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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.

Valence Security raises fresh capital to secure the SaaS app supply chain • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Enterprise, M12, Microsoft, SaaS, startup, Startups, Valence SecurityNo Comments

Valence Security, a company securing business app infrastructure, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series A round led by M12, Microsoft’s corporate venture arm, with participation from YL Ventures, Porsche Ventures, Akamai Technologies, Alumni Ventures and former Symantec CEO Michael Fey. The new capital brings the company’s total raised to $32 million, and co-founder Shlomi Matichin says it’ll be put toward product development and doubling Valence’s 25-person headcount by the end of the year. Matichin co-founded Valence Security with Yoni Shohet in 2021. A two-time entrepreneur, Shohet previously co-launched SCADAfence, an industrial Internet of Things security startup. Matichin, for his part, was one of the founding members of Capester, a platform for cataloging videos of civic violations. “In recent years, malicious actors have placed their focus on the interconnectivity between software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, leveraging its potential for their attack campaigns, as we saw in the SolarWinds breach,” Matichin told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Organizations struggle to secure this [app] mesh — a growing, complex and interconnected environment of SaaS apps, third-party integrations, identities, privileges and data.” Matichin and Shohet built Valence to address these challenges around visibility into the SaaS supply chain, including misconfigurations, risk prioritization and remediation. The platform attempts to detect all of a company’s SaaS apps and contextualize them with vendor risk assessments, offering tools to spot improperly configured security controls and drifts from established policies. Valence can also help manage risky, inactive and overprivileged authentication keys, third-party integrations and no- and low-code workflows, Matichin says — in addition to potentially insecure public-facing files and emails forwarded externally. Identity security flows within Valence, meanwhile, aim to ensure users are managed by a central identity provider, using multi-factor authentication and are properly offboarded. According to Matichin, driving the demand for these services is the increasing threats companies face — and general SaaS app sprawl. The average enterprise uses around 80 SaaS apps, with BetterCloud estimating that businesses with more than 1,000 employees use more than 150 apps. This opens firms to attack. According to a Dimensional Research survey commissioned by ReversingLabs, a cybersecurity vendor, just over half (51%) of IT security teams report being able to protect their software from supply chain attacks. The impact of such attacks can be devastating. In a recent paper, Kaspersky estimated the cost of a supply chain software attack to an enterprise at $1.4 million. That doesn’t factor in the lost revenue from additional downtime arising during remediation, which can substantially add to costs (to the tune of thousands to millions of dollars) and affect a firm’s reputation. “Beyond security concerns, the repercussions of SaaS supply chain attacks are at the top of business priorities in light of the growing number of high-profile SaaS supply breaches over the past two years,” Matichin said. “These breaches can expose multiple interconnected SaaS applications for a single organization as well as threaten the business-critical data stored in those applications. This risk to business objectives, as well as to business continuity and efficiency due to the significant impact these breaches have on SaaS use, should be top-of-mind for the C-suite.” Tel Aviv-based Valence competes with a number of vendors in the supply chain SaaS app security space, including Canonic Security, Atmosec (which has raised $6 million), Astrix Security ($15 million), Wing Security ($26 million), AppOmni ($123 million), Obsidian Security ($119.5 million) and Adaptive Shield ($34 million). When asked whether that concerned him, Matichin responded by highlighting what he sees as a growing need for visibility and control over SaaS assets and remediation of the risks. “As remote working conditions accelerated the adoption and use of SaaS applications, a unique and unaddressed risk surface uncovered a growing need for SaaS security solutions targeting the sprawling SaaS mesh,” Matichin said. “In this respect, Valence was strongly positioned to address the unique security and business needs at the height of the pandemic, [and] Valence will continue to set the standard for SaaS security going forward.” Matichin didn’t reveal the size of Valence’s customer base or projected revenue. But even if it’s lower than that of the company’s close competitors, VCs seem ready and willing to throw their weight behind security vendors. In the first half of 2022, there was $12.5 billion in venture capital invested across more than 530 deals, according to a report from investment firm Momentum Cyber — in line with H1 2021’s $12.6 billion invested.

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.”

SwiftConnect, which lets employees use their phones to access the office, raises $17M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Enterprise, Jamf, JLL Spark Global Ventures, navitas capital, startup, Startups, SwiftConnectNo Comments

The widespread adoption of flexible work has increased the challenge of managing access to physical, commercial buildings, given the dynamic nature of hybrid workspaces. With today’s staffers coming and going to the office on unpredictable timetables, it can be tough to keep track of which have access to rooms and office resources. In a recent survey conducted by HID Global, an independent brand of access control conglomerate Assa Abloy, 41% of businesses said they believed that their current system met requirements — down from 51% in 2021. HID Global, being a vendor, isn’t necessarily impartial. But it’s not inconceivable that there’s truth to the assertion access control has become harder than it once was. Chip Kruger certainly believes so. Hurdles in the access control space spurred him to found SwiftConnect, a platform for handling space booking, visitors and meetings in physical offices. Kruger previously partnered with Matt Copel, SwiftConnect’s other co-founder, to start Waltz, an access control company launched in Copel’s dorm room that was acquired by WeWork in mid-2019. Both Copel and Kruger briefly worked at WeWork, but left to found SwiftConnect in 2020. “We had the idea that the flexibility and on-demand nature of access control that WeWork wanted was now going to be a requirement of every owner and occupier for their own buildings and offices going forward due to changing work patterns, including the increasing number of people working on-site and remotely,” Kruger told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “SwiftConnect also tapped into the fact that administrators were also seeking to use physical space and real estate more efficiently.” SwiftConnect — which today closed a $17 million Series A round co-led by JLL Spark Global Ventures and Navitas Capital — sells access to cloud services that tie together existing credential providers, reader terminals and other business systems. The company provides tools to automate identity, credentialing and permissioning steps for office spaces through mobile devices, for example a dashboard that allows admins to issue credentials to access certain buildings to iOS devices via Apple Wallet. Using SwiftConnect, employees and tenants can add their employee badge to Apple Wallet on the iPhone or Apple Watch after an initial set-up process. Once added, the badge gives them access to enter their office building, office space and shared fitness and amenity spaces secured by NFC-enabled locks. SwiftConnect’s platform allows companies to orchestrate physical access controls. Image Credits: SwiftConnect “As hybrid and flexible work have made the execution of seamless access control ever more challenging, commercial building owners and operators are increasingly seeing it as both an opportunity and a pain point they’re trying to solve,” Kruger said. “On-demand, connected, mobile-first access control is a requirement for most organizations who want their access control system to enable a more dynamic space where access permissions and credentials must change based on space booking or other context.” SwiftConnect isn’t the first to market with a mobile-centric access control management platform. Openpath, which has raised tens of millions of dollars in venture funding, offers a solution that allows workers to replace their physical access cards with the phones they already have. But Kruger emphasizes that — unlike Openpath — SwiftConnect’s system doesn’t require installing any new reader hardware. But what about when your iPhone dies? Well, Kruger doesn’t have the perfect solution to that problem. He notes, though, that Apple Wallet on the Apple Watch works even when the ultra-battery-saving Power Reserve mode is active. As for the all-too-common misplaced phone scenario, he suggests Apple’s Find My app. “For users of office spaces, SwiftConnect’s platform means they can enjoy coming back to the office with a ‘skip-the-wait’ experience that gets them from street-to-seat efficiently and without ever having to worry about a plastic badge again,” Kruger said. The plug-and-play nature of SwiftConnect’s approach seemingly appeals to large real estate clients like Silverstein Properties, which installed it in its 7 World Trade Center office building in February. SwiftConnect more recently announced a collaboration with Microsoft to develop “intuitive, employee-centric” experiences on top of Microsoft Places, Microsoft’s app for managing office workers across hybrid work campuses. That’s surely music to the ears of SwiftConnect’s investors. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global access control market was worth $10.31 billion in 2019 and could reach $20.02 billion by 2027. Kruger said that the Series A, which SwiftConnect plans to put toward growing its professional services and engineering teams as well as expanding its presence across the U.K., Europe and Australia, was raised to “weather any potential economic headwinds.” It brings the startup’s total cash in the bank to $27 million. “We have product-market fit given our traction, deployments, happy customers and growth,” Kruger said, while declining to answer questions about revenue or customer count. “We are receiving significant inbound interest from other verticals and geographies, including financial services and tech companies occupying spaces in premium locations in Europe and Australia.” A mix of real estate and institutional investors including Nuveen, Cushman & Wakefield, Bridge Investment Group, Crow Holdings, World Trade Ventures, 1414 Ventures and JAMF, the Apple device management vendor, also participated in SwiftConnect’s latest equity funding round. SwiftConnect currently has 70 employees, with an expectation to reach 80 by the end of 2022 — a hiring spree largely fueled by the proceeds.

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.

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.”

Enable lands $94M to help B2B companies manage their rebate programs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Commerce, Enable, Enterprise, Insight Partners, startupNo Comments

Enable, a startup selling access to a platform that helps business-to-business (B2B) companies manage their rebate programs, today announced that it raised $94 million in an oversubscribed Series C round led by Insight Partners with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, SE Ventures, PSP Growth and HarbourVest Partners. Bringing Enable’s total capital raised to $156 million, the proceeds will be put toward increasing headcount and expanding to new markets, particularly Europe, CEO Andrew Butt told ZebethMedia in an interview. Rebates are a familiar concept in the consumer space, but they tend to work a little differently in B2B. B2B companies offer rebates when their customers achieve some benchmark, such as total spend, purchasing a collection of products or a marketing referral. The challenge becomes keeping track of these benchmarks and progress toward them, ensuring customers receive the rebates to which they’re entitled and — in the process — fostering relationships. Enable, which Butt co-founded in 2016 with Denys Shortt, aims to remove some of the burden of rebates and ideally turn them into profit drivers. The platform surfaces deal term and sales incentive data for manufacturers, distributors and retailers, providing insights into what’s owed versus collected, the status of rebate deals and what’s on deck. Butt says he was inspired to launch the company by his experiences in the B2B space, including at Enable Informatix, a property management software-as-a-service vendor he co-founded and sold to Sovereign Capital in 2010. “For many organizations, rebate and incentive data is typically tucked away in massive spreadsheets where one formula error will break everything,” Butt said. “Often, this data is the responsibility of a single employee, meaning few people understand the data and how these deals work.” Image Credits: Enable In contrast, Enable provides collaborative dashboards to author, execute and track the progress of rebate deals. The platform, which allows customers to create joint business plans, also forecasts rebate activity, attempting to guarantee companies that they’ll be able to pay and collect on all rebates owed. Enable recently launched a special pricing agreements product that connects to a company’s supply chain to improve transparency on claimbacks, the agreements between distributors and manufacturers based on sales to a contractor. Elsewhere, Enable introduced new services to manage a wider range of incentives, including a module that allows sales and pricing teams to align around large deals and a commissions system that delivers rebate status tracking to manufacturers. “Enable helps companies incentivize the purchasing behavior of partners while also ensuring they collect all incentives owed to them,” Butt said. “Our biggest competition is Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or overextended enterprise resource management platforms.” Butt claims that around 10,000 companies are using Enable’s platform today and that growth has been “accelerating” year-over-year after expanding to the U.S. and Canada (although he didn’t define “growth”). Enable employs 400 people, and the company expects to end the year with 435 throughout the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia. “We’ve been extremely successful with our growth in this market, and [the Series C] round adds fuel to that growth. At the same time, it helps us extend our vision,” Butt said. “Rebates are incentives. They are a key way to drive behavior between partners. It’s our vision to empower thriving partner ecosystems, so as we continue our growth you’ll see us adding products that enhance partners alignment on goals and incentives while increasing transparency and easing friction, allowing every partner to flourish.”

Ambi Robotics secures $32M infusion to deploy its item-sorting robots in warehouses • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 17, 2022Posted in ambi, ambi robotics, Bow Capital, Robotics & AI, startup, Startups, tiger globalNo Comments

