Enterprise

Momento launches out of stealth with a serverless cache • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in bain capital ventures, Enterprise, momento, Serverless, Startups, The General PartnershipNo Comments

After working at NASA as a rover roboticist, Khawaja Shams underwent something of a career pivot, joining AWS to team up with engineer Daniela Miao on DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service. Not content to stop there, Shams and Miao left AWS to co-found Momento, a Seattle-based startup that’s today emerging from stealth with a “serverless cache” optimized for cloud computing. What’s a serverless cache, you ask? Well, Shams describes it as an elastic, “highly available” cache that delivers commonly used data to apps and databases faster. He claims that Momento’s platform lets developers add a cache to their cloud stack with around five lines of code, accelerating databases that run in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. “Legacy caching providers offer a different model that requires customers to provision and pay for their peak capacity. These inelastic services are highly inefficient, expensive, require a lot of work to get right, and simply do not scale,” Shams told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Momento allows customers to provision a secure cache, capable of handling millions of transactions per second, with a single API call.” Shams makes the case that legacy caching services are complicated and inefficient, forcing engineering teams to waste time tinkering around with too many configurations. Moreover, he says, because they don’t automatically scale, they require engineers to provision for peak usage — leading to wasteful spending. By contrast, Momento handles load spikes while abstracting away configuration. The platform automatically optimizes, scales and manages caches, also securing caches with end-to-end encryption and audit log support. Image Credits: Momento “Cloud computing made it easier than ever for customers to rapidly provision resources. Unfortunately, during the growth-focused phases in the recent years, customers have ended up massively over-provisioning capacity and are struggling with large bills from their cloud providers,” Shams said. “Momento is helping customers optimize one of the top line items on their cloud bills.” To Shams’ point, cloud costs for some enterprises skyrocketed during the pandemic as digital transformation efforts accelerated. A 2022 survey from Anodot, an analytics platform, shows that nearly half of businesses (49%) are finding it difficult to get their cloud costs under control. According to a separate poll by Flexera, more than 50% of companies now spend over $2.4 million on the public cloud each year. Momento claims to have closed “multiple six-figure deals” with customers including CBS, NTT Docomo and smart home company Wyze Labs. The startup got an early vote of confidence from VCs including Bain Capital Ventures, which led Momento’s $15 million seed funding round that closed this week. The General Partnership participated alongside Flickr CEO Don MacAskill, former Mozilla CEO John Lilly and other angels. Shams says that the funding will be used to expand 25-employee Momento’s engineering team, build a “full-cycle” go-to-market team, grow the Momento platform and add support for additional public clouds. “Due to the recent economic downturn, organizations are actively seeking cost savings and efficiency. Caching tends to be among the top line items on their cloud bills, and Momento’s ability to save on their caching is appealing,” Shams said.

Xata gives Jamstack developers access to a serverless data platform with an API call • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in developer tools, Enterprise, JAMstack, Monica Sarbu, Postgres, XataNo Comments

A couple of years ago, Xata founder Monica Sarbu was putting together a passion project called Tupo.io, a platform she was building to help women in tech find mentors. She wanted to include a Postgres database with Elastic search in the Tupo web application, and as a side project, she wanted it to be fairly self-sufficient because volunteers were helping to build and run the site. As she looked for a serverless database, she realized that there was nothing really out there that met her requirements, and like any good entrepreneur, she started building it. That project would become Xata, a serverless data platofrm that is generally available starting today. The platform is built from from several open source components including a Postgres database with Kafka for data streaming and Elastic for search. Web application developers, particularly those building Jamstack applications, can simply connect to it through an API and they are good to go. “What we’ve done is build this data platform for you, so you don’t have to hire a team of developers internally to work on building a data platform. Instead, we built this for you and offer it as a service, and you can access everything you need over an API,” Sarbu told ZebethMedia. She says that companies like Netlify and Vercel have made it simple to build and launch a Jamstack web application in production, but what’s been missing is a simple way to connect to a data platform, a hole that Xata is attempting to fill. “Unfortunately, what’s missing is the data part. There isn’t really a way to preview and test your data before merging into production. So we want to complete this workflow and offer the best experience for web developers,” she said. Today, developers typically create this kind of data platform from scratch every time, and the idea with Xata is to have this serverless data platform that reduces all of the complexity related to building it yourself. Sarbu says this lets companies and development teams do more with less, a goal of every organization, especially in today’s economic climate. But more than that, they can also put those limited resources to work building the best application, rather than fiddling with the data stack components. “There is such a shortage of talent on the market, and everyone is fighting for the few developers. My philosophy is that companies need to build more with less resources. They need to concentrate on building the features that matter for their product, rather than building the [data stack]” she said. Xata has been in beta, but starting today, it will be generally available to all developers to use. The product includes a free tier to get started with a small project in production, and as the product grows companies can shift to pay plans. Prior to launching Xata and Tupo.io, Sarbu co-founded a monitoring company called Packetbeat, which was acquired by Elastic in 2015. She launched Xata last year and has raised $35 million, per Crunchbase.

