funding

Integration platform Cinchy lands fresh cash to connect data sources • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Apps, data integration, Enterprise, funding, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Cinchy, a startup that provides a data management service for enterprise customers, today announced that it raised $14.5 million in Series B funding led by Forgepoint Capital with participation from IVP, SUV, Techstars and Mars. Bringing the company’s total raised to $24 million, the capital will be put toward scaling Cinchy’s outreach and continuing to invest in the startup’s core technology, CEO Dan DeMers told ZebethMedia in an interview. “Data management remains an expensive chore, and a proliferation of apps producing an ever-increasing volume of data only adds to the challenge. As a result, rather than being a business driver or competitive advantage, data is more often a drain on IT budgets and a nightmare for compliance teams,” DeMers said. “The Cinchy platform addresses many of the challenges associated with today’s IT environments, specifically those defined by data silos, data copies and complex code.” DeMers co-founded Cinchy with Karanjot Jaswal in 2017 with the ambitious goal of abstracting away data integration processes. DeMers was previously the director of prime finance and futures technology at Citi, where he built and managed a tech delivery and support services group for brokerage. Jaswal was also at Citi, working on the data warehouse team on risk and margin. Both DeMers and Jasawal perceived that companies were struggling to overcome data integration hurdles. To their point, in a recent IBM survey, 40% of IT leaders said their data integrations are getting too expensive while 19% believe their current data integration solutions can’t handle all data sources. “The existing app- and API-centric architecture requires individual apps to manage their own data, and this means every new app or API adds yet another data silo,” DeMers said. “It’s like a tax on innovation that only gets worse with every new solution that’s delivered.” Cinchy aims to solve this by enabling organizations to decouple data from apps and other silos by connecting them to a “network-based” platform. Project teams first connect data from core systems, software-as-a-service apps and spreadsheets to the platform — Cinchy handles things like data backup, data versioning and data engagement tracking without actually hosting the data. Admins can access the platform to view, edit or query data for individuals and teams. Other users with the right permissions can engage with the data to build data models. Image Credits: Cinchy Cinchy uses the platform itself to run its business. Employees have self-serve access to discover, query, create and change data, DeMers says. Changes to data are version-controlled, access-controlled and available to apps and users based on granular controls. “Anyone who’s experienced the collaboration and efficiency of collaboration tools like Google Drive and Docs will understand the significance of bringing those capabilities to organizational data,” DeMers said. “The outcomes in terms of speed, efficiency, control and creative problem-solving are staggering.” DeMers sees Cinchy competing with any vendor that promises to simplify data integration. There’s a fair number out there, including Equalum, Airbyte, Hevo Data and Jitsu — all chasing after a market that could be worth $22.28 billion by 2027. Demand for data integrations solutions certainly appears high, with a 2020 survey from Dresner Advisory Services finding that 67% of enterprises were relying on data integration to support analytics and business intelligence platforms and that 24% were planning to in the next 12 months. But DeMers argues that most are focused on workarounds to better deal with data fragmentation, particularly in the context of analytics. “Most products that may be seen to be competing with Cinchy are in fact only exacerbating the challenges to agility and compliance associated with data integration,” he said. Rivals no doubt disagree. It’s true, though, that Cinchy has a growing customer base, particularly in the financial industry — suggesting that it’s winning over businesses. Adopters span institutions like TD Bank, National Bank and Natixis; Cinchy recently launched a credit union edition of the platform to better serve financial institutions. “Organizations everywhere are looking for ways to save money while continuing to capitalize on market opportunities with new solutions. This is why we’re confident that the Cinchy platform will increasingly appeal to chief experience officers and team leaders tasked with bridging these priorities,” DeMers said. “Cinchy … enables organizations to liberate their data from applications, spreadsheets, and other silos and make it [available] for real-time collaboration whenever and wherever it’s needed.” Toronto-based Cinchy, which has just over 50 employees, is currently hiring.

Devtron raises fresh capital for its cloud DevOps platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Apps, Dev, devops, Enterprise, funding, Insight Partners, StartupsNo Comments

The cloud-native market has seen the introduction of a range of open source DevOps tools — tools that combine software development and IT operations — built to address very specific use cases. As a result, DevOps teams today have too many narrow choices that don’t work together seamlessly or that can’t be integrated into a single platform. At least, that’s the opinion of Prashant Ghildiyal, one of the co-founders of Devtron, a startup offering a platform to address what he believes are the top challenges facing the DevOps space. A container management system, Devtron offers a low-code delivery platform optimized for Kubernetes. (“Containers” are packages of software that contain the necessary elements to run in any environment.) The platform handles app management, security and more, providing an interface that abstracts away the underlying infrastructure. To Ghildiyal’s point, there’s evidence to suggest that there’s a gap between DevOps adoption and success. In a 2019 Harvard Business Review survey, only 10% of developers said that their companies were successful at building and deploying software quickly, with less than half (48%) saying their organization always relies on DevOps methodologies. A separate, more recent poll by infrastructure automation company Puppet found that companies were hitting a number of DevOps speed bumps in the race to be cloud native, including a skills shortage, issues with legacy architecture, organizational resistance to change and limited or lack of automation. Investors are keen on Devtron, as evidenced by the company today closing a $12 million funding round led by Insight Partners. “Devtron integrates with products across the lifecycle of microservices, and in particular Kubernetes, enabling its users to deploy faster and automate their CI/CD pipelines without worrying about Kubernetes knowhow,” Insight Partners principal Josh Zelman told ZebethMedia via email. Ghildiyal says that he and Devtron’s other co-founders, Nishant Kumar and Rajesh Razdan, experienced the challenges of scaling DevOps firsthand in their previous roles as heads of technology and software architects at various startups. Their experiences informed Devtron’s design, which Ghildiyal describes as “DevOps in a box,” with tools that provide audit logs and metrics showing the state of an organization’s DevOps maturity. Devtron also provides tools for access controls and policy management, as well as environment orchestration, software delivery workflow and cost. “This saves significant time and resources to build and deploy in production,” Zelman added. Ghildiyal sees Devtron competing against formidable incumbent vendors like GitLab and Harness in a DevOps market that was worth an estimated $4 billion in 2020, according to Global Market Insights. (That’s not to mention startups like Render, which raised $20 million last November after winning our Disrupt SF 2019 Startup Battlefield.) When asked about clients, Ghildiyal said Devtron has “several” unicorns and growth-stage companies as commercial customers, but he declined to reveal names — or Devtron’s revenue. Ghildiyal said that India-based Devtron’s principal focuses post-fundraise will be resources and cost optimizations to “enable DevOps automation and efficiency at scale.”

Unito, a platform for managing SaaS apps, raises $30M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Apps, Enterprise, funding, SaaS, software as a service, startup, Startups, UnitoNo Comments

