a16z

MotherDuck secures investment from Andreessen Horowitz to commercialize DuckDB • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in a16z, data analytics, Enterprise, funding, redpoint, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Jordan Tigani — a founding engineer at Google BigQuery, Google’s fully managed data analysis platform — was working as the chief product officer at SingleStore when he noticed that the vast majority of database workloads were small (less than 10GB in size) and low-bandwidth. While vendors were building for massive data sets, the term “big data” was becoming a misnomer thanks to recent advances in hardware, the way Tigani saw it. Around the same time, Tigani got in touch with Hannes Mühleisen, the co-creator of the lightweight database platform DuckDB, to toss ideas for a paid service back and forth. Seeking to launch a product for developers with light database requirements, Tigani — with Mühleisen’s blessing — began building a DuckDB-based cloud service. The service became the cheekily named MotherDuck, a startup independent of the original DuckDB that’s focused on commercializing open source DuckDB packages. “Users want easy and fast answers to their questions — they don’t want to wait for the cloud,” Tigani told ZebethMedia via email. “The fact is that a modern laptop is faster than a modern data warehouse. Cloud data vendors are focused on the performance of 100TB queries, which is not only irrelevant for the vast majority of users, but also distracts from vendors’ ability to deliver a great user experience.” It’s a classic playbook — take an open source tool and build a service on top of it. But while it might not be original, Tigani’s plan has already paid dividends. MotherDuck today announced that it raised $47.5 million across seed and Series A rounds, valuing the company at $175 million post-money. Redpoint led the seed while Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the Series A — other investors include Madrona, Amplify Partners and Altimeter. Tigani says that MotherDuck wasn’t planning to raise the Series A so soon after the seed, but did so at the urging of LPs — and for the opportunity to work with a16z. “With this funding, MotherDuck is able to build out their world-class engineering team and add a go-to-market function to provide a cloud analytics platform for organizations that want to use DuckDB in an evolved way,” Tigani said. “At the same time, it allows DuckDB to continue to be a vehicle for academic research.” Tigani claims that MotherDuck’s service — powered by DuckDB, which HackerNoon once described as “mutant offspring of SQLite and Redshift” — allows practitioners to start answering questions from data faster than most existing tooling. It uses local computing resources in concert with the cloud, driving data analytics and other data-heavy workloads. That’s in contrast to typical data warehouse systems that offer reporting and tools almost exclusively for enterprise-scale analytics. As Madrona’s Jon Turow explains in a forthcoming blog post (ZebethMedia got a sneak peak), MotherDuck uses a “hybrid execution” technique to query a data set that’s spread across multiple places. Some of the data might be on a developers laptop, some in the cloud instance and the rest in a different cloud, but MotherDuck makes it possible for a dev to query the combination of these sources. “The platform intelligently decides where to operate upon each bit of data to minimize the costs of compute and data transfer,” Turow writes. The data warehouse concept has existed since the ’80s, but it’s risen to prominence in recent years as companies shift their workloads to the cloud. There’s startups like Firebolt and Hydra, which aim to become the open cloud data warehouse of choice for large companies. Panoply, another player in the data warehouse space, has taken a different approach, developing tools that make it easier for businesses to analyze their data with standard database queries. While Tigani sees MotherDuck as a competitor in the data analytics market alongside data warehouse vendors, he positions the platform as the technological superior alternative. “The high efficiency of DuckDB will allow MotherDuck to be cost-competitive, while also being more performant for most data workloads,” Tigani asserted. “Advances in CPU, memory, disk performance and networks are making existing architectures obsolete. Large distributed analytics clusters are no longer necessary due to these advances. Single-node DuckDB can often be much faster, cheaper and simpler than these distributed systems.” The DuckDB team is involved to a degree with MotherDuck, which in turn is a member of the DuckDB Foundation, the nonprofit that holds much of DuckDB’s IP. DuckDB’s own commercial arm, DuckDB Labs, is a shareholder in the company and contributed code to the cloud platform. Tigani assures me that DuckDB will continue to be freely available under a permissive MIT license and that the original DuckDB team will build, maintain and promote the core DuckDB codebase going forward. Fueled by the fresh capital, MotherDuck plans to expand its small workforce from 13 people to 18 by the end of the year. When asked, he declined to answer questions about the size of the startup’s customer base or revenue, saying it’s too early.

