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Explo snags $2.3M seed to help build customer-facing BI dashboards
Explo, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 class, which is helping customers build customer-facing business intelligence dashboards, announced a $2.3 million seed round today. Investors included Amplo VC, Soma Capital and Y Combinator, along with several individual investors.
The company originally was looking at a way to simplify getting data ready for models or other applications, but as the founders spoke to customers, they saw a big need for a simple way to build dashboards backed by that data and quickly pivoted.
Explo CEO and co-founder Gary Lin says the company was able to leverage the core infrastructure, data engineering and production that it had built while at Y Combinator, but the new service they created is much different from the original idea.
“In terms of the UI and the output, we had to build out the ability for our end users to create dashboards, for them to embed the dashboards and for them to customize the styles on these dashboards, so that it looks and feels as though it was part of their own product,” Lin explained.
While the founders had been working on the original idea since last year, they didn’t actually make the pivot until September. They made the change because they were hearing this was really what customers needed more than the tool they had been building while at Y Combinator. In fact, Chen says that their YC mentors and investors have been highly supportive of the switch.
The company is just getting started with the four original co-founders — Lin, COO Andrew Chen, CTO Rohan Varma and product designer Carly Stanisic — but the plan is to use this money to beef up the engineering team with three to five new hires.
With a diverse founding team, the company wants to continue looking at diversity as it builds the company. “One of the biggest reasons that we think diversity is important is that it allows us to have a bigger perspective and a grander perspective on things. And honestly, it’s in environments where I have personally […] been involved where we’ve actually been able to create the best ideas was by having a larger perspective. And so we definitely are going to be as inclusive as possible and are definitely thinking about that as we hire,” Lin said.
As the company has grown up during the pandemic, the founding core is used to working remotely and the goal moving forward is to be a distributed company. “We will be a remote distributed company so we’re hiring people no matter where they are, which actually makes it a lot easier from a hiring perspective because we’re able to reach a much more diverse and large pool of applicants,” Lin said.
They are in the process of thinking about how they can build a culture as they bring in distributed employees. “I think the way that we’ve started to see it is that working distributed is not a reduced experience, but just a different one and we are thinking about different things like how we organize new people when they on-board, and maybe we can meet up as a team and have a retreat where we are located in the same place [when travel allows],” he said.
For now, they will remain remote as they take their first half-dozen customers and begin to build the company with the new investment.
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JumpCloud raises $75M Series E as cloud directory service thrives during pandemic
JumpCloud, the cloud directory service that debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in 2013, announced a $75 million Series E today. The round was led by BlackRock with participation from existing investor General Atlantic.
The company wasn’t willing to discuss the current valuation, but has now raised more than $166 million, according to Crunchbase data.
Changes in the way that IT works have been evolving since the company launched. Back then, most companies used Microsoft Active Directory in a Windows-centric environment. Since then, things have gotten more heterogeneous with multiple operating systems, web applications, the cloud and mobile, and that has required a different way of thinking about directory structures.
JumpCloud co-founder and CEO Rajat Bhargava says that the pandemic has only accelerated the need for his company’s kind of service as more companies move to the cloud. “Obviously now with COVID, all these changes made it much more difficult for IT to connect their users to all the resources that they needed, and to us that’s one of the most critical tasks that an IT organization has is making their team productive,” he said.
He said their idea was to build an “independent cloud directory platform that would connect people to really whatever it is they need and do that in a secure way while giving IT complete control over that access.”
The product, which includes a free tier for 10 users on 10 systems for an unlimited amount of time, has 100,000 users. Of those, Bhargava says that about 3,000 are paying.
The company has 300 employees, with plans to add 200-250 in the next year with a goal of adding 500 in the next couple of years. As he does that, Bhargava, who is South Asian, sees diversity and inclusion as an important component of the hiring process. In fact, the company tries to make sure it always has diverse candidates in the hiring pool.
