Category: UNCATEGORIZED

“We think of diversity as a keystone issue for the cannabis industry,” said Curio WMBE Fund managing director Jerel Registre in a conversation with TechCrunch. Registre’s conviction around this program is obvious as he explains the problem the fund is addressing.

The new fund, started by the Maryland-based medical cannabis company Curio Wellness, aims to help underserved entrepreneurs entering the cannabis market. With $30 million to invest, the Curio WMBE Fund is looking to invest in up to 50 women, minority and disabled veterans seeking to open and operate a Curio Wellness franchise with a path to 100% ownership in three years.

Registre tells TechCrunch the goal is to create more diverse ownership through a proven business model. Participants of this program gain access to capital and operational resources.

Curio made a name for itself in Maryland, where it’s the largest cannabis cultivator by market share. Founded in 2014, the family-owned business operates dispensaries rooted in a patient-centric approach. While a legally separate but affiliated entity from Curio Wellness, the Curio WMBE Fund aims to give franchisees access to Curio’s secret sauce.

“In looking at the systemic barriers that women, minorities and disabled veterans face in accessing capital, we decided to develop a solution that directly addresses this massive economic disparity,” said Michael Bronfein, CEO of Curio Wellness. “The Fund provides qualifying entrepreneurs with the investment capital they need to become a Curio Wellness Center franchisee while ensuring their success through our best in class business operations.”

“Let’s bottle the success we have,” Registre added. He likens the franchise model to McDonald’s, where the national corporation gives operators a proven standard operating procedure and ongoing support.

“Our fund is unlike any other in the industry,” Registre said, “as eligible entrepreneurs will have a clear path to 100% ownership in as little as three years. Many other funds rely on a model that utilizes minority entrepreneurs as a vehicle to achieve licenses: The Curio approach flips this model by empowering diverse entrepreneurs and supporting them along the way. If something happens and an investment-funded franchisee defaults, they must be replaced by another minority or woman owner. This ensures these licensees can get the financial support they need to launch while ensuring that the fund’s ultimate mission of supporting diverse entrepreneurs is achieved.”

Registre explained that diversity is central to Curio Wellness, too. Of the company’s 200 employees, 40% are female, and more than half are minorities. At the leadership level, 38% of management is female, and 44% identify as a member of a minority community.

“Diversity is a core asset that we recognize as integral to our success and our future, and that is why we decided to create this investment fund,” Registre said.

The fund provides two phases of support. The first provides capital to franchisees to open their Curio Wellness Center and assist them in obtaining licenses, selecting a location and hiring and training employees. Once the location is operational, the fund intends to provide ongoing support around managing, sales and marketing, store operations, and ensuring employees stay updated on product information.

Curio sees its locations as more than cannabis dispensaries. The company calls them Wellness Centers.

“Curio locations go beyond the traditional experience people have at a medical cannabis dispensary — they are total wellness destinations, under the leadership of a licensed pharmacist,” Registre explains. “Patient wellness is at the center of everything we do and is exemplified by a diverse array of holistic health products, services and educational programming we offer. While additive to the medical cannabis patient experience, these features open the store up to the entire community, not limiting the healthcare experience to only those with a medical cannabis card. This practice, of a patient-first mindset through a pharmacist-led model, allows us to truly lead the pursuit of wellness for everyone who walks in the front door.”

As of writing, the fund has raised half of its $30 million target. The company says the fund intentionally targeted, pitched and secured an investment pool that includes women and minorities. The fund expects to close by the end of 2020, and applications are expected to open in early 2021.

“We think of diversity as a keystone issue for the cannabis industry,” said Curio WMBE Fund managing director Jerel Registre in a conversation with TechCrunch. Registre’s conviction around this program is obvious as he explains the problem the fund is addressing.

The new fund, started by the Maryland-based medical cannabis company Curio Wellness, aims to help underserved entrepreneurs entering the cannabis market. With $30 million to invest, the Curio WMBE Fund is looking to invest in up to 50 women, minority and disabled veterans seeking to open and operate a Curio Wellness franchise with a path to 100% ownership in three years.

Registre tells TechCrunch the goal is to create more diverse ownership through a proven business model. Participants of this program gain access to capital and operational resources.

