Kdan Mobile, a Taiwanese startup that makes cloud-based software for content creators, announced a $5 million Series A today, raised from investors including W.I. Harper Group, Darwin Venture Management and Accord Ventures. Founded in 2009, the Tainan City startup says its products have been downloaded more 120 million times, with about 40% of its customers located in the United States.
Its Series A takes Kdan Mobile’s total funding so far to $6.5 million. The capital will be used for product development, including blockchain-based encryption for documents and real-time collaboration features, to appeal to enterprise and education users. The company also plans to spend more on user acquisition in the U.S. and China, two of its growth markets.
Kdan Mobile’s products include Creativity 365, a software suite with a mobile animation creator and video editor, and Document 365, launched last year to attract enterprise users. The company also recently began offering new subscription plans for businesses and educational organizations and claims that its cloud platform, called Kdan Cloud, now counts over 3.5 million members.
Founder and chief executive officer Kenny Su says Kdan Mobile is seeking new partners that will allow it to establish a bigger presence in markets like Japan. One of its Series A investors, Accord Ventures, is based in Tokyo, and Kdan Mobile may start marketing to the country’s animation industry, Su tells TechCrunch. The company already has partnerships with Taiwanese mobile services provider GMobi, Jot Stylus maker Adonit and Ningbo, China-based design sharing platform LKKER.
Su says one of the ways Kdan’s products differentiate from cloud-based software by Google, Microsoft, Adobe and other major competitors is its focus on artists, designers and other creative professionals. Kdan’s products were also created to allow users to start projects on mobile devices before moving onto desktop apps. As many users of Google Docs, Office 365 or Adobe Creative Cloud have discovered, accessing them on mobile devices feels much more awkward than on desktop. Kdan Mobile, however, was founded just as smartphones and tablets usage was becoming widespread, and its products were created specifically for mobile.
“We are trying to fill the gap, helping users create content on mobile and then allowing them to finish it in a desktop environment, not only with our own tools, but also by exporting to other places including Adobe,” says Su.
Part of Kdan Mobile’s Series A financing will also be used to figure out how to the company can increase the use of artificial intelligence in its products. Kdan Mobile already uses machine learning algorithms to improve its software by analyzing what users upload and recommend on its content sharing platform.
In a press statement, W.I. Harper Group managing director Y.K. Chu said “We are stunned by Kdan’s leading development technology and global vision. We are glad to be part of their development plan and expect to grow with them.”
Given the timing of the unveiling, the company is likely targeting a May public debut.
Its core business is online software development courses, helping people improve their skills in categories like IT, data and security. Businesses small and large pay Pluralsight to help train their employees. It also has offerings for individual subscribers.
In the filing, the company acknowledges that it is a competitive landscape, and names Cornerstone OnDemand, Udacity, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning as others in a comparable market. It also mentions General Assembly, which was recently acquired by Adecco for $413 million.
This is the first glimpse we get at Pluralsight’s financials. For 2017, the company brought in $166.8 million in revenue, up from $131.8 million in 2016 and $108.4 million in 2015.
Losses are growing, however. This is partly due to a sizeable increase in sales and marketing expenditures. For 2017, the company lost $96.5 million. This is up from losses of $20.6 million in 2016 and $26.4 million in 2015.
Pluralsight has been around since 2004. Like many startups outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, the company bootstrapped its business and didn’t raise significant outside funding until 2013. Pluralsight previously raised nearly $200 million in financing.
The largest shareholder is Insight Venture Partners, which owned 46.1% of the shares prior to the IPO, an unusually high percentage. Co-founder and CEO Aaron Skonnard owned 13.4% and investment group ICONIQ owned 8.1%.
Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan served as lead underwriters. Wilson Sonsini and Goodwin Procter served as counsel.
Pluralsight plans to list on the Nasdaq, under the ticker “PS.”
