Y Combinator

Vimcal wants be the most nifty calendar app on the block • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Apps, calendar, calendar app, Vimcal, Y CombinatorNo Comments

Y Combinator-backed company Vimcal thinks creating an event takes too many steps in the current crop of calendar apps. So the company has made a calendar app that lets you create and edit events in just a few steps. Today, the startup is releasing its iOS app along with integration for Outlook accounts. The company already has web and desktop clients for Windows and Macs (both Intel and M1), and a Chrome extension for folks who like to look at their calendars and schedule their events on a big screen. But until now, Vimcal only supported Google (Google Workspace) accounts. The team has made it easier to use the calendar by assigning a keyboard shortcut to almost every action: from creating an event to jumping quickly between meetings to see what’s coming up in the week. It roughly takes three to five steps to create an event. The calendar also has a command center, which lets you type sentences like “Lunch meeting with Lisa at 1 pm tomorrow” to quickly create an event. Image Credits: Vimcal Vimcal also makes it easier to provide timeslots for meetings. It offers a more customizable solution to scheduling software like Calendly: you can simply drag available slots across the calendar, copy them, and paste it into an email. You can also define fixed timeslots for every week with a feature called Personal Links, which is more like Calendly. Slots — the fastest way to send availabilities — is now just as easy on the go. Swiftly navigate to any date. Hold and swipe down to multi-select times. pic.twitter.com/6rnJtnLoA5 — Vimcal (@vimcal) April 4, 2022 One of the handiest features of Vimcal is time travel, which easily lets you compare time zones so you can find a suitable slot for all. And it lets you add multiple time zones for comparison. 📱 New in Vimcal: Time Travel for iOS! ✈️ One of our most popular features is now available on mobile! Schedule with anyone, anywhere in the world. No mental math required. pic.twitter.com/EupAeufcZ0 — Vimcal (@vimcal) October 20, 2022 All of these features are available in the new iOS app, which has been in beta since April. But instead of keyboard shortcuts, they are optimized for touch interface. The company made this app with the help of its acquisition of Weve Calendar earlier this summer. The new app also lets you send a quick email from the notification screen to send an email to others if you’re running a few minutes late for a meeting. Image Credits: Vimcal Vimcal for iOS is a free app, but if you want to use the product on the desktop you will have to pay $15 per month or $150 per year. For teams with more than five members, the product costs $120 per year. The company is already working on making Vimcal adaptable to enterprise usage with customizable features. Both mobile and desktop versions allow you to look at your teammates’ calendars, making it easier to pick a time for a meeting across time zones. The company’s founder and CEO John Li first launched the product in January 2020 — right before the pandemic and the rise of remote work. Initially, the company onboarded users with a 30-minute call to give an overview of the product — similar to email client Superhuman — and answer any questions they might have. Li said that for the first year and a half the team onboarded 10,000 users through calls — some of them doubled as investor calls. The company still has an option for new customers to schedule a call with the team while trying out the product or purchasing the subscription. Vimcal has raised $1.9 million to date from investors like Y Combinator, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Teachable founder Ankur Nagpal, and Hustle Fund. “For the next half year, we are concentrating on building features for teams. Until now, we were focused on making the external scheduling and self-scheduling experience smooth. Now, we want to focus on internal scheduling for teams and enterprises. We are also building apps for iPad and Apple Watch, and later Android,” Li said on a call with ZebethMedia. The startup, which has a team of nine people, also launched a product called Vimcal Maestro for executive assistants earlier this month. There is plenty of competition in the calendar space. There are legacy players like Google and Outlook with new players like Calendly, Aerotime, Amie, and Magical competing for a slot on your calendar. Li claims that speed and ease of use is Vimcal’s USP. “We always tell our users that whatever you can do in another calendar app, you can do in Vimcal in half the number of steps or less. We have designed our product to be intuitive and fast,” Li said. “When we were making our app, we listed out every keystroke and mouse movement you needed to make to do the top 10 things like creating an event in a calendar. And then we looked at that list and reduced the number of steps.”

