While Slack is trying to kill email, a new email startup backed by Kleiner Perkins is trying to make corporate email more like Slack.

Consider is an email service for startups that balances some premium individual features with collaboration tools that it hopes will help them bring startups on board.

The founders of Consider both met at Intercom as the 1st and 10th employees there. While at Intercom, CEO Ben McRedmond met Kleiner Perkins’ Mamoon Hamid, who was an early investor there. Hamid also wrote the first check for Consider before the founders even had a product to demo. That 2017 check combined with a more recent investment from Bedrock brings the total funding for the startup to $5 million.

As the product emerges from stealth, it’s also signaling a shift in its customer focus from individuals wanting an email experience that’s “calm and focused” to startup teams that are looking to keep more of their team’s collaboration happening inside email.

The central part of this strategy is the addition of a Slack-like Groups feature, which allows people to join shared inboxes inside their company that people can forward messages to or cc on emails. The founders started the company with the idea that the inbox was essentially a list of to-dos, with this idea also extending to group-work, allowing engineers to amass bug reports and create a shared repository of emails with relevance to the whole group.

The startup says they aren’t actually trying to kill Slack or other synchronous chat tools but they want people to use email in a more collaborative way, and part of that means categorizing the emails you receive and putting them in front of the right eyeballs. The fact is, the bulk of this functionality — though not all — is possible inside of stock Gmail with the right filters, but it’s all pretty messy and people will generally pay for an interface that is built to be effective.

The premium email service space has been gathering attention; most of that attention has been directed toward $30/month Superhuman, which was recently valued at $260 million.

Consider is charging $10 per user per month. They’re not discouraging individual users curious for a new inbox experience either, though without Groups there is less to differentiate the app. On an individual basis the app brings functionality focused on sorting emails and sending you batches of the ones it has deemed non-critical at certain times of the day so you aren’t being inundated with notifications.

The app is out of beta and live for sign-ups of Gmail users on Web, Mac, iOS and Android.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Kleiner Perkins bets on a premium email service that’s bringing Slack-like Groups into Gmail

PlaceIQ is announcing a strategic investment from Experian.

CEO Duncan McCall said the investment is part of a growth round that PlaceIQ raised after divesting itself of its advertising business (which is being taken over by Zeta Global). He declined to disclose the size of the round, or of the Experian investment.

“It’s a multi-year, strategic partnership, where we will work together to license data [to Experian], and they also proactively become an investor in the company,” McCall said, adding that this “coincided nicely with us divesting of our media business and raising a modest growth round.”

While Experian is best-known for credit reporting, this partnership involves its marketing services business. Under the deal, the Experian Marketing Services will incorporate PlaceIQ’s LandMark location data product into its broader suite of data and measurement tools.

“With the mindset that consumers need to be at the heart of every marketing strategy, brands and agencies need to find ways to reach them and deliver more relevant messages,” said Experian’s president of marketing services Kevin Dean in a statement.” We believe quality data and advanced technology underpin that entire approach, and our collaboration and investment with PlaceIQ reinforce our commitment to helping brands meet that expectation.”

Asked about the direction of PlaceIQ’s business going forward, McCall explained that the company started with a focus on selling location data, and now, it’s gone back to “being a data-only company again.”

“Of course, we would have preferred to have focused on just one business model all these years, but life’s not that simple,” he said.

In his telling, PlaceIQ had to expand into the ad sales business because the infrastructure didn’t exist at the time to incorporate that data into the ad-buying process. Now that the infrastructure is there, PlaceIQ can focus once more on selling location data, which can then be used for targeting on a broad range of ad-buying platforms.

According to Crunchbase, PlaceIQ previously raised a total of $52 million in funding.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Experian makes strategic investment in location data company PlaceIQ

Tesorio, a startup that helps businesses aggregate and analyze their cash flow data, today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A round led by Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group. Existing investors First Round Capital, Floodgate, Y Combinator, Fathom Capital and Fuel Capital participated. This brings Tesorio’s total funding to $17 million. Madrona’s Hope Cochran will join the company’s board.

The company is tackling an interesting market that is surprisingly underserved, given that every company likely wants to be able to track its cash flow as closely as possible. In most companies, though, that’s still done with the help of Excel spreadsheets. The fact that Jeff Epstein, former CFO of Oracle; Ron Gill, former CFO of NetSuite; and Greg Henry, CFO of Couchbase and former SVP of Finance at ServiceNow all gave angel funding to Tesorio shows how big a problem this is.

“Billion-dollar companies are running their cashflow in Excel — and that’s real,” Tesorio co-founder and CEO Carlos Vega told me. “What that doesn’t allow you to do is use all that data that goes into that cashflow in a smart way. […] Imagine all of that could be connected and interconnected — and that’s basically what we’re building.”

Tesorio helps businesses aggregate all of their cash flow — in some ways, you can think of it as a Mint for businesses — and then runs its AI models over it to predict a company’s overall financial health. Current customers include the likes of Veeva Systems, Box and WP Engine, which use the company’s systems to, for example, automate their accounts receivable operations to understand when customers are likely to pay. While there are other tools that help you manage the overall workflow, Vega argues that Tesorio is different because it can pull in data from all of these disparate systems and create a cash flow forecast based on this.

“Many departments have systems of record to log things like accounting entries, bank info, billings, customer interactions, spend, etc.,” Vega explained. “The exciting opportunity is to tie that data together dynamically so you can have a multifaceted view on the trajectory of your business (with a focus on the effects to cash flow) and then automate the levers that can help you impact cash.”

While the company didn’t disclose any revenue numbers, it did note that its revenue grew 4x year-over-year in 2018.

As Vega told me, it’s usually the financial teams and CFOs that adopt Tesorio. The company focuses on bringing on companies with 100 to 3,000 employees and it already has a number of international customers, too. In total, the platform has analyzed $56 billion in payments, 10 million invoices and 5 million user activities. As with all machine learning services, every new transaction also helps to make its models more precise.

As usual, Tesorio will use the new funding to expand its product — with a special focus on adding integrations with other finance systems — and its expand its go-to-market initiatives.

Madrona’s Hope Cochran, who herself was a public company CFO during her time at Clearwire and King Digital, stressed the need for a service like this. “The ultimate financial metric for a company is Cash,” she writes in today’s announcement. “Not just the current balance, but the trajectory of the balance. In the vast majority of companies, this analysis is performed on a spreadsheet. One containing many links, often circular references, and pulling in data from multiple sources. The risk of an error, a break, is high.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Tesorio raises M Series A to help companies track their cash flow

Serverless technology offers developers a way to develop without thinking about the infrastructure resources required to run a program, but up until now it has mostly been limited to function-driven programming. CloudState, a new open-source project from Lightbend, wants to change that by moving beyond functions.

Lightbend CTO Jonas Bonér believes this ability to abstract away infrastructure could extend beyond functions and triggers into a broader developer experience. “I think people sometimes [don’t distinguish] between serverless and Function as a Service. I think that’s actually cutting the technology short. What serverless really brings to the table is this completely new developer experience and operations experience by trying to automate as much as possible,” Bonér told TechCrunch.

He says that when he talks to customers, they are hankering for a more complete serverless developer experience that includes all parts of the program. “A lot of people say that I have this excellent use case for the current incarnation of serverless and Function as a Service, but the rest of my application doesn’t really work running there,” he said. That’s exactly what CloudState is trying to address.

Bonér is careful to point out that he’s not looking to replace function-driven programming. He only wants to augment it. CloudState takes advantage of some existing technologies like KNative, the open-source project that is trying to bring together serverless and containerization, as well as gRPC, Akka Cluster and GraalVM on Kubernetes.

He acknowledges that CloudState is still a work in progress, but he has the basic building blocks in place, and he’s hoping to use the power of open source to drive the development of this early-stage project. Today, it includes several key pieces — a specification outlining the goals of the project, a protocol to begin implementing it and a testing kit.

The goal here is to bring to fruition this broader vision of what serverless means, where developers can just write code without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure where the program will run. It’s a bold approach, but as Bonér says, it’s still early days, and will take time and a community to really build this out.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | New open-source project wants to expand serverless vision beyond functions

Enjoy, the e-commerce startup led by former Apple VP of retail operations, Ron Johnson, has raised an additional $150 million in Series C funding from L Catterton’s new consumer technology platform, LCH Partners. The funds will be used to fuel Enjoy’s U.K. expansion and other international growth. The startup is also today launching a partnership with British mobile network operator EE, which will allow the company to serve over 80% of U.K. households by 2020.

The company announced the funding but not the size of the round. An SEC filing shows $150 million was offered, but only half had closed. However, a source familiar with the round confirmed $150 million had been raised.

The new growth funding brings Enjoy’s total raise to date to $350 million, following its May 2015 launch. Prior investors include Riverwood Capital, Stamos Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Highland Capital and Oak Capital Management.

Having spent more than a decade at Apple, Johnson is best known for pioneering the concept of Apple’s retail stores and Genius Bar. He previously held an executive position at Target as VP of Merchandising and, following Apple, had a less successful run as J.C. Penney’s CEO, which led to his ouster. (Though in hindsight, it’s been argued that J.C. Penney should have just stuck with his plan, after all.)

With Silicon Valley-based Enjoy, Johnson combined the convenience of online shopping with the personal service that comes from shopping in a physical, brick-and-mortar store and the help you’d receive at Genius Bar, for example.

As Johnson explained around the time of launch, the goal was to figure out how to provide personal service to those who want to buy online.

“One of the observations from my time at Apple is that Apple makes the easiest to use products on the planet, but look at how busy the stores are with people asking questions and needing help. So what about the rest? How do you deliver help in this digital world we live in?,” he said, during an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2015.

Through partnerships with other companies, including AT&T, Sonos, Google and now EE, Enjoy creates an online mobile store where customers can shop for devices and receive same-day delivery. They also can opt to have an Enjoy expert deliver the item and help them get set up, free of charge.

Enjoy generates its revenue from its business partners, who pay to have their products sold through an online storefront. Enjoy then returns information like what sort of challenges customers face with their setups, and help to reduce calls to tech support while also increasing brand loyalty.

“One of the highlights of my retail career was creating a new channel for Apple customers, which was the Apple Retail Store,” said Ron Johnson, CEO and co-founder of Enjoy, in a statement. “Now I get to do it again by creating the mobile retail store for not just one company, but for many great companies around the world. As we look to drive the next phase of our growth, L Catterton was a natural choice as our partner, given their expertise in building consumer and technology brands on a global scale.”

Including today’s expansion by way of its EE partnership, Enjoy now operates in more than 54 U.S. markets and covers more than 50% of the U.S. population, and will be offered in 11 U.K. markets, covering more than 60% of the population, by year-end. As of 2020, it will reach 80% of the U.K. population.

The company also plans to expand to at least one other country this year, and additional countries in 2020.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Ron Johnson’s e-commerce startup Enjoy raises 0M, expands in UK

At a time when the industry appears to bet that AI will replace most human jobs, starting with the tens of millions currently residing in call centers, one startup is working to use the same technology to empower the jobs it is pegged to displace.

VoiceOps, a San Francisco-based startup, today announced it has raised $9 million in a Series A financing round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Existing investors Accel and Y Combinator also participated in the round. As part of the new fundraise, Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures is joining VoiceOps’ board of directors, the startup said.

VoiceOps works with companies to help them coach and train their call center representatives. The idea is simple: Sales people are often not putting their best foot forward when they make the pitches. There is some gap between what they should be presenting in their calls and what they end up pitching.

That’s where VoiceOps comes in. It claims to have built one of the world’s biggest data sets of sales behavior. It works with companies to understand what they are trying to sell and how they wish to go about it, Ethan Barhydt, co-founder and CEO of VoiceOps, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Co-founders of VoiceOps Ethan Barhydt, left, and Nate Becker pose for a picture. Their third co-founder, Daria Evdokimova, who previously serves as the startup’s CEO, is no longer involved in day to day operations.

The startup uses an AI-powered system to transcribe and analyze the sales calls and evaluates how often sales people adhere to the guidelines.

After the analysis, VoiceOps shares these insights with its clients. This helps the company quickly understand and address gaps in their reps’ sales behaviors. Thousands of calls originate from a call center each day. With the existing tools, it is hard to track exactly what improvements or changes a rep needs to make, Barhydt explained.

Barhydt likened VoiceOps’ approach to how self-driving car companies are improving their AI models. “Self-driving car companies take millions of images, where they have people manually label the cars in the stop signs, in the street lights, on the road, and then they feed that data into these models, and train the models to be able to do this accurately at scale. So we are doing the same thing. But instead of doing it on images, we’re doing it on conversation. The underlying technical problem that we have to solve is how do you take these complex unstructured conversations and turn it into structured data,” he said.

VoiceOps declined to share the number of clients it has, but said its customers today run some of the largest call centers in insurance, real estate, travel and insurance businesses, making as many as 50,000 calls each in a day. Additionally, the startup said its clients are able to see their conversion rate improve between 5% to 20% in the first 60 days itself, which helps them generate tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue.

In the last 12 months, Barhydt said VoiceOps’ solutions have helped several of its customers hit historic highs. “Early customers who spent $50K with us last year have 5X’d their spend to $250K after seeing stellar results,” he said. Education group Penn Foster, one of VoiceOps’ clients, is seeing the best rate of conversion in more than 100 years of its existence, he said.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Bain Capital Ventures’ Agarwal said the startup will use the fresh capital to scale its product offerings, hire more engineers and attract more customers. “This is a company that we think will grow at extraordinary rates — four to five times kind of growth. The kind of momentum that they have demonstrated in the past six months, we want to see it continue and grow that over the course of the next year,” he said.

VoiceOps, which currently serves customers in the U.S., intends to focus on expanding its footprint within the nation. “There is a conception that all the call center jobs are going outside of the U.S., but if you look at the data, call center jobs are growing about 5% year-over-year,” VoiceOps’ Barhydt said.

According to official U.S. government figures, there are about 3.5 million Americans who work in this space today. VoiceOps wants to help them. “When reps receive effective coaching, their calls improve, they hit quota more often, and they make more money,” Barhydt said.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | VoiceOps raises M to help companies coach their call center reps

The hype around blockchain seems to have cooled a bit, but companies like Kadena have been working on enterprise-grade solutions for some time, and continue to push the technology forward. Today, the startup announced that Kadena Scalable Permissioned Blockchain on Azure is available for free in the Azure Marketplace.

Kadena co-founder and CEO Will Martino says today’s announcement builds on the success of last year’s similar endeavor involving AWS. “Our private chain is designed for enterprise use. It’s designed for being high-performance and for integrating with traditional back ends. And by bringing that chain to AWS marketplace, and now to Microsoft Azure, we are servicing almost all of the enterprise blockchain market that takes place in the cloud,” Martino told TechCrunch.

The free product enables companies to get comfortable with the technology and build a Proof of Concept (PoC) without making a significant investment in the tooling. The free tool provides 2,000 transactions a second across four nodes. Once companies figure this out and want to scale, that’s when the company begins making money, but Martino recognizes that the technology is still immature and companies need to get comfortable with it, and that’s what the free versions on the cloud platforms like Azure are encouraging.

Martino says Kadena favors a hybrid approach to enterprise blockchain that combines public and private chains, and in his view, gives customers the best of both worlds. “You can run a smart contract on our public Chainweb protocol that will be launching on October 30th, and that smart contract can be linked to a cluster of private permission chain nodes that are running the other half of the application. This allows you to have all of the market access and openness and transparency and ownerlessness of a public network, while also having the control and the security that you find in a private network,” he said.

Martino and co-founder Stuart Popejoy both worked on early blockchain projects at JPMorgan, but left to start Kadena in 2016. The company has raised $14.9 million to date.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Kadena brings free private blockchain service to Azure Marketplace

Platform9, the startup best known for its SaaS-based, fully managed hybrid cloud platform, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series D round led by NGP Capital. Mubadala Ventures and existing investors Redpoint Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Canvas Ventures and HPE Pathfinder also participated in the round.

The company’s managed services sit on top of open-source tools like Kubernetes and OpenStack and focus on providing users with solutions that go beyond the basic infrastructure and help them throughout the life cycle of their applications. With the proliferation of cloud-native technologies, enterprises are now struggling with how to put them into production. With Fission, Platform9 even supports a new serverless framework that is still very much at the cutting edge. All of this comes with a considerable degree of complexity, though, if enterprises want to adopt and deploy these technologies themselves and, as Platform9 CEO and co-founder Sirish Raghuram notes in today’s announcement, they want to move fast and are looking for services to simplify these deployments.

“Simplifying the operational burden of delivering cloud-native infrastructure at scale across any environment is a key consideration for organizations going through digital transformation,” he said. “They are looking to leverage open-source modern technologies on top of their existing infrastructure and multi-cloud deployments, without crumbling under the complexity of managing technologies such as Kubernetes, monitoring, service-mesh, and more.”

Platform9 says its revenue grew 130% in the last year and its bookings are up 156%. It’s also seeing new revenue retention of 124%. Like most companies in this position, Platform9 plans to use the new capital to expand its sales, product and marketing teams. It also plans to invest in developing its core Kubernetes product, including Managed Prometheus, Managed Istio, kubevirt and others, the company tells me.

The company remains committed to OpenStack, too. “For enterprises and service providers that have many VM workloads, OpenStack remains the only open platform for IaaS and our OpenStack business is on pace to grow over 100% this year,” Raghuram tells me. “In addition to supporting OpenStack, we’re also investing in supporting VM workloads with kubevirt, which offers less functionality but could be very attractive to enterprise customers who are already committed to cloud-native with Kubernetes. However, kubevirt isn’t yet ready for production and we are guiding customers requiring production support for VMs today to choose OpenStack.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Platform9 raises million Series D for its managed hybrid cloud solution