Email is one of those things that no one likes but that we’re all forced to use. Superhuman, founded by Rahul Vohra, aims to help everyone get to inbox zero.

Launched in 2017, Superhuman charges $30 per month and is still in invite-only mode with more than 275,000 people on the waitlist. That’s by design, Vohra told us earlier this week on Extra Crunch Live.

“I think a lot of folks misunderstand the nature of our waitlist,” he said. “They assume it’s some kind of FOMO-generating technique or some kind of false scarcity. Nothing could be further from the truth. The real reason we have the waitlist is that I want everyone who uses Superhuman to be deliriously happy with their experience.”

Today, the app is only available for desktop and iOS. Superhuman started with iOS because most premium users have iPhones, Vohra said. Still, many users have Android, so Superhuman’s waitlist consists mostly of Android users.

“We don’t think that if we onboard them they’d have the best experience with Superhuman because email really is an ecosystem product,” he said. “You do it just as much on the go as you do from your laptop. There’s a lot of reasons like that. So if you’re a person who identifies that as a must-have, well, we’ll take in the survey, we’ll learn about you so we know when to reach out to you. Then when we have those things built or integrated, we’ll reach out.”

We also chatted about his obsession with email, determining pricing for a premium product, the impact of COVID-19, diversity in tech in light of the police killing of George Floyd and so much more.

Throughout the conversation, Vohra also offered up some good practical advice for founders. Here are some highlights from the conversation.

On competition from Hey, the latest buzzy email app

Yeah, I’m not at all worried. I used to get worried about this. You know, 10 years ago, even as recently as five years ago, I would get worried about competitors. But I think Paul Graham has really, really great advice on this. I think he says pretty much verbatim: Startups don’t kill other startups. Competition generally doesn’t kill the startup. Other things do, like running out of money being the biggest one, or lack of momentum or lack of motivation or co-founder feuds; these are all really dangerous things.

Competition from other startups generally isn’t the thing that gets you and you know, props to the Basecamp team and everything they’ve done with Hey. It’s really impressive. I think it’s for an entirely different demographic than Superhuman is for.

Superhuman is for the person for whom essentially email is work and work is email. Our users kind of almost personally identify with their email inbox, and they’re coming from Gmail or G Suite. Typically it’s overflowing so they often receive hundreds if not thousands of emails a day, and they send off 100 emails a day. Superhuman is for high-volume email for whom email really matters. Power users, essentially, though power users isn’t quite the right articulation. What I actually say is prosumers because there’s a lot of people who come to us at Superhuman and they’re not yet power users of email, but they know they need to be.

That’s what I would call a prosumer — someone who really wants to be brilliant at doing email. Now Hey doesn’t seem to be designed for that target market. It doesn’t seem to be designed for high-volume emailers or prosumers or power users.

According to a recent Fortune Business Insights report, the global ERP software market is expected to grow at 8.5% CAGR to reach $71.63 billion by 2026. Cloud-based planning software provider Anaplan...

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Later today, TechCrunch’s Extra Crunch Live series is sitting down with Plaid CEO Zach Perret. Extra Crunch members can tune in at 10 a.m. PDT/1 p.m. EDT/5 p.m. GMT. The livestream links and scheduling links are below for your use. (Update: We’re going live shortly.)

Extra Crunch Live has previously spoken with investors like Sequoia’s Roelof Botha, business celebrity Mark Cuban and entrepreneurs like Eventbrite’s CEO and co-founder Julia Hartz. Perret, however, is unique in that he’s joining us after a multibillion dollar deal to sell Plaid to Visa was announced, but before the deal is completed. The situation should make for an interesting conversation.

TechCrunch wants to know about Plaid’s $250 million, 2018-era venture round and how the huge infusion changed Plaid’s growth plans and corporate culture. We’re going to ask why Perret decided to sell the business instead of working to take it public and how the decision to sell was evaluated among leadership and investors.

Plaid’s core product helps other fintech and finservices companies connect to consumer bank accounts.

Hosts Jordan Crook and Alex Wilhelm will also dig into trends that we are keeping tabs on, like huge growth in market demand for savings and investing products. As Plaid helps a host of other fintech shops reach consumers, it has a view into what types of fintech startups are doing well. We want to know what’s bubbling up now that is new and surprising.

If time permits, we’ll also chat about API-based startups themselves and how some fintech companies today are bringing lower-cost services to individuals who are often underserved — and overcharged — by traditional banking players.

We’ll ask your questions as well. So, make sure your Extra Crunch membership is active, and we’ll see you later today. Chat soon!

Details

The following links will get you sorted. YouTube livestream link will be added closer to the start time.

