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Canva raises $200 million at a $40 billion valuation
Canva is now valued at $40 billion following a fresh capital injection of $200 million (USD) in a round led by T. Rowe Price. New and existing investors participated in the round, including Franklin Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investments, Blackbird, Felicis and AirTree Ventures.
This round solidifies Canva as one of the most valuable private software companies out there, and it also propels the Australian tech scene forward.
Co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins and her team started working on Canva in 2012, and launched the product in 2013. The premise behind it was relatively simple, but the technology itself… not so much.
Canva allows anyone to design. Presentations, t-shirts, brochures, flyers… you name it. The first step in this is creating a truly simple user interface, where folks can simply drag and drop components into their designs, complete with hundreds of thousands of templates, without doing a lot of fine tuning. The second step is creating a massive library of content, from fonts to templates to imagery, gifs and videos. The third step is to make that product accessible to everyone, whether it’s a platform or device or language or price.
Going after everyone, instead of just designers, has proved incredibly fruitful for the company. To be clear, designers still use Canva to lay out components they’ve designed in other products, such as Figma and Sketch, and Canva actually plays nicely with a variety of design software products. But Canva has no intention of going head to head with Figma, Adobe or Sketch.
Perkins described it with the example of a business card. Designers will create the components of a business card in their design platform of choice, and then lay out the template for business cards in Canva, sharing that template with the entire organization. That way, when someone gets a title change or a new employee comes on, they can actually edit the card themselves without the help of a designer and send it to print.
TechCrunch asked Perkins why Canva hasn’t extended the platform more aggressively into the workflow of professional designers.
“We would like to replace PDF,” said Perkins. “Rather than people sending PDFs backwards and forwards between the designer and the client, designers can just create a template for organization use. It’s less important for us to absolutely excel at things like vector design because there are amazing programs on the market that may be there. We really want to focus on that collaboration piece.”
Though a bottoms-up enterprise strategy is relatively popular these days, Canva was an early master of the model. Canva launched as a free product, and over time the company introduced enterprise layers into the mix.
As of now, Canva has more than 60 million monthly active users across 190 countries, with big-name companies on the enterprise plan. This includes Salesforce, Marriott International, PayPal and American Airlines. Canva expects to exceed $1 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2021. More than 500,000 teams are paying for the product in some capacity.
With a 2,000-person team, Canva will use the fresh funding to double its workforce in the next year.
Canva also shared its DEI numbers, with females representing 42% of the workforce. The company did not share any stats around people of color on the team.
Perkins explained to TechCrunch that a huge part of the company’s growth has to do with an obsession over creating a highly valuable free product.
“We intentionally make our free product extremely generous for a number of reasons,” said Perkins. “It’s critical both for our marketing and towards our mission of empowering people to design. But, as part of our marketing, it means that people are able to love the product, share it with their friends and family, and promote it on social media. And then that virality really rapidly fuels our growth.”
Alongside growing the team, Canva also has plans to further build out the product in the next year, launching website design soon. This will allow users to turn existing and new presentations and designs into a website, and even search for and buy a domain for that site.
Canva is also working on a new video editor and an offline mode.
Perkins says that Canva has two goals, and that each fuels the other. The first is to become one of the world’s most valuable companies, and the other is to do the most good that it can do.
The company has already joined the 1% pledge and has several efforts around being a force for good, including giving the premium product to more than 130,000 nonprofits, allocating more than 45,000 volunteering hours each year and launching Print One, Plant One, which is a project that plants a tree for every single print order placed through Canva.
With today’s funding announcement, cofounders Perkins and Cliff Obrecht are committing the vast majority of their own equity in the company (around 30%) to doing good in the world, with plans to do this through the Canva Foundation.
Perkins will be joining us at Disrupt to talk about the new funding, valuation, what’s in store for Canva, and share her broader thoughts on design as a category.
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Celonis snares $1B Series D on $11B valuation
Celonis, the late-stage process mining software startup, announced a $1 billion Series D investment this morning on an eye-popping $11 billion valuation, up from $2.5 billion in its Series C in 2019, quadrupling its value in just two years.
