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In its first funding in 7 years, profitable fintech Lower raises $100M Series A led by Accel
Lower, an Ohio-based home finance platform, announced today it has raised $100 million in a Series A funding round led by Accel.
This round is notable for a number of reasons. First off, it’s a large Series A even by today’s standards. The financing also marks the previously bootstrapped Lower’s first external round of funding in its seven-year history. Lower is also something that is kind of rare these days in the startup world: profitable. Silicon Valley-based Accel has a history of backing profitable, bootstrapped companies, having also led large Series A rounds for the likes of 1Password, Atlassian, Qualtrics, Webflow, Tenable and Galileo (which went on to be acquired by SoFi).
In fact, Galileo founder Clay Wilkes introduced the VC firm to Dan Snyder, Lower’s founder and CEO. The two companies have a few things in common besides being profitable: they were both bootstrapped for years before taking institutional capital and both have headquarters outside of Silicon Valley.
“We were immediately intrigued because Ohio-based Lower echoes both of these themes,” said Accel partner John Locke, who led the firm’s investment in Lower and is taking a seat on the company’s board as part of the investment. “Like Galileo, Lower will be one of the most successful bootstrapped fintech companies globally. The combination of a company built in a nontraditional region across the globe and a bootstrapped company reminds us of [other] companies we have partnered with for a large Series A.”
There were other unnamed participants in the round, but Accel provided the “majority” of the investment, according to Lower.
Snyder co-founded Lower in 2014 with the goal of making the home-buying process simpler for consumers. The company launched with Homeside, its retail brand that Snyder describes as “a tech-leveraged retail mortgage bank” that works with realtors and builders, among others.
In 2018, the company launched the website for Lower, its direct-to-consumer digital lending brand with the mission of making its platform a one-stop shop where consumers can go online to save for a home, obtain or refinance a mortgage and get insurance through its marketplace. This year, it launched the Lower mobile app with a savings account.
Sitting (L to R): Co-founders Dan Snyder, Grayson Hanes
Standing (L to R): Co-founders Mike Baynes, Chris Miller
Not pictured: Robert Tyson; Image credit: Lower
Over the years, Lower has funded billions of dollars in loans and notched an impressive $300 million in revenue in 2020 after doubling revenue every year, according to Snyder.
“Our history is maybe a little atypical of fintech companies today,” he told TechCrunch. “We’ve had a view going back to the start of the company that we wanted to run it profitably. That’s been one of our pillars, so that’s what we’ve done. Also, we all grew up in the mortgage industry, so we saw firsthand the size of the market, but also how broken it was, so we wanted to change it.”
In launching the direct-to-consumer digital lending brand, the company was working to make the homebuying process more “digital, transparent and easier for consumers to access,” Snyder said.
At the same time, the company didn’t want to lose the human touch.
“We tried to design the app flow in a way where you can get as far along as you can in the application but if you want, at any point in time, to talk or chat with someone, we’re available,” Snyder added.
Image Credits: Lower
Lower’s typical customer is the millennial and now Gen Z who’s aspiring to own their first home, according to Snyder.
“They might be thinking, ‘OK, I might be living in an apartment now, but in the next few years I’m going to meet someone and/or have a child and I want to unlock the investment that is a home,’” he told TechCrunch. “And we’ll help them on that journey.”
Lower’s recently launched new app offers a deposit account it’s dubbed “HomeFund.” The interest-bearing, FDIC-insured deposit account offers a 0.75% Annual Percentage Yield and is designed to help consumers save for a home with a “dollar-for-dollar match in rewards” up to the first $1,000 saved, Snyder said.
Lower works with more than 35 major insurance carriers nationally, including Nationwide, Liberty Mutual and Allstate. It has more than 1,600 employees, about half of which are based in Lower’s home state. That’s up from about 650 employees in June of 2020.
Looking ahead, the company plans to add more services and has an “aggressive roadmap” for adding new features to its platform. Today, for example, Lower sells primarily to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And while it services the majority of its loans, like many large lenders, it uses a subservicer. That will change, however, in early 2022, when Lower intends to launch its own native servicing platform.
And while the company intends to continue to run profitably, Snyder said he and his co-founders “think the time is now to gain share.”
“We want to become a global brand, raise money and gain market share,” he added. “We’re going to continue to double down on product and build out our capabilities. We are the best-kept secret in fintech and plan to change that with smart branding, advertising and sponsorships.”
