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Rocket fuel technology startup Firehawk Aerospace has added $1.2 million to its existing seed financing, bringing the full amount invested in the round to $2.5 million. The new tranche comes from Harlow Capital Management, a Dallas-based firm run by Colby Harlow, who will join Firehawk’s board of directors as part of the deal.
Firewhawk, which was a finalist in our first-ever all-virtual Startup Battlefield at TC Disrupt last September, has developed a new kind of hybrid rocket fuel that greatly enhances rocket launch safety, cost and transportation using additive manufacturing (basically, the grown-up version of 3D printing). Hybrid rocket fuel (which combines aspects of both liquid and solid propellants used previously) isn’t new, but past technology has been unable to compete on cost and efficacy relative to existing nonhybrid alternatives.
The startup’s Chief Scientist Ron Jones was able to get around these limitations with two new approaches: Using a fuel with a hard polymer structure and producing it using additive manufacturing instead of casting via molds with a liquid that hardens.
Firehawk now intends to use its seed funding to test its technology in operational conditions and at the kind of scale required for commercialization, and to build out its partnerships and client list. The startup also intends to grow its R&D and manufacturing operations in both Texas and Oklahoma.
Each year Okta processes millions of SaaS logons via its authentication system. It kindly aggregates that data to find the most popular apps and publishes an annual report. This year it found that the most popular tool by far was Microsoft Office 365.
It’s worth noting that while app usage popularity varied by region, Office 365 was number one with a bullet across the board, whether globally or when the report broke it down by geographic area. That wasn’t true of any other product in this report, so Office 365 has extensive usage across the world (at least among companies that use Okta).
But as with everything cloud, it’s not a simple matter to say that because lots of people signed onto Office 365, Microsoft is the clear winner in a broader sense. In reality, the cloud is a complex marketplace, and just because people use one tool doesn’t preclude them from using tools that compete directly with it.
As a case in point, consider that the report found that 36% of Microsoft 365 customers were also using Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite), which offers a similar set of office productivity tools. Further, Okta found that 42% of Office 365 customers were using Zoom and 32% were using Slack.
This is pretty remarkable when you consider that Office 365 bundles Teams with similar functionality for free. What’s more, so does Google with Google Hangouts, so people use the tool they want when they want, and sometimes it seems they use competing versions of the same tool. The report also found that of those Office 365 users, 44% are using Salesforce, 41% AWS, 15% Smartsheet and 14% Tableau (which is owned by Salesforce). Microsoft has products in all those categories.
Microsoft is clearly a big company with a lot of products, but the report blows a hole in the idea that because people like Office 365, they are going to be big fans of other Microsoft products, or that they can count on any kind of brand loyalty across the range of products or even exclusivity within the same product category.
All of this, and much of the other data in this report makes tremendously interesting reading as far as it goes. It’s not a definitive window on the state of SaaS. It’s a definitive reading on the state of Okta customers’ use of SaaS, on the Okta Integration Network (OIN), a point the company readily acknowledges in the report’s methodology section.
“As you read this report, keep in mind that this data is representative of Okta’s customers, the applications and integrations we connect to through the OIN, and the ways in which users access these tools through our service,” the report stated.
But it is a way to look at the state of SaaS taking advantage of the 9400 Okta customers using the network and the 6500 integrations to the world’s most popular SaaS tools. That gives the company a unique view into the world of SaaS. What you can conclude is that the cloud is complicated, and it’s not a zero sum game by any means. In fact, being a winner in one area is not a guarantee of winning across the board.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/29/okta-saas-report-finds-office-365-wins-the-cloud-sort-of/
As a turbulent week in the capital world, we’re taking a look at something a bit slower moving: venture capital trends in Africa during 2020.
The Exchange has long explored quarterly and yearly data regarding the North American, European and Asian venture capital markets, along with data on particular startup categories. From today, we’ll also provide regular examinations of what’s happening in Africa.
As an aside, we’re sorry The Exchange didn’t come out yesterday. The world went mad and we had to tend to breaking news. We’re back!
To dig into African venture capital results, we’re looking at a report concerning 2020 data from Briter Bridges, a research group that focuses on the continent’s private capital market. The Exchange also interviewed report author and Briter director Dario Giuliani about the collected data.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
What emerges is a generally growing venture capital scene, but one that had mixed results in 2020 compared to 2019. However, if we control for an outsized investment or two, things smooth out rather nicely.
Let’s check the top-line figures, get insight from Giuliani concerning where the capital is flowing most rapidly, and wrap with a look at which startup categories are seeing the most investment in Africa today.
Africa’s 2020 venture capital results
During my time at Crunchbase News, I helped lead a team that generated acre-feet of reporting on the global and domestic venture capital markets. It’s difficult work that involves making decisions on what counts, what doesn’t and how to handle rounds that have not been disclosed publicly.
