Author : zebethcontrol

Apis in talks to back fintech Money View at $1 billion valuation despite market slump • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Accel, Apis Partners, Fintech, india, Startups, tiger globalNo Comments

India’s Money View is in talks to raise a new round of funding at a unicorn valuation, two sources familiar with the matter told ZebethMedia, in a boost to the local fintech community that has been rattled by the central bank’s stringent guidelines and funding crunch in recent months. Apis Partners is deliberating leading a funding round of about $125 million to $150 million in the Bengaluru-headquartered startup at a valuation of about $1 billion, the sources said. The round, a Series E, hasn’t been finalized, so terms of the deal may still change, the sources cautioned, requesting anonymity speaking about nonpublic information. Apis Partners, Money View and the startup’s founders did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday evening local time. The eight-year-old startup, which was valued at $615 million in a Series D funding round in March this year, offers lending to individuals who can’t avail credit from banks and other financial institutions. The startup has said in the past that the majority of its customers live in small Indian cities and towns. “India is one of the most underserved large economies when it comes to access to credit. More than 70% of the credit provided by banks is only given to the top 10% of affluent Indians,” it describes on its website. “The most underserved segments are people who earn less than 5L [$6,070] a year. Money View aims to bridge this credit gap by providing personalized loan offers for its customers through its robust data and risk assessment model. The company’s proprietary data models provide a 360-degree risk assessment, enabling credit for the underserved segments.” Money View — which counts Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global and Accel among its existing backers — has been profitable for over a year, its founder Puneet Agarwal said in a press statement in May, and was on pace to clock an annualized revenue run rate of about $80 million. “In the age of cash burning businesses, we are one of the very few fintech startups to be profitable for more than a year now,” Agarwal said in a press release in May. Its new funding deliberations come at a time when the dealflow activity has slowed down dramatically in the South Asian market as investors grow cautious of writing new checks and evaluate their underwriting models after valuations of publicly listed firms take a tumble. Indian startups raised $3 billion in the quarter that ended in September, down 57% from the previous quarter and 80% year-over-year, according to market intelligence platform Tracxn.

GenZero’s Frederick Teo on “limitless” opportunities in climate tech • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Climate, climate tech, GenZero, Singapore, sosv, Southeast Asia, temasek, VentureNo Comments

