cloud
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Okta acquires cloud identity startup Auth0 for $6.5B
As Okta announced earnings today after the bell, it revealed that it’s buying cloud identity startup Auth0 for a hefty $6.5 billion. The company had a valuation of $1.92 billion when it raised $120 million led by Salesforce Ventures last July.
With Auth0, Okta gets a cloud identity company that helps developers embed identity management into applications, adding an entirely new dimension to its identity platform. Okta co-founder and CEO Todd McKinnon says the acquisition gives his company broad coverage in the identity space and the acquisition has the power to lift identity to a first-class cloud category along with infrastructure, enterprise software like collaboration and CRM and others.
“There are a few other [primary cloud categories], but one of those has to be identity. And for identity to rise to that status, it has to cover all the use cases. It’s got to be both workforce and customer. So workforce [has been] our [primary] business traditionally, and customer is newer,” McKinnon told me.
The customer piece involves having your customers use Okta/Auth0 on the back end to sign onto your platform, rather using it as just your corporate credentials. Having coverage across both areas is what has McKinnon so excited.
Eugenio Pace, co-founder and CEO Auth0 sees his company together with Okta as powerful combination in the identity management space, and he’s not just hyping the deal when he says that. “Together, we can offer our customers workforce and customer identity solutions with exceptional speed, simplicity, security, reliability and scalability. By joining forces, we will accelerate our customers’ innovation and ability to meet the needs and demands of consumers, businesses and employees everywhere,” Pace said in a statement.
Pace and co-founder Matias Woloski came from Microsoft where they worked until launching their startup in 2013. As McKinnon points out this is a substantial company with 800 employees. It is expected to reach $200 million in revenue this year.
“So they have this mindset of building a service that is flexible and API-driven and great tools for developers and all the extensibility or customizability, that developers would need. And you can’t, you can’t do that later, you have to start from the beginning
McKinnon says while they share some common customers, there will be net new ones as well and the nature of the two companies coverage areas means that they can sell Auth0 into traditional Okta customers and vice versa. The combined entities could fill in a soup-to-nuts kind of identity offering.
As Pace told TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker in 2019, it has always been focused on developers:
“We’re not profitable because we’ve chosen to reinvest and continue to sustain the high scale of growth,” he said. “But we are more efficient every day — in the way we acquire customers, the way we service customers, in the way we ship new design capabilities.”
The question is how much this will change under the Okta, but Auth0 users can breathe a sigh of relief in that McKinnon says that the company will operate as an independent unit inside of Okta as they look for paths to integration in the coming months. What’s more, McKinnon says he has a relationship with the two founders going back years and it sounds like there is an element of trust there.
Okta had a pretty good quarter too while it was at it, announcing $234.7 million in revenue up 40% year over year, but Wall Street appears to be unhappy with the deal with the stock price down 6.9% in after hours trading.
Auth0 was founded in 2013 and raised over $300 million along the way. In addition to Salesforce Ventures, other investors included Sapphire Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Meritech Capital Partners.
Powered by WPeMatico
Yugabyte announces $48M investment as cloud-native database makes enterprise push
As demand for cloud-native applications is growing, Yugabyte, makers of the cloud-native, open-source YugabyteDB database, is seeing a corresponding rise in demand for its products, especially with large enterprise customers. Today, the company announced a $48 million financing round to help build on that momentum. The round is an extension of the startup’s $30 million Series B last June.
Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with participation from Greenspring Associates, Dell Technologies Capital, Wipro Ventures and 8VC. It has raised a total of $103 million, according to the company.
Kannan Muthukkaruppan, Yugabyte co-founder and president, says the startup saw a marked increase in interest in both the open-source and commercial offerings in 2020 as the pandemic pushed many companies to the cloud faster than they might have gone otherwise, something many startup founders have pointed out to me.
“The distributed SQL space is definitely heating up, and if anything over the last six months almost in every vector in terms of enterprise customers — from Fortune 500 companies across financial, retail, ISP or telcos — are putting Yugabyte in production to be the system of record database to meet some of their business critical services needs,” Muthukkaruppan told me.
In addition, he’s seeing a similar rise in the level of interest from the open-source version of the product. “Similarly, the groundswell on the community and the open-source adoption has been phenomenal. Our Slack [open source] user community quadrupled in 2020,” he said.
That kind of momentum led to the increased investor interest, says co-founder and CTO Karthik Ranganathan. “Some of the primary reasons to go and even ask for funding was that we realized we could accelerate some of this stuff, and we couldn’t do that with the original $30 million we had raised,” he said. The original thinking was to do a secondary raise in the $15-20 million range, but multiple investors expressed interest in participating, and it ended up being $48 million when all was said and done.
Former Pivotal president Bill Cook came on board as CEO at the same time they were announcing their last funding round in June, and brought some enterprise chops to the table. It was his job to figure out how to expand the market opportunity with larger high-value enterprise clients. “And so the last six or seven months has been about that, dealing with enterprise clients on one hand and then this emerging developer-led cloud offering as well,” Cook said.
The company has a three-tier offering that includes the open-source YugabyteDB. Then there is a fully managed cloud version called Yugabyte Cloud, and finally there is a self-managed cloud version of the database called Yugabyte Platform. The latter is especially attractive to large enterprise customers who want to be in the cloud, but still want to maintain control of their data and infrastructure, and so choose to manage the cloud installation themselves.
Yugabyte started last year with 50 employees, doubled that to this point, and now expects to reach 200 by the end of this year. As they add employees, the leadership team is cognizant of the importance of building a diverse and inclusive workforce, while recognizing the challenges in doing so.
“It’s work in progress as always. We’ve added diversity candidates right along the whole spectrum as we’ve grown but from my perspective it’s never sufficient, and we just need to keep pushing on it hard, and I think as a leadership team we recognize that,” Cook said.
The three leaders of the company have been working together remotely now since the announcement in June, and had only met briefly in person prior to the pandemic shutting down offices, but they say that it has gone smoothly. And while they would obviously like to meet in person again when the time is right, the momentum the company is experiencing shows that things are moving in the right direction, regardless of where they are getting their work done.
Note: The article originally stated this was a Series C round, but the company later clarified that it was a B-1 round; we’ve updated the article to reflect that.
Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, legal, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included in each for audience questions and discussion.
Powered by WPeMatico
Airbyte raises $5.2M for its open-source data integration platform
Airbyte, an open-source data integration platform, today announced that it has raised a $5.2 million seed funding round led by Accel. Other investors include Y Combinator, 8VC, Segment co-founder Calvin French-Owen, former Cloudera GM Charles Zedlewski, LiveRamp and Safegraph CEO Auren Hoffman, Datavant CEO Travis May and Alain Rossmann, the president of Machinify.
The company was co-founded by Michel Tricot, the former director of engineering and head of integrations at LiverRamp and RideOS, and John Lafleur, a serial entrepreneur who focuses on developer tools and B2B services. The last startup he co-founded was Anaxi.
Image Credits: Airbyte
In its early days, the team was actually working on a slightly different project that focused on data connectivity for marketing companies. The founders were accepted into Y Combinator and built out their application, but once the COVID pandemic hit, a lot of the companies that had placed early bets on Airbyte’s original project faced budget freezes and layoffs.
“At that point, we decided to go into deeper data integration and that’s how we started the Airbyte project and product as we know it today,” Tricot explained.
Today’s Airbyte is geared toward data engineering, without the specific industry focus of its early incarnation, but it offers both a graphical UI for building connectors, as well as APIs for developers to hook into.
As Tricot noted, a lot of companies start out by building their own data connectors — and that tends to work alright at first. But the real complexity is in maintaining them. “You have zero control over how they behave,” he noted. “So either they’re going to fail, or they’re going to change something. The cost of data integration is in the maintenance.”
Even for a company that specializes in building these connectors, the complexity will quickly outpace its ability to keep up, so the team decided on building Airbyte as an open-source company. The team also argues that while there are companies like Fivetran that focus on data integration, a lot of customers end up with use cases that aren’t supported by Airbyte’s closed-source competitors and that they had to build themselves from the ground up.
“Our mission with Airbyte is really to become the standard to replicate data,” Lafleur said. “To do that, we will open source every feature that addresses the need of the individual contributor, so all the connectors.” He also noted that Airbyte will exclusively focus on its open-source tools until it raises a Series A round — likely early next year.
To monetize its service, Airbyte plans to use an open-core model, where all of the features that address the needs of a company (think enterprise features like data quality, privacy, user management, etc.) will be licensed. The team is also looking at white-labeling its containerized connectors to others.
Currently, about 600 companies use Airbyte’s connectors — up from 250 just a month ago. Its users include the likes of Safegraph, Dribbble, Mercato, GraniteRock, Agridigital and Cart.com.
The company plans to use the new funding to double its team from about 12 people to 25 by the end of the year. Right now, the company’s focus is on establishing its user base, and then it plans to start monetizing that — and raise more funding — next year.
Early Stage is the premiere ‘how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first-hand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company-building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, legal, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in – there’s ample time included in each for audience questions and discussion.
Powered by WPeMatico
Xage introduces Zero Trust remote access cloud solution for hard-to-secure environments
When a hacker broke into the computer systems of the Oldsmar, Florida water supply last month, it sent up red flags across the operational tech world, whether that’s utilities or oil and gas pipelines. Xage, a security startup that has been building a solution to help protect these hard-to-secure operations, announced a Zero Trust remote access cloud solution today that could help prevent these kinds of attacks.
Duncan Greatwood, CEO at Xage, says flat out that if his company’s software was in place in Oldsmar, that hack wouldn’t have happened. Smaller operations like the one in Oldsmar tend to be one-person IT shops running older remote access software that’s vulnerable to hacking on a number of levels.
“It’s not difficult to compromise a virtual network computing (VNC) connection. It’s not difficult to compromise a stale account that’s been left on a jump box. What we started to do last year was deliver what we call a Zero Trust remote access solution to these kinds of customers,” Greatwood told me.
This involves controlling access device by device and person by person by determining who can do what based on them authenticating themselves and proving who they are. “It doesn’t rely on knowledge of a device password or a VPN zone password,” he explained.
The solution goes further with a secure traversal tunnel, which relies on a tamper-proof certificate to prevent hackers from getting from the operations side of the house — whether that’s a utility grid, water supply or oil and gas pipeline — to the IT side where they could then begin to muck about with the operational technology.
Xage also uses a distributed ledger as a core part of its solution to help protect identity policies, logs and other key information across the platform. “Having a distributed ledger means that rather than an attacker having to compromise just a single node, it would have to compromise a majority of the nodes simultaneously, and that’s very difficult [if not impossible] to do,” he said.
What’s more, the ledgers operate independently across locations in a hierarchy with a global ledger that acts as the ultimate rules enforcer. That means even if a location goes offline, the rules will be enforced by the main system whenever it reconnects.
They introduced an on-premise version of the Zero Trust remote access system last October, but with this kind of technology difficult to configure and maintain, some customers were looking for a managed solution like the one being introduced today. With the cloud solution, customers get a hosted solution accessible via a web browser with much faster deployment.
“What we’ve done with the cloud solution is made it really simple for people to adopt us by hosting the management software and the core Xage fabric nodes in this Xage cloud, and we’re really dramatically reducing that time to value for a remote access solution for OT,” Greatwood said.
You might be thinking that CISOs might not trust a cloud solution for these sensitive kinds of environments, and he admits that there is some caution in this market, even though they understand the benefits of moving to the cloud. To help ease these concerns, they can do a PoC in the cloud and there is a transfer tool to move back on prem easily if they are not comfortable with the cloud approach. So far he says that no early customers have chosen to do that, but the option is there.
Xage was founded in 2017 and has raised $16 million so far, according to Crunchbase data.
Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, legal, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included in each for audience questions and discussion.
Powered by WPeMatico
Microsoft brings tighter integration to Dynamics 365 and Teams
As the pandemic drags on and we learn about the requirements of working from home with distributed teams, users could be craving more integration across their tools to help reduce the clicks required to complete a set of tasks. Today at the Ignite Conference, Microsoft announced tighter integration between its business suite Dynamics 365 and its collaboration tool Teams to help with that issue.
Alysa Taylor, corporate VP for business applications and global industry at Microsoft, pointed out that one of the advantages of this native integration approach is that it helps reduce context switching across different applications. “We are committed to really bringing together the collaboration platform and the business process layer to enable salespeople, service representatives, operations managers [and other similar roles] to really have a unified platform in which they both collaborate and have their everyday business functions,” Taylor explained.
