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As IBM shifts to hybrid cloud, reports have them laying off 10,000 in EU

Published November 25, 2020

As IBM makes a broad shift in strategy, Bloomberg reported this morning that the company would be cutting around 10,000 jobs in Europe. This comes on the heels of last month’s announcement that the organization will be spinning out its infrastructure services business next year. While IBM wouldn’t confirm the layoffs, a spokesperson suggested there were broad structural changes ahead for the company as it concentrates fully on a hybrid cloud approach.

IBM had this to say in response to a request for comment on the Bloomberg report: “Our staffing decisions are made to provide the best support to our customers in adopting an open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities. We also continue to make significant investments in training and skills development for IBMers to best meet the needs of our customers.”

Unfortunately, that means basically if you don’t have the currently required skill set, chances are you might not fit with the new version of IBM. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna alluded to the changing environment in an interview with Jon Fortt at the CNBC Evolve Summit earlier this month when he said:

The Red Hat acquisition gave us the technology base on which to build a hybrid cloud technology platform based on open-source, and based on giving choice to our clients as they embark on this journey. With the success of that acquisition now giving us the fuel, we can then take the next step, and the larger step, of taking the managed infrastructure services out. So the rest of the company can be absolutely focused on hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna wants to completely transform his organization

The story has always been the same around IBM layoffs, that as they make the transition to a new model, it requires eliminating positions that don’t fit into the new vision, and today’s report is apparently no different, says Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research.

“IBM is in the biggest transformation of the company’s history as it moves from services to software and specialized hardware with Quantum. That requires a different mix of skills in its employee base and the repercussions of that manifest itself in the layoffs that IBM has been doing, mostly quietly, for the last 5+ years,” he said.

None of this is easy for the people involved. It’s never a good time to lose your job, but the timing of this one feels worse. In the middle of a recession brought on by COVID, and as a second wave of the virus sweeps over Europe, it’s particularly difficult.

We have reported on a number of IBM layoffs over the last five years. In May, it confirmed layoffs, but wouldn’t confirm numbers. In 2015, we reported on a 12,000 employee layoff.

As IBM spins out legacy infrastructure management biz, CEO goes all in on the cloud

Insurtech’s big year gets bigger as Metromile looks to go public

Published November 25, 2020

In the wake of insurtech unicorn Root’s IPO, it felt safe to say that the big transactions for the insurance technology startup space were done for the year.

After all, 2020 had been a big one for the broad category, with insurtech marketplaces raising lots, rental insurance startup Lemonade going public, Root itself debuting even more recently on the back of its automotive insurance business, a big round to help Hippo keep building its homeowners company and more.

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

But yesterday brought with it even more news: Metromile, a startup competing in the auto insurance market, is going public via a blank-check company (SPAC), and Hippo raised a huge, unpriced round.

So let’s talk about why Metromile might be plying the public markets, and why Hippo may have have decided to pick up more cash. Hint: The reasons are related.

A market hungry for growth

The Lemonade IPO was a key moment for neoinsurance startups, a key part of the broader insurtech space. When the rental insurance provider went public, it helped set the tone for public exit valuations for companies of its type: fast-growing insurance companies with slick consumer brands, improving economics, a tech twist and stiff losses.

For the Roots and Metromiles and Hippos, it was an important moment.

So, when Lemonade raised its IPO range, and then traded sharply higher after its debut, it boded well for its private comps. Not that rental insurance and auto insurance or homeowners insurance are the same thing. They very most decidedly are not, but Lemonade’s IPO demonstrated that private investors were correct to bet generally on the collection of startups, because when they reached IPO-scale, they had something that public investors wanted.

Slack’s stock climbs on possible Salesforce acquisition

Published November 25, 2020

News that Salesforce is interested in buying Slack, the popular workplace chat company, sent shares of the smaller firm sharply higher today.

