Salman Sarfraz

UpKeep – Fully Mobile CMMS Raises $10M

UpKeep, a fully mobile maintenance management software, added just an year ago to our list of portfolio startups has shown amazing growth in a short span of time and has successfully raised $10M funding in Series A round led by Emergence Capital. Well done UpKeep!

UpKeep, which helps technicians create and track work orders, raised a $10 million Series A round led by Emergence Capital on Tuesday. The company also counts Bain Capital, Battery Ventures and Y Combinator as investors.

The company’s high rate of organic adoption is a testament to that competitive edge. UpKeep doesn’t have a marketing budget and the application has been free on the App Store since its inception. The majority of its clients, like Unilever, sought out deals with UpKeep after their workers downloaded and began using the product themselves. That has led to a user base of 50,000 workers across 1,000 businesses, including other major companies like Marriott, Jet.com and McDonald’s. The premium model used by these companies allows employees to collaborate and management to deploy advanced analytics and reporting features.

UpKeep reports that its customers experience as much as a 90% reduction in the time it takes to complete maintenance jobs. Chan, who landed on this year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 Manufacturing & Industry list, attributes this to the fact that the easy-to-use system is more likely to be adopted and continually used by workers.

The most recent fundraising round has brought the company’s total funding to almost $13 million. In addition to enabling new iterations of the software, Chan hopes to build a collaborative platform for workers to troubleshoot maintenance problems. “We really want to build a community around maintenance,” says Chan. “We have this fragmented industry where they aren’t as online and learning from each other as other industries…. We want to help support those conversations.”

Please read full story at Forbes.

Salman Sarfraz

Eight – Smart Sleep Products Company Raises Another $14M

Almost an year ago, we announced about $5M funding raised by our portfolio startup, Eight in Series A round. And we are very excited to share that Eight, a smart sleep products manufacturing company has also raised another $14M in Series B funding round led by Khosla Ventures in participation with existing investors Yunqi Partners and YCombinator.

“The partnership with Khosla is a clear fit for us. They share our vision of a future in which technology and data make healthcare more scientific and consistent. With this new funding, our growing team and investors reaffirm the commitment we made in 2014 to bringing the biggest technological evolution that sleep has seen in the last 300 years.”, said Matteo Franceschetti Co-founder and CEO, Eight.

“Thanks to over 20,000 of you, we are on a path to become the largest sleep database in the world. In addition to tracking over 2.5 million nights of sleep, we have also collected and processed 500 terabytes of data, executed over 200,000 sleep-related smart home actions, and warmed up beds for over 1 million hours.” added Matteo Franceschetti.

Please read full story at Eight.

Salman Sarfraz

SendBird – Messaging and Chat API for Mobile Apps and Websites Raises $16M

SendBird, a messaging SDK and chat API for developers to add secure one to one messaging, group chat or open channels in mobile apps or websites has raised $16M in Series A funding round. We added SendBird to our startups portfolio two years ago after it got graduated from YCombinator Winter 2016 batch and we are happy for their growth. Congrats to SendBird!

SendBird, a company that provides the infrastructure for developers to build messaging and chat services into their apps, has raised $16 million in a series A round of funding led by Shasta Ventures and August Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and FundersClub.

“It’s our mission to digitize human interactions for businesses,” noted SendBird CEO and cofounder John S. Kim. “With the new round of financing, we can accelerate our plan to help companies rapidly increase the engagement and retention of their users by enabling real-time conversation with our chat API.”

The company claims that it powers chat and messaging for more than 6,500 applications globally, with the ability to support more than a million concurrent users per application. Its customers include Asian Uber rival Go-Jek, recently touted as Indonesia’s first billion-dollar startup; Korean video game giant Nexon; and Korean bank KB Kookmin Bank.

Please read the full story at VentureBeat.

Salman Sarfraz

MyVR – Vacation Rental Management Platform Raises $6.1M

MyVR, a cloud based complete solution for vacation rental management is quite special for us because it’s one of our initial portfolio startups in 2012 after we incorporated Zillionize and we are glad to announce that finally MyVR has raised $6.1M in Series A funding round. This round pushes their total funding amount forward to $7.5M since their launch in October 2010. We wish them good luck for a better future ahead.

The $6.1 million round was led by True Ventures, with participation from existing angel investors. Previous investors in MyVR include SV Angel, Hotwire president Clem Bason, and Chris Dixon (prior to his joining Andreessen Horowitz).

The company is focused on serving Airbnb hosts and property managers who handle up to roughly 20 properties. MyVR’s software places listings on popular sites like Booking.com, Airbnb, and Home Away. The new funds will be used to expand the management platform’s app and service ecosystem for property managers.

“In the past year, we’ve launched an app marketplace and services marketplace, and this is one of the big reasons for our funding. We want to ramp up these third-party integrations with third-party service providers,” MyVR CEO and cofounder Jonathan Murray told VentureBeat in a phone interview. In terms of focus, Murray said: “cleaners, maintenance, and service providers; home automation; and financial stuff are the big categories we’ll focus on first.”

