Startups

Y42 wants to become mission control for your data pipelines • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in business intelligence, data integration, data pipelines, Enterprise, managed service, Startups, y42No Comments

When Berlin-based Y42 launched in 2020, its focus was mostly on orchestrating data pipelines for business intelligence. That mission has expanded quite a bit over the course of the last couple of years and today, Y42 announced the launch of what it calls its “Modern DataOps Cloud.” Built on top of data warehousing service Snowflake and Google’s BigQuery engine, Y42‘s new fully managed service aims to provide businesses with more of the tools to make their data stack easily accessible for more users while also providing additional collaboration tools and improved data governance services. “The use case for data has moved beyond ad hoc reporting to become the very lifeblood of a company. However, data pipelines built ad hoc are inherently brittle and inevitably break over time, leading to an overflow of fire-fighting requests and, ultimately, mistrust in business data. For organizations that rely on data to make mission-critical decisions, this can be fatal,” said Y42 founder and CEO Hung Dang. Image Credits: Y42 He argues that Y42’s new DataOps Cloud will allow organizations to more easily create and run production-ready pipelines and consume the data that comes through them. Like before, Y42 fully manages the data stack, using open source tools like Airbyte to integrate the different services and dbt Core for transformations. For advanced users and data teams, Y42 offers Git-based version control (though non-technical users can leverage this through the service’s web app, too) and with this new platform, the company also now offers enhanced governance tools like a data catalog, asset ownership assignments, data contracts and multi-level access controls. “Our vision is for every organization — whether it has one single data engineer, data analyst or a whole data team — to be able to create and run production-ready data pipelines efficiently and consume data in any downstream application to make better business decisions. The Y42 Modern DataOps Cloud makes this vision a reality — today,” said Dang. In addition to the new managed service, Y42 also today announced that it has brought on Jules Cantwell as its president. Before Y42, Cantwell was the COO of Qualtrics EMEA. “The tech industry is at a tipping point where the breadth and volume of data that companies are gathering is rapidly outpacing their ability to manage it effectively. The need for a Modern DataOps Cloud to manage data pipelines in a scalable manner has become mission-critical,” said Cantwell. “Y42 has the product vision, customer proof points and passionate team to truly transform the data management space.” The company also recently brought on Max Herrmann, the former CMO of data integration platform Cask (which Google acquired in 2018) and most recently the CMO at Swim.ai, as its senior VP of Marketing.

Momento launches out of stealth with a serverless cache • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in bain capital ventures, Enterprise, momento, Serverless, Startups, The General PartnershipNo Comments

After working at NASA as a rover roboticist, Khawaja Shams underwent something of a career pivot, joining AWS to team up with engineer Daniela Miao on DynamoDB, a fully managed NoSQL database service. Not content to stop there, Shams and Miao left AWS to co-found Momento, a Seattle-based startup that’s today emerging from stealth with a “serverless cache” optimized for cloud computing. What’s a serverless cache, you ask? Well, Shams describes it as an elastic, “highly available” cache that delivers commonly used data to apps and databases faster. He claims that Momento’s platform lets developers add a cache to their cloud stack with around five lines of code, accelerating databases that run in public clouds such as Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud. “Legacy caching providers offer a different model that requires customers to provision and pay for their peak capacity. These inelastic services are highly inefficient, expensive, require a lot of work to get right, and simply do not scale,” Shams told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Momento allows customers to provision a secure cache, capable of handling millions of transactions per second, with a single API call.” Shams makes the case that legacy caching services are complicated and inefficient, forcing engineering teams to waste time tinkering around with too many configurations. Moreover, he says, because they don’t automatically scale, they require engineers to provision for peak usage — leading to wasteful spending. By contrast, Momento handles load spikes while abstracting away configuration. The platform automatically optimizes, scales and manages caches, also securing caches with end-to-end encryption and audit log support. Image Credits: Momento “Cloud computing made it easier than ever for customers to rapidly provision resources. Unfortunately, during the growth-focused phases in the recent years, customers have ended up massively over-provisioning capacity and are struggling with large bills from their cloud providers,” Shams said. “Momento is helping customers optimize one of the top line items on their cloud bills.” To Shams’ point, cloud costs for some enterprises skyrocketed during the pandemic as digital transformation efforts accelerated. A 2022 survey from Anodot, an analytics platform, shows that nearly half of businesses (49%) are finding it difficult to get their cloud costs under control. According to a separate poll by Flexera, more than 50% of companies now spend over $2.4 million on the public cloud each year. Momento claims to have closed “multiple six-figure deals” with customers including CBS, NTT Docomo and smart home company Wyze Labs. The startup got an early vote of confidence from VCs including Bain Capital Ventures, which led Momento’s $15 million seed funding round that closed this week. The General Partnership participated alongside Flickr CEO Don MacAskill, former Mozilla CEO John Lilly and other angels. Shams says that the funding will be used to expand 25-employee Momento’s engineering team, build a “full-cycle” go-to-market team, grow the Momento platform and add support for additional public clouds. “Due to the recent economic downturn, organizations are actively seeking cost savings and efficiency. Caching tends to be among the top line items on their cloud bills, and Momento’s ability to save on their caching is appealing,” Shams said.

