Lightyear nabs $13M Series A as online network procurement takes shape

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It seems like everything is being pushed online now, but network procurement stubbornly has remained an in-person or phone-based negotiation. Lightyear, an early-stage New York City startup, decided to change that last year, and the company announced a $13.1 million Series A today.

The round was led by Ridge Ventures with participation from Zigg Capital and a slew of individual investors. Today’s investment comes on the heels of a $3.7 million seed round last October, bringing the total raised to $16.8 million.

CEO and co-founder Dennis Thankachan says that the company has been able to gain customers by offering a new way to procure network resources, which was a great improvement over manual negotiating.

“Last year we launched Lightyear, which was the first tool for buying your telecom infrastructure on the web. And although changing behaviors and the way that enterprises have done things for years is difficult, the status quo in telecom has been zero transparency, no web-based ways to do things, and oftentimes interfacing with really, really large vendors where you have no negotiating leverage even if you’re a big enterprise. That experience was so poor that a lot of enterprises were extremely happy to see what we put in the market,” he said.

What Lightyear offers is an online marketplace where companies can interact with vendors and get a range of price quotes to make a more informed buying decision. The company spent a lot of time improving the product since last October when you could configure some basic stuff, get a price quote and Lightyear would help you buy it.

Now Thankachan says that the solution covers the full life cycle of services including configuring a bigger array of services, helping manage the installation of the services and helping reduce the amount of delays and errors in installs. Finally, they help track and manage network inventory and can automate renewal for a whole group of services.

Embedded procurement will make every company its own marketplace

That has resulted in 4X growth in just nine months since the last round. In addition, the company had relationships with 400 vendors in October and has grown that to mid-500 vendors today. The startup has also doubled the number of employees to around 20.

Thankachan says that as a person of color he is particularly cognizant about building a diverse and inclusive culture. “I’m a person of color, who has been a minority in different work environments in the past, and I know how that feels and how frustrating that can be for a person who feels like their voice is not heard. […] So I think we can start to build a culture that is not necessarily the norm in [the telecommunications industry] by trying to give opportunities to [underrepresented] people,” he said.

Yousuf Khan, a partner at Ridge Ventures, who is leading the round and will be joining the board under the terms of the deal, says that as a former CIO he found Lightyear’s approach quite appealing.

“As a former CIO and someone who has led global technology operations, it’s refreshing to see Lightyear transforming the way business infrastructure gets bought…I wish Lightyear existed during my years as a CIO,” Khan said in a statement.

Lightyear scores $3.7M seed to digitize networking infrastructure procurement

 

Scaling CockroachDB in the red ocean of relational databases

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Most database startups avoid building relational databases, since that market is dominated by a few goliaths. Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server have embedded themselves into the technical fabric of large- and medium-size companies going back decades. These established companies have a lot of market share and a lot of money to quash the competition.

So rather than trying to compete in the relational database market, over the past decade, many database startups focused on alternative architectures such as document-centric databases (like MongoDB), key-value stores (like Redis) and graph databases (like Neo4J). But Cockroach Labs went against conventional wisdom with CockroachDB: It intentionally competed in the relational database market with its relational database product.

While it did face an uphill battle to penetrate the market, Cockroach Labs saw a surprising benefit: It didn’t have to invent a market. All it needed to do was grab a share of a market that also happened to be growing rapidly.

Cockroach Labs has a bright future, compelling technology, a lot of money in the bank and has an experienced, technically astute executive team.

In previous parts of this EC-1, I looked at the origins of CockroachDB, presented an in-depth technical description of its product as well as an analysis of the company’s developer relations and cloud service, CockroachCloud. In this final installment, we’ll look at the future of the company, the competitive landscape within the relational database market, its ability to retain talent as it looks toward a potential IPO or acquisition, and the risks it faces.

CockroachDB’s success is not guaranteed. It has to overcome significant hurdles to secure a profitable place for itself among a set of well-established database technologies that are owned by companies with very deep pockets.

It’s not impossible, though. We’ll first look at MongoDB as an example of how a company can break through the barriers for database startups competing with incumbents.

When life gives you Mongos, make MongoDB

Dev Ittycheria, MongoDB CEO, rings the Nasdaq Stock Market Opening Bell. Image Credits: Nasdaq, Inc

MongoDB is a good example of the risks that come with trying to invent a new database market. The company started out as a purely document-centric database at a time when that approach was the exception rather than the rule.

Web developers like document-centric databases because they address a number of common use cases in their work. For example, a document-centric database works well for storing comments to a blog post or a customer’s entire order history and profile.

How engineers fought the CAP theorem in the global war on latency

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CockroachDB was intended to be a global database from the beginning. The founders of Cockroach Labs wanted to ensure that data written in one location would be viewable immediately in another location 10,000 miles away. The use case was simple, but the work needed to make it happen was herculean.

The company is betting the farm that it can solve one of the largest challenges for web-scale applications. The approach it’s taking is clever, but it’s a bit complicated, particularly for the non-technical reader. Given its history and engineering talent, the company is in the process of pulling it off and making a big impact on the database market, making it a technology well worth understanding. In short, there’s value in digging into the details.

Using CockroachDB’s multiregion feature to segment data according to geographic proximity fulfills Cockroach Labs’ primary directive: To get data as close to the user as possible.

In part 1 of this EC-1, I provided a general overview and a look at the origins of Cockroach Labs. In this installment, I’m going to cover the technical details of the technology with an eye to the non-technical reader. I’m going to describe the CockroachDB technology through three questions:

  1. What makes reading and writing data over a global geography so hard?
  2. How does CockroachDB address the problem?
  3. What does it all mean for those using CockroachDB?

What makes reading and writing data over a global geography so hard?

Spencer Kimball, CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs, describes the situation this way:

There’s lots of other stuff you need to consider when building global applications, particularly around data management. Take, for example, the question and answer website Quora. Let’s say you live in Australia. You have an account and you store the particulars of your Quora user identity on a database partition in Australia.

But when you post a question, you actually don’t want that data to just be posted in Australia. You want that data to be posted everywhere so that all the answers to all the questions are the same for everybody, anywhere. You don’t want to have a situation where you answer a question in Sydney and then you can see it in Hong Kong, but you can’t see it in the EU. When that’s the case, you end up getting different answers depending where you are. That’s a huge problem.

Reading and writing data over a global geography is challenging for pretty much the same reason that it’s faster to get a pizza delivered from across the street than from across the city. The essential constraints of time and space apply. Whether it’s digital data or a pepperoni pizza, the further away you are from the source, the longer stuff takes to get to you.

“Developers, as you know, do not like to pay for things”

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In the previous part of this EC-1, we looked at the technical details of CockroachDB and how it provides accurate data instantaneously anywhere on the planet. In this installment, we’re going to take a look at the product side of Cockroach, with a particular focus on developer relations.

As a business, Cockroach Labs has many things going for it. The company’s approach to distributed database technology is novel. And, as more companies operate on a global level, CockroachDB has the potential to gain some significant market share internationally. The company is seven years into a typical 10-year maturity model for databases, has raised $355 million, and holds a $2 billion market value. It’s considered a double unicorn. Few database companies can say this.

The company is now aggressively expanding into the database-as-a-service space, offering its own technology in a fully managed package, expanding the spectrum of clients who can take immediate advantage of its products.

But its growth depends upon securing the love of developers while also making its product easier to use for new customers. To that end, I’m going to analyze the company’s pivot to the cloud as well as its extensive outreach to developers as it works to set itself up for long-term, sustainable success.

Cockroach Labs looks to the cloud

These days, just about any company of consequence provides services via the internet, and a growing number of these services are powered by products and services from native cloud providers. Gartner forecasted in 2019 that cloud services are growing at an annual rate of 17.5%, and there’s no sign that the growth has abated at all.

Its founders’ history with Google back in the mid-2000s has meant that Cockroach Labs has always been aware of the impact of cloud services on the commercial web. Unsurprisingly, CockroachDB could run cloud native right from its first release, given that its architecture presupposes the cloud in its operation — as we saw in part 2 of this EC-1.

