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Stealth fintech startup Digits raises $10.5 million Series A from Benchmark and others

Published November 6, 2019

Stealth fintech startup Digits, from the same team that built Crashlytics to scale then sold to Twitter for more than $100 million, has raised a $10.5 million round of Series A funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by Benchmark and has the backing of 72 angels, including founders and CEOs from companies like Box, GitHub, Tinder, Twitch, StitchFix, SoFi and several others.

With the round, Digits also gains a new board member, Peter Fenton, who has served on the boards at AirTable, Twitter, NewRelic, Yelp and elsewhere.

The funding is a big bet on serial entrepreneurs Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert, who launched and sold their crash reporting service to Twitter, which itself later sold it to Google. At Twitter, the team remained to build out the product and launch new services, like Answers. After the sale to Google four years later, it was then folded into Google’s own developer platform to become the crash reporting tool for Android. Today, it’s still on nearly 5 billion monthly active devices and used inside millions of apps.

Now, the Crashlytics co-founders have returned with most of their original team to develop a new fintech startup, Digits, which describes itself vaguely as “a counting company.”

The company’s focus aims to solve a problem the founders had faced themselves when building Crashlytics.

“As builders, there is nothing more exciting than cracking the next engineering puzzle; than perfecting the next design; than delivering the next capability to customers. And there is nothing more mind-numbing than the paperwork, and spreadsheets, and financial reports, and inscrutable transaction records that are all required to actually operate the business,” a Digits blog post earlier this year explained.

“Globally, most entrepreneurs today have no formal training in business finance. We certainly didn’t. Today, you start a company to solve a real problem for real people, or to offer a service you’re skilled at, or to provide a living for you and your family. You don’t start a company because you want to operate a business—but you have to anyway,” the founders said.

While Digits isn’t talking about the specifics of its new product yet, its software is described as pairing design and machine learning in order to “democratize financial savvy.”

More specifically, it leverages APIs, classification algorithms and machine learning techniques to provide a real-time view into a business’ finances, proactively alert you to what’s important and allow you to deep dive into your data to better understand what’s driving your business.

The company believes its approach to visualizing a company’s finances is unique, and apparently a sizable number of investors agree.

Among the 70+ angels backing Digits are Box CEO Aaron Levie; Adam Bain and Dick Costolo (ex COO and CEO of Twitter); Ali Rowghani (partner at Y Combinator, ex-COO Pixar); SoFi CEO Anthony Noto; Drift CEO David Cancel; AngelList board member Jeff Fagnan; Justin Kan (CEO Atrium, co-founder Twitch, YC partner); StitchFix CEO Katrina Lake; GitHub CEO Nat Friedman; First Republic Bank COO Mike Selfridge; Desktop Metal CEO Ric Fulop; Tinder co-founder Jonathan Badeen; DraftKings CEO Jason Robins; LegalZoom co-founder Brian Lee; Gusto CEO Josh Reeves; and Notazie CEO Pat Kinsel.

Though Digits hasn’t publicly launched — the product is in invite-only status for now — it already has live customers and is seeing more than $1.5 billion in transactions processing on its platform, the company says.

And unlike Crashlytics, which was based in Boston, Digits is a 100% remote operation. LinkedIn shows just 10 employees, including co-founders Chang and Seibert.

The team hasn’t said when Digits itself will be publicly unveiled or opened to sign-ups.

Niantic will open Pokémon GO Pokéstop submissions to players worldwide next week

Published November 6, 2019

Pokémon GO and games like it can’t exist without waypoints — the in-game locations that correlate to real-world points of interest, acting as the Pokéstops, gyms, etc. The more waypoints they have around the world, the better the game becomes.

But building up these databases of waypoints is tough. A company can’t do it alone; that just doesn’t scale. Even if they open it up to user submissions, verifying new locations (so as to avoid a bunch of false/bad locations being thrown into the mix) is tough for a company to do alone.

Niantic has spent the last few years figuring out this process, building a user-driven and peer-moderated system that got its start way back with the company’s first game.

Next week, at long last, they’re opening the submission process to Pokémon GO players around the world.

Called Niantic Wayfarer, the submission system will be largely user-driven. One player nominates a location, submitting a photo of the location and answering a handful of questions to help determine eligibility. Other high-level players will review these submissions, helping to filter out the ones that are inaccurate, offensive or just not right for the game.

