In the Press

Hangar today announced that it has raised $15 million for an uncapped fund that launches high-growth technology companies tackling problems governments cannot solve alone. Limited partners in the fund include the Kresge Foundation endowment and Michael Bloomberg, majority owner of Bloomberg LP. The funding will enable Hangar to continue its ground-breaking work building and investing in new companies. Hangar has built four successful companies since 2018 and expects that the investment will enable it to launch an additional three companies annually.

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The more clarity we have with our numbers, the more accurate we can feel about these estimates. As it stands now, there's still a lot of uncertainty, and all of the numbers above must be viewed with several grains of salt.

When we counsel our patients, we err on the side of caution, so that we don't give people a false sense of security until we have more data.

The safest strategy is and will remain to stay at home and remain socially distanced as much as possible — but it's up to each of us to assess our own personal risk and make decisions knowing that those decisions come with some degree of risk.

Our hope is that as testing becomes more available and more information comes out of clinical trials, the more comfortable we'll feel that we're making those assessments based on reality instead of hope.

Gregory Katz is a cardiologist at the Hudson Valley Heart Center of Nuvance Health working as an intensivist at Vassar Brothers Hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. He writes an email newsletter on medicine and COVID-19 that can be found here.

Harry S. Saag is a hospitalist and clinical assistant professor of medicine at NYU Langone Health and the CEO of Roster Health. He publishes a blog on COVID-19 that can be found here.

OPEN PLATFORMS: Look for the collaborators. There are several data aggregators that are committed to supporting an ecosystem of communities, businesses, and research partners, by sharing data or code in safe and responsible ways. Such open ecosystem approaches, while not easy to manage, can yield high dividends.

Example: Where technology companies like Camber Systems, Cubeiq and Facebook have allowed scientists to examine their data, researchers can compare data across these novel data streams to account for representativeness and correct biases, making the data even more useful. The Covid-19 Mobility Data Network, of which we are part, comprises a voluntary collaboration of epidemiologists from around the world analyzes aggregated data from technology companies to provide daily insights to city and state officials from California to Dhaka, Bangladesh. Governments convey what information gaps exist in their planning and policy making, the scientists help identify the best analytic approaches to address those gaps, and the technology companies make available the data they have access to in a meaningful, interpretable format. All data exchange follows strict institutional ethical guidelines and is in compliance with local and international law. Daily outputs speak to the articulated needs of the collaborating government officials.

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At just about the same time, Ian Allen, a former marine and C.I.A. paramilitary officer, cold-called Harvard’s School of Public Health and asked if there was anything that his new company, Camber Systems, could do to help with the pandemic.

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Camber Systems, of which Allen is the C.E.O., is a year-old startup that, among other things, hopes to offer federal, state, and local government agencies ways to use commercially harvested location data to improve their operations without violating privacy laws. Shortly before the pandemic, Allen and his business partner, Navin Vembar, a mathematician who served as the chief technology officer of the General Services Administration, were searching for potential clients, talking with officials in Madison, Wisconsin, about using location data to shore up tourism and distribute the city’s public resources equitably. Assisting Buckee’s covid-19 Mobility Data Network was the kind of project they envisioned when they launched their company with Hangar, a venture-capital firm that funds companies that use technology in the public interest.

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In assembly-line fashion, an analytics firm called Camber Systems takes mobile application data from digital ad companies and sends it multiple times a day to researchers who’ve joined the Covid-19 Mobility Data Network, according to network co-coordinator Andrew Schroeder.

Those scientists study the now-anonymous data from multiple sources for insights about mobility rates, which are then shared with foreign governments like Italy and Spain and with U.S. states and cities, including New York, Seattle and California, Schroeder said.

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A task force created by tech executives, entrepreneurs and investors presented a range of ideas around disease mapping and telehealth to the White House during a private meeting Sunday. The discussions included representatives from tech giants, including Apple and Google; investors led by the New York-based firm Hangar and well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ron Conway; public-health leaders from Harvard University; and smaller telehealth start-ups like Ro, two people said.

“We are still in the process of collecting ideas, recommendations, and proposed actions from task-force members, which we intend to present to the White House in the coming days,” said Josh Mendelsohn, the managing partner at Hangar, who helped organize the effort.

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