Author: azeeadmin

Sheltering-in-place and working from home curing COVID-19 has driven many of us to reorganize and de-clutter our living environments, and today one of the startups that is capitalizing on that trend is announcing a large round of funding to continue its growth. MakeSpace, an on-demand storage company that makes it easy to order, store and retrieve your physical belongings (also providing the muscle — that is, people — to help you do it), has closed a $45 million round of equity funding led by Iron Mountain, a strategic partner (its primary focus is storage for larger businesses) that is an existing investor in the company.

The funding is notable in part because of its size, but also because of the fact that it has happened at all.

On-demand storage startups have sprung up all over the world, hopeful that their new take on an antiquated, fragmented and valuable ($38 billion annually spent on storage) market would lead to big returns in a brave, new, Uberified world. But in reality, we’ve seen a lot of ups and downs, with various startups merging, closing, transferring and trying to pivot in the process. That’s left a consolidated space with fewer, hopefully better capitalised and better organised, competitors remaining.

MakeSpace looks like it’s making a successful play to be in that group. This is a Series E for the startup — with other investors in the round including 8VC, Upfront Ventures, Maywic Select Investments, Ten Eighty, Provenio Capital, and CX Collective — and co-founder and CEO Rahul Gandhi said was at “a premium” to the valuation MakeSpace had in the last round of funding (a Series D that closed last year), without confirming either the previous or current numbers.

For some more context, PitchBook details what seems to have been a rollercoaster of valuations for the startup, which if accurate underscore some of those obvious challenges in this market. We’ll see if we can get some more clarification on that and update when and if we learn more.

MakeSpace itself has hit a number of milestones that point to its own growth. Last year, it added 20 new markets, bringing the total to 31 in North America, and doing so in a cost-effictive way. While one of the biggest costs (and stumbling blocks) for storage services to date has been grappling with building real estate businesses, MakeSpace has leaned on the infrastructure of its strategic investor Iron Mountain to bypass that challenge (and reduce those associated costs).

Gandhi said that it’s been outpacing “even our strongest forecasts,” with growth north of 30% on its targets, and he said the company has tens of thousands of customers.

And while you might assume that a lack of house moving might mean less activity for storage companies, it seems the opposite is the case: MakeSpace and others like it have been designated “essential services” and its services have been in demand for people who are looking at their living spaces — and the prospect of spending significantly more time in them doing more than just watching Netflix, eating and sleeping — with new eyes. And ditto small businesses that are moving out of premises, even temporarily, or needing to rejig their environments because of distancing rules.

What’s also notable about MakeSpace is how it organises its workforce. While many on-demand businesses today have scaled by using an army of contractors, and all the complexities that this brings into the equation with regards to employee protections and benefits, MakeSpace has hired only full-time people, using its own team and those employed by Iron Mountain.

“They can get wonderful packages and all the benefits and perks to keep employee base happy,” Gandhi said. “It makes it easier to scale up the business and in terms of the hiring capabilities to help us scale.”

He acknowledged also that while Iron Mountain is an obvious acquirer longer-term, it remains a minority investor. “It’s really key that we remain independent,” he added. “We understand the strength of what they bring to table but in order for this business to capture major market share we felt collectively it was important for it to remain that way. At some point that discussion [on a bigger stake or acquisition] may happen but for now we feel incredibly good about what they are bringing to the table.”

“I’ve got a really high attention to detail, which might sound great, but it’s possibly a curse because I can’t help but spot problems with everything around me,” says Peter Ramsey .

He’s the founder of Built for Mars, a U.K.-based UX advisory, and he has spent the last three months documenting and analyzing the user experience of a dozen leading British banks — both incumbents and challengers — including Barclays, HSBC, Santander, Monzo, Starling and Revolut.

“Quite literally, I opened 12 real bank accounts,” he explains. “You remember the stress of opening one account? I did that 12 times, [and] it was probably a terrible idea. But I really needed to control as many variables as possible, and this was the only way of doing that.”

Next, Ramsey says he “logged everything,” recording every click, screen and action. “I saved every letter, and made a note of when they arrived. I recorded pretty much everything I could,” he recalls. “At one point I even weighed all the debit cards to see if some were heavier. That was a total waste of time though, because they all weighed the same amount. But you see what I mean, I just thought about making it as scientific as possible. Also, UX is really quite subjective, so I wanted to back up my opinions with some more quantifiable metrics.”

The resulting analysis — covering opening an account, making a first payment and freezing your card — supported by individual bank case studies, is being published on the Built for Mars website over the month with a new interactive chapter released weekly.

After being given early access to the first three chapters and an initial series of case studies, I put several questions to Ramsey to understand his motivation, methodology and what he learned. And if you’re wondering which bank came out on top, keep reading.

TechCrunch: Why did you choose to do this on banks?

Peter Ramsey: My background is in fintech, and I think the banks are just in this weird place right now. When they first came out I think consumers were surprised at how much better the apps were. Banking was renowned for having old software, it was almost acceptable for an old bank to be buggy. But now that these challenger banks have been out for five years, I think that perception has changed. So I chose the banks because they represent this industry of “challenger” versus “legacy.” Plus, for billion-dollar companies, you’d expect them all to really care about experience.

One of the VC partners in a well-established London firm told me straight out:

Venture capital is money [laughs], it is a risky asset class, perhaps the wildest asset class […] and it has the biggest possible returns.

I have detailed elsewhere how I think caring more beyond the immediate-return mentality often associated with shareholder value capitalism makes sense (financially and ethically). But the arguments I am making are normative and ideological and don’t describe the status quo of VC investing. The more VCs I speak to — so far more than 150 between Berlin and Silicon Valley — the more it becomes clear that most of them couldn’t care less about environmental, social and governance, impact, sustainability, green tech or what Nicholas Colin calls safety net 2.0. Most VC money last year went into fintech; real estate and automation continue to be big, too. Only a tiny portion of businesses in these areas are remotely “impactful.”

Why, then, have the big, supposedly much less progressive asset managers and funds — from KKR to BlackRock to JPMorgan Chase — started to announce that they do (intend to) care?

What are these institutions sitting at the heart of capitalism seeing turning to ESG guidelines, screaming for more regulation and pushing to make portfolios climate-friendly? Why is it that big CEOs want to shift their efforts away from just shareholder value to benefit all stakeholders? Obviously, it must be about money, about a new investment opportunity. Being “good” must be on the verge of becoming profitable. But why are VCs not getting into that in big waves, the investors who are usually ahead of the curve qua their forward-looking business model?

Don’t get me wrong — there is indeed a class of new VCs that has decided to specialize in impact investing and “social good.” Perhaps with the exception of DBL, most of the funds in this new class, however, have only started recently; none of them will be considered top tier funds yet. Exceptions only confirm the rule, however. While Obvious, itself a B-Corp lead among others by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, is celebrating the Beyond Meat IPO, Greylock is struggling to recruit more than one female into its investment team and is still most keen on blitzscaling marketplaces. While in Germany, Ananda is the only self-fashioned impact investor, sector heavy-hitters such as Holtzbrinck, Earlybird and Point9 are still struggling with the future of e-commerce and SaaS and have discovered gaming as a way of making a 3x return.

Why? Why is dumb money that sits in KKR and is only supposed to strive for the biggest available profit imposing ESG guidelines on itself while hundreds of clever VC general partners are seemingly closing their eyes and path-dependably follow their old-school patterns chasing disruption everywhere but in “the good” and “impact?”

Here are six hypotheses and excuses:

1. It isn’t clear what “impact” even is. While GIIN, the OECD the UN and others are publishing new metrics for ESG and impact measures almost on a daily basis (also reinventing the language around it), the people on the ground doing the investing find it hard to keep up. As many dedicated impact investors I have spoken to, as many different ways of interpreting it I have seen. Some of the VCs I interviewed hence find a relatively easy way out: How are you supposed to aim if you don’t know what your target is?

2. In the VC world, there aren’t reliable return numbers for impact investing yet. VCs have a strong instinct for herding; while seemingly new territory should be what they are used to, when it comes to proven financial return patterns, they often turn a blind eye. As long as there are no data points to prove — also with regards to communicating with their LPs — that “good tech” makes financial sense in the VC world, many won’t move.

3. Why change when what has worked continues to work? The VC business model of doing high-risk investments into mostly technology and biotech has worked very well; in fact, the ongoing low-interest rate environment has driven increasing amounts of capital into the asset class that is looking for exactly the kind of above-average returns the traditional VC model has generated. Why change that now?

4. The others are not really investing real money into impact either. It is true — lots of asset managers and PE investors have publicized their intentions about “going ESG” or “doing impact” widely, but not too much capital has yet been deployed concretely. Bain’s Double Impact fund is $390 million (versus the approximately $30 billion of Bain’s assets under management); KKR’s Global Impact fund is $1 billion, versus around $300 billion under management.

5. The pressure on other asset managers is much higher. On the one hand, LPs have a bigger influence over big asset managers (and they can often be the ones driving change), and on the other, the KKRs and BlackStones of the world need to overcompensate even more for how bad society thinks they are. Virtue signaling — just like CSR — is a good way of doing that (particularly if there is indeed a financial opportunity).

6. Lots of people in VC self-select to not care. As a former partner in a famous SV firm put it to me recently: young people don’t become VCs today to do good, they do it to make a fortune and wield power. While the tech world might have once been run by utopians like Steve Jobs, the wheel is now in the hands of techno-libertarians building cities in the sea, buying up NZ and (at times) supporting Trump (to then make money off that connection by extending surveillance). You reap what you sow.

But even if some of the above excuses are real — for-profit impact is in fact still a tiny asset class (see latest GIIN numbers) for instance — aren’t VCs usually ahead of the game? Contrarian and looking for the next narrative violation? Isn’t it the VCs’ task to sniff up new investment opportunities and sectors first? Most importantly: How long are VCs going to ignore the massively growing consumer appetite for responsible and impactful business (and investing, as KPMG recently found)?

So, the question remains puzzling for me: When will we see the first Tier 1 VC-firm (after Kleiner Perkins in the 2000s) announce that they’ll start a ‘”good tech” fund?

Amazon is joining India’s online food delivery market just as top local players Swiggy and Zomato reduce their workforces to steer through the coronavirus pandemic.

The e-commerce giant today launched its food delivery service, called Amazon Food, in select places in Bangalore. The company had originally planned to launch the service in India last year, which it then moved to March but there were further delays because of the nationwide stay-at-home order the Indian government issued in late March.

In the run up to the launch, the e-commerce giant had been testing its food delivery service with select restaurant partners in Bangalore, TechCrunch reported earlier this year.

“Customers have been telling us for some time that they would like to order prepared meals on Amazon in addition to shopping for all other essentials. This is particularly relevant in present times as they stay home safe,” an Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch.

“We also recognize that local businesses need all the help they can get. We are launching Amazon Food in select Bangalore pin codes allowing customers to order from handpicked local restaurants and cloud kitchens that pass our high hygiene certification bar. We are adhering to the highest standards of safety to ensure our customers remain safe while having a delightful experience,” the spokesperson added.

Amazon’s foray into the food delivery market would create new challenges for Prosus Ventures -backed Swiggy, and Zomato, a 11-year-old startup that acquired Uber’s Eats business in India in January this year.

Both the startups, having raised more than $2 billion together, are still not profitable and are losing more than $15 million each month to acquire new customers and sustain existing ones.

Anand Lunia, a VC at India Quotient, said earlier this year that the food delivery firms have little choice but to keep subsidizing the cost of food items on their platform as otherwise most of their customers can’t afford them.

Figuring out a path to profitability is especially challenging in India as unlike in the developed markets such as the U.S., where the value of each delivery item is about $33; in India, a similar item carries the price tag of $4, according to estimates by Bangalore-based research firm RedSeer.

More to follow…

Facebook has rolled out a new safety feature in India that will enable users to easily lock their account so that people they are not friends with on the platform cannot view their posts and zoom into and download their profile picture and cover photo.

The feature is especially aimed at women to give them more control over their Facebook experience, the company said. “We are deeply aware of the concerns people in India, particularly women, have about protecting their online profile,” said Ankhi Das, Public Policy Director at Facebook India, in a statement.

