Monthly Archives: February 2021

News: As expected, stock trading service Public raises $220M at unicorn valuation

• February 17, 2021
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The day before Robinhood goes under the the Congressional hammer, domestic rival Public.com announced this morning that it has closed a $220 million funding round at a $1.2 billion valuation. News of the round was first broken by TechCrunch. Further reporting colored in the lines concerning the investment’s size and valuation range. Confirming the funding

The day before Robinhood goes under the the Congressional hammer, domestic rival Public.com announced this morning that it has closed a $220 million funding round at a $1.2 billion valuation. News of the round was first broken by TechCrunch. Further reporting colored in the lines concerning the investment’s size and valuation range.

Confirming the funding news today, Public added a fresh metric to the mix, namely that it has reached one million members – over the course of just 18 months post-launch, the company was quick to point out.

That means that Public’s backers – its latest round was put together by prior investors, including Greycroft, Accel, Tiger Global, Inspired Capital and others – values the company at around $1,200 per current “member.” Whether or not that feels rich, we leave to you to decide.

But with rising interest in the savings and investing space – some data here — and Robinhood’s revenues growing to a run rate of more than $800 million in Q4 2020 and looking even better at the start of 2021, it’s not hard to see why investors are backing Public. It’s even easier if you believe that Robinhood’s brand has undergone material harm from its woes during the GameStop saga.

The pair, along with a host of other fintech services that offer savings and investing products, have been buoyed by a secular shift in banking away from the physical world (in-person shopping, bank branches, plastic cards) to the digital (neo-banks, ecommerce, virtual cards). Robinhood shook up the trading world with zero-cost investing, fitting neatly into the mobile and virtual banking future that is being built. And Public has taken that model a step further by dropping payment for order flow (PFOF), a method revenue generation in which companies like Robinhood get a small fee for sending their users’ trades to one particular market maker or another.

TechCrunch recently joked that it seems like “there is infinite money for stock-trading startups,” in light of the anticipated Public round, which has now has arrived. Let’s see who is next to take home a big check.

News: Ally.io rasies $50M Series C as the OKR software market stays explosive

• February 17, 2021
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This morning Ally.io, a software startup with a focus on the OKR (objectives and key results, in case you’ve somehow avoided being exposed) goal-setting technique, announced that it has closed $50 million in new capital. The Series C round was led by Green Oaks Capital, Madrona Capital, and its Series B lead, Tiger Global. Ally

This morning Ally.io, a software startup with a focus on the OKR (objectives and key results, in case you’ve somehow avoided being exposed) goal-setting technique, announced that it has closed $50 million in new capital. The Series C round was led by Green Oaks Capital, Madrona Capital, and its Series B lead, Tiger Global.

Ally raised an $8 million Series A in August, 2019 and a $15 million Series B in October of the same year. The Series C is more than its A and B rounds put together – and doubled.

That Ally raised such a large round really wasn’t too big a surprise. OKR-software rival Gtmhub raised a $30 million Series B earlier this year, and companies in this particular software niche reported rapid-fire growth last year. TechCrunch collected growth metrics from a host of companies competing in the OKR and corporate goal-setting market, including Ally. In 2020, Gtmhub, Perdoo, WorkBoard, and Ally.io all grew in the triple digits.

In a blog post that TechCrunch saw before publication, Madrona investor and Ally backer S. Somasegar noted that “nearly $300 million” has been invested into OKR startups in the last two years. Such rapid growth from so many players in such a competitive space could signal a huge market.

Ally’s latest round makes it clear that investors expect similar growth from the cohort in 2021.

For flavor, we got new growth numbers from Ally.io. Previously the startup had shared growth of 3.3x in 2020. Its CEO Vetri Vellore told TechCrunch in an email that Ally.io’s “revenue has increased by 5x and [has] added over 600 customers” since its Series B, which came around 15 months prior. That’s quick.

It’s the sort of growth that venture investors want to own a piece of. So, even though Vellore told TechCrunch that his company has “most of [its] Series B money in the bank,” it decided to take on more capital “to accelerate further,” to which we’d add because it could.

