Telstra Ventures Archives - Product Management Confabulation

March 29, 2022

LambdaTest raises $45 million to build ‘AWS for testers’

Web developers have to run hundreds of tasks and they are able to do so on their own machines. But when a developer firm – at a scale – has to perform similar activities, they don’t often have – and in many cases, want to have – the required computing power at their disposal to run such tasks locally.

“Can we build a platform that helps these developers and their firms save a ton of time – bringing down what would otherwise take four to five hours to 10 minutes?” says Asad Khan.

Khan has spent a decade attempting to solve this problem. And at his most recent venture, LambaTest, he has productized the solution.

The four-year-old startup’s cloud-based offerings allow users to test their websites and apps on over 3,000 different combinations of browsers, operating systems, devices, and different variants of them.

“We have built AWS for testers,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. “We are not a testing tool company, but an enabler of an ecosystem where developers can run all kinds of tests written in any language or framework. The platform enables you to run your tasks at any scale from anywhere at any time.”

And as is often the case with a fast-growing startup, LambdaTest’s efficiency has drawn interest from investors.

On Tuesday, the startup said it has raised $45 million in its Series C financing round led by Premji Invest. Existing investors Sequoia Capital India, Telstra Ventures, Blume Ventures, Leo Capital as well as Sandeep Johri, former chief executive of software testing firm Tricentis, also participated in the round, bringing the startup’s all-time funding to $70 million.

LambdaTest says over 500 enterprises and a million developers and testers across 130 nations are using its platform. The firm has helped them run more than 100 million tests, achieve 95% quicker time-to-market, increase their release productivity by 62% and identify 67% of issues prior to launch, the startup said. On its website, LambdaTest counts Microsoft, Apple, Xerox, Postman, Yale, Directi among its customers.

Khan said the pandemic also played a key role in persuading many potential customers to explore LambdaTest. The startup grew its business by 300% last year, he said.

“We are razor focussed on making the lives of developers and QA teams easier when it comes to test orchestration and execution. Over the past few months, we’ve released HyperExecute, a next-gen smart test orchestration platform to help businesses run end-to-end automation tests at the fastest speed possible. We will soon be launching our test intelligence platform Test-at-Scale (TAS). It is already in beta. We are also continuously enhancing our core execution platform’s capabilities,” said Asad Khan.

With some of its offerings, LambdaTest competes with BrowserStack, a startup valued at $4 billion. Without naming any competitors, Khan said LambdaTest’s offerings are far more comprehensive and its approach to scaling unique. (BrowserStack certainly appears to see LambdaTest as a competitor. A Google search for LambdaTest returned BrowserStack as the top sponsored result last week, for instance.)

The startup plans to further expand its offerings and also its headcount. Currently it employs about 250 people, mostly in India and the US. With the new funding, Khan said he is looking to aggressively expand the team in the Bay Area.

“LambdaTest is helping businesses orchestrate their test execution by providing them cost-effective and scalable solutions while giving them improved control over their existing infrastructure without the need to add more to it. They are pushing the boundaries of speed, reliability and performance of test execution. We are happy to partner with this super ambitious LambdaTest team that is looking to change the face of test execution,” said Atul Gupta, a Partner at Premji Invest, in a statement.

December 15, 2021

Cequence adds $60M Series C to improve API security

When we last checked in with Cequence Security in February 2019, the company had just closed a $17 million Series B and was concentrating on security to protect business logic. While it still does that, it has shifted focus to API security, and today it announced a $60 million Series C.

Menlo Ventures led the latest round with participation from new investors Icon Ventures, Telstra Ventures and HarbourVest Partners along with existing investors Shasta Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital and T-Mobile Ventures. The company said it has now raised $100 million.

CEO Larry Link said that the startup was seeing more vulnerabilities through APIs with customers, and they began to shift the focus of the Cequence analytics engine to find those kinds of vulnerabilities.

“We now will discover what your API footprint looks like. [Without having] to instrument it, we’re finding things, and then we detect [any] abuse that’s going on on those API endpoints, and then we can mitigate that. So that’s how the product has evolved,” Link told me.

He said that Cequence looks at approximately 150 data points to determine if the activity is something to worry about.

“So we look at individual requests first, and then we look at clustering of requests second, and then we look at the intent of those requests third, and that’s where we tease things out like, ‘Hey, this is an account takeover attack, or this is a credential stuffing attack, or this is an inventory manipulation attack,'” he said.

Link said the company grew 2.5x over the last year and that there is a lot of room for growth. “We’re not releasing our revenue numbers, but it’s a very healthy growth rate and pretty high ARR for this kind of the business, and that’s why we wanted to raise this Series C, because we have a lot of opportunity. We need to fuel that,” he said.

The startup has just over 100 employees today and could reach as high as 250 by the end of 2022, depending on how the business goes. Link said that as the company expanded over the last year and moved at least partly remote, the workforce has grown more diverse.

“We’re big believers in the value of a diverse workforce. We think it gives us better insight and is a better platform to grow and expand the company. So the recent change in the last year and a half where some jobs need to be HQ-based, but most of our jobs can be working from anywhere. And this is kind of a new transition that we’ve seen, and it’s enabling us to get, I think, a better quality workforce and also a more diverse workforce,” he said.

This is Link’s fifth startup. His previous job before joining Cequence was VP of Sales at Palo Alto Networks. The founders hired him after starting the company to add an experienced industry veteran to run the show.

October 13, 2021

Lively is building the modern health savings account that puts consumers first

Alex Cyriac recalls his mother, who had a bone marrow transplant, stopped taking medication because she didn’t have enough money for the co-pay. His friend, Shobin Uralil, and his wife had similar medical issues with their first baby.

Though they knew each other in India, they bonded in the United States going through these personal experiences that were associated with the costs of healthcare.

They recognized health savings accounts as a powerful utility to save on healthcare costs, but thought the way those were run — largely by banks offering the service as an afterthought, according to Cyriac — were not putting the consumer first.

“We saw an opportunity to approach it differently and put the consumer first,” he added.

CEO Cyriac and Uralil started Lively in 2016 to be a modern take on the HSA for employers and individuals. Their early decision to build their own record-keeping technology stack means that the company can make its products free for individuals, who can set up recurring or one-time transactions and also don’t have to fill out forms for each claim.

Lively investments. Image Credits: Lively

Today, the San Francisco-based company announced an $80 million Series C led by B Capital Group, which included Telstra Ventures and existing investor Costanoa Ventures. The latest funding round brings Lively’s total funding to over $120 million.

The new funding enables the company to build more consumer tools, scale its team and expand its offerings to financial institutions and employers. Lively started out direct-to-consumer and is now pushing into business-to-business.

Over the past 18 to 24 months, it built out that focus and saw its users double last year and then more than double this year, Cyriac said. This year, Lively partnered with BMO Harris to be the HSA provider for its members.

Market research firm Devenir showed that in 2020, HSA assets were estimated to be $77.8 billion held in over 30 million accounts, a figure that has doubled in the last three years. Similarly, HSA adoption has propelled Lively to $500 million in assets under management, Cyriac added. That’s after doubling its AUM every 11 months over the past few years. He expects to top $1 billion in assets early in 2022, which he said will make the company the fastest HSA provider to reach that milestone.

With costs rising year over year, there are fewer options for saving for long-term healthcare, and to open and fund an HSA, an individual has to be on a high-deductible health plan. Uralil says the average deductible on all health plans is now greater — nearly $5,000 per year — than the Internal Revenue Service definition of a high-deductible health plan.

“It’s a function of what is happening in healthcare, consumer-driven health, with more people responsible for the financial aspects of healthcare,” Cyriac said. “Every year, more people are eligible for HSA because of the rising costs and fast adoption of healthcare plans. Lively is providing tools to make more informed decisions on how to spend that money.”

Health clouds are set to play a key role in healthcare innovation

October 12, 2021

FitOn pumps up its fitness platform with $18M in Delta-v Capital-led funding

Carving out 45 minutes or an hour for a workout can be difficult between work, home and daily life. Digital fitness and wellness company FitOn was created to provide 15- or 20-minute workouts aimed at getting people moving in whatever time they can make.

The company closed on an $18 million Series B round of funding, led by Delta-v Capital, with participation from existing investors Accel, Telstra Ventures, Crosscut Ventures, Maverick Ventures and Second Avenue Partners.

The funding comes as the Los Angeles-based company hits 10 million members for its app that offers personalized fitness and wellness programs and a unique social experience from trainers likes Orangetheory Fitness, KINRGY and Zumba, and even some celebrity ambassadors like Gabrielle Union, Julianne Hough, Halle Berry, Jonathan Van Ness and The Chainsmokers.

Fitbit adds ECG and stress-level scanning to its Charge fitness tracker

Founded by the husband-and-wife team of former Fitbit executive Lindsay Cook and AllTrails founder Russell Cook, the app launched two years ago with a mission of what CEO Lindsay Cook called a “democratization of digital fitness.”