Emerge Career’s pre-release job training lands $3.2M seed and new state contracts • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 4, 2022Posted in emerge career, Government & Policy, Startups, Y CombinatorNo Comments

Education options during and after incarceration have never been particularly extensive, despite the best intentions of educators. Emerge Career is working on changing that and its early success in putting formerly incarcerated folks to work is attracting investment from both VCs and government programs. It was only August when Emerge first appeared as it came out of Y Combinator’s latest batch, and I covered its initial ambitions and approach then. The team previously worked on Ameelio, which upended years of bad and exploitative video calling services in prisons, but also made the problem of education clear to them. Security and limited budgets at vocational and community colleges limit the amount of help they can actually offer people in the system, and courses from GEDs to trades often take a very “study by mail” approach during incarceration, or traditional brick and mortar one on release. Emerge changes that with modern video lectures and regular video call office hours with educators who specialize in the subject matter. At first the subject was strictly getting a commercial driver’s license, and that has helped numerous former inmates to find jobs soon after release in a sector hurting for labor. Now Emerge is also planning to offer nursing assistant and welding courses — two other areas where a shortage of workers means employers may not think twice about hiring someone recently out of prison. “Besides the clear labor shortage and high compensations, these are two professions that the justice-involved people we met in prisons and reentry centers across the country showed a lot of interest in,” said Emerge’s Gabe Saruhashi. “Trucking has been an exciting starting point, but we know many people cannot be away from home for prolonged periods of time, be it for personal reasons or reentry obligations. Ultimately, we want to offer training programs for individuals from all walks of life.” Co-founder Uzoma Orchingwa said the feedback from their first students has been very positive, highlighting the self-paced training (since it can be accessed piece by piece whenever is convenient), its speed (the aim is to go from zero to job in about two months), and the hands-on support they get from Emerge’s career coaches. Emerge reports that graduates from its program, who once averaged $13 an hour if they had a stable job, are pulling in an average of $78K now. It’s hoped the new programs will broaden the appeal and let the company support more students and locations. The company’s pitch pulled in local officials, a good step if you’re hoping to get into state-funded institutions, and now Emerge has landed a two-year, $845K contract (using American Rescue Plan funds) with the Connecticut Department of Labor. They also have several letters of intent, perhaps waiting on outcomes from the other programs. This early success has also brought in investment: a $3.2 million seed round led by Alexis Ohanian’s 776, with participation from the Softbank Opportunity Fund, Y Combinator, Lenny Rachitsky, and Michael Seibel. The money will be used to hire engineers and start up the new welding and nursing programs, as well as expand to three more states. Saruhashi said their ambition is to make Emerge Career the first choice for anyone in the country who has a disadvantaged background to get a second chance in the modern workforce.

Rapyd Ventures backs Indian fintech-as-a-service startup Decentro • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Fintech, india, rapyd, Startups, Y CombinatorNo Comments

