Enterprise

Microsoft Teams now lets you challenge colleagues to a game of Minesweeper or Solitaire • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in Apps, Enterprise, Gaming, Microsoft, Microsoft TeamsNo Comments

With remote or hybrid work going nowhere any time soon, Microsoft today announced new social gaming functionality inside its Teams productivity and collaboration platform. Available to Teams Enterprise and Education subscribers only, the new “Games for Work” app allows colleagues to challenge each other to a game of Minesweeper, Wordament, Icebreaker, and even Solitaire, a classic card game familiar to anyone who has used Windows from 1990 onwards. Microsoft said that each game — including Solitaire — has a multiplayer option for up to 250 players, with support for those only wishing to spectate. And given that the games are only available for paying Teams subscribers, no ads are included. The new app was developed by an Xbox Games Studio called Microsoft Casual Games. Microsoft Solitaire While baking games into what is ostensibly a business product for most people might seem counterintuitive, the logic is sound enough: workmates have long engaged in games socially at work, whether it’s table tennis or a game of cards during lunch. For remote workers, that desire to connect and interact competitively is surely still there. “Games promote creativity, collaboration and communication in powerful and unique ways, and we can’t wait to see the how the Games for Work app on Microsoft Teams inspires productivity and helps foster connections in the workplace,” noted Jill Braff, general manager of integrations and casual games at Microsoft, in a blog post. The Games for Work app integrates with Teams on desktop and mobile, with Microsoft adding that it plans to add new games in the future.

Akeyless secures a cash infusion to help companies manage their passwords, certificates and keys • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in Enterprise, funding, secrets, Security, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Back in 2018, Refael Angel, a former security software engineer at Intuit, had an idea for a new approach to protect encryption keys — the random string of bits created to scramble and unscramble data — on the cloud. He met with Shai Onn and then Oded Hareven, with whom Angel had worked five years earlier, to look for signs of product-market fit. After finding it, the three co-founders together built a service for managing passwords, API keys and digital certificates, which evolved into a fully fledged business — Akeyless — over the course of the next several years. Today, Akeyless is thriving, Angel tells me — despite fierce competition from incumbents like Hashicorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager and Google Cloud’s Secret Manager. Akeyless has customers across the retail, fintech, insurance and gaming sectors, among others, including Wix and Outbrain. And the company’s revenue has increased 350% over the past year. “The pandemic and resulting workforce trends, such as work-from-home initiatives, have only increased the need for employees to access corporate IT resources remotely and have accelerated the adoption of cloud technologies and increased the number of secrets needed,” Shai told ZebethMedia in an email interview. In software development, “secrets” refer to credentials like passwords and access tokens. “Similarly, the economic downturn and tech slowdown stand to only further encourage organizations to seek software-as-a-service-based solutions that offer faster deployment, low to zero maintenance, global auto-scalability, lower total cost of ownership and higher adoption rates.“ To lay the groundwork for future growth, Akeyless today closed a $65 million Series B round — $45.5 million in equity and $19.5 million in debt — led by NGP Capital with participation from Team8 Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners. Bringing Akeyless’s total funding to date to $80 million, the new capital gives the company at least two and a half years of runway and will be put toward various sales, marketing, customer service and product development initiatives, Hareven said via email. “This will allow us to navigate the current economic climate and continue to provide our much-needed solution to the market,” he added. Akeyless’s co-founders attribute the startup’s success in part to the comprehensiveness of its product offerings. Akeyless both encrypts and signs the certificates, credentials and keys that organizations use to provide access to their systems, apps and data. The platform performs cryptographic operations using fragments of an encryption key that reside across different regions and cloud providers. The fragments are never combined — not even during the encryption and decryption process, Hareven claims — and one of the fragments is created on the customer side to ensure Akeyless has zero knowledge of the keys. An abstracted view of the Akeyless secrets management dashboard. Image Credits: Akeyless The core problem Akeyless attempts to tackle is what Hareven refers to as “secret sprawl.” As a company’s IT environment expands, so does the amount of passwords, API keys and certificates that the company uses to enable authentication between processes, services and databases, he notes. Those passwords and keys are found in code, configuration files and automation tools, introducing risk that could result in data breaches. According to a 2021 survey from code security platform GitGuardian, three code commits out of 1,000 expose at least one secret. GitGuardian estimates that app security engineers on average have to handle over 3,400 secrets occurrences. And in a separate report from Forrester published in the same year, developers revealed that 57% of their employers experienced a security incident related to exposed secrets within the past two years. Akeyless’s solution is centralizing secrets through plug-ins for existing IT, dev, and security tools and capabilities like disaster recovery, Hareven continued. Secrets stored by the platform are made accessible in all of a company’s environments. “While modern secret management solutions address the security challenges of [development] environments, many organizations are still forced to rely on siloed and disconnected tools for securing secrets in legacy environments,” Hareven said. “Our customers are expressing a need for the convergence of legacy tools to reduce risks and improve compliance across all environments and use cases.” Akeyless certainly occupies a large and profitable sector — Grand View Research predicts that the market for password management software will be worth up to $2.05 billion by 2025. But it’ll have to fend off rivals like Doppler, which recently raised $20 million for its platform to help companies manage their app secrets. Another challenge will be convincing holdouts to embrace secrets management as a discipline; according to one report, only 10% of organizations were using secrets management solutions as of 2019. If Akeyless’s co-founders have concerns, they didn’t show it. To the contrary, Hareven pointed to the team’s track record in cybersecurity — Onn’s previous security venture, Fireglass, was acquired by Symantec for $250 million — and noted that Akeyless is expanding, with plans to double its 80-person workforce by the end of next year. Hareven didn’t mention during our conversation, but Akeyless is also likely to benefit from the continued broader VC interest in cybersecurity. Venture capital investments in security startups eclipsed $13 billion this year, according to PitchBook data, up from $11.47 billion in 2020. “The fact that we are a software-as-a-service provider and free of the ‘on-premise technical debt’ of versioning and support makes our economics much more efficient, allowing us to respond faster to market needs and rapidly innovate,” Hareven said.