And last but not least, Lower is eyeing the public markets as part of its longer-term roadmap.
“Ultimately, we know we can build a great public company,” Snyder told TechCrunch. “We’re of the scale to be a public company right now, but we’re going to keep our heads down and we’re going to keep building for the next few years and then I think we can be in a spot to be a strong public business.”
Accel’s Locke points out that in the U.S., mortgage and home finance are among the largest financial service markets, and they have primarily been handled by large banks.
“For most consumers, getting a mortgage through these banks continues to be an overly complex, slow-moving process,” Locke told TechCrunch. “We believe by providing consumers a great mobile experience, Lower will gain share from incumbent banks, in the same way that companies like Monzo have in banking or Venmo in payments or Trade Republic and Robinhood in stock trading.”
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Atlassian’s in-house incubator lets employees put their product ideas to work
Every company wants to maintain that initial spark it had when it was an early-stage startup, but keeping that going as you scale into a public company isn’t always easy. Atlassian is taking a unique approach by opening up product ideas to an internal competition, and actually funding and building the best ones with the goal of bringing them to market.
Steve Goldsmith, who is heading up the project for Atlassian, says that it’s an in-house startup incubator called Point A. The company wants to encourage employees to be constantly thinking about new ways to improve the products. And every employee is encouraged to participate, not just engineers or product managers, as many might think.
“Point A is our internal framework for turning ideas into products. It’s our way of finding the innovation that’s happening all over the company, and giving a process and framework for those ideas to reach the maturity of actually becoming products that we offer to our customers,” Goldsmith told me.
He says that like many companies they hold internal hackathons and other events where many times employees come up with creative concepts for products, but they tend to get put on a shelf after the event is over and never get looked at again. With Point A, they can actually compete to put their experiments to work and see if they are actually viable.
“So we think of Point A as a way of finding all those different ideas and prototypes and concepts that people have in their brains or on the side of their desk kind of thing, and giving a process and a structure for those ideas to get out the door, and really invest in the ones that have some traction,” Goldsmith said.
He says by providing an official internal process to vet and maybe fund some of them, people inside the organization know that their proposals are being heard and they have a mechanism for submitting them, and the company has a way of seeing them.
The company launched Point A in 2019 looking at 35 possible projects, and testing them as possible products. Last January, they chose nine that made the final cut and four turned into actual products and made it out the door this week, including the Jira Work Management tool, which is being released today.
The next program is ready to roll with employees ready to present their ideas in a pitch day competition to get things going. “Our first class is graduating out of this program, and […] we start the process again. We actually just went through our big list of all the ideas to do it a second time, and we are doing a pitch day. It’s going to be a fun Shark Tank, The Voice kind of inspired [competition],” he said.
Company co-founders and co-CEOs Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar both participate in judging the competition, so it has executive buy-in, giving more clout to the program and sending a message to employees that their ideas are being taken seriously.
The company provides funding, time away from your regular job and executive coaches, and combines that with customer collaboration and early founder involvement with the goal of finding a scalable, repeatable process with defined phases that helps teams take the most innovative ideas from concept to customer.
Some make it. Some don’t, as you might expect, but so far the plan seems to be working and is successfully encouraging innovation from within, something every company should be trying to do.
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Atlassian launches a Jira for every team
Atlassian today announced a new edition of its Jira project management tool, Jira Work Management. The company has long been on a journey of bringing Jira to teams beyond the software development groups it started out with. With Jira Service Management, it is successfully doing that with IT teams. With Jira Core, it also moved further in this direction, but Jira Work Management takes this a step further (and will replace Jira Core). The idea here is to offer a version of Jira that enables teams across marketing, HR, finance, design and other groups to manage their work and — if needed — connect it to that of a company’s development teams.
“Jira Software’s this de-facto standard,” Atlassian’s VP of Product Noah Wasmer told me. “We’re making just huge inroads with Jira Service Management right now, bringing IT teams into that loop. We have over 100,000 customers now on those two products. So it’s really doing incredibly well. But one of the things that CIOs say is that it’s really tough to put Jira Software in front of an HR team and the legal team. They often ask, what is code? What is a pull request?”
Image Credits: Atlassian
Wasmer also noted that even though Jira Software is specifically meant for developers, about half of its users are already in other teams that work with these development teams. “We think that [Jira Work Management] gives them the more contextually relevant tool — a tool that actually helps them accelerate and move faster,” Wasmer said.
