TechCrunch

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• Europe proposes rules for fair access to connected device data
• Vendr acquires Blissfully, combining its SaaS buying services with management tools
• Ramp expands into travel as the corporate spend category goes horizontal
• Recruit, retain, resign, re-skill, repeat
• thatDot launches Quine, a streaming graph engine
• Netflix brings its short-form video feed ‘Fast Laughs’ to the TV
• Secureframe secures $56M for a platform that automates an enterprise’s compliance with standards like HIPAA and SOC2
• Bloomreach, now valued at $2.2B, continues to plant seeds of customer personalization
• Aporia raises $25M Series A for its ML observability platform
• LeadGenius co-founder gets back to user-centric design roots with Marvin
• Real-time flight rewards search engine point.me raises $2M to scale its travel tool
• Signadot promises developers faster feedback loops
• Pitch your startup on TechCrunch Live, a weekly show featuring founders and VCs
• Pipe expands into media and entertainment financing with its acquisition of Purely Capital
• Aviron looks to game home fitness with its connected rowing machine
• DishDivvy serves up marketplace for on-demand, home-cooked food
• Stop guessing your KPIs; Varos shows e-commerce, SaaS companies how you compare to peers
• Revel to expand EV fast-charging network with backing from BlackRock
• anecdotes, a compliance operating system platform, secures $25M Series A
• Astrix Security emerges from stealth to help organizations spot rogue third-party apps

Europe proposes rules for fair access to connected device data Posted: 23 Feb 2022 07:06 AM PST The European Union has proposed an interesting addition to its fast updating digital rulebook today: The Data Act slots into an already ambitious digital policy framework with the goal of bringing clarity and fairness around the sharing of (mostly industrial) data generated by connected devices. It won’t be the last word on this either, as the Commission is working on sector-specific regulations to plug into the Data Act (including one incoming within “weeks” for health data-sharing; and another in the works for connected cars). But EU lawmakers said today that they intend the Data Act to be around for the long term. “We wanted to make sure this was a horizontal text because it has to be a long term one, it has to be visible, it has to be clear in the long term,” noted internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, during a press conference. The Data Act will address “the legal, economic and technical issues that lead to data being under-used”, the Commission said in a press release on the “Proposal for a Regulation on harmonised rules on fair access to and use of data”; suggesting the legislation will “unlock the economic and societal potential of data and technologies in line with EU rules and values” by creating “a single market to allow data to flow freely within the EU and across sectors for the benefit of businesses, researchers, public administrations and society at large”. Breton added that the Data Act, much like the Commission’s Digital Services Act proposal, is “cross-cutting, horizontal in nature, defines the rules” — aka a “basic tool box” — but will also be built upon with more specific rules for certain sectors, such as for connected cars. (And via ongoing work to devise “common European data spaces“.) The Commission has a few different aims for the Data Act — here’s a quick overview: Firstly, it wants to avoid the sensor-laden Internet of Things (IoT) further concentrating market power in the digital sphere by empowering consumers who own so-called ‘smart’ devices to be able to gain access to data generated by them; and order a manufacturer to provide their data in real-time to third parties of their choosing whose (non-competing) services they wish to take up. The Commission hopes this will foster innovation, such as in aftermarket repairs or predictive maintenance. It kicked off an investigation of the IoT sector back in July 2020 — saying at the time that it was concerned about the risks to competition and open markets linked to the data collection capabilities of connected devices. The Data Act looks to be a key component of the EU’s response to that threat. (And during the press conference the Commission confirmed that tech giants who are deemed to be “gatekeepers” under its Digital Markets Act ex ante competition reform proposal won’t be able to make use of the Data Act to receive third party companies’ data — i.e. to avoid the risk of further entrenching their market power.) Secondly, the Commission is concerned about abusive contractual terms being imposed on smaller companies by more powerful platforms and market players to, essentially, extract the less powerful company’s most valuable data — so the Data Act will bring in a “fairness test” with the goal of protecting SMEs against unfair contractual terms. The legislation will stipulate a list of unilaterally imposed contractual clauses that are deemed or presumed to be unfair — such as a clause that states a company can unilaterally interpret the terms of the contract — and those that do not pass the test will be not be binding on SMEs. The Commission says it will also develop and recommend non-binding model contractual terms, saying these standard clauses will help SMEs negotiate “fairer and balanced data sharing contracts with companies enjoying a significantly stronger bargaining position”. Some major competition complaints lodged against tech giants in the EU have concerned their access to third party data, such as the investigation into Amazon’s use of merchants data, for example, and those investigations are likely influencing what the Commission is proposing here around contractual terms. Thirdly, the Data Act takes aim at cloud service lock-in by proposing news rules intended to allow customers to effectively switch between different cloud data-processing services providers — combined with safeguards against unlawful data transfer, per the Commission. Barriers to switching are a key, long-standing complaint in digital markets — where network effects can be further harnessed by follow-on lock-in tactics that add friction or even hard barriers to porting data, enabling a provider to maintain their earlier grip on market power. EU lawmakers say they want to make it easier for businesses and consumers that are making use of cloud and edge service providers to be able to move their data and apps — whether a private photo archive or an entire business administration — from one provider to another without incurring any costs. To do that the Data Act proposes new contractual obligations for cloud providers, and a new standardisation framework for data and cloud interoperability. Fourthly, the Commission wants the regulation to set clear rules for scenarios when governments/public sector organizations may want to access IoT data — such as in public emergencies. The coronavirus crisis has clearly concentrated minds on this front where there was an imperative to access commercial mobility data (such as from mobile phones) to help policymakers assess responses to restrictions on people’s movements or otherwise model how the pandemic might spread. The Data Act is extremely broad — applying to data generated across the EU in all economic sectors. And while the Commission’s emphasis is on greasing the pipe to encourage the sharing of machine/industrial data, there can be plenty personal data generated by connected devices (just think of a smartwatch or a fitness band, for instance) — albeit, the sharing of any personal data would need to be done in compliance with the EU’s existing data protection framework, GDPR. “The Data Act will remove barriers to access data, for both private and public sector bodies, while preserving incentives to invest in data generation by ensuring a balanced control over the data for its creators,” the Commission writes in a Q&A detailing its main goals for the proposal. “It will unlock the value of data generated by connected objects in Europe, one of the key areas for innovation in the coming decades. It will clarify who can create value from such data and under which conditions. It will ensure fairness in the allocation of data value among the actors in the data economy and in their contracts while respecting the legitimate interests of companies and individuals that invest in data products and services. The new rules will empower consumers and companies by giving them a say on what can be done with the data generated by their connected products.” An earlier EU proposal setting out a framework to govern and encourage industrial data-sharing, such as by setting the rules for data intermediaries — aka, the Data Governance Act (DGA) — has already been adopted. The Commission says the Data Act to slots into that framework, helping to generate data flows to intermediaries — which it hopes will, in turn, fire up data-driven innovation across the bloc as part of its overarching goal of driving digital transformation as a strategy to fire economic growth. Indeed, it says the new rules making more data available for reuse are expected to create €270BN of additional GDP by 2028. The Commission also argues that better access to more real-time sensor data will be crucial in achieving the bloc’s climate goals and shrinking carbon emissions — to hit its 2050 ‘net zero’ target. The Data Act proposal still needs the backing of the EU’s co-legislators — before it’s adopted and becomes regional law. But the relatively fast pace of the DGA’s passage suggests the Commission’s data strategy enjoys broad support. Although it remains to be seen whether the proposal will attract any of the frenzied lobbying that other pieces of EU digital policy have attracted in recent years. If well implemented the Data Act certainly certainly looks like it could be a boon to both consumers and startups. In a statement welcoming the Commission proposal, BEUC, the European Consumer Organization, described the legislation as “essential” for consumers. In a statement, Monique Goyens, its director general, added: "The Data Act is an important piece of the jigsaw to make sure data can be accessed fairly across industries while giving users full power to decide what happens to the data they generate. Beyond providing a framework in which data gets accessed and shared, the EU's Data Act must complement existing data protection, consumer, and competition rules. "It is essential that consumers decide what happens to the data they generate, when they share it and with whom. Consumers should have a simple-to-exercise data portability right, which extends beyond personal data, so that they can for example take all their data from one service to another if they want to. The EU must also ensure that the Data Act does not end up reinforcing Big Tech data monopolies." US giants top tech industry’s $100M+ a year lobbying blitz in EU Europe lays out its plan to reboot digital rules and tame tech giants

