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Former Snap employees raise $9M for Trust, emerging from beta to level marketing playing field
Trust wants to give smaller businesses the same advantages that large enterprises have when marketing on digital and social media platforms. It came out of beta with $9 million in seed funding from Lerer Hippeau, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures and Upper90.
The Los Angeles-based company was started in 2019 by a group of five Snap alums working in various roles within Snap’s revenue product strategy business. They were building tools for businesses to fund success with digital marketing, but kept hearing from customers about the advantage big advertisers had over smaller ones — the ability to receive good payment terms, credit lines, as well as data and advice.
Aiming to flip the script on that, the group created Trust, which is a card and business community to help digital businesses navigate the ever-changing pricing models to market online, receive the same incentives larger advertisers get and make the best decision of where their marketing dollars will reach the furthest.
Trust dashboard
Trust does this in a few ways: Its card, built in partnership with Stripe, enables businesses to increase their buying power by up to 20 times and have 45 days to make payments on their marketing investments, CEO James Borow told TechCrunch. Then as part of its community, companies share knowledge of marketing buys and data insights typically reserved for larger advertisers. Users even receive news via their dashboard around their specific marketing strategy, he added.
“The ad platforms are walled gardens, and most people don’t know what is going on inside, so our customers work together to see what is going on,” Borow said.
The growth of e-commerce is pushing more digital marketing investments, providing opportunity for Trust to be a huge business, Borow said. E-commerce sales in the U.S. grew by 39% in the first quarter, while digital advertising spend is forecasted to increase 25% this year to $191 billion. Meanwhile, Google, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter all recently reported rapid growth in their year-over-year advertising revenues, Borow said.
The new funding will go toward increasing the company’s headcount.
“We have active customers on the platform, so we wanted to ramp up hiring as soon as we went into general release,” he added. “We are leaving beta with 25 businesses and a few hundred on our waitlist.”
That list will soon grow. In addition to the funding round, Trust announced a strategic partnership with social shopping e-commerce platform Verishop. The company’s 3,500 merchants will receive priority access to the Trust card and community, Borow said.
Andrea Hippeau, partner at Lerer Hippeau, said she knew Borow from being an investor in his previous advertising company Shift, which was acquired by Brand Networks in 2015.
When Borow contacted Lerer about Trust, Hippeau said this was the kind of offering that would be applicable to the firm’s portfolio, which has many direct-to-consumer brands, and knew marketing was a huge pain point for them.
“Digital marketing is important to all brands, but it is also a black box that you put marketing dollars into, but don’t know what you get,” she said. “We hear this across our portfolio — they spend a lot of money on ad platforms, yet are treated like mom-and-pop companies in terms of credit. When in reality Casper is outspending other companies by five times. Trust understands how important marketing dollars are and gives them terms that are financially better.”
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E-commerce-as-a-service platform Cart.com picks up $98M to give brands scaling tools
Cart.com, a Houston-based company providing end-to-end e-commerce services, brought in its third funding round this year, this time a $98 million Series B round to bring its total funding to $143 million.
Oak HC/FT led the new round of funding and was joined by PayPal Ventures, Clearco, G9 Ventures, Mercury Fund, Valedor Partners and Arsenal Growth. Strategic investors in the Series B include Heyday CEO Sebastian Rymarz and Casper CEO Philip Krim. This new round follows a $25 million Series A round, led by Mercury and Arsenal in July, and a $20 million seed round from Bearing Ventures.
Cart.com CEO Omair Tariq, who was previously an executive at Home Depot and COO of Blinds.com, co-founded the company in September 2020 with Jim Jacobson, former CEO of RTIC Outdoors.
Tariq told TechCrunch that the company provides software, services and infrastructure to businesses so they can scale online. Cart.com is taking the best parts of selling direct-to-consumer on marketplaces like Amazon and Shopify to create value for brands. Tariq said he is pioneering the term “e-commerce-as-a-service” to bring together under one platform a suite of business tools like storefront software, marketing, fulfillment, payments and customer service.
