Year: 2020

Collaborative enterprise software is absolutely booming, and Airtable is riding that wave in a very real way.

The company, which offers a flexible, collaborative database product, has raised more than $170 million in funding from investors like CRV, Benchmark, Coatue Management, and Thrive Capital. So it should come as no surprise that we’re simply thrilled to have Airtable cofounder and CEO Howie Liu join us at Disrupt 2020.

Liu went to Duke University before starting his first company, eTacts, which was an automated CRM system that received investment from the founders of YouTube, Powerset and Delicious, as well as investors like Ron Conway and Ashton Kutcher.

Liu then went on to lead the social CRM product for Salesforce before leaving to set his own course once again with Airtable .

Airtable was founded back in 2012 with a broad mission of democratizing software. At its essence, Airtable is a relational database. Laymen can think of it as a Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel on steroids, but it actually goes much deeper than that.

Software is built on data — organized data, to be exact — and while many of us can compile and organize data into a spreadsheet, few can make it sing its way to a software product. Airtable aims to make that possible for anyone, even a non-developer.

That said, the company faces several hurdles. Airtable is a product that can be used in many, many ways, from tracking sales goals to organizing product road maps to managing workflows. With this type of open-ended product, it can be difficult to educate the end-user on how to make the most of it, or how to use it to begin with.

We’ll talk with Liu about how to build a very complex product in the most user-friendly way possible. We’ll also ask him about the state of enterprise software sales at a time when most large companies are freezing or decreasing spending, the future of no- and low-code software, and how he thinks about hyper-growth.

Disrupt is all virtual in 2020 and runs September 14 to September 18, and we have several Digital Pass options to be part of the action or to exhibit virtually, which you can check out here.

Liu joins a stellar roster of speakers, including Roelof Botha, Cyan Banister, Charles Hudson, and Mike Cannon-Brookes, with more speakers to be announced soon!

Google is introducing new tools for newsrooms looking to understand their online audiences and how those audiences feed into their overall business.

These efforts fall under the umbrella of the broader Google News Initiative, introduced in 2018 as a way for the search giant to fund quality journalism and find other ways to support the industry. Since then, Google has introduced two journalism-focused products that sit on top of Google Analytics — News Consumer Insights, which is designed to help publishers grow their audiences and become more profitable, as well as Realtime Content Insights, which is supposed to help newsrooms see what’s trending at any given moment.

“We heard over and over again that our news partners were drowning in this data,” said Amy Adams Harding, director of analytics and revenue optimization for news and publishing at Google. “They had difficulty teasing out actionable intelligence in the tsunami of numbers.”

She added that it was “important” to her team that these products be free to use and “accessible to anyone using Google Analytics.”

Today, Google is introducing version 2.0 of both News Consumer Insights and Realtime Content Insights, while also adding a new feature called the News Tagging Guide.

Image Credits: Google

NTG is supposed to make it easier for publishers to collect the data they need. That falls into three broad categories — video analytics, user engagement and reader revenue. Publishers will be able to select the category and the specific types of data they want to track, and then Google will give them JavaScript that they can copy and paste onto their website in order to start feeding that data into Google Analytics.

Meanwhile, the News Consumer Insights product now includes personalized recommendations for the publisher. For example, it might point out that a publisher’s newsletter signups are relatively low, and then it could suggest different ways to improve those signups. Harding noted that NCI didn’t lack recommendations before, but to find them, publishers had to continually refer back to the generalized playbook, rather than having the most relevant recommendations highlighted for them while they’re going over their data.

And Realtime Content Insights have been expanded to include similar data about video content, as well as historic performance data, so publishers can see which stories performed best in a given period of time. And it’s not simply focused on pageviews — RCI also tracks things like social sharing and engagement, and it identifies which stories are doing better with casual readers versus loyal readers (who visit more than once a month) versus brand loyalists (who visit at least 15 times a month).

