Raphael Stevens

Firefly Aerospace aims to make its second attempt to reach orbit with its Alpha rocket in the coming weeks, having received government approval to resume launch operations.
Private equity firm AE Industrial Partners last month acquired stake in Firefly from a fund run by Ukrainian entrepreneur Max Polyakov, who came under scrutiny for national security concerns.
Firefly also closed a $75 million fundraise led by AE Industrial Partners, which Markusic says means the company’s broader growth plan is “fully funded.”

The company’s inaugural Alpha rocket launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Sept. 2, 2021.
Firefly Aerospace

WASHINGTON – Firefly Aerospace aims to make its second attempt to reach orbit with its Alpha rocket in the coming weeks, having received government approval to resume launch operations after a controversial investor sold his stake.
Firefly CEO Tom Markusic told CNBC that the company “worked methodically and cooperatively with the government” to both complete the divestment, as well as to add “security protocols” at the company.

With the move complete, Markusic said the company now has “full access to our facilities to go back and launch.” Firefly will next transport its second Alpha rocket from its headquarters near Austin, Texas, to California, and aims to launch as soon as it can.
“We think it’ll take us about eight weeks from here to launch — so in May is our target,” Markusic told CNBC.
Private equity firm AE Industrial Partners last month acquired stake in Firefly from Noosphere Ventures, the fund run by Max Polyakov, a Ukrainian software entrepreneur who came under scrutiny for national security concerns by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or CFIUS. The nature of the government’s concern about Polyakov is unclear. Polyakov had said that his interest in Firefly stemmed from his desire to keep the technology out of Russia’s hands, according to Bloomberg.
The government halted Firefly’s launch operations at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California until Polyakov’s venture divested its reported 50% stake. The divestiture came late last month, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Firefly also closed a $75 million fundraise led by AE Industrial Partners, which Markusic says means the company’s broader growth plan is “fully funded.”

AEI partner Kirk Konert said the firm’s stake and investment in Firefly was because it views the company as “a clear leader” in the rocket business.
“We think Firefly is going to come out as a market leader in this size class within the launch market,” Konert told CNBC, adding that the company is “taking a more broad view around space transportation” with its work toward a larger rocket called Beta, a transfer vehicle, and a lunar lander.
Konert declined to specify Firefly’s valuation following the funding round, but said it represents an increase from the company’s prior valuation at just over $1 billion in May 2021.
Firefly’s Alpha rocket, which stands 95 feet tall, is designed to launch as much as 1,000 kilograms of payload to low Earth orbit – at a price of $15 million per launch. This puts Firefly in the “medium-lift” category of rockets, pitting it against several other companies including Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit, ABL Space and Relativity Space.
Firefly launched its Alpha rocket for the first time in September, but the attempt to reach orbit failed mid-flight. One of the rocket’s four engines shut down due to an electrical connection failure, a problem Markusic said “was sort of a fluke” and was “very simple to resolve.”
“Flight two is really a repeat of flight one,” Markusic said. “We’re confident that we won’t have that problem again.”
The company aims to launch its third Alpha mission, which will be for NASA, about two months after the second.
Firefly plans to use the new funding to fund more Alpha rocket launches, further develop its larger rocket Beta, finance its Blue Ghost lunar lander, and continue work on a space utility vehicle – also known as a “space tug” — to transport satellites into unique orbits after a launch. The company says its Blue Ghost lander recently completed a critical design review, with Firefly having won a $93 million contract from NASA to carry payloads to the moon’s surface in 2023.

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Maverick Ventures’ Ambar Bhattacharyya, an early investor in OneMedical and Cityblock Health, believes in the transformative power of digital health care. 
“Artificial intelligence and machine learning in health care are not hypotheticals anymore,” he tells CNBC Healthy Returns.
Bhattacharyya says these tools are doing tasks more efficiently and effectively for health insurers, medical providers and pharmaceutical companies.  

