True Ventures
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Solo.io raises $11M to help enterprises adopt cloud-native technologies
Solo.io, a Cambridge, Mass-based startup that helps enterprises adopt cloud-native technologies, is coming out of stealth mode today and announcing both its Series A funding round and the launch of its Gloo Enterprise API gateway.
Redpoint Ventures led the $11 million Series A round, with participation from seed investor True Ventures . Like most companies at the Series A state, Solo.io plans to use the money to invest in the product development of its enterprise and open-source tools, as well as to grow its sales and marketing teams.
Solo.io offers a number of open-source tools, like the Gloo function gateway, the Sqoop GraphQL server and the SuperGloo (see a theme here?) service mesh orchestration platform. In addition, the team has also, among others, open-sourced its Kubernetes debugger, a tool for building and running unikernels.
Its first commercial offering, though, is an enterprise version of the Gloo function gateway. Built on top of the Envoy proxy, Gloo can handle the routing necessary to connect incoming API requests to microservices, serverless applications (on the likes of AWS Lambda) and traditional monolithic applications behind the proxy. Gloo handles the load balancing and other functions necessary to aggregate the incoming API requests and route them to their destinations.
“Costumers who use Gloo to connect between microservices and serverless found that invocation of [AWS] Lambda is 350ms faster than the AWS API Gateway,” Idit Levine, the founder and CEO of Solo.io, told me. “Gloo also offers them direct money saving, since AWS bills per invocation. In general, Gloo offers money saving because it allows our clients to use the less expensive technologies — like their legacy apps, and sometimes containers — whenever they can, and limit the use of more expensive stuff to whenever it’s necessary.”
The enterprise version adds features like audit controls, single sign-on and more advanced security tools to the platform.
In addition to broadening its customer base, the company plans to invest heavily into its customer success and support teams, as well as its evangelism and education efforts, Levine tells me.
“Helping enterprises easily adopt innovative technologies like microservices, serverless and service mesh is our goal at Solo.io,” Levine in today’s announcement. “Melding different technologies into one coherent environment, by supplying a suite of tools to route, debug, manage, monitor and secure applications, lets organizations focus on their software without worrying about the complexity of the underlying environment.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Teamable, the Tinder for hiring, raises $5M and acquires Simppler
Teamable, a provider of hiring software that leverages employees’ social networks, has brought in $5 million from new investor Foundation Capital and existing backers True Ventures and SaaStr Fund.
The startup also announced its acquisition of Simppler‘s referral recommendation engine and matchmaking recruiting software. Teamable’s co-founder and chief executive officer Laura Bilazarian declined to disclose the terms of the deal but said none of the $5 million investment was used to finance the transaction.
According to Crunchbase, Simppler had raised $3.2 million in equity funding from Foundation Capital, Greylock, Vertex Ventures and others. The company, which is akin to Teamable, creates a referral platform using existing employee networks; it was founded by Vipul Sharma in 2013. Sharma previously ran machine learning at Eventbrite and, according to his LinkedIn profile, he’s been an engineering director at Indeed for the past year.
Sharma and the Simppler team will not be joining Teamable .
Using Gmail, Facebook, GitHub and other social media platforms, Teamable aggregates its employees’ contacts to connect recruiters with a more focused set of potential candidates. Companies using Teamable, including Spotify and Lyft, then facilitate a warm introduction between a candidate and the employee in their network. The startup says its social recruiting algorithms lead to more efficient and diverse hiring practices.
“I don’t think candidates love the way recruiting is done,” Bilazarian told TechCrunch. “They are throwing applications over a wall and not hearing back. And I don’t think companies love the way recruiting is done because people are just making guesses based off a job description and they aren’t getting the right applicants.”
“Instead of few people at a company spamming the entire world, you have people who really understand the company reaching out to you,” she added. “Teamable is very precise. It’s reach out to five people to get a hire versus reach out to 200 just to get one response.”
The Foundation-led investment brings Teamable’s total equity funding to date to $10 million, including last year’s $5 million Series A. Bilazarian says the 50-person company is cash flow positive with 200 customers. With offices in San Francisco and Yerevan, Armenia, Teamable will use the capital to expand its team and recruiting platform.
Powered by WPeMatico
Mode raises $3M Series A to put sensor data in the cloud
True Ventures has led the $3 million round for Mode, a real-time database that gives companies instant access to sensor data. GigaOm founder and True Ventures partner Om Malik has joined the startup’s board of directors as part of the deal.
Sensor data is collected from vehicles, cell phones, appliances, medical equipment and other machines. Businesses deploying these sensors, however, often don’t have back-end databases or tools to understand what that data means for the real world.
San Mateo-based Mode wants to help them make sense of it by moving the hoards of sensor data to the cloud, where they can better understand their devices and derive actionable insights. For now, Mode is targeting the solar, medical and manufacturing industries.
“We focus on data collection because we want to address common infrastructure challenges and let customers spend their time utilizing data for their businesses,” said Gaku Ueda, Mode co-founder and Twitter’s former director of engineering.
Ueda and co-founder Ethan Kan, who was previously the director of engineering at gaming startup 50Cubes, have a long history of friendship. True Ventures’ Malik says that’s part of what attracted him to the company.
“Companies are not a straight line,” Malik told TechCrunch. “You go through ups and downs. If you have a good co-founder, you have someone to get you through it.”
The round brings Mode’s total funding to $5 million. The company, which is also backed by Kleiner Perkins, Compound.vc and Fujitsu, will use the Series A financing to connect additional sensors to the cloud and expand its team.
Powered by WPeMatico
Catalyst brothers find capital success with $2.4M from True
Over the past few years, the old language of “customer support” has been supplanted by the new language of “customer success.” In the old model, companies would essentially disappear following the conclusion of a sale, merely handling customer problems when they arose. Now, companies are actively reaching out to customers, engaging them with education and training and monitoring them with analytics to ensure they have the best time with the product as possible.
What’s changing is the nature of product and services today: subscription. Customers no longer just make a single buying decision about a product, but instead must actively commit to using the product, or else they churn.
New York-based Catalyst, founded by brothers Edward and Kevin Chiu, wants to rebuild customer success from the ground up with an integrated software platform. They have received some capital success of their own, securing $2.4 million in venture capital from Phil Black of True Ventures with participation from Ludlow Ventures and Compound.
New York has had something of an increase in founder mafias, as TechCrunch reported this weekend. Catalyst is no exception to this trend, with the Chiu brothers both working at DigitalOcean, one of New York’s many high-flying enterprise startups. Edward Chiu was director of customer success at the company for a number of years, but had a unique background in sales and also in coding before starting.
Kevin Chiu was head of inside sales at DigitalOcean . “I brought my brother on to do sales at DigitalOcean,” Edward Chiu explains. “We always knew that we wanted to start a company together, but wanted to see if we would kill each other.” The two worked together, and lo and behold, they didn’t kill each other.
Edward Chiu wanted to match the product experience of using DigitalOcean with the experience of using its internal customer success tools. Nothing on the market fit. “Given that DigitalOcean was a very technical product,” Chiu explained, “we decided to build our own tool.” Chiu thought of customer success at DigitalOcean as its own product, and his team built up the platform to improve its functionality and scalability. “We just used the tool and we loved it,” he said, so we “started to show this tool to a bunch of other customer success leaders I am connected with.”
Other customer success leaders said they wanted the platform, and “after the 20th person told me that,” he and his brother spun out of DigitalOcean to go on their own. Unlike enterprise startups in New York a couple of years ago that often struggled to find any investors, Catalyst found cash quickly. “Two weeks in we had more offers than we knew what to do with,” Chiu explained. The two said they had originally targeted a fundraise of $750,000, but ended up at $2.4 million.
Catalyst is a platform that integrates between a number of other major SaaS services such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Mixpanel and others to create a unified dashboard for data around customer success. From there, customer success managers have a set of automated tools to handle engagement, such as customer segmentation and email campaigns.
A major challenge in the customer success world is that these managers often don’t have the skills required to do advanced data analytics, so they often rely on their friends in engineering to run scripts or perform database lookups. The hope is that Catalyst’s feature set is powerful enough that these sorts of ad hoc tasks become a thing of the past. “Because we aggregate all this data, you can run queries,” Chiu explains.
Chiu says that Catalyst doesn’t just want to be a software platform, but rather a movement that pushes every company to think about how they can make their customers successful. “There are so many companies that are starting to understand that it is not something that you do once you raise a Series A, but something you do from day one,” Chiu said. “If you take care of your very first customer, they will constantly promote you and constantly promote your business.”
The company is based in Flatiron, and has eight employees.
Powered by WPeMatico
Gradle Grabs $4.2 Million To Expand Commercial Company Around Open Source Build System
Surely by now we know that every company is a software company, and as more companies focus on software development, it is increasingly difficult for them to manage the complexity around coordinating builds and creating executables. That’s where the open source Gradle tool comes in — and it got $4.2 million today to continue to expand the commercial company behind the open… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
Connectifier Raises $6M More For Its AI-Based Recruitment Search
A couple of weeks ago, LinkedIn announced a new version of its recruitment product, giving HR teams the ability to look for new hires that most closely match the profiles of employees they already know and like. But LinkedIn was not the first to use search technology, machine learning and so-called “entity recognition” to update and improve the hiring process. A much… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico