Author: azeeadmin

It’s become increasingly obvious over the last few years, as Vladimir Putin has tightened his grip on his country, that Russian entrepreneurs who want to engage properly with the rest of the world have had to leave their mother country. Gone are the days when a startup in Russia might attract attention from many Western investors. The same, alas, is true of Russian-speaking Belorussians, many of whom have left the country after brutal crackdowns there. Ukraine’s economy also remains sub-par due to the ongoing Russian aggression in the East of the country. So it’s fallen to enterprising Russian-speaking investors in and outside Russia to work out the best ways to harness the obvious talent out there.

Leta Capital makes a play of investing in Russian-speaking entrepreneurs based just about anywhere. It’s now launching its third and largest fund to date and says it will invest over $100 million in UK, European, and US-based growth-stage tech companies over the next three years. Its focus will be Seed/ Round A / Round B investments. It intends to invest in the range of $2-5 million and will be focused on software, IT, and internet technologies

The new fund will to hone in on East European and Russian-speaking entrepreneurs. Particularly those operating out of international hubs such as London and New York.

Leta’s founder and former tech entrepreneur Alexander Chachava says Russian-speaking startups based abroad are often – these days – over-looked and under-valued by Western VCs and investors, and I dare say he’s right. Prejudice isn’t just about skin color, as we all know.

Chachava says his fund has invested over $45 million to date since 2012, going into 30 technology companies including Synthesis AI, Unigine, InDriver, NovaKid (which I covered last year) and 365Scores.

Exits include the sale of Bright Box HK to Zurich Insurance Group in 2017, and WeWork’s acquisition of sales and marketing platform Unomy.

Chachava said: “While we are significantly broadening our geographic focus towards key global hubs, our strategy effectively remains the same: to identify exciting, high-potential technology start-ups and entrepreneurs, and support them in realizing their international ambitions.”

Chachava says his own research suggests there are in excess of 17,000 Russian-speaking and East European tech entrepreneurs and start-ups active in the UK, Europe, and US.

“Our analysis shows they continue to be undervalued and overlooked for funding, despite often generating significant cash when it comes to ARR. These entrepreneurs are some of the most dynamic and technically skilled in the world, and for investors, they represent a massive untapped opportunity.”

He has a point. Significant businesses such as Telegram, Revolut, TradingView, PandaDoc, and Preply were all started by Russian speakers who are emigres from their respective Russian-influenced countries.

Leta says its first “evergreen” fund of $15 million was fully deployed in early 2020, delivering a gross IRR of 27% per annum to investors. Its second $50 million fund had its first closing in September 2018 and has committed about 60% of its capital, says the company.

Leta will invest out of an entity in the Cayman Islands, but doesn’t plan to have an office right now, and nor will it need it to invest.

As Chachava told me over a Zoom call: “The last two years, we have not been not traveling too much, our work has been downgraded to Zoom calls. But before that, we spent a couple of months in the US, a couple of months in Western Europe. I was a frequent visitor to London but I don’t think we need space anymore in our modern world.”

Turning the page from the early-stage venture capital market to the super late-stage exit market, this morning we’re talking about endpoint security company SentinelOne’s IPO in the context of Sprinklr’s own. We’ll have more on the public offering market later today when Doximity and Confluent price their respective IPOs after the close of trading.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

SentinelOne’s IPO, expected to price on June 29 and trade June 30, is a fascinating debut. Why? Because the company sports a combination of rapid growth and expanding losses that make it a good heat-check for the IPO market. Its debut will allow us to answer whether public investors still value growth above all else. And this week, the company gave us an early dataset regarding its market value in the form of an IPO price range. This means we can do some unpacking and thinking.

A reminder regarding why we dwell on the exit market for unicorns: We care because the value of late-stage startups when they reach a liquidity point helps set valuation comps for myriad smaller startups. Furthermore, the level of public-market enthusiasm for loss-making, growth-focused companies will determine the scale of returns for many a venture capitalist, founder, and early employee.

So, let’s talk about SentinelOne’s cybersecurity IPO price range; Sprinklr’s social-media software debut will play foil.

The price of growth

It can make good sense to pay up for a quickly growing company’s shares. This is why you may hear of a startup raising an early-stage round at a very high revenue multiple.

Why put a $50 million price tag on a startup that just crossed the $1 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) threshold? If it’s growing sufficiently quickly, the math can pencil out. If that startup was growing at 300% per year, say, the revenue multiple that you paid in the round valuing the startup at $50 million would fall sharply over the next year, at which point other investors would probably scramble to put more capital into the firm at a higher price.

Bingo! You just got a markup on your initial investment, and the company has found someone else to lead their next round at a higher price, giving it even more capital to keep its growth game going and make your early investment appear prescient. See? Venture capital is easy.¹

The same general idea applies to companies going public. Growth matters, and the more rapidly a company is adding revenue, the more money it will be worth because investors can anticipate its future scale (within reason). Some companies that sport quick growth can have other issues that impact their value. Extensive debt, for example, a history of uneven growth, or deteriorating economics could come into play. Or simply very high losses.

In 2019, LinkedIn’s engineering team announced DataHub, a metadata tool it had built to help it organise, search and discover insights from its vast data trove. In 2020, LinkedIn open sourced it. Now, a startup co-founded by one of the creators of DataHub and by a former senior engineer from Airbnb who helped build the latter company’s Dataportal, is coming out of stealth — backed by LinkedIn, among others — to usher the DataHub platform into its latest chapter: commercialization.

Acryl Data, as the company is called, is launching today with $9 million led by 8VC, with LinkedIn and Insight also participating, to help other companies use the tools for their own big data needs.

The impetus for Acryl Data comes from the salient fact that big data, and specifically being able to organize, understand, make the most of fragmented big data troves (with information coming from and living in multiple places, be it Snowflake, or Databricks, or Looker, or something else altogether), is a challenge that impacts any organization that has a large digital component in its operations. Traditionally, big tech companies have been some of the more innovative in addressing that issue, with a number of them also open sourcing their technology to make it usable by others.

The breakthrough for the founders of Acryl — discovered before they started the company, when they were still working at their respective big tech companies — was the realization that metadata held the key to organizing that big data information.

“The interesting part about metadata is actually that it has become a big data problem,” said Shirshanka Das, the LinkedIn alum who is CEO and co-founded the company with Swaroop Jagadish (the Airbnb alum who is CTO). “And so all of the data infrastructure DNA that we have, in terms of building large-scale data collections, streaming, indexing, searching — those all need metadata management solutions that can actually scale to the demands of the modern enterprise. That, I think, is really our secret sauce, that we’ve been able to build a metadata platform that takes in all the best practices of doing data infrastructure right, and applied it to doing metadata infrastructure.”

As an open source project, DataHub has picked up some significant traction. In addition to LinkedIn itself, Expedia, Saxo Bank, Klarna and many others are using the framework — essentially a generalized metadata search and discovery tool — to build their own metadata graph to connect their various data entities together. Altogether the project has racked up over 3,200 GitHub stars and has more than a 100 contributors.

Acryl Data, like other open source commercialization efforts, is setting out to build a toolset that will make that framework easier to scale and apply in more use cases, particularly at those companies that might lack the resources to build these implementations on their own. The first of these, it says, will be a data catalogue that is based on design learnings from Airbnb’s Dataportal. LinkedIn will be collaborating with Acryl Data, along with the wider open source community, on future products.

“LinkedIn’s unique view of the global economy provides us with the opportunity to improve economic outcomes for hundreds of millions of people around the world through data-driven insights and AI-powered products. To discover the right data, navigate the tens of thousands of derived datasets that our researchers and engineers use every day and manage them well, we rely on DataHub,” said Igor Perisic, Chief Data Officer at LinkedIn, in a statement. “We are excited to partner with Acryl Data to continue to advance DataHub with them.”

The opportunity is a big one. Collibra, a competitor in the same space, last year raised a round at a $2.3 billion valuation. Another, Alation, was valued at $1.2 billion earlier this month. But with a lot of space for innovation left, it’s interesting to see the people who built some of the most foundational tools in the space getting stuck in as entrepreneurs themselves to meet the challenge.

“The modern data stack needs a fundamental rethink in how metadata is managed,” said Insight Partners MD George Mathew, in a statement. “We believe a next-generation, real-time metadata platform is needed, and Acryl Data is the best team to lead this transformation based on their groundbreaking work with DataHub.”