India’s Decentro, the Y Combinator-backed startup that helps companies enter the fintech market by deploying its APIs, has raised $4.7 million in a Series A round. The Bengaluru-based startup offers banking and payments APIs that allow development of fintech products such as banking, payment cards, neobanking and collections and payout services in a short period of time. Decentro has partnered with scores of industry players including Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Yes Bank, Visa, RuPay, Quickwork, Equifax, Aadhaar and National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) to offer solutions for prepaid payment instruments, no-code workflows, conversational banking via WhatsApp and enable document verification and KYC process. “Whenever a fintech startup or a company wants to launch a new product in the market, it takes them a minimum of a few months to launch. And it purely has to do with the bank processes, the way the bank runs the process, as well as the tech of the bank. It’s not so great. That’s essentially the problem we are solving,” said Rohit Taneja, co-founder and CEO, Decentro, in an interview with ZebethMedia. Taneja, who has previously co-founded social payments platform Mypoolin, which was acquired by Cupertino-based financial services company Wibmo, and spent eight years in the fintech market, co-founded Decentro with Pratik Daukhane in 2020 — after personally facing all the problems he wants to address. He considers Cashfree and PineLabs-owned Setu among the key competitors for the startup but believes that it’s differentiating with “solution-driven enterprise customer base” and “superior” product experience. The startup has already amassed over 250 customers in commerce and fintech sectors. Some of these include Freo, Mobile Premier League, FamPay, CreditWise, Uni Cards and BharatX. Decentro, which has a headcount of over 40 people, offers products to let companies create virtual, business and escrow accounts, enable payments and provide lending. The available products comply with all the latest regulations in the country, the startup said. The Series A round of Decentro is led by Rapyd Ventures, the venture arm of the UK fintech-as-a-service giant, along with participation from Leonis VC and Uncorrelated Ventures. Indian angel investors including CRED founder Kunal Shah, Groww co-founder and CEO Lalit Keshre, Gupshup co-founder and CEO Beerud Sheth and former CBO of BharatPe Pratekk Agarwaal also participated in the funding round. Taneja told ZebethMedia that the startup aims to utilize the fresh funding to go deeper into its partnership with banks and enter categories including large enterprises. It also plans to acquire licenses and launch in Singapore to expand beyond India eventually. “Building their innovation layer in India first gives Decentro a great base to build scalable innovations that can be expanded as other emerging markets modernize their own infrastructure. We’re excited to support Decentro as they scale and expand,” said Joel Yarbrough, MD of Rapyd Ventures and Rapyd’s VP of Asia Pacific, in a prepared statement. Before the latest funding round, Decentro had raised a total of $1.7 million in seed and angel rounds. The seed round, which closed in October 2020, included investments from Y Combinator and FundersClub. Since then, the startup claims its valuation has increased by 3.3X and revenues have grown by more than 35X. Taneja, however, did not reveal any specifics about the valuation. Dcentro’s API transactional volumes have also been growing by 50 to 70% every quarter since early 2021, with an average of 70 million annualized API transactions recorded over the last 12 months, it said. The startup is also profitable, the co-founder said.

Needl wants to become the search engine for your accounts • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Apps, productivity, Search, Startups, Y CombinatorNo Comments

Google, DuckDuckGo, and other search engines help you find information from the web. But it’s hard to find documents, messages, meetings, and emails from your own accounts. You need to go to different applications to find things that might be related to one project. A Y-Combinator-backed app called Needl is helping users with that. Needl is a cross-platform application that lets you search across your local filesystem and accounts like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Notion, and Slack. The free version — available on the web, Windows, and Mac — lets you connect a single account per integration. If you need more account connections and integrations like Jira and Linear, you will need to pay $10 per month. The application is simple to set up and use: once you install it on your system, it will ask you to connect your Google, Slack, and Notion accounts. Once that’s done, you can search for files, events, emails, and other things across all these accounts and your local filesystem. You can filter these results by files, messages, events, tasks, and emails. Image Credits: Needl If you’re a keyboard ninja, the app has handy shortcuts for you to launch the interface and navigate around. Users can customize shortcuts to launch the app and jump to the home view. The default view on the app shows the Activity Feed, which will show you contextual information on different apps such as your upcoming meeting. Needl founders Max Keenan, Angela Liu, and James Liu are all Chicago university alums and met at a hackathon. They worked on a few side projects like a tool to write essays using GPT-2 and a TikTok for blog posts. After university, MaxKeenan in investment banking at Moelis while Angela Liu and James Liu joined Microsoft. The trio said that they had to become organized once they joined their jobs and meticulously follow naming systems and folder structures to easily find info. They wanted to solve this problem of constantly and manually reorganizing information through search. “We were looking for a problem that historically had never been solved, but improvements in language models would be able to solve. As we were onboarding virtually during the pandemic, it hit us right in the face — information was siloed across all of these different platforms and we could improve the search and discovery of info,” Keenan said in an email conversation with ZebethMedia. Image Credits: Needl Needl team wrote the first line of code in June when it was in the Y-combinator’s summer 2022 cohort. The company has raised $2.5 million from various investors including Fuse, Y Combinator, Palm Drive Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, Collin Wallace and Nathan Wenzel. The company rolled out the product under a closed beta to around 200 users in August. Now the company is making it available to everyone under public beta. Keenan said the company wants to focus on improving its contextual and semantic search through large language models (LLM) over the next 12 months. Plus, the startup wants to add more premium integrations like Asana, Hubspot, and Salesforce. The startup considers Glean, a startup powering enterprise search across apps, as one of its major competitors. In May, Glean raised $100 million in its series C funding round led by Sequoia with participation from Lightspeed, General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, and the Slack Fund at a $1 billion valuation post-money. Keenan said that a major differentiation between Glean and Needl is the shorter setup time for the latter. “Biggest difference from Glean is that our product is self-serve and can be set up in under 2 mins by anyone, regardless of company size. Glean sells through sales-led processes that require full company adoption, can take months, and are inaccessible to individuals or small teams,” he said. Neeva, a search engine built by a former Google ad exec, also offers search features through app integrations. However, it is available only in the U.S. with European expansion underway. Keenan said in long term, Needl wants to pre-empt the need for search and present information through its own recommendation engine.