Durable Capital Partners LP and T. Rowe Price Associates co-led the round, with participation from new investors Franklin Templeton, Splunk Ventures and existing investors Arena Holdings. Other unnamed existing investors also participated.
While it was at it, the company announced it was naming experienced financial pro Carlos Kirjner as CFO. Kirjner’s most recent job was at Google, where he led finance for ads and other key product areas, according to the company.
The presence of institutional investors like T. Rowe Price and Franklin Templeton and the huge influx of capital could be a signal that this is the last private fundraise for the company before it goes public, and Celonis CEO and co-founder Alexander Rinke did not shy away from IPO talk when asked about it.
“It could be, yeah. It’s kind of tough to predict the future, but look, we’re very bullish about the growth and our prospects both as a private — and down the road — a public company, and obviously we now have backers that can invest capital in both [public and private markets],” Rinke told TechCrunch.
Rinke says what’s driving this interest is the tremendous potential of the market even beyond process mining, which he sees as just a starting point for a much larger market. “Process mining where we originated from is really just the gateway to build new processes and better processes for organizations, and as you think about that that’s a much much bigger market that we’re addressing,” he said.
The company’s processing mining software sits at the beginning of the process automation food chain, which includes robotic process automation, no-code workflow and other tools to bring more automated workflows to companies. It’s quite possible that the company could develop other pieces of this or use the new capital to buy talent and functionality, something that Rinke acknowledges is possible now with this much capital behind the company.
Celonis started by mapping out exactly how work flows through an organization, something that used to take high-priced human consultants months to figure out sitting with employees and watching how work flows. Once a company knows how work moves through an organization, it’s easier to find inefficiencies and places that are ripe for using automation tools. Speeding up that first part of the operation with technology can bring down the cost and accelerate innovation and change.
The company made a huge deal with IBM recently where IBM plans on training 10,000 consultants worldwide to use Celonis tooling. That brings the power of a company the size of IBM to one that is still relatively small in comparison — Rinke thinks they’ll reach 2,000 employees by year end — and that could be at least part of the reason investors were willing to pump so much capital into the company.
The company, which recently turned 10, currently has 1,000 enterprise customers, including Uber, Dell, Splunk (which is also an investor), L’Oréal and AstraZeneca.
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SecurityScorecard snags $180M Series E to measure a company’s security risk
SecurityScorecard has been helping companies understand the security risk of its vendors since 2014 by providing each one with a letter grade based on a number of dimensions. Today, the company announced a $180 million Series E.
The round includes new investors Silver Lake Waterman, T. Rowe Price, Kayne Anderson Rudnick and Fitch Venture, along with existing investors Evolution Equity Partners, Accomplice, Riverwood Capital, Intel Capital, NGP Capital, AXA Venture Partners, GV (Google Ventures) and Boldstart Ventures. The company reports it has now raised $290 million.
Co-founder and CEO Aleksandr Yampolskiy says the company’s mission has not changed since it launched. “The idea that we started the company was a realization that when I was CISO and CTO I had no metrics at my disposal. I invested in all kinds of solutions where I was completely in the dark about how I’m doing compared to the industry and how my vendors and suppliers were doing compared to me,” Yampolskiy told me.
He and his co-founder COO Sam Kassoumeh likened this to a banker looking at a mortgage application and having no credit score to check. The company changed that by starting a system of scoring the security posture of different companies and giving them a letter grade of A-F just like at school.
Today, it has ratings on more than 2 million companies worldwide, giving companies a way to understand how secure their vendors are. Yampolskiy says that his company’s solution can rate a new company not in the data set in just five minutes. Every company can see its own scorecard for free along with advice on how to improve that score.
He notes that the disastrous SolarWinds hack was entirely predictable based on SecurityScorecard’s rating system. “SolarWinds’ score has been lagging below the industry average for quite a long time, so we weren’t really particularly surprised about them,” he said.
The industry average is around 85 or a solid B in the letter grade system, whereas SolarWinds was sitting at 70 or a C for quite some time, indicating its security posture was suspect, he reports.
