Enterprise

Anthill connects frontline workers to company resources through text messaging • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Anthill, Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Disrupt, Enterprise, StartupsNo Comments

If the pandemic has made us completely rethink the way we work, that we — the swath of workers at home in pajamas popping into meetings on Zoom — leaves out a massive chunk of the workforce that continues to show up for work in-person, every time. As knowledge workers explore the intricacies of the virtual office, frontline workers from a cross-section of critical industries still lack the basic tools they need to do simple tasks like switching shifts, asking HR a question or seeing when their next paycheck arrives. “This workforce can’t be overlooked, there is a business imperative right now…[and] there is a really exciting opportunity to create more paths to the middle class,” Anthill co-founder and CEO Muriel Clauson told ZebethMedia. Clauson and Anthill co-founder and CTO Young-Jae Kim met in a PhD program for industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Georgia. Through their shared academic research interests, they identified what Clauson described as a “massive gap” in the communication between frontline, deskless workers and their employers — a gap that workers frequently fall into, to everyone’s detriment: [There are] 2.7 billion people globally, who never sit at computers to do their jobs. So they never worked from home over the pandemic and they never will because they can’t actually do their job that way. So most often folks think of manufacturing, distribution — basically anybody who’s out there working with their hands on the field on the floor. These folks do not use software, and especially work software, they just in general do not and the reason being is they’re not sitting at computers, they’re not going to use something on a desktop. They’re probably not using email [and] they probably don’t even have an email address. And they’re also increasingly not downloading or using apps on their phone — or they don’t even have a phone that you can use an app on. For employers who manage an in-person workforce, attrition is a huge issue. Many workers aren’t necessarily fluent in the language of their workplace and face other barriers to connecting at work, creating turnover issues when they’re not able to communicate effectively. Anthill, which pitched on the Startup Battlefield stage at Disrupt, offers a non-app way for employers to communicate with workers — and vice versa — through text messages, the one sure-fire platform that reaches everybody and doesn’t let anyone fall through the cracks. “We knew as researchers if we wanted these folks to talk to us and stay in our studies we had to text them,” Clauson said. “And so we are super bullish on technology that meets people where they are, works within the fiber of how they already work and live their lives, and doesn’t force them to learn a new suite of technologies.” The idea is to give workers a way to access any information they could need — pay schedules, contact with a manager, taking a sick day — all through text message. And a way on the employer side to automate as much of that as makes sense, all while offering a full portal of resources without forcing people to download apps or jump through hoops that not everyone can manage. In the interest of making access to those resources more equitable, Anthill automatically translates its services into more than 100 languages — a feature that could also help employers retain workers who might be alienated by the lingua franca of the workplace. “A lot of us have family members who have not been able to participate in benefit adoption or knowing how to have any kind of outside of work community through their employer around all those critical things like tax season and schedules and just the basics — because language was a barrier,” Clauson said. “There’s a lot of folks who can work in English, but that doesn’t mean it’s their preferred language and it doesn’t mean that’s going to be the language that they can most successfully navigate their ability to work.” Anthill plans to focus on a handful of core industries out of the gate, including manufacturing, distribution (think Amazon warehouses) and agriculture. Kim and Clauson also see opportunities for connecting deskless workers with employers in retail and healthcare, but observe that those areas have a bit more tech already than some other sectors. “We really focused on individual-level needs [and] what they actually need is communication,” Kim told ZebethMedia. “Those workers, they actually need very simple things, but they need the answer right away,” Kim told ZebethMedia. While some employers have gone the route of using chatbots and apps, Anthill lets managers save recent answers to commonly asked questions and personalize the resources in a way that more tech-focused solutions might overlook. It’s probably difficult for knowledge workers or big tech companies to imagine, but Clauson says that the two modes of communication that Anthill replaces most frequently are AM radio followed by an old-fashioned corkboard. “We do try to stay focused within industry verticals. So we’re very focused right now on manufacturing workers inside of plants or distribution workers in distribution centers or truck drivers,” Clauson said. “That’s where we saw the biggest pain points and that’s where we’re focused first.” Anthill first opened in alpha in late 2020, with paid pilots and a beta version of the product the following year. The company launched a full version of the platform in 2022 and currently operates in over 300 job sites in the U.S., with global contracts in the pipeline slated for 2023. According to the company, large employers trying out Anthill often do a test run with a single distribution center or a cluster of regional sites and scale up from there. They can buy Anthill on a per-user, per-month basis, making it relatively straightforward to scale the platform up and out if it’s a good fit. The services are opt-in, not required, but Kim and Clauson have observed swift adoption that travels by word of

