Year: 2019

Slack, the provider of workplace communication and collaboration tools, has submitted paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public later this year, the company announced on Monday.

This is its first concrete step toward becoming a publicly-listed company, five years after it launched.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Slack has raised more than $1 billion in venture capital investment, including a $427 million funding round in August. The round valued the business at $7.1 billion, cementing its position as one of the most valuable privately-held businesses in the U.S.

The company counted 10 million daily active users around the world and 85,000 paying users as of January 2019.

Slack’s investors include SoftBank’s Vision Fund, Dragoneer Investment Group, General Atlantic, T. Rowe Price Associates, Wellington Management, Baillie Gifford, Social Capital and IVP, as well as early investors Accel and Andreessen Horowitz.

Slack is one of several tech unicorns on deck to go public this year. Uber and Lyft have both similarly filed confidentially to go public in what are expected to be traditional initial public offerings. Slack, however, is expected to pursue a direct listing, following in Spotify’s footsteps. Instead of issuing new shares, Slack will sell existing shares held by insiders, employees and investors directly to the market, a move that will allow it to bypass a roadshow and some of Wall Street’s exorbitant IPO fees.

Solar installations are becoming a no-brainer for anyone with a roof in much of the country. But getting an estimate on how much it would cost and how much juice it would generate can be complicated and time consuming. Aurora Solar has made an automated process for doing this, and attracted $20 million in funding as a result.

A big part of the uncertainty anyone has about getting solar installed is the upfront cost and return on investment. An on-site visit may cost hundreds, or thousands for a commercial property, or that cost may be rolled up into the overall charge. But why send someone out when all the data you need can be acquired in bulk from the air?

Aurora uses lidar data for this — but not the kind of lidar where you have to fly a drone with the instrument over the house. That would hardly be less expensive and time-consuming than a normal visit. Instead they use lidar collected by small aircraft making low-altitude passes over the city.

The resulting data (you can see it above) produces detailed 3D models of the terrain and all the buildings on it; the exact size and slope of a roof can be determined with high precision. It’s actually similar in a way to how archaeologists used it to map out an ancient Mayan metropolis.

There are some programs and services out there that do virtual site visits, but many just estimate your roof area and orientation by looking at satellite imagery. That’s good for a basic estimate, but Aurora uses multiple sources of data to create a detailed 3D map of your roof, and its proud of its results.

“From the get go, we have been very ambitious about the way we address the problem, probably since we faced same issues our clients face ourselves,” said co-founder Christopher Hopper in an email to TechCrunch. That would have been in 2012, when he and co-founder Samuel Adeyemo experienced significant friction with a solar install in East Africa. The installation itself was a snap, they found, but the planning and design of the system took months.

“Aurora pioneered the concept of ‘remote site visits,’ which enables solar installers to precisely calculate how many solar panels fit on a property, and how much energy they produce without traveling to the site,” Hopper said. “We have a large dataset of LIDAR data pre-loaded in the application that’s accessible to our users. We estimate that that covers about 2/3 of the US population.”

This and other data lets Aurora create a detailed CAD model of the building in just a few minutes, and generate a basic plan for solar cell placement as well that accounts for slope, exposure, and any shade-producing obstacles like chimneys or trees nearby. (Shade reports are usually done in person, and are necessary to receive certain rebates.)

From there users can go straight into the sales and financing process, even including line diagrams for the electrical system you’ll be building. And theoretically it could all take under an hour, which is probably how much time you’d spend on the phone trying to get a local solar installer to come out.

The A round was led by Energize Ventures, whose managing director Amy Francetic will be joining the board, with S28 and seed investor Pear also contributing.

Once nice thing about companies relying on data and automation: they scale well. So Aurora won’t need to buy a thousand new trucks to get its next few thousand customers — it needs to hire engineers, sales and support people, which is exactly what it plans to do.

“We expect to expand all of the functions in our organization,” said Hopper. “We are particularly excited about all of the things we can do on the product side and in customer success. And finally, this funding means that we are here to stay. For companies [i.e. Aurora’s clients] that rely on a software provider for their day-to-day operations this is important factor.”

Adeyemo notes in the press release announcing the funding that “the solar professional” is the “fastest growing occupation in the U.S.” Hopefully making things easier for the customer will keep it that way for a while.

Disclosure: Former TechCruncher Rahul Nihalani now works for Aurora. Rahul’s great, but this does not affect our coverage.

