Browsing Tag: Startups

“The screen is becoming the most important place in the world,” says InVision CEO and founder Clark Valberg . In fact, it’s hard to get through a conversation with him without hearing it. And, considering that his company has grown to $100 million in annual recurring revenue, he has reason to believe his own affirmation.

InVision, the startup looking to be the Salesforce of design, has officially achieved unicorn status with the close of a $115 million Series F round, bringing the company’s total funding to $350 million. This deal values InVision at $1.9 billion, which is nearly double its valuation as of mid-2017 on the heels of its $100 million Series E financing.

Spark Capital led the round, with participation from Goldman Sachs, as well as existing investors Battery Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, Tiger Global Management, FirstMark and Geodesic Capital. Atlassian also participated in the round. Earlier this year, Atlassian and InVision built out much deeper integrations, allowing Jira, Confluence and Trello users to instantly collaborate via InVision.

As part of the deal, Spark Capital’s Megan Quinn will be joining the board alongside existing board members and observers Amish Jani, Lee Fixel, Matthew Jacobson, Mike Kourey, Neeraj Agrawal, Vas Natarajan and Daniel Wolfson.

InVision started in 2011 as a simple prototyping tool. It let designers build out their experience without asking the engineering/dev team to actually build it, to then send to the engineering and product and marketing and executive teams for collaboration and/or approval.

Over the years, the company has stretched its efforts both up and downstream in the process, building out a full collaboration suite called InVision Cloud, so that every member of the organization can be involved in the design process; Studio, a design platform meant to take on the likes of Adobe and Sketch; and InVision Design System Manager, where design teams can manage their assets and best practices from one place.

But perhaps more impressive than InVision’s ability to build design products for designers is its ability to attract users that aren’t designers.

“Originally, I don’t think we appreciated how much the freemium model acted as a flywheel internally within an organization,” said Quinn. “Those designers weren’t just inviting designers from their own team or other teams, but PMs and Marketing and Customer Service and executives to collaborate and approve the designs. From the outside, InVision looks like a design company. But really, they start with the designer as a core customer and spread virally within an organization to serve a multitude.”

InVision has simply dominated prototyping and collaboration, today announcing it has surpassed 5 million users. What’s more, InVision has a wide variety of customers. The startup has a long and impressive list of digital-first customers — including Netflix, Uber, Airbnb and Twitter — but also serves 97 percent of the Fortune 100, with customers like Adidas, General Electric, NASA, IKEA, Starbucks and Toyota.

Part of that can be attributed to the quality of the products, but the fundamental shift to digital (as predicted by Valberg) is most certainly under way. Whether brands like it or not, customers are interacting with them more and more from behind a screen, and digital customer experience is becoming more and more important to all companies.

In fact, a McKinsey study showed that companies that are in the top quartile scores of the McKinsey Design Index outperformed their counterparts in both revenues and total returns to shareholders by as much as a factor of two.

But as with any transition, some folks are averse to change. Valberg identifies industry education and evangelism as two big challenges for InVision.

“Organizations are not quick to change on things like design, which is why we’ve built out a Design Transformation Team,” said Valberg. “The team goes in and gets hands on with brands to help them with new practices and to achieve design maturity within the organization.”

With a fresh $115 million and 5 million users, InVision has just about everything it needs to step into a new tier of competition. Even amongst behemoths like Adobe, which pulled in $2.29 billion in revenue in Q3 alone, InVision has provided products that can both complement and compete.

But Quinn believes the future of InVision rests on execution.

“As with most companies, the biggest challenge will be continued excellence in execution,” said Quinn. “InVision has all the right tail winds with the right team, a great product and excellent customers. It’s all about building and executing ahead of where the pack is going.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | InVision, valued at .9 billion, picks up 5 million Series F

Vroom has raised $146 million in Series G funding, an expansion to a $30 million investment we reported in early September. U.S. automotive retailer AutoNation led the round for the startup, with participation from existing investors T. Rowe Price, L Catterton, General Catalyst and Fraser McCombs Capital.

The company declined to disclose the valuation, but says it was an up round. Vroom was valued at $440 million in 2016 with a $50 million financing, according to PitchBook.

Led by chief executive officer Paul Hennessy, the former CEO of Priceline.com, Vroom is an online platform for buying and selling refurbished, pre-owned cars. The company purchases used vehicles, then includes them in its online catalog, which currently lists just over 3,200 cars. Once it finds a buyer, it provides financing support through a number of lending partners, including CapitalOne and Ally, and delivers the vehicle directly to customers’ doorsteps in the U.S. To date, the company says it has sold 250,000 cars.

Founded in 2013, the company has raised $440 million in equity funding to date, but it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Earlier this year, Vroom laid off roughly 30 percent of its staff after a futile attempt at building brick-and-mortar car dealerships. As a result, Vroom shut down its Dallas dealership, which was where most of the layoffs occurred, Hennessy said. Its Houston dealership is the only in-person effort still up and running.

“Clearly our investors were supportive of the strategic steps we took,” Hennessy told TechCrunch.

Since the layoffs, Vroom has been focused on building out its leadership team. Dave Jones, who spent over a decade at Penske Automotive Group, joined as the company’s chief financial officer; Mitch Berg, who was most recently the senior vice president of technology at dailymotion, was brought on as chief technology officer; and Dennis Looney, a veteran in supply chain management, was tapped as chief supply chain officer. 

The infusion of capital is necessary for the five-year-old business, which operates in a capital-intensive industry. Carvana, perhaps its largest competitor in the space, raised $300 million in equity funding and hundreds of millions in debt before going public in 2017. Auto1, a German car trading platform, has raised more than $1 billion, including a significant investment from SoftBank’s Vision Fund earlier this year.

Other digitally native vehicle retailers have fallen on hard times despite venture backing. British startups Hellocar and Carspring both shut down in 2017, and Beepi, a Silicon Valley peer-to-peer used car marketplace, brought in $150 million in VC backing before going out of business last year. Vroom acquired some of Beepi’s software as the company went under.

Vroom’s decision to halt the operations of its physical dealership looks to have satisfied investors, but whether it’s built a sustainable business that can operate without a consistent influx of VC support remains to be seen.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Vroom nabs 6M from AutoNation, VCs for its used car site

In the five years since its product was showcased onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt New York’s hackathon, Plaid has emerged as one of the most critical contributors to financial technology’s evolution — and one of the most under the radar.

That is, until now. The company is today announcing a $250 million Series C investment led by famed venture capitalist and the author of the Internet Trends report Mary Meeker, who will join its board of directors as part of the deal. The funds were raised at a valuation of $2.65 billion, according to sources close to the company. Capital from Meeker’s investment came from Kleiner Perkins’ growth fund — where Meeker has been a partner since 2010 — not from the reported billion-dollar-plus solo fund she’s in the process of raising.

New investors Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Coatue Management also participated, as did existing investors Goldman Sachs, NEA and Spark Capital. The financing brings Plaid’s total raised to $310 million and provides a major boost to its valuation, which was just over $200 million with its 2016 Series B.

Making money easier for everyone

Plaid builds infrastructure that allows a consumer to interact with their bank account on the web through a number of third-party applications, like Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, Acorns and LendingClub. The San Francisco-based startup has integrated with 10,000 banks in the U.S. and Canada and says 25 percent of people living in those countries with bank accounts have linked with Plaid through at least one of the hundreds of apps that leverage Plaid’s application program interfaces (APIs) — an increase from 13 percent last year.

The platform allows companies to create financial services applications without having to hire their own team of engineers to build out a tool that connects apps to its users’ bank accounts, something Plaid’s founders themselves lacked when they set out to build a fintech startup years ago. Plaid was founded by a pair of former Bain consultants, William Hockey and Zach Perret, the chief technology officer and chief executive officer, respectively, in 2012.

“We were always really infatuated with the concept of financial services,” Hockey told TechCrunch. “We thought it had so much power to impact and improve people’s lives but at the time it really wasn’t … We quickly realized building financial services was almost impossible to do because there wasn’t the tooling or the infrastructure, so we turned around and started building that infrastructure.”

Plaid closed a $44 million Series B in mid-2016 and has since seen its valuation increase more than tenfold. On top of that, it doubled its customer base this year, launched in Canada — its first market outside the U.S. — opened its third office, expanded its overall headcount to 175 employees and debuted a digital mortgage product called Assets.

Hockey and Perret say the new funding will be used to continue expanding the team in San Francisco, Salt Lake City and New York. Plaid, given how essential its tools are to any technology companies that deals with payments in any fashion, which these days is the vast majority of businesses, is a company to watch going into 2019.

