Enterprise

FlowForge nabs $7.2M to help companies integrate IoT using Node-RED • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Enterprise, FlowForge, Hardware, Node-RED, open sourceNo Comments

A new company from one of the original creators of the open source Node-RED project is setting out to make it easier for companies to bridge the gap between incompatible IoT ecosystems at scale. Node-RED, for the uninitiated, is a low-code, visual programming tool developed inside IBM for connecting APIs, hardware, and related assets that constitute the broader Internet of Things (IoT) — it’s all about enabling IoT developers to build applications at speed, while addressing the sheer number of IoT devices, manufacturers, and protocols they have to contend with. IBM transitioned stewardship of the project to the JS Foundation (a Linux Foundation project) back in 2016, and today it is used by organizations including Siemens, Hitachi, and Bosch. While Node-RED has been gaining traction within industry, it has also faced challenges typical of many open source projects, vis-à-vis the time and resources required to deploy and manage Node-RED beyond small-scale or prototype projects — which is where FlowForge enters the fray with a commercial platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that helps IoT companies run Node-RED at scale in production environments. Via the FlowForge UI, users can spin up Node-RED instances in seconds and manage them all from a single pane, as well as monitor the health of their project. Moreover, companies can elect to use FlowForge’s hosting, centralized audit logging, security, role-based access control, and more — basically, letting FlowForge take care of all the heavylifting. FlowForge in action Cashflow Founded out of the U.K. in 2021 by IBM’s former Node-RED lead and project maintainer Nick O’Leary, alongside early GitLab employee Zeger-Jan van de Weg, FlowForge has largely flown under the radar up until now. O’Leary told ZebethMedia that the company has previously received some $2 million in funding from GitLab cofounder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij through Open Core Ventures to get the business off the ground. And to help take things to the next level, FlowForge today announced a fresh $7.2 million in financing from Cota Capital, Westwave Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, and Open Core Ventures. While there are a handful of similar commercial players out there already, such as Krysp.io, Sensetecnic’s FRED, and Prescient Devices, FlowForge is carving a path to market through adopting an open source ethos. And having Node-RED’s creator at the helm doesn’t hurt its outlook either. “Building FlowForge as an open source platform means we complement the open source nature of Node-RED,” O’Leary explained. “Many people have come to Node-RED as an open source alternative to the proprietary solutions that are out there today. For customers of FlowForge, it gives them much more direct access to what we’re building. They can provide feedback on items they care about from the very beginning of the development process.” With FlowForge version 1.0 fresh off the production line just last week, the company is now gearing up to develop bigger features, including collaboration tooling that will allow developers to work with each other in real time, a little like Google Docs. “So far we have been primarily focused on getting the core platform in place,” O’Leary said. “With our 1.0 release, we are now at a point to start working on the features that will really set us apart. Collaboration has always been a less-than-smooth user experience in Node-RED. That’s something we want to address and are looking at more real-time collaboration options.” With another $7.2 million in the bank, FlowForge is well-financed to ramp things up, targeting companies across all industries and sizes. “We see Node-RED being adopted by a wide range of companies, across many different industries and scales,” O’Leary continued. “We believe FlowForge will help solve problems faced by anyone wanting to take Node-RED into production in a well-managed environment.”

Amplitude’s earnings show what you need to report to survive in today’s market • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in amplitude, EC Enterprise, EC Newsletter, EC venture capital, Enterprise, Startups, The ExchangeNo Comments

The U.S. Federal Reserve raised the price of money once again yesterday. Investors expected the move, but shares dove after the Fed declined to tell investors that it intends to slow the pace at which it raises interest rates in the future, as some had hoped. While shares of many U.S. companies fell in the wake of the news, tech stocks took a particular whacking. And then a few tech companies reported earnings. You have to feel for them to some degree — reporting earnings during a down cycle for your sector right after market conditions just became more difficult is not the stuff of CEO dreams. The opposite, really. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on ZebethMedia+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. But the earnings news was not all bad. Despite a weak advertising market imperiling the Snaps and Metas of the world, and in contrast to slowing cloud growth more generally, there were a few green shoots amid yesterday’s earnings reports that are worth our time. Why? Because when we see public market investors react warmly to smaller-cap tech companies’ results, we can get a vibe for how unicorns might be valued if and when they do go public. Robinhood, the consumer trading platform, is up around 9% this morning after its own earnings report, worth around $10 billion. And later this afternoon, Coinbase will report results.

