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Alphabet-backed primary care startup One Medical files to go public
One Medical, a San Francisco-based primary care startup with tech-infused, concierge services filed for an IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission today.
Internal medicine doctor Tom Lee founded the startup, now valued at well-over $1 billion dollars, in 2007. Lee exited his company in 2017, leaving it in the hands of former UnitedHealth group executive Amir Rubin.
The startup currently operates 72 health clinics in nine major cities throughout the U.S., with three more markets expected to open in 2020 and has raised just over $500 in venture capital from it’s biggest investor, the Carlyle Group (which owns just over a quarter of shares), Alphabet’s GV, J.P. Morgan and others. Google also incorporates One Medical into its campuses and accounts for about 10% of the company revenue, according to the SEC filing. The filing also mentions the company, which is officially incorporated as 1Life Healthcare Inc. ONEM, now plans to raise about $100 million.
Presumably, this money will help the company improve upon its technology and expand to more markets. We’ve reached out to One Medical for more and so far have only been referred to its wire statement.
According to that statement, One Medical has applied for a listing as ticker symbol, ONEM under its common stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.
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In the shadow of Amazon and Microsoft, Seattle startups are having a moment
Venture capital investment exploded across a number of geographies in 2019 despite the constant threat of an economic downturn.
San Francisco, of course, remains the startup epicenter of the world, shutting out all other geographies when it comes to capital invested. Still, other regions continue to grow, raking in more capital this year than ever.
In Utah, a new hotbed for startups, companies like Weave, Divvy and MX Technology raised a collective $370 million from private market investors. In the Northeast, New York City experienced record-breaking deal volume with median deal sizes climbing steadily. Boston is closing out the decade with at least 10 deals larger than $100 million announced this year alone. And in the lovely Pacific Northwest, home to tech heavyweights Amazon and Microsoft, Seattle is experiencing an uptick in VC interest in what could be a sign the town is finally reaching its full potential.
Seattle startups raised a total of $3.5 billion in VC funding across roughly 375 deals this year, according to data collected by PitchBook. That’s up from $3 billion in 2018 across 346 deals and a meager $1.7 billion in 2017 across 348 deals. Much of Seattle’s recent growth can be attributed to a few fast-growing businesses.
Convoy, the digital freight network that connects truckers with shippers, closed a $400 million round last month bringing its valuation to $2.75 billion. The deal was remarkable for a number of reasons. Firstly, it was the largest venture round for a Seattle-based company in a decade, PitchBook claims. And it pushed Convoy to the top of the list of the most valuable companies in the city, surpassing OfferUp, which raised a sizable Series D in 2018 at a $1.4 billion valuation.
Convoy has managed to attract a slew of high-profile investors, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and even U2’s Bono and the Edge. Since it was founded in 2015, the business has raised a total of more than $668 million.
Remitly, another Seattle-headquartered business, has helped bolster Seattle’s startup ecosystem. The fintech company focused on international money transfer raised a $135 million Series E led by Generation Investment Management, and $85 million in debt from Barclays, Bridge Bank, Goldman Sachs and Silicon Valley Bank earlier this year. Owl Rock Capital, Princeville Global, Prudential Financial, Schroder & Co Bank AG and Top Tier Capital Partners, and previous investors DN Capital, Naspers’ PayU and Stripes Group also participated in the equity round, which valued Remitly at nearly $1 billion.
Up-and-coming startups, including co-working space provider The Riveter, real estate business Modus and same-day delivery service Dolly, have recently attracted investment too.
A number of other factors have contributed to Seattle’s long-awaited rise in venture activity. Top-performing companies like Stripe, Airbnb and Dropbox have established engineering offices in Seattle, as has Uber, Twitter, Facebook, Disney and many others. This, of course, has attracted copious engineers, a key ingredient to building a successful tech hub. Plus, the pipeline of engineers provided by the nearby University of Washington (shout-out to my alma mater) means there’s no shortage of brainiacs.
There’s long been plenty of smart people in Seattle, mostly working at Microsoft and Amazon, however. The issue has been a shortage of entrepreneurs, or those willing to exit a well-paying gig in favor of a risky venture. Fortunately for Seattle venture capitalists, new efforts have been made to entice corporate workers to the startup universe. Pioneer Square Labs, which I profiled earlier this year, is a prime example of this movement. On a mission to champion Seattle’s unique entrepreneurial DNA, Pioneer Square Labs cropped up in 2015 to create, launch and fund technology companies headquartered in the Pacific Northwest.
Boundless CEO Xiao Wang at TechCrunch Disrupt 2017
Operating under the startup studio model, PSL’s team of former founders and venture capitalists, including Rover and Mighty AI founder Greg Gottesman, collaborate to craft and incubate startup ideas, then recruit a founding CEO from their network of entrepreneurs to lead the business. Seattle is home to two of the most valuable businesses in the world, but it has not created as many founders as anticipated. PSL hopes that by removing some of the risk, it can encourage prospective founders, like Boundless CEO Xiao Wang, a former senior product manager at Amazon, to build.
“The studio model lends itself really well to people who are 99% there, thinking ‘damn, I want to start a company,’ ” PSL co-founder Ben Gilbert said in March. “These are people that are incredible entrepreneurs but if not for the studio as a catalyst, they may not have [left].”
Boundless is one of several successful PSL spin-outs. The business, which helps families navigate the convoluted green card process, raised a $7.8 million Series A led by Foundry Group earlier this year, with participation from existing investors Trilogy Equity Partners, PSL, Two Sigma Ventures and Founders’ Co-Op.
Years-old institutional funds like Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group have done their part to bolster the Seattle startup community too. Madrona raised a $100 million Acceleration Fund earlier this year, and although it plans to look beyond its backyard for its newest deals, the firm continues to be one of the largest supporters of Pacific Northwest upstarts. Founded in 1995, Madrona’s portfolio includes Amazon, Mighty AI, UiPath, Branch and more.
Voyager Capital, another Seattle-based VC, also raised another $100 million this year to invest in the PNW. Maveron, a venture capital fund co-founded by Starbucks mastermind Howard Schultz, closed on another $180 million to invest in early-stage consumer startups in May. And new efforts like Flying Fish Partners have been busy deploying capital to promising local companies.
There’s a lot more to say about all this. Like the growing role of deep-pocketed angel investors in Seattle have in expanding the startup ecosystem, or the non-local investors, like Silicon Valley’s best, who’ve funneled cash into Seattle’s talent. In short, Seattle deal activity is finally climbing thanks to top talent, new accelerator models and several refueled venture funds. Now we wait to see how the Seattle startup community leverages this growth period and what startups emerge on top.
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Buy your tickets to the 3rd Annual TechCrunch Winter Party
We love parties almost as much as we love startups, but we go absolutely bonkers for a hot startup/party mashup. That’s why we’re returning to host our 3rd Annual TechCrunch Winter Party in San Francisco on Friday, February 7. Even better news, party-goers — additional (the second batch) coveted tickets to this wild winter romp are available now. Better get your tickets while you can.
Last year’s inaugural event was a huge success, as nearly 1,000 of Silicon Valley’s brightest minds came to relax, connect and celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit of the startup community — and cast a keen eye over some promising startups.
This year’s soiree takes place at Galvanize and features tasty libations, delicious hors d’oeuvres and engaging conversation. That sounds so very civilized, right? Well, don’t dry clean your stuffed shirt just yet, because we’ll have plenty of party games and activities, giveaways and fun surprises. And, of course, plenty of photo ops, baby!
Galvanize may be a multi-level venue, but the space is still limited — as are the tickets. We’re rolling them out in batches over the next few weeks, so keep checking back if you can’t snag a ticket.
Here are the pertinent Winter Party details:
When: Friday, February 7, 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Where: Galvanize, 44 Tehama St., San Francisco, CA 94105
Ticket price: $85 (buy them here)
Here’s another great idea. Why just mingle and schmooze when you can mingle, schmooze and demo your early-stage startup in front of hundreds of the Valley’s top star-makers? Buy a demo table for $1,500 (the price also includes four attendee tickets). Demo tables are limited, so act now before other founders snatch ’em up.
Of course, no TechCrunch party is complete without plenty of awesome prizes, including TC swag and tickets to Disrupt San Francisco 2020. Come on out for a great midwinter’s night of relaxed connection, fun and opportunity. Get your tickets to the 3rd Annual TechCrunch Winter Party at Galvanize today.
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VSCO acquires video editing startup Rylo
The photo-sharing app behind the 2019 meme craze “VSCO girls” has acquired Rylo, a video editing startup founded by the original developer of Instagram’s Hyperlapse.
A spokesperson for VSCO, an eight-year-old subscription-based business on track to surpass 4 million paying users, declined to disclose the terms of the deal. Rylo had raised roughly $38 million in venture capital funding, reaching a valuation of $120.25 million with a $20 million Series B announced in October 2018, according to data collected by PitchBook.
San Francisco-based Rylo was backed by a number of institutional investors, including Sequoia Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, Icon Ventures and Accel — a Silicon Valley venture capital fund and key stakeholder in Oakland-based VSCO.
Founded in 2015, Rylo is best known for its 360° camera capable of creating cinematic video in 5.8K resolution. The device previously retailed for nearly $500 but now sells for as low as $250 on BestBuy.com. Under VSCO’s ownership, Rylo will focus exclusively on building out its video editing tools for mobile. The company tells us it will not continue to manufacture and sell its signature device but will continue to honor the warranty on previously sold cameras.
Rylo was launched by Alex Karpenko and Chris Cunningham. Karpenko, Rylo’s chief executive officer, previously founded Luma Camera in 2011, a video-capture, stabilization and sharing app acquired by Instagram in 2013. The deal marked Instagram’s first-ever acquisition; the app was subsequently shut down, with Karpenko joining Instagram’s team as a software engineer. Karpenko became key developer of Hyperlapse, Instagram’s time-lapse video app.
Cunningham, for his part, focused on iLife, Aperture and iPhoto for iOS as an engineer at Apple from 2008 to 2013. Cunningham eventually exited Apple for Facebook-owned Instagram, where he worked as an iOS engineer focused on Instagram Direct.
VSCO, led by co-founder and chief executive officer Joel Flory, charges users $19.99 per year for access to a full-suite of mobile photo-editing tools, exclusive photo filters, tutorials and more. In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Flory outlined ambitions to expand beyond photo-sharing and editing to video and illustration. The company’s latest deal, its first since its 2015 acquisitions of Moving Sciences and Artifact Uprising, confirms its intent to grow the business and carve out new revenue streams.
“We’ve seen video editing double on VSCO and DSCO, our GIF creation tool remains one of our most popular features,” Flory writes in a company blog post. “It’s clear that our users want more video tools and new ways to tell their stories through creative self-expression.”
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The 7 most important announcements from Microsoft Ignite
It’s Microsoft Ignite this week, the company’s premier event for IT professionals and decision-makers. But it’s not just about new tools for role-based access. Ignite is also very much a forward-looking conference that keeps the changing role of IT in mind. And while there isn’t a lot of consumer news at the event, the company does tend to make a few announcements for developers, as well.
This year’s Ignite was especially news-heavy. Ahead of the event, the company provided journalists and analysts with an 87-page document that lists all of the news items. If I counted correctly, there were about 175 separate announcements. Here are the top seven you really need to know about.
Azure Arc: you can now use Azure to manage resources anywhere, including on AWS and Google Cloud
What was announced: Microsoft was among the first of the big cloud vendors to bet big on hybrid deployments. With Arc, the company is taking this a step further. It will let enterprises use Azure to manage their resources across clouds — including those of competitors like AWS and Google Cloud. It’ll work for Windows and Linux Servers, as well as Kubernetes clusters, and also allows users to take some limited Azure data services with them to these platforms.
Why it matters: With Azure Stack, Microsoft already allowed businesses to bring many of Azure’s capabilities into their own data centers. But because it’s basically a local version of Azure, it only worked on a limited set of hardware. Arc doesn’t bring all of the Azure Services, but it gives enterprises a single platform to manage all of their resources across the large clouds and their own data centers. Virtually every major enterprise uses multiple clouds. Managing those environments is hard. So if that’s the case, Microsoft is essentially saying, let’s give them a tool to do so — and keep them in the Azure ecosystem. In many ways, that’s similar to Google’s Anthos, yet with an obvious Microsoft flavor, less reliance on Kubernetes and without the managed services piece.
Microsoft launches Project Cortex, a knowledge network for your company
What was announced: Project Cortex creates a knowledge network for your company. It uses machine learning to analyze all of the documents and contracts in your various repositories — including those of third-party partners — and then surfaces them in Microsoft apps like Outlook, Teams and its Office apps when appropriate. It’s the company’s first new commercial service since the launch of Teams.
Why it matters: Enterprises these days generate tons of documents and data, but it’s often spread across numerous repositories and is hard to find. With this new knowledge network, the company aims to surface this information proactively, but it also looks at who the people are who work on them and tries to help you find the subject matter experts when you’re working on a document about a given subject, for example.
Microsoft launched Endpoint Manager to modernize device management
What was announced: Microsoft is combining its ConfigMgr and Intune services that allow enterprises to manage the PCs, laptops, phones and tablets they issue to their employees under the Endpoint Manager brand. With that, it’s also launching a number of tools and recommendations to help companies modernize their deployment strategies. ConfigMgr users will now also get a license to Intune to allow them to move to cloud-based management.
Why it matters: In this world of BYOD, where every employee uses multiple devices, as well as constant attacks against employee machines, effectively managing these devices has become challenging for most IT departments. They often use a mix of different tools (ConfigMgr for PCs, for example, and Intune for cloud-based management of phones). Now, they can get a single view of their deployments with the Endpoint Manager, which Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella described as one of the most important announcements of the event, and ConfigMgr users will get an easy path to move to cloud-based device management thanks to the Intune license they now have access to.
Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge browser gets new privacy features, will be generally available January 15
What was announced: Microsoft’s Chromium-based version of Edge will be generally available on January 15. The release candidate is available now. That’s the culmination of a lot of work from the Edge team, and, with today’s release, the company is also adding a number of new privacy features to Edge that, in combination with Bing, offers some capabilities that some of Microsoft’s rivals can’t yet match, thanks to its newly enhanced InPrivate browsing mode.
Why it matters: Browsers are interesting again. After years of focusing on speed, the new focus is now privacy, and that’s giving Microsoft a chance to gain users back from Chrome (though maybe not Firefox). At Ignite, Microsoft also stressed that Edge’s business users will get to benefit from a deep integration with its updated Bing engine, which can now surface business documents, too.
You can now try Microsoft’s web-based version of Visual Studio
What was announced: At Build earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would soon launch a web-based version of its Visual Studio development environment, based on the work it did on the free Visual Studio Code editor. This experience, with deep integrations into the Microsoft-owned GitHub, is now live in a preview.
Why it matters: Microsoft has long said that it wants to meet developers where they are. While Visual Studio Online isn’t likely to replace the desktop-based IDE for most developers, it’s an easy way for them to make quick changes to code that lives in GitHub, for example, without having to set up their IDE locally. As long as they have a browser, developers will be able to get their work done.
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Microsoft launches Power Virtual Agents, its no-code bot builder
What was announced: Power Virtual Agents is Microsoft’s new no-code/low-code tool for building chatbots. It leverages a lot of Azure’s machine learning smarts to let you create a chatbot with the help of a visual interface. In case you outgrow that and want to get to the actual code, you can always do so, too.
Why it matters: Chatbots aren’t exactly at the top of the hype cycle, but they do have lots of legitimate uses. Microsoft argues that a lot of early efforts were hampered by the fact that the developers were far removed from the user. With a visual too, though, anybody can come in and build a chatbot — and a lot of those builders will have a far better understanding of what their users are looking for than a developer who is far removed from that business group.
Cortana wants to be your personal executive assistant and read your emails to you, too
What was announced: Cortana lives — and it now also has a male voice. But more importantly, Microsoft launched a few new focused Cortana-based experiences that show how the company is focusing on its voice assistant as a tool for productivity. In Outlook on iOS (with Android coming later), Cortana can now read you a summary of what’s in your inbox — and you can have a chat with it to flag emails, delete them or dictate answers. Cortana can now also send you a daily summary of your calendar appointments, important emails that need answers and suggest focus time for you to get actual work done that’s not email.
Why it matters: In this world of competing assistants, Microsoft is very much betting on productivity. Cortana didn’t work out as a consumer product, but the company believes there is a large (and lucrative) niche for an assistant that helps you get work done. Because Microsoft doesn’t have a lot of consumer data, but does have lots of data about your work, that’s probably a smart move.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – APRIL 02: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella walks in front of the new Cortana logo as he delivers a keynote address during the 2014 Microsoft Build developer conference on April 2, 2014 in San Francisco, California (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Bonus: Microsoft agrees with you and thinks meetings are broken — and often it’s the broken meeting room that makes meetings even harder. To battle this, the company today launched Managed Meeting Rooms, which for $50 per room/month lets you delegate to Microsoft the monitoring and management of the technical infrastructure of your meeting rooms.
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Startups Weekly: Understanding Uber’s latest fintech play
Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about how SoftBank is screwing up. Before that, I noted All Raise’s expansion, Uber the TV show and the unicorn from down under.
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.
Uber Head of Payments Peter Hazlehurst addresses the audience during an Uber products launch event in San Francisco, California, on September 26, 2019. (Photo by Philip Pacheco / AFP) (Photo credit should read PHILIP PACHECO/AFP/Getty Images)
The sheer number of startup players moving into banking services is staggering,” writes my Crunchbase News friends in a piece titled “Why Is Every Startup A Bank These Days.”
I’ve been asking myself the same question this year, as financial services business like Brex, Chime, Robinhood, Wealthfront, Betterment and more raise big rounds to build upstart digital banks. North of $13 billion venture capital dollars have been invested in U.S. fintech companies so far in 2019, up from $12 billion invested in 2018.
This week, one of the largest companies to ever emerge from the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem, Uber, introduced its team focused on developing new financial products and technologies. In a vacuum, a multibillion-dollar public company with more than 22,000 employees launching one new team is not big news. Considering investment and innovation in fintech this year, Uber’s now well-documented struggles to reach profitability and the company’s hiring efforts in New York, a hotbed for financial aficionados, the “Uber Money” team could indicate much larger fintech ambitions for the ride-hailing giant.
As it stands, the Uber Money team will be focused on developing real-time earnings for drivers accessed through the Uber debit account and debit card, which will itself see new features, like 3% or more cash back on gas. Uber Wallet, a digital wallet where drivers can more easily track their earnings, will launch in the coming weeks too, writes Peter Hazlehurst, the head of Uber Money.
This is hardly Uber’s first major foray into financial services. The company’s greatest feature has always been its frictionless payments capabilities that encourage riders and eaters to make purchases without thinking. Uber’s even launched its own consumer credit card to get riders cash back on rides. It’s no secret the company has larger goals in the fintech sphere, and with 100 million “monthly active platform consumers” via Uber, Uber Eats and more, a dedicated path toward new and better financial products may not only lead to happier, more loyal drivers but a company that’s actually, one day, able to post a profit.
VC deals
- IoT security startup Particle grabs $40M Series C
- Video news business Brut launches in the U.S. with $40M
- Crunchbase nabs $30M to become the ‘LinkedIn for company data’
- Muy raises $15M to expand its cloud kitchen concept
- Modus raises $12.5M for Pete Flint and others
- Quill gets $12.5M Series A to compete with Slack
- Fem tech business Inne secures $8.8M
- Oliver Space raises $6.8M to furnish your apartment
- Forecast raises $5.1M for its AI-powered project management software
- Capital gets $5M to help startups secure venture debt financings
Meet me in Berlin
The TechCrunch team is heading to Berlin again this year for our annual event, TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, which brings together entrepreneurs and investors from across the globe. We announced the agenda this week, with leading founders including Away’s Jen Rubio and UiPath’s Daniel Dines. Take a look at the full agenda.
I will be there to interview a bunch of venture capitalists, who will give tips on how to raise your first euros. Buy tickets to the event here.
Listen to Equity
This week on Equity, I was in studio while Alex was remote. We talked about a number of companies and deals, including a new startup taking on Slack, Wag’s woes and a small upstart disrupting the $8 billion nail services industry. Listen to the episode here.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on iTunes, Overcast and all the casts.
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Bosun Tijani talks strategy as CEO of Africa’s new largest tech hub
With CcHub‘s acquisition of iHub in September, Nigerian Bosun Tijani is at the helm of (arguably) the largest tech network in Africa.
He is now CEO of both organizations, including their robust membership rosters, startup incubation programs, global partnerships and VC activities from Nigeria to Kenya .
One could conclude Tijani has become one of the most powerful figures in African tech with the CcHub/iHub merger. But that would be a little shortsighted.
The techie from Lagos still faces plenty of challenges and unknowns in integrating two innovation hubs that lie 3,818 flight kilometers apart. Several sources speaking on background over the last year have indicated iHub was experiencing financial difficulties.
Tijani offered TechCrunch some initial details last month on how the acquisition will fall together.
But more recently he shared greater detail on his strategy for operating the multi-country innovation network. A big test for Tijani will be aligning the organizations on a path to sustainability. The buzzword is usually code for generating consistent operating income beyond expenses.
The growth of innovation spaces, accelerators and incubators in Africa — which tally 618 per GSMA stats — is often lauded as an achievement for the continent’s tech ecosystem.
But debate on how these focal points for startup formation, training and IT activity fund themselves is ever-present.
Grant income has served as a dominant revenue source for Africa’s tech hubs — including iHub in its early days — though many have worked to diversify.
That includes CcHub, according to Tijani, who plans to continue the trend across the expanded CcHub/iHub organization.
“When people talk about sustainability, we’ve been in business for nine years,” he notes of CcHub Nigeria.
“We de-emphasized grant funding six years ago; most of our revenue is actually earned revenue.”
On income sources Tijani looks to foster across both organizations, he named consulting services (for corporates, governments and development agencies), events services and generating greater return on investment.
iHub has been active with startup seed investments and CcHub has a portfolio of companies through its Growth Capital Fund.
“Our size will become a major part of us being able to invest in startups, and the longer we stay invested the more we will start to see significant returns and exits,” said Tijani.
The CcHub/iHub nexus will also use its size to leverage more partnerships. Tijani and team have already mastered gaining collaborations with big African and global tech names, such as MainOne and Facebook.
Tijani will look to connect iHub to CcHub’s Google-sponsored Pitch Drive — which has done African startup tours of Asia and Europe — and potentially take the show to the U.S.
“We’re talking about it,” Tijani said, of a U.S. pitch trip. And this could lead to a permanent presence in San Francisco for the new CcHub/iHub entity.
“Beyond just a tour, we want to build strong presence in the Bay Area,” Tijani said, but didn’t offer more specifics on what that could mean.
So on the list of things to emerge from the CcHub-iHub acquisition, African tech planting a big flag in San Francisco is a future possibility.
A more immediate result of the union between the innovation spaces will be Bosun Tijani becoming a regular sight on flights between Lagos and Nairobi.
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IoT security startup Particle raises $40M in Series C
Particle, a platform for Internet of Things devices, has raised $40 million in its latest round of funding.
Qualcomm Ventures and Energy Impact Partners led the Series C raise, with backing from existing investors including Root Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, Industry Ventures, Spark Capital, Green D Ventures, Counterpart Ventures and SOSV.
With its latest round of funding, Particle has raised $81 million to date.
The San Francisco-based startup provides the back-end for its customers to bring Internet of Things devices to market without having to shell out for their own software infrastructure. The platform aims to be the all-in-one solution for IoT devices, with encryption and security, as well as data autonomy and scalability.
That means more traditional businesses can buy a fleet of sensors and other monitoring devices, hook them up to their own machines and use Particle’s infrastructure for monitoring.
That’s a common theme that Particle sees, according to Zach Supalla, the company’s chief executive.
“More and more of our customers are in old-fashioned, even unglamorous, businesses like stormwater management, industrial equipment, shipping or monitoring any number of compressors, pumps and valves,” he said in remarks. “These businesses are diverse, but the common thread is that they need to monitor and control mission-critical machines, and we see it as our mission to help bring their machines, vehicles and devices into the 21st century.”
Particle said the funding round follows “significant growth” for its enterprise platform, seeing 150% year-over-year growth in revenue.
The company currently has 100 staff working to support 85 enterprise clients across agriculture, automotive, smart city and other industries.
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Slack investor Index Ventures backs Slack competitor Quill
Slack created a new solution for workplace communication, one copied by many, even Microsoft. But the product, which is meant to help individuals and businesses collaborate, has been critiqued for sending too many notifications, with some claiming it’s sabotaged workplace productivity.
Quill, a startup led by Ludwig Pettersson, Stripe’s former creative director and design aficionado, claims to offer “meaningful conversations, without disturbing your team.” The company has raised a $2 million seed round led by Sam Altman with participation from General Catalyst, followed by a $12.5 million Series A at a $62.5 million valuation led by Index Ventures partner and former Slack board observer Sarah Cannon, TechCrunch has learned.
Quill and Cannon declined to comment.
The company, based in San Francisco, has created a no-frills messaging product. Still in beta, Quill plans to encourage fewer, more focused conversations with a heavy emphasis on threads, sources tell TechCrunch . The product is less of a firehose than Slack, says former Y Combinator president Altman, where one can get stuck for extended periods of time filtering through direct messages, threads and channels.
“It’s relentlessly focused on increasing the bandwidth and efficiency of communication,” Altman tells TechCrunch. “The product technically works super well–it surfaces the right information in the feed and it’s pretty intelligent about how it brings the right people into conversations.”
Pettersson previously worked with Altman at his current venture, OpenAI, a research-driven business focused on development that steers artificial intelligence in a “friendlier” direction. Pettersson was a member of the company’s technical staff in 2016 and 2017, creating OpenAI’s initial design.
Index Ventures, for its part, appears to be doubling down on the growing workplace communications software category. The firm first invested in Slack, which completed its highly-anticipated direct listing earlier this year, in 2015. Slack went on to raise hundred millions more, reaching a valuation of over $7 billion in 2018.
Since going public, Slack has struggled to find its footing on the public markets, in large part due to the growing threat of Microsoft Teams, the software giant’s Slack-like product that debuted in 2016. Quickly, Microsoft has gobbled up market share, offering convenient product packages including beloved tools used by most businesses. As of July, Teams had 13 million daily active users and the title of Microsoft’s fastest-growing application in its history. Slack reported 12 million daily active users earlier this month.
Startups like Quill pose a threat to Slack, too. It created the playbook for workplace chat software and proved the massive appetite for such tools; companies are bound to iterate on the model for years to come.
Quill is also backed by OpenAI’s chairman and chief technology officer Greg Brockman and Elad Gil, a former Twitter executive and co-founder of Color Genomics.
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ZeroDown, valued at $150M, plans to take on Zillow
Days out of Y Combinator, venture capitalists valued ZeroDown, a financial and real estate technology startup, at $150 million, the company has confirmed. The startup had the perfect match of experienced founders and eye-popping ambitions to carve a new path to home ownership.
“I think we will be known as a company that makes it easier to buy a home in every single aspect,” ZeroDown co-founder and chief executive officer Abhijeet Dwivedi tells TechCrunch.
The startup, which has raised $30 million in total equity funding and more than $110 million in debt financing to help Bay Area residents make down payments on homes, now plans to take on Zillow and Redfin with its new home search engine.
The business, founded by former Zenefits chief operating officer Dwivedi, Laks Srini, Zenefits’ former chief technology officer, and Hari Viswanathan, a former Zenefits staff engineer, was founded last year and quickly landed backing from Sam Altman, followed by consumer technology venture capital fund Goodwater Capital. Targeting those in the Bay Area, where costs of home ownership are amongst the highest in the country, ZeroDown charges $10,000 to purchase your home outright and front your entire down payment.
That is, however, if your home is priced between approximately $550,000 and $1,750,000 and you have an individual or combined salary of more than $200,000, stock options and some money put away (or some variation of this). If you meet these criteria, ZeroDown will purchase your home and lease it to you. The goal is to eliminate one of the largest pain points of home-buying, the down payment, and facilitate more real estate purchases.
The company says it intends to expand the service outside the greater San Francisco area to cities like Denver, Seattle and Austin, but given the $10,000 price tag and large population of wealthy tech workers in the Bay, the business could flourish in this area without expanding.
With the launch of its home search engine, Dwivedi says users will be able to learn about more than just the square footage of a home. The tool tells users whether a potential home is naturally lit, if it has a large backyard, if it has a decent commute to your work and to various schools and, most importantly, whether it’s dog friendly.
ZeroDown has also partnered with a number of San Francisco-based tech companies, including Pinterest, Postmates and Square, to provide their employees a rebate if they choose to purchase a home using ZeroDown.
“We know first-hand what companies need to support a great quality of life and keep their employees in the Bay Area,” Dwivedi said. “A part of that is loving where you live — feeling part of a local community.”
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