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Robotic Automations

Givebutter is turning a profit making tech for nonprofits | TechCrunch

April 27, 2024 9:45 PM0


Givebutter started in a George Washington University dorm room in 2016 as a software solution to make nonprofit fundraising more transparent and fun. Eight years later, the company is profitable and it just raised $50 million to scale as momentum for nonprofit-focused startups appears to be growing.

The company’s co-founder and CEO, Max Friedman, fundraised for a variety of organizations in college, ranging from raising for GW’s Greek life to raising for national nonprofits like TAMID. Friedman told TechCrunch that regardless of the size or scope of the organization he was fundraising for, they all had the same problem: They all used a disjointed mix of one-solution tech software that didn’t really make the process better and often came with hidden fees.

“We realized that nonprofits are using a lot of different tools to solve different pain points, and what we can do for the sector is bringing it all under one roof,” Friedman said. “It exists in restaurants and in e-commerce; there [was] no Shopify or Toast for nonprofits.”

The result was Givebutter, a CRM platform for nonprofits that strives to be transparent and all-encompassing. It features marketing resources, ways to track donors, fundraising tools for a variety of different strategies, and payment processing. Nonprofits can either use Givebutter for free, if their fundraising campaigns offer a place for users to donate to Givebutter, or organizations pay a 1% to 5% platform fee.

“From day one, we had customers,” Friedman said. “It was very clear that there was a lot of demand for great fundraising tools and not a great tool set for those change makers.”

The startup raised $50 million from Bessemer’s Venture Partner’s BVP Forge Fund with participation from Ardent Venture Partners this week. Friedman said the money will be used for marketing to help the startup scale as the company has grown to this size thus far largely with almost zero marketing spend.

What initially got me interested in this deal — beyond the fact that the company is profitable from a largely donation-based revenue system or the fact that it calls its employees “Butter Slices” — was that it was a sizable round in the nonprofit tech sector, which has been popping up significantly more as of late.

During the most recent YC Demo Day, two startups, Givefront and Aidy, were building tech for nonprofits. While these companies weren’t the first nonprofit-flavored startups to ever go through YC, they are some of the first to be building software for the nonprofits; many past YC companies in the space are nonprofits themselves, and Givefront and Aidy absolutely stood out in this year’s AI- and dev-tool-dominated cohort.

I asked Friedman if it felt like momentum in this category had changed since he got started eight years ago, and Friedman said it definitely has and that the timing is right for this category. There has been a lot of recent consolidation in the space, especially regarding private equity-backed nonprofit software players like Bloomerang and Bonterra, each of which has made a handful of acquisitions in the last few years alone. This leads to higher fees and many nonprofits looking for less-expensive solutions, Friedman said. Once people get interested in the sector, he said, they often realize how big the potential market is.

In 2022, Americans donated nearly $500 billion to charity, according to the National Philanthropic Trust, down 3.4% from 2021. There are more than 1.5 million nonprofits and growing, and building to even get a slice of that market could provide a huge windfall. Givebutter is a good example of this. The company works with more than 35,000 nonprofits and has processed more than $1 billion in donations, but it is still barely making a dent in the overall nonprofit industry.

“We have about 1% market share,” Friedman said. “That’s amazing. I’m really proud of that, but I’m also like there are 99% of nonprofits out there that can benefit, and a big part of why we raised was to go do that.”

Givebutter might just start to run into more competition on the way. “Nonprofits are incredibly resilient,” Friedman said. “There [have] been downturns and upturns in the economy for a number of years and nonprofits have grown. Nonprofits also solve some of the world’s largest problems. I’m happy to see more people being aware of that and investing in that.”


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

How Rubrik’s IPO paid off big for Greylock VC Asheem Chandna | TechCrunch

April 27, 2024 4:13 AM0


When Asheem Chandna drove up to Rubrik’s office in Palo Alto on a Friday night in early 2015, he was looking forward to learning what the young company that had yet to build its product would show him. The Greylock partner wasn’t disappointed.

The company’s CEO, Bipul Sinha, drew Rubrik’s plan to revamp the data management and recovery market on a whiteboard. “The old versus new architecture he presented was very compelling,” Chandna said. “Based on my knowledge of the sector, I knew it could be built into a large business.”

