Month: August 2018

Rent the Runway today announced that it has partnered with Temasek for a $200 million credit facility.

Founded in 2009, Rent the Runway lets users rent items of clothing for special events or occasions, bringing runway styles to folks without the cash to purchase the clothing outright.

Rent the Runway started out by letting users rent their wares for about 10 percent of the item’s price. But in 2017, RTR introduced a subscription model, giving users unlimited rentals for $89/month.

The model has already been proven by other businesses. RTR started giving users access to fashion in the same way that Netflix gives users access to video, Spotify gives access to music, or even the way ClassPass gives users access to studio fitness classes.

Since the subscription launch, RTR’s subscription business is up 150 percent year over year, and represents 50 percent of the company’s overall revenue.

According to the release, RTR will use the new funds to continue growing its subscription business, expand operations, and refinance its existing debt facility. As part of the deal, Temasek has received an observer seat on the board of directors.

In response to the question around why Rent The Runway chose a credit facility over traditional VC investment, CFO Scarlett O’Sullivan had this to say via email:

We are very pleased that the company has demonstrated the kind of business model, growth prospects and financial discipline that make it possible to access a credit facility of this size with an equity-minded long-term partner like Temasek – they have a proven track record of supporting disruptive high-growth companies.

We were specifically looking for debt for three key reasons:

1 – This facility gives us the ability to access more financing – we can draw capital as we need to, giving us flexibility to grow our subscription business more quickly

2 – We improved the terms of our prior facility which we refinanced with a portion of these funds — and debt for us is a lower cost option to finance the business

3 – It is less dilutive to our existing shareholders – we believe there will be significant value creation over the next several years as we continue to change consume behavior and help women put their closet in the cloud

Before this latest deal, Rent the Runway had raised more than $200 million in funding from investors such as Bain Capital, KPCB, Highland Capital, TCV, and more.

Stampli, an invoice management platform, announced today the closing of a $6.7 M Series A funding round led by SignalFire, with participation from Bloomberg Beta, Hillsven Capital, and UpWest Labs.

If you’ve ever freelanced for a company, you’ll know that the long, instant ramen-filled days between filing an invoice and having it completed can be grueling. Brothers Eyal and Ofer Feldman launched Stampli in 2015 to help solve this problem and bridge the communication gap between accountants, related internal departments and vendors. Aimed at mid to large size companies, to date Stampli has helped a wide range of companies (from fashion to tech) manage over $4 billion in invoices through its AI driven interface.

“Invoice management is like an elephant,” co-founder and CEO Eyal Feldman told TechCrunch. “One person sees the head, one person sees the tail, one person sees the legs. It’s a process that different people see different versions of but the whole picture should include everybody. The ability for all of these people to be involved is really the core of the process.”

Traditional invoice management between vendors and internal departments in a company can be a tangled mess of email exchanges, lost messages and ultimately delayed payments. But, Stampli’s interface (which can be integrated directly into a company’s enterprise resource planning software like NetSuite, Intuit QuickBooks, or SAP) allows for every step of the invoice’s journey to have a central landing page for every relevant party to collaborate on.

“We found that 85 percent of our users are not accounting people,” said Feldman. “[They] are all the managers around and all the other people involved. What we found in our research is that when the process works for them is when accounting is happy.”

This landing page not only provides easy access to pertinent information between departments, but Stampli’s built-in AI, Billy the Bot, helps invoice managers fill in relevant information by first learning the structure of the invoice and then learning through observation the user’s behavior and work flow. When Billy passes an 80 percent confidence threshold for its decision, it goes ahead and auto-fills the information. But, if it’s feeling unsure about its choice, Billy will leave it as a suggestion instead to avoid introducing any errors to the paperwork.

The more invoices users process through Stampli, the more Billy learns how to best streamline the process for that company.

In the arena of invoice management, Stampli faces competition from companies like Determine and Concur, which also offer all-in-one platforms for invoice management and, in the case of Concur, also incorporate machine learning to capture invoices.

According to Feldman, what helps Stampli stand apart from the competition is its emphasis on company collaboration and its no-fee installation of the software. With no upfront cost, the company only charges per invoice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tade Oyerinde is obsessed with communications inside educational institutions. A few years ago, while studying at Leeds University in England, he founded Gleepost, a Craigslist-like service targeting college campuses.

