Tribeca Venture Partners
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Clean.io raises $5M to continue its battle against malicious adtech
Clean.io, a startup that helps digital publishers protect themselves from malicious ads, recently announced that it has raised $5 million in Series A funding.
The Baltimore-based company isn’t the only organization promising to fight malvertising (such as ads that force visitors to redirect to another website). But as co-founder Seth Demsey told me last year, Clean.io provides “granular control over who gets to load JavaScript.”
CEO Matt Gillis told me via email this week that the challenge will “always” be evolving.”
“Just like an antivirus company needs to constantly be updating their definitions and improving their protections, we always need to be alert to the fact that bad actors will constantly try to evade detection and get over and around the walls that you put in front of them,” Gillis wrote.
The company says its technology is now used on more than 7 million websites for customers including WarnerMedia’s Xandr (formerly AppNexus), The Boston Globe and Imgur.
Image Credits: Clean.io
Clean.io has now raised a total of $7.5 million. The Series A was led by Tribeca Venture Partners, with participation from Real Ventures, Inner Loop Capital and Grit Capital Partners.
Gillis said he’d initially planned to fundraise at the end of February, but he had to put those plans on hold due to COVID-19. He ended up doing all his pitching via Zoom (“I saw more than my fair share of small NY apartments”) and he praised Tribeca’s Chip Meakem (whose previous investments include AppNexus) as “a world-class partner.”
Of course, the pandemic’s impact on digital advertising goes far beyond pausing Gillis’ fundraising process. And when it comes to malicious ads, he said that with the cost of digital advertising declining precipitously in late March, “bad actors capitalized on this opportunity.”
“We saw a pretty constant surge in threat levels from mid-March until early May,” Gillis continued. “Demand for our solutions have remained strong due to the increased level of attacks brought on by the pandemic. Now more than ever, publishers need to protect their user experience and their revenue.”
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Domio raises $100M in equity and debt to take on Airbnb and hotels with its curated apartments
Airbnb has well and truly disrupted the world of travel accommodation, changing the conversation not just around how people discover and book places to stay, but what they expect when they get there, and what they expect to pay. Today, one of the startups riding that wave is announcing a significant round of funding to fuel its own contribution to the marketplace.
Domio, a startup that designs and then rents out apart-hotels with kitchens and other full-home experiences, has raised $100 million ($50 million in equity and $50 million in debt) to expand its business in the U.S. and globally to 25 markets by next year, up from 12 today. Its target customers are millennials traveling in groups or families swayed by the size and scope of the accommodation — typically five times bigger than the average hotel room — as well as the price, which is on average 25% cheaper than a hotel room.
The Series B, which actually closed in August of this year, was led by GGV Capital, with participation from Eldridge Industries, 3L Capital, Tribeca Venture Partners, SoftBank NY, Tenaya Capital and Upper90. Upper90 also led the debt round, which will be used to lease and set up new properties.
Domio is not disclosing its valuation, but Jay Roberts, the founder and CEO, said in an interview that it’s a “huge upround” and around 50x the valuation it had in its seed round and that the company has tripled its revenues in the last year. Prior to this, Domio had only raised around $17 million, according to data from PitchBook.
For some comparisons, Sonder — another company that rents out serviced apartments to the kind of travelers who have a taste for boutique hotels — earlier this year raised $225 million at a valuation north of $1 billion. Others like Guesty, which are building platforms for others to list and manage their apartments on platforms like Airbnb, recently raised $35 million with a valuation likely in the range of $180 million to $200 million. Airbnb is estimated to be valued around $31 billion.
Domio plays in an interesting corner of the market. For starters, it focuses its accommodations at many of the same demographics as Airbnb. But where Airbnb offers a veritable hodgepodge of rooms and homes — some are people’s homes, some are vacation places, some never had and never will have a private occupant, and across all those the range of quality varies wildly — Domio offers predictability and consistency with its (possibly more anodyne) inventory.
“We are competing with amateur hosts on Airbnb,” said Roberts, who previously worked in real estate investment banking. “This is the next step, a modern brand, the next Marriott but with a more tech-powered brain and operating model.” These are not to be confused with something like Hilton’s Homewood Suites, Roberts stressed to me. He referred to Homewood as “a soulless hotel chain.”
