Category: UNCATEGORIZED

This morning Gtmhub, a multinational startup that builds software to help other companies manage their corporate planning, announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B. The round was led by Insight, and included both participation from new investor Singular, and prior investors LauncHub and CRV.

Gtmhub raised capital around 13 months ago, a $9 million Series A. At the time, the new capital was larger than the aggregate of its preceding funding efforts. The startup’s new funding round, like its 2019 Series A, towers above its prior fundraising totals in a similar manner.

How has Gtmhub managed to raise so much money? In a word, growth.

TechCrunch reported at the time of its Series A that Gtmhub had managed 400% growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) heading into the round, on a year-over-year basis. Similar levels of topline expansion have continued, with Gtmhub COO Seth Elliott telling TechCrunch that the company grew its ARR by a multiple of three last year (measured December 2019 through December 2020).

Around the time when Gtmhub raised in 2019, a number of other startups focused on the same software market raised as well, leading to TechCrunch asking “why is everyone making OKR software?”

The acronym OKR translates to “objectives and key results,” a planning method that has become popular among American technology firms, and, according to Elliott, is becoming more popular internationally and among non-technology companies.

The startup executive also told TechCrunch that he sees Gtmhub growing alongside two business trends. The first, the rise of OKRs themselves, is a wave that his company is riding, he told TechCrunch. The second, one that he thinks his startup is leading, deals with large companies pursuing corporate transformations to boost their agility; those firms are adopting Gtmhub, he said, which can help them execute their digital transformation, or similar efforts successfully.

It’s not a big surprise that large companies looking to rejuvenate their operations might want a new planning method to help keep their staff pointing in the same direction, and Gtmhub has long had an enterprise bent.

That enterprise focus performed well for the company last year, we learned. TechCrunch asked the company for updates on its annual contract value (ACV) results and gross margin levels during our discussion of its new round. In 2019, at the time of its Series A, the company said that it had grown its ACV by 650% in the preceding year. The COO told TechCrunch that that figure rose by a factor of ten in 2020, implying success in selling to large companies. And, Elliott added, the total number of paying users of the service also rose by a factor of ten during the year.

The company’s gross margins held up to their roughly 90% levels set in 2019, it said.

Given those results, it’s not a surprise that Gtmhub was able to raise another round more quickly than the startup-standard 18 month timeline would have had us estimate.

The round came together quickly. According to Elliott, Gtmhub started to chat with investors outside of a formal process in early November, kicking off a more serious effort to raise capital by the end of that month. The round was closed as 2020 concluded.

It will be interesting to see if other startups working on the software category that also raised money around a year ago will also now raise more capital. The names on our watch list regarding that question include WorkBoard and Ally. There are other players in the space as well, like Perdoo, that we’d love to hear from when it comes to their own 2020 growth.

Gtmhub declined to share its 2021 growth plans with TechCrunch.

The larger lesson from this round is that even inside of a software niche that you might have dismissed as overly narrow — namely OKR-focused software — is in fact large enough to support a handful of high-growth startups. That applies broadly, and underscores a little of the pace of the venture and startup industries in the last few quarters.

This morning Gtmhub, a multinational startup that builds software to help other companies manage their corporate planning, announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B. The round was led by Insight, and included both participation from new investor Singular, and prior investors LauncHub and CRV.

Gtmhub raised capital around 13 months ago, a $9 million Series A. At the time, the new capital was larger than the aggregate of its preceding funding efforts. The startup’s new funding round, like its 2019 Series A, towers above its prior fundraising totals in a similar manner.

How has Gtmhub managed to raise so much money? In a word, growth.

TechCrunch reported at the time of its Series A that Gtmhub had managed 400% growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) heading into the round, on a year-over-year basis. Similar levels of topline expansion have continued, with Gtmhub COO Seth Elliott telling TechCrunch that the company grew its ARR by a multiple of three last year (measured December 2019 through December 2020).

Around the time when Gtmhub raised in 2019, a number of other startups focused on the same software market raised as well, leading to TechCrunch asking “why is everyone making OKR software?”

The acronym OKR translates to “objectives and key results,” a planning method that has become popular among American technology firms, and, according to Elliott, is becoming more popular internationally and among non-technology companies.

The startup executive also told TechCrunch that he sees Gtmhub growing alongside two business trends. The first, the rise of OKRs themselves, is a wave that his company is riding, he told TechCrunch. The second, one that he thinks his startup is leading, deals with large companies pursuing corporate transformations to boost their agility; those firms are adopting Gtmhub, he said, which can help them execute their digital transformation, or similar efforts successfully.

