Monthly Archives: July 2021

News: Platform as a service startup Porter aims to become go-to for deploying, managing cloud-based apps

• July 30, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Any DevOps team can use Porter to manage applications in the cloud, delivering the full flexibility of Kubernetes through a Heroku-like experience.

By the time Porter co-founders Trevor Shim and Justin Rhee decided to build a company around DevOps, the pair were well versed in doing remote development on Kubernetes. And like other users, they were consistently getting burnt by the technology.

They realized that for all of the benefits, the technology was there, but users were having to manage the complexity of hosting solutions as well as incurring the costs associated with a big DevOps team, Rhee told TechCrunch.

They decided to build a solution externally and went through Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 batch, where they found other startup companies trying to do the same.

Today, Porter announced $1.5 million in seed funding from Venrock, Translink Capital, Soma Capital and several angel investors. Its goal is to build a platform as a service that any team can use to manage applications in its own cloud, essentially delivering the full flexibility of Kubernetes through a Heroku-like experience.

Why Heroku? It is the hosting platform that developers are used to, and not just small companies, but also later-stage companies. When they want to move to Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud or DigitalOcean, Porter will be that bridge, Shim said.

However, while Heroku is still popular, the pair said companies are thinking the platform is getting outdated because it is standing still technology-wise. Each year, companies move on from the platform due to technical limitations and cost, Rhee said.

A big part of the bet Porter is taking is not charging users for hosting, and its cost is a pure SaaS product, he said. They aren’t looking to be resellers, so companies can use their own cloud, but Porter will provide the automation and users can pay with their AWS and GCP credits, which gives them flexibility.

A common pattern is a move into Kubernetes, but “the zinger we talk about” is if Heroku was built in 2021, it would have been built on Kubernetes, Shim added.

“So we see ourselves as a successor’s successor,” he said.

To be that bridge, the company will use the new funding to increase its engineering bandwidth with the goal of “becoming the de facto standard for all startups.” Shim said.

Porter’s platform went live in February, and in six months became the sixth-fastest growing open-source platform download on GitHub, said Ethan Batraski, partner at Venrock. He met the company through YC and was “super impressed with Rhee’s and Shim’s vision.

“Heroku has 100,000 developers, but I believe it has stagnated,” Batraski added. “Porter already has 100 startups on its platform. The growth they’ve seen — four or five times — is what you want to see at this stage.”

His firm has long focused on data infrastructure and is seeing the stack get more complex, saying “at the same time, more developers are wanting to build out an app over a week, and scale it to millions of users, but that takes people resources. With Kubernetes it can turn everyone into an expert developer without them knowing it.”

News: Gopuff confirms new $1B cash injection at a $15B valuation to expand its instant grocery delivery service

• July 30, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Gopuff, the startup that’s helped kickstart a new category of food delivery in the U.S. — “instant” delivery of essential groceries and other home goods for a flat fee of $1.95, 24 hours a day — has closed a huge tranche of funding to help it scale its service further across the country and globe.

Gopuff, the startup that’s helped kickstart a new category of food delivery in the U.S. — “instant” delivery of essential groceries and other home goods for a flat fee of $1.95, 24 hours a day — has closed a huge tranche of funding to help it scale its service further across the country and globe. It’s raised $1 billion in a Series H round that values the Philadelphia-based company at $15 billion.

New backers Blackstone’s Horizons platform, Guggenheim Investments, Hedosophia, and Adage Capital, and previous backers Fidelity Management and Research Company, Softbank Vision Fund 1, Atreides Management, and Eldridge Capital all participated in the round.

This news confirms our scoop of last week, when reported on this Series H as it was still being closed.

Gopuff said it plans to use the funding to continue expanding in North America, the UK (where it has already acquired one company, Fancy, and, sources tell us, is acquiring another, Dija), and Europe; on more hiring; and to continue building out the tech platform that bridges an ecosystem that includes customers, drivers, suppliers and distribution centers.

It currently operates 450 sites across North America and the UK, with includes more than 285 dark stores (or “micro-fulfillment centers” in Gopuff’s words), plus more than 185 retailers by way of its acquisition of BevMo earlier this year.

One of the reasons that Gopuff has raised such a large sum is that building out food-based, logistics-fueled, transportation business along all of those parameters is capital-intensive.

