Author: azeeadmin

When the pandemic forced everyone to stay at home last year, many gym-goers looked to at-home fitness makers to fill the void for their cardiovascular and strength-training workouts.

To help meet that demand, Tempo, the five-year-old fitness startup founded by Moawia Eldeeb and Josh Augustin, closed a $220 million Series C round led by SoftBank. The company plans to use the raise to shore up its supply chain, keep up with increased consumer demand and fuel efforts such as R&D and content. Other participants in the Series C round included Bling Capital, DCM, General Catalyst and Norwest Venture Partners. 

Tempo’s freestanding cabinet, which the company launched in February 2020, includes a 42-inch touchscreen with a 3D motion-tracking camera that consistently scans, tracks and coaches users as they work out.

It currently sells three hardware bundles, starting at $2,495, that include accessories like barbells, dumbbells, a folding bench, a kettlebell system, a squat rack, a workout mat, a recovery foam roller and a heart rate monitor, depending on which bundle customers spring for. Users also pay a $39 monthly subscription to access on-demand and live classes. 

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The concept for Tempo came about in 2015 when Eldeeb and Augustin developed SmartSpot, a computer vision-augmented smart screen they sold to gyms that helped trainers analyze and improve their clients’ form during workouts. With the trove of data generated and collected by SmartSpot, Eldeeb and Augustin developed a program that identified fitness users’ most common movement errors and utilized machine learning to offer unique recommendations for each individual user — a program that became part of the foundation for Tempo. 

“Being a personal trainer once, I remember charging $150 an hour,” explains Eldeeb. “I want to create a better experience and offer it to many more people for a lot less. That means we’re going to continue to invest in the core technology that makes that possible.” 

Tempo’s launch came during a particularly opportune time. With the pandemic unfolding, demand for at-home fitness solutions soared. The startup has seen sales surge 1,000% since it began taking pre-orders in early 2020, with delivery delays currently ranging between five to seven weeks — a common issue faced by other at-home fitness companies such as Peloton, Tonal and Echelon. Tempo users have collectively performed 5 million workouts, or clocked 40,000 hours on their devices to date, according to the company. 

“That [supply chain] was definitely an issue,” acknowledges Eldeeb, pointing to production challenges posed by factories temporarily shutting down or reducing operations in 2020. “We were doing this for the first time at scale, and we’d made small quantities of the product before [launch]. But for our first year in the market, we had to solve all those problems and still ship the product, which was a huge undertaking. We basically had to reduce sales because I wanted the factory workers to be safe.” 

For Tempo, the opportunity to scale is enormous, as the global market is estimated to reach $29.4 billion by 2025. With new funding in tow, Eldeeb wants to capitalize on surging demand, with plans of doubling down on logistics and its supply chain, growing employee headcount and expanding its content to offer yoga and boxing classes later this year.  

With vaccinations across the U.S. steadily increasing and gyms reopening, the big question is whether people will stick with their at-home fitness workouts, throw themselves back into their old gym routines or adopt a hybrid model that marries the two. Eldeeb is betting that now that more people have acclimated to working out in their homes, they’ll stay the course out of sheer convenience, pointing to a Consumer Trends report from The New Consumer published earlier this year indicating that 81% of people under the age of 40 prefer to exercise at home. 

If true, then companies like Tempo will continue to reap the benefits of this shift of fitness into the home. 

For a long time, “revenue” seemed to be a taboo word in the startup world. Fortunately, things have changed with the rise of SaaS and alternative funding sources such as revenue-based investing VCs. Still, revenue modeling remains a challenge for founders. How do you predict earnings when you are still figuring it out?

The answer is twofold: You need to make your revenue predictable, repeatable and scalable in the first place, plus make use of tools that will help you create projections based on your data. Here, we’ll suggest some ways you can get more visibility into your revenue, find the data that really matter and figure out how to put a process in place to make forecasts about it.

Base projections on repeatable, scalable results

Aaron Ross is a co-author of “Predictable Revenue,” a book based on his experience of creating a process and team that helped grow Salesforce’s revenue by more than $100 million. “Predictable” is the key word here: “You want growth that doesn’t require guessing, hope and frantic last-minute deal-hustling every quarter- and year-end,” he says.

