Applications networking company F5 announced today that it is acquiring Volterra, a multi-cloud management startup, for $500 million. That breaks down to $440 million in cash and $60 million in deferred and unvested incentive compensation.

Volterra emerged in 2019 with a $50 million investment from multiple sources, including Khosla Ventures and Mayfield, along with strategic investors like M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm) and Samsung Ventures. As the company described it to me at the time of the funding:

Volterra has innovated a consistent, cloud-native environment that can be deployed across multiple public clouds and edge sites — a distributed cloud platform. Within this SaaS-based offering, Volterra integrates a broad range of services that have normally been siloed across many point products and network or cloud providers.

The solution is designed to provide a single way to view security, operations and management components.

F5 president and CEO François Locoh-Donou sees Volterra’s edge solution integrating across its product line. “With Volterra, we advance our Adaptive Applications vision with an Edge 2.0 platform that solves the complex multi-cloud reality enterprise customers confront. Our platform will create a SaaS solution that solves our customers’ biggest pain points,” he said in a statement.

Volterra founder and CEO Ankur Singla, writing in a company blog post announcing the deal, says the need for this solution only accelerated during 2020 when companies were shifting rapidly to the cloud due to the pandemic. “When we started Volterra, multi-cloud and edge were still buzzwords and venture funding was still searching for tangible use cases. Fast forward three years and COVID-19 has dramatically changed the landscape — it has accelerated digitization of physical experiences and moved more of our day-to-day activities online. This is causing massive spikes in global Internet traffic while creating new attack vectors that impact the security and availability of our increasing set of daily apps,” he wrote.

He sees Volterra’s capabilities fitting in well with the F5 family of products to help solve these issues. While F5 had a quiet 2020 on the M&A front, today’s purchase comes on top of a couple of major acquisitions in 2019, including Shape Security for $1 billion and NGINX for $670 million.

The deal has been approved by both companies’ boards, and is expected to close before the end of March, subject to regulatory approvals.

Like many startups, Atlanta-based Voxie was created to solve a problem that founder and CEO Bogdan Constantin faced himself.

In Constantin’s case, this was at his previous tuxedo rental startup Menguin (ultimately acquired by Generation Tux), where he said he had to market a product with a six-to-nine month sales cycle, as customers were usually weighing different options for their weddings.

Email marketing, Constantin said, would result in “worse and worse” open rates over time. So one day, he decided to just try texting everyone who signed up, introducing himself as “your personal stylist here at Menguin.” Not surprisingly, he got a lot more responses.

The challenge, of course, is having those kinds of text conversations across a large customer base. And that’s why Voxie — which is announcing that it has raised $6.7 million in Series A funding — offers tools to help businesses automate and manage that process.

Constantin claimed that compared to other text marketing tools, messages sent via Voxie feel like a real, personalized conversation — even though 80% to 90% are actually automated, with the rest of the messages written by people. Plus, Voxie will allow businesses to send their messages from a normal 10-digit phone number (rather than the more common five-digit numbers used for marketing).

Voxie was initially built for large enterprise customers, but Constantin said that during the pandemic, the company created a lower-cost version that is now being used by “a lot of retail, restaurant franchise brands, main street brands that are struggling right now.”

He added, “We’re working with brands that have hundreds of locations all over the country that needed a better way to engage their customers — to ask their names, ask how many kids they have and store that information at the individual profile level.”

Current Voxie customers include LG, Danone, Massage Heights and Buff City Soap.

The funding, meanwhile, was led by Noro-Moseley Partners, with participation from Circadian Ventures and Engage Ventures, as well as Atlanta entrepreneurs Wain Kellum, Andy Powell, David Cummings and Fred Castellucci.

“Voxie leads the market as the only platform that allows brands to have personalized conversations with customers at scale, which we believe will be key for its target customers to succeed in a post-COVID world,” said Noro-Moseley’s John Ale in a statement. “Businesses love Voxie as they see meaningful revenue uplift quickly and the personalization of the content means customers find the messages useful and highly relevant to their needs.”

