In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, almost every industry in the world has adopted social distancing protocols. When possible, working remotely has become the new norm and in cases where it is not feasible, people have to maintain reasonable distance between workers at all times. As the pandemic rages on, there are many industries that have felt the negative effects yet some others that have managed to prosper from the change in business processes.

Online Real Estate – Rentberry

Despite the scourge of COVID-19, property owners still need to collect rent, advertise vacancies, vet renters, perform inspections on their properties and even process documents. Almost none of these can happen if government stipulations prevent extensive movement as well as the potential risk of contact and spreading the virus.

It turns out that there is a startup in Silicon Valley – Rentberry - that developed novel technology several years ago that is being extremely applicable in today’s pandemic environment. Rentberry, the San Francisco based startup, offers an absolutely closed-loop rental ecosystem where all of the rental tasks are done in one place. In addition to this, Rentberry provides a full transparent application process and allows for negotiated rental terms (rental price and security deposit) without the need for face-to-face or over the phone negotiations. The Company has received positive feedback, and has been featured on TV prime time news multiple times, as they became the first long-term home rental company that offers such extensive automation in a contactless fashion for the real estate industry.

Rentberry confirmed that their number of Monthly Active Users (MAU) skyrocketed to 300,000 from 40,000 slightly more than a year ago. CEO of Rentberry, Oleksiy Lubinsky, also mentioned that the company plans to achieve 1 million MAU in 2021. Based on the way things are developing now, it is absolutely possible.

Since inception, Rentberry has raised more than $10M from top VC funds, such as Zing Capital, 808 Ventures, Beechwood Ventures, JadeValue and Angel Investors Marlborough. The company also got backed by a number of top executives: former CEO/Chairman of CBRE; CEO of SwissLife; CEO of Invesque; CEO of Intensity; President of 92 Ventures; CEO of Hopewell Development and many others. Moreover, Rentberry is currently the top performing crowdfunding campaign on WeFunder– securing more than $1.8M in just a couple of weeks after going public with the campaign.

A surge in monthly active users combined with success in raising capital during the global economic turmoil proves that Rentberry is on the right track when it comes to making the home rental process more efficient even in a COVID-19 economy.

Online Business Meetings – Zoom and Slack

Everyone in Silicon Valley has heard of Zoom and Slack. Companies use these two applications to streamline business communication between their coworkers. Zoom became very popular lately as people were looking for efficient solution to conduct conference calls. It has become a tool for professionals to interact with coworkers and clients. Slack on the other hand is a collaboration hub that replaced emails to help employees work together seamlessly. It's designed to support the way people naturally work together, so they would be able to collaborate with each other online as efficiently as they do face-to-face. Slack also has the ability to integrate with third-party services and supports community-built integrations, including Zoom.

Now, the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic saw the world reconvene on the internet on video conferencing applications and software's of which Zoom seems to be most favoured in all of this.

The pandemic restricted access to the workplaces. Even though the restrictions will be slowly removed, people are already used to working from home. Companies realizing that working from home for most of the parts has the same effect for the business as working from the office – started to cancel their leases or at least to dramatically narrow the working spaces. All of this greatly benefits Zoom and Slack as employees doing work from home still need to be plugged in to the business and have ability to communicate with each other.

It should come as no surprise then that both Zoom and Slack are prospering during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Back in March, Slack's Chief Executive Officer Stewart Butterfield disclosed to his Twitter followers that the number of ‘simultaneously connected users’ hit 10 million. This is up from 1 million in October 2015 and the number grew to 11 million in less than a week after Butterfield’s Tweet.

Zoom has also been on the rise during the COVID-19 pandemic. With more people working from home and no end to pandemic in sight – investors were fast to notice the potential of the company. Zoom shares that were worth $36 during the IPO in 2019, closed higher than $250 at some point. And that's not all.  It is reported that the founder's fortunes grew by at least $4 billion so far this year.

In the first two months of 2020, Zoom recorded no less than 2.2 million new monthly active users; a number which trumps the 1.9 million monthly active users they gained throughout 2019. Zooms's growth may in part be credited to efforts made by the company to provide individuals and corporate entities with resources that will enable them in "navigating the (COVID-19) outbreak" said Eric Yuan, Zoom's founder and CEO, in this interview with CNBC.

But the work collaboration giant, Slack, would not be left behind. As remote work take centre stage in trying times like this, teams turned to Slack in their millions to ensure team work doesn't get severely interrupted. For instance, between March 10th and Match 25th this year (2020), Slack gained 2.5 million connected users. This will be inserted addition to the 9,000 paying subscribers the company gained in the almost two months leading to that time. Also, Slack is also trading at its highest prices up 50% so far in 2020.

Online Food Delivery – Instacart

Courtesy of the coronavirus menace, the demand for food, grocery supplies and daily essentials have hit an all-time high. So high was the need for home delivery of food and grocery items that Uber had to compete for a share of this market. But it is Instacart that gets most of the action at the moment.

 And if you have been to a grocery store in the last few months, you’ve probably had to deal with long lines, one-way isles and a lot of protocol with hand sanitizers. It makes perfect sense that most people would naturally want to avoid this headache. As a result, companies like Instacart who try to rid consumers of this stress have seen an increase in patronage. Instacart is a grocery pick-up and delivery service company that allows users to food and grocery items just by clicking a few buttons. Instacart also offers exclusive coupons, organic groceries and even alcohol delivery options.

In a statement released in April on the Instacart website, Vice President Mark Killick noted that the demand for Instacart's services had "surged" and the company's active shoppers grew to "more than 350,000". This is a significant increase from the previous 200,000.

The company has also recently released new features designed to improve the safety of customers and staff alike as the coronavirus disease is still out there. Some of these new features include leave at my door delivery, contactless alcohol delivery and in-app communications. Personal shopping experience became less of an adventure and fun and more of time consuming and unpleasant experience.

From all indications, Instacart will continue to benefit from its wide brand recognition and expansive market share (at least in the US). Experts estimate the company made some $10 million in April, 2020 as Americans bought goods worth at least $1.4 billion through Instacart in the first half of April alone. Whether the company can sustain this momentum beyond the COVID-19 era is debatable but there is no telling that more Americans would not mind having their weekly shopping done for them and delivered to their homes. Riding on the growth and success they found through helping out during this lockdown, Instacart is expanding their team size to meet consumer demands, and that includes some 250,000 shoppers and agents for their care team.

Conclusion

 The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked a huge havoc on the global economy in proportions that have not been seen in a very long time. The world stays at home but the world's economy is not resting indoors, neither are the world's most innovative companies.

Desperate times call for desperate, innovative moves. Rentberry, Zoom, Slack, Instacart, and innovation-driven companies in that calibre are crushing it by helping out in new, useful ways. As anyone can speculate, the rewards for their services include all-round growth and endearment in the hearts of customers.