Vendr acquires Blissfully, combining its SaaS buying services with management tools Posted: 23 Feb 2022 07:00 AM PST Vendr, a startup that aims to help its customers buy software products faster and at a lower cost, announced this morning it has acquired Blissfully, a startup that builds SaaS management tooling. Vendr raised a $60 million round led by Tiger last year, making it one of the high-growth software companies that the crossover investor bet on during the 2021 boom. The startup’s CEO, Ryan Neu, told TechCrunch that Vendr tripled in size last year and has surpassed the $20 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) threshold. Its acquisition of Blissfully, which TechCrunch has learned was worth around $100 million, should bolster its 2022 growth, with Neu saying that the transaction will help his company continue similarly rapid expansion. Buying + management? Ariel Diaz and Aaron White founded Blissfully around five years ago, Diaz said, with the goal of helping companies manage their software-as-a-service spending. The company’s tooling assists its customers in tracking internal SaaS usage, benchmarking their software spending compared to other companies and handling vendors. It’s not hard to see how Blissfully will fit into what Vendr has built, namely what it considers to be the fastest SaaS-buying service out there. As a combined entity, the newly enlarged Vendr will be able to manage customer software from the point of purchase, through use and into the renewal phase. Ariel Diaz, Ryan Neu, Aaron White. Image Credits: Vendr Despite a recent deceleration in value creation among software stocks, the pandemic underscored how critical software is to the functioning of the global economy. This means that companies have myriad software services in their organization, which can represent both an operational challenge and a financial liability. So, why not get some help? That appears to be the core Vendr pitch in the wake of its acquisition. Neu told TechCrunch that Diaz and White will be considered co-founders of the combined organization and that his company is snapping up Blissfully’s team as part of the transaction. So what’s next? With a growing customer base — now around the 500 mark, the company said — Vendr is collecting information concerning how companies use software. And because it will only accrete more with Blissfully under its roof, Vendr should be able to draw up a reasonably complete picture of SaaS usage for companies of varying size and industry. This means it can get into the recommendation game. And not merely recommendations, really, but forward projections. Riffing with Neu and Diaz, it seems that their company will be able to tell customers that at their current scale, most companies of their ilk use software services one, two and three, and that as their employee count doubles, services four, five and six are common adds. This means that Vendr could not only help customers buy and manage SaaS, but also select new products. Naturally, my conflict-of-interest antenna went up at this point, so I asked the newly conjoined co-founders how they would handle potential bias in such situations. Why bias? Because the business of recommending products to other businesses is, well, big business. It’s the whole shebang for G2, Gartner and other companies. Which means that companies will pay for a bonus recommendation — an advertising product, really. The Vendr execs said that because they have worked to engender buy-side trust, they are loath to upset their current market posture. Let’s close with a few questions for the future: First, as a combined pair, how far can Vendr and Blissfully scale this year? Second, if they can reach the $50 million ARR milestone by the end of the year, is the company a 2023 early IPO candidate, or more of a 2024 hopeful? And, third, does the slowdown in the value of tech companies that sell software imply a softening in growth? If so, Vendr could see some of the pressures that propelled its operations to new scale diminish. Let’s see!

Ramp expands into travel as the corporate spend category goes horizontal Posted: 23 Feb 2022 07:00 AM PST Corporate spending has marked a huge opportunity in the world of fintech. Multiple players have emerged with various solutions – from software to corporate cards – to help businesses of all types and sizes better manage their expenses and save money and time while doing it. Now one of those players, Ramp, is announcing that it is expanding into the travel space, the company has told TechCrunch exclusively. The move, while no doubt a logical one, puts in direct competition with another startup, TripActions. The latter, though, started its life focused on travel and pivoted to also offer general expense management when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. For the unacquainted, Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh founded Ramp in March 2019 and launched its first corporate card product in August of that year. The company last August raised $300 million at a $3.9 billion valuation and is rumored to be raising another round that could double the company's valuation to $8 billion (rumors it has declined to confirm). Investors include Founders Fund, Redpoint Ventures and Stripe, among others. Its launch of "Ramp for Travel" marks a new chapter for the company. The startup’s goal with the new offering, which will be offered to all existing customers and any new ones at no additional cost, according to Glyman is to help business travelers "book anywhere" while giving businesses an "unprecedented level of insight and control over their travel." Ramp plans to use AI-assisted software to "completely" automate companies' expense reporting, doing things like automatically collecting receipts and categorizing all travel-related expenses. "We felt there were some fundamental design issues with how travel had been done by companies," he told TechCrunch. "Usually the solution has been to use a managed travel app." Ramp raises $300M at a $3.9B valuation, makes its first acquisition Filing expenses is no doubt one of the biggest pain points of employees worldwide. And the use of existing corporate travel solutions, Ramp maintains, limits choices for employees and can cost companies thousands by not giving access to better deals. The startup says its new offering gives employees a way to book travel with whatever service they want to, for no charge. Employers gain the ability to glean insights into all trips across an organization, including exactly what employees are spending on automatically, Glyman said. They can also look at historical transitions including every flight booked, he added. By offering employee travelers cards with controls, businesses can see not just a flight transaction, but details such as the routes, and if it was economy or first class and if the travel aligned with the company's expense policy, he added. Companies are able to create travel policies with air travel, lodging, and per diem limits that, according to Ramp, will "automatically get enforced." For example, managers would get real-time alerts when employees spend out-of-policy. "We wanted to provide a new way to enhance the information and deliver a managed form of travel that would give companies an unprecedented level of visibility and tools," Glyman said. "We view this as a chance to take a new design approach to what's been sort of an industry that's operated in walled gardens." Ramp is doing this through a combination of structured data and some machine learning. "You can actually visualize a trip on the map, and know when the trip started and when it ends," Glyman said. "You can see, for example, if an employee took a trip down to Miami, and maybe had three dinners there, and took six Ubers or Lyfts. And the magic is, the traveler never had to enter it. Ramp is actually able to pull the information automatically. Most current systems are not up to that task." This saves employees time and employers money, Ramp believes. As part of the new offering, the company has completed a direct integration with Lyft so that for customers that use Lyft, Ramp will automatically collect travel receipts. That integration is one of many the company is planning, according to Glyman.  Ramp said it has also developed a new extension for Chrome browsers so employees can book travel with the service of their choosing. The corporate spend is an increasingly crowded, and competitive one with Ramp competing with other well-known startups, including Brex (which most recently raised $300 million), TripActions (which last October raised $275 million) and Airbase, which announced last week that it was working with American Express on a pilot that will see its service offered to certain customers of the credit giant. Other players are emerging in other parts of the world, such as Pluto, which aims to serve the underserved Middle East. But as TechCrunch has previously reported, it’s not a winner-takes-all space. Fintech Roundup: Corporate spend just can’t be a winner-takes-all space

