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Meet Singular, a new VC firm based in Paris that just finished raising its initial fund. The firm was founded by two former Alven partners — Raffi Kamber and Jérémy Uzan. They have some ambitious goals and an interesting investment model that could help them remain involved even during late-stage rounds. Overall, the firm raised €225 million, or $265 million at today’s exchange rate.

If you browse Singular’s website, you’re not going to find a lot of information. Here’s what it looked like last week before the team added a list of portolio companies:

The Singular team doesn’t want to be secretive. But they don’t like talking about themselves. That’s why you may have seen Singular’s name in a few articles I wrote over the past few months. But now it’s time to talk a bit about what the firm has in mind when it comes to startup investment.

Jérémy Uzan and Raffi Kamber spent 11 and 8 years at Alven. They’ve been behind some of the firm’s most successful investments, such as Dataiku and OpenClassrooms. “But every time you raise another fund, you sign up for a long time,” Uzan told me.

The duo left Alven quite naturally as they felt it was time in their careers to take their destiny in their own hands. There’s no hard feeling with their previous fund.

It was the right timing personally but also the right timing for the tech ecosystem. While Singular is based in Paris, the firm plans to build a true European VC firm with its headquarters in Paris. Singular doesn’t think London should be the center of gravity for European tech investment.

Singular started fundraising in late 2019 and early 2020. Kamber and Uzan didn’t know anything about raising a fund and didn’t work with an external financial firm to handle the fundraising effort.

When asked about the coronavirus pandemic and the impact on the process, they both said that the lockdown actually helped as everyone was stuck at home. Around two-thirds of the limited partners that invested in Singular are based outside of France.

“These are historic VC investors. They really believe in tech — and Europe too. They have seen that Europe has been taking off for the past two or three years,” Kamber told me.

Just like a startup, Singular wanted to be backed by some well-known investors. And some of those investors are injecting money in a French VC fund for the first time. Limited partners include a mix of pension funds, funds of funds, sovereign funds and family offices.

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Bpifrance, Vintage Investment Partners, Axa Venture Partners, Sofina, MACSF and Mubadala Capital are some of Singular’s backers. Unless you’ve raised a VC fund in the past, you may discover some of those names for the first time. And yet, these investors are significant. For instance, while you might not be familiar with the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, they have over $200 billion in net assets.

Singular started closing investment deals around October 2020. So far, the company has invested in six different startups:

A Series B round in Gtmhub, an OKR management serviceA Series B round in Indy, an accounting automation software suiteA Series A round in Soda, an enterprise-grade data monitoring platformA seed round in Moka.care, a mental health solution for employeesA seed round in Resilience, a full-stack software approach to improve cancer treatmentAnother undisclosed Series A round

It’s hard to find some common trends around this list of investments, but I’m going to help you. First, let’s start with the average check size.

“We are mostly focused on Series A/B because we think there’s a lot of room to grow at that stage,” Kamber said. And Singular can invest as much as €20 million in a single round ($23.6 million at today’s exchange rate).

When it comes to verticals, Singular openly says that it doesn’t want to focus on a specific area in particular. “We are a generalist fund and we are quite opportunistic,” Uzan said. Singular doesn’t want to choose between B2B and consumer, between AI and e-commerce, etc.

Where Singular stands out is that it has a unique approach to late-stage rounds. When a portfolio company reaches the Series C or Series D stage, Singular might not have enough money under management for infinite follow-on investments.

The VC firm didn’t want to raise its own late-stage fund. So Singular will be able to structure special-purpose investment vehicles with its limited partners. A few limited partners could put some money in this investment vehicle directly and the startup could accept to raise a new round with this new investment vehicle instead of a late-stage fund.

This way, Singular remains very much involved with the portfolio company in question. It could keep a board seat and have a say when it comes to the startup’s next phases.

It’s still too early to see how it would work in real life and it’s going to happen on a case-by-case basis. But the fact that Singular can offer that kind of investments is significant — it could be appealing for some entrepreneurs. You don’t have to accept it and you’re not tied with Singular forever, but the offer is on the table.

So that’s Singular — Eva Mayoud, Alexandre Flamant and Sonia Pélisson also joined the team. It’s not that often that a French VC firm starts from zero and raises a €225 million fund in a year. It’s going to be interesting to track the firm’s upcoming investments. In the meantime, here’s some TechCrunch coverage of Singular’s past deals:

Ajaib, the Indonesian investment app, has added $65 million to its Series A, bringing the round’s new total to $90 million. The extension was led by Ribbit Capital, the fintech investor that also led Robinhood’s $3.4 billion funding last month. Ajaib is Ribbit Capital’s first investment in Southeast Asia.