While Yampolskiy didn’t want to discuss valuation or revenue or even growth numbers, he did say the company has 17,000 customers worldwide, including 7 of the 10 top pharmaceutical companies in the world.
The company has reached a point where this could be the last private fundraise it does before going public, but Yampolskiy kept his cards close on timing, saying it could happen some time in the next couple of years.
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Color raises $167 million funding at $1.5 billion valuation to expand ‘last mile’ of US health infrastructure
Healthcare startup Color has raised a sizable $167 million in Series D funding round, at a valuation of $1.5 billion post-money, the company announced today. This brings the total raised by Color to $278 million, with its latest large round intended to help it build on a record year of growth in 2020 with even more expansion to help put in place key health infrastructure systems across the U.S. — including those related to the “last mile” delivery of COVID-19 vaccines.
This latest investment into Color was led by General Catalyst, and by funds invested by T. Rowe Price, along with participation from Viking Global investors as well as others. Alongside the funding, the company is also bringing on a number of key senior executives, including Claire Vo (formerly of Optimizely) as chief product officer, Emily Reuter (formerly of Uber, where she played a key role in its IPO process) as VP of Strategy and Operations, and Ashley Chandler (formerly of Stripe) as VP of Marketing.
“I think with the [COVID-19] crisis, it’s really shone the light on that lack of infrastructure. We saw it multiple times, with lab testing, with antigen testing and now with vaccines,” Color CEO and co-founder Othman Laraki told me in an interview. “The model that we’ve been developing, that’s been working really well and we feel like this is the opportunity to really scale it in a very major way. I think literally what’s happening is the building of the public health infrastructure for the country that’s starting off from a technology-first model, as opposed to, what ends up happening in a lot of industries, which is you start off taking your existing logistics and assets, and add technology to them.”
Color’s 2020 was a record year for the company, thanks in part to partnerships like the one it formed with San Francisco to establish testing for healthcare workers and residents. Laraki told me they did about five-fold their prior year’s business, and while the company is already set up to grow on its own sustainably based on the revenue it pulls in from customers, its ambitions and plans for 2021 and beyond made this the right time to help it accelerate further with the addition of more capital.
Laraki described Color’s approach as one that is both cost-efficient for the company, and also significant cost-saving for the healthcare providers it works with. He likens their approach to the shift that happened in retail with the move to online sales — and the contribution of one industry heavyweight in particular.
“At some point, you build Amazon — a technology-first stack that’s optimized around access and scale,” Laraki said. “I think that’s literally what we’re seeing now with healthcare. What’s kind of getting catalyzed right now is we’ve been realizing it applies to the COVID crisis, but also, we started actually working on that for prevention and I think actually it’s going to be applying to a huge surface area in healthcare; basically all the aspects of health that are not acute care where you don’t need to show up in hospital.”
Ultimately, Color’s approach is to rethink healthcare delivery in order to “make it accessible at the edge directly in people’s lives,” with “low transaction costs,” in a way that’s “scalable, [and] doesn’t use a lot of clinical resourcing,” Laraki says. He notes that this is actually very possible once you reasses the problem without relying on a lot of accepted knowledge about the way things are done today, which result in a “heavy stack” versus what you actually need to deliver the desired outcomes.
Laraki doesn’t think the problem is easy to solve — on the contrary, he acknowledges that 2021 is likely to be even more difficult and challenging than 2020 in many ways for the healthcare industry, and we’ve already begun to see evidence of that in the many challenges already faced by vaccine distribution and delivery in its initial rollout. But he’s optimistic about Color’s ability to help address those challenges, and to build out a “last mile” delivery system for crucial care that expands accessibility, while also making sure things are done right.
“When you take a step back, doing COVID testing or COVID vaccinations … those are not complex procedures at all — they’re extremely simple procedures,” he said. “What’s hard is doing them massive scale and with a very low transaction cost to the individual and to the system. And that’s a very different tooling.”
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Xometry raises $75M Series E to expand custom manufacturing marketplace
When companies need to find manufacturers to build custom parts, it’s not always an easy process, especially during a pandemic. Xometry, a seven-year-old startup based in Maryland, has built an online marketplace where companies can find manufacturers across the world with excess capacity to build whatever they need. Today, the company announced a $75 million Series E investment to keep expanding the platform.
