Pinecone lands $10M seed for purpose-built machine learning database

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Pinecone, a new startup from the folks who helped launch Amazon SageMaker, has built a vector database that generates data in a specialized format to help build machine learning applications faster, something that was previously only accessible to the largest organizations. Today the company came out of stealth with a new product and announced a $10 million seed investment led by Wing Venture Capital.

Company co-founder Edo Liberty says that he started the company because of this fundamental belief that the industry was being held back by the lack of wider access to this type of database. “The data that a machine learning model expects isn’t a JSON record, it’s a high dimensional vector that is either a list of features or what’s called an embedding that’s a numerical representation of the items or the objects in the world. This [format] is much more semantically rich and actionable for machine learning,” he explained.

He says that this is a concept that is widely understood by data scientists, and supported by research, but up until now only the biggest and technically superior companies like Google or Pinterest could take advantage of this difference. Liberty and his team created Pinecone to put that kind of technology in reach of any company.

The startup spent the last couple of years building the solution, which consists of three main components. The main piece is a vector engine to convert the data into this machine-learning ingestible format. Liberty says that this is the piece of technology that contains all the data structures and algorithms that allow them to index very large amounts of high dimensional vector data, and search through it in an efficient and accurate way.

The second is a cloud hosted system to apply all of that converted data to the machine learning model, while handling things like index lookups along with the pre- and post-processing — everything a data science team needs to run a machine learning project at scale with very large workloads and throughputs. Finally, there is a management layer to track all of this and manage data transfer between source locations.

Tecton.ai nabs $35M Series B as it releases machine learning feature store

One classic example Liberty uses is an eCommerce recommendation engine. While this has been a standard part of online selling for years, he believes using a vectorized data approach will result in much more accurate recommendations and he says the data science research data bears him out.

“It used to be that deploying [something like a recommendation engine] was actually incredibly complex, and […] if you have access to a production grade database, 90% of the difficulty and heavy lifting in creating those solutions goes away, and that’s why we’re building this. We believe it’s the new standard,” he said.

The company currently has 10 people including the founders, but the plan is to double or even triple that number, depending on how the year goes. As he builds his company as an immigrant founder — Liberty is from Israel — he says that diversity is top of mind. He adds that it’s something he worked hard on at his previous positions at Yahoo and Amazon as he was building his teams at those two organizations. One way he is doing that is in the recruitment process. “We have instructed our recruiters to be proactive [in finding more diverse applicants], making sure they don’t miss out on great candidates, and that they bring us a diverse set of candidates,” he said.

Looking ahead to post-pandemic, Liberty says he is a bit more traditional in terms of office versus home, and that he hopes to have more in-person interactions. “Maybe I’m old fashioned but I like offices and I like people and I like to see who I work with and hang out with them and laugh and enjoy each other’s company, and so I’m not jumping on the bandwagon of ‘let’s all be remote and work from home’.”

How artificial intelligence will be used in 2021

SAP launches ‘RISE with SAP,’ a concierge service for digital transformation

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SAP today announced a new offering it calls ‘RISE with SAP,’ a solution that is meant to help the company’s customers go through their respective digital transformations and become what SAP calls ‘intelligent enterprises.’ RISE is a subscription service that combines a set of services and product offerings.

SAP’s head of product success Sven Denecken (and its COO for S/4Hana) described it as “the best concierge service you can get for your digital transformation” when I talked to him earlier this week. “We need to help our clients to embrace that change that they see currently,” he said. “Transformation is a journey. Every client wants to become that smarter, faster and that nimbler business, but they, of course, also see that they are faced with challenges today and in the future. This continuous transformation is what is happening to businesses. And we do know from working together with them, that actually they agree with those fundamentals. They want to be an intelligent enterprise. They want to adapt and change. But the key question is how to get there? And the key question they ask us is, please help us to get there.”

With RISE for SAP, businesses will get a single contact at SAP to help guide them through their journey, but also access to the SAP partner ecosystem.

The first step in this process, Denecken stressed, isn’t necessarily to bring in new technology, though that is also part of it, but to help businesses redesign and optimize their business processes and implement the best practices in their verticals — and then measure the outcome. “Business process redesign means that you analyze how your business processes perform. How can you get tailored recommendations? How can you benchmark against industry standards? And this helps you to set the tone and also to motivate your people — your IT, your business people — to adapt,” Denecken described. He also noted that in order for a digital transformation project to succeed, IT and business leaders and employees have to work together.