Slack shares are up just under 25% at the moment, according to Yahoo Finance data. Slack is worth $36.95 per share as of the time of writing, valuing it at around $20.8 billion. The well-known former unicorn has been worth as little as $15.10 per share inside the last year and worth as much as $40.07.

Inversely, shares of Salesforce are trading lower on the news, falling around 3.5% as of the time of writing. Investors in the San Francisco-based SaaS pioneer were either unimpressed at the combination idea, or perhaps worried about the price that would be required to bring the 2019 IPO into their fold.

Why Salesforce, a massive software company with a strong position in the CRM market, and aspirations of becoming an even larger platform player, would want to buy Slack is not immediately clear though there are possible benefits. This includes the possibility of cross-selling the two companies products’ into each others customer bases, possibly unlocking growth for both parties. Slack has wide marketshare inside of fast-growing startups, for example, while Salesforce’s products roost inside a host of megacorps.

Slack’s earnings detail how COVID-19 is both a help and a hindrance to cloud growth

TechCrunch reached out to Salesforce, Slack and Slack’s CEO for comment on the deal’s possibility. We’ll update this post with whatever we get.

While Salesforce bought Quip for $750 million in 2016, which gave it a kind of document sharing and collaboration, Salesforce Chatter has been the only social tool in the company’s arsenal. Buying Slack would give the CRM giant solid enterprise chat footing and likely a lot of synergy among customers and tooling.

But Slack has always been more than a mere chat client. It enables companies to embed workflows, and this would fit well in the Salesforce family of products, which spans sales, service, marketing and more. It would allow companies to work both inside and outside the Salesforce ecosystem, building smooth and integrated workflows. While it can theoretically do that now, if the two were combined, you can be sure the integrations would be much tighter.

What’s more, Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research says it would give Salesforce a sticky revenue source, something they are constantly searching for to keep their revenue engine rumbling along. “Slack could be a good candidate to strengthen its platform, but more importantly account for more usage and ‘stickiness’ of Salesforce products — as collaboration not only matters for CRM, but also for the vendor’s growing work.com platform,” Mueller said. He added that it would be a way to stick it to former-friend-turned-foe Microsoft.

That’s because Slack has come under withering fire from Microsoft in recent quarters, as the Redmond-based software giant poured resources into its competing Teams service. Teams challenges Slack’s chat tooling and Zoom’s video features and has seen huge customer growth in recent quarters.

Finding Slack a corporate home amongst the larger tech players could ensure that Microsoft doesn’t grind it under the bulk of its enterprise software sales leviathan. And Salesforce, a sometimes Microsoft ally, would not mind adding the faster-growing Slack to its own expanding software income.

The question at this juncture comes down to price. Slack investors won’t want to sell for less than a good premium on the pre-pop per-share price, which now feels rather dated.

Someone could scoop up Slack before it IPOs

Join us for a live Q&A with Sapphire’s Jai Das on Tuesday at 2 pm EST/11 am PST

Published November 25, 2020

Sure, we’re heading into a holiday weekend here in America, but that doesn’t mean that the good ship TechCrunch is going to slow down. We’re diving right back in next week with another installment in season two of Extra Crunch Live, our regular interview series with startup founders, venture capitalists and other leaders from the technology community.

This series is for Extra Crunch members, so if you haven’t signed up you can hop on that train right here.

Next week I’m virtually sitting down with Jai Das, a well-known managing director at Sapphire Ventures.

Das has invested in companies like MuleSoft (sold for $6.5 billion), Alteryx (now public), Square (also public), Sumo Logic (yep, public) while at Sapphire, having previously worked corporate venture jobs at Intel Capital and Agilent Ventures. (Sapphire was itself originally SAP’s corporate venture capital arm, but it split off from its parent in 2011, rebranded and kept on raising funds.)

Here are notes from the last episode of Extra Crunch Live with Bessemer’s Byron Deeter.

It’s going to be fun as there’s so much to talk about. I’m still bubbling up my question list, so to avoid giving the Sapphire PR team too much pre-discussion ammo let’s just say that corporate venture capital’s place in the 2020 boom is an interesting topic for both founders and investors alike.

