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With another $2.5 million in funding, Julia Collins’ Planet FWD launches climate-friendly snack brand
Planet FWD, the climate-friendly food startup founded by Zume co-founder Julia Collins, is today launching its first product, Moonshot Snacks. The climate-friendly snack is carbon neutral, organic, kosher, plant-based, non-GMO and has no sugar added.
The crackers come in three flavors: sourdough sea salt, rosemary garlic and tomato basil. A box of crackers costs $5.99.
Planet FWD is also announcing an additional $2.5 million in funding led by Emerson Collective, Concrete Rose, MCJ Collective and Arlan Hamilton, as well as existing investors, including BBG Ventures, January Ventures and Kapor Capital, among others. This is on top of the $2.7 million the startup announced earlier this year.
What’s unique about Planet FWD’s Moonshot Snacks is that it uses ingredients from farmers that use regenerative agriculture practices. Regenerative agriculture is a farming technique that aims to reverse the effects of climate change by capturing carbon in soil and aboveground biomass, which ultimately increases biodiversity, enriches soils and improves watersheds.
“We want to engage customers and show them they have the power to address climate change just with the way they eat,” Collins told TechCrunch. “We can use our food choices as a way to promote better farm management practices and company practices that can help decarbonize the environment.”
Ideally, Planet FWD will be able to show there’s consumer demand for climate-friendly products, Collins said. From there, she hopes that would encourage more farmers to implement these regenerative agriculture practices.
Unlike organic foods, where those specific farms are relatively well-known and identified, that can’t be said for regenerative agriculture. This is where the software element of Planet FWD comes in.
Additionally, Planet FWD is alpha testing a carbon impact assessment. So, if a brand wanted to determine what its current greenhouse gas impact is for its products, the tool could break down where it comes from — whether that’s the packaging, the ingredients, the distribution, etc. From there, the tool would recommend how to reduce the product’s greenhouse gas impact.
“Frankly, I think it’s a privilege to be alive and aware during this time where this is this window of opportunity to address climate change,” Collins said. “We can’t stop it. We can’t reverse it. But we can address it so it’s still possible for people to live on this planet. But the window is closing.”
Moonshot Snacks begins shipping today via its website. On December 16, it will be available via plastic-free grocery store Zero and will have a more traditional retail launch next year.
Planet FWD will create other products down the line, like cookies and chips. But first and foremost, the company’s road map is driven by the supply chain and understanding where there are opportunities to convert farms to regenerative practices.
“Through its sustainable and climate-friendly ingredient platform, Planet FWD is building a movement of more climate-conscious farmers and producers who can lead us toward a better, more sustainable future,” Fern Mandelbaum, managing director at Emerson Collective, said in a statement. “Through Julia’s inclusive leadership and passion, Planet FWD is helping create a new standard for the food industry and its role in being part of climate solutions.”
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Boast.ai raises $23M to help businesses get their R&D tax credits
Nobody likes dealing with taxes — until the system works in your favor. In many countries, startups can receive tax credits for their R&D work and related employee cost, but as with all things bureaucracy, that’s often a slow and onerous task. Boast.ai aims to make this process far easier, by using a mix of AI and tax experts. The company, which currently has about 1,000 customers, today announced that it has raised a $23 million Series A round led by Radian Capital.
Launched in 2012 by co-founders Alex Popa (CEO) and Lloyed Lobo (president), Boast focuses on helping companies — and especially startups — in the U.S. and Canada claim their R&D tax credits.
“Globally, over $200 billion has been given in R&D incentives to fund businesses, not only in the U.S. and Canada, but the U.K., Australia, France, New Zealand, Ireland give out these incentives,” Lobo explained. “But there’s huge red tape. It’s a cumbersome process. You got to dive in and figure out work that qualifies and what doesn’t. Then you’ve got to file it with your taxes. Then if the government audits you, it’s like a long, laborious process.”
Image Credits: Boast.ai
After working on a few other startup ideas, the co-founders decided to go all-in on Boast. And in the process of working on other ideas, they also realized that AI wasn’t going to be able to do it all, but that it was getting good enough to augment humans to make a complex process like dealing with R&D tax credits scalable.
