YC Winter 2020
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YC alum Paragon snags $2.5M seed for low-code app integration platform
Low-code is a hot category these days. It helps companies build workflows or simple applications without coding skills, freeing up valuable engineering resources for more important projects. Paragon, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort, announced a $2.5 million seed round today for its low-code application integration platform.
Investors include Y Combinator, Village Global, Global Founders Capital, Soma Capital and FundersClub.
“Paragon makes it easier for non-technical people to be able to build out integrations using our visual workflow editor. We essentially provide building blocks for things like API requests, interactions with third party APIs and conditional logic. And so users can drag and drop these building blocks to create workflows that describe business logic in their application,” says company co-founder Brandon Foo.
Foo acknowledges there are a lot of low-code workflow tools out there, but many like UIPath, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere concentrate on robotic process automation (RPA) to automate certain tasks. He says he and co-founder Ishmael Samuel wanted to focus on developers.
“We’re really focused on how can we improve developer efficiency, and how can we bring the benefits of low code to product and engineering teams and make it easier to build products without writing manual code for every single integration, and really be able to streamline the product development process,” Foo told TechCrunch.
The way it works is you can drag and drop one of 1,200 predefined connectors for tools like Stripe, Slack and Google Drive into a workflow template, and build connectors very quickly to trigger some sort of action. The company is built on AWS serverless architecture, so you define the trigger action and subsequent actions, and Paragon handles all of the back-end infrastructure requirements for you.
It’s early days for the company. After launching in private beta in January, the company has 80 customers. It currently has six employees, including Foo, who previously co-founded Polymail, and Samuel, who was previously lead engineer at Uber. They plan to hire four more employees this year.
With both founders people of color, they definitely are looking to build a diverse team around them. “I think it’s already sort of built into our DNA. As a diverse founding team we have perhaps a broader viewpoint and perspective in terms of hiring the kind of people that we seek to work with. Of course, I think there’s always room for improvement, and so we’re always looking for new ways that we can be more inclusive in our hiring recruiting process [as we grow],” he said.
As far as raising during a pandemic, he says it’s been a crazy time, but he believes they are solving a real problem and that they can succeed in spite of the macro economic conditions of the moment.
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Datree announces $8M Series A as it joins Y Combinator
Datree, the early-stage startup building a DevOps policy engine on GitHub, announced an $8 million Series A today. It also announced it has joined the Y Combinator Winter 20 cohort.
Blumberg and TLV Partners led the round with participation from Y Combinator . The company has now raised $11 million with the $3 million seed round announced in 2018.
Since that seed round, company co-founder and CEO Shimon Tolts says that the company learned that while scanning code for issues was something DevOps teams found useful, they wanted help defining the rules. So Datree has created a series of rules packages you can run against the code to find any gaps or issues.
“We offer development best practices, coding standards and security and compliance policies. What happens today is that, as you connect to Datree, we connect to your source code and scan the entire code base, and we recommend development best practices based on your technology stack,” Tolts explained.
He says that they build these rules packages based on the company’s own expertise, as well as getting help from the community, and in some cases partnering with experts. For its Docker security package, it teamed up with Aqua Security.
The focus remains on applying these rules in GitHub where developers are working. Before committing the code, they can run the appropriate rules packages against it to ensure they are in compliance with best practices.
Datree rules packages. Screenshot: Datree
Tolts says they began looking at Y Combinator after the seed round because they wanted more guidance on building out the business. “We knew that Y Combinator could really help us because our product is relevant to 95 percent of all YC companies, and the program has helped us go and work on six figure deals with more mature YC companies,” he said.
Datree is working directly with Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel, and he says being part of the Winter 20 cohort has helped him refine his go-to-market motion. He admits he is not a typical YC company having been around since 2017 with an existing product and 12 employees, but he thinks it will help propel the company in the long run.
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Whatnot wants to be the GOAT of collectible toys, starting with Funko Pops
Funko Pops. You’ve probably noticed them at your local GameStop, Hot Topic or spread out all over your co-worker’s desk. These lil’ vinyl figurines and their big ol’ heads have taken over retail shelves in the last few years. You can now find a Funko Pop! (or thirty) for just about every fandom; there are more than 8,000 different Pops, and that number never seems to stop growing.
Like most collectible things, some Pops are worth more than others — whether they’re obscure characters that didn’t get a big run, limited-edition color variations or were only sold for a day or two at a convention, the rarest Pops can sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars. And, like anything where people are dropping piles of cash, there are folks trying to sell fakes.
Whatnot, a company out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 class, wants to tackle the issue of fakes in collectibles by adapting a model proven by services like GOAT and StockX: authenticated resale.
As with the aforementioned, Whatnot works as the obsessively-informed middle man between buyer and seller. Buyer makes an offer, seller sends their figurine to Whatnot, Whatnot uses its growing knowledge of what’s real (and how to flag what’s not) to make sure it’s legit. If everything looks good, Whatnot forwards the Funko Pop to the buyer and takes their cut (about 9%, plus a few bucks for shipping).
“We started out buying and reselling sneakers, actually,” Whatnot co-founder Grant LaFontaine tells me. “Then we started getting into buying/reselling Funko Pops. As we started to do this, we noticed it was much more difficult, and much more unsafe, to buy and sell Funko Pops than it was to buy and sell sneakers.”
Services like GOAT and StockX had “drastically simplified” the process for sneaker fans, LaFontaine says, helping to weed out counterfeits for buyers while limiting potential scams that could hurt sellers.
Today all sales on Whatnot are verified by a human expert. That makes sense for the rarer, more expensive figurines. The “Grails,” as Funko Pop collectors call them — like this Comic Con Sith Trooper that has been selling for around $600-700, or this 2012 “Holographic” Darth Maul that can go for thousands. For the less rare stuff, though, it’s a bit overkill.
With that in mind, Whatnot is building out its database of the red flags to look for with each transaction — things like boxes that are just slightly mis-sized, or a logo that doesn’t look quite right. In time, this could allow for more of their verification to be automated, with the human expert (and the associated higher fees) reserved for bigger transactions.
Whatnot isn’t alone in noticing this market’s potential. StockX, the authenticated resale marketplace that first focused on sneakers, expanded into collectibles late last year. Whatnot is looking to find its fan base by focusing solely on collectibles, giving collectors the exact user experience, filters and info they’d be looking for within a given category.
That’s not to say they’re focusing solely on Funko Pops, though — not in the long run, at least. The team intends to expand into other types of collectibles down the road, with Pokémon cards being the likely next candidate.
Whatnot tells me it has raised a $550,000 pre-seed round from Wonder Ventures, YC, and a handful of angel investors.
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