startup

Daylight, the LGBTQ+ neobank, raises cash to launch subscription plan for family planning • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 18, 2022Posted in Anthemis Group, Apps, Bank, citi ventures, daylight, Fintech, funding, Gaingels, Kapor Capital, lgbtq, neobank, queer, startup, StartupsNo Comments

A day after a bill that would codify same-sex marriage in the U.S. cleared a key hurdle in the Senate, Daylight, a digital bank that pitches itself as LGBTQIA+-friendly, closed a $15 million Series A round led by Anthemis Group with participation from CMFG Ventures, Kapor Capital, Citi Ventures and Gaingels. Daylight Co-founder and CEO Rob Curtis says that the new capital will be used to, in his words, “build the financial products and services to help queer people live their best lives” — starting with a subscription plan called Daylight Grow designed to help prospective queer families with financial planning. “There are over 30 million LGBTQ+ Americans with a spending power of around $1 trillion and yet the community lacks access to the suite of products and services they need to live their best lives,” Curtis told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Daylight was created with a single mission: to build the financial products and services to help queer people live their best lives.” Curtis co-launched Daylight with Billie Simmons, a trans woman, and Paul Barnes-Hoggett in early 2020. Prior to starting Daylight, Curtis worked for several organizations supporting the LGBTQ+ lifestyle and causes, including Gaydar, a dating site for gay and bisexual men. He also co-founded Squad Social and Helsa Helps, startups aiming to improve access to mental health for members in the LGBTQ+ community. Daylight is a part of wave of recent neobanks — bank-like fintech companies that operate online, without physical branch networks — organized around aspirational causes and missions. Rapper Killer Mike’s Greenwood aims to help Black and Latinx communities build generational wealth. Majority, which launched the same year as Greenwood (2020), seeks to build banking tools and resources for immigrants. Purpose Banking, Aspiration and One all promise to never let deposits fund fossil fuels. Image Credits: Daylight With the wealth of ethics-forward fintechs out there, why found a neobank for LGBTQ+ people? According to Curtis, most mainstream banking products simply weren’t designed with U.S.-based queer folks in mind. (Pride Bank, a neobank with similarly queer-forward branding, is based in Brazil.) For example, Daylight provides debit cards with customers’ chosen names, which aren’t always the same as what’s on their ID. It offers members 10% cash back every time they spend with a queer and allied business that Daylight has partnered with. And it offers guided goals for gender-affirming procedures like top surgery and facial feminization. Beyond cash management features like a checking account, free ATMs and the ability for members to get paid two days early, Daylight hosts communities where customers can ask questions around “queer financial literacy,” such as family planning, in what Curtis claims is a safe and supportive environment. “At Daylight, our mission has always been to break down the financial barriers that hold LGBTQ+ people back … In this post-Dobbs world, Daylight’s commitment to supporting queer families has never been more necessary,” Curtis said, referring to the Supreme Court case that legalized abortion bans in the U.S. and opened the door to legal challenges of marriage equality. Certainly, members of the LGBTQ+ community face fiscal challenges that many cisgender, straight adults never do. Some suffer the consequences of being kicked out of their homes by unaccepting parents. Others find themselves on the hook for HIV/AIDS treatment, hormone therapy and fertility procedures. Most queer people gravitate toward pricey metro areas because they’re more accepting and progressive, and many queer people lack a safety net — whether because they lack family support or don’t have children who can take care of them. For those reasons and others, LGBTQ+ people frequently earn less, live in poverty and have less in pension savings than their cisgender counterparts. The situation for transgender people is particularly dire, with the poverty rate for the transgender community in the U.S. averaging around 30% — close to double the rate of cisgender adults — according to a 2019 study from the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. Transgender people are also twice as likely to be unemployed and four times as likely to have a household income below $10,000; the 2021 U.S. federal poverty was $12,880. The aforementioned Daylight Grow isn’t a cure-all, but targets the major hurdles many queer couples encounter in starting a family. This is a significant portion of Daylight’s customers. A recent poll by the Family Equality Council found that nearly two-thirds of LGBTQ millennials — 63% — are considering becoming parents for the first time or expanding their family. Image Credits: Daylight When the product launches in early 2023, Simmons says that Daylight Grow will offer a personalized “family creation plan” covering financial, legal and logistical milestones tailored to individual states and needs, “family planning concierges” to provide financial advice and logistical support, a “family-building marketplace” with vetted family attorney networks and recommendations for IVF and surrogacy clinics, and in-person financial and fertility education events. “Family creation is a major life event for queer people and the challenges we face are increasingly more complex than those for non-LGBTQ people,” Simmons told ZebethMedia via email. “The launch of Daylight Grow will help queer people navigate through the complex legal and financial challenges involved with starting a family, making it faster and easier to start a family, and unlocking critical intergenerational wealth for our community.” Daylight Grow will also offer access to family-building loans, a potential game-changer for queer customers who’ve dealt with discrimination from traditional banks. According to a 2019 study, same-sex borrowers were 73% more likely to be denied a mortgage or be approved for a mortgage at a higher-than-average interest rate. Daylight plans to offer hundreds of free Grow subscriptions to low-income, marginalized families in states where LGBTQ+ rights are under significant legal attack, Curtis said. Which states — and Grow’s pricing — are still being decided. Daylight has raised $20 million in capital to date. Curtis wouldn’t answer questions about revenue and hiring plans, preferring, at least for now, to keep the focus on the company’s core mission.

Speak lands investment from OpenAI to expand its language learning platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Apps, funding, language learning, OpenAI Startup Fund, Robotics & AI, SPEAK, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Speak, an English language learning platform with AI-powered features, today announced that it raised $27 million in a Series B funding round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, with participation from Lachy Groom, Josh Buckley, Justin Mateen, Gokul Rajaram and Founders Fund. Notably, Speak is the third startup in which OpenAI, the AI lab closely aligned with Microsoft, has publicly invested through its fund — the others being Descript and Mem. OpenAI Startup Fund participants receive early access to new OpenAI systems and Azure resources from Microsoft in addition to capital. “We are very excited to partner with the outstanding team at Speak, who are well-positioned to deliver on this powerful application of generative AI — making language learning effective and accessible,” Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s COO and the manager of the OpenAI Startup Fund, said in a statement. “Speak has the potential to revolutionize not just language learning, but education broadly, and this aligns with the OpenAI Startup Fund’s goal of accelerating the impact of powerful AI to improve people’s lives.” Speak was founded in 2016 by Connor Zwick and Andrew Hsu, both of whom had an acute interest in AI from an early age. Hsu has a health background, having completed a neuroscience PhD at Stanford before joining Zwick to co-launch Speak. Zwick came from the edtech industry — he sold his first startup, the flashcard app Flashcards+, to Chegg in 2013 after dropping out of Harvard. Zwick and Hsu met through The Thiel Fellowship originally, Hsu being in the first cohort and Zwick in the second. (Note that Founders Fund, which Thiel co-founded, pledged cash toward Speak’s Series B.) Prior to starting Speak, the two spent a year studying and researching machine learning and developing accent detection algorithms using YouTube videos as training data. “Most language learning software can help with the beginning part of learning basic vocabulary and grammar, but gaining any degree of fluency requires speaking out loud in an interactive environment,” Zwick told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “To date, the only way people can get that sort of practice is through human tutors, which can also be expensive, difficult and intimidating.” Image Credits: Speak Speak’s solution is a collection of interactive speaking experiences that allow learners to practice conversing in English. Through the platform, users can hold open-ended conversations with an “AI tutor” on a range of topics while receiving feedback on their pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. The premise might sound like Duolingo and some of the other AI-powered language learning apps out there, such as Yanadoo, ELSA and Loora. But Zwick insists that Speak’s AI tech is superior to most. “Under the hood, we combine the latest from OpenAI with in-house models to deliver the best performance across speech recognition, speech generation and conversation generation,” he said. “We’re able to provide feedback on things like pronunciation and more natural vocabulary and syntax using [our] models … We are accumulating a substantial data set of second-language labeled speaking examples, which enables us to uniquely deliver state-of-the-art speech models for foreign accented speakers.” Whether that’s true is up for debate. Speak didn’t provide any empirical data showing its platform outperforms rivals. But what Speak does demonstrably have is early momentum. It’s one of the top education apps in Korea on the iOS App Store, with over 15 million lessons started annually, 100,000 active subscribers and “double-digit million” annual recurring revenue. Speak offers auto-renewing monthly and annual subscriptions, both of which provide access to courses, electives and review content in addition to the AI-guided practice sessions. For Speak’s next act, the company plans to expand to new languages and markets, including Japan, and invest in features that leverage text-generating models like OpenAI’s GPT-3. “The pandemic accelerated remote work and the expansion of global, distributed teams, meaning there’s even more demand for people around the world to speak the same language. It’s also driven demand for new solutions more oriented around remote or programmatic experiences as opposed to in-person instruction.” Zwick added. “Speak has remained fairly lean and has multiple years of runway enabling it to control its own destiny regardless of the fundraising environment over the next few years.” Currently, Speak has 40 employees across offices in San Francisco (its headquarters), Seoul and Ljubljana, Slovenia. Zwick says that the new funding, which brings Speak’s total raised to “just over” $47 million, will be put toward expanding the company’s engineering, machine learning, product, marketing, content and operations departments.

ReadySpaces, which offers co-warehousing spaces to corporate customers, secures $20M in debt • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Commerce, funding, startup, Startups, warehouseNo Comments

Jon Zimmerman — the co-founder of ReadySpaces, a warehouse storage provider for small businesses — was working in the self-storage market when he had the idea for a product with the flexibility of self-storage but the capabilities of a traditional warehouse, aimed primarily at enterprise customers. His partner, Kevin Petrovic, had a different company that was a customer of Jon’s at his first “beta” location, in the ’90s. The two started working together to grow ReadySpaces — formerly CustomSpace — into a nationwide business. Today, ReadySpaces operates 32 warehouses and services a customer base of over 2,000 businesses. That impressed investors, evidently, who pledged $20 million in the startup as a part of an all-debt funding round that closed today. Bringing ReadySpaces’ total raised to $40 million, the new funding will fuel expansion, Petrovic says, as ReadySpaces prepares to roll out new services. Why opt for debt as opposed to equity? Petrovic claims that it was “the most efficient capital structure for growth” given the current financial environment. It’s definitely true that equity is harder to come by these days, with valuations dropping and debt financing slowly gaining in popularity. “We have an ambitious growth plan for 2023 and this capital will allow us to remain the leader in the co-warehousing space,” Petrovic told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Certain pandemic-related pressures, such as backups in major ports, have eased, but we see our business model continuing to resonate every day for both established businesses and small companies just starting off.” While ReadySpaces has been around in some form since 2013, it’s only in recent years that co-warehousing has become a hot trend. The pandemic supercharged co-warehousing, which allowed physical goods businesses (e.g., manufacturers of household products and construction materials) dealing with supply chain challenges to store inventory without having to purchase a facility. In a co-warehousing setup, multiple companies can use the same warehouse space — eliminating the need for the companies to invest in the infrastructure themselves. For example, ReadySpaces offers co-located units in sizes ranging from 200 to 5,000 square feet, each equipped with power units, loading docks and forklifts, Wi-Fi, industrial workspaces, and private offices and conference rooms. A view of a ReadySpaces facility in Tukwila, Washington, where the startup has a sizable hub. Image Credits: ReadySpaces Petrovic posits that co-warehousing lets businesses insure against economic uncertainty and busy periods, such as holidays, by providing affordable, scalable storage for reserve inventory. “The need for small warehouse space isn’t constrained to small businesses,” Petrovic said. “We’ve worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies to provide short-term overflow space. The key is that we take an asset class that moves slowly and is generally difficult to operate in and make it absolutely seamless.” Certainly, ReadySpaces’ competitors have demonstrated the demand for co-warehousing. Saltbox, a company providing co-working and warehousing space for up-and-coming e-commerce businesses, recently attracted a $128 million investment from real estate investment platform Fundrise to expand its footprint. And last year, private equity real estate firm Capstone Equities launched Portal Warehousing, a flexible warehouse solution offering smaller spaces and share amenities, which plans to expand to cities, including Los Angeles, Brooklyn and Las Vegas, in the coming months. As for ReadySpaces, Petrovic claims that the Los Angeles–based company — which employs around 50 people — is “comfortably profitable,” with revenue growing approximately 50% year over year. “Since our last announcement, we have opened numerous new locations and in a few new markets as well. For example, Queens, New York; Kearny, New Jersey; Saddle Brook, New Jersey; and Round Rock, Texas, are all recent new sites,” Petrovic said. “We don’t have a burn rate … Nationally, we’ve seen demand skyrocket by 375% over the last three years.” One point of concern is a slowdown in consumer spending related to inflation, which could depress sales in retail and, by extension, the demand for warehouse space. The warehouse industry is running the risk of oversupply, some experts say, as developers heavily invest in warehouse expansion. Q2 2022 saw a record 613 million square feet of warehouse space built in the U.S. — almost double the construction pipeline in 2019. Petrovic acknowledged the headwinds, but insisted that ReadySpaces is in a position to weather them. “There are numerous major shifts in the industrial real estate market happening now due to robust demand and high development costs,” he added. “Our focus is on navigating these market changes successfully so we can continue to provide the product that we know customers love.”

Terzo lands $16M to extract key data from contracts • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in AI, Enterprise, funding, Robotics & AI, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Contract governance is the steps taken to make sure agreed-upon terms between a company and its suppliers are met. It’s an essential part of doing business, and the consequences for getting it wrong can be steep. McKinsey estimates that poor contract governance can cost organizations up to 9% of their total revenue, which equates to $1.4 trillion for the Fortune 500 alone and $6.4 trillion across all enterprise business-to-business companies. Challenges around contract governance have fueled the rise of startups like Icertis, which recently secured $150 million at a $3.2 billion valuation to build out its contracting tools. LinkSquares in April landed $100 million for its AI-powered contract analysis platform, while ContractPodAi, a close competitor, has raised tens of millions to digitize contract reviews. A relatively new entrant in the space is Terzo, which was co-founded by Brandon Card, Al Giocondi and Pradeep Thangavel in 2020. A suite of contract processing software, Terzo uses AI to extract data in contracts related to a company’s spend and revenue across their supplier and customer relationships. In a sign investor interest in contract management startups hasn’t waned, Terzo today closed a $16 million Series A round led by Align Ventures with participation from TYH Ventures, Engage Ventures, Human Capital and other unnamed institutional investors. The proceeds bring the company’s total raised to more than $18f million, and Card, who serves at Terzo’s CEO, says they’ll be put toward Terzo’s sales and marketing initiatives as well as enhancing the platform’s AI capabilities. “As our technology evolves, we aim to deliver advanced insights around financials and budgeting,” Card said. “Contract systems were built for legal use cases and legal teams to focus on drafting and clauses. There are no analytics or financial insights for leaders to make smarter decisions. Terzo was founded to solve that problem.” Image Credits: Terzo Card says his experiences at Microsoft, where he was an enterprise portfolio manager at Microsoft Cloud, inspired him to co-found Terzo. Giocondi came from account manager roles at Oracle and IBM. As for Thangavel, he spent nearly seven years on the engineering side at Freshworks prior to joining alongside Card and Giocondi. Card says that Terzo’s AI was trained using real-world business contracts to extract data such as inventory and costs, supervised by a quality assurance team to ensure baseline accuracy. Terzo integrates with enterprise resource platforms like SAP and Oracle to track contractual obligations and expiration dates, including metrics related to environmental, social and governance policies. “Terzo is valuable to the IT audience because it allows them to see data faster,” Card said. “We’ve created a platform that combines data management, automation and AI, but also keeps people in the loop.” VCs see promise in contract management legal tech like Terzo’s, perhaps in part because of the high customer adoption rate. According to a 2020 Bloomberg Law survey, more than half (56%) of in-house lawyers said that they’re using contract management programs. (That’s despite the fact that the legal industry is notoriously slow to adopt new tech.) If the current trend holds, Markets and Markets predicts the contract management life cycle market will grow from $1.5 billion in 2019 to $2.9 billion by 2024. Card says that Terzo has “over a dozen” customers, including a Fortune 50 retailer and the largest financial transaction processor in the world. The plan into the next year is to drive revenue at over 50% of Terzo’s overall expenses, he says, and to break even in 2024. “We are positioned to be a profitable business by 2025,” Card added. “Both the pandemic and current tech slowdown has taught us how to run a lean business that is focused on efficient growth. The current downturn has caused our customers to prioritize spending and budgeting so we look at this as a positive tailwind heading into 2023.”

Namecoach raises cash to teach users how to correctly pronounce names • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in AI, Enterprise, funding, Robotics & AI, startup, StartupsNo Comments

We’ve all been faced with a name that’s difficult to pronounce. But not everyone considers the consequences of their mispronunciations. In a piece for Fast Company, Madhumita Mallick, the head of inclusion, equity and impact at Carta, recalls how her name became a source of anxiety even when she was a grade-school student. Studies have indeed found that when peers and teachers incorrectly pronounce or change the names of students of color, those students participate less in class and becoming socially withdrawn to avoid associating with their name. As the co-authors of one wrote in 2012: “actions and attitudes [students] experienced in K-12 schools highlight a type of cultural ‘othering’ that contradicts our goals for multicultural school environments .. even just stumbling over a name they had never seen before, the tone set by a teacher about a student’s name [is] something significant.” Praveen Shanbhag, the CEO of Namecoach, heard a speaker at his sister’s alma mater flub her name during her college graduation. That, along with his experiences as a first-generation immigrant to the U.S., inspired him to co-found Namecoach, which develops name pronunciation tools that can be embedded in existing platforms like Salesforce, Canvas and Gmail. “We are on a mission to make name mispronunciation a thing of the past for everyone,” Shanbhag told ZebethMedia via email. Shanbhag started dabbling in programming while working on his Ph.D. in philosophy at Stanford. He decided to code an app that would collect recordings of students saying their names and deliver them to name readers for graduation, which became Namecoach. By 2016, Shanbhag says that hundreds of schools were using Namecoach’s software and services. Namecoach — which eventually broadened its customer base to client brands — isn’t alone in the market. NameShouts offers a robust set of name pronunciation tools, as does Facebook, Slack and LinkedIn. But Shanbhag tells me that early on, he sought to differentiate Namecoach by investing heavily in AI and integrations. Image Credits: Namecoach For example, Namecoach uses an AI system to predict the correct pronunciation when someone’s name has multiple correct pronunciations based on factors like nationality, ethnicity, gender and location. Another of the platform’s systems synthesizes speech in situations where an audio recording of a name isn’t available. At a high level, Namecoach shows name pronunciations both user-generated and drawn from a database of audio name pronunciations. When asked about the system’s accuracy and whether users can remedy mistakes that might make their way onto the database, Shanbhag said that Namecoach consults with linguistic experts and offers a submission form for corrections. It’s not yet live, but Shanbhag says that Namecoach is developing a AI to provide pronunciations that take the speaker’s native language into account — not just the name-owner’s language. “Your name is central to your identity, and accurate pronunciation sets the tone for a positive interaction for both parties,” he said. Namecoach’s platform works out-of-the-box with services including Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Google Workspace and offers an API and software development kit to let third parties build Namecoach’s functionality into their products. But the focus over the next few months will be the startup’s first-ever consumer app, Shanbhag says, which will be made available as a Chrome extension next year. Namecoach — which today closed an $8 million Series A round led by Impact America Fund with participation from Authentic Ventures, Metaplanet, Engage.VC, Founders Fund, Bisk Ventures and others — also plans to ramp up its sales and marketing efforts and expand the platform’s collection of connectors. Shanbhag hinted at capabilities beyond pronunciation guidance coming down the pipeline, including prompts to enable warm interactions in sales scenarios and feedback to help users improve their conversations more generally. Leaning into sales applications makes sense given Namecoach’s marquee customers — Salesforce, Netjets and PwC. Beyond those three, the 30-person startup claims to have more than 300 education and corporate clients worldwide. “The Series A funding enables us to accelerate our goal of integrating novel voice technology into every communication workflow to solve name pronunciation across a wide spectrum of use cases during any voice interaction,” said Shanbhag, who wouldn’t Namecoach’s disclose revenue figures when asked. “Namecoach has customers across a very wide range of verticals, use cases and organization size, which means that we are not reliant on any subsegment to thrive in a downturn.” To date, Palo Alto-based Namecoach has raised $15 million in venture capital.

With fresh capital, Symend aims to build a better debt collection system • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in BDC Growth Venture Co-Investment Fund, BDC Women in Technology Fund, debt collection, EDC, Fintech, funding, Growth Venture Co-Investment Fund, Impression Ventures, iNovia Capital, Mistral Venture Partners, Plaza Ventures, Robotics & AI, startup, Startups, symend, Women in Technology FundNo Comments

Squeezed by the recessionary COVID-19-era economy and the rising prices of everyday goods, some consumers are increasingly turning to lines of credit to make ends meet. According to a September 2021 survey from Bankrate.com, 42% of U.S. adults with credit card debt increased their balances since the pandemic began in March 2020. A more recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimates that total household debt in Q3 2022 reached $16.51 trillion, $2.36 trillion higher than at the end of 2019. The New York Fed’s study also showed that the share of current debt becoming delinquent climbed for nearly all debt types, from mortgages to auto loans. But even before the pandemic and crippling inflation struck, the U.S. had a delinquent debt problem. A 2016 whitepaper from the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals International found that debt rose from $150 billion to over $600 billion in the previous five years. During the same timeframe, collection agencies — who take between 20% to 50% of money recovered — had an annual success rate of 7%. To solve it — an ambitious goal, to be sure — Hanif Joshaghani and Tiffany Kaminsky co-founded Symend, a company that employs AI and machine learning to automate processes around debt resolution for telcos, banks and utilities. Symend today announced that it raised $42 million in a Series C round led by Inovia Capital with participation from Impression Ventures, Mistral Venture Partners, BDC’s Growth Venture Co-Investment Fund, BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Fund, Plaza Ventures and EDC. While substantially smaller than Symend’s once-extended Series B round ($95 million), Joshaghani, Symend’s CEO, noted that it’s “all equity” and brings the company’s total capital raised to date to $140 million. “We have maintained and continue to maintain a very conservative balance sheet profile,” Joshaghani told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “This latest injection of growth capital allows us to meet the growing demand for our behavioral engagement technology around the world. While this is not an optimal time for many businesses to turn to funding, for Symend, this was an ideal time as our product demand rises and the realities of the market create a deepening white space for us to capture.” Joshaghani hails from the financial industry, having worked as a corporate finance manager and investment banking association. Kaminsky’s background is marketing — prior to co-founding Symend, she was the head of sales and marketing strategy at Frog3D, a CNC fabrication business. Examples of messages customers might see from brands working with Symend. Both Joshaghani and Kaminsky personally experienced the negative impact of debt, they say. Joshaghani grew up in a household frequently targeted by calls from debt collectors, and Kaminksi ran into trouble with collections with her first credit card as a young adult. “To this day, I remember the anxiety I felt when receiving calls from collections and knew there had to be a better way — both for customers and businesses,” Joshaghani said. “We founded Symend to help consumers like us and as we’ve grown over the past six years, that mission has remained the same — our vision is to transform the science of engagement on a global scale.” Symend identifies when customers are having trouble paying bills and provides analytics and tools aimed at helping companies develop debt remediation programs. Via the platform’s workflows, businesses can engage with nearly-delinquent customers at points likeliest to drive turnaround. For example, they can configure Symend to create payment plans and limited-time payment discounts for certain segments of customers, or they can have the platform connect at-risk customers with financial planning tools, resources and credit rehabilitation programs. As Joshaghani explained to me, Symend works with a company’s existing systems to “optimize engagement” with customers falling behind on bills due to illness, job loss, family trouble and other foreseen and unforeseen circumstances. The platform allows a business to send “hyper-personalized” messages via a customer’s preferred channels (e.g. text and email) while providing that business access to playbooks for various debt collection scenarios (e.g., delinquent credit card). “Our clients continue to use general-purpose engagement platforms to manage their broad-based customer communications but deploy Symend specifically to solve complex challenges around their past-due customer base,” Joshaghani said. “Our ability to productize behavioral science is one of three key innovation areas of our technology, which uses AI, machine learning and data science to develop proven behavioral engagement playbooks to deliver impact out-of-the-box for companies in various industries.” Symend is rather vague about the functionality and technical underpinnings of its platform — its website prefers jargony buzzwords to plain-English descriptions. But that hasn’t scared away customers, it’d seem; Joshaghani claims that Symend is currently serving financial institutions, alternative lenders, utility companies and the majority of telecom providers in North America, including Telus. No doubt, the rise in buy now, pay later (BNPL) services — which let users split up purchases into equal installments over a fixed short-term period — is driving new business to Symend. A recent U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report found that delinquencies on BNPL services are rising sharply as vendors approve more customers for loans. “As with many businesses right now, the current market conditions and economic uncertainty has led to us seeing clients with tighter budgets and streamlined decision-making,” Joshaghani added. “However, this latest funding highlights the market need, growing consumer demands for an empathetic, personalized approach as consumers face financial stress, and investor confidence in the company’s proven track record with some of the largest financial institutions and telecommunications providers during a time where every dollar and customer has become more important than ever.”

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

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

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

Yakoa raises $4.8M to help detect NFT fraud for platforms and creators • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Crypto, crypto ecosystem, funding, NFT, startupNo Comments

Yakoa, an NFT fraud detection startup, has raised $4.8 million to build tools to fight intellectual property fraud in web3, the company exclusively told ZebethMedia. One of the most common attacks Yakoa sees is people making copies of NFTs and claiming them as their own work, Andrew Dworschak, co-founder of the startup, said. Yakoa provides tools and an indexer that detects copies or infringement probabilities on original NFTs, ranging from direct forgery to partial or stylistic forgery, which will then notify platforms, brands or creators of these fraudulent activities. The funding round was led by Collab+Currency, Volt Capital, and Brevan Howard Digital with participation from Data Community Fund, Alliance DAO, Uniswap Labs Ventures, Orange DAO, Time Zero Capital, gmjp, Sunset Ventures and FAST by GETTYLAB, as well as angel investors. The capital will be used to grow its machine learning and data engineering teams internally, according to Graham Robinson, co-founder of Yakoa. The platform identifies an NFT’s first existence across a number of blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Polygon and more. “In terms of blockchains, having every blockchain is on our road map,” Dworschak said. “The belief we have is it doesn’t matter where you mint IP or publish an address, what matters is that it’s publicly verifiable.” Anyone can make “a quick buck off of anyone,” Dworschak noted. “It’s really hard to protect against this stuff ’cause there’s so many assets. In some cases [fraudsters are] photoshopping and cropping or changing colors, when they’re really using someone else’s IP.” “When we’re doing an attribution search, we’re trying to figure out where an asset might be derived from and give as much information as we can,” Dworschak said. “Two assets can be similar and not fraudulent and that’s completely appropriate. There’s a lot of edge cases we need to be aware of and other ones that pop up in a similar vein and some use cases we take on as a platform and give people the chance to record their opinion.” “The entire ecosystem is open and we want to continue to make sure it stays that way,” Robinson said. “We’re trying to create the tools for the industry to use and they can use it in their environment.” The name Yakoa came from the saying, “A-OKAY,” but backward, Dworschak said. “When you’re using the blockchain, you want to make sure it’s ‘A-OKAY,’ so that’s why we named it that.” Today, the NFT market has “already demonstrated a lot of potential,” Dworschak said. “It has created types of assets not bound to a specific platform that allows creators to publish their assets and trade them freely across platforms. It’s a brand new method of commerce and it’ll spill over to what’s unimaginable today.” Long-term, fraud protection will be something that can run in the backend for platforms, Robinson said. “There’s a bunch of services that can start from this IP protection.”

MotherDuck secures investment from Andreessen Horowitz to commercialize DuckDB • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in a16z, data analytics, Enterprise, funding, redpoint, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Jordan Tigani — a founding engineer at Google BigQuery, Google’s fully managed data analysis platform — was working as the chief product officer at SingleStore when he noticed that the vast majority of database workloads were small (less than 10GB in size) and low-bandwidth. While vendors were building for massive data sets, the term “big data” was becoming a misnomer thanks to recent advances in hardware, the way Tigani saw it. Around the same time, Tigani got in touch with Hannes Mühleisen, the co-creator of the lightweight database platform DuckDB, to toss ideas for a paid service back and forth. Seeking to launch a product for developers with light database requirements, Tigani — with Mühleisen’s blessing — began building a DuckDB-based cloud service. The service became the cheekily named MotherDuck, a startup independent of the original DuckDB that’s focused on commercializing open source DuckDB packages. “Users want easy and fast answers to their questions — they don’t want to wait for the cloud,” Tigani told ZebethMedia via email. “The fact is that a modern laptop is faster than a modern data warehouse. Cloud data vendors are focused on the performance of 100TB queries, which is not only irrelevant for the vast majority of users, but also distracts from vendors’ ability to deliver a great user experience.” It’s a classic playbook — take an open source tool and build a service on top of it. But while it might not be original, Tigani’s plan has already paid dividends. MotherDuck today announced that it raised $47.5 million across seed and Series A rounds, valuing the company at $175 million post-money. Redpoint led the seed while Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the Series A — other investors include Madrona, Amplify Partners and Altimeter. Tigani says that MotherDuck wasn’t planning to raise the Series A so soon after the seed, but did so at the urging of LPs — and for the opportunity to work with a16z. “With this funding, MotherDuck is able to build out their world-class engineering team and add a go-to-market function to provide a cloud analytics platform for organizations that want to use DuckDB in an evolved way,” Tigani said. “At the same time, it allows DuckDB to continue to be a vehicle for academic research.” Tigani claims that MotherDuck’s service — powered by DuckDB, which HackerNoon once described as “mutant offspring of SQLite and Redshift” — allows practitioners to start answering questions from data faster than most existing tooling. It uses local computing resources in concert with the cloud, driving data analytics and other data-heavy workloads. That’s in contrast to typical data warehouse systems that offer reporting and tools almost exclusively for enterprise-scale analytics. As Madrona’s Jon Turow explains in a forthcoming blog post (ZebethMedia got a sneak peak), MotherDuck uses a “hybrid execution” technique to query a data set that’s spread across multiple places. Some of the data might be on a developers laptop, some in the cloud instance and the rest in a different cloud, but MotherDuck makes it possible for a dev to query the combination of these sources. “The platform intelligently decides where to operate upon each bit of data to minimize the costs of compute and data transfer,” Turow writes. The data warehouse concept has existed since the ’80s, but it’s risen to prominence in recent years as companies shift their workloads to the cloud. There’s startups like Firebolt and Hydra, which aim to become the open cloud data warehouse of choice for large companies. Panoply, another player in the data warehouse space, has taken a different approach, developing tools that make it easier for businesses to analyze their data with standard database queries. While Tigani sees MotherDuck as a competitor in the data analytics market alongside data warehouse vendors, he positions the platform as the technological superior alternative. “The high efficiency of DuckDB will allow MotherDuck to be cost-competitive, while also being more performant for most data workloads,” Tigani asserted. “Advances in CPU, memory, disk performance and networks are making existing architectures obsolete. Large distributed analytics clusters are no longer necessary due to these advances. Single-node DuckDB can often be much faster, cheaper and simpler than these distributed systems.” The DuckDB team is involved to a degree with MotherDuck, which in turn is a member of the DuckDB Foundation, the nonprofit that holds much of DuckDB’s IP. DuckDB’s own commercial arm, DuckDB Labs, is a shareholder in the company and contributed code to the cloud platform. Tigani assures me that DuckDB will continue to be freely available under a permissive MIT license and that the original DuckDB team will build, maintain and promote the core DuckDB codebase going forward. Fueled by the fresh capital, MotherDuck plans to expand its small workforce from 13 people to 18 by the end of the year. When asked, he declined to answer questions about the size of the startup’s customer base or revenue, saying it’s too early.

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

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

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