2050 is an important year for climate tech, with the Paris Agreement calling for emissions to reach net zero by then. In a conversation with GenZero’s Frederick Teo for SOSV’s Climate Tech Summit, we talked about realistic paths to hitting that goal and how startups can tackle what Teo called one of the most existentialist challenges of our generation. GenZero is a $3.6 billion investment company that is backed by Temasek, already known for its climate investing. Teo talked about how it gauges companies before investing, supporting nascent technologies and solutions in the space and what startups can tackle in the next two decades. This Q&A was edited for length, and you can watch the full conversation here or at the bottom of the article. TC: GenZero’s initial commit is from Temasek, which was already a leader in global investing when it announced GenZero in June. It’s a wholly-owned company of Temasek, so why did Temasek decide to start GenZero and what is GenZero doing that Temasek isn’t already? FT: Temasek, as you know, has already taken a lot of steps in the past few years into making investments into sustainability, as well as clean energy and climate-related spaces. It is important for us to think about how to deploy capital in this space because obviously all of us are aware of the climate emergency, the fact that this is actually likely to be one of the most existentialist challenges of our generation. It is important for us to be able to find solutions that can actually address many of these things like global warming, sea level rises, the challenges of food production in a sustainable way. So we wanted to be able to have a dedicated capability to access some of these decarbonization opportunities, and Temasek decided to park aside a sizable amount of capital to be able to develop a team that would be able to focus on issues like carbon markets, decarbonization technologies as well as nature solutions. So that is the reason why we established GenZero as a separate investment platform company. In our work we have been looking at technology solutions such as low carbon materials and carbon capture capabilities, nature solutions that seek to protect and restore natural ecosystems, often with a view to generate carbon credits on top of that, as well as to invest into ecosystem enablers in the carbon market space. The reason for that is because we think that in the near term, energy transition would require some form of participation from carbon markets to allow people to gradually execute this transition. But we do need carbon markets to be credible, effective, transparent, high quality, and therefore there is still investments needed in order to be able to improve capabilities and technologies and solutions in that space. TC: For companies that are curious about trying to pitch themselves to you, what are some examples of your current portfolio companies? FT: In the technology space, we have invested into both funds as well as companies, so a major fund investment is Decarbonization Partners, and that is basically a climate-focused fund that is a joint venture between Temasek and BlackRock. We are an LP invested in that, and they are very focused on late-venture, early growth opportunities across different areas in the decarbonization space. We have also invested into a technology company called Newlight, which seeks to be able to produce bio plastics from captured methane. On the nature side, we have been investing into a few forestry projects that generate carbon credits, and then on the carbon market side, we count among our portfolio companies things like South Pole, which is a global leader in providing project advisory, technical advisory solutions and project development for companies seeking to embark on a net zero decarbonization journey, as well as a carbon exchange called Climate Impact X, which is headquartered here in Singapore. TC: For companies that are curious about potentially getting investment from you, what investment stage does GenZero typically look at? FT: We are kind of flexible. For very early-stage companies, say around the Series A or just before, we will work with different partners to be able to evaluate and deploy capital to support early-stage companies, but I think it’s important to understand why we need to do this. If we think about the broader net zero decarbonization challenge, everybody talks about this 2050 timeline to get to net zero. But the reality is that if we want to create significant climate impact by 2050, we are looking at new solutions that must already somewhat exist today or are starting to come into being today, because we will need another 10 to 15 years for the technologies and solutions to mature and get to a stage where they could be commercializes, and then probably another 10 to 15 years for it to actually be able to be deployed and create some kind of impact. That basically means that this current cohort of young companies are going to make a difference to the 2050 agenda. That is the reason why we are very excited to participate in this space right now, because the action must take place now in order to have any meaningful difference by 2050. TC: Considering that, with technology not coming to fruition by them until then, or making actionable results by then, in light of that, what kind of metrics or milestones do you like to see companies bring to the table before you consider them for your portfolio? FT: I think it goes back to the way we evaluate our performance at GenZero. We have a double bottom line, so our shareholder expects us to be able to obviously achieve some level of financial returns. That’s a given. But we also take the idea around measuring climate impact rather seriously. We try and understand, for example, the kind of climate impact that a solution would be able to achieve if successful deployed. We also look

Y’all really made Mark Zuckerberg defend himself to investors because of your memes • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Mark Zuckerberg, meta, metaverse, SocialNo Comments

On today’s quarterly earnings call, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on the defensive when it comes to the company’s investment in the metaverse. Once again, the company lost over $3 billion dollars to its Reality Labs division this quarter, and Meta’s net income took a big hit. Since rebranding from Facebook to Meta, Zuckerberg’s company has gotten a lot of flack for its complete nosedive into the metaverse. But perhaps one of the most brutal moments came in August, when the CEO posted a selfie in front of a metaverse Eiffel Tower to celebrate the expansion of VR social platform Horizon Worlds into France and Spain. Image Credits: Facebook His selfie looked so bad that it became a meme, which he had to address by posting another mock-up of what avatars will look like in the future. Clearly, Mark took the criticism to heart, as he brought it up again on today’s earnings call when an investor asked if Meta’s progress so far has lived up to his expectations. “I know sometimes when we ship products, there’s a meme where people say, ‘You’re spending all this money and you produce this thing,’” Zuckerberg said. “I think that’s not really the right way to think about it.” He continued, “I think there’s a number of different products and platforms that we’re building, where we think we’re doing leading work that will become… launching consumer products and then eventually mature products at different cadences, different periods of time over the next 5 to 10 years.” Some of these consumer products include… legs. He added that he thinks that the Reality Labs teams are making good progress, and that there’s no indication that suggests that VR and AR won’t be dominant technologies in the future. But he changed the way that he characterized products like Horizon Worlds, describing it as something that Meta is building out in the open and iterating upon in public. “Obviously it has a long way to go before it’s going to be what we aspire for it to be,” Zuckerberg said about Horizon Worlds. “We think we’re doing some leading work there, but obviously we need to get that into the product and continue innovating on that.” Still, Zuckerberg continues to project confidence that the billions of dollars Meta is pumping into VR is a good idea. “A lot of people might disagree with this investment,” Zuckerberg said. “But from what I can tell, I think that this is going to be a very important thing, and I think it would be a mistake for us to not focus on any of these areas, which I think are going to be fundamentally important to the future.” Zuckerberg sounds a bit more human than normal when he points out that VR and AR are big opportunities for growth in the tech industry. But Zuckerberg’s vision for the metaverse — one in which we are constantly strapped into our headsets — remains a bit hard to swallow. The Quest 2 is actually pretty cool piece of technology, and the next consumer grade headset is sure to be even better. Already on the Quest 2, you can play extremely realistic ping pong with friends from across the world and talk to them like they’re standing right next to you! But do we really want to spend our nine-to-five with a giant screen right against our eyeballs? Would we rather hang out in Horizon Worlds than grab IRL coffee with a friend? Not me, at least.