“The way I think to bootstrap a company is three things,” Lobo explained. “One, customers are looking for an outcome. Get them that outcome in the fastest, cheapest way possible. Two, when you’re doing that, you may have to do a lot of manual work. Figure out what those manual touch points are and then build the workflow to automate that. And once you have those two things, then you’ll have enough data to start working on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Those are the key learnings that we learned the hard way.”
So after doing some of that manual work, Boast can now automatically pull in data using tech tools like JIRA and GitHub and a company’s financial tools like QuickBooks, Gusto and (soon) ADP. It then uses its algorithms to cluster this data, figure out how much time employees spend on projects that would qualify for a tax credit and automate the tax filing process. Throughout the process — and to interact with the government if necessary — the company keeps humans in the loop.
“So all our [customer success] team is engineers,” Lobo noted. “Because if you don’t have engineers they can’t inform the decision-making process. They help figure out if there are any loose ends and then they deal with the audits, communicating with the government and whatnot. That’s how we’re able to effectively get SaaS-like margins or more.”
Ideally, a tool like Boast pays for itself and the company says it has secured more than $150 million in R&D tax credits since launch. Currently, it’s also doubling growth year over year, and that’s what made the founders decide to raise outside money for the first time. That funding will go toward increasing the sales team (which is currently only four people strong) and improving the platform, but Lobo was clear that he doesn’t want to be too aggressive. The goal, he said, is not to have to raise again until Boast can hit the $30 to $50 million revenue mark.
Once fully implemented, Boast also effectively becomes a system of record for all R&D and engineering data. And indeed, that’s the company’s overall vision, with the tax credits being somewhat of a Trojan horse to get to this point. By the middle of next year, the team plans to offer a new product around R&D-based financing, Lobo tells me.
Over the years, the Boast team also focused on not just growing its customer base but also the overall startup ecosystem in the markets in which it operates, with a special focus on Canada. The Boast team, for example, is also the team behind the popular annual Traction conference in Vancouver, Canada (Disclosure: I’ve moderated sessions at the event since its inception). A thriving startup ecosystem creates a larger client base for Boast, too, after all — and coincidently, the team met its investors at the event, too.
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Hibob raises $70M for its new take on human resources
Productivity software has been getting a major re-examination this year, and human resources platforms — used for hiring, firing, paying and managing employees — have been no exception. Today, one of the startups that’s built what it believes is the next generation of how HR should and will work is announcing a big fundraise, underscoring its own growth and the focus on the category.
Hibob, the startup behind the HR platform that goes by the name of “bob” (the company name is pronounced, “Hi, Bob!”), has picked up $70 million in funding at a valuation that reliable sources close to the company tell us is around $500 million.
“Our mission is to modernize HR technology,” said Ronni Zehavi, Hibob’s CEO, who co-founded the company with Israel David. “We are a people management platform for how people work today. Whether that’s remotely or physically collaborative, our customers face challenges with work. We believe that the HR platforms of the future will not be clunky systems, annoying, giant platforms. We believe it should be different. We are a system of engagement rather than record.”
The Series B is being led by SEEK and Israel Growth Partners, with participation also from Bessemer Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, Eight Roads Ventures, Arbor Ventures, Presidio Ventures, Entree Capital, Cerca Partners and Perpetual Partners, the same group that also backed Hibob in its last round (a Series A extension) in 2019. It has raised $124 million to date.
The company has its roots in Israel but these days describes its headquarters as London and New York, and the funding comes on the back of strong growth in multiple markets. In an interview, Zehavi said that Hibob specialises in the mid-market customers and says that it has more than 1,000 of them currently on its books across the U.S., Europe and Asia, including Monzo, Revolut, Happy Socks, ironSource, Receipt Bank, Fiverr, Gong and VaynerMedia. In the last year Hibob has had “triple-digit” year-on-year growth (it didn’t specify what those digits are).
Human resources has never been at the more glamorous end of how a company works, and it can sometimes even be looked on with some disdain. However, HR has found itself in a new spotlight in 2020, the year when every company — whether one based around people sitting at desks or in more interactive and active environments — had to change how it worked.
