Year: 2021

Content is king, as the saying goes. But in actual fact, a lot of what companies do today with content, and thus the power of that content, is relatively limited by the tools that exist to present it. That is slowly changing, and now a startup called Sanity, which has built a system to make it easier to repurpose and use content assets across a number of places, and to more easily use data as content, is announcing $39 million in funding on the back of strong demand for its tech.

This round, a Series B, is led by ICONIQ Growth (the growth round investment arm of the storied ICONIQ, backed by a number of high profile family offices including that of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg). Lead Edge Capital, Threshold Ventures, Heavybit, and Alliance Venture are also in this round, some of which also participated in Sanity’s previous $9.3 million fundraise in October 2020.

This latest investment brings the total raised by Sanity to $51.8 million. It is not disclosing its valuation, but Magnus Hillestad, Sanity’s CEO and co-founder, said the company was “very happy” with the number. In any case, it comes on the back of some very strong growth. Sanity is now being used by almost 100,000 developers, marketers, content creators and product professionals, the company said, with “active users” numbering at 30,000 (double the number of active users the company had in October, he said). Customers include the likes of National Geographic, Puma, InVision, Datastax and Brex — who are using it to manage their content repositories and letting them flexibly use information across a range of endpoints.

“Headless” has become a big theme in the world of technology, covering services as varied as content (by way of content management systems, commerce, banking and financial services. Organizations that want to buy systems to, say, build websites without putting a lot of investment into design can use platforms that both help them manage the content of the sites, as well as the look of them. But some might want a more customized experience, and they will opt for headless offerings, where there are systems still built to help automate and manage data at the backend, but giving them the ability to design front ends that are tailored to their specific needs.

In Hillestad’s view, the rise of headless services has been an important development, but what Sanity has conceived of is the next step in extensibility: a platform that lets you use content on the fly in a number of ways without people having to work on that in separate systems.

“We are taking a programmatic approach to content,” he said. “What businesses need now are not just marketing, or product, or e-commerce experiences.” These are all converging, he believes, “So you need to be able to build experiences to catch people wherever they are.

“Data is content, but content is also data. If you think about what we are doing, what we are giving companies is a content lake,” he continued. “Like data lakes, a content lake is structured, yet schema-less.”

This in turn gives companies the ability to use it across a number of use cases. This is notable because typically content is stored in silos created for specific purposes, part of the limitation of how CMS systems, even typical headless CMS systems, are conceived and built.

For now, there are however also limitations in Sanity: the company has yet to come up with interesting ways to enable translations between, say, audio and printed content, although that would appear to be a logical step for the company to take as it grows, given how many consumers already switch between different kinds of media formats.

“In an era of digital globalization, companies must rapidly deliver complex, multi-channel, and engaging digital experiences to reach customers wherever they are. This is forcing them to rethink the CMS. At the same time, developers are increasingly leading the adoption of new technologies and holding the keys to adapt effectively to this shift,” said Doug Pepper, general partner at ICONIQ Growth, who is joining the board with this round. “Sanity has created the hero product for building innovative product experiences, with an impressive developer-oriented approach to content delivery and a personalized product experience that breaks down silos for content creators, marketing and developer teams. We’re excited to support the Sanity team as they enter this next phase of growth.”

The big news in tech this morning is a new a16z cryptocurrency-focused fund totaling some $2.2 billion. The new investment vehicle is worth around four times what the company’s preceding crypto fund — its second — was worth.

Andreessen’s wager on cryptocurrency is only accelerating over time as the investing house raises larger funds focused on the market with less time between them.

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It’s not hard to see why a16z is so enthused about the crypto market; its investments into trading house Coinbase paid off handsomely this year when the unicorn direct listed at a huge valuation premium to its previous worth. Why not put more capital into a startup cohort that was recently immensely lucrative?

But the venture capital group is up to a bit more than just writing new checks. We can tell that much from the firm’s short post announcing its new fund. Mix in a recent interview with a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen concerning the American regulatory environment, and we can understand that the firm is not simply planning a flurry of new deals.

Defending the future of crypto

The headline figure of $2.2 billion in capital available for crypto projects is driving headlines this morning, but the dollar figure should not be a surprise. There’s essentially infinite money in the market for name-brand venture capital firms today, it appears, and with a16z’s recent Coinbase win, I doubt it was monstrously difficult for the firm to compile a new, larger crypto-focused vehicle.

As companies deliver code ever faster, they need tooling to provide some semblance of control and governance over the cloud resources being used to deliver it. Env0, a startup that is helping companies do just that, announced a $17 million Series A today.

M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, led the round with participation from previous investors Boldstart Ventures, Grove Ventures and Crescendo Ventures. The company received a $3.3 million seed round, which we covered, last April and a previously unannounced $3.5 million add-on last summer. Today’s round brings the total raised to $23.8 million.

The company’s service helps companies control cloud costs, while giving developers the ability to deploy to the cloud with cost limits. It also provides a level of governance for code as it moves through the development cycle to deployment.

When we spoke to the company last April around its seed round, the company’s product was just entering beta. It has been generally available for about 4 months now and they’ve built out a lot of functionality since then, according to company co-founder and CEO Ohad Maislish.

“The last time we spoke we were just focussed on manual self service and empowering developers in non production environments. Now with infrastructure as code automation and teams and governance, we basically manage all of the cloud deployments for our customers,” Maislish explained.

Since going generally available with the product this year, he reports the company now has dozens of paying customers and is generating revenue. Customers includes JFrog, Varonis and BigID.

The startup has also grown from just 7 employees in April 2020 to 17 today with plans to reach 50 in the next 18 months it begins putting the new capital to work. He says that bringing in a diverse group of workers should help his company grow and bring different ways of solving problems. “I think that bringing people with different cultures, different backgrounds, is key in that they will bring [different ways of thinking].”

For now, the company is based in Israel with plans to open offices in the U.S.. Mailslish says that his plans to move to California were put on hold by the pandemic, but he hopes to open an office in Sunnyvale in the fall.

The Israeli office is a minimum of two days in the office, three days at home or whatever combination employees wish. He says that he plans to hire people in the U.S. office as he establishes himself there and some of those employees can be remote if it makes sense for the role.

Business operation automation startup Tonkean announced this morning that it closed a $50 million Series B round of capital. Accel led the round, which came just over a year after the startup raised a $24 million Series A. Lightspeed Ventures, which led the company’s preceding venture capital round, also participated in its new funding event.

Sagi Eliyahu, Tonkean’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch in an interview that his company’s valuation rose by around 4x in its latest funding round.

The startup was able to secure more capital at a higher price thanks in part to quick growth in 2020, which Eliyahu said was concentrated in the second half of 2020.

Tonkean is an interesting mix of business process automation, no-code and humans. In short, the startup allows a company’s ops groups — sales ops, marketing ops, etc. — to set up automated business logic across applications that can include human-in-the-loop elements. And Tonkean built its system to be IT-friendly, allowing it to support enterprise-scale customers.

The automation space has been broadly hot in recent quarters. Robotic process automation (RPA) is great for mechanizing repetitive tasks that waste human time. The method of using computers to do stuff that humans previously had to do by clicking far too much has proven to be big business.

Tonkean allows for something a bit different. An example may help: During our interview, Eliyahu mused about what might happen if a salesperson for a Tonkean client wanted to send a lead into a nurture campaign. Tonkean would let the sales ops team set up logic so that when the frontline salesperson selects the lead for a nurture effort inside their CRM, the lead would then automatically be added to a specific Marketo campaign. Furthermore, the click-to-nurture system would alert a human on the sales team, perhaps asking for approval of the decision.

Tonkean software employs no-code tools to let ops groups use off-the-shelf command modules to build business logic — or craft their own as needed. The use of the company’s software could allow for more empowered teams at companies that are less reliant on engineering groups for help in accelerating and automating their work.

That thematically fits inside the general narrative we’ve seen from no-code startups in general: They want to allow non-technical folks to have more control of their work through less reliance on technical teams at their place of employment.

