Monthly Archives: May 2021

News: Rock-picking robotics startup TerraClear raises $25 million

• May 26, 2021
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Rock picking is probably not the first thing you think about when you think agricultural robotics. Understandably so. There are a number of companies out there looking to automate aspects like fruit and vegetable picking, weeding and field tending, but rocks are still a major issue for many farmers. They’re big, they’re heavy and they

Rock picking is probably not the first thing you think about when you think agricultural robotics. Understandably so. There are a number of companies out there looking to automate aspects like fruit and vegetable picking, weeding and field tending, but rocks are still a major issue for many farmers. They’re big, they’re heavy and they can really mess up a piece of machinery.

“This is something I’ve personally dealt with my entire life,” TerraClear CEO Brent Frei said in a press release. “There are more than 400 million arable acres worldwide that have been waiting for a cost-effective and productive solution to this problem. Repetitive tasks like this are optimal targets for automation, and the technologies we are bringing to the field dramatically reduce the labor and time needed to prep fields for planting.”

TerraClear has built an automated robotic solution, capable of picking up to 400 rocks per hour and picking and moving ones weighing up to 300 pounds. Back in 2019, the Bellevue, Washington-based company announced a $6 million raise to expand its offering, and today it has announced a $25 million Series A.

Madrona Venture Group returns to lead the round, which brings its total funding up to $38 million. The funding will go toward scaling up the company’s production and sales for next year, as well as growing headcount. TerraClear’s Rock Picker robot is now up for preorder. The system works with mapping and third-party drone systems, using AI to identify large rocks, which the robot can then be deployed to clear out.

 

News: SpotOn raises $125M in a16z-led Series D, triples valuation to $1.875B

• May 26, 2021
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Certain industries were hit harder by the COVID-19 pandemic than others, especially in its early days. Small businesses, including retailers and restaurants, were negatively impacted by lockdowns and the resulting closures. They had to adapt quickly to survive. If they didn’t use much technology before, they were suddenly being forced to, as so many things

Certain industries were hit harder by the COVID-19 pandemic than others, especially in its early days.

Small businesses, including retailers and restaurants, were negatively impacted by lockdowns and the resulting closures. They had to adapt quickly to survive. If they didn’t use much technology before, they were suddenly being forced to, as so many things shifted to digital last year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. For companies like SpotOn, it was a pivotal moment. 

The startup, which provides software and payments for restaurants and SMBs, had to step up to help the businesses it serves. Not only for their sake, but its own.

“We really took a hard look at what was happening to our clients. And we realized we needed to pivot, just to be able to support them,” co-CEO and co-founder Matt Hyman recalls. “We had to make a decision because our revenues also were taking a big hit, just like our clients were. Rather than lay off staff or require salary deductions, we stayed true to our core values and just kept plugging away.”

All that “plugging away” has paid off. Today, SpotOn announced it has achieved unicorn status with a $125 million Series D funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

Existing backers DST Global, 01 Advisors, Dragoneer Investment Group and Franklin Templeton also participated in the financing, in addition to new investor Mubadala Investment Company. 

Notably, the round triples the company’s valuation to $1.875 billion compared to its $625 million valuation at the time of its Series C raise last September. It also marks San Francisco-based SpotOn’s third funding event since March 2020, and brings the startup’s total funding to $328 million since its 2017 inception.

Its efforts have also led to impressive growth for the company, which has seen its revenue triple since February 2020, according to Hyman.

Put simply, SpotOn is taking on the likes of Square in the payments space. But the company says its offering extends beyond traditional payment processing and point-of-sale (POS) software. Its platform aims to give SMBs the ability to run their businesses “from building a brand to taking payments and everything in-between.” SpotOn’s goal is to be a “one-stop shop” by incorporating tools that include things such as custom website development, scheduling software, marketing, appointment scheduling, review management, analytics and digital loyalty.

When the pandemic hit, SpotOn ramped up and rolled out 400 “new product innovations,” Hyman said. It also did things like waive $1.5 million in fees (it’s a SaaS business, so for several months it waived its monthly fee, for example, for its integrated restaurant management system). It also acquired a company, SeatNinja, so that it could expand its offering.

