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Livestorm raises $30M for its browser-based meeting and webinar platform
Video communication startup Livestorm announced today that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding.
Co-founder and CEO Gilles Bertaux told me that the company started out with a focus on webinars before launching a video meeting product as well (which we used for our interview).
“The way we think about it is, webinars and meetings are not use cases,” Bertaux said.
He argued that it’s more meaningful to talk about whether you’re having a team meeting or a training demo or whatever else, and then how many people you want to attend, with Livestorm supporting all of those use cases and meeting sizes through different templates: “We’re trying to remove the semantic distinction of meeting and webinar out of the equation.”
Among other things, Livestorm is distinguished from other video conferencing tools because it’s purely browser based, without requiring presenters or attendees to install any software. The company says it has grown revenue 8x since it raised its €4.6 million Series A last fall, with a customer base that now includes 3,500 customers such as Shopify, Honda and Sephora.
Image Credits: Livestorm
Of course, you’d expect a video communication product to do well in 2020. At the same time, Zoom has dominated the remote work conversation this year — in fact, Bertaux acknowledged that Zoom may have built “the best video meeting technology.”
But he also suggested that the landscape is changing: “The thing is, we’re entering a period where video is becoming a commodity.”
So the Livestorm team is less focused on the core video technology and more on the experience around the video, with in-meeting features like screen sharing and virtual background, as well as a broader suite of marketing tools that allow customers to continue delivering targeted messages to event attendees.
Bertaux compared Livestorm to HubSpot, which he said “didn’t reinvent landing pages,” but put the different pieces of the marketing stack together around those landing pages.
The Livestorm executive team. Image Credits: Livestorm
“In 2021, we want to have the biggest ecosystem of integrations on a video product,” he said.
The round was led by Aglaé Ventures and Bpifrance Digital Venture, with participation from Raise Ventures and IDInvest.
In a statement, Aglaé Ventures partner Cyril Guenoun similarly described Livestorm “the HubSpot for video communications,” adding, “Video and online events have become essential in 2020, and are here to stay. The Livestorm platform thrives in this environment, providing a seamless solution for meetings and events with all the connectors that marketing, sales, customer service and HR pros need to make video a tightly integrated part of their communications strategies.”
Bertaux said the new funding will allow Paris-headquartered Livestorm to continue expanding into North America — apparently, the U.S. already represents one-third of its customer base and is the company’s fastest-growing region.
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Menlo Security announces $100M Series E on $800M valuation
Menlo Security, a malware and phishing prevention startup, announced a $100 million Series E today on an $800 million valuation. The round was led by Vista Equity Partners with help from Neuberger Berman, General Catalyst, JP Morgan and other unnamed existing investors. The company has now raised approximately $250 million.
CEO and co-founder Amir Ben-Efraim says that while the platform has expanded over the years, the company stays mostly focused on web and email as major attack vectors for customers. “We really focused on a better kind of security outcome relative to the major threat factors of web and email. So web and email is really how most of the world or the enterprise world at least does its work, and these channels remain forever vulnerable to the latest attack,” Ben-Efraim explained.
He says that to protect those attack surfaces, the company pioneered a technology called web isolation to disconnect the user from the content and send only safe visuals. “When they click a link or engage with a website, the safe visuals are guaranteed to be malware-free, no matter where you go or you end up,” Ben-Efraim said.
With a valuation of $800 million, he’s proud having built his company from the ground up to this point. He’s not quite ready to discuss an IPO yet, but he expects to take this large influx of cash and continue to grow an independent company with an IPO perhaps three years out.
With an increase in business and the new capital, the company, which has 270 employees of which around 70 came on board this year, hopes to continue to grow at that pace in 2021. He says that as that happens the security startup has been paying close attention to the social justice movements.
“As a management team and for myself as a CEO, it’s an important topic. So we were paying close attention to our own diversification goals. We want Menlo to become a more diversified company,” Ben-Efraim said. He believes the way to get there is to prioritize recruiting channels where they can tap into a wider variety of potential recruits for the company.
