funding – Page 168 – Product Management Confabulation

February 17, 2022

Subskribe revamps quote-to-revenue approach for new ‘post-subscription SaaS’ world

Take a look at most subscription-based SaaS pricing strategies and they will often have a free version for a certain number of seats, a pro version for a larger set of seats and an enterprise version for large companies.

But what about everything in between — the company that is just above the 10-seat threshold for the free version, but won’t be growing fast enough to make the pro version worthwhile?

Enter Subskribe, a startup that is bringing flexibility to the world of quote-to-revenue, where it was often difficult for salespeople to set up a software quote when information is found in different places, reconcile it and then bill subscriptions and one-off services.

The company was started in 2020 by Durga Pandey, who previously worked at Google, started the company with former Zuora engineering director Yibin Guo and former Okta senior director of business technology Prakash Raina.

“Everyone likes a recurring model, but the customer doesn’t want to pay for a $5,000 license if they can pay $10 per month,” CEO Pandey told TechCrunch. “In the last 10 years, the SaaS model has changed a lot and is similar to what a Netflix subscription would be, but is still sold like a cell phone plan that offers $40 per month for 400 minutes.”

Instead, Subskribe’s technology is designed to be an adaptive quote-to-revenue system built so that salespeople can structure more usage-based contracts, often called ramp deals, that offer increasing discounts as usage grows, and add creative upsells and cross-sells.

Image Credits: Subskribe

Each part of the process, from quoting to billing, refers to the same repository of dynamic orders so that it is a unified experience from end to end. As a result, companies get a deal that’s optimized for their growth and also end up spending less money, Pandey added.

The company officially launched Thursday with a handful of customers and $18.4 million in seed and Series A funding from 8VC, which led the A round, and Slow Ventures, which led the seed round. Joining the round were a group of senior finance and operations executives at companies, including Amplitude, Asana, Coupa, Dialpad, Okta, Plaid and UiPath.

Pandey plans on using the new funding to expand the engineering team and will also focus on expanding its customer base and product development.

Subskribe has only been selling for four months, so there is not much in the way of growth metrics that he could talk about, but he did say there were some big names in its customer pipeline that are close to signing.

“Our goal is to establish ourselves as the de facto player in this space and provide a product that allows these customers to not worry so much about the process of making money,” Pandey added.

Subscription-based pricing is dead: Smart SaaS companies are shifting to usage-based models

February 17, 2022

Convictional grabs another round of funding to help retailers quickly onboard vendors

Retailers have traditionally onboarded their drop-ship, marketplace and wholesale suppliers using electronic data interchange (EDI), which is a fancy way of saying information that is sent from one company to another electronically.

However, setting up this process can take months, time most retailers don’t have if they want to get ahead in Amazon’s world.

In contrast, Convictional is developing what co-founders Roger Kirkness and Chris Grouchy called “supplier enablement” technology that puts those drop-ship, marketplace and wholesale suppliers at the center of the onboarding process. Instead, they connect their products and inventory to retailers using Convictional’s guided workflow and one-click integration.

This way, retailers can more easily discover and change out inventory. It also enables their retailer customers, like Indigo and Harry Rosen, to get going in as little as 10 days versus three months. Moving that fast means retailers can identify emerging brands before they wind up on big-box store shelves, Grouchy said.

“Most enterprise retailers onboard third partner vendors for drop-ship and could maybe only onboard three suppliers each quarter,” he added. “With Convictional, they can onboard 20 to 30 brands a quarter, which is a vastly different gross merchandise volume growth for businesses.”

Kirkness, who graduated from high school at 16, started his career at GNC, starting and running the company’s e-commerce business. That was when he personally saw how difficult it was to connect GNC’s software to a supplier — the company was sourcing from thousands of suppliers, but the connection process took so long that, at the time, they were only able to get fewer than 100 up-and-running.

Convictional is not the only company finding success in this space. Logicbroker, an e-commerce company focused on drop-ship, marketplace and EDI, secured a $135 million growth round from K1 Investment Management last October.

Image Credits: Convictional

At the time, CEO Peyman Zamani told me that “electronic data interchange is now at the heart of e-commerce,” and “the concept today is the same, but what I envisioned was this taking place in the cloud, but no one was focusing on the connectivity and automation in a scalable way.”

However, while some $5 trillion is estimated to be generated through EDI across a U.S. B2B e-commerce market, valued at $9 trillion, not every company has access to EDI, Kirkness explained.

That was something he and Grouchy wanted to figure out. They met each other at Shopify where they were in a group working on new markets, in this case, B2B, trying to figure out if what Shopify built would translate to that sector. That’s how they learned that the struggle to connect with EDI was due to not having any APIs.

“APIs are the hot style format for people learning computers in the web world,” Kirkness said. “We thought about making an API for doing EDI, but when we talked to customers, they wanted a way to source, onboard, integrate and trade with suppliers all in one system.”

So they designed Convictional so that suppliers can choose their own connection path of least resistance, API or EDI, he added.

4 trends that will define e-commerce in 2022

There are two customer sides to the technology: the buyer side where retailers engage with consumers and look at brands, and the seller side, the manufacturing side, where suppliers need to upload product information, receive orders and share information to get paid.

Meanwhile, five months after announcing $6.7 million in Series A capital, the company Thursday secured $40 million in Series B funding, led by YC Continuity, with participation from existing major investors, including Lachy Groom, that led the Series A and an earlier seed round, and FundersClub. In total, the company has raised just under $49 million, Kirkness said.

At the time of the Series A, Convictional had just closed its first enterprise deals, but had not activated them. Today, Kirkness and Grouchy say they also have activated five enterprise customers and are poised to add 20 more this year.

In addition, more than 1,000 suppliers joined the platform in 2021, prompting usage to increase by 26% month over month and the number of orders to jump seven times compared with 2020. The company also increased its headcount by four times.

The new funding will go into R&D and its sales and marketing efforts for new customer acquisition. Kirkness and Grouchy filled the role of marketers and are now hiring across the board to replace themselves in key functions.

As part of the investment, YCC’s managing director Ali Rowghani is joining Convictional’s board of directors. Rowghani said that he often looks for two characteristics in companies: virality and network effect, of which Convictional has both.

“I’ve known Roger and Chris a long time, and they are strong about their vision and passion, which is the profile of a company to put a shoulder behind,” Rowghani said. “If they become a big company, a lot of people win — the sellers that can integrate into more distribution points, while buyers can grow assortment for their customers.”

Online retailers: Stop trying to beat Amazon

February 17, 2022

3 keys that unlock data-driven fundraising

Blair Silverberg Contributor

Blair Silverberg is co-founder and CEO of Hum Capital, a financial services company using technology to accelerate the fundraising process.

Start with revenue cohort analysis

A cohort analysis looks at different groups of customers, whether that be users over certain periods of time or segmented by region or size, and allows investors to see how they individually perform. Investors love to see into the future because they know that the value of a business is the present value of its future cash flows.

By decomposing the drivers of revenue growth via cohort analysis, you can raise investors’ confidence in your cash flow projections, resulting in a higher valuation or more favorable loan terms.

Revenue cohort analysis, May 2019 - March 2022

Revenue cohort analysis, May 2019 to March 2022. Image Credits: Hum Capital

Take the above graph as an example. The cohort analysis shows that newer groups of customers are larger and more retentive than ever before. This indicates to investors that there is a trend toward higher customer lifetime value, which ultimately instills confidence in your company’s future growth.

Companies that can tie the same cohort performance to improving sales and marketing efficiency will help demonstrate that the business’ growth is not just a function of increased spending on customer acquisition and retention. In other words, this is a company that is compounding value and thus even more valuable to investors.

February 17, 2022

Goldcast spotlights which event attendees will be your next customer

Investor attention is focused on event companies lately, especially as pandemic restrictions ease around the world and events become in-person again.

Just this year, we’ve seen companies like EventX, Twine, Vendelux and Zuddl announce either funding or strategic moves that enable them to vie for attendee attention.

It’s not just a matter of going to events anymore, but of helping attendees get the most out of their time and money. The global event management software market size jumped from $1.5 billion in 2019 to $5.8 billion in 2020 and is poised to nearly triple by 2028, according to Grandview Research’s data.

But not everything is rosy in the industry. While some virtual event companies, like Hopin, became one of the fastest-growing companies in the past few years as a result, the shift back to in-person is now slowing down the demand for pure online events. This was one of the drivers for Hopin announcing last week that it laid off 12% of its staff.