This could manifest itself in a number of different ways across marketing, sales and service. For instance, a marketer can create a webinar, which they set up and track in Dynamics 365 Marketing tools and run in Teams as a streaming event with the Teams streaming setup integrated directly into the Dynamics 365 console.
In a sales example Taylor says, “We’re enabling sellers to be able to track the career movements of their contacts using the LinkedIn Sales Navigator, as well as connect very specific sales records within Microsoft Teams without ever having to leave Dynamics 365 Sales. So you can be in the Sales application and you have the ability to deeply understand a contact and any contact changes that occur in Teams, and that’s automatically updated in Sales.”
If your company is not an all-Microsoft shop and wants to use different tools as part of these workflows, Taylor says that you can use Microsoft cross-cloud connectors to connect to another service, and this is true regardless of the tasks involved (so long as the connector to the desired application is available).
Salesforce, a primary rival of Microsoft in the business software space, spent over $27 billion to buy Slack at the end of last year to bring this kind of integration to its platform. Taylor sees the acquisition as a reaction to the integration Microsoft already has and continues to build.
“I think that Salesforce had to acquire Slack to be able to have that collaboration [we have], so we are years ahead of what they’re going to be able to provide because they will not have these native integrations. So I actually see the Salesforce acquisition as a response to what we’re doing with Dynamics 365 and Teams,” Taylor told me.
It’s worth pointing out that Salesforce is far ahead of Microsoft when it comes market share in the CRM space, with over 19% versus under 3% for Microsoft, according to Gartner numbers from 2019. While it’s possible these numbers have shifted some since then, probably not significantly.
Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, legal, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included in each for audience questions and discussion.
Powered by WPeMatico
Microsoft launches Azure Percept, its new hardware and software platform to bring AI to the edge
Microsoft today announced Azure Percept, its new hardware and software platform for bringing more of its Azure AI services to the edge. Percept combines Microsoft’s Azure cloud tools for managing devices and creating AI models with hardware from Microsoft’s device partners. The general idea here is to make it far easier for all kinds of businesses to build and implement AI for things like object detection, anomaly detections, shelf analytics and keyword spotting at the edge by providing them with an end-to-end solution that takes them from building AI models to deploying them on compatible hardware.
To kickstart this, Microsoft also today launches a hardware development kit with an intelligent camera for vision use cases (dubbed Azure Percept Vision). The kit features hardware-enabled AI modules for running models at the edge, but it can also be connected to the cloud. Users will also be able to trial their proofs-of-concept in the real world because the development kit conforms to the widely used 80/20 T-slot framing architecture.
In addition to Percept Vision, Microsoft is also launching Azure Percept Audio for audio-centric use cases.
Azure Percept devices, including Trust Platform Module, Azure Percept Vision and Azure Percept Audio. Image Credits: Microsoft
“We’ve started with the two most common AI workloads, vision and voice, sight and sound, and we’ve given out that blueprint so that manufacturers can take the basics of what we’ve started,” said Roanne Sones, the corporate vice president of Microsoft’s edge and platform group. “But they can envision it in any kind of responsible form factor to cover a pattern of the world.”
Percept customers will have access to Azure’s cognitive service and machine learning models and Percept devices will automatically connect to Azure’s IoT hub.
Microsoft says it is working with silicon and equipment manufacturers to build an ecosystem of “intelligent edge devices that are certified to run on the Azure Percept platform.” Over the course of the next few months, Microsoft plans to certify third-party devices for inclusion in this program, which will ideally allow its customers to take their proofs-of-concept and easily deploy them to any certified devices.
“Anybody who builds a prototype using one of our development kits, if they buy a certified device, they don’t have to do any additional work,” said Christa St. Pierre, a product manager in Microsoft’s Azure edge and platform group.
St. Pierre also noted that all of the components of the platform will have to conform to Microsoft’s responsible AI principles — and go through extensive security testing.
Early Stage is the premiere “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company-building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, legal, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included in each for audience questions and discussion.