Curio made a name for itself in Maryland, where it’s the largest cannabis cultivator by market share. Founded in 2014, the family-owned business operates dispensaries rooted in a patient-centric approach. While a legally separate but affiliated entity from Curio Wellness, the Curio WMBE Fund aims to give franchisees access to Curio’s secret sauce.

“In looking at the systemic barriers that women, minorities and disabled veterans face in accessing capital, we decided to develop a solution that directly addresses this massive economic disparity,” said Michael Bronfein, CEO of Curio Wellness. “The Fund provides qualifying entrepreneurs with the investment capital they need to become a Curio Wellness Center franchisee while ensuring their success through our best in class business operations.”

“Let’s bottle the success we have,” Registre added. He likens the franchise model to McDonald’s, where the national corporation gives operators a proven standard operating procedure and ongoing support.

“Our fund is unlike any other in the industry,” Registre said, “as eligible entrepreneurs will have a clear path to 100% ownership in as little as three years. Many other funds rely on a model that utilizes minority entrepreneurs as a vehicle to achieve licenses: The Curio approach flips this model by empowering diverse entrepreneurs and supporting them along the way. If something happens and an investment-funded franchisee defaults, they must be replaced by another minority or woman owner. This ensures these licensees can get the financial support they need to launch while ensuring that the fund’s ultimate mission of supporting diverse entrepreneurs is achieved.”

Registre explained that diversity is central to Curio Wellness, too. Of the company’s 200 employees, 40% are female, and more than half are minorities. At the leadership level, 38% of management is female, and 44% identify as a member of a minority community.

“Diversity is a core asset that we recognize as integral to our success and our future, and that is why we decided to create this investment fund,” Registre said.

The fund provides two phases of support. The first provides capital to franchisees to open their Curio Wellness Center and assist them in obtaining licenses, selecting a location and hiring and training employees. Once the location is operational, the fund intends to provide ongoing support around managing, sales and marketing, store operations, and ensuring employees stay updated on product information.

Curio sees its locations as more than cannabis dispensaries. The company calls them Wellness Centers.

“Curio locations go beyond the traditional experience people have at a medical cannabis dispensary — they are total wellness destinations, under the leadership of a licensed pharmacist,” Registre explains. “Patient wellness is at the center of everything we do and is exemplified by a diverse array of holistic health products, services and educational programming we offer. While additive to the medical cannabis patient experience, these features open the store up to the entire community, not limiting the healthcare experience to only those with a medical cannabis card. This practice, of a patient-first mindset through a pharmacist-led model, allows us to truly lead the pursuit of wellness for everyone who walks in the front door.”

As of writing, the fund has raised half of its $30 million target. The company says the fund intentionally targeted, pitched and secured an investment pool that includes women and minorities. The fund expects to close by the end of 2020, and applications are expected to open in early 2021.

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox.

Hello and welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B.

For all my American readers, I hope you’re happy and satiated from the Thanksgiving holiday in this oddest of years. My hope for all Station readers, no matter where you reside, is a safe and healthy remainder of the year (and beyond!). While I took some time off last week, the news wheel kept on turning. A few of items got my attention last week, notably an EY study that examined how views on public transit, mobility as a service and car ownership are changing due to COVID-19. Let’s get reading!

Email me anytime at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, offer up opinions or tips. You can also send a direct message to me at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec.

Micromobbin’

Lime is adding another 1,000 scooters in San Francisco, an action it is able to take because the company also holds Jump’s permit in the city. For those who might have forgotten, Lime now owns Jump through a complex deal with Uber.

The company also released San Francisco scooter ridership data that shows how trip start and ends have moved outside of the downtown core and into neighborhoods like the Mission, Castro and Hayes Valley. Lime said this changing ridership pattern is consistent with its findings across the country, with more trips moving to residential neighborhoods since the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe.

In other news …

CAKE, the Swedish maker of lightweight electric motorcycles, and the European battery supplier Northvolt have partnered to develop new battery cells for CAKE’s range of electric motorcycles. Research, development, and testing will take place in 2021 with product slated to grace 2022 models.

Deal of the week

Another day, another SPAC. Anyone else looking forward to a good old fashioned S-1 filing?

Metromile, the pay-per-mile auto insurer, is credited for disrupting some of the inefficiencies of the auto insurance business model, notably how consumers are charged. Instead of a standard flat fee, the company charges customers based on their mileage, which it is able to measure via a device plugged into the vehicle.

That sounds like the kind of business model that might see an uptick in new customers during COVID pandemic times. And that did eventually happen. However, during the space between existing customers reducing their driving time and new drivers signing up with Metromile, the company was forced to lay off about one-third of its workforce.

The company has since recovered and now it’s taking the SPAC path to the public markets. Metromile plans to merge with special purpose acquisition company INSU Acquisition Corp. II, with an equity valuation of $1.3 billion. The company raised $160 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, in an investment round led by Chamath Palihapitiya’s firm Social Capital.

Metromile plans to use those proceeds to reduce existing debt and accelerate growth, specifically to hire employees to support its consumer insurance and enterprise businesses, and grow beyond its eight-state geographic footprint to a goal of 21 states by the end of next year and nationwide coverage by the end of 2022.

For details on the Metromile SPAC head on over to my story. For a deeper dive into the insurance tech business, check out Alex Wilhelm’s article.

Another giant deal 

Manbang — described as the Chinese Uber for trucks — was formed in 2017 through a merger between rivals Yunmanman and Huochebang. The company’s app matches truck drivers and merchants transporting cargo and provides financial services to truckers.

Apparently, investors can’t get enough of these kinds of freight app businesses. Manbang is the latest example with a $1.7 billion haul from Softbank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital China, Permira and Fidelity, a consortium that co-led the round. Other participants were Hillhouse Capital, GGV Capital, Lightspeed China Partners, Tencent, Jack Ma’s YF Capital and more.

This is just two years after the company raised $1.9 billion. Manbang said it achieved profitability this year. Its valuation was reportedly on course to reach $10 billion in 2018.

It’s raining dollars!

 Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

For Tesla, that is.

I’m sure you’re all aware, but in case you missed it, Tesla’s market cap surpassed $500 billion last week. As of today (Monday), it sits at $547 billion — a more than fivefold increase since the start of the year.

It’s likely that price will push higher thanks to its imminent inclusion on the S&P 500 Index. When Tesla joins the S&P 500 on December 21, it will be among the most valuable companies on the benchmark. Its weighting will be so influential that the S&P DJI is mulling whether to add the stock at the full float-adjusted market capitalization weight all at once or in two tranches.

Tesla’s addition to the S&P 500 isn’t just a symbolic nod. Joining the S&P 500 has real financial benefits, as investors that have index-tracked funds will be forced to buy shares. With share prices already popping, that will mean investors will have to sell other stocks to make room for Tesla.

The rise of the car

It’s nearing December, which means I’ve been — and will continue to be — flooded with year-end surveys, studies and forecasts for 2021.

One study from EY, which examined data from nine countries, suggests that mobility as a service (MaaS) is losing momentum to the car, truck and SUV.

And millennials are driving the trend. The 2020 EY Mobility Consumer Index, which surveyed more than 3,300 consumers across nine countries, found that 31% of people without a car intend to buy one in the next six months with 45% of those will be millennials. The study also found that just 6% of non-car owners surveyed are looking to buy an all-electric vehicle.

More than three-quarters (78%) of respondents said they’re going to be more likely to use their cars for travel in a post-pandemic world with millennials making more than half of that number (52%), according to EY.

This isn’t just a U.S. phenomenon. Respondents from Italy (47%) and Germany (46%) said they’re more likely to purchase a new car. Respondents from China were most likely to increase their car usage (90% of respondents), closely followed by India (85%) and Germany (81%).

Meanwhile, public transport use is expected to decline by around 30%.

John Simlett, EY Global Future of Mobility Leader, raises several questions in the study.

“With more people buying cars and car usage expected to increase, this leaves policymakers with some very difficult questions to answer: How to accommodate all these cars on our roads aim for a more diverse mobility mix? How will this trend impact public transport investment? Quite simply, is this sustainable, and if not, what needs to be done and by whom?”

Readers: what are your answers? Send them my way.

Notable reads and other tidbits

And finally, the news smorgasbord you’ve been waiting for.

Ford’s all-electric Mustang Mach-E has an estimated EPA range of between 211 miles to 300 miles, depending on the model. While the Mach-E matched Ford’s range target, it’s well under that found in competing vehicles.

