Sands Capital Ventures
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Snyk snags another $530M as valuation rises to $8.4B
Snyk, the Boston-based late-stage startup that is trying to help developers deliver more secure code, announced another mega-round today. This one was for $530 million, with $300 million in new money and $230 million in secondary funding, the latter of which is to help employees and early investors cash in some of their stock options.
The long list of investors includes an interesting mix of public investors, VC firms and strategics. Sands Capital Ventures and Tiger Global led the round, with participation from new investors Baillie Gifford, Koch Industries, Lone Pine Capital, T. Rowe Price and Whale Rock Capital Management. Existing investors also came along for the ride, including Accel, Addition, Alkeon, Atlassian Ventures, BlackRock, Boldstart Ventures, Canaan Partners, Coatue, Franklin Templeton, Geodesic Capital, Salesforce Ventures and Temasek.
This round brings the total raised in funding to $775 million, excluding secondary rounds, according to the company. With secondary rounds, it’s up to $1.3 billion, according to Crunchbase data. The company has been raising funds at a rapid clip (note that the last three rounds include the Snyk money plus secondary rounds):
While the company wouldn’t share specific revenue figures, it did say that ARR has grown 158% YoY; given the confidence of this list of investors and the valuation, it would suggest the company is making decent money.
Snyk CEO Peter McKay says that the additional money gives him flexibility to make some acquisitions if the right opportunity comes along, what companies often refer to as “inorganic” growth. “We do believe that a portion of this money will be for inorganic expansion. We’ve made three acquisitions at this point and all three have been very, very successful for us. So it’s definitely a muscle that we’ve been developing,” McKay told me.
The company started this year with 400 people and McKay says they expect to double that number by the end of this year. He says that when it comes to diversity, the work is never really done, but it’s something he is working hard at.
“We’ve been able to build a lot of good programs around the world to increase that diversity and our culture has always been inclusive by nature because we’re highly distributed.” He added, “I’m not by any means saying we’re even remotely close to where we want to be. So I want to make that clear. There’s a lot we still have to do,” he said.
McKay says that today’s investment gives him added flexibility to decide when to take the company public because whenever that happens it won’t have to be because they need another fundraising event. “This raise has allowed us to set up with strong, highly reputable public investors, and it gives us the financial resources to pick the timing. We are in control of when we do it and we will do it when it’s right,” he said.
Powered by WPeMatico
Tellius announces $8M Series A to build ML-fueled business data query tool
Getting actionable business information into the hands of users who need it has always been a challenge. If you have to wait for experts to help you find the answers, chances are you’re going to be too late. Enter Tellius, an early-stage startup building a solution to help business users find the information they need when they need it.
Today the company announced an $8 million Series A led by Sands Capital Ventures, with participation from Grotech. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $17 million, according to the company.
CEO and founder Ajay Khanna says the company is attempting to marry two technologies that have traditionally lived in silos: business intelligence and artificial intelligence. He believes that bringing them together can lead to greater wisdom and help close the insight gap.
“Tellius is an AI-driven decision intelligence platform, and what we do is we combine machine learning — AI-driven automation — with a Google-like natural language interface, so combining the left brain and the right brain to enable business teams to get insights on the data,” Khanna told me.
The idea is to let the machine learning teams and the business analysts continue to do their thing, but provide an application where business users can put all of that to work. “We believe that to go from data to decisions, you need to know not only what happened, but why things change and how you can improve your company,” he said.
The product takes aim at three employee groups. The first is the business user, who can simply query the data with a natural language question to get results. The second is a data analyst, who can get more granular by choosing a specific model to base the query on, and finally a data scientist who can enhance the query with Python or Spark code.
It connects to various data sources, including Salesforce and Google Analytics, data lakes like Snowflake, csv files to take advantage of Excel data or cloud storage tools like Amazon S3. It comes in two versions: one that the customer can connect to the cloud infrastructure provider of choice, and one which they run as a service and manage for the customers.
Khanna says that as companies struggled to change the way they do business during the pandemic, they needed the kind of insights his company provides, and business grew 300% last year as a result.
The startup launched in 2016 after Khanna sold a previous company, which allowed him to bootstrap while in stealth. They spent a couple of years building the product and brought the first version of Tellius to market in Q3 2018. That’s when they took a $7.5 million seed round.
Powered by WPeMatico