Ambar Bhattacharyya, managing director at Maverick Ventures
Maverick Ventures

Ambar Bhattacharyya is managing director at Maverick Ventures, a $400 million venture capital fund based in San Francisco which invests in health start-ups. His health-care portfolio firms include six IPOs and four unicorns (start-ups valued at $1 billion or more).
Bhattacharyya — who currently sits on the board of directors of Artemis Health, Docent Health, Centivo, and Cityblock Health, and serves as a board observer at Collective Medical Technologies and Hims & Hers Health — recently spoke with CNBC ahead of the upcoming CNBC Healthy Returns event on March 30 focused on health innovation. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

CNBC: Telemedicine is a focal point at Maverick Ventures, where do you see the biggest opportunities in this space?  
Bhattacharyya: Over the past few years, we have seen the rise of telemedicine both as a standalone platform, and also a technology that providers leverage to expand their reach. We were early backers of companies like Hims & Hers and One Medical that have changed the paradigm of how hundreds of thousands of people access health care – in a virtual-first way. Going forward, we see several new waves of telemedicine acceleration. 
I expect health systems to reexamine how they are using telemedicine to extend their reach beyond their four walls. There has been a buzz word about ‘the digital front door’ for hospitals for the last five years. Most hospitals have figured out at least step one of that transformation, primarily through virtual visits. But going forward, health systems are going to think about how telemedicine can more significantly transform each department.
For instance, companies like Proximie are extending how hospitals can leverage their operating rooms by providing high fidelity telemedicine between surgeons around the world. I expect to see significant innovations in other areas, including cardiology.
CNBC: Related to this, you talk about the rise of remote patient monitoring, at-home phlebotomy, glucose tracking … a drill-down of virtual care growth, plus the growth of specialty virtual clinics, in cardiology, GI, endocrinology, etc. 

Bhattacharyya: The root cause of the interest in these areas is the desire to do more preventive health care, turning our system from a ‘sick care’ system to a ‘health system.’ 
One fundamental issue is that in the traditional fee-for-service model, the financial incentives are aligned with treating people after they are sick, not necessarily spending time with a patient beforehand. The real upshot of all of these technologies is that we can intervene in a patient before that hospital visit or a regularly scheduled follow-up. 
In a perfect world, one would believe that the current system is frictionless. But the reality is otherwise: driving to Quest Diagnostics or Labcorp every week/month/quarter for a blood draw does add friction to a person’s life, as does pricking one’s finger three times a day for 10+ years. These innovations on both services and hardware can help facilitate more longitudinal, patient-centric, and preventive care. If done at scale, these will transform how specialist practices operate.

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CNBC: Let’s talk about how the Covid-19 pandemic heightened the need for comprehensive health care, and community-based organizations to deliver medical care. Explain how Cityblock Health, one of your portfolio start-ups, is making big inroads in this space.
Bhattacharyya: Cityblock has been fortunate to work with many of the most vulnerable members of our population during this immense moment of need. The company has over 70,000 members today, and it is poised to redesign the health-care system for the underserved in this country.
CNBC: Your fund is also interested in mental and behavioral health start-ups, an area you suggest has been ignored as part of the health system for far too long. What does your due diligence look like for these companies?
Bhattacharyya: For diligence in mental and behavioral start-ups, we tend to focus on a combination of factors. First, we love to understand from the management team what insight they had that was ‘non-obvious’ (and some may have even said impossible) and could upend the way the traditional system works. That tends to provide us with a vision of what the team wants the world to look like, and how, with enough capital and support, they might create it.
After that, our diligence focuses on the ‘white hot risk’ that is the core assumption behind whether the business model will work. Sometimes that is around changing consumer behavior; sometimes provider behavior. Other times it centers around what insurance companies will pay or a broader data play. Most importantly, we want to make sure the clinical model is patient-centric and represents a step function improvement on the status quo.
Within mental health, I’ll mention that one aspect of due diligence we focus on less than we used to before is market size. There are real mental health deserts throughout America, and over the years, we have found that the patient experience for people diagnosed with a less prevalent mental illness is flat-out terrible. In these areas, we believe that a focused approach combined with excellent clinical results can pave the way towards creating new gold-standards for care. 
CNBC: You’ve seen a growing appetite for consumers to pay for health and wealth outside the insurance realm. What appears to be a counter-intuitive willingness to pay for these direct-to-consumer models. What is the profile of these consumers, and where are the opportunities in this space?
Bhattacharyya: Before I became an investor, I worked at a company called MinuteClinic (now owned by CVS). MinuteClinic operates health clinics inside of drug stores where people can walk-in for a same day appointment and now works with most major insurance companies. But in the early days, MinuteClinic wasn’t in network with insurance companies, and we had a ‘menu’ of our prices and services hanging outside of our clinics (almost like a restaurant). And what I noticed is that people were willing to pay all cash, out of pocket, for what they deemed to be a ‘better’ health-care experience. 
At that moment in time, the definition of ‘better’ was very controversial. Our clinics were staffed by nurse practitioners, we did not treat everything, and of course we were located in non-traditional locations. But the value proposition to our customers was ‘better’ – it was high quality care, with transparent pricing, open during nights and weekends, and a few feet over from a pharmacy in case they needed a script. And they were willing to go to an out of network, cash-pay only provider in order to receive those benefits. It was that magical.
That MinuteClinic experience shaped my view on consumers’ willingness to pay in healthcare. There remains a major lack of segmentation in health care, and there are millions of patients who are willing to pay for their version of ‘better.’ For some, that means having same-day access to a clinician on their schedules; for others it means getting access to holistic medicine. Others may want a second or third opinion on a serious health issue. These are very deep wells that we are just now beginning to tap into. 
CNBC: You have noticed a stepped-up interest in applying U.S-based care models abroad, especially in emerging economies. Describe this trend.
Bhattacharyya:  The U.S. has been an innovator in the health-care ecosystem, but there are nuances to how care is delivered in other countries that can lead to local models having an edge. For instance, in economies like India, the majority of the health-care system is cash pay. So we have seen many of the models here that have started with insurance or an employer go-to-market motion go directly to consumer and scale quite rapidly. 
In Brazil, we have noticed a similar dynamic between patients who get care via its national health-care service SUS (approximately 75% of the population) and Medicaid in the U.S. (approximately 84 million people). Significant differences exist, but the core problem remains the system – how do you get better care to the underserved in a way that best suits those communities? We have started to see a cross-pollination of ideas from these countries to the U.S. and vice versa, which is exciting to watch
CNBC: What comes next?
Bhattacharyya: We are in a fascinating moment where, to the casual observer, many of the Covid-19 tailwinds for health care seem to be slowing down. What I think they are missing is the large demographic and societal trends that will keep pushing health-care innovation to the top of the priority stack this coming decade. New challenges are arising. We have a significant clinician shortage in this country, and the clinicians we do have are burnt out – and we need to find ways to address that.
Technology can help. Artificial intelligence and machine learning in health care are not hypotheticals anymore; many payors, providers, and pharma companies are using those tools today to do tasks more efficiently and effectively.  There’s a lot of wood to chop, and we need the most creative and passionate people to work on solving these problems.  More

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The Royal Mint says it will use “patented new chemistry” from a Canada-based firm called Excir to recover gold from the circuit boards of cell phones and laptops.
The plant will be located in South Wales, where the Mint is based, with construction beginning this month.
This week’s statement builds on a previous announcement from October 2021.

Smith Collection/Gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images

LONDON — Britain’s Royal Mint plans to build a facility that will extract gold from electronic waste, with the plant set to be fully up and running in 2023.
In a statement Monday, the government-owned company which manufactures precious metal products and coins said it would use what it called “patented new chemistry” from a Canada-based firm called Excir to recover gold from the circuit boards of cell phones and laptops.

According to The Royal Mint, the process is able to recover “over 99% of the precious metals contained within electronic waste — selectively targeting the metal in seconds.”
The recovery, it said, takes place at room temperature, as opposed to the high temperatures required for smelters to process e-waste. The plant will be located in South Wales, U.K., where the mint is based, with construction beginning this month.
It said it expected the facility to process as much as 90 metric tons of circuit boards sourced from the U.K. each week. This would produce “hundreds of kilograms” of gold every year, it added.
This week’s statement builds on a previous announcement from Oct. 2021 in which The Royal Mint said it had signed an agreement with Excir to roll out its technology in the U.K. In that release, the Mint said the process could potentially also recover copper, silver and palladium.

