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The Slack origin story
Let’s rewind a decade. It’s 2009. Vancouver, Canada.
Stewart Butterfield, known already for his part in building Flickr, a photo-sharing service acquired by Yahoo in 2005, decided to try his hand — again — at building a game. Flickr had been a failed attempt at a game called Game Neverending followed by a big pivot. This time, Butterfield would make it work.
To make his dreams a reality, he joined forces with Flickr’s original chief software architect Cal Henderson, as well as former Flickr employees Eric Costello and Serguei Mourachov, who like himself, had served some time at Yahoo after the acquisition. Together, they would build Tiny Speck, the company behind an artful, non-combat massively multiplayer online game.
Years later, Butterfield would pull off a pivot more massive than his last. Slack, born from the ashes of his fantastical game, would lead a shift toward online productivity tools that fundamentally change the way people work.
Glitch is born
In mid-2009, former TechCrunch reporter-turned-venture-capitalist M.G. Siegler wrote one of the first stories on Butterfield’s mysterious startup plans.
“So what is Tiny Speck all about?” Siegler wrote. “That is still not entirely clear. The word on the street has been that it’s some kind of new social gaming endeavor, but all they’ll say on the site is ‘we are working on something huge and fun and we need help.’”
Maybe I make a terrible boss, but at least I know it. Work with me: http://tinyspeck.com/jobs/cptl/
— Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) July 10, 2009
Siegler would go on to invest in Slack as a general partner at GV, the venture capital arm of Alphabet .
“Clearly this is a creative project,” Siegler added. “It almost sounds like they’re making an animated movie. As awesome as that would be, with people like Henderson on board, you can bet there’s impressive engineering going on to turn this all into a game of some sort (if that is in fact what this is all about).”
After months of speculation, Tiny Speck unveiled its project: Glitch, an online game set inside the brains of 11 giants. It would be free with in-game purchases available and eventually, a paid subscription for power users.
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Bringing tech efficiencies to the agribusiness market, Silo harvests $3 million
Roughly $165 billion worth of wholesale produce is bought and sold every year in the U.S. And while that number is expected to go up to $1 trillion by 2025, the business of agribusiness remains unaffected by technology advancements that have reshaped almost every other industry.
Now Silo, a company that recently raised $3 million from investors led by Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian’s Initialized Capital and including Semil Shah from Haystack Ventures, angel investors Kevin Mahaffey and Matt Brezina and The Penny Newman Grain Company, an international grain and feed marketplace, is looking to change that.
Silo’s chief executive, Ashton Braun, spent years working in commodities marketplaces as a coffee trader in Singapore and moved to California after business school. As part of the founding team at Kite with Adam Smith, Braun worked on getting off the ground Kite’s software to automate computer programming, but he’d never let go of creating a tool that could help farmers and buyers better communicate and respond to demand signals, Braun says.
“I was a super young, green, bright-eyed potential entrepreneur,” says Braun. Eventually, Braun took the opportunity to develop the software that had been on his mind for four-and-a-half years.*
He’d seen the technology work in another industry closer to home. Growing up in Boston, Braun had seen how technology was used to update the fishing industry, giving ships a knowledge of potential buyers of their catch while they were still out in ocean waters.
“When you’re moving a product that’s worth tens of thousands of dollars and has a shelf life of a few days there’s literally no room for error and there’s a lot you need to do,” says Braun. It’s a principle that applies not only to seafood but to the hundreds of millions of dollars of produce and meat that comes from farms in places like California. “What we want to do is we want communication and data to live in the right places at the right time.”
Braun says there’s limited data coming in to farmers to let them know what demand for certain produce looks like, so they’re making guesses that have real financial outcomes with very little data.
Silo’s software vets and supports buyers and suppliers to give farmers a window into demand and potential buyers a view into available supply and quality.
“What Silo is building has the potential to make marketing and distribution of agriculture incredibly more efficient, which is a win both for the suppliers and buyers. We’re excited to support and assist this team as they work to move agriculture forward,” said Eric Woersching, general partner at Initialized Capital, in a statement.
Silo is using the new financing to make a hiring push and develop new products and services to support liquidity in its perishable goods marketplace.
