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Anodot, a startup that helps customers monitor business operations against a set of KPIs, announced a $35 million Series C investment today.

Intel Capital led this round with a lot of help. New investors SoftBank Ventures Asia, Samsung NEXT and La Maison participated along with existing investors Disruptive Technologies L.P., Aleph Venture Capital and Redline Capital. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $62.5 million, according to the company.

Anodot lets you take any kind of data, whatever your company finds important, and it tracks it automatically and reports on changes that would have an impact on the business, according to David Drai, CEO and co-founder.

“We take any kind of normalized data into our platform, and learn all the behavior of the data against normal behavior. When I say normal behavior, it means any time-based data in what is called a time series. And we understand all the trends of that data and we do this autonomously without any configuration, except defining what is interesting for you,” Drai explained.

That means that the platform will let you know, for example, of any drop in your business, any drop in your conversions, any spike in your costs — and so forth. What you track depends on your vertical and what’s important to your business.

He compares it to applications performance monitoring, but instead of monitoring the company’s technology systems, it’s monitoring the systems that run the business. Just as you don’t want to miss signals that your servers could be going down, neither do you want to let factors that could cost your business money go unnoticed.

This dashboard lets you monitor unusual changes in cloud costs. Image Credit: Anodot

The way it works is you connect to the systems that matter, and Anodot can review those systems, learn what constitutes a level of normal behavior, then identify when anomalies occur. It does this by mapping against your KPIs, and this can involve thousands or even tens of thousands of KPIs based on an individual company.

As Drai points out, an eCommerce company with 1000 products in 50 countries, will have 50,000 KPIs, one for each product in each country, and you can track these in Anodot.

He says that under the current economic conditions, he is taking a two-pronged approach to building his business involving  both offense and defense. On defense, he will take a cautious approach to hiring, but he sees his product helping companies understand and control costs, so he will continue to sell the product as a cost-saving device at a time when that is of increasing importance to businesses everywhere.

The company was founded in 2014. It currently has 70 employees and 100 paying customers including Atlassian, T Mobile, Lyft and Pandora.

India said today Zoom is ‘not a safe platform’ as the video conference service surges in popularity in many nations including the world’s second largest smartphone market as billions of people remain stuck at home due to the coronavirus crisis.

“Zoom is a not a safe platform,” the Cyber Coordination Centre (CyCord) of India’s ministry of home affairs said in a 16-page advisory. The advisory also includes guidelines for users who still wish to use Zoom for their private communications.

The move comes as several companies including Google, Apple, NASA, and Tesla have urged — or warned — their employees from using Zoom, which has amassed over 200 million users. German and Taiwan have also banned the use of Zoom in their nations. But the firm, with market cap of over $40 billion, has also come under scrutiny — and become subject of a lawsuit — after several of its security and privacy lapses emerged in recent weeks.

Zoom has been trending in India in recent weeks, too, in a surprise as enterprise services rarely get traction with consumers in the country. Several Indian ministers in India have also tweeted pictures that showed they were using Zoom in recent weeks.

The app is being downloaded more than 450,000 times a day for the last two weeks in India, research firm Apptopia told TechCrunch. This week, India also started a competition for startups to develop a secure conferencing app.

Zoom chief executive has Eric S. Yuan has apologized for the security lapses and pledged to prioritize focus on users’ privacy and security over development of new features. The firm recently also recently hired former Facebook security officer Alex Stamos as an advisor.

Action camera manufacturer GoPro has announced some massive organizational changes at the company. In particular, the company is laying off over 200 employees — it represents a 20% staff reduction.

GoPro will shut down some offices altogether. There will be offices in five geographies after the round of layoffs. The company expects to reduce operating expenses by $100 million in 2020. But it says that it’ll cut operating expenses again by $250 million in 2021. In other words, if you still have a job at GoPro, you could lose your job next year.

Behind the scene, GoPro is making some radical changes to its business model. The company is still selling cameras, accessories and subscriptions. But it is switching to a direct-to-consumer model with GoPro.com acting as the main storefront.

The company will stop selling its devices in many retail stores. GoPro will still work with select retailers in some regions as they still generate a lot of sales.

But selling directly on GoPro.com represents the future of the company, which should improve margins. They don’t have to give a cut to retailers when GoPro is acting as the retailer. In 2019, GoPro.com represented a bit more than 20% of European revenue and a bit less than 20% of revenue in the U.S.

"GoPro's global distribution network has been negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, driving us to transition into a more efficient and profitable direct-to-consumer-centric business over the course of this year," founder and CEO Nicholas Woodman wrote. "We are crushed that this forces us to let go of many talented members of our team, and we are forever grateful for their contributions."

In addition to today’s layoffs, sales and marketing expenditure will be cut down in 2020 and beyond. Woodman himself won’t take a salary for the remainder of the year. The company’s board won’t receive any cash compensation either.

GoPro has withdrawn earnings guidance for Q1 and 2020. The company now expects revenue of $119 million with a non-GAAP EPS loss of $0.30 to $0.40 per share. In pre-market trading, GoPro shares are currently trading at $2.58, 3% below yesterday’s closing price.

Early-stage companies often have trouble dealing with the amount of data that can run through the organization, especially as it grows. Large sums are spent on data software, dislocated data, dealing with data pipelines. All of which involve data warehousing, cleaning tools and a visualization platform.

Count is a startup that is an attempt to create an all-in-one data platform to deal with this problem, providing early-stage teams with tools to build data pipelines more cheaply.