That was a prescient call. On Thursday, nine years after that meeting, Rubric began its life as a publicly traded company with a market cap of over $6 billion. Greylock holds a 13% stake, according to the latest SEC filings. By the close of market Friday, with shares priced at $38, those nearly 19.9 million shares were worth over $756 million. 

But Chandna says it was much more than Rubrik’s desire to take on the arcane data recovery market that motivated him to lead Rubrik’s $40 million Series B in May 2015. (The Series B round sold for $2.45/share, adjusting for splits, according to those SEC documents. While Greylock also participated in later rounds at higher prices, Chandra’s returns on this one are hefty.) 

“The longer I do what I do, the more I fundamentally believe that venture is a people business,” said Chandna, who has been an investor for over 20 years and has an enviable track record of successful exits. He has helped incubate Palo Alto Networks in Greylock’s offices and was on the nearly $100 billion-worth company’s board until last year. Chandna was also an early investor in AppDynamics, Sumo Logic and Arista Networks.

Chandna looks for people who are not only motivated and ambitious, but are also self-aware of their weaknesses, and can recruit people who can get things done in areas that are not the founder’s strong suits.  

Another essential ingredient for a founder is grit. “If you had technology that was adequate, but slightly inferior to my technology, but you were very self-aware and persistent, you will beat me,” he said.

That’s what he saw in Sinha. Rubrik’s founder had a lifelong dream of starting a company. When he founded the data management and recovery startup in 2013, he couldn’t find strong engineers who wanted to come work there, Chandra recalled. The business he was trying to build was inherently not sexy at the time. 

Despite having been an investor with Lightspeed for four years before launching Rubrik, recruiting talent turned out to be a big challenge for Sinha. But he didn’t give up. He pinged engineers on LinkedIn and then invited them for coffee blocks away from where they worked.

“Startup journeys are very hard, even for the most successful companies,” Chandna said. “I want people who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”

Perhaps it was Sinha’s grit and ambition that compelled him to take his company public despite the lukewarm IPO environment.

“Rubric has just under $800 million in annualized recurring revenue,” Chandna said, “That’s larger than most companies that went public in the last many years. I think they just wanted to get on with it.”

Chandna declined to say if he expects other Greylock portfolio companies to follow Rubrik’s lead but added emphatically that the firm’s best-performing late-stage businesses are Abnormal Security, Cato Networks, Discord, Figma and Lyra Health.

We will be following their fate closely.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

The FTC's ban on noncompete clauses could be good for startups. But it also might be struck down. | TechCrunch

April 26, 2024 6:57 AM0


The Federal Trade Commission voted 3-2 to ban the use of most noncompete agreements on Tuesday. This ruling means companies can’t require their employees, that aren’t senior executives, to wait a set amount of time before joining a competitor or launching their own company in the same category. While the FTC’s ruling will impact industries like financial services and hedge funds the most, due to the prevalence of such agreements in those industries, it could also impact startups.

The ban could actually be positive news for startup founders and hiring managers in a number of ways. For one, it could open up the hiring pool, says Nick Cromydas, the co-founder and CEO of hiring and recruiting startup Hunt Club.

“Now there will be more potential crosspollination of companies that really understand businesses models and spaces,” Cromydas said. “I expect you will see more hiring with direct domain experience than you’ve seen in a while.”

Ryan Vann, a partner focused on employment law at Cooley, agreed. He said that he’s had clients that were too anxious to hire potentially game-changing talent away from larger companies for fear those companies would act on the noncompete agreement.

Banning noncompete agreements could also encourage startups to foster a strong company culture that makes people want to stay, as opposed to using threats to keep them, Cromydas said.

Some members of the startup community seem happy about the ruling as well — rare these days when it comes to decisions by the FTC. Sarah Guo, the founder at AI-focused VC firm Conviction, tweeted that banning noncompete agreements is a win for innovation. Cole Harrington, the co-founder and CEO at ThoughtWave AI agreed with her.

Understandably, some startup CEOs are worried about how the end of noncompetes could impact the security of intellectual property, but Cromydas said there are other ways for companies to protect themselves. Startups can have employees sign non-disclosure agreements regarding intellectual property, or spend more time filing patents. Instead of blocking an employee’s future employment, such alternatives prevent them from using the previous employer’s intellectual property knowledge at their new jobs.

Startup employees might not see much of a change for two other reasons: noncompete agreements were already very hard to enforce, Vann said, and they were trending out of vogue among startups anyway. Certain states, including startup-heavy California, have existing state laws that restrict them. Although, he added that any client of his that can use them, typically does despite the low-rate of them actually coming into play.

“Even without this ban, it is really, really hard in virtually every court in America to enforce a noncompete unless you have something added that are bad facts like theft of confidential information, soliciting customers before you go, trying to set up competing business before you go,” Vann said. “I would almost never go into litigation unless I was armed with that kind of evidence or misappropriation of trade secrets.”

Given all that, noncompetes are becoming less common, according to company data from Hunt Club. While five years ago 90% of offers that came through Hunt Club’s platform included a noncompete agreement, that figure now is about 40%. Although, Cromydas said he wouldn’t doubt it they were rising again in hot sectors like AI where intellectual property is crucial and the war for talent is high.

So what should startup CEOs do if they currently use noncompete agreements with their employees? Absolutely nothing, according to Vann who questions whether the ban will actually stick. Multiple lawsuits against the ruling have already been filed including one from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and another from tax service firm Ryan LLC.

Vann thinks this potential ban could be struck down by numerous courts. If it does clear these legal hurdles, startups wanting to hire someone that may have signed one can terminate existing noncompete agreements incredibly easily.

“The worse case scenario if you are a startup, and hire someone with a noncompete, is all you have to do is issue the notice to say that your noncompete is not enforceable,” Vann said. “I would keep it at status quo right now and monitor what’s happening.”




Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Rubrik's shares climb 20% in its public debut | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 11:28 PM0


Rubrik shares hit the New York Stock Exchange Thursday debuting at $38 a share. The cybersecurity company priced it shares at $32 apiece Wednesday night, just a hair over its initial target range of $29 to $31 after raising $752 million. This share price gives Rubrik a fully diluted valuation of $6.6 billion, up 88% from its last primary valuation of $3.5 billion in 2019.

Rubrik sells cloud-based security software to enterprise customers and has 1,700 customers with contracts worth more than $100,000 and 100 customers who pay the company more than $1 million a year. The Silicon Valley startup was founded in 2014 and has raised more than $550 million in venture capital, according to Crunchbase data.

The VCs hoping the most that Rubrik’s stock keeps climbing are Lightspeed and Greylock. Lightspeed backed the company in five separate rounds, including leading the company’s Series A round back in 2015. Lightspeed, and those affiliated with it, own 23.9% of Rubrik’s shares prior to the IPO, according the company’s S-1 filing. The firms’ conviction in the company might come from the fact that Rubrik co-founder and CEO, Bipul Sinha, was formerly a partner at Lightspeed from 2010 to 2014. Sinha owns 7.6% of shares.

Greylock holds 12.2% of Rubrik’s shares. The venture firm led the startup’s $41 million Series B round in 2016 and participated in the Series C and Series D rounds as well. Greylock partner Asheem Chandna has sat on the company’s board since 2015.

In addition to Sinha, Rubrik’s other two co-founders hold notable stakes. Arvind Jain, a co-founder who is now the CEO of AI work assistant startup Glean, holds a 7% stake. Arvind Nithrakashyap, co-founder and current Rubrik CTO, holds 6.7%.

Other big-name VCs backed the company, too. Khosla Ventures led Rubrik’s Series C round in 2016; IVP led the company’s Series D round in 2017; and Bain Capital Ventures led the company’s Series E round in 2019. It’s unclear what percentage of shares these firms still own, but it’s under 5%, as none of these investors were named in the company’s S-1. NBA All-Star Kevin Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures was also an investor.

