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Google closes $2.6B Looker acquisition

Published February 13, 2020

When Google announced that it was acquiring data analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion, it was a big deal on a couple of levels. It was a lot of money and it represented the first large deal under the leadership of Thomas Kurian. Today, the company announced that deal has officially closed and Looker is part of the Google Cloud Platform.

While Kurian was happy to announce that Looker was officially part of the Google family, he made it clear in a blog post that the analytics arm would continue to support multiple cloud vendors beyond Google.

“Google Cloud and Looker share a common philosophy around delivering open solutions and supporting customers wherever they are—be it on Google Cloud, in other public clouds, or on premises. As more organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy, Looker customers and partners can expect continued support of all cloud data management systems like Amazon Redshift, Azure SQL, Snowflake, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Teradata,” Kurian wrote.

As is typical in a deal like this, Looker CEO Frank Bien sees the much larger Google giving his company the resources to grow much faster than it could have on its own. “Joining Google Cloud provides us better reach, strengthens our resources, and brings together some of the best minds in both analytics and cloud infrastructure to build an exciting path forward for our customers and partners. The mission that we undertook seven years ago as Looker takes a significant step forward beginning today,” Bien wrote in his post.

At the time the deal was announced in June, the company shared a slide, which showed where Looker fits in what they call their “Smart Analytics Platform,” which provides ways to process, understand, analyze and visualize data. Looker fills in a spot in the visualization stack while continuing to support other clouds.

Slide: Google

Looker was founded in 2011 and raised more than $280 million, according to Crunchbase. Investors included Redpoint, Meritech Capital Partners, First Round Capital, Kleiner Perkins, CapitalG and PremjiInvest. The last deal before the acquisition was a $103 million Series E investment on a $1.6 billion valuation in December 2018.

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Datometry snares $17M Series B to help move data and applications to the cloud

Published February 13, 2020

Moving data to the cloud from an on-prem data warehouse like Teradata is a hard problem to solve, especially if you’ve built custom applications that are based on that data. Datometry, a San Francisco startup, has developed a solution to solve that issue, and today it announced a $17 million Series B investment.

WRVI Capital led the round with participation from existing investors including Amarjit Gill, Dell Technologies Capital, Redline Capital and Acorn Pacific. The company has raised a total of $28 million, according to Crunchbase data.

The startup is helping move data and applications — lock, stock and barrel — to the cloud. For starters, it’s focusing on Teradata data warehouses and applications built on top of that because it’s a popular enterprise offering, says Mike Waas CEO and co-founder at the company.

“Pretty much all major enterprises are struggling right now with getting their data into the cloud. At Datometry, we built a software platform that lets them take their existing applications and move them over to new cloud technology as is, and operate with cloud databases without having to change any SQL or APIs,” Waas told TechCrunch.

Today, without Datometry, customers would have to hire expensive systems integrators and take months or years rewriting their applications, but Datometry says it has found a way to move the applications to the cloud, reducing the time to migrate from years to weeks or months, by using virtualization.

The company starts by building a new schema for the cloud platform. It supports all the major players including Amazon, Microsoft and Google. It then runs the applications through a virtual database running the schema and connects the old application with a cloud data warehouse like Amazon Redshift.

Waas sees virtualization as the key here as it enables his customers to run the applications just as they always have on prem, but in a more modern context. “Personally I believe that it’s time for virtualization to disrupt the database stack just the way it has disrupted pretty much everything else in the datacenter,” he said.

From there, they can start developing more modern applications in the cloud, but he says that his company can get them to the cloud faster and cheaper than was possible before, and without disrupting their operations in any major way.

Waas founded the company in 2013 and it took several years to build the solution. This is a hard problem to solve, and he was ahead of the curve in terms of trying to move this type of data. As his solution came online in the last 18 months, it turned out to be good timing as companies were suddenly looking for ways to move data and applications to the cloud.

He says he has been able to build a client base of 40 customers with 30 employees because the cloud service providers are helping with sales and walking them into clients, more than they can handle right now as a small startup.

The plan moving forward is to use some of the money from this round to build a partner network with systems integrators to help with implementation so that they can concentrate on developing the product and supporting other data repositories in the future.

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GameSnacks, from Google’s Area 120, brings fast, casual online games to developing markets

Published February 13, 2020

A new project called GameSnacks is launching today from Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120, with the goal of bringing fast-loading, casual online games to users in developing markets. Billions of people are coming online through mobile devices. But they’re often on low memory devices with expensive data plans and struggle with unreliable network connections. That makes web gaming inaccessible to millions, as the games aren’t optimized for these sorts of constraints.

