Browsing Tag: Startups

Mode, a five-year-old collaborative analytics platform based in San Francisco, has raised $23 million in Series C funding led by Valor Equity Partners.

Foundation Capital and REV Venture Partners, which had led Mode’s Series A and B financing rounds, respectively, also joined the round, which brings the company’s total funding to $50 million.

In some ways, the investment is a bet on the continuing need for data scientists, despite the many companies that are focused on making data analysis available and understandable to a broader swath of employees, like Snowflake and BigQuery.

The way Mode co-founder and CEO Derek Steer sees it, owing to today’s tools, organizations may need fewer data scientists. But they need also to better empower those individuals to effectively answer key questions, like how clients are using their product. Mode does this through an integrated SQL editor, Python, R notebooks and visualization builder that it says give users the flexibility to choose the level of abstraction they want for a given data set.

The new round is also very much a bet on Steer, says David Obrand, a partner at Valor who is joining the board, and who worked previously with Steer at Yammer, the enterprise-level social networking site that was acquired by Microsoft in 2012.

Obrand, who was Yammer’s chief customer officer, credits Steer as “key in accelerating [Yammer’s] path as a data-driven business.” He says further that Steer “embodies the persona of the customer he’s serving.”

As importantly, at Yammer, Steer learned how to build a “freemium” software business that’s adopted by an organization after a small set of employees begins actively using its free version. Indeed, Mode’s playbook is much the same, giving data scientists access to a free product called Mode Studio with the hope that, for many, it will become core to their workflow, and they’ll then ask decision-makers across the organization to use it.

That plan appears to be working. Steer tells us 600 organizations now use Mode, including Twitch, Lyft, Shopify, Meredith and Conde Nast. And while he says he isn’t certain of the exact percentage of users that are paying the company for its tools, its newest round suggests the number is meaningful.

Right now, Mode targets companies with up to 5,000 seats. It also caters largely to a U.S. audience.

With its new capital, the company plans to expand geographically, including hiring employees outside of San Francisco for the first time. Steer suggests to expect new features, too. The company also plans to expand each of its departments, focusing on its community efforts, in particular.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Mode, a collaborative analytics platform focused on empowering data scientists, just landed million in fresh funding

Datadog, the popular monitoring and analytics platform, today announced that it has acquired Madumbo, an AI-based application testing platform.

“We’re excited to have the Madumbo team join Datadog,” said Olivier Pomel, Datadog’s CEO. “They’ve built a sophisticated AI platform that can quickly determine if a web application is behaving correctly. We see their core technology strengthening our platform and extending into many new digital experience monitoring capabilities for our customers.”

Paris-based Madumbo, which was incubated at Station F and launched in 2017, offers its users a way to test their web apps without having to write any additional code. It promises to let developers build tests by simply interacting with the site, using the Madumbo test recorder, and to help them build test emails, password and testing data on the fly. The Madumbo system then watches your site and adapts its check to whatever changes you make. This bot also watches for JavaScript errors and other warnings and can be integrated into a deployment script.

The team will join Datadog’s existing Paris office and will work on new products, which Datadog says will be announced later this year. Datadog will phase out the Madumbo platform over the course of the next few months.

“Joining Datadog and bringing Madumbo’s AI-powered testing technology to its platform is an amazing opportunity,” said Gabriel-James Safar, CEO of Madumbo. “We’ve long admired Datadog and its leadership, and are excited to expand the scope of our existing technology by integrating tightly with Datadog’s other offerings.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Datadog acquires app testing company Madumbo

InVision, the design company valued at $1.9 billion, has today announced the acquisition of Australia-based Trunk.

Trunk is focused wholly on file versioning for designers. In the world of engineering, GitHub has provided a way for developers to keep versions organized — developers can track changes, create a separate branch to experiment, and collaborate more easily with other developers by merging branches. But the same courtesy hasn’t properly been extended to designers, who usually spend plenty of time scrolling through long email chains searching for the latest version of the attachment.

The deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, came about after Trunk applied for funding from InVision’s Design Forward Fund. After taking a look at the Trunk business and getting to know the team better, InVision decided to take it a step further with a proper acquisition offer.

“We’re truly inverting the workflow,” said InVision CEO and founder Clark Valberg . “It’s gone from engineering first to design first because, in the process of building, design is the best place to have conversations across the company. Everyone can understand it and strategize. Engineers have had version control since the very early days.”

The Trunk team will be focusing their energy on Studio, InVision’s design tool, which launched about a year ago.