Niantic had previously opened up location submissions in select regions, including much of Central and South America and parts of Asia. With the launch next week, the submission system goes worldwide.

“This is going to be launched for Pokémon GO players next week,” Niantic CEO John Hanke told a handful of reporters at a press gathering yesterday. “So worldwide people will be able to submit and rate and review these locations. That’s for GO now, and it’ll be in other games in the future. You can imagine that Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, and other games as they come online, will also share this capability.”

If you’ve been following Niantic for a while, the Wayfarer system might seem familiar. It’s effectively a polished up, rebranded version of the “Portal Recon” system originally built into Niantic’s first game, Ingress. Niantic tells us that they’ve seen 27 million waypoint locations submitted by users so far, with 26 million having been reviewed, and 9.4 million approved and in-game. Even in these early stages, the company says it’s seeing about 1 million nominations per week.

One catch: At least initially, you’ll need to be level 40 (the highest level in Pokémon GO) to submit or review potential new stops. The company tells me you’ll also have to take a little quiz to confirm that you’ve got a good understanding of what makes for a good Pokéstop.

A common (constant?) complaint from Pokémon GO fans has been that players in rural areas are at a massive disadvantage compared to players in major cities — a portion of which, at least, boils down to rural areas having considerably fewer stops, gyms, etc. Opening the player submission system doesn’t completely fix the gameplay challenges in rural areas, but it should at least be a big step in the right direction.

Wardrobe picks up $1.5 million for a new fashion rental marketplace

Published November 6, 2019

Wardrobe, a new peer-to-peer fashion rental marketplace, has today announced the close of a $1.5 million seed round and its public launch out of beta.

The funding was led by angel investor Cyan Banister and Ludlow Ventures, with participation from GroundUp Ventures, Airbnb co-founder Nate Blecharczyk and HQ Trivia founder Rus Yusupov, among others.

Wardrobe was founded by Adarsh Alphons after he had an epiphany about just how many items of clothes in his own house went mostly unused. In fact, The WSJ suggests that most people only wear around 20% of their wardrobe on a regular basis. Alphons says that the average woman has 57 items of clothes in her closet that she doesn’t even wear once a year.

So began Wardrobe.

Wardrobe is a peer-to-peer rental marketplace for vintage, designer and luxury brand clothing. However, unlike Rent the Runway or other sharing economy fashion platforms, Wardrobe uses dry cleaners as hubs for the inventory. This not only allows the company to scale more quickly from geography to geography, but also to remain lean without taking on the risk of big warehouses and complicated logistics around shipping.

Here’s how it works:

Folks who want to rent their clothes on Wardrobe simply fill out a few answers to questions and receive a shipping label in the mail. Once their clothes are approved, they’re sent to a local dry cleaner where they wait to be rented for either 4, 10 or 20 days.

Wardrobe HQ handles everything from storage to shipping to photographing the pieces for the app.

The owner of the clothes makes between 70 and 75% of the rental cost after the cost of dry cleaning.

Interestingly, Alphons learned in beta that users want to not only browse the app for clothes, but follow specific users and closets that they particularly like. So the app is now tailored to let users follow one another and watch each other’s closets, creating an environment that may attract influencers to the platform.

Wardrobe currently has partnerships with more than 40 Manhattan dry cleaners, serving all of the island below 110th Street. Alphons says that each dry cleaner can hold between 100 and 1,000 items of clothing at a time.

Niantic will soon let small businesses pay to have a Pokémon GO Pokéstop

Published November 6, 2019

Sponsored locations aren’t new to Niantic games. Companies like Sprint, McDonald’s and AT&T have had sponsored locations in games like Pokémon GO and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite for a long while now. The idea: by turning your business into a big in-game beacon and giving players some reason to stop by, you increase foot traffic.

So far, though, the sponsorship system has really only been open to these mega chains. Starbucks got to turn all of its stores into sponsored Pokéstops at the height of the Pokémon GO craze, but the little mom-and-pop coffee shop down the street? No such luck.

That’ll change later this year, as the company opens a self-serve platform for small to medium-sized businesses looking to light up sponsored locations in-game.

