Year: 2020

LeoLabs has been building out its global network of space-scanning radars for the last couple years, leading up to today’s launch of its Collision Avoidance system, essentially satellite-monitoring-as-a-service. It should prove an indispensable asset to startups that don’t happen to have their own state of the art radar setup.

Space is full of junk, and it isn’t tracked as closely as anyone would like. A bit of debris the size of a pebble could put nearly any satellite out of commission, and there are thousands upon thousands of them in unknown orbits.

Most debris tracking is done by a motley collection of radars administrated by the U.S. Air Force and other government entities, but they’re limited in the precision and accuracy of their readings. LeoLabs aims to augment these capabilities with its own system, which can monitor more and smaller debris.

The company put the finishing touches on its newest radar antenna in New Zealand late last year, completing the network it needed to assemble to provide global coverage. Having kicked the tires for a bit with a group of early customers (Planet, Digital Globe, Black Sky and the Air Force Research Lab), the company is now ready to open the doors to its product to all and sundry.

Like any other modern data product, Collision Avoidance (as it is called) is completely cloud-based. You subscribe to the service and provide the requisite details, allowing the system to identify your assets in orbit. From then on you receive automatic alerts should, for instance, any tracked objects enter a potentially threatening orbit or some new piece of debris come worryingly close to yours (these are called “conjunctions”). It can also provide direct observational confirmation of your satellite’s position and trajectory, should you for some reason suspect the telemetry is off.

Perhaps the most important part is simply that it’s all very responsive. If you’re exploring 10 different possibilities for a maneuver to raise a satellite’s orbit, you don’t need to email the Air Force 10 times and hear back hours or days later. You can check the safety of a maneuver in real time, or once committed, request the radar scan your satellite — within minutes, not days — to make sure that it accomplished it correctly.

That kind of capability has always been lacking in space applications, which are often mired not just in red tape but in uncertainty of timelines and the immense complexity of the crowded zoo that is low Earth orbit. Being able to just sign up for it like any other enterprise service is a huge convenience for both large and small space companies.

Right now LeoLabs has three radars that cover a great deal of the sky, but it’s planning three more to increase the frequency with which satellites can be seen and tracked, especially those in equatorial orbits.

“Never before has a single end-to-end solution, from radars to web application, been available as a commercial off-the-shelf service,” said a proud-sounding Michael Nicolls, co-founder and CTO of LeoLabs, in a press release. “This turnkey SaaS solution puts a simple face in front of the sophisticated cloud-based astrodynamics platform and network of ground-based radars.”

Justine and Olivia Moore, the twin investors behind the CRV-backed Liftoff List have long believed in the power of student entrepreneurship.

The twin sisters were among the early architects of Stanford University’s student investment program, Cardinal Ventures, and even back then they’d noticed that it was hard for student entrepreneurs to get press and coverage for their companies without raising significant capital in the Bay Area.

The Liftoff List, which launched with its inaugural batch earlier this month, is the twins’ effort to highlight student entrepreneurship across the country with an award of $100,000 going to the top student-run startup from the applicants for the list.

“I think the idea was actually a thirty under thirty style list for student entrepreneurs,” Justine said.

The two women spread the word about the new list to readers of their newsletter and Slack group, Accelerated.

“Accelerated has 15,000 mostly college students reading it every week,” Justine Moore said. “We’re positioned to find the best student startups. We ultimately picked four and one of them ended up winning a $100,000 convertible note from CRV.”

In all the inaugural Liftoff List received 225 applications from 68 schools across the U.S. After applicants filled out the initial form to enter, the women culled the list down to a 60 companies that had products and conducted interviews with the founders to get a better sense of the teams.

Eventually that pool was narrowed down to four finalists out of twenty five featured companies. Those finalists: ChefMark, whose founders hailed from Wharton; Atomus, a company from the University of Southern California; IndieHub, from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business; and Arist, from Babson College, all pitched before a panel of judges.

The veritable sharks who determined the winner included Dream Machine founder (and former TechCrunch editor) Alexia Bonatsos; Saar Gur, a managing partner at CRV; Hunter Walk, the co-founder of Homebrew; and ProductHunt co-founder and architect of the Weekend Fund Ryan Hoover.

The ultimate winner of the competition was USC’s Atomus Printing, a company that solves the complex problem of rights management for component parts made using 3D printers.

The Los Angeles-based company has managed to crack the code on a problem that’s bedeviled the 3D printing industry for years. And it already has a marquee first customer in none other than the U.S. Department of Defense.

The company actually came together as part of a new initiative from the Defense Department that tries to use undergrads and graduate students at the country’s top schools to develop solutions to some of the military’s most intractable problems.

“Our problem came from the Marine Corps revolving around 3D printing,” recalled Joel Joseph, Atomus’ co-founder. “The military spends billions of dollars on 3D printers but they weren’t seeing the uptake that they were expecting.”

The issue was that the military had the capacity to make the component parts that they need to keep multi-million dollar pieces of equipment from becoming stranded assets in a theater of operations because of a small mechanical error or a part breaking or malfunctioning. “If you’re missing one part of a tank, you can’t use that tank,” said Joseph.

However, they didn’t have access to the design files owned by original equipment manufacturers, because selling replacement parts is a huge revenue generator for military suppliers. Atomus broke the logjam by becoming essentially “the iTunes of 3D printing”, according to Joseph. “It’s a digital rights management for 3D printers, allowing them to get paid every time the military or an outside manufacturer 3D prints their design file.”

Atomus may have been the ultimate winner of the first Liftoff List competition, but each company had a compelling pitch.

Here are the 25 companies that made the cut.

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Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

When we kicked off our series on private companies that have reached $100 million ARR, we didn’t expect it to last. Maybe a piece or two, but nothing more. Today’s entry should bring us past the thirty company mark.

It was less than a month ago that we added eight names to the club in a single post (HeadSpin, UiPath, DigitalOcean, BounceX, Wrike, Aeris, Podium and Lucid), the latter two of which had recently raised capital, announcing their revenue milestones at the same time. This morning, we’re appending just three names, but pay attention all the same.

We joked in February that our running tally of growth-oriented, private companies that had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue read like a list of firms that either could, or should go public in short order. Since then, the IPO market has largely closed in light of COVID-19, so I suppose we’re more adding to the backlog than queuing up companies for an S-1.

Either way, let’s talk about ActiveCampaign, Recorded Future, and ON24 this morning!

New names

We’ll start, then, with Recorded Future .

Recorded Future

Boston-based Recorded Future, a cybersecurity company focused on “threat intelligence,” announced that it crossed the $100 million ARR mark recently, making the firm a success story for its city. But as with so many companies that we add to our list, its inclusion is slightly fraught.

Israeli cybersecurity company CyberArk has acquired identity startup Idaptive for $70 million in an all-cash deal.

CyberArk is one of the shining stars in the Israeli cybersecurity scene before its initial public offering in 2013 saw it go public on the Nasdaq. To date, its share price has almost quadrupled.

At the core of CyberArk’s identity and privileged access management technology is making sure the right people — like corporate employees — can access the right systems and services. Data suggests exposed or breached credentials can account for most data breaches. Having technologies in place that put barriers in place to prevent credential misuse can prevent further damage.

No wonder Idaptive makes for a good fit.

Idaptive, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup that spun out from Centrify in 2018, made a name for itself by taking a zero-trust approach to identity security. Zero-trust treats every user the same, whether they’re inside the firewall or not.

In a blog post, CyberArk said the acquisition will bolster its position in the identity management space, allowing its customers to improve their security posture across a multitude of different infrastructures, like hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

“Merging the innovative technology and talents of the Idaptive team with that of CyberArk represents an exciting opportunity to deliver a differentiated, modern approach as we work to continually meet the ever-changing needs of the dynamic threat landscape,” said CyberArk’s chief marketing officer Marianne Budnik.

Loon, the Alphabet -owned company that’s using stratospheric balloons to provide high-speed bandwidth to hard-to-serve areas without strong ground infrastructure, has signed a new deal with carrier Vodacom to expand its offering in Africa to Mozambique. This is the second commercial agreement that Loon has in place in the continent, and its close proximity to Kenya, where its first deal is in place, means that the company will be able to use balloons across both markets.

The way Loon provides internet is by sending balloons to extremely high altitudes, equipped with radio equipment that effectively turns them into floating cellular broadband towers. The stratospheric positioning means they can cover a much wider area than ground-based cell towers, and reach areas where it’s been hard due to costs or accessibility to actually put in ground towers to begin with.

The deal for coverage in Mozambique will work similarly to its arrangement in Kenya, providing access to Vodacom’s customers in Cabo Delgado and Niassa, two provinces in the country. Connectivity simply wasn’t available at all to some of the areas covered under the new agreement, and Loon has already worked with its partners to secure the permissions necessary to fly its balloons over the target coverage areas.

Next up is installing ore ground infrastructure that can help relay the signals needed to ensure consistent connectivity, and Loon will also be test flying its balloons above Mozambique in order to gather the seat necessary for it to train the automated systems that fly them while in operation. Loon’s tech works by training algorithms to determine the best way to navigate stratospheric air currents in patterns that mean the balloons can stay in a relatively stable position over the target coverage area.

