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Camunda snares $98M Series B as process automation continues to flourish

Published March 22, 2021

It’s clear that automated workflow tooling has become increasingly important for companies. Perhaps that explains why Camunda, a Berlin startup that makes open-source process automation software, announced an €82 million Series B today. That translates into approximately $98 million U.S.

Insight Partners led the round with help from A round investor Highland Europe. When combined with the $28 million A investment from December 2018, it brings the total raised to approximately $126 million.

What’s attracting this level of investment says Jakob Freund, co-founder and CEO at Camunda, is the company is solving a problem that goes beyond pure automation. “There’s a bigger thing going on which you could call end-to-end automation or end-to-end orchestration of endpoints, which can be RPA bots, for example, but also micro services and manual work [by humans],” he said.

He added, “Camunda has become this endpoint agnostic orchestration layer that sits on top of everything else.” That means that it provides the ability to orchestrate how the automation pieces work in conjunction with one another to create this full workflow across a company.

SAP is buying Berlin business process automation startup Signavio

The company has 270 employees and approximately 400 customers at this point, including Goldman Sachs, Lufthansa, Universal Music Group and Orange. Matt Gatto, managing director at Insight Partners, sees a tremendous market opportunity for the company and that’s why his firm came in with such a big investment.

“Camunda’s success demonstrates how an open, standards-based, developer-friendly platform for end-to-end process automation can increase business agility and improve customer experiences, helping organizations truly transform to a digital enterprise,” Gatto said in a statement.

Camunda is not your typical startup. Its history actually dates back to 2008 as a business process management (BPM) consulting firm. It began the Camunda open-source project in 2013, and that was the start of pivoting to become an open-source software company with a commercial component built on top of that.

It took the funding at the end of 2018 because the market was beginning to catch up with the idea, and they wanted to build on that. It’s going so well that the company reports it’s cash-flow positive, and will use the additional funding to continue accelerating the business.

Address cybersecurity challenges before rolling out robotic process automation

Camunda hauls in $28M investment as workflow automation remains hot

Tech companies predict the (economic) future

Published March 22, 2021

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here.

Earnings season is coming to a close, with public tech companies wrapping up their Q4 and 2020 disclosures. We don’t care too much about the bigger players’ results here at TechCrunch, but smaller tech companies we knew when they were wee startups can provide startup-related data points worth digesting. So, each quarter The Exchange spends time chatting with a host of CEOs and CFOs, trying to figure what’s going on so that we can relay the information to private companies.

Sometimes it’s useful, as our chat with recent fintech IPO Upstart proved after we got to noodle with the company about rising acceptance of AI in the conservative banking industry.

This week we caught up with Yext CEO Howard Lerman and Smartsheet CEO Mark Mader. Yext builds data products for small businesses, and is betting its future on search products. Smartsheet is a software company that works in the collaboration, no-code and future-of-work spaces.

They are pretty different companies, really. But what they did share this time ’round the earnings cycle were macro notes, or details regarding their forward financial guidance and what economic conditions they anticipate. As a macro-nerd, it piqued my interest.

Yext cited a number of macroeconomic headwinds when it reported its Q4 results. And tying its future results somewhat to an uncertain macro picture, the company said that it is “basing [its] guidance on the business conditions [it sees for itself] and [its] customers currently, with the macro economy, which remains sluggish, and customers who remain cautious,” per a transcript.

Lerman told The Exchange that it was not clear when the world would open — something that matters for Yext’s location-focused products — so the company was guiding for the year as if nothing would change. Wall Street didn’t love it, but if the economy improves Yext won’t have high hurdles to jump over. This is one tack that a company can take when it talks guidance.

Smartsheet took a slightly different approach, saying in its earnings call that its “fiscal year ’22 guidance contemplates a gradual improvement in the macro environment in the second half of the year.” Mader said in an interview that his company wasn’t hiring economists, but was instead simply listening to what others were saying.

He also said that the macro climate matters more in saturated markets, which he doesn’t think that Smartsheet is in; so, its results should be more impacted by things more like “the secular shift to the cloud and digital transformation,” to quote its earnings call.

AI fintech products are operating at scale and investor interest is maturing

What the economy will do this year matters quite a lot for startups. An improving economy could boost interest rates, making money a bit more expensive and bonds more attractive. Valuations could see modest downward pressure in that case. And venture capital could slow fractionally. But with Yext forecasting as if it was facing a flat road and Smartsheet only expecting things to pick up pace from Q3 on, it’s likely that what we have now is mostly what we’ll get.

And things are pretty damn good for startups and late-stage liquidity at the moment. So, smooth sailing ahead for startup-land? At least as far as our current perspective can discern.

We still have a grip of notes from Splunk CEO Douglas Merritt on how to take an old-school software company and turn it into a cloud-first company, and Jamf CEO Dean Hager about packaging discrete software products. More to come from them in fits.

Various and sundry

There were rounds big and small this week. Companies like Squarespace raised $300 million, while Airtable raised $277 million. On the smaller-end of the spectrum, my favorite round of the week was a modest $2.9 million raise from Copy.ai.

But there were other rounds that TechCrunch didn’t get to that are still worth our time. So, here are a few more for you to dig into this weekend:

A so-called pre-Series A round for Lilli, a U.K.-based startup that uses sensors and other tech to track the well-being of folks who might need help to live on their own. Using tech to take care of folks is always good by me. The deal was worth £4.5 million, per UKTN.
An IPO for Tuya, a Chinese software company that raised $915 million in its American debut. Chinese IPOs on American indices were once a big deal. They are less frequent now. Surprised that I missed this one, but, hey, there’s been a lot going on.
And the Republic round, worth $36 million, that is banking on the recently-expanded American crowdfunding regulations. Some startups have seen success with the approach, including Juked.gg.

Forget medicine, in the future you might get prescribed apps

Upcoming attractions

Next week is Y Combinator Demo Day week, so expect a lot of early-stage coverage on the blog. Here’s a preview. From The Exchange we’re looking back into insurtech (with data from WeFox and Insurify), and talking about Austin-based software startup AlertMedia’s decision to sell itself to private-equity instead of raising more traditional capital.

And to leave you with some reading material, make sure you’ve picked through our look at the valuations of free-trading apps, the issues with dual-class shares, the recent IPO win for the New York scene and how unequal the global venture capital market really is.

The global inequity in venture financing is staggering

Closing, this BigTechnology piece was good, as was this Not Boring essay. Hugs, and have a lovely respite,

Alex

Tim Cook and Tim Sweeney among potential witnesses for Apple/Epic trial

Published March 20, 2021

A proposed witness list filed by Apple for its upcoming trial against game-maker Epic reads like a who’s who of executives from the two companies. The drawn out battle could well prove a watershed moment from mobile app payments.

The two sides came to loggerheads when the Fortnite maker was kicked out of the App Store in August of last year after adding an in-game payment system designed to bypass Apple’s – along with Apple’s cut of the profiles.

Epic has accused Apple of monopolist practices pertaining to mobile payment. Apple, meanwhile, has argued that Epic broke the App Store agreement in order to increase its revenue.

Filed late last night by the hardware giant, the document includes top executives from bot sides. For Apple, the list includes CEO Tim Cook, Software Engineering SVP Craig Federighi and Apple Fellow, Phil Schiller. On team Epic, it’s Tim Sweeney and VP Mark Rein. Executives from Microsoft, Facebook and NVIDIA are also included, for good measure.

In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Apple notes,

Our senior executives look forward to sharing with the court the very positive impact the App Store has had on innovation, economies across the world and the customer experience over the last 12 years. We feel confident the case will prove that Epic purposefully breached its agreement solely to increase its revenues, which is what resulted in their removal from the App Store. By doing that, Epic circumvented the security features of the App Store in a way that would lead to reduced competition and put consumers’ privacy and data security at tremendous risk.

The trial is expected to kick off May 3. We’ve reached out to Epic for additional comment.

Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney likens fight against Apple to fight for civil rights

Startups, Supreme, and soft-circling your way to an investment

Published March 20, 2021

In an Extra Crunch Live this past week, Cleo Capital founding partner Sarah Kunst broke down what founders can learn from Supreme, a sought-after streetwear brand. She argued that founders, similar to Supreme, should build a brand around themselves that is so well-respected and has clout that whenever they start something new, investors will line up.

“A Supreme shirt that costs $100 bucks in the store will cost $1,000 online so, as an investor, I am just a kid on the street corner flipping sportswear,” Kunst mentioned. “Who do I think is going to be an investment with such velocity that getting in early is going to be more than worth it as they grow.”

I think this is the best framing I’ve seen about how to drum up excitement for a startup as a founder. FOMO isn’t a strategy, it’s a tactic. What really works, as Kunst alluded to, is when founders can point to key insights they’ve had throughout their career beyond the context of a fundraising process. In other words, anyone can create a nice t-shirt and slap a logo on it. Which founder in this sector is going to give it meaning? It might be the one with the big former exit, the one that was the first Black woman to ever build a unicorn, or the one that was on the ground facing the pain point they now want to solve.

