How founder and CTO Dries Buytaert sold Acquia for $1B

Acquia announced yesterday that Vista Equity Partners was going to buy a majority stake in the company worth a $1 billion. That would seem to be reason enough to sell the company. That’s a good amount a dough, but as co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert told Extra Crunch, he’s also happy to be taking care of his early investors and his long-time, loyal employees who stuck by him all these years.

Vista is actually buying out early investors as part of the deal, while providing some liquidity for employee equity holders. “I feel proud that we are able to reward our employees, especially those that have been so loyal to the company and worked so hard for so many years. It makes me feel good that we can do that for our employees,” he said.

Image via TechCrunch

Netdata, a monitoring startup with 50-year-old founder, announces $17M Series A

Nearly everything about Netdata, makers of an open-source monitoring tool, defies standard thinking about startups. Consider that the founder is a polished, experienced 50-year-old executive who started his company several years ago when he became frustrated by what he was seeing in the monitoring tools space. Like any good founder, he decided to build his own, and today the company announced a $17 million Series A led by Bain Capital.

Marathon Ventures also participated in the round. The company received a $3.7 million seed round earlier this year, which was led by Marathon.

Costa Tsaousis, the company’s founder and CEO, was working as an executive for a company in Greece in 2014 when he decided he had had enough of the monitoring tools he was seeing. “At that time, I decided to do something about it myself — actually, I was pissed off by the industry. So I started writing a tool at night and on weekends to simplify monitoring significantly, and also provide a lot more insights,” Tsaousis told TechCrunch.

Mind you, he was a 45-year-old executive who hadn’t done much coding in years, but he was determined, as any startup founder tends to be, and he took two years to create his monitoring tool. As he tells it, he released it to open source in 2016 and it just took off. “In 2016, I released this project to the public, and it went viral, I wrote a single Reddit post, and immediately started building a huge community. It grew up about 10,000 GitHub stars in a matter of a week,” he said. Even today, he says that it gets a half million downloads every single day, and hundreds of people are contributing to the open-source version of the product, relieving him of the burden of supporting the product himself.

Panos Papadopoulos, who led the investment at Marathon, says Tsaousis is not your typical early-stage startup founder. “He is not following many norms. He is 50 years old, and he was a C-level executive. His presentation and the depth of his thinking, and even his core materials, are unlike anything else have seen in an early-stage startup,” he said.

What he created was an open-source monitoring tool, one that he says simplifies monitoring significantly, and also provides a lot more insights, offering hundreds of metrics as soon as you install it. He says it is also much faster, providing those insights every second, and it’s distributed, meaning Netdata doesn’t actually collect the data, just provides insights on it wherever it lives.

Screenshot 2019 09 25 09.58.36

Live dashboard on the Netdata website

Today, the company has 24 employees and Tsaousis has set up shop in San Francisco. In addition, to the open-source version of the product, there is a SaaS version, which also has what he calls a “massively free plan.” He says the open-source monitoring agent is “a gift to the world.” The SaaS tool is about democratizing monitoring and the pay version is even different from most monitoring tools, charging by the seat instead of by the amount of infrastructure you are monitoring.

Tsaousis wants no less than to lead the monitoring space eventually, and believes that the free tiers will lead the way. “I think Netdata can change the way people perceive and understand monitoring, but in order to do this, I think that offering free services in a massive way is essential. Otherwise, it will not work. So my aim is to lead monitoring. This may sound arrogant, and Netdata is not there yet, but I think it can be,” he said.

Why Flexport built a slick Slack SaaS for shipping

“Make their metrics your metrics” is one of Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen’s mantras. Sometimes that means building free software for your clients. It can be frustrating aligning your fates with a fellow business if they operate on email, phone and fax like much of the freight-forwarding industry that gets pallets of goods across the world from factories to retailer’s floors. So today, the new Flexport Platform launches, allowing brand clients, their factories and their Flexport logistics reps to all team up to get stuff where it belongs on time.

The software could further stoke Flexport‘s growth by locking in customers to work with the shipping startup that was valued at $3.2 billion after raising $1 billion from SoftBank in February (to bring it to $1.3 billion in funding). Flexport’s revenue was up 95%, to $441 million in 2018, Forbes’s Alex Konrad reported. Yet there’s plenty of green field to conquer given even Flexport’s largest competitor Kuehne & Nagel only holds 2.5% market share while the whole freight-forwarding industry grows 4% per year.