Recruit, retain, resign, re-skill, repeat Posted: 23 Feb 2022 07:00 AM PST Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex asked: How has the great resignation changed the way startups hire? The conversation started with defining the Great Resignation and sharing numbers to back the sentiment that everyone can’t stop talking about. As always, the flowed to naturally care more about the employees within startups, and their feelings, than employers and the power they’ve traditionally sat atop.  To check our ‘what about VC’ box, we talked through what startups are facing today in terms of a labor market, how it has changed, and how they might be able to compete with big-tech’s big dollars. After all, is any company going to be able to beat Meta on comp? Probably not. Alex thinks VCs are the new recruiters, which will help startups some. From the other angle — putting labor in our remit and not capital, for once — Natasha wants to ditch her 9-5 to represent Shopify employees, it seems. We won’t let her, naturally. Closing, it appears that the forces driving more venture capital into early-stage companies are not too far from the causes of the labor shortage. Everyone is looking for return, either on their labor, or their capital. And that means a tight hiring market, and picky workers. Arlan Hamilton wants to reroute how startups hire Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

thatDot launches Quine, a streaming graph engine Posted: 23 Feb 2022 07:00 AM PST ThatDot, a Portland, Oregon-based startup that focuses on streaming event processing, today announced the launch of Quine, a new MIT-licensed open-source project for data engineers that combines event streaming with graph data to create what the company calls a ‘streaming graph.’ That sounds complicated, in part because it is and also because t’s a relatively new concept. Based on years of research that was supported by DARPA, the idea behind Quine is to take high-volume data streams and build them into stateful graphs. Quine, which was — as you surely already guessed — named after logician Willard Van Orman Quine, can then query this graph using what the team calls a ‘standing query.’ These are essentially real-time computations on the incoming data that Quine can then, in turn, stream out to other applications. “We’ve developed the streaming graph to really target the kind of the problem in the industry right now — the rock and hard place that we all sit between of,” Quine’s creator and thatDot CEO and co-founder Ryan Wright told me. “On one side, there’s huge volumes of data. For the last 10 years, big data has just become de rigueur, it’s a normal ordinary thing now and only getting bigger. But the other side of that is how do you interpret all that data?” More often than not these days, that data is in motion and for many workloads, latencies matter. Wright argues that existing solutions like the open-source Apache Kafka event streaming platform in combination with Apache Fink for analyzing that streaming data force enterprises to devote dozens of engineers to build their data platform and pipelines to analyze all of this incoming data. As for other modern approaches, there are tools like Neo4j and TigerGraph, which have popularized graph databases among developers, but Wright argues that they all approach this problem from the perspective of a database. Image Credits: thatDot “In that mode of thinking, you’re stuck with all the traditional old problems that you’d encounter about the technical details and difficulties of making that fast and making that easy and making that scalable. So what usually happens in the industry is, if you’ve got lots of data coming in, you can’t really consider graph solutions because they’re too slow,” Wright said. Most current solutions, he argues, would be able to maybe handle a few thousand events per second, but the kind of customers thatDot is talking to would need a solution that can handle 250,000 events per second and Wright is confident that Quine can handle that — and a lot more. “Using Quine, I replaced pages of complex custom logic and SQL queries with simple queries for the stream computed rollup value that updates at each underlying event change,” said Matt Splett, a principle engineer at Tripwire. Those users, Wright and his co-founder and COO Rob Malnati noted, span the gamut from security companies to observability companies, log processing companies, FinTech companies, advertising companies and fraud detection companies. Like other open-source companies, thatDot’s mission is to support high-volume enterprise Quine users, but the company is also using Quine as a platform to build new solutions on top of. The company raised just over $2 million in seed funding in 2020, led by the Oregon Venture Fund, and expects to raise a Series A round later this year.

Netflix brings its short-form video feed ‘Fast Laughs’ to the TV Posted: 23 Feb 2022 06:57 AM PST Netflix is bringing its short-form video feature, “Fast Laughs,” to the TV’s big screen. Launched a year ago, the TikTok-inspired feed of funny videos had previously been available only on mobile devices, where it serves as a way to introduce Netflix users to new shows, movies, and comedy specials they may want to watch. The smartphone version of “Fast Laughs” was given a prominent position in the Netflix app, where it’s currently the middle button in the bottom navigation bar — a placement that seems to indicate the streamer is worried about losing users’ time spent on mobile to rival video apps like TikTok, or now, Instagram and Facebook’s Reels. Similar to TikTok, “Fast Laughs” on mobile had offered a swipeable, vertical video feed where buttons to react, share, or save the content are stacked on the right side of the screen. However, Netflix’s goal is not to develop a social platform; it’s to encourage users to add shows, movies and specials to their Netflix watch list or jump right in to start streaming a title after viewing the short video teaser. On Netflix’s TV platform, “Fast Laughs” will work a little differently. The opt-in feature will begin to appear on members’ homepages, somewhere around rows 6 through 12. In this case, the idea is to serve up the short videos at a time when users have been scrolling down looking for something to watch. And instead of navigating through the content vertically, as on the phone, the videos can be clicked through with your remote control via the arrow on the right side of the screen. At the bottom of the screen, you can see the program’s name, rating and can choose to click a button for “More Info,” to be directed to the title’s landing page. Image Credits: Netflix As the feature can sometimes showcase more mature content, it will not appear on kids’ profiles. (Netflix had tested a kid-friendly short-form video feature on mobile, too. But that one is not yet expanding to the TV.) However, “Fast Laughs” will respect users’ maturity settings, if configured, Netflix notes. At launch, the TV version of “Fast Laughs” will include clips from Netflix movies like “Army of the Dead,” “Fatherhood,” and “The Kissing Booth;” TV shows like “Big Mouth,” “Dead to Me,” and “Never Have I Ever;” plus stand-up comedy from Ali Wong, Jo-Koy, and Jerry Seinfeld, and more. Netflix says “Fast Laughs” on the TV is still considered a test for the time being and will first start rolling out to English-speaking markets including the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia, among others. These rollouts began on Feb. 22 and will slowly continue in the days and weeks ahead. “Fast Laughs” isn’t the first time the company has borrowed a concept from social media apps when designing new features. In 2018, Netflix adopted the “Stories” format when introducing its Previews feature. And Netflix is always experimenting with ideas that could help members better discover content from its catalog. Last year, for instance, it tried to introduce more serendipity into the Netflix experience with the launch of its “Play Something” shuffle mode feature, which would play a title the service thinks you may like based on your interests and prior viewing behavior.

Secureframe secures $56M for a platform that automates an enterprise’s compliance with standards like HIPAA and SOC2 Posted: 23 Feb 2022 06:07 AM PST Meeting compliance standards like HIPAA and SOC 2 can be a critical — and often mandatory — part of the matrix of boxes that need to be ticked when securing an organization, but it’s also one of the more thorny to see through, since it involves not only assessing systems as they currently appear, but also making sure that they continue to adhere to standards as they grow and shrink and work with other parties. A startup called Secureframe believes that it has come on a solution with a system to automates this process for organizations, and today, it’s announcing $56 million in funding to fuel its growth. Accomplice — the Boston VC — led the round with participation from a mix of financial and strategic investors. They include Kleiner Perkins, Optum Ventures (United Health), Kaiser Permanente, Alphabet’s Gradient Ventures, Soma Capital, Gaingels and Flexport; as well as a number of individual investors such as Jon Oberheide (Duo Security CTO), Ash Devata (VP / GM for Zero Trust and Duo at Cisco), Leore Avidar (Alt CEO). Michael Viscuso, who is a partner at Accomplice and in a previous life was the founder of another cybersecurity company, Carbon Black, is joining the board with this round. Secureframe currently covers some of the most well-used and well-known security and privacy compliance standards — HIPAA for health data, SOC 2 and ISO 27001 for information security, and PCI DSS for financial information. Shrav Mehta, Secureframe’s founder and CEO, said that the plan will be to use the funding in part to continue expanding that list to a much wider set of standards, including those specific to certain regions and use cases. Compliance with security standards has — unsurprisingly, given the growth of security breaches globally — become a more pressing issue within organizations, but as Mehta describes it, the imperative has also spread into how organizations interface with the wider world: third parties now also require their would-be partners to meet security compliance as part of their own diligence before engaging in any business activity. (Indeed, just earlier today I wrote about another cybersecurity company, BlueVoyant, whose customers in part rely on it to continuously audit, identify and potentially repair potential breach scenarios in their supply chains, another sign of how organizations’ security strategy has spilled out beyond their own firewalls.) “The reality is that no one wants to end up as the focus of the next big data breach or big leak of business data,” he said. “Everyone expects companies now to go through security reviews. That is the main thing that is driving security standards compliance.” But saying your organization needs this, and actually following through on that, are two different stories. “Security compliance is not just about internal processes but also risk management,” he said in an interview. “It's become a boardroom issue. But getting security compliance is harder than it looks. A lot don't complete certifications, or don't update and stay compliant.” The implication is that overall, this is creating more of a market for companies like Secureframe to come in and provide tools to meet that need. Mehta said that he first came across the challenges of this while working across different organizations in previous roles, where he found himself working not just with companies but their partners to help put together check lists to make the process of meeting security compliance standards easier. He calls this effectively the “first version” of Secureframe. Eventually, he started a company to productize this process, and over time he and the team have incorporated an increasing amount of automation into the mix, although it still focuses on providing human teams to help implement processes and troubleshoot, and it still produces best-practice lists and provides training for customers, just as Mehta would have done before starting Secureframe. The opportunity here is not just addressing localized and international standards for data protection, security and privacy, but also the fact that these are likely to become even more ubiquitous, and codified around specific use cases over time, to meet the sheer reality of how everything we do now is typically carried out on digital platforms. “I do think we will see more security and privacy regulations,” Mehta said. This in turn, becomes a big business opportunity, if not also a very competitive area. Companies today also helping organizations with their security standards compliance include Vanta, Drata and SolarWinds, as well as Anecdote which today also announced funding (not to mention companies like BlueVoyant that are netting in solutions and also addressing how the wider ecosystem is managing its security). “Secureframe is onto something big," said Mike Viscuso, founder of Carbon Black, in a statement. "They have the vision, the talent, and the technology to drive major transformation in continuous compliance certification. What's most exciting to me is they've already become the go-to solution for startups and high-growth companies who want to automate their entire compliance portfolio. It's clear why Accomplice is leading Secureframe's Series B, and I'm thrilled to serve on the board of directors to help play a role in the company's continued growth."

Bloomreach, now valued at $2.2B, continues to plant seeds of customer personalization Posted: 23 Feb 2022 06:02 AM PST As more consumers find ease buying online and using digital channels to find what they need and discover new products, Bloomreach is helping online retailers provide that commerce experience. In 2019, worldwide e-commerce sales were $3.3 trillion; two years later, sales were $4.9 trillion and are now expected to reach $7.4 trillion by 2025. Advertisements hit us all over the place, from our social media feeds to our custom emails that hit our inbox seconds after looking around on a website. Bloomreach powers hundreds of billions of dollars in gross merchandise value by giving businesses those kinds of tools to personalize customer journeys. When we search for something to buy, that is powered by customer and product data in such a way that we land on unique digital experiences. Bloomreach co-founder and CEO Raj De Datta. Image Credits: Bloomreach "Personalization is a 20-year-old technology, but so much on the web is still generic — that has to change," co-founder and CEO Raj De Datta told TechCrunch. "We are cool when Spotify recommends a song based on what we are listening to, and we enable retailers to know what brands you prefer and every aspect of the interaction." It's been a few years since we last checked in on Bloomreach, but the company has been busy since. Its headcount is nearing 800, and it is adding about 150 people per quarter and plans to continue that substantial growth this year in Europe, India and the United States. BloomReach wants to deliver meaningful data directly to online merchandizers From an annual recurring revenue standpoint, Bloomreach grew 63% year over year and ended 2021 with $117 million in ARR. De Datta also revealed that the growth was done in a capital-efficient way, burning less than $5 million in cash last year. Meanwhile, its customer base grew to 1,100 brands after adding more than 100 in 2021. In the past year, its commerce experience cloud also grew with the launch of its Bloomreach Content headless content tool, the release of new features within its "Discovery" pillar and the unveiling of its "Engagement" pillar following the acquisition of Exponea, a customer data and experience platform, in early 2021. Today it announced $175 million in an investment, led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management, with participation from existing Bloomreach investors Bain Capital Ventures and Sixth Street Partners. This latest funding more than doubled its valuation in one year, to $2.2 billion, and follows a $150 million investment made in January 2021 to give it $420 million in total funding to date, De Datta said. "We have seen, with the pandemic, a reinvention of e-commerce, and it is a $5 trillion market and we saw it grow 80% to 100% overnight," De Datta added. "We saw opportunity as structural shifts happened, and now people are used to it and will stick with it. Now is an incredible moment to capitalize on that performance. Go big and go transform commerce." The new capital will be invested in R&D to bring more personalization to life and make it easier to connect via APIs. Bloomreach is also going to expand its go-to-market teams and its geographic footprint in the U.S. and Europe. All of this will be to help customers make sense of the volatility experienced in e-commerce over the past two years, De Datta said. The company has some of the largest data sets to understand consumer behavior, and while at the beginning of the pandemic people were freaking out and stocking up on milk and toilet paper, many got used to purchasing items like groceries and apparel online. One of the questions he is looking at, especially as people return to shopping in person, is if the trend of e-commerce will continue now that people are used to buying online. It's not that people don't like shopping in stores anymore, but the bar was raised for experiences. He expects people to go less frequently, but will make it a more enjoyable experience, saving those "everyday purchases" for online. "The battle in commerce is shifting to winning experience in e-commerce," De Datta added. "The first 20 years made it possible to buy on the web, and now in the next 20 years, it will be about moving a store to stand out in the crowd. There is so much competition and just 18% penetration of e-commerce so far. The transforming experience is all ahead of us." Meet retail’s new sustainability strategy: Personalization

Aporia raises $25M Series A for its ML observability platform Posted: 23 Feb 2022 06:00 AM PST Aporia, a Tel Aviv-based startup that helps businesses monitor and explain their AI-based services, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global. New investor Samsung Next, as well as previous investors TLV Partners and Vertex Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total amount raised to $30 million. When the service launched last year, its focus was squarely on being an observability platform. Since then, the team has widened its net a bit more to become more of a full-stack ML monitoring platform. “When I’m looking at our solution right now, it includes four main pillars,” Aporia co-founder and CEO Liran Hason explained. “The first one would be visibility — like dashboarding, being able to see the predictions and so on. The second one, which is pretty new, is explainability. We have some users using that already. Then the monitoring and finally automation, which is also new.” Automation, of course, is a pretty obvious next step for any monitoring service, given that users typically want to take some action on the alerts they are getting. Since Aporia already featured a drag-and-drop tool for its monitoring service, the team was able to quickly add this feature, too, and Hason noted that he wants to expand these automation capabilities to cover more complex user cases. Explainability, too, is a feature set the company added based on customer feedback. Increasingly, companies are under regulatory pressure to be able to explain what their models are doing. Aporia now helps its users understand why a model makes the predictions it does and how different input parameters contribute to them. The mission to become a more full-stack ML observability platform seems to be resonating with customers. Aporia says the number of customers that use its services grew 600% in the last six months alone. Its customers now include the likes of New Relic, Lemonade and Armis. “Aporia has demonstrated unbelievable growth since its launch and has amazing momentum, quickly becoming a leader in the space of ML observability,” said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global. “Executives at global enterprises understand the benefits of artificial intelligence and how it’s impacting virtually every industry but the risks keep them awake at night. Aporia is positioned to be the solution every organization turns to for ensuring their responsible use of AI.” Aporia raises $5M for its AI observability platform

LeadGenius co-founder gets back to user-centric design roots with Marvin Posted: 23 Feb 2022 06:00 AM PST Prayag Narula and his brother, Chirag Narula, aim to do for product and market research calls what Gong and Chorus.ai did for sales calls. They created Marvin in 2020, a user research platform that helps companies better understand the needs of their customers. It stems, in part, from Prayag Narula's background. He co-founded and ran marketing technology company LeadGenius for many years, guiding it to raise over $30 million in venture funding and grow to hundreds of employees. Not coming from a sales and marketing background, he decided to hire a friend to join LeadGenius, who eventually transitioned to CEO at the beginning of the pandemic. At the same time, Prayag Narula stepped down as CEO, but stayed on the board of directors. "Marvin is in some ways me going back to my roots in user-centric design," he said. "Sales teams talk to customers and want to make a sale, while customer success teams want to upsell. With product and design teams, their only agenda is how to make the customer's life better with the product. It's the purest form of user engagement, and we wanted to leverage that." Narula went on to explain that at LeadGenius, the right tools were not available to get that done. Fast-forward to today, and thanks to video conferencing, it is easy to record conversations and mine them for information. However, more companies are seeing the value of being user-centric, but don't know how to begin. Marvin co-founders Prayag Narula and Chirag Narula. Image Credits: Marvin Marvin's technology is an interview and user research tool that plugs into video conferencing tools, like Zoom, and takes notes during the calls. It also automates all aspects of user research, including scheduling interviews and turning the recordings into searchable insights with keywords and hashtags. "Companies spend a lot of time talking to their customers, getting feedback and doing research," Narula said. "All of this is happening over Zoom now. We help make these conversations more efficient and collaborative." Thousands of customers are already using Marvin, like Lattice and Simon-Kucher, and record thousands of minutes of recordings each week. Many users leverage the technology to talk to customers to understand their challenges and get feedback on a design or product. From those conversations, they are figuring out patterns and sharing those with their respective teams. Companies are also using the tool as a management consultant to talk to industry experts or on academic research. Today, the company is coming out of private beta and announcing an earlier pre-seed round of $3.8 million. Sam Altman's Apollo Projects and Fuel Capital co-led the round, with participation from Scrum Ventures, Hack.VC, Global Founders Capital, House Fund, Gaingels and a group of angel investors. The funding will enable Marvin to scale its team and product development to better enable teams to conduct, organize, analyze and share user interviews. Much of the company's growth happened in the last five months. The company currently has 20 employees and is hiring across the board. "We've gone from zero paid users in the third quarter of last year to over a thousand users, so now it is time to scale that to thousands of paid users," Prayag Narula said. How to acquire customer research that shapes your go-to-market strategy

Real-time flight rewards search engine point.me raises $2M to scale its travel tool Posted: 23 Feb 2022 06:00 AM PST New York-based Point.me, the makers of an online search tool that makes it easy to discover real-time reward flight options, has raised $2 million in seed funding led by PAR Capital Ventures. The tool, which is now launching out of beta, searches routes on more than 150 airlines to uncover reward travel options that the company says would have been difficult to find otherwise. The site additionally provides information on how to maximize your airline miles and points. Point.me CEO and co-founder Adam Morvitz told TechCrunch that the startup was created based on his personal experience with booking flights. In 2011, Morvitz was traveling frequently, earning lots of credit card points and airline miles along the way. As a financial consultant for much of his career, Morvitz says he loved researching the best flights he could find using his points. When his colleagues began asking him how he was taking business class flights to Europe for a few thousand points, he saw the opportunity to create a business. That same year, Morvitz launched Juicy Miles, a concierge reward flight booking service. As the company grew to 60 agents, Morvitz knew they needed a way to search all the loyalty program options instantly instead of conducting manual searches. That led to the creation of point.me in 2019, which Morvitz co-founded with long-time friend and travel expert Tiffany Funk, who had previously worked in executive roles at luxury travel blog One Mile at a Time and consulting service PointsPros. To build their metasearch engine, the duo reimagined the possibilities of displaying points flights in an easy-to-ready way. Point.me is compatible with over 30 loyalty programs, including numerous credit card reward programs. Customers can filter search results by program, airline or route to find the best available deals, which will be tailored to their preferences and points balances. The site offers a variety of services, including access to its self-serve search tool, full-service award concierge and elite status and credit card consulting.  The company’s standard plan costs $129 per year and comes with unlimited searches, customized results, access to rewards deals and tips for replenishing your points. Point.me also has a premium plan that costs $260 per year that includes everything in the standard plan, along with a 10% discount on all concierge services, an annual personalized miles and points checkup feature, and more. The company also offers a starter pass for $5 that gives users standard plan access for 24 hours. Image Credits: point.me “Before point.me, customers had to manually search airline loyalty programs individually to find flight options that they could book with their points, which meant a lot of time, frustration, and often getting only a tiny fraction of what their points were actually worth,” Point.me co-founder and CMO Tiffany Funk told TechCrunch. “Once you've selected a flight, you're taken to one of the things we're most proud of, our comprehensive and incredibly detailed booking instructions. Again, the interface isn't complicated, but we tell you exactly how many points you need to transfer and then our product team has created these step-by-step flows that really guide you through everything.” With the new funding, point.me plans to continue to expand its product range and enhance the capabilities of the search engine, which will require a deeper engineering team. The funds will go towards hiring frontend and backend engineers to help improve the core product. The startup will also hire additional customer service agents to enhance the customer experience. WndrCo Holdings invested in the seed round, with participation from former DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, Dropbox Business founder Sujay Jaswa, and former DreamWorks Animation president Ann Daily. Skinnygirl founder and CEO Bethenny Frankel and her fiancé, real estate executive and film producer Paul Bernon, are also investors in point.me, along with David M. Baggett and Carl de Marcken, co-founders of ITA Software (which became Google Flights following its acquisition). Regarding the future, Morvitz says point.me will be focused on adding a variety of new functions to the service. The company plans to show the cash price for the flight you’re interested in, so you can see an immediate comparison of the value you’re getting for miles. Point.me also wants to allow users to search several days of flights at once. And it plans to focus on personalized recommendations and results, while also suggesting alternatives that would help customers have a better flight experience. “Longer-term, we believe we can fundamentally change the loyalty space from both a consumer and business standpoint,” Morvitz said. “The combination of our proprietary technology with our unique knowledge set allows for a world where points search is easy, seamless, and valuable for everyone across all global loyalty currencies. Our vision for point.me goes beyond search. We aim to become the go-to loyalty management site, using our investment in data to improve the experience for our customers and enterprise partners, including AI-based algorithms to highlight redemptions that clients are most likely to book and using predictive technology to recommend which awards have the best chance of becoming available.”

Signadot promises developers faster feedback loops Posted: 23 Feb 2022 06:00 AM PST Signadot, a startup that aims to simplify the development process for microservice-based applications by making it easier for developers to test their code, today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed funding round. The round was led by Redpoint Ventured, with participation from Y Combinator (the company was part of the Winter 2020 batch) as well as a group of angel investors that includes former Heroku CEO Adam Gross, former Github CTO Jason Warner, Gitlab’s Sébastien Pahl, and LaunchDarkly co-founder and CEO Jon Kodumal. The company also today announced that its service is now available as a public beta. At its core, Signadot is a Kubernetes-based platform that provides developers with a production-like environment to test their code before it hits the staging environment. This allows developers to test their code without any potential impact on other developers in a shared staging environment. All of these environments (Signadot calls them ‘sandboxes’) can be spun up and down in seconds for every pull request or commit, for example, making for significantly faster feedback loops. The company was founded by Arjun Iyer (CEO), who previously built AppDynamics’ data science platform, and Anirudh Ramanathan (CTO), who was previously a software engineer at Google, working on Kubernetes. Signadot co-founders Arjun Iyer, CEO, and Anirudh Ramanathan, CTO. “The story actually began at AppDynamics for me,” Iyer told me. “I was managing a large engineering team there and we built everything cloud-native and eventually moved everything to microservices and Kubernetes. I was witnessing that whole transition. And what I realized was that my developers are spending a lot of time discovering issues late. They would discover issues only in pre-production or even, in the worst case, in production. […] The developer experience of having these long feedback loops and discovering issues very late really hurt our ability to ship software fast.” Image Credits: Signadot At the same time, though, developers don’t want to spend a lot of time building a tearing down testing environments, so the promise of Signadot is that the service will allow them to quickly run their integration tests against real services in isolated environments. Iyer also noted that part of the idea here is to ensure that the production environment isn’t a walled garden that the developers can’t touch. Instead, Signadot wants to bring a very production-like environment to developers. These sandbox environments are also what Signadot is basing its pricing model on. Customers will pay a subscription fee based on the number of sandboxes that they use and create every month. During the private alpha, Signadot worked with a number of very large customers to ensure that its service can scale. The service should prove just as useful to smaller companies, though, given that there are few companies out there who would prefer a slower development process. Like most companies at this stage, Signadot plans to use the new funding to build out its team and expand its platform. “It's no secret that the future of software applications is entirely in the cloud,” said Tomasz Tunguz, partner at Redpoint Ventures. “As cloud-native becomes more ubiquitous and demand for it grows, developers will need all the help they can get to streamline their process and build software quickly without sacrificing quality. Arjun and Anirudh have created the perfect solution with Signadot, and I can't think of anyone more qualified to attack this problem. I have no doubt that this is only the beginning of the company's journey.”

Pitch your startup on TechCrunch Live, a weekly show featuring founders and VCs Posted: 23 Feb 2022 05:59 AM PST Each week, TechCrunch editors host a weekly show featuring entrepreneurs, developers, and venture capitalists. It’s a great time, and we hope you can join us to present your startup in the pitch feedback session at the end of the show. The show is free, and you don’t have to fill out a form to apply. Just watch the show and follow the instructions on Hopin. TechCrunch Live is designed to help founders build better venture-backed businesses. The show is on its third season, and the upcoming lineup is stacked with killer guests Agility Robotics’ Jonathan Hurst, A16z’s Anish Acharya, and Bradley Tusk from Tusk Ventures. Each week during TCL, a founder and VC join a TechCrunch Editor and talk through an early pitch deck — what worked, what didn’t work, and what would the founder do differently. We want to know how the investor and founder work together, and how they handle disagreements. We want to know what advice they have for those in similar situations. Last week, Itai Damti revealed how the company's long-running Culture and Values document helped pitch the company. Flourish Ventures managing partner explained how this document helped give key insights into Unit’s company culture. This week DeepScribe’s Akilesh Bapu is talking through the pitch deck that resulted Index Venture partner Nina Achadjian leading the company’s Series A. How do you watch? Click to register for this episode set to take place on February 23rd at 1130am PT / 230pm ET.

Pipe expands into media and entertainment financing with its acquisition of Purely Capital Posted: 23 Feb 2022 05:00 AM PST When Pipe was founded in 2019, its vision was to provide SaaS companies a funding alternative outside of equity or venture debt. Specifically, the Miami-based fintech's mission was to give SaaS companies a way to get their revenue upfront, by pairing them with investors on a marketplace that paid a discounted rate for the annual value of those contracts. Pipe describes its buy-side participants as "a vetted group of financial institutions and banks." The goal of the platform was to offer companies with recurring revenue streams access to capital so they don't dilute their ownership by accepting external capital or get forced to take out loans. Over time, its executive team realized that its model could apply to other verticals. So last March, the company announced it was broadening the scope of its platform beyond strictly SaaS companies to "any company with a recurring revenue stream." At that time, it said that could include D2C subscription companies, ISP, streaming services or telecommunications companies. Even VC fund admin and management fees were being piped on its platform, for example, according to co-founder and co-CEO Harry Hurst. Today, Pipe is announcing that it is branching out into another new vertical while at the same time making its first acquisition in picking up London-based Purely Capital, a media and entertainment financing company. UK-born Hurst said it was during his time spent under lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic that he became familiar with the company's CEO and co-founder Wayne Marc Godfrey. "We met through one of our investors and have mutual friends," says Hurst, who was in London, building out Pipe's new office there. He learned that financing for independent movie production companies was crucial if they wanted to be able to move on to their next projects. Without the deep pockets of major streaming companies such as Amazon, Disney, Hulu and Netflix, these independent companies were often in limbo, waiting three to five years to get their money back and go on to their next projects. By purchasing Purely Capital, Pipe has now created a new media and entertainment division on its platform, giving independent distributors the opportunity to trade their revenue streams in the same way a SaaS company could. "There was $220 billion spent on streaming content in 2020, and $250 billion in 2021," Hurst said. "That's huge year-over-year growth. And independently produced content versus major film studios makes up over 65% of that spent, meaning it's the majority of the market. This is a vertical that is incredibly interesting to, and a gigantic opportunity for, us." More funding flows into Pipe, as buzzy fintech raises $250M at a $2B valuation Hurst declined to say how much Pipe paid for the company. Variety reported in March of 2020 that Purely Capital had secured $150 million "from a variety of institutional lenders and banks. At that time, the company had just launched its entertainment fintech receivables platform. In total, the company has originated the purchases of over 250 titles from its customers, representing over $45 million in revenues. Godfrey has assumed the role of general manager of Pipe's new division and his team of five will also help run the new division. Its lean team was something that also appealed to Hurst, who runs his company with the same mentality. Since its inception, Pipe – which describes itself as the "Nasdaq for revenue" – has raised a total of $316 million. Its last raise was a $250 million round that was announced last May, valuing the company at $2 billion. It today has around 80 employees, or "plumbers,” as Pipe calls them. "We're very proud of the fact that we built this business with very few people relative to our scale," Hurst said. Currently, over 50% of the businesses trading on Pipe’s platform are non-SaaS. With this acquisition, that percentage is going to become "even larger," Hurst said. In 2021, Pipe issued $1.2 billion of financing to its vendors and got to "just about $1 billion" in trading volume on a run rate basis, according to Hurst. The company launched its platform to the public in 2020. Image Credits: Pipe Pipe’s expansion into so many new verticals evolved “very much organically,” he said. When the company raised $50 million in a strategic round last March that included investors such as HubSpot, Okta, Slack and Shopify, it was an inflection point for the company. “That’s when we started thinking about this long-term play,” Hurst added. Looking ahead, he believes that Pipe’s “capital markets engine” could support “the entire revenue-as-an-asset class” globally,” he told TechCrunch. “Eventually, anyone should be able to originate onto our platform.” Pipe's platform assesses a customer's key metrics by integrating with its accounting, payment processing and banking systems. It then instantly rates the performance of the business and qualifies them for a trading limit. Trading limits at the time of its last raise ranged from $50,000 for smaller early-stage and bootstrapped companies to over $100 million for late-stage and publicly traded companies, although there is no cap on how large a trading limit can be. Of course, Pipe is not the only startup out to help SaaS startups with revenue-based financing. Arc came out of stealth in January with $150 million in debt financing and $11 million in seed funding to build what it describes as "a community of premium software companies" that gives SaaS startups a way to borrow, save and spend "all on a single tech platform."

Aviron looks to game home fitness with its connected rowing machine Posted: 23 Feb 2022 05:00 AM PST Gamification is nothing new on the exercise front, of course. It's been a foundational element of fitness bands — and later smartwatches — essentially since the beginning. And for good reason — it's great for motivation and engagement, whether it's a Fitbit or a game of Beat Saber. With Peloton pushing more aggressively into the gaming side of things with its Lanebreak offering, it seems like a safe bet that such programming is set to be a key part of home fitness content, moving forward, beyond the standard trainer courses the embattled firm helped pioneer. Aviron, on the other hand, has been doing the game thing since before it was cool. The YC-backed firm, which pivoted from its gym machine focus to home fitness at the outset of the pandemic, has made gaming the centerpiece of its experience. In fact, the firm has eschewed the trainer model in favor of rowing game competitions. Image Credits: Aviron We first noted the Toronto-based startup at the beginning of January 2021. By mid-year, it announced $4.5 million in seed funding, and today, it's adding an $18.5 million Series A, as it looks to expand its footprint in the U.S. and hit Canadian retail stories. The round was led by Stripes and features Global Founders Capital and Formic Ventures. It comes amid increased interest for gamified home workouts, as well as rowing machines, the latter of which Peloton was said to be working on. Of course, given the company's recent struggles, it's hard to know when — if ever — it will add a home rower alongside its treadmills and bikes. The company's got some healthy numbers to back it up, with a 2,700% y-o-y increase in paid subscribers by its count. That (and the aforementioned funding) have afforded it the opportunity to grow its headcount from two to 36. It's still small, but a new healthy infusion of money should help it accelerate things on that front, as well. Speaking of hiring, Aviron is also using today's news to announce that it's added Nike/Lululemon/Burton expat Amy Curry-Staschke on as COO.

DishDivvy serves up marketplace for on-demand, home-cooked food Posted: 23 Feb 2022 05:00 AM PST Sitting down to a homemade meal is not always easy, but DishDivvy has come online to make it more of a reality, and at the same time provide home cooks with a way to make money from their creations. Ani Torosyan, co-founder and CEO, started the Los Angeles-based company three years ago with CTO Davit Avetisyan. Her family immigrated to the U.S., and though both of her parents were busy engineers, Torosyan recalls growing up with a home-cooked meal on the table everyday. Ani Torosyan, co-founder and CEO of DishDivvy. Image Credit: DishDivvy "Fast-forward to now, I am the busy working parent, and although I love to cook, we always have the dinner dilemma of what to eat," she added. "I have a mother-in-law who is also a good cook, and I kept thinking about how to productize what she was doing, especially as I saw more and more of the people in my community open to paying for access to this." Etsy was the inspiration for DishDivvy's marketplace, which aims to reduce the additional overhead costs for its home cooks, Torosyan said. "Its reason for success was that it was providing tools to take the boring business stuff out of running a business and help people focus on their craft," she added. "Similarly, we provide SaaS tools for uploading menus, orders, revenue and transactions. We also partner with DoorDash, so any home cook where there is coverage can have delivery. All of those are a hurdle for people who just want to make food." Indeed, home cooks, who are vetted and food-safety certified, get a suite of tools on the app to upload their menu items, and they can tag ingredients, allergens and note the prep time, which is used to calculate how much advance notice is needed for people to order and a calendar to schedule their dishes. The home cooks don't have to be a 9-to-5 restaurant, either. They can offer, for example, three dishes on Thursday and two on Friday. DishDivvy’s app for home chefs. Image Credit: DishDivvy On the customer side, they can explore the meals being made near them, add dishes to their cart, select the day and time for pickup at the cook's home or delivery, and checkout. When the customer pulls up for a curbside order, there is a button on the app that tells the cook they are there. Torosyan boasts that the average time from the customer saying they are there to getting the food in their car is 44 seconds. The global pandemic saw many people start working in the gig economy, and similarly, Torosyan saw a surge in cook applications beginning two years ago. Not just for home cooks, but for people who used to work in restaurants and hospitality. Torosyan was also on the advocacy team leading the passage of AB 626, the California Homemade Food Act. That has since paved the way for legislation around home kitchen operations to progress into 44 home cooking bills across 29 states since 2018. Now DishDivvy boasts more than 500 cooks and 10,000 users across California. "Initially we were looking at the ethnic uniqueness of the cooks, but now that we have so many cooks, we are focused on food that you can't find in a restaurant or can't find a more authentic dish," Torosyan added. "It's like having an 'Anthony Bourdain' experience without leaving your neighborhood." Today the company announced $1.3 million in pre-seed funding to expand its reach in California and into pockets of Austin, Chicago, Charlotte, N.C., Baltimore and the Washington, D.C. area. It will also invest in product development, operations and team growth. Torosyan aims to triple the size of the team of nine this year after seeing its revenue grow an average of 33% year over year over the past three years. Its average order volume is $48, and 85% of that goes to the cook. 10X Venture led the pre-seed, with participation from early employees and senior executives of DoorDash, Etsy, Eaze and MasterClass. WoodSpoon's food delivery service cooks up support for home chefs with $14M round Prahar Shah, who was an early employee at DoorDash and is currently managing director of 10X Venture and a member of DishDivvy's board, said he also recalls his family eating together, and, in fact, the immigrant community he was a part of in Canada fed itself. "You knew everyone's speciality," he added. "I'm surprised this marketplace didn't already exist in the U.S., but it really exists offline. Ani is the voice of the home cook, and when I met her and experienced the product, I knew I had to be involved with it." Meanwhile, DishDivvy is operating in an increasingly crowded landscape, where companies like WoodSpoon, Shef, Feastastic, Supper in London, Wummly, Foodcloud, Homefoodi, FoodyBuddy and ZuperMeal are going after what Torosyan estimates is a $6 billion home restaurant market inside the larger $1 trillion restaurant industry. Torosyan saw many competitors come online after the California home cook bill passed; however, she also saw many start up for a few months and then abandon the idea. What she ultimately sees is having access to what amounts to a personal chef service at to-go prices. "Part of the passion is to make good food and feed the kids, and home cooking is all about that," she added. "We are bringing back eating well, but keeping it hyperlocal so none of the food travels across the country. That sends a signal that every person can become a home cook, and we have a place for you to do it." 4 trends that will define e-commerce in 2022

Stop guessing your KPIs; Varos shows e-commerce, SaaS companies how you compare to peers Posted: 23 Feb 2022 05:00 AM PST When one public company in a certain sector communicates a difficult quarter, the other companies in the sector tend to see a dip in share price. However, for private companies, it is hard to know exactly why there was an increase in costs last week — was it due to the company's performance or happening to everyone else, too. Varos, based in San Francisco and Tel Aviv, is shedding some light on how companies compare to their peers in terms of key performance indicators, like customer acquisition costs. CEO Yarden Shaked founded Varos in 2021 with CTO Lior Chen and his father, Gil Shaked and was part of Y Combinator's summer 2021 batch. They created a data-sharing tool that crowdsources data via API integrations with its customers' tech stack. The data is pulled in real time and requires no maintenance by customers, according to Chen. E-commerce companies are data-driven, but typically only have their own historical data to go by, Yarden Shaked told TechCrunch. "You are flying blind — you don't know if you are performing well or not, and you can't answer if your KPIs are good or bad, so you don't know what levers to pull because you don't know what the problem is," he added. "On the other side are the trends. If your customer acquisition cost spikes, it could be a market trend. We come in and provide that solution through data cooperation. People feed in the data, we anonymize it and give it back to you for insights." With Varos, it is all self-serve. Customers connect their data, it is placed into various verticals and tagged in different ways. Users get a dashboard where they can compare to, for example, an apparel company spending $100,000 a month on digital marketing with average order values of a certain amount and get a graph of how that has moved over time. Varos founders, from left, Gil Shaked, Yarden Shaked and Lior Chen. Image Credits: Varos One of the big hits is Varos' Monday morning report of trends, where users see their weekly data versus weekly benchmarks. This is a new category of data analytics that helps users understand their own performance as it compares to direct competitors, Yarden Shaked added. He says this type of data collaboration is being done in other industries, including farming, travel and late-stage investing, where valuation is based on competitive data, but is relatively new for the e-commerce and SaaS spaces. And it is already gaining traction since its soft launch last August: more than 250 users are feeding marketing data into Varos to see how they stack up against their peers. Varos has been a free service as its builds up its data marketplace, but also has multiple paying customers. To keep up with the demand, the company raised $4 million in seed funding, led by Ibex Investors, which also included Y Combinator and a group of individual investors, including Tom Glocer, former CEO of Thomson Reuters; Andy Dunn, co-founder of Bonobos; Amol Deshpande, co-founder of Farmers Business Network; Bob Moore, the CEO of Crossbeam; and John Jersin, co-founder of Connectifier. Varos, which officially launched Wednesday, started with marketing KPIs, but doesn't want to stop there. The company is not only adding Shopify, Google and TikTok integrations and others around revenue growth and conversion rates, but will also expand into other areas, like finance, product and sales, Yarden Shaked said. Until a month ago, it was just the three founders, but the company now has a team of seven, mainly in product and design. The plan is to double the headcount by the end of this year. "We are happy our hypothesis is working," Yarden Shaked said. "The trend used to be that without Varos, if something spied or changed, there was a learning period to understand where it was not performing well. Now with Varos, we say you can focus on the creative, but based on what you see." After talking to marketing leaders for a year, here’s my advice for CEOs