And I’ll want to press Das on the current market for software startups, where we are in the historical arc of SaaS multiples, the importance of API-led tech upstarts, where founders might look to build the next great enterprise startup and if there are any new platforms bubbling up that could be a foundation for future founders to later leverage.

As this is an Extra Crunch Live, I’ll also work in a few questions from the audience (that means you, make sure your Extra Crunch subscription is live), to augment my own clipboard of notes.

This is going to be a good one. I’ll see you next Tuesday for the show.

Details

Below are links to add the event to your calendar and to save the Zoom link. We’ll share the YouTube link shortly before the discussion:

Cast.ai nabs $7.7M seed to remove barriers between public clouds

Published November 25, 2020

When you launch an application in the public cloud, you usually put everything on one provider, but what if you could choose the components based on cost and technology and have your database one place and your storage another?

That’s what Cast.ai says that it can provide, and today it announced a healthy $7.7 million seed round from TA Ventures, DNX, Florida Funders and other unnamed angels to keep building on that idea. The round closed in June.

Company CEO and co-founder Yuri Frayman says that they started the company with the idea that developers should be able to get the best of each of the public clouds without being locked in. They do this by creating Kubernetes clusters that are able to span multiple clouds.

“Cast does not require you to do anything except for launching your application. You don’t need to know […] what cloud you are using [at any given time]. You don’t need to know anything except to identify the application, identify which [public] cloud providers you would like to use, the percentage of each [cloud provider’s] use and launch the application,” Frayman explained.

This means that you could use Amazon’s RDS database and Google’s ML engine, and the solution decides how to make that work based on your requirements and price. You set the policies when you are ready to launch and Cast will take care of distributing it for you in the location and providers that you desire, or that makes most sense for your application.

Startups are helping cloud infrastructure customers avoid vendor lock-in

The company takes advantage of cloud-native technologies, containerization and Kubernetes to break the proprietary barriers that exist between clouds, says company co-founder Laurent Gil. “We break these barriers of cloud providers so that an application does not need to sit in one place anymore. It can sit in several [providers] at the same time. And this is great for the Kubernetes application because they’re kind of designed with this [flexibility] in mind,” Gil said.

Developers use the policy engine to decide how much they want to control this process. They can simply set location and let Cast optimize the application across clouds automatically, or they can select at a granular level exactly the resources they want to use on which cloud. Regardless of how they do it, Cast will continually monitor the installation and optimize based on cost to give them the cheapest options available for their configuration.

The company currently has 25 employees with four new hires in the pipeline, and plans to double to 50 by the end of 2021. As they grow, the company is trying keep diversity and inclusion front and center in its hiring approach; they currently have women in charge of HR, marketing and sales at the company.

“We have very robust processes on the continuous education inside of our organization on diversity training. And a lot of us came from organizations where this was very visible and we took a lot of those processes [and lessons] and brought them here,” Frayman said.

Frayman has been involved with multiple startups, including Cujo.ai, a consumer firewall startup that participated in TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in New York in 2016.

Cujo is a firewall for the connected smart home network

New venture firm The-Wolfpack takes a fresh approach to D2C startups

Published November 25, 2020

The-Wolfpack’s co-founders, Toh Jin Wei, Tan Kok Chin and Simon Nichols (Image Credit: The-Wolfpack)

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the consumer, leisure and media companies hard, but a new venture firm called The-Wolfpack is still very upbeat on those sectors. Based in Singapore, the firm was founded by former managing directors at GroupM, one of the world’s largest advertising and media companies, and plans to work very closely with each of its portfolio companies. Its name was chosen because they believe “entrepreneurs thrive best in a wolfpack.”

