Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Finesse, a startup promising to take the guesswork and waste out of fashion, is announcing that it has raised $4.5 million in seed and pre-seed funding.

Founder and CEO Ramin Ahmari said the tremendous waste in the fashion industry has become badly-kept secret, with Burberry recently facing a backlash over its practice of burning unwanted products, and the fashion industry as a whole producing an estimated 13 million tons of textile waste each year.

Finesse is looking to change that, Ahmari said, in part by taking advantage of the fact that that fashion trends moving out of the “hermetically sealed” world of fashion catwalks and onto social media, where new products take off “on the backs and bodies and posts” of influencers like Kylie Jenner.

“This is data we have access to,” he said. Noting that he previously worked in finance, Ahmari added that the stock market is “much more unpredictable” than the fashion industry — there just hasn’t been a tech startup applying tools like natural language processing and deep learning to fashion.

“In the simplest terms, you can think of what we do as seeing when Kylie posts a picture on Instagram and people go crazy about it … and then you see that happen not just on Kylie’s post but across Instagram, TikTok, Google Trends,” he said. “We predict the establishing of a trend before it goes super viral.”

Finesse then uses this data to design new products. Ahmari said that by taking advantage of a “very fast supply chain,” along with tools like CLO 3D modeling software, Finesse can go from identifying a trend to have a product available for purchase in less than 25 days.

While the startup is officially launching today, it’s already been selling products through “drops,” where customers can vote for and pre-order products that will only be available in limited quantities. Ahmari said Finesse focuses on selling unique pieces rather than staples, but because it’s confident about consumer demand, it can keep things much more affordable — the products currently for sale range from $8 to $116.

And unlike most fashion companies, Ahmari said that Finesse does not need to employ a giant design department, although he suggested that the team members like Vice President of Product Andrea Knopf and Head of Product Development Brittany Fleck — who work in tandem with the startup’s algorithms —are “artists in their own right.”

“Unless we have true AI — which we’re very far from — you are never going to have a machine that’s purely creative,” he said. “You have to have feedback cycles … What we are eliminating is the job where it’s just an intern doing grunt work, all of these people just going to through Instagram to find new fashion trends.”

Ahmari also said that with its emphasis on sustainability and connecting with the LGBTQ community (Ahmari identifies as queer and non-binary, and all of the startup’s products are designed for any gender), Finesse is aimed squarely Gen Z consumers who are tired of fashion dictated by “white, older cisgender men.”

The startup’s investors include former Twitter head of engineering Alex Roetter, Collective Health CEO Ali Diab, Hoxton Ventures, MaC Venture Capital, Mango Capital and Fab Fit Fun co-founder Sam Teller.

“We believe that FINESSE is truly the future of fashion, from its trend prediction to sustainable supply-chain and manufacturing,” said MaC Managing Partner Marlon Nichols in a statement. “We hope other fashion brands can learn from FINESSE’s disruption in the space and we’re eager to see what’s next.”

The top-line feature for Ring’s latest is no doubt its price. No way around that. At $60, it’s $40 cheaper than the standard Video Doorbell – and prices from there go up significantly, with the “Elite” running $350.

Perhaps the company is feeling some pressure from the race the bottom for smart home hardware pricing. Wyze, notably, has done the Wyze thing, launching a $30 doorbell along with a slew of other products in September. Though as of this writing, that device is still listed as a “pre-order.”

The Wyze device was expected to be available this month, but has since been pushed back to February. The Ring Video Doorbell Wired is also currently slated for next month, with a shipping date of the 24th. As the name suggests, the new product is only available in a hardwired option – which could be a deal breaker for some. Other standard features here include 1080p video with night vision, motion zones that trigger notifications and two-way audio with noise cancelation built-in. It’s also the company’s smallest doorbell to date.

The Amazon-owned company is, of course, not without its share of controversy. Earlier this month, we noted a security flaw that exposed the locations and home addresses of people using its Neighbors app. There has also been plenty of concern around the brand’s willingness to partner with the law enforcement. A number of civil rights penned an open letter in 2019. Earlier this year, Ring finally enabled end-to-end encryption that requires user opt-in.

The new doorbell will be available through Amazon (naturally) and will be a Home Depot in-store exclusively through late-March.

Pinecone, a new startup from the folks who helped launch Amazon SageMaker, has built a vector database that generates data in a specialized format to help build machine learning applications faster, something that was previously only accessible to the largest organizations. Today the company came out of stealth with a new product and announced a $10 million seed investment led by Wing Venture Capital.

