Tiger Global Management
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Splunk acquires cloud monitoring service SignalFx for $1.05B
Splunk, the publicly traded data processing and analytics company, today announced that it has acquired SignalFx for a total price of about $1.05 billion. Approximately 60% of this will be in cash and 40% in Splunk common stock. The companies expect the acquisition to close in the second half of 2020.
SignalFx, which emerged from stealth in 2015, provides real-time cloud monitoring solutions, predictive analytics and more. Upon close, Splunk argues, this acquisition will allow it to become a leader “in observability and APM for organizations at every stage of their cloud journey, from cloud-native apps to homegrown on-premises applications.”
Indeed, the acquisition will likely make Splunk a far stronger player in the cloud space as it expands its support for cloud-native applications and the modern infrastructures and architectures those rely on.
Ahead of the acquisition, SignalFx had raised a total of $178.5 million, according to Crunchbase, including a recent Series E round. Investors include General Catalyst, Tiger Global Management, Andreessen Horowitz and CRV. Its customers include the likes of AthenaHealth, Change.org, Kayak, NBCUniversal and Yelp.
“Data fuels the modern business, and the acquisition of SignalFx squarely puts Splunk in position as a leader in monitoring and observability at massive scale,” said Doug Merritt, president and CEO, Splunk, in today’s announcement. “SignalFx will support our continued commitment to giving customers one platform that can monitor the entire enterprise application lifecycle. We are also incredibly impressed by the SignalFx team and leadership, whose expertise and professionalism are a strong addition to the Splunk family.”
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Startups Weekly: The Peloton IPO (bull vs. bear)
Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a newsletter published every Saturday that dives into the week’s noteworthy venture capital deals, funds and trends. Before I dive into this week’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about the proliferation of billion-dollar companies. Before that, I noted the uptick in beverage startup rounds. Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets.
Now, time for some quick notes on Peloton’s confirmed initial public offering. The fitness unicorn, which sells a high-tech exercise bike and affiliated subscription to original fitness content, confidentially filed to go public earlier this week. Unfortunately, there’s no S-1 to pore through yet; all I can do for now is speculate a bit about Peloton’s long-term potential.
What I know:
- Peloton is profitable. Founder and chief executive John Foley said at one point that he expected 2018 revenues of $700 million, more than double 2017’s revenues of $400 million.
- There is strong investor demand for Peloton stock. Javier Avolos, vice president at the secondary marketplace Forge, tells TechCrunch’s Darrell Etherington that “investor interest [in Peloton] has been consistently strong from both institutional and retail investors. Our view is that this is a result of perceived strong performance by the company, a clear path to a liquidity event, and historically low availability of supply in the market due to restrictions around selling or transferring shares in the secondary market.”
- Peloton, despite initially struggling to raise venture capital, has accrued nearly $1 billion in funding to date. Most recently, it raised a $550 million Series F at a $4.25 billion valuation. It’s backed by Tiger Global Management, TCV, Kleiner Perkins and others.
A bullish perspective: Peloton, an early player in the fitness tech space, has garnered a cult following since its founding in 2012. There is something to be said about being an early-player in a burgeoning industry — tech-enabled personal fitness equipment, that is — and Peloton has certainly proven its bike to be genre-defining technology. Plus, Peloton is actually profitable and we all know that’s rare for a Silicon Valley company. (Peloton is actually New York-based but you get the idea.)
A bearish perspective: The market for fitness tech is heating up, largely as a result of Peloton’s own success. That means increased competition. Peloton has not proven itself to be a nimble business in the slightest. As Darrell noted in his piece, in its seven years of operation, “Peloton has put out exactly two pieces of hardware, and seems unlikely to ramp that pace. The cost of their equipment makes frequent upgrade cycles unlikely, and there’s a limited field in terms of other hardware types to even consider making. If hardware innovation is your measure for success, Peloton hasn’t really shown that it’s doing enough in this category to fend of legacy players or new entrants.”
TL;DR: Peloton, unlike any other company before it, sits evenly at the intersection of fitness, software, hardware and media. One wonders how Wall Street will value a company so varied. Will Peloton be yet another example of an over-valued venture-backed unicorn that flounders once public? Or will it mature in time to triumphantly navigate the uncertain public company waters? Let me know what you think. And If you want more Peloton deets, read Darrell’s full story: Weighing Peloton’s opportunity and risks ahead of IPO.
Anyways…
Public company corner
In addition to Peloton’s IPO announcement, CrowdStrike boosted its IPO expectations. Aside from those two updates, IPO land was pretty quiet this week. Let’s check in with some recently public businesses instead.
Uber: The ride-hailing giant has let go of two key managers: its chief operating officer and chief marketing officer. All of this comes just a few weeks after it went public. On the brightside, Uber traded above its IPO price for the first time this week. The bump didn’t last long but now that the investment banks behind its IPO are allowed to share their bullish perspective publicly, things may improve. Or not.
Zoom: The video communications business posted its first earnings report this week. As you might have guessed, things are looking great for Zoom. In short, it beat estimates with revenues of $122 million in the last quarter. That’s growth of 109% year-over-year. Not bad Zoom, not bad at all.
We cover a lot of startup and big tech news here at TechCrunch. Sometimes, the really great features writers put a lot of time and energy into fall between the cracks. With that said, I just want to take a moment this week to highlight a few of the great stories published on our site recently:
A peek inside Sequoia Capital’s low-flying, wide-reaching scout program by Connie Loizos
How to calculate your event ROI by Sarah Shewey
Why four security companies just sold for $1.5B by Ron Miller
In case you missed it, Bird is in negotiations to acquire Scoot, a smaller scooter upstart with licenses to operate in the coveted market of San Francisco. Scoot was last valued at around $71 million, having raised about $47 million in equity funding to date from Scout Ventures, Vision Ridge Partners, angel investor Joanne Wilson and more. Bird, of course, is a whole lot larger, valued at $2.3 billion recently.
On top of this deal, there was no shortage of scooter news this week. Bird, for example, unveiled the Bird Cruiser, an electric vehicle that is essentially a blend between a bicycle and a moped. Here’s more on the booming scooter industry.
Thumbtack is raising up to $120M on a flat valuation
Depop, a shopping app for millennials, bags $62M
Fitness startup Mirror nears $300M valuation with fresh funding
Step raises $22.5M led by Stripe to build no-fee banking services for teens
Possible Finance lands $10.5M to provide kinder short-term loans
Voatz raises $7M for its mobile voting technology
Flexible housing startup raises $2.5M
Legacy, a sperm testing and freezing service, raises $1.5M
If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s venture-focused podcast, Equity. In this week’s episode, available here, Crunchbase News editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm and I discuss how a future without the SoftBank Vision Fund would look, Peloton’s IPO and data-driven investing.
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India’s Locus raises $22 million to expand its logistics management business
Locus, an Indian startup that uses AI to help businesses map out their logistics, has raised $22 million in Series B funding to expand its operations in international markets.
The financing round for the four-year-old startup was led by Falcon Edge Capital and Tiger Global. Existing investors Exfinity Venture Partners and Blume Ventures also participated in the round. The startup has raised $29 million to date, Nishith Rastogi, co-founder and CEO of Locus, told TechCrunch in an interview.
Locus works with companies that operate in FMCG, logistics and e-commerce spaces. Some of its clients include Tata Group companies, Myntra, BigBasket, Lenskart and Bluedart. It helps these clients automate their logistics workload — tasks such as planning, organizing, transporting and tracking of inventories, and finding the best path to reach a destination — that have traditionally required intensive human labor.
“Say a Lenskart representative is visiting a house or an office to offer an eye checkup, and suddenly two more people there are interested in getting their eyes checked. The representative could attend these two new potential clients, or wrap things up with the first client and take care of his or her next appointment,” said Rastogi.
Locus looks at a client’s past data, identifies patterns and automates these kind of decisions on a large scale. In an example shared earlier with TechCrunch, Rastogi talked about how Locus had built a scanner for e-commerce companies for measuring products.
Rastogi said he will use the fresh capital to develop products and expand Locus in Southeast Asian and North American markets. The startup says half of its 110-person workforce is outside of India. Half of the IP it has built and the revenue it generates comes from its team outside of India.
He said the startup has spent the recent quarters studying these international markets, and has secured some anchor clients to expand the business. Locus is operationally profitable already and any additional capital goes into expanding its business, he added.
The logistics market in India has long been riddled with challenges. A growing number of startups, including BlackBuck — which raised $150 million last week — have emerged in recent years to tackle these problems.
