Year: 2021

Pitching is the single-most important skill a founder needs to refine to be successful in building a startup. You can’t attract a co-founder, teammates, customers or investors without a well-crafted pitch about your product and vision, and so learning how to pitch and communicate effectively tends to be the first gateway to early entrepreneurial success.

While books and talks galore have been published on pitching, the reality is that the art of the pitch deck is a constantly changing fashion. The pandemic last year upended notions of how to draft a deck, given that founders had to pitch virtually on shared screens. As always, those aesthetics continue to change: VCs are busier than ever, seeing more companies than ever, and have to wade through ever more decks in their quest to find the next startups to back.

As we enter a hybrid investing world with a mix of online and in-person pitching, getting the pitch deck right has changed again — and remains just as important as ever.

That’s why we’re excited to be hosting Mar Hershenson, the founding managing partner of Pear VC, on one of our most perennially popular panels about How to Craft Your Pitch Deck, which will happen on the Extra Crunch stage at the all-virtual TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 coming up this September 21-23.

Hershenson has been a longtime venture capitalist and has consistently invested at the founding stages of startups. She has backed IPO’d companies like Guardant Health and DoorDash, as well as startups such as Aurora Solar, BioAge and Branch. Perhaps most importantly, in our survey of founders last year, Hershenson was one of the top-ranked VCs in the world in terms of founder recommendations.

Her background is as a technical builder and entrepreneur. In addition to nabbing a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford, Hershenson co-founded three companies before heading into venture: Barcelona Design, Sabio Labs and Revel Touch.

On this panel, Hershenson will discuss what’s changed when it comes to pitch decks in 2021, how she evaluates pitch decks in her day-to-day investing work, and whether and how pitch decks evolve and expand from first connection to final pitch meeting. We’ll also be taking questions from the audience to ensure that we cover all the strategies and tactics you have questions on about this critical skill.

So come join Hershenson (and all of our other fantastic speakers) at Disrupt 2021 online this September 21-23.

In just one month we kick off TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising (July 8-9). If you’re an early-stage founder (pre-seed through Series A), don’t miss out on this two-day bootcamp. You’ll learn from the top experts across the startup ecosystem and take away tips and advice that you can implement in your business right now.

Get amongst it: Buy your TC Early Stage 2021 pass, and be sure to look at our jam-packed agenda to start planning your schedule.

When we say this event focuses on information every startup founder needs to build a successful business, we mean it. Case in point: Nate Wright, vice president of product marketing at UserTesting, will hold forth on the topic of customer experience.

Customer experience can make or break any business. Right now — in the early stages of building your startup — is the perfect time to bake an outstanding customer experience into your company’s infrastructure. That means evaluating every touchpoint along way and implementing policies that ensure a great experience.

Fact: A great experience leads to happy, loyal customers, and we all know that happy loyal customers deliver better business results.

That’s a subject worth mastering, amirite? Here’s the description of Nate’s presentation, which takes place on July 8 from 12:45 pm – 1:25 pm (EDT).

Iterating More Effectively with Feedback: A great product alone is not enough. To be successful, early-stage companies need to optimize all phases of the customer journey. This session will include tactics, best practices and case studies on how to use customer feedback to understand customer needs, craft more compelling messaging, and improve all phases of the customer experience.

We’ll add more breakout sessions — from Dell, Flatfile and Movile — to the agenda soon. And don’t stress about time conflicts. Your pass includes video on demand, so you can watch any sessions you miss or review sessions to catch any details you might have missed.

TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising takes place on July 8-9. Buy your pass, strap on your boots, head to camp and learn how to build a stronger startup.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Early Stage 2021 – Marketing & Fundraising? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Solid Power, a solid-state battery developer backed by Ford and BMW, is going public. The company said Tuesday it would head to the NASDAQ via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Decarbonization Plus Acquisition Corp III at a post-deal implied market valuation of $1.2 billion.

The transaction is expected to generate around $600 million in cash, including a $165 million private investment in public equity (PIPE) transaction from investors Koch Strategic Platforms, Riverstone Energy Limited, Neuberger Berman and Van Eck Associates Corporation. Solid Power said in a statement Tuesday that the funds will go toward growth and operations.

Solid state batteries are considered by many as the next long-awaited breakthrough in battery technology. They are so named because they lack a liquid electrolyte, the mechanism that moves ions between the cathode and anode in traditional lithium-ion batteries, as Mark Harris explained in an Extra Crunch article earlier this year. By getting rid of this liquid component, developers say SSBs are safer and with far superior energy density. Solid Power said in a June 15 investor presentation that its batteries are expected to deliver a nearly 500-mile range on a single charge and more than double a conventional battery’s 8-year lifespan.

