Jeff Morris Jr.
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Turing nabs $32M more for an AI-based platform to source and manage engineers remotely
As remote work continues to solidify its place as a critical aspect of how businesses exist these days, a startup that has built a platform to help companies source and bring on one specific category of remote employees — engineers — is taking on some more funding to meet demand.
Turing — which has built an AI-based platform to help evaluate prospective, but far-flung, engineers, bring them together into remote teams, then manage them for the company — has picked up $32 million in a Series B round of funding led by WestBridge Capital. Its plan is as ambitious as the world it is addressing is wide: an AI platform to help define the future of how companies source IT talent to grow.
“They have a ton of experience in investing in global IT services, companies like Cognizant and GlobalLogic,” said co-founder and CEO Jonathan Siddharth of its lead investor in an interview the other day. “We see Turing as the next iteration of that model. Once software ate the IT services industry, what would Accenture look like?”
It currently has a database of some 180,000 engineers covering around 100 or so engineering skills, including React, Node, Python, Agular, Swift, Android, Java, Rails, Golang, PHP, Vue, DevOps, machine learning, data engineering and more.
In addition to WestBridge, other investors in this round included Foundation Capital, Altair Capital, Mindset Ventures, Frontier Ventures and Gaingels. There is also a very long list of high-profile angels participating, underscoring the network that the founders themselves have amassed. It includes unnamed executives from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft, Snap and other companies, as well as Adam D’Angelo (Facebook’s first CTO and CEO at Quora), Gokul Rajaram, Cyan Banister and Scott Banister, and Beerud Sheth (the founder of Upwork), among many others (I’ll run the full list below).
Turing is not disclosing its valuation. But as a measure of its momentum, it was only in August that the company raised a seed round of $14 million, led by Foundation. Siddharth said that the growth has been strong enough in the interim that the valuations it was getting and the level of interest compelled the company to skip a Series A altogether and go straight for its Series B.
The company now has signed up to its platform 180,000 developers from across 10,000 cities (compared to 150,000 developers back in August). Some 50,000 of them have gone through automated vetting on the Turing platform, and the task will now be to bring on more companies to tap into that trove of talent.
Or, “We are demand-constrained,” which is how Siddharth describes it. At the same time, it’s been growing revenues and growing its customer base, jumping from revenues of $9.5 million in October to $12 million in November, increasing 17x since first becoming generally available 14 months ago. Current customers include VillageMD, Plume, Lambda School, Ohi Tech, Proxy and Carta Healthcare.
Remote work = immediate opportunity
A lot of people talk about remote work today in the context of people no longer able to go into their offices as part of the effort to curtail the spread of COVID-19. But in reality, another form of it has been in existence for decades.
Offshoring and outsourcing by way of help from third parties — such as Accenture and other systems integrators — are two ways that companies have been scaling and operating, paying sums to those third parties to run certain functions or build out specific areas instead of shouldering the operating costs of employing, upsizing and sometimes downsizing that labor force itself.
Turing is essentially tapping into both concepts. On one hand, it has built a new way to source and run teams of people, specifically engineers, on behalf of others. On the other, it’s using the opportunity that has presented itself in the last year to open up the minds of engineering managers and others to consider the idea of bringing on people they might have previously insisted work in their offices, to now work for them remotely, and still be effective.
Siddarth and co-founder Vijay Krishnan (who is the CTO) know the other side of the coin all too well. They are both from India, and both relocated to the Valley first for school (post-graduate degrees at Stanford) and then work at a time when moving to the Valley was effectively the only option for ambitious people like them to get employed by large, global tech companies, or build startups — effectively what could become large, global tech companies.
“Talent is universal, but opportunities are not,” Siddarth said to me earlier this year when describing the state of the situation.
A previous startup co-founded by the pair — content discovery app Rover — highlighted to them a gap in the market. They built the startup around a remote and distributed team of engineers, which helped them keep costs down while still recruiting top talent. Meanwhile, rivals were building teams in the Valley. “All our competitors in Palo Alto and the wider area were burning through tons of cash, and it’s only worse now. Salaries have skyrocketed,” he said.
After Rover was acquired by Revcontent, a recommendation platform that competes against the likes of Taboola and Outbrain, they decided to turn their attention to seeing if they could build a startup based on how they had, basically, built their own previous startup.
There are a number of companies that have been tapping into the different aspects of the remote work opportunity, as it pertains to sourcing talent and how to manage it.
They include the likes of Remote (raised $35 million in November), Deel ($30 million raised in September), Papaya Global ($40 million also in September), Lattice ($45 million in July) and Factorial ($16 million in April), among others.
What’s interesting about Turing is how it’s trying to address and provide services for the different stages you go through when finding new talent. It starts with an AI platform to source and vet candidates. That then moves into matching people with opportunities, and onboarding those engineers. Then, Turing helps manage their work and productivity in a secure fashion, and also provides guidance on the best way to manage that worker in the most compliant way, be it as a contractor or potentially as a full-time remote employee.
The company is not freemium, as such, but gives people two weeks to trial people before committing to a project. So unlike an Accenture, Turing itself tries to build in some elasticity into its own product, not unlike the kind of elasticity that it promises its customers.
It all sounds like a great idea now, but interestingly, it was only after remote work really became the norm around March/April of this year that the idea really started to pick up traction.
“It’s amazing what COVID has done. It’s led to a huge boom for Turing,” said Sumir Chadha, managing director for WestBridge Capital, in an interview. For those who are building out tech teams, he added, there is now “No need for to find engineers and match them with customers. All of that is done in the cloud.”
“Turing has a very interesting business model, which today is especially relevant,” said Igor Ryabenkiy, managing partner at Altair Capital, in a statement. “Access to the best talent worldwide and keeping it well-managed and cost-effective make the offering attractive for many corporations. The energy of the founding team provides fast growth for the company, which will be even more accelerated after the B-round.”
PS. I said I’d list the full, longer list of investors in this round. In these COVID times, this is likely the biggest kind of party you’ll see for a while. In addition to those listed above, it included [deep breath] Founders Fund, Chapter One Ventures (Jeff Morris Jr.), Plug and Play Tech Ventures (Saeed Amidi), UpHonest Capital (Wei Guo, Ellen Ma), Ideas & Capital (Xavier Ponce de León), 500 Startups Vietnam (Binh Tran and Eddie Thai), Canvas Ventures (Gary Little), B Capital (Karen Appleton Page, Kabir Narang), Peak State Ventures (Bryan Ciambella, Seva Zakharov), Stanford StartX Fund, Amino Capital, Spike Ventures, Visary Capital (Faizan Khan), Brainstorm Ventures (Ariel Jaduszliwer), Dmitry Chernyak, Lorenzo Thione, Shariq Rizvi, Siqi Chen, Yi Ding, Sunil Rajaraman, Parakram Khandpur, Kintan Brahmbhatt, Cameron Drummond, Kevin Moore, Sundeep Ahuja, Auren Hoffman, Greg Back, Sean Foote, Kelly Graziadei, Bobby Balachandran, Ajith Samuel, Aakash Dhuna, Adam Canady, Steffen Nauman, Sybille Nauman, Eric Cohen, Vlad V, Marat Kichikov, Piyush Prahladka, Manas Joglekar, Vladimir Khristenko, Tim and Melinda Thompson, Alexandr Katalov, Joseph and Lea Anne Ng, Jed Ng, Eric Bunting, Rafael Carmona, Jorge Carmona, Viacheslav Turpanov, James Borow, Ray Carroll, Suzanne Fletcher, Denis Beloglazov, Tigran Nazaretian, Andrew Kamotskiy, Ilya Poz, Natalia Shkirtil, Ludmila Khrapchenko, Ustavshchikov Sergey, Maxim Matcin and Peggy Ferrell.
Powered by WPeMatico
Former Tinder VP Jeff Morris Jr. opens up Product Club, an accelerator meant to stay small and focused
Startup accelerators tend to grow the size of each new class over time, as more of their portfolio companies find exits, their network of mentors expands and they find new ways to scale things up. The most recognized example of this is almost certainly Y Combinator, which started with a group of just eight companies in 2005 and has since grown to over 150 companies per recent batch.
VC and former Tinder VP Jeff Morris Jr. is taking a different approach with his new accelerator, Product Club: start small and stay small.
The first Product Club batch will be made up of just three companies. While Morris tells me this might grow a bit over time, he doesn’t see it expanding drastically. “I imagine it being up to 10,” he says. “But no more.”
“I’ve spoken to a lot of people who’ve built accelerators and have said ‘There’s no way you’ll find a winner with class sizes that small,’ ” Morris tells me. “But I’m kind of okay with that if it means we can be more hands-on.”
Product Club will invest $100,000 in each company, taking 5% equity in return. In addition to investment, the program will provide one-on-one mentorship with a different mentor each week, with each session “100% focused on product development.”
Though new, Product Club has already built up a pretty notable roster of mentors, including:
- Danny Trinh (head of Design at Zenly)
- Merci Victoria Grace (investor at Lightspeed, formerly head of Growth at Slack)
- Scott Belsky (founder of Behance, CPO at Adobe)
- Sriram Krishnan (investor, formerly led consumer product teams at Twitter)
- Manik Gupta (investor, former Chief Product Officer at Uber)
- Brian Norgard (investor, former CPO at Tinder)
- Jules Walter (product monetization at Slack, co-founder of the BlackPM network)
- Josh Elman (board partner at Greylock, investor, former VP of Product at Robinhood)
They’ve also partnered with a handful of product designers who will provide hands-on help to the companies on things like branding and UX.
Morris tells me that he intends for Product Club to be a good bit more transparent than other accelerators traditionally have been. Rather than keeping things largely under wraps until Demo Day, he says, they’re “just going to tell everybody from the start who’s in each batch,” with the intent of doing things like founder office hours with users, with product development and changes happening mostly out in the open “almost like a change log.” They’ll have a Demo Day for investors, but it’ll be more of an overview and less of a reveal.
Product Club will operate as part of Chapter One, the early-stage seed fund that Morris founded in 2017. Prior to becoming an investor, Morris led the revenue team at Tinder, where he built things like Tinder Gold — the dating app’s subscription tier that lets you see who “liked” you without you first having to swipe. He was also the director of Product Growth at Lambda School for a few months prior to parting ways with the company to focus on investing full time.
The program’s first session (the Summer 2020 batch) is scheduled to start on August 3, running for a total of 10 weeks. They’re accepting applications immediately, with the deadline to apply currently set for July 19. The program will be entirely remote, so applications are open globally.
Powered by WPeMatico
Reset Button is approaching student debt from a new angle
Student loan debt in the U.S. totals $1.5 trillion, and more than 44 million Americans have outstanding student loan debt.
According to research by Villanova law professor Jason Iuliano, a million student loan debtors have filed for bankruptcy in the past five years. However, 99.9% of them did not include their student loan debt in their bankruptcy filing.
This research was the seed of what would become Reset Button, a new startup founded by Iuliano and Rob Hunter looking to help student loan debtors who have gone through bankruptcy find a new way to include those debts in their filing.
The only way you can include student loan debt in a bankruptcy filing is through litigation. Those cases have been historically less likely to settle out of court than other types of civil cases.
This means that the cost of including student loan debt in bankruptcy filings is, at the very least, around $10,000. Now, if there was some guarantee that you could trade hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loan debt for $10,000-$15,000, you’d obviously do it. But most folks who are already in the process of filing for bankruptcy don’t have a spare $10,000 minimum to spend on a litigator. And even if they did, there is no guarantee they’d win in court, resulting in even more debt and no relief.
This is what Reset Button is trying to change.
To be clear, Reset Button is targeted directly at folks who have already filed for bankruptcy but were told they couldn’t include their student loan debt in those filings, and so they didn’t.
Here’s how it works:
Reset Button has built a network of litigation lawyers who have experience in seeking student loan discharges. When a new user fires up Reset Button, the startup sends them through an evaluation process that collects financial information, etc. to assess whether or not one of those lawyers could litigate the discharge of that user’s student loan debt. That evaluation factors in a number of signals, including past legal cases that are comparable to the user’s situation.
That process also does a lot of the heavy lifting that makes hiring a litigator so expensive. These lawyers often have to do tons of research, tracking down statements and bills and other paperwork, before they can truly get started with the litigation.
Reset Button, as the connective tissue between debtor and lawyer, is able to automate a lot of that process for the lawyers, delivering a package of information on the case and connecting the user with the right lawyer for them.
Reset is also looking to bring down the cost for debtors. The company charges either 12% of the total debt discharged, or $10,000 (whichever is lowest). Reset also allows users to pay that sum over time, in $300 monthly installments. This is in stark contrast to people who hire their own lawyer, who would be responsible for the costs upfront.
Reset Button is able to do this through a payment process called factoring. In short, Reset buys the receivables from the attorney’s fees, and charges the debtor with their own payment plan. Reset makes money from lawyers who pay for the lead generation, the technology services and the marketing apparatus.
Factoring has come under fire from some who say that service providers sometimes raise prices to account for their fee, but Reset Button co-founders Hunter and Iuliano say their lawyers are actually charging less because of the workflow optimization provided by Reset Button.
The company also provides a Knowledge Base for debtors seeking financial guidance and resources, but the only revenue stream comes from the actual litigation of student loan debt in bankruptcy filings. Other services like refinancing, debt consolidation or income-based payments are not provided by Reset Button, and the company has no official partnerships with those types of service providers.
However, Hunter said that it may be an avenue the company explores as it grows.
Perhaps most importantly, Reset Button offers a Fresh Start guarantee. In short, if the lawyer doesn’t manage to get your debt wiped, Reset will pay your legal bills.
There has been movement in the landscape of student loan discharges with bankruptcy.
Essentially, debtors must prove in court that they pass the test of “undue hardship,” which is a notably vague framework. Though there is a bit of variability among the various court circuits, the general idea is that a debtor must prove that they can’t currently pay back the loan, that there will not be a change down the line that will allow them to pay the loan in the future and that they have made every effort to pay the loans in the past.
Historically, that’s been a difficult threshold to cross for the fraction of people who take steps to litigate their student loan debt. However, in small ways, courts seem to be opening up the interpretation of undue hardship.
“There’s a phrase that gets used in these cases that I think perpetuates this myth, and that is to call it a ‘certainty of hopelessness’,” said John Rao, attorney with the National Consumer Law Center. “And it’s almost like, as long as you’re still alive and breathing, something could improve for you. That’s just an impossible burden. It’s basically saying you could win the lottery or something. That’s just not the standard I think Congress had in mind.”
In 2015, in a case between Robert E. Murphy and the DOE/ECMC, Rao wrote to the courts arguing that they should reassess the test for undue hardship:
Rather than adopt one existing test over another, we urge this Court to provide a formulation of the undue hardship standard in simple terms, that restricts consideration of extraneous and inappropriate factors not consistent with the statutory language. A finding about whether a debtor’s hardship is likely to persist should be based on hard facts, not conjecture and unsubstantiated optimism.
More recently, a judge in the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of a debtor, wiping more than $200,000 in Kevin Rosenberg’s student debt. Of course, the lenders will be appealing the case.
However, Judge Morris, who presided over the case, wrote in her decision that “most people (bankruptcy professionals as well as lay individuals) believe it impossible to discharge student loans,” and that her “Court will not participate in perpetuating these myths.”
Reset Button has raised money from investors Craft Ventures, Slow Ventures and Jeff Morris Jr. of Lambda School, among others. The company declined to share its total amount of investment.
“Society has been led to believe something for decades that is not true, which is probably the biggest initial challenge,” said founder and CEO Rob Hunter . “One of the unfortunate things is the reason that many consumers believe incorrect information is because a lawyer told them that. So, that is a bit of an uphill battle to swim against.”
Powered by WPeMatico