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New lo-fi, text-based social app Lex, for queer women, raises $1.5 million
Lex, a new social app for women, trans, genderqueer and non-binary people offering the ability to post personal ads, has today announced the close of a $1.5 million seed funding round.
Investors in the round include Corigin Ventures, X-Factor Ventures and Tusk Ventures, as well as angels Michelle Kennedy (Peanut), Andy Dunn (Bonobos) Amanda Bradford (The League), Rei Wang (The Grand), Bumble Fund, Elisabeth Hartley, Tavi Gevinson, Nisha Dua, A.G. Breitenstein, Albert Lee, Alice Cheng, Justin Stefano, Piera Gelardi, Philippe von Borries, Debbie Millman and Roxane Gay. Female Founders Fund led the round.
Short for Lexicon, Lex was founded by Kell Rakowski, who originally rose to some prominence after starting an Instagram account called Herstory that curated cool lesbian content from the 1800s to the 90s, including the Personals Ads found in the backs of lesbian erotica magazines from the 80s.
“[The personal ads] were just so hot, and so cool,” said Rakowski. “They were really witty and the women were super direct, and were able to express themselves in a really clear and inspiring way.”
Rakowski had an idea: What if the queer personal ad came back? She asked her Herstory followers if they’d want to post their own personals and the premise quickly took off, with hundreds of personal ads flooding in over the two-day period each month when submissions were open.
The popularity of the format led to yet another idea. Rakowski decided to set up a dating/social app that was focused on these text-based personal ads for women, trans, genderqueer and non-binary people.
Lex, which launched on the App Store in November 2019, is an MVP that does just that.
Users can set up their own profile and post personals, as well as browse the feed of other personals and like the ones that pique their interest. While the personals themselves can be rather graphic, the app is not. There are currently no pictures on Lex, with the caveat that users can link out to their Instagram account if they so choose.
Rather, users can browse through the text-based personals and like them, or message the author of the personal to start up a conversation.
Moreover, unlike traditional dating apps, there is no mutuality required to start a private conversation. In other words, people don’t have to be “matched” to chat. Just like the personal ads of yesteryear, the author sends out a call for responses and the responses flow in.
It’s still early days for the app, but Rakowski has plans to set up the ability to post pictures to profiles (which would not be included in the feed, but would be clickable should the text intrigue you), as well as adding group chat to the app for folks looking to build community.
Lex also has plans to eventually introduce a freemium subscription model to the app, giving users extended functionality for a monthly price. For now, however, the focus is on growth and building out the app.
With the new funding, Lex is looking to hire underrepresented talent in tech for product and engineering positions. The team, comprised of five people, is currently 80% cis women and 20% cis men, with 80% identifying as LGBTQ. Three of the five team members are people of color.
Lex is being aggressive about this hiring sprint, posting its open positions on the app and on Instagram.
“I’ve gotten so many incredible queer tech talent applying for positions at Lex,” said Rakowski. “It’s so inspiring and also emotional. People are writing the most beautiful emails about how much they like Lex. Hiring is 100% our main focus.”
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Qumulo scores $125M Series E on $1.2B valuation as storage biz accelerates
Qumulo, a Seattle storage startup helping companies store vast amounts of data, announced a $125 million Series E investment today on a $1.2 billion valuation.
BlackRock led the round with help from Highland Capital Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Kleiner Perkins and new investor Amity Ventures. The company reports it has now raised $351 million.
CEO Bill Richter says the valuation is more than 2x its most recent round, a $93 million Series D in 2018. While the valuation puts his company in the unicorn club, he says that it’s more important than simple bragging rights. “It puts us in the category of raising at a billion-plus dollar level during a very complicated environment in the world. Actually, that’s probably the more meaningful news,” he told TechCrunch.
It typically hasn’t been easy raising money during the pandemic, but Richter reports the company started getting inbound interest in March just before things started shutting down nationally. What’s more, as the company’s quarter closed at the end of April, they had grown almost 100% year over year, and beaten their pre-COVID revenue estimate. He says they saw that as a signal to take additional investment.