This morning Chilean company Copec announced a corporate venture capital (CVC) fund, dubbed Wind Ventures. Wind will write checks worth between $1 million and $10 million into Series A, B and C rounds, with an eye on startups that fit into the categories that its parent company works in, namely energy, retail and mobility.

According to Wind Ventures’ head, Brian Walsh, the CVC intends to “balance [its] investments across those three sectors,” including putting money to work in tech that its parent firm Copec works with today, and “technologies that Copec is not currently involved in,” citing hydrogen projects as an example.

The CVC has invested in several companies while operating in effective stealth over the past few months.

Copec, part of the larger AntarChile conglomerate, is part of a family of companies that produce energy and industrial products, among other business lines. The Wind name appears to be an homage to investing in decarbonized energy production.

A Wind Ventures deck that TechCrunch viewed highlighted the possible impact of Copec helping “accelerate global startups and scaleups growth in LatAm.” Every VC firm has a thesis, or advantage it hopes to leverage to attract deal flow at lucrative prices. For Wind, access to the Latin America market via what it described as 3,500 service stations (of which 630 are in its home country of Chile), amongst other assets, is part of its pitch.

Walsh told TechCrunch that his group can help startups manage the regulatory and cultural environment of Latin America, noting that there are “20 different countries,” each with their own cultures and that “to succeed in the region, a startup must succeed in each country separately.” The CVC head highlighted that his parent company Copec may “provide the deployment capital to get [initial pilots] done with the right customers.”

Wind also intends to invest in startups located in the Southwest region of the United States, where Copec also operates; the CVC is based in San Francisco.

Latin America has seen its startup scene dramatically accelerate in recent years, with deal volume rising from around 190 rounds per year from 2014 to 2016, to around 450 in 2018 and 2019 according to industry data. As venture deal volume has soared, so too has the dollar volume of venture investments in the region, with the same data indicating that $4.6 billion was deployed last year. That figure was sharply above 2018’s dollar result of just under $2 billion, the preceding record.

So there should be plenty of deals for Wind to compete in for allocation. The question for the CVC is whether its value-proposition can get it into the right rounds, and at the right price. We’ll keep track.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that I should have asked you? Bronwyn Spira: One topic is the value of data and how it can spur healthcare on to the next iteration. One of the the things we’ve...

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The alchemy for a successful startup can be hard to parse. Sometimes, it’s who you know. Sometimes it’s where you go to school. And sometimes it’s what you do. In the case of La Haus, a startup that wants to bring U.S. tech-enabled real estate services to the Latin American real estate market, it’s all three.

The company was founded by Jerónimo Uribe and Rodrigo Sánchez Ríos, both graduates of Stanford University who previously founded and ran Jaguar Capital, a Colombian real estate development firm that had built over $350 million worth of retail and residential projects in the country.

Uribe, the son of the controversial Colombian President Daniel Uribe (who has been accused of financing paramilitary forces during Colombia’s long-running civil war and wire-tapping journalists and negotiators during the peace talks to end the conflict) and Sánchez Ríos, a former private equity professional at the multi-billion-dollar firm Lindsay Goldberg, were exposed to the perils and promise of real estate development with their former firm.

Now the two entrepreneurs are using their know-how, connections and a new technology stack to streamline the home-buying process.

It’s that ambition that caught the attention of Pete Flint, the founder of Trulia and now an investor at the venture capital firm NFX. Flint, an early investor in La Haus, saw the potential in La Haus to help the Latin American real estate market leapfrog the services available in the U.S. Spencer Rascoff, the co-founder of Zillow, also invested in the company.

“Latin America is very early on in its infancy of having really professional agents and really professional brokerages,” said Flint.

La Haus guides home buyers through every stage of the process, with its own agents and salespeople selling properties sourced from the company’s developer connections.

“The average home in the U.S. sells in six weeks or less,” said La Haus chief financial officer Sánchez Ríos in an interview. “That timing in Latin America is 14 months. That’s the dramatic difference. There is no infrastructure in Latin America as a whole.”

La Haus began by reaching out to the founders’ old colleagues in the real estate development industry and started listing new developments on its service. Now the company has a mix of existing and new properties for sale on its site and an expanded geographic footprint in both Colombia and Mexico.

“We have a portal… that acts as a lead-generating machine,” said Sánchez Ríos. “We aggregate listings, we vet them. We focus on new developers.”

The company has about 500 developers using the service to list properties in Colombia and another 200 in Mexico. So far, the company has facilitated more than 2,000 transactions through its platform in three years.