A provision in the JOBS Act from 2012 helped make it so that companies could file confidentially and then reveal financials and other business information just weeks before making public debuts. This helps companies avoid too much scrutiny in the months leading up to an IPO. There is also a quiet period in this time, meaning that companies are limited in what they can say publicly about their businesses.
Like most tech companies, Pluralsight chose to take advantage of this confidential filing provision. But it also announced that it filed, something that companies don’t usually do. Most choose to stay quiet about IPO plans until they make the filings public, unless reporters break the news first.
It was no surprise to those who have been following Utah’s tech scene that Pluralsight is planning to list on the stock market this year. The venture-backed “unicorn” has been a late-stage company for several years now, with a reported valuation of $1 billion as of 2014.
After a slow first couple months, there has been a flurry of tech IPO activity in recent weeks. Dropbox, Spotify and Zuora recently debuted. Pivotal, Smartsheet and Carbon Black are amongst the companies expected to list in the coming weeks.
“The percentage of Top 40 music made with our platform blows my mind” says Splice co-founder Steve Martocci. He tells me about some bedroom music producers who were “working at Olive Garden until they put sounds on Splice.” Soon they quit their jobs since they were earning enough from artists downloading those sounds to use in their songs. That led them to collaborate with famous DJ Zedd, resulting in the Billboard #12 hit “Starving”.
Splice has attracted $47 million in funding to power this all-new music economy. That might be a shock considering Martocci estimates that 95% of digital instruments and sample packs are pirated since they’re often expensive with no try-before-you-buy option. Even Kanye West got caught stealing the trendy Serum digital synthesizer.
But Splice lets artists pay $7.99 per month to download up to 100 samples they can use royalty-free to create music. That’s cheaper than it costs to listen to music on Spotify. Splice then compensates artists based on how frequently their sounds are downloaded, and has already paid out over $7 million.
Splice Sounds is like an iTunes Store for samples
“We try to make more seats at the table in the music business” says Martocci, who previously founded messaging app GroupMe which sold to Skype for between $50 million and $80 million in 2011. “GroupMe was made to go to concerts with our friends. Music has always been my motivator, but code is my canvas. Artists come up to me and hug me because I’m changing the creative process.”
Splice co-founder Steve Martocci
But now he’s getting some big name assistance, attracted by Splice’s success in the stubborn musician community and its $35 million Series B from December. Splice has just hired former Facebook product manager Matt Pake as VP of product to lead core teams in New York, and former Secret co-founder Chrys Bader to build out a new squad in Los Angeles. [Disclosure: I knew both from before they moved out of the SF social scene]
Splice now has 100 staffers, mostly hobbyist musicians themselves, but “I don’t think I have one bay area employee” says Martocci. He wants his offices where the artists live. “Everyone has a genuine passion for music. It doesn’t feel like a tech company as much” says Bader. Martocci apparently takes feedback well, which is different because “I’ve had some pretty fucking hard people to work with in the past…” Bader notes, likely referring to disagreements with his co-founder at Secret. “I have zero tolerance for bullshit at this point in my life and there’s zero bullshit on this team.”
While the Sounds marketplace has blown up recently, pushing Splice to 1.5 million users, the startup has a grander vision for software to eat instruments. That means creating the same kind of tools that help programmers code apps, but for musicians to compose songs. Splice Studio integrates with composition software like GarageBand, Logic, and Ableton to offer cloud-synced version control.
This might sound nerdy, but it’s a lifesaver. Splice Studio automatically backs up the artist’s work-in-progress song after every single edit so they can always reverse changes and safely work with collaborators without having to nervously save manually and fret about keeping all the copies organized.
Splice saves every edit to a song-in-progress so you can experiment but always reverse changes
Since Splice’s staffers actually make music themselves rather than parachuting into a foreign space, they intimately understand the frustrations they’re trying to solve. Knowing income can be unpredictable, Splice lets musicians access plugins, software, and instruments on a rent-to-own basis where they can pause payment and resume later. That’s the kind of convenience that Bader says makes Splice “easier than piracy”, echoing Spotify director Sean Parker’s plan to beat bootleg MP3s with a simple streaming service. “I wanted to build something even Reddit couldn’t complain about”, Martocci laughs.