Vanta lands $40M to automate cybersecurity compliance • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in compliance, crowdstrike, cybersecurity, Falcon Fund, funding, Security, Sequoia, startup, Startups, Vanta, Y CombinatorNo Comments

Vanta, a security compliance automation startup, today announced that it raised $40 million in an extension of its Series B funding round that closed in June, which valued the company at $1.6 billion. Notably, Crowdstrike invested in the extension — which was led by Craft Ventures — through its Falcon Fund, joined by Sequoia, Y Combinator and unnamed existing investors. CEO Christina Cacioppo tells ZebethMedia that the new cash will be used to support Vanta’s customer acquisition, product R&D and go-to-market efforts. It brings the company’s total capital raised to $203 million. Cacioppo founded Vanta in 2016 to — in her words — “help companies achieve and maintain a strong security posture.” Previously a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Cacioppo co-founded Nebula Labs, a software development house, before joining Dropbox as a product manager on Dropbox Paper. “With massive breaches on the rise — like Uber, Sony, Equifax — companies understand that proving their security is a must to doing business. Why? Because enterprises won’t buy a product that is not secure and regulators will crack down on any company with a weak security posture,” Cacioppo told ZebethMedia via email. “The problem is emerging companies lack the resources and expertise in-house to properly secure their perimeter, leaving them open to incoming threats and penalties for non-compliance, and they have no way to prove to their customers that their critical business assets are safe from threats.” Vanta offers services designed to enable businesses to meet regulations, compliance standards and laws, like HIPA and GDPR. The company provides workflows and controls for various apps and services to ensure compliance, allowing auditors to complete audits within Vanta and delivering alerts and guidance via email and apps like Slack. Vanta recently began offering what it calls “Trust Reports,” which aim to summarize a company’s compliance position. Behind the scenes, a monitoring engine collects data from Vanta customers’ software-as-a-service app and cloud stack and runs analyses to surface potential security threats. Cacioppo explained: “A customer’s journey in Vanta is guided by data-driven insights from the thousands of companies that have used Vanta to build and demonstrate their security. Each new customer benefits from the experience of all previous Vanta customers.” Certainly, compliance is a tricky field — one many companies struggle with. A 2021 survey from The Harris Poll found that nearly two-thirds (63%) of organizations see compliance issues as critical barriers to growth. In a separate, recent study from Telos, an IT cybersecurity firm, organizations reporting having to comply with an average of 13 different IT security and privacy regulations and spend $3.5 million annually on compliance activities, with audits taking close to two months each fiscal quarter. That’s been good for business. San Francisco-based Vanta, which employs more than 350 people, now has a customer base numbering north of 4,000 organizations that includes brands like Quaro, Modern Treasury and Autodesk. When asked, Cacioppo didn’t reveal annual recurring revenue figures — save for that revenue has grown “significantly faster” than Vanta’s valuation. “Vanta continues to drive innovation in the space by building beyond ‘check the box compliance’ to a scalable set of security tools that help address the risks inherent in running businesses in the cloud,” Cacioppo said, citing a report from Polaris Market Research that predicts the enterprise governance, risk and compliance software market will be worth $96.98 billion by 2028. “‘Growth at all costs’ has never been our MO. [I] bootstrapped the company until it hit $10 million annual recurring revenue to make sure there was strong product-market fit and the company could stand on its own … The metrics that investors are scrutinizing now — burn rate, capital efficiency, gross margins — are ones Vanta has always excelled at.” The challenge for Vanta will be beating back competitors in the increasingly crowded risk and compliance space. Just in May, Kintent, a startup providing enterprise compliance and security solutions, raised $18 million in venture capital. Earlier this year, Secureframe landed $56 million for its platform that automates an enterprise’s compliance with standards like HIPPA and SOC 2. Other rivals include Ethyca, Ketch, Soveren and Anecdotes, the last of which secured $25 million in its Series A. There’s cash to go around, fortunately. Investors poured $5.1 billion into governance, risk and compliance startups in Q2 2021, a 113% increase from Q2 2020, according to Crunchbase data cited by The Wall Street Journal. In the first 10 weeks of 2022 alone, funding reached nearly $1 billion — spurred by international sanctions and data privacy legislation like the California Consumer Privacy Act. In an emailed statement, CrowdStrike CTO Michael Sentonas said: “Compliance is no longer a siloed function — it’s a boardroom priority and an essential component of the modern security stack. We invested in Vanta because they created a way for every company, large and small, to achieve and maintain compliance by automating the process end-to-end.”

