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Cisco beefing up app monitoring portfolio with acquisition of Epsagon for $500M
Cisco announced on Friday that it’s acquiring Israeli applications-monitoring startup Epsagon at a price pegged at $500 million. The purchase gives Cisco a more modern microservices-focused component for its growing applications-monitoring portfolio.
The Israeli business publication Globes reported it had gotten confirmation from Cisco that the deal was for $500 million, but Cisco would not confirm that price with TechCrunch.
The acquisition comes on top of a couple of other high-profile app-monitoring deals, including AppDynamics, which the company bought in 2018 for $3.7 billion, and ThousandEyes, which it nabbed last year for $1 billion.
With Epsagon, the company is getting a way to monitor more modern applications built with containers and Kubernetes. Epsagon’s value proposition is a solution built from the ground up to monitor these kinds of workloads, giving users tracing and metrics, something that’s not always easy to do given the ephemeral nature of containers.
As Cisco’s Liz Centoni wrote in a blog post announcing the deal, Epsagon adds to the company’s concept of a full-stack offering in their applications-monitoring portfolio. Instead of having a bunch of different applications monitoring tools for different tasks, the company envisions one that works together.
“Cisco’s approach to full-stack observability gives our customers the ability to move beyond just monitoring to a paradigm that delivers shared context across teams and enables our customers to deliver exceptional digital experiences, optimize for cost, security and performance and maximize digital business revenue,” Centoni wrote.
That experience point is particularly important because when an application isn’t working, it isn’t happening in a vacuum. It has a cascading impact across the company, possibly affecting the core business itself and certainly causing customer distress, which could put pressure on customer service to field complaints, and the site reliability team to fix it. In the worst case, it could result in customer loss and an injured reputation.
If the application-monitoring system can act as an early warning system, it could help prevent the site or application from going down in the first place, and when it does go down, help track the root cause to get it up and running more quickly.
The challenge here for Cisco is incorporating Epsagon into the existing components of the application-monitoring portfolio and delivering that unified monitoring experience without making it feel like a Frankenstein’s monster of a solution globbed together from the various pieces.
Epsagon launched in 2018 and has raised $30 million. According to a report in the Israeli publication, Calcalist, the company was on the verge of a big Series B round with a valuation in the range of $200 million when it accepted this offer. It certainly seems to have given its early investors a good return. The deal is expected to close later this year.
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Shopistry bags $2M to provide ‘headless commerce without the headaches’
Canada-based Shopistry wants to turn the concept of headless commerce, well, on its head. On Monday, the e-commerce startup announced $2 million in seed funding to continue developing its toolkit of products, integrations, services and managed infrastructure for brands to scale online.
Jaafer Haidar and Tariq Zabian started Shopistry in 2019. Haidar’s background is as a serial technology founder with exits and ventures in e-commerce and cloud software. He was working as a venture capitalist when he got the idea for Shopistry. Zabian is a former general manager at OLX, an online classified marketplace.
Shopistry enables customers to create personalized commerce experiences accessible to all. Haidar expects headless will become the dominant architecture over the next five years, though he isn’t too keen on calling it “headless.” He much prefers the term “modular.”
“It’s a modular system, we call it ‘headless without the headaches,’ where you grab the framework to manage APIs,” Haidar told TechCrunch. “After a company goes live, they can spend 50% of their budget just to keep the lights on. They use marketplaces like Shopify to do the tech, and we are doing the same thing, but providing way more optionality. We are not a monolithic system.”
Currently, the company offers five products:
- Shopistry Console: Brands turn on their optimal stack and change anytime without re-platforming. There is support for multiple e-commerce administrative tools like Shopify or Square, payment providers, analytics and marketing capabilities.
- Shopistry Cloud is a managed infrastructure spearheading performance, data management and orchestration across services.
- Shopistry Storefront and Mobile to manage web storefronts and mobile apps.
- Shopistry CMS, a data-driven, headless customer management system to create once and publish across channels.