Ally did not have to twist arms to raise more. Vellore described the round as “extremely competitive” in an email, noting that he had “started the [fundraising] process in early January.” It’s just over mid-February, so the round came together quickly: “Within two weeks of starting the process, we were able to wrap it up,” the CEO wrote, adding that the investment “was heavily oversubscribed due to strong interest from both existing investors and our new investors.”

The market for OKR software, and corporate goal-setting software in general, is proving to be large, and lucrative. Let’s see which rival player is the next to raise.

News: Google Maps users can now pay for parking or their transit fare right from the app

• February 17, 2021
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Drivers throughout the United States will now have the option to pay for street parking right from Google Maps as part of an expanded partnership with transportation software companies Passport and Parkmobile. Google also announced it was extending this contactless payment feature to public transit users. Google Maps’ pay for parking feature will expand first

Drivers throughout the United States will now have the option to pay for street parking right from Google Maps as part of an expanded partnership with transportation software companies Passport and Parkmobile. Google also announced it was extending this contactless payment feature to public transit users.

Google Maps’ pay for parking feature will expand first via Android to more than 400 U.S. cities, including Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York and Washington D.C. The feature will be available through the iOS version of the Google Maps app soon, the company said. The transit feature will include more than 80 transit agencies globally.

The parking feature, which integrates with Passport’s operating system, launched in Austin last year. The two companies indicated, at the time, that the feature would eventually roll out in other U.S. cities. While the expansion was expected, it’s still a boon for the North Carolina-based startup, which is now integrated in one of the most widely used navigation apps. The same goes for Parkmobile, which is also embedded in Google Maps.

The aim, according to Google Maps product manager Vishal Dutta and Google Pay’s Fausto Araujo, is to help drivers users pay for parking without having to touch a meter — a compelling feature in this era of COVID-19.

When navigating with Google Maps on iOS and Android, drivers in certain cities in the U.S. will see an option to pay for parking with Google Pay as they approach their destination. This means a user has to set up a Google Pay account, which is linked to a credit or debit card. From there, drivers add their meter number, the amount of time they wish to pay for, and complete the payment via Google Pay. Parkers can also add time to their meter from their Google Pay app without returning to their vehicle.

News: Low-code focused OutSystems raises $150M at a $9.5B valuation

• February 17, 2021
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This morning OutSystems, a low-code app development service, announced that it has closed $150 million in new capital. The round was led by Abdiel Capital and Tiger Global. Notably this is not the largest funding event that the Portugal and U.S.-based software company has raised. TechCrunch covered a $360 million round that OutSystems raised in

This morning OutSystems, a low-code app development service, announced that it has closed $150 million in new capital. The round was led by Abdiel Capital and Tiger Global. Notably this is not the largest funding event that the Portugal and U.S.-based software company has raised. TechCrunch covered a $360 million round that OutSystems raised in 2018.

OutSystems was founded in 2001, making it older than most companies that we cover on TechCrunch, and yet it remains privately held. And like many startups, it appears to have caught a tailwind from the accelerating digital transformation of companies both large and small.

By selling $150 million worth of its own shares at a $9.5 billion valuation, OutSystems parted ways with around 1.6% of itself in the deal. Investors would not be willing to buy such a tiny slice of a company for such a price if they didn’t have confidence in its future performance.

The new funds put OutSystems on an IPO path, we reckon; the company declined to discuss public market plans with TechCrunch. It could go out sooner rather than later. This round smells a bit like pre-IPO capital, and OutSystems touted its model to TechCrunch as “efficient” in a conversation about its new funding, implying moderate cash-consumption at worst.

TechCrunch had asked the company to break down its stated plan to invest its new capital in both go-to-market (GTM) capabilities and product (R&D) work. OutSystems CEO Paulo Rosado told TechCrunch in an email that even before this announcement OutSystems was “steadily increasing both our R&D and GTM capacity,” meaning that it was “investing for growth.” The company remains “focused on building scale in an efficient way,” the CEO added.

OutSystems works on low-code app development, in contrast to the startups and more mature private concerns that are focused on the no-code project; no-code tools do not involve code, while low-code services bring together some coding along with visual programming interfaces.

In an interview with Rosado in late 2020, he explained to TechCrunch the differences between no-code and low-code as both complexity (the ability to tackle heavy-duty internal corporate workflows) and extensibility (the ability to adapt).

In OutSystems’ view low-code is simply better suited to creating material corporate apps. Here’s how the CEO explained it:

The problem is not low-code is worse than no-code. If no-code is very narrow, which most no-code tools are, when you get [a] change request that goes beyond what you can do visually, that’s it. The only answer that you have for the customer is “no, we cannot do it.”

With low-code, you can do it. But you have to do it with code. You go, you [add] code, and the code then gets blended into the no-code portion.So low-code means it’s a no-code capability, with the possibility of jumping into code.

No-code fans would argue that as their tools’ ability to avoid code improves, the code-required portion of development that Rosado details will decline. Regardless, the OutSystem’s method approach to the market appears to be working, if its recent capital raise is any indication.

Back to the round, to better understand of OutSystems’ market position in both competitive and completeness terms, TechCrunch asked the CEO about its relative strength in customer pricing calls. He responded by saying that the OutSystem’s “pricing model is based on platform utilization” over traditional SaaS pricing. We could quibble with the company here – it does have seat limits on lower-priced tiers – but the focus on consumption over traditional SaaS reminded us more of on-demand software over what Salesforce pioneered. Given the changes we’ve seen in the SaaS market lately, it’s a distinction worth keeping in mind.

Finally, how competitive is the low-code market that OutSystems’ is now taking on with fresh funding? According to its CEO, their chief competitor is not some other startup, but, instead “non-consumption.” A bit like how Netflix is competing with sleep, instead of HBO.

TechCrunch has covered the no-code and low-code for quite some time. We put words together concerning OutSystem’s 2016-vintage, $55 million round for example. But lately it seems that the demand for corporate apps – be they no-code or low-code – does appear to have accelerated. In the last four or six quarters, startups in the less-code market have consistently reported high-demand to TechCrunch.

Let’s see if the moment is enough to carry OutSystems all the way to the public markets.

News: YouTube to expand Shorts to the U.S., add 4K and DVR to YouTube TV, launch in-video shopping and more in 2021

• February 17, 2021
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YouTube has a host of big product updates coming this year, and it just detailed a lot of them in a blog post from Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan. Google’s streaming video site plans to expand its TikTok-esque Shorts mobile video creation and consumption tool to the U.S. (it’s currently in beta in India), make

YouTube has a host of big product updates coming this year, and it just detailed a lot of them in a blog post from Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan. Google’s streaming video site plans to expand its TikTok-esque Shorts mobile video creation and consumption tool to the U.S. (it’s currently in beta in India), make YouTube TV a more full-featured in-home cable alternative, add customization and control options to YouTube Kids and more.

Many of the product updates detailed by Mohan are expansions of existing tests and beta features, but there are also entirely new developments that could significantly change how YouTube works for both creators and audiences. YouTube’s focus on monetization and new formats also indicates a desire to keep creators happy, which makes a lot of sense in the context of the platform’s popular new mobile-first competitor TikTok.

Here’s a TL;DR of everything YouTube announced today for its 2021 roadmap:

• Expansion of its in-video e-commerce shopping experience beyond the current limited beta
• Expansion of Applause tipping feature
• YouTube Shorts launching in the U.S.
• Adding the ability for parents to specify individual channels and videos for their kids to be able to watch on YouTube Kids
• New features for user playlists on YouTube Music, and making those playlists more discoverable to others
• A new paid add-on coming to YouTube TV that offers 4K streaming, DVR for off-line playback, and unlimited simultaneous in-home streams
• Automatic video chaptering for some videos that don’t have creator-defined ones
• A redesigned YouTube VR experience focused on accessibility, search and better navigation

YouTube has a big year planned, and some of these changes could significantly alter the dynamics of the platform. Making it possible for every creator to turn their channel in a mini shopping channel has a lot of potential to alter what it looks like to build a business on the platform, while YouTube TV’s transformation narrows the gap even further between that service and traditional cable and satellite provider offerings.