Pakistan strips YC-backed Tag of fintech services, orders to pull apps • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 9, 2022Posted in Fintech, Government & Policy, pakistan, Tag, Y CombinatorNo Comments

Pakistan’s central bank on Friday revoked the in-principle and pilot operations approval of Tag to operate as an electronic money institution in a move that poses existential threat to the firm. State Bank of Pakistan said in an order that it is revoking Tag’s approval to operate as an electronic money institution, the permission that is required for entities to offer innovative, user-friendly and cost effective low-value digital payments instruments such as wallets, cards and contactless payments. The central bank has also ordered the startup to close all customers’ wallet accounts and pull its apps from the app stores with immediate effect. The central bank’s action is in response to Tag violating regulatory requirements and “other concerns” that emerged during the pilot operations of the firm, it said. The decision has been taken to “protect the interest of the public at large,” it added. The regulatory action follows a months-long probe into Tag, which offers banking and financial services such as contactless payment, cards and wallets to users in Pakistan. The startup has been accused of forging documents to the central bank, according to an earlier investor letter obtained by ZebethMedia. The central bank ordered Tag in August to “immediately” refund all funds of customers. Tag is among the most valuable startups in Pakistan. It was valued at $100 million in its seed financing round in September last year. The startup counts Liberty City Ventures, Canaan Partners, Y Combinator, Addition and Mantis among its backers. The State Bank of Pakistan did not immediately respond to a request for comment via phone and email. Friday’s action is another blow to the nascent but fast growing startup ecosystem in Pakistan, which clocked record funding last year. Airlift, once the most valuable startup in the South Asian market, shut down in July this year after it failed to secure fresh funding. Tag’s chief executive couldn’t be immediately reached for comment. The startup will explore appealing the State Bank’s decision, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told ZebethMedia.