- Shopistry Services, an offering to brands that need design and engineering help.
Investors in the seed round include Shoptalk founder Jonathan Weiner, Hatch Labs’ Amar Varma, Garage Capital, Mantella Venture Partners and Raiven Capital.
“At MVP we love companies that can simplify complexity to bring the proven innovations of large, technically sophisticated retailers to the masses of small to midsize retailers trying to compete with them,” said Duncan Hill, co-founder and general partner at Mantella Venture Partners, in a written statement. “Shopistry has the team and tech to be a major player in this next phase of the e-commerce evolution. This was easy to get excited about.”
Shopistry is already working with retailers like Honed and Oura Ring to manage their e-commerce presences without the cost, complexity or need for a big technology team.
Prior to going after the seed funding, Haidar and Zabian spent two years working with high growth brands to build out its infrastructure. Haidar intends to use the new capital to future that development as well as bring on sales and marketing staff.
Haidar was not able to provide growth metrics just yet. He did say the company was growing its customer base and expects to be able to share that growth next year. He is planning to add more flexibility and integrations to the back end of Shopistry’s platform and add support for other platforms.
“We are focusing next on the go-to-market perspective while we gear up for our big launch coming in the fourth quarter,” he added. “There is also a big component to ‘after the sale,’ and we want to create some amazing experiences and focus on back office operations. We want to be the easiest way to control and manage data while maintaining a storefront.”
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There could be more to the Salesforce+ video streaming service than meets the eye
When Salesforce announced its new business video streaming service called Salesforce+ this week, everyone had a reaction. While not all of it was positive, some company watchers also wondered if there was more to this announcement than meets the eye.
If you look closely, the new initiative suggests that Salesforce wants to take a bite out of LinkedIn and other SaaS content platforms and publishers. The video streaming service could be a launch point for a broader content platform, where its partners are producing their own content and using Salesforce+ infrastructure to help them advertise to and cultivate their own customers.
The video streaming service could be a launch point for a broader content platform, where its partners are producing their own content and using Salesforce+ infrastructure to help them advertise to and cultivate their own customers.
The company has, after all, done exactly this sort of thing with its online marketplaces and industry events to great success. Salesforce generated almost $6 billion in its most recent quarterly earnings report. That mostly comes from selling its sales, marketing and service software, not any kind of content production, but it has lots of experience putting on Dreamforce, its massive annual customer event, as well as smaller events throughout the year around the world.
On its face, Salesforce+ is a giant, ambitious and quite expensive content marketing play. The company reportedly has hired a large professional staff to produce and manage the content, and built a broadcasting and production studio designed to produce quality shows in-house. It believes that by launching with content from Dreamforce, its highly successful customer conference, attended by tens of thousands people every year pre-pandemic, it can prime the viewing pump and build audience momentum that way, perhaps even using celebrities as it often does at its events to drive audience. It is less clear about the long-term business goals.
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ThirdAI raises $6M to democratize AI to any hardware
Houston-based ThirdAI, a company building tools to speed up deep learning technology without the need for specialized hardware like graphics processing units, brought in $6 million in seed funding.
Neotribe Ventures, Cervin Ventures and Firebolt Ventures co-led the investment, which will be used to hire additional employees and invest in computing resources, Anshumali Shrivastava, Third AI co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
Shrivastava, who has a mathematics background, was always interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning, especially rethinking how AI could be developed in a more efficient manner. It was when he was at Rice University that he looked into how to make that work for deep learning. He started ThirdAI in April with some Rice graduate students.
ThirdAI’s technology is designed to be “a smarter approach to deep learning,” using its algorithm and software innovations to make general-purpose central processing units (CPU) faster than graphics processing units for training large neural networks, Shrivastava said. Companies abandoned CPUs years ago in favor of graphics processing units that could more quickly render high-resolution images and video concurrently. The downside is that there is not much memory in graphics processing units, and users often hit a bottleneck while trying to develop AI, he added.
“When we looked at the landscape of deep learning, we saw that much of the technology was from the 1980s, and a majority of the market, some 80%, were using graphics processing units, but were investing in expensive hardware and expensive engineers and then waiting for the magic of AI to happen,” he said.
He and his team looked at how AI was likely to be developed in the future and wanted to create a cost-saving alternative to graphics processing units. Their algorithm, “sub-linear deep learning engine,” instead uses CPUs that don’t require specialized acceleration hardware.
Swaroop “Kittu” Kolluri, founder and managing partner at Neotribe, said this type of technology is still early. Current methods are laborious, expensive and slow, and for example, if a company is running language models that require more memory, it will run into problems, he added.
“That’s where ThirdAI comes in, where you can have your cake and eat it, too,” Kolluri said. “It is also why we wanted to invest. It is not just the computing, but the memory, and ThirdAI will enable anyone to do it, which is going to be a game changer. As technology around deep learning starts to get more sophisticated, there is no limit to what is possible.”
AI is already at a stage where it has the capability to solve some of the hardest problems, like those in healthcare and seismic processing, but he notes there is also a question about climate implications of running AI models.
“Training deep learning models can be more expensive than having five cars in a lifetime,” Shrivastava said. “As we move on to scale AI, we need to think about those.”
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Box reports earnings early to give shareholders time to review financials ahead of board vote
Box has been in an ongoing dispute with activist investors Starboard Value over control of the board, an argument that is expected to come to a head on September 9th at the annual shareholder meeting. In an effort to show shareholders that the numbers are continuing to improve under the current leadership, Box took the unusual move of releasing its earning report this morning, two weeks ahead of the expected August 25th report date.
Companies don’t normally report ahead of schedule, but perhaps Box sees the opportunity to do some lobbying, or conversely, to counter any negative lobbying that Starboard may be doing with its fellow investors ahead of the vote.
It’s also worth noting that in spite of the meeting being on September 9th, like a lot of voting these days, people will be sending in votes throughout this month, ahead of that day. Box wants to get its latest financial information out there sooner rather than later to catch those early voters before they cast their ballots.
Fortunately for Box and CEO Aaron Levie, the numbers look decent.
Earnings
It’s not hard to see why Box released its earnings early, as the numbers provide an argument for keeping the company’s current leadership in place.
In the three-month period ending July 31, 2021 — the second quarter of Box’s fiscal 2022 — the company generated $214 million in revenue, up 11% on a year-over-year basis. And, as Box is quick to point out, its second consecutive quarter of “accelerating revenue growth.” The company bested its own guidance of $211 to $212 million in revenue for the period.
It matters that Box is showing an ability to accelerate its revenue growth. First, because doing so puts wind in the sales of its stock; quickly growing companies are worth more per dollar of revenue than more slowly growing concerns, and accelerating revenue growth over time is investor catnip.
The accelerating pace of growth over the last half year also provides footing for Box’s leadership to argue that their product choices have been sound, directly supporting their positions that they should remain in charge of the company. If they made good product decisions quarters ago, and those choices are leading to accelerating revenue growth, why swap out the CEO?
Box had more quarterly good news apart from its revenue numbers to disclose. It also reported improved GAAP and non-GAAP operating margins — a key measure of profitability — better billings results than it had previously anticipated for the period. Box’s net retention rate also expanded to 106% from 103% in the sequentially preceding period.
And the company boosted its guidance for its fiscal year from “$845 million to $853 million” to “$856 million to $860 million.”
The counter arguments are somewhat easy to generate, however. Yes, Box’s revenue growth is accelerating, but from an admittedly reduced base; it’s not as hard to accelerate revenue expansion from low numbers as it is from higher base levels. And the company’s net retention is lower than what any business-focused SaaS company would want to report.
Will the good news be enough? Shares of Box are up around 1.5% in today’s regular trading, despite a somewhat mixed overall market. Investors now have to vote with more than just their dollars.