It’s not a big surprise that large companies looking to rejuvenate their operations might want a new planning method to help keep their staff pointing in the same direction, and Gtmhub has long had an enterprise bent.

That enterprise focus performed well for the company last year, we learned. TechCrunch asked the company for updates on its annual contract value (ACV) results and gross margin levels during our discussion of its new round. In 2019, at the time of its Series A, the company said that it had grown its ACV by 650% in the preceding year. The COO told TechCrunch that that figure rose by a factor of ten in 2020, implying success in selling to large companies. And, Elliott added, the total number of paying users of the service also rose by a factor of ten during the year.

The company’s gross margins held up to their roughly 90% levels set in 2019, it said.

Given those results, it’s not a surprise that Gtmhub was able to raise another round more quickly than the startup-standard 18 month timeline would have had us estimate.

The round came together quickly. According to Elliott, Gtmhub started to chat with investors outside of a formal process in early November, kicking off a more serious effort to raise capital by the end of that month. The round was closed as 2020 concluded.

It will be interesting to see if other startups working on the software category that also raised money around a year ago will also now raise more capital. The names on our watch list regarding that question include WorkBoard and Ally. There are other players in the space as well, like Perdoo, that we’d love to hear from when it comes to their own 2020 growth.

Gtmhub declined to share its 2021 growth plans with TechCrunch.

The larger lesson from this round is that even inside of a software niche that you might have dismissed as overly narrow — namely OKR-focused software — is in fact large enough to support a handful of high-growth startups. That applies broadly, and underscores a little of the pace of the venture and startup industries in the last few quarters.

This morning Gtmhub, a multinational startup that builds software to help other companies manage their corporate planning, announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B. The round was led by Insight, and included both participation from new investor Singular, and prior investors LauncHub and CRV.

Gtmhub raised capital around 13 months ago, a $9 million Series A. At the time, the new capital was larger than the aggregate of its preceding funding efforts. The startup’s new funding round, like its 2019 Series A, towers above its prior fundraising totals in a similar manner.

How has Gtmhub managed to raise so much money? In a word, growth.

TechCrunch reported at the time of its Series A that Gtmhub had managed 400% growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) heading into the round, on a year-over-year basis. Similar levels of topline expansion have continued, with Gtmhub COO Seth Elliott telling TechCrunch that the company grew its ARR by a multiple of three last year (measured December 2019 through December 2020).

Around the time when Gtmhub raised in 2019, a number of other startups focused on the same software market raised as well, leading to TechCrunch asking “why is everyone making OKR software?”

The acronym OKR translates to “objectives and key results,” a planning method that has become popular among American technology firms, and, according to Elliott, is becoming more popular internationally and among non-technology companies.

The startup executive also told TechCrunch that he sees Gtmhub growing alongside two business trends. The first, the rise of OKRs themselves, is a wave that his company is riding, he told TechCrunch. The second, one that he thinks his startup is leading, deals with large companies pursuing corporate transformations to boost their agility; those firms are adopting Gtmhub, he said, which can help them execute their digital transformation, or similar efforts successfully.

It’s not a big surprise that large companies looking to rejuvenate their operations might want a new planning method to help keep their staff pointing in the same direction, and Gtmhub has long had an enterprise bent.

That enterprise focus performed well for the company last year, we learned. TechCrunch asked the company for updates on its annual contract value (ACV) results and gross margin levels during our discussion of its new round. In 2019, at the time of its Series A, the company said that it had grown its ACV by 650% in the preceding year. The COO told TechCrunch that that figure rose by a factor of ten in 2020, implying success in selling to large companies. And, Elliott added, the total number of paying users of the service also rose by a factor of ten during the year.

The company’s gross margins held up to their roughly 90% levels set in 2019, it said.

Given those results, it’s not a surprise that Gtmhub was able to raise another round more quickly than the startup-standard 18 month timeline would have had us estimate.

The round came together quickly. According to Elliott, Gtmhub started to chat with investors outside of a formal process in early November, kicking off a more serious effort to raise capital by the end of that month. The round was closed as 2020 concluded.

It will be interesting to see if other startups working on the software category that also raised money around a year ago will also now raise more capital. The names on our watch list regarding that question include WorkBoard and Ally. There are other players in the space as well, like Perdoo, that we’d love to hear from when it comes to their own 2020 growth.