News: Amazon will let users vote on new Alexa devices with pre-orders, including a cuckoo clock

• February 17, 2021
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Amazon’s Day 1 Edition program pulled back the curtain ever-so-slightly on the company’s hardware development process. The initial class featured its Echo Frames smart glasses and Loop smart ring. Based on early user feedback, the company only opted to continue production on the former. But it takes the idea even further. The program is akin

Amazon’s Day 1 Edition program pulled back the curtain ever-so-slightly on the company’s hardware development process. The initial class featured its Echo Frames smart glasses and Loop smart ring. Based on early user feedback, the company only opted to continue production on the former.

But it takes the idea even further. The program is akin to a kind of in-house crowdfunded pre-order program. Amazon presents a handful of concepts and potential customers vote with their pre-order. If the goal is met, they’ll bring the product to market. If not, they spike it. It’s not dissimilar to the “First Flight” program Sony Japan launched a little over five years back.

Clearly Amazon doesn’t wont for resources when it comes to launching products. But while a system like this isn’t necessary, I can certainly appreciate how it will facilitate letting the hardware team get a little weird with it. There have been a few exceptions from the company in recent years, with an Alexa-enabled Big Mouth Billy Bass, but as a rule, big corporations don’t often let really weird hardware concepts get all the way to production.

Image Credits: Amazon

There are three products in this first batch, and they run the gamut from straightforward to wacky. The common thread — at least with this round — is they all work with Alexa. I’d anticipate that will be the case going forward, but Amazon’s willingness to tip its hand has some very clear limits.

On the more mundane side is a Smart Stick Note printer. Basically you tell Alexa/Echo something and it will use thermal technology to print to an off-brand Post-it. The thermal tech means there’s no ink to replace. The idea is you can print, say, grocery lists and event reminders using voice. That’s up for a $90 pre-order (like Kickstarter/Indiegogo, prices will increase if/when these come to market).

Image Credits: Amazon

The $35 Smart Scale is designed to work with an Echo Show. You say something like, “Alexa, ask Smart Scale how much sugar is in these blueberries,” or “Alexa, ask Smart Scale to weigh 200 calories of blueberries” and the smart screen will show off the nutritional information for the weighed amount.

The weirdest/most fun of the bunch is the Smart Cuckoo Clock. Following up on the much more mundane Echo Wall Clock, the proposed model adds a mechanical cuckoo to the mix. There’s also a removable pendulum, allowing users to mount it on a wall or stick it on a shelf. That one is $80 in pre-order.

Image Credits: Amazon

The company isn’t listing specific goals, but each project will show the percentage toward completion (with no numbers listed). If the goal isn’t met, pre-orders won’t be charged and the company will move on to the next project.

News: Grafana Labs launches observability stack for enterprise customers

• February 17, 2021
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Grafana Labs has created an open source observability trifecta that includes Prometheus for monitoring, Loki for logging and Tempo for tracing. Today, the company announced it was releasing enterprise versions of these open source projects in a unified stack designed specifically for the needs of large companies. Company CEO Raj Dutt says that this product

Grafana Labs has created an open source observability trifecta that includes Prometheus for monitoring, Loki for logging and Tempo for tracing. Today, the company announced it was releasing enterprise versions of these open source projects in a unified stack designed specifically for the needs of large companies.

Company CEO Raj Dutt says that this product is really aimed at the largest companies in the world, who crave  control over their software. “We’re really going after at scale users who want a cutting edge observability platform based on these leading open source projects. And we are adding a lot of feature differentiation in the enterprise version along with 24/7 support from the experts, from the people who have actually created software,” he said.

Among those features is a set of plug-ins that lets these large customers pull data into the platform from leading enterprise software companies including Splunk, New Relic, MongoDB and Snowflake. The Enterprise Stack also provides enhanced authentication and security.

Dutt calls this product self-managed to contrast it with the managed cloud versions of the product the company already has been offering for some time. “We have two main products, Grafana Cloud and now Grafana Enterprise Stack. Grafana Cloud is our hosted deployment model, and the Grafana Enterprise Stack is essentially licensed software that customers are free to run however they want, whether that’s on prem, in a colocation company like Equinix or on the cloud vendor of their choice,” Dutt explained.

They can also mix and match their deployments across the cloud or on-prem in a hybrid style, and the large enterprise customers that the company is going after with this product should like that flexibility. “It also allows them to hybridize their deployments, so they may decide to use the cloud for metrics, but their logs contain a lot of sensitive information [and they want to deploy that on prem]. And since it’s a composable stack, they may have a hybrid deployment that’s partly in the cloud cloud and partly on prem,” he said.