After buying Twitter, will Musk bite back at Apple’s in-app purchase fees? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Daily Crunch, Startups, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Wednesday, and we’re excited to bring you another round of our esteemed Daily Crunch newsletter. There’s a wide variety of morsels, nuggets, and other bite-sized delights, so let’s go! — Christine and Haje The ZebethMedia Top 3 Startups and VC Asset management firm Stone Ridge has launched a startup accelerator, Wolf, that will be dedicated to growing Bitcoin-focused applications. The program will bring four cohorts per year, each consisting of about eight to 12 teams, or about 30 to 50 founders, to New York City from around the world for eight weeks at a time to focus on building on the Bitcoin-centric Lightning Network and Taro protocol, Kelly Brewster, CEO of Wolf, told Jacquelyn. Today, for a series of climate-related conversations organized by the global venture firm SOSV, Connie interviewed famed investor Chris Sacca. In their chat, Sacca dismissed questions around whether efforts like carbon capture can work at scale. (“The naysayers kind of fuel me, actually.”) He also said — naturally — that he has “no doubt we will have multiple companies worth trillions of dollars that emerge from our portfolio.” It wound up being a fairly wide-ranging conversation. Moar? Moar! Investors are sitting on mountains of cash: Where will it be deployed? Image Credits: H-Gall (opens in a new window) / Getty Images No matter what’s happening in the public markets, bees make honey and venture capitalists raise money: It’s just what they do. But since the “extreme valuation recalibration” in the public markets, VCs are amassing more and more dry powder, write Jeremy Abelson and Jacob Sonnenberg of Irving Investors. More frustrating news for founders: Investor fundraising “is on pace to finish the year at $172 billion,” but capital deployment is way down. “Dollars are flowing and will continue to flow, but it will be more capital to fewer companies,” they write. Now that “traditional SaaS has become too expensive and secondarily saturated,” sectors like web3, life sciences and agtech will attract more investors, they predict. Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. Kirsten has some late-breaking news that Ford’s and VW’s autonomous vehicle startup Argo AI will be shut down and parts of it will be absorbed by the two companies. This story is still developing, so keep going back to it for more, particularly a comment from the companies in question. Who doesn’t like a good fraction yelled at them? Duolingo certainly does not. Natasha M writes that Duolingo’s owl will now shout all the fractions you want at you as part of its new math app that is now public after spending some months in beta. And we have five more for you:

Meta posts another revenue decline as investors voice metaverse concerns • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, meta, SocialNo Comments