With $18M in new funding, EngFlow wants to speed up your builds • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in a16z, Bazel, EngFlow, Enterprise, funding, Gradle, StartupsNo Comments

Back in 2015, Google launched an open-source port of its internal automation tool for building and testing code. Dubbed Bazel (because the internal tool was called Blaze), the service uses a Python dialect to help developers write their rules and macros. Today, the tooling is used by companies ranging from Adobe to Databricks, Dropbox, LinkedIn and Redfin, so when the lead developer of Bazel at Google, Ulf Adams, and the lead of enterprise customer onboarding for Bazel at Google and co-creator of BazelCon, Helen Altshuler, raise new funding for their Bazel-centric startup EngFlow, it’s probably worth paying attention to. As the team announced today, EngFlow has raised an $18 million Series A round from Tiger Global, Firstminute Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, which also led the company’s $3.7 million seed round. Cockroach Labs CEO Spencer Kimball, Github co-founder Tom Preston-Werner and Snowflake CFO Mike Scarpelli, as well as Envoy creator Matt Klein and GitHub engineering VP Rachel Potvin also participated in this round. Image Credits: Bazel EngFlow describes itself as a “build acceleration company” that helps its enterprise customers more efficiently build and test their source code, with support for Bazel, Chromium and the Android Platform. “When we are talking about Bazel use at Google, an important factor is that Google has integrated Bazel with a lot of developer services,” Adams said. “So it’s not just the build tool, but you have remote execution, you have a user interface, you have coverage runners for analyzing coverage data from the tests, you have integration with deployment, all of that stuff. We’ve been talking to Bazel users for four years and they are looking for these things. Sometimes we say that Google is a snowflake, Google is special, but we often see that other companies want to want to do similar things. And so we thought there was an opportunity there.” Altshuler also stressed that increasingly, enterprises are creating platform engineering teams that aim to bring a more opinionated approach to CI/CD to their teams. “That is usually the audience for Bazel to try it to make it work for their specific company — and then launch it to the engineers. These platform engineering teams are our primary customers, but behind every platform engineering team, there are hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of engineers that are impacted by Bazel as a result and hopefully don’t have to be Bazel experts and know all of the internals — it should just work for them,” she noted. Image Credits: Bazel The team noted that a lot of new customers are migrating from Gradle or CMake to the service, so it’s maybe no surprise that EngFlow also recently hired Jay Conrod, the developer of the open-source Gazelle tool for migrating to Bazel (and also a former Googler). It’s worth stressing that while Bazel is a main focus here, the platform also supports Chromium and Android platform builds. Brave, with its Chromium-based browser, is a customer, for example. For Brave, EngFlow’s distributed build system brought build times down from two hours to fifteen minutes. But still, Bazel is the main focus here and the team today also launched its Bazel Invocation Analyzer, a new open-source tool that allows developers to get deeper insights into their Bazel profiles and optimize their builds. “Build is one of the most critical aspects of building software. And traditionally it’s been a massive time and cost sink for companies to get right,” said Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “EngFlow is the leading company changing all of this. Coming from deep roots in Bazel and build, they’ve put together a solution which for the first time we’ve ever seen, is able to tackle the most complex code bases and large infrastructure environments and offer dramatic savings in development time and costs. These aren’t mere words, EngFlow has extraordinary customer traction across a number of verticals, far more than we normally see at this stage. We’re delighted to be investors and doubling down as EngFlow continues their path as the leading build company.” Given the popularity of taking Google open-source tools and bringing them to the enterprise (hello, Kubernetes), it’s maybe no surprise that EngFlow isn’t the only startup in this space. YC-backed BuildBuddy, for example, also offers a Bazel-centric build system. Meanwhile, well-funded Gradle Enterprise offers support for Gradle, Maven and Bazel as part of its enterprise build tool.