Alation bags $123M at a $1.7B valuation for its data-cataloging software • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in AI, Alation, data catalog, Enterprise, funding, startup, StartupsNo Comments

There’s been an explosion of enterprise data in recent years, accelerated by pandemic-spurred digital transformations. An IDC report commissioned by Seagate projected companies would collect 42.2% more data by year-end 2022 than in 2020, amounting to multiple petabytes of data in total. While more data is generally a good thing, particularly where it concerns analytics, large volumes can be overwhelming to organize and govern — even for the savviest of organizations. That’s why Satyen Sangani, a former Oracle VP, co-founded Redwood City–based Alation, a startup that helps crawl a company’s databases in order to build data search catalogs. After growing its customer base to over 450 brands and annual recurring revenue (ARR) to over $100 million, Alation has raised $123 million in a Series E round led by Thoma Bravo, Sanabil Investments, and Costanoa Ventures with participation from Databricks Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Icon Ventures, Queensland Investment Corporation, Riverwood Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Union Grove, the company announced today. The all-equity tranche values Alation at over $1.7 billion — an impressive 15 times higher than the company’s previous valuation in a challenging economic climate. In an interview with ZebethMedia, Sangani said the new capital — which brings Alation’s total raised to $340 million — will be put toward investments in product development (including through acquisitions) and expanding Alation’s sales, engineering and marketing teams, with a focus on the public sector and corporations based in Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. “With the capital, we will continue to focus on engagement and adoption, collaboration, governance, lineage, and on APIs and SDKs to enable us to be open and extensible,” Sangani said via email. “We’re going to bring innovation to the market that will increase the number of data assets we cover and the people who will leverage and access Alation.” With Alation, Sangani and his fellow co-founders — Aaron Kalb, Feng Niu and Venky Ganti — sought to build a service that enables data and analytics teams to capture and understand the full breadth of their data. The way Sangani sees it, most corporate leadership wants to build a “data-driven” culture but is stymied by tech hurdles and a lack of knowledge about what data they have, where it lives, whether it’s trustworthy and how to make the best use of it. Alation’s platform organizes data across disparate systems. Image Credits: Alation According to Forrester, somewhere between 60% and 73% of data produced by enterprises goes unused for analytics. And if a recent poll by Oracle is to be believed, 95% of people say they’re overwhelmed by the amount of data available to them in the workplace. “With the astounding amount of data being produced today, it’s increasingly difficult for companies to collect, structure, and analyze the data they create,” Sangani said. “The modern enterprise relies on data intelligence and data integration solutions to provide access to valuable insights that feed critical business outcomes. Alation is foundational for driving digital transformation.” Alation uses machine learning to automatically parse and organize data like technical metadata, user permissions and business descriptions from sources like Redshift, Hive, Presto, Spark and Teradata. Customers can visually track the usage of assets like business glossaries, data dictionaries and Wiki articles through the Alation platform’s reporting feature, or they can use Alation’s collaboration tools to create lists, annotations, comments and polls to organize data across different software and systems. Alation also makes recommendations based on how information is being used and orchestrated. For example, the platform suggests ways customers can centrally manage their data and compliance policies through the use of integrations and data connectors. “Alation’s machine learning contributes to data search, data stewardship, business glossary, and data lineage,” Sangani said. “More specifically, Alation’s behavioral analysis engine spots behavioral patterns and leverages AI and machine learning to make data more user-friendly. For example, search is simplified by highlighting the most popular assets; stewardship is eased by emphasizing the most active data sets; and governance becomes a part of workflow through flags and suggestions.” According to IDC, the data integration and intelligence software market is valued at more than $7.9 billion and growing toward $11.6 billion over the next four years. But Alation isn’t the sole vendor. The startup’s competition includes incumbents like Informatica, IBM, SAP and Oracle, as well as newer rivals such as Collibra, Castor, Stemma, Data.World and Ataccama, all of whom offer tools for classifying and curating data at enterprise scale. One of Alation’s advantages is sheer momentum, no doubt — its customer base includes heavyweights like Cisco, General Mills, Munich Re, Pfizer, Nasdaq and Salesforce, in addition to government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Australia’s Department of Defense. Alation counts more than 25% of the Fortune 100 as clients, touching verticals such as finance, healthcare, pharma, manufacturing, retail, insurance and tech. In terms of revenue coming in, Sangani claims that Alation — which has more than 700 employees and expects to be at just under 800 by 2023 — is in a healthy position, pegging the firm’s cumulative-cash-burn-to-ARR ratio at around 1.5x. Despite the downturn, he asserts that customer spend is remaining strong as the demand for data catalog software grows; for the past five quarters, Alation’s ARR has increased year over year. In another win for Alation, the investment from Databricks Ventures is strategic, Sangani says. It’ll see the two companies jointly develop engineering, data science and analytics applications that leverage both Databricks’ and Alations’ platforms. “The most successful data intelligence platforms will be adopted by everyone. Vendors that are jack-of-all-trades, but masters of none, promise everything and succeed at little. Similarly, point products achieve limited success, but only serve to create data silos that our customers are trying to avoid. The future of data intelligence is about connectedness and integration,” Sangani said. “We know that and will continue to put our money behind our beliefs.”