The new funding also illustrates Tiger Global’s new strategy for the Indian market. The VC fund, which has invested in B2C businesses Flipkart and Ola in India, has made a number of investments in B2B startups in recent months. Last month, it invested $90 million in agritech supply chain startup Ninjacart, and weeks later, it gave cloud-based solutions provider Zenoti $50 million. It also participated in customer marketing service ClearTap’s $26 million round.
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Sumo Logic announces $110M Series G investment on valuation over $1B
Sumo Logic, a cloud data analytics and log analysis company, announced a $110 million Series G investment today. The company indicated that its valuation was “north of a billion dollars,” but wouldn’t give an exact figure.
Today’s round was led by Battery Ventures with participation from new investors Tiger Global Management and Franklin Templeton. Other unnamed existing investors also participated, according to the company. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $345 million.
When we spoke to Sumo Logic CEO Ramin Sayar at the time of its $75 million Series F in 2017, he indicated the company was on its way to becoming a public company. While that hasn’t happened yet, he says it is still the goal for the company, and investors wanted in on that before it happened.
“We don’t need to raise capital. We had plenty of capital already, but when you bring on crossover investors and others in this stage of a company, they have minimum check sizes and they have a lot of appetite to help you as you get ready to address a lot of the challenges and opportunities as you become a public company,” he said.
He says the company will be investing the money in continuing to develop the platform, whether that’s through acquisitions, which of course the money would help with, or through the company’s own engineering efforts.
The IPO idea remains a goal, but Sayar was not willing or able to commit to when that might happen. The company clearly has plenty of runway now to last for quite some time.
“We could go out now if we wanted to, but we made a decision that that’s not what we’re going to do, and we’re going to continue to double down and invest, and therefore bring some more capital in to give us more optionality for strategic tuck-ins and product IP expansion, international expansion — and then look to the public markets [after] we do that,” he said.
Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at investor Battery Ventures, says his firm likes Sumo Logic’s approach and sees a big opportunity ahead with this investment. “We have been tracking the Sumo Logic team for some time, and admire the company’s early understanding of the massive cloud-native opportunity and the rise of new, modern application architectures,” he said in a statement.
The company crossed the $100 million revenue mark last year and has 2,000 customers, including Airbnb, Anheuser-Busch and Samsung. It competes with companies like Splunk, Scalyr and Loggly.
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SendBird snags additional $50M for messaging API tool, as it extends Series B to $102M
SendBird, a startup that enables developers to add messaging to their apps with a couple of lines of code, announced a secondary Series B investment of $50 million today. This additional funding comes on top of the $52 million, the company raised in February.
The new money was led by Tiger Global Management, with significant participation from Iconiq, the firm that led the initial Series B round. Today’s investment brings the total raised to more than $120 million, according to Crunchbase data.
This is a huge investment for a Series B-level company, and what appears to be driving such a large influx of cash is a fast-growing market with tremendous demand for user-to-user messaging inside apps. By offering this as an API service, developers can drop the capability into their apps without having to build it from scratch. It’s a similar value proposition as Twilio for communications or Stripe for payments.
As SendBird CEO John Kim told us in the first part of the Series B investment in February, his company is aiming to make it simple for developers to add in-app messaging:
We are a very flexible, fully customizable, white label messaging capability. We come with a fully managed infrastructure. So basically, you can log into any mobile applications or websites out there, and use our messaging capability.
Kim says today’s additional money comes at a time when his company is accelerating its go-to-market strategy. “Starting from marketing and sales, we are building the go-to-market engine to scale our global presence by hiring leaders in key areas of the business and building teams around those leaders. To accelerate this process, we’re working with our new investors for Series B, who have made many investments in our target markets and built strong connections there,” Kim told TechCrunch.
Founded in South Korea in 2013, SendBird has 98 employees, with headquarters in San Mateo, Calif. It was a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2016 class.
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Tiger Global and Ant Financial lead $500M investment in China’s shared housing startup Danke
A Chinese startup that’s taking a dorm-like approach to urban housing just raised $500 million as its valuation jumped over $2 billion. Danke Apartment, whose name means “eggshell” in Chinese, closed the Series C round led by returning investor Tiger Global Management and newcomer Ant Financial, Alibaba’s e-payment and financial affiliate controlled by Jack Ma.