The Cloud Foundry Foundation gets a new chair • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Cloud Foundry Foundation, EnterpriseNo Comments

The Cloud Foundry Foundation, the home of the Cloud Foundry open source development platform for cloud-native applications, today announced that Catherine McGarvey, a vice president of software engineering at VMware, is the new chair of its governing board. She succeeds Kubernetes co-founder and VMware VP of R&D Craig McLuckie, who took the role in late 2021. McLuckie recently left VMware, though (while former Cloud Foundry Foundation CTO Chip Childers recently joined it). Because it’s the Foundation’s members who make up the governing board, that also meant that the Foundation had to find a new chair. It’s worth noting that the governing board’s focus is on managing the Foundation’s business and IP. Technical decision making is handled by the Technical Oversight Committee and various working groups. McGarvey is no stranger to the Cloud Foundry ecosystem. At VMware, her work already involved working with a number of open source communities — including Cloud Foundry — and supporting projects like Spring, knative, carve, Kubernetes and RabbitMQ. “Catherine has been working with Cloud Foundry for more than 10 years in various capacities,” said Chris Clark, program manager, Cloud Foundry Foundation. “She brings a wealth of experience in both technical and managerial aspects of Cloud Foundry and other associated projects/products. Her experience with Kubernetes comes at a crucial time for projects like Korifi, which are critical to the success of the community as a whole. The Cloud Foundry Foundation is pleased to welcome Catherine, with her passion and product expertise, to lead the Governing Board.” The Foundation also today announced that it is now publishing open roadmaps for its working groups. The idea here is to improve the overall transparency of the project but also to make it easier for vendors and to participate in the development process. “The transparency added by open roadmaps for open source projects helps engineering teams plan their feature development and focus engineering efforts,” said Ram Iyengar, chief evangelist at Cloud Foundry. “For consumers of the project, it will facilitate better collaboration and allow them to contribute more freely to the project. Overall, the productivity and efficiency of the community goes up while allowing engineering teams to streamline their work.”

Starboard Value reportedly taking ‘significant’ stake in Salesforce • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in activist investors, CRM, Enterprise, Salesforce, Starboard ValueNo Comments

Activist investor Starboard Value announced this morning that it was taking a “significant stake” in Salesforce, per CNBC. A presentation on Starboard’s website confirmed the firm’s interest in Salesforce, as well as Wix and Splunk. The presentation looks at the company’s financial situation and concludes that it could be giving investors a better return. On the positive side, Starboard likes the company’s refreshed executive team with Bret Taylor as co-CEO. It also likes Salesforce’s ambitious $50 billion revenue target for fiscal year 2026, but Starboard was less pleased with Salesforce’s combined growth and operating margin target of 42%. It claimed that Salesforce’s peers’ average is over 50%, and the implication is that it wants to see Salesforce closer to — or ahead of — its peer group. Further, Starboard sees a company that has much greater scale than peer cloud companies like Workday and ServiceNow, its comparison companies. Starboard claims in the investor presentation that “despite expecting to grow slower than [these] peers, [it] is only targeting operating margins in-line to below its much smaller peers.” “On a growth + margin basis, Salesforce significantly lags these companies and the peer set,” the company wrote in its presentation. It believes that if Salesforce “generates incremental margins that are in-line with peer levels as it grows towards $50 billion in FY2026 revenue, margins would significantly exceed the Investor Day target.” And that would increase free cash flow per share over the next several years as it approaches that $50 billion revenue mark. Salesforce issued a rather staid reaction to the news of Starboard’s move: “We are committed to acting in the best interests of our shareholders and are focused on continuing to execute on our strategy outlined at Dreamforce,” a company spokesperson told me. Salesforce stock is up over 6% in trading this morning on the news. This is a breaking story. We will update the story with additional information as it becomes available.