Dataloop secures cash infusion to expand its data annotation tool set • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in AI, data labeling, Enterprise, machine learning, Robotics & AI, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Data annotation, or the process of adding labels to images, text, audio and other forms of sample data, is typically a key step in developing AI systems. The vast majority of systems learn to make predictions by associating labels with specific data samples, like the caption “bear” with a photo of a black bear. A system trained on many labeled examples of different kinds of contracts, for example, would eventually learn to distinguish between those contracts and even extrapolate to contracts that it hasn’t seen before. The trouble is, annotation is a manual and labor-intensive process that’s historically been assigned to gig workers on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk. But with the soaring interest in AI — and in the data used to train that AI — an entire industry has sprung up around tools for annotation and labeling. Dataloop, one of the many startups vying for a foothold in the nascent market, today announced that it raised $33 million in a Series B round led by Nokia Growth Partners (NGP) Capital and Alpha Wave Global. Dataloop develops software and services for automating aspects of data prep, aiming to shave time off of the AI system development process. “I worked at Intel for over 13 years, and that’s where I met Dataloop’s second co-founder and CPO, Avi Yashar,” Dataloop CEO Eran Shlomo told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Together with Avi, I left Intel and founded Dataloop. Nir [Buschi], our CBO, joined us as third co-founder, after he held executive positions [at] technology companies and [lead] business and go-to-market at venture-backed startups.” Dataloop initially focused on data annotation for computer vision and video analytics. But in recent years, the company has added new tools for text, audio, form and document data and allowed customers to integrate custom data applications developed in-house. One of the more recent additions to the Dataloop platform is data management dashboards for unstructured data. (As opposed to structured data, or data that’s arranged in a standardized format, unstructured data isn’t organized according to a common model or schema.) Each provides tools for data versioning and searching metadata, as well as a query language for querying datasets and visualizing data samples. Image Credits: Dataloop “All AI models are learned from humans through the data labeling process. The labeling process is essentially a knowledge encoding process in which a human teaches the machine the rules using positive and negative data examples,” Shlomo said. “Every AI application’s primary goal is to create the ‘data flywheel effect’ using its customer’s data: a better product leads to more users leads to more data and subsequently a better product.” Dataloop competes against heavyweights in the data annotation and labeling space, including Scale AI, which has raised over $600 million in venture capital. Labelbox is another major rival, having recently nabbed more than $110 million in a financing round led by SoftBank. Beyond the startup realm, tech giants, including Google, Amazon, Snowflake and Microsoft, offer their own data annotation services. Dataloop must be doing something right. Shlomo claims the company currently has “hundreds” of customers across retail, agriculture, robotics, autonomous vehicles and construction, although he declined to reveal revenue figures. An open question is whether Dataloop’s platform solves some of the major challenges that exist in data labeling today. Last year, a paper published out of MIT found that data labeling tends to be highly inconsistent, potentially harming the accuracy of AI systems. A growing body of academic research suggests that annotators introduce their own biases when labeling data — for example, labeling phrases in African American English (a modern dialect spoken primarily by Black Americans) as more toxic than the general American English equivalents. These biases often manifest in unfortunate ways; think moderation algorithms that are more likely to ban Black users than white users. Data labelers are also notoriously underpaid. The annotators who contributed captions to ImageNet, one of the better-known open source computer vision libraries, reportedly made a median of $2 per hour in wages. Shlomo says it’s incumbent on the companies using Dataloop’s tools to affect change — not necessarily Dataloop itself. “We see the underpayment of annotators as a market failure. Data annotation shares many qualities with software development, one of them being the impact of talent on productivity,” Shlomo said. “[As for bias,] bias in AI starts with the question that the AI developer chooses to ask and the instructions they supply to the labeling companies. We call it the ‘primary bias.’ For example, you could never identify color bias unless you ask for skin color in your labeling recipe. The primary bias issue is something the industry and regulators should address. Technology alone will not solve the issue.” To date, Dataloop, which has 60 employees, has raised $50 million in venture capital. The company plans to grow its workforce to 80 employees by the end of the year.