The startup flopped, so Oyerinde moved on to build with his college roommate and twin brother Uniroulette, a Chatroulette clone but limited to people with .edu email addresses. It was here that he got a searing introduction to product design and also learned how to become a social hacker, using design choices to drive conversations and engagement. “With Uniroulette… we needed to have about 20 kids concurrently on just to make it work,” he explained to me. To get those numbers, the startup officially opened at 8pm each evening, and anyone who tried to login earlier was given a countdown timer.

To further drive engagement, Oyerinde created dozens if not hundreds of Facebook pages around the concept of love and missed connections targeting different campuses, such as Leeds Crushes or Bodleian Library Secrets. Students were hooked — and also getting carefully calibrated advertising messages to spend more time on Uniroulette. He raised $250k from angels in London, but ultimately, the startup lost traffic and eventually twinkled out.

Oyerinde hopes that the third time is a charm with his new project, Campuswire. The platform, launching publicly today, is designed to maximize the efficiency of classroom conversations, even among different disciplines from math to English. The product is certainly inspired from Slack and other current campus communications tools, but with an intense focus on saving the time of teachers and faculty.

“70% of the things that students need to communicate in a college class is asking a question,” Oyerinde said. “You need a balance of synchronous and asynchronous communications, and we had a bunch of experience with this.”

The challenge for campuses these days is that the methods by which faculty and students communicate couldn’t be more different. Existing incumbents like Blackboard have forums features, but the community is often moribund. Professors use email, which is asynchronous, but not easily shared among students attending a class. Meanwhile, today’s students are obsessed with SMS, Instagram, and YouTube as channels for communication. Campuswire’s goal is to meet everyone halfway.

There were several design decisions that make Campuswire unique. One is that students can post questions anonymously in their classes. “40% of students were never going to ask questions unless they can do it anonymously,” Oyerinde said. He noted that they have had limited issues with trust and safety issues since class discussions are closed to non-enrolled students.

Most importantly, the design of the product is driven by efficiency. Questions are easy to surface for students, helping teachers limit repetitive answers. The other side of efficiency is encouraging students to chime in with their own answers. We wanted to “incentivize the top 5% of students to help each other out,” Oyerinde explained. “They literally jump in, so professors have to do less work.” That’s critical in classes where the number of students can be in the hundreds if not thousands.

The platform has been in beta since last fall at UCLA, and usage in the initial set of classes has been heavy. “Users use us over five hours per day in three out of the four classes in UCLA, and in all of them it was over three hours per day on average,” Oyerinde said. He also said that “we had over 75% 10-week retention.” The team chose UCLA because of its quarterly schedule, “so it meant we had twice the iteration half-life.”

Campuswire debuts just as the kickoff for the new school season gets underway. We are going to “continue with the student outreach and getting a wide cross-section of classes this fall,” he said. The startup now has a team of six based in New York City.

As a result of the larger cord-cutting trend, more consumers are watching TV streamed over the internet. And the size of this streaming TV audience is rapidly growing. According to a new report from Conviva, out this morning, streaming TV content consumption has more than doubled over the last 12 months, and is continuing to accelerate, with streaming TV viewing hours up 115 percent in Q2 2018 compared with the same time last year.

In addition, the World Cup had a remarkable impact on metrics like viewing hours, plays, and peak concurrent plays, the firm found. 7.9 million people tuned in for the World Cup online, which led to a 118 percent growth in peak concurrent plays over Q2 2017.

But the metrics aren’t just up year-over-year because of this special event. When Conviva pulled out the views attributed to the World Cup, it still found that peak concurrency was up by 45 percent year-over-year, to reach 5.3 million concurrent plays. This occurred during another large sporting event – the 7th game of the NBA Western Conference Finals.

The report also indicated that North America remains the largest and fastest-growing audience for streaming TV. In this market, plays were up 124 percent and viewing hours were up 139 percent year-over-year, as of Q2.

Asia, for comparison’s sake, saw a 63 percent increase in plays but more modest growth in viewing hours at 22 percent year-over-year. Also of note, while China drives much of the traffic, it had one of the lowest percentages in terms of long-form content viewing at 8 percent, versus 14 percent for short-form, and 16 percent for live event viewing.

Different types of content is being viewed on different devices, the report found. Streaming TV, in general, is shifting away from PCs (24% of plays) to mobile devices (49% of plays), especially for short-form content. But connected TVs (51% of viewing hours) are favored for long-form content. This supports findings from individual streaming TV providers as well – for example, Hulu recently said that 78 percent of its viewing takes place in the living room.

