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Relyance AI scores $25M Series A to ensure privacy compliance at the code level
Relyance AI, an early-stage startup that is helping companies stay in compliance with privacy laws at the code level, announced a $25 million Series A today. At the same time, they revealed a previously unannounced $5 million seed round.
Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures led the A round, while Unusual was sole lead on the seed. Serial entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal from Unusual will join the board under the terms of the deal. His partner John Vrionis had previously joined after the seed round. Matt Murphy from Menlo is coming on as a board observer. The company has now raised $30 million.
Relyance takes an unusual approach to verifying that data stays in compliance working at the code level, while ingesting contracts and existing legal requirements as code to ensure that a company is in compliance. Company co-CEO and co-founder Abhi Sharma says that code-level check is key to the solution. “For the first time, we are building the legal compliance and regulation into the source code,” Sharma told me.
He added, “Relyance is actually embedded within the DevOps pipeline of our customers’ infrastructure. So every time a new ETL pipeline is built or a machine learning model is receiving new source code, we do a compiler-like analysis of how personal sensitive data is flowing between internal microservices, data lakes and data warehouses, and then get a metadata analysis back to the privacy and compliance professionals [inside an organization].”
Leila R. Golchehreh, the other founder and co-CEO, brings a strong compliance background to the equation and has experienced the challenge of keeping companies in compliance firsthand. She said that Relyance also enables companies to define policy and contracts as code.
“Our approach is specifically to ingest contracts. We’ve actually created an algorithm around how [you] actually write a good data protection agreement. We’ve extracted those relevant provisions and we will compare that against [your] operational reality. So if there’s a disconnect, we will be able to raise that as an intelligent insight of a data misalignment,” she said.
With 32 employees, the co-founders hope to double or perhaps even triple that number in the next 12-18 months. Golchehreh and Sharma are a diverse co-founder team and they are attempting to build a company that reflects that. They believe being remote-first gives them a leg up in this regard, but they also have internal policies to drive it.
“The recruiters we work with have a mandate internally to say, ‘Hey, we really want to hire good people and diverse people.’ Relyance as a company is the genesis of two individuals from two completely different ends of the spectrum coming together. And I think hopefully, we can do our job of relaying that into the company as we scale,” Sharma said.
The two founders have been friends for several years and began talking about forming a company together in 2019 over a pizza dinner. The idea began to gel and they launched the company in February 2020. They spent some time talking to compliance pros to understand their requirements better, then in July 2020 began building the solution they have today. They released a beta in February and began quietly selling it in March.
Today they have a number of early customers working with their software, including Dialpad, Patreon, Samsara and True.
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Product-led sales startup Endgame raises over $17M
Endgame, enabling software companies to turn customer observations into go-to-market strategies, announced Tuesday it raised a total of $17 million in back-to-back seed and Series A funding rounds.
The $12.25 million Series A was led by Menlo Ventures, while the $5 million seed round was led by Upfront Ventures. Also participating in the round are a group of investors including Todd and Rahul’s Fund, Liquid 2 Ventures and Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta.
Los Angeles-based Endgame was founded in 2020 and provides a self-service look at what’s happening in a software trial so that a sales team can prioritize accounts based on user behavior signals and act on them faster without having to be a data scientist or engineer.
Company CEO Alex Bilmes told TechCrunch that the concepts of product-led sales and product-led growth have taken over the sale of software. Today’s customers sign up for a trial, and if they like it, they invite their friends to try it.
However, at a certain point, some sales pressure is needed to close the deal. That’s where Endgame comes in: It shows who is doing what, and what features are being used — data that is typically opaque to sales and revenue teams.
Traditional customer relationship management systems are designed to be rep-driven, meaning the sales rep is responsible for adding notes. It’s simpler if a rep only has a few accounts, but across tens of millions of users, Endgame analyzes the data and identifies which accounts are most likely to convert, who are the users to engage, what makes a good customer and how to take action with the right people.
Endgame is not competing against other companies so much as in-house developers that are cobbling a bunch of apps together in efforts to create a system that works for them, Bilmes said.
“Most of this is solved with do-it-yourself,” he added. “I have built Endgame a number of times at other companies using databases and other piece-meals to put together something so I could mash data from lots of places and build subscriptive views for revenue teams. We compete with those data scientists and internal teams stitching together horizontal tools.”
Endgame is pre-revenue and is already catering to a group of beta customers like Figma, Loom, Airtable, Clubhouse, Mode, Retool and Algolia that are looking for a dedicated software platform to capture product-led value.
Bilmes said the customer relationship management market, both huge and fast-growing at 35% annually, is expected to reach $114 billion by 2027. To meet demand, he intends to use the new funds to continue hiring aggressively. He has already tripled the size of the team to nine in the past few months, and expects to double that in the coming year. In addition, funds will go toward R&D and to further define the product-led sales landscape.
Growth over the next year will be customer-focused as Endgame works to get into the hands of the right customers and making it as accessible as possible for people to begin doing product-led motions.
“Our efforts are product-focused,” Bilmes said. “We’ve seen more demand than we can possibly hope to fill given the problem is so real for so many.”
As part of the investment, Upfront Ventures Partner Kara Nortman and Menlo Ventures Partner Naomi Ionita will join Endgame’s board of directors. Sandhya Hegde, partner at Unusual Ventures, which also participated in both rounds, joins as a board observer to create an all-women investor board.
When Endgame was raising its seed fund, it wanted to work with Nortman, who has expertise in applying consumer concepts to enterprise, Bilmes said. When it came to the Series A, Bilmes said he felt Ionita was the perfect partner due to her similar background to Bilmes and expertise in teaching salespeople how to engage.
Ionita told TechCrunch she learned about Endgame from Nortman, with whom she has invested in other startups. The company understands the pain point and is for companies that offer a self-service version for the “why and how.”
“This intelligence doesn’t exist, and I know that because I lived it — building in-house or seeing companies flying blind,” she added. “Alex just gets this, and I see Endgame being the system of record and intelligence for bridging self-serve. They will be the final bridge that needs to exist between product teams and product-facing sales reps for which accounts to address and why.”
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CoScreen launches its screen-sharing product, announces $4.6M in fundraising
This morning CoScreen, a startup that helps teams share screens and collaborate in real time, formally launched its product to market. It also disclosed that it has raised $4.6 million to date.
Unusual Ventures led its seed round. Till Pieper, CoScreen’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch in an interview that it raised the bulk of its capital pre-pandemic, with the rest coming during 2020 in smaller chunks. A number of angels took part in funding the company, including GitHub CTO Jason Warner.
Why is screen-sharing worth millions in funding, and the time and attention of a whole team? It’s a good question. Happily the CoScreen team have built something that could prove more than a bit better than what you currently use in Zoom to share puppy pics with your team during meetings.
What’s CoScreen?
CoScreen provides screen-sharing capabilities, but in a neat manner. Let’s say you are on a Mac at your house, and I’m on a PC at mine. And we need to collab and share some work. I have a document you need to help me edit, and you have an image you want me to view. Using CoScreen, with one click according to Pieper, we can share the two apps across the internet. Yours will appear on my screen as it was native, and vice versa, and we can both interact with them in real time.
Or as close to real time as possible; Pieper told TechCrunch that latency is something that CoScreen will work on forever. Which makes sense, but what the company has built it thinks is good enough to take to market. So, today it’s launching the service after a period of time in beta for both Windows and Mac.
CoScreen also has audio and video-chatting capabilities. With limits. You can’t make video windows too big, for example, helping to keep the mental-load of chatting low. As someone with regular Zoom poisoning, that makes sense.
The startup’s project hits me as one of those things that sounds easy but isn’t. Remember Google Wave? It allowed for instantaneous co-writing. It was amazing. It died. And its successor-of-sorts Google Docs is a laggy mess to this day that feels more quarter-baked than half-done. Real-time tech is not simple.
Is the market too full of apps that allow a version of what CoScreen does for the startup to succeed? Maybe, maybe not. Zoom stormed the already mature video chat market with a product that actually worked. And so software that I have used has been very good at screen-sharing, let alone sharing and collaborating. So if CoScreen’s tech is good, the company should have a shot at broad adoption.
Which it is banking on. The startup is currently offering its product for free for a few weeks. It will focus on monetization later, Pieper explained. Making money is just not a burning desire for the firm at the moment, which implies both confidence in its product and bank account.
Closing, the startup is targeting engineers and other agile teams, though I suspect that its product will have wider market remit in time.
At this juncture, we’ll have to wait for numbers to see what’s ahead for CoScreen. The company didn’t share much in the way of usage metrics, which was reasonable, given its recent beta status. We’ll expect more hard figures the next time we chat.
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Contra wants to be the community that independent workers are missing
Whether you’re working on something new according to your Twitter bio, or self-employed, according to your LinkedIn bio, founder Ben Huffman thinks his platform, Contra, will be the best way for independent workers to explain and monetize what they are working on.
Contra is a platform that wants professionals to create profiles that show project-based identities, versus a role-based identity that one would show on LinkedIn. It’s been built for what Huffman thinks is the future: digital knowledge workers, a term he uses to describe independent tech workers who freelance for different companies or gigs.
The early adopters are independent workers who want to work or advise for a product team.
“So you can think about any type of modern-day product team consisting of like a designer, an engineer, a PM, maybe a writer, or maybe someone else distributing content. There’s a high degree of referability amongst these user types,” he said.
Users would showcase the tools they use, projects they’ve led and initiatives they’ve pushed instead of simply writing “Former Stripe Engineer” and calling it a day.
“What you don’t know is what problems they solved at Stripe,” Huffman explained, and Contra wants to give users space to explain that.
A Contra profile looks like a storefront for an independent creators’ business. The first thing you will see is project experience, with the option to toggle between services currently available for sale, recommendations from the referral network and, finally, the About page.
A goal of Contra’s, per Huffman, is to help independent workers create high-signal referral networks so they can land new opportunities and gigs. Whenever a user posts a new project experience to their resume, they can add who they worked with as a collaborator.
It’s different from LinkedIn, where you can add anyone you meet and they become a “connection.” Contra requires you to have work experience with your network, making the referral network high-signal. Contra positions referrals high-up on profiles, reminiscent of the MySpace Top 10.
Referrals as a core mechanism to get jobs could disproportionately hurt Black and brown founders, who have been left out of networks. But Huffman says that Contra doesn’t only rely on referrals, it also helps position someone as more than their resume.
“Most resumes are filtered out by AI today and have historically disadvantaged BPOC candidates,” he said. “With a project focus instead of roles and education credential-focus on the identity, we help undiscovered talent get ahead.”
Huffman, who experienced resume bias first-hand as a college dropout with no-credentials from a rural area, thinks that his tool can combat bias in an effective way. The best-case scenario would be if Contra could help a talented designer based in Minneapolis get an opportunity in a city like San Francisco or New York by showcasing their work.
But Contra has ambition to be more than just the latest startup to aim at LinkedIn, Huffman tells TechCrunch. Beyond being a professional network, it wants to also be a place where independent workers can make money for their services and get inbound customers. He describes Contra as a LinkedIn meets Shopify for independent workers.
In other words, Contra is a profile that independent workers can build and then monetize off of, as well as track engagement on how certain services of theirs might be in more demand than others.
“We’re trying to enable people to monetize the value they create, versus the time they spend in places,” says Huffman. The goal here is to “enable people to build these identities, and give them infrastructure to be successful as an independent worker. Contra integrates with Stripe to bring on payments infrastructure, letting workers actually sell their services on the platform.
From an independent worker’s perspective, the internal view offers analytics to understand what the public is looking at on their profile, from what services are most in demand to what projects get the most attention. The analytics, which are private to everyone except the user, also helps workers understand what the conversion rate is once people come to their platform.
It is free to make money and a profile on Contra, which differentiates it from freelance marketplaces like UpWork and Fiverr, which take a percent cut of earnings. Since Contra doesn’t charge a commission on earnings, it monetizes through a SaaS subscription, $29 a month, that includes benefits such as same-day payouts and higher visibility in the platform to eventually get better opportunities.
A potentially large new competitor might be from LinkedIn itself, which is developing a new service called Marketplaces to help freelancers find and book work. Facebook is also working on a tool related to freelancers. Huffman sees Contra’s focus on professional identity as a competitive advantage, and the fact that the tool might be taking commissions.
“It makes what we are doing that much more relevant,” he said.
Luckily, the startup has raised a $14.5 million Series A round to meet its competition head on. The financing event was led by Unusual Ventures, with participation from Cowboy Ventures and Li Jin’s recently announced Atelier Ventures.
Contra wouldn’t disclose the number of users it currently has but did confirm that the total is “in the six-figure range.”
The cash will be used to increase the speed in which it can ship features, as well as build out an ambassador program, in which it will pay users $1,000 a month to test out the product and support the shift to independent work.
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Arrikto raises $10M for its MLOps platform
Arrikto, a startup that wants to speed up the machine learning development lifecycle by allowing engineers and data scientists to treat data like code, is coming out of stealth today and announcing a $10 million Series A round. The round was led by Unusual Ventures, with Unusual’s John Vrionis joining the board.
“Our technology at Arrikto helps companies overcome the complexities of implementing and managing machine learning applications,” Arrikto CEO and co-founder Constantinos Venetsanopoulos explained. “We make it super easy to set up end-to-end machine learning pipelines. More specifically, we make it easy to build, train, deploy ML models into production using Kubernetes and intelligent intelligently manage all the data around it.”
Like so many developer-centric platforms today, Arrikto is all about “shift left.” Currently, the team argues, machine learning teams and developer teams don’t speak the same language and use different tools to build models and to put them into production.
Image Credits: Arrikto
“Much like DevOps shifted deployment left, to developers in the software development life cycle, Arrikto shifts deployment left to data scientists in the machine learning life cycle,” Venetsanopoulos explained.
Arrikto also aims to reduce the technical barriers that still make implementing machine learning so difficult for most enterprises. Venetsanopoulos noted that just like Kubernetes showed businesses what a simple and scalable infrastructure could look like, Arrikto can show them what a simpler ML production pipeline can look like — and do so in a Kubernetes-native way.
Arrikto CEO Constantinos Venetsanopoulos. Image Credits: Arrikto
At the core of Arrikto is Kubeflow, the Google -incubated open-source machine learning toolkit for Kubernetes — and in many ways, you can think of Arrikto as offering an enterprise-ready version of Kubeflow. Among other projects, the team also built MiniKF to run Kubeflow on a laptop and uses Kale, which lets engineers build Kubeflow pipelines from their JupyterLab notebooks.
As Venetsanopoulos noted, Arrikto’s technology does three things: it simplifies deploying and managing Kubeflow, allows data scientists to manage it using the tools they already know, and it creates a portable environment for data science that enables data versioning and data sharing across teams and clouds.
While Arrikto has stayed off the radar since it launched out of Athens, Greece in 2015, the founding team of Venetsanopoulos and CTO Vangelis Koukis already managed to get a number of large enterprises to adopt its platform. Arrikto currently has more than 100 customers and, while the company isn’t allowed to name any of them just yet, Venetsanopoulos said they include one of the largest oil and gas companies, for example.
And while you may not think of Athens as a startup hub, Venetsanopoulos argues that this is changing and there is a lot of talent there (though the company is also using the funding to build out its sales and marketing team in Silicon Valley). “There’s top-notch talent from top-notch universities that’s still untapped. It’s like we have an unfair advantage,” he said.
“We see a strong market opportunity as enterprises seek to leverage cloud-native solutions to unlock the benefits of machine learning,” Unusual’s Vrionis said. “Arrikto has taken an innovative and holistic approach to MLOps across the entire data, model and code lifecycle. Data scientists will be empowered to accelerate time to market through increased automation and collaboration without requiring engineering teams.”
Image Credits: Arrikto
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Founders don’t need to be full-time to start raising venture capital
“More than 50% of our founders still are in their current jobs,” said John Vrionis, co-founder of seed-stage fund Unusual Ventures.
The fund, which closed a $400 million investment vehicle in November 2019, has noticed that more and more startup employees are thinking about entrepreneurship as the pandemic has shown how much room there is for new innovation. To gain a competitive advantage, Unusual is investing small checks into founders before they’re full-time.
Unusual, which cuts an average of eight checks per year into seed-stage companies, isn’t doling out millions to every employee who decides to leave Stripe. The firm is conservative with its spending and takes a more focused approach, often embedding a member from the firm into a portfolio company. It’s not meant to scale to dozens of portfolio companies a year, but instead requires a methodical approach.
One with a healthy pipeline of companies to choose from.
In an Extra Crunch Live chat, Vrionis and Sarah Leary, co-founder of Nextdoor and the firm’s newest partner, said lightweight investing matters in the early days of a company.
“There were a lot of teams that needed capital to start the journey, but frankly, it would have been over burdensome if they took on $2 or $3 million,” Leary said. “[New founders] want to be in a place where they have enough money to get going but not too much money that they get locked into a ladder in terms of expectations that they’re not ready to take advantage of.” The checks that Unusual cuts in pre-seed often range between $100,000 to half a million dollars.
Leary chalks up the boom to the disruption in consumer behavior, which opens up the opportunity for new companies to win.
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Discuss the unbundling of early-stage VC with Unusual Ventures’ Sarah Leary & John Vrionis
This year has been everything but business as usual for the venture and tech community. And we still have a presidential election ahead of us.
So, why not listen to the aptly-named experts over at Unusual Ventures? Partners Sarah Leary (co-founder of Nextdoor) and John Vrionis, formerly of Lightspeed Ventures Partners, will join us on Tuesday, October 20 on the Extra Crunch Live virtual stage.
Thanks to all of you who have joined us for our series of live discussions that has included tech leaders like Sydney Sykes, Alexia von Tobel, Mark Cuban and many others (all recordings are still accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers to watch and learn from).
If you’re new, welcome! You’ll have a chance to participate in the live discussion if you have an Extra Crunch subscription.
Unusual Ventures’ investments span the consumer and enterprise space, including companies like Robinhood, AppDynamics, Mulesoft and Winnie.
For this chat, I plan to spend some time talking to Leary and Vrionis about how early-stage venture capital has changed with the rise of rolling funds, community funds and syndicates. Unusual Ventures claims “there’s an enormous opportunity to raise the bar on what seed-stage investors provide for early-stage founders,” so we’ll get into that opportunity as well.
And if we have time, we’ll discuss remote work, building in public and the U.S. presidential election.
So, what are you waiting for? Add the deets to your calendar (below the jump!) and join me next Tuesday.
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Transposit scores $35M to build data-driven runbooks for faster disaster recovery
Transposit is a company built by engineers to help engineers, and one big way to help them is to get systems up and running faster when things go wrong — as they always will at some point. Transposit has come up with a way to build runbooks for faster disaster recovery, while using data to update them in an automated fashion.
Today, the company announced a $35 million Series B investment led by Altimeter Capital, with participation from existing investors Sutter Hill Ventures, SignalFire and Unusual Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $50.4 million, according to the company.
Company CEO Divanny Lamas and CTO and founder Tina Huang see technology issues as less an engineering problem and more as a human problem, because it’s humans who have to clean up the messes when things go wrong. Huang says forgetting the human side of things is where she thinks technology has gone astray.
“We know that the real superpower of the product is that we focus on the human and the user side of things. And as a result, we’re building an engineering culture that I think is somewhat differentiated,” Huang told TechCrunch.
Transposit is a platform that at its core helps manage APIs, connections to other programs, so it starts with a basic understanding of how various underlying technologies work together inside a company. This is essential for a tool that is trying to help engineers in a moment of panic figure out how to get back to a working state.
When it comes to disaster recovery, there are essentially two pieces: getting the systems working again, then figuring out what happened. For the first piece, the company is building data-driven runbooks. By being data-driven, they aren’t static documents. Instead, the underlying machine learning algorithms can look at how the engineers recovered and adjust accordingly.
Image Credits: Transposit
“We realized that no one was focusing on what we realize is the root problem here, which is how do I have access to the right set of data to make it easier to reconstruct that timeline, and understand what happened? We took those two pieces together, this notion that runbooks are a critical piece of how you spread knowledge and spread process, and this other piece, which is the data, is critical,” Huang said.
Today the company has 26 employees, including Huang and Lamas, who Huang brought on board from Splunk last year to be CEO. The company is somewhat unique having two women running the organization, and they are trying to build a diverse workforce as they build their company to 50 people in the next 12 months.
The current make-up is 47% female engineers, and the goal is to remain diverse as they build the company, something that Lamas admits is challenging to do. “I wish I had a magic answer, or that Tina had a magic answer. The reality is that we’re just very demanding on recruiters. And we are very insistent that we have a diverse pipeline of candidates, and are constantly looking at our numbers and looking at how we’re doing,” Lamas said.
She says being diverse actually makes it easier to recruit good candidates. “People want to work at diverse companies. And so it gives us a real edge from a kind of culture perspective, and we find that we get really amazing candidates that are just tired of the status quo. They’re tired of the old way of doing things and they want to work in a company that reflects the world that they want to live in,” she said.
The company, which launched in 2016, took a few years to build the first piece, the underlying API platform. This year it added the disaster recovery piece on top of that platform, and has been running its beta since the beginning of the summer. They hope to add additional beta customers before making it generally available later this year.
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BluBracket scores $6.5M seed to help secure code in distributed environments
BluBracket, a new security startup from the folks who brought you Vera, came out of stealth today and announced a $6.5 million seed investment. Unusual Ventures led the round with participation by Point72 Ventures, SignalFire and Firebolt Ventures.
The company was launched by Ajay Arora and Prakash Linga, who until last year were CEO and CTO respectively at Vera, a security company that helps companies secure documents by having the security profile follow the document wherever it goes.
Arora says he and Linga are entrepreneurs at heart, and they were itching to start something new after more than five years at Vera. While Arora still sits on the Vera board, they decided to attack a new problem.
He says that the idea for BluBracket actually came out of conversations with Vera customers, who wanted something similar to Vera, except to protect code. “About 18-24 months ago, we started hearing from our customers, who were saying, ‘Hey you guys secure documents and files. What’s becoming really important for us is to be able to share code. Do you guys secure source code?’”
That was not a problem Vera was suited to solve, but it was a light bulb moment for Arora and Linga, who saw an opportunity and decided to seize it. Recognizing the way development teams operated has changed, they started BluBracket and developed a pair of products to handle the unique set of problems associated with a distributed set of developers working out of a Git repository — whether that’s GitHub, GitLab or BitBucket.
The first product is BluBracket CodeInsight, which is an auditing tool, available starting today. This tool gives companies full visibility into who has withdrawn the code from the Git repository. “Once they have a repo, and then developers clone it, we can help them understand what clones exist on what devices, what third parties have their code, and even be able to search open source projects for code that might have been pushed into open source. So we’re creating what we call a blueprint of where the enterprise code is,” Arora explained.
The second tool, BluBracket CodeSecure, which won’t be available until later in the year, is how you secure that code including the ability to classify code by level importance. Code tagged with the highest level of importance will have special status and companies can attach rules to it like that it can’t be distributed to an open source folder without explicit permission.
They believe the combination of these tools will enable companies to maintain control over the code, even in a distributed system. Arora says they have taken care to make sure that the system provides the needed security layer without affecting the operation of the continuous delivery pipeline.