“When we think about our long-term goals, we want to make money easier for everyone,” Perret told TechCrunch. “We want everyone to lives these simple, straightforward digitally enabled financial lives and for us, that means supporting these tech innovators in the space and these large incumbents. We want to be able to help them create great consumer financial experiences so consumers can live simpler financial lives.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Fintech startup Plaid raises 0M at a .65B valuation

French VC firm Hardware Club just announced the final closing of its first fund. The firm will invest $50 million in total in hardware startups (as the name suggests).

Hardware Club first started as a community of hardware startups sharing knowledge, tips and contacts in the hardware community. If you’re launching a hardware product, chances are many companies before you had the same supply chain struggles.

The club itself has negotiated partnerships with well-known manufacturers and distributors, such as Foxconn, Amazon and Honda. Right now, there are 470 startups in the club from 39 countries, as well as 150 partners.

And Hardware Club then invests in the most promising startups that are part of the club. Let’s hope that startups get enough perks from the community because investing in some companies but not all of them creates a signaling issue.

After the first closing of $28 million, Hardware Club already invested in multiple companies, such as Cowboy Bike, Alcatraz AI, Automata and Left Hand Robotics. Overall, Hardware Club invested in 28 startups and expects to realize an exit very soon. The firm also plans to invest in another 20 startups with this fund, ideally in a seed or Series A round.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Hardware Club closes its million fund

French startup Molotov is slowly becoming the leading platform to stream TV in France. With a single account, you can watch TV on your phone, tablet, computer and set-top box. The company is about to release a VR app that lets you watch TV using a virtual reality headset — but there’s a twist.

The new service is called Molotov Together and is an interesting experience in many ways. I tried an early version of the service a couple of weeks ago.

At first, I was quite reluctant about the idea of watching TV in a VR headset. I’m not a fan of VR in general, and many VR headsets already let you watch videos in in virtual reality.

In many cases, you end up with a YouTube player in a web browser projected on a virtual wall in a virtual room. But Molotov is aware of that and knows that watching a video is still better on an actual TV.

When Molotov co-founder and CEO Jean-David Blanc started pitching me the idea of Molotov Together, he first talked about live TV.

In the era of Netflix shows and huge iTunes libraries, it’s hard to remember that watching TV used to mean watching something live, sharing a moment together. You can still experience this with football matches, election nights and other important events.

And in those cases, the side conversations and jokes can be as important as the content itself.

TV for long-distance besties

Molotov has created a virtual reality coffee shop called Molotov Café. With Molotov Together, you can invite one or two friends to watch TV with you in the café. You all sit in comfortable virtual reality armchairs and can see each other.

Each person can control the TV channel they want to watch and access all Molotov content — in that experience, you don’t share a TV, everyone has its own TV. But Molotov Together truly shines when you’re all watching the same channel.

After that, you can watch the same content and talk together using voice chat. You don’t have to press any button, you can just casually sit back and watch something together.

I tried Molotov Together with Jean-David Blanc and I didn’t expect it to work so well. At first, entering the virtual coffee shop is a bit odd because it’s a significant context change. But once you start chatting with the other person and comment on what you see, it feels like you’re sitting next to each other.

Long-distance friends and couples sometimes watch the same movie with Skype or FaceTime running on a device. Molotov wants to perfect this concept and people in this situation will love the service. Similarly, there’s a reason why people watch reaction videos to popular TV shows. Hearing jokes and comments on your favorite show is a good way to enhance your favorite content.

Mind tricks

A product like Molotov Together doesn’t work well if the team behind it isn’t paying attention to small details. I tried Molotov Together with an Oculus Go but the app should eventually work with all major VR headsets.

Molotov Together is a multiplayer experience. Just like a video game, you need to see the same thing at the same time. If your favorite team scores a goal and your feed is five seconds behind, it’s not going to cut it. That’s why Molotov made sure that two persons stream from the same content delivery network so that the video feeds are perfectly in sync.

While you can control the volume of your virtual TV, the voices of your friends are also spatialized. Even if both of your friends have a similar sounding voice, you know who is talking without even looking.

From the coffee shop to your living room

Molotov Together will be released in February 2019. Any Molotov user will be able to access the service if they have a compatible VR headset.

The company wants to release new features after that. In particular, Molotov will let you invite people to your own virtual living room and watch your TV. This time, the host controls the TV and can stream premium content — other people can watch premium content even if they are not subscribers. It’s going to be interesting to see the reaction of French regulators.

Molotov currently has around 7 million users in France. Every day, 1.2 million users watch something on Molotov. They stream a total of 1.1 million hours of content. As you can see, those Molotov sessions can be quite long.