CockroachDB, the database that just won’t die

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There is an art to engineering, and sometimes engineering can transform art. For Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis, those two worlds collided when they created the widely successful open-source graphics program, GIMP, as college students at Berkeley.

That project was so successful that when the two joined Google in 2002, Sergey Brin and Larry Page personally stopped by to tell the new hires how much they liked it and explained how they used the program to create the first Google logo.

Cockroach Labs was started by developers and stays true to its roots to this day.

In terms of good fortune in the corporate hierarchy, when you get this type of recognition in a company such as Google, there’s only one way you can go — up. They went from rising stars to stars at Google, becoming the go-to guys on the Infrastructure Team. They could easily have looked forward to a lifetime of lucrative employment.

But Kimball, Mattis and another Google employee, Ben Darnell, wanted more — a company of their own. To realize their ambitions, they created Cockroach Labs, the business entity behind their ambitious open-source database CockroachDB. Can some of the smartest former engineers in Google’s arsenal upend the world of databases in a market spotted with the gravesites of storage dreams past? That’s what we are here to find out.

Berkeley software distribution

Mattis and Kimball were roommates at Berkeley majoring in computer science in the early-to-mid-1990s. In addition to their usual studies, they also became involved with the eXperimental Computing Facility (XCF), an organization of undergraduates who have a keen, almost obsessive interest in CS.

The CockroachDB EC-1

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Every application is a palimpsest of technologies, each layer forming a base that enables the next layer to function. Web front ends rely on JavaScript and browser DOM, which rely on back-end APIs, which themselves rely on databases.

As one goes deeper down the stack, engineering decisions become ever more conservative — changing the location of a button in a web app is an inconvenience; changing a database engine can radically upend an entire project.

It’s little surprise then that database technologies are among the longest-lasting engineering projects in the modern software developer toolkit. MySQL, which remains one of the most popular database engines in the world, was first released in the mid-1990s, and Oracle Database, launched more than four decades ago, is still widely used in high-performance corporate environments.

Database technology can change the world, but the world in these parts changes very, very slowly. That’s made building a startup in the sector a tough equation: Sales cycles can be painfully slow, even when new features can dramatically expand a developer’s capabilities. Competition is stiff and comes from some of the largest and most entrenched tech companies in the world. Exits have also been few and far between.

That challenge — and opportunity — is what makes studying Cockroach Labs so interesting. The company behind CockroachDB attempts to solve a long-standing problem in large-scale, distributed database architecture: How to make it so that data created in one place on the planet is always available for consumption by applications that are thousands of miles away, immediately and accurately. Making global data always available immediately and accurately might sound like a simple use case, but in reality it’s quite the herculean task. Cockroach Labs’ story is one of an uphill struggle, but one that saw it turn into a next-generation, $2-billion-valued database contender.

The lead writer of this EC-1 is Bob Reselman. Reselman has been writing about the enterprise software market for more than two decades, with a particular emphasis on teaching and educating engineers on technology. The lead editor for this package was Danny Crichton, the assistant editor was Ram Iyer, the copy editor was Richard Dal Porto, figures were designed by Bob Reselman and stylized by Bryce Durbin, and illustrations were drawn by Nigel Sussman.

CockroachDB had no say in the content of this analysis and did not get advance access to it. Reselman has no financial ties to CockroachDB or other conflicts of interest to disclose.

The CockroachDB EC-1 comprises four main articles numbering 9,100 words and a reading time of 37 minutes. Here’s what we’ll be crawling over:

We’re always iterating on the EC-1 format. If you have questions, comments or ideas, please send an email to TechCrunch Managing Editor Danny Crichton at danny@techcrunch.com.

CockroachDB, the database that just won’t die

PrintNightmare | Latest Patch Almost Puts Microsoft Vulnerability to Bed

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Executive Summary

  • A remote code execution vulnerability is being dubbed ‘PrintNightmare’ (CVE-2021-34527 and CVE-2021-1675).
  • The vulnerabilities are present in the Windows Spooler Service present on all Windows versions.
  • Microsoft has released two patches to address these vulnerabilities (an Out-of_Band update on July 1 as well as the July 13th monthly update).
  • Exploit code is readily available and has already been folded into popular hacking tools like Mimikatz and the Metasploit framework.
  • SentinelOne has provided DeepVisibility queries to detect attempts to exploit PrintNightmare in customer environments.

What Happened?

On June 29, 2021, details emerged of a remotely exploitable vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows Print Spooler service affecting all versions of Windows to date. The vulnerability was originally discovered by security researchers at Sangfor Technologies and responsibly disclosed to Microsoft. Variants of the vulnerability, appropriately dubbed ‘PrintNightmare’, are tracked under CVE-2021-34527 and CVE-2021-1675. They allow Remote Code Execution and have now been folded into popular attack tools like Mimikatz and Metasploit. Microsoft has released updated versions of their patches and guidance as of July 13th. That said, if Microsoft’s instructions are not carefully followed, hosts may still be left exposed to exploitation.

The PrintNightmare Rapidly Escalates

Initially, it was believed that the vulnerability could only be exploited on Windows Servers; however, researchers found an alternative call flow to the vulnerable function that allows attacking any Windows machine running the Print Spooler service. Much of the severity lies in the ease of exploitation: it is network exploitable, requires no user interaction, and can be initiated from a lower-privileged context. All of that is a recipe for quick adoption by attackers of all stripes.

In this flaw, the Windows Print Spooler service improperly governs access to RpcAddPrinterDriverEx(), resulting in the ability to achieve SYSTEM privileges, and subsequently execute code within that context. The vulnerability was first exploited using the RpcAddPrinterDriverEx API. Subsequently, newer versions of the exploit began using an alternative execution flow calling the function RpcAsyncAddPrinterDriver to bypass detections. Ultimately, the flaw allows for the loading of a malicious DLL of the attacker’s choice, making the vulnerability ideal for multiple stages in the attack chain.

The vulnerability affects all supported versions of Microsoft Windows (servers and workstations alike). Hosts with the Windows Print Spooler Service running are exposed to potential exploitation.

Several days after Microsoft Emergency patch (KB5005010) was published, researchers published a full bypass which still allows full remote exploitation of a fully patched and rebooted system. The PrintNightmare attack was quickly integrated into mainstream attack tools such as MetaSploit, Mimikatz, and WinPwn.

One Demo/PoC of PrintNightmare Exploitation (by cube0x0)

This case continues to highlight vulnerabilities in older aspects of the Windows codebase, and the printing infrastructure in particular. During 2020-2021 multiple previous vulnerabilities were discovered in the Print Spooler/Fax code including: FaxHell (Oct 2020), CVE-2020-1337 (Aug 2020), Evil Printer (Jun 2020), PrintDemon (May 2020). In addition, it is critical to note that attackers will continue looking for systems exposed to this vulnerability for years to come. It is probable that this flaw will fall in with MS08-067 and other ‘commodity’ vulnerabilities that seem to linger far past their welcome.

Mitigation and Workarounds

In addition to applying the revised update from Microsoft, there are multiple Microsoft remediation suggestions with registry changes and GPO policies.

  1. Install the official updates from Microsoft
  2. Follow additional guidance from Microsoft regarding registry settings and/or GPO updates:
    • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindows NTPrintersPointAndPrint (set to 0)
    • NoWarningNoElevationOnInstall = 0 (DWORD) or not defined (default setting)
    • UpdatePromptSettings = 0 (DWORD) or not defined (default setting)

Additional Workarounds

If you are unable to apply the latest patch or use the suggestions above, it is also possible to disable inbound remote printing via Group Policy. This can be done via PowerShell

Stop-Service -Name Spooler -Force
Set-Service -Name Spooler -StartupType Disabled

or via gpedit.msc:

Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / PrintersAllow Print Spooler to accept client connections Disabled

Note: The Print Spooler service will need to be restarted following this change.

Disable remote printing via gpedit.msc

Finding Drivers Vulnerable to PrintNightmare

SentinelOne customers can also proactively search for vulnerable drivers using the following Deep Visibility query:

EventType In ( "File Rename","File Creation" ) AND TgtFilePath Contains Anycase "spooldriversx64" AND TgtFilePath Contains Anycase "Old" AND TgtFilePath Contains Anycase "dll" AND TgtFileIsSigned != "signed" AND AgentMachineType In ( "Server" )
Hunting for PrintNightmare in Deep Visibility

Conclusion

PrintNightmare (CVE-2021-34527) is a critical, high impact, and easily exploitable vulnerability, which has already found its way into the toolsets of cybercriminals. We recommend expediting the deployment and installation of Microsoft’s official security update. In addition, there are a number of workarounds available that can help mitigate some of the risk.

This is a sobering example of how quickly these flaws can unravel once released into the wild. The challenge lies in our ability to rapidly pivot, manage the risk, and employ available countermeasures. Modern endpoint security products like SentinelOne’s Singularity Platform, which proactively provide rapid threat hunting packs, are key in providing the visibility and protection around new and emerging threats.

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YuLife nabs $70M at a $346M valuation for its gamified, wellness-oriented approach to life insurance

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Life insurance — financial protection you buy against your death — may not read like the liveliest of industries on paper. But a life insurance startup that believes it can turn that stigma around, by infusing the concept with gamification and a push toward wellness and health — and change the life insurance industry in the process — is today announcing significant funding, a sign of the traction it’s getting for its big ideas.

YuLife, a London startup that has built a new kind of life insurance concept — it incentivizes and rewards users to focus on their physical and mental health through a gamified interface — has raised $70 million in what is, to date, one of the largest Series Bs raised by an insurtech startup in Europe.

Led by Target Global, the round also included Eurazeo, Latitude and previous backers Creandum, Notion Capital, Anthemis, MMC Ventures, and OurCrowd. Sammy Rubin, YuLife’s CEO and founder, confirmed that the round values YuLife at $346 million (£250 million).

The company will be using the funding to continue expanding its business, build more products on its platform, and importantly continue to invest in the technology that it uses to run its service and determine how its policies should run.

“Our insurance is about helping people live healthier and longer lives,” Rubin said in an interview. “If we can help to reduce claims while incentivizing people to do that, it’s a win-win.” But it’s about more than that, he added. “We are building a new type of risk model where we are able to create new actuarial tables, which have not been updated in 200 years. Actually, I think smoker rates and how they’ve changed was the last update. So, most will just look at your age and whether you are a smoker and that’s it.”

YuLife is currently active only in the U.K. and is only sold directly to organizations, who in turn provide it to their employees. That business currently — which also includes income protection and critical illness cover — provides $15 billion of coverage and has seen 10x growth in the last year — a bumper one for life insurance policies, possibly for the worst reasons (hello, pandemic; goodbye, predicting what the future might look like). Customers include Capital One, Co-op, Curve, Havas Media, Severn Trent and Sodexo.

That $15 billion is just a drop in the bucket in an industry that is currently estimated to be worth some $2.2 trillion.

The company got its start on the back of a persistent problem that Rubin experienced at his previous insurance startup PruProtect (which is now called Vitality Life).

“Usually insurance benefits just sit on a shelf and never get used,” he said. YuLife set out to change that by making the policy “all about engagement.”

The app — built by veterans of the gaming industry — is designed around the concept of different environments, currently covering forest, ocean, desert and mountains, which YuLife collectively terms its “Yuniverse.” (This incidentally also became a template for the company’s HQ design in London.)

Within each of these environments, users are encouraged to walk, cycle, meditate and do other activities to get around their environments in a healthy way, while at the same time being able to compare their progress against other co-workers. There is a degree of personalization in everyone’s experience, in that one person leaning into one activity over another seems to produce different subsequent scenarios.

Along with this, users are offered discounts on third-party products to further engage with the game within YuLife, which could include a subscription to meditation app Calm, FitBit and Garmin devices, and more.

As users make their way through their worlds, they get rewards, in the form of something called YuCoins. The YuCoins can in turn be used to redeem vouchers from the likes of Amazon and Asos to buy things … consumerism being another way to improve happiness for some of us.

All of this sums up as more than just a policy aimed at giving people peace of mind for their families should they depart this world.

“Long term, it’s not just about health, it’s about lifestyle,” Rubin said.

It’s also about YuLife’s business: The various products that it offers are built around an affiliate model, so there is a business interest for the company around offering and seeing items purchased and redeemed. However, this is not essential to using the app as a policy holder.

The win-win theme runs strong, but so too does the fact that YuLife is taking a different approach altogether, in an industry where most of the “disruption” has up to now been more about how to buy life insurance, rather than reassessing what life insurance actually is. For others in the space doing just that, see DeadHappy, BIMA, and the Jay-Z-backed Ethos. That being said, it’s also not the only one tackling “lifestyle” as part of life insurance: Sproutt is another rethinking that area as well.

“YuLife is redefining life insurance, using the most innovative technologies to transform a largely traditional industry,” said Ben Kaminski, partner, Target Global, in a statement. “With health and well-being increasingly thrust into the limelight in the wake of COVID-19, YuLife is fundamentally changing insurance by incentivizing people to lead healthier lifestyles. YuLife is ideally positioned to build on its tenfold growth during the pandemic and lead the way in helping its clients respond to the challenges posed by an ever-changing working environment. We are very proud to partner with YuLife on its journey of becoming a global leader in life insurance.”

Insurtech is hot on both sides of the Atlantic

Railsbank raises $70M to build out its fintech-as-a-service platform

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Financial services as a service — where entities like neobanks, retailers and others can create and sell their own financial products by way of a few lines of code and APIs — has been one of the bigger trends in the world of fintech in recent years, with embedded finance on its way to being a $7.2 trillion market by 2030, according to a forecast from Bain Capital. Now, one of the companies building and providing those APIs is announcing some growth funding to expand.

Railsbank, which builds APIs for banking, payment cards and credit products for use by fintechs but also a wide range of other kinds of businesses, has raised $70 million in new equity funding, money that the London startup plans to use to continue growing internationally and to add more features to its product set.

“Our mission is to reinvent, unbundle and democratise access to the complex, opaque and byzantine 70-year-old credit card market, which is worth $4 trillion in the U.S. alone,” Nigel Verdon, CEO and co-founder of Railsbank, told TechCrunch in an interview last year. Verdon is a repeat entrepreneur, with one of his previous companies being Currency Cloud.

Railsbank not disclosing its valuation, but Verdon hints that it is in the high hundreds of millions and close to $1 billion.

“As a policy, we rarely talk about valuation as we prefer to talk about customers,” he told TechCrunch today. “Valuation is a very inward-facing and self-centered metric. Saying that, near-unicorn would best describe us today.”

As a point of comparison data from PitchBook noted that the company was valued at just under $200 million in its last round at the end of last year (we reported on it here).

This latest round is being led by Anthos Capital, a previous backer of the company, with Central Capital, Cohen and Company, and Chris Adelsbach’s fund Outrun Ventures, as well as other unnamed previous backers also participating. Central Capital is a strategic investor: It’s the VC arm of the largest privately held bank in Indonesia, while Cohen and Company is the founder of Bancorp. Those backers speak to where Railsbank is targeting its services and who is interested in potentially working with it.

Banking as a service, and other financial products as a service, has become one of the most significant building blocks not just in the world of fintech, but in financial services overall. As with Twilio or Sinch in communications, or Stripe in payments, the idea here is that financial specialists have built out the complicated infrastructure and partnerships that underpin a product like a credit card, or a banking account.

This is then packaged up in a service that can be integrated into another one by way of an API, and the small amount of code needed to add it to another platform. In turn, that API can be used not just by another financial services company that is consumer- or business-facing, but by any kind of company that sees offering a financial product as part of a bigger customer service and loyalty play. That could mean a retailer offering its own-brand credit card, but also a “neobank” that is building a slick front end with great customer service and personalization, without needing to build the now-commoditized banking infrastructure underneath it to run it.

Railsbank is far from being the only company that has identified and built around this concept. Other big players include Rapyd, which raised a big round at a $2.5 billion valuation earlier this year; Unit, which also has been picking up funding and growing; FintechOS, which really does what its name says; and the startup 10x was even built for incumbent players to also have access to lighter fintech as a service.