“Because a lot of these businesses had to go digital literally overnight, we built a free website for them all,” Hyman said. SpotOn also did things like offer commission-free online ordering for restaurants and helped retail merchants update their websites for e-commerce. “Obviously these businesses were resilient,” Hyman said. “But such efforts also created a lot of loyalty.” 

Today, more than 30,000 businesses use SpotOn’s platform, according to Hyman, with nearly 8,000 of those signing on this year. The company expects that number to triple by year’s end.

Currently, its customers are split about 60% retail and 40% restaurants, but the restaurant side of its business is growing rapidly, according to Hyman.

The reason for that, the company believes, is while restaurants initially rushed to add online ordering for delivery or curbside pickup, they soon realized they “wanted a more affordable and more integrated solution.”

What makes SpotOn so appealing to its customers, Hyman said, is the fact that it offers an integrated platform so that businesses that use it can save “thousands of dollars” in payments and software fees to multiple, “à la carte” vendors. But it also can integrate with other platforms if needed.

In addition to growing its customer base and revenue, SpotOn has also boosted its headcount to about 1,250 employees (from 850 in March of 2020). Those employees are spread across its offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Mexico City, Mexico and Krakow, Poland.

SpotOn is not currently profitable, which Hyman says is “by choice.”

“We could be cash flow positive technically whenever we choose to be. Right now we’re just so focused on product innovation and talent to exceed the needs of our clients,” he said. “We chose the capital plan so that we could really just double down on what’s working so well.”

The new capital will go toward further accelerating product development and expanding its market presence.

“We’re doubling down on our single integrated restaurant management system,” Hyman said. 

The raise marks the first time that a16z has put money in the startup, although General Partner David George told TechCrunch he was familiar with co-founders Matt Hyman and Zach Hyman through mutual friends.

George estimates that about 80% of restaurants and SMBs use legacy solutions “that are clunky and outdated, and not very customer friendly.” The COVID-19 pandemic has led to more of these businesses seeking digital options.

“We think we’re in the very early days in the transition [to digital], and the opportunity is massive,” he told TechCrunch. “We believe we’re at the tipping point of a big tech replacement cycle for restaurant and small business software, and at the very early stages of this transition to modern cloud-native solutions.”

George was also effusive in his praise for how SpotOn has executed over the past 14 months.

“There are companies that build great products, and companies that can build great sales teams. And there are companies that offer really great customer service,” he said. “It’s rare that you find two of those and extremely rare to find all three of those as we have in SpotOn.”

News: Emile Learning bets it can make high school students study, not scroll

• May 26, 2021
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Edtech has realized it needs to build for the TikTok generation. It’s part of the reason we’re seeing a rise in supplemental, aspirational companies such as Outschool and MasterClass, which both lean on snappy editing, engaging content and, most of all, on-demand learning. But a nut that is yet to be cracked is how to

Edtech has realized it needs to build for the TikTok generation. It’s part of the reason we’re seeing a rise in supplemental, aspirational companies such as Outschool and MasterClass, which both lean on snappy editing, engaging content and, most of all, on-demand learning.

But a nut that is yet to be cracked is how to add measurable outcomes to the mix. As with every edtech startup, a common tension exists: the platform has to be hard enough to teach consumers something, but fun (or easy) enough for them to actually use it.

The latest startup to throw its hat into the ring of frictionless learning is Emile Learning, which offers on-demand high school classes, accredited or not, with high-quality production. The startup just closed a $3 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins, which has also backed the likes of Duolingo and Coursera.

Other investors include the Softbank Opportunity Fund, Uber Alum Syndicate, Owl Ventures, John Thornton, the former president of Goldman Sachs, Steven Galanis, founder of Cameo, and Ankur Nagpal, founder of Teachable. With the round, Emile’s total capital raised to date is $5.3 million.

Founded in 2020, Emile is built by a trio of Latino founders: CEO Felix Ruano, a McKinsey and Harvard alum, COO Michael Vilardo, an Uber and Nike alum and CTO Jon Quiros, a Dun & Bradstreet and CSU Pomona alum.

“We want to create the go-to platform where a student, anywhere in the world, can access content in the most frictionless way possible,” Ruano said. “Not just for fun, not just logging into YouTube on the weekends, but instead a full end-to-end course and receiving high school credit for it.”

