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Application performance monitoring startup Sentry announced today that it has reached unicorn status, raising a $60 million Series D with a post-funding valuation of $1 billion. The round was led by Accel and New Enterprise Associates, both returning investors, and Bond.
Accel led Sentry’s seed funding in 2015, and has invested in each of its rounds since then. The startup, which serves 68,000 organizations, has now raised a total of $127 million. Its clients include Disney, Cloudflare, Peloton, Slack, Eventbrite, Supercell and Rockstar Games.
Sentry’s software monitors apps for potential issues, helping developers catch bugs before they result in outages, downtime and frustrated users. Its Series D will be used on product development, like adding support for more languages and frameworks, and hiring for its offices in San Francisco, Toronto and Vienna.
While Sentry’s products are used by a wide range of sectors, it is seeing continued growth in gaming and streaming media, and new demand in industries that are digitizing more of their infrastructure and services, including finance, commerce and healthcare.
In July, Sentry announced the launch of frontend monitoring software for Python and Javascript. At the time, Sentry’s chief executive officer Milin Desai told TechCrunch that its customers in all verticals were relying more heavily on the platform as the COVID-19 pandemic increased the usage of work, education and e-commerce apps.
In a press statement, Accel partner Dan Levine said, “With nearly all companies moving to digital-first ways of working and engaging with customers, application health has become a business-critical initiative, and as a result, Sentry is poised for explosive growth.”
Some more internal emails Facebook really doesn’t want you to see: Turns out in 2017 COO Sheryl Sandberg had already known for years there were problems with a free ad planning tool the company offers to marketeers to display estimates of how many people campaigns running on its platform may reach, per newly unsealed court documents.
The filing also reveals that a Facebook product manager for the ‘potential reach’ tool warned the company was making revenue it “should never have” off of “wrong data”.
The unsealed documents pertain to a US class action lawsuit, filed in 2018, which alleges that Facebook deceived advertisers by knowingly including fake and duplicate accounts in ‘potential reach’ metric.
Facebook denies the claim but has acknowledged accuracy issues with the ‘potential reach’ metric as far back as 2016 — and also changed how it worked in 2019.
While the litigants have continued to accuse Facebook of continuing to misrepresent the ad reach estimate in updates to their 2018 complaint.
Redacted documents from the lawsuit, reported by the WSJ last year, included the awkward detail that a Facebook employee had asked “how long can we get away with the reach overestimation?”
But sections of the filing pertaining to Sandberg and other Facebook executives were redacted.
Newly unsealed documents from the suit — which we’ve reviewed — now reveal that in fall 2017 Sandberg “acknowledged in an internal email she had known about problems with Potential Reach for years”.
They also show Facebook repeatedly rejected internal proposals to fix the issue of fake and duplicate accounts inflating the estimates its platform showed to advertisers of the number of people who could see their ads — citing impact on revenue as a reason not to act.
In early 2018 Facebook estimated that removing duplicate accounts would cause a 10% drop in potential reach, per the unsealed filing. While Facebook management rejected an employee’s suggestion to change the language the tool showed to advertisers, declining to swap out the words “people” and “reach” for the (more accurate) term “accounts” — on the grounds that “people-based marketing was core to Facebook’s value proposition”.
The filing also reveals that a product manager for ‘potential reach’, Yaron Fidler, proposed a fix for the tool that would have decreased its numbers. His proposal was rejected by Facebook’s metrics leadership on the grounds that it would have a “significant” impact on the company’s revenue — to which Fidler responded: “It’s revenue we should have never made given the fact it’s based on wrong data.”
Always interesting to go back and see what Facebook worked for years to keep sealed. "trade secrets"….lol 2/4 pic.twitter.com/vISCzezjKH
— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) February 18, 2021
In 2016, when Facebook published an update on metrics — a few weeks after publicly disclosing it had been over-inflating average video view times, as it sought to regain advertiser trust in its reporting tools — the tech giant also announced a new channel for “regular information on metrics enhancements”, called Metrics FYI.
This is where it made the aforementioned fuzzy disclosure of accuracy issues with ‘potential reach’ — writing then that it was “improving our methodology for sampling and extrapolating potential audience sizes” to “help to provide a more accurate estimate for a given target audience and to better account for audiences across multiple platforms (Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network)”.
“In most cases, advertisers should expect to see less than a 10% change (increase or decrease) in the audience sizes shown in the tool,” it added at the time.
