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EV Connect, the Los Angeles-based company that sells software to manage electric vehicle charging, has raised $12 million in a Series B round led by investors Mitsui & Co. and Ecosystem Integrity Fund.
The company has raised $25 million to date.
EV Connect’s cloud-based platform has an open standard architecture that is designed to be hardware agnostic. In other words, EV Connect aims to provide a variety of hardware vendors a way to monitor, manage and maintain charging stations.
The end goal is to push the industry away from a closed and fragmented system to a more open one, according to EV Connect CEO and founder Jordan Ramer.
EV Connect has a two-tiered approach. The company provides and manages 1,000 electric vehicle charging sites through its EV Connect network. EV Connect has a smartphone app to give drivers of electric vehicles real-time access to charging station status.
Its also sells a cloud-based software platform that businesses can customize. Clients include Yahoo!, Marriott, Hilton, Western Digital, Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority and New York Power Authority.
As part of the round, Mitsui and EV Connect have agreed to develop new business models around EV charging infrastructure. EV Connect plans to work with Mitsui on various applications of EV charging to lower the cost of charging and maximize its utilization, including fleet and energy management solutions, Ramer elaborated to TechCrunch in an emailed response.
“We strongly believe that EV Connect’s infrastructure management technology accelerates the electric vehicle revolution in the energy and power industry where Mitsui has many assets and access to partners,” Kazumasa Nakai, the COO of Mitsui’s infrastructure projects business unit, said in a statement. “Our unique engineering capabilities, in conjunction with EV Connect’s cloud-based EV infrastructure, will enable us to develop new business models to solve the challenges EV infrastructure currently pose for energy management companies.”
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Databricks is a SaaS business built on top of a bunch of open-source tools, and apparently it’s been going pretty well on the business side of things. In fact, the company claims to be one of the fastest growing enterprise cloud companies ever. Today the company announced a massive $400 million Series F funding round on a hefty $6.2 billion valuation. Today’s funding brings the total raised to almost a $900 million.
Andreessen Horowitz’s Late Stage Venture Fund led the round with new investors BlackRock, Inc., T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Tiger Global Management also participating. The institutional investors are particularly interesting here because as a late-stage startup, Databricks likely has its eye on a future IPO, and having those investors on board already could give them a head start.
CEO Ali Ghodsi was coy when it came to the IPO, but it sure sounded like that’s a direction he wants to go. “We are one of the fastest growing cloud enterprise software companies on record, which means we have a lot of access to capital as this fundraise shows. The revenue is growing gangbusters, and the brand is also really well known. So an IPO is not something that we’re optimizing for, but it’s something that’s definitely going to happen down the line in the not-too-distant future,” Ghodsi told TechCrunch.
The company announced as of Q3 it’s on a $200 million run rate, and it has a platform that consists of four products, all built on foundational open source: Delta Lake, an open-source data lake product; MLflow, an open-source project that helps data teams operationalize machine learning; Koalas, which creates a single machine framework for Spark and Pandos, greatly simplifying working with the two tools; and, finally, Spark, the open-source analytics engine.
You can download the open-source version of all of these tools for free, but they are not easy to use or manage. The way that Databricks makes money is by offering each of these tools in the form of Software as a Service. They handle all of the management headaches associated with using these tools and they charge you a subscription price.
It’s a model that seems to be working, as the company is growing like crazy. It raised $250 million just last February on a $2.75 billion valuation. Apparently the investors saw room for a lot more growth in the intervening six months, as today’s $6.2 billion valuation shows.
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Aurora Insight, a startup that provides a “dynamic” global map of wireless connectivity that it built and monitors in real time using AI combined with data from sensors on satellites, vehicles, buildings, aircraft and other objects, is emerging from stealth today with the launch of its first publicly available product, a platform providing insights on wireless signal and quality covering a range of wireless spectrum bands, offered as a cloud-based, data-as-a-service product.
“Our objective is to map the entire planet, charting the radio waves used for communications,” said Brian Mengwasser, the co-founder and CEO. “It’s a daunting task.” He said that to do this the company first “built a bunker” to test the system before rolling it out at scale.
