After much anticipation, Lyft stock hit the public markets last week, with a nearly 10% pop on its first day of trading. However, concerns over the company’s lofty valuation, deep losses and uncertain path to profitability have caused the stock to fall flat in the days since.

TechCrunch’s resident transportation expert Kirsten Korosec and venture capital ax Kate Clark have been on the case, closely following the market’s reaction and the evolving theses around Lyft’s business… Today at 11:00 am PT, Kirsten and Kate will be helping Extra Crunch members understand how investors are thinking about Lyft and will be offering their views on where the company goes from here.

Tune in to join the Lyft debate as it unfolds, as well as for the opportunity to ask Kirsten and Kate any and all things Lyft, transportation, or venture.

To listen to this and all future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Talk Lyft’s stock market debut with TechCrunch writers

Parker Conrad’s last startup, Zenefits, drowned in busy work. Now with Rippling, he wants to boil that ocean. Instead of trying to nail one thing then expand, “very counter to conventional wisdom, we took on something that’s a lot broader and more ambitious.” That meant spending two years with 40 engineers working in stealth to build integrations with nearly every popular business tool to combine HR, IT and single-sign on services. The result is that when you hire an employee, Rippling onboards them to all those services in a single click. Goodbye, busy work. Hello, gateway to the enterprise app ecosystem.

The past few years have seen a Cambrian explosion of startups building specialty software for office productivity and collaboration. But that’s left customers struggling to get their teams set up on all these fragmented tools. As such, Rippling had a very good first year on the market with rapidly growing revenue. So when Rippling went out to raise money, Conrad was signing term sheets in just over a week.

Forty-five million dollars. “I know that rounds are bigger these days, but still, for a Series A, that’s pretty substantial,” Conrad tells me with a wide grin over coffee at San Francisco’s Four Barrel. “We want to keep doubling down on the engineering, investing and putting more money into R&D, so we have real product advantages and technology advantages over other players in our space, even though a lot of them have been around a lot longer than we have.” The Information‘s Zoe Bernard had reported Rippling was raising at least $30 million.

Rippling’s round was led by Kleiner Perkins and its enterprise guru Mamoon Hamid. As Conrad tells me, “Many of the metrics you use to evaluate SaaS companies were invented by Mamoon. He really knows his stuff. He’s also just a really great person.” Kleiner was his dream partner for Rippling. “I remember when I was in high school, Kleiner Perkins was the only VC firm I’d ever heard of. When I was a little kid, I thought ‘Oh that’d be cool some day.’ ” The round was joined by Initialized Capital, Threshold Ventures (formerly DFJ) and Y Combinator.

A source confirms the round was a stunning $270 million valuation. Hamid was also skeptical about Rippling trying to integrate with everyone before launch. But, he says, “What was a concern a few years ago is now something we like about the company.” After getting pitched so many piecemeal enterprise solutions, it suddenly clicked for Hamid why customers would want “one stop for everything. You need an independent party to be that glue layer.” 

Typically, enterprise software is an unglued mess. Apps don’t talk to each other, so when you hire a new employee, you have to manually add them, their role, their team, their manager, their permissions and more to every single tool your team uses. There are HR systems that control payroll and benefits, IT systems that determine what equipment you’re issued, productivity and collaboration apps like Slack and Dropbox and department-specific tools like Salesforce or GitHub. Conrad believes manually updating these with each hire, fire or promotion is the source of almost all administrative work at a company.

The willingness to slog through office chores rather than strategically nullify them is why Zenefits grew so fast, then suddenly hit a wall. What can be begrudgingly brute-forced at 50 employees becomes impossible to manage at 500 employees. That’s why, he says, “We don’t want to have anything that’s not software end to end in the product.” If it requires a client to call Rippling’s operations team for help, it could be built better. That maniacal focus actually allowed Conrad to temporarily hold Rippling’s only role responding to user complaints, which he also credits with propelling rapid iteration. The CEO wants to remain in that mindset, so he still lists his job title on LinkedIn as “Customer Support.”

Conrad seems to have convinced investors that though he was pushed out of his $4.5 billion-valuation HR startup Zenefits, he was more responsible for its rise than its fall. Conrad had built a script that allowed Zenefits staffers to stay logged in to the study portion of their insurance exam. Conrad insists it played no part in helping them study for or pass the certification test. Still, regulators got involved, leading to his departure and a combined $1 million SEC fine for him and Zenefits. The desire to speed things up was another symptom of busy work draining the company’s time.

There were also culture issues, with Zenefits once having to tell employees not to have sex in the office stairwells. A more measured pace and a deeper commitment to diversity are a few other ways Rippling hopes to avoid the culture troubles of Conrad’s last venture.

Rippling only truly began hiring more than engineers when it came out of stealth a year ago. Now the startup has established two lucrative business models. First, it earns reseller fees from other enterprise tool makers when people buy them through the Rippling gateway. Any developer with a well-established brand becomes an integrated Rippling partner. It’s not going to try to out-build Zoom or Mailchimp. “As Rippling is successful, what I think it can do is bring a lot of customers to these other businesses. If you can bring down the marginal cost of adding an N+1 business system, there’s a lot less hesitation about adding products.” Customers want more utility, just without the headache.

Meanwhile, Rippling develops its own in-house versions of undifferentiated parts of the HR and IT stacks, like PTO management or commuter benefits. Customers aren’t loyal to a brand in these areas yet, so it’s easy for Rippling to swoop in. And it can charge a similar rate, but beat competitors on convenience because its homegrown systems integrate directly with Rippling’s source of truth on employee details. Upstarts in the single-sign on space like Okta and LastPass claim to be identity layers, but are really just password managers. And their early growth has spurred SaaS companies to build API endpoints on which Rippling’s version RPass can piggyback.

For a while I thought Slack would emerge as the enterprise identity provider because chat is such a ubiquitous need that it could be the start of a cross-app profile. But HR and IT are an even more foundational layer, and Slack doesn’t feel like a natural place to gather employee details like Rippling is. “For slack, communication and collaboration in general are a big enough opportunity to not let identity get in the way of the core business there,” says Hamid.

Now with Rippling’s business revving up and plenty of cash to fuel the engine, Conrad tells me his biggest concern is hiring the right people. “The really challenging thing in a company is when the headcount grows too quickly. I’m making sure we don’t do things like more than double headcount in a 12-month period,” he tells me. While Zenefits was a mad blitz for scale, Conrad has tried to bias Rippling toward action without being so impulsive that the company makes mistakes. “It’s never easy, but we’re not yet at the scale where things become really scary. We have a little bit more time to hit milestones. We’re growing at a healthy clip, but nothing that’s straining things in any way and we see that because we track our NPS very closely,” he says of trying to run a business at a more livable pace while being an active dad, too.

Luckily, Zenefits taught him how to avoid many of the pitfalls of entrepreneurship. Conrad concludes that he’s happy to have gone from “playing video games on impossible mode versus medium mode.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Rippling raises M at 0M to be the biz app identity layer

Identity management software provider Okta, which went public two years ago in what was one of the first pure-cloud subscription-based company IPOs, wants to fund the next generation of identity, security and privacy startups.

At its big customer conference Oktane, where the company has also announced a new level of identity protection at the server level, chief operating officer Frederic Kerrest (pictured above, right, with chief executive officer Todd McKinnon) will unveil a $50 million investment fund meant to back early-stage startups leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain technology.

“We view this as a natural extension of what we are doing today,” Okta senior vice president Monty Gray told TechCrunch. Gray was hired last year to oversee corporate development, i.e. beef up Okta’s M&A strategy.

Gray and Kerrest tell TechCrunch that Okta Ventures will invest capital in existing Okta partners, as well as other companies in the burgeoning identity management ecosystem. The team managing the fund will look to Okta’s former backers, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock, for support in the deal sourcing process.

Okta Ventures will write checks sized between $250,000 and $2 million to eight to 10 early-stage businesses per year.

“It’s just a way of making sure we are aligning all our work and support with the right companies who have the right vision and values because there’s a lot of noise around identity, ML and AI,” Kerrest said. “It’s about formalizing the support strategy we’ve had for years and making sure people are clear of the fact we are helping these organizations build because it’s helpful to our customers.”

Okta Ventures’ first bet is Trusted Key, a blockchain-based digital identity platform that previously raised $3 million from Founders Co-Op. Okta’s investment in the startup, founded by former Microsoft, Oracle and Symantec executives, represents its expanding interest in the blockchain.

“Blockchain as a backdrop for identity is cutting edge if not bleeding edge,” Gray said.

Okta, founded in 2009, had raised precisely $231 million from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, Khosla Ventures, Floodgate and others prior to its exit. The company’s stock has fared well since its IPO, debuting at $17 per share in 2017 and climbing to more than $85 apiece with a market cap of $9.6 billion as of Tuesday closing.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Okta unveils M in-house venture capital fund

Two of the issues limiting blockchain adoption in the enterprise has been lack of scalability and privacy. Offchain Labs, a startup that spun out of research at Princeton, wants to help create more scalable smart contracts while shifting part of the process off of the public blockchain to increase privacy. Today, the company announced a $3.7M seed round led by Pantera Capital.

Compound VC, Raphael Ouzan of Blocknation, Jake Seid, managing director at Stone Bridge Ventures and other unnamed investors also participated.

The startup has created a protocol called Arbitrum that helps developers scale smart contracts in a way that’s difficult to do right now, says company co-founder Ed Felten. “We’re working to build a platform for smart contract development that provides what we think developers want, a combination of scalability so that you can scale to more transactions per second, more users, and to contracts that have more code and still have more data in them,” he explained.

In addition to scalability, the company believes that companies want a way to business without sharing everything they are doing, as is required on a public chain. “The second thing we think people want is privacy, meaning control over who gets to see what’s happening in their contract. So you don’t have to publish everything about your contracts, your code and everything it does on a public chain in order to get your work done.”

The last piece related to that is trust. “Our platform offers what we call the ‘Any Trust Guarantee’, which means that when you launch or deploy your contract, you specify a set of validators for it. And the guarantee we give you is that as long as at least one validator is acting honestly, your contract will execute correctly, no matter how evil or inattentive the other validators are,” Felten said.

The company was born out of research at Princeton University and began with what Felten called an academic prototype created in their labs. Felten is a computer science professor at Princeton, and also served as Deputy CTO to the White House under President Obama,

Those credentials and the prototype showed enough to attract investors. Today, the company is hoping to use the money to complete a Beta version of Arbitrum. He wouldn’t commit to a timeline, but said the product is close.

While Felten recognizes he is competing with giants like IBM and SAP in the enterprise blockchain space, he believes that the startup has come up with a solution to a persistent problem for blockchain developers, and they are releasing the protocol as open source to make it even more attractive.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Enterprise blockchain startup Offchain Labs scores .7M seed round

Tel Aviv’s Run.AI, a startup that is building a new virtualization and acceleration platform for deep learning, is coming out of stealth today. As a part of this announcement, the company also announced that it has now raised a total of $13 million. This includes a $3 million seed round from TLV Partners and a $10 million Series A round led by Haim Sadger’s S Capital and TLV Partners.

It’s no secret that building deep learning models take a hefty amount of GPU power or access to specialized AI chips. Run.AI argues that the virtualization layers that worked so well for in the past don’t quite cut it for training today’s AI models.

“We believe that we’re only scratching the surface of the full potential of deep learning,” Run.AI CEO and co-founder Omri Geller told me. “But the computational infrastructure needs of deep learning are a totally different ballgame. […] The rise of deep learning is triggering a new era of compute.”

Traditionally, Geller argues, virtualization was all about being generous and sharing the resources of a single machine for workloads that typically only run for a short time or use a small amount of resources. Deep learning workloads, however, are very different and are essentially selfish in that they want to take over all the available compute resources of a given machine. These training sessions also typically run for hours or days. At its core, what Run.AI offers is a new virtualization layer for distributed machine learning tasks that can across a large number of machines.

“We built a compute abstraction layer that bridges the gap between the new form of workloads and the new hardware that is evolving,” said Geller. “By using this abstraction layer, we can achieve 100x faster compute using distributed computing. We can double the resource utilization of the hardware and we can bring to companies the control over time and cost regarding deep learning.” That’s 100x faster than using a single resource, though that’s a bit aspirational as Geller also tells me that the team is seeing about a 10x speedup in production right now, though he’s confident that the team will get to 100x over time. Either way, though, the promise here is that the service will allow you to optimize the utilization of your deep learning workloads.

That’s only one part of the company’s solution, though. In addition, the company’s tools also analyze the model in order to break it down into smaller models that can then run in parallel across these servers. With that, the service can understand how many resources a workload would need and what machines to best send the given workloads to. In doing this, the system takes into account everything from available compute resources to network bandwidth, as well as the data pipeline and size.

The company also argues that this allows it to train large models that are bigger than the individual GPU memory capacity of a single machine.

There’s a financial aspect to this, too, because users can determine whether they want the service to prioritize cost savings over training speed, for example. The platform supports both private and public cloud deployments. In private clouds, cost savings are obviously less of a factor but the premise of increased utlization of the existing hardware investment will likely be a draw for many of these users.

The company, which was founded by Geller, Dr. Ronen Dar and Prof. Meir Feder, was founded in 2018. While still in stealth, it signed a number of early customers and opened a U.S. office. 

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Run.AI raises M for its distributed machine learning platform

Aqua Security, a startup that helps customers launch containers securely, announced a $62 million Series C investment today led by Insight Partners.

Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), TLV Partners and Shlomo Kramer also participated. With today’s investment, the startup’s investments since inception now total over $100 million, according to the company.

Early investors took a chance on the company when it was founded in 2015. Containers were barely a thing back then, but the founders had a vision of what was coming down the pike and their bet has paid off in a big way as the company now has first-mover advantage. As more companies turn to Kubernetes and containers, the need for a security product built from the ground up to secure this kind of environment is essential.

While co-founder and CEO Dror Davidoff says the company has 60 Fortune 500 customers, he’s unable to share names, but he can provide some clues like five of the world’s top banks. As companies like that turn to new technology like containers, they aren’t going to go whole hog without a solid security option. Aqua gives them that.

“Our customers are all taking very dramatic steps towards adoption of those new technologies, and they know that existing security tools that they have in place will not solve the problems,” Davidoff told TechCrunch. He said that most customers have started small, but then have expanded as container adoption increases.

You may thank that an ephemeral concept like a container would be less of a security threat, but Davidoff says that the open nature of containerization actually leaves them vulnerable to tampering. “Container lives long enough to be dangerous,” he said. He added, “They are structured in an open way, making it simple to hack, and once in, to do lateral movement. If the container holds sensitive info, it’s easy to have access to that information.”

Aqua scans container images for malware and makes sure only certified images can run, making it difficult for a bad actor to insert an insecure image, but the ephemeral nature of containers also helps if something slips through. DevOp can simply take down the faulty container and put a newly certified clean one quickly.

The company has 150 employees with offices in the Boston area and R&D in Tel Aviv in Israel. With the new influx of cash, the company plans to expand quickly, growing sales and marketing, customer support and expanding the platform into areas to cover emerging areas like serverless computing. Davidoff says the company could double in size in the next 12-18 months and he’s expecting 3x to 4x customer growth.

All of that money should provide fuel to grow the company as containerization spreads and companies look for a security solution to keep containers in production safe.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Container security startup Aqua lands M Series C