However the December 2016 blog post did not go into any detail about the nature of the accuracy problems Facebook thought needed improving — reading more like another classic slice of Facebook crisis PR.
The class action suit, meanwhile, alleges that rather than accepting internal proposals to fix the accuracy problems of ‘potential reach’, Facebook instead “developed talking points to deflect from the truth”.
The tech giant did announce some changes to the ad tool in March 2019 — when it said an advertiser’s campaign’s estimated potential reach “is now based on how many people have been shown an ad on a Facebook Product in the past 30 days who match your desired audience and placement criteria” (vs the estimates being previously based on “people who were active users in the past 30 days”).
But the litigants argue that the changes to the tool which displays an estimate to advertisers as they are beginning to create a campaign — and therefore when they’re deciding/considering whether/how much money to spend with Facebook — do not fully fix the issue of the metric not corresponding to the potential audience of people who could see the ad on Facebook.
An analyst report back in 2017 showed that Facebook’s ad platform claimed to reach millions more users among specific age groups in the U.S. than official census data indicated reside in the country.
At the time the company said the audience reach estimates “are based on a number of factors, including Facebook user behaviors, user demographics, location data from devices, and other factors”, per the WSJ, and claimed they are “not designed to match population or census estimates”. Facebook added then that it is “always working to improve our estimates”.
Asked about the latest batch of unsealed court documents pertaining to the lawsuit — including the revelation that Facebook’s COO had told staff she knew about “problems” with the ad tool “for years” as far back as fall 2017 — Facebook sent us this statement, attributed to a spokesperson: “These allegations are without merit and we will defend ourselves vigorously.”
Problems with self-reporting ad metrics have been a recurring theme for Facebook.
Last year the tech giant disclosed yet another issue on this front — saying its ‘conversion lift’ ad tool had a code error that meant it had miscalculated the number of sales derived from ad impressions for a number of advertisers.
That ‘technical problem’ with Facebook’s internal calculation of the efficacy of third parties’ ad campaigns meant advertisers saw skewed data which they may have used to determine how much to spend on its platform.
Yext Answers allows businesses to provide a better search experience on their own websites — but as the name implies, the goal is really to make sure consumers get the answers they’re looking for.
“If we deliver a link [in response to a search query], we consider it a failure on our side,” Chief Strategy Officer Marc Ferrentino told me.
Ferrentino said the company will be able to do an even better job of that starting on March 17, with the launch of the “Orion” update to its search algorithm.
Yext will then be able to pull answers directly from unstructured pages on a business’ website. The key, he said, is that Yext can “extract structured information” from an unstructured document — whether that’s a webpage, a blog post or a help document — rather than just searching for keywords. So instead simply presenting a link or a “blob of text,” it will offer a “rich snippet” that actually answers your question.
Image Credits: Yext
There’s a good chance that you’re familiar with something similar from Google’s consumer search experience, where the results often include a widget with questions and answers. Ferrentino welcomed the comparison, saying this will allow Yext customers to close the “experience gap” between Google’s search experience and their own.
To demonstrate the technology, Ferrentino showed me how Yext Answers could crawl pages about presidential history and then return the correct answer when asked, “Who was the only U.S. president to be impeached twice?”
Or for a more commercial (albeit slightly meta) example, he showed me how it could answer questions about Yext’s technology. As another example, Yext says it could search a bank’s website to answer a question about the difference between a 401(k) and Roth IRA.
And Yext co-founder and President Jon Brod noted that this change won’t just improve things for business and their customers, but also Yext’s non-profit clients, including the World Health Organization, which is using Yext to provide pandemic-related answers online.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/yext-answers-orion/
Each year, millions of students in India rush to get an admission in universities abroad. Often they don’t know which program they should focus on, or the college that is right for their skillset and ambition.
Scores of legacy and newfound firms are attempting to offer counselling to these students. But despite India contributing more international students than any other country, most firms aiming to address this challenge are not focused on India, and struggle to understand some unique problems students in the world’s second most populous country face.
An Indian startup that is bridging this gap on Thursday said it has raised $6.5 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its platform in the world’s second largest internet market.
Leverage Edu said Tomorrow Capital led the Delhi-headquartered startup’s Series A financing round. Existing investors Blume Ventures and DSG Consumer Partners also participated in the round.
