Monthly Archives: February 2021

News: Electric moped startup Revel launches an EV charging business

• February 3, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Revel, the shared electric moped startup, is building a DC fast-charging station for electric vehicles in New York City, the first in a new business venture that will eventually spread to other cities. The company said Wednesday that this new “Superhub,” which is located at the former Pfizer building in Brooklyn, will contain 30 chargers

Revel, the shared electric moped startup, is building a DC fast-charging station for electric vehicles in New York City, the first in a new business venture that will eventually spread to other cities.

The company said Wednesday that this new “Superhub,” which is located at the former Pfizer building in Brooklyn, will contain 30 chargers and be open to the public 24 hours a day. This will be the first in a network of Superhubs opened by Revel across New York City, the company said.

Revel didn’t build the EV charging infrastructure in house. Instead, it is using Tritium’s new RTM75 model for the first 10 chargers at its Brooklyn site, which will go live this spring. These chargers are designed to delivery with 100 additional miles of charge to an electric vehicle in about 20 minutes, according to Revel.

The EV charging business has been couched by Revel as a mission to electrify cities. The move comes as a growing number of automakers, including legacy companies like GM, Ford and VW Group along with new entrant Rivian and EV leader Tesla add more electric vehicles to their portfolios.

Revel’s expansion into charging marks its first new product line since launching a shared fleet of electric mopeds in 2018. Revel, founded by Frank Reig and Paul Suhey, started with a pilot program in Brooklyn and later expanded to Queens, the Bronx and sections of Manhattan. It has been on a fast-paced growth track thanks to the $27.6 million in capital raised October 2019 in a Series A round led by Ibex Investors. The equity round included newcomer Toyota AI Ventures and further investments from Blue Collective, Launch Capital and Maniv Mobility.

Several thousands mopeds are available to rent in New York City today. Revel expanded its shared moped business to other cities such as Austin, Miami and Washington, D.C in its first 18 months of operation. Last year, the company launched in Oakland and received a permit in July 2020 to operate in San Francisco.

Shared mopeds haven’t been successful everywhere. Revel pulled out of Austin in December. Reig said at the time that the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused ridership to fall across shared micromobility services, along with the city’s deep-rooted car culture was proven difficult to penetrate.

News: Venture capital is going to get even bigger, faster, and more expensive this year

• February 3, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

The venture capital market has skewed later and larger in recent quarters, something you might have felt in the rapid recent pace of new unicorn formation. December was a hot month for new unicorns, for example. So was January. February likely will be more of the same. Powering those unicorns births are huge rounds led

The venture capital market has skewed later and larger in recent quarters, something you might have felt in the rapid recent pace of new unicorn formation. December was a hot month for new unicorns, for example. So was January. February likely will be more of the same.

Powering those unicorns births are huge rounds led by large funds. In 2020, for example, there were at least 97 global fintech rounds worth $100 million or more. That number was up from 92 in 2019 and 66 in 2018. Each preceding year was a prior record.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

It’s possible to see how venture is trending towards bigger, later-stage rounds in other pieces of private market data. Venture capital in Europe during Q4 2020 set a record for dollars invested, some $14.3 billion, for example. But that money was spread against the continent’s lowest deal count since Q4 2019.

The result of that divergence has been rising deal sizes in Europe. A median Series B on the continent saw its value double from $10 million in 2016 to $20 million in 2020, for example.

Adding to the pile of numbers, the US startup industry raised around 90 rounds worth $100 million or more in Q3 2020 alone.

The data goes on and on. If you read essentially any recent TechCrunch piece concerning the state of venture capital, private rounds are getting bigger as unicorns propagate, and the pace at which the market manages to find exits for the largest startups lags their aggregate value creation.

2021 could be more than just more of the same; this year could set fresh records for private investment results.

Parsing data from Silicon Valley Bank’s most recent markets’ report, I’ve pulled a few trends that help illustrate where the startup and private capital markets are heading this year. And, for flavor, I’ve also collected some data from an Insight Partners’ dive into the impact that middle-ages startups have on job creation. That final set of data will illustrate how quickly the startup market has bounced back from COVID-19 lows to near-record numbers and what that rebound could mean for 2021.

It’s going to be one hell of a year. Let’s talk about why.