Ford Motor Company and BMW AG have made it clear they’re bullish on Solid Power’s ability to deliver. The two OEMs led the battery developer’s $130 million Series B in May and signed joint development agreements for automotive-scale batteries from Solid Power’s pilot production line to be delivered in early 2022.

The SPAC transaction will likely be completed in the fourth quarter of 2021, Solid Power said. It’s expected to trade on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “SLDP.”

Solid Power is just the latest battery company to go public via a SPAC in recent months. One of its main rivals, Volkswagen-backed QuantumScape, went public via a SPAC merger last September at a valuation of $3.3 billion. Earlier this year, European battery manufacturer FREYR and power system developer Microvast also announced mergers with so-called “blank-check” firms.

The UK’s competition watchdog will take a deep dive look into Apple and Google’s dominance of the mobile ecosystem, it said today — announcing a market study which will examine the pair’s respective smartphone platforms (iOS and Android); their app stores (App Store and Play Store); and web browsers (Safari and Chrome). 

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is concerned that the mobile platform giants’ “effective duopoly” in those areas  might be harming consumers, it added.

The study will be wide ranging, with the watchdog concerns about the nested gateways that are created as a result of the pair’s dominance of mobile ecosystem — intermediating how consumers can access a variety of products, content and services (such as music, TV and video streaming; fitness tracking, shopping and banking, to cite some of the examples provided by the CMA).

“These products also include other technology and devices such as smart speakers, smart watches, home security and lighting (which mobiles can connect to and control),” it went on, adding that it’s looking into whether their dominance of these pipes is “stifling competition across a range of digital markets”, saying too that it’s “concerned this could lead to reduced innovation across the sector and consumers paying higher prices for devices and apps, or for other goods and services due to higher advertising prices”.

The CMA further confirmed the deep dive will examine “any effects” of the pair’s market power over other businesses — giving the example of app developers who rely on Apple or Google to market their products to customers via their smart devices.

The watchdog already has an open investigation into Apple’s App Store, following a number of antitrust complaints by developers.

It is investigating Google’s planned depreciation of third party tracking cookies too, after complaints by adtech companies and publishers that the move could harm competition. (And just last week the CMA said it was minded to accept a series of concessions offered by Google that would enable the regulator to stop it turning off support for cookies entirely if it believes the move will harm competition.)

The CMA said both those existing investigations are examining issues that fall within the scope of the new mobile ecosystem market study but that its work on the latter will be “much broader”.

It added that it will adopt a joined-up approach across all related cases — “to ensure the best outcomes for consumers and other businesses”.

It’s giving itself a full year to examine Gapple’s mobile ecosystems.

It is also soliciting feedback on any of the issues raised in its statement of scope — calling for responses by 26 July. The CMA added that it’s also keen to hear from app developers, via its questionnaire, by the same date.

Taking on tech giants

The watchdog has previously scrutinized the digital advertising market — and found plenty to be concerned about vis-a-vis Google’s dominance there.

That earlier market study has been feeding the UK government’s plan to reform competition rules to take account of the market-deforming power of digital giants. And the CMA suggested the new market study, examining ‘Gapple’s’ mobile muscle, could similarly help shape UK-wide competition law reforms.

Last year the UK announced its plan to set up a “pro-competition” regime for regulating Internet platforms — including by establishing a dedicated Digital Markets Unit within the CMA (which got going earlier this year).

The legislation for the reform has not yet been put before parliament but the government has said it wants the competition regulator to be able to “proactively shape platforms’ behavior” to avoid harmful behavior before it happens” — saying too that it supports enabling ex ante interventions once a platform has been identified to have so-called “strategic market status”.

Germany already adopted similar reforms to its competition law (early this year), which enable proactive interventions to tackle large digital platforms with what is described as “paramount significance for competition across markets”. And its Federal Cartel Office has, in recent months, wasted no time in opening a number of proceedings to determine whether Amazon, Google and Facebook have such a status.

The CMA also sounds keen to get going to tackle Internet gatekeepers.

Commenting in a statement, CEO Andrea Coscelli said:

“Apple and Google control the major gateways through which people download apps or browse the web on their mobiles – whether they want to shop, play games, stream music or watch TV. We’re looking into whether this could be creating problems for consumers and the businesses that want to reach people through their phones.

“Our ongoing work into big tech has already uncovered some worrying trends and we know consumers and businesses could be harmed if they go unchecked. That’s why we’re pressing on with launching this study now, while we are setting up the new Digital Markets Unit, so we can hit the ground running by using the results of this work to shape future plans.”

The European Union also unveiled its own proposals for clipping the wings of big tech last year — presenting its Digital Markets Act plan in December which will apply a single set of operational rules to so-called “gatekeeper” platforms operating across the EU.

The clear trend in Europe on digital competition is toward increasing oversight and regulation of the largest platforms — in the hopes that antitrust authorities can impose measures that will help smaller players thrive.

Critics might say that’s just playing into the tech giants’ hands, though — because it’s fiddling around the edges when more radical intervention (break ups) are what’s really needed to reboot captured markets.

Apple and Google were contacted for comment on the CMA’s market study.

A Google spokesperson said: “Android provides people with more choice than any other mobile platform in deciding which apps they use, and enables thousands of developers and manufacturers to build successful businesses. We welcome the CMA’s efforts to understand the details and differences between platforms before designing new rules.”

According to Google, the Android App Economy generated £2.8BN in revenue for UK developers last year, which it claims supported 240,000 jobs across the country — citing a Public First report that it commissioned.

The tech giant also pointed to operational changes it has already made in Europe, following antitrust interventions by the European Commission — such as adding a choice screen to Android where users can pick from a list of alternative search engines.

Earlier this month it agreed to shift the format underlying that choice screen from an unpopular auction model to free participation.

Cruise, the self-driving subsidiary of GM, has tapped a $5 billion line of credit from the automaker’s financial arm to pay for hundreds of purpose-built electric and autonomous Origin vehicles as they start to roll off the assembly line.

The access to the credit provided by GM Financial will push Cruise’s “total war chest” to more than $10 billion as it prepares for commercialization, CEO Dan Ammann wrote in a blog post Tuesday.

Pre-production of the Cruise Origin, which was first unveiled in January 2020, has started at GM’s Factory ZERO assembly plant. Factory ZERO is the renamed and renovated Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant. Last year, GM announced plans to invest $2.2 billion into the factory to produce all-electric trucks and SUVs as well as Cruise Origin. The automaker said at the time it will invest an additional $800 million in supplier tooling and other projects related to the launch of the new electric trucks. Detroit-Hamtramck will be GM’s first fully dedicated electric vehicle assembly plant. When fully operational, the plant will create more than 2,200 jobs, according to GM.

The Origin, the product of a multi-year collaboration with parent company GM and investor Honda, is designed for a ridesharing service. The shuttle-like vehicle has no steering wheel or pedals and is designed to travel at highway speeds. The interior is roomy, with seats that face each other, similar to what a traveler might find on some trains.

The first run of 100 pre-production Cruise Origins will be assembled over the summer and tested at GM’s Milford proving grounds. Commercial production of the Cruise Origin is expected to begin in 2023.

E-commerce platform Shopify announced this morning its one-click checkout service known as Shop Pay will become available to any U.S. merchant that sells on Facebook or Google — even if they don’t use Shopify’s software to power their online stores. That makes Shop Pay the first Shopify product offered to non-Shopify merchants, the company notes.

First introduced at its developer conference in 2017, Shop Pay is similar to other instant checkout solutions that offer an easier way to pay online by reducing the number of fields a customer has to fill out during the checkout process. The service remembers and encrypts the customer’s information, so consumers can check out with just a tap when shopping online and, as of recently, even pay for purchase in installments, thanks to a partnership with Affirm.

Shopify in February had expanded Shop Pay to Facebook and Instagram, in partnership with Facebook, but it only worked for existing Shopify merchants selling on those social platforms at the time. In May, Google announced at its I/O developer conference it was partnering with Shopify on an online shopping expansion that would give Shopify’s more than 1.7 million merchants the ability to reach customers through Google Search and other “shopping journeys” that began through other Google properties like Search, Maps, Images, Lens, and YouTube.

The company declined to share how many of its 1.7 million merchants are already available on Facebook or Google today, but said they are two of the most popular channels.

Following today’s announcement, other merchants will also have the option to adopt Shop Pay for their own Facebook or Google stores. While how many will actually do so is yet unknown, Shopify notes that every day 1.8 billion people log onto Facebook and a billion shopping sessions take place across Google.

The company also touted Shop Pay’s advantages, including its 70% faster checkout than a typical checkout offers, with a 1.72x higher conversion rate — meaning fewer abandoned charts.

For consumers, the advantage of using Shop Pay over a traditional checkout, beyond the speed, is its integration with Shopify’s mobile app, Shop, which organizes and tracks your online orders across merchants, including Amazon,  so you can see when orders are arriving or quickly ask questions and manage returns.

To date, the Shop app has tracked over 430 million orders, the company says.

Over time, the Shop app can also customize a feed including users’ favorite stores to point to other recommendations, including those from local merchants. Shopify confirmed that the Shop app will be able to track the Shop Pay-enabled orders from the non-Shopify merchants.

“Since launching, Shop Pay has set the standard for checkout experiences, facilitating more than $24 billion in orders,” noted Shopify VP, Carl Rivera, who heads Product for Shop. “According to studies, cart abandonment averages 70%, with nearly 20% occurring because of a complicated checkout process. Shop Pay makes that process fast and simple, and the expansion to all merchants selling on Facebook and Google is a mission-critical step in bringing a best-in-class checkout to every consumer, every merchant, every platform, and every device,” he added.

The expansion could be a notable challenge to other payment mechanisms, including PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, and those offered by the platforms themselves, thanks to Shopify’s growing traction with merchants — one analysis gives its platform a 23% market share in the U.S — combined with the popularity of the Shop app, now the No. 3 Shopping app on the App Store.

The news follows yesterday’s confirmation that Shopify has taken a significant stake in payments giant Stripe, the backbone of the Shop Pay service, as well as Shopify’s partner on merchant services, including bank accounts and debit cards.

Shopify says the Shop Pay service will be enabled for all U.S. merchants selling on Facebook in the “coming months,” and will roll out to all merchants on Google by late 2021.

Following a smattering of leaks, Sonos and Ikea just unveiled the newest addition to their three-year-old Symfonisk line of home speakers. As the name implies, the Picture Frame is a medium-size, flat-panel speaker that can either be mounted on a wall or sat on a shelf via kickstand.

As with the rest of the Symfonisk line, the product is designed to get out of its own way, and blend in its surroundings. It’s a direction much of the industry has gone in over the last several years, with fabric covers aimed at matching the surrounding décor and more or less fade into the background.

Image Credits: Ikea/Sonos

The Picture Frame form factor is another logical extension of this, with a design that doesn’t require clearing off desk space. The front grille is covered in either black or white, with a design created by artist Jennifer Idrizi, which Ikea notes was inspired by cymatics – a visualization of sound vibrations. Fitting and simple, though the company also offers a pair of replacement panels with different designs, at $20.

The Picture Frame itself is $199 – not cheap, exactly, but certainly not unreasonable – especially by Sonos hardware standards. It features built-in WiFi, connects with the rest of Sonos’ hardware and works with 100 different streaming services. There are volume and Play/Pause buttons built in and a number of small touches, like the ability to reconfigure the power cord placement, based on how the frame is positioned.

It’s will be available online and in Ikea stores starting a month from today. The Symfonisk line also includes a lamp speaker and a more traditional rectangular form factor, ranging between $100 and $200.

Waterloo-based SkyWatch was among the first startups to recognize that the key to unlocking the real benefits of the space economy lay in making Earth observation data accessible and portable, and now the company has raised a $17.2 million Series B to help it further that goal. Fresh on the heals of a partnership with Poland-based satellite operator SatRevolution, SkyWatch is now set to bridge the gulf between satellite startups and customers in a bigger way as it lowers the barriers to entry for new companies focused on high-tech spacecraft payloads.

The new round of funding was led by new investor Drive Capital, and included participation from existing investors including Bullpen Capital, Space Capital, Golden Ventures and BDC Ventures. SkyWatch CEO and co-founder James Slifierz told me that bringing Drive on was a major win for the Series B.

“Drive is a firm that has actually been researching the space industry for a few years now, and looking for an opportunity that would be their first space technology investment,” he said. “Not their first in the [GTA-Waterloo] area  they’re based out of Columbus, Ohio, made up of Silicon Valley veterans. They were a little early to the trend of believing that a majority of the really interesting and large opportunities would eventually evolve outside of the Bay Area and outside of New York City.”

SkyWatch definitely fits the bill, having built strong revenue pipeline for an Earth observation data platform that makes the information collected by the many observation satellites on orbit accessible to private industry, in a way that doesn’t require re-architecting existing systems or handling huge amounts of data in unfamiliar formats.

