Auth0 snags $55M Series D, seeks international expansion

Auth0, a startup based in Seattle, has been helping developers with a set of APIs to build authentication into their applications for the last five years. It’s raised a fair bit of money along the way to help extend that mission, and today the company announced a $55 million Series D.

This round was led by led by Sapphire Ventures with help from World Innovation Lab, and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Trinity Ventures, Meritech Capital and K9 Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $110 million. The company did not want to share its valuation.

CEO Eugenio Pace said the investment should help them expand further internationally. In fact, one of the investors, World Innovation Lab, is based in Japan and should help with their presence there. “Japan is an important market for us and they should help explain to us how the market works there,” he said.

The company offers an easy way for developers to build in authentication services into their applications, also known as Identification as a Service (IDaaS). It’s a lot like Stripe for payments or Twilio for messaging. Instead of building the authentication layer from scratch, they simply add a few lines of code and can take advantage of the services available on the Auth0 platform.

That platform includes a range of service such as single-sign on, two-factor identification, passwordless log-on and breached password detection.

They have a free tier, which doesn’t even require a credit card, and pay tiers based on the types of users — regular versus enterprise — along with the number of users. They also charge based on machine-to-machine authentication. Pace reports they have 3500 paying customers and tens of thousands of users on the free tier.

All of that has added up to a pretty decent business. While Pace would not share specific numbers, he did indicate the company doubled its revenue last year and expected to do so again this year.

With a cadence of getting funding every year for the last three years, Pace says this round may mark the end of that fundraising cycle for a time. He wasn’t ready to commit to the idea of an IPO, saying that is likely a couple of years away, but he says the company is close to profitability.

With the new influx of money, the company does plan to expand its workforce as moves into markets across the world . They currently have 300 employees, but within a year he expects to be between 400 and 450 worldwide.

The company’s last round was a $30 million Series C last June led by Meritech Capital Partners.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Auth0 snags $55M Series D, seeks international expansion https://ift.tt/2rHDLUm

Read More

WhatsApp revamps Groups to fight Telegram

Facebook just installed its VP of Internet.org as the new head of WhatsApp after its CEO Jan Koum left the company. And now Facebook is expanding its mission to get people into “meaningful” groups to WhatsApp. Today, WhatsApp launched a slew of new features for Groups on iOS and Android that let admins set a description for their community and decide who can change the Groups settings. Meanwhile, users will be able to get a Group catch up that shows messages they were mentioned in, and search for people in the group.

WhatsApp’s new Group descriptions

WhatsApp Group participant search

Group improvements will help WhatsApp better compete with Telegram, which has recently emerged as an insanely popular platform for chat groups, especially around cryptocurrency. Telegram has plenty of admin controls of its own, but the two apps will be competing over who can make it easiest to digest these fast-moving chat forums.

“These are features are based on user requests. We develop the product based on what our users want and need” a WhatsApp spokesperson told me when asked why it’s making this update. “There are also people coming together in groups onWhatsApp like new parents looking for support, students organizing study sessions, and even city leaders coordinating relief efforts after natural disasters.”

Facebook is on a quest to get 1 billion users into “meaningful” Groups and recently said it now has hit the 200 million user milestone. Groups could help people strengthen their ties with their city or niche interests, which can make them feel less alone.

With Group descriptions, admins can explain the purpose and rules of a group. They show up when people check out the group and appear atop the chat window when they join. New admin controls let them restrict who is allowed to alter a group’s subject, icon, and description. WhatsApp is also making it tougher to re-add someone to a group they left so you can’t “Group-add-spam people”. Together, these could make sure people find relevant groups, naturally acclimate to their culture, and don’t troll everyone.

As for users, the new Group catch up feature offers a new @ button in the bottom right of the chat window that when tapped, surfaces all your replies and mentions since you last checked. And if you want to find someone specific in the Group, the new participant search on the Info page could let you turn a group chat into a private convo with someone you meet.

WhatsApp Group catch up

Now that WhatsApp has a stunning 1.5 billion users compared to 200 million on Telegram, its next phase of growth may come from deepening engagement instead of just adding more accounts. Many people already do most of their one-on-one chatting with friends on WhatsApp, but Groups could invite tons of time spent as users participate in communities of strangers around their interests.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2L2olSs WhatsApp revamps Groups to fight Telegram Josh Constine https://ift.tt/2IpNxAU
via IFTTT

Read More

BRD crowdraises $32 million to build financial services into a mobile crypto wallet

Crypto wallets can’t remain crypto wallets for long. There is so much competition and so many scammers that value-added features like financial services are de rigueur. BRD knows this quite well and is putting $32 million behind the platform to grow out the features and cryptocurrencies supported on their popular app.

Founded by Aaron Voisine, Adam Traidman, and Aaron Lasher, the company started out as a side product called Bread Wallet. BRD, say the founders, was the first iOS bitcoin wallet in the App Store.

The team has 1.1 million users in 170 countries and 76% of those are iOS. They’ve received 71% of their customers in the past year, a fact that attests to the recent popularity of cryptocurrencies. They have $6 billion of crypto assets under protection.

The team has also partnered with Changelly to help transfer more tokens than Bitcoin and Ethereum – including their own BRD token.

How did they raise the money? By token sale, of course. They ran a $12 million presale and a $20 million crowd sale, resulting in a combine Seed and A round that would make most fintech orgs blush.

The team is most proud of their focus on decentralization.

“We’ve made our name around security, first and foremost. That’s what most the miners and dev crowd know us for, as the most secure way to hold and protect all their cryptoassets,” said Voisine. “The assets themselves are not stored in any centralized system within BRD. A transaction on BRD connects directly to the blockchain and are synced in real-time. There is literally nothing to steal from BRD, since we’re not holding a single asset ourselves… even though we have over $6B USD under protection.”

Further, they are offering BRD Rewards that will let BRD users get discounts and other benefits. This is an effort to “bring a much better balance between fees and utilization.”

“We want to be the service for first-time buyers of crypto. We want to be the most popular onramp for consumers into the crypto economy,” he said.

Lasher feels that his mission is far more interesting than just making an iOS wallet. He sees this as a philosophical change that will bring new understanding of the importance of crypto.

“If sending money globally as easily as an email doesn’t impress you, how about the ability to store your life savings in your head, then walking your family across a war-torn border to safety?” he said.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J BRD crowdraises $32 million to build financial services into a mobile crypto wallet https://ift.tt/2IiU3gP

Read More

WhatsApp revamps Groups to fight Telegram

{rss:content:encoded} WhatsApp revamps Groups to fight Telegram https://ift.tt/2IpNxAU https://ift.tt/2L2olSs May 15, 2018 at 05:00PM

Facebook just installed its VP of Internet.org as the new head of WhatsApp after its CEO Jan Koum left the company. And now Facebook is expanding its mission to get people into “meaningful” groups to WhatsApp. Today, WhatsApp launched a slew of new features for Groups on iOS and Android that let admins set a description for their community and decide who can change the Groups settings. Meanwhile, users will be able to get a Group catch up that shows messages they were mentioned in, and search for people in the group.

WhatsApp’s new Group descriptions

WhatsApp Group participant search

Group improvements will help WhatsApp better compete with Telegram, which has recently emerged as an insanely popular platform for chat groups, especially around cryptocurrency. Telegram has plenty of admin controls of its own, but the two apps will be competing over who can make it easiest to digest these fast-moving chat forums.

“These are features are based on user requests. We develop the product based on what our users want and need” a WhatsApp spokesperson told me when asked why it’s making this update. “There are also people coming together in groups onWhatsApp like new parents looking for support, students organizing study sessions, and even city leaders coordinating relief efforts after natural disasters.”

With Group descriptions, admins can explain the purpose and rules of a group. They show up when people check out the group and appear atop the chat window when they join. New admin controls let them restrict who is allowed to alter a group’s subject, icon, and description. WhatsApp is also making it tougher to re-add someone to a group they left so you can’t “Group-add-spam people”. Together, these could make sure people find relevant groups, naturally acclimate to their culture, and don’t troll everyone.

As for users, the new Group catch up feature offers a new @ button in the bottom right of the chat window that when tapped, surfaces all your replies and mentions since you last checked. And if you want to find someone specific in the Group, the new participant search on the Info page could let you turn a group chat into a private convo with someone you meet.

WhatsApp Group catch up

Now that WhatsApp has a stunning 1.5 billion users compared to 200 million on Telegram, its next phase of growth may come from deepening engagement instead of just adding more accounts. Many people already do most of their one-on-one chatting with friends on WhatsApp, but Groups could invite tons of time spent as users participate in communities of strangers around their interests.