With Jira Work Management, the company is looking at making it easier for any team to track and manage their work in what Wasmer described as a “universal system and family of product.” As company’s look at how to do remote and hybrid work, Atlassian believes that they’ll need this kind of core product to keep track of the work that is being done. But it’s also about the simple fact that every business is now a software business and while every team’s work touches upon this, marketing and design teams often still work in their own silos.
Image Credits: Atlassian
These different teams, though, also have quite different expectations of the user interface they need to manage their work most effectively. So while Jira Work Management features all of the automation features and privacy controls of its brethren, it is based around a slightly different and simplified user interface than Jira Software, for example.
What’s even more important, though, is that Jira Work Management offers a variety of views for teams to enter and manipulate their data. To get new users onboarded quickly, Atlassian built a set of templates for some of the most common use cases it expects, though users are obviously free to customize all these different views to their hearts’ — and business needs’ — content.
Atlassian also changed some of the language around Jira tickets. There are no “stories” and “bugs” in Jira Work Management (unless you add them yourself) and instead, these templates use words like “tasks,” “assets” (for design use cases) or “candidates” (for HR).
Image Credits: Atlassian
Given the fact that spreadsheets are the universal language of business, it’s maybe no surprise that the List view is core here, with an Excel/Airtable-like experience that should immediately feel familiar to any business user. It’s inline editable and completely abstracts away the usual Jira ticket, even though underneath, it’s the same taxonomy and infrastructure.
“We really wanted people to walk into this product and just understand that there is work that needs to be done,” Chase Wilson, the head of product marketing for Jira Work Management, said. He noted that the team worked on making the experience feel snappy.
Image Credits: Atlassian
The other views available are pretty straightforward: a calendar and Gantt chart-like timeline view, as well as the traditional Kanban board that has long been at the core of Jira (and Agile in general).
Jira Work Management also lets users build forms, using a drag-and-drop editor that makes it easy for anybody inside an organization to build forms and collect requests that way. Only a few weeks ago, Atlassian announced the acquisition of ThinkTilt, the company behind the popular no-code form-builder ProForma and it looks like it is already putting this acquisition to work here.
As Wasmer stressed, Jira Work Management is meant to help different teams get work done in a way that works best for them. But because Jira is now a family of products, it also enables a lot more cross-team collaboration. That means a development team that is working on implementing a GDPR requirement can now build a workflow that ties in with the project board for a legal team that then allows legal to hold up a software release until it approves this new feature.
“We hear about this all the time today,” he said. “They just stick the legal team into Jira Software — and it over-inundates them with information that’s not relevant to what they’re trying to get done. Now we can expose them. And we also then get that legal team, that marketing team, exposed to different templates for different work. What they’re finding is that once they get used to it for that must-do use case, they start saying: Well, hey, why don’t I use this for contract approvals at the end of the quarter?”
Image Credits: Atlassian
As for pricing, Atlassian follows its same standard template here, offering a free tier for teams with up to 10 users and then the paid tiers start at $5/user/month, with discounts for larger teams.
Looking ahead, Atlassian plans to add more reporting capabilities, native approvals for faster signoffs and more advanced functionality across the new work views.
It’s worth noting that Jira Work Management is the first product to come out of Point A, Atlassian’s new innovation program “dedicated to connecting early-adopter customers with product teams to build the next generation of teamwork tools.”
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JXL turns Jira into spreadsheets
Atlassian’s Jira is an extremely powerful issue tracking and project management tool, but it’s not the world’s most intuitive piece of software. Spreadsheets, on the other hand, are pretty much the de facto standard for managing virtually anything in a business. It’s maybe no surprise then that there are already a couple of tools on the market that bring a spreadsheet-like view of your projects to Jira or connect it to services like Google Sheets.
The latest entrant in this field is JXL Spreadsheets for Jira (and specifically Jira Cloud), which was founded by two ex-Atlassian employees, Daniel Franz and Hannes Obweger. And in what has become a bit of a trend, Atlassian Ventures invested in JXL earlier this year.
Franz built the Good News news reader before joining Atlassian, while his co-founder previously founded Radiant Minds Software, the makers of Portfolio for Jira, which was acquired by Atlassian.
