Andreessen Horowitz
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Fantasy sports startup Sleeper closes Series B led by a16z as it expands to esports amid pandemic
Sleeper is widening its ambitions to esports as the arena sports world goes into hibernation amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
While CEO Nan Wang has high hopes that the upcoming NFL season can proceed amid the pandemic, he’s hoping to expand his fantasy sports app’s appeal to gamers by launching support for the intensely popular title League of Legends. Wang says that esports support was always in the cards, but that its rollout was never supposed to come this early.
“Originally, the goal was to do arena sports and then strategically select esports that we thought would be big market opportunities,” Wang says. “In the absence of sports, it becomes easier for us to push something that was further out on the roadmap.”
As Sleeper looks to push beyond its 1 million active users, the company is bulking up on funding reserves. The fantasy sports app has closed a $20 million Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Kevin Durant, Baron Davis, JuJu Smith-Schuster and Twitch CEO Kevin Lin are also recent investors. In August, the company shared it had raised a $5.3 million Series A led by General Catalyst.
For now, all of Sleeper’s services are free and there aren’t immediate plans to change that. Wang says that delayed and canceled seasons of arena sports is likely going to push out the company’s timelines for beginning to generate revenues.
Sleeper’s investors have hailed the startup as leading the way among a new class of vertical-focused social networks.
“The next social platforms are going to be vertical and look a lot more like games, offering deeper engagement than broad social networking platforms. Sleeper’s leagues provide shared activities between friends, and has some of the best stickiness metrics we’ve seen,” Andreessen Horowitz GP Andrew Chen said in a statement.
With its League of Legends launch, Sleeper is in the position of helping define a fantasy league experience for a popular franchise. The league’s organization isn’t fundamentally different from other fantasy sports. Users recruit a fantasy crew and draft professional esports athletes to their teams. From there, users in a league participate in weekly head-to-head matches with each other, making predictions and leveraging gameplay-specific mechanics.
League of Legends support is a big deal to Sleeper because it also represents the company’s first international foray. Users in the U.S., Europe, Vietnam, Korea and Brazil can participate in this upcoming fantasy season.
On the product side, the startup recently launched voice chat to capitalize on users stuck at home amid the pandemic. Wang tells TechCrunch the team is also hoping to add video chat to the app soon. Wang also notes that Sleeper is on track to launch three new sports this year.
As Sleeper aims to grow around the roadblocks of pandemic lockdowns, Wang and his team hope that their continued focus on social features can ensure the startup’s shared success in the worlds of online gaming and arena gaming.
“The roadmap for us has always been to win both sports and esports because they both have the same underlying motivation,” Wang says. “The most important thing for any sports fan is being able to enjoy it with their friends and family members.”
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IPOs, crypto funds and other things I missed this week
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
What a week it’s been. I’m exhausted. Not only are we another cycle deeper into the COVID-19 quarantine, but there seems to be more news than ever to sift through. I’ve fallen behind. So, today, this little column is taking look back at things that it missed but wanted to cover. (There may come a day when we run out of stuff to talk about, but it’s not coming any time soon.)
So let’s talk about a16z’s new crypto fund, recent economic data, the Ebang F-1, Lime’s layoffs, Procore’s IPO delay and fresh valuation, stocks, Luckin, and, if we have time, Twitter’s changing jobs data. Let’s get this all out of our heads and into the world.
Odds, ends
To annoy my editors, we’re using bullet points this morning. Bullet points are great way to convey a bloc of information in a neat format. Let the haters hate, we have a lot of ground to cover:
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Figma raises $50 million Series D led by Andreessen Horowitz
Figma, the design platform that lets folks work collaboratively and in the cloud, has today announced the close of a $50 million Series D financing. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with partner Peter Levine and cofounding partner Marc Andreessen managing the deal for the firm. New angel investors, including Henry Ellenbogen from Durable Capital, also participated in the round alongside existing investors Index, Greylock, KPCB, Sequoia and Founders Fund.