While he wouldn’t discuss revenue, he did say in spite of the pandemic, the business is growing rapidly and sales are up 155% in terms of net new sales over last year. “The momentum for that being customers specifically in critical infrastructure, financial services, government and the like are seeing an uptick in attacks associated with COVID, and are looking at security as essential in an area that they need to double down on. So despite the financial difficulties, that’s created a bit of a tailwind for us strangely in 2020, even though the world economy as a whole is clearly being challenged by this epidemic,” he said.
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Gaming startup Statespace raises $29 million, tops 1.5 million MAUs
Statespace, the training platform for gamers, has today announced the close of a $29 million Series B financing led by Khosla Ventures. This comes just six months after the announcement of a $15 million Series A funding, also led by Khosla.
Founder and CEO Wayne Mackey described the funding as pre-emptive as the company experiences a growth spurt alongside the broader gaming industry. Statespace has jumped from 2 million registered users and 500,000 monthly active users in May to 5 million total registered users and 1.5 million monthly active users today.
Statespace launched out of stealth in 2017 with a product called Aim Lab. Aim Lab runs on Steam and replicates the physics of popular video games to give users a training environment to practice their aim. Moreover, Aim Lab (which was developed by neuroscientists) measures visual acuity and lets users know their strengths and weaknesses.
Image Credits: Statespace
The company also has plans to launch a product called The Academy, which lets users pay for courses that are taught by top streamers and players. These players include KingGeorge (Rainbox Six Siege), SypherPK (Fortnite), Valkia (Overwatch), Drift0r (CoD) and Launders (CS:GO).
The tech behind Aim Lab can be applied to a number of use cases in the gaming world. For one, pro esports organizations don’t necessarily have the breadth of data they want to make decisions on roster formation, recruiting, etc. Statespace partnered with the Pro Football Hall of Fame to develop a “Cognitive Combine,” giving players an overall score based on a wide range of skills outside of any specific game.
There are also medical applications for the tech. The company has applied for a grant alongside several universities to work on a commercial application for stroke rehabilitation, and believes that its tech can be used to help with cerebral palsy rehabilitation.
Statespace has also grown its team to more than 40 people, and interestingly around one quarter of those people do not have a college degree.
“Internally, we talk about being like the island of misfit toys as a company,” said Mackey. “Give us all the underdogs and weirdos and people that traditionally wouldn’t have this type of career or a shot and let’s put them all together and win.”
The Statespace team is 30% female, 28% people of color and 5% Black.
Mackey explained that growth is the number-one priority of the company, which has yet to determine a primary revenue channel. Statespace is currently partnering with teams and big streamers to develop skins that are for sale, but Aim Lab is free to use.
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mmhmm videochat software is now available to all for Mac
mmhmm, the presentation software developed by Evernote founder Phil Libin, is today coming out of beta. The mmhmm app is now officially available for Mac.
The software allows folks to spice up their video calls with the ability to add different backgrounds, play videos, add images and use filters, among other cool effects. The app has been invite-only since its inception, but today it becomes available to all.
Alongside the launch of the free app, mmhmm is also introducing Premium Tools.
This includes customizable rooms, presenter controls and extra add-ons like laser pointers. Users can get a free seven-day trial of the Premium Tools, and after the trial will have access to these tools for one hour per day. The Premium Tools will cost $99/year or $9.99/month, but free users will still be able to video chat, record, collaborate and use the basic present with a default background and simple presenter mode.
Another important note: mmhmm has decided to make its Premium Tools free to students and educators for one year.
The public launch also brings a handful of new features, including Big Hand Mode (which lets folks in the video call visually react), improvements to the appearance of mmhmm’s virtual green screen and mmhmm Creative Services.
Image Credits: mmhmm
Big Hand Mode is only available on Apple’s new M1-powered Macs.
Creative Services represent another revenue channel for the company, which will now offer white-glove bespoke services to folks running large events or experiences.
For now, mmhmm is only available on MacOS, but the company is working on a Windows beta as we speak.
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President-elect Joseph Biden reportedly plucks Revolution’s Ron Klain as new chief of staff
President-elect Joseph Biden has plucked Ron Klain, a longtime colleague and confidant and the current executive vice president of the venture capital firm Revolution, as his White House chief of staff, reports The New York Times.
Klain was Biden’s chief of staff for two years during the Obama administration and left his post as chief of staff in 2011 to join Revolution, the firm founded by former AOL chief executive and founder Steve Case. Revolution did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
If Klain makes his second entrance into the White House, Biden will be bringing on a chief of staff he’s known for more than 35 years. The duo first worked together in 1989, when the president-elect was a senator and Klain was a newly graduated law student from Harvard Law School. He most recently worked as the White House Ebola Response coordinator from October 2014 to February 2015, and helped as a debate advisor to President Obama and President Clinton, as well as nominees Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.
Klain’s appointment could pacify some of the presumed tension that could occur between startups and the government under the Biden-Harris administration. Biden has been vocal about pursuing aggressive regulation on the tech industry, which could negatively impact behemoths like Google, Apple and Facebook. Klain has spoken up (in TechCrunch!) about how regulatory hurdles could hinder key innovation in startup-land. Klain also helped lead efforts for Higher Ground Labs, an incubator and accelerator focused on politically-focused (and Democrat-loved) startups. While that likely wouldn’t impact Big Tech, it doesn’t hurt that, reportedly, one of Biden’s closest confidants will have a soft spot for startups.
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Join us for a live Q&A with Bessemer’s Byron Deeter next Tuesday at 3 p.m ET, noon PT
The Extra Crunch Live series rolls along with a big new installment next week as Jordan Crook and Alex Wilhelm will welcome Bessemer Venture Partners‘ Byron Deeter to the conversation.
Deeter is an obvious addition to the collection of investors, founders and tech luminaries that TechCrunch has interviewed so far in the Live series — for a taste, here’s a look at our discussion with Unusual Ventures’ John Vrionis and Sarah Leary, and our chat with Plaid co-founder Zach Perret.
Why talk to a Bessemer partner in the current moment? The firm is well-known for its investments into SaaS and cloud companies, a key startup cohort that has performed well. Recent days have shaken that narrative as Q4 races to the halfway mark, with public investors seeming to rotate into other equities, punishing software firms that had been the market’s favored bet for most of the year.
We’ll dig into what’s changing on the private side of that coin, looking to understand today’s software venture capital dynamics, and what Deeter sees happening in 2021.
But there’s more to Bessemer’s active portfolio than SaaS. The venture group has also dropped dollars into Discord, which is seeing both revenue and usage explode, and Betterment, which plays in the active fintech savings and investing space. There’s lots to get into.
If you are an Extra Crunch Live veteran — you rock star, you! — or a brand-new participant — make sure your Extra Crunch membership is live! — bring a question or two as we’ll try to work in a few from the audience as we go.
Chat with you next Tuesday afternoon! (Oh, and you can now pre-submit questions down below, which is a great improvement over the old system which only allowed for live submissions!)
Details
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Dear Sophie: What does Biden’s win mean for tech immigration?
Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”
Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.
Dear Sophie:
What does President-elect Biden’s victory mean for U.S. immigration and immigration reform?
I’m in tech in SF and have a lot of friends who are immigrant founders, along with many international teammates at my tech company. What can we look forward to?
—Anticipation in Albany
Dear Anticipation,
Glimpsing into my crystal ball, I see opportunity ahead. President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris have long stood committed to important immigration changes that will directly affect the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem.
Dream with ambition, lead with conviction, and see yourself in a way that others might not see you, simply because they’ve never seen it before.
— Kamala Harris
We’re appreciative of what’s to come. As my firm’s mission is to transcend borders, expand opportunity and connect the world by practicing compassionate, visionary and expert immigration law in service of the betterment of humanity, we’re looking forward to a deluge of immigration changes that will support our clients as well as innovation and entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and beyond. Please join me tomorrow for a free webinar as we take a look at what’s ahead for U.S. immigration in 2020, what these important developments mean for Silicon Valley, for startup founder immigration, and for recruiting, hiring and retaining top talent.