“We’re not saying one is better than the other,” said Anntao Diaz, Google’s head of News Consumer Insights, Realtime Content Insights and Google Surveys for Publishers. Instead, he suggested that different articles can attract different readers to serve different purposes, whether that’s growing the overall audience or building a relationship with a loyal audience that might pay for subscriptions.

Google has already been testing these features with select publishers, including Time and local newspaper publisher Lee Enterprises.

“As Lee Enterprises’ audience reach continues to grow in our newspapers’ communities, our partnership with Google News Initiative provides excellent insight and industry benchmarks to measure our success,” said Kyle Rickhoff, director of analytics at Lee Enterprises, in a statement. “The new version News Consumer Insights powered by News Tagging Guide improves our understanding of readers’ engagement and helps us prioritize business opportunities for video, engagement conversions and on-site subscriptions with better data.”

Relativity Space has a new customer for its 3D printed rockets: Established satellite maker and operator Iridium, which has picked the company for launches in 2023. To accomplish those, and other launches like them, the company is also setting up a new launch site at Vandenberg Air Base in California.

“It’s obviously pretty huge news for us,” Relativity co-founder and CEO Tim Ellis told TechCrunch. “Not only do we have a second launch site, but we have an anchor customer. We’ve actually pre-sold more launches since any other company in the industry since SpaceX.”

Iridium has 66 satellites in orbit over the last few years on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets, but there are several in storage as spares should it become necessary to replace one. Replacement launches will occur as needed starting no earlier than 2023, giving both companies plenty of wiggle room.

“Relativity is one of the only companies that can launch these at all — they’re north of 800 kilograms,” Ellis noted. That puts smaller vehicles like Rocket Lab’s Electron and aspirants like Virgin Orbit out of the running, pitting Relativity’s Terran I against Arianespace’s Vega and ISRO’s PSLV.

Not only would a Terran I much less expensive than those, but “we’re fully U.S. funded, staffed, operated, and launched,” Ellis said. That makes it very attractive to more than a few segments of the space community.

The Iridium launches would need to enter a polar orbit, which isn’t possible with the setup Relativity has at its launch facility in Cape Canaveral. So the company has been working with Vandenberg Air Base, near Los Angeles, to establish a spot where polar and sun-synchronous orbits are possible.

It’s like you’re there.

The company and the Air Force have reached what’s known as “right of entry,” a term specific to arrangements like this that basically means Relativity can do testing on site while fulfilling the other prerequisites to using the area in a more permanent fashion.

Ellis noted with satisfaction that the new spot at Vandenberg has a special quality: “It’s the southernmost site, and since we fly south, we don’t overfly any other major launch sites. So from a scheduling conflict perspective, we expect the fewest conflicts of any site out there.” That means more flexibility and possibly an increased launch cadence down the road.

That’s all presuming everything goes as planned as far as actually getting Terran I into space, though the company’s momentum is substantial.

“We’re fully on track for first launch in 2021 in Cape Canaveral. We’ve already passed the environmental assessment, and we’re close to getting a full site license,” Ellis said.

Testing has restarted at NASA’s Stennis Space Center, and the company is planning a full scale engine test in the fall. Relativity also recently moved to a new, enormous headquarters in Long Beach where its unique 3D printing process for rocket parts will take in raw materials and output nearly complete launch vehicles at industry-leading rates.

The pandemic put some things on hold but, Ellis said, actually accelerated their hiring. Relativity recently added to its roster Zac Dunn, who contributed hugely to SpaceX’s success and also worked at Vandenberg; no doubt his network has been put to good use. The company also recently hired its first CFO, Mohamed Shazad, formerly of the Honest Company and Goldman Sachs. Perhaps he’ll know what to do with the hundreds of millions of dollars the company has.

AfterShip, the e-commerce shipment tracking platform, announced today that Postmen, its shipping API, is now available for free, with no limits on shipment volume.

Co-founder Andrew Chan told TechCrunch that the company decided to make the Postmen API, previously offered as a SaaS subscription for enterprises, free in response to the massive jump in online shopping caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. About 60% of Postmen’s users are in the United States.