That might have involved sending everyone home to sign in from offices possibly made out of corners of bedrooms or kitchens, or that might have involved a vastly different set of practices in terms of when and where workers showed up and how they interacted with people once they did. But regardless of the implementations, they all involved a team of people who needed to be linked together, still feeling connected and managed; and sometimes hired, furloughed, or let go.
That focus has started to reveal the strains of how some legacy systems worked, with older systems built to consider little more than creating an employee identity number that could then be tracked for payroll and other purposes.
Hibob — Zehavi said they chose the name after the person who owned the bob.com domain wanted too much to sell it, but they liked “bob” for the actual product — takes an approach from the ground up that is in line with how many people work today, balancing different software and apps depending on what they are doing, and linking them up by way of integrations: its own includes Slack, Microsoft Teams and Mercer, and other packages that are popular with HR departments.
While it covers all of the necessary HR bases like payroll and further compensation, onboarding, managing time off and benefits, it further brings in a variety of other features that help build out bigger profiles of users, such as performance and culture, with the ability for peers, managers and workers themselves to provide feedback to enhance their own engagement with the company, and for the company to have a better idea of how they are fitting into the organization, and what might need more attention in the future.
That then links into a bigger organizational chart and conceptual charts that highlight strong performers, those who are possible flight risks, those who are leaders and so on. While there have been a number of others in the HR world that have built standalone apps that cover some of these features (for example, 15five was early to spot the value of a platform that made it much easier to set goals and provide feedback), what’s notable here is how they are all folded into one system together.
The end effect, as you can see here, looks less like word salad and more interactive, graphic interfaces that are presumably a lot more enjoyable and at least easier to use for HR people themselves.
The importance for investors has been that the product and the startup has identified the opportunity, but has delivered not just more engagement, but a strong piece of software that still provides the essentials.
“This is certainly not a Workday,” said Adam Fisher, a partner at Bessemer, in an interview. “Our overall thesis has been that HR is only growing in importance. And while engagement is super important, that opportunity is not enough to create the market.”
The end result is a platform that has a significant shot at building in even more over time. For example, another large area that has been seeing traction in the world of enterprise and B2B software is employee training. Specifically, enterprise learning systems are creating another way to help keep people not only up to speed on important aspects of how they work, but also engaged at a time when connections are under strain.
“Training, a SuccessFactors -style offering, is definitely in our road map,” said Zehavi, who noted they are adding new features all the time. The latest has been compensation, sometimes known as merit increase cycles. “That is a very complex issue and requires deeper integrations finance and the CFO’s office. We streamlined it and made it easy to use. We launched two months ago and it’s on fire. After learning and development there are other modules also down the road.”
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GetAccept raises $20M Series B, led by Bessemer, to expand its sales platform for SMBs
Last year all-in-one digital sales platform GetAccept raised a $7 million Series A funding round. The platform, which wraps in video, live chat, proposal design, document tracking and e-signatures, has now raised $20 million in Series B funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, as the company expands its platform aimed at SMBs. The funding comes as the pandemic means SMBs have largely shifted to remote, and so has their digital sales process.
Last year the funding was led by DN Capital, with participation from BootstrapLabs, Y Combinator and a number of Spotify’s early investors. This round brings GetAccept’s total financing raised to $30 million. GetAccept competes with several separate tools, including well-financed solutions like DocSend, PandaDoc, Showpad, Highspot, DocuSign and Adobe Sign.
Founded in 2015 by Swedish entrepreneurs and Y Combinator alumni Samir Smajic, Mathias Thulin, Jonas Blanck and Carl Carell, GetAccept has expanded from 30 to now 100+ employees over the last 18 months, with offices across the U.S. and EU countries.
Smajic said: “We believe in the power of relationships and want to bring personalized and engaging interactions back to the online sales process. We saw this digital sales shift and change in behavior back in 2015, which is why we founded GetAccept in the first place. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated and forced B2B buyers and sellers to go digital, which has placed digital sales models high up on the company agendas. We aim to be the online place where every B2B business happens, in a personal way.”
Alex Ferrara, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners commented: “Bessemer Venture Partners is thrilled to back the ambitious GetAccept team and their vision to empower millions of SMBs to streamline and digitize their end-to-end sales processes. They have built a world-class product, prepared for business transactions that continue to shift permanently online at a rapid pace. We look forward to partnering with GetAccept on the journey ahead.”