Today, over half of mobile website visitors leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, but on low memory devices and 2G or 3G networks, a typical web game will load much more slowly — even triple or quadruple that load time, or worse.

The idea with GameSnacks is to speed up load time and performance of web games by reducing the size of the initially-loaded HTML page, compressing additional assets like scripts, images, and sounds, then waiting to load them until necessary.

GameSnacks says this allows its games to load in a few seconds even on network connections as slow as 500 Kbps.

For instance, A GameSnacks title called Tower is ready to play on a 1 GB RAM device over 3G within just a few seconds. A typical web game on that same device took as long as 12 seconds, the company claims.

In addition, GameSnacks’ games are simple, casual games that only last a few minutes. They’re meant to fill those idle moments you have when waiting line, waiting at the bus stop, or waiting for a doctor’s appointment to start, for example. The games are also designed to have straightforward rules so they can be learned without instructions.

While mobile may be a primary platform, GameSnacks’ games are also accessible on any web-capable device, including desktop computers with a keyboard and mouse. On mobile, both iOS and Android are supported.

At launch, GameSnacks is partnering with a leading technology platform in Southeast Asia, Gojek, which is bringing the new games to their ecosystem through the GoGames service. Initially, this partnership is focused on delivering games to users in Indonesia before expanding elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Currently, GameSnacks is working with developers including Famobi, Inlogic Games, Black Moon Design, Geek Games, and Enclave Games. Other HTML5 game developers who think their title may make sense in the GameSnacks catalog are encouraged to reach out.

GameSnacks’ business model will ultimately involve other partnerships that allow other developers to embed GameSnacks games into their own apps, even customized to feel native to that app’s experience.

Founded by Ani Mohan and Neel Rao, GameSnacks is a team of six working within Area 120 at Google, which is home to a variety of experimental ideas, including those in social networking, video, advertising, education, transit, business and more.

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Tozny introduces encrypted identity tool as part of security service platform

Published February 13, 2020

Tozny, a Portland, Oregon startup that wants to help companies more easily incorporate encryption into programs and processes, introduced TozID today. It is an identity and access control tool that can work independently or in conjunction with the company’s other encryption tools.

“Basically we have a Security as a Service platform, and it’s designed to help developers and IT departments add defense in depth by [combining] centralized user management with an end-to-end encryption platform,” Tozny CEO and founder Isaac Potoczny-Jones told TechCrunch.

The company is introducing an identity and access solution today with the hope of moving beyond its core developer and government audience to a broader enterprise customer base.

Under the hood, TozID uses standards identity constructs like single sign-on, SAML and OpenID, and it can plug into any existing identity framework, but the key here is that it’s encryption-based and uses Zero Knowledge identification. This allows a user (or application) to control information with a password while reducing the risk of sharing data because Tozny does not store passwords or send them over the network.

In this tool, the password acts as the encryption key, which enables users or applications to control access to data in a very granular way, only unlocking information for people or applications they want to be able to access that information.

As Potoczny-Jones pointed out, this can be as simple as one-to-one communication in an encrypted messaging app, but it can be more complex at the application layer depending on how it’s set up. “It’s really powerful to have a user make that decision, but that’s not the only use case. There are many different ways to enable who gets access to data, and this tool enforces those kinds of decisions with encryption,” he explained.

Regardless of how this is implemented, the user never has to understand encryption or even know that encryption is in play in the application. All they need to do is enter a password as they always have, and then Tozny deals with the complex parts under the hood using standard open source encryption algorithms.

The company also has a data privacy tool geared towards developers to build in end-to-end encryption into applications, whether that’s web, mobile, server and so forth. Developers can use the Tozny SDK to add encryption to their applications without a lot of encryption knowledge.

The company has been around since 2013 and hasn’t taken any private investment. Instead, it has developed an encryption toolkit for government agencies, including NIST and DARPA, that has acted as a funding mechanism.

“This is an open source toolkit on the client side, so that folks can vet it for security — cryptographers like that — and on the server side it’s a SaaS-type platform,” he said. The latter is how the company makes money, by selling the service.

“Our goal really here is to bring the kind of cybersecurity that we’ve been building for government agencies into the commercial market, so this is really work on our side to try to, you might say, bring it down market as the threat landscape moves up market,” he said.