Supernova wants to make it easy to move design elements to code bases • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in design, developer tools, Enterprise, Supernova, wing venture capitalNo Comments

As companies increasingly turn to tools like Figma to design their software, moving the design elements like color schemes from the design tool to your code base can be a time-consuming and manual process. Supernova is an early-stage startup that wants to make it easier by acting as a bridge between your design team and your development team, making it easy to change design pieces in an automated way. Today the Y Combinator graduates announced a $4.8 million seed round. “The idea for Supernova comes from the discrepancy between designers and developers. There is, I think, sort of a communication block between them. Also, the design and developer worlds are quite disconnected from each other, and so any kind of thing that you can do to help designers and developers work better together actually goes a long way, and that’s especially true in larger organizations,” company CEO and co-founder Jiri Trecak told ZebethMedia. The software acts as a bridge of sorts, connecting your different tools and design repositories with your coding tools to facilitate the connection between all of these tools at scale. What’s more, if you have a particularly complex workflow, you can build custom apps or scripts on top of Supernova to extend the tooling even further, Trecak explained. He says an easy way to understand how this works is to imagine you have a brand like Spotify and you need to change the color of your logo from the familiar green to a new color. An undertaking like this would take months to do manually, but with Supernova, you just change your color scheme in your design tooling and run the scripts, and it will cascade across the entire code base, changing the colors automatically. He said it can work across multiple design tools and Supernova will still move the changes regardless. He started the company in the Czech Republic in 2018 and became the first startup from that country to be accepted into Y Combinator in the winter of 2019. Today, Trecak runs the company out of San Francisco, and the company launched the current iteration of the product last year. The engineering team remains in the Czech Republic. They have built up a user base of over 1,000 customers, several dozen of whom are large enterprise users. The company currently has about 30 people, with plans to increase that number with the new funding. As he grows the company, Trecak says that he is very much focused on building a diverse employee base and currently has employees who represent eight or nine different nationalities. “This is something that is very much our focus. We have been trying to be quite diligent about this and we will try to be even more so as we go to the U.S. market,” he said. Today’s funding was led by Wing Venture Capital with participation from EQT Ventures and Kaya VC, along with several prominent industry angels.