“Some of the things that we’ve tried to do is make sure that every role has some diversity candidates involved in the hiring process. That’s something that our recruiting team is working on and making sure that we’re having that conversation with every single hire,” he said. He acknowledges that it’s a work in progress, and a problem across the entire tech industry that he and his company continue to try to address.
Since the pandemic, the company, which is based in Colorado, has made the decision to be remote first, and they will be hiring from across the country and across the world as they make these new hires, which could help contribute to a more diverse workforce over time.
With a $75 million investment, and having reached Series E, it’s fair to ask if the company is thinking ahead to an IPO, but Bhargava didn’t want to discuss that. “We just raised this $75 million round. There’s so much work to be done, so we’re just looking forward to that right now,” he said.
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Indian logistics startup Xpressbees raises $110 million
Xpressbees, an Indian logistics firm that works with several e-commerce firms in the country, said on Monday it has raised $110 million in a new financing round as online shopping booms in the world’s second largest internet market.
The Pune-headquartered startup’s Series E financing round was led by private equity firms Investcorp, Norwest Venture Partners and Gaja Capital, the five-year-old startup said. Xpressbees, which concluded its Series D round three years ago, has raised $175.8 million to date, according to research firm Tracxn. The new round valued the startup at more than $350 million.
Xpressbees helps more than 1,000 customers — including financial and e-commerce services giant Paytm, social commerce startup Meesho, eyewear seller Lenskart, phone maker Xiaomi, online pharmacy NetMeds and online marketplace Snapdeal — deliver their products across the country. It has presence in over 2,000 cities and towns, and it processes more than 2.5 million orders a day — up from about 600,000 daily orders last year.
“We have been truly impressed by their strong customer centricity and capital efficiency which has resulted in exceptional feedback from top players in the e-commerce sector!” said Niren Shah, managing director and head of Norwest Venture Partners in India, in a statement.
Xpressbees started its journey within FirstCry, an e-commerce for baby products, in 2012. But in 2015, it became an independent company with Amitava Saha, co-founder and chief operating officer of FirstCry, moving out of FirstCry to become chief executive of Xpressbees. Supam Maheshwari, who co-founded FirstCry and serves as its chief executive, is the other co-founder of Xpressbees.
The startup said it plans to deploy the fresh capital to further automate its hubs and sorting centres, and expand its delivery footprint to cover the entire country. “I am delighted to see the impact we are making in the logistics ecosystem in the country,” said Saha in a statement.
At stake is India’s growing logistics industry, which NVP’s Shah estimated to be worth $200 billion. “We continue to believe that new age technology led logistics players such as Xpressbees will continue to play a pivotal role both in the growth of the e-commerce sector in India,” he added.
E-commerce sales, which account for less than 5% of all retail sales in India, skyrocketed during the pandemic after New Delhi enforced a two-month nationwide lockdown. During their festival sales last month, Amazon India and Walmart-owned Flipkart reported a record surge in their sales. The firms have created more than 150,000 seasonal jobs to accommodate the growing demand of orders. Xpressbees works with over 30,000 delivery staff.
Xpressbees competes with a handful of established firms and startups, including SoftBank-backed Delhivery, which became a unicorn last year, and Ecom Express, which has presence in about 2,400 Indian cities and towns.
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Startup fundraising is the most tangible gender gap. How can we overcome it?
Ximena Aleman is co-founder and chief business development officer at Prometeo, an open banking platform that serves Latin America.
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Year-in, year-out, the gender gap in venture capital investment continues to be a problem women founders face. While the gender gap in other areas (such as the number of women entering tech in general) may be on the right path, this disparity in funding seems to be stagnant. There has been little movement in the amount of VC dollars going to women-founded companies since 2012.
In fintech, the problem is especially prominent: Women-founded fintechs have raised a meager 1% of total fintech investment in the last 10 years. This should come as no surprise, given that fintech combines two sectors traditionally dominated by men: finance and technology. Though by no means does this mean that women aren’t doing incredible work in the field and it’s only right that women founders receive their fair share of VC investment.
