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Vectorized announces $15.5M investment to build simpler streaming data tool
Streaming data is not new. Kafka has existed as an open source tool for a decade. Vectorized was founded on the premise that the existing tools were too complex and not designed for today’s streaming requirements. Today the company released its first product, Redpanda, an open source tool designed to make it easier for developers to build streaming data applications.
While it was at it, the startup announced a $15.5 million funding round, which is actually a combination of a previously unannounced $3 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and a $12.5 million Series A, which was also from Lightspeed with help from Google Ventures.
Redpanda is an open source tool that is delivered as an “intelligent API” to help “turn data streams into products,” company founder and CEO Alexander Gallego explained. It’s built to be a Kafka replacement, while remaining Kafka-compatible to help deal with backwards compatibility.
At the same time, it takes a more modern approach. Gallego points out that teams building data streaming applications have been getting lost in the complexity and he recognized an opportunity to build a company to simplify that.
“People are drowning in complexity today managing Kafka, ZooKeeper (an open source configuration management tool) and the data lake,” he said, adding “We enable new things that couldn’t be done before for several reasons: one is performance, one is simplicity and the other one is this store procedures.”
He says that the key to developer adoption is making the product free through open source, and having Kafka compatibility so that developers don’t feel like they have to just dump existing projects and start from scratch. While the company is launching with an open source tool, it plans to use the funding to build a hosted version of Redpanda to put it within reach of more organizations. “This funding round in particular is to power our cloud,” he said.
Arif Janmohamed, a partner at Lightspeed Ventures who is leading the investment in Vectorized sees a company looking to improve upon an existing technology with a better approach. “With a simple, elegant solution that doesn’t require any changes to an existing application’s code, Vectorized delivers 10x better performance, a much simpler management paradigm, and new functionality that will unleash the next set of real-time applications for the next decade,” Janmohamed said.
The company has 22 employees today with plans to add another 8 in the first half of this year, mostly engineers to help build the hosted version. As a Latino founder, Gallego is acutely aware of the need for a diverse and inclusive workforce. “What I have found is that being a [Latino] CEO, it attracts more people that look like me, and so that’s been a big thing, and it’s made a difference [in attracting diverse candidates],” he said.
One concrete thing he has done is start a scholarship to encourage under represented groups to become developers. “I started a scholarship where we just give money and mentorship to communities of Latino, Black and female developers, or people that want to transition to software engineering,” he said. While he says he does it without strings attached, he does hope that some of these folks could become part of the tech industry eventually, and perhaps even work at his company.
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Jam collaborative software launches Jam Genies to give small startups access to experts
As the world moves towards remote work, the collaborative tools market continues to expand. Jam, a platform for editing and improving your company’s website, is adding to the trend by introducing a new arm to its product today called Jam Genies.
Jam Genies is a network of highly experienced product experts that Jam users can tap for guidance and advice around their specific issue or challenge.
Cofounder Dani Grant explained to TechCrunch that many small and early-stage companies don’t have the deep pockets to hire a consultant when they run into a challenge, as many charge exorbitant rates and they often have a minimum time requirement. It can be incredibly difficult to get bite-sized advice at a reasonable cost.
That’s where Jam Genies comes in.
Genies hail from a variety of ‘verticals’, such as investors, designers, brand people, and growth hackers. The list includes:
- Brianne Kimmel – Angel investor and founder of Worklife VC. Investor in Webflow, Hopin & 40+ software companies building the future of work.
- Erik Torenberg – Partner at Village Global, a fund backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and others. Founding team at Product Hunt.
- Sahil Lavingia – Founder & CEO of Gumroad, first engineer at Pinterest, and angel investing $10 million a year via shl.vc.
- Iheanyi Ekechukwu – Engineer turned angel investor, and scout investor for Kleiner Perkins.
- Soleio – Facebook’s second product designer, former head of design at Dropbox, and advisor at Figma. Invests in design-focused founders at Combine.
- Dara Oke – Product design lead at Netflix, formerly designed and built products at Microsoft, Twitter, and Intel.
- Katie Suskin – Designed many products you know and love like Microsoft Calendar, OkCupid, Tia, and … Jam.