With this new product, Molotov proves that it’s a technology company that competes with content companies. Molotov Together won’t change the face of the company. But the startup is still experimenting with new ways to watch TV. And that might be enough to give it an edge over its competitors.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Molotov creates a VR coffee shop to watch TV together

I’ve been thinking hard about the concept of sponsored content — you can find some of it on TechCrunch if you look hard enough, and it appears almost everywhere else. It’s an important consideration, because as an online journalist I’ve heard everything from “How much did Apple pay you to post this?” to “How much can I pay you to post something to TechCrunch?”

And I’m sick of it.

Journalists afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Marketers comfort the comfortable. The only person who wins in that struggle is the guy with the biggest wallet to buy as much coverage as possible. Crypto, for all its faults, promises to change that.

Now I’d like to introduce something else I built (and I never do this on TC so I think it’s pretty important and interesting). It’s called HypeHop and it’s an experiment in sponsored video. Most sponsored video appears in front of your YouTube selections like a cold sore — you know it’s there, it’s unwanted and you know it will take a while for it to go away. For example, this deeply applicable ad appeared as my son was watching Nerf videos, for example, proving that algorithms aren’t always the smartest.

Enough.

In the current system marketers pay media platforms for their audience. The marketer gets eyeballs, the media platform gets money and the user gets bupkus. I wanted to try to change that.

With a few friends I made something called HypeHop. It basically pays you for watching videos. At this point it’s a proof-of-concept that accepts uploaded videos, a small payment for hosting, and then watches the viewer to ensure they are watching the video. “Watching the viewer?,” you ask? Sure. We’re being surveilled every day. Isn’t it time we were paid for it?

Viewers currently get about 40 cents in BTC per view. I created a demo video with my son here to show off how it worked and preseeded some videos with BTC to test. Thus far it’s been an interesting experiment.

I’d love to talk to like-minded folks about expanding this technology. I could, for example, see this as a tool to make sponsored posts more interesting to readers — who doesn’t want a few pennies for reading marketing dross — and a way to monetize many marketing tools for readers, producers and marketers. Ultimately this is a win-win-win in a win-win-lose world and it’s vitally important we look at it as a way forward in our fight against fake news and faker marketing.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | HypeHop is a product to fix sponsored videos

SoftBank continues to invest in the future of transportation — this time in ParkJockey, a startup that has built a technology platform aimed at monetizing parking lots. And ParkJockey, which was founded in 2013, is already using that capital to scale up.

Along with the SoftBank investment news, ParkJockey also announced that it was acquiring two of the largest parking operators in North America. The startup, with help from Abu Dhabi-based Mubadala Capital and debt financing from Owl Rock, said it had reached an agreement to acquire Imperial Parking Corporation, a North American-based parking management company often referred to as Impark. The agreement follows ParkJockey’s acquisition of parking management operator Citizens Parking Inc.

The investment puts the ParkJockey valuation to more than $1 billion, reported Miami Herald.

Miami-based ParkJockey developed a parking management platform that helps commercial property owners better monetize parking lots as well as handle operations at large venues and stadiums. The company’s platform offers features like automatic license plate recognition and pay-by-app, among others.  The company’s app also can be used by drivers to find parking spaces more efficiently.

Financial terms of the SoftBank investment or the acquisitions weren’t disclosed. The announcement follows an Axios article last week that reported SoftBank was backing the startup.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | SoftBank invests in parking startup ParkJockey pushing valuation to billion

The race to replace the mouse and keyboard has yielded a lot of weird tech, but as various hardware startups try to find the missing link between what we have now and some sort of embedded brain chip, we’re seeing some fascinating solutions surface.

New York-based CTRL-labs just announced its first developer kit that’s aiming to refresh how people interact with computers — an armband that can track a user’s finger movements by measuring electrical impulses. It’s not quite a brain controller, though in practice this type of tech can definitely feel like it’s reading your mind, taking minor finger movements and yielding a surprising amount of insight into the position of your hand and the pressure you’re applying on your finger tips.

CTRL-labs’ investors are betting big on the insight this unconventional interface type can deliver. The startup closed a $28 million Series A in May with funding coming from Vulcan Capital, GV and others.

The use cases for something like this seem to be a little up in the air at the moment, hence the interest in getting a developer kit out into the wild. There are some more obvious use cases in the VR space, but pushing a theoretical input type on an industry with theoretical appeal obviously isn’t the best basket in which to put a Series A.

