Blizzard announced today that Diablo II: Resurrected will have a technical alpha test from April 9 to April 12.Read More

Netmarble has launched NBA Ball Stars, a free-to-play puzzle-based mobile basketball game developed by Kung Fu Factory.Read More

I sort of took a Q1 Vacation last week.

2021 didn’t really feel like it started for me until January 21st. Yeah, I took a company public on January 4th, but then January 6th happened. It was a cold, dark, and anxious stretch where January felt like it had about 51 days in it. Then I was deep in SPACland and lots of deals and financings. I definitely had some “I just need to get to March 26th, and then I get a break” in my head.

We got back to Boulder on a Friday, settled into our house on Saturday, and I sort of kind of tried to disconnect (but failed) on Sunday. Monday, I had a full day of work, and a couple of things had landed on Wednesday, so I decided “fuck it” and just worked Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before going dark from Thursday to Sunday.

It is delicious to be back in Boulder. The weather is perfect, the birds are singing, and our meadowlark is back in our meadow, chirping away. We missed Cooper (we don’t take him to Aspen), so it has been a fun adjustment to get used to him again (and for him to get used to us.)

I had a monster week of running – mostly on trails. 65 miles with almost 4,300 ft of elevation. That’s the most I’ve done in a long time, and my body absorbed it pretty well.

When I wasn’t running, napping, or eating, I read. A lot. And there are some themes in what I’ve been reading.

Lighten Up!: A Complete Handbook for Light and Ultralight Backpacking: I knew of ultralight backpacking (and have heard the phrase a bunch recently in marketing stuff), but I didn’t really know the parameters or the style. This was a great intro.

Allen & Mike’s Really Cool Backpackin’ Book: Traveling & camping skills for a wilderness environment: Recommended by the previous book. Some new stuff, some repetition. Some ultralight. Some normal backpacking.

Ultralight Backpackin’ Tips: 153 Amazing & Inexpensive Tips for Extremely Lightweight Camping: Again recommended by the first book. I fell into the Kindle content market trap and clicked on links. Mostly repetitive, but good reinforcement on a few things.

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century: Jeff Lawson and Twilio are awesome. This book is phenomenal, both as the story of Twilio with the underpinning of Jeff’s management philosophy. If you ever use the Marc Andreessen phrase “software is eating the world,” but you haven’t read this book, go read it to understand what the phrase really means. I’m going to host Jeff for two book events: one with Techstars and one with our portfolio. Yes, every entrepreneur and would-be entrepreneur should read this book.

Guantánamo Diary: Now published as The Mauritanian. Amy and I watched the movie a few weeks ago in Aspen when it came out. It was powerful. The book was even more powerful. I wish Guantanamo never existed – it’s a massive negative on American values. I wish Obama had followed through on closing it down. I hope Biden closes it down. If you disagree with me, read the book.

Lost in Startuplandia: Wayfinding for the Weary Entrepreneur: I recently did a talk for a class Ted Zoller teaches at UNC, and he recommended this book. I had it on my Kindle but had never read it. It was a fun memoir-like story of Keller Fitzsimmons’ entrepreneurial journey. Having read hundreds of these by men, I always learn a lot more now when I read one by a woman. It’s excellent.

Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet: Another one that had been lingering on my Kindle since 2017. Another recommendation. Hilarious, awesome, fun, and inspiring. I guessed that Seal was David Goggins pretty early on based on what I knew of Goggins. But I had no idea who Jesse Itzler was (now I do.) So, the next book I read was …

Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds: Goggins is an epic specimen of a human. But I didn’t really know his story beyond his ultrarunning. It’s an incredible story at many levels. It’s not as fun as Itzler’s book but still awesome and much more inspiring. And it led me to read Itzler’s other book …

Living with the Monks: What Turning Off My Phone Taught Me about Happiness, Gratitude, and Focus: Still funny (Itzler is hilarious and writes well about his own hilarity), somewhat inspiring, but lots of fun. Not as powerful as Living with a SEAL, but now I know Itzler even better.

The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth Book 3): I listened to N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy on Audible while I’ve been running. This series deserves its own blog post and will get that at some point. I think Jemisin may have moved to the top of my contemporary sci-fi writer list. I realized all I was reading were books by white men, so I found a few non-white women sci-fi writers. Jemisin is a world builder at the level of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson and may even be better than them at this point. It was an incredible series.

Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The rise and fall of Sierra On-Line: I still remember playing Mystery House on my Apple ][ and being blown away. I spent hours and hours playing Ultima. I felt naughty when I bought Softporn as a teenager, even though the game wasn’t really porn (or even very salacious.) I didn’t know Roberta and Ken Williams, but as an early Apple ][ aficionado, I bought or pirated everything Sierra On-Line did when I was a teenager. And played them all. Choplifter and Olympic Decathlon got more playtime, but Sierra On-Line had a special place in my heart. I loved this book – Ken Williams doesn’t pull any punches anywhere about Sierra On-Line’s rise and fall. It’s a great entrepreneurial software tale from the 1980s and 1990s.

Too Old to Ultra: When a marathon is just not enough: A quick jolt of inspiration from a bunch of storytelling and some advice from a serious ultrarunner who is older than me.

I wish I’d really taken the beginning of last week off. I feel fresher, but after a very busy Q1, I didn’t get the full vacation I needed. Oh well – such is life. At least it’s springtime.

The post Partial Q1 Vacation – Books and Running appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Following the acquisition by Twilio, Segment is focused on a building the next generation of customer data management tools.Read More

Pllay has raised $1 million in funding for its skill-based video game wagering platform, enabling gamers to wager on duels.Read More

Former Akamai CSO Andy Ellis will advise security startups on product roadmap, go-to-market strategy, and customer acquisition at YL Ventures.Read More

Charles, a Berlin-based startup that offers a “conversational-commerce” SaaS for businesses that want to sell on WhatsApp and other chat apps, has raised €6.4 million in funding.

Led by Accel and HV Capital, the seed funding will be used by the company to scale and meet existing demand for its conversational commerce platform.

Launched in 2020 by Artjem Weissbeck and Andreas Tussing after the pair had run a year-long experiment running a store in WhatsApp, Charles enables businesses to sell products and services via WhatsApp and other chat apps in order to “increase conversion rate, customer loyalty and ultimately revenue”.

The SaaS connects chat app APIs, such as WhatsApp and Messenger, with shop and CRM systems, like Shopify, SAP and HubSpot, all delivered through a user-friendly interface. The idea is to make it easier for businesses to meet their customers on the channels they already use and to bridge the gap between sales enquiries and support, and actual conversions.

” ‘Traffic’ and with it ‘conversion’ will exponentially move from the streets (retail) and the browser/native apps into chat apps,” says Weissbeck. “Thereby, conversational commerce will be the third big pillar of commerce, gluing together all channels and unlocking the full potential of personalization via the unique identification of customers via their phone number”.

This transition, argues the Charles founder, creates “tremendous challenges and opportunities” for companies in terms of customer journey design and the tech stack, which to date — Asia, aside — has been predominantly tailored around webshops and e-mail.

“Ultimately our technology provides the operating system for companies to master this challenge,” adds Tussing. “The core of our software integrates chat apps with shop/CRM backends in an intuitive interface that puts the human chat sales agent in the center, supported by chatbots and AI”.

Luca Bocchio, partner at Accel, says that conversational commerce is emerging as a “critical channel for brands,” and is a trend that will reshape the way brands interact with customers. [This is] paving the way for potential new category-defining tools to emerge,” he says, noting that Charles has the potential to be one of those tools.

“When we talk to potential clients it’s mostly existing customer service tools like Zendesk who are starting to add chat apps as an additional channel,” says Weissbeck, when asked to cite direct competitors. “These tools are usually built upon a ‘ticketing’ logic, optimized to solve customer inquiries as quickly as possible and with a clear focus on service cases, not sales”.

In contrast, Weissbeck says Charles is built upon a “feed” logic, showing customer interaction as an ongoing conversation and end-to-end relationship — in the same way as the customer sees it.

“Further we deeply integrate into shop/CRM-backends to make it easy for agents to sell product and create carts or contracts — all in a very design-driven and intuitive interface, that is fun to use for the agent and puts her/him in the center,” says Tussing. “Supported by chatbots, not replaced”.

Meanwhile, the revenue model is simple enough: Businesses pay a monthly base fee to cover Charles’ fixed costs and on top of this the startup earns money on conversions. “We take a small share of the net sales, ensuring we are co-incentivised,” explains Weissbeck.