And given the fact that “Zoom University” has struggled with accountability and engagement, the founder is optimistic that its a good time for Emile to launch more broadly.

The company serves up virtual, high-quality production high school classes, ranging from AP language and AP biology to personal finance and acting. Emile began as a way to help students prepare for AP exams – since a good score can help a student get college credit once they enter undergrad and save them thousands of dollars.

Now, less than a year since founding, it added on an accredited set of classes that can be used in high school, too. Students can get high school credit via a WASC accredited transcript, in addition to college credit via AP classes.

Vilardo explained how APs were a wedge to get them into the minds of high schoolers, but thinks the bigger opportunity will be for-credit within the schools themselves.

“The students may come for AP piece, but they’re gonna have a chance with low risk, high potential to engage in some of these experiential style courses, and maybe they end up deciding early in high school if they love finance or they love coding,” he said.

To create its content, Emile company sources top high school and college teachers across the United States, flies them to Los Angeles and shoots content there. Right now there are over 20 classes on the platform, with the goal of getting to 30 classes by September.

Over 50,000 students have used its platform to date, the company claims.

‘99% of investors still have no idea’

Emile charges students an annual fee to use its platform, a sum that can range between $100 to $200. While this is more economically accessible than private tutoring, the team isn’t set on this as Emile’s only monetization strategy.

“The way this becomes a billion-dollar company is the government-funded system,” he said. The COO estimates that around $600 billion flows into high school education in the United States every year from the government. The COVID-19 relief fund, which has recently begun hitting high schools, is part of this wave – and Emile could be recipient of those dollars if it is successful.

Ruano explained how, even with a bigger spotlight on edtech in the wake of the pandemic, “99% of investors still have no idea” about the importance of optionality in high school coursework.

“On average, they’ve gone through the best learning experiences their entire lives,” he said. “The idea that there is a legacy edtech market around for-credit classes is a completely new concept to them.” The key here was finding investors who came from diverse learning backgrounds to understand the importance of Emile’s pitch.

There’s been a number of high-school focused startups that have raised in the past year, including Galileo, Fiveable and Sora Schools. Kleiner Perkins, the lead check in Emile’s seed round, took two days from pitch to check.

It will be key to see how these companies don’t repeat the history of AltSchool, a San Francisco-based edtech company that opened up physical schools to replace traditional grade schools. While investors flocked to the company, families and educators ultimately got frustrated at the pressure that scaling put on AltSchool students and outcomes. Unlike Emile, AltSchool was selling personalized education to younger kids – not high schoolers.

Nonetheless, the past has given any startup that aims to replace traditional schooling a clear message: go slow, and don’t break too many things when it comes to education.

News: Self-driving truck startup Kodiak partnering with SK Group to expand into Asia

• May 26, 2021
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Kodiak Robotics, the U.S.-based self-driving truck startup, is partnering with South Korean conglomerate SK to explore the possibility of deploying its autonomous vehicle technology in Asia. The ultimate aim of the partnership is to sell and distribute Kodiak’s self-driving technology in the region. Kodiak will examine how it can use SK’s products, components and technology

Kodiak Robotics, the U.S.-based self-driving truck startup, is partnering with South Korean conglomerate SK to explore the possibility of deploying its autonomous vehicle technology in Asia.

The ultimate aim of the partnership is to sell and distribute Kodiak’s self-driving technology in the region. Kodiak will examine how it can use SK’s products, components and technology for its autonomous system, including artificial intelligence microprocessors and advanced emergency braking systems. Both companies have also agreed to work together to provide fleet management services for customers in Asia.

Kodiak co-founder and CEO Don Burnette couched the initial agreement as a first step towards a commercial enterprise in Asia.

“This is really just the first handful of steps to explore the possibility,” Burnette said. “What would it would look like to bring Kodiak’s AV technologies to Asian markets? What would be required? Who would be the partners? What are the regulatory forces that we have to contend with?”

Kodiak, which is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has operations in Texas, would be squaring off against at least two other self-driving companies — Plus and TuSimple — that already have a presence in the region. Both Plus and TuSimple announced mergers in the past six months with special purpose acquisition companies, an increasingly popular path for startup to go public.