How to combine PLG and enterprise sales to improve your funnel • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Column, EC Column, EC Enterprise Applications, EC How To, Enterprise, enterprise sales, product-led growth, StartupsNo Comments

Kate Ahlering Contributor Kate Ahlering is the chief revenue officer at Calendly, where she leads sales, sales enablement, revenue operations and partnerships functions. Between the changing tides of the economy and digital buying preferences, SaaS companies are under tremendous pressure. Many of these companies understand that 80% of their interactions with buyers occur on digital channels. At the same time, they need to drive profitability to meet investor expectations. The question is: How do they appease customers who want self-service while accelerating profitable growth? While product-led growth (PLG) is a successful strategy, many companies will complement these efforts with sales-led growth (SLG), or an enterprise sales motion, to move upmarket or into a specific customer segment. With the right go-to-market (GTM) architecture in place and effective use of data, companies can make the most of both strategies to accelerate revenue growth. When does it make sense to complement PLG with SLG? Typically, companies follow three patterns when it comes to their GTM approach: It’s important to make sure your pricing and packaging is differentiated between your individual, team and enterprise plans. Product-led: Focusing on the user and their experience with the product as the primary path to revenue. Sales-led: Leveraging traditional marketing and sales methods to reach the buyer or economic decision-maker. This approach may be supported by selected PLG techniques to drive user advocacy. Hybrid: Combining the best of both worlds, with PLG techniques generating awareness and making inroads into prospect accounts, and sales activities driving most of the revenue. With PLG, the product needs to make an impact on the user — and do it quickly. After all, the product is the primary vehicle for user acquisition, retention and expansion. While PLG works best for products with some level of virality, in many cases, you do not have to choose between SLG and PLG. As an example, Calendly’s sales team often talks to customers about how we can help scale the platform to create an even deeper impact within their organizations. We follow a hybrid GTM approach, where PLG provides a critical access point into prospect accounts, and sales drives enterprise expansion and revenue. While PLG feeds the funnel, sales targets end users with influential titles inside the core use case we serve (e.g. VP of sales), where we can drive the most value and business outcomes.

Enable lands $94M to help B2B companies manage their rebate programs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Commerce, Enable, Enterprise, Insight Partners, startupNo Comments

Enable, a startup selling access to a platform that helps business-to-business (B2B) companies manage their rebate programs, today announced that it raised $94 million in an oversubscribed Series C round led by Insight Partners with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, SE Ventures, PSP Growth and HarbourVest Partners. Bringing Enable’s total capital raised to $156 million, the proceeds will be put toward increasing headcount and expanding to new markets, particularly Europe, CEO Andrew Butt told ZebethMedia in an interview. Rebates are a familiar concept in the consumer space, but they tend to work a little differently in B2B. B2B companies offer rebates when their customers achieve some benchmark, such as total spend, purchasing a collection of products or a marketing referral. The challenge becomes keeping track of these benchmarks and progress toward them, ensuring customers receive the rebates to which they’re entitled and — in the process — fostering relationships. Enable, which Butt co-founded in 2016 with Denys Shortt, aims to remove some of the burden of rebates and ideally turn them into profit drivers. The platform surfaces deal term and sales incentive data for manufacturers, distributors and retailers, providing insights into what’s owed versus collected, the status of rebate deals and what’s on deck. Butt says he was inspired to launch the company by his experiences in the B2B space, including at Enable Informatix, a property management software-as-a-service vendor he co-founded and sold to Sovereign Capital in 2010. “For many organizations, rebate and incentive data is typically tucked away in massive spreadsheets where one formula error will break everything,” Butt said. “Often, this data is the responsibility of a single employee, meaning few people understand the data and how these deals work.” Image Credits: Enable In contrast, Enable provides collaborative dashboards to author, execute and track the progress of rebate deals. The platform, which allows customers to create joint business plans, also forecasts rebate activity, attempting to guarantee companies that they’ll be able to pay and collect on all rebates owed. Enable recently launched a special pricing agreements product that connects to a company’s supply chain to improve transparency on claimbacks, the agreements between distributors and manufacturers based on sales to a contractor. Elsewhere, Enable introduced new services to manage a wider range of incentives, including a module that allows sales and pricing teams to align around large deals and a commissions system that delivers rebate status tracking to manufacturers. “Enable helps companies incentivize the purchasing behavior of partners while also ensuring they collect all incentives owed to them,” Butt said. “Our biggest competition is Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or overextended enterprise resource management platforms.” Butt claims that around 10,000 companies are using Enable’s platform today and that growth has been “accelerating” year-over-year after expanding to the U.S. and Canada (although he didn’t define “growth”). Enable employs 400 people, and the company expects to end the year with 435 throughout the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia. “We’ve been extremely successful with our growth in this market, and [the Series C] round adds fuel to that growth. At the same time, it helps us extend our vision,” Butt said. “Rebates are incentives. They are a key way to drive behavior between partners. It’s our vision to empower thriving partner ecosystems, so as we continue our growth you’ll see us adding products that enhance partners alignment on goals and incentives while increasing transparency and easing friction, allowing every partner to flourish.”

