MemSQL, a company best known for the real-time capabilities of its eponymous in-memory database, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series D round, bringing the company’s overall funding to $110 million. The round was led by GV (the firm you probably still refer to as Google Ventures) and Glynn Capital. Existing investors Accell, Caffeinated Capital, Data Collective and IA Ventures also participated.
The MemSQL database offers a distributed, relational database that uses standard SQL drivers and queries for transactions and analytics. Its defining feature is the combination of its data ingestions technology that allows users to push millions of events per day into the service while its users can query the records in real time. The company recently showed that its tools can deliver a scan rate of over a trillion rows per second on a cluster with twelve servers.
The database is available for deployments on the major public clouds and on-premises.
MemSQL recently announced that it saw its fourth-quarter commercial booking hit 200 percent year-over-year growth — and that’s typically the kind of growth that investors like to see, even as MemSQL plays in a very competitive market with plenty of incumbents, startups and even open source projects. Current MemSQL users include the likes of Uber, Akamai, Pinterest, Dell EMC and Comcast.
“MemSQL has achieved strong enterprise traction by delivering a database that enables operational analysis at unique speed and scale, allowing customers to create dynamic, intelligent applications,” said Adam Ghobarah, General Partner at GV, in today’s announcement. “The company has demonstrated measurable success with its growing enterprise customer base and we’re excited to invest in the team as they continue to scale.”
BrainQ, an Israel-based startup that aims to help stroke victims and those with spinal cord injuries treat their injuries with the help of a personalized electromagnetic treatment protocol, today announced that it has raised a $5.3 million funding round on top of the $3.5 million the company previously raised. The company’s investors include Qure Ventures, crowdfunding platform OurCrowd.com, Norma Investments, IT-Farm and a number of angel investors, including Valtech Cardio founder and CEO Amir Gross.
When we last talked to BrainQ earlier this year, the team was working on two human clinical trials for stroke patients in Israel. At that time, the company had closed its first funding round and had also recently started to work with Google’s Launchpad Accelerator, too.
The general idea behind BrainQ is to use the patient’s brainwaves to generate a tailored treatment protocol. No AI company would be complete without data — it’s what drives these algorithms, after all — and the company says it owns one the largest Brain Computer Interface-based EEG databases for motor tasks. It’s that database that allows it to interpret the patient’s brain waves and generate its treatment protocol.
BrainQ EEG reader device
“We are on the verge of a new era where AI- based precision medicine will be used to treat neurodisorders, which do not have a sufficient solution to date,” said BrainQ CEO Yotam Drechsler in today’s announcement. “At BrainQ, we are thrilled by the opportunity to bring this vision to life in the world of neuro-recovery. In a short time, we have already achieved significant results and are looking forward to the opportunity to push our technology and expand our operations, further positioning BrainQ as a leader in the world of BCI-based precision medicine.”
As is typical for Israeli startups, the team’s background is quite impressive and includes former members of the country’s elite intelligence units and academics with a background in AI and neuroscience.
Prisma, a Berlin and San Francisco startup that is betting big on GraphQL — the data query language originally developed by Facebook to make it easier for front-end code to talk to application servers — has raised $4.5 million in seed funding.
Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins led the round, with participation from a number of angel investors, many of whom have deep roots in the developer and/or open source space, including Nick Schrock, one of the creators of GraphQL itself.
TechCrunch first learned of Kleiner’s pending investment in Prisma (formerly Graphcool) back in March, when the deal hadn’t yet closed. In a brief call yesterday, Prisma co-founder and CEO Johannes Schickling confirmed the investment and explained that the startup sought to raise from West Coast VCs and investors, rather than European VCs, who “really understand Open Source,” noting that any serious developer offering has to take a bottom up approach in order to become adopted by the wider developer community.
To that end, Schickling tells me Prisma itself has pivoted away from its narrower Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) model to an Open Source one, with the core offering — dubbed “Prisma 1.0” — released as a standalone infrastructure component under an Apache 2 open source license.
The company is building what it describes as the GraphQL data layer for all databases, in recognition that modern backends typically combine and connect to multiple specialised databases e.g. Postgres, Elasticsearch, Redis, Neo4j etc. This requires complex “mapping logic” to the underlying databases, which is precisely the heaving-lifting that Prisma has set out to solve. Prisma wants you to be able to access all of your databases in a single GraphQL query.
