Daily Archives: April 7, 2021

News: How to kick the 10 worst startup habits with Fuel Capital’s Leah Solivan

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Fuel Capital General Partner Leah Solivan joined us at TechCrunch Early Stage 2021 to talk about how to avoid early mistakes in building your startup

Fuel Capital General Partner Leah Solivan joined us at TechCrunch Early Stage 2021 to talk about how to avoid early mistakes in building your startup. Solivan has ample experience on both sides of the fence, as she founded TaskRabbit and led it to exit through an acquisition by Ikea in 2017. She shared a list of 10 things to avoid in total, but here are some highlights of what to watch out for.

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Share your ideas freely

Solivan urged founders to not be shy about sharing their ideas, as some people can tend to be secretive about their startup concept. The notion that giving up your idea somehow means you’ll end up with more competition is not a legitimate concern in the end, Solivan said. Instead, sharing that idea with as many people as you can is much more likely to generate positive results than negative.

I can’t tell you how many times I would be giving a presentation. And someone after the presentation would come up to me and say, oh my goodness, I had this same idea for TaskRabbit, like 10 years ago. And I’d be like, great! What did you do with that idea? And I think the point is, is that the idea itself isn’t the magic — the magic is in the execution of your idea and actually turning that idea into a business. (Timestamp: 01:42)

• You might just have missed the best time to sell your startup
• 15 things founders should know before accepting funding from a corporate VC

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Take everyone’s advice, but make the call

News: As competition heats up, TikTok announces six new interactive music effects for creators

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TikTok today is doubling down on its roots as a music-backed creation app with the launch of a half dozen new music effects for creators. The effects, which offer interactivity, visualizations, animations and more, will roll out over the next few weeks, starting with the launch of Music Visualizer. This effect is now available to

TikTok today is doubling down on its roots as a music-backed creation app with the launch of a half dozen new music effects for creators. The effects, which offer interactivity, visualizations, animations and more, will roll out over the next few weeks, starting with the launch of Music Visualizer. This effect is now available to TikTok’s global user base and runs real-time beat tracking to animate a retro greenscreen landscape, the company says.

The effect was added to TikTok’s Creative Effects tray yesterday and there are already over 28,000 videos created using the new feature. The effect results in videos featuring a purple sky with multiple moons (or planets?) in the background, where the grid on the ground pulses up and down with the music.

Music Visualizer works with any sounds in TikTok’s music library and has also been adopted by the electronic dance music duo AREA21 who used Music Visualizer to tease their new track “La La La.” Unfortunately, their use of the effect hides the animation behind one of their own. But several other creators showcase the effect better.

Other effects on the way include:

• Music Machine, which offers an interactive set of tools that will allow users to control the real-time rendering of MIDI loops for different music layers. There will also be a BPM slider for real-time adjustments; five, one-shot sound effects; and dynamic visual responses for the video of your recorded music.
• Delayed Beats, which recreates the freeze-frame effect that’s already popular on TikTok while aligning transitions to the beat of the music
• Text Beats, which allows creators to add animated text overlays to their video that transition in sync with the beat of any sound from TikTok’s library.
• Solid Beats, which add visual effects that sync to the beat of any song.
• Mirror Beats, which align display transitions with the beat of any song from TikTok’s library.

The launch of the new features follow arrival of several new TikTok competitors from major social networks, including Instagram (Reels), Snapchat (Spotlight), and YouTube (Shorts). The additions of the features help to demonstrate how far behind these rivals are in terms of competing on on the product experience. While the newcomers to the short-form video space may have launched their own set of basic creation tools, they’re lacking the larger libraries of creative effects that make TikTok fun to use, as well as appealing to those who are more specifically interested in its music features.

All the new effects will be rolled out to the dedicated “Music” tab within TikTok’s Creative Effects tray, as they become globally available.

News: Streamlit nabs $35M Series B to expand machine learning platform

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As a company founded by data scientists, Streamlit may be in a unique position to develop tooling to help companies build machine learning applications. For starters, it developed an open source project, but today the startup announced an expanded beta of a new commercial offering and $35 million Series B funding. Sequoia led the investment

As a company founded by data scientists, Streamlit may be in a unique position to develop tooling to help companies build machine learning applications. For starters, it developed an open source project, but today the startup announced an expanded beta of a new commercial offering and $35 million Series B funding.

Sequoia led the investment with help from previous investors Gradient Ventures and GGV Capital. Today’s round brings the total raised to $62 million, according to the company.

