Greylock Partners
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Serverless Stack raises $1M for open-source application framework
Open-source framework startup Serverless Stack announced Friday that it raised $1 million in seed funding from a group of investors that includes Greylock Partners, SV Angel and Y Combinator.
The company was founded in 2017 by Jay V and Frank Wang in San Francisco, and they were part of Y Combinator’s 2021 winter batch.
Serverless Stack’s technology enables engineers to more easily build full-stack serverless apps. CEO V said he and Wang were working in this space for years with the aim of exposing it to a broader group of people.
While tooling around in the space, they determined that the ability to build serverless apps was not getting better, so they joined Y Combinator to hone their idea on how to make the process easier.
Here’s how the technology works: The open-source framework allows developers to test and make changes to their applications by directly connecting their local machines to the cloud. The problem with what V called an “old-school process” is that developers would upload their apps to the cloud, wait for it to run and then make any changes. Instead, Serverless Stack connects directly to the cloud for the ability to debug applications locally, he added.
Since its launch six months ago, Serverless Stack has grown to over 2,000 stars on GitHub and was downloaded more than 60,000 times.
Dalton Caldwell, managing director of YC, met V and Wang at the cohort and said he was “super impressed” because the pair were working in the space for a long time.
“These folks are experts — there are probably just half a dozen people who know as much as they do, as there aren’t that many people working on this technology,” Caldwell told TechCrunch. “The proof is in the pudding, and if they can get people to adopt it, like they did on GitHub so far, and keep that community engagement, that is my strongest signal of staying power.”
V has earmarked the new funding to expand the team, including hiring engineers to support new use cases.
Serverless initially gravitated toward specific use cases — APIs are now allowing its community to chime in and it is using that as a guide, V said. It recently announced more of a full-stack use case for building out APIs with a database and also building out the front end frameworks.
Ultimately, V’s roadmap includes building out more tools with a vision of getting Serverless Stack to the point where a developer can come on with an idea and take it all the way to an IPO using his platform.
“That’s why we want the community to drive the roadmap,” V told TechCrunch. “We are focused on what they are building and when they are in production, how they are managing it. Eventually, we will build out a dashboard to make it easier for them to manage all of their applications.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Gaming infrastructure startup Pragma raises $12M from Greylock, Mark Pincus and others
Pragma is building what it calls a “backend as a service,” providing ready-made infrastructure to developers of online, live service games. And it’s announcing today that it has raised $12 million in Series A funding.
The round was led by David Thacker at Greylock, with participation from Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Oculus founder Nate Mitchell and Cloudera founder Amr Awadallah, along with previous investors Upfront Ventures and Advancit Capital. Amy Chang, who sold her business intelligence startup Accompany to Cisco, is joining Pragma’s board of directors.
Co-founder and CEO Eden Chen told me that where Unity and Unreal have built popular frontend game engines, he and his co-founder Chris Cobb (former engineering lead at Riot Games) are hoping Pragma will fill the void for a “de facto backend game engine.”
And while “many companies tried to do this” over the past decade, Chen suggested that this is the right time to launch the platform, thanks to the continued rise of live service games (like League of Legends) that have to be treated as “living, breathing products,” as well as improved tooling around infrastructure platforms like Amazon Web Services.
Image Credits: Pragma
Pragma is launching a starter kit today designed to allow developers to quickly set up and test game loops. Meanwhile, the broader platform is currently in private beta testing with studios including One More Game (started by started by Pat Wyatt, one of Blizzard’s first employees) and Mitchell’s Mountain Top Studios.
Chen said the platform’s features fall into three broad categories — player accounts/social, game loops (including lobbies and matchmaking) and player/game data. Pragma isn’t building all of this from scratch; in some cases, it’s “acting as the integrator” for other platforms like Discord. Chen also noted that while the team plans to build a fully managed solution in the future, the current version is on-premise: “We’re building an instance of Pragma on the studio’s own infrastructure, [so they can] so they can take our code base and customize it to their own preferences.”
Pragma is initially targeting game studios with about 10 to 50 team members. Eventually, Chen hopes the platform could serve larger studios while also supporting “the democratization of these tools, so that a one- to five-person team can really leverage [them] to launch a networked, online game.”