Since February, AfterShip has seen an 85% increase in shipping volume, a sharp contrast to previous years, when volume declined after the holiday shopping season ended, Chan said. Many retailers have also had to move most or all of their operations online, with many brick-and-mortar stores adjusting to e-commerce very quickly as movement restrictions were put in place around the world.

Postmen is partnered with 60 couriers, including USPS, DHL, FedEx and UPS, and integrates with a retailer’s existing shipping system. It allows them to print shipping and return labels, and track courier costs, delivery time estimates and shipment performances. It also allows them to keep discounted rates they have already negotiated with couriers and makes it possible to add new couriers within two weeks, a process Chan said can typically take months.

He added that giving retailers more flexibility during the pandemic, which has disrupted many logistics and fulfillment networks.

“If you are shipping with postal services, we have data that shows most of China Post’s parcels, for example, were usually delivered within 26 days, but now it is 40 days. Some of them take longer and some of them are shipped within normal times, but the problem is we don’t know,” Chan said. “Postmen lets users switch to other carriers more easily and then for tracking, we give visibility into shipping performance, so you can analyze carriers and chose different ones.”

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Hong Kong, AfterShip’s products are used by clients ranging from small- to medium-sized businesses to large enterprises. Postmen users include Etsy, Harry’s Razor Blades and Watson’s, one of the world’s largest health and beauty retail groups. Chan said Watson’s uses the software to manage shipments for its Asia-Pacific operations, including warehouse-to-store deliveries performed by multiple couriers.

Some of the smaller companies that use Postmen include e-commerce order fulfillment provider Floship. Its co-founder, Steven Suh, said in a statement that Floship’s postal shipping lead time used to be about one to two weeks, but after the pandemic, that increased to as much as 60 days or more. At the same time, Floship’s postal costs rose by almost 100%.

“For our business to survive the pandemic, we need to offer express shipping with major carriers, and Postmen allows us to do so. Rather than building our own carrier integrations, we can go through Postmen’s catalog of existing carrier integrations and get express shipping up and running within 2-3 days,” Suh said. “Without Postmen, we’d need to hire three additional full-time developers to manage and maintain our shipping process. Postmen has been a huge time-saver for us and has helped accelerate offering new and better solutions for our clients.”

The Cloud Foundry Foundation, the nonprofit behind the popular open-source enterprise platform-as-a-service project, is holding its developer conference today. What’s usually a bi-annual community gathering (traditionally one in Europe and one in North America) is now a virtual event, but there’s still plenty of news from the Summit, both from the organization itself and from the wider ecosystem.

After going through a number of challenging technical changes in order to adapt to the new world of containers and DevOps, the organization’s focus these days is squarely on improving the developer experience around Cloud Foundry (CF). The promise of CF, after all, has always been that it would make life easier for enterprise developers (assuming they follow the overall CF processes).

“There are really two areas of focus that our community has: number one, re-platform on Kubernetes. No major announcements about that. […] And then the secondary focus is continuing to evolve our developer experience,” Chip Childers, the executive director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, told me ahead of today’s announcements.

At the core of the CF experience is its “cf” command-line interface(CLI). With today’s update, this is getting a number of new capabilities, mostly with an eye to giving developers more flexibility to support their own workflows.

“The cf CLI v7 was made possible through the tremendous work of a diverse, distributed group of collaborators and committers,” said Josh Collins, Cloud Foundry’s CLI project lead and senior product manager at VMware. “Modern development techniques are much simpler with Cloud Foundry as a result of the new CLI, which abstracts away the nuances of the CF API into a command-line interface that’s easy and elegant to use.”

Built on top of CF’s v3 APIs, which have been in the making for a while, the new CLI enables features like rolling app deployments for example, to allow developers to push updates without downtime. “Let’s say you have a number of instances of the application out there and you want to slowly roll instance by instance to perform the upgrade and allow traffic to be spread across both new and old versions,” explained Childers. “Being able to do that with just a simple command is a very powerful thing.”

