Work Week | Lots Of Funding Going On
| Intranets: Simpplr | Spreadbases: Coda | Work Platforms: ClickUp | Startups Still Being Funded | Microsoft 10-K |
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Intranets
Intranet Creator Simpplr Secures $10M in Series B Funding | Christine Hall reports on new funding for Simpler, which has raised a total of $30 million since its founding in 2014. The funds will be used to drive product innovation, especially applying AI:
Simpplr has also added some new features, including an auto-governance engine — which the company touts as the industry’s first — using AI technology to ensure that intranet content is up-to-date, relevant and useful. It also made enhancements to its Adaptive Personalization product that takes into account user information such as role, department, location and previous searches to only provide relevant information.
Personalization and integration are two areas Simpplr plans to do a deeper dive into. Sharma sees Netflix as a role model, a company which provides a unique user experience based on what is watched. He wants to do the same for Simpplr, where the platform finds and provides users what they should know, as well as more app integrations, now that Simpplr is attracting more enterprise customers, he added.
Meanwhile, more than 200 customers are already using Simpplr’s platform, growing the company’s 2019 annual recurring revenue by 130 percent.
[Disclosure: Simpplr is a client of GigaOm.]
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Spreadbases
Coda has announced a new round of funding in Funding the future of Coda, written by the CEO, Shishir Mehrotra. Coda is what I call a spreadbase, apps that rely on an underlying database and with a user experience that presents spreadsheet- or document-like views over the information in the database. Other spreadbases include Airtable, Notion, fibery.io, Anytype, Stackby, and Zenkit.
This is a series C round of $80 million, led by Kleiner Perkins, and joined by four other firms, and values the firm at $636 million. Mehrotra is thinking about Coda as an ecosystem, not just a product:
An ecosystem of docs and Packs.
One of the things we often hear about Coda is that Coda feels like much more than just the product, it feels like a community of makers. We leaned into this idea with the Doc Gallery, where makers can share their tools and best practices with the world. Because the more we share, the more we can learn, and the smarter we can work and live. We’ll keep building on that effort, recruiting more makers to open-source their wisdom. And we’ll be focusing on another part of our community: Developers. Now that we have a v1 of our API, we’re continue to expand our third-party ecosystem. We’ll be investigating new partnerships and dev relations, and of course we’ll be working our way down your growing Packs requests list.
I have been researching spreadbases and plan a report soon.
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Work Platforms
I overlooked the series A funding of ClickUp, a work management smorgasbord platform with task management software, tables, docs, wikis, chat, integrations, and automation capabilities. I haven’t really invested the time to grasp its principles, but it may be growing in a bottom-up way into another spreadbase.
What really caught my eye was that David Sacks, the founder of Yammer — and now a partner at Craft Ventures — led the round and has joined the board.
The startup tells TechCrunch that they’ve closed a $35 million Series A round led by Craft Ventures with participation from Georgian Partners. Craft’s David Sacks is joining the company’s board as part of the raise.
This is the startup’s first outside capital, [CEO Zeb] Evans says the startup will use the funding to begin paid marketing and localizing the product to different languages and user geographies. Furthermore, the company’s leadership is looking to scale the team aggressively, hoping to grow from its current staff of 100, to 500 employees by year’s end.
Officially on my watch list.
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Funding
Start-Ups Braced for the Worst. The Worst Never Came. | Erin Griffith reports on the start up downturn that hasn’t materialized:
Start-ups in the United States raised $34.3 billion in the second quarter, down slightly from $36 billion a year earlier, according to PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. Much of the financing went to the largest companies, with the number of “mega-rounds” (deals larger than $100 million) on a pace to top last year’s total.
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Start-up expenditures also began rising again. Brex, which provides corporate credit cards to roughly 10,000 start-ups in the United States, said spending on items like software, servers and ads is now more than a third above February levels — though spending on business travel and office snacks remains depressed.
“Everyone woke up and thought, ‘Wait a second, people are still going to do business,’” said Steve Sloane, an investor at Menlo Ventures. “They’re just going to do it online.”
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Envoy, a start-up in San Francisco that sells sign-in systems to offices, also suffered its first monthly net loss in February and March, said its chief executive, Larry Gadea. But that changed in May after the company formed a service called Protect, with features for limiting capacity in the office and managing which employees are in the office.
Around that time, working from home was becoming untenable for some people and companies wanted a way to allow a limited number of workers to return. Around 100,000 workers have used Envoy’s new system at 500 offices, Mr. Gadea said.
“It saved the business,” he said.
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Canva, an online design software provider, saw its growth accelerate as more people worked remotely, and it doubled its valuation to $6 billion in June. Discord, a social media chat service whose use increased roughly 50 percent in the pandemic, raised $100 million in June in a matter of weeks.
People need technology more than ever, even if companies like Envoy have to zig and zag to meet new market needs when we all adopt minimum office.
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Microsoft
Filing shows where Microsoft is really making its money; reveals M&A spending; adds Netflix, Hulu, Tencent to list of rivals | Todd Bishop pored over Microsoft’s 10-K and 10-Q and plotted this graph:
Cloud server and services and office and cloud services sectors are booming.
Microsoft’s back-end server products and cloud services are booming. Revenue grew by nearly 27% to $41.4 billion in the product category of Server and Cloud Services in the fiscal year ended June 30.
Office and Cloud Services revenue was the second-fastest growing category, at 11%, reaching $35.3 billion in revenue for the year. Windows grew by 9% to $22.3 billion.
A lot of video calls and chat on Teams.
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