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Luxury air travel startup Aero raises $20M
Aero, a startup backed by Garrett Camp’s startup studio Expa, has raised $20 million in Series A funding — right as CEO Uma Subramanian said demand for air travel is returning “with a vengeance.”
I last wrote about Aero in 2019, when it announced Subramanian’s appointment as CEO, along with the fact that it had raised a total of $16 million in funding. Subramanian told me that after the announcement, the startup (which had already run test flights between Mykonos and Ibiza) spent the next few months buying and retrofitting planes, with plans for a summer 2020 launch.
Obviously, the pandemic threw a wrench into those plans, but a smaller wrench than you might think. Subramanian said that as borders re-opened and travel resumed in a limited capacity, Aero began to offer flights.
“We had a great summer,” she said. “We sold a lot of seats, and we were gross margin positive in July and August.”
The startup describes its offering as “semi-private” air travel — you fly out of private terminals, on small and spacious planes (Subramanian said the company has taken vehicles with 37 seats and retrofitted them to hold only 16), with a personalized, first-class experience delivered by its concierge team. Aero currently offers a single route between Los Angeles and Aspen, with one-way tickets costing $1,250.
Subramanian was previously CEO of Airbus’ helicopter service Voom, and she said she approached the company “very skeptically,” since the conventional wisdom in the aviation industry is that the business is all about “putting as many people into a finite amount of square footage” as possible. But she claimed that early demand showed her that “the thesis is real.”
“There is a set of people who want this,” she said. “Air travel used to be aspirational, something people got dressed up for. We want to bring back the magical part of the travel experience.”
After all, if you’re the kind of “premium traveler” who might already spend “thousands of dollars a night” on a vacation in Amangiri, Utah, it seems a little silly to be “spending hours trying to find a low-cost flight out of Salt Lake City.”
Image Credits: Aero
Subramanian suggested that while demand for business travel may be slow to return (it sounds like she enjoyed the ability to fundraise without getting on a plane), the demand for leisure travel is already back, and will only grow as the pandemic ends. Plus, the steps that Aero took to create a luxury experience also meant that it’s well-suited for social distancing.
Speaking of fundraising, the Series A was led by Keyframe Capital, with Keyframe’s chief investment officer John Rapaport joining the Aero board. Cyrus Capital Partners and Expa also participated.
The new funding will allow Aero to grow its team and to add more flights, Subramanian said. Next up is a route between Los Angeles and Cabo San Lucas scheduled to launch in April, and she added that the company will be returning to Europe this year.
“It’s a horrendous time to be Lufthansa, but counterintuitively, it’s the best time to start something from scratch,” she said — in large part because it’s been incredibly affordable to buy planes and other assets.
Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion.
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Snapcommerce raises $85M to make over your mobile shopping experience
People are not only shopping digitally more than ever, they’re also shopping using their mobile phones more than ever.
And for mobile-first companies like Snapcommerce, this is good news.
Snapcommerce, formerly known as SnapTravel, has raised $85 million in what the company is describing as a “Pre-IPO” growth round to help further its mission of “changing the way people shop on their phones.”
The Toronto, Ontario-based startup has built out an AI-driven, vertical-agnostic platform that uses messaging in an effort to personalize the mobile shopping experience and “deliver the best promotional prices.” While it was initially focused on the travel industry, the company is now branching out into other consumer verticals — hence its name change.
Inovia Capital and Lion Capital co-led the new growth round, which included participation from Acrew DCF, Thayer Ventures and Full In Partners, as well as existing backers Telstra Ventures and Bee Partners. The financing brings Snapcommerce’s total raised since its 2016 inception to over $100 million. Its last raise — a $7.2 million round from Telstra and NBA star Steph Curry — took place in 2019.
The startup was founded by tech entrepreneurs Hussein Fazal, whose prior company AdParlor grew to $100+ million in revenue, then sold to AdKnowledge back in 2011; and Henry Shi, who previously built uMentioned and worked at Google, where he helped launch YouTube Music Insights, according to previous TechCrunch reporting.
Snapcommerce co-founders Henry Shi and Hussein Fazal. Image courtesy of Snapcommerce
Snapcommerce launched its first, travel-focused product in 2017. It works by using chatbots to interact with customers via messaging apps such as SMS, Facebook and WhatsApp. But the company also has human agents ready to help if people need more assistance, in the past essentially serving as on-demand travel agents.
Its service is not just for hotels and flights, but also to help people book restaurants and activities too.
“Our focus has been on building that personal relationship,” Fazal said. “Many people end up coming back to us when they travel again.” In fact, over 40% of its sales in 2020 came from repeat customers.