“We see the power of having an interconnected platform,” Tariq said. “There also needs to be a hybrid between selling direct-to-consumer and on Amazon and Shopify for companies that don’t have the money to pay for a percentage of their sales and receive no access to customers or data, and needing 20 different plug-ins that are not connected.”
Cart.com went after the new funding after seeing validation of its idea: brands coming to them wanting more products and services, which led to acquisitions. The company has acquired seven companies so far, including — AmeriCommerce, Spacecraft Brands and, more recently, DuMont Project and Sauceda Industries. Tariq is planning for another three or four by the end of the year.
In addition, it received inbound interest from strategic investors, like Oak and PayPal, which Tariq said was going to enable the company “to be more successful faster.”
Allen Miller, principal at Oak HC/FT, said after spending time with Tariq to understand his vision about Cart.com’s software, payments and services, he felt that the company was doing something that didn’t exist in today’s commerce infrastructure.
He said that Cart.com is well positioned to help companies, like those with $1 million in sales, stay focused on growing the business while Cart.com stitches together all of the tools for them to operate in the background.
“It’s a unique offering to merchants that has a high value proposition,” Miller said. “The vision and drive that Omair and Jim have, along with an inspiring mission they want to achieve — to be brand-centric and help the next generation of merchants. These guys also have a good playbook on finding companies and teams to acquire, as well as handling the post M&A to have everyone on one platform.”
The new financing will enable Cart.com to further invest in technology development and to increase headcount by at least 15 times, with plans to go from fewer than two dozen employees to more than 300 team members by the end of the year. The company has nearly 70 jobs posted on its website for positions in engineering, technology, digital marketing and e-commerce. Tariq also expects half of the funds to go toward more acquisitions.
Cart.com currently serves over 2,000 e-commerce brands, including GNC, Haymaker Coffee and KeHE, and processes more than $700 million in gross merchandise value per year. The company saw revenue increase 400% since the platform’s launch in November.
In addition, the company has nine fulfillment centers across the country, and is increasing its access to reach 80% of the U.S. population with two-day shipping, Tariq added.
“We are giving the power back to brands by giving them what they need to operate e-commerce,” he said. “There are still a few pieces to fill in so brands have a unified experience, but with us, they can add fulfilment, marketing or customer conversion tools with the click of a couple of buttons.”
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Bite Ninja scoops up pre-seed funding to reimagine restaurant working environments
Will Clem knows all too well about restaurant workers not showing up for a shift. At least one person would have car trouble or need to stay home with sick children, and it became a common occurrence on the weekends for the co-founder of Memphis Meats and owner of Baby Jacks BBQ in Memphis.
Needing to fill a shift one Friday night, Clem decided to prop his laptop in the drive-thru lane of one of his restaurants and took orders from home by remoting into the system. No one noticed that he wasn’t actually taking orders from the kitchen itself. Thus came the idea for Bite Ninja, a remote hiring technology platform for restaurants.
Clem connected with Orin Wilson to start the company in 2020 and worked for a year on the technology before launching it in March. Today, the company announced $675,000 in pre-seed funding led by Y Combinator, AgFunder and Manta Ray.
With many restaurants unable to find workers as a result of the global pandemic, Clem and Wilson wanted to build a technology that would enable restaurants to go back to normal operating hours, or even reopen their stores. At the same time, the workers, or “Ninjas” as they are referred to, can work the drive-thru or counter for a lunch or dinner rush shift from home, but appear on-screen to customers via menu boards, Wilson said.
Bite Ninja drive-thru. Image Credits: Bite Ninja
“When a restaurant is slammed, you need an army of people to work the rush, but it is not reasonable to ask them to get in their uniform and get in their cars, last-minute, to clock in for just an hour or two,” he added. “They have control of their schedule and can pick the right shift for them. It is so popular that we typically have five to 10 people bidding on each shift.”
