If this year has taught us a lesson about the world of work, it’s that collectively, we weren’t very well-equipped in terms of the technology we use to translate the in-person experience seamlessly to a remote version. That’s led to a rush of companies launching new services to fill that hole — cloud computing and data warehousing startups, collaboration platforms, sales tools and more — and today one of the latest startups in the area of videoconferencing is announcing a round of funding to see its business scale to the next level.

Wonder, a Berlin startup that has built a platform for people to come together in video-based groups to meet up, network and collaborate, while also having a bird’s-eye view of a larger space where they can more serendipitously, or more intentionally, interact with others — not unlike in an office or other business venue — is today announcing that it has raised $11 million (€9 million) in a substantial seed round.

The funding was led by European VC EQT Ventures, with BlueYard Capital — which led a pre-seed round in the startup when it was previously called “YoTribe” — also participating.

It comes on the heels of the young startup seeing some impressive traction this year.

Wonder now has 200,000 monthly users from a pretty diverse set of organizations, including NASA, Deloitte, Harvard and SAP, which are using it for a variety of purposes, from team collaboration through to career fairs. The company will use the funding both to add in more features as requested by current users, as well as to hire more people for its team, co-founder Stephane Roux said in an interview. Those features will include sharing files and other technical services, but they will not be piled on quickly or thickly.

“We think of this less in terms of content and more about people,” he said. “The core experience is about live interaction, not just repositories of stuff. We want to build a place for collaboration and communication. Interesting ways to carve up a group virtually.”

Now, you may be thinking: another workplace video app? Hasn’t this $14 billion space race already been “won” by Zoom (which some of us now use as a verb for videoconferencing, regardless of which app we actually use)? Or Microsoft or Google or BlueJeans, or whatever it is that your organization has inevitably already signed up and paid for?

But it turns out that for all the growth and use that these other platforms have had, they are sorely lacking in their overall experience, as it pertains to what it’s like to be in physical spaces with other people. One of the key points, it turns out, is that a lot of solutions are not really built with the user experience of the larger group in mind.

Wonder is built around the idea of a “shared space” that you enter. That space comes not from a VR experience as you might expect, but something much simpler that takes a tip from more rudimentary but very effective older game dynamics. You get a single window where you can “see” from an aerial view, as it were, all of the other people who are in the same space, and the areas within that space where they might cluster together.

Those clusters could be designed around a specific interest (such as marketing or HR or product) or — if the product is being used at a career fair, for example, at a list of different companies taking part; or — at a conference — different conference sessions, plus an exhibition space.

You can move around all of the clusters, or start your own, or sit in the margins with another person, and when you do come together with one or more people, you can join them in a video chat to interact. In the future, the plan is to do more than just join a video chat; you might also be able to access documents related to that cluster, and more.

The clusters can be “public” for anyone to join, or set to private, as you might have in a physical meeting room. The overall effect is that, without actually being in a physical space, you get the sense of a collective group of people in motion.

The startup was originally the brainchild of Leonard Witteler, who built a version of this last year as a coding project at university before showing it to friends and family and getting positive feedback.

As another co-founder, Pascal Steck, describes it, he, Witteler and Roux, who all knew each other, had been looking to build a startup together, but around a completely different idea — a portal for photographers and other creatives in the wedding industry.

Given how drastically curtailed weddings and other group gatherings have been this year, that didn’t really go anywhere at all. But the three could see an opportunity, a very different one, with the software that Witteler had built while still a student. So in the grand tradition of startups, they pivoted.

Wonder had previously been called YoTribe, which sounds a little like YouTube and also plays on the idea of groups of friends who come together around special interests.

And from how Steck and Roux described it to me in an interview (over Wonder of course), it didn’t sound like the initial idea was to target enterprises at all, but people who found themselves a bit at a loss when music festivals and other events like that suddenly died a death because of COVID-19.

Indeed, they themselves were all too aware of the state of the market for videoconferencing apps: it was very, very crowded.

“The space is very busy and some great products are already out there. But as soon as you zoom into this space” — no pun intended, Steck said — “when it’s about large group meetings, these other tools do not allow for serendipitous conversations or bottom-up gatherings, and the list gets very thin very quickly. Our focus is around improving presentations, but in the case of large groups, there is just not a lot out there. Especially something building an association as we know it to how we do things in the offline world. We think we have a unique spot in the market. 

“A meeting for three people can use Zoom or Teams perfectly. There is no need for anything else, but for larger groups, that is not the case and it seems like the market is really open for something like Wonder.”

The name “Wonder” is an interesting choice when the startup rebranded from YoTribe. Wonder’s main meaning is surprise and discovery, but it has long been thought and assumed that “wonder” is also connected to the word “wander”. (In fact, the two are not related etymologically, but have often crossed paths and wandered into each other’s territories over the centuries.) Similarly, the idea with Wonder the app is that you can “wander” around a room, and find who and what you are looking for in the process.

Wonder is not the only upstart video app that has picked up some attention in the last several months. In fact, there has been a wave of them launching or announcing funding (or both) in 2020 to try to address the gaps — or opportunities — that exist as a result of the features from the current leaders.

Other launches have included mmhmm (Phil Libin’s latest startup that adds lots of bells and whistles to make the presentations more than just a talking head); Headroom (founded by ex-Google and ex-Magic Leap entrepreneurs, using AI to get more meaningful insights from the video conversations); Vowel (which lets people search across video chats to follow up items and dig into what people said across different calls); and Descript, Andrew Mason’s audio effort, now also has video features.

But if anything, a lot of these newer tools fail to address the shortcomings of what it’s like being a part of a big group using a video app. In fact, many of these newer entrants highlight another set of challenges, those of the speaker, who is thus graced with better presentation tools in mmhmm, or given way better insights into the audience with Headroom, etc.

In any case, Wonder has found, serendipitously, a lot of traction from people who have identified and lamented the problems with so much else out there today. The app is still free to use, and the plan will be to keep it that way until some time in 2021, Roux said. Ironically, he pointed out that many of its current customers are asking to be charged, not least because it lends using it more credibility, which is important with IT departments and so on. All that might mean the charging plan gets pushed up sooner.

In any case, even if companies are also using something else, they are also adopting Wonder, and that has in turn piqued the interest of investors who are interested to see where it might go next.

“Throughout COVID-19, real-time video has become the default for both private and professional interactions, and hybrid working is here to stay,” said Jenny Dreier, investor at EQT Ventures Berlin, in a statement. “No other video tools come anywhere near as close to replicating real-life interactions as Wonder, so the product has explosive potential, already foreshadowed with the platform’s stellar organic growth. It’s incredibly exciting to be working with the team and to be part of the journey; I can’t wait to be a part of their next chapter.”

Tecton.ai, the startup founded by three former Uber engineers who wanted to bring the machine learning feature store idea to the masses, announced a $35 million Series B today, just seven months after announcing their $20 million Series A.

When we spoke to the company in April, it was working with early customers in a beta version of the product, but today, in addition to the funding, they are also announcing the general availability of the platform.

As with their Series A, this round has Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital co-leading the investment. The company has now raised $60 million.

The reason these two firms are so committed to Tecton is the specific problem around machine learning the company is trying to solve. “We help organizations put machine learning into production. That’s the whole goal of our company, helping someone build an operational machine learning application, meaning an application that’s powering their fraud system or something real for them […] and making it easy for them to build and deploy and maintain,” company CEO and co-founder Mike Del Balso explained.

They do this by providing the concept of a feature store, an idea they came up with and which is becoming a machine learning category unto itself. Just last week, AWS announced the Sagemaker Feature store, which the company saw as major validation of their idea.

As Tecton defines it, a feature store is an end-to-end machine learning management system that includes the pipelines to transform the data into what are called feature values, then it stores and manages all of that feature data and finally it serves a consistent set of data.

Del Balso says this works hand-in-hand with the other layers of a machine learning stack. “When you build a machine learning application, you use a machine learning stack that could include a model training system, maybe a model serving system or an MLOps kind of layer that does all the model management, and then you have a feature management layer, a feature store which is us — and so we’re an end-to-end life cycle for the data pipelines,” he said.

