Biotech startup Valar Labs has built a tool that accurately predicts certain treatment outcomes, potentially saving precious time for patients.
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A Singapore High Court has effectively approved Pine Labs’ request to shift its operations to India.
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Harness Lab isn’t founder Jyoti Bansal’s first startup. He sold AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion in 2017, the week it was supposed to go public. His latest venture has raised $425 million, per Crunchbase. On Tuesday, Harness announced $150 million in debt financing, essentially a line of credit that the company can draw on […]
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It may seem like a paradox to have virtualized Kubernetes clusters. They are, after all, an abstraction in themselves of virtual machines made popular by VMware in the early 2000s.
Loft Labs saw a similar problem with resource utilization in Kubernetes clusters that VMware saw with server utilization, and has built a virtualization tool to make them more efficient by sharing common underlying applications.
Today, the startup announced a $24 million Series A.
There are a set of applications that run with every single Kubernetes environment, like Istio, Rancher and Vault, and it gets expensive and unwieldy to manage and run these across multiple containers, especially as you scale. Loft Labs lets users share these common applications with multiple virtual clusters in the same way that VMs share server resources.
“We’re essentially turning many clusters into one cluster, and then have virtual clusters on top of the common applications,” CEO Lukas Gentele told TechCrunch.
So rather than running all your clusters as separate entities, you can just run a few — such as one for development, one for staging and one for production — and all of the relevant virtual clusters can live in each one.
“You get all this consolidation of the shared platform stack that is much cheaper, much more efficient, much more consistent because you only have maybe three instances of Istios running now instead of 5,000,” he said. And like virtual machines you get secure isolation to keep each one of these workloads and tenants separate, and Loft can handle management tasks such as shutting down clusters automatically that aren’t in use.
Investors have traditionally liked startups built on top of popular open source projects because they provide a ready top-of-sales funnel. But such startups must come up with a way to monetize that popularity.
Loft Labs has done both. Since releasing the open source version of the product, vCluster, in 2021, it has seen 40 million downloads and a million virtual clusters created, suggesting that a lot of people are interested in this concept.
It has also released vCluster Pro to monetize the idea in a novel way. Most open source startups add some enterprise features like security and authentication, or build a SaaS version to make it easier to install and manage. Loft has built a complementary product that helps companies manage high-volume Kubernetes cluster environments, which incentivizes their largest customers to buy the product.
It took the company some time to get to the point where it built this particular solution. In fact, it started with a Platform-as-a-Service product that attempted to provide an environment for developers to access shared multi-tenant clusters, but quickly realized that there was no way to do that. At the same time, it was finding it hard to convince enterprises to use the platform, and shut down.
But as the co-founders were doing a post mortem, they realized that they had stumbled across a good idea: “Okay, what did we actually learn here? And the thing that we learned was the problem of sharing Kubernetes clusters, isolating tenants in the cluster and how hard it is. And then we asked ourselves, don’t other people have that same problem internally, especially in larger organizations?”
They found their way to vCluster, first releasing another open source project to see if they were onto something. “We launched an open source project called Kiosk, a multi-tenancy extension to test the waters. And it got quite some traction pretty quickly,” he said. AWS even put it in their multi tenancy best practices guide, giving them more confidence in their idea. “And then because that experiment was successful, we became obsessed with solving this problem,” he said. The end result was vCluster, which they first released at the end of 2021.
Today’s round was led by Khosla Ventures with participation from existing investors Berkeley SkyDeck Fund, Emergent Ventures, Fusion Fund and Surface Ventures, with additional angel investment. The company has now raised a total of $28.6 million.
Like many immigrants, the New York City skyline was one of the first sights young brothers Edi and Etrit Demaj took in when they arrived in the U.S. more than 20 years ago. The pair, along with their family, had fled violence in their native Kosovo, and they still remember the view as their plane flew overhead.
“The first building that we saw was the Empire State Building,” Etrit recalls.
The Demaj family soon settled in Detroit, where the brothers completed their education and started various companies, including their latest, Kode Labs, which integrates and automates various systems in commercial buildings — including the Empire State Building.
