Tech has a bad reputation for pulling money out of musicians’ pockets, but Splice is changing that. The audio sample marketplace and music production collaboration tool has now paid out $15 million to artists since 2013, doubling in the last year. Splice lets musicians sell their sounds for royalty-free use, and songs by Eminem, Ariana Grande and Marshmello that were powered by those samples have topped the charts. Splice charges $7.99 per month for unlimited access to its array of 3 million synthesizers, drum hits, vocal flares and other sounds. Despite being designed for serious musicians, Splice’s suite of tools now has 2.5 million users, up from 1.5 million a year ago.

Steve Martocci

“Music is going through a beautiful moment,” says Steve Martocci, Splice’s co-founder and CEO who formerly built and sold GroupMe. “The tailwinds from the success of streaming are great. As more people realize how big the market it, how much people want to create music, there’s a huge opportunity here.”

Now Union Square Ventures and True Ventures are seizing on that opportunity, co-leading a $57.5 million Series C for Splice. “It’s all about scale,” Martocci tells me. “We’re investing in ourselves. Continuing to build new products. Continuing to work with bigger artists. We think there’s so much about the creative process and ecosystem of musicians that needs to be fixed. We want to diversify the content available so all artists in all genres feel like we have what they need.”

The round, which includes DFJ Growth, Flybridge, Lerer Hippeau, Liontree, Founders Circle Capital and Matt Pincus, brings Splice to $104.5 million in total funding. Splice wouldn’t disclose the valuation, but using the industry standard of selling 20 percent equity for a Series C, Splice could be valued in the ballpark of $285 million. That would make it one of the top music startups that isn’t selling streaming, tickets or hardware. Its success has also begun to draw competition from companies like Native Instruments, which launched its Sounds.com marketplace last year.

Splice’s subscription revenue is pooled and then doled out to artists based on whose samples got the most downloads. Creators range from bedroom tinkerers to Drake’s Grammy-winning producer Boi-1da. Martocci confirms that artists receive the majority of Splice’s sample marketplace revenue, saying, “they’re very favorable deals.” That’s especially great for the music production industry, because a lot of Splice’s sample creators aren’t celebrity DJs; Martocci says they’re audio engineers and other “people behind the scenes getting an opportunity to step into the light with an amazing revenue opportunity, but also an opportunity to be seen for their creative contributions.”

Splice began with a eureka moment at a concert. A friend asked Martocci why there weren’t great tools for producing music like there are for building software like GroupMe. After eventually leaving his chat app that Skype acquired, Martocci connected with Splice co-founder Matt Aimonetti and discovered he’d been an audio engineer for half of his life. They saw a chance to build a GitHub for music, with version control and admin permissions for making saving and collaborating on productions simple. By 2015 Splice had launched its Sounds subscription library, and the next year began selling rent-to-own software synthesizers to make avoiding piracy affordable for creators.

Fast-forward and Martocci tells me prioritization across Splice’s different product lines will be one of its big challenges. Luckily, he has a new crew of lieutenants to help. Former product lead for Apple Music and Beats by Dre VP Ryan Walsh has joined as chief product officer because, Martocci says, “he felt like his mission in music was unfinished.” Former chief financial officer of Marvel Entertainment Chris Acquaviva is now Splice’s CFO, who offers deep licensing expertise. And bringing the creator community vibe, MakerBot’s former CHRO, Kavita Vora, has become Splice’s chief people officer.

In an era when tech public image has been tested by non-stop scandals from the industry giants, Splice is pulling in ace talent that want to work on something unequivocally positive. Martocci tells me parents tell him that their kids spend all their time playing Fortnite and making music on Splice, but the latter is screen time they’re happy to encourage.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Music’s next big startup Splice raises .5M to sell samples

Skedulo, a service that helps businesses manage their mobile employees, today announced that it has raised a $28 million Series B funding round led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. Existing investors Blackbird and Castanoa Ventures also participated in this round.

