PandaDoc, the startup that provides a fully digital sales document workflow from proposal to electronic signature to collecting payment, announced a $30 million Series B extension today, making it the second such extension the company has taken since taking its original $15 million Series B in 2017. The total for the three B investments is $50 million.

Company co-founder and CEO Mikita Mikado says that he took this approach — taking the original money in 2017, then $5 million last year along with the money announced today — because it made more sense financially for the company than taking a huge chunk of money all at once.

“Basically when we do little chunks of cash frequently, [we found that] you dilute yourself less,” Mikado told TechCrunch. He said that they’ve grown comfortable with this approach because the business became more predictable once it passed 10,000 customers. In fact today it has 20,000.

“With a high-velocity in-bound sales model, you can predict what’s going to happen next month or [say] six months out. So you kind of have this luxury of raising as much money as you need when you need it, minimizing dilution just like public companies do,” he said.

While he wouldn’t discuss specifics in terms of valuations, he did say that the B1 had 2x the valuation of the original B round and the B2 had double the valuation of the B1.

For this round, One Peak led the investment, with participation from Microsoft’s Venture Fund (M12), Savano Capital Partners, Rembrandt Venture Partners and EBRD Venture Capital Investment Programme.

Part of the company’s growth strategy is using their eSignature tool to move people to the platform. They made that tool free in March just as the pandemic was hitting hard in the U.S., and it has proven to be what Mikado called “a lead magnet” to get more people familiar with the company.

Once they do that he says, they start to look at the broader set of tools and they can become paying customers. “This launch helped us validate that businesses need a broader workflow solution. Businesses used to think of the eSignature as the Holy Grail in getting a deal done. Now they are realizing that eSignature is just a moment in time. The full value is what happens before, during and after the eSignature in order to get deals done,” Mikado said.

The company currently has 334 employees with plans to hit 380 by year’s end and is aiming for 470 by next year. With the office in San Francisco, Belarus and Manila, it has geographic diversity built in, but Mikado says it’s something they are still working at and includes anti-bias programs and training and leadership programs to give more people a chance to be hired or promoted into management.

When it came to shutting down offices and working from home, Mikado admits it was a challenge, especially as some of the geographies they operate in might not have access to a good internet connection at home or face other challenges, but overall he says it has worked out in terms of maintaining productivity across the company. And he points out being geographically diverse, they have had to deal with online communications for some time.

WordPress.com, a division of Automattic, is launching a new product called P2. And this time, it’s all about improving internal communications for private groups. As a remote company, Automattic has been using P2 internally for years to communicate asynchronously. It’s a place to share long-form posts, a repository to keep onboarding documents and other important evergreen documents.

P2 is built on top of WordPress . You can view it as a sort of WordPress for teams that is heavily customized around the concept of sharing ideas with other team members. Companies now rely on multiple internal communication tools. P2 can replace some of them but doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel altogether.

For instance, P2 isn’t a Slack competitor. You can’t use it for real-time chat. But P2 can be used to share important announcements — the kind of announcements that you can find on an intranet portal.

Image Credits: WordPress.com

You can also use it for long-term projects and create your own P2 for your team in particular. In that case, P2 competes more directly with Workplace by Facebook or Yammer. In order to make it more useful for asynchronous communications, P2 has some features that make it more useful than a simple WordPress blog.

For instance, you can @-mention your co-workers to send them a notification and follow posts to receive updates. You can also create checklists, embed PDF documents, stick important posts at the top of the homepage and stay on top of what happened while you were gone. There are dedicated menus to view new posts, new comments and mentions you’ve received.

While you can theoretically access the classic WordPress back-end, you can write new posts, edit existing posts and write comments without ever leaving P2. The company uses the new block editor that lets you add headings, lists, video embeds and media in a visual way. It works a bit like Squarespace’s editor or Notion, and it makes a ton of sense to leverage the new editor right next to content you’re viewing, commenting on, etc.

For content that always remains relevant, you can create documents, which are pages without a specific publishing date and without comments. These documents are sorted in their own category and can be easily shared across a company. You can use documents for internal policies, guides or important contact information. Many companies rely on Google Docs and shared folders in Google Drive for this kind of document. P2 could potentially replace those shared folders and become the main information repository.