Please read full story at VentureBeat.

Salman Sarfraz

Jopwell – Digital Diversity Recruitment Platform Raises $7.5M

Jopwell, a startup with the mission to connect under-represented professionals and students from ethnic minorities including Black, Latinx and Native Americans with the employers was added to our portfolio in August 2015. We are happy to announce that Jopwell has successfully raised a funding of $7.5M in Series A round which will help them to grow their network of students, professionals and employers.

The round was led by pre-existing investor Cue Ball Capital. Returning investors in this round include Y Combinator, Omidyar Network, Kapor Capital, and Valar Ventures. Among our new investors are SJF Ventures, Blue Ivy Ventures, and Teneo Ventures. This capital from our investors, both returning and new, will enable us to continue working toward our mission to diversify the workforce, while supporting the career advancement of our growing community.

We will put this investment to work to deliver mentorship and career advice in an even bigger way, create more networking opportunities, build tools and resources so users can continue to learn and grow in their careers, and expand the stories we are able to share via our digital magazine, The Well. Through new content, events, and initiatives, we want to provide our community a space to discuss the unique challenges they face in the workplace and celebrate the triumphs.

This round of investment will also help us expand our product suite to reach more partner companies of all sizes, from the scrappy startup to the Fortune 500. We not only want to increase the breadth of roles candidates can apply for through Jopwell.com – we also want to ensure we are working with young companies to help them prioritize diversity from day one.

Please read full story at Jopwell.

Salman Sarfraz

Zillionize Invests in Quilt Data – Docker for Data

If you are a programmer, you would have heard about docker and may be you have used it already. In simple words, docker is an open source product that automates deployment of applications in software containers. With docker, you can easily package your application along with everything your application needs including libraries and any other dependencies etc. and finally, using that package you can be sure that your application would run on any Linux or Windows machine with native docker installed on it. Docker provides many benefits like version control, isolation, CI etc. This was a brief introduction of docker. Now, let’s talk about the real problem.

These days, many companies are leveraging the use of data science to perform analysis and understand problems in a better way to make important decisions. These data science jobs may involve large amounts of data which needs to be first prepared before performing analysis. Data preparation is a time consuming job and according to various studies, 80% average time of a data scientist is spent in only data preparation. Mostly, data is scattered, repeated and not in a form that can save a data scientist’s time. Another challenge is to maintain versions of data for tracking changes and ensuring that nothing gets lost.

To address most of these data related problems for data scientists and businesses in the same way as docker does it for software applications, we would like to introduce you to Quilt Data, our latest portfolio startup from YCombinator’s Summer 2017 batch.

Quilt Data – Docker for Data

Quilt Data treats your data like code and allows you to create reusable data packages by combining your files and folders. Every data package is versioned by Quilt Data and you can review complete version history of your data packages. In case, if you lose some data, you can always roll back to a previous version easily. This version control feature helps customers to always generate consistent and expected results from their data.

Moreover, Quilt Data internally stores data packages in Apache Parquet format (a columnar DBMS format) which also improves the performance of I/O operations and helps with quicker data analysis. Tools like Presto DB and Hive also benefit from Apache Parquet format and run even faster. Quilt Data also provides deeper integration with Python and developers can directly import Quilt Data packages to save time just as they use pip command to install and manage python packages.

Quilt Data offers affordable monthly pricing plans for individuals and businesses. However, if any business is interested in on-premise service, they can contact Quilt Data for more details. Quilt Data also offers Free plan for everyone and it allows to create unlimited data packages for no charges but these packages have to be public. By allowing everyone to create unlimited public data packages, Quilt Data encourages its users to build and share more data packages with each other.

On the corporate side, technology offered by Quilt Data also helps businesses integrate their data sources keeping everyone in the company on the same page and many businesses including some of the largest banks have already adopted it. You should also give it a try.

Salman Sarfraz

Next Caller – Intelligent Caller Identification & Fraud Prevention Service Raises $5M

Next Caller, an intelligent caller identification service that helps enterprises specially financial institutions and call centers to prevent fraud and serve their customers quickly by authenticating inbound callers in just few milliseconds after they call, was added to our portfolio three years ago. Recently, Next Caller has got $5M more from Crystal Towers, a fund backed by YC founders to further develop their platform.

Next Caller, which launched at Disrupt SF in 2013, raised $5 million in a recent round of funding led by the secretive Crystal Towers fund, an investment put together by YC alumni to back promising companies coming out of the group.

Using the technology, companies no longer need to ask callers to verify their identity. Next Caller has already identified the caller as the legitimate account holder, allowing the customer service rep to offer assistance sooner.

Typically, fraud detection has relied heavily on biometrics and phone number “reputation scores,” according to a statement from the company. Those methods, Next Caller says, are extremely vulnerable to spoofing.

Next Caller’s technology combats the spoofing menace in part by analyzing carrier-level metadata to determine whether a call is legitimate or not.

Please read full story at TechCrunch.