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Author: Danny Crichton

With $55M third fund, Scout Ventures is funding veterans ready to tackle the hardest technical challenges

by Danny Crichton

When it comes to people pushing the frontiers of science, few institutions can match the talent of the Department of Defense, the intelligence agencies, and the U.S. national laboratory system. With ample budgets and flexible oversight under that aura of national security, ambitious scientists and engineers are working on everything from quantum computing to next-generation satellites.

That wealth of talent is often left behind in the frenetic product development and fundraising world of Silicon Valley. Langley, Arlington, and Los Alamos are a far cry from Palo Alto or New York City. Even more challenging is the career transition: the government is, well, the government, and the private sector is, well, the private sector. Moving from one to the next can be quite jarring.

Scout Ventures wants to act as the bridge between the startup world and that vast science and technology workforce, with a particular focus on veterans of the military, intelligence agencies, and national labs. Founded about a decade ago in 2012 by Brad Harrison, the firm raised two funds and invested in several dozen companies at the earliest stages, including identity verification platform ID.me (now valued at $1.5 billion), men’s subscription service Bespoke Post, and youth sports management platform LeagueApps. It also incubated companies like health services company Unite Us.

The firm announced this morning that is has raised a $55 million third fund, which will continue its focus on backing veterans while centering its investment thesis on frontier tech in areas like (Read more...)

A16Z leads investment in Firemaps, a marketplace for home hardening against wildfires

by Danny Crichton

Wildfires are burning in countries all around the world. California is dealing with some of the worst wildfires in its history (a superlative that I use essentially every year now) with the Caldor fire and others blazing in the state’s north. Meanwhile, Greece and other Mediterranean nations have been fighting fires for weeks to bring a number of massive blazes under control.

With the climate increasingly warming, millions of home just in the United States alone are sitting in zones at high risk for wildfires. Insurance companies and governments are putting acute pressure on homeowners to invest more in defending their homes in what is typically dubbed “hardening,” or ensuring that if fires do arrive, a home has the best chance to survive and not spread the disaster further.

SF-based Firemaps has a bold vision for rapidly scaling up and solving the problem of home hardening by making a complicated and time-consuming process as simple as possible.

The company, which was founded just a few months ago in March, sends out a crew with a drone to survey a homeowner’s house and property if it is in a high-risk fire zone. Within 20 minutes, the team will have generated a high-resolution 3D model of the property down to the centimeter. From there, hardening options are identified and bids are sent out to trade contractors to perform the work on the company’s marketplace.

Once the drone scans a house, Firemaps can create a full CAD model of the structure and (Read more...)

With more cash and a launch, Vannevar Labs is reconnecting Silicon Valley to its defense industry roots

by Danny Crichton

Silicon Valley was once one of the most productive regions in the country for the defense industry, churning out chips and technologies that helped the United States overtake the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Since then, the region has been known far less for silicon and defense than for the consumer internet products of Google, Facebook and Netflix.

A small number of startups though are attempting to revitalize that important government-industry nexus as the rise of China pushes more defense planners in Washington to double down on America’s technical edge. Vannevar Labs is one of this new crop, and it has hit some new milestones in its quest to displace traditional defense contractors with Silicon Valley entrepreneurial acumen.

I last chatted with the company just as it was debuting in late 2019, having raised a $4.5 million seed. The company has been quiet and heads down the past two years as it developed a product and traction within the defense establishment. Now it’s ready to reveal a bit more of what all that work has culminated in.

Vannevar Labs comes out of stealth to bring best-in-class AI tech to national security agencies

First, the company officially launched its Vannevar Decrypt product in January of this year. It’s focused on foreign language natural language processing, organizing overseas data and resources that are collected by the intelligence community and then immediately translating and interpreting those documents for foreign policy decision-makers. CEO and co-founder Brett Granberg said that the product “went (Read more...)

informed., you want to be? Trio of European media veterans take on the problem of news economics

by Danny Crichton

News is vital to society, but it’s also incredibly expensive to produce. As ad rates have suffered across the industry (minus a positive blip this summer), publishers have increasingly turned to paywalls to make ends meet. There’s just one problem: the open internet which allowed readers to range over the entire thought of humanity has transformed into row after row of walled gardens locked down by angry sentries. The subscription hell I talked about three years ago has indeed only accelerated.

