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Realtime Robotics raises a $31M Series A
Boston-based Realtime Robotics this morning announced a $31.4 million round. The funding is part of the $11.7 million Series A the company announced all the way back in late 2019. Investors include HAHN Automation, SAIC Capital Management, Soundproof Ventures , Heroic Ventures, SPARX Asset Management, Omron Ventures, Toyota AI Ventures, Scrum Ventures and Duke Angels.
Realtime is one of a number of startups building control on top of industrial robotics. Specifically, the startup looks to help companies deploy systems with limited programming, offering adaptable controls that work for multiple systems at once.
This round, which nearly doubles the company’s existing funding, will be used to accelerate its product development and extend its offering to more markets, globally. It comes as interest in robotics have ramped up amid the global pandemic.
“This investment by some of the world’s leading manufacturers and automation providers stands as a testament to our ability to dramatically improve the value proposition for robotic implementations,” CEO Peter Howard says in a release. “Having already realized early deployment success, a broad spectrum of customers and partners are working closely with us to refine features and user experiences, readying our technology for rollouts in their engineering, factory and warehouse operations.”
The company’s offerings serve a wide range of different industrial robotics tasks, including pick and place machines, packaging and palletizing boxes.
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Architect Capital brings alternative capital to the early stage with new $100M fund
Early-stage startups are increasingly looking for alternative ways to access capital, meaning not every company wants to raise money from VCs or take on debt.
In recent years, a flurry of startups have emerged to give companies other options. (Think Pipe, for example.)
And today, San Francisco-based Architect Capital is a new firm that is launching with over $100 million in funds to serve as an “asset-based lender” to “high-growth,” early-stage tech companies. Specifically, the new firm aims to provide non-dilutive or less-dilutive financing options to asset-rich fintech, e-commerce and SaaS companies in the U.S. and Latin America, but with an emphasis on the latter. The region, Architect maintains, does not have a plethora of institutional financing available against assets.
The firm is not out to replace traditional venture capital or venture debt, emphasizes founder and CEO James Sagan, but rather to offer asset-based products that will complement them.
For some context, Sagan is no stranger to the startup world, having co-founded and served as managing partner of Arc Labs, an early-stage credit fund focused on lending to technology-enabled businesses. He’s been investing in Latin America for years, and recognized the need for new forms of financing to fund “novel and underappreciated assets.”
Also, he believes the region is home to “the most prominent fintech ecosystem in the world.”
To Sagan, traditional forms of equity and debt financing in the venture world are vital for things like growing headcount, but he believes they are “not engineered to support the growth of a company’s underlying financial products.”
“VC is highly dilutive and should be used for ROI activities such as hiring engineers and building great teams,” Sagan told TechCrunch. “It’s expensive to use equity to fund assets. Equity should not be put in a loan book. We’ll fund the loan book.”
Image Credits: Architect Capital founder James Sagan / Architect Capital
Architect’s goal is to provide “tailored and less dilutive funding,” especially to companies that produce repeatable revenues, such as SaaS and subscription businesses.
Sagan said he first discovered the strategy in 2015 when he was working for a multifamily office that was lending against a bunch of traditional assets.
“A colleague and good friend of mine started a business and raised some equity and venture debt, but he couldn’t find the asset-specific financing for the receivables he was generating,” Sagan recalls. “He was lending to small businesses and needed asset-specific financing against those receivables.”
Venture debt doesn’t really work for receivables-based lending because venture debt shops typically are underwriting assets, or rather, underwriting the quality of the investors in the company, Sagan believes.
“So we really tailor our underwriting towards those assets themselves right and those assets range from unsecured consumer receivables to secure small business receivables to real estate,” he told TechCrunch. “Essentially, we’re providing an additional instrument for asset-heavy businesses that will allow them to scale in a way that venture debt will not.”
Architect’s LPs are mostly large institutions, as opposed to traditional high net worth individuals. The firm’s average check size will land at around $10 million to $15 million.
“Our portfolio allocation is more concentrated in general,” Sagan said. “We expect to grow our AUM (assets under management) pretty precipitously.”
Architect Capital has invested in six companies since inception, including PayJoy, a company that delivers consumer financing and smartphone technology to customers in emerging markets; Forum Brands, a U.S.-based e-commerce marketplace aggregator; and ADDI, a fintech that aims to give Colombian consumers access to fair and affordable credit through point-of-sale-financing that recently raised $65 million.
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Gong going gangbusters, grabs $250M Series E on $7.25B valuation
Gong, the revenue intelligence startup, has been raising capital at a rapid pace, and today the company announced another $250 million on a $7.25 billion valuation, a number that triples its previous valuation from last summer.