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The widespread proliferation of technology such as smart phones, tablets and laptops has seen electronic waste become a topic of much debate and discussion in recent years.

In 2019, the world produced around 53.6 million metric tons of e-waste, according to the Global E-waste Monitor 2020 report. The report also said just 17.4% of this waste was “officially documented as properly collected and recycled.”
In addition to this low collection and recycling rate, the report also said e-waste contained harmful substances including mercury, hydrochlorofluorocarbons, chlorofluorocarbons and brominated flame retardants.
As concerns about the environment and sustainability mount, companies like Excir are looking to roll out and monetize techniques focused on the recycling and repurposing of e-waste.
Others include New Zealand-based Mint Innovation. In 2020, Ollie Crush, the company’s chief scientific officer, told CNBC it had “developed a biological process for recovering valuable metals from weird and wonderful feedstocks, such as electronic waste.”
Crush explained that Mint Innovation’s system involved taking scrap material and “grinding it up into a sand like consistency.” 
“The reason we do this is that we need to make sure that we’re exposing all the metal contained within to a subsequent chemical leaching process,” he added.
“For instance, when you look at circuit boards, they’ve got lots of chips on them — a lot of the value is contained within those chips, so we really need to make sure it’s exposed.” More

For an aircraft like China Eastern’s Boeing 737-800 to crash in midflight is “simply unprecedented,” said one aviation analyst who cited the plane’s excellent safety record.
“Air travel is the safest form of transport. But when we do suffer incidents or accidents, we don’t see anything like what we have seen in China over the last 24 hours,” Alex Macheras, an independent aviation analyst, told CNBC’s “Capital Connection” on Tuesday. 
No bodies or survivors have yet been found from the crash as of Tuesday morning, Chinese state media said. The domestic flight, which was carrying 132 people, nose-dived Monday afternoon in the southern region of Guangxi.

For an aircraft like China Eastern’s Boeing 737-800 to crash in midflight is “simply unprecedented,” said one aviation analyst who cited the plane’s excellent safety record.
“Air travel is the safest form of transport. But when we do suffer incidents or accidents, we don’t see anything like what we have seen in China over the last 24 hours,” Alex Macheras, an independent aviation analyst, told CNBC’s “Capital Connection” on Tuesday. 

“This nosedive was simply unprecedented, especially from cruising altitude. We’re talking about the safest phase of the flight. That’s why those answers are going to be needed as soon as possible to determine,” he added.
No bodies or survivors have yet been found from the crash as of Tuesday morning, Chinese state media said.
The domestic flight was carrying 132 people when it nose-dived Monday afternoon in the southern region of Guangxi.
The plane was cruising at 29,100 feet and began a sharp descent after 2:20 p.m., recovering more than 1,000 feet briefly — then continuing to dive again before it lost contact. It fell more than 25,000 feet in about two minutes.
The 737-800 that crashed Monday in China first flew in June 2015. It was not a Boeing 737 Max, the plane that was grounded worldwide after two fatal crashes in 2018 and 2019. China was one of the first countries to ground the 737 Max after the second of the two crashes. 

Aircraft’s safety record

“The aircraft involved was a 6-year-old, so a very young 737-800, which has a stellar safety record all over the globe,” said Macheras.
“We are talking about an aircraft that makes up the entire fleet of European low-cost airline Ryanair. An airline aircraft that is in service with American Airlines, Qantas, FlyDubai, Ethiopian, KLM,” he added, saying the plane is used to performing in very difficult conditions.
According to travel analytics firm Cirium, there are more than 4,200 Boeing 737-800s in service worldwide and 1,177 of them are in Chinese airlines’ fleets.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered an investigation and rescue teams to the location of the crash in the rural, mountainous region.