By default, P2 sites are private, but you can make them public in case you want to share updates on your product with clients or use P2 for public events.

If you’re familiar with the WordPress ecosystem, you might already know a WordPress theme called P2. The new P2 announced today is a new product that takes that idea to the next level. Automattic has been iterating on the concept and using it widely with its 1,300 employees across 912 internal P2 sites.

WordPress.com is going to offer hosted P2 instances. Anybody can create a P2 for free and invite other people. Eventually, WordPress.com plans to offer paid subscriptions for advanced features. In other words, P2 is going to be a software-as-a-service product. But there will be a self-hostable, open-source version in the future as well.

I played around with a few P2 instances, and the overall impression is that the complexity of WordPress remains hidden by default, which is a good thing. It’s a clean and focused product that would work particularly well in that spot between company-wide emails and announcements getting lost in Slack.

Image Credits: WordPress.com

Data science is the name of the game these days for companies that want to improve their decision making by tapping the information they are already amassing in their apps and other systems. And today, a startup called Mode Analytics, which has built a platform incorporating machine learning, business intelligence and big data analytics to help data scientists fulfill that task, is announcing $33 million in funding to continue making its platform ever more sophisticated.

Most recently, for example, the company has started to introduce tools (including SQL and Python tutorials) for less technical users, specifically those in product teams, so that they can structure queries that data scientists can subsequently execute faster and with more complete responses — important for the many follow-up questions that arise when a business intelligence process has been run. Mode claims that its tools can help produce answers to data queries in minutes.

This Series D is being led by SaaS specialist investor H.I.G. Growth Partners, with previous investors Valor Equity Partners, Foundation Capital, REV Venture Partners and Switch Ventures all participating. Valor led Mode’s Series C in February 2019, while Foundation and REV respectively led its A and B rounds.

Mode is not disclosing its valuation, but co-founder and CEO Derek Steer confirmed in an interview that it was “absolutely” an up-round.

For some context, PitchBook notes that last year its valuation was $106 million. The company now has a customer list that it says covers 52% of the Forbes 500, including Anheuser-Busch, Zillow, Lyft, Bloomberg, Capital One, VMware and Conde Nast. It says that to date it has processed 830 million query runs and 170 million notebook cell runs for 300,000 users. (Pricing is based on a freemium model, with a free “Studio” tier and Business and Enterprise tiers priced based on size and use.)

Mode has been around since 2013, when it was co-founded by Steer, Benn Stancil (Mode’s current president) and Josh Ferguson (initially the CTO and now chief architect).

Steer said the impetus for the startup came out of gaps in the market that the three had found through years of experience at other companies.

Specifically, when all three were working together at Yammer (they were early employees and stayed on after the Microsoft acquisition), they were part of a larger team building custom data analytics tools for Yammer. At the time, Steer said Yammer was paying $1 million per year to subscribe to Vertica (acquired by HP in 2011) to run it.

They saw an opportunity to build a platform that could provide similar kinds of tools — encompassing things like SQL Editors, Notebooks and reporting tools and dashboards — to a wider set of users.

“We and other companies like Facebook and Google were building analytics internally,” Steer recalled, “and we knew that the world wanted to work more like these tech companies. That’s why we started Mode.”

All the same, he added, “people were not clear exactly about what a data scientist even was.”

Indeed, Mode’s growth so far has mirrored that of the rise of data science overall, as the discipline of data science, and the business case for employing data scientists to help figure out what is “going on” beyond the day to day, getting answers by tapping all the data that’s being amassed in the process of just doing business. That means Mode’s addressable market has also been growing.

But even if the trove of potential buyers of Mode’s products has been growing, so has the opportunity overall. There has been a big swing in data science and big data analytics in the last several years, with a number of tech companies building tools to help those who are less technical “become data scientists” by introducing more intuitive interfaces like drag-and-drop features and natural language queries.

They include the likes of Sisense (which has been growing its analytics power with acquisitions like Periscope Data), Eigen (focusing on specific verticals like financial and legal queries), Looker (acquired by Google) and Tableau (acquired by Salesforce).

Mode’s approach up to now has been closer to that of another competitor, Alteryx, focusing on building tools that are still aimed primarily at helping data scientists themselves. You have any number of database tools on the market today, Steer noted, “Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Databricks, take your pick.” The key now is in providing tools to those using those databases to do their work faster and better.

That pitch and the success of how it executes on it is what has given the company success both with customers and investors.

“Mode goes beyond traditional Business Intelligence by making data faster, more flexible and more customized,” said Scott Hilleboe, managing director, H.I.G. Growth Partners, in a statement. “The Mode data platform speeds up answers to complex business problems and makes the process more collaborative, so that everyone can build on the work of data analysts. We believe the company’s innovations in data analytics uniquely position it to take the lead in the Decision Science marketplace.”

Steer said that fundraising was planned long before the coronavirus outbreak to start in February, which meant that it was timed as badly as it could have been. Mode still raised what it wanted to in a couple of months — “a good raise by any standard,” he noted — even if it’s likely that the valuation suffered a bit in the process. “Pitching while the stock market is tanking was terrifying and not something I would repeat,” he added.

Given how many acquisitions there have been in this space, Steer confirmed that Mode too has been approached a number of times, but it’s staying put for now. (And no, he wouldn’t tell me who has been knocking, except to say that it’s large companies for whom analytics is an “adjacency” to bigger businesses, which is to say, the very large tech companies have approached Mode.)

“The reason we haven’t considered any acquisition offers is because there is just so much room,” Steer said. “I feel like this market is just getting started, and I would only consider an exit if I felt like we were handicapped by being on our own. But I think we have a lot more growing to do.”

Microsoft today announced the launch of a new open-source service mesh based on the Envoy proxy. The Open Service Mesh is meant to be a reference implementation of the Service Mesh Interface (SMI) spec, a standard interface for service meshes on Kubernetes that has the backing of most of the players in this ecosystem.

The company plans to donate Open Service Mesh to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to ensure that it is community-led and has open governance.

“SMI is really resonating with folks and so we really thought that there was room in the ecosystem for a reference implementation of SMI where the mesh technology was first and foremost implementing those SMI APIs and making it the best possible SMI experience for customers,” Microsoft director of partner management for Azure Compute (and CNCF board member) Gabe Monroy told me.

Image Credits: Microsoft

He also added that, because SMI provides the lowest common denominator API design, Open Service Mesh gives users the ability to “bail out” to raw Envoy if they need some more advanced features. This “no cliffs” design, Monroy noted, is core to the philosophy behind Open Service Mesh.

As for its feature set, SMI handles all of the standard service mesh features you’d expect, including securing communications between services using mTLS, managing access control policies, service monitoring and more.

Image Credits: Microsoft

There are plenty of other service mesh technologies in the market today, though. So why would Microsoft launch this?

“What our customers have been telling us is that solutions that are out there today, Istio being a good example, are extremely complex,” he said. “It’s not just me saying this. We see the data in the AKS support queue of customers who are trying to use this stuff — and they’re struggling right here. This is just hard technology to use, hard technology to build at scale. And so the solutions that were out there all had something that wasn’t quite right and we really felt like something lighter weight and something with more of an SMI focus was what was going to hit the sweet spot for the customers that are dabbling in this technology today.”

Monroy also noted that Open Service Mesh can sit alongside other solutions like Linkerd, for example.

A lot of pundits expected Google to also donate its Istio service mesh to the CNCF. That move didn’t materialize. “It’s funny. A lot of people are very focused on the governance aspect of this,” he said. “I think when people over-focus on that, you lose sight of how are customers doing with this technology. And the truth is that customers are not having a great time with Istio in the wild today. I think even folks who are deep in that community will acknowledge that and that’s really the reason why we’re not interested in contributing to that ecosystem at the moment.”

“Marketing cloud” has become an increasingly popular concept in the world of marketing technology — used by the likes of Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle and others to describe their digital tool sets for organizations to identify and connect with customers. Now, a startup that is building its own take on the idea aimed specifically at e-commerce companies is announcing some funding after seeing a surge of business in the last few months.