- Julius Tarng – Helped scale design at Webflow and led design tooling at Facebook.
- Abe Vizcarra – Currently leading brand at Fast, former Global Design Director at Snap Inc.
- Tiffany Zhong – CEO, Zebra IQ. Recognized by Forbes as one of the Top 10 Gen Z Experts.
- Nicole Obst – Former Head of Web Growth (B2C) at Dropbox and Head of Growth at Loom
- James Sherrett – 9th employee at Slack, led the original marketing and sales of Slack.
- Asher King Abramson – CEO at Got Users, a growth marketing platform widely used by startups around Silicon Valley.
Users on the Jam platform can choose a Genie and set an appointment through Calendly. The sessions last half an hour and cost a flat fee of $250, all of which goes to the Genie.
Jam raised $3.5 million in October, from firms like Union Square Ventures, Version One Ventures, BoxGroup, Village Global and a variety of angel investors, to fuel growth and further build out the product. Jam Genies is, in many respects, a growth initiative for the company to better acquaint early-stage startups with the platform.
The main Jam product lets groups of developers and designers work collaboratively on a website, leaving comments, discuss changes and create and assign tasks. The platform integrates with all the usual suspects, such as Jira, Trello, Github, Slack, Figma, and more.
Since its launch in October 2020, the company has signed up 4,000 customers for its private beta waitlist, with 14,000 Jam comments created on the platform. The introduction of Jam Genies could add momentum to this growth push.
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Run:AI raises $30M Series B for its AI compute platform
Run:AI, a Tel Aviv-based company that helps businesses orchestrate and optimize their AI compute infrastructure, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round. The new round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors TLV Partners and S Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to date to $43 million.
At the core of Run:AI’s platform is the ability to effectively virtualize and orchestrate AI workloads on top of its Kubernetes-based scheduler. Traditionally, it was always hard to virtualize GPUs, so even as demand for training AI models has increased, a lot of the physical GPUs often set idle for long periods because it was hard to dynamically allocate them between projects.
Image Credits: Run.AI
The promise behind Run:AI’s platform is that it allows its users to abstract away all of the AI infrastructure and pool all of their GPU resources — no matter whether in the cloud or on-premises. This also makes it easier for businesses to share these resources between users and teams. In the process, IT teams also get better insights into how their compute resources are being used.
“Every enterprise is either already rearchitecting themselves to be built around learning systems powered by AI, or they should be,” said Lonne Jaffe, managing director at Insight Partners and now a board member at Run:AI.” Just as virtualization and then container technology transformed CPU-based workloads over the last decades, Run:AI is bringing orchestration and virtualization technology to AI chipsets such as GPUs, dramatically accelerating both AI training and inference. The system also future-proofs deep learning workloads, allowing them to inherit the power of the latest hardware with less rework. In Run:AI, we’ve found disruptive technology, an experienced team and a SaaS-based market strategy that will help enterprises deploy the AI they’ll need to stay competitive.”
Run:AI says that it is currently working with customers in a wide variety of industries, including automotive, finance, defense, manufacturing and healthcare. These customers, the company says, are seeing their GPU utilization increase from 25 to 75% on average.
“The new funds enable Run:AI to grow the company in two important areas: first, to triple the size of our development team this year,” the company’s CEO Omri Geller told me. “We have an aggressive roadmap for building out the truly innovative parts of our product vision — particularly around virtualizing AI workloads — a bigger team will help speed up development in this area. Second, a round this size enables us to quickly expand sales and marketing to additional industries and markets.”
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Extra Crunch roundup: Digital health VC survey, edtech M&A, deep tech marketing, more
I had my first telehealth consultation last year, and there’s a high probability that you did, too. Since the pandemic began, consumer adoption of remote healthcare has increased 300%.
Speaking as an unvaccinated urban dweller: I’d rather speak to a nurse or doctor via my laptop than try to remain physically distanced on a bus or hailed ride traveling to/from their office.
Even after things return to (rolls eyes) normal, if I thought there was a reliable way to receive high-quality healthcare in my living room, I’d choose it.
Clearly, I’m not alone: a May 2020 McKinsey study pegged yearly domestic telehealth revenue at $3 billion before the coronavirus, but estimated that “up to $250 billion of current U.S. healthcare spend could potentially be virtualized” after the pandemic abates.
That’s a staggering number, but in a category that includes startups focused on sexual health, women’s health, pediatrics, mental health, data management and testing, it’s clear to see why digital-health funding topped more than $10 billion in the first three quarters of 2020.
Drawing from The TechCrunch List, reporter Sarah Buhr interviewed eight active health tech VCs to learn more about the companies and industry verticals that have captured their interest in 2021:
- Bryan Roberts and Bob Kocher, partners, Venrock
- Nan Li, managing director, Obvious Ventures
- Elizabeth Yin, general partner, Hustle Fund
- Christina Farr, principal investor and health tech lead, OMERS Ventures
- Ursheet Parikh, partner, Mayfield Ventures
- Nnamdi Okike, co-founder and managing partner, 645 Ventures
- Emily Melton, founder and managing partner, Threshold Ventures
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Since COVID-19 has renewed Washington’s focus on healthcare, many investors said they expect a friendly regulatory environment for telehealth in 2021. Additionally, healthcare providers are looking for ways to reduce costs and lower barriers for patients seeking behavioral support.
“Remote really does work,” said Elizabeth Yin, general partner at Hustle Fund.
We’ll cover digital health in more depth this year through additional surveys, vertical reporting, founder interviews and much more.
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week; I hope you have a relaxing weekend.
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
8 VCs agree: Behavioral support and remote visits make digital health a strong bet for 2021
Image Credits: Luis Alvarez (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Lessons from Top Hat’s acquisition spree
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
In the last year, edtech startup Top Hat acquired three publishing companies: Fountainhead Press, Bludoor and Nelson HigherEd.
Natasha Mascarenhas interviewed CEO and founder Mike Silagadze to learn more about his content acquisition strategy, but her story also discussed “some rumblings of consolidation and exits in edtech land.”
How VCs invested in Asia and Europe in 2020
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Last year, U.S.-based VCs invested an average of $428 million each day in domestic startups, with much of the benefits flowing to fintech companies.
This morning, Alex Wilhelm examined Q4 VC totals for Europe, which had its lowest deal count since Q1 2019, despite a record $14.3 billion in investments.
Asia’s VC industry, which saw $25.2 billion invested across 1,398 deals is seeing “a muted recovery,” says Alex.
“Falling seed volume, lots of big rounds. That’s 2020 VC around the world in a nutshell.”
Decrypted: With more SolarWinds fallout, Biden picks his cybersecurity team
Image Credits: Treedeo (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
In this week’s Decrypted, security reporter Zack Whittaker covered the latest news in the unfolding SolarWinds espionage campaign, now revealed to have impacted the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and Malwarebytes.
In other news, the controversy regarding WhatsApp’s privacy policy change appears to be driving users to encrypted messaging app Signal, Zack reported. Facebook has put changes at WhatsApp on hold “until it could figure out how to explain the change without losing millions of users,” apparently.
Hot IPOs hang onto gains as investors keep betting on tech
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
A big IPO debut is a juicy topic for a few news cycles, but because there’s always another unicorn ready to break free from its corral and leap into the public markets, it doesn’t leave a lot of time to reflect.
Alex studied companies like Lemonade, Airbnb and Affirm to see how well these IPO pop stars have retained their value. Not only have most held steady, “many have actually run up the score in the ensuing weeks,” he found.
Dear Sophie: What are Biden’s immigration changes?
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch
Dear Sophie:
I work in HR for a tech firm. I understand that Biden is rolling out a new immigration plan today.
What is your sense as to how the new administration will change business, corporate and startup founder immigration to the U.S.?
—Free in Fremont
Hello, Extra Crunch community!
Image Credits: atakan (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
I began my career as an avid TechCrunch reader and remained one even when I joined as a writer, when I left to work on other things and now that I’ve returned to focus on better serving our community.
