Fundings & Exits
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Cisco to acquire Indy startup Socio to bring hybrid events to Webex
Cisco announced this morning that it intends to acquire Indianapolis-based startup Socio, which helps plan hybrid in-person and virtual events. The two companies did not share the purchase price.
Socio provides a missing hybrid event management component for the company to add to its Webex platform. The goal appears to be to combine this with the recent purchase of Slido and transform Webex from an application mostly for video meetings into a more comprehensive event platform.
“As part of Cisco Webex’s vision to deliver inclusive, engaging and intelligent meeting and event experiences, the acquisition of Socio Labs complements Cisco’s recent acquisition of Slido, an industry-leading audience engagement tool, which together will create a comprehensive, cost-effective and easy-to-use event management solution [ … ],” the company explained in a statement.
The impact of the pandemic was not lost on Cisco, and it’s clear that as we can foresee going back to live events, having the ability to combine it with a virtual experience means that you can open up your event to a much wider audience beyond those who can attend in person. That’s likely not something that’s going away, even after we get past COVID.
Jeetu Patel, SVP and GM for security and collaboration at Cisco says that the future of work is going to be hybrid, whether it’s for work meetings or larger events and Cisco is making this acquisition to expand the use cases for the Webex platform.
“Whether it’s a 1:1 call, a small team huddle, a group meeting or a large external event, we want to remove friction and help people engage with each other in an inclusive manner. Slido allows for every voice to be heard — even when you’re not talking. Socio allows for getting your voice heard by a large number of people,” Patel said.
And the company believes that Webex provides the platform to make it all happen. “It’s a really potent combination of technology to make human interactions more engaging, no matter the type of conversation,” he added.
Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, says that it’s a smart move to take advantage of the changing events landscape and that this acquisition helps make Cisco a serious player in this space.
“As we get closer to a post-pandemic world, the need to create hybrid event experiences is going to quickly accelerate as people start venturing out to attend physical events. So having an event stack that combines local event support/participation with tools to integrate a broader virtual audience will be the future of event management,” Leary told me.
Socio was founded in 2016 and raised around $7 million in investment capital, according to Crunchbase data. It has a prestigious list of enterprise customers that includes Microsoft, Google, Jet Blue, Greenpeace, PepsiCo and Hyundai.
The deal is expected to close in Q4 of FY2021. When it does close, Socio’s 135 employees will be joining Cisco. The plan is to incorporate Socio’s tooling into the Webex platform while allowing it to continue as a stand-alone product, according to a Cisco spokesperson.
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Jamf snags zero trust security startup Wandera for $400M
Jamf, the enterprise Apple device management company, announced that it was acquiring Wandera, a zero trust security startup, for $400 million at the market close today. Today’s purchase is the largest in the company’s history.
Using a set of management services for Apple devices, Jamf provides IT at large organizations. It is the leader in the market, and snagging Wandera provides a missing modern security layer for the platform.
Jamf CEO Dean Hager says that Wandera’s zero trust approach fills in an important piece in the Jamf platform tool set. “The combination of Wandera and Jamf will provide our customers a single source platform that handles deployment, application lifecycle management, policies, filtering and security capabilities across all Apple devices while delivering zero trust network access for all mobile workers,” Hager said in a statement.
Zero trust, as the name implies, is an approach to security where you don’t trust anybody regardless of whether they are inside or outside your network. It requires that you force everyone to provide multiple forms of authentication to prove their identity before they can access company resources.
The need for a zero trust approach became even more acute during the pandemic when employees have often been working from home and have needed access to applications and other company resources from wherever they happened to be, a trend that was happening even prior to COVID, and is likely to continue after it ends.
Wandera, which is based in London, was founded in 2012 by brothers Roy and Eldar Tuvey, who had previously co-founded another security startup called ScanSafe. Cisco acquired that company, which helped protect web gateways as a service, for $183 million back in 2009. The brothers raised over $53 million along the way for Wandera. Investors included Bessemer Venture Partners, 83North and Sapphire Ventures.
Sapphire co-founder and managing director Andreas Weiskam had this to say about the company: “I’ve had the pleasure of working with co-founders (and brothers) Eldar Tuvey and Roy Tuvey for the last several years now and I can honestly say they’re great entrepreneurs and leaders, having built a real company of consequence.”
He added, “They’ve created a unique security product which addresses mobile threats by leveraging the increasingly important zero trust network. By joining the Jamf family, the two will help shape the future of the zero trust cloud. And it goes without saying that this is a big win for the customers, especially for those in the Apple ecosystem.”
Under the terms of the deal, Jamf is paying Wandera $350 million in cash, then paying them two $25 million payments on October 1, 2021 and December 15, 2021. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter, assuming it passes regulatory scrutiny.
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The Last Gameboard raises $4M to ship its digital tabletop gaming platform
The tabletop gaming industry has exploded over the last few years as millions discovered or rediscovered its joys, but it too is evolving — and The Last Gameboard hopes to be the venue for that evolution. The digital tabletop platform has progressed from crowdfunding to $4 million seed round, and having partnered with some of the biggest names in the industry, plans to ship by the end of the year.
As the company’s CEO and co-founder Shail Mehta explained in a TC Early Stage pitch-off earlier this year, The Last Gameboard is a 16-inch square touchscreen device with a custom OS and a sophisticated method of tracking game pieces and hand movements. The idea is to provide a digital alternative to physical games where that’s practical, and do so with the maximum benefit and minimum compromise.
If the pitch sounds familiar… it’s been attempted once or twice before. I distinctly remember being impressed by the possibilities of D&D on an original Microsoft Surface… back in 2009. And I played with another at PAX many years ago. Mehta said that until very recently there simply wasn’t the technology and the market wasn’t ready.
“People tried this before, but it was either way too expensive or they didn’t have the audience. And the tech just wasn’t there; they were missing that interaction piece,” she explained, and certainly any player will recognize that the, say, iPad version of a game definitely lacks physicality. The advance her company has achieved is in making the touchscreen able to detect not just taps and drags, but game pieces, gestures and movements above the screen, and more.
“What Gameboard does, no other existing touchscreen or tablet on the market can do — it’s not even close,” Mehta said. “We have unlimited touch, game pieces, passive and active… you can use your chess set at home, lift up and put down the pieces, we track it the whole time. We can do unique identifiers with tags and custom shapes. It’s the next step in how interactive surfaces can be.”
It’s accomplished via a not particularly exotic method, which saves the Gameboard from the fate of the Surface and its successors, which cost several thousand dollars due to their unique and expensive makeups. Mehta explained that they work strictly with ordinary capacitive touch data, albeit at a higher framerate than is commonly used, and then use machine learning to characterize and track object outlines. “We haven’t created a completely new mechanism, we’re just optimizing what’s available today,” she said.
Image Credits: The Last Gameboard
At $699 for the Gameboard it’s not exactly an impulse buy, either, but the fact of the matter is people spend a lot of money on gaming, with some titles running into multiple hundreds of dollars for all the expansions and pieces. Tabletop is now a more than $20 billion industry. If the experience is as good as they hope to make it, this is an investment many a player will not hesitate (much, anyway) to make.
Of course, the most robust set of gestures and features won’t matter if all they had on the platform were bargain-bin titles and grandpa’s-parlor favorites like “Parcheesi.” Fortunately, The Last Gameboard has managed to stack up some of the most popular tabletop companies out there, and aims to have the definitive digital edition for their games.
Asmodee Digital is probably the biggest catch, having adapted many of today’s biggest hits, from modern classics “Catan” and “Carcassonne” to crowdfunded breakout hit “Scythe” and immense dungeon-crawler “Gloomhaven.” The full list of partners right now includes Dire Wolf Digital, Nomad Games, Auroch Digital, Restoration Games, Steve Jackson Games, Knights of Unity, Skyship Studios, EncounterPlus, PlannarAlly and Sugar Gamers, as well as individual creators and developers.
Image Credits: The Last Gameboard
These games may be best played in person, but have successfully transitioned to digital versions, and one imagines that a larger screen and inclusion of real pieces could make for an improved hybrid experience. There will be options both to purchase games individually, like you might on mobile or Steam, or to subscribe to an unlimited access model (pricing to be determined on both).
It would also be something that the many gaming shops and playing venues might want to have a couple of on hand. Testing out a game in-store and then buying a few to stock, or convincing consumers to do the same, could be a great sales tactic for all involved.
In addition to providing a unique and superior digital version of a game, the device can connect with others to trade moves, send game invites and all that sort of thing. The whole OS, Mehta said, “is alive and real. If we didn’t own it and create it, this wouldn’t work.” This is more than a skin on top of Android with a built-in store, but there’s enough shared that Android-based ports will be able to be brought over with little fuss.
Head of content Lee Allentuck suggested that the last couple years (including the pandemic) have started to change game developers’ and publishers’ minds about the readiness of the industry for what’s next. “They see the digital crossover is going to happen — people are playing online board games now. If you can be part of that new trend at the very beginning, it gives you a big opportunity,” he said.
CEO Shail Mehta (center) plays Stop Thief on the Gameboard with others on the team. Image Credits: The Last Gameboard
Allentuck, who previously worked at Hasbro, said there’s widespread interest in the toy and tabletop industry to be more tech-forward, but there’s been a “chicken and egg scenario,” where there’s no market because no one innovates, and no one innovates because there’s no market. Fortunately things have progressed to the point where a company like The Last Gameboard can raise $4 million to help cover the cost of creating that market.
The round was led by TheVentureCity, with participation from SOSV, Riot Games, Conscience VC, Corner3 VC and others. While the company didn’t go to HAX’s Shenzhen program as planned, they are still HAX-affiliated. SOSV partner Garrett Winther gave a glowing recommendation of its approach: “They are the first to effectively tie collaborative physical and digital gameplay together while not losing the community, storytelling or competitive foundations that we all look for in gaming.”
Mehta noted that the pandemic nearly cooked the company by derailing their funding, which was originally supposed to come through around this time last year when everything went pear-shaped. “We had our functioning prototype, we had filed for a patent, we got the traction, we were gonna raise, everything was great… and then COVID hit,” she recalled. “But we got a lot of time to do R&D, which was actually kind of a blessing. Our team was super small so we didn’t have to lay anyone off — we just went into survival mode for like six months and optimized, developed the platform. 2020 was rough for everyone, but we were able to focus on the core product.”
Now the company is poised to start its beta program over the summer and (following feedback from that) ship its first production units before the holiday season when purchases like this one seem to make a lot of sense.
(This article originally referred to this raise as The Last Gameboard’s round A — it’s actually the seed. This has been updated.)
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DataRobot expands platform and announces Zepl acquisition
DataRobot, the Boston-based automated machine learning startup, had a bushel of announcements this morning as it expanded its platform to give technical and nontechnical users alike something new. It also announced it has acquired Zepl, giving it an advanced development environment where data scientists can bring their own code to DataRobot. The two companies did not share the acquisition price.
Nenshad Bardoliwalla, SVP of Product at DataRobot says that his company aspires to be the leader in this market and it believes the path to doing that is appealing to a broad spectrum of user requirements, from those who have little data science understanding to those who can do their own machine learning coding in Python and R.
“While people love automation, they also want it to be [flexible]. They don’t want just automation, but then you can’t do anything with it. They also want the ability to turn the knobs and pull the levers,” Bardoliwalla explained.
To resolve that problem, rather than building a coding environment from scratch, it chose to buy Zepl and incorporate its coding notebook into the platform in a new tool called Composable ML. “With Composable ML and with the Zepl acquisition, we are now providing a really first-class environment for people who want to code,” he said.
Zepl was founded in 2016 and raised $13 million along the way, according to Crunchbase data. The company didn’t want to reveal the number of employees or the purchase price, but the acquisition gives it advanced capabilities, especially a notebook environment to call its own to attract those more advanced users to the platform. The company plans to incorporate the Zepl functionality into the platform, while also leaving the standalone product in place.
Bardoliwalla said that they see the Zepl acquisition as an extension of the automated side of the house, where these tools can work in conjunction with one another with machines and humans working together to generate the best models. “This [generates an] organic mixture of the best of what a system can generate using DataRobot AutoML and the best of what human beings can do and kind of trying to compose those together into something really interesting […],” Bardoliwalla said.
The company is also introducing a no-code AI app builder that enables nontechnical users to create apps from the data set with drag and drop components. In addition, it’s adding a tool to monitor the accuracy of the model over time. Sometimes, after a model is in production for a time, the accuracy can begin to break down as the data on which the model is based is no longer valid. This tool monitors the model data for accuracy and warns the team when it’s starting to fall out of compliance.
Finally, the company is announcing a model bias monitoring tool to help root out model bias that could introduce racist, sexist or other assumptions into the model. To avoid this, the company has built a tool to identify when it sees this happening both in the model-building phase and in production. It warns the team of potential bias, while providing them with suggestions to tweak the model to remove it.
DataRobot is based in Boston and was founded in 2012. It has raised more than $750 million and has a valuation of over $2.8 billion, according to PitchBook.
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Cycode raises $20M to secure DevOps pipelines
Israeli security startup Cycode, which specializes in helping enterprises secure their DevOps pipelines and prevent code tampering, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A funding round led by Insight Partners. Seed investor YL Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the total funding in the company to $24.6 million.
Cycode’s focus was squarely on securing source code in its early days, but thanks to the advent of infrastructure as code (IaC), policies as code and similar processes, it has expanded its scope. In this context, it’s worth noting that Cycode’s tools are language and use case agnostic. To its tools, code is code.
“This ‘everything as code’ notion creates an opportunity because the code repositories, they become a single source of truth of what the operation should look like and how everything should function, Cycode CTO and co-founder Ronen Slavin told me. “So if we look at that and we understand it — the next phase is to verify this is indeed what’s happening, and then whenever something deviates from it, it’s probably something that you should look at and investigate.”
Cycode Dashboard. Image Credits: Cycode
The company’s service already provides the tools for managing code governance, leak detection, secret detection and access management. Recently it added its features for securing code that defines a business’ infrastructure; looking ahead, the team plans to add features like drift detection, integrity monitoring and alert prioritization.
“Cycode is here to protect the entire CI/CD pipeline — the development infrastructure — from end to end, from code to cloud,” Cycode CEO and co-founder Lior Levy told me.
“If we look at the landscape today, we can say that existing solutions in the market are kind of siloed, just like the DevOps stages used to be,” Levy explained. “They don’t really see the bigger picture, they don’t look at the pipeline from a holistic perspective. Essentially, this is causing them to generate thousands of alerts, which amplifies the problem even further, because not only don’t you get a holistic view, but also the noise level that comes from those thousands of alerts causes a lot of valuable time to get wasted on chasing down some irrelevant issues.”
What Cycode wants to do then is to break down these silos and integrate the relevant data from across a company’s CI/CD infrastructure, starting with the source code itself, which ideally allows the company to anticipate issues early on in the software life cycle. To do so, Cycode can pull in data from services like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Jenkins (among others) and scan it for security issues. Later this year, the company plans to integrate data from third-party security tools like Snyk and Checkmarx as well.
“The problem of protecting CI/CD tools like GitHub, Jenkins and AWS is a gap for virtually every enterprise,” said Jon Rosenbaum, principal at Insight Partners, who will join Cycode’s board of directors. “Cycode secures CI/CD pipelines in an elegant, developer-centric manner. This positions the company to be a leader within the new breed of application security companies — those that are rapidly expanding the market with solutions which secure every release without sacrificing velocity.”
The company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its R&D efforts, and expand its sales and marketing teams. Levy and Slavin expect that the company will grow to about 65 employees this year, spread between the development team in Israel and its sales and marketing operations in the U.S.
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Exeger takes $38M to ramp up production of its flexible solar cells for self-powered gadgets
Sweden’s Exeger, which for over a decade has been developing flexible solar cell technology (called Powerfoyle) that it touts as efficient enough to power gadgets solely with light, has taken in another tranche of funding to expand its manufacturing capabilities by opening a second factory in the country.
The $38 million raise is comprised of $20M in debt financing from Swedbank and Swedish Export Credit Corporation (SEK), with a loan amounting to $12M from Swedbank (partly underwritten by the Swedish Export Credit Agency (EKN) under the guarantee of investment credits for companies with innovations) and SEK issuing a loan amounting to $8M (partly underwritten by the pan-EU European Investment Fund (EIF)); along with $18M through a directed share issue to Ilija Batljan Invest AB.
The share issue of 937,500 shares has a transaction share price of $19.2 — which corresponds to a pre-money valuation of $860M for the solar cell maker.
Back in 2019 SoftBank also put $20M into Exeger, in two investments of $10M — entering a strategic partnership to accelerate the global rollout of its tech and further extending its various investments in solar energy.
The Swedish company has also previously received a loan from the Swedish Energy Agency, in 2014, to develop its solar cell tech. But this latest debt financing round is its first on commercial terms (albeit partly underwritten by EKN and EIF).
Exeger says its solar cell tech is the only one that can be printed in free-form and different colors, meaning it can “seamlessly enhance any product with endless power”, as its PR puts it.
So far two devices have integrated the Powerfoyle tech: A bike helmet with an integrated safety taillight (by POC), and a pair of wireless headphones (by Urbanista). Although neither has yet been commercially launched — but both are slated to go on sale next month.
Exeger says its planned second factory in Stockholm will allow it to increase its manufacturing capacity tenfold by 2023, helping it target a broader array of markets sooner and accelerating its goal of mass adoption of its tech.
Its main target markets for the novel solar cell technology currently include consumer electronics, smart home, smart workplace, and IoT.
More device partnerships are slated as coming this year.
Exeger’s Powerfoyle solar cell tell integrated into a pair of Urbanista headphones (Image Credits: Exeger/Urbanista)
“We don’t label our rounds but take a more pragmatic view on fundraising,” said Giovanni Fili, founder and CEO. “Developing a new technology, a new energy source, as well as laying the foundation for a new industry takes time. Thus, a company like ours requires long-term strategic investors that all buy into the vision as well as the overall strategy. We have spent a lot of time and energy on this, and it has paid off. It has given the company the resources required, both time and money, to bring an invention to a commercial launch, which is where we are today.”
Fili added that it’s chosen to raise debt financing now “because we can”.
“The same answer as when asked why we build a new factory in Stockholm, Sweden, rather than abroad. We have always said that once commercial, we will start leveraging the balance sheet when securing funds for the next factory. Thanks to our long-standing relationship with Swedbank and SEK, as well as the great support of the Swedish government through EKN underwriting part of the loans, we were able to move this forward,” he said.
Discussing the forthcoming two debut gizmos, the POC Omne Eternal helmet and the Urbanista Los Angeles headphones — which will both go sale in June — Fili says interest in the self-powered products has “surpassed all our expectations”.
“Any product which integrates Powerfoyle is able to charge under all forms of light, whether from indoor lamps or natural outdoor light. The stronger the light, the faster it charges. The POC helmet, for example, doesn’t have a USB port to power the safety light because the ambient light will keep it charging, cycling or not,” he tells TechCrunch.
“The Urbanista Los Angeles wireless headphones have already garnered tremendous interest online. Users can spend one hour outdoors with the headphones and gain three hours of battery time. This means most users will never need to worry about charging. As long as you have our product in light, any light, it will constantly charge. That’s one of the key aspects of our technology, we have designed and engineered the solar cell to work wherever people need it to work.”
“This is the year of our commercial breakthrough,” he added in a statement. “The phenomenal response from the product releases with POC and Urbanista are clear indicators this is the perfect time to introduce self-powered products to
the world. We need mass scale production to realize our vision which is to touch the lives of a billion people by 2030, and that’s why the factory is being built now.”
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Serial fiction app Radish acquired by Kakao Entertainment for $440M
Serialized fiction app Radish has been acquired by Kakao Entertainment in a transaction valued at $440 million. Kakao Entertainment is owned by Kakao, the South Korean internet giant whose services include its eponymous messaging platform. Radish founder Seungyoon Lee will hold onto his role as its chief executive officer, while also becoming Kakao Entertainment’s global strategy officer to lead its growth in international markets.
Radish claims millions of users in North America, and the acquisition will be help Kakao Entertainment expand its own webtoons and web novel business there, and in other English-speaking markets. Radish will retain management autonomy and continue operating as its own brand.
Founded in 2015, Radish originally focused on user-generated content, but now the core of its business is Radish Originals, or serial fiction series designed specifically for the app. The company said the launch of Radish Originals in 2018 helped propel its growth, with revenue increasing more than 10 times in 2020 from the previous year.
Radish monetizes content through its micropayments system, which allows users to read several free episodes before making payments of about 20 to 30 cents to unlock new episodes (users also have the option of waiting an hour to unlock episodes for free). About 90% of its revenue now comes from Radish Originals.
The acquisition means that Radish Originals’ intellectual property will now be adapted by Kakao into webtoons, videos and other content, increasing their reach. Since 2016, Kakao Entertainment has adapted several web novels including “What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim?,” “A Business Proposal” and “Solo Leveling” into webtoons and other media.
Lee told TechCrunch that Radish started exclusively distributing several of Kakao Entertainment’s most popular original series, like “What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim?” last month. It plans to launch more content from Kakao Entertainment’s portfolio and are also “looking at ways in which we can make original localized novel adaptions of Kakao’s popular stories,” he added.
In a press statement, Kakao Entertainment CEO Jinsoo Lee said, “Radish has firmly established itself as a leading web novel platform and yet we see even greater growth potential… With the combination of Kakao’s expertise in the IP business and Radish’s strong North American foothold, we are excited about what we can achieve together.”
The acquisition has been approved by Radish’s board of directors, which includes a representative from SoftBank Ventures Asia, its largest investor, and the majority of its shareholders. Radish’s other backers include Lowercase Capital, K50 Ventures, Nicolas Bergruen, Charlie Songhurst, Duncan Clark and Amy Tan, the best-selling author.
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Aspire’s business accounts reach $1B in annualized transaction volume one year after launching
Singapore-based Aspire, which wants to become the financial services “one-stop shop” for SMEs, announced that its business accounts have reached $1 billion in annualized transaction volume one year after launching. The company also unveiled Bill Pay, its latest feature that lets businesses manage and pay invoices by emailing them to Aspire’s AI-based digital assistant.
Launched in May 2020, Aspire’s online business accounts are targeted to startups and small- to medium-sized enterprises, and do not require minimum deposits or monthly fees. Co-founder and chief executive officer Andrea Baronchelli told TechCrunch more than 10,000 companies now use Aspire’s business accounts and that adoption was driven by two main reasons. The first was Aspire’s transition to a multi-product strategy early last year, after focusing on corporate cards and working capital loans. The second reason is the COVID-19 pandemic, which made it harder for companies to open accounts at traditional banks.
“We can go in and say we offer all-in-one financial tools for growing businesses,” he said. “People come in and use one thing first, and then we offer them other things later on, so that’s been a huge success for us.”
Founded in 2018, Aspire has raised about $41.5 million in funding so far, including a Series A announced in July 2019. Its investors include MassMutual Ventures Southeast Asia, Arc Labs and Y Combinator.
Baronchelli said Aspire’s business account users consist of two main segments. The first are “launchers,” or people who are starting their first businesses and need to set up a way to send and receive money. Launchers typically make less than $400,000 a year in revenue and their Aspire account serves as their primary business account. The second segment are companies that make about $500,000 to $2 million a year and already had another bank account, but started using Aspire for its credit line, expense management or foreign exchange tools, and decided to open an account on the platform as well.
The company has customers from across Southeast Asia, and is particularly focused on Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam. For example, it launched Aspire Kickstart, with incorporation services for Singaporean companies, at the start of this year.
Bill Pay, its newest feature, lets business owners forward invoices by email to Aspire’s AI-based digital assistant, which uses optical character recognition and deep learning to pull out payment details, including terms and due dates. Then users get a notification to do a final check before approving and scheduling payments. The feature syncs with accounting systems integrated into Aspire, including Xero and QuickBooks. Baronchelli said Aspire decided to launch Bill Pay after interviewing businesses and finding that many still relied on Excel spreadsheets.
Aspire’s offerings overlap with several other fintech companies in Southeast Asia. For example, Volopay, Wise and Revolut offer business accounts, too, and Spenmo offers business cards. Aspire plans to differentiate by expanding its stack of multiple products. For example, it is developing tools for accounts receivable, such as invoice automation, and accounts payable, like a dedicated product for payroll management. Baronchelli said Aspire is currently interviewing users to finalize the set of features it will offer.
“I don’t want to close the door that others might come toward a multiple product approach, but if you ask me what our position is now, we are basically the only one that offers an all-in-one product stack,” he added. “So we are a couple years ahead of the competition and have a first-mover advantage.”
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ServiceNow leaps into applications performance monitoring with Lightstep acquisition
This morning ServiceNow announced that it was acquiring Lightstep, an applications performance monitoring startup that has raised more than $70 million, according to Crunchbase data. The companies did not share the acquisition price.
ServiceNow wants to take advantage of Lightstep’s capabilities to enhance its IT operations offerings. With Lightstep, the company should be able to provide customers with a way to monitor the performance of applications with the goal of detecting problems before they grow into major issues that take down a website or application.
“With Lightstep, ServiceNow will transform how software solutions are delivered to customers. This will ultimately make it easier for customers to innovate quickly. Now they’ll be able to build and operate their software faster than ever before and take the new era of work head on with confidence,” Pablo Stern, SVP & GM for IT Workflow Products at ServiceNow said in a statement.
Ben Sigelman, founder and CEO at Lightstep sees the larger organization being a good landing spot for his company. “We’ve always believed that the value of observability should extend across the entire enterprise, providing greater clarity and confidence to every team involved in these modern, digital businesses. By joining ServiceNow, together we will realize that vision for our customers and help transform the world of work in the process […], Sigelman said in a statement.
Lightstep is part of the application performance monitoring market with companies like Datadog, New Relic and AppDynamics, which Cisco acquired in 2017 the week before it was scheduled to IPO for $3.7 billion. It seems to be an area that is catching the interest of larger enterprise vendors, which are picking off smaller startups in the space.
Last November, IBM bought Instana, an APM startup and then bought Turbonomic for $2 billion at the end of last month as a complementary technology. Being able to monitor apps and keep them up and running is crucial, not only from a business continuity perspective, but also from a brand loyalty one. Even if the app isn’t completely down, but is running slowly or generally malfunctioning in some way, it’s likely to annoy users and could ultimately cause users to jump to a competitor. This type of software gives customers the ability to observe and detect problems before they have an impact on large numbers of users.
Lightstep, which is based in San Jose, California, was founded in 2015. It raised $70 million from investors like Altimeter Capital, Sequoia, Redpoint and Harrison Metal. Customers include GitHub, Spotify and Twilio. The deal is expected to close this quarter.
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Metafy adds $5.5M to its seed round as the market for games coaching grows
This morning Metafy, a distributed startup building a marketplace to match gamers with instructors, announced that it has closed an additional $5.5 million to its $3.15 million seed round. Call it a seed-2, seed-extension or merely a baby Series A; Forerunner Ventures, DCM and Seven Seven Six led the round as a trio.
Metafy’s model is catching on with its market. According to its CEO Josh Fabian, the company has grown from incorporation to gross merchandise volume (GMV) of $76,000 in around nine months. That’s quick.
The startup is building in public, so we have its raw data to share. Via Fabian, here’s how Metafy has grown since its birth:
From the company. As a small tip, if you want the media to care about your startup’s growth rate, share like this!
When TechCrunch first caught wind of Metafy via prior seed investor M25, we presumed that it was a marketplace that was built to allow esports pros and other highly capable gamers teach esports-hopefuls get better at their chosen title. That’s not the case.
Don’t think of Metafy as a marketplace where you can hire a former professional League of Legends player to help improve your laning-phase AD carry mechanics. Though that might come in time. Today a full 0% of the company’s current GMV comes from esports titles. Instead, the company is pursuing games with strong niche followings, what Fabian described as “vibrant, loyal communities.” Like Super Smash Brothers, its leading game today in terms of GMV generated.
Why pursue those titles instead of the most competitive games? Metafy’s CEO explained that his startup has a particular take on its market — that it focuses on coaches as its core customer, over trainees. This allows the startup to focus on its mission of making coaching a full-time gig, or at least one that pays well enough to matter. By doing so, Metafy has cut its need for marketing spend, because the coaches that it onboards bring their own audience. This is where the company is targeting games with super-dedicated user bases, like Smash. They fit well into its build for coaches, onboard coaches, coaches bring their fans, GMV is generated model.
Metafy has big plans, which brings us back to its recent raise. Fabian told TechCrunch any game with a skill curve could wind up on Metafy. Think chess, poker or other games that can be played digitally. To build toward that future, Metafy decided to take on more capital so that it could grow its team.
So what does its $5.5 million unlock for the startup? Per its CEO, Metafy is currently a team of 18 with a monthly burn rate of around $80,000. He wants it to grow to 30 folks, with nearly all of its new hires going into its product org, broadly.
TechCrunch’s perspective is that gaming is not becoming mainstream, but that it has already done so. Building for the gaming world, then, makes good sense, as tools like Metafy won’t suffer from the same boom/bust cycles that can plague game developers. Especially as the startup becomes more diversified in its title base.
Normally we’d close by noting that we’ll get back in touch with the company in a few quarters to see how it’s getting on in growth terms. But because it’s sharing that data publicly, we’ll simply keep reading. More when we have a few months’ more data to chew on.
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