Former Yext CEO launches Roam to provide a virtual HQ for distributed teams • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Enterprise, funding, IVP, remote work, Roam, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Roam, which bills itself as a “cloud HQ” for distributed, remote companies, today emerged from stealth with $30 million in Series A funding led by IVP with participation from undisclosed angel investors. The tranche, which comes after a previously unannounced $10.6 million seed round and values the company at $95 million post-money, will be put toward go-to-market efforts in the U.S. and abroad, CEO Howard Lerman said. Lerman previously co-founded and led Yext, the publicly traded brand management company that uses a cloud-based network of apps and search engines to keep company information up to date across the web. When Yext’s workforce transitioned to remote work during the pandemic, Lerman perceived that employees lost “spontaneity and serendipity,” spent more time in meetings and began to lose visibility into what other meetings were going on and what their colleagues were doing. “I had this flash of insight — what if there was a bird’s-eye view of all the Zooms going on at a company at the same time that everyone could see? And better yet, what if people could move between and among them so they could participate as necessary and then quickly be on to their next thing?” Lerman told ZebethMedia via email. To Lerman’s point, shifts to a mostly remote workforce don’t occur overnight. One survey suggests that nearly half of employees — 46% — find remote work, at least in the early stages, can make it more difficult to maintain professional relationships with key stakeholders. That inspired Roam, which provides what Lerman describes as cloud-based “flex spaces” for workers at home, in offices and in the field. Roam’s Map View lets workers see what’s going on and have “project presence,” Lerman says, as well as chat with colleagues via text or video chat. Lerman didn’t reveal much beyond that — it’s early days for Roam, which currently has around 40 corporate customers. But he argued that the platform as it exists today can save substantial time compared to typical remote setups. Image Credits: Roam “I found my own personal meeting minutes dropped by more than 40% when I switched from Zoom to Roam from 4.5 hours per day to 2.6 hours per day. My average meeting time in Roam is eight minutes, an astounding number when you think about the prescheduled world of 30- and 60-minute Zoom time blocks,” Lerman said. Shorter and fewer meetings can lead to cost savings through improved productivity. One recent study out of the University of North Carolina found that unnecessary meetings waste about $25,000 per employee annually, translating to $101 million a year for any organization with over 5,000 staffers. Roam isn’t the first startup to attempt to tackle challenges around remote work with a cloud-based workspace. In fact, there are dozens of virtual HQ platforms, some venture-backed and some bootstrapped, mixing gamification and productivity into a service. In August, Kumospace raised $21 million for its platform that leverages lo-fi graphics and game-like mechanics to create a sense of togetherness. Gather is another big winner (despite layoffs) in the space, having raised $77 million in total from investors, including Sequoia, Index and Y Combinator. It’s not just startups. This summer, Microsoft launched Viva Engage, an in-house social media app for employee engagement. Other companies are piloting VR and apps such as Oculus for Business or Horizon Workrooms, aiming to boost collaboration with immersive meetings for remote workers. But Lerman believes strongly that Roam is differentiated, having invested the entirety of the seed round himself. He points out that as many as 77% of U.S.-based jobs are now either remote or hybrid, according to a March 2022 Gallup poll, representing a huge potential customer base. Indeed, after more than two years of remote work, many employees have no interest in returning to the office. Not all businesses are behind the changes, but there’s no denying that the pandemic rewrote the rules around the workplace — to the benefit of startups like Roam, potentially. “We are in the midst of a massive platform shift from in-office workplaces to various remote and hybrid models. In pre-pandemic 2019, [only] 40% of US jobs were either remote or hybrid,” Lerman said. “The pandemic has significantly accelerated the rate of distributed businesses and the need for a cloud HQ. No matter the size or how well they are faring, the future of work is a top issue for nearly every company right now.” Roam has 15 employees and plans to hire five more by the end of the year. Lerman declined to reveal financials, including revenue figures, when asked.