“That’s the American dream,” Etrit said.
When the Demaj brothers founded Kode in 2017, they sought to bring building management into the cloud era. They set about developing a suite of software that digests data from various internet-connected parts of a building’s operation, including air handlers, fire alarms, elevators, occupation sensors, EV chargers and more, and then controls them in a way that wrings efficiency out of the systems. Kode claims that it can talk with more than 130 different systems.
The brothers liken it to an OS that integrates building systems like a computer OS integrates various circuit boards.
“What we’re trying to do is bring in data and normalize it, index it, use that data to build applications on top of it to make the operating system more useful, to drive energy efficiency, while creating amazing experiences,” Edi told TechCrunch.
Commercial buildings might seem like clean neighbors, but they generate 16% of all carbon pollution in the U.S., according to the EPA. The way many are operated is not just environmentally damaging, it’s also fiscally unsound.
Today, commercial buildings are riddled with inefficiencies of the sort that automation could address. In the process, owners would not only stand to trim their carbon emissions, but save piles of cash. Between 2020 and 2050, global adoption of automation could cut carbon by 9.5 billion to 14 billion metric tons and save owners at least $2.3 trillion, according to Project Drawdown.
Kode has also developed a range of applications to run on its platform, allowing customers to monitor energy use, track carbon emissions and keep an eye on water consumption. Not only do these help keep a lid on costs, some of the data is necessary to comply with laws in various cities, including New York City, where Local Law 97 will require buildings over 25,000 square feet to cut their carbon emissions by 40% by the end of the decade.
“With all the goals and the laws in place in many different locations and areas, they have no choice but to continue going this route,” Etrit said.
Already, the company’s software is used by building managers and owners on five continents, and its customers include Fortune 100 companies and higher education institutions, Etrit said. The company has been profitable from day one, he added. Customer churn is “zero percent,” Edi said, and annual recurring revenue has grown 200% every year for the last three years.
Kode’s business model is similar to Salesforce’s, Edi said, with customers first paying an implementation fee that’s negotiated based on the size of the property portfolio and then paying recurring fees based on how many square feet are under management and the number of applications the customer chooses to use.
Kode has grown significantly since raising its $8 million Series A in 2022, with more than 40 employees in Detroit, 150 in Kosovo and a handful more in other countries.
Sensing an opportunity to grow quickly, Kode recently raised a $30 million Series B, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The round was led by Maverix Private Equity with participation by I Squared Capital and Telus Ventures. The startup plans to use the funds to expand its app marketplace and further develop its use of AI to optimize building operations.
Smart ring manufacturer Oura is introducing a new section in its app called Oura Labs to test out new features and get user feedback. As part of this rollout — currently available only on iOS — the company is launching Symptom Radar, which tracks strain markers on your body to detect an onset of changing health.
Oura said that Symptom Radar will monitor biometric signals such as body temperature range, respiratory rate, resting heart rate and heart rate variability.
Image Credits: Oura
The feature tries to observe if your body has seen sudden changes. It will show a notification under Readiness Score about variations in your symptoms so you can rest if needed. The company said that if users enable this feature, they will not get notifications from rest mode.
The company said that rest mode prompts are generic while the new Symptom Radar prompts are more detailed and focused in nature. However, the company noted that Symptom Radar is not a diagnostic tool and users shouldn’t rely on it for medical guidance.
Shyamal Patel, Oura’s head of Science, told TechCrunch over a call that the company’s R&D department regularly releases features to test internally.
“Oura Labs is our approach to recreate internal engagement for new features with users in a structured and formal way. With this feature, you will have a dedicated space in the app where you can go and start engaging with these new concepts we are building. Users will get to see a lot of early-stage ideas in Oura Labs,” Patel said.
He noted that the company has made it easy to opt in and out of this experimental space at any time. Users can provide direct feedback about these experimental features along with general feedback for the product through Oura Labs.
Last month, Oura started selling its rings on Amazon after making the devices available on BestBuy.com in April 2023.
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