startup

Zest wants to make buying and sending gifts online ‘delightful’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Apps, boxgroup, character, Commerce, eCommerce, funding, GV, operator partners, startup, StartupsNo Comments

While e-commerce was on the rise before the pandemic, the massive shift to digital supercharged the online shopping industry — bringing entirely new categories of products (and shoppers) to the web. According to Adobe, Americans have spent a record $1.7 trillion online over the last two years, a 55% uptick from two years before the pandemic. A fair number of those online purchases are gifts as revealed by search trends — from 2019 to 2020, there was an 80% increase in searches for “online gifting” on Google Search. But despite the fact that hundreds of billions of people now regularly turn to digital channels (e.g. Amazon) to gift, the gifting experience remains subpar. That’s the opinion of Alex Ingram, at least, who co-founded a startup — Zest — that’s focused on e-commerce gifting flows. Zest is Ingram’s second company after Sunlight Health, which sought to make brand-name and specialty prescription medications affordable for patients with chronic conditions. He met Zest’s second co-founder, Jeremy Feinstein, while working at Flatiron Health, where they helped to develop cancer center software. “After Flatiron’s sale to Roche, we both felt it was time for something new,” Ingram told ZebethMedia via email. “Obviously, e-commerce is worlds away from oncology. But we wanted to build something that could really help small- and medium-sized businesses to succeed in an increasingly challenging environment.” Image Credits: Zest With Zest, Ingram says that the goal was to make the experience of online gifting “delightful.” How? By allowing e-commerce brands to embed a “send as a gift” button on their product or cart pages and letting givers choose a digital greeting card, add their own message, pay through Shopify and deliver the gift to the recipient via text or email. With gifts gifted through Zest, recipients — who can opt into shipping notifications — can add their own mailing address or customize the gift’s attributes (like size or color) and optionally send a thank-you note to the sender. There’s certainly something to affording recipients some choice in their online gifts. While it might ruin the surprise, a 2015 survey from Loop Commerce (now GiftNow) found that buying the wrong size and the hassle of online returns were some of the top reasons people were reluctant to buy gifts online. Ingram is well aware that Zest isn’t the only online gifting tool out there. There’s Goody, which has raised millions in venture capital for its mobile app that lets users send gifts via text. Givingli, an online gifting service that lets users customize digital greetings and send gifts to anyone, recently closed a $10 million equity round. GiftNow is perhaps Zest’s closest competitor, offering a checkout technology that lets customers buy gifts without having to worry about product details like size, color and shipping addresses. But Ingram argues that Zest uniquely takes a “brand-first” approach, helping brands grow by building direct relationships with their customers. “With some of the other gifting tools out there, the brands are almost an afterthought,” Ingram said. “Zest makes sending a gift a convenient and easy experience for shoppers, who never have to leave their favorite brand’s website — it’s as intuitive as clicking ‘Add to Cart’ or ‘Buy It Now.’ There are lots of e-gift card apps too, but we don’t believe e-gift cards are the future of gifting. They feel transactional and impersonal. They’re so forgettable that billions of dollars of gift cards go unused every year in the U.S. And many brands don’t like to deal with the accounting headaches that come with the long-standing liabilities of unused gift cards.” Image Credits: Zest The future of e-gift cards aside — to Ingram’s point, consumers seem to prefer physical gift cards over digital — Zest is evidently beating back rivals to gain a toehold in the gifting space, with about 50 customers across categories like food and beverage, apparel and flowers. Ingram wouldn’t disclose revenue figures. But he revealed that Zest has raised $4 million in seed funding led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) with participation from BoxGroup, Character, Operator Partners, Bungalow Capital and Company Ventures. “E-commerce and gifting exploded during the pandemic,” Ingram said. “People wanted to send more gifts to friends and family to help bridge the literal gap between them and loved ones. And while that growth rate has slowed, it’s a behavior that’s here to stay. [But] it’s never been harder for direct-to-consumer brands to acquire and retain customers. That’s partly due to the sheer number of direct-to-consumer brands out there today … For brands, the value we’re providing is first and foremost an elevated gifting experience for their customers. When it’s so easy and natural to send a gift directly from a product or cart page, these brands will sell more gifts and reach more people.”

Meeting camera startup Owl Labs lands $25M and partnership with HP • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Enterprise, funding, HP, Matrix Partners, playground global, Robotics & AI, Spark Capital, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Owl Labs, a startup developing a linuep AI-powered meeting hardware, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series C round led by HP Tech Ventures (HP’s venture capital arm) with participation from Sourcenext, Matrix Partners, Spark Capital and Playground Global. The closing of the tranche marks the start of a strategic partnership with HP, Owl Labs CEO Frank Weishaupt says, which will see HP invest in Owl Labs’ various product offerings while providing sales coverage and outreach with enterprise customers. HP, notably, recently acquired Poly, which developed a range of video and voice devices and software for virtual conferencing. Weishaupt sees no conflict, arguing that Poly’s products are complementary with Owl Labs’ and show “HP’s commitment to transforming the workplace to a hybrid model.” “The funding will allow Owl Labs to continue its accelerated growth … Owl Labs will use the investment to support product development and increase global adoption of the company’s products, including the [Owl Labs’] product line,” Weishaupt told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “The funding will also be used to expand Owl Labs’ global footprint and deepen go-to-market partnerships starting with a commercial agreement between Owl Labs and HP France, where HP will sell Owl Labs’ products through their local sales team.” Owl Labs was founded by Mark Schnittman and Max Makeev in 2014, who sought to develop a better videoconferencing experience than cameras at the time could achieve. (Weishaupt, a former CarGurus exec, joined Owl Labs as CEO in early 2019.) Drawing on their work at iRobot, the Schnittman and Schnittman created Owl Labs’ first product, the auto-swiveling Meeting Owl Pro, after testing the concept by putting a laptop on a spinning stool. Today, Owl Labs sells several products, including a dedicated whiteboard camera, meeting room control console and its latest-generation meeting camera, the Meeting Owl 3. The Meeting Owl 3 features a mic and speaker array paired with a 360-degree camera, which zooms in on whoever’s speaking. There’s countless “intelligent” meeting cameras on the market, including from heavy hitters like Microsoft and Google. But Weishaupt makes the case that Owl Labs’ software is a differentiator. Called the Owl Intelligence System, it allows customers to connect up to two Meeting Owls to expand their video and audio range and add facial recognition including for masked faces. “Meeting Owl 3 is the only 360-degree videoconferencing device on the market that can be connected to others to expand reach in larger spaces,” Weishaupt said. ” Owl Labs’ technology learns the space to create a more seamless experience, getting smarter over time.” Owl Labs got caught in a negative press cycle earlier this year when a security firm, Modzero, uncovered vulnerabilities in several models of the Meeting Owl and whiteboard camera that attackers could’ve exploit to obtain sensitive data. Owl Labs patched the exploit, which doesn’t appear to have majorly dented sales — Weishaupt says that over 130,000 organizations are using Owl Labs products including 84 Fortune 100 companies. “We can share that we’ve had a solid growth trajectory with more than 3x revenue growth year-over-year and 7x revenue growth since the pandemic began,” Weishaupt said, declining to share more precise revenue figures. “Owl Labs became the first company to build AI-powered, 360-degree video conferencing solutions for hybrid organizations. Owl Labs as a company was hybrid pre-pandemic and are experts at using technology to bridge the gap between remote and in-person work environments.” To date, Boston-based, over-100-employee Owl Labs has raised $47 million in funding.

222 wants to match perfect strangers for bespoke, real-life experiences • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in App, Apps, Social, startup, StartupsNo Comments

