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GitLab, the increasingly popular DevOps platform, today announced a major update to its subscription model. The company is doing away with its $4/month Bronze/Starter package. Current users will be able to renew one more time at the existing price or move to a higher tier (and receive a significant discount for the first three years after they do so).
The company’s free tier, it is worth noting, is not going away and GitLab argues that it includes “89% of the features in Bronze/Starter.”
As GitLab founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij told me, this was a difficult decision for the team. He acknowledged that this is a big change for those on the Bronze plan. “I hope that they see that we we did our homework and that we have great legacy pricing,” Sijbrandij said, and added that the company will listen to feedback from its users.
To ease the pain, Bronze users will be able to renew their existing subscription before January 26, 2022 for an additional year at the existing price. They can also opt to move to the Premium tier at a discounted price for the next three years, starting at $6/user/month in Year 1, but that price then goes up to $9/user/month and $15/user/month in Year 2 and 3 respectively. For new users, the Bronze package is no longer available, starting now.
Image Credits: GitLab
In the end, this was a purely financial decision for GitLab. As Sijbrandij told me, the company was losing money on every Bronze-tier customer. “The Bronze tier, we were selling at a loss,” he said. “We were just losing money every time we sold it — just on hosting and support. To be a sustainable business, this was a move we had to make. It’s a big transition for our customers but we want to make sure we’re a sustainable company and we can keep investing.”
Sijbrandij told me the team looked at increasing the price of the Bronze tier to make it profitable. “We looked at all options, but in the end, you’re going to have an offering that is very similar to Premium. It would be too much overlap between the two,” he explained.
With this change, GitLab now offers three tiers: Free, Premium and Ultimate (it’s also doing away with the “Silver/Premium” and “Gold/Ultimate” naming).
The free tier, which in terms of total users is the most popular plan on GitLab, will remain in place. While it is surely a loss-leader for GitLab, it only comes with limited CI/CD credits and doesn’t include any support options, so the overall loss here must have been worth it for the company. Sijbrandij also noted that, as an open core company, having a free and open offering is simply a must.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/gitlab-reshuffles-its-paid-subscription-plans/
Late last week, independent journalist Eric Newcomer reported that Databricks is raising new capital at a valuation of “about $27 billion.” A few days later, another publication chimed in, saying that they had heard that the round could be worth $29 billion at a slightly higher valuation.
Well, well!
Last year, The Exchange covered Databricks’ financial progress as a private company. Databricks, as a refresher, provides its customers with analytics and data science tooling and crossed a $350 million run rate at the end of Q3 2020.
That figure was up from $200 million in the year-ago period. As we wrote at the time, Databricks was “an obvious IPO candidate” and a company with “broad private-market options.” Reports that it has raised more capital underscore our previous notes.
But we took it all one step further after news surfaced that Databricks could go public in the first half of 2021, noodling around with all the financial information we could scrape together for the company to come up with a valuation range. Our resulting figures were a bit low compared to recent news, which forms the crux of our work today: Can we come up with a set of numbers that help make sense of Databricks at $27 billion?
Databricks declined to comment. But that won’t stop us from having fun. So, let’s remind ourselves of what we know about Databricks’ growth history, economics and scale.
From there we will be able to check our estimates against its purported new valuation range and come up with some implied multiples. Then, we’ll contrast those with some high-flying public companies.
Do the numbers somewhat fit? Can we see Databricks making sense at more than $25 billion, more than four times its 2019-era private valuation of $6.2 billion? Let’s find out.
What’s it worth?
In our previous work, we ran a number of growth scenarios to come up with different estimates for Databricks’ current scale. Sparing you several hundred words, given how the company grew from $200 million in annual run rate to $350 million between Q3 2019 and Q3 2020, we estimated that the company would close Q1 2021 with between $425 million and $486.5 million in annualized revenue.
Looking at different data points from the Bessemer Cloud Index at the time while using some flexible-but-not-conservative estimates for Databricks’ revenue quality, we came up with market comps that would have given it a sales multiple of between 20x and 38x. At the high end of our revenue run rate guess for Q1 2021, and top multiple, you get a valuation of $18.5 billion.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/does-a-27-or-29-billion-valuation-make-sense-for-databricks/
Years ago, Uber had a problem. With millions of users and tens of thousands of drivers scattered across a widening expanse of the globe, the fast-growing mobility startup wanted to display more accurate maps to users about where their ride was coming from and where it was intending to go to reach its destination. The challenge is that geospatial datasets can easily reach into the petabytes, so how do you transmit and visualize such data — particularly on mobile?
“We were tasked with this massive planetary dataset,” Sina Kashuk explained about the purpose of Uber’s data visualization team, and “if money wasn’t an object, how would you architect this so that it would have the best performance?” That was the active problem that confronted a quad of engineers and data scientists tasked with solving the problem. Kashuk, Shan He, Isaac Brodsky and Ib Green collectively spent about 16 years at Uber, and they and their teammates at Uber built up what is today Uber’s extensive geospatial data visualization system. He, Brodsky and Green had joined Uber around 2014 and 2015, while Kashuk joined later in 2017.
Thankfully, the code they developed wasn’t locked inside the Uber app — core elements of their engineering were open-sourced into two libraries: Kepler.gl, a web application that can take geospatial datasets and visualize them, and Deck.gl, which offers an extensible application framework for processing geospatial datasets and preparing them for visualization. According to Kashuk, Green was one of the leaders in the development of Deck.gl, and He developed Kepler.gl a year later using Deck.gl as a base. Both libraries remain in active development on GitHub and through Uber’s Visualization team.
Eventually, the quad realized that they could offer services on top of these libraries to other businesses, given some of the interest they were seeing with the open-source projects. “What we realized is that [these libraries] are all mature and they are ready to go to the market [and] there is opportunity beyond usage at Uber, and we thought that we can take these technologies to the next level,“ Kashuk said. The four departed Uber and eventually came together to create Unfolded.ai in late 2019.
The four founders of Unfolded.ai. Via Unfolded.ai.
The startup’s main product is called Unfolded Studio, which acts as a backend-as-a-service for applications built on top of Kepler.gl (which is only a frontend library itself) handling components like data management and server communications. In particular, the product is designed to bring different geospatial datasets together and allow them all to interact with each other in one unified view.
The team first funded their operations with some consulting projects, including with Google Earth, but now it has raised a seed round to further expand the team and its ambitions. To date according to Kashuk, Unfolded has raised a bit more than $6 million, with a seed round that closed last week led by Shvet Jain at S28 Capital with participation from other firms including Fontinalis Ventures. Auren Hoffman wrote the first personal check into the company, and the first institutional VC was IA Ventures.
Some of the first customers of the Unfolded platform have been in agtech, including a company called Indigo Agriculture, which focuses on helping farmers grow crops and livestock sustainably. Unfolded sees potential in many markets where location data intersects business, but for now, remains mostly heads down building out its platform and readying itself for more customers.
TikTok, UC Browser, UC News, Baidu Map, Xiaomi’s Video and Community and 53 other Chinese apps that India banned in late June won’t be returning to the country anytime soon, the Indian government has decided, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
Last week New Delhi told the parent firms of these apps that it wasn’t satisfied with the responses they had provided so far to address cybersecurity concerns charged against them, the source said, requesting anonymity as the communication is private.
Citing this reason, New Delhi has said that it will retain the ban on these apps, but it has not completely shut communication channels with the firms, the source said. Indian media reported last week that the country, which is the world’s second largest internet market with over 600 internet users, was making the ban permanent.
Beginning in late June, India banned over 200 apps including PUBG Mobile with links to China last year amid geo-political tension between the two neighboring nations. All these apps engaged in activities that posed threats to “national security and defence of India, which ultimately impinges upon the sovereignty and integrity of India,” the nation’s IT ministry has said.
New Delhi has so far only sent feedback about the responses to the apps that were banned in late June.
TikTok has been the most high-profile app to be banned by India. ByteDance’s crown app had more than 200 million users in India prior to being blocked in the nation. Despite the ban, the company has retained most of its India-based employees so far.
A source told TechCrunch that ByteDance operates several properties in India including a productivity suite called Lark that remains operational in the country and the team continues to develop these apps. This information has not been previously reported. (UC Browser, too, was once very popular in India, though the rising popularity of Google’s Chrome browser put an end to the Chinese app’s dominance in the country.)
Despite the ban, TikTok and several of the blocked Chinese apps still maintain millions of users in the country who are using specialized software such as virtual private networks to access them. TikTok had over 5 million active users (MAU) in India last month, and PUBG Mobile over 15 million, according to mobile insight firm App Annie, data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch.
TikTok said it was reviewing New Delhi’s notice. “We continually strive to comply with local laws and regulations and do our best to address any concerns the government may have. Ensuring the privacy and security of all our users remains to be our topmost priority,” a spokesperson said.
The ban — as well as the whole U.S. drama about a potential block — hasn’t made much impact on ByteDance’s financials. The Information reported on Tuesday that ByteDance more than doubled its revenue last year to $37 billion, and increased its operating profit to $7 billion, from $4 billion in 2019.
American and Chinese firms have rushed to India in the past decade in search for their next billion users. But the South Asian nation contributes very little to these firms’ bottom line. Kunal Shah, a serial entrepreneur in India, said at a conference in 2018 that the nation has become an “MAU farm” for many companies.
Regardless, since their ban, TikTok and PUBG Mobile have explored various ways to make a comeback in India. TikTok engaged in early investment talks with Reliance Industries, one of India’s largest conglomerates, and PUBG Mobile cut ties with game publisher Tencent and pledged to invest $100 million in India.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/india-retains-ban-on-tiktok-uc-browser-and-57-other-chinese-apps/
PepsiCo, the planetary purveyor of sugary drinks, greasy chips, and (weirdly) oatmeal, hummus, and gazpacho(?) is partnering with Beyond Meat, the publicly traded plant-based protein provider, on a poorly named joint venture to hawk new plant-based food and beverages to consumers.
The PLANeT Partnership (which was clearly branded by the same genius behind the comic sans font), will combine Beyond Meat’s skills with protein prestidigitation and PepsiCo’s marketing and manufacturing savvy to flood the global market with new snacks and drinks, the two companies said.
Neither company disclosed any financial terms and other pesky details around who, what, where, and when, except to say that the the joint venture operations will be managed through the newly created PLANeT Partnership.
(If the companies put as much effort into running the business as they did with naming and branding it, Impossible Foods shouldn’t have much to worry about…. The capitalization and branding of this thing is an affront to the English language is all I’m saying.)
“Plant-based proteins represent an exciting growth opportunity for us, a new frontier in our efforts to build a more sustainable food system and be a positive force for people and the planet, while meeting consumer demand for an expanded portfolio of more nutritious products,” said Ram Krishnan, PepsiCo Global Chief Commercial Officer, in a statement.
In the announcement touting the new JV, PepsiCo referred to its storied history of snack innovation including baked LAY’S chips, Sabra Snack Cups, Alvalle ready-to-drink gazpacho, Quaker Breakfast flats and Gatorade Juiced.
The company has also acquired BFY Brands, which makes PopCorners; SodaStream, which makes… well… SodaStreams… and BareSnacks, which makes baked fruit and vegetable chips.
The deal is the latest really really big partnership for Beyond Meat and follows an oddly botched announcement with McDonald’s that the two companies would be collaborating on new menu items.