We get into how to build a fundraising process, the concept of soft-circling an investor and what Kunst says is one of her biggest pet-peeves in a pitch deck on the site, but I wanted to give you that sneak peek for now.

Saying ‘yes, please’ to no code

This week, Airtable was valued at $5.77 billion from a fresh Series E fundraise.

Here’s what to know: As we discussed on Equity, Airtable is far more than a savvy Excel sheet with bells and whistles. It is one of the leaders in the no-code movement, and founder Howie Liu recently opened up its API to promote developer innovation atop its platform.

Okay, the GPT-3 hype seems pretty reasonable

Image Credits: Cadalpe (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

A seedy asset class

Per Climate Editor Jonathan Shieber, farmland could become the next big asset class modernized by marketplace startups.

Here’s what to know: One startup, AcreTrader, is trying to create a Robinhood for buying farmland, which I think is indicative of how lucrative some view a patch of land. CEO Carter Malloy thinks that while private equity often gets press for being in the land game, most land is owned by smaller ownership through families.

“Over the last few months, we’ve consistently seen our offering sizes grow while our funding windows shrink, showcasing the fast-growing desire surrounding this resilient asset class,” he said.

More places for investors to throw their money reminds me of two other stories for you to check out:

A green row celery field in the Salinas Valley, California USA. Image Credits: Pgiam (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images

Around TechCrunch

Consider these upcoming notes as the coupon section for your early-stage founder and investor dreams.

First up, I’m tossing you a discount code to our TechCrunch Early Stage conference, our two-day virtual event for founders, investors and operators. Use code “TCARTICLE” to get 20% off your ticket so you can attend super cool events like how to bootstrap with Calendly’s Tope Awotona and OpenView’s Blake Bartlett, how to pitch your Series A fundraise with Kleiner Perkins’ Bucky Moore, and finance for founders with Alexa von Tobel.

Secondly, we are already well into planning TechCrunch Disrupt 2021! Grab super early-bird passes for less than $100, to attend our all-virtual event.

Thirdly, thank you for all the support. DM me any questions you might have, and I really hope to see your lovely faces there.

Across the week

Seen on TC

Uber under pressure over facial recognition checks for drivers

5 trends in the boardrooms of high-growth private companies

Forget medicine, in the future you might get prescribed apps

Tech companies should oppose the new wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation

Seen on EC

Social+ payments: Why fintechs need social features

Snowflake gave up its dual-class shares, should you?

MaaS transit: The business of mobility as a service

Survey: Share feedback on Extra Crunch

Talk next week,

Survey: Share feedback on Extra Crunch

Extra Crunch roundup: AI eats fintech, fundraising visas, no-code transition tips, more

Published March 19, 2021

Most American retail banks are designed the same way: Customers must pass several desks set aside for loan and mortgage officers before they can talk to a customer representative.

I only step inside a bank a few times each year, but even pre-pandemic, I can’t remember the last time I saw someone sitting at one of those desks. Everyone I know who’s obtained a home or business loan in the recent past started with an online application process.

For this morning’s column, Alex Wilhelm interviewed Dave Girouard, CEO of Upstart, an AI-powered fintech lender that expects to see growth increase 114% this year.

A forecast like that suggests that retail banks have gotten comfortable with using automated tools to calculate risk, which may help explain all the empty desks at my local branch.

“If Upstart hits its 2021 numbers, we will be able to read into them broader adoption of AI among old-guard firms,” says Alex.

According to PitchBook, investors are also more bullish on AI: Q4 2020 saw record funding for AI and ML startups, and exit totals are increasing as well.

I wouldn’t mind adding a gently used desk to my home office; perhaps I should call my bank and see if they have one to spare.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch. Have a great weekend!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

AI fintech products are operating at scale and investor interest is maturing

Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.

A crypto company’s journey to Data 3.0

young woman uses digital tablet on virtual visual screen at night

Image Credits: dowell (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Data is a gold mine for a company. If managed well, it provides the clarity and insights that lead to better decision-making at scale, in addition to an important tool to hold everyone accountable.

However, most companies are stuck in Data 1.0.

A crypto company’s journey to Data 3.0

Dear Sophie: What type of visa should we get to fundraise in Silicon Valley?

lone figure at entrance to maze hedge that has an American flag at the center

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Dear Sophie:

A friend and I founded a tech startup last year. Like a lot of other startups, we’re looking for funding.

Should we come to Silicon Valley to meet with venture capitalists?

