General Catalyst
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Contentful raises $80M Series E round for its headless CMS
Headless CMS company Contentful today announced that it has raised an $80 million Series E funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Salesforce Ventures and a number of other new and existing investors. With this, the company has now raised a total of $158.3 million and a Contentful spokesperson tells me that it is approaching a $1 billion valuation.
In addition, the company also today announced that it has hired Bridget Perry as its CMO. She previously led Adobe’s marketing efforts across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Currently, 28% of the Fortune 500 use Contentful to manage their content across platforms. The company says it has a total of 2,200 paying customers right now and these include the likes of Spotify, ITV, the British Museum, Telus and Urban Outfitters.
Steve Sloan, the company’s CEO who joined the company late last year, attributes its success to the fact that virtually every business today is in the process of figuring out how to become digital and serve its customers across platforms — and that’s a process that has only been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Ten or 15 years ago, when these content platforms or content management systems were created, they were a) really built for a web-only world and b) where the website was a complement to some other business,” he said. “Today, the mobile app, the mobile web experience is the front door to every business on the planet. And that’s never been any more clear than in this recent COVID crisis, where we’ve seen many, many businesses — even those that are very traditional businesses — realize that the dominant and, in some cases, only way their customers can interact with them is through that digital experience.”
But as they are looking at their options, many decide that they don’t just want to take an off-the-shelf product, Sloan argues, because it doesn’t allow them to build a differentiated offering.
Image Credits: Contentful
Perry also noted that this is something she saw at Adobe, too, as it built its digital experience business. “Leading marketing at Adobe, we used it ourselves,” she said. “And so the challenge that we heard from customers in the market was how complex it was in some cases to implement, to organize around it, to build those experiences fast and see value and impact on the business. And part of that challenge, I think, stemmed from the kind of monolithic, all-in-one type of suite that Adobe offered. Even as a marketer at Adobe, we had challenges with that kind of time to market and agility. And so what’s really interesting to me — and one of the reasons why I joined Contentful — is that Contentful approaches this in a very different way.”
Sloan noted that putting the round together was a bit of an adventure. Contentful’s existing investors approached the company around the holidays because they wanted to make a bigger investment in the company to fuel its long-term growth. But at the time, the company wasn’t ready to raise new capital yet.
“And then in January and February, we had inbound interest from people who weren’t yet investors, who came to us and said, ‘hey, we really want to invest in this company, we’ve seen the trend and we really believe in it.’ So we went back to our insiders and said, ‘hey, we’re going to think about actually moving in our timeline for raising capital,” Sloan told me. “And then, right about that time is when COVID really broke out, particularly in Western Europe in North America.”
That didn’t faze Contentful’s investors, though.
“One of the things that really stood out about our investors — and particularly our lead investor for this round Sapphire — is that when everybody else was really, really frightened, they were really clear about the opportunity, about their belief in the team and about their understanding of the progress we had already made. And they were really unflinching in terms of their support,” Sloan said.
Unsurprisingly, the company plans to use the new funding to expand its go-to-market efforts (that’s why it hired Perry, after all), but Sloan also noted that Contentful plans to invest quite a bit into R&D, as well, as it looks to help its customers solve more adjacent problems.
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This startup just raised $12 million from top VCs to offer financial planning as an employee perk
Companies increasingly recognize that one of the greatest stresses for their employees is financial wellness. Even at innovative tech startups, people typically bump up against the limits of how much they know about wealth management pretty fast.
But providing financial education to a workforce, which has become increasingly common, is largely useless as most employees will tell you. The information can be hard to navigate, and it’s often not personalized in a way that addresses an employee’s circumstance and goals, which change over time depending on whether they are a recent graduate, getting married or even eyeing retirement.
It’s why so many employed people look to outside apps that promise to help them to not only understand their financial picture but actually manage it. It’s also a missed opportunity, according to a growing number of founders who are working to convince employers to move beyond education and instead offering automated financial planning (with a dash of human involvement) as an employee perk.
Their understandable argument: While offering benefits around fertility, family planning, and mental health are wonderful, companies are missing out on the chance to address the very top priority for their employees, which is how to avoid financial trouble.
Origin, a year-old San Francisco-based company led by Matt Watson — whose last company was acquired in December — is among the newest entrants to make the case.
Freshly backed by $12 million in funding led by Felicis Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Founders Fund and early Stripe employee Lachy Groom, among others, Origin wants to become the place where employees can track financial milestones, get professional advice from licensed financial planners, and take action, whether it be paying down student debt, building emergency savings or finding the right home and automotive insurance.