With it, Aurora Insight is also announcing that it has raised $18 million in funding — an aggregate amount that reaches back to its founding in 2016 and covers both a seed round and Series A — from an impressive list of investors. Led by Alsop Louie Partners and True Ventures, backers also include Tippet Venture Partners, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Promus Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, ValueStream Ventures and Intellectus Partners.
The area of measuring wireless spectrum and figuring out where it might not be working well (in order to fix it) may sound like an arcane area, but it’s a fairly essential one.
Mobile technology — specifically, new devices and the use of wireless networks to connect people, objects and services — continues to be the defining activity of our time, with more than 5 billion mobile users on the planet (out of 7.5 billion people) today and the proportion continuing to grow. With that, we’re seeing a big spike in mobile internet usage, too, with more than 5 billion people, and 25.2 billion objects, expected to be using mobile data by 2025, according to the GSMA.
The catch to all this is that wireless spectrum — which enables the operation of mobile services — is inherently finite and somewhat flaky in how its reliability is subject to interference. That in turn is creating a need for a better way of measuring how it is working, and how to fix it when it is not.
“Wireless spectrum is one of the most critical and valuable parts of the communications ecosystem worldwide,” said Rohit Sharma, partner at True Ventures and Aurora Insight board member, in a statement. “To date, it’s been a massive challenge to accurately measure and dynamically monitor the wireless spectrum in a way that enables the best use of this scarce commodity. Aurora’s proprietary approach gives businesses a unique way to analyze, predict, and rapidly enable the next-generation of wireless-enabled applications.”
If you follow the world of wireless technology and telcos, you’ll know that wireless network testing and measurement is an established field — about as old as the existence of wireless networks themselves (which says something about the general reliability of wireless networks). Aurora aims to disrupt this on a number of levels.
Mengwasser — who co-founded the company with Jennifer Alvarez, the CTO who you can see presenting on the company here — tells me that a lot of the traditional testing and measurement has been geared at telecoms operators, who own the radio towers, and tend to focus on more narrow bands of spectrum and technologies.
The rise of 5G and other wireless technologies, however, has come with a completely new playing field and set of challenges from the industry.
Essentially, we are now in a market where there are a number of different technologies coexisting — alongside 5G we have earlier network technologies (4G, LTE, Wi-Fi); and a potential set of new technologies. And we have a new breed of companies building services that need to have close knowledge of how networks are working to make sure they remain up and reliable.
Mengwasser said Aurora is currently one of the few trying to tackle this opportunity by developing a network that is measuring multiples kinds of spectrum simultaneously, and aims to provide that information not just to telcos (some of which have been working with Aurora while still in stealth) but the others kinds of application and service developers that are building businesses based on those new networks.
“There is a pretty big difference between us and performance measurement, which typically operates from the back of a phone and tells you when have a phone in a particular location,” he said. “We care about more than this, more than just homes, but all smart devices. Eventually, everything will be connected to network, so we are aiming to provide intelligence on that.”
One example are drone operators that are building delivery networks: Aurora has been working with at least one while in stealth to help develop a service, Mengwasser said, although he declined to say which one. (He also, incidentally, specifically declined to say whether the company had talked with Amazon.)
5G is a particularly tricky area of mobile network spectrum and services to monitor and tackle, which is one reason why Aurora Insight has caught the attention of investors.
“The reality of massive MIMO beamforming, high frequencies, and dynamic access techniques employed by 5G networks means it’s both more difficult and more important to quantify the radio spectrum,” said Gilman Louie of Alsop Louie Partners, in a statement. “Having the accurate and near-real-time feedback on the radio spectrum that Aurora’s technology offers could be the difference between building a 5G network right the first time, or having to build it twice.” Louie is also sitting on the board of the startup.
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Chad Hurley is hunting for what comes after fantasy sports. He envisions a new way for fans to play by watching live and cheering for the athletes they love. Beyond a few scraps of info the YouTube co-founder would share and his new startup’s job listings revealed, we don’t know what Hurley’s game will feel like. But the company is called GreenPark Sports, and it’s launching in spring 2020.
“There is an absence of compelling, inclusive ways for large masses of sports fans to compete together,” Hurley tells me. “The idea of a ‘sports fan’ has evolved -0 it is now more a social behavior than ever before. We’re looking at a much bigger, inclusive way for all fans of sports and esports teams to play.”
Hurley already has an all-star team. One of GreenPark’s co-founders, Nick Swinmurn, helped start Zappos, while another, Ken Martin, created marketing agency BLITZ. Together they’ve raised an $8.5 million seed round led by SignalFire and joined by Sapphire Sports and Founders Fund. “With this team’s impeccable track record and vision for the future of fandom, this was an investment we had to make,” said Chris Farmer, founder and CEO of SignalFire .
It all comes down to allegiance — something Hurley, Swinmurn and Martin truly understand. Everyone is seeking ways to belong and emblems to represent them. In an age when many of our most prized possessions, from photographs to record collections, have been digitized, we lack tangible objects that center our individuality. Culture increasingly centers around landmark events, with what we’ve done mattering more than what we own.
GreenPark could seize upon this moment by helping us align our identities with a team. This instantly unlocks a like-minded community, a recurrent activity and a unified aesthetic. And when reality gets heavy, people can lose themselves by hitching their spirits to the scoreboard.
Rather than just tabulating results after the match like in fantasy sports, GreenPark wants to be entwined with the spectacle as it happens. “We’re going to be working with a mix of ways to visualize the live game — from unique gamecast-like data to highlight clips. The social viewing experience can be much more than just the straight live video,” Hurley explains.
He came up with GreenPark after selling assets of his video editing app Mixbit to BlueJeans a year ago. Hurley already had an interactive relationship with sports… though one that’s reserved for the rich: he’s part owner of the Golden State Warriors and Los Angeles Football Club. Meanwhile, Swinmurn co-founded the Burlingame Dragons Football Club affiliated with San Jose’s team, and is on the board of Denmark’s FC Helsingør.
Those experiences taught them the satisfaction that comes from a deeper sense of ownership or allegiance with a team. GreenPark will give an opportunity for anyone to turn fandom into its own sport. “We shared a love of sports and set out to look into opportunities around legalized sports betting in the U.S.,” Hurley tells me. But quickly they found “it was obvious the regulated space wouldn’t allow us to innovate as quickly as we wanted,” and they saw more opportunity amidst a younger mainstream audience.
“We’re not ready to disclose publicly the exact detailed gameplay yet,” Hurley says. But here’s what we could cobble together from around the web.
GreenPark Sports lets you “Destroy the other teams’ fans” to “climb the leaderboards,” its site says cryptically. According to job listings, it will pipe in live game data, starting with the NBA and expanding to other leagues, and offer cartoon characters with facial expressions and full-body gestures to let users live out the highs and lows of matches. Don’t expect trivia questions or player stat memorization. It almost sounds like a massively multiplayer online fan arena.
As with blockbuster games Fortnite or League of Legends, GreenPark is free-to-play. But a mention of virtual clothing hints at monetization, where you could spruce up avatars with digital team apparel. Hurley tells me, “We are in the perfect storm of the thirst for innovation at the traditional league level, the next level of maturing for esports, investment in sports betting and overall dire need to better understand today’s largest populace of sports fans — millennial / Gen Z.” The closed beta launches in the spring.
There’s a massive hole to fill in the wake of the Draft Kings / FanDuel marketing surge a few years ago. Most apps in the space just carry scores or analysis, rather than community. “What’s amazing about being a fan of a team or player is the common bond you have with other fans,” Hurley explains, “where even if you don’t know the other fans of your team — you are all in it to win it — together.”
Publications like The Athletic have proven there are plenty of fans willing to pay to feel closer to their favorite teams. The most direct competitor for GreenPark might be Strafe, which lets you track and predict the winners of esports matches.
People already spend tons of time on building fictional worlds like Minecraft, and money outfitting their Fortnite avatar with the coolest clothes. If GreenPark can create a space for sports fans’ self-expression, it could create the online destination for legions of IRL enthusiasts that see who they root for as core to who they are.
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A year ago, at a demo day south of San Francisco, we watched a number of recently formed startups pitch investors on their companies. One that stood out to us at the time was Zubale, a Mexico City-based outfit whose founders were looking to connect big corporations with Latin Americans eager to address tasks on their behalf. A person could conduct on-the-ground market research for a brand, for example, then earn mobile phone credits or other redeemable digital rewards.
Fast-forward and Zubale, which had 10 employees at the time, now has 40 full-time employees, and has completed 170,000 tasks on behalf of the consumer brands on which it is squarely focused — and for two reasons.
First, according to Zubale co-founder Allison Campbell, the retail industry across Latin America is generating $2 trillion per year, but companies are also shelling out $40 billion on “super painful and high spend” that includes employees who complete in-store tasks like stocking shelves, checking prices and building displays.
Campbell says Zubale can save — even make — these companies money by crowdsourcing the same tasks to independent contractors who can choose from an inventory of similar jobs near them.
Campell and her co-founder, Sebastian Monroy, also know a few things about retail in emerging markets. Before heading to HBS, Campbell spent nearly eight years with Walmart, first as a merchandise manager, then as a director of international strategic initiatives, roles that placed her in Gurgaon, India, then Shanghai and Shenzhen, China. Monroy’s path was similar; he spent more than seven years working in a variety of sales roles for Proctor & Gamble in Mexico before heading to Harvard, where he met Campbell on their first day of business school. (“We realized we were wearing the same exact glasses and took a picture together,” she says with a laugh. They decided to team up on Zubale a year later.)
Indeed, though one could see Zubale using its platform to crowdsource any number of tasks, à la TaskRabbit, the opportunity is so massive in catering to retailers that the startup plans to stay in its lane for the foreseeable future.
If anything, says Campell, Zubale — which plans to eventually expand from Mexico into other countries, including Brazil, Chile and Peru — may end up offering the contractors more in the way of financial services products, given that there remains a dearth of these and that these individuals are constantly checking the app anyway.
It makes sense. While 85% of Mexico’s population of 125 million now has a smart phone — giving rise to more app-driven startups like Zubale — only 10% have a credit card, and only 35% have a checking account. It’s for that reason that many of the people who work for Zubale still choose to earn mobile phone credit and other digital rewards that they can redeem through making online purchases.
They “love us,” too, says Campbell, because they can “increase their income by 40%” by performing work for Zubale. In fact, she suggests Zubale hasn’t had to do much in the way of marketing, thanks to Facebook Groups where the company is discussed, as well as through other word of mouth, including workers’ friends who want more jobs and find it easier to find and complete jobs in 30-minute increments at the same store location rather than run from store to store or job to job. (On average, she adds, they complete 20 jobs for the company per week.)
Certainly, investors like the company. Campbell and Monroy say they had a lot of inbound interest when they began seeking seed funding more recently. They chose the venture firm NFX to lead the $4.4 million round, given its expertise in marketplaces and network effects-driven businesses. Other participants in the round include Industry Ventures, Joe Montana’s Liquid 2 Ventures and XFactor Fund, along with individual investors Jonathan Swanson (who is the chairman of Thumbtack), Sergio Romo (the CEO of Grow Mobility) and Bob White (the founder and a former managing director of Bain Capital).
Meanwhile, the company’s very first check came from the seed-stage firm Pear, which had hosted that demo day.
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Pendo, the late-stage startup that helps companies understand how customers are interacting with their apps, announced a $100 million Series E investment today on a valuation of $1 billion.
The round was led by Sapphire Ventures . Also participating were new investors General Atlantic and Tiger Global, and existing investors Battery Ventures, Meritech Capital, FirstMark, Geodesic Capital and Cross Creek. Pendo has now raised $206 million, according to the company.
Company CEO and co-founder Todd Olson says that one of the reasons they need so much money is they are defining a market, and the potential is quite large. “Honestly, we need to help realize the total market opportunity. I think what’s exciting about what we’ve seen in six years is that this problem of improving digital experiences is something that’s becoming top of mind for all businesses,” Olson said.