Forbes reports that the latest funding round values Figma at $2 billion.
Dylan Field, Figma founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that discussions between a16z and Figma actually began towards the end of the fundraising cycle for the company’s Series C, which closed in February of 2019.
“It felt a bit like a shotgun wedding,” said Field, explaining that both parties instead opted to get to know each other better. They’ve been building their relationship over the past year, leading to today’s Series D close. Field also added that he has not met other investors in this round in person, and the vast majority of the deal was done over Zoom.
“When you think about the future of Silicon Valley, there is an interesting question around capital infrastructure being here and people not being able to access that if they’re not here, too,” said Field. “I got to see firsthand how a deal done online can work and I think more and more investors aren’t going to worry about whether you’re in Silicon Valley or not.”
Figma launched in 2015 after nearly six years of development in stealth. The premise was to create a collaborative, cloud-based design tool that would be the Google Docs of design.
Since, Figma has built out the platform to expand access and usability for individual designers, small firms and giant enterprise companies alike. For example, the company launched plug-ins in 2019, allowing developers to build in their own tools to the app, such as a plug-in for designers to automatically rename and organize their layers as they work (Rename.it) and one that gives users the ability to add placeholder text that they can automatically find and replace later (Content Buddy).
The company also launched an educational platform called Community, which gives designers the ability to share their work and let other users ‘remix’ that design, or simply check out how it was built, layer by layer.
A spokesperson told TechCrunch that this deal was “opportunistic,” and that the company was in a strong cash position pre-financing. The new funding expands Figma’s runway during these uncertain times, with coronavirus halting a lot of enterprise purchasing and ultimately slowing growth of some rising enterprise players.
Field explained that Figma’s data is counter to the expected narrative around enterprise purchasing because Figma is specifically built to let teams collaborate in the cloud.
“We’re actually seeing a lot of acceleration for bigger deals on the sales side,” said Field. “Figma is a tool that can help right now.”
The company says that one interesting change they’ve seen in the COVID era is a significant jump in user engagement from teams to collaborate more in Figma. The firm has also seen an uptick in whiteboarding, note taking, slide deck creation and diagramming, as companies start using Figma as a collaborative tool across an entire organization rather than just within a team of designers.
This latest deal brings Figma’s total funding to $132.9 million. Field added that, though the company is not yet profitable, this latest financing gives the company three to four years of runway, even with aggressive scaling and hiring efforts moving forward.
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Tecton.ai emerges from stealth with $20M Series A to build machine learning platform
Three former Uber engineers, who helped build the company’s Michelangelo machine learning platform, left the company last year to form Tecton.ai and build an operational machine learning platform for everyone else. Today the company announced a $20 million Series A from a couple of high-profile investors.
Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital co-led the round with Martin Casado, general partner at a16z and Matt Miller, partner at Sequoia joining the company board under the terms of the agreement. Today’s investment combined with the seed they used to spend the last year building the product comes to $25 million. Not bad in today’s environment.
But when you have the pedigree of these three founders — CEO Mike Del Balso, CTO Kevin Stumpf and VP of Engineering Jeremy Hermann all helped build the Uber system — investors will spend some money, especially when you are trying to solve a difficult problem around machine learning.
The Michelangelo system was the machine learning platform at Uber that looked at things like driver safety, estimated arrival time and fraud detection, among other things. The three founders wanted to take what they had learned at Uber and put it to work for companies struggling with machine learning.
“What Tecton is really about is helping organizations make it really easy to build production-level machine learning systems, and put them in production and operate them correctly. And we focus on the data layer of machine learning,” CEO Del Balso told TechCrunch.
Image Credit: Tecton.ai
Del Balso says part of the problem, even for companies that are machine learning-savvy, is building and reusing models across different use cases. In fact, he says the vast majority of machine learning projects out there are failing, and Tecton wanted to give these companies the tools to change that.