I’ve been chatting with some of the folks in our community and I’d love to talk to you, too. Nothing fancy, just 5-10 minutes of your time to hear more about what you want to see from us and get some feedback on what we’ve been doing so far.
If you would be so kind as to take a minute or two to fill out this form, I’ll drop you a note and hopefully we can have a chat about the future of the Extra Crunch community before we formally roll out some of the ideas we’re cooking up.
Drew Olanoff
@yoda
In 2020, VCs invested $428m into US-based startups every day
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Last year was a disaster across the board thanks to a global pandemic, economic uncertainty and widespread social and political upheaval.
But if you were involved in the private markets, however, 2020 had some very clear upside — VCs flowed $156.2 billion into U.S.-based startups, “or around $428 million for each day,” reports Alex Wilhelm.
“The huge sum of money, however, was itself dwarfed by the amount of liquidity that American startups generated, some $290.1 billion.”
Using data sourced from the National Venture Capital Association and PitchBook, Alex used Monday’s column to recap last year’s seed, early-stage and late-stage rounds.
How and when to build marketing teams at deep tech companies
Image Credits: Andy Roberts (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Building a marketing team is one of the most opaque parts of spinning up a startup, but for a deep tech company, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
How can technical founders working on bleeding-edge technology find the right people to tell their story?
If you work at a post-revenue, early-stage deep tech startup (or know someone who does), this post explains when to hire a team, whether they’ll need prior industry experience, and how to source and evaluate talent.
Bustle CEO Bryan Goldberg explains his plans for taking the company public
Bustle Digital Group CEO Bryan Goldberg. Image Credits: Bustle Digital Group
Senior Writer Anthony Ha interviewed Bustle Digital Group CEO Bryan Goldberg to get his thoughts on the state of digital media.
Their conversation covered a lot of ground, but the biggest news it contained focuses on Goldberg’s short-term plans.
“Where do I want to see the company in three years? I want to see three things: I want to be public, I want to see us driving a lot of profits and I want it to be a lot bigger, because we’ve consolidated a lot of other publications,” he said.
It may not be as glamorous as D2C, but beauty tech is big money
Image Credits: Laia Divols Escude/EyeEm (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is not a huge fan of personal-care D2C brands merging with traditional consumer product companies.
This month, razor startup Billie and Proctor & Gamble announced they were calling off their planned merger after the FTC filed suit.
For similar reasons, Edgewell Personal Care dropped its plans last year to buy Harry’s for $1.37 billion.
In a harsher regulatory environment, “the path to profitability has become a more important part of the startup story versus growth at all costs,” it seems.
Twilio CEO says wisdom lies with your developers
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – SEPTEMBER 12: Founder and CEO of Twilio Jeff Lawson speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2016 at Pier 48 on September 12, 2016 in San Francisco, California. Image Credits: Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch
Companies that build their own tools “tend to win the hearts, minds and wallets of their customers,” according to Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson.
In an interview with enterprise reporter Ron Miller for his new book, “Ask Your Developer,” Lawson says founders should use developer teams as a sounding board when making build-versus-buy decisions.
“Lawson’s basic philosophy in the book is that if you can build it, you should,” says Ron.
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StackPulse announces $28M investment to help developers manage outages
When a system outage happens, chaos can ensue as the team tries to figure out what’s happening and how to fix it. StackPulse, a new startup that wants to help developers manage these crisis situations more efficiently, emerged from stealth today with a $28 million investment.
The round actually breaks down to a previously unannounced $8 million seed investment and a new $20 million Series A. GGV led the A round, while Bessemer Venture Partners led the seed and also participated in the A. Glenn Solomon at GGV and Amit Karp at Bessemer will join the StackPulse board.
Nobody is immune to these outages. We’ve seen incidents from companies as varied as Amazon and Slack in recent months. The biggest companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon employ site reliability engineers and build customized platforms to help remediate these kinds of situations. StackPulse hopes to put this kind of capability within reach of companies, whose only defense is the on-call developers.
Company co-founder and CEO Ofer Smadari says that in the midst of a crisis with signals coming at you from Slack and PagerDuty and other sources, it’s hard to figure out what’s happening. StackPulse is designed to help sort out the details to get you back to equilibrium as quickly as possible.