When you combine this new enterprise version with the managed cloud version that already exists, it gives Grafana another potentially large revenue source. The open source products act as a driver, giving Grafana a way into these companies, and Dutt says they know of over 700,000 instances of the open source products in use across the world.

While the open source business model usually only turns a fraction of these users into paying customers, having numbers like this gives the company a huge head start and it’s gotten the attention of investors. The company has already raised over $75 million including a $24 million Series A 2019 and a $50 million Series B in 2020.

News: Edgybees raises $9.5M Series A for its aerial video augmentation service

• February 17, 2021
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Edgybees, a company that helps businesses, first responders and military users accurately geotag and augment their aerial video streams in real time, today announced that it has raised a $9.5 million Series A round. The news comes almost exactly two years after the company announced its $5.5 million seed round. Seraphim Capital, which specializes in

Edgybees, a company that helps businesses, first responders and military users accurately geotag and augment their aerial video streams in real time, today announced that it has raised a $9.5 million Series A round. The news comes almost exactly two years after the company announced its $5.5 million seed round. Seraphim Capital, which specializes in space tech investments, led this new round. New investors Refinery Ventures, LG Technology Ventures, Kodem Growth, as well as existing investors OurCrowd, 8VC, Verizon Ventures and Motorola Solutions Venture Capital also participated.

“Our mission is to ensure positive human outcomes during life-saving missions,” says Edgybees co-founder and CEO Adam Kaplan. “Our new partners will be key to continuing to push our mission forward. With their unique industry expertise, we are poised to expand our global footprint and drive innovation within the industry. We look forward to the next phase of growth, meeting the critical demands of the defense, public safety and critical infrastructure markets.”

Using the company’s Visual Intelligence Platform, users can easily register and track assets in video show by a drone, for example. The standard use case here would be to help first responders get an accurate picture of an evolving emergency on top of live images from the scene, with the ability to track all of their assets and personnel in real time. But Edgybees has also shown other use cases that range from tracking and visualizing golf games to insurance and defense use cases.

About a year ago, Edgybees, which had its start in Israel but is now based in San Diego, launches its Argus platform, which makes it easier for users to bring their own drone and other live video platforms to the service’s geo-registration engine.

Image Credits: Edgybees

“Edgybees solves a huge problem in spatial computing: how do you really know what you are seeing through fast moving airborne or other video feeds? Edgybees brings together the real and virtual worlds and helps first responders save lives, industrial drone users save money, and defense teams get the mission done,” Ourcrowd CEO Jon Medved explained.

Similarly, Seraphim managing partner and CEO Mark Boggett noted that he thinks of Edgybees as a Google Maps fused with live video. “Their geo-referencing capability is a breakthrough technology that brings a new level of insight and usability to video streams from space, drones or bodycams. We are very excited about Edgybees, not only for the innovation it brings to public safety and defense, but because its ability to be utilized in a wide range of industries,” he said.

Image Credits: Edgybees

News: Spectral raises $6.2M for its DevSecOps service

• February 17, 2021
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Tel Aviv-based Spectral is bringing its new DevSecOps code scanner out of stealth today and announcing a $6.2 million funding round. The startup’s programming language-agnostic service aims to automated code security development teams to help them detect potential security issues in their codebases and logs, for example. Those issues could be hardcoded API keys and

Tel Aviv-based Spectral is bringing its new DevSecOps code scanner out of stealth today and announcing a $6.2 million funding round. The startup’s programming language-agnostic service aims to automated code security development teams to help them detect potential security issues in their codebases and logs, for example. Those issues could be hardcoded API keys and other credentials, but also security misconfiguration and shadow IT assets.

The four-person founding team has a deep background in building AI, monitoring and security tools. CEO Dotan Nahum was a Chief Architect at Klarna and Conduit (now Como, though you may remember Conduit from its infamous toolbar that was later spun off), and the CTO at Como and HiredScore, for example. Other founders worked on building monitoring tools at Elastic and HP and on security at Akamai. As Nahum told me, the idea for Spectral came to him and co-founder and COO Idan Didi during their shared time at mobile application build Conduit/Como.