But also, that effort to grow is coming amidst a strong surge of competition. Getir out of Turkey, backed by Sequoia and others and most recently valued at $7.5 billion, is also aggressively expanding. And just looking at Europe, there are a wave of others such as Flink, Gorillas, Glovo, Zapp, Cajoo, and Weezy also bulking up their bank accounts to throw their delivery bags into the ring. (In the U.S., established delivery giants like DoorDash will also be moving deeper into Gopuff’s territory.)

Gopuff believes it can give all of these and others a run for their money. Founded back in 2013 by Rafael Ilishayev and Yakir Gola — now co-CEOs — while they were still in university to fill a gap they saw in the market for students like themselves, Gopuff has expanded well beyond that by catering to anyone looking for a quick and relatively low-cost way of getting essential goods without physically going out to get those items themselves.

In a stretch of time where many of us were either being ordered by our municipal governments, or acting on our own decisions, to stay in place to curtail the spread of Covid-19, Gopuff’s star rose quickly as an easy way of complying without compromising our consumerist tendencies.

But Companies like Getir out of Turkey — which has been around for years also building out a model of “instant” delivery of essential goods — have demonstrated that there is staying power to the concept, and that is what Gopuff is betting on, too.

“Gopuff has quietly built a very strong business and solidified itself as the leading player, continuing to define this evolving category,” said Scott Minerd, Global Chief Investment Officer of Guggenheim Investments, in a statement. “Rafael and Yakir are focused on maintaining fiscal responsibility while having the ability to successfully execute on strategic growth opportunities. This measured approach along with Gopuff’s impressive offering has only just scratched the surface. We are thrilled to support this incredibly strong company and look forward to being part of Gopuff’s journey and continued expansion.”

Part of Gopuff’s strategy has been to augment the basic instant delivery of essentials model with more efficient distribution along with a wider vision of what constitutes essentials.

So in addition to building out more localized “dark” stores to more easily distribute goods to customers who buy them, that has included starting “Gopuff kitchens” to make and deliver ready-made food; buying alcohol retailer BevMo for $350 million in November 2020; and acquiring more logistics technology, in the form of buying rideOS for $115 million.

Gopuff itself has been on a fundraising tear to finance all of this. It was only in March that it raised $1.15 billion at an $8.9 billion valuation, which came just months after a $380 million round at a $3.8 billion valuation. Together the three most recent rounds total around $2.5 billion in funding in the space of 10 months, and the idea here seems to be that there may be more of where that came from.

“As Gopuff continues to define the Instant Needs economy, we are thrilled to have new leading global partners onboard, along with the support of our longtime investors. This funding round is further validation of the success of our model and will enable us to continue to do what we do best: deliver an unmatched customer experience,” said Ilishayev in a statement.

“We have truly doubled down on our key business priorities, accelerating our geographic expansion by entering new markets in the US and abroad, innovating for our customers, and continuing to invest heavily in our technology, our people, and our partners. We look forward to continuing to enhance the customer experience and to bring the magic of Gopuff to new customers around the world,” added Yakir Gola.

News: Catch takes hold of $12M to provide benefits that aren’t tied to employers

• July 30, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Catch is working to make sure that every gig worker has the health and retirement benefits they need.

Catch is working to make sure that every gig worker has the health and retirement benefits they need.

The company, which is in the midst of moving its headquarters to New York, sells health insurance, retirement savings plans and tax withholding directly to freelancers, contractors or anyone uncovered.

It is now armed with a fresh round of $12 million in Series A funding, led by Crosslink, with participation from earlier investors Khosla Ventures, NYCA Partners, Kindred Ventures and Urban Innovation Fund, to support more distribution partnerships and its relocation from Boston.

Co-founders Kristen Anderson and Andrew Ambrosino started Catch in 2019 and raised $6.1 million previously, giving it a total of $18.1 million in funding.

It took the Catch team of 15 nearly two years to get approvals to sell its platform in 38 states on the federal marketplace. Anderson boasts that only eight companies have been able to do this, and three of them — Catch included — are approved to sell benefits to consumers.

“More companies are not offering healthcare, while more people are joining the creator and gig economies, which means more people are not following an employer-led model,” Anderson told TechCrunch.

The age of an average Catch customer is 32, and in addition to current offerings, they were asking the company to help them set up income sources, like setting aside money for taxes, retirement and medical leave without having to actively save.