Next, Constantin said the company will launch “reply to buy” functionality, allowing customers to place orders directly from their text conversations. And while Voxie is currently focused on SMS messaging, he claimed its vision is broader: “We want to deliver the right message at the right time via the right medium.”

RedHat today announced that it’s acquiring container security startup StackRox . The companies did not share the purchase price.

RedHat, which is perhaps best known for its enterprise Linux products has been making the shift to the cloud in recent years. IBM purchased the company in 2018 for a hefty $34 billion and has been leveraging that acquisition as part of a shift to a hybrid cloud strategy under CEO Arvind Krishna.

The acquisition fits nicely with RedHat OpenShift, its container platform, but the company says it will continue to support StackRox usage on other platforms including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. This approach is consistent with IBM’s strategy of supporting multicloud, hybrid environments.

In fact, Red Hat president and CEO Paul Cormier sees the two companies working together well. “Red Hat adds StackRox’s Kubernetes-native capabilities to OpenShift’s layered security approach, furthering our mission to bring product-ready open innovation to every organization across the open hybrid cloud across IT footprints,” he said in a statement.

CEO Kamal Shah, writing in a company blog post announcing the acquisition, explained that the company made a bet a couple of years ago on Kubernetes and it has paid off. “Over two and half years ago, we made a strategic decision to focus exclusively on Kubernetes and pivoted our entire product to be Kubernetes-native. While this seems obvious today; it wasn’t so then. Fast forward to 2020 and Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto operating system for cloud-native applications and hybrid cloud environments,” Shah wrote.

Shah sees the purchase as a way to expand the company and the road map more quickly using the resources of Red Hat (and IBM), a typical argument from CEOs of smaller acquired companies. But the trick is always finding a way to stay relevant inside such a large organization.

StackRox’s acquisition is part of some consolidation we have been seeing in the Kubernetes space in general and the security space more specifically. That includes Palo Alto Networks acquiring competitor TwistLock for $410 million in 2019. Another competitor, Aqua Security, which has raised $130 million, remains independent.

StackRox was founded in 2014 and raised over $65 million, according to Crunchbase data. Investors included Menlo Ventures, Redpoint and Sequoia Capital. The deal is expected to close this quarter subject to normal regulatory scrutiny.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Happy 2021, or as our own Danny Crichton aptly names it, December 38, 2020.

Equity crew is back to start the new year in full force, with Alex, Natasha and Danny on the mics and Chris behind the scenes. The reunion led to extreme Dad joke energy from all of us, which helped get through the mountain of tech news that we had in front of us.

In fact, there was so much to talk about that we have a bonus episode coming out Saturday dealing with Roblox and the gaming environment. Stay tuned.

For now, here’s what’s in today’s episode:

The remote work space is rushing to cure your Zoom fatigue, or at least give you new ways to handle it. This week, we saw GitHub alumni raise millions for a video repository tool, and Teamflow raise more for a virtual platform meant to mimic the serendipity (and productivity) of your currently shuttered office.WeLink raised a $185 million Series A round and, while we could have made financial nomenclature jokes, there was much to unpack on the opportunity of 5G and wireless.Divvy locked down $165 million, making itself a unicorn in the process. Consider this one another win for Utah, and a big moment for the company itself, which is working in a very competitive space.We also noted a series of new VC funds that closed in the final days of 2020, including One Way, USV, Learn Capital and Madrona.Hopin went shoppin’, picking up StreamYard for a quarter-billion because they thought it was boppin’. Please forgive our attempt at poetry. Regardless, Hopin spent $250 million for StreamYard, a livestreaming technology platform that it intends to operate independently. The combined company has around $65 million in annual recurring revenue, with the purchased entity bringing $30 million of that on its own. A big deal.Twitter is also out in the market with a checkbook, picking up a podcasting app and a design studio.And on the podcast front, Amazon is also in the market. This brings up the question, what really is Amazon Prime, anyways?Finally, we had few words on why P&G backing off from buying Billie impacts DTC startups everywhere. 