Read More

Instagram has an unlaunched “time spent” Usage Insights dashboard

Instagram may be jumping into the time well spent movement, following the unveiling of Google’s new time management controls last week. Code buried in Instagram’s Android app reveals a “Usage Insights” feature that will show users their “time spent”. It’s not exactly clear whether that will be your total time spent in Instagram ever, which could be a pretty scary number to some users, or within some shorter time frame like a day, week, or month.

By being upfront with users about how much of their lives they’re investing in their favorite apps, tech giants could encourage people to adopt healthier habits and avoid the long, passive, anti-social browsing sessions that can harm their well-being. These features could also help parents keep track of what their kids are doing online. Both might lead people to spend less time on apps like Instagram, but they could be happier with companies like Instagram.

The Usage Insights screenshot and “time spent” code were discovered by prolific app investigator Jane Manchun Wong inside the Instagram for Android application package, or “APK”. When asked by TechCrunch for more evidence about how the feature worked, she tweeted screenshot below of Instagram’s code. Several of Wong’s other recent discoveries of unlaunched features like Facebook Avatars and Twitter encrypted DMs were subsequently confirmed by the companies as being in testing.

An Instagram spokesperson told TechCrunch the company has no comment on this discovery for now, but may return with more info later. We’ll update when we hear back. Until then we’ll have to wait and see what exactly the time spent dashboard will show. For comparison, the new Android time management tool shows a daily look at how much time you spent on different apps, and lets you set time limits. But since most of Google’s apps outside of YouTube are utilities designed to be used as quickly as possible, it might have less to lose by revealing how users spend time on their phones than Facebook.

Google’s new Android time management features. Image via The Verge.

Offering “Usage Insights” aligns with Facebook’s recent discussion of research that shows active social networking, like messaging, posting, or commenting can be positive for people’s well-being, but endless zombie scrolling can make people feel worse. While Facebook hasn’t created anything like this feature in its own apps, it’s started to change its algorithm to promote active interactions while downranking viral videos that people consume passively. That led to Facebook’s first ever decline in its North American daily user count in Q4 2017, though it was growing again in the region by Q1 2018.

Instagram’s photo and video-heavy feed especially lends itself to the negative social networking behaviors like envy spiraling, where users constantly compare themselves against the glamorous highlights posted by their friends. Letting users know how long they’re Instagramming, or even let them set time limits, could push people to go out and live life instead of watching through a screen as others live it.

The difference between good and bad Facebooking

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Io2KCu Instagram has an unlaunched “time spent” Usage Insights dashboard Josh Constine https://ift.tt/2jYfvcj
via IFTTT

Read More

Genoox raises $6M to help physicians better diagnose patients with genomic data

{rss:content:encoded} Genoox raises $6M to help physicians better diagnose patients with genomic data https://ift.tt/2KrXwX0 https://ift.tt/2IhTFyV May 15, 2018 at 03:30PM

23andMe, Color, and other genomic sequencing startups have exposed demand from consumers for cheap ways to test for potential problems they may have — and Amir Trabelsi hopes to bring that mentality to medical institutions around the world.

That’s the hope for Genoox, a genomic analysis startup that’s geared toward doctors, clinicians and researchers that hopes to lower the cost of getting data from gene sequencing, and speed that process up, in the same ways that 23andMe and Color have done for consumers. Genoox at its heart is a data science company, taking the raw data from a genome sequencing and figuring out how to convey actionable information to medical professionals — and, hopefully, on a more complete scale than just consumer startups targeting specific health problems. The company said it has raised a $6 million funding round led by Triventures, a healthcare-focused venture firm.

“We want to bring [medical institutions] the ability to run clinical applications and use genomic data part of the clinical routine,” Genoox co-founder Trabelsi said. “We understand the direct-to-consumer market is growing and the demand is growing, but there is a gap in clinical applications. Genomic data is complicated especially when it comes to clinical outcomes — how can you make things more actionable for [professionals], how can you reduce the cost and overhead, and how can you filter out what is relevant and not relevant.”

Trabelsi said the goal is not to just hand a patient information based on their genome, but rather target clinical experts that might be able to use that data and better determine diagnoses for patients. The physician is the one that will have the final say in the decision or diagnosis, and the whole point here is to just take massive amounts of data and figure out a few points that a physician can use in order to make a better judgment call. And beyond that, Genoox can update those doctors as more and more research comes out regarding the potential health complications a patient may have.