Currently staffed by 32 employees, six are financial planners, and they can handle the unique circumstances of “mid thousands of people,” says Watson, who notes that after an employee initially sets up a plan, much can be automated until a life event changes the picture.
“If you use just the tech, you’re only getting limited information,” he says, adding that access to Origin’s planners is “unlimited.”
The company already has 15 customers with between 250 and 5,000 employees, including the social network NextDoor; the cloud communications and collaboration software platform Fuze; and Therabody, whose Theragun therapy tool is used by pro athletes and trainers to pulverize their aching muscles.
All are paying $6 per employee per month because it doesn’t matter how much employees are making, says Watson. “The thing about financial stress is that it impacts everyone pretty evenly. The greater your income, the more stuff you buy.”
Considering that employees spend an estimated two to four hours each week dealing with their personal finances, an offering like Origin’s seems like a no-brainer for employers looking to both improve employee productivity and employee retention.
Indeed, the only thing holding back such offerings earlier in time were the kind of open banking APIs that exist today.
Now, the biggest challenge for Origin is to capture employers’ attention ahead of the competition. For example, another startup that’s also developing financial planning services as an employee perk is Northstar, founded by Red Swan Ventures investor Will Peng. More established players like Betterment that have long catered to individual investors are also focusing more on building up ties to employers that can use their offerings as an employee resource.
Either way, the trend is a positive one for employees, who are right now living through an economic roller coaster and could more generally use a lot more help with both staying afloat and saving for the future.
“Everyone struggles with finances,” says Watson, who worked in high-yield credit trading at Citi in New York before moving to San Francisco to start his last company. “I’m supposed to understand this stuff, and it’s complicated for me.”
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Why VCs say they’re open for business, even if they’re pausing new deals
This week Alexia Bonatsos of Dream Machine and Niko Bonatsos of General Catalyst swung by Extra Crunch Live to discuss where they are investing today and what the future might look like.
As expected, these seed and early-stage venture capitalists had a lot to say about their current investing cadence and what interests them in the world of edtech, Clubhouse and more. A big thanks to everyone who came out and submitted some great questions.
Going back through the chat today, a few sections jumped out. For this recap, I’ve gathered answers from the transcript regarding today’s fundraising climate, the future of AI and the possible impact of the downturn on VC-backed founder diversity.
And for everyone who couldn’t join us live, I’ve included the full video replay below. (You can get access here, if you need it.)
Today’s fundraising climate
Alexia:
It’s kind of a Rashomon; depending on whose perspective you’re getting the story, is just completely different.
Let’s see, are [VCs] being as active as they were in 2018? I’m gonna say no. I mean, look at your data, your data says no. But does that mean people [have] shut down the shop and are all in Montana? Also no, right?
We know that these kinds of “crisistunities” — and I’m not diminishing the crisis at all, it is very sad and very scary, and it’s something that I’m very privileged to be able to be experiencing from inside my apartment and not from outside within an emergency room or a food bank or any other place that it’s actually at the front lines, right?
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Mobile website builder Universe raises $10M from GV as it ventures into commerce
A startup that has framed itself as an Instagram for websites is now squaring up against Shopify as it nabs new funding from Google’s venture capital arm.
Brooklyn-based Universe has just closed a $10 million Series A from GV. The funding round was well in the works before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold stateside; nevertheless, CEO Joseph Cohen definitely sounded relieved to have everything signed.
“Hopefully, it’ll take some weight off their shoulders that may have been there otherwise,” said GV general partner M.G. Siegler, who led the deal and is taking a seat on their board.
When the team launched out of YC two years ago, the initial aim was to be the go-to short link for young people and creatives to stick in their Instagram bios. The mobile app allowed users to create very basic landing pages, allowing them to type up some text, toss up photos and arrange their creation across a couple of web pages.
As the startup matures and looks to home in on a more robust business model, they’re now looking to build an incredibly low-friction commerce platform. Users can add a shopping “block” to their site, add a photo, description and price and then start accepting orders.
“We’ve gone from a landing page builder to a full-fledged website builder,” Cohen told TechCrunch in an interview.
Universe is going after what Cohen calls “very small businesses.” This could be an artist selling prints, a yoga instructor charging for Zoom classes or one of their latest customers, a farmer selling live bait. “These are people who don’t work at desks,” Cohen says.