“When you’re compiling or when you’re going from development to staging to production, in those cases because the code is sitting in Git, and the code itself has not been modified, BluBracket won’t break the chain,” he explained. If you tried to distribute special code outside the system, you might get a message that this requires authorization, depending on how the tags have been configured.
This is very early days for BluBracket, but the company takes its first steps as a startup this week and emerges from stealth next week at the RSA security conference in San Francisco. It will be participating in the RSA Sandbox competition for early security startups at the conference, as well.
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At TechCrunch Disrupt, insights into key trends in venture capital
At TechCrunch Disrupt, the original tech startup conference, venture capitalists remain amongst the premier guests.
VCs are responsible for helping startups — the focus of the three-day event — get off the ground, and, as such, they are often the most familiar with trends in the startup ecosystem, ready to deliver insights, anecdotes and advice to our audience of entrepreneurs, investors, operators, managers and more.
In the first half of 2019, VCs spent $66 billion purchasing equity in promising upstarts, according to the latest data from PitchBook. At that pace, VC spending could surpass $100 billion for the second year in a row. We plan to welcome a slew of investors to TechCrunch Disrupt to discuss this major feat and the investing trends that have paved the way for recording funding.
Mega-funds and the promise of unicorn initial public offerings continue to drive investment. SoftBank, of course, began raising its second Vision Fund this year, a vehicle expected to exceed $100 billion. Meanwhile, more traditional VC outfits revisited limited partners to stay competitive with the Japanese telecom giant. Andreessen Horowitz, for example, collected $2.75 billion for two new funds earlier this year. We’ll have a16z general partners Chris Dixon, Angela Strange and Andrew Chen at Disrupt for insight into the firm’s latest activity.
At the early-stage, the fight for seed deals continued, with larger funds moving downstream to muscle their way into seed and Series A financings. Pre-seed has risen to prominence, with new funds from Afore Capital and Bee Partners helping to legitimize the stage. Bolstering the early-stage further, Y Combinator admitted more than 400 companies across its two most recent batches,
We’ll welcome pre-seed and seed investor Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures and Redpoint Ventures general partner Annie Kadavy to give founders tips on how to raise VC. Plus, Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel and Ali Rowghani, the CEO of YC’s Continuity Fund, which invests in and advises growth-stage startups, will join us on the Disrupt Extra Crunch stage ready with tips on how to get accepted to the respected accelerator.
Moreover, activity in high-growth sectors, particularly enterprise SaaS, has permitted a series of outsized rounds across all stages of financing. Speaking on this trend, we’ll have AppDynamics founder and Unusual Ventures co-founder Jyoti Bansal and Battery Ventures general partner Neeraj Agrawal in conversation with TechCrunch’s enterprise reporter Ron Miller.
We would be remiss not to analyze activity on Wall Street in 2019, too. As top venture funds refueled with new capital, Silicon Valley’s favorite unicorns completed highly anticipated IPOs, a critical step toward bringing a much needed bout of liquidity to their investors. Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, Zoom, PagerDuty, Slack and several others went public this year, and other well-financed companies, including Peloton, Postmates and WeWork, have completed paperwork for upcoming public listings. To detail this year’s venture activity and IPO extravaganza, David Krane, CEO and managing partner of Uber and Slack investor GV, will be on deck, as will Sequoia general partner Jess Lee, Floodgate’s Ann Miura-Ko and Aspect Ventures’ Theresia Gouw.
There’s more where that came from. In addition to the VCs already named, Disrupt attendees can expect to hear from Bessemer Venture Partners’ Tess Hatch, who will provide her expertise on the growing “space economy.” Forerunner Ventures’ Eurie Kim will give the Extra Crunch Stage audience tips on building a subscription product, Mithril Capital’s Ajay Royan will explore opportunities in the medical robotics field and SOSV’s Arvind Gupta will dive deep into the cutting-edge world of health tech and more.
Disrupt SF runs October 2-4 at the Moscone Center in the heart of San Francisco. Passes are available here.
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