“Real estate now is turning fully digital and also in this market professionalizing,” said Flint. “The publicly traded online real estate companies are approaching all-time highs. People are just prizing the space that they spend their time in… the technologies from VR and digital walkthroughs to digital closes become not just a nice to have but a necessity. “

Capitalizing on the open field in the market, La Haus recently closed on $10 million in financing led by Kaszek Ventures, one of the leading funds in Latin America. That funding will be used to accelerate the company’s geographic expansion in response to increasing demand for digital solutions in response to the COVID-19 epidemic.

“Because of Covid-19, consumers’ willingness to conduct real estate transactions online has gone through the roof,” said Sánchez Ríos, in a statement. “Fortunately we were in the position to enable that, and we expect to see a permanent shift online in how people conduct all, or at least most, of the home-buying process. This funding gives us ample runway to build the end-to-end real estate experience for the post-Covid Latin America.”

Joining NFX, Rascoff, and Kaszek Ventures are a slew of investors, including Acrew Capital, IMO Ventures and Beresford Ventures. Entrepreneurs like Nubank founder David Velez; Brian Requarth, the founder of Vivareal (now GrupoZap); and Hadi Partovi, CEO and founder of Code.org, also participated in the financing.

“We backed La Haus because we saw many of the same ingredients that resulted in a fantastic outcome for many of our successful companies: A world-class team with complementary skills; a huge addressable market; and an almost religious zeal by the founders to solve a big problem with technology,” said Hernan Kazah, co-founder and managing partner of Kaszek Ventures. 

In another up for technology shares, software companies saw their values reach new heights today.

The day’s trading comes after a sell-off last week eased some of technology companies’ rebounds from their COVID-19 lows; stocks in tech companies have more than made up for their early-year declines in mid-2020, with the Nasdaq reaching 10,000 points before giving up some ground.

Today the Nasdaq Composite index rose 0.15% to 9,910.53 points, just a few bips short of its all-time highs. A thematic tech index focused on fintech also saw their values recover to a mote under previous highs. The S&P 500 fell 0.36% to close at $3,113.41 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index decreased 0.65% to $26,119.13.

But software companies, tech’s highest fliers, set new records as measured by the Bessemer cloud index. According to the Financial Times, the software-and-cloud tracking index has seen gains of more than 45% during the last year, a sharp advance during a year of economic uncertainty and occasional stock market carnage.

Looking around more broadly, tech shares with a bit more of a value flavor — GAAP profitability, regular dividends, etc. — performed well, with Apple setting new record highs as well. The smartphone giant and services shop is worth more than $1.5 trillion, underscoring how attractive stable-tech has proved in 2020. On the same theme, Microsoft is a few points from all-time highs, and is worth around $1.48 trillion.

But while software’s growth has proved attractive, as has the stability of megacorp tech shops, less certain bets have also proved attractive. Nikola, an electric vehicle company that went public recently in a reverse debut, is still worth around $26 billion despite having no reported revenue. On a similar theme, Tesla shares are up from around $225 a year ago to over $993 today, a gain of 340% or so. In Q1 2020 the company posted 38% year-over-year growth.

$420 per share feels like a long time ago.

Speaking of transportation, Uber and Lyft had separate announcements Wednesday that should have primed the ol’ investor pump. Instead, shares of both companies bopped from flat to slightly down throughout the day.

Uber announced Wednesday that it will manage an on-demand service for Marin County in the San Francisco Bay area, marking the company’s broader push to Software as a Service and public transit.

Transportation Authority of Marin (TAM) will pay Uber a subscription fee to use its management software to facilitate requesting, matching and tracking of its high-occupancy vehicle fleet, starting with a service that operates along the Highway 101 corridor. Marin Transit trips will show up in the Uber app and let users book and even share rides.

This fundamental piece of news should have appealed to investors. Today they responded with a resounding “meh,” even though it represents the first steps into generating a new stream of revenue.

Uber shares closed down 0.60% to $33.29.

Meanwhile, rival Lyft pledged Wednesday that every car, truck and SUV on its platform will be all electric or powered by another zero-emission technology by 2030, a commitment that will require the company to coax drivers to shift away from gas-powered vehicles.

The target, which Lyft plans to pursue with help from the Environmental Defense Fund, will stretch across multiple programs. It will include the company’s autonomous vehicles, the Express Drive rental car partner program for rideshare drivers, consumer rental cars for riders and personal cars that drivers use on the Lyft app.

Perhaps investors understand that even with a decade-long timeline, the target could be difficult to meet.

Lyft shares closed at $35.32, down 3.79%.

TechCrunch has slowed its public market coverage as tech equities have returned to a more stable period; that they have made back lost ground has been worth noting, but lower volatility has lowered the market’s newsworthiness. Still, from time-to-time when new all-time highs are hit, it’s worth putting our toes back into the water. And on days when different blocs of public tech set records, we can’t help but make a public note.

Tech and tech-ish stocks: still in fashion.

Sidewalk congestion is a major pain point for cities, and fully charged scooters for riders are no guarantee. Those are the two main selling points of micromobility docking startup Swiftmile and remote-controlled scooter repositioning startup Tortoise, respectively. Today, Swiftmile and Tortoise announced a partnership to solve those problems.

“These are incredibly complementary services,” Tortoise co-founder and president Dmitry Shevelenko told TechCrunch. “Swiftmile provides the ideal destination and origin for repositioning. So riders can have the experience that dockless enables, they can leave the scooter wherever their destination is and using Tortoise, can drive to the nearest Swiftmile station to dock and charge.”

Swiftmile has already deployed hundreds of its charging stations in cities like Austin and Berlin. Later this month, Swiftmile will deploy a Spin-branded dock in San Francisco. Swiftmile charges scooter operators by the minute, but not to exceed a certain amount, depending on the market. Initially, the docking system will be open to all operators in order to show them how it works and how beneficial it can be. After a certain period of time, Swiftmile will only charge its customers’ scooters.

Tortoise, which launched in October, does not make its own scooters. Instead, Tortoise sells its software to customers, which need to install about $100 worth of equipment on each scooter in order to run Tortoise’s software. That includes two phone cameras, a piece of radar, a processor and a motor. If it’s a two-wheeled vehicle, Tortoise requires the addition of robotic training wheels. All of this is included in the reference design Tortoise provides to operators.

Given the volume of micromobility operators in the space today, Tortoise aims to make it easier for these companies to more strategically deploy their respective vehicles and reposition them when needed. Using autonomous technology in tandem with remote human intervention, Tortoise’s software enables operators to remotely relocate their scooters and bikes to places where riders need them, or, where operators need them to be recharged. On an empty sidewalk, Tortoise may employ autonomous technologies, while it may rely on humans to remotely control the vehicle on a highly trafficked city block.

“Cities say they need 21st-century infrastructure,” Swiftmile CEO Colin Roche told TechCrunch. “This creates that where we have these hubs centered around Swiftmile and Tortoise can come and park and charge. It’s exactly what the cities want.”

The plan is to aggressively launch this partnership wherever Tortoise operates. Currently, however, Tortoise only operates in Peachtree Corners, Georgia in partnership with GoX. Shevelenko says he hopes to launch in partnership with Swiftmile in Peachtree Corners as soon as possible. Ideally, the first pilot will be this summer, he said.

“The technology is ready and the solutions work together,” he said. “We want cities to know this is available and the tech is ready and mature.”

After Peachtree Corners, Tortoise and Swiftmile have their eyes set on San Jose. Tortoise, however, is not yet disclosing its vehicle partner.

“But Swiftmile and Tortoise have the same set of customers, in general,” Shevelenko said. “The bulk of the Swiftmile business is selling directly to scooter operators and they’re our customer as well. We have this joint shared customer.”

Disrupt 2020 offers an unprecedented opportunity to introduce your pre-series A, early-stage startup to thousands of potential investors, customers, journalists, technologists and other influential movers and shakers around the world. How? Read on.

Grab yourself a Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package and get ready to virtually showcase your innovative products, platforms or services in front of a global audience. Startup Alley is the heart and soul of every Disrupt conference. It’s high-octane networking and opportunity on steroids. It’s where crucial relationships begin and startup dreams move to the next level.

Sounds great, right? But what really happens when you exhibit in Startup Alley? Is it worth the time, energy and money?  We asked Felicia Jackson, inventor and founder of CPRWrap, to share her experience in Startup Alley.

A medical professional trained in CPR, Felicia Jackson froze when her two-year-old son suddenly stopped breathing. “In my panic, I forgot everything I had been taught. Fortunately, my husband stepped in and eventually saved our son.”

That incident inspired Jackson to invent CPRWrap — a patented single-use CPR template that guides you through the American Heart Association’s four recommended steps during respiratory or cardiac emergencies. Initially nervous about attending Disrupt because her product was low-tech, Jackson exhibited in a Startup Alley pavilion as part of a Nashville-based incubator called Launch Tennessee.

“TechCrunch is all about innovative startups, and CPRWrap is highly innovative. Exhibiting in Startup Alley validated my product, my mission and my company,” said Jackson.

Exhibiting at Disrupt introduced Jackson to engineers, investors, manufacturers and new technologies she says she never would have learned about or met back in Tennessee.