Developers can also now run sub-steps of their “cf -push” processes. With this, they get more granular control over their deployments (“cf -push” is the command for deploying a CF application) and they now get the ability to push apps that run multiple processes, maybe for a UI process and a worker process.

In the overall Cloud Foundry ecosystem, things continue at their regular pace, with EngineerBetter, for example, joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a new member, Suse updating its Cloud Application Platform and long-time CF backers like anynines, Atos and Grape Up updating their respective CF-centric platforms, too. Stark & Wayne, which has long offered a managed CF solution, too, is launching new support options with the addition of college-style advisory sessions and an update to its Kubernetes-centric Gluon controller for CF deployments.

Suse, the well-known German open-source company that went through more corporate owners than anybody can remember until it finally became independent again in 2019, has long been a champion of Cloud Foundry, the open-source platform-as-a-service project. And while you may think of Suse as a Linux distribution, today’s company also offers a number of other services, including a container platform, DevOps tools and the Suse Cloud Application Platform, based on Cloud Foundry. Today, right in time for the bi-annual (and now virtual) Cloud Foundry Summit, the company announced the launch of version 2.0 of this platform.

The promise of the Application Platform, and indeed Cloud Foundry, is that it allows for one-step application deployments and an enterprise-ready platform to host them.

The marquee feature of version 2.0 is that it now includes a new Kubernetes Operator, a standard way of packaging, deploying and managing container-based applications, which makes deploying and managing Cloud Foundry on Kubernetes infrastructure easier.

Suse President of Engineering and Innovation Thomas Di Giacomo also notes that it’s now easier to “install, operate and maintain on Kubernetes platforms anywhere — on premises and in public clouds,” and that it opens up a new path for existing Cloud Foundry users to move to a modern container-based architecture. Indeed, for the last few years, Suse has been crucial to bringing both Kubernetes support to Cloud Foundry and Cloud Foundry to Kubernetes.

Cloud Foundry, it’s worth noting, long used its home-grown container orchestration tool, which the community developed before anybody had even heard of Kubernetes. Over the course of the last few years, though, Kubernetes became the de facto standard for container management, and today, Cloud Foundry supports both its own Diego tool and Kubernetes.

“Suse Cloud Application Platform 2.0 builds on and advances those efforts, incorporating several upstream technologies recently contributed by Suse to the Cloud Foundry Community,” writes Di Giacomo. “These include KubeCF, a containerized version of the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime designed to run on Kubernetes, and Project Quarks, a Kubernetes operator for automating deployment and management of Cloud Foundry on Kubernetes.”

Lightrun, a Tel Aviv-based startup that makes it easier for developers to debug their production code, today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed round led by Glilot Capital Partners, with participation from a number fo engineering executives from several Fortune 500 firms.

The company, which was co-founded by Ilan Peleg (who, in a previous life, was a competitive 800m runner) and Leonid Blouvshtein, with Peleg taking the CEO role and Blouvshtein the CTO position.

The overall idea behind Lightrun is that it’s too hard for developers to debug their production code. “In today’s world, whenever a developer issues a new software version and deploys it into production, the only way to understand the application’s behavior is based on log lines or metrics which were defined during the development stage,” Peleg explained. “The thing is, that is simply not enough. We’ve all encountered cases of missing a very specific log line when trying to troubleshoot production issues, then having to release a new hotfix version in order to add this specific logline, or –alternatively — reproduce the bug locally to better understand the application’s behavior.”

With Lightrun, as the co-founders showed me in a demo, developers can easily add new logs and metrics to their code from their IDE and then receive real-time data from their real production or development environments. For that to work, they need to have the Lightrun agent installed, but the overhead here is generally low because the agent sits idle until it is needed. In the IDE, the experience isn’t all that different from setting a traditional breakpoint in a debugger — only that there is no break. Lightrun can also use existing logging tools like Datadog to pipe its logging data to them.

While the service’s agent is agnostic about the environment it runs in, the company currently only supports JVM languages. Blouvshtein noted that building JVM language support was likely harder than building support for other languages and the company plans to launch support for more languages in the future.

