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Macro just raised $4.3M to make your never-ending Zoom calls more useful
In this pandemic world, in-person meetings are a thing of the past. Most meetings these days are done via video conference, and no company has capitalized on the shift quite like Zoom.
Macro, a new FirstMark-backed company, is looking to capitalize on the capitalization. To Capitalism!
Sorry. Let’s get back on track. Macro is a native app that employs the Zoom SDK to add depth and analysis to your daily work meetings.
There are two modes. The first is essentially focused on collaboration, which turns the usual Zoom meeting into a light overlay, where folks are shown in small, circular bubbles at the top of the screen. This mode is to be used when folks are working on the same project, such as a wireframe or a collaborative document. The UI is meant to kind of fade into the background, allowing users to click on taps or objects behind other attendees’ bubbles.
The other mode is an Arena or Stadium mode, which is meant for hands-on meetings and presentations. It has two distinct features. The first is an Airtime feature, which shows how much different participants have ‘had the floor’ for the past five minutes, thirty minutes, or in total during the meeting. The second is a text-input system on the right side of the UI that lets people enter Questions, Takeaways, Action Items and Insights from the call.
Macro automatically adds that text to a Google Doc, and formats it into something instantly shareable.
There is no extra hassle involved in getting Macro up and running. When a user installs Macro on their computer, they’re instantly loaded into Macro each time they click a Zoom link, whether it’s in an email, a calendar invite, or in Slack.
Macro cofounders Ankith Harathi and John Keck explained to TechCrunch that this isn’t your usual enterprise play. The product is free to use and, with the Google Doc export, is still useful even as a single-player product. The Google Doc is auto-formatted with Macro messaging, explaining that it was compiled by the company with a link to the product.
In other words, Harathi and Keck want to see individuals within organizations get Macro for themselves and let the product grow organically within an organization, rather than trying to sell to large teams right off the bat.
“A lot of collaborative productivity SaaS applications need your whole team to switch over to get any value out of them,” said Harathi. “That’s a pretty big barrier, especially since so many new products are coming out and teams are constantly switching and that creates a lot of noise. So our plan was to ensure one person can use this and get value out of it, and nobody else is affected. They get the better interface and other team members will want to switch over without any requirement to do so.”
This is possible in large part to the cost of the Zoom SDK, which is $0. The heavy lifting of audio and video is handled by Zoom, as is the high compute cost. This means that Macro can offer its product for free at a relatively low cost to the company as it tries to grow.
Of course, there is some risk involved with building on an existing platform. Namely, one Zoom platform change could wreak havoc on Macro’s product or model. However, the team has plans to expand beyond Zoom to other video conferencing platforms like Google, BlueJeans, WebEx, etc. Roelof Botha told TechCrunch back in May that businesses built on other platforms have a much greater chance of success when there is platform across that sector, as there certainly is here.
And there seems to be some competition for Macro in particular — for one, Microsoft Teams just added some new features to its video conferencing UI to relieve brain fatigue and Hello is looking to offer app-free video chat via browser.
Macro is also looking to add additional functionality to the platform, such as the ability to integrate an agenda into the meeting and break up the accompanying Google doc by agenda item.
The company has raised a total of $4.8 million since launch, including a new $4.3 million seed round from FirstMark Capital, General Catalyst and Underscore VC. Other investors include NextView Ventures, Jason Warner (CTO GitHub), Julie Zhuo (former VP Design Facebook), Harry Stebbings (Founder/Host of 20minVC), Adam Nash (Dropbox, Wealthfront, LinkedIn), Clark Valberg (CEO Invision), among others.
Macro has more than 25,000 users and has been a part of 50,000 meetings to date.
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NS1 nets $40M ‘true coronavirus fundraise’ amidst surging customer demand
Apparently, the internet is still popular.
With the novel coronavirus marooning people at home for work and play, those “tubes” carrying our data back and forth have become ever more important to our livelihoods. Yet while we often as consumers think of the internet as what we buy from a service provider like Spectrum or TechCrunch’s parent company Verizon, the reality is that businesses need key network services like DNS and IP Address Management in order to optimize their performance and costs.