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Peru’s startup scene is ready for more

Published February 12, 2020
Greg Mitchell
Contributor

Greg Mitchell is regional director of Angel Ventures, a startup investor and advisor and is the creator of the blog Ruta Startup.

Funding of Latin American startups has doubled each year over the past two years.

And while most of this capital has been directed toward Brazil and Mexico, this surge is starting to have an effect on startups in the region’s smaller markets. The increased availability of capital for later rounds is creating more opportunities for startups to scale both regionally and globally. And while it may not be one of the largest countries in Latin America, Peru continues to have one of the best-performing economies and fastest-growing startup scenes.

In 2019, a new record was set for the amount of capital invested into Peruvian startups, at least $11 million, a 24% increase compared to 2018. Most of the money went to fintech (47%) and edtech (37%) startups. Over the past four years, more than $22.7 million in public funds went toward startup-related projects as well.

The government-backed program Innóvate Perú awarded approximately $13.8 million of its total investments almost exclusively to startups. Total venture capital investment will likely exceed US$25 million in 2020, doubling what was achieved in 2019, and will continue to grow from there.

In 2019, Peru’s development bank, COFIDE, announced a new fund of funds to invest in venture capital firms, mirroring similar entities such as Chile’s CORFO, Colombia’s Bancoldex and Mexico’s NAFIN. While there are plenty of opportunities to secure seed-stage capital in Peru, many startups still have to look abroad for growth capital. Keynua, Xertica, Turismoi and Runa are just a few of the Peruvian startups that sought international investors to lead their rounds over $1 million. Following in the path of similar funds, the fund of funds will invest $20 million in half a dozen venture capital firms, which would in turn invest in approximately 120 startups.

As government support for entrepreneurs continues to pour in, the Peruvian startup ecosystem is entering a new phase. More and more startups are launching, graduating from accelerator programs and seeking ways to reach their next milestone. Local early-stage investors are stepping in to fill the financing gap and have teamed up to form the Peruvian Seed and Venture Capital Association, PECAP, to share investment opportunities and lay a strong foundation for venture capital in Peru. Here’s a look at just a few of the opportunities for more venture capital to step in.

Fueling Peru’s growing fintech sector

A massive fintech boom is playing out across Latin America, with the size of the industry expected to exceed $150 billion by 2021. Peru is home to an estimated 120 fintech startups actively tackling the issues of financial inclusion and better servicing the region’s small and medium-sized businesses. Peru’s economy is still largely informal, with approximately 14 million people underbanked. In 2017, María Laura Cuya started Peru’s Fintech Association to work alongside regulators, academics and other organizations to improve financial literacy and access to financial products, with a focus on Peruvian SMEs.

A few of Peru’s fintech sectors stand out, including factoring and foreign exchange, where a number of startups are quickly gaining traction and already branching out to neighboring markets. Innova Funding, Innova Factoring, Facturedo, Kambista and Rextie are just a few examples. Peru’s membership in the Pacific Alliance also makes it an attractive initial market prior to launching in other Pacific Alliance countries.

In 2019, Peruvian fintechs Keynua and Apurata were selected for the Y Combinator accelerator program, putting them on the international radar. Traditional banks in Peru are also shifting their mindsets and warming up to fintech partnerships. The publicly traded Peruvian bank, Credicorp, for example, recently set up a corporate venture fund called Krealo. The bank made its first investments in Culqi, a local payments gateway, and Independencia, a lending platform.

Impact investing opportunities

Latin America is a top destination for impact investment capital, outpacing many other regions in the world, with a 15% compound annual growth rate over the last five years, according to the Global Impact Investing Network. Edtech represents a rising entry point across the region for impact investors thanks to its potential for both financial and non-financial returns.

According to an OECD report, approximately 30 million young people in Latin America are not participating in any form of education, training or employment, and 76% of this total are women. Laboratoria, co-founded by edtech thought leader Mariana Costa Checa, helps women develop technical skills and has expanded across the region from its headquarters in Lima to train more than 1,000 women so far. The startup has received praise from global companies, including Walmart and Facebook. In 2019, the skills development platform Crehana raised the largest-ever round for a Peruvian startup ($4.5 million) from both regional and global funds.

Peru attracted more impact investment capital than Mexico, a longtime leader in the region, for the first time in 2018. Much of this investment is focused on improving Peru’s education system. Local startups are addressing everything from early childhood education to workforce training, and as more success stories emerge, more resources will be needed to fully tap into Latin America’s large markets for these solutions.