“We make a point of investing in technologies that transform big industries,” said Kobi Samboursky, founder and managing partner at Glilot Capital Partners . “Lightrun is spearheading Continuous Debugging and Continuous Observability, picking up where CI/CD ends, turning observability into a real-time process instead of the iterative process it is today. We’re confident that this will become DevOps and development best practices, enabling I&O leaders to react faster to production issues.”

For now, there is still a bit of an onboarding process to get started with Lightrun, though that’s generally a very short process, the team tells me. Over time, the company plans to make this a self-service process. At that point, Lightrun will likely also become more interesting to smaller teams and individual developers, though the company is mostly focused on enterprise users and despite only really launching out of stealth today and offering limited language support, the company already has a number of paying customers, including major enterprises.

“Our strategy is based on two approaches: bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up, we’re targeting developers, they are the end-users and we want to ensure they get a quality product they can trust to help them. We put a lot of effort into reaching out through the developer channels and communities, as well as enabling usage and getting feedback. […] Top-down approach, we are approaching R&D management like VP of R&D, R&D directors in bigger companies and then we show them how Lightrun saves company development resources and improves customer satisfaction.”

Unsurprisingly, the company, which currently has about a dozen employees, plans to use the new funding to add support for more languages and to improve its service with new features, including support for tracing.

Cape Privacy emerged from stealth today after spending two years building a platform for data scientists to privately share encrypted data. The startup also announced $2.95 million in new funding and $2.11 million in funding it got when the business launched in 2018 for a total of $5.06 million raised.

Boldstart Ventures and Version One led the round with participation from Haystack, Radical Ventures and Faktory Ventures.

Company CEO Ché Wijesinghe says that data science teams often have to deal with data sets that contain sensitive data and share data internally or externally for collaboration purposes. It creates a legal and regulatory data privacy conundrum that Cape Privacy is trying to solve.

“Cape Privacy is a collaboration platform designed to help focus on data privacy for data scientists. So the biggest challenge that people have today from a business perspective is managing privacy policies for machine learning and data science,” Wijesinghe told TechCrunch.

The product breaks down that problem into a couple of key areas. First of all it can take language from lawyers and compliance teams and convert that into code that automatically generates policies about who can see the different types of data in a given data set. What’s more, it has machine learning underpinnings so it also learns about company rules and preferences over time.

It also has a cryptographic privacy component. By wrapping the data with a cryptographic cypher, it lets teams share sensitive data in a safe way without exposing the data to people who shouldn’t be seeing it because of legal or regulatory compliance reasons.

“You can send something to a competitor as an example that’s encrypted, and they’re able  to process that encrypted data without decrypting it, so they can train their model on encrypted data,” company co-founder and CTO Gavin Uhma explained.

The company closed the new round in April, which means they were raising in the middle of a pandemic, but it didn’t hurt that they had built the product already and were ready to go to market, and that Uhma and his co-founders had already built a successful startup, GoInstant that was acquired by Salesforce in 2012. (It’s worth noting that GoInstant debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2011.)

Uhma and his team brought Wijesinghe on board to build the sales and marketing team because as a technical team, they wanted someone with go to market experience running the company, so they could concentrate on building product.

The company has 14 employees and are already an all remote team, so that the team didn’t have to adjust at all when the pandemic hit. While it plans to keep hiring fairly limited for the foreseeable future, the company has had a diversity and inclusion plan from the start.

“You have to be intentional about about seeking diversity, so it’s something that when we sit down and map out our hiring and work with recruiters in terms of our pipeline, we really make sure that that diversity is one of our objectives. You just have it as a goal, as part of your culture, and it’s something that when we see the picture of the team, we want to see diversity,” he said.

Wijesinghe adds, “As a person of color myself, I’m very sensitive to making sure that we have a very diverse team, not just from a color perspective, but a gender perspective as well,” he said.

The company is gearing up to sell the product  and has paid pilots starting in the coming weeks.