Ambi Robotics, a startup developing supply chain automation hardware, today announced that it raised $32 million in additional funding led by Tiger Global and Bow Capital, with participation from Ahren and logistics firm Pitney Bowes. Pitney Bowes is a strategic investor in Ambi, having recently inked a $23 million deal with the company to deploy Ambi’s hardware in U.S.-based Pitney Bowes fulfillment centers. The new capital came in the form of a SAFE, or simple agreement for future equity, which grants investors the right to purchase equity in the company at a future date, allowing Ambi to delay negotiations around valuation and terms of investment. CEO Jim Liefer says that it’ll be put toward continuing deployments and installations of Ambi’s tech, expanding the company’s product portfolio and growing engineering, customer support and operations teams headcount. “This additional funding round came together very quickly, spawning from a ‘normal’ company update to our existing investors and partners,” Liefer told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “It sparked interest to further fuel manufacturing and deployments of our current and future categories of AI-powered parcel sorting systems … Just this year, our team has more than doubled and we will continue to add engineering and customer success talent and other areas to keep pace with customer demand for our robotic solutions across their operations.” The co-founders of Ambi — including Ken Goldberg, the chair of the industrial engineering and operations research department at UC Berkeley — years ago discovered clever techniques to train robots in simulation and transfer those learnings to the real world. After a breakthrough on a system called Dex-Net, Goldberg and Jeff Mahler, a former doctoral student, launched the company in 2019, along with other scientists and engineers from UC Berkeley. Dex-Net, short for Dexterity Network, is an AI system that trains on thousands of images of 3D models of objects. Using deep learning, the system scans the data and uses algorithms to learn the best way to pick up the objects. A row of Ambi’s autonomous item-sorting robotic arms deployed to a warehouse floor. Image Credits: Ambi Robotics Ambi’s robotics platform builds on this to automate processes primarily in logistics and fulfillment. The company claims its products, which include robotic arms and the software to run them, can be “taught” to pick and pack millions of unique items while adapting to different packaging (e.g. boxes and envelopes) on the fly. Using “end effectors” like suction cups, Ambi machines pick, scan, insert, place and pack items arranged in mail sacks on fulfillment center floors in tandem with workers. Software running in the background analyzes data on productivity, item dimensions and weights, utilization and more and identifies “pick points” on items in cluttered environments like conveyor belts, totes and bins. Customers pay upfront for Ambi’s robotics units and then pay a monthly subscription cost for use of the software. “The team at Ambi Robotics brings a new way of thinking about traditional problems,” Liefer said. “With advanced tech that can solve a wide range of real-world problems, the team [has] decided to use their expertise to drive the exploding ecommerce industry toward a sustainable supply chain, so the strain of sorting parcels doesn’t rest on the shoulders of our most valuable asset — people.” Liefer says that Ambi’s current focus is deploying the latest generation of its robotics tech, AmbiSort A-Series v3, which features a “soft-touch” end effector that can handle both deformable and rigid items. Ambi claims that warehouse associates can work alongside three to four of these systems to increase the average throughput per employee to over 1,200 items sorted per hour. Ambi competes with Covariant, Nomagic, Soft Robotics, Pickle, Hai Robotics, XYZ Robotics and RightHand, among others, in a favorable investment climate for robotics. According to Crunchbase, more than $17 billion poured into VC-backed robotic startups in 2021 — nearly triple the investment in 2020. In April, Amazon announced that it would create a new $1 billion fund to back companies working in the customer fulfillment, logistics and supply chain sectors. And in May, Walmart expanded its partnership with robotics startup Symbotic to install the latter’s machines into all of Walmart’s distribution centers in the U.S. As of 2019, the global warehouse automation market was worth about $15 billion, according to Statista. That number is expected to double within the next four years, with supply chain executives in an Accenture survey citing automation as one of their top three investment priorities — workers’ concerns about the tech aside. Leifer says that Ambi, for its part, began generating revenue through commercial deployments in October 2020, installing systems prior to the peak holiday buying season. The company is currently in the process of installing 80 parcel-sorting systems while supporting more than 80 “full-stack” sorting systems across 15 sorting hubs. Gregg Zegras, EVP and president of global e-commerce at Pitney Bowes, added in an emailed statement: “Ambi Robotics is an important part of an innovation strategy that is helping Pitney Bowes improve service to our clients and efficiently grow our global ecommerce business. In Ambi Robotics, we see the same commitment to client-led innovation that has helped Pitney Bowes evolve and win in the marketplace for over 100 years. We look forward to continuing to work together to drive innovation in our global ecommerce hubs.” Berkeley-based Ambi, which recently moved into a new HQ, has raised $67 million to date and has more than 50 employees.

The highs and lows of Q3 venture capital data for women startup founders • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 14, 2022Posted in EC DEI, EC venture capital, startup, Startups, Venture, womenNo Comments

Perhaps unsurprisingly, <a href=” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>new PitchBook data found that U.S. companies with all female founders are raising less capital this year than the last amid current economic woes. Last year, women raised around 2.4% of all venture capital allocated, a figure that stands at 1.9% through Q3 of this year. That number becomes even lower and even worse if we factor race into account. When the overall number for all-female teams was 2.4% last year, Black and Latinx women hovered around 0.05% each, while Indigenous Americans raised approximately 0.004% of known capital in the United States, according to Crunchbase. It has long been a worry that, as the venture market slows, the most marginalized groups would be pushed aside as investors retreat to old networks and deals that feel most familiar to them from the founders they don’t hesitate to trust. The direct line between the venture haves and have-nots has always been stark, but there is some good news on the front. Year-to-date capital invested in all-female-founded companies in the United States is slightly higher than what was disbursed in all of 2020. (Last year was a record-breaking year, and given the current market conditions, it’s not shocking that present-day numbers are meager in comparison). All-female teams raised $3.6 billion (out of a total U.S. figure of $194.9 billion) across 742 deals so far this year. In all of 2020, all-female teams raised $3.3 billion (out of $168.7 billion) across 771 deals. It’s clear that 2021 was an outlier: all-female teams raised $8 billion across 1,132 deals. “There is no logical justification for why female founders should be impacted any more so than any other founder category, be it in a bear or bull market.” Pippa Lamb of Sweet Capital It’s jarring to note the difference between deal counts and the amount of money raised when the founding teams are mixed-gender rather than all-female. Compared to $3.6 billion worth of deals all-female teams closed this year, teams with at least one male co-founder raised $32.4 billion in 2,811 deals. So far, mixed-gender teams have also been able to secure the same percentage of capital they raised last year, around 17%.