The new research additionally supports earlier reports that put Roku in the lead of other TV platforms. According to Conviva, Roku accounted for 22 percent of all viewing hours on connected TVs, and 8 percent of all plays. Fire TV is the fastest growing, with a 140 percent increase year-over-year.

Other platforms – including Sony’s PlayStation, Google’s Chromecast, and Amazon’s Fire TV – all gained as well, and combined saw more than two times video consumption, versus the year-ago period. Some of their growth is coming from the decline of native TV platforms, like Samsung’s smart TV, as consumers shifted to Roku, Chromecast, and Fire TV. 

The full report delves into the metrics in more detail, and includes stats on video quality, which is also increasing in North American and European markets.

Conviva’s customer base includes a large number of streaming TV, subscription video and other providers, including names like Hulu, Sky, Sling TV, HBO, AT&T, Playstation Vue, and many more.

On the face of it, Seismic is addressing a big problem with a familiar approach. The San Francisco-based startup develops wearable suits designed to aid movement for people with mobility issues. The company hopes to one day make its product available for all users, but is beginning by targeting elderly users.

What sets Seismic apart from fellow Bay Area robotics startups Ekso and SuitX, however, is the company’s more subtle approach to its wearable tech. While those systems rely on large, pricey technology, Seismic’s offerings are constructed mostly from textiles, designed to be worn, undetected, beneath a standard articles of clothing.

The startup’s technology might not be the sort of miracle technology that can help paraplegic users walk, but the kind of increased mobility it promises has the potential to transform millions of lives.

Founder and CEO Rich Mahoney will join us at Disrupt to showcase the latest version of Seismic’s technology. The executive will also discuss the company’s journey, as a spinoff from SRI, Stanford’s nonprofit research institute, into a for-profit startup.

While at SRI, Mahoney helped develop the early stages of a number of key Bay Area robotics companies, including Abundant Robotics, Verb Surgical, Motobot, Redwood Robotics, Grabit and Robot Miner. The executive also served as the founding president of Silicon Valley Robotics.

The full agenda is here. You can purchase tickets here.

It happened. Apple won the race to $1 trillion in market capitalization. Following this week’s earnings release, Apple shares (NASDAQ:AAPL) briefly traded at $207.05, which values the company sightly over $1 trillion based on the most recent share count of July 20.

While the smartphone market is more or less saturated, Apple managed to increase its margins and the average selling price thanks to the iPhone X.

iPhone sales grew by 1 percent, but revenue jumped by 20 percent. With $53.3 billion in revenue, the company managed to grow by 17 percent year-over-year.

iPad sales are more or less flat while Mac sales are down. For the past few years, Apple has been saying that services are going to become a key part of the company’s bottom line. All various services (Apple Music, iCloud, Apple Pay, etc.) now represent $9.6 billion in revenue.

But let’s be honest. Apple is killing it on the iPhone front, and it’s all that matters.

Big tech companies have been performing incredibly well for the past year. Alphabet (Google), Amazon and Microsoft now all have a credible shot at crossing the $1 trillion mark.

It’s a meaningless milestone, but an impressive one — $1,000,000,000,000.

Apple has been the biggest company in the world when it comes to market cap for years. It might not remain the case forever, so the company can celebrate this moment.

Now that tech companies have become so big, it raises a ton of questions. Do they cause antitrust issues? Is there enough regulation to make sure they don’t hold too much economical and political power?

Apple (and Tim Cook) are more powerful than many countries and political leaders. Let’s hope they use this power for good.

Apple shares are now slightly below today’s high:

The cost of childcare is one of the biggest financial burdens American families face. Even dependent care flexible spending accounts, pre-tax benefit accounts meant to reduce caregiving costs, can be an extra stressor because they involve filling out many forms. Kinside, a startup in Y Combinator’s current batch, wants to help by automating the claims process. It also serves as a childcare management tool, letting parents pay their care providers with a Venmo-like feature while making it simpler for companies to offer childcare benefits, like matching costs, that can help attract talented employees. Kinside is still in beta, but it’s already been adopted by several tech companies, including Le Tote.

Kinside’s three founders—CEO Shadiah Sigala, COO Rob Bircher and CTO Abe Han—were motivated to launch the startup after realizing that dependent care FSAs (which can also be used for other caregiving-related costs, like elder care) are vastly underutilized.