As mentioned, the close proximity of Mozambique to Kenya means that Loon will be able to figure out even more efficient ways to share balloons across both areas, so that when they float out of one country’s coverage area, they’ll be able to float into one for the other. That should give you a clue about Loon’s future expansion plans – economically, it makes the most sense for it to pursue partnerships in areas where it can realize even more of these kinds of efficiencies.

As we move through life in the pandemic, companies are being forced to review and understand how workflows happen. How do you distribute laptops to your workforce? How do you make sure everyone has the correct tool set? FortressIQ, a startup that wants to help companies use data to understand and improve internal processes, announced a $30 million Series B investment today.

M12, Microsoft’s venture fund and Tiger Global Management led the round with help from previous investors Boldstart Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Eniac Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company has now raised almost $65 million, according to Pitchbook data.

As the product has matured, founder and CEO Pankaj Chowdhry, says its focus has shifted a bit. Whereas before it was primarily about using computer vision to understand workflows, customers are now using that data to help drive their own internal transformations.

That used to require a high priced consulting team to pull off, but FortressIQ is trying to use software, data and artificial intelligence to replace the consultant and expose processes that could be improved.

“We’re building this kind of cool computer vision to help with process discovery, mostly in the automation space to help you automate processes. But what we’ve seen is people leveraging our data to drive transformation strategies, of which automation ends up being a pretty small component,” Chowdry explained.

He said that this is helping define new ways of using the tool they hadn’t considered when they first started the company. “If you think about it, we can use analytics to drive better experiences, better training, all of that. We’ve seen how customers are driving overall improvement strategies by leveraging the data coming out of this system,” he said.

The company currently has 65 employees, but he couldn’t commit to a future number at this point because of the uncertainty that exists in the economy. He knows he wants to hire, but he’s not sure what that will look like. He said they used to revisit hiring every six months. Now it’s ever six weeks, and so they keep having to reevaluate based on an ever-shifting set of conditions.

Chowdry believes that companies will need to be more agile moving forward to react more quickly to changing circumstances beyond the current crisis, and he thinks that’s going to require solid business relationships to pull off.

“I think the idea is to be leveraging this time to build that relationship with your customers so as they do start looking at what are they going to do and where they need to be invested in the business, that we’ve got both the data and the infrastructure to help them do that.”

With November looming, the scramble to protect the 2020 U.S. election from coronavirus chaos is on.

To that end, a small, skilled cluster of voting rights advocates are launching a new voter mobilization project. Called VoteAmerica, the new non-profit shares DNA with Vote.org, the esteemed nonpartisan voter mobilization site VoteAmerica founder Debra Cleaver first launched in 2008.

VoteAmerica’s goal is to boost voter turnout by helping people vote by mail. In a normal year that might mean striving to drive record turnout. But in the midst of the pandemic, the team is working to ensure that 2020’s presidential election turnout doesn’t slump like it would in a midterm election year.

“It seems at this point that Americans are either going to be unable or unwilling to vote in person in the November election, which could lead to catastrophically low turnout,” Cleaver said in an interview with TechCrunch. “But if we have our way, there will be no perceivable dip in turnout in November.”

While Vote.org is still around, the organization severed ties with Cleaver last summer in a drawn out battle with the group’s board. As Recode reported last month, some key Vote.org partners and donors walked out the door with Cleaver—a major concern for an organization with valuable ties in Silicon Valley and a more dire mission than ever in 2020.

With VoteAmerica, they might be back in the picture. Some of Cleaver’s previous Silicon Valley backers include Y Combinator’s Sam Altman (Cleaver is a YC alum), LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and angel investor Ron Conway. In a conversation with TechCrunch, Cleaver noted that at least Conway is back on board, pitching in with the $5 million in initial funding—a mix of grants and early contributions—to get the fledgling organization off the ground.

“We have the expertise, the team, the experience, and the plan,” Cleaver wrote in a Facebook post last month, adding that a “generous donor” had already stepped up to cover the nascent organization’s payroll costs.

Cleaver describes VoteAmerica as a lean team with deep experience—and one ready to hit the ground running. The project’s new website VoteAmerica.com fittingly displays an election day countdown clock in stark white-on-red lettering to convey the urgency of its task.

In the announcement for the new project, Cleaver said she believes that the 2020 elections “will be the most chaotic in American history”—a prediction that unfortunately is very difficult to argue with.