Image Credits: JXL
“Jira is so successful because it is awesome,” Franz told me. “It is so versatile. It’s highly customizable. I’ve seen people in my time who are doing anything and everything with it. Working with customers [at Atlassian] — at some point, you didn’t get surprised anymore, but what the people can do and track with Jira is amazing. But no one would rock up and say, ‘hey, Jira is very pleasant and easy to use.’ ”
As Franz noted, by default, Jira takes a very opinionated view of how people should use it. But that also means that users often end up exporting their issues to create reports and visualizations, for example. But if they make any changes to this data, it never flows back into Jira. No matter how you feel about spreadsheets, they do work for many people and are highly flexible. Even Atlassian would likely agree because the new Jira Work Management, which is currently in beta, comes with a spreadsheet-like view and Trello, too, recently went this way when it launched a major update earlier this year.
Image Credits: JXL
Over the course of its three-month beta, the JXL team saw how its users ended up building everything from cross-project portfolio management to sprint planning, backlog maintenance, timesheets and inventory management on top of its service. Indeed, Franz tells me that the team already has some large customers, with one of them having a 7,000-seat license.
Pricing for JXL seems quite reasonable, starting at $1 flat for teams with up to 10 users. Larger teams pay per user/month, with prices that go down to $0.45/user/month for licenses with over 5,000 seats. There is also a free trial.
One of the reasons the company can offer this kind of pricing is because it only needs a very simple backend. None of a customer’s data sits on JXL’s servers. Instead, it sits right on top of Jira’s APIs, which in turn also means that changes are synced back and forth in real time.
JXL is now available in the Atlassian Marketplace and the team is actively hiring as it looks to build out its product (and put its new funding to work).
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Atlassian peps up Confluence with new graphical design features
Confluence, Atlassian’s wiki-like collaborative workspace, has been around for more than 15 years, and is often a core knowledge-sharing tool for the companies that implement it. But for the most part, Confluence is a business tool and looks like it, with walls of text and the occasional graph, table or image. But user expectations have changed, and so it’s maybe no major surprise that Atlassian is now bringing a stronger emphasis on design to the service.
Today’s update, for example, brings to the service features like cover images, title emojis and customizable space avatars (that is, “icons that denote a ‘space’ or section of Confluence”). The team also recently introduced smart links, which allow you to paste links from services like YouTube and Trello and have the service immediately recognize them and display them in their native format. Other new features include the ability to schedule when a new page is published and the ability to convert pages to blog posts (because, as it turns out, Atlassian has seen a bit of a resurgence in corporate blogging — mostly for internal audiences — during the pandemic).
Image Credits: Atlassian
“We ended up doing something that we called ‘love sprint,’ where we prioritize about 30 features for the enhancements, which are all — if you think about the themes — about how you design information in this world where you have to read more, where you have to write more,” Natalia Baryshnikova, the head Of Product Management for Atlassian’s Confluence Experience Group, told me. “And there’s the attention span that’s kind of pushing its limits. So how do you design for that situation? How do you discover our content?”
Baryshnikova tells me that the team took a close look at how content production, management and delivery works in the social media world. But some of the new features are also purely a reaction to a changing work environment. Take the ability to schedule when pages are published, for example. Employees who work from home may work especially late or early right now, for example, in order to prioritize childcare. But they still want the content they produce to be seen inside the company, and that can be hard when you would otherwise publish it at 11 p.m., for example.
Image Credits: Atlassian
And having your content get noticed is getting harder because Confluence usage has dramatically increased in the last 12 months. As Atlassian noted today, more than 60,000 companies are now using the service. And inside those companies, those users are also far more active than ever before. The number of Confluence pages created from March 2020 to March 2021 increased by more than 33%. The average user now creates 11% more pages, but the product’s superusers have often doubled or tripled their output.
The use of Confluence has also helped many companies reduce their number of meetings, but as Baryshnikova noted, “not only are pages competing with meetings — but pages are competing with pages.” So using good graphics, for example, is a way for a user’s content to stand out in the noise of corporate content production. Which, I have to admit, strikes me as a somewhat strange dynamic. But I guess that just like on the web, in order to stand out in a corporate environment, you have to make the documents you produce stand out in order to get noticed. Maybe that — as well as the lack of watercooler conversations — is also the reason corporate blogging is seeing an uptick right now.
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Atlassian is acquiring Chartio to bring data visualization to the platform
The Atlassian platform is chock full of data about how a company operates and communicates. Atlassian launched a machine learning layer, which relies on data on the platform with the addition of Atlassian Smarts last fall. Today the company announced it was acquiring Chartio to add a new data analysis and visualization component to the Atlassian family of products. The companies did not share a purchase price.