T. Rowe Price Associates led the investment, with participation from new firms Durable Capital Partners LP and ArrowMark Partners. Previous investors also joined the round, including BMW i Ventures, Greenspring Associates, Dell Technologies Capital, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, Foundry Group, Highland Capital Partners and Almaz Capital . Today’s investment brings the total raised to $193 million, according to the company.
Company CEO and co-founder Randy Altschuler says Xometry fills a need by providing a digital way of putting buyers and manufacturers together with a dash of artificial intelligence to put the right combination together. “We’ve created a marketplace using artificial intelligence to power it, and provide an e-commerce experience for buyers of custom manufacturing and for suppliers to deliver that manufacturing,” Altschuler told TechCrunch.
The kind of custom pieces that are facilitated by this platform include mechanical parts for aerospace, defense, automotive, robotics and medical devices — what Altschuler calls mission-critical parts. Being able to put companies together in this fashion is particularly useful during COVID-19 when certain regions might have been shut down.
“COVID has reinforced the need for distributed manufacturing and our platform enables that by empowering these local manufacturers, and because we’re using technology to do it, as COVID has unfolded […] and as continents have shut down, and even specific states in the United States have shut down, our platform has allowed customers to autocorrect and shift work to other locations,” he explained
What’s more, companies could take advantage of the platform to manufacture critical personal protective equipment. “One of the beauties of our platform was when COVID hit customers could come to our platform and suddenly access this tremendous amount of manufacturing capacity to produce this much-needed PPE,” he said.
Xometry makes money by facilitating the sale between the buyer and producer. They help set the price and then make money on the difference between the cost to produce and how much the buyer was willing to pay to have it done.
They have relationships with 5,000 manufacturers located throughout the world and 30,000 customers using the platform to build the parts they need. The company currently has around 350 employees, with plans to use the money to add more to keep enhancing the platform.
Altschuler says from a human perspective, he wants his company to have a diverse workforce because he never wants to see people being discriminated against for whatever reason, but he also says as a company with an international market, having a diverse workforce is also critical to his business. “The more diversity that we have within Xometry, the more we’re able to effectively market to those folks, sell to those folks and understand how they utilize technology. We’re just going to better understand our customer set as we [build a more diverse workforce],” he said.
As a Series E-stage company, Altschuler does not shy away from the IPO question. In fact, he recently brought in new CFO Jim Rallo, who has experience taking a company public. “The market that we operate in is so large, and there’s so many opportunities for us to serve both our customers and our suppliers, and we have to be great for both of them. We need capital to do that, and the public markets can be an efficient way to access that capital and to grow our business, and in the end that’s what we want to do,” he said.
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Warby Parker, valued at $3 billion, raises $245 million in funding
Warby Parker, the optical e-commerce giant, has today announced the close of a $245 million funding round from D1 Capital Partners, Durable Capital Partners, T. Rowe Price and Baillie Gifford.
A source familiar with the company’s finances confirmed to TechCrunch that this brings Warby Parker’s valuation to $3 billion.
The fresh $245 million comes as a combination of a Series F round ($125 million led by Durable Capital Partners in Q2 of this year) and a Series G round ($120 million led by D1 Capital in Q3 of this year). Neither of the two rounds was previously announced.
In the midst of COVID-19, Warby has also pivoted a few facets of its business. For one, the company’s Buy A Pair, Give A Pair program, which has focused on vision services across the globe, pivoted to stopping the spread of COVID-19 in high-risk countries. The company also used their Optical Lab in New York as a distribution center to facilitate the donation of N95 masks to healthcare workers.
The company has also launched a telehealth service for New York customers, allowing them to extend an existing glasses or contacts prescription through a virtual visit with a Warby Parker OD, and expanded its Prescription Check app to new states.
Warby Parker was founded 10 years ago to sell prescription glasses online. At the time, e-commerce was still relatively nascent and the idea of direct-to-consumer glasses was novel, to say the least. By cutting out the cost of physical stores, and competing with an incumbent who had for years enjoyed the luxury of overpricing the product, Warby was able to sell prescription glasses for less than $100/frame.