Over time, I’ve also become comfortable with venture data from PitchBook and CB Insights as well, and am now adding the Briter dataset to the trusted cohort.
During my chat with Giuliani, it became clear that his team is doing the hard and valuable work of carefully collating and sorting information. I say all of that simply to let you know that we now have a regular source for trustworthy information (compiled in concert with seventy different investing groups) on Africa that we’ll use regularly to keep tabs on the continent. This is a win.
So, what does the data say? We have to parse it some, as historically Briter has collated megadeals — which it counts as investments of $90 million or more — and M&A in the same bucket. So, tracking just the dollar volume of African deals smaller than $90 million gives us the following set of results:
As a turbulent week in the capital world, we’re taking a look at something a bit slower-moving: venture capital trends in Africa during 2020.
The Exchange has long explored quarterly and yearly data regarding the North American, European and Asian venture capital markets, along with data on particular startup categories. From today, we’ll also provide regular examinations of what’s happening in Africa.
As an aside, we’re sorry The Exchange didn’t come out yesterday. The world went mad and we had to tend to breaking news. We’re back!
To dig into African venture capital results, we’re looking at a report concerning 2020 data from Briter Bridges, a research group that focuses on the continent’s private capital market. The Exchange also interviewed report author and Briter director Dario Giuliani about the collected data.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
What emerges is a generally growing venture capital scene, but one that had mixed results in 2020 compared to 2019. However, if we control for an outsized investment or two, things smooth out rather nicely.
Let’s check the top-line figures, get insight from Giuliani concerning where the capital is flowing most rapidly, and wrap with a look at which startup categories are seeing the most investment in Africa today.
Africa’s 2020 venture capital results
During my time at Crunchbase News, I helped lead a team that generated acre-feet of reporting on the global and domestic venture capital markets. It’s difficult work that involves making decisions on what counts, what doesn’t and how to handle rounds that have not been disclosed publicly.
Over time, I’ve also become comfortable with venture data from PitchBook and CB Insights as well, and am now adding the Briter dataset to the trusted cohort.
During my chat with Giuliani, it became clear that his team is doing the hard and valuable work of carefully collating and sorting information. I say all of that simply to let you know that we now have a regular source for trustworthy information (compiled in concert with seventy different investing groups) on Africa that we’ll use regularly to keep tabs on the continent. This is a win.
So, what does the data say? We have to parse it some, as historically Briter has collated mega-deals — which it counts as investments of $90 million or more — and M&A in the same bucket. So, tracking just the dollar volume of African deals smaller than $90 million gives us the following set of results:
In recent years we’ve seen a whole bunch of visual/style fashion-focused search engines cropping up, tailored to helping people find the perfect threads to buy online by applying computer vision and other AI technologies to perform smarter-than-keywords visual search which can easily match and surface specific shapes and styles. Startups like Donde Search, Glisten and Stye.ai to name a few.
Early stage London-based Cadeera, which is in the midst of raising a seed round, wants to apply a similar AI visual search approach but for interior decor. All through the pandemic it’s been working on a prototype with the aim of making ecommerce discovery of taste-driven items like sofas, armchairs and coffee tables a whole lot more inspirational.
Founder and CEO Sebastian Spiegler, an early (former) SwiftKey employee with a PhD in machine learning and natural language processing, walked TechCrunch through a demo of the current prototype.
The software offers a multi-step UX geared towards first identifying a person’s decor style preferences — which it does by getting them to give a verdict on a number of look book images of rooms staged in different interior decor styles (via a Tinder-style swipe left or right).
It then uses these taste signals to start suggesting specific items to buy (e.g. armchairs, sofas etc) that fit the styles they’ve liked. The user can continue to influence selections by asking to see other similar items (‘more like this’), or see less similar items to broaden the range of stuff they’re shown — injecting a little serendipity into their search.
The platform also lets users search by uploading an image — with Cadeera then parsing its database to surface similar looking items which are available for sale.
It has an AR component on its product map, too — which will eventually also let users visualize a potential purchase in situ in their home. Voice search will also be supported.
“Keyword search is fundamentally broken,” argues Spiegler. “Image you’re refurbishing or renovating your home and you say I’m looking for something, I’ve seen it somewhere, I only know when I see it, and I don’t really know what I want yet — so the [challenge we’re addressing is this] whole process of figuring out what you want.”
“The mission is understanding personal preferences. If you don’t know yourself what you’re looking for we’re basically helping you with visual clues and with personalization and with inspiration pieces — which can be content, images and then at some point community as well — to figure out what you want. And for the retailer it helps them to understand what their clients want.”