When the global pandemic hit, many of Catch’s customers saw their income collapse 40% overall across industries, as workers like hairstylists and cooks had income go down to zero in some cases.

It was then that Anderson and Ambrosino began looking at partnership distribution and developed a network of platforms, business facilitation tools, gig marketplaces and payroll companies that were interested in offering Catch. The company intends to use some of the funding to increase its headcount to service those partnerships and go after more, Anderson said.

Catch is one startup providing insurance products, and many of its competitors do a single offering and do it well, like Starship does with health savings accounts, Anderson said. Catch is taking a different approach by offering a platform experience, but going deep on the process, she added. She likens it to Gusto, which provides cloud-based payroll, benefits and human resource management for businesses, in that Catch is an end-to-end experience, but with a focus on an individual person.

Over the past year, the company’s user base tripled, driven by people taking on second jobs and through a partnership with DoorDash. Platform users are also holding onto five times their usual balances, a result of setting more goals and needing to save more, Anderson said. Retirement investments and health insurance have grown similarly.

Going forward, Anderson is already thinking about a Series B, but that won’t come for another couple of years, she said. The company is looking into its own HSA product as well as disability insurance and other products to further differentiate it from other startups, for example, Spot, Super.mx and Even, all of which raised venture capital this month to provide benefits.

Catch would also like to serve a broader audience than just those on the federal marketplace. The co-founders are working on how to do this — Anderson mentioned there are some “nefarious companies out there” offering medical benefits at rates that can seem too good to be true, but when the customer reads the fine print, they discover that certain medical conditions are not covered.

“We are looking at how to put the right thing in there because it does get confusing,” Anderson added. “Young people have cheaper options, which means they need to make sure they know what they are getting.”

News: Airtel Africa gets an extra $200M for its mobile money business from QIA

• July 30, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Three months ago, Mastercard invested $100 million in Airtel Mobile Commerce BV (AMC BV) — the mobile money business of telecom Airtel Africa. This was two weeks after it also received $200 million from TPG’s Rise Fund. Today, the African telecoms operator has announced that it has secured another investment for its mobile money arm.

Three months ago, Mastercard invested $100 million in Airtel Mobile Commerce BV (AMC BV) — the mobile money business of telecom Airtel Africa. This was two weeks after it also received $200 million from TPG’s Rise Fund.

Today, the African telecoms operator has announced that it has secured another investment for its mobile money arm. The investor? Qatar Holding LLC, an affiliate of the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar with over $300 billion in assets. The Middle Eastern corporation is set to invest $200 million into AMC BV through a secondary purchase of shares from Airtel Africa.

AMC BV is an Airtel Africa subsidiary and the holding company for several of Airtel Africa’s mobile money operations across 14 African countries, including Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria. The mobile money arm operates one of the largest financial services on the continent. It provides users access to mobile wallets, support for international money transfers, loans and virtual credit cards.

According to a statement released by the telecoms operator, the proceeds of the investment will be used to reduce debt and invest in network and sales infrastructure in the respective operating countries. The deal will close in two tranches — $150 million invested at the first close, most likely in August. The remaining $50 million will be invested at second close.

Airtel Africa claims QIA will hold a minority stake while it continues to hold the majority stake. This transaction still values Airtel Africa at $2.65 billion on a cash and debt-free basis like other deals. However, what’s different this time is that QIA is entitled to appoint a director to AMC BV’s board and “to certain customary information and minority protection rights.”

Airtel Africa’s most recent report for Q1 2021 shows signs of growth. The telecoms operator saw a year on year revenue growth of 53.7%, pushed by a 24.6% growth in customer base to 23.1 million. Transaction value went up 64.4% to $14.7 billion ($59 billion annualised); and EBITDA stood at $60 million ($240 million annualised) at a margin of 48.8%. The company also generated $124 million in revenue ($496 million annualised), while its profits before tax year-on-year for Q1 2021 stood at $185 million.

Mansoor bin Ebrahim Al-Mahmoud, CEO of QIA, said the sovereign’s wealth fund investment in Airtel Africa would help promote financial inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa. “Airtel Money plays a critical role in facilitating economic activity, including for customers without access to traditional financial services. We firmly believe in its mission to expand these efforts over the coming years,” he added.