Four years ago, Beijing-based Danke set out with a mission to provide more affordable housing for young Chinese working in large urban centers. It applies the co-working concept to housing by renting apartments that come renovated and fully furnished, a model not unlike that of WeWork’s WeLive. The idea is by slicing up a flat designed for a family of three to four — the more common type of urban housing in China — into smaller units, young professionals can afford to live in nicer neighborhoods as Danke takes care of hassles like housekeeping and maintenance. To date, the startup has set foot in 10 major Chinese cities.
With the new funds, Danke plans to upgrade its data processing system that deals with rental transactions. Housing prices are set by AI-driven algorithms that take into account market forces such as locations rather than rely on the hunches of a real estate agent. The more data it gleans, the smarter the system becomes. That layout is the engine of the startup, which believes an internet platform play is a win-win for both homeowners and tenants because it provides greater transparency and efficiency while allowing the company to scale faster.
“We are focused on business intelligence from day one,” Danke’s angel investor and chairman Derek Shen told TechCrunch in an interview. Shen was the former president of LinkedIn China and was instrumental in helping the professional networking site enter the country. “By doing so we are eliminating the need to set up offline retail outlets and are able to speed up the decision-making process. What landlords normally care is who will be the first to rent out their property. The model is also copyable because it requires less manpower.”
“We’ve proven that the rental housing business can be decentralized and done online,” added Shen.
Photo: Danke Apartment via Weibo
Danke doesn’t just want to digitize the market it’s after. Half of the company’s core members have hailed from Nuomi, the local services startup that Shen founded and was sold to Baidu for $3.2 billion back in 2015. Having worked for a business whose mission was to let users explore and hire offline services from their connected devices, these executives developed a propensity to digitize all business aspects, including Danke’s day-to-day operations, a scheme that will also take up some of the new funds. This will allow Danke to “boost operational efficiency and cut costs” as it “actively works with the government to stabilize rental prices in the housing market,” the company says.
The rest of the proceeds will go toward improving the quality of Danke’s apartment amenities and tenant experiences, a segment that Shen believes will see great revenue potential down the road, akin to how WeWork touts software services to enterprises. The money will also enable Danke, which currently zeroes in on office workers and recent college graduates, to explore the emerging housing market for blue-collar workers.
Other investors from the round include new backer Primavera Capital and existing investors CMC Capital, Gaorong Capital and Joy Capital.
China’s rental housing market has boomed in recent years as Beijing pledges to promote affordable apartments in a country where few have the money to buy property. As President Xi Jinping often stresses, “houses are for living in, not for speculation.” As such, investors and entrepreneurs have been piling into the rental flat market, but that fervor has also created unexpected risks.
One much-criticized byproduct is the development of so-called “rental loans.” It goes like this: Housing operators would obtain loans in tenants’ names from banks or other lending institutions allegedly by obscuring relevant details from contracts. So when a tenant signs an agreement that they think binds them to rents, they have in fact agreed to take on loans and their “rent” payments become monthly loan repayments.
Housing operators are keen to embrace such practices because the loans provide working capital for renovation and their pipeline of properties. On the other hand, the capital allows companies like Danke to lower deposits for cash-strapped young tenants. “There’s nothing wrong with the financial instrument itself,” suggested Shen. “The real issue is when the housing operator struggles to repay, so the key is to make sure the business is well-functioning.”
Danke, alongside competitors Ziroom and 5I5J, has drawn fire for not fully informing tenants when signing contracts. Shen said his company is actively working to increase transparency. “We will make it clear to customers that what they are signing are loans. As long as we give them enough notice, there should be little risk involved.”
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As shared kitchens heat up, a China-based startup, Panda Selected, nabs $50 million led by Tiger Global
A few weeks ago, we told you that former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick looks to be partnering with the former COO of the bike-sharing startup Ofo, Yanqi Zhang, to bring his new L.A.-based company, CloudKitchens, to China. Kalanick didn’t respond to our request for more information, but according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), his plan is to provide local food businesses with real estate, facilities management, technology and marketing services.
He might want to move quickly. Kitchens that invite restaurants to share their space to focus on take-out orders is a concept that’s picking up momentum fast in China. And one company looks to have just assumed pole position in that race: Panda Selected, a Beijing-based shared-kitchen company that just raised $50 million in Series C funding led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from earlier backers DCM and Glenridge Capital. The round brings its total funding to $80 million.
Little wonder there’s a contest afoot. China’s food-delivery market is already worth $37 billion dollars, according to the SCMP, which says 256 million people in China used online food ordering services in 2016, and the number is expected to grow to 346 million this year.