Flowers Software helps SMBs manage their workflows • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Automation, Enterprise, Flowers Software, La Famiglia VC, smb, Startups, workflow automationNo Comments

Workflow automation may not be what gets you out of bed every morning, but it has long been a hot topic in the world of enterprise software. There are few businesses, after all, that don’t have dozens and dozens of repetitive workflows that are currently done manually that could be automated. Munich-based Flowers Software, which originally launched in 2019, is trying to put its own stamp on this field by offering a somewhat different approach from many of its competitors. The company today announced that it has raised a $3.2 million seed funding round led by La Famiglia VC, with participation from LEA Partners and Collective Ventures. A number of angel investors also participated, including Personio’s co-founder Ignaz Forstmeier, SAP Hybris’ founder Carsten Thoma, SevDesk founders Fabian Silberer and Marco Reinbold, and Ironhack co-founder Gonzalo Manrique. Image Credits: Flowers Software Founded by Andreas Martin and Daniel Vöckler, who both spent time working at a number of small and medium businesses, Flowers currently focuses its marketing on two use cases: invoice approvals and general approvals. But the idea behind the tool is to offer a highly flexible no-code workflow tool to automate virtually any repetitive business process. “When we founded Flowers, we already knew that we were going to solve this major problem because of our experience from our previous jobs, the different industries and company sizes, etc.,” said Martin. “What we learned is that there are tons of tasks that go wrong in every company literally every day. […] And unfortunately, since most tasks are in recurring workflows, they go wrong repeatedly. For all of those problems, you will find one tool that solves exactly this problem. So you can have 1,000 problems and 1,001 tools solving them. But Daniel and I didn’t want to create another single-solution tool.” Flowers team photo. Image Credits: Flowers Software Martin noted that many traditional workflow automation tools focus on the backend, while Flowers provides anyone in the company with tools to build these workflows but also access to a user interface to step through these workflows from beginning to end. He noted that this also helps to make information more accessible and transparent to everyone inside a company. And while users can integrate a lot of third-party tools, for many of the current use cases, teams are doing a lot of their work in Flowers themselves. The team actually started building Flowers as a general-purpose automation tool but found that simply giving its users all of this freedom only led to confusion. So after some trial and error, Flowers decided to build out a few templates for common use cases — invoicing being one of those — and with that, the service took off. What the team needs to do now — and what Flowers will use at least some of the new funding for — is building out templates for more use cases so it can expand its user base. The team also plans to expand its marketing efforts to go beyond its current core market of most German-speaking countries to more of Europe and North America. Image Credits: Flowers Software “We’re going to launch with different use cases in different countries, or service work for use cases in every country, but some countries have more problems with contracts and approvals, or travel expenses,” Martin explained. “Our highly adaptable software makes it possible for us to support those laws, regulations and compliance rules very easily because the tool is flexible enough.” Flowers Software was already cashflow positive early on in its history, but the team decided to raise now in order to be able to grow faster and capture more of the market. “We really want to push as hard as we can and scale as hard as we can,” said Martin. “Flowers is changing the game for SMBs in business efficiency, productivity and profitability with a different approach to workflow creation and automation that is resonating with many customers across industries,” said Judith Dada, general partner at La Famiglia VC. “With Flowers, companies finally have a software that adapts to the way they work, rather than a software that requires the customer to change. We’re impressed by the product and strong sales traction that Andreas, Daniel and the team have already acquired and are excited to support them as they scale to new markets.”