With B2B technology companies spending an average of 25% to 40% of their budgets on marketing events each year to meet their pipeline goals, Goldcast is hoping to shed some light on the “black box” that is event revenue impact.

Hong Kong’s offline and virtual events platform EventX closes $18M Series B

Goldcast’s founding team. Image Credits: Goldcast

It is the latest startup feeling some investor love as it develops a software stack designed for business-to-business marketers, hosting interactive virtual and hybrid events, to use go-to-market channels and actionable account-based insights for sales teams to show the pipeline impact of events.

The Boston-based company secured $10 million in seed funding, led by Unusual Ventures, with participation from HubSpot Ventures, Afore Capital, Underscore VC and a group of angel investors.

Palash Soni, CEO, started Goldcast with his Harvard Business School mates, Kishore Kothandaraman and Aashish Srinivas, in June 2020. Prior to coming to the U.S. for school, he was working for an adtech company and saw the challenge the company’s events team had in getting ahold of event data.

“We started thinking about an events CRM, but then the pandemic hit, and I saw an even bigger opportunity to build an end-to-end platform for companies to have this pipeline,” Soni told TechCrunch.

The company’s technology has two parts: first are the event resources for producing everything from a webinar to a full-scale event, and second, the data analytics integration and workflows so that sales teams can figure out the impact of the events.

Soni said it does compete against the likes of Hopin and other event companies, but believes Goldcast differentiates itself by its focus on B2B marketers and how those events drive pipeline for companies.

“We have a lot of integrations built in that capture everything on the attendee from registration up through the end of the event,” he added. “The journey is recreated and lives in HubSpot or another place, and shows how engaged someone was. You can then create models to say these engagements led to this pipeline impact and see where it drove it.”

Goldcast officially launched its product in January 2021 and decided to go after seed funding after seeing an immediate product market fit that included reaching 100 customers and seeing revenue grow between 50% and 150% quarter over quarter throughout the past 12 months, Soni said. Customers on the list include Drift, Salesloft, Attentive, Weave, Toast, Avalara and Microsoft GitHub.

He intends to deploy the new capital into growing Goldcast’s customer base and product development to go after larger customers, especially as bigger conferences go back to in-person or even a mix of that and virtual.

As part of the investment, Sandhya Hegde, partner at Unusual Ventures, will join the board. She says today’s B2B companies want to use go-to-market strategies and a smart tech stack to secure sales versus the traditional mention of getting on phone calls and “using brute force.”

Hegde, who has a product and engineering background, was working in marketing prior to Unusual Ventures and said she “was shocked at how far behind the stack they were using.”

“Goldcast is focused on getting the plumbing right around managing lead flow and integration,” she added. “Instead of the old ways of sending a lot of emails to a database and hoping they somehow end up in the inbox, marketers can use virtual events like a scalable engagement channel.”

Virtual events startups have high hopes for after the pandemic

February 17, 2022

Dutch raises $20M to scale its telemedicine platform for pets

Virtual veterinarian care platform Dutch has raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Forerunner Ventures and Eclipse Ventures. The San Francisco-based company’s latest round comes seven months after its market launch and brings its total funding raised to $25 million. Dutch utilizes licensed veterinarians and provides a digital health platform for pets and their families to make pet care more accessible.

The platform launched in July 2021 and was inspired by Dutch founder and CEO Joe Spector’s personal experience. Spector told TechCrunch that he realized there was an opportunity to create a modern form of accessible veterinary care after seeing that his brother’s anxious dog was being left untreated. He noted that many pet owners wait until their pet is experiencing a much larger issue so that they can make the most of one vet visit and just one fee, but pet owners shouldn’t have to do so anymore.

“Like tens of millions of other Americans, my wife and I got a pandemic puppy,” Spector said. “Even though we’ve been using telemedicine for ourselves and our kids during the lockdowns, I realized that pretty much any interaction I would need for my new pup would require me dragging him to the vet’s office, which is not only expensive but time-consuming. It didn’t make sense that humans and even babies could chat with a doctor online and get medications prescribed, but pet parents could not. I realized there was a much-needed opportunity to create a modern form of accessible, high quality and trustworthy veterinary care for everyday ailments.”

Since its launch, Dutch has served over 25,000 pets through 100 licensed veterinarians. To get started with the platform, pet owners are asked to provide a few details, after which they can set up a time for a video call. Once you’ve completed your first visit, you can reconnect with a vet at any time through the platform. Dutch’s team of vets can help with numerous issues, including itching, tremors or shivering, hair loss, fear of being alone, diet and nutrition, fear of new places or people, red or inflamed skin, vomiting and more.