Flexport Dashboard

The Flexboard Platform dashboard offers maps, notifications, task lists, and chat for Flexport clients and their factory suppliers.

The Flexport Platform lets 10,000 clients, like Bombas socks, invite their suppliers to collaborate on managing shipments together. An integrated calendar makes shipping timelines clear. A map gives clients a god-view of their freight criss-crossing the globe. Pre-filled forms expedite compliance. Tagging lets users group shipments and filter or search their dashboards, and flag something for extra care — like a pallet of goods critical for a marketing launch event. Collaborators also can sync up via a Facebook Wall-style feature, or direct message the team with threaded conversations, much like Slack.

Ryan Petersen Flexport

Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen

“There’s infinite demand for a job well done,” Petersen says about his industry.The hard part has always been doing a good job.” Taking the confusion out communication scattered across email chains means clients get shipping documentation filled out 50% faster with 4X more accurate data. Flexport is on the tip of the tongue as software eats the world, with antiquated sectors suddenly leveling up.

Petersen saw the inefficiency first-hand growing up running his own import/export and customs business. He is part of a wave of entrepreneurs attacking unsexy businesses that the typical Silicon Valley enterprise exec might never stumble across. But three years after we profiled his scrappy company, when it had raised just $26 million in funding and had 700 clients, Petersen tells me “We’re trying to retire the word ‘startup.’ ”

It turns out top global brands like Sonos and Klean Kanteen don’t like the second half of “move fast and break things” when those things are boats and planes full of their products. “They want a company that will help them grow, not the fly-by-night startup,” Petersen explains. But with competitors trying to chase it and incumbents trying to adopt similar technologies, Flexport must maintain its agility to avoid being subsumed by the pack.

As his company has grown to 1,700 employees, he’s dedicated a ton of his time to keeping its culture in check — especially after a certain other logistics giant startup had some uber-painful troubles with workplace toxicity. “You either have too much bureaucracy or not enough process, and no one knows what to do. The English language lacks a positive word for bureaucracy — just the right amount of process so people can move quickly.”

That’s what Flexport wanted to give clients with the new platform. From a dedicated tasks queue to a notifications pane, it’s built to take the guesswork out of what to do next while being as approachable as consumer software for new users. That also why it’s free. It’s not supposed to be some chore you’re forced to complete, product lead Frank te Pas tells me. “As you move your first shipment you get onboarded onto this system” says te Pas. “It’s our way of helping.”

Flexport Warehouse

That’s meant a ton of personal growth, too. Petersen is still enthusiastic, curious and charmingly rough around the edges, but he carries it all with more dignity and gravity than a few years back. “The only way I get to stay in this role is if I learn faster than anybody else. Being the CEO of a 1,700-person company is not something I knew how to do four to five years ago, or even last year,” he tells me. “I’ve changed and become more self-aware. It’s been really important to take care of myself — sleeping a lot, I quit drinking alcohol, I lost 30 pounds. I feel great.”

With plenty of cash in the bank, industry talent taking it seriously and new businesses like Flexport Capital freight financing and its cargo insurance offered in partnership with Marsh, the company might not be a startup for long. It looks like a hot candidate for a coming season of IPOs. And while this company has its own plane (the leading entry for the naming contest is “Weird Flex But OK”), it’s actually part of its shipping fleet.

Segment’s new privacy portal helps companies comply with expanding regulations

With the EU’s sweeping GDPR privacy laws and the upcoming California Consumer Privacy ACT (CCPA), companies have to figure out how to deal with keeping private data private — or face massive fines. Segment announced a new Privacy Portal today that could help companies trying to remain in compliance.

Segment CEO and co-founder Peter Reinhardt says companies have built a false dichotomy between personalization and privacy, and he says that it doesn’t have to be that way. “We’ve noticed that a lot of companies feel this tension between privacy and growth. They basically see a paradox between being either privacy-respectful versus providing a very personalized experience,” he said.

The new Privacy Portal is designed to be a central place where customers can sort their data in an automated way and create an inventory of what data they have inside the company. “By introducing a single point of collection for all the data, it creates a choke point on the data collection to allow you to actually govern that, a single place to inspect, monitor, alert and have an inventory of all the data that you’re collecting, so that you can ensure that it’s compliant, and so that you can ensure that you’ve got consent, and all of those things,” he said.