6 key metrics that can help SaaS startups outlast this downturn • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Column, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC Column, EC How To, Enterprise, enterprise saas, growth tactics, SaaS management, StartupsNo Comments

Sudheesh Nair Contributor Sudheesh Nair is CEO of ThoughtSpot, a business intelligence company that has built an intuitive Google-like interface for data analytics. Before ThoughtSpot, Sudheesh was president at Nutanix. More posts by this contributor A blueprint for building a great startup founding team With the economy slowing and businesses tightening their belts, the coming months will be make or break for many startups. Business is shifting from a “growth at all costs” mindset to one that is more measured. This means leaders need to know where to conserve cash, where to target spend effectively and which customers are at risk of churn so they can take proactive steps accordingly. SaaS companies are in a better position than most because they have access to the data that can guide these decisions. They inherently know not only that a customer bought a product, but who is using it, how they’re using it and how often. Management teams should pay close attention to this data for signs of changing customer behavior and watch their sales pipeline for clues about where to target spend and where to cut costs. At a high level, leaders need to understand — before it becomes obvious — if the slowdown this year is affecting demand at their company and where that’s happening. The goal is to pick up on warning signs early and course-correct as you go, and those signs are often hidden in the breadcrumbs. Do you know what your customers are thinking? Not all industries are affected equally, so don’t assume your customers will cut spending this year just because the headlines are bleak. When thinking about metrics for SaaS companies, it’s helpful to look at how current customers are using your product so you can identify areas of concern and take action. You should also read the tea leaves in your pipeline to understand where to cut back and where to invest. Every CFO is looking closely at contracts to evaluate areas for cost-cutting. Only those technologies offering real value will survive, so SaaS vendors need to get ahead of this. Traditional customer satisfaction metrics like NPS are a lagging indicator and will not help you respond quickly enough. Instead, look at the following areas to be more proactive: How much are customers using your product? You can measure usage trends with points of access, number of registered users, volume of queries or some other metric depending on your product. The point is, as a SaaS company, you should not have to guess who is using your product, when, why, how much and if that’s changing. Say you have a customer that logs in and uses your product 10 times a day, and that number hasn’t increased over the last year. It’s a sign they are not adding new use cases and creating new value.

Port internal development platform gives visibility into DevOps architecture • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in devops, Enterprise, Israeli startups, portNo Comments