Bite Ninja is providing a better experience and reaches potential workers that would not necessarily have an interest in performing fast food work. Many of the 3,000 Ninjas already working with the company are stay-at-home moms and retirees with customer service experience, but who can’t physically come into a store, Clem said. In addition, the company is working with the Nurse-Family Partnership to help women get back into the workforce.
The company initially ran three pilot programs and has expanded services to curbside and front cashier stations. The funding will enable Bite Ninja to scale initiatives, hire additional software engineers and prepare for a rollout at national food chains.
Since launching earlier this year, Bite Ninja is already being used in a few thousand stores.
Manuel Gonzalez, partner at AgFunder, said restaurants are a big part of entrepreneurship, but the pandemic forced more than 110,000 of them out of business.
“Bite Ninja’s solution is one that decreases costs to restaurant owners, but increases the income of the worker,” he said. “It also helps entrepreneurs and the community because restaurants are important for economic, cultural, community and social points of view.”
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Pave gets Y Combinator to back better startup compensation tools, again
Pave, a San Francisco-based startup that helps companies benchmark, plan and communicate compensation to their employees, has raised a $46 million Series B. YC Continuity led the round, which also saw participation from Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners. The round comes eight months after Pave closed a $16 million Series A round. Today’s financing puts Pave’s valuation at $400 million, up from $75 million one year ago.
Pave launched with an ambitious goal: Can it measure pay across venture-backed tech companies in real time, and help startups move their comp table off of spreadsheets? AngelList and Glassdoor have already tried to build a similar benchmark-worthy data set, but Pave may have a built-in advantage over the companies that tried to fix the same problem before. Y Combinator, which helped incubate Pave and is now leading its most recent round through its later-stage capital vehicle, is one of the largest startup accelerators in the world. Of Pave’s 900 customers to date, one-third come from Y Combinator, and CEO Matthew Schulman only sees that number growing.
“Having YC’s deep support of Pave as the YC-stamped leader in the burgeoning [compensation technology] industry is and will continue to be game changing for our distribution and ability to have ample data coverage in our benchmarking product,” Schulman said. He compared Pave’s distribution trajectory as similar to what fintech company Brex, also backed by Y Combinator Continuity, managed. The founder estimates that 60% of YC companies are active Brex customers.
The reliance on YC could engender platform risk, considering how often the accelerator invests in competitors — often within the same batch. That said, an investment from Y Combinator Continuity, which does Series B rounds and higher, may be a signal that YC has found the comptech player it wants to back. Ali Rowghani, the managing director of the fund and former COO of Twitter, is joining Pave’s board.
Data is everything for the startup, supporting each of Pave’s three main services that it offers to companies. First, Pave uses market and partner data to help companies benchmark salaries for their employees. Second, the startup integrates with HR tools such as Workday, Carta and Greenhouse to give its customers a holistic picture on how employees are currently being compensated, and what makes sense for promotion cycles and salary bumps. And third, the data work culminates into formal offers and compensation packages that employers can then offer to new and old employees.
Pave’s current customers account for data on over 65,000 employee records. The first product serves as a free top of funnel service, while the last two are paid services offered up like any ol’ enterprise software contract.
The world of compensation is rife with inequity, leading to the gender wage gap, and the gaps we can see in the market regarding minority pay disparity.
Schulman views one of Pave’s goals as getting companies to go from doing their D&I analysis from once a year, to doing it consistently. The company plans to build diversity and inclusion-specific dashboards that allow companies to see inequities and access ways or suggestions to improve their breakdown.
“What gets measured, gets improved,” Schulman said. Pave has begun to track its own compensation and diversity metrics, in an effort to be more transparent with its employees and maybe inspire some companies to do the same. About 33% of Pave’s workforce identify as women, compared to an industry average of 28.8%. Half of Pave’s executives, and half of Pave’s board members, identify as women. The company has committed to having 50% of its client-facing roles, which include customer success managers and sales members, “to be female or persons from underrepresented groups.”
While Pave is starting to disclose its own internal benchmarks, transparency around diversity isn’t yet a standard within tech companies — it’s far easier to get valuations than to get specifics around the makeup of historically overlooked individuals within organizations. Pave recently launched the Pave Data Lab, which uses its data set to showcase compensation trends and inequities within how tech workers are paid. That said, Pave doesn’t currently require the companies it works with to upload gender and race information into their benchmarking tool, and didn’t disclose what specific percentage of companies on its platform share that data.
It is hoping noise will make a difference. Pave’s compensation benchmarking data is now free for all companies to use, which will bring more data underneath its umbrella, and more standards to the confusing world of compensation.
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Extra Crunch roundup: Influencer marketing, China’s tech clampdown, drafting growth teams
Before you hire a marketing consultant who doesn’t understand your products or commit to a CMO who has several years of experience — but none in your sector — consider influencer marketing.
If the phrase evokes images of celebrities hawking hard seltzer, think again: An influencer can be as humble as an enthusiastic Reddit user who manages your Telegram channel.
According to Uber growth marketing manager Jonathan Martinez:
“ … You don’t need to find influencers with millions of followers. Instead, lean toward microinfluencers for testing, which will bring cost efficiency and the ability to sponsor a diverse range of people.”
If your startup has a clear brand pitch, “an enticing offer” and “clear next steps,” you’re ready to reach out to influencers, he says.
In a guest post, Martinez explains how to structure offers that will maximize conversions and keep your representatives motivated to promote your products and services.
Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.
Image Credits: Julian Shapiro
This morning, we published an interview with growth expert Julian Shapiro, a founder and angel investor who also advises startups on the best way to present themselves.
Marketing is data-driven, but good storytelling is an art, says Shapiro.
To connect with consumers on an emotional level, “you need a mix of goodwill, what-we-stand-for ideology, social prestige and customer delight — among other affinity-building ingredients.”
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week!
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
Everyone wants to fund the next Coinbase
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
“In celebration of Coinbase’s earnings report today, investors poured a mountain of cash into one of the company’s global competitors,” Alex Wilhelm writes in The Exchange.
Rolling up his sleeves, he dug into numbers from Coinbase, FalconX and FTX to give readers some perspective on the state of cryptocurrency exchanges.
How to hire and structure a growth team
Image Credits: tomertu (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Companies that have reached $5 million to $10 million in annual revenue are more likely to assemble growth teams; it’s a smart investment for any startup that’s achieved product-market fit.
It can also be potentially disruptive: Early marketing and product managers may feel sidelined by new cross-functional teams that suddenly take a leadership role.
In a detailed walkthrough, senior director of growth at OpenView Sam Richard explains the core players needed to build a growth team and how to integrate them into the organization smoothly, and shares some useful experiments to run.
“Don’t expect a single hire to scratch the growth itch for you,” Richard warns.
“A brilliant hire is going to come up with ideas, but will absolutely need a team to support them, turn them into experiments and then make them a reality.”
Indiegogo’s CEO on how crowdfunding navigated the pandemic
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
In an interview with Brian Heater, Indiegogo CEO Andy Yang spoke about how the pandemic has impacted the crowdfunding platform, the challenges of stepping into the role after the previous CEO departed, and how the company reached profitability.
The company wasn’t profitable when you joined?
We weren’t profitable. I joined and then we cut to profitability, or at least kind of a neutral state, and with any kind of change in leadership, some tenured folks opted out, and we basically became a new team overnight to kind of re-found the company, and we’ve been slowly adding people over the last couple years, but always with that eye on profitability and controlling our own destiny.
Kickstarter’s CEO on the future of crowdfunding
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
Last week, Kickstarter announced that people have backed more than 200,000 projects with $6 billion in pledges since the company launched in 2009. Just 15 months ago, it crossed the $5 billion threshold.