Spin, Ford’s micromobility subsidiary, has launched its first custom designed and built electric scooter. The company says the S-100T scooters are its safest and longest lasting, two qualities that it hopes will attract the attention of cities as it aims its strategy at exclusive partnerships. 

When the company launches its service in Sacramento in July, it’ll deploy 25 of the new S-100T scooters along with its existing fleet. Spin hopes to scale to 350 S-100Ts by August and have more than a few thousand in the market by the end of the year, according to a spokesperson for the company. 

The S-100T joins Spin’s other vehicles, the original S-100, the three-wheeler S-200 and a new e-bike, which are manufactured in partnership with Segway-Ninebot and Okai. Spin will continue these partnerships in order to maintain a diverse fleet.

Spin has been working on its own scooter since 2019, when many of the scooters on the road came off-the-shelf and fell apart fast. A Los Angeles Times report found LA-area Bird scooters lasted only 126 days.

“At that time, the founders decided to really set a new standard not only for Spin itself, but also for the industry on what e-scooter durability should be,” Maxime Veron, VP of product at Spin, told TechCrunch. “So we really set out to create the toughest scooter out there, and that has been the north star for the design, build and testing of the S-100T.”

The ‘T’ stands for ‘tough,’ Veron added. 

“And we really tested it, tortured it, I should say, way beyond the expectation of the industry, and that’s why we expect it to last twice as long as other e-scooters,” he said.

Spin expects the S-100T to last over three years, compared to about 18 months for its S-100. The company reached this estimated lifespan after performing 400 different safety and durability tests, many of which involved pulverizing the vehicle and making it withstand temperatures from -4 degrees Fahrenheit to 149 degrees Fahrenheit.

Low life expectancy of scooters is one of the main reasons why it’s been so hard for companies to achieve profitability, which is why Spin is focusing its scooter design around durability. 

“Durability is the biggest lever we have in terms of profitability,” said Veron. “It’s gonna help both our bottom line in terms of making sure that the scooters last longer, and our top line of attracting customers who will love the ride.”

Veron says the S-100T is designed to be modular, with a single frame design that’s durable and allows for easy repairs and parts replacements, which should help with lifespan and sustainability of the vehicle. Perhaps one day, both the design and Spin’s ownership of the vehicles will also help the company come up with a good end-of-life strategy and design for recyclability. 

“Durability has been the number one, but we will be able over time to improve on all the key checkpoints including end-of-life because we control it all,” said Veron.

Thoughtful and high-quality product design is no longer optional. Gone are the days that a startup could launch with a bare-bones app or website. The demand side of the design equation has only grown — consumers are used to beautiful, intuitive products — while the supply side is struggling to keep up.

How are startups supposed to educate themselves in product design, hire the right people for those positions and think about product design as a core piece of their business?

A good starting point is an upcoming TC Early Stage: Marketing & Fundraising session with Scott Tong on July 8 & 9.

Tong was a principal designer at IDEO, a co-founder at IFTTT, head of product design at Pinterest, an EIR at IMO Ventures and is now a startup advisor at Design Fund.

When it comes to thoughtfully crafting products, and ensuring that those designs fit in line with the company’s broader short and long-term goals, there is perhaps no one better suited to show us how it’s done.

Tong joins a long list of experts in a variety of startup core competencies who will be speaking at TC Early Stage in July. That list includes Sequoia’s Mike Vernal (Product Market Fit Is All About Tempo), Coatue’s Caryn Marooney (formerly Facebook’s head of comms) and Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra (Growth Hacking). You can check out the agenda here.

The coolest part of TC Early Stage is that all sessions are designed with plenty of time for audience Q&A, so founders can get specific, tailored advice about their own business challenges.

These mini-bootcamps kick off in just two weeks so we hope you’ll be joining us at TC Early Stage— Grab your ticket here!

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie,

I’ve been working on an H-1B in the U.S. for nearly two years. While I’m grateful to have made it through the H-1B lottery and to be working, I’m feeling unhappy and frustrated with my job.

I really want to start something of my own and work on my own terms in the United States. Are there any immigration options that would allow me to do that?

— Seeking Satisfaction

Dear Seeking,

Job dissatisfaction and frustration while on H-1B is normal, according to Edward Gorbis. He is the founder of Career Meets World and a performance coach who specifically works with immigrants and first-generation professionals to help them find fulfillment and thrive in their careers and life. I recently spoke with him for my podcast, “Immigration Law For Tech Startups.”

He says that “once immigrants reach stability, they start to think, ‘Who am I, what do I value, what’s my core identity?’” He partners with people to help them to gain a better understanding of why they think the way they do, teach them how our brain really works, and then reshape and retrain the brain for success.

Gorbis says that imagining overcoming the hurdles that stand in the way of doing the work that will fulfill you is the first step. So, here are some options that can help you imagine how to move toward building the life of your dreams.

Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window)

Raise $250,000 and be the CEO

A great new option for aspiring entrepreneurs is International Entrepreneur Parole, a new immigration program in the United States that allows CEOs, CTOs, and others to obtain a 2.5-year immigration status. You can live in the U.S. and run your company. Your spouse can work and you could be eligible for a 2.5-year extension.

How to qualify? You’ll need to own at least 10% of a U.S. company, such as a Delaware C corporation registered in California. Ideally, you’ll want to show that your company bank account has at least $250,000 raised from qualifying U.S. investors prior to applying, but you can demonstrate other evidence to show that your company has the potential to grow rapidly and create jobs in the U.S.

See yourself at another company

There is technically no limit on how many H-1B employers you can have or how many hours you work — or how few hours you work — in an H-1B position. So, think about other companies.

Security compliance is precisely three things: incredibly boring, time consuming, and entirely necessary to run a business in the modern age. Compliance isn’t going away, but startups like Drata are making it slightly easier to bear.

Drata helps companies get their SOC 2 compliance quicker by using automation. SOC 2 is a certification used to show that a company can store customer data in the cloud securely, but the process is notoriously complex and can take months to complete — and you have to do it all over again every year. That’s particularly burdensome for startups and smaller firms.

Drata says it can get companies SOC 2-compliant faster and keep them in compliance for longer by integrating with popular business tools and cloud services to get a better picture of a company’s security posture.

Now with a new round of $25 million at Series A in the bank, Drata said it’s expanding its compliance platform to also include ISO 27001, another core security standard used all over the world to help companies protect their systems and safeguard data.

The round landed six months after its $3.2 million seed round in January, and was led by GGV Capital, with participation from Silicon Valley CISO Investors, Okta Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Leaders Fund, and SV Angel.

Drata CEO and co-founder Adam Markowitz told TechCrunch that the company is growing on average 100% month-over-month since it launched out of stealth and is serving hundreds of customers, including three-person startups to publicly traded companies.

The startup joins several other companies in the compliance space. Secureframe raised $18 million at Series A in March to offer SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications. Strike Graph raised a $3.9 million seed round last year to help companies automate security audits and get FedRamp certification needed to provide technology to the federal government. And, Startup Battlefield participant Osano in 2019 raised $5.4 million at Series A to build out its risk and compliance platform.

Related funding news:

• Strike Graph raises $3.9M to help automate security audits
• Drata raises $3.2M for its compliance audit platform
• Osano, a risk and compliance startup, raises $5M in Series A
• Secureframe raises $18M Series A to simplify cybersecurity compliance

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

For this week’s deep dive Danny, Alex, and a bunch of the TechCrunch crew took on the recent happenings in the world of bitcoin. In a break from our regular format, we recorded live from a Twitter Space — it’s like a Clubhouse, but closer to where your social network is — so the audio quality is not going to be Utterly Perfect. But we think the conversation will more than make up for it!

Before we get into the show notes, do not forget that we’re recording Equity live on Hopin Thursday the 24th. Come hang with us and have some fun. It’s free, of course, and should be a good time. Details here, sign up here!

So what did we get into? A lot!

• Recent price changes to the value of major coins
• The impact of China on the larger crypto ecosystem
• What’s the latest from the NFT craze?
• Are DAOs, you know, actually a thing?

And more. A big thanks to Romain Dillet and Lucas Matney for hanging with us, Drew Olanoff for hosting, and Chris Gates for snagging the audio and making it all work.