“When you’re putting up nearly 100% year over year growth in an environment like this, I think it really draws a lot of attention in a positive way,” he said. And that attention came in the form of a huge round that closed this week.
What’s driving that growth is that the amount of unstructured data, which plays to the company’s storage strength, is accelerating during the pandemic as companies move more of their activities online. He says that when you combine that with a shift to the public cloud, he believes that Qumulo is well positioned.
Today the company has 400 customers and more than 300 employees, with plans to add another 100 before year’s end. As he adds those employees, he says that part of the company’s core principles includes building a diverse workforce. “We took the time as an organization to write out a detailed set of hiring practices that are designed to root out bias in the process,” he said.
One of the keys to that is looking at a broad set of candidates, not just the ones you’ve known from previous jobs. “The reason for that is that when you force people to go through hiring practices, you open up the position to a broader, more diverse set of candidates and you stop the cycle of continuously creating what I call ‘club memberships’, where if you were a member of the club before you’re a member in the future,” he says.
The company has been around since 2012 and spent the first couple of years conducting market research before building its first product. In 2014 it released a storage appliance, but over time it has shifted more toward hybrid solutions.
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Waldo is a ‘no code’ automated mobile testing service that anyone can use
Meet Waldo, a new product that wants to make mobile testing both faster and easier. The New York-based startup lets you record tests in your browser by interacting with your app like you’d normally do. Every time you compile a new build, Waldo runs the same tests you previously recorded on multiple software and hardware models to tell you if everything works fine.
If you’re an app developer, you currently have two possibilities. You can keep a bunch of smartphones and run your current build on these devices to see if there’s anything wrong, but it takes a ton of time. Or you can develop testing scripts that validate the core features of your app — but that requires additional development and creates a whole new set of headaches when you need to update your scripts.
“It’s always a bit weird that we can create incredible experiences when it comes to UX, but that the way we test those apps is outdated,” co-founder and CEO Amine Bellakrid told me.
Waldo wants to lower the barrier to entry and let smaller mobile development teams take advantage of automated functional and UI testing. It is part of a bigger trend of “no code” startups — no technical skills required.
The company raised a $6.5 million round led by First Round Capital (with Josh Kopelman), with existing investor Matrix Partners and business angels also participating.
Creating tests on Waldo is pretty straightforward. The product runs your app directly (.app / .ipa / .apk), which means you don’t have to create a special version of your app to take advantage of the platform.
After uploading your app, you see your app running in your browser window. Waldo records every screen and every action you take. For instance, you can record the signup flow or a feature that lets you upload content.
Image Credits: Waldo
When you’re done recording your tests, Waldo keeps them for future versions. Every time you have a new build of your mobile app, Waldo runs the same tests on that new version. In addition to that, Waldo can run those tests on other devices with different screen sizes, older versions of mobile operating systems and in different languages.
If a test fails, users get notified and can browse the replay of the test. You can see exactly what went wrong to spot the problematic step more easily.
The idea is that you set up Waldo once and let it run in the background. It integrates with popular continuous integration (CI) tools, such as Fastlane, Bitrise and CircleCI. You can receive alerts in Slack or see the status of your test results in GitHub directly.
“We have customers that run 500 tests at once every week or we have customers that run 10 to 15 tests multiple times a day,” Bellakrid said.
Waldo is launching a free plan today to kick the tires, and you can then pay a subscription to run more tests. Some companies have started using Waldo already, such as AllTrails, Jumprope, KeepSafe and Elevate. Right now, Waldo only works with iOS apps, but the team is already working on adding Android support in the future.
Image Credits: Waldo
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Benchmark-backed Optimizely confirms it has laid off 15% of staff
Optimizely, a San Francisco-based startup that popularized the concept of A/B testing, has laid off 15% of its staff, the company confirmed in a statement to TechCrunch. The layoff impacts around 60 people, and those laid off were given varied levels of severance. Each employee was given six months of COBRA and was allowed to keep their laptops.
