Monday, September 16, 2019
iPhone 11 Series Pre-Orders Off to a Good Start, Analysts Say
Fieldwire just raised $33.5 million more to give PlanGrid and its new owner Autodesk a run for their money
Fieldwire, which makes task management software for construction teams that helps organize everyone involved in a project so things don’t fall through the figurative (or literal) cracks, has raised $33.5 million in Series C funding led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Brick & Mortar Ventures, Hilti Group, and Formation 8.
It isn’t a huge amount of money. Still, the traction Fieldwire is enjoying might give the folks at Autodesk some pause, given the growing threat it presents to PlanGrid — a rival that Autodesk acquired last year for $875 million.
Already, six-year-old Fieldwire has 65 employees, with 45 of them in San Francisco and the rest in Phoenix, plus a smaller outpost in France. And founder and CEO Yves Frinault says the company expects to have closer to 150 employees by next summer.
Fieldwire is also “cash profitable,” he says, “meaning our bank account goes up every month, even though we started going fast.” To underscore his point, he notes that when we last talked with him in 2015, the company’s platform was hosting 35,000 projects; it has since hosted half a million altogether, with more than 2,000 unique paying customers on the platform. Many of them pack a punch, too, like Clark Construction Group, a 113-year-old, Maryland-based construction firm that reported more than $5 billion in revenue last year and that began using Fieldwire across all of its projects this past summer. (Clark employs 4,200 people.)
Because Fieldwire grows from the bottom up, meaning it targets teams who then use it for projects that are then run by numerous enterprises that work on various projects with other teams that can then also adopt the software, it has spread particularly quickly throughout North America, which counts for 70 percent of its volume. Fieldwire is also making inroads in Europe, where 15 percent of its revenue is coming and, to a lesser but growing extent, Australia.
Altogether, its software is localized in 13 languages.
It employs a freemium model. Small teams with five members or less can use a significant portion of the product for free. But more users requires more storage typically, and that’s where Fieldwire starts charging — typically between $30 and $50 per user per month, though bigger companies tend to pay the company by the year or based on the scope of a particular project versus on a per-license basis.
Fieldwire’s two main types of customers are general contractors and subcontractors. GCs will usually use the company’s software as a way to track quality and progress. Subcontractors tend to use the software internally to run their own crews.
As for what’s on its roadmap, Fieldwire — which already enables users to look at floor plans in real time, message with one another, track punch lists, schedule jobs and file reports — suggests it’s zeroing in on 3D architectural drawings, which puts it in more direct competition with PlanGrid.
PlanGrid also makes construction productivity software, and fueled by parent company Autodesk, it also now offers users the ability to access building information modeling data, in either 2D or 3D. Fieldwire doesn’t seem terribly daunted by this. Instead, Frinault calls it a “product challenge to make a 3D product model consumable, so we’re working on it right now.”
With its newest round of funding, Fieldwire has now raised $40.4 million altogether.
Computer scientist Richard Stallman, who defended Jeffrey Epstein, resigns from MIT CSAIL and the Free Software Foundation
Computer scientist and open software advocate Richard Stallman said he has resigned from his position as a visiting scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) after describing a victim of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein as “entirely willing” in emails sent to a department list. Stallman has also stepped down from his roles as president and board director at the Free Software Foundation, the nonprofit he founded in 1985.
Last week, the Daily Beast reported that Stallman had also called for the legalization of child pornography and abolishment of age of consent laws on his personal blog in multiple posts published over the course of 15 years.
In his MIT CSAIL resignation, also posted to his personal blog, Stallman wrote: “To the MIT Community, I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT. I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings.”
MIT has been under scrutiny for its ties to Epstein, who a New Yorker investigation found had secured $7.5 million in donations for the MIT Media Lab, far more than what was previously disclosed. As a result, its director, Joi Ito, resigned last week and MIT ordered an investigation into the Media Lab’s ties to Epstein, who was found dead in his jail cell last month while awaiting federal trial on sex trafficking charges.
As part of its preliminary findings, MIT president Rafael Reif admitted that the law firm conducting the investigation had uncovered a letter he wrote to thank Epstein for a donation in 2012, four years after Epstein had already pled guilty to procuring for prostitution a girl under 18. “I apparently signed this letter on August 16, 2012, about six weeks into my presidency,” Reif wrote. “Although I do not recall it, it does bear my signature.”
Stallman’s emails were first made public last week by mechanical engineer and MIT alum Selam Jie Gano (the entire thread was later published by Vice). In an email sent to a MIT CSAIL mailing list earlier this month, Stallman wrote that Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s sex trafficking victims, who testified that she had been ordered to have sex with late MIT professor Marvin Minsky during a trip to the U.S. Virgin Islands when she was 17, had likely “presented herself to him as entirely willing.” He also wrote that “I’ve concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it is absolutely wrong to use the term ‘sexual assault’ in an accusation.”