Boardroom context
Starboard bought approximately 7.5% of the company in 2019, and actually stayed fairly quiet for the first year, but at the end of 2020 it started making itself heard with rumors of pressure to sell the company. In what appeared to be a defensive move, Box took a $500 million investment from private equity firm KKR and gave the investor a board seat in April.
The activist investor did not take kindly to that move, writing in a letter to investors in early May, “The only viable explanation for this financing is a shameless and utterly transparent attempt to “buy the vote” and shows complete disregard for proper corporate governance and fiscal discipline.” In that same letter, Starboard made it official that it wanted to take over several board seats, outlining a litany of complaints it had about the way the company was being run. It also made clear that it wanted co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie gone or the company sold.
Box pushed back that the letter and another on May 10th did not accurately reflect the progress that the company had made. In July, Box took the battle public in an SEC filing detailing the back and forth dance that had been going between Box and Starboard since it bought its stake in the company
So far, the cloud content management company has staved off all attempts to force its hand and sell the company or fire Levie, but this is all going to culminate with the shareholder’s vote. It’s truly a battle for the soul of the company.
If Starboard convinces shareholders to give it several seats on the Box board, it would probably be able to push out Levie, take control of the company and likely sell it to the highest bidder. The early financial report released today, while not exactly stellar, shows a pattern of increasingly good quarters, and that’s what Box is hoping voters will focus on when they fill out their ballots.
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Youreka Labs spins out with $8.5M to provide smart mobile assistant apps to field workers
Mobile field service startup Youreka Labs Inc. raised an $8.5 million Series A round of funding co-led by Boulder Ventures and Grotech Ventures, with participation from Salesforce Ventures.
The Maryland-based company also officially announced its CEO — Bill Karpovich joined to lead the company after previously general manager at IBM Cloud & Watson Platform.
Youreka Labs spun out into its own company from parent company Synaptic Advisors, a cloud consulting business focused on the customer relationship management transformations using Salesforce and other artificial intelligence and automation technologies.
The company is developing robotic smart mobile assistants that enable frontline workers to perform their jobs more safely and efficiently. This includes things like guided procedures, smart forms and photo or video capture. Youreka is also embedded in existing Salesforce mobile applications like Field Service Mobile so that end-users only have to operate from one mobile app.
Youreka has identified four use cases so far: healthcare, manufacturing, energy and utilities and the public sector. Working with companies like Shell, P&G, Humana and the Transportation Security Administration, the company’s technology makes it possible for someone to share their knowledge and processes with their colleagues in the field, Karpovich told TechCrunch.
“In the case of healthcare, we are taking complex medical assessments from a doctor and pushing them out to nurses out in the field by gathering data into a simple mobile app and making it useful,” he added. “It allows nurses to do a great job without being doctors themselves.”
Karpovich said the company went after Series A dollars because it was “time for it to be on its own.” He was receiving inbound interest from investors, and the capital would enable the company to proceed more rapidly. Today, the company is focused on the Salesforce ecosystem, but that can evolve over time, he added.
The funding will be used to expand the company’s reach and products. He expects to double the team in the next six to 12 months across engineering to be able to expand the platform. Youreka boasts 100 customers today, and Karpovich would also like to invest in marketing to grow that base.
In addition to the use cases already identified, he sees additional potential in financial services and insurance, particularly for those assessing damage. The company is also concentrated in the United States, and Karpovich has plans to expand in the U.K. and Europe.
In 2020, the company grew 300%, which Karpovich attributes to the need of this kind of tool in field service. Youreka has a licensing model with charges per end user per month, along with an administrative license, for the people creating the apps, that also charges per user and per month pricing.
“There are 2.5 million jobs open today because companies can’t find people with the right skills,” he added. “We are making these jobs accessible. Some say that AI is doing away with jobs, but we are using AI to enhance jobs. If we can take 90% of the knowledge and give a digital assistant to less experienced people, you could open up so many opportunities.”