This makes recurring revenue particularly desirable, though it is by no means the be-all-end-all of predictable revenue. On one hand, there is always the risk that recurring revenue won’t last, as customers may churn and organic growth runs out of gas. On the other, there is a broader picture for predictable revenue that goes beyond subscription-based models.

Ross and his co-author, Marylou Tyler, outline three steps to predictable revenue: predictable lead generation, a dedicated sales development team and consistent sales systems. They wrote an entire book about it, so it would be hard to sum it up here. So what’s the takeaway? You shouldn’t base your projections on processes and results that aren’t repeatable and scalable.

Cross the hot coals

In their early days, startups usually grow via word of mouth, luck and sheer hustle. The problem is that it likely won’t lead to sustainable growth; as the saying goes, what got you here won’t get you there. In between, there is typically a phase of uncertainty and missed results that Ross refers to as “the hot coals.”

Before the hot coals, predicting revenue is vain at best, and oftentimes impossible. I, for one, remember being at a loss when an old-school investor asked me for five-year profit-and-loss projections when my now-defunct startup was nowhere near a stable money-making path. Not all seed investors expect this, so there was obviously a mismatch here, but the challenge is still the same for most founders: How do you bridge the gap between traditional projections and the reality of a startup?

Mobility mavens, June 9 will be here before you know it, and that means it’s time to get your strategy ducks in a row for TC Sessions: Mobility 2021. You want to make the most of your time at this one-day virtual intensive featuring interactive presentations with the mobility industry’s top movers, shakers and startup dream makers, amirite?

Take your team to increase your ROI. Right now, you can grab a group discount — at the early bird price — when you buy a block of four or more tickets to TC Sessions: Mobility. Don’t procrastinate. At $70 per pass, you’ll save a couple hundred bucks — but only if you make your purchase by May 5, at 11:59 pm (PT).

Like the old expression says, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. You’ll cover more ground and discover more opportunities with your whole team at your side.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 will feature an incredible lineup of speakers, presentations, fireside chats and breakouts all focused on the current and future state of mobility — like EVs, micromobility and smart cities for starters — and the investment trends that influence them all.

Investors like Clara Brenner (Urban Innovation Fund), Quin Garcia (Autotech Ventures) and Rachel Holt (Construct Capital) — all of whom will grace our virtual stage. They’ll have plenty of insight and advice to share, including the challenges that startup founders will face as they break into the transportation arena.

You’ll hear from CEOs like Starship Technologies’ Ahti Heinla. The company’s been busy testing delivery robots in real-world markets. Don’t miss his discussion touching on challenges ranging from technology to red tape and what it might take to make last-mile robotic delivery a mainstream reality.

Taking your team also makes you a highly efficient networking unit. Find ad hoc opportunities in the virtual platform’s chat feature or use CrunchMatch, our AI-powered platform to zero in on the people best aligned with your business goals. Schedule virtual product demos, pitch investors or recruit new talent.

Here’s what Rachael Wilcox, a creative producer at Volvo Cars, told us about her networking experience at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020.

“I didn’t think I’d network on a virtual platform but, it turns out, it’s a lot easier to network with more people. Folks just felt more comfortable reaching out. I had conversations with people I probably wouldn’t have met otherwise, and that was an unexpected benefit.”

TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 take place on June 9, but if you want to take your team — and save 25% in the process — it’s now o’clock. Buy your group discount passes before the early bird price disappears on May 5 at 11:59 pm (PT). Grab your cohort and go!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

The $9 trillion financial management firm Blackrock is collaborating with the $313 billion Singapore investment firm Temasek to back companies developing technologies and services to help create a zero emission economy by 2050.

The two mega-investment firms will invest an initial $600 million to launch Decarbonization Partners, and look to raise money from investors committing to achieving a net zero world and long-term sustainable finacnial returns. The two partners have set themselves a goal to raise $1 billion for their first fund, including capital from Temasek and BlackRock.

The partnership, coming during Earth month, is one of several big multi-billion dollar initiatives that are underway to prevent global climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.