Schickling says the new funding will be used to bolster the team, including opening an office in San Francisco in addition to its Berlin engineering base. On the product roadmap is support for more databases. Prisma currently plugs into MySQL and Postgres, but plans to add the likes of MongoDB, Elastic, and Cassandra.
Alongside the startup’s open source product, it offers Prisma Enterprise to enable critical security workflows (compliance, access control, audit logging etc.) and Prisma Cloud for teams to collaborate and easily manage databases.
Prisma’s other seed investors include Robin Vasan (board member of HashiCorp, Couchbase, InfluxData), John Komkov (Fathom Capital), Augusto Marietti (CEO Kong), Guillermo Rauch (CEO Zeit), Spencer Kimball (CEO CockroachDB), and Nicholas Dessaigne (CEO Algolia).
AnyDesk, a startup that offers remote desktop software powered by a bespoke video codec, has scored €6.5 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is EQT Ventures, with participation from angel investors, including Chris Hitchen, and previous backer Andreas Burike.
The Stuttgart, Germany-based company says it will use the injection of cash for further development of the AnyDesk product and to grow the technical and commercial teams.
“AnyDesk’s mission can be summarised as overcoming distances,” co-founder and CEO Philipp Weiser tells TechCrunch. “Today, people need to work with their teams and content just as quickly and effectively when working remotely as they do when in the office. Legacy remote desktop offerings do not enable this — they are complicated, frustrating and slow. At best, you can do a presentation or help a colleague install a printer. Some ideas are born out of frustration and we decided to re-engineer the remote desktop for today’s workplace”.
To that end, as well as modern-day apps for Windows, MacOS, various flavours of Linux/Unix, Android and iOS, the AnyDesk team has created a proprietary video codec called “DeskRT” that has been engineered especially for graphical user interfaces. It transmits 60 frames per seconds and prioritises low latency.
As a result, the startup says users generally experience high quality video and sound, and image transmission that is fast and fluid enough to forget that you are using a different computer. That’s because, unlike traditional screen sharing, AnyDesk is built for collaboration.
“We created AnyDesk so that anyone, anywhere can get their work done,” says Weiser. “More than 50 million users worldwide have downloaded AnyDesk. We have more than 7,000 business customers, including Spidercam, Amedes and Sun Chemical”.
There is a free version of AnyDesk for personal use, and various professional tiers, all the way up to large enterprise use.
Meanwhile, the AnyDesk co-founder concedes that there a number of other players in the rather crowded remote desktop software space. They include LogMeIn, TeamViewer, Splashtop, and Citrix GoTo. However, he claims AnyDesk is better than current offerings as the startup has approached the remote desktop from a “software-design focused angle” and created an architecture and a custom video codec specifically for the purpose of low latency transmission.
“Some competing products use expensive hardware for this, but this is not the case with AnyDesk. We’ve achieved superior performance in a software-only solution. This means AnyDesk provides people with the experience they’ve come to expect when consuming content. When you view a website or video on your devices, chances are you don’t think about the web browser or media player working in the background. You are focused on the content. AnyDesk works in the same way, running behind-the-scenes so you can be productive, creative and get on with your work”.
As an aside, EQT Ventures is talking up the way it discovered AnyDesk, namely via the VC firm’s “Motherbrain” AI platform. The software claims to scan the tech startup ecosystem online for specific signals related to a company’s performance. Based on these digital footprints, it then flags the most promising companies and surfaces the relevant structured and unstructured data to the EQT Ventures team.
Of course, this sort of approach isn’t unique to EQT — most VC firms of a certain size use data tracking as part of their deal discovery and evaluation, and newer VCs such as InReach Ventures and Fly Ventures make a virtue of this — but it is perhaps noteworthy nonetheless.
French startup Welcome to the Jungle is raising a funding round of $8.4 million (€7 million) from XAnge, Bpifrance and Kima Ventures, as well as existing investors Jean-Paul Guisset and Michael Benabou.
Welcome to the Jungle is taking a different approach to job recruitment. The startup isn’t going to find employees for you. Instead, Welcome to the Jungle wants to give you the tools and exposure to get enough inbound applications.