The company has come up with a solution to make it much easier to create a model and put it to work by connecting to data sources, making it easier to reuse the data and the models across related use cases. “We’re focused on the data tasks related to machine learning, and all the data pipelines that are related to power those models,” Del Balso said.
Certainly Martin Casado from a16z sees a problem in search of a solution and he likes the background of this team and its understanding of building a system like this at scale. “After tracking a number of deep engagements with top ML teams and their interest in what Tecton was building, we invested in Tecton’s A alongside Sequoia. We strongly believe that these systems will continue to increasingly rely on data and ML models, and an entirely new tool chain is needed to aid in developing them…,” he wrote in a blog post announcing the funding.
The company currently has 17 employees and is looking to hire, particularly data scientists and machine learning engineers, with a goal of 30 employees by the end of the year.
While Del Balso is certainly cognizant of the current economic situation, he believes he can still build this company because he’s solving a problem that people genuinely are looking for help with right now around machine learning.
“From the customers we’re talking to, they need to solve these problems, and so we don’t see things slowing down,” he said.
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5 top gaming investors explain how the pandemic is reshaping MMOs and social games
Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has forced millions into isolation, video games are seeing a surge in usage as people seek entertainment and social interaction.
When we surveyed gaming-focused VCs in October, Andreessen Horowitz partner Jonathan Lai predicted that “next-generation games will be bigger than anything we’ve seen yet,” eventually reaching “Facebook scale.” This month, when we asked 17 VCs how this era would impact consumer startups, gaming was one of the top verticals they named.
We wanted to learn more about how the venture community thinks about the future of this sector, so we asked five experienced gaming investors about where they do — and don’t — see new opportunities within this trend:
- Kevin Zhang, Upfront Ventures
- Ryann Lai, Makers Fund
- Shanti Bergel, Transcend Fund
- Bertrand Vernizeau, Game Seer Venture Partners
- Siamac Kamalie, Skycatcher
Below are their responses, edited for space and clarity. We’ll follow up with surveys on other gaming categories in the next couple of weeks.
And if you’re interested in understanding the challenges for gaming companies aiming to become next-generation social platforms, be sure to read my eight-part series on virtual worlds.
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Fishtown Analytics raises $12.9M Series A for its open-source analytics engineering tool
Philadelphia-based Fishtown Analytics, the company behind the popular open-source data engineering tool dbt, today announced that it has raised a $12.9 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with the firm’s general partner Martin Casado joining the company’s board.
“I wrote this blog post in early 2016, essentially saying that analysts needed to work in a fundamentally different way,” Fishtown founder and CEO Tristan Handy told me, when I asked him about how the product came to be. “They needed to work in a way that much more closely mirrored the way the software engineers work and software engineers have been figuring this shit out for years and data analysts are still like sending each other Microsoft Excel docs over email.”
The dbt open-source project forms the basis of this. It allows anyone who can write SQL queries to transform data and then load it into their preferred analytics tools. As such, it sits in-between data warehouses and the tools that load data into them on one end, and specialized analytics tools on the other.
As Casado noted when I talked to him about the investment, data warehouses have now made it affordable for businesses to store all of their data before it is transformed. So what was traditionally “extract, transform, load” (ETL) has now become “extract, load, transform” (ELT). Andreessen Horowitz is already invested in Fivetran, which helps businesses move their data into their warehouses, so it makes sense for the firm to also tackle the other side of this business.
“Dbt is, as far as we can tell, the leading community for transformation and it’s a company we’ve been tracking for at least a year,” Casado said. He also argued that data analysts — unlike data scientists — are not really catered to as a group.
Before this round, Fishtown hadn’t raised a lot of money, even though it has been around for a few years now, except for a small SAFE round from Amplify.
But Handy argued that the company needed this time to prove that it was on to something and build a community. That community now consists of more than 1,700 companies that use the dbt project in some form and over 5,000 people in the dbt Slack community. Fishtown also now has over 250 dbt Cloud customers and the company signed up a number of big enterprise clients earlier this year. With that, the company needed to raise money to expand and also better service its current list of customers.
“We live in Philadelphia. The cost of living is low here and none of us really care to make a quadro-billion dollars, but we do want to answer the question of how do we best serve the community,” Handy said. “And for the first time, in the early part of the year, we were like, holy shit, we can’t keep up with all of the stuff that people need from us.”
The company plans to expand the team from 25 to 50 employees in 2020 and with those, the team plans to improve and expand the product, especially its IDE for data analysts, which Handy admitted could use a bit more polish.
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Where top VCs are investing in remote events
The novel coronavirus pandemic has rapidly moved companies into a remote-first world.
Nearly all of the world’s largest events have been canceled, put on pause or pivoted to online-only. In the tech world, event cancellations thus far have included SXSW, GDC, Mobile World Congress, Google I/O, Facebook F8, E3 and others.
As more and more hosts consider staging fully remote events as possible alternatives, we decided to take a deeper look into the venture-backed startups focused on supporting large-scale virtual gatherings, like Hopin and Run The World. To further understand the impact of COVID-19, we asked five leading VCs who have invested in or have knowledge of startups focused on remote events to update us on the state of the market and to share where they see opportunity in the sector:
- Sarah Cannon, Index Ventures
- Connie Chan, Andreessen Horowitz
- Andrei Brasoveanu, Accel Partners
- Ryan Kuder, Techstars Anywhere
- Paul Murphy, Northzone
Sarah Cannon, Index Ventures
Which trends in remote events/conferencing excite you the most from an investing perspective?
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Libra rival Celo launches 50-member Alliance For Prosperity
Some Libra Association members like Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures are double-dipping, backing a competing cryptocurrency developer platform. Launching today with over 50 partners, non-profit The Celo Foundation’s ‘Alliance For Prosperity’ offers a way for developers to build decentralized mobile apps that are based on Celo’s blockchain platform and USD stablecoin.
The open-source Celo platform is still in testing with plans to officially launch its mainnet in April. The non-profit founded in 2017 has raised $36.4 million, including its Series A where Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z Crypto bought $15 million worth of Celo Gold tokens.
The biggest differentiator of Celo’s network versus other blockchains is that payments in the Celo Dollar stablecoin can be sent to people’s phone numbers rather than complicated addresses. The goal is to make delivering utility via blockchain easier by building a flexible network of applications that doesn’t scare regulators like Libra has.
The Alliance For Prosperity includes Andreessen Horowitz (which funded Celo), Coinbase (Ventures), Bison Trails, Anchorage, and Mercy Corps — all of which are also Libra Association members. That could potentially create a conflict of interest regarding which cryptocurrency and developer platform they promote to their portfolio companies, integrate into their products, or focus on for delivering financial services to the needy.
Other high-profile Alliance partners include Carbon, GiveDirectly, Grameen Foundation, Maple, and Polychain. Partners have made a somewhat vague commitment to “backing development efforts of the project, building infrastructure, implementing desired use cases on the platform, integrating Celo assets in their projects, or collaborating on education campaigns in their communities to further advance the use of blockchain technology” according to Chuck Kimble, Celo’s cLabs head of business development and head of the Alliance. Anyone can apply to join the open network, and there’s no minimum financial investment like Libra’s $10 million prerequisite.
Celo isn’t trying to replace the dollar with its own synthetic currency, and its reserve is backed with other cryptocurrencies rather than fiat cash. That might make it more acceptable to regulators who were worried that Libra’s token and fiat currency bundle-backed reserve could impact the global financial system. The first of the decentralized apps on the platform, the Celo Wallet, is already available for iOS and Android.
Like many blockchain projects, there are some lofty intentions for social impact with Celo. Use cases include “powering mobile and online work, enabling faster and affordable remittances, reducing the operational complexities of delivering humanitarian aid, facilitating payments, and enabling microlending” says Kimble. The real driver of this potential is Celo’s promise of much lower transaction fees than traditional middlemen charge.