Sheila Kahyaoglu, aerospace and defense analyst at Jefferies, said the safety record of the aircraft makes it highly probable something unusual happened during flight.
“Given the safety record of this aircraft, and the fact that it only had nine fatal accidents in 25 years, I highly doubt it’s a manufacturer’s issue,” she told CNBC on Tuesday.
“Obviously it’s too early to think about that, or to make that conclusion,” Kahyaoglu acknowledged, indicating that perhaps “something abnormal happened” since the aircraft has had a good safety record so far.

Search for the ‘black box’

As the jet was a U.S.-made plane, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said it has appointed an investigator for the crash.
Investigators will work to recover so-called black boxes that contain cockpit voice recordings and flight data. They are also likely to examine the aircraft’s previous flights, maintenance history, weather data and pilot health.
Macheras said it’s the black box that is going to “ultimately push investigators into the right direction, in that quest for answers.”
“As the nature of the crash remains completely unexplained, what role the aircraft was playing will be the question on so many regulators’ [minds] worldwide,” he said. “There is always that risk and that’s why investigators will be wanting to rule out whatever they can. But as we say, the black box is what’s going to contain the most impact.”
— CNBC’s Evelyn Cheng and Leslie Josephs contributed to this report.

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Pfizer expects to start supplying the antiviral pills, Paxlovid, to UNICEF beginning next month and will continue to do so through the end of the year.
The company would not disclose the financial terms of the agreement when asked by CNBC.
Pfizer has also licensed Paxlovid through the Medicines Patent Pool, a U.N.-backed public health organization, which will allow other companies to produce generic, low-cost version of the Covid treatment.
While Pfizer is widely licensing Paxlovid for generic manufacturing, the drugmaker has not done the same for its Covid vaccine.

Paxlovid, a Pfizer’s coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pill, is seen manufactured in Ascoli, Italy, in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters on November 16, 2021.
Pfizer | Handout | via Reuters

Pfizer will supply up to 4 million courses of its oral Covid-19 treatment to dozens of poorer nations under an agreement with the United Nations Children’s Fund, the company announced Tuesday.
Pfizer expects to start supplying the antiviral pills, Paxlovid, to UNICEF beginning next month and will continue to do so through the end of the year, according to the company. Low-income nations will receive the pills at a not-for-profit price, while upper-middle-income nations will pay more under a tiered pricing system, according to Pfizer.

The company would not disclose the financial terms of the agreement when asked by CNBC.
Pfizer has licensed Paxlovid through the Medicines Patent Pool, a U.N.-backed public health organization, which will allow other companies to produce a generic, low-cost version of the Covid treatment to boost supply in lower-income nations throughout the world. So far 35 companies in 12 nations across Latin America, the Middle East as well as South and East Asia have signed agreements to either produce the raw ingredients or the finished drug.
The agreement with UNICEF will supply Paxlovid to the same 95 low- and middle-income nations targeted by the licensing agreement. The goal is to provide short-term access to the oral antiviral treatment as companies get the generic manufacturing up and running, according to Pfizer.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized Paxlovid on an emergency basis in December for people 12 years of age and older. Paxlovid was 89% effective at preventing hospitalization in those at high risk of severe Covid in clinical trials.
Pfizer expects $22 billion in sales for Paxlovid in 2022 based on deals already signed or close to finalization. The drugmaker has agreed to supply 20 million courses of Paxlovid to the U.S. government through September of this year.

Paxlovid is administered as soon as possible after a Covid-19 diagnosis in a three tablet course twice daily for five days. Patients take two nirmatrelvir pills, developed by Pfizer, with one tablet of ritonavir, a widely used HIV drug. Nirmatrelvir inhibits an enzyme the virus needs to replicate, while ritonavir slows the patients’ metabolism to allow the drug to remain active in the body for longer.
While Pfizer is widely licensing Paxlovid for generic manufacturing, the drugmaker has not done the same for its Covid vaccine. Oxfam America has called on shareholders at the company’s annual meeting to support a feasibility study on transferring the technology underlying the vaccine to developing nations.
Pfizer’s board has called on shareholders to vote against the proposal, contending that the technology underlying the vaccine is complex and requires a high-level proficiency to maintain the quality of the shots. Pfizer aims to supply 2 billion vaccine doses to poorer nations by the end of 2022.

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