Image Credits: Dutch

As for the new funding, Spector says Dutch will use it to invest in its intellectual property and grow its electronic medical records database to make it easier for pet owners to collect and share their pets’ data and prescriptions. The funding will also be used to grow its pharmacy network to enable same-day and next-day delivery. In addition, Dutch plans to hire across various divisions and double down on customer acquisition tools while also expanding its veterinary network.

In terms of the future, Spector says Dutch plans to build out its membership perks and also introduce more ways for customers to choose how they want to communicate based on the condition that their pet is in.

“Our north star is to put the power of pet health in the hands of consumers,” Spector said. “With the consumer at the center, we want to focus on bringing as many services as possible to the consumer’s door and on the consumer’s time. We want to make our product offering and pricing transparent, high value and customizable.”

Dutch’s Series A investment follows its Jimmy Fallon-backed $5 million seed round announced last year. The seed round was led by Forerunner Ventures and included participation from Bing Capital and Trust Ventures.

February 17, 2022

Earnipay raises $4M to help employees in Nigeria get faster access to their salaries

Earnipay, a fintech that provides flexible and on-demand salary access to income-earners, has raised $4 million in seed financing led by early-stage venture capital firm Canaan.

Participating investors include XYZ Ventures, Village Global, Musha Ventures, Voltron Capital, Ventures Platform and Paystack CEO Shola Akinlade.

Earnipay, which has been in beta since September 2021 and only launched last month, plans to offer its on-demand salary solution to 200,000 employees by the end of 2022.

Most of Africa’s workforce is paid monthly but live paycheck to paycheck. Unlike more developed countries like the U.S., where weekly or bi-weekly salaries can take care of this lifestyle, low monthly wages — which is the norm in Africa — can’t. So what ends up happening is that income-earners takes salary advances or borrow money from payday lenders and loan sharks to offset their daily expenses and emergencies, eventually falling into a debt cycle.

A few individual businesses have sought to tackle this problem internally and allow employees to access their daily salaries as they work for it. Earnipay founder and CEO Nonso Onwuzulike tried this while running Reaval, a Ghana-based recycling business he started on the side in 2019.

His employees were waste collectors from the informal sector, with a history of collecting daily or weekly payments. On the other hand, Onwuzulike who had worked most of his life in the formal sector — even holding the position of country manager of Bolt Ghana during this period — was accustomed to paying and receiving monthly salaries, which caused problems for his recycling business.

“There were adverse effects of that long wait time between pay cycles, especially for these people who didn’t earn a lot of income,” said the founder describing the salary situation at his former company. “They ended up not being productive because they had money issues and it led to attrition and retention problems for me because these were guys who are used to getting paid immediately, but I was paying them once a month, and it didn’t make sense to them.”

Onwuzulike developed a solution to make their payment flexible: weekly or bi-weekly. He then figured he could scale it to companies in the formal sector and there was data to back this decision. Per a survey carried out among a few income-earners who worked in the formal sector, about 80% of them preferred having flexible access to their salaries rather than the salary advance option popularly pioneered by banks. That’s how Earnipay came to be, with Busayo Oyetunji and Joshua Ajayi joining as COO and CTO respectively.

Earnipay is building what is known globally as an earned wage access platform. But Onwuzulike describes the company as a financial wellness solution for employees, of which its first product is on-demand salary access.

The platform integrates with companies’ existing payroll or HRM systems to offer its services to employees, who can then track and withdraw their accrued salaries via the app.

Employees’ salaries are prorated daily and companies can set limits for the percentage of salaries employees can withdraw each month. For instance, if an employee earns ₦300,000 monthly, they can get ₦10,000 daily (for 30 days) or ₦15,000 (if the employer sets the system to count only workdays; 20 in this case).

The founder said that Earnipay makes these payments on behalf of the company, especially those whose cash flow may be affected should they finance the payments themselves. At the end of each month, they reimburse Earnipay. But for others who can afford to make these payments, Earnipay sets up a reconciliation account on top of the employees’ salary accounts scheduled to make automatic reimbursements.