Yotpo, which provides a suite of tool to help direct-to-consumer and other e-commerce players build better relationships with customers, is today announcing that it has raised $75 million in funding, money it will use to continue growing its suite of products, as well as to acquire more customers and build out more integration partnerships.

The Series E included a number of Yotpo’s existing investors, namely Bessemer Venture Partners, Access industries (the owner of Warner Music Group, among a number of other holdings) and Vertex Ventures (a subsidiary of Temasek), new investor Hanaco (which focuses on Israeli startups — Yotpo is co-headquartered in Tel Aviv and New York) and other unnamed investors.

It brings the total raised by the startup to $176 million, and while it’s not disclosing valuation, its CEO Tomer Tagrin — who co-founded the company with COO Omri Cohen — describes it as “nearly a unicorn.”

“I like to call what we’re building a flamingo, which is also a rare and beautiful animal but also a real thing, and we are a proper business,” he said in an interview, adding that Yotpo is on target for ARR next year to be $100 million.

The company had its start as an app in Shopify’s App Store, providing tools to Shopify customers to help with customer engagement by way of user-generated content, and while it has outgrown that single relationship — it now has some 500 additional strategic partners, including Salesforce, Adobe, BigCommerce and others — Yotpo’s CEO still likes to describe his company in Shopify-ish terms.

“Just as Shopify manages your business, we manage your customers end to end,” Tagrin said. He said that while it’s great to see the bigger trend of consolidation around marketing clouds, it’s not a one-size-fits-all problem. He believes Yotpo’s e-commerce-specific approach to that stands apart from the pack because it addresses issues unique to D2C and other e-commerce companies.

Yotpo’s services today include SMS and visual marketing, loyalty and referral services and reviews and ratings, which are used by a range of e-commerce companies, spanning from newer direct-to-consumer brands like Third Love and Away, to more established names like Patagonia and 1-800-Flowers. Some of these have been built in-house, and some by way of acquisition — most recently, SMSBump, in January. The plan is to use some of the funding to continue that acquisition strategy.

“Since our first investment more than three years ago, Tomer and Omri have executed flawlessly, expanding the product suite, serving a wider range of customers, and continually hiring strong talent across the organization,” says Adam Fisher, a partner at BVP, in a statement. “Yotpo is singularly focused on helping direct-to-consumer eCommerce brands solve the dual challenge of engaging consumers and increasing revenue, and with their multi-product strategy and innovative edge, they are uniquely positioned to dominate the eCommerce industry for years to come.”

Yotpo is built as a freemium platform, with some 9,000 customers paying for services, and a further 280,000 customers on its free-usage tier. Customer count grew by 250% in the last year, Tagrin said.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a well-documented impact on internet use, and specifically e-commerce, as people turned to digital channels in record numbers to procure things while complying with shelter-in-place orders, or trying to increase social distancing to slow down the spread of the coronavirus.

E-commerce has been on the rise for years, but the acceleration of that trend has been drastic since February, with revenue and spend both regularly exceeding baseline figures over the last several months, according to research from digital marketing agency Common Thread Collective.

That, in turn, had a big impact on companies that help enable those e-commerce enterprises operate in more direct and personable ways. Yotpo was a direct beneficiary: It said it had a surge of sign-ups of new customers, many taking paid services, working out to a 170% year-on-year ARR and lower customer churn.

The bigger picture, of course, is not completely rosy, with thousands of layoffs across the whole tech service, and a huge number of brick-and-mortar business closures. Those economic indicators could ultimately also have a knock-on effect not just in more business moving online, but also a slowdown in spending overall.

That will inevitably have an impact on startups like Yotpo, too, which is definitely on a rise now but will continue to think longer term about the impact and how it can continue to diversify its products to meet a wider set of customer use cases.

For example, today, the company addresses customer care needs by way of integrations with companies like Zendesk, but longer term it might consider how it can bring in services like this to continue to build out the touchpoints between D2C brands and their customers, and specifically running those through a bigger picture of the customer as profiled on Yotpo’s platform.

This is a big part of our product in our meetings and debates,” Tagrin said about product expansions.

“I do think any celebration of growth and funding comes to me with something else: we need to be internalising more what is going on,” he said. “The world is not back to normal and we shouldn’t act like it is.”