Right now Genoox is targeting rare diseases — starting from one launching point, much like Color or 23andMe — but hopes to expand beyond that into other processes like carrier screening or hereditary cancer. This is a strategy that those direct-to-consumer companies are also employing, with Color recently rolling out a test that tries to search for hereditary risk for heart conditions like arrhythmia. As companies get more and more data, they’re able to better sift through a person’s genomic information and flag potential aberrations that could signal increased risk for various conditions.

“We see the growing demand for direct-to-consumer, but we’re also seeing more and more clinical practices using genetic data,” Tabelsi said. “It’s still not efficient or 100% there, but I think the next two years we’re going to see dramatically increased use of genetic data of clinical applications or clinical use. It’s not about the tech, which was proven to be powerful by some cases we were able to solve. I think the technology was kind of proven, along the years, and through some papers we published the question was not about the tech but whether the market is here or where are we in using genetic data.”

Genoox, however, is not the only one targeting clinicians with a data-oriented approach to understanding a patient’s genome. Sophia Genetics is also looking to use genomic data and physician input to better diagnose patients, and also raised an additional $30 million in September last year. As the cost of gene sequencing continues to decline, more and more companies will be going after it as a data play — whether that’s in the consumer or clinician-focused space — and that means Genoox will likely not be alone as it looks to snap up the attention of clinicians and professionals.

 

Read More

Instacart names David Hahn as new Chief Product Officer

Instacart, the on-demand grocery delivery platform that finds itself at the center of ever-increasing competition, has today announced that David Hahn will be taking over as Instacart’s new Chief Product Officer.

Hahn previously served as VP of Product at LinkedIn, after which time he went to Greylock to serve as an entrepreneur in residence, helping portfolio companies think through their products and monetization strategies.

Most recently, Hahn was President and Chief Product Officer at GoFundMe.

Hahn joins Instacart during an interesting time for the grocery space. Online grocery shopping a delivery has reached “a tipping point,” in the words of Hahn, as incumbents like Walmart and Target formulate their own delivery options. Meanwhile, as we all know, Amazon is working to integrate newly acquired Whole Foods into its Prime delivery portfolio.

“Just a few years from now, everyone will get their groceries this way,” said Hahn. “I’m excited to be part of a company leading that change in such a large and important market.”

Hahn said that he’ll be prioritizing a few things as he acclimates to the role, including the front-end product for consumers and back-end products for retailers that help with inventory management.

Indeed, one of the biggest hurdles at Instacart is integrating with dozens of retailers, many of whom use varying inventory management systems, to consistently and accurately list what is available now in stores to Instacart users.

When this information isn’t correct, it sets off a series of events wherein the shopper has to replace ordered items, which could result in a less-than-perfect delivery.

While the task may seem daunting, Hahn is excited to join Instacart at this particular part of its journey. 

“It’s quite rare to find a business at this particular stage,” said Hahn. “Instacart has reached a super impressive scale with an impressive growth rate, but there is a lot of opportunity ahead and lots of building to do.”

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Instacart names David Hahn as new Chief Product Officer https://ift.tt/2L5EkPA

Read More

Lerer Hippeau raises a new $122M fund, plus $60M for follow-on investments

Lerer Hippeau has raised two new funds — $122 million for a sixth fund devoted to seed stage investments, as well as $60 million for a “Select Fund” focused on later-stage deals.

Managing Partner Eric Hippeau said both funds will be used to continue the firm’s existing strategy: “We continue to be seed-first investors and New York-first investors. We’re big believers in New York.”

And while Hippeau acknowledged that the New York ecosystem is still be waiting for the kind of massive exit that makes “a lot of people very rich, who will then leave and start their own companies,” he pointed to recent success stories like Oracle’s acquisition of Moat and Roche’s acquisition of Flatiron Health. (Neither of them were Lerer Hippeau investments, but they’re both NYC-based.)

“There’s a huge pipeline in New York of companies that have been valued in the hundreds of millions and in some cases billions of dollars — a lot of them are our companies, but not always,” Hippeau said. “That’s where the strength of New York is going to come from in the short term, all of these companies really popping to the surface and adding a few billion dollars of value, one at a time.”