The company integrates with customer apps, capturing user behavior and feeding data back to product teams to help prioritize features and improve the user experience. In addition, the product provides ways to help those users either by walking them through different features, pointing out updates and new features or providing other notes. Developers can also ask for feedback to get direct input from users.
Olson says early on its customers were mostly other technology companies, but over time they have expanded into lots of other verticals, including insurance, financial services and retail, and these companies are seeing digital experience as increasingly important. “A lot of this money is going to help grow our go-to-market teams and our product teams to make sure we’re getting our message out there, and we’re helping companies deal with this transformation,” he says. Today, the company has more than 1,200 customers.
While he wouldn’t commit to going public, he did say it’s something the executive team certainly thinks about, and it has started to put the structure in place to prepare should that time ever come. “This is certainly an option that we are considering, and we’re looking at ways in which to put us in a position to be able to do so, if and when the markets are good and we decide that’s the course we want to take.”
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Pensando, an edge computing startup founded by former Cisco engineers, came out of stealth mode today with an announcement that it has raised a $145 million Series C. The company’s software and hardware technology, created to give data centers more of the flexibility of cloud computing servers, is being positioned as a competitor to Amazon Web Services Nitro.
The round was led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lightspeed Venture Partners and brings Pensando’s total raised so far to $278 million. HPE chief technology officer Mark Potter and Lightspeed Venture partner Barry Eggers will join Pensando’s board of directors. The company’s chairman is former Cisco CEO John Chambers, who is also one of Pensando’s investors through JC2 Ventures.
Pensando was founded in 2017 by Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero and Soni Jiandani, a team of engineers who spearheaded the development of several of Cisco’s key technologies, and founded four startups that were acquired by Cisco, including Insieme Networks. (In an interview with Reuters, Pensando chief financial officer Randy Pond, a former Cisco executive vice president, said it isn’t clear if Cisco is interested in acquiring the startup, adding “our aspirations at this point would be to IPO. But, you know, there’s always other possibilities for monetization events.”)
The startup claims its edge computing platform performs five to nine times better than AWS Nitro, in terms of productivity and scale. Pensando prepares data center infrastructure for edge computing, better equipping them to handle data from 5G, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things applications. While in stealth mode, Pensando acquired customers including HPE, Goldman Sachs, NetApp and Equinix.
In a press statement, Potter said “Today’s rapidly transforming, hyper-connected world requires enterprises to operate with even greater flexibility and choices than ever before. HPE’s expanding relationship with Pensando Systems stems from our shared understanding of enterprises and the cloud. We are proud to announce our investment and solution partnership with Pensando and will continue to drive solutions that anticipate our customers’ needs together.”
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MyGate, a Bangalore-based startup that offers security management and convenience service for guard-gated premises, said today it has bagged more than $50 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprint in the nation.
Chinese internet giant Tencent, Tiger Global, JS Capital and existing investor Prime Venture Partners funded the three-year-old startup’s $56 million Series B financing round. The new round pushes MyGate’s total fundraise to $67.5 million.
MyGate offers an eponymous mobile app that allows home residents to approve entries and exits, communicate with their neighbors, log attendance and pay society maintenance bills and daily help workers.
The startup says it is operational in 11 cities in India and has amassed over 1.2 million home customers. Its customer base is increasing by 20% each month, it claimed. The service is handling 60,000 requests each minute and clocking over 45 million check-in requests each month.
The idea of MyGate came after its co-founder and CEO, Vijay Arisetty, left the Indian armed force. In an interview with TechCrunch, he said his family was appalled to learn about the poor state of security across societies in India.
“This was also when e-commerce companies and food delivery firms were beginning to gain strong foothold in the nation. This meant that many people were entering a gated community each day,” he said.
MyGate has inked partnerships with many e-commerce players to create a system to offer a silent and secure delivery experience for its users. The startup also trains guards to understand the system.
According to industry estimates, more than 4.5 million people in India today live in gated communities, and that figure is growing by 13% each year. The private security industry in the country is a $15 billion market.
Arisetty says he believes the startup could significantly accelerate its growth as its solution understands the price-sensitive market. Using MyGate costs an apartment about Rs 20 (28 cents) per month. Even at that price, the startup says it is making a profit. “Today, we are seeing more demand than we can handle,” he said.
That’s where the new funding would come into play for the startup, which today employs about 700 people.
The startup plans to use the fresh capital to expand its technology infrastructure, its marketing and operations teams and build new features. The startup aims to reach 15 million homes in 40 Indian cities in the next 18 months.
In a statement, Sanjay Swamy, managing partner at Prime Venture Partners, said, “It’s been great to see a fledgling startup execute consistently and holistically, and grow into a category-creating market-leader.”
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Autify, a platform that makes testing web application as easy as clicking a few buttons, has raised a $2.5 million seed round from Global Brain, Salesforce Ventures, Archetype Ventures and several angels. The company, which recently graduated from the Alchemist accelerator program for enterprise startups, splits its base between the U.S., where it keeps an office, and Japan, where co-founders Ryo Chikazawa (CEO) and Sam Yamashita got their start as software engineers.
The main idea here is that Autify, which was founded in 2016, allows teams to write tests by simply recording their interactions with the app with the help of a Chrome extension, then having Autify run these tests automatically on a variety of other browsers and mobile devices. Typically, these kinds of tests are very brittle and quickly start to fail whenever a developer makes changes to the design of the application.
Autify gets around this by using some machine learning smarts that give it the ability to know that a given button or form is still the same, no matter where it is on the page. Users can currently test their applications using IE, Edge, Chrome and Firefox on macOS and Windows, as well as a range of iOS and Android devices.
Chikazawa tells me that the main idea of Autify is based on his own experience as a developer. He also noted that many enterprises are struggling to hire automation engineers who can write tests for them, using Selenium and similar frameworks. With Autify, any developer (and even non-developer) can create a test without having to know the specifics of the underlying testing framework. “You don’t really need technical knowledge,” explained Chikazawa. “You can just out of the box use Autify.”
There are obviously some other startups that are also tackling this space, including SpotQA, for example. Chikazawa, however, argues that Autify is different, given its focus on enterprises. “The audience is really different. We have competitors that are targeting engineers, but because we are saying that no coding [is required], we are selling to the companies that have been struggling with hiring automating engineers,” he told me. He also stressed that Autify is able to do cross-browser testing, something that’s also not a given among its competitors.
The company introduced its closed beta version in March and is currently testing the service with about a hundred companies. It integrates with development platforms like TestRail, Jenkins and CircleCI, as well as Slack.
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Canva, the Australian-based design tool maker, has today announced that it has raised an additional $85 million to bring its valuation to $3.2 billion, up from $2.5 billion in May.
Investors in the company include Mary Meeker’s Bond, General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Blackbird and Sequoia China.
Alongside the new funding and valuation, Canva is also making its foray into enterprise with the launch of Canva for Enterprise.
Thus far, Canva has offered users a lightweight tool set for creating marketing and sales decks, social media materials and other design products mostly unrelated to product design. The idea here is that, outside of product designers, the rest of the organization is often left behind with regards to keeping brand parity in the materials they use.
Canva is available for free for individual users, but the company has addressed the growing need within professional organizations to keep brand parity through Canva Pro, a premium version of the product available for $12.95/month.
The company is now extending service to organizations with the launch of Canva for Enterprise. The new product will not only offer a brand kit (Canva’s parlance for Design System), but will also offer marketing and sales templates, locked approval-based workflows and even hide Canva’s massive design library within the organization so employees only have access to their approved brand assets, fonts, colors, etc.
Canva for Enterprise also adds another layer of organization, allowing collaboration across comments, a dashboard to manage teams and assign roles, and team folders.
“We’re in a fortunate place because the market has been disaggregated,” said Canva CEO and founder Melanie Perkins. “The way we think about the pain point consumers have is that people are being inconsistent with the brand, and there are huge inefficiencies within the organization, which is why people have been literally asking us to build this exact product.”
More than 20 million users sign in to Canva each month across 190 countries, with 85% of Fortune 500 companies using the product, according to the company.
Perkins says the ultimate goal is to have every person in the world with access to the internet and a design need to be on the platform.
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