The company’s service offers businesses all the necessary tools to manage their mobile employees, including their schedules. A lot of small businesses still use basic spreadsheets and email to do this, but that’s obviously not the most efficient way to match the right employee to the right job, for example.

“Workforce management has traditionally been focused on employees that are sitting at a desk for the majority of their day,” Skedulo CEO and co-founder Matt Fairhurst told me. “The overwhelming majority — 80 percent — of workers will be deskless by 2020 and so far, there has been no one that has addressed the needs of this growing population at scale. We’re excited to help enterprises confront these challenges head-on so they can compete and lean into rapidly changing customer and employee expectations.”

At the core of Skedulo, which offers both a mobile app and web-based interface, is the company’s so-called “Mastermind” engine that helps businesses automatically match the right employee to a job based on the priorities the company has specified. The company plans to use the new funding to enhance this tool through new machine learning capabilities. Skedulo will also soon offer new analytics tools and integrations with third-party services like HR and financial management tools, as well as payroll systems.

The company also plans to use the new funding to double its headcount, which includes hiring at least 60 new employees in its Australian offices in Brisbane and Sydney.

As part of this round, Priya Saiprasad, principal of M12, will join Skedulo’s board of directors. “We found a strong sense of aligned purpose with Priya Saiprasad and the team at M12 — and their desire to invest in companies that help reduce cycles in a person’s working day,” Fairhurst said. “Fundamentally, Skedulo is a productivity company. We help companies, the back-office and mobile workforce, reduce the number of cycles it takes to get work done. This gives them time back to focus on the work that matters most.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Skedulo raises M for its mobile workforce management service

Atlanta-based Movius, a company that allows companies to assign a separate business number for voice calls and texting to any phone, today announced that it has raised a $45 million Series D round led by JPMorgan Chase, with participation from existing investors PointGuard Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Anschutz Investment company. With this, the company has now raised a total of $100 million.

In addition to the new funding, Movius also today announced that it has brought on former Adobe and Sun executive John Loiacono as its new CEO. Loiacono was also the founding CEO of network analytics startup Jolata.

“The Movius opportunity is pervasive. Almost every company on planet Earth is mobilizing their workforce but are challenged to find a way to securely interact with their customers and constituents using all the preferred communication vehicles – be that voice, SMS or any other channel they use in their daily lives,” said Loiacono. “I’m thrilled because I’m joining a team that features highly passionate and proven innovators who are maniacally focused on delivering this very solution. I look forward to leading this next chapter of growth for the company.”

Sanjay Jain, the chief strategy officer at Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, and Larry Feinsmith, the head of JPMorgan Chase’s Technology Innovation, Strategy & Partnerships office, are joining the company’s board.

Movius currently counts more than 1,400 businesses as its customers, and its carrier partners include Sprint, Telstra and Telefonica. What’s important to note is that Movius is more than a basic VoIP app on your phone. What the company promises is a carrier-grade network that allows businesses to assign a second number to their employees’ phones. That way, the employer remains in charge, even as employees bring their own devices to work.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Movius raises M for its business communications service

Iterable, a startup that helps companies build complex marketing campaigns across channels to reduce churn and increase usage, announced a $50 million Series C round today.

Investors include Blue Cloud Ventures, CRV, Harmony Partners, Index Ventures and Stereo Capital. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $80 million.

Company co-founder and CEO Justin Zhu says the Iterable platform captures a constant stream of data from consumers from a variety of sources to give marketers the ability to build segments or event triggers based on consumer behavior.

“Customers are streaming real-time updates of who they are, where they’re purchasing, what they’re doing in the app, what they’re up to on the website, and we’re taking all that data and making it available in real time,” Zhu explained.

Photo: Iterable

This could allow marketers to contact people based on behaviors, such as a segment of people who haven’t opened the app in two weeks. Marketers also can use event triggers to automate contact. In the classic scenario of the abandoned shopping cart, a marketer could set a trigger to send an email or an SMS message two hours after the cart was abandoned to prompt the customer to come back.

As a platform, Iterable is offering a set of tools in a single solution that marketers would have had to buy separately. “In the past, what you typically would do is cobble together a variety of point solutions. You may buy a product just for mobile and buy one just for email. You may have engineers cobble together custom code to handle the lifecycle management. With Iterable, that can be all done in one place, and it can be done by a marketer, which would be the focus for their job,” Zhu said.

He said the company is streaming customer data from the various data sources directly to the marketers, so there is no data sharing involved with third parties. “This is a first-party data from our own customers,” he said.

The company is reporting triple-digit year-over-year growth, although it would not share specific revenue numbers. Iterable has 300 customers, including Box, DoorDash and Zillow. It currently has 200 employees spread across three locations, including the company headquarters in San Francisco and offices in Denver and New York City.

Zhu says the company’s vision is to be a global company, and with this funding it plans to expand into Europe and Asia as it continues to build the company.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Iterable lands M Series C investment to expand cross-channel marketing platform

Six months ago, Roman, the cloud pharmacy for erectile dysfunction, dropped the “man” to become “Ro.” At the same time, the company raised a monstrous Series A funding round of $88 million and unveiled Zero, a product meant to help people quit smoking, a root cause of ED.

Now, Ro is addressing a different demographic. Today, it announces Rory, a line of products for menopausal women. In total, Rory offers six products treating four conditions, with prices starting at $13 per month. Prescription medication and supplements for hot flashes, over-the-counter treatments for insomnia, prescription vaginal estrogen cream and an all-natural water-based lubricant for vaginal dryness and Latisse, which helps grow eyelashes, are available for purchase and direct-to-consumer delivery.

All of these conditions, including hair loss and insomnia, can be associated with menopause, or the process, typically at midlife, in which a woman stops menstruating.

To use Rory, which launches in 47 states today, women must complete an online doctor’s visit before they can be prescribed a personalized treatment plan. Rory is also launching a Facebook group and an online community, called Roar, for menopausal women to provide support to one another and to discuss topics from sex positions that help with vaginal dryness to how to sleep better at night.

“We aren’t used to talking about issues like vaginal dryness,” Rory co-founder Rachel Blank told TechCrunch. “Right now, we have [millions] of women experiencing menopause. They are walking around and frankly, their vagina hurts and they are uncomfortable. Really, what we are building at Rory is a lot of the educational content around this to let women know they have choices and they can take control during this phase of life where they feel like their bodies are rebelling against them.”

Rory’s leadership team. From left to right: Melynda Barnes, Rachel Blank and Ro co-founder and CEO Zachariah Reitano.

Unsurprisingly, the Ro founders are all male. In order to launch Rory, the trio — Rob Schutz, Saman Rahmanian and Zachariah Reitano — had to bring on talent knowledgeable of women’s health. Rachel Blank, a former investor at General Catalyst, an investor in Ro, seemed like a natural choice. Blank joined Ro full-time in the fall after learning about the company’s long-term vision to create personalized healthcare for everyone. General Catalyst, for its part, had been an investor in Ro since its August 2017 seed round.

“I was watching their pitch and having had that experience myself and listening to the founders of Ro talk about how much of a difference this platform could make in the lives of men with stigmatized conditions, it really resonated with me that this could really be a powerful tool for women as well,” Blank said.

Blank herself was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome, a hormonal disorder that can cause the development of a number of cysts in the ovaries, at 21 years old. She is joined by Rory clinical director Melynda Barnes, a surgeon and otolaryngologist, and Ro co-founder and chief executive officer Zachariah Reitano, who oversees Ro’s growing portfolio of spin-out brands.

Ro has raised just over $90 million in venture capital funding to date, hitting a valuation of $154 million with its Series A, according to PitchBook. Its investors include Initialized Capital, Box Group and Slow Ventures, as well as angels like Y Combinator partner Aaron Harris, Benchmark’s Scott Belsky and the chief executives of Casper, Code Academy and Pill Pack.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Erectile pharmacy app Ro launches telehealth service for women

The seven Africa-focused companies that presented as part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2019 class of 200 startups may seem like a small percentage for such a large class, but it represents the growing significance of African ventures in YC’s universe.

Since 2016, the Silicon Valley accelerator — which provides seed funds and mentorship for early-stage startups — has backed 25 companies located in Africa, and another 10 with an Africa product focus, according to YC spokesperson Lindsay Amos.

Past YC Africa alumns covered here at TechCrunch include payments startup Paystack, logistics firm Kobo360 and VOD startup Afrostream (now shuttered).

Of the seven Africa-oriented YC class that presented at Demo Day 2019, five originated in Nigeria and one in Tanzania. Six are fintech ventures, with products targeted across currency trading, agriculture, healthcare and education.

Here’s the skinny on the Africa-focused startups that presented at Demo Day 2019.

Nala (Tanzania): A fintech service building internet-free mobile payments for Africa, Nala lets users pay bills, do P2P payments and purchase cell phone minutes without an internet connection. The startup’s app is one of Google PlayStore’s Top Free Finance Apps in Tanzania, according to founder Benjamin Fernandes. Nala plans to leverage the seed funding and exposure from YC participation to raise additional capital to close its first seed round, he told TechCrunch.

54gene (Nigeria): 54gene aims to be the 23andMe for Africa. The company says that competitor data is limited because their users are mostly white. By focusing on Africa, the company can help detect and identify DNA markers that might otherwise go overlooked. Co-founder Abasi Ene-Obong has a PhD in cancer biology from the University of London.

VertoFX (UK): VertoFX is a B2B currency marketplace and international payment provider for frontier markets with an initial target market of Africa. The platform allows businesses to gain easy access to foreign currencies and make international payments seamlessly, providing clients with real-time and cheaper exchange rates, liquidity and faster settlement periods. VertoFX’s founders are ex-bankers Anthony Oduwole and Ola Oyetayo. In an email to TechCrunch, Oduu said there are currently 18 currencies on the platform and the ability to settle in 120 countries, including China and the U.S. 

Thrive Agric (Nigeria): The company helps smallholder farmers in Nigeria access crowdfunded loans to help grow their crops, as well as help them sell their produce. The company has worked with 14,000 farmers to date, with plans to reach 1,000,000 farmers across Africa by 2022 in what it says is a $54 billion market opportunity.

CredPal (Nigeria): A credit card company that allows consumers in Africa to make purchases across online and offline merchants and pay in fixed monthly installments, CredPal touts it cards as having the convenience of a credit card and the simplicity of fixed monthly repayments. The purpose is reducing the financial pressure faced by consumers in Africa and also improving their standard of living. The scope is Africa and it is currently operational in Nigeria. Founders are Fehintolu Olaogun and Olorunfemi Jegede.

Schoolable (Nigeria): Schoolable provides simple finance solutions for schools in Africa. There are 65 million students in Africa attending private schools, but tuition payments can be a pain point for parents paying for their child’s education. That’s because tuition payments are often due upfront and it’s more difficult than it should be for schools to keep track of payments. Schoolable is creating an invoicing app that helps ensure parents make payments on time, while also using the app to save directly for tuition.

Wallet.NG (Nigeria): A fintech app that allows people to send money to friends or family and pay bills with only the recipient’s phone number, Wallet helps users keep track of their spending through financial reporting available on the app.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Seven Africa-focused startups present at Y Combinator’s Demo Day

As enterprises adopt cloud-native technologies like containers to build their applications, the next question they often have to ask themselves is how they adapt their data storage and management practices to this new reality, too. One of the companies in this business is the four-year-old Portworx, which has managed to attract customers like Lufthansa Systems, GE Digital and HPE with its cloud-native storage and data-management platform for the Kubernetes container orchestration platform.

Portworx today announced that it has raised a $27 million Series C funding round led by Sapphire Ventures and the venture arm of Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company. Existing investors Mayfield Fund and GE Ventures also participated, as well as new investors Cisco, HPE and NetApp, which clearly have a strategic interest in bringing Portworx’s storage offering to their own customers, too, and partnering with the company.

Portworx’s tools make it easier for developers to migrate data, create backups and recover them after an issue. The service supports most popular databases, including Cassandra, Redis and MySQL, but also other storage services. Essentially, it creates a storage layer for database containers or other stateful containers that your apps can then access, no matter where they run or where the data resides.

“As the cloud-native stack matures, Portworx’s leadership in the data layer is really what is highlighted by our funding,” Portworx CEO and co-founder Murli Thirumale told me. “We clearly have a significant number of customers, there is a lot of customer growth, our partner network is growing. What you are seeing is that within that cloud-native ecosystem, we have the maximum number of production deployments and that momentum is something we’re continuing to fuel and fund with this round.”

As Thirumale told me, the company expanded its customer base by over 100 percent last year and increased its total bookings by 376 percent year-over-year. That’s obviously the kind of growth that investors want to see. Thirumale noted, though, that the company wasn’t under any pressure to raise at this point. “We were seeing such strong growth momentum that we knew we need the money to fuel the growth.” That means expanding the company’s sales force, especially internationally, as well as its support team to help its new customers manage their data life cycle.

In addition to today’s funding round, Portworx also announced the latest version of its flagship Portworx Enterprise platform, which now includes new data security and disaster recovery functions. These include improved role-based access controls that go beyond what Kubernetes traditionally offers (and that integrate with existing enterprise systems). The new disaster recovery tools now allow enterprises to make incremental backups to data centers that sit in different geographical locations. Maybe more importantly, Portworx now also lets users automatically save data in two nearby data center zones as updates happen. That’s meant to enable use cases where zero data loss would be acceptable in the case of an outage. With this, a company could automatically back up data from a database that sits in Azure Germany Central and back it up to AWS Europe Frankfurt, for example.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Portworx raises M Series C for its cloud-native data management platform

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is an extension of DevOps designed for more complex environments. The problem is that this type of approach is difficult to implement and has usually only been in reach of large companies, requiring custom software. Blameless, a Bay Area startup, wants to put it reach of everyone. It emerged from stealth today with an SRE platform for the masses and around $20 million in funding.

For starters, the company announced two rounds of funding with $3.6 million in seed money last April and a $16.5 million Series A investment more recently in January. Investors included Accel,  Lightspeed Venture Partners and others.

Company co-founder and CEO Ashar Rizqi knows first-hand just how difficult it is to implement an SRE system. He built custom systems for Box and Mulesoft before launching Blameless two years ago. He and his co-founder COO Lyon Wong saw a gap in the market where companies who wanted to implement SRE were being limited because of a lack of tooling and decided to build it themselves.

Rizqi says SRE changes the way you work and interact and Blameless gives structure to that change. “It changes the way you communicate, prioritize and work, but we’re adding data and metrics to support that shift” he said.

Screenshot: Blameless

As companies move to containers and continuous delivery models, it brings a level of complexity to managing the developers, who are working to maintain the delivery schedule, and operations, who must make sure the latest builds get out with a minimum of bugs. It’s not easy to manage, especially given the speed involved.

Over time, the bugs build up and the blame circulates around the DevOps team as they surface. The company name comes because their platform should remove blame from the equation by providing the tooling to get deeper visibility into all aspects of the delivery model.

At that point, companies can understand more clearly the kinds of compromises they need to make to get products out the door, rather than randomly building up this technical debt over time. This is exacerbated by the fact that companies are building their software from a variety of sources, whether open source or API services, and it’s hard to know the impact that external code is having on your product.

“Technical debt is accelerating as there is greater reliability on micro services. It’s a black box. You don’t own all the lines of code you are executing,” Rizqi explained. His company’s solution is designed to help with that problem.

The company currently has 23 employees and 20 customers including DigitalOcean and Home Depot.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Blameless emerges from stealth with M investment to help companies transition to SRE