One of the most interesting (and confusing) news announcements of Microsoft’s Build developer conference earlier this year was the first public demo of the company’s Fluid Framework. Fluid is meant to make building collaborative real-time editing experiences easier for developers, but Microsoft is also building it into some of its own tools, like Office and Outlook. It’s nothing less than a re-imagining of what documents should look and feel like.

Today, at its Ignite conference in Orlando, Fla., Microsoft launched the first public preview of the Fluid Framework end-user experience, as well as a private preview for developers.

As Microsoft notes, the Fluid Framework has three main capabilities: the multi-person co-authoring features, the componentized document model and the ability to plug in intelligent agents that can, for example, translate text in real-time or suggest edits. To some degree, this isn’t all that different from Google Docs or even Microsoft’s own collaboration features in Office. But what’s new is that Microsoft is opening this up to developers and that it is looking at the Fluid Framework as a new way to deconstruct and componentize documents, which can then be used across applications.

Microsoft plans to build the Fluid Framework into lots of experiences across Microsoft 365, including Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, OneNote and Office. If you want to see it in action, you can now try the public preview to see what editing documents with it feels like.

Volterra is an early-stage startup that has been quietly working on a comprehensive solution to help companies manage applications in hybrid environments. The company emerged from stealth today with a $50 million investment and a set of products.

Investors include Khosla Ventures and Mayfield, along with strategic investors M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), Itochu Technology Ventures and Samsung NEXT. The company, which was founded in 2017, already has 100 employees and more than 30 customers.

What attracted these investors and customers is a full-stack solution that includes both hardware and software to manage applications in the cloud or on-prem. Volterra founder and CEO Ankur Singla says when he was at his previous company, Contrail Systems, which was acquired by Juniper Networks in 2012 for $176 million, he saw first-hand how large companies were struggling with the transition to hybrid.

“The big problem we saw was in building and operating applications that scale is a really hard problem. They were adopting multiple hybrid cloud strategies, and none of them solved the problem of unifying the application and the infrastructure layer, so that the application developers and DevOps teams don’t have to worry about that,” Singla explained.

He says the Volterra solution includes three main products — VoltStack​, VoltMesh and VoltConsole — to help solve this scaling and management problem. As Volterra describes the total solution, “Volterra has innovated a consistent, cloud-native environment that can be deployed across multiple public clouds and edge sites — a distributed cloud platform. Within this SaaS-based offering, Volterra integrates a broad range of services that have normally been siloed across many point products and network or cloud providers.” This includes not only the single management plane, but security, management and operations components.

The money has come over a couple of rounds, helping to build the solution to this point, and it required a complex combination of hardware and software to do it. They are hoping organizations that have been looking for a cloud-native approach to large-scale applications, such as industrial automation, will adopt this approach.

Search and personalization services continue to be a major area of investment among enterprises, both to make their products and services more discoverable (and used) by customers, and to help their own workers get their jobs done, with the market estimated to be worth some $100 billion annually. Today, one of the big startups building services in this area raised a large round of growth funding to continue tapping that opportunity.

Coveo, a Canadian company that builds search and personalization services powered by artificial intelligence — used by its enterprise customers by way of cloud-based, software-as-a-service — has closed a C$227 million ($172 million in U.S. dollars) round, which CEO Louis Tetu tells me values the company at “well above” $1 billion, “Canadian or U.S. dollars.”

Specifically, the equity stake of this round is 15.5%, equating to a valuation of $1.46 billion Canadian dollars, or $1.1 billion in U.S. dollars.

The round is being led by Omers Capital Private Growth Equity Group, the investing arm of the Canadian pensions giant that makes large, later-stage bets (the company has been stepping up the pace of investments lately), with participation also from Evergreen Coast Capital, FSTQ and IQ Ventures. Evergreen led the company’s last round of $100 million in April 2018, and in total the company has now raised just over $402 million with this round.

The valuation appears to be a huge leap in the context of Coveo’s funding history: in that last round, it had a post-money valuation of about $370 million, according to PitchBook data.

Part of the reason for that is because of Coveo’s business trajectory, and part is due to the heat of the overall market.

Coveo’s round is coming about two weeks after another company that builds enterprise search solutions, Algolia, raised $110 million. The two aim at slightly different ends of the market, Tetu tells me, not directly competing in terms of target customers, and even services.