In a typical large organization DevOps tasks have become so complex, and involve navigating so many tools, it has become difficult to understand the current state of affairs, and to add resources when needed. It’s gotten to the point where developers often need to submit a ticket, even for a routine operation, which is adding unnecessary friction and slowing down the entire process. Port, an early stage Israeli startup, wants to help by offering a portal of sorts where DevOps engineers can get visibility into the current state of the architecture, while deploying new resources when needed, all from a single window. Traditionally, this kind of functionality was only available to large engineering organizations like Netflix, Spotify and Lyft. Today, Port announced a $7 million seed investment to bring it to the masses. The startup has created what is called an ‘internal development platform’ with the goal of letting both developers and operations get more work done without filing tickets, says Zohar Einy, company co-founder and CEO. “We’ve built this internal development platform that essentially allows engineering to access a single interface that acts as a single pane of glass [for all DevOps information],” Einy said This actually is highly customizable and Port provides the building blocks to create a portal that makes most sense to the customer and their way of working, a lot like the portal building tools from the past, but geared specifically towards DevOps. “We took a builder-based approach that gives them a very simple tool set to build their internal platform with [low] code components that we provide them,” he said. Ultimately they can do two main things, no matter how they build it. “The first layer is the ability provides engineering with good visibility into DevOps. They can define the software catalog with all the data that engineering cares about regarding microservices, environments, cloud resources, permissions and things like that,” he said. The second piece lets them self-provision components like creating an environment or setting up a microservice. He says all of this is designed with the goal of cutting down the number of help tickets filed between developers and operations to keep development flowing more smoothly. The company just launched a year ago, but they have paying customers using the product in a proof of concept scenario. With 22 employees already, Einy says that diversity is a big priority for the company. He says to that end, they have been working with NGOs, a common method for hiring underrepresented people in Israel where the company is based. Roni Floman, who runs marketing for Port says the NGOs help the company find people from communities in Israel, who might not otherwise apply at a startup like Port. “Israel has some NGOs dealing with adding Orthodox, very religious people, or people from Israel’s Arab community and usually those NGOs help place people [from these communities] in companies because in many cases, these people don’t usually just apply for a job [at a company like this],” she explained. “[Our] plan is to connect and proactively reach out to be able to hire those people and create a more diverse workforce.” Today’s $7 million seed round was led by TLV Partners with participation from some prominent industry angels.

Pacdora wants to be a ‘Canva + Figma’ for the $1 trillion packaging industry • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in canva, collaboration, design, design collaboration, Enterprise, Figma, GGV, hearst ventures, pacdora, packaging, printingNo Comments

I love meeting startups that are making a tangible impact on the factory floor. While Shein applies a data-driven approach to improve efficiency for clothing manufacturing, Pacdora is doing something similar for packaging, from design all the way to production. Packaging sounds archaic and pretty removed from tech — and it is, which is why there aren’t many competitors for Pacdora, yet. But the opportunity is enormous. In 2019, McKinsey estimated the global packaging industry had exceeded $1 trillion, thanks to a combination of factors like the e-commerce boom and changing consumer expectations. Most important, it’s an industry primed for technological disruption. The traditional lifecycle of packaging is highly inefficient. The illustrator might take a few days to draw up the design and spend another few days to discuss with their client before they can finalize the dieline — the 2D diagram marking the folds and cuts for a 3D box — only to be told later by the factory that the measurement doesn’t add up and the colors and materials requested aren’t available. This back-and-forth can take weeks before the prototype goes into production. “That’s because most designers don’t have real-life manufacturing experience and they are drawing things that aren’t useable by the factory,” Xianfeng Wang, founder and CEO of Pacdora tells ZebethMedia. To bridge the gap between designers and manufacturers, Wang’s team developed Pacdora, which is like Canva plus Figma for packaging. The platform offers thousands of packaging templates for all kinds of products, from shipping boxes and coffee bags to lotion bottles and yogurt pouches. With a click, designers can switch between the 2D dieline and 3D-rendered mockup. Any tweaks to the look apply to both modes automatically, freeing designers from spatial visualization challenges. Powering the automatic 2D-3D conversion is Pacdora’s proprietary algorithm, which took the team six months to develop, according to Wang. The Figma aspect of the platform allows a client to view and comment on the design in real time, further speeding up the project cycle. The collaboration feature is available on Pacdora’s Chinese version and will later debut on its international platform powered by AWS. Packaging is also notoriously polluting. Look around and you’d be uneasy with how much packaging there is, from bubble wrappers for your Amazon order to the plastic container holding cupcakes. That is just the visible portion of the waste generated by the industry. Traditionally, factories are only willing to take large orders — that is, at least tens of thousands of units — due to the overhead of starting up a printing machine. If the production volume is too low, the machine ends up idle for most of the time and the factory operates at a loss. “Therefore many clients are forced to order tens of thousands of packaging units even though they know they can’t sell that many products,” observes Wang. The inflexibility in traditional manufacturing fails to meet the growing need for product customization. Instead of sticking to the same classic bottle look, beverage makers, for example, are increasingly introducing brand collaboration or seasonal packaging. Brands now want to order 500 customized wrappers instead of 10,000 standardized ones. Pacdora’s other main service is to solve this mismatch. “The beauty of an internet platform is that we can group the same kinds of low-volume orders and place one batch order with a factory,” says Wang. Factories get to keep production costs low while brands pay the price for mass production and avoid inventory waste. Pacdora has launched the printing service in China by connecting designers to third-party manufacturers, and it’s getting its hands dirty by setting up its own production line to make prototypes. “We want to ensure quality control. Only after our client approves a sample will we place the order with factories,” says Wang. The firm’s freemium, Canva-like design platform enjoys an 80% profit margin; its supply chain side of the business, which works to consolidate orders, also has a comfortable 40% margin compared to 10% for traditional manufacturers. Pacdora has accumulated some 1.5 million registered users with revenues expected to exceed 10 million yuan ($1.37 million) this year. In August, the company raised $8 million from investors including Hearst Ventures, GGV Capital, and Sequoia Capital China at a valuation of $110 million. It has around 110 employees, mostly based in China. Like many other SaaS startups that originate from China, Pacdora is excited about expanding to more mature markets like the U.S. Businesses in China are increasingly willing to pay for software that can help cut costs and boost income, but the SaaS market is still years behind that of the U.S. SaaS penetration in China was just 28%, compared to 58% in the U.S., according to a November 2021 report by Deloitte. The startup’s growth outside China is telling. Several months after launching the international version of its design platform, Pacdora is generating $200,000 to $300,000 in revenues a month, with the U.S., the U.K. and Australia being its largest markets. It took the firm three years to reach that revenue level in China. While it doesn’t currently provide a manufacturing service for overseas customers, Wang is bullish about a future of connecting Chinese factories to global designers because of the country’s obvious price advantage: the same box that costs one yuan to make in China can easily cost seven times more, or one dollar, to make in America.