He added, “The vision for us long term is that we really want to be innovating on the social side, creating social features that improve the game and build stronger connections.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Greylock GP Mike Duboe to discuss how to scale your company at TechCrunch Early Stage in July
While the money flowing into Silicon Valley is reaching historic heights, the competition for getting customer attention and growing businesses is still a major challenge.
At TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing & Fundraising, we’re diving into the topic of growth and scaling and bringing in experts across the startup landscape to share what they’ve learned in the pilot’s seat. We’re thrilled that Greylock General Partner Mike Duboe will be joining us in July to discuss what’s hot and what’s next for growth in consumer and B2B technology.
Before joining Greylock and being promoted to his current role as a GP, Duboe led growth at Stitch Fix as the company built out its online styling empire. Previous to that, Duboe was the first growth hire at Tilt and has had stints on YC’s growth advisory council and as a growth lecturer at Reforge.
Duboe’s interests as an investor have centered on commerce infrastructure, marketplaces, creator tools and more, with investments in no-code visual editor Builder, SMS marketing platform Postscript and online wholesale marketplace Vori. We’ll chat with Mike about where he advises founders to focus their efforts and how to make the most of budgets across channels.
Tickets for TC Early Stage: Marketing & Fundraising are available at the early bird rate which gives you an instant $100 savings if you book before May 1!
Powered by WPeMatico
Reduct.Video raises $4M to simplify video editing
The team at Reduct.Video is hoping to dramatically increase the amount of videos created by businesses.
The startup’s technology is already used by customers including Intuit, Autodesk, Facebook, Dell, Spotify, Indeed, Superhuman and IDEO. And today, Reduct is announcing that it has raised a $4 million round led by Greylock and South Park Commons, with participation from Figma CEO Dylan Field, Hopin Chief Business Officer Armando Mann and former Twitter exec Elad Gil.
Reduct was founded by CEO Prabhas Pokharel and CTO Robert Ochshorn (both pictured above). Pokharel argued that despite the proliferation of streaming video platforms and social media apps on the consumer side, video remains “underutilized” in a business context, because it simply takes so much time to sort through video footage, much less edit it down into something watchable.
As Pokharel demonstrated for me, Reduct uses artificial intelligence, natural language processing and other technologies to simplify the process by automatically transcribing video footage (users can also pay for professional transcription), then tying that transcript to the video.
“The magic starts there: Once the transcription has been made, every single word is connected to the [corresponding] moment in the video,” he said.
Image Credits: Reduct.Video
That means editing a video is as simple as editing text. (I’ve taken advantage of a similar linkage between text and media in Otter, but Otter is focused on audio and I’ve treated it more as a transcription tool.) It also means you can search through hours of footage for every time a topic is mentioned, then organize, tag and share it.
Pokharel said that AI allows Reduct to simplify parts of the sorting and editing process, like understanding how different search terms might be related. But he doesn’t think the process will ever become fully automated — instead, he compared the product to an “Iron Man suit,” which makes a human editor more powerful.
He also suggested that this approach changes businesses’ perspective on video, and not just by making editing faster and easier.
“Users on Reduct emphasize authenticity over polish, where it’s much more the content of the video that matters,” Pokharel said. He added that Reduct has been “learning from our customers” about what they can do with the product — user research teams can now easily organize and share hundreds of hours of user footage, while marketers can turn customer testimonials and webinars into short, shareable videos.
“Video has been so supply constrained, it’s crazy,” he continued. “There are all these use cases for asynchronous video that [companies] haven’t even bothered with.”
For example, he recalled one customer who said that she used to insist that team members attend a meeting even if there was only two minutes of it that they needed to hear. With Reduct, she can “give them that time back” and just share the parts they need.
Powered by WPeMatico
Building your startup’s customer advisory board
A customer advisory board (CAB) can be an invaluable resource for startups, but many founders struggle with putting together the right group of advisors and how to incentivize them. At our TechCrunch Early Stage event, Saam Motamedi, a general partner at Greylock Partners, talked about how he thinks about putting together the right CAB.
“We encourage all of our early-stage companies to put this in place,” Motamedi said. The goal here is to speed up the process to get to product/market fit since your CAB will provide you with regular feedback.
