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Ethena co-founders Roxanne Petraeus and Anne Solmssen began their company with a clear goal: There needs to be a more modern, and effective, way to deploy anti-harassment training to employees. Ethena’s solution is to send employees bite-sized monthly “nudges” or pings with five-minute lessons, replacing the usual one-hour annual workshop with more flexible learning.
The startup raised $2 million off of that vision in June, and today has announced it has raised follow-on funding with the same exact amount, led by GSV. The startup currently has $5 million in venture capital, with investors including Homebrew, Neo and Village Global.
The follow-on capital comes right after Ethena has had some solid growth itself. The startup closed a couple major contracts with companies including Netflix, Zoom and Zendesk, and tells TechCrunch that more than 20,000 active employees complete its monthly training.
Solid growth and new cash is where the story could stop for now, but Petraeus tells TechCrunch that early momentum has also inspired a shift of sorts in what Ethena is trying to accomplish.
“When we initially launched in Feb 2020, we thought that for our first year, we’d focus entirely on scaling companies because only startups would be interested in an innovative approach to compliance training,” she said. “What’s changed is we’ve learned that even large enterprises want a better approach, deeper impact and are willing to be innovative in a space historically dominated by lawyers and legacy e-learning providers.”
The startup is expanding its offering from anti-sexual harassment training to a wide variety of training courses focused on compliance, from financial compliance to code of conduct measures. The shift wasn’t because of a lack of interest from customers, the co-founder said, but instead demand from existing enterprise customers to offer more than just a singular topic.
“We think taking a specific sector-based approach can actually narrow the impact we’re having,” Petraeus said. “So we are trying to take a really inclusive approach,” from the start on what kind of topics should be treated as more than “just checking off a box.”
Petraeus, an army veteran, says that Ethena’s confidence in effectiveness and outcomes comes from military data on how adults learn.
“We know that traditional training just isn’t effective at behavior change, and there are some studies that show that it’s a pretty big backlash with increased unconscious bias after training versus before.” The startup differentiates from other micro-learning plays in its curriculum.
The curriculum is designed to be consumed over the course of a year instead of in an annual hour-long session. This tiny iteration is enough to give employees a repetitive way to understand the content. “We’re experimenting with things like graphic novels and podcasts to present training,” Petraeus said. “Just making sure whatever we’re doing yesterday is important tomorrow, because I think it’s important for us to be agile content creators.”
But Ethena’s biggest differentiation, Petraeus says, is its content. The pandemic has boasted a whole new sort of situation that employees need help, or proactive guidance, navigating. Petraeus says that Ethena’s monthly cadence gives it flexibility to adopt “modern” scenarios like Slack culture and Zoom etiquette. Ethena’s top performing training nudges in 2020 included lessons on online harassment prevention and mental health inclusivity.
The micro-learning approach has long been popular among edtech companies as a way to sneak or gamify small lessons into a workflow. So far, Ethena says over 90% of 150,000 in-app learner feedback notes are positive, saying the information is engaging and relevant. In Q4, Ethena saw learner growth of more than 250% quarter over quarter.
GSV’s Deborah Quazzo, who led Ethena’s seed and now this follow-on financing, said that it’s “not a coincidence that they’ve picked up some of the best logos in the world at an early stage,” referring to Ethena’s big customers. Quazzo thinks the compliance market has had very limited innovation so far, even though it’s a massive opportunity.
“They are seeing such strong product market fit and customers are pulling them into areas of content extension, so having more room to run faster made total sense,” she said.
Over the past two decades, there has been a complete revolution in software engineering driven by the rise of open source. Proprietary tools and libraries have widely given way to open-source libraries and editors shared on sites like GitHub. The result has been an explosion of new software engineers who can both learn from and contribute to the most cutting-edge software in the world.
That open model remains mostly a pipe dream in the silicon world. The pipeline and tooling for designing and engineering chips remains almost entirely proprietary, and while new architectures like RISC-V and new specifications like OpenRAN have made some headway in recent years, the industry is still almost hermetically sealed to open innovation.
CHIPS Alliance was started in March 2019 with the mission to open that ecosystem up and encourage the development of open-source practices throughout the hardware silicon world. It’s hosted as a member of the Linux Foundation, and shares a similar ethos of using openness to spur further innovation.
The Alliance announced today that it has hired Rob Mains as its new executive director. Mains joined the organization last month as general manager, and previously, had a multi-decade career across the silicon industry at companies like Qualcomm, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and IBM.
Mains sees those experiences as being formative for understanding the current ecosystem, but understands that the silicon world has to change. “Obviously, it’s a very different mindset from silicon companies have had in the past,” Mains said. CHIPS Alliance is “creating a platform that different companies and members can contribute to … and bridge us to the next stage of innovation.”
New CHIPS Alliance executive director Rob Mains. Photo via CHIPS Alliance.
Currently, the organization has more than two dozen corporate and university members, including Intel, Google, Alibaba and RISC-V darling SiFive.
Compared to the RISC-V Foundation and other orgs focused on specific open-source technologies, Mains sees CHIPS Alliance trying to create a more open ecosystem holistically. “There are a number of different areas where we can promote standards and examples,” he said, pointing to examples like bus protocols and interfaces between chiplets. CHIPS Alliance hosts the OpenXtend protocol first developed at Western Digital, which is designed to provide a consistent interface between processor caches and memory controllers, and it is also backing the Advanced Interface Bus (AIB) standard first developed at Intel to connect multiple semiconductor dies together.
Mains has a particular background in electronic design automation (EDA) tools, which help chip designers translate their models into actual transistors on physical silicon. He sees a real opportunity to further expand open-source tools in the EDA space. In addition, the organization is interested in further exploring progress on Open PDK (process design kit) infrastructure such as a recent experimental preview offered by Google and Skywater.
Mains hopes that by being a community and a champion for open-source methodologies in hardware, this cloistered industry can open up and expand the range and efforts of innovation happening.
The IPO frenzy is not letting up, Bumble informed the world this morning.
Per a new SEC filing, the dating company raised its target IPO price range, indicating that its previous attempt to quantify its per-share value was an undershoot. This means we’ll need to calculate a host of new valuations and revenue multiples for the company.
But more than that, we have a question to answer: Is Bumble aiming for a Match.com price, despite not being as profitable as its already-public rival? The last time we covered the pair, Bumble’s implied revenue multiples were discounted compared to Match, but with this new price, has the smaller company gained ground?
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And if so, does it mean that we’re seeing more public market enthusiasm for private companies? We’ll find out.
When it comes to the frenetic demand for IPO shares from public investors, I am reminded of a particular Dilbert. In this particular strip, Wally gets fired and is then hired back as a consultant. People outside the company appear smarter, he said, so he’s now back and getting paid more money than before.
This, but for private companies going public. Some companies appear to have huge promise while private, only to fizzle slowly while public. Or they manage huge price gains during their IPO process, only to cede those wins after they have a few trading months under their belt.
Is that what’s going to happen with Bumble?
Bumble’s new IPO pricing range
Bumble targeted a $28 to $30 per-share IPO price when it first set a range, implying a greater-than $1 billion raise. Now the company is selling more shares at an even higher price. From 34.5 million shares to 45 million, and at a new $37 to $39 per share price range, Bumble could raise $1.66 billion to $1.76 billion in its IPO.
And that’s not counting its underwriters’ option of 6.75 million shares, which might bring its total raise to $2.02 billion at the top end of its new pricing interval.
What is Bumble worth at those new prices? Using its simple, shares-outstanding post-IPO count of 112,745,301 — inclusive of its underwriters’ option — the company would be worth $4.17 billion to $4.40 billion.
The Atlanta-based BIP Capital has a new name for its venture capital operations (Panoramic Ventures); a new partner (Paul Judge); and is launching a $300 million new fund in its bid to plant a flag as the premier venture fund among the rising startup cities across the country.