In part, that includes technology offerings and adopting robotic process automation (RPA), for example. As Denecken stressed, all of this builds on top of the work SAP has done with its customers over the years to define business processes and KPIs.

On the technical side, SAP is obviously offering its own services, including its Business Technology Platform, and cloud infrastructure, but it will also support customers on all of the large cloud providers. Also included in RISE is support for more than 2,200 APIs to integrate various on-premises, cloud and non-SAP systems, access to SAP’s low-code and no-code capabilities and, of course, its database and analytics offerings.

“Geopolitical tensions, environmental challenges and the ongoing pandemic are forcing businesses to deal with change faster than ever before,” said Christian Klein, SAP’s CEO, in today’s announcement. “Companies that can adapt their business processes quickly will thrive – and SAP can help them achieve this. This is what RISE with SAP is all about: It helps customers continuously unlock new ways of running businesses in the cloud to stay ahead of their industry.”

With this new offering, SAP is now providing its customers with a number of solutions that were previously available through its partner ecosystem. Denecken doesn’t see this as SAP competing with its own partners, though. Instead, he argues that this is very much a partner play and that this new solution will likely only bring more customers to its partners as well.

“Needless to say, this has been a negotiation with those partners,” he said. “Because yes, it’s sometimes topics that we now take over they [previously] did. But we are looking for scale here. The need in the market for digital transformation has just started. And this is where we see that this is definitely a big offering, together with partners. “

SAP is buying Berlin business process automation startup Signavio

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Rumors have been flying this week that SAP was going to buy Berlin business process automation startup Signavio, and sure enough the company made it official today. The companies did not reveal the purchase price, but Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the deal could be worth $1.2 billion.

With Signavio SAP gets a cloud-native business process management tool. SAP CFO Luka Mucic sees a world where understanding and automating businesses processes has become a key part of a company’s digital transformation efforts.

“I cannot overstress the importance for companies to be able to design, benchmark, improve and transform business processes across the enterprise to support new capabilities and business models,” he said in a statement.

While traditional enterprise BPA tools have existed for years, having a cloud-native tool gives SAP a much more modern approach to attacking this problem, and being able to automate business processes via the cloud has become more important during the pandemic when many employees are working entirely from home.

SAP also sees Signavio as a key missing piece in the company’s business process intelligence unit. “The combination of business process intelligence from SAP and Signavio creates a leading end-to-end business process transformation suite to help our customers achieve the requirements needed to gain a competitive edge,” he said.

SAP has been making moves into process automation of late. In fact at SAP TechEd in December, the company announced SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, its foray into the RPA space. This should fit in nicely alongside it.

SAP latest enterprise software giant to offer low-code workflow

Dr. Gero Decker, Savigno co-founder and CEO, sees SAP resources helping push the company beyond what it could have done on its own. “Considering the positioning of SAP, its geographical coverage and financial muscle, SAP is the biggest and best platform to bring process intelligence to every organization,” he said in a statement.

The increased resources and reach argument is one that just about every acquired company CEO makes, but being pulled into a company the size of SAP can be a double-edged sword. Yes, it has vast resources, but it also can be hard for an acquired company to find its place in such a large pond. How well they fit in and make that transition from startup to big company cog, will go a long way in determining the success of this transaction in the long run.

Signavio launched in 2009 in Berlin and has raised almost $230 million, according to Crunchbase data. Investors include Apax Digital and Summit Partners. The most recent investment was a July 2019 Series C for $177 million, which came in at a $400 million valuation.

Customers include Comcast, Bosch, Liberty Mutual and yes SAP. Perhaps it will be getting a discount now.

Signavio raises $177M at a $400M valuation for its business process automation solutions

International Action Targets Emotet Crimeware

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Authorities across Europe on Tuesday said they’d seized control over Emotet, a prolific malware strain and cybercrime-as-service operation. Investigators say the action could help quarantine more than a million Microsoft Windows systems currently compromised with malware tied to Emotet infections.

First surfacing in 2014, Emotet began as a banking trojan, but over the years it has evolved into one of the more aggressive platforms for spreading malware that lays the groundwork for ransomware attacks.

