Month: September 2020

The CEO of Pan-African fintech unicorn, Mitchell Elegbe, is set to speak at TechCrunch Disrupt 2020 on September 16. He founded the company in Lagos in 2002 to connect Nigeria’s — then — largely disconnected banking system.

Over the next decade plus, Interswitch accelerated the adoption of digital payments across Africa and now stands as one of the continent’s rare fintech unicorns. The company is poised to list on a global exchange, which would also create Africa’s next big tech IPO.

At Disrupt 2020, TechCrunch will seek Elegbe’s perspective on the continent’s fintech scene, Interswitch’s venture plans, and the economic impact of Covid-19 on African startups. This year’s event is 100% virtual, making it possible for anyone with an internet connection to sign in and learn more about Elegbe’s company and digital innovation in Africa.

If you’re a VC or founder in London, Bangalore or San Francisco, you’ll likely interact with some part of Africa’s tech landscape for the first time — or more — in the near future. When measured by monetary values, the continent’s tech ecosystem is small by Shenzhen or Silicon Valley standards.

But when you look at year-over-year expansion in venture capital, startup formation and tech hubs, it’s one of the fastest-growing tech markets in the world.

Bringing the continent’s large unbanked population and underbanked consumers and SMEs online has factored prominently. Roughly 66% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s 1 billion people don’t have a bank account, according to World Bank data.

As such, fintech has become Africa’s highest funded tech sector, receiving the bulk of an estimated $2 billion in VC that went to startups in 2019.

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Interswitch became a pioneer of building the infrastructure to digitize finance on the continent. The company pre-dates the rise of mobile money in Kenya through Safaricom’s M-Pesa product, which is one of Africa’s most recognized fintech use-cases. 

Interswitch’s path from startup to unicorn traces back to the vision of CEO Mitchell Elegbe, who was a Nigerian electrical engineering graduate before founding the firm in 2002. The company has since produced a run of product innovation and expansion, starting in Nigeria. Interswitch created the first electronic switch whereby Nigerian financial institutions could communicate and operate ATMs and point of sales operations. The company now provides much of the rails for Nigeria’s online banking system.

Interswitch has since moved into high-volume personal and business finance, with its Verve payment cards and Quickteller payment app. The fintech firm (now well beyond startup phase) has also shaped a Pan-African and global reach — selling its products in 23 African countries with a physical presence in Uganda, Gambia and Kenya . In August 2019, Interswitch launched a partnership that allows its Verve cardholders to make payments on Discover’s global network.

Image Credits: Interswitch

Interswitch also launched a venture arm in 2015 called its global ePayment Growth Fund. Another milestone came in November 2019 when Interswitch achieved a $1 billion unicorn valuation after Visa took a reported $200 million minority stake in the company. Other Interswitch backers include IFC and Helios Investment Partners.

The company’s Nigerian origins and operations have become more significant as Nigeria is now Africa’s most populous nation and largest economy. The West African country has become the continent’s unofficial tech hub and fintech capital. Nigerian startups now raise the majority of Africa’s annual VC haul, according to a study by Partech.

Heading into 2020, the momentum was there and the pieces were falling in place for Interswitch to mark that next big achievement — an IPO. Where that listing stands for the firm, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, is one of many topics TechCrunch is excited to discuss with CEO Mitchell Elegbe at Disrupt 2020.

The event runs from September 14 through September 18 and (as mentioned) is 100% virtual this year, making it possible for anyone from London to Lagos to sign in. Get your front row seat to see Mitchell Elegbe live with a Disrupt Digital Pro Pass or a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package. We’re excited to see you there.

Google today announced the launch of Android 11, the latest version of its mobile operating system. After a slightly longer public preview, users who own a select number of Pixel devices (starting with the Pixel 2), OnePlus, Xiaomi, OPPO or realme phones will now see the update roll out to their phones in the coming days, with others launching their updates over the next few months.

Android 11 isn’t a radical departure from what you’ve come to expect in recent years, but there are a number of interesting new user-facing updates here that mostly center around messaging, privacy and giving you better control over all of your smart devices.

