funding

Travel app Hopper raises $96M from Capital One to double down on social commerce • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in App, Apps, capital one, funding, startup, Startups, Transportation, travel, travel bookingNo Comments

Evidently, the downturn hasn’t soured investors on the travel industry. Travel booking startup Hopper today announced that it closed a $96 million follow-on investment from Capital One, bringing the company’s total raised to close to $730 million. The fresh cash will be put toward several efforts, CEO and co-founder Frederic Lalonde said in a press release, including supporting Hopper’s new social commerce initiatives. As a part of the funding, Hopper says it’s extending its partnership with Capital One to create new travel products aimed at Capital One customers. Hopper’s tech already powers Capital One Travel and Premier Collection, Capital One’s marketplace of hotels and resorts exclusive to Capital One Venture X cardholders. It’s a safe bet that similar experiences along that vein are forthcoming. “With Hopper, we have found a partner who can not only match that pace, but help us continue to challenge the status quo and take a differentiated approach to building a world-class travel brand,” Capital One managing VP Matt Knise said in statement. “Through this strategic partnership, we’re well-positioned to adapt to a rapidly changing travel environment and create industry-leading solutions for our customers along their travel journey.” Founded by Frederic Lalonde and Joost Ouwerkerk in 2007, Hopper spent six years in stealth building what it claimed at the time was the “world’s largest structured database of travel information.” The company’s web-crawling tech ingested blogs, photo-sharing sites and other sources of information about locales and tagged them to a geolocation in a massive place database. But after Hopper’s public debut in 2014, the company’s leadership decided to pivot to mobile and devote engineering resources to flight prediction, building a tool that continuously monitors airline prices and sends price change alerts via push notification. Since the, Hopper has evolved into one of the largest travel apps in North America, with over 80 million downloads and sales of flights, hotels, homes and rental cars on the platform set to exceed $4.5 billion this year. Hopper differentiates itself from rival travel services (e.g. Travelocity) with features such as airfare price freezes and flight disruption guarantees, the former of which the company says represents about 40% of its total app revenue. Last year, Hopper ventured into the business-to-business market with the launch of Hopper Cloud, a partnership program that allows travel providers including Kayak, Marriott and Trip.com to resell Hopper’s fintech and travel agency products through a white-label portal. Hopper claims that Cloud has seen a rapid uptake, now comprising more than 40% of Hopper’s business; Lalonde claims that Hopper Cloud is on track to make more in 2022 than all of Hopper did in last year. On the consumer side, this spring, Hopper shifted its focus to in-app promotions, discounts and sales events. Social commerce is the company’s next big push, anchored by features like referrals, share-to-earn, team buying and daily gift, which reward users for with discounts on travel purchases for launching the app and engaging in sharing with friends. Hopper was last valued at $5 billion, ZebethMedia reported in early February. The company — which has an estimated 11.2% of the third-party air travel market in the U.S. — plans to eventually go public.

EdgeDB raises $15M ahead of the launch of its cloud database service • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in Accel, Apps, EdgeDB, Enterprise, funding, Nava Ventures, relational database, startup, StartupsNo Comments

EdgeDB, the startup looking to modernize databases for cutting-edge apps, today announced that it raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Nava Ventures and Accel. The new capital brings the startup’s total raised to $19 million, which CEO Yury Selivanov said will be used to boost headcount and launch the previously announced hosted version of EdgeDB’s database solution, EdgeDB Cloud. “Cloud, which in our case is a database-as-a-service, requires significant investment upfront to build a reliable and scalable infrastructure,” Selivanov told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “We plan on eventually introducing turn-key integrations with Vercel, Netlify, GitHub, GitLab, Sentry, DataDog and many other services, making EdgeDB Cloud the key component of future application stacks.” Selivanov co-founded EdgeDB with Elvis Pranskevichus in 2022, after co-launching a software development consultancy called MagicStack in Toronto in 2008. As they began to create bespoke tooling for clients, the founders came to the realization that they wanted to lead a purely product-driven company as opposed to a consulting firm. And so EdgeDB was born. EdgeDB’s product is fundamentally a relational database, or a collection of data items with predefined relationships between them. But Selivanov makes the case that EdgeDB “reinvents pretty much every concept” about relational databases, introducing its own high-level data model, a query language called EdgeQL, a low-latency network protocol and a set of tools to handle day-to-day operations like installing the database and making backups. Image Credits: EdgeDB “EdgeDB’s extensive feature set was always guided by solving the real pain points we observed the industry has with databases,” Selivanov said. “Technical decision-makers appreciate the low friction of building with EdgeDB compared to most other relational database products on the market.” EdgeDB competes with PlanetScale, Supabase and Prisma for dominance in the relational database market. At least one forecaster believes it could be worth $18.8 billion by 2026, growing nearly 40% from 2021. It’s been a rockier-than-anticipated road to revenue — while Selivanov told ZebethMedia in April that he expected EdgeDB would be generating revenue in Q4 2022, he now expects it won’t be until “late Q1 2023.” Selivanov blames that on the delayed launch of EdgeDB Cloud, which was originally set for 2022. But he stresses that EdgeDB’s 14-person team is heads-down, continuing to build out the database’s architecture and query language. “After successful launches of EdgeDB v1.0 and v2.0, we could easily demonstrate that people love the product and now is the right time to focus on the hosted version. Raising money at that point felt like the natural next step,” Selivanov said. “In the next release we plan to introduce a visual constructor for queries and a visualization UI for explaining queries performance … We will also be expanding the list of programming languages we natively support.” EdgeDB also has the advantage of backing from notable angels in the software dev space, including ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner, Firebase co-founder James Tamplin, ex-IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano, Netlify co-founder Mathias Biilmann and Sentry co-founder David Cramer. OpenAI co-founder and CTO Greg Brockman is another supporter, having invested in EdgeDB’s seed round this spring.

OpenAI will give roughly 10 AI startups $1M each and early access to its systems • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in AI, artificial intelligence, funding, OpenAI, Robotics & AI, startup, Startups, VentureNo Comments

OpenAI, the San Francisco-based lab behind AI systems like GPT-3 and DALL-E 2, today launched a new program to provide early-stage AI startups with capital and access to OpenAI tech and resources. Called Converge, the cohort will be financed by the OpenAI Startup Fund, OpenAI says. The $100 million entrepreneurial tranche was announced last May and was backed by Microsoft and other partners. The 10 or so founders chosen for Converge will receive $1 million each and admission to five weeks of office hours, workshops and events with OpenAI staff, as well as early access to OpenAI models and “programming tailored to AI companies.” “We’re excited to meet groups across all phases of the seed stage, from pre-idea solo founders to co-founding teams already working on a product,” OpenAI writes in a blog post shared with ZebethMedia ahead of today’s announcement. “Engineers, designers, researchers, and product builders … from all backgrounds, disciplines, and experience levels are encouraged to apply, and prior experience working with AI systems is not required.” The deadline to apply is November 25, but OpenAI notes that it’ll continue to evaluate applications after that date for future cohorts. When OpenAI first detailed the OpenAI Startup Fund, it said recipients of cash from the fund would receive access to Azure resources from Microsoft. It’s unclear whether the same benefit will be afforded to Converge participants; we’ve asked OpenAI to clarify. We’ve also asked OpenAI to disclose the full terms for Converge, including the equity agreement, and we’ll update this piece once we hear back. Beyond Converge, surprisingly, there aren’t many incubator programs focused exclusively on AI startups. The Allen Institute for AI has a small accelerator that launched in 2017, which provides up to a $500,000 pre-seed investment and up to $450,000 in cloud compute credits. Google Brain founder Andrew Ng heads up the AI Fund, a $175 million tranche to initiate new AI-centered businesses and companies. And Nat Friedman (formerly of GitHub) and Daniel Gross (ex-Apple) fund the AI Grant, which provides up to $250,000 for “AI-native” product startups and $250,000 in cloud credits from Azure. With Converge, OpenAI is no doubt looking to cash in on the increasingly lucrative industry that is AI. The Information reports that OpenAI — which itself is reportedly in talks to raise cash from Microsoft at a nearly $20 billion valuation — has agreed to lead financing of Descript, an AI-powered audio and video editing app, at a valuation of around $550 million. AI startup Cohere is said to be negotiating a $200 million round led by Google, while Stability AI, the company supporting the development of generative AI systems, including Stable Diffusion, recently raised $101 million. The size of the largest AI startup financing rounds doesn’t necessarily correlate with revenue, given the enormous expenses (personnel, compute, etc.) involved in developing state-of-the-art AI systems. (Training Stable Diffusion alone cost around $600,000, according to Stability AI.) But the continued willingness of investors to cut these startups massive checks — see Inflection AI‘s $225 million raise, Anthropic’s $580 million in new funding and so on — suggests that they have confidence in an eventual return on investment.

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.