Gatik, the autonomous vehicle startup focused on the “middle mile,” is expanding into Canada through a partnership with retail giant Loblaw. The company, which also announced $25 million in fresh funding, already uses its self-driving box trucks to deliver customer online grocery orders for Walmart.

Gatik is deploying five autonomous box trucks in Toronto to deliver goods for Loblaw starting in January 2021. The fleet will be used seven days a week on five routes along public roads. All vehicles will have a safety driver as a co-pilot. This deployment, which follows a 10-month pilot in the Toronto area, marks the first autonomous delivery fleet in Canada.

General Motors changed sides in a battle over whether states — and specifically California — can set tailpipe emissions regulations and other rules meant to mitigate climate change that are stricter than the federal government. The automaker said it will no longer back the Trump administration’s lawsuit to prevent California from setting its own rules.

May Mobility, the autonomous shuttle startup backed by Toyota, has a new partnership with on-demand shuttle platform Via. (I missed this item in the last newsletter). The aim is for the companies to combine their expertise to expand services to new cities in 2021. May Mobility will use Via’s fleet platform for booking, routing, passenger and vehicle assignment and identification, customer experience, and fleet management of its autonomous vehicles.

Ola, Uber and other ride-hailing firms in India will be only able draw a fee of up to 20% on ride fares. The new rules are  a setback for the SoftBank-backed firms, which are already struggling to improve their finances in the key overseas market.

The guidelines, which for the first time bring modern-age app-based ride-hailing firms under a regulatory framework in the country, also put a cap on the so-called surge pricing, the fare Uber and Ola charge during hours when their services see peak demands, TechCrunch’s Manish Singh reports.

Image Credits: Sketchboard Pro

Sketchboard Pro

CRED, a two-year-old startup that is helping credit card users in India improve their financial behaviour, has raised $80 million in a new financing round, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The new financing round, a Series C for CRED, was led by existing investor DST Global. Much of the round — in fact, if not whole — has been financed by existing investors including Sequoia Capital and Ribbit Capital that are doubling down on Kunal Shah’s startup, the source said on the condition of anonymity as they are not authorized to speak to the media.

The new round gives CRED a post-money valuation of about $800 million, the source said. That’s up from about $450 million valuation that CRED attained after its $120 million Series B round last year.

A CRED spokesperson declined to comment.

On CRED, customers are offered a range of features, including the ability to better track their spendings across various credit cards, and get reminders. Moreover, CRED incentivizes customers to pay their bill on time by rewarding them points, which they can use to subscribe to a range of premium services and get a discount on purchase of high-quality products.

The platform is not available to all credit card holders in India. The startup requires a customer to have a certain credit score — about 750 — to be able to sign up for the service. This way, CRED has built a customer base that comprise of some of the most sought-after people in India.

In recent quarters, CRED has introduced a number of additional services including allowing customers to pay their rent using their credit card, and bulked up its e-commerce store. What other ways Shah, who previously ran mobile wallet service Freecharge and is celebrated for delivering one of the few successful exits in the nation’s 15-year-old startup ecosystem, wants to serve these customers remains a big question.

“CRED has the richest Indians as customers already,” wrote Anmol Maini, a San Francisco based engineer, who closely tracks the Indian startup ecosystem. “Kunal Shah has the luxury of time for building CRED into the company he envisions it to be. He has that luxury because he has access to capital and talent, knows how to build and scale companies and he definitely knows how to generate returns for his investors.”

The new funds come at a time when CRED is enjoying a surge in its growth. The startup, which was one of the sponsors of recently concluded IPL cricket tournament, ran a number of clever and fun advertisements during the tournament featuring Indian legends. And those ads worked.

A couple of years ago, French President Emmanuel Macron initiated the Tech for Good Summit by inviting 50 tech CEOs to discuss the challenges in the tech industry and make some announcements.

Usually, tech CEOs meet ahead of Viva Technology, a tech event in Paris. This year, Viva Technology had to be canceled, which means that tech CEOs couldn’t get together, take a group photo and say that they want to make the world a better place.

In the meantime, dozens of tech CEOs have chosen to sign a common pledge. Despite the positive impact of some technological breakthroughs, they collectively recognize that everything is not perfect with the tech industry.