Image Credits: Spectral

“We basically stored certificates for every client that we had, so we could submit their apps to the various marketplaces,” Nahum told me of his experience at Counduit/Como. “That certificate really proves that you are who you are and it’s super sensitive. And at each point at these companies, I really didn’t have the right tools to actually make sure that we’re storing, handling, detecting [this information] and making sure that it doesn’t leak anywhere.”

Nahum decided to quit his current job and started to build a prototype to see if he could build a tool that could solve this problem (and his work on this prototype quickly discovered an issue at Slack). And as enterprises move from on-premises software to the cloud and to microservices and DevOps, the need for better DevSecOps tools is only increasing.

“The emphasis is to create a great developer experience,” Nahum noted. “Because that’s where we started from. We didn’t start as a top down cyber tool. We started as a modest DevOps friendly, developer-friendly tool.”

Image Credits: Spectral

One interesting aspect of Spectral’s approach, which uses a machine learning model to detect these breaches across programming languages, is that it also scans public-facing systems. On the backend, Spectral integrates with tools like Travis, Jenkins, CircleCI, Webpack, Gatsby and Netlify, but it can also monitor Slack, npm, maven and log providers — tools that most companies don’t really think about when they think about threat modeling.

“Our solution prevents security breaches on a daily basis,” said Spectral co-founder and COO Idan Didi. “The pain points we’re addressing resonate strongly across every company developing software, because as they evolve from own-code to glue-code to no-code approaches they allow their developers to gain more speed, but they also add on significant amounts of risk. Spectral lets developers be more productive while keeping the company secure.”

The company was founded in mid-2020, but it already has about 15 employees and counts a number of large publicly-listed companies among its customers.

News: Databricks brings its lakehouse to Google Cloud

• February 17, 2021
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Databricks and Google Cloud today announced a new partnership that will bring to Databricks customers a deep integration with Google’s BigQuery platform and Google Kubernetes Engine. This will allow Databricks’ users to bring their data lakes and the service’s analytics capabilities to Google Cloud. Databricks already features a deep integration with Microsoft Azure — one

Databricks and Google Cloud today announced a new partnership that will bring to Databricks customers a deep integration with Google’s BigQuery platform and Google Kubernetes Engine. This will allow Databricks’ users to bring their data lakes and the service’s analytics capabilities to Google Cloud.

Databricks already features a deep integration with Microsoft Azure — one that goes well beyond this new partnership with Google Cloud — and the company is also an AWS partner. By adding Google Cloud to this list, the company can now claim to be the “only unified data platform available across all three clouds (Google, AWS and Azure).”

It’s worth stressing, though, that Databricks’ Azure integration is a bit of a different deal from this new partnership with Google Cloud. “Azure Databricks is a first-party Microsoft Azure service that is sold and supported directly by Microsoft. The first-party service is unique to our Microsoft partnership. Customers on Google Cloud will purchase directly from Databricks through the Google Cloud Marketplace,” a company spokesperson told me. That makes it a bit more of a run-of-the-mill partnership compared to the Microsoft deal, but that doesn’t mean the two companies aren’t just as excited about it.

“We’re delighted to deliver Databricks’ lakehouse for AI and ML-driven analytics on Google Cloud,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian (or, more likely, one of the company’s many PR specialists who likely wrote and re-wrote this for him a few times before it got approved). “By combining Databricks’ capabilities in data engineering and analytics with Google Cloud’s global, secure network—and our expertise in analytics and delivering containerized applications—we can help companies transform their businesses through the power of data.”

Similarly, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi noted that he is “thrilled to partner with Google Cloud and deliver on our shared vision of a simplified, open, and unified data platform that supports all analytics and AI use-cases that will empower our customers to innovate even faster.”

And indeed, this is clearly a thrilling delight for everybody around, including customers like Conde Nast, whose Director of Data Engineering Nana Essuman is “excited to see leaders like Google Cloud and Databricks come together to streamline and simplify getting value from data.”

If you’re also thrilled about this, you’ll be able to hear more about it from both Ghodsi and Kurian at an event on April 6 that is apparently hosted by TechCrunch (though this is the first I’ve heard of it, too).