In February, Airtel Africa first made it known that it wanted to sell a minority stake in AMC BV to raise cash and sell off some assets. The subsequent month, it sold off telecommunication towers in Madagascar and Malawi to Helios Towers for $119 million and raised $500 million from outside investors.

News: Introducing the Open Cap Table Coalition

• July 29, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

If this coalition gets all the relationships right, doesn’t get greedy and understands that there is a social good component here, this could be as impactful as the SAFE was.

On Tuesday, the Open Cap Table Coalition announced its launch through an inaugural Medium post. The goal of this project is to standardize startup capitalization table data as well as make it far more accessible, transparent and portable.

For those unfamiliar with a cap table, it’s a list of who owns your company’s securities, which includes your company shares, options and more. A clear and simple cap table should quickly indicate who owns what and how much of it they own. For a variety of reasons (sometimes inexperience or bad advice) too many equity holders often find companies’ capitalization information to be opaque and not easily accessible.

This is particularly important for the small percentage of startups that survive in the long term, as growth makes for far more complicated cap tables.

A critical part of good startup hygiene is to always have a clean and updated cap table. Since there is no set format and cap tables are generally not out in the open, they are often siloed rather than collaborative.

Cap tables are near and dear to me as someone who has advised hundreds of startups over the past two decades as the founder of an accelerator, a venture partner and a senior adviser at a government-funded startup launchpad. I have been on the shareholder side of the equation as well and can assure you that pretty much nothing destroys trust between shareholders and startups quicker than poor communication, especially around issues such as the current status of the cap table.

I really like the idea of a cap table being an open corporate record, because the value proposition to the companies is clear. From the time a startup creates a cap table, it’s prone to inaccuracy, friction and mistakes. What this means in practice is that startups may spend money on cap-table-related issues that they should be spending on other things. From a legal process perspective, the law firm that is brought in to help with these issues has to deal with tedious back-end work, so the legal time isn’t high value for either the startup or the law firm.

The value proposition for equity holders is equally clear. All equity holders have a general and legal interest in a company’s capitalization information. They have the right to this information, which they may need for a variety of reasons (including, if things ever get really bad, an aggrieved shareholder action). So making this information clear and easily accessible is a service to equity holders and can also encourage more investment, especially from less experienced investors.

When I imagine what this project could become in the next couple of years, I think back to late 2013, when Y Combinator announced the SAFE (simple agreement for future equity). I think the SAFE is a good analogy here, as no one knew what it was and people wondered if this was a nice-to-have rather than a must-have for startups. But the end result was a dramatic improvement in the early-stage capital-raising process.

While the coalition’s founders include Morgan Stanley’s Shareworks, LTSE Software and Carta, it’s also heavy on Big Law, with Cooley, Goodwin Procter, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Orrick, Gunderson Dettmer, Latham & Watkins, and Fenwick & West rounding out the group of 10 founding members.

So what’s the real motivation of seven law firms, which together saw revenue of over $10 billion in 2020 to collaborate on an open cap table product for startups? Deal flow.

Big Law has been trying for a couple of decades to build relationships with startups at the stage where it makes no sense for a startup to be dealing with a massive and expensive law firm. Their efforts to build startup programs have often fallen short and received mixed reviews. They have also been far too heavy on the self-serve and too light on the “we’re going to give you our regular Big Law level of services at a small fraction of the costs just in case you make it big and can one day pay our regular fees.” So these firms are trying to separate themselves from the rest of the Big Law pack by building this entrepreneur-friendly tech.

The coalition has already produced its initial version of the open cap table. The real question is whether this is going to be a big deal, as the SAFE was, or whether it’s going to be a vanity solution in search of a real problem. My best guess is that if this coalition gets all the relationships right, doesn’t get greedy and understands that there is a social good component at play here, this could be, reasonably quickly, as impactful as the SAFE was.