Company co-founder Edo Liberty says that he started the company because of this fundamental belief that the industry was being held back by the lack of wider access to this type of database. “The data that a machine learning model expects isn’t a JSON record, it’s a high dimensional vector that is either a list of features or what’s called an embedding that’s a numerical representation of the items or the objects in the world. This [format] is much more semantically rich and actionable for machine learning,” he explained.

He says that this is a concept that is widely understood by data scientists, and supported by research, but up until now only the biggest and technically superior companies like Google or Pinterest could take advantage of this difference. Liberty and his team created Pinecone to put that kind of technology in reach of any company.

The startup spent the last couple of years building the solution, which consists of three main components. The main piece is a vector engine to convert the data into this machine-learning ingestible format. Liberty says that this is the piece of technology that contains all the data structures and algorithms that allow them to index very large amounts of high dimensional vector data, and search through it in an efficient and accurate way.

The second is a cloud hosted system to apply all of that converted data to the machine learning model, while handling things like index lookups along with the pre- and post-processing — everything a data science team needs to run a machine learning project at scale with very large workloads and throughputs. Finally, there is a management layer to track all of this and manage data transfer between source locations.

One classic example Liberty uses is an eCommerce recommendation engine. While this has been a standard part of online selling for years, he believes using a vectorized data approach will result in much more accurate recommendations and he says the data science research data bears him out.

“It used to be that deploying [something like a recommendation engine] was actually incredibly complex, and […] if you have access to a production grade database, 90% of the difficulty and heavy lifting in creating those solutions goes away, and that’s why we’re building this. We believe it’s the new standard,” he said.

The company currently has 10 people including the founders, but the plan is to double or even triple that number, depending on how the year goes. As he builds his company as an immigrant founder — Liberty is from Israel — he says that diversity is top of mind. He adds that it’s something he worked hard on at his previous positions at Yahoo and Amazon as he was building his teams at those two organizations. One way he is doing that is in the recruitment process. “We have instructed our recruiters to be proactive [in finding more diverse applicants], making sure they don’t miss out on great candidates, and that they bring us a diverse set of candidates,” he said.

Looking ahead to post-pandemic, Liberty says he is a bit more traditional in terms of office versus home, and that he hopes to have more in-person interactions. “Maybe I’m old fashioned but I like offices and I like people and I like to see who I work with and hang out with them and laugh and enjoy each other’s company, and so I’m not jumping on the bandwagon of ‘let’s all be remote and work from home’.”

SAP today announced a new offering it calls ‘RISE with SAP,’ a solution that is meant to help the company’s customers go through their respective digital transformations and become what SAP calls ‘intelligent enterprises.’ RISE is a subscription service that combines a set of services and product offerings.

SAP’s head of product success Sven Denecken (and its COO for S/4Hana) described it as “the best concierge service you can get for your digital transformation” when I talked to him earlier this week. “We need to help our clients to embrace that change that they see currently,” he said. “Transformation is a journey. Every client wants to become that smarter, faster and that nimbler business, but they, of course, also see that they are faced with challenges today and in the future. This continuous transformation is what is happening to businesses. And we do know from working together with them, that actually they agree with those fundamentals. They want to be an intelligent enterprise. They want to adapt and change. But the key question is how to get there? And the key question they ask us is, please help us to get there.”

With RISE for SAP, businesses will get a single contact at SAP to help guide them through their journey, but also access to the SAP partner ecosystem.

The first step in this process, Denecken stressed, isn’t necessarily to bring in new technology, though that is also part of it, but to help businesses redesign and optimize their business processes and implement the best practices in their verticals — and then measure the outcome. “Business process redesign means that you analyze how your business processes perform. How can you get tailored recommendations? How can you benchmark against industry standards? And this helps you to set the tone and also to motivate your people — your IT, your business people — to adapt,” Denecken described. He also noted that in order for a digital transformation project to succeed, IT and business leaders and employees have to work together.

In part, that includes technology offerings and adopting robotic process automation (RPA), for example. As Denecken stressed, all of this builds on top of the work SAP has done with its customers over the years to define business processes and KPIs.

On the technical side, SAP is obviously offering its own services, including its Business Technology Platform, and cloud infrastructure, but it will also support customers on all of the large cloud providers. Also included in RISE is support for more than 2,200 APIs to integrate various on-premises, cloud and non-SAP systems, access to SAP’s low-code and no-code capabilities and, of course, its database and analytics offerings.

“Geopolitical tensions, environmental challenges and the ongoing pandemic are forcing businesses to deal with change faster than ever before,” said Christian Klein, SAP’s CEO, in today’s announcement. “Companies that can adapt their business processes quickly will thrive – and SAP can help them achieve this. This is what RISE with SAP is all about: It helps customers continuously unlock new ways of running businesses in the cloud to stay ahead of their industry.”

With this new offering, SAP is now providing its customers with a number of solutions that were previously available through its partner ecosystem. Denecken doesn’t see this as SAP competing with its own partners, though. Instead, he argues that this is very much a partner play and that this new solution will likely only bring more customers to its partners as well.

“Needless to say, this has been a negotiation with those partners,” he said. “Because yes, it’s sometimes topics that we now take over they [previously] did. But we are looking for scale here. The need in the market for digital transformation has just started. And this is where we see that this is definitely a big offering, together with partners. “

Gamestop shares are set to rally 70% this morning when trading starts, extending a rally that has perplexed market observers, irked hedge funds, and generally made crypto’s recent rally appear soft and weak.

Being a retail trader is mostly being a sucker, hoping to best the markets while lacking the infrastructure, access, and information that professionals enjoy. Hell, most professional fund managers that regular folks can invest in fail to beat the market. That’s one reason why index funds and other passive investments that merely track aggregate performance have grown so much in recent years; why pay more to have someone make you less money than simply making the same returns as the S&P 500?

Things have changed some in recent years. Robinhood blew up the trading fee economy, and now along with a host of similar companies — Public.com with its social focus, Freetrade in the UK, and so forth — has made retail investing far more accessible than it was before to more folks. And we’re all trapped inside. And a rude, jokey Reddit forum has gone from in-nerd joke to front-page news after its users started to push their weight around.

It’s something that was noted by none other than the founder of Reddit Alexis Ohanian who shared some thoughts on Twitter.

It’s an old saw that back in the dotcom boom traders would congregate in chat rooms to share tips, lie to each other, and try to pump their own equities higher. That all still happens. But what has changed is that the combination of mature social platforms and free trading has at once boosted access to the public markets while Reddit and other online congregation points have provided a simpler way for retail investors, the hoi polloi, to fuck around and make other people find out.

Again, Ohanian’s thoughts on this resonate.

“A couple hundred thousand years of evolution conditioned us to believe in and rally around the immediate tribe around us. The idea of an ‘institution’ – a faceless, nameless entity we just have to trust — is actually pretty foreign to our species,” the venture investor wrote on Twitter. “I know they’re all ‘random people on the internet’ but there’s a lot more empathy and community there than people realize. It’s why I’ve been saying for 15 years that (online) community is still massively undervalued.”

This is what has happened with Gamestop, a company that until recently was unnotable, and stuck between a physical retail footprint, the pandemic, and its customers increasingly preferring digital game purchases. It was worth around $4 per share last summer. It started 2021 worth around $18. Now it’s $147.98 after rising 92.7% yesterday, and is up $69.02 this morning, or 46.6%.

How did that happen? No, the company did not get suddenly, radically stronger in short order. Instead, a coterie of Reddit users realized that Gamestop was shorted by more than 100%. That means that investors had bet more shares than existed in the company that it would lose value.

And mostly this would have been fine, a quirk of the market; other highly-shorted stocks can see a majority of their shares sold short, but to see a short-percentage of greater than 100% was eyebrow-raising.

Then came the wager: If big investors had bet more shares than Gamestop had in existence that it would lose value, what would happen if lots of individuals investors — retail interest, as they say — started buying the stock? That might drive its value up, forcing the hedge funds and other big capital pools to decide whether to hold onto their negative bet and take strong paper losses as Gamestop rallied, or cover their short, buying the stock at a higher price than they initially paid for it, losing money. Covering shorts would require buying the stock at high prices, perhaps boosting its value yet again.

It’s the wildest short-squeeze we can recall.

There’s always tension between short-sellers and investors who prefer to make positive wagers. Indeed, shorts are generally hated and the term perma-bear, slang for someone who is chronically worried about the price of assets to the point of distraction,¹ is often levied at them.

But a boom in retail investing and social platforms allowing the congregation of disparate individual investors can do quite a lot, it turns out. So, users of the WallStreetBets sub-Reddit started buying Gamestop. And they kept doing so, pushing its price higher and higher.

The result was that big money got smacked in the shorts, literally. CNBC reports that short-sellers have lost more than $5 billion so far thanks to Gamestop’s rapid appreciation on the back of becoming an internet meme.

But the tug-of-war between professionals betting that Gamestop is not worth its inflated priced, and that it will fall, is not over. Short interest remains high. So, even if some pro investors have cried uncle and exited their trade, the retail revenge on the so-called smart money is hardly a sure thing; what those excitable individuals may have done is merely set up a more enticing short position for hedge funds than had existed before.

Gamestop has a lot further to fall from over $140 per share than it did from $18, say.

Of course no one knows what will happen today. The investors who have taken out more short positions during the rally are set to eat their own ties this morning when Gamestop opens higher. Perhaps they will hold, and eventually their short bet will pay off. Or perhaps retail will be able to keep rallying Gamestop until, well, no one really knows.

But while most folks have their retirement accounts in investments so boring you’ve forgotten their names — Fidelity Freedom 2060 Fund, or what have you — small-time investors are sticking it to the man. This is the political war underneath the trading scrap. Retail is generally said to be mad at being pushed around, front-run, and generally speaking operating as second-class investing citizens. The Gamestop gambit is, to some degree, revenge.

Not that it will matter, per se, in the long-term. Large investing groups will still crush retail, having access to better information and tools and the like, as we mentioned up top. But today, at least, those same concerns are going to start the day with huge paper losses on their Gamestop shorts.

And that’s hilarious, because the company is obviously overvalued and individual simply do not give a fuck.

1. I, Alex Wilhelm, am like this before coffee.

After acquiring Optimizely last fall, content management company Episerver is adopting the Optimizely name for the entire organization.

CEO Alex Atzberger told me that the company will be rolling out new branding in the next coming months, as well as renaming its entire product suite to reflect the Optimizely brand.

“We believe it’s no longer just about personalizing the experience or driving recommendations,” Atzberger said. “The brand and word Optimizely really signifies optimal performance. Companies today of any size, any scale [need to be] much more sophisticated in terms of how they digitally connect with their customers. It’s a never-ending story.”

At the same time, he emphasized that Episerver is making the change from “a position of strength,” with the combined company seeing double-digit revenue growth last year and going live with more than 250 new customers.

Asked whether adopting the Optimizely name was always part of the post-acquisition plan, Atzberger replied, “When we acquired Optimizely, we knew that we would be acquiring not just a great product, not just a great customer base, but also acquiring a very well-known brand. We had not yet decided on [rebranding], but it was certainly something that, for me, was part of the consideration.”

In addition to announcing the new company name, Episerver/Optimizely is also announcing a new platform that it’s calling Optimization-as-a-Service, which integrates aspects of Optimizely and Episerver products to offer web targeting, testing and recommendations. As Atzberger put it, this new platform allows customers to determine “who to show something to, what content to show and how to actually show this content.”

Days after the billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya announced his involvement in the $1.3 billion acquisition of the solar and home improvement lending business Sunlight Financial, a collection of investors announced a nearly $1 billion cash infusion into Loanpal, another renewable energy and home improvement lender.

The $800 million commitment to Loanpal arrives alongside a flurry of climate commitments from some of the world’s largest investors.

Yesterday, Blackrock chief Larry Fink, released the $9 trillion investment manager’s annual letter calling for more stringent accounting and reporting of climate data, and Bank of America joined 60 other companies in committing to a new reporting standard for climate and sustainability endorsed by the International Business Council and the World Economic Forum. Fink endorses a separate reporting scheme called the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures that has the backing of some of the biggest financial investors in the world.

These new standards will drive more investment dollars into businesses that are reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global climate change. And lending programs incentivizing the switch to more energy efficient appliances and renewable installations are probably the lowest of low hanging fruit for the financial services industry.

That’s one reason why investors like NEA, the WestCap Group, Brookfield Asset Management, and the giant private equity energy investment fund Riverstone Holdings are backing Loanpal.

The deal, which was a secondary transaction to give strategic investors a stake in the business actually wrapped up last year. As a result Scott Sandell, the managing general partner at NEA and a longtime investor in pr and Laurence Tosi, Managing Partner of WestCap Group, have joined the company’s board of directors.

“We invited a number of players into the company,” said Loanpal’s founder, chairman and chief executive Hayes Barnard. The former chief revenue officer for SolarCity before its acquisition by Tesla, Barnard has a long history with solar energy development. At Loanpal he also had the balance sheet to take his pick among would-be investors. “We’re a multi-billion dollar company,” said Barnard.

“This was us inviting strategic investors into the company and being thoughtful about where they could help and how they could help,” Barnard said.

Loanpal is profitable, has zero debt and throws off monthly dividends to its financial backers. “Today we finance $400 million a month for roughly 15,000 solar systems that are combined with battery systems,” says Barnard. In all, the company has arranged $5.9 billion in consumer finance loans since its launch in 2018. Loanpal also counts around 85% of the top solar firms as vendors and has a staff of around 12,000 sales professionals.

Those numbers allowed the company to bring in board members like Tosi, the former chief financial officer of the multi-billion dollar financial services firm, Blackstone. “He really understands how to bring in capital markets at scale,” said Barnard. 

If anything, the attention from Blackrock, Blackstone, Riverstone and all the financial services firms without references to stones or rocks in their name shows that this is a problem of capital at scale. Decarbonizing the global economy is a $10 trillion business, according to the World Economic Forum (or, for the retail investment crowd, the equivalent of roughly 66.7 billion Gamestops at yesterday’s share price).

“The near term market that we’re going to penetrate now is sustainable home solutions that’s a $100 billion market,” Barnard said. 

A significant chunk of that $10 trillion is going to come from the development and integration of new consumer facing appliances and hardware to reduce the consumption of energy. “We believe the battery storage market, the smart thermostat market and the solar market are all intertwined and combined,” said Barnard. “Overall the most important thing is that this is just technology that is better. It was going to scale regardless of who was in the White House. These pieces of technology are better, they save homeowners money.. It’s kind of an IQ test if homeowners want to do it.”

Lynk, a “knowledge-as-a-service” platform that connects clients with over 840,000 experts in a wide range of fields, announced today it has raised $24 million led by Brewer Lane Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, with participation from Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund. The company uses machine learning algorithms to match users, who include investment firms, Fortune 100 companies and government entities, with experts on its platform, helping connect them with people they would probably not find at traditional consultancies or by searching online.

“At the core of it, the search is a people search based on what you know, and not just where you work, to put it very simply,” co-founder and chief executive officer Peggy Choi told TechCrunch.

Founded in 2015, Lynk has now raised a total of $30 million. It has more than 200 employees across offices in eight cities: Hong Kong, New York City, Singapore, London, Mumbai, Shanghai, Hyderabad, Toronto and Manila. Its funding will be used for product launches and to expand in North America and China, where its seen demand grow over the past twelve months.

Lynk’s flagship product, Lynk Answers, is currently used by about 200 enterprise clients when their employees need to do research for projects including geographical expansion, product-market fit and due diligence, with many relying on the platform for on-the-ground research in areas they can’t travel to because of the pandemic. For example, investors talk with advisors on Lynk to understand new technology or the dynamics in a sector. Over the past few years, companies have used Lynk to help them react quickly to geopolitical changes, including events that affected their supply chain. Some sought supply chain experts when shipments got stuck in customs or they wanted to diversify their manufacturing by setting up factories in Southeast Asia.

Before Lynk, Choi worked in finance, including at Silver Lake in London and TPG in San Francisco. As an investor, “every day you have to do a lot of conversations with executives and different kinds of experts to learn about new industries or companies really quickly. Through that experience, I realized that talking to the right person makes a huge difference,” she said.

In contrast, Choi found herself at a loss when her parents wanted to launch an art gallery. “They had all these day-to-day business questions and sometimes they asked me because they thought I would know how to address it. But I don’t know either, I’m not the right person for them, so I had to find the right people,” she said. “When I saw that contrast, I thought, what about using data to organize people in a way based on what they know?”

Lynk, which monetizes by charging enterprise clients a subscription fee, fills the gap between traditional consultancies and consumer-oriented Q&A platforms like Quora or China’s Zhihu. The platform also includes SaaS features that provide an alternative to email chains, like collaboration tools and auto-transcription for expert interviews so they can be organized, searched and referenced by a team.

Lynk’s experts, who the platform calls “Knowledge Partners,” include C-suite executives, independent consultants, lawyers, engineers, financial analysts and scientists, among others. The company finds them through several channels, including digital marketing, a referral program for current Knowledge Partners and partnerships with groups, associations and institutions. Lynk vets experts before they are added to the platform, where they set their own rates.

When users have a question, Lynk’s search engine shows them a list of experts based on criteria like domain expertise and geography. Then they ask potential experts a couple of questions to see if they are the right match. Lynk uses data from those conversations, on an anonymized basis, to refine its search technology and make matching more accurate. Once users pick experts, they work with them in different ways. Most of the time they do a question-and-answer session. Sometimes that turns into speaker and workshop engagements or longer-term projects.

Choi said building an inclusive roster of experts is a priority for Lynk. The company’s team and board are divided equally between women and men and represent more than 20 nationalities. It wants to build a diverse database through initiatives like outreach programs and campaigns like Lynk Elite Expert Women to recruit people, including those who haven’t done consulting before.

“When we were running the [Lynk Elite Expert Women] campaign, we realized that a lot of people find it a very new way of being valued,” said Choi. “Especially if they’ve spent their entire life doing something, they also want to know what people want to know about their area.”

Literati has raised a $40 million Series B to pursue an unusual startup opportunity — namely, book clubs.

Founder and CEO Jessica Ewing (a former product manager at Google) explained that the Austin-based company started out with book clubs for kids, before launching its Luminary brand for adult book clubs last year. And the Luminary clubs live up to the name — they’re curated by notable figures such as activist and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, NBA star Stephen Curry, entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir Richard Branson, journalist Susan Orlean and the Joseph Campbell Foudnation.

When you sign up for a Literati book club, you receive a print edition of each month’s selection with a note from the curator. You also get access to the Literati app, where you can discuss the book with other readers, and where curators host author conversations. For example, Curry is leading a book club focused on nonfiction about people who “transcend expectations” (he invested in Literati as well), while Yousafzai chooses books by women “with bold ideas from around the world.”

Ewing told me that she’s trying to build the first “new, innovative bookseller” since Amazon launched 25 years ago. And she’s doing that by focusing on curation.

“There’s too much choice, too many lists, it’s completely overwhelming for most people,” she said. And she argued that it helps to enlist celebrities and other big names to do the curation: “Books are aspirational. No one aspires to play more video games, people aspire to read more … People want their books to be recommended by someone a little bit smarter than they are.”

Ewing’s hope for Literati is to create “the next great literary social network,” bridging the gap between celebrity-driven lists like Oprah’s Book Club and Reese’s Book Club and what she described as “the wine-and-cheese, super intimate model.”

“I would love to see in-person meetups once we’re out of the COVID environment,” she added. “But I also think there’s everything in between. We’re enabling threaded discussions [in the app] right now, and it’s cool to have asynchronous conversations about the books.”

And on the children’s book side, Literati is also working building personalization tools designed to recommend the best books for each child.

“To me, this is one of the most exciting applications: How do we make this generation of kids love reading by pairing them with the right books?” Ewing said.

Literati previously raised $12 million in funding from Shasta Ventures and others, according to Crunchbase. The new round was led by Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures, with participation from Dick Costolo and Adam Bain of 01 Advisors, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Shasta, Silverton Partners, Springdale Ventures and — as previously mentioned — Stephen Curry.

“I wanted to start my own book club with Literati, because their mission to better the world through reading naturally aligns with my values as an entrepreneur and father,” Curry said in a statement. “I was a fan before I was an investor, and am so proud to be a part of a company that works to better the lives of others, one book at a time.”

LottieFiles, a platform for JSON-based Lottie animations, has raised a Series A of $9 million. The round was led by M12, Microsoft’s venture capital arm, with participation from returning investor 500 Startups.

Based in San Francisco and Kuala Lumpur, LottieFiles was founded in 2018. The platform includes Lottie creation, editing and testing tools, and a marketplace for animations. It now claims about one million users from 65,000 companies, including Airbnb, Google, TikTok, Disney and Netflix, and 300% year-over-year growth. The new funding brings its total raised to about $10 million.

Smaller than GIF or PNG graphics, Lottie animations also have the advantage of being scalable and interactive. It was introduced as an open-source library by Airbnb engineers six years ago and quickly became popular with app developers because Lottie files can be used across platforms without additional coding and edited after shipping.

LottieFiles co-founder and chief executive officer Kshitij Minglani told TechCrunch the startup originally started as a community for designers and developers, before adding tools, integrations and other resources. It launched its marketplace during the COVID-19 lockdown, with 70% of earnings going directly to creators, and also has a list of animators who are available for hire.

LottieFiles’ core platform and tools are currently pre-revenue, with plans to monetize later this year. “It’s not often a revolutionary format comes about and disrupts an entire industry, saving tons of precious design and development hours,” said Minglani. “We didn’t want to stunt the adoption of Lottie by monetizing early on.”

The new funding will be used on LottieFiles’ product roadmap, expanding its infrastructure and increasing its global user base.