Over the years, the company claims to have helped more than 10 million users globally save over $75 million. It expects to cross over $1 billion in total mobile sales this year.
And now it’s ready to branch out into helping consumers save money on goods.
“When shopping, it’s hard to find the right product and even if you do, it’s hard to find a good deal,” he said. “On a desktop, there’s ways around it. But on mobile, it’s virtually impossible.”
The company turned the corner to profitability three months into the pandemic in 2020, seeing a 60% spike in sales in the second half of the year compared to H2 2019, according to CEO Fazal.
It then decided to re-invest its profits to continue growing the business.
“The profitability during the pandemic gave us confidence that we could turn to profitability whenever we needed to and gave us control of our own destiny, which enabled this fundraise,” Fazal told TechCrunch. “The third quarter of 2020 ended up being our greatest quarter ever.”
The COVID-19 pandemic, naturally, only accelerated its growth as more consumers turned to mobile.
“We believe the next wave of power purchasers will be via mobile,” Fazal said. “Some of the new generation don’t even have desktops or laptops, and they spend all their time on their mobile phone and messaging. So we’re able to be at the forefront.”
Snapcommerce has an IPO in its sights, although no specific timeline. The company did not reveal its current valuation or hard revenue figures. The company makes money by either marking up prices provided by a merchant or charging the merchant a commission.
Chris Arsenault, partner at Inovia and Snapcommerce lead investor, said his firm “tripled up” on its investment in the startup after witnessing its success in the travel space.
“Other companies out there only care about the transaction, and force consumers to look through several services to see if they got the best price, all the while telling them ‘there’s only two seats left,’ ” he told TechCrunch. “We believe that consumers aren’t going to accept that type of pressure-selling in the future. And Snapcommerce’s ability to build trust with its customers and service providers has attracted us to them as they are defining what the future of commerce is going to be like.”
Ultimately, the company plans to use its fresh capital to continue to scale with the goal of streamlining the entire mobile search, purchase and fulfillment process and make finding “the right item at the right price as easy as sending a message to a trusted friend.”
Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion.
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Papaya Global raises $100M more at a $1B+ valuation for tools to hire, pay and manage distributed workforces
Remote working — hiring people further afield and letting people work outside of a central physical office — is looking like it will be here to stay, and today one of the startups building tools for that environment is announcing a big fundraise in response to the opportunity.
Papaya Global, an Israeli startup that provides cloud-based payroll and hiring, onboarding and compliance services across 140 countries for organizations that employ full-time, part-time and contract workers outside of their home country, has picked up $100 million in funding and has confirmed that its valuation is now over $1 billion.
The company targets organizations that not only have global workforces, but are expanding their employee bases quickly. They include fast-growing startups like OneTrust, nCino and Hopin (which today announced a monster $400 million round), as well as major corporates like Toyota, Microsoft, Wix and General Dynamics.
Papaya is not disclosing revenue numbers but said that sales have grown 300% year-over-year for each of the last three years.
Led by Greenoaks Capital Partners, this Series C also includes significant participation from IVP and Alkeon Capital. Previous backers Insight Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Dynamic Loop, New Era and Workday Ventures, Access Ventures and Group 11 also chipped in. The new investment brings Papaya’s total funding to $190 million.
Papaya has been on a fundraising tear in the last 18 months. Today’s news comes less than six months after it raised a $40 million Series B. And that round came less than a year after a $45 million Series A.
Why so much, so quickly? Partly because of the demands on the business, but possibly also to capitalize on an opportunity at a time when so many others are also going after it as well.
The opportunity is that companies and other organizations are finding themselves needing tools to address the current state of play: Workforce growth today doesn’t look like it did in 2019, and so incumbent solutions like ADP, or cobbled together solutions covering multiple geographies, either don’t cut it, or are too costly to maintain.
Papaya Global, in contrast, says it has built an AI-based platform that automates a lot of work and removes much of the manual activity that comes out of trying to right-size a lot of legacy payroll products to work in new paradigms.
“The major impact of COVID-19 for us has been changing attitudes,” CEO Eynat Guez, who co-founded the company with Ruben Drong and Ofer Herman, told me in an interview last September. “People usually think that payroll works by itself, but it’s one of the more complex parts of the organization, covering major areas like labor, accounting, tax. Eight months ago, a lot of clients thought, it just happens. But now they realize they didn’t have control of the data, some don’t even have a handle on who is being paid.”
One challenge, however, is that many others are also chasing these customers in hopes of becoming the ADP of distributed and global work.