LF Europe’s Project Sylva wants to create an open source telco cloud stack • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in cloud, Enterprise, Europe, linux foundation, open source, telco, telecommunicationsNo Comments

The Linux Foundation Europe (LF Europe) — the recently launched European offshoot of the open source Linux Foundation — today announced the launch of Project Sylva, which aims to create an open source telco cloud framework for European telcos and vendors. This is the first project hosted by LF Europe and is a good example of what the organization is trying to achieve. The project aims to create a production-grade open source telco cloud stack and a common framework and reference implementation to “reduce fragmentation of the cloud infrastructure layer for telecommunication and edge services.” Currently, five carriers (Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Orange, Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom) and two vendors (Ericsson and Nokia) are working on the project. “There’s a whole bunch of Linux Foundation networking projects already that have taken telecommunications into the open source era,” Arpit Joshipura, the general manager for Networking, Edge and IoT at the Linux Foundation, told me. “All those projects are under what is called the [LF] Networking foundation. […] So whatever that work is that is done by the telcos, Sylva is going to leverage and build on top of it with these European vendors to solve EU specific requirements. Those are security, energy, federated computing, edge and data trust.” At the core of Sylva is a framework for a compute platform that can be agnostic to whether a workload is running on the telco access network, edge or in the core. The project aims to build a reference implementation, leveraging all of the work already being done by LF Networking, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (the home of Kubernetes and other cloud-native infrastructure projects), LF Energy and others. All of this, of course, is done with a focus on the EU’s goals around security, data privacy and energy management, but even though the project has this EU focus, the overall ambition is broader and goes well beyond the European Union. Many of these regulations, after all, will make it to other markets as well. “Linux Foundation, Europe allows us to focus more on specific regional requirements, but without those siloes and fragmentation that foster that techno-nationalism, if you want to call it that, by really being able to foster local collaboration and then, pushing that stuff upstream gives us this amazing conduit to go across borders,” explained Gabriele Columbro, the general manager of the Linux Foundation Europe. The vendors joining the project all argue that they are doing so in order to reduce fragmentation as the industry moves to a cloud-centric model and to enable interoperability between different platforms. “The Telco Cloud ecosystem today is fragmented and slowing down our operational model transformation. Despite a transition to cloud native technologies, a real interoperability between workloads and platforms remains a challenge,” said Laurent Leboucher, group CTO and SVP, Orange Innovation Networks. “Indeed, operators have to deal with a lot of vertical solutions that are different for each vendor, leading to operational complexity, lack of scalability and high costs. Sylva, by providing a homogenous telco cloud framework for the entire industry, should help all the ecosystem to use a common technology, which will be interoperable, flexible and easy to operate.”

Payload raises $4.7M for its developer-first headless CMS • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in content management, developers, Enterprise, funding, headless CMS, seed round, StartupsNo Comments