Tonkean employs around 60 people today, up from around 15 folks at the time of its Series A. It plans to hire rapidly now that it has more capital. Eliyahu claims most of its Series A is still in the bank. So why did it raise?

Because Eliyahu considers his startup’s market to be so large that he wants to pull the company’s future closer to today; the new capital will give Tonkean the space it needs to hire more rapidly and build more quickly than it might have if it continued to operate from a smaller capital case.

Fifty million dollars is a lot of money. Let’s see how far it gets Tonkean. The next time we talk to the company, we’ll demand some harder growth metrics so we can see if the additional capital was the accelerant that the company hopes it will be.

Update: Google has now confirmed the delay, writing in a blog post that its engagement with UK regulators over the so-called “Privacy Sandbox” means support for tracking cookies won’t start being phased out in Chrome until the second half of 2023.

Our original report follows below… 

Adtech giant Google appears to be leaning toward postponing a long planned deprecation of third party tracking cookies.

The plan dates back to 2019 when it announced the long-term initiative that will make it harder for online marketers and advertisers to track web users, including by deprecating third party cookies in Chrome.

Then in January 2020 it said it would make the switch within two years. Which would mean by 2022.

Google confirmed to TechCrunch that it has a Privacy Sandbox announcement incoming today — set for 4pm BST/5pm CET — after we contacted it to ask for confirmation of information we’d heard, via our own sources.

We’ve been told Google’s new official timeline for implementation will be 2023.

However a spokesman for the tech giant danced around providing a direct confirmation — saying that “an update” is incoming shortly.

“We do have an announcement today that will shed some light on Privacy Sandbox updates,” the spokesman also told us.

He had responded to our initial email — which had asked Google to confirm that it will postpone the implementation of Privacy Sandbox to 2023; and for any statement on the delay — with an affirmation (“yep”) so, well, a delay looks likely. But we’ll see how exactly Google will spin that in a few minutes when it publishes the incoming Privacy Sandbox announcement.

Google has previously said it would depreciate support for third party cookies by 2022 — which naturally implies that the wider Privacy Sandbox stack of related adtech would also need to be in place by then.

Earlier this year it slightly hedged the 2022 timeline, saying in January that any changes would not be made before 2022.

The issue for Google is that regulatory scrutiny of its plan has stepped up — following antitrust complaints from the adtech industry which faces huge changes to how it can track and target Internet users.

In Europe, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has been working with the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office to understand the competition and privacy implications of Google’s planned move. And, earlier this month, the CMA issued a notification of intention to accept proposed commitments from Google that would enable the regulator to block any depreciation of cookies if it’s not happy it can be done in a way that’s good for competition and privacy.

At the time we asked Google how the CMA’s involvement might impact the Privacy Sandbox timeline but the company declined to comment.

Increased regulatory oversight of Big Tech will have plenty of ramifications — most obviously it means the end of any chance for giants like Google to ‘move fast and break things’.

JW Player, a very early mover in the market for online video technology — it powered YouTube’s first video player, before Google acquired it and it built its own — has long been profitable through a business model of providing one-to-many video streaming tools to publishers and others that want to bring video into their own online experiences, without building the technology from the ground up, nor being beholden to companies that might themselves profit from the videos and the customer data that is generated through video views.

Now, after a year of strong growth on the back of the bigger boom in online video from Covid-19, the New York-based company is announcing a big funding round — $100 million — to expand its tech, and to be where it believes video is going next.

The capital is coming from a single investor, LLR Partners, and while the JW Player’s valuation is not being disclosed, we understand it’s not quite yet at $1 billion, but fast approaching it. It comes on the heels of the company charting some massive growth, despite being a relatively quiet player in the industry.

Dave Otten, the CEO and co-founder of the company (which is named after another co-founder, Jeroen Wijering, who developed the initial technology), told TechCrunch in an interview that the company’s video streaming traffic by nearly 200% over the last year, with live streaming growing 400% in that period.

