Author: azeeadmin

The Indianapolis-based venture studio High Alpha has created a new business line called High Alpha Innovations to bring its startup spinup approach to big business.

So far the firm has managed to sign on clients like the financial services firm, Silicon Valley Bank, the industrial manufacturer, Cummins, and the security hardware and services company, Allegion.

Founded by the management team behind ExactTarget, the High Alpha studio shows how new technology ecosystems can emerge when successful founders reinvest in their local technology ecosystems. The venture studio alone has managed to spin up 24 new companies which have either been publicly announced or are still in stealth mode, according to Elliott Parker, who joined High Alpha as Managing Director of Business Design and Corporate Innovation in May of 2018.

And those companies have already raised $140 million in follow-on funding, Parker said.

Parker heads the new High Alpha Innovations business and has already launched one company in conjunction with Cummins, the startup Anvil, which coaches field technicians on how to be safer on the job when they’re working with big machines.

“We got really good at this venture studio model and big companies started to reach out to us,” said Parker of how the new venture got started. 

Unlike accelerator or corporate venture programs that find external companies to invest in, Parker said that the High Alpha Innovation model was really about working with corporate partners to spin up businesses internally and in a collaborative way. “We are staring with problems that the corporation is facing and we’re building our own luck in a way.”

Not every collaboration between the studio and the corporate partner, Parker said. “A lot of times in these partnerships many of the ideas that we identify and develop along the way are transformed into a new product or service. Maybe 80% are product and only 20% are equipped to be a startup,” he said.

High Alpha receives a small amount of funding to manage operations with its corporate partners, but most of the compensation comes in the form of an equity split between High Alpha Innovations and its corporate partners in the startups that get built, according to Parker. Both the sponsoring corporation and High Alpha split the equity stake after a share allocation is made for founders and employees for the startup, Parker said.

“High Alpha Innovation is taking our venture studio playbook and applying it to innovation challenges within the world’s largest organizations,” said Mike Fitzgerald, Partner at High Alpha, in a statement. “This is a major expansion opportunity for High Alpha as we serve our corporate partners and look to scale the studio model across different industries and geographies.” 

“For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has supported the innovators and entrepreneurs that invent the future,” said Melody Dippold, Head of Innovation at Silicon Valley Bank. “High Alpha Innovation has been an important partner as we develop new ideas, solutions and companies together that will help our clients accelerate their own growth and innovation.” 

The new firm is led by Elliott Parker who joined High Alpha as Managing Director of Business Design and Corporate Innovation in May of 2018. Prior to High Alpha, Parker served as a Principal at Innosight, a strategy consulting firm founded by the late Harvard Business School professor and best-selling author Clayton Christensen. 

“Every innovation leader and executive I meet is trying to figure out how to work with venture studios or launch their own corporate studio,” said Parker, the CEO of High Alpha Innovation. “We believe the venture studio is an ideal model for overcoming the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’ and helping companies increase the quality and quantity of their innovation efforts through startup formation. Over the last two decades, we’ve seen an explosion of corporate venture capital investing. We expect a similar trend over the next decade with corporate venture studios and believe we’re uniquely positioned to help.” 

The beauty of podcasting is that anyone can do it. It’s a rare medium that’s nearly as easy to make as it is to consume. And as such, no two people do it exactly the same way. There are a wealth of hardware and software solutions open to potential podcasters, so setups run the gamut from NPR studios to USB Skype rigs (the latter of which has become a kind of default during the current pandemic).

We’ve asked some of our favorite podcast hosts and producers to highlight their workflows — the equipment and software they use to get the job done. The list so far includes:

First Draft and Track Changes’ Sarah Enni
RiYL remote podcasting edition
Family Ghosts’ Sam Dingman
I’m Listening’s Anita Flores
Broken Record’s Justin Richmond
Criminal/This Is Love’s Lauren Spohrer
Jeffrey Cranor of Welcome to Night Vale
Jesse Thorn of Bullseye
Ben Lindbergh of Effectively Wild
My own podcast, RiYL

A miniseries contained within the feed of the massively popular 99% Invisible, Articles of Interest explores a wide variety of topics within the broader subject of clothes. Now entering its second season, the show has garnered positive press for creator Avery Trufelman’s ability to weave complex and intertwining stories, ranging from punk to kids clothing.