At the core of the improved messaging and communication features are improved notifications for conversations from your messaging apps. These now live in a dedicated space at the top of the notification shade and feature a more “people-forward design,” as the company describes it. The new Bubbles API now also makes chat bubbles a core part of the Android messaging experience.

One addition feature Google lists under the communications section is screen recording, which is now finally a built-in tool that lets you record what’s happening on your screen, using either the sound from your mic, the device or both. Until now, you needed third-party apps like AZ Screen Recorder for this (and you will still need these for more advanced features like live streaming, for example).

Image Credits: Google

As for controlling your smart devices, Google notes how you now simply long-press your power button to get access to a new menu that gives you access to device controls (similar to what you’d find in the Google Home app, but with a different design), as well as payment methods and your boarding passes, for example. And yes, you can still restart and power off your device from there, too.

Media controls are getting a redesign, too, with the controls moving out of the notifications and to the quick settings bar instead. From there, it is now also easier to choose where you want to play your audio and video.

Over the last few years, the Android team added a number of privacy features to the operating system, but this clearly remains a moving target. With this update, the focus is on app permissions. It’s now easier to provide an app with one-time permissions to access your microphone, camera and location, helping you to ensure that an app won’t have perpetual access to your location, for example. After you haven’t used an app for a while, Android will also reset your permissions and you’ll have to re-grant access to the app the next time you launch it.

On the enterprise side, Google is also launching some new features to help employees who use some personal apps on their work phone keep their personal profile data and activity out of the hands of their company’s IT departments.

If you own a compatible phone, you should see an upgrade notification for Android 11 soon.

It’s never easy, deciding which of the 20 companies that make it into the Disrupt Battlefield Competition will be anointed its winner. There’s just so much at stake each year and this year at Disrupt 2020 this September 14-18 the stakes are even higher.

For that one startup that makes it all the way through the gauntlet, winning means $100,000, along with some serious bragging rights, which is non-trivial. But it can also be life-changing, given the interest the winner receives from customers, from investors, and from the corporate development teams of the world’s biggest companies. (While some past winners have gone public, like Dropbox, others have quickly sold, like Mint and like Vurb.)

The winner each year also benefits from the kind of media exposure that’s virtually impossible for a young startup to enjoy elsewhere.

It’s because TechCrunch takes such pride in getting our winners right that the group of judges who make the ultimate call is so important, and we feel confident that we have the exact right team this year. You’ll have to stay tuned to watch them at work, but here’s what to know in advance about the six individuals who — in less than two weeks —  will forever impact forever the future of one young founding team:

Sonali De Rycker joined Accel in 2008 and has helped lead its London office ever since. There, she focuses on consumer, software and fintech startups. and some of her most notable deals include Avito (acquired by Naspers); Spotify, which went public last year;  and Letgo (acquired by Naspers). Before joining Accel, De Rycker — who grew up in Mumbai and graduated from Bryn Mawr College and Harvard Business School — was an investor with Atlas Venture (now Accomplice). She also previously served on the board of Match.com.

Caryn Marooney is a general partner at Coatue Management, and, as such, sits on the boards of Zendesk and Elastic, and holds an advisory role at Airtable. While newer to the world of investing — she joined Coatue late last year — Marooney knows startups as well as anyone in Silicon Valley, having previously cofounded the powerhouse public relations agency OutCast Agency, whose early customers included Amazon, Salesforce, Netflix, VMWare. Indeed, underscoring her ability to identify the most promising startups, she left her own company in 2011 for a client that seemed particularly promising to her — Facebook — where she spent the following eight years as its VP of communications and as a trusted advisor to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

For the last two-and-a-half years, Ilya Fushman has been a general partner at Kleiner Perkins, which he joined after spending several years with Index Ventures and, before that, spending four years at Dropbox, where he was one of the company’s first 75 employees. Fushman — who was born in Russia and immigrated with his family to Israel, then Germany, then finally the U.S. — holds a PhD in Applied Physics and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S. in Physics from Caltech. Among the deals he has been involved with over the years are Slack, Intercom, and Optimizely,

Troy Carter is the founder and CEO of Atom Factory, a 10-year-old entertainment management company that famously worked early on with Grammy-Award winner Lady Gaga, among other celebrities. Carter began his career in Philadelphia working for Will Smith and James Lassiter’s Overbrook Entertainment. He more recently incorporated A \ IDEA, a product development and branding agency, as well as AF Square, an angel fund and technology consultancy. Some of his most recent bets include Good Money, an Austin, Texas-based digital banking platform, and Truebill, the New York-based app that enables users to optimize spending and manage subscriptions.

Michael Siebel is a partner at Y Combinator and the CEO of its startup accelerator. He joined YC full time in 2014 after first cofounding two YC-backed startups with serial entrepreneur Justin Kan: Justin.tv, the life-streaming service that birthed Twitch (which Amazon later acquired for $970 million in cash) and Socialcam, which was acquired by Autodesk for $60 million just 18 months after it was founded. Siebel is also credited with introducing Airbnb to YC soon after it was founded. Back in June, Siebel was appointed to the board of Reddit after the company’s cofounder, Alexis Ohanian, said he was giving up his role as a director and urged the company to fill his seat with a Black candidate.

Matthew Panzarino has been the editor-in-chief of TechCrunch since 2015 and a top editor with the organization since 2013. Before joining TC, he was News Editor and Managing Editor at The Next Web. He also previously founded a professional photography business and a news blog covering the Apple ecosystem. Panzarino — who has made a name for himself in the tech world through his coverage of Apple and Twitter, as well as his understanding of a broad range of fields, including robotics, computer vision, AI, fashion, VR, and AR — has served as a finals judge for each of the last five years.

We are so pleased — and thankful — that De Rycker, Marooney, Carter, Fushman, and Siebel can join us for this year’s Disrupt, which kicks off this coming Monday, September 14, and runs though Friday, Septebmer 18.

If you want to catch some of what are sure to be the fastest-rising stars in the vast startup ecosystem, you won’t want to miss your chance to nab a front row seat to the Startup Battlefield competition and much more with a Disrupt Digital Pro Pass or a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package. Or you can just sign up to watch the Startup Battlefield competition and our Breakout Sessions with the Disrupt Digital Pass for just $45 for a limited time.

PopSQL, a startup that builds a collaborative SQL editor for teams, today announced that it has raised a $3.4 million seed round led by Google’s AI-focused Gradient Ventures fund. Other participants include Y Combinator and FundersClub, as well as angel investors Max Mullen, the co-founder of Instacart; Calvin French-Owen, the CTO of Segment; and Guillermo Rauch, the CEO of Vercel.

Like most startups at this stage, the company plans to use the new capital to execute on its product roadmap.

Image Credits: PopSQL

“I started PopSQL because I was frustrated with the existing tools on the market. I wanted a SQL editor that was beautiful, easy to use, and collaborative. Just as new collaboration tools like Slack changed the way teams communicate, our vision is that PopSQL will change the way teams analyze and share data,” said Rahil Sondhi, CEO and founder of PopSQL. “The new capital from Gradient allows us to scale the company and pursue our vision of creating the best tools for teams to analyze data together.”

With PopSQL, teams can write a database query once and then easily share it within their company (and build a library of shared queries in the process). That’s a massive timesaver for many companies, where queries like this are often still shared by email or as code snippets in Slack, which PopSQL also integrates with. With this tool, developers and data analysts can also easily create different versions of a query.

Image Credits: PopSQL

PopSQL currently supports a wide range of databases, ranging from Snowflake, Google Cloud’s BigQuery, AWS Redshift, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB and Cassandra.

Image Credits: PopSQL

In addition to the collaborative features, though, PopSQL also offers a number of other interesting features, including the ability to schedule recurring queries using what is essentially a visual cron editor.

The tool also features some basic charting functions and while these are mostly meant to easily allow users to visualize their queries, you can also use this feature to build basic dashboards, for example. Sondhi noted that he doesn’t necessarily think of PopSQL as a business intelligence tool, but the core functionality is there if you want it.