Of course, it wasn’t as simple as throwing up a few pictures of frames on a website and watching the orders pour in. The company developed a process where customers could order five potential frames to be delivered to their home, try them on, and send them back once they made a selection.
Since, the company has expanded into new product lines, including sunglasses and children’s frames, as well as expanding its footprint with physical stores. In fact, the company has 125 stores across the U.S. and in parts of Canada.
Warby also developed the prescription check app in 2017 to allow users to extend their prescription through a telehealth check up.
In 2019, Warby launched a virtual try-on feature that uses AR to allow customers to see their selected frames on their own face.
The D2C giant, in its 10 years of existence, has balanced its technological innovation with its physical expansion, which could explain its newfound triple-unicorn status. These latest rounds bring Warby Parker’s total funding to $535.5 million.
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Rapyd, which offers fintech-as-a-service via a single API, adds $20M more to its coffers at a $1.2B valuation
One of the biggest trends in the world of financial technology has been an ongoing push towards consolidation, where larger fish are snapping up smaller fish (including a proliferation of interesting startups) to get improved economies of scale in a business model where every transaction brings incremental returns. But today, a startup that has built the concept of consolidation into its basic DNA has raised another round of funding to continue doubling down on its business.
Rapyd — a London-based startup that has built an API that lets customers tap into a range of financial services spanning payments, checkout, funds collection, fund disbursements, compliance as a service, foreign exchange, card issuing and soon logistics across a wide range of geographies — has picked up an additional $20 million. Rapyd’s valuation with the funding is now at $1.2 billion (up from just under $1 billion in October).
The $20 million comes from new investment firm Durable Capital Partners.
Notably, it was only in October that Rapyd announced a $100 million raise. CEO and co-founder and Arik Shtilman said that Rapyd has now raised $180 million in total, with previous investors in the startup including Oak HC/FT Tiger Global, Coatue, General Catalyst, Target Global, Stripe and Entrée Capital. (Stripe, itself a fast-growing fintech upstart, remains only a financial investor in the company, Shtilman confirmed.)
Durable is the firm founded by Henry Ellenbogen, formerly a star investor at T. Rowe Price, in what Rapyd said was the firm’s first investment. (Note: Durable was also announced earlier as an investor in Convoy’s $400 million round, some clear signs that it’s open for business now.)
With Rapyd only recently raising a round, Shtilman said that the reason for the — err — rapid follow up was because the company is gearing up to make some acquisitions, as it too moves in on the consolidation trend by adding in more tools into its “Swiss Army Knife” of services.
“We’ve started to look at two acquisitions that were bigger than what we originally planned, with prices more in the range of $100 million,” he said. Up to now, Rapyd has largely built its technology from the ground up, but this will be about “getting at new business very quickly,” he added. Both deals are in progress now and are likely to close in February / March. One is of a card issuing platform (a la Marqeta), and the other is of a company based in Asia Pacific that is a significant player in payments in the region.
The focus on Asia Pacific both for testing out new services and acquisitions is in part because this, along with Latin America, have shaped up to be important geographies for the company. In the last three months, Rapyd has signed on 20 additional large-scale companies, Shtilman said, with several of them based out of, or serving, customers out of the two regions.
In fact, Rapyd doesn’t talk much about actual customers, but they include e-commerce merchants, gig-economy platforms — including Uber — financial institutions, and technology providers. The basic pitch is that financial services are complex, and providing one like payments often means having to offer others. Building these from scratch if this is not your core competency can be time-consuming and costly, and so that is where a company like Rapyd steps in with its API.
This is what attracted its newest investor, too. “Durable Capital Partners LP has a vision to identify and invest in promising early stage growth companies and invest in teams that have bold ideas but can also execute at a world-class level and build much larger companies,” said Ellenbogen in a statement. “I believe the Fintech-as-a-Service category has tremendous potential as companies seek to embed financial services as an integral part of the next generation technology stack. I believe Rapyd is very well positioned to drive this trend and I believe Arik’s track record in scaling cloud-based businesses will deliver success in this sector.”