a16z-backed Tellus wants to help people use their savings to become real estate investors • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in a16z, Fintech, real estate, Startups, TellusNo Comments

Crypto is not having a good week, as Bitcoin crashed to under $17,000 — its lowest level in two years. The stock market continues to post declines as layoffs abound. Meanwhile, inflation recently reached a 40-year high. For those looking for a safe place to park their cash and actually earn a decent amount of interest on their savings above the national average APY of just 0.20%, the options are not exactly plentiful. Enter Tellus. The six-year-old fintech startup claims it can offer people yields of 3.85% to 4.5% on their savings balances by using the money to fund certain U.S. single-family-home loans. With mortgage interest rates having more than doubled since a year ago, one might think that this is not the best time to be a digital mortgage lender. But co-founder Rocky Lee believes his company’s unique business model sets it apart from other such lenders in the space. For one, the company has a very niche offering. It targets existing home owners who wish to upgrade to larger homes without selling the homes they live in, which makes it difficult for them to get approved for loans by traditional mortgage lenders. If it sounds complicated, well, it is. Lee breaks it down as such: “The home they [Tellus’ borrowers] buy typically is not the starter home. What they are seeking is called a super jumbo loan, which is designed for people that actually don’t have a ready to use mortgage solution. And we provide that solution for those categories of people.” So where does the savings part come in? Tellus’ interest rates are typically two basis points higher than the standard conforming mortgage. For example, in today’s market if a loan’s rate is 7%, Tellus will charge 9% — a premium because it claims it’s offering to lend money to American single-family-home borrowers “in prime cities” who would otherwise not be able to get such loans. Because it is using its retail customers’ savings deposits to fund these loans at a 3.85% to 4.5% yield, Tellus makes its money on the spread of what it’s paying out in interest versus what it’s charging its borrowers. Its retail customers are able to earn interest on a daily basis, while getting help with things such as budgeting funds and setting financial goals. Tellus says it promotes financial literacy by quizzing users on financial terms, for example, and then rewarding them with higher interest rates. At the same time, the company touts that it is enabling these consumers to invest in real estate in a way they would not have otherwise been able to while having the ability to withdraw their money at any time. While its strategy might sound risky, Lee told ZebethMedia that Tellus utilizes “very strict underwriting criteria” and has not yet seen any defaults because the majority of its borrowers go on to soon after refinance their loans at more favorable terms. Since its 2016 inception, Tellus has lent out more than $80 million with an average loan size of $2 million. It partners with mortgage brokers to find borrowers. And it finds its retail clients via channels such as Instagram, TikTok and Google. Since the company is mobile-first, it focuses on people using a smartphone. Tellus allows anyone in the U.S. to use its savings software. It only lends in California because that’s where it has a lending license and partnerships. Despite a challenging real estate market, the company says it grew its revenue by 55% in the third quarter compared to the second quarter of 2022, according to co-founder T Zhu. And earlier this year, it raised $16 million in a seed round of funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and with participation from All-Stars Investments, Alumni Ventures, Decent Capital, Vectr Ventures, West Arrow and Westwood Ventures. Co-founders of YouTube, Lime and Sereno Group Real Estate also participated in the financing, which followed a $10 million SAFE. The remote-first, Cupertino, California-based startup is emerging from stealth as it seeks to build out its engineering, marketing and product teams, adding to its headcount of 50. It also plans to build upon its recently launched new offering aimed at SMBs.