In the chip game, more is usually better, and to that end, Ampere announced the next chip on its product roadmap today, the Altra Max, a 128-core processor the company says is designed specifically to handle cloud-native, containerized workloads.

What’s more, the company has designed the chip so that it will fit in the same slot as their 80-core product announced last year (and in production now). That means that engineers can use the same slot when designing for the new chip, which saves engineering time and eases production, says Jeff Wittich, VP of products at the company.

Wittich says that his company is working with manufacturers today to make sure they can build for all of the requirements for the more powerful chip. “The reason we’re talking about it now, versus waiting until Q4 when we’ve got samples going out the door is because it’s socket compatible, so the same platforms that the Altra 80 core go into, this 128-core product can go into,” he said.

He says that containerized workloads, video encoding, large scale out databases and machine learning inference will all benefit from having these additional cores.

While he wouldn’t comment on any additional funding, the company has raised $40 million, according to Crunchbase data, and Wittich says they have enough funding to go into high-volume production on their existing products later this year.

Like everyone, the company has faced challenges keeping a consistent supply chain throughout the pandemic, but when it started to hit in Asia at the beginning of this year, the company set a plan in motion to find backup suppliers for the parts they would need should they run into pandemic-related shortages. He says that it took a lot of work, planning and coordination, but they feel confident at this point in being able to deliver their products in spite of the uncertainty that exists.

“Back in January we actually already went through [our list of suppliers], and we diversified our supply chain and made sure that we had options for everything. So we were able to get in front of that before it ever became a problem,” he said.

“We’ve had normal kinds of hiccups here and there that everyone’s had in the supply chain, where things get stuck in shipping and they end up a little bit late, but we’re right on schedule with where we were.”

The company is already planning ahead for its 2022 release, which is in development. “We’ve got a test chip running through five nanometer right now that has the key IP and some of the key features of that product, so that we can start testing those out in silicon pretty soon,” he said.

Finally, the company announced that it’s working with some new partners, including Cloudflare, Packet (which was acquired by Equinix in January), Scaleway and Phoenics Electronics, a division of Avnet. These partnerships provide another way for Ampere to expand its market as it continues to develop.

The company was founded in 2017 by former Intel president Renee James.

Salesforce has a bunch of announcements coming out of the virtual TrailheaDX conference taking place later this week, starting today with some new developer tools. The goal of these tools is to give developers a more modern way of creating applications on top of the Salesforce platform.

Perhaps the most interesting of the three being announced today is Salesforce Functions, which enable developers to build serverless applications on top of Salesforce. With a serverless approach, the developer creates a series of functions that trigger an operation. The cloud provider then delivers the exact amount of infrastructure resources required to run that operation and nothing more.

Wade Wegner, SVP of product for Salesforce and Salesforce DX, says the Salesforce offering gives developers a lot of flexibility around development languages such as Node.js or Java, and cloud platforms such as AWS or Azure. “I can just write my code, deploy it and let Salesforce operate it for me,” he said.

Wegner explained that the new approach lets developers build serverless applications with data that lives in Salesforce, and then run it on elastic infrastructure. This gives them the benefits of vertical and horizontal scale without having to be responsible for managing all aspects of how their application will run on the cloud infrastructure.

In addition to Functions, the company is also announcing Code Builder, a web-based IDE based on Microsoft Visual Studio Code Spaces. “By leveraging Visual Studio Code Spaces we can bring the same capabilities to developers right in the browser,” Wegner said.

He adds that this enables them to be more productive with support for many languages and frameworks in a browser in the context of the environment that they’re doing their work, while giving them a consistent and familiar experience.

Finally, the company is announcing the DevOps Center, which is a place to manage the growing complexity of delivering applications built on top of Salesforce in a modern continuous way. “It is really meant to provide new ways with which teams of developers can collaborate around the work that they’re doing, and to manage the complexities of continuously delivering applications…,” he said.

As is typical for Salesforce, the company is announcing these tools today, but they will not be generally available for some time. Functions and Code Builders are both in pilot, while DevOps Center will be available as a developer preview later this year.