The results of Rubrik’s IPO are under more scrutiny than some of the other recent public listings, because Rubrik’s debut looks more like a 2021 IPO and less like the other 2024 IPOs. Ibotta debuted as a profitable company. Astera Labs and Reddit both had recently swung to a GAAP net profit. Rubrik, however, is as an unprofitable business seeing its losses continue to grow, not shrink.

The company reported that its revenue grew a little under 5% from its fiscal 2023 year to its fiscal 2024 year, growing from $599.8 million to $627.9 million. At the same time, the company’s losses continued to grow: Its net losses grew from 46% in its fiscal 2023 to 56% in its fiscal 2024 year.

The company’s metrics do have a bright spot, however: subscription revenue. In the company’s most recent fiscal quarter, subscriptions made up 91% of the revenue, up from 73% a year prior. Subscription revenue tends to be sticky, and growth there could explain why some investors are more confident about the future prospects of Rubrik despite its current losses and lack of profitability.

Rubrik is the fourth venture-backed company to go public in recent months as investors seem eager to reopen the IPO market. All three companies that went before Rubrik — Ibotta, Reddit and Astera Labs — popped on the first day of trading and have all since settled, some in better positions than others. But none has been a disaster or negative omen for other potential IPOs this year.

While four positive IPO debuts could spark more companies to come off of the sidelines, the current guidance that interest rate cuts may not come as early in 2024 as many had predicted may put a damper on the the IPO market’s recent momentum.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Exclusive: Seed-stage firm Eniac Ventures raises $220M across two funds

April 24, 2024 11:31 PM0


Eniac Ventures has closed two funds totaling $220 million, the seed-stage firm shared exclusively with TechCrunch.

New York-based Eniac has raised $60 million for Select 1, the firm’s vehicle for follow-on later-stage investments in portfolio companies, and $160 million for Eniac VI. The firm has made 11 investments out of Select 1, which actually closed in 2021 but was not publicly announced until now. The firm plans to make its first investment “shortly” out of its sixth fund, according to co-founder and general partner Nihal Mehta. It plans to make about 40 investments across both funds.

When making new investments, Eniac’s average check size is $1.5 million. Follow-on checks are typically larger, Mehta said, with the largest check invested out of its Select fund being $6 million.

Eniac is a sector-agnostic firm, with Mehta describing the team as “pre-product-market-fit generalists.” Despite being sector agnostic, even Eniac has been bitten by the artificial intelligence bug, with Mehta noting that “machine learning and AI has been a predominant theme” for the firm over the past decade.

“There is some hype in AI, but we believe it to be the most transformative wave of computing we have seen since the internet,” he said.

Portfolio companies include 1up Health, Alloy, Anchor, Attentive, Brightwheel, Embrace, Ghost, Hinge, Hive, Level.ai, Maestro, Owlet and Vungle. Eniac also was an early investor in Airbnb and has seen exits in companies such as TapCommerce (to Twitter), Anchor (to Spotify), Dubsmash (to Reddit), Hinge (to IAC), Workflow (to Apple), Vungle (to Blackstone) and Vence (to Merck Animal Health).

Mehta declined to name specific LPs, noting only that they are a mix of “top foundations, endowments, pensions and fund of funds,” and that the majority of them are “mission-driven.”

Despite the challenging fundraising environment, Mehta said the fundraise “ironically was the quickest” Eniac has done in 15 years.

“We attribute this success to being able to return multiple funds in the past few years,” he told TechCrunch, though he declined to provide specific figures around returns.

The size of Eniac’s funds has grown significantly over the years. Eniac raised its inaugural $1.5 million fund in 2010, raised $100 million for its fourth fund in 2017 and raised another $125 million for Eniac Fund V in 2021. Over the years, it has backed more than 250 startups.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Rippling’s Parker Conrad on the company's new round, new SF lease, and also, its newest critic | TechCrunch

April 22, 2024 9:46 PM0


Last week, TechCrunch broke the news that the workforce management software outfit Rippling was on the cusp of closing a new, $200 million round of funding at a hefty $13.4 billion valuation led by Coatue. We also reported that the round featured a separate, $670 million secondary component meant to give some of the company’s investors a bigger bite of the company, while letting Rippling’s employees – some of whom joined at the outset in 2016 – cash out some of their shares.