The-Wolfpack’s debut fund, called the Wolfpack Pioneer VCC, is already fully subscribed at $5 million USD, and will focus on direct-to-consumer companies, with plans to invest in eight to 10 startups. The firm is already looking to raise a second fund, with a target of $20 million SGD (about $14.9 million USD) and above, and will set up another office in Thailand, with plans to expand into Indonesia as well.

The-Wolfpack was founded by Toh Jin Wei and Simon Nichols, who met while working at GroupM, and Tan Kok Chin, a former director at Sunray Woodcraft Construction who has worked on projects with Marina Bay Sands, Raffles Hotel and the Singapore Tourism’s offices.

In addition to providing financial capital, The-Wolfpack wants to build ecosystems around its portfolio companies by connecting them with IP owners, digital marketing experts, content producers and designers who can help create offline experiences. It also plans to invest in startups based on opportunities for them to collaborate or cross-sell with one another.

Toh told TechCrunch that formal planning on The-Wolfpack began at the end of 2019, but he and Nichols started thinking of launching their own business five years ago while working together at GroupM.

“Our perspective on what the industry needed was similar — strategic investors who truly knew how to get behind D2C founders,” Toh said.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impact has hurt spending in The-Wolfpack’s three key sectors (consumer, leisure and media). But it also presents opportunities for innovation as consumer habits shift, Nichols said.

For example, even though consumer spending has dropped, people are still “drawn towards brands that build towards higher-quality engagements,” he said. “There is a real business advantage for D2C brands who’ve recognized this shift and know how to act on it.”

The-Wolfpack hasn’t disclosed its investments yet since deals are still being finalized, but some of the brands its debut fund are interested in include one launched by an Australian makeup artist who wants to scale to Southeast Asia, and an online gaming company whose ecosystem includes original content, gaming teams and studios. The-Wolfpack plans to help them set up a physical studio to create an offline experience, too.

“Typically brands have talked at customers, but it’s become a two-way conversation, and startups who get D2C right have a real potential for exponential growth that’s worth investing in,” said Toh.

How D2C brands are holding up during the pandemic

Working to understand C3.ai’s growth story

Published November 24, 2020

The end-of-year IPO wave continues, this time with C3.ai moving closer to its own formal debut by updating its S-1 filing with third-quarter data.

The new data provides the market with a much better look into how the unicorn AI company’s business has progressed during the COVID-19 era, and should help public investors price the company’s equity as it looks to float.

TechCrunch previously explored C3.ai’s performance through the its July 31 quarter. Today we received information about its subsequent fiscal period, the quarter ending October 31.

We noted during our initial dig into C3.ai’s numbers that while the AI startup has had strong historical revenue growth — from $92 million to $157 million in the fiscal years ending April 31, 2019 and 2020 — in more recent quarters, its pace of expansion has slowed.

This brings us to the October 31, 2020, period. Let’s explore what changed for C3.ai and what did not.

C3.ai’s growth story

In the October 31, 2019, quarter C3.ai generated $38.9 million in total revenue, counting both its subscription (high gross-margin) and services (low gross-margin) incomes. That figure grew to $41.3 million in the January 31, 2020, quarter.

Pay-per-mile auto insurer Metromile is heading to public markets via SPAC

Published November 24, 2020

Metromile, the pay-per-mile auto insurer that earlier this year laid off a third of its staff due to economic uncertainties caused by COVID-19, is taking the SPAC path to the public markets.

The company, which was founded in 2011 and is led by CEO Dan Preston, said it has reached a merger agreement with special purpose acquisition company INSU Acquisition Corp. II, with an equity valuation of $1.3 billion.

Metromile said it was able to raise $160 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, in an investment round led by Chamath Palihapitiya’s firm Social Capital. Existing investors Hudson Structured Capital Management and Mark Cuban, as well as new backers Miller Value and Clearbridge participated. Metromile will have about $294 million of cash at closing.

The company plans to use those proceeds to reduce existing debt and accelerate growth, specifically to hire employees to support its consumer insurance and enterprise businesses, and grow beyond its eight-state geographic footprint to a goal of 21 states by the end of next year and nationwide coverage by the end of 2022.