Earnipay’s revenues come from charging employees a fee for accessing a part of their salary early. For withdrawals between ₦2,000($4) and ₦10,000 ($20), Earnipay collects a ₦250 ($0.5) fee. For ₦10,000 to ₦50,000 ($100) withdrawals, the charge increases to ₦500 ($1).

Nonso Onwuzulike (Founder and CEO, Earnipay)

Since operating in beta, Earnipay has served over 20 businesses, outsourcing firms and HR solution providers in Nigeria. Some of its clients include Eden Life and Thrive Agric, whose “thousands of employees” have used the app to access their salary over 1,000 times, said the company.

“We are super bullish on the product that we were building. Our goal is financial wellness for all and we want to build products in line with that. We’ve taken the first step, which is affordable access,” Onwuzulike said.

“The second product that we’re building is financial education to provide people with financial literacy tools so they make better spending decisions. We will build products around that primarily just so that we’ll enable employers to make their employees happier, improve productivity, retain talent and solve the biggest problem in the workplace today that nobody is solving, which is employee money issues.”

Earnipay will use this seed funding to target large enterprises and shift its focus regionally. It might face competition from YC-backed South African startup FloatPays, which plans to expand across the continent.

That said, the experience of Earnipay’s investors in backing identical companies across emerging markets will be pivotal to the Nigerian fintech’s growth. XYZ Capital is an investor in Refyne, a two-year-old Indian earned wage access platform that recently raised $82 million in Series B. The San Francisco-based venture capital firm also backs Mexico-based Minu alongside Village Global.

India’s Refyne raises $82 million to help workers get faster access to wages

For Canaan, this seems to be its first investment in an earned wage access platform, judging from its portfolio. Earnipay presents an opportunity for the Connecticut-based fund to participate in a promising fintech category witnessing an increase in uptake across emerging markets.

“We’ve seen earned wage access grow rapidly in many markets and believe it’s a natural fit in Africa,” said Brendan Dickinson, general partner at Canaan. “Earnipay has quickly established itself with a product built specifically for the payroll behaviors of this region, and early employer uptake is very strong. Nonso has built one of the strongest teams that we’ve met on the entire continent, and we’re thrilled for the opportunity to partner with them.”

February 17, 2022

Indian social commerce startup DealShare bags $45 million from Abu Dhabi Investment Authority

Abu Dhabi Investment Authority is backing the Indian social commerce startup DealShare, the two said Thursday, joining a roster of marquee investors doubling down on India’s fast-growing e-commerce market.

A wholly-owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is investing $45 million in DealShare, extending the size of the Jaipur-headquartered startup’s recently unveiled Series E financing round to $210 million. The round, which TechCrunch first reported about in late October, values DealShare at $1.7 billion and pushes its all-time raise to $393 million.

DealShare, which counts Tiger Global and Alpha Wave Global among its investors, operates a so-called social commerce startup through which it is serving customers in over 100 Indian cities and towns where the likes of Amazon and Flipkart have made little to no inroad.

To reach the masses, DealShare is “gamifying and socialising the elements of purchases,” said Rajat Shikhar, the startup’s co-founder and chief product officer, in an interview with TechCrunch. These strategies include incentivizing customers to buy in a group and inviting their friends as well as “bargaining” on prices, he said.

“We provide very high engagement on the platform because we are serving customers who are not so tech-savvy and have historically not made online purchases,” he said.

By giving incentive to customers to get their friends on the platform, DealShare has been able to considerably reduce its customer acquisition and order fulfilling costs, he added. On the platform, customers also negotiate on prices with the system, replicating a behaviour that is a norm in physical shops.

The startup also works with local brands and also operates its own ecosystem of in-house private labels to make its offering affordable to customers, he said.

“We aim to democratize online shopping for Bharat users with unmatched service and experience by developing innovative products and tech solutions. This will be supported by building our teams across the country and hiring new tech talent at all levels,” said Vineet Rao, co-founder and chief executive of DealShare, in a statement.

At stake is the world’s second-largest internet market, where e-commerce has hardly made any dent to the overall retail.

The social commerce market alone is expected to be worth up to $20 billion in value by 2025, up from about $1 billion to $1.5 billion last year, analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein said last year. “Social commerce has the ability to empower more than 40 million small entrepreneurs across India. Today, 85% of sellers using social commerce are small, offline-oriented retailers who use social channels to open up new growth opportunities,” they wrote in a report clients.

