Deals

Signal Media has closed a $16 million Series B funding round for an AI-fueled approach to media monitoring and b2b market intelligence. The UK startup uses machine learning techniques to filter through external information at scale — generating real-time insights for its customers, including for reputation management and decision support purposes.

Its system analyzes more than 2.8M global online, print, television, radio and regulatory sources, translated in real time in over 100 languages from 200 markets — serving up a customized overview of public conversations, market movements and issues pertinent to the client.

The Series B funding round was led by GMG Ventures, an independent VC fund whose limited partner is The Scott Trust, owner of The Guardian news organisation; although MMC Ventures was the largest investor. The round also included a debt facility from Kreos Capital. Other investors include Frontline, Hearst Ventures, Reed Elsevier Ventures and LocalGlobe.

Signal Media announced a £5.8M Series A at the end of 2016. It also took in debt financing last year, and seed funding back in 2015. And says the total raised to date is north of $27M.

On the customer side, Signal Media has more than 200 clients at this point — including the likes of Allen & Overy, Amnesty International, British Airways, E.ON, TalkTalk, Thomas Cook and Whitbread. While its headcount has doubled to almost 100 people in a year, and it notes it’s more than quadrupled revenues since its Series A raise in September 2016 — claiming 300 per cent year-on-year growth in 2017-18.

While PR and communications is where the company has focused its initial product push, it wants to broaden out into risk management for tax and compliance, and business development in financial and legal services — using the latest investor cash injection to train its AIs on more tasks.

Specifically, says CEO and founder David Benigson, it will be using the funding to build out the AI-driven features of the product.

“Alongside our topics and entities, we’ve built a range of product features, from quote detection, to automatic clustering and auto-translation. We’re already working on a sentiment system that explores the meaning behind entire articles, mentions within an article and tone. We think it’s mad to try and put a numerical -1 to +1 score of ‘sentiment’ around an article — because depending on the reader’s context, a quote in an article could be good and the article could be bad, yet for another reader, the reverse might be true! We’re going beyond this kind of thinking. What kind of good is it? What impact will it have? These are the questions we’re trying to give answers to,” he tells TechCrunch.

“We’re also working on an entirely new way to deliver information to our users by understanding more about their world up front, so the AI can automatically surface contextual articles that are of interest — but that haven’t been actively searched for. Imagine the system itself saying ‘hey, you should really read this, it’s really worth reading considering your interest in X’. That’s what we mean when we talk about the ‘unknown unknowns’ we’re trying to help people see.”

“We’re working with researchers to automate some of the lower-level research work like producing biographies, or company ‘cheat-sheets’,” he adds. “What does this all boil down to? We’re confident we can get to a point relatively quickly where you could be shown an article you didn’t know about, with a competitor or M&A opportunity you haven’t been aware of, give you an immediate idea of what other people think about that competitor, and then give you an instant 2-page summary of that company with all their key information, coupled with some insight into where they sit in a market. It’s really exciting!”

Another focus for the funding is expanding further into the US — where it sees growth potential.

Benigson says a fifth of its revenue currently comes from the market, but he touts the number as “improving daily as we build the team out there”.

The typical Signal Media buyer is currently the head of PR or head of comms in a professional services, financial or legal firm — who’s after reputation management software. But Benigson says increasingly the CEO or wider leadership team is wants to tap into real-time updates for business decision support purposes.

“We always had a vision that Signal would be used horizontally to surface business intelligence,” he says — citing regulation tracking as one of the nascent use-cases it’s interested in. “How does public sentiment and policy impact regulation down the line?”

And it’s certainly true that political risk has stepped up for businesses in all sorts of sectors in recent years — as tech-fueled disruption has generated societal and political pressures, alongside a range of volatile geopolitical events.

On the regulatory tracking front, Benigson says it’s working with a major consultancy on an enterprise-wide application of the service aimed at surfacing global regulatory information.

“The idea is to help risk professionals provide high-quality analysis and insight in real-time, so clients can stay ahead of the change by planning for regulation before it’s even announced. How is regulation X or Y going to unfold? What are the different ways that you could adopt or implement that particular change in regulation?” he explains. “We’re not there yet, but the aspiration of the business is to augment those professionals with decision support.”

Some existing clients have also been using the service to source new business — including for spotting potential M&A targets — and this is another area Signal Media wants to nurture and grow.

“For example, we trained the system to source content on financially distressed firms, and it’s used by the M&A teams at several banks to build their pipeline. For these kinds of clients, the first-mover advantage is crucial and can result in seven- or eight-figure deals, so the real-time alerts from Signal are very important if you’re going to beat your competitors to the punch,” he says.

“Imagine being able to see that the M&A rumors around a prospect are ramping over the course of a morning — calling at 1130 instead of 1201 when they make their announcement public might make all the difference.”

Another business intelligence use-case it wants to serve relates to executive moves — and Benigson says it’s “ramping the training of our AI” to help customers get wind of key job changes before rivals do.

In the reputation management space Signal Media is competing with a range of incumbents — such as Kantar and Cision — plus some newer approaches from the likes of Meltwater and RiskEye, though Benigson argues none of its rivals have “machine learning at their heart”. He names that as its “real differentiator” (vs, for example, the keyword based monitoring used by others).

He also argues it’s “sitting uniquely in the market offering decision support”. “The scope of what we are now able to do in terms of ‘real’ sentiment, automated, readable summaries and contextual analysis is far beyond the traditional scope of reputation management,” he claims.

“We’re also interested in so much more than just reputation and the value of earned media for a CMO (although this is certainly something we help track). My dream is that ultimately we will consolidate insights across risk, reputation, and opportunity back into a single real time dashboard for any C-level professional so that a CEO has as much transparency, clarity, granularity as to what’s happening outside of their organization as inside it.”

While not yet profitable — owing to its focus to date on growth, Benigson expresses confidence in being able to scale the business and achieve profitability down the line. “When we look at the dashboard of AOV, quota, lead time, conversion rate, all of them are trending in the right direction,” he says. “There’s a clear unit-economic pathway to profitability, and we’ll go for it when we’re comfortable about our market position.”

Commenting in a statement, Simon Menashy, partner at MMC Ventures, adds: “We first backed Signal to develop their market-leading AI media monitoring tool, innovating in a space where every large company has a solution but few are happy with it. It’s now become clear that their technology can be applied to solve all kinds of other information problems businesses face. We’re delighted to be significantly increasing our investment and backing Signal’s next phase of growth.”

from TechCrunch

Codefresh, a continuous integration and delivery platform built for the Kubernetes container ecosystem, today announced that it has raised an $8 million Series B round led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. Viola Ventures, Hillsven and CEIF also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $15.1 million.

In a market where there are seemingly more CI/CD platforms every day, Codefresh sets itself apart thanks to its focus on Kubernetes, which is now essentially the de facto standard for container orchestration services and which is seeing a rapid growth in adoption. The service promises that it can help developers to automate their application deployments to Kubernetes and that teams will see “up to 24X faster development times.” That number seems a bit optimistic, but the whole point of adoption Kubernetes and CI/CD is obviously to speed up the development and deployment process.

“The meteoric rise of Kubernetes is happening so fast that most toolchains haven’t kept up, and M12 knows it,” said Raziel Tabib, Codefresh co-founder and CEO. “With this latest round of funding we’re going to aggressively accelerate our roadmap and expand our customer base.”

The Codefresh platform hit general availability in 2017 and the company currently claims about 20,000 users, including the likes Giphy.

from TechCrunch

Social SafeGuard, a 2014-founded U.S. startup which sells security services to enterprises aimed at mitigating a range of digital risks that lie outside the corporate firewall, has closed an $11 million Series B funding round, from AllegisCyber and NightDragon Security.