AI models not only take time to build and train, but also to deploy in an organization’s workflow. That’s where MLOps (machine learning operations) companies come in, helping clients scale their AI technology. InfuseAI, a MLOps startup based in Taiwan, announced today it has raised a $4.3 million Series A, led by original design manufacturer Wistron Corporation, with participation from Hive Ventures, Top Taiwan Venture Capital Group and Silicon Valley Taiwan Investments.

Founded in 2018, InfuseAI says the market for MLOps solutions is worth $30 million a year in Taiwan, with the global market expected to reach about $4 billion by 2025, according to research firm Cognilytica. Its clients include E.SUN, one of Taiwan’s largest banks, SinoPac Holdings and Chimei.

InfuseAI helps companies deploy and manage machine learning models with turnkey solutions like PrimeHub, a platform that includes a model training environment, cloud or on-premise cluster computing (including container orchestration with Kubernetes) and collaboration tools for teams. Another product, called PrimeHub Deploy, lets clients train, deploy, update and monitor AI models.

In a press statement, Hive Ventures founder and managing partner Yan Lee said, “As enterprises from manufacturing, healthcare, finance and other sectors seek to scale their AI operations and model deployments, they will require a platform like InfuseAI to allow seamless collaboration between developers and data scientists. InfuseAI fits perfectly into our investment thesis which is focused on platforms and software in the enterprise adoption cycle.”

Glints, the Singapore-based career platform, announced today it has raised $22.5 million in Series C funding led by Japanese human resources management firm PERSOL Holdings. The new capital will be used on Glints’ expansion in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Taiwan and hiring for its product and engineering teams.

Glints co-founder and chief executive officer Oswald Yeo said this is the largest funding round to date for a talent platform in Southeast Asia, and brings the startup’s total raised to $33 million. Other participants included returning investors Monk’s Hill Ventures, Fresco Capital, Mindworks Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and former Goldman Sachs TMT China head and partner Xiaoyin Zhang.

Founded in 2013, Glints says it has been used by more than 1.5 million professionals and 30,000 organizations, including Gojek, Tokopedia, Starbucks and Mediacorp. Most of its current users are from the tech and financial services sectors, but Glints has a “broad horizontal focus on young to mid-level professionals,” and its long-term goal is to be sector agnostic, Yeo told TechCrunch.

One of the ways Glints differentiates from other job platforms active in its markets, like LinkedIn, JobStreet and CakeResume, is by building a “full-stack” of services for people who want to advance their careers. In addition to its job marketplace, which the company says has more than 7,000 active listings and 4 million visitors each month, Glints also offers community features and skills education, like online classes.

One of Glints’ value propositions is helping companies, especially in tech, cope with the regional talent shortage, a topic it recently covered in a comprehensive report with Monk’s Hill Ventures.

One of the solutions the report highlighted is hiring teams based in different Southeast Asian countries to address talent crunches in specific markets, like Singapore. Glints says its cross-border remote work hub, TalentHub, doubled its business in 2020 as the pandemic also made employers more open to hiring remotely.

Hipmunk’s founders are building a successor to their now-defunct flight search service.

The startup was acquired by SAP-owned travel and expense platform Concur in 2016, and its CEO Adam Goldstein departed in 2018. But Goldstein told me he and his co-founder Steve Huffman (also co-founder and CEO of Reddit) were still disappointed when Concur shut the service down at the beginning of last year.

“Over the years, there were millions and millions of people who used it and loved it,” Goldstein said. (I was one of those people — even before I knew what he was working on, I started out our call by telling Goldstein how much I miss Hipmunk.)

So the pair seed funded a project called Flight Penguin, with Goldstein serving as the new company’s chairman. And he said the actual product was built by former Hipmunk developer Sheri Zada.

The Flight Penguin interface will be very familiar to old Hipmunk users, with a visual layout that makes it easy to see the timing of flights and length of layovers. And just as Hipmunk allowed users to organize results by “agony” (so that the top results aren’t just cheap flights with inconvenient timing or ridiculous layovers), Flight Penguin allows them to sort their flights by “pain.”

But this isn’t just the old experience with a fresh coat of paint — it’s also meant to improve on Hipmunk in a few key ways. For one thing, it allows users to search by Chase Ultimate Rewards Points (as well as U.S. dollars, with the goal of adding more currencies and rewards programs in the future).