Brian Heater spoke to CEO Aziz Hasan, who took over in 2019, about last year’s substantial of layoffs, the pandemic’s long-term impact on crowdfunding, and how he’s working to build a more resilient company:
I think for us some of the most important things are to really just understand how we’re operating the business, making sure that we are sufficient in the buffer that we have for the business to make sure that we’re operating in a way that we can feel confident that the team is going to have some stability, that they’re going to have this resilience.
Craft your pitch deck around ‘that one thing that can really hook an investor’
We frequently run articles with advice for founders who are working on pitch decks. It’s a fundamental step in every startup’s journey, and there are myriad ways to approach the task.
Michelle Davey of telehealth staffing and services company Wheel and Jordan Nof of Tusk Venture Partners appeared on Extra Crunch Live recently to analyze Wheel’s Series A pitch.
Nof said entrepreneurs should candidly explain to potential investors what they’ll need to believe to back their startup.
” … It takes a lot of guesswork out of the equation for the investor and it reorients them to focus on the right problem set that you’re solving,” he said.
“You get this one shot to kind of influence what they think they need to believe to get an investment here … if you don’t do that … we could get pretty off base.”
Online retailers: Stop trying to beat Amazon
Image Credits: TravelCouples (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Going up against global e-commerce behemoth Amazon might seem futile, but smaller players can leverage value adds that give them a leg up when it comes to ensuring a loyal customer base, says Kenny Small, vice president SAP and Enterprise at Qualitest Group.
“The reality is that Amazon’s true unique selling proposition is its distribution network,” he writes in a guest post. “Online retailers will not be able to compete on this point because Amazon’s distribution network is so fast.
“Instead, it’s important to focus on areas where they can excel — without having to become a third-party seller on Amazon’s platform.”
The China tech crackdown continues
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Edtech and fintech have been in the Chinese Communist Party crosshairs in recent weeks — now, chat apps and gaming are among the targets.
Beijing filed a civil suit against Tencent over claims that its WeChat Youth Mode flouts laws protecting minors, and state media criticized the gaming industry as the digital equivalent of passing out drugs to kids, Alex Wilhelm writes in The Exchange.
He writes that the “news appears to indicate that we should expect more of the same as we’ve seen in recent months from the Chinese government: More complaints about the impact of ‘excessive’ capital in its industries, more tumbling share prices and more held IPOs.”
5 ways AI can help mitigate the global shipping crisis
Image Credits: Yuichiro Chino (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
In an increasingly on-demand world, shipping delays and disruptions are a major roadblock to customer happiness.
AI can help, says Ahmer Inam, chief artificial intelligence officer at Pactera EDGE, who offers five strategies for using AI that can help startups understand supply chain disruptions and prepare for a Plan B.
“While AI won’t protect startups, manufacturers and retailers from these types of disruptions in the future, it can help them sense, anticipate, reroute and respond to them more effectively.”
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Product School raises $25M in growth equity to scale its product training platform
Traditional MBA programs can be costly, lengthy and often lack the application of real-world skills. Meanwhile, big global brands and companies who need product managers to grow their businesses can’t sit around waiting for people to graduate. And the edtech space hasn’t traditionally catered to this sector.
This is perhaps why Product School says it has secured $25 million in growth equity investment from growth fund Leeds Illuminate (subject to regulatory approval) to accelerate its product and partnerships with client companies.
The growth funding for the company comes after bootstrapping since 2014, in large part because product managers (PMs) are no longer needed just inside tech companies but have become sought after across almost virtually all industries.
Product School provides certificates for individuals as well as team training, and says it has experienced an upwelling of business since COVID switched so many companies into digital ones. It also now counts Google, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, Uber and Amazon amongst its customers.
“Product managers have an outsized role in driving digital transformation and innovation across all sectors,” said Susan Cates, managing partner of Leeds Illuminate. “Having built the largest community of PMs in the world validates Product School’s certification as the industry standard for the market and positions the company at the forefront of upskilling top-notch talent for global organizations.”
Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, CEO and founder of Product School, who started the company after moving from Spain, said: “There has never been a better time in history to build digital products and Product School is excited to unlock value for product teams across the globe to help define the future. Our company was founded on the basis that traditional degrees and MBA programs simply don’t equip PMs with the real-world skills they require on the job.”
Product School has also produced the The Product Book, The Proddy Awards and ProductCon.
Its main competitor is MindTheProduct, a community and training platform, which has also boostrapped.
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Salesforce wants Salesforce+ to be the Netflix of biz content
Salesforce just closed a $28 billion mega-deal to buy Slack, generating significant debt along the way, but it’s not through spending big money.
Today the CRM giant announced it was taking a leap into streaming media with Salesforce+, a forthcoming digital media network with a focus on video that, in the words of the company, “will bring the magic of Dreamforce to viewers across the globe with luminary speakers.” (Whether that’s a good thing or not is in the eye of the beholder.)
Over the last year, Salesforce has watched companies struggle to quickly transform into fully digital entities. The Slack purchase is part of Salesforce’s response to the evolving market, but the company believes it can do even more with an on-demand video service providing business content around the clock.
Salesforce president and CMO Sarah Franklin said in an official post that her company has had to “reimagine how to succeed in the new digital-first world.” The answer apparently involves getting the larger Salesforce community together in a new live, and recorded video push.
In a Q&A with Colin Fleming, Salesforce’s senior vice president of Global Brand Marketing, he sees it as a way to evolve the content the company has been sharing all along. “As a result of the pandemic, we looked at the media landscape, where people are consuming content, and decided the days of white papers in a business-to-business setting were no longer interesting to people. We’re staring at a cookie-less future. And looking at the consumer world, we reflected on that for Salesforce and asked, “Why shouldn’t we be thinking about this too,” he said in the Q&A.
The company’s efforts are not small. Axios reports that there are “50 editorial leads” aboard the project to help it launch, and “hundreds of people at Salesforce currently working on Salesforce+” more broadly.
Notably Salesforce does not have near-term monetization plans for Salesforce+. The service will be free, and will not feature external advertising. Salesforce+ will launch in September in conjunction with Dreamforce and include four channels: Primetime for news and announcements, Trailblazer for training content, Customer 360 for success stories and Industry Channels for industry-specific offerings.
The company hopes that by combining the announcement with Dreamforce, it will help drive interest in what Salesforce has cooked up. After the Dreamforce push, Salesforce+ will enter into interesting territory. How much do Salesforce customers, and the larger business community, really want what the company describes as “compelling live and on-demand content for every role, industry and line of business,” and “engaging stories, thought leadership and expert advice”?
Salesforce is considered the most successful SaaS-first company in history, and as such may have an opinion that people are interested in hearing. In its most recent quarterly earnings report in May, the company disclosed $5.96 billion in revenue, up 23% compared to the year-ago quarter, putting it close to a $25 billion run rate. The company also generates lots of cash. But being cash-rich doesn’t absolve the question of whether this new streaming effort will prove to be a money pit, costing buckets of cash to produce with limited returns.
The service sounds a bit like your LinkedIn feed brought to life, but in video form. At the very least, it’s probably the largest content marketing scheme of all time, but can it ever pay for itself either as a business unit or through some other monetization plans (like advertising) down the road?
Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM essentials, says that he could see Salesforce eyeing advertising revenue with this venture and having it all tie into the Salesforce platform. “A customer could sponsor a show, advertise a show or possibly collaborate on a show… and have leads generated from the show directly tied to the activity from those options while tracking ROI, and it’s all done on one platform. And the content lives on with ads living on with them,” Leary told TechCrunch.
Whether that’s the ultimate goal of this venture remains to be seen, but Salesforce has proven that there is market appetite for Dreamforce content at least in the physical world, with over a hundred thousand people involved in 2019, the last time the company was able to hold a live event. While the pandemic shifted most traditional conference activity into the digital realm, making Dreamforce and related types of content available year-round in video format makes some sense in that context.