Unito, a startup offering a service to bring together disparate software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms — for example, Jira and Trello — today announced it raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by CDPQ’s Equity 253 fund with participation from Rainfall Ventures, Investissement Québec, Bessemer Venture Partners, Tom Williams and Mistral Venture Partners. The new cash brings the company’s total raised to $33 million, which CEO Marc Boscher says is being put toward product development and expanding Unito’s headcount from 65 people to 70 by the end of the year. SaaS tool usage is on the rise, with corporate teams now using 40 to 60 tools on average; a 2019 report from Blissfully found companies were spending around $343,000 per year on SaaS. But while SaaS apps have become the lifeblood of organizations, they can often be unwieldy. In a 2021 survey, enterprise architecture startup LeanIX found that businesses rarely have common standards when it comes to responsibility for SaaS management. On a mission to uncover a solution — or invent a new one — Boscher and Eryk Warren joined Montreal’s Founder Institute program in 2015. Boscher hails from the IT industry, while Warren has software engineering experience, having worked at startups in Montreal, including events ticketing system Outbox Technology and Fluential. Boscher and Warren founded Unito that same year, in late 2015, as they finally arrived at a way to help companies manage SaaS sprawl. Rather than build a new project management or collaboration platform, the two co-founders created two-way integrations with automatic syncing between existing SaaS tools. “The massive proliferation of online tools is causing nearly as many headaches as it solves,” Boscher told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “[T]ools made for collaboration can actually hinder collaboration, as they become virtual information silos … There are more SaaS tools than ever before and remote work is forcing companies to adopt these digital solutions, which leads to fragmentation and less control over tools as people work from anywhere on any device.” Configuring workflows using Unito’s cloud platform. Image Credits: Unito Unito attempts to ease this fragmentation by letting IT teams choose which apps they wish to connect — supported apps include GitLab, HubSpot, Google Sheets, ClickUp, Salesforce and Wrike — and authorize the Unito service to access them. Users with admin access can then map how other users, lists, custom fields and more travel among and leverage the various connected tools. On the back end, Unito provides analytics, including usage statistics and executive reporting for IT resource planning. The platform also acts as a secure gateway, limiting access to SaaS apps to only authorized users. Boscher argues that Unito can even save companies money by reducing seat requirements and “optimizing” software licensing. “Two-way syncing means developers can stay in their software development tools, and business teams in their project management tools — no doubling up on licenses to allow collaboration,” he added. “Eliminating hours of manual copying and pasting and always having the right information in your tools is key for agile and high-velocity teams.” True or not, many vendors claim to achieve this with their own tools for SaaS app management. Beamy recently raised $9 million to further develop its platform to detect and orchestrate SaaS apps. Torri, which is also venture backed, aims to bring businesses together around the cloud apps they use so they can discover all the apps they have — and automatically take action on those most appropriate for return on investment. Those are just the tip of the SaaS management iceberg — see BetterCloud, Lumos and Paragon for other examples. But Boscher believes there’s breathing room yet in the budding market. He points to findings from Gartner, which suggest 50% of organizations using multiple SaaS apps will centralize orchestration and usage of these apps using a SaaS management platform — an increase from less than 20% in 2021. “Unito’s competitors include integration software-as-a-service players like Zapier and its copycats, which boast thousands of easy to use but shallow one-way connectors, and integration platform-as-a-service players like Workato and Tray.io, which offer deeper one-way integrations but are difficult to use and need professional services and/or developers for implementation,” Boscher said, touting the ostensible advantages of Unito’s two-way syncing tech. “Unito’s two-way sync provides users with the most recent data from any work app and shares it in real-time based on customized fields and rules set by the user.” Boscher claims Unito has more than 50,000 users across 7,000 companies, including Atlassian, Corpay, Teamwork, the Cincinnati Reds and Wrike, with workflows in IT, project management, sales, spreadsheets and the software development domains. This year alone, Unito’s inbound monthly sign-ups doubled in six months, he says. And while Boscher wouldn’t reveal revenue, he noted that Unito is still hiring. “Having taken startups through two recessions before, Unito founders are taking hiring slow and keeping the bar high … Unito has always kept burn in line with growth,” Boscher said. “Unito aims to become the universal translator for enterprises by letting any team or department set up deep integrations on their own, while keeping IT in control at the governance and security level.”

LatticeFlow raises $12M to eliminate computer vision blind spots • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Atlantic Bridge, Enterprise, funding, LatticeFlow, machine learning, openocean, StartupsNo Comments