Akshay Chaturvedi, founder and chief executive of Leverage Edu, told TechCrunch in an interview that he believes that eventually the firm that is going to serve the students best and emerge most successful will be the one that is physically closer to them, and not to the universities.
Chaturvedi, 30, began exploring this idea for this startup in 2015 and spent a little more than a year experimenting with different models. One of the earliest iterations of Leverage Edu offered mentorship to students and rewarded counselors with points.
Today, the startup offers a broad range of services in addition to offering personalized mentorship. Through its workshops, it helps students find the right college, guides them with complex applications and grade conversions, as well as assists with education loan, VISA, and accommodation. “It’s one digital dashboard. You get everything from flight tickets to local phone numbers, to education loan in one place,” he said.
“We believe it is inevitable that the next stellar brand in the global cross-border education space will be a home-grown one. We have a great belief in Akshay as a founder – he has a fantastic roadmap for scaling the business and the passion to build a truly global Indian edtech brand – and are excited about working with the Leverage Edu team on this journey,” said Rohini Prakash, chief executive of Tomorrow Capital, in a statement.
Leverage Edu helps students land admission in the most prestigious colleges, but also works with those that didn’t score the most marks.
“Students going to the top colleges is just 10% of the potential audience,” explained Chaturvedi, who spent his teen years attending talks from startup founders and also made money by bringing more people to those talks. “There are many universities that don’t have the best branding. To connect them with students, we have our SaaS offering Univalley.com,” he said.
The startup plans to deploy the fresh capital to help students find colleges in more geographies including the UK and Australia, he said.
“We want to focus on a few things and do them really really well. There is also this myth around foreign education being expensive that we’ve been busting for last four years. 18 months from now, we want to be among the top study abroad companies in India, both by number of students and a roof-hitting NPS – because a happy student is why we are all really motivated everyday to do this!”, he added.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/indias-college-admission-platform-leverage-edu-raises-6-5-million/
Each year, millions of students in India rush to get an admission in universities abroad. Often they don’t know which program they should focus on, or the college that is right for their skillset and ambition.
Scores of legacy and newfound firms are attempting to offer counselling to these students. But despite India accounting for more students than any other country, most firms aiming to address this challenge are not focused on India, and struggle to understand some unique problems students from the world’s second most populous country face.
An Indian startup that is bridging this gap on Thursday said it has raised $6.5 million in a new financing round as it looks to scale its platform in the world’s second largest internet market.
Leverage Edu said Tomorrow Capital led the Gurgaon-headquartered startup’s Series A financing round. Existing investors Blume Ventures and DSG Consumer Partners also participated in the round.
Akshay Chaturvedi, founder and chief executive of Leverage Edu, told TechCrunch in an interview that he believes that eventually the firm that is going to serve the students best and emerge most successful will be the one that is physically closer to them, and not to the universities.
Chaturvedi, 30, has been experimenting with the right model for his startup for over five years. One of the earliest iterations of Leverage Edu offered mentorship to students and rewarded counselors with points.
Today, the startup offers a broad range of services in addition to offering personalized mentorship. Through its workshops, it helps students find the right college, guides them with complex applications and grade conversions, as well as assists with education loan, VISA, and accommodation. “It’s one digital dashboard. You get everything from flight ticket to local phone number, to education loan in one place,” he said.
“We believe it is inevitable that the next stellar brand in the global cross-border education space will be a home-grown one. We have a great belief in Akshay as a founder – he has a fantastic roadmap for scaling the business and the passion to build a truly global Indian edtech brand – and are excited about working with the Leverage Edu team on this journey,” said Rohini Prakash, chief executive of Tomorrow Capital, in a statement.
Leverage Edu helps students land admission in the most prestigious colleges, but also works with those that didn’t score the most marks and find high-profile colleges.
“Students going to the top colleges is just 10% of the potential audience,” explained Chaturvedi, who spent his teen years attending talks from startup founders and also made money by bringing more people to those talks. “There are many universities that don’t have the best branding. To connect them with students, we have Univalley.com,” he said.
The startup plans to deploy the fresh capital to help students find colleges in more geographies including UK and Australia, he said.
“We want to focus on a few things and do them really really well. There is also this myth around foreign education being expensive that we’ve been busting for last four years. 18 months from now, we want to be among the top study abroad companies in India, both by number of students and a roof-hitting NPS – because a happy student is why we are all really motivated everyday to do this!”, he added.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/indias-college-admission-platform-leverage-edu-raises-6-5-million/