When we last talked with Rapyd in October, we asked Shtilman about whether the company would ever move into logistics as part of its range of tools. After all, when you think about the complexities of procuring, storing and moving goods, it’s clear that logistics is one of the cornerstones you need to get right in an online business.
He said that this was on the company’s roadmap, and now Rapyd is in a pilot in Indonesia — an interesting test bed, considering that the country’s is spread across thousands of islands — where it has integrated a logistics service and given access to a single merchant as stage one of its closed beta. It’s also in discussions with other companies about how it can incorporate their services into the Rapyd platform to provide further “logistics as a service” to customers. He also confirmed the Durable has been a help here, by making an introduction to Convoy as part of that wider strategy.
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WeWork accelerates IPO plans, plots September listing
WeWork chief executive officer Adam Neumann is already rich, but soon all of the early employees and investors of the co-working giant will be too.
The business, now known as The We Company, has accelerated its plans to go public, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. WeWork is expected to unveil is S-1 filing next month ahead of a September initial public offering.
WeWork declined to provide comment for this story.
The New York-based company, valued at $47 billion earlier this year, has long been rumored to be plotting a massive IPO. The WSJ reports it’s now in the process of meeting with Wall Street banks to secure an asset-backed loan upwards of $6 billion in what could be an effort to downsize its upcoming stock offering. WeWork disclosed massive 2018 net losses of $1.9 billion in March on revenue of $1.8 billion. To convince Wall Street it’s a business worthy of their investment will be a challenge, to say the least. Seeking capital elsewhere ahead of the IPO manages expectations and ensures WeWork ultimately has the cash it needs to continue its global expansion. Here’s a look at WeWork’s expanding revenues and losses:
- WeWork’s 2017 revenue: $886 million
- WeWork’s 2017 net loss: $933 million
- WeWorks 2018 revenue: $1.82 billion (+105.4%)
- WeWork’s 2018 net loss: $1.9 billion (+103.6%)
WeWork has raised a total of $8.4 billion in a combination of debt and equity funding since it was founded in 2011. Its IPO is poised to become the second largest offering of the year behind only Uber, which was valued at $82.4 billion following its May IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.
WeWork is said to have initially filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO in December, in part so it was ready to hit the public markets if other avenues for cash fell through. The business is one of several tech unicorns to attract billions from the SoftBank Vision Fund. Recently, the Japanese telecom giant eyed a majority stake in the company worth $16 billion, but scaled back their investment down to $2 billion at the last minute.
WeWork, despite mounting losses, is growing — fast. The company established a 90% occupancy rate in 2018 as membership totals rose 116%, to 401,000.
Still, whether WeWork, backed by SoftBank, Benchmark, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity and Goldman Sachs, will be able to match its $47 billion valuation when it goes public this fall is questionable. Early investors will be sure to see a nice return, but late-stage investors may be nervous about their prospects.
Neumann, for his part, has reportedly cashed out of more than $700 million from his company ahead of the IPO. The size and timing of the payouts, made through a mix of stock sales and loans secured by his equity in the company, is unusual, considering that founders typically wait until after a company holds its public offering to liquidate their holdings.
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CEO Jennifer Tejada just took PagerDuty public; we talked about the roadshow, the IPO and what comes next
PagerDuty debuted on the New York Stock Exchange today, and as we type, shares of the nine-year-old, San Francisco-based incident response software company are trading at nearly $39.
That’s up more than 60 percent above their IPO range of $24 per share, which was itself adjusted from the range of $21 to $23 that had been expected earlier and gives the company a valuation of close to $3 billion. That’s an awful lot for a company whose software helps technical teams at 11,000 companies spot problems with applications and respond to incidents. Though it’s growing quickly — revenue was up 48 percent last year — it still pulled in just $117.8 million in 2018. Meanwhile, its net loss widened last year, to $40.7 million from $38.1 million in 2017.