While the partnership is at its earliest stage, it does connect Kodiak with a company that has a vast reach in South Korea as well as other countries in the region. The partnership is with SK Inc., a holding company of SK Group that has more than 120 operating companies, including ones connected to the logistics industry.

“Our partnership with Kodiak will help accelerate the commercialization of self-driving trucks in Asia,” said Jungho Shin, executive vice president of SK Inc. “Kodiak’s industry-leading technology and SK’s unrivaled reach in Korea and across Asia make this a natural partnership. We look forward to working with Kodiak to make autonomous trucking a reality around the globe.”

Burnette told TechCrunch the partnership agreement was reached after SK conducted an extensive technical review.

“They recognize the importance of AV technology broadly, they recognize the safety benefits, the economic benefits, and they want to play a role,” he said.

This is Kodiak’s first international expansion. But it might not be the last. Burnette said the company has been interested in certain international markets since it launched in 2018.

“We’ve had conversations about the Australian market,” Burnette noted. “I think Australia is another great market with future potential for this AV technology, particularly the long-haul highway, out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere kind of driving. There’s South American markets. Brazil is a big one that’s interesting to us, and, of course, Europe.

This partnership with SK Inc. follows an announcement with the U.S. Air Force for a contract to bring autonomous transportation to the U.S. Department of Defense’s Dover Air Force base in Delaware.

News: Instagram launches a new section for shopping product drops

• May 26, 2021
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Instagram today announced it’s adding a new feature to help connect online shoppers to product drops through its app. Drops, which are a newer e-commerce trend, help sellers create buzz for forthcoming products in the days and weeks leading up to their availability. The products themselves are often only available in limited supplies or for

Instagram today announced it’s adding a new feature to help connect online shoppers to product drops through its app. Drops, which are a newer e-commerce trend, help sellers create buzz for forthcoming products in the days and weeks leading up to their availability. The products themselves are often only available in limited supplies or for a short period of time, increasing demand.

On Instagram, drops will now have their own destination inside the app at the top of the Shop tab, where consumers can discover, browse and shop all the latest product launches as well as view upcoming launches. Shoppers can also sign up to receive reminders about products they’re interested in from here, and look through products and collections from other drops that recently took place on Instagram.

Like other online shopping offered through Instagram, consumers can make their Drops purchases directly in the Instagram app itself via Checkout on Instagram, not by visiting third-party websites. This model will eventually allow Instagram to collect fees on purchases — something that’s become a more important part of Facebook and Instagram’s overall business model in the wake of Apple’s privacy crackdown on iOS apps that impacts Facebook’s ad revenues.

However, Instagram has temporarily waived its selling fees to both help businesses who are recovering from the last year of Covid. The move will also help it to gain ground in online shopping against new competitors, including TikTok.

Brands on Instagram had already been running drops before today, following Instagram’s release of a product reminders feature back in 2019 that allowed consumers to get notified when an item they were interested in became available for purchase. To date, brands across fashion, beauty, streetwear and others have leveraged the feature, the company says, including Hill House Home, Dragun Beauty, adidas, and others.

The new Drops location simply organizes the product launches in one place to make it easier to browse and shop. Instagram tells us it’s curating the featured drops in this section. To be considered, brands need to use the product launch feature which is available to businesses on Checkout with Instagram.

At launch, some of the drops available include today’s Drake x NOCTA ‘Cardinal Stock’ collection and upcoming drops like Wren + Glory hand-painted summer collection and Charlotte Tilbury Exclusive Pillow Talk Lips & Dreams Lashes Kit. This week, there are five total drops available. This number will vary from week to week as Instagram continues to test the new feature, the company tells us.

On an individual brand’s page inside Drops, consumers can view info like when the product became available, pricing, and other item details. They can also bookmark the item to add it to a wishlist or share the drop with a friend through Instagram’s direct messaging feature. From the top of the Drops page, users can return to their Cart or Wishlist at any time to complete the checkout — assuming they aren’t too late, of course.

In addition, the brand’s Live shopping can be scheduled to align with their product drop. When the brand goes live for a drop, there’s an on-screen countdown and confetti animation when the product becomes available.

The new feature is currently only available in the Instagram app in the U.S., and only on mobile devices (iOS and Android), not the web.

News: Flywire’s flotation suggests the IPO slowdown is behind us

• May 26, 2021
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The Flywire IPO is neat from a financial perspective and notable in that it’s a Boston exit as opposed to yet another New York or San Francisco-based flotation.

Boston-based payment processor Flywire announced its IPO pricing last night. The company sold 10.44 million shares at $24 per share, the upper limit of its $22 to $24 per share price range. At that share count and price, Flywire’s gross IPO proceeds stood at $250.6 million.

Renaissance Capital pegs the company’s fully diluted valuation at $2.8 billion. Using a simple share count, the company is worth $2.40 billion at its IPO price.

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The Flywire IPO is neat from a financial perspective and notable in that it’s a Boston exit as opposed to yet another New York or San Francisco-based flotation. It’s nice to see some other cities put points on the board.

But more than that, this IPO is a useful measuring stick for keeping tabs on the IPO market as a whole. This year and the last are shaping up to be key exit periods for startups and unicorns of all shapes and sizes; many a venture capital fund return rests on these public debuts.

News: Cataclysms are a growth industry

• May 26, 2021
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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, Alex and Natasha dug into Danny’s latest mega-project: A long, fascinating, and deeply-reported series into the world of disaster tech. It’s all about the market, startups, and their backers, so it was perfect fare for

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, Alex and Natasha dug into Danny’s latest mega-project: A long, fascinating, and deeply-reported series into the world of disaster tech. It’s all about the market, startups, and their backers, so it was perfect fare for our Wednesday episode, in which we dive deep into a single topic.

Part 1: The most disastrous sales cycle in the world

Part 2: Data was the new oil, until the oil caught fire

Part 3: When the Earth is gone, at least the internet will still be working

Part 4: The human-focused startups of the hellfire

We were super curious why Danny had picked disaster tech to niche into, as we hadn’t heard that much about it, frankly. But past the fact that it’s a world where sales cycles can last as long as House Congressional tenures, there was quite a lot to get into:

• Consumer: Dorothy wants to to provide bridge loans to folks who get rekt by a hurricane. As government, and insurance money can take ages to arrive, the startup could be onto something. and Perimeter wants to take data, and help folks actually know where to go when there is am emergency.
• Data: Danny’s deep dive into the world of data in the disaster space came with a provocative headline, but the market backs him up. In this space we took a look at Cornea, which just raised $15 million to help firefighters better understand conflagrations, and Gridware raised $5.3 million to install boxes on power lines. Very smart boxes, we should add.
• Mental health: We end with a riff on how companies are preparing humans to better handle disaster before and after it strikes. Alto Neuroscience, which is a stealthy startup founded by Amit Etkin, is looking to solve PTSD with brain-wave data, while NeuroFlow uses polling, and savvy collabs with practitioners to monitor emerging symptoms. Psychedelic therapeutics also might have some opportunity to shine thanks to Osmind.

The series was fun to mine through, and expect Danny’s byline to be all over the topic in the coming weeks. Talk soon, unless – actually especially, if – all of hell breaks loose!

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: Treet, with $2.8 million in seed funding, gets brands involved in the resale market

• May 26, 2021
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Treet, a company rethinking the resale retail market, announced the close of a $2.8 million seed round today. The financing comes from Bling Capital, Matchstick Ventures, Techstars, BABM Ventures, BBG Ventures, Green Meadow, Interlace Ventures, V1.VC, and Alante Capital. Despite the fact that selling old clothes is the most sustainable, and most financially beneficial way

Treet, a company rethinking the resale retail market, announced the close of a $2.8 million seed round today. The financing comes from Bling Capital, Matchstick Ventures, Techstars, BABM Ventures, BBG Ventures, Green Meadow, Interlace Ventures, V1.VC, and Alante Capital.

Despite the fact that selling old clothes is the most sustainable, and most financially beneficial way to dispose of them, the process can be super tedious for both sellers and buyers.

Treet’s approach to simplifying its market and lowering consumer friction is to go through brands. Essentially, Treet helps brands set up their own resale sites where buyers and sellers can list and find items. Because Treet is tied in with the brand itself, sellers can easily list their items based on SKU and buyers can trust that the items they’re browsing are the real deal.