It’s also coming out of stealth mode and announcing a $2.4m fund-raise led by LocalGlobe, with participation from Global Founders Capital . Its angel investors include Charlie Songhurst, the former head of corporate strategy at Microsoft .

The company was founded in 2016 by former management consultant Oliver Hughes and Imperial College physicist Oliver Pike, who identified that companies weren’t able to make data-driven decisions because of the complexity of standard data software and the technical and design constraints accepted by the industry. 

In a statement, Hughes described the problem they are addressing: “The teams making the most progress were having to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, across separate solutions, to help them get their data under control and it was taking them up to 12-18 months to purchase and implement it all. So many startups get locked into long term contracts with tools that are no longer suitable for them. Count has a simple pay-as-you-go model so teams can start using the platform for free and only pay more as their team and data grow.”

Remus Brett, Partner at LocalGlobe, said: “Most people know that data is incredibly important but the ability to take it and tell stories with it still remains difficult. Now more than ever, we see the value in being able to process and analyze data at speed, to help us make critical decisions. Count makes it possible for even very early stage companies to begin making decisions based on analysis of their data.”

Edd Read, CTO at Tiney.co which uses count said: “Count has given us a way to pull all our data together and build reports for the whole team,” said. “Notebooks are a powerful way for us to share insights in context and give the team the ability to query data without having to learn SQL.” 

Count competes with a number of different solutions including Data warehouses such as Snowflake; Data cleaning tools like DBT; and analytics platforms like Looker.

While general purpose chatbots haven’t shaped user interfaces as radically as early advocates like Facebook may have hoped, when used in a more targeted capacity, they have shown promise in building closer relationships between consumers and brands and making critical enterprise workflows more streamlined.

India’s Yellow Messenger operates a conversational AI platform used by companies including Accenture, Flipkart and Grab to communicate with employees and customers. The startup is announcing new funding as they officially launch their chatbot platform stateside.

The Bengaluru-based company tells TechCrunch they’ve closed a $20 million Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The startup previously raised funding from Lightspeed India Partners, which led the startup’s Series A last year.

Semi-intelligent chatbots had a rough start but have become key parts of enterprise workflows in the past several years as the companies pushing them grew more in touch with their limitations. Companies like Intercom have helped lead the way, raising more $240 million to build out its customer communication platform that uses AI to push customer conversations along the most efficient routes.

“One in every three companies globally is implementing conversational AI and chatbots—the pull is irreversible,” Lightspeed India’s Dev Khare said in a statement.

Yellow Messenger has courted major customers in India and Southeast Asia but will use this Series B funding to expand their footprint and approach businesses in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific regions. The company has steadily prepared itself for broad international expansion adding support for more than 120 languages to its platform since launch.

CEO Raghu Ravinutala tells TechCrunch that one of his company’s central advantages is the horizontal structure of the platform that allows customers to tailor the platform to a bunch of different needs. The platform can help automate customer support and engagement but can also be used internally for managing HR and sales.

Yellow Messenger’s platform currently supports a variety of platforms, including Microsoft Teams, Slack, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

This morning Everee, a Utah-based software as a service (SaaS) startup focused on payroll, announced that it has closed a $10 million Series A. The funding event was led by Origin Ventures and Signal Peak Ventures. Previously, Everee had raised a $3.7 million Seed round in mid-2019.

The company is therefore as well capitalized as it has been in its life, right as the economy enters a rough patch. TechCrunch spoke with one of the company’s founders, Ron Ross, and its new CEO Brett Barlow (formerly of Utah unicorn Pluralsight), about the new capital and what it plans on doing with it.

Payroll

According to Ross, the company was founded out of a problem he saw in the market. When his daughter went to college and started working she earned enough to cover her expenses, but her income timing didn’t match her cash flow needs, so she had to ask her parents for occasional loans. Ross wasn’t stoked by the situation, until he dug into it more closely and found that the payroll system of today doesn’t always match well with the cash needs of workers.

And thus Everee was born, a SaaS tool that handles payroll with a neat twist. Instead of paying workers merely every two weeks, the service offers more flexible payout options. Its lower-cost service lets workers select twice-weekly, every two weeks or monthly payouts. Its more expensive service lets workers cash out their earnings on a daily or weekly basis, as well.

This might sound odd, but it makes sense; why should workers’ wages be tied up for weeks until they receive them? That’s stupid as heck. If you work, you should get paid right away. That would be more worker-friendly and sensible, and with modern banking, it should be common.

Everee also does what you’d expect from a payroll service, like onboarding, timecard management and the rest. I was a little surprised by its price point, which starts at $15 per worker per month for its cheaper service ($10 per month with more employees), but the company told me that it’s priced largely in line with competition.

Before we close, a financial wrinkle. Everee doesn’t change a company’s cash flow if its workers decide to cash out earnings more rapidly than what’s normal. Instead, it covers the cash flow changes itself, using a credit facility. The firm then eats that cost of capital as cost of revenue (COGS), meaning that to offer its pay-when-you-want-to-get-paid it takes a gross margin hit. Why does that matter? It means that Everee is changing its revenue quality to offer a neat service. This isn’t a knock, more of a note. Everee is, to a degree, shaving about 5 points off its gross margins, according to its executives, so that workers can get paid more promptly.

To be clear, Everee is a SaaS business with likely attractive economics, but I’m a sucker for tooling that helps working people, and thus wanted to highlight how the system works.

Finally, how will Everee approach growth in a market where hourly workers are being laid off around the nation? When TechCrunch spoke to the company, it noted there are a host of workers still employed, including folks working at grocery stores and other critical pieces of infrastructure. It will still have a market to grow into, or at least the cash to float itself until the employment market comes back.