Certainly, its performance has to make the company’s investors — who last assigned the company a valuation of $1.3 billion back in September — very happy. Some of the VCs poised to win big if PagerDuty’s shares continue flying high include Andreessen Horowitz, which owned 18.4 percent of PagerDuty’s shares sailing into the IPO; Accel, which owned 12.3 percent; and Bessemer, which owned 12.2 percent. Other winners include Baseline Ventures (6.7 percent) and Harrison Metal (5.3 percent).
It’s also exciting for CEO Jennifer Tejada, a proven operator who was brought in to lead PagerDuty in 2016 and now becomes part of a small — but growing — club of women CEOs to take their tech companies public, including Katrina Lake of Stitch Fix and Julia Hartz of Eventbrite.
We talked with Tejada earlier today about the company’s big day. In addition to crediting company co-founders (and shareholders) Andrew Miklas and Baskar Puvanathasan, both of whom have since left the company, Tejada thanked PagerDuty co-founder Alex Solomon, who remains the company’s CTO. She also told us a little bit about what today has been like, and how the IPO changes things — and doesn’t. Our chat has been edited for length.
TC: First and foremost, how are you feeling?
JT: It’s been an incredible day. It’s been an incredible several months. You have to enjoy it when it’s going well.
TC: How does the vision for the company change now that it’s public? Have you been thinking ahead to possible acquisitions?
JT: The vision doesn’t change. We intend to do exactly what we’ve been doing, which is to provide the best real-time operations platform available to companies as they undergo digital transformation to meet the growing demands of their customers. We think we’re [facing] an early and very large opportunity that will be available to us for a long time. So our job continues to be to build great products, stay close to our customers, expand regionally and continue doing what has allowed us to be a successful private company.
TC: You and I had talked about the challenges of retaining employees in San Francisco when we sat down together in November. It’s a battle for every local company. How do you keep employees beyond the lock-up period? How do you ensure they stay focused on performance and not your share price?
JT: I think that mindset of, ‘It’s all over when you go public,’ is kind of a Silicon Valley fable. If you look at the most successful SaaS companies on the planet, they’ve gained 10x, 20x, 30x their value post their IPO. I also think what employees look for ahead of their financial success is career success. Am I being developed and recognized and can I build my career at this company? And we’ve worked really hard to create those career opportunities for our employees who [I think see, as I do] the IPO like a racing boat pushing off the dock, across the starting line, and into the open ocean, where the next adventure awaits.
In the meantime, we’ve already lessened our reliance on [overheated job markets] by opening offices in Toronto and Atlanta and Seattle and London and Sydney, even while we’re still hiring in San Francisco and Seattle.
TC: Obviously, Lyft’s shares have been up and down, owing to short sellers. Have you been monitoring short interest? Are you at all concerned about investors driving the price sky high, then selling it on the way down?
JT: I haven’t even looked at the stock price in the last several hours . . . There are a lot of things outside of my control, and the free market is one of them.
TC: PagerDuty is rare in that is doesn’t have a dual-class structure, which can greatly empower leaders over everyone else associated with a company. Presumably, this is a great relief to your investors; I just wonder whether it was ever a consideration?
JT: I’m a little bit of a traditionalist. I’ve been around long enough to know how checks and balances work, and a single-class structure made sense for PagerDuty. Also, dual-class structures tend to emerge more when you have deeply involved founders, and though Alex is still very much a part of the business, PagerDuty’s other two founders have worked outside of the business for some time.
TC: You have plenty of operating experience, including previously running Keynote Systems, but you’ve never taken a company public. Were there ways in which you found the roadshow experience surprising?
JT: I was surprised by how fun it was! [Laughs.] When you have a great story, and a great partner helping you tell it — in my case that’s [PagerDuty CFO] Howard Wilson, who I’ve worked with for 10 years — it’s great. We had a great reception from investors. I loved our IPO team; our Top were both led by women and whenever I had a question, they [had the answer]. I also had this cocoon of experience surrounding me thanks to our board. If anyone tells you that [in this position] they are super comfortable, they’re either lying or [clueless] but I was very lucky. I also have a whole bunch of buddies who are CEOs [and other executives] in SaaS and I’ve been shaking them down for advice for months, so I felt well-prepared.