2020’s venture capital market

News: Global smartphone shipments expected to rebound 11% this year

• February 3, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Like countless other industries, mobile phone sales got hit hard in 2020. The industry hit a 10.5% decline for the year, as Covid-19 first decimated the supply and later consumer demand for devices. It was the latest in a rough couple of years for manufacturers, but 2020 hit significantly harder than most. New numbers from

Like countless other industries, mobile phone sales got hit hard in 2020. The industry hit a 10.5% decline for the year, as Covid-19 first decimated the supply and later consumer demand for devices. It was the latest in a rough couple of years for manufacturers, but 2020 hit significantly harder than most.

New numbers from Gartner point to a rebound to pre-2020 levels. The firm is forecasting 1.5 billion devices shipped globally for 2021, amounting to an 11.4% increase across the board. We certainly saw the beginnings of that rebound arrive in Q4 for last year, as declines continued to slow, thanks in no small part to a record quarter for iPhone sales.

That points to the beginnings of a so-called “supercycle” for Apple, which hits a sort of perfect storm. The last few years have seen consumers slow down upgrades, as device prices increased, features were generally less compelling and their existing devices were perfectly fine so as not to warrant a standard two to three year upgrade pattern.

Analysts pointed to 5G a clear conduit for righting slipping sales numbers early last year, but a global pandemic very much threw a wrench in all of that. If anything, however, the iPhone’s Covid-19 related delay actually contributed to a stellar quarter for the company, both in time for holiday sales and the arrival of multiple vaccines that pointed to some potential return to normalcy.

The long awaited 5G bump will continue in 2021, according to the new numbers, coupled with a quick push to offer next-gen wireless at an accessible price.

“The growing availability of 5G networks coupled with a higher variety of 5G smartphones starting at $200 will steer demand in mature markets and China,” the firm notes. “Demand in emerging countries will be driven by buyers looking for a smartphone with better specifications and a 5G connectivity as an optional feature. Gartner forecasts sales of 5G smartphones will total 539 million units worldwide in 2021, which will represent 35% of total smartphone sales in that year.”

News: Box acquires eSignature startup SignRequest for new content workflows

• February 3, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Box announced this morning that it has agreed to acquire eSignature startup SignRequest for $55 million.The acquisition gives the company a native signature component it has been lacking and opens up new workflows for the company. Box CEO Aaron Levie says the company has seen increased demand from customers to digitize more of their workflows,

Box announced this morning that it has agreed to acquire eSignature startup SignRequest for $55 million.The acquisition gives the company a native signature component it has been lacking and opens up new workflows for the company.

Box CEO Aaron Levie says the company has seen increased demand from customers to digitize more of their workflows, and this acquisition is about giving them a signature component right inside Box that will be known as Box Sign moving forward. “With Box Sign, customers can have a seamless esignature experience right where their content already lives,” Levie told me.

While Box has partnerships with other eSignature vendors, this gives it one to call its own, one that will be built into Box starting this summer. As we have learned during this pandemic, the more work we can do remotely, the safer it is. Even after the pandemic ends and we get back to more face-to-face interactions, being able to do things fully in the cloud and removing paper from the workflow will speed up everything.

“The massive push to remote work effectively instantly highlighted for every enterprise where their digital workflows were breaking down. And eSignature was a major part of that — too many industries still rely on paper based processes,” he said.

Levie says that the signature component has been a key missing piece from the platform. “As for our platform, when you look at Snowflake, they’re the data cloud. Salesforce is the sales cloud. Adobe is the marketing cloud. We want to build the content cloud. Imagine one platform that can power the entire lifecycle of content. eSignature has been a major missing link for critical workflows,” he said.

He believes this will open up the platform for a number of scenarios, that while possible before, could not flow as easily between Box components. “Having SignRequest gets us more natively into mission critical workflows like customer contracts, vendor onboarding, healthcare onboarding and supply chain collaboration,” Levie explained.

It’s worth noting that Dropbox acquired HelloSign for $230 million two years ago to provide it with a similar kind of functionality and workflow capability, but analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe from Deep Analysis, a firm that follows the content management market, says this wasn’t really in reaction to that.

“I think what is interesting here is that Box is going to integrate SignRequest and bundle it as part of the standard service. That’s what really caught my eye as the challenge with eSig is that it’s typically a separate product and so gets limited use. They bought it partly in response to Dropbox, but it was a hole that needed fixing regardless so would have done so anyway,” Pelz-Sharpe explained.

As for SignRequest, the company was founded in the Netherlands in 2014. Neither Pitchbook nor Crunchbase has a record of it raising funds. The plan is for the company’s employees to join Box and help build the signature component that will become Box Sign. According to a message to customers on the company website, existing customers will have the opportunity over the next year to move to Box Sign, and get all of the other components of the Box platform.

Levie says the basic Box Sign function will be built into the platform at no additional charge, but there will be more advanced features coming that they could charge for. The deal is expected to close soon with the SignRequest team remaining in The Netherlands.

News: Evinced raises $17M to speed up accessibility testing for the web

• February 3, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Making and keeping the web accessible is a full-time job, and like any other development role, accessibility tools need to evolve to keep up with the times. Evinced is a startup that promises both richer and faster checks of websites in production or in progress, and it just raised $17M to take its tools to

Making and keeping the web accessible is a full-time job, and like any other development role, accessibility tools need to evolve to keep up with the times. Evinced is a startup that promises both richer and faster checks of websites in production or in progress, and it just raised $17M to take its tools to the next level.

Because accessibility problems can happy in so many ways, it often takes a lot of manual code review to catch the errors. Even a team thinking about making their site fully accessible from the start — which should be everyone — can miss that this script doesn’t hook into that variable right if this menu is opened, and so on.

There’s automated code review, but it can be slow and bulky. Evinced is making a powerful, streamlined tool that checks a website in a fraction of a second while you’re using it, presenting the problems in a way that’s easy for devs to share and address. It also doesn’t trip up on the fancy, javascript-heavy web apps that millions use today.

Here’s an example of a modern website that looks fine but is obviously (for demo purposes) riddled with accessibility issues. The video gives a good breakdown of what this part of the Evinced product does:

Honestly, that’s how it feels like it ought to look, but existing enterprise-level tools probably aren’t quite so efficient. And as you can see, the tool responds instantly while the user (that is to say, the developer) proceeds through the various actions the site enables. It could be, after all, that auditing the site before anyone fills in a form or pulls down any menus could give a misleading green light.

The inspector also brings in a bit of AI in the form of smart rules and computer vision, so if an element looks like a menu or button but isn’t labeled correctly, it isn’t fooled. Those elements do have distinct styles and roles: if something can be clicked and turns into a list that the user chooses from, well, it’s a pulldown menu whether it’s called that or not.

Image Credits: Evinced

Naturally there are also quick fixes suggested and the ability to easily export the issues for formal inspection by the boss, as well as other expected features for a web development tool. It’s available as a Chrome extension, or as an API or automated part of other analysis or commit actions, throwing its list of errors in with the rest.

The company formed back in 2018, when they started development. The next year they hooked up with a few large enterprises to see about integrating and testing within their ecosystems. Capitol One became their biggest customer and is now an investor.

“We have since deployed our products in production at Capital One (means they are used every day – and power their end-to-end accessibility operations – see the Capital One blog) and others. These are paying customers that have an enterprise license,” said Founder and CEO, Navin Thandani.

Indeed, as Capitol One explains:

Capital One partnered with Evinced early, to guide their development with a particular focus on: helping developers release accessible code integrating multiple automated testing steps through the build and deployment lifecycle building products that can automatically scan for accessibility across a full web property (including through logins and internal repositories), and do this fast.

Capital One partnered with Evinced early, to guide their development with a particular focus on: helping developers release accessible code integrating multiple automated testing steps through the build and deployment lifecycle building products that can automatically scan for accessibility across a full web property (including through logins and internal repositories), and do this fast.

We’ve seen Evinced discover as much as 10x more critical accessibility issues than we were previously finding through automated testing alone. An even greater number of issues are discovered when a site is more interactive, including keyboard and screen reader usability issues.

Automated testing on a large enterprise scale can be an extremely complex and time consuming effort. Evinced is speedy and reliable, with 40x faster execution, enabling us to cut our processing time in some cases from 4-5 days down to less than 3 hours (and is being further optimized).

Glowing words, even if they are from an investor (technically Capital One Ventures, but still).

The company’s $17M series A was co-led by M12 BGV, and Capital One Ventures and included previous investors Engineering Capital.

As a sort of debut celebration present, Evinced is announcing its free tiers of service, including an iOS app accessibility debugger, which should be helpful to all the folks making apps who don’t know a thing about WCAG guidelines and ARIA roles. There’s also a free “community edition” site scanner that admins can sign up to be approved for, and a free trial for enterprises that want to give it a shot.

News: Dear Sophie: What’s the recipe for an H-1B?

• February 3, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

What goes into an H-1B petition? How has it changed in recent weeks? Is the lottery going to be wage-based or random?

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

I want to sponsor a potential employee for an H-1B but the process for an H-1B petition seems pretty complex.

What goes into an H-1B petition? How has it changed in recent weeks? Is the lottery going to be wage-based or random?

— Hungry to Learn in Hillsborough

Dear Hungry:

This is a great time to get started on the H-1B lottery process — the time is fast approaching. In my most recent podcast episode about H-1Bs on Immigration Law for Tech Startups, we covered planning for the H-1B lottery.

For all those foodies out there, in this column, I include a recipe for making your very first H-1B, plus the latest on lottery timing, whether the lottery will be wage-based and pay-to-play, the end of Buy American, Hire American, and changes in how H-1B wage levels are calculated.

New to the H-1B?

To get started, if you’re a newbie looking to whet your appetite with what’s involved in the H-1B process, there’s no need for the H-1B lottery season to feel complex or daunting. In fact, I wrote out a recipe so you can easily understand how to cook up an H-1B petition. 😉

Composite image credits: Joanna Buniak (opens in a new window) / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window)

Alcorn H-1B Petition Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 hungry employer seeking top global talent
• > 1 motivated job seeker(s) from around the world
• > 1 experienced business immigration attorney
• > 1 compassionate business immigration paralegal
• 1 package clear communication
• 1 gallon legal strategy; add more to taste
• 1 gallon hard work, divided
• 4 cups enthusiasm and dedication
• 2 questionnaires
• 1 Labor Condition Application (LCA)
• 4 forms for USCIS, 5 if you want to broil the case and eat sooner
• 1 robust letter of support from the company
• To taste: Job seekers’ supporting documents, as needed
• For startup flavor: sprinkling of company formation documents

Directions

1. It’s important to start off the H-1B with a solid legal strategy. Start by combining the employer and job seeker with at least one business immigration attorney and at least one business immigration paralegal. Add communication, half gallon of legal strategy and 1 cup of enthusiasm and dedication.
2. After the legal strategy has been prepped, separate the rest of the ingredients into separate containers (there will be some overlap).
3. Take the two questionnaires and distribute evenly between the employer and job seeker. Add to pan over medium-low heat or high heat depending on how soon everyone wants to eat.
4. Once the questionnaires are evenly browned, remove from heat and examine to make sure everything is cooked properly.
5. Once the questionnaires are reviewed, use some of the flavors to prepare the Labor Condition Application (LCA). Add in 1 cup of legal strategy and 1 quart of hard work. Let simmer for 7-10 days.
6. While the LCA is simmering, prep your forms one at a time. Add ½ cup of legal strategy and 2 cups of hard work.
7. After the forms are prepped, use the remaining legal strategy (more if necessary), 2 quarts of hard work, and 1 cup of enthusiasm and dedication to prepare the letter of support.
8. Once that’s ready, and the LCA is fully cooked, use ½ quart of hard work to add the glazed forms, LCA and letter of support into a bowl (preferably Adobe Acrobat). After adding the letter of support, fold in the job seekers’ supporting documents. Add 1 cup of enthusiasm and dedication. Add startup sprinkles if desired.
9. Finally, use the remaining 2 cups of enthusiasm and dedication to bake the case with USCIS!
10. Allow to cool for 15 calendar days if famished, or 4-6 months if you’re not that hungry.
11. Enjoy!

For those experts out there hungering for the latest H-1B updates, here’s a rundown of what we’ve been seeing over the last two weeks since the Biden Administration took office:

Lottery timing

We expect an imminent announcement regarding the details of the upcoming FY2022 H-1B lottery registration process for cap-subject nonimmigrant visa petitions. The electronic registration period lasts at least 14 days, and the latest possible start date will be March 18, 2021. We’re also awaiting details on when the initial registration period will begin; last year it lasted from March 1 to 20. Feel free to listen back to Get Ready for the H-1B FY2022 Lottery for more details on how this worked last year and please stay tuned if you’re planning on filing an H-1Bs this year: Following these dates is crucial.

Will the lottery be pay-to-play?