With so much money behind the company it is growing fast, going from 17 employees to 26 since we spoke in April, with plans to more than double that number by the end of next year. Del Balso says he and his co-founders are committed to building a diverse and inclusive company, but he acknowledges it’s not easy to do.

“It’s actually something that we have a primary recruiting initiative on. It’s very hard, and it takes a lot of effort, it’s not something that you can just make like a second priority and not take it seriously,” he said. To that end, the company has sponsored and attended diversity hiring conferences and has focused its recruiting efforts on finding a diverse set of candidates, he said.

Unlike a lot of startups we’ve spoken to, Del Balso wants to return to an office setup as soon as it is feasible to do so, seeing it as a way to build more personal connections between employees.

We learn more about Slack’s future, Revolut adds new payment features and DoorDash pushes its IPO range upward. This is your Daily Crunch for December 4, 2020.

The big story: Slack and Salesforce execs explain their big acquisition

After Salesforce announced this week that it’s acquiring Slack for $27.7 billion, Ron Miller spoke to Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and Salesforce President and COO Bret Taylor to learn more about the deal.

Butterfield claimed that Slack will remain relatively independent within Salesforce, allowing the team to “do more of what we were already doing.” He also insisted that all the talk about competing with Microsoft Teams is “overblown.”

“The challenge for us was the narrative,” Butterfield said. “They’re just good [at] PR or something that I couldn’t figure out.”

Startups, funding and venture capital

Revolut lets businesses accept online payments — With this move, the company is competing directly with Stripe, Adyen, Braintree and Checkout.com.

Health tech venture firm OTV closes new $170M fund and expands into Asia — This year, the firm led rounds in telehealth platforms TytoCare and Lemonaid Health.

Zephr raises $8M to help news publishers grow subscription revenue — The startup’s customers already include publishers like McClatchy, News Corp Australia, Dennis Publishing and PEI Media.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

DoorDash amps its IPO range ahead of blockbuster IPO — The food delivery unicorn now expects to debut at $90 to $95 per share, up from a previous range of $75 to $85.

Enter new markets and embrace a distributed workforce to grow during a pandemic — Is this the right time to expand overseas?

Three ways the pandemic is transforming tech spending — All companies are digital product companies now.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

WH’s AI EO is BS — Devin Coldewey is not impressed by the White House’s new executive order on artificial intelligence.

China’s internet regulator takes aim at forced data collection — China is a step closer to cracking down on unscrupulous data collection by app developers.

Gift Guide: Games on every platform to get you through the long, COVID winter — It’s a great time to be a gamer.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

When Salesforce bought Slack earlier this week for $27.7 billion, it was in some ways the end of a startup fairytale. Slack was the living embodiment of the Silicon Valley startup success fantasy. It started as a pivot from a game company, of all things. It raised $1.4 billion, went from zero to a $7 billion valuation to IPO, checking off every box on the startup founder’s wish list.

Then quite suddenly this week, Slack was part of Salesforce, plucked off the market for an enormous sum of money.

While we might not ever know the back (Slack) room maneuvering that went on to make the deal a reality, it is interesting to note that Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told me in an interview this week that he was not actually trying to sell the company when he approached Salesforce president and COO Bret Taylor earlier this year. Instead, he wanted to buy something from them.

“I actually talked to Bret in the early days of the pandemic to see if they wanted to sell us Quip because I thought it would be good for us, and I didn’t really know what their plans were [for it]. He said he’d get back to me, and then got back to me six months later or so,” Butterfield said.

At that point, the conversation flipped and the companies began a series of discussions that eventually led to Salesforce acquiring Slack.

Big money, big expectations

From the Salesforce perspective, Taylor says that the Slack deal was worth the money because it really allows his company to bring together all the pieces of their platform, one that has expanded over the years from pure CRM to include marketing, customer service, data visualization, workflow and more. Taylor also said that having Slack gives Salesforce a missing communication layer on top of its other products, something especially important when interactions with customers, partners or fellow employees have become mostly digital.

“When we say we really want Slack to be this next generation interface for Customer 360, what we mean is we’re pulling together all these systems. How do you rally your teams around these systems in this digital work-anywhere world that we’re in right now where these teams are distributed and collaboration is more important than ever,” Taylor said.