“Algolia is in a different ZIP code,” he said. Good thing, too, if that’s the case: Salesforce — which is one of Coveo’s biggest partners and customers — was also a strategic investor in the Algolia round. Even if these two do not compete, there are plenty of others vying for the same end of the enterprise search and personalization continuum — they include Google, Microsoft, Elastic, IBM, Lucidworks and many more. That, again, underscores the size of the market opportunity.

In terms of Coveo’s own business, the company works with some 500 customers today and says SaaS subscription revenues grew more than 55% year-over-year this year. Five hundred may sound like a small number, but it covers a lot of very large enterprises spanning web-facing businesses, commerce-based organizations, service-facing companies and enterprise solutions.

In addition to Salesforce, it includes Visa, Tableau (also Salesforce now!), Honeywell, a Fortune 50 healthcare company (whose name is not getting disclosed) and what Tetu described to me as an Amazon competitor that does $21 billion in sales annually but doesn’t want to be named.

Coveo’s basic selling point is that the better discoverability and personalization that it provides helps its customers avoid as many call-center interactions (reducing operating expenditures), improves sales (boosting conversions and reducing cart abandonment) and helps companies themselves just work faster.

Significantly, the area that Coveo works in is going through a noticeable shift these days.

A swing toward stronger data protection and consumers’ preference for having more control over how their data is used and for what — spurred by high-profile revelations detailing how different organizations manipulated user data across social networking sites and other platforms to target people with sneaky political content and advertising to influence voting, subsequently cracking open the wasp nest to reveal just how much of our data is harvested and used all the time — has meant that there are at times fewer tools than there used to be to provide the kind of “discoverability” and “personalization” that companies like Coveo build for their clients.

Tetu believes there is a way to deliver personalization without compromising how a person wants to exist in the digital world.

“The whole notion is to be able to control data but also have personalizaton in the future,” he said. But there are two dimensions to this, he added:

“The continued and growing regulatory pressure around privacy [such as GDPR] is good, it’s the will of the people and legislation will go that way. The world is going cookie-less,” he said. “But we can’t ignore the arbitrage between privacy and utility. If I understand what you will do with my data and use it to provide more relevance, that can be excellent, too.”

He calls himself an “Amazon addict” but points out that it highlights the two sides of the data coin: “Is it predatory or excellent in doing the job it does? I can’t decide on an answer. I think they are both.”

All the same, it’s working on ways around the “cookie-less” future. The company Coveo acquired in Milan earlier this year, Tetu said, “can do machine learning detection. In five clicks it can detect your propensity to buy and your interest. It means you can’t blame anyone for observing you.”

So, while there are a lot of players out there chasing the same discoverability and personalization market, the attraction here is not just about a company doing it well, but looking to skate to where the puck is going (see what I did there, Canadian startup?).

“We believe that Coveo is the market leader in leveraging data and AI to personalize at scale,” said Mark Shulgan, managing director and head of Growth Equity at Omers, in a statement. “Coveo fits our investment thesis precisely: an A-plus leadership team with deep expertise in enterprise SaaS, a Fortune 1000 customer base who deeply love the product, and a track record of high growth in a market worth over $100 billion. This makes Coveo a highly-coveted asset. We are glad to be partnering to scale this business.”

Alongside business development on its own steam — the company now has around 500 employees — Coveo is going to be using this funding for acquisitions. Tetu notes that Coveo still has a lot of money in the bank from previous rounds.

“We are a real company with real positive economics,” he said. “This round is mostly to have dry powder to invest in a way that is commensurate in the AI space, and within commerce in particular.” To get the ball rolling on that, this past July, Coveo acquired Tooso, a specialist in AI-based digital commerce technology.

There’s too much hype about mythical “10X developers.” Everyone’s desperate to hire these “ninja rockstars.” In reality, it’s smarter to find ways of deleting annoying chores for the coders you already have. That’s where CTO.ai comes in.

Emerging from stealth today, CTO.ai lets developers build and borrow DevOps shortcuts. These automate long series of steps they usually have to do manually, thanks to integrations with GitHub, AWS, Slack and more. CTO.ai claims it can turn a days-long process like setting up a Kubernetes cluster into a 15-minute task even sales people can handle. The startup offers both a platform for engineering and sharing shortcuts, and a service where it can custom build shortcuts for big customers.

What’s remarkable about CTO.ai is that amidst a frothy funding environment, the 60-person team quietly bootstrapped its way to profitability over the past two years. Why take funding when revenue was up 400% in 18 months? But after a chance meeting aboard a plane connected its high school dropout founder Kyle Campbell with Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, CTO.ai just raised a $7.5 million seed round led by Slack Fund and Tiger Global.