While an earlier generation of agribusiness software focused on increasing productivity on farms, a new crop of companies is targeting the business of farming itself. Companies like AgriChain and GrainChain also offer supply chain management software for farming, and WorldCover is creating insurance products for small farmowners in emerging markets.
The penetration of technology through near ubiquitous mobile devices, coupled with sensing technologies and machine learning-enhanced predictive software, is transforming one of the world’s oldest industries.
“I’ve come across quite a few marketplace platforms attempting to serve different segments of the agriculture supply chain, and none of which have come close to impressing me to the degree Silo has in their tech-forward approach to reducing the friction that comes with managing all aspects of the supply chain on their platform. Silo’s deployment of machine learning streamlines the process, requiring little to no change in their users’ workflow, and removes many barriers of their platform reaching critical mass,” said Matthew Nicoletti, commodity trader at The Penny Newman Grain Company.
*An earlier version of this story referenced Kite’s sale to Microsoft . The company remains independent.
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Printify raises $3M to expand its marketplace for custom printing
In Riga, Latvia, an 80-person startup called Printify is reimagining the on-demand printing business.
Gone are the days where small merchants have to sell their customized products on platforms like Zazzle, Society6, CafePress or Teespring . Using Printify, e-commerce business owners can create clothes, accessories and more fixed with their designs, logos, art or photos, then sell them directly on their very own online stores.
The “first wave” of on-demand printing companies, Printify founder and chief executive officer James Berdigans explained to TechCrunch, typically require that merchants sell their items on the provider’s platforms.
“The problem is that these merchants don’t have the capability to build their own brand,” Berdigans said. “At the end of the day, you end up building the Teespring brand, not your own brand.”
Printify, a graduate of the 500 Startups accelerator, has attracted a $3 million investment from Bling Capital, a venture capital fund launched five months ago by Ben Ling, a former general partner at Khosla Ventures.
“Printify is perfectly positioned to enable the new trend of micro and boutique brands,” Ling said in a statement. “Consumers and SMBs alike can benefit from Printify’s high-quality, low-cost and fast printing platform — and create their own micro-brands.”
Founded in 2015 by Berdigans, Artis Kehris and Gatis Dukurs, Printify had previously raised a $1 million round following a big pivot. Initially, the business “pretended to be the manufacturer,” opting to be less transparent as a means to entice customers.
“That was a terrible idea,” Berdigans said. “Even though you aren’t lying, you end up not being a very honest company and that’s not the business model we wanted.”
Now, Printify operates as a B2B marketplace that connects manufacturers with e-commerce stores. Plus, the startup handles the mundane tasks of fulfilling orders, including billing, manufacturing requests and shipping so store owners can focus on brand building. The switch allowed the startup to begin growing 30% month-over-month, as well as add hundreds of unique products to its catalog.
The founders say Printify most often caters to political campaign employees, designers & artists, and influencers & “hustlers,” or people who are self-taught experts on managing digital sales. With a fixed pricing scheme, merchants know exactly what they are paying Printify, but have the flexibility of pricing their own product. Other print-on-demand marketplaces, like the aforementioned “first wave” businesses, don’t give merchants the ability to determine their own margins.
“If you use Zazzle, for example, you only get a small portion of revenue share but on Printify, you pay us a small fee,” Berdigans said. “If you were selling t-shirts for $25 and the average production cost is $10, our sellers will see a 50 to 60% margin.”
Dozens of angel investors, including YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, ClassPass co-founder Fritz Lanman, DoorDash co-founder Evan Moore, Google AdSense pioneer Gokul Rajaram and Facebook’s vice president of product Kevin Weil, also participated in the company’s latest round.
“What Airbnb did for the hospitality industry, that’s basically what we can do for the print-on-demand industry,” said Kehris, Printify’s chief operating officer.
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Medivis has launched its augmented reality platform for surgical planning
After two years of development, Medivis, a New York-based company developing augmented reality data integration and visualization tools for surgeons, is bringing its first product to market.
The company was founded by Osamah Choudhry and Christopher Morley who met as senior residents at NYU Medical Center.
Initially a side-project, the two residents roped in some engineers to help develop their first prototypes and after a stint in NYU’s Summer Launchpad program the two decided to launch the company.
Now, with $2.3 million in financing led by Initialized Capital and partnerships with Dell and Microsoft to supply hardware, the company is launching its first product, called SurgicalAR.