Rippling declined to comment at the time, but in an interview Friday afternoon, founder Parker Conrad confirmed our information, adding that the secondary component is actually a $590 million tender, with $200 million available for employees and $390 million available for seed and other investors. 

The round, Rippling’s Series F, is also almost entirely an inside round. Coatue is an earlier investor in Rippling, along with other backers in this round that have been investing all along, including Founders Fund and Greenoaks. The only new member on the cap table is Dragoneer, a growth-stage investment firm in San Francisco.

Of course, we were interested in much more than Rippling’s new fundraise, so while we had Conrad on the phone, we talked turnover. We discussed the company’s new office lease in San Francisco (right now, it’s the second-biggest lease to be signed this year in the city). Conrad also shared why Rippling is relatively “free” of AI. Later this week, you can hear that full conversation in podcast form; for now, excerpts of that conversation follow, edited for length.

So why raise this money?

Honestly, it started out as just an employee tender. We wanted to find a way to get some liquidity for early employees, so we went to market, looking really to do about $200 million for employees that wanted to sell some stock. [But] we got a lot of investor interest, so we expanded it first to include a small amount of primary [capital] – mostly as a way to get more ownership for investors that were looking to buy more – and then beyond that, we ended up expanding into seed investors as well.

What does this secondary sale say about your plans to eventually go public? An IPO is a little bit in the distance?

I definitely think it’s a bit in the distance, but it’s not like a way of delaying [anything]. If anything, it’s probably nice if there are people who want to buy a house or [want more cash] because life happens. It’s great to relieve some of that pressure before you go public so that you don’t have tons of people selling as soon as they can in the public markets. 

Is this the first time employees have been able to sell some shares? 

It’s not. We did something in 2021. But it was smaller and the company was smaller, and it was a long time ago.

Do you worry about employees leaving after cashing out?

One of the things that we talked about internally when we launched it was, we said, ‘Look, the first rule of an employee tender is that you don’t talk about the tender internally or publicly.’ We don’t want to see anyone spiking the football, or something like that. And the second rule of the employee tender is, ‘see the first rule.’ This is a very private, personal thing, and I’m thrilled for everyone [participating]; if this makes a difference in [their] life, that’s great. But it’s not the destination. The game’s not over. 

How do you feel about turnover more generally? Some people don’t like to see it; other managers think it’s for the best. Elon Musk seems to be a fan, given the rate at which he turns over his executive team at Tesla.

The executive team at Rippling has been remarkably stable for a long time. A lot of the people on the team are people who I originally hired for those roles. Some of them are people I have long work histories with, even before this company. And certainly I always like to keep people. I mean, every once in a while, there’s an early Rippling employee who leaves the company, and I find it always just emotionally really sad when that happens, even if the company is going to be fine and they want to do something else or, you know, in some cases just kind of hang out. On a personal level, that’s always very difficult for me.

You newly leased 123,000 square feet in San Francisco for local employees, who are now back three days a week. How did you settle on that policy, and do you worry about retention or hiring?

We just think there’s an enormous amount of value of people being in the office together. We were never a company that was going remote. When we went remote temporarily during the pandemic, we said, this is for three weeks, and then we’re going back to the office. Of course, it was unfortunately a lot longer than that, but we were back in the office as soon as we could be. I think it’s possible for some companies to be fully remote, but it’s sort of like playing the game on hard mode. I think it’s a lot easier if people can get together in person; you get a lot done.

In the meantime, workforce management software is super crowded. You’re going up against a company that you famously co-founded and ran, Zenefits. There’s Paycor, Workday, Gusto, to name a few . . . 

The weird thing is that Rippling is not actually a [human capital management] HCM company. Everyone who has been building business software believes that the way to build the  best business software is to build these extremely narrow, focused deep products. And I think it’s completely wrong. I think the way you build the best business software is to build a really broad product suite of deeply integrated and seamlessly interoperable products. Yes, we have a very strong HR and payroll suite, but we also have an IT and security suite; we have a spend management suite, where we do things like corporate cards and bill pay and expense reimbursements. Actually, we’re using the primary capital that we raised in this round to fund the R&D efforts for a new, fourth cloud that we intend to launch in a completely different area. 