“Chaos driven by a global pandemic, foreign interference, threats of political violence, a radicalized electorate, a virulent campaign of disinformation, and fragile election administration technology all combine to make voting in person more difficult and less secure than ever before,” Cleaver said.

Because states conduct elections in the United States, her group’s core mission is to shepherd voters through the national patchwork of voting registration systems. On the simple site, visitors can register to vote, check their registration status, find a polling place, request an absentee ballot or sign up to vote-by-mail.

While many states in the U.S. already administer a large chunk of their voting through absentee vote-by-mail, It looks likely that the urgent public health threat posed by the coronavirus will mean that mass public gatherings in crowded polling places remain unwise. In light of that threat, states are looking to dramatically scale up those systems now to get them ready in time for November.

Old systems, new solutions

For VoteAmerica, navigating the quirks of American election systems can look like lending voters a fax machine.

“You can only sign up [for a mail-in ballot] online in 15 states, which is not actually a significant number, but there’s another 15 more where you can fax in your form, which doesn’t seem relevant because it’s 2020 and who uses a fax machine?”

But using fax APIs, VoteAmerica is building out a system that allows voters to request a vote-by-mail application just by taking a photo of their signature. VoteAmerica’s tool then uses code to put the signature in the right spot on the form and then programmatically faxes it to the relevant local election official.

“This is kind of wonky because we’re using truly antiquated technology to modernize the vote-by-mail process,” Cleaver said. “But if you have a mobile device—and 87% of Americans have a smartphone—we’re building technology that lets you sign up directly from your mobile device without printing and mailing.”

It’s just one way that VoteAmerica plans to employ technology solutions to civic problems—like the outdated government systems that still haunt American life. The solution sounds small, but at scale it can mobilize a huge amount of voters who otherwise could have been tangled up in the bureaucratic process. Naturally, that kind of elegant workaround to inefficient systems attracts interest from the tech community.

“We definitely do get a lot of tech money, and I think it’s because tech people both appreciate and trust using technology to clear antiquated hurdles,” Cleaver said.

“The things that we do, people in Silicon Valley are very receptive to it, whereas people outside the Valley might take a little more time to warm up to it.”

Even in these trying economic times, there are some services that companies can’t do without. Having good security tools is one of them. Expel, a 4-year old startup that offers security operations as a service, announced a $50 million Series D financing today.

CapitalG led the round with participation from existing investors Battery Ventures, Greycroft, Index Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Scale Venture Partners. The company has now raised almost $117 million, according to Pitchbook data.

It’s never easy finding quality security talent to help protect a large organization. The idea behind Expel is to give customers a set of tools to help use automation to reduce the number of people required to keep an organization safe.

Most companies struggle to find experienced security employees, so it’s using automation to solve a real pain point for them. While co-founder and CEO Dave Merkel says you still need to staff the security operations center, you can do it with fewer people with his platform.

“You may have a 24×7 Security Operations Center, but you don’t need the number of people everybody else does to protect your customers because Workbench does all of the heavy lifting for you. So instead of a SOC with 100 people, maybe you’ve got one with 15 people, and that gives tremendous leverage through this platform, and the platform ensures that you can provide high quality security without having to continually grow headcount,” Merkel explained.

Merkel sees the same economy everyone else does, but he believes that companies will continue to invest in security because they have to.

“Security tends to be a need as opposed to a want in many organizations, and so we still do see business happening. We will be using some of the money to continue to invest smartly in sales and marketing, but we’ll just need to be deliberate to make sure that we’re picking the right things that are still effective right now,” he said.

One thing that’s remarkable about this round is that Expel didn’t go looking for this new money. In fact, CapitalG came knocking, according to CapitalG general partner Gene Frantz.

“We sought out Expel, first and foremost. It wasn’t that Expel sought out to raise money and they called a bunch of people. We called them, and that was in response to a bunch of thematic work that we continually do in the security space,” Frantz told TechCrunch.

That work involved three main areas, where Expel happened to check all the boxes. The first was the threat landscape becoming ever more treacherous. The second was information overload from a variety of security products, and finally the dearth of experienced security personnel to deal with the first two problems.

“And so our bet is that this is the company in the space that actually will take on and address these challenges,” Frantz said.

Merkel describes having a company like CapitalG come to him as a humbling experience for him and his co-founders, especially under the current circumstances.

“It’s tremendous validation, but it is also humbling. We’re pretty thankful to be in that position, and we want to make sure that we do the right things to continue to honor the opportunity that we see in front of us.”

As millions of students and teachers shift to learn from home in response to the novel coronavirus disease, modern-day flashcard business Quizlet has raised $30 million in a Series C round led by General Atlantic.

