Category: UNCATEGORIZED

For the third time since last February, Gong has raised a significant sum. In February, the company scored $40 million. In December, it grabbed another $65 million, and today it was $200 million on a $2.2 billion valuation. That’s a total of $305 million in less than 18 months.

Coatue led today’s cash infusion with help from new investors Index Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Thrive Capital, and existing investors Battery Ventures, NextWorld Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and Wing Venture Capital. It has now raised a total of $334 million, according to the company.

What is attracting this kind of investor attention? When we spoke to Gong about its Series B round, it had 300 customers. Today it has around 1300, representing substantial growth in that time period. The company reports revenue has grown 2.5x this year alone.

Gong CEO Amit Bendov says his company is trying to create a category they have dubbed “revenue intelligence.” As he explains it, today sales data is stored in a CRM database consisting of descriptions of customer interactions as described by the salesperson or CSR. Gong is trying to transform that process by capturing both sides of the interaction, then using artificial intelligence, it transcribes and analyzes those interactions.

Bendov says that the pandemic and economic malaise has created a situation where there is a lot of liquidity in the market and investors have been looking for companies like his to invest some of it.

“There’s a lot of liquidity in the market. There are very few investment opportunities. I think the Investment community was waiting a little bit to see how the market shakes out […] and they are betting on companies that could benefit long term from the new normal, and I think we’re one of them,” Bendov told TechCrunch.

He says that he wasn’t looking for money, and in fact still is operating off the Series B investment, but when firms come knocking with checkbooks open and favorable terms, he wasn’t about to turn them down. “There are CEOs schools [of thought that] tell you to raise money when you can, not when you need to. It’s not very diluted at this kind of valuation and it was a very easy process. […] The whole deal closed in 14 days from term sheet to money in the bank,” he said.

Bendov said that taking the money was “pretty much a no-brainer.” In fact, he says that the money gives them the freedom to operate and further legitimacy in the marketplace. “It gives us the ability to buy companies, make strategic investment, accelerate plans, and it also, especially since we cater to large enterprise customers, it gives them confidence that this company is here to stay…,” he said.

With around 350 employees today, it hopes to add 100 people by the end of the year. Bendov says diversity and inclusion is a “massive priority” for the company. Among the steps they’ve taken recently is opening a recruiting hub in Atlanta to bring more diverse candidates into the company, working with a company called FlockJay to train and hire underrepresented groups in customer success roles, and in Israel where the company’s R&D center is located, helping members of the Arab community with computer science backgrounds to learn interview skills. Some of those folks will end up working for Gong, and some at other places.

While the company has grown remarkably quickly and has shown great promise, Bendov is not thinking ahead to an IPO just yet. He says he wants to grow the company to at least a couple of hundred million dollars in sales and that’s two-three years away at this point. He certainly has plenty of cash to operate until then.

As the coronavirus hampers the fitness industry, leading to a rapid evolution toward digital classes, ClassPass is pressing onward with its product roadmap, albeit a bit ahead of schedule.

The company, which has raised more than $500 million from investors such as General Catalyst, Thrive, GV, Temasek, Apax Digital and L Catterton, is introducing personal training sessions via a partnership with Fyt.

“We’ve been thinking about adding personal training to the platform for quite a while now, and this seems like an excellent time to do so to really diversify our options to our members and give them a wider set of opportunities to work out and keep their workouts,” said Kinsey Livingston, ClassPass VP of Partnerships. “Especially during quarantine, training sessions can be really interesting and motivating and give them that extra accountability that only comes with a personal trainer.”

Of course, these personal training sessions will be virtual and follow the same UX flow as Classpass’s recently introduced virtual classes. Users can find a trainer on the ClassPass app, use credits to book it, and receive a unique Zoom link for their session.

To start, the personal training program will have 10 trainers, who can manage several hundred sessions per week, and will scale up as needed. The trainers, which are employed as 1099 contractors, are 50/50 gender balanced with 20 percent Black trainers. Fyt has 7,000 trainers total on its platform, and the technical side of deployment is relatively easy and straightforward should ClassPass want to scale up the program.

Each training session lasts one hour and comes with a free 15-minute video chat consultation to go over goals, etc. These sessions are all billed through ClassPass using credits — each session costs 23 credits. Depending on geography, that can range from $35 to $55.

ClassPass introduced virtual credits several years ago to have a way to regulate various factors of the business model, such as dynamic pricing for in-demand trainers, the pricing differences between different geographies, and the actual usage volume of customers.

In the future, ClassPass sees the potential to do in-person training sessions where the trainer would come to the customer’s house or meet up in a park. Of course, that would require a much larger number of trainers on the platform across a wide variety of geographies. For now, however, distance isn’t a factor with virtual sessions, giving the company more flexibility on meeting demand.

I asked David Huang, Fyt cofounder and CEO, about the logistical challenges of virtual personal training. For example, free Zoom sessions cut out after 40 minutes, while these sessions are billed for an hour.

“We’re going to start with 10 paid accounts,” said Huang. “We’ll scale it up. I don’t think we’re necessarily going to give each trainer their paid account. We might do a pool of Zoom accounts to use in facilitated sessions. We’ll play that by ear, based on how we scale up.”

Personal training sessions are available now to ClassPass users on the app.

Adaptive Shield, a Tel Aviv-based security startup, is coming out of stealth today and announcing its $4 million seed round led by Vertex Ventures Israel. The company’s platform helps businesses protect their SaaS applications by regularly scanning their various setting for security issues.

The company’s co-founders met in the Israeli Defense Forces, where they were trained on cybersecurity, and then worked at a number of other security companies before starting their own venture. Adaptive Shield CEO Maor Bin, who previously led cloud research at Proofpoint, told me the team decided to look at SaaS security because they believe this is an urgent problem few other companies are addressing.

“When you look at the problems that are out there — you want to solve something that is critical, that is urgent,” he said. “And what’s more critical than business applications? All the information is out there and every day, we see people moving their on-prem infrastructure into the cloud.”

Bin argues that as companies adopt a large variety of SaaS applications, all with their own security settings and user privileges, security teams are often either overwhelmed or simply not focused on these SaaS tools because they aren’t the system owners and may not even have access to them.

“Every enterprise today is heavily using SaaS services without addressing the associated and ever-changing security risks,” says Emanuel Timor, general partner at Vertex Ventures Israel . “We are impressed by the vision Adaptive Shield has to elegantly solve this complex problem and by the level of interest and fast adoption of its solution by customers.”

Onboarding is pretty easy, as Bin showed me, and typically involves setting up a user in the SaaS app and then logging into a given service through Adaptive Shield. Currently, the company supports most of the standard SaaS enterprise applications you would expect, including GitHub, Office 365, Salesforce, Slack, SuccessFactors and Zoom.

“I think that one of the most important differentiators for us is the amount of applications that we support,” Bin noted.

The company already has paying customers, including some Fortune 500 companies across a number of verticals, and it has already invested some of the new funding round, which closed before the global COVID-19 pandemic hit, into building out more integrations for these customers. Bin tells me that Adaptive Shield immediately started hiring once the round closed and is now also in the process of hiring its first employee in the U.S. to help with sales.

The bar for being a successful VC just keeps getting higher. With more and more capital sloshing around and not enough founders and startups to invest in, founders are getting the opportunity to be choosier and choosier about who they want to work with on their cap tables. You can’t just bring a checkbook anymore — founders want operational experience and deep domain expertise in critical areas like growth marketing or recruiting.

That’s led to the creation of more service-led VC models like Sweat Equity Ventures, which “earn” their cap table stake through engineering work for startups among other services (while also offering capital). As these operational VC firms and angel investors proliferate though, how do you find the right ones for your startup?

What you need is a Conduit to great investors, and that’s precisely what Edward Lando and Sree Kolli and their team have been building.

Lando and Kolli have been angel investing from New York City together for a number of years, but increasingly felt that they needed a scalable way to connect their startups to quality operational VCs. Starting from their own networks and expanding organically, they slowly built up Conduit in private beta since January, officially launching to the public today.

So what exactly is Conduit? It’s essentially a matchmaking service for founders and investors. Founders looking for investors setup free profiles of their startups on the platform and then can search for investors based on criteria like investment sector (like “Finance” or “E-commerce”), expertise areas (“Business Development” or “Operations”), and which rounds an investor typically participates in. Founders can also include a short video to give their profile more personality.

On the reverse side, investors can setup profiles giving their specializations and investment areas of interest, and then they can browse available startups and click to get introduced.

There are a couple of interesting mechanics here. Whereas the profiles are free for startups, investors either get a limited set of introductions or have to pay a subscription fee to get more introductions to founders. So Conduit’s revenue model relies on the (hopefully more) flush investor side of the marketplace. Right now, there is only one tier of subscription, although the team is thinking about a “super special tier” that might include early access to some startup fundraises.

Second, many of the elements of the marketplace are curated by the Conduit team. Both investors and startups applying for access to the platform go through an application process and are vetted by the Conduit team. On top of that, the team works to optimize introductions — hopefully to increase the rate of success and the quality of matches. Lando described this as a “white-globe approach” that has been helpful to both founders and investors in their initial testing.

Lando described “the jackpot scenario” as “a startup, you get someone who is super knowledgeable about a problem you’re facing to also just wire you money — so they pay you to also just help you.”

Right now, Conduit only helps connect founders and investors together — the platform doesn’t actually facilitate or broker the underlying startup investment.

In addition to the marketplace, Conduit hosts “office hours” with prominent founders like Jennifer Fleiss of Rent the Runway to discuss specific operational challenges and also has compiled a number of market maps and other operational guidebooks for founders to take advantage of.

Lando and Kolli share an ambition of making it easier for founders to secure funding and get back to building. Kolli said that “I think Conduit is uniquely positioned to not only democratize on the founder side but also on the capital front,” pointing out that family offices in particular have been receptive to getting easier access to startups. For his part, Lando emphasized that he believes much of the world’s capital is effectively wasted on “real estate stuff, or bonds or ETFs or what not” and that even fractionally moving more of that capital to venture could dramatically improve the world and the pace of innovation.

Ultimately, Conduit has a bit of the feel of AngelList — but without the crowds. Whether it can scale carefully to maintain quality on both the startup and investor side without diluting that high value will be the company’s biggest challenge going forward. For startups today, assuming you get through the velvet rope line, an investment may well be a click away.

Varjo, the Finnish startup that has developed a virtual and mixed reality headset capable of “human-eye resolution” for use in various enterprise applications, has closed a $51.7 million in Series C funding.

Backing the round is Tesi, NordicNinja, and Swisscanto Invest by Zürcher Kantonalbank. Existing investors including Lifeline Ventures, Atomico, EQT Ventures and Volvo Cars Tech Fund have also followed on. It brings total raised by Varjo to around $100 million to date.

The company is also announcing the appointment of Timo Toikkanen, who was previously president and COO of Varjo, as its new CEO. Co-founder and previous CEO, Niko Eiden, becomes CXO where he’ll be tasked with continuing to drive the company’s technology innovations and, notably, remains a board member.

Varjo says the injection of capital will be used to accelerate its global expansion and development of industry-leading hardware and software products. Global enterprise clients using the company’s various headsets include Volvo Cars, Boeing, Audi and Siemens. Applications span immersive astronaut and pilot training, designing “cars of the future”, and streamlining product development.

“We are seeing tremendous demand for virtual and mixed reality use cases, particularly as much of the world continues to work remotely,” says Timo Toikkanen, CEO of Varjo, in a statement. “When you combine the photorealistic resolution and accurate, integrated eye tracking found in our devices with the broad software compatibility we offer, the possibilities for creating, training and running research in immersive environments are endless. With support from our growing group of investors, we look forward to scaling our operations and delivering the cutting-edge technology our customers need to transform the way they work”.

The Series C round follows a number of cited milestones, such as expansion of the company’s global operations and reseller network to over 40 countries in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. This includes the launch of sales and direct shipping to “key markets” including Singapore, Israel, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

Varjo has also signed a commercial partnership with MeetinVR to deliver photorealistic virtual collaboration, a much-needed solution for users to be able to collaborate remotely. Can we say the new normal? (sorry, ed.)

I can’t recall the last time people were this intrigued by a (non-Xbox) piece of Microsoft hardware. Announced a little under a year ago amid a deluge of new devices, the Surface Duo turned a lot of heads, leaving many wondering whether the product amounted to more than a concept device.

Today, however, the dual-screen mobile device takes an important step closer to reality, with a release date and price. As a matter of fact, the Duo actually goes up for pre-order starting today. It’s set to arrive in stores on September 10. As for how much it costs, well, that’s bound to be a sticking point for some.

In the grand scheme of things, $1,399 isn’t a crazy price to pay for a dual-screen, perhaps. Certainly it pales in comparison to, say, the first generation of foldable mobile devices. But it will probably be enough to deter those who were simply casually interested in the new form factor.

The price tag seems to largely be a product of the Duo very much being a first-generation product for Microsoft. To hear the company, they built the system from the ground up, including the 360-degree hinge and a cabling system that allows for a pair of batteries, each hidden behind one of the screens.

I’ll preface this by saying I have not seen the Duo in person: COVID-19 has really put a damper on my ability to travel to events. That said, the hardware looks slick, and Microsoft has done a good job here building on top of the Android foundation to ensure there’s a dynamic two-screen experience. Again, the important caveat here being that some of those foldable devices also looked slick in the initial videos/demos, so I’m holding off on making any sort of sweeping judgments until I can get my hands on a unit.

Most additions to Android are focused on things like multi-tasking. The most obvious example of this is probably the App Groups, which lets users essentially pair two apps into a single icon on the desktop top. Tapping it will open them both at the same time, so you can, say, have a book open on one display and a note-taking app on the other. Or, perhaps, two social media apps, if you want to punish yourself.

Android is, perhaps, not the most obvious choice for Microsoft, which has devoted so much time to sticking Windows 10 on as many form factors as humanly possible. But it does, perhaps, represent some growth for a company committed to choosing the best software for this specific hardware, a decision that largely came down to the lack of mobile apps on Windows. The Duo is likely to start life as a niche device, but limiting the number of potential apps will only dampen its appeal.

In addition to its own first-party productivity apps, the company has already worked with a number of developers, including Amazon on a Kindle app — that certainly makes perfect sense for the dual-screen form factor, finally realizing some degree of the long-ago abandoned promise of the Courier device. Microsoft says apps will work across the dual-screens regardless, but an API will help developers further customize them for the unique form factor.

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As for why the company went dual-screen instead of foldable, that appears to mostly come down to materials. A foldable display would have made it much more difficult to cover the product with a sufficiently strong glass covering, which, in turn, would have made a pen input a bit of a non starter. And Microsoft’s Surface Pen is going to be a big part of the puzzle here (even if it’s not actually included in the $1,399 price tag).

There are, of course, trade-offs. Because there are always trade-offs. That’s just how this world works, friend. Here the biggest one seems to be the gap between screens. Sure, the two displays add up to a sizable 8.1 inches, but the gap plus the bezels could be a real pain when it comes to things like watching video on the thing.

Ultimately, I suspect the Duo will very much be a learning experience for Microsoft and the industry at large, but at the very least, it’s going to be one of the more interesting ones we’ve seen from a major vendor in recent years.

Until late last year social video app TikTok was using an extra layer of encryption to conceal a tactic for tracking Android users via the MAC address of their device which skirted Google’s policies and did not allow users to opt out, The Wall Street Journal reports. Users were also not informed of this form of tracking, per its report.

Its analysis found that this concealed tracking ended in November as US scrutiny of the company dialled up, after at least 15 months during which TikTok had been gathering the fixed identifier without users’ knowledge.

A MAC address is a unique and fixed identifier assigned to an Internet connected device — which means it can be repurposed for tracking the individual user for profiling and ad targeting purposes, including by being able to re-link a user who has cleared their advertising ID back to the same device and therefore to all the prior profiling they wanted to jettison.

TikTok appears to have exploited a known bug on Android to gather users’ MAC addresses which Google has still failed to plug, per the WSJ.

A spokeswoman for TikTok did not deny the substance of its report, nor engage with specific questions we sent — including regarding the purpose of this opt-out-less tracking. Instead she sent the below statement, attributed to a spokesperson, in which company reiterates what has become a go-to claim that it has never given US user data to the Chinese government:

Under the leadership of our Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Roland Cloutier, who has decades of experience in law enforcement and the financial services industry, we are committed to protecting the privacy and safety of the TikTok community. We constantly update our app to keep up with evolving security challenges, and the current version of TikTok does not collect MAC addresses. We have never given any US user data to the Chinese government nor would we do so if asked.

“We always encourage our users to download the most current version of TikTok,” the statement added.

With all eyes on TikTok, as the latest target of the Trump administration’s war on Chinese tech firms, scrutiny of the social video app’s handling of user data has inevitably dialled up.

And while no popular social app platform has its hands clean when it comes to user tracking and profiling for ad targeting, TikTok being owned by China’s ByteDance means its flavor of surveillance capitalism has earned it unwelcome attention from the US president — who has threatened to ban the app unless it sells its US business to a US company within a matter of weeks.

Trump’s fixation on China tech, generally, is centered on the claim that the tech firms pose threats to national security in the West via access to Western networks and/or user data.

The US government is able to point to China’s Internet security law which requires firms to provide the Chinese Communist Party with access to user data — hence TikTok’s emphatic denial of passing data. But the existence of the law makes such claims difficult to stick.

TikTok’s problems with user data don’t stop there, either. Yesterday it emerged that France’s data protection watchdog has been investigating TikTok since May, following a user complaint.

The CNIL’s concerns about how the app handled a user request to delete a video have since broadened to encompass issues related to how transparently it communicates with users, as well as to transfers of user data outside the EU — which, in recent weeks, have become even more legally complex in the region.

Compliance with EU rules on data access rights for users and the processing of minors’ information are other areas of stated concern for the regulator.

Under EU law any fixed identifier (e.g. a MAC address) is treated as personal data — meaning it falls under the bloc’s GDPR data protection framework, which places strict conditions on how such data can be processed, including requiring companies to have a legal basis to collect it in the first place.

If TikTok was concealing its tracking of MAC addresses from users it’s difficult to imagine what legal basis it could claim — consent would certainly not be possible. The penalties for violating GDPR can be substantial (France’s CNIL slapped Google with a $57M fine last year under the same framework, for example).

The WSJ’s report notes that the FTC has said MAC addresses are considered personally identifiable information under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act — implying the app could also face a regulatory probe on that front, to add to its pile of US problems.

Presented with the WSJ’s findings, Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) told the newspaper that Google should remove TikTok’s app from its store. “If Google is telling users they won’t be tracked without their consent and knowingly allows apps like TikTok to break its rules by collecting persistent identifiers, potentially in violation of our children’s privacy laws, they’ve got some explaining to do,” he said.

We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

Habito, the London startup that has spent the last few years moving the mortgage process online, including offering its own mortgages beyond acting as a broker, has completed £35 million in Series C funding.

The newly disclosed round — comprising an earlier Series C equity raise and a more recent Series C extension in the form of a convertible loan note, was led by new investors Augmentum Fintech, SBI Group and mojo.capital, with participation from various existing investors including Ribbit Capital, Atomico and Mosaic Ventures.

The convertible loan was also matched by the U.K. taxpayer-funded Future Fund, set up by the government to help mitigate the coronavirus crisis’ affect on the country’s venture-backed startup ecosystem. It brings the total raised by Habito to just over £63 million since launching in 2016.

In a call, Habito founder Daniel Hegarty that the new investment will be used by the company to continue digitising aspects of home financing and buying which still remain a pain-point for homebuyers and sellers.

The fintech/proptech started out by offering a digital mortgage brokerage, promising to help you secure a new mortgage and monitor the competitiveness of your existing mortgage. The idea was to make applying for or switching mortgages as frictionless as possible.

In July 2019, Habito announced that it would begin direct lending via its own range of mortgages. Starting with ‘buy to let’ mortgages, the move saw the company expand beyond brokerage after it received regulatory approval to become a mortgage lender. By doing so, the aim was to cut the timeframe from mortgage application to offer in half, enabled in part by Habito’s integration with the conveyancing process to add more transparency for the homebuyer, while the number of documents needed was also significantly reduced.

In January this year, Habito launched “Habito Plus,” something getting closer to an end-to-end homebuying service. It brings together a buyer’s mortgage application, conveyancing needs and surveys “under one roof” — which feels less vitamin pill and more actual painkiller for anyone who has ever experienced having to deal with and coordinate all of the various stakeholders and parties involved in buying or selling a property.

Most recently, Habito launched its broker portal, providing more than 3,000 external brokers access to its own buy-to-let mortgage products and “Instant Decision” technology capabilities. Hegarty tells me the company intends to develop a suite of “innovative” residential mortgage products for all types of homeowners, not just ‘buy to let’.

Notably, Habito recently become a “B Corp” certified company, meaning it has made a legal commitment to put “people and planet on the same level as profit”. Resembling somewhat of a movement, there are more than 3,000 accredited B Corp companies globally, including Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia, and WeTransfer.

La Famiglia, the Berlin-based “female-led” VC firm that invests in European B2B tech startups at seed-stage, has raised a second fund totalling €50 million, up from its debut fund of €35 million in 2017.

Investors in La Famiglia have ties to numerous industry giants in Europe and beyond. They include the Mittal, Pictet, Oetker, Hymer and Swarovski families, industry leaders Voith and Franke, as well as the owning families behind conglomerates such as Hapag Lloyd, Solvay, Adidas, and Valentino. In addition, the likes of Niklas Zennström (Skype, Atomico), Zoopla’s Alex Chesterman and Personio’s Hanno Renner, are also LPs.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its investor list, La Famiglia — which has backed 37 startups to date, such as Forto, Arculus, and Graphy — positions itself based on its industry network, promising to foster cooperation between “young digital disruptors and leading companies,” including many parts of the old economy needing to outsource R&D/innovation.

“Our ambition is to capture the fundamental shift in value creation across the largest sectors of our European economy, which are either being disrupted or enabled by digital technologies,” La Famiglia founding partner Dr. Jeannette zu Fürstenberg tells me. “We believe that opportunities in fields such as manufacturing or logistics will be shaped by a deep process understanding of these industries, which is the key differentiator in creating successful outcomes and a strength that European entrepreneurs can leverage”.

“Picking up a lot of signals from various expert sources in our network informs the opportunity landscape we see and allows us to invest with a strong sense of market timing,” adds La Famiglia partner Judith Dada. “Next to verticals like insurance or industrial manufacturing, we also invest into companies tackling more horizontal opportunities, such as sustainability in its vast importance across industries, as well as new ways that our work is being transformed, for workers of all types. We look for opportunities across a spectrum of technological trends, but are particularly focused on the application potential of machine learning and AI”.

On La Famiglia’s ability to partner with big industry, zu Fürstenberg cites her own industrial family business background, growing up with many other “next-generation” family business owners. “Rather than providing a mere network, which is often highly transactional, this exposure has allowed La Famiglia to form strong relationships that are built on trust,” she argues. “No matter what the age or the industry, when you put entrepreneurs face to face they often speak the same language, and this allows for fast time to impact for both sides”.

Meanwhile, several investments have already been made out of La Famiglia’s second fund. They include Berlin-based Spread.ai, building a product intelligence platform, Munich-based Luminovo, building the operating system for the electronics industry, and London-based ChaosIQ, building a resilience infrastructure platform.

Pinterest’s former chief operating officer has filed a lawsuit accusing the company of gender discrimination. Françoise Brougher, who says she was abruptly fired from the company in April, is suing the company to hold it “accountable for discrimination, retaliation, and wrongful termination in violation of the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), and the Labor Code,” according to a Tuesday filing in San Francisco Superior Court. (The full text of the filing is embedded below.)

Pinterest announced in June that it currently has about 400 million monthly active users, most of whom are women. But its top executives are all men. “Ironically, even though Pinterest markets itself to women as a source of lifestyle inspiration, the company leadership team is male dominated, and gender-biased attitudes are prevalent,” the lawsuit says.

Before joining Pinterest in March 2018, Brougher held executive positions at Square, Google and Charles Schawb. Despite her experience, Brougher claims in her lawsuit that she was hired with a less favorable equity compensation package than her male peers. During her time at the company, Brougher also says she was left out of key decision-making by other executives; subjected to a hostile work environment; and ultimately fired by chief executive officer Ben Silbermann when she spoke up against her treatment.