Metromile is credited for disrupting some of the inefficiencies of the auto insurance business model, notably how consumers are charged. Instead of a standard flat fee, Metromile charges customers based on their mileage, which it is able to measure via a device plugged into the vehicle. Some two-thirds of U.S. drivers are considered low-mileage, according to Metromile. By charging per mile, Metromile says its customers save 47% on average compared to their previous insurer.

The company developed a mobile app, which besides allowing users to file claims, offers other features such as alerting the driver of possible parking violations due to street sweeping activity. Now, with three billion miles of driver data, the company is able to make predictive models that help lower customer costs and improve their overall experience.

The company also built out an enterprise division in 2019 that offers a cloud-based software as a service to large legacy insurers. Metromile licenses components of its platform, including claims automation and fraud detection tools.

The COVID-19 pandemic created initial headwinds for Metromile, which had been one of the fastest-growing startups in the Bay Area. Metromile ended up laying off about 100 people as it aimed to pare back its workforce. The company said at the time that its business was affected by pandemic-related stay-at-home orders, which caused its customers to drive less. The pandemic also prompted U.S. drivers to shop around for insurance and look for deals that supported their shift to lower mileage.

Investor Cuban said in the company’s SPAC announcement sees an upside for the business.

“During these times of financial hardship, unemployment and work from home, Metromile provides an important insurance alternative,” Cuban said. “The option to pay for insurance by the mile is a game changer and why I’m incredibly excited about Metromile’s future!”

Social Capital’s Palihapitiya is equally bullish on the company, tweeting Tuesday “Buffett had Geico. I pick @Metromile.”

Metromile has hired back staff and returned employees that it placed on furlough this spring. Today, the company has more than 230 employees and doesn’t expect any reductions in the workforce in the future. Instead, the company told TechCrunch it plans to hire additional staff on the expectation that both its consumer and enterprise businesses will grow “considerably” in the next few years.

The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021. The combined company will be named Metromile Inc., and is expected to remain listed on NASDAQ under the new ticker symbol “MLE.”

Discord is close to closing a round that would value the company at up to $7B

Published November 24, 2020

Discord, the communications service that’s become the 21st century’s answer to MUD rooms, is close to closing a new round of financing that would value the company at up to $7 billion, according to sources with knowledge of the round.

The new funding comes just months after a $100 million investment that gave the company a $3.5 billion valuation. Discord’s doubling in corporate value comes as the persistent, inept, American response to the COVID-19 pandemic continues to accelerate the adoption and growth of businesses creating virtual social networking opportunities.

Those opportunities are apparent in Discord’s explosive growth. Monthly active users have almost doubled to 120 million this year and the company has seen 800,000 downloads a day thanks, in part, to the wildly popular game Among Us (which received a ringing endorsement from the popular congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez).

AOC’s Among Us stream topped 435,000 concurrent viewers

Discord built its initial growth on the back of the gaming industry and the rise of multiplayer, multiplatform games that supplanted earlier social networks as the online town square for a generation of young gamers (whose numbers globally now spiral north of several billion).

But, as the company’s founders noted when they announced their last round of financing, the Discord use case has extended far beyond the gaming community.

“It turns out that, for a lot of you, it wasn’t just about video games anymore,” wrote co-founders Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy in a July blog post announcing the latest financing.

The two men frame their company as “a place designed to hang out and talk in the comfort of your own communities and friends.” Discord, they say, is “a place to have genuine conversations and spend quality time with people, whether catching up, learning something or sharing ideas.”

If that sounds familiar to some of the internet’s earliest users, that’s because it is. Back in the dawn of the world wide web, multiuser dungeons (MUDs) provided ways for practitioners of any number of subcultures to find each other online and chat about whatever tickled their collective fancy.

As the web evolved, so did the number of places and spaces for these conversations to happen. Now there are multivariate ways for users to find each other within the web, but Discord seems to have risen above most of the rest.