Miami may have grabbed headlines recently as a new hub for venture capital and technology startups, but like other cities across the Southeast it’s lacked venture funds of a significant size since the early days of the dot-com bubble. Panoramic wants to be the fundraising destination for entrepreneurs outside of traditional tech hubs like Boston, Silicon Valley and New York as these new tech hubs emerge.
Atlanta, which already boasts several startup companies that have achieved billion-dollar valuations including Greenlight Financial and Calendly, has an equally burgeoning startup scene and an opportunity to become the central hub for venture capital investment in a region that encompasses several other rising tech hubs in the Southeast like Birmingham, Miami, Nashville, and New Orleans.
It’s a strategy similar to the one that Drive Capital has employed to become a leading fund in the Midwest and across the U.S.
Under the new partnership, which will include famed early stage Atlanta investor, Paul Judge, BIP Capital’s venture activities will operate under the Panoramic Ventures brand.
Should the firm manage to raise the $300 million it has targeted for Panoramic’s inaugural investment vehicle it would become the largest venture fund in the Southeast.
“It’s important to have a fund at that scale,” said Mark Buffington, a co-founder of BIP Capital and Panoramic Ventures. “You see the venture activity that is increasing in the region [and] one thing that’s been missing is a really active venture fund that can scale up as companies grow.”
Panoramic intends to be active at the seed stage while having the capacity to make investments in later stage venture backed companies as well, according to the two co-founders. And the firm will also try to focus on a more diverse group of entrepreneurs, thanks to the addition of Paul Judge.
Judge, a Black serial entrepreneur and investor, was the co-founder of the Atlanta-based voice recognition tech developer Pindrop, the Wi-Fi startup Luma Home, and security tech developer Purewire. He’s also an investor several startups across the Southeast through his own venture initiatives, including Techsquare Labs and Judge sits on the investment committee for the SoftBank Opportunity Fund, focused on Black, Hispanic and Native American founders. His portfolio includes companies like LeaseQuery, Cove.tool, OncoLens and Eventeny.
About $125 million has already been soft-circled for the new Panoramic Ventures fund, which expects to work closely with some of the other investment firms that have cropped up or established a presence in the Southeast. That includes firms like Outlander Labs, founded by the husband and wife investment team of Paige and Leura Craig, and the LA-based firm, Mucker Labs, which has an investment partner working out of Nashville.
“There’s been an absence of this type of energy and this type of heft in a venture fund in Atlanta,” said Judge. “That’s the hole that we’ve been aiming to fill.”
Panoramic will invest in Seed, Series A, and Series B funding rounds, the company said in a statement. Investment areas will focus on include business-to-business software as a service companies, healthcare software, financial technologies, digital media, cybersecurity, and frontier technologies.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and be sure to check out last week’s main ep that dug into Robinhood, Miami, and a host of other topics.
This morning we had a pile of news to get through. Here’s the rundown:
- Pony.ai raised another $100 million, which underscores our growing thesis that there is no amount of money yet that will produce the tech required for self-driving cars to work. Perhaps we will get there, but it is going to cost a pretty penny or two.
- Sticking to cars, the Apple-Kia tieup is kaput, which we should have known the moment it became known. Apple previously bought startup Drive.ai back in 2019, of course.
- Vroom, a 2020 IPO, bought a Super Bowl ad. Who would have expected that? Its shares are up, however, after the ad.
- Still on the car beat, Tesla bought $1.50 billion in bitcoin, and may accept the stuff as tender to buy its vehicles in the future. The move sent the price of bitcoin higher.
- Clubhouse got banned in China.
- Phable raised $12 million, Nexthink raised $180 million, and Bumble is targeting a higher share price in its impending IPO.
- And we may have figured out the ∆ between what investors are saying about the Seed market, and what data has largely said.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/08/equity-monday-tesla-buys-bitcoin-nexthink-raises-and-bumble/