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Squire, a barbershop tech startup, triples its valuation to $250M in latest round
Squire, a startup that sells software to barbershops, has raised $59 million in a round led by Iconiq Capital. The raise is $45 million in equity capital, and $15 million in debt financing.
The round comes just months after Squire closed its $34 million Series B, led by CRV. With the new financing, Squire has nearly tripled its valuation, up from $85 million in June to $250 million today. Other investors in the company include Tiger Global and Trinity Ventures.
What happened? Squire’s revenue went from zero in March, when all barber shops closed, to between $10 million to $20 million in ARR just 10 months later, TechCrunch has learned. The growth indicates how the next wave of barbershops will be built atop digital technology, instead of offline processes.
“We just took off like a lightning bolt,” co-founder Dave Salvant tells TechCrunch.
Salvant and Squire’s other co-founder, Songe LaRon, began the business in 2016 as a back-end barbershop management tool for independent businesses. Squire lets businesses schedule appointments, offer loyalty programs and install contactless and cashless payment. The team claims that barbershop operations are more complex than many other types of small businesses because there are multiple parties transacting, plus customers might check out different services from different barbers all within one service.
That’s where Squire comes in — to be a point of sale to manage those confusing transactions.
The coronavirus has threatened the livelihoods of small and medium-sized business owners, making it harder for them to secure loans or financing to undergo tricky times. Salvant says that Squire took on $15 million in debt financing to create a banking-as-a-service feature for these business owners.
“This market is underserved by traditional financial institutions,” Salvant said. “And we think there’s opportunities to help these owners with financial tools.”
Going forward, Squire plans to expand into new markets, including Australia, Canada and the U.K. The majority of capital raised will go toward hiring new sales and marketing professionals.
Squire’s total staff is currently 100 people.
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Arthur.ai snags $15M Series A to grow machine learning monitoring tool
At a time when more companies are building machine learning models, Arthur.ai wants to help by ensuring the model accuracy doesn’t begin slipping over time, thereby losing its ability to precisely measure what it was supposed to. As demand for this type of tool has increased this year, in spite of the pandemic, the startup announced a $15 million Series A today.
The investment was led by Index Ventures with help from newcomers Acrew and Plexo Capital, along with previous investors Homebrew, AME Ventures and Work-Bench. The round comes almost exactly a year after its $3.3 million seed round.
As CEO and co-founder Adam Wenchel explains, data scientists build and test machine learning models in the lab under ideal conditions, but as these models are put into production, the performance can begin to deteriorate under real-world scrutiny. Arthur.ai is designed to root out when that happens.
Even as COVID has wreaked havoc throughout much of this year, the company has grown revenue 300% in the last six months smack dab in the middle of all that. “Over the course of 2020, we have begun to open up more and talk to [more] customers. And so we are starting to get some really nice initial customer traction, both in traditional enterprises as well as digital tech companies,” Wenchel told me. With 15 customers, the company is finding that the solution is resonating with companies.
It’s interesting to note that AWS announced a similar tool yesterday at re:Invent called SageMaker Clarify, but Wenchel sees this as more of a validation of what his startup has been trying to do, rather than an existential threat. “I think it helps create awareness, and because this is our 100% focus, our tools go well beyond what the major cloud providers provide,” he said.
Investor Mike Volpi from Index certainly sees the value proposition of this company. “One of the most critical aspects of the AI stack is in the area of performance monitoring and risk mitigation. Simply put, is the AI system behaving like it’s supposed to?” he wrote in a blog post announcing the funding.
When we spoke a year ago, the company had eight employees. Today it has 17 and it expects to double again by the end of next year. Wenchel says that as a company whose product looks for different types of bias, it’s especially important to have a diverse workforce. He says that starts with having a diverse investment team and board makeup, which he has been able to achieve, and goes from there.
“We’ve sponsored and work with groups that focus on both general sort of coding for different underrepresented groups as well as specifically AI, and that’s something that we’ll continue to do. And actually I think when we can get together for in-person events again, we will really go out there and support great organizations like AI for All and Black Girls Code,” he said. He believes that by working with these groups, it will give the startup a pipeline to underrepresented groups, which they can draw upon for hiring as the needs arise.