I learned about materials to make a better product for less money. I met investors, I met engineers who expressed interest in collaborating with me to create an app for my product. How cool is that for an inventor?

Exhibitors in Startup Alley can meet all kinds of influencers — investors, R&D teams, advisors, potential customers — and form connections that can, when nurtured, result in exciting partnerships. Disrupt offers so many opportunities to connect but, as Jackson notes, it’s up to you to foster those relationships.

As a direct result of the connections she made in Startup Alley, Jackson is working on collaborations with Gustavo Rodriguez of Baby Spark, an early childhood development app with more than one million users, and Erik Bast of Bee Intelligence. She’s also in ongoing negotiations with Kaiser Permenente.

The connections I made at Disrupt offer long-term benefits. Investors willing to put forth capital, engineers offering tech expertise and manufacturers to help me streamline… Fostering these relationships will help me grow my company and my bottom line.

Still not sure whether a Digital Startup Alley Package, which costs $445, is right for you? We will host an Ask Me Anything session on the TechCrunch LinkedIn page July 15.  Join TechCrunch staff along with Felicia Jackson and other Startup Alley exhibitors to get answers to all your burning questions. More info to come, but if you have any questions, you can email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

In the meantime, sign up for our third installment of Pitchers and Pitches on July 1. Five startups that are a part of this year’s Digital Startup Alley will give their best elevator pitch to TC Editors and VCs from Construct Capital and Betaworks Ventures.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact the sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

There is a darker side to cybersecurity that’s frequently overlooked.

Just as you have an entire industry of people working to keep systems and networks safe from threats, commercial adversaries are working to exploit them. We’re not talking about red-teamers, who work to ethically hack companies from within. We’re referring to exploit markets that sell details of security vulnerabilities and the commercial spyware companies that use those exploits to help governments and hackers spy on their targets.

These for-profit surveillance companies flew under the radar for years, but have only recently gained notoriety. But now, they’re getting unwanted attention from U.S. lawmakers.

In this week’s Decrypted, we look at the technologies police use against the public.

THE BIG PICTURE

Secrecy over protest surveillance prompts call for transparency

Last week we looked at how the Justice Department granted the Drug Enforcement Administration new powers to covertly spy on protesters. But that leaves a big question: What kind of surveillance do federal agencies have, and what happens to people’s data once it is collected?

While some surveillance is noticeable — from overhead drones and police helicopters overhead — others are worried that law enforcement are using less than obvious technologies, like facial recognition and access to phone records, CNBC reports. Many police departments around the U.S. also use “stingray” devices that spoof cell towers to trick cell phones into turning over their call, message and location data.

Some audience questions answered by Sramana: – Why do we need to study entrepreneurship? – What kind of a business can a software engineer start? – How do entrepreneurs come up with...

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Your company’s one metric that matters (OMTM) shouldn’t be return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS), net promoter score (NPS), brand affinity or one of the other sophisticated-sounding acronyms marketers use to gauge success.

Your company’s one metric that matters should be long-term profitability.

Put another way, your business should be singularly focused on how much money it can return to its owners, investors and shareholders. Sounds obvious, right?

You’d be surprised: A majority of Fortune 500 and Silicon Valley startup marketing budgets aren’t optimized for long-term profitability.

Instead, budgets are often optimized for secondary or upper-funnel metrics. Besides tracking ROI, ROAS, NPS and brand affinity, many marketers monitor key performance indicators (KPI) like net revenue, customer acquisition cost (CAC), cost per thousand (CPM) and brand recall — none of which directly correlate with long-term profitability.

In fact, many brands’ marketing departments frequently omit the word “profit” all together from the line items and KPIs in their monthly performance reports.

A good way to think about the futility of the KPI status quo is the following fictional scenario, which reflects the marketing and advertising playbooks of a shockingly large segment of American businesses: Main Street Shoes spends $100 on a Facebook ad campaign to promote a new line of sneakers to Jack and Andrew. As a result of the retailer’s Facebook ad campaign, Jack and Andrew each spend $100 to buy new sneakers.

Podcasting continues to see a strong trajectory in the world of streamed audio content, and today comes the latest development on that front. SiriusXM, owner of Pandora and backer of SoundCloud, said that it is acquiring Simplecast, a podcast management platform used by creators to publish and distribute podcasts, and subsequently analyse how they are consumed. SiriusXM plans to integrate Simplecast with AdsWizz, a digital audio advertising company that it acquired in 2018 for $66.3 million in cash plus shares to power ads on Pandora .

The company is not disclosing any of the financial terms for the Simplecast acquisition but we have asked and will update if we learn more. As a startup, New York-based Simplecast, which will continue to be led by its founder and CEO Brad Smith, had raised a modest $7.87 million in funding from investors since launching in 2013, per PitchBook data.

The deal is interesting because it is bringing one of the more popular independent platforms and set of tools used by streamers under the wing of a platform. Simplecast’s many podcasts and users today include Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, Netflix, Maximum Fun, Cloud10, QCODE, Anna Faris is Unqualified, Blue Wire, Revision Path and (disclaimer) TechCrunch, who use it to distribute content over multiple, and sometimes competing, networks, including Apple, Spotify, Google and Overcast. (Business plans currently range in price and start at $15/month and go up to $85/month or more depending on podcast size, number of users and features that you need.)

Pandora (with help from SiriusXM, which has a large and popular stable of talk radio shows on its channels) has been building up its own spoken-word content, of course, so there is a direct opportunity to push more on-demand podcasts to that platform in particular, as well as offer more interesting terms for doing so, as well as bring in a much wider spectrum of podcasts to run AdsWizz’s inventory, which currently is seen by more than 100 million people each month across the U.S. and Canada (SiriusXM’s and Pandora’s footprint in vehicles, online and more).

We have asked SiriusXM if the plan will be to keep all of Simplecast’s services as-is after the deal closes.

What’s clearer is that, with SiriusXM also making a key investment in SoundCloud last year, the company is — like Spotify (which acquired a Simplecast competitor, Anchor, last year) — building up its music-business tools to complement its position as a content provider: This is a key role to play in the brave new world of digital music, where monetisation remains a challenge for most, and the tools to distribute, analyse and (yes) monetise one’s creative content continue to get more sophisticated, so much so that getting that part of the equation right can make or break an artist or wider creative or media endeavour.

“Our goal is to provide audio publishers with state-of-the-art platforms and give them everything they need to be successful,” said Alexis van de Wyer, CEO of AdsWizz, in a statement. “Empowering podcasters of any size to create, distribute, analyze, and monetize their work is the next natural step in pursuing our vision.”

“From the beginning, Simplecast’s mantra and mission was to remain laser-focused on podcast creators – building the best tools for publishing and insights,” said Brad Smith, the founder & CEO of Simplecast, in a statement of his own. “The opportunity and alignment with AdsWizz allows our product — and our customers — access to a powerful monetization platform. Two best-in-class platforms are now able to align with the shared mission of helping publishers succeed, while each team continues to focus on their respective areas of expertise.”

Finding somewhere in a Slack conversation, or stored in Box, Dropbox, Google Docs or Office 365, that one document you want to attach to an email is a huge challenge as we find ourselves spreading our content across a variety of cloud services. It’s one challenge that Cloudtenna has been trying to solve, and today the company announced a $2.5 million funding round along with the release of a new mobile search tool.

The funding comes from a variety of unnamed investors, along with Blazar Ventures, and brings the total raised to $6.5 million, according to the company.

Cloudtenna co-founder Aaron Ganek says that by using AI and document metadata, his company can find content wherever it lives. “What we’re really focused on is helping companies bring order to file chaos. Files are scattered everywhere across the cloud, and we have developed AI-powered applications that help users find files, no matter where they’re stored,” he said.

The company introduced a desktop search application in 2018 and today it’s announcing a mobile search tool called Workspace to go with it. Ganek says they built this app from the ground up to take advantage of the mobile context.

“Today, we’re bringing the search technology to smartphones and tablets. And just to be clear, this is not just a mobile version of our desktop product, but a complete case study in how people collaborate on the go,” he said.

The AI component helps find files wherever they are based on your user history, who you tend to collaborate with and so forth. That helps the tool find the files that are most relevant to you, regardless of where they happen to be stored.

He says that raising money during a pandemic was certainly interesting, but the company has seen an uptick in usage due to the general increase in SaaS usage during this time, and investors saw that too, he said.

The company launched in 2016 and currently has nine employees, but Ganek said there aren’t any plans to expand on that number at this time, or at least any number he was ready to discuss.

Onna, the “knowledge integration platform” (KIP) that counts Dropbox and Slack as backers, has raised $27 million in Series B funding.

Leading the round is Atomico, with participation from Glynn Capital. Previous investors Dawn Capital, Nauta Capital and Slack Fund also followed on.

Founded in 2015, Barcelona and New York-based Onna integrates with a plethora of workplace apps, including Slack, Dropbox, G Suite, Microsoft 365 and Salesforce, to help unlock the proprietary knowledge stored in a company’s various cloud and on-premise software. Typical applications for a KIP include compliance, governance, archiving and “eDiscovery.”

From communication apps to cloud storage to HR platforms, the idea is to unify all of this data and make it searchable but in a way that is secure and protects existing permissions and privacy. In fact, another way to think of Onna is like Apple’s Spotlight functionality but for the enterprise. However, pitched as a platform not just a feature, Onna also offers an API of its own so that various use cases can be built on top of this “single source of truth.”

“Onna’s knowledge integration platform is a centralised, searchable and secure hub that connects company data wherever it resides and makes it easier and faster to make informed decisions,” Onna founder and CEO Salim Elkhou tells TechCrunch. “It is a productivity tool built for the way businesses work today… something that didn’t exist before, creating a new industry standard which benefits all companies within the ecosystem.”

Citing a report by single sign-in provider Okta, Elkhou notes that companies today use an average of 88 different apps across their workforce, a 21% increase from three years ago.

“The reason apps have become so popular is that they’re very effective for tackling specific challenges, or even a broad range of tasks. But the problem large organisations were coming up against is that their knowledge was spread across a wide range of apps that weren’t necessarily designed to work together.”

For example, a legal counsel could be looking to find contracts company-wide to assess a company’s exposure. The problem is that contracts may be saved in Salesforce, sent by email, shared over Slack or even saved on desktops. “Your company may have acquired another company, which has its own ways of saving information, so now the simple task of finding contracts can be a heavy lifting exercise, involving everyone’s time. With Onna, being the connective tissue across these applications, this search would take a split second,” claims Elkhou.

But the potential power of a KIP goes well beyond search alone. Elkhou says a more ambitious use case is unifying knowledge across apps and using Onna as infrastructure. “We believe that the next generation of workplace apps will be built on top of a knowledge integration platform like Onna,” he explains. “Due to our plug and play integrations with most enterprise apps and our open API, you can now build your own bespoke workflows on top of your company’s knowledge. More importantly, we handle all the heavy lifting on the back end when it comes to processing the right contextual information across multiple systems securely, which means you can get on with creatively building a more efficient workplace.”

“In Onna, we saw a product in a new and complementary category, providing a solution not at the data level but at the ‘knowledge level,’ ” adds Atomico’s Ben Blume, who has also joined the Onna board. “Onna’s core solution integrates with any tools in an organisation where knowledge resides, [and] ingests, indexes and classifies the knowledge inside, enabling it to power applications in many areas.”

Blume also points to the belief that some of the cloud tools vendors themselves have in Onna, with both Slack and Dropbox “investing, using and promoting” Onna’s solution. “As they look to grow their own penetration in organisations with a wider range of needs and demands, we saw partnering with Onna as a recognition of its best in class nature to their customers,” he says.

Meanwhile, I understand the new round of funding was done remotely due to lockdown, even though Atomico and Onna had already met and stayed in touch after the VC firm ended up not participating in the startup’s Series A.

Recalls Elkhou: “We had met with our investors in person over a year ago, and have had many video calls since and prior to the pandemic. However, soon after the lockdowns took effect, the need for remote collaboration tools skyrocketed which only accelerated the critical role Onna has in helping people within organisations access and share knowledge that was spread across an ever growing number of apps. If anything, it brought new urgency to the problem we were solving, because workplace serendipity no longer existed. You couldn’t answer questions over a coffee or by the water cooler, but these new remote workers still needed to access knowledge and share it securely.”

Landing page optimization company Unbounce is announcing that it has raised $52 million Canadian (approximately $38.4 million in U.S. dollars).

Unbounce was founded back in 2009 with what co-founder and CEO Rick Perreault described as a goal of helping small and medium businesses easily create different landing pages where they can direct potential customers after they’ve engaged with their ad and marketing campaigns. (Apparently some Unbounce customers are successful with just a “handful” of landing pages, while others create “hundreds and hundreds.”)

The Vancouver-headquartered company now has a 200-person team, with customers including Hootsuite, Zola and World Vision. It also says it recently passed the milestone of having powered 1 billion conversions.

Aside from a small seed round back in 2011, Perreault said the company has not taken on any outside funding. Apparently it raised a big round now in order to invest in technology that can bring more automation to the process.

Perreault said the ultimate goal is to allow a business to “set it and forget it through machine learning” — so that they no longer have to create landing pages at all, because the Unbounce platform is doing all the optimization and personalization for them. As a first step in that direction, Unbounce has created a Smart Traffic product that will automatically use visitor data to send visitors to the best landing page, resulting in an average conversion lift of 20%.

“As more and more millennials become the SMB owners, and they’re much more savvy with computers and comfortable with online and digital marketing … landing pages are becoming more critical than ever,” he added.

The funding was led by Denver-based equity firm Crest Rock Partners, with Crest Rock’s Steve Johnson and Jeff Carnes joining Unbounce’s board of directors.