“Domio is the anti-hotel chain,” he added.
Roberts is also quick to describe how Domio is not a real estate company as much as it is a tech-powered business. For starters, it uses quant-style algorithms that it’s built in-house to identify regions where it wants to build out its business, basing it not just on what consumers are searching for, but also weather patterns, economic indicators and other factors. After identifying a city or other location, it works on securing properties.
It typically sets up its accommodations in newer or completely new buildings, where developers — at least up to now — are not usually constructing with short-term rentals in mind. Instead, they are considering an option like Domio as an alternative to selling as condominiums or apartments, something that might come up if they are sensing that there is a softening in the market. “We typically have 75%-78% occupancy,” Roberts said. He added that hotels on average have occupancy rates in the high 60% nationally.
As Domio lengthens its track record — its 12 U.S. markets include Miami, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Phoenix — Roberts says that they’re getting a more select seat at the table in conversations.
“Investors are starting to go out to buy properties on our behalf and lease them to us,” he said. This gives the startup a much more favorable rate and terms on those deals. “The next step is that Domio will manage these directly.” The most recent property it signed, he noted, includes a Whole Foods at the ground level, and a gym.
Using technology to identify where to grow is not the only area where tech plays a role. Roberts said that the company is now working on an app — yet to be released — that will be the epicenter of how guests interact to book places and manage their experience once there.
“Everything you can do by speaking to a human in a traditional hotel you will be able to do with the Domio app,” he said. That will include ordering room service, getting more towels, booking experiences and getting restaurant recommendations. “You can book your Uber through the Domio app, or sync your Spotify account to play music in the apartment.
Ans there are plans to extend the retail experience using the app. Roberts says it will be a “shoppable” experience where, if you like a sofa or piece of art in the place where you’re staying, you can order it for your own home. You can even order the same wallpaper that’s been designed to decorate Domio apartments.
Ripe for the booking
Although Airbnb has grown to be nearly as ubiquitous as hotels (and perhaps even more prominent, depending on who you are talking to), the wider travel and accommodation market is still ripe for the taking, estimated to reach $171 billion by 2023 and the highest growth sector in the travel industry.
“Airbnb has taught us that hotels are not the only place to stay,” said Hans Tung, GGV’s managing partner. “Domio is capitalizing on the global shift in short-term travel and the consumer demand for branded experiences. From my travels around the world, there is a large, underserved audience — millennials, families, business teams — who prefer the combined benefits of an apartment and hotel in a single branded experience.”
I mentioned to Roberts that the leasing model reminded me a little of WeWork, which itself does not own the property it curates and turns into office space for its tenants. (The SoftBank investor connection is interesting in that regard.) Roberts was very quick to say that it’s not the same kind of business, even if both are based around leased property re-rented out to tenants.
“One of the things we liked about Domio is that is very capital-efficient,” said Tung, “focusing on the model and payback period. The short-term nature of customer stays and the combination of experience/price required to maintain loyal customers are natural enforcers of efficient unit economics.”
“For GGV, Domio stands out in two ways,” he continued. “First, CEO Jay Roberts and the Domio team’s emphasis on execution is impressive, with expansion into 12 cities in just three years. They have the right combination of vision, speed and agility. Domio’s model can readily tap into the global opportunity as they have ambition to scale to new markets. The global travel and tourism spend is $2.8 trillion with 5 billion annual tourists. Global travelers like having the flexibility and convenience of both an apartment and hotel — with Domio they can have both.”
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AlphaSense, a search engine for analysis and business intel, raises $50M led by Innovation Endeavors
Google and its flagship search portal opened the door to the possibilities of how to build a business empire on the back of organising and navigating the world’s information, as found on the internet. Now, a startup that’s built a search engine tailored to the needs of enterprises and their own quests for information has raised a round of funding to see if it can do the same for the B2B world.
AlphaSense, which provides a way for companies to quickly amass market intelligence around specific trends, industries and more to help them make business decisions, has closed a $50 million round of funding, a Series B that it’s planning to use to continue enhancing its product and expanding to more verticals.