A final rule called “Modification of Registration Requirement for Petitioners Seeking To File Cap-Subject H–1B Petitions” issued under Trump is currently scheduled to take effect on March 9, 2021. It would change the lottery from being random to being allocated based on highest to lowest relative wage. On January 20 the Biden administration instructed all agencies to consider delaying the effective date of certain rules not yet in effect, such as this one.

We’re all waiting with bated breath to see if this new change will go through. So far USCIS has not published any rule in the Federal Register indicating that the wage-based H-1B lottery will be delayed until after the scheduled start date. Also, over the past few days, there are some preliminary indications that the system will go forward as Trump planned, even under the Biden administration. This includes changes to the H-1B registration online tool and the form.

Although a wage-based allocation might make H-1B salaries more expensive for some employers, it would also dramatically increase immigrant security and employer predictability. As we all wait to see what USCIS will decide to do here, you can also access our free H-1B guide for more information on H-1Bs.

The end of Buy American, Hire American

On January 25, President Biden issued Executive Order 14005, “Ensuring the Future Is Made in All of America by All of America’s Workers.” This ends Trump’s “Buy American and Hire American” Executive Order and ensures a broader focus of helping American businesses “compete in strategic industries” and helping “America’s workers thrive.” We anticipate that this change will probably lead to higher rates of U.S.-business-based visas and green cards being approved in the future.

Changes in wage-level calculations

There are changes to the way that prevailing wages are calculated for visas such as H-1Bs and the PERM portion of the green card process. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain indicated that new rules may be withdrawn or delayed. We’ve already seen the Department of Labor withdraw the Office of Foreign Labor Certification H-1B Program Bulletin and a Wage and Hour Division Field Assistance Bulletin (FAB) on LCAs, so it is no longer in effect. Additionally, DOL announced this week that it will delay the rule regarding prevailing wage levels, to not take effect until May 14, 2021.

We’re tracking all the major H-1B changes here, so stay tuned to Dear Sophie for all the latest!

All my best,

Sophie

Have a question? Ask it here. We reserve the right to edit your submission for clarity and/or space. The information provided in “Dear Sophie” is general information and not legal advice. For more information on the limitations of “Dear Sophie,” please view our full disclaimer here. You can contact Sophie directly at Alcorn Immigration Law.

Sophie’s podcast, Immigration Law for Tech Startups, is available on all major podcast platforms. If you’d like to be a guest, she’s accepting applications!

News: Edtech valuations aren’t skyrocketing, but investors see more exit opportunities

• February 3, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Despite the pandemic, investors don’t seem to value remote learning as much as they do tech sectors like e-commerce and fintech.

Less than a year after we put out an initial temperature check survey, it’s clear that specialist investors are even more bullish on edtech. Bears are hard to find right now: the sector, once undercapitalized, has brought in $10 billion in venture capital funding globally in 2020.

As investors told us last week, the biggest consumer opportunity in 2021 and beyond is lifelong learning (and portfolio companies have the profits to prove it).

But despite edtech’s noise, the second installment of our edtech survey shows that VCs think startups haven’t enjoyed parallel gains from a valuation perspective. The sentiment suggests that despite an apparent revitalization, edtech isn’t at the same level of “value” in investor eyes like sectors such as e-commerce, consumer and fintech.

As Mercedes Bent of Lightspeed Venture Partners said, “edtech didn’t tend to have heady valuations before the pandemic, and through 2020 I’m seeing edtech companies raise at valuations that are reasonable for Silicon Valley; still nothing like what we see in fintech.”

Now, valuations aren’t everything — but they aren’t nothing, either. Where edtech lacks in impressive valuations, investors see it gaining in exit opportunities. Many investors think that the exit environment is set to dramatically change in the next few years.

We’ve already seen Nerdy and Skillsoft, two edtech companies, go public via SPACs in the past few months. Private equity ownership is an interesting dynamic to be aware of here, especially as Vista recently scooped up PluralSight for $3.5 billion.

