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Amagi tunes into $100M for cloud-based video content creation, monetization
Media technology company Amagi announced Friday $100 million to further develop its cloud-based SaaS technology for broadcast and connected televisions.
Accel, Avataar Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners joined existing investor Premji Invest in the funding round, which included buying out stakes held by Emerald Media and Mayfield Fund. Nadathur Holdings continues as an existing investor. The latest round gives Amagi total funding raised to date of $150 million, Baskar Subramanian, co-founder and CEO of Amagi, told TechCrunch.
Bangalore-based Amagi provides cloud broadcast and targeted advertising software so that customers can create content that can be created and monetized to be distributed via broadcast TV and streaming TV platforms like The Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus and Pluto TV. The company already supports more than 2,000 channels on its platform across over 40 countries.
“Video is a complex technology to manage — there are large files and a lot of computing,” Subramanian said. “What Amagi does is enable a content owner with zero technology knowledge to simplify that complex workflow and scalable infrastructure. We want to make it easy to plug in and start targeting and monetizing advertising.”
As a result, Amagi customers see operational cost savings on average of up to 40% compared to traditional delivery models and their ad impressions grow between five and 10 times.
The new funding comes at a time when the company is experiencing rapid growth. For example, Amagi grew 30 times in the United States alone over the past few years, Subramanian said. Amagi commands an audience of over 2 billion people, and the U.S. is its largest market. The company also sees growth potential in both Latin America and Europe.
In addition, in the last year, revenue grew 136%, while new customer year over year growth was 44%, including NBCUniversal — Subramanian said the Tokyo Olympics were run on Amagi’s platform for NBC, USA Today and ABS-CBN.
As more of a shift happens with video content being developed for connected television experiences, which he said is a $50 billion market, the company plans to use the new funding for sales expansion, R&D to invest in the company’s product pipeline and potential M&A opportunities. The company has not made any acquisitions yet, Subramanian added.
In addition to the broadcast operations in New Delhi, Amagi also has an innovation center in Bangalore and offices in New York, Los Angeles and London.
“Consumer behavior and infrastructure needs have reached a critical mass and new companies are bringing in the next generation of media, and we are a large part of that growth,” Subramanian said. “Sports will come on quicker, while live news and events are going to be one of the biggest growth areas.”
Shekhar Kirani, partner at Accel, said Amagi is taking a unique approach to enterprise SaaS due to that $50 billion industry shift happening in video content, where he sees half of the spend moving to connected television platforms quickly.
Some of the legacy players like Viacom and NBCUniversal created their own streaming platforms, where Netflix and Amazon have also been leading, but not many SaaS companies are enabling the transition, he said.
When Kirani met Subramanian five years ago, Amagi was already well funded, but Kirani was excited about the platform and wanted to help the company scale. He believes the company has a long tailwind because it is saving people time and enabling new content providers to move faster to get their content distributed.
“Amagi is creating a new category and will grow fast,” Kirani added. “They are already growing and doubling each year with phenomenal SaaS metrics because they are helping content providers to connect to any audience.
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Former Nutanix execs launch new startup with $50M seed round
Today a new software company from two former Nutanix executives called DevRev emerged from stealth with a $50 million seed round from Mayfield Fund, Khosla Ventures and several industry luminaries. The company, which aims to bring the coding and revenue processes closer together, already has 75 employees working on the new software platform, which they hope to have ready to launch later this year.
It’s not every day you see a $50 million seed round, but perhaps the fact that former Nutanix co-founder and CEO Dheeraj Pandey and his former SVP of engineering Manoj Agarwal are involved, could help explain the investor enthusiasm for the new project.
Pandey says that he has seen a gap between developers and the revenue the applications they create are supposed to generate. The idea behind the new company is to break down the silos that exist between the front of the office and the back of the office and give developers a deeper understanding of the customers using their products, or at least that’s the theory.
“Dev and rev are yin and yang to each other. In today’s world they are really far apart with tons of bureaucracy between these two parties. Our goal to bring dev and rev to get rid of the bureaucracy,” Pandey told me
The company intends to build an API to help developers pull this information from existing systems for companies already working with a CRM tool like Salesforce, while helping gather that customer information for younger companies who might lack a tool. Regardless, the idea is to bring that info where the developer can see it to help build better products.
The way it works in most companies is customer service or sales hears complaints or suggestions about the product, and tickets get generated, but putting these issues in front of the people building the software isn’t always easy or direct. DevRev hopes to change that.
Navin Chaddha, managing director at Mayfield, whose firm is investing in DevRev, sees a need to bring these different parts of the company together in a more direct way. “The code that developers work on today is used by support as well as marketing and sales. By bringing the world of issues and tickets closer to the world of revenue and growth, DevRev’s unified platform bridges the gap between developer and customer and elevates the developer to a business leader,” Chaddha said.
With 75 employees working on the problem, DevRev is already a substantial startup. As experienced founders Pandey and Agarwal certainly understand the importance of building a diverse and inclusive company. Pandey sees the top of the employment funnel really being focused on engineering, design and business schools and the company is working to bring in a diverse group of young employees.
“[We are looking at ways] to search for talent and to promote talent, to make them into leaders. I think we have an empty canvas by the way, and we have this idea of COVID, and being able to do remote work has really grown the top of the funnel, the mouth of the funnel now can be anything and everything. […] [Colleges and universities] are I would say the real source of all diversity at the end of the day. We have seen how engineering schools, design schools and business schools are actually getting so diverse,” he said.
The company is working to build the product now and reaching out to developer communities on Discord, GitHub and other places that developers gather online to get their input, while testing and improving the product in-house and with design partners.
Nutanix, the founders’ previous company, launched in 2009 and raised over a $1 billion before going public in 2016. Pandey and Agarwal left Nutanix at the end of last year to launch the new company.
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What’s driving API-powered startups forward in 2020?
Startups that deliver products via an API are seeing momentum in 2020, as their method of serving customers becomes increasingly mainstream. And investors are taking note.
It’s not hard to find a startup with an API-based delivery model that is doing well this year. This column noted a grip of recently funded API-focused startups in May, for example, underscoring how attractive they are to venture capitalists today.
Yesterday, I caught up with Alpaca, a startup whose API allows other companies to add equities-trading capabilities to their own services. The company’s business is skyrocketing this year. According to data it provided to TechCrunch, Alpaca’s trading volume, processed for its developer users and customers, has grown from $388.1 million in January to nearly $1.6 billion in both June and July. Volume fell some in August, but according to CEO Yoshi Yokokawa, September’s trading volume could see Alpaca surpass its summer records.
Alpaca announced a $6 million round from Spark Capital last November that TechCrunch covered, with Social Leverage, Portag3, Fathom Capital and Zillionize helping boost its total capital raised to nearly $12 million. We confirmed with Yokokawa that his startup’s revenue scales with volume, meaning that the company’s top line has exploded this year, with trading volumes up 10x from July 2019 to July 2020.
Alpaca is a good example of what to think of when we consider an API-powered company versus something more traditional, like Robinhood, which provides services to end users. Alpaca considers developers as its users, and those developers bring Alpaca to market in their own fashion.
The developer-first model can lead to efficiencies. As Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson told TechCrunch regarding new software products: “I don’t want to go through a sales process,” he said, adding that he also doesn’t want to wait “a week to get a call back” but would rather “start exploring now.” With many API companies offering a free tier or low-cost options for tinkering, lowering sales and marketing costs in certain instances when developers sell themselves on an API-delivered service.
So what?
What’s driving the API-delivered model forward in 2020? Or, more simply, why do I keep hearing from API-powered startups that are either raising money, or are seeing rapid growth?
Alpaca’s Yokokawa has a theory. According to the startup exec, two macro trends are coming together to push API startups forward. The first is a simple evolution of the tech industry toward a new software delivery model. Yokokawa drew a timeline for TechCrunch, from legacy IT systems to on-prem software, through SaaS to API-delivered services today, the last in the bunch offering what he views as having the most flexibility. That trend has combined with more folks becoming developers, in his view, through traditional education, coding schools and even no-code’s growth.
An industry shift toward software and services in an increasingly on-demand model (SaaS is more on-demand than on-prem software, and API-delivered tools are even more on-demand than SaaS) and more developers to help plug APIs into other apps could make for a nice tailwind for companies employing the business model.
To get a bit more on the where we stand today, The Exchange chatted with Shasta’s Isaac Roth and collected notes from two Mayfield investors, Patrick Salyer and Rajeev Batra. There’s a general air of bullishness around startups selling APIs. Let’s learn how it is impacting venture interest.
The investor perspective
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Synthetic biology startups are giving investors an appetite
There’s a growing wave of commercial activity from companies that are creating products using new biological engineering technologies.
Perhaps the most public (and tastiest) example of the promise biomanufacturing holds is Impossible Foods . The meat replacement company whose ground plants (and bioengineered additives) taste like ground beef just raised another $200 million earlier this month, giving the privately held company a $4 billion valuation.
But Impossible is only the most public face for what’s a growing trend in bioengineering — commercialization. Platform companies like Ginkgo Bioworks and Zymergen that have large libraries of metagenomic data that can be applied to products like industrial chemicals, coatings and films, pesticides and new ways to deliver nutrients to consumers.
The new products coming to market
In fact, by 2021 consumer products made with Zymergen’s bioengineered thin films should be appearing at the Consumer Electronics Show (if there is a Consumer Electronics Show). It’s one of several announcements this year from the billion dollar-valued startup.
In August, Zymergen announced that it was working with herbicide and pesticide manufacturer FMC in a partnership that will see the seven-year-old startup be an engine for product development at the nearly 130-year-old chemical company.
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Nvidia acquires data storage and management platform SwiftStack
Nvidia today announced that it has acquired SwiftStack, a software-centric data storage and management platform that supports public cloud, on-premises and edge deployments.
The company’s recent launches focused on improving its support for AI, high-performance computing and accelerated computing workloads, which is surely what Nvidia is most interested in here.
“Building AI supercomputers is exciting to the entire SwiftStack team,” says the company’s co-founder and CPO Joe Arnold in today’s announcement. “We couldn’t be more thrilled to work with the talented folks at NVIDIA and look forward to contributing to its world-leading accelerated computing solutions.”
The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but SwiftStack had previously raised about $23.6 million in Series A and B rounds led by Mayfield Fund and OpenView Venture Partners. Other investors include Storm Ventures and UMC Capital.
SwiftStack, which was founded in 2011, placed an early bet on OpenStack, the massive open-source project that aimed to give enterprises an AWS-like management experience in their own data centers. The company was one of the largest contributors to OpenStack’s Swift object storage platform and offered a number of services around this, though it seems like in recent years it has downplayed the OpenStack relationship as that platform’s popularity has fizzled in many verticals.
SwiftStack lists the likes of PayPal, Rogers, data center provider DC Blox, Snapfish and Verizon (TechCrunch’s parent company) on its customer page. Nvidia, too, is a customer.
SwiftStack notes that it team will continue to maintain an existing set of open source tools like Swift, ProxyFS, 1space and Controller.
“SwiftStack’s technology is already a key part of NVIDIA’s GPU-powered AI infrastructure, and this acquisition will strengthen what we do for you,” says Arnold.
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