In principle, I am not a gearhead. I think people get discouraged from starting to make work because they don’t know what equipment to invest in, and it all is kind of intimidating. For the longest time, I was learning and teaching myself radio with a Zoom H1n––I just used the internal mic––and did interviews that I edited on GarageBand and Audacity. It totally did the trick. All the audio editing programs are dialects of the same language, and I found that it was more important to get a feel for how to work with story, before understanding the technicalities of command keys and mic placement. Those technical elements are simple enough to grasp, but I’m still learning all the time about how to craft a story.

I was really slow to upgrade my equipment, but now I use a Rode NTG-2 shotgun mic and a Zoom H5 to gather all my scene tape. I always try to meet my subjects in person, ideally in their home or their office. I think it puts subjects at ease, and then we don’t have the time constraints that come with studio reservations. I’m also a huge fan of texture and room tone, and tend to think that studios sound a little sterile anyway! When I go out “in the field” I bring a spare Zoom H2n as a backup. Those recorders are so sturdy and dependable and I cannot tell you how many times I’ve dropped them. I like to use them if I need to make a backup recording, and also they’re really nice if you’re trying to inconspicuously record ambiance or a scene, rather than one individual voice.

Normally, to record narration, I would go to the 99% Invisible office, in Beautiful Downtown Oakland, California, to use our whisper room with our extremely lovely Neumann Condenser Mics. But now that we’re all sheltering-in-place, I’m also using my lil Rode/H5n kit to record my narration. And I just do it in my closet. Which is perfect, since I make a show about clothes. In some ways I get a kick out of this scrappy system, because this was how we used to record narration when I first started at 99% Invisible as an intern seven years ago. We just used a shotgun mic in a closet. Punk as hell!

I think it works well enough, but then again, I’m spoiled because I get to work with one of the greatest engineers in the business, Sharif Youssef. He somehow makes everything sound beautiful after I hand him my Pro Tools sessions full of insanely mismatched tape. I’m really appreciative of all the work he does, and I probably have no idea the extent of all that goes on behind the scenes.

The other thing is that COVID-19 came right as I was gearing up to do all the publicity stuff for Articles of Interest. So suddenly all my photoshoot plans were swept off the table. But I remembered that my literal neighbors, across the hall from me in my building, are photographers. So we did a socially distant photoshoot on film, and my neighbor Austin Hobart developed all the images in his bathroom. I think they came out beautifully. But my favorite image is the one we took for an episode about knockoffs–– it’s a paper bag that I drew Louis Vuitton logos all over myself.

Like all business leaders, chief information security officers (CISOs) have shifted their roles quickly and dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, but many have had to fight fires they never expected.

Most importantly, they’ve had to ensure corporate networks remain secure even with 100% of employees suddenly working from home. Controllers are moving millions between corporate accounts from their living rooms, HR managers are sharing employees’ personal information from their kitchen tables and tens of millions of workers are accessing company data using personal laptops and phones.

This unprecedented situation reveals once and for all that security is not only about preventing breaches, but also about ensuring fundamental business continuity.

While it might take time, everyone agrees the pandemic will end. But how will the cybersecurity sector look in a post-COVID-19 world? What type of software will CISOs want to buy in the near future, and two years down the road?

To find out, I asked six of the world’s leading CISOs to share their experiences during the pandemic and their plans for the future, providing insights on how cybersecurity companies should develop and market their solutions to emerge stronger:

• Ian Amit, Cimpress
• Colin Anderson, Levi Strauss & Co.
• Al Ghous, ServiceMax
• Adrian Ludwig, Atlassian
• Rinki Sethi, Rubrik
• Elwin Wong, Ross Stores

The security sector will experience challenges, but also opportunities

The good news is, many CISOs believe that cybersecurity will weather the economic storm better than other enterprise software sectors. That’s because security has become even more top of mind during the pandemic; with the vast majority of corporate employees now working remotely, a secure network has never been more paramount, said Rinki Sethi, CISO at Rubrik. “Many security teams are now focused on ensuring they have controls in place for a completely remote workforce, so endpoint and network security, as well as identity and access management, are more important than ever,” said Sethi. “Additionally, business continuity and disaster recovery planning are critical right now — the ability to respond to a security incident and have a robust plan to recover from it is top priority for most security teams, and will continue to be for a long time.”

That’s not to say all security companies will necessarily thrive during this current economic crisis. Adrian Ludwig, CISO at Atlassian, notes that an overall decline in IT budgets will impact security spending. But the silver lining is that some companies will be acquired. “I expect we will see consolidation in the cybersecurity markets, and that most new investments by IT departments will be in basic infrastructure to facilitate work-from-home,” said Ludwig. “Less well-capitalized cybersecurity companies may want to begin thinking about potential exit opportunities sooner rather than later.”

Less than a year after raising $25M led by Microsoft for its take on building API marketplaces, RapidAPI has rapidly followed that up with another infusion of capital as it reaches 20,000 APIs tracked, integrated, and used across its marketplace by millions of developers. Today the startup is announcing that it raised another $25 million from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, DNS Capital, Green Bay Ventures, M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), and Grove.

This is a second closing of RapidAPI’s Series B, which we first wrote about last year, bringing the total for the round to $50 million and $62.5 million overall. PitchBook notes that the startup’s previous valuation was $80 million, which would put this now at upwards of $105 million but likely higher, considering that the company has scaled by quite a bit. Co-founder and CEO Iddo Gino would not disclose the actual amount in an interview this week.

APIs are the building blocks of today’s digital world: developers use them to quickly integrate features, data, services and functions into their own apps, removing the need to build and scale all those elements themselves from scratch. But while the big selling point of using APIs is that they allow developers to integrate using only a few lines of code, that doesn’t tell the whole story. The issue is that a lot of API interfaces are not uniform and so sourcing and using a variety of them can become very time-consuming and on aggregate a lot more difficult than the basic concept of API would have you assume.

“You can’t build everything from scratch, and using APIs makes work a lot more efficient,” co-founder Iddo Gino once said to me. “But each API has a different format and authentication strategy. You have to speak a lot of different languages to use them all.”

RapidAPI’s approach is to create a framework that not only helps you find the API you are looking for, but lets you integrate them more easily by way of a single API key and SDK. It covers both free and paid APIs, and public as well as “private” APIs. When your company is a subscriber — by way of the RapidAPI for Teams product — it can also help keep track of your own organization’s API work.

The formula has been a success. There are now 18,000 teams using the Teams product among more than one million developers using the platform overall.

Within that number, RapidAPI — originally founded in Israel in 2015 and now based also in San Francisco — says that since January, it has added 300,000 new developers, up six-fold monthly compared the the same five months of 2019. The marketplace itself now has 20,000 APIs, doubling in the last year, with 1,000 getting added each month. Contributors to its marketplace include Microsoft, Twilio, SendGrid, Nexmo, Skyscanner and (our former stablemate) Crunchbase.

RapidAPI doesn’t charge people to use APIs that are already free to use. Rather it makes its money from subscriptions to its API management service as well as through serving paid APIs. It says that paid subscriptions have also grown by 30,000, with those using the enterprise tier — where you can develop your own white-label, in-house version of a marketplace for your own staff and customers — are on the rise with financial services, insurance companies, carriers and healthcare companies among those building marketplaces on RapidAPI’s rails.

While a lot of businesses, including even tech startups, have had to make big adjustments to work in our new environment and its focus on social distancing to help manage the spread of COVID-19, the same didn’t go for RapidAPI, noted Gino. The company already had remote teams — a consequence of being founded in one country and now essentially having two gravitational poles — and RapidAPI’s team of 75, and its customers, have in their culture working across different environments including virtualised ones.

What the current climate has pointed to, however, is that RapidAPI is the kind of company that stands to benefit from how other organizations are coping with digital transformation, by helping provide developers with libraries that they can use, wherever they happen to be.

Another interesting thing that has come up in the current climate is the impact it’s had on what APIs are getting the most calls. In addition to the regular roster of most popular APIs that include communications, payments and other financial services, Gino told me that APIs related to COVID-19 data have emerged as some of the most heavily trafficked, in line with how so many are working to make sense of what is going on, and how they might help the rest of us.

These include API calls for datasets and geolocation, as well as other statistics, some of which are free and some of which are paid. RapidAPI says that between March 1 and mid-May, the top five COVID APIs had more than 224 million calls with a peak of almost 4.5 million in a single day.

Real estate is one of those classic industries we always talk about in Silicon Valley: multi-trillion dollars in scale in terms of assets and transaction volume, but still relying on good ole’ pen and paper to get anything actually done. A huge number of companies have launched to digitize all aspects of real estate, from calculating valuations to monitoring operational costs and underwriting mortgages.

One of those companies is New York City-based Spruce, which was founded back in 2016 to digitize the prodigious paperwork that must be completed during a real estate transaction, including handling title, ensuring all closing docs are completed, and monitoring compliance in every geographical jurisdiction they operate in. The company raised a cumulative $19.1 million in Series A funding across two tranches (my colleague Jon Shieber covered the first tranche back in 2017), and now it is poised for even more growth.

The company is announcing today that it has added $29 million in growth capital led by Alex Niehenke at Scale Venture Partners, with Zigg Capital and Bessemer participating. Niehenke has previously funded companies like Root Insurance, which is focused on offering more competitive car insurance based on realistic data from drivers.

That seems to be roughly the same thesis here with Spruce — better data and digitalization can massively improve the quality and efficiency of legacy industries.

“Instead of using local offices with manual communication and manual processes, we provide [our clients] with API’s that allow them to scale effectively and to provide great digital experiences to their customers,” said Patrick Burns, the cofounder and CEO of the company. Burns had previously done product at wealth management startup Betterment, where he also met his cofounder Andrew Weisgall.

It can be bewildering how all the startups in real estate tech fit together, but this one is simple. Spruce wants to be the workflow tool for real estate transactions, which means that they don’t underwrite mortgages or handle valuations themselves directly. Rather, the platforms wants to be the central nervous system between buyers, sellers, lenders, and all the coterie of other services required to get a transaction closed. The company handles all kinds of transactions from new home purchases by families to investor-to-investor sales.

What’s interesting is that they have two streams of revenue according to Burns. First, they take a closing fee, which is customary in real estate transactions. Spruce argues that its efficiency cuts the price of closing a transaction, ultimately saving its clients money. Second, the company earns a premium as the agent of record for the title insurance policy agreed to in the transaction, which provides a continual stream of revenue from its clients. Similar to closing fees, title insurance broker fees are customary in the industry.

It’s a pretty clear value proposition, and that’s helped it grow transaction volume dramatically. According to the company, it has processed $1.25 billion of transactions on its platform, and its revenue has grown 400% annually. With roughly five million existing homes sold in the U.S. each month, that’s still an exiguous chunk of the market.

The global pandemic underway right now has taken a massive bite out of real estate transactions, particularly for homes, since buyers mostly can’t attend showings due to social distancing policies. The upshot is that those same social distancing policies have also scrambled the traditional real estate closing, which required passels of attorneys and others to work together to get all documents signed. Spruce — and other digitalization startups in the space — are poised to transition more of that legacy paperwork onto their platforms as industry players look for online approaches.

Burns says the capital will be used to expand Spruce’s product and client partnerships. The company currently has three operations “hubs” in New York, Texas, and California.