Gano also published an email that Stallman sent to another CSAIL list that included undergraduate students. In it, he said “I think it is morally absurd to define ‘rape’ in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.”
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Amazon Great Indian Festival sale 2019 announced: Dates, discounts and more
Hong Kong-based AutoX, which recently announced plans to roll out 100 robotaxis in Shanghai by early 2020, has closed $100M Series A from Alibaba and others (Song Jingli/KrASIA)
Hong Kong-based AutoX, which recently announced plans to roll out 100 robotaxis in Shanghai by early 2020, has closed $100M Series A from Alibaba and others — Hong Kong-based startup AutoX said on Monday that it has closed its Series A financing round, bagging USD 100 million, according to a press release.
Crisp, which helps food brands reduce food waste by analyzing data from sources such as inventory databases and POS systems, raises $14.2M Series A (Paul Sawers/VentureBeat)
Crisp, which helps food brands reduce food waste by analyzing data from sources such as inventory databases and POS systems, raises $14.2M Series A — “Optimizing output,” or cutting waste, has emerged as something of a micro-trend in the investment realm.
New policy to supercharge handset making
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LastPass fixes a bug in its Chrome and Opera extensions which exposed credentials entered on previously visited websites (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
LastPass fixes a bug in its Chrome and Opera extensions which exposed credentials entered on previously visited websites — LastPass has released a fix last week. Vulnerability details are now public. Users advised to update. — Password manager LastPass has released an update last week …
Aspect Ventures, founded by Theresia Gouw and Jennifer Fonstad, is splitting up
Aspect Ventures, an early-stage, five-year-old, San Francisco-based venture firm founded five years ago very notably by two veteran VCs who happen to be women, is splitting up. Cofounders Jennifer Fonstad, formerly of DFJ, and Theresia Gouw, formerly of Accel, are launching separate firms, a source confirms.
The WSJ reported the news earlier today.
Fonstad tells the outlet that the split owes to “different leadership styles and different ways of operating at the portfolio level.”
Going forward, she plans to operate under the brand Owl Capital and to invest in growth deals, including in enterprise software, which has been a major focus area for Aspect, though it has occasionally backed consumer startups, including newly public TheRealReal and a direct-to-consumer jewelry brand called Baublebar.
Gouw, who is appearing in several weeks at our TechCrunch Disrupt event to talk about industry trends, declined to comment. But some members of Aspect’s team are joining her at new firm, aCrew, including Lauen Kolodny, who joined Aspect five years ago and was promoted from principal to partner in 2017; and Vishal Lugani, who joined Aspect as a principal in 2016 after spending 3.5 years as a senior associate with Greycroft and whose LinkedIn bio now identifies him as a founding partner with aCrew.
Team members who are meanwhile joining Fonstad include Chad Herrin, a former SuccessFactors VP who has been a venture partner with Aspect since last year; and Rebecca Hu, who spent a year with Earlybird Venture Capital before joining Aspect roughly one year ago as an investor.
Aspect had raised $150 million for its debut fund and a second $181 million fund at the start of 2018. Gouw, Fonstad and the rest of their Aspect colleagues will continue managing out these investments, though they will be making all new investments out of their respective new vehicles, presumably as they are locking down capital commitments.
According to the WSJ, aCrew is targeting $175 million for its debut fund, while Owl Capital is shooting for $125 million in capital commitments.
The firm is far from the first to split over clashing management styles. Most recently, Social Capital drastically changed shape, with cofounder Mamoon Hamid heading over to help recharge Kleiner Perkins, and numerous other early members of the firm leaving to found Tribe Capital.
Richard Stallman says he has resigned from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory due to pressure on MIT over his Epstein-related emails (Joseph Cox/VICE)
Richard Stallman says he has resigned from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory due to pressure on MIT over his Epstein-related emails — Stallman said the “most plausible scenario” is that one of Epstein's underage victims was “entirely willing.”
Consumer affairs ministry extends deadline to submit feedback on e-commerce guidelines
Alibaba's DAMO Academy releases RynnBrain, an open-source foundation model to help robots perform real-world tasks like navigating rooms, trained on Qwen3-VL (Saritha Rai/Bloomberg)
Saritha Rai / Bloomberg : Alibaba's DAMO Academy releases RynnBrain, an open-source foundation model to help robots perform real-worl...
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Amrith Ramkumar / Wall Street Journal : An interview with White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, a Peter Thiel protégé confirmed by ...
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