Last month, a startup called Oyster, also aimed at distributed workforces, raised $20 million. Others in the same area that have raised lots of capital include Turing, Deel, Remote, Hibob, Personio, Factorial, Lattice, Turing and Rippling.
And as we have pointed out before, these are just some of the HR startups that have raised money in the last year. There are many, many more.
Investors here are hoping that as we see some consolidation emerge out of this mix, there will be a few leaders and that Papaya will be one of them.
“Papaya Global has built a best in class solution to onboard new employees, automate payroll, and manage a global workforce through a single pane of glass. Both growing and established companies have dramatically changed their working practices in recent years, and Papaya has seen impressive growth as a result. We’re excited to continue supporting them as they seek to simplify an increasingly complex challenge for some of the world’s biggest companies,” said Patrick Backhouse, partner at Greenoaks Capital, in a statement.
Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion.
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Cashify raises $15 million for its second-hand smartphone business in India
Tens of millions of people each year purchase a second-hand smartphone in India, the world’s second-largest market. Phone makers and giant online sellers such as Amazon and Flipkart are aware of it, but it’s too much of a hassle for them to inspect, repair and resell used phones. But these firms also know that customers are more likely to buy a smartphone if they are offered the ability to trade-in their existing handsets.
A startup that is helping these firms tackle this challenge said on Thursday it has raised $15 million in a new financing round. New York-based Olympus Capital Asia made the investment through Asia Environmental Partners, a fund dedicated to the environmental sector. The five-year-old startup, which counts Blume Ventures among its early investors, has raised $42 million to date.
Cashify operates an eponymous platform — both online and physical stores and kiosks — for users to sell and buy used smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, laptops, desktops and gaming consoles. But 90% of its business today surrounds the smartphone category, explained Mandeep Manocha, founder and chief executive of Cashify, in an interview with TechCrunch.
“For consumers, our proposition is that we make it easy for you to sell your devices. You come to our site or app, answer questions to objectively evaluate the condition of your device, and we give you an estimate of how much your gadget is worth,” he said. “If you like the price, we pick it up from your doorstep and give you instant cash.”
A few years ago, I wrote about the struggle e-commerce firms face globally in handling returned items. There are many liability challenges — such as having to ensure that the innards in a returned smartphone haven’t been tempered with — as well as overhead costs in reversing an order.
Manocha said that phone makers and e-commerce firms have found better ways to handle returned items in recent years, but they still lose a significant amount of money on them. These challenges have created a big opportunity for startups such as Cashify.
In fact, Cashify says it’s the market leader in its category in India. The startup has partnerships with “nearly every OEM,” including Apple, Samsung, OnePlus, Oppo, Xiaomi, Vivo and HP. “If you walk into an Apple store today, they use our platform.” For consumers in India, if they opted for the trade-in program, Apple.com also uses Cashify’s trading platform, he said.
The startup also works with top e-commerce firms in India — Amazon, Flipkart and Paytm Mall. The firms use Cashify’s trading and exchange software, and also rely on the startup for liquidation of devices. The startup then repairs these gadgets and sells the refurbished units to customers.
“Essentially, whether you come directly to us, or go to popular e-commerce firms or phone OEMs, we are handling the majority of the trading,” he said. Even if a customer trades in the device to OEMs, or e-commerce firms, these companies sell the device to players like Cashify, which serves over 2 million customers in more than 1,500 cities.
The startup plans to deploy part of the fresh capital to expand its presence in the offline market. Manocha said Cashify currently has dozens of offline stores and kiosks at shopping malls across the country and it has already proven immensely effective in brand awareness among customers.
The startup also plans to expand outside of India, hire more talent and invest more in getting the word out about its offerings. Manocha said the team is also working on expanding its expertise to more hardware categories such as cameras.
“The management team at Cashify has an excellent track record in building a strong consumer-facing franchise and building relationships with OEMs, e-commerce companies and electronic product retailers to be present across all touch points for the consumer,” said Pankaj Ghai, managing director of Asia Environmental Partners, in a statement.
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Bottomless closes $4.5M Series A to scale its subscription coffee business
As a devoted coffee drinker I was enthused by the idea of Bottomless. The Y Combinator-backed startup sends its users coffee as they run low so that they never run out of the Magic Juice of Life. What could be better?
Because life is somewhat funny, after signing up for its service the company reached out to share that it had raised a Series A. So I got on the phone with Liana Herrera, the company’s co-founder, to chat about the startup, which is part coffee-sourcing engine, part subscription/e-commerce play and part hardware effort.
So before we talk about its Series A, let’s work better to understand what Bottomless is building, and how it works.
What’s Bottomless?
Born from its founders’ issues ordering the right amount of Soylent when they actually needed it, and wondering why there wasn’t a better way to subscribe to goods consumed on a regular basis, Herrera uncovered the idea for Bottomless.
Today the product works by letting users pick the type of coffee they are interested in, be it caffeine level, price and the like. The company then provides customers with a small digital scale that they connect to their home internet. And then as users consume coffee that Bottomless sends them, placing the bag on the hardware in between uses, the scale notes how much is left and orders more before they run out.
A Bottomless scale, via the company as my kitchen lighting is bad.
You can set the sensitivity of the scale, asking it to either be ambitious in keeping you from running out of beans or ground coffee, or more relaxed. As I write to you today, I think that my third bag of decaf has arrived. It’s a neat system.
And from a business perspective, the Bottomless model has plusses. I honestly do not recall the price range of coffee that I picked, and do not know how much I am actually paying Bottomless at the moment. But I do know that having different types of coffee arrive at the house as I run low is pretty damn cool.
To make that happen, however, is not easy. The startup’s business is a little complex. Before and even after Bottomless went through Y Combinator back in 2019, the company hand-built its coffee-weighing scales. Herrera told TechCrunch that the old Silicon Valley saw that hardware is hard is in fact an understatement. After all the soldering she described during an interview, I believe her.
Still, after finishing the accelerator program the company managed to grow in 2019 by what Herrera said was around 10x. That customer expansion allowed the company to order bulk hardware from China in early 2020. After its first production run finished — a few thousand units — COVID-19 shut down that country’s supply chain. Happily for the startup, by the time COVID-19 had taken over America, the Chinese economy opened up and production could begin again.
Per the company, Bottomless scaled another 5-7x in 2020. An October 2020 CNN piece notes that the company had around 750 customers in late 2019, and some 6,000 by the time of publication. Herrera wants to massively expand that number, telling TechCrunch that she’d like to grow by 10x again this year, and that 5x expansion was the lower-end of her expectations.
Powering that growth are a host of coffee companies that Bottomless works with. Those companies handle roasting the beans and sending them to different Bottomless customers. So that no one reaches a zero-coffee state. And dies. Or whatever happens when one actually runs out of coffee.
The startup told TechCrunch that there are some 500 roasters on their wait list, implying that it will have the capacity to take on more customers this year.
Despite all the growth, the company still has some edges to refine. Setting up Wi-Fi on my scale wasn’t super-simple, for example. Herrera did note that her firm has a new scale coming out in the next three months. That could lower the difficulty barrier for new customers. Still, with 6,000 customers last October ordering three to four bags of coffee monthly, per Herrera’s estimate, the company had reached a comfortable seven-figure GMV run-rate before 2021 began.
For coffee roasters who may have seen their customer base slow during the pandemic, and consumers increasingly willing to dive into e-commerce, the company’s model could have long-term legs. Which brings us to the investors making that bet.
The round
Bottomless raised a $4.5 million Series A in January of 2021. It’s a smaller A than we tend to see in recent years, but Herrera said that her company has always been scrappy, which we take to mean that it has a history of being frugal. Patrick OShaughnessy led the round.
TechCrunch asked if the $4.5 million was a lot of money for the startup, as we didn’t have a clear picture at the time of its fundraising history. Herrera said that Bottomless has gotten to where it is today on just $2 million. So, the Series A is more than double all the money that the company as raised to date. It’s a lot of money, in other words.
Besides the new scale design, when asked about what the company intends to do with its funds, Herrera detailed the type of person she’s looking to hire — namely intellectually flexible folks who are informal, scrappy and very hack-y. More staff, in other words.
Let’s see how far Bottomless can get with its new check. Apparently I will be helping its KPIs for the foreseeable future as a customer.
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After 200% ARR growth in 2020, CourseKey raises $9M to digitize trade schools
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and forced educational institutions to go virtual, many were scrambling to develop online or blended curriculums.
That struggle was particularly challenging for trade schools, many of which were not designed to teach online and were mostly paper-driven.
CourseKey, a San Diego-based trade school management SaaS startup, was in a unique position. Demand surged and its ARR grew by 200% in 2020. And now, the company has raised $9 million in a Series B led by SignalFire, with participation from existing backer Builders VC to help it continue its momentum.
Founded in 2015 by Luke Sophinos and Fadee Kannah, CourseKey’s B2B platform is designed to work with organizations that teach some of our most essential workers — from automotive mechanics to electricians to plumbers to nurses, phlebotomists and dental assistants.
CourseKey founders Luke Sophinos (left) and Fadee Kannah (right). Image Credits: Luke Sophinos/Fadee Kannah
The goal is to help those organizations boost revenue by improving student retention and graduation rates, helping them maintain regulatory compliance and generally streamline processes.