But where Splice goes next could addresses the biggest, most insidious barrier to creative output: writer’s block. Ask most modern musicians, and they’ll tell you about their giant folders of unfinished songs. Getting from a melody rattling around in you head to a few tracks laid out in your preferred composition software is the easy part. Polishing those parts, ditching the unnecessary ones, finding the rights sounds, and tieing it all together into something listenable can be agonizingly difficult.
Creative Companion is Splice’s solution. Currently being built by Bader’s LA team, it’s a songwriting assistant that can suggest a next step and surface samples that fit well with those you’re already using. Martocci explains how Splice uses “cool machine learning stuff” to recommend ‘Hey, you should add a bass line. You should add some mastering.”
Splice just hired Chrys Bader, previously the co-founder of Secret
The question for Splice will be how many music producers out there are willing to pay. “There’s an upper bound. This is not a consumer product” Bader admits. Citing internal research, he says there 30 million music producers in the world. Many might not even know about Splice, “but at $8 a month, that’s not really breaking the bank. You might pay $200 for a plugin or $700 for Ableton. That’s insane. Musicans can’t afford that. Yet a musician friend tells me all the time ‘I’m broke, I’m broke…but I live or die by Splice.’”
Splice’s heavy-duty funding from Union Square Ventures, True Ventures, and DFJ could also attract competition. It might awake the interest of big creative services corporations like Adobe, or more established music production tool companies like Native Instruments which just launched a direct competitor called Sounds.com. But Splice is digging in for a long fight, giving away Splice Studio to lure in users and commissioning exclusive sample packs from top creators. In that sense, Splice is almost like a record label.
“I want to see a world with more transcendent musical highs” where “you have more music that’s ready for moment” Martocci opines. “If we build something that makes musicians lives better, that makes our lives better because a lot of us are musicians, what else is there in life?” Bader explains.
Computers democratized music-making, leading to a flood of amateurs sharing their content with the world. But all good democratizations necessitate layers of curation to sort through all the output, which social networks have become, and tools to let the most talented artists create what’s worth everyone’s attention.
Martocci concludes “Software is a great instrument. One-third of the world tries to make music at some point. They’re not going to pick up guitars and recorders any more.” Whatever app they choose, Splice wants to keep them in the creative flow.
Coinbase, the prominent cryptocurrency exchange, has announced its most significant piece of M&A to date after it agreed to buy Earn.com, the U.S. startup that uses the blockchain for its paid-email service, in a deal worth more than $120 million. In addition, Coinbase has appointed Earn.com co-founder and CEO Balaji Srinivasan as its first CTO, while the rest of the team will transition over, too.
The deal doesn’t come as a complete surprise as Coindesk reported last month that Coinbase and Earn.com were in talks over a deal.
This is Coinbase’s fifth acquisition to date — its most recent was a deal to buy Cipher Browser last week — and its largest outlay so far. Neither party is saying exactly how much Coinbase is paying, but Srinivasan told TechCrunch in an interview that the deal represents a positive return on investment for those who backed Earn.com, which was formerly known as 21. The company had raised more than $120 million from investors, according to Crunchbase data, which gives some idea of the total deal package.
All of Coinbase’s previous acquisitions have centered around talent; for example, last week’s Cipher deal saw highly rated developer Peter Kim join the Coinbase ranks. That seems to be a major motivator for landing Earn.com, despite a high price and a product that both Srinivasan and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong intend to “double down” on post-acquisition.
A Stanford graduate who holds a BS, MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering, Srinivasan is highly prized in Silicon Valley. He sits on the board at power investor firm Andreessen Horowitz and is known for being an early evangelist of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. (He once told me that he tipped Uber drivers in bitcoin in its early days, going so far as to set up Coinbase wallets for them while in their back of their car as they took him to his destination.)