As you can tell by our laughs and jokes this week, it is really good to be back. Enjoy the show, and don’t forget the Saturday extra!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

What a week. Democracy is still standing and the nation is getting back to work, so let’s press forward, even if it does feel surreal to cover business news after witnessing a live-streamed coup attempt.

Setting aside the tectonic political moment, there’s plenty of activity inside the world of startups we need to discuss.

The pace at which new unicorns are being announced feels incredibly rapid, possibly implying that private-market investors anticipate exit valuations will remain high, and that a venture market that tilted late-stage will continue its bias in this new year.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Regular readers will recall that as 2020 wrapped up, we noted that “new unicorn formation continue[d] to impress.” That late-2020 trend is becoming a 2021 narrative.

For context, 17 unicorns were minted in the United States during Q3 2020. We don’t have Q4 numbers yet, but should inside the next week or so. There were more than 200 unexited unicorns in the United States as the fourth quarter kicked off last year.

We’re at four new domestic unicorns in the first week of Q1 2020, along with at least one more from other shores.

Keep in mind that announcement of private-market rounds lag their actual closing, so the deals we’re discussing were likely closed in Q4 2020, not Q1 2021.

Which startups reached the $1 billion threshold required to earn the unicorn tag? The list is long, but Divvy, Hinge Health, Salesloft, Starburst Data and Mambu seem to fit the bill. Lacework and iboss are possibles, along with Ikena Oncology and Senti Biosciences.

Let’s take a look at the rounds to see if we can spot any correlations amidst the data.

New-nicorns

Divvy raised earlier this week, putting together a $165 million round that valued the Utah-based company at $1.6 billion. That was up more than twice its preceding private valuation of around $700 million.

Roblox is now one of the world’s most valuable private companies in the world after a monster Series H raise brings the social gaming platform a stratospheric $29.5 billion valuation. The company won’t be private for long, though.

The $520 million raise led by Altimeter Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group is a significant cash influx for Roblox, which had previously raised just over $335 million from investors according to Crunchbase. The Investment Group of Santa Barbara, Warner Music Group, and a number of current investors, also participated in this round.

In February of 2020, the company closed a $150 million Series G led by Andreessen Horowitz which valued the company at $4 billion.

The gaming startup had initially planned an IPO in 2020, but after the major first-day pops of DoorDash and Airbnb, the company leadership reconsidered their timeline, according to a report in Axios. Those major day-one share price pops left significant money on the table for the companies selling those shares, an outcome Roblox is likely looking to avoid. Today, the company also announced that it plans to enter the public markets via a direct listing.

Roblox’s 7x valuation multiple signals just how feverish public and private markets are for tech stocks. The valuation also highlights how investors foresee the company benefiting from pandemic trends which pushed more users online and toward social gaming platforms. In a 2019 prospectus, the company shared that it had 17.6 million users, now Roblox claims to have 31 million daily active users on its platform.

Cable or fiber. For the vast majority of American homes, there’s no choice of how customers get their internet access. If you’re lucky to live in some dense urban areas with amenable landlords, that “or” might become an “and.” Yet, as more and more people rely on the internet for more than just cat photos (and after recent events, maybe rely on cat photos as well for sustenance), it seems obvious the market needs more choice and competition.

Utah-based WeLink wants to be that alternative. Taking advantage of advances in 5G in the millimeter spectrum as well as rapidly declining hardware costs, the startup is pioneering a mesh network of wireless base stations that can transmit high-bandwidth signals across entire neighborhoods at relatively cheap infrastructure installation costs.

It’s a paradigm that caught the eye of investors, with Digital Alpha Advisors, a longtime telecom VC with close ties to Cisco, investing $185 million into the company in equity as well as a debt facility in exchange for revenue share (sort of the hardware version of SaaS securitization). It dubbed the latter an “outcome-based financial structure.” Rick Shrotri and Neil Sheridan from Digital Alpha will join WeLink’s board.

The startup was founded by CEO Kevin Ross and CTO Ahsan Naim in 2018. Ross had been interested in wireless internet since 2005, but the technology was early — and very expensive. “I was 20 years ahead of my time or [maybe] 15 years, and so it was an exercise in frustration waiting for the technology to actually commercialize,” Ross said. He built one company in the space, eventually selling it to Vivint, a smart home company that was owned by Blackstone and which went through a reverse merger with a SoftBank unit last year for $6.5 billion. The buyer at Vivint was Luke Langford, who left to work on another startup called Lucid Software before joining WeLink more recently as president and COO.

Now, wireless internet has been a story many of us have followed for more than a decade, with few notable success stories. Ross is convinced though that the combination of reliable millimeter-wave 5G (at around 60-70 Ghz) plus dramatically cheaper hardware costs has finally opened the door to high-quality wireless internet for the first time. (It’s probably good to note that TechCrunch is editorially independent from our ultimate parent company Verizon, which obviously has a fiber customer or two.)

WeLink’s technology uses a mesh architecture, which means that signals can be bounced between different base stations as necessary throughout a neighborhood in order to reach a “point of presence” station with a fiber connection. For the typical single-family home installation, a small base station (Ross says about four inches by four inches) is installed on the roof “similar to a satellite dish” and a single cable is run down to connect to the home’s router or Wi-Fi station.

Ross says that WeLink doesn’t need a lot of density to reach ubiquity. “We don’t need much — a couple of percentage points in a neighborhood of take rate … and that actually ends up giving us blanket coverage. What happens is we will typically get north of 5% very quickly.” Once a neighborhood has an ever higher rate of, say, 10%, “There’s so much redundancy there,” Ross said. The company says it offers “Up to 940 Mbps Download/Upload,” although of course, your mileage will vary in reality. That bandwidth is symmetrical unlike cable internet, which should be good for video broadcasting and large file uploads in this remote-work world.

He also noted that the company doesn’t need a lot of approvals from cities in order to launch, which has historically been a large barrier to new internet connectivity startups. “There’s no permitting required other than at our fiber points of presence where we’re broadcasting from, but those are minimal.”

WeLink’s first launch neighborhoods are in Henderson, Nevada outside Las Vegas, and the company is expanding into Arizona with installations in Tucson and Phoenix. The company intends to expand to 10 markets in the coming years. Ideal markets tend to be suburban neighborhoods and subdivisions where there is enough density to make the mesh network work but with a built environment that doesn’t prevent line-of-sight between antennas. “We’re kind of primarily focused on bedroom communities, the doughnut around the urban core in big cities,” Ross said.

Pricing is $80 per month on a month-to-month plan, and $70 per month with a two-year contract. After two years, the price drops $10 per month in what Ross described as a “loyalty discount.”

On the investment side, Langford the COO noted Digital Alpha Advisors’ Cisco connections as a key consideration for the company. “There is an affiliation with Cisco, and being an internet service provider, it’s nice to be able to punch above our own weight as a startup and still have dialogue with the leaders in networking technology, so certainly that was something that was attractive to us,” he said. “They were comfortable with a business that has atoms, not just bits.” As for the debt model, Langford said that “There’s some advantages to not having as much dilution … but also have capital to make sure that we can go add customers.”

Obviously there are other internet wireless startups out there, the most prominent these days given its backer being satellite-based ISP Starlink. Ross noted that he doesn’t really see the company as a competitor, since WeLink’s bandwidth is significantly higher and more reliable given its 5G mesh architecture. He sees Starlink competing much more heavily for the rural market, where many other internet connectivity technologies like cable and fiber are less viable.

It’s a lot of venture money, a serious bet in the 5G space, and hopefully for families fighting on Zoom for pixels, an opportunity to get more competition for high-bandwidth internet.

Mandy Price was already a highly successful lawyer in private practice before she took the jump into entrepreneurship alongside two co-founders to launch Kanarys a little over one year ago.

The Harvard Law School graduate didn’t have to start her company, which helps businesses measure the efficacy of their diversity and inclusion efforts using hard data, but she needed to start the company.

Now, a year after its launch, the company counts companies like Yum Brands, the Dallas Mavericks and Neiman Marcus among the dozen or so companies using its service, and has $3 million in seed funding to help it expand.

For Price, the drive to launch Kanarys came from her own experiences working in law. It wasn’t the microagressions, or the lower pay, or casually dismissive attitude of colleagues toward her well-earned success that led Price to start Kanarys, but the knowledge that her experience wasn’t unique and that thousands of other women and minorities faced the same experiences daily.

“I have had many things happen to me in the workplace that is similar to what many other women and women of color have dealt with, and didn’t want to have my children have to go through similar issues,” Price said. 

So alongside her husband, Bennie King (himself a serial entrepreneur in the Dallas area), and her University of Texas at Austin and Harvard classmate, Star Carter, Price launched Kanarys in late 2019.

The company uses Equal Employment Opportunity reports and assessments of various policies involving promotion, recruitment and benefits to track how a company is performing in relation to its industry peers.

“A lot of the inequities we see are from a structural and systemic standpoint. That is where Kanarys can see how they’re perpetuating inequity,” Price said. 

Kanarys starts with an independent assessment of a company’s policies and practices and then conducts quarterly surveys with employees of its customers to see how well they are meeting their stated goals and objectives. They also integrate with existing human resources systems to track things like pay equity and promotions.

The service has attracted the attention of the Rise of the Rest fund, Morgan Stanley, Jigsaw Ventures, Segal Ventures and Zeal Capital Partners, which led the company’s $3 million seed round.

“Organizations have typically tried to address this with individual interventions,” said Price. “What we’re saying is we have to address it on both fronts. So much of the inequities that we see are based off of institutional and systemic policies and practices.”

Not only does Kanarys track information on diversity and inclusion efforts for customers, but for job seekers there’s a database of about 1,000 companies which operates like Glassdoor. The focus is not just on worker satisfaction, but on how employees view the diversity efforts their employers are undertaking.

Notably, Kanarys founders join the (far-too-few) ranks of Black entrepreneurs launching businesses and raising venture capital. In 2017, studies showed that 98% of venture capital raised in the U.S. went to men, according to data provided by the company. Black entrepreneurs in general receive less than 1 % of venture capital, and Black women founders make up only 0.6% of venture capital funding raised. 

“We know that a focus on DEI in business is not just the right thing to do for employees, it also makes good business sense,” said Price, CEO and co-founder of Kanarys, in a statement. “Kanarys’ DEI data arms companies, for the first time, to make precise, immediate, and informed decisions using real, intersectional metrics around their diversity goals and inclusion programs that ultimately drive bottom-line business objectives.”

 

This morning Gtmhub, a multinational startup that builds software to help other companies manage their corporate planning, announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B. The round was led by Insight, and included both participation from new investor Singular and prior investors LauncHub and CRV.

Gtmhub raised capital around 13 months ago, a $9 million Series A. At the time, the new capital was larger than the aggregate of its preceding funding efforts. The startup’s new funding round, like its 2019 Series A, towers above its prior fundraising totals in a similar manner.

How has Gtmhub managed to raise so much money? In a word, growth.

TechCrunch reported at the time of its Series A that Gtmhub had managed 400% growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) heading into the round, on a year-over-year basis. Similar levels of topline expansion have continued, with Gtmhub COO Seth Elliott telling TechCrunch that the company grew its ARR by a multiple of three last year (measured December 2019 through December 2020).

Around the time Gtmhub raised in 2019, a number of other startups focused on the same software market raised as well, leading to TechCrunch asking “why is everyone making OKR software?”

The acronym OKR translates to “objectives and key results,” a planning method that has become popular among American technology firms, and, according to Elliott, is becoming more popular internationally and among non-technology companies.

The startup executive also told TechCrunch that he sees Gtmhub growing alongside two business trends. The first, the rise of OKRs themselves, is a wave that his company is riding, he told TechCrunch. The second, one that he thinks his startup is leading, deals with large companies pursuing corporate transformations to boost their agility; those firms are adopting Gtmhub, he said, which can help them execute their digital transformation, or similar efforts, successfully.

It’s not a big surprise that large companies looking to rejuvenate their operations might want a new planning method to help keep their staff pointing in the same direction, and Gtmhub has long had an enterprise bent.