Indeed, BlackRock is somewhat tardy to the party. Temasek, for its part, has already made a number of high-profile bets in the alternative meat market — namely in companies like Impossible Foods — and in alternative energy technology developers including Eavor, a geothermal company, and a $500 million bet on a renewable power developer in India.

Meanwhile, a coalition of billionaires led by Bill Gates are already on their second billion dollar investment vehicle through Breakthrough Energy, a multi-stage, multi-strategy initiative that includes a venture capital arm as well as other types of financing on the way.

“The world cannot meet its net zero ambitions without transformational innovation,” said Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, in a statement. “For decarbonization solutions and technologies to transform our economy, they need to be scaled. To do that, they need patient, well-managed capital to support their vital goals. This partnership will help define climate solutions as a standalone asset class that is both essential to our collective mission and a historic investment opportunity created by the net zero transition.”

To get a sense of what Decarbonization Partners might back, companies should probably look to the Breakthrough Energy portfolio — the firms share similar interests in new sources of energy, technologies to distribute that energy, building and manufacturing technologies, and material science and process innovations.

It’s a big swing that the firms are taking, but the flood of capital coming into the sustainability sector is commensurate with both the size of the problem, and the potential opportunity in returns generated by solving it.

A report from Morgan Stanley estimated that solving climate change would be a $50 trillion problem, according to a 2019 report from Forbes.

“Bold, aggressive actions are needed to make the global net zero ambition a reality. Decarbonization Partners represents one of several steps we are taking to follow through on our commitment to halve the emissions from our portfolio by 2030, and ultimately move to net zero emissions by 2050,” said Dilhan Pillay, Chief Executive Officer of Temasek International. “Through collective efforts with like-minded partners, we will be able to create sustainable value for all of our stakeholders over the long term, and investors will have the opportunity to help deliver innovative solutions at scale to address climate challenges.”

How much is Epic Games worth? Well, we’ve long ago surpasses the realm of dollar figures regular humans can contextualize. With its latest round, the gamer hits an equity valuation of $28.7 billion. Yes, “b” for “billion.” That’s a lot of micro-transactions.

Time to start talking metaverse!

Best known for the wildly successful battle royale title, Fortnite, Epic just announced another $1 billion funding round, featuring a $200 million Sony Group Corporation investment. The rest of the list is, predictably, a long one, including [deep breath], Appaloosa, Baillie Gifford, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, GIC, T. Rowe Price Associates-managed accounts, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, BlackRock managed accounts, Park West, KKR, AllianceBernstein, Altimeter, Franklin Templeton and Luxor Capital.

“We are grateful to our new and existing investors who support our vision for Epic and the Metaverse,” CEO and founder Tim Sweeney said in a statement tied to the news. “Their investment will help accelerate our work around building connected social experiences in Fortnite, Rocket League and Fall Guys, while empowering game developers and creators with Unreal Engine, Epic Online Services and the Epic Games Store.”

Sweeney has plenty of reason to be grateful, as the controlling shareholder.

Developing…

Justin Mast has a simple reason for starting his plant retail startup Bloomscape in Detroit.

“This is home,” he told me. “This is where I have a really strong network and I knew I’d be able to find a lot of support.”

Mast didn’t grow up in Detroit proper, but he’s from Grand Rapids, Michigan’s second largest city. He recalled a weekend in Detroit after finishing graduate school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, when he was “totally blown away” by the city’s energy.

And when it came time to launch Bloomscape in 2018, Mast said it made sense to do so from Detroit because of Michigan’s “strong heritage in the horticulture industry” — in floriculture, for example, it ranks as one of the biggest producers in the United States.

That heritage isn’t abstract to him. Mast said his family has been involved in the industry for five generations on his father’s side (including three generations in the Netherlands) and three generations on his mother’s. He worked in the family greenhouse as a child and even starting a roadside plant stand.

Image Credits: Bloomscape

“This was my version of a lemonade stand,” he said — albeit a lemonade stand that became popular enough that Mast needed to recruit his siblings for help, and that eventually provided him with enough money to buy a used car.

Bloomscape launched in 2018, and Mast said that from the beginning, the startup’s advantage was “to really know the ins and outs of the business.” That allowed Bloomscape to ship larger plants (like birds of paradise and Chinese fan palms), and more recently to expand with outdoor plants and garden “bloom kits.”