Facebook this morning announced a new feature for Messenger designed to cut down on malicious parties looking to scam users. The company scans accounts for suspicious activity, leveraging machine learning to pick up anomalies like accounts sending a large number of requests in a short time span or numerous message requests to users under 18. The feature arrives amid a notable uptick in false friend requests caused by a change to the service’s search algorithm. 

If suspicious activity is detected, the app will pop up a chat window noting the issue, along with options for blocking or ignoring the user. The system has already seen a limited roll out for some Android users, dating as far back as March; iOS functionality, meanwhile, is set to arrive some time next week.

The feature aims to both cut down on scammers and users posing as other people, along with helping to protect minors from bad actors. The system is designed to limit interactions between adults and younger users who aren’t already connected on the platform. Per Facebook, “Our new feature educates people under the age of 18 to be cautious when interacting with an adult they may not know and empowers them to take action before responding to a message.”

Facebook says the feature will continue to work with the addition of end-to-end encryption on the platform, which is likely where that machine learning comes in, keeping human operators from having to view potentially sensitive information. 

When former Bill Clinton speechwriter and political wunderkind Andrei Cherny launched Aspiration four years ago, the upstart fintech startup was one of Los Angeles’ early entrants into a  financial services market dominated by players from Europe and the financial capital of the U.S. in New York City.

Fast forward four years and the big New York fintechs are still around, but Cherny’s Aspiration remains undimmed and has today disclosed a $153 million funding round to get even bigger.

Unlike other financial services startups that compete around a suite of product offerings designed to offer no-fee checking and deposits or upfront cash payments and short-term no-interest loans, Aspiration differentiates itself with a focus on sustainability and conscious consumerism.

The company first pitched the market with an investment management service like those from Betterment and Wealthfront, but one where customers could choose their own fees. It also guaranteed investments in sustainable companies and a portfolio that would not include fossil fuel companies or other businesses deemed to be less-than-friendly to Mother Nature.

The conscious consumerism is a through-line that knits together the other products in the Aspiration portfolio including its Impact Measurement Score product that gives customers a window into how their shopping habits measure up with their desires to be more earth-friendly.

The company’s just-announced $135 million cash infusion brings the total capital raised to $200 million and was led by local investor Alpha Edison. Additional new and existing investors including UBS O’Connor Capital Solutions, DNS Capital, Radicle Impact, Sutter Rock, Jeff Skoll, Joseph Sanberg, Social Impact Finance, the Pohlad Companies, and AGO Partners, also participated in the financing.

So far, 1.5 million Americans have signed up to use Aspiration’s financial management and banking services and the company has seen $4 billion in transactions pass through its accounts.

There’s a whole suite of new services designed to help customers go green too. The company launched a matching feature where the company plants a tree for every debit card purchase that its customers make, when they round up to the nearest dollar. And it’s offering a premium subscription tier that includes debit cards made from recycled ocean plastic. The card offers higher cash back and interest rates and a feature that offsets the carbon emissions of every mile a customer drives.

Finally, Aspiration has inked partnerships with other socially conscious companies like Toms and Warby Parker giving its customers extra cash back rewards when they shop at those businesses.

“Aspiration has built deep, trusting customer relationships that are beginning to unlock latent demand for financial services among the tens of millions of conscious consumers,” said Nate Redmond of Alpha Edison, in a statement. “We are excited to lead a great group of investors to fuel Aspiration’s durable growth and lasting impact.”

Chief, the social network dedicated exclusively to women in professional leadership positions, announced today that it has $15 million in funding from its existing investors, including General Catalyst, Inspired Capital, GGV Capital, Primary Venture Partners, Flybridge Capital and BoxGroup.

The startup is a highly-vetted network of women who are leaders in their business, either managing a budget, a large team or both. The women are often at the VP or executive level. The company has more than 2,000 members in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago from companies like Google, IBM, HBO, Chobani, Walmart, Visa, Teladoc, Doctors Without Borders and the New York Times.

Chief was founded by Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan, who saw an opportunity to bring community, mentorship and guidance to a very underserved client: the female business leader.

Childers was SVP of Operations at Handy and led the launch of Soap.com, serving as GM there through its acquisition by Amazon. Kaplan was on the founding team of Casper, serving as VP of Communications and Brand, before leaving to co-found Chief.

Chief members are placed into a Core Group, which is industry agnostic, to receive training from one of the company’s contracted and vetted executive coaches alongside their peers. In these peer groups, members talk about their challenges and receive support and guidance from one another, as well as an executive coach. Members also have access to a community chat feature, and Chief’s events, which include leadership workshops, conversations with industry leaders and community roundtables.

Obviously, the coronavirus pandemic has put a damper on in-person features of the platform, such as Core Groups and live events. But Chief has moved swiftly to put all these core services on the web for members to attend and participate virtually.

The company has also fast-tracked the launch of its hiring board, which gives members the ability to privately list great candidates and open positions to the broader network.

Chief vets its members to ensure that the women on the platform ‘get it,’ as Kaplan likes to say.

“We all know it gets lonely at the top, and it gets a lot lonelier a lot earlier for women,” said Childers. “Women are on panels or on the circuit and they’re exhausted. This is a community they don’t have to be the one in the spotlight and feel all the pressure, but can actually be supported in a network of women who feel the exact same way. These women are the only person or one of the few people in their organization who have hit that level of leadership, and really need support from people who get it.”

The company looks at the applicants experience, the size of their organization and immediate team, the reporting structure, budget size, awards and credentials, thought leadership and impact as well as current member nominations.

Interestingly, no more than 9 percent of the Chief membership work in a single industry, which leads to cognitive diversity within the community. The average age of a Chief member is 43, and members manage over $10 billion in collective budget at their organizations and more than 100,000 employees.

Executive-level members pay $7,900 annually, while VP-level members pay $5,800 each year. Chief says that 40 percent of its members are Executives, with the other 60 percent are VPs. The company says that 30 percent of its membership base are women of color.

Chief also operates a Membership Grant program, created to promote diversity of background and thought among members, that brings the cost of an annual membership down to $3,800 for folks coming from non-corporate or underfunded organizations. The company did not disclose what percentage of customers are on the grant program.

Some napkin math then tells us that Chief is likely generating more than $10 million in revenue in 2020, on the conservative end. Kaplan and Childers say that they have a waitlist of 8,000 to join.

The new funding will be used to accelerate growth to meet demand in new cities and support the build-out of technology infrastructure. This latest round brings Chief’s total funding to $40 million.

As we move deeper into the pandemic, it’s clear that the way we conduct business is changing, maybe forever. That means that business has to change too — and fast. But if you’ve never conducted business digitally or only nominally, how do you suddenly transform on the fly?

Salesforce Commerce Cloud CEO Mike Micucci says that they were hearing from customers they needed help. Salesforce decided to build four packages of services very quickly for customers specifically designed to help conduct business during COVID-19. The company even has SI partners who will run everything for the first three months, so these businesses don’t have to do much of anything except turn the key (so to speak).

The four tools are part of the Salesforce Quick Start Commerce Solutions and include Quick Start Commerce for D2C Consumer and Essential Goods to get a site up running fast, Quick Start Commerce for Grocery and Food Service to help restaurants and grocery stores set up online curbside food purchasing systems, Quick Start Commerce for B2B for companies setting up business-to-business sites and Quick Start Commerce for Buy Online and Curbside Pickup, which enables non-food companies to move in-store inventories online, and arrange curbside pick up systems.

Quick Start Commerce for Buy Online and Curbside Pickup. Image Credit: Salesforce

Micucci says that online commerce has been operating at a holiday kind of surge since we went into lockdown 10 weeks ago and customers have been clamoring for help. He said that they responded initially with a series of materials on best practices for getting online quickly, but customers wanted something more concrete.

