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Ifeoma Ozoma, a former Pinterest employee who alleged racial and gender discrimination at the company, is co-leading new legislation with California State Senator Connie Levya and others to empower those who experience workplace discrimination and/or harassment. Introduced today, the Silenced No More Act (SB 331) would prevent the use of non-disclosure agreements in workplace situations involving all forms of discrimination and harassment.
“It is unacceptable for any employer to try to silence a worker because he or she was a victim of any type of harassment or discrimination—whether due to race, sexual orientation, religion, age or any other characteristic,” Levya said in a statement. “SB 331 will empower survivors to speak out—if they so wish—so they can hold perpetrators accountable and hopefully prevent abusers from continuing to torment and abuse other workers.”
This proposed bill would expand the current protections workers have through the Stand Together Against Non-Disclosures Act, also authored by Levya, that went into effect 2019. Ozoma, along with former coworker Aerica Shimizu Banks, came forward with claims of both racial and gender discrimination last year. They eventually settled with Pinterest, but the STAND Act technically only protected them for speaking out about gender discrimination. This new bill would ensure workers are also protected when speaking out about racial discrimination.
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“It was a legal gamble,” Ozoma told TechCrunch about coming forward with claims of both racial and gender discrimination, despite having signed an NDA. Pinterest could’ve decided to sue both Ozoma and Banks, Ozoma said, but that would’ve required the company to admit wrongdoing.
“Technically, we weren’t [supposed to talk about racial discrimination] and that’s what most companies bank on,” she said.
It’s a long road ahead for the bill, which needs to be passed by the legislature and ultimately signed into law by CA Governor Gavin Newsom, but it would represent a monumental shift in the tech industry, if passed.
“It would be huge and not just for tech, but for your industry as well,” she told me. “I believe that we don’t have real progress unless we approach things intersectionally and that’s the lesson from all of us.”
Lost amongst all the IPO chatter of the mega-unicorns are a crop of companies reaching their stride, often flush with capital, ready with big plans, and still with some time before they go public. This group of companies are what we’re calling our $50 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) group, though we’re not too strict on that revenue figure.
Close enough will do.
A little bit ago we kicked off the series by looking at OwnBackup and Assembly. Today we’re continuing the series, digging into SimpleNexus and PicsArt. Next up is and Synack, and we have an interview with Kaseya on deck. The latter company is a bit oversized for our cohort, but we’ll figure out what to do with our notes from that chat in due time.
As a reminder, we’re looking at startups that are around the $50 million ARR mark because our 2020 exploration of $100 million ARR companies wound up merely taking looks at companies, like Lemonade, that were going public in short order. We’ll still do the occasional piece on the group, but we’re focusing on smaller firms this year.
So, into the breach with notes on SimpleNexus and PicsArt, drawing on public information concerning their fundraising history and product, and interviews with both companies. Let’s see what we can learn from their growth!
SimpleNexus
SimpleNexus is a Utah-based technology company that provides digital mortgage software. The company most recently raised $108 million in January of this year, a Series B that we sadly lack a valuation for.
The company is growing quickly, with founders Matt Hansen and Ben Miller telling TechCrunch that they expect to scale from $30 million to $58 million in the next 12 months. That puts the the company comfortably into our new group.
SimpleNexus’s product is sold to banks and other financial institutions, helping provide a hub — a simple nexus, if you will — providing consumers a single login to manage their home-buying process from search to purchase. The software itself is sold on a SaaS basis, often white-labeled to banks.
But while SimpleNexus has seen success with its current model, claiming to touch around one in every eight mortgages, its founders told TechCrunch in a video call that they have bigger aspirations. Hansen, who is also the company’s CEO, said that in the future its service could stick with customers after they buy a home, perhaps helping them connect utilities, find appraisers, and manage their home.
TechCrunch was curious about the company’s recent capital raise, and how it may impact SimpleNexus’s ramp to nearly $60 million in revenue by January 2021. Per the company, it wasn’t looking for capital, but after receiving some inbound offers to sell its entire business, which weren’t what its founders wanted, it decided to raise more external capital instead. Insight, which led the round, was excited about their company, the founders said, thanks to its customer growth and revenue expansion.
Rust — the programming language, not the survival game — now has a new home: the Rust Foundation. AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla banded together to launch this new foundation today and put a two-year commitment to a million-dollar budget behind it. This budget will allow the project to “develop services, programs, and events that will support the Rust project maintainers in building the best possible Rust.”
Rust started out as a side project inside of Mozilla to develop an alternative to C/C++ . Designed by Mozilla Research’s Graydon Hore, with contributions from the likes of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich, Rust became the core language for some of the fundamental features of the Firefox browser and its Gecko engine, as well as Mozilla’s Servo engine. Today, Rust is the most-loved language among developers. But with Mozilla’s layoffs in recent months, a lot of the Rust team lost its job and the future of the language became unclear without a main sponsor, though the project itself has thousands of contributors and a lot of corporate users, so the language itself wasn’t going anywhere.