LatticeFlow, a startup that was spun out of Zurich’s ETH in 2020, helps machine learning teams improve their AI vision models by automatically diagnosing issues and improving both the data and the models themselves. The company today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series A funding round led by Atlantic Bridge and OpenOcean, with participation from FPV Ventures. Existing investors btov Partners and Global Founders Capital, which led the company’s $2.8 million seed round last year, also participated in this round. As LatticeFlow co-founder and CEO Petar Tsankov told me, the company currently has more than 10 customers in both Europe and the U.S., including a number of large enterprises like Siemens and organizations like the Swiss Federal Railways, and is currently running pilots with quite a few more. It’s this customer demand that led LatticeFlow to raise at this point. “I was in the States and I met with some investors in Palo Alto, Tsankov explained. “They saw the bottleneck that we have with onboarding customers. We literally had machine learning engineers supporting customers and that’s not how you should run the company. And they said: ‘OK, take $12 million, bring these people in and expand.’ That was great timing for sure because when we talked to other investors, we did see that the market has changed.” As Tsankov and his co-founder CTO Pavol Bielik noted, most enterprises today have a hard time bringing their models into production and then, when they do, they often realize that they don’t perform as well as they expected. The promise of LatticeFlow is that it can auto-diagnose the data and models to find potential blind spots. In its work with a major medical company, its tools to analyze their datasets and models quickly found more than half a dozen critical blind spots in their state-of-the-art production models, for example. The team noted that it’s not enough to only look at the training data and ensure that there is a diverse set of images — in the case of the vision models that LatticeFlow specializes in — but also examine the models. LatticeFlow founding team (from left to right): Prof. Andreas Krause (scientific advisor), Dr. Petar Tsankov (CEO), Dr. Pavol Bielik (CTO) and Prof. Martin Vechev (scientific advisor). Image Credits: LatticeFlow “If you only look at the data — and this is a fundamental differentiator for LatticeFlow because we not only find the standard data issues like labeling issues or poor-quality samples, but also model blind spots, which are the scenarios where the models are failing,” Tsankov explained. “Once the model is ready, we can take it, find various data model issues and help companies fix it.” He noted, for example, that models will often find hidden correlations that may confuse the model and skew the results. In working with an insurance customer, for example, who used an ML model to automatically detect dents, scratches and other damage in images of cars, the model would often label an image with a finger in it as a scratch. Why? Because in the training set, customers would often take a close-up picture with a scratch and point at it with their finger. Unsurprisingly, the model would then correlate “finger” with “scratch,” even when there was no scratch on the car. Those are issues, the LatticeFlow teams argues, that go beyond creating better labels and need a service that can look at both the model and the training data. LatticeFlow uncovers a bias in data for training car damage inspection AI models. Because people often point at scratches, this causes models to learn that fingers indicate damage (a spurious feature). This issue is fixed with a custom augmentation that removes fingers from all images. Image Credits: LatticeFlow LatticeFlow itself, it is worth noting, isn’t in the training business. The service works with pre-trained models. For now, it also focuses on offering its service as an on-prem tool, though it may offer a fully managed service in the future, too, as it uses the new funding to hire aggressively, both to better service its existing customers and to build out its product portfolio. “The painful truth is that today, most large-scale AI model deployments simply are not functioning reliably in the real world,” said Sunir Kapoor, operating partner at Atlantic Bridge. “This is largely due to the absence of tools that help engineers efficiently resolve critical AI data and model errors. But, this is also why the Atlantic Bridge team so unambiguously reached the decision to invest in LatticeFlow. We believe that the company is poised for tremendous growth, since it is currently the only company that auto-diagnoses and fixes AI data and model defects at scale.”

Greener wants to help consumers and businesses be more sustainable • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in Australia, Climate, funding, Greener, StartupsNo Comments

Many consumers and companies want to reduce their impact on the environment but may not know where to start or how to sustain the necessary changes. Founder of Greener, an Australian cleantech startup, Tom Ferrier, wants to help. He argues that sustainability and climate action doesn’t need to be complicated. His startup is geared towards simplifying the decision-making process to help consumers and businesses understand sustainability and reduce their emissions, such as by making different purchasing decisions — and he points to a statistic that suggests around 88% of consumers in the U.S. and the U.K want businesses to help them be more sustainable. For consumers, Greener offers an app that links to the user’s bank account, enabling customers to learn about their carbon impact and get suggestions to make better choices on shopping greener based on potential purchases for 250+ brands. “For consumers, it is as simple as downloading the app and securely connecting their bank account using our open banking technology partner Basiq, to start tracking their carbon footprint [of every dollar spent],” he said. “Once a new user signs up to Greener, open banking technology alongside data and expertise from the world’s leading climate scientists, enables the Greener app to instantly calculate the greenhouse gas emissions of the user’s spending.” When asked about users’ data privacy, Perrier explained that Basiq open banking makes it easy for Greener customers to sign up and connect their bank account. “Basiq open banking also allows us to securely pass anonymous, aggregated data back to businesses to provide them with insights that will help them build customer loyalty and attract even more climate-conscious customers,” Ferrier said. Offering a double-sided tech solution, Greener also provides tailored solutions for businesses of all sizes towards reducing their footprint based on business type, size, business model and current sustainable activities. Ferrier told ZebethMedia that a business can see where they are on the sustainability journey and is provided with personalized, clear advice on what they can do to reduce their carbon emissions and waste. From its consumer app trials, the company saw that it was able to help shoppers reduce the emissions of their purchases by 23%. The company also saw upwards of 10% of customer growth, with shoppers switching to greener businesses from non-green competition services. The startup is announcing a seed raise of 4 million AUD today ($2.5 million), led by NAB Ventures with participation from RealVC. It plans to use the funding to continue its product development, which is currently in beta, and ramp up to the public launch of its consumer app and Greener for Business solutions next year. “Although there are other carbon tracking and offset platforms in the market, no other business is tackling the climate solution from both sides – consumer and business,” Ferrier argued. Greener’s app is free for consumers, while businesses fund the model at a low margin and can be rewarded with new customers and personalized services, he told ZebethMedia. L-R: Co-founders of Greener, Tom Ferrier and Neil McVeigh (Image credits: Greener) Greener suggests the opportunity is enormous as 300g of CO2 is attached to every dollar spent, with $184 billion spent globally every day. The major challenge facing climate action is awareness, Ferrier continued. He added that the company sees education as the solution, closing the gap between motivation and know-how, and rewarding consumers and businesses for their efforts. The startup has partnered with a number of brands, such as Microsoft, T2 Tea, Scoop Wholefoods, Brew Dog, Huskee and Go for Zero, since its inception in 2019. Greener has also partnered with the City of Sydney and the Australian Retailer Association (ARA) to help their members accelerate net-zero strategies. Greener’s previous backers include Phil Vernon, former CEO of the managed investment fund Australian Ethical. “We all have a part to play in climate action and NAB certainly recognises our role,” said Todd Forest, managing director of NAB Ventures, in a statement. “We’re continuously looking at ways we can support our customers and colleagues to take action to reduce their carbon footprint and we think Greener’s product has great potential. Greener is an excellent fit for NAB Ventures and we look forward to working with them and exploring further opportunities together.”

Fermyon raises $20M to build tools for cloud app dev • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 24, 2022Posted in Amplify Partners, Apps, cloud, Dev, Enterprise, Fermyon, funding, Insight Partners, startup, Startups, WebAssemblyNo Comments

Matt Butcher and Radu Matei worked on container technologies for years, “containers” in this context referring to software packages containing all the necessary elements to run in any environment, from desktop PCs to servers. As engineers at Deis, and then DeisLabs once Microsoft acquired it in 2017, their team explored the container landscape and built the package manager Helm as well as Brigade and other tooling. Along the journey, they faced myriad problems with containers — namely speed and cost. The setbacks spurred them and a handful of other DeisLabs veterans to found Fermyon, which today closed a $20 million Series A funding round led by Insight Partners with participation from Amplify Partners and angel investors. Fermyon offers a managed cloud service, Fermyon Cloud, that allows developers to quickly build microservices, or pieces of apps that work independently, but together (e.g., if one microservice fails, it won’t bring down the others). “Fermyon is building the next wave of cloud services atop WebAssembly,” Butcher said, referring to the open standard that allows web browsers to run binary code. “Originally written for the browser, WebAssembly has all of the earmarks of an excellent cloud compute platform … [Its] combination of features got us excited. Fermyon set out to build a suite of tools that enables developers to build, deploy, and then operate WebAssembly binaries in a cloud context.” Butcher argues WebAssembly is superior to containers in a number of respects, such as start-up time and compatibility across operating systems including Windows, Linux and Mac plus hardware platforms like Intel and Arm. It’s also more secure, he asserts, because it can safely execute even untrusted code. To explore WebAssembly’s container-replacing potential, Fermyon developed Spin, an open source dev tool for creating WebAssembly cloud apps. Fermyon Cloud is the evolution of this work, providing a platform where customers can host those apps. “Fermyon Cloud empowers developers to deploy … applications written in a variety of languages (such as Rust, .NET, Go, JavaScript) and experience brilliantly fast performance,” Butcher said. “[A]nyone with a GitHub account can create cloud native WebAssembly applications … The developer self-service paradigm reduces the friction of building applications by making it not only possible but easy for developers to write and test their code in a production-grade environment — and then deploy the finished version to that same hosted environment. Fermyon Cloud lets devs create up to five web apps or microservices and run them in a hosted environment for free. In addition to hosting applications, the service delivers release management, log access and app configuration from a web console. With employees now in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America, Fermyon’s focus is continuing to build out both its open source and commercial projects, Butcher said. Fermyon Cloud will expand into an “enterprise-ready” commercial offering in the coming months, he added, as Fermyon looks to double its 20-person headcount by mid-2023 — emphasizing product, marketing, developer relations and community roles. “We are well-positioned to weather macro-economic storms due to the financing we’re announcing today,” said Butcher while declining to reveal revenue figures. “[We] have funds to last us several years.” To date, Colorado-based Fermyon has raised $26 million.

Black startup founders raised just $187 million in the third quarter • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in black founders, EC DEI, EC venture capital, funding, Startups, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments

The amount of capital raised by Black entrepreneurs continues to decrease. The latest Crunchbase numbers show that Black founders raised $187 million in Q3, a staggering decline from the nearly $1.1 billion they received in Q3 2021 and a sizable drop from the $594 million the cohort raised in Q2. Black founders raised just 0.12% of the $150.9 billion deployed in Q3. Within that, Black women raised 49% of all the capital allocated to Black founders in Q3, according to Crunchbase, pacing the number at around $91.63 million. To grab crumbs, it’s good, at least, to see that Black men and women appeared to receive nearly equal amounts of funding this quarter, even though the number they split is appalling. Frankly, there are homes worth more than $187 million. Adam Neumann raised more in one round than all Black founders could in one quarter. Adele is worth $220 million. However, these numbers are not necessarily surprising. ZebethMedia reported investors often retreat to their networks amid economic downturns, taking fewer risks on minorities. “When the venture capital industry catches a cold, underrepresented founders catch pneumonia.” Tiana Tukes, investor, Colorful VC Perhaps this is best exemplified by the fact that the capital raised by Black founders this Q3 is roughly on par with the $180 million allocated to the cohort in Q3 2020. However, Black founders were able to raise that $187 million from just 32 deals, compared to 2020, when it took 93 deals to hit $180 million. In total, Black founders have raised a little more than $2 billion in venture capital this year, a decrease from the stunning $4.72 allocated in the record-breaking year that was 2021.

BeReal raised $60M in its Series B earlier this year, now has 20M DAUs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Apps, bereal, funding, Social, social media, StartupsNo Comments

BeReal, the photo-sharing app, has been a huge hit with Gen Z and beyond. Now with other big social apps rushing to clone some of its no-frills ethos, it’s put together a war chest to work on its next chapter. ZebethMedia has learned that the startup closed a round of $60 million earlier this year. The funding is coming in the form of a Series B and it values Paris, France–based BeReal at a valuation north of €600 million — which at today’s exchange rates is just under $587 million. (Exchange rates are tricky right now; the dollar is strong against other currencies in the face of global economic turmoil. When the Information first reported on some of the details of this round, it noted the premoney valuation of around $600 million. The size of the round had not previously been reported.) A source tells us that the company now has around 20 million DAUs. As a point of reference, the Information noted that the app had 7.9 million users as of July of this year. The numbers appear to indicate that despite efforts from competing social apps to reproduce the core of the BeReal experience — a two-photo set taken from a user’s front and back phone cameras, to be shared with friends at the same time each day — it ain’t nothing like the real thing, so to speak. The numbers are still only a small fraction of the users the world’s biggest social apps are attracting, but the velocity of BeReal’s growth, and its traction with the key demographic of young adults, have been strong fillips for those other apps to pay attention to how they can bring the same kind of experience into their own platforms. Others that have cloned the app include TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. (We’re not including the now-defunct FrontBack in the list.) Founded in 2019 by former GoPro employee Alexis Barreyat along with Kévin Perreau, BeReal began to take off in earnest earlier this year, as its Gen Z user base sent the app climbing the App Store charts. In April, app intelligence firm Apptopia reported BeReal had grown its installs by 315% year to date. BeReal itself is simple to use: once a day, it sends users a notification encouraging them to take a dual photo, or a “BeReal” — a combination of a selfie and a front-facing photo, snapped simultaneously. This experience intends to provide its users with a more authentic photo feed compared with the curated aesthetic found on Instagram. And the photos themselves disappear after 24 hours. The app’s appeal attracted a range of investors, culminating in a $30 million Series A, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel in June 2021. When the Information reported on the Series B earlier this year, it was said to be valuing the app at $100 per daily active user. As one of our sources described it to us, yes, the world of consumer apps has had a lot of examples of early juggernauts fizzling out (sad waves to YikYak, Peach, Yo and the rest). But in relative terms, BeReal’s fast growth and how it seemed to capture attention among a certain group of users made it enough of an interesting bet at this stage. It also came at a time when the app was reaching mainstream awareness — as apparent by the fact that it was the subject of an SNL skit in October. The big question now is how BeReal plans to use the funding and what its next moves might be to evolve its product. The app today has no business model, though the FT said it may be considering subscriptions. Data provided by Sensor Tower this month also found that, despite some 53 million lifetime installs, only 9% of BeReal users on Android were opening the app daily. This doesn’t correlate to real-world usage, though, because more of BeReal’s core user base — younger Gen Z users in the U.S. — tend to use iPhones.

Banyan raises $43M to grow its network of item-level purchase data • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Commerce, Enterprise, Fin Capital, Fintech, funding, M13, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Banyan, a platform for product purchase data that allows customers such as banks, fintechs, hotels and merchants to automate expense management and more, today announced that it raised $43 million in a Series A funding round — $28 million in equity and $15 million in debt — led by Fin Capital with participation from M13, FIS Impact Ventures and TTV Capital. A source familiar with the matter tells ZebethMedia that the valuation is in the “mid-$100 million” range. CEO Jehan Luth says that the new capital will be put toward product research and development and infrastructure growth, as well as toward expanding Banyan’s headcount from 46 employees to 50 by the end of the year. “This funding round positions Banyan well with ample runway to grow,” he told ZebethMedia in an email interview, noting that it brings the company’s total raised to $53 million. Banyan maintains a database of “SKU-level” data and a platform that leverages the database to enable companies to use purchase data in various ways (e.g., fraud prevention, loyalty programs and card-linked offers). For example, Banyan can integrate item-level purchase data into business banking or expense management apps, removing the need to organize receipts and expense reports. Elsewhere, the platform organizes, classifies and standardizes receipt data to enable merchants and their partners to target offers to specific items, categories and aisle-level subcategories they want to reward (think ad campaigns like “buy grilling equipment at grocer X and get 20% cash back”). Luth — who holds an associate’s degree in computer science from the University of Cambridge, a bachelor’s degree in food science from the Culinary Institute of America, and master’s degrees in epidemiology and law from the University of Pennsylvania — founded Banyan in 2019 after serving as technology director of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He claims one of the company’s major differentiators is that its network obtains data directly from first-party sources, such as merchants, and doesn’t collect personal information — addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and the like — “unless absolutely necessary” to deliver a service. “Merchants are a key collaborator in our network, providing secure purchase receipt data so that there is no need for screen scraping or problematic receipt snapshots with a mobile phone,” Luth said. “We are organizing and standardizing item-level data across all merchants so that it can be accurate and consistent when integrated into banking institution customer platforms.” Banyan claims to have processed billions of transactions and receipts from the over 35,000 merchant partners in its network. Luth, who declined to reveal the size of the company’s customer base, says it’s made up largely of banks and fintechs (he wouldn’t name names). “In an environment where many consumers are tightening their belts and rethinking brand loyalty, item-level data can be a key for retailers to offer real savings leveraging strategic ‘aisle’ budgets, while also managing inventory levels and efficiently driving sales retention,” Luth said, demurring when asked about Banyan’s revenue numbers. “Our investments will enable financial institutions to increase customer engagement by delivering personalized digital experiences, and enable merchants to streamline the purchase experience and create new sources of sales revenue along with improving their ability to manage inventories.”

