Tag: funding

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Acronis raises $147M from Goldman Sachs to expand its cyber security services

When you hear the name Acronis, chances are you’re thinking about products like its disk cloning tool True Image or maybe its backup services. The company, though, wants you to think about cyber protection and all of its products (and their marketing) are now focused on this direction. To expand on this vision, the company has now raised $147 million from Goldman Sachs at a valuation over $1 billion.

The company says it will use the funding to expand its engineering teams in Singapore, Bulgaria and Arizona, as well as to build new data centers and acquire other companies to fast-track its product development. The company also plans to invest in its business growth, specifically in North America, through its recently launched partner (and former Acronis business) Arconis SCS, which focuses on selling to the U.S. public sector.

“We are excited about Goldman Sachs‘ investment,” said Serguei Beloussov, founder and CEO of Acronis . “In 2018, Acronis achieved 20% business growth, and in 2019 it is on track for over 30% growth with the Acronis Cyber Cloud business growing by over 100%. Recently we announced the Acronis Cyber Platform, enabling third-parties to customize, extend, and integrate our cyber protection solutions to the needs of their customers and partners. The investment round led by Goldman Sachs will help us to fast-track the product development through acquisitions of companies and additional resources, and accelerate the growth.”

While you may not necessarily think of Acronis as a cybersecurity company, it has made quite a few strides in this direction and the Switzerland- and Singapore-based company’s products are currently in use by 80 percent of the Fortune 1000. With this new war chest of $147 million, chances are we’ll see Acronis pick up quite a few smaller companies in the near future as it looks to expand its product portfolio and strengthen its brand.

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FarmWise and its weed-pulling agribot harvest $14.5M in funding

Automating agriculture is a complex proposition given the number and variety of tasks involved, but a number of robotics and autonomy companies are giving it their best shot. FarmWise seems to have impressed someone — it just raised $14.5 million to continue development of its autonomous weeding vehicle.

Currently in the prototype stage, these vehicles look like giant lumbering personnel carriers or the like, but are in fact precision instruments which scan the ground for invasive weeds among the crop and carefully pluck them out.

“Each day, one FarmWise robot can weed crops to feed a medium-sized city of approximately 400,000 inhabitants,” said FarmWise CEO Sebastien Boyer in a press release announcing the latest funding round. “We are now enhancing the scale and depth of our proprietary plant-detection technology to help growers with more of their processes and on more of their crops.”

Presumably the robot was developed and demonstrated with something of a specialty in one crop or another, more as a proof of concept than anything.

Well, it seems to have proved the concept. The new $14.5 million round, led by Calibrate Ventures, is likely due to the success of these early trials. This is far from an easy problem, so going from idea to nearly market-ready in under three years is pretty impressive. Farmers love tech — if it works. And tiny issues or error rates can lead to enormous problems with the vast monoculture fields that make up the majority of U.S. farms.

FarmWise turns to Roush to build autonomous vegetable weeders

The company previously took in about $5.7 million in a seed round, following its debut on Alchemist Accelerator’s demo day back in 2017. Robots are expensive!

Hopefully the cash infusion will help propel FarmWise from prototype to commercialization, though it’s hard to imagine they could build more than a handful of the machines with that kind of money. Perhaps they’ll line up a couple big orders and build on that future revenue.

Meanwhile they’ll continue to develop the AI that powers the chunky, endearing vehicles.

“Looking ahead, our robots will increasingly act as specialized doctors for crops, monitoring individual health and adjusting targeted interventions according to a crop’s individual needs,” said Boyer. So not only will these lumbering platforms delicately remove weeds, but they’ll inspect for aphids and fungus and apply the necessary remedies.

With that kind of inspection they can make a data play later — what farmer wouldn’t want to be able to digitally inspect every plant in their fields?

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Boston-based DataRobot raises $206M Series E to bring AI to enterprise

Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly large role in enterprise software, and Boston’s DataRobot has been helping companies build, manage and deploy machine learning models for some time now. Today, the company announced a $206 million Series E investment led by Sapphire Ventures.

Other participants in this round included new investors Tiger Global Management, World Innovation Lab, Alliance Bernstein PCI, and EDBI along with existing investors DFJ Growth, Geodesic Capital, Intel Capital, Sands Capital, NEA and Meritech.

Today’s investment brings the total raised to $431 million, according to the company. It has a pre-money valuation of $1 billion, according to PitchBook. DataRobot would not confirm this number.

The company has been catching the attention of these investors by offering a machine learning platform aimed at analysts, developers and data scientists to help build predictive models much more quickly than it typically takes using traditional methodologies. Once built, the company provides a way to deliver the model in the form of an API, simplifying deployment.

The late-stage startup plans to use the money to continue building out its product line, while looking for acquisition opportunities where it makes sense. The company also announced the availability of a new product today, DataRobot MLOps, a tool to manage, monitor and deploy machine learning models across a large organization.

The company, which was founded in 2012, claims it has had triple-digit recurring revenue growth dating back to 2015, as well as one billion models built on the platform to-date. Customers contributing to that number include a broad range of companies such as Humana, United Airlines, Harvard Business School and Deloitte.

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Ironclad raises $50M Series C round for its digital contracting platform

Ironclad, a startup that makes it easier for legal teams to manage their contracts workflow, today announced that it has raised a $50 million Series C round led by Y Combinator Continuity, with participation from Emergence Captial, as well as existing investors including Access and Sequoia Capital. This round brings Ironclad’s total funding to $83 million, according to Crunchbase.

In addition to the new funding, Ironclad, which was part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2015 class, also today announced the launch of its Workflow Designer. This tool allows teams to easily create their own custom workflows based their individual business processes and timelines. Setting up those workflows looks be a pretty straightforward process. After tagging the existing contract, teams can then set up their processes based on what’s in a specific document. If a contract is over a specific value, for example, they can add a payment clause, or set up an approval process based on that value.

Workflow Designer complements the service’s existing tools for managing the contract lifecycle and collaborating on legal documents.

The company says it will use the new funding to expand into new geographies and expand its product.

“This round and our continued momentum highlights how big the opportunity is to streamline contracting for every type of company in the world,” said Jason Boehmig, co-founder and CEO of Ironclad. “Our newest investors bring a depth of later stage company experience and a vision for what Cloud companies will look like in the future. Our new funding will fuel continued product innovations, like our new Workflow Designer, which is accelerating contracting time by 85% for our customers.”

 

 

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$100M Grant for the Web fund aims to jump-start a new way to pay online

Getting paid for providing content online isn’t simple, and as the ad-based economy continues to collapse pretty much everyone is looking for alternatives. One problem: While the web is great at moving images and audio and files around, it has a real problem with money. Coil, Mozilla, and Creative Commons hope to change that with a native web payments standard and $100M to get it off the ground.

“Web monetization” is the name of the game here, not just generally but also the specific new web protocol being proposed. It’s meant to be an open, interoperable standard that will let anyone send money to anyone else on the web.

That doesn’t mean it sprang fully formed out of nowhere, though. It’s based on a protocol called Interledger pursued by former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas in his new company Coil.

“We were basically applying the concept of internet protocol to payments — routing little packets of money,” Thomas told TechCrunch, though he was quick to add that it’s not blockchain-powered. Those systems, he said, are useful in their place, but end up bogged down in upkeep and administration. And services like Flattr are great, he said, but limited by the fact that they’re essentially run by a single company.

Interledger, he explained, is a protocol for securely and universally connecting existing payment systems in a totally agnostic way. “It supports any underlying payment structure, bitcoin or a bank ledger or whatever, and any connection you use, satellite or wi-fi, it doesn’t care. We were working on on it for a long time, since like 2015, and last year were like, well, how do we get this out into the real world?”

300M-user meme site Imgur raises $20M from Coil to pay creators

The answer was a new company, for one thing, but also partnering with open web advocates at Mozilla and Creative Commons on Grant for the Web, a $100M fund to disburse with their input. Both have a seat at the table in selecting grant recipients, and the latter is a recipient itself.

“This is an opportunity for CC to experiment with optional micropayments in CC Search,” said Creative Commons interim CEO Cable Green. “If users want to provide micropayments to authors of openly licensed images, to show gratitude, we’re interested in exploring these options with our global community.”

“An open source micropayment protocol and ecosystem could be good for creators and users,” he continued. “Building a web that doesn’t rely on data acquisition and advertising is a good thing.”

The $100M fund is all Coil money, which makes sense as Coil was founded to promote and develop the Interledger and Web Monetization protocols. Huge funding pushes don’t seem like the ordinary way to establish new web standards, but Thomas explained that payments are a unique case.

“The underlying business model for the web is kind of broken,” he said. And that’s partly by design: Enormous companies with vested interests in existing payment and monetization structures are always working to maintain the status quo or shift it in a favorable direction — companies like Google that rely on advertising, or Visa and others that power traditional payment methods.

Payments giant Stripe debuts a credit card in its latest step into the financing fray

“From our perspective, what the standard is ultimately competing with is proprietary platforms with billions in funding,” Thomas said.

The $100M fund will be spread out over five years or so, and will be awarded both to companies and people that use or plan to use the Web Monetization standard in an interesting way, and to content creators who are poorly served by existing monetization methods.

Long tail content that’s nevertheless important, like investigative journalism or documentaries from and by marginalized communities, is one of the targets for the fund. Grants could come in the form of direct funding, or matching subscribers’ contributions. There’s no quid pro quo, Thomas said, except for a hard minimum of half the content being released under an open license like Creative Commons — which that organization is likely excited about.

Right now a subscription-based browser extension that allows easy payments to sites that have implemented the standard is the only way to get in the door. Admittedly that’s not a very sexy onboarding experience. But part of the fund is intended to juice the development and adoption of the standard much more widely.

It’s a way — though an expensive one, sure — to show that an alternative model exists to the traditional ad-based or subscription-based methods of supporting content.

You can sign up now to be notified when they start accepting grant applications at grantfortheweb.org.

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FOSSA scores $8.5 million Series A to help enterprise manage open source licenses

As more enterprise developers make use of open source, it becomes increasingly important for companies to make sure that they are complying with licensing requirements. They also need to ensure the open sources bits are being updated over time for security purposes. That’s where FOSSA comes in, and today the company announced an $8.5 million Series A.

The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures with help from Costanoa Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners. Today’s round brings the total raised to $11 million, according to the company.

Company founder and CEO Kevin Wang says that over the last 18 months, the startup has concentrated on building tools to help enterprises comply with their growing use of open source in a safe and legal way. He says that overall this increasing use of open source great news for developers, and for these bigger companies in general. While it enables them to take advantage of all the innovation going on in the open source community, they need to make sure they are in compliance.

“The enterprise is really early on this journey, and that’s where we come in. We provide a platform to help the enterprise manage open source usage at scale,” Wang explained. That involves three main pieces. First it tracks all of the open source and third-party code being used inside a company. Next, it enforces licensing and security policy, and finally, it has a reporting component. “We automate the mass reporting and compliance for all of the housekeeping that comes from using open source at scale,” he said.

The enterprise focus is relatively new for the company. It originally launched in 2017 as a tool for developers to track individual use of open source inside their programs. Wang saw a huge opportunity inside the enterprise to apply this same kind of capability inside larger organizations, who were hungry for tools to help them comply with the myriad open source licenses out there.

“We found that there was no tooling out there that can manage the scale and breadth across all the different enterprise use cases and all the really complex mission-critical code bases,” he said. What’s more, he found that where there were existing tools, they were vastly underutilized or didn’t provide broad enough coverage.

The company announced a $2.2 million seed round in 2017, and since then has grown from 10 to 40 employees. With today’s funding, that should increase as the company is expanding quickly. Wang reports that the startup has been tripling its revenue numbers and customer accounts year over year. The new money should help accelerate that growth and expand the product and markets it can sell into.

FOSSA scores $2.2M to help developers manage open source licenses

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Plaid announces strategic investment from Mastercard and Visa

When Plaid announced its $250 million Series C investment, last year, it left out a couple of key investors. Today it revealed that Mastercard and Visa had also quietly participated in the round.

For a company like Plaid, which builds APIs to enable customers to access their bank accounts inside applications in a seamless way, having the blessing of two of the major credit companies in the world is a big deal. It could signal that the startup intends to move more broadly into payments, although it didn’t make any specific assertion it was doing that in the announcement.

CEO and co-founder Zach Perret, writing in a blog post this morning, addressed the broad implications of having these companies on board. “We’re particularly excited about what this means for our customers and consumers. As an industry when we come together with a shared vision for an ecosystem that is open, secure and encouraging of innovation the possibilities are limitless,” he wrote.

Screenshot 2019 09 16 07.44.17

Plaid tools

Plaid helps developers connect to financial services in a similar way that Stripe helps them to connect to payments or Trello to communications tools. By having access to a set of tools from Plaid, developers can build access to bank information and other financial data into their applications without having to have knowledge about how to connect to thousands of different banking systems.

Former CTO and co-founder William Hockey explained to TechCrunch what this meant in an announcement earlier this year:

“Everybody in the U.S. can actually use this product now. And some of those [connections] are super quick and instant, and some of those maybe take a day to verify, but what we’re doing is we’re wrapping all of that in the product. And so you as a developer, you don’t have to worry about all of the different authentication methods at some of these banks,” Hockey explained.

Plaid has raised over $310 million since it launched, and that Series C investment last year carried with it a fat $2.65 billion valuation. Strategic investments of this sort show that the industry as a whole is behind a startup, and having Mastercard and Visa involved, gives the company additional credibility in the marketplace.

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India’s OkCredit raises $67M to help small merchants digitize their bookkeeping

OKCredit, a Bangalore-based startup that enables small merchants to turn their bookkeeping digital, has raised $67 million to expand its business in the nation.

The Series B financing round for the two-year-old startup was led by Lightspeed and Tiger Global. The new round, which follows Series A financing round in June this year, climbs OkCredit’s total raise to $87 million.

OkCredit operates an eponymous mobile app that allows merchants to keep track of their day-to-day purchases and sales. Last month, startup founders told TechCrunch that the app had amassed over 5 million active merchants across 2,000 cities in India.

More to follow…

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Shape Security hits $1B valuation with $51M Series F

Anti-fraud startup Shape Security has tipped over the $1 billion valuation mark following its latest Series F round of $51 million.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced the fundraise Thursday, bringing the total amount of outside investment to $173 million since the company debuted in 2011.

C5 Capital led the round along with several other new and returning investors, including Kleiner Perkins, HPE Growth, and Norwest Ventures Partners.

Shape Security protects companies against automated and imitation attacks, which often employ bots to break into networks using stolen or reused credentials. Shape uses artificial intelligence to discern bots from ordinary users by comparing known information such as a user’s location, and collected data like mouse movements to shut down attempted automated logins in real-time.

The company said it now protects against two billion fraudulent logins daily.

C5 managing partner André Pienaar said he believes Shape will become the “definitive” anti-fraud platform for the world’s largest companies.

“While we while we expect a strong financial return, we also believe that we can bring Shape’s platform into many of the leading companies in Europe who look to us for strategic ideas that benefit the entire value-chain where B2C applications are used,” Pienaar told TechCrunch.

Shape’s chief executive Derek Smith said the $51 million injection will go towards the company’s international expansion and product development — particularly the capabilities of its AI system.

He added that Shape was preparing for an IPO.

Anti-fraud startup Shape Security raises $26M in Series E round to drive global expansion

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Patch Homes locks in $5m Series A to give homeowners financial freedom without debt

Homeownership has long been touted as the American dream. But rising rates of mortgage debt, student loan debt, or otherwise are making the pursuit of homeownership a nightmare. Debt burdened individuals or those with inconsistent or tight cash flow can not only struggle to get credit loan approval when buying a home but also struggle to satisfy monthly mortgage payments even after purchase. 

Patch Homes is hoping to keep the proverbial American dream alive. Patch looks to provide homeowners with cash flow and liquidity by allowing them to monetize their homes without taking on debt, interest or burdensome monthly payments. 

Today, Patch took another big step in making its vision a far-reaching reality. The company has announced it’s raised a $5 million Series A round led by Union Square Ventures (USV)  with participation by from Tribe Capital and previous investors Techstars Ventures, Breega Capital, and Greg Schroy.

Patch Home looks to partner with homeowners by investing up to $250,000 (with an average investment of ~$100,000) for an equity stake in the home’s value, generally in the 5% to 20% range. Homeowners aren’t subject to any interest or recurring payments and have ten years to pay back Patch’s investment. Upon doing so, the only incremental money Patch receives is its portion of the change in the home’s value over the course of the ten year period. If the value of the home goes down in value, Patch willingly takes a loss on its investment.