Craft Ventures leads $11.5M into meez’s culinary recipe tool • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Craft Ventures, Enterprise, Meez, recipe management, VentureNo Comments

Restaurant kitchens across the country are trying to manage customers while also managing labor shortages. This means it’s important to get new employees up and running faster. Josh Sharkey, chef, founder and CEO of meez, a recipe management app for chefs, started the company in 2020 so that food and beverage professionals could digitally manage and execute recipe workflow, from creation and cost to organization and training. That training pain point is one that Sharkey has continued to hear from kitchens. “Right away we can see the impact of how they can train much faster than before to make sure that when someone new comes on board, it doesn’t take them a month, but for some, only a couple of days,” Sharkey told ZebethMedia. “Anecdotally, we have several case studies where there’s almost like an 80% decrease in the time it takes to train a new employee because they embedded meez in their organization and can now just hand off things that they need to execute on.” Sharkey is not alone: other startups, like Galley, a food data company, are lending their approach to helping this industry. For Galley, it raised $14.2 million in Series A funding earlier this year to help kitchens with predictive purchasing, smart inventory and accurate food production planning. We previously profiled meez last January when the company announced a $6.5 million seed round. At the time, the company was working with around 750 customers and has increased that to 1,200 kitchens worldwide, including fine dining and fast casual restaurants, culinary schools, ghost kitchens and catering companies. It also now has tens of thousands of active users. Now meez is back with new funding, $11.5 million in Series A capital, led by Craft Ventures. Joining Craft is Struck Capital, FJ Labs, AME Cloud Ventures, Moving Capital, Max Mullen, Lenny Rachitsky, Mike Montero, Bobby Lo, Austin Rief, Louis Beryl, James Beshara, Allison Pickens and the Todd & Rahul Fund. The new investment gives meez $18 million in total funding. The company wasn’t planning to raise as soon as it did, but while working on a partnership that accelerated growth, meez began hitting milestones befitting a Series A company, and Craft Ventures preempted the round, Sharkey notes. “It was really just a smart move,” he added. “We were growing fast, had a lot more customers and felt a responsibility to make sure we could serve them.” Along with an increased customer base, meez nearly tripled its revenue since the beginning of the year and has 41 employees. It is also now offering a free version of its platform for individuals who get unlimited recipes and recipe books, recipe sharing and publishing to the web. It also has two other paid tiers for kitchen teams that start at $49 per month. Sharkey intends to deploy the new funds into product and engineering teams, marketing and new premium features. For example, chefs will be able to assess how their recipes contribute to the profitability and success of the business and then be able to adjust their menu items based on sales, demand and margin data. In addition, meez is working on a new component targeting bakers (and chefs who do a lot of R&D) that will help with percentages of ingredients. “The short term is still creating a universal recipe language that everybody in the world can use in the medium to store, create, organize and share your recipes,” he added. “The long-term vision is growth and adding more value to holistically what happens in the business to help them generate more revenue through the lens of their recipes.”