Powered by WPeMatico
Microsoft Azure expands its NoSQL portfolio with Managed Instances for Apache Cassandra
At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced the launch of Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra, its latest NoSQL database offering and a competitor to Cassandra-centric companies like Datastax. Microsoft describes the new service as a “semi-managed offering that will help companies bring more of their Cassandra-based workloads into its cloud.”
“Customers can easily take on-prem Cassandra workloads and add limitless cloud scale while maintaining full compatibility with the latest version of Apache Cassandra,” Microsoft explains in its press materials. “Their deployments gain improved performance and availability, while benefiting from Azure’s security and compliance capabilities.”
Like its counterpart, Azure SQL Manages Instance, the idea here is to give users access to a scalable, cloud-based database service. To use Cassandra in Azure before, businesses had to either move to Cosmos DB, its highly scalable database service that supports the Cassandra, MongoDB, SQL and Gremlin APIs, or manage their own fleet of virtual machines or on-premises infrastructure.
Cassandra was originally developed at Facebook and then open-sourced in 2008. A year later, it joined the Apache Foundation and today it’s used widely across the industry, with companies like Apple and Netflix betting on it for some of their core services, for example. AWS launched a managed Cassandra-compatible service at its re:Invent conference in 2019 (it’s called Amazon Keyspaces today), Microsoft launched the Cassandra API for Cosmos DB in September 2018. With today’s announcement, though, the company can now offer a full range of Cassandra-based servicer for enterprises that want to move these workloads to its cloud.
Early Stage is the premiere “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company-building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, legal, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included in each for audience questions and discussion.
Powered by WPeMatico
Salesforce delivers, Wall Street doubts as stock falls 6.3% post-earnings
Wall Street investors can be fickle beasts. Take Salesforce as an example. The CRM giant announced a $5.82 billion quarter when it reported earnings yesterday. Revenue was up 20% year over year. The company also reported $21.25 billion in total revenue for the just-closed FY2021, up 24% YoY. If that wasn’t enough, it raised its FY2022 guidance (its upcoming fiscal year) to over $25 billion. What’s not to like?
You want higher quarterly revenue, Salesforce gave you higher revenue. You want high growth and solid projected revenue — check and check. In fact, it’s hard to find anything to complain about in the report. The company is performing and growing at a rate that is remarkable for an organization of its size and maturity — and it is expected to continue to perform and grow.
How did Wall Street react to this stellar report? It punished the stock with the price down over 6%, a pretty dismal day considering the company brought home such a promising report card.
Image Credits: Google
So what is going on here? It could be that investors simply don’t believe the growth is sustainable or that the company overpaid when it bought Slack at the end of last year for over $27 billion. It could be it’s just people overreacting to a cooling market this week. But if investors are looking for a high-growth company, Salesforce is delivering that.
While Slack was expensive, it reported revenue over $250 million yesterday, pushing it over the $1 billion run rate with more than 100 customers paying over $1 million in ARR. Those numbers will eventually get added to Salesforce’s bottom line.
Canaccord Genuity analyst David Hynes Jr. wrote that he was baffled by investors’ reaction to this report. Like me, he saw a lot of positives. Yet Wall Street decided to focus on the negative, and see “the glass half empty,” as he put it in his note to investors.
“The stock is clearly in the show-me camp, which means it’s likely to take another couple of quarters for investors to buy into the idea that fundamentals are actually quite solid here, and that Slack was opportunistic (and yes, pricey), but not an attempt to mask suddenly deteriorating growth,” Hynes wrote.
During the call with analysts yesterday, Brad Zelnick from Credit Suisse asked how well the company could accelerate out of the pandemic-induced economic malaise, and Gavin Patterson, Salesforce’s president and chief revenue officer, says the company is ready whenever the world moves past the pandemic.
“And let me reassure you, we are building the capability in terms of the sales force. You’d be delighted to hear that we’re investing significantly in terms of our direct sales force to take advantage of that demand. And I’m very confident we’ll be able to meet it. So I think you’re hearing today a message from us all that the business is strong, the pipeline is strong and we’ve got confidence going into the year,” Patterson said.
While Salesforce execs were clearly pumped up yesterday with good reason, there’s still doubt out in investor land that manifested itself in the stock starting down and staying down all day. It will be, as Hynes suggested, up to Salesforce to keep proving them wrong. As long as they keep producing quarters like the one they had this week, they should be just fine, regardless of what the naysayers on Wall Street may be thinking today.