Image Credits: PopSQL

Ride hailing giant Uber is committing to become a fully zero-emission platform by 2040 and setting aside $800 million to help get its drivers using electric vehicles by 2025.

The company said that it would invest further in its micro-mobility options as well with the goal of having 100 percent of its rides take place on electric vehicles in the US, Canada, and European cities in which the company operates. Uber also said it would commit to reaching net-zero emissions from its own corporate operations by 2030.

If the company can hit its timeline, Uber would achieve necessary milestones in its operations a decade ahead of the Paris Climate Agreement targets set for 2050.

The keys to the company’s efforts are four new and expanding initiatives, according to a statement.

The first is the launch of Uber Green in 15 US and Canadian cities. For customers willing to spend an extra dollar, they can request an EV or hybrid electric vehicle to pick them up. By the end of the year, Uber Green will be available in over 65 cities around the world. Riders who choose the green option will also receive three times the Uber Rewards points they would have received for a typical UberX ride, the company said.

Uber’s second step toward making the world a greener place is to commit $800 million to transition its fleet to electric vehicles. Part of that transition is being subsidized by the $1 surcharge for riders who choose to go green and from fees that the company collects under its London and French Clean Air Plans. Those are 15 cent (or pence) surcharges that Uber has been collecting since January of last year to pay for the electrification of its drivers’ cars in European cities.

Dara Kowsrowshahi, chief executive officer of Uber Technologies Inc., speaks during an event in New Delhi, India, on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018. During his Japan trip, Khosrowshahi has made it clear the ride-hailing company isnt scaling back its ambitions in certain Asian markets, despite speculation of a retreat. Photographer: Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg via Getty Images

To incentivize drivers to go green, Uber’s doling out an extra 50 cents per trip in the US and Canada for every “Uber Green” trip completed to be paid out by riders. Drivers using EVs will also get another dollar from Uber itself, amounting to $1.50 more per trip for each EV ride completed.

Other enticements include partnerships with GM in the US and Canada and Renault-Nissan in Europe to offer discounts on electric vehicles to Uber drivers. Working with Avis, Uber is planning to offer more electric vehicles for rental to US drivers. Meanwhile, the company said it would also expand electric vehicle charging by working to develop new charging stations in conjunction with companies like BP, EVgo, Enel X, Izivia by EDF, and Power Dot.

Uber’s also working to revive the vision of robotic battery swapping to enable customers to forget about their concerns when it comes to charging a new vehicle. It’s working with the San Francisco-based startup, Ample, as the young company develops its battery-swapping tech — and Lithium Urban Technologies, an electric fleet operator out of India.

Building on its existing micro-mobility network, the company is going to integrate bikes and scooters from Lime even closer into its networks and expanding its shared ride programs as soon as its safe to do it. The company is also intent on expanding its Journey Planning feature to enable users to see pricing options, schedules, and directions to and from transit stations. Uber also now offers in-app ticketing in more than ten cities, so people can buy public transit passes in the app itself. As a coup de grace, Uber’s also unveiling a new feature that allows users to plan their trips in Chicago and Sydney using cars and public transit to get where they need to go.

Finally, the company has released its first Climate Assessment and Performance Report analyzing emissions from the company’s operations in the United States and Canada from 2017 through 2019. Unsurprisingly, Uber found that it was more efficient than single-occupant driving, but the company did reveal that its carbon intensity is higher than that of average-occupancy personal cars. Meaning when there’re two people using a personal car, their footprint is lower than that of an Uber driver looking for passengers.

Although arguably, Uber shouldn’t be having its customers foot so much of the bill for its electric transition, these are all positive steps from a company that still has a long road ahead of it if it’s looking to reduce its carbon footprint.

The rumors of a new Apple Watch and iPad has thus far proven untrue. One thing that did pan out, however, is an invite for the company’s next big (virtual) event. Apple just announced that its annual Fall event will kick off September 15 at 10am PT.

This will most likely herald the arrival of the iPhone 12, which will finally find the company embracing 5G technology. This was, of course, going to be the year that 5G helped stem slowing smartphone sales — but like practically every other aspect of our lives, COVID put a major dent in those plans.