The classic example of a company that builds software in this way is Microsoft. Microsoft is the like the OG of compound software businesses. 

Speaking of Microsoft, what is your “AI strategy”? 

We are a company that is relatively free of any AI products right now. There’s some stuff that we’re working on. But I am always very skeptical of things that are, like, super trendy in Silicon Valley. So I can tell you what [our AI strategy] is not. I’m super skeptical of these chatbots. I don’t think anyone wants to chat with their HR software. 

I have to ask about a tweet related to our story about your new round. I saw [Benchmark general partner] Bill Gurley chimed in that “Anti-focus ain’t cheap.” I wasn’t sure if that was laudatory or a dig. Do you know?

I assume given that it came from Bill that it’s a dig. And he’s not wrong that taking this opposite approach is expensive, particularly on the R&D side. If you look at Rippling financially, the thing that really stands out is how we spend on R&D. If you compare us to other HCM competitors – because you talked about the crowded HCM space –  they spend an average of 10% of their revenue on R&D. Next year, Rippling is going to spend as much on R&D as [three rival companies] combined, and we have a much lower revenue footprint than the three. It’s definitely true that there’s a huge upfront investment phase in building what we’re building that obviously over time, as a percent of revenue, should come down. So he’s not wrong, but it’s a very explicit part of our strategy. What Bill might not totally understand is the benefit that you get from building software in this way; much higher upfront R&D costs [later result in] much higher sales and marketing efficiency. 

Has Bill ever done business with you?

No, I’ve never met Bill. He’s sort of a constant, low-grade antagonist, but I’ve never actually met him. 

I know he doesn’t get along very well with Marc Andreessen. 

Then Bill and I have that in common. Maybe we should meet up and grab a beer over that particular thing. 




Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Cendana, Kline Hill have a fresh $105M to buy stakes in seed VC funds from LPs looking to sell | TechCrunch

April 21, 2024 2:11 AM0


If you ask investors to name the biggest challenge for venture capital today, you’ll likely get a near-unanimous answer: lack of liquidity.

Despite investing in startups or VC funds that increased in value, due to the dearth of IPOs, those bets are not generating much, if any, cash for their backers. That’s the drawback of private investment versus the public market. Shares of companies in private companies like startups cannot be sold at will. The companies must authorize their existing investors to sell their shares to approved others, known as secondary sales.

Cash-hungry venture investors, whether VCs themselves or their limited partners, are increasingly looking to sell their illiquid positions to secondary buyers. 

Now, add in that many early-stage startups were overvalued during the fundraising frenzy that peaked in 2021 and that those shares may now be worth less. That presents a new and unique opportunity to buy stakes in seed-stage VC funds, as well as shares in startups, at relative bargains.

Today, Cendana Capital, a fund of funds that invests in dozens of seed-stage venture firms, and partner Kline Hill Partners, a firm focused on buying small previously owned private assets, are announcing a new $105 million Kline Hill Cendana Partners fund, which is well above the $75 million target they initially hoped to raise.

“Over the past two years, we’ve been hearing from our portfolio funds, ‘We have a family office that wants to sell their $2 million commitment. Would you be interested in buying it?’” said Michael Kim, founder and managing director of Cendana Capital.

Kim felt the opportunity to increase his firm’s ownership in venture funds and promising startups at a substantial discount was too good to pass up. But, since investing in secondary assets requires expertise that none of Cendana’s investors had, he decided to join forces with Kline Hill.

Raising money for this fund was easy, Kim said. Cendana’s limited partners were asking Kim to take advantage of this buyer’s market.

“We simply passed the hat around to our existing LPs at Kline Hill and Cendana,” said Kim.

Buying stakes in seed funds

Michael Kim, founder and managing director of Cendana Capital. Image Credits: Michael Kim

What sets Kline Hill/Cendana’s investing vehicle apart is that it’s buying secondary interest in seed-stage firms and individual companies from seed funds. Most existing secondary players are too large to go after this opportunity, according to Kim.