How can students work or launch a startup while maintaining their immigration status? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Column, Dear Sophie, EC Column, EC DEI, F-1 visa, Government & Policy, immigration law, Sophie Alcorn, Startups, Verified Expert - lawyerNo Comments

Sophie Alcorn Contributor Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives. More posts by this contributor Dear Sophie: How can early-stage startups improve their chances of getting H-1Bs? Dear Sophie: How can I launch a startup while on OPT? Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies. “Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.” ZebethMedia+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off. Dear Sophie, I’m studying bioinformatics at a university in the U.S. What options do I have to work before and after graduation on my student visa? Do any of these options allow me to launch my own startup? — Wanting to Work Dear Wanting, I applaud your enthusiasm to get to work! The opportunity to work and get training in your field is one of the draws of studying in the U.S. Complex immigration rules and regulations for international students — not to mention processing delays and time limits — can make things challenging, but all you need is a little planning to overcome those challenges! Your ability to work in your area of study — and for how long — depends on what type of student visa you hold: F-1 student visa. J-1 educational and cultural exchange visa. M-1 student visa. F-1 offers the most flexible work options Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window) The F-1 student visa offers the most options for working both before you graduate and after. Two types of training programs are available to most international students who hold an F-1 visa, making them eligible to work in their field of study: Curricular Practical Training (CPT) is available to students at some colleges and universities. Optional Practical Training (OPT) is available either before or after graduation. STEM OPT is a 24-month extension of OPT available to students who graduated with a STEM degree designated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Working under CPT If CPT is available at a university or college, then students on F-1 visas are eligible if they have been enrolled full time for at least one academic year and have not yet graduated. Some graduate programs allow or even require students to apply for CPT at the very beginning of their program.

Trio of Brown University grads think elder care needs a helping hand with data • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, Brown University, Deerfield Management, elder care, Intus Care, StartupsNo Comments

As a young boy growing up in Michigan, Robbie Felton went on home visits with his geriatric social worker mother. Seeing low-income, elderly and disabled patients so vulnerable stuck with Felton. As a student at Brown University, he became interested in how Medicare and Medicaid integrate to take care of these patient populations — so much so that he even left school for a while to work full time across the long-term care continuum and learn as much as he could about “very integrated high-touch models of care for seniors.” Serendipitously, while studying at Brown, he realized he wasn’t alone in his desire to help this population when he, Evan Jackson and Alex Rothberg wound up in the same class pitching the same idea — separately — to their teacher. Jackson had been introduced to the senior care space when in high school as he worked alongside a mentor in private equity who invested in and acquired elderly care facilities. Recalls Rothberg: “We had to apply to the class with an idea. The three of us basically submitted the same idea.” That idea ended up being the genesis of what is today Intus Care, a healthcare analytics startup that aims to synthesize financial, clinical and administrative data to identify trends in long-term care facilities by integrating with electronic health record, claims and accounting software to highlight clinical risks in elderly patients. If you’ve ever had an elderly relative in long-term care you can see firsthand how difficult it is for everyone involved in a patient’s care — especially with all the staffing shortages that are prevalent today — to have the time or ability to go through all of a patient’s clinical history to truly understand how to better care for them or prevent future illnesses or falls from happening. “We’re trying to address some of the core issues surrounding the way health care has been built,” Felton said. “And the fact that it’s disparate in nature makes the process of managing and caring for our loved ones so difficult.” In summary, Intus’ mission is “to catalyze data-driven change” in the care of older adults. “At the base layer, we’ve created a solution that integrates with all of an organization’s data and surfaces the insights most important for them to tangibly push the needle on outcomes related to the quality of care that they’re providing,” Felton, who serves as the company’s CEO, told ZebethMedia. “We want to help them scale a high-quality, high-value model of care to as many participants as efficiently and effectively as possible, nationwide.” Image Credits: The trio — who just graduated five months ago — raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding for their venture in March of 2020 and then another $1.6 million in May of 2021 from some angel investors and smaller institutional investors. They raised another $3 million in May of this year and today Intus is announcing a $14 million Series A financing led by Deerfield Managementm, with participation from existing backers Jumpstart, Nova and Collab Capital. The startup operates as a SaaS business and its customers are the organizations providing care. “Our end users are the care coordinators — the individuals who are on the ground providing care services to the patients,” said COO Jackson. “We want to enable them with data so they can make more informed decisions.” But really, anyone who is making proactive decisions — whether it be care coordinators, facility managers or social workers — can use Intus’ offering. “You can use our tool at two levels,” Rothberg, CTO, explained. “One being very individual in terms of how do we get a snapshot of a person’s health in a much more comprehensive way than any other technology will let you.” “And then zooming out a little bit — how do we plan for this person’s health over a six- and 12-month period…not just oh, someone fell yesterday. But more of ‘How do we prevent that?’ So if our data shows there’s a pattern of falls and every single time it’s between 4 and 6 am.” The end goal is to not only recognize the patterns, Rothberg added, but let clinicians make plans going forward. Intus plans to use its capital primarily toward hiring people experienced in scaling healthcare ventures, with a focus on engineers and product folks. It also wants to hire sales and marketing staff because thus far, the three founders and one other person have been working to acquire customers. Even with that small crew, Intus says it has experienced 50% revenue growth quarter-over-quarter this year. Julian Harris, operating partner at Deerfield Management, said his firm invests across the healthcare industry and believes that Intus has built “elegant, intuitive tools to serve a range of users…in ways that impact cost and quality outcomes.” “We believe they have incredible account management infrastructure, and they leverage insights from their customers to drive enhancements to the platform faster than any incumbents in the space,” Harris wrote via email. “They also have deep regulatory and compliance expertise on their team, enabling them to infuse their tools and services with these insights. And, the founders are among the best sales leaders I’ve encountered in my career.”

On average, CTOs make more than CEOs at early-stage startups • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in salary, salary data, StartupsNo Comments

New data from Kruze Consulting’s salary data from more than 200 startups show that CTOs, on average, are on higher salaries than their CEO counterparts. On average, co-founders make the same, but where there is a difference, the balance typically tips in the favor of the technical co-founder. With a dataset of more than 200 startups, startup accountants Kruze Consulting found the balance leans toward the technical co-founder of a startup. Image Credits: Kruze Consulting (opens in a new window) The data suggest that differences vary by stage and by industry. At Series A and beyond, the salary typically tips in the CEO’s favor. It’s easy to imagine early-stage companies needing to pay their technical leadership more, as they have a higher opportunity cost; especially in the Bay Srea, high-quality technical co-founders have their pick of high-paying, high-prestige jobs across the entire industry, with starting compensation packages significantly higher than at a startup. Differences by stage. Data from: Kruze Consulting Comparing industry to industry, healthcare and pure software/SaaS startups see the biggest discrepancies. Again, that makes sense if the opportunity cost is a factor; the vast majority of skills needed to build a SaaS company is directly transferable to some of the highest-paying developer and product roles at pretty much every company you can mention. Data by industry. Data from: Kruze Consulting The interesting outlier in the data is healthcare; it seems as if here, healthcare technical co-founders are particularly lucrative, and are able to attract higher wages as a result. Of course, with a dataset of 200 or so, it’s possible there are some outliers in the data that skew things, but in terms of general trends, these numbers are congruent with the broader compensation numbers we are seeing across the ecosystem. Kruze Consulting also has a CEO salary report it published earlier this year, which can help you figure out what the market rate is for a CEO in the current financial climate, and a CTO salary report it published today.

Mozilla launches $35M venture capital fund for early-stage ‘responsible’ startups • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Firefox, Mozilla, Mozilla Ventures, Startups, VentureNo Comments

It seems that every internet company and their dog have at least one venture capital (VC) arm under their wing, with the likes of Google Ventures (now GV), Microsoft Ventures (now M12), Salesforce Ventures, Twilio Ventures, and Zoom Ventures all serving their corporate namesakes potential cash cows via hundreds of equity investments. Today, it’s Mozilla’s turn to solidify its investment endeavors via a new dedicated $35 million VC fund targeted at early-stage startups. Formally announced at Web Summit in Portugal today, Mozilla Ventures builds on other recent investments the company has made as part of its Mozilla Builders startup incubator program, though in truth Mozilla has sporadically invested in nearly 20 companies over the past decade. More recently, Mozilla joined a $900,000 pre-seed funding round into password management startup Heylogin. While Heylogin confirmed Mozilla as an investor back in September, we now know that this represented one of the first three investments that Mozilla has made from its new fund. The other two include Block Party, which raised a $4.8 million seed round in September to combat online harassment, and Secure AI Labs which is reportedly in the process of raising $9 million for a product that fosters collaboration in the medical industry while safeguarding aggregated patient data. While it’s not disclosing exactly how much it’s plowing into these companies, the triumvirate of investments gives some idea as to what Mozilla Ventures is aiming for with the new fund. It’s focusing on seed to Series A stage startups, but more specifically it says that it’s targeting what it calls “responsible” tech companies that “push the internet and the tech industry in a better direction.” But first, let’s take a quick step back and look at how we arrived at “Mozilla the VC,” from a brand that is still pretty much best known for its web browser. The story so far The Mozilla “community” emerged from Netscape back in 1998, and today it constitutes a not-for-profit entity called the Mozilla Foundation and a for-profit subsidiary called the Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla’s open source Firefox emerged as a major player in the web browsing space, taking on the (then) mighty Internet Explorer and hitting the giddy heights of a circa-30% market share around 2010. In the intervening years, it has dwindled to around 4% market share, though this still places it in the top three browsers behind Chrome and Safari. Today, Mozilla is a vocal proponent of privacy and positions itself as the antithesis of Big Tech behemoths such as Google, even though it relies substantively on the internet giant for revenue. It has also introduced a bunch of new privacy products in recent years, including a virtual private network (VPN) and an email-masking service. It has dabbled in other projects too, such as the now-defunct operating system Firefox OS. But with the Firefox web browser recently hitting version 100, it’s clear that Mozilla is still heavily reliant on its browser for income. The organization makes around $500 million annually, the lion’s share arriving via a search engine partnership with Google. Other sources of cash include subscriptions (VPN and email-masking), advertising, and donations from the public. ‘People before profits’ This all takes us to today, with Mozilla now looking to extend its rake into the world of venture capital. The new fund is being spearheaded by managing partner Mohamed Nanabhay, a South Africa-based technology and media executive and investor, who also served as a Mozilla board member until August this year. Mozilla Ventures is keen to set itself apart from the pack by stressing its focus on “putting people before profits.” In truth, there are plenty of VC funds that can easily lay claim to a similar mission, whether it’s through investing purely in climate tech or other companies working in the environmental-social-governance (ESG) realm. Mozilla, however, is addressing slightly different areas of the technological spectrum, such as privacy; “trustworthy AI”; and products that ultimately help decentralize digital power, which could be code for web3. “There are a lot of funds focused on ethical investing in areas like climate and economic justice,” Mozilla Foundation executive director Mark Surman explained to ZebethMedia. “We’ve taken a lot of inspiration from funds like these. As far as we know, Mozilla Ventures is the first focused solely on responsible internet startups. And, while some other funds do have investments in this area, the startups we met through Mozilla Builders told us that much is needed here.” Mozilla’s experimental Builders incubator program was a short-lived initiative that pretty much started and ended in 2020, though Mozilla said it culminated in more than 80 small investments. “The Builders experiment made it clear that there are founders and teams out there hungry to ‘fix the internet,’ but they need support,” Surman said. “Earlier this year, we decided that Mozilla needs to make a sustained commitment to supporting people and projects like the ones we met through Builders. Mozilla Ventures is our first step in this direction.” It’s also worth noting that the initial $35 million fund is being provided entirely by the Mozilla Foundation for now, whose funds come from sources that include donations from the public — many of whom may donate purely to support their favorite web browser. However, Firefox is technically maintained by the Mozilla Corporation, with Surman stating that all the money the Mozilla Foundation receives from donations is put entirely to fund its advocacy and philanthropy efforts, including its Privacy Not Included guide and grants given to professors that teach about responsible technology programs. “Mozilla Ventures is being funded from Mozilla’s long-term savings,” Surman said. “In simple terms, we are moving funds from our existing investment accounts into an investment vehicle focused on companies whose mission is in line with Mozilla.” Nanabhay will be the only full-time member working on Mozilla Ventures at first, supported by a team of consultants in London, Boston, and San Francisco, but the process is currently underway to recruit more heads in the U.S. and Europe to bolster the fund’s investment

Byju’s eyes $1 billion IPO for physical tutor chain Aakash • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in aakash, byju's, india, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Indian edtech giant Byju’s is engaging with bankers to put together a plan for the initial public offering of its physical tutor chain unit Aakash, which it acquired last year, a source familiar with the matter told ZebethMedia. The Bengaluru-headquartered firm is looking to raise $800 million to $1 billion in the initial public offering of Aakash at a valuation of over $3.5 billion, the source said, requesting anonymity as the details are private. The startup may file the paperwork for the IPO as early as February, the source said. The deliberations are at an early stage, so the terms of the deal may change or get completely abandoned, the source cautioned. Byju’s and its founder, Byju Raveendran, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A plan for the IPO of Aakash, which Byju’s acquired for nearly $1 billion last year, comes as the group firm has postponed its own listing plan amid the global market downturn. Byju’s seriously explored going public earlier this year through the SPAC route at north of $40 billion valuation but changed the plan after the market dramatically reversed most of the gains from the past 13 years of the bull run. Raveendran told ZebethMedia in an earlier interview that Byju’s was watching the macro market conditions closely and will file for an IPO in nine to 12 months. “I don’t think the markets will turn this year,” he said at the time. Another reason why Byju’s is considering listing Aakash on Indian stock exchanges is its apprehension about the consumer awareness of the Indian unit in the global markets, a person familiar with the matter said. The 34-year-old Aakash runs a chain of physical coaching centres across India. Prior to the acquisition, the firm was planning to list in the country. Aakash, which has been profitable for years, is on track to clock a revenue of over $360 million in the financial year ending 2024 at a 25% margin, the person familiar with the matter said.

Alation bags $123M at a $1.7B valuation for its data-cataloging software • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in AI, Alation, data catalog, Enterprise, funding, startup, StartupsNo Comments

There’s been an explosion of enterprise data in recent years, accelerated by pandemic-spurred digital transformations. An IDC report commissioned by Seagate projected companies would collect 42.2% more data by year-end 2022 than in 2020, amounting to multiple petabytes of data in total. While more data is generally a good thing, particularly where it concerns analytics, large volumes can be overwhelming to organize and govern — even for the savviest of organizations. That’s why Satyen Sangani, a former Oracle VP, co-founded Redwood City–based Alation, a startup that helps crawl a company’s databases in order to build data search catalogs. After growing its customer base to over 450 brands and annual recurring revenue (ARR) to over $100 million, Alation has raised $123 million in a Series E round led by Thoma Bravo, Sanabil Investments, and Costanoa Ventures with participation from Databricks Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Icon Ventures, Queensland Investment Corporation, Riverwood Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Union Grove, the company announced today. The all-equity tranche values Alation at over $1.7 billion — an impressive 15 times higher than the company’s previous valuation in a challenging economic climate. In an interview with ZebethMedia, Sangani said the new capital — which brings Alation’s total raised to $340 million — will be put toward investments in product development (including through acquisitions) and expanding Alation’s sales, engineering and marketing teams, with a focus on the public sector and corporations based in Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East. “With the capital, we will continue to focus on engagement and adoption, collaboration, governance, lineage, and on APIs and SDKs to enable us to be open and extensible,” Sangani said via email. “We’re going to bring innovation to the market that will increase the number of data assets we cover and the people who will leverage and access Alation.” With Alation, Sangani and his fellow co-founders — Aaron Kalb, Feng Niu and Venky Ganti — sought to build a service that enables data and analytics teams to capture and understand the full breadth of their data. The way Sangani sees it, most corporate leadership wants to build a “data-driven” culture but is stymied by tech hurdles and a lack of knowledge about what data they have, where it lives, whether it’s trustworthy and how to make the best use of it. Alation’s platform organizes data across disparate systems. Image Credits: Alation According to Forrester, somewhere between 60% and 73% of data produced by enterprises goes unused for analytics. And if a recent poll by Oracle is to be believed, 95% of people say they’re overwhelmed by the amount of data available to them in the workplace. “With the astounding amount of data being produced today, it’s increasingly difficult for companies to collect, structure, and analyze the data they create,” Sangani said. “The modern enterprise relies on data intelligence and data integration solutions to provide access to valuable insights that feed critical business outcomes. Alation is foundational for driving digital transformation.” Alation uses machine learning to automatically parse and organize data like technical metadata, user permissions and business descriptions from sources like Redshift, Hive, Presto, Spark and Teradata. Customers can visually track the usage of assets like business glossaries, data dictionaries and Wiki articles through the Alation platform’s reporting feature, or they can use Alation’s collaboration tools to create lists, annotations, comments and polls to organize data across different software and systems. Alation also makes recommendations based on how information is being used and orchestrated. For example, the platform suggests ways customers can centrally manage their data and compliance policies through the use of integrations and data connectors. “Alation’s machine learning contributes to data search, data stewardship, business glossary, and data lineage,” Sangani said. “More specifically, Alation’s behavioral analysis engine spots behavioral patterns and leverages AI and machine learning to make data more user-friendly. For example, search is simplified by highlighting the most popular assets; stewardship is eased by emphasizing the most active data sets; and governance becomes a part of workflow through flags and suggestions.” According to IDC, the data integration and intelligence software market is valued at more than $7.9 billion and growing toward $11.6 billion over the next four years. But Alation isn’t the sole vendor. The startup’s competition includes incumbents like Informatica, IBM, SAP and Oracle, as well as newer rivals such as Collibra, Castor, Stemma, Data.World and Ataccama, all of whom offer tools for classifying and curating data at enterprise scale. One of Alation’s advantages is sheer momentum, no doubt — its customer base includes heavyweights like Cisco, General Mills, Munich Re, Pfizer, Nasdaq and Salesforce, in addition to government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and Australia’s Department of Defense. Alation counts more than 25% of the Fortune 100 as clients, touching verticals such as finance, healthcare, pharma, manufacturing, retail, insurance and tech. In terms of revenue coming in, Sangani claims that Alation — which has more than 700 employees and expects to be at just under 800 by 2023 — is in a healthy position, pegging the firm’s cumulative-cash-burn-to-ARR ratio at around 1.5x. Despite the downturn, he asserts that customer spend is remaining strong as the demand for data catalog software grows; for the past five quarters, Alation’s ARR has increased year over year. In another win for Alation, the investment from Databricks Ventures is strategic, Sangani says. It’ll see the two companies jointly develop engineering, data science and analytics applications that leverage both Databricks’ and Alations’ platforms. “The most successful data intelligence platforms will be adopted by everyone. Vendors that are jack-of-all-trades, but masters of none, promise everything and succeed at little. Similarly, point products achieve limited success, but only serve to create data silos that our customers are trying to avoid. The future of data intelligence is about connectedness and integration,” Sangani said. “We know that and will continue to put our money behind our beliefs.”

Troop rallies retail investors to get out the proxy vote • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in ESG, Fintech, shareholder activism, StartupsNo Comments

Retail investors entered the stock market in droves over the past couple of years. Much ink has already been spilled analyzing competition between fintech companies such as Robinhood and Public.com to capture these new customers. But there’s another implication of this trend that’s less obvious: these new investors also have the power to introduce and vote on shareholder proposals that can shape the trajectories of publicly-traded companies. It’s a classic David-and-Goliath battle, though, as retail investors typically don’t stand a chance in organizing around their interests when they are going up against the behemoth fund managers that tend to hold the majority of shares in large, public companies through indexes. Troop, a New York-based startup, is optimistic that the balance of power can shift. Troop cofounders Seb Jarquin, Felix Tabary, Zen Yui Image Credits: Troop The company just announced it raised a $4.3 million seed round co-led by Northzone and BlockTower Capital for what it calls a “collective bargaining platform for everyday investors.” The raise brings its total funding to $6.1 million to date ahead of its private beta launch slated for later this month, co-founder and CEO Felix Tabary told ZebethMedia in an interview. Tabary started his career as a salesperson at Bloomberg, where he covered activist hedge fund clients. That experience opened his eyes to how shareholder advocacy can enact change at large companies, he said. The first time he thought to bring those tactics to retail investors through a new tech platform occurred years later in 2021 after small activist firm Engine No. 1 mobilized some of ExxonMobil’s largest shareholders to fill two of the company’s board seats with directors who were more conscious of climate risks. “Despite only owning a tiny bit of that company, they were able to kind of wrangle together a really interesting coalition to kind of push the company in the direction of sustainability for environmental and economic reasons,” Tabary said. “Motivated by seeing what was possible on the institutional level, and inspired by what happened in the Gamestop story, we figured, what can we do to combine these?” The ExxonMobil campaign was a watershed moment for socially-conscious activist investors. This year, the number of ESG (environmental, social and governance) proposals filed by shareholders at S&P 500 and Russell 3000 companies has surged. It’s quite uncommon today for retail investors to actually vote on proposals, though. Tabary and his co-founders, Seb Jarquin and Zen Yui, along with their 15 employees, are betting that building a stronger community of investors can lead to a more robust flow of information and therefore encourage a higher level of retail investor engagement. Troop’s platform seeks to take advantage of this trend by providing a home for retail investors to interact with one another where they can remain anonymous, but their shares are still verified on the platform, Tabary explained. Once users connect their brokerage accounts to the Troop app and become verified, they can connect with an “influential community of verified shareholders” to vote collectively on polls and campaigns that could eventually translate into formal shareholder proposals. “If you look at the landscape today, there really aren’t that many practical ways to align your finances, your personal wealth, your portfolio, your 401k, you name it, with, strictly speaking, your values, in a productive, impactful, measurable way. [Shareholder voting], I think, is a really concrete lever to try and hold companies to the best and highest possible standards,” Tabary said. While the tech is still in the early stages, Tabary said Troop’s plan is to monetize through B2B revenue by selling its platform to professional activist investors. “Professional activist investors are doing more and more activism, but they’re taking smaller and smaller stakes in the companies that they’re targeting, which means they need to build broader support from a larger number of people,” he said. There are some prominent firms such as ISS and Glass Lewis that provide proxy voting advisory services to institutions but haven’t historically focused on retail investors, Tabary explained. Publicly-traded fintech Broadridge, he added, is another player that does have a consumer-facing platform to aggregate proxy votes but in Tabary’s view, the company is constrained by highly specific rules that limit its ability to incentivize shareholders to actually vote. As a young upstart, Troop may have more latitude to experiment with different strategies to get retail investors on board. Ultimately, retail investors could end up making a decisive difference in important proxy votes, according to Tabary, which is why Troop is so focused on bringing them into the conversation. “The bulk of shareholder activism happens six to nine months ahead of the annual shareholder meeting, and it starts with small, incremental coalition-building. What we’re trying to do is very consciously build out the retail portion of that coalition that typically tends to only be involved at the very end to make up the 5-6% difference in vote swings,” Tabary said.