“Even though upwards of 70% of companies offer this FSA, we found in our conversations with numerous companies that maybe 10% of eligible parents are using this benefit,” Sigala says. “From an employee experience perspective, we are really taking on a very onerous, traditional FSA product and streamlining the payments process, not only for employers to offer this benefit very seamlessly, but also streamlining the process for parents to take advantage of this benefit.”

One reason eligible employees forgo their dependent care FSA benefits is the claims process, which can take weeks to process and involves collecting receipts and uploading them onto a website (snail mail and fax are other options). As parents, Kinside’s founders have experienced firsthand the headache of dealing with dependent care FSA forms at previous jobs.

“Some of the products we’ve seen already look a decade old, with multiple screens of input. They are really clumsy, so from a modern Web app and UX experience, Kinside brings it up to speed,” says Han.

Kinside also takes advantage of the trio’s past experience in the payments and benefits space. Before launching Kinside, Sigala co-founded HoneyBook, a CRM for entrepreneurs in creative fields. Han also worked at HoneyBook as lead software engineer, while Bircher was senior vice president of sales and marketing at healthcare benefits tech company Picwell.

The team’s goal is to not only encourage use of dependent care FSAs, but also relieve the mental load for harried parents. To sign up for Kinside, they enter their childcare provider’s information on its Web app and connect a bank account. Kinside then makes automated childcare payments with funds from their FSAs and bank accounts or sends payment reminders. It keeps receipts and at the end of the year provides parents with a tax form.

“This couldn’t be done five years ago because there wasn’t a modern payroll. There weren’t modern payments services that existed and we didn’t have APIs for payment and payroll services,” says Sigala. “A lot of employers offer dependent care FSAs already, but they are very receptive to our service because they are looking for products that will improve the experience.”

Kinside is targeting other tech companies first, since many are at the forefront of building family-friendly policies. Several, including Netflix, Facebook and Etsy, have made headlines for offering parental benefits that are considered very generous by American standards, like longer paid leave, flex time and childcare subsidies. This doesn’t just help parents. It also helps companies build diverse workforces by attracting more millennials and women (the high cost of childcare is a big reason why many new mothers leave the workforce, even if they don’t want to. They simply can’t afford to work).

“They know that you have to offer more than a trivial benefit like free lunch or a foosball table,” says Sigala. “Childcare is more expensive than healthcare, or as expensive as rent. Healthcare is eating up to 20% of a Bay Area family’s income.”

One of Kinside’s selling points is enabling small to mid-sized businesses to offer competitive benefits, too. “You see solutions that cater to larger employers, like on-site daycare centers, that are very inaccessible to smaller to mid-sized companies,” says Bircher. “We want to fill a void that we thought existed for SMBs and this was one way to do it.”

As more companies turn to better family benefits to boost recruitment and retention, it’s conceivable that other startups will also look at ways to make using Dependent Care FSAs easier. Sigala says one advantage Kinside has is the founding team’s prior experience, which means they know the right distribution channels. The startup is looking at ways to help parents get more use out of the money they put in their FSAs by partnering with eligible childcare-related services. It also wants to work with companies that pre-screen providers, so Kinside can potentially address all steps of the childcare process, from finding a trustworthy carer and paying them on time to preparing year-end tax forms.

“Parents are going to pay an arm and a leg for childcare already,” says Sigala. “If we can help them get tax-free dollars toward childcare, that’s what we want to do.”

A look back at the past decade of consumer technology use in the UK has shone a light on changing gadget habits, underlining how Brits have gone from being smartphone dabblers back in 2008 when a top-of-the-range smartphone cost ~£500 to true addicts in today’s £1k+ premium smartphone era.

The report also highlights what seems to be, at times, a conflicted relationship between Brits and the Internet.

While nine in ten people in the UK have home access to the Internet, here in 2018, some web users report feeling being online is a time-sink or a constraint on their freedom.

But even more said they feel lost or bored without it.

Over the past decade the Internet looks to have consolidated its grip on the spacetime that boredom occupied for the less connected generations that came before.

The overview comes via regulator Ofcom’s 2018 Communications Market report. The full report commenting on key market developments in the country’s communications sector is a meaty, stat and chart-filled read.

The regulator has also produced a 30-slide interactive version this year.