Details are still somewhat light, but Niantic says that they’ll start accepting applications tomorrow and roll out an “early access” beta program later this year. As with pretty much everything Niantic does, they’re rolling it out on a region-by-region basis; in this case, it’ll only be open to U.S. businesses at first. The first new sponsored locations should start showing up in December.

“Sponsored” locations tend to have slight perks over their non-sponsored counterparts. Sponsored gyms in Pokémon GO, for example, are almost always “EX Raid” locations — which in GO-speak just means that battling there might get you a ticket to a bigger, badder, invite-only boss battle in the weeks that follow. Sponsored fortresses in Harry Potter: Wizards Unite give out more XP and more of the spell energy required to play.

Beyond being able to pay to have a sponsored in-game location, these businesses will also be able to pay to schedule things like Pokémon GO raids (read: bigger, co-operative boss battles that often require 5-10 players working together to win) during time slots when foot traffic might be slow. And because getting foot traffic is only part of the equation, sponsored businesses will also be able to offer up deals and promotions in-game to (hopefully) turn those passing by into paying customers.

Niantic also says that businesses will be able to host other on-site “mini-games” beyond GO raids in the future, but didn’t elaborate on what those might be.

According to this page, Niantic will offer two plans:

$30 per month gets you one Pokéstop, with the ability to change its image/description/promotion once per month
$60 per month gets you a gym, with the ability to schedule one hour of raiding per month. This plan allows you to change the image/description/promotion twice per month.

Niantic says that small businesses can have one stop or gym per physical location, and up to 30 per chain.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, and if/how it impacts things in-game. While Pokémon GO isn’t the overwhelmingly popular monster of a game that it was at launch, it can still cause crowds to pop up out of nowhere — particularly when new Pokémon appear as raid bosses, or when they’ve got some limited-time event going on. Will sponsoring a raid cause fewer raids nearby (to maximize visibility of the sponsored spot), or will more of them pop up nearby to hook groups looking to do multiple raids in one swoop?

Professional network for women Elpha raises seed funding

Published November 6, 2019

As slow-moving LinkedIn leaves room for startups to flourish, Elpha aims to create a tailored online network for women in tech.

The company is not only a graduate of Y Combinator, but was conceived of behind the scenes of the San Francisco accelerator program. Cadran Cowansage, the co-founder and chief executive officer of the startup, was a software engineer at YC from 2016 to early 2019. It was during that stint that she created Leap, a tool meant to help her and her colleagues communicate. Soon enough, she’d granted the entire YC network of female founders access to the tool. Then earlier this year, she decided to spin the company out of YC entirely, rebrand and relaunch as Elpha.

“There’s a velocity that comes with building a startup and the pressure of funding that keeps you moving very fast,” Cowansage, who counts Kuan Luo as a co-founder, said of her decision to make Elpha an independent business.

“I had the idea for a long time,” she told TechCrunch. “I didn’t feel like I really had a big enough network of women who were at my level or a bit further along than I could go to for advice. Things like how do I get this promotion? Or my male peers, they are being paid more than me, what do I do about that? The conversations that are difficult that you really want a woman’s perspective on.”

A hybrid social and professional network, Elpha is meant to offer women in tech a dedicated space to communicate via public forums and direct messages, foster relationships and build their careers. The company, which completed YC this summer, is today announcing a $1.1 million round with participation from Y Combinator, the accelerator’s co-founder, CEO and president (Jessica Livingston, Michael Siebel and Geoff Ralston, respectively), as well as Maveron, Moxxie Ventures, JaneVC, Friale, Kabam co-founder and visiting YC partner Holly Liu, Block Party founder Tracy Chou and Breaker co-founder Leah Culver.

The “LinkedIn for women” charges $12,000 in annual subscription fees to companies who use Elpha to identity potential hires. Cowansage said the company currently has 20 paying customers, many of which are venture-backed startups like Lambda School and Webflow. The Elpha team plans to use the seed investment to hire, host events and continue the development of new products, including a mobile app expected out next year.

Ultimately, Cowansage hopes Elpha will bring together women in media, science, medicine and more.

“There’s a huge opportunity to bring women together across different industries and also create those sub-communities,” she said. “There’s a ton we can do from here.”

Neural Magic gets $15M seed to run machine learning models on commodity CPUs

Published November 6, 2019

Neural Magic, a startup founded by a couple of MIT professors, who figured out a way to run machine learning models on commodity CPUs, announced a $15 million seed investment today.

