Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

In this blog post, we will explore 

pg_dump

/

pg_restore

, one of the most commonly used options for performing a PostgreSQL upgrade. It is important to understand the scenarios under which

pg_dump

and

pg_restore

utilities will be helpful.

This post is the second of our Upgrading or Migrating Your Legacy PostgreSQL to Newer PostgreSQL Versions series where we’ll be exploring different methods available to upgrade your PostgreSQL databases.

About pg_dump

pg_dump

is a utility to perform a backup of single database. You cannot backup multiple databases unless you do so using separate commands in parallel. If your upgrade plan needs global objects to be copied over,

pg_dump

need to be supplemented by

pg_dumpall

 . To know more about

pg_dumpall

 , you may refer to our previous blog post.

pg_dump formats

pg_dump

can produce dumps in multiple formats – plain text and custom format – each with own advantages. When you use

pg_dump

with custom format

(-Fc)

, you must use

pg_restore

to restore the dump.

If the dump is taken using a plain-text format, pg_dump generates a script file of multiple SQL commands. It can be restored using psql.

A custom format dump, however, is compressed and is not human-readable.

A dump taken in plain text format may be slightly larger in size when compared to a custom format dump.

At times, you may wish to perform schema changes in your target PostgreSQL database before restore, for example, table partitioning. Or you may wish to restore only a selected list of objects from a dump file.

In such cases, you cannot restore a selected list of tables from a plain format dump of a database. If you take the database dump in custom format,  you can use pg_restore, which will help you choose a specific set of tables for restoration.

Steps involved in upgrade

The most important point to remember is that both dump and restore should be performed using the latest binaries. For example, if we need to migrate from version 9.3 to version 11, we should be using the pg_dump binary of PostgreSQL 11 to connect to 9.3 .

When a server is equipped with two different versions of binaries, it is good practice to specify the full path of the pg_dump from the latest version as follows :

/usr/lib/postgresql/11/bin/pg_dump <connection_info_of_source_system> <options>

Getting the global dumps

In PostgreSQL, users/roles are global to the database cluster, and the same user can have privileges on objects in different databases. These are called “Globals” because they are applicable for all the databases within the instance. Creation of globals in the target system at the earliest opportunity is very important, because rest of the DDLs may contain GRANTs to these users/roles. It is good practice to dump the globals into a file, and to examine the file, before importing into destination system. This can be achieved using the following command :

/usr/lib/postgresql/11/bin/pg_dumpall -g -p 5432 > /tmp/globals_only.sql

Since this produces a plain SQL dump file, it can be fed to

psql

connected to the destination server. If there are no modifications required, the globals can be directly piped to the destination server using the command in the next example. Since this is a plain SQL dump file, it can be fed to psql for restore.

/usr/lib/postgresql/11/bin/pg_dumpall -g <source_connection_info> | psql -p <destination_connection_info>

The above command would work for an upgrade in a local server. You can add an additional argument

-h

for

hostname

in the

<destination_connection_info>

if you are performing an upgrade to a remote database server.

Schema Only Dumps

The next stage of the migration involves the creation of schema objects. At this point, you might want to move different database objects to different tablespaces, and partition a few of the tables. If such schema modifications are part of the plan, then we should extract the schema definition to a plain text file. Here’s an example command that can be used to achieve this :

/usr/lib/postgresql/11/bin/pg_dump -s -d databasename -p 5432 > /tmp/schema_only.sql

In general, the majority of the database objects won’t need any modifications. In such cases, it is good practice to dump the schema objects as such into the destination database using a

PIPE

, using a similar command to this:

/usr/lib/postgresql/11/bin/pg_dump -s -d databasename <source_connection> | psql -d database <destination_connection>

Once all the schema objects are created, we should be able to drop only those objects which need modification. We can then recreate them with their modified definition.

Copying data

This is the stage when the majority of the data transfers between the database servers. If there is good bandwidth between source and destination, we should look to achieve maximum parallelism at this stage. In many situations, we could analyze the foreign key dependency hierarchy and import data in parallel batches for a group of tables. Data-only copying is possible using

-a

or

--data-only

  flag of

pg_dump

 .

Copying the data of individual tables

You might have to incorporate schema changes as part of an upgrade. In this case, you can copy the data of a few tables individually. We provide an example here:

/usr/lib/postgresql/11/bin/pg_dump <sourcedb_connection_info> -d <database> -a -t schema.tablename | psql <destinationdb_connection_info> <databasename>

There could be special situations where you need to append only a partial selection of the data. This happens especially on time-series data. In such cases, you can use copy commands with a WHERE clause cto extract and import specific data. You can see this in the following example :

/usr/lib/postgresql/11/bin/psql <sourcedb_connection_info> -c "COPY (select * from <table> where <filter condition>)” > /tmp/selected_table_data.sql

Summary

pg_dump/pg_restore may be useful if you need to perform a faster upgrade of PostgreSQL server with a modified schema and bloat-free relations. To see more about this method in action, please subscribe to our webinar here.