The company counts some 1,000 clients on its books, with a heavy emphasis on investment banks and related financial services companies. That’s in part because of how the company got its start: Finnish co-founder and CEO Jaakko (Jack) Kokko had been an analyst at Morgan Stanley in a past life and understood the labor and time pain points of doing market research, and decided to build a platform to help shorten a good part of the information-gathering process.
“My experience as an analyst on Wall Street showed me just how fragmented information really was,” he said in an interview, citing as one example how complex sites like those of the FDA are not easy to navigate to look for new information and updates — the kind of thing that a computer would be much more adept at monitoring and flagging. “Even with the best tools and services, it still was really hard to manually get the work done, in part because of market volatility and the many factors that cause it. We can now do that with orders of magnitude more efficiency. Firms can now gather information in minutes that would have taken an hour. AlphaSense does the work of the best single analyst, or even a team of them.”
(Indeed, the “alpha” of AlphaSense appears to be a reference to finance: it’s a term that refers to the ability of a trader or portfolio manager to beat the typical market return.)
The lead investor in this round is very notable and says something about the company’s ambitions. It’s Innovation Endeavors, the VC firm backed by Eric Schmidt, who had been the CEO of none other than Google (the pace-setter and pioneer of the search-as-business model) for a decade, and then stayed on as chairman and ultimately board member of Google and then Alphabet (its later holding company) until just last June.
Schmidt presided over Google at what you could argue was its most important time, gaining speed and scale and transitioning from an academic idea into a full-fledged, huge public business whose flagship product has now entered the lexicon as a verb and (through search and other services like Android and YouTube) is a mainstay of how the vast majority of the world uses the web today. As such, he is good at spotting opportunities and gaps in the market, and while enterprise-based needs will never be as prominent as those of mass-market consumers, they can be just as lucrative.
“Information is the currency of business today, but data is overwhelming and fragmented, making it difficult for business professionals to find the right insights to drive key business decisions,” he said in a statement. “We were impressed by the way AlphaSense solves this with its AI and search technology, allowing businesses to proceed with the confidence that they have the right information driving their strategy.”
This brings the total raised by AlphaSense to $90 million, with other investors in this round including Soros Fund Management LLC and other unnamed existing investors. Previous backers had included Tom Glocer (the former Reuters CEO who himself is working on his own fintech startup, a security firm called BlueVoyant), the MassChallenge incubator, Tribeca Venture Partners and others. Kokko said AlphaSense is not disclosing its valuation at this point. (I’m guessing though that it’s definitely on the up.)
There have been others that have worked to try to tackle the idea of providing more targeted, and business-focused, search portals, from the likes of Wolfram Alpha (another alpha!) through to Lexis Nexis and others like Bloomberg’s terminals, FactSet, Business Quant and many more.
One interesting aspect of AlphaSense is how it’s both focused on pulling in requests as well as set up to push information to its users based on previous search parameters. Currently these are set up to only provide information, but over time, there is a clear opportunity to build services to let the engines take on some of the actions based on that information, such as adjusting asking prices for sales and other transactions.
“There are all kinds of things we could do,” said Kokko. “This is a massive untapped opportunity. But we’re not taking the human out of the loop, ever. Humans are the right ones to be making final decisions, and we’re just about helping them make those faster.”
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Domio just raised $12 million in Series A funding to build ‘apart hotels’ across the US
Hotels can be pricey, and travelers are often forced to leave their rooms for basic things, like food that doesn’t come from the minibar. Yet Airbnb accommodations, which have become the go-to alternative for travelers, can be highly inconsistent.
Domio, a two-year-old, New York-based outfit, thinks there’s a third way: apartment hotels, or “apart hotels,” as the company is calling them.
The idea is to build a brand that travelers recognize as upscale yet affordable, more tech friendly than boutique hotels and features plenty of square footage, which it expects will appeal to both families as well as companies that send teams of employees to cities and want to do it more economically.
Domio has a host of competitors, if you’ll forgive the pun. Marriott International earlier this year introduced a branded home-sharing business called Tribute Portfolio Homes wherein it says it vets, outfits and maintains to hotel standards homes of its choosing. And Marriott is among a growing number of hotels to recognize that customers who stay in a hotel for a business trip or a family vacation might prefer a multi-bedroom apartment with hotel-like amenities.