There are now over 600,000 applications and sites running video powered by JW Player, with about 10,000 of those premium users; the rest use its software for free, Otten said.

This is enough of a balance that the company has been profitable for a number of years, he said. And in cases where the software is being used for free, JW Player is getting “paid” in a  Some of the many customers using its tools include Sesame Street, TIME, Hearst, Insider, IMDB and the Chelsea Football Club.

It’s a long way away from JW’s early days powering YouTube — screen shot of how it looked above — but contrary to so many examples of early movers being some of the slowest to innovate later on, JW is hoping that the fact that it was a first mover in video does not mean it will be the last to anticipate what is coming in the future.

The current product challenge for JW Player mirrors that of its customers: monetization.

Just as companies have increasingly started to create paywalls around their written content, they are looking to do the same for their video catalogues, too, and JW Player wants to be their partner for this. That will include more investments into subscription services, as well as a a new set of tools for personalizing videos and providing advertising opportunities by way of the extensive data that it has amassed and continues to gather about video usage.

The company has a strong card to play in its hand for the latter business: those who use the free version of JW Player “pay” the company by way of helping it gather lots of insights into how videos are watched.

Another area that the company will be doing more is in the area of live and on-demand video. In May, it acquired Vualto, a UK-based specialist in these areas that also builds DRM solutions, which it has already integrated into its platform.

Video now accounts for a whopping 80% of all online traffic, with people typically spending more than two hours days watching it. While some of that is inevitably going big platforms like YouTube, Facebook, social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, there remains a big opportunity for others, aided by the likes of JW, to carve out spaces for themselves in the mix.

“JW Player has been at the forefront of digital video innovation ever since founder Jeroen Wijering created YouTube’s original video player in 2008. Today, the company offers the most comprehensive technology, advertising and data analytics platform in the digital video ecosystem,” said David Reuter, Partner at LLR Partners, in a statement. “We look forward to partnering with the JW Player team as they expand their platform and continue to elevate the way brands can host, stream and monetize video.”

Electric propulsion developer Orbion Space Technology has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round, which it says it will use to scale production capacity of its Aurora propulsion system.

The Michigan-based startup manufactures Hall effect plasma thrusters for use in small and cube satellites. Thrusters are used throughout the lifespan of a satellite (or any object in space that needs to maintain its orbit, like the space station) to adjust orbital altitude, avoid collisions, and de-orbit the craft once it has reached the end of its useful life. Hall thrusters use a magnetic field to ionize a propellant and produce plasma.

While they have long been used in space, this type of thruster has mostly been too expensive for small satellite operators. Orbion says it has created a cost-effective production capacity to meet the growing demand of startups and developers launching to low Earth orbit. Orbion CEO Brad King said in a statement that the company considered contract manufacturers but ultimately chose a vertically integrated manufacturing model. Now, the company says it has outgrown its existing manufacturing space.

The company is facing “unprecedented market demand” for its Aurora system, King said. With the boom of the so-called new space economy, driven in part by the decreased costs of processors, components and even launch, it’s no surprise that there’s been a concurrent uptick in demand for efficient in-space propulsion systems.

Image Credits: Orbion Space Technology (opens in a new window)

The company had previously raised a $9.2 million Series A in August 2019. Since that time, the company secured a research partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense that’s testing the resiliency of American space systems. Orbion also landed a contract with satellite manufacturer Blue Canyon Technologies last September.

This most recent funding round was led by the US-India VC firm Inventus Capital Partners, with additional participation from Material Impact, Beringea and Wakestream Ventures.

“The space game is changing,” Inventus Capital Partners investor Kanwal Rekhi said in a statement. “Large satellites are being replaced by a multitude of nano-satellites; just like the PCs replaced mainframes. Orbion is providing these nano-satellites maneuverability to get into more precise orbits and stay there longer.”

Volvo Cars and Luminar Technologies are beefing up their partnership. The two companies said Thursday that Luminar’s autonomous driving stack – a combination of hardware and software that includes lidar sensors and a proprietary perception system – will be standard on Volvo’s forthcoming flagship electric SUV.