When asked what the biggest threats to Celo’s success are, he told me “Banking infrastructure improving faster than we expect” and “Mobile adoption or LTE data not expanding on their current trajectory.” He did not mention the developer fatigue, regulatory scrutiny, technical complexity, or slow adoption of blockchain utilities that have plagued other crypto for good projects.
Here’s the full list of members working towards these goals:
Abra, Alice, AlphaWallet, Anchorage, Appen, Ayannah, Andreessen Horowitz, B12, BC4NB (Blockchain for the Next Billion), BeamAndGo, Bidali, Bison Trails, Blockchain Academy Mexico, Blockchain.com, Blockchain for Humanity (b4h), Blockchain for Social Impact (BSIC), Blockdaemon, Carbon, cLabs, CloudWalk Inc, Cobru, Coinbase, Coinplug, Cryptio, Cryptobuyer, CryptoSavannah, eSolidar, Fintech4Good, Flexa, Gitcoin, GiveDirectly, Grameen Foundation, GSMA, KeshoLabs, Laboratoria, Ledn, Maple, Mercy Corps, Metadium, Moon, MoonPay, Pipol, Pngme, Polychain, Project Wren, SaldoMX, Semicolon Africa, The Giving Block, Utrust, Upright, Yellow Card, and 88i. [Update: Ledger joined this morning.]
“Many of these organizations have on-the-ground operations that will begin to get Celo into the hands of those who have been underserved by the current global financial system” Andreessen Horowitz general partner Katie Haun told me. “Our hope is that this partnership will start unlocking the potential of internet money”. To spur adoption, the Alliance will distribute ‘Prosperity Gifts’ in the form of financial grants to developers proposing Celo products that would benefit society.
There are also some peculiar characteristics of Celo’s system. People exchange other cryptocurrencies for Celo Gold, then exchange that for Celo Dollars they can spend. The reserve is backed with other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum rather that fiat, and isn’t fully collateralized. That could make it vulnerable to a Celo bank run or crash in price of those currencies. Celo also lets arbitrageurs pocket the difference if Celo Gold and Celo Dollars get out of sync.
While it might not be a danger to the world financial system like Libra, it could be a danger to itself. At least on the anti-money laundering front, cLabs — the team that’s kicking off development of the Celo platform — has hired former Capital One head of enterprise risk management Jai Ramaswamy. Plus, the Celo founders come well pedigreed, including Marek Olszewski and Rene Reinsberg who spun out machine learning startup Locu from MIT and sold it to GoDaddy, as well as EigenTrust inventor and former MIT Media Lab professor Sep Kamvar.
So far, 130 teams have expressed interest in building on the Celo platform. For reference, Libra said 1,500 organizations had said they wanted to work on that project four months after its reveal. Celo Camp and Blockchain for Social Impact Incubator will also be fostering projects for the blockchain.
Celo could make banking cheaper and more accessible while power new fintech innovation. But for any of that to happen, it will need to get enough developers building truly useful products, make the blockchain and currency exchange simple enough for mainstream audiences in developing nations, and grow adoption to meaningful levels few cryptocurrency projects have yet achieved. The Alliance For Prosperity will have to throw their weight into this project, not just their names, if it’s going to succeed.
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$75M legal startup Atrium shuts down, lays off 100
Justin Kan’s hybrid legal software and law firm startup Atrium is shutting down today after failing to figure out how to deliver better efficiency than a traditional law firm, the CEO tells TechCrunch exclusively. The startup has now laid off all its employees, which totaled just over 100. It will return some of its $75.5 million in funding to investors, including Series B lead Andreessen Horowitz. The separate Atrium law firm will continue to operate.
“I’m really grateful to the customers and the team members who came along with me and our investors. It’s unfortunate that this wasn’t the outcome that we wanted but we’re thankful to everyone that came with us on the journey” said Kan. He’d previously founded Justin.tv which pivoted to become Twitch and later sold to Amazon for $970 million. “We decided to call it and wind down the startup operations. There will be some capital returned to investors post wind-down” Kan told me.