Powered by WPeMatico
EC roundup: BNPL startups, growth marketing tips, solid state battery market map, more
When I needed a new sofa several months ago, I was pleased to find a buy now, pay later (BNPL) option during the checkout process. I had prepared myself to make a major financial outlay, but the service fees were well worth the convenience of deferring the entire payment.
Coincidentally, I was siting on said sofa this morning and considering that transaction when Alex Wilhelm submitted a column that compared recent earnings for three BNPL providers: Afterpay, Affirm and Klarna.
I asked him why he decided to dig into the sector with such gusto.
Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.
“What struck me about the concept was that we had just seen earnings from Affirm,” he said. “So we had three BNPL players with known earnings, and I had just covered a startup funding round in the space.”
“Toss in some obvious audience interest, and it was an easy choice to write the piece. Now the question is whether I did a good job and people find value in it.”
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week! Have a great weekend.
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
As BNPL startups raise, a look at Klarna, Affirm and Afterpay earnings
Pilot CEO Waseem Daher tears down his company’s $60M Series C pitch deck
Image Credits: Colin Hawkins (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
I avoid running Extra Crunch stories that focus on best practices; you can find those anywhere. Instead, we look for “here’s what worked for me” articles that give readers actionable insights.
That’s a much better use of your time and ours.
With that ethos in mind, Lucas Matney interviewed Pilot CEO Waseem Daher to deconstruct the pitch deck that helped his company land a $60M Series C round.
“If the Series A was about, ‘Do you have the right ingredients to make this work?’ then the Series B is about, ‘Is this actually working?’” Daher tells TechCrunch.
“And then the Series C is more, ‘Well, show me that the core business is really working and that you have unlocked real drivers to allow the business to continue growing.’”
Can solid state batteries power up for the next generation of EVs?
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
A global survey of automobile owners found three hurdles to overcome before consumers will widely embrace electric vehicles:
- 30-minute charging time
- 300-mile range
- $36,000 maximum cost
“Theoretically, solid state batteries (SSB) could deliver all three,” but for now, lithium-ion batteries are the go-to for most EVs (along with laptops and phones).
In our latest market map, we’ve plotted the new and established players in the SSB sector and listed many of the investors who are backing them.
Although SSBs are years away from mass production, “we are on the cusp of some pretty incredible discoveries using major improvements in computational science and machine learning algorithms to accelerate that process,” says SSB startup founder Amy Prieto.
Dear Sophie: Which immigration options are the fastest?
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
Dear Sophie:
Help! Our startup needs to hire 50 engineers in artificial intelligence and related fields ASAP. Which visa and green card options are the quickest to get for top immigrant engineers?
And will Biden’s new immigration bill help us?
— Mesmerized in Menlo Park
Why F5 spent $2.2B on 3 companies to focus on cloud native applications
Image Credits: Jasmin Merdan / Getty Images
Founded in 1996, F5 has repositioned itself in the networking market several times in its history. In the last two years, however, it spent $2.2 billion to acquire Shape Security, Volterra and NGINX.
“As large organizations age, they often need to pivot to stay relevant, and I wanted to explore one of these transformational shifts,” said enterprise reporter Ron Miller.
“I spoke to the CEO of F5 to find out the strategy behind his company’s pivot and how he leveraged three acquisitions to push his organization in a new direction.”
DigitalOcean’s IPO filing shows a two-class cloud market
Image Credits: Who_I_am (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Cloud hosting company DigitalOcean filed to go public this week, so Ron Miller and Alex Wilhelm unpacked its financials.
“AWS and Microsoft Azure will not be losing too much sleep worrying about DigitalOcean, but it is not trying to compete head-on with them across the full spectrum of cloud infrastructure services,” said John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy Research.
Oscar Health’s initial IPO price is so high, it makes me want to swear
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
I asked Alex Wilhelm to dial back the profanity he used to describe Oscar Health’s proposed valuation, but perhaps I was too conservative.
In March 2018, the insurtech unicorn was valued at around $3.2 billion. Today, with the company aiming to debut at $32 to $34 per share, its fully diluted valuation is closer to $7.7 billion.