“By focusing on one of the least glamorized parts of this industry, the supply chain, we are able to design this process for shipping larger plants, at scale, throughout the country,” he said. “We’re shipping out tropical plants in the dead of winter, thousands of times a week, with a real high level of consistency. We know the plants really well, we how they perform, how they move through a supply chain, we know the nuances of FedEx and UPS, we know what growers are growing quality product.”

Bloomscape has raised a total of $24 million, most recently in a Series B last fall led by General Catalyst, with participation from Annox Capital’s Bob Mylod, Home Depot board member Jeff Boyd, former Seventh Generation and Burt’s Bees CEO John Replogle and existing investors Revolution Ventures and Ludlow Ventures.

Bloomscape bloom kits

When I asked whether investors had ever pressured him to move the startup to Silicon Valley, Mast said, “We’ve had successful funding rounds, but even in most successful rounds, not everyone’s going to be the right fit.” So it sounds like the issue came up, but Mast made sure that everyone who actually invested saw the startup’s location as an advantage, or at least “if they saw it as a disadvantage, they were willing to overlook it.”

Nor has the location proven to be an issue when it comes to hiring. Mast said the company successfully lured Aaron Averbuch (formerly based in Seattle and a vice president of engineering at Placed and Snap) to Detroit to become CTO. He also noted that Detroit is close to the University of Michigan, and that “all the schools in Chicago and Pittsburgh are within a few hours’ drive.”

Mast added that the last six months have been “a particularly exciting time” to run a startup in Detroit, with the success of companies like StockX, Floyd and Autobooks.

“We’re thrilled to be here,” he said.

HomeX, a home services platform for homeowners and service providers, has raised $90 million in a funding round led by New Mountain Capital.

New Mountain Capital, a New York-based investment firm with more than $30 billion in assets under management, was the only institutional investor to put money in this round alongside company executives. The company was bootstrapped until a 2019 $50 million-plus debt financing.

Founded in 2017, Chicago-based HomeX aims to “radically improve” home services by pairing service workers with homeowners, both virtually and in person. It also has built software, and offers services for, contractors that are aimed at helping them drive and manage demand “more efficiently.”

Notably, one of the company’s co-founders, CTO Simon Weaver, and several team members were on the development team of Evi, a startup that had built an AI program that can be communicated with using natural language via an app, that was acquired by Amazon in 2012. That technology was essentially the brain behind Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa. 

HomeX uses artificial intelligence to diagnose home issues virtually before a contractor even goes out to a home, with the goal of helping them resolve a problem faster (by having the necessary equipment ahead of time for example), which in turn makes customers happier. 

“We’re using machine-generated content to create solutions that are specific to a homeowner’s issues,” said  co-founder and president Victor Payen. “Using machines to understand symptoms, the questions to ask and to actually get to a diagnosis and a recommendation or resolution is where AI absolutely shines and allows us to do things that were not possible even three or five years ago.”

Co-founder and CEO Michael Werner worked in the $500 billion services industry for years (his family founded Werner Ladders) and recognized just how fragmented it was. He also acknowledges that, especially in certain markets, “there’s a terrible imbalance between very high demand and not enough contractors to do the work, or rather, a terrible labor shortage.”

HomeX Remote Assist in particular virtually connects homeowners (via phone, video or chat) with HomeX’s licensed technicians to diagnose and repair common home issues. That business unit has experienced more than 400% growth in less than a year, according to Werner. Last year, the company grew by “about 5x” the number of contractors on its platform. It declined to reveal revenue figures.

Image courtesy of HomeX

“For homeowners, we’re making home maintenance less complicated,” Werner said. “At the same time, we want to help the contractor succeed. Similar to how telemedicine has changed how medicine is delivered, HomeX Remote Assist is going to change the service experience for taking care of your home.”

Another area of HomeX’s business that is growing rapidly is its B2B offering. Home warranty and insurance companies see remote services “as very additive to make their business more efficient,” notes Payen.

“We are using some of our capital toward a pilot program and a number of business development opportunities there,” he said.