“Unbounce is the clear market leader in conversion optimization today — a world-class team, well-respected brand and the company’s conversion intelligence strategy will together dramatically increase the distance between Unbounce and its competitors,” Johnson said in a statement.

Perreault said he was also pleased that Crest Rock was on-board with Unbounce’s “people first” culture, which includes a commitment to diversity. In fact, the company says it recently reached gender parity, with 50% of employees (and 56% of the senior leadership team) identifying as women. In addition, 34% of employees are visible ethnic minorities.

Unbounce is also announcing that Chief Revenue Officer Felicia Bochicchio has been appointed the company’s president.

Every company today is struggling to deal with security and understanding what is happening on their systems. This is even more pronounced as companies have had to move their employees to work from home. Uptycs, a Boston-area security analytics startup, announced a $30 million Series B today to help companies detect and understand breaches when they happen.

Sapphire Ventures led the round with help from Comcast Ventures and ForgePoint Capital. The startup has now raised a total of $43 million, according to the company. Under the terms of today’s deal, Sapphire Ventures’ president and managing director Jai Das will be joining the company’s board.

Company co-founder and CEO Ganesh Pai says he and his co-founders previously worked at Akamai, where they observed Akamai’s debugging and diagnostic tools, which were designed to work at massive scale. The founders believed they could use a similar approach to building a security analytics platform, and in 2016 the group launched Uptycs .

“We help people to solve intrusion detection, compliance and audit and incident investigation. These are table stakes requirements [for security solutions] that most large scale organizations have, and of course with their scale the challenges vary. What we at Uptycs do is provide a solution for that,” Pai told TechCrunch.

The company uses a flight recorder approach to security, giving security operations teams the ability to sift through the data and review exactly how a detection happened and how the intruder got through the company’s defenses.

He recognizes his company is fortunate to get a round this large right now, but he says the solution has attracted a number of customers signing seven-digit contracts and this in turn got the attention of investors. “That customer engagement, their experience and this commitment from our customers led to this substantial round of funding,” he said.

The company currently has 65 employees spread across offices in Waltham, a Boston suburb, as well as two offices in India. Pai says the plan is to double that number in the next 12 months. “Between the cash flow from our existing customers and the pipeline for us and the funding, we are planning to grow in a meaningful way. If everything aligns with our expectation we will double our team size in the next 12 months,” he said.

As he grows his company in this way, Pai says they are talking to their investors about how to build a diverse workforce. “We’ve thought long and hard about it, both in terms of diversity and inclusion. It is a lot harder to execute because at the end of the day, there is a finite talent pool, but we are having conversations with our investors, who have seen patterns of success in terms of implementing such plans from growth stage ventures,” he said.

He added, “And of course we are a very early-stage company, but we are extremely cognizant, and given the current circumstances are acutely aware that we need to do our very best and make a difference.”

As the company has moved to work from home across its operations, he says it has benefited from working in the cloud from the start. “As an organization we are very fortunate that we built our organization so that everything runs in the cloud and everyone has been able to remain very productive,” he said.

Ryan Easter couldn’t believe he was being asked to run a pandemic business continuity test.

It was late October, 2019 and Easter, IT Director and a principal at Johnson Investment Counsel, was being asked by regulators to ensure that their employees could work from home with the same capabilities they had in the office. In addition, the company needed to evaluate situations where up to 50% of personnel were impacted by a virus and unable to work, forcing others to pick up their internal functions and workload.

“I honestly thought that it was going to be a waste of time,” said Easter. “I never imagined that we would have had to put our pandemic plan into action. But because we had a tested strategy already in place, we didn’t miss a beat when COVID-19 struck.”

In the months leading up to the initial test, Johnson Investment Counsel developed a work anywhere blueprint with their technology partner Evolve IP. The plan covered a wide variety of integrated technologies including voice services, collaboration, virtual desktops, disaster recovery and remote office connectivity.

“Having a strategy where our work anywhere services were integrated together was one of the keys to our success,” said Easter. “We manage about $13 billion in assets for clients across the United States and provide comprehensive wealth and investment management to individual and institutional investors. We have our own line of mutual funds, a state-chartered trust company, a proprietary charitable gift fund, with research analysts and traders covering both equity and fixed income markets. Duct taping one-off solutions wasn’t going to cut it.”

Easter continued, “It was imperative that our advisors could communicate with clients, collaborate with each other and operate the business seamlessly. That included ensuring we could make real-time trades and provide all of our other client services.”

Five months later, the novel coronavirus hit the United States and Johnson Investment Counsel’s blueprint test got real.