The extension will be used to expand Ajaib’s product development and engineering capabilities. The startup, which claims to run the fourth largest stock brokerage in Indonesia based on number of trades, announced the $25 million first closing of its Series A in January. Other participants included Y Combinator Continuity, ICONIQ Capital, Bangkok Bank PLC, and returning investors Horizons Ventures, SoftBank Ventures Asia, Alpha JWC and Insignia Ventures. David Velez and SG Lee, the founders of fintech startups Nubank and Toss respectively, also invested.

Ajaib was founded in 2019 by chief executive officer Anderson Sumarli and chief operating officer Yada Piyajomkwan. It is among a new crop of fintech startups that are focused on making stock investing more accessible to first-time investors. In Indonesia, less than 1% of the population own stocks, but that number is increasing, especially among millennials.

Other investment apps in Indonesia that have also raised funding recently include Pluang, Bibit and Bareksa. Ajaib’s founders told TechCrunch in January that it differentiates as a low-fee stock trading platform that also offers mutual funds for diversification.

In a press statement, Ribbit Capital managing partner Micky Malka said, “We are witnessing an unprecedented revolution in retail investing around the world. Ajaib is at the forefront of this revolution and is on their way to building the most trusted brand in the market. Their commitment to bring transparency and serve Indonesia’s millennial investors with the best products is at par with the best companies worldwide.”

One of the biggest pain points for startups and small businesses is keeping up with back office tasks such as bookkeeping and managing taxes.

QuickBooks, it seems, just doesn’t always cut it.

Three-time co-founders Waseem Daher, Jeff Arnold, and Jessica McKellar formed Pilot with the mission of affordably providing back office services to startups and SMBs. With over 1,000 customers, it has gained serious traction over the years. And Pilot has now also received validation from some big-name investors. On Friday, the company announced a $100 million Series C that doubles the company’s valuation to $1.2 billion.

Bezos Expeditions — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ personal investment fund — and Whale Rock Capital (a $10 billion hedge fund) co-led the round, which also included participation from Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Authentic Ventures and others. 

Stripe and Index Ventures co-led Pilot’s $40 million Series B in April 2019. The latest financing brings the company’s total funding raised to over $158 million since its 2017 inception.

The founding team certainly has an impressive track record, having founded and sold two previous companies: Ksplice  (to Oracle) and Zupli (to Dropbox).

Pilot’s pitch is about more than just software. The company combines its software with accountants to do things such as provide “CFO Services” to SMBs without a full-stack finance team. It also provides monthly variance analysis for all its bookkeeping customers, essentially serving as a controller for those companies, so they can make better budgeting and spending decisions.

It also helps companies access small business tax credits they may not have otherwise known about. 

Last year, Pilot completed more than $3 billion in bookkeeping transactions for its customers, which range from pre-revenue startups to larger companies with more than $30M of revenue a year. Customers include Bolt, r2c and Pathrise, among others.

Pilot has also inked a number of co-marketing partnerships with companies such as American Express, Bill.com, Brex, Carta, Gusto, Rippling, Stripe, SVB, and Techstars.

Ironically, Pilot says it aspires to the “AWS of SMB backoffice.” (In fact, co-founder Waseem Daher started his career as an intern at Amazon). Put simply, Pilot wants to take care of all those back office tasks so companies can focus more on growth and winning business.

Pilot strives to offer an “exceptional customer experience,” which is reflected in the fact that over 80% of the company’s business is driven by customer referrals and organic interest, according to Daher.

Whale Rock Partner Kristov Paulus said that white-glove customer service experience and Pilot’s “carefully-engineered” software make a powerful combination.

“We look forward to supporting Pilot in their vision to make back office services as easy-to-use, scalable, and ubiquitous as AWS has with the cloud,” he said.

Pilot’s mission reminds me of that of ScaleFactor’s, an Austin-based startup that raised $100 million in a year before it crashed and burned. But the difference in this case is that Pilot seems to have satisfied customers.

Mayfield partner Navin Chaddha and Poshmark founder and CEO Manish Chandra met all the way back in 2003, well before Poshmark was even a glimmer in his eye. They stayed connected over the years, through Chandra’s sale of his startup Kaboodle to Hearst and after he left.