Comcast Ventures led the round, with participation from NEA, Andreessen Horowitz, Pillar VC and Amdocs. The company had previously received a $5 million pre-seed, making the total raised so far $20 million.

The company also announced early access to its first product, an inference engine that data scientists can run on computers running CPUs, rather than specialized chips like GPUs or TPUs. That means that it could greatly reduce the cost associated with machine learning projects by allowing data scientists to use commodity hardware.

The idea for this solution came from work by MIT professor Nir Shavit and his research partner and co-founder Alex Mateev. As he tells it, they were working on neurobiology data in their lab and found a way to use the commodity hardware he had in place. “I discovered that with the right algorithms we could run these machine learning algorithms on commodity hardware, and that’s where the company started,” Shavit told TechCrunch.

He says there is this false notion that you need these specialized chips or hardware accelerators to have the necessary resources to run these jobs, but he says it doesn’t have to be that way. He says his company not only allows you to use this commodity hardware, it also works with more modern development approaches, like containers and microservices.

“Our vision is to enable data science teams to take advantage of the ubiquitous computing platforms they already own to run deep learning models at GPU speeds — in a flexible and containerized way that only commodity CPUs can deliver,” Shavit explained.

He says this also eliminates the memory limitations of these other approaches because CPUs have access to much greater amounts of memory, and this is a key advantage of his company’s approach over and above the cost savings.

“Yes, running on a commodity processor you get the cost savings of running on a CPU, but more importantly, it eliminates all of these huge commercialization problems and essentially this big limitation of the whole field of machine learning of having to work on small models and small data sets because the accelerators are kind of limited. This is the big unlock of Neural Magic,” he said.

Gil Beyda, managing director at lead investor Comcast Ventures, sees a huge market opportunity with an approach that lets people use commodity hardware. “Neural Magic is well down the path of using software to replace high-cost, specialized AI hardware. Software wins because it unlocks the true potential of deep learning to build novel applications and address some of the industry’s biggest challenges,” he said in a statement.

Investment platform eToro acquires crypto portfolio tracker app Delta

Published November 6, 2019

The multi-asset investment platform eToro, which spans “social” stock trading to cryptocurrency, has acquired Delta, the crypto portfolio tracker app.

Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although one source tells me the deal was worth $5 million. It is not clear if it is stock only or cash (or a mixture of both) and if it is contingent on any future targets being met.

The Delta app helps investors make better decisions regarding their crypto investments by providing tools such as portfolio tracking and pricing data. It very much fits with the evolution of eToro, which not only wants to “own” the commission-free stocks (and ETF) space, but has also ventured ambitiously into crypto — most recently bringing crypto asset trading to the U.S.

Delta’s crypto portfolio tracker app has support for more than 6,000 crypto assets from more than 180 exchanges. It provides investors with a range of tools to track and analyse their crypto portfolios. To date, Delta says it has seen 1.5 million downloads and has “hundreds of thousands” of active monthly users.

The acquisition sees Delta become part of the eToro Group, while the Delta team led by Nicolas Van Hoorde will become part of eToroX, reporting to Doron Rosenblum. “The team will continue to be based in Belgium, working in close collaboration with eToro and eToroX employees across the globe,” says eToro.

Meanwhile, eToro is talking up the fact that it is a regulated platform where you can hold crypto and traditional assets in the same portfolio. The idea with the Delta acquisition is to extend that so you’ll be able to track all your investments in once place, starting with crypto and eventually multi-asset. In addition, you’ll be able to trade from the app via eToroX, eToro’s own crypto exchange.

“At a time when other fintechs state that they are not even targeting profitability, we are proud to be a well funded, profitable business that is growing both in terms of geographical coverage but also product range,” says Yoni Assia, co-founder and CEO of eToro, in a statement.

“We are a trading and investing platform that not only provides clients with access to the assets they want, from commission free stocks and ETFs through to FX, commodities and cryptoassets, but also lets customers choose how they invest. They can trade directly, copy another trader or invest in a portfolio. We believe in empowering our clients and the acquisition of Delta will allow us to add an important new element to our offering.”

Cyber-skills platform Immersive Labs raises $40M in North America expansion

Published November 6, 2019

Immersive Labs, a cybersecurity skills platform, has raised $40 million in its Series B, the company’s second round of funding this year following an $8 million Series A in January.