“Recognizing that such progress may be hindered by negative externalities, including unfair competition such as abuse of dominant or systemic position, and fragmentation of the internet; that, without appropriate safeguards, technology can also be used to threaten fundamental freedoms and human rights or weaken democracy; that, unless we implement appropriate measures to combat it, some individuals and organizations inevitably use it for criminal purposes, including in the context of conflicts,” the pledge says.

Among other things, companies that sign the pledge agree to cooperate when it comes to fighting toxic content, such as child sexual abuse material and terrorist content. They promise to “responsibly address hate speech, disinformation and opinion manipulation.”

Interestingly, they also agree that they should “contribute fairly to the taxes in countries where [they] operate.” This has been an ongoing issue between the French government and the U.S. government. The OECD and the European Union have also discussed implementing a tax on tech giants so that they report to tax authorities in each country where they operate.

Other commitments mention privacy, social inclusiveness, diversity and equity, fighting all sorts of discriminations and more. As the name suggests, the pledge revolves around using technology for good things.

Now let’s talk about who signed the pledge. There are some well-known names, such as Sundar Pichai from Alphabet (Google), Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Brad Smith from Microsoft, Evan Spiegel from Snap and Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and Square. Other companies include Cisco, Deliveroo, Doctolib, IBM, OpenClassrooms, Uber, etc.

Some nonprofit organizations also signed the pledge, such as the Mozilla Foundation, Simplon, Tech for Good France, etc.

But it’s more interesting to see who’s not on the list. Amazon and Apple have chosen not to sign the pledge. There have been discussions with Apple but the company eventually chose not to participate.

“Amazon didn’t want to sign it and I invite you to ask them directly,” a source close to the French president said. The French government is clearly finger-pointing in Amazon’s case.

This is an odd move as it’s a non-binding pledge. You can say that you want to “contribute fairly to taxes” and then argue that you’re paying everything that you owe — tax optimization is not tax evasion, after all. Worse, you can say that you’re building products with “privacy by design” in mind while you’re actually building entire companies based on personalized ads and micro-targeting.

In other words, the Tech for Good summit was created for photo opportunities (like this photo from 2018 below). Tech CEOs want to be treated like heads of state, while Macron wants to position himself as a tech-savvy president. It’s a win-win for them, and a waste of time for everyone else.

Some nonprofit organizations and governance groups are actually working hard to build digital commons. But big tech companies are using the same lexicon with these greenwashing-style campaigns.

In 2018, hundreds of organizations signed the Paris Call. In 2019, the biggest social media companies signed the Christchurch Call. And now, we have the Tech for Good Call. Those calls can’t replace proper regulation.

Image Credits: Charles Platiau / AFP / Getty Images

In the United States, critical city, state and federal infrastructure is falling behind. While heavy investment, planning and development have gone into the U.S. infrastructure system, much of it is not keeping up with the pace of new technology, and some of it hasn’t had a proper update in decades, instead just adding new systems onto old systems. This can be allotted to a combination of liability structures in the U.S., difficulty in enabling interconnection between infrastructure in different jurisdictions, worry over introducing large-scale security risks and an attempt to mitigate that risk.

There is interest in upgrading city systems to be more efficient, to be more in line with real-time demand and to move into the 21st century, but it’s going to take work. It’s also going to take new technology.

Distributed ledger technology (DLT), when applied correctly, can do for a city’s infrastructure what existing technologies cannot. Where existing technologies are heavy, requiring expensive servers and a larger energy draw, distributed ledger technology is light and can be implemented on individual nodes (code environments) and directly onto things like traffic light sensors. It also allows for more oversight from a privacy perspective. The ability to bring distributed ledger technology into lightweight frameworks allows for more security and upgrades to critical infrastructure.

Benefits of smart infrastructure

The biggest impact of smart infrastructure is that it enables local governments to focus on the reason they’re there in the first place; to increase the quality of life of the local residents, bring stability and culture to local businesses, and create a welcoming and frictionless environment for tourists or visitors. Governments can create stability, streamline sources of revenue, and integrate a frictionless operational environment for people and organizations in their jurisdiction.

Consider transportation infrastructure. A lot of revenue in cities and states comes from things like tolls and roadside parking, and of course taxes. States control the highways, interstates, and tolling infrastructure commonly through collaboration with service providers. Cities control the local roadside and passthrough streets and the revenue accrued through parking solutions. With the pandemic, these resources have dried up due to people staying at home, social distancing, using less public transit and working remotely.

This now offers an opportunity for an expanded example of the desire to understand the transportation flow. If cities had more real time insights into this, they’d be able to understand the demand and have a more fluidly flowing traffic condition. This can be done through new technologies such as what are seen deployed in Singapore like green link determinings systems, parking guidance systems, and expressway monitoring systems allowing for enhanced traffic awareness and guidance.

There are also keen ways to incentivize traffic guidance while bringing stability to local small and medium businesses throughout cities such as using parking guidance systems to enable local businesses to offer discounts for parking nearby.

An open transportation grid (in the sense of data points gathered for streamlining and managing) can create smoother traffic patterns in cities with smaller road grids. Transportation centers could communicate with delivery services, understanding their routes and setting up parking reservation windows. Traffic flow could be managed so that delivery services are able to get in and out without causing back-ups on tight, busy roads.

Another offering of smart infrastructure can be seen with cross border connections for transportation of goods and services. The ownership of infrastructure in the U.S. is highly fragmented; with cities owning local and neighborhood roadsides, and states owning highways and interstates. This also means that the infrastructure supporting this is highly distributed, because each entity has to have it’s own systems in place to support their infrastructure, typically using different solutions, services and data structures.

DeepMind, the AI technology company that’s part of Google parent Alphabet, has achieved a significant breakthrough in AI-based protein structure prediction. The company announced today that its AlphaFold system has officially solved a protein folding grand challenge that has flummoxed the scientific community for 50 years. The advance inn DeepMind’s AlphaFold capabilities could lead to a significant leap forward in areas like our understanding of disease, as well as future drug discovery and development.

The test that AlphaFold passed essentially shows that the AI can correctly figure out, to a very high degree of accuracy (accurate to within the width of an atom, in fact), the structure of proteins in just days – a very complex task that is crucial to figuring out how diseases can be best treated, as well as solving other big problems like working out how best to break down ecologically dangerous material like toxic waste. You may have heard of ‘Folding@Home,’ the program that allows people to contribute their own home computing (and formerly, game console) processing power to protein folding experiments. That massive global crowdsourcing effort was necessary because using traditional methods, portion folding prediction takes years and is extremely expensive in terms of straight cost, and computing resources.

DeepMind’s approach involves using an “Attentionb-basd neural network system” (basically a neural network that can focus on specific inputs in order to increase efficiency). It’s able to continually refine its own predictive graph of possible protein folding outcomes based on their folding history, and provide highly accurate predictions as a result.

How proteins fold – or go from being a random string of amino acids when originally created, to a complex 3D structure in their final stable form – is key to understanding how diseases are transmitted, as well as how common conditions like allergies work. If you understand the folding process, you can potentially alter it, halting an infection’s progress mid-stride, or conversely, correct mistakes in folding that can lead to neurodegenerative and cognitive disorders.

DeepMind’s technological leap could make accurately predicting these folds a much less time- and resource-consuming process, which could dramatically change the pace at which our understanding of diseases and therapeutics progresses. This could come in handy to address major global threats including future potential pandemics like the COVID-19 crisis we’re currently enduring, by predicting viral protein structures to a high degree of accuracy early in the appearance fo any new future threats like SARS-CoV-2, thus speeding up the development of potential effective treatments and vaccines.

The rumors ignited last Thursday that Salesforce had interest in Slack. This morning, CNBC is reporting the deal is all but done and will be announced tomorrow. Chances are, this is going to a big number, but this won’t be Salesforce’s first big acquisition. We thought it would be useful in light of these rumors to look back at the company’s biggest deals.

Salesforce has already surpassed $20 billion in annual revenue, and the company has a history of making a lot of deals to fill in the road map and give it more market lift as it searches for ever more revenue.

The biggest deal by far so far was the $15.7 billion Tableau acquisition last year. The deal gave Salesforce a missing data visualization component and a company with a huge existing market to feed the revenue beast. In an interview in August with TechCrunch, Salesforce president and chief operating officer Bret Taylor (who came to the company in the $750 million Quip deal in 2016), sees Tableau as a key part of the company’s growing success:

“Tableau is so strategic, both from a revenue and also from a technology strategy perspective,” he said. That’s because as companies make the shift to digital, it becomes more important than ever to help them visualize and understand that data in order to understand their customers’ requirements better.”

Next on the Salesforce acquisition hit parade was the $6.5 billion Mulesoft acquisition in 2018. Mulesoft gave Salesforce access to something it didn’t have as an enterprise SaaS company — data locked in silos across the company, even in on-prem applications. The CRM giant could leverage Mulesoft to access data wherever it lived, and when you put the two mega deals together, you could see how you could visualize that data and also give more fuel to its Einstein intelligence layer.

In 2016, the company spent $2.8 billion on Demandware to make a big splash in e-Commerce, a component of the platform that has grown in importance during the pandemic when companies large and small have been forced to move their businesses online. The company was incorporated into the Salesforce behemoth and became known as Commerce Cloud.

In 2013, the company made its first billion dollar acquisition when it bought ExactTarget for $2.5 billion. This represented the first foray into what would become the Marketing Cloud. The purchase gave the company entree into the targeted email marketing business, which again would grow increasingly in importance in 2020 when communicating with customers became crucial during the pandemic.

Last year, just days after closing the Mulesoft acquisition, Salesforce opened its wallet one more time and paid $1.35 billion for ClickSoftware. This one was a nod to the company’s Service cloud, which encompasses both customer service and field service. This acquisition was about the latter, and giving the company access to a bigger body of field service customers.

The final billion deal (until we hear about Slack perhaps) is the $1.33 billion Vlocity acquisition earlier this year. This one was a gift for the core CRM product. Vlocity gave Salesforce several vertical businesses built on the Salesforce platform and was a natural fit for the company. Using Vlocity’s platform, Salesforce could (and did) continue to build on these vertical markets giving it more ammo to sell into specialized markets.

While we can’t know for sure if the Slack deal will happen, it sure feels like it will, and chances are this deal will be even larger than Tableau as the Salesforce acquisition machine keeps chugging along.

Materialize, the SQL streaming database startup built on top of the open source Timely Dataflow project, announced a $32 million Series B investment today led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Lightspeed Ventures.

While it was at it, the company also announced a previously unannounced $8 million Series A from last year that had been led by Lightspeed, bringing the total raised to $40 million.

These firms see a solid founding team that includes CEO Arjun Narayan, formerly of Cockroach Labs, and chief scientist Frank McSherry, who created the Timely Flow project on which the company is based.

Narayan says that the company believes fundamentally that every company needs to be a real-time company and it will take a streaming database to make that happen. Further, he says the company is built using SQL because of its ubiquity, and the founders wanted to make sure that customers could access and make use of that data quickly without learning a new query language.

“Our goal is really to help any business to understand streaming data and build intelligent applications without using or needing any specialized skills. Fundamentally what that means is that you’re going to have to go to businesses using the technologies and tools that they understand, which is standard SQL,” Narayan explained.

Bucky Moore, the partner at Kleiner Perkins leading the B round sees this standard querying ability as a key part of the technology. “As more businesses integrate streaming data into their decision making pipelines, the inability to ask questions of this data with ease is becoming a non-starter. Materialize’s unique ability to provide SQL over streaming data solves this problem, laying the foundation for them to build the industry’s next great data platform,” he said.

They would naturally get compared to Confluent, a streaming database built on top of the Apache Kafka open source streaming database project, but Narayan says his company uses straight SQL for querying, while Confluent uses its own flavor.

The company still is working out the commercial side of the house and currently provides a typical service offering for paying customers with support and a service agreement (SLA). The startup is working on a SaaS version of the product, which it expects to release some time next year.

They currently have 20 employees with plans to double that number by the end of next year as they continue to build out the product. As they grow, Narayan says the company is definitely thinking about how to build a diverse organization.

He says he’s found that hiring in general has been challenging during the pandemic, and he hopes that changes in 2021, but he says that he and his co-founders are looking at the top of the hiring funnel because otherwise, as he points out, it’s easy to get complacent and rely on the same network of people you have been working with before, which tends to be less diverse.

“The KPIs and the metrics we really want to use to ensure that we really are putting in the extra effort to ensure a diverse sourcing in your hiring pipeline and then following that through all the way through the funnel. That’s I think the most important way to ensure that you have a diverse [employee base], and I think this is true for every company,” he said.

While he is working remotely now, he sees having multiple offices with a headquarters in NYC when the pandemic finally ends. Some employees will continue to work remotely, but the majority coming into one of the offices.