One of Microsoft’s oldest and biggest verticals for its Azure cloud business has been education, and today it announced an acquisition that it hopes will help it deepen its reach: it has acquired DataSense — a data management platform that can be used to collect, integrate and report information from across a range of online education applications and services — from an educational technology company called BrightBytes, to integrate the functionality into Azure.

DataSense is a master platform that’s used by schools and educational authorities both to ingest information as well as report it to state and other authorities as part of their reporting, used to manage data for millions of students in the US, BrightBytes says.

It looks like the deal actually closed in December, according to data from PitchBook, although it’s only being announced today.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but as a point of reference, BrightBytes was valued at $120 million when it last raised money, in 2015 — a $33 million round led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from Bessemer, Learn Capital and Rethink Education.

The startup had raised just over $50 million in total, with other investors including New Schools Venture Fund and Andy Pechacke. It looks like BrightBytes will continue to operate, focusing on its Clarity data analytics platform, which itself is used by 25,000 schools in the US.

“We are excited about the global acceleration this sale provides to our mission,” said BrightBytes CEO, Traci Burgess, in a statement. “Schools around the world will benefit greatly from capabilities across data integration, interoperability, and provisioning.”

The deal will include people at BrightBytes who had been working on the DataSense product, both to continue supporting existing customers as well as to develop the future product. It’s unclear how many people that includes but we are asking.

Microsoft will be integrating DataSense into its Azure platform to expand how Microsoft serves schools and educators on its platform while continuing to keep a link between it and Clarity.

“In the coming months, we’re excited to begin the process of integrating DataSense technology into our products for schools, providing a single, more secure, Microsoft-based service that will unlock the power of data analytics for schools,” said GM of Education Strategy and Platforms at Microsoft, Steve Liffick, in a statement. It will also continue to serve existing customers of the product.

BrightBytes and Microsoft have a common goal in sight. Both have identified that education has become a very big data business, but one with a huge amount of legacy infrastructure and fragmentation. As education authorities have started to update their systems to work with government and other organizations better — and also to try to better organize the data that they already have in their systems — companies like Microsoft and BrightBytes have stepped in to provide assistance.

On the part of Microsoft, the company is working at a number of levels here — providing hardware, addressing different stakeholders from teachers and students through to IT administrators, and through software, cloud services, training and more. This deal specifically is aimed at the IT admins who help the wheels turn although it will ultimately touch data affecting many others.

Productboard, the San Francisco and Prague-based startup that offers product management software, has raised $10 million in further funding, adding to its Series A in July last year. The round is led by Index Ventures, and sees Index General Partner Jan Hammer joining the board.

Also participating is previous backers Kleiner Perkins, Credo Ventures, Rockaway Capital, and Reflex Capital. It brings total funding for Productboard to $19.7 million, while I understand from sources that the company’s valuation increased three-fold since the A round and is “close to a 9-digit figure”.

Founded in 2014 by Hubert Palan and Daniel Hejl, Productboard has developed a “product management system” to help companies deliver better experiences for customers, faster. Specifically, the cloud software is designed to bridge the gap between customer feedback and feature requests and a company’s product roadmap, thus doing away with the use of desperate tools such as chat apps, email, spreadsheets and Powerpoint.

More broadly, the former Startup Battlefield company fits into and is helping to drive the trend that is seeing winning companies understand they need to become “product-first,” as a new generation of consumers set a much higher bar in terms of product experiences and future expectations.

“As competition in the digital space heats up, it takes only a couple of years for a great new product to dominate the market, [and] companies realize that their only way of survival is to deliver the right products to market faster than others,” Productboard co-founder and CEO Hubert Palan tells me. “That is why Product management has been increasingly critical and growing role. What was once a job based on simply gathering customer requirements to send to engineering teams has become a much more strategic role, gaining more influence in the C-suite”.

However, in spite of the growing importance of product management — from startups to much larger enterprises — Palan says there hasn’t before existed a dedicated system for product teams to ensure that they’re building the right products. While sales people have Salesforce and marketers have Marketo, he says product managers have traditionally had to use an assortment of Powerpoint, email, Post-It Notes, Slack, and “many other generic task management and engineering tools,” which aren’t really up to the job.

Productboard draws from the so-called “Product Excellence” framework, an approach to product management that emphasizes getting the right products to market faster through “deep user insight, a clear product strategy, and coherent roadmap”. The online software wants serve as the system of record — or “single source of truth” — for all customer insights, strategy, and roadmaps in order to help align everyone on what to build next.

Product managers can capture all of their feature ideas organized by user need or product area. Different feature ideas can be prioritised based on objectives, an auto-calculated “User Impact Score,” and other criteria.