Data scientists can download the open source project and build a machine learning application, but it requires a certain level of technical aptitude to make all the parts work. Company co-founder and CEO Adrien Treuille  says that so far the company has 20,000 monthly active developers using the open source tooling to develop streaming apps, which have been viewed millions of times.

As they have gained that traction, they have customers who would prefer to use a commercial service. “It’s great to have something free and that you can use instantly, but not every company is capable of bridging that into a commercial offering,” Treuille explained.

Company COO and co-founder Amanda Kelly says that the commercial offering called Streamlit for Teams is designed to remove some of the complexity around using the open source application. “The whole [process of] how do I actually deploy an app, put it in a container, make sure it scales, has the resources and is securely connected to data sources […] — that’s a whole different skill set. That’s a DevOps and IT skill set,” she said.

What Streamlit for Teams does is take care of all that in the background for end users, so they can concentrate on the app building part of the equation without help from the technical side of the company to deploy it.

Sonya Huang, a partner at Sequoia, who is leading the firm’s investment in Streamlit, says that she was impressed with the company’s developer focus and sees the new commercial offering as a way to expand usage of the applications that data scientists have been building in the open source project.

“Streamlit has a chance to define a better interface between data teams and business users by ushering in a new paradigm for interactive, data-rich applications,” Huang said.

They have data scientists at big-name companies like Uber, Delta Dental and John Deere using the open source product already. They have kept the company fairly lean with 27 employees up until now, but the plan is to double that number in the coming year with the new funding, Kelly says.

She says that the founding team recognizes that it’s important to build a diverse company. She admits that it’s not always easy to do in practice when as a young startup, you are just fighting to stay alive, but she says that the funding gives them the luxury to step back and begin to hire more deliberately.

“Literally right before this call, I was on with a consultant who is going to come in and work with the executive team, so that we’re all super clear about what we mean [when it comes to] diversity for us and how is this actually a really core part of our company, so that we can flow that into recruiting and people and engineering practices and and make that a lived value within our company,” she said.

Streamlit for Teams is available in beta starting today. The company plans to make it generally available some time later this year.

News: Hiro Capital puts $2.3M into team sports tracking platform PlayerData — as does Sir Terry Leahy

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Hiro Capital has gradually been making a name for itself as an investor in the area know as ‘Digital Sports’ or DSports for shorts. It’s now led a $2.3m funding round in PlayerData. While the round might sound small, the area it’s going into is large and growing. Also investing in the round is Sir

Hiro Capital has gradually been making a name for itself as an investor in the area know as ‘Digital Sports’ or DSports for shorts. It’s now led a $2.3m funding round in PlayerData. While the round might sound small, the area it’s going into is large and growing. Also investing in the round is Sir Terry Leahy, previously the CEO of Tesco, the largest British retailer.

Edinburgh, UK-based PlayerData uses wearable technology and software tracking to give grass-roots and professional sports teams feedback on their training. It can, for instance, allow coaches to replay key moments from a game, even modeling different outcomes based on player positioning.

This is Hiro Capital’s 4th DSports and ‘connected fitness’ investment, and it joins Zwift, FitXR and NURVV. Hiro has also invested in eight games startups in the UK, USA and Europe, as befits the heritage of cofounder and partner Ian Livingstone, OBE,CBE, who is the former chairman of Tomb Raider publisher Eidos plc and all-round gaming pioneer.

PlayerData says it has captured more than 10,000 team sessions across UK soccer and rugby, and logged over 50 million meters of play. It also has strong network effects, it says. Every time a new team encounters one using Playerdata’s platform, it generates 5 more clubs as users.

Roy Hotrabhvanon is cofounder and CEO of PlayerData, and is a former international-level archer. He’s joined by Hayden Ball, cofounder and CTO, a firmware and cloud infrastructure expert.

In a statement Hotrabhvanon said: “Our mission is to bring fine-grained data and insight to clubs across team sports, helping them supercharge their game-making, improve player performance, and avoid injury… Our ultimate goal is to implement cutting-edge insights from pioneering wearables that are applicable to any team in any discipline at any level.”

Cherry Freeman, co-founding Partner at Hiro says: “PlayerData ticks all of our key boxes: a huge TAM with over 3m grass-roots clubs; a deep moat built on shared player data, machine learning and highly actionable predictive algorithms; compelling customer network effects; and a really impressive yet humble founding team.”