That’s where New York City-based NS1 has done particularly well. My colleague Ron Miller first covered the company and its founding story for us two years ago, as part of our in-depth look at the New York City enterprise software ecosystem. Fast forward two years, and NS1 couldn’t be doing better: in just the first quarter of this year, new customer bookings were up 159% year over year according to the company, and it currently serves 600 customers.
That traction in a critical infrastructure segment of the market attracted the attention of even more growth capital. Today, the company announced that Energy Impact Partners, which has traditionally invested in sustainable energy startups but has recently expanded into software and internet services, is leading a $40 million Series D round into the startup, bringing its total fundraising to date to $125 million. The round was led by Shawn Cherian, a partner at EIP who just joined the firm at the beginning of June (nothing like getting a deal done your first day on the job).
Kris Beevers, cofounder and CEO of NS1, said that COVID-19 has had a huge impact on the startup’s growth the past few months. “For example, [a] large software customer of ours [said] that our number two KPI for our coronavirus task force is network performance and saturation as managed by NS1.” Customers have made network management significantly higher priority since degradations in latency and reliability can dramatically limit a service’s viability for stay-at-home workers and consumers.
NS1’s Founding Team
“The quip that I have used a few times recently is digital transformation initiatives have compressed from five or ten years down to months or a year at this point. Everybody’s just having to accelerate all of these things,” Beevers said.
The company has doubled down on its key tools like DNS and IP management, but it has also launched new features using feedback from customers. “For example, we launched a VPN steering capability to help our customers optimize their VPN footprints because obviously those suddenly are more important than they’ve ever been,” he said. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) allow employees to login to their company’s network as if they were physically present in the office.
While NS1 had money in the bank and increasing appetite from customers, the company was also starting a fundraise in the middle of a global pandemic. Beevers said that it was hard at first to get momentum. “April was a dead zone,” he said. “All the VCs were sort of turtle up.”
The tide began to turn by early May as VCs got a handle on their portfolios and started to survey where the opportunities were in the market given the lessons of the early days of COVID-19. “We actually started to get a huge amount of inbound interest in early May timeframe,” he said.
“Call it like a true coronavirus fundraise,” Beevers explained. It was “end to end like less than a month getting to know [Cherian] to term sheet, and all virtual. Partner meeting was all virtual, diligence all virtual. Not a single in-person interaction in the whole fundraising process, and that was the case with everybody else who was involved in the round too, so all the folks that didn’t in the end write the winning term sheet.”
What made Cherian stand out was Energy Impact Partners’ portfolio, which touches on energy, industry and IoT — sectors that are increasingly being digitized and need the kind of internet infrastructure services that NS1 provides. Also, Cherian led a round into Packet, which is a fellow NYC enterprise company that sold to Equinox for more than $300 million. Packet’s founder Zac Smith and Beevers worked together at Voxel and are part of the so-called “Voxel mafia” of infrastructure engineers in Manhattan.
With the new funding, NS1 intends to continue to expand its traction in the network layer while also doubling down on new markets like IoT.
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Paige, the computational pathology startup targeting cancer, closes a Series B at $70M
Paige, the startup that spun out of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and launched in 2018 to help advance cancer research and care by applying AI to better understand cancer pathology, is today announcing a milestone in its growth story: it has raised a further $20 million from Goldman Sachs and Healthcare Venture Partners, closing out its Series B at $70 million.
Leo Grady, Paige’s CEO, says the funding will go toward several areas.
It will be used for hiring; to continue expanding its partnerships with biopharmaceutical companies (deals that have not yet been made public); and to continue investing in clinical work, based around algorithms it has built and trained using more than 25 million pathology slides in MSK’s archive, plus IP related to the AI-based computational pathology that underpins Paige’s work. It will also be used to help it expand to the U.K. and Europe. Paige has a CE mark to be used clinically in both regions and the startup already has beta sites in the U.K. and EU, but it hasn’t had a fully commercial launch in either region, Grady said.
Paige — which has now raised more than $95 million with other investors, including Breyer Capital, MSK and Kenan Turnacioglu — is keeping quiet about its valuation. But for some context, we noted that it was around $208 million when the first tranche of the round was announced — $45 million in December 2019, with a further $5 million in April. It attracted this latest $20 million in part because business has been strong, Grady noted. As a result, despite it being a generally tough climate for raising money right now, Paige didn’t face those challenges.