“Things really took off last year when the coronavirus hit,” Sophinos said. “So many schools had to adopt a digital arsenal. We saw a massive acceleration trend that was already going to happen. Every industry had been eaten. We just found a space that wasn’t yet.”
CourseKey currently works with more than 200 career colleges, including the Paul Mitchell School and the Institute for Business & Technology, among others. More than 100,000 students use its software.
For Sophinos and Kannah, founding CourseKey was more than just a business opportunity. Kannah, who had fled Iraq as a refugee, saw family members going through trade schools that were lacking technology infrastructure and modern software tools. He architected the CourseKey platform.
Sophinos, frustrated by his own college experience, applied for The Thiel Fellowship — a program that supports students in company building instead of university attending. However, he recognized that not everyone who doesn’t want to go to traditional college has that option.
“While looking at alternatives, our early team began recognizing a market that we felt no one was paying attention to. It was occupied by our friends and by our family members,” Sophinos said. “It was a space that, for some odd reason, was largely being left out of the education conversation.”
In 2017, the founding team (Sophinos, Kannah, Ryan Vanshur, Marc Barron, Michael Woo, Fadi George and Luan Nguyen) partnered with a large vocational education provider to build and launch what Sophinos describes as “the world’s first trade school management system.”
“We focused on automating daily classroom procedures like attendance and grading, enhancing the student experience through communication tools, helping to identify at-risk students, and simplifying compliance,” he said. “We also visualized data for retention purposes.”
CourseKey also does things like track skill attainment, run evaluations and exams and integrate third-party tools.
Image Credits: CourseKey
The startup’s goal with its new capital is to scale the platform to serve “every trade school in the country” with the mission of changing the narrative that four-year college is the “only option.” It also plans to add new features and capabilities, largely based on customer requests. CourseKey also plans to nearly double its current headcount of just over 50 employees to nearly 100 over the next two years.
“This is a massive market and massive business opportunity,” Sophinos said.
CourseKey has an impressive list of supporters beyond SignalFire and Builders. Steve Altman, former vice chairman and president of Qualcomm, led its $3.5 million seed round, which also included participation from Larry Rosenberger, former FICO CEO. Dennis Yang, former CEO of edtech giant Udemy, and Altman now serve on its board.
SignalFire Managing Director Wayne Hu, who also took a seat on the startup’s board with the new round, said his firm recognized that vocational schools and their administrators, instructors and students “suffer from a lack of purpose-built software.”
“Student Information Systems and Learning Management Systems are optimized for traditional K-12 schools and university workflow, but vocational schools are stuck relying on pen and paper or trying to shoe-horn in solutions that aren’t built for them,” Hu wrote in a blog post.
CourseKey, in SignalFire’s view, is reimagining a new education operating system built specifically for experiential, hands-on learning models, which continues to evolve with hybrid/distance learning.
Hu also pointed out that since many of the jobs that vocational schools are preparing people for “have life or death consequences,” they are highly regulated.
“Not only does CourseKey improve trade school business KPIs, it serves as insurance against this existential risk,” he added.
Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, legal, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included in each for audience questions and discussion.
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Clari revenue forecasting platform snags $150M investment and triples valuation to $1.6B
Clari, the revenue operations platform that helps companies predict revenue outcomes, announced a $150 million Series E today on a $1.6 billion valuation, a number that more than triples its 2019 Series D valuation of $500 million.
Silver Lake led the latest investment with participation from B Capital Group and existing investors Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Madrona Ventures, Thomvest and Tenaya Capital. The company reports it has now raised a total of $285 million.
While COVID made 2020 trying for everyone, a company with a product that allows executive teams to understand and predict revenue at a granular level was obviously going to be in demand, and Clari saw a lot of interest over the last year.
“It was a surreal year for us, given the momentum we had and all of the tough news we saw going on around us. For us, the usage metrics were just off the charts, as people need visibility and predictability and control over their revenue forecasts,” company co-founder and CEO Andy Byrne told me.
While Byrne didn’t want to discuss revenue specifics, he did point out that he beat by 110% the revenue plan he submitted to his board. He said the performance has led to a lot of inbound investor interest in the company.
“That’s why we’ve had such great investor interest is that [VCs] were hearing in the investment community about how transformative Clari has been […] just giving companies what we call revenue confidence, being able to go and understand where you’re going to be and to accurately predict the impact the pandemic is going to have on your trajectory, good or bad,” Byrne explained.
To this point, the company has been working with sales and marketing teams, but Byrne says that the company is expanding the scope of the product to bring that same predictability to other parts of an organization.
Clari has mostly focused on technology companies with customers like HPE, Workday and Adobe, but it has plans to expand beyond that vertical. In fact, one of the ways Byrne plans to put today’s investment to work is to push into other verticals, which could also benefit from this kind of revenue visibility.
The company is up to 300 employees, with plans to double that number by the end of 2021. Byrne says he is building a positive work culture and points to recently being recognized as one of the best places to work by Inc., Bay Area News Group, #GirlsClub and Built In. He says they have made progress when it comes to diversity hirings across a number dimensions, but admits there is still work to be done.
“We actually specifically [established] a commission around diversity and inclusion that has board level [backing] that we’re running to continue to do better work there. Having said that, we still recognize that we’re not too dissimilar to a lot of companies where we feel like there’s so much more that we need to do,” he said.
At this point in the company’s evolution with plenty of money in the bank and a healthy valuation, Byrne did not shy away from the IPO question, although as you would imagine, he wasn’t ready to discuss specifics.
“I would say the answer is unequivocally yes, and we’re building toward this. […] We don’t have a time frame upon which we know where we’re going to go public, but the next goal is to get to the IPO starting line,” he said.
Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, legal, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included in each for audience questions and discussion.
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Yugabyte announces $48M investment as cloud-native database makes enterprise push
As demand for cloud-native applications is growing, Yugabyte, makers of the cloud-native, open-source YugabyteDB database, is seeing a corresponding rise in demand for its products, especially with large enterprise customers. Today, the company announced a $48 million financing round to help build on that momentum. The round is an extension of the startup’s $30 million Series B last June.
Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with participation from Greenspring Associates, Dell Technologies Capital, Wipro Ventures and 8VC. It has raised a total of $103 million, according to the company.
Kannan Muthukkaruppan, Yugabyte co-founder and president, says the startup saw a marked increase in interest in both the open-source and commercial offerings in 2020 as the pandemic pushed many companies to the cloud faster than they might have gone otherwise, something many startup founders have pointed out to me.
“The distributed SQL space is definitely heating up, and if anything over the last six months almost in every vector in terms of enterprise customers — from Fortune 500 companies across financial, retail, ISP or telcos — are putting Yugabyte in production to be the system of record database to meet some of their business critical services needs,” Muthukkaruppan told me.
In addition, he’s seeing a similar rise in the level of interest from the open-source version of the product. “Similarly, the groundswell on the community and the open-source adoption has been phenomenal. Our Slack [open source] user community quadrupled in 2020,” he said.
That kind of momentum led to the increased investor interest, says co-founder and CTO Karthik Ranganathan. “Some of the primary reasons to go and even ask for funding was that we realized we could accelerate some of this stuff, and we couldn’t do that with the original $30 million we had raised,” he said. The original thinking was to do a secondary raise in the $15-20 million range, but multiple investors expressed interest in participating, and it ended up being $48 million when all was said and done.
Former Pivotal president Bill Cook came on board as CEO at the same time they were announcing their last funding round in June, and brought some enterprise chops to the table. It was his job to figure out how to expand the market opportunity with larger high-value enterprise clients. “And so the last six or seven months has been about that, dealing with enterprise clients on one hand and then this emerging developer-led cloud offering as well,” Cook said.
The company has a three-tier offering that includes the open-source YugabyteDB. Then there is a fully managed cloud version called Yugabyte Cloud, and finally there is a self-managed cloud version of the database called Yugabyte Platform. The latter is especially attractive to large enterprise customers who want to be in the cloud, but still want to maintain control of their data and infrastructure, and so choose to manage the cloud installation themselves.
Yugabyte started last year with 50 employees, doubled that to this point, and now expects to reach 200 by the end of this year. As they add employees, the leadership team is cognizant of the importance of building a diverse and inclusive workforce, while recognizing the challenges in doing so.
“It’s work in progress as always. We’ve added diversity candidates right along the whole spectrum as we’ve grown but from my perspective it’s never sufficient, and we just need to keep pushing on it hard, and I think as a leadership team we recognize that,” Cook said.
The three leaders of the company have been working together remotely now since the announcement in June, and had only met briefly in person prior to the pandemic shutting down offices, but they say that it has gone smoothly. And while they would obviously like to meet in person again when the time is right, the momentum the company is experiencing shows that things are moving in the right direction, regardless of where they are getting their work done.
Note: The article originally stated this was a Series C round, but the company later clarified that it was a B-1 round; we’ve updated the article to reflect that.