That enterprise focus performed well for the company last year, we learned. TechCrunch asked the company for updates on its annual contract value (ACV) results and gross margin levels during our discussion of its new round. In 2019, at the time of its Series A, the company said that it had grown its ACV by 650% in the preceding year. The COO told TechCrunch that that figure rose by a factor of 10 in 2020, implying success in selling to large companies. And, Elliott added, the total number of paying users of the service also rose by a factor of 10 during the year.

The company’s gross margins held up to their roughly 90% levels set in 2019, it said.

Given those results, it’s not a surprise that Gtmhub was able to raise another round more quickly than the startup-standard 18-month timeline would have had us estimate.

The round came together quickly. According to Elliott, Gtmhub started to chat with investors outside of a formal process in early November, kicking off a more serious effort to raise capital by the end of that month. The round was closed as 2020 concluded.

It will be interesting to see if other startups working on the software category that also raised money around a year ago will also now raise more capital. The names on our watch list regarding that question include WorkBoard and Ally. There are other players in the space as well, like Perdoo, that we’d love to hear from when it comes to their own 2020 growth.

Gtmhub declined to share its 2021 growth plans with TechCrunch.

The larger lesson from this round is that even inside of a software niche that you might have dismissed as overly narrow — namely OKR-focused software — is in fact large enough to support a handful of high-growth startups. That applies broadly, and underscores a little of the pace of the venture and startup industries in the last few quarters.

 

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Envisics founder and CEO Dr. Jamieson Christmas launched the startup three years ago to “revolutionize” the in-car experience with its holographic technology. Now, it has a partner that could help it achieve that mission.

The U.K.-based holographic technology startup said Friday it reached an agreement with Panasonic Automotive Systems to jointly develop and commercialize a new generation of head-up displays for cars, trucks and SUVs. Panasonic Automotive Systems is a Tier 1 automotive supplier and a division of Panasonic Corporation of North America. The head-up displays are units integrated in the dash of a vehicle that project images onto the windshield to aid drivers with navigation and provide other alerts. The Panasonic HUDs, as they’re often called, will use Envisics holographic technology.

The deal, announced ahead of the virtual 2021 CES tech trade show, follows Envisics’ $50 million Series B funding round and news that its tech will be integrated in the upcoming Cadillac Lyriq electric vehicle. The funding round, which brought Envisics a valuation of more than $250 million, included investments from Hyundai Mobis, GM Ventures, SAIC Ventures and Van Tuyl Companies.

Envisics’ technology, the foundation of which came out of Christmas’ PhD studies at Cambridge University more than 15 years ago, electronically manipulates the speed of light. This process enables images to appear three-dimensional, Christmas explained in a recent interview. The company has secured more than 250 patents and has another 160 pending certification.

The company is solely focused upon the automotive application of holography, Christmas said, adding that its first generation is already integrated in more than 150,000 Jaguar Land Rover vehicles.

Christmas said this new agreement aims to combine Panasonic’s expertise in optical design and its global reach as a Tier 1 supplier with Envisics’ technology to bring holography into the mainstream. Mass production of vehicles using its technology is slated for 2023, according to the companies.

“This is very much about part of our business plan, you know the Series B funding round we undertook was about scaling the business and enabling us to move forward as we enter the market,” Christmas said. “Part of that was a commitment to engage in partnerships with Tier ones that we can then work with to deliver these products to market.

“This is the first of those agreements,” he added, suggesting that Envisics has a much larger aim.

What that means, Christmas said, will be head-up displays with high resolution, wide color gamut and large images that can be overlaid upon reality. The technology can also project information at multiple distances simultaneously.

“That really unlocks very interesting applications,” he said. “In the short term, it will be kind of relatively simple augmented reality applications like navigation, highlighting the lane you’re supposed to be in and some safety applications. But as you look forward into things like autonomous driving it unlocks a whole realm of other opportunities like entertainment and video conferencing.”

He added that it could even be used for night vision applications such as overlaying enhanced information upon a dark road to make it clear where the road is going and what obstacles might be out there.