“It increases trust, you’re more sure about your purchases, you’re less likely to return something — which is a huge cost to retailers. And, at the same time, you may also buy more because you more easily find things you can buy,” he adds.
Ecommerce has had a massive boost from the pandemic which continues to drive shopping online. But the flip side of that is bricks-and-mortar retailers have been hit hard.
The situation may be especially difficult for furniture retailers that may well have been operating showrooms before COVID-19 — relying upon customers being able to browse in-person to drive discovery and sales — so they are likely to be looking for smart tools that can help them transition to and/or increase online sales.
And sector-specific visual search engines do seem likely to see uplift as part of the wider pandemic-driven ecommerce shift.
“The reason why I want to start with interior design/home decor and furniture is that it’s a clearly underserved market. There’s no-one out there, in my view, that has cracked the way to search and find things more easily,” Spiegler tells TechCrunch. “In fashion there are quite a few companies out there. And I feel like we can master furniture and home decor and then move into other sectors. But for me the opportunity is here.”
“We can take a lot of the ideas from the fashion sector and apply it to furniture,” he adds. “I feel like there’s a huge gap — and no-one has looked at it sufficiently.”
The size of the opportunity Cadeera is targeting is a $10BN-$20BN market globally, per Spiegler.
The startup’s initial business model is b2b — with the plan being to start selling its SaaS to ecommerce retailers to integrate the visual search tools directly into their own websites.
Spiegler says they’re working with a “big” UK-based vintage platform — and aiming to get something launched to the market within the next six to nine months with one to two customers.
They will also — as a next order of business — offer apps for ecommerce platforms such as WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Shopify to integrate a set of their search tools. (Larger retailers will get more customization of the platform, though.)
On the question of whether Cadeera might develop a b2c offer by launching a direct consumer app itself, Spiegler admits that is an “end goal”.
“This is the million dollar question — my end-goal, my target is building a consumer app. Building a central place where all your shopping preferences are stored — kind of a mix of Instagram where you see inspiration and Pinterest where you can keep what you looked at and then get relevant recommendations,” he says.
“This is basically the idea of a product search engine we want to build. But what I’m showing you are the steps to get there… and we hopefully end in the place where we have a community, we have a b2c app. But the way I look at it is we start through b2b and then at some point switch the direction and open it up by providing a single entry point for the consumer.”
But, for now, the b2b route means Cadeera can work closely with retailers in the meanwhile — increasing its understanding of retail market dynamics and getting access to key data needed power its platform, such as style look books and item databases.
“What we end up with is a large inventory data-set/database, a design knowledge base and imagery and style meta information. And on top of that we do object detection, object recognition, recommendation, so the whole shebang in AI — for the purpose of personalization, exploration, search and suggestion/recommendation,” he goes on, sketching the various tech components involved.
“On the other side we provide an API so you can integrate into use as well. And if you need we can also provide with a responsive UX/UI.”
“Beyond all of that we are creating an interesting data asset where we understand what the user wants — so we have user profiles, and in the future those user profiles can be cross-platform. So if you purchase something at one ecommerce site or one retailer you can then go to another retailer and we can make relevant recommendations based on what you purchased somewhere else,” he adds. “So your whole purchasing history, your style preferences and interaction data will allow you to get the most relevant recommendations.”
While the usual tech giant suspects still dominate general markets for search (Google) and ecommerce (Amazon), Cadeera isn’t concerned about competition from the biggest global platforms — given they are not focused on tailoring tools for a specific furniture/home decor niche.
He also points out that Amazon continues to do a very poor job on recommendations on its own site, despite having heaps of data.
“I’ve been asking — and I’ve been asked as well — so many times why is Amazon doing such a poor job on recommendations and in search. The true answer is I don’t know! They have probably the best data set… but the recommendations are poor,” he says. “What we’re doing here is trying to reinvent a whole product. Search should work… and the inspiration part, for things that are more opaque, is something important that is missing with anything I’ve seen so far.”
And while Facebook did acquire a home decor-focused visual search service (called GrokStyle) back in 2019, Spiegler suggests it’s most likely to integrate their tech (which included AR for visualization) into its own marketplace — whereas he’s convinced most retailers will want to be able to remain independent of the Facebook walled garden.
“GrokStyle will become part of Facebook marketplace but if you’re a retailer the big question is how much do you want to integrate into Facebook, how much do you want to be dependent on Facebook? And I think that’s a big question for a lot of retailers. Do you want to dependent on Google? Do you want to be dependent on Amazon? Do you want to be dependent on Facebook?” he says. “My guess is no. Because you basically want to stay as far away as possible because they’re going to eat up your lunch.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/29/cadeera-is-doing-ai-visual-search-for-home-decor/