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Dooly closes on $20M for AI-based tools to help salespeople with their busywork
Robotic process automation has taken the enterprise world by storm by providing a set of tools for those doing repetitive, volume-based tasks to use software to remove some of that labor to let those people focus on more complicated tasks. Today a startup that’s taken some of that ethos and is applying it to more individualized work — that of salespeople — is announcing some funding.
Dooly, a Vancouver, Canada-based startup that has built a set of AI-based tools that automate the busywork that goes into updating data in their sales software, and namely Salesforce, has picked up $20 million in funding to build out its business, which to date has picked up a number of customers among the sales teams of enterprise-focused software companies. They include Airtable, Asana, Intercom, Contentful, Vidyard, BigCommerce, Liftoff and CrowdRiff.
Its aim is to make sales software more useful for salespeople by eliminating the work that goes into inputting data into those systems.
“Really they’ve just created a mountain of virtual filing cabinets,” Kris Hartvigsen, Dooly’s founder and CEO, said in an emailed interview with me. “Filing cabinets just wait for drawers to be opened — or in the case of enterprise software, reports to be pulled and data to be input. We know people are capturing information across the business and our job is to make sure that the people and systems across the business have a better, faster, more far-reaching way of staying informed.”
The funding is being announced today, but it was actually raised in two tranches that had not previously been disclosed. A $3.3 million seed round was led by Boldstart Ventures and also included BoxGroup. Its $17 million Series A, meanwhile, was led by Addition, with Boldstart and BoxGroup again participating, along with Battery Ventures, Mantis (representing musicians The Chainsmokers) and SV Angel.
Alongside the VCs, there are a number of interesting strategic individual investors, too. Daniel Dines and Brandon Deer of UiPath (the RPA connection clearly is not one that I’m imagining!); Allison Pickens, the ex-COO of Gainsight; Zander Lurie of SurveyMonkey); Jay Simons, ex-CEO of Atlassian); Harry Stebbings; and other unnamed investors are all also involved. Ed Sim of Boldstart is joining Dooly’s board of directors with this announcement.
The challenge that Dooly has been built to solve is that while there are a lot of tools out there now to help salespeople source leads, manage the progress of their sales, give them advice and other helpful material to supplement their charm and the basic strength of a product, manage customers once they’ve signed on, and so on, all of them still require something important to work: a time commitment from salespeople to keep them updated with information. Ironically, the more tools to help them that are built, the more time salespeople need to spend feeding them data.
Even more ironically, one of the big daddies of the problem — the somewhat overweight Salesforce — has published figures (cited by Dooly) that say salespeople spend just 34% of their time selling. The rest (minus trips to get coffee to stay caffeinated) seems to be about data entry.
The idea with Dooly is that you turn it on, connect it to what you are using — starting with Salesforce — and Dooly lets you make notes which it then organises and puts into the right places in the rest of your apps.
“When a salesperson starts using Dooly, the ‘aha moment’ is pretty immediate,” Hartvigsen said. “Whether they want to do quick pipeline edits or push their notes to Salesforce, we don’t ask the user to learn any new patterns they aren’t familiar with, we just automate a bunch of things they hate doing, often comparing those traditional chores to clerical work.” For example, he notes, when they sync a note, Dooly automatically updates any Salesforce with any contacts found in the meeting, updates fields, adds to-dos, logs activities, and pushes messages to the appropriate internal stakeholders on Slack, all in the same motion.
The product currently also integrates with Slack, G-Cal and G-Drive, because, Hartvigsen said, “we see this as an area where there is the most immediate friction and an area that was in need of disruption.” He added that the plan is to add more integrations over time. “We see need to expand the solutions that anchor to our connected workspace, with our near-term focus being the systems that touch revenue teams,” he said.
The design of Dooly seems to be about investing a little in order to save more. On average people are using Dooly between 2.5 and 5 hours each day, but Hartvigsen claims that right now the system helps people make up for more hours each week in lost productivity. Its pricing starts at $25 per user per month, going up depending on features and use.
There are quite literally thousands of products out in the market today, and among them hundreds of strong ones, being built to help salespeople with different aspects of getting their jobs done. I’ve written about quite a few of them, and I’ve actually asked companies about whether they are tackling the very issue that Dooly has identified and is trying to fix.
They weren’t, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t. Chief among them are companies like UiPath and Salesforce, which sit on different sides of this problem and could well move into it as they keep growing. (Having UiPath as a backer by way of its founder and a senior executive points to a relationship there, which is interesting.)
In the meantime, there have been some other interesting innovations using AI to improve the sales process, with companies like Pipedrive, Clari, Seismic, Chorus.ai and Gong all using natural language, machine learning and big data analytics (itself helped by AI) to improve how sales get done.
