madrona venture group
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Former Facebook teammates raise $10.4M in Sequoia-led round to launch features development
Statsig is taking the A/B testing applications that drive Facebook’s growth and putting similar functionalities into the hands of any product team so that they, too, can make faster, data-informed decisions on building products customers want.
The Seattle-based company on Thursday announced $10.4 million in Series A funding, led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Madrona Venture Group and a group of individual investors, including Robinhood CPO Aparna Chennapragada, Segment co-founder Calvin French-Owen, Figma CEO Dylan Field, Instacart CEO Fidji Simo, DoorDash exec Gokul Rajaram, Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi and a16z general partner Sriram Krishnan.
Founder and CEO Vijaye Raji started the company with seven other former Facebook colleagues in February, but the idea for the company started more than a year ago.
He told TechCrunch that while working at Facebook, A/B testing applications, like Gatekeeper, Quick Experiments and Deltoid, were successfully built internally. The Statsig team saw an opportunity to rebuild these features from scratch outside of Facebook so that other companies that have products to build — but no time to build their own quick testing capabilities — can be just as successful.
Statsig’s platform enables product developers to run quick product experiments and analyze how users respond to new features and functionalities. Tools like Pulse, Experiments+ and AutoTune allow for hundreds of experiments every week, while business metrics guide product teams to build and ship the right products to their customers.
Raji intends to use the new funding to hire folks in the area of design, product, data science, sales and marketing. The team is already up to 14 since February.
“We already have a set of customers asking for features, and that is a good problem, but now we want to scale and build them out,” he added.
Statsig has no subscription or upfront fees and is already serving millions of end-users every month for customers like Clutter, Common Room and Take App. The company will always offer a free tier so customers can try out features, but also offers a Pro tier for 5 cents per thousand events so that when the customer grows, so does Statsig.
Raji sees adoption of Statsig coming from a few different places: developers and engineers that are downloading it and using it to serve a few million people a month, and then through referrals. In fact, the adoption the company is getting is “bottom up,” which is what Statsig wants, he said. Now the company is talking to bigger customers.
There are plenty of competitors for this product, including incumbents in the market, according to Raji, but they mostly focus on features, while Statsig provides insights and ties metrics back to features. In addition, the company has automated analysis where other products require manual set up and analysis.
Sequoia partner Mike Vernal worked at Facebook prior to joining the venture capital firm and had worked with Raji, calling him “a top 1% engineer” that he was happy to work with.
Having sat on many company boards, he has found that many companies spend a long time talking about sales and marketing, but very little on product because there is not an easy way to get precise numbers for planning purposes, just a discussion about what they did and plan to do.
What Vernal said he likes about Statsig is that the company is bringing that measurement aspect to the table so that companies don’t have to hack together a poorer version.
“What Statsig can do, uniquely, is not only set up an experiment and tell if someone likes green or blue buttons, but to answer questions like what the impact this is of the experiment on new user growth, retention and monitorization,” he added. “That they can also answer holistic questions and understand the impact on any single feature on every metric is really novel and not possible before the maturation of the data stack.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Sila banks $13M to offer single API for developing financial products, services
Sila announced Monday it raised $13 million in Series A funding for its banking and payment platform that gives software teams tools to build the next generation of financial products and services.
Revolution Ventures led the round and was joined by existing investors Madrona Venture Group, Oregon Venture Fund and Mucker Capital, as well as Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus. The funding brings the total investment to date for Portland, Oregon-based Sila to $20 million.
The company was founded in 2018 by Shamir Karkal, Angela Angelovska, Isaac Hines and Alex Lipton to simplify digital payments and storage in a regulatory compliant way and build on blockchain technology. CEO Karkal has a long history in the fintech space, co-founding Simple, an app unifying various accounts into one accessible bank card, in 2009. It was acquired by BBVA in 2014 for $117 million and shuttered earlier this year.
Karkal told TechCrunch that the idea for Sila was born out of frustration while starting another bank. He saw a need for financial application development, but was hindered by a banking system “still stuck in the 20th century.” He thought consumers expected a different level of service, which is why many flock to fintechs.
However, whenever a business tried to connect existing banking systems, fintechs and cryptocurrency innovators, as it built and scale, would always run into technology and compliance issues, Karkal said.
“The problem with working with banks, is that you have to figure out how to integrate with their mainframe,” he added. “In the process, you end up having to also be compliance experts just to be able to do it.”
Whereas it took Karkal three years to get bank processes set up for other companies, it took Sila 18 months. Its banking APIs enable developers to create their own digital wallets, replacing the need to integrate with legacy financial institutions. Sila also has partnerships with fintech platforms, including Plaid, Alloy, Lithic and Arcus to move money, and is backed by Evolve Bank and Trust.
Sila can now get customers up-and-running in six to eight weeks. And unlike competitors that focus almost exclusively on e-commerce, most of Sila’s customers are doing regulated payments within the fintech, insurtech, commercial real estate and cryptocurrency spaces that tend to be more complex from a compliance basis, Karkal said.
Since the company launched its platform, business was building steadily, and took off in the second half of 2020. The company raised a $7.7 million seed round earlier in the year. In the last 12 months, Sila grew its revenue 10 times and customers’ end users grew over 500% in the last seven months.
Sila will use the new funding to increase headcount, target additional partners and expand product features, including its Ethereum MainNet stablecoin issuance and interoperability between FedWire and the Nacha Automated Clearing House network.
“There is a massive wave of fintechs emerging in the U.S., and we have barely scratched the surface,” Karkal said. “Places like India, Africa and Latin America could accelerate at the same time because they are mainly starting from zero. We are here to ‘arm the rebels’ and help those innovators build applications to give all end users a much better financial experience.”
As part of the investment, Clara Sieg, partner at Revolution Ventures, is joining the company’s board. She told TechCrunch she met the company’s co-founders through the Portland ecosystem.
Revolution tends to look at fintech startups from a consumer angle. Recognizing that the problem with building infrastructure meant dealing with banks, the firm set out how to find a company building the pipes to solve it, she said.
In the landscape of fintech, she considers Dwolla to be a competitor to Sila. Last week, the company raised $21 million to continue developing its API that allows companies to build and facilitate fast payments, specifically with a focus on ACH. However, it comes down to actually signing up customers, and that competitive landscape is pretty thin, Sieg added.
“Sila is building an easy way for people to program money and taking a regulatory eye to things,” Sieg said. “When Shamir was building Simple, he could see how challenging it was for incumbents to provide the tools developers need to embed financial services, and this is why we have confidence in his ability to win.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Esper raises $30M Series B for its IoT DevOps platform
There may be billions of IoT devices in use today, but the tooling around building (and updating) the software for them still leaves a lot to be desired. Esper, which today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round, builds the tools to enable developers and engineers to deploy and manage fleets of Android-based edge devices. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Root Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures and Haystack.
The company argues that there are thousands of device manufacturers who are building these kinds of devices on Android alone, but that scaling and managing these deployments comes with a lot of challenges. The core idea here is that Esper brings to device development the DevOps experience that software developers now expect. The company argues that its tools allow companies to forgo building their own internal DevOps teams and instead use its tooling to scale their Android-based IoT fleets for use cases that range from digital signage and kiosks to custom solutions in healthcare, retail, logistics and more.
“The pandemic has transformed industries like connected fitness, digital health, hospitality, and food delivery, further accelerating the adoption of intelligent edge devices. But with each new use case, better software automation is required,” said Esper CEO and co-founder Yadhu Gopalan, who founded the company together with COO Shiv Sundar. “Esper’s mature cloud infrastructure incorporates the functionality cloud developers have come to expect, re-imagined for devices.”
Image Credits: Esper
Mobile device management (MDM) isn’t exactly a new thing, but the Esper team argues that these tools weren’t created for this kind of use case. “MDMs are the solution now in the market. They are made for devices being brought into an environment,” Gopalan said. “The DNA of these solutions is rooted in protecting the enterprise and to deploy applications to them in the network. Our customers are sending devices out into the wild. It’s an entirely different use case and model.”
To address these challenges, Esper offers a range of tools and services that includes a full development stack for developers, cloud-based services for device management and hardware emulators to get started with building custom devices.
“Esper helped us launch our Fusion-connected fitness offering on three different types of hardware in less than six months,” said Chris Merli, founder at Inspire Fitness. “Their full stack connected fitness Android platform helped us test our application on different hardware platforms, configure all our devices over the cloud, and manage our fleet exactly to our specifications. They gave us speed, Android expertise, and trust that our application would provide a delightful experience for our customers.”
The company also offers solutions for running Android on older x86 Windows devices to extend the life of this hardware, too.
“We spent about a year and a half on building out the infrastructure,” said Gopalan. “Definitely. That’s the hard part and that’s really creating a reliable, robust mechanism where customers can trust that the bits will flow to the devices. And you can also roll back if you need to.”
Esper is working with hardware partners to launch devices that come with built-in Esper-support from the get-go.
Esper says it saw 70x revenue growth in the last year, an 8x growth in paying customers and a 15x growth in devices running Esper. Since we don’t know the baseline, those numbers are meaningless, but the investors clearly believe that Esper is on to something. Current customers include the likes of CloudKitchens, Spire Health, Intelity, Ordermark, Inspire Fitness, RomTech and Uber.
Powered by WPeMatico
PlexTrac raises $10M Series A round for its collaboration-centric security platform
PlexTrac, a Boise, ID-based security service that aims to provide a unified workflow automation platform for red and blue teams, today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by Noro-Moseley Partners and Madrona Venture Group. StageDot0 ventures also participated in this round, which the company plans to use to build out its team and grow its platform.
With this new round, the company, which was founded in 2018, has now raised a total of $11 million, with StageDot0 leading its 2019 seed round.
“I have been on both sides of the fence, the specialist who comes in and does the assessment, produces that 300-page report and then comes back a year later to find that some of the critical issues had not been addressed at all. And not because the organization didn’t want to but because it was lost in that report,” PlexTrac CEO and President Dan DeCloss said. “These are some of the most critical findings for an entity from a risk perspective. By making it collaborative, both red and blue teams are united on the same goal we all share, to protect the network and assets.”
PlexTrac CEO and President Dan DeCloss. Image Credits: PlexTrac
With an extensive career in security that included time as a penetration tester for Veracode and the Mayo Clinic, as well as senior information security advisor for Anthem, among other roles, DeCloss has quite a bit of firsthand experience that led him to found PlexTrac. Specifically, he believes that it’s important to break down the wall between offense-focused red teams and defense-centric blue teams.
“Historically there has been more of the cloak and dagger relationship but those walls are breaking down — and rightfully so, there isn’t that much of that mentality today — people recognize they are on the same mission whether they are an internal security team or an external team,” he said. “With the PlexTrac platform the red and blue teams have a better view into the other teams’ tactics and techniques — and it makes the whole process into an educational exercise for everyone.”
Image Credits: PlexTrac
At its core, PlexTrac makes it easier for security teams to produce their reports — and hence free them up to actually focus on “real” security work. To do so, the service integrates with most of the popular scanners like Qualys, and Veracode, but also tools like ServiceNow and Jira in order to help teams coordinate their workflows. All the data flows into real-time reports that then help teams monitor their security posture. The service also features a dedicated tool, WriteupsDB, for managing reusable write-ups to help teams deliver consistent reports for a variety of audiences.
“Current tools for planning, executing and reporting on security testing workflows are either nonexistent (manual reporting, spreadsheets, documents, etc. …) or exist as largely incomplete features of legacy platforms,” Madrona’s S. Somasegar and Chris Picardo write in today’s announcement. “The pain point for security teams is real and PlexTrac is able to streamline their workflows, save time, and greatly improve output quality. These teams are on the leading edge of attempting to find and exploit vulnerabilities (red teams) and defend and/or eliminate threats (blue teams).”
Powered by WPeMatico
Rec Room raises at $1.25B valuation from Sequoia and Index as VCs push to find another Roblox
Investor FOMO following Roblox’s blockbuster public debut is pushing venture capitalists who missed out on that gaming giant to invest in competing platforms.
Today, Rec Room announced it has raised $100 million from Sequoia and Index, with participation from Madrona Venture Group. The deal is a huge influx of capital for Rec Room, which had raised less than $50 million before this round, including a $20 million Series C that closed in December. In 2019, we reported that the company had raised its Series B at a $126 million valuation, this latest deal values the company at $1.25 billion, showcasing how investor sentiment for the gaming space has shifted in the wake of Roblox’s monster growth.
Rec Room launched as a VR-only platform, but as headset sales creeped along slowly, the company embraced traditional game consoles, PC and mobile to expand its reach.
In a press release accompanying today’s funding announcement, Rec Room detailed it has surpassed 15 million “lifetime users” and had shown 566% year-over-year revenue growth. In December, CEO Nick Fajt told TechCrunch that the company has tripled its player base in the past 12 months.
The company has been following in Roblox’s footsteps in many ways as it build out its creator tools and seeks to build out an on-platform economy for game creators. The company says that 2 million players have created content on the platform and that Rec Room is on track to pay out more than $1 million to them this year.
Powered by WPeMatico
OctoML raises $28M Series B for its machine learning acceleration platform
OctoML, a Seattle-based startup that offers a machine learning acceleration platform built on top of the open-source Apache TVM compiler framework project, today announced that it has raised a $28 million Series B funding round led by Addition. Previous investors Madrona Venture Group and Amplify Partners also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $47 million. The company last raised in April 2020, when it announced its $15 million Series A round led by Amplify.
The promise of OctoML, which was founded by the team that also created TVM, is that developers can bring their models to its platform and the service will automatically optimize that model’s performance for any given cloud or edge device.
As Brazil-born OctoML co-founder and CEO Luis Ceze told me, since raising its Series A round, the company started onboarding some early adopters to its “Octomizer” SaaS platform.
Image Credits: OctoML
“It’s still in early access, but we are we have close to 1,000 early access sign-ups on the waitlist,” Ceze said. “That was a pretty strong signal for us to end up taking this [funding]. The Series B was pre-emptive. We were planning on starting to raise money right about now. We had barely started spending our Series A money — we still had a lot of that left. But since we saw this growth and we had more paying customers than we anticipated, there were a lot of signals like, ‘hey, now we can accelerate the go-to-market machinery, build a customer success team and continue expanding the engineering team to build new features.’ ”
Ceze tells me that the team also saw strong growth signals in the overall community around the TVM project (with about 1,000 people attending its virtual conference last year). As for its customer base (and companies on its waitlist), Ceze says it represents a wide range of verticals that range from defense contractors to financial services and life science companies, automotive firms and startups in a variety of fields.
Recently, OctoML also launched support for the Apple M1 chip — and saw very good performance from that.
The company has also formed partnerships with industry heavyweights like Microsoft (which is also a customer), Qualcomm and AMD to build out the open-source components and optimize its service for an even wider range of models (and larger ones, too).
On the engineering side, Ceze tells me that the team is looking at not just optimizing and tuning models but also the training process. Training ML models can quickly become costly and any service that can speed up that process leads to direct savings for its users — which in turn makes OctoML an easier sell. The plan here, Ceze tells me, is to offer an end-to-end solution where people can optimize their ML training and the resulting models and then push their models out to their preferred platform. Right now, its users still have to take the artifact that the Octomizer creates and deploy that themselves, but deployment support is on OctoML’s roadmap.
“When we first met Luis and the OctoML team, we knew they were poised to transform the way ML teams deploy their machine learning models,” said Lee Fixel, founder of Addition. “They have the vision, the talent and the technology to drive ML transformation across every major enterprise. They launched Octomizer six months ago and it’s already becoming the go-to solution developers and data scientists use to maximize ML model performance. We look forward to supporting the company’s continued growth.”
Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.
Powered by WPeMatico
6 investors on 2021’s mobile gaming trends and opportunities
Many VCs historically avoided placing bets on hit-driven mobile gaming content in favor of clearer platform opportunities, but as more success stories pop up, the economics overturned conventional wisdom with new business models. As more accessible infrastructure allowed young studios to become more ambitious, venture money began pouring into the gaming ecosystem.
After tackling topics including how investors are looking at opportunities in social gaming, infrastructure bets and the moonshots of AR/VR, I asked a group of VCs about their approach to mobile content investing and whether new platforms were changing perspectives about opportunities in mobile-first and desktop-first experiences.
While desktop gaming has evolved dramatically in the past few years as new business models and platforms take hold, to some degree, mobile has been hampered. Investors I chatted with openly worried that some of mobile’s opportunities were being hamstrung by Apple’s App Store.
“We are definitely fearful of Apple’s ability to completely disrupt/affect the growth of a game,” Bessemer’s Ethan Kurzweil and Sakib Dadi told TechCrunch. “We do not foresee that changing any time in the near future despite the outcry from companies such as Epic and others.”
All the while, another central focus seems to be the ever-evolving push toward cross-platform gaming, which is getting further bolstered by new technologies. One area of interest for investors: migrating the ambition of desktop titles to mobile and finding ways to build cross-platform experiences that feel fulfilling on devices that are so differently abled performance-wise.
Madrona’s Hope Cochran, who previously served as CFO of Candy Crush maker King, said mobile still has plenty of untapped opportunities. “When you have a AAA game, bringing it to mobile is challenging and yet it opens up an entire universe of scale.”
Responses have been edited for length and clarity. We spoke with:
- Hope Cochran, managing director, Madrona Venture Group
- Daniel Li, partner, Madrona Venture Group
- Ethan Kurzweil, partner, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Sakib Dadi, investor, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Alice Lloyd George, founding partner, Rogue VC
- Gigi Levy-Weiss, general partner, NFX
Hope Cochran and Daniel Li, Madrona Venture Group
Does it ever get any easier to bet on a gaming content play? What do you look for?
Hope Cochran: I feel like there are a couple different sectors in gaming. There’s the actual studios that are developing games and they have several approaches. Are they developing a brand new game, are they reimagining a game from 25 years ago and reskinning it, which is a big trend right now, or are they taking IP that is really trendy right now and trying to create a game around it? There are different ways to predict which ones of those might make it, but then there’s also the infrastructure behind gaming and then there’s also identifying trends and which games or studios are embracing those. Those are some of the ways I try to parse it out and figure out which ones I think are going to rise to the top of the list.
Daniel Li: There’s this single-player narrative versus multiplayer metaverse and I think people are more comfortable on the metaverse stuff because if you’re building a social network and seeing good early traction, those things don’t typically just disappear. Then if you are betting more on individual studios producing games, I think the other thing is we’re seeing more and more VCs pop up that are just totally games-focused or devoting a portion of the portfolio to games. And for them it’s okay to have a hits-driven portfolio.
There seems to be more innovation happening on PC/console in terms of business models and distribution, do you think mobile feels less experimental these days? Why or why not?
Hope Cochran: Mobile is still trying to push the technology forward, the important element of being cross-platform is difficult. When you have a AAA game, bringing it to mobile is challenging and yet it opens up an entire universe of scale. The metrics are also very different for mobile though.
Daniel Li: It seems like the big monetization innovation that has happened over the last couple of years has been the “battle pass” type of subscription where you can unlock more content by playing. Obviously that’s gone over to mobile, but it doesn’t feel like mobile has had some sort of new monetization unlock. The other thing that’s happened on desktop is the success of the “pay $10 or $20 or $20 for this indie game” type of thing, and it feels like that’s not going to happen on mobile because of the price points that people are used to paying.
Alice Lloyd George, Rogue VC
Powered by WPeMatico
Social gaming platform Rec Room scores $20 million Series C
Social gaming platform Rec Room has scored some new funding as it aims to bring its once VR-centric world to every major gaming platform out there.
The startup has closed a $20 million Series C led by Madrona Venture Group . Existing investors, including First Round Capital, Index, Sequoia and DAG, also participated in the round. They’ve raised just shy of $50 million to date.
The platform has been around for years serving as a social hub and gaming platform for virtual reality users. In recent years, the company has tried to scale its ambitions past being known as the “Roblox of VR” and scale its capabilities to meet its young user base. This year was big for the platform doing just that.
CEO Nick Fajt estimates that the company has tripled its total audience since this time last year as the company has made a concerted drive on new platforms. While a substantial portion of Rec Room’s audience still comes from its bread-and-butter VR audience, the platform’s base of console users has grown substantially in 2020 and, by the end of next year, Fajt expects that mobile will have grown to be Rec Room’s most common point of entry. Meanwhile, mobile Android remains one of the last major gaming platforms on which Rec Room still doesn’t have a home.
One of the company’s big aims heading into the new year is scaling their creation tools, which allow players to build their own experiences inside the game. More than 1 million of the platform’s 10 million registered users have engaged with creator tools, building 4 million distinct rooms on the platform. Next year, Fajt plans to scale up creator payments estimating that by the end of 2021 they’ll have paid out $1 million to their network.
Fajt says he wants creation tools on Rec Room to be more accessible to the general player base than other platforms, including Roblox, aiming to keep tools simple for now and push everyday users to invest time in the creation platform.
Image via Rec Room
“Roblox has an incredible business, that’s certainly no secret,” Fajt tells TechCrunch. “We want breadth of expression over depth of expression; we want anyone who comes into to Rec Room to be able to build.”
Despite the slow maturation of the VR market, Fajt says the company doesn’t plan on moving away from its VR roots anytime soon. The company has just updated its popular battle royale mode Rec Royale for the new Quest 2, as well as on iOS.
Powered by WPeMatico
OthersideAI raises $2.6M to let GPT-3 write your emails for you
When I send an email, it’s special. A crafted, beautiful thing that — who am I kidding, it’s mostly automatic. So why not automate it? OthersideAI is taking this idea (with a $2.6 million seed round) beyond the auto-responders and smart replies, using OpenAI’s GPT-3 language generation engine to turn bullet points into full, personalized messages.
GPT-3, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, is of course the latest version of the AI model that writes such convincing copy that everyone under the sun has let it write their column about it, and then attempted to surprise readers by revealing the fact at the end. (There are usually a few tells, though.)
Access is carefully limited, though, and the team at OthersideAI has a cozy but uncharacterized relationship with OpenAI . It began when the team was working on their previous project, and found they had more emails than they could handle. At the time, GPT-3’s predecessor GPT-2 was in vogue.
“We built a cold email thing with it, but then we thought — that might be the business we should be pursuing,” said CEO Matt Shumer. “So we decided to go all in.”
He and his colleagues Jason Kuperberg and Miles Feldstein built a demo that got a bit of attention when they posted it to Twitter, and soon obtained access to the new version of the GPT engine.
OpenAI arguably already did the hard part by building this astonishing language engine, but it’s not as simple as letting it run wild in someone’s inbox. Unrestrained, GPT-3 will chase its own tail down a rabbit hole, producing truly strange stuff, as any player of AI Dungeon can attest.
“GPT-3 makes an amazing demo, but putting it in a product is another story,” said Shumer. “Our job is in a sense to tame its creativity.”
The resulting product turns a summary or bullet points into a complete email, and looks like this in action:
Image Credits: OthersideAI
If you don’t like the result, or there’s an error, or you just like torturing AIs, you can hit the button and it’ll generate it again, differently. Tweak it a bit first and the system will understand that in the future you’d prefer the new way.
The GPT systems are trained on millions of words and phrases, and then generate text inspired by that corpus after being given an input to work from. In this case the system takes as input not just your bullet points, but other information from the email chain and the user’s past preferences.
That way it picks up not just context: it may say “It was great to sit down for coffee with you” if coffee is referenced even if you only wrote “good to meet” in the bullet. And it also learns your style, preferring certain words or phrases or learning that you like to sign off a certain way.
It can make good guesses at technical and financial details, such as in making a job offer:
Of course, for something so important, you may wonder: why bother letting an AI do it at all?
It’s sort of like how a car can go 120 MPH, but you never drive it faster than 80 (okay… 90). You want to know the thing isn’t going to fall apart as soon as it leaves its most obvious use case. For OthersideAI’s model, this means being robust enough to handle “serious” emails even if it’s most likely to spend its time replacing rote messages.
Kuperberg said the company, which has almost 10,000 people waiting to get into its test version, has seen interest from engineers and developers as well as sales and support people. One instantly sees the application in a support or sales scenario where a handful of scripted questions or replies can be re-generated to be different every time, or slightly adjusted for the person or situation. That avoids the feeling of receiving a “form email” even though it amounts to the same thing.
I mentioned the possibility of helping people who have trouble typing — someone who must write emails letter by letter using gaze detection might find this extremely compelling. Shumer said this hadn’t been on their radars to begin with but that in the last few weeks they’ve seen interest from this direction.
Shumer was careful to assure that security comes first and this isn’t a data-sucking operation — obviously no one would want to use a tool that reads your email and uses that info for nefarious purposes, with the notable exception of Gmail.
They feel secure in their approach, noting that Google seems more interested in selecting the right reply for the context, and text generation tools aren’t robust enough to handle the inputs OthersideAI’s GPT-3-based system handles with ease.
“If you want to make an email in the tone of the user, it can’t guess about the details. It needs a human. This isn’t a generated response, it’s taking direction,” Shumer said.
The $2.6 million seed round was led by Madrona Venture Group, with Active Capital, Hustle Fund, Chapter One and more participating. It’s all going toward building the team so the company can build a full-scale product.
Ultimately, they envision this as a small-scale test for a larger system of interlocking AIs that can safely and securely connect with one another, answering questions and providing information in a human-like way but with only the minimum human involvement. Obviously that’s somewhat of a long-term goal, but given all the talk for a decade or so about replacing email has come to nothing, perhaps it’s time to embrace it but let someone (or something) else take on a bit of the load.
Powered by WPeMatico
Pulumi raises $37.5M Series B for its cloud engineering platform
Seattle-based Pulumi, one of the newer startups in the ”infrastructure-as-code” space, today announced that it has raised a $37.5 million Series B funding round led by NEA. Previous investors Madrona Venture Group and Tola Capital also participated in this round, which brings the total investment in the company to $57.5 million.
The new investment follows the launch of Pulumi 2.0, which got the company closer to its vision of becoming what the team calls a “cloud engineering platform” and impressive growth over the last year, with a 10x growth in adoption in the last 12 months.
“We started with infrastructure as code, because we felt like that was a foundational piece that gave us the programming model, along with the cloud resource model,” Pulumi co-founder and CEO Joe Duffy told me. “That was an important place to start. With [Pulumi] 2.0, we launched support for testing, for policy as code — so that you could actually apply governance and compliance as part of your infrastructure management — and really helping more of the team work together.”
Indeed, after starting with a focus on infrastructure teams, Pulumi is now looking to expand across teams.
“The infrastructure team is becoming the nucleus that pulls the whole team together. We’re actually calling this cloud engineering,” Duffy explained. “What we’re calling cloud engineering is developers using the cloud in a first-class way, infrastructure teams helping them do that and increasingly pulling in security engineers to make sure that governance is part of the story as well. The 2.0 release was our first time exploring those adjacencies and trying to paint a path to realizing the full Pulumi vision.”
Infrastructure as code isn’t necessarily new, of course. The promise of Pulumi is that it isn’t hobbled by any legacy products but that the team designed it as a cloud-native product from the ground up. That’s something NEA’s Aaron Jacobson, who will join the company’s board, also stressed.
More on Pulumi
“If you think about how fast the cloud has evolved just in 10 years, Pulumi is built in a place of multi-cloud, of Kubernetes, of serverless, Jacobson said. “And much of the original infrastructure-as-code constructs didn’t even have those in mind. Since Pulumi is newer to market and has come after all those constructs, it just has better integration, it’s just a more delightful experience to developers.”
NEA’s Scott Sandell is actually taking this a bit further. “Venture capitalists are in the business of pattern recognition,” he said. “And the pattern that I recognized actually goes all the way back to when I was a product manager in the windows group. And I saw that developers don’t want to have to deal with complexity — they want to have the complexity managed for them.” That, he argues, is what Pulumi does for developers — and it surely helped both Duffy and his co-founder and Pulumi executive chairman Eric Rudder, who left successful careers at Microsoft to build this company.
In addition to the new funding, Pulumi also today announced that it brought in a number of new executives, including industry veterans Jay Wampold as CMO, Lindsay Marolich as senior director of demand generation, Kevin Kotecki as VP of sales and Lee-Ming Zen as VP of engineering.
Powered by WPeMatico