With a $13B valuation, Celonis defies current startup economics • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 16, 2022Posted in Automation, Celonis, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, Enterprise, process mapping, workflowNo Comments

When Celonis, an 11-year-old German process mining company, announced a $1 billion raise in August on a $13.2 billion post-money valuation, it was a bit of a shock. After all, VC firms were pulling back from the huge raises and gaudy valuations of yesteryear. But Celonis — which has raised $2.4 billion, per Crunchbase, with $2 billion coming in the last year alone — has been able to defy the current thinking in startup circles by taking on huge chunks of capital. Consider that its valuation has grown an eye-popping 420% since 2019, when it raised $290 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. That was followed last year with $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation, culminating in August’s $13 billion valuation. Part of the reason it’s such a valuable company is that along the way, it’s forged partnerships with corporate giants like IBM and ServiceNow to sell its software, helping push Celonis into markets where even well-funded startups might be limited by the resource requirements. It’s also been able to fill in the platform with several strategic acquisitions (more on that later). Why are customers, investors, and partners so interested in Celonis? Because Celonis, using software, can dig into the way processes move through a company, looking at complex areas like procurement, bill paying, and inventory and searching for inefficiencies and duplications that can ultimately add up to huge savings. This is the kind of work that high-priced consultants have tended to do, camping inside companies for months or years and figuring out how work flows through the organization while collecting fat checks to do it. Having software that can replace those human efficiency experts, and in fairly short order, is a tremendous advantage.

SurveyMonkey parent Momentive Global lays off 11% of workforce • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 14, 2022Posted in Enterprise, layoff, SurveyMonkeyNo Comments

Momentive Global, the parent of the web-survey portal SurveyMonkey, laid off 11% of its workforce this week. Multiple people across divisions — including those handling the business development, customer support, recruitment and sales at the San Mateo, California-headquartered company — have been impacted, ZebethMedia has learned and confirmed. “In an 8-K filed on October 13, we announced plans to reduce our headcount by 11%. We are undertaking this difficult change as part of a strategic shift as we streamline our focus and align our resources to our top priorities,” Hillary Wilson, senior communications manager at Momentive, said in a statement emailed to ZebethMedia. The company has also created an online spreadsheet that lists affected employees who have agreed to share their contact information for getting new jobs. In the 8-K filing, Momentive described its layoff as part of a restructuring plan to “improve operating margin and create efficiencies”. The company said that it would incur between $4 million and $5 million in charges, which includes employee severance, employee benefits and related facilitation costs. “We expect that the majority of these costs will be incurred and paid during the fourth quarter of 2022 and that execution of the restructuring plan, including cash payments, will be substantially complete by the end of fiscal 2022,” the company said in its filing. It also noted that the process, which is impacting its global workforce, might extend into the first quarter or 2023 or beyond in certain countries. The company said in the filing that it expects to have made between $119.5 million and $122.5 million in sales for the quarter that ended September 30, with a non-GAAP operating margin between 5-7%, both within previous guidance. In February, software company Zendesk terminated its proposed $4.1 billion transaction to acquire Momentive after Zendesk’s stockholders rejected the acquisition. The all-stock deal was announced in October last year. Shortly after its deal with Zendesk broke off, Momentive announced a $200 million share repurchase program to regain the confidence of its shareholders. At the time, it did not explicitly confirm whether it would continue to seek a buyer or plan to go solo. “The setbacks we’ve faced are transient. We compete in a massive market and we maintain a valuable portfolio of products that address specific challenges our customers face, in small and large companies alike. Our sales-assisted business is strong, and our team is committed and inspired to drive value for our customers and shareholders,” Zander Lurie, chief executive officer of Momentive, said at the time. Since then, the company’s share price has dropped more than 63%, from $15.72 to $5.66 on Friday. Momentive is not the only tech company to shed employees in this layoff season. Companies including Netflix, Noom, Spotify and Tencent have taken similar moves in recent weeks and months due to ongoing economic challenges and projected business instability. Similarly, Indian startups including Byju’s and Ola have laid off hundreds of employees. Tech giants including Meta have also paused hiring to reduce their operational costs, while others appear to be turning to contractors to offset that pause.