Unicorns face 5-1 odds as they wait for public markets to warm • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in battery ventures, cloud, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC Newsletter, EC venture capital, Enterprise, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Earlier today, The Exchange dug into changing investor sentiment regarding growth and profitability. A new report looking at cloud and software companies from Battery Ventures ran the math on how investors are rewarding faster growth from less unprofitable companies — dare we say, profitable companies? — with the data indicating that, at least for now, growth is no longer enough to maximize corporate value. For startups busy stacking new revenue with minimal burn, the situation is good news. For companies that raised while money was cheap — and sitting on huge valuations predicated on yesteryear’s valuations — the news that profitability is in vogue again is far from welcome. Many unicorns are likely now trapped between changing investor preferences and a general compression of the value of software companies. Why? Because many a unicorn was minted during the 2020-2021 era on the back of quick revenue growth more than anything else. And, as revenue multiples stretched to the sky during that time period, a great number of startups reached the $1 billion valuation threshold — or a multiple thereof — on the back of small, if quickly expanding, top line. If revenue multiples have come down, that’s bad news for unicorns. If revenue multiples have come down and growth is losing comparative luster to profits, high-burn unicorns that were once valued more for something else are doubly bound by changing market conditions. Even worse, Battery points out a few difficult facts about just how many unicorns might be able to go public in the coming years compared to how many unicorns there are in the market today. There’s a lining of good news in the data for truly standout startups. But for the bog-standard unicorn, there’s more than just storm clouds on the horizon. Why is the math bad? In the last 10 years, Battery counts 200 software companies that went public. In contrast, the venture firm counts more than 1,000 new unicorns minted over the same time frame. That’s a 5-1 ratio of IPOs to new billion-dollar companies.

2022 R&D tax prep, social media for founders, managing remote teams • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in EC roundup, Enterprise, Startup Accelerator, Startups, Tax law, tech layoffs, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VentureNo Comments