The PlayerData news forms part of a wider growth in digital sports, which includes such breakout names as Peloton, Tonal, Mirror, as well as Hiro’s portfolio investment, Zwift. With the pandemic putting an emphasison both home workouts and general health, the fascination with digital measurement of performance now has a growing grip on the sector.

Speaking to TechCrunch, Freeman added: “We think there are something like 3 million teams that are potential customers for PlayerData. Obviously the number of runners is enormous, and they only need to get a small slice of that market to have a very, very large business. At the end of the day everyone, everyone works out, even if you just go for a walk, so the target market’s huge and they started with running but their technology is applicable to a whole raft of other sports.”

News: Highlights from Berkeley SkyDeck’s virtual demo day

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With 17 startups participating, Berkeley SkyDeck’s Demo Day isn’t the largest cohort we’ve seen by any stretch. The collection of companies is, however, defined by a wide range of focuses, from pioneering diabetes treatments to retrofitting autonomous trucking, curated by the SkyDeck’s small team and a number of advisors. Founded in 2012, the accelerator is

With 17 startups participating, Berkeley SkyDeck’s Demo Day isn’t the largest cohort we’ve seen by any stretch. The collection of companies is, however, defined by a wide range of focuses, from pioneering diabetes treatments to retrofitting autonomous trucking, curated by the SkyDeck’s small team and a number of advisors.

Founded in 2012, the accelerator is focused on developing early-stage companies tied to the University of California system. Applicants must be affiliated with either one of the 10 UC schools or their national laboratories in Berkeley, Livermore and Los Alamos. Notable alumni include micromobility unicorn, Lime, and delivery robotics firm, Kiwi.

In 2020, SkyDeck — along with much of the rest of the world — went virtual.

“While flight restrictions did cause some international founders to pull crazy hours from our home countries to participate in the sessions, virtual sessions allowed additional members of our teams to participate that would otherwise not have been able to do so,” the accelerator’s organizers said in a TechCrunch post last year. “We are also hearing chatter that Demo Day will be larger than ever before because virtual events are much more scalable.”

The 17 startups presenting today were whittled down from 1,850 applicants, according to the accelerator. Being a member of the cohort involves six months of launch  assistance from SkyDeck, coupled with up $105,000. “In six months, you’re going to pitch on stage at demo day, to an institutional investor in your industry,” Executive Director Caroline Winnett tells TechCrunch.

Here’s a closer look at six highlights from this Demo Day.

EndoCrine

Building on technologies developed in the stem cell research labs of UCSF, EndoCrine is looking to commercialize a better way to discover and develop drugs. Specifically, the startup is hoping to improve diabetes treatment beyond standard insulin injections.

“EndoCrine’s proprietary human stem cell-derived islet platform revolutionizes the drug discovery and development process, saving years of time and millions of dollars usually spent by pharma companies,” CEO Gopika Nair said in a statement offered to TechCrunch. “Our innovative solution opens an exciting era of personalized medicine in diabetes.”

The company says SkyDeck helped it take the earliest steps out of the lab and into startup mode.

NuPort Robotics

NuPort Robotics is among the most mature of the 17 startups included here. In fact, in mid-March, the startup signed a partnership with Canadian Tire and the Ontario government, as part of a $3 million investment in an autonomous middle-mile trucking solution.

Rather than building autonomous trucking from scratch, NuPort’s solution is designed to retrofit semis with autonomous technologies.

“This results in operational cost reduction by eliminating the need to replace their existing fleet and yields a safer, more efficient and sustainable transportation system,” CEO Raghavender Sahdev tells TechCrunch.

The Hurd Co.

The Hurd Co.’s goal is simple: reduce the environmental impact of clothing companies by helping to remove trees from the process. Specifically, the company creates cellulosic fiber pulp from agricultural byproducts. This is designed to bypass tree-based agrilose, which is used in the production of a wide variety of fabrics, including rayon.

“Apparel brands are scrambling for new, low-impact fabric that will allow them to meet their ambitious sustainability goals,” CEO Taylor Heisley-Cook tells TechCrunch. “We completely eliminate trees from the supply chain with a hyper-efficient process that dramatically reduces brands’ impact on the environment.”

The company says its process uses half the water and significantly less energy than standard processes. The technology was developed by Hurd’s CTO, Charles Cai.

Humm

I won’t lie, this is the one in the batch I have the most questions about, having seen a number of companies claim their wearables can increase memory.

Here’s what CEO Iain McIntyre has to say: “It’s ideal for activities that depend on memory, like reading, problem solving or multi-tasking. The Humm patch uses tACS (transcranial alternating stimulation) and in clinical research studies, the Humm patch saw a measurable (+~20%) improvement against placebo.”

It’s an interesting underlying technology, and the advisors — which include a number of university professors in the sciences — certainly see commercial potential. There are some lingering questions around tACS.

Quoting Scientific American from January: “The potential therapeutic effects of tACS on memory, food craving and other neural processes have been tested in dozens of studies in the past. Questions have been raised about whether this method actually exerts any meaningful changes in the brain, however.”

Definitely interested in seeing more about this one and perhaps taking it for a spin when the product ships, later this year.

Publica

As far as elevator pitches go, Publica may have the best one of the show. “Publica is Shopify for Digital Content.” Essentially, the company wants to be a direct conduit between content creators and consumers.

“Publica is a service that enables authors and content creators to have their own custom storefront to share, market and sell e-books, audiobooks and any other types of digital content with no intermediaries,” CEO Pablo Laurino tells TechCrunch. “In the era of D2C and marketplaces, Publica helps authors and content to achieve that on their own storefront, offering authors complete control over their brand and ownership of the relationships.”

The system helps creators make their own own digital storefront to sell a wide variety of products, including audiobooks and e-books. The site is already up and running, with more than 1,200 stores created by 250 clients.

Serinus Labs

Serinus is developing a warning system for detecting failure in lithium-ion batteries.

Per CEO, Hossain Fahad, “Battery safety is the biggest challenge in the EV industry today. Serinus Labs’ proprietary LiCANS technology provides early warning signals to prevent catastrophic battery failure in electric vehicles.”

The tech uses gas sensing to detect early traces of vented gases that occur prior to battery failure.

News: CaptivateIQ raises $46M for its no-code sales commissions platform

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CaptivateIQ, which has developed a no-code platform to help companies design customized sales commission plans, has raised $46 million in a Series B round led by Accel. Existing backers Amity, S28 Capital, Sequoia, and Y Combinator also participated in the financing, which brings the San Francisco-based company’s total raised to $63 million since its 2017

CaptivateIQ, which has developed a no-code platform to help companies design customized sales commission plans, has raised $46 million in a Series B round led by Accel.

Existing backers Amity, S28 Capital, Sequoia, and Y Combinator also participated in the financing, which brings the San Francisco-based company’s total raised to $63 million since its 2017 inception.

CaptivateIQ must be doing something right. Its revenue has grown 600% year-over-year. To date, it has processed over $2 billion in commissions on its platform across hundreds of enterprise customers including Affirm, TripActions, Udemy, Intercom, Newfront Insurance and JMAC Lending.

“A big part of our growth is that we can help any company that offers a performance-based compensation plan, so we don’t have any restrictions with the types of businesses we work with,” said co-CEO Mark Schopmeyer. “We typically see conversations start with teams that have a minimum of 25 sales people, though we easily serve enterprises and public companies as well.”

The number of payees — defined as someone receiving a payout in CapitvateIQ’s system — was up four times in December 2020 from the year prior. Plus, the company had “back-to-back record months” from September through the end of the year in 2020, according to Schopmeyer.

He, co-CEO Conway Teng and CTO Hubert Wong founded CaptivateIQ after coming out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2017 cohort. 

The company touts its SaaS platform as a combination of the familiarity of spreadsheets, with the scalability and performance of software, so that users can configure any commission plan “entirely on their own,” according to Teng. 

“Calculating commissions is really complicated and mission critical – think of it like a very complicated form of payroll – each company has a unique commission plan that involves a lot more calculations and data than your typical salary payroll math,” Teng said. “Also, in recent years, companies have access to more data than ever, giving them room to incentive employees on more performance metrics.” 

Today, CaptivateIQ has 90 employees, more than triple what it did one year ago.

In 2020, the startup saw a bump in the number of non-high technology companies buying its software, and as a result, CapitivateIQ is going to increase its efforts into those other verticals, according to Teng. So far, it has found success in particular in financial services, manufacturing, and business services, among other sectors.

The pandemic served as a tailwind to its business. Sales teams generally rely on in-person interactions to stay productive, Schopmeyer points out. Without those activities over the past year, “having the right incentives in place became ever more critical as companies required new ways to motivate teams during the shift to remote work.”