“I was super immersed in the category and working at a fitness company, but found that I did not have a lot of time for fitness myself,” she said. “I was underwhelmed by some of the apps, which were not premium products and had so many barriers to entry, like expensive bikes or hardware equipment. I saw a change to democratize fitness when I saw that no one was going after the mass market.”

She teamed up with her husband, who had spent 20 years in digital products, to put together a health and fitness app that would do what AllTrails did for outdoors and what Calm did for meditation, Cook added.

FitOn app

FitOn is a freemium product, and members have access to hundreds of workouts in cardio, strength, yoga, stretch and meditation. It also has a pro subscription model that includes music tracks on top of the workouts, connection to health monitoring devices, offline downloads, meal plans and recipes. It also has a social platform built in with a chat feature, and members can invite friends to participate in programs and challenges.

The latest round of funding gives FitOn a total of $30 million raised to date, which includes a seed round in 2018 and Series A in 2020.

“FitOn is delivering millions of workouts a month to its members by prioritizing product innovation, community and premium content to build one of the largest health and fitness communities,” said David Schaller, managing partner at Delta-v Capital. “We are thrilled for FitOn to join our portfolio of innovators in digital fitness and wellness, which includes other category-leaders such as Tonal.”

Since the Series A, the company’s growth has accelerated and is up 500% year over year on revenue from the subscription model. Now that it has passed 10 million members, Cook expects to reach 25 million by the end of next year. In addition, FitOn members passed over 1 billion workout minutes, and most work out three or four times a week.

The app is seeing over 285% more downloads than Peloton, 588% more than Beachbody and is consistently in the top 20 of the health and fitness category and has garnered more than 300,000 five-star reviews, according to Cook.

The new funding will enable the company to grow its team, build out key positions and continue on its fast pace of releasing new products. In the past two years, the company released more than 78 products. FitOn has focused mostly on the United States, but it is planning to grow internationally as well.

“For a business still two years in the making, we are satisfied with revenue and have lots of opportunity to build large-scale business,” Lindsay Cook said. “In this anti-diet culture, it is not about the ‘perfect body,’ but promoting self-care. We are building a lifestyle brand encouraging people to do a 10-minute workout here and there.”

Peloton’s CEO John Foley on the changing face of connected fitness

July 13, 2021

Breach simulation startup AttackIQ raises $44M to fuel expansion

AttackIQ, a cybersecurity startup that provides organizations with breach and attack simulation solutions, has raised $44 million in Series C funding as it looks to ramp up its international expansion.

The funding round was led by Atlantic Bridge, Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures (SAEV), and Gaingels, with existing vendors — including Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Telstra Ventures — also participating. The round brings the company’s total funding raised to date to $79 million.

AttackIQ was founded in 2013 and is based out of San Diego, California. It provides an automated validation platform that runs scenarios to detect any gaps in a company’s defenses, enabling organizations to test and measure the effectiveness of their security posture and receive guidance on how to fix what’s broken. Broadly, AttackIQ’s platform helps an organization’s security teams to anticipate, prepare, and hunt for threats that may impact their business, before hackers get there first.

Its Security Optimization Platform platform, which supports Windows, Linux, and macOS across public, private, and on-premises cloud environments, is based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework, a curated knowledge base of known adversary threats, tactics, and techniques. This is used by a number of cybersecurity companies also building continuous validation services including FireEye, Palo Alto Networks, and Cymulate.

AttackIQ says this latest round of funding, which comes more than two years after its last, arrives at a “dynamic time” for the company. Not only has cybersecurity become more of a priority for organizations as a result of a major uptick in both ransomware and supply-chain attacks, the company also recently accelerated its international expansion efforts through a partnership with technology distributor Westcon.

The startup says it’s planning to use these new funds to further expand internationally through its newfound partnership with Atlantic Bridge, which will also see Kevin Dillon, the company’s co-founder and managing director, join the AttackIQ board of directors.

“AttackIQ has established itself as a category leader with a formidable enterprise customer base that includes four of the Fortune 20,” said Dillon. “We believe deeply in the company’s vision and potential to become the next billion-dollar cybersecurity software company and look forward to helping the company turn early traction in Europe and the Middle East into robust, long-term expansion.”

Brett Galloway, CEO of AttackIQ, said the round “reaffirms the strength” of its platform.