SecuriThings is bringing order to IoT device management with $21M investment • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in edge devices, Enterprise, IoT, physical security, SecuriThings, usvpNo Comments

As companies deploy more security devices like cameras, access control systems, intercoms and many other tools throughout their organizations, they are often disconnected from traditional IT, and may lack any way of managing the equipment in a systematic way. SecuriThings has built a solution to solve this problem with a platform that helps building operations understand and control what’s happening on physical security devices across a company. Today the company announced a $21 million Series B. Roy Dagan, company CEO and co-founder, says that while companies are spending inordinate amounts of money on this equipment, they often don’t know if they are even working because they lack visibility. “We built the ultimate system to help them automate the management of these devices at scale, and really provide the equivalent of an IT type of system for managing these kinds of devices,” Dagan told ZebethMedia. The system automates a bunch of management tasks that are typically done manually including firmware upgrades, managing certificates and rotating passwords. What’s more, it can help find and troubleshoot issues with these devices as they happen. “It can also perform things like root cause analysis. So we can tell when an issue occurs, and we can tell you what’s at fault,” he said. “You may think it’s a [camera], but it’s actually a switch and it’s affecting 15 [cameras], which are all down. And that’s a problem because while building operations manages the broken cameras, the broken switch is under the purview of IT, and they need to know about it to fix it. SecuriThings includes ways to communicate with IT about these issues. “You can collaborate with your counterparts in IT. So it can be integrated with ServiceNow or other ticketing systems…and that helps you also start working better with the rest of the enterprise,” Dagan said. He believes that in spite of the economic uncertainty we are seeing, his company is well positioned to deal with it. “One of the cool business outcomes is really around cost reduction. Because if you look at the enterprise, and you look at the amount of spend they have today on these devices, and the way things are done manually and reactively, it’s almost a no brainer. The cost savings are huge,” he said. While he wouldn’t discuss revenue growth, he said the company currently has dozens of customers using the platform and the number of customers has grown over 300% year over year. The startup currently has 70 employees with plans to add more with the new investment. He says that being diverse is built into the company’s values. “So it’s just part of our culture, and it’s core to the company. It really is, and just looking at stats that we have today where 40% of leadership is female, and 40% of the company is female…But then also our HR team is constantly evaluating the numbers and looking at different opportunities and how we create that diversity even more,” he said. Today’s investment was led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and participation from Swisscom Ventures existing investors Aleph, Firstime VC and Cresson Management. The startup reports it has now raised a total of $39 million.

Katana, an ERP for SMB manufacturers, raises $34M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in Commerce, Enterprise, ERP, Katana, manufacturing, StartupsNo Comments

Katana, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform for small- and medium-sized manufacturers, has raised €35 million ($34 million) in a Series B round of funding. ERP is a form of business management software that can serve any number of functions inside a company, from marketing and risk management, to supply chain management and beyond. Integrations are pivotal to any ERP software, as it typically involves taking data from different systems such as HR, CRM, accounting, and order management to generate insights and analysis — at its core, ERP is all about identifying potential problems and improving efficiency. Founded out of Tallinn, Estonia, in 2017, Katana is an ERP for the manufacturing sector, with prebuilt integrations for many of the most common tools that a manufacturer might use, including e-commerce platforms (e.g., Shopify and WooCommerce), accounting (e.g., QuickBooks and Xero), shipping, forecasting, CRM, and more. Collectively, these various integrations can help a manufacturer predict what their future inventory needs will be based on historical or real-time sales data, for example, to ensure that they don’t run out of stock or parts. Katana: Inventory overview Image Credits: Katana End of ‘made in China’ era A big driving force behind demand for such software is direct-to-consumer (D2C) manufacturing, which has seen smaller, local manufacturers — or “micro-manufacturers” — remove many of the intermediaries that were traditionally necessary to get their products made. “The rise in D2C manufacturing has driven a small manufacturing renaissance, giving consumers a wealth of options that reduce the hold of brands relying on mass production,” Katana co-founder and CEO Kristjan Vilosius explained o ZebethMedia. “As manufacturing moves closer to the ever-increasingly conscious consumer, brands that rely on local production and inventory are gaining market share. In short, the ‘made in China’ era is ending.” This has been aided by modern technologies such as 3D printing and computer-aided laser cutters, allowing companies to produce goods on a smaller scale away from centralized, mass-production factories. In tandem, the emergence of online marketplaces, e-commerce software, and the broader cloud computing movement has made it easier to assume greater control of the entire business process, from manufacturing through to sales. “Manufacturers already have a tech stack of tools like e-commerce platforms, shipping tools, and accounting software,” Vilosius continued. “What’s missing is a central source-of-truth that streamlines the flow of information and minimizes manual data entry and, as a result, human error.” Legacy ERP software from the likes of Netsuite and SAP are typically geared toward larger businesses, which is why we’ve seen a slew of younger upstarts enter the fray to much VC fanfare in recent years, with Katana and its ilk trying to usher in a more modern toolset purpose-built for SMBs — and in Katana’s case specifically, SMB manufacturers. “Supporting this new wave of manufacturers is critical — enterprise business suites like NetSuite and SAP come with hefty costs and a plethora of features and functionalities that exceed the needs of small- to medium-sized businesses,” Vilosius said. “The ERP space is also known for poor user experience and user interface, and low customer satisfaction. Many small businesses opt for spreadsheets despite being error-prone and difficult to scale as their businesses grow.” Katana had previously raised around $16 million, the bulk of which arrived via its Series A round last year, and in the intervening months the company claims to have quadrupled its annual recurring revenue (ARR), grown its headcount from 30 to 140, and scaled its customer base from “hundreds of micro-businesses to thousands of customers in the SMB segment,” according to Vilosius. On top of that, the company launched an open API for customers to build their own integrations. With another $34 million in the bank, the company said that it’s well-financed to “bring manufacturing software into the digital era,” which will include rolling out “more advanced accounting integrations.”

