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Blameless raises $30M to guide companies through their software lifecycle
Site reliability engineering platform Blameless announced Tuesday it raised $30 million in a Series B funding round, led by Third Point Ventures with participation from Accel, Decibel and Lightspeed Venture Partners, to bring total funding to over $50 million.
Site reliability engineering (SRE) is an extension of DevOps designed for more complex environments.
Blameless, based in San Mateo, California, emerged from stealth in 2019 after raising both a seed and Series A round, totaling $20 million. Since then, it has turned its business into a blossoming software platform.
Blameless’ platform provides the context, guardrails and automated workflows so engineering teams are unified in the way they communicate and interact, especially to resolve issues quicker as they build their software systems.
It originally worked with tech-forward teams at large companies, like Home Depot, that were “dipping [their toes] into the space and now [want] to double down,” co-founder and CEO Lyon Wong told TechCrunch.
The company still works with those tech-forward teams, but in the past two years, more companies sought out resident SRE architect Kurt Anderson to advise them, causing Blameless to change up its business approach, Wong said.
Other companies are also seeing a trend of customers asking for support — for example, in March, Google Cloud unveiled its Mission Critical Services support option for SRE to serve in a similar role as a consultant as companies move toward readiness with their systems. And in February, Nobl9 raised a $21 million Series B to provide enterprises with the tools they need to build service-level-objective-centric operations, which is part of a company’s SRE efforts.
Blameless now has interest from more mainstream companies in the areas of enterprise, logistics and healthcare. These companies aren’t necessarily focused on technology, but see a need for SRE.
“Companies recognize the shortfall in reliability, and then the question they come to us with is how do they get from where they are to where they want to be,” Anderson said. “Often companies that don’t have a process respond with ‘all hands on deck’ all the time, but instead need to shift to the right people responding.”
Lyon plans to use the new funding to fill key leadership roles, the company’s go-to-market strategy and product development to enable the company to go after larger enterprises.
Blameless doubled its revenue in the last year and will expand to service all customer segments, adding small and emerging businesses to its roster of midmarket and large companies. The company also expects to double headcount in the next three quarters.
As part of the funding announcement, Third Point Ventures partner Dan Moskowitz will join Blameless’ board of directors with Wong, Accel partner Vas Natarajan and Lightspeed partner Ravi Mhatre.
“Freeing up engineering to focus on shipping code is exactly what Blameless achieves,” said Moskowitz in a written statement. “The Blameless market opportunity is big as we see teams struggle and resort to creating homegrown playbooks and point solutions that are incomplete and costly.”
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WeWork and SoftBank unveil the first 14 startups in their Emerge accelerator for underrepresented founders
SoftBank Investment Advisers and WeWork Labs say they’ve officially kicked off the first session of Emerge, an accelerator program designed for underrepresented founders.
In their press release, the companies describe Emerge as “launched by SoftBank with support from WeWork Labs” (that’s the co-working company’s global accelerator program), with a goal of bringing more equality to tech and venture capital.
It’s an equity-free, eight-week program that includes workshops, access to mentors from SoftBank and the WeWork community and sessions with SoftBank executives. It all culminates in a showcase event for investors and SoftBank partners.
The Emerge website describes the program as based in San Mateo, Calif. — but given COVID-19, the sessions and programming are all virtual.
“Supporting underrepresented founders is a top priority for us, ensuring we see more diverse startups across the tech ecosystem,” said Catherine Lenson, managing partner and chief human resources officer at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a statement. “There is a lack of diversity in the sector as a whole, and we need to do more to address it. That is why we’re excited to launch this program and to see the positive impact that these inspiring founders will have.”
This is also a reminder that while the larger corporate entities are currently embroiled in a legal and financial dispute, WeWork and its largest investor remain closely intertwined.
Here are the 14 startups in the initial program:
- Aquagenuity, which allows users to take any smart device and track water quality and monitor their environment in real time
- Bridge to College, which helps students choose colleges wisely by matching and providing data
- Caldo uses flexible automation and mobile designs to power satellite eateries for restaurants
- GameJolt, a platform for gamers to follow more than 100,000 games while they’re still in development
- Koniku, which is diagnosing disease using breath
- Mogul, which helps employers find diverse talent
- Moment AI, which uses AI to understand the driver and improve safety
- Node, which builds houses through a proprietary assembly kit
- OjaExpress, a marketplace connecting immigrants and foodies to local ethnic mom-and-pop grocery stores
- Proven, which offers personalized skin care products powered by The Skin Genome Project, winner of MIT’s 2018 Artificial Intelligence Award
- Rebellyous Foods, a production stack for plant-based meat
- ScriptHealth, which provides easy access to prescription medications
- Shyft, which builds IoT hardware and integrated software to connect and intelligently manage distributed energy resources
- SPS, a cross-border payments provider operating across all major U.S. states and Canada
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Lime’s founding CEO steps down as his co-founder takes control
In an all-hands meeting this afternoon, the scooter and bike-sharing phenom Lime announced co-founder and chief executive officer Toby Sun would transition out of the C-suite to focus on company culture and R&D. Brad Bao, a Lime co-founder and long-time Tencent executive, will assume chief responsibilities, Lime confirmed to TechCrunch.
“Lime has experienced unprecedented growth in the global marketplace under the joint leadership of our co-founders Brad Bao and Toby Sun,” the company said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “Fortunately, Lime’s structure allows for our executive leadership to be multipurpose and we are making a few changes to our team today to seize the opportunity ahead of us.”
Sun and Bao launched Lime together in late 2016. The San Mateo-based company had near-immediate success, attracting hundreds of millions in venture capital funding and reaching a valuation of more than $1 billion in only a year and a half’s time. Today, the company is valued at $2.4 billion and is expected to hit the fundraising circuit soon.
In addition to today’s CEO shake-up, Lime’s chief operating officer and former GV partner Joe Kraus has been promoted to the role of president. Kraus joined Lime full-time late last year after more than a decade at the venture capital arm of Alphabet.
Meet @tobysun and @Bradbao, our founders.#UnlockLife
Full Film: https://t.co/FyLLe86Ywt pic.twitter.com/0ndiBCTOIT— Lime (@limebike) May 23, 2019
Bao, given his Tencent tenure, seems like a natural choice to lead Lime into a more mature phase of business. Sun, a former investment director at Fosun Kinzon, has less operational experience than his counterpart, who was most recently the vice president of the Chinese conglomerate’s gaming decision.
News of Sun’s demotion comes hot off the heels of a fresh new marketing campaign, featured above, in which the Lime co-founders describe the scooter-sharing startup’s origin story and grand ambitions. The company, backed by Bain Capital Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity Ventures, GV, IVP and a slew of other top-notch investors, is active in more than 100 cities in the U.S. and 27 cities internationally. As of June, riders had taken more than 50 million trips on one of Lime’s vehicles.
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Remote workers and nomads represent the next tech hub
Amid calls for a dozen different global cities to replace Silicon Valley — Austin, Beijing, London, New York — nobody has yet nominated “nowhere.” But it’s now a possibility.
There are two trends to unpack here. The first is startups that are fully, or almost fully, remote, with employees distributed around the world. There’s a growing list of significant companies in this category: Automattic, Buffer, GitLab, Invision, Toptal and Zapier all have from 100 to nearly 1,000 remote employees.
The second trend is nomadic founders with no fixed location. For a generation of founders, moving to Silicon Valley was de rigueur. Later, the emergence of accelerators and investors worldwide allowed a wider range of potential home bases. But now there’s a third wave: a culture of traveling with its own, growing support networks and best practices.
You don’t have to look far to find startup gurus and VCs who strongly advise against being remote, much less a nomad. The basic reasoning is simple: Not having a location doesn’t add anything, so why do it? Startups are fragile, so it’s best to avoid any work practice that could disrupt delicate growth cycles.
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Truepill, the ‘AWS for pharmacies,’ gets $10M from Initialized Capital
Venture capitalists’ latest on-demand delivery bet is in the pharmaceutical space.
Truepill, an online pharmacy powering delivery for the likes of Hims, Nurx, LemonAID and other direct-to-consumer healthcare brands, has nabbed a $10 million Series A from early-stage VC fund Initialized Capital. The investment brings the Y Combinator graduate’s total raised to $13.4 million. Y Combinator, Sound Ventures, Tuesday Capital and others participated in the round.
Founded in 2016, the San Mateo-based startup employs 150 workers and plans to expand its team and fulfillment facilities into the U.K. with the fresh funding. Truepill is currently active in all 50 states and has delivered 1 million subscriptions for birth control, erectile dysfunction medication, hair loss treatment and more.
It is, as co-founders Sid Viswanathan and Umar Afridi explained, Amazon Web Services for pharmacies.
“We are really only scratching the surface of where this telemedicine landscape is going to go,” Viswanathan, who became a product manager at LinkedIn after the social network acquired his transcription service CardMunch, told TechCrunch. “We are catering to this first wave of those companies and we want to be that pharmacy fulfillment service powering that entire shift … We want to build the next generation of pharmacy infrastructure.”
Afridi, for his part, previously spent more than a decade as a pharmacist at retail chains like CVS and Fred Meyer.
In addition to operating a prescription delivery service, Truepill provides a set of APIs that give its customers programmatic access to its pharmacy and allows brands to fully customize packaging.
Foundation Capital, Index Ventures, Social Capital, Box Group and Joe Montana are also Truepill stakeholders.
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Scoop gets Bay Area cities to pick up the tab for carpooling to alleviate traffic jams
A startup that matches riders with drivers for paid and pre-scheduled carpooling, Scoop, has inked a deal with two big towns in the increasingly congested commuter hubs in the San Francisco Bay Area, Foster City and San Mateo. With this deal, each city is subsidizing carpoolers’ rides so that passengers only have to pay $2 each way, and will ostensibly refrain from driving solo or… Read More
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