How should we begin that process? What type of visa should we get and how easy is it to get?

—Logical in Lagos

Dear Sophie: What type of visa should we get to fundraise in Silicon Valley?

To solve all the small things, look to everyday Little AI

Numbers code panel with blue glowing on dark background.

Image Credits: Yuichiro Chino / Getty Images

Why are developers still solving everyday pain points with manual, archaic processes, as opposed to employing “Little AI”?

There are millions of everyday use cases for AI, where technology is empowered to learn and decide on a course of action that offers the best outcome for consumers and companies alike.

To solve all the small things, look to everyday Little AI

How to recruit data scientists without paying top dollar

Female scientists working on project data on whiteboard in research lab

Image Credits: Thomas Barwick (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

The increasing demand for AI and data science experts, driven in part by the pandemic’s economic impact, is showing no sign of abating.

Many employers are failing to identify viable job candidates, much less interviewing or hiring them. What’s holding them back?

Often, it’s a poorly drafted job posting.

How to recruit data scientists without paying top dollar

3 steps to aid the transition to becoming a no-code company

Image Credits: Korrawin / Getty Images

No-code is changing how organizations build and maintain applications.

It democratizes application development by creating “citizen developers” who can quickly build out apps that meet their business-facing needs in real time, realigning IT and business objectives by bringing them closer together.

How can your company get ahead of the trend?

3 steps to ease the transition to a no-code company

No taxation without innovation: The rise of tax startups

Image Credits: jokerpro / Getty Images

The idiosyncrasies of sales taxes are a burden on small- and medium-sized businesses, but a new legion of startups is emerging to help companies manage the intricacies of cross-jurisdictional taxes.

No taxation without innovation: The rise of tax startups

Snowflake gave up its dual-class shares: Should you?

Four business people used ropes to tighten their money bags, economic austerity, reduced income, economic crisis

Image Credits: VectorInspiration / Getty Images

Some founders and investors argue that these preferred shares protect them from the whims of the market, but the perspective isn’t universally accepted.

Dual-class shares are a controversial governance structure, and some wonder if they are setting up an unfair playing field by allowing a cabal to wield outsized power.

So why would Snowflake give up such a powerful tool?

Snowflake gave up its dual-class shares. Should you?

MaaS transit: The business of mobility as a service

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

As transit agencies seek to win back riders, a flurry of platforms — some backed by giants like Uber, Intel and BMW — are offering new technology partnerships.

Whether it’s bundling bookings, payments or just trip planning, startups are selling these mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) offerings as a lifeline to make transit agencies the backbone of urban mobility.

MaaS transit: The business of mobility as a service

What eToro’s investor presentation and $10B valuation tells us about Robinhood

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Israeli consumer stock-trading service eToro is going public in the United States via a SPAC. One thing that points to?

Trading platforms are being valued like high-margin video games.

What eToro’s investor presentation and $10B valuation tells us about Robinhood

The global inequity in venture backing is staggering

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

I knew African founders lacked the same access to capital as entrepreneurs based in Europe or the United States, but the numbers are far less favorable than I thought.

According to Dauda Barry, CEO of Adaplay Esports, African startups have raised $500 million so far in 2021. If that trend continues, he estimates that the region’s tech companies will exceed the $1.4 billion they raised in 2020.

For perspective: “Stripe raised more yesterday than Barry had reported for the entire African continent this year,” Alex Wilhelm noted in today’s column.

Digging deeper, he pulled numbers from Crunchbase and PitchBook to track VC activity in Africa over the last three months. Once he filtered private equity funding from nonequity investments, the numbers were “staggering.”

“I am surprised that more VCs aren’t investing in Africa,” says Alex. “It smells like investing arbitrage.”

The global inequity in venture financing is staggering

Farmland could be the next big asset class modernized by marketplace startups

Image Credits: Pgiam (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Companies that help farmers raise money for agricultural development projects are revolutionizing the way farm and forestland are acquired, developed and commercialized across the United States.

While private equity has gotten a lot of press for expanding the size of their farmland investments, those investments are still dwarfed by the size of the potential farm industry in the U.S., meaning there’s still plenty of opportunity for investors to provide additional capital.

Farmland could be the next big asset class modernized by marketplace startups

The NFT market is just getting started, but where is it headed?

Image Credits: Beeple (opens in a new window) under a CC BY 4.0 (opens in a new window) license.

The crypto art craze might seem silly and expensive, but it could empower artists from emerging economies and underrepresented groups to access the global art market in ways that they couldn’t before.

Can it outlive the hype?