In the short term, women founders can take action to boost their chances at VC success in the current investment climate, including leveraging their community and support network and building the necessary self-belief to thrive. In the long term, there needs to be foundational change to level the playing field for women entrepreneurs. VC funds must look at ways they can bring in more women decision-makers, all the way up to the top.
Let’s dive into the state of gender bias in VC investing as it stands, and what founders, stakeholders and funds themselves can do to close the gap.
Venture capital is far from a level playing field
In 2019, less than 3% of all VC investment went to women-led companies, and only one-fifth of U.S. VC went to startups with at least one woman on the founder team. The average deal size for female-founded or female co-founded companies is less than half that of only male-founded startups. This is especially concerning when you consider that women make up a much bigger portion of the founder community than proportionately receive investment (around 28% of founders are women). Add in the intersection of race and ethnicity, and the figures become bleaker: Black women founders received 0.6% of the funding raised since 2009, while Latinx female founders saw only 0.4% of total investment dollars.
The statistics paint a stark picture, but it’s a disparity that I’ve faced on a personal level too. I have been faced with VC investors who ask my co-founder — in front of me — why I was doing the talking instead of him. On another occasion, a potential investor asked my co-founder who he was getting into business with, because “he needed to know who he’d be going to the bar with when the day was up.”
This demonstrates a clear expectation on the part of VC investors to have a male counterpart within the founding team of their portfolio companies, and that they often — whether subconsciously or consciously — value men’s input over that of the women on the leadership team.
So, if you’re a female founder faced with the prospect of pitching to VCs — what steps can you take to set yourself up for success?
Get funded, as a woman
Women founders looking to receive VC investment can take a number of steps to increase their chances in this seemingly hostile environment. My first piece of advice is to leverage your own community and support network, especially any mentors and role models you may have, to introduce you to potential investors. Contacts that know and trust your business may be willing to help — any potential VC is much more likely to pay you attention if you come as a personal recommendation.
If you feel like you’re lacking in a strong support network, you can seek out female-founder and startup groups and start to build your community. For example, The Next Women is a global network of women leaders from progress-driven companies, while Women Tech Founders is a grassroots organization on a mission to connect and support women in technology.
Confidence is key when it comes to fundraising. It’s essential to make sure your sales, pitch and negotiation skills are on point. If you feel like you need some extra training in this area, seek out workshops or mentorship opportunities to make sure you have these skills down before you pitch for funding.
When talking with top male VCs and executives, there may be moments where you feel like they’re responding to you differently because of your gender. In these moments, channeling your self-belief and inner strength is vital: The only way that they’re going to see you as a promising, credible founder is if you believe you are one too.
At the end of the day, women founders must also realize that we are the first generation of our gender playing the VC game — and there’s something exciting about that, no matter how challenging it may be. Even when faced with unconscious bias, it’s vital to remember that the process is a learning curve, and those that come after us won’t succeed if we simply hand the task over to our male co-founder(s).
More women in VC means more funding for female founders
While there are actions that women can take on an individual level, barriers cannot be overcome without change within the VC firms themselves. One of the biggest reasons why women receive less VC investment than men is that so few of them make up decision-makers in VC funds.
A study by Harvard Business Review concluded that investors often make investment decisions based on gender and ask women founders different questions than their male counterparts. There are countless stories of women not being taken seriously by male investors, and subsequently not being seen as a worthwhile investment opportunity. As a result of this disparity in VC leadership teams, women-focused funds are emerging as a way to bridge the funding gender gap. It’s also worth noting that women VCs are not only more likely to invest in women-founded companies, but also those founded by Black entrepreneurs. In addition to embracing women and minority-focused investors, the VC community as a whole should ensure they’re bringing in more women leaders into top positions.
Gender equality in VC makes more business sense
From day one, the Prometeo team has made concerted efforts to have both men and women in decision-maker roles. Having women in the founding team and in leadership positions has been crucial in not only helping to fight the unconscious bias that might take place, but also in creating a more dynamic work environment, where diversity of thought powers better business decisions.
Striving for gender equality, both within the walls of VC funds and in the founder community, is also better for businesses’ bottom line. In fact, a study by Boston Consulting Group found that women-founded startups generate 78% for every dollar invested, compared to 31% from men-founded companies.
Here in Latin America, women founders receive a higher proportion of VC investment than anywhere else in the world, so it’s no surprise that women are leading the region’s fintech revolution. Having more women in leadership positions is ultimately a better bet for business.
Closing the gender gap in VC funding is no simple task, but it’s one that must be undertaken. With the help of internal VC reform and external initiatives like community building, training opportunities and women-focused support networks, we can work toward finally making the VC game more equitable for all.
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Cookware startup Great Jones raises $1.75M as it expands into bakeware
Great Jones is expanding into a new area of the kitchen tomorrow, with what co-founder and CEO Sierra Tishgart described as the startup’s biggest launch since it released its first products two years ago.
Ahead of launching the new bakeware line, Great Jones is announcing that it has raised $1.75 million in new funding.
The money comes from notable figures in the e-commerce world — Fellow founder Jake Miller and Very Great founders Eric Prum and Josh Williams — along with restauranteurs including Mimi Cheng’s co-founder Hannah Cheng, Lilia founder Sean Feeny, Kopitiam co-owner Moonlynn Tsai and Konbi co-owner Akira Akuto.
NEA partner Liza Landsman invested as well, and Tishgart said that Sweetgreen’s Nic Jammet and Parachute’s Ariel Kaye have joined the startup’s board of directors. Tishgart noted that Great Jones has worked on collaborations and product partnerships with many of these investors, and she also pointed to Kaye and Parachute as providing a model for how Great Jones can grow.
“To me, starting with sheets, [Kaye] has taken a product which people loved and thoughtfully expanded to a broad selection,” Tishgart said.
She sees a similar path for Great Jones — just as Parachute has become a “one-stop shop” for the home, Tishgart wants her startup to do the same for your kitchen. Great Jones launched with pots, pans and a Dutch oven, then added a baking sheet and is now expanding into a whole line of bakeware.
Image Credits: Great Jones
The new bakeware products (many of them inspired by classic Pyrex designs) include the Sweetie Pie ceramic pie dish, the Hot Dish ceramic casserole dish, the Breadwinner loaf pan, the Patty Cake cake pan and a new broccoli-colored version of the Holy Sheet baking sheet. You can buy the pieces à la carte (the Holy Sheet is $35, the pie pans are $45 and the bread pans are $65 for a pair) or purchase the whole set for $245.
Tishgart added that the company has had a “really, really busy year” with lockdowns and social distancing.
“People are cooking more than ever,” she said. “This is a category and an industry that have really been able to thrive on this.”
At the same time, Tishgart emphasized that the growing interest from millennials and younger consumers is a long-term trend that won’t go away when the pandemic is over — with the rise of celebrity chefs, high-profile restaurants and more food content than ever, food and cooking have become a bigger “cultural force” than ever.
There have been challenges as well, particularly as the pandemic has affected supply chains. Tishgart said the company has spent much of the year “chasing product,” but it benefited from using a variety of materials and working with a variety of manufacturers.
“This is one thing that upfront made for a more complicated supply chain,” she said. “But it’s a strong saving grace now, because we’re not reliant on one factory or one part of the world.”
The funding, Tishgart said, will allow Great Jones to invest in further product development and production. And while there are plenty of other cookware startups raising funding, she said that “it’s motivating, it’s exciting to see how other people interpret it” and that the different brands “all speak to different customers.”
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Cellwize raises $32M to help carriers and their partners adopt and run 5G services
As 5G slowly moves from being a theoretical to an active part of the coverage map for the mobile industry — if not for consumers themselves — companies that are helping carriers make the migration less painful and less costly are seeing a boost of attention.
In the latest development, Cellwize, a startup that’s built a platform to automate and optimize data for carriers to run 5G networks within multi-vendor environments, has raised $32 million — funding that it will use to continue expanding its business into more geographies and investing in R&D to bring more capabilities to its flagship CHIME platform.