It’s hard not to see the symbiosis between the two firms. Cendana’s relationships with its portfolio funds, including Lerer Hippeau, Forerunner Ventures and Bowery Capital, are helping it take the lead on sourcing secondary deals. It then passes these opportunities to Kline Hill, which values, underwrites and negotiates the transaction price.

While Kline Hill has been investing in secondary VC since the firm’s founding in 2015, Chris Bull, a managing director at the firm, said that partnering with Cendana brings the type of information that’s extremely valuable to the investment process.

“What’s most exciting for us is we’re able to get transactions done where I think either of us individually would have had difficulty getting across the line,” Bull said.

The current plan is to invest the whole $105 million fund through the end of 2024. The two firms are giving this joint venture a try, and if it goes well, they’ll raise a successor fund next year.

The two firms are not alone in noticing a large opportunity in scooping up previously owned venture stakes. Traditional secondary investors, such as Lexington Partners and Blackstone, recently raised their largest secondary funds ever. While these vehicles target all types of private assets, investors say a portion of that capital is bound to go to venture. In addition, Industry Ventures has picked up a nearly $1.5 billion fund dedicated to secondhand VC. 

But billion-dollar funds like these “typically focus on much, much larger, more multistage firms,” Kim said. Applying such big finance tactics to the seed stage is far less prevalent. 

Kline Hill/Cendana is on to something. With VC-backed companies tending to stay private longer than their investors’ 10-year fund cycles, the need for liquidity will likely only continue to grow.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Exclusive: A16z promotes Jennifer Li to help lead the new $1.25B Infrastructure fund

April 19, 2024 7:09 PM0


Powerhouse venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is promoting Jennifer Li to general partner after six years at the firm. She’s being tapped to help invest the new $1.25 billion Infrastructure fund managed by longtime a16z general partner Martin Casado.

The Infrastructure fund is part of the fresh $7.2 billion that the Silicon Valley VC giant just raised. Li has been an investing partner on the Infrastructure team for a while, which means she was already writing checks and taking board seats. But her promotion puts her in rarified air: making her the 27th general partner at the firm, and she’s hit this career milestone while in her early 30s.

While that may sound like a lot of GPs, a16z currently has over 500 employees. Plus she’s one of only four GPs on the Infrastructure team. The others are Anjney Midha who joined the firm last summer; Zane Lackey, who joined two years ago; and Casado.

“Promoting Jennifer to general partner means that much more autonomy in deal making and, as importantly, that much more influence on the team’s culture, investment philosophy, and operating model,” Casado told TechCrunch over email.

In Casado’s blog post announcing her promotion, he also mentioned that she and he were the two people largely responsible for building the infrastructure investing team. He described her as “a low ego, incredibly reliable and generous partner to work with. No detail escapes her notice, and no challenge too daunting for her to tackle. As Ben Horowitz has said many times, ‘She embodies the a16z culture.’”

In her time at a16z, Li helped the firm find data connectivity startup Fivetran, valued at $5.6 billion in 2021; and data analytics developer tool startup dbt, which hit a $4.2 billion valuation in 2022 (both of those deals were led by Casado). She led the firm’s investments in developer-focused video platform Mux, a unicorn as of 2021; database startup Motherduck, valued at $400 million earlier this year; and AI voice startup Eleven Labs, a unicorn as of January, where she serves on the board.

Prior to joining a16z in 2018, she led product at AI startup Solvvy, acquired by Zoom in 2022; led self-service and analytics products at AppDynamics, acquired by Cisco for $3.7 billion; and was a Kleiner Perkins Product Fellow in 2016.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Cambium is building a recycled wood supply chain | TechCrunch

April 18, 2024 5:54 PM0


The global demand for wood could grow by 54% between 2010 and 2050, according to a study by the World Resources Institute. While some building materials like steel get consistently recycled back into the supply chain, wood does not. Cambium hopes to fix that.

Cambium looks to build the supply chain that keeps wood from being wasted by connecting those with already-been-used wood to the businesses and folks that need it. Cambium co-founder and CEO Ben Christensen recently told TechCrunch’s Found podcast that only 5% to 10% of wood gets reused currently, with most ending up in landfills or turned into mulch.