Franklin Templeton led today’s festivities with participation from Coatue, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, Thrive Capital and Tiger Global. The company raised $200 million last August at a $2.2 billion valuation, and has now raised $584 million, $450 million coming in the last year.
What is making investors open their wallets and pull out such large sums of cash? The company is helping solve a hard problem on how to bring more intelligence to the revenue process. They do this by using artificial intelligence to listen to every customer interaction, whether that’s a sales or service call (or anything else), and use that information to determine valuable information like who is most likely to buy and who is most likely to churn.
It’s been going well and CEO Amit Bendov says the company’s performance really validates the valuation. While he wasn’t ready to discuss specific numbers, he did say that ARR grew 2.3x between Q1 last year and this year, and he says Q2 is on pace to triple ARR.
“The valuation is up about 3x from last summer, but sales are more than 3x. We have high logo customers. [Last year], it was still unclear how COVID was going to impact us. People believed [our business] was going to do well [during the pandemic], but it wasn’t as obvious. Now, it is obvious. And all the […] financials are way better, so from a pure financials [perspective] our multipliers are pretty reasonable for our revenue trajectory,” he said.
With all this growth, the company is adding employees at a rapid pace. It closed the year with 400 people, and is up to around 550 today with a goal of reaching 950 by year end. It has partnered with a consulting firm called ReadySet, which helps companies build diverse and inclusive organizations, and Bendov says they are an equal-pay company.
Women represent around 40% of the employees and around 4% are Black, a number he hopes to increase by growing the Atlanta office. In the office in Israel, he has set up employment and training programs to build bridges to the Arab community.
Bendov says he looks forward to meeting his U.S. employees in the coming weeks when he’ll be visiting the Atlanta office for the first time.
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One Concern raises $45M from SOMPO to scale its disaster resilience platform across Japan
Climate change is intensifying across the globe, and one of the most challenging cases is Japan. In addition to lying on a major fault, the archipelago is increasingly inundated from rising sea levels that make the country more prone to disasters. A decade ago, the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami dealt billions of dollars in damage, and the recovery from that tragedy remains a major international relations flashpoint.
Technology to address disasters and resilience is a key area of venture capital investment these days, and now another startup in the space is proving that there is widespread interest in this growing market.
One Concern, which builds a platform to model and simulate community resilience and response to earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters, announced this morning that it has raised $45 million from SOMPO Holdings, the holding company of Japan’s SOMPO, one of the country’s largest insurers. The investment is part of a total $100 million, multi-year deal that will plug One Concern’s platform into the Japanese market.
Japan has been something of a gem in One Concern’s market development the past few years. The startup hired Hitoshi Akimoto as country manager for Japan in late 2019 before formally announcing that it was expanding to Japan in February 2020. In August last year, it announced a strategic partnership with SOMPO, and the insurer’s holding company invested $15 million. Today’s deal expands that partnership further.
According to its press release, One Concern will sell its platform to six or more Japanese cities as part of the tie-up.
Previously, One Concern had raised three rounds of capital according to Crunchbase and SEC filings: a seed round in October 2015, a $33 million Series A round led by NEA in 2017 and a $37 million round also co-led by NEA. The company was founded in 2015.
Update June 3, 2021: Rephrased SOMPO Holdings as the parent company of SOMPO, and not its venture wing.
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OroraTech’s space-based early wildfire warnings spark $7M investment
With wildfires becoming an ever more devastating annual phenomenon, it is in the whole planet’s interest to spot them and respond as early as possible — and the best vantage point for that is space. OroraTech is a German startup building a constellation of small satellites to power a global wildfire warning system, and will be using a freshly raised €5.8 million (~$7 million) A round to kick things off.
Wildfires destroy tens of millions of acres of forest every year, causing immense harm to people and the planet in countless ways. Once they’ve grown to a certain size, they’re near impossible to stop, so the earlier they can be located and worked against, the better.
But these fires can start just about anywhere in a dried out forest hundreds of miles wide, and literally every minute and hour counts — watch towers, helicopter flights and other frequently used methods may not be fast or exact enough to effectively counteract this increasingly serious threat. Not to mention they’re expensive and often dangerous jobs for those who perform them.
OroraTech’s plan is to use a constellation of about 100 satellites equipped with custom infrared cameras to watch the entire globe (or at least the parts most likely to burst into flame) at once, reporting any fire bigger than 10 meters across within half an hour.
Image Credits: OroraTech
To start out with, the Bavarian company has used data from over a dozen satellites already in space, in order to prove out the service on the ground. But with this funding round they are set to put their own bird in the air, a shoebox-sized satellite with a custom infrared sensor that will be launched by Spire later this year. Onboard machine learning processing of this imagery simplifies the downstream process.