Commenting on the report findings in a statement, Ian Macrae, Ofcom’s director of market intelligence, said: “Over the last decade, people’s lives have been transformed by the rise of the smartphone, together with better access to the Internet and new services. Whether it’s working flexibly, keeping up with current affairs or shopping online, we can do more on the move than ever before.

“But while people appreciate their smartphone as their constant companion, some are finding themselves feeling overloaded when online, or frustrated when they’re not.”

We’ve pulled out some highlights from the report below…

• Less than a fifth (17%) of UK citizens owned a smartphone a decade ago; the figure now stands at 78% — and a full 95% of 16-24 year-olds. So, yeah, kids don’t get called digital natives for nothin’
• People in the UK check their smartphones, on average, every 12 minutes of the waking day. (‘Digital wellbeing’ tools clearly have their work cut out to kick against this grain… )
• Ofcom found that two in five adults (40%) first look at their phone within five minutes of waking up (rising to 65% of the under 35s). While around a third (37%) of adults check their phones five minutes before lights out (again rising to 60% of under-35s). Shame it didn’t also ask how well people are sleeping
• Contrary to a decade ago, most UK citizens say they need and expect a constant Internet connection wherever they go. Two thirds of adults (64%) say it’s an essential part of their life. One in five adults (19%) say they spend more than 40 hours a week online, up from 5% just over ten years ago
• Three quarters (74%) of people say being online keeps them close to friends and family. Two fifths (41%) say it enables them to work more flexibly

Smartphone screen addicts, much?

• Seventy-two per cent of adults say their smartphone is their most important device for accessing the Internet; 71% say they never turn off their phone; and 78% say they could not live without it
• Ofcom found the amount of time Brits spend making phone calls from mobiles has fallen for the first time — using a mobile for phone calls is only considered important by 75% of smartphone users vs 92% who consider web browsing on a smartphone to be important (and indeed the proportion of people accessing the Internet on their mobile has increased from 20% almost a decade ago to 72% in 2018)
• The average amount of time spent online on a smartphone is 2 hours 28 minutes per day. This rises to 3 hours 14 minutes among 18-24s

Social and emotional friction, plus the generation gap…

• On the irritation front, three quarters of people (76%) find it annoying when someone is listening to music, watching videos or playing games loudly on public transport; while an impressive 81% object to people using their phone during meal times
• TV is another matter though. The majority (53%) of adults say they are usually on their phone while watching TV with others. There’s a generation gap related to social acceptance of this though: With a majority (62%) of people over the age of 55 thinking it’s unacceptable — dropping to just two in ten (21%) among those aged 18-34
• Ofcom also found that significant numbers of people saying the online experience has negative effects. Fifteen per cent agree it makes them feel they are always at work, and more than half (54%) admit that connected devices interrupt face-to-face conversations with friends and family — which does offer a useful counterpoint to social media giant’s shiny marketing claims that their platforms ‘connect people’ (the truth is more they both connect & disconnect). While more than two in five (43%) also admit to spending too much time online
• Around a third of people say they feel either cut off (34%) or lost (29%) without the Internet, and if they can’t get online, 17% say they find it stressful. Half of all UK adults (50%) say their life would be boring if they could not access the Internet 
• On the flip side, a smaller proportion of UK citizens view a lack of Internet access in a positive light. One in ten says they feel more productive offline (interestingly this rises to 15% for 18-34 year-olds); while 10% say they find it liberating; and 16% feel less distracted

The impact of (multifaceted and increasingly powerful and capable) smartphones can also be seen on some other types of gadgets. Though TV screens continue to compel Brits (possibly because they feel it’s okay to keep using their smartphones while sitting in front of a bigger screen… )

• Ofcom says ownership of tablets (58% of UK households) and games consoles (44% of UK adults) has plateaued in the last three years
• Desktop PC ownership has declined majorly over the past decade — from a large majority (69%) of households with access in 2008 to less than a third (28%) in 2018
• As of 2017, smart TVs were in 42% of households — up from just 5% in 2012
• Smart speakers weren’t around in 2008 but they’ve now carved out a space in 13% of UK households
• One in five households (20%) report having some wearable tech (smart watches, fitness trackers). So smart speakers look to be fast catching up with fitness bands

BBC mightier than Amazon …

• BBC website visitor numbers overtook those of Amazon in the UK in 2018. Ofcom found the BBC had the third-highest number of users after Google and Facebook
• Ofcom also found that six in ten people have used next-day delivery for online purchases, but only three in ten have used same-day delivery in 2018. So most Brits are, seemingly, content to wait until tomorrow for ecommerce purchases — rather than demanding their stuff right now

What else are UK citizens getting up to online? More of a spread of stuff than ever, it would appear…

• Less general browsing/surfing than last year, though it’s still the most popular reported use for Internet activity (69% saying they’ve done this in the past week vs 80% who reported the same in 2017)
• Sending and receiving email is also still a big deal — but also on the slide (66% reporting doing this in the past week vs 76% in 2017)
• Social media use is another popular but slightly less so use-case than last year (50% in 2017 down to 45% in 2018). (Though Twitter bucks the trend with a percentage point usage bump (13% -> 14%) though it’s far less popular overall)
• Instant messaging frequency also dropped a bit (46% -> 41%)
• As did TV/video viewing online (40% -> 36%), including for watching short video clips (31% to 28%)
• Online shopping has also dropped a bit in frequency (48% -> 44%)
• But accessing news has remained constant (36%)
• Finding health information has seen marginal slight growth (22% -> 23%); ditto has finding/downloading information for work/college (32% -> 33%); using local council/government services (21% -> 23%); and playing games online/interactively (17% -> 18%)
• Streaming audio services have got a bit more popular (podcasts, we must presume), with 15% reporting using them in the past week in 2017 up to 19% in 2018. Listening to the radio online is also up (13% -> 15%)
• However uploading/adding content to the Internet has got a bit less popular, though (17% to 15%)

One more thing: Women in the UK are bigger Internet fans than men.

Perhaps contrary to some people’s expectations, women in the UK spend more time online on average than men across almost all age groups, with the sole exception being the over 55s (where the time difference is pretty marginal)…

If you’re still working on your submission to the first Virtual Hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7, then you’d best start praying to the caffeine gods and chug another Red Bull. The deadline you need to hit rolls in tonight, August 2 at midnight PST — no second chances on this one, folks. Give your coded creation a final round of tweaks and tests and then submit your hack right here.

Previous TechCrunch Hackathons lasted 24 hours, took place on-site, showcased incredible talent and generated some amazing winners, including:

• Quick Insurance — the easiest way to purchase an insurance product for all your valuable stuff (Disrupt Berlin 2017)
• Alexa Shop Assist — lets you ask Alexa where to find products in a store (Disrupt SF 2017)
• reVIVE — a VR solution that provides both a diagnostic and treatment mechanism for ADHD (Disrupt NY 2017)

In this, our first, Virtual Hackathon, literally thousands of talented developers, programmers, hackers and tech makers from around the world have been hard at work since June to show how they’d creatively produce and apply technology to solve various challenges. We cannot wait to see what comes from their efforts.

Here’s how the judging works. We’ve recruited a top-notch panel of experts to review all eligible submitted hacks and rate them on a scale of 1-5. The 100 top-scoring teams each receive up to five Innovator Passes to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018.

Out of that group, the top 30 teams will enter the semi-finals and get to demo their hack at Disrupt SF next month. The judges then select the best 10 teams, and they will present and demo their product on The Next Stage. One team will be crowned the first TC Disrupt Virtual Hackathon champion and take home the $10,000 grand prize.

In a classic, “but wait, there’s more” moment, our sponsors have created some incredible challenge hacks, and they’ve put plenty of cash and prizes on the table. We’re talking contests sponsored by Sony Pictures, United Airlines, BYTON, TomTom, Viond, HERE Mobility and Amazon. Check out the full listing.

The first Virtual Hackathon goes down at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7. And if you want a shot at winning anything, you have only a few more hours — tonight, August 2 at midnight PST — to submit your hack. It’s time to get ‘er done!

Namely, a 400-person, six-and-a-half-year-old company, has mostly had the kind of trajectory that other startups envy. Mostly.

The startup’s mobile-first platform — which sells payroll, talent management, and other HR services to mid-size businesses across the U.S. via subscription software — has for years been seen as among New York’s most promising businesses. Investors like True Ventures and Lerer Hippeau (not to mention a very long list of angel investors) poured into the company’s early rounds and sang its praises.

Last year, Forbes included the company on its list of 100 top cloud startups.