The firm announced its first follow-on fund last year. At the time, Hippeau said it had only raised $28 million so that the two funds could be “synced up,” which is what’s happening now.

The first Select Fund was used to make follow-on investments in companies that Lerer Hippeau had already backed at the seed stage, like Allbirds and Casper. That will continue with the new fund, but Hippeau said it could also be used for Series A investments in startups that the firm didn’t back initially, and which might now seem like missed opportunities.

Caitlin Strandberg

Meanwhile, the Lerer Hippeau team has also been growing, with the recent hiring of Caitlin Strandberg (formerly vice president at FirstMark) as principal and Isabelle Phelps as associate, as well as Amanda Mulay as senior talent manager.

“I couldn’t be more excited to join the most active early-stage firm in New York, just as it gets fresh capital,” Strandberg said in an emailed statement. “Lerer Hippeau has built a fantastic reputation as being a hands-on, accessible and helpful investor all while cultivating a powerful and engaged community. I’m looking forward to investing in the next great generation of startups, supporting our existing founders and teams, and continuing to build a great tech ecosystem here in NYC.”

Lerer Hippeau now has around 20 people on the team. And while firms like Andreessen Horowitz (where Mulay used to work) have made their huge support staff a selling point, Hippeau said that at his firm, “We don’t really want to have dozens of people doing this. We want to be very precise and very selective about how can help.”

Still, he said that “the service that’s most in-demand is help with recruiting,” so it made sense to bring on Mulay to help startups hire,  and also to help them “set up a proper HR function.”

Lerer Hippeau’s investment team built its reputation in media — Hippeau was formerly CEO at The Huffington Post, Kenneth Lerer cofounded HuffPost and is now chairman at BuzzFeed and Ben Lerer is CEO at Group Nine Media. (The three of them are pictured at the top of this post.) But with the seemingly constant news about digital media layoffs and shutdowns, would Hippeau invest in a media startup today?

Actually, the firm did back one such startup recently, podcast network Wondery. But Hippeau said media has “never been more than 10 percent of our portfolio.” (Other recent investments include cryptocurrency wallet Casa and cannabis talent network Vangst.)

“We love media, we continue to look at media companies, but we are relatively selective,” he said.

https://ift.tt/2wKyvUI Lerer Hippeau raises a new $122M fund, plus $60M for follow-on investments https://ift.tt/2GfYbrL

Read More

Genoox raises $6M to help physicians better diagnose patients with genomic data

23andMe, Color, and other genomic sequencing startups have exposed demand from consumers for cheap ways to test for potential problems they may have — and Amir Trabelsi hopes to bring that mentality to medical institutions around the world.

That’s the hope for Genoox, a genomic analysis startup that’s geared toward doctors, clinicians and researchers that hopes to lower the cost of getting data from gene sequencing, and speed that process up, in the same ways that 23andMe and Color have done for consumers. Genoox at its heart is a data science company, taking the raw data from a genome sequencing and figuring out how to convey actionable information to medical professionals — and, hopefully, on a more complete scale than just consumer startups targeting specific health problems. The company said it has raised a $6 million funding round led by Triventures, a healthcare-focused venture firm.

“We want to bring [medical institutions] the ability to run clinical applications and use genomic data part of the clinical routine,” Genoox co-founder Trabelsi said. “We understand the direct-to-consumer market is growing and the demand is growing, but there is a gap in clinical applications. Genomic data is complicated especially when it comes to clinical outcomes — how can you make things more actionable for [professionals], how can you reduce the cost and overhead, and how can you filter out what is relevant and not relevant.”

Trabelsi said the goal is not to just hand a patient information based on their genome, but rather target clinical experts that might be able to use that data and better determine diagnoses for patients. The physician is the one that will have the final say in the decision or diagnosis, and the whole point here is to just take massive amounts of data and figure out a few points that a physician can use in order to make a better judgment call. And beyond that, Genoox can update those doctors as more and more research comes out regarding the potential health complications a patient may have.

Right now Genoox is targeting rare diseases — starting from one launching point, much like Color or 23andMe — but hopes to expand beyond that into other processes like carrier screening or hereditary cancer. This is a strategy that those direct-to-consumer companies are also employing, with Color recently rolling out a test that tries to search for hereditary risk for heart conditions like arrhythmia. As companies get more and more data, they’re able to better sift through a person’s genomic information and flag potential aberrations that could signal increased risk for various conditions.