“As with so many other businesses globally, Optimizely has been impacted by COVID-19. Today, we have had to make a heartbreaking decision to reduce the size of our workforce,” Erin Flynn, chief people office, wrote in a statement to TechCrunch, adding that “today’s difficult decision sets up our business for continued success.”
The startup was founded in 2009 by Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen on the idea that it helps to have customers experience different versions of the website, also known as A/B testing, to see what iteration sticks best. A year after founding, the startup went through Y Combinator and in 2013 it signed a lease for a 56,000-square-foot office in San Francisco.
Optimizely last raised $50 million in Series D financing from Goldman Sachs, bringing its total venture capital secured to date to $200 million. Other investors include Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and GV.
In June, Optimizely said it handles more than 6 billion events a day. Customers include Visa, BBC, IBM, The Wall Street Journal, Gap, StubHub and Metromile.
Optimizely was not listed as applying for a PPP loan, a program created by the government to help businesses avoid laying off staff. The loans were met with controversy in Silicon Valley, as some thought venture-backed businesses should turn to investors, instead of the government, for extra capital.
Optimizely’s layoffs are somewhat surprising, given recent earnings reports that show that enterprise SaaS companies have broadly benefited from the coronavirus pandemic. In an online work world, infrastructure and software services become more vital by the day. Box, for example, helps people manage content in the cloud and it beat expectations on adjusted profit and revenue. So why is Optimizely struggling?
There are a ton of reasons for layoffs beyond what the market thinks about a business. Optimzely’s customers are a mix of heavy-hitters in enterprise, but also include businesses that have struggled during this pandemic, including StubHub and Metromile — both of which had layoffs.
While the pace of layoffs is slowing down, cuts themselves aren’t disappearing. As the stocks show us, it’s a volatile time and businesses are looking for ways to stay financially safe.
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StackHawk, the Denver-based bug-detecting service, hires developer of open-source project Zed Attack Proxy
StackHawk, the Denver-based software startup offering service to detect and fix security bugs, is doubling down on its support for the popular open-source OWASP Zed Attack Proxy web app security scanner by bringing on board its founder, Simon Bennetts.
At StackHawk, Bennetts will continue to focus on the development of the open-source project, which the company said is among the world’s most frequently used security scanning tools.
StackHawk already uses the open-source project for its underlying scanning technology and has built a business by layering on security test automation, integrations with development tools and functionality for new development paradigms.
“Since founding ZAP, the vision has always been to deliver application security to developers,” Bennetts said, in a statement. “While the project has been widely adopted by security teams and pen testers, I’m excited to work with a team dedicated to delivering our original vision of AppSec for devs and that also believes in growing the open source community.”
StackHawk founders Joni Klippert, Scott Gerlach and Ryan Severns and Bennetts found common cause in their belief that bug-editing tools are too often built for external enterprise security teams instead of the developers who are closest to the apps they’re building.
“Simon’s work on the ZAP project has both changed the security and open-source worlds for the better. It became clear that we were highly aligned in our mission to bring application security into the hands of developers,” said Klippert, the chief executive and founder of StackHawk, in a statement. “Simon joining the StackHawk team provides an exciting opportunity to invest more in the ZAP open source project, while also building capabilities that make it easy for enterprise development teams to streamline AppSec into their CI/CD pipelines.”
In the eleven years since Bennetts first began working on ZAP, the OWASP Foundation-incorporated security scanner has become popular among the developer community for its dynamic application security testing.
After the hire, StackHawk said that nothing much will change. Bennetts will continue to work on the open-source project while the company will continue to build functionality around the scanner.
The Denver-based company has raised nearly $5 million in financing from investors including Flybridge, Costanoa Ventures, Matchstick Ventures and Foundry Group .
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GoHealth’s shares dip after upsized IPO
On the heels of nCino’s blockbuster debut, GoHealth’s public offering proved a more sedate affair, at least when comparing the two companies’ initial trading days.