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Consumer goods software company Aforza bags $22M to open US headquarters
Aforza, developing cloud and mobile apps for consumer goods companies, announced a $22 million Series A round led by DN Capital.
The London-based company’s technology is built on the Salesforce and Google Cloud platforms so that consumer goods companies can digitally transform product distribution and customer engagement to combat issues like unprofitable promotions and declining market share, Aforza co-founder and CEO Dominic Dinardo told TechCrunch. Using artificial intelligence, the company recommends products and can predict the order a retailer can make with promotions and pricing based on factors like locations.
The global market for consumer packaged goods apps is forecasted to reach $15 billion by 2024. However, the industry is still using outdated platforms that, in some cases, lead to a loss of 5% of sales when goods are out of stock, Dinardo said.
Aforza’s trade promotion designer mobile image. Image Credits: Aforza
Dinardo and his co-founders, Ed Butterworth and Nick Eales, started the company in 2019. All veterans of Salesforce, they saw how underserved the consumer goods industry was in terms of moving to digital.
Aforza is Dinardo’s first time leading a company. However, from his time at Salesforce he feels he got an education like going to “Marc Benioff’s School of SaaS.” The company raised an undisclosed seed round in 2019 from Bonfire Ventures, Daher Capital, DN Capital, Next47 and Salesforce Ventures.
Then the pandemic happened, which had many of the investors leaning in, which was validation of what Aforza was doing, Dinardo said.
“Even before the pandemic, the consumer goods industry was challenged with new market entrants and horrible legacy systems, but then the pandemic turned off pathways to customers,” he added. “Our mission is to improve the lives of consumers by bringing forth more sustainable products and packaging, but also helping companies be more agile and handle changes as the biggest change is happening.”
Joining DN Capital in the round were Bonfire Ventures, Daher Capital and Next47.
Brett Queener, partner at Bonfire Ventures, said he helped incubate Aforza with Dinardo and Eales, something his firm doesn’t typically do, but saw a unique opportunity to get in on the ground floor.
Also working at Salesforce, he saw the consumer goods industry as a major industry with a compelling reason to make a technology shift as customers began expecting instant availability and there were tons of emerging startups coming into the direct-to-consumer space.
Those startups don’t have a year or two to pull together the kind of technology it took to scale. With Aforza, they can build a product that works both online and off on any device, Queener said. And rather than planning promotions on a quarterly basis, companies can make changes to their promotional spend in real time.
“It is time for Aforza to tell the world about its technology, time to build out its footprint in the U.S. and in Europe, invest more in R&D and execute the Salesforce playbook,” he said. “That is what this round is about.”
Dinardo intends on using the new funding to continue R&D and to double its employee headcount over the next six months as it establishes its new U.S. headquarters in the Northeast. It is already working with customers in 20 countries.
As to growth, Dinardo said he is using his past experiences at startups like Veeva and Vlocity, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2020, as benchmarks for Aforza’s success.
“We have the money and the expertise — now we need to take a moment to breathe, hire people with the passion to do this and invest in new product tiers, digital assets and even payments,” he said.
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Former Snap employees raise $9M for Trust, emerging from beta to level marketing playing field
Trust wants to give smaller businesses the same advantages that large enterprises have when marketing on digital and social media platforms. It came out of beta with $9 million in seed funding from Lerer Hippeau, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures and Upper90.
The Los Angeles-based company was started in 2019 by a group of five Snap alums working in various roles within Snap’s revenue product strategy business. They were building tools for businesses to fund success with digital marketing, but kept hearing from customers about the advantage big advertisers had over smaller ones — the ability to receive good payment terms, credit lines, as well as data and advice.
Aiming to flip the script on that, the group created Trust, which is a card and business community to help digital businesses navigate the ever-changing pricing models to market online, receive the same incentives larger advertisers get and make the best decision of where their marketing dollars will reach the furthest.