Shopify has been one of the biggest tech success stories of the past several years, but Cohen sees weaknesses for Universe to capitalize on. Shopify is “complex and not mobile-first,” he says. Universe not only doesn’t require a developer to implement, it doesn’t seem to require someone that’s particularly tech-savvy.
The price of simplicity for the end user is a hefty cut for Universe. At launch, the company isn’t taking a percentage for the first $1,000 of a customer’s revenue, but will take a 10% slice thereafter, a number that’s notably multiples higher than the rates of competitors.
Cohen acknowledges that if a business succeeds, this can be a significant expense for them, one that might push them to another platform. He say that he wants to figure out a model that can help his startup “grow and scale” with their customers, but he didn’t offer up any details on what that might look like.
The team is still working with free and paid “pro” tiers that offer advanced features like analytics. Commerce features will be available for both tiers.
Universe has raised $17 million to date. Other investors include Javelin Venture Partners, General Catalyst and Greylock Partners.
We chatted with GV’s M.G. Siegler about closing this deal and how his role as an investor has shifted since the current crisis took hold. You can read that interview on Extra Crunch.
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As demand for mental health services soars, SonderMind raises $27 million to expand its services
“Our real focus is on democratizing mental healthcare,” says SonderMind co-founder chief executive, Mark Frank.
His company, founded back in 2017, is having a moment. With the restrictions and economic stresses caused by the government’s efforts to mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic in the U.S., demand for mental health services is soaring. And it’s compounding what was already a mental health crisis in the U.S.
A 2019 article from Bloomberg Businessweek laid out the scope of the problem in stark terms. In 2017, 47,000 people died by suicide in the U.S. and there were 1.4 million suicide attempts — a suicide rate that’s the country’s highest since World War II, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Drug overdoses, another measure of the nation’s anguish, killed 70,000 people in 2017. Another 7% of U.S. adults reported suffering at least one major depressive episode in 2018.
Taken together, the data points to a tremendous health problem. One that the current healthcare system is only now grappling with.
SonderMind’s chief executive sees his company as part of the solution.
Most mental health practitioners don’t operate within a healthcare network or take insurance, which means that the only folks with access to care are the ones that can afford the high price of therapy. SonderMind changes that equation by offering practitioners a toolkit and back office services so they can bill insurance providers and take care of the operational side of running a healthcare practice. It also acts as a funnel, gauging the needs of potential patients and connecting them to the therapists that are best suited to provide them the care they need. That lets practitioners focus on seeing patients, the company said.
The company currently counts 500 providers on its marketplace, which operates in Colorado, Arizona and Texas, and has raised $27 million in its latest round of financing to extend its services to other parts of the U.S.
The San Francisco-based investment firm General Catalyst led the financing, which also included additional new investors F-Prime Capital and participation from previous investors like the Kickstart Seed Fund, Diōko Ventures (managed by FCA Venture Partners) and Jonathan Bush.
“This financing provides the fuel to support our growth objectives and advance our mission to make behavioral health more accessible, approachable and utilized by building a modern marketplace that holds great appeal to both clinician and patient,” said Frank in a statement.
The investment extends General Catalyst’s funding into healthcare services in recent years and represents a continued emphasis on healthcare services for the firm. “Healthcare is obviously a really important thesis for GC as a whole,” says Holly Maloney, a managing director at General Catalyst. “This is going to be one of the largest value drivers for VC this decade.”
General Catalyst already had a robust portfolio of healthcare-focused companies — including Livongo, OM1 and Oscar Health.
For Maloney, the investment in SonderMind grew out of the firm’s exposure to mental health investment through another portfolio company, Mindstrong Health. “Mindstrong forced us to explore… access to care and finding care,” says Maloney.
The General Catalyst investor sees the investment in SonderMind as also helping to open doors for more people to join the profession.
“It helps people to start their business for sure. It helps more people pursue it as a career path,” she said. And that’s good for a country where more mental health professionals and better access to care are desperately needed.
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Olive, a startup developing an automation tool for healthcare administration, raises $51 million
Time is money, as the old adage goes, and this is doubly true in healthcare systems operating with thin margins now made even thinner thanks to the loss of revenue caused by a freeze on elective procedures.
Stepping in with a technology that automates much of the time-consuming back-end processes hospitals and healthcare providers need to keep up with is Olive, a startup out of Columbus, Ohio.
The company, which counts among its customers more than 500 hospitals representing some of the largest healthcare providers in the U.S., has raised a new round of $51 million as it sees significant growth for its business.