At a breakfast one morning, Chandra told Chaddha he was going to try to do everything from his iPhone for the next six months.

Over the course of that time, the idea for Poshmark started to percolate into something more concrete. Chandra, following Kaboodle, knew he wanted to do several things differently. The first was create an engagement and revenue model that was symbiotic, rather than starting with engagement and having to build out a business model later. He also knew he wanted to start with people first, and build a founding team that had deep DNA in the fashion world to pair with his technical background.

He met Tracy Sun, brought her on, and got to work.

This was back in 2011, and Chandra was absolutely adamant that he wanted Poshmark to be an app, not a website. So adamant, in fact, that during beta he actually provided 100 users with video iPods. (He recalled that he only got 20% of them back.)

“Lead with love, and the money comes.” It’s one of the cornerstone values at Poshmark. The company practiced that early on by holding IRL, and then virtual, parties, allowing users to show each other their wares and create an engagement cycle that offered instant gratification. The user base grew from 100 to 150 to 1,000 and so on.

“We still to this day use a similar kind of strategy in a much more compressed timeframe as we go to different countries,” said Chandra. “We focus on building the community first and then scale that community.”

Chaddha and Mayfield led the company’s Series A deal a decade ago. On the latest episode of Extra Crunch Live, Chandra and Chaddha sat down with us and walked us through that original Series A pitch deck (which you can check out below). They also participated in the Pitch Deck Teardown, giving their expert feedback on decks submitted by the audience. If you’d like your deck to be featured on a future episode of Extra Crunch Live, hit up this link.

Poshmark’s Series A Deck

Time stamp — 11:00

Poshmark was built on a couple fundamental premises. The first was that the iPhone would transform the way we do just about everything. The second was more pointed: That fashion, at the time underserved by technology, was a discovery process over a direct search process. A decade ago, Chandra envisioned a fashion marketplace that mimicked shopping in the real world — walk into a shop and let natural attraction do its thing — without holding any inventory.

Since the pandemic began, I have been pushing the limits of my imagination to try to picture what cities will look and feel like in the coming years.

If your town looks like San Francisco, where I live, it’s a pressing question: Our once-bustling financial district is a ghost town, but even in outer neighborhoods, the number of vacant storefronts is unsettling. People are starting to emerge after sheltering in place for a year, but we are a long way from fully restoring our shared spaces.

What’s going to happen to those semi-vacant office towers, some of which are still under construction? There’s been renewed talk of converting some skyscrapers into residential housing, but there are real economic/logistic hurdles to clear before that can be broadly applied. Scores of restaurants have closed in recent months; who will take over those spaces? I spend a lot of time walking around, and it’s been a long time since I’ve noticed a “Grand Opening” sign.

Seeking answers, Managing Editor Eric Eldon interviewed 10 VCs who are active in proptech and found that most were generally “optimistic.”

Several expressed genuine uncertainty about the future of offices, but most were bullish about prospects for remote work, the rebirth of physical retail and the emergence of “third spaces” that will fill the gap between work and home.

In a companion article on TechCrunch, Eric explores these broader shifts, concluding, “you can start to see a world emerging that sounds a lot more like the fantasies of a New Urbanist than the world before the pandemic.”

Here’s who he interviewed:

Clelia Warburg Peters, venture partner, Bain Capital VenturesChristopher Yip, partner and managing director, RET VenturesZach Aarons, co-founder and general partner, MetaPropCasey Berman, general partner, Camber CreekVik Chawla, partner, Fifth WallAdam Demuyakor, co-founder and managing partner, Wilshire Lane PartnersRobin Godenrath and Julian Roeoes, partners, Picus CapitalStonly Baptiste, founding partner, and Shaun Abrahamson, managing partner, Urban UsAndrew Ackerman, managing director, Dreamit

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week. Have a great weekend!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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It’s time to abandon business intelligence tools

Ideally, BI transforms raw data into actionable information, but according to Charles Caldwell, VP of product management at Logi Analytics, “a gap exists between the functionalities provided by current BI and data discovery tools and what users want and need.”

Few BI tools actually integrate with existing workflows and most offer clunky user experiences, “leaving many individuals feeling like they need an advanced computer science degree to actually be able to pull insights out.”

Instead of requiring workers to abandon workflow applications to access data, embedded analytics are more efficient and easier to use, says Caldwell.

In short, “it’s time to abandon BI — at least as we currently know it.”

Pre-seed round funding is under scrutiny: Is VC pandemic posturing here to stay?

Amid the pandemic, investors became laser-focused on sections of the pitch deck that address monetization and business viability — signs that founders need to come to the table with better-defined businesses in order to succeed.

Investors’ heightened expectations for monetization potential and a company’s positioning within its competitive landscape are unlikely to lessen in the years to come, even in a post-COVID economy.

Clubhouse UX teardown: A closer look at homepage curation, follow hooks and other features

Clubhouse’s hockey-stick growth is something most startups would kill for.

However, it also means that UX problems can only be addressed while in “full flight” — and that changes to the user experience will be felt at scale rather under the cover of a small, loyal and (usually) forgiving user base.

Our favorite companies from Y Combinator’s W21 Demo Day

We’re not investors, so we’re not pretending to sort the unicorns from the goats.

But TechCrunch reporters spend a lot of time talking with startups, hearing pitches and telling their stories; if you’re curious about which companies stood out from Y Combinator’s W21 Demo Day, read on.

A look at 4 IPO updates and 2 late-stage funding rounds

There’s a lot going on: The venture capital market is redlining its engines while public markets remain sympathetic to growing, unprofitable companies.

Let’s round up IPO news from DigitalOcean, Kaltura, Robinhood and Zymergen, and big rounds for Lattice and goPuff.

Dear Sophie: When can I finally come to Silicon Valley?

Dear Sophie:

I’m a startup founder looking to expand in the U.S. I was originally looking at opening an office in Silicon Valley to be close to software engineers and investors, but then … COVID-19 :)

A lot has changed over the last year — can I still come?

— Hopeful in Hungary

Staying ahead of the curve on Google’s Core Web Vitals

Aside from improved SEO, small business websites optimizing for Google’s new Core Web Vitals will reap the rewards of an improved user experience for their site visitors.

While many are looking at the Core Web Vitals as a big hoop to jump through to please the search powers that be, others are seeing — and seizing — the opportunities that come along with this change.

Steady’s Adam Roseman and investor Emmalyn Shaw outline what worked (and what was missing) in the Series A deck

When it comes to Steady — the platform that helps hourly workers manage and maximize their income and access deals on things like benefits and financial services — the strengths of the business are clear.

But it took time for founder and CEO Adam Roseman to clearly define and communicate each of them in his quest for fundraising.

 

Discord’s reported $10B exit; Compass and Intermedia Cloud Communications set IPO price ranges

Alex Wilhelm dug into Discord’s possible $10 billion exit to Microsoft and explored IPO price ranges for real estate tech company Compass and Intermedia Cloud Communications, a unified-communications-as-a-service company.

“It’s a lot,” he noted, “but if we don’t get through it all now, we’ll fall behind and feel silly later.”

Will fading YOLO sentiment impact Robinhood, Coinbase and other trading platforms?

The consumer trading frenzy could be slowing.

What would happen to Robinhood and its cohorts if the apparent cooling in consumer trading demand continues?

How VC and private equity funds can launch portfolio-acceleration platforms

Almost every private equity and venture capital investor now advertises that they have a platform to support their portfolio companies, “however, most of us don’t have the budget of an Andreessen Horowitz to support almost every major need” for each startup they’ve bet on, says Versatile VC founder David Teten.

If you’re prioritizing a platform buildout for your firm, consider using the framework he’s outlined.

Automakers, suppliers and startups see growing market for in-vehicle AR/VR applications

Despite all of the pomp and promises about the potential for AR and VR, there isn’t a clear understanding of market demand for bringing the technology to cars, trucks and passenger vans.

Estimates of the global market range from $14 billion by 2027 to as much as $673 billion by 2025, showing just how nascent the market currently is and how much opportunity is present.

Amid pandemic, Middle East adtech startups play essential role in business growth

The Middle East is a promising region with growing digital advertising solutions despite locals’ attachment to traditional means of advertising.

In recent years, there has been a shift to the active use of social media and online shopping, meaning the Middle East embodies great potential for adtech startups.

Social+ payments: Why fintechs need social features

Social+ products are seeing mass adoption because they marry community with functionality.

This applies even to fintech companies as taboos around money fall away.

The lightning-fast Series A that was 3 years in the making

It took Christine Tao, founder of Sounding Board, just over three years to recognize the value of executive coaching and get her company to a Series A.

Here’s how she did it.

NFTs could bridge video games and the fashion industry

Music companies, celebrities and fashion brands are some of the latest entities to dip a toe into the burgeoning NFT market.

In part two of a three-part series, we take a look at why NFTs are “the next chapter of digital art history.”

Where is the e-commerce app ecosystem headed in 2021?

The pandemic-induced growth of e-commerce is, by now, well documented.

What is happening in the app ecosystem that supports e-commerce? Is it growing, or are we more likely to see consolidations and IPOs?

Let’s explore.

ironSource is going public via a SPAC and its numbers are pretty good

You’ll want to pay attention to this one: Israel’s ironSource, an app-monetization startup, is going public via a SPAC.

It’s the second SPAC-led debut from an Israeli company in recent weeks worth more than $10 billion, and ironSource is actually a pretty darn interesting company from a financial perspective.

Coursera set to roughly double its private valuation in impending IPO

The market views Coursera’s edtech business warmly ahead of its impending public offering.

Coursera is being valued as a software company, likely a breathe-easy moment for still-private edtech companies, since the debut could be an industry bellwether.

There’s certainly no shortage of SaaS performance metrics leaders focus on. While all SaaS companies do, and must, home in on acquisition metrics, there’s also massive revenue potential within your current customer base.

I think NRR (net revenue retention) is without question the most underrated metric out there. NRR is simply total revenue minus any revenue churn plus any revenue expansion from upgrades, cross-sells or upsells. The greater the NRR, the quicker companies can scale. Simply put: the power of compound math!

Over the course of two quarters, Terminus grew its NRR by more than 30 points, opening up incredible new levels of growth opportunities.

To boost our NRR for the better, I focused on three core pillars within our organization.

People

We took a holistic look at the organization and our org structure. One of the biggest and most impactful changes we made was to move new business, retention and account management all under our chief revenue officer. At the end of the day, it just makes a ton of sense to have acquisition and retention living under the same roof — why bother acquiring new customers if you can’t retain them?

We also rolled out a surround-sound team (around three or four people per customer) who onboard and help customers with their account from day one. In total, we have about a quarter of our company dedicated to this 24/7 support and hands-on guidance to ensure we’re enabling customers immediately.

Process

“Headless commerce” is a phrase that gets thrown around lot (I’ve typed it several times today already), but Vue Storefront CEO Patrick Friday has an especially vivid way of using the concept to illustrate his startup’s place in the broader ecosystem.

“Vue Storefront is the bodiless front end,” Friday said. “We are the walking head.”

In other words, while most headless commerce companies are focused on creating back-end infrastructure, Vue powers the front end, namely the progressive web applications with which consumers actually interact. The company describes itself as “the lightning-fast front-end platform for headless commerce.”

Friday said that he and CTO Filip Rakowski created the Vue Storefront technology as an open-source project while working at e-commerce agency Divante, before eventually spinning it out into a separate startup last year. The company was also part of the latest class at accelerator Y Combinator, and it recently raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by SMOK Ventures and Movens VC.

“We had to set up a new entity in the middle of COVID, we had to raise in the middle of COVID and we had to convince the agency to get rid of the product in the middle of COVID,” Friday said. He even recalled signing papers with an investor one morning in early December and doing an interview with Y Combinator that evening.

As they’ve created a business around the core open-source technology, Friday and his team have realized that Vue has more to offer than just building web apps, because it connects e-commerce platforms like Magento and Shopify with headless content management systems like Contentstack and Contentful, payments systems like PayPal and Stripe and other third-party services.

In fact, Friday said customers have been telling them, “You are like the glue. Headless was so complex to me, and then I got this Vue Storefront thing to come in on top everything else and be the glue connecting things.”

The platform has been used to create more than 300 stores worldwide. Friday said adoption has accelerated as the pandemic and resulting growth in e-commerce have driven businesses to realize they’re using “this legacy platform, using outdated frameworks and technologies from a good four or five years ago.”

Rakowski added, “We also see that many customers actually come to us deciding that Vue Storefront can be the first step of migration to another platform. We can quickly migrate the front end and write back-end agnostic code.”

Because it had just raised funding, the Vue Storefront team did not participate in the recent YC Demo Day, and it will be presenting at the next Demo Day instead. In the meantime, the company will be holding its own virtual Vue Storefront Summit on April 20.

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture is weekend reading for anyone who wants to understand me and my generation.

I was born in 1965 – right at the beginning of the transition from “Boomers” to “Xers.” I’m glad my parents had me in 1965 instead of 1964, where I’d spend my life arguing (maybe with myself) that I’m not a boomer.

A millennial friend of mine didn’t know anything about Generation X, so I sent her a copy of the book. I suppose I was teasing her too much about being a millennial, which was just me mostly being a typical ironic Gen X slacker.

I reread Generation X a few weeks ago, and it held up. The definitions in the margins made me flash back to phrases we used in my early 20s. Douglas Copeland’s brilliant imagination shines throughout. And, at 55, I’ve become comfortable saying “Kids today …” which is what I’m sure my parents (and the boomers) said about me and my generation.

This week sucked emotionally. The Boulder shooting on Monday took the wind completely out of Amy and me. It’s Friday, and I’m winding down for the weekend. Work was intense, so I didn’t have a lot of time to feel my feelings. We were in the car for a while this morning driving back to Boulder from Aspen, so I let myself settle into how I felt. Now that I’m not shocked anymore, the best word I can come up with is “sad.” Very sad.

Grunge is my music. Pessimism abounds in Gen Xers. I’ve adopted the mantle of “paranoid optimist,” which I first heard from Madeleine Albright. At 55, I prefer to be happy and optimistic, but underneath it all is cynicism.

I’m glad to be back in Boulder.

The post Book: Generation X appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Hub, a productivity platform for technical pre-sales, has formally launched with $1 million in seed funding.

CEO Freddy Mangum and CTO Karl Gainey founded Hub in 2020. The pair both had experience in technical sales and recognized the challenges of using spreadsheets to manage their business.

They researched and surveyed sales engineers at big and small companies alike, discovering that many of these professionals were spending a lot of time doing things like “wrangling data to report to management, forcing individual contributors to enter data into a CRM (customer relationship management) system.”

“Performing these kinds of mundane tasks was taking time away from them actually selling,” said Mangum. “We also came to the conclusion that technical sales professionals have been the unsung heroes of sales, behind the scenes driving enterprise.”

So they set about creating a better way for presales, solution architects and sales engineers to manage their day-to-day technical sales activities.

Then COVID hit, and obviously, as Mangum puts it, digital selling became much more real.

“That really accentuated the need for specific commercial tooling,” he said.

San Francisco-based Hub was born. The company describes its offering as a SaaS application that “securely interconnects and complements popular CRM systems and productivity applications.”

As a personalized productivity platform, Hub is designed to help individual contributors manage the sales process. By gaining greater visibility into every step, the goal is to better analyze and do more accurate forecasting so an organization can better “identify investment areas while taking corrective actions in real time,” Mangum said.

“Our tool can help them automate the mundane tasks and put the focus on high-value tasks to actually win more business,” he added.

Targeting technical sales professionals is an underserved market, according to Mangum, which presents tremendous opportunity.

Investors in the company include Tom Noonan, general partner of Atlanta-based TechOperators (and former chairman and CEO of Internet Security Systems, which was acquired in 2007 by IBM for $1.3 billion) and SalesLoft CEO and co-founder Kyle Porter.

To Noonan, the pandemic presented the challenge of keeping an enterprise sales force effective while working remotely.

“The biggest concern was not that sales people couldn’t engage with customers. It was how the technical part of the sales cycle was going to be conducted remotely, such as the concepts demonstrations integrations, the modifications, all the things that have to be articulately communicated, and also aligned with the customer’s needs,” he told TechCrunch. “And to me that just made the need for this model of selling that we’re in today.”

Looking ahead, Noonan believes these teams are going to question why they spent so much time on travel and on-site activities. 

“More and more customers have actually gotten accustomed to remote interactions and even more importantly, many of the customers are not working in a place of business now either,” he said. “And that leaves a huge challenge for the solution architects, because they are the glue that bridge between a buyer saying that’s interesting, and an organization concluding that the capabilities of whatever system is being sold to them truly meets their needs both from a technical perspective and integration perspective and a functional perspective.”

Hub, he believes, can help address that challenge.

With a diverse founding team (Mangum is a Bolivian immigrant and Gainey is Black), Hub aims to reflect that diversity in its team. Its developers are based in Argentina, for example. 

“As someone who graduated from ESL when I came to this country it is important that opportunities not be closed off to people just because of language barriers,” Mangum said.

When TechCrunch covered UIPath’s Series A in 2017, it was a small startup out of Romania working in a little known area of enterprise software called robotic process automation (RPA).

Then the company took off with increasingly large multibillion dollar valuations. It progressed through its investment rounds, culminating with a $750 million round on an eye-popping $35 billion valuation last month.

This morning, the company took the next step on its rapid-fire evolutionary path when it filed its S-1 to go public. To illustrate just how fast the company’s rise has been, take a look at its funding history:

RPA is much better understood these days with larger enterprise software companies like SAP, Microsoft, IBM and ServiceNow getting involved. With RPA, companies can automate a mundane process like processing an insurance claim, moving work automatically, while bringing in humans only when absolutely necessary. For example, instead of having a person enter a number in a spreadsheet from an email, that can happen automatically.

In June 2019, Gartner reported that RPA was the fastest-growing area in enterprise software, growing at over 60% per year, and attracting investors and larger enterprise software vendors to the space. While RPA’s growth has slowed as it matures, a September 2020 Gartner report found it expanding at a more modest 19.5% with total revenue expected to reach $2 billion in 2021. Gartner found that stand-alone RPA vendors UIPath, Blue Prism and Automation Anywhere are the market leaders.

Although the market feels rather small given the size of the company’s valuation, it’s still a nascent space. In its S-1 filing this morning, the company painted a rosy picture, projecting a $60 billion addressable market. While TAM estimates tend to trend large, UIPath points out that the number encompasses far more than pure RPA into what they call “Intelligent Process Automation.” That could include not only RPA, but also process discovery, workflow, no-code development and other forms of automation.

Indeed, as we wrote earlier today on the soaring process automation market, the company is probably going to need to expand into these other areas to really grow, especially now that it’s competing with much bigger companies for enterprise automation dollars.

While UIPath is in the midst of its quiet period, it came up for air this week to announce that it had bought Cloud Elements, a company that gives it access to API integration, an important component of automation in the enterprise. Daniel Dines, the company co-founder and CEO said the acquisition was about building a larger platform of automation tools.

“The acquisition of Cloud Elements is just one example of how we are building a flexible and scalable enterprise-ready platform that helps customers become fully automated enterprises,” he said in a statement.

While there is a lot of CEO speak in that statement, there is also an element of truth in that the company is looking at the larger automation story. It can use some of the cash from its prodigious fundraising to begin expanding on its original vision with smaller acquisitions that can fill in missing pieces in the product road map.

The company will need to do that and more to compete in a rapidly moving market, where many vendors are fighting for different parts of the business. As it continues its journey to becoming a public company, it will need to continue finding new ways to increase revenue by tapping into different parts of the wider automation stack.

While new headless commerce platforms are emerging all the time, Swell CEO Eric Ingram told me that it remains “really hard to do something new in e-commerce.”

Specifically, he told me that most headless platforms (which offer back-end infrastructure separate from the front-end shopping experience) allow businesses to build a faster shopping experience, but they’re largely designed for marketplaces where you search, browse and purchase from a traditional product catalog.

“The most interesting ideas in e-commerce aren’t just another catalog,” Ingram said.

Swell, which is announcing that it has raised $3.4 million in seed funding, was designed to offer more flexibility when it comes to the underlying business models. Ingram (who founded the company with Stefan Kende, Dave Loneragan, Joshua Voydik and Mark Regal) described it as the “future-proof backend” for e-commerce companies, which can grow and adapt with them as their business models evolve.

“Typical catalogs” have been built on the platform, he said, but it also supports Spinn‘s marketplace of independent coffee roasters, B2B vacuum pump marketplace Nowvac and ethical direct-to-consumer diamond retailer Great Heights.

In fact, Voydik described Swell as “infinitely flexible.” Among other things, the company says it achieves this flexibility by offering API access to every component, as well as native subscription support and an unlimited number of product attributes.

“Every store on Swell effectively has their own database SaaS platform,” Ingram added.

Overall, he said the platform offers the flexibility that you’d normally get from an open-source approach without the technical headaches: “No one wants to maintain their own code base and their own database.”

He continued, “You don’t need to be technical, you don’t need to have developers to leverage this. A lot of our customers are developers, but a lot of them are just regular marketers and ops people who know a bit of development concepts and want to have control over the systems.”

The startup’s new funding was led Jim Andelman of Bonfire Ventures, with participation from Willow Growth Partners, Andreas Klinger of Remote First Capital, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, GitHub CTO Jason Warner and former Salesforce Commerce Cloud CEO Mike Micucci.