Earlier this year, Meta posted its first quarterly revenue decline. Once again, Meta’s financials aren’t inspiring much faith in its investors this quarter. Meta’s revenue declined 4% year over year to hit $27.7 billion; but Meta CFO David Wehner pointed out on the earnings call today that some of this decline is owed to inflation. Meanwhile, net income was just $4.395 billion, down from $9.194 billion year over year. This decline in income is mostly due to Meta’s huge investment in the metaverse. Reality Labs, Meta’s virtual reality division, lost $3.672 billion this quarter. The same thing happened in Q1, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg justified a $3 billion loss by saying that the 2030s will be “exciting.” Image Credits: Meta (opens in a new window) “There’s still a long road ahead to build the next computing platform. But we’re clearly doing leading work here. This is a massive undertaking and it’s often gonna take a few versions of each product before they become mainstream,” Zuckerberg said on today’s earnings call. “But I think that our work here is going to be of historic importance and create the foundation for an entirely new way that we will interact with each other and blend technology into our lives, as well as the foundation for the long term of our business.” Meta also casually dropped the news that it will launch its next consumer-grade Quest headset next year, which is responsible for some of these costs. Meta just shipped its first high-grade Quest Pro headsets this week. Zuckerberg also elaborated on Meta’s overall plans for the metaverse. He’s now referring to Horizon Worlds, the company’s underwhelming social VR platform, as something that Meta is “iterating on out in the open.” He also called the platform an “early product.” “Obviously it has a long way to go before it’s going to be what we aspire for it to be,” Zuckerberg said about Horizon Worlds. “We think we’re doing some leading work there, but obviously we need to get that into the product and continue innovating on that.” He also emphasized Meta’s commitment to developing VR and AR technology in general. When it comes to social media, Zuckerberg shared some updated figures. He said that there are now more than 140 billion Reels plays across Facebook and Instagram, which is a 50% increase from six months ago. Across all platforms, Reels has a $3 billion annual revenue run rate. As the company has stated in past earnings calls, Meta is investing heavily in AI content discovery to compete with platforms like TikTok. Meta also shared that hiring will significantly slow next year. The company added 3,700 net new employees in Q3, down from 5,700 net additions in Q2. “We expect hiring to slow dramatically going forward and to hold the headcount roughly flat next year relative to current levels,” Wehner said.

Meta will release a new consumer grade VR headset next year • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Hardware, meta, Quest 2, Virtual realityNo Comments

A follow-up to the Quest 2, Meta is launching another consumer grade virtual reality headset next year. The company announced this during today’s Q3 earnings call, in which the company marked yet another $3 billion quarterly loss to its metaverse investments. But CFO David Wehner says that some of this continued cost can be explained via Meta’s continued investment in new hardware development, including another consumer-grade headset that will come out next year. Just weeks ago, Meta unveiled the Quest Pro, a $1,499 headset that is targeted toward power users, especially those who will use it to work. But existing headsets like the Quest 2 are aimed to immerse average people in the company’s dreams for the metaverse. Right now, the Quest 2 retails for $399, but this summer, Meta hiked the price by $100 to try to make up for lost costs. We don’t know much more about Meta’s new headset, aside from the fact that… it’s in the works! But in the lead up to the Quest Pro, previously referred to as “Project Cambria,” Meta dropped a whole lot of breadcrumbs to hype up the powerful headset, so it’s only a matter of time before we learn more. “There’s still a long road ahead to build the next computing platform. But we’re clearly doing leading work here. This is a massive undertaking and it’s often gonna take a few versions of each product before they become mainstream,” Zuckerberg said on today’s earnings call. “But I think that our work here is going to be of historic importance and create the foundation for an entirely new way that we will interact with each other and blend technology into our lives, as well as the foundation for the long term of our business.”

Ford takes $2.7B hit on Argo shutdown, shifts its bet to driver assist tech • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Argo AI, Ford, TransportationNo Comments

As the third-quarter earnings drumbeat continues, we learned more about the state of global supply chains, global consumer appetite for big-ticket items and the future of self-driving technology. After the bell this afternoon, Ford beat Wall Street analyst revenue estimates of $36.25 billion, per Yahoo Finance, with automotive Q3 2022 top line of $37.2 billion, and total revenues of $39.25 billion, up 10% despite lingering supply chain issues. The company’s adjusted earnings per share also came in ahead of expectations. However, the financial news was quickly outweighed at least in commentary terms by the company’s choices regarding autonomous vehicle technology. ZebethMedia broke the news earlier Wednesday that Argo AI, a self-driving company in which Ford was an investor, is shutting down. Ford, in its earnings report, wrote that it is shifting its capital spend from the Level 4 autonomous systems being developed by Argo AI to internally developed “L2+/L3” advanced driver assistance technology. “So it’s taking that investment and putting it towards a business where we think we will have a sizable return in the near term relative to one that’s going to have a long arc,” said Doug Field, chief advanced product development and technology officer at Ford, during Wednesday’s investor call. Jim Farley, Ford’s CEO, even went so far as to say “profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off and we won’t necessarily have to create that technology for ourselves.” “We don’t expect a single ‘Aha!’ moment like we used to,” he said during a call with investors. “Advancing Level 2 hardware and software beyond what Blue Cruise can do today, and ultimately enabling our customers to travel in very large ODDs or operating domains with their eyes off the road will give them back the single most valuable commodity in our modern lives. Time.” Letting go of the Argo AI investment, however, had a material impact on the company’s profitability in the quarter. To unwind the trade, Ford had to endure a $2.7 billion “non-cash, pretax impairment” on its Argo stake. That pushed the company’s GAAP results into negative territory for the three-month period. Taking a huge pre-tax loss is notable, as is the shift to focus on lower-level driver-assist technologies. The company had some good news to report, however, apart from its top-and-bottom line beats: profitability. Per the automotive company, Ford expects 2022 to bring in $11.5 billion in earnings before interest and taxes. Free cash flow projections for the year also ticked higher, with Ford anticipating $9.5 billion to $10.0 billion worth of the substance in 2022. (Ford’s EBIT in the third-quarter of $1.8 billion was above its own expectations.) The news of Argo’s dissolution comes not even a month after the company officially launched a robotaxi service on Lyft’s network in Austin using a fleet of Ford Escape hybrid vehicles. Last month, Argo also launched an ecosystem of products and services aiming to support commercial delivery and robotaxi operations. It’s not clear what will happen with those services now, and Argo did not respond to ZebethMedia in time. Ford’s view that it can forgo investments into pricey — and seemingly yet far-out — self-driving technology could mean a dearth of future deals from major car companies into smaller, tech-heavy autonomous companies. And the pullback in optimism could impact suppliers for those companies — the lidar concerns, and their ilk. Last week at ZebethMedia Disrupt, Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe shared similar sentiments to Farley’s, saying that fully autonomous vehicles would be harder to achieve and scale. He said Rivian would pursue Level 2 and Level 3 systems which are on cars now and are getting increasingly better every day. Ford is not the only company struggling with its self-driving ambitions; Tesla is reportedly in trouble with the U.S. government about its own self-driving tech. The U.S. Department of Justice is reportedly investigating the company regarding its “Autopilot” capabilities, which is Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system that CEO Elon Musk has boldly claimed can drive itself in certain scenarios. This story is developing. Check back in for updates.

The tide is shifting on tech’s layoff wave. Kind of. • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in layoff, startup employees, Startups, tech layoffsNo Comments

In tech, emerging trends usually elicit excitement and surprise, whether it’s the hot new sector that every venture capitalist is clamoring for a stake in, or the rise of a new technology you haven’t heard of. Until you only hear of it. This year, however, one of the biggest trends to form inside tech was a darker one: layoffs. We can talk more about the specific layoff themes. And we have. Over 780 companies cut a portion of their staff off this year, according to data tracker layoffs.fyi. The workforce reductions have impacted at least 92,558 known people. The real figure is likely higher given reporting delays. But the same data source suggests that the tide is somewhat shifting on the cadence of tech layoffs. Nearly 70% of people who have been laid off this year, lost their jobs during May, June, July and August. Since the summertime of sadness, staff cuts have decreased. September had half the number of layoff events than August, and in October, new layoff events slowed while people impacted slightly inched upward from August. There’s two big asterisks to these figures. First, layoffs.fyi has only tracked publicly reported and tipped layoff events, meaning that there could be many more underneath the surface (especially smaller scale layoffs) that are not being tracked. Second, zombies. Zombie companies are basically companies that raised a ton of money over the boom cycle but aren’t producing nearly enough revenue to justify the historical valuation. The late-stage market is full of them, a founder recently told me, and it will take awhile for us to realize this because many got overcapitalized and have enough runway to hide behind. In other words, more layoffs may come later once companies run out of runway. Today’s numbers just give us a time check on just how far into this re-correction we are. Needless to say, layoffs haven’t disappeared. Just today, Zillow announced that it was cutting 5% of its total workforce, impacting 300 employees. Yesterday, Cerebral cut 20% of its employees. Some of the biggest layoffs since the beginning of COVID-19’s impact on the technology sector happened this year, with Getir’s 14% cut, Byju’s fall from grace, and Better.com’s worsening situation. Still, I’m relieved (and maybe you are too) that the layoffs are slowing down. I don’t want to jinx things, and I realize this is totally jinxing things; but hopefully 2022 ends quiet, and 2023 starts even quieter.