“We saw our product usage skyrocket at the beginning of the pandemic as businesses quickly adjusted incentives, team quotas, SPIFs, and other components of their comp plans to stay competitive,” he said. 

The company plans to use its new capital to improve upon the user experience. Specifically, Teng said, it plans to introduce “more powerful data transformations, a richer set of formulas, and off-the-shelf templates.”

Another goal is to automate and streamline the commissions process from beginning to end, he added. The startup is expanding its data integrations to support “all major data systems” and introducing new dashboarding capabilities. It’s also enhancing existing collaboration workflows around approvals, inquiries and contracts.

Looking ahead, CaptivateIQ is exploring the potential of applying its technology to solve for use cases outside the world of commissions — something that it says its customers are already doing.

“It’s exciting to see what people have been building, and we’re looking forward to enabling new solutions as we continue to release more of our core technology platform,” Teng said.

Accel Partner Ben Fletcher said the pain point of calculating and reporting sales commissions kept coming up among portfolio companies, with CaptivateIQ frequently referenced. Those companies, he said, tried more enterprise-grade solutions — “spending hundreds of thousands on implementation to ultimately find that their products did not work.” They also tried other newer tools that also just didn’t work well.

“As we dug in and talked with more and more customers, it was abundantly clear — CaptivateIQ was the best product in the space,” Fletcher said.

Besides ease of use, the fact that CaptivateIQ is a no-code tool, is a big deal to Accel.

“Similar to UIPath, Webflow, and Ada, CaptivateIQ is able to bring the power of customer development and automation to an easy to use, drag-and-drop product,” Fletcher said. 

News: Authentic Artists is building virtual, AI-powered musicians

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Chris McGarry, who previously led music integration at Facebook’s Oculus, is taking a new approach to bringing music into the virtual world with his startup Authentic Artists. McGarry pointed to virtual celebrities like Lil Miquela and virtual concerts like Travis Scott’s giant event in Fortnite as setting the stage for Authentic Artists. In a sense,

Chris McGarry, who previously led music integration at Facebook’s Oculus, is taking a new approach to bringing music into the virtual world with his startup Authentic Artists.

McGarry pointed to virtual celebrities like Lil Miquela and virtual concerts like Travis Scott’s giant event in Fortnite as setting the stage for Authentic Artists. In a sense, the startup represents a combination of those ideas, creating virtual musicians who perform their own concerts — initially in Twitch — and can respond to audience requests.

“We are very intentionally not trying to create a digital facsimile of what already exists,” he said. “We want to use new tools to create new art, new experiences, new culture. The appeal is that these artists can really be vehicles for collaboration with the audience, so that [audience members] can selectively shape the live show.”

In fact, Authentic Artists has already held some test concerts on Twitch, and McGarry said the team was “frankly, sort of blown away by the response,” with average watch time of 35 minutes.

It will be unveiling its next generation of virtual artists in Twitch concerts starting on April 14, co-hosted by (human) Twitch streamers, who will introduce the concept to audiences — though McGarry said there’s potential for more collaboration between virtual and human stars in the future.

There are a number of different pieces to the Authentic Artists platform, working together to animate a virtual musician, generate their music and allow them to respond to audience feedback, whether that’s increasing the intensity of a song, decreasing the tempo or fast forwarding to the next song.

“Music is the lifeblood of our vision, and accordingly, we’ve invested significantly in the core audio engine,” McGarry said. He emphasized that the platform is not simply recombining music loops composed by humans, but rather generating music on its own: “We want [our virtual artists] to have autonomy, we want them to be real.”

It sounds like the team is still putting the final touches on the new artists, so I didn’t get to see a full concert experience. Instead, McGarry and his team presented renderings of these artists (including a half-human cyborg and a giant iguana) and their virtual venues, and they demonstrated the music engine, creating new compositions on-the-fly while adjusting different parameters. As McGarry put it, “These are all original compositions, generated and produced as we sit here, with no manual intervention.”

Authentic Artists is backed by investors including OVO Fund, James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems, Mixi Group and Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park. McGarry said he’s currently more focused on finding product-market fit than on the business model, but he sees opportunities to make money through avenues such as branded music and decentralized finance/NFTs in the future.