Wenchel says that when he can go back to the office, he wants to bring employees back, at least for part of the week for certain kinds of work that will benefit from being in the same space.
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HealNow raises $1.3 million to bring online payments to pharmacies
As the health tech landscape rapidly evolves, another startup is making its presence known. HealNow has closed a $1.3 million round of funding from SoftBank Opportunity Fund and Alabama Futures Fund.
The company was founded by Halston Prox and Joshua Smith. Prox has worked in healthcare for more than a decade with major organizations such as Providence Health, Mount Sinai and Baylor Scott & White, mostly focused on digitizing health records and designing and implementing software for doctors, nurses, etc. Smith, CTO at the company, has been a developer since 2012.
The duo founded HealNow to become the central nervous system for order and delivery of prescriptions, according to Prox. Your average payments processing system isn’t necessarily applicable to pharmacies large and small because of the complexities of health insurance and the regulatory landscape.
Not only is it costly to facilitate online payments for pharmacies, but they also have their own pharmacy management systems and workflows that can be easily disrupted by moving to a new payments system.
HealNow has built a system that’s specifically tailored to pharmacies of any shape or size, from grocery stores to mom and pop pharmacies and everything in between. It’s a white label solution, meaning that any pharmacy can put their brand language on the product.
“We’re embedded in their current workflows and pharmacies don’t have to do anything manual, even if they’re using a pharmacy management system,” said Prox.
When a user looks to get a prescription from their pharmacy, they are sent a link that allows them to securely answer any questions that may be necessary for the pickup, enter insurance info, make a payment and schedule a curbside pickup or a delivery. The tech also integrates with third-party delivery services for pharmacies that offer deliveries.
This technology has been particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic, giving smaller pharmacies the chance to compete with bigger chains who have digital solutions already set up that allow for curbside pick up. This is especially true now that Amazon has gotten into the space with the launch of Amazon Pharmacy.
HealNow is a SaaS company, charging a monthly subscription fee for use of the platform, as well as a service fee for prescriptions purchased on the platform. However, that service fee is a flat rate that never changes based on the cost of the prescription.
The space is crowded and growing more crowded, with competitors like NimbleRX and Capsule offering their own spin on simplifying and digitizing the pharmacy. One big difference for HealNow, says Prox, is that the startup has no intention of ever being a pharmacy, but rather serving pharmacies in a way that doesn’t disrupt their current workflow or system.
“We’re not a pharmacy, and we want to enable all these pharmacies to be online,” said Prox. “To do that we have to do that in an unbiased way by focusing on being a complete tech company.”
The funding is going primarily toward building out the sales and marketing arms of the company to continue fueling growth. HealNow has a foothold in the West, Southwest and Middle America, and is opening an office in Birmingham to sprint across the East Coast. Prox says the company is processing thousands of orders a day and tens of thousands of orders each month.
HealNow launched in 2018 after graduating from the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator .
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WorkRamp raises $17M to ramp up its enterprise learning platform
Remote learning and training have become a large priority this year for organizations looking to keep employees engaged and up to date on work practices at a time when many of them are not working in an office — and, in the case of those who have joined in 2020, may have never met any of their work colleagues in person, ever. Today one of the startups that’s built a new, more user-friendly approach to creating and provisioning those learning materials is announcing some funding as it experiences a boost in its growth.
WorkRamp, which has built a platform that helps organizations build their own training materials, and then distribute them both to their workforce and to partners, has raised $17 million, a Series B round of funding that’s being led by OMERS Ventures, with Bow Capital also participating.
Its big pitch is that it has built the tools to make it easy for companies to build their own training and learning materials, incorporating tests, videos, slide shows and more, and by making it easier for companies to build these themselves, the materials themselves become more engaging and less stiff.
“We’re disrupting the legacy LMS [learning management system] providers, the Cornerstones of the world, with our bite-size training platform,” said CEO and founder Ted Blosser in an interview. “We want to do what Peloton did for the exercise market, but with corporate training. We are aiming for a consumer-grade experience.”
The company, originally incubated in Y Combinator, has now raised $27 million.