GoHealth priced above its anticipated IPO range, selling more shares than initially planned in the process. By vending 43.5 million shares at $21 apiece — $1 per share more than the top of its preceding $18 to $20 range, and four million shares more than its target of 39.5 million — the insurance technology company put more than $900 million onto its balance sheet this week.
The debut is a win for Chicago’s industry and tech scenes. GoHealth was worth a little less than $6.7 billion at its IPO price, not counting shares that may be sold to its underwriters, which would boost its valuation.
Despite its better-than-anticipated pricing, however, GoHealth shares sagged in afternoon trading, slipping to $19.00 per share, down 9.5% as of the time of writing. The declines stand in contrast to the recent debuts of nCino, Lemonade and others, which saw their shares instantly gain value after going public.
GoHealth’s CEO, however, stressed the long-term vision of his company in an interview with TechCrunch. Speaking with Clint Jones during GoHealth’s first trading day, the executive told TechCrunch that his company’s offering was oversubscribed, and had met its goal of accumulating long-term investors during its IPO process.
The company intends to hire with its new funds, including 1,000 more licensed insurance agents, the CEO said.
Asked whether the company has plans to acquire smaller companies with its IPO funds, Jones told TechCrunch that it could be “opportunistic” regarding buying tech platforms, or smaller teams with particular talent. For the many startups competing in other parts of the insurance marketplace world — TechCrunch has covered the space extensively, including a bevy of funding rounds for insurtech startups — a newly wealthy public company could provide an interesting exit opportunity.
The company’s strong IPO pricing, if somewhat slack first-day’s trading, feels akin to a wash for related, smaller firms watching its public offering with interest; how GoHealth trades moving forward could help set the tone for select insurtech startup valuations.
For today, however, we have yet another unicorn tech-ish offering all wrapped up. GoHealth’s path to the public market’s wasn’t as straightforward as some, but it got there all the same.
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Sidekick embraces remote working with always-on teleconferencing hardware
Those forced to acclimate to remote work understand what a pain it can be. Sure, there are certainly benefits to not having to commute into work each day, but among other things, you lose a lot when you eliminate human interaction. Apps like Zoom and Slack have their place, certainly, but none does a particularly good job replicating the in-person work environment.
Formed by three ex-Palantir employees and a former Googler, Y Combinator-backed Sidekick has impeccable timing. The startup (which is fittingly remotely split between the Bay Area and New York), has built a hardware solution designed to bring an always-on video connection to the desk of remote workers (which, as it so happens, is most of us non-essentials, these days).
Development of the project began in earnest when the startup set out interviewing 100+ teams to discuss the challenges of remote work.
“We reflected deeply on what’s needed to enable these organic conversations. We came from a background as ICs and managers working on distributed teams at Palantir and Google, where we had all the shiniest collaboration tools at our disposal — Slack, Zoom, Notion, Tandem,” Sidekick writes in a recent blog post. “Despite this entire suite of shiny tools, we would still fly out for a week every month from our home office in NYC to join our remote halves in London — over 20 hours in travel and thousands of dollars in expenses every month.”
Image Credits: Sidekick
Sidekick contends that teleconferencing apps like Zoom create too much friction between the user and creating a kind of virtual open office. The teams the company spoke with suggested that a dedicated hardware device was the way to go here, so Sidekick repurposed an OEMed tablet, forking Android to their purpose. The company’s roadmap involves a proprietary hardware device sporting key aspects like a depth sensor.
For now, however, it’s selling its version of the existing consumer tablet through a hardware-as-a-service plan. Customers will be charged $50 per month, per device.
“They should only pay us as long as we’re delivering that value, and stop paying us if we’re not,” Sidekick told TechCrunch when asked about the subscription method. “We see the hardware as the best way of delivering that, but we believe that what’s most fair is for our users to pay for exactly the continued value we provide — not the hardware itself.”
