Tuesday, July 28, 2020
Etail user protection law will apply to online services also
Sweet news for food delivery firms; volumes up, order values too
Thanks to COVID-19, everybody wants Density’s technology tracking building occupancy and use
Before the COVID-19 epidemic, Density was being used by companies like TechCrunch’s parent company, Verizon, to see how it could better use office space after the Yahoo!/Aol merger. Now, thanks to the COVID-19 epidemic everyone wants the company’s technology to track building and room occupancy and use.
It’s one reason why the company managed to raise $51 million in a new round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from previous investors like Dick Costolo’s 01 Advisors and the Los Angeles-based investment firm, Upfront Ventures.
“The primary driver [for demand] has been being able to reopen buildings safely and to do so without invading privacy,” says Density chief executive Andrew Farah.
And while the company started out as a service for data-loving tech companies, retail stores and coffee chains, it’s now become a ubiquitous technology for needed for every business with shared space, said Farah. That means fulfillment centers, grocery stores, warehouses, meat processing plants, in addition to something like TechCrunch headquarters.
What will the company do with all that money? Spend it on sales, marketing, and actually getting the tech into customers’ buildings, according to Farah.
“A lot of what we’re going to invest in is customer success, core infrastructure and growing our product and sales,” said Farah. “The first time our customers hear about us is when they get on a demo for a sales call.”
New orders for the company’s hardware and software service are pouring in, he said. And these order range from $20,000 to $50,000 pilot projects to seven-figure, thousand-unit initial deployments. “All of our customers end up tripling in size from their initial land,” he said. Density charges a one-time fee of $895 for installation of its sensors and another $800 per-sensor per-year for access to the data.
Density works through both channel partners and direct sales, according to Farah, and the urgency of its potential customers has led to the massive uptick in funding.
“A lot of customers are trying to solve a problem that they had last week. There’s a sense of urgency from real estate and safety teams that we haven’t seen before,” said Farah.
Behind all of this is the demand from employees for safe, socially distanced public workspaces as the country continues to battle the COVID-19 epidemic that continues to ravage the U.S.
And while COVID-19 may be today’s main selling point, investors like Upfront Ventures’ Mark Suster saw the value in Density’s technology much earlier. “The investment thesis for me combines my belief in computer vision as a next-gen I/O (3) along with my thesis that The Innovator’s Dilemma or Deflationary Economics drive all of the largest success on the Internet (4). Today’s people tracking solutions are hugely expensive and mostly used in retail environments,” Suster wrote in a blog post announcing Upfront’s initial investment in the company, back in 2016. “The costs have greatly limited adoption and we think that’s about to change in a massive way.”
A 2016 animation of Density’s tracking capabilities via GIPHY
At Kleiner Perkins, the latest firm to back Density’s computer vision-based technology, the investment was a year-long process.
“I had heard through the grapevine that they were going to talk to investors,” said Ilya Fushman, a new director at the company and one of Kleiner Perkins’ partners, who had first begun speaking with Farah about a year ago.
Fushman said that Kleiner was interested in the real estate market and its commitment to Density falls in line with another recent investment in Proxy, a startup providing cardless and fobless building access controls.
“If you look for market sizing, which we do, there are few markets that are as big as real estate,” Fushman said. “It’s also a market that’s historically been under-penetrated by technology. A lot of building management is done on pen and paper when it comes to space utilization.”
Both access control and utilization have been areas that more companies need to get a handle on thanks to the COVID-19 epidemic, which made backing a company like Density a natural fit, he said.
Hevo draws in $8 million Series A for its no-code data pipeline service
Hevo founders Manish Jethani and Sourabh Agarwal
According to data pipeline startup Hevo, many small- to medium-sized companies juggle more than 40 different applications to manage sales, marketing, finance, customer support and other operations. All of these applications are important sources of data that can be analyzed to improve a company’s performance. That data often remains separate, however, making it difficult for different teams to collaborate.
Hevo enables its clients’ employees to integrate data from more than 150 different sources, including enterprise software from Salesforce and Oracle, even if they don’t have any technical experience. The company announced today that it has raised an $8 million Series A round led by Singapore-based venture capital firm Qualgro and Lachy Groom, a former executive at payments company Stripe.