News: Swyft raises $17.5 million to bring same-day delivery to all the retailers that aren’t Amazon

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Thanks to major players like Amazon and Walmart, we’ve become accustomed to next- or same-day delivery. But the pandemic has also renewed our interest in buying from smaller businesses and retailers. Swyft, a company that has just raised $17.5 million in Series A, helps retailers of any size provide affordable same-day delivery. The round was

Thanks to major players like Amazon and Walmart, we’ve become accustomed to next- or same-day delivery. But the pandemic has also renewed our interest in buying from smaller businesses and retailers.

Swyft, a company that has just raised $17.5 million in Series A, helps retailers of any size provide affordable same-day delivery. The round was co-led by Inovia Capital and Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Shopify and existing investors Golden Ventures and Trucks VC.

Swyft is a marketplace, connecting a network of shipping carriers with vendors. But the company also provides software to those carriers to make them more efficient, and turns them into a vast network that allows them to pick up more inventory without adding to their infrastructure.

In other words, several regional carriers may play a part in delivering a parcel shipped via Swyft without making any big changes to their original routes or adding new drivers, trucks, etc.

To date, major players in both shipping and retail have dominated this space, thanks in large part to their ability to deliver quickly. Swyft is looking to amass an army, for lack of a better term, comprised of all of the smaller players, including mom and pop retailers and vendors as well as smaller, regional carriers. Banded together through software, these carriers and retailers can match the scale and influence of the behemoths without spending a fortune.

Swyft was cofounded by Aadil Kazmi (CEO), Zeeshan Hamid (Head of Engineering), and Maraz Rahman (Head of Sales). Kazmi and Hamid both spent their careers at Amazon, working on data and last-mile operations for the behemoth. Rahman was an early employee at a YC-backed proptech startup.

The trio started asking themselves early last year why retailers weren’t able to offer same-day delivery and chose to tackle the gap they discovered.

The key ingredient to Swyft is not its aggregation of couriers, but the software it provides to them. Because Swyft is increasing demand for these carriers, it also needs to make them more efficient. The back-end software allows carriers to digitize or automate a good deal of what they’re traditionally doing by hand.

CEO Aadil Kazmi says that Swyft is able to come in anywhere between 25 and 30 percent cheaper than the incumbent option.

“I don’t know what percent of your purchases are from Amazon, but for me it’s like 150 percent,” said Eurie Kim. “I’d prefer to buy elsewhere with the pandemic, and support local and independent brands, but Amazon’s trained us all to have fast and free shipping. It feels like an opportunity where the consumer experience is really lacking and the burden on merchants and retailers is extremely heavy.”

Swyft currently has 16 full-time employees. Twelve percent are female and 75 percent are people of color, according to the company.

Since April 2020, Swyft has facilitated the delivery of more than 180,000 packages, and expanded gross margin from 78 percent to 82 percent, thanks in large part to revenue from the software side of the business and a zero-asset model.

News: Saying hello to TechCrunch’s newest podcast: Found

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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive, the Equity team sat down not with external investors or founders, but with two of our own. Yes, this week, for the first time Natasha and Alex got to break a little internal

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

For this week’s deep dive, the Equity team sat down not with external investors or founders, but with two of our own. Yes, this week, for the first time Natasha and Alex got to break a little internal news instead of focusing on the world outside.

Why did we have Jordan Crook and Darrell Etherington on the show? Because we’re jazzed to add a second startups-focused podcast to a slowly but surely growing TC podcast network: Found. Found lands April 9, so tune in! The show will focus on talking to early-stage founders about building their company, from the emotional rollercoaster moments to tactical insights no one tells you until you’ve raised your first dollar.

Equity will keep its eyes on the news, with extra attention to all the dollar signs that are to be found in startup-land and the venture capital world.  At the same time, Found will bring a number of startup founders aboard to talk about the more human, and procedural work of building the next great tech company.

We hope you love a new show from our friends as much as we do, and remember Equity will be back on Friday with news, banter, and fun soon. In the meantime, here’s where you can find Found:

• Spotify
• @Found on twitter

Chat soon!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

News: Pathlight, a performance management tool for customer-facing teams and the individuals in them, raises $25M

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The longer we continue to work with either all or part of our teams in remote, out-of-physical-office environments, the more imperative it becomes for those teams to have some tools in place to keep the channels of communication and management open, and for the individuals in those teams to have a sense of how well

The longer we continue to work with either all or part of our teams in remote, out-of-physical-office environments, the more imperative it becomes for those teams to have some tools in place to keep the channels of communication and management open, and for the individuals in those teams to have a sense of how well they are performing. Today, one of the startups that provides a team productivity app with that in mind is announcing a round of funding to fuel its growth.