Rewind wants to revamp how you remember, with millions from a16z • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in a16z, Andreessen Horowitz, Dan Siroker, Optimizely, rewind, Robotics & AI, StartupsNo Comments

While there have been quite a few attempts to disrupt search engines, Rewind may be the first I’ve ever seen try to revamp the way we search through our online lives. One app at a time. Built by Dan Siroker, the co-founder and former chief executive of Optimizely, Rewind wants to help people with their memory. The startup, launching today, uses nifty tech to record how someone scrolls and chats through their day. It creates a searchable recording of what happened when, who said what during that Zoom meeting and every instance someone has ever brought up expense reporting hacks. “The content of discussions, debates and decisions are often lost forever as soon as a meeting is over,” Siroker said. “With Rewind, you never have to worry about losing this content again….you can go back to the exact moment in a meeting you are looking for by simply searching for a word that was said, a word that appeared on your screen.” Siroker compares the app to a hearing aid, which he says changed his life after he started to go deaf in his 20s. “To lose a sense and gain it back again felt like gaining a superpower,” Siroker said. After leaving Optimizely in October 2020, he began looking for different ways to augment human capability. According to LinkedIn, he started a foundation in 2018 to “fund and conduct scientific research in order to accelerate our path toward human mind emulation.” In product form, this goal looks like Rewind. Siroker said that the startup “uses APIs to determine the specific app that is in focus at any given time,” and then creates a timeline of that behavior. It also uses an API to allow deep linking to websites, so people can open in chrome directly from search results. Users don’t need to integrate with Gmail, Dropbox or Slack, but instead just can download and “rewind” to start capturing the apps. Put in practice, if, for example, you forget the URL of the landing page of a new rival app that someone mentioned during a developer stand-up, you can rewind – haha – through your day, find the moment in the meeting someone threw the link on the screen, copy the link and paste. As for the “why now” question, Siroker had an immediate answer: “Apple Silicon (i.e. M1 and M2 chips). Without it, we couldn’t do what we do. We leverage every part of the System on a Chip (SoC) to do everything locally on your machine.” Rewind claims that it compresses raw video recording data up to 3,750x times without a loss of quality; “that means even with the smallest hard drive you can buy from Apple today, you can store years of continuous recordings,” the company said in a statement provided to ZebethMedia ahead of today’s announcement. (Apple is not an investor). Rewind addresses one of the biggest challenges with any app – user trust – head on. The recordings are stored locally on individuals’ Mac computers. In theory, that means that the company doesn’t touch the data. Rewind says that only users have access to their data. Siroker added that users can pause and delete recordings at any time, excluding specific apps like Signal or 1Password or go Incognito mode, saying that “by default, we don’t record Chrome Incognito or Safari private browsing windows). Image Credits: Rewind There are still some risks with storing a sensitive, all-encompassing repository of everything you’ve seen, said or heard on a machine. Malware could potentially tap into sensitive data if your computer is compromised, for example. There’s also the awkward dance of a Rewind user recording someone on their screen without their permission; which is illegal in some states. Siroker said that he recommends users ask those they are recording for verbal permission, emphasizing that only the user can have access to the recordings. Still, a user with Rewind may feel less inclined to complain about their corporate parents or share personal stories knowing that there is a recording of it somewhere (delete button doesn’t retroactively work, unfortunately). “While the laws differ from state to state, we believe privacy is so important that we recommend users of our product hold themselves accountable to a much higher standard than the bare legal minimum, ” Siroker said, speaking about proactive recording consent. “Not only is this the safest approach legally, but it is also just the right thing to do.” As for how this makes people better at remembering instead of just better at not losing track of random things throughout their workday, the jury is still out. If you look through your day, that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll remember things more, it may just mean you have more stored memories at your fingertips. Which I guess is a memory aid, but definitely one that requires you to be sitting down at your computer. “The long-term vision is giving humans perfect memory, the product today is all about search,” Siroker said. “That’s where we can have the biggest impact. If you think about it, if we all already had perfect memory we wouldn’t need to search our emails, texts, dcos etc to find things we’ve seen before. We would just remember them.” So far, the company has raised $10 million at a $75 million valuation in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from First Round Capital and others. The app is currently free, Siroker says, but there will be a freemium monthly subscription down the road. And, despite his history in helping companies better market advertising campaigns, Siroker says that Rewind “will never sell your data or do advertising.”