The funding is notable because of the list of strategic companies doing the investing, as well as because of the amount of traction that Cellwize has had to date.
The Series B round is being co-led Intel Capital and Qualcomm Ventures LLC, and Verizon Ventures (which is part of Verizon, which also owns TechCrunch by way of Verizon Media) and Samsung Next, with existing shareholders also participating. That list includes Deutsche Telekom and Sonae, a Portuguese conglomerate that owns multiple brands in retail, financial services, telecoms and more.
That backing underscores Cellwize’s growth. The company — which is based in Israel with operations also in Dallas and Singapore — says it currently provides services to some 40 carriers (including Verizon, Telefonica and more), covering 16 countries, 3 million cell sites, and 800 million subscribers.
Cellwize is not disclosing its valuation but it has raised $56.5 million from investors to date.
5G holds a lot of promise for carriers, their vendors, handset makers and others in the mobile ecosystem: the belief is that faster and more efficient speeds for wireless data will unlock a new wave of services and usage and revenues from services for consumers and business, covering not just people but IoT networks, too.
Notwithstanding the concerns some have had with health risks, despite much of that theory being debunked over the years, one of the technical issues with 5G has been implementing it.
Migrating can be costly and laborious, not least because carriers need to deploy more equipment at closer distances, and because they will likely be running hybrid systems in the Radio Access Network (RAN, which controls how devices interface with carriers’ networks); and they will be managing legacy networks (eg, 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE) alongside 5G, and working with multiple vendors within 5G itself.
Cellwize positions its CHIME platform — which works as an all-in-one tool that leverages AI and other tech in the cloud, and covers configuring new 5G networks, optimizing and monitoring data on them, and also providing APIs for third-party developers to integrate with it — as the bridge to letting carriers operate in the more open-shop approach that marks the move to 5G.
“While large companies have traditionally been more dominant in the RAN market, 5G is changing the landscape for how the entire mobile industry operates,” said Ofir Zemer, Cellwize’s CEO. “These traditional vendors usually offer solutions which plug into their own equipment, while not allowing third parties to connect, and this creates a closed and limited ecosystem. [But] the large operators also are not interested in being tied to one vendor: not technology-wise and not on the business side – as they identify this as an inhibitor to their own innovation.”
Cellwize provides an open platform that allows a carrier to plan, deploy and manage the RAN in that kind of multi-vendor ecosystem. “We have seen an extremely high demand for our solution and as 5G rollouts continue to increase globally, we expect the demand for our product will only continue to grow,” he added.
Previously, Zemer said that carriers would build their own products internally to manage data in the RAN, but these “struggle to support 5G.”
The competition element is not just lip service: the fact that both Intel and Qualcomm — competitors in key respects — are investing in this round underscores how Cellwize sees itself as a kind of Switzerland in mobile architecture. It also underscores that both view easy and deep integrations with its tech as something worth backing, given the priorities of each of their carrier customers.
“Over the last decade, Intel technologies have been instrumental in enabling the communications industry to transform networks with an agile and scalable infrastructure,” said David Flanagan, VP and senior MD at Intel Capital, in a statement. “With the challenges in managing the high complexity of radio access networks, we are encouraged by the opportunity in front of Cellwize to explore ways to utilize their AI-based automation capabilities as Intel brings the benefits of cloud architectures to service provider and private networks.”
“Qualcomm is at the forefront of 5G expansion, creating a robust ecosystem of technologies that will usher in the new era of connectivity,” added Merav Weinryb, Senior Director of Qualcomm Israel Ltd. and MD of Qualcomm Ventures Israel and Europe. “As a leader in RAN automation and orchestration, Cellwize plays an important role in 5G deployment. We are excited to support Cellwize through the Qualcomm Ventures’ 5G global ecosystem fund as they scale and expedite 5G adoption worldwide.”