As well as enabling organizations to review the robustness of their security defenses, the startup also runs the AttackIQ Academy, which provides free entry-level and advanced cybersecurity training. It has accumulated 17,200 registered students to date across 176 countries.

Cymulate nabs $45M to test and improve cybersecurity defenses via attack simulations

March 4, 2021

Snapcommerce raises $85M to make over your mobile shopping experience

People are not only shopping digitally more than ever. They’re also shopping using their mobile phones more than ever.

And for mobile-first companies like Snapcommerce, this is good news.

Snapcommerce, formerly known as SnapTravel, has raised $85 million in what the company is describing as a “Pre-IPO” growth round to help further its mission of “changing the way people shop on their phones.”

The Toronto, Ontario-based startup has built out an AI-driven, vertical-agnostic platform that uses messaging in an effort to personalize the mobile shopping experience and “deliver the best promotional prices.” While it was initially focused on the travel industry, the company is now branching out into other consumer verticals – hence its name change.

Inovia Capital and Lion Capital co-led the new growth round, which included participation from Acrew DCF, Thayer Ventures, Full In Partners as well as existing backers Telstra Ventures and Bee Partners. The financing brings Snapcommerce’s total raised since its 2016 inception to over $100 million. Its last raise — a $7.2 million round from Telstra and NBA star Steph Curry — took place in 2019.

The startup was founded by tech entrepreneurs Hussein Fazal, whose prior company AdParlor grew to $100+ million in revenue, then sold to AdKnowledge back in 2011; and Henry Shi, who previously built uMentioned and worked at Google, where he helped launch YouTube Music Insights, according to previous TechCrunch reporting.

Snapcommerce co-founders Henry Shi and Hussein Fazal, Image courtesy of Snapcommerce

Snapcommerce launched its first, travel-focused product in 2017. It works by using chatbots to interact with customers via messaging apps such as SMS, Facebook and Whatsapp. But the company also has human agents ready to help if people need more assistance, in the past essentially serving as on-demand travel agents.

Its service is not just for hotels and flights, but also to help people book restaurants and activities too.

“Our focus has been on building that personal relationship,” Fazal said. “Many people end up coming back to us when they travel again.” In fact, over 40% of its sales in 2020 came from repeat customers.

Over the years, the company claims to have helped more than 10 million users globally save over $75 million. It expects to cross over $1 billion in total mobile sales this year.

And now it’s ready to branch out into helping consumers save money on goods.

“When shopping, it’s hard to find the right product and even if you do, it’s hard to find a good deal,” he said. “On a desktop, there’s ways around it. But on mobile, it’s virtually impossible.”

The company turned the corner to profitability three months into the pandemic in 2020, seeing a 60% spike in sales in the second half of the year compared to H2 2019, according to CEO Fazal.

It then decided to re-invest its profits to continue growing the business.

“The profitability during the pandemic gave us confidence that we could turn to profitability whenever we needed to and gave us control of our own destiny, which enabled this fundraise,” Fazal told TechCrunch. “The third quarter of 2020 ended up being our greatest quarter ever.”

The COVID-19 pandemic, naturally, only accelerated its growth as more consumers turned to mobile.

“We believe the next wave of power purchasers will be via mobile,” Fazal said. “Some of the new generation don’t even have desktops or laptops, and they spend all their time on their mobile phone and messaging. So we’re able to be at the forefront.”

Snapcommerce has an IPO in its sights although no specific timeline. The company did not reveal its current valuation or hard revenue figures. The company makes money by either marking up prices provided by a merchant or charging the merchant a commission.

Chris Arsenault, partner at Inovia and Snapcommerce lead investor, said his firm “tripled up” on its investment in the startup after witnessing its success in the travel space.

“Other companies out there only care about the transaction, and force consumers to look through several services to see if they got the best price, all the while telling them ‘there’s only 2 seats left,’ ” he told TechCrunch. “We believe that consumers aren’t going to accept that type of pressure-selling in the future. And Snapcommerce’s ability to build trust with its customers and service providers has attracted us to them as they are defining what the future of commerce is going to be like.”

Ultimately, the company plans to use its fresh capital to continue to scale with the goal of streamlining the entire mobile search, purchase and fulfillment process and make finding “the right item at the right price as sending a message to a trusted friend.”

March 4, 2021

Snapcommerce raises $85M to make over your mobile shopping experience

People are not only shopping digitally more than ever. They’re also shopping using their mobile phones more than ever.

And for mobile-first companies like Snapcommerce, this is good news.