The funding comes on the back of strong growth for WorkRamp . Blosser said that it now has around 250 customers, with 1 million courses collectively created on its platform. That list includes fast-growing tech companies like Zoom, Box, Reddit and Intercom, as well as Disney, GlobalData and PayPal. As it continues to expand, it will be interesting to see how and if it can also snag more legacy, late adopters who are not as focused on tech in their own DNA.
WorkRamp estimates that there is some $20 billion spent annually by organizations on corporate training. Unsurprisingly, that has meant the proliferation of a number of companies building tools to address that market.
Just Google WorkRamp and you’re likely to encounter a number of its competitors who have bought its name as a keyword to snag a little more attention. There are both big and small players in the space, including Leapsome, Capterra, Lessonly, LearnUpon (which itself recently raised a big round), SuccessFactors and TalentLMS.
The interesting thing about what WorkRamp has built is that it plays on the idea of the “creator,” which really has been a huge development in our digital world. YouTube may have kicked things off with the concept of “user-generated content.” but today we have TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and so many more platforms — not to mention smartphones themselves, with their easy facilities to shoot videos and photos of others, or of yourself, and then share with others — which have made the idea of building your own work, and looking at that of others, extremely accessible.
That has effectively laid the groundwork for a new way of conceiving of even more prosaic things, like corporate training. (Can there really be anything more comedically prosaic than that?) Other startups like Kahoot have also played on this idea, by making it easy for enterprises to build their own games to help train their staff.
This is what WorkRamp has aimed to tap into with its own take on the learning market, to help its customers eschew the idea of hiring outside production companies to make training materials, or expect WorkRamp to build those materials for them: Instead, the people who are going to use the training now have the control.
“I think it’s critical to be able to build your own customer education,” Blosser said. “That’s a big trend for clients that want both to rapidly onboard people but also reduce costs.”
The company’s platform includes user-friendly drag-and-drop functionality, which also lets people build slide shows, flip cards and questions that viewers can answer. The plan is to bring on more “Accenture” style consultants, Blosser said, for bigger customers who may not be as tech savvy to help them take better advantage of the tools. It also integrates with third-party packages like Salesforce.com, Workday and Zoom both to build out training as well as distribute it.
“Since 2000, we have seen three major technology shifts in the enterprise: the transition from on-premise to SaaS, the growth of mobile, and the most recent – sweeping digital transformation across almost every part of every business,” said Eugene Lee of OMERS Ventures, in a statement. “The pandemic has forced adoption of a digital-first approach towards customers and employees across virtually all industries. WorkRamp’s platform is foundational to empowering both of these important audiences today and in the future. We are bullish on the massive opportunity in front of the company and are excited to get involved.” Lee is joining the board with this round.
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Firebolt raises $37M to take on Snowflake, Amazon and Google with a new approach to data warehousing
For many organizations, the shift to cloud computing has played out more realistically as a shift to hybrid architectures, where a company’s data is just as likely to reside in one of a number of clouds as it might in an on-premise deployment, in a data warehouse or in a data lake. Today, a startup that has built a more comprehensive way to assess, analyse and use that data is announcing funding as it looks to take on Snowflake, Amazon, Google and others in the area of enterprise data analytics.
Firebolt, which has redesigned the concept of a data warehouse to work more efficiently and at a lower cost, is today announcing that it has raised $37 million from Zeev Ventures, TLV Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Angular Ventures. It plans to use the funding to continue developing its product and bring on more customers.
The company is officially “launching” today but — as is the case with so many enterprise startups these days operating in stealth — it has been around for two years already building its platform and signing commercial deals. It now has some 12 large enterprise customers and is “really busy” with new business, said CEO Eldad Farkash in an interview.
The funding may sound like a large amount for a company that has not really been out in the open, but part of the reason is because of the track record of the founders. Farkash was one of the founders of Sisense, the successful business intelligence startup, and he has co-founded Firebolt with two others who were on Sisense’s founding team, Saar Bitner as COO and Ariel Yaroshevich as CTO.
At Sisense, these three were coming up against an issue: When you are dealing in terabytes of data, cloud data warehouses were straining to deliver good performance to power its analytics and other tools, and the only way to potentially continue to mitigate that was by piling on more cloud capacity.
Farkash is something of a technical savant and said that he decided to move on and build Firebolt to see if he could tackle this, which he described as a new, difficult and “meaningful” problem. “The only thing I know how to do is build startups,” he joked.
In his opinion, while data warehousing has been a big breakthrough in how to handle the mass of data that companies now amass and want to use better, it has started to feel like a dated solution.
“Data warehouses are solving yesterday’s problem, which was, ‘How do I migrate to the cloud and deal with scale?’ ” he said, citing Google’s BigQuery, Amazon’s RedShift and Snowflake as fitting answers for that issue. “We see Firebolt as the new entrant in that space, with a new take on design on technology. We change the discussion from one of scale to one of speed and efficiency.”
The startup claims that its performance is up to 182 times faster than that of other data warehouses. It’s a SQL-based system that works on principles that Farkash said came out of academic research that had yet to be applied anywhere, around how to handle data in a lighter way, using new techniques in compression and how data is parsed. Data lakes in turn can be connected with a wider data ecosystem, and what it translates to is a much smaller requirement for cloud capacity.
This is not just a problem at Sisense. With enterprise data continuing to grow exponentially, cloud analytics is growing with it, and is estimated by 2025 to be a $65 billion market, Firebolt estimates.
Still, Farkash said the Firebolt concept was initially a challenging sell even to the engineers that it eventually hired to build out the business: It required building completely new warehouses from the ground up to run the platform, five of which exist today and will be augmented with more, on the back of this funding, he said.
And it should be pointed out that its competitors are not exactly sitting still either. Just yesterday, Dataform announced that it had been acquired by Google to help it build out and run better performance at BigQuery.
“Firebolt created a SaaS product that changes the analytics experience over big data sets,” Oren Zeev of Zeev Ventures said in a statement. “The pace of innovation in the big data space has lagged the explosion in data growth rendering most data warehousing solutions too slow, too expensive, or too complex to scale. Firebolt takes cloud data warehousing to the next level by offering the world’s most powerful analytical engine. This means companies can now analyze multi Terabyte / Petabyte data sets easily at significantly lower costs and provide a truly interactive user experience to their employees, customers or anyone who needs to access the data.”
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Calm raises $75M more at $2B valuation
Calm, a well-known meditation app, has raised new capital at a valuation of $2 billion. The round was anticipated after the company was reported to be hunting for up to $150 million at a valuation of $2.2 billion; perhaps Calm will follow in the steps of Robinhood and add a second tranche to the round in time.
Prior investor Lightspeed Venture Partners led the investment, which also saw participation from Insight, TPG and Salesforce CEO and new Slack owner Marc Benioff, among others.
That Calm was able to secure more capital is not surprising. The company has a history of quick revenue growth, and is reportedly profitable, to boot. And the investment comes after mental health-focused startups as a category have performed well from a venture capital perspective.
The coronavirus pandemic has likely also played into Calm’s attractiveness as an investment. Since the beginning, researchers have warned about the psychological toll that a pandemic could have on humanity. A recent Pew Research study suggested that people who have lost their jobs during the pandemic might be feeling higher levels of distress during this time. Rival service Headspace offered an annual subscription to its platform for free for those that are unemployed.
Calm responded to the toll of coronavirus by launching a page of free resources, and focusing on a partnership with nonprofit health system Kaiser Permanente. Kaiser was the first health system to make Calm app’s Premium subscription free for its members.
The startups sells a consumer service for around $70 per year, or $15 per month. And the startup has built out a corporate arm, “Calm for Business,” that likely brings revenue stability that augments its consumer efforts.
As part of a release concerning today’s news, Calm detailed a number of nearly useful growth metrics. The service has over 100 million downloads, up from 40 million downloads in February 2019. It also grew up from 1 million paying users to 4 million paying users in the same time period (we asked if that data was inclusive of any Calm for Business customers, a question Calm did not answer).
Other TechCrunch queries regarding the company’s economics, revenue growth and performance compared to its pre-COVID plan also went unanswered.
Calm and rival service Headspace have now raised a combined $434 million according to Crunchbase data, underscoring how attractive their models have proved to venture capitalists. According to a Bloomberg interview, Calm is considering acquiring smaller companies in the wake of its new capital event.
Regardless, Calm now has a refreshed war chest heading into 2021 and a plan to go hunting. That should generate a headline or two.
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