The NFT market is just getting started, but where is it headed?

Olo raises IPO range as DigitalOcean sees possible $5B debut valuation

Green arrow going up with red background

Image Credits: jayk7 (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

That Olo raised its IPO price is not a huge surprise, given the software company’s rapid growth and profits. In the case of DigitalOcean, we have more work to do as its approach to growth is a bit different.

Olo raises IPO range as DigitalOcean sees possible $5B debut valuation

Stripe’s epic new valuation and the value-capture gap between public and private markets

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Stripe’s $600 million round values the payments and banking software company at $95 billion, near the top end of the valuation range at which the company was said to be raising funds back in November 2020.

Sadly, Stripe is still being coy with growth metrics. The Exchange digs in, no matter how vague.

Stripe’s epic new valuation and the value-capture gap between public and private markets

Julia Collins and Sarah Kunst outline how to build a fundraising process

Julia Collins, the first Black woman to co-found a venture-backed unicorn, and investor Sarah Kunst offer fundraising pointers on Extra Crunch Live.

Kunst says good design is critical, but:

If you’re not a graphic designer, then any incremental minute that you’re spending on trying to make your deck pretty is a waste of time. You need to be focusing on content. Hire somebody, pay them a tiny bit of money to be able to do a nice graphics pass on your deck, and it’s going to make it a lot easier for people to to get the information that you need them to know.

Julia Collins and Sarah Kunst outline how to build a fundraising process

How nontechnical talent can break into deep tech

Image Credits: Getty Images

Startup hiring processes can be opaque, and breaking into the deep tech world as a nontechnical person seems daunting. This column offers tactical advice for finding, reaching out to, cultivating relationships with and working at deep tech companies as a nontechnical candidate.

Now approved in LA, Abodu’s backyard homes can now go from contract to completion in as little as 30 days

Published March 19, 2021

Abodu, one of a slew of startup companies pitching backyard homes and office spaces to Californians in an effort to help address the state’s housing shortage, has instituted a new “Quickship” program that can take an order from contract to construction and installation in about 30 days.

Behind the quick turnaround time is a pre-approval process that was first rolled out in Santa Fe and came to Los Angeles in recent weeks.

Abodu began installing homes through a pre-approval process back in 2019, when the city of San Jose created a program that allowed developers of alternative dwelling units to submit plans for pre-approval to cut the time for homeowners.

That approval process means that ADU developers like Abodu can be permitted in one hour. Other ADU developers pre-approved in San Jose, California include Acton ADU, the venture-backed Connect Homes, J. Kretschmer Architect, Mayberry Workshop, Open Remodel and prefabADU. In Los Angeles, La Mas, IT House, Design, Bitches, Connect Homes, Welcome Projects and First Office have all had homes pre-approved for construction.

Beyond the cities where Adobu’s ADUs have received pre-approval, the company has built across California in cities ranging from, Palo Alto, Millbrae, Orange County, LA and Oakland. Units in the Bay Area cost roughly $189,000 as a starting price, compared to the $650,000 to $850,000 it takes to build units in a mid-rise apartment building, or $1 million per unit in a steel-reinforced highrise, according to the company.

Construction tech startups are poised to shake up a $1.3-trillion-dollar industry

“Our Quickship program is the fastest way to add housing,” said John Geary, CEO at Abodu. “Homeowners with immediate needs, be it family situations or those looking for investment income, can now complete an ADU project in as little as four weeks. A key mission for Abodu is to make a serious dent in our state’s housing deficit while providing people and municipalities the necessary blueprint to enact real change.”

For Initialized partner (and former TechCrunch writer) Kim-Mai Cutler, who serves on the Abodu board of directors, the achievement of a 30-day construction milestone is almost a dream come true. Cutler wrote the book (or the equivalent of a book) on the housing crisis and its impact on the Bay Area and California broadly.

That piece led Cutler to work in public service “on boards and commissions overseeing the spending of federal dollars on homelessness and the proceeds of municipal bonds directed at financing affordable housing (because yes, for some segments of residents, you do have to explicitly subsidize housing at the local level),” as she noted in a blog post about her investment in Abodu.

The interior of an Abodu home. Photo via Abodu.

Cutler backed the company because of her deep knowledge of the issues associated with housing.

“The reason this is a big deal is because Northern California has been the most expensive and unpredictable place to build new housing in the world. Projects typically take several years because of uncertainty with entitlements and materials,” Cutler wrote. “Over the past year, Abodu co-founders John Geary and Eric McInerney have put homes in the backyards of parents bringing kids home from college, a mother-and-son pair that each bought one for their homes in Millbrae, a couple looking to eventually house a grandmother in San Jose and on and on.”

The key inspiration that Abodu’s founders hit on was their concentration on granny flats, casitas and backyard dwellings. “While deliberations over mid-rise density were stalling in Sacramento, the state legislature (and legislatures up north in the Pacific Northwest) were passing bill after bill, including Phil Ting’s AB 68 and Bob Wieckowski’s SB 1069, to make it really easy to add backyard units,” Cutler wrote. “This is the kind of change that suburban America wants, is comfortable with and can politically pass and implement easily.”

To Cutler’s thinking, Adobu’s 30-day construction schedule will change consumer behavior, thanks to the fact that the home can be craned in and installed in less than a day on a foundation constructed in less than two weeks. Its incredibly low cost will enable a lot of opportunities to develop new inventory and the simple fact is that inventory remains a scarce commodity. As Cutler noted, only half as many homes are trading across the United States as were available a year ago, which is happening at the same time as when millennials are entering prime family formation years.

How Burrowing Owls Lead To Vomiting Anarchists (Or SF’s Housing Crisis Explained)

It’s time to abandon business intelligence tools

Published March 19, 2021

Charles Caldwell
Contributor

Charles Caldwell is VP of product management at Logi Analytics, which empowers the world’s software teams with intuitive, developer-grade embedded analytics solutions. He has more than 20 years’ experience in the analytics market, including 10+ years of direct customer implementation experience.

Organizations spend ungodly amounts of money — millions of dollars — on business intelligence (BI) tools. Yet, adoption rates are still below 30%. Why is this the case? Because BI has failed businesses.

Logi Analytics’ 2021 State of Analytics: Why Users Demand Better survey showed that knowledge workers spend more than five hours a day in analytics, and more than 99% consider analytics very to extremely valuable when making critical decisions. Unfortunately, many are dissatisfied with their current tools due to the loss of productivity, multiple “sources of truth,” and the lack of integration with their current tools and systems.

A gap exists between the functionalities provided by current BI and data discovery tools and what users want and need.

Throughout my career, I’ve spoken with many executives who wonder why BI continues to fail them, especially when data discovery tools like Qlik and Tableau have gained such momentum. The reality is, these tools are great for a very limited set of use cases among a limited audience of users — and the adoption rates reflect that reality.

Data discovery applications allow analysts to link with data sources and perform self-service analysis, but still come with major pitfalls. Lack of self-service customization, the inability to integrate into workflows with other applications, and an overall lack of flexibility seriously impacts the ability for most users (who aren’t data analysts) to derive meaningful information from these tools.

BI platforms and data discovery applications are supposed to launch insight into action, informing decisions at every level of the organization. But many are instead left with costly investments that actually create inefficiencies, hinder workflows and exclude the vast majority of employees who could benefit from those operational insights. Now that’s what I like to call a lack of ROI.

Business leaders across a variety of industries — including “legacy” sectors like manufacturing, healthcare and financial services — are demanding better and, in my opinion, they should have gotten it long ago.

It’s time to abandon BI — at least as we currently know it.

Here’s what I’ve learned over the years about why traditional BI platforms and newer tools like data discovery applications fail and what I’ve gathered from companies that moved away from them.

The inefficiency breakdown is killing your company

Traditional BI platforms and data discovery applications require users to exit their workflow to attempt data collection. And, as you can guess, stalling teams in the middle of their workflow creates massive inefficiencies. Instead of having the data you need to make a decision readily available to you, instead, you have to exit the application, enter another application, secure the data and then reenter the original application.

According to the 2021 State of Analytics report, 99% of knowledge workers had to spend additional time searching for information they couldn’t easily locate in their analytics solution.

Cloud infrastructure spending passed on-prem data centers in 2020

Published March 19, 2021

There is a prevailing notion that while the cloud infrastructure market is growing fast, the vast majority of workloads remain on premises. While that could be true, new research from Synergy Research Group found that cloud infrastructure spending surpassed on-prem spending for the first time in 2020 — and did so by a wide margin.

“New data from Synergy Research Group shows that enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure services continued to ramp up aggressively in 2020, growing by 35% to reach almost $130 billion. Meanwhile enterprise spending on data center hardware and software dropped by 6% to under $90 billion,” the firm said in a statement.

While the numbers have been trending toward the cloud for a decade, the spending favored on-prem software until last year when the two numbers pulled even, according to Synergy data. John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy says that this new data shows that CIOs have shifted their spending to the cloud in 2020.

“Where the rubber meets the road is what are companies spending their money on, and that is what we are covering here. Quite clearly CIOs are choosing to spend a lot more money on cloud services and are severely crimping their spend on on-prem (or collocated) data center assets,” Dinsdale told me.

Chart comparing on prem spending to cloud infrastructure spending from Synergy Research.

Image Credits: Synergy Research Group

The total for on-prem spending includes servers, storage, networking, security and related software required to run the hardware. “The software pieces included in this data is mainly server OS and virtualization software. Comparing SaaS with on-prem business apps software is a whole other story,” Dinsdale said.

As we see on-prem/cloud numbers diverging in this way, it’s worth asking how these numbers compare to research from Gartner and others that the cloud remains a relatively small percentage of global IT spend. As workloads move back and forth in today’s hybrid world, Dinsdale says that makes it difficult to quantify where it lives at any given moment.

Customer experience and digital transformation concepts are merging during the pandemic

“I’ve seen plenty of comments about only a small percentage of workloads running on public clouds. That may or may not be true (and I tend more toward the latter), but the problem I have with this is that the concept of ‘workloads’ is such a fungible issue, especially when you try to quantify it,” he said.

It’s worth noting that the pandemic has led to companies moving to the cloud much faster than they might have without a forcing event, but Dinsdale says that the trend has been moving this way over years, even if COVID might have accelerated it.

Whatever numbers you choose to look at, it’s clear that the cloud infrastructure market is growing much faster now than its on-premises counterpart, and this new data from Synergy shows that CIOs are beginning to place their bets on the cloud.

The cloud infrastructure market hit $129B in 2020

Fetcher raises $6.5M to automate parts of the recruiting process

Published March 19, 2021

Fetcher, a startup that promises to make the recruiting process easier while also diversifying the candidate pool, is announcing that it has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding.

Originally known as Scout, the New York startup was founded by CEO Andres Blank, CPO Chris Calmeyn and engineering directors Javier Castiarena and Santi Aimetta.

Blank told me that Fetcher automates parts of recruiters’ jobs, namely finding job candidates and sending the initial outreach emails. When I wondered whether that just leads to more spammy recruiting messages, he said that Fetcher emails actually result in “a very good response rate” because they’re targeted at the right candidates.

“The reality is that if you’re looking for a job, you don’t need an email to be so amazing, and if you’re a recruiter, you don’t want to spend 10 minutes thinking about what to write to each candidate,” he said.

He also described Fetcher’s approach as a “human in the loop” approach. Yes, the initial outreach is automated, but then the recruiter handles the conversations with candidates who respond.

Image Credits: Fetcher

“By automating both the sourcing [and] outreach sides of recruiting, Fetcher reduces the amount of time a recruiter spends in front of a computer searching for candidates, making a recruiter’s job more balanced, strategic and impactful, all while continuing to build a robust, diverse pipeline for the company,” Blank wrote in a follow-up email.

He also suggested that automated sourcing allows recruiters to reach a much more diverse candidate pool than they would through traditional methods. For example, he sent me a case study in which Fetcher helped video collaboration startup Frame.io hire 11 new employees in less than 12 months, nine of whom were women and/or underrepresented minorities.

“Fetcher has freed up time and given us the capacity to diversify our pipeline more organically,” said Anna Chalon, Frame.io’s senior director of talent and diversity, equity and inclusion, in a statement. “This has allowed us to make some incredible hires, mostly from underrepresented groups, over the last year.”

Blank added that after Fetcher has seen its revenue increase every month since July of last year, owing to shrinking recruiting teams needing to be able to do more with fewer resources, as well as a greater corporate focus on the aforementioned diversity, equity and inclusion.

Fetcher has now raised a total of $12 million. The Series A was led by G20 Ventures, with participation from KFund, Slow Ventures and Accomplice. Blank said he’s planning to double the employee count (currently 80) by the end of the year and to build out additional analytics (including diversity analytics) and CRM tools.

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Nigeria’s Termii raises $1.4M seed led by Future Africa and Kepple Africa Ventures

Published March 19, 2021

Ideally, it is expected of every business to reach its customers effectively. However, that’s not the case, as limiting factors that hinder proper digital communication come into play at different growth stages. Termii, a Nigerian communications platform-as-a-service startup that solves this problem for African businesses, announced today that it has closed a $1.4 million seed round.

The round was co-led by African early-stage VC firm Future Africa and Japanese but Africa-focused VC Kepple Africa Ventures. Other investors include Acuity Ventures, Aidi Ventures, Assembly Capital, Kairos Angels, Nama Ventures, RallyCap Ventures and Remapped Ventures.

Angel investors like Ham Serunjogi, co-founder and CEO of Chipper Cash; Josh Jones, former co-founder and CTO, Dreamhost; and Tayo Oviosu, co-founder and CEO of Paga also participated.

Gbolade Emmanuel and Ayomide Awe launched Termii after Emmanuel’s experience as a digital marketer helped him recognize the need for businesses to have exceptional communication channels. The CEO consulted for these companies and leveraged emails to retain customers, but as he found out that this process was lethargic, he sought other channels as a replacement.

“That got me to start thinking about multichannel messaging. What it meant was that we needed to find how to allow companies to use WhatsApp, voice, SMS effectively,” he said to TechCrunch. “And we had to make the process simple because in the African market, you can’t do complex stuff. You have to be as simple as possible.”

In 2017, the company officially launched and subsequently secured investment from Lagos-based VC Microtraction. Emmanuel says the company found product-market fit two years later after collating enough data from companies in different industries to understand what they really wanted.

Termii found out that in addition to assisting businesses to retain customers, there was a clear need to verify, authenticate and engage them.

“Many of these businesses we started engaging said they required tools to effectively communicate and verify customers because they were losing money at those points. For us, we saw it was a bigger problem,” Emmanuel added.

After making some tweaks, the team began to see an increase in customer numbers, especially amongst fintech startups. Positioning itself in the fast-moving space, Termii created an API-based communication infrastructure that caters to more than 500 fintech startups across the continent. That’s not all. More than 1,000 businesses and developers are also using Termii’s API.

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Some of these businesses include uLesson, Yassir, Helium Health, PiggyVest, Bankly, Paga and TeamApt.

Playing in a $3.6 billion B2C communications market estimated to grow 6% annually, Termii runs a B2B2C model. But how does it make money? While a subscription-based model would’ve made sense, the two years spent by the company trying to find PMF made them think otherwise.

So the company leverages a virtual wallet system tied to a bank account and customers can make payments to the platform using mobile money, bank transfer and credit cards. The startup charges these wallets on a per-message basis. It also does the same on every successful customer verification made toward customers’ contacts.

The Termii team. Image Credits: Termii

In early 2020, Termii started seeing immense progress and this coincided with their acceptance into Y Combinator. The growth continued throughout the year, growing its messaging transactions by 1,000% and experiencing a 400% increase in its ARR.

Spilling into this year, Emmanuel says the company’s revenue is growing 60% month-on-month as a result of the surge in online financial transactions, which to date makes up for 68% of the company’s total messaging transactions.

The seed investment that is coming a year after Termii graduated from YC will be used for expansion and launch more messaging offerings across Africa.

Emmanuel says the company has its sights set on North Africa with a physical presence in Algeria for the expansion. The reason lies behind the fact that in this quarter, Nigeria has accounted for 76% of the company’s messaging transactions, while Algeria currently accounts for 15%.

With this new fundraising, the company plans to tap into the wealth of experience from some of its new investors like Oviosu and Serunjogi, who have also taken local companies into expansion phases.

Termii’s round is also noteworthy because it strays away from the usual fintech, mobility, agritech and cleantech sectors that investors typically notice. In fact, there are only a handful of venture-backed communications platform-as-a-service companies on the continent. A notable example is Kenya’s Africa Talking. It might be a stretch to say we might see more funding activity from this segment, but one thing is apparent — investors are willing to place bets on less popular sectors.

Another highlight of Termii’s investment is that while foreign investors continue to dominate rounds in African tech startups, local and Africa-focused firms are beginning to step up by leading some, which is a good sign for the bubbling ecosystem.

Nigerian founders-turned-investors are now running syndicate funds

This round is also a big step for Future Africa. According to publicly available information, the firm is leading a million-dollar round for the first time since officially launching last year. This achievement is a continuation of its work over the past three quarters, having invested in more than 10 African startups in the last three quarters and 30 startups in general.

Kepple Africa Ventures, the co-lead, is also an active investor and can be argued to be the most early-stage VC firm on the continent — in terms of the number of deals made. So far, the firm has invested in 79 companies across 11 countries.

Speaking on the investment for Kepple Africa, Satoshi Shinada, a partner at the firm, said, “Fragmented and unstable communication channels are one of the biggest challenges for the digitization of businesses in Africa. Emmanuel has proven that with his visionary goals and solid implementation of iterations on the ground, his team is unparalleled to build an innovative solution in this space.”

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