Gtmhub declined to share its 2021 growth plans with TechCrunch.

The larger lesson from this round is that even inside of a software niche that you might have dismissed as overly narrow — namely OKR-focused software — is in fact large enough to support a handful of high-growth startups. That applies broadly, and underscores a little of the pace of the venture and startup industries in the last few quarters.

Digital product design — the process of building services like websites and apps that work without bugs and as you intend them to — has come into focus as an especially important thing to get right in the last year. With more customers using sites and apps to interact with a business, if something is broken or just isn’t working that well, you can lose them much more easily than in the past in physical spaces, when store assistants might help, or the customer might simply get distracted and interested by another product.

Today, one of the startups building tools to help with digital product design is announcing a huge round of funding, a sign of the urgency and interest in the space.

Quantum Metric, which provides a cloud-based service both to build digital products, and then test and fix them in real time to improve how they work, sold by the company as Continuous Digital Product Design, has picked up $200 million in funding, a Series B round that values the company at over $1 billion, a 9.2-fold increase compared to its valuation in 2018.

This is a significant round for the company also in the context of its previous fundraising, which previously only totaled $50 million from just three named investors: Bain, Hangar 51 and Insight.

The funding is being led by Insight Partners with other backers undisclosed. Insight is shaping up to be a huge and prolific backer of companies focused on building better customer service experiences in our current, socially-distanced and very digital economy: just earlier today, the same partner that led this round for Quantum Metric, managing director Lonne Jaffe, led a $78 million round in Glia, a platform to help customer service agents do their work more easily.

Mario Ciabarra, the founder and CEO of Quantum Metric, has built his company out of Colorado, and it somewhat feels like the DNA of being “remote” from the Bay Area has in a way fueled how the company’s own product has been created and built, with the idea being that you don’t need to be on the ground and in the room with someone to be able to identify when they are unhappy.

The company, through its customer base of enterprises, collects data interactions that cover some 1 billion internet users and some 20% of all internet activity, he said, “capturing experiences to see where people are frustrated on the web and in native apps. Our focus is on friction and frustration.” Quantum Metric is part devops, and part martech: when it is used, its customers can in turn monitor when their customers are clicking too much trying to get something done, or clicking and navigating away. It logs these actions, and then suggests ways to fix them.

That focus on looking for bad online experiences seems to follow him wherever he goes: the first thing Ciabarra talked to me about when we spoke for this article was about how bad the experience was for his 12 year old daughter “while trying to buy a bed online for her birthday” when she couldn’t immediate see a bed she wanted appear in her cart. (Yes, some 12 year-olds buy beds for themselves online, it seems. I’ll make sure my kids don’t know about this.)

“Economic downturns have a way of shining a light on high-growth ScaleUps that are particularly compelling to customers, and this year, the surging customer demand for Quantum Metric’s product from customers hit hard by the pandemic, has been extraordinary,” said Jaffe in a statement. “Quantum Metric lets enterprises use real-time qualitative and quantitative data to take the guesswork out of improving their digital features and products. We are excited to double down on our partnership with the Quantum Metric team as they bring their powerful analytics capabilities to customers across the world.”

The company today counts large internet and offline brands among its customers, with the list including Alaska Airlines, Crate and Barrel, Lenovo, Western Union, Lulu Lemon and Fanduel, and Ciabarra claims that it has held a 98% gross retention of that base, despite the aggressive competition from the likes of Log Rocket and Decibel, which actively market themselves in comparison to it. There is still a lot of opportunity, though, as the market continues to push ahead and not just shift online, but start to look like it’s here to stay.

Before Covid, Ciabarra said, “just 10-15% of transactions were online. That’s flipped, with only 10% in person now.” And the reason it’s having traction, he added, is not just because of how customer interactions are changing, “but because company cultures are changing, too.”

Happy almost CES! Sure the year’s biggest consumer electronics show hasn’t officially kicked off, but, well, what do such arbitrary signposts really mean in a year like 2021, right? Samsung just dropped what’s almost certainly one of its biggest pieces of news for the show, with the arrival of the Galaxy Chromebook 2.

The two-in-one follows almost a year to a day after the announcement of the original. It appears to share a fair bit of the charm of its predecessor, but notably has a much improvement price point. This time out the Chrome OS powered portable starts at a far more reasonable $549 – down from $999.

Image Credits: Samsung

Mind you, that’s for the one running a 10th gen Intel Celeron processor. If you want the Core i3, that starts at $699. It’s a bit of a jump, but a better starting point for users looking at the product as day-to-day machine. And besides, it’s still significantly less expensive than the original. Keep in mind here that last year’s model started with an i5 – which is to say the price drop comes with a bit of a processor downgrade.

Battery life was an issue on the original and is still a bit of a question here. The device now sports a QLED display (which Samsung claims is “world’s first” for a Chromebook), rather than the original’s 4K AMOLED, which could go a ways toward improving longevity.

The changes between the first and second gen product are a pretty clear indicator that companies are still trying to figure out precisely what a “premium Chromebook” entails. After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that the phrase was a bit of an oxymoron. The company’s computing GM Shoneel Kolhatkar sums up the general though process here pretty well in the associated press announcement,

Many kids grew up using Chromebooks in school, and as they enter the workforce, their needs evolve, they’re looking for premium, powerful hardware that can elevate that intuitive Google experience. We designed the Galaxy Chromebook 2 with these users in mind, taking the popular features from Galaxy Chromebook—incredible visuals, great specs, and gorgeous design and color—and bringing them to a wider base of customers.

In a sense, Samsung is taking a similar journey as the one Google made from the Pixelbook to the Pixelbook Go. And with Google pretty quiet on that front for the moment, there’s a decent sized market opening for Samsung here.

The Galaxy Chromebook 2 arrives later this quarter, sporting a 13.3 inch display, 4/8GB of RAM and 64/128GB of storage. And yes, it still comes in “Fiesta Red” or gray, if you prefer.

The popular news app News Break is announcing that it has raised $115 million in new funding.

The press release claims this round makes News Break “one of the first new unicorns of 2021,” but the company declined to disclose its actual valuation.

Founder and CEO Jeff Zheng said that when he started the company in 2015, the goal was to differentiate itself from other news aggregation apps by focusing on local news, and to “help or empower these local content creators.”

To be clear, you can find similar stories in News Break that you’d see in other news apps (there’s a whole section for coronavirus news and this morning you’ll see plenty of stories about yesterday’s violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol), you’ll also see many stories that are highlighted specifically based on your location.

“Technology is interweaving with every aspect of the company — in how we empower local publishers and local journalists to generate content more effectively and to reach an online audience more effectively,” Zheng said. “We have AI tools help to provide all these relevant articles … We have location profiles and what you’re most interested in, which we basically match against the content.”

The local approach seems to have paid off, with News Break reaching the top spot in the News category of the U.S. App Store multiple times (it’s currently ranked number four). The startup says it’s currently reaching 12 million daily active users.

News Break previously raised $26 million in funding. The new round was led by Francisco Partners, which is taking a seat on the News Break board. IDG Capital also participated.

Updating

Three years ago, Mercedes-Benz unveiled MBUX, an infotainment system that represented a leap forward in the legacy automotive industry. The system, with its crisp graphics, intuitive user interface and voice assistant, was closer to the experience of using a smartphone and finally got away from the pixelated screens and cluttered designs found in most modern infotainment systems.

Mercedes unveiled Thursday the next iteration of the MBUX, a 56-inch curved screen that runs the length of a dashboard — the central feature of a next-generation infotainment system that learns the behaviors of its driver. The MBUX Hyperscreen, as its called, will be option in the 2022 Mercedes EQS, the flagship sedan under the automaker’s electric EQ brand. The Hyperscreen, which was unveiled ahead of the virtual CES tech trade show, features 8 CPU cores, 24-gigabyte RAM and 46.4 GB per second RAM memory bandwidth. There’s a multifunction camera and a sensor that adapts the brightness of the screen depending on the lighting conditions.

All of this technology is meant to deliver an intuitive infotainment system that can be individualized for up to seven people. The software behind the Hyperscreen allows the system to continually get to know the customer better, according to Mercedes-Benz CTO Sajjad Khan, adding that it’s designed without the occupant needing to click or scroll anywhere.

“The MBUX Hyperscreen is both the brain and nervous system of the car,” Khan, said in a statement.

Mercedes-EQ. MBUX Hyperscreen

The curved screen, which is really several individual displays under a glass housing, is protected by two coatings of scratch-resistant aluminum silicate on the cover plate to reduce reflections and make cleaning easier. Mercedes also designed the screen with predetermined breaking points in case of a crash.