Heylo wants to help you build your own little social circles for events • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in funding, Social, Startups, worklife venturesNo Comments

If you’ve worked at large tech companies, you’ve probably seen that a bunch of groups show up, whether officially or unofficially. Google calls ’em Employee Resource Groups (ERG), Facebook has its internal version of Facebook with groups, and other orgs have systems that range from listservs that have been running since the 1990s, to internal Slack groups, or perhaps a Mighty Network or two. Heylo just raised some money to bring these types of special interest groups to startups and companies of all sizes, giving employees a way to help each other in novel ways. “After working at Google and other corporate jobs for a decade, a sense of purpose was missing in my life. I tried new activities — running, reading and even teaching myself how to do a backflip. But after years, I still felt empty because I was pursuing these activities alone,” said Eric Winters, Heylo’s CEO & founder, in an interview with ZebethMedia. “I tried to join groups, but struggled to belong. After years of searching, I finally found the right group. It changed my life. I had experiences I could never imagine and met people I never knew existed. Too many people feel the way I did — a little lost, a little lonely. I found my calling by helping people belong to great groups.” Heylo was founded in 2019, by Xooglers (that’s ex-Googler) Eric Winters and Brandon Pearcy. They bootstrapped the company to profitability, and today announced they raised $1.5 million in a round led by Worklife Ventures to bring their product to the whole world. One of the core problems the group solves is payments; if you’re arranging an outing at work, receiving payments in cash or Venmo is possible, of course, but that gets messy once you scale your event past 30 or so; who has paid, who hasn’t, what-have-you. In addition to payments, the software streamlines group chats, event details, DMs among members, booking and waitlist features, etc. The lead investors are Charles Hudson from Precursor Ventures and Brianne Kimmel from Worklife. “Before the pandemic, millions of people had much simpler lives. They went to an office every day and their co-workers were often their most important relationships. Now, with remote work, people have lost that workplace camaraderie and must proactively cultivate relationships based on common interests,” said Brianne Kimmel of Worklife Ventures. “New kinds of social groups are on the rise: running groups, kayaking groups, book clubs, roller skating, volleyball, it’s endless. I see Heylo as being the glue and toolkit that makes these groups easy to organize and manage. More importantly, I see Heylo as a catalyst for the creation of groups that wouldn’t otherwise exist.” “Charles has been a seed investor for over 20 years. He has seen all the pitches and advised companies large and small. Moreover, he’s a sincere and genuinely good person. He knows everyone, and you can’t find anyone to say a bad thing about him. We are huge beneficiaries of his expertise and network,” said Winters. “Brianne is a leader herself. Worklife brings people together, literally, in their community spaces. Brianne has been instrumental in hiring and go-to-market strategy. She encourages us to think big and make a meaningful impact on the leaders we support.” By day, Josh Goldman is a doctor at UCLA. By night, he is the co-founder of the Electric Athletic Club, a social fitness group. He has grown EAC to multiple cities throughout the US and unites his members through active, social lifestyles. Image Credit: Heylo / Michael Rodmaker The company’s near-term goal is to help group members get so much value from their group that they are happy to pay for it, in turn using that as leverage not only to provide resources for leaders, but it increases participation and engagement from members. Under the mantra “We value what we pay for,” Heylo has helped groups launch memberships, host paid events and receive donations. The company claims that in many cases, its platform offered the first time for leaders to receive meaningful money from their group. “Heylo has collected over $500,000 for our initial cohort of leaders, and their groups are growing and engaged more than ever,” says Winters, He explains his longer-term vision: “Heylo will change the paradigm for leaders. No longer will leading a group be a cost center in their life. It can become a financially viable pursuit — one that is equally fulfilling and entrepreneurial. We want to inspire the next generation of creators to lead groups. The world doesn’t need more content or online products. We need more leaders who can build community and make a positive impact on their members.”

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.

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.

Digital card and gifting platform Givingli nabs $10M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Apps, Commerce, funding, gifting, Givingli, StartupsNo Comments

Three years ago, Ben and Nicole Green were planning their wedding and decided to go digital with registries to save on money and materials. But when it came time to gift others, while they preferred going the digital route — as they did with their wedding — they found that digital gifting platforms on the web didn’t meet their criterion. “We noticed there was no platform we would actually want to use,” Nicole Green told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “In combination, I recognized there was a gap in the market for a more genuine and authentic way for people to connect and celebrate one another in the digital age.” So in 2019, Ben and Nicole co-founded Givingli, an online gifting service that lets users customize digital greetings and send gifts to anyone. The company today announced that it raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Seven Seven Six, the VC firm founded by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, with participation from Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke. The proceeds bring the 13-person, Los Angeles–based company’s total raised to $13 million. “We’re doubling down on Givingli because they’ve continued to not just organically grow, but thrive — even during these uncertain times — by productizing kindness & connection,” Ohanian told ZebethMedia via email. “This is as much a social network as it is a gifting platform and it’s been valuable for all sides: artists who design the gifts, brands who are partners, and ultimately the gift givers and receivers who keep coming back and spreading the word.” Image Credits: Givingli Indeed, Nicole sees Givingli as more than your average digital gift marketplace. The service offers messaging features, including group chats with family and friends, who can react with tokens of appreciation to e-cards and e-gifts. Users get reminders for friends’ and families’ birthdays. And for cards, which can be shared via email, text or social media, customers can choose from designs contributed by independent artists and brand partners such as Starbucks, Nike and Target — and add their own photos or videos in addition to writing text. In 2020, Givingli launched a partnership with Snap that brought its gifting service inside of Snapchat via an in-app integration. The company’s current focus is a desktop app, launching soon in early access, which Nicole says will “bring even more features for power gifters.” (Givingli was previously iOS only.) “People are looking for more accessible and practical options to stay connected and celebrate a special relationship in their lives. They’re looking to share love and words of compassion from a distance,” Nicole said. “Givingli is focused on the heart and sentiment of gifting, while sparing our customers from losing time on travel, waste and stress.” Will platforms like Givingli ever replace physical gifting? That seems unlikely (see American Greetings). But there are signs that the demand for digital gifting solutions is growing. A June 2022 survey from Incisiv — sponsored by digital gifting vendor GiftNow, granted — found that 67% of consumers prefer instant digital gifts. Allied Market Research estimates that the market for digital gift cards alone was worth $258.34 billion in 2020. Givingli makes money by charging users a monthly subscription fee for access to the platform, plus additional fees for premium cards. Nicole wouldn’t comment on revenue but said that “millions” of people have used the service to date. “The pandemic has sped things up and we’ve been moving fast to keep up,” Nicole said. “We’re going to use this latest funding round to create more of that value for all members of our community — from loyal and daily users to our trusted brand and loyal partners, with desirable cards and gifts on the platform.”

Arnica raises $7M to improve software supply chain security • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 31, 2022Posted in Arnica, Enterprise, First Rays Venture Partners, funding, Security, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Everybody wants to talk about software supply chain risks these days, whether that’s security teams, developers or government officials. It’s no surprise then, that VCs, despite the current economic climate, continue to fund startups in this space, too. One of the newest members in this club is Arnica, a startup that takes a somewhat broader view of supply chain security than most of its competitors and helps companies. The company today announced that it has raised a $7 million seed round. The round was led by Joule Ventures and First Rays Venture Partners. A number of angel investors, including Avi Shua (co-founder & CEO of Orca Security), Dror Davidoff (co-founder & CEO of Aqua Security) and Baruch Sadogursky (head of Developer Relations at JFrog), also participated in this round. Arnica founding team. Image Credits: Arnica “As a former buyer of application security products, I tested more than a dozen solutions for securing my previous company’s software supply chain but reached a dead end. Most products were expensive visibility dashboards driven by varying definitions of “best practices,” said Arnica CEO and co-founder Nir Valtman. “We decided to provide this visibility for free, for unlimited users, forever. We went further though and developed a comprehensive solution to not only identify risks based on historical and anomalous behavior but also to mitigate them. We do this by using automated workflows with single-click mitigations that empower developers to own security from within the tools they already use.” The team argues that supply chain attacks succeed because of inefficient developer access management or the inability to detect anomalous identity or code behavior. So that’s where Arnica comes in. Its behavior-based approach combines access management and a service that can detect anomalous developer behavior that could be the result of a breach. “Each of our machine learning algorithms have thousands of features that identify whether it was actually the developer who wrote the pushed code,” explained Valtman. “When an anomaly is detected, it kicks off an immediate workflow to validate it with the developer in a simple and secure way. It is not only good for the company, but also good for developers.” There’s also secret detection to avoid leaking those, a service that continuously monitors security and compliance and tools for identifying the open source libraries used across an organization, which can also compile a full software bill of materials (SBOM). The company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its go-to-market and R&D efforts, with a focus on expanding its automated workflows and mitigation capabilities. “In a market full of security solutions adding only incremental value, Arnica’s instant resolution-oriented approach is a game changer for enterprise dev teams,” said Brian Rosenzweig, partner at Joule Ventures. “Arnica goes beyond just flagging security problems — every issue that is identified can be immediately addressed with a provided one-click fix. This allows businesses to quickly protect their software supply chain from attacks, while behavior-based detection ensures it remains secure in the long term. Arnica’s pragmatic approach and advanced technology enable companies to avoid costly breaches without compromising on agility.”