hostile takeover bid of HP. The drama began last fall with a flurry of increasingly angry letters between the two companies, and confrontational actions from Xerox, including an attempt to take over the HP board that had rejected its takeover overtures.

All that came crashing to the ground today when Xerox officially announced it was backing down amid worldwide economic uncertainty related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company also indicated it was dropping its bid to take over the board.

&The current global health crisis and resulting macroeconomic and market turmoil caused by COVID-19 have created an environment that is not conducive to Xerox continuing to pursue an acquisition of HP Inc. (NYSE: HPQ) (‘HP&). Accordingly, we are withdrawing our tender offer to acquire HP and will no longer seek to nominate our slate of highly qualified candidates to HPBoard of Directors,& the company said in a statement.

As for HP, it said it was strong financially and would continue to drive shareholder value, regardless of the outcome:

We remain firmly committed to driving value for HP shareholders. HP is a strong company with market leading positions across Personal Systems, Print, and 3D Printing - Digital Manufacturing. We have a healthy cash position and balance sheet that enable us to navigate unanticipated challenges such as the global pandemic now before us, while preserving strategic optionality for the future.

The bid never made a lot of sense. Xerox is a much smaller company, with a market cap of around $4 billion compared with HP with a market cap of almost $25 billion. It was truly a case of the canary trying to eat the cat.

Yet Xerox continued to insist today, even while admitting defeat, that it would have been better to combine the two companies, something HP never felt was realistic. HP questioned the ability of Xerox to come up with such a large sum of money, and, if it did, would it be financially stable enough to pull off a deal like this.

Yet even as recently as last month, Xerox increased the bid from $22 to $24 per share in an effort to entice shareholders to bite. It had previously threatened to bypass the board and go directly to shareholders before attempting to replace the board altogether.

HP didn&t like the hostility inherent in the bid or any of the subsequent moves Xerox made to try to force a deal. Last month, HP offered its investors billions in give-backs in an effort to convince them to reject the Xerox bid. As it turned out, the drama simply fizzled out in the middle of a worldwide crisis.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a new program today thatdesigned to foster close collaboration between public and private organizations in order to &bring coronavirus treatments to market as fast as possible,& according to U.S. Department of Health - Human Services Secretary Alex Azar in a press release. The program, dubbed the &Coronavirus Treatment Acceleration Program,& or CTAP, will see the FDA redeploy resources and personnel with an eye toward providing private companies, researchers and scientists with &regulatory advice, guidance and technical assistance as quickly as possible.&

Based on the information provided by the agency, it sounds like CTAP is a formalization of a lot of the work that was already being done within the FDA to reduce the burden placed on companies and scientists looking to field trials and the steps required by the administration to qualify new treatments and therapies for use.

In real-world terms, the FDA says that means itturning things around much more quickly, reviewing protocols for many freshly submitted clinical studies within 24 hours, and also turning around single-patient requests for expanded access to some therapies granted under compassionate or investigate use &generally within three hours.& The FDA is also looking at how it can build out streamlined protocols that can apply across use by different institutions and for different programs wherever possible to further limit processing time through templated strategies.

Internally, the FDA has re-arranged staffing resources to help make this possible, putting medical and regulatory staff that otherwise would be focused elsewhere on teams dedicated to COVID-19-related reviews.

Therelikely to be some debate about the implications of the introduction of a program like this. On the one hand, it should help novel approaches and even startups in the biotech space with unproven, but promising technologies in development to work hand-in-hand with the FDA on potential solutions. On the other hand, the administration has already been criticized for some of its more aggressive decisions regarding COVID-19 therapeutics, including the Emergency Use Authorization ordered for anti-malarial hydroxychlroquine earlier this week.

While small-scale studies have shown that the drug could offer some benefit in the treatment of COVID-19 patients, the key word there is &could,& and other small-scale studies have shown that standard anti-viral treatments are just as effective. The bottom line is that there isn&t enough data available to say anything definitively either way, and this particular EUA means that efforts to stockpile the drug could make it less available to those who use it for another of its common purposes: treating chronic rheumatoid arthritis, which can be debilitating in its severity.

The current coronavirus pandemic is unprecedented in terms of its spread and impact, at least in terms of viral outbreaks during the modern medical era. The FDA definitely needs to address the situation in a unique manner as a result, but critics and observers will definitely be watching to see what results from increased pressure on the agency to cut red tape.