Luminar had previously announced the production deal with Volvo last May. But at that time, Luminar’s stack was going to be optional on the flagship vehicle — an upgrade that would add on cost. Now, it will be built into each vehicle as a matter of course.

However, customers will still have to pay if they want to take advantage of the Highway Pilot functionality. That capability, which will be available only when the vehicle is driving on a highway, puts the driver out of the loop — they won’t even have to actively monitor the vehicle, as is common in some systems already on the road today, a source familiar with the technology told TechCrunch. It’s the highest capability of autonomy that the system offers, and if customers want it, they will have to pay for it.

That functionality will be activated wirelessly when the conditions are verified to be safe, Luminar said in a news release. What customers won’t have to pay for is a suite of safety capabilities, like automatic emergency braking and lane-keeping, that target the most common cause of car accidents.

The deal is undoubtedly a major boon for Luminar. In addition to higher production volumes, the company will also benefit from the many thousands of driving miles its system will be exposed to — valuable data that it can feed back into its autonomous driving stack. The system will also be capable of wireless over-the-air updates, so drivers should benefit as it grows ‘smarter’ over time.

Volvo did not reveal how much the Highway Pilot add-on will cost, nor whether it will be available in a subscription model or as a one-time purchase. But the carmaker did say that all vehicles will be “hardware ready” for unsupervised autonomous driving once it’s available.

A lot of startups were built to help people make all-cash offers on homes with the purpose of gaining an edge against other buyers, especially in ultra-competitive markets. 

Accepti.inc is a Denver-based company that is attempting to create a new category in real estate technology. To help scale its digital mortgage lending platform, the company announced today that it has secured $90 million in debt and equity – with $78 million in debt and $12 million in equity. Signal Fire led the equity portion of its financing, which also included participation from existing seed investors Y Combinator and DN Capital.

Accept.inc describes itself as an iLender, or a “technology-enabled lender” that gives people a way to submit all-cash offers on a home upon qualifying for a mortgage.

Using its platform, a buyer gets qualified first and then can start looking for homes that fall at or under the amount he or she is approved for. They can purchase a more expensive home, but any amount above what they are approved for would have to come out of pocket. Historically, most buyers don’t know that they will have to pay out of pocket until they’ve made an offer on a specific home and an appraisal comes under the amount of the price they are paying for a home. In those cases, the buyer has to cough up the difference out of pocket. With Accept.inc., its execs tout, buyers know upfront how much they are approved for and can spend on a new home “so there are no surprises later.”

SignalFire Founding Partner and CTO Ilya Kirnos describes Accept.inc as “the first and only iLender.”

He points out that since it is a lender, Accept.inc doesn’t make its money by charging buyers fees like some others in the all-cash offer space.

“Unlike ‘iBuyers’ or ‘alternative iBuyers,’ Accept.inc fronts the cash to buy a house and then makes money off mortgage origination and title, meaning sellers, homebuyers and their agents pay no additional cost for the service,” he told TechCrunch.

IBuyers instead buy homes from sellers who signed up online, make a profit by often fixing up and selling those homes and then helping people purchase a different home with all cash. They also make money by charging transaction fees. A slew of companies operate in the space including established players such as Opendoor and Zillow and newer players such as Homelight.

Image credit: Accept.inc. Left to right: Co-founders Adam Pollack, Nick Friedman and Ian Perrex.

Since its 2016 inception, Accept.inc says it has helped thousands of buyers, agents and sellers close on “hundreds of millions of dollars” in homes. The company saw ”14x” growth in 2020 and from June 2020 to June 2021, it achieved “10x” growth in terms of the size of its team and number of transactions and revenue, according to CEO and co-founder Adam Pollack. Accept.inc wants to use its new capital to build on that momentum and meet demand.

Pollack and Nick Friedman met while in college and started building Accept.inc with the goal of “turning every offer into a cash offer.” The pair essentially “failed for two years,” half-jokes Pollack.

“We basically became an encyclopedia of 1,000 ways the idea of helping people make all-cash offers wouldn’t work,” he said.