Fixing hell is going to take some doing, but three veterans of news and media in Europe are ready to take a crack at it.

Benjamin Mateev, Martin Kaelble, and Axel Bard Bringéus have come together to launch informed. (official branding: no caps, mandatory period). The Berlin-based startup wants to be a layer on top of prominent paywalled news services, connecting readers with curated “playlists” of news and opinion stories called Read Lists and augmented with an original summary. The company was founded in January, is currently in beta, and has raised a “significant pre-seed by modern standards” from local shop 468 Capital.

What’s interesting here is the team. Bringéus previously spent six years at Spotify where he ultimately worked as global head of markets during the company’s rapid overseas expansion. He has most recently been a deal partner at prominent European firm EQT Ventures. Meanwhile, Mateev was a lead engineer on to-do list platform Wunderlist through its Microsoft acquisition and head of product at opinion news site (Read more...)

No-code Bubble raises $100M to make technical co-founders obsolete

by Danny Crichton

Among Silicon Valley circles, a fun parlor game is to ask to what extent world GDP levels are held back by a lack of computer science and technical training. How many startups could be built if hundreds of thousands or even millions more people could code and bring their entrepreneurial ideas to fruition? How many bureaucratic processes could be eliminated if developers were more latent in every business?

The answer, of course, is on the order of “a lot,” but the barriers to reaching this world remain formidable. Computer science is a challenging field, and despite proactive attempts by legislatures to add more coding skills into school curriculums, the reality is that the demand for software engineering vastly outstrips the supply available in the market.

Coding is not a bubble, and Bubble wants to empower the democratization of software development and the creation of new startups. Through its platform, Bubble enables anyone — coder or not — to begin building modern web applications using a click-and-drag interface that can connect data sources and other software together in one fluid interface.

It’s a bold bet — and it’s just received a bold bet as well. Bubble announced today that Ryan Hinkle of Insight Partners has led a $100 million Series A round into the company. Hinkle, a longtime managing director at the firm, specializes in growth buyout deals as well as growth SaaS companies.

If that round size seems huge, it’s because Bubble has had a long history as a bootstrapped (Read more...)

You can see fires, but now Qwake wants firefighters to see through them

by Danny Crichton

When it comes to tough environments to build new technology, firefighting has to be among the most difficult. Smoke and heat can quickly damage hardware, and interference from fires will disrupt most forms of wireless communications, rendering software all but useless. From a technology perspective, not all that much has really changed today when it comes to how people respond to blazes.

Qwake Technologies, a startup based in San Francisco, is looking to upgrade the firefighting game with a hardware augmented reality headset named C-THRU. Worn by responders, the device scans surrounding and uploads key environmental data to the cloud, allowing all responders and incident commanders to have one common operating picture of their situation. The goal is to improve situational awareness and increase the effectiveness of firefighters, all while minimizing potential injuries and casualties.

The company, which was founded in 2015, just raised about $5.5 million in financing this week. The company’s CEO, Sam Cossman, declined to name the lead investor, citing a confidentiality clause in the term sheet. He characterized the strategic investor as a publicly-traded company, and Qwake is the first startup investment this company has made.

(Normally, I’d ignore fundings without these sorts of details, but given that I am obsessed with DisasterTech these days, why the hell not).

Data was the new oil, until the oil caught fire

Qwake has had success in recent months with netting large government contracts as it approaches a wider release of its product in late-2021. It (Read more...)

Dataminr’s first ever acquisition is UK-based geovisualization platform WatchKeeper

by Danny Crichton

When it comes to detecting events transpiring anywhere in the world, few companies hold a candle to Dataminr. Founded in 2009, the company has raised more than $1 billion over the past 12 years (including $475 million at a $4.1 billion valuation just this past March) to build out a data-gobbling platform that transforms raw inputs into actionable event intelligence.

Those events are sent to a variety of customers — corporate security professionals, supply chain risk analysts, even journalists — for whatever purpose they need in their work. CEO and co-founder Ted Bailey said that the company has made event detection its core skillset. It’s “all been geared to the detection of events,” he said. “What we have never built into our corporate product is an advanced geospatial platform,” that would allow users to visualize risks rather than just getting a push notification or an email.