As director of Techstars’ startup pipeline, Saba Karim spends much of his time touting the ways entrepreneurs can benefit by joining an accelerator. But is it the right choice for every founder? After he posted a thread on Twitter offering several rationales explaining why some should definitely avoid them, I invited him to adapt it for a TC+ guest post we published yesterday. “Keep in mind that funding will solve your money problems, but it won’t solve everything else,” he writes. Full ZebethMedia+ articles are only available to membersUse discount code TCPLUSROUNDUP to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription “You’ll still need to figure out how to acquire customers, find the best talent, build an incredible product, assemble a great advisory board and get to product-market fit.” His article confirms a suspicion I’ve long harbored: many entrepreneurs pursue accelerators so they can gain access to investors, score free publicity, or receive positive reinforcement for their idea. But none of those are determining factors for success. “If you’re not living and breathing your startup, you’re going to struggle anyway,” says Karim. If you have information, knowledge or experience to share that could help early-stage startup founders, investors and workers make better decisions, please review our submission guidelines and drop us a line. Thanks very much for reading, Walter ThompsonEditorial Manager, ZebethMedia+@yourprotagonist These founders landed early checks by being savvy about social media (L-R) Connie Loizos, Silicon Valley Editor, ZebethMedia, Nik Milanović, Founder, This Week in Fintech; General Partner, The Fintech Fund, Joshua Ogundu, CEO, Campfire and Gefen Skolnick, Founder, Couplet Coffee. Image Credits: Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for ZebethMedia Is there a correlation between being extremely online and a founder’s ability to fundraise? According to three entrepreneurs Connie Loizos spoke with at ZebethMedia Disrupt, a social media presence that blends aspects of your business and personal lives can “make it easier to connect with investors and customers.” Nik Milanović (founder, This Week in Fintech), Gefen Skolnick (founder, Couplet Coffee) and Josh Ogundu (CEO, Campfire) talked about the benefits and downsides of using TikTok, Twitter and other platforms to build authentic personal and business brands. “I even tweeted yesterday that it was kind of not a good day as a founder, and it was really nice and people engaged with that,” said Skolnick. “I don’t believe in constantly showing that things are good. Some days things are just not good.” How to effectively manage a remote team during wartime Image Credits: Anna Fedorenko / Getty Images “There are a lot of studies about crisis management on the web, but none of them tell us how to manage a company during times of war,” according to Alex Fedorov, CEO and founder of Ukrainian startup OBRIO. Prior to Russia’s invasion, “our company had never seen a real crisis,” he writes in a post that presents the six methods his company used to maintain continuity while protecting workers. “Training to manage stress, anxiety and personal finances will help your employees build the needed knowledge and respond to tough situations.” 3 founders discuss how to navigate the nuances of early-stage fundraising Image Credits: Kelly Sullivan / Getty Images Founders who have raised funds for early-stage startups in the last year have generally had an easier time than people seeking Series A money (or later). Then again, “easy” is such a relative term. At ZebethMedia Disrupt, Rebecca Szkutak spoke to three entrepreneurs to learn more about how they adjusted their expectations and tactics as they approach investors during a downturn: Amanda DoAmaral, co-founder and CEO, Fiveable Arman Hezarkhani, founder, Parthean Sarah Du, co-founder, Alloy Automation Prepare to amortize: Inflation may spell doom for R&D tax expensing Image Credits: Fancy/Veer/Corbis (opens in a new window) / Getty Images The U.S. federal government has made R&D tax credits available for decades, but a major change set to take place this year will impact startups across the board. Previously, R&D expenditures could be expensed upfront, but now, “those expenses will need to be amortized over 5 years in the case of domestic research, and 15 years for foreign research,” according to tax attorney Andrew Leahey. Because so many startups “incur the bulk of their R&D costs in their first year of operation,” many could wait “the equivalent of a lifetime” to recover those expenses. High inflation has stalled efforts to repeal the amortization requirement, so Leahey shares several tactics companies can use “to prepare for the possibility of the rule coming into effect.” Remote work is here to stay. Here’s how to manage your staff from afar Image Credits: Kelly Sullivan / Getty Images Before the pandemic, most startup workers had the same experience on their first day: set up a new laptop, fill out some onboarding paperwork, then start gathering intel on the best places to grab lunch near the office. Now that so many teams are hybrid or fully remote, companies are learning the importance of fostering company culture and community from day one, a topic Rebecca Bellan delved into at ZebethMedia Disrupt with three experienced managers: Adriana Roche, chief people officer, Mural Deidre Paknad, CEO and co-founder, WorkBoard Allison Barr Allen, angel investor, Trail Run Capital “The biggest learning for us over the last three years was that it’s very difficult to really build expertise in a domain or a subject through Zoom,” said Paknad. How our startup made it through 2 recessions without relying on layoffs Image Credits: Aaron Black (opens in a new window) / Getty Images So far this year, about 45,000 tech workers have been laid off. If that’s hard to visualize, imagine a sold-out Mets game at Citi Field in New York City. Cutting staff is standard operating procedure during a downturn, but Sachin Gupta, who leads sales, marketing and general operations for HackerEarth, says his company has weathered two recessions without resorting to mass firings. “At any given time, our staff portfolio operates at about 90% of what we consider ideal,” he says. “Think of this like the distance

Metrist raises $5.5M to provide better cloud service outage data • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Enterprise, funding, honeycomb, monitoring, New Relic, observability, outages, StartupsNo Comments