The smartphone market seen further cratering, due to the virus. Though the iPhone hasn’t seen nearly as big a hit as some of its competition, according to the latest analyst figures. The pandemic has also severely hampered the supply chain for many industries. On an earnings call in July, the company acknowledged that the 12 will be available “a few weeks later.” It was a fairly unprecedented move for the company, but these are fairly unprecedented times.

The event will also likely cover news around the next Apple Watch. The handset continues to be a big seller for the company — not to mention a category leading product. Most of the rumors continue the wearable’s focus on health monitoring, including the addition of a pulse oximeter and blood oxygen levels. Also key is increased battery life — a necessary addition given the latest version of watchOS’s addition of sleep tracking.

Apple set a standard for live events back at WWDC, and will likely look to clear that bar again after a couple of months’ prep.

Despite the public markets posting a few days of losses, the IPO wave continues to crest as a number of well-known technology companies line up to float their equity on American exchanges. Most recently we saw e-commerce giant Wish file (albeit privately) and news that dating service Bumble could look to go public next year.

Those bits of news came on the heels of Airbnb filing, again privately, and the public release of IPO filings from Unity, Asana, Snowflake and, key for our work today, Sumo Logic and JFrog.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

There are too many venture capital firms associated with the above companies to name here, but the mid-to-late-2020 IPO cohort is a fulcrum upon which a number of venture funds rest, their return profile waiting to see which way the scales tip.

Which made new IPO filings from Sumo Logic and JFrog this morning all the more exciting. The documents provide a bit of homework for us to handle, namely calculating the company’s valuation ranges. But when we do have those figures in place, we’ll be able to see what sort of revenue multiples each company may be able to earn during their public offerings and what sort of delta the former startups can build against their final, private valuations.

If you are just catching up to these IPOs, we have notes on Sumo Logic and JFrog’s earlier SEC filings ready for you. Let’s go!

JFrog and Sumo Logic set IPO price ranges

We’ll proceed in alphabetical order, kicking off with JFrog .

You can read JFrog’s new IPO filing here, which has all the notes you could want on its new price and past performance. Today, however, in honor of saving time, I’ll walk you through the key numbers quickly:

Typically, institutional investors favor managers who’ve spun out of an established firm over those who’ve broken into venture from outside. Spin-outs are seen as a lower-risk, safer bet.

On the surface, that looks like a tried-and-true tack garnering much attention, appeal and capital. However, there’s an alternative path that deserves a spotlight: Spin-ins by emerging managers who have broken into VC by raising their own funds. The experiences of emerging managers, and even their personality traits, position them to be ready to scale within an established firm.

I’ve put together a few reasons I hold this view, based largely on my own experience. In 2015, I broke into VC by embarking on the fundraising process for my own fund. As a former aerospace person, I hate the term “building the airplane as you go,” because it’s just ridiculous, but I find it warmly applicable here. At the start, although I’d spent a decade launching satellites into space, I needed a serious crash course in venture capital. I vividly remember bringing on a partner and seeing the horrified look on their face when we shared our first “call for capital,” which we’d sent as email text. We were learning on the go.

Five years later, we’ve fully deployed MiLA Capital’s first fund, built an ecosystem for founders building tech you can touch, and invested in 22 companies. I can look back with reflection and gratitude on what I’ve learned.

Here are the top seven reasons emerging managers who built their own firms make great spin-in candidates:

1. They’ve developed a personal brand and reputation that’s inherently theirs. They didn’t have to conform to a firm’s culture or pitch; they developed their own. Their thought leadership, their tweets, their way of working with founders — it’s proprietary. Authenticity enables them to both reach founders and win deals.
2. They practice outbound recruitment as a way of life. A press release or call for submissions likely didn’t yield them torrential deal flow overnight, and so they’ve had to establish inroads with organizations, universities and other investors as a way to evolve their access to opportunities.
3. They’ve hustled to get their portfolio to the next stage, because, survival. In order to jump over the valley of death that is the distance from fund one to fund two, the emerging manager had to show wins from their portfolio. This means that they were likely first in line to help a founder get over their hurdles and challenges, and that they know what it takes to act as a real partner to a startup.
4. They’re used to spending time worrying about both the big and little things, and they’ll place a high value on your ability to reduce that cognitive load. Did we pay our taxes? Our internet bill? How can we scrape together the capital to hire an intern? Let me update our web page. Launching a firm brings incredible highs along with the pettiest of tasks. But it means that, much like founders, emerging managers are used to wearing dozens of hats and performing insane tasks, like unclogging the facility toilet and making a Costco run for air freshener.
5. They built character through the fund development process. The emerging fund manager had to hit the road with an encyclopedia under their arm. They’ve practiced, learned and unlearned answers to “why now” and “why you” in their sleep. In 2019, according to First Republic Bank’s annual count, the number of micro VCs in the United States was approaching 1,000, up about 100 every year since 2015. Yet, the managers were able to differentiate themselves enough to win the opportunity to show proof of concept. This experience adds storytelling and grit to the toolbox.
6. They likely sacrificed a lot for a career in venture. Building a fund takes time and doesn’t provide immediate pay in exchange for the work. Someone who accepts that reality and perseveres is embodying a long-term outlook (which is good for a VC) and commitment to this industry. There are a lot of sacrifices to make, often modulating an abundance mindset against the impact of the reality of their own life, and that says something about the manager’s character.
7. Micro VCs attract a different, diverse pool of leaders. Emerging fund managers are driven by a desire to fill funding gaps. These are often related to gender and ethnicity. They are either outsiders inspired to deliver different outcomes, or insiders who become frustrated at their inability to execute where they see opportunity. This matters because founders have increasing choice and recognition of their power to counterselect investors, and this has become a critical crux, particularly in early-stage investing.

Consuelo Valverde (SV LatAm Capital), Christine Kenna (IGNIA), Jodi Sherman Jahic (Aligned Partners), Noramay Cadena (MiLA Capital), Lisa Feria (Stray Dog Capital), Miriam Rivera (Ulu Ventures), Ariel Jaduszliwer (Brainstorm Ventures). Image Credits: Noramay Cadena

I want to expand on this last idea, because diversity and access are increasingly the disruptors in venture. Today, 80% of investment partners at venture capital firms are white, compared with only 3% Latinx and 3% Black (NVCA). Latinx and Black-owned firms manage 1% of aggregate AUM in venture capital (Knight Foundation), even though, according to the NAIC, these types of diverse-owned firms can generate superior returns. Specifically, they achieve 15.2% median net IRR versus 3.7% for all PE firms in NAIC’s portfolio.

From experience, I’ve seen that diverse fund managers tend to be concentrated in micro VCs, with a few notable exceptions, including Miriam Rivera of Ulu Ventures . These micro VCs have been heads-down focused on building sustainable inroads and foundations, and on delivering on their visions to invest differently and with a gender and diversity lens.

In a VC ecosystem that has now looked up long enough to embrace the Black Lives Matter affirmation and the diversity conversations that have followed, firms are thinking creatively about how they access investment opportunities by underrepresented talent. Sidecar funds are being launched, pitch competitions are being promoted, VC job postings are being shared more widely, intros have been bypassed and processes are being streamlined and made more transparent.

That’s a great start. For sustainable change, firms interested in how they invest post-2020 should approach the journey top down and take a long hard look at spin-ins, as former emerging managers can catalyze their evolution toward a more representative, equitable and lasting venture capital firm.

The 2020 class of Techstars’ Starburst Space Accelerator are graduating with an official Demo Day on Wednesday at 10 AM PT (1 PM ET), and you can watch all the teams present their startups live via the stream above. This year’s class includes 10 companies building innovative new solutions to challenges either directly or indirectly related to commercial space.

Techstars Starburst is a program with a lot of heavyweight backing from both private industry and public agencies, including from NASA’s JPL, the U.S. Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Maxar Technologies, SAIC, Israel Aerospace Industries North America, and The Aerospace Corporation. The program, led by Managing Director Matt Kozlov, is usually based locally in LA, where much of the space industry has significant presence, but this year the Demo Day is going online due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation.