The launch of Studio was the first time that InVision truly showed its hand, revealing efforts to go well beyond a simple collaboration tool and become the Salesforce of the design world.

In order to do so, InVision is building bridges between itself and other design focused startups, whether its through integrations, investment, or straight-up acquisition.

“As a growing company with some 800 employees, we’re always looking for people who are passionate about each individual slice of this design pie as possible,” said Valberg. “After using Trunk’s technology, we realized that they really really really care about this slice around design file versioning.”

The InVision collaboration suite currently boasts a place at 98 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, with more than 5 million users. This means the company is shifting its focus squarely to Studio. Design collaboration software was a relatively novel idea back when InVision launched, but design software wasn’t. With Studio, InVision is taking on incumbents like Adobe and other newcomers such as Sketch.

Of course, the feature set of Studio itself is important in beating out other design tools, but InVision believes that the real deal closer is integration with the deeper back-end of InVision’s suite of tools, such as InVision collaboration and now, design file versioning.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | InVision acquires design file versioning startup Trunk

SumUp, the London-based fintech company that enables small businesses to take card payments via its device and online, has acquired “multi-channel” e-commerce platform Shoplo.

Terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed, while SumUp says the acquisition will enable it to expand its product suite to give SumUp merchants access to various online marketplaces, such as Facebook, eBay and Etsy. In addition, Shoplo’s tech will also help SumUp merchants create better-looking online storefronts.

“The acquisition of Warsaw-based company Shoplo, consisting of 30 employees, will provide SumUp with the template, technology, and expertise to expand the e-commerce area of its business, enabling it to offer a scalable solution that will allow its merchants to easily create their own online stores and sell on numerous e-commerce platforms in just a few clicks,” says SumUp.

More broadly, BBVA-backed SumUp started out offering functionality akin to Silicon Valley’s Square, and subsequently merged with Rocket Internet’s Square clone Payleven. However, the full SumUp product suite today encompasses accepting payments on-the-go or online, managing business at the point of sale, invoicing and bookkeeping, third-party integrations of payments, and other services via SDKs and APIs.

In part, this has been achieved through acquisition, including another recent purchase: Danish company Debitoor, an invoicing software platform originally established for freelancers and SMEs which will be integrated within SumUp’s user offering

Meanwhile, SumUp says these acquisitions are part of SumUp’s ambitious expansion drive as it attempts to create a one-stop-shop for businesses of all sizes. It has also been rumoured that the U.K. fintech has achieved ‘unicorn’ status — a valuation of $1 billion or more — which it also officially conforming today. The company claims its surpassed annual revenue of $200 million.

Adds Marc-Alexander Christ, co-founder of SumUp, in a statement: “From the shop-floor to the online checkout, SumUp is looking to be the first point-of-call to merchants globally. Every decision we make to expand our product suite is made with the consideration and feedback from our 1 million users worldwide”.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | SumUp acquires ‘multi-channel’ e-commerce platform Shoplo

Virtuo, the Paris-headquartered car rentals startup, has raised €20 million in Series B funding. The round is backed by Iris Capital, Balderton Capital and Raise Ventures, and will be used to continue expanding across the U.K. and other European countries.

Originally founded in France and available in 19 French and 2 Belgium locations, Virtuo launched in London last Summer, and says it plans to bring the service to U.K. cities Manchester, Bristol and Edinburgh later this year.

The company will also expand to Spain and Germany in 2019, creating what Virtuo claims will be a “truly pan-European rental option,” for drivers who are seeking an alternative to the big five incumbent car rental companies.

Designed to bring car rentals into the mobile age and in turn improve the user experience, the Virtuo app lets you book and unlock a Mercedes A-Class or GLA “in minutes,” at stations across the various cities the company operates, eradicating long wait times and arduous paperwork often associated with renting a car.

Like a plethora of mobility startups, the idea is to provide more options to a generation of non-car owners and in turn help creative a longer-term alternative to car ownership more generally.

“From the outset, we have been new challengers in an industry that has long-been dominated by 5 key players, whose bricks and mortar approach is deeply ingrained, not just in terms of market coverage, but also consumer rental habits,” Virtuo co-founder Karim Kaddoura tells me.

“We were the first to come into this industry with the fundamental belief that a 100 percent mobile approach is the only way to rebuild and re-think how car rental can be delivered from the ground up… From an operational perspective, by not being tied to bricks and mortar, we are able to launch stations, markets and services at a pace that has not been seen in the industry before”.