As analyst John Koetsier noted in Forbes back in 2019, there were already 250 million Discord users sending 315 million messages a day. Those are the company’s pre-pandemic numbers — and they’re impressive by any standards.

As with any platform that has become popular on the web, Discord isn’t without its underbelly. Three years ago, the company tried to boot a number of its most racist users, but their ability to use the platform to disseminate hate speech has stubbornly persisted.

Until mid-2019, white nationalists were comfortable enough using the service to warrant a shoutout from Daily Stormer founder, Andrew Anglin, who urged his fellow travelers to stop using the service.

“Discord is always on and always present among these groups on the far-right,” Joan Donovan, the lead researcher on media manipulation at the Data & Society Research Institute, told Slate in 2018. “It’s the place where they do most of the organizing of doxing and harassment campaigns.”

To date, Discord has raised $379.3 million, according to Crunchbase, from an investor group that includes Greylock, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Tencent and Benchmark.

In addition to the cash it raised earlier this year, Discord emphasized a new user experience and added video functionality so that users could communicate more readily (and so the company could compete with Zoom). There are templates available to help users create servers, and the company has increased its voice and video capacity by 200%.

As part of this new focus on product, Discord has launched what it calls a “Safety Center” that clearly defines the company’s rules and regulations and what actions users can take to monitor and manage their use of service for hate speech and abuse.

“We will continue to take decisive action against white supremacists, racists and others who seek to use Discord for evil,” the founders wrote in June.

As we reported at the time, Index Ventures co-founder Danny Rimer, who led the investor group that backed Discord’s latest $100 million cash infusion, was an advocate for the company’s expanded vision for itself.

“I believe Discord is the future of platforms because it demonstrates how a responsibly curated site can provide a safe space for people with shared interests,” Rimer wrote in a statement. “Rather than throwing raw content at you, like Facebook, it provides a shared experience for you and your friends. We’ll come to appreciate that Discord does for social conversation what Slack has done for professional conversation.”

Apparently, investors are doubling down on that assessment.

Dija, a new delivery startup from former Deliveroo employees, is closing in on a $20M round led by Blossom

Published November 24, 2020

Dija, a new U.K.-based startup founded by senior former Deliveroo employees, is closing in on $20 million in funding, TechCrunch has learned.

According to multiple sources, the round, which has yet to close, is being led by Blossom Capital, the early-stage venture capital firm founded by ex-Index and LocalGlobe VC Ophelia Brown. It’s not clear who else is in the running, although I understand it was highly contested and the startup had offers from several top-tier funds. Blossom Capital and Dija declined to comment.

Playing in the convenience store and delivery space, yet to launch Dija is founded by Alberto Menolascina and Yusuf Saban, who both spent a number of years at Deliveroo in senior positions.

Menolascina was previously director of Corporate Strategy and Development at the takeout delivery behemoth and held several positions before that. He also co-founded Everli (formerly Supermercato24), the Instacart-styled grocery delivery company in Italy, and also worked at Just Eat.

Saban is the former chief of staff to CEO at Deliveroo and also worked at investment bank Morgan Stanley.

In other words, both are seasoned operators in food logistics, from startups to scale-ups. Both Menolascina and Saban were also instrumental in Deliveroo’s Series D, E and F funding rounds.

Meanwhile, few details are public about Dija, except that it will offer convenience and fresh food delivery using a “dark” convenience store mode, seeing it build out hyper local fulfilment centers in urban high population areas for super quick delivery. It’s likely akin to Accel and SoftBank-backed goPuff in the U.S. or perhaps startup Weezy in the U.K.

That said, the model is yet to be proven everywhere it’s been tried and will likely be a capital intensive race in which Dija is off to a good start. And, of course, with everybody making the shift to online groceries while in a pandemic, as ever, timing is everything.

Delivery startup goPuff raises $380M at a $3.9B valuation