“We needed to bring the software to bear on this. So we designed these four quick start packages. Essentially, the whole model was that we need to get you running in weeks, not months. The goal was literally [to get you up in] two weeks, and included software, obviously our cloud-based commerce and whatnot, but more importantly it included a package of services,” Micucci explained.

To build that package, it involved more than just Salesforce itself. It needed to get partners involved too to include payment, shipping, order management and other related kinds of tooling, depending on the package requirements.

Finally, they wanted to even remove the site management headaches from the customer, at least initially. Understanding that it would be difficult for businesses to train people internally to manage the system at this time, they got systems integrators involved to do it for them for the first three months. If the customer wants to take over sooner, they can, and if they want the SI to continue to manage the whole thing, that’s fine too.

As Salesforce itself moved out of the office and home, it was observing that online sales were spiking, and Micucci says after a couple of weeks of making sure the workforce was settled, he started hearing from customers about the problems they were having conducting business, and they went to work. The first of these packages came together in just a couple of weeks including partners.

They got them out to customers for quick Beta testing and refinement to the extent they could, but the guiding principle in producing these packages was speed over perfection. They realize the products will very likely require further refinement as they get out into the field, but they learned you can produce a package to meet a pressing customer need, and do it quickly, and that’s a lesson that will likely resonate even after this crisis is over.

Couchbase. the Santa Clara-based company behind the eponymous NoSQL cloud database service, today announced that it has raised a $105 million all-equity Series G round “to expand product development and global go-to-market capabilities.”

The oversubscribed round was led by GPI Capital, with participation from existing investors Accel, Sorenson Capital, North Bridge Venture Partners, Glynn Capital, Adams Street Partners and Mayfield. With this, the company has now raised a total of $251 million, according to Crunchbase.

Back in 2016, Couchbase raised a $30 million down round, which at the time was meant to be the company’s last round before an IPO. That IPO hasn’t materialized, but the company continues to grow, with 30 percent of the Fortune 100 now using its database. Couchbase also today announced that, over the course of the last fiscal year, it saw 70 percent total contract value growth, more than 50 percent new business growth and over 35 percent growth in average subscription deal size. In total, Couchbase said today, it is now seeing almost $100 million in committed annual recurring revenue.

“To be competitive today, enterprises must transform digitally, and use technology to get closer to their customers and improve the productivity of their workforces,” said Couchbase President and CEO Matt Cain in today’s announcement. “To do so, they require a cloud-native database built specifically to support modern web, mobile and IoT applications.  Application developers and enterprise architects rely on Couchbase to enable agile application development on a platform that performs at scale, from the public cloud to the edge, and provides operational simplicity and reliability. More and more, the largest companies in the world truly run their businesses on Couchbase, architecting their most business-critical applications on our platform.”

The company is playing in a large but competitive market, with the likes of MongoDB, DataStax and all the major cloud vendors vying for similar customers in the NoSQL space. One feature that has always made Couchbase stand out is Couchbase Mobile, which extends the service to the cloud. Like some of its competitors, the company has also recently placed its bets on the Kubernetes container orchestration tools with, for example the launch of its Autonomous Operator for Kubernetes 2.0. More importantly, though, the company also introduced its fully-managed Couchbase Cloud Database-as-a-Service in February, which allows businesses to run the database within their own virtual private cloud on public clouds like AWS and Microsoft Azure.

“We are excited to partner with Couchbase and view Couchbase Server’s highly performant, distributed architecture as purpose-built to support mission-critical use cases at scale,” said Alex Migon, a partner at GPI Capital and a new member of the company’s board of directors. “Couchbase has developed a truly enterprise-grade product, with leading support for cutting-edge application development and deployment needs.  We are thrilled to contribute to the next stage of the company’s growth.”

The company tells me that it plans to use the new funding to continue its “accelerated trajectory with investment in each of their three core pillars: sustained differentiation, profitable growth, and world class teams.” Of course, Couchbase will also continue to build new features for its NoSQL server, mobile platform and Couchbase Cloud — and in addition, the company will continue to expand geographically to serve its global customer operations.