—
image based on photos by Skitterphoto and Magda Ehlers from Pexels

You know how kings used to have trumpeters heralding their arrival wherever they went? Proxy wants to do that with Bluetooth. The startup lets you instantly unlock office doors and reserve meeting rooms using Bluetooth Low Energy signal. You never even have to pull out your phone or open an app. But Proxy is gearing up to build an entire Bluetooth identity layer for the world that could invisibly hover around its users. That could allow devices around the workplace and beyond to instantly recognize your credentials and preferences to sign you into teleconferences, pay for public transit or ask the barista for your usual.

Today, Proxy emerges from stealth after piloting its keyless, badgeless office entry tech with 50 companies. It’s raised a $13.6 million Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins to turn your phone into your skeleton key. “The door is a forcing function to solve all the hard problems — everything from safety to reliability to the experience to privacy,” says Proxy co-founder and CEO Denis Mars. “If you’re gonna do this, it’s gonna have to work right, and especially if you’re going to do this in the workplace with enterprises where there’s no room to fix it.”

But rather than creepily trying to capitalize on your data, Proxy believes you should own and control it. Each interaction is powered by an encrypted one-time token so you’re not just beaming your unprotected information out into the universe. “I’ve been really worried about how the internet world spills over to the physical world. Cookies are everywhere with no control. What’s the future going to be like? Are we going to be tracked everywhere or is there a better way?” He figured the best path to the destiny he wanted was to build it himself.

Mars and his co-founder Simon Ratner, both Australian, have been best buddies for 10 years. Ratner co-founded a video annotation startup called Omnisio that was acquired by YouTube, while Mars co-founded teleconferencing company Bitplay, which was bought by Jive Software. Ratner ended up joining Jive where the pair began plotting a new startup. “We asked ourselves what we wanted to do with the next 10 or 20 years of our lives. We both had kids and it changed our perspective. What’s meaningful that’s worth working on for a long time?”

They decided to fix a real problem while also addressing their privacy concerns. As he experimented with Internet of Things devices, Mars found every fridge and light bulb wanted you to download an app, set up a profile, enter your password and then hit a button to make something happen. He became convinced this couldn’t scale and we’d need a hands-free way to tell computers who we are. The idea for Proxy emerged. Mars wanted to know, “Can we create this universal signal that anything can pick up?”

Most offices already have infrastructure for badge-based RFID entry. The problem is that employees often forget their badges, waste time fumbling to scan them and don’t get additional value from the system elsewhere.

So rather than re-invent the wheel, Proxy integrates with existing access control systems at offices. It just replaces your cards with an app authorized to constantly emit a Bluetooth Low Energy signal with an encrypted identifier of your identity. The signal is picked up by readers that fit onto the existing fixtures. Employees can then just walk up to a door with their phone within about six feet of the sensor and the door pops open. Meanwhile, their bosses can define who can go where using the same software as before, but the user still owns their credentials.

“Data is valuable, but how does the end user benefit? How do we change all that value being stuck with these big tech companies and instead give it to the user?” Mars asks. “We need to make privacy a thing that’s not exploited.”

Mars believes now’s the time for Proxy because phone battery life is finally getting good enough that people aren’t constantly worried about running out of juice. Proxy’s Bluetooth Low Energy signal doesn’t suck up much, and geofencing can wake up the app in case it shuts down while on a long stint away from the office. Proxy has even considered putting inductive charging into its sensors so you could top up until your phone turns back on and you can unlock the door.

Opening office doors isn’t super exciting, though. What comes next is. Proxy is polishing its features that auto-reserve conference rooms when you walk inside, that sign you into your teleconferencing system when you approach the screen and that personalize workstations when you arrive. It’s also working on better office guest check-in to eliminate the annoying iPad sign-in process in the lobby. Next, Mars is eyeing “Your car, your home, all your devices. All these things are going to ask ‘can I sense you and do something useful for you?’ ”

After demoing at Y Combinator, thousands of companies reached out to Proxy, from hotel chains to corporate conglomerates to theme parks. Proxy charges for its hardware, plus a monthly subscription fee per reader. Employees are eager to ditch their keycards, so Proxy sees 90 percent adoption across all its deployments. Customers only churn if something breaks, and it hasn’t lost a customer in two years, Mars claims.

The status quo of keycards, competitors like Openpath and long-standing incumbents all typically only handle doors, while Proxy wants to build an omni-device identity system. Now Proxy has the cash to challenge them, thanks to the $13.6 million from Kleiner, Y Combinator, Coatue Management and strategic investor WeWork. In fact, Proxy now counts WeWork’s headquarters and Dropbox as clients. “With Proxy, we can give our employees, contractors and visitors a seamless smartphone-enabled access experience they love, while actually bolstering security,” says Christopher Bauer, Dropbox’s physical security systems architect.

The cash will help answer the question of “How do we turn this into a protocol so we don’t have to build the other side for everyone?,” Mars explains. Proxy will build out SDKs that can be integrated into any device, like a smoke detector that could recognize which people are in the vicinity and report that to first responders. Mars thinks hotel rooms that learn your climate, wake-up call and housekeeping preferences would be a no-brainer. Amazon Go-style autonomous retail could also benefit from the tech.

When asked what keeps him up at night, Mars concludes that “the biggest thing that scares me is that this requires us to be the most trustworthy company on the planet. There is no ‘move fast, break things’ here. It’s ‘move fast, do it right, don’t screw it up.’ “

At last year’s Microsoