signalfire
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Where top VCs are investing in open source and dev tools (Part 1 of 2)
The once-polarizing world of open-source software has recently become one of the hotter destinations for VCs.
As the popularity of open source increases among organizations and developers, startups in the space have reached new heights and monstrous valuations.
Over the past several years, we’ve seen surging open-source companies like Databricks reach unicorn status, as well as VCs who cashed out behind a serious number of exits involving open-source and dev tool companies, deals like IBM’s Red Hat acquisition or Elastic’s late-2018 IPO. Last year, the exit spree continued with transactions like F5 Networks’ acquisition of NGINX and a number of high-profile acquisitions from mainstays like Microsoft and GitHub.
Similarly, venture investment in new startups in the space has continued to swell. More investors are taking shots at finding the next big payout, with annual invested capital in open-source and dev tool startups increasing at a roughly 10% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) over the last five years, according to data from Crunchbase. Furthermore, attractive returns in the space seem to be adding more fuel to the fire, as open-source and dev tool startups saw more than $2 billion invested in the space in 2019 alone, per Crunchbase data.
As we close out another strong year for innovation and venture investing in the sector, we asked 18 of the top open-source-focused VCs who work at firms spanning early to growth stages to share what’s exciting them most and where they see opportunities. For purposes of length and clarity, responses have been edited and split (in no particular order) into part one and part two of this survey. In part one of our survey, we hear from:
- Vas Natarajan, Accel
- Stephanie Zhan, Sequoia Capital
- Tomasz Tunguz, Redpoint Ventures
- Deepak Jeevankumar, Dell Technologies Capital
- Anna Khan, CRV
- Peter Levine, Andreessen Horowitz
- Ilya Kirnos, SignalFire
- S. Somasegar, Madrona Ventures
Powered by WPeMatico
Stampli raises $25 million in Series B to bring AI to invoice management
Stampli, the Mountain View-based company looking to automate invoice management, has today announced the close of a $25 million Series B round. The funding round was led by SignalFire, with participation from existing investors such as Hillsven Capital and Bloomberg Beta, as well as new investors such as NextWorld Capital.
Stampli launched in 2015 to build software specifically focused on invoice management. Part of the problem with invoice management is that many people in the organization procure services and contract vendors, but the people who deal with the majority of the paperwork are siloed off from that process. This means the folks in the finance department are often tasked with chasing down co-workers from other departments to resolve their issues.
With Stampli, the entire procure to pay process happens in a collaborative software suite. Each invoice is turned into its own communications hub, allowing people across departments to fill in the blanks and answer questions so that payments are handled as efficiently as possible. Moreover, Stampli uses machine learning to recognize patterns around how the organization allocates cost, manages approval workflows and what data is extracted from invoices.
In other words, over time, Stampli gets better and better for each individual organization.
Stampli charges based on the amount of transactions an organization has in the system, as well as how many “advanced users” are taking part in that action. Stampli recognizes the difference between users in the finance department, making high-level decisions, and other users from the organization who are simply collaborating on the platform much more infrequently.
Co-founder and CEO Eyal Feldman believes that another big differentiator for the company is that it has specifically decided to be payments-agnostic, letting customers choose their payments provider and maintain control of that part of the system.
As of right now, Stampli is processing more than $12 billion in invoices annually, with more than 1,900 businesses and 40,000 users on the platform.
This new round comes on the heels of a $6.7 million Series A round from August 2018, also led by SignalFire, with participation from UpWest Labs, Bloomberg Beta and Hillsven Capital. This brings Stampli’s total funding to $34.7 million.
Powered by WPeMatico
YouTube founder secretly building sports fan game GreenPark
Chad Hurley is hunting for what comes after fantasy sports. He envisions a new way for fans to play by watching live and cheering for the athletes they love. Beyond a few scraps of info the YouTube co-founder would share and his new startup’s job listings revealed, we don’t know what Hurley’s game will feel like. But the company is called GreenPark Sports, and it’s launching in spring 2020.
“There is an absence of compelling, inclusive ways for large masses of sports fans to compete together,” Hurley tells me. “The idea of a ‘sports fan’ has evolved -0 it is now more a social behavior than ever before. We’re looking at a much bigger, inclusive way for all fans of sports and esports teams to play.”
Hurley already has an all-star team. One of GreenPark’s co-founders, Nick Swinmurn, helped start Zappos, while another, Ken Martin, created marketing agency BLITZ. Together they’ve raised an $8.5 million seed round led by SignalFire and joined by Sapphire Sports and Founders Fund. “With this team’s impeccable track record and vision for the future of fandom, this was an investment we had to make,” said Chris Farmer, founder and CEO of SignalFire .
It all comes down to allegiance — something Hurley, Swinmurn and Martin truly understand. Everyone is seeking ways to belong and emblems to represent them. In an age when many of our most prized possessions, from photographs to record collections, have been digitized, we lack tangible objects that center our individuality. Culture increasingly centers around landmark events, with what we’ve done mattering more than what we own.
GreenPark could seize upon this moment by helping us align our identities with a team. This instantly unlocks a like-minded community, a recurrent activity and a unified aesthetic. And when reality gets heavy, people can lose themselves by hitching their spirits to the scoreboard.
Rather than just tabulating results after the match like in fantasy sports, GreenPark wants to be entwined with the spectacle as it happens. “We’re going to be working with a mix of ways to visualize the live game — from unique gamecast-like data to highlight clips. The social viewing experience can be much more than just the straight live video,” Hurley explains.
He came up with GreenPark after selling assets of his video editing app Mixbit to BlueJeans a year ago. Hurley already had an interactive relationship with sports… though one that’s reserved for the rich: he’s part owner of the Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Football Club. Meanwhile, Swinmurn co-founded the Burlingame Dragons Football Club affiliated with San Jose’s team, and is on the board of Denmark’s FC Helsingør.
Those experiences taught them the satisfaction that comes from a deeper sense of ownership or allegiance with a team. GreenPark will give an opportunity for anyone to turn fandom into its own sport. “We shared a love of sports and set out to look into opportunities around legalized sports betting in the U.S.,” Hurley tells me. But quickly they found “it was obvious the regulated space wouldn’t allow us to innovate as quickly as we wanted,” and they saw more opportunity amidst a younger mainstream audience.
“We’re not ready to disclose publicly the exact detailed gameplay yet,” Hurley says. But here’s what we could cobble together from around the web.
GreenPark Sports lets you “Destroy the other teams’ fans” to “climb the leaderboards,” its site says cryptically. According to job listings, it will pipe in live game data, starting with the NBA and expanding to other leagues, and offer cartoon characters with facial expressions and full-body gestures to let users live out the highs and lows of matches. Don’t expect trivia questions or player stat memorization. It almost sounds like a massively multiplayer online fan arena.
As with blockbuster games Fortnite or League of Legends, GreenPark is free-to-play. But a mention of virtual clothing hints at monetization, where you could spruce up avatars with digital team apparel. Hurley tells me, “We are in the perfect storm of the thirst for innovation at the traditional league level, the next level of maturing for esports, investment in sports betting and overall dire need to better understand today’s largest populace of sports fans — millennial / Gen Z.” The closed beta launches in the spring.
There’s a massive hole to fill in the wake of the Draft Kings / FanDuel marketing surge a few years ago. Most apps in the space just carry scores or analysis, rather than community. “What’s amazing about being a fan of a team or player is the common bond you have with other fans,” Hurley explains, “where even if you don’t know the other fans of your team — you are all in it to win it — together.”
Publications like The Athletic have proven there are plenty of fans willing to pay to feel closer to their favorite teams. The most direct competitor for GreenPark might be Strafe, which lets you track and predict the winners of esports matches.
People already spend tons of time on building fictional worlds like Minecraft, and money outfitting their Fortnite avatar with the coolest clothes. If GreenPark can create a space for sports fans’ self-expression, it could create the online destination for legions of IRL enthusiasts that see who they root for as core to who they are.
Powered by WPeMatico
Andreessen pours $22M into PlanetScale’s database-as-a-service
PlanetScale’s founders invented the technology called Vitess that scaled YouTube. Now they’re selling it to any enterprise that wants their data both secure and consistently accessible. And thanks to its ability to re-shard databases while they’re operating, it can solve businesses’ troubles with GDPR, which demands they store some data in the same locality as the user to whom it belongs.
The potential to be a computing backbone that both competes with and complements Amazon’s AWS has now attracted a mammoth $22 million Series A for PlanetScale. Led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by the firm’s Cultural Leadership Fund, head of the US Digital Service Matt Cutts, plus existing investor SignalFire, the round is a tall step up from the startup’s $3 million seed it raised a year ago. Andreessen general partner Peter Levine will join the PlanetScale board, bringing his enterprise launch expertise.
PlanetScale co-founders (from left): Jitendra Vaidya and Sugu Sougoumarane
“What we’re discovering is that people we thought were at one point competitors, like AWS and hosted relational databases — we’re discovering they may be our partners instead since we’re seeing a reasonable demand for our services in front of AWS’ hosted databases,” says CEO Jitendra Vaidya. “We are growing quite well.” Competing database startups were raising big rounds, so PlanetScale connected with Andreessen in search of more firepower.
Vitess is a horizontal scaling sharding middleware engineered for MySQ that was built to run on “Borg” the predecessor to Kubernetes at Google. It lets businesses segment their database to boost memory efficiency without sacrificing reliable access speeds. PlanetScale sells Vitess in four ways: hosting on its database-as-a-service, licensing of the tech that can be run on-premises for clients or through another cloud provider, professional training for using Vitess and on-demand support for users of the open-source version of Vitess. PlanetScale now has 18 customers paying for licenses and services, and plans to release its own multi-cloud hosting to a general audience soon.
With data becoming so valuable and security concerns rising, many companies want cross-data center durability so one failure doesn’t break their app or delete information. But often the trade-off is unevenness in how long data takes to access. “If you take 100 queries, 99 might return results in 10 milliseconds, but one will take 10 seconds. That unpredictability is not something that apps can live with,” Vaidya tells me. PlanetScale’s Vitess gives enterprises the protection of redundancy but consistent speeds. It also allows businesses to continually update their replication logs so they’re only seconds behind what’s in production rather than doing periodic exports that can make it tough to track transactions and other data in real-time.
Now equipped with a ton of cash for a 20-person team, PlanetScale plans to double its staff by adding more sales, marketing and support. “We don’t have any concerns about the engineering side of things, but we need to figure out a go-to-market strategy for enterprises,” Vaidya explains. “As we’re both technical co-founders, about half of our funding is going towards hiring those functions [outside of engineering], and making that part of our organization work well and get results.”
But while a $22 million round from Andreessen Horowitz would be exciting for almost any startup, the funding for PlanetScale could assist the whole startup ecosystem. GDPR was designed to reign in tech giants. In reality, it applied compliance costs to all companies — yet the rich giants have more money to pay for those efforts. For a smaller startup, figuring out how to obey GDPR’s data localization mandate could be a huge engineering detour they can hardly afford. PlanetScale offers them not only databases but compliance-as-a-service too. It shards their data to where it has to be, and the startup can focus on their actual product.
Powered by WPeMatico
OneSignal raises $7M for its free push notification tools
Push notifications are one of the main ways we connect with our apps — but according to OneSignal CEO George Deglin, most of the tools for managing those notifications are too expensive without offering the features that developers need. Deglin’s company started out as a Y Combinator-backed mobile developer called Hiptic Games. It was as a game developer that he said he first… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
Robots and on-board ovens deliver on Zume’s promise of better pizza
Today, in a world of bacon-wrapped crust and custom-modified Chevys with pizza warmers, being excited about pizza is just not as easy as it used to be. Zume Pizza founder Julia Collins and her Elon Musk-esque approach to pizza doesn’t care much for the rest of the pizza industry. In her mind, the pizzavations of the previous decades are irrelevant if the pies arrive soggy, cold and… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico