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BigID keeps rolling with $70M Series D on $1B valuation

Published December 16, 2020

BigID has been on the investment fast track, raising $94 million over three rounds that started in January 2018. Today, that investment train kept rolling as the company announced a $70 million Series D on a valuation of $1 billion.

Salesforce Ventures and Tiger Global co-led the round with participation Glynn Capital and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners and Boldstart Ventures. The company has raised almost $165 million in just over two years.

BigID is attracting this kind of investment by building a security and privacy platform. When I first spoke to CEO and co-founder Dimitri Sirota in 2018, he was developing a data discovery product aimed at helping companies coping with GDPR find the most sensitive data, but since then the startup has greatly expanded the vision and the mission.

“We started shifting I think when we spoke back in September from being this kind of best of breed data discovery privacy to being a platform anchored in data intelligence through our kind of unique approach to discovery and insight,” he said.

That includes the ability for BigID and third parties to build applications on top of the platform they have built, something that might have attracted investor Salesforce Ventures. Salesforce was the first cloud company to offer the ability for third parties to build applications on its platform and sell them in a marketplace. Sirota says that so far their marketplace includes just apps built by BigID, but the plan is to expand it to third-party developers in 2021.

While he wasn’t ready to talk about specific revenue growth, he said he expects a material uplift in revenue for this year, and he believes that his investors are looking at the vast market potential here.

BigID scores $30 million Series B months after closing A round

He has 235 employees today with plans to boost it to 300 next year. While he stopped hiring for a time in Q2 this year as the pandemic took hold, he says that he never had to resort to layoffs. As he continues hiring in 2021, he is looking at diversity at all levels from the makeup of his board to the executive level to the general staff.

He says that the ability to use the early investments to expand internationally has given them the opportunity to build a more diverse workforce. “We have staff around the world and we did very early […] so we do have diversity within our broader company. But clearly not enough when it came to the board of directors and the executives. So we realized that, and we are trying to change that,” he said.

As for this round, Sirota says like his previous rounds in this cycle he wasn’t necessarily looking for additional money, but with the pandemic economy still precarious, he took it to keep building out the BigID platform. “We actually have not purposely gone out to raise money since our seed. Every round we’ve done has been preemptive. So it’s been fairly easy,” he told me. In fact, he reports that he now has five years of runway and a much more fully developed platform. He is aiming to accelerate sales and marketing in 2021.

The company’s previous rounds included a $14 million Series A in January 2018, a $30 million B in June that year and a $50 million C in September 2019.

BigID announces $50M Series C investment as privacy takes center stage

Zoomin raises $21M for a platform to make fragmented product content troves easier to use

Published December 16, 2020

Technical manuals and other product content may not be the first things that come to mind when you are thinking of software. But if you’ve ever found yourself in a pickle or just need some help getting something to work correctly, you know how vital they can be, and also how frustrating it can be if you cannot find what you are looking for.

Today, a startup called Zoomin, which has built a platform that uses AI to help companies get their technical documentation in order, and natural language to help better understand what answers people are looking for, so that those content troves can be used better and across more environments, is announcing that it has raised $21 million, and picked up a strategic investor, as it comes out of stealth.

“We are focused on product content assets — manuals, guides, and so on — the most boring assets at every company,” Gal Oron, the CEO and co-founder, joked. “To us, it’s all gold because this is actually the information customers are looking for.”

Bessemer Venture Partners, strategic backer Salesforce Ventures and Viola Growth are leading the funding, which actually came in two parts while Zoomin — founded in Israel but now with operations and its CEO also in New York — was still under the radar.

“We have done no PR for the last four years,” said Gal Oron, who co-founded the company with Joe Gelb and Hannan Saltzman. “It’s because we’ve been very busy developing product and signing our first customers. Now, after having dozens of very big customers and nice traction, we felt like this was the time to go.”

The startup now counts Imperva, Dell, Automation Anywhere and McAfee among its customers, with the companies using the Zoomin platform to better organise their content into something that can be used by both customer service agents helping people with issues, and by customers themselves if they opt to try the DIY option, wherever they might be seeing information: be it on a website, in a customer forum, over email or chat, or in a piece of software or an app itself.

The challenge that Zoomin is going after goes a little something like this: technical content is a boring yet necessary component for using software and hardware, especially when a user comes up against any kind of hitch.

The issue is that a lot of it has been written in fits and spurts, and often in a way that might not be easy for the average user to access or understand, with no easy and quick way of drilling into the content to find what you are specifically looking for. And a lot of it exists in disparate places and these days, the entry points for where a user might be looking for that information might also be as fragmented as the places where the content lives.

“Dell has no way of controlling where you might engage with a product,” Oron explained. It might be on Dell’s site, in its software, on a forum, on social media, and so on.

Zoomin aims to provide what Oron describes as a personalised experience for users wherever they may be searching. By that, he means that Zoomin learns what a user is working with, and what that user typically searching for, in order to connect them more quickly with the right answers. In an app, this might take the form of a widget that appears for help. On a forum, it might more likely be by way of an agent who is participating, using Zoomin’s engine to find the right answers to respond to questions.

For Zoomin, this has so far applied primarily to the world of B2B customer service: its product is used to organise and “orchestrate” knowledge for its customers to in turn provide to business/enterprise customers. But Oron notes that it could be just as applicable, and may well see traction over time, with non-business consumers, too, since at the end of the day they are all consumers, he noted.

“We like to think of ourselves as consumerizing the experience,” he said. “We want to make it as easy as buying on Amazon or browsing Netflix.”

The wider area of “knowledge base management” or knowledge orchestration is often part of a larger customer service play, an unsurprisingly the companies that have products in a similar area include the likes of Zendesk and Hubspot. Other tech companies building solutions to help organise knowledge bases include companies like ProProfs, Helpjuice and Instrktiv.

Salesforce is an interesting strategic investor in that regard: it hasn’t build something like this itself in its community and service clouds, so Zoomin is a close partner to provide that option. (The startup also integrates with a number of other platforms like Oracle’s service cloud, Zendesk, Jira, SharePoint and more.)

“Salesforce Ventures supports bold ideas put forward by enterprise cloud companies, so we are thrilled to support Zoomin on their journey to improve how product content is experienced. We believe in the innovative team at Zoomin and their vision of increasing content accessibility,” added Alex Kayyal, partner and head of Salesforce Ventures International.

Investors are especially interested in the role that a company like Zoomin might be playing these days in particular: with customer service enquiries higher than ever before as more of us are working remotely, it puts a big strain on systems to triage and answer questions. This presents an opportunity.

“The era of digital transformation has clearly reached product content,” said Amit Karp, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners in a statement. “As technical product content continues to grow exponentially, Zoomin allows enterprises to leverage this content as a strategic asset.”

Zoomin is not disclosing valuation at this stage.

ClickUp hits $1 billion valuation in $100M Series B raise

Published December 16, 2020

Just six month after raising its first bit of outside funding, ClickUp has closed $100 million in new funding and reached a $1 billion valuation, a report in Bloomberg first reported.

The company has seen plenty of growth in the past several months to justify that new unicorn status, including doubling the amount of users to 2 million. In a press release the company also detailed it had grown revenue nine times over since the beginning of the year.

This latest $100 million round was led by Canadian firm Georgian with participation from Craft Ventures, which led the startup’s $35 million Series A back in June. The high valuation showcases just how eager investors are to find winners in the productivity software space, which has seen massive customer gains as an industry this year, partially as a result of shifting corporate attitudes toward working from home.

Productivity platform ClickUp raises $35 million from Craft Ventures

ClickUp is aiming to further capitalize as it scales its team and product. The company of 200 has doubled in size since its last raise and is hoping to double again in the next several months, CEO Zeb Evans tells TechCrunch.

ClickUp sells productivity software, but their main sell has been tying several products in that space into a single platform, aiming to reduce the number of tools their customers use. The team has recently begun integrating tools like email into their platform so that users can complete workflows inside the product.

“It’s not just like a value play of using one app instead of three or four, it’s an efficiency play by saving so much time and frustration from having all the other different solutions,” Evans tells TechCrunch.

Even as the company continues scaling the product through weekly updates to the company’s apps, including a newly revamped iOS app which launched today (Android launches tomorrow), the team is looking toward how they can build for the long-term.

As to how long this cash will last, Evans isn’t making any promises. “I think this will keep us going for a while, though to be honest with you I would’ve said the same thing with the Series A,” Evans says.

Revolut launches mid-tier subscription plan

Published December 16, 2020

Fintech startup Revolut is tweaking its subscription plans with a new mid-tier offering called Revolut Plus — it costs £2.99 per month. Like N26 Smart and Monzo Plus, the new plan is a pandemic-proof package that doesn’t focus as much on travel.

For the past couple of years, challenger banks and alternatives to traditional bank accounts have been packaging additional services into paid plans. Essentially, those fintech startups are slowly becoming freemium software-as-a-service companies.

The majority of users don’t subscribe to paid plans. But a small portion is willing to pay a fixed monthly fee to access advanced features, get an insurance package and pay less in variable fees.

Revolut already has two paid plans — Premium and Metal. Premium increases limits on free ATM withdrawals and foreign exchange. You also get overseas medical insurance, delayed baggage and flight insurance and winter sports coverage. You can also access advanced features, such as disposable virtual cards and Revolut Junior accounts

With a Metal plan, your insurance package is a bit more thorough, with purchase protection and car hire excess. You get a tiny bit of cash back on purchases (0.1% in Europe, 1% outside of Europe capped at the monthly subscription price) and higher limits across various products.

Another big selling point has been card designs. With the Metal plan, as the name suggests, you get a metal card. It’s not that useful but some people like it. Premium subscribers can also choose between premium card designs.

Revolut Premium costs £6.99 per month and Revolut Metal costs £12.99 per month (or €7.99 and €13.99, respectively in Europe). You pay a bit less if you pay upfront for a year.

So what is Revolut Plus? It costs £2.99 per month, which makes it a lot more affordable than Revolut Premium. The main selling point is purchase protection provided by Qover. All paid plans now get purchase protection with different limits on damaged or stolen goods (up to £1,000, £2,500 and £10,000 depending on your plan). You can get a refund on purchases up to 90 days after buying eligible products. If you book a ticket and your event is cancelled, you could also get a refund.

In addition to a new card design, Revolut Plus subscribers can also use virtual cards. You can also create junior accounts with the new mid-tier plan.

As you can see, there’s no overseas travel insurance. You also don’t get unlimited free currency exchange (other than spread). Revolut Plus is focused on people who mostly use their Revolut account in their home country.

Revolut is also tweaking other plans, so it’s going to be important to check the terms and conditions before you renew your paid plan. The new Plus plan is available today in the U.K. and will be rolled out next week in the European Economic Area.

Monzo launches new Monzo Plus with software features it hopes users will want to pay for

N26 launches mid-tier subscription plan for €4.90 per month

Image Credits: Revolut

Launch startup Astra’s rocket reaches space

Published December 15, 2020

Rocket launch startup Astra has joined an elite group of companies that can say their vehicle has actually made it to orbital space — earlier than expected. The company’s Rocket 3.2 test rocket (yes, it’s a rocket called “Rocket”) passed the Karman line, the separation point 100 km (62 miles) up that most consider the barrier between Earth’s atmosphere and space, during a launch today from Kodiak, Alaska.

This is the second in this series of orbital flight tests by Astra; it flew its Rocket 3.1 test vehicle in September, but while that flight was successful by the company’s own definition, since it lifted off and provided a lot of data, it didn’t reach space or orbit. Both the 3.1 and 3.2 rockets are part of a planned three-launch series that Astra said would be designed to reach orbital altitudes by the end of the trio of attempts.