DealShare kickstarted its journey the day Walmart acquired Flipkart. The startup began as an e-commerce platform on WhatsApp, where it offered hundreds of products to consumers.

“India’s e-commerce ecosystem is developing rapidly, and DealShare is addressing an underserved and growing segment within it. This investment aligns with our approach of backing innovative businesses with differentiated business models to execute on their growth strategies,” said Hamad Shahwan Al Dhaheri, Executive Director of the Private Equities Department at ADIA, in a statement.

February 16, 2022

Still managing engineers remotely? Okay has a performance dashboard for that

As employers try to manage the loss of workers to “The Great Resignation” and engage employees working from home, Okay co-founder and CEO Antoine Boulanger says the company is seeing its quantitative and empathetic management approach become more in demand as “the distinction between productivity and employee satisfaction is disappearing for knowledge workers.”

Two years ago, we profiled Okay, an engineering visibility tool helping engineering managers lead effective and engaged teams, which was fresh out of Y Combinator with $2.2 million in new funding in its pocket. Boulanger said he and co-founder Tomas Barreto started Okay after meeting at Box.

“What we’ve seen in the past couple years is a transition for people, managers and teams on how to manage teams fully remote,” Boulanger added. “There is a notion that people want more visibility and to understand what is happening with the team. We saw at the beginning of the pandemic, when there was an increase in meetings, but as people got used to different things, and now going back into the office, those same transitions are happening again.”

Okay’s suite of tools are meant to largely replace tools built in-house and provide a look at the interruptions and inadequate tooling keeping engineers from feeling productive and engaged. The product can be integrated with a company’s existing tools, including software like Google Calendar, GitHub, PagerDuty and CircleCI.

In the past year, the company saw both its revenue and customer base grow around 10 times, including customers like Sourcegraph and mParticle, which Boulanger attributes to its approach to engineering productivity that is focused on identifying bottlenecks in the development process instead of measuring output.

To build on that momentum, Okay took in another round of capital, this time $4.4 million, led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and executives from Plaid, Brex and Instacart.

The new funding will go toward increasing the number of integrations, new features and hiring. Boulanger’s aim is to support bigger companies — its focus is in a market with companies that have hundreds of engineers, but eventually to be able to support companies with thousands of engineers.

“We spent three years building the product, which is a complex data product, so we have had our senior team working on this and partnering with customers,” he added. “The idea is to double down on our engineering team, go-to-market efforts and design. One area we are excited about is creating a way for sharing queries, so everyone in the company can share the data.”

How my company is winning the war for engineering talent

February 16, 2022

With a $50M Series C, Instrumental looks to expand data-driven manufacturing solution

Instrumental was launched by two former Apple mechanical engineers in 2015. Having worked on products like the iPod and Apple Watch for the previous six years, they were intimately familiar with the process for checking on manufacturing quality: You got on a plane to Asia and took a look for yourself.

CEO and co-founder Anna-Katrina Shedletsky said that after logging thousands of air miles, she and co-founder Samuel Weiss left Apple in 2015 with an idea for replacing on-site inspections with a software solution, meaning engineers could perform quality control without leaving their offices.

“We build software that helps our customers aggregate data, do smart things with the data to make changes on their [manufacturing] lines, and the reason customers buy it is because it accelerates their ability to get great products out, and it improves their product margins by eliminating waste,” she said.

The solution they developed involves several key pieces. First, they simply collect the data that manufacturers compile as part of their normal testing process. Using a phone as an example, Shedletsky said that could involve testing the camera or the antenna to make sure they are working as they should.

While that data is valuable, it doesn’t tell the full story without seeing what was causing a potential problem. So they place eyes on the assembly line in the form of a high-resolution camera to capture key aspects of the product building process in search of anomalies, which typically are a harbinger of a problem.

She said what really makes this data so valuable for engineers is when they combine the two data sets and apply a machine learning model to surface the biggest problems, showing the test results and the pictures together in one dashboard to help them find and resolve issues faster.

Instrumental view of test data and pictures showing reason for test failures.

Image Credits: Instrumental

“So they can use Instrumental to discover that they have problems, and then they can use Instrumental to actually automatically figure out what the root cause is,” she said. As customers identify issues that matter to them, it helps train the company’s machine models, which should then get better over time at finding the most critical problems.