News: Daily Crunch: Scarlett Johansson sues Disney, says streaming release of ‘Black Widow’ breaches contract

• July 29, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 29, 2021. Between the IPO cycle and earnings it has been quite the day. And Nikola’s founder was indicted on three counts of fraud. It’s busy! Let’s get into it! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3 (OK, four, but it’s about Scarlett Johansson)

• Nikola founder indicted on fraud charges: From the you saw this coming files, former Nikola CEO and walking bottle of Mountain Dew Trevor Milton was indicted on three counts of fraud. Per the federal indictment unsealed by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan on Thursday, the former exec “engaged in a fraudulent scheme to deceive retail investors.” Not a great day for SPACs, frankly.
• Microsoft may invest in hotel unicorn OYO: Here’s an odd one. Microsoft, the U.S. software giant, may invest in OYO, the India-based hotels startup that raised capital from SoftBank’s first Vision Fund. Why? Per our reporting, there may be some sort of cloud deal in the mix. Both parties are staying mum for now.
• The Latin American startup market is hitting its stride: On the back of an epic boom in venture investment, founders in Latin America are finally getting their due, investors told TechCrunch. Between locally sourced capital, external funds and economies in the region that are increasingly digitally enabled, it’s a bullish time to build in the region.
• Scarlett Johansson files suit over Disney+ ‘Black Widow’ release: The actress alleges Disney breached its agreement with her when it released the Marvel flick on streaming service Disney+ at the same time it landed in theaters. Johansson’s attorneys say Disney is “hiding behind COVID-19,” but with the delta variant being very much a problem, we must say we’d prefer to observe our Avengers films from our couches for the time being.

Startups/VC

• Tenderly wants more dApps: Decentralized apps, or dApps, are a big category in the larger blockchain economy. And Tenderly, a startup that just raised $15.3 million, wants folks to build more of them. The company has built a “a developer platform for Ethereum devs to monitor and test the smart contracts that power their decentralized apps.”
• Online grocery continues to attract capital: This time it’s Merqueo, which operates an on-demand service in Latin America. Between grocery delivery and so-called “instant” grocery startups, lots of capital is finding its way into the business of bringing food to folks’ houses. Merqueo just raised a $50 million Series C for its efforts.
• La Haus raises $100M for its online real estate marketplace: La Haus is a Colombian startup, as is Merqueo. See, we told you that Latin America was busy! In this case, La Haus raised $50 million in equity capital and $50 million in debt. Per our reporting, the company saw “transactions conducted on its Mexico portal climb by nearly 10x in the second quarter of 2021 compared to the 2020 second quarter.” Not bad!
• More money for mental health: Talkiatry announced earlier today that it has raised a $20 million Series A led by Left Lane Capital. The startup wants to make psychiatry services available through insurance providers and has partnered with a host of them. Anything to make mental health care easier and cheaper for consumers is good by us.
• Hello Divorce raises $2M so your divorce won’t cost $2M: Getting divorced is about as much fun as putting broken glass in your shoe while taking a hike. At least that’s what our friends have told us. Hello Divorce wants to make the whole process better. Given that divorce is something that happens rather often to lots of folks, it certainly won’t lack for TAM.
• Pangea raises $2M for its student labor marketplace: Hailing from Providence, Rhode Island, Pangea announced a seed round today. The company’s service connects digitally savvy college students with businesses looking for freelance talent. GMV is rising at the company, and now it has more capital in its accounts than ever. Let’s see how it grows the rest of the year.
• Odoo sells $215M of its stock: Now worth over €2 billion, Odoo, an open-source business management software play, is the first unicorn out of Wallonia, a region in Belgium. The round was purely secondary, notably. The company provides most of its software for free, while charging for certain features.
• Employee-success startup CultureAmp raises $100M: The startup, which was founded to let companies poll their workers, is now worth $150 million. You can think of it as management analytics, providing “turnover prediction and team goal tracking,” per our own reporting.
• In case you were looking for something entirely different, we present a review of Nothing’s new earpods.

Livestream e-commerce: Why companies and brands need to tune in

This year, livestream viewers in China are projected to spend more than $60 billion on digital shopping experiences where they can interact with influencers in real time.

Promoting everything from cosmetics to food, social media stars use Taobao, TikTok and other platforms to tout products and answer live questions.

On Taobao’s Single’s Day Global Shopping Festival in 2020, livestreams racked up $6 billion in sales, twice as much revenue as the year prior.

Sensing a trend, Western startups are getting in on the action, with companies like Whatnot and PopShop.Live raising rounds to build out their infrastructure. Looking forward, Alanna Gregory, senior global director at Afterpay, says she foresees four major trends:

• Networks.
• SaaS streaming tools.
• Host discovery and outreach tools.
• Host marketplaces and agencies.