Pathlight, which has built a performance management platform for customer-facing teams — sales, field service and support — to help managers and employees themselves to track and analyze how they are doing, to coach them when and where it’s needed, and to communicate updates and more, has picked up $25 million — money that it will be using to continue growing its customer base and the functionality across its app.

The funding is being led by Insight Partners, with previous backers Kleiner Perkins and Quiet Capital also participating, alongside Uncorrelated Ventures; Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp; David Glazer, CFO of Palantir; and Michael Ovitz, co-founder of CAA and Owner of Broad Beach Ventures. Pathlight has now raised $35 million.

Pathlight today provides users with a range of tools to visualize team and individual performance across various parameters set by managers, using data that teams integrate from other platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk and Outreach, among others.

Using that data and specific metrics for the job in question, managers can then initiate conversations with individuals to focus in on specific areas where things need attention, and provide some coaching to help fix it. It can also be used to provide team-wide updates and encouragement, which sits alongside whatever other tools a person might use in their daily customer-facing work.

Since launching in March 2020, the startup has picked up good traction, with customers including Twilio, Earnin, Greenhouse, and CLEAR. But perhaps even more importantly, the pandemic and resulting switch to remote work has underscored how necessary tools like Pathlight’s have become: the startup says that engagement on its platform has shot up 300% in the last 12 months.

Alexander Kvamme, the CEO of Pathlight, said that he first became aware of the challenges of communicating across customer-facing teams, and having transparency on how they are doing as individuals and as a group, when he was at Yelp. Yelp had acquired his startup, reservations service SeatMe, and used the acquisition to build and run Yelp Reservations.

He was quick to realize that there weren’t really effective tools for him to see how individuals in the sales team were doing, how they were doing compared to goals the company wanted to achieve and based on the sales data they already had in other systems, how to work more effectively with people to communicate when something needed changing, and how to tailor all that in line with new variations in the formula — in their case, how to sell new products like a reservations service alongside advertising and other Yelp services for businesses.

“Whether it’s five or 3,000 people, the problem doesn’t go away,” he said. “Everyone uses their own systems, and it hurts front line employees when they don’t know how they are doing, or don’t get recognition when they are doing well, or don’t get coaching when they are not. Our thesis was that if software is eating the world, and you as a company are buying more software and analytics, over time managers will be more like data analysts. So we are providing a way for managers to be more data-driven.”

Five years down the line, Kvamme got the bug again to start a company and decided to return to that problem, teaming up with co-founder Trey Doig, the engineer who designed SeatMe and then turned it into Yelp Reservations and is now Pathlight’s CTO.

As they see it, the challenge has still not really been addressed. That’s not to say that there are not a number of companies — competitors to Pathlight, looking to fill that gap as well. Another people management platform called Lattice last year picked up $45 million  (I’m guessing it will be raising money again around about now); HubSpot, Zoho, SalesLoft and a number of others also are taking different approaches to the same challenge: front-line customer-facing people spend the majority of their time and attention on interacting with people, and so there need to be better tools in place to help them figure out how to make that communication more effective, figure out what is working and what is not.

And all of this, of course, is not at all new: it’s not like we all woke up one day and suddenly wanted to know how we are doing at work, or managers suddenly felt they needed to communicate with staff.

What has changed, however, is how we work: many of us have not seen the inside of our offices for more than a year at this point, and for a large proportion of us, we may never return again, or if we do it will be under different circumstances.

All of this means that some of the more traditional metrics and indicators of our performance, praising, management relationships, and learning from team mates simply is not there anymore.

In customer-facing areas like sales, support and field service, that lack of contact may be even more acute, since many of the teams working in these environments have long relied on huddles and communication throughout the day, week and month to continuously tweak work and improve it. So while tools like Pathlight’s will be useful as data analytics provision for teams regardless of how we work, it can be argued that they are even more important right now.

“I think people have started to realize that if you can empower front line to be more independent, your numbers will go up and do better,” Kvamme said.

This is part of what went into the investment decision made here.

“With the acceleration of digital transformation across the enterprise, it’s not enough to rethink the way we work—we must also rethink the way we manage,” said Jeff Lieberman, MD at Insight Partners. “Pathlight is ushering in a new age of data-driven management, an ethos that we believe every enterprise will need to embrace—quickly. We are excited to partner with the Pathlight team as they bring their powerful platform to companies across the world.”