Kaddoura says Virtuo is also taking a data-driven and customer centric approach to building out its product, helping the company to innovate and improve every facet of renting a car. This has seen Virtuo garner 500,000 downloads of its app, which is popular with drivers between the age of 25 and 35.

I’m also told the average number of days of each rental is 4, averaging 325 miles per rental. Meanwhile, 80 percent of customers go for the compact A Class, while 20 percent take SUV.

“By continually listening to customer pain-points around booking processes, damage reporting, refuelling, communication and transparency, we can tackle these long-standing issues in new ways with technology as the solution,” he says. “The series B will play a key role in being able to provide greater availability across Europe and our existing markets”.

Adds Bernard Liautaud, managing partner of Balderton Capital: “Technology in cars and other areas of mobility is evolving rapidly, due to concerns over the environment and congestion. Given these shifts, renting a car as and when you need it is becoming a viable alternative to buying, particularly for younger people who have come of age as the sharing economy took off”.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Car rental startup Virtuo picks up €20M Series B

InReach Ventures, the so-called “AI-powered” venture capital firm based in London, is announcing the first closing of a new €53 million fund targeting early-stage European technology companies — surpassing the original fund target of €50 million, apparently.

Founded by former Balderton Capital General Partner Roberto Bonanzinga, along with Ben Smith (former U.K. Engineering Director at Yammer) and John Mesrie (former General Counsel at Balderton Capital), InReach set out in 2015 to use technology to help scale VC, especially across Europe’s idiosyncratic and highly fragmented market.

The firm’s proprietary software-based approach, which is underpinned by machine learning, claims to be able to generate and evaluate deal-flow more efficiently than traditional venture firms that mostly employ human VCs alone — although, admittedly, practically every VC firm is underpinned by some eliminate of data science and/or technology these days. Berlin’s Fly VC is another machine learning-enabled early-stage VC that comes to mind.

However, InReach certainly appears to be putting its money where its mouth is, disclosing that it has invested over €3 million in the development of its software, codenamed “DIG”. To back this up, Bonanzinga tells me the firm employs “more software engineers than investors”. (I saw an early demo of the software a couple of years ago and even then it seemed legit.)

Regards the new fund, Bonanzinga says InReach is targeting the most promising and innovative startups across Europe, primarily in the areas of consumer internet, software as a service and marketplaces. “We are geographically agnostic and will invest in companies anywhere in Europe, from Helsinki to Barcelona, from Warsaw to Rome,” he says. “In most cases we will be the first institutional investors and our first cheques will be between €500,000 and €2 million”.

To date, InReach Ventures has invested in eight startups from across Europe. They include Oberlo (Lithuania), which was subsequently acquired by Shopify, Soldo (Italy/UK), Tutorful (U.K.), Shapr3D (Hungary), Traitly (Sweden) and Loot (Germany).

Below follows a lightly edited Q&A with Bonanzinga on the new fund, how AI can be used to scale venture capital, and why machines won’t put VCs out of a job entirely any time soon.

TC: You have often said that venture capital doesn’t scale, especially across a fragmented market like Europe, but what do you mean by this?

RB: People get very excited about ecosystems but the data shows that startups can come from anywhere; the big technology hubs or more remote locations. This is carried through to Europe’s largest exists: from Betfair in London to Zalando in Berlin, from Supercell and Spotify in the Nordics, to Critio in France and Yoox in Italy, and so on. So not only is deal sourcing fragmented across Europe, but so are the returns.

Traditional ventures firms have looked to manage this fragmentation by throwing people at the problem, but if you want true coverage you need to have a presence in every city in Europe. This is how you need to think of our technology platform, as like having a highly trained associate in every city and town across the whole of Europe, providing structured diligent deal-flow. With this data/technology driven approach we can be truly pan-European at the early-stage, even as the first institutional investor on the cap-table.

TC: A lot of VCs say they use technology to help find or manage deal-flow, how is InReach any different?

RB: Many venture firms talk about data and software. Lately, it has become a hot topic in pitches to limited partners. I predict a new hype: the rush of needing to check the box of “we have a data strategy”. We will have many firms with 30+ investment professionals and a data engineer in a corner. The real question is how many firms are willing to transform their professional service DNA into a product DNA? As always, this is more of a people/organisational question, rather than a question simply of the use of technology.

Take a look at InReach, we are a very atypical founding team for a venture firm. In particular, Ben Smith comes from a software engineering background and has built many data platforms and product development teams (most recently at Yammer/Microsoft). The majority of the people at InReach are software engineers. This is the only Venture Firm we know in which there are more software engineers than investors! So far we have invested over €3m in developing our proprietary technology platform.

TC: Without giving away your secret sauce, how does the InReach platform work, both in terms of the machine learning/feedback loop or the signals/data you plug into it?

RB: From a technology perspective, our logical architecture is primarily based on 3 distinct layers: data, intelligence, and workflow. The data layer is a mix of massive data aggregation, with deep data enhancement, including the generation of a large set of original data. The intelligence layer makes sense of these millions of data points through an ensemble of machine learning algorithms, ranging in complexity from simple rules to advanced networks. Given this data-driven approach and the significant deal-flow this generates, we invest heavily in building a workflow product which allows us to efficiently process thousands of companies each month.

TC: You say the final investment decision is still made by humans: why is that and do you think this will always be the case?

RB: As with any AI company, it’s all about data. We have spent the past 3 years aggregating data from across the internet and building algorithms to provide us with significant dealflow. Much more crucially, we have been collecting and generating our own proprietary data-set of investment decisions and how these startups grow and adapt over time. Clearly this will only get more powerful.

However, especially at this early-stage, so much of the investment decision is based on the founders and what we call the DNA fit of the founders and the problem they are trying to solve. Some of this can be encoded in algorithms and learnt by AI, but there are still intangibles that ultimately require that we ask the question: do we enjoy spending time together?

RB: What has been the reaction by under the radar founders when they are discovered really early via InReach’s software?

RB: The first question is always ‘How did you find out about us?’. Once we explain what we do and how the platform works we create an immediate connection with the entrepreneur. This is exactly what happened when we reached out to 5 entrepreneurs in Vilnius who had started a company called Oberlo. Over the following year, we helped them grow and expand to 30 people across both Vilnius and Berlin, prior to their acquisition by Shopify.

We are taking a very entrepreneurial approach to investing; we run InReach more as a product development organisation, rather than a professional services firm, so we look and feel native to the entrepreneurs we talk to. We try to share our experiences and current-best-practices through the company building process, whether it be OKRs, different agile development methodologies, product roadmaps, etc.

Reaching out to promising entrepreneurs early is not the only advantage that DIG gives us. We are also very efficient and responsive when analysing inbound opportunities. In fact, if you look at our website, we optimize our website to convert visitors to share their startup with us. We are not concerned with being bombarded by opportunities because we have developed a scalable workflow that allows us to efficiently manage significant dealflow.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | InReach Ventures, the ‘AI-powered’ European VC, closes new €53M fund

Bevy announced today that it has acquired CMX, which it describes as “the world’s largest community for community professionals.”

In other words, CMX is trying to connect and support the people whose job is to build communities around their companies. To do that, it organizes the CMX Summit and also offers membership to a private network called CMX Pro.

Bevy, meanwhile, has built software for companies to manage community events. In fact, the company was created by the organizers of Startup Grind, who said they initially built Bevy because of the challenge involved in managing all the different Startup Grind events.

The company now says it works with customers including Slack, Atlassian, Asana, Gainsight and Duolingo — in fact, Duolingo uses it to host 1,000 monthly events.

In an email, Bevy CEO Derek Andersen told me, “I’ve been a  CMX community speaker, sponsor, and member for many years, and there is no better way to get educated and networked in the community industry than CMX.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. CMX’s co-founder and CEO David Spinks will continue to lead CMX initiatives within Bevy, and he will become the company’s vice president of community.

“People are in desperate need of meaningful community,” Spinks said in the acquisition announcement. “They’re craving more depth, and that often comes through in-person, real world connection. Derek and the Bevy team have built a great platform to help teams scale their IRL community programs. We’re thrilled to join forces and work toward a more meaningfully connected world.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Bevy acquires community-focused networking company CMX

Just days after Postmates filed confidential paperwork for an initial public offering, the latest news in the on-demand delivery space is that competitor DoorDash is in the process of raising a $500 million round, The Wall Street Journal reports. The round would reportedly value DoorDash at more than $6 billion and possibly up to $7 billion.

According to the WSJ, Temasek Holdings Pte., Singapore’s state investment firm, is expected to lead the round.

Last year, DoorDash raised a $250 million round of financing that valued the company at $4 billion. In total, DoorDash has raised nearly $1 billion in funding from investors like SoftBank, Sequoia, DST Global, Kleiner Perkins and others.