Few, if any, programs out there can claim such a broad representation of big-name partners from across commercial, military and general civil space in terms of stakeholders, which is the main reason it manages to attract a range of interesting startups.  This is the second class of graduating startups from the Starburst Space Accelerator; last year’s batch included some exceptional standouts like on-orbit refuelling company Orbit Fab (also a TechCrunch Battlefield participant), imaging micro-satellite company Pixxel and satellite propulsion company Morpheus.

As for this year’s class, you can check out a full list of all ten participating companies below. The demo day presentations begin tomorrow, September 9 at 10 AM PT/1 PM PT, so you can check back in here then to watch live as they provide more details about what it is they do.

Bifrost

A synthetic data API that allows AI teams to generate their own custom datasets up to 99% faster – no tedious collection, curation or labelling required.
founders@bifrost.ai

Holos Inc.

A virtual reality content management system that makes it super easy for curriculum designers to create and deploy immersive learning experiences.
founders@holos.io

Infinite Composites Technologies

The most efficient gas storage systems in the universe.
founders@infinitecomposites.com

Lux Semiconductors

Lux is developing next generation System-on-Foil electronics.
founders@luxsemiconductors.com

Natural Intelligence Systems, Inc.

Developer of next generation pattern based AI/ML systems.
leadership@naturalintelligence.ai

Prewitt Ridge

Engineering collaboration software for teams building challenging deep tech projects.
founders@prewittridge.com

SATIM

Providing satellite radar-based intelligence for decision makers.
founders@satim.pl

Urban Sky

Developing stratospheric Microballoons to capture the freshest, high-res earth observation data.
founders@urbansky.space

vRotors

Real-time remote robotic controls.
founders@vrotors.com

WeavAir

Proactive air insights.
founders@weavair.com

Hasura, a service that provides developers with an open-source engine that provides them a GraphQL API to access their databases, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series B round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Previous investors Vertex Ventures US, Nexus Venture Partners, Strive VC and SAP.iO Fund also participated in this round.

The new round, which the team raised after the COVID-19 pandemic had already started, comes only six months after the company announced its $9.9 million Series A round. In total, Hasura has now raised $36.5 million.

In addition to the new funding, Hasura also today announced that it has added support for MySQL databases to its service. Until now, the company’s service only worked with PostgreSQL databases.

Rajoshi Ghosh, co-founder and COO (left) and Tanmai Gopal, co-founder and CEO (right).

As the company’s CEO and co-founder Tanmai Gopal told me, MySQL support has long been at the top of the most requested features by the service’s users. Many of these users — who are often in the health care and financial services industry — are also working with legacy systems they are trying to connect to modern applications and MySQL plays an important role there, given how long it has been around.

In addition to adding MySQL support, Hasura is also adding support for SQL Server to its line-up, but for now, that’s in early access.

“For MySQL and SQL Server, we’ve seen a lot of demand from our healthcare and financial services / fin-tech users,” Gopa said. “They have a lot of existing online data, especially in these two databases, that they want to activate to build new capabilities and use while modernizing their applications.

Today’s announcement also comes only a few months after the company launched a fully-managed managed cloud service for its service, which complements its existing paid Pro service for enterprises.

“We’re very impressed by how developers have taken to Hasura and embraced the GraphQL approach to building applications,” said Gaurav Gupta, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and Hasura board member. “Particularly for front-end developers using technologies like React, Hasura makes it easy to connect applications to existing databases where all the data is without compromising on security and performance. Hasura provides a lovely bridge for re-platforming applications to cloud-native approaches, so we see this approach being embraced by enterprise developers as well as front-end developers more and more.”

The company plans to use the new funding to add support for more databases and to tackle some of the harder technical challenges around cross-database joins and the company’s application-level data caching system. “We’re also investing deeply in company building so that we can grow our GTM and engineering in tandem and making some senior hires across these functions,” said Gopa.