Next product managers can consolidate all ideas, requests, and feedback from various channels, such as Intercom, Zendesk, email, Slack, surveys, CRM systems, NPS tools, etc. into a single repository for user insights. They can also import user research and submit notes from meetings with prospects and customers.

Finally, Palan says they’re able to rally everyone around their plans by creating interactive roadmaps. “They can share different versions with different audiences, and all roadmap versions automatically update as plans evolve,’ he explains. Productboard also integrates with engineering task management systems such as JIRA, PivotalTracker, GitHub, and Trello to support communication between product management and engineering teams.

“Our customers span a broad range of categories and industries including SaaS solutions, e-commerce platforms, medical device manufacturers, academic journals, news outlets, book publishers, on-demand services, and brick and mortar stores transitioning to digital storefronts,” adds Palan.

“Our main users are product management teams encompassing everyone from associate product managers to Chief Product Officers. Many of our users are also user researchers, designers, product marketers, project managers and similar roles, who may not have the title of Product Manager, but lead their company’s efforts to deliver the right products for their customers”.

To that end, Productboard claims 1,600 customers. They include UiPath, Envoy, MetroMile, Houzz, Macmillan, Unity, Twilio, SproutSocial, Avast, BambooHR, and many others.

On-demand food delivery startup DoorDash has partnered with mRelief, a startup focused on helping people access food stamps. As federal workers — especially low-wage workers like janitors, cooks and security guards — recover from the 35-day partial government shutdown, DoorDash and mRelief are teaming up to offer those eligible for food stamps in San Francisco DoorDash credit.

In San Francisco, about one in four people struggle with hunger, according to the SF-Marin Food Bank. Meanwhile, $13 billion in food stamps benefits are unclaimed every year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Because of the government shutdown, those low-wage workers are likely now eligible for food stamps, mRelief says.

“Our work at mRelief is about bringing the simplicity of technology typically used to provide on-demand services, to things that are critical needs,” mRelief co-founders Rose Afriyie (pictured above) and Genevieve Nielsen told TechCrunch via email.

Through startup mRelief, people with low incomes can easily figure out if they qualify for resources like food stamps, as well as other much-needed social services. Last January, mRelief launched an end-to-end process for people to enroll in the food stamp program in San Francisco. Once people complete the sign-up, qualified applicants can receive up to $35 in DoorDash credit as part of the collaboration.

“The value is that we are also trying to learn how this initiative might positively impact the process of applying for food assistance,” DoorDash Social Impact Manager Sueli Shaw said in a statement to TechCrunch.

mRelief first launched in 2014, as part of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator. Since then, the startup has helped people receive $65 million worth of food stamps across the nation.

“You” first premiered on Lifetime last fall, but it’s moving to Netflix for its second season, making the show a Netflix Original — and fair game for the Original Content podcast.

The series stars Penn Badgley of “Gossip Girl.” This time, plays Joe Goldberg, a charming, “nice guy” bookstore manager (the second episode is pointedly titled “The Last Nice Guy in New York”) who becomes obsessed an aspiring writing named Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail). As the story (based on a novel by Caroline Kepnes) unfolds, we see Joe go to increasingly disturbingly lengths in his pursuit of Beck’s affection.

For our review, we’re joined by Anna Escher and Sarah Perez to discuss why audiences find Joe so compelling (to say the least), what we made of the frequently obnoxious twentysomething New Yorkers on the show (not that we wanted to see them get murdered or anything …) and what we’re hoping will happen in season two.

Also, since Anna, Anthony and Jordan were all big “Gossip Girl” fans, we debate how Badgley’s “You” and “Gossip Girl” characters compare (spoiler: they’re weirdly similar) before Sarah joins the conversation mid-episode.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken just closed its biggest acquisition to date. The company is buying Crypto Facilities in a nine-figure deal.

Crypto Facilities is an exchange and index provider regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in the U.K. In particular, Crypto Facilities lets you trade futures on multiple cryptocurrency pairs.

Following this acquisition, some Kraken users can now access both spot and futures trading. The company also has an OTC service for large orders. Futures are limited to six pairs for now.

Kraken currently has 4 million users who traded the equivalent of $90 billion in 2018. In the past, the company had acquired smaller exchanges, such as Coinsetter, Cavirtex and CleverCoin, as well as Glidera and Cryptowatch. While Coinbase is quite popular in the U.S., Kraken has been popular with European customers. It has a large volume of orders in EUR.

Fortune also reports that Kraken is about to close a $100 million funding round. Instead of raising from traditional VC funds, the company has emailed its most loyal customers for this new funding round.

According to Fortune, this unusual path provides multiple advantages. For instance, the company doesn’t have to register the round with the SEC. Kraken has been working exclusively with accredited investors or foreign investors that are covered by an exemption.

I’d love to see the list of investors, but it’s clear that Kraken wants to stay secretive with this funding round.

As Airbnb adds more features to court business users, a smaller startup has raised some funding to take it on in the $18 billion business travel market. 2nd Address, an Airbnb-style platform for business travellers looking for home rentals that extend beyond 30 days — as an alternative to staying in hotels — is announcing funding of $10 million from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Foundation Capital, along with Amicus and Pierre Lamond.

The startup says it will be investing the money to improve its technology as well as to expand to more cities. Its current footprint covers the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and Washington DC — where it claims that a property on its platform typically comes in about 40 percent cheaper on a per-night basis compared to a business or extended stay hotel — and the plan is to extend that to 17 more markets in 2019.

“We’ve seen a big change in the way people travel for business. They want the same experience they have as consumers,” said 2nd Address CEO Chung-Man Tam. “There have been many platforms built for consumers, but not specifically for business travel.”

Scale will be the name of the game for the startup, which today works with just 650 hosts covering some 3,200 listings.

Customers that have already signed on as users include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Google, SAP, Deloitte, KLM and Stanford and Northwestern University. 

2nd Address has raised $42 million to date, with a portion of that dating back to when it was a rentals platform called HomeSuite.

HomeSuite focused on providing a quick way to find and secure short-term rentals for people moving to new cities and interested in trying out different neighborhoods before committing to a housing arrangement longer-term. The original pitch was that HomeSuite handled all the paperwork and other painful processes to make it easy both to list a place and to rent it.

When it failed to find enough traction with people who were relocating, the startup changed its name to 2nd Address in 2017 and shifted to business travellers, where it saw a gap in the market. (And that backend technology, in turn, got repurposed.)

Aimed at people who stay between 30 days and nine months, Tam — who took over as CEO after founder David Adams stepped away from the role — said a lot of business travellers are looking for something more when staying in a city for an extended period, with the option of a kitchen, more living space and other personalised home effects beyond what you get in a typical business hotel or extended stay suite.

At the same time, 2nd Address saw an opportunity to target hosts as well.

Regulation is making it tougher in some markets to work with short-term letting platforms like Airbnb, Tam noted, adding that 2nd Address, operating in “what’s legally defined as the rentals market” because of the length of stay, is able to understand how to handle this. “Underneath the transaction with are making sure the booking is complying with all the rental regulations.”

That’s on top of the work that needs to be done to tidy up and maintain a property when guests are staying for as little as one or two nights. “And of course you can have a large variety of guests from those who are well behaved to those who are not,” he added.

That “variability,” he said, “has come to a head” for some hosts who are looking for more predicable guests staying for longer than a night or two. “They would rather take a business traveller staying for a whole month any day,” he said.

But 2nd Address is not the only company that has identified the opportunity provide an Airbnb-style platform catering to business users and those who want to host them.

Chief among its competitors is Airbnb itself.

As it inches closer to an IPO, Airbnb has been working on diversifying and expanding its operations, and part of that has been to expand Airbnb for Work, which targets business users. In January, Airbnb made its latest move in that area by acquiring Gaest, a startup from Denmark that lets people book rooms, homes and other venues for meetings and offsites.

It has also tailored the wider Airbnb experience for Airbnb for Work in other ways, offering team-building experiences, a searchable database of homes and boutique hotels meeting criteria like “homes for family relocation,” “work-ready homes,” and “homes verified for comfort.” Within this, it guarantees a specific check-list of amenities in the accommodations that match many of the standards of typical business hotels and might be a cut above the a typical basic Airbnb property.

So far, the higher-margin Airbnb for Work has had an impact at the business: last August Airbnb said business bookings accounted for 15 percent of all its business.

But even putting Airbnb to one side, there are a number of other competitors also providing platforms for hosts to list apartments aimed at business users, as well as corporate travel people to rent them.

Sonder has raised more than $130 million to built out a network of its own apartments that provide experiences on par with hotels (but with a personalised apartment feel); Domio has also been targeting urban visitors (and also raising funding to do it). Meanwhile in Europe there are also several startups also vying to tackle the same market. They include MagicStay and AtHomeHotel out of France and Homelike from Germany, which has also been attracting the attention of VCs from the Valley.

But despite all of this, Tam and his investors believe that 2nd Address still has an advantage over the rest of the field.

On the topic of Airbnb, the claim is that providing properties to both consumer and business users, using the same back end, can be problematic.

“If you are looking to book a place in February, a whole property can be out of the running if another guest had already booked that property for just one night in that month,” Tam said. “It’s hard to combine long-term and short-term rentals at the same time.” He added that for this reason, “we have a lot of inventory where Airbnb does not.”

Investors additionally think that while 2nd Address is benefitting from the overall opportunity, it also has unique and better technology. “We saw an acute shortage of vendors for monthly stays overall, but specifically also for business people,” said Paul Holland, a general partner at Foundation. “2nd Address not only proved the concept but are in a perfect position to take the market. Yes, rising tides lift all boats, including Airbnb, but it’s a very large opportunity.” He added that some of 2nd Address’s (unnamed) competitors are even using its back end and listings to power their own efforts.

On the tech front, 2nd Address plans to add more tools for hosts to help with home management, and beyond that planning for how they tailer properties in the future. Specifically, it sees an opportunity in providing analytics and business intelligence around guest preferences in terms of locations, pricing, detailing the interiors and more.

It’s also planning to add in more integrations with the tools that corporates are using to book travel today. These include not just platforms like Concur for searching and booking places, but reporting and billing services to manage aspects beyond the actual stay.

When Samsung announced a collaboration with Supreme at an event back in December, it didn’t go over great. It wasn’t that people weren’t excited about the potential of rocking a Supreme-branded Galaxy Note or whatever, so much as which Supreme the company had struck a deal with.

You see, there’s Supreme, the U.S.-based streetwear company beloved by hypebeasts everywhere, and then there’s “Supreme.” Or, in this case, Supreme Italia. There are all sorts of intellectual property-related reasons the company is allowed to exist with near-identical signage, but the long and short of it is that the deal rubbed plenty of people the wrong way.

After initially balking at the pushback, Samsung this week announced that it’s killing the deal. According to a Weibo statement translated by Engadget Chinese, “Samsung Electronics had previously mentioned a collaboration with Supreme Italia at the Galaxy A8s China launch event on December 10th, Samsung Electronics has now decided to terminate this collaboration.”

So, yes, those dreams of sporting that familiar red and white logo on your Android handset will have to wait. Or you can always just take matters into your own hands. 

Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand Goop is coming to Netflix. According to a scoop from Variety, Goop will expand its original content offerings with a docuseries on Netflix, focused on issues related to physical and spiritual wellness, much like Goop itself. The brand also partnered with Delta Airlines for an exclusive podcast, and is planning its own in-house podcasts that will delve into areas like beauty, food and books, the report says.

The Netflix series, however, is the most ambitious of the new digital initiatives, as it will consist of 30-minute episodes hosted by Goop editors, chief content officer Elise Loehnen and Paltrow herself. The team will discuss topics like mental, physical and sexual health, with an emphasis on those stories that will benefit from having a TV-sized budget.

Last November, reports had leaked that Goop was in talks with Netflix for a show that Paltrow had been developing for more than a year. At the time, it was said the series would discuss wellness and homeopathic traditions in different cultures.

Goop is best known these days for its questionable, controversial products.

Word of the Netflix show followed the news that Goop had to settle a $125,000 lawsuit over false advertisements for a $66 vaginal jade egg, which the company claimed would balance hormones, prevent uterine prolapse and more. The egg has been one of many overpriced and ineffective, or even harmful, products that Goop has sold, according to medical experts.

Despite the controversies — and dangers — around some of the products Goop promotes, the company has continued to grow thanks to Paltrow’s star power and a growing interest in alternative health products. It pulled in another $50 million in funding this past March, bringing its total outside investment to $82 million and its valuation to $250 million. Investors include NEA, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Felix Capital and others.

In addition, Goop’s live events — its wellness summits — sell out. Its newsletter also claimed 8 million subscribers as of last year. For Netflix, all this means Goop represents a sizable audience ready to be tapped, while Goop gets to market itself to a wider audience through the streaming platform.

In addition to the Netflix show, the Delta partnership will bring eight episodes of the Goop podcast to 600 planes, expanding its reach to 18 million-plus listeners, Variety says. The exclusive deal will include episodes hosted by Paltrow and Loehnen, including one that includes an interview with Oprah.

Goop’s standalone podcasts will also feature a food series by an award-winning chef, Goop book club and beauty podcast from in-house expert Jean Godfrey-June.