The company started by profiling hundreds of tech companies in Paris. Instead of creating a giant Excel spreadsheet, Welcome to the Jungle works with a video crew, photographers and a writing staff to produce high quality content about your company. Think about it as glossy paper articles with Condé Nast-like production budget.
All of this is pricy. Companies pay for these profiles and get their own page on Welcome to the Jungle’s website. In addition to that, Welcome to the Jungle also produces quarterly magazines for a hundred universities and a thick paper magazine once per year.
And it’s true that Welcome to the Jungle has covered a ton of companies in Paris. When you think about a company name, chances are you can find a profile on Welcome to the Jungle.
Overall, a thousand companies partnered with Welcome to the Jungle. The website now attracts 600,000 unique visitors every month. For engineers, you can now filter depending on your skill set and your technical stack.
In addition to that, the startup has been slowly ramping up its software-as-a-service recruitment platform called Welcome Kit. Imagine somebody reads about your company in Welcome to the Jungle’s magazine and then ends up on a poorly designed job page.
Welcome Kit replaces the “Jobs” link in your website’s footer. The platform lets you list positions, create application forms and track candidates. Basic features are free and you can pay for additional features and branding options.
With today’s funding round, it’s time to look further. The company now wants to expand to another country, which could be Spain. It’s going to be a slow expansion as Welcome to the Jungle needs to put together a local team in each country to create content.
Carro, an automotive classifieds service and car financing startup based in Singapore, has closed a $60 million Series B round to scale its business in Southeast Asia.
The deal was co-led by SoftBank Ventures Korea, Insignia Ventures — the firm from ex-Sequoia Asia partner Yinglan Tan — and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group. Other participants include IDG Ventures India founder Manika Arora (via his family fund) and existing Carro backers Venturra,
Singtel Innov8, Golden Gate Ventures and Alpha JWC.
The 2.5-year-old company said in an announcement that $250 million of vehicles were sold last year across its three markets: Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore. That’s more than double the $120 million it claimed in 2016. Last March, Carro introduced its Genie Finance underwriting business, and over its first year, it claims to have originated over $100 million in loans while amassing a loan book of nearly $40 million.
Carro CEO Aaron Tan previously spent time at Singtel Innov8 and is one of a trio of co-founders. Tan told TechCrunch that the capital will initially be spent growing Carro’s business in Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore, but further down the line, there’s a plan for expansion.
“The exact markets are still to be determined but it may be a small setup in Japan and other sources of cars,” he added.
Carro has already expanded in terms of services. Initially a vehicle marketplace, it launched Genie Finance and has also forayed into insurance brokerage and road-side assistance. It recently introduced a service that completes vehicle sales in 60 minutes — Carro Express — which it said is now available in 30 locations across Southeast Asia.
“We will double down on our online marketplaces and financing in emerging markets this year. Ultimately, we want to improve the experience of selling and buying a car, as well as provide access to capital to the next billion people, which will improve the quality of lives,” Tan said in a statement.
Carro is rivaled by a number of startups, including BeliMobilGue in Indonesia, Carsome, iCar Asia and Rocket Internet’s Carmudi, although with its new raise in the bank Carro is the best-funded by some margin.
In the case of Carmudi, the business has retrenched itself. At its peak it covered over 20 markets worldwide across Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, but today its focus is on Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka.
Carro’s monster raise follows another notable deal in Southeast Asia today which saw Carousell close a Series C round worth $85 million. The firm added backing from new investors DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, and EDBI, the corporate investment arm of Singapore’s Economic Development Board.
Carousell, the mobile listing service in Southeast Asia, has pulled in an $85 million Series C fund as it seeks to strengthen its business among the region’s competitive e-commerce landscape before expanding globally.
The round was co-led by existing investor Rakuten Ventures and EDBI, the corporate investment arm of Singapore’s Economic Development Board. Other participants included returning investors 500 Startups, Golden Gate Ventures and Sequoia India as well as new investor DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank with over $330 billion in assets.
“It’s been six years since I made my partners very angry when I decided to do a startup, so it’s great to again get the validation of our investors,” CEO Siu Rui Quek joked in an interview with TechCrunch. “Six years ago it was mobile, now we’re going into an AI-first world [with other challenges such as] how do we make payments a lot more frictionless.”