“For brands, SaaS streaming tools will be the most impactful way to take advantage of livestream commerce trends,” Gregory writes in an Extra Crunch guest post. “All of this will be incredibly transformative.”

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

We went a bit long on the startup side of things, so let’s be brief when it comes to Big Tech.

• First up, Amazon’s FireTV Cube now supports Zoom. Everything should support Zoom. Zoom is good. So, it’s both unsurprising and welcome that Amazon is building out greater integration with the video chat provider.
• Next, Facebook’s next product will be a collab with Ray-Ban to build smart glasses. How you feel about this bit of news will depend on what you think about Facebook, but as a former Google Glass fan I suppose I am willing to wait to make judgment.
• PayPal has a super app in the wings, a service that will include messaging. Do we want this? I don’t know, but super apps — mobile applications that encompass a wide range of services in a single package — are big around the world, so why not here in U.S. as well?

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

We’re reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices. Fill out the survey here.

Read one of the testimonials we’ve received below!

Marketer: Scott Graham

Recommended by: Heather Larrabee, CMO, FORM

Testimonial: “He was referred to us and blew our socks off from his initial analysis. He’s the rare growth adviser expert at strategy and execution. He’s a servant leader, a systems thinker, integrates with the team with empathy and curiosity like he’s an internal teammate, brings a wealth of cutting-edge knowledge, and a stable of incredible partners and resources. He runs with the best and the brightest, but he’s the first one on and the last one off for the day, putting in the time to make things great. He has an uncanny ability to communicate complex concepts and make them accessible for all audiences, and he’s been a foundational game changer for our business and many others.”

News: Another banner quarter as Chromebook shipments grow 75% YOY

• July 29, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Last quarter, Chromebooks saw 275% year-over-year growth up to 12 million units. The figure isn’t quite as unwieldy for Q2, but a 75% year-over-year growth is still extremely respectable, with the category hitting 11.9 million shipments, per the latest figures from research firm, Canalys. Chromebooks joined the rest of the PC market in getting an

Last quarter, Chromebooks saw 275% year-over-year growth up to 12 million units. The figure isn’t quite as unwieldy for Q2, but a 75% year-over-year growth is still extremely respectable, with the category hitting 11.9 million shipments, per the latest figures from research firm, Canalys.

Chromebooks joined the rest of the PC market in getting an overall bump from the pandemic. Standard tablets and PCs saw healthy increases as consumers scrambled to create work from home setups, while Google’s OS got an even larger rise as schools implemented remote learning.

As schools in a number of locations have reopened more than a year into the pandemic, however, Chromebook sales are still hot. Google is certainly looking to capitalize on that success by once again attempting to extend the operating system’s reach beyond its educational foothold.

The company is clearly eyeing the enterprise segment, which may be welcoming of systems that are both easy to deploy and lock down.

Image Credits: Canalys

“With Chrome’s hold over the education space relatively secure, Google is set to bet big on the commercial segment this year,” Canalys’ Brian Lynch said in a statement. We expect to see a strong focus on attracting small businesses with updated services, such as the new ‘Individual’ subscription tier for Google Workspace and promotions on CloudReady licenses to repurpose old PCs for deployment alongside existing Chromebook fleets.”

After the launch of multiple M1-based systems, Apple, too, is making a big play for business. The company recently launched a new Apple at Work site.

“Whether your organization has 10 devices or 10,000, Apple fits easily into your existing infrastructure,” the company writes of its new IT efforts. “Zero-touch deployment allows IT to configure and manage remotely, and IT can tailor the setup process to any team. So every Mac, iPad, iPhone and Apple TV is ready to go from the start.”

With Windows 11 arriving later this year, Microsoft will no doubt be making its own case to maintain dominance over the office — remote and otherwise.

News: Varda Space Industries closes $42M Series A for off-planet manufacturing

• July 29, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Varda Space Industries has raised a $42 million Series A to bring to manufacturing a key capability that can only be found off-world: microgravity. The eight-month-old startup is looking to establish its first manufacturing facility in space as early as 2023, and by doing so, bring back to Earth advanced products that can only be

Varda Space Industries has raised a $42 million Series A to bring to manufacturing a key capability that can only be found off-world: microgravity.