That’s about to change, as the company announced today its first acquisition in its corporate history with the purchase of UK-based WatchKeeper. WatchKeeper’s platform was designed to help corporate physical security executives visualize how events could affect a company’s assets. For instance, a bank with branches in Florida needs to understand what happens if a hurricane is heading toward the peninsula.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, although Bailey said that “it’s a mature product — this is by no means an acquihire.” WatchKeeper, which was founded in 2018, previously raised £1 million from venture capitalists, according to Crunchbase (Read more...)

Robinhood is going public and we’re very excited

by Danny Crichton

It’s a sweltering day here in New York City, and that means Wall Street is on fire, and so is Robinhood, apparently. The popular stock trading app officially filed its Form S-1 with the SEC a few hours ago to go public, where it will trade under the ticker “HOOD.”

Robinhood files to go public after squeaking to profitability in 2020

The Equity crew has been yammering about Robinhood for years now, and we have been chomping on the bit to see those S-1 results for what feels like ages. Well, we finally got the numbers, we chomped that bit (or at least Alex and Danny did, since Natasha went on vacation about 15 minutes before the IPO hit the wires), and so here’s a special Equity Shot to talk about all the highlights.

We talked about so much in an itsy-bitsy 15-minute episode: crazy revenue growth, crazy revenue concentration from two major sources, regulatory hurdles that the company has been clearing up, better financials with a bit of nuance on the company’s Q1 finances, and the company’s special plan for its IPO.

Wowza.

Here’s what we got up to:

  • Historical growth and profitability.
  • Revenue mix and revenue concentration, along with constituent concerns.
  • The importance of options-related incomes for the company.
  • Dogecoin.
  • Why the company’s adjusted income may help it assuage investors who have their eyes pop out of their skulls when they see its GAAP Q1 2021 results.

And a lot more. Of course, if you hate Robinhood, (Read more...)

Neo4j raises Neo$325m as graph-based data analysis takes hold in enterprise

by Danny Crichton

Databases run the world, but database products are often some of the most mature and venerable software in the modern tech stack. Designers will pixel push, frontend engineers will add clicks to make it more difficult to drop out of a soporific Zoom call, but few companies are ever willing to rip out their database storage engine. Too much risk, and almost no return.

So it’s exceptional when a new database offering breaks through the barriers and redefines the enterprise.

Neo4j, which offers a graph-centric database and related products, announced today that it raised $325 million at a more than $2 billion valuation in a Series F deal led by Eurazeo, with additional capital from Alphabet’s venture wing GV. Eurazeo managing director Nathalie Kornhoff-Brüls will join the company’s board of directors.

That funding makes Neo4j among the most well-funded database companies in history, with a collective fundraise haul of more than half a billion dollars. For comparison, MongoDB, which trades on Nasdaq, raised $311 million in total according to Crunchbase before its IPO. Meanwhile, Cockroach Labs of CockroachDB fame has now raised $355 million in funding, including a $160 million round earlier this year at a similar $2 billion valuation.

The past decade has seen a whole new crop of next-generation database models, from scale-out SQL to document to key-value stores to time series and on and on and on. What makes graph databases like Neo4j unique is their focus on the connections between individual data entities. Graph-based (Read more...)

Neo4j raises Neo$325m as graph-based data analysis takes hold in enterprise

by Danny Crichton

Databases run the world, but database products are often some of the most mature and venerable software in the modern tech stack. Designers will pixel push, frontend engineers will add clicks to make it more difficult to drop out of a soporific Zoom call, but few companies are ever willing to rip out their database storage engine. Too much risk, and almost no return.

So it’s exceptional when a new database offering breaks through the barriers and redefines the enterprise.

Neo4j, which offers a graph-centric database and related products, announced today that it raised $325 million at a more than $2 billion valuation in a Series F deal led by Eurazeo, with additional capital from Alphabet’s venture wing GV. Eurazeo managing director Nathalie Kornhoff-Brüls will join the company’s board of directors.

That funding makes Neo4j among the most well-funded database companies in history, with a collective fundraise haul of more than half a billion dollars. For comparison, MongoDB, which trades on Nasdaq, raised $311 million in total according to Crunchbase before its IPO. Meanwhile, Cockroach Labs of CockroachDB fame has now raised $355 million in funding, including a $160 million round earlier this year at a similar $2 billion valuation.

The past decade has seen a whole new crop of next-generation database models, from scale-out SQL to document to key-value stores to time series and on and on and on. What makes graph databases like Neo4j unique is their focus on the connections between individual data entities. Graph-based (Read more...)