Monthly Archives: February 2021

News: Accord launches B2B sales platform with $6M seed

• February 10, 2021
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The founders of Accord, an early stage startup focused on bringing order to B2B sales, are not your typical engineer founders. Instead, the two brothers, Ross and Ryan Rich, worked as sales reps seeing the problems unique to this kind of sale first-hand. In November 2019, they decided to leave the comfort of their high-paying

The founders of Accord, an early stage startup focused on bringing order to B2B sales, are not your typical engineer founders. Instead, the two brothers, Ross and Ryan Rich, worked as sales reps seeing the problems unique to this kind of sale first-hand.

In November 2019, they decided to leave the comfort of their high-paying jobs at Google and Stripe to launch Accord and build what they believe is a missing platform for B2B sales, one that takes into account the needs of both the sales person and the buyer.

Today the company is launching with a $6 million seed round from former employer Stripe and Y Combinator. It should be noted that the founders applied to YC after leaving their jobs, and impressed the incubator with their insight and industry experience, even though they didn’t really have a product yet. In fact, they literally drew their original idea on a piece of paper.

The original prototype was just a drawing of their idea. Image Credits: Accord

Recognizing they had the sales skills, but lacked programming chops, they quickly brought in a third partner, Wayne Pan to bring their idea to life. Today, they have an actual working program with paying customers. They’ve created a kind of online hub for B2B sales people and buyers to interact.

As co-founder Ross Rich points out these kinds of sales are very different from the consumer variety, often involving as many as 14 people on average on the buyer side. With so many people involved in the decision-making process, it can become unwieldy pretty quickly.

“We provide within the application shared next steps and milestones to align on and that the buyer can track asynchronously, a resource hub to avoid sorting through those hundreds of emails and threads for a single document or presentation and stakeholder management to make sure the right people are looped in at the right time,” Rich explained.

Accord also integrates with the company CRM like Salesforce to make sure all of that juicy data is being tracked properly in the sales database. At the same time, Rich says the startup wants this platform to be a place for human interaction. Instead of an automated email or text, this provides a place where humans can actually interact with one another, and he believes that human element is important to help reduce the complexity inherent in these kinds of deals.

With $6 million in runway and a stint at Y Combinator under their belts, the founders are ready to make more concerted go-to-market push. They are currently at 9 people, mostly engineers aside from the two sales-focused founders. He figures to be bringing in some new employees this year, but doesn’t really have a sense of how many they will bring on just yet, saying that is something that they will figure out in the coming months.

As they do that, they are already thinking about being inclusive with several women on the engineering team, recognizing if they don’t start diversity early, it will be more difficult later on. “[Hiring a diverse group early] only compounds when you get to nine or 10 people and then when you’re talking to someone and they are wondering ‘do I trust this team and is that a culture where I want to work?’ He says if you want to build a diverse and inclusive workplace, you have to start making that investment early.

It’s early days for this team, but they are building a product to help B2B sales teams work more closely and effectively with customers, and with their background and understanding of the space, they seem well positioned to succeed.

News: Lang.ai snags $2M to remove technical burden of implementing AI for businesses

• February 10, 2021
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Lang.ai, which has developed a no-code platform for businesses, closed on a $2 million seed funding round. The company’s SaaS platform aims to allow business users to structure any free-text data with custom categories built through a drag & drop interface, based on AI-extracted concepts. Village Global led the financing, which included participation from new

Lang.ai, which has developed a no-code platform for businesses, closed on a $2 million seed funding round.

The company’s SaaS platform aims to allow business users to structure any free-text data with custom categories built through a drag & drop interface, based on AI-extracted concepts.

Village Global led the financing, which included participation from new and existing backers including Acceleprise, Oceans Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, 2.12 Angels, GTMFund, and Lorimer Ventures.

Spain-born Jorge Penalva founded Lang.ai in 2018 with the goal of giving any business user the ability “to build enterprise-ready natural language processing models in just minutes.” It was built to give non-engineers a way to automate repetitive tasks in use cases such as customer service and claims processing.

“It can be installed in our cloud or theirs,” Penalva said. 

Lang.ai saw its revenue double from the last quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2021 and the seed funding was motivated mainly to continue that momentum.

“We’re getting demand in the form of projects with our larger customers, so we needed the funding to be able to support that demand,” Penalva told TechCrunch.

In his previous role of CEO of Séntisis, Penalva realized that processes driven by free-text data remained a blind spot for many companies. 

“Today, millions of dollars and hours are invested by companies to manually read and process textual information captured from disparate areas of their business,” he said.

His mission with Lang.ai is to “empower businesses to put AI to work for them, without the technical complexities of building and training custom algorithms.” 

Specifically, Penalva said that Lang.ai’s product analyzes a customer’s historical data “in minutes” and suggests AI-extracted concepts to build custom categories through a drag & drop interface. The custom categories are applied in real-time to automate “tedious” tasks such as the manual tagging and routing of support tickets, the processing of insurance claims and the dispatching of field engineers to incoming work order requests.

Put simply, Lang.ai’s goal is to remove the technical burden of implementing AI for a business.

Lang.ai’s community of users (called “Citizen NLP Builders”) consists of mostly non-technical business roles, ranging from customer service operations to marketers, business analysts and UX designers.

Customers include Freshly, Userzoom, Playvox, Spain’s CaixaBank, Yalo Chat and Bancolombia, among others. 

Ben Segal, director of infrastructural efficiency at Freshly, described the platform as “so nimble.”

“Out of the box, it took us two days to make automated tagging 15% more reliable than a previous platform that we had had in production for 2 years, with the added benefit that now all of our teams can tap into and exploit our support data,” Segal said. “The marketing team has built workflows to understand key customer moments. Our data and analytics team is super excited about having all these new tags in Snowflake, and it’s crazy how easy it is to use.”

Penalva is proud of the fact that Lang.ai’s engineering team is primarily based in Spain and that he has been able to grow the 10-person company outside of his native country.

“With very few resources, it took us a little over two years to build an enterprise-grade product and find the right set of early customers and investors who are aligned with our vision,” he said. “I moved to the US from Spain to build a global company and this is just the beginning…Lang has always been powered by immigrant hustle, and it has been core to our values since day 1.”

News: Huawei files suit over security threat designation

• February 10, 2021
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Earlier this week, Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei spoke rather diplomatically about the company’s hopes of holding talks with the new U.S. administration. The hardware giant is also taking a less conciliatory route, challenging its FCC designation as a national security threat. The company this week filed a suit with the U.S. Court of Appeals for

Earlier this week, Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei spoke rather diplomatically about the company’s hopes of holding talks with the new U.S. administration. The hardware giant is also taking a less conciliatory route, challenging its FCC designation as a national security threat.

The company this week filed a suit with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, calling the FCC ruling, “arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion and not supported by substantial evidence.”

Questions have swirled around the smartphone maker’s ties to the Chinese government for years, but the U.S. greatly ramped up actions against Huawei during the Trump years. The federal government has taken a number of routes to essentially kneecap the company, including, notably, its addition to the Department of Commerce’s “entity list,” which effectively barred it from working with U.S. companies.

Huawei likely sees a change in U.S. governance as an opportunity to be reevaluated by the powers that be. The company has long denied spying and other security charges. “I would welcome such phone calls and the message is around joint development and shared success,” Ren earlier this week told the media that he was eager to speak with Biden. “The U.S. wants to have economic growth and China wants to have economic growth as well.”

In a statement offered to The Wall Street Journal, however, an FCC spokesperson stayed firm to the 2020 decision, stating, “Last year the FCC issued a final designation identifying Huawei as a national security threat based on a substantial body of evidence developed by the FCC and numerous U.S. national security agencies. We will continue to defend that decision.”

Thus far, the Biden administration hasn’t indicated any plans to soften restrictions on Huawei. Facing opposition from Republican lawmakers, Commerce Secretary nominee Gina Raimondo noted, “I currently have no reason to believe that entities on those lists should not be there. If confirmed, I look forward to a briefing on these entities and others of concern.”

The Biden administration does appear to be reviewing other actions against Chinese companies taken during the Trump administration. Notably, a planned forced sale of TikTok’s U.S. wing has been put on hold while the White House reassesses security concerns.

News: Quilt, an audio social network focused on self care, raises $3.5 million in seed

• February 10, 2021
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The era of social audio 1.0 is in full swing, and while podcasts and Clubhouse have led the way, there are many other audio startups joining the fold. Quilt, an audio social network that focuses on wellness and community, has raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Mayfield Fund, with partner Rishi Garg joining

The era of social audio 1.0 is in full swing, and while podcasts and Clubhouse have led the way, there are many other audio startups joining the fold. Quilt, an audio social network that focuses on wellness and community, has raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Mayfield Fund, with partner Rishi Garg joining the board, to do just that.

Quilt started as a community platform founded by Ashley Sumner, which let local folks meet up with one another in their own homes. Sumner was on the founding team at NeueHouse and has spent her career building community through physical space. Thousands of Quilt conversations were happening out of peoples’ homes until the pandemic struck in March, resulting in an existential crisis for the startup.

Sumner quickly moved Quilt over to Zoom but soon realized that video chat didn’t quite capture the magic that was happening in person, nor did it prove the right medium to foster the type of conversations that had made Quilt so special.

She worked to develop an audio app that would become the new Quilt 2.0, which went live in the App Store at the end of January.

Quilt allows anyone to start a room for a conversation, dropping a line or two of text to describe what they want to talk about. The app is focused on wellness, breaking rooms into three different categories: spiritual and personal development (with conversations around meditation, astrology, human design, etc.), career and purpose (“it was very important to link purpose to it,” said Sumner, “these aren’t networking events”), and relationships, sex, and family.

Image Credits: Quilt

The platform has put specific focus on balancing the engagement levels of content creators and consumers. According to Quilt, 98 percent of hosts attend other hosts’ conversations and more than 50 percent of Quilters talk during any given conversation.

Garg, who has spent nearly two decades in the emerging media space, talked about how the engagement ratio among creators, consumers and ‘bystanders’ is different for each social platform based on the medium and product choices.

“With YouTube, the famous number was 1 percent create, 9 percent engage, and 90 percent sit back,” said Garg. “At Twitter, interestingly, it was 10 percent, 30 percent, 60 percent. If you look at something like Clubhouse, you’re seeing that parallel already happen. It’s like celebrity central. Part of what got us excited about Quilt was that anyone could just start a room. We really focused in on the pathway between being a consumer to being a creator. Starting or hosting a room is shorter than on any other social media platform.”

He added that the norms within the Quilt community are a big part of what makes that possible, saying there is a hurdle associated with platforms that are more celebrity driven or top heavy. Consumers look at the bar that is set by the community and feel they’re not famous enough, or don’t have a big enough community to contribute, he said.

“Part of the magic of Quilt is that everyone can feel like they have something to offer,” Garg explained. “I think it’s a lot more scalable and a lot less fragile than an ecosystem built entirely on celebrity.”

Retention also seems to be strong in Quilt’s early days, with 80 percent of sign-ups coming back for conversations every week. The company also said that around 60 percent of conversations are started spontaneously, rather than being a planned and promoted ‘event.’

Sumner says that Quilt will never generate revenue through advertising, but rather employ a freemium model.

Existing investors such as Freestyle VC’s Jenny Lefcourt and Upside Partnership’s Kent Goldman and Christina Hunt also participated in this latest round alongside new investors, including Houseparty CEO Sima Sistani, The Mini Fund’s Eros Resmini, former Discord CMO Allison Stoloff, and others.

The Quilt team is currently made up of eight people, 50 percent of whom are female and 25 percent of whom are non-Black people of color. Twenty percent are LGBT and 10 percent are non-binary.

News: TikTok’s forced sale to Oracle is put on hold

• February 10, 2021
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The insane saga of a potential forced sale of TikTok’s US operations is reportedly ending — another victim of the transition to methodical and rational policymaking that appears to be the boring new normal under the Presidency of Joe Biden. Last fall, the U.S. government under President Donald Trump took a stab at “gangster capitalism”

The insane saga of a potential forced sale of TikTok’s US operations is reportedly ending — another victim of the transition to methodical and rational policymaking that appears to be the boring new normal under the Presidency of Joe Biden.

Last fall, the U.S. government under President Donald Trump took a stab at “gangster capitalism” by trying to force the sale of TikTok to a group of buyers including Oracle and Walmart.

While the effort was doomed from the start, with TikTok’s parent company ByteDance winning most of the legal challenges to the government effort, a Rubicon had effectively been crossed where the U.S. government appeared willing to spend political capital to stymie the growth of a successful foreign business on its shores for the flimsiest of security reasons.

Now, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the efforts by the U.S. government to push the deal forward “have been shelved indefinitely”, citing sources familiar with the process.

However, discussions between TikTok and U.S. national security officials are continuing because there are valid concerns around TikTok’s data collection and the potential for manipulation and censorship of content on the app.

In the meantime, the U.S. is taking a look at all of the potential threats to data privacy and security from intrusions by foreign governments or using tech developed overseas, according to Emily Horne, the spokeswoman for the National Security Council.

News: Accessibility overlay startup AccessiBe closes $28M series A

• February 10, 2021
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If you want to make your website accessible right now but lack the resources for the kind of serious revamp it would take, an “accessibility overlay” may take the pressure off while the work gets done. Though critics argue that these tools aren’t a permanent solution, AccessiBe has raised $28 million to show that its

If you want to make your website accessible right now but lack the resources for the kind of serious revamp it would take, an “accessibility overlay” may take the pressure off while the work gets done. Though critics argue that these tools aren’t a permanent solution, AccessiBe has raised $28 million to show that its approach is an important part of making the entire web available to everyone.

It’s a problem often faced by small businesses: their website may not have been built to modern accessibility standards, and not only needs a deep dive by professionals to fix, but ongoing work to keep up to date and fix errors. This sort of work can be very expensive, and SMBs may not have the cash to lay out. This is not only a bummer for anyone with a disability who visits the site, but it exposes the business to legal action.

At the enterprise level accessibility is increasingly becoming part of the development process, and startups like Fable and Evinced are looking to push things forward there. For those whose development budgets compete with rent and food money, however, other approaches may be desired.

AccessiBe is one of a few new services called accessibility overlays that claim to provide total ADA compliance and other features just by installing a line of javascript. If it sounds too good to be true… well, it is and it isn’t.

What the overlay code does is scrub the whole website’s user-facing code for issues like unlabeled buttons, fields that aren’t addressable by keyboard navigation, images without alt text, and other common accessibility issues. AccessiBe’s system does so with the addition of machine learning to match features of the target site to those in its training database, so even if something is really poorly coded, it can still be recognized by its context or clear intention.

You can try it out yourself at a handful of websites by appending #showacsb: it’s live on Everlast, Tupperware, and Playmobil (among many others).

The result is a website that works in many ways as if it was designed with accessibility in mind, fixing a lot of the basic problems that prevent visitors with disabilities from using a site, and providing plenty of additional quality-of-life features like improving contrast, stopping animations, changing the font, etc. The overlay can be automatically activated or manually by users prompted by screen reader text that tells them how to do so.

AccessiBe’s agent scans the site regularly and updates what users will see, and the website owner pays monthly (from $40 to a couple hundred a month depending on the size of the site) to have the tool available. This demo video does a pretty good job of showing the problems the tool fixes.

You may wonder how this could be considered anything but good for accessibility, but there’s serious debate over the role of overlays in considerations for how the web should be made more accessible. The implication of such a tool is that all that’s needed to make any website accessible is a single line of code. This leads to a couple problems.

First, it’s questionable whether automated processes like accessiBe’s (and others aimed at developers, like Evinced and AudioEye) can actually catch and fix every accessibility problem. There are many that slip past even the best analysis and others that resist automated fixes. (The company offers a free assessment tool in case you’re curious what it would and wouldn’t catch at your website.)

AccessiBe CEO Shir Ekerling said that this concern has been ameliorated by recent improvements to the technology.

“AccessiBe scans and analyzes every website every day. We know, automatically, exactly what are the interactive elements of the site, where people click, put their mouse, or stay the longest,” he explained. “Combining this with probability algorithms we run (matching every site element to every site element of over 100,000 websites including an insane amount of artificial data), we are able to know exactly what each and every element of the site is and adjust it so it is accessible adhering to WCAG 2.1 level AA.” (The WCAG guidelines can be perused here.)

Likewise considerations that overlays can interfere with existing accessibility tools, for example if a user has a browser or add-on that automatically captions images or reads out text a certain way; Ekerling said accessiBe defers to user-side tools on these things. And it also works on mobile browsers, which many previous overlays didn’t.

There’s also the more philosophical question of whether, by having accessibility essentially something you can turn on and off, a site owner is maintaining a sort of “separate but equal access” to their content. That’s a big no-no in this field, like a restaurant having a separate dining room for people with wheelchairs rather than adding a ramp to the front door. Of course since accessiBe doesn’t make a separate site or permanently modify the source code, it clearly isn’t that. But it’s equally clear that the base site isn’t built to be accessible — it just has a layer of accessibility spread over the top.

The company’s position is that their overlay provides everything needed for ADA compliance and WCAG best practices, and as such constitutes a complete solution for making a website accessible. Others contend that this is not the case and at any rate that developers should not be incentivized to ignore accessibility while building because they think a third party service can provide it with one line of code.

accessiBe is also working on a user-side version that isn’t reliant on a website including the widget, something that could potentially be very helpful to a lot of people but do little to make the web more accessible in its fundamentals. That takes dedication by many independent actors and businesses. The recently hired Michael Hingson, “chief visionary officer,” acknowledges this while also asserting the usefulness of well-done overlays.

The company has raised $28M in the last year, all from K1 Investment Management. K1 initially invested $12M last may, but more than doubled that commitment after 2020 saw accessiBe tripled their ARR. Much of the cash will be used for further R&D and to consult and hire more people with disabilities for testing, feedback, and development.

Every website should be accessible, that much everyone can agree on. But it’s a long, complicated, and expensive road to get there. Tools like accessiBe may not be a permanent solution, but they can make a website more accessible tomorrow — and potentially less vulnerable to lawsuits alleging noncompliance with ADA rules — where deeper changes may take months or years to achieve.

News: Level closes $1.5M to provide financial services to gig workers

• February 10, 2021
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This morning Level, a Seattle-based startup that offers credit to gig-economy workers, announced that it has raised a $1.5 million pre-seed round. Level intends to provide various services to gig-economy workers, starting with a lending product. The goal of Level today is to furnish access to credit to workers who might not be able to

This morning Level, a Seattle-based startup that offers credit to gig-economy workers, announced that it has raised a $1.5 million pre-seed round. Level intends to provide various services to gig-economy workers, starting with a lending product.

The goal of Level today is to furnish access to credit to workers who might not be able to tap it from traditional sources, using their current income from freelance work to back the loan; akin to revenue-based financing for startups, workers can borrow a set amount, and pay back a portion of their future earnings until the debt is settled.

Level has larger plans, including offering other services like insurance products to gig workers in the future.

The startup is not big on the “gig economy” moniker, instead preferring to say that it’s helping the smallest companies grow atop various labor marketplaces, summarizing comments that Level CEO David Edelstein to TechCrunch during an interview concerning the round.

His company has something of a point. Level is not offering loans to Uber drivers, but instead plugged-in with freelance groups like Dolly (on-demand moving), Porch (home improvement), and SmartHop (on-demand trucking), services whose users that may depend on non-standard equipment, like trucks and tools.

So if you are doing, say, moving jobs, and want to invest in a new truck, Level may be willing to front you a chunk of capital towards that buy. Edelstein told TechCrunch, lots of folks manage to earn more after putting borrowed funds to work in their small business.

Users of Level’s loan service can access up to $10,000, though the CEO said that around $2,000 was the “sweet spot” for his company’s service, as that was an amount of money hard to put on consumer credit cards, but still meaningful to its customer base.

This brings us to repayment. As you’d expect, if a person did borrow money from Level and managed to generate more revenue afterwards, they might want to retire their debt more quickly than originally anticipated. What’s notable about the startup’s model is that if a user repays their loan in less than six weeks, Level will refund half the cost of capital that was originally agreed upon.

Normally repayment of capital takes four months, with the percentage of earnings consumed running between 5% and 15%. So, why would Level be willing to drop half its fee for rapid repayment? Trust, its CEO said. As Level wants to offer more services in the future, it’s pushing down capital costs for users, hoping that they will help themselves to more services from the company later on.

To that end, Edelstein said, the company’s usual fee for capital has fallen from 10% to 7%, a rate that his company may push lower over time, perhaps to the break-even point or beyond. Credit, the CEO said, could become a funnel for his company’s broader product suite.

Certainly with its new capital, raised in late December of 2020 from co-lead investors NextView and Untapped, the Seattle-based Level has more time now to maneuver when it comes to product. And with insurance products coming in Q2 to some degree, and more broadly in Q3, we’re not far from seeing what’s next for the startup.

TechStars, Acumen, and Ascend.vc also participated in the round. Per the startup, the Employment Technology Fund is “supporting” the startup’s credit facility. (Credit facilities can get quite large, business depending. If Level scales as it hopes to, expect it to announce more on this front in time.)

Level is a bit like an American Heru in that, akin to its Latin American fellow-traveler, it wants to offer more and better services, including insurance, to those active at work but not in traditional, full-time roles. If they succeed, expect similar companies to crop up around the world.

News: LA-based SoLo Funds raises $10 million to offer an alternative to predatory payday lenders

• February 10, 2021
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SoLo Funds wants to replace payday lenders with a community-based, market-driven model for individual lending and now has $10 million to expand its business in the U.S. Payday lenders offer high interest, short-term loans to borrowers who are at their most vulnerable and the terms of their loans often trap borrowers in a cycle of

SoLo Funds wants to replace payday lenders with a community-based, market-driven model for individual lending and now has $10 million to expand its business in the U.S.

Payday lenders offer high interest, short-term loans to borrowers who are at their most vulnerable and the terms of their loans often trap borrowers in a cycle of debt from which there’s no escape.

Around 80% of Americans don’t have adequate savings to cover unforeseen expenses, and it’s that statistic that has made payday lending a lucrative business in the U.S.

Over the past decade websites like GoFundMe and others have cropped up to offer a space where people can donate money to individuals or causes that in some cases serve to supplement the incomes of people most in need. SoLo Funds operates as an alternative.

It’s a marketplace where borrowers can set the terms of their loan repayment and lenders can earn extra income while supporting folks who need the help.

The company is financing tens of thousands of loans per month, according to chief executive officer and co-founder, Travis Holoway and loan volumes are growing at about 40% monthly, he said.

While Holoway would not disclose the book value of the loans transacted on the platform, he did say that the company’s default and delinquency rates were lower than that of its competitors. “Our default rate is about three times better than the industry average — which is the payday lending industry that we’re looking to disrupt,” Holoway said.

The company also offers a sort of default insurance product that lenders can purchase to backstop any losses they experience, Holoway said. That service, rolled out in April of last year, helped account for some of the explosive 2,000% growth that the company saw over the course of 2020.