It’s hoping to ride the surge in awareness around social media fakery — putting the new funding towards sales and marketing, plus some product dev.

“As one of the few dedicated cybersecurity venture firms, we know how big this challenge has become for today’s security executives,” said Spencer Tall, MD of AllegisCyber, in a supporting statement. Tall is joining the Social SafeGuard board.

“This is no longer a fringe need that can be ignored or deferred. Digital risk protection should be on the shortlist of corporate security priorities for the next decade,” he adds.

Social SafeGuard’s SaaS platform is designed to alert customers to risks that might cause damage to a business or brand’s reputation — such as brand impersonation, compliance issues or even the spread of fake news — as well as more pure-play security threats, such as social phishing, malware, spam and fake accounts.

Its platform uses machine learning and a customized policy engine to offer real-time monitoring of 50 digital and social channels (integrating via an API hub) — including social media platforms, mobile messaging apps, IM tools like Slack, unified comms platforms (Skype for business etc), clouds apps like Office365, blogs and news sites, and the dark web.

The types of threats the platform is trained to look out for include malicious message content, inappropriate images, malicious links, account takeover attempts and brand impersonation.

“Digital risks to any enterprise are twofold: internal or external — from employees communicating in non-compliant ways that expose a business to regulatory danger to more typical cyber threats like phishing, malware, account hacks or brand impersonation. Social SafeGuard helps mitigate all of these new digital risks by giving companies the tools to detect threats and defend against them, so they can adopt new technologies without fear,” says founder and CEO Jim Zuffoletti.

As well as threat detection and real-time notification, the platform includes built in take-down requests and follow-through — “to make threat management as responsive as possible”, as he puts it.

Social SafeGuard’s software also does risk scoring to aid the rapid triage of potential threats, and uses AI to try to anticipate “potential attacks and identify known bad actors” — so it’s responding to a wider security industry shift from purely defensive, reactive actions towards pro-active detection and response.

On the compliance front, the platform includes a governance and customizable policy engine that enterprises can use to monitor employee and partner communications for regulatory violations.

“For compliance-focused clients, messages are archived with automated audit trails that provide transparency and clarity,” notes Zuffoletti.

The platform has around 50 customers at this stage. Zuffoletti says its biggest customers are in the financial services and life sciences sectors — but says high tech is its fastest-growing sector.

Examples of the kinds of attacks its tools have been used to prevent include account takeovers, malware attacks, financial regulations violations, and FCPA and HIPAA violations.

“In one recent example, we were able to perform a forensic analysis of an online securities fraud scheme, which also posed brand reputation issues for one of our clients,” he adds. “Our platform is adaptable to evolving hybrid threats, too.”

On the competitive front, Zuffoletti namechecks the likes of Proofpoint and RiskIQ.

from TechCrunch

Security breaches are a disaster for corporate companies, but good news if you’re someone who offers preventative solutions. Today in 2018, wide-ranging attacks on the likes of Equifax, Sony Pictures and Target have only added value to those charged with safeguarding companies.

Balbix, one such solutions provider, has pulled in a $20 million Series B to grow its business and try to prevent high-profile cybersecurity disasters using a predictive model of measuring and assessing threats.

The round is led by Singtel Innov8, the corporate fund of Singapore telco Singtel which owns Trustwave and is active in the security space, and Mubadala Ventures, the Abu Dhabi firm that’s well known for backing SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund. Existing Balbix investor Mayfield Fund also took part alongside angels including ex-Cisco CEO John Chambers, former Cisco EVP Pankaj Patel and entrepreneurs BV Jagadeesh and Gary Gauba.

Balbix raised $8.6 million a year ago when it came out of stealth although the company was first founded 2.5 years ago by CEO Gaurav Banga (photographed above), who was a founder of Bromium, a fellow security company that has raised over $115 million from investors.