Here are the investors we spoke to, along with their areas of interest and expertise:

• Deborah Quazzo, managing partner, GSV Ventures (an education fund backing ClassDojo, Degreed, Clever)
• Ashley Bittner, founding partner, Firework Ventures (a future-of-work fund with portfolio companies LearnIn and TransfrVR)
• Jomayra Herrera, principal, Cowboy Ventures (a generalist fund with portfolio companies Hone and Guild Education)
• John Danner, managing partner, Dunce Capital (an edtech and future-of-work fund with portfolio companies Lambda School and Outschool)
• Mercedes Bent and Bradley Twohig, partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners (a multistage generalist fund with investments including Forage, Clever and Outschool)
• Ian Chiu, managing director, Owl Ventures (a large edtech-focused fund backing highly valued companies including BYJU’s, Newsela and Masterclass) 
• Jan Lynn-Matern, founder and partner, Emerge Education (a leading edtech seed fund in Europe with portfolio companies like Aula, Unibuddy and BibliU) 
• Benoit Wirz, partner, Brighteye Ventures (an active edtech-focused venture capital fund in Europe that backs YouSchool, Lightneer, and Aula)
• Charles Birnbaum, partner, Bessemer Venture Partners (a generalist fund with portfolio companies including Guild Education and Brightwheel)
• Daniel Pianko, co-founder and managing director, University Ventures (a higher-ed and future-of-work fund that is backing Imbellus and Admithub)
• Rebecca Kaden, managing partner, Union Square Ventures (a generalist fund with portfolio companies including TopHat, Quizlet, Duolingo)
• Andreata Muforo, partner, TLCom Capital (a generalist fund backing uLesson)

Deborah Quazzo, managing partner, GSV

How has edtech’s boom impacted your deal-making? Has the new interest from generalist investors made valuations too bubbly, or is the market growth helping everyone?

We met on Zoom with over 800 founding teams in COVID all over the world. We invested in 14 new companies and are just finishing rounds in two more. Valuation pressures are across tech sectors. I’d argue that education still lags average tech. The question for edtech is whether there is potential for a $100 billion company in the sector — will TAMs support it.

Edtech has traditionally had few exits. When do you expect to see that change? Are you optimistic about the boom in funding lately? On the other hand, what consolidation do you expect to see?

Exit volume is rising already with a wide range of strategic and financial buyers of edtech companies — something that didn’t exist before. You will see numerous high-value exits in the first half of 2021. It’s the public market “exits” that have really lagged and that I hope turns around in 2021 and 2022. There are numerous global companies that could go public and the addition of SPAC IPOs creates another positive dynamic.

Ashley Bittner, founding partner, Firework Ventures

How has edtech’s boom impacted your deal-making? Has the new interest from generalist investors made valuations too bubbly, or is the market growth helping everyone?

The boom has not directly impacted my deal-making. We tend to work with CEOs looking for category expertise and track record in the space. I do worry about overexuberance creating disappointing returns that sour interest in the sector. There are important TAM, business model, pedagogical and regulatory factors to consider in valuation.

Edtech has traditionally had few exits. When do you expect to see that change? Are you optimistic about the boom in funding lately? On the other hand, what consolidation do you expect to see? 

I think that will change shortly … I suspect many of the notable exits will come in future of work/human capital, consumer and in international markets for early education and K-12.

Jomayra Herrera, principal, Cowboy Ventures

How has edtech’s boom impacted your deal-making? Has the new interest from generalist investors made valuations too bubbly, or is the market growth helping everyone?
Edtech has a history of going in booms (when investors find new excitement for the sector) and busts (when investors realize the difficulties in scaling companies in the space). We happen to be going through a boom right now, which I think is an overall good thing for market innovation. While valuations across all sectors are expensive right now, I think more capital going toward innovating a sector that has an impact on everyone’s life will result in a net positive. We have a history of investing in the sector and will continue to do so as we see new, category-defining companies arise.

Edtech has traditionally had few exits. When do you expect to see that change? Are you optimistic about the boom in funding lately? On the other hand, what consolidation do you expect to see?
Edtech has had plenty of exits, but they are usually smaller and typically to PE firms or companies that have large distribution channels. There are very few large IPOs. I think we will start to see larger exits for three primary reasons: (I) accelerated consumer adoption of online and hybrid learning will increase market sizes, (II) as educators and institutions get more comfortable with leveraging technology in their practice we may see shorter sales cycle and more budget available, (III) many larger exits tend to be platforms as opposed to content providers (e.g., Canvas, 2U, Instructure) and with a higher standard for infrastructure there is a space for new competitors.
I expect even more consolidation in the bootcamp space. We’re already seeing it with Flatiron, Thinkful, General Assembly, Bloc and many others having already been acquired.