The team went through Y Combinator in the winter of 2019 and that’s when they created the iLender concept. In the iLender model, the company uses its cash to buy a house for buyers. Once the loan with Accept.inc is ready to close, the company sells back the house to the buyer “at no additional cost or fees.”

“Basically what we learned through those two years is that you have to vertically integrate all of your core competencies, and you can’t rely on third parties to own or manage your special sauce for you,” Pollack told TechCrunch. “We also realized that if you’re going to build a cash offer for anyone who could afford a mortgage, you’ve got to make it a full bona fide cash offer that closes in three days as opposed to a better version of what existed. And you have to own that, and take the risk that comes with it and be comfortable with that.”

The benefits of their model, the pair say, is that buyers get to be cash buyers, sellers can close in as little as 32 hours, and agents “get a guaranteed commission check.” 

“Our mission is that everyone should have an equal chance at homeownership,” Friedman said. “We not only want to level the playing field, we want to create a new standard.”

Buyers using Accept.inc win 6-7 times more frequently, the company claims. With its new capital, It also plans to double its team of 90 and enter new markets outside of its home base of Denver.

SignalFire Partner Chris Scoggins believes that Accept.inc is different from other lenders in that its focus is on “winning the home, not just servicing the loan, with a business model that’s 10x more capital-efficient than other players in the market.

“The team is driven…to level the playing field for homebuyers who today lose out against all-cash offers from home-flippers and wealthy individuals,” he added. “We see an enormous opportunity for Accept.inc to become the backbone of the future of mortgage lending.”

It’s no surprise that the coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we shop, especially when it comes to groceries. Grocery delivery apps experienced a record number of downloads in March 2020, and by the following month, Walmart Grocery (which is now integrated into the Walmart app) surpassed Amazon as the No. 1 shopping app on both Google Play and the App Store. But even as pandemic restrictions have eased, consumers are still using ordering groceries for delivery or pickup more frequently than they were pre-pandemic.

As Walmart’s grocery delivery services have continued to boom, posing competition to companies like Amazon and Instacart, the tech that Walmart uses has expanded too. Today, Walmart shared information about how it’s training its AI to make smarter substitutions in online grocery orders.

Bringing this technology to grocery delivery isn’t novel by any means. Last May, Walmart reported how it used to AI to determine eligibility for its Express delivery service, which was brand new at the time. A year into the United States’ coronavirus outbreak, Instacart engineers reported that they crunched “petabytes daily to predict what will be on grocery shelves and even how long it will take to find parking.”

So what makes Walmart’s AI for grocery substitutions unique? According to Srini Venkatesan, an Executive Vice President at Walmart Global Tech, it’s the sheer quantity of data that Walmart can use to teach its AI. Over 200 million people shop at Walmart in-store and online each week for more than 150,000 different grocery products. The AI uses that data to predict consumer behavior, preferences, and needs.

“The tech we built uses deep learning AI to consider hundreds of variables — size, type, brand, price, aggregate shopper data, individual customer preference, current inventory and more — in real time to determine the best next available item,” explained Venkatesan. “It then preemptively asks the customer to approve the substituted item or let us know they don’t want it, an important signal that’s fed back into our learning algorithms to improve the accuracy of future recommendations.”

Image Credits: Walmart

Rather than asking a Personal Shopper to make a quick decision about how to substitute for cherry yogurt (do you get a different flavor from the same brand, the same flavor from a more expensive brand, and so on), the AI makes that choice for them. Walmart started developing this algorithm last year, and in the time since, customer acceptance of substitutions has improved.

“We were at about 90% before this algorithm rolled out,” said Venkatesan. “We are now around 97% to 98%.”

In the last year, Walmart doubled its number of Personal Shoppers to over 170,000 workers. About 3,750 stores are enabled for order pickup, and 3,000 stores are enabled for delivery, which covers 68% of the population. Earlier this year, Walmart dropped the $35 order minimum on its Express delivery service, a competitor to Amazon’s Prime Now.