Metrist, a startup that helps IT teams stay on top of outages among the many cloud services they use to run their own applications, today announced that it has raised a $5.5 million seed round from the likes of Heavybit, Morado Ventures, as well as PagerDuty co-founder Alex Solomon and StatusPage co-founders Scott and Steve Klein. The overall idea behind Metrist is pretty straightforward, but there are surprisingly few companies doing this. While products like Twitter or StatusPage (which is now owned by Atlassian) allow companies to easily communicate issues with their services to their users, they don’t always reflect every problem and service degradation — something that then comes into play when it’s time to review an SLA agreement or a contract comes up for renewal and the two parties have vastly different perceptions of a product’s reliability. And while application performance monitoring and observability tools like New Relic or Honeycomb can give you some of this data, it’s not their core use case as these services tend to be inward facing. Image Credits: Metrist “Apps are built on top of other apps today,” Metrist co-founder and CEO Jeff Martens told me. “That means if one of them goes down or gets degraded or has some kind of an issue, your app and your business can potentially have the same fate. But current observability tools don’t do anything special for those external dependencies — they still continue to focus inward. You can find out things about your external dependencies — it’s not that you can’t know — but the challenge really becomes verifying so you can take action, but then also hold your vendors accountable.” More than anything else, Metrist wants to become the trusted neutral player that buyers and vendors can refer to when they discuss outages. The service will be a success, Martens said, when Metrists is written into a contract as the third-party independent validator of an SLA. “Too many of the incidents posted to StatusPage simply reference upstream or third-party providers,” said StatusPage co-founder Steve Klein. “It’s exciting that Metrist is going after the root of the problem, creating visibility where before there was none.” Metrist team On the technical side, Metrist uses either an agent or eBPF to gather data about the services a company runs, but it also constantly checks for downtime and service degradations from 21 different cloud regions across AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Out of the box, Metrist covers more than 100 services, but customers can also host their own tests or use in-app tests. The team noted that these tests also go well beyond simply checking for a correct HTTP response code. “It’s not just like pinging an API and saying, ‘does this URL return to 200 or 202?’ Say you’re hitting an endpoint and it’s supposed to create a thing in that platform — we actually will call the retrieval API later to see how long it took to create that thing,” Metrist co-founder and CTO Ryan Duffield explained. Customers also get a lot of flexibility when and how they get alerted of an issue. For some, a two-percent increase in latency may be unacceptable, while for others, that’s no issue, for example. Alerts can go to Slack, email Datadog or PagerDuty (and users can create their own alerting systems using webhooks, too). Image Credits: Metrist While Metrist is only announcing its funding today, it’s worth noting that the team actually raised this amount over two different raises, including a pre-seed before the product even existed. Both happened proactively, Martens explained, without the team actually going out to raise. This happened just before the economy and the funding environment changed. “Modern applications depend on an ever-increasing number of cloud products managed by external vendors, but the overall approach to observability hasn’t changed. You wouldn’t dream of operating your internal services blindly and you need to manage your cloud dependencies with the same care,” Heavybit general partner Joseph Ruscio explained. “Metrist enables teams to proactively know when an external service is down, with the goal of avoiding or mitigating incidents stemming from dependencies. Metrist’s approach to third-party observability ensures teams know authoritatively when SLAs are not met.” Metrist offers a free plan that allows you to monitor up to three services with one day of data retention. Paid plans start at $99/month for seven services and seven days of data retention.

Are investors really paying more for profits than growth today? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in battery ventures, cloud, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC Newsletter, EC venture capital, Enterprise, Startups, The Exchange, VentureNo Comments

What’s better: growing quickly or making lots of money? The answer, in startup terms, is both. But because there is a natural tension between growth (which usually comes with incremental costs, often in advance of new revenues) and profitability (allowing revenue to further extend its coverage of operating costs), most startups lean more on the growth side of the equation. It’s not hard to understand why. Venture investors provide capital that often greatly exceeds a startup’s revenue base, allowing the company to hire and market aggressively — and build, we hasten to add — in hopes of far-larger future scale at the cost of near-term profitability. The tradeoff between growth and profitability is often detailed in the so-called Rule of 40. Indeed, the rubric that combines a growth metric (measured in year-over-year terms) and a profitability result (measured in percent-of-revenue terms) in hopes of the sum meeting or exceeding 40 has generated derivative metrics for companies of a particular age or segment. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on ZebethMedia+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. Naturally, the Rule of 40 is not something that applies to, say, pre-revenue startups hoping to raise a pre-seed round. It’s a metric that applies to startups that are generating revenues at a sufficient scale to make the numbers reasonable; no one cares if you can meet the Rule of 40 while tripling your revenue from $1 to $3 per year, but if you are expanding your revenues from $1 million to $3 million per year, the rule is likely something you’ll be measured against. Now that venture markets are in retreat and public markets have been revalued, there’s been some push for startups to change their posture, trading some growth now for smaller deficits. A flight to quality, some call it. We’d call it a rebalancing away from quicker growth and staggering losses toward merely rapid growth and less cash burn. Battery Ventures recently dropped a new report (the “State of the OpenCloud 2022”) that includes some fascinating data on the profit/growth conversation. It’s something that we’ve touched on repeatedly here at ZebethMedia as both venture investors and their public-market cognates have shaken up their valuation models.

