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Alexandr Wang has spent the last five years looking to accelerate the development of AI and machine learning algorithms with Scale AI. The company has raised upward of $270 million since inception and doesn’t show any signs of slowing.
That’s why we’re thrilled to hang out with Wang and Scale AI investor Dan Levine (Accel) on Wednesday, April 7 on Extra Crunch Live.
Extra Crunch Live is free to everyone and focuses on the relationships between founders and investors that have led to successful business building. We talk about what made them choose each other, hear about the initial pitch meetings and learn about how they make decisions about the future together.
ECL also features the Pitch Deck Teardown, wherein our esteemed guests give their live feedback on decks submitted by the audience. If you’d like to send us your deck to be featured on a future episode of Extra Crunch Live, hit up this link.
Dan Levine worked on the platform team at Dropbox before getting into venture, and before that was an entrepreneur himself, founding YC-backed Chartio. His current portfolio includes Gem, Mux, Numeracy (acquired by Snowflake), ReadMe, Scale, Searchlight, Sentry and Vercel.
Wang, for his part, was a technical lead at Quora before founding Scale. He also worked as an algorithm developer at Hudson River Trading and as a software engineer at Addepar after attending, and ultimately dropping out from, MIT, where he studied artificial intelligence.
Between the two of them, these speakers have plenty of wisdom to impart about how to ideate, fund and scale (ha!) businesses.
The episode goes down on April 7 at 12 p.m. PDT/3 p.m. EDT and is free to attend live. Only Extra Crunch members will have access to the episode on demand so be sure to register now and hang out with us.
Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE” at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.
Plaid, a unicorn that helps connect consumers’ bank accounts to financial applications, has raised a $425 million Series D, it announced this morning. TechCrunch understands that the new capital infusion, led by Altimeter Capital, values the company at around $13.4 billion.
It is not surprising that Plaid, a former takeover target for consumer credit giant Visa, is raising more capital. After its $5.3 billion sale to the larger company fell through this January, it became clear that Plaid would chart its own future, sans a corporate parent.
When the Visa-Plaid deal did finally grind to a halt in the face of regulatory scrutiny there was chatter amongst startup and venture folks that the sale dying out was a good thing. Why? Because Plaid had had a great 2020 and was generally agreed to be worth far more than what Visa had agreed to pay.
The startup’s Series D valuation confirms the sentiment. And it wasn’t merely Altimeter that was willing to put capital into the company at its new valuation. The group was joined by two more news investors, Silver Lake Partners and Ribbit Capital. Silver Lake is a private equity leviathan with dozens of billions of dollars under management, while Ribbit is known for its myriad fintech bets.
In short, Plaid has picked up a hybrid of investor scale, late-stage guidance, and fintech acumen in a single round. A number of prior investors also put capital into round.
TechCrunch spoke with Plaid CEO Zachary Perret about the deal, who told TechCrunch in a brief phone call that Altimeter was selected as its new lead investor over other options due to shared alignment regarding the future of financial services for consumers. He added that he’s excited to learn from his trio of new backers, which will help the company build for the long-term.
The CEO also made passing mention of a future IPO, though TechCrunch doesn’t expect to see paperwork regarding a potential flotation from Plaid for some time; it was, however, refreshing to hear an executive admit to having future financial goals.
Regarding the amount of capital that it raised, Perret said that it was the “right level” of capital to allow Plaid to invest in scale, both in terms of its team and its product lineup. The CEO also said that the funds will allow his company to be opportunistic.
The last 12 months for Plaid have been busy. Perret mentioned the time period several times during the interview, explaining how rapidly the world evolved regarding the digitization of consumer financial services over the last year.
Finally, what of growth? What was Plaid willing to share on the growth front was light, merely disclosing that it grew its customer count by 60% in 2020. Perret said that the figure represented an acceleration from previous years. With around 650 staffers today, Plaid grew its headcount by around 20% in the first quarter according to its CEO.
Plaid sits in the midst of the fintech boom that TechCrunch has covered extensively over the past several quarters. As far as external signals go, watching the companies that must partially comprise Plaid’s customer base expand is about as close as we can get to other growth metrics. That particular signal bodes well for Plaid.