“We’re building a better value chain where you can use local material, you can use salvaged material, and all of that is connected through our technology,” Christensen said. “So that’s what we do is we deliver carbon smart wood, locally salvaged wood, tracked on our technology, to large buyers to build buildings, to build furniture, to use any sort of thing that you use wood for. And we do that in a really efficient and cost-competitive way.”

Demand for more sustainable wood has been growing in recent years, Christensen said, but before Cambium there wasn’t a good system to find the recycled wood. Cambium fixes that and more, he said. The company goes to businesses with recycled wood to sell and shows them the demand for their products while also selling its software that helps with inventory management and point of sale to these suppliers.

Cambium also helps buyers get better visibility into where their wood is coming from and can further reduce their carbon footprint by selecting a local vendor, Christensen said.

“People like really, really want to buy this material, we’ve been really overwhelmed with demand there and that helps us get sourcing and volume onto the platform in order to go and meet that demand,” Christensen said.

Christensen added that the company has benefited from a generational shift too as construction companies and people in wood-related trades retire and the next generation of folks in those fields look to adopt technology and be more environmentally friendly.

Cambium was founded in 2019 and is based in Washington, D.C. The startup has raised more than $8.5 million in funding from VCs including The Alumni Fund, Gaingels and MaC Venture Capital, among others.


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Metalab goes from quietly building the internet to investing in it | TechCrunch

April 18, 2024 5:51 AM0


Nearly 20 years after finding success in helping startups build products, Canadian interface design firm Metalab has launched Metalab Ventures to invest in many of those product-led startups.

Serial entrepreneur and investor Andrew Wilkinson started Metalab in 2006, a company that went on to support product innovations by companies including Slack, Coinbase, Uber and Tumblr.

Metalab often works with startups, acting a bit like co-founders, to help them get a product off the ground. Then Metalab “lets them loose” to grow, CEO Luke Des Cotes told TechCrunch. Metalab had a record year in 2023 and was involved in the development of 40 products that went into the market last year.

Corporate venture capital has found its stride over the last decade as a stable source of capital or when startups have something Big Tech wants.

With Metalab Ventures, the venture arm will play the role of a long-term value investor, essentially “putting our money where our mouth is,” Des Cotes said.

“We want to go on a journey with them for the next 10 to 12 years,” he said. “We’ve been asked over and over again by founders when we will invest, and sometimes we have, but it’s been very ad hoc in the past. Today, we make that a formal process.”

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Metalab Ventures has raised $15 million in capital commitments for its first fund to invest in product-led startups where strategy, design and technology are the key differentiators.

“Product-led” is how a product will be the differentiator for the business, Des Cotes said. Most businesses have some major component of success riding on how well a product is created and how well it’s connecting to the user. Metalab Ventures seeks out founders who “believe in the power of design as a tool to be able to connect with users in a way that’s different and special,” he said.

Des Cotes and David Tapp, head of partnerships at Metalab, are the general partners at Metalab Ventures and will invest in 25 to 35 startups at the pre-seed, seed and Series A stages. So far, the firm made a handful of unannounced investments, Des Cotes said.

The limited partnership makeup of the new fund includes institutional, funds to fund, angel investors and founders of companies with whom Metalab has previously worked. Metalab is also an LP in the fund.

The company performs diligence on thousands of founders each year to determine who it will help, and that same process was shifted to Metalab Ventures in the way it evaluates investments, Des Cotes said.

When determining who to invest in, the process includes getting to know the founders and if the firm can add value. Metalab often taps into its 160-person workforce for design, technology, product and research leadership.

“We’ve already operated very much like a venture fund,” Des Cotes said. “Now we are working through that process to understand what’s the product, what’s the opportunity, what’s the value that can be created here. When we believe in this business, we think of human capital as being our scarce resource that we can then deploy into those businesses.”

Have a juicy tip or lead about happenings in the venture world? Send tips to Christine Hall at [email protected] or via this Signal link. Anonymity requests will be respected. 

Ulta Beauty launches a fund, showcasing the resilience of corporate venture capital


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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