Precisely how the company will justify the sizable addition to its marketing budget will be interesting; measuring ROI from video products is not entirely straightforward when it is not monetized directly. And sooner or later it will have to have some direct or indirect impact on the business or face questions from shareholders on the purpose of the venture.
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Salesforce’s Kathy Baxter is coming to TC Sessions: SaaS to talk AI
As the use of AI has grown and developed over the last several years, companies like Salesforce have tried to tap into it to improve their software and help customers operate faster and more efficiently. Kathy Baxter, principal architect for the ethical AI practice at Salesforce, will be joining us at TechCrunch Sessions: SaaS on October 27th to talk about the impact of AI on SaaS.
Baxter, who has more than 20 years of experience as a software architect, joined Salesforce in 2017 after more than a decade at Google in a similar role. We’re going to tap into her expertise on a panel discussing AI’s growing role in software.
Salesforce was one of the earlier SaaS adherents to AI, announcing its artificial intelligence tooling, which the company dubbed Einstein, in 2016. While the positioning makes it sound like a product, it’s actually much more than a single entity. It’s a platform component, which the various pieces of the Salesforce platform can tap into to take advantage of various types of AI to help improve the user experience.
That could involve feeding information to customer service reps on Service Cloud to make the call move along more efficiently, helping salespeople find the customers most likely to close a deal soon in the Sales Cloud or helping marketing understand the optimal time to send an email in the Marketing Cloud.
The company began building out its AI tooling early on with the help of 175 data scientists and has been expanding on that initial idea since. Other companies, both startups and established companies like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft, have continued to build AI into their platforms as Salesforce has. Today, many SaaS companies have some underlying AI built into their service.
Baxter will join us to discuss the role of AI in software today and how that helps improve the operations of the service itself, and what the implications are of using AI in your software service as it becomes a mainstream part of the SaaS development process.
In addition to our discussion with Baxter, the conference will also include Databricks’ Ali Ghodsi, UiPath’s Daniel Dines and Puppet’s Abby Kearns, as well as investors Casey Aylward and Sarah Guo, among others. We hope you’ll join us. It’s going to be a stimulating day.
Buy your pass now to save up to $100, and use CrunchMatch to make expanding your empire quick, easy and efficient. We can’t wait to see you in October!
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OwnBackup reels in $240M Series E on $3.35B valuation, up from $1.4B in January
OwnBackup, the late-stage startup that helps companies in the Salesforce ecosystem back up their data, announced a $240 million Series E today at a $3.35 billion valuation. The latter is up from $1.4 billion in January when the company announced a $167.5 million Series D.
Alkeon Capital and B Capital Group co-led today’s investment, which also included BlackRock Private Equity Partners and Tiger Global along with existing investors Insight Partners, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Vertex Ventures. The company has now raised close to $500 million, with more than $455 million coming since last July.
That’s a lot of capital, but OwnBackup CEO Sam Gutmann says that as the Salesforce ecosystem has grown, which includes not only Salesforce itself, but companies like Veeva and nCino, business has been booming, growing 100% year-over-year since 2018. That kind of growth gets investor attention, and Gutmann reported a lot of inbound investor interest in this round.
What’s more, the company announced that it will now support the same type of backup for Microsoft Dynamics 365 customers, thereby greatly expanding its potential market. “We’re also announcing that we are expanding into the Microsoft ecosystem specifically around Microsoft Dynamics 365’s huge ecosystem. I think it’s the second-largest B2B SaaS ecosystem beyond Salesforce. We’re just getting started there, but super excited about the opportunity,” he said.
The company also sees the opportunity to grow the business through acquisition. Over the last year, it bought two small companies, but he says that was more focused on acquiring specific talent to develop the platform, while future acquisitions could be more focused on expanding the business itself.