Quizlet’s chief executive officer Matthew Glotzbach said that the new funding values the business at $1 billion, up five times from its last funding round in 2018. Quizlet’s total known financing is more than $60 million.

The fresh funding comes off the heels of unprecedented usage for Quizlet, which connects students to virtual flashcards and study guides. Once a user makes a guide, they can share a unique link with friends and collaborate ahead of a test. School shutdowns due to COVID-19 have caused students to flock to the platform as they look for new ways to study, retain information and collaborate.

Students ask over 1 billion questions on Quizlet each week and more than 400 million virtual study guides have been created. The San Francisco-based startup is also seeing “massive international growth,” with 200% to 400% new user growth across its top international markets.

The company declined to share daily numbers, but said it sees over 50 million users every month, which is similar to a statistic it shared two years ago.

Glotzbach noted that more than two-thirds of high schoolers in the United States use Quizlet. At least half of U.S. college students have used the platform. That kind of market hold only comes from two aspects: volume and variety. The site’s curriculum spans from acid and bases in chemistry to the science of roller coasters to the art of sensation and perception.

As for why a flash card business could be worth a billion dollars, it isn’t. But an AI-powered tutoring platform could be, and that’s exactly what Quizlet is focusing on as a core product move in the foreseeable future. Quizlet Learn, Glotzbach says, is the most popular feature on the site and uses AI to help users study topics and learn mastery by a certain time.

Quizlet’s newest investor, General Atlantic, has invested in a number of edtech companies around the world, like OpenClassrooms, Ruangguru, Unacademy and, recently, Duolingo. Glotzbach said that Quizlet will continue to expand to new international markets, but does not have any “specific targets or names.” It is currently used in 130 countries across 19 localized languages, so it has a lot of room to grow.

Quizlet did not comment on profitability, but said its revenue is growing 100% year over year.

Quizlet views its closest competitor as Chegg, an online textbook company that went public in November 2013. Glotzbach says it has a larger audience and bigger footprint on education in the United States. He noted that other learning apps like Duolingo are vertical and subject focused, while Quizlet has a more broad curriculum.

While the new funding officially makes Quizlet a unicorn, Glotzbach said that when he announced the funding to his staff he compared the company more closely to a camel.

“We’ve built a very large-scale business with products that are easy to use, easy to get up and running and easy to share,” he said. “We use a low-cost subscription model that is very inexpensive so we get a lot of people upgrading to our premium product, and it drives economic business.”

Slow and steady is part of its founding story: Quizlet was founded in 2005 by a 15-year-old, Andrew Sutherland. It was fully bootstrapped until 2015. Glotzbach, who was previously an executive at YouTube, then joined in 2016.

But while it has humble roots, this new round was closed in the heat of a global pandemic.

“We saw record drops in the stock market multiple days in a row while trying to both manage [the round] and move an entire company to remote work,” he detailed. “It was closed during such a volatile time.”

Glotzbach said that the round was more opportunistic, and that it didn’t “need an injection of capital to make ends meet.”

Therefore, Quizlet’s new shiny valuation is yet another example of how edtech has found both revitalization and green shoots during this catastrophic time, and how remote learning is going from a tool to a necessity for many learners.

Rocket Lab is already in the testing phase for a new engine it’s building to propel its forthcoming Photon Lunar spacecraft, according to CEO and founder Peter Beck . Beck shared an image of the engine, called hyperCurie, undergoing tests conducted by the company’s propellant team.

HyperCurie, as its name implies, is an evolution of the Curie engine that currently powers the third stage of the Electron rocket that Rocket Lab uses for its missions, as well as the Photon satellite bus. The hyperCurie will power the forthcoming Photon Lunar, which is a new satellite bus being developed by Rocket Lab to carry small payloads to the Moon, Mars, Venus and even beyond.

Rocket Lab was awarded a contract to launch a payload to the Moon on behalf of NASA back in February, and it clearly sees more opportunity in delivering small satellites both to lunar orbit and to other deep space destinations on behalf of the agency as well as other clients. The NASA lunar mission will be a precursor to the agency’s ultimate goal of building and deploying a Lunar Gateway orbital station near the Moon, which will be a key element for future Moon exploration and long-term human missions.

Beck previously shared a detailed wireframe schematic drawing of Photon Lunar at the beginning of this month, showing the forthcoming spacecraft with the hyperCurie engine attached. HyperCurie uses electric pumps, unlike the pressure-fed Curie, to improve its peformance and produce more thrust.

Rocket Lab’s lunar delivery mission for NASA is set to take place in 2021 based on current timelines, so it makes sense that the engine would already be ar enough along to be in the active testing phase.