First off, it helps identify the severity of the incident. Is it a false alarm or something that requires your team’s immediate attention or something that can be put off for a later maintenance cycle? If there is something going wrong that needs to be fixed right now, StackPulse can not only identify the source of the problem, but also help fix it automatically, Smadari explained.
After the incident has been resolved, it can also help with a post-mortem to figure out what exactly went wrong by pulling in all of the alert communications and incident data into the platform.
As the company emerges from stealth, it has some early customers, and 35 employees based in Portland, Oregon and Tel Aviv. Smadari says that he hopes to have 100 employees by the end of this year. As he builds the organization, he is thinking about how to build a diverse team for a diverse customer base. He believes that people with diverse backgrounds build a better product. He adds that diversity is a top level goal for the company, which already has an HR leader in place to help.
Glenn Solomon from GGV, who will be joining the company board, saw a strong founding team solving a big problem for companies and wanted to invest. “When they described the vision for the product they wanted to build, it made sense to us,” he said.
Customers are impatient with down time and Solomon sees developers on the front line trying to solve these issues. “Performance is more important than ever. When there is downtime, it’s damaging to companies,” he said. He believes StackPulse can help.
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UK’s WhiteHat rebrands as Multiverse, raises $44M to build tech apprenticeships in the US
University education is getting more expensive, and at the moment it feels a bit like a Petri dish for infections, but the long-term trends continue to show a dramatic growth in the number of people worldwide getting degrees beyond high school, with one big reason for this being that a college degree generally provides better economic security.
But today, a startup that is exploring a different route for those interested in technology and knowledge worker positions — specifically by way of apprenticeships to bring in and train younger people on the job — is announcing a significant round of growth funding to see if it can provide a credible, scalable alternative to that model.
Multiverse, a U.K. startup that works with organizations to develop these apprenticeships, and then helps source promising, diverse candidates to fill those roles, has raised $44 million, funding that it will be using to spearhead a move into the U.S. market after picking up some 300 clients in the U.K. and thousands of apprentices.
The Series B is being led by General Catalyst (which has been especially active this week with U.K. startups: it also led a large round yesterday for Bloom & Wild), with GV (formerly known as Google Ventures), Audacious Ventures, Latitude and SemperVirens also participating. Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, which first invested in the company in its $16 million Series A in 2020, also participated.
Valuation is not being disclosed, but for what it’s worth, the round was one that generated a lot of interest. In between getting pitched this story and publishing it, the size of the Series B grew by $8 million (it was originally closed at $36 million). The FT notes that the valuation was around $200 million with this round, but the company says that is “speculation on the FT’s part.”
The company was originally co-founded as WhiteHat and is officially rebranding today. Co-founder Euan Blair (who happens to be the son of the former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and his accomplished barrister wife Cherie Booth Blair) said the name change was because the original name was a reference to how the startup sought to “hack the system for good.”
However, he added, “The scale has become bigger and more evolved.” The new name is to convey that — as in gaming, which is probably the arena where you might have heard this term before — “anything is possible.”
There are “multiple universes” one can inhabit as a post-18 young adult, Blair continued. While it’s been assumed that to get into tech, the obvious route was a two-to-four year (and often more) tour through college or university to pick up a higher education degree, the bet that Multiverse is making here is that apprenticeships can easily, and widely, become another. “We want to build an outstanding alternative to university and college,” he said. These typically last 1.5 years.
The idea of an “outstanding alternative” is especially important when thinking of how to target more marginalized groups and how this ties up with how tech companies are looking to be more diverse in the future, without cutting down on the quality of what people are getting out of the experience, or the resulting talent that is getting recruited.
There’s long been a stigma attached to less prestigious institutions, and putting money or effort into another channel to perpetuate that doesn’t really make sense or point to progress.
Blair said that currently over half of the people making their way through Multiverse are people of color, and 57% are women, and the plan is to build tools to make that an even firmer part of its mission.
The startup sees itself as part tech company and part education enterprise.
It works with tech companies and others to open up opportunities for people who have not had any higher education or any training, where fresh high school graduates can come in, learn the ropes of a job while getting paid and then continue on working their way up the ladder with that knowledge base in place.
Apprenticeships on the platform right now range from data analysts through to exhibition designers, and the idea is that by opening up and targeting the U.S. market, the breadth, number and location of roles will grow.
This is not just a social enterprise: There is actual money in this area. Blair said that prices it charges the companies it works with range by qualification, “but are broadly around the $15,000 mark.” (The individuals applying don’t pay anything, and they will also be paid by the companies providing the apprenticeships.)
On the educational front, Multiverse doesn’t just connect people as a recruiter might: it has a team in place to build out what the “curriculum” might be for a particular apprenticeship, and how to deliver and train people with the requisite skills alongside the practice experience of working, and more.
That latter role, of course, has taken on a more poignant dimension in the last year: Concepts like remote training and virtual mentorship have very much come into their own at a time when offices are largely standing empty to help reduce the spread of COVID-19.
Regardless of what happens in the year ahead — fingers crossed that vaccinations and other efforts will help us collectively move past where we are right now — many believe that the infrastructure that has been put into place to keep working virtually will continue to be used, which bodes well for a company like Multiverse that is building a business around that, both with technology it creates itself and will bring in from third parties and partners.
Indeed, the ecosystem of companies building tools to deliver educational content, provide training and work collaboratively has really boomed in the pandemic, giving companies like Multiverse a large library of options for how to bring people into new work situations. (Google, which is now an investor in Multiverse, is very much one of the makers of such education tools.)
Apprenticeships are an interesting area for a startup to tackle. Traditionally, it’s a term that would have been associated mainly with skilled labor positions, rather than “knowledge workers.”
But you can argue that with the bigger swing that the globe has seen away from industrial and towards knowledge economies, there is an argument to be made for building more enterprises and opportunities for an ever wider pool of users, rather than expecting everyone to be shoehorned into the models of the last 50 years. (The latter would essentially imply that college is possibly the only way up.)
You might also be fair to claim that Blair’s connections helped him secure funding and open doors with would-be customers, and that might well be the case, but ultimately the startup will live or die by how well it executes on its premise, whether it finds a good way to connect more people, engage them in opportunities and keep them on board.
This is what really attracted the investors, said Joel Cutler, managing director and co-founder of General Catalyst.
“Euan has a genuine belief that this is important, and when you talk to him, you get a feeling of manifest destiny,” Cutler said in an interview. In response to the question of family connections, he said that this was precisely the kind of issue that the technology industry should be tackling to fight.
“Of all the industries to break the mold of where you went to school, it should be the tech world that will do that, since it is far more of a meritocracy than others. This is the perfect place to start to break that mold,” he said. “Education will be super valuable but apprenticeships will also be important.” He noted that another company that General Catalyst invests in, Guild Education, is addressing similar opportunities, or rather the gaps in current opportunities, for older people.
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GitLab raises $195M in secondary funding on $6B valuation
GitLab has confirmed with TechCrunch that it raised a $195 million secondary round on a $6 billion valuation. CNBC broke the story earlier today.
The company’s impressive valuation comes after its most recent 2019 Series E in which it raised $268 million on a 2.75 billion valuation, an increase of $3.25 billion in under 18 months. Company co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij believes the increase is due to his company’s progress adding functionality to the platform.
“We believe the increase in valuation over the past year reflects the progress of our complete DevOps platform towards realizing a greater share of the growing, multi-billion dollar software development market,” he told TechCrunch.
While the startup has raised over $434 million, this round involved buying employee stock options, a move that allows the company’s workers to cash in some of their equity prior to going public. CNBC reported that the firms buying the stock included Alta Park, HMI Capital, OMERS Growth Equity, TCV and Verition.
The next logical step would appear to be IPO, something the company has never shied away from. In fact, it actually at one point included the proposed date of November 18, 2020 as a target IPO date on the company wiki. While they didn’t quite make that goal, Sijbrandij still sees the company going public at some point. He’s just not being so specific as in the past, suggesting that the company has plenty of runway left from the last funding round and can go public when the timing is right.
“We continue to believe that being a public company is an integral part of realizing our mission. As a public company, GitLab would benefit from enhanced brand awareness, access to capital, shareholder liquidity, autonomy and transparency,” he said.
He added, “That said, we want to maximize the outcome by selecting an opportune time. Our most recent capital raise was in 2019 and contributed to an already healthy balance sheet. A strong balance sheet and business model enables us to select a period that works best for realizing our long-term goals.”
GitLab has not only published IPO goals on its Wiki, but its entire company philosophy, goals and OKRs for everyone to see. Sijbrandij told TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm at a TechCrunch Disrupt panel in September that he believes that transparency helps attract and keep employees. It doesn’t hurt that the company was and remains a fully remote organization, even pre-COVID.
“We started [this level of] transparency to connect with the wider community around GitLab, but it turned out to be super beneficial for attracting great talent as well,” Sijbrandij told Wilhelm in September.
The company, which launched in 2014, offers a DevOps platform to help move applications through the programming lifecycle.
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Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson says wisdom lies with your developers
Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson knows a thing or two about unleashing developers. His company has garnered a market cap of almost $60 billion by creating a set of tools to make it easy for programmers to insert a whole host of communications functionality into an application with a couple of lines of code. Given that background, perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Lawson has written a book called “Ask Your Developer,” which hit the stores this week.
Lawson’s basic philosophy is that if you can build it, you should.
Lawson’s basic philosophy in the book is that if you can build it, you should. In every company, there is build versus buy calculus that goes into every software decision. Lawson believes deeply that there is incredible power in building yourself instead of purchasing something off the shelf. By using components like the ones from his company, and many others delivering specialized types functionality via API, you can build what your customers need instead of just buying what the vendors are giving you.
While Lawson recognizes this isn’t always possible, he says that by asking your developers, you can begin to learn when it makes sense to build and when it doesn’t. These discussions should stem from customer problems and companies should seek digital solutions with the input of the developer group.
Building great customer experiences
Lawson posits that you can build a better customer experience because you understand your customers so much more acutely than a generic vendor ever could. “Basically, what you see happening across nearly every industry is that the companies that are able to listen to their customers and hear what the customers need and then build really great digital products and experiences — well, they tend to win the hearts, minds and wallets of their customers,” Lawson told me in an interview about the book this week.
Image Credits: Twilio (image has been cropped)
He says that this has caused a shift in how companies perceive IT departments. They have gone from cost centers that provision laptops and buy HR software to something more valuable, helping produce digital products that have a direct impact on the business’s bottom line.
He uses banking as an example in the book. It used to be you judged a bank by a set of criteria like how nice the lobby was, if the tellers were friendly and if they gave your kid a free lollipop. Today, that’s all changed and it’s all about the quality of the mobile app.
“Nowadays your bank is a mobile app and you like your bank if the software is fast, if it is bug free and if they regularly update it with new features and functionality that makes your life better [ … ]. And that same transformation has been happening in nearly every industry and so when you think about it, you can’t buy differentiation if every bank just bought the same mobile app from some vendor and just off the shelf deployed it,” he said.
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Harness snags $85M Series C on $1.7B valuation as revenue grows 3x
Harness, the startup that wants to create a suite of engineering tools to give every company the kind of technological reach that the biggest companies have, announced an $85 million Series C today on a $1.7 billion valuation.
Today’s round comes after 2019’s $60 million Series B, which had a $500 million valuation, showing a company rapidly increasing in value. For a company that launched just three years ago, this is a fairly remarkable trajectory.
Alkeon Capital led the round with help from new investors Battery Ventures, Citi Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Sorenson Capital and Thomvest Ventures. The startup also revealed a previously unannounced $30 million B-1 round raised after the $60 million round, bringing the total raised to date to $195 million.
Company founder and CEO Jyoti Bansal previously founded AppDynamics, which he sold to Cisco in 2017 for $3.7 billion. With his track record, investors came looking for him this round. It didn’t hurt that revenue grew almost 3x last year.
“The business is doing very well, so the investor community has been proactively reaching out and trying to invest in us. We were not actually planning to raise a round until later this year. We had enough capital to get through that, but there were a lot of people wanting to invest,” Bansal told me.