Property management companies have been raising funding left and right for the same reason. Among them: Sonder, a four-year-old, San Francisco-based startup offering “spaces built for travel and life” that, according to Crunchbase, has raised $135 million from investors, much of it this year; TurnKey, a six-year-old, Austin, Tex.-based home rental management company that has raised $72 million from investors, including via a Series D round that closed back in March; and Vacasa, a nine-year-old, Portland, Ore.-based vacation rental management company that manages more than 10,000 properties and which just this week closed on $64 million in fresh financing that brings its total funding to $207.5 million.
That’s saying nothing of Airbnb itself, which has begun opening hotel-like branded apartment complexes that lease units to both long-term renters and short-term visitors in partnership with development partner Niido.
Whether Domio can stand out from competitors remains to be seen, but investors are happy to provide it the financing to try. The company is today announcing it has raised $12 million in Series A equity funding led by Tribeca Venture Partners, with participation from SoftBank Capital NY and Loric Ventures. The round comes on the heels of Domio announcing a $50 million joint venture last month with the private equity firm Upper 90 to exclusively fund the leasing and operations of as many as 25 apartment-style hotels for group travelers.
Indeed, Domio thinks one advantage it may have over other home-share companies is that rather than manage the far-flung properties of different owners, it can shave costs and improve the quality of its offerings by entering five- to 10-year leases with developers and then branding, furnishing and operating entire “apart hotel” properties. (It even has partners in China making its furniture.)
As CEO and former real estate banker Jay Roberts told us earlier this week, the plan is to open 25 of these buildings across the U.S. over the next couple of years. The units will average 1,500 square feet and feature two to three bedrooms, and, if all goes as planned, they’ll cost 10 to 25 percent below hotel prices, too.
And if the go-go property management market turns? Roberts insists that Domio can “slow down growth if necessary.” He also notes that “Airbnb was founded out of the recession, supported by people who were interested in saving money. We’re starting to see companies that want to be more cost-effective, too.”
Domio had earlier raised $5 million in equity and convertible debt from angel investors in the real estate industry; altogether it has now amassed funding of $67 million.
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Tentrr is turning private land into glampgrounds, with the help of VCs
If you’ve ever gone camping and found yourself thinking it kind of sucks, likely because you’re too close to other campers, you might be interested to learn about Tentrr, a three-year-old, 47-person company that’s promising to make it “dirt simple” to enjoy the great outdoors. How: by striking deals with private landowners who are willing to host semi-permanent campsites on their property.
What do these look like? Picture elevated decks with Adirondack chairs, canvas expedition tents, wood picnic tables and sun showers, not to mention a fire pit, lanterns, dry food storage, cookware, a camping toilet and air mattresses that, courtesy of most hosts, will come with fresh linens.
Venture capitalists certainly appreciate the startup’s pitch. Tentrr — founded by one-time investment banker turned former NYSE managing director Michael D’Agostino — has raised $13 million to date, including a newly closed $8 million Series A round led by West, a San Francisco-based venture studio that both funds startups and helps them market their goods and services.
No doubt the investors are looking at the overall market, whose numbers are compelling. According to one trade association, the outdoor recreation industry represents an $887 billion opportunity, with Americans shelling out $24 billion annually on campsites alone.
Still, it’s easy to wonder how scalable the company will be. Tentrr had 100 campsites up and running in the Northeastern U.S. as of the end of last year. D’Agostino expects it will have 1,000 sites by year-end, including on the West Coast, where it will begin installing camps this summer. But this assumes that Tentrr can convince enough families with sufficiently large properties that partnering with the company is worthwhile.
D’Agostino says its landowner partners need to have 15 acres at least and that the average property on the platform currently is much larger than that. He also says these property owners keep 80 percent of whatever they decide to charge campers to stay on their grounds.
For what it’s worth, Tentrr doesn’t seem to have much in the way of direct competition if you exclude state campgrounds. Venture-backed Hipcamp, for example, which raised a small amount of seed funding back in 2014, partners with private landowners to help arrange camping experiences, but it mostly acts as a search engine. A growing number of RV-focused startups have also sprung up, including Outdoorsy. But their customers are largely looking for adventure on the road, not in a secluded field.
There’s always industry giant Airbnb to worry about. But Airbnb, whose offerings include campsites, emphasizes unique experiences. Tentrr is largely about standardizing its process in order to leave fewer questions — and less doubt — about what to expect. (D’Agostino says that roughly 40 percent of Tentrr customers are first-time campers.)
We know that if the service makes it way to California, we’re likely to try it, having suffered through some fairly crummy camping experiences. If you’re also interested in learning more, you might check out our conversation with D’Agostino, edited for length. We chatted yesterday.
TC: You were a banker, then you traveled around the country and world, trying to convince companies that they should list on the NYSE instead of Nasdaq. How did this company come to pass?
MD: When I was a little kid, we’d sometimes stay at a family friend’s farm in Litchfield, Connecticut. I assumed that every kid had a Litchfield farm where they could camp, which isn’t the case obviously. Meanwhile, working 100 hours a week as an investment banker, it just became harder and harder to get out of the city and have great experiences.
After a couple of disastrous camping trips at noisy, dirty campgrounds with my girlfriend and now wife, Eloise, we just realized the idea [of camping as it’s known today] is stupid. It’s taking a bunch of people who are living on top of each other in a city and moving them to a campground where they’re living on top of each other in flimsy tents.
The legacy campground industry hasn’t changed since the Civil War. It’s run by the government — which I’m happy to compete with all day long. And these are just terrible businesspeople. We want to wipe away this infrastructure by distributing it among rural landowners.
TC: So you’re building these semi-permanent camping sites. How standardized is the pricing?
MD: Pricing is variable and set by the landowner who keeps 80 percent of that fee. We keep 20 percent; we also charge a 15 percent fee on top of that nightly rate. Right now, the average price per night is $140, but we’re introducing more features for [hosts], including minimum-night stays, and [surge] pricing if they have demand for a bunch of bookings at the same time.
They can also offer extra amenities and experiences that will allow you to have a personalized experience. For example, landowners, or “camp keepers” as we call them, can offer extra bundles of wood or luxury bedding or horseback riding or skeet shooting. It’s really only limited by the imagination. We’ll also soon allow third parties to provide curated activities so that when you log on to our app, you can book a whitewater rafting trip or reservations at the best farm-to-table restaurant nearby.
TC: What happens if something goes wrong? Who insures what?
MD: Every campsite is covered by a $2 million commercial insurance policy. It’s a benefit not just in terms of liability but in making people feel more comfortable during these stays — both the hosts and guests.
TC: Where are you building these sites, exactly, and how long do you estimate that they will last?
MD: We build them ourselves, right now in places from southern Maine to eastern Pennsylvania.
We get our tents from a family company in Colorado that’s been around for 90 years and that still receives requests to repair tents they’d built 30 years ago [meaning they’re durable]. We also use pressure-treated lumber and marine-grade plywood, so we expect they’ll last for 10 to 20 years.
TC: You’re having to convince people to let strangers onto their properties, sprawling as they may be. What does that sales process look like?
MD: It used to look like me putting 45,000 miles on my Jeep Cherokee and explaining to families why they should have a Tentrr campsite in their hayfields. [Laughs.] Today, direct mail campaigns work beautifully. [Hosts] are also hearing about us from other [hosts] and we make it easier for them to [apply] to join the platform. You click on a link that says “List my property” and you’re walked through a 20-point checklist, including about accessibility and how secluded a property is. Using that feedback, we know with 90 percent accuracy whether or not a property is appropriate. If we think it is, we’ll send out a scout.
TC: Are there sometimes more than one campsite on a property?
MD: No, and we ensure the sites are secluded from neighbors, as well as the landowners, as well as other possible distractions.
TC: What does the clean-up process involve?
MD: It’s relatively maintenance free. There’s no maid service. No keys. No worries about someone stealing silverware. Homeowners have to make sure there are no beer cans left behind, but we place a high priority on land stewardship and emphasize a leave-no-trace approach when it comes to our guests.
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Ozobot raises $3 million for toys that teach kids coding basics off-screen
There are many toys on the market today that promise to teach kids programming skills, and a good percentage require the use of a connected tablet or smartphone. At a time when parents are already struggling to keep kids’ screen time to a minimum, father and entrepreneur Nader Hamda wanted to build something different. He also observed a lot of expensive educational toys on the market,… Read More
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