As anyone who’s moved to a city sight unseen can tell you — this reporter included — making platonic connections isn’t easy. Adult friendships are fickle beasts in metros of millions, where casual friends are cheap currency. Statistics back up my anecdotal evidence. According to a 2021 survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life, an increasing number of people can’t identify a single person as a “close friend.” In 1990, only 3% of Americans said that they had no close friends, while in 2021, that percentage rose to 12%. Many a startup has attempted to “solve socializing” with apps, algorithms and social nudges, or a combination of those three things. Bumble, for instance, has experimented with a communities feature that lets users connect with one another based on topics and interests. Patook took a Tinder-like approach to matching potential friends, using AI both to connect users and block flirtatious messages. But not everyone’s found these experiences to be especially fulfilling. “[I’m alarmed] by the tech industry’s lack of focus on building social products that are truly social rather than purely built to capture attention and exploit our desire for external validation,” Keyan Kazemian told ZebethMedia in an interview. He’s one of the three co-founders of 222, a social events app that aims to — unlike many that’ve come before it — facilitate meaningful and authentic connections. “Our society’s brightest minds — our fellow scientists, engineers and product managers — are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars not to solve the existential problems of loneliness, climate change, space travel, cancer and aging but to instead find new ways to keep an already mentally ill society consuming endless content, always fighting for more of their attention,” Kazemian continued. “We’re building a product to swing the pendulum in the other direction.” Kazemian co-launched 222 in late 2021 with Danial Hashemi and Arman Roshannai. They initially came together over a university-funded project around predicting social compatibility among a group of strangers. Toward the end of the pandemic, Kazemian, Hashemi and Roshannai — all Gen Zers (at 23, Kazemian is the oldest) — curated intimate dinners in Kazemian’s backyard over wine and pasta for friends of friends who’d never met each other, using machine learning and a psychological questionnaire to craft the guest lists. “Folks loved the backyard dinners so much they convinced us to try to replicate it with real venues,” Kazemian said. “In early 2022, we moved to Los Angeles and started partnering with brick and mortar locations, creating a marketplace between hyperlocal venues and members looking to discover their city and meet new people through unique social experiences.” That marketplace became 222. Today, anyone between the ages of 18 and 27 can sign up for an account — the founding team is focused on the Gen Z crowd presently. There’s no app — just a basic Typeform workflow — and the sign-up process is designed to be simple. Once you provide your name, email address and date of birth, 222 has you answer roughly 30 Myers-Briggs-type questions covering topics from movie, music and cereal preferences to political views and religious affiliation. 222’s onboarding survey. Some are uncomfortably personal — you’ll be asked about your income level, sexual orientation and college major — but Kazemian says it’s in the interest of narrowing down potential matches. “All of our data is encrypted and used only to better each 222 member’s social experience,” he added when asked about 222’s privacy practices. 222’s small print also indicates that data from the app is being analyzed as a part of a university social science project — a continuation of the one Kazemian, Hashemi and Roshannai led a year ago. Opting out requires contacting the company. Image Credits: 222 After answering additional questions about your personality (e.g. “Is social activism is incredibly important for you?”, “Are you willing to have uncomfortable and difficult conversations with your friends?”) and go-to social activities (e.g. drinking, watching sports, going out to nightclubs), 222 has you list dietary restrictions and your ZIP code. You’re then asked to choose which factors you find most important in meeting new people (e.g., social scene, political leanings), and it’s finally off to the races. Or it should be. When I tried to sign up, the website threw an internal server error. I eventually received a text confirming my enrollment, but it included a link to a webpage that endlessly loaded. Kazemian chalked it up to teething issues and promised a fix. When the Typeform is working properly, Kazemian says, an algorithm behind the scenes factors in the answers to those 30-some questions to determine which of 16 categories your personality falls into. Once that’s decided, you’ll be notified if you’re selected for a 222 event — for example, dinner at a local venue partner of 222’s — which are currently held weekly and cost $2.22 to attend. Those who aren’t recruited for the dinner can choose to join for post-event mingling. So is the algorithm any good? Kazemian asserts that it is, and that, furthermore, 222 is one of the few social apps directly training and matching based on real-life experiences. “Most dating apps don’t do any sort of matching at all and rather focus solely on an Elo-type score, like in chess. Users on those products are only exposed to those that have a similar ‘yes-swipe-to-no-swipe ratio to themselves,” Kazemian said. “[By contrast,] based on our member’s onboarding questionnaire, 222 develops a psychological profile for each new sign up … Our algorithm will then not only pair each member with the best possible group of strangers for a given experience, it will also curate an itinerary for the evening with the best possible consumer experience — which speakeasy, café, concert or restaurant will this group of individuals have the best time at.” That’s quite a claim to make considering Tinder and even Facebook has dabbled with helping strangers connect at events. But algorithmic robustness aside, users might be wary of attending events

Coefficient wants to bring live data into your existing spreadsheets • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in analytics, Apps, battery ventures, business intelligence, Coefficient, Enterprise, startup, StartupsNo Comments

With the explosive adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps, the average company now has more than 100 SaaS apps to manage — leading to data being siloed across countless different systems. That makes analysis challenging. To wit, according to Forrester, between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics. Ideally, analysts need something that connects disparate enterprise systems, like business intelligence and analytics tools. But these tools are often complex and unintuitive, leading employees to spend hours each day searching and gathering information. In search of an answer, Navneet Loiwal teamed up with Tommy Tsai, with whom he’d previously founded an e-commerce app, to build Coefficient, an app that brings live data into Google Sheets and other existing spreadsheet platforms. “Tsai and I had worked on consumer technologies for many years, and we saw a big opportunity to bring consumer-grade experiences to companies,” Loiwal told ZebethMedia in an email interview. Loiwal was previously a software developer at Google working on AdWords, while Tsai was an early engineer at location-sharing smartphone app Loopt. “Most data products are designed for the technical user, which results in a poor user experience and low adoption for business users. We wanted to bring the power of technical products to the business user with the simplicity that they expect in their consumer lives.” To this end, Coefficient — which today closed an $18 million Series A funding round — is designed to cut down on the number of manual and repetitive tasks business users have to complete daily to cross-reference data across systems. The platform lays on top of Google Sheets (with support for Excel forthcoming), bringing in data from customer relationship management (CRMs) systems, SQL databases and other SaaS tools. Using Coefficient, users can create, share and automate live reports, set up alerts and write data back to connected SaaS tools. A template gallery provides pre-made spreadsheet dashboards for common reports used by business operations teams (think team KPIs, leadership dashboards and decks and revenue analyses), which users can integrate with existing data systems to enable live data to power all charts within their spreadsheets. Coefficient’s spreadsheet add-on. Image Credits: Coefficient “Business users are more technical in the spreadsheet than anywhere else, yet business teams are often forced to resort to archaic methods of managing data — requesting frequent updates from technical teams with data expertise or exporting raw data from dashboards or CRMs to report repeat, manual analysis, reducing team efficiency and productivity,” Loiwal said. “Coefficient’s products extend the reach of advanced, connected data and analytics to business users, enabling the business to become more self-sufficient through real-time connectivity to the data in their source systems from where they’re working: in spreadsheets.” That’s a lot to promise. And to be sure, Coefficient isn’t the first to attempt this sort of thing. Startups like Airtable and Smartsheet already offer spreadsheet-like UIs to organize business data. Others have tried to put their own spins on the formula, like spreadsheets with apps and spreadsheets with granular access controls. Indeed, at first glance, Coefficient sounds a lot like Actiondesk, which similarly connects with databases, CRMs and SaaS tools to feed live data into Excel and Google Sheets spreadsheets. Like Coefficient, Actiondesk supports common formulas and offers templates for getting started. But to its credit, Coefficient got off to an auspicious start — Loiwal claims that Zendesk, Spotify, Foursquare, Contentful and Miro are among its customers. Combined, tens of thousands of people are currently using the platform. “We are seeing our customers grow their contracts with us despite undergoing layoffs — a testament to the value proposition of making business teams more efficient,” Loiwal said. “Additionally, with increased remote work and complex economic headwinds, companies need their employees to become more self-sufficient.” Loiwal says that the proceeds from the Series A will be put toward expanding Coefficient’s product offerings and “scaling global operations.” In the coming months, the startup plans to add new SaaS system integrations and expand the scope of its reporting automation tools. Battery Ventures led Coefficient’s Series A with participation from Foundation Capital and S28 Capital. To date, the company has raised $24.7 million in capital. Neeraj Agrawal, a general partner at Battery Ventures, added: “It is a testament to the Coefficient team’s product craftsmanship that users become evangelists, promoting use of the product throughout the organization … Coefficient products equip business users with the tools and automation needed to reach peak performance, a critical advantage amid an unpredictable macroeconomic environment.”

Peloton co-founder John Foley is a rug guy now

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in EC venture capital, fundraising, john foley, Peloton, startup, Startups, VentureNo Comments

What Ernesta’s round tells us about today’s VC market John Foley clearly didn’t take (ahem) a brake after leaving Peloton. The former co-founder and CEO of the connected fitness company — who stepped down as CEO in February and left the company altogether in September — is back with a new startup. Ernesta, which aims to launch in spring 2023, will sell custom rugs through a direct-to-consumer strategy. It has already raised a $25 million Series A round from a slate of investors that also backed Peloton, including True Ventures and Lee Fixel, through his current firm Addition. It’s not surprising to see Foley getting back into the startup game by any means — venture capital both embraces failure and loves a good comeback story. Plus, there are plenty of previous examples of this happening involving folks who left companies on much worse terms than Foley did. But this deal is particularly interesting — even when you look past the seeming randomness of it. For one thing, comeback stories in venture don’t generally start in the same calendar year that the previous tale ended in. And Foley’s ability to quickly raise such a sizable round before the company’s launch actually tells us quite a bit about where the market is at right now.

Security automation startup Veriti launches out of stealth with $18.5M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in AI, cybersecurity, Enterprise, funding, Security, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Veriti, a platform for unifying cybersecurity infrastructure, today emerged from stealth with $18.5 million in funding, a combination of $12 million from Insight Partners and a $6.5 million round led by NFX and Amiti. According to CEO Adi Ikan, the newly announced capital is being put toward scaling Veriti’s business operations and developing its product suite. Veriti’s launch comes as VCs continue to show enthusiasm for cybersecurity startups despite the generally unfavorable funding climate. According to PitchBook data, venture capital investments in the security sector this year eclipsed $13.66 billion — up from $11.47 billion in 2020. And the global cybersecurity market is projected to be worth over $500 billion by 2030. Founded in 2021 by Ikan and Oren Koren — both ex-Check Point executives — Veriti integrates with a company’s existing security stack to evaluate risk posture by analyzing security configurations, logs, sensor telemetries and threat intelligence feeds. The platform taps AI to identify which events might be impacting business uptime and present the root cause, as well as which security policy improvements need to be taken to remediate the impacts. “Enterprise security posture is usually sub-optimal. This is due to many reasons, including tool sprawl, increased complexity, massive amounts of data and limited resources,” Koren told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “This is what inspired us to build Veriti’s platform — to address these complexities and help IT and security stay on top of this challenge.” Koren makes the case that Veriti can augment security teams’ efforts in spotting security gaps, ultimately reducing the time spent on monitoring and maintenance tasks. The growing number of security solutions in organizations can introduce complexity because each solution has its own functions and tools to learn, he argues, while the volume of alerts issued by the solutions end up creating murky visibility into the actual security posture. Koren isn’t exactly an unbiased source. But he’s not the only one who’s observed these troubling trends in enterprise security. One recent survey of over 800 IT professionals found that almost 60% were receiving over 500 cloud security alerts per day, and that the alert fatigue created by the volume caused 55% to miss critical alerts on either a daily or weekly basis. “While affording more expansive security capabilities, the proliferation of security solutions creates room for misconfigurations that can result in inadvertent security gaps and adversely impact the business by blocking legitimate applications and users,” Ikan said via email. “IT and security leadership today have a poor idea of the true utilization of security investments and of the effective security posture of their organizations.” Veriti’s challenge will be demonstrating that its approach is superior to the other security posture-analyzing platforms on the market. Rival vendor Secureframe provides a service that integrates with cloud providers and apps to understand its customers’ security postures. Hunters, another competitor, aims to automate the threat-hunting process by taking in data from networking and security tools to detect stealth attacks. It’s very early days for Veriti — Koren wouldn’t reveal the size of the company’s customer base or current revenue. But he’s betting that Veriti’s tech expertise will help it stand out from the pack. “By leveraging modern techniques like machine learning, focusing on automation, we aim to provide a way for modern teams to maximize security posture while minimizing issues that impact business uptime,” he said. As the idiom goes: time will tell.

Eliyan raises $40M from Intel and Micron to build chiplet interconnects • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in chips, funding, Hardware, Intel, Micron, semiconductor, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Increasingly, as Moore’s law rears its ugly head, computer chip developers are adopting “chiplet” architectures to scale their hardware’s processing power. Chiplets are Lego-like integrated circuit blocks designed to work with other, similar chiplets to form complex, stackable chips that boost performance while maintaining a similar physical footprint. Chiplets offer a number of advantages over conventional designs. But assembly issues — as well as challenges in balancing cost, performance, power consumption and time to market — often plague them in the early phases. Aiming to overcome the hurdles in chiplet creation, Ramin Fajadrad, Syrus Ziai and Patrick Soheili founded Eliyan, a chiplet interconnect startup, in 2021. Eliyan’s technology — dubbed NuLink — connects chiplet components using standard chip packaging, leading to what the company claims are faster-performing and more energy-efficient chips. “The focus is on developing a way to enable a more high-performance, lower-power and lower-latency interconnect for chiplet architectures, which experts agree is the only path to continuing to scale Moore’s law,” Farjadrad told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “We use our technology in standard packaging, thus saving time, cost and development effort compared to more advanced packing that other interconnect schemes require. In addition, our approach has sustainability benefits by reducing material costs and waste in the manufacturing process and lowering energy consumption for high-performance compute chips.” Eliyan’s roots are in a previous startup, Aquantia, that Marvell acquired in 2019. Farjadrad says the technology has been under development since 2017; he co-started Aquantia and served as the startup’s chief engineer for nearly 15 years. Prior to co-founding Eliyan, Farjadrad spent several years at Marvell as CTO and VP of the company’s networking and automotive division. Ziai is a former Qualcomm engineering VP, while Soheili was previously VP of business development at semiconductor firm eSilicon. While Eliyan hasn’t launched its technology commercially yet — it expects the first silicon to hit the market in Q2 2023 — the company claims to have achieved the last step before manufacturing, a tape-out, using semiconductor manufacturer TSMC’s 5 nm process. “Process” in chip lingo refers to an architectural platform; TSMC began mass-producing 5 nm chips in 2020. “Eliyan’s technology enables processors by allowing them to scale in performance and power to be more readily and practically manufacturable,” Farjadrad said. “The world will always need more computing power, and Eliyan is enabling a critical aspect of making sure scaling will happen for any type of high-performance computing application.” The fact that Eliyan’s tech has yet to reach market might give some would-be customers pause. But the startup has notable investors in the chip world behind it, including Intel and Micron, who alongside Cerberus and Celestra contributed to Eliyan’s $40 million Series A tranche that closed today. With the capital, Eliyan plans to continue chasing after a chiplet market that could be worth $50 billion in 2024 — specifically by ramping up testing and implementation. Farjadrad wouldn’t name clients, but said that Eliyan, which currently has a 21-person staff, is in discussions with “big semi companies, hyperscalers and AI processor startups.” “We’re dealing with the challenges and realities of physics in designing and manufacturing advanced chips … [but we’re] in a high-demand market,” Farjadrad said. “Our technology will ultimately lead to faster, more efficient and cheaper high-performance computing to run data centers, cloud computing AI, graphics and more.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

AfroTech Conference heads to Austin for first in-person event since 2019 • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 4, 2022Posted in AfroTech, conference, EC DEI, Media & Entertainment, startupNo Comments

The AfroTech Conference, one of the nation’s most prominent Black tech gatherings, will touch down in Austin on November 13 for its first in-person event since 2019. The event is put on annually by the publication AfroTech, with this year’s theme being web3. High-profile speakers for the conference include NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace, billionaire Mark Cuban, and “venture rapitivist” — VC and rapper — Chamillionaire, who will speak about brand-building and investments. Other speakers include 15 Percent Pledge founder Aurora James, Career Karma CEO Ruben Harris, and Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton. Speaking to ZebethMedia, Morgan DeBaun, the co-founder and CEO of AfroTech’s parent company, Blavity, said this year’s event aims to bridge the gap between music, culture, technology, and fintech. It’s added new sessions and programming to help build the skills of attendees in various technical positions and will host workshops on how to find mentors and advisers. “Tech continues to be the fastest-growing industry in the world,” DeBaun told ZebethMedia. “We want to make sure that our community is not just getting the early career jobs, but actually making it all the way through the career ladder.” Unlike many other tech conferences, culture and music play a central role at AfroTech. DeBaun said her goal was to make the event as entertaining as possible, and music is a defining feature of African American culture. There will be live musical performances from artists like Bia, Wale, and Zaytoven, and Disney will premiere “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”