John Danner, managing partner, Dunce Capital

News: Granulate nabs $30M for software to optimize workloads and latency

• February 3, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Services like video streaming, gaming, media-intensive advertising and marketing technology are putting more strain on bandwidth and backend latency than ever before due to the surge of online traffic in the last year. But for most organizations in today’s usage-based cloud world, that can represent a huge cost in compute power — or a major

Services like video streaming, gaming, media-intensive advertising and marketing technology are putting more strain on bandwidth and backend latency than ever before due to the surge of online traffic in the last year. But for most organizations in today’s usage-based cloud world, that can represent a huge cost in compute power — or a major investment in a company’s own latency technology — to try to address that.

This has created an opportunity for startups building optimization tools. Today, one called Granulate — which has built software for organizations to handle those loads more intelligently and cost-effectively — is announcing a round of funding after seeing a huge boost in business in the last 10 months, with customer growth up 360% and revenues growing 570%.

The Tel Aviv startup has picked up $30 million, a Series B, led by Red Dot Capital Partners, with previous backers Insight Partners, TLV Partners, and Hetz Ventures, and new backer Dawn Capital also participating.

The timing of this Series B speaks to the demand in the market right now: it comes on the back of Granulate closing a $12 million Series A only in April last year. Investors say that its business growth is what prompted them to re-up so soon.

“Granulate’s unique technology and impressive growth since their last funding round reflects a rising market demand for their game-changing optimization solution,” said Yaniv Stern, Managing Partner at Red Dot Capital Partners, in a statement. “For companies facing rising infrastructure costs or focusing on operating cost reduction, Granulate offers a solution that can drive additional improvement regardless of any other solutions already deployed by their clients.”

Granulate is not disclosing its valuation with this latest round, which brings the total raised by the startup to $45 million. 

The opportunity in the market that Granulate is targeting is the fact that media-heavy content, and services like e-commerce that rely on efficient responsiveness on sites and apps to keep people from abandoning their shopping carts, are all on the rise.

But as companies look to keep customers happy with better quality services, they are also trying to keep an eye on margins and therefore want to keep infrastructure and computing costs low.

Granulate’s solution is software that sits at the server layer — either in the cloud or on-premises, as a customer prefers — that uses AI to detect workloads that a customer tags as important and prioritize them so that they work more efficiently. Granulate said that its software can improve response times by up to 40%, and throughput up to five times, while reducing costs by up to 60%. The company today has partnerships with AWS and Microsoft’s Azure and is in the “early stages” of talks with Google Cloud Platform.

Bigger tech companies like Netflix, Google and Amazon typically invest huge sums to build their own optimization technology, but it’s an area that smaller organizations (and you can still be huge while still being smaller than companies like Google) will not have the bandwith — pun intended — to address in the same way.

“We are aware of similar things going on inside of Netflix as what we have built,” Asaf Ezra, co-founder and CEO of Granulate, said in an interview. “But to us, it’s a testament of how large you need to be to address this issue and the talent you need to hire to address the lowest level issues.”

The company’s customers include at least one major retailer (which it can’t name), AppsFlyer, Period and PicsArt.

What will be interesting to watch is how the growth of 5G will affect the bigger problem: as Ezra notes, it will undoubtedly improve front-end latency.

“5g will not cannibalize Granulate,” he said. “In fact, when it becomes standard, the round trip time will be reduced for data, but the front end will be less of the ratio of the time, while the back-end latency will become more of the problem. 5g would solve only the access to your server, but not latency at the server itself.”

Longer term, it’s likely that Granulate will add more optimization and management solutions around those it already offers for latency, Ezra said, while also looking for ways to stand out apart from others in the same space. Competitors are in the process of some consolidation — witness Spot acquired by NetApp last June — so features based around a wider platform will likely be a key way to keep customers interested.

News: Amazon begins testing customer deliveries using Rivian electric vans

• February 3, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Amazon has started making deliveries to customers in Los Angeles using electric vans designed and built by Rivian. The electric vans, which are part of Amazon’s 2040 climate pledge, won’t go into series production until the end of the year, according to an update Wednesday by the company. Amazon declined to reveal how many electric

Amazon has started making deliveries to customers in Los Angeles using electric vans designed and built by Rivian.

The electric vans, which are part of Amazon’s 2040 climate pledge, won’t go into series production until the end of the year, according to an update Wednesday by the company. Amazon declined to reveal how many electric vans were in the test fleet.