Supporting long-term startup growth

The government-backed program Innóvate Perú has financed more than 3,400 entrepreneurial projects to date, and more than 25 private institutions are now accelerating, incubating and investing in Peruvian startups. New startup creation is at its highest rate ever; however, these companies are outgrowing their angel and seed-stage supporters and are now seeking ways to take their ventures to the next level.

Over the past few years, Latin America has proven that it is a place where startups can scale and succeed. Now, with more startups coming out of the region’s smaller, underserved markets, like Peru, there is an opportunity to deploy capital effectively and bring impactful solutions to millions of people across the region.

*Angel Ventures was an investor in Culqi before it was sold to BCP. Neither Angel Ventures nor Greg Mitchell currently hold any shares.

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FTC votes to review influencer marketing rules & penalties

Published February 12, 2020

Undisclosed influencer marketing posts on social media should trigger financial penalties, according to a statement released today by the Federal Trade Commission’s Rohit Chopra. The FTC has voted 5-0 to approve a Federal Register notice calling for public comments on questions related to whether The Endorsement Guides for advertising need to be updated.

“When companies launder advertising by paying an influencer to pretend that their endorsement or review is untainted by a financial relationship, this is illegal payola,” Chopra writes. “The FTC will need to determine whether to create new requirements for social media platforms and advertisers and whether to activate civil penalty liability.”

Currently the non-binding Endorsement Guides stipulate that “when there is a connection between an endorser and a seller of an advertised product that could affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement, the connection must be clearly and conspicuously disclosed.” In the case of social media, that means creators need to note their post is part of an “ad,” “sponsored” content or “paid partnership.”

But Chopra wants the FTC to consider making those rules official by “Codifying elements of the existing endorsement guides into formal rules so that violators can be liable for civil penalties under Section 5(m)(1)(A) and liable for damages under Section 19.” He cites weak enforcement to date, noting that in the case of department store Lord & Taylor not insisting 50 paid influencers specify their posts were sponsored, “the Commission settled the matter for no customer refunds, no forfeiture of ill-gotten gains, no notice to consumers, no deletion of wrongfully obtained personal data, and no findings or admission of liability.”

Strangely, Chopra fixates on Instagram’s Branded Content Ads that let marketers pay to turn posts by influencers tagging brands into ads. However, these ads include a clear “Sponsored. Paid partnership with [brand]” and seem to meet all necessary disclosure requirements. He also mentions concerns about sponcon on YouTube and TikTok.

Additional targets of the FTC’s review will be use of fake or incentivized reviews. It’s seeking public comment on whether free or discounted products influence reviews and should require disclosure, how to handle affiliate links and whether warnings should be posted by advertisers or review sites about incentivized reviews. It also wants to know about how influencer marketing affects and is understood by children.

Chopra wisely suggests the FTC focus on the platforms and advertisers that are earning tons of money from potentially undisclosed influencer marketing, rather than the smaller influencers themselves who might not be as well versed in the law and are just trying to hustle. “When individual influencers are able to post about their interests to earn extra money on the side, this is not a cause for major concern,” he writes, but “when we do not hold lawbreaking companies accountable, this harms every honest business looking to compete fairly.”

While many of the social media platforms have moved to self-police with rules about revealing paid partnerships, there remain gray areas around incentives like free clothes or discount rates. Codifying what constitutes incentivized endorsement, formally demanding social media platforms to implement policies and features for disclosure and making influencer marketing contracts state that participation must be disclosed would all be sensible updates.

Society has enough trouble with misinformation on the internet, from trolls to election meddlers. They should at least be able to trust that if someone says they love their new jacket, they didn’t secretly get paid for it.

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Microsoft’s game streaming service Project xCloud launches in preview on iOS

Published February 12, 2020

Last year, Microsoft launched a preview of Project xCloud, its ambitious game streaming service that aims to deliver games to any screen — console, PC or mobile. However, the service until now has only been available to mobile users on Android. Today, that changes as Microsoft is bringing the Project xCloud preview to iOS devices by way of Apple’s TestFlight program.

Microsoft had been testing xCloud on iOS internally, but had yet to open it up to the public.

Unfortunately, the iOS test will be limited. As is standard with Apple’s TestFlight platform, the new build will be limited to only 10,000 testers.

That won’t likely be enough spots to meet demand, Microsoft admits, and says invitations will be distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis. To work around the limitation, Microsoft plans to boot out some early testers to make room for new testers during the course of the public beta.

“Those who are accepted into the iOS TestFlight preview may not necessarily participate for the full duration of the preview,” the company explains via blog post. “As noted earlier, there are limited spaces available, so for testing purposes we may need to cycle through registrants in order to best utilize the available testing audience. This also means that even if you miss out on the initial allocation, you might receive an invitation to participate later in the preview,” it says.

The iOS preview will also be limited to only one game: “Halo: The Master Chief Collection.” In addition, this particular test won’t include the preview of Xbox Console Streaming as the Android test currently does.

To qualify, testers will need a Microsoft account associated with their Xbox gamertag; an iPhone or iPad running iOS 13.0 or higher and Bluetooth v. 4.0; a Bluetooth-enabled Xbox Once Wireless Controller; access to Wi-Fi or a mobile data connection that supports 10 Mbps-down bandwidth; and, optionally, a third-party controller mount for phone-based games (like this one).

The move to bring console-quality games to smartphones represents a shift in Microsoft’s gaming strategy. The company understands that it can only sell so many consoles, for starters, but mobile phones are everywhere. In addition, people today want to play games on any available screen — not just the big TV screen at home. And for some users, mobile is their only screen.

Meanwhile, cross-platform gaming is becoming increasingly popular, thanks to titles like Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox, PUBG and others, which proved that mobile experiences can match consoles.

Project xCloud aims to make it easier for developers to build games that work everywhere. This is no small task, as it required Microsoft to architect a new customizable blade that hosts the component parts of multiple Xbox One consoles, as well as the associated infrastructure needed to support it. It also needs to ensure the technology can deliver games at console speeds with low latency, so mobile users don’t feel like they’re getting a second-rate experience.

Instructions on how to join the TestFlight are available here.

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GSMA cancels Mobile World Congress due to coronavirus concerns

Published February 12, 2020

The GSMA, the organization behind MWC, the world’s largest mobile trade show, has announced that it is officially canceling the show. MWC usually attracts more than 100,000 attendees from 200 countries to Barcelona. This year’s show was supposed to take place on February 24-27.

Several publications received a statement about the cancellation. “The GSMA has cancelled MWC Barcelona 2020 because the global concern regarding the coronavirus outbreak, travel concern and other circumstances, make it impossible for the GSMA to hold the event,” GSMA CEO John Hoffman told Bloomberg and the Financial Times. El Diario, El País and La Vanguardia also report that the show has been canceled.

The GSMA has now published a statement confirming its decision to cancel — writing:

Since the first edition of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in 2006, the GSMA has convened the industry, governments, ministers, policymakers, operators and industry leaders across the broader ecosystem.

With due regard to the safe and healthy environment in Barcelona and the host country today, the GSMA has cancelled MWC Barcelona 2020 because the global concern regarding the coronavirus outbreak, travel concern and other circumstances, make it impossible for the GSMA to hold the event.

The Host City Parties respect and understand this decision.

The GSMA and the Host City Parties will continue to be working in unison and supporting each other for MWC Barcelona 2021 and future editions.

Our sympathies at this time are with those affected in China, and all around the world.

Further updates from the GSMA, are on our website and can be found on www.mwcbarcelona.com.

Over the past few days, dozens of big names announced they would skip this year’s show. LG first announced that it wouldn’t attend the trade show, citing safety concerns related to the coronavirus outbreak. Nvidia and Ericsson followed suit.

On Sunday, the GSMA sent a long coronavirus-related email to registered attendees. The association wanted to reassure attendees by demonstrating that it would implement tough restrictions.

Here’s what GSMA CEO John Hoffman wrote:

  • All travellers from the Hubai province will not be permitted access to the event
  • MWC Barcelona, Four Years From Now (4YFN), xside and YoMo
  • All travellers who have been in China will need to demonstrate proof they have been outside of China 14 days prior to the event (passport stamp, health certificate)
  • Temperature screening will be implemented
  • Attendees will need to self-certify they have not been in contact with anyone infected.

But that email made things even worse.

Dozens of companies pulled out of the trade show. In other words, some of the top consumer electronics and telecom companies got scared. And those who thought that GSMA had things under control started to cancel their attendance as well — it wasn’t worth going to Barcelona if many important partners had already canceled.

Some of the companies that announced they wouldn’t be attending include Amazon, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Facebook, HMD, Intel, LG, Nokia, NTT Docomo, Sony and Sprint.

GSMA’s lawyers wanted to make sure that the association wouldn’t be held accountable if there was a single case of coronavirus at the show. But they started another virus — companies pulling out one by one.

As companies usually spend millions of dollars to secure exhibit space and send large teams, canceling MWC altogether is going to be an unexpected financial blow for the GSMA.

According to a report from El País, the GSMA originally planned to meet on Friday and consider the next steps. The association held an emergency meeting earlier today in order to make a decision more quickly.

MWC originally started as a trade show for carriers. Big telecom companies would meet up with hardware vendors and discuss the evolution of telecommunications networks. More recently, phone manufacturers started attending the show to talk with telecom companies and unveil their latest products. Big tech companies, such as Facebook and Amazon, have also had a formal presence in recent years as they have developed important ties with the mobile industry.

According to the World Health Organization, there are more than 43,000 cases of coronavirus around the world. More than 1,000 people have died.

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Andy Rubin’s Essential shuts down

Published February 12, 2020

Essential was supposed to disrupt the smartphone industry. And when it was done with that, it was coming for the smart home. The company came out of stealth with a $330 million funding round and grandiose plans for a new brand of handset, led by none other than Android head, Andy Rubin.

But bad timing, broader industry issues and a founder embroiled in some pretty troubling allegations of sexual misconduct contributed to a company that has struggled to make it far beyond the launch of its first handset. In a blog post today, Essential announced that it would be ceasing operations and shutting down.

The post is a strange mix of existential dread and hopefulness, unveiling a final device it was never able to launch in the process. “Our vision was to invent a mobile computing paradigm that more seamlessly integrated with people’s lifestyle needs,” the ‘Essential team’ writes. “Despite our best efforts, we’ve now taken Gem as far as we can and regrettably have no clear path to deliver it to customers. Given this, we have made the difficult decision to cease operations and shutdown Essential.”

That’s all a nod to Project Gem, a new mobile form factor Essential first showcased through renders on social media back in October. The post features the first product videos for Gem, set to a kind of moody acid jazz soundtrack showcasing the skinny candy bar form factor that plays out as a sort of alternative history insight into what might have been, had things gone better for a company once valued at $1 billion.

The news follows years of speculation about the health of the company. In May 2018, reports surfaced that Essential was up for sale following disappointing sales of its first handset. Spokespeople for Essential have long insisted, however, that the company was carrying on in spite of reports. The Project Gem reveal, it seems, was a Hail Mary that turned into a parting shot. What “taken Gem as far as we can” means with regard to a product that didn’t make it beyond the promotional video stage remains to be seen.

Sadly, this also seems to be an end for Newton Mail, the power user-focused email client Essential took over when it acquired CloudMagic in 2018. Essential says that “current Newton Mail users will have access to the service through April 30, 2020.”

TechCrunch reached out to Essential for further comment, but we were ultimately directed to the initial blog post. The same month Gem was revealed, news surfaced that Rubin had been bought out of his Playground incubator, which shared closed ties — and an office — with Essential.

The executive had become a liability following explosive allegations of sexual misconduct during his time at Google. 

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Eight Sleep CEO says his startup is more than a mattress company

Published February 12, 2020

Matteo Franceschetti, CEO of Eight Sleep, would prefer that you don’t call his startup a mattress company.

Eight Sleep does sell mattresses, albeit smart ones packed with sensors and temperature regulation controls. The company has raised north of $70 million from backers including Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures. A great deal of this funding surrounds the idea that there is more untapped potential in the sleep economy than existing players in the space have been able to imagine.

While Franceschetti says he intends for his company to remain private for the “foreseeable future,” Eight Sleep is in a less-than-comfortable spot following Casper’s botched IPO last week. Though Casper’s stock popped on its first day of trading, the process of pricing its shares ended up leaving its private investors a bit less than ecstatic. Casper debuted trading at a value of $575 million, a far cry from the $1.1 billion private market valuation it had previously achieved.

Franceschetti has been aiming to transform Eight Sleep into a company more focused on a robust tech platform than your average bed-in-a-box company. The startup’s initial effort, a smart sleep cover for your existing mattress, evolved into a mattress with a layer of sensors that then transformed into a sensor-laden mattress with a heating and cooling unit, called “The Pod.” The company’s product development has aimed to build out a more end-to-end platform for sleep, something Franceschetti says has made him reticent to compare his company to other direct-to-consumer mattress companies.

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