“The climate in which Goldman made its initial investment” — the $5 million round in April — “was when COVID-19 had hit hard and they were realising the magnitude,” Grady said. “They wanted to see how things played out for Paige in the economy. But the way it has been going has been encouraging.”
Indeed, a lot of attention these days is focused around the current public health crisis making its way around the world in the form of COVID-19, and the knock-on effects that it is having across the economy and socially. Paige’s growth in that context has been interesting.
We’re still in the early stages of understanding COVID-19 and how it interacts with other conditions (such as cancer) — and it’s not an area that Paige is directly exploring in its work. But in the meantime, its platform — based around digitised slides — has come into its own for clinicians and others who can no longer regularly physically visit laboratories.
Paige’s enterprise imaging system — the company was co-founded by Dr Thomas Fuchs, known as the “father of computational pathology” and is the director of Computational Pathology in The Warren Alpert Center for Digital and Computational Pathology at Memorial Sloan Kettering, as well as a professor of machine learning at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences; and Dr David Klimstra, chairman of the department of pathology at MSK — allows users to view digital slides remotely, and while all hardware manufacturers today have digital viewers, these are proprietary, tied to those scanners and “not built for high performance,” Grady noted.
Paige’s platform allows its users not only to share research and primary data without physically sending slides around, but to use high performance software built to “read” the data in a more comprehensive way than clinicians and researchers would otherwise be able to do. That initially has been applied to work in prostrate and breast cancers but is now also being explored around other cancers as well, Grady said. “We’re adding in information to the workflow, boosting the confidence and quality of data. The first piece [the platform and the slides] enables the second piece.”
The Goldman Sachs investment is coming from the financial services giant’s merchant banking division, and as part of it, David Castelblanco, MD at Goldman Sachs, has joined Paige’s board of directors.
“We have been very impressed with the company and its pace of development,” he said in a statement. “We are excited to increase our commitment to support Leo, Thomas and the Paige team’s transformative work with artificial intelligence and machine learning in the cancer field.”
“We initially invested in Paige recognizing the potential of their products to add significant value to the industry and impact the future of cancer care,” added Jeffrey C. Lightcap, senior managing director of Healthcare Venture Partners. “After seeing Paige make tremendous progress in such a short period, we added to our investment to further accelerate their growth.”
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UiPath reels in another $225M as valuation soars to $10.2B
Last year, Gartner found that robotic process automation (RPA) is the fastest growing category in enterprise software. So perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that UiPath, a leading startup in the space, announced a $225 million Series E today on an eye-popping $10.2 billion valuation.
Alkeon Capital led the round with help from Accel, Coatue, Dragoneer, IVP, Madrona Venture Group, Sequoia Capital, Tencent, Tiger Global, Wellington and T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $1.202 billion, according to the company.
It’s worth noting that the presence of institutional investors like Wellington is often a signal that a company could be thinking about going public at some point. CFO Ashim Gupta didn’t shy away from a future IPO, saying that co-founder and CEO Daniel Dines has discussed the idea in recent months and what it would take to become a public company.
“We’re evaluating the market conditions and I wouldn’t say this to be vague, but we haven’t chosen a day that says on this day we’re going public. We’re really in the mindset that says we should be prepared when the market is ready, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s in the next 12-18 months,” he said.
One of the factors that’s attracting so much investor interest is its growth rate, which Gupta says is continuing on an upward trajectory, even during the pandemic as companies look for ways to automate. In fact, he reports that recurring revenue has grown from $100 million to $400 million over the last 24 months.
RPA helps companies add a level of automation to manual legacy processes, bringing modernization without having to throw out existing systems. This approach appeals to a lot of companies not willing to rip and replace to get some of the advantages of digital transformation. The pandemic has only served to push this kind of technology to the forefront as companies look for ways to automate more quickly.
The company raised some eyebrows in the fall when it announced it was laying off 400 employees just six months after raising $568 million on a $7 billion valuation, but Gupta said that the layoffs represented a kind of reset for the company after it had grown rapidly in the prior two years.