And that’s still a little less than a quarter of the country’s population of 1.4 billion people.
Panda Selected is wasting little time in trying to reach them. While SCMP says that online delivery services already blanket 1,300 cities. Panda Selected, founded just three years ago, says it already operates 120 locations that cover China’s biggest centers, including Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Hangzhou. It claims to work with more than 800 domestic catering brands, including Luckin Coffee, Kungfu and TubeStation. The company also says that its kitchens are typically 5,000-square-feet in size and can accommodate up to 20 restaurants in each space.
With its new funding, it expects to double that number over the next eight months, too, its founder, Haipeng Li, tells Bloomberg. That’s going to make it difficult to challenge, especially by any U.S.-based company, given overall relations between the two countries and the ever-changing regulatory environment in China.
Then again, this may be just the first inning. Stay tuned.
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Insurance startup Bright Health raises $200M at ~$950M valuation
A flurry of digital-first insurers are betting they can surpass industry incumbents with a little help from technology and a lot of help from venture capitalists.
The latest to land a massive check is Bright Health, a Minneapolis-headquartered provider of affordable individual, family and Medicare Advantage healthcare plans in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, New York City, Ohio and Tennessee. The company, founded by the former chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare Bob Sheehy; Kyle Rolfing, the former CEO of UnitedHealth-acquired Definity Health; and Tom Valdivia, another former Definity Health executive, has brought in a $200 million Series C.
The funding values Bright Health at $950 million, according to PitchBook — more than double the $400 million valuation it garnered with its $160 million Series B in June 2017. Sheehy, Bright Health’s CEO, declined to comment on the valuation. New investors Declaration Partners and Meritech Capital participated in the round, with backing from Bessemer Venture Partners, Greycroft, NEA, Redpoint Ventures and others. Bright Health has raised a total of $440 million since early 2016.
VCs have deployed significantly more capital to the insurance technology (insurtech) space in recent years. Startups in the industry, long-known for a serious dearth of innovation, have raked in nearly $3 billion in private capital this year. U.S.-based insurtech startups have raised $2 billion in 2018, a record year for the sector and more than double last year’s total.
Deal count, meanwhile, is swelling. In 2016, there were 72 deals conducted in the space, followed by 86 in 2017 and 94 so far this year, again, according to PitchBook’s data.
Oscar Health, the health insurance provider led by Josh Kushner, is responsible for about 25 percent of the capital invested in U.S. insurtech startups this year. The company has raised a total of $540 million across two notable deals in 2018. The first saw Oscar pulling in $165 million at a $3 billion valuation and the second, announced in August, had Alphabet investing a whopping $375 million. Devoted Health, a Waltham, Mass.-based Medicare Advantage startup, followed up with a massive round of its own. The company nabbed $300 million and announced that it would begin enrolling members to its Medicare Advantage plan in eight Florida counties. Devoted is led by Todd Park, the co-founder of Athenahealth and Castlight Health.
Bright Health co-founders Bob Sheehy, CEO; Tom Valdivia, chief medical officer; and Kyle Rolfing, president
VC’s interest in insurtech isn’t limited to healthcare.
Hippo, which sells home insurance plans at lower premiums, officially launched in 2017 and has brought in $109 million to date. Earlier this month the company announced a $70 million Series C funding round led by Felicis Ventures and Lennar Corporation. Lemonade, which is similarly an insurer focused on homeowners, raised $120 million in a SoftBank-led round late last year. And Root Insurance, an app-based car insurance company founded in 2015, itself raised a $100 million Series D led by Tiger Global Management in August. The financing valued the company at $1 billion.
Together, these companies have raised well over $1 billion this year alone. Why? Because building a health insurance platform is incredibly cash-intensive and particularly difficult given the breadth of incumbents like Aetna or UnitedHealth. Sheehy, considering his 20-year tenure at UnitedHealthcare, may be especially well-positioned to disrupt the industry.
The opportunity here for investors and startups alike is huge; the health insurance market alone is forecasted to be worth more than $1 trillion by 2023. Companies that can leverage technology to create consumer-friendly, efficient and, most importantly, reasonably priced insurance options stand to win big.
As for Bright Health, the company plans to use its $200 million infusion to rapidly expand into new markets, planning to triple its geographic footprint in 2019.