This time around with Balbix, Banga is turning predictive. The company’s platform uses a combination of smarts like artificial intelligence and machine learning to essentially map out all potential vulnerabilities within an organization. That could range from varying operating system version numbers to weak employee passwords, one employee’s poorly-secured laptop and beyond. The Balbix system plugs into existing operational security products to offer reactive responses and to create a real-time view of an organization’s security health and any weaknesses.

“At enterprise scale, keeping everything up to snuff is very hard,” CEO Gauba told TechCrunch in an interview. “Most organizations have little visibility into attack surfaces, the right decisions aren’t made and projects aren’t secured.”

“We started this company so that we could use cutting-edge machine learning algorithms to automatically and comprehensively measure the security and attack surface, and to produce relevant insights for all stakeholders,” he added. “You look at the numbers and you could easily have hundreds of millions or tens of billions of data points to watch for vulnerabilities — you have to make sure they are ok.”

The timing certainly seems opportune, with data breaches seemingly in the headlines on a regular basis. In particular, in the case of Equifax, the implications of the attack went to the C-level management and boardroom.

“2017 was special,” Gauba said. “Ask any CIO, CEO, or board member of a public company and that was the year that everyone woke up [and] figured their careers were at risk. It should have happened before but it took he Equifax breach… they realized this thing is real and it can have a career-altering impact on their work and personal life.”

“The CSO was always the fall guy before, but now it can go all the way up,” he added. “One of our challenges we face now is how do you answer a board member or CEO’s questions on security. For us, the answer is simple: if you can’t measure something then you can’t improve it, the right decisions are based on data so go ahead and find that data.”

Unlike other solutions, Balbix doesn’t charge security companies by the event — aka attacks — so it remains invested in preventing those kinds of scenarios from happening.

For this round, Gauba said that the company was focused on raising “smart money” that goes beyond simply providing capital to offer strategic value, too. The company does have international reach in terms of customers — which include both enterprise customers and global managed security service providers (MSSP) — and sales but for now its only office is San Jose.

Internationalization is certainly an area where Singtel Innov8 and Mubadala Ventures — located in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, respectively — can lend a hand, and the company itself is weighing up international offices.

from TechCrunch

UST Global is a multinational digital and tech services firm, but it is not your average unicorn.

The U.S.-based firm was founded in 2009, it has “significant” revenues and is profitable. But nonetheless, it has joined the $1 billion-valuation club courtesy of a $250 million investment from Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund.

The business may be over 15 years old, but its name is perhaps not well known in startup circles, but it has achieved the kind of scale that few unicorns have. It claims 17,000 staff across 35 offices worldwide while its client base includes more than 50 Fortune 500 companies covering industries like banking, media, telecom, healthcare, shipping and more. Its broad range of services include digital customer engagement, mapping, data analytics, AI, cloud consulting, product engineering, automation, and cybersecurity solutions, but its philosophy is “fewer clients, more attention”.

At that size and scale, why take investment at all?

UST Global chairman Paras Chandaria

“We feel we’re one of the leaders in the space we’re in, [but] this is an opportunity to catapult to another level,” UST Global chairman Paras Chandaria told TechCrunch. “We said: ‘Let’s raise some additional capital and have a war chest we can use to make a few acquisitions that can enhance our current capabilities and geographic strengthening.’”

Chandaria, whose family are the main shareholders of the business, said that UST Global also identified a cultural and values business with Temasek, which he believes will be able to open doors in Asia and beyond.

“We’ve traditionally been very strong in the U.S. and are growing in Europe, India and Southeast Asia. We felt it is the right time to expand in Southeast Asia and Temasek can definitely help us to do that. But as we got to know Temasek and its portfolio, we realized it isn’t about Southeast Asia — actually they’ll give us access beyond the geographies that we originally expected,” he added.

Beyond the business value from its new investor, Chandaria said that the deal — and the $1 billion-plus valuation — will give UST Global further validation.

“We could have continued just doing what we are doing [but it will] help us in the public eye to validate our business model and the initiatives that we are undertaking,” he said. “Our valuation is based on real revenue and cash generation [and] it strengthens our credentials and position. [Plus] whenever we look to acquire a business we have the possibility of co-investment from Temasek.”