This fresh funding will help SkyWatch accelerate the rollout of its TerraStream product, a nw platform that the company developed to provide full-service data management, ordering, processing and delivery for satellite companies. This allows SkyWatch to not only make data collected by Earth observation satellites like those operated by SatRevolution accessible to customers — but also to source customers for those companies, too, effectively handling both sales and delivery, which many satellite startups born from a technical or academic background don’t start out equipped to tackle.

“My favorite analogy for TerraStream is it’s Shopify for space companies,” Slifierz said. “It takes away a lot of the complexity of going to market. So if you want to build an amazing shoe brand today, Shopify enables you to not have to worry about the logistics, and shipping, and the inventory management, the website, storefront and all that; it allows you to focus on the things that will build value in your company, which is the quality of your product, and your brand.”

He added that just like Shopify depends on the existence of a rich third-party ecosystem to support its platform, so does SkyWatch, and that ecosystem is only now reaching maturity after years of infrastructure development, including things like the proliferation of launch startups, ground station build out, data warehousing and more.

Ultimately, what SkyWatch provides is the ability to go to market “faster and more profitably,” Slifierz says, which is a major shift for hard tech satellite startups working on new and improved sensor capabilities, often spinning out of research labs at academic institutions.

“The strongest value proposition is that we give you instant access to hundreds of customers, which we’re growing at a very fast pace on the EarthCache [SkyWatch’s commercial satellite imagery marketplace] side. So in that way, we sort of joke, it’s like Shopify for space, but also integrated with the AWS marketplace.”

SkyWatch can also actually help identify demand, by providing satellite-side customers with real data to back up signals of what the market is actually looking for. Slifierz says that’s helped them advised partners on how to tweak their offering to meet a real need, which is beneficial in an industry where research and tech development often lead payload design, with actual demand as a somewhat secondary consideration.

Canada made headlines during U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration for its efforts to lure STEM workers north. Trump is gone now, but Canada hasn’t stopped trying to recruit talent from its neighbor — and one of the hottest fronts in this talent war is biotech.

For generations of Canadian engineers, coders and researchers, Silicon Valley’s better salaries and weather were a siren call. But four years of Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric, policy and visa restrictions gave Canadian tech companies and governments a competitive advantage.

After Trump took office in 2016, Canada’s federal government boosted the tech ecosystems of cities like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver by creating a program to fast-track immigration. Canadian tech leaders climbed aboard with campaigns to tempt more workers north. In Quebec, the industry even persuaded Quebec’s notoriously immigration-shy provincial government to accept as many as 14% more newcomers.

The pandemic-driven exodus from Silicon Valley has sent large numbers of Canadian expatriates flocking home. The number of Canadians applying for the U.S. H-1B program has fallen dramatically, accelerating a decade-long trend.

Still, Canadian tech and political leaders remain concerned about the inbound flow of talent to key sectors like advanced manufacturing, clean tech and biotechnology. They’re pressing every button they can to chip away at long-held American advantages.

Much of the action is in biotech. COVID-19 has exposed Canada’s lack of vaccine manufacturing capacity, but the country has a vibrant biotech and life-sciences research sector, driven by an excellent university ecosystem and several thousand startup ventures doing cutting-edge research. Many of these firms have cashed in on the pandemic biotech investment boom, racking in a record amount of venture capital in 2020.

But while this influx has changed the funding landscape, many Canadian companies are still trying to reach scale. The Canadian tech ecosystem is full of talent but it hasn’t traditionally developed, recruited and retained enough of the senior people these firms need to develop into global powerhouses.

They don’t just need scientists — they need business leaders. A recent survey of Toronto-area hubs and ventures revealed that biomedical engineering, regenerative medicine and related firms are suffering significant shortages of senior executives, top managers and scientific specialists, who gravitate toward the better pay and opportunities of the U.S. industries.

At a recent summit of Canada’s Innovation Economy Council (IEC), which both our organizations belong to, industry leaders spoke of unfilled jobs in global regulatory affairs and business development, even chief medical officers. These are hybrid roles that require the kind of technical and business acumen forged from both academic training and progressive leadership roles in the workplace.

Canadian universities, hubs and venture-capital firms are reacting to this need by building specialized training institutes and programs. And scaling Canadian companies are trying to fill the gaps by using newly raised cash to recruit heavily in the U.S. and beyond, offering remote work and flexible work hours while striking partnerships and investigating untapped talent pools.

Against this backdrop, Canada’s federal government just delivered its first full budget in two years. It’s one of the most activist tech-spending plans the country has ever rolled out, showing how seriously the federal government is about building out advanced industries and creating STEM jobs at a time when global markets are moving away from the country’s traditional energy exports, natural resources and manufactured goods. The budget includes college research partnerships, hiring subsidies, grants, and support for incubators and hubs. Critically, there is also a $2.2 billion commitment for building a life-sciences talent pipeline.

Canadians have been broadly supportive of government spending to beat back COVID-19 and hasten the transition to a new economy. An IEC/Campaign Research poll conducted in early April found 3:1 public support for investments in postsecondary STEM education and similarly strong support for government investment in advanced manufacturing, including biotech. That’s just what it takes to compete with a neighbor 10 times your size.

It’s fair to say that Canada won’t drain the U.S. of all its research scientists and Big Pharma CEOs anytime soon. But with an influx of investment capital, a burgeoning tech ecosystem and a concerted policy effort to build, recruit and retain a self-sustaining talent ecosystem, it’s flying under the radar as a place the industry increasingly wants to be.

In other words, America, take note: Canada is actively working to attract your biotech talent.

Macrometa, the edge computing cloud and global data network for app developers, announced today it has raised a $20 million Series A. The round was led by Pelion Venture Partners, with participation from returning investors DNX Ventures (the Japan and US-focused enterprise fund that led Macrometa’s seed round), Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), Partech Partners, Fusion Fund, Sway Ventures and Shasta Ventures.

The startup, which is headquartered in Palo Alto with operations in Bulgaria and India, plans to use its Series A on feature development, acquiring more enterprise customers and integrating with content delivery networks (CDN), cloud and telecom providers. It will hire for its engineering and product development centers in the United States, Eastern Europe and India, and add new centers in Ukraine, Portugal, Greece, Mexico and Argentina.

The company’s last round of funding, an $7 million seed, was announced just eight months ago. Its Series A brings Macrometa’s total raised since its was founded in 2017 to $29 million.

As part of the new round, Macrometa expanded its board of directors, adding Pelion general partner Chris Cooper as a director, and Pelion senior associate Zain Rizavi and DNX Ventures principal Eva Nahari as board observers.

Macrometa’s global data network combines a globally distributed noSQL database and a low-latency stream data processing engine, enabling web and cloud develops to run and scale data-heavy, real-time cloud applications. The network allows developers to run apps concurrently across its 175 points of presence (PoPs), or edge regions, around the world, depending on which one is closest to an end user. Macrometa claims that the mean roundtrip time (RTT) for users on laptops or phones to its edge cloud and back is less than 50 milliseconds globally, or 50x to 100x faster than cloud platforms like DyanmoDB, MongoDB or Firebase.

Macrometa co-founder and CEO Chetan Venkatesh

Since its seed round last year, the company has accelerated its customer acquisition, especially among large global enterprises and web scale players, co-founder and chief executive officer Chetan Venkatesh told TechCrunch. Macrometa also made its self-service platform available to developers, who can try its serverless database, pub/sug, event processing and stateful compute runtime for free.

Macrometa recently became one of two distributed data companies (the other one is Fauna) partnered with Cloudflare for developers building new apps on Workers, its serverless application platform. Venkatesh said the combination of Macrometa and Cloudflare Workers enables data-driven APIs and web services to be 50x to 100x faster in performance and lower latency compared to the public cloud.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated Macrometa’s business significantly, said Venkatesh, because its enterprise and web scale customers needed to handle the unpredictable data traffic patterns created by remote work. The pandemic also “resulted in several secular and permanent shifts in cloud adoption and consumption,” he added, changing how people shop, consume media, content and entertainment. That has “exponentially increased the need for handling dynamic bursts of demands for application infrastructure securely,” he said.

One example of how enterprise clients use Macrometa is e-commerce providers who implemented its infrastructure with their existing CDN and cloud backends to provide more data and AI-based personalization for shoppers, including real-time recommendations, regionalized search at the edge and local data geo-fencing to comply with data and privacy regulations.

Some of Macrometa’s SaaS clients use its global data network as a global data cache for handling surges in usage and keep regional copies of data and API results across its regional data centers. Venkatesh added that several large telecom operators have used Macrometa’s data stream ingestion and complex event processing platform to replace legacy data ingest platforms like Splunk, Tibco and Apache Kafka.

In a statement, Pelion Venture Partners, general partner Chris Cooper said, “We believe the next phase of computing will be focused on the edge, ultimately bringing cloud-based workloads closer to the end user. As more and more workloads move away from a centralized cloud model, Macrometa is becoming the de facto edge provider to run data-heavy and compute-intensive workloads for developers and enterprises alike, globally.”