“Bright Health has continued to execute at a fast pace towards our goal of disrupting the old health care model that places insurers at odds with providers,” Sheehy said in a statement. “[Its] current high re-enrollment rate shows that consumers are ready for this improved healthcare experience – especially when it is priced competitively.”
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Postmates raises another $300M, reportedly valued at $1.2B
On-demand delivery service Postmates announced this morning that it has raised $300 million in additional funding led by Tiger Global Management.
While the company’s press release doesn’t mention this, Fortune reports that the deal valued Postmates at $1.2 billion. Tiger’s Scott Schleifer is joining the board of directors.
Postmates does say that it’s completing “millions” of deliveries every month and is profitable in 90 percent of its markets, and that over the past four years, gross margins have “improved dramatically to nearly 50%.”
Over the past few months, Postmates expanded into more than 100 new cities (it’s now available in more than 400 U.S. cities, as well as Mexico City) and also announced partnerships with companies like Instacart and Walmart.
Postmates previously raised a $140 million round at a $600 million valuation in 2016. More broadly, it looks like VCs aren’t backing away from the on-demand delivery market — DoorDash, for example, recently raised $250 million at a $4 billion valuation.
“The transformation of how commerce moves in cities demands that we build the most innovative tools for businesses to keep up and distribute their products to the modern consumer — efficiently and cost effectively,” said Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann in the release. “Postmates is proud to be the first and largest on-demand network that is enabling the growth of retail across the country, and today’s investment accelerates our ability to pair technology with the vitality of our neighborhoods.”
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Kids’ gaming platform Roblox raises $150M
Roblox, which allows kids to create 3D worlds and games, has raised an additional $150 million in funding.
The company didn’t disclose its valuation in the announcement, but a source with knowledge of the deal told us that it valued Roblox at more than $2.5 billion — the price that Microsoft paid to acquire Minecraft four years ago.
“This is a big year for us that fortifies the dream,” said co-founder and CEO David Baszucki .
Earlier this year, Roblox announced that it had become cash-flow positive, and Baszucki told me the company remains “extremely profitable.” So why raise more money?
“First and foremost, the reason to fundraise is to have a war chest, to have a buffer, to have the opportunity to do acquisitions, to have a strong balance sheet as we grow internationally,” he said.
In order to support that growth, Baszucki said Roblox will be opening offices in some regions like China (“most likely with a partner that hasn’t been announced yet”), but it also requires building out infrastructure like local language and local payment support.
Roblox has now raised a total of $185 million in equity funding. The new round was led by Greylock Partners and Tiger Global, with participation from existing investors Altos Ventures, Index Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners and others.
Greylock’s David Sze has had big successes in both gaming and social media, having backed Facebook, LinkedIn, SGN and others. But he said Roblox is the first company he’s seen to “unify those two together on a platform in a magical kind of way.”
Apparently, Sze has known Baszucki for a long time — their kids went to the same school, and Sze remembered Baszucki bringing an early version of Roblox to the science fair. Gaming companies can be a risky investment, because their business relies on creating new hits, but Sze said Roblox is different.
“They aren’t making the games,” Sze said. “They’re letting the long tail of developers develop all the games on the platform, they’re let users decide what the successes are. It’s much more like a YouTube or much more like an Apple with the App Store.”
In a blog post about the funding, Sze even suggested that some of the next big gaming franchises could emerge from the Roblox platform, a prediction he repeated in our interview
“I’d be surprised if there aren’t some huge, high quality games that aren’t originated on Roblox in the next three-to-five years,” he said.
Roblox says it now has more than 70 million monthly active users, with more than 4 million creators who have built more than 40 million-plus experiences.
Of course, having a big platform with lots of user-generated content also creates risks — as illustrated in a recent incident where characters mimed gang raping a young girl’s avatar. (Roblox said a single server had been hacked, allowing users to upload code that violated the company’s rules.)
Asked whether these risks gave him any pause, Sze said, “User protection, user safety, all the aspects of having of having youth on your platform, it takes those things extremely seriously.”
“Are we perfect? No,” he said. “But I can tell you from inside the company that it’s an incredibly high priority. They’ve already done lots of things to help protect and make the user experience the best, and they have a list of stuff that they’re already working on.”
I’ll be interviewing Baszucki on-stage at Disrupt SF this afternoon, so stay tuned to TechCrunch (or come on out to the event!) for more on the funding and his future plans.
This story has been updated with the corrected amount for Roblox’s total funding.
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