Tesla said to face criminal investigation by the Department of Justice over self-driving claims • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Tesla Autopilot, tesla full self-driving, TransportationNo Comments

Tesla is said to be facing a criminal investigation launched by the U.S. Department of Justice facing claims made by the company regarding its “Autopilot” capabilities, Reuters reports, citing “three people familiar with the matter.” The inquiry was launched last year per the sources and was initiated following over a dozen accidents involving the active use of Tesla’s Autopilot system, some resulting in fatalities. Tesla, and in particular CEO Elon Musk have been bold in their claims regarding Autopilot’s capabilities: The company’s so-called “Full Self-Driving” or FSD (which is not that at all, by the way, even by the admission of the company’s own materials) beta launched in October of 2020, and now has over 100,000 members enrolled from the larger global Tesla owner population, according to the most recent public numbers. The automaker still cautions users of “Autopilot,” “Enhanced Autopilot” and “Full Self-Driving Capability” that they must remain “alert,” with their “hands on the steering wheel at all times” and that they “maintain control of [their] car.” That said, Musk himself has suggested FSD could be “safer than a human” before the end of this year in an earrings call from January. It was a reiteration of a claim from a year prior he made on Twitter, noting that FSD would “work at a safety level well above that of the average driver this year.” Note that just because the DoJ is investigating doesn’t mean criminal charges will necessarily result — they could opt to pursue civil action, do nothing at all or level charges.

Where cloud management is going next • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in cloud cost optimization, cloud infrastructure, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, Enterprise, finops, product-led growth, Startups, usage-based pricing, VentureNo Comments

“There’s a big wave of innovation in managing cloud costs,” Team8 co-founder and managing partner Liran Grinberg told ZebethMedia as part of our latest cloud investor survey. Having noticed tailwinds for the wave of B2B startups that offer cloud cost-optimization solutions, and cloud management more broadly, we were curious to know where VCs thought the space was headed — and the answers we heard show promise. Indeed, the tailwinds we are referring to aren’t limited to the current macroeconomic climate. The need to better manage cloud spend is undoubtedly fueled by the downturn, which makes everyone more cost-conscious. But, as we will explore, innovation in this field is also a corollary to broader trends, such as the rise of product-led growth among B2B SaaS companies, which have become both practitioners and consumers of usage-based pricing. There are also reasons to think that we haven’t seen all of it yet. “We continue to see tremendous opportunity in the cloud management space given how early we are in the cloud adoption journey,” Battery Ventures venture investor Danel Dayan said. So what might be next? Let’s dive in. Beyond cost optimization The first wave of cloud optimization solutions did the obvious: help companies track and lower their cloud spend. Per Team8’s Grinberg: “The first generation of cloud cost management (represented by Cloudability, CloudHealth) helped provide visibility and clarity on the spend on AWS, Azure and GCP. Meanwhile, cloud cost-optimization tools (represented by Spot, Granulate) allowed for tactical changes to lower costs.” Consolidation followed, ZebethMedia’s Kyle Wiggers noted, “as incumbents in adjacent sectors saw the opportunities presented by cloud cost optimization. Microsoft in 2017 acquired Cloudyn [ … ]. Then, in 2019, Apptio snatched up [ … ] Cloudability, while VMware and NetApp bought CloudHealth and Spot (formerly Spotinst), respectively, within the span of a few years.” And this April, Intel bought Granulate for $650 million. As time and mergers went by, it became clear that there was more than startups in this space could do for their customers. First and foremost, cloud teams required more than cost optimization — they needed cloud management.