Fourteen more satellites are planned for launch by 2023, presumably once they’ve kicked the proverbial tires on the first one and come up with the inevitable improvements.
“In order to cover even more regions in the future and to be able to give warning earlier, we aim to launch our own specialized satellite constellation into orbit,” said CEO and co-founder Thomas Grübler in a press release. “We are therefore delighted to have renowned investors on board to support us with capital and technological know-how in implementing our plans.”
Image Credits: OroraTech
Those renowned investors consist of Findus Venture and Ananda Impact Ventures, which led the round, followed by APEX Ventures, BayernKapital, Clemens Kaiser, SpaceTec Capital and Ingo Baumann. The company was spun out of research done by the founders at TUM, which maintains an interest.
“It is absolutely remarkable what they have built up and achieved so far despite limited financial resources and we feel very proud that we are allowed to be part of this inspiring and ambitious NewSpace project,” APEX’s Wolfgang Neubert said, and indeed it’s impressive to have a leading space-based data service with little cash (it raised an undisclosed seed about a year ago) and no satellites.
It’s not the only company doing infrared imagery of the Earth’s surface; SatelliteVu recently raised money to launch its own, much smaller constellation, though it’s focused on monitoring cities and other high-interest areas, not the vast expanse of forests. And ConstellR is aimed (literally) at the farming world, monitoring fields for precision crop management.
With money in its pocket Orora can expand and start providing its improved detection services, though sadly, it likely won’t be upgrading before wildfire season hits the northern hemisphere this year.
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Iterative raises $20M for its MLOps platform
Iterative, an open-source startup that is building an enterprise AI platform to help companies operationalize their models, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A round led by 468 Capital and Mesosphere co-founder Florian Leibert. Previous investors True Ventures and Afore Capital also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $25 million.
The core idea behind Iterative is to provide data scientists and data engineers with a platform that closely resembles a modern GitOps-driven development stack.
After spending time in academia, Iterative co-founder and CEO Dmitry Petrov joined Microsoft as a data scientist on the Bing team in 2013. He noted that the industry has changed quite a bit since then. While early on, the questions were about how to build machine learning models, today the problem is how to build predictable processes around machine learning, especially in large organizations with sizable teams. “How can we make the team productive, not the person? This is a new challenge for the entire industry,” he said.
Big companies (like Microsoft) were able to build their own proprietary tooling and processes to build their AI operations, Petrov noted, but that’s not an option for smaller companies.
Currently, Iterative’s stack consists of a couple of different components that sit on top of tools like GitLab and GitHub. These include DVC for running experiments and data and model versioning, CML, the company’s CI/CD platform for machine learning, and the company’s newest product, Studio, its SaaS platform for enabling collaboration between teams. Instead of reinventing the wheel, Iterative essentially provides data scientists who already use GitHub or GitLab to collaborate on their source code with a tool like DVC Studio that extends this to help them collaborate on data and metrics, too.
Image Credits: Iterative
“DVC Studio enables machine learning developers to run hundreds of experiments with full transparency, giving other developers in the organization the ability to collaborate fully in the process,” said Petrov. “The funding today will help us bring more innovative products and services into our ecosystem.”
Petrov stressed that he wants to build an ecosystem of tools, not a monolithic platform. When the company closed this current funding round about three months ago, Iterative had about 30 employees, many of whom were previously active in the open-source community around its projects. Today, that number is already closer to 60.
“Data, ML and AI are becoming an essential part of the industry and IT infrastructure,” said Leibert, general partner at 468 Capital. “Companies with great open-source adoption and bottom-up market strategy, like Iterative, are going to define the standards for AI tools and processes around building ML models.”
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Stemma launches with $4.8M seed to build managed data catalogue
As companies increasingly rely on data to run their businesses, having accurate sources of data becomes paramount. Stemma, a new early-stage startup, has come up with a solution, a managed data catalogue that acts as an organization’s source of truth.
Today the company announced a $4.8 million seed investment led by Sequoia with assorted individual tech luminaries also participating. The product is also available for the first time today.
Company co-founder and CEO Mark Grover says the product is actually built on top of the open-source Amundsen data catalogue project that he helped launch at Lyft to manage its massive data requirements. The problem was that with so much data, employees had to kludge together systems to confirm the data validity. Ultimately manual processes like asking someone in Slack or even creating a Wiki failed under the weight of trying to keep up with the volume and velocity.
“I saw this problem firsthand at Lyft, which led me to create the open-source Amundsen project with a team of talented engineers,” Grover said. That project has 750 users at Lyft using it every week. Since it was open-sourced, 35 companies like Brex, Snap and Asana have been using it.
What Stemma offers is a managed version of Amundsen that adds functionality like using intelligence to show data that’s meaningful to the person who is searching in the catalogue. It also can add metadata automatically to data as it’s added to the catalogue, creating documentation about the data on the fly, among other features.
The company launched last fall when Grover and co-founder and CTO Dorian Johnson decided to join forces and create a commercial product on top of Amundsen. Grover points out that Lyft was supportive of the move.
Today the company has five employees, in addition to the founders, and has plans to add several more this year. As he does that, he is cognizant of diversity and inclusion in the hiring process. “I think it’s super important that we continue to invest in diversity, and the two ways that I think are the most meaningful for us right now is to have early employees that are from diverse groups, and that is the case within the first five,” he said. Beyond that, he says that as the company grows he wants to improve the ratio, while also looking at diversity in investors, board members and executives.
The company, which launched during COVID, is entirely remote right now and plans to remain that way for at least the short term. As the company grows, they will look at ways to build camaraderie, like organizing a regular cadence of employee offsite events.
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Celonis snares $1B Series D on $11B valuation
Celonis, the late-stage process mining software startup, announced a $1 billion Series D investment this morning on an eye-popping $11 billion valuation, up from $2.5 billion in its Series C in 2019, quadrupling its value in just two years.
Durable Capital Partners LP and T. Rowe Price Associates co-led the round, with participation from new investors Franklin Templeton, Splunk Ventures and existing investors Arena Holdings. Other unnamed existing investors also participated.
While it was at it, the company announced it was naming experienced financial pro Carlos Kirjner as CFO. Kirjner’s most recent job was at Google, where he led finance for ads and other key product areas, according to the company.
The presence of institutional investors like T. Rowe Price and Franklin Templeton and the huge influx of capital could be a signal that this is the last private fundraise for the company before it goes public, and Celonis CEO and co-founder Alexander Rinke did not shy away from IPO talk when asked about it.
“It could be, yeah. It’s kind of tough to predict the future, but look, we’re very bullish about the growth and our prospects both as a private — and down the road — a public company, and obviously we now have backers that can invest capital in both [public and private markets],” Rinke told TechCrunch.
Rinke says what’s driving this interest is the tremendous potential of the market even beyond process mining, which he sees as just a starting point for a much larger market. “Process mining where we originated from is really just the gateway to build new processes and better processes for organizations, and as you think about that that’s a much much bigger market that we’re addressing,” he said.
The company’s processing mining software sits at the beginning of the process automation food chain, which includes robotic process automation, no-code workflow and other tools to bring more automated workflows to companies. It’s quite possible that the company could develop other pieces of this or use the new capital to buy talent and functionality, something that Rinke acknowledges is possible now with this much capital behind the company.
Celonis started by mapping out exactly how work flows through an organization, something that used to take high-priced human consultants months to figure out sitting with employees and watching how work flows. Once a company knows how work moves through an organization, it’s easier to find inefficiencies and places that are ripe for using automation tools. Speeding up that first part of the operation with technology can bring down the cost and accelerate innovation and change.
The company made a huge deal with IBM recently where IBM plans on training 10,000 consultants worldwide to use Celonis tooling. That brings the power of a company the size of IBM to one that is still relatively small in comparison — Rinke thinks they’ll reach 2,000 employees by year end — and that could be at least part of the reason investors were willing to pump so much capital into the company.
The company, which recently turned 10, currently has 1,000 enterprise customers, including Uber, Dell, Splunk (which is also an investor), L’Oréal and AstraZeneca.
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DealHub raises $20M Series B for its sales platform
DealHub.io, an Austin-based platform that helps businesses manage the entire process of their sales engagements, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B funding round. The round was led by Israel Growth Partners, with participation from existing investor Cornerstone Venture Partners. This brings DealHub’s total funding to $24.5 million.
The company describes itself as a ‘revenue amplification’ platform (or ‘RevAmp,’ as DealHub likes to call it) that represents the next generation of existing sales and revenue operations tools. It’s meant to give businesses a more complete view of buyers and their intent, and streamline the sales processes from proposal to pricing quotes, subscription management and (electronic) signatures.
“Yesterday’s siloed sales tools no longer cut it in the new Work from Anywhere era,” said Eyal Elbahary, CEO & Co-founder of DealHub.io. “Sales has undergone the largest disruption it has ever seen. Not only have sales teams needed to adapt to more sophisticated and informed buyers, but remote selling and digital transformation have compelled them to evolve the traditional sales process into a unique human-to-human interaction.”
The platform integrates with virtually all of the standard CRM tools, including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Freshworks, as well as e-signature platforms like DocuSign.
The company didn’t share any revenue data, but it notes that the new funding round follows “continued multi-year hyper-growth.” In part, the company argues, demand for its platform has been driven by sales teams that need new tools, given that they — for the most part — can’t travel to meet their (potential) customers face-to-face.
“Revenue leaders need the agility to keep pace with today’s fast and ever-changing business environment. They cannot afford to be restrained by rigid and costly to implement tools to manage their sales processes,” said Uri Erde, General Partner at Israel Growth Partners. “RevAmp provides a simple to operate, intuitive, no-code solution that makes it possible for sales organizations to continuously adapt to the modern sales ecosystem. Furthermore, it provides sales leaders the visibility and insights they need to manage and consistently accelerate revenue growth. We’re excited to back the innovation DealHub is bringing to the world of revenue operations and help fuel its growth.”
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Cognigy raises $44M to scale its enterprise-focused conversational AI platform
Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly common part of how customer service works — a trend that was accelerated in this past year as so many other services went virtual and digital — and today a startup that has built a set of low-code tools to help enterprises integrate more AI into their customer service processes is announcing some funding to fuel its growth.
Cognigy, which provides a low-code conversational AI platform that notably can be used flexibly across a range of applications and geographies — it supports 120 languages; it can be used in external or internal service applications; it can support voice services but also chatbots; it provides real-time assistance for human agents and usage analytics or fully automated responses; it can integrate with standard call center software, and also with RPA packages; and it can be run in the cloud or on-premise — has closed a round of $44 million, funding that it will be using to continue scaling its business internationally.
Insight Partners is leading the Series B investment, with previous backers DN Capital, Global Brain, Nordic Makers, Inventures and Digital Innovation and Growth also participating. The Dusseldorf-based company had previously only raised $11 million and spent the first several years of business bootstrapped.
Cognigy is not disclosing its valuation but it has up to now built up a concentration of customers in areas like transportation, e-commerce and insurance and counts a number of big multinational companies among its customer list, including Lufthansa, Mobily, BioNTech, Vueling Airlines, Bosch and Daimler, with “thousands” of virtual assistants now powered by Cognigy live in the market.
With 25% of Cognigy’s business already coming from the U.S., the plan now is to use some funding to invest in building out its service deeper into the U.S., Asia and across more of Europe, CEO and founder Philipp Heltewig said in an interview.
“Conversational AI” these days appears in many guises: it can be a chatbot you come across on a website when you’re searching for something, or it can be prompts provided to agents or salespeople, information and real-time feedback to help them do their jobs better. Conversational AI can also be a personal assistant on your company’s HR application to help you book time off or deal with any number of other administrative jobs, or a personal assistant that helps you use your phone or set your house alarm.
There are a number of companies in the tech world that have built tools to address these various use cases. Specifically in the area of services aimed at enterprises, some of them, like Gong, are raising huge money right now. What is notable about Cognigy is that it has built a platform that is attempting to address a wide swathe of applications: one platform, many uses, in other words.
Cognigy’s other selling point is that it is playing into the new interest in low- and no-code tools, which in Cognigy’s case makes the integration of AI into a customer assistance process a relatively easy task, something that can be built not just by developers, but data scientists, those working directly on conversation design, and nontechnical business users using the tools themselves.
“The low-code platform helps enterprises adopt what is otherwise complex technology in an easy and flexible way, whether it is a customer or employee contact center,” said Heltewig. As you might expect, there are some direct competitors in the low- and no-code conversational AI space, too, including Ada, Talkie, Snaps and more.
Flexibility seems to be the order of the day for enterprises, and also the companies building tools for them: it means that a company can grow into a larger customer, and that in theory Cognigy will also evolve the platform based on what its customers need. As one example, Heltewig pointed out that a number of its customers are — contrary to the beating drum and march you see every day toward cloud services — running a fair number of applications on-premises, since this appears to be a key way to ensure the security of the customer data that they handle.
“Lufthansa could never run its customer services in the cloud because they handle a lot of sensitive data and they want full ownership of it,” he noted. “We can run cloud services and have a full offering for those who want it, but many large enterprises prefer to run their services on premises.”
Teddie Wardi, an MD at Insight, is joining the board with this round. “We are thrilled to be leading Cognigy’s Series B as the company continues on their ScaleUp journey,” he said in a statement. “Evident by their strong customer retention, Cognigy has created an essential product for global businesses to improve their customer experience in an efficient and effortless manner. With the new funding, Cognigy will be able to expand their leadership position to reach new markets and acquire more customers.”
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