“From 2017 to 2019, we invested in a lot of different areas. I think in October, the way we thought about it was, we really started taking a pause as we became more confident in our strategy, and we reassessed areas that we wanted to cut back on, and that drove those layoff decisions in October.
As for why the startup needs all that cash, Gupta says in a growing market, it is spending to grab as much market share as it can and that takes a lot of investment. Plus, it can’t hurt to have plenty of money in the bank as a hedge against economic uncertainty during the pandemic. Gupta notes that UiPath could also be looking at strategic acquisitions in the months ahead to fill in holes in the product roadmap more rapidly.
While the company doesn’t expect to go through the kind of growth it went through in 2017 and 2018, it will continue to hire, and Gupta says the leadership team is committed to building a diverse team at all levels of the organization. “We want to have the best people, but we really do believe that having the best people and the best team means that diversity has to be a part of that,” he said.
The company was founded in 2005 in Bucharest, outsourcing automation libraries and software. In 2015, it began the pivot to RPA and has been growing in leaps and bounds ever since. When we spoke to the startup in September 2018 around its $225 million Series C investment (which eventually ballooned to $265 million), it had 1,800 customers. Today it has 7,000 and is growing.
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A recapitalization reckoning
If you’re an angel who invested in a startup that was meant to go public in 2014, you might be getting a little bit impatient. High-risk, high-reward investing has lost its shine in this environment: the stock market is a mess these days, and you want your cash back.
Enter recapitalization events, where startups restructure their entire cap table to squeeze out old investors, bring on new ones and shift the way equity and debt is managed. For investors, it’s a killer way to enter a company on friendlier terms than normal (read: desperation), and a nice way to get liquidity on a startup you’re betting on.
For founders, it’s rarely good news, as departing investors is not a metric they’re going to add to the pitch deck. As one investor said on background, the spur of coronavirus-related recapitalization events shows “hella dilution for desperate times.”
That’s what makes Workhuman’s transparency with its recent recapitalization event all the more enticing.
Last year, the human-resources platform brought in $580 million in revenue from customers like LinkedIn, Cisco, J&J and other clients. In April, business grew 40%. Co-founder and CEO Eric Mosley says business has grown five times in size since the company pulled back from its 2014 plans to IPO. Workhuman hasn’t raised a single venture round since 2004 (and doesn’t plan to any time soon).
Being conservative has paid off; although Workhuman has operated for nearly two decades, Mosley says he thinks the company is still at the “tip of the iceberg.” The company recently had a recapitalization event to sell the stakes of its earliest investors, who cut a $200,000 check more than 20 years ago.
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LogDNA announces $25M Series C investment and new CEO
LogDNA, a startup that helps DevOps teams dig through their log data to find issues, announced a $25 million Series C investment today along with the promotion of industry vet Tucker Callaway to CEO.
Let’s start with the funding. Emergence Capital led the round with participation from previous investors Initialized Capital and Providence Equity. New investors TI Platform Management, Radianx Capital, Top Tier Capital and Trend Forward Capital also joined the round. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $60 million, according to the company.
Current CEO and co-founder Chris Nguyen says the company provides a centralized way to manage log data for DevOps teams with an eye toward troubleshooting issues and getting applications out faster.
New CEO Callaway, whose background includes executive stints at Chef and Sauce Labs, came on board in January as president and CRO with an eye toward moving him into the top spot when the time was right. Nguyen, who will move to the role of chief strategy officer, says everyone was on board with the move, and he was ready to step back into a more technical role.
“When we closed the latest round of funding and looked at what the journey forward looks like, there was just a lot of trust and confidence from my co-founder, the board of directors, all of the investors on the team that Tucker is the right leader,” Nguyen said.
As Callaway takes over in the midst of the pandemic, the company is in reasonably good shape, with 3,000 customers using the product and a strategic partnership with IBM to provide logging services for IBM Cloud. Having $25 million in additional capital certainly helps, but he sees a company that’s still growing and intends to keep hiring.
As he brings more people on board to lead the company of approximately 100 employees, he says that diversity and inclusion is something he is passionate about and takes very seriously. For starters, he plans to put the entire company through unconscious bias training. They have also hired someone to review their hiring practices to date and they are bringing in a consultant to help them design more diverse and inclusive hiring practices and hold them accountable to that.
The company was a member of the same Y Combinator winter 2015 cohort as GitLab. It actually started out building a marketing technology product, only to realize they had built a powerful logging tool on the back end. That logging tool became the basis for LogDNA .
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Colvin raises $15M to rethink the flower supply chain
At first glance, Colvin — which recently announced that it has raised a $15 million Series B — might look like just another flower and plant delivery company, but co-founder and CEO Andres Cester said the startup has a much grander vision.
“We were born with the ambition to be the company that would redesign global flower trade,” he said.
Apparently, when Cester and his co-founder/COO Sergi Bastardas started researching the flower supply chain, they found an industry that was both “fragmented” in terms of growers and sellers, but also surprisingly centralized, with the Aalsmeer Flower Auction in the Netherlands accounting for 77% of all flower bulbs sold globally.
With all the middlemen, Cester said flowers end up being more expensive (with the growers getting a smaller share of the overall payment), and it takes longer for the flowers to reach the consumer.
So the startup created a marketplace where consumers are buying flowers straight from the growers, with Colvin as the only intermediary. That results in average savings of 50% to 100% compared to online competitors, Cester said. (For example, the bouquets featured on the Colvin homepage all cost about €33 or €34).
And while the flower business is hurting overall due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bastardas said consumers are turning to online options, with Colvin seeing a fourfold sales increase year-over-year, and delivery volumes worth $1 million in a single day. The challenge, he said, has been making sure to deliver those flowers within the promised time window.
Image Credits: Colvin
Cester said Colvin started by selling directly to consumers because it was a good way to build the supply from growers, and that consumer sales should become a profitable, “cash-generating business.” However, the company’s big focus moving forward is building out its sales to flower wholesalers, who in turn sell to the retailers.
“We’re envisioning the B2B part of the business is going to drive most of the returns and valuation,” Bastardas added.
Colvin was founded in Spain and currently operates in Spain, Italy, Germany and Portugal. There are no plans to come to the U.S. anytime soon, but Cester said, “We believe that if we really want to … redesign how the flower industry works, we’re going to have to land in U.S. sooner or later.”
The startup has now raised a total of $27 million. The new round was led by Italian investment fund Milano Investment Partners, with participation from P101 sgr and Samaipata.
And if you’re wondering about the name, Bastardas said the company was named for civil rights pioneer Claudette Colvin, who was arrested several months before Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person.
It’s an incongruous choice for a flower startup, but Bastardas said the founders took inspiration from Colvin’s story and the idea that “from several small actions, we can really change an industry.”
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PQShield raises $7M for quantum-ready cryptographic security solutions
A deep tech startup building cryptographic solutions to secure hardware, software, and communications systems for a future when quantum computers may render many current cybersecurity approaches useless is today emerging out of stealth mode with $7 million in funding and a mission to make cryptographic security something that cannot be hackable, even with the most sophisticated systems, by building systems today that will continue to be usable in a post-quantum future.
PQShield (PQ being short for “post-quantum”), a spin out from Oxford University, is being backed in a seed round led by Kindred Capital, with participation also Crane Venture Partners, Oxford Sciences Innovation and various angel investors, including Andre Crawford-Brunt, Deutsche Bank’s former global head of equities.
PQShield was founded in 2018, and its time in stealth has not been in vain.
The startup claims to have the UK’s highest concentration of cryptography PhDs outside academia and classified agencies, and it is one of the biggest contributors to the NIST cybersecurity framework (alongside academic institutions and huge tech companies), which is working on creating new cryptographic standards, which take into account the fact that quantum computing will likely make quick work of breaking down the standards that are currently in place.
“The scale is massive,” Dr Ali El Kaafarani, a research fellow at Oxford’s Mathematical Institute and former engineer at Hewlett-Packard Labs, who is the founder and CEO of PQShield said of that project. “For the first time we are changing the whole of public key infrastructure.”
And according to El Kaafarani, the startup has customers — companies that build hardware and software services, or run communications systems that deal with sensitive information and run the biggest risks from being hacked.
They include entities in the financial and government sectors that it’s not naming, as well as its first OEM customer, Bosch. El Kaafarani said in an interview that it is also in talks with at least one major communications and messaging provider exploring more security for end-to-end encryption on messaging networks. Other target applications could include keyless cars, connected IoT devices, and cloud services.
The gap in the market the PQShield is aiming to address is the fact that while there are already a number of companies exploring the cutting edge of cryptographic security in the market — they include large tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft, Hub Security, Duality, another startup out of the UK focused on post-quantum cryptography called Post Quantum and a number of others — the concern is that quantum computing will be utilised to crack even the most sophisticated cryptography such as the RSA and Elliptic Curve cryptographic standards.
This has not been much of a threat so far since quantum computers are still not widely available and used, but there have been a number of signs of a breakthrough on the horizon.
El Kaafarani says that PQShield is the first startup to approach that predicament with a multi-pronged solution aimed at a variety of use cases, including solutions that encompass current cryptographic standards and provide a migration path the next generation of how they will look — meaning, they can be commercially deployed today, even without quantum computers being a commercial reality, but in preparation for that.
“Whatever we encrypt now can be harvested, and once we have a fully functioning quantum computer people can use that to get back to the data and the sensitive information,” he said.
For hardware applications, it’s designed a System on Chip (SoC) solution that will be licensed to hardware manufacturers (Bosch being the first OEM). For software applications, there is an SDK that secures messaging and is protected by “post-quantum algorithms” based on a secure, Signal-derived protocol.
Thinking about and building for the full spectrum of applications is central to PQShield’s approach, he added. “In security it’s important to understand the whole ecosystem since everything is about connected components.”
Some sectors in the tech world have been especially negatively impacted by the coronavirus and its consequences, a predicament that has been exacerbated by uncertainties over the future of the global economy.
I asked El Kaafarani if that translated to a particularly tricky time to raise money as a deep tech startup, given that deep tech companies so often work on long-term problems that may not have immediate commercial outcomes.
Interestingly, he said that wasn’t the case.
“We talked to VCs that were interested in deep tech to begin with, which made the discussion a lot easier,” he said. “And the fact is that we’re a security company, and that is one of the areas that is doing well. Everything has become digitised, and we have all become more heavily reliant on our digital connections. We ultimately help make the digital world more secure. There are people who understand that, and so it wasn’t too difficult to talk to them and understand the importance of this company.”
Indeed, Chrysanthos Chrysanthou, partner at Kindred Capital, echoed that sentiment:
“With some of the brightest minds in cryptography, mathematics and engineering, and boasting world-class software and hardware solutions, PQShield is uniquely positioned to lead the charge in protecting businesses from one of the most profound threats to their future,” he said. “We couldn’t be happier to support the team as it works to set a new standard for information security and defuse risks resulting from the rise of quantum.”
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SetSail raises raises $7M to change how sales teams are compensated
Most sales teams earn a commission after a sale closes, but nothing prior to that. Yet there are a variety of signals along the way that indicate the sales process is progressing, and SetSail, a startup from some former Google engineers, is using machine learning to figure out what those signals are, and how to compensate salespeople as they move along the path to a sale, not just after they close the deal.
Today, the startup announced a $7 million investment led by Wing Venture Capital with help from Operator Collective and Team8. Under the terms of the deal, Leyla Seka from Operator will be joining the board. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $11 million, according to the company.
CEO and co-founder Haggai Levi says his company is based on the idea that commission alone is not a good way to measure sales success, and that it is in fact a lagging indicator. “We came up with a different approach. We use machine learning to create progress-based incentives,” Levi explained.
To do that they rely on machine learning to discover the signals that are coming from the customer that indicate that the deal is moving forward, and using a points system, companies can begin compensating reps on hitting these milestones, even before the sale closes.
The seeds for the idea behind SetSail were planted years ago when the three founders were working at Google tinkering with ways to motivate sales reps beyond pure commission. From a behavioral perspective, Levi and his co-founders found that reps were taking fewer risks with a pure commission approach and they wanted to find a way to change that. The incremental compensation system achieves that.