I’m confident we’ll see meaningful changes in immigration for startups, founders, investors, researchers, highly skilled professionals, students, Dreamers and families under the Biden administration. Check out my Immigration Law for Tech Startups podcast for my take on some of the highlights. Of top priority, Biden and Harris plan to unravel recent executive orders and regulations, modernize our immigration system, and perhaps most importantly, welcome immigrants.
President-elect Biden’s six-point plan for building a fair and humane immigration system includes promises to:
- Rescind Trump immigration policies, regulations and executive orders.
- Modernize the immigration system.
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Only 72 hours left until early-bird savings end for TC Sessions: Space 2020
We’re just about a month away from TC Sessions: Space 2020, a two-day conference dedicated to bold visionaries with the passion, audacity and technical skills to chart a new course in space. Fun fact: A bold visionary likes a good deal as much as the next one.
But timing is everything. The deadline for securing the early-bird price expires in just 72 hours. Buy your pass before prices go up on stardate 98468.52 (aka 11.13.20 at 11:59 p.m. PST) and save $100.
If you’re looking for more ways to save, we’ve got you covered. We offer group discount passes ($100 each — bring four team members and get the fifth one free); student discounts ($50); and discounts for government, military and nonprofits ($95). If you subscribe to Extra Crunch, knock an extra 20% off the price of admission.
Your pass provides access to all live sessions and video on demand, making it easy to network with attendees or conduct other business during your day. Plus, you don’t have to choose between presentations that air simultaneously.
What can you expect on this space odyssey? You’ll hear from — and get to engage with — some of the most important movers and shakers across public, private and defense sectors. Enjoy interviews, panel discussions, breakout sessions and interactive Q&As geared to help early-stage startups build and succeed.
Here’s a taste of what we have on tap. Check out the event agenda to strategize your schedule.
Fast Money — The Space Force Accelerators: Learn how the Hyperspace Challenge, Catalyst Space Accelerator and other government accelerators can connect you to the U.S. Space Force.
Ground Control to Major Tom: Data connectivity and communications are key to commercial space monetization and the strategic plans for further space exploration and development. Hear from the key players about the state of play in the industry.
In Space, No One Can Change Your Oil — Yet: Once a spacecraft is in orbit, it’s on its own — but what if it could be refueled, repaired, refurbished and, if necessary, retired? OrbitFab founder Daniel Faber and Astroscale U.S. President Ron Lopez discuss how in-space operations could upend today’s engineering and business models.
Hot Tip: Looking to increase engagement and exposure for your space startup? Buy a Startup Exhibitor Package and you’ll get five minutes to pitch your company live to thousands of global attendees.
No matter where you fall in the early-stage startup ecosystem, TC Sessions: Space 2020 is dedicated to helping visionaries like you succeed. Join your people at the best possible rate and secure your pass before the early-bird deal expires in 72 hours on 11.13.20 at 11:59 p.m. PST. Make it so.
Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Space 2020? Click here to talk with us about available opportunities.
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As edtech crowds up, Campuswire bets big on real-time learning
Campuswire was in a fortuitous spot when colleges and universities across the world shut down on short notice because of the threat of coronavirus. Founded by Tade Oyerinde in 2018, Campuswire is a virtual solution for any teacher who wants to digitize their internal classroom communications, from Q&A time to the lecture itself.
The strategy, for the most part, has worked. Campuswire is now used at more than 300 universities among 200,000 students, Oyerinde tells me.
While Campuswire’s pitch was set to boom overnight, the founder instead saw a bigger challenge approaching: more competition. As professors moved online, lectures moved to Zoom or tools built atop of Zoom. Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts filled in the gap for classrooms that couldn’t afford fancy licenses. Campuswire’s key monetization strategy, which was selling pro licenses for its online class software, felt threatened by alternatives.
So, after months of iterating, Campuswire has adapted its monetization strategy and today announced that it is launching live courses taught by professors. Instead of solely working with professors to streamline internal class communications, Campuswire will now help teachers produce classes that students can then take for a fee. The tuition revenue will be split between the teacher and Campuswire.
Campuswire courses kick off with an angel investing class taught by Charles Hudson, the founder and general partner of Precursor Ventures. Hudson lectures at Stanford occasionally, and working with Campuswire allows him to teach a broader set of students.
Meanwhile, Campuswire software will be free to use starting in January 2021.
The move marks Campuswire’s further dive into synchronous learning. Campuswire’s model is built on how existing classrooms work in universities and colleges. Classes on Campuswire are capped at 500 to promote conversation, and large lectures are supplemented with teacher assistant (TA) classes to hammer home confusing concepts.
Meanwhile, it’s clear amid the pandemic that asynchronous learning has its perks (students can learn on their own schedule, while educators are able to work more flexible hours). Still, Oyerinde thinks a pre-recorded format is not effective for pedagogy purposes.
“This is kind of the hill we’re going to die on,” he said. “Real, lasting learning has to be synchronous for the majority of people.”
In other words, while there’s a small group of gifted-and-talented students who can watch a one-hour lecture and absorb every factoid and nuance, the majority of students need engagement, interaction and motivation to understand a topic, he argues. It’s the reason why MOOCs, or massive open online course providers, only have a 2-3% completion rate on their courses, he argues.
At its core, Campuswire has evolved from a platform trying to compete with Zoom to a platform that is trying to compete with these MOOCS through engaging content taught by experienced professors. Its main differentiation from MOOCs is that it’s live and has teacher assistants.
There are a number of startups that are trying to create engaging, celebrity professor-taught classes through hybrid plays. MasterClass, which just raised $100 million a few months ago, sells entertainment and education in one go, offering cooking classes from Gordon Ramsay and tennis lessons from Serena Williams. While you can’t interact with Ramsay or Williams, you can chat with fellow classmates.
BookClub connects readers to the authors they are reading, giving bookworms an opportunity to ask about cliffhangers and character development. The upstart is still in its early stages, but founder David Blake says that readers could talk directly to authors down the road. There’s also Teachable, which got acquired by Hotmart earlier this year. Teachable helps any expert who wants to create a business around their expertise do so with a virtual course. Arlan Hamilton, a seed-stage investor, has a course on the platform.
Today’s pivot signals the founder’s mindset that, in order to grow to the billion-dollar business mark in edtech, you need to sell more than software that Google and Microsoft will always give away for free.
“Online learning can be 100 times bigger than it is today,” Oyerinde said. “Once you actually support synchronicity, you actually support people getting to actually interact with UCLA/Princeton/Cornell professors, not just watching them on pre-recorded videos.”
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Square and PayPal earnings bring good (and bad) news for fintech startups
Earnings season is racing past us, with the big ride-hailing companies’ numbers in, all of the Big Five having wrapped their reporting and lots of SaaS numbers in the market. But amidst all the noise, The Exchange has kept an eye on two companies in particular: PayPal and Square.
We’re not really concerned with their overall revenue and profit metrics. Instead, we’ve been hunting around in their numbers for hints and notes about what is going on inside of fintech itself. Why? There are a host of hugely valuable fintech unicorns that have to go public in the future that also share some market space with one or both of our public charges.
What can we learn from looking at what PayPal and Square reported to their own investors?
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
Lots, it turns out.
As TechCrunch reported when PayPal dropped its Q3 numbers, the public company had bullish results from its Venmo service, payment processing and consumer activity metrics. The numbers pointed to strong consumer adoption of fintech services during the pandemic, something that we presumed was not unique to PayPal itself, but was likely indicative of a generally warm environment for consumer fintech services.
Square continued the trend, posting a set of results that contains nearly all positive data for consumer fintech activity — with one critical caveat for Q4 that we’ll get to at the end.
Still, what the majors tell us about the fintech space indicates a warmth in activity that explains why Chime, Robinhood and others have had such fun in 2020, accreting tectonic capital to keep their growth hot.
Digging through Square’s earnings gives us a window into consumer payment activity, card usage, stock purchases and more. Let’s see what we can learn, and to which unicorns it might apply.
A very fintech 2020
Let’s start by talking about the broader fintech market before niching down.
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