And that is the key point. Right now there are precious few 5G deployments, and sometimes, when you read some the less shiny reports of 5G rollouts, you might be forgiven for feeling like it’s more marketing than reality at this point. But Zemer — who is not a co-founder (both of them have left the company) but has been with it since 2013, almost from the start — is sitting in on the meetings with carriers, and he believes that it won’t be long before all that tips.
“Within the next five years, approximately 75% of mobile connections will be powered by 5G, and 2.6 billion 5G mobile subscriptions will be serving 65% of the world’s population,” he said. “While 5G technology holds a tremendous amount of promise, the reality is that it is also hyper-complex, comprised of multiple technologies, architectures, bands, layers, and RAN/vRAN players. We are working with network operators around the world to help them overcome the challenges of rolling out and managing these next generation networks, by automating their entire RAN processes, allowing them to successfully deliver 5G to their customers.”
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Slintel grabs $4.2M seed to grow sales intelligence platform
As the pandemic rages on, companies are looking for an edge when it comes to sales. Having the right data about the customers most likely to convert can be a huge boost right now. Slintel, an early-stage startup building a sales intelligence tool, announced a $4.2 million seed round today.
The investment was led by Accel with help from Sequoia Capital India and existing investor Stellaris Venture Partners. The company reports it has now raised $5.7 million, including a pre-seed round last year.
Deepak Anchala, company founder and CEO, says that while sales and marketing teams are trying to target a broad market, most of the time their emails and other forms of communication with customers fall flat. As a sales person in previous startups, Eightfold and Tracxn, this was a problem Anchala experienced first hand. He believed with data, he could improve this, and he started Slintel to build a tool to provide the sales data that he was missing in these previous positions.
“We focus on helping our customers solve that [lack of data] by identifying people with high buying intent. So we are able to tell sales and marketing teams, for example, who is most likely to buy your product or your service, and who is most likely to buy your product today, as opposed to two months or six months from now,” Anchala explained.
They do this by looking at signals that might not be obvious, but which let sales teams know key information about these companies and their likelihood of buying soon. He says that every company leaves a technology footprint. This could be data from SEC filings, annual reports, job openings and so forth.
“In today’s world there is an enormous amount of footprint left online when a company uses a certain product. So what our algorithms do is we map that at scale for about 15 million companies to all the products that they’re using from the different sources we are able to identify — and we track it all from week to week,” he said.
The company has 45 employees today and expects to double that number by the end of 2021. As he builds the company, especially as an immigrant founder, Anchala wants to build a diverse and inclusive organization.
“I think one of the key successes for companies today is having diversity. We have a global workforce, so we have a workforce in the U.S. and India and we want to capitalize on that. In the next phase of hires we are looking at hiring more diverse candidates, more female employees and people of different nationalities,” he said.
The company, which was founded in 2018, and emerged from stealth last year, has amassed 100 enterprise customers and has seen most of the customers actually come on board this year as COVID has forced companies to find ways to be more efficient with their sales processes.
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Ushur raises $25M for its no-code platform to build customer communication flows
No-code is the name of the game in enterprise software, and today a startup called Ushur that has built a platform for any business to create its own AI-based customer communication flows with no coding required is announcing some funding to help fuel its growth.
The startup has picked up $25 million in a Series B round of funding led by Third Point Ventures (the fund founded and led by activist investor and hedge fund supremo Daniel Loeb), with previous investor 8VC (Joe Lonsdale’s fund) also participating. It brings the total raised by Ushur to $36 million.
Ushur is not disclosing its valuation, but it’s growing fast. As a mark of how it is doing, the startup is currently focusing on the insurance sector (a big one when it comes to speaking with customers and amassing data during the conversation) and it counts Aetna, Irish Life, Tower Insurance and Unum among its customers building chatbots (dubbed Virtual Customer Assistants by Ushur), automated email response flows (branded SmartMail) and tools to help customer service agents serve people more quickly (FlowBuilder). It has APIs for those who need them, with integrations into Slack, ServiceNow, Salesforce and Jira, and works in 60 languages (not just English).
It’s now widening the net to also target financial services and telecoms companies, with the plan being to use the funding primarily to expand Ushur’s sales and marketing to keep growing its business after seeing a rise in demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, CEO and co-founder Simha Sadasiva said in an interview.
As companies — not just e-commerce or other online companies, but all companies — have turned to having more virtual interactions with their customers, solutions like Ushur’s have come into their own.
That’s been especially true for companies that are not “tech” at their core. They may lack the in-house talent and other resources to build and run tech-based services from the ground up, but at the same time also are looking for solutions that don’t involve the cost (and time) of working with third-party system integrators to implement them. This is the case, Sadasiva said, with RPA (robotic process automation) solutions, which he described as a competing approach that typically requires technical expertise or systems integrators to create and implement software.
Enter no-code: solutions — software platforms really — that are built with all the nitty gritty coding behind the scenes, and easy-to-use interfaces at the front for users to knit together programs, query databases and run calculations without needing to know how to do these at the coding level, at a typically lower cost.
“For every dollar you spend on RPA tool you have to spend $3-4 more to deploy it so we are very competitive,” Sadasiva said. One email service developed by Irish Life for its agents reduced typical enquiry processing times from between 3 hours – 2.5 days to “less than a second” with 40% fewer resources, the company claims.
To be clear, these are not off-the-shelf pieces of software, but flows that are customised by the customers based on what they need and then powered by natural language processing (which is also baked in behind the scenes).
“We have hundreds of templates already created,” Sadasiva said. “But the key thing is that they are like Lego pieces, or building blocks. We provide the assembly kit to make lots of new shapes and objects.”
Although there are a lot of companies marketing themselves as no-code and low-code, and indeed there is a big demand for more productivity and communication tools that don’t require you to be a programmer to use them but give you the flexibility of building what you need, not what a software company thinks you need, Ushur is finding a lot of traction with investors and customers.
“They’re right at the intersection of some of the biggest developments in enterprise software,” said Third Point Ventures Managing Partner Robert Schwartz in a statement. “Automation that feels personal yet delivers tremendous efficiencies to the enterprise. No-code design that allows customers to get to deployment and benefit easily and incredibly fast. Customer experiences that actually favor the customer. And they’re doing an incredible job with execution.”
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Extra Crunch Live: Join Greylock’s Asheem Chandna today at 3pm EST/12pm PST on the future of enterprise and cybersecurity investing
Yes, there is an election, but that’s getting pretty boring at this point. What’s far more interesting is the future of enterprise and cybersecurity startups, markets where companies are dumping billions of dollars in the wake of the largest change in office work in decades. Old notions are being discarded, new ideas are in — and all that portends huge potential opportunities for ambitious founders.
That’s why I am so excited to be hosting the next edition of our Extra Crunch Live interview series with the superlative enterprise venture capitalist Asheem Chandna of Greylock. We’re live in about two hours today at 3 p.m. EST/11 a.m. PST/8pm GMT. Details to join are below the fold, and if you don’t have an Extra Crunch membership, click through to signup in advance.
For nearly two decades, Asheem Chandna has been investing in enterprise and security startups at Greylock, with massive investment wins in Palo Alto Networks, AppDynamics and Sumo Logic. These days, he continues to invest in cybersecurity with companies like Awake Security and Abnormal Security, data platforms like Rubrik and Delphix, and the stealthy search engine company Neeva. As a leading early-stage investor and mentor in the space, he’s seen a multitude of companies transition from inception to product-market fit to IPO.
We’re going to be talking about the current landscape for enterprise and cybersecurity startups and then also talk about company building in these contexts, an area that Chandna has been particularly focused over his career. Plus, as always with ECL, we’ll be taking questions from you, our always inquisitive audience.
So come prepared for a great conversation, and join us shortly for another ECL live broadcast.