Payload, which develops a headless open-source content management system (CMS), today announced that it has raised a $4.7 million seed round led by Google’s AI-focused Gradient Ventures. Other investors include MongoDB Ventures, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Grand Ventures and Exceptional Capital, in addition to a number of angel investors. Unlike most CMS tools, Michigan-based Payload puts its emphasis on developers. Bootstrapped since 2021, the team behind the platform argues that typical app frameworks give developers the tools to create their backends but not the CMS-style user interfaces they would need to manage apps and their content. Image Credits: Payload “To devs, ‘content management system’ is usually a swear word. If an engineer gets assigned a CMS project, it’s less than thrilling. They want to avoid roadblocks, write code and build things they’re proud of — but existing CMS’s get in the way of that left and right,” said CEO James Mikrut, who co-founded the company together with Dan Ribbens (COO) and Elliot DeNolf (CTO). “We’re not competing with Webflow or Squarespace — rather, we’re going to give talented engineers a tool they can trust to build critical content infrastructure.” Instead of building another no-code CMS, the team went in the exact opposite direction and built something more akin to a framework than ‘just’ a pure headless CMS. To get started, developers describe their configuration for Payload in TypeScript and the service creates a Mongo database, sets up REST and GraphQL APIs, handles file storage, authentication and access control — and, of course, creates the admin UI, which defaults to a clean, minimalist look. The company is currently in the middle of its first launch week, a concept that seems to be making the rounds among startups these days. Earlier this year, the team also launched version 1.0 and now that it has raised its first funding round, the plan is to expand the team and invest in the open-source community around Payload. And like most open-source startups, the company plans to launch a managed service, Payload Cloud, to power its monetization strategy and function as a hub for deploying Payload apps.

TheGist taps AI to summarize Slack channels and threads • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in AI, aleph, App, Apps, Enterprise, Robotics & AI, slack, summarization, TheGistNo Comments

Itay Dressler and Itzik Ben Bassat, who’ve held various software engineering and executive roles at startups together over the years, are accustomed to exchanging brief messages. Ben Bassat has ADHD, and for that reason prefers to keep texts on the shorter side. But as he and Dressler were faced with wrangling an increasing number of tools at their employers, they came to realize they weren’t the only ones who could benefit from more succinct updates. So they founded TheGist with the grand mission of “simplifying information consumption in workplace communications and data” through instant highlights. The startup’s first product uses AI to scan Slack messages and provide a personalized summary, aiming to filter out noise. And in the enterprise, there’s plenty of noise to filter. According to a 2021 report in Tech Republic, a survey of remote workers showed that 18% suffered from “information overload” while 8% were overwhelmed by the amount of data and apps they were meant to check each day. “There’s an overload of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that aren’t deeply integrated. Different teams use different tools to create information silos,” Ben Bassat told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “The integration between those SaaS tools makes the information overload greater, not smaller. There is no reason that in 2022, using AI, employees can’t get the information they need to make better decisions in a short and personalized form.” Installing TheGist’s Slack app — which can summarize both channels and threads — is a straightforward-enough process. Once connected to a workspace, the app can be added or invited to channels that a user wishes to summarize. Typing the command “/gist” summons it, generating a fresh summary — generally a bullet point or two in length — of what happened in the channel, visible only to the person who requested it. Image Credits: TheGist TheGist Slack app can provide summaries covering time scales from one day to several weeks. Beyond this, it can summarize particularly long individual Slack messages. Service is free for up to five summaries but unlimited summaries requires a premium subscription, which starts at $10 per user per month. “We wanted to release a tool that highlights the need for shortening the information overload in companies,” Ben Bassat said. “TheGist is a game changer for decision makers as we enable managers to dramatically increase the amount of workplace information they can consume by digesting it and personalizing it … For employees, we serve them the information they need when they need it so they can be aligned with the organization and make better and more knowledgeable decisions.” That’s a lot to promise. AI, while improving by leaps and bounds, has its limitations; TheGist’s summaries are bound to contain mistakes from time to time. And from a security standpoint, companies might be loathe to let a third-party app process the internal messages — particularly companies in highly regulated industries. Ben Bassat didn’t provide much in the way of detail around TheGist’s AI systems and their development, save that it’s leveraging “multiple open source large languages models” with “specific in-house fine-tuning.” “We are using statistical models to evaluate our models’ output and assess correctness,” Ben Bassat said. “As in every product which is generated by AI, results can have summary errors, and our users are made aware of that.” On the compliance question, Ben Bassat claims that TheGist doesn’t store Slack data other than the specific messages users ask to summarize, which it deletes after the summaries are generated. “We only store analytical and usage data in order to improve our product and personalize the user experience. Users can ask to delete their data according to our privacy policy,” Ben Bassat added. There aren’t a lot of competitors in the Slack summarization space. But there are a few, it’s worth noting. Frame summarizes the previous day’s Slack activity, providing metrics including team responsiveness and auto-detected “high” and “low” moments. Grok, a Slack app, provides summaries of Slack conversations and threads generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3 API. There’s also TLDR, which uses algorithms to spit out Slack message summaries. Image Credits: TheGist But Ben Bassat and co don’t see TheGist’s first app as the endgame. In parallel to it, Ben Bassat says that the company’s on the cusp of releasing “proprietary generative AI solutions” for different platforms in the near future — although it’s not clear for which platforms and what types of generative AI. Ben Bassat didn’t have much to say on the subject, which suggests that the specifics are in flux. “The goal of our platform is to enable anyone to be informed with short updates from any app they use for communication or productivity: Email, texts, project managing tools, doc files and more. Solving this challenge requires a lot of technological focus with a high level of expertise,” Ben Bassat said. “Our vision is to provide accurate summaries and actionable insights across all information-producing apps.” The success of TheGist’s Slack app aside, generative AI is probably a wise path to take. It’s the hot new thing in tech, to be sure, with startups like Jasper, an AI copywriting app for marketers, recently raising $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. VCs are certainly excited by the prospect; Sequoia Capital said in a blog post from September that it thought generative AI could “create trillions of dollars of economic value.” For its part, TheGist has raised $7 million to date in pre-seed funding co-led by StageOne Ventures and Aleph. Eden Shochat, a partner at Aleph, said via email: “TheGist’s debut tool is only the starting point, and there is so much more to come. In a world where companies create excessive amounts of data, across multiple tools, employees only want to zero in on the insights that matter to them, at the point in time when they are relevant. TheGist is on a mission to create magical tools that work for the user, rather than the other way around.”

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.

Retool launches Workflows to go beyond the front end • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in automation service, backend automation, developers, Enterprise, low-code, retool, Software, StartupsNo Comments

Since its launch in 2017, Retool has made a name for itself by offering developers an easier way to build line-of-business apps for their internal users. Unlike the many low-code/no-code tools on the market today, Retool’s focus remains squarely on developers, despite its helpful drag-and-drop interface. Now, about half a year after announcing its $45 million funding round, the company is expanding its feature set by adding new tools for building backend workflows, too. Retool Workflows, as the company named this new feature, makes it easy for developers to create automated processes like cron jobs, custom alerts and standard extract, transform, load (ETL) tasks, using a similar graphical interface as the frontend tool, all while adding a lot more flexibility than tools like Zapier. “Some people try to put us in the no code-space or something. You’ll never hear us ever saying that,” Retool CEO and co-founder David Hsu told me. “The reason for that is we actually don’t believe in it really. I think if you look at tools like for example Airtable or Zapier or stuff like that, we think that’s really great if you have a simple use case or a medium-sized use case — it’s great for that. But if you want to build a really advanced use case, like an internal tool that an Amazon might build, for example, then Zapier will be able to get you 50% there very quickly, but the remaining 50% basically becomes impossible.” Image Credits: Retool Instead of going for a no-code approach, the Retool team always built its service for developers first. “We believe in the power of code,” said Hsu. He also noted that the trend he sees is that more and more people now learn how to code and that this is the trend he wants to bet on — not dumbing down the coding experience. Workflows fits right in here, he argues, because it’s very hard to build a low-code/no-code tool that allows you to build complex workflows without quickly hitting the limitations of what these tools can do without resorting to writing custom code (though we’ve seen quite a few companies try). Hsu noted that a lot of customers were already hacking the Retool app to make some of these capabilities work for them. But instead of firing off a cron job, they would write a script that would automatically click a button in a custom app at a certain time to kick off a workflow, for example (which is apparently what one of Retool’s customers did). “Developers need the flexibility of code. They want a toolset that speeds up work withoutnarrowing their options,” said Jamie Cuffe, Product Lead, Retool. “Retool Workflows aims to abstract away the tedious parts of building automations from scratch while preserving the ability to write code to solve the problem.” The Retool team argues that building regular cron jobs, with their arcane format, is both time consuming and error prone — and the final result is hard to maintain and debug. “I really think there is no developer-focused workflows product that I’m aware of. That is why we’re launching this,” said Hsu. In addition to running scripts at regular intervals, Retool Workflows can also use webhooks for a more event-driven approach. That means it could be used for alerting, in addition to more traditional lightweight ETL applications. Indeed, Hsu said that most users in the Workflows beta got started with alerting and notifications and then transitioned to ETL use cases over time. It’s worth noting that this isn’t so much an enterprise integration tool for moving data between applications but still squarely focused on getting this data into Retool-based line-of-business applications. “We needed an efficient way to translate product data in our warehouse into timely, insightfulreporting in Slack,” said Joel McLean, director of product growth at RE/MAX. “With Retool Workflows, my team can easily configure our resources in one place and focus only on writing the logic unique to our business.” The new service will be priced based on data throughput. Each Retool plan, including the free one, will come with 1GB of Workflows data for free, with overages starting at $50/GB. For now, Workflows is only available as a hosted service, but the team is already working on an on-prem version. That’s how many of Retool’s customers are already using its app building tool, including the likes of Stripe, Brex, Coinbase and Plaid, so it only makes sense for the company to do the same for Workflows.

As product-led growth expands, Loops digs into the data to track key metrics • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Enterprise, product marketing, product-led growth, scale venture partnersNo Comments

Companies are increasingly looking at product led growth, where the product helps drive market expansion. If you’re giving the people what they want, they will spend more money, or so the theory goes, but how do you actually measure progress? That’s where an early stage startup called Loops comes in. It announced a $14 million seed, a hefty amount by today’s standards, to help companies look at a variety of data sources and answer specific questions about how they are measuring up. Company co-founder and CEO Tom Laufer says that he led a similar operation at Google before starting his company, and he saw smaller companies without Google’s resources, struggling to pull the data together to understand how well they were doing against their product goals. “So many [product-led growth] enterprises today struggle to make data-driven decisions because they face torrents of data [and struggle to turn that into] real insights and real opportunities,” Laufer told ZebethMedia. He says this isn’t a dashboard with lines going up and down. Instead it’s a solution that offers very specific suggestions designed to answer individual questions and improve things like conversion, retention, engagement and monetization. Loops providing a specific insight in how to improve conversion to paying customers. Image Credits: Loops Loops connects to various data sources, and using machine learning models, bring back answers to the product team about how to improve their metrics based on the data that Loops finds — and importantly they are able to do this without a team of data scientists to pull the data together. And this was a key reason that Ariel Tseitlin, partner at lead investor Scale Venture Partners was attracted to the company. “Loops gives you the ability to essentially package up those insights in a way that is repeatable and automated without actually having to incur the expense of [building a data science team]. So there’s a real powerful cost savings element there as well,” he said. The startup currently has around 20 people with plans to add more with the new funding, which closed recently. As he grows his workforce, Laufer says building a diverse company is a key factor for him. “We are literally doubling down on diversity including minorities and not just because it’s the right thing to do, it protects the future of the company by creating better brainstorming, better collaboration,” he said. Today’s round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Cardumen Capital and a host of industry angels.

Contentstack raises $80M to grow its headless CMS platform for the enterprise • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Apps, content management system, contentstack, Enterprise, headless CMS, startup, StartupsNo Comments

The market for enterprise content management systems (CMS) is steeply growing as the need to organize and manage documents, images and other forms of digital content increases. According to Allied Market Research, the entire CMS sector combined could be worth $53.2 billion by 2030, up from $21.5 billion in 2020. While the concept of CMS has been around for decades, a relatively new innovation — so-called headless CMS — is beginning to attract both market share and the interest of investors. Headless CMS systems act primarily as content repositories, managing back-end infrastructure while affording plenty of customization on the front end. They’re similar to widgets or plug-ins on a website; a headless CMS is usually combined with a separate presentation layer that handles the design and structure elements, templates and the like. Contentstack is one of several vendors offering a headless CMS geared toward enterprise customers. The company today announced that it raised $80 million in a Series C round co-led by Georgian and Insight Partners, which also saw participation from Illuminate Ventures. Having raised $169 million to date, Contentstack plans to put the funding toward customer acquisition, geographic expansion, new partnerships and product development, CEO Neha Sampat tells ZebethMedia. “Contentstack empowers marketers and developers to deliver composable digital experiences at the speed of their imagination through automated headless CMS technology,” Sampat said via email. “Composable architectures ensure that enterprises can innovate swiftly, deploy new features rapidly, and remain agile in the face of digital disruption. Nobody gets ‘stuck’ with monolithic systems that don’t grow with the business or the world.” Contentstack, which was founded in 2018, was created on the back of fifteen-year-old consulting firm Raw Engineering and Built.io, an app development platform that Raw Engineering launched in 2013. (Closing the loop, Contentstack eventually bought the CMS division of Raw Engineering in 2018). Sampat — who co-founded Built.io — teamed up with Nishant Patel, the former VP of engineering at Software AG (which ended up acquiring Built.io) and Built.io’s second co-founder, to launch Contentstack. A look at Contentstack’s CMS platform for enterprises, which leans into workflow automation and customization. Image Credits: Contentstack Contentstack competes with headless CMS vendors, including Storyblok, which raised $47 million in May for its CMS aimed at nontechnical users, and Prismic, which recently raised $20 million to build out its fully managed CMS. (An interesting data point: VCs have invested over $118 million in CMS startups in the last year alone.) Strapi and Kontent are among the startup’s other rivals. But Sampat makes the case that Contentstack is the only CMS offering automation capabilities that don’t require code. Using the workflows in Contentstack, users can review, approve and publish content across their organization. A marketplace offers a hub for extensions, apps and integrations built by customers, partners and the company’s own engineering team. “Typically, content management requires a lot of backend development and programming skills. There is a risk that comes with that, for example, the risk of breaking other processes, enduring the cumbersome and lengthy requirements to implement the solution into the tech stack, and a lack of flexibility to change or maintain the flow of content,” Sampat said. “With Contentstack’s composable architecture, enterprises can tailor their martech stack and tools to their unique brand, team and customer experience needs quickly and easily unlocking the full potential of a composable tech stack.” Is Contentstack’s platform that much easier to use than the competition’s? Perhaps. Data shows, however, that many organizations struggle to use CMS to its full potential regardless of the vendor. In a 2021 survey released by the Content Marketing Institute, 56% of employees said that integration issues stymied their implementation of CMS while 55% blamed a lack of training. The company, which has more than 400 employees, appears to have won over enterprises regardless, though, with a client base that includes Shell, JPMorgan Chase, HP, McDonald’s and Mattel and several unnamed public sector agencies. The company claims to have doubled its customers since last summer and surpassed 50,000 users on the platform. “The pandemic and recent economic pressure has generated a major shift in the market, causing enterprises to review the performance of their existing digital investments and shift focus to efficiency. Ultimately, this means enterprises now have a higher standard for the return on investment in digital investments,” Sampat continued. “For digital strategy, having a composable architecture enables the speed to iterate and keep up with the constantly changing conditions and demands. Contentstack is well-positioned to empower these digital leaders to outperform through a ‘value- and success-based’ approach coupled with a proven path to a modern, composable architecture that will scale and adapt for the long term.”