Makersite lands $18M to help companies manage product supply chains • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 19, 2022Posted in Climate, environment, funding, Makersite, Planet A Ventures, Robotics & AI, startup, Startups, supply chain, sustainabilityNo Comments

In 2018, Neil D’Souza, a software engineer by trade and previously the VP of product development at Thinkstep, came to the realization that his ten-plus-year effort to solve enterprise product challenges in the areas of sustainability, compliance and risk were having little impact. The way he saw it, they took too long, which minimized their influence on product design choices. “For example, analyzing a car’s life cycle assessment can easily take an automotive company an entire year,” D’Souza told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Speed matters, otherwise the analysis just becomes a meaningless report.” That frustration was the genesis of his startup, Makersite, which aims to produce near-instant impact assessments in the areas of sustainability, compliance and risk to inform corporate-level decisions. Makersite, D’Souza says, is an attempt to bridge the gap between experts who know what “good” looks like from an environmental, cost, compliance or risk perspective and decision makers with control over the product supply chain. With over 30 customers including Microsoft, Cummins and Vestas and a balance sheet showing profitable operations over the last few years, Makersite is beginning to attract investor attention, this week securing $18 million in a Series A round with participation from Planet A Ventures. D’Souza says the tranche — Makersite’s first besides “a few convertible notes”; the company was bootstrapped until now — will be put toward work with integrators and resellers and expanding the size of Makersite’s team. “There are many companies out there that specialize in solving cost, compliance, risk or sustainability challenges. The problem is they each sit in siloes and the data they use is specialized to the people who work in those fields,” D’Souza said. “That’s what makes our solution different. We’re unique in the space as we’re the first to solve the challenge of bringing multi-criteria decision analysis to non-experts.” Using AI, Makersite maps a company’s product data against a material and supply chain database, generating automated reports. The idea is to help companies meet their sustainability goals while minimizing costs and keeping compliance at the forefront. The aforementioned database — which D’Souza says is among the largest of its kind — allows Makersite to identify contextual relationships to build a model of products and their supply chains automatically. The models cover not just what a product is made out of, but how every component or ingredient is manufactured — all the way from the mining resources to the factory floor. “[Makersite] enables a customer to drop in a bill of material for, say, a wind turbine, tell the AI that it’s a wind turbine, answer a few questions (e.g., about power output), and the system will automatically build a ‘cradle-to-grave’ model of that turbine that’s localized to where it’s made and where it’ll be erected,” D’Souza explained. “That allows you to optimize designs of specific elements of the turbine — like the tower and nacelle — to locally available resources and infrastructure, such as recycling facilities, and understand trade-offs across the lifecycle and criteria, like cost, risks and regulations.” As Makersite grows its headcount from around 40 employees to over 100 over the next 12 months, D’Souza says that the focus will be on building out the company’s sales and marketing teams to grow business particularly in the U.S. and Europe. On the integration side, Makersite’s investing capital in connectors to software like Autodesk to deliver cost and environmental insights within computer-assisted design platforms. “There is a paradigm shift towards sustainable products which are driven by regulation, competition, customer demand and investments,” D’Souza said. “For that, Makersite enables procurement and product design professionals to make day-to-day decisions without the need for compliance, sustainability, cost or risk experts.”