The round, which brings Hevo’s total raised so far to $12 million, also included participation from returning investors Chiratae Ventures and Sequoia Capital India’s early-stage startup program Surge. The company was first covered by TechCrunch when it raised seed funding in 2017.
Hevo’s Series A will be used to increase the number of integrations available on its platform, and hire sales and marketing teams in more countries, including the United States and Singapore. The company currently has clients in 16 markets, including the U.S., India, France, Australia and Hong Kong, and counts payments company Marqeta among its customers.
In a statement, Puneet Bysani, tech lead manager at Marqeta, said, “Hevo saved us many engineering hours, and our data teams could focus on creating meaningful KPIs that add value to Marqeta’s business. With Hevo’s pre-built connectors, we were able to get data from many sources into Redshift and Snowflake very quickly.”
Based in Bangalore and San Francisco, Hevo was founded in 2017 by chief executive officer Manish Jethani and chief technology officer Sourabh Agarwal. The two previously launched SpoonJoy, a food delivery startup that was acquired by Grofers, one of India’s largest online grocery delivery services, in 2015. Jethani and Agarwal spent a year working at Grofers before leaving to start Hevo.
Hevo originated in the challenges Jethani and Agarwal faced while developing tech for SpoonJoy’s order and delivery system.
“All of our team members would come to us and say, ‘hey, we want to look at these metrics,’ or we would ask our teams questions if something wasn’t working. Oftentimes, they would not have the data available to answer those questions,” Jethani told TechCrunch.
Then at Grofers, Jethani and Agarwal realized that even large companies face the same challenges. They decided to work on a solution to allow companies to quickly integrate data sources.
For example, a marketing team at a e-commerce company might have data about its advertising on social media platforms, and how much traffic campaigns bring to their website or app. But they might not have access to data about how many of those visitors actually make purchases, or if they become repeat customers. By building a data pipeline with Hevo, they can bring all that information together.
Hevo is designed to serve all sectors, including e-commerce, healthcare and finance. In order to use it, companies sign up for Hevo’s services on its website and employees enter their credentials for software supported by the platform. Then Hevo automatically extracts and organizes the data from those sources and prepares it for cloud-based data warehouses, such as Amazon Redshift and Snowflake. A user dashboard allows companies to customize integrations or hide sensitive data.
Hevo is among a roster of “no code, low code” startups that have recently raised venture capital funding for building tools that enable non-developers to add features to their existing software. The founders say its most direct competitor is Fivetran, an Oakland, California-based company that also builds pipelines to move data to warehouses and prepare it for analysis.
Jethani said Hevo differentiates by “optimizing our product for non-technical users.”
“The number of companies who need to use data is very high and there is not enough talent available in the market. Even if it is available, it is very competitive and expensive to hire that engineering talent because big companies like Google and Amazon are also competing for the same talent,” he added. “So we felt that there has to be some democratization of who can use this technology.”
Hevo also focuses on integrating data in real-time, which is especially important for companies that provide on-demand deliveries or services. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Jethani says e-commerce clients have used Hevo to manage an influx in orders as people under stay-at-home orders purchase more items online. Companies are also relying on Hevo to help organize and manage data as their employees continue to work remotely.
In a statement about the funding, Qualgro managing partner Heang Chhor said, “Hevo provides a truly innovative solution for extracting and transforming data across multiple data sources–in real time with full automation. This helps enterprises to fully capture the benefit of data flowing though the many databases and software they currently use. Hevo’s founders are the type of globally-minded entrepreneurs that we like to support.”