On either side of the curved screen are two physical air vents that have been integrated into the screen,

Putting the look and size of the screen aside, the user interface and how it operates is what stands out. (Althoug to be clear, we have yet to truly test it). Mercedes chose to put information on charging, entertainment, phone, navigation, social media, connectivity and massage — yes massage — right up front on the screen. This means no scrolling through menus or using the voice assistant to locate these options. 

The system’s software, which will learn the patterns of the driver, will prompt the user, removing any need to go deeper into the sub-menu. The navigation map is always visible in the center and located just below it are the controls for the phone and entertainment – or the feature that best suits the specific situation, according to the automaker.

Mercedes leaned into the software of the system, playing up its smart features during the Thursday reveal. For instance, if the driver always calls one particular person on the way home on certain days, the system begin to anticipate that action. A business card will appear with their contact information and — if it’s stored — their photo will appear. If someone else drives the EQS on that same evening, this recommendation would not be made.

Mercedes-EQ. MBUX Hyperscreen

The driver can dive deeper into the system to change settings or access other features. The front seat passenger has their own section of the screen called the co-driver display to play around with during a trip. In certain markets, the passenger will also be able to watch videos while traveling using the Bluetooth headphones. An intelligent camera-based locking concept will prevent the driver from looking at the passenger display to avoid distraction.

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire set to likely soon become the world’s richest man, and one of the most influential voices in the world of tech entrepreneurship, continued his recent trend of criticizing Facebook with a Twitter post late Wednesday night, following the attempted insurrection by pro-Trump rioters at the U.S. Capitol building. Musk shared a meme suggesting the founding of Facebook ultimately led to the day’s disastrous and shameful events.

Musk, who has himself used his massive reach (he has around 42.5 million followers on Twitter) to spread misinformation to his many followers, specifically around COVID-19 and its severity, also followed that up on Thursday morning with a reply expressing a lack of surprise at WhatsApp’s new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, which will make sharing data from WhatsApp users back to Facebook mandatory for all on the platform.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO also recommended that people instead use Signal, an encrypted messaging client which uses encryption by default and which is based on open-source standards. Side-note: If you do end up following Musk’s advice, you should also enable the app’s “disappearing messages” feature for an added layer of protection on both ends of the conversation.

Musk has a long history of opposing the use of Facebook, including the deletion of not just his own personal page, but also those of both Tesla and SpaceX, in 2018 during the original #deletefacebook campaign following the revelation of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The ongoing push for social distancing to slow the spread of Covid-19 has meant that more people than ever before are using internet-based services to get things done. And that is having a direct impact on digital customer service, which is seeing unprecedented traffic and demands when things are not running smoothly. Today, one of the startups that’s built an interesting, very “hands-on” approach to addressing that problem is announcing a round of funding to expand its business.

Glia, which has built a platform that not only integrates and helps manage different customer support channels, but also provides tools to help agents proactively get into a customer’s app or web page to help them find things or fix issues, is today announcing that it has picked up $78 million, a Series C. Dan Michaeli, the co-founder and CEO who is based out of New York (the company has a substantial operation in Estonia too), said will be used to continue developing its technology and expanding to address inbound interest for its services after seeing its revenues grow by 150% in 2020.

The company’s original focus was around financial services and it counts a large base of customers in that area, but it is also seeing a lot of activity in adjacent industries like insurance, as well as education, retail and other categories Michaeli said.

“We’ve had overwhelming demand and it’s incredible to see how businesses want to adopt us right now,” he said in an interview. “The plan is to significantly scale up and continue to define and meet that demand for digital customer service.” The company is likely also to use some of the funding for acquisitions in what appears to be a rapidly consolidating market.

The round is being led by Insight Partners, with Don Brown (an entrepreneur in the world of customer service, with his company Interactive Intelligence acquired by Genesys for $1.4 billion) also participating.

Glia isn’t disclosing other investors, but past backers include Tola Capital, Temerity Capital, Grassy Creek and Wildcat Capital, as well as Insight. Prior to this, the company, which has been around since 2012 and was previously known as Salemove, had raised just $28 million and its valuation was a modest $69 million according to PitchBook data (and it’s not disclosing valuation today).

While there are a lot of customer service startups in the market today, and a number of them are seeing huge boosts in their business, and even some consolidation as others snap up tech to make sure they have their own customer service strategies going in the right direction. (Witness Facebook of all companies acquiring omnichannel customer support and CRM leader Kustomer for $1 billion in November.)

Glia is not unlike many of the new guard of these companies, in that its focus is very squarely on providing a platform to be able to manage and interact across whatever digital channel a customer happens to be using. Glia, I should point out, means “glue” in Greek.

What makes Glia quite interesting and different from these are some of the twists it uses to engage with users. One of these involves being able to give agents the ability to actually get on the screen of the user in question, in order to both guide the user around the screen, and to see what the user is doing on that screen.

To be clear, the connection and ability to track what the user is doing is just on the screen in question, and it’s done with the user’s awareness of what is going on. In the demo of the service that I went through, it’s a very smooth service, which reminded me just a little of things like Clippy on Microsoft Word.

Alongside this, Glia provides tools to agents to let coach them on questions to ask, phrasing to use, and links for answers, and Glia also develops virtual customer service assistants, to help with more basic questions. These also have the ability to interact with people’s screens when they make contact with a company. This in effect sees the company combining a number of technologies in one place, from natural language to suggest (and in some cases run) customer service responses, through to computer vision to help detect what is going on on the remote screen, through to more fundamental CRM technology to run those services across multiple platforms.

While screen sharing has been a well-used tool in other areas — for example in workforce collaboration environments, or for presenting online — Glia is seen as one of the pioneers in leveraging that for customer service. For investors, the interest in Glia has been to tap into that.

“We are proud to expand our investment in Glia as the company continues to lead the evolution of Digital Customer Service for businesses across the globe,” said Lonne Jaffe, managing director at Insight Partners, in a statement. “Glia’s platform provides the modern technology necessary for businesses to meet customers in their digital journeys and communicate through the customer’s channel of choice. With this capital, the company will continue to scale and keep up with skyrocketing demand.”

We are in a key moment of digital transformation in customer services. Surprisingly, there are still many who opt for calling in to ask questions, but as Michaeli noted, these days, even when they are still using phones, customers will do so with “their screens in front of them.”

Brown believes that this is the other opportunity to seize. “Many companies are still focused on moving antiquated, on-premises telephony systems to cloud contact centers that essentially offer the same functionality,” he said in a statement. “Instead, businesses can leapfrog this process and move directly to a digital-first cloud approach by partnering with Glia. If I were to build Interactive Intelligence for today’s contact center, I would take Glia’s approach.”

As the pandemic took hold in 2020, companies accelerated their move to cloud services. Lacework, the cloud security startup, was in the right place at the right time as customers looked for ways to secure their cloud native workloads. The company reported that revenue grew 300% year over year for the second straight year.

It was rewarded for that kind of performance with a $525 million Series D today. It did not share an exact valuation, only saying that it exceeded $1 billion, which you would expect on such a hefty investment. Sutter Hill and Altimeter Capital led the round with help from D1, Coatue, Dragoneer Investment Group, Liberty Global Ventures, Snowflake Ventures and Tiger Capital. The company has now raised close to $600 million.

Lacework CEO Dan Hubbard says one of the reasons for such widespread interest from investors is the breadth of the company’s security solution. “We enable companies to build securely in the cloud, and we span across multiple different categories of markets, which enable the customers to do that,” he said.

He says that encompasses a range of services including configuration and compliance, security for infrastructure as code, build time and runtime vulnerability scanning and runtime security for cloud native environments like Kubernetes and containers.

As the company has grown revenue, it has been adding employees quickly. It started the year with 92 employees and closed with over 200 with plans to double that by the end of this year. As he looks at hiring, Hubbard is aware of the need to build a diverse organization, but acknowledges that tech in general hasn’t done a great job so far.

He says they are working with the various teams inside the company to try and change that, while also working to support outside organizations that are helping educate under represented groups to get the skills they need and then building from that. “If you can help solve the problem at an earlier stage, then I think you’ve got a bigger opportunity [to have a base of people to hire] there,” he said.

The company was originally nurtured inside Sutter Hill and is built on top of the Snowflake platform. It reports that $20 million of today’s total comes from Snowflake’s new venture arm, which is putting some money into an early partner.

“We were an alpha Snowflake customer, and they were an alpha customer of ours. Our platform is built on top of the Snowflake data cloud and their new venture arm has also joined the round with an investment to further strengthen the partnership there,” Hubbard said.

As for Sutter Hill, investor Mike Speiser sees Lacework as one of his firm’s critical investments. “[Much] like Snowflake at a similar point in its evolution, Lacework is growing revenue at over 300% per year making Lacework one of Sutter Hill Ventures’ most important and promising portfolio companies,” he said in a statement.