“The clear takeaway from the first Oscar Health IPO pricing interval is that public investors have lost their minds,” says Alex.
His advice for companies considering an IPO? “Go public now.”
If Coinbase is worth $100 billion, what’s a fair valuation for Stripe?
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Last week, Alex wrote about how cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase was being valued at $77 billion in the private markets.
As of Monday, “it’s now $100 billion, per Axios’ reporting.”
He reviewed Coinbase’s performance from 2019 through the end of Q3 2020 “to decide whether Coinbase at $100 billion makes no sense, a little sense or perfect sense.”
Winning enterprise sales teams know how to persuade the Chief Objection Officer
Image Credits: Alla Aramyan (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
A skilled software sales team devotes a lot of resources to pinpointing potential customers.
Poring through LinkedIn and reviewing past speaker lists at industry conferences are good places to find decision-makers, for example.
Despite this detective work, GGV Capital investor Oren Yunger says sales teams still need to identify the deal-blockers who can spike a deal with a single email.
“I call this person the Chief Objection Officer.”
3 strategies for elevating brand authority in 2021
Image Credits: Klaus Vedfelt / Getty Images
Every startup wants to raise its profile, but for many early-stage companies, marketing budgets are too small to make a meaningful difference.
“Providing real value through content is an excellent way to build authority in the short and long term,” says Amanda Milligan, marketing director at growth agency Fractl.
RIBS: The messaging framework for every company and product
Image Credits: luchezar (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
The most effective marketing uses good storytelling, not persuasion.
According to Caryn Marooney, general partner at Coatue Management, every compelling story is relevant, inevitable, believable and simple.
“Behind most successful companies is a story that checks every one of those boxes,” says Marooney, but “this is a central challenge for every startup.”
Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig: The objective of pricing is to become less wrong over time
On a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live, Ironclad founder and CEO Jason Boehmig and Accel partner Steve Loughlin discussed the pitch that brought them together almost four years ago.
Since that $8 million Series A, Loughlin joined Ironclad’s board. “Both agree that the work they put in up front had paid off” when it comes to how well they work together, says Jordan Crook.
“We’ve always been up front about the fact that we consider the board a part of the company,” said Boehmig.
TC Early Stage: The premiere how-to event for startup entrepreneurs and investors
From April 1-2, some of the most successful founders and VCs will explain how they build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios.
At TC Early Stage, we’ll cover topics like recruiting, sales, legal, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session includes ample time for audience questions and discussion.
Use discount code ECNEWSLETTER to take 20% off the cost of your TC Early Stage ticket!
Powered by WPeMatico
DigitalOcean’s IPO filing shows a two-class cloud market
This morning DigitalOcean, a provider of cloud computing services to SMBs, filed to go public. The company intends to list on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol “DOCN.”
DigitalOcean’s offering comes amidst a hot streak for tech IPOs, and valuations that are stretched by historical norms. The cloud hosting company was joined by Coinbase in filing its numbers publicly today.
DigitalOcean’s offering comes amidst a hot streak for tech IPOs.
However, unlike the cryptocurrency exchange, DigitalOcean intends to raise capital through its offering. Its S-1 filing lists a $100 million placeholder number, a figure that will update when the company announces an IPO price range target.
This morning let’s explore the company’s financials briefly, and then ask ourselves what its results can tell us about the cloud market as a whole.
DigitalOcean’s financial results
TechCrunch has covered DigitalOcean with some frequency in recent years, including its early-2020 layoffs, its early-2020 $100 million debt raise and its $50 million investment from May of the same year that prior investors Access Industries and Andreessen Horowitz participated in.
From those pieces we knew that the company had reportedly reached $200 million in revenue during 2018, $250 million in 2019 and that DigitalOcean had expected to reach an annualized run rate of $300 million in 2020.
Those numbers held up well. Per its S-1 filing, DigitalOcean generated $203.1 million in 2018 revenue, $254.8 million in 2019 and $318.4 million in 2020. The company closed 2020 out with a self-calculated $357 million in annual run rate.
During its recent years of growth, DigitalOcean has managed to lose modestly increasing amounts of money, calculated using generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), and non-GAAP profit (adjusted EBITDA) in rising quantities. Observe the rising disconnect:
Powered by WPeMatico