The system (called CTRL-kit) is, indeed, a developer kit, so there hasn’t been the highest premium placed on miniaturizing all of the tech in the tethered system, but the company tells TechCrunch that the intent is definitely to get into a wrist-worn form factor like a smartwatch in the future. Watch a few of the tech demos and you’ll see what an interesting proposition this is for the wearable of the future.

CTRL-kit

Think about the link between some lightweight glasses with a heads-up display and an Apple Watch-type controller that can parse hand gestures and you can see a more predictable endgame for this kind of tech.

Controlling augmented reality systems has always been a big UX question. Hand-tracking startups like Leap Motion have delivered very polished solutions that offer finesse but sidestep realistic user behaviors. Who’s going to wave their hands in front of their face while walking down the street? Microsoft has dumbed this down into optically tracked gestures like the “air tap” for HoloLens that let you select things in a pretty straightforward, yet cumbersome way. Magic Leap integrates a few input types into their system but seems to be pushing developers toward a physical controller while the current hardware is more focused on home use.

The company says they’re also intrigued by potential with the automotive industry and more conventional desktop applications. Like a good amount of technologies that are attractive for VR and AR tech, what CTRL-labs is building has an attractive endgame but suspect near-term utility. Startups like Thalmic Labs, now North, tried and failed to gain an audience for a consumer-grade motion-control armband like this. For the time being, the company expects a decent amount of developer attention to go toward using this tech for gaming.

The company says it plans to begin shipping the CTRL-kit in the first quarter of next year.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | CTRL-labs’ first dev kit is a gesture-tracking neural controller

Blippar, the U.K.-based AR startup that raised more than $130 million, may be nearing the end of the road. The company has been burning through cash in a bid to pivot in search of a profitable AR business model, and now shareholders are in dispute over whether to throw Blippar any more money to aid that effort, according to a statement the company provided to TechCrunch.

The company has been on the brink for a while now, but things have taken a hard turn in the past few months on the back of yet another pivot.

A Blippar spokesperson told TechCrunch that a single shareholder is blocking the required unanimous vote to close on emergency funding, without which Blippar must begin insolvency proceedings. The company is hoping to continue negotiating with the holdout and come to a resolution this week.

A source close to the company confirmed The Sunday Times report from this weekend, which stated that Khazanah, a strategic investment fund from the Malaysian government, did not approve Blippar’s bid for emergency funding. In July, Khazanah’s board resigned as part of the transition to a new government, meaning that the top brass at the firm are not the same people who invested in Blippar originally.

In September, Blippar raised $37 million from Candy Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures, stating that the Series E financing would help the company achieve its goal of becoming profitable by September 2019. But the private company has posted losses for the past two years, according to BI. It’s unclear whether or not the emergency funding being blocked now is the same $37 million Series E the company claimed to have closed in September or new cash.

Blippar has been a contender in the AR space since 2011. The company started as a marketing agency that would allow brands to purchase augmented reality ads placed on real-world objects or on magazines. Users could scan these “Blipps” to unlock additional AR content and offers.

In 2013, Blippar launched in the U.S. and the company grew alongside the momentum of the AR space in general. But there were more than a few missteps.

The company spent time and money building for short-lived platforms like Windows Phone and Google Glass.

But even if resources weren’t wasted on now-defunct platforms, the general premise of Blippar was always somewhat questionable. Even if the format of the engagement was novel, an ad is still an ad. Few consumers are interested in downloading and engaging with an app that simply serves up brand content.

So Blippar switched things up. The company pivoted on the heels of its $45 million Series C to become a computer vision-powered visual search engine.

Blippar overhauled the technology to allow for content to be unlocked by any object in the real world via computer vision, instead of relying on physical stickers (Blipps). The company also started incorporating content that wasn’t necessarily ad-based but information-based, such as the make and model of a car or the scientific name of a plant.

Indeed, there seems to be a use case for visual-based search. There are times when we simply don’t have the words to properly identify something we see in the real world. But in a world where really only one company dominates search, executing on that proved incredibly complicated for Blippar.

Google has offered a form of visual search for years, and you could argue that those companies that are already strong players in search and information discovery might become strong players (or at least tough competition) in visual search, an extension of what they already do.

Blippar has claimed it has upwards of 65 million registered users via its network of brand and publishing partners, white-label SDK partners, etc.; actual downloads of its app were closer to 500,000 in 2017, reports BI. (And it’s not clear how many of those registered users were regular users, anyway.)