The abrupt firing of the company’s cofounder and CEO, Matt Straz, back in May, cast a bit of a cloud over the company. Straz, who’d built the company from the ground up, was let go following an investigation into actions “inconsistent with that which is expected of Namely leadership,” the company told employees at the time.

In a series of calls with investors yesterday, none would elaborate on Straz’s alleged behavior, preferring to reiterate the company’s earlier talking points. (We weren’t able yesterday to reach Straz, who has deleted his LinkedIn account and seemingly abandoned Facebook for now.)

Still, credit is due for moving Namely forward more quickly than at other HR startups that — coincidentally and strangely — have also parted ways with their founding CEOs over HR issues. (Think Zenefits and Betterworks.)

In fact, the board member who led the investigation into Straz, longtime Silicon Valley executive Elisa Steele, was just appointed as Namely’s permanent CEO. Steele seems to have hit the ground running, too, judging by her first task, which was to help the company raise more money. Indeed, today, Namely is announcing $60 million in new funding led by GGV Capital.

Tenaya Capital also joined the round, along with early investors, including True, Matrix Partners, and Sequoia Capital.

It was not a job that Steele sought out. Steele had joined the board of Namely last year, and after Straz’s departure, Steele — who has worked previously as the CEO of (then public) Jive Software; the head of marketing for Microsoft’s consumer apps and services brands; and as the CMO of Skype, among other things — planned to help find his replacement.

Things changed when she “went on the road with the team for our fundraising, and we got ready for our user conference [held recently],” she says. “I just fell in love with the company and with the team, and it felt like a great match.”

Unsurprisingly, investors sound excited about Namely’s odds of succeeding in the market its chasing, which is estimated to grow to around $30 billion globally by 2025.

They point partly to the success that companies like Shopify and GoDaddy and Dropbox have enjoyed by going after resource-constrained mid-size businesses that are increasingly relying on cloud-based software to get their work done. These businesses “haven’t seen a ton of innovation until now” when it comes to mid-market HR offerings, says Jeff Richards, a managing director at GGV Capital who led the firm’s new investment in Namely.

“Most organizations don’t have dozens of people in an HR function; they have a couple,” adds Namely board member Pat Grady of Sequoia Capital, which first invested in Namely in 2015. That means “the easier you can make their lives, the more they like your software.”

Further, though Namely has plenty of competition, the field has thinned a bit in recent years, owing to rivals’ missteps. Gusto, another HR benefits platform, just raised $140 million in fresh funding earlier this week, and publicly traded Workday increasingly caters to both large and mid-size businesses. At the same time, for example, Zenefits “had  a very meteoric rise, then it faded a bit, so we don’t see them as much as a competitor,” says Richards.

As for Steele, Richards and Grady are highly effusive about her leadership abilities.

Grady first met Steele through Jive Software, which Sequoia had backed, and says that though “her background is in marketing, she’s surprisingly operational and deep across a variety of functional areas.” Richards is such a fan that he introduced her last year to another GGV portfolio company, the Bluetooth products company Tile, where she now sits on the board. (Steele is also a director on the boards of publicly traded companies Splunk and Cornerstone OnDemand, and at Everwise, a Sequoia-backed startup.)

“She has the chance to be a superstar,” says Richards of Steele, who was also a VP at Sun Microsystems during the go-go dot com days of nearly 20 years ago. “She just has an incredible range of experience.”

Whether Steele will have the chance again to be a public company CEO remains to be seen. But one would guess that if Namely stays on track, it has a good shot at an IPO. Public market investors have shown time and again this year that they understand software-as-a-subscription businesses, and Namely’s numbers seem promising. Steele says the company currently serves 1,000 companies that collectively employ 200,000 people, and that it has now surpassed $50 million in annual recurring revenue. (The bar for most public companies these days is at least $100 million in ARR.)

With Namely’s newest round of funding — which pushes the total amount of capital it has raised to roughly $200 million — Steele is putting the pedal to the metal, too, she suggests. Among other things on Namely’s road map: much deeper analysis that helps companies better understand the composition of their workforces and their peers; more employees; and of course, more customers, including through new partnerships.

As for whether Namely is still feeling the impact of Straz’s departure, it’s all in the past, say Namely’s representatives. “I think in the last couple of months, there’s been a renewed sense of pride and enthusiasm that the company takes the highest possible moral road and that it lives by the values it espouses,” says Grady. “When put to the test, you do see what a company’s values really are.”