The customer deliveries are part of continuous testing being conducted by Amazon and Rivian to measure performance as well as safety durability in various climates and geographies. Road tests first started more than four months ago. The current fleet of vehicles was built at Rivian’s headquarters in Plymouth, Michigan and can drive up to 150 miles on a single charge. Rivian engineers will continue to refine the vehicles for the start of production at its Normal, Illinois factory.

Image Credits: Amazon

In the meantime, these electric vehicles will continue to pop up on delivery routes in up to 15 additional cities in 2021. Eventually, Amazon plans to deploy at least 100,000 electric vans — the size of its order with Rivian — over the next several years.

Amazon and Rivian began testing vehicles four months prior to making customer deliveries, as part of the testing and development process. Amazon is also starting to modify its buildings to accommodate the new fleet of vehicles and has installed thousands of electric vehicle charging stations at its delivery stations across North America and Europe, the company said.

“We’re loving the enthusiasm from customers so far–from the photos we see online to the car fans who stop our drivers for a first-hand look at the vehicle,” Ross Rachey, director of Amazon’s global Fleet and products, said in a statement. “From what we’ve seen, this is one of the fastest modern commercial electrification programs, and we’re incredibly proud of that.”

The exterior of Rivian-built electric vans share some the same design features found in today’s gas-powered versions. There are a few more rounded edges and an overall sleeker look to the electric vans.

The real difference is in the electric architecture and the custom features that have been integrated into the vans, including, highway driving and traffic assist features; exterior cameras that can provide a 360-degree view for the driver via a digital display, a larger interior floor space in the cabin to help with drivers getting to and from the cabin compartment, surround tail lights for better braking visibility and three-level shelving and a bulkhead cargo compartment separating door. Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is also an embedded feature.

News: Scratchpad snags $13M Series A to simplify Salesforce data entry

• February 3, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Scratchpad is an early stage startup that wants to make it easier for sales people to get information into Salesforce by placing a notation layer on top of it. Today, it announced a $13 million Series A led by Craft Ventures with participation from Accel. The company has now raised a total of $16.6 million

Scratchpad is an early stage startup that wants to make it easier for sales people to get information into Salesforce by placing a notation layer on top of it. Today, it announced a $13 million Series A led by Craft Ventures with participation from Accel.

The company has now raised a total of $16.6 million including the $3.6 million seed round we covered in October. Co-founder and CEO Pouyan Salehi says that he wasn’t really looking to add capital, but the investors understood his vision and the money will help accelerate the product roadmap.

“To be honest, it actually wasn’t on our radar to raise again so soon after we raised what I consider a substantial seed. We had plenty of runway, but we started to see a lot of bottom-up user growth, this bottom-up motion just really started to take hold,” Salehi told me.

He says that lead investor David Sacks, who has built some successful startups himself, really got what they were trying to do, and the deal came together fairly easily. In fact, the company caught the attention of Craft because they were hearing about Scratchpad from their portfolio companies.

The bottoms up approach is certainly something we have seen with developer tools and with software for knowledge workers, but companies often take aim at sales through the sales manager, rather than trying directly to get salespeople to use a particular tool. This approach of getting the end users involved early allows them to gain traction with members of the sales team before approaching management about paid versions.

Traditionally, sales teams don’t like the tools that are thrust upon them. They are essentially databases and even with a visual interface, it doesn’t really match up with the way they work. Scratchpad gives them an interface like a spreadsheet or notes application that they are typically using to hack together a workflow, but with a direct connection to Salesforce.

What the paid tiers provide is a way to bring all this data together and get a bigger picture view of what’s happening on the sales team, and it helps ensure that people are using Salesforce because the data in Scratchpad links to the Salesforce database automatically.

The company has completed the initial work of building the individual salesperson’s workspace, but the next phase, and part of what this capital is going to fund, is building the team workspace and seeing how this data can flow from individuals to a team view to give management more insight into what their individual reps are doing. This includes notes, which usually don’t make it into Salesforce, but provide a lot of context about interactions with customers.

It’s resonating with thousands of users (although Salehi didn’t want to share an exact customer number just yet). Customers include Autodesk, Brex, Lacework, Snowflake and Twilio.

Sacks says that he liked the viral way the product has been spreading. “Once a rep starts using Scratchpad, two things tend to happen: it becomes a daily habit, and they share it with their teammates. This phenomena of viral spread is rare and indicates a very strong product-market fit,” he said in a statement.