For now, while the company is not profitable overall, it is profitable in the services side of its business, according to Werner. It has 250 employees and is contracted with 750 service workers. Over the years, it has served “hundreds of thousands” of clients via its platform, defined by unique virtual and physical appointments.  

New Mountain Capital Managing Director Harris Kealey said his firm viewed HomeX as a business that is primed to reshape the home and commercial services industry.

“The market is massive and the need for change and innovation is substantial,” he said in a written statement.

Another company in the space, Thumbtack, recently expanded into video home checkups. Thumbtack, a marketplace where you can hire local professionals for home improvement and other services such as repairs, in December acquired Setter, a startup which provided its customers with video home checkups conducted by experts, and then offered personalized plans for how to address any issues.

Thumbtack had laid off 250 employees at the end of March 2020, after the company saw big declines in its major markets. Since then, however, CEO Marco Zappacosta told TechCrunch there’s been “a renewed focus on the home and an acceleration of digital adoption.”

Artificial intelligence technology holds a huge amount of promise for enterprises — as a tool to process and understand their data more efficiently; as a way to leapfrog into new kinds of services and products; and as a critical stepping stone into whatever the future might hold for their businesses. But the problem for many businesses is that they are not tech businesses at their cores and so bringing on and using AI will typically involve a lot of heavy lifting.  Today, one of the startups building AI services is announcing a big round of funding to help bridge that gap.

SambaNova — an AI startup building hardware and integrated systems that run on it that only officially came out of three years in stealth last December — is announcing a huge round of funding today to take its business out into the world. The company has closed in on $676 million in financing, a Series D that co-founder and CEO Rodrigo Liang has confirmed values the company at $5.1 billion.

The funding is being led by SoftBank, which is making the investment via Vision Fund 2. Temasek and the Government of Singapore Investment Corp. (GIC), both new investors, are also participating, along with previous backers BlackRock, Intel Capital, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Walden International and WRVI also participating, among other unnamed investors. (Sidenote: BlackRock and Temasek separately kicked off an investment partnership yesterday, although it’s not clear if this falls into that remit.)

Co-founded by two Stanford professors, Kunle Olukotun and Chris Ré, and Liang, who had been an engineering executive at Oracle, SambaNova has been around since 2017 and has raised more than $1 billion to date, first to build out its AI-focused hardware, which it calls DataScale, and then to build out the system that runs on it. (The “Samba” in the name is a reference to Liang’s Brazilian heritage, he said, but also the Latino music and dance speaks of constant movement and shifting, not unlike the journey AI data regularly needs to take that makes it too complicated and too intensive to run on more traditional systems.)

It typically competes against companies like Nvidia and Graphcore — another startup in the space which earlier this year also raised a significant round. However, SambaNova has also taken a slightly different approach to the AI challenge.

In December, it launched Dataflow-as-a-service as an on-demand, subscription-based way for enterprises to tap into SambaNova’s AI system without necessarily doing all the heavy lifting themselves. It’s the latter that SambaNova will be focusing on selling and delivering with this latest tranche of funding, Liang said.

SambaNova’s opportunity, Liang believes, lies in selling software-based AI systems to enterprises that are keen to adopt more AI into their business, but might lack the talent and other resources to do so if it requires running and maintaining large systems.

“The market right now has a lot of interest in AI. They are finding they have to transition to this way of competing, and it’s no longer acceptable not to be considering it,” said Liang in an interview.

The problem, he said, is that most AI companies “want to talk chips,” yet many would-be customers will lack the teams and appetite to essentially become technology companies to run those services. “Rather than you coming in and thinking about how to hire scientists and hire and then deploy an AI service, you can now subscribe, and bring in that technology overnight. We’re very proud that our technology is pushing the envelope on cases in the industry.”

The company has not disclosed many customer names so far in the work that it has done — the two reference names it provided to me are both research labs, the Argonne National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — but Liang noted some typical use cases. One was in imaging, such as in the healthcare industry, where the company’s technology is being used to help train systems based on high-resolution imagery. Another involves building systems around custom language models, for example in specific industries like finance, to process data quicker. And a third is in recommendation algorithms, something that appears in most digital services and frankly could always do to work a little better than it does today.