The eight-month-old startup is looking to establish its first manufacturing facility in space as early as 2023, and by doing so, bring back to Earth advanced products that can only be made under sustained periods of zero-G.

The round was led by Khosla Ventures and Caffeinated Capital, with participation from existing investors Lux Capital, General Catalyst, Founders Fund. It pushes the company’s total raise thus far to over $50 million, including a $9 million seed round last December.

Varda’s idea is different than that of Jeff Bezos, who said after his own trip to space earlier this month that he wants to “move all heavy industry and all polluting industry off Earth.” The company’s co-founders, SpaceX veteran Will Bruey and Founders Fund principal Delian Asparouhov, aren’t imagining cement mixers and steel plants in orbit. Instead, they want to open up manufacturing processes that aren’t possible on Earth, in order to make bioprinted organs, fiber-optic cables, or pharmaceuticals – products that require fundamentally different conditions than what’s available on-planet.

Building the space factory of the future

The value of microgravity manufacturing, Bruey and Asparouhov say, can be found with the International Space Station, essentially a scientific outpost. A steady stream of research has emerged from the ISS over the last few decades showing that novel materials and products are possible in space. But until now, getting, staying in, and returning from orbit has been too costly to consider scaling these findings.

“In a way, a lot of our R&D has already been done for us in the public sector, and we’re essentially a ramp towards commercialization for that research that’s already been proven out,” Bruey told TechCrunch.

Right now, the company is building a three-module spacecraft comprised of an off-the-shelf satellite platform, a center platform where the microgravity manufacturing will take place, and a reentry vehicle to bring the materials back to Earth. For the first ten or so launches, Bruey said Varda would build the products itself. Once the company has established that its process is reliable and cheap, he added that in the long-term the goal is to become a contract manufacturing platform for other companies wanting to build products in space.

Asparouhov likened it to the iPhone and the App Store: “The iPhone didn’t come out with the App Store. Apple developed the first 10 or 11 apps to share the value of that. So we’re developing those first few apps ourselves to show the value in this commercial capability that we’re bringing to market, but over time, we will start to release an app store.”

One key part of Varda’s plan is to make all of the manufacturing automated. By keeping humans out of the picture (at least for now), the company is able to reduce critical overhead by skipping human-rated spacecraft development(and the associated safety concerns with crewed launches).

Varda invited regulators and the DoD to a preliminary design review. Image Credits: Varda Space Industries (opens in a new window)

“I think that what investors, NASA, and the [Department of Defense], really see as exciting about our approach is that in comparison to everyone else that’s ever discussed ‘space manufacturing,’ we’re by far the most near-term, pragmatic, commercially viable approach, launching and producing materials less than 18 months from now, as opposed to plans that are typically five years, 10 years, decades away from being viable,” Asparouhov said.

He added that one way to think about space manufacturing is that there is a certain dollar per unit-mass that Varda will need to spend to get things up to microgravity, and a dollar per unit-mass of value from manufacturing in microgravity. The key to profitability is finding the products that maximizes the difference between these two equations. Novel pharmaceuticals, for example, could yield massive profits if the innovation gains from zero G are correspondingly high.

The company is imagining “multiple missions” in 2023, Bruey said, and then moving to once per quarter and even imagining multiple reentry capsules returning with products per day. The Varda cofounders are convinced that the scale of demand for novel space-made products is potentially high enough to meet this kind of launch and reentry schedule.

Compared to a burgeoning industry like space tourism, Bruey said the space manufacturing has the potential to positively affect a much higher portion of humanity.

“It will touch many different parts of humanity’s experience out here on Earth, with significant improvements in quality of life,” he said.

News: 4 key areas SaaS startups must address to scale infrastructure for the enterprise

• July 29, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

As companies grow, their security and reliability needs evolve. When working with large customers, having empathy for these needs will go a long way.

Startups and SMBs are usually the first to adopt many SaaS products. But as these customers grow in size and complexity — and as you rope in larger organizations — scaling your infrastructure for the enterprise becomes critical for success.

Below are four tips on how to advance your company’s infrastructure to support and grow with your largest customers.

Address your customers’ security and reliability needs

If you’re building SaaS, odds are you’re holding very important customer data. Regardless of what you build, that makes you a threat vector for attacks on your customers. While security is important for all customers, the stakes certainly get higher the larger they grow.