For brands, they get the chance to own their secondhand market and potentially gain new customers. The company says that 30 percent of buyers on Treet haven’t purchased directly from the brand before.

Involving brands benefits Treet in a big way, too. Brands are best positioned to know who has their items, and can send emails and messaging encouraging resale through Treet. They also have the distribution to put potential customers on to the resale site.

Treet gives sellers two options to redeem their funds. If they choose cash, a ten percent cut goes to the brand and a ten percent cut goes to Treet. If they choose to redeem via brand credit, only Treet takes 10 percent.

The startup’s customer list currently includes Boyish, Coclico, Altar, and époque évolution, with Goodfair and Birdy Grey launching soon.

“The greatest challenge is brands being hesitant about getting into resale,” said cofounder and CEO Jake Disraeli. “For a brand, promoting a used item with lesser margins is kind of a scary thought. We’re starting to prove out that they can expand their potential customer base and give brands the chance to participate alongside their customers who are reselling items on third-party platforms anyway.”

The clothing and fashion startup market has been active in recent quarters. The Real Real went public back in 2019, Poshmark went public last year, while fellow resale company ThreadUp held an IPO this year, and UK-based Lyst raised $85 million the other week. Treet’s funding fits neatly into the theme.

News: Parametrix Insurance raises $17.5 million to offer cloud downtime insurance

• May 26, 2021
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Insurtech is picking up steam in a big way, but startup Parametrix thinks there is still plenty of room left to innovate. The company, which today announced the close of a $17.5 million funding round, offers insurance policies for companies who rely on third-party cloud providers, ecommerce services, payment gateways and CRM systems. In essence,

Insurtech is picking up steam in a big way, but startup Parametrix thinks there is still plenty of room left to innovate. The company, which today announced the close of a $17.5 million funding round, offers insurance policies for companies who rely on third-party cloud providers, ecommerce services, payment gateways and CRM systems.

In essence, downtime from one of these services can cost a company millions in revenue, but it’s completely out of their control. A fact of life, one might say, until Parametrix.

Parametrix approaches this problem in two key ways.

The first is that the company has developed a system that continuously monitors third-party IT services all over the world, giving the startup a direct view into service interruptions down to the millisecond. This system is also aware of the interdependent nature of many of these services and incorporates that into the precision monitoring.

The second differentiator is its pricing model, which uses millions of data points to help customers estimate the financial risk involved with downtime and lets them customize the payout per hour of downtime. The model spits out a premium based on that payout rate.

“We’ve all felt the pain of downtime,” said co-founder and CTO Neta Rozy. “When any part of the infrastructure goes down, the companies go down as well. Normally, when you have a pain caused by technology, you try to fix it with technology. Downtime is inevitable. It doesn’t matter how great your infrastructure is or how redundant your platform is and there are almost always direct financial losses.”

The combination of the pricing model and monitoring system means that this product that looks very different from the insurance policies we’re used to in another key way. Parametrix is named for the parametric model it uses. Essentially, if the insurer event happens, the customer gets compensation immediately, with no claim process and no proof of loss.

Parametrix is not a carrier itself, but rather partners with incumbent insurance carriers to payout customers. As you can imagine, when it rains it pours for something like downtime insurance, where infrastructure downtime could affect many policy holders at once.

The Parametrix team is 30 people, and gender diversity is split down the middle across the entire team, including upper management and the founding team.

FirstMark Capital and F2 Venture Capital led this new $17.5 million funding round.

News: Zoom fatigue no more: Rewatch raises $20M to index, transcribe and store enterprise video content

• May 26, 2021
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We don’t hear as much these days about “Zoom fatigue” as we did in the first months after the Covid-19 pandemic kicked off last year, but what’s less clear is whether people became more tolerant to the medium, or if they’d found ways of coping with it better, or if they were hopeful that tools

We don’t hear as much these days about “Zoom fatigue” as we did in the first months after the Covid-19 pandemic kicked off last year, but what’s less clear is whether people became more tolerant to the medium, or if they’d found ways of coping with it better, or if they were hopeful that tools for coping would soon be around the corner.