“The first thing we noticed when we met the Dooly team was the thoughtful design-first approach to product that engendered tons of customer love. This love was inherent not only on popular ratings sites like G2 Crowd but also in the individual usage and viral adoption throughout companies with only one initial user,” said Ed Sim, founder and managing partner at Boldstart Ventures in a statement. “Dooly is revolutionizing the note-taking experience for customer facing end users from sales to customer success to product.”
“Dooly is relentlessly focused on building a user-first experience for its customers to seamlessly create workflows and unlock new revenue opportunities,” said Lee Fixel, founder of Addition, added. “We are thrilled to support Dooly as it continues to scale and enhance the sales function for more businesses.”
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Fluid Truck, the Zipcar of commercial trucks, raises $63M to take on rental giants
Fluid Truck has built an app-based platform that aims to take away the pain and cost of owning or leasing commercial vehicles, all while grabbing market share from established companies like Penske, Ryder and U-Haul.
Now, it has the capital to help it get there. The Denver-based company said Tuesday it raised $63 million in a Series A funding round to expand its truck-sharing platform, which helps mid-mile and last-mile delivery companies remotely manage an on-demand rental fleet via web or mobile app. Private equity firm Bison Capital led the round, with participation from Ingka Investments (part of Ingka Group, the main Ikea retailer), Sumitomo Corporation of Americas and Fluid Vehicle Owners.
The investment, its first external round, comes after rapid growth at the four-year-old company. Founder and CEO James Eberhard told TechCrunch that revenue increased 100x in the last two years. That type of growth sounds promising, but the company did not provide a baseline, so it’s hard to judge scale.
With e-commerce expected to continue to rise at a global 9.5% compound annual growth rate from 2020 to 2025, the demand for accessible trucks for hire might see correlative growth. It’s no surprise that e-commerce is one of the industries Fluid Truck has targeted.
Fluid Truck, which operates in 25 U.S. markets, operates like the car-sharing company Zipcar, with a commercial bent. Businesses such as moving and e-commerce delivery companies can use the platform to rent trucks. Fluid Truck’s pitch to businesses extends beyond the “you don’t need to buy or lease” argument. The platform also allows delivery companies to dispense with having a manager on staff who would manage, maintain and eventually sell the fleet.
Businesses eager to outsource the purchasing and managing of their trucks can find fleets for hire in industrial parks and retail areas within Fluid’s service network.
“You can hop on our platform, rent a truck and be in it in a matter of minutes, which really allows businesses to scale up and scale down,” said Eberhard. “We’re watching our user behavior go from a place where they used to own every vehicle they needed at a time to a place where they’re now grabbing spare capacity off Fluid.”
Eberhard hopes to see that type of supplementary use morph into an end state where companies don’t own a single truck and run solely on Fluid Truck’s platform.
Fluid Truck argues that its tech stack, which is designed to smooth out the booking and renting process, gives it a competitive edge in a market dominated by the likes of U-Haul, Ryder and or other small depots. Eberhard said the process of going to a depot and waiting in line is slow and sloppy, whereas Fluid Truck’s app makes renting a van as easy as calling an Uber.
“We take all those complexities away and allow people to have a virtual fleet,” Eberhard told TechCrunch.
Fluid Truck’s fleet is made up of thousands — and soon to be tens of thousands — of cargo vans, pickup trucks, large box trucks and various other vehicles. The company also claims to have the largest medium-duty EV rental fleet in the United States, which it continues to expand as it works with OEMs to increase fleet capacity. Electric vehicles still make up less than 1% of its total portfolio due to the slower adoption of EVs on the commercial side.
Eberhard wants Fluid to be a dominant force in the trucking industry. But Fluid Truck is not the only truck sharing app on the streets. Competitors GoShare and Bungii have similar offerings.
This sizable round could provide an advantage as it tries to become the household name in digital truck sharing. Perhaps, as importantly, the company has the attention and investment of Ikea.
“This is another step in enabling Ikea retail to provide last mile delivery services to our customers, continue to improve on our customer promise, while also reducing our environmental footprint,” Krister Mattsson, managing director of Ingka Investments said in a statement, a comment that suggests a future partnership with Fluid Truck.
With this latest capital round, Fluid’s goal is to (you guessed it) scale outwards, with a focus on expanding the team, adding dozens more markets in the U.S. and preparing to take Fluid into the EU and Canada.
Fluid Truck will also be investing back into its own tech stack, which includes an internal proprietary telematics platform to predict and automate servicing and maintenance of the company’s fleet.
Early Stage is the premier ‘how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first-hand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company-building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in – there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion.
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