In a statement published Wednesday morning on an action dubbed “Operation Ladybird,” the European police agency Europol said the investigation involved authorities in the Netherlands, Germany, United States, the United Kingdom, France, Lithuania, Canada and Ukraine.

“The EMOTET infrastructure essentially acted as a primary door opener for computer systems on a global scale,” Europol said. “Once this unauthorised access was established, these were sold to other top-level criminal groups to deploy further illicit activities such data theft and extortion through ransomware.”

Experts say Emotet is a pay-per-install botnet that is used by several distinct cybercrime groups to deploy secondary malware — most notably the ransomware strain Ryuk and Trickbot, a powerful banking trojan. It propagates mainly via malicious links and attachments sent through compromised email accounts, blasting out tens of thousands of malware-laced missives daily.

Emotet relies on several hierarchical tiers of control servers that communicate with infected systems. Those controllers coordinate the dissemination of second-stage malware and the theft of passwords and other data, and their distributed nature is designed to make the crimeware infrastructure more difficult to dismantle or commandeer.

In a separate statement on the malware takeover, the Dutch National police said two of the three primary servers were located in the Netherlands.

“A software update is placed on the Dutch central servers for all infected computer systems,” the Dutch authorities wrote. “All infected computer systems will automatically retrieve the update there, after which the Emotet infection will be quarantined. Simultaneous action in all the countries concerned was necessary to be able to effectively dismantle the network and thwart any reconstruction.”

A statement from the German Federal Criminal Police Office about their participation in Operation Ladybird said prosecutors seized 17 servers in Germany that acted as Emotet controllers.

“As part of this investigation, various servers were initially identified in Germany with which the malicious software is distributed and the victim systems are monitored and controlled using encrypted communication,” the German police said.

Sources close to the investigation told KrebsOnSecurity the law enforcement action included the arrest of several suspects in Europe thought to be connected to the crimeware gang. The core group of criminals behind Emotet are widely considered to be operating out of Russia.

A statement by the National Police of Ukraine says two citizens of Ukraine were identified “who ensured the proper functioning of the infrastructure for the spread of the virus and maintained its smooth operation.”

A video released to YouTube by the NPU this morning shows authorities there raiding a residence, seizing cash and computer equipment, and what appear to be numerous large bars made of gold or perhaps silver. The Ukrainian policeman speaking in that video said the crooks behind Emotet have caused more than $2 billion in losses globally. That is almost certainly a very conservative number.

Police in the Netherlands seized huge volumes of data stolen by Emotet infections, including email addresses, usernames and passwords. A tool on the Dutch police website lets users learn if their email address has been compromised by Emotet.

But because Emotet is typically used to install additional malware that gets its hooks deeply into infected systems, cleaning up after it is going to be far more complicated and may require a complete rebuild of compromised computers.

The U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency has labeled Emotet “one of the most prevalent ongoing threats” that is difficult to combat because of its ‘worm-like’ features that enable network-wide infections.” Hence, a single Emotet infection can often lead to multiple systems on the same network getting compromised.

It is too soon to say how effective this operation has been in fully wresting control over Emotet, but a takedown of this size is a significant action.

In October, Microsoft used trademark law to disrupt the Trickbot botnet. Around the same time, the U.S. Cyber Command also took aim at Trickbot. However, neither of those actions completely dismantled the crimeware network, which remains in operation today.

Roman Hüssy, a Swiss information technology expert who maintains Feodotracker — a site that lists the location of major botnet controllers — told KrebsOnSecurity that prior to January 25, some 98 Emotet control servers were active. The site now lists 20 Emotet controllers online, although it is unclear if any of those remaining servers have been commandeered as part of the quarantine effort.

A current list of Emotet control servers online. Source: Feodotracker.abuse.ch

Further reading: Team Cymru on taking down Emotet

Arrest, Seizures Tied to Netwalker Ransomware

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U.S. and Bulgarian authorities this week seized the darkweb site used by the NetWalker ransomware cybercrime group to publish data stolen from its victims. In connection with the seizure, a Canadian national suspected of extorting more than $27 million through the spreading of NetWalker was charged in a Florida court.

The victim shaming site maintained by the NetWalker ransomware group, after being seized by authorities this week.

NetWalker is a ransomware-as-a-service crimeware product in which affiliates rent access to the continuously updated malware code in exchange for a percentage of any funds extorted from victims. The crooks behind NetWalker used the now-seized website to publish personal and proprietary data stolen from their prey, as part of a public pressure campaign to convince victims to pay up.

NetWalker has been among the most rapacious ransomware strains, hitting at least 305 victims from 27 countries — the majority in the United States, according to Chainalysis, a company that tracks the flow virtual currency payments.

“Chainalysis has traced more than $46 million worth of funds in NetWalker ransoms since it first came on the scene in August 2019,” the company said in a blog post detailing its assistance with the investigation. “It picked up steam in mid-2020, growing the average ransom to $65,000 last year, up from $18,800 in 2019.”

Image: Chainalysis

In a statement on the seizure, the Justice Department said the NetWalker ransomware has impacted numerous victims, including companies, municipalities, hospitals, law enforcement, emergency services, school districts, colleges, and universities. For example, the University of California, San Francisco paid $1.14 million last summer in exchange for a digital key needed to unlock files encrypted by the ransomware.

“Attacks have specifically targeted the healthcare sector during the COVID-19 pandemic, taking advantage of the global crisis to extort victims,” the DOJ said.

U.S. prosecutors say one of NetWalker’s top affiliates was Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins, of Gatineau, in Ottawa, Canada. An indictment unsealed today in Florida alleges Vachon-Desjardins obtained at least $27.6 million from the scheme.

The DOJ’s media advisory doesn’t mention the defendant’s age, but a 2015 report in the Gatineau local news website ledroit.com suggests this may not be his first offense. According to the story, a then-27-year-old Sebastien Vachon-Desjardins was sentenced to more than three years in prison for drug trafficking: He was reportedly found in possession of more than 50,000 methamphetamine tablets.

The NetWalker action came on the same day that European authorities announced a coordinated takedown targeting the Emotet crimeware-as-a-service network. Emotet is a pay-per-install botnet that is used by several distinct cybercrime groups to deploy secondary malware — most notably the ransomware strain Ryuk and Trickbot, a powerful banking trojan.

The NetWalker ransomware affiliate program kicked off in March 2020, when the administrator of the crimeware project began recruiting people on the dark web. Like many other ransomware programs, NetWalker does not permit affiliates to infect systems physically located in Russia or in any other countries that are part of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) — which includes most of the nations in the former Soviet Union. This is a prohibition typically made by cybercrime operations that are coordinated out of Russia and/or other CIS nations because it helps minimize the chances that local authorities will investigate their crimes.

The following advertisement (translated into English by cybersecurity firm Intel 471) was posted by the NetWalker affiliate program manager last year to a top cybercrime forum. It illustrates the allure of the ransomware affiliate model, which handles everything from updating the malware to slip past the latest antivirus updates, to leasing space on the dark web where affiliates can interact with victims and negotiate payment. The affiliate, on the other hand, need only focus on finding new victims.

We are recruiting affiliates for network processing and spamming.
We are interested in people whose priority is quality and not quantity.
We prefer candidates who can work with large networks and have their own access to them.
We are going to recruit a limited number of affiliates and then close the openings until they are available again.

We offer you prompt and flexible ransomware, a user-friendly admin panel in Tor, an automated service.

Encryption of shared accesses: if several users are logged in to the target computer, the ransomware will infect their mapped drives, as well as network resources where those users are logged in — shared accesses/NAS etc.

Powershell build. Each build is unique, in that the malware is inside the script – it is not downloaded from the internet. This makes bypassing antivirus protection easier, including Windows Defender (cloud+).

A fully automated blog where the victim’s dumped data is directed. The data is published according to your settings. Instant and automated payouts: initially 20 percent, no less than 16 percent.

Accessibility of a crypting service to avoid AV detections.

The ransomware has been in use since September 2019 and proved to be reliable. The files encrypted with it cannot be decrypted.

Targeting Russia or the CIS is prohibited.

You’ll get all the information about the ransomware as well as terms and conditions after you place an application via PM.

Application form:
1) The field you specialize in.
2) Your experience. What other affiliate programs have you been in and what was your profit?
3) How many accesses [to networks] do you have? When are you ready to start? How many accesses do you plan on monetizing?

Bloomreach raises $150M on $900M valuation and acquires Exponea

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Bloomreach, an API company that helps eCommerce customers with search and web site creation, announced a $150 million investment today from Sixth Street Growth. Today’s funding values the company at $900 million.

At the same time, the company announced it has acquired Exponea, a startup that gives Bloomreach a marketing automation component it had been missing. The two companies did not reveal the acquisition price, but along with the pure functionality, the company gains 200 additional employees, which is significant, considering Bloomreach had 300 prior to the acquisition. It also gains 250 net new customers, giving it a total of 750.

“Historically, we have had two major pillars of the business — the search part of it and the content part,” Bloomreach CEO and co-Founder Raj De Datta told TechCrunch. The content management component lets customers build websites, while the search powers the search box, navigation and merchandising. He points out that all of it is powered by an underlying data analysis engine that matches data to people and people to products.

Exponea will give the company more of a complete platform of services, allowing marketers to target and personalize their marketing messages across multiple channels. De Datta says the two companies had similar missions and made a good fit. “We have a common vision and common sort of product direction. […] Both companies are data-driven optimization technologies[…] and both are entrepreneurial product-driven companies,” he said.

It also helped that they had been partnering together for six months prior to the sale, which has now closed. Exponea was founded in 2016 in Slovakia and has raised over $57 million, according to Pitchbook data. The plan is to leave Exponea as a stand-alone product, while finding ways to integrate it more smoothly with the other components in the Bloomreach platform. They expect the integration parts to happen over the next year.

While De Datta did not want to share specific revenue figures, he did say that the company had a record second half as business was pushed online due to the pandemic. Michael McGinn, partner at Sixth Street and co-head at investor Sixth Street Growth doesn’t see the demand for eCommerce abating, even post-COVID, and that will drive a need for more customized online shopping experiences.

“Technology serving more bespoke customer experiences is a rapidly expanding market and we are pleased to join Bloomreach in its leadership of the digital commerce experience and marketing sector,” McGinn said in a statement.

De Datta says the money was used in part to buy Exponea, but he also plans to invest more in engineering to continue building the product line. The ultimate goal is an IPO, but as you would expect, he wasn’t ready to commit to any timeline just yet.

“I wouldn’t say we have a timeline, but our goal is that the company over the course of 2021 should make investments towards that, so that it’s an option for us.”

BloomReach shoots for more complete digital experience with Hippo acquisition

Run:AI raises $30M Series B for its AI compute platform

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Run:AI, a Tel Aviv-based company that helps businesses orchestrate and optimize their AI compute infrastructure, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round. The new round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors TLV Partners and S Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to date to $43 million.

At the core of Run:AI’s platform is the ability to effectively virtualize and orchestrate AI workloads on top of its Kubernetes-based scheduler. Traditionally, it was always hard to virtualize GPUs, so even as demand for training AI models has increased, a lot of the physical GPUs often set idle for long periods because it was hard to dynamically allocate them between projects.

Image Credits: Run.AI

The promise behind Run:AI’s platform is that it allows its users to abstract away all of the AI infrastructure and pool all of their GPU resources — no matter whether in the cloud or on-premises. This also makes it easier for businesses to share these resources between users and teams. In the process, IT teams also get better insights into how their compute resources are being used.

“Every enterprise is either already rearchitecting themselves to be built around learning systems powered by AI, or they should be,” said Lonne Jaffe, managing director at Insight Partners and now a board member at Run:AI.” Just as virtualization and then container technology transformed CPU-based workloads over the last decades, Run:AI is bringing orchestration and virtualization technology to AI chipsets such as GPUs, dramatically accelerating both AI training and inference. The system also future-proofs deep learning workloads, allowing them to inherit the power of the latest hardware with less rework. In Run:AI, we’ve found disruptive technology, an experienced team and a SaaS-based market strategy that will help enterprises deploy the AI they’ll need to stay competitive.”

Run:AI says that it is currently working with customers in a wide variety of industries, including automotive, finance, defense, manufacturing and healthcare. These customers, the company says, are seeing their GPU utilization increase from 25 to 75% on average.

“The new funds enable Run:AI to grow the company in two important areas: first, to triple the size of our development team this year,” the company’s CEO Omri Geller told me. “We have an aggressive roadmap for building out the truly innovative parts of our product vision — particularly around virtualizing AI workloads — a bigger team will help speed up development in this area. Second, a round this size enables us to quickly expand sales and marketing to additional industries and markets.”

Run.AI raises $13M for its distributed machine learning platform

Vectorized announces $15.5M investment to build simpler streaming data tool

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Streaming data is not new. Kafka has existed as an open source tool for a decade. Vectorized was founded on the premise that the existing tools were too complex and not designed for today’s streaming requirements. Today the company released its first product, Redpanda, an open source tool designed to make it easier for developers to build streaming data applications.

While it was at it, the startup announced a $15.5 million funding round, which is actually a combination of a previously unannounced $3 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and a $12.5 million Series A, which was also from Lightspeed with help from Google Ventures.

Redpanda is an open source tool that is delivered as an “intelligent API” to help “turn data streams into products,” company founder and CEO Alexander Gallego explained. It’s built to be a Kafka replacement, while remaining Kafka-compatible to help deal with backwards compatibility.

At the same time, it takes a more modern approach. Gallego points out that teams building data streaming applications have been getting lost in the complexity and he recognized an opportunity to build a company to simplify that.

“People are drowning in complexity today managing Kafka, ZooKeeper (an open source configuration management tool) and the data lake,” he said, adding “We enable new things that couldn’t be done before for several reasons: one is performance, one is simplicity and the other one is this store procedures.”

He says that the key to developer adoption is making the product free through open source, and having Kafka compatibility so that developers don’t feel like they have to just dump existing projects and start from scratch. While the company is launching with an open source tool, it plans to use the funding to build a hosted version of Redpanda to put it within reach of more organizations. “This funding round in particular is to power our cloud,” he said.

Arif Janmohamed, a partner at Lightspeed Ventures who is leading the investment in Vectorized sees a company looking to improve upon an existing technology with a better approach. “With a simple, elegant solution that doesn’t require any changes to an existing application’s code, Vectorized delivers 10x better performance, a much simpler management paradigm, and new functionality that will unleash the next set of real-time applications for the next decade,” Janmohamed said.

The company has 22 employees today with plans to add another 8 in the first half of this year, mostly engineers to help build the hosted version. As a Latino founder, Gallego is acutely aware of the need for a diverse and inclusive workforce. “What I have found is that being a [Latino] CEO, it attracts more people that look like me, and so that’s been a big thing, and it’s made a difference [in attracting diverse candidates],” he said.

One concrete thing he has done is start a scholarship to encourage under represented groups to become developers. “I started a scholarship where we just give money and mentorship to communities of Latino, Black and female developers, or people that want to transition to software engineering,” he said. While he says he does it without strings attached, he does hope that some of these folks could become part of the tech industry eventually, and perhaps even work at his company.

Jam collaborative software launches Jam Genies to give small startups access to experts

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As the world moves towards remote work, the collaborative tools market continues to expand. Jam, a platform for editing and improving your company’s website, is adding to the trend by introducing a new arm to its product today called Jam Genies.

Jam Genies is a network of highly experienced product experts that Jam users can tap for guidance and advice around their specific issue or challenge.

Cofounder Dani Grant explained to TechCrunch that many small and early-stage companies don’t have the deep pockets to hire a consultant when they run into a challenge, as many charge exorbitant rates and they often have a minimum time requirement. It can be incredibly difficult to get bite-sized advice at a reasonable cost.

That’s where Jam Genies comes in.

Genies hail from a variety of ‘verticals’, such as investors, designers, brand people, and growth hackers. The list includes:

  • Brianne Kimmel – Angel investor and founder of Worklife VC. Investor in Webflow, Hopin & 40+ software companies building the future of work.
  • Erik Torenberg – Partner at Village Global, a fund backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and others. Founding team at Product Hunt.
  • Sahil Lavingia – Founder & CEO of Gumroad, first engineer at Pinterest, and angel investing $10 million a year via shl.vc.
  • Iheanyi Ekechukwu – Engineer turned angel investor, and scout investor for Kleiner Perkins.
  • Soleio – Facebook’s second product designer, former head of design at Dropbox, and advisor at Figma. Invests in design-focused founders at Combine.
  • Dara Oke – Product design lead at Netflix, formerly designed and built products at Microsoft, Twitter, and Intel.
  • Katie Suskin – Designed many products you know and love like Microsoft Calendar, OkCupid, Tia, and … Jam.
  • Julius Tarng – Helped scale design at Webflow and led design tooling at Facebook.
  • Abe Vizcarra – Currently leading brand at Fast, former Global Design Director at Snap Inc.
  • Tiffany Zhong – CEO, Zebra IQ. Recognized by Forbes as one of the Top 10 Gen Z Experts.
  • Nicole Obst – Former Head of Web Growth (B2C) at Dropbox and Head of Growth at Loom
  • James Sherrett – 9th employee at Slack, led the original marketing and sales of Slack.
  • Asher King Abramson – CEO at Got Users, a growth marketing platform widely used by startups around Silicon Valley.

Users on the Jam platform can choose a Genie and set an appointment through Calendly. The sessions last half an hour and cost a flat fee of $250, all of which goes to the Genie.

Jam raised $3.5 million in October, from firms like Union Square Ventures, Version One Ventures, BoxGroup, Village Global and a variety of angel investors, to fuel growth and further build out the product. Jam Genies is, in many respects, a growth initiative for the company to better acquaint early-stage startups with the platform.

The main Jam product lets groups of developers and designers work collaboratively on a website, leaving comments, discuss changes and create and assign tasks. The platform integrates with all the usual suspects, such as Jira, Trello, Github, Slack, Figma, and more.

Since its launch in October 2020, the company has signed up 4,000 customers for its private beta waitlist, with 14,000 Jam comments created on the platform. The introduction of Jam Genies could add momentum to this growth push.

SetSail nabs $26M Series A to rethink sales compensation

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SetSail wants to upend the way sales people get compensated by paying them throughout the sales cycle, rather than a single commission after the sale closes. Today, the startup announced a $26 million Series A.

Insight Partners led the round with participation from existing investors Wing Venture Capital, Team8 and Operator Collective. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $37 million, according to the company.

SetSail connects to your CRM, email, calendar and other systems that have signals about the progress of a particular sale, and then using machine learning looks at points in the sales cycle where it would make sense to reward the sales person for the progress they are making.

As CEO and co-founder Haggai Levi told me at the time of the startup’s $7 million seed round in July, the single commission system discourages risk taking:

“If I’m closing the deal, I’m getting my commission. If I’m not closing the deal, I’m getting nothing. That means from a behavioral point of view, I would take the shortest path to win a deal, and I would take the minimum risk possible. So if there’s a competitive situation I will try to avoid that,” he said in July.

He said the idea of changing the way we think about compensation resonated with sales executives during the pandemic, especially as everyone’s role got altered and teams became distributed because of COVID, but he says while rethinking compensation was certainly a big factor so was SetSail’s ability to connect to all of the sales systems to help build these new approaches to pay.

“I think it’s even beyond just compensation. […] It’s also connecting to all of your data using an end-to-end platform that helps you understand what’s happening between you, your reps and your customers and allowing you to tie that back in using behavioral science to machine learning-based compensation,” he explained.

The company began 2020 with five customers, a reasonable start for an early stage startup, but it ended the year with more than 20 including Cisco, Dropbox and HubSpot. It now has over 5000 sales reps using the platform.

In spite of the growing number of users, Levi says they have no plans to aggregate data, leaving each customer’s data as distinct to build the compensation packages that make sense to them. “We try not to play kind of the data, aggregator role because we want to make sure that every customer’s data is encrypted and secured in a completely different container. The trade off between getting knowledge between customers versus receiving their data is is too high in our opinion,” he said.

The company now has 35 employees with five more hired who will be starting in the next several weeks and plans to reach 70 by the end of the year. They are thinking hard about how to hire a diverse workforce. For starters, Levi says that the company board has two female members. He says hiring in general is a challenge for every CEO, especially early on, and hiring a diverse group even more so, but he says it’s important to be thinking about this from the start because from a gender perspective at least, you are losing half the talent pool if you ignore it.

When the pandemic is over, he sees having at least some in-person office presence in spite of being spread out across San Francisco, New York and Tel Aviv, but it will be probably be a hybrid approach and not require as much office space as they might have rented prior to COVID.

SetSail raises $7M to change how sales teams are compensated