Butterfield sees a natural connection between what people do in the course of their work, what machines do behind the scenes in these systems of record and engagement and how Slack can help bridge the gap between humans and machines.

He says that by putting Slack in the middle of business processes, you can begin to eliminate friction that occurs in complex enterprise software like Salesforce. Instead of moving stuff through email, clicking a link, opening a browser, signing in and then finally accessing the tool you want, the approval could be built into a single Slack message.

“If you have hundreds of those kinds of actions a day, there’s a real opportunity to increase the velocity, and that has an impact, and not just in the minutes saved by the person doing the approval, but the speed of how the whole business operates,” Butterfield said.

Competing with Microsoft

While neither executive said the deal was about competing with Microsoft, it was likely an underlying reason that the companies decided to join forces. They may prove better together than they are separately, and both have complicated histories with Microsoft.

Slack has had an ongoing battle with Microsoft and its Teams product for years. It filed suit against the company last summer in the EU over what it called unfairly bundling of Teams for free with Office 365. In an interview last year with The Wall Street Journal, Butterfield said that he believes Microsoft sees his company as an existential threat. Hyperbole aside, there is tension and competition between the two enterprise software companies.

Salesforce and Microsoft also have a long history, from lawsuits in the early days to making friends and working together when it makes sense after Satya Nadella took over in 2014, while still competing hard in the market. It’s hard not to see the deal in that context.

In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Battery Ventures general partner Neeraj Agrawal said the deal was at least partially about catching Microsoft.

“To get to a market cap of $1 trillion, Salesforce now has to take MSFT head on. Until now, the company has mostly been able to stay in its own swim lane in terms of products,” Agrawal told TechCrunch.

As for Butterfield, while he saw the obvious competition, he denied the deal was about putting his company in a better position to compete with his rival.

“I don’t think that was really an important part of the rationale, at least for me,” he said, adding “the competition with Microsoft is overblown. The challenge for us was the narrative. They’re just good PR or something that I couldn’t figure out,” he said.

While Butterfield cited a list of large clients in enterprise tech, insurance and banking, the narrative has always been that Slack was favored by developer teams, which is where it initially gained traction. Whatever the reality, with Salesforce, Slack is definitely in a better position to compete with any and all comers in the enterprise communications space, and while it will be part of Salesforce, the two companies also have to figure out how to maintain some separation.

Keeping Slack independent

Taylor certainly recognizes that Slack’s current customers are watching closely to see how they handle the acquisition, and his company will have to walk a fine line between respecting the brand and product independence on one hand, while finding ways to create and build upon existing hooks into Salesforce to allow the CRM giant to take full advantage of its substantial investment.

It won’t be easy to do, but you can see a similar level of independence in some of Salesforce’s recent big-money purchases like MuleSoft, the company it bought in 2018 for $6.5 billion, and Tableau, the company it bought last year for more than $15 billion. As Butterfield points out, those two companies have clearly maintained their brand identity and independence, and he sees them as role models for Slack.

“So there’s a layer of independence that’s like that [for Mulesoft and Tableau] because it’s not going to help anyone call us Chat Cloud or something like that. They paid a lot of money for us, so they want us to do more of what we were already doing,” he said.

Taylor, whose opinion matters greatly here, certainly sees it in similar terms.

“We want to make sure we have a real integrated value proposition, a real integrated platform for developers, but also maintain Slack’s technology independence, technology agnostic platform and its brand,” he said.

Better together

As for the companies coming together, both men see a lot of potential here to merge Slack communications with Salesforce’s enterprise software prowess to make something better, and Taylor sees Slack helping link the two with workflows and automations.

“When you think about automation, it’s event driven, these long-running processes, automations. If you look at what people are doing with the Slack platform, it’s essentially incorporating workflows and bots and all these things. The combination of the Salesforce platform where I think we have the best automation intelligence capabilities with the Slack platform is incredible,” Taylor said.

The challenge these two men now face as they move forward with this acquisition, and all of the expectations inherent in a deal this large, is making it work. Salesforce has a lot of experience with large acquisitions, and they have handled some well, and some not so well. It’s going to be imperative for both companies that they get this right. It’s now up to Taylor and Butterfield to make sure that happens.