Revel to expand EV fast-charging network with backing from BlackRock Posted: 23 Feb 2022 05:00 AM PST Revel, the Brooklyn-based startup that first made a name for itself with its iconic shared blue electric mopeds in New York City, has raised a $126 million Series B in a funding round led by BlackRock Renewable Power. Toyota Ventures, an existing investor, also participated in the round, along with Goodyear Ventures, Shell Ventures, Broadscale Group, the St Baker Energy Innovation Fund and an account managed by Knighthead Capital Management. The latest investment, following a $34 million Series A last year, brings the company’s total funding to around $165 million. Representatives from BlackRock and Toyota Ventures will join Revel's board of directors, according to the company. Revel plans to use the funds to expand its network of EV fast-charging “Superhubs” throughout 2022. The company wouldn’t share many specifics, but it said it would have 10 to 25 universal DC-fast chargers at sites operating across NYC and potentially other major cities in the U.S., as well. "This investment is highly complementary to our existing portfolio of investments in the rapidly growing EV charging infrastructure space, which presents an attractive opportunity for our clients as we continue to support the energy transition," Martin Torres, Head of the Americas for BlackRock, said in a statement. Revel launched its first — and so far only –Superhub in Brooklyn with 25 charge points last June, and like that one, all of the new hubs will be open to the public 24/7 and accessible to any brand of EV. "Urban charging infrastructure is the missing piece that's kept millions of drivers from making the switch to EVs, and with this funding Revel will be able to build it in cities across the country," CEO and co-founder Frank Reig said in a statement. While consumer and commercial EV use grows, Revel’s Brooklyn charging station has had guaranteed utilization from the company itself, which launched an all-EV (all-Tesla, no less) ride-hail service in Manhattan last August. There was some initial conflict with NYC’s Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), which had issued a cap on new taxis from entering the over-saturated market, but Revel was ultimately able to rely on an exemption for electric and wheelchair-accessible vehicles to gain approval to launch. Perhaps the fact that it actually employs its drivers and provides benefits lent a helping hand to the company’s cause. The TLC did not immediately respond to requests for more information about Revel’s ongoing status as a taxi operator. While the moped service will continue, Revel is winding down one of its business units – e-bike subscriptions. The company launched a limited service a year ago, but realizes that the market is trending more toward an ownership rather than a subscription model as e-bikes become increasingly affordable. "Revel's vertical integration of electric vehicle options on top of fast-charging EV Superhubs maximizes both consumer choice and infrastructure utilization," Jim Adler, founding managing director of Toyota Ventures, said in a statement. "It's the right strategy to provide accessible transit that lowers city carbon emissions, improves the health of the planet and drives Revel's success in the most lucrative markets in the world."

anecdotes, a compliance operating system platform, secures $25M Series A Posted: 23 Feb 2022 04:30 AM PST According to a Gartner’s report, about 75% of compliance leaders say they still lack the confidence to effectively run and report on program outcomes despite the added scrutiny on data privacy and protection and newly added regulations over the last several years. San Francisco-based startup anecdotes developed a compliance operating system platform to provide customized compliance services for businesses.  "The [compliance] tools available to [users] now are essentially templates for meeting basic requirements and passing audits, offering very little in the way of the scalability and customization needed to facilitate, versus hinder, growth," said Yair Kuznitsov, co-founder and CEO of anecdotes. "By breaking down siloed processes, replacing outdated manual activities with automation and establishing an underlying fabric via which compliance posture can be monitored and understood at all times, we transform compliance from a burden into a driver for growth and expansion." Today, anecdotes announced that it has raised $25 million in a Series A round to develop new applications for its compliance operating system platform, specifically tailored to fast-growing clients’ needs.  The funding news comes on the heels of its 175% increase in post-IPO commercial customers after raising $5 million in seed funding in February 2021. The startup had commercial agreements with Similarweb, Riskified, Fiverr, Unity and more.  The startup added 70 integrations with identity providers, security tools, collaboration software, ticketing and cloud infrastructures platforms in 2021 alone.  Anecdotes was founded in 2020 by Kuznitsov, CPO Roi Amior and R&D VP Eitan Adler, who all come from a cybersecurity background and have knowledge about data-based compliance.  Anecdotes says it continuously collects and maps data from AWS, Snowflake, Cloudflare, GitHub, Datadog and more. The data is then leveraged to power various applications for compliance needs like audit management, risk analysis, policies and customer evidence. Through its customized controls and frameworks, companies can meet internal and external audits and have the visibility, flexibility and data-backed intelligence to simultaneously scale their compliance program against their own impressive growth.  Founders of anecdotes (from left to right): CTO Eitan Adler, CEO Yair Kuznitsov, CPO Roi Amior. Image Credits: anecdotes The Series A funding was led by Red Dot Capital Partners, with participation from Vintage Investment Partners, Shasta Ventures, Glilot Capital Partners and Aleph. Barak Salomon and Atad Peled of Red Dot will join anecdotes' board of directors as part of this round.  The company, which has R&D offices in Israel, plans to open a new office in New York and double its team from 60 to 120, hiring globally.  "There is an insatiable appetite for data protection and privacy today. And yet, most compliance leaders rely on basic and outdated technology like spreadsheets or tedious manual labor to manage critical infrastructures and postures, essentially left to do their jobs with one hand tied behind their back in the process,” said Atad Peled, principal at Red Dot Capital Partners. "Getting through one audit once a year is one thing, but there remains a huge market gap in addressing needs beyond that for fast-growing companies with super complex and forever-evolving infrastructures on a regular basis. This is why anecdotes and its compliance OS system are so critical and directly primed for rapid growth.” The anecdotes OS. Image Credits: anecdotes

Astrix Security emerges from stealth to help organizations spot rogue third-party apps Posted: 23 Feb 2022 04:09 AM PST Astrix Security, an Israeli cybersecurity startup that provides access management for third-party app integrations, has emerged from stealth with $15 million in funding. The startup was co-founded in 2021 by CEO Alon Jackson and CTO Idan Gour, both former members of Israel's famed intelligence division Unit 8200, to help organizations monitor and control the complex web of third-party apps connected to their critical systems. The number of integrations used by organizations has increased dramatically over the past two years as a result of the widespread shift to remote working and, in turn, cloud-based environments. Astrix claims that while businesses are largely on top of managing user access to critical systems, the majority are falling short when it comes to managing API access, which is exposing them to a growing attack surface vulnerable to supply chain attacks, data spillage, and compliance violations. That's why the startup developed Astrix Security, a platform that equips businesses with full integration lifecycle management. "Current solutions provide a security score that helps you assess the security posture of apps you want to adopt. Others, such as NoName, look at API security, which focuses on the APIs that you develop and want others to consume," Jackson, who served as head of R&D at Argus prior to founding Astrix, told TechCrunch. "We look at integrations that are done through third-parties; it could be your CRM on Salesforce or your intellectual property in GitHub. These are all systems that you did not develop, but you have API access enabled to them." Astrix Security provides organizations with an immediate inventory of all third-party connectivity to enterprise applications. It automatically detects changes and malicious anomalies within these integrations and low-code or no-code workflow configurations and provides real-time remediations. This technology, Jackson claims, could have prevented organizations from becoming a casualty of the CodeCov hack last year, which saw attackers breach the company's software auditing tool to gain access to hundreds of its customers’ networks. "What happened is exactly what we are building for; the developer just added a new third-party connection on top of his code repository in GitHub. He removed it, but didn't revoke the access, which led to their entire IP being sold on the dark web," Jackson said. Astrix Security is already in the hands of a number of global enterprise customers, spanning the technology, health tech, and automotive sectors. Jackson says the startup plans to use its $15 million seed investment, which was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and F2 Capital, with participation from Venrock and over 20 cybersecurity angel investors, to expand its current team of 20 and to bolster its go-to-market efforts.

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