In fact, it was the launch of the HoloLens that really gave Medivis its boost, according to Morley. That technology pointed a way toward what Morley said was one of the dreams for technology in the medical industry.
“The Holy Grail is to be able to holographically render a patient,” he said.
For now, Medivis is able to access patient data and represent it visually in a three-dimensional model for doctors to refer to as they plan surgeries. That model is mapped back to the patient to give surgeons a plan for how best to approach an operation.
“The interface between medical imaging and surgical utility from it is really where we see a lot of innovation being possible,” says Morley.
So far, Medivis has worked with the University of Pennsylvania and New York University to bring their prototypes into a surgical setting.
The company is integrating some machine learning capabilities to be able to identify the most relevant information from patients’ medical records and diagnostics as they begin to plan the surgical process.
“What we’ve been working on over this time is developing this really disruptive 3D pipeline,” says Morley. “What we have seen is that there is a distinct lack of 3D pipelines to allow people to directly interface… very quickly try to automate the entire rendering process.”
For now, Medivis is selling a touchscreen monitor, display and a headset. The device plugs into a hospital network and extracts medical imaging to display from their servers in about 30 seconds, according to Choudhry.
“That’s where we see this immediately being useful in that pre-surgical planning stage,” Choudhry says. “The use in surgical planning and being able to extend this through surgical navigation… Streamline the process that requires a large amount of pieces and components and setups so you only need an AR headset to localize pathology and make decisions off of that.”
Already the company has performed 15 surgeries in consultation with the company’s technology.
“When we first met Osamah and Chris, we immediately understood the magnitude of the problem they were out to solve. Medical imaging as it relates to surgical procedures has largely been neglected, leaving patients open to all sorts of complications and general safety issues,” said Eric Woersching, general partner, Initialized Capital, in a statement. “We took one look at the Medivis platform and knew they were poised to transform the operating room. Not only was their hands-free approach to visualization meeting a real need for greater surgical accuracy, but the team has the passion and expertise in the medical field to bring it all to fruition. We couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome Medivis to the Initialized family.”
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FabFitFun raises $80 million for its growing lifestyle brand
Nine years after launching its online magazine, and three years after diversifying into the subscription box business, FabFitFun has raised $80 million in a growth round of funding, led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from its previous investors Upfront Ventures and NEA.
The Los Angeles-based company has steadily expanded its retail and lifestyle empire through subscription boxes, video… and even an augmented reality app.
Last year the company crossed $200 million in revenue and managed to net more than 1 million subscribers for the service.
In a statement the company said the new financing would be used to expand FabFitFun membership offerings and consolidate its position as a marketing partner and platform for brands.
As a result of the investment, Kleiner Perkins general partners Mood Rowghani and Mary Meeker will join as board member and observer, respectively.
It’s been a long ride for co-founders Daniel and Michael Broukhim and Katie Rosen Kitchens. From a newsletter and blog to the subscription box to the launch of live programming last year.
For brands, the pitch is a new way to find customers and engage with them. The seasonally curated boxes and special exclusive co-branded box opportunities with Los Angeles’ pool of influencers results in hundreds of millions of targeted impressions, according to the company.
“FabFitFun has emerged into an exciting and entirely new distribution channel that brings retail to the platforms where consumers are most engaged,” said Mood Rowghani, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins, in a statement. “The company’s personalized connection with its community allows brands to better understand and interact with consumers – establishing a long-term relationship rather than simply a transaction.”
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TiE Global Chairman Venktesh Shukla Joins Fenox Venture Capital as General Partner
Fenox Venture Capital is bringing on TiE Global Chairman and the founder of TiE Angels, Venktesh Shukla, as General Partner.
For the unfamiliar, TiE is a nonprofit mentoring network for entrepreneurs and promoter of entrepreneurship worldwide. Its annual conference, TiEcon, is in its 23rd year.
According to Fenox VC partners, the firm will rely on Shukla to source deals in, as well as help… Read More
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How To Make Calculated Decisions When Forming Your GP Entity
You just turned 30 and are either a successful entrepreneur who made a fortune developing a very popular gaming app, or you’re one of the early employees at an emerging technology company that just achieved “unicorn” status. In either scenario, you’ve made your fortune. And having reached a very important milestone in your life, you’re eager to see how the other… Read More
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