“We see the growing demand for direct-to-consumer, but we’re also seeing more and more clinical practices using genetic data,” Tabelsi said. “It’s still not efficient or 100% there, but I think the next two years we’re going to see dramatically increased use of genetic data of clinical applications or clinical use. It’s not about the tech, which was proven to be powerful by some cases we were able to solve. I think the technology was kind of proven, along the years, and through some papers we published the question was not about the tech but whether the market is here or where are we in using genetic data.”

Genoox, however, is not the only one targeting clinicians with a data-oriented approach to understanding a patient’s genome. Sophia Genetics is also looking to use genomic data and physician input to better diagnose patients, and also raised an additional $30 million in September last year. As the cost of gene sequencing continues to decline, more and more companies will be going after it as a data play — whether that’s in the consumer or clinician-focused space — and that means Genoox will likely not be alone as it looks to snap up the attention of clinicians and professionals.

 

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Genoox raises $6M to help physicians better diagnose patients with genomic data https://ift.tt/2KrXwX0

Read More

BrainQ raises $5.3M to treat neurological disorders with the help of AI

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.

https://ift.tt/2wRmYDp BrainQ raises $5.3M to treat neurological disorders with the help of AI https://ift.tt/2IJWCrm

Read More

Prisma raises $4.5M seed round led by Kleiner Perkins

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).

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Prisma raises $4.5M seed round led by Kleiner Perkins https://ift.tt/2wG4Fkh

Read More

Good Eggs raises $50M and eyes West Coast expansion

Good Eggs, the food delivery service that promises “absurdly fresh” groceries and meal kits, has raised $50 million in new funding.

That looks like a big turnaround from 2015, when the company had multiple rounds of layoffs, shut down operations outside of San Francisco and brought on Bradley Hall (an executive from Plum Organics and Clif Bar) as its new CEO.

Hall said that after he took over, he spent months focused on retooling the fundamental business: “We didn’t have a single conversation about growth.” Since then, he said the company started looking at “growth with purpose” and in 2018 is ready for “thoughtful, measured expansion.”

“The first change is, we realized that we were a food company enabled by technology, versus a technology company that sells food,” Hall said.

That might sound vague, but it led to more concrete “trickle effects,” like quadrupling the number of products that Good Eggs sells to more than 1,000. Hall said the service has become people’s “primary food supplier,” with the average customer ordering from Good Eggs more than once a week. That also meant the company had to shift from next-day to same-day delivery, which he described as “table stakes in the future.”

At the same time, Hall said the company maintains its “rigorous sourcing criteria,” with 70 percent of its products sourced locally. And thanks to the Good Eggs model, where the company buys directly from local farmers and producers, customers don’t have to worry about sending a delivery person to the supermarket only to discover that the product they want isn’t available.

The new funding comes from was led by Benchmark, with additional participation from existing investors Index Ventures, Obvious Ventures, S2G Ventures, DNS Capital, Uprising and Collaborative Fund. Benchmark’s Bill Gurley is joining Good Eggs’ board of directors.

“Our team was deeply impressed by the operational discipline that Bentley and the team at Good Eggs have implemented to transform this business,” Gurley said in the funding announcement. “We made a study of what Good Eggs has achieved and believe the business is very well positioned to capture and scale the growing market of people who are passionate about the quality and provenance of the food they consume. It’s a massive opportunity.”

Good Eggs delivery remains limited to the San Francisco Bay Area, but the company said it will be expanding throughout the region and adding capacity, then launch in Southern California next year.

“We’re not going to grow where we sacrifice the foudnation we’ve worked so hard to build, and we’re not going to grow in a way that sacrifices the customer experience,” Hall said. “We’ll grow as quickly as we can while maintaining those two principles. For us, that means expanding slowly and thoughtfully throughout the West Coast.”

And while Hall was happy to frame the Good Eggs story as turnaround, he didn’t want to take all the credit for it.

“This is such a team effort,” he said. “I know this usually gets told as somebody came in and turned it around, but this was across the entire team. Our 260, 270 hourly employees, they get as much if not more of the credit as I do.

https://ift.tt/2rJivNT Good Eggs raises $50M and eyes West Coast expansion https://ift.tt/2IjOXN1

Read More