Former Yext CEO launches Roam to provide a virtual HQ for distributed teams • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Enterprise, funding, IVP, remote work, Roam, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Roam, which bills itself as a “cloud HQ” for distributed, remote companies, today emerged from stealth with $30 million in Series A funding led by IVP with participation from undisclosed angel investors. The tranche, which comes after a previously unannounced $10.6 million seed round and values the company at $95 million post-money, will be put toward go-to-market efforts in the U.S. and abroad, CEO Howard Lerman said. Lerman previously co-founded and led Yext, the publicly traded brand management company that uses a cloud-based network of apps and search engines to keep company information up to date across the web. When Yext’s workforce transitioned to remote work during the pandemic, Lerman perceived that employees lost “spontaneity and serendipity,” spent more time in meetings and began to lose visibility into what other meetings were going on and what their colleagues were doing. “I had this flash of insight — what if there was a bird’s-eye view of all the Zooms going on at a company at the same time that everyone could see? And better yet, what if people could move between and among them so they could participate as necessary and then quickly be on to their next thing?” Lerman told ZebethMedia via email. To Lerman’s point, shifts to a mostly remote workforce don’t occur overnight. One survey suggests that nearly half of employees — 46% — find remote work, at least in the early stages, can make it more difficult to maintain professional relationships with key stakeholders. That inspired Roam, which provides what Lerman describes as cloud-based “flex spaces” for workers at home, in offices and in the field. Roam’s Map View lets workers see what’s going on and have “project presence,” Lerman says, as well as chat with colleagues via text or video chat. Lerman didn’t reveal much beyond that — it’s early days for Roam, which currently has around 40 corporate customers. But he argued that the platform as it exists today can save substantial time compared to typical remote setups. Image Credits: Roam “I found my own personal meeting minutes dropped by more than 40% when I switched from Zoom to Roam from 4.5 hours per day to 2.6 hours per day. My average meeting time in Roam is eight minutes, an astounding number when you think about the prescheduled world of 30- and 60-minute Zoom time blocks,” Lerman said. Shorter and fewer meetings can lead to cost savings through improved productivity. One recent study out of the University of North Carolina found that unnecessary meetings waste about $25,000 per employee annually, translating to $101 million a year for any organization with over 5,000 staffers. Roam isn’t the first startup to attempt to tackle challenges around remote work with a cloud-based workspace. In fact, there are dozens of virtual HQ platforms, some venture-backed and some bootstrapped, mixing gamification and productivity into a service. In August, Kumospace raised $21 million for its platform that leverages lo-fi graphics and game-like mechanics to create a sense of togetherness. Gather is another big winner (despite layoffs) in the space, having raised $77 million in total from investors, including Sequoia, Index and Y Combinator. It’s not just startups. This summer, Microsoft launched Viva Engage, an in-house social media app for employee engagement. Other companies are piloting VR and apps such as Oculus for Business or Horizon Workrooms, aiming to boost collaboration with immersive meetings for remote workers. But Lerman believes strongly that Roam is differentiated, having invested the entirety of the seed round himself. He points out that as many as 77% of U.S.-based jobs are now either remote or hybrid, according to a March 2022 Gallup poll, representing a huge potential customer base. Indeed, after more than two years of remote work, many employees have no interest in returning to the office. Not all businesses are behind the changes, but there’s no denying that the pandemic rewrote the rules around the workplace — to the benefit of startups like Roam, potentially. “We are in the midst of a massive platform shift from in-office workplaces to various remote and hybrid models. In pre-pandemic 2019, [only] 40% of US jobs were either remote or hybrid,” Lerman said. “The pandemic has significantly accelerated the rate of distributed businesses and the need for a cloud HQ. No matter the size or how well they are faring, the future of work is a top issue for nearly every company right now.” Roam has 15 employees and plans to hire five more by the end of the year. Lerman declined to reveal financials, including revenue figures, when asked.