Railsbank believes its distinct from many of its would-be competitors in part because it has built a lot of its own infrastructure from the ground up (hence the “rails” in its name), “bypassing” legacy players, in contrast to others that are built as software that still ultimately runs on top of stacks (and inefficiencies) of those older providers. This also means that it is regulated as a financial institution.

Railsbank is also in the business of making some acquisitions in order to grow its business, for example acquiring the U.K. business of German fintech Wirecard when it was crashing due to financial malpractices. And it doesn’t build everything from scratch: Earlier this year it also partnered with Plaid to embed some of its services within Railsbank’s.

Railsbank does not disclose a full list of customer names but has case studies on a number of smaller clients that speak to just how widely proliferated financial services are today. They include GoSolo, Kyshi and SimpledCard.

“The market has evolved so rapidly since we founded the world’s first BaaS business, the Bancorp,” noted Betsy Cohen, chairman of Fintech Masala and founder of Bancorp, in a statement. “As we move into the $7 trillion embedded finance market, it has been great watching Railsbank’s growth story. With this investment, it’s a privilege to continue to be part of the journey with a global leader like Railsbank.”

Maybe neobanks will break even after all

Former Nutanix execs launch new startup with $50M seed round

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Today a new software company from two former Nutanix executives called DevRev emerged from stealth with a $50 million seed round from Mayfield Fund, Khosla Ventures and several industry luminaries. The company, which aims to bring the coding and revenue processes closer together, already has 75 employees working on the new software platform, which they hope to have ready to launch later this year.

It’s not every day you see a $50 million seed round, but perhaps the fact that former Nutanix co-founder and CEO Dheeraj Pandey and his former SVP of engineering Manoj Agarwal are involved, could help explain the investor enthusiasm for the new project.

Pandey says that he has seen a gap between developers and the revenue the applications they create are supposed to generate. The idea behind the new company is to break down the silos that exist between the front of the office and the back of the office and give developers a deeper understanding of the customers using their products, or at least that’s the theory.

“Dev and rev are yin and yang to each other. In today’s world they are really far apart with tons of bureaucracy between these two parties. Our goal to bring dev and rev to get rid of the bureaucracy,” Pandey told me

The company intends to build an API to help developers pull this information from existing systems for companies already working with a CRM tool like Salesforce, while helping gather that customer information for younger companies who might lack a tool. Regardless, the idea is to bring that info where the developer can see it to help build better products.

The way it works in most companies is customer service or sales hears complaints or suggestions about the product, and tickets get generated, but putting these issues in front of the people building the software isn’t always easy or direct. DevRev hopes to change that.

Why Slack and Salesforce execs think they’re better together

Navin Chaddha, managing director at Mayfield, whose firm is investing in DevRev, sees a need to bring these different parts of the company together in a more direct way. “The code that developers work on today is used by support as well as marketing and sales. By bringing the world of issues and tickets closer to the world of revenue and growth, DevRev’s unified platform bridges the gap between developer and customer and elevates the developer to a business leader,” Chaddha said.

With 75 employees working on the problem, DevRev is already a substantial startup. As experienced founders Pandey and Agarwal certainly understand the importance of building a diverse and inclusive company. Pandey sees the top of the employment funnel really being focused on engineering, design and business schools and the company is working to bring in a diverse group of young employees.

“[We are looking at ways] to search for talent and to promote talent, to make them into leaders. I think we have an empty canvas by the way, and we have this idea of COVID, and being able to do remote work has really grown the top of the funnel, the mouth of the funnel now can be anything and everything. […] [Colleges and universities] are I would say the real source of all diversity at the end of the day. We have seen how engineering schools, design schools and business schools are actually getting so diverse,” he said.

The company is working to build the product now and reaching out to developer communities on Discord, GitHub and other places that developers gather online to get their input, while testing and improving the product in-house and with design partners.

Nutanix, the founders’ previous company, launched in 2009 and raised over a $1 billion before going public in 2016. Pandey and Agarwal left Nutanix at the end of last year to launch the new company.

Nutanix execs discuss how they built their 2016 IPO roadshow deck