According to Patch Homes CEO and cofounder Sahil Gupta, one of the major motivations behind the company’s model is to align Patch’s incentives with the homeowners, allowing both parties to think of each other as trusted partners even after financing. After Patch’s investment, the company provides a number of ancillary services to homeowners such as credit score monitoring, as well as home value and property tax tracking.

In one instance recounted by Gupta in an interview with TechCrunch, Patch even covered three months of an owner’s mortgage during a liquidity crunch for his small business, allowing him to maintain his home and credit score. Patch is incentivized to provide all services that can help ensure an increase in home value, benefitting both Patch and the homeowner, with the homeowner earning the majority of the asset’s appreciated value.  

Additionally, since Patch’s model isn’t focused on a homeowner’s ability to pay back a loan, interest or periodic payments, Patch is able to provide financing to more people. Patch is able to help those with more variable qualifications that struggle to get traditional loans — such as a 1099 contracted worker — monetize their illiquid assets with less harsh or restrictive terms and without increasing their debt burden. Gupta described this as solving the core problem of providing liquidity to asset-rich but cash-flow sensitive people. 

Patch is not only looking to provide easier liquidity to more homeowners, but they’re trying to do so faster than traditional lenders. Interested customers can first receive a free estimate of whether Patch will invest in their home or not, how much its willing to invest and what percentage equity it will take — primarily based on Patch’s machine learning models that focus on asset, market, and location level attributes. 

After the initial estimate, a Patch home advisor will educate the customer on the product and start a formal application process, which includes your standard income and credit score verification and otherwise, that takes 5-10 days. All-in, homeowners have the ability to get money in as little as 14 days, a significantly shorter timeline than your standard home credit process. Once the investment is made, owners have full freedom with how they use the money.

According to Patch, while its customers come from a diverse set of backgrounds, many either accumulated debt have to pay down the net or may struggle making monthly payments. The average Patch homeowner uses 40% of the investment to eliminate debt, adds 40% to their savings account or passive income, and invests 20% into home improvements.

To date, Patch has raised a total of $6 million and believes the latest round of funding will help scale its operations as they team up with advisors like USV that have experience scaling fintech companies (such as a Lending Club or Carta). The funds will be used to invest in product and Patch’s clearing technology in order to further speed up Patch’s lending process.

Patch also hopes to use the investment to help them gradually expand their footprint, with the goal of eventually having a presence all 50 states. (Patch is currently available in 11 regional markets within California and Washington and expects to be in 18 regional markets by the end of the year including those in Utah, Colorado and Oregon.)

Patch Homes Co Founders Sundeep Ambati L and Sahil Gupta R

Image via Patch Homes

What makes homeownership so galvanizing for the Patch team? Patch CEO Sahil Gupta spent years putting his Carnegie Mellon financial engineering degree to work in banking and finance, as well as in financial products and strategy positions at fintech startups backed by heavy hitters such as YC to Goldman Sachs.

After realizing the majority of the US population were homeowners, but were struggling to make monthly payments or save for the future, Sahil wanted to figure out how we could take an illiquid asset like a home and make it easily accessible. 

Around the same time, Sahil’s cofounder Sundeep Ambat was working as a contractor on a new business venture of his and was struggling to get a home equity loan. While these circumstances ultimately led Sahil and Sundeep to found Patch Homes in 2016 out of the TechStars New York accelerator program, the deeper motivation behind Patch can be traced back nearly 30 years when Sahil’s father made an equity sharing agreement with his brother as they were building his family’s home in India.

With a growing family and a pregnant wife, Sunil’s father was adamant about living debt-free and so his brother provided an investment in exchange for an equity stake in the house. According to Sahil, the home is still in the family and has appreciated substantially in value to the benefit of both Sahil’s father and his brother. Longer-term, Patch wants to be the preferred partner for homeownership, helping reduce cash tight owners’ financial anxiety without the debilitating weight of debt. 

“Some companies want to help people buy or sell homes, but homeownership really begins after that point. Patch is built to be inside the home with you and everything that comes thereafter,” Gupta told TechCrunch.

“Patch was created to partner with homeowners to help them unlock their home equity so they can achieve their financial goals along every step of their homeownership journey.