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Ayar raises $35M for optical interconnect tech to overcome computing bottlenecks in the CPU
The race is on to build more efficient chip technology for faster and less power-intensive computing, and today an innovative startup that’s built one solution based on in-package optical interconnect (optical I/O) technology is announcing a round of growth funding from a number of strategic investors that speaks to how its approach is getting traction.
Ayar Labs, which makes chip solutions based on optical networking principals — architecture that promises both faster computing speeds and far less power consumption (and heat) in the process — has picked up $35 million in a Series B round of funding. Co-led by Downing Ventures and BlueSky Capital, the round also includes Applied Ventures (the VC arm of Applied Materials), Castor Ventures and SGInnovate (the Singaporean government’s deep tech fund), with participation also from existing investors Founders Fund, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Intel Capital, Lockheed Martin Ventures and Playground Global.
Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs, style=”letter-spacing: -0.1px; font-size: 1.125rem;”> said that the funding will be used to continue developing its product as well as working on further commercialization. “The main application area for our technology is next-generation computing, anywhere that there is massive movement of data,” he said.
That includes aerospace and government applications, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, telecoms and cloud applications, and lidar for self-driving car and other autonomous systems. Currently Wuischpard said that most of Ayar’s work is in the areas of AI and HPC — it’s a key partner of Intel’s in its work on AI computers for Darpa (see here and here) — and in telecoms/cloud.
Ayar’s focus on optical technology — specifically using silicon photonics and processing to build an optical communication device that can be built into a CPU — is emerging as a key area for chipmakers. Just last week, Marvell announced that it would buy Inphi, an optical networking specialist, for $10 billion.
As Wuischpard describes it, the big breakthrough that Ayar has brought to bear has been bringing down the size and scale of the technology to work within a computer’s core chip architecture, its CPU, which impacts and controls memory, control unit and processing/logic, helping to speed up computing for the most demanding applications.
(The company was co-founded by Mark Wade, Chen Sun, Vladimir Stojanovic and Alexandra Wright-Gladstein based on work at MIT, and they brought in Wuischpard, an engineer by training and also a veteran exec from Intel, to help figure out how to build a commercialised business around that.)
“Optics has been around for a long time,” he points out, first in subsea cabling, then between data centers and then inside the data center. “We think of ourselves as the last or first mile, bringing optical tech into the CPU.”
As he describes it, the company has devised a new type of modulator to turn electrons into photons, a “microing modulator” as he calls it. “There have been 1,000 research papers on this, but it’s typically difficult to manufacture and operate over a wide range of temperatures, and this is where a lot of our patents come in, to develop that into a single chiplet,” he said. The amount of bandwidth the tech can handle, 2 terabits/second, “would fill a whole server, but we are doing it in 5×9 millimeters.”
He adds that the opportunities here are such that there are others also working on the same kind of technology. “There are bigger companies and one or two smaller ones, but they are all still a couple of years behind us in commercialization,” he said. “It’s one thing to build one, versus a million.” Having GLOBALFOUNDRIES as an investor — it’s also fabricating hardware for Ayar — is key in this regard.
The company seems like it would be a key acquisition target, I pointed out, not least because of the race for having ownership of technology that can give a company a leading edge over another, but also because of the trend of consolidation in the chip industry. (Intel’s acquisition of Habana Labs also underscores the interest it has in optical tech.)
Wuischpard laughs a little ironically and says that COVID-19 has been a “help” in this regard: acquisitions have slowed down, giving the startup more time and less pressure to sell up.
“Ayar Labs represents the future of interconnects which have eventual applicability to every electronic device on earth”, said Warren Rogers, partner and head of Ventures at Downing Ventures, in a statement. “We have the highest confidence that when their optical I/O technology is applied to computing, the industry will finally break away from Moore’s Law and redefine the boundaries of computing.”
“We’ve been an investor in Ayar Labs since the beginning and have been looking for opportunities to increase our ownership in the company” added Madison Hamman, managing director of BlueSky Capital. “We are very excited about Ayar Labs and believe in their patented technology and execution of a plan that makes it a core building block of future computing systems.”
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