In a Medium post published today, Brougher writes, “I have always been a private person, but I am opening up about my experience because if someone of my privilege and seniority is fired for speaking out about these issues, the situation is likely far worse for people earlier in their careers.”

Brougher’s case against Pinterest comes two months after two Black former employees, Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, accused the company of unequal pay, racial discrimination and retaliation.

At the time Brougher was hired, the lawsuit says she was told Pinterest’s board directed executives to receive backloaded equity grants. Her equity grant stipulated that only 10% of shares vested in the first year; followed by 20% the second year; 30% the third year; and 40% the fourth year. Brougher assumed this vesting schedule was standard for Pinterest executives.

When the company filed to go public last year, however, Brougher realized while looking at its S-1 filing that her male peers’ equity grants were not backloaded. Brougher’s compensation was adjusted after she raised concerns with Silbermann, who directed her to Pinterest’s human resources department.

Brougher says she was not invited on Pinterest’s IPO roadshow, despite being its COO and knowing many of the company’s investors.

After Pinterest’s initial public offering in April 2019, Brougher says she was no longer invited to board meetings, even though members of were team occasionally were, sometimes without her knowledge. “As COO of Pinterest, Ms. Brougher no longer had meaningful engagement with the company’s board,” the lawsuit says.

Brougher’s suit also claims that she began receiving more critical feedback, and cites a study by tech executive Kiernan Snyder called “The Abrasiveness Trap,” which found women are assessed more negatively than men in 248 reviews collected from 28 companies of different sizes. Snyder found that 87.9% of reviews for women contained critical feedback, compared to 58.9% of reviews for men. Their personalities were the focus of criticism in 75.5% of critical reviews for women, compared to just 2.4% of the critical reviews received by men.

The lawsuit claims Silbermann criticized Brougher for “not being collaborative and told her that she did not have consistently healthy cross-functional relationships.” When Brougher asked him for more details, she claims “he told her to keep quiet, saying she should ‘be mindful’ of how she acted in a group setting.”

Pinterest’s chief financial officer Todd Morgenfeld also allegedly became “increasingly disrespectful” to Brougher beginning in January 2020, undermining her authority by ignoring her and talking directly to her team members.

In one meeting, Brougher claims Morgenfeld sarcastically asked “What is your job anyway?” Silbermann would also wait to make key strategy decisions after meetings Brougher attended, meeting with one or two male colleagues after she had left.

In February, the lawsuit says Brougher received a peer review written by Morgenfeld, even though she had not been asked to review him. Despite Brougher’s work on Pinterest’s IPO, advertiser base and monetization strategy in Europe, the lawsuit says the “Morgenfeld’s only comment on her 2019 achievements was: “Seems to be a champion for diversity issues.”

During a video call with Morgenfeld on February 21, 2020, Brougher says she tried to address his feedback, but that he became angry during the call, raised his voice, called her a liar, and questioned the value she brought to Pinterest before hanging up on her.

After the call, Brougher says she texted Silbermann and told him it had not gone well. On February 24, she met with Pinterest’s Chief Human Resources Officer Jo Dennis and said she wanted to find a way to work with Morgenfeld, but was uncomfortable meeting alone with him. Instead of mediating between Brougher and Morgenfeld, the lawsuit alleges Dennis treated the matter as a possible legal issue, escalating it to Pinterest’s in-house counsel.

On the same day, Brougher also met with Silbermann. The lawsuit claims that Silbermann compared the situation between Morgenfeld and Brougher to “an old couple fighting over who would make coffee.”

Then on April 2, Silbermann told Brougher that she was being fired and told her to transfer her responsibilities to Morgenfeld over the next month. He also asked her to tell her team that she had made the decision to leave, which she refused to do. Brougher claims her termination cost her “tens of millions of dollars in lost earnings and equity compensation.”

Brougher is being represented by law firm Rudy, Exelrod, Zieff & Lowe, which also represented Ellen Pao in her gender discrimination lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins.

TechCrunch has reached out to Pinterest for comment. In a statement to The New York Times, a Pinterest representative said the company is conducting an independent review of its culture, policies, and practices.

BROUGHER_VS_PINTEREST.pdf by TechCrunch on Scribd