MLOps platform Galileo lands $18M to launch a free service • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in AI, Enterprise, funding, machine learning, MLops, Robotics & AI, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Galileo, a startup launching a platform for AI model development, today announced that it raised $18 million in a Series A round led by Battery Ventures with participation from The Factory, Walden Catalyst, FPV Ventures, Kaggle co-founder Anthony Goldbloom and other angel investors. The new cash brings the company’s total raised to $23.1 million and will be put toward growing Galileo’s engineering and go-to-market teams and expanding the core platform to support new data modalities, CEO Vikram Chatterji told ZebethMedia via email. As the use of AI becomes more common throughout the enterprise, the demand for products that make it easier to inspect, discover and fix critical AI errors is increasing. According to one recent survey (from MLOps Community), 84.3% of data scientists and machine learning engineers say that the time required to detect and diagnose problems with a model is a problem for their teams, while over one in four (26.2%) admit that it takes them a week or more to detect and fix issues. Some of those issues include mislabeled data, where the labels used to train an AI system contain errors, like a picture of a tree mistakenly labeled “houseplant.” Others pertain to data drift or data imbalance, which happens when data evolves to make an AI system less accurate (think a stock market model trained on pre-pandemic data) or the data isn’t sufficiently representative of a domain (e.g., a data set of headshots has more light-skinned people than dark-skinned). Galileo’s platform aims to systematize AI development pipelines across teams using “auto-loggers” and algorithms that spotlight system-breaking issues. Built to be deployable in an on-premises environment, Galileo scales across the AI workflow — from predevelopment to postproduction — as well as unstructured data modalities like text, speech and vision. In data science, “unstructured” data usually refers to data that’s not arranged according to a preset data model or schema, like invoices or sensor data. Atindriyo Sanyal — Galileo’s second co-founder — makes the case that the Excel- and Python script–based processes to ensure quality data is being fed into models are manual, error-prone and costly. A screenshot of the Galileo Community Edition. Image Credits: Galileo “When inspecting their data with Galileo, users instantly uncover the long tail of data errors such as mislabeled data, underrepresented languages [and] garbage data that they can immediately take action upon within Galileo by removing, re-labeling or by adding additional similar data from production,” Sanyal told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “It has been critical for teams that Galileo supports machine learning data workflows end to end — even when a model is in production, Galileo automatically lets teams know of data drifts, and surfaces the highest-value data to train with next.” The co-founding team at Galileo spent more than a decade building machine learning products, where they say they faced the challenges of developing AI systems firsthand. Chatterji led product management at Google AI, while Sanyal spearheaded engineering at Uber’s AI division and was an early member of the Siri team at Apple. Third Galileo co-founder Yash Sheth is another Google veteran, having previously led the company’s speech recognition platform team. Galileo’s platform falls into the burgeoning category of software known as MLOps, a set of tools to deploy and maintain machine learning models in production. It’s in serious demand. By one estimation, the market for MLOps could reach $4 billion by 2025. There’s no shortage of startups going after the space, like Comet, which raised $50 million last November. Other vendors with VC backing include Arize, Tecton, Diveplane, Iterative and Taiwan-based InfuseAI. But despite having launched just a few months ago, Galileo has paying customers from “high-growth” startups to Fortune 500 companies, Sanyal claims. “Our customers are using Galileo while building machine learning applications such as hate speech detection, caller intent detection at contact centers and customer experience augmentation with conversational AI,” he added. Sanyal expects the launch of Galileo’s free offering — Galileo Community Edition — will boost sign-ups further. The Community Edition enables data scientists working on natural language processing to build machine learning models using some of the tools included in the paid version, Sanyal said. “With Galileo Community Edition, anyone can sign up for free, add a few lines of code while training their model with labeled data or during an inference run with unlabeled data to instantly inspect, find and fix data errors, or select the right data to label next using the powerful Galileo UI,” he added. Sanyal declined to share revenue figures when asked. But he noted that San Francisco–based Galileo’s headcount has grown in size from 14 people in May to “more than” 20 people as of today.