It’s important to note that the customers are not the manufacturing facilities, but the brands hiring them. So far the approach has attracted companies like Honeywell, Motorola Mobility and Bose. In total, they are involved with 30 customers working on 50 programs across 10 countries. Further, Shedletsky reports it’s a sticky product, meaning customers don’t tend to leave once they start using it, with net revenue retention of 150% in 2021.

The company has 75 employees, with plans to add more with the new cash infusion to drive further growth. She said the startup takes a practical approach to building a diverse workforce.

“We do a couple of things to ensure that we have a fair hiring process that leads people to join the team who are mission-driven and culturally additive,” she said. “We really structure our interviews around four competencies that we’re looking for, versus like brain-teaser questions.”

They also give candidates an opportunity to provide a work sample to prove that they can do the job, regardless of their background or school, and they work hard to attract diverse candidates at the top of the funnel. She said they also built a diverse leadership team, which can help attract more diverse candidates, something she said she certainly noticed when she was working as an engineer.

The new Series C investment was led by BAM Elevate with help from existing investors Canaan, Root Ventures and Eclipse Ventures. The company reports it has now raised over $80 million.

February 16, 2022

Founded by Opendoor and Twilio alums, Nomad closes on $20M to ‘transform the landlord-tenant experience’

Nomad, a marketplace that aims to provide small-time rental property owners with “guaranteed rent,” has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Silicon Valley Bank Capital.

The raise comes just six months after the Denver-based startup raised about $5 million in a seed round of funding. Nomad’s co-founders PJ O’Neil and Matt Thelen started the company after leaving their respective roles at Opendoor and Twilio. O’Neil was a general manager at Opendoor and Thelen was director of business operations at Twilio.

Founded in 2020, Nomad’s goal is to remove risk and financial uncertainty for small-time rental property owners. Today, it offers several financial products for both rental owners and their residents. Its flagship product is guaranteed rent for mom-and-pop rental property owners (primarily DIY landlords), which is designed to give these landlords more certainty even in turbulent market conditions.

“We help these rental owners maximize what they earn by reducing unnecessary vacancy costs that are painful to bear when there’s a mortgage and other expenses to cover,” said O’Neil.

In 2021, Nomad said it grew “8x,” or 700% year over year, processed over $10 million of rent and guaranteed rent for a portfolio of homes valued in excess of $250 million. It also has grown its team from 12 to 40 today and has more than 1,000 customers on its platform, including owners and residents.

Last year, the company also entered the Phoenix market, and is eyeing Raleigh and then Charlotte, North Carolina, next. It also added more financial products for rental owners such as rent advance, rewards for tenured residents and brokerage services that give its customers a way to buy, sell, rent and manage with its support.

Specifically, in addition to guaranteeing rent, Nomad has a financial product embedded in its core offering that allows property owners to tap into their future rental income by requesting up to six months of rent advance. The thinking is they can use the funds to do things like make upgrades to their property, or to invest in another rental property.

Nomad also wants to help renters by positioning them to be first-time homebuyers. For example, it reports on-time rent payments to credit agencies to help tenants build their credit. It also offers rebates to cover closing costs if one chooses to buy their first home using Nomad.

“Our goal is to make renting better for everyone involved, from DIY rental property owners and residents to property managers, real estate agents and maintenance professionals,” said O’Neil, who serves as Nomad’s CEO.

The company plans to use its new capital to hire dozens more employees this year and expand its geographical footprint to up to 10 new markets over the next 24 months. It also plans to continue to invest in its technology and partner with local real estate agents, property managers, lenders and service professionals.

Nomad’s investors are, naturally, bullish. Kickstart Fund, Peterson Ventures and Range Ventures also participated in the financing.

Zillow may be pulling up the welcome mat, but rival Opendoor is expanding into new markets

“Nomad has created a unique product that transforms the landlord-tenant experience for the single-family rental market,” said Beau Laskey, managing partner at SVB Capital, in a written statement.

Chris Erickson from Range Ventures, who wrote the first check into Nomad and co-founded Apartment List, believes the single-family rental market is going through a major shift.

“We are watching as billions of dollars in institutional capital is being deployed in the space and as first-time homebuyers are increasingly getting locked out of owning a home,” he wrote via email. “We believe Nomad will enable residential mom-and-pop rental property owners to remain competitive amidst the entrance of Wall Street landlords and will empower its residents to become first-time homeowners.”