Atrium had attempted a pivot back in January, laying off its in-house lawyers to become a more pure software startup with better margins. Some of its lawyers formed a separate standalone legal firm and took on former Atrium clients. But Kan tells me that it was tough to regain momentum coming out of that change, which some Atrium customers tell me felt chaotic and left them unsure of their legal representation.
More layoffs quietly ensued as divisions connected to those lawyers were eliminated. But trying to build software for third-party lawyers, many of which have entrenched processes and older leadership, proved difficult. The streamlined workflows may not have seemed worth the thrash of adopting new technology.
“If you look at our original business model with the veritcalized law firm, a lot of these companies that have this kind of full stack model are not going to survive” Kan explained. “A lot of these companies, Atrium included, did not figure out how to make a dent in operational efficiency.”
Disrupting Law Firms Proves Difficult
Founded in 2017, Atrium built software for startups to navigate fundraising, hiring, acquisition deals, and collaboration with their legal team. Atrium also offered in-house lawyers that could provide counsel and best practices in these matters. The idea was that the collaboration software would make its lawyers more efficient than a traditional law firm so they could get work done faster, translating to savings for clients and Atrium.
Atrium’s software included Records, a Dropbox-esque system for keeping track of legal documents, and Hiring, which instantly generated employment offer letters based on details punched into a form while keeping track of signatures. The startup hoped it could prevent clients and lawyers from wasting time digging through email chains or missing a sign-off that could put them in legal jeopardy.
The company tried to generate client leads by hosting fundraising workshops for startups, starring Kan and his stories from growing Twitch. A charismatic leader with a near-billion dollar exit under his belt, investors and founders alike were quick to buy into Kan’s vision and advice. Startups saw Atrium as an ally with industry expertise that could help them avoid dirty term sheets or botched hires.
But keeping a large squad of lawyers on staff proved costly. Atrium priced packages of its software and legal assistance under subscriptions, with momentous deals like acquisitions incurring add-on fees. The model relied less on milking clients with steep hourly rates measured down to six-minute increments like most law firms.
Yet eliminating the busy work for lawyers through its software didn’t materialize into bountiful profits. The pivot saught to create a professional services network where Atrium could route clients to attorneys. The layoffs had shaken faith in the startup as clients demanded stability lest they be caught without counsel at a tough time
Rather than trudge on, Kan decided to fold the company. The standalone Atrium law firm will continue to operate under partners Michel Narganes and Matthew Melville, but the startup developing legal software is done.
Atrium’s implosion could send ripples through the legaltech scene, and push other entrepreneurs to start with a more focused software-only approach.
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Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz discusses consumer tech’s winners and losers
Last week, I sat down with Connie Chan, a general partner with Andreessen Horowitz who focuses on investing in consumer tech. She joined the firm in 2011 after working at HP in China.
From her temporary offices located in a modest skyscraper with unobscured views of San Francisco, we talked about where she sees the biggest opportunities right now, along with how big of an impact fears over coronavirus could have on the startup industry — and for how long.
Our conversation has been edited for length. You can also find a longer version of our chat in podcast form.
TechCrunch: There’s so much money flowing into the Bay Area and startups generally from all over the world. What happens if that slows down because of the coronavirus?
Connie Chan: It’s interesting, I was just talking to a friend of mine who is an investor in Asia, in China. And she said that some industries are going to suffer significantly. Restaurants, for example, are hurting [along with] any store that relies on foot traffic [like] bookstores, so forth. Yet you see a lot of companies also doing really well in this time. You’ll see grocery delivery as something that’s in high demand. Insurance is in very high demand. People are spending more time at home, so whether it’s games or streaming or whatever they’re doing at home is doing well. Lots of my counterparts in China are also taking all their pitches via video conference. They’re still doing work, but they’re all just working from home.
Where do you think we’ll see the biggest impact most immediately?
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