The way this works is that as the data comes into the portal, it automatically gets put into a bucket based on the level of concern about it. “We are basically giving customers monitoring and a consolidated view over all of the different data points that are coming in. So we have matches that basically look for things that might be PII, and we automatically grade most of them with green, yellow or red in terms of the level of potential concern,” Reinhardt explained.

On top of that, companies can apply policies, based on the grades, say letting anything that’s green or yellow through, but preventing any red data (PII) from being shared with other applications.

In addition, to make sure that the product can connect to as many marketing tools as possible to get the most complete data picture, the company is releasing a new feature called Functions, which lets customers build their own custom data connectors. With thousands of marketing technology tools, it’s impossible for Segment to build connectors for all of them. Functions lets companies build custom connectors in a low-code way in instances where Segment doesn’t provide it out of the box.

The two tools are available to Segment customers starting today.

Symantec’s Sheila Jordan named to Slack’s board of directors

Workplace collaboration software business Slack (NYSE: WORK) has added Sheila Jordan, a senior vice president and chief information officer of Symantec, as an independent member of its board of directors. The hiring comes three months after the business completed a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

Jordan, responsible for driving information technology strategy and operations for Symantec, brings significant cybersecurity expertise to Slack’s board. Prior to joining Symantec in 2014, Jordan was a senior vice president of IT at Cisco and an executive at Disney Destination for nearly 15 years.

With the new appointment, Slack appears to be doubling down on security. In addition to the board announcement, Slack recently published a blog post outlining the company’s latest security strategy in what was likely part of a greater attempt to sway potential customers — particularly those in highly regulated industries — wary of the company’s security processes. The post introduced new features, including the ability to allow teams to work remotely while maintaining compliance to industry and company-specific requirements.

Jordan joins Slack co-founder and chief executive officer Stewart Butterfield, former Goldman Sachs executive Edith Cooper, Accel general partner Andrew Braccia, Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar, Andreessen Horowitz general partner John O’Farrell, Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya and former Salesforce chief financial officer Graham Smith on Slack’s board of directors.

“I believe there is nothing more critical than driving organizational alignment and agility within enterprises today,” Jordan said in a statement. “Slack has developed a new category of enterprise software to help unlock this potential and I’m thrilled to now be a part of their story.”

Slack closed up nearly 50% on its first day of trading in June but has since stumbled amid reports of increased competition from Microsoft, which operates a Slack-like product called Teams.

Slack co-founder and chief technology officer Cal Henderson will join us onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco next week to discuss the company’s founding, road to the public markets and path forward. Buy tickets here.

Tipalti collects $76M from Twitter alums’ 01 Advisors and more for its AI-based accounts payable solution

Accounting is one of the cornerstones to building a business, but for most companies, getting it right is more of a necessity than it is one of their core competencies. That has created a vacuum, and now, a company called Tipalti — which has developed a popular solution to automate accounting for businesses that are not accounting companies by nature — has raised a significant round of funding to underscore that demand.

Today, the Israeli-Californian startup is announcing that it has picked up $76 million, money it plans to use to continue expanding the functionality of its platform and growing its business.

The funding, a Series D that brings the total raised by Tipalti to $146 million, is interesting in part because of who is providing it. Led by Zeev Ventures, it also includes backing from previous investor Group 11, along with new backers 01 Advisors, Greenspring Associates and TrueBridge Capital Partners.

In case the name doesn’t ring a bell, 01 Advisors is the new investment firm co-founded by Twitter’s former CEO and COO, Dick Costolo and Adam Bain, respectively, which started raising money only last month and appears to have disclosed one other investment before this (in the esports startup PlayVS).

01 Advisors’ interest in backing Tipalti comes from the fact that Twitter is a longtime customer of Tipalti’s, dating back to when Costolo and Bain were running things. Chen Amit, CEO and co-founder of Tipalti, told me in an interview that the social media company signed up around the time that it was going public, ramping up its revenue-generating functions (mainly advertising), and needed a strong accounts payable solution to pay suppliers and others in its ecosystem that wouldn’t break the bank and would help it track all the taxes and other areas that would now be getting thoroughly audited.

That experience, along with Tipalti’s wider track record among other fast-growing tech businesses whose business models are built on working with large networks of partners — other customers include Uber, Roku, Zumba, GoDaddy, Zola, GoPro, Foursquare and Vimeo — is what compelled Costolo and company to invest.

“While at Twitter, we chose Tipalti and they played a pivotal role in enabling us to scale and grow,” he said in a statement. “Tipalti’s platform was crucial in helping us manage payments to thousands of our publishers and partners around the world with ease, while delivering a flawless experience. Investing in Tipalti allows us to help bring the same benefits we experienced as operators to the thousands of companies that need this support.”

Tipalti’s emergence and growth comes out of an interesting climate shift in the world of startups. The accounting department is not the first thing people usually think about when they consider an exciting tech startup. Indeed, there’s a longstanding belief among some founders and their investors that certain ideas are too good to adulterate early on with thoughts of generating revenue, especially when the startup is in high-growth mode. However, when the scale does tip over into making money (way earlier for some than others), it becomes a crucial area to get right.

Tipalti sits among a number of other startups that have emerged in recent years to help handle less-sexy, but very essential, back-office functions, the kind that can cripple or even kill off a business if not handled well. Others in the group include the likes of AppZen, which has built AI-based expense auditing tools that it now wants to expand into other finance-team functions; and Gusto, which helps manage payroll and benefits.

There are also a number of companies looking to build better tools for accounts payable automation, including the likes of AccessPay (which also covers accounts receivable functions), OneSource Virtual, and MineralTree. All of the big accounting software providers will provide a degree of automation in their products, too, although Tipalti’s Amit believes that these target much larger enterprises. RPA companies that are aiming to automate all back-office functions are also potential (if not existing) competitors, too.

Tipalti’s pitch is primarily to the midmarket, which is partly why it has been a big hit with startups that are growing fast but might not yet be at the point of considering solutions built for much larger companies. The tools are able to read, process, pay and account for invoices using its automation technology, and the startup measures its effectiveness in terms of how much human work it can take on.

In fact, it describes a slightly frighteningly precise efficiency equivalent: citing research from the Levvel Research Accounts Payable Survey, the average midmarket organization has “an average of 9.8 full-time accounts payable employees.” Tipalti says that its platform can provide 80% of that workload function. (The idea being that the remaining 1.96 of humans (!) left over after Tipalti has done its magic can work on other tasks and longer need to dedicate all of their time to accounts payable procedures.)

It’s not just about reducing human overhead, though.

Amit said that some 30%-40% of its customers are gig economy businesses, with a fair number working across different international markets. That makes for a very messy accounting operation. “When you have payees all over the world, that affects you every month,” he said, adding that regulations are becoming ever more stringent on how businesses account for revenues and pay out to people, with the rise in money laundering and using assets in nefarious ways. “Regulators want more information communicated around payments, or there can be a new embargo on an entity, and so you need to change that, your banking process and who you can work with.”

The big pitch with automating companies may be that they are not aiming to take humans out of work, but to free them up to work on other things that AI cannot replace — not yet, anyway — and as an added benefit, they are helping companies reduce their operational expenses and helping them to run things better. How that will play out in the longer term could indeed be great, or it could see even more people with too much time on their hands. But in the meanwhile, Tipalti has grown by leaps and bounds. The company says it’s now processing more than $8 billion in annual transactions, with its customer and business bookings doubling in the first half of 2019.

Tipalti is not disclosing its valuation with this round, but Amit said on the back of that growth it has tripled since it last raised money.

Fundbox raises $176 million Series C to build ‘Visa’ for B2B payments

Credit cards have become all but ubiquitous for consumer transactions, and it isn’t hard to see why. By intermediating payments, networks like Visa allow buyers and sellers to exchange money for goods and services without knowing the financial risk profile of the counter-party. Rather than applying for credit at every merchant you shop at, you apply once at your issuing institution, and then can transact with every merchant on the network. It’s the simple formula: reducing friction means more sales, and therefore more profits.

Yet for all the innovation in the consumer side of the economy, there has been an astonishingly limited amount of innovation in the B2B world. Payments between businesses are still conducted through invoices, with net payment terms that can exceed 90 days and with little knowledge of the financial risk of the counter-parties. There is no FICO score for business as there is with consumers, nor is there a system that can intermediate those transactions and reduce their friction.

That’s where Fundbox comes in. The SF-headquartered startup wants to ultimately transform B2B payments by creating a Visa-like payments network that allows businesses to transact with each other without having to know counter-party risk while also getting everyone paid faster.

It’s a vision that has pulled in the attention of even more venture capital. The company, which was founded in 2013, announced today that it has raised $176 million in a series C equity financing led by a consortium of funders, including Allianz X, Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan, HarbourVest and a litany of others. Existing backers Khosla, General Catalyst, and Spark Capital Growth also participated. With this new round of capital, the company’s total equity funding reaches upwards of $300 million.

In addition to the equity capital, the company also announced that it has raised a $150 million credit facility to underwrite its product.

Fundbox CEO Eyal Shinar said that a priority in this fundraise was to select backers who not only could invest in equity, but also had large balance sheets who could expand the company’s underwriting capability as it scales.

Today, Fundbox’s core product is a revolving line of credit for small businesses. Cash flow is a huge concern for many companies, since they often have to wait for a payment from an invoice to arrive before investing in their next projects or hiring more employees. A revolving line of credit allows companies to flexibly draw down and pay back a loan, while only paying fees on what a company uses.

To apply for the loan, companies connect Fundbox to their financial data store (for example, QuickBooks), and Fundbox slurps in the data and offers a credit decision in as fast as minutes. Companies can then tap their line of credit almost immediately and use it as working capital. As invoices are paid, companies can then pay off their line of credit and stop paying fees.

From that product base, Shinar ultimately sees Fundbox as a GDP-scale startup, given the value it could potentially unlock for companies and the economy at large. “There are more than $3 trillion locked in those invoices,” he explained to me, “$3.4 trillion flows through consumer credit cards, but $23 trillion are in invoices … and even if you focus on [just] small and medium business, it’s $9 trillion.”

As the company collects data from all the players in the market, it wants to build upon those data network effects to ultimately operate the payment rails for B2B transactions. So instead of offering a line of credit to the seller, it could facilitate both sides of the transaction and get rid of the root complexity in the first place.

It’s a bold vision, and certainly one that has attracted a variety of players. In the startup world, Kabbage (whose co-founder and president Kathryn Petralia I will be interviewing at TechCrunch Disrupt SF next week) has built a business around line of credit lending and has similarly raised large amounts of venture capital.

Larger companies like Square, PayPay, and Intuit (which owns the popular accounting software QuickBooks) have introduced various lending products to B2B customers. And in terms of payments, Stripe through its new credit card and Brex offer the means for companies to empower their employees to make purchases on behalf of the company.

Shinar said that a huge priority for Fundbox has been to make underwriting more efficient. He said that a large percentage of the current employee base at the company is data scientists, and the company has built upon the wave of digitalization that has taken place among small and medium businesses. “Every company has at least one set of APIs … and it is accessible, and it is granular,” Shinar said. By just tapping into those existing data feeds, Fundbox is able to avoid the human underwriting common with much of business lending today.

One initiative the company has undertaken is a tool dubbed “X-Ray” to better describe how the company’s machine learning models are really underwriting its loan products. Shinar noted that payments is a highly-regulated space, and that the company has to be able to explain its decisions and how they are unbiased to any regulator that might start asking questions.

The company today has 240 employees spread across SF, Tel Aviv, and a recently launched office in Dallas. Shinar says that he wants to use the new funds to “go on the offensive” and “double and triple down on what is working.”

Fivetran hauls in $44M Series B as data pipeline business booms

Fivetran, a startup that helps companies move data from disparate repositories to data warehouses, announced $44 million Series B financing today, less than a year after collecting a $15 million Series A round.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the round with participation from existing investors Matrix Partners and CEAS Investments. As part of the deal, Martin Casado from a16z will join the Fivetran board. Today’s investment brings the total raised to more than $59 million, according to Crunchbase.

Company co-founder and CEO George Fraser said they raised a little sooner than expected, but they needed a cash infusion to keep up with the steady growth they have been seeing. He said the company also wanted to get the funding done while the capital markets were still strong. “If we wait four months or six months, the terms are not going to be that much better — and, who knows, there could be a recession. You never know how long the sun shines, and we had interest from some really good firms that we liked, and that’s a big factor too obviously,” he said.

He added that it’s not purely an economic decision. “We’re really happy with where we landed with Martin [Casado] joining the board and Andreessen Horowitz on the cap table, but [the economic outlook] was definitely part of our calculus.”