SoLo has seen the most activity in Texas, Illinois, California, and New York, states with large populations and cities with the highest cost of living.

“Our borrowers are school teachers… are social workers. When you live in those larger cities with higher costs of living they can’t afford the financial shocks that they could if they lived in Dayton, Ohio,” said Holoway.

While the company’s borrowers represent one cross section of America, the lenders tend to also not be hailing from the demographic that a casual observer might expect, Holoway said.

About half of loans on the platform are made by folks that Holoway called power lenders, while the rest are coming from less frequent users.

“A majority of [power lenders] are college educated and the majority of them tend to be white men. It’s individuals who you might not think are going to be power lenders… They may make $100,000 to $125,000 per year,” said Holoway. “They’re looking to diversify their capital and deploy it to make returns. And they’re able to help individuals out who otherwise would not be able to pay for groceries, paying rent or taking care of their transportation expenses.”

Given the company’s growth, it’s no wonder investors like ACME Capital, with support from Impact America Fund, Techstars, Endeavor Catalyst, CEAS Investments and more joined the new round. previous investors like West Ventures, Taavet Hinrikus of Transferwise, Jewel Burks Solomon of Google Startups, Zachary Bookman of OpenGov, Richelieu Dennis of Essence Ventures, and tech innovation accelerators also participated in financing the company.

“For too long, there have been limited options for individuals in need of immediate funds due to unforeseen circumstances, like a shift in hourly schedules, unplanned car troubles or other cases,” said SoLo, co-founder and CEO Travis Holoway. “SoLo was created to offer safe, affordable options for borrowers that need cash quickly, while also creating a marketplace for lenders to grow capital and help community members in need. We believe that at the end of the day, people are innately honest and tend towards generosity, and our platform’s growth is further proof that people want to do good in the world and make an impact.”

News: Nobl9 raises $21M Series B for its SLO management platform

• February 10, 2021
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SLAs, SLOs, SLIs. If there’s one thing everybody in the business of managing software development loves, it’s acronyms. And while everyone probably knows what a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is, Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) may not be quite as well known. The idea, though, is straightforward, with SLOs being the

SLAs, SLOs, SLIs. If there’s one thing everybody in the business of managing software development loves, it’s acronyms. And while everyone probably knows what a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is, Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) may not be quite as well known. The idea, though, is straightforward, with SLOs being the overall goals a team must hit to meet the promises of its SLA agreements, and SLIs being the actual measurements that back up those other two numbers. With the advent of DevOps, these ideas, which are typically part of a company’s overall Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) efforts, are becoming more mainstream, but putting them into practice isn’t always straightforward.

Noble9 aims to provide enterprises with the tools they need to build SLO-centric operations and the right feedback loops inside an organization to help it hit its SLOs without making too many trade-offs between the cost of engineering, feature development and reliability.

The company today announced that it has raised a $21 million Series B round led by its Series A investors Battery Ventures and CRV. In addition, Series A investors Bonfire Ventures and Resolute Ventures also participated, together with new investors Harmony Partners and Sorenson Ventures.

Before starting Nobl9, co-founders Marcin Kurc (CEO) and Brian Singer (CPO) spent time together at Orbitera, where Singer was the co-founder and COO and Kurc the CEO, and then at Google Cloud, after it acquired Orbitera in 2016. In the process, the team got to work with and appreciate Google’s site reliability engineering frameworks.

As they started looking into what to do next, that experience led them to look into productizing these ideas. “We came to this conclusion that if you’re going into Kubernetes, into service-based applications and modern architectures, there’s really no better way to run that than SRE,” Kurc told me. “And when we started looking at this, naturally SRE is a complete framework, there are processes. We started looking at elements of SRE and we agreed that SLO — service level objectives — is really the foundational part. You can’t do SRE without SLOs.”