Liang would not comment on whether Google and Intel were specifically tapping SambaNova as a partner in their own AI services, but he didn’t rule out the prospect of partnering to go to market. Indeed, both have strong enterprise businesses that span well beyond technology companies, and so working with a third party that is helping to make even their own AI cores more accessible could be an interesting prospect.

“We’re quite comfortable in collaborating with others in this space,” Liang said. “We think the market will be large and will start segmenting. The opportunity for us is in being able to take hold of some of the hardest problems in a much simpler way on their behalf. That is a very valuable proposition.”

The promise of creating a more accessible AI for businesses is one that has eluded quite a few companies to date, so the prospect of finally cracking that nut is one that appeals to investors.

“SambaNova has created a leading systems architecture that is flexible, efficient and scalable. This provides a holistic software and hardware solution for customers and alleviates the additional complexity driven by single technology component solutions,” said Deep Nishar, Senior Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a statement. “We are excited to partner with Rodrigo and the SambaNova team to support their mission of bringing advanced AI solutions to organizations globally.”

Building, scaling and launching new tools and products is the lifeblood of the technology sector. When we consider these concepts today, many think of Big Tech and flashy startups, known for their industry dominance or new technologies that impact our everyday lives. But long before garages and dorm rooms became decentralized hubs for these innovations, local and state governments, along with many agencies within the federal government, pioneered tech products with the goal of improving the lives of millions.

As an industry, we’ve developed a notion that working in government, the place where the groundwork was laid for the digital assistants we use every day, is now far less appealing than working in the private sector. The immense salary differential is often cited as the overwhelming reason workers prefer to work in the private sphere.

But the hard truth is the private sector brings far more value than just higher compensation to employees. Look no further than the boom in the tech sector during the pandemic to understand why it’s so attractive. A company like Zoom, already established and successful in its own right for years, found itself in a situation where it had to serve an exponentially growing and diverse user base in a short period of time. It quickly confronted a slew of infrastructure and user experience pivots on its way to becoming a staple of work-from-home culture — and succeeded.

That innate ability to work fast to deliver for consumers and innovate at what feels like a moment’s notice is what really draws talent. Compare that to the government’s tech environment, where decreased funding and partisan oversight slow the pace of work, or, worse, can get in the way of exploring or implementing new ideas entirely.

One look (literally, see our graph below) at the trends around R&D spending in the private and government sectors also paints a clear picture of where future innovations will come from if we don’t change the equation.

Image Credits: Josh Mendelsohn/Hangar

Look no further than the U.S. government’s own (now defunct) Office of Technology Assessment. The agency aimed to provide a thorough analysis of burgeoning issues in science and technology, exposing many public services to a new age of innovation and implementation. Amid a period of downsizing by a newly Republican-led Congress, the OTA was defunded in 1995 with a peak annual budget of just $35.1 million (adjusted for 2019 dollars). The authoritative body on the importance of technology to the government was deemed duplicative and unnecessary. Despite numerous calls for its reinstatement, it has since remained shuttered.

Despite dwindling public sector investment and lackluster political action, the problems that technology is poised to help solve haven’t gone away or even eased up.

From the COVID pandemic to worsening natural disasters and growing societal inequities, public leaders have a responsibility to solve the pressing issues we face today. That responsibility should breed a desire to continuously iterate for the sake of constituents and quality of life, much in the same way private tech caters to the product, user and bottom line.

My own experiences in government have shaped my career and approach to building new technologies more than my time in Silicon Valley. There are plenty of tangible parallels to the private sector that can attract driven and passionate tech workers, but the responsibility of giving government work realistic consideration doesn’t just fall at the feet of talent. The governments that we depend on must invest more capital and pay closer attention to the tech community.

Tech workers want an environment where they can thrive and get to see their work in action, whoever the end user may be. They don’t want to feel hamstrung by the threat of decreased funding or the red tape that comes as a result of government partisanship. Replicating the unimpeded focus of Silicon Valley’s brightest examples is a must if we’re serious about drawing talented individuals into government or public-sector-focused work.

A great example of these ideas in action is one of the most beloved government agencies, NASA. Its continued funding has produced technologies developed for space exploration that are now commonplace in our lives, such as scratch-resistant lenses, memory foam and water filters. These use cases came much later on, only after millions of dollars were invested without knowing what would result.