And Casado is happy to have invested in Fivetran. Writing in a blog post today about the investment, he sees a company that’s solving a big problem in a modern context. “Fivetran is a SaaS service that connects to the critical data sources in an organization, pulls and processes all the data, and then dumps it into a warehouse (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery or RedShift) for SQL access and further transformations, if needed. If data is the new oil, then Fivetran is the pipes that get it from the source to the refinery,” he wrote.

He said that the company already has over 750 customers and a16z is included among them. It certainly doesn’t hurt when your lead investor uses your product.

The company was founded in 2012 and has been growing steadily. Last year it had 80 employees at the time of its Series A; today it has 175. Fraser expects that to double again over the next year, and it’s all driven by business needs. He says that over the last 12 months revenue has grown 3x.

With 150 connectors today, the company wants to continue to expand its array of data connection tools and cover more data requirements. But he says the connectors are complicated and that will take an investment in more engineering talent. Today’s announcement should help in that regard.

Vista Equity Partners buys Acquia for $1B

Vista Equity Partners, which likes to purchase undervalued tech companies and turn them around for a hefty profit, has purchased web content management and digital experience company Acquia in a deal valued at $1 billion.

Robert F. Smith, who is founder and chairman of Vista Equity Partners, says that increasingly brands understand that delivering a quality digital experience is essential to their success, and he sees Acquia as well-positioned in the market to help deliver that. “Acquia understands this and is leading the way in providing innovative solutions to its customers while, at the same time, giving back to the open source community,” Smith said in a statement.

Company co-founder Dries Buytaert, writing on his personal blog about the deal, reiterated that the company will continue to be a big open-source contributor after the deal goes through. “This investment should be great news for the Drupal and Mautic communities as we’ll have the right resources to compete against other solutions, and our deep commitment to Drupal, Mautic and Open Source will be unchanged. In fact, we will continue to increase our current level of investment in Open Source as we grow our business,” he wrote.

Scott Liewehr, principal analyst at Digital Clarity Group, says Vista tends to buy companies and then centralize operations so the companies can concentrate purely on growth. “Vista, as a PE firm, tends to make money on companies by standardizing their operations to cut costs. It runs the portfolio companies more like divisions of a larger company than independent entities,” Liewehr wrote in a tweet.

Tony Byrne, founder and principal analyst at Real Story Group, a firm that keeps a close eye on the digital experience market, points to Marketo as a prime example of how this works. Vista acquired Marketo in May, 2016 for $1.8 billion in cash. It applied the centralization formula and sold the company to Adobe last year for $4.75 billion, a tidy little profit for holding the company for two years, but he cautions there is no guarantee this is how it will play out.

“For customers it depends on whether Vista is looking for mid-term income or pump-up-and-exit à la Marketo. For the former, it likely means some cost-cutting and potentially staff changes. For the latter, it means more acquisitions and heavy upselling of new services — likely as precursor to long-awaited IPO,” Byrne told TechCrunch. He added, “Tough to imagine any other software firm wanting to buy Acquia, though it’s always possible.”

It’s worth noting that Ping Identity, another firm Vista purchased in 2016, is set to go public soon, so that pathway to IPO is a direction that Vista has also taken.

Acquia, which is the commercial arm for the open-source Drupal project, had raised $173.5 million, according to Crunchbase. The Drupal project was started by Buytaert in his dorm room at the University of Antwerp in 2000. Acquia launched as the project’s commercial arm in 2007.

Windows 10 now runs on over 900M devices

So you thought there were 800 million Windows 10 Devices that will get Microsoft’s most recent out-of-band emergency patch? Think again. As the company announced on Twitter today, Windows 10 now runs on more than 900 million devices.

That’s a bit of bad timing, but current security issues aside, the momentum for Windows 10 clearly remains steady. Last September, Microsoft said Windows 10 was running on 700 million devices, and by March of this year, that number had gone up to 800 million. That number includes standard Windows 10 desktops and laptops, as well as the Xbox and niche devices like the Surface Hub and Microsoft’s HoloLens.

As Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of its Modern Life, Search and Devices group, also noted, the company added more Windows 10 devices in the last 12 months than ever before.

Come January 2020, Windows 7 is hitting the end of its (supported) life, which is likely pushing at least some users to move over to a more modern (and supported) operating system.

While those numbers for Windows 10 are clearly ticking up, Microsoft itself famously thought that Windows 10 would get to 1 billion devices by the middle of 2018. At this rate, Windows 10 will likely hit 1 billion sometime in 2020.