Trust dashboard
Trust does this in a few ways: Its card, built in partnership with Stripe, enables businesses to increase their buying power by up to 20 times and have 45 days to make payments on their marketing investments, CEO James Borow told TechCrunch. Then as part of its community, companies share knowledge of marketing buys and data insights typically reserved for larger advertisers. Users even receive news via their dashboard around their specific marketing strategy, he added.
“The ad platforms are walled gardens, and most people don’t know what is going on inside, so our customers work together to see what is going on,” Borow said.
The growth of e-commerce is pushing more digital marketing investments, providing opportunity for Trust to be a huge business, Borow said. E-commerce sales in the U.S. grew by 39% in the first quarter, while digital advertising spend is forecasted to increase 25% this year to $191 billion. Meanwhile, Google, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter all recently reported rapid growth in their year-over-year advertising revenues, Borow said.
The new funding will go toward increasing the company’s headcount.
“We have active customers on the platform, so we wanted to ramp up hiring as soon as we went into general release,” he added. “We are leaving beta with 25 businesses and a few hundred on our waitlist.”
That list will soon grow. In addition to the funding round, Trust announced a strategic partnership with social shopping e-commerce platform Verishop. The company’s 3,500 merchants will receive priority access to the Trust card and community, Borow said.
Andrea Hippeau, partner at Lerer Hippeau, said she knew Borow from being an investor in his previous advertising company Shift, which was acquired by Brand Networks in 2015.
When Borow contacted Lerer about Trust, Hippeau said this was the kind of offering that would be applicable to the firm’s portfolio, which has many direct-to-consumer brands, and knew marketing was a huge pain point for them.
“Digital marketing is important to all brands, but it is also a black box that you put marketing dollars into, but don’t know what you get,” she said. “We hear this across our portfolio — they spend a lot of money on ad platforms, yet are treated like mom-and-pop companies in terms of credit. When in reality Casper is outspending other companies by five times. Trust understands how important marketing dollars are and gives them terms that are financially better.”
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E-commerce-as-a-service platform Cart.com picks up $98M to give brands scaling tools
Cart.com, a Houston-based company providing end-to-end e-commerce services, brought in its third funding round this year, this time a $98 million Series B round to bring its total funding to $143 million.
Oak HC/FT led the new round of funding and was joined by PayPal Ventures, Clearco, G9 Ventures, Mercury Fund, Valedor Partners and Arsenal Growth. Strategic investors in the Series B include Heyday CEO Sebastian Rymarz and Casper CEO Philip Krim. This new round follows a $25 million Series A round, led by Mercury and Arsenal in July, and a $20 million seed round from Bearing Ventures.
Cart.com CEO Omair Tariq, who was previously an executive at Home Depot and COO of Blinds.com, co-founded the company in September 2020 with Jim Jacobson, former CEO of RTIC Outdoors.
Tariq told TechCrunch that the company provides software, services and infrastructure to businesses so they can scale online. Cart.com is taking the best parts of selling direct-to-consumer on marketplaces like Amazon and Shopify to create value for brands. Tariq said he is pioneering the term “e-commerce-as-a-service” to bring together under one platform a suite of business tools like storefront software, marketing, fulfillment, payments and customer service.
“We see the power of having an interconnected platform,” Tariq said. “There also needs to be a hybrid between selling direct-to-consumer and on Amazon and Shopify for companies that don’t have the money to pay for a percentage of their sales and receive no access to customers or data, and needing 20 different plug-ins that are not connected.”
Cart.com went after the new funding after seeing validation of its idea: brands coming to them wanting more products and services, which led to acquisitions. The company has acquired seven companies so far, including — AmeriCommerce, Spacecraft Brands and, more recently, DuMont Project and Sauceda Industries. Tariq is planning for another three or four by the end of the year.
In addition, it received inbound interest from strategic investors, like Oak and PayPal, which Tariq said was going to enable the company “to be more successful faster.”
Allen Miller, principal at Oak HC/FT, said after spending time with Tariq to understand his vision about Cart.com’s software, payments and services, he felt that the company was doing something that didn’t exist in today’s commerce infrastructure.