Carousell’s core business is a consumer-to-consumer sales which, like a listings site, lets people sell unwanted items to each other. To date, the platform has helped sell over 50 million items and today it has 144 million listings. In recent years, it has fanned out to offer more verticals that include cars, property, jobs, services and finance.
The primary C2C portion of the business remains free, but the company has begun to monetize over the past several quarters, Quek explained.
Its revenue streams include advertising and partnerships — such as financial services and travel insurance — promoted listing and ‘spotlight’ ads for sellers, cost per click ads, and certain premium verticals, including automotive, real estate and more.
Quek said, however, played up the role of these straight-up e-commerce firms.
“They serve an important part of the system, they’re very complementary,” he explained. “For example, when Lazada runs a big sale, we’re quite happy because people will have unwanted items or things to sell later.”
“Lots of e-commerce guys have come [to Southeast Asia] but we continue to grow,” he added.
Figuring out just how large Carousell is in Southeast Asia isn’t all that easy. The company doesn’t talk about GMV. Quek said the number isn’t relevant — it doesn’t take payment for consumer-to-consumer sales, and advertising/services are major income streams — although sources last year suggested Carousell’s GMV could be around $5 billion.
Considering Carousell business is different to the others, that number is impressive. Shopee claimed $1.6 billion GMV during its most recent quarter — which would be $6.4 billion annually — while Lazada no longer reveals its figures but claims to be larger.
Back to topics that Carousell does talk about, and global expansion remains something of interest to the team — which hails from Singapore’s NUS; making them arguably Singapore’s first home-grown startup.
“We do have global ambitions as a company, but the focus is really still cementing our leadership in Southeast Asia. It’s such an exciting region, it’s still nascent and there’s still a lotto work for us to do in the grand scheme of things,” said Quek.
That discussion about moving outside of the region is likely to happen in “the next year or so,” he added.
Hiring is the single biggest challenge
For now though, Carousell is focused on growing its position in Southeast Asia, and in particular expanding its premium offerings — automotive, real estate and partnerships — beyond Singapore and into markets like Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, and Thailand. The startup is also keen to grow its engineering chops, especially around AI which helps it match buyers and sellers.
“Hiring is extremely difficult,” Quek explained. “The single biggest focus for me and my team is going back into the weeds to find great talent. We already have over 100 product engineers covering 19 nationalities, we’ve got to bring people in from across the world.”
Beyond an HQ in Singapore, Carousell has been pragmatic in opening up offices where it can find talent. There’s a team of 20 in Taiwan and a small office of 10 engineers in Vietnam, too, while it has made three acquihires to bring in talent and expand its business. Those have been case-by-case, Quek said, so we shouldn’t expect the company to necessary go out and make more acquisitions following this new round of investment.
“Acquisitions are not a specific stream we’re deliberate about at this point – -but we’re definitely keen to see if opportunistic acquisitions might come about,” he said.
For now, though, Quek said that isn’t a thought he or his team are giving time to.
“There are no plans for an IPO, we’re still super excited about the long-term opportunities and building on the mission,” he said. “We always say we are less than one percent done.”
Capital One has acquired the San Francisco-based digital identity and fraud alert startup Confyrm, the company announced through a blog post on Thursday. The deal will bring Confyrm’s technology to the bank in order to help speed its development and implementation of consumer identity services at scale.
CEO Andrew Nash founded Confyrm in 2013, along with Dale Olds and Emma Lindley, with a vision of restoring trust in digital identities, he says.
“We recognized that despite an increasing reliance on digital identities, consumer trust in those identities continued to erode,” explains Nash. “We wanted to make a real difference to reducing online fraud and to make the internet a safer place for everyone engaged in it, but critically to do this without abusing customer privacy and storing personal data.”
The company created a system to offer early notifications of suspicious account activity, in order to mitigate the impact of fraud or account theft for identity providers and consumers alike. The system also uses privacy-enhancing mechanisms to protect the identities of the individual consumers and the event publishers.
For example, if a financial service was processing a password reset request but detected that the consumer’s email account had been taken over by a fraudster, it could stop the attack on the consumer’s account immediately. Meanwhile, the consumer could be alerted at the same time to take additional steps to secure their account.
Before starting Confyrm, Nash had previously served as Director of Identity Services at Google, one of the largest providers of consumer identity services in the world, with over a billion consumer and enterprise accounts. He also served as Senior Director of Consumer Identity at PayPal, managing over 350 million identities validated for use in the financial services space, and was Director of Technologies at RSA Security.
So for Capital One, the acquisition of Confyrm isn’t just about the technology itself – it’s about bringing Nash on board.
Following the deal’s close, Nash will become Managing Vice President of Consumer Identity Services.
He says working at Capital One will help the team reach more consumers than a startup could on its own, allowing them to “massively increase the set of consumers that we can help to protect.”
It’s unclear how far along Confyrm was on actually bringing its product to consumers – its website touted a few pilot programs several years ago, but hadn’t been updated in some time. Some of the site’s text is still “Lorem Ipsum” filler text, in fact, and there’s been little coverage by press in the years since its founding. The company hadn’t talked much about its pilot partners, but the list was reported to include an internet email provider, mobile operator, financial services company, and multiple e-commerce sites. Likely, Capital One was the early partner, which is what later led to this acquisition.
Deal terms regarding the Capital One acquisition were not being shared, but Confyrm had raised $1.2 million, according to Crunchbase, which attributes the funding to a grant. (Another source states the grant was for $2.4 million, however).
Dropbox made its debut as a public company earlier this year and today passed through its first milestone of reporting its results to public investors, and it more or less beat expectations set for Wall Street on the top and bottom line.
The company reported more revenue and beat expectations for earnings that Wall Street set, bringing in $316.3 million in revenue and appearing to pick up momentum among its paying user base. It also said it had 11.5 million paying users, a jump from last year. However, the stock was largely flat in extended trading. One small negative signal — and it definitely appears to be a small one — was that its GAAP gross margin slipped slightly to 61.9% from 62.3% a year earlier. Dropbox is a software company that’s supposed to have great margins as it begins to ramp up its own hardware, but that slipping margin may end up being something that investors will zero in on going forward.
This is a pretty important moment for the company as it was a darling in Silicon Valley and rocketed to a $10 billion valuation in the early phases of the Web 2.0 era, but quickly faced a ton of criticism as to whether it could be a robust business as larger companies started to offer cloud storage as a perk and not a business. Dropbox then found itself going up against companies like Box and Microsoft as it worked to create an enterprise business, but all this was behind closed doors — and it wasn’t clear if it was able to successfully maneuver its way into a second big business. Now the company is beholden to public shareholders and has to show all this in the open, and it serves as a good barometer of not just storage and collaboration businesses, but also some companies that are looking to drastically simplify workflow processes and convert that into a real business (like Slack, for example).
Here’s the final scorecard for the company:
Q1 revenue: $316.3 million, compared to Wall Street estimates of $308.7 million (up 28% year over year.)
Q1 earnings: 8 cents per share adjusted, compared to Wall Street estimates of 2 cents per share adjusted.
Paying users: 11.5 million, up from 9.3 million in the same period last year
GAAP Gross margin: 61.9%, down from 62.3% last year
Dropbox was largely considered to be a successful IPO, rising more than 40% in its trading debut. That does mean that it may have left some money on the table, but its operating losses have been largely stable, even as it looks to woo larger enterprise customers as it — which is a bit of a taller order than its typical growth amid consumers that’s heavily driven by organic growth. Those larger enterprise customers offer more stable, and larger, revenue streams than a consumer base that faces a variety of options as many companies start to offer free storage. The company is now worth well over that original $10 billion valuation as a public company. Dropbox says it has more than 500 million users.
Since going public, the stock has had its ups and downs, but for the most part hasn’t dipped below that significant jump it saw from day one. Keeping that number propped up — and growing — is an important part of growing a business as a public company as it waves off more intense scrutiny and pressure for change from public shareholders, as well as offering competitive compensation packages for incoming employees in order to attract the best talent. It’s also good for morale as it offers a kind of grade for how the company is doing in the eyes of the public, though CEOs of companies often say they are committed toward long-term goals. The company’s shares are up around 11% since going public.