The company plans to incorporate Chartio technology across the platform, starting with Jira. Before being acquired, Chartio has generated its share of data, reporting that 280,000 users have created 10.5 million charts for 540,000 dashboards pulled from over 100,000 data sources.
Atlassian sees Chartio as way to bring that data visualization component to the platform and really take advantage of the data locked inside its products. “Atlassian products are home to a treasure trove of data, and our goal is to unleash the power of this data so our customers can go beyond out-of-the-box reports and truly customize analytics to meet the needs of their organization,” Zoe Ghani, head of product experience at platform at Atlassian wrote in a blog post announcing the deal.
Chartio co-founder and CEO Dave Fowler wrote in a blog post on his company website that the two companies started discussing a deal late last year, which culminated in today’s announcement. As is often the case in these deals, he is arguing that his company will be better off as part of large organization like Atlassian with its vast resources than it would have been by remaining stand-alone.
“While we’ve been proudly independent for years, the opportunity to team up our technology with Atlassian’s platform and massive reach was incredibly compelling. Their product-led go to market, customer focus and educational marketing have always been aspirational for us,” Fowler wrote.
As for Chartio customers unfortunately, according to a notice on the company website, the product is going to be going away next year, but customers will have plenty of time to export the data to another tool. The notice includes a link to instructions on how to do this.
Chartio was founded in 2010, and participated in the Y Combinator Summer 2010 cohort. It raised a modest $8.03 million along the way, according to Pitchbook data.
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Atlassian stops selling on-prem server licenses, adds new enteprise pricing tier
Atlassian has made it clear for some time that it’s all in on the cloud, but now it’s official. The company stopped selling new on-prem server licenses as of yesterday. Perhaps to take away the sting of that move for large organizations, today it announced a new all-inclusive enterprise pricing tier.
Atlassian chief revenue officer Cameron Deatsch says that previously the company had offered a free tier and then standard and premium-level paid tiers. “And now this cloud Enterprise Edition will be our highest tier, and what this will allow is for the most complex deployments, the largest customers who need unlimited scale, the customers that have all the security and regulatory requirements, data residency, you name it, — that is what we’re launching starting [today],” Deatsch told me.
What the enterprise tier delivers is unlimited instances across the Atlassian product line for each enterprise customer. That means a big company with multiple divisions could, for instance, have 20 instances of Jira and Confluence deployed with one for each division and a central management console.
While the company is supporting existing on-prem server customers until 2024, the idea is to now move them to the cloud and this offering should help. One thing we have clearly seen is that the pandemic has accelerated the move to the cloud by companies of every size, and this should encourage the company’s largest customers to make the move.
“The reality is, the demand was there, which was great to see, but we actually had this huge pipeline of our largest customers, basically trying to build their plan over the next couple of years to get to our cloud. The general availability of our Enterprise Edition is going to accelerate that even more,” he said.
It’s a move the company has been working toward for some time, but it really began to take shape when they shifted their operations to AWS and rebuilt the entire stack as a set of microservices beginning in 2016. This was the first step toward being able to handle the increased kinds of workloads an enterprise tier would require.
The company reported earnings at the end of last month with revenue of $501.4 million up 23% YoY with over 11,000 net new subscribers, a record for the company. The new enterprise tier won’t help with new customer volume, but it should help with overall revenue as more customers look for cloud solutions and pricing that meets their needs.
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3 questions to ask before adopting microservice architecture
As a product manager, I’m a true believer that you can solve any problem with the right product and process, even one as gnarly as the multiheaded hydra that is microservice overhead.
Working for Vertex Ventures US this summer was my chance to put this to the test. After interviewing 30+ industry experts from a diverse set of companies — Facebook, Fannie Mae, Confluent, Salesforce and more — and hosting a webinar with the co-founders of PagerDuty, LaunchDarkly and OpsLevel, we were able to answer three main questions:
- How do teams adopt microservices?
- What are the main challenges organizations face?
- Which strategies, processes and tools do companies use to overcome these challenges?
How do teams adopt microservices?
Out of dozens of companies we spoke with, only two had not yet started their journey to microservices, but both were actively considering it. Industry trends mirror this as well. In an O’Reilly survey of 1500+ respondents, more than 75% had started to adopt microservices.