He said that Cart.com is well positioned to help companies, like those with $1 million in sales, stay focused on growing the business while Cart.com stitches together all of the tools for them to operate in the background.
“It’s a unique offering to merchants that has a high value proposition,” Miller said. “The vision and drive that Omair and Jim have, along with an inspiring mission they want to achieve — to be brand-centric and help the next generation of merchants. These guys also have a good playbook on finding companies and teams to acquire, as well as handling the post M&A to have everyone on one platform.”
The new financing will enable Cart.com to further invest in technology development and to increase headcount by at least 15 times, with plans to go from fewer than two dozen employees to more than 300 team members by the end of the year. The company has nearly 70 jobs posted on its website for positions in engineering, technology, digital marketing and e-commerce. Tariq also expects half of the funds to go toward more acquisitions.
Cart.com currently serves over 2,000 e-commerce brands, including GNC, Haymaker Coffee and KeHE, and processes more than $700 million in gross merchandise value per year. The company saw revenue increase 400% since the platform’s launch in November.
In addition, the company has nine fulfillment centers across the country, and is increasing its access to reach 80% of the U.S. population with two-day shipping, Tariq added.
“We are giving the power back to brands by giving them what they need to operate e-commerce,” he said. “There are still a few pieces to fill in so brands have a unified experience, but with us, they can add fulfilment, marketing or customer conversion tools with the click of a couple of buttons.”
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Bite Ninja scoops up pre-seed funding to reimagine restaurant working environments
Will Clem knows all too well about restaurant workers not showing up for a shift. At least one person would have car trouble or need to stay home with sick children, and it became a common occurrence on the weekends for the co-founder of Memphis Meats and owner of Baby Jacks BBQ in Memphis.
Needing to fill a shift one Friday night, Clem decided to prop his laptop in the drive-thru lane of one of his restaurants and took orders from home by remoting into the system. No one noticed that he wasn’t actually taking orders from the kitchen itself. Thus came the idea for Bite Ninja, a remote hiring technology platform for restaurants.
Clem connected with Orin Wilson to start the company in 2020 and worked for a year on the technology before launching it in March. Today, the company announced $675,000 in pre-seed funding led by Y Combinator, AgFunder and Manta Ray.
With many restaurants unable to find workers as a result of the global pandemic, Clem and Wilson wanted to build a technology that would enable restaurants to go back to normal operating hours, or even reopen their stores. At the same time, the workers, or “Ninjas” as they are referred to, can work the drive-thru or counter for a lunch or dinner rush shift from home, but appear on-screen to customers via menu boards, Wilson said.
Bite Ninja drive-thru. Image Credits: Bite Ninja
“When a restaurant is slammed, you need an army of people to work the rush, but it is not reasonable to ask them to get in their uniform and get in their cars, last-minute, to clock in for just an hour or two,” he added. “They have control of their schedule and can pick the right shift for them. It is so popular that we typically have five to 10 people bidding on each shift.”
Bite Ninja is providing a better experience and reaches potential workers that would not necessarily have an interest in performing fast food work. Many of the 3,000 Ninjas already working with the company are stay-at-home moms and retirees with customer service experience, but who can’t physically come into a store, Clem said. In addition, the company is working with the Nurse-Family Partnership to help women get back into the workforce.
The company initially ran three pilot programs and has expanded services to curbside and front cashier stations. The funding will enable Bite Ninja to scale initiatives, hire additional software engineers and prepare for a rollout at national food chains.
Since launching earlier this year, Bite Ninja is already being used in a few thousand stores.
Manuel Gonzalez, partner at AgFunder, said restaurants are a big part of entrepreneurship, but the pandemic forced more than 110,000 of them out of business.
“Bite Ninja’s solution is one that decreases costs to restaurant owners, but increases the income of the worker,” he said. “It also helps entrepreneurs and the community because restaurants are important for economic, cultural, community and social points of view.”
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