Summit Partners led the fundraise, with Goldman Sachs participating, the Bristol, U.K.-based company confirmed.

Immersive, led by former GCHQ cybersecurity instructor James Hadley, helps corporate employees learn new security skills by using real, up-to-date threat intelligence in a “gamified” way. Its cybersecurity learning platform uses a variety of techniques and psychology to build up immersive and engaging cyber war games to help IT and security teams learn. The platform aims to help users better understand cybersecurity threats, like detecting and understanding phishing and malware reverse-engineering.

It’s a new take on cybersecurity education, as the company’s founder and chief executive Hadley said the ever-evolving threat landscape has made traditional classroom training “obsolete.”

“It creates knowledge gaps that increase risk, offer vulnerabilities and present opportunities for attackers,” said Hadley.

The company said it will use the round to expand further into the U.S. and Canadian markets from its North American headquarters in Boston, Mass.

Since its founding in 2017, Immersive already has big customers to its name, including Bank of Montreal and Citigroup, on top of its U.K. customers, including BT, the National Health Service and London’s Metropolitan Police.

Goldman Sachs, an investor and customer, said it was “impressed” by Immersive’s achievements so far.

“The platform is continually evolving as new features are developed to help address the gap in cyber skills that is impacting companies and governments across the globe,” said James Hayward, the bank’s executive director.

Immersive said it has 750% year-over-year growth in annual recurring revenues and more than 100 employees across its offices.

Goldman Sachs leads $8M round in cybersecurity skills platform Immersive Labs

Neo4j introduces new cloud service to simplify building a graph database

Published November 6, 2019

Neo4j, a popular graph database, is available as an open-source product for anyone to download and use. Its enterprise product aimed at larger organizations is growing fast, but the company recognized there was a big market in between those two extremes, and today it introduced a new managed cloud service called Aura.

They wanted something in the product family for smaller companies, says Emil Eifrem, CEO and co-founder at Neo4j . Aura really gives these smaller players a much more manageable offering with flexible pricing options. “To get started with an enterprise project can run hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Whereas with Aura, you can get started for about 50 bucks a month, and that means that it opens it up to new segments of the market,” Eifrem told TechCrunch. As he points out, even a startup on a shoestring budget can afford $50 a month.

Aura operates on a flexible pricing model, and offers the kind of value proposition you would expect from a cloud version of the product. The company deals with all of the management, security and updates for you. It will also scale as needed to meet your data requirements as you grow. The idea is to allow developers to concentrate on simply building applications and let Neo4j deal with the database for you.

He says over time, he could see larger businesses, which don’t want to deal with the management side of developing a graph database application, also using the cloud product. “Why would you want to operate your own database? You should probably focus on your core business and building applications to support that core business,” he said. But he recognizes change happens slowly in larger organizations, and not every business will be comfortable with a managed service. That’s why they are offering different options to meet different requirements.

Graph databases allow you to see connections between data. It is the underlying technology, for example, in a social networking app, that lets you see the connection between people you know and people your friends know. It is also the technology on an e-commerce site that can offer recommendations based on what you bought before because people who buy a certain product are more likely to purchase other related products.

New Neo4J platform gives developers a set of tools for building enterprise graph applications

Coveo raises US$172M at $1B+ valuation for AI-based enterprise search and personalization

Published November 6, 2019

Search and personalization services continue to be a major area of investment among enterprises, both to make their products and services more discoverable (and used) by customers, and to help their own workers get their jobs done, with the market estimated to be worth some $100 billion annually. Today, one of the big startups building services in this area raised a large round of growth funding to continue tapping that opportunity.

Coveo, a Canadian company that builds search and personalization services powered by artificial intelligence — used by its enterprise customers by way of cloud-based, software-as-a-service — has closed a C$227 million ($172 million in U.S. dollars) round, which CEO Louis Tetu tells me values the company at “well above” $1 billion, “Canadian or U.S. dollars.”

Specifically, the equity stake of this round is 15.5%, equating to a valuation of $1.46 billion Canadian dollars, or $1.1 billion in U.S. dollars.

The round is being led by Omers Capital Private Growth Equity Group, the investing arm of the Canadian pensions giant that makes large, later-stage bets (the company has been stepping up the pace of investments lately), with participation also from Evergreen Coast Capital, FSTQ and IQ Ventures. Evergreen led the company’s last round of $100 million in April 2018, and in total the company has now raised just over $402 million with this round.