It’s not a secret that Coinbase has struggled to fill its vacancies with talent, and that has extended to the CTO role. Bringing in a name as big as Srinivasan is a major coup for the company and, with the startup said to be paying some of its talent more than $1 million per year in salary, it doesn’t make you wonder how big a factor landing Srinivasan is in making this deal happen.
More importantly for Andreessen Horowitz, Qualcomm Ventures, Khosla Ventures and other backers of Earn.com, this deal with Coinbase — which includes cash, stock and crypto — represents a turnaround in fortunes for the startup.
Founded as secretive bitcoin mining operation ’21E6′ in 2013, the company quickly raised over $100 million but struggled as the price of bitcoin fell and expensive operational costs weighed it down.
Srinivasan was an initial co-founder but he stepped back from daily operations to take a full-time role with Andreessen Horowitz as the startup got going. He returned to the fold as CEO role in 2015 when, he explained, the company had less than a year in runway having wracked up large capital commitments that it couldn’t pay back, even with millions of dollars of mining profit each month.
Alongside CFO Lily Liu, Srinivasan refocused the company to offer a service that rewards users financially for answering emails and completing tasks. Today, he said, the company — which was renamed to Earn.com last year — is profitable with revenue at an eight-digital annual rate run with “hundreds of thousands” of users.
“With Coinbase’s user base and distribution muscle, I think it could hit $100 million in ARR in a few months,” Srinivasan told TechCrunch. “I’m proud of the fact that we turned what could have been a disaster into a successful product and I’m excited about the road ahead.”
(Srinivasan wrote more about “the turnaround” of Earn.com on his blog here.)
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong onstage at TechCrunch DIsrupt San Francesco in 2014
It is fairly easy to dismiss Earn.com as Silicon Valley hyperbole — the fact that Mark Andreesen will answer your email in return for a $100 donation to Black Girls Code may be neat but it is not game-changer — but the company’s product gets interesting when you consider it at scale.
Srinivasan explained how the ability to reach hundreds of domain experts with questions — for example AI engineers about their next career move, or expectations for how the industry matures — starts to become a powerful tool, particularly when the surveyor pays based on results. That’s a very different proposal to existing intelligence services, and it has found success among some tech industry verticals.
Writing in a blog post for Coinbase — which interestingly focuses heavily on Srinivasan’s arrival at the company — CEO Armstrong called Earn.com “arguably one of the earliest practical blockchain applications to achieve meaningful scale.”
It’ll be interesting to see what Coinbase does with it, particularly around product integrations.
Perhaps of more significance is what Srinivasan does in his new role.
Acknowledging what many perceive as Coinbase’s conservative approach to cryptocurrencies — it offers users the chance to buy only four — Srinivasan said a large part of his role is to look at emerging technologies.
“There’s a lot of amazing stuff happening,” he told TechCrunch. “Atomic swaps, sharding, plasma, proof of stake, etc, and a big part of my job will be to take all of that stuff, and rank it based on whether we can use it to create new products for our users.”
Another part, he mentioned, will be evangelizing the concept of blockchain itself beyond just the cryptocurrencies as investments. So you can expect him to pop up at events and generally have a wider presence in the media as Coinbase looks to cement its position as a blockchain and crypto leader.
Srinivasan will also continue to be involved with Andreessen Horowitz, and at Coinbase he’ll be part of the company’s recently announced investment arm, Coinbase Ventures.
“Every once in a while, a company comes along that is the start button for a technology,” Srinivasan said, citing companies like Microsoft (Windows) and Facebook and their roles in igniting the next phases of technology development.
“If you control and build that onboarding process, then you can build everything else downstream. If you do it right, then Coinbase goes from the place people build cryptocurrency to the place where blockchain technology is built.”
“I want to see a world with more transcendent musical highs” where “you have more music that’s ready for moment” Martocci opines. “If we build something that makes musicians lives better, that makes our lives better because a lot of us are musicians, what else is there in life?” Bader explains.