As Singer noted, in order to adopt SLOs, businesses have to know how to turn the data they have about the reliability of their services, which could be measured in uptime or latency, for example, into the right objectives. That’s complicated by the fact that this data could live in a variety of databases and logs, but the real question is how to define the right SLOs for any given organization based on this data.

“When you go into the conversation with an organization about what their goals are with respect to reliability and how they start to think about understanding if there’s risks to that, they very quickly get bogged down in how are we going to get this data or that data and instrument this or instrument that,” Singer said. “What we’ve done is we’ve built a platform that essentially takes that as the problem that we’re solving. So no matter where the data lives and in what format it lives, we want to be able to reduce it to very simply an error budget and an objective that can be tracked and measured and reported on.”

The company’s platform launched into general availability last week, after a beta that started last year. Early customers include Brex and Adobe.

As Kurc told me, the team actually thinks of this new funding round as a Series A round, but because its $7.5 million Series A was pretty sizable, they decided to call it a Series A instead of a seed round. “It’s hard to define it. If you define it based on a revenue milestone, we’re pre-revenue, we just launched the GA product,” Singer told me. “But I think just in terms of the maturity of the product and the company, I would put us at the [Series] B.”

The team told me that it closed the round at the end of last November, and while it considered pitching new VCs, its existing investors were already interested in putting more money into the company and since its previous round had been oversubscribed, they decided to add to this new round some of the investors that didn’t make the cut for the Series A.

The company plans to use the new funding to advance its roadmap and expand its team, especially across sales, marketing and customer success.

News: Facebook to test downranking political content in News Feed

• February 10, 2021
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After years of optimizing its products for engagement, no matter the costs, Facebook announced today it will “test” changes to its News Feed focused on reducing the distribution of political content. The company qualified these tests will be temporary, impact a small percentage of people, and will only run in select markets, including the U.S.,

After years of optimizing its products for engagement, no matter the costs, Facebook announced today it will “test” changes to its News Feed focused on reducing the distribution of political content. The company qualified these tests will be temporary, impact a small percentage of people, and will only run in select markets, including the U.S., Canada, Brazil, and Indonesia.

The point of the experiments, Facebook says, is to explore a variety of ways it can rank political content in the News Feed using different signals, in order to decide on what approach it may take in the future.

It also notes that COVID-19 information from authoritative health organizations like the CDC and WHO, as well as national and regional health agencies and services, will be exempt from being downranked in the News Feed during these tests. Similarly, content from official government agencies will not be impacted.

The tests may also include a survey component, where Facebook asks impacted users about their experience.

Facebook’s announcement of the tests is meant to sound underwhelming because any large-scale changes would be an admission of guilt, of sorts. Facebook has the capacity to make far greater changes — when it wanted to downrank publisher content, it did so, decimating a number of media businesses along the way. In previous years, it also took harder action against low-quality sites, scrapers, clickbait, spam, and more.

The news of Facebook’s tests comes at a time when people are questioning social media’s influence and direction. A growing number of social media users now believe tech platforms have been playing a role in radicalizing people, as their algorithms promote unbalanced views of the world, isolate people into social media bubbles, and allow dangerous speech and misinformation to go viral.

In a poll this week, reported by Axios, a majority of Americans said they now believe social media radicalizes, with 74% also saying misinformation is an an extremely or very serious problem. Another 76% believe social media was at least partially responsible for the Capitol riot, which 7 in 10 think is the result of unchecked extreme behavior online, the report noted.

Meanwhile, a third of Americans regularly get their news from Facebook, according to a study from Pew Research Center, which means they’re often now reading more extreme viewpoints from fringe publishers, a related Pew study had found.

Elsewhere in the world, Facebook has been accused of exacerbating political unrest, including the deadly riots in Indonesia, genocide in Myanmar, the spread of misinformation in Brazil during elections, and more.

Facebook, however, today argues that political content is a small amount of the News Feed (e.g. 6% of what people in the U.S. see) — an attempt to deflect any blame for the state of the world, while positioning the downranking change as just something user feedback demands that Facebook explore.