In fact, he said there is so much investor interest that he could have raised twice as much, but didn’t feel a need to take on that much capital at this time. “Overall, the investor community sees the value in developer tools and the DevOps market. There are so many big public companies now in that space that have gone out in the last three to five years and that has definitely created even more validation of this space,” he said.
Bansal says that he started the company with the goal of making every company as good as Google or Facebook when it comes to engineering efficiency. Since most companies lack the engineering resources of these large companies, that’s a tall task, but one he thinks he can solve through software.
The company started by building a continuous delivery module. A cloud cost-efficiency module followed. Last year the company bought open-source continuous integration company Drone.io and they are working on building that into the platform now, with it currently in beta. There are additional modules on the product roadmap coming this year, according to Bansal.
As the company continued to grow revenue and build out the platform in 2020, it also added a slew of new employees, growing from 200 to 300 during the pandemic. Bansal says that he has plans to add another 200 by the end of this year. Harness has a reputation of being a good place to work, recently landing on Glassdoor’s best companies list.
As an experienced entrepreneur, Bansal takes building a diverse company with a welcoming culture very seriously. “Yes, you have to provide equal opportunity and make sure that you are open to hiring people from diverse backgrounds, but you have to be more proactive about it in the sense that you have to make sure that your company environment and company culture feels very welcoming to everyone,” he said.
It’s been a difficult time building a company during the pandemic, adding so many new employees, and finding a way to make everyone feel welcome and included. Bansal says he has actually seen productivity increase during the pandemic, but now has to guard against employee burnout.
He says that people didn’t know how to draw boundaries when working at home. One thing he did was introduce a program to give everyone one Friday a month off to recharge. The company also recently announced it would be a “work from anywhere” company post-COVID, but Bansal still plans on having regional offices where people can meet when needed.
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Openbase scores $3.6M seed to help developers find open-source components
Openbase founder Lior Grossman started his company the way that many founders do — to solve a problem he was having. In this case, it was finding the right open-source components to build his software. He decided to build something to solve the problem, and Openbase was born.
Today, the company announced a $3.65 million seed round led by Zeev Ventures with participation from Y Combinator and 20 individual tech industry investors. Openbase was a member of the YC 2020 cohort.
Grossman says that being part of YC helped him meet investors, especially on Demo Day when hundreds of investors listened in. “I would say that being part of YC definitely gave us a higher profile, and exposed us to some investors that I didn’t know before. It definitely opened doors for us,” he said.
As developers build modern software, they often use open-source components to help build the application, and Openbase helps them find the best one for their purposes. “Openbase basically helps developers choose from among millions of open-source packages,” Grossman told me.
The database includes 1.5 million JavaScript packages today, with support for additional languages including Python and Go in beta. The way it works is that users search for a package based on their requirements and get a set of results. From there, they can compare components and judge them based on user reviews and other detailed insights.
Image Credits: Openbase
Grossman found that his idea began resonating with developers shortly after he launched in 2019. In fact, he reports that he went from zero to half a million users in the first year without any marketing beyond word of mouth. That’s when he decided to apply to Y Combinator and got into the Summer 2020 class.
The database is free for developers, and that has helped build the user base so quickly. Eventually he hopes to monetize by allowing certain companies to promote their packages on the system. He says that these will be clearly marked and that the plan is to have only one promoted package per category. What’s more, they will retain all their user reviews and other associated data, regardless of whether it’s being promoted or not.
Grossman started the company on his own, but has added five employees, with plans to hire more people this year to keep growing the startup. As an immigrant founder, he is sensitive to diversity and sees building a diverse company as a key goal. “I built this company as an immigrant myself […] and I want to build an inclusive culture with people from different backgrounds because I think that will produce the best environment to foster innovation,” he explained.
So far the company has been fully remote, but the plan is to open an office post-pandemic. He says he sees a highly flexible approach to work, though, with people spending some days in the office and some at home. “I think for our culture this hybrid approach will work. Whenever we expand further I obviously imagine having more offices and not only our office in San Francisco.”
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