And the product itself is a Google Chrome extension, rather than a traditional flight search website. The extension actually presents a full, standalone web experience (rather than an overlay on another website), but Goldstein said this approach is still important, because it allows Flight Penguin to pull its data “through the frontend instead of the backend,” giving it the most up-to-date information. This helps to avoid situations where a flight or price shows up in search results but isn’t available on the airline’s or other seller’s website.

In addition, Goldstein said Flight Penguin will show “all the flights.” In other words, it won’t be making any deals with the airlines to hide certain flights or prices, and it will also show airlines that don’t normally make their flights available on other search platforms.

“There are actually many, many flights available but consumers don’t see them because travel search sites work out these deals,” he said. “We’re choosing not to play that game.”

That has the obvious benefit of offering more comprehensive results, but also the disadvantage that Flight Penguin will not be able to collect affiliate fees for flight purchases. Instead, after a 30-day trial period, it will charge users $10 per month. (This is an introductory fee and will likely change in the future.)

Goldstein acknowledged that this is probably “not going to be a mainstream product that 50 million Americans use,” but he’s hoping that it can attract a significant subscriber base of frequent travelers who “value their time and care about the flight booking experience.”

“What we learned from Hipmunk was […] the way business has traditionally been done in online travel worked for consumers in an era with lots of competition between airlines and travel agencies,” he added. “In a world where there’s much less competition, you’re basically becoming an agent for the people you’re working with, and it’s hard to build a business model around providing a great user experience. That’s why we’re saying that we’re going to opt out of this game and play by our own rules.”

Flight Penguin is currently accepting signups for its waitlist, but Goldstein said the company is simply using this to bring users on-board in a controlled fashion, and that it plans to move people off the wait list pretty quickly.

Clubhouse, a one-year-old social audio app reportedly valued at $1 billion, will now allow users to send money to their favorite creators — or speakers — on the platform. In a blog post, the startup announced the new monetization feature, Clubhouse Payments, as the “the first of many features that allow creators to get paid directly on Clubhouse.”

Clubhouse declined to comment. Paul Davison, the co-founder of Clubhouse, mentioned in the company’s latest town hall that the startup wants to focus on direct monetization on creators, instead of advertisements.

Here’s how it will work: A user can send a payment in Clubhouse by going to the profile of the creator to whom they want to give money. If the creator has the feature enabled, the user will be able to tap “Send Money” and enter an amount. It’s like a virtual tip jar, or a Clubhouse-branded version of Venmo (although the payments feature doesn’t currently let the user send a personalized message along with the money).

“100% of the payment will go to the creator. The person sending the money will also be charged a small card processing fee, which will go directly to our payment processing partner, Stripe,” the post reads. “Clubhouse will take nothing.”

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison tweeted shortly after the blog post went up that “It’s cool to see a new social platform focus first on participant income rather than internalized monetization / advertising.”

When the startup raised a Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz in January, part of the reported $100 million funding was said to go to a creator grant program. The program would be used to “support emerging Clubhouse creators,” according to a blog post. It’s unclear how they define emerging, but cultivating influencers (and rewarding them with money) is one way the startup is promoting high-quality content on its platform.

The synergies here are obvious. A Clubhouse creator can now get tips for a great show, or raise money for a great cause, while also being rewarded by the platform itself for being a recurring host.

The fact that Clubhouse’s first attempt at monetization includes no percentage cut of its own is certainly noteworthy. Monetization, or Clubhouse’s lack thereof, has been a topic of discussion about the buzzy startup since it took off in the early pandemic months. While it currently relies on venture capital to keep the wheels churning, it will need to make money eventually in order to be a self-sustaining business.

Creator monetization, with a cut for the platform, has led to the growth of large businesses. Cameo, a startup that sends personalized messages from creators and celebrities, takes about a 25% cut of each video sold on its platform. The startup reached unicorn status last week with a $100 million raise. OnlyFans, another platform that helps creators directly raise money from fans in exchange for paywalled contact, is projecting $1 billion in revenue for 2021.

Clubhouse’s payments feature will first be tested by a “small test group” starting today, but it is unclear who is in this group. Eventually, the payments feature will be rolled out to other users in waves.

The following is a guest post by Joe Uddeme the founder of Name Experts. Joe started the company 12 years ago and specializes in complex domain, purchases and sales. I’m a client of Joe and have used him for a number of domain purchases -- but am otherwise not affiliated. I do not make any money should you use Joe’s company. I just found his expertise useful so I am sharing it with the OnStartups community. -Dharmesh

Finding a domain name for a startup is tricky. Particularly with the scarcity of quality domain names that are available these days.If you spend extra time brainstorming the perfect domain name, you may achieve better brand positioning and credibility to keep you way ahead of your competitors, right off the bat.

Of course, it’s much easier said than done. It's often frustrating and takes a tremendous amount of effort. This article will guide you in the right direction and have you closer to that perfect domain name.

Finding a Great Startup Domain Name

Choose a Specific Name

Tools to use when searching for a domain name

Most Brands Stick With .COM

Buying a Premium Domain is an Option

Ideally, a business name and domain name should match. By doing so, a startup establishes a solid brand clients will remember. If the domain is taken, there are some steps you can follow by using a variation of the domain name or using a service that may help you buy the domain (discussed later).

Here are some things to consider when looking for a domain name for your startup:

Sounds positive and upbeat- Avoid negative connotations and meanings. Fewer syllables are also better. Keep it simple - The easier the word is to spell, the better for consumers. Top of mind names are very important when scaling a business. Choose the right Top-Level-Domain for the brand. What is the intent and growth trajectory of the company? That can help determine the ideal URL for the brand positioning into the future. Do your research - After you come up with a name, look it up. Do a legal name search. Does it already exist? Is it trademarked? Are there similar companies or brands that currently trade under your intended brand name?

General words or phrases work okay at times, but specificity is going to be your partner in success. A general name's pitfall is that no real sense of identity is formed, as it's just way too vague.

Not only that, but you'll be competing with literally all the top contenders in that niche when clients are searching. Do a few searches on Google to see what results appear. Make sure there are no competing brands that will make it difficult for your business name to rank on top of the results.

As a startup, you often can't compete, nor are you likely to have the resources to do so. By having a specific name, you can avoid this a lot more. Sure, there's still going to be competitors, but at least you won't be face to face with billion-dollar companies.

 

To guide you towards a more specific name, try to reflect your identity and what your product can do for people. Specificity still needs to sound comfortable and catchy.

Coming up with the perfect name is by no means easy. But, there are tools you can use to help with the search:

Leandomainsearch - A domain generator created by the same team that currently manages WordPress. It’s incredibly easy to use, and all you need is one “seed” word that defines your niche and your brand. Within seconds, thousands of domain suggestions will appear before you. The best part: all the generated names are available for use. Domize - This tool tells you whether your domain name idea has been taken. If the domain name is taken, the tool will tell you how long until the domain expires. For available domains, the site gives pricing estimates on how much it will cost to own them. Namestall - A domain generator with intensive customization options. Like Leandomainsearch, it's super easy, and all you have to do is enter a "seed" word. Pick whether you want the keyword to be at the end or the beginning, enable or disable hyphens, and choose a “word group”. These word groups are a unique feature that allows even more customization to your generated name. Examples of word groups include “1000 top keywords” and “500 popular 4-letter words”. They even have entirely different generators, ranging from rhyming to keyword domain generators. Wordoid - Ever wonder how companies come up with such catchy but somehow made-up words? Wordoid might be it. You can filter the quality, length, and even language of the generated phrases. Go to the filter, and under "pattern", input what phrase or word you want as the basis of the generated word. After the domains are generated, you can see if each one is available and purchase them directly if you wish to. DomainTyper - A reliant and secure way to easily find out if the domain you come up with is available or not. Just type the domain name, and real-time information on the availability of the name will appear. Both unavailable and available TLDs will appear, along with prices if applicable. Use this after you come up with a domain name to polish it up.

New Top Level Domain extensions (TLDs) have added many new options into the market. About six years ago, the Internet began to be flooded with new TLDs. The traditional extensions of .com, .net, and .org, .co, .info, and .biz were now competing with more than 1500 new extensions.

As more supply hit the market with new extensions like .Tattoo, .law and .club started to increase availability and added more registrations to their registries. Many brands began to see the overall importance and dominance of .com.

The .com TLD has existed for almost four decades and is ingrained in our culture and part of the global business dominance that drives the World's largest brands.

A .COM TLD is harder to find and can be more expensive, but your startup's success may significantly increase from using a .com. Users see .COM as the most reliable TLD, helping to build credibility and upside for your brand. Additionally, .COM is the leading TLD in global commerce, and most effective at appealing to the globally-diverse world of business.

A few additional notes: There are a few important notes about some of the legacy TLD’s.

The .io TLD may be considered for tech startups instead. It has gained traction and is becoming a favorite amongst tech enthusiasts. .ORG is a strong tld for health care and professional and non-profit organizations, .AI has grown in popularity with artificial intelligence.

Ultimately, the .COM is the king of commerce and should always be the top target of any emerging brand.

You come up with the perfect name, but it's already registered, or in use. Now what? Though settling for another TLD like .net or .co might sound like a good idea, it can get confused with the .com version. You may also run into trademark issues.

One important thing to do before investing money in the desired domain: Make sure it isn't trademarked. Trademarks can be tricky, and will sometimes require an attorney’s review before potentially spending considerable amounts of money on your domain name.

To test if your domain idea is already trademarked, you can go to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website and search the trademark database. If the domain is not trademarked and seems inactive or bought simply for reselling purposes, you may be able to buy the domain.

Attempting to buy the domain directly from the owner can be tricky. Domain brokers are experts in buying domains and can make the process stress-free and easy. Here are a few other benefits of using a domain broker:

Settle at a fair price - Startup owners are passionate about their businesses, and the domain owner may use this fact to inflate the price of the sale. With a domain broker, you stay completely anonymous, and the domain broker handles all negotiation, paperwork and escrow while coaching you through the entire process.  This guarantees a fair price that you may have difficulty negotiating yourself due to many underlying factors. Broker experience - Many brokers have worked in this field for years. With their  experience comes qualification and also relationships. Did you know that about 60/70 percent of the top, aftermarket domain names are owned by domain-Industry professionals? Reputable domain brokers often have long-standing relationships with the largest aftermarket domain owners in the world. This could help you tap into previously inaccessible domain names that would never appear on your radar. Handles the paperwork - An experienced broker will be able to help with all aspects of the transaction from beginning to end. This includes all the paperwork and coordination of the transaction. From soup-to-nuts. Escrow coordination and Speedy transfers between registrars. Remove Emotional Attachment and add a layer of security and expertise to keep things moving forward.

Premium domain names should be treated as such, and require an expert to help negotiate a fair market value for a domain name. In most instances, you only have one chance to secure the perfect domain name, and should take the necessary steps to secure the perfect domain name.

Coming up with the perfect name for your brand is far from easy, and you really have to dedicate a lot of time to it. But it's the centerpiece of your brand. Spent extra time now, and you'll reap the benefits later.

It appears that the slowdown in tech debuts is not a complete freeze; despite concerning news regarding the IPO pipeline, some deals are chugging ahead. This morning, we’re adding Alkami Technology to a list that includes Coinbase’s impending direct listing and Robinhood’s expected IPO.

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

We are playing catch-up, so let’s learn about Alkami and its software, dig into its backers and final private valuation, and pick apart its numbers before checking out its impending IPO valuation. After all, if Kaltura and others are going to hit the brakes, we must turn our attention to companies that are still putting the hammer down.

Frankly, we should have known about Alkami’s IPO sooner. One of a rising number of large tech companies based in nontraditional areas, the bank-focused software company is based in Texas, despite having roots in Oklahoma. The company raised $385.2 million during its life, per Crunchbase data. That sum includes a September 2020 round worth $140 million that valued the company at $1.44 billion on a post-money basis, PitchBook reports.

So, into the latest SEC filing from the software unicorn we go!

Alkami Technology

Alkami Technology is a software company that delivers its product to banks via the cloud, so it’s not a legacy player scraping together an IPO during boom times. Instead, it is the sort of company that we understand; it’s built on top of AWS and charges for its services on a recurring basis.

The company’s core market is all banks smaller than the largest, it appears, or what Alkami calls “community, regional and super-regional financial institutions.” Its service is a software layer that plugs into existing financial systems while also providing a number of user interface options.

In short, it takes a bank from its internal systems all the way to the end-user experience. Here’s how Alkami explained it in its S-1/A filing:

Simple enough!

Thanks to a warm welcome from Miami, our first City Spotlight was a big success. We met investors and entrepreneurs who are working on amazing things, and we were proud to share their personal stories on why Miami is the right city for them to live in and do business.

Join us on our next (virtual) field trip to Southeast Michigan. All lights will be shining on the Motor City.

Why Detroit? This is where StockX and Rivian call home, along with a growing stable of medical technology companies, fintech startups and security companies. The area is quickly transforming thanks to active investors, a low cost of living and access to amazing universities that have a long history of supporting entrepreneurs.

If you’re interested in what’s happening in Detroit in general, are seeking out a new up-and-coming city to live in or looking for cool companies and talented founders to invest in, then you’ll want to register and drop Thursday April 15 on your calendar.

Here’s just some of what you can expect:

Networking: It’s what you can always count on us for. Companies are started and deals get done at TechCrunch events (yes, even the virtual ones!).Panels: Meet the movers and shakers up close and personal. Hear about their journeys, ask them questions and find out what’s special to them about Detroit.Pitch-off: Detroit startups, submit your decks. Take part in our first Detroit pitch-off and be crowned champion.

We want to hear from everyone who lives in the birthplace of techno, and we’re looking to you for suggestions of folks who should be getting all of the attention we can throw at them on the 15th.

It’s going to be one to remember, and the perfect setup for the day we can once again do this all in-person.

Cora, a São Paulo-based technology-enabled lender to small and-medium-sized businesses, has raised $26.7 million in a Series A round led by Silicon Valley VC firm Ribbit Capital.

Kaszek Ventures, QED Investors and Greenoaks Capital also participated in the financing, which brings the startup’s total raised to $36.7 million since its 2019 inception. Kaszek led Cora’s $10 million seed round (believed at that time to be one of the largest seed investments in LatAm) in December 2019, with Ribbit then following.

Last year, Cora got its license approved from the Central Bank of Brazil, making it a 403 bank. The fintech then launched its product in October 2020 and has since grown to have about 60,000 customers and 110 employees.

Cora offers a variety of solutions, ranging from a digital checking account, Visa debit card and management tools such as an invoice manager and cashflow dashboard. With the checking account, customers have the ability to send and receive money, as well as pay bills, digitally.

This isn’t the first venture for Cora co-founders Igor Senra and Leo Mendes. The pair had worked together before — founding their first online payments company, MOIP, in 2005. That company sold to Germany’s WireCard in 2016 (with a 3 million-strong customer base), and after three years the founders were able to strike out again.

With Cora, the pair’s long-term goal is to “provide everything that a SMB will need in a bank.”

Looking ahead, the pair has the ambitious goal of being “the fastest growing neobank focused on SMBs in the world.” It plans to use the new capital to add new features and improve existing ones; on operations; and launching a portfolio of credit products.

In particular, Cora wants to go even deeper in certain segments, such as B2B professional services such as law and accounting firms, real estate brokerages and education.

Ribbit Capital partner Nikolay Kostov believes that Cora has embarked on “an ambitious mission” to change how small businesses in Brazil are able to access and experience banking.

“While the consumer banking experience has undergone a massive transformation thanks to new digital experiences over the last decade, this is, sadly, still not the case on the small business side,” he said.

For example, Kostov points out, opening a traditional small business bank account in Brazil takes weeks, “reels of paper, and often comes with low limits, poor service and antiquated digital interfaces.”

Meanwhile, the number of new small businesses in the country continues to grow.

“The combination of these factors makes Brazil an especially attractive market for Cora to launch in and disrupt,” Kostov told TechCrunch. “The Cora founding team is uniquely qualified and deeply attuned to the challenges of small businesses in the country, having spent their entire careers building digital products to serve their needs.”

Since Ribbit’s start in 2012, he added, LatAm has been a core focus geography for the firm “given the magnitude of challenges, and opportunities in the region to reinvent financial services and serve customers better.”

Ribbit has invested in 15 companies in the region and continues to look for more to back.

“We fully expect that several fintech companies born in the region will become global champions that serve to inspire other entrepreneurs across the globe,” Kostov said.

It has been a long winter. Really long. From my perspective, winter has been about 17 months, going back to November 2019. The Covid crisis started just as spring 2020 was beginning. As a result, winter continued through the spring, summer, and fall. And then, well, winter …

I took a half-week vacation last week. I planned for a Q1 vacation, but I had some stuff on Monday and some more stuff on Wednesday, so I just decided to start my vacation on Thursday. I went off the grid, had Amy drive me to Superior, and spent Thursday and Friday running in the mountains back to my house in Longmont. I did an easy run on Saturday and then drove to Waterton Canyon early Sunday and went for a long run there. Between runs, I read a bunch of books and napped.

Being outside on the trails cleared my head and let me completely reset. It’s beautiful in Colorado right now, and even though there continues to be a lot of trauma everywhere, I’m letting my paranoid optimist take over and embrace that we finally are once again in springtime, which is my favorite time of year.

The post Welcome to Spring appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here.

This morning we took a global look at the news, trying to take in the latest from around our little planet:

American stocks are set to rise as much of the world had the day off from trading; Indian stocks fell on the back of poor COVID-19 news.The biggest tech news was this bit of bad news from Facebook, if you are a fan of privacy. And the FT has data on the Chinese tech liquidity market that isn’t great news.Amazon is in trouble after it illegally retaliated against workers. And there’s more reporting on how low the company was willing to stoop to try to block union activity. Corporations, they’re always letting us down.And edtech giant Byju’s is buying an IRL tutoring service for a billion dollars.On the funding front, Meesho is now worth $2.1 billion thanks to SoftBank Vision Fund 2, while Cresta now has $50 million more in its own coffers.And we wrapped with a peek at the Alkami Technology IPO, which was good fun thanks to where the company was founded.

It’s going to be a blast of a week. Talk to you Wednesday!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!

Over the course of their careers, Alex Bovee and Paul Querna realized that while the use of SaaS apps and cloud infrastructure was exploding, the process to give employees permission to use them was not keeping up.

The pair led Zero Trust strategies and products at Okta, and could see the problem firsthand. For the unacquainted, Zero Trust is a security concept based on the premise that organizations should not automatically trust anything inside or outside its perimeters and, instead must verify anything and everything trying to connect to its systems before granting access.

Bovee and Querna realized that while more organizations were adopting Zero Trust strategies, they were not enacting privilege controls. This was resulting in delayed employee access to apps, or to the over-permissioning employees from day one.

Last summer, Bovee left Okta to be the first virtual entrepreneur-in-residence at VC firm Accel. There, he and Accel partner Ping Li got to talking and realized they both had an interest in addressing the challenge of granting permissions to users of cloud apps quicker and more securely.

Recalls Li: “It was actually kind of fortuitous. We were looking at this problem and I was like ‘Who can we talk to about the space?’ And we realized we had an expert in Alex.”

At that point, Bovee told Li he was actually thinking of starting a company to solve the problem. And so he did. Months later, Querna left Okta to join him in getting the startup off the ground. And today, ConductorOne announced that it raised $5 million in seed funding in a round led by Accel, with participation from Fuel Capital, Fathom Capital and Active Capital. 

ConductorOne plans to use its new capital to build what the company describes as “the first-ever identity orchestration and automation platform.” Its goal is to give IT and identity admins the ability to automate and delegate employee access to cloud apps and infrastructure, while preserving least-privilege permissions. 

“The crux of the problem is that you’ve got these identities — you’ve got employees and contractors on one side and then on the other side you’ve got all this SaaS infrastructure and they all have sort of infinite permutations of roles and permissions and what people can do within the context of those infrastructure environments,” Bovee said.

Companies of all sizes often have hundreds of apps and infrastructure providers they’re managing. It’s not unusual for an IT helpdesk queue to be more than 20% access requests, with people needing urgent access to resources like Salesforce, AWS or GitHub, according to Bovee. Yet each request is manually reviewed to make sure people get the right level of permissions. 

“But that access is never revoked, even if it’s unused,” Bovee said. “Without a central layer to orchestrate and automate authorization, it’s impossible to handle all the permissions, entitlements and on- and off-boarding, not to mention auditing and analytics.”

ConductorOne aims to build “the world’s best access request experience,” with automation at its core.

“Automation that solves privilege management and governance is the next major pillar of cloud identity,” Accel’s Li said.

Bovee and Querna have deep expertise in the space. Prior to Okta, Bovee led enterprise mobile security product development at Lookout. Querna was the co-founder and CTO of ScaleFT, which was acquired by Okta in 2018. He also led technology and strategy teams at Rackspace and Cloudkick, and is a vocal and active open-source software advocate.   

While the company’s headquarters are in Portland, Oregon, ConductorOne is a remote-first company with 10 employees.

“We’re deep in building the product right now, and just doing a lot of customer development to understand the problems deeply,” Bovee said. “Then we’ll focus on getting early customers.”

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