“If I’m closing the deal, I’m getting my commission. If I’m not closing the deal, I’m getting nothing. That means from a behavioral point of view, I would take the shortest path to win a deal, and I would take the minimum risk possible. So if there’s a competitive situation I will try to avoid that,” he said.
They look at things like appointments, emails and call transcripts. The signals will vary by customer. One may find an appointment with CIO is a good signal a deal is on the right trajectory, but to avoid having reps gaming the system by filling the CRM with the kinds of positive signals the company is looking for, they only rely on objective data, rather than any kind of self-reporting information from reps themselves.
The team eventually built a system like this inside Google, and in 2018, left to build a solution for the rest of the world that does something similar.
As the company grows, Levi says he is building a diverse team, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because it simply makes good business sense. “The reality is that we’re building a product for a diverse audience, and if we don’t have a diverse team we would never be able to build the right product,” he explained.
The company’s unique approach to sales compensation is resonating with customers like Dropbox, Lyft and Pendo, who are looking for new ways to motivate sales teams, especially during a pandemic when there may be a longer sales cycle. This kind of system provides a way to compensate sales teams more incrementally and reward positive approaches that have proven to result in sales.
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Athlane looks to connect brands and esports streamers with a fresh $3.3 million in funding
Athlane, the YC-backed company from the Summer ’19 cohort, is today ready to launch with a fresh $3.3 million in capital. Investors include Y Combinator, Jonathan Kraft (New England Patriots), Michael Gordon (President of Fenway Sports Group, which owns the Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club), Global Founders Capital, Romulus Capital, Seabed VC and more.
The startup originally positioned itself as the “NCAA of esports” but, after some time in stealth, has taken a new approach. Athlane is looking to be the connective fiber between streamers and brands, facilitating sponsorship and endorsement deals with more transparent data and analytics and a streamlined communications flow.
Athlane has products for both brands and streamers.
Brands can use the Athlane Terminal to manage their sponsorships. The Insights Hub uses proprietary data to help brands understand which streamers are followed by their target demographic, and whether or not the products will resonate with that fan base. Insights also allow brands to see when a streamer’s viewership is growing.
From there, brands can send out sponsorship deals to streamers directly through the Athlane Terminal, and then track the ROI on that sponsorship deal throughout the campaign.
On the streamer side, the company has built out a platform called Athlane Pro, which lets streamers manage each task from their sponsors individually. Streamers can also use Athlane Pro to counter-offer inbound sponsorship deals or negotiate terms.
Streamers can also use Athlane’s machine learning algorithm to get clearer insights on their stream performance, such as whether their YouTube viewership overlaps with their Twitch viewership, or see which videos do better based on title or thumbnail. But more importantly, the Athlane Content Hub gives streamers the opportunity to understand if their fan base specifically aligns with this or that brand, and gives them the tools to reach out directly to that brand to solicit a sponsorship.
Athlane has also built out a Shop tool that lets streamers build out a no-code storefront for their fans, which they can link to on their Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, etc. This storefront can be a repository for all the products that streamer is endorsing, allowing fans to see products from multiple brands in a single place.
“We have a number of proprietary partnerships with data providers including companies like Twitter,” said co-founder Faisal Younus. “For example, we have a partnership with the leading manufacturer of apparel in esports, which ties back into our system so we can look at how merchandise is moving.”
That data, when paired with the data provided when a streamer signs in and integrates with the platform, becomes very precise, according to the company.
The startup charges brands using a tiered SaaS model, and streamers can do their first sponsorship for free on the platform. After the first sponsorship, streamers are charged a fee between $10 and $20 per deal. Athlane has also started working with agencies that represent brands and charges a discovery fee for talent those agencies find on the platform.
“COVID-19 has brought on very rapid growth on the viewership side, and because of that we’ve seen an intense interest from a number of brands while conventional entertainment is shut down,” said Younus. “A lot of media spend is going to go unspent, but there is also a higher risk appetite for spending a little bit in esports, and our challenge is making sure this industry growth is sustained.”
He added that helping brands understand the true ROI of that spend will be key.
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