After a number of attempts at making visual search relevant — including a truly bizarre move into social with the launch of a Snapchat-esque feature called Halos — Blippar turned its attention to spaces.

In 2017, the company launched the AR City app, which lets users navigate their way through more than 300 cities using the camera on their smartphone. The company argued that navigation via its computer vision tech was more accurate than GPS. In August 2018, Blippar took the technology indoors with the launch of the Indoor Visual Positioning System. The hope with this launch is that it would attract whales for clients, as it was built to be used in large commercial spaces like stadiums, airports, shopping centers and large office buildings/campuses.

The positioning system not only allowed for hyper accurate indoor navigation, but also extra AR content such as points of interest, personalized content, etc.

Shortly after the launch, in September of this year, Blippar picked up its most recent $37 million Series E funding, which it said would “help the company reach its profitability goal within the next 12 months.”

But, if this report is true, it would appear that it’s just too little too late.

While being an early player can have its advantages, many pioneers in the tech startup landscape don’t have the benefit of learning from others’ mistakes. With a launch in 2011, Blippar most certainly falls into that category.

But beyond the timing, Blippar also seemed to be building technology for the sake of building technology, without ever really nailing down a focused way for that technology to earn money.

We reached out to the company and a Blippar spokesperson had this to say:

The rate of change in the AR industry resulted in a lack of standardisation across platforms and tools which has become a barrier to greater adoption and application of the technology. In response to these we refined our strategy to primarily focus on our SaaS self-service AR creation and publishing platform and we are on the path to accelerate the developments of this platform. Our goal is to unify and standardise all AR formats and make it easy for everybody to create AR.

Our strategy and product roadmap to enable this goal has unanimous approval from our board, for which we require an additional amount of funding to accelerate our growth and fulfill our profitability plans. The additional funding has been secured and approved by the whole board, but ultimately requires shareholders’ approval, which was given by all except one.

Despite not participating in any further funding of the business, that shareholder took the decision to vote against the additional funding. We tried to reach an agreement with them that would allow the business to continue with these plans and have offered various solutions, and so far they have refused all proposals.

Our board is still trying to negotiate with them and we hope to have a reasonable position at some point this week.

We also reached out to Qualcomm Ventures but have not heard back. We will update if/when we do.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | AR startup Blippar in danger of becoming a blip as shareholders fight over future funding

Solo.io, a Cambridge, Mass-based startup that helps enterprises adopt cloud-native technologies, is coming out of stealth mode today and announcing both its Series A funding round and the launch of its Gloo Enterprise API gateway.

Redpoint Ventures led the $11 million Series A round, with participation from seed investor True Ventures . Like most companies at the Series A state, Solo.io plans to use the money to invest in the product development of its enterprise and open-source tools, as well as to grow its sales and marketing teams.

Solo.io offers a number of open-source tools, like the Gloo function gateway, the Sqoop GraphQL server and the SuperGloo (see a theme here?) service mesh orchestration platform. In addition, the team has also, among others, open-sourced its Kubernetes debugger, a tool for building and running unikernels.

Its first commercial offering, though, is an enterprise version of the Gloo function gateway. Built on top of the Envoy proxy, Gloo can handle the routing necessary to connect incoming API requests to microservices, serverless applications (on the likes of AWS Lambda) and traditional monolithic applications behind the proxy. Gloo handles the load balancing and other functions necessary to aggregate the incoming API requests and route them to their destinations.

“Costumers who use Gloo to connect between microservices and serverless found that invocation of [AWS] Lambda is 350ms faster than the AWS API Gateway,” Idit Levine, the founder and CEO of Solo.io, told me. “Gloo also offers them direct money saving, since AWS bills per invocation. In general, Gloo offers money saving because it allows our clients to use the less expensive technologies — like their legacy apps, and sometimes containers — whenever they can, and limit the use of more expensive stuff to whenever it’s necessary.”

The enterprise version adds features like audit controls, single sign-on and more advanced security tools to the platform.

In addition to broadening its customer base, the company plans to invest heavily into its customer success and support teams, as well as its evangelism and education efforts, Levine tells me.

“Helping enterprises easily adopt innovative technologies like microservices, serverless and service mesh is our goal at Solo.io,” Levine in today’s announcement. “Melding different technologies into one coherent environment, by supplying a suite of tools to route, debug, manage, monitor and secure applications, lets organizations focus on their software without worrying about the complexity of the underlying environment.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Solo.io raises M to help enterprises adopt cloud-native technologies