“The idea here is [that] you have this feedback loop from customers back to your product where you build, you go get feedback, you iterate — and the tighter this feedback loop is, the faster you’ll get to product-market fit. And you want to do things structurally to make this feedback loop tighter, starting with a CAB.”
Motamedi said a CAB should consist of about three to six customers. These should be “luminaries or forward thinkers” in the market you are serving. “You add them to the CAB — you might give them small advisory grants — and they become stakeholders and give you feedback as you work through the early stages of product development.”
Image Credits: Greylock Partners
As for the people who you put on the CAB, Motamedi suggests first setting the right expectations for the board.
“There are three components. Number one, the most valuable thing you can get from these customer advisors is their time. So the first piece is you want them to commit to a monthly cadence, that could be 60 minutes, it could be 90 minutes, where you’re going to say, ‘Hey, I’m going to come to the meeting, I’m going to bring two of my teammates, we’re going to show you the latest product demo, and you’re going to drill us with feedback. We’re going to do that once a month.’ […] And then piece two is this notion of customer days, you could do quarterly, you could also do twice a year.
“The idea is you want to bring the customers together. Because if you and I are both CIOs at Fortune 500 companies and we independently react to a product, that’s one thing, but if we sit in a room together, we all look at the product together, there’s going to be interesting data amongst us as customers and the founder is going to learn a lot from that.[…] And I think the third piece is just an expectation that as the company progresses and product maturity increases, that folks on the CAB are going to be advocates and evangelists for the company with their customer networks.”
Motamedi recommends outlining those expectations in a short document.
Powered by WPeMatico
Pepper, a platform for restaurants and suppliers, pivots to deliver food to consumers
Though the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on restaurants has been crystal clear, many forget the impact this disease has had on food chain suppliers. With restaurants closed, these suppliers — who still have access to tons upon tons of food — no longer have customers.
Meanwhile, end consumers are dealing with their own stresses around securing food, deciding between venturing out to the grocery store and ordering food through increasingly unreliable grocery delivery services.
That’s where Pepper comes in.
Pepper launched late last year with an enterprise product focused on connecting restaurants with their suppliers. Most restaurants have 6+ different suppliers, and manually placed orders with each of them individually each night either by email, voicemail or text message. Oftentimes, there was no confirmation that the order was received, with employees receiving orders and hoping that everything arrived on time as it was requested.
To digitize the industry, Pepper developed an app that let restaurants input the contact information of suppliers and place orders quickly, and then let those suppliers press a single button to confirm the order was received and in progress.
In the six months since launch, things have changed dramatically for the startup, which has led co-founder and CEO Bowie Cheung to rethink the business.
Alongside facilitating orders between restaurants and suppliers, Pepper has now opened up a consumer-facing portal called Pepper Pantry, allowing everyday users to place an order directly with a food supplier.
Folks pay a flat $5 payments processing fee on the platform, and can choose from fresh meats, produce, dairy and other categories to have food delivered directly to their home.
Of course, this involved considerable adaptation on the part of Pepper and their suppliers, who are used to shipping pallets of food rather than bags or boxes. However, it has created some jobs on the supplier side as folks repackage food to amounts that are suitable for families or individuals, rather than businesses.
Cheung says the portions are still ‘bulk’ but more on par with a Sam’s Club or Costco purchase than the types of orders restaurants were placing.
Suppliers are able to choose their minimum order amount, which can range between $0 and $150. Thus far, eight suppliers have signed on to the Pepper Pantry platform, serving the greater NYC area (NYC, NJ, CT) and the greater Boston area.
Pepper declined to disclose its total funding amount, but did share that it has received investment from Greylock’s Mike Duboe and Box Group.
Powered by WPeMatico
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.
Powered by WPeMatico
Greylock’s Reid Hoffman and Sarah Guo to talk fundraising at Early Stage SF 2020
Early Stage SF is around the corner, on April 28 in San Francisco, and we are more than excited for this brand new event. The intimate gathering of founders, VCs, operators and tech industry experts is all about giving founders the tools they need to find success, no matter the challenge ahead of them.
Struggling to understand the legal aspects of running a company, like negotiating cap tables or hiring international talent? We’ve got breakout sessions for that. Wondering how to go about fundraising, from getting your first yes to identifying the right investors to planning the timeline for your fundraise sprint? We’ve got breakout sessions for that. Growth marketing? PR/Media? Building a tech stack? Recruiting?
We. Got. You.
Hoffman + Guo
Today, we’re very proud to announce one of our few Main Stage sessions that will be open to all attendees. Reid Hoffman and Sarah Guo will join us for a conversation around “How To Raise Your Series A.”
Reid Hoffman is a legendary entrepreneur and investor in Silicon Valley. He was an Executive VP and founding board member at PayPal before going on to co-found LinkedIn in 2003. He led the company to profitability as CEO before joining Greylock in 2009. He serves on the boards of Airbnb, Apollo Fusion, Aurora, Coda, Convoy, Entrepreneur First, Microsoft, Nauto and Xapo, among others. He’s also an accomplished author, with books like “Blitzscaling,” “The Startup of You” and “The Alliance.”
Sarah Guo has a wealth of experience in the tech world. She started her career in high school at a tech firm founded by her parents, called Casa Systems. She then joined Goldman Sachs, where she invested in growth-stage tech startups such as Zynga and Dropbox, and advised both pre-IPO companies (Workday) and publicly traded firms (Zynga, Netflix and Nvidia). She joined Greylock Partners in 2013 and led the firm’s investment in Cleo, Demisto, Sqreen and Utmost. She has a particular focus on B2B applications, as well as infrastructure, cybersecurity, collaboration tools, AI and healthcare.
The format for Hoffman and Guo’s Main Stage chat will be familiar to folks who have followed the investors. It will be an updated, in-person combination of Hoffman’s famously annotated LinkedIn Series B pitch deck that led to Greylock’s investment, and Sarah Guo’s in-depth breakdown of what she looks for in a pitch.
They’ll lay out a number of universally applicable lessons that folks seeking Series A funding can learn from, tackling each from their own unique perspectives. Hoffman has years of experience in consumer-focused companies, with a special expertise in network effects. Guo is one of the top minds when it comes to investment in enterprise software.
We’re absolutely thrilled about this conversation, and to be honest, the entire Early Stage agenda.
How it works
Here’s how it all works:
There will be about 50+ breakout sessions at the event, and attendees will have an opportunity to attend at least seven. The sessions will cover all the core topics confronting early-stage founders — up through Series A — as they build a company, from raising capital to building a team to growth. Each breakout session will be led by notables in the startup world.
Don’t worry about missing a breakout session, because transcripts from each will be available to show attendees. And most of the folks leading the breakout sessions have agreed to hang at the show for at least half the day and participate in CrunchMatch, TechCrunch’s app to connect founders and investors based on shared interests.
Here’s the fine print. Each of the 50+ breakout sessions is limited to around 100 attendees. We expect a lot more attendees, of course, so signups for each session are on a first-come, first-serve basis. Buy your ticket today and you can sign up for the breakouts that we’ve announced. Pass holders will also receive 24-hour advance notice before we announce the next batch. (And yes, you can “drop” a breakout session in favor of a new one, in the event there is a schedule conflict.)
Grab yourself a ticket and start registering for sessions right here. Interested sponsors can hit up the team here.
Powered by WPeMatico
Figma’s Community lets designers share and remix live files
As designers grow both in sheer numbers and within the hierarchy of organizations, design tool makers are adapting to their evolving needs in different ways. Figma, the web-based collaborative design tool, is taking a note from the engineering revolution of the early aughts.
“What if there were a GitHub for designers?” mused Dylan Field, early on in the lifecycle of Figma as a company. Today, that vision is brought to life with the launch of Figma Community. (Figma Community is launching in a closed beta for now.)
In a crowded space, with competitors like Adobe, InVision, Sketch and more, Figma differentiates itself on its web-based multiplayer approach. Figma is a design tool that works like Google Docs, with multiple designers in the same file, working alongside one another without disrupting each other.
But that’s just the base level of the overall collaboration that Figma believes designers crave. Field told us that he sees a clear desire from designers to not only share their work, whether it’s on a portfolio webpage or on social media, as well as a desire to learn from the work of other designers.
And yet, when a creative shares a design on social media, it’s just a static image. Other designers can’t see how it went from a blank page to an interesting design, and are left to merely appreciate it without learning anything new.
With Figma Community, designers and even organizations can share live design files that others can inspect, remix and learn from.
Individual designers can set up their own public-facing profile page to show off their designs, as well as intra-organization profile pages so other team members within their organization can learn from each other. On the other hand, organizations can publicly share their design systems and philosophy on their own page.
For example, the city of Chicago has set up a profile on Figma Community for other designers to follow the city’s design system in their own materials.
As far as remixing design files goes, Figma is using a CC4 license, which allows for a remix but forces attribution. That said, Field says the company is using this closed beta period to learn more about what the community wants around different license types.
Community is free and is not meant to drive revenue for the company, but rather offer further value to designers using the platform.
“It’s early,” said Dylan Field. “This is just the scaffolding of what’s to come. It’s the start of a lot of work that we’re going to be doing in the area of collaboration and community.”
Figma has raised a total of $83 million from investors like Index, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Grelock, according to Crunchbase.
Powered by WPeMatico
Startups Weekly: The unicorn from down under, an Uber TV show and All Raise’s expansion
Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy news pertaining to startups and venture capital. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about Revel, a recent graduate of Y Combinator that’s raised a small seed round.
Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here.
What happened this week?
Uber the TV show
Is anyone surprised Mike Isaac’s “Super Pumped” is set to become a TV show? Travis Kalanick’s notorious journey to CEO of Uber and subsequent ouster was made for television. This week, news broke that Showtime’s Brian Koppelman and David Levien, the creators and showrunners of “Billions,” would develop the project, with Isaac himself on board to executive produce. I will be watching.
All Raise expansion
All Raise, an 18-month-old nonprofit organization that seeks to amplify the voices of and support women in tech, announced new chapters in Los Angeles and Boston this week. I spoke with leaders of the organization about expansion plans, new hires, product launches and more. “Women are hungry for the support and guidance we provide. I think the movement is just gathering momentum,” All Raise CEO Pam Kostka told me.
VCThe unicorn from down under
You’ve probably heard of Canva by now. The Australian tech company, which has developed a simplified graphic design tool, is worth a whopping $3.2 billion as of this week. Investors in the company include Bond, General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Blackbird and Sequoia China. Alongside a fresh $85 million funding, Canva is also making its foray into enterprise with the launch of Canva for Enterprise. Read about that here.
What else?
- The Station, TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec’s new weekly newsletter, has officially launched. She is going deep each week on all things mobility and transportation. You can read her first one here and subscribe here.
- ‘Cloud kitchens’ is an oxymoron, says TechCrunch editor Danny Crichton. He penned an interesting piece this week, arguing cloud kitchens are just adding more competition to one of the most competitive industries in the world, and that isn’t a path to leverage.
- NASA made history this week when astronauts Christina H. Koch and Jessica Meir took part in the first-ever spacewalk in the agency’s history featuring only women. No, this isn’t startup-related but it’s pretty damn cool. Watch the video here.
NASA astronauts Christina H. Koch and Jessica Meir
VC deals
- Pensando comes out of stealth with $278M in funding
- Pendo scores $100M at unicorn valuation
- Galileo Financial raises $77M
- Mobile game startup MadBox raises $16.5M
- Winnow secures $12M for its food waste solution
- Realtime Robotics secures $11.7M Series A
- TruTag nabs $7.5M for tiny, edible bar codes
- Mexico City’s Zubale gets $4.4M to put locals to work
- Evervault gets $3.2M from Sequoia
- Autify raises $2.5M seed for its no-code software testing tool
Startup spotlight: Petalfox. I discovered the business earlier this week. Basically, it’s a super easy way to order flowers, coffee and others goods via SMS. I’m trying it out. That’s all.
Equity
This week was honestly a treat. We had myself in the studio along with Alex Wilhelm and a special guest, Sarah Guo from Greylock Partners, a venture firm (obviously). Guo has the distinction of having the best-ever fun fact on the show. We kicked off with Grammarly, a company that recently put $90 million into its accounts. Then chatted about Lattice, Tempest, WeWork, SaaS, the future of valuations in Silicon Valley and more if you can believe it. Listen here.
Powered by WPeMatico