It’s rare for companies to start building with microservices from the ground up. Of the companies we spoke with, only one had done so. Some startups, such as LaunchDarkly, plan to build their infrastructure using microservices, but turned to a monolith once they realized the high cost of overhead.
“We were spending more time effectively building and operating a system for distributed systems versus actually building our own services so we pulled back hard,” said John Kodumal, CTO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly.
“As an example, the things we were trying to do in mesosphere, they were impossible,” he said. “We couldn’t do any logging. Zero downtime deploys were impossible. There were so many bugs in the infrastructure and we were spending so much time debugging the basic things that we weren’t building our own service.”
As a result, it’s more common for companies to start with a monolith and move to microservices to scale their infrastructure with their organization. Once a company reaches ~30 developers, most begin decentralizing control by moving to a microservice architecture.
Teams may take different routes to arrive at a microservice architecture, but they tend to face a common set of challenges once they get there.
Large companies with established monoliths are keen to move to microservices, but costs are high and the transition can take years. Atlassian’s platform infrastructure is in microservices, but legacy monoliths in Jira and Confluence persist despite ongoing decomposition efforts. Large companies often get stuck in this transition. However, a combination of strong, top-down strategy combined with bottoms-up dev team support can help companies, such as Freddie Mac, make substantial progress.
Some startups, like Instacart, first shifted to a modular monolith that allows the code to reside in a single repository while beginning the process of distributing ownership of discrete code functions to relevant teams. This enables them to mitigate the overhead associated with a microservice architecture by balancing the visibility of having a centralized repository and release pipeline with the flexibility of discrete ownership over portions of the codebase.
What challenges do teams face?
Teams may take different routes to arrive at a microservice architecture, but they tend to face a common set of challenges once they get there. John Laban, CEO and co-founder of OpsLevel, which helps teams build and manage microservices told us that “with a distributed or microservices based architecture your teams benefit from being able to move independently from each other, but there are some gotchas to look out for.”
Indeed, the linked O’Reilly chart shows how the top 10 challenges organizations face when adopting microservices are shared by 25%+ of respondents. While we discussed some of the adoption blockers above, feedback from our interviews highlighted issues around managing complexity.
The lack of a coherent definition for a service can cause teams to generate unnecessary overhead by creating too many similar services or spreading related services across different groups. One company we spoke with went down the path of decomposing their monolith and took it too far. Their service definitions were too narrow, and by the time decomposition was complete, they were left with 4,000+ microservices to manage. They then had to backtrack and consolidate down to a more manageable number.
Defining too many services creates unnecessary organizational and technical silos while increasing complexity and overhead. Logging and monitoring must be present on each service, but with ownership spread across different teams, a lack of standardized tooling can create observability headaches. It’s challenging for teams to get a single-pane-of-glass view with too many different interacting systems and services that span the entire architecture.
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Acapela, from the founder of Dubsmash, hopes ‘asynchronous meetings’ can end Zoom fatigue
Acapela, a new startup co-founded by Dubsmash founder Roland Grenke, is breaking cover today in a bid to re-imagine online meetings for remote teams.
Hoping to put an end to video meeting fatigue, the product is described as an “asynchronous meeting platform,” which Grenke and Acapela’s other co-founder, ex-Googler Heiki Riesenkampf (who has a deep learning computer science background), believe could be the key to unlock better and more efficient collaboration. In some ways the product can be thought of as the antithesis to Zoom and Slack’s real-time and attention-hogging downsides.
To launch, the Berlin -based and “remote friendly” company has raised €2.5 million in funding. The round is led by Visionaries Club with participation from various angel investors, including Christian Reber (founder of Pitch and Wunderlist) and Taavet Hinrikus (founder of TransferWise). I also understand Entrepreneur First is a backer and has assigned EF venture partner Benedict Evans to work on the problem. If you’ve seen the ex-Andreessen Horowitz analyst writing about a post-Zoom world lately, now you know why.
Specifically, Acapela says it will use the injection of cash to expand the core team, focusing on product, design and engineering as it continues to build out its offering.
“Our mission is to make remote teams work together more effectively by having fewer but better meetings,” Grenke tells me. “With Acapela, we aim to define a new category of team collaboration that provides more structure and personality than written messages (Slack or email) and more flexibility than video conferencing (Zoom or Google Meet)”.
Grenke believes some form of asynchronous meetings is the answer, where participants don’t have to interact in real-time but the meeting still has an agenda, goals, a deadline and — if successfully run — actionable outcomes.