The round, raised from investors including Drive Capital, Oak HC/FT and Ascension Ventures, was led by General Catalyst, which recently closed on $2.3 billion in new capital to invest in early-stage companies.
As a result of the investment, Ron Paulus, the former president and chief executive of Mission Health, will join the board of directors, the company said in a statement.
Olive’s software toolkit automates administrative tasks like revenue cycle, supply chain management, clinical administration and human resources, the company said in a statement. And demand for the company’s technology is surging.
According to data provided by the company, roughly half of hospital administrators intend to invest in robotic process automation by 2021.
“There’s a growing, multi-billion dollar problem: healthcare doesn’t have the internet. Instead, healthcare uses humans as routers, forcing workers to toggle between disparate systems — they copy, they paste, they manipulate data – they become robots. They click and type and extract and import, all day long — and it’s one of the leading reasons that one out of every three dollars spent in the industry today is spent on administrative costs,” said Olive chief executive Sean Lane in a September statement.
Olive doesn’t just automate processes, but makes those processes better for hospitals by identifying problem areas that could lead to lost revenues for hospitals. The software has access to pre-existing health claim status data, which allows it to identify where mistakes in previous claims were made. By using accurate coding, hospitals can add additional revenue.
“As a recent health system CEO, I appreciate the duress our hospitals are under as they focus on delivering the best patient care possible under challenging circumstances all while needing to keep the lights on,” said Dr. Ronald A. Paulus. “Olive’s reliable automation of essential back-office processes saves time, reduces errors and allows staff to focus on higher-order work. I am excited to be working closely with Olive’s management team to maximize the outsized positive impact we can have in healthcare on both the administrative and clinical fronts.”
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GC’s Niko Bonatsos on Y Combinator, edtech and investing in the shadow of coronavirus
This week, Extra Crunch hosted a call with General Catalyst managing director Niko Bonatsos to discuss a number of startup topics, including what the novel coronavirus is doing to investing in the Valley, as well as his thoughts on robotics, homeschooling, edtech, SMBs, international investing and what he’s looking to see today in startups. Joining me on the live call was my fellow Equity host Alex Wilhelm and a couple of dozen EC members.
If you missed this conference call for EC members, don’t fret: We’ll have more of these to come in this era of work-from-home. In the meantime, here is a lightly edited transcript, along with a recording of the call if you’d like to listen in.
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As 5 more startups join the $100M club, are we just making a pre-IPO list?
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Today we’re adding five names to the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) club and listing all preceding members in a single post. This series, which was a bit of an accident, if I’m being honest, has included more than a dozen companies that have reached $100 million ARR, along with a handful more that are close.
Today we’re adding Seismic, ThoughtSpot, Noom, Riskified and Moveable Ink to the list. As always, we have funding histories, growth metrics and interviews below on the new group. But at this juncture, as we head toward the two-dozen company mark, it’s a good time to ask, what is this list that we’re compiling?
At first, the goal of the jokingly-named “$100 million ARR club” was to highlight companies that were of real scale, an idea designed to gently push back against the “unicorn” moniker. As more and more unicorns were born and the private-capital world became adept at getting startups of all maturity levels over the requisite $1 billion valuation threshold, the term began to feel too diluted to have much signaling value.
While, in contrast, $100 million in ARR felt much more “hard” to the valuation metric’s comparable squishiness. But, since that first post, more and more companies have written in, sharing hard metrics and the series has continued. Perhaps we’re really just compiling an IPO watchlist, a grouping of firms that will probably go (or should go) public in the next 18 months.
Let’s dig into our new additions. Then, we’ll list all our prior entrants with links to our preceding coverage in case you are playing catch up. With that, here’s the entire $100 million ARR club a list of companies that we think could go public inside the next six quarters.
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Google backs productivity startup building algorithmic inbox for Slacks, emails and texts
There have been plenty of stories written about the so-called “Slack-lash” and the growing unrest among workers dealing with DM interruptions that take their attention away from the task at hand. Slack is a poster child for the problem, but VCs have invested heavily in a number of collaboration tools over the past several years that have compartmentalized chat and commenting systems and have left workers reeling.
It seems fairly likely that we’ve reached peak VC interest in collaboration, but VCs are dealing with any slowdown by betting more heavily on tools that help workers make sense of the panoply of slick interfaced messaging tools. The latest bet, ’nuffsaid, is, yes, yet another productivity startup, though one that seems devoted to making the messaging realities of 2020 employment a bit more tolerable.