NASA has continued to bolster its ability to stay nimble and evolve at a rapid pace by partnering with private companies. For talent in the tech sphere, the ability to leverage outside resources in this way, without compromising the product or work, is a boon for ideation and iteration.

One can also point to the agency when considering the importance of keeping technology research and innovation as apolitical as possible. It’s one of the few widely known public entities to prosper on the back of bipartisan support. Unfortunately, politicians typically do all of us a disservice, particularly tech workers in government, when they too closely connect themselves or their parties to a particular program or platform. It hinders innovation — and the ensuing mudslinging can detract from talented individuals jumping into government service.

There is no shortage of extremely capable tech workers who want to help solve the biggest issues facing society. Will we give them the legitimate space and opportunity to conquer those problems? There’s been some indication that we can. These ambitious and forward-looking efforts matter today more than ever and show all of us in the tech ecosystem that there’s a place in government for tech talent to grow and flourish.

ConsenSys, a key player in crypto and a major proponent of the Ethereum blockchain, has raised a $65 million funding round from J.P. Morgan, Mastercard, and UBS AG, as well as major blockchain companies Protocol Labs, the Maker Foundation, Fenbushi, The LAO and Alameda Research. Additional investors include CMT Digital and the Greater Bay Area Homeland Development Fund. As well as fiat, several funds invested with Ethereum-based stablecoins, DAI and USDC, as consideration.

Sources told TechCrunch that this is an unpriced round because of the valuation risk, and the funding instrument is “full”, so the round is being closed now.

The fundraise looks like a highly strategic one, based around the idea that traditional institutions will need visibility into the increasingly influential world of ‘decentralized finance’ (DeFi) and the Web3 applications being developed on the Ethereum blockchain.

In a statement on the fundraise, ConsenSys said it has been through a “period of strategic evolution and growth”, but most outside observers would agree that this is that’s something of an understatement.

After a period of quite a lot of ‘creative disruption’ to put it mildly (at one point a couple of years ago, ConsenSys seemed to have everything from a VC fund, to an accelerator, to multiple startups under its wing), the company has restructured to form two main arms: ConsenSys, the core software business; and ConsenSys Mesh, the investment arm, incubator, and portfolio. It also acquired the Quorum product from J.P. Morgan which has given it a deeper bench into the enterprise blockchain ecosystem. This means it now has a very key product suite for the Etherum platform, including products such as Codefi, Diligence, Infura, MetaMask, Truffle, and Quorum.

This suite allows it to serve both public and private permissioned blockchain networks. It can also support Layer 2 Ethereum networks, as well as facilitate access to adjacent protocols like IPFS, Filecoin, and others. ConsenSys is also a major contributor to the Ethereum 2.0 project, for obvious reasons.

Commenting on the fundraise, Joseph Lubin, founder of ConsenSys and co-founder, Ethreum said in a statement: “When we set out to raise a round, it was important to us to patiently construct a diverse cap table, consistent with our belief that similar to how the web developed, the whole economy would join the revolutionaries on a next-generation protocol. ConsenSys’ software stack represents access to a new automated objective trust foundation enabled by decentralized protocols like Ethereum. We are proud to partner with preeminent financial firms alongside leading crypto companies to further converge the centralized and decentralized financial domains at this particularly exciting time of growth for ConsenSys and the entire industry.”

With financial institutions able to see, ‘in public’ DeFi happening on Ethereuem, because of the public chain, they can see how much of the financial system is gradually starting to merge with the blockchain world. So it’s becoming clearer what attracts these major institutions.

Mike Dargan, Head of Group Technology at UBS said: “Our investment in ConsenSys adds proven expertise in distributed ledger technology to our UBS Next portfolio.”

For MasterCard this appears to be not just a pure investment – Consensys has been working with it on a private permissioned network.

Raj Dhamodharan, executive vice president of digital asset and blockchain products and partnerships at Mastercard said: “Enterprise Ethereum is a key infrastructure on which we and our partners are building payment and non-payment applications to power the future of commerce… Our investment and partnership with ConsenSys helps us bring secure and performant Enterprise Ethereum capabilities to our customers.”