Rocket startup Astra’s first orbital launch attempt ends early due to first-stage burn failure

Astra is a small satellite launch startup that builds its rockets in California’s East Bay, at a factory it established there which is designed to ultimately produce its launchers in volume. Their model uses smaller craft than existing options like either SpaceX or Rocket Lab, but aims to provide responsive, short turnaround launch services at a relatively low cost — a bus to space rather than a hired limousine. They compete more directly with something like Virgin Orbit, which has yet to reach space with its launch craft.

The view from Astra’s Rocket 3.2 second stage from space.

This marks a tremendous win and milestone for Astra’s rocket program, made even more impressive by the relatively short turnaround between their rocket loss error in September, which the company determined was a result of a problem in its onboard guidance system. Correcting the mistake and getting back to an active, and successful launch, within three months, is a tremendous technical achievement, even in the best of times, and the company faced additional challenges because of COVID-19.

Astra was not expecting to make it as far as it did today — the startup has defined seven stages of reaching orbital flight for its development program; today it expected to achieve 1) count and liftoff; and 2) reaching Max Q, the point of maximum dynamic pressure undergone by a rocket in flight in Earth’s atmosphere. Third, they were looking to achieve nominal main-engine cutoff for first stage — and this is where they would’ve pegged success today, but the “rocket continued to perform,” according to CEO and founder Chris Kemp on a call following the launch.

Rocket 3.2 then performed a successful stage separation, and then the second stage passed through the Karman line, reaching outer space. After that, it went farther still, achieving a successful upper-stage ignition, and a nominal upper-stage engine shut off six minutes later. Even then, the rocket reached 390 km, which is its target orbital height, but then reached a velocity of 7.2 km per hours, just one half km/hour less than the 7.68 km required for orbital velocity.

Why Astra built a space startup and rocket factory in Silicon Valley

Astra emphasized that the mix for the propellant for this stage is basically only to be nailed down while testing in situ in space, so they say this will just require some upper-stage propellant mixtures to achieve that extra velocity, and Kemp said they’re confident they can do that in the next couple of months, and start reliving payloads early next year. This won’t require any hardware or software changes, the company noted, just a tweak in the variables involved.

Image Credits: John Kraus for Astra (opens in a new window)

He added that this is a big win for the underlying theory behind Astra’s approach, which focuses on using significant amounts of automation in order to reduce costs.

“We’ve only been in business for about four years, and this team only has about 100 people today,” Kemp said. “This team was able to overcome tremendous challenges on the way to this success. We had a member of the team quarantining, and tested positive on the way to Kodiak, which meant they had to quarantine the entire team, and then sent an entire backup team to replace them.” This was possible because they only use five people on the launch team.

“We now are at a point where just five people can go up, and set up the entire launch site and rocket, and launch in just a couple of days,” Kemp said. The team is literally just five people — including labor, rocket unloading, setup and everything on-site — the rest is run remotely from mission control in California via the cloud.

Now they will do some tuning for Rocket 3.3, which is currently in California at the Astra factory, before soon attempting that final orbital test flight with a payload on board to deploy. After that, they intend to continue to iterate with each version of Rocket launched, focusing on reducing costs and improving performance through rapid evolution of the design and technology.

Virgin Orbit’s first orbital test flight cut short after rocket released from carrier aircraft

Vista’s $3.5B purchase of Pluralsight signals a maturing edtech market

Published December 15, 2020

On Monday, Pluralsight, a Utah-based startup that sells software development courses to enterprises, announced that it has been acquired by Vista for $3.5 billion.

The deal, yet to close, is one of the largest enterprise buys of the year: Vista is getting an online training company that helps retrain techies with in-demand skills through online courses in the midst of a booming edtech market. Additionally, the sector is losing one of its few publicly traded companies just two years after it debuted on the stock market.

The Pluralsight acquisition is largely a positive signal that shows the strength of edtech’s capital options as the pandemic continues.