Apex Space takes on satellite bus ‘bottleneck’ with seed round led by a16z • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in a16z, Andreessen Horowitz, apex space, katherine boyle, Space, StartupsNo Comments

Apex Space, a startup that aims to transform satellite bus manufacturing, emerged from stealth Monday with a $7.5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The Los Angeles-based company has set its sights on the satellite bus — the part of the spacecraft that hosts the payload — which it says is the “new bottleneck” hitting the space industry. Apex’s two co-founders, Ian Cinnamon and Maximilian Benassi, said in a blog post that they independently observed core changes to the industry that convinced them that a new satellite bus manufacturing solution was needed. Cinnamon, a technology startup founder whose company, Synapse Technology, was acquired by Palantir in 2020, said he saw payload customers being “held back” by the long and costly process associated with building custom satellite buses. Benassi, an engineer whose career includes a six-year tenure at SpaceX and nearly a year-and-a-half at Astra, observed changes to launch economics that make mass manufacturing — rather than the bespoke engineering process that’s characterized satellite buses thus far — more sensible. “Given this transformative change, we must begin to think about spacecraft differently and adapt to the new market conditions,” the pair said. “We cannot just build spacecraft. We must manufacture them at scale.” This approach, which Cinnamon described in an interview with ZebethMedia as scalable and product-led, is a major departure from traditional satellite bus manufacturing. Apex aims to deliver satellite busses to customers in a matter of months, rather than the status quo timescale of a few years. Apex will come to the market with a small satellite bus called Aries, which will be capable of carrying payloads up to 94 kilograms. That platform will be suitable for missions to low Earth orbit; the startup says on its website that future products will be compatible with other missions, such as those to geosynchronous orbit. Apex also offers add-ons like insurance and flight booking. Cinnamon said the company plans on delivering the first Aries platform in 2023, followed by 5 in 2024, and continue to scale from there. While the two co-founders praised the likes of Astra and Rocket Lab for transforming the launch sector, these companies are also competitors, each designing satellite buses as part of a full-stop-shop solution for customers. Other major players in the satellite bus manufacturing space are Terran Orbital, which announced plans last year to build a 660,000-square-foot satellite manufacturing facility in Florida, and York Space Systems, which landed a $1.12 billion valuation after selling a majority stake to Firefly Aerospace’s owner AE Industrial Partners. But Cinnamon said Apex is differentiating itself from these players in a few different ways: the first is that the startup’s “bread and butter” will be commercial customers, rather than government customers. He added that the company is aiming to manufacture on a scale of a matter of months to keep up with demand from the commercial sector. The call for large-scale manufacturing clearly found resonance at Andreessen Horowitz, which launched a new fund at the beginning of this year called “American Dynamism,” led by general partner Katherine Boyle. The fund aims to invest in companies that bolster the nation’s interest and solve problems in industries like supply chain, aerospace and manufacturing (amongst others). As Boyle argued in her sweeping investment thesis, “the only immediate way to kickstart American renewal is through startups building for critical problems.” To the Apex co-founders, solving the satellite bus manufacturing problem isn’t just critical to the space industry today. It’s also key to making humans a multiplanetary species in the future. “If we really think about that future, do we think that all of the other spacecraft that are out there, that are moving around goods and services, that are doing imaging of Mars and the Moon, that are providing communication services, etcetera, are all of those spacecraft truly going to be built by hand as custom one-offs like they are today? Or are they actually going to be manufactured at scale? And I believe that in order to enable that future, they have to be manufactured at scale, and we want to be the first company out there to truly scale up manufacturing of these vehicles.” In addition to a6z, the round also saw participation from XYZ Venture Capital, J2 Ventures, Lux Capital and Village Global. The number one priority for the new funding is hiring, Cinnamon said, and the company is looking for people from new space, traditional aerospace, and outside the space sector entirely. The company will also use the raise to continue developing the Aries platform, including ordering components and beginning to assemble the manufacturing line.