Bump builds a central hub for all your APIs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in api, bump, Bump.sh, dev tool, Enterprise, StartupsNo Comments

Meet Bump, a French software-as-a-service startup that wants to help you maintain and use APIs across your organization. The company automatically generates documentation for your APIs so that other teams always know how to use certain APIs. Over time, Bump becomes the central repository for all things related to your APIs. It acts as a single source of truth with information that remains up to date and changelogs so that you can see what’s new. This summer, the company raised a $4 million funding round (€4 million) led by Galion.exe and Bpifrance’s Digital Venture fund. Business angels also participated in the round. An API is an application programming interface. Developers use APIs so that two different services or applications can interact with each other. Companies also use APIs for their own internal use cases. By relying on APIs, different teams can work on different parts of the same application. All they have to do is make sure that they are using APIs properly to push changes or fetch information from a different area of the product. And that’s where Bump is particularly useful. APIs break all the time. Development teams change some parameters, add attributes, improve a feature or send a different result than the one expected. “There are even team members that are less technical that use APIs,” co-founder and CEO Sébastien Charrier told me. “Product, developer relationship or marketing people need to know what’s happening.” That’s why Bump has built a documentation generator for APIs. It works with both RESTful and message-driven APIs, which makes it stand out from other solutions that tend to focus on RESTful APIs. You can integrate it in your workflow in many different ways. For instance, you can trigger Bump using a GitHub action, use Bump’s command-line interface in a script, or interact with Bump using Bump’s own API — yes, it’s an API for APIs. The idea is that everyone in the company can start using Bump, even if some teams do things differently. Once all the APIs are documented on Bump, whenever there’s a change, Bump can send notifications and highlight changes compared to the previous version. The result is that Bump becomes the API portal for the entire company. When someone joins the company, they can easily see the logic behind some components just by browsing Bump’s hub. When I talked with Sébastien Charrier, he compared Bump’s approach to GitHub. You can always export your documentation and leave the platform, but the nice thing about Bump is that you can see all the diffs. Up next, the startup wants to turn its product into a collaboration platform. And that’s what’s going to improve the product’s stickiness. So far, 250 companies are actively using the product, such as Meilisearch, Memo Bank, Canopy Servicing and Forto. The startup plans to hire 20 people in the coming months.

Tiger Global-backed SaaS startup Chargebee cuts 10% jobs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in ChargeBee, Enterprise, Layoffs, StartupsNo Comments

Chargebee, backed by marquee investors including Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India, has laid off about 10% of its staff in a “reorganization” effort due to ongoing global macroeconomic challenges and growing operational debt. The Chennai and San Francisco-headquartered startup, which offers billing, subscription, revenue and compliance management solutions, confirmed to ZebethMedia that the update impacted 142 employees. “This decision was a difficult one, and we want to first acknowledge and thank the team members who helped us get where we are today. Chargebee has grown exponentially over the last few years, and amid changing market conditions, we have decided to proactively refocus resources to set a strong foundation on which to continue our growth,” said Penny Desatnik, director of corporate communications at Chargebee, in a statement emailed to ZebethMedia. “We will continue to build and strengthen key relationships, and by focusing on efficient growth, we expect to sharpen our go-to-market strategy and operations to meet the rising market demand for subscription services across B2C and B2B businesses. We wish success to our former colleagues and remain committed to the success of our customers and partners around the globe,” Desatnik added. On Wednesday, Chargebee co-founder and CEO Krish Subramanian wrote on a LinkedIn post that the startup had changed its hiring plan to align with priorities owing to the macroeconomic factors and started reducing its expenses across various areas including tools, consulting and contractors due to a growing gap between revenue and spending. “While the scaling decisions were under our control and responsibility, the economic situation and lack of visibility into the future has made it harder for everyone,” the note said. The affected employees will receive three months of pay and extended medical benefits while they look for new opportunities, he added. The startup will also offer outplacement career services and an extension of time to exercise stock options granted under its stock incentive plan. Chargebee raised $250 million in a Series H round in February — over nine months after earning unicorn status following the $125 million Series G funding in April last year. The startup counts Insight Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Steadview Capital, Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India among its key backers. Unfavorable economic conditions have impacted several startups and tech companies around the world. In the last few months, Indian startups including Unacademy, Byju’s and Ola have cut their workforces amid a significant dip in the funding. U.S. companies including digital bank Chime, online real estate marketplace Opendoor and lending giant Upstart also recently made similar decisions.

Y42 wants to become mission control for your data pipelines • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in business intelligence, data integration, data pipelines, Enterprise, managed service, Startups, y42No Comments

When Berlin-based Y42 launched in 2020, its focus was mostly on orchestrating data pipelines for business intelligence. That mission has expanded quite a bit over the course of the last couple of years and today, Y42 announced the launch of what it calls its “Modern DataOps Cloud.” Built on top of data warehousing service Snowflake and Google’s BigQuery engine, Y42‘s new fully managed service aims to provide businesses with more of the tools to make their data stack easily accessible for more users while also providing additional collaboration tools and improved data governance services. “The use case for data has moved beyond ad hoc reporting to become the very lifeblood of a company. However, data pipelines built ad hoc are inherently brittle and inevitably break over time, leading to an overflow of fire-fighting requests and, ultimately, mistrust in business data. For organizations that rely on data to make mission-critical decisions, this can be fatal,” said Y42 founder and CEO Hung Dang. Image Credits: Y42 He argues that Y42’s new DataOps Cloud will allow organizations to more easily create and run production-ready pipelines and consume the data that comes through them. Like before, Y42 fully manages the data stack, using open source tools like Airbyte to integrate the different services and dbt Core for transformations. For advanced users and data teams, Y42 offers Git-based version control (though non-technical users can leverage this through the service’s web app, too) and with this new platform, the company also now offers enhanced governance tools like a data catalog, asset ownership assignments, data contracts and multi-level access controls. “Our vision is for every organization — whether it has one single data engineer, data analyst or a whole data team — to be able to create and run production-ready data pipelines efficiently and consume data in any downstream application to make better business decisions. The Y42 Modern DataOps Cloud makes this vision a reality — today,” said Dang. In addition to the new managed service, Y42 also today announced that it has brought on Jules Cantwell as its president. Before Y42, Cantwell was the COO of Qualtrics EMEA. “The tech industry is at a tipping point where the breadth and volume of data that companies are gathering is rapidly outpacing their ability to manage it effectively. The need for a Modern DataOps Cloud to manage data pipelines in a scalable manner has become mission-critical,” said Cantwell. “Y42 has the product vision, customer proof points and passionate team to truly transform the data management space.” The company also recently brought on Max Herrmann, the former CMO of data integration platform Cask (which Google acquired in 2018) and most recently the CMO at Swim.ai, as its senior VP of Marketing.