The Utah startup is emerging from stealth, launching the first element of their productivity platform in early access, and disclosing that they’ve raised $4.3 million in seed funding from General Catalyst, Google’s Gradient Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Work Life Ventures, SV Angel and Wasabi Ventures.
The oddly named company is releasing its first oddly named product, ‘nflow, into early access, bringing multiple collaboration platforms and a calendar into a single inbox. Just as the algorithmic timeline shaped how we digest the firehose of social media content, algorithmic inboxes might be the solution to a Slack-lash. And ’nuffsaid is taking this algorithmic approach for prioritizing Slack messages, as well as emails, texts and Zoom messages, with ‘nflow. The searchable unified inbox brings all of your messages into a single app, letting you know what’s urgent and what can probably wait until you’re finished taking care of the task at hand.
“We think there’s going to be an entire category of products that are all about adding AI into existing workflows. With ‘nflow, we think we’re taking our first baby step to our vision of that future,” CEO and co-founder Chris Hicken tells TechCrunch. Hicken was previously COO of UserTesting.
One of the more exciting elements of ‘nflow is the way it brings the calendar inside the communications hub. Google Calendar is still among the more estranged elements of productivity workflows. Using messages and emails as the basis for calendar events has always been a wishlist item, but the integration is rarely tight enough. Although ’nuffsaid’s drag-and-drop interface for creating calendar events while tagging team members and adding additional info showcases seems to be a pretty attractive solution, I’ll wait until I can poke around the app myself before making any full-throated endorsements.
The ’nuffsaid team says ‘nflow will launch commercially at (a rather pricey) $25 per month, but that people who sign up for their early access waitlist will unlock a lifetime rate of $10 per month.
The team of 18 has bigger near-term ambitions than the product they’re launching in early access today. If ‘nflow represents a more mass-market approach to delivering a productivity tool to workers frustrated by a messaging overload, their future launches signify a desire to dig deeper into specific enterprise workflows and bring specific types of teams on board.
Over the summer, the company plans to roll out a separate AI-driven customer success module that integrates with a variety of apps to give workers more actionable insights on what tasks are the most critical to maintaining and building customer relationships. The startup plans to build and roll out dedicated versions of the module for engineering, product and marketing, as well.
“There are so many collaboration tools, what I like about ’nuffsaid is that it’s where the work is actually happening and they’re not asking users to change their procedures,” General Catalyst Managing Director Niko Bonatsos tells TechCrunch. “Users still have the same email address, they’re still contacting their customers the same ways, they don’t have to start doing unnatural things that disrupt their workflows.”
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Securiti.ai scores $50M Series B to modernize data governance
Securiti.ai, a San Jose startup, is working to bring a modern twist to data governance and security. Today the company announced a $50 million Series B led by General Catalyst, with participation from Mayfield.
The company, which only launched in 2019, reports it has already raised $81 million. What is attracting all of this investment in such a short period of time is that the company is going after a problem that is an increasing pain point for companies all over the world because of a growing body of data privacy regulation like GDPR and CCPA.
These laws are forcing companies to understand the data they have, and find ways to be able to pull that data into a single view, and, if needed, respond to customer wishes to remove or redact some of it. It’s a hard problem to solve with customer data spread across multiple applications, and often shared with third parties and partners.
Company CEO and founder Rehan Jalil says the goal of his startup is to provide an operations platform for customer data, an area he has coined PrivacyOps, with the goal of helping companies give customers more control over their data, as laws increasingly require.
“In the end it’s all about giving individuals the rights on the data: the right to privacy, the right to deletion, the right to redaction, the right to stop the processing. That’s the charter and the mission of the company,” he told TechCrunch.
You begin by defining your data sources, then a bot goes out and gathers customer data across all of the data sources you have defined. The company has links to more than 250 common modern and legacy data sources out of the box. Once the bot grabs the data and creates a central record, humans come in to review the results and make any adjustments and final decisions on how to handle a data request.
It has a number of security templates for different kinds of privacy regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA, and the bot finds data that must meet these requirements and lets the governance team see how many records could be in violation or meet a set of criteria you define.
Securiti.ai data view. Screenshot: Securiti.ai (cropped)
There are a number of tools in the package, including ways to look at your privacy readiness, vendor assessments, data maps and data breaches to look at data privacy in broad way.
The company launched in 2019, and in just five months has already grown to 185 employees, a number that is expected to increase in the next year with the new funding.
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