“Building tools that streamline software development is really expensive for companies, especially when they need their developers focused on building features and shipping to customers,” Campbell tells me. The same way startups don’t build their own cloud infrastructure and just use AWS, or don’t build their own telecom APIs and just use Twilio, he wants CTO.ai to be the “easy button” for developer tools.

Teaching snakes to eat elephants

“I’ve been a software engineer since the age of 8,” Campbell recalls. In skate-punk attire with a snapback hat, the young man meeting me in a San Francisco Mission District cafe almost looked too chill to be a prolific coder. But that’s kind of the point. His startup makes being a developer more accessible.

After spending his 20s in software engineering groups in the Bay, Campbell started his own company, Retsly, that bridged developers to real estate listings. In 2014, it was acquired by property tech giant Zillow, where he worked for a few years.

That’s when he discovered the difficulty of building dev tools inside companies with other priorities. “It’s the equivalent of a snake swallowing an elephant,” he jokes. Yet given these tools determine how much time expensive engineers waste on tasks below their skill level, their absence can drag down big enterprises or keep startups from rising.

CTO.ai shrinks the elephant. For example, the busywork of creating a Kubernetes cluster such as having to the create EC2 instances, provision on those instances and then provision a master node gets slimmed down to just running a shortcut. Campbell writes that “tedious tasks like running reports can be reduced from 1,000 steps down to 10,” through standardization of workflows that turn confusing code essays into simple fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice questions.

The CTO.ai platform offers a wide range of pre-made shortcuts that clients can piggyback on, or they can make and publish their own through a flexible JavaScript environment for the rest of their team or the whole community to use. Companies that need extra help can pay for its DevOps-as-a-Service and reliability offerings to get shortcuts made to solve their biggest problems while keeping everything running smoothly.

5(2X) = 10X

Campbell envisions a new way to create a 10X engineer that doesn’t depend on widely mocked advice on how to spot and capture them like trophy animals. Instead, he believes one developer can make five others 2X more efficient by building them shortcuts. And it doesn’t require indulging bad workplace or collaboration habits.

With the new funding that also comes from Yaletown Partners, Pallasite Ventures, Panache Ventures and Jonathan Bixby, CTO.ai wants to build deeper integrations with Slack so developers can run more commands right from the messaging app. The less coding required for use, the broader the set of employees that can use the startup’s tools. CTO.ai may also build a self-service tier to augment its seats, plus a complexity model for enterprise pricing.

Now it’s time to ramp up community outreach to drive adoption. CTO.ai recently released a podcast that saw 15,000 downloads in its first three weeks, and it’s planning some conference appearances. It also sees virality through its shortcut author pages, which, like GitHub profiles, let developers show off their contributions and find their next gig.

One risk is that GitHub or another core developer infrastructure provider could try to barge directly into CTO.ai’s business. Google already has Cloud Composer, while GitHub launched Actions last year. Campbell says its defense comes through neutrally integrating with everyone, thereby turning potential competitors into partners.

The funding firepower could help CTO.ai build a lead. With every company embracing software, employers battling to keep developers happy and teams looking to get more of their staff working with code, the startup sits at the intersection of some lucrative trends of technological empowerment.

“I have a three-year-old at home and I think about what it will be like when he comes into creating things online,” Campbell concludes. “We want to create an amazing future for software developers, introducing automation so they can focus on what makes them such an important aspect. Devs are defining society!”

[Image Credit: Disney/Pixar via WallHere Goodfon]

Seismic is announcing that it’s acquiring Percolate in a deal that it says is combining “two essential pillars of the marketing technology stack.”

It sounds like the two companies aren’t direct competitors, but they offer related tools: Seismic helps companies create and manage the content they use in sales and marketing, while Percolate expanded from a social media publishing tool to a broader suite of software for managing the marketing process.

As part of the acquisition, Percolate CEO Randy Wootton is joining the Seismic team, where he will continue to lead Percolate, and where he will report to Seismic CEO Doug Winter. The combined company will have a headcount of more than 800 people.

“Both of our companies endeavor to foster better alignment between marketing and sales and improve the buyer/seller interaction, resulting in accelerated deals and pipeline for our customers,” Wootton said in a statement. “Combining with Seismic allows Percolate to provide even more capability to our customer base and more value to the marketing ecosystem.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Percolate raised a total of $106.5 million from investors including GGV Capital, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed, Slow Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and First Round Capital, according to Crunchbase.

Seismic, meanwhile, raised a $100 million investment at a $1 billion valuation last year.