TC: What was some of the advice you received from those friends about how your life is about to change?
JT: Some of it was about the need to keep people focused and not get distracted, to remind everyone that this is a milestone, not the goal. [Some centered on] surrounding yourself with a great team and the importance of great investor relations, a function you don’t have as a private company but that can create huge value and provide support and understanding of the market.
One CEO said to just make sure you keep having fun, to try and stay “you,” to find joy in the same things as before. There will be stressful moments and tough questions — that’s true of any company that’s scaling — but I heard a lot of advice about just taking care of myself, including on the roadshow. In fact, there were a lot of really supportive notes and private tweets that, in a job that can feel lonely, made me feel not alone, and I’m very appreciative of that.
TC: People call IPOs just another funding event, but that’s kind of baloney, isn’t it? If you had to list the most meaningful moments in your life on a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being the most important, where might today fall? Would today be up there on that list?
JT: When I think of most meaningful moments, I think of the day my daughter was born, and my wedding. Another day that was very meaningful to me was when I approved our pledge to donate one percent [of PagerDuty’s equity, one percent of its product and one percent of employees’ time] to social impact. We did it a lot later in the game than some companies; our equity was already valuable. But we knew that it was going to create meaningful impact over time.
But yes, it is a gratifying day, especially for the co-founders who were pulling the idea together for PagerDuty a couple of years before they even launched it, and for employees who’ve been with the company for nearly as long and who turned down safer and higher-paying jobs along the way. Seeing their joy today — that is a memory that will be in my top 10 for sure.
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1stdibs, the high-end online marketplace, just nabbed $76 million in Series D funding
1stdibs began pushing the antiques business into the 21st century long ago. Apparently, investors think it can push further and faster with $76 million in new funding. That’s how much the now-18-year-old, New York-based company says it just closed on for its Series D round, led by T. Rowe Price Associates, with participation from earlier backers Index Ventures, Benchmark and Spark Capital.
The company now boasts a valuation of well over $500 million, it tells the WSJ. Other investors in the new round include Sofina Group, Foxhaven Asset Management, and Allen & Company, as well as Michael Zeisser, who is the former chairman of U.S. Investments for Alibaba Group, and Groupe Artémis, which owns the auction house Christie’s.
1stdibs has always been an interesting startup, one that’s both loved by the antiques dealers who use it, and, apparently, feared. When, in 2016, 1stdibs became heavier-handed about enforcing the commissions from each sale on its platform — and on which it relies for revenue — more than 30 dealers reportedly met at a design store in lower Manhattan to grouse about the development, complaining that the company had begun prizing revenue growth over its relationships.
Of course, with venture-capital funding — and the company has now collected $170 million altogether — comes expectations. And despite pushback from dealers, they’ve apparently stuck with the platform. 1stdibs says an average of 50 items sell for more than $5,000 on its platform daily, and that 15 of these are items that sell for more than $10,000. (A quick scan suggests a very wide range of prices, with many vintage items priced at $5,000 or less, but plenty with far richer tags, like a three-carat ruby and diamond ring available right now on the site for a cool $200,000, and a chandelier dating back to roughly 1870 and selling, someone is hoping, for more than $300,000.)
With venture funding comes competition, too. Though 1stdibs may be the doyen of the online antiques market, other, newer companies eyeing its traction have since emerged on the scene, many of which have also since raised venture funding and are also growing fast, including The RealReal, which was founded in 2011 and is reportedly weighing a public offering; and Chairish, founded in 2013, which sells vintage and used decor.
Chairish has raised just $16.7 million from investors to date. The RealReal has raised $288 million.
In fact, a fight for brand recognition in what’s become an increasingly crowded playing field as the U.S. population ages (and more antiques are dispersed into the world) may ultimately lead 1stdibs to follow a growing number of formerly online-only marketplaces now extending their reach into the offline world.
Though the company already has a New York location, in a block-long, late-19th-century warehouse called the Terminal Stores building, CEO David Rosenblatt tells the WSJ that using its new funding, more brick-and-mortar showrooms may be in its future.
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