See you tomorrow!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

Salesforce and AWS represent the two most successful cloud companies in their respective categories. Over the last few years the two cloud giants have had an evolving partnership. Today they announced plans for a new set of integration capabilities to make it easier to share data and build applications that cross the two platforms.

Patrick Stokes, EVP and GM for Platform at Salesforce, points out that the companies have worked together in the past to provide features like secure sharing between the two services, but they were hearing from customers that they wanted to take it further and today’s announcement is the first step towards making that happen.

“[The initial phases of the partnership] have really been massively successful. We’re learning a lot from each other and from our mutual customers about the types of things that they want to try to accomplish, both within the Salesforce portfolio of products, as well as all the Amazon products, so that the two solutions complement each other really nicely. And customers are asking us for more, and so we’re excited to enter into this next phase of our partnership,” Stokes explained.

He added, “The goal really is to unify our platforms, so bring [together] all the power of the Amazon services with all of the power of the of the Salesforce platform.” These capabilities could be the next step in accomplishing that.

This involves a couple of new features the companies are working on to help developers on both the platform and application side of the equation. For starters that includes enabling developers to virtualize Amazon data inside Salesforce without having to do all the coding to make that happen manually.

“More specifically, we’re going to virtualize Amazon data within the Salesforce platform, so whether you’re working with an S3 bucket, Amazon RDS or whatever it is we’re going to make it so that that the data is virtualized and just appears just like it’s native data on the Salesforce platform,” he said.

Similarly, developers building applications on Amazon will be able to access Salesforce data and have it appear natively in Amazon. This involves providing connectors between the two systems to make the data flow smoothly without a lot of coding to make that happen.

The companies are also announcing event sharing capabilities, which makes it easier for both Amazon and Salesforce customers to build microservices-based applications that cross both platforms.

“You can build microservices-oriented architecture that spans the services of Salesforce and Amazon platforms, again without having to write any code. To do that, [we’re developing] out of the box connectors so you can click and drag the events that you want.”

The companies are also announcing plans to make it easier from an identity and access management perspective to access the platforms with a guided setup. Finally, the companies are working on applications to build Amazon Chime communications tooling into Service Cloud and other Salesforce services to build things like virtual call centers using AWS machine learning technology.

Amazon VP of Global Marketing Rachel Thorton says that having the two cloud giants work together in this way should make it easier for developers to create solutions that span the two platforms. “I just think it unlocks such possibilities for developers, and the faster and more innovative developers can be, it just unlocks opportunities for businesses, and creates better customer experiences,” Thornton said.

It’s worth noting that Salesforce also has extensive partnerships with other cloud providers including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

As is typically the case with Salesforce announcements, while all of these capabilities are being announced today, they are still in the development stage and won’t go into beta testing until later this year with GA expected sometime next year. The companies are expected to release more details about the partnership at Dreamforce and re:Invent, their respective customer conferences later this year.

Frumtak Ventures, one of the few VCs in Iceland, has raised its third fund, Frumtak III. The $57 million (ISK 7b, €48m) fund will focus on post-seed and Series A startups. The firm says its typical ticket size will range from $1-5 million (€850k-4.2m).

Frumtak was a somewhat lesser-known European VC until it popped up on our radar as the backers behind the Controlant real-time supply chain monitoring startup, the technology from which was pictured beside Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, when he held up a box containing the first-ever shipment of the COVID-19 vaccine to the city. Controlant has been a key player in the global distribution cold chain associated with vaccines.

However, the fund has also backed digital banking solutions provider Meniga, digital therapeutics scaleup Sidekick Health, travel CRM and travel booking system provider Kaptio, live event and fan engagement data analytics company Activity Stream, and Data Market, which was acquired by Qlik in 2014.

Svana Gunnarsdottir, managing partner of Frumtak Ventures said: “We are proud of the accomplishments of our portfolio companies and their teams, as well as the investment decisions we made through our first two funds. We look forward to continuing our support of high-potential startups and brilliant founders with Frumtak III. We are also grateful for the confidence shown to us by our LP’s, many of whom have been with us since our first fund in 2009.”

Concurrently, Asthildur Otharsdottir has joined the firm as partner and Frumtak III’s lead investment manager. Otharsdottir was previously Frumtak’s Chairman for 6 years and has been on the board of Marel and Icelandair Group.