Investors and founders told Techcrunch that the Pluralsight acquisition is largely a positive signal that shows the strength of edtech’s capital options as the pandemic continues.

“What’s happening in edtech is that capital markets are liquidating,” said Deborah Quazzo, managing partner of GSV Advisors.

Quazzo, a seed investor in Pluralsight, said the ability to move fluidly between privately held and publicly held companies is a characteristic of tech sectors with deep capital markets, which is different from edtech’s “old days, where the options to exit were very narrow.”

Live-streaming platform BoxCast raises $20M

Published December 15, 2020

BoxCast, a Cleveland-based company aiming to make it easy to live stream any event, has raised $20 million in Series A funding.

Co-founder and CEO Gordon Daily said that when the company first launched in 2013, “streaming wasn’t something that everyone understood,” and you needed professional help to live stream anything. BoxCast is supposed to make that process accessible to anyone.

The company has created several different video encoder devices, but Daily said the “small box” is just a one piece of BoxCast platform, which is designed to cover all your live-streaming needs, with support for 1080p broadcasting; streaming to Facebook Live, YouTube and your own website; analytics and more — plus there are add-ons like automatic scoreboard displays and event ticketing.

Pricing starts at $99 per month for the “essential” streaming plan, plus $399 for a BoxCast encoder. (You can also just stream from an iOS device.)

And it’s no surprise that 2020 has been a “watershed moment” for the company, as Daily put it, with BoxCast now live streaming millions of events per year — everything from sports to religious services to virtual safaris offered by Sri Lanka’s tourism board.

BoxCast dashboard

“When you can’t even meet in-person … we knew that there was going to be higher usage,” he said. “What caught me off-guard was the volume increase — it’s new customers, it’s existing customers, at peak times there’s a 10x increase [from pre-pandemic usage].”

And while in-person events will hopefully become more common next year, Daily said live streams will still be a valuable tool to reach audiences who can’t attend, and to promote your business or organization with new kinds of programming.

COO Sam Brenner added that while BoxCast employed fewer than 40 people before the pandemic, the team has grown to 56, and will likely double within the next 12 months.

The Series A was led by Updata Partners, with participation from audio equipment manufacturer Shure.

“The live streaming video market has grown dramatically over the last decade, and COVID-19 has accelerated adoption in recent months. BoxCast offers a unique end-to-end platform that makes live streaming easy,” said Updata’s Carter Griffin in a statement. “We’re excited to partner with Gordon and his team, and look forward to contributing to their vision of making live events accessible to all.”

Twitter app code indicates that live video broadcasting app Periscope may get shut down

AWS introduces new Chaos Engineering as a Service offering

Published December 15, 2020

When large companies like Netflix or Amazon want to test the resilience of their systems, they use chaos engineering tools designed to help them simulate worst-case scenarios and find potential issues before they even happen. Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels introduced the company’s Chaos Engineering as a Service offering called AWS Fault Injection Simulator.

The name may lack a certain marketing panache, but Vogels said that the service is designed to help bring this capability to all companies. “We believe that chaos engineering is for everyone, not just shops running at Amazon or Netflix scale. And that’s why today I’m excited to pre-announce a new service built to simplify the process of running chaos experiments in the cloud,” Vogels said.

As he explained, the goal of chaos engineering is to understand how your application responds to issues by injecting failures into your application, usually running these experiments against production systems. AWS Fault Injection Simulator offers a fully managed service to run these experiments on applications running on AWS hardware.

Image Credits: Amazon / Getty Images

“FIS makes it easy to run safe experiments. We built it to follow the typical chaos experimental workflow where you understand your steady state, set a hypothesis and inject faults into your application. When the experiment is over, FIS will tell you if your hypothesis was confirmed, and you can use the data collected by CloudWatch to decide where you need to make improvements,” he explained.

While the company was announcing the service today, Vogels indicated it won’t actually be available until some time next year.

It’s worth noting that there are other similar services out there by companies, like Gremlin, which are already providing a broad Chaos Engineering Service as a Service offering.

Gremlin brings Chaos Engineering as a Service to Kubernetes

Startup valuations have recovered from summer lows

Published December 15, 2020

As 2020 comes to a close, some parts of the startup world are completing a loop, ending the year where they began.

Startup valuations, for example, as seen in the Silicon Valley area are effectively back to where they were at the start of the year. According to a report from Fenwick & West examining data through October in the San Francisco Bay area, the percentage of startups that raised up rounds (rounds priced higher than preceding investments) came within spitting distance of its pre-COVID levels.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

There are other positive signs in the data for startup bulls.

Median and average price increases for startup valuations in the Valley have both crested their 2019 averages. The gains have proven especially sharp amongst software startups, which managed somewhat epic valuation gains in October; Fenwick’s data, something we’ve covered before on The Exchange, lags the calendar month somewhat.

This morning, let’s take a break from IPOs to look at startup health in the region still generally heralded as its promised land.

Revenge of the bulls

As optimism for business conditions — tech-focused startups in particular — improved in Q3, startup valuations kicked off Q4 on a strong note.

In October, Silicon Valley startup investments that were priced up from their preceding deal rose to 79%. That’s down from what Fenwick reports as 2019’s average, but a dip from 83% to 79% is not much. Notably, startups in the region managed to reach an up-round percentage of rounds in the mid-to-high-seventies over the summer, but during those months down rounds were 11% to 17% of the total.

What to expect tomorrow at TC Sessions: Space 2020

Published December 15, 2020

Ready to explore an incredible range of space technology from the comfort of your own home or office? TC Sessions: Space 2020 starts tomorrow, December 16, and we’re here to point out just some of the events, presentations and fireside chats waiting for you on day one.

You’ll hear from and engage with the world’s top space experts, founders, scientists, engineers and investors across public, private and defense sectors. You’ll learn where and how to access the funds to fuel your dreams and launch your startup.

You can still buy a pass here before prices increase tomorrow, and we also offer discounts for groups, students and active military/government employees. Note: Expo Ticket holders can only access the exhibition area and the breakout sessions (both live stream and VOD). Want to upgrade your pass to access all the main-stage presentations? Shoot us an email at events@techcrunch.com for assistance.

Strap in and get ready for lift off, folks. Like the OSIRIS-Rex, we’re going to puff a bit of nitrogen gas at the agenda and blow a sampling of the day’s events into your consciousness (yes, we puffed, but we did not inhale). You’ll find a complete listing of all the sessions in the event agenda.

Asteroid Rocks and Moon Landings: From robots scooping rocks from the surface of galaxy-traveling asteroids, to preparing for the return of humans to the surface of the moon, we’ll cover all aspects of scientific and civil exploration of the solar system. Lisa Callahan, vice president & general manager of Commercial Civil Space, Lockheed Martin Space.

From Space Rock Returns to Financial Returns — An Investor Panel: Some investors spend a lot of their time looking to the stars for the next venture capital opportunity. It’s a market unlike any other, but does that change the math on equity-based investment? Don’t forget to submit your questions for the panel. Chris Boshuizen (Data Collective DCVC), Mike Collett (Promus Ventures) and Tess Hatch (Bessemer Venture Partners).

Fast Money — Working with the Army to Operationalize Science for Transformational Overmatch: Learn about DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory and the xTech Program of prize competitions that accelerate innovative solutions that can help solve Army challenges. Peter Khooshabeh (DEVCOM, ARL West) and Ashley Kowalski (The Aerospace Corporation).

Founders in Focus: We sit down with the founders poised to be the next big disruptors in the space industry. Here we chat with Will Edwards, CEO of Firehawk Aerospace, a custom rocket engine design and manufacturing company.

You’ve had just a tiny taste of what to expect on day one. We’ve initiated the launch sequence and we’re in the final countdown. Buy a pass today before prices increase tonight, join us at TC Sessions: Space 2020 and set your coordinates for out-of-this-world opportunity.

Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Space 2020? Click here to talk with us about available opportunities.