The valuation appears to be a huge leap in the context of Coveo’s funding history: in that last round, it had a post-money valuation of about $370 million, according to PitchBook data.

Part of the reason for that is because of Coveo’s business trajectory, and part is due to the heat of the overall market.

Coveo’s round is coming about two weeks after another company that builds enterprise search solutions, Algolia, raised $110 million. The two aim at slightly different ends of the market, Tetu tells me, not directly competing in terms of target customers, and even services.

“Algolia is in a different ZIP code,” he said. Good thing, too, if that’s the case: Salesforce — which is one of Coveo’s biggest partners and customers — was also a strategic investor in the Algolia round. Even if these two do not compete, there are plenty of others vying for the same end of the enterprise search and personalization continuum — they include Google, Microsoft, Elastic, IBM, Lucidworks and many more. That, again, underscores the size of the market opportunity.

In terms of Coveo’s own business, the company works with some 500 customers today and says SaaS subscription revenues grew more than 55% year-over-year this year. Five hundred may sound like a small number, but it covers a lot of very large enterprises spanning web-facing businesses, commerce-based organizations, service-facing companies and enterprise solutions.

In addition to Salesforce, it includes Visa, Tableau (also Salesforce now!), Honeywell, a Fortune 50 healthcare company (whose name is not getting disclosed) and what Tetu described to me as an Amazon competitor that does $21 billion in sales annually but doesn’t want to be named.

Coveo’s basic selling point is that the better discoverability and personalization that it provides helps its customers avoid as many call-center interactions (reducing operating expenditures), improves sales (boosting conversions and reducing cart abandonment) and helps companies themselves just work faster.

Significantly, the area that Coveo works in is going through a noticeable shift these days.

A swing toward stronger data protection and consumers’ preference for having more control over how their data is used and for what — spurred by high-profile revelations detailing how different organizations manipulated user data across social networking sites and other platforms to target people with sneaky political content and advertising to influence voting, subsequently cracking open the wasp nest to reveal just how much of our data is harvested and used all the time — has meant that there are at times fewer tools than there used to be to provide the kind of “discoverability” and “personalization” that companies like Coveo build for their clients.

Tetu believes there is a way to deliver personalization without compromising how a person wants to exist in the digital world.

“The whole notion is to be able to control data but also have personalizaton in the future,” he said. But there are two dimensions to this, he added:

“The continued and growing regulatory pressure around privacy [such as GDPR] is good, it’s the will of the people and legislation will go that way. The world is going cookie-less,” he said. “But we can’t ignore the arbitrage between privacy and utility. If I understand what you will do with my data and use it to provide more relevance, that can be excellent, too.”

He calls himself an “Amazon addict” but points out that it highlights the two sides of the data coin: “Is it predatory or excellent in doing the job it does? I can’t decide on an answer. I think they are both.”

All the same, it’s working on ways around the “cookie-less” future. The company Coveo acquired in Milan earlier this year, Tetu said, “can do machine learning detection. In five clicks it can detect your propensity to buy and your interest. It means you can’t blame anyone for observing you.”

So, while there are a lot of players out there chasing the same discoverability and personalization market, the attraction here is not just about a company doing it well, but looking to skate to where the puck is going (see what I did there, Canadian startup?).

“We believe that Coveo is the market leader in leveraging data and AI to personalize at scale,” said Mark Shulgan, managing director and head of Growth Equity at Omers, in a statement. “Coveo fits our investment thesis precisely: an A-plus leadership team with deep expertise in enterprise SaaS, a Fortune 1000 customer base who deeply love the product, and a track record of high growth in a market worth over $100 billion. This makes Coveo a highly-coveted asset. We are glad to be partnering to scale this business.”

Alongside business development on its own steam — the company now has around 500 employees — Coveo is going to be using this funding for acquisitions. Tetu notes that Coveo still has a lot of money in the bank from previous rounds.

“We are a real company with real positive economics,” he said. “This round is mostly to have dry powder to invest in a way that is commensurate in the AI space, and within commerce in particular.” To get the ball rolling on that, this past July, Coveo acquired Tooso, a specialist in AI-based digital commerce technology.