“We think we can be multiples of the validation we’re at now if we’re able to act quickly and correctly,” he added.

The UST campus in Trivandrum, India, is the firm’s largest office

Adding an investor like Temasek, which has close to $200 billion under management, does raise questions over a potential exit. Chandaria is quick to play that down, but he did admit that the company does have an interest in going public in the future.

“We want to be IPO ready [and] having a partner like Temasek helps us on that journey if we were going to take it [but] for the next couple of years looking to continue organic growth and acquisitions,” he told TechCrunch.

Areas for acquisition might include AI, machine learning, analysis, cloud, UI and UX, and cyber security among others, according to Chandaria, who said also that acquisition strategy may be driven by strengthening its business in geographies like Europe and Asia, too.

from TechCrunch

Pet services can be serious startup business. Witness the likes of dog walking startups Rover and Wag, for example. At the same time digital health is a major area of interest for entrepreneurs, thanks to reliable demand meeting tech’s disruptive potential.

Well, Sweden’s FirstVet is dabbling in both — offering remote video consultations and advice for pet owners wondering if they should worry about their furry friend’s latest bout of coughing/sneezing/vomiting, or whether that chocolate bar the dog snarfed when you weren’t looking is a cause for real concern.

As the name suggests, the niche FirstVet is looking to carve out is a pretty specific one — focused on first layer pet owner concerns which essential boil down to asking a qualified professional whether you really need to take Fido to the vet or not. So it’s main competitor is probably Google search.

“We are a supplement to physical clinics rather than a substitute to them,” says CEO and co-founder David Prien. “The most common problems we help pet owners with are gastrointestinal questions, wounds, skin/fur/ears. Our main objective is to be the natural first point of contact for pet owners.”

True to his word, a note on FirstVet’s website warns prospective customers: “If your pet is acutely ill or severely wounded you should always seek veterinary care immediately.”

“We really don’t want to be the party that pet owners turn to in real emergency cases and always refer them directly to physical vet clinics, we always make the medical journals available for both the clinic receiving the referral and pet owner directly after each consultation,” adds Prien.

The startup launched in 2016, and now claims around 60,000 registered users in its home market of Sweden — saying it’s answered close to 4,500 calls after slightly over a year on the market. Business has been growing 25 per cent month over month, it adds.

Prien says the price point for the service is set at about 30-40% of the starting fee for a physical vet visit in the market.

Which is still 30-40% more expensing than Googling symptoms — i.e. assuming you’re happy to ignore the risk of the free info you found online being entirely bogus.

While FirstVet intended to offer a b2c service, its route to market has been via partnerships with insurance companies who offer the service to their customers as a way to potentially reduce the risk of more major pet insurance payouts, or as a touchpoint for reaching pet owners who don’t have insurance cover and thus could be persuaded to sign up.

“What happened was that we quickly found that it made sense to collaborate with the insurance companies since it saves money for both them and the end customer,” says Prien. “The service is very popular amongst un-insured pet owners as well, and the share of uninsured pets using the service corresponds with the insurance penetration for each market so far.”

“We have collaborations in place with all eight active insurance companies in Sweden (where the insurance penetration is about 80%),” he adds.”And are currently launching new collaborations with three Finnish insurance companies as we speak.”

FirstVet is announcing a €5.1 million (~6M) Series A today, led by Creandum with participation from existing angel investors — which is says include experts in the telemedicine space.

The funding will be used for business growth and additional market expansion in Europe, with Norway and Denmark slated as “coming soon”. It says its plan is to launch into all the Nordic countries — along with “key European markets” that have high rates of pet insurance.

“Our aim to launch in at least one central European market during 2018,” adds Prien.

Asked whether it’s taking a cut of vet visit fees for any referrals, he says not in its home region. Though his response to this question leaves a bit of wiggle room in markets where veterinary services have not been so consolidated.

FirstVet could face a competitive squeeze from on-demand vet startups which are operating in some European markets — such as the likes of UK startup PawSquad — which can send a qualified veterinarian to check out your pet at home. And does also offer its own 24/7 remote vet consultation option, including via video or text chats.

But Prien suggests FirstVet’s model offers pet owners the advantage of impartial advice — since it’s not incentivized to generate a physical vet visit in cases where this can be avoided. Whereas home visit services might want to encourage visits to to grab a bigger fee.

“To have a truly independent source to turn to, no matter the time or place/if you’re insured or not, really provides great value for pet owners,” he argues. “Given that the market is fully privatized, we strongly believe that it is important not to make this type of service ‘dependent on the incentive of actually generating a physical vet visit when it potentially could be avoided (as many pet owners perceive vet visits as quite stressful, time consuming and expensive).”

While it’s still early days for FirstVet, and it’s focusing on market expansion, Prien says it is also looking into ways to expand the services it can offer pet owners by creating DIY tests which they could carry out to help with remote diagnostics.

“We’re currently in the very beginning of developing self-tests for pet owners to conduct from home together with a partner as well, that indicate super interesting results,” he adds.

from TechCrunch

While everybody is focused on self-driving cars, Shone is working on autonomous technologies for container ships. The startup doesn’t want to turn those giant ships into unmanned vehicles, but it wants to help seafarers and make ships more efficient.

After attending Y Combinator, Shone recently raised a $4 million round from Alven, Liquid 2, Paul Graham, David Marcus and D. Scott Phoenix.

“The basic idea is that autonomous ships are coming. Overall, it seems unavoidable,” co-founder and CEO Ugo Vollmer told me. “And yet, there are still 25 people on the boat and it runs on Windows.”

The team spent a lot of time talking with people working in the shipping industry to understand their needs. After traveling on container ships and buying a tiny boat for prototyping, Shone is already working with a shipping company to retrofit their ships with their technology.

“Our vision is that it’s going to happen progressively,” Vollmer said. “There will be a lot of navigation assistance systems first.”

At first, it could lead to fewer people on the boat. There are around 15 people maintaining the engine and the machinery. These people won’t go away any time soon. But there are also around ten people who are keeping an eye on the radar, on the different tools and also on the sea itself. They rotate as they need to have a small team in the cabin 24/7.

This second team could need some help, and this is where Shone shines. The startup adds a few sensors but mostly hooks their system to existing sensors. While there are a ton of sensors already, none of them communicate together.

Shone can combine all this data and analyze it to give some insights. Eventually, the startup plans to recommend different courses to save some fuel and time. Existing autopilot solutions on ships is more like cruise control in cars. You can follow a predetermined path, but you can’t say “let’s go from A to B”.

And saving fuel is key when it comes to global warning. Each ship carries a mountain of goods, so it’s quite efficient when you think about the impact of one ton of goods. But if you can make a container ship slightly more efficient, it would have a huge impact on the environment.

“If you can make a 1 percent optimization, you have a bigger impact than Tesla today,” Vollmer said. It’s hard to compare those two things as cars and ships are different beasts though.

For now, Shone is only focusing on deep sea. The crew doesn’t handle the first and last mile anyway as someone from the harbor usually comes on board to guide you to the dock.

Shone has signed a partnership with CMA CGM to collect data and add some hardware devices. It’s still early days for Shone as the company is first focusing on situational awareness before moving further into recommendations.

from TechCrunch

On the busiest nights, a restaurant can’t afford to even lose a dishwasher to getting sick or not being around — or simply ghosting on the company — and end up frustrating the whole experience for the rest of the staff and restaurant goers.

It’s a problem that Will Pacio was acutely familiar with during his time at Spice Kit, and it’s why he and Dave Lu — who didn’t really have much experience other than delivering Chinese food in high school, but wanted to get into the industry — started Pared. It essentially serves as an on-demand tool for restaurant workers, who might find themselves already working across multiple different jobs or multiple different restaurants and are looking for a lifestyle over which they have some more control. The company said it has raised a $10 million financing round led by CRV, with existing investors Uncork Capital and True Ventures also participating. CRV partner Saar Gur is joining the company’s board of directors.

“Even if I go [to Craigslist], it’ll take four to six weeks to get someone to show up,” Wu said. “You hire them, you train them, and then they don’t show up to work the very first day. Even if I paid overtime, I don’t have enough employees to cover the shifts. For [Pacio] it was a nightmare, and I just want to be able to tap an app to get that kid from Safeway across the street who knows how to make sandwiches and make them for me.”

The app largely focuses on back-of-the-house operations like line cooks, prep cooks, and dishwashers, though it could theoretically extend to any part of the restaurant experience. Restaurants go to the app and say they are looking for what the app calls a ‘Pro’ in whatever role they need, and are able to book the employee right away for the slot they have in their schedule. It might come at a slight premium over the typical hire, but restaurants are already willing to pay overtime in order to cover those gaps and keep things moving smoothly, Wu said.

For employees, it’s a pretty similar experience — they see a job posted on the app, with a time slot, and they make themselves available for an hourly wage. The second benefit, Wu said, is that they can start to slowly make a name for themselves if they are able to prove out their skills and move up the ranks at any of those restaurants. The culinary community is a small one, he said, and it offers a lot of room to start building up a reputation as an exceptional chef or just finally get a first shot at a sauté position in the kitchen after working at the back of the house. That, too, might be part of the appeal of jumping on a service like Pared rather than just driving for Uber.

“On our platform, every shift and rating you get, every connection you get in the industry — and it’s a very tight network — you build up your own reputation or identity,” Wu said. “We’re helping them build up, it’s more like a race to the top than a race to the bottom. They start off as a prep cook, and they start getting offers for line cook positions. We might have videos for learning to do this or that. They can work their way up to build that reputation. It’s all about reputation, it’s about people you trust.”

And like Uber, that flexibility is one of the more critical selling points of the application. A line cook might want to spend some time in New York to learn the scene there, and with an app like Pared, they can get access to some potential openings at restaurants in the area. As their experience — and their reputation — builds up over time, Wu hopes Pared gets known as a launching point for many careers, in addition to just offering restaurant workers a more flexible lifestyle.

There are certainly larger platforms that aren’t just targeting the restaurant ecosystem, and look to be a more global hub for hourly workers. Shiftgig, which raised $20 million last year, is one interpretation of that idea. But by offering a more curated and focused experience — one for which a kind of aspirational chef might keep gravitating back toward because they hope to one day end up running their own kitchen — can help build up that reputation for having a reliable workforce that any restaurant can use.

from TechCrunch

ZenProspect, a startup that emerged from the Y Combinator Winter 2016 class to help companies use data and intelligence to increase sales, announced today that it was rebranding as Apollo. It also announced a $7 million Series A investment.

The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners. Social Capital and Y Combinator also participated. Apparently Y Combinator liked what they saw enough to continue to invest in the company.

Apollo helps customers connect their sales people with the right person at the right time. That is typically a customer that is most likely to buy the product. It does this by combining a number of tools including a rules engine to automate prospect routing, a lead scoring tool and analytics to measure results at a granular level, among others.

The company also uses data they have collected from 200 million contacts at 10 million companies to match sellers to buyers along with the information in the user’s own CRM tools — typically Salesforce. Apollo is making this vast database of company and contact data available for customers to use themselves for free starting today.

Apollo CEO and founder Tim Zheng says the company was born out of a need at a previous venture. He was working at a startup that was floundering and sales had flatlined. When they couldn’t find a product on the market to help them, they decided to build it and saw the number of users increase from 5000 to 150,000 users in just five weeks. That eventually reached a million users.  As he spoke to friends at other Bay area companies about what his company had done, he heard a lot of interest, and decided to turn that sales tool into a company.