As the company takes on this kind of investment, Gutmann sees an IPO possibility at some point in the future, but for now he’s concentrating on growth. “We’re not focused on exiting. We’ve really focused on developing what is already a huge market and growing into an even bigger market, continuing to expand with a business that has great unit economics and continues to grow nicely,” he said.
The company has ballooned to 500 employees this year, with plans to double that number in the next year. As he does that, Gutmann says that hiring in general is challenging, but he is always looking to find ways to diversify his workforce. “It’s really, really hard. Our hiring managers definitely focus on [diversity], but at the end of the day, we want the best employees for the job. I think we’ve made a lot of strides. We’re working with one of our largest investors, Insight, who is co-sponsoring a program to train, more on the junior side, some underrepresented minorities in technical fields and bring them on as full-time employees after that program,” Gutmann said.
Gutmann says his offices have remained open throughout the pandemic, but nobody was required to come in. In fact, he says that his company is one of the few that has actually added office space to make it easier to distance. The company, which is located in New Jersey, has also expanded space outdoors for working outside when the weather permits.
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Upscribe, raising $4M, wants to drive subscription-first DTC brand growth
Upscribe founder and CEO Dileepan Siva watched the retail industry make a massive shift to subscription e-commerce for physical products over the past decade, and decided to get in it himself in 2019.
The Los Angeles-based company, developing subscription software for direct-to-consumer e-commerce merchants, is Siva’s fourth startup experience and first time as founder. He closed a $4 million seed round to go after two macro trends he is seeing: buying physical products, like consumer-packaged goods, on a recurring basis, and new industries offering subscriptions, like car and fashion companies.
Merchants use Upscribe’s technology to drive subscriber growth, reduce churn and enable their customers to personalize a subscription experience, like skipping shipments, swapping out products and changing the order frequency. Brands can also feature products for upsell purposes throughout the subscriber lifecycle, from checkout to post-purchase.
Upscribe also offers APIs for merchants to integrate tools like Klaviyo, Segment and Shopify — a new subscription offering for checkouts.
Uncork Capital led the seed round and was joined by Leaders Fund, The House Fund, Roach Capitals’ Fahd Ananta and Shippo CEO Laura Behrens Wu.
“As the market for D2C subscriptions booms, there is a need for subscription-first brands to grow and scale their businesses,” said Jeff Clavier, founder and managing partner of Uncork Capital, in a written statement. “We have spent a long time in the e-commerce space, working with D2C brands and companies who are solving common industry pain points, and Upscribe’s merchant-centric approach raised the bar for subscription services, addressing the friction in customer experiences and enabling merchants to engage subscribers and scale recurring revenue growth.”
Siva bootstrapped the company, but decided to go after venture capital dollars when Upscribe wanted to create a more merchant-centric approach, which required scaling with a bigger team. The “real gems are in the data layer and how to make the experience exceptional,” he added.
The company is growing 43% quarter over quarter and is close to profitable, with much of its business stemming from referrals, Siva said. It is already working with customers like Athletic Greens, Four Sigmatic and True Botanicals and across multiple verticals, including food and beverage, health and wellness, beauty and cosmetics and home care.
The new funding will be used to “capture the next wave of brands that are going to grow,” he added. Siva cites the growth will come as the DTC subscription market is forecasted to reach $478 billion by 2025, and 75% of those brands are expected to offer subscriptions in the next two years. As such, the majority of the funding will be used to bring on more employees, especially in the product, customer success and go-to-market functions.
Though there is competition in the space, many of those are focused on processing transactions, while Siva said Upscribe’s approach is customer relationships. The cost of acquiring new customers is going up, and subscription services will be the key to converting one-time buyers into loyal customers.
“It is really about customer relationships and the ongoing engagement between merchants and subscribers,” he added. “We are in a different world now. The first wave could play the Facebook game, advertising on social media with super low acquisition and scale. That is no longer the case anymore.”
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