Colleen Sullivan, Co-Founder and CEO of CMT Digital said: “ConsenSys is the pioneer in bridging the gaps across traditional finance, centralized crypto, and DeFi, and more broadly, between Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. We are proud to participate in this funding round as the ConsenSys team continues to pave the way for global users  — retail and institutional — to easily access the crypto ecosystem.”

TechCrunch understands that the fundraise was started around the time of the Quorum acquisition, last June. The $65 million round is in majority fiat currency as opposed to cryptocurrency and is an adjunct to the round done with JP Morgan last summer.

The presence of significant crypto players such as Maker Protocol Labs shows the significance of the fund-raise, beyond the simple transaction. The announcement also comes just ahead of the Coinbase IPO, which makes for interesting timing.

ConsenSys’ products have become highly significant in the world where developers, enterprises, and consumers meet blockchain and crypto. In its statement, the company claims MetaMask now has over three million monthly active users across mobile and desktop, a 3x increase in the last five or six months, it says. This is roughly the same amount of monthly active customers as Coinbase.

The ConsenSys announcement comes just ahead of the Coinbase IPO. While Coinbase is acting as an exchange to turn fiat into crypto and vice versa, it has also been getting into DeFi of late. Where there are also resemblances with ConsenSys, is that Coinbase, with 3 million users, is used as a wallet, and MetMask, which also has 3 million users, can also be used as a wallet. The comparison ends there, but it’s certainly interesting, given Coinbase’s $100 billion valuation.

As Jeremy Millar, Chief Development Officer, told me: “Coinbase has pioneered an exchange, in one of the world’s was regulated financial markets, the US. And it has helped drive significant interest in the space. We enjoy a very positive relationship with Coinbase, trying to further enable the ecosystem and adoption of the technology.”

The background to this raise is that a lot of early-stage blockchain and crypto companies have been raising a lot of money recently, but much of this has been through crypto investment firms. Only a handful of Silicon Valley VCs are backing blockchain, such as Andreessen Horowitz.

What’s interesting about this announcement is that these incumbent financial giants are not only taking an interest, but working alongside ConsenSys to both invest and build products on Ethereum.

It’s ConsenSys’ view that every payment service provider, banks will need this financial infrastructure in the future, especially for DeFI.

Given there is roughly $43 billion collateralized in DeFi, it’s increasingly the case that major investors are involved, and there are increasingly higher returns than traditional yield and bond or bond yields.

The moves by Central Banks into digital currencies is also forcing companies and governments to realize digital currency, and the ‘blockchain rails’ on which it runs, is here to stay. This is what is suggested by the Greater Bay Area Homeland Development Fund’s (a Shenzhen / Hong Kong joint partnership) decision to get involved.

Another aspect of this story is that ConsenSys is sitting on some extremely powerful products. Consensys has six products that serve three different types of people.

Service developers who are building on Ethereum are using Truffle to develop smart contracts. Users joining the NFT hype are using MetaMask underneath it all.

The MetaMask wallet allows users to swap one token for another. This has proved quite lucrative for ConsenSys, which says it has resulted in $1.8 billion in volume in decentralized exchange use. ConsenSys takes a 0.875 percent cut on every swap that it serves.

And institutions are using Consensys’ products. The company says more than 150,000 developers use Infura’s APIs, and 4.5 million developers create and deploy smart contracts using Truffle, while its Protocols group — developer of Hyperledger Besu and ConsenSys Quorum — are building Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) for six central banks, says Consensys.

Consensys is also making hay with the NFT boom. Developers are using Consensys products for the nodes and infrastructure on Ethereum which stores the NFT files.

Consensys is also riding two waves. One is the developer eave and the other is the financial system wave.

As a spokesperson said: “Where the interest in money and invention started happening was on public networks like Ethereum. So we really believe that these are converging and they will continue to, and every one of our products offers public main net compatibility because we think this is the future.”

Millar added: “If we want to help the world adopt the technology we need to meet it at its adoption point, which for many large enterprises means inside the firewall first. But similarly, we think, just like the public Internet, the real value – the disruptive value – changes the ability to do this on a broader permissionless basis, especially when you have sufficient privacy and authentication available.”