Let’s see how well the company can fend off domestic and international competition. It certainly now has the funds to do so.
TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey European founders and investors in cities outside the larger European capitals.
Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in these cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words.
This is your chance to put Zagreb on the Techcrunch Map!
If you are a tech startup founder or investor in the city please fill out the survey form here.
This is the follow-up to the huge survey of investors (see also below) we’ve done over the last six or more months, largely in capital cities.
These formed part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing regularly for ExtraCrunch, our subscription service that unpacks key issues for startups and investors.
In the first wave of surveys, the cities we wrote about were largely capitals. You can see them listed here.
This time, we will be surveying founders and investors in Europe’s other cities to capture how European hubs are growing, from the perspective of the people on the ground.
We’d like to know how your city’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19, and generally how your city will evolve.
We leave submissions mostly unedited and are generally looking for at least one or two paragraphs in answers to the questions.
So if you are a tech startup founder or investor in one of these cities please fill out our survey form here.
Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email mike@techcrunch.com and/or reply on Twitter to @mikebutcher.
China is pushing forward an internet society where economic and public activities increasingly take place online. In the process, troves of citizen and government data get transferred to cloud servers, raising concerns over information security. One startup called ThreatBook sees an opportunity in this revolution and pledges to protect corporations and bureaucracies against malicious cyberattacks.
Antivirus and security software has been around in China for several decades, but until recently, enterprises were procuring them simply to meet compliance requests, Xue Feng, founder and CEO of six-year-old ThreatBook, told TechCrunch in an interview.
Starting around 2014, internet accessibility began to expand rapidly in China, ushering in an explosion of data. Information previously stored in physical servers was moving to the cloud. Companies realized that a cyber attack could result in a substantial financial loss and started to pay serious attention to security solutions.
In the meantime, cyberspace is emerging as a battlefield where competition between states plays out. Malicious actors may target a country’s critical digital infrastructure or steal key research from a university database.
“The amount of cyberattacks between countries is reflective of their geopolitical relationships,” observed Xue, who oversaw information security at Amazon China before founding ThreatBook. Previously, he was the director of internet security at Microsoft in China.
“If two countries are allies, they are less likely to attack one another. China has a very special position in geopolitics. Besides its tensions with the other superpowers, cyberattacks from smaller, nearby countries are also common.”
Like other emerging SaaS companies, ThreatBook sells software and charges a subscription fee for annual services. More than 80% of its current customers are big corporations in finance, energy, the internet industry, and manufacturing. Government contracts make up a smaller slice. With its Series E funding round that closed 500 million yuan ($76 million) in March, ThreatBook boosted its total capital raised to over 1 billion yuan from investors including Hillhouse Capital.
Xue declined to disclose the company’s revenues or valuation but said 95% of the firm’s customers have chosen to renew their annual subscriptions. He added that the company has met the “preliminary requirements” of the Shanghai Exchange’s STAR board, China’s equivalent to NASDAQ, and will go public when the conditions are ripe.
“It takes our peers 7-10 years to go public,” said Xue.
ThreatBook compares itself to CrowdStrike from Silicon Valley, which filed to go public in 2019 and detect threats by monitoring a company’s “endpoints”, which could be an employee’s laptops and mobile devices that connect to the internal network from outside the corporate firewall.
ThreatBook similarly has a suite of software that goes onto the devices of a company’s employees, automatically detects threats and comes up with a list of solutions.
“It’s like installing a lot of security cameras inside a company,” said Xue. “But the thing that matters is what we tell customers after we capture issues.”
SaaS providers in China are still in the phase of educating the market and lobbying enterprises to pay. Of the 3,000 companies that ThreatBook serves, only 300 are paying so there is plentiful room for monetization. Willingness to spend also differs across sectors, with financial institutions happy to shell out several million yuan ($1 = 6.54 yuan) a year while a tech startup may only want to pay a fraction of that.
Xue’s vision is to take ThreatBook global. The company had plans to expand overseas last year but was held back by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’ve had a handful of inquiries from companies in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. There may even be room for us in markets with mature [cybersecurity companies] like Europe and North America,” said Xue. “As long as we are able to offer differentiation, a customer may still consider us even if it has an existing security solution.”