Locking the profile applies multiple existing privacy settings and several new measures to a user’s Facebook profile in a few taps, the company said. Once a user has locked their account, people they are not friends with will no longer be able to see photos and posts — both historic and new — and zoom into, share, and download profile pictures and cover photos.

“We have often heard from young girls that they are hesitant to share about themselves online and are intimidated by the idea of someone misusing their information. I am very happy to see that Facebook is making efforts to learn about their concerns and building products that can give them the experience they want. This new safety feature will give women, especially young girls a chance to express themselves freely,” said Ranjana Kumari, Director at New Delhi-based women advocacy group Centre for Social Research, in a statement.

A user can lock the account by tapping on More under their name, then tapping the Lock Profile button and the confirmation button that prompts afterward.

Prior to Thursday’s announcement, this feature was available to users in Bangladesh, a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The new feature appears to be an extension of a similar effort Facebook made in 2017 in India to combat catfishing. That feature, called Profile Picture Guard, allowed users to protect their profile picture from being zoomed into and shared by their friends and those not in the friend list.

Automattic, the open source force behind WordPress .com, WooCommerce, Longreads, Simplenote and Tumblr, has made a $4.6M strategic investment into New Vector — the creators of an open, decentralized communications standard called Matrix. They also develop a Slack rival (Riot) which runs on Matrix.

The investment by Automattic, which is at a higher valuation than the last tranche New Vector took in, extends an $8.5M Series A last year, from enterprise tech specialists Notion Capital and Dawn Capital plus European seed fund Firstminute Capital — and brings the total raised to date to $18.1M. (Which includes an earlier $5M in strategic investment from an Ethereum-based secure chat and crypto wallet app, Status).

New Vector’s decentralized tech powers instant messaging for a number of government users, including France — which forked Riot to launch a messaging app last year (Tchap) — and Germany, which just announced its armed forces will be adopting Matrix as the backbone for all internal comms; as well as for the likes of KDR, Mozilla, RedHat and Wikimedia, to name a few.

Getting Automattic on board is clearly a major strategic boost for Matrix — one that’s allowing New Vector to dream big.

“It’s very much a step forwards,” New Vector CEO and CTO and Matrix co-founder, Matthew Hodgson, tells TechCrunch. “We’re hopefully going to get the support from Automattic for really expanding the ecosystem, bringing Matrix functionality into WordPress — and all the various WordPress plugins that Automattic does. And likewise open up Matrix to all of those users too.”

A blog post announcing the strategic investment dangles the intriguing possibility of a decentralized Tumblr — or all WordPress sites automatically getting their own Matrix chatroom.

“This is huge news, not least because WordPress literally runs over 36% of the websites on today’s web – and the potential of bringing Matrix to all those users is incredible,” New Vector writes in the blog post. “Imagine if every WP site automatically came with its own Matrix room or community?  Imagine if all content in WP automatically was published into Matrix as well as the Web?… Imagine there was an excellent Matrix client available as a WordPress plugin for embedding realtime chat into your site?”

Those possibilities remain intriguing ideas for now. But as well as ploughing funding into New vector Automattic is opening up a job for a Matrix.org/WordPress integrations engineer — so the Matrix team has another tangible reason to be excited about future integrations.

“One of the best and the biggest open source guys really believes in what we’re doing and is interested in trying to open up the worlds of WordPress into the decentralized world of Matrix,” adds Hodgson. “In some ways it’s reassuring that a relatively established company like Automattic is keeping its eye on the horizon and putting their chips on the decentralized future. Whereas they could be ‘doing a Facebook’ and just sitting around and keeping everything centralized and as locked down as possible.”

“It’s a bit of a validation,” says Matrix co-founder and New Vector head of ops and products, Amandine le Pape. “The same way getting funding from VCs was validation of the fact it’s a viable business. Here it’s a validation it’s actually a mainstream open source project which can really grow.”

While the strategic investment offer from Automattic was obviously just a great opportunity to be seized by New vector, given ideological alignment and integration potential, it also comes at helpful time, per le Pape, given they’ve been growing their SaaS business.

“The business model that we’re looking at with New Vector to go and drive — both to fund Matrix and also to keep the lights on and grow the projects and the company — is very, very similar to what Automattic have successfully done with WordPress.com,” adds Hodgson. “So being able to compare notes directly with their board and our board to go and say to them how do you make this work between the WordPress.org and the WordPress.com split should be a really useful tool for us.”

While Matrix users can choose to host their own servers there’s obviously a high degree of complexity (and potential expense) involved in doing so. Hence New Vector’s business model is to offer a paid Matrix hosting service, called Modular, where it takes care of the complexity of hosting for a fee. (Marketing copy on the Modular website urges potential customers to: “Sign up and deploy your own secure chat service in seconds!”)

“Some of our highest profile customers like Mozilla could go and run it themselves, obviously. Mozilla know tech. But in practice it’s a lot easier and a lot cheaper overall for them to just go and get us to run it,” adds Hodgson. “The nice thing is that they have complete self sovereignty over their data. It’s their DNS. We give them access to the database. They could move off at any time… switch hosting provider or run it themselves. [Users] typically start off with us as a way to get up and running.”

Talking of moving, Hodgson says he expects Automattic to move over from Slack to Riot following this investment.

“I am very excited about what New Vector is doing with Matrix — creating a robust, secure, open protocol that can bring all flavors of instant messaging and collaboration together, in the way that the web or email has its foundation layer,” added Automattic founder, Matt Mullenweg, in a supporting statement. “I share New Vector’s passion for open source and the power of open standards. I’m excited to see how Automattic and New Vector can collaborate on our shared vision in the future.” 

Mullenweg was already a supporter of Matrix, chipping into its seed via Patreon back in 2017. At the time the team was transitioning from being incubated and wholly financed by Amdocs, a telco supplier where New Vectors’ co-founders used to work (running its unified comms division), to spinning out and casting around for new sources of funding to continue development of their decentralized standard.

Some three years on — now with another multi-million dollar tranche of funding in the bank — Hodgson says New Vector is able to contemplate the prospect of profitability ahead, with ~16.8 million users and 45,000 deployments at this point (up from 11M and 40k back in October).

“I think there’s also a high chance — touch wood — that this injection gives us a path straight through to profitability if needed,” he tells us. “Given the macroeconomic uncertainty thanks to the [COVID-19] pandemic, the opportunity to say we have this amount of cash in the bank, assuming our customers follow roughly the trajectory that we’d seen so far… this would be a way to get out the other side without having to depend on any further funding.

“If things are on track we probably would do additional funding next year in order to double down on the success. But right now this at least gives us a pretty chunky safety net.”

The coronavirus crisis has been accelerating interest in Matrix “significantly”, per Hodgson, as entities that might have been contemplating a switch to decentralized comms down the line feel far greater imperative to take control of their data — now that so many users are logging on from home.

“As lockdowns began we saw sign ups increase by a factor of about 10,” he says. “It’s tapered off a little bit but it was a real scaling drama overnight. We had to launch an entirely new set of videoconferencing deployments on Jitsi’s offering, as well as scaling up the hardware for the service which we run by several times over.

“We’re also seeing retention go up, which was nice. We assumed there would be a huge spike of users desperately trying to find a home and then they wouldn’t necessarily stick around. In practice they’ve stuck around more than the existing user base which is reassuring.”

In some cases, New Vector has seen customers radically shrink planned deployment timescales — from months to a matter of days.

“We literally had one [educational] outfit in German reach out and say that tender in September — we want you to go live on Monday,” says Hodgson, noting that in this instance the customer skipped the entire tendering process because of they felt they needed a secure system school kids could use. (And privacy concerns ruling out use of centralized options such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams.)

“The biggest impact from a New Vector perspective at least has been that a lot of our slower moving, bigger opportunities — particularly in the public sector with governments — have suddenly sped up massively,” he adds. “Because it was previously a nice to have premium thing — ‘wouldn’t it be good if we had our own encrypted messenger and if everybody wasn’t using Telegram or WhatsApp to run our country’ — and then suddenly, with the entire population of whichever country it might be suddenly having to work remotely it’s become an existential requirement to have high quality communication, and having that encrypted and self sovereign is a massive deal.”

In terms of competing with Slack (et al), the biggest consideration is usability and UX, according to Hodgson.

So, over the last year, New Vector has hired a dedicated in-house design team to focus on smoothing any overly geeky edges — though most of this work is yet to be pushed out to users.

“We’ve actually pivoted the entire development of Riot to be design led,” he says. “It’s no longer a whole bunch of developers, like myself, going and hacking away on it — instead the product owner and the product direction’s being laid by the design team. And it is an unrecognizable difference — in terms of focus and usability.

“Over the coming year we are expecting Riot to basically be rebuilt at least cosmetically to get rid of the complexity and the geekiness and the IRC hangovers which we have today in favor of something that can genuinely punch its weight against Slack and Discord.”

In another major recent development New Vector switched on end-to-end encryption across the piece in Riot, making it the default for all new non-public conversations (DMs and private chats).

“It’s the equivalent of email suddenly mandating PGP and managing not to break everything,” says Hodgson of that feat.

A key challenge was to “get parity” with users of the non-encrypted version of Matrix before it could be enabled everywhere — with associated problems to tackle, such as search.

“Typically we were doing search on the server and if the messages are encrypted the server obviously can’t index them — so we had to shift all of our search capabilities to run client side. We went and wrote a whole bunch of REST that allows you to basically embed a search engine into Riot on the client, including on the desktop version, so that people can actually reach their encrypted message history there and share it between devices,” he explains.

Another focus for the e2e was the verification process — which is also now built in by default.

“When you now log into Riot it forces you to scan a QR code on an existing login if you’ve already logged in somewhere. A bit like you do on WhatsApp web but rather than just using it to authenticate you it also goes and proves that you are a legitimate person on that account,” he says. “So everyone else then knows to trust that login completely — so that if there is an attack of some kind, if you admin tries to add a malicious device into your account to spy on you or if there’s a man-in-the-middle attack, or something like that, everybody can see that the untrusted device hasn’t been verified by you.

“It’s basically building out a simple web of trust of your devices and immediate contacts so that you have complete protection against ghost devices or other nastier attempts to go and compromise the account. The combination of using QR codes and also using emoji comparison rather than having to read out numbers to one another is I think almost unique now, in terms of creating really, really super robust end-to-end encryption.”

The e2e encryption Matrix uses is based on algorithms popularized by the Signal protocol. It was audited by NCC Group in 2016 but plans for the new funding include a full stack audit — once they’ve ironed out any teething issues with the new default e2e.

“[We want to] at least pick a path, a particular set of clients and servers — because we can’t do the whole thing, obviously, because Matrix has got 60-70 different apps on it now, or different clients. And there are at least four viable server implementations but we will pick the long term supported official path and at least find a set which we can then audit and recommend to governments,” says Hodgson of the audit plans.

They’re also working with Jitsi on a project to make the latter’s WebRTC-compatible videoconferencing platform e2e encrypted too — another key piece as Jitsi’s tech is what New Vector offers for video calling via Matrix.

“We partner with Jitsi for the videoconferencing side of things and we’re working with them on their e2e encrypted videoconferencing… They [recently] got the world’s first WebRTC -based e2e encrypted conferencing going. And they plan to use Matrix as the way to exchange the keys for that — using also all of the verification process [New Vector has developed for Riot]. Because end-to-end encryption’s great, obviously in terms of securing the data — but if you don’t know who you’re talking to, in terms of verifying their identity, it’s a complete waste of time,” adds Hodgson.

So when Jitsi’s e2e encryption launches New Vector will be able to include e2e encrypted videoconferencing as part of its decentralized bundle too.

How much growth is New Vector expecting for Matrix over the next 12 months? “We’ve tripled almost all of the sizing metrics for the network in the last year, and I think we tripled the year before that so I’m hoping that we can continue on that trajectory,” he says on that.

Another “fun thing” New Vector has been working on, since the end of last year, is a peer-to-peer version of Matrix — having developed a “sufficiently lightweight server implementation” that allows Matrix users to run ‘riot’ in a decentralized p2p space via a web browser (or via the app on a mobile device).

“We turned on the peer-to-peer network about a month ago now and they’re at the point right now of making it persistent — previously if all of the clients on the network went away then the entire network disappeared, whereas now it has the ability to persist even if people start restarting their browsers and apps. And it’s very much a mad science project but as far as I know nobody else is remotely in that ballpark,” he says.

“The nice thing is it looks and feels identical to Matrix today. You can use all of the clients, all of the bridges that people have already written… It just happens to be that the Riot is connecting to a server wedged into itself rather than talking to one sitting on the server… So it’s a total paradigm shift.”

“We weren’t sure it was going to work at all but in practice it’s working better than we could have hoped,” he adds. “Over the next year or so we’re going to expect to see more and more emphasis on peer-to-peer — possibly even by default. So that if you install Riot you don’t have to pick a server and go through this fairly clunky thing of figuring out what service provider to trust and do you want to buy one from us as New Vector or do you want to a Swiss ISP. Instead you can start off bobbing around the ocean in a pure peer-to-peer land, and then if you want to persist your data somewhere then you go and find a server to pin yourself to a home on the Internet. But it would be a completely different way of thinking about things.”

Those interested in dipping a toe in p2p decentralized IM can check out this flavor of Riot in a web browser via p2p.riot.im

Automattic, the open source force behind WordPress .com, WooCommerce, Longreads, Simplenote and Tumblr, has made a $4.6M strategic investment into New Vector — the creators of an open, decentralized communications standard called Matrix. They also develop a Slack rival (Riot) which runs on Matrix.

The investment by Automattic, which is at a higher valuation than the last tranche New Vector took in, extends an $8.5M Series A last year, from enterprise tech specialists Notion Capital and Dawn Capital plus European seed fund Firstminute Capital — and brings the total raised to date to $18.1M. (Which includes an earlier $5M in strategic investment from an Ethereum-based secure chat and crypto wallet app, Status).

New Vector’s decentralized tech powers instant messaging for a number of government users, including France — which forked Riot to launch a messaging app last year (Tchap) — and Germany, which just announced its armed forces will be adopting Matrix as the backbone for all internal comms; as well as for the likes of KDR, Mozilla, RedHat and Wikimedia, to name a few.

Getting Automattic on board is clearly a major strategic boost for Matrix — one that’s allowing New Vector to dream big.

“It’s very much a step forwards,” New Vector CEO and CTO and Matrix co-founder, Matthew Hodgson, tells TechCrunch. “We’re hopefully going to get the support from Automattic for really expanding the ecosystem, bringing Matrix functionality into WordPress — and all the various WordPress plugins that Automattic does. And likewise open up Matrix to all of those users too.”

A blog post announcing the strategic investment dangles the intriguing possibility of a decentralized Tumblr — or all WordPress sites automatically getting their own Matrix chatroom.

“This is huge news, not least because WordPress literally runs over 36% of the websites on today’s web – and the potential of bringing Matrix to all those users is incredible,” New Vector writes in the blog post. “Imagine if every WP site automatically came with its own Matrix room or community?  Imagine if all content in WP automatically was published into Matrix as well as the Web?… Imagine there was an excellent Matrix client available as a WordPress plugin for embedding realtime chat into your site?”

Those possibilities remain intriguing ideas for now. But as well as ploughing funding into New vector Automattic is opening up a job for a Matrix.org/WordPress integrations engineer — so the Matrix team has another tangible reason to be excited about future integrations.

“One of the best and the biggest open source guys really believes in what we’re doing and is interested in trying to open up the worlds of WordPress into the decentralized world of Matrix,” adds Hodgson. “In some ways it’s reassuring that a relatively established company like Automattic is keeping its eye on the horizon and putting their chips on the decentralized future. Whereas they could be ‘doing a Facebook’ and just sitting around and keeping everything centralized and as locked down as possible.”

“It’s a bit of a validation,” says Matrix co-founder and New Vector head of ops and products, Amandine le Pape. “The same way getting funding from VCs was validation of the fact it’s a viable business. Here it’s a validation it’s actually a mainstream open source project which can really grow.”

While the strategic investment offer from Automattic was obviously just a great opportunity to be seized by New vector, given ideological alignment and integration potential, it also comes at helpful time, per le Pape, given they’ve been growing their SaaS business.

“The business model that we’re looking at with New Vector to go and drive — both to fund Matrix and also to keep the lights on and grow the projects and the company — is very, very similar to what Automattic have successfully done with WordPress.com,” adds Hodgson. “So being able to compare notes directly with their board and our board to go and say to them how do you make this work between the WordPress.org and the WordPress.com split should be a really useful tool for us.”

While Matrix users can choose to host their own servers there’s obviously a high degree of complexity (and potential expense) involved in doing so. Hence New Vector’s business model is to offer a paid Matrix hosting service, called Modular, where it takes care of the complexity of hosting for a fee. (Marketing copy on the Modular website urges potential customers to: “Sign up and deploy your own secure chat service in seconds!”)

“Some of our highest profile customers like Mozilla could go and run it themselves, obviously. Mozilla know tech. But in practice it’s a lot easier and a lot cheaper overall for them to just go and get us to run it,” adds Hodgson. “The nice thing is that they have complete self sovereignty over their data. It’s their DNS. We give them access to the database. They could move off at any time… switch hosting provider or run it themselves. [Users] typically start off with us as a way to get up and running.”

Talking of moving, Hodgson says he expects Automattic to move over from Slack to Riot following this investment.

“I am very excited about what New Vector is doing with Matrix — creating a robust, secure, open protocol that can bring all flavors of instant messaging and collaboration together, in the way that the web or email has its foundation layer,” added Automattic founder, Matt Mullenweg, in a supporting statement. “I share New Vector’s passion for open source and the power of open standards. I’m excited to see how Automattic and New Vector can collaborate on our shared vision in the future.” 

Mullenweg was already a supporter of Matrix, chipping into its seed via Patreon back in 2017. At the time the team was transitioning from being incubated and wholly financed by Amdocs, a telco supplier where New Vectors’ co-founders used to work (running its unified comms division), to spinning out and casting around for new sources of funding to continue development of their decentralized standard.

Some three years on — now with another multi-million dollar tranche of funding in the bank — Hodgson says New Vector is able to contemplate the prospect of profitability ahead, with ~16.8 million users and 45,000 deployments at this point (up from 11M and 40k back in October).

“I think there’s also a high chance — touch wood — that this injection gives us a path straight through to profitability if needed,” he tells us. “Given the macroeconomic uncertainty thanks to the [COVID-19] pandemic, the opportunity to say we have this amount of cash in the bank, assuming our customers follow roughly the trajectory that we’d seen so far… this would be a way to get out the other side without having to depend on any further funding.

“If things are on track we probably would do additional funding next year in order to double down on the success. But right now this at least gives us a pretty chunky safety net.”

The coronavirus crisis has been accelerating interest in Matrix “significantly”, per Hodgson, as entities that might have been contemplating a switch to decentralized comms down the line feel far greater imperative to take control of their data — now that so many users are logging on from home.

“As lockdowns began we saw sign ups increase by a factor of about 10,” he says. “It’s tapered off a little bit but it was a real scaling drama overnight. We had to launch an entirely new set of videoconferencing deployments on Jitsi’s offering, as well as scaling up the hardware for the service which we run by several times over.

“We’re also seeing retention go up, which was nice. We assumed there would be a huge spike of users desperately trying to find a home and then they wouldn’t necessarily stick around. In practice they’ve stuck around more than the existing user base which is reassuring.”

In some cases, New Vector has seen customers radically shrink planned deployment timescales — from months to a matter of days.

“We literally had one [educational] outfit in German reach out and say that tender in September — we want you to go live on Monday,” says Hodgson, noting that in this instance the customer skipped the entire tendering process because of they felt they needed a secure system school kids could use. (And privacy concerns ruling out use of centralized options such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams.)

“The biggest impact from a New Vector perspective at least has been that a lot of our slower moving, bigger opportunities — particularly in the public sector with governments — have suddenly sped up massively,” he adds. “Because it was previously a nice to have premium thing — ‘wouldn’t it be good if we had our own encrypted messenger and if everybody wasn’t using Telegram or WhatsApp to run our country’ — and then suddenly, with the entire population of whichever country it might be suddenly having to work remotely it’s become an existential requirement to have high quality communication, and having that encrypted and self sovereign is a massive deal.”

In terms of competing with Slack (et al), the biggest consideration is usability and UX, according to Hodgson.

So, over the last year, New Vector has hired a dedicated in-house design team to focus on smoothing any overly geeky edges — though most of this work is yet to be pushed out to users.

“We’ve actually pivoted the entire development of Riot to be design led,” he says. “It’s no longer a whole bunch of developers, like myself, going and hacking away on it — instead the product owner and the product direction’s being laid by the design team. And it is an unrecognizable difference — in terms of focus and usability.

“Over the coming year we are expecting Riot to basically be rebuilt at least cosmetically to get rid of the complexity and the geekiness and the IRC hangovers which we have today in favor of something that can genuinely punch its weight against Slack and Discord.”

In another major recent development New Vector switched on end-to-end encryption across the piece in Riot, making it the default for all new non-public conversations (DMs and private chats).

“It’s the equivalent of email suddenly mandating PGP and managing not to break everything,” says Hodgson of that feat.

A key challenge was to “get parity” with users of the non-encrypted version of Matrix before it could be enabled everywhere — with associated problems to tackle, such as search.

“Typically we were doing search on the server and if the messages are encrypted the server obviously can’t index them — so we had to shift all of our search capabilities to run client side. We went and wrote a whole bunch of REST that allows you to basically embed a search engine into Riot on the client, including on the desktop version, so that people can actually reach their encrypted message history there and share it between devices,” he explains.

Another focus for the e2e was the verification process — which is also now built in by default.

“When you now log into Riot it forces you to scan a QR code on an existing login if you’ve already logged in somewhere. A bit like you do on WhatsApp web but rather than just using it to authenticate you it also goes and proves that you are a legitimate person on that account,” he says. “So everyone else then knows to trust that login completely — so that if there is an attack of some kind, if you admin tries to add a malicious device into your account to spy on you or if there’s a man-in-the-middle attack, or something like that, everybody can see that the untrusted device hasn’t been verified by you.

“It’s basically building out a simple web of trust of your devices and immediate contacts so that you have complete protection against ghost devices or other nastier attempts to go and compromise the account. The combination of using QR codes and also using emoji comparison rather than having to read out numbers to one another is I think almost unique now, in terms of creating really, really super robust end-to-end encryption.”

The e2e encryption Matrix uses is based on algorithms popularized by the Signal protocol. It was audited by NCC Group in 2016 but plans for the new funding include a full stack audit — once they’ve ironed out any teething issues with the new default e2e.

“[We want to] at least pick a path, a particular set of clients and servers — because we can’t do the whole thing, obviously, because Matrix has got 60-70 different apps on it now, or different clients. And there are at least four viable server implementations but we will pick the long term supported official path and at least find a set which we can then audit and recommend to governments,” says Hodgson of the audit plans.

They’re also working with Jitsi on a project to make the latter’s WebRTC-compatible videoconferencing platform e2e encrypted too — another key piece as Jitsi’s tech is what New Vector offers for video calling via Matrix.

“We partner with Jitsi for the videoconferencing side of things and we’re working with them on their e2e encrypted videoconferencing… They [recently] got the world’s first WebRTC -based e2e encrypted conferencing going. And they plan to use Matrix as the way to exchange the keys for that — using also all of the verification process [New Vector has developed for Riot]. Because end-to-end encryption’s great, obviously in terms of securing the data — but if you don’t know who you’re talking to, in terms of verifying their identity, it’s a complete waste of time,” adds Hodgson.

So when Jitsi’s e2e encryption launches New Vector will be able to include e2e encrypted videoconferencing as part of its decentralized bundle too.

How much growth is New Vector expecting for Matrix over the next 12 months? “We’ve tripled almost all of the sizing metrics for the network in the last year, and I think we tripled the year before that so I’m hoping that we can continue on that trajectory,” he says on that.

Another “fun thing” New Vector has been working on, since the end of last year, is a peer-to-peer version of Matrix — having developed a “sufficiently lightweight server implementation” that allows Matrix users to run ‘riot’ in a decentralized p2p space via a web browser (or via the app on a mobile device).

“We turned on the peer-to-peer network about a month ago now and they’re at the point right now of making it persistent — previously if all of the clients on the network went away then the entire network disappeared, whereas now it has the ability to persist even if people start restarting their browsers and apps. And it’s very much a mad science project but as far as I know nobody else is remotely in that ballpark,” he says.

“The nice thing is it looks and feels identical to Matrix today. You can use all of the clients, all of the bridges that people have already written… It just happens to be that the Riot is connecting to a server wedged into itself rather than talking to one sitting on the server… So it’s a total paradigm shift.”

“We weren’t sure it was going to work at all but in practice it’s working better than we could have hoped,” he adds. “Over the next year or so we’re going to expect to see more and more emphasis on peer-to-peer — possibly even by default. So that if you install Riot you don’t have to pick a server and go through this fairly clunky thing of figuring out what service provider to trust and do you want to buy one from us as New Vector or do you want to a Swiss ISP. Instead you can start off bobbing around the ocean in a pure peer-to-peer land, and then if you want to persist your data somewhere then you go and find a server to pin yourself to a home on the Internet. But it would be a completely different way of thinking about things.”

Those interested in dipping a toe in p2p decentralized IM can check out this flavor of Riot in a web browser via p2p.riot.im

SoftBank Corp. and Mapbox, the mapping data company that competes with Google and Here, announced that they have established a joint venture called Mapbox Japan.

The JV will provide Mapbox’s mapping platform, including APIs and data services, to developers in Japan. Between June 1 and September 30, Mapbox Japan will also provide up to three months of free support for organizations building COVID-19 related mapping services, including infection cases and statistical data, for developers in the country, which has relied on tracking virus clusters to limit the spread of infections.

Mapbox collects data from sources including government and commercial databases, and uses them in customizable AI-based APIs, SDKs and other products. Its clients have included Facebook, Snap, the New York Times, the Federal Communications Commission and automotive companies like Land Rover and Rimac.

Founded in 2010 by Eric Gunderson, Mapbox says its tech now reaches more than 600 million monthly users. SoftBank Vision Fund led Mapbox’s $164 million Series C in 2017. At the time, Gunderson told TechCrunch that part of the funding would be used to expand in Asia through SoftBank’s presence in regions including Southeast Asia and China.

Mapbox has operated in Japan since July 2019, though that was through partnerships with Yahoo! Japan and Zenrin, one of the country’s biggest mapping software companies. Zenrin also has a partnership with Google Maps, but early last year Google began reducing the amount of mapping data it uses from Zenrin, possibly to focus on building its own trove of mapping data in Japan.

Working closely with Zenrin opens potential new opportunities for Mapbox in Japan. Last year, Gunderson told Nikkei Asian Review that “we are going to be the number one mapping provider in all of Japan and we’ll be able to do this because we have the best data in all of Japan through our partnership with Zenrin.” The company plans to develop products for the Japanese market that include mapping services for industrial automation.

In SoftBank’s announcement, Eric Gan, SoftBank Corp. head of business development, said, “I am very excited to bring Mapbox’s technology to Japan to help enterprises enhance their existing mapping services while also creating new customizable location-based services and management tools. We are seeing a significant rise in demand for Mapbox’s products from retail, ride-share, hotel, office-sharing, payment, mobility and manufacturing industries.”

SoftBank Corp. and Mapbox, the mapping data company that competes with Google and Here, announced that they have established a joint venture called Mapbox Japan.

The JV will provide Mapbox’s mapping platform, including APIs and data services, to developers in Japan. Between June 1 and September 30, Mapbox Japan will also provide up to three months of free support for organizations building COVID-19 related mapping services, including infection cases and statistical data, for developers in the country, which has relied on tracking virus clusters to limit the spread of infections.

Mapbox collects data from sources including government and commercial databases, and uses them in customizable AI-based APIs, SDKs and other products. Its clients have included Facebook, Snap, the New York Times, the Federal Communications Commission and automotive companies like Land Rover and Rimac.

Founded in 2010 by Eric Gunderson, Mapbox says its tech now reaches more than 600 million monthly users. SoftBank Vision Fund led Mapbox’s $164 million Series C in 2017. At the time, Gunderson told TechCrunch that part of the funding would be used to expand in Asia through SoftBank’s presence in regions including Southeast Asia and China.

Mapbox has operated in Japan since July 2019, though that was through partnerships with Yahoo! Japan and Zenrin, one of the country’s biggest mapping software companies. Zenrin also has a partnership with Google Maps, but early last year Google began reducing the amount of mapping data it uses from Zenrin, possibly to focus on building its own trove of mapping data in Japan.

Working closely with Zenrin opens potential new opportunities for Mapbox in Japan. Last year, Gunderson told Nikkei Asian Review that “we are going to be the number one mapping provider in all of Japan and we’ll be able to do this because we have the best data in all of Japan through our partnership with Zenrin.” The company plans to develop products for the Japanese market that include mapping services for industrial automation.

In SoftBank’s announcement, Eric Gan, SoftBank Corp. head of business development, said, “I am very excited to bring Mapbox’s technology to Japan to help enterprises enhance their existing mapping services while also creating new customizable location-based services and management tools. We are seeing a significant rise in demand for Mapbox’s products from retail, ride-share, hotel, office-sharing, payment, mobility and manufacturing industries.”

Founder Collective, a seed-stage fund formed 11 years ago in Cambridge, Ma., has closed its newest fund with $85 million.

Earlier today, we talked with the firm’s general partners — Eric Paley, David Frankel, Micah Rosenbloom — to learn more about it. Among our first questions: whether the three are themselves the largest investors in the new vehicle, as was the case with the firm’s third fund, which closed with $75 million in capital commitments four years ago. (The three have long prided themselves on their ability to tell founders who they take the firm’s money that they are truly are taking investors’ money.)

We also talked exits, geography, and investing through the coronavirus, a time when a lot of personal investors are being more cautious with their dollars.

TC: Eric, you wrote a seed check to Uber and I spied you on the Midas list this year. Still, it’s a scary time to be investing one’s capital aggressively. Are you and David and Micah again the biggest investors in this new fund?

EP:  The three of us were the largest investors in [our third fund] and we’re significantly bigger investors in Fund IV. While we’re fortunate to have some of the best LPs in the world, we believe that being our own largest investor allows us to make decisions that better align with our founders.  We also hope it sends a signal to founders that we’re honest brokers. When we were running our startups, it frustrated us when VCs would add a punitive clause to a term sheet citing “fiduciary responsibilities” to their LPs as the justification. We’re principals and stewards of our capital, not agents of LPs.

TC: How many investors are now involved in the day-to-day of the firm and how has this changed at all in the past years? 

DF: We have ten people full-time with offices in Soho in New York and Harvard Square in Cambridge. There are three partners and a principal on the investment team. We also have a Founder Partner program with some of the best entrepreneurs covering a variety of geographies and domains. [Editor’s note: some of these include Raj DeDatta of Bloomreach, Jack Groetzinger of SeatGeek, Andy Palmer of Tamr, Zach Klein of DIY, James Tamplin of Firebase, Nadia Boujarwah of Dia&Co, Elliot Cohen of PillPack and Noah Glass  of Olo.

Caterina [Fake], who was a Founder Partner with us for 10 years, recently founded Yes.vc, and our first principal, Gaurav Jain, started Afore, a pre-seed VC.

TC: What are some of the most recent exits for the firm?

DF: Over the last couple of years, we’ve been fortunate to see Uber go public and PillPack join Amazon. CoverWallet and Hotel Tonight were another pair of outstanding outcomes. We were fortune to have backed ten companies that have either exited or been valued at more than $1 billion in our first two funds, but we’re also proud of $100 million M&A events. They often go unreported, but because of our fund size, they make a material impact to us – and, more importantly, the founders.

Have seed-stage check sizes changed? I imagine they were getting bigger and now I’d guess they might get smaller again?

EP: From the beginning of Founder Collective, we’ve done two kinds of investing, $1 million to $2 million checks, where we lead and take a board seat, and around $400,000 investments, where we participate. We’ve seen the average valuations rise over the last five years, but we’ve tried to stay disciplined.

MR: So far in the COVID era, check sizes aren’t that different. It’s been more of a binary situation where startups that are deemed as “on-trend” can still command healthy valuations. The companies that are pre-market, or in an out-of-favor category that might have gotten funded in February are having a hard time getting funded. But we try not to be influenced by thematic trends.

DF: One pleasant surprise has been how quickly most of our companies have responded to the “new normal.” Some have reopened rounds to put a little more capital on the balance sheet, while others have found strategic investors to help tide them over. By and large, they’re acting responsibly.

TC: Remind me of where Founder Collective invests — does it have a focus mostly on the Northeast?

MR: We invest primarily in four geographies: New York, Boston, the Bay Area, and Southern California. That said, we’ve invested in startups as far afield as Nigeria, South Korea, and Israel, and genuinely unusual and fun places like Wisconsin, Winnipeg, and Boise.

EP: The reality is that startup geography is changing. For example, the most valuable software startup in the Western world to launch after Facebook is Shopify, which currently has a $90 billion market cap and is based in Ottawa. It would be foolhardy for investors not to broaden their view on where great startups can be built.

That said, there are powerful network effects around startup centers. It’s absolutely possible to build a multi-billion dollar tech business anywhere; it’s orders of magnitude easier when there’s a deep talent pool to hire from, local mentors who have seen scale before, and a broad ecosystem of knowledgeable service providers that can provide guidance.

DF: Also, while we invest globally, we feel the East Coast is an undervalued startup hub. Over the past 20 years, Boston has had more billion-dollar exits than any Western city aside from San Francisco, and New York has produced multiple $10 billion-plus startups in spaces as diverse as consumer hardware, SaaS, dev tools, and craft marketplaces.

TC: How has the pandemic changed your outlook for the next year?

EP: Over the years, we’ve written a lot about capital efficiency for entrepreneurs and even made warning labels that we send to founders alerting them to the dangers of too much money, too soon. Historically, we’ve pushed this message because capital was overabundant, and it damaged startups. The principles of capital efficiency are even more critical in a tight capital market. We’ll be increasingly focused on helping founders understand efficient entrepreneurship and how to build models that are tuned to scale without burning capital.

We’ll also put a premium on founders who have demonstrated the flexibility to operate amid unprecedented levels of uncertainty. In this environment, companies need to focus on their customers’ needs as they are now and not fixate on their pre-existing strategy. For instance, our portfolio company Formlabs sells 3D printers mostly to engineers and designers. After they started printing a novel nasal swab design for COVID tests, hospitals became an important new customer category. The world is changing rapidly, and founders need to keep pace.

TC: What are a few of the firm’s most recent bets and what do they say about Founder Collective’s investing style?

MR: A few recent examples are TrueWork [which sells HR-focused software-as-a-service), Trusted Health [a nursing marketplace], Lovevery [which makes learning toys] and ULesson [which makes consumer education software for African students].

On the surface, it’s a diverse group of companies, but the common thread is a founding team that is all over it. The founders were obsessed with the problems they were solving, had spent meaningful time in these industries, and proved out a lot before seeking funding. There’s no way we can be experts in all those fields, but we do think we know how to spot the founders who are.

TC: Presumably, you’ve already sorted your startups into these red, yellow, and green groups that VCs like to talk about. What are happening to the startups in the red group? Are you helping them to unwind their businesses? 

MR: It’s still so early, it’s hard to say what the ultimate impact will be, and the longer it goes, the worse it will likely get. So far, COVID was the nail in the coffin for a few of our startups, and we’ve tried to help the founders find soft landings for the teams and assets. Some of our distance-learning companies and our health-oriented companies have benefited due to the growing need for their products.

Most of our startups are somewhere in the middle. We try to help entrepreneurs on a case-by-case basis, sometimes that means organizing peer discussion groups about cash management in a time of crisis. Other times, it takes the form of making introductions to potential acquirers. When possible, we help to catalyze new rounds of funding.

TC: What’s one new area of interest for founder collective and why?

DF: One of our core beliefs is that the best startups are built by founders approaching weird and wonderful spaces.We’ve backed ad tech for the flooring industry, IoT-based offshore oyster farming robots, crypto, cologne, doggy DNA tests, data management tools. We’re proudly anti-thematic, and historically, that’s led to good outcomes.