Today, a startup that has come up with a solution to handling all that video is announcing some funding to grow, on the understanding that whatever people are doing with video today, there will be a lot more video to handle in the future, and they will need more than just a good internet connection, microphone and video camera to deal with it.

Rewatch, which has built a set of tools for organizations to create a “system of record” for their internal video archives — not just a place to “rewatch” all of their older live video calls, but to search and organise information arising from those calls — has closed a $20 million round of funding.

Along with this, Rewatch from today is opening up its platform from invite-only to general availability.

This latest round is a Series A and is being led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Semil Shah at Haystack and Kent Goldman at Upside Partners, as well as a number of individuals, also participating.

It comes on the heels of Rewatch announcing a $2 million seed round only in January of this year. But it’s had some buzz in the intervening months: customers that have started using Rewatch include GitHub (where co-founders Connor Sears and Scott Goldman previously worked together), Brex, Envoy, and The Athletic.

The issue that Rewatch is tackling is the fact that a lot more of our work communications are happening over video. But while video calling has been hailed as a great boost to productivity — you can work wherever you are now, as long as you have a video connection — in fact, it’s not.

Yes, we are talking to each other a lot, but we are also losing information from those calls because they’re not being tracked as well as they could be. And, by spending all of our time talking, many of us are working on other things less, or are confined into more rigid times when we can.

Rewatch has built a system that plugs into Zoom and Google Meet, two of the most-used video tools in the workplace, and automatically imports all of your office’s or team’s video chats into a system. This lets you browse libraries of video-based conversations or meetings to watch them on-demand, on your time. It also provides transcripts and search tools for finding information in those calls.

You can turn off the automatic imports, or further customize how meetings are filed or accessibility. Sears said that Rewatch can be used for any video created on any platform, for now those require manually importing the videos into the Rewatch system.

Sears also said that over time it will also be adding in ways to automatically turn items from meetings into, say, work tickets to follow them up.

While there are a number of transcription services available on tap these days, as well as any number of cloud-based storage providers where you can keep video archives, what is notable about Rewatch’s is that it’s identified the pain point of managing and indexing those archives and keeping them in a single place for many to use.

In this way, Rewatch is highlighting and addressing what I think of as the crux of the productivity paradox.

Essentially, it is this: the tech industry has given us a lot of tools to help us work better, but actually, the work required to use those tools can outweigh the utility of the tools themselves.

(And I have to admit, this is one of the reasons why I’ve grown to dislike Slack. Yes, we all get to communicate on it, and it’s great to have something to connect all of us, but it just takes up so much damn time to read through everything and figure out what’s useful and what is just watercooler chat.)

“We go to where companies already are, and we automate, pull in video so that you don’t have to think about it,” Sears said. “The effort around a lot of this takes a lot of diligence to make sure people are recording and transcribing and distributing and removing. We are making this seamless and effortless.”

It sometimes feels like we are on the cusp, technologically, of leaning on tools by way of AI and other innovations that might finally cross that chasm and give us actual productivity out of our productivity apps. Dooly, which raised funding last week, is looking to do the same in the world of sales software (automatically populating various sales software with data from your phone, video and text chats, and other sources), is another example of how this is playing out.

Similarly, we’re starting to see an interesting wave of companies emerge that are looking for better ways to manage and tap into all that video content that we now have swimming around us. AnyClip, which announced funding yesterday, is also applying better analytics and search to internal company video libraries, but also has its sights on a wider opportunity: organizing any video trove. That points, too, to the bigger opportunity for Rewatch.

For now, though, enterprises and businesses are an opportunity enough.

“As investors we get excited about founders first and foremost, and Connor and Scott immediately impressed us with their experience, clear articulation of the problem, and their vision for how Rewatch could be the end-all solution for video and knowledge management in an organization,” noted David Ulevitch, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, in a blog post. “They both worked at GitHub in senior roles from the early days, as a Senior Director of Product Design and a Principal Engineer, respectively, and have first-hand experience scaling a product. Since founding Rewatch in early 2020, they have very quickly built a great product, sold it to large-scale customers, and hired top-tier talent, demonstrating rapid founder and company velocity that is key to building an enduring company.”