It’s safe to say that we don’t yet know how long the Covid-19 situation will continue, but it has already had a major impact on public health and the economy. Tech can play a role in helping on various fronts:
- Startups and tech companies working directly on tackling Coronavirus – from prevention to testing and patient care.
- Startups and companies offering free or deeply discounted services to support impacted people – from educating kids in quarantine to helping teams work better remotely.
For #1, there are calls for action coming from the EU and UK government to companies that can accelerate the manufacturing of respirators. I was happy to see great examples of Israeli startups fighting Covid-19 being put to use in hospitals, techies using their 3D printers to create much needed valves, and hackathons being organised by the tech community to improve working from home, business continuity and help those in need.
In this post, I’ll be covering #2 only. At the time of writing this post there’s already been over 110 entries from Europe and Israel. Please fill this form to add your company. Hopefully this helps inspire more action-oriented entrepreneurs to contribute to solving this global pandemic in whatever way they can. I removed spam and irrelevant entries.
A few examples worth calling out:
- Touchnote – Send a free postcard to vulnerable people who are isolated due to coronavirus, using the code KINDNESS20
- Guild – Offering Guild free to any event organiser who has an event cancelled in the next 6 months as a way to engage their community and provide a means to communicate, connect and collaborate.
- Genially – Create stunning presentations, infographics, and more, to help our educators community and facilitate #remotelearning. Our premium templates and resources will be made available for free.
- CodeSpark Academy – At home kids coding for ages 5-9. Use promo code “schoolclosed” for 3 FREE Months
- Busuu – is offering free language lessons to children affected by coronavirus school closures. They are being live streamed on YouTube. A lesson schedule can be found here: https://www.busuu.com/en/keep-kids-learning
- Geomiq – connecting design engineers with manufacturers. Making their platform available at no cost for whoever is manufacturing parts for ventilators (hopefully manufacturers will also manufacture at cost)
- Seedlegals – offering a free working from home policy doc for startups.
- Kapwing offers a way to create multimedia in a shared, collaborative space is giving away free pro accounts for educators until April 17th.
- Strattic – Free Strattic hosting for Covid-19 informational websites
100+ startups offering free products or services in response to Covid-19
(Last updated April 20th – there are now over 295 entries)
I’ll keep the form open another week and will continue to update this list.
A couple more resources for startups worth calling out:
- Comprehensive remote work wiki for startups
- Corona virus tech handbook – https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/
- US Covid-19 startup resources https://lnkd.in/e_9nAvi
- Best practices from the German Startup association https://lnkd.in/enrwN3J hashtag
- Mark Suster – funding in the times of Coronavirus
We’ll get through this crisis. Stay safe.
#coronavirus #covid-19 #techforgood #startups
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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Great list Eze. One week ago Travelopment.com made their online academy (course platform) free to help travel businesses through the hard times and hopefully come out even stronger.
Thanks for including Guild Eze. We’re being pretty ‘flexible’ generally at the moment generally and hoping to help out by offering Guild for free to others too e.g. charities and some public institutions.
Great! We (my team and I) are currently working on something spectacular to curb the spread of Coronavirus here in Nigeria, West Africa. We will keep you posted shortly.
Awesome list! Thank you for sharing Novatools.org – We believe we can businesses adapt to today’s #workremotely situation by helping them manage their ideation process with key tools and resources like canvas, templates, sticky notes… all interactive and collaborative. Our team is happy to help training and guiding companies too. Thank you again!!!
Great initiative, Eze!
At Allegro AI we’re hoping to do our small part to help this global crisis and are proud to be part of this list.
Great resource thank you one and all for helping each other and those in need out.
Thank you Eze, from the entire Applied Labs team, great boost!.
We will continue to deliver the best of ourselves. You motivate us to keep going and continue helping each other.