The company launched as ZenProspect in 2015 and went through Y Combinator in 2016. They were the third fastest growing company in that YC batch, generating $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) during their tenure. In fact, they were profitable out of the gate, using their own software to sell the product.

Zheng points out that there are thousands of sales tools out there, but he said, even if you bought every one of them and stitched them together you still wouldn’t have a great sales process. Zheng says his company has figured out how to solve that problem and provide that structure to deliver the best prospects to sales people to close deals.

The company works closely with Salesforce as 80 percent of its customers are using data inside of Salesforce in conjunction with the Apollo tool. It’s worth noting, however, that Apollo is not built on top of Salesforce platform. It just integrates with it.

They target both early stage startups looking to increase sales and established enterprise customers with huge sales teams. So far it’s been working. Today, Apollo has 500 customers and 50 employees. With the current influx of money, they expect to get to 120 in the next 12 -18 months.

from TechCrunch

If a coffee fanatic decides they want to open up a coffee shop somewhere, odds are they’ll have to end up Googling “liability insurance” at some point — and trying to navigate the complex legal web to get all of that nailed down before they even sell their first iced latte.

Inaki Berenguer instead hopes they’ll stumble upon CoverWallet in that Google search, which streamlines the process of setting up commercial insurance for a small business. The company is trying to take another step now by saying it will create an open-ended tool that allows third parties to plug directly into its services, giving small businesses a way to pick up commercial insurance while they are going through the flow of another set of SMB management software. All of this is geared toward ensuring that more and more users are able to start tapping the service, which allows it to pick up additional business — and data — even if it means partially handing off the branding and user experience to another service.

“When we had three employees and we moved to New York, we were told, if you want to sign a lease you have to buy insurance.” Berenguer said. “I wanted to go to a website, and input my square footage, and my revenue, and get a quote, and do everything else in five to ten minutes — but I was told that didn’t exist for business insurance. I had to go to a general provider, complete a 20-page PDF, which the broker sends it to the insurance company, and then they’ll come back with a quote. This process is analog and time consuming and opaque. I know this process can be reinvented. There are 25m small businesses in the U.S., and they all need to buy insurance.”

CoverWallet is much like what Berenguer explained in his dream scenario when he was moving his last company into an office. The insurance policies are personalized for restaurants, startups, retail stores, contractors, or various other types of commercial insurance products. Users input their business information, and then are able to pay for the policies — up front or in monthly installments — and get their policy set up in short order. If that doesn’t work, CoverWallet also has a team of agents to cover the rest of the questions they have, and users can modify any of those policies whenever they want.

But in the end, it may be that users are looking to keep things simple – especially if it’s a small- to medium-sized business that isn’t the kind of technically savvy ones you’ll often find in a major metropolitan area like New York or San Francisco. While CoverWallet looks to simplify the whole process of getting commercial insurance, which can be a major roadblock to getting something as simple as a coffee shop off the ground, integrating into other tools and making the whole process more and more seamless ensures that it’ll be able to keep that flow of businesses coming in — and those businesses may eventually start to spread the word on their own.

“Businesses might already be using accounting software or payroll,” Berenguer said. “Those systems have all the company info. Why do they need to come to a platform, and type everything, when that info is somewhere else. It’s like white labeling your solution. But if you want to be customer centric, the less they have to type the better.”

There likely isn’t much stopping the larger insurance carriers from offering a similar sort of plug-and-play API. But Berenguer said building a whole aggregation across all of those insurance providers, and then giving that pipeline to customers as they look to pick up insurance through another SMB tool like Gusto (though Gusto isn’t one of the clients, Berenguer said), gives them enough of a compelling argument for those employment suites to bring them in. Certain providers may only offer certain kinds of policies, or cover certain geographic regions, and CoverWallet hopes it will make a good enough case that it can cover all those gaps.

from TechCrunch