TransferWise announces a new $319M secondary share sale round led by Lone Pine Capital and D1 Capital Partners at a $5B valuation (Ryan Browne/CNBC)
TransferWise announces a new $319M secondary share sale round led by Lone Pine Capital and D1 Capital Partners at a $5B valuation — - TransferWise employees and early investors sold some of their stakes in a $319 million secondary deal. — The company's $5 billion valuation makes …
Monday, July 27, 2020
Facebook Says EU Antitrust Probe Invades Employee Privacy
Intel Chief Engineer Exits After 7nm Chip Delay
Google Extends Work From Home Through June Next Year
Worldwide 5G network infrastructure spending expected to nearly double in 2020
Worldwide 5G network infrastructure spending expected to nearly double in 2020
Stiff competition awaits Reliance Jio as it takes 'made-in-India' 5G tech to the world
Tencent wants to take full control of long-time search ally Sogou
It’s been seven years since Tencent picked up a 36.5% stake in Sogou to fend off rival Baidu in the online search market. The social and gaming giant is now offering to buy out and take private its long-time ally.
NYSE-listed Sogou said this week it has received a preliminary non-binding proposal from Tencent to acquire its remaining shares for $9 each American depositary share (ADS) it doesn’t already own. That means Sohu, a leading web portal in the Chinese desktop era and the controlling shareholder in Sogou, will no longer hold an interest in the search firm.
Sohu’s board of directors has not yet had an opportunity to review the proposal or determine whether or not to take the offer, the company stated. Sogou’s shares leaped 48% on the news to $8.51 on Monday, yet still far below its all-time high at $13.85 at the time of its initial public offering.
Founded in 2005, Sogou went public in late 2017 billing itself as a challenger to China’s biggest search service Baidu, though it has long been a distant second. The company also operates the top Chinese input software, which is used by 482 million people every day to type and convert voice to text, according to its Q1 earnings report.
Ever since the strategic partnership with Tencent kicked off, Sogou, which means “Search Dog” in Chinese, has been the default search engine for WeChat and benefited immensely from the giant’s traffic, though WeChat has also developed its own search feature.
The potential buyout will add Sogou to a list of Chinese companies to delist from the U.S. as tensions between the countries heighten in recent times. It will also allay concerns amongst investors who worry WeChat Search would make Sogou redundant. So far WeChat’s proprietary search function appears to be gleaning data mainly within the app’s enclave, from users’ news feed, user-generated articles, e-commerce stores, through to lite apps integrated into WeChat.
That’s a whole lot of content and services targeted at WeChat’s 1.2 billion active users. Many people need not look beyond the chat app to consumer news, order food, play games, or purchase groceries. But there remains information outside the enormous ecosystem, and that’s Sogou’s turf — to bring what’s available on the open web (of course, subject to government censorship like all Chinese services) to WeChat users.
The arrangement reflects an endemic practice on the Chinese internet — giants blocking each other or making it hard for rivals to access their content. The goal is to lock in traffic and user insights. For instance, articles published on WeChat can’t be searched on Baidu. Consumers can’t open Alibaba shopping links without leaving WeChat.
Sogou is hardly WeChat’s sole search ally. To capture a full range of information needs, the messenger has also struck deals to co-opt fellow microblogging platform Weibo, Quora-like Zhihu, and social commerce service Xiaohongshu into its search pool.
Combined market cap of Apple, Facebook, Alphabet, and Amazon is ~$5T, their combined 2019 revenue was ~$773B, and they have a combined cash reserve of ~$420B (Kyle Daly/Axios)
Combined market cap of Apple, Facebook, Alphabet, and Amazon is ~$5T, their combined 2019 revenue was ~$773B, and they have a combined cash reserve of ~$420B — The four Big Tech CEOs who will testify before Congress Wednesday command global empires with power and wealth that make them more like countries than companies.
Through June 30, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft announced 27 deals, up 29% YoY, at the fastest pace since 2015, raising more antitrust concerns (Bloomberg Law)
Through June 30, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft announced 27 deals, up 29% YoY, at the fastest pace since 2015, raising more antitrust concerns — Listen — The biggest U.S. technology companies have gone on a buying spree this year, waving off intense scrutiny …
Russian cryptocurrency payment network A7 expands to Africa, as Moscow builds an alternative payments system amid western sanctions after its Ukraine invasion (Financial Times)
Financial Times : Russian cryptocurrency payment network A7 expands to Africa, as Moscow builds an alternative payments system amid weste...
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The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
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Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