Given the stakes, it’s paramount to build infrastructure, products and processes that address your customers’ growing security and reliability needs. That includes the ethical and moral obligation you have to make sure your systems and practices meet and exceed any claim you make about security and reliability to your customers.

Here are security and reliability requirements large customers typically ask for:

Formal SLAs around uptime: If you’re building SaaS, customers expect it to be available all the time. Large customers using your software for mission-critical applications will expect to see formal SLAs in contracts committing to 99.9% uptime or higher. As you build infrastructure and product layers, you need to be confident in your uptime and be able to measure uptime on a per customer basis so you know if you’re meeting your contractual obligations.

Real-time status of your platform: Most larger customers will expect to see your platform’s historical uptime and have real-time visibility into events and incidents as they happen. As you mature and specialize, creating this visibility for customers also drives more collaboration between your customer operations and infrastructure teams. This collaboration is valuable to invest in, as it provides insights into how customers are experiencing a particular degradation in your service and allows for you to communicate back what you found so far and what your ETA is.

Backups: As your customers grow, be prepared for expectations around backups — not just in terms of how long it takes to recover the whole application, but also around backup periodicity, location of your backups and data retention (e.g., are you holding on to the data too long?). If you’re building your backup strategy, thinking about future flexibility around backup management will help you stay ahead of these asks.

News: Pinterest shares drop as company misses on user growth…again

• July 29, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Pinterest’s shares had popped last week when Snap posted its best quarter in four years, as investors were betting Pinterest’s image-based social app would also see a return in advertiser spending. Those expectations now appear to be correct, as Pinterest beat on earnings with second-quarter revenue of $613.2 million and earnings per share of 25

Pinterest’s shares had popped last week when Snap posted its best quarter in four years, as investors were betting Pinterest’s image-based social app would also see a return in advertiser spending. Those expectations now appear to be correct, as Pinterest beat on earnings with second-quarter revenue of $613.2 million and earnings per share of 25 cents, above analysts’ estimates. However, Pinterest’s stock still tanked as the company reported monthly active user growth of just 9% to reach 454 million, when analysts were expecting 482 million.

Ahead of Pinterest’s announcement, Wall St. had forecast revenue of $562.3 million and earnings of $0.133 per share, up from a loss of $0.70 per share from the same quarter last year.

But while Pinterest delivered on financials, the company’s struggles with user growth sent the stock tumbling.

The image pinboard and shopping inspiration site had initially benefitted from increased engagement and user growth during the early days of the pandemic, but both slowed in the first quarter of 2021 due the easing of Covid-19 restrictions, which had then sent the stock down by more than 10% after its first quarter earnings were posted.

Today, the stock was down more than 12% in after-hours trading, shortly after earnings were announced.

Pinterest addressed the issues around user growth upfront on the earnings call, again blaming the COVID pandemic for declines in usage.

“The pandemic was an unprecedented and unique global event,” explained Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann. “In past earnings calls, we talked about how stay-at-home orders significantly increased usage of Pinterest. And for the past year, we’ve highlighted how people came to Pinterest for inspiration to reinvent their lives during such a difficult time,” he continued. “Now, as the world opens up, we’re seeing the similar effect in the opposite direction that impacted our growth — particularly because some of the core use cases we see on our platform are less common in 2021 than they were a year ago. That shifting behavior in Q2 impacts engagement,” Silbermann said.

The company also noted that, as of July 27, 2021, its monthly active users in the U.S. had declined by approximately 7%, while global monthly active users gained approximately 5% year-over-year.

Pinterest said its web users tend to be less engaged and generate less revenue than those who come from mobile apps. In the second quarter, its monthly active users on mobile apps grew in U.S. and internationally, year-over-year, by more than 20%.

The company’s issues with user growth and engagement indicate just how critical Pinterest’s plan to cater to the creator industry is the company’s future. Recently, the company launched video-first Idea Pins that allow creators to showcase their crafts, recipes, fashion, beauty tutorials, projects or anything else. This week, Pinterest introduced new features that will now allow creators to make money from those pins.

Despite user growth issues, the return of ad spending led to year-over-year revenue growth of 78% in the first quarter, and the company predicted it would see even higher 105% year-over-year revenue growth in Q2. Today, it reported 125% revenue growth — above with the 116% Snap reported in its record second quarter — a figure Pinterest attributed to advertisers’ return.