While there have been a wave of enterprise IPOs this year, including zScalar and Pluralsight’s upcoming IPO, Dropbox was largely considered to be a potential gauge of whether the IPO window was still open this year because of its hybrid nature. Dropbox started off as a consumer company based around a dead-simple approach of hosting and sharing files online, and used that to build a massive user base even as the cost of cloud storage was rapidly commoditized. But it also is building a robust enterprise-focus business, and continues to roll out a variety of tools to woo those businesses with consistent updates to products like its document tool Paper. Last month, the company started rolling out templates, as it looked to make traditional workflow processes easier and easier for companies in order to capture their interest much in the same way it captured the interest of consumers at large.
Robinhood started off as a dead-simple stock trading application that had no transaction fees — but since it’s continued to grow, and especially as it starts to dive into cryptocurrenty, investors are getting pretty excited about its prospects and are pouring a ton of new funding into it.
And it’s that tantalizing prospect of creating a next generation way of trading assets and cryptocurrency is now sending Robinhood to a $5.6 billion valuation in a new financing round that the company is announcing today. Robinhood says it’s closed a $363 million Series D financing round, with DST Global led this new round and Iconiq, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia and Capital G participated. Robinhood had a $1.3 billion valuation last year when it had around 2 million users, and Robinhood says it now has 4 million users and has passed $150 billion in transaction volume.
“It’s the only place right now where you can trade crypto, stocks, and options all in one place,” CEO Vlad Tenev said. “For us to construct an experience that feels seamless and natural for customers, that for example want to sell an equity and use the proceeds to buy crypto, seamlessly, that’s been challenging not just from a product and design standpoint, but also infrastructure standpoint. There’s complexity under the hood, and our goal is to make it as seamless as possible in the process and make that complexity go away.”
Those 4 million users — and that valuation — indicates that Robinhood has clearly exposed a lot of demand for an easier way to users to dip their toes into financial services without having to work with firms that have trading fees like Scotttrade or E*Trade. And while there are a lot of services that offer robo-advisory services like Betterment and Wealthront, which make it easier to start investing small amounts of money, Robinhood offers users the opportunity to do these things at a more granular level.
And, of course, there’s the cryptocurrency aspect that is clearly spurring a lot of interest in the company. At the time, 1 million users waitlisted for access in just the five days after Robinhood Crypto was announced. Robinhood has premium services like Robinhood Gold, where the company can find additional ways to generate revenue that offset the requirements of running a system that allows users to trade stocks for free. Robinhood has raised $539 million to date, as diving into financial services can be an expensive prospect, as well as getting enough users on board to the point that it can scale to a level that the business starts to increasingly make sense.
Robinhood’s crypto trading service came out in February and by today, the comapny says it’s available in 11 states. The company also rolled out a web version and stock option trading, trying to become a more robust financial services company that’s still tuned to a younger generation that wants an easier way to get into investing without needing a big balance to invest. Most of Robinhood’s users, too, aren’t so-called “day traders” and are instead holding stocks for a while after they buy them.
“If you look at the data and the statistics, people that are active day traders are actually a very small percentage of our space,” Tenev said. “People that are actually transacting on that cadence are the minority of our customers. Most of our customers engage in more of these buy and hold accumulation strategies. We really see a lot of unique things because we don’t charge trading commissions. There are customers that deposit money regularly twice or once a month and then buy stocks as soon as those deposits come in. We don’t see a lot of customers that are doing rapid buying and selling.”
Still, as it tries to further expand — especially into products like crypto and new regions — it’s going to increasingly find itself trying to jump hurdles that financial services companies find when going abroad. And there’s always a chance that the trading platforms will try to become a little more competitive (and companies like Square are even getting into Bitcoin trading). That’s going to require a robust amount of funding to try to outmaneuver well-capitalized companies that might already have those relationships in place to more easily expand.
“The political climate is uncertain, it sort of affects everyone, it doesn’t affect us uniquely,” Tenev said. “We’re a crypto business now. Not a lot of people have a ton of clarity on what that’s gonna look like in the future, it’s a new space that’s evolving really rapidly. I think that we’re confident we can adapt and evolve, and we’re operating the business in a responsible way. There’s only so much you can do, but I feel like we’ve done a lot to address any concerns.”