Earlier this year, the food-delivery startup became the first startup to operate in all 50 states. Meanwhile, similar to Instacart, DoorDash has also reportedly been subsidizing worker pay with tips from customers, but DoorDash still has yet to respond to TechCrunch regarding the practice.

I’ve reached out to DoorDash and will update this story if I hear back.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | DoorDash is reportedly raising 0M at a B+ valuation

The City of Paris first warned Airbnb, and it is now taking action. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, told the JDD that the city is suing the company for 1,010 illegal listings. The fine could be worth as much as $14.2 million (€12.625 million).

Based on current legislation, you can’t rent an apartment more than 120 days a year. If you want to rent an apartment on Airbnb in Paris, you first must register your apartment with the city. The city then gives you an ID number so they can track how many nights you’re listing your apartment on Airbnb.

And yet, many listings still don’t have that ID number. The mayor’s office flagged around 1,000 apartments back in December 2017 and said Airbnb was dragging its feet. The company had little incentive to comply, as hosts were responsible for their own listings.

Thanks to a new law, the responsibility is now shared between the hosts and the platform. The City of Paris can now fine Airbnb for all those illegal listings, up to €12,500 per listing.

According to Hidalgo, Airbnb has been putting too much pressure on the housing market. She thinks that 65,000 apartments are now reserved for Airbnb in Paris alone. In some areas, it has become quite hard to find an apartment because of that. Local shops also suffer because tourists have different needs. In addition to better monitoring, Hidalgo is also in favor of restricting listings to 30 nights per year.

Airbnb told the JDD that it has complied with regulations and informed all Airbnb hosts about the new rules. The company also says that regulation in Paris doesn’t comply with European regulation. It’s clear that this fight is not over.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Paris sues Airbnb for illegal listings and seeks .2 million

Aditya and Aarti Kochhar Kaji didn’t set out to start the snack food business Taali Foods when they were studying for their business degrees at Harvard.

The couple both hail from Mumbai and met at the University of Pennsylvania . They were married before starting at Harvard’s Business School and initially were interested in other areas — Aarti was exploring a career in venture capital and Aditya was looking at the food and beverage industry broadly in his classes at Harvard.

Addicted to snack foods like chips and popcorn to fuel her Harvard study sessions, Aarti started making popped water lily seeds as a snack — a food both she and her husband had grown up eating in India, she said.

The seeds, which are high in anti-oxidants and low in fat, have been a staple of Ayurvedic medicine — thanks to their purported anti-inflammatory properties, and are a staple of Indian snacking traditions. Now, with American consumers on the hunt for healthier snacks, they’re becoming a big business in the U.S. as well.

Y Combinator is very on-trend, with its decision to invest and accelerate Taali as part of its most recent cohort of startups. But in this instance you may call the accelerator a fast follower rather than a progenitor of this trend.

No less auspicious a food tastemaker than Whole Foods named water lily seeds as one of the top 10 new food trends of 2019. With that attention, competitors to Taali abound.

Bohana and AshaPops are just two new snack food companies floating on the popped water lily seed movement. Bohana even managed to nab the attention of PepsiCo’s Nutrition Greenhouse competitive accelerator.

It’s no secret that technology investors are investing more heavily in consumer businesses — everything from snack foods to period products and baby formula — and startups need only point to the success of Amazon as the everything store to show that there’s always money to be made in the category.

Indeed, at $1.47 trillion, the consumer packaged goods industry dwarfs technology as a share of the nation’s economy.

As Ryan Caldbeck, the head of the consumer-focused investment firm CircleUp noted last year:

The uptick in tech VC dollars going to the CPG market is partly because tech investing is brutally competitive and saturated, and largely because these VCs are awakening to the strong historical returns in CPG, especially with the trend leaning towards small brands stealing market share.

Consumer is a massive market – about 3x the size of tech, as seen below.

Despite the size of the market, the early-stage has historically been underserved by investors due to market inefficiencies like the geographic dispersion of brands and a lack of structured information sources (i.e. there is no Silicon Valley for consumer, and certainly no Crunchbase equivalents – yet).

Strong exits are already possible for consumer brands — and not necessarily from the big-ticket, headline grabbing acquisitions like Dollar Shave Club. Last week This is L. — the condom and period product retailer — sold for roughly $100 million after raising seed funding from investors, including 500 Startups and Y Combinator.

Taali was similarly bootstrapped before it was accepted into Y Combinator. The company is already selling its snacks through Amazon and in retail locations like Fairway in New York and Central Market in Texas. The founders expect to be in stores in California in the next few months.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Taali takes its popped water lily snacks from Y Combinator to the world