A large open-source project often needs some kind of guidance, which the new foundation will provide — and it takes a legal entity to manage various aspects of the community, including the trademark, for example. The new Rust board will feature five board directors from the five founding members, as well as five directors from project leadership.
“Mozilla incubated Rust to build a better Firefox and contribute to a better Internet,” writes Bobby Holley, Mozilla and Rust Foundation Board member, in a statement. “In its new home with the Rust Foundation, Rust will have the room to grow into its own success, while continuing to amplify some of the core values that Mozilla shares with the Rust community.”
All of the corporate sponsors have a vested interest in Rust and are using it to build (and rebuild) core aspects of some of their stacks. Google recently said that it will fund a Rust-based project that aims to make the Apache webserver safer, for example, while Microsoft recently formed a Rust team, too, and is using the language to rewrite some core Windows APIs. AWS recently launched Bottlerocket, a new Linux distribution for containers that, for example, features a build system that was largely written in Rust.
DoorDash is expanding its robotic footprint into the kitchen. The delivery service is set to acquire Chowbotics, a Bay Area-based robotics best known for its salad-making robot, Sally. TechCrunch has confirmed the acquisition, which was first noted by The Wall Street Journal.
“We have long admired the work that Chowbotics has done to increase access to fresh meals, with its groundbreaking robotics product and vision,” DoorDash co-founder Stanley Tang said in a comment offered to TechCrunch. “At DoorDash, we are always working to innovate and continue improving how we support our merchant partners and their success — and are excited to leverage this technology to do so in new ways. With the Chowbotics team on board, we can explore new use cases and customers, providing another service to help our merchants grow.”
Founded in 2014, Chowbotics has raised around $21 million to date, including an $11 million round back in 2018. The company’s vending machine-style salad bar robot was already well-positioned for the pandemic, removing a human element from the food preparation process — not to mention the fact that salad bars and buffets tend to be open air affairs. In October, the startup added a contactless feature to the robot, letting users order ahead of time, via app.
“Joining the DoorDash team unlocks new possibilities for Chowbotics and the technology that this team has built over the past seven years,” CEO Rick Wilmer said in a statement. “As the leader in food delivery and on-demand logistics, DoorDash has the unparalleled reach and expertise to help us grow and deploy our technology more broadly, so together, we can make fresh, nutritious food easy for more people.”
It’s not entirely clear how the company’s technology will fit into the delivery service’s current offering, though DoorDash notes it will “improve consumer access to fresh and safe meals, and enhance our robust merchant offerings and logistics platform.” It also remains to be seen whether Chowbotics will continue to operate as its own entity within the broader DoorDash. We’ve reached out for more insight.
“At DoorDash, we strive to become a merchant’s first call when they want to grow their business,” Tang said. “What excites us most about Chowbotics is that the team has developed a remarkable tool for helping merchants grow. Bringing Chowbotics’ technology into the DoorDash platform gives us a new opportunity to help merchants expand their current menu offerings and reach new customers in new markets — which is a fundamental part of our merchant-first approach to empowering local economies.”
DoorDash has been working with robotics companies for a number of years now. Perhaps the most prominent example is a partnership with Starship Technologies to explore food delivery robots. Though that technology has seen a fair number of roadblocks among local officials not eager to turn their sidewalks over to robots. The delivery company likens Chowbotics’ kiosk-style technology to its work with ghost kitchens, effectively serving as a conduit to help expand food options at local merchants – be it in store or through delivery. The former will likely be of more interest once the current pandemic is in the rear view.
Details of the acquisition have not been disclosed.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/08/doordash-acquires-salad-making-robotics-startup-chowbotics/
Last week, another container security startup came off the board when Rapid7 bought Alcide for $50 million. The purchase is part of a broader trend in which larger companies are buying up cloud-native security startups at a rapid clip. But why is there so much M&A action in this space now?
Palo Alto Networks was first to the punch, grabbing Twistlock for $410 million in May 2019. VMware struck a year later, snaring Octarine. Cisco followed with PortShift in October and Red Hat snagged StackRox last month before the Rapid7 response last week.
This is partly because many companies chose to become cloud-native more quickly during the pandemic. This has created a sharper focus on security, but it would be a mistake to attribute the acquisition wave strictly to COVID-19, as companies were shifting in this direction pre-pandemic.
It’s also important to note that security startups that cover a niche like container security often reach market saturation faster than companies with broader coverage because customers often want to consolidate on a single platform, rather than dealing with a fragmented set of vendors and figuring out how to make them all work together.
Containers provide a way to deliver software by breaking down a large application into discrete pieces known as microservices. These are packaged and delivered in containers. Kubernetes provides the orchestration layer, determining when to deliver the container and when to shut it down.
This level of automation presents a security challenge, making sure the containers are configured correctly and not vulnerable to hackers. With myriad switches this isn’t easy, and it’s made even more challenging by the ephemeral nature of the containers themselves.
Yoav Leitersdorf, managing partner at YL Ventures, an Israeli investment firm specializing in security startups, says these challenges are driving interest in container startups from large companies. “The acquisitions we are seeing now are filling gaps in the portfolio of security capabilities offered by the larger companies,” he said.
