Month: October 2018

It was once unusual for venture capital funds to cross the billion-dollar threshold. Now, multiple billion-dollar fund announcements in the same week is nothing to gawk at.

Bessemer Venture Partners, an investment firm founded more than 100 years ago, is the latest to complete the fundraising circuit. The firm has brought in $1.85 billion for its tenth flagship VC fund, its fourth consecutive billion-dollar fund, according to PitchBook.

Earlier reports indicated the firm had set a $1.6 billion target for the vehicle. At the time, TechCrunch surmised that if the firm indeed raised $1.6 billion — the size of its last two funds — it would be bucking VCs’ new favorite trend of raising their largest funds to date in defense of SoftBank’s $93 billion Vision Fund. Well, this is certainly Bessemer’s largest fund to date, but the firm says their approach is unchanged.

“It’s no secret that many in the Valley are raising larger—and larger—funds, and others are raising multiple new funds across different stages or geographies,” the firm wrote in an announcement today. “As we planned BVP X, we naturally asked if we should do the same. But as we thought through how we can be the best partner to visionary entrepreneurs, we felt the right decision was to stay true to an approach that has seen 122 companies go public and helped many other entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to create revolutions of their own. At $1.85 billion, BVP X is slightly larger than our earlier funds but still allowing us to focus on what we’re passionate about making early-stage investments and sticking with companies and their leaders at every stage of their growth.”

With offices in Boston, New York, San Francisco, India and Israel, the Redwood City-based firm backs global startups at the seed, Series A and Series B stages. It’s known for its investments in Shopify, LinkedIn, Blue Apron and several others, with a current portfolio that includes Pinterest, Zoosk, Ola, Betterment, Rocket Lab, Toast, PagerDuty, ServiceTitan and Fiverr.

This is the fourth massive fundraise for a VC fund in the last week. Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital announced the close of $1 billion in new capital for its sixth flagship venture fund on Tuesday in what was similarly the firm’s largest raise to date. On Monday, Tiger Global garnered $3.75 billion for its latest fund — the second largest venture fund of 2018 — after actively marketing it for just six weeks. And only days before that, GGV Capital raised $1.9 billion across three funds for U.S. and China-based companies.

Sequoia’s mammoth $8 billion fund, which closed this summer, remains the largest fund of the year. Other new and notable buckets of capital include YF Capital’s $2.5 billion fund, Tunlan Investment’s Xiong’An $1.6 billion Global Blockchain Innovation Fund, General Catalyst’s $1.375 billion fund and Lightspeed Venture Partners $1.8 billion fundraise for two new funds.

It was once unusual for venture capital funds to cross the billion-dollar threshold. Now, multiple billion-dollar fund announcements in the same week is nothing to gawk at.

Bessemer Venture Partners, an investment firm founded more than 100 years ago, is the latest to complete the fundraising circuit. The firm has brought in $1.85 billion for its tenth flagship VC fund, its fourth consecutive billion-dollar fund, according to PitchBook.

Earlier reports indicated the firm had set a $1.6 billion target for the vehicle. At the time, TechCrunch surmised that if the firm indeed raised $1.6 billion — the size of its last two funds — it would be bucking VCs’ new favorite trend of raising their largest funds to date in defense of SoftBank’s $93 billion Vision Fund. Well, this is certainly Bessemer’s largest fund to date, but the firm says their approach is unchanged.

“It’s no secret that many in the Valley are raising larger—and larger—funds, and others are raising multiple new funds across different stages or geographies,” the firm wrote in an announcement today. “As we planned BVP X, we naturally asked if we should do the same. But as we thought through how we can be the best partner to visionary entrepreneurs, we felt the right decision was to stay true to an approach that has seen 122 companies go public and helped many other entrepreneurs lay strong foundations to create revolutions of their own. At $1.85 billion, BVP X is slightly larger than our earlier funds but still allowing us to focus on what we’re passionate about making early-stage investments and sticking with companies and their leaders at every stage of their growth.”

With offices in Boston, New York, San Francisco, India and Israel, the Redwood City-based firm backs global startups at the seed, Series A and Series B stages. It’s known for its investments in Shopify, LinkedIn, Blue Apron and several others, with a current portfolio that includes Pinterest, Zoosk, Ola, Betterment, Rocket Lab, Toast, PagerDuty, ServiceTitan and Fiverr.

This is the fourth massive fundraise for a VC fund in the last week. Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital announced the close of $1 billion in new capital for its sixth flagship venture fund on Tuesday in what was similarly the firm’s largest raise to date. On Monday, Tiger Global garnered $3.75 billion for its latest fund — the second largest venture fund of 2018 — after actively marketing it for just six weeks. And only days before that, GGV Capital raised $1.9 billion across three funds for U.S. and China-based companies.

Sequoia’s mammoth $8 billion fund, which closed this summer, remains the largest fund of the year. Other new and notable buckets of capital include YF Capital’s $2.5 billion fund, Tunlan Investment’s Xiong’An $1.6 billion Global Blockchain Innovation Fund, General Catalyst’s $1.375 billion fund and Lightspeed Venture Partners $1.8 billion fundraise for two new funds.

Dropbox has been building out Paper, its document-driven collaboration tool since it was first announced in 2015, slowly but surely layering on more functionality. Today, it added a timeline feature, pushing beyond collaboration into a light-weight project planning tool.

Dropbox has been hearing that customers really need a way to plan with Paper that was lacking. “That pain—the pain of coordinating all those moving pieces—is one we’re taking on today with our new timelines feature in Dropbox Paper,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new feature.

As you would expect with such a tool, it enables you to build a timeline with milestones, but being built into Paper, you can assign team members to each milestone and add notes with additional information including links to related documents.

You can also embed a To-do lists for the person assigned to a task right in the timeline to help them complete the given task, giving a single point of access for all the people assigned to a project

Gif: Dropbox

“Features like to-dos, @mentions, and due dates give team members easy ways to coordinate projects with each other. Timelines take these capabilities one step further, letting any team member create a clean visual representation of what’s happening when—and who’s responsible,” Dropbox wrote in the blog post announcement.

Dropbox has recognized it cannot live as simply a content storage tool. It needs to expand beyond that into collaboration and coordination around that content, and that’s what Dropbox Paper has been about. By adding timelines, the company is looking to expand that capability even further.

Alan Lepofsky, who covers the “future of work” for Constellation Research sees Paper as part of the changing face of collaboration tools. “I refer to the new breed of content creation tools as digital canvases. These apps simplify the user experience of integrating content from multiple sources. They are evolving the word-processor paradigm,” Lepofsky told TechCrunch.

It’s probably not going to replace a project manager’s full-blown planning tools any time soon, but it at least the potential to be a useful adjunct for the Paper arsenal to allow customers to continue to find ways to extract value from the content they store in Dropbox.

Dropbox has been building out Paper, its document-driven collaboration tool since it was first announced in 2015, slowly but surely layering on more functionality. Today, it added a timeline feature, pushing beyond collaboration into a light-weight project planning tool.

Dropbox has been hearing that customers really need a way to plan with Paper that was lacking. “That pain—the pain of coordinating all those moving pieces—is one we’re taking on today with our new timelines feature in Dropbox Paper,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new feature.

As you would expect with such a tool, it enables you to build a timeline with milestones, but being built into Paper, you can assign team members to each milestone and add notes with additional information including links to related documents.

You can also embed a To-do lists for the person assigned to a task right in the timeline to help them complete the given task, giving a single point of access for all the people assigned to a project

Gif: Dropbox

“Features like to-dos, @mentions, and due dates give team members easy ways to coordinate projects with each other. Timelines take these capabilities one step further, letting any team member create a clean visual representation of what’s happening when—and who’s responsible,” Dropbox wrote in the blog post announcement.

Dropbox has recognized it cannot live as simply a content storage tool. It needs to expand beyond that into collaboration and coordination around that content, and that’s what Dropbox Paper has been about. By adding timelines, the company is looking to expand that capability even further.

Alan Lepofsky, who covers the “future of work” for Constellation Research sees Paper as part of the changing face of collaboration tools. “I refer to the new breed of content creation tools as digital canvases. These apps simplify the user experience of integrating content from multiple sources. They are evolving the word-processor paradigm,” Lepofsky told TechCrunch.

It’s probably not going to replace a project manager’s full-blown planning tools any time soon, but it at least the potential to be a useful adjunct for the Paper arsenal to allow customers to continue to find ways to extract value from the content they store in Dropbox.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here:

1. Tesla earns its first profit in two years

Tesla reported a profit in the third quarter, reversing seven consecutive quarters of losses. This is only the third time in the company’s history that it has achieved this milestone.

The turnaround was driven by sales of the Model 3. The company said customers are trading up their relatively cheaper vehicles to buy a Model 3, even though there is not yet a leasing option and the starting price was $49,000.

2. Trump has two ‘secure’ iPhones, but the Chinese are still listening

A new report by The New York Times puts a spotlight on the president’s array of devices and how he uses them. However, both Trump and a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry have denied the story.

(BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

3. Red Dead Redemption 2 sets the bar high for the next generation of open world games

Tomorrow, Red Dead Redemption 2 goes live after months of breathless speculation. And according to Devin Coldewey and Jordan Crook, it’s as good as you’ve been hoping.

4. Facebook is building Lasso, a video music app to steal TikTok’s teens

Facebook is building a standalone product where users can record and share videos of themselves lip syncing or dancing to popular songs, according to information from current and former employees.

5. One-year-old Ribbon raises $225m to remove the biggest stress of home buying

The startup wants to replace the incredible stress of securing a mortgage during the home-buying process with a Ribbon Offer: If a buyer can’t secure a mortgage in time for close, Ribbon will pay for the house itself and give the buyer extra time to get financing.

6. Twitter beats Wall St Q3 estimates with $758M in revenue

Twitter reported a 29 percent increase in ad revenue to $650 million, and the company says total ad engagements increased 50 percent year over year. However, user growth didn’t quite match expectations.

7. Confirmed: ShopRunner acquires Spring, raises $40M

ShopRunner is announcing its first infusion of venture funding under CEO Sam Yagan, plus an acquisition of the shopping app Spring. Sources also say it’s readying a major overhaul of its mobile app.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here:

1. Tesla earns its first profit in two years

Tesla reported a profit in the third quarter, reversing seven consecutive quarters of losses. This is only the third time in the company’s history that it has achieved this milestone.

The turnaround was driven by sales of the Model 3. The company said customers are trading up their relatively cheaper vehicles to buy a Model 3, even though there is not yet a leasing option and the starting price was $49,000.

2. Trump has two ‘secure’ iPhones, but the Chinese are still listening

A new report by The New York Times puts a spotlight on the president’s array of devices and how he uses them. However, both Trump and a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry have denied the story.

(BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

3. Red Dead Redemption 2 sets the bar high for the next generation of open world games

Tomorrow, Red Dead Redemption 2 goes live after months of breathless speculation. And according to Devin Coldewey and Jordan Crook, it’s as good as you’ve been hoping.

4. Facebook is building Lasso, a video music app to steal TikTok’s teens

Facebook is building a standalone product where users can record and share videos of themselves lip syncing or dancing to popular songs, according to information from current and former employees.

5. One-year-old Ribbon raises $225m to remove the biggest stress of home buying

The startup wants to replace the incredible stress of securing a mortgage during the home-buying process with a Ribbon Offer: If a buyer can’t secure a mortgage in time for close, Ribbon will pay for the house itself and give the buyer extra time to get financing.

6. Twitter beats Wall St Q3 estimates with $758M in revenue

Twitter reported a 29 percent increase in ad revenue to $650 million, and the company says total ad engagements increased 50 percent year over year. However, user growth didn’t quite match expectations.

7. Confirmed: ShopRunner acquires Spring, raises $40M

ShopRunner is announcing its first infusion of venture funding under CEO Sam Yagan, plus an acquisition of the shopping app Spring. Sources also say it’s readying a major overhaul of its mobile app.

Short of an actual apocalypse (which should be coming any day now), this Nerf-branded gun from Hasbro is (thankfully) probably the closest you’re going to come to any real life Fortnite action in the near future.

The dart-firing gun was announced recently, alongside a Fortnite version of Monopoly (which launched earlier this month), and now we’ve got some pictures and a June 1 release date. The AR-L Blaster was inspired by the firearm in the wildly popular sandbox survival game and has the giant Fortnite branding across its body to provide it.

The gun has a 10-dart clip, flip-up sight and runs on 4 AA batteries. It’s priced at $50 USD — V-Bucks not accepted, apparently. It’s set to be the first of a series of Nerf blasters inspired by the game, according to Hasbro.

Short of an actual apocalypse (which should be coming any day now), this Nerf-branded gun from Hasbro is (thankfully) probably the closest you’re going to come to any real life Fortnite action in the near future.

The dart-firing gun was announced recently, alongside a Fortnite version of Monopoly (which launched earlier this month), and now we’ve got some pictures and a June 1 release date. The AR-L Blaster was inspired by the firearm in the wildly popular sandbox survival game and has the giant Fortnite branding across its body to provide it.

The gun has a 10-dart clip, flip-up sight and runs on 4 AA batteries. It’s priced at $50 USD — V-Bucks not accepted, apparently. It’s set to be the first of a series of Nerf blasters inspired by the game, according to Hasbro.

Teikametrics is a Boston-based startup that helps retailers tackle the challenges of advertising on Amazon. Today, the company is announcing that it has raised $10 million in Series A funding.

CEO Alasdair McLean-Foreman said third-party sellers represent 60 percent of the transactions on Amazon. But they don’t have any real data science capabilities, so they need help advertise their goods in a way that maximizes profitability.

“We are using big data to help sellers optimize for profitability,” McLean-Foreman said. He compared it to the work that Amazon has done “optimizing on the consumer side — all the advanced econometrics” to determine things like the price of Amazon Prime. “We’re on the other side. We’re helping sellers and brands.”

That’s a very different challenge from optimizing Facebook ads to get the most clicks. McLean-Foreman argued that it’s not even something Amazon can do properly, because, “They don’t have critical information on cost of goods sold, and they also don’t have the context of being on the supply chain side.”

(At the same time, he emphasized, “We’re aligned with Amazon, we’re pro-Amazon and we’ve built our company off the back of Amazon.”)

In contrast, Teikametrics — through its “retail optimization platform” Flywheel — allows sellers to incorporate things like transaction data, inventory data and pricing data. So when they look at the results of of their campaigns, they can see their gross profit margins and profitability after ad spend.

How appealing is this to sellers? Well Teikametrics says it’s being used by advertisers who represent 1 percent of all sales on Amazon, including brands like Razer, Power Practical and Zipline Ski. Eventually, the company plans to expand its technology beyond Amazon, to other marketplaces.

Teikametrics has been bootstrapped since its founding in 2013, at least until now. McLean-Foreman said he decided to raise outside funding because “the crown jewel is the sheer amount of data that we can model,” which means hiring “a tremendous amount of very, very high-powered machine learning folks.”

The Series A funding was led by Granite Point Capital, Jump Capital and FJ Lab.

A growing number of states has legalized retail marijuana sales, but ensuring that everything works as advertised is no easy task. Among the many things that regulators have to concern themselves with are: granting licenses to dispensaries, retail sales, delivery, distribution, ensuring marijuana has been tested for pesticides and other materials, and other parts of the cannabis supply system.

In California, the software system that’s being used statewide to record the inventory and movement of cannabis and cannabis products through the commercial cannabis supply chain is made by Metrc, a low-flying, five-year-old, Lakeland, Florida company. In fact, Metrc now services 11 states altogether, including Colorado, Oregon, Alaska, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, and Louisiana. It’s also used by regulators in Washington, D.C.

It’s the kind of traction that investors notice, and indeed, today Metrc is announcing its first outside round of funding, in the form of $50 million from Tiger Global Management and Casa Verde Ventures, the three-year-old, cannabis-focused venture firm that was famously cofounded by rapper Snoop Dogg but is largely managed by Goldman Sachs and Nomura Securities alum Karan Wadhera.

Wadhera tells us he’d been following Metrc for a “number of years as it became one of the de facto track-and-trace systems” for government entities that regulate the cannabis industry. Eventually, he introduced to the company Tiger, with which Case Verde “shares deal flow quite regularly,” says Wadhera, pointing to another co-investment the two firms have made together in Green Bits, a maker of point-of-sale software for dispensaries. (Worth noting: Green Bits launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2015.)

Certainly, that kind of working relationship helps, but the supply chain expertise of Metrc CEO Jeff Wells also presumably gave Tiger and Casa Verde confidence in their investment. Not so long ago, Metrc was part of a larger company called Franwell that was founded by Wells in 1993 and that quickly began developing products for the RFID market. More specifically, Wells tells us, Franwell began focusing on cold chain management and fresh foods, building up resources, research, and knowledge along the way . — including about regulated markets — that he believes gives an edge to its clients today, including those of Metrc.

As for how Metrc will use its fresh capital, Wells says the company plans to remain focused solely on regulators but to “look to expand our regulatory focus,” including, eventually, by potentially expanding into “other regulated markets and products that need the type of tools that Metrc has created.” The company, which currently employs roughly 100 people, also expects to work eventually with both domestic and international regulators.

Surely, as more state and sovereign governments legalize cannabis, compliance will play an even more critical role. Says Wadhera of the deal, “Compliance is the backbone of the cannabis industry. If a license holder isn’t compliant, their business will cease to exist.” That’s good for proponents of greater accessibility to cannabis. It’s good for consumers who can be better assured that the products they’re buying is safe. For Metrc and now Tiger and Casa Verde Capital, that’s also good for business.