“Instead of sitting through hours of video calls on a daily basis, users can connect their calendars and select meetings they would like to discuss asynchronously,” he says. “So, as an alternative to everyone being in the same call at the same time, team members contribute to conversations more flexibly over time. Like communication apps in the consumer space, Acapela allows rich media formats to be used to express your opinion with voice or video messages while integrating deeply with existing productivity tools (like GSuite, Atlassian, Asana, Trello, Notion, etc.)”.
In addition, Acapela will utilise what Grenke says is the latest machine learning techniques to help automate repetitive meeting tasks as well as to summarise the contents of a meeting and any decisions taken. If made to work, that in itself could be significant.
“Initially, we are targeting high-growth tech companies which have a high willingness to try out new tools while having an increasing need for better processes as their teams grow,” adds the Acapela founder. “In addition to that, they tend to have a technical global workforce across multiple time zones which makes synchronous communication much more costly. In the long run we see a great potential tapping into the space of SMEs and larger enterprises, since COVID has been a significant driver of the decentralization of work also in the more traditional industrial sectors. Those companies make up more than 90% of our European market and many of them have not switched to new communication tools yet”.
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Atlassian Smarts adds machine learning layer across the company’s platform of services
Atlassian has been offering collaboration tools, often favored by developers and IT for some time with such stalwarts as Jira for help desk tickets, Confluence to organize your work and BitBucket to organize your development deliverables, but what it lacked was a machine learning layer across the platform to help users work smarter within and across the applications in the Atlassian family.
That changed today, when Atlassian announced it has been building that machine learning layer, called Atlassian Smarts, and is releasing several tools that take advantage of it. It’s worth noting that unlike Salesforce, which calls its intelligence layer Einstein or Adobe, which calls its Sensei, Atlassian chose to forgo the cutesy marketing terms and just let the technology stand on its own.
Shihab Hamid, the founder of the Smarts and Machine Learning Team at Atlassian, who has been with the company 14 years, says they avoided a marketing name by design. “I think one of the things that we’re trying to focus on is actually the user experience and so rather than packaging or branding the technology, we’re really about optimizing teamwork,” Hamid told TechCrunch.
Hamid says that the goal of the machine learning layer is to remove the complexity involved with organizing people and information across the platform.
“Simple tasks like finding the right person or the right document becomes a challenge, or at least they slow down productivity and take time away from the creative high-value work that everyone wants to be doing, and teamwork itself is super messy and collaboration is complicated. These are human challenges that don’t really have one right solution,” he said.
He says that Atlassian has decided to solve these problems using machine learning with the goal of speeding up repetitive, time-intensive tasks. Much like Adobe or Salesforce, Atlassian has built this underlying layer of machine smarts, for lack of a better term, that can be distributed across their platform to deliver this kind of machine learning-based functionality wherever it makes sense for the particular product or service.
“We’ve invested in building this functionality directly into the Atlassian platform to bring together IT and development teams to unify work, so the Atlassian flagship products like JIRA and Confluence sit on top of this common platform and benefit from that common functionality across products. And so the idea is if we can build that common predictive capability at the platform layer we can actually proliferate smarts and benefit from the data that we gather across our products,” Hamid said.
The first pieces fit into this vision. For starters, Atlassian is offering a smart search tool that helps users find content across Atlassian tools faster by understanding who you are and how you work. “So by knowing where users work and what they work on, we’re able to proactively provide access to the right documents and accelerate work,” he said.
The second piece is more about collaboration and building teams with the best personnel for a given task. A new tool called predictive user mentions helps Jira and Confluence users find the right people for the job.
“What we’ve done with the Atlassian platform is actually baked in that intelligence, because we know what you work on and who you collaborate with, so we can predict who should be involved and brought into the conversation,” Hamid explained.
Finally, the company announced a tool specifically for Jira users, which bundles together similar sets of help requests and that should lead to faster resolution over doing them manually one at a time.
“We’re soon launching a feature in JIRA Service Desk that allows users to cluster similar tickets together, and operate on them to accelerate IT workflows, and this is done in the background using ML techniques to calculate the similarity of tickets, based on the summary and description, and so on.”
All of this was made possible by the company’s previous shift from mostly on-premises to the cloud and the flexibility that gave them to build new tooling that crosses the entire platform.
Today’s announcements are just the start of what Atlassian hopes will be a slew of new machine learning-fueled features being added to the platform in the coming months and years.
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