With $24.2M in funding, Diagrid launches its fully managed Dapr service for Kubernetes • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in developers, Diagrid, Enterprise, Kubernetes, microservices, NorwestNo Comments

Back in 2019, Microsoft launched Dapr, an open source project that aimed to make it easier for developers to build microservices on top of Kubernetes. Dapr, which stands for “distributed application runtime,” handles a lot of the primitives for building distributed applications (think pub/sub, state management, secrets management, event triggers, etc.), allowing developers to focus on the business logic of their distributed applications. Today, Dapr is a CNCF incubating project and among the CNCF’s fastest growing ones, with more than 2,000 contributors and 19,400 GitHub stars. And as with so many popular open source projects, a small startup ecosystem is now forming around it. Diagrid, which is coming out of stealth today and announcing a total of $24.2 million in funding, has a bit of a head start: It was co-founded by the creators of the Dapr and Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaling (KEDA) projects, Mark Fussell and Yaron Schneider. The two quietly raised a $4.2 million seed round led by Amplify and now a $20 million Series A round led by Norwest. Its angel investors are a who’s who of the cloud native ecosystem, including the likes of Kubernetes and Heptio co-founder Joe Beda, Envoy creator Matt Klein and Buoyant CEO William Morgan, as well as Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich (who the co-founders worked under during their time at Microsoft), former Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath and former Heroku CEO Adam Gross. Image Credits: Diagrid “We saw this tremendous growth in microservices applications everywhere, where for developers, that’s now the de facto way for building these. And you see this massive change in the last two years in terms of the growth of Kubernetes and the growth of containers around that,” Fussell said. “We developed Dapr because we wanted to help all those developers become productive about building the applications. And so we decided to leave Microsoft because we wanted to forge a path — particularly of building services around the Dapr open source project.” Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly what the team did. The company, which will likely grow from 10 to around 30 people in the near future, is officially launching its first product today: Diagrid Conductor, a fully managed Dapr platform for Kubernetes. Conductor, Fussell explained, will help operations teams operate and manage Dapr in production. “Kubernetes is a wonderful platform for hosting and running distributed systems platforms, but Kubernetes itself — and any technology that gets deployed onto it — has its challenges,” Fussell said. “So Diagrid Conductor helps teams operate Dapr in production — and what it does, effectively, is it improves the reliability and operational ability of Dapr on Kubernetes.” Image Credits: Diagrid Schneider also noted that Conductor provides operational insights into application health. Typically, companies that run Dapr today have to monitor and patch it themselves, while Conductor handles all of this for them. Diagrid is charging its users per Kubernetes cluster. For now, that’s still a somewhat manual onboarding process, but the company plans to launch a self-service tool next year. “Cloud-based, microservices architectures have imposed real costs on engineering teams where developers have to become infrastructure wranglers and distributed systems theorists just to deploy a simple app,” said Lenny Pruss, general partner at Amplify Partners and Diagrid board member. “Dapr open source and the commercial solutions built by Diagrid strike at the heart of this problem, providing a set of developer-friendly tools and APIs that abstract away much of the distributed system complexity, thereby allowing engineering teams to focus on what matters: their business applications.”