There’s a physical button that puts the system to sleep, but when it’s on, it’s on. Users can’t turn the camera off and remain in stealth, either. Personally, I’d be hesitant to have an always-on camera sitting in my living room (small, one bedroom New York apartment) with a direct line to my co-workers. One of the things you risk working from home is getting a little too…comfortable, if you will. After a few hours of not interacting, it’s easy to forget that there’s a camera trained on you.
The startup tells TechCrunch that the system isn’t for everyone. “Sidekick is meant for fast-moving teams, often forced into remote work, that truly need to be in the same room to make progress,” the company explains. “Teams like startup founding teams, product leadership, executives/chief-of-staffs and sales.”
There’s probably something to be said for the executives themselves who are looking for an easier way to keep tabs on employees now that they can’t just swing by their cubicle. Sidekick has a purchasing option “for teams of all sizes and setups,” though hopefully the product remains more about collaboration and less about monitoring for most teams.
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As companies accelerate their digital transitions, employees detail a changed workplace
The U.S.’s COVID-19 caseload continues to set records as major states move to re-shutter their economies in hopes of stemming its spread. For many workers the situation means more time in the home office and less time in their traditional workplace. My colleague Greg Kumparak spent some time talking to companies about how best to work remotely. You can read that on Extra Crunch here.
What the world will look like when safety eventually returns is not clear, but it’s becoming plain that the workplace will not revert to its old normal. New data details changed employee sentiment, showing that a good portion of the working world doesn’t want to get back to its pre-COVID commute, and, in many cases, is eyeing a move to a different city or state in the wake of the pandemic and its economic disruptions.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, and now you can receive it in your inbox. Sign up for The Exchange newsletter, which will drop every Saturday starting July 25.
The changing workplace has shifted — accelerated, you could say — demand for all sorts of products and services, from grocery delivery to software. The latter category of tools has seen quickening demand as the world moves to support newly remote workforces, helping keep them both productive and secure.
TechCrunch has covered the accelerating digital transformation — industry slang for companies moving to a more software-and-cloud world — before, noting that investors are making big bets on companies that might benefit from its ramping pace. Thanks to new data from a Twilio-led survey, we have a fresh look at that trend.
Undergirding the digital transformation is how today’s workers are adapting to remote work. If many workers don’t want to stop working from home, the gains that companies serving the digital transformation are seeing could prove permanent. New data from a Qualtrics -led survey may help us understand the new mindset of the domestic and global worker.
At the union of the two datasets is a lens into the future of not only how many information workers, to borrow an old phrase, will labor in the future, but how they’ll feel about it. So, this morning let’s explore the world through two data-driven lenses, helped as we go with notes from interviews with Qualtrics’ CEO Ryan Smith and Twilio’s chief customer officer, Glenn Weinstein.
What workers want
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Crisp, the platform for demand forecasting the food supply chain, gets $12 million in funding
Crisp, a demand forecasting platform for the food industry, has today announced the close of a $12 million Series A funding round led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from Spring Capital and Swell Partners.
Crisp launched out of beta in January of this year with a product that aimed to give food suppliers and distributors a clearer picture of customer demand at retailers. Before Crisp, these organizations usually had several data scientists compiling data from various sources into an unintelligible spreadsheet, making it difficult to see general demand outlooks, and nearly impossible to spot anomalies.
Not only does this lead to losses in revenue, but it also contributes to a terrible amount of food waste.
Crisp looks to solve this by giving these suppliers and distributors a visualization of their data instantly and in real time. The company has built integrations with a large number of ERP software, ingesting historical data from food brands and combining them with a wide range of other signals around demand drivers, such as seasonality, holidays, price sensitivity, past marketing campaigns, changes in the competitive landscape and weather that might affect the sale or shipment of ingredients or the product itself.
The end goal is to consolidate data across the industry, from brands to distributors to grocery stores, so that each individual link in the food chain can do a better job of matching their supply with their demand on an individual basis.
Since launching out of beta, Crisp has expanded beyond food brands and suppliers into retail and distributor space. The company has also expanded beyond produce and dairy into verticals like beverages, bakery, CPG, flowers, meat and poultry. The startup says its seen an 80% increase in the number of customers using the platform since January.
Obviously, the coronavirus pandemic brings its own unique challenges and opportunities to Crisp’s business. On the one hand, grocery store shopping is booming and the supply chain behind it is certainly in need of better data science and demand forecasting as user behavior shifts rapidly. On the other hand, user behavior is shifting rapidly.
With state by state, and sometimes county by county, lockdowns and shifts in the restrictions imposed on small businesses, Crisp has had to manually track what’s going on around the country in order to provide clear insights to its customers.
“This period we’re in has increased that willingness to share data and increased collaboration between everybody in the supply chain,” said founder and CEO Are Traasdahl. “We’ve seen a big shift there. Earlier, everyone assumed that everyone else was able to deliver, but now this ability to have a full, top-down visibility across a whole depth of companies, not just the companies next to you in your trading relationships, but being able to unify data and have more insights from multiple steps away from yourself, and get that data in real time been accelerated.”
Crisp currently has 33 employees (with plans to hire on the back of the funding), which is 33% women and 15% people of color. Half of Crisp’s management team are women.
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VidMob rethinks video production in the pandemic era
VidMob, which started out as a marketplace connecting marketers and video editors, now bills itself as a “creative technology platform.” Now there’s a “creator network” that’s part of a broader suite of tools for managing video production and turning those videos into online ads.
And the company has continued to evolve during the COVID-19 pandemic. Founder and CEO Alex Collmer told me that how customers use the platform has changed substantially in recent months. For example, he said that one of the platform’s “best skills” involved taking existing footage — including footage shot for TV commercials — and other creative assets and turning them into social media ads. But of course, “Over the last few months, all physical shoots were canceled.”
So Collmer said that rather than simply treating VidMob as a social media advertising tool, brands are increasingly turning to the startup for a way to manage remote video production. The result is that the company saw 100% year-over-year “logo growth” (a.k.a. new customers) in the first quarter, and then grew another 50% in Q2.
“What we have seen here is the acceleration of the digital transformation of the enterprise,” he said. “Pretty much every client we have, every marketer we talk to is looking very seriously at how to move all their creative operations onto some sort of unifying software platform, so that they feel safe in the event that they continue to have to work in a remote environment, and to be more efficient with existing media.”
One of those gin brand Monkey 47, whose brand lead Jennifer Schwartz said in a statement, “We have worked multiple times with VidMob as they quickly and efficiently help a lean and nimble brand like ours get out our message to millions of consumers.”
Another client is Citi, whose Chief Brand Officer Carla Hassan told me her team has been working with VidMob since last year. She said that as as a result of the pandemic, like many marketers, “We were required to really be flexible and adjust and scale programs quickly.”
For example, in response to the #InItTogether hashtag, Citi used VidMob to create a series of inspirational videos showcasing the work of its employees — such as Mihir in the video above, who was 3D printing protective equipment for his communities.
“As we thought about how we told the stories, we realized that your colleagues are some of the most important heroes that you have,” Hassan said.
According to Citi, the videos have been viewed nearly 250,000 times since the campaign launched in early May, with 80% of that viewing on LinkedIn.
And although dealing with the initial pandemic and shutdown was difficult enough, the news keeps coming, with protests for racial justice, a COVID-19 resurgence, resulting closures and more.
“We’re going to be in a period of uncertainty for a while, but to be honest, I see that as an opportunity,” Hassan said. “Brands who understand what their consumers want, brands who are tuned into the cultural zeitgeist, brands [who] pivot quickly to create content that is relevant and engaging and drive business KPIs … that will be what wins in the future.”
Similarly, Collmer said that in a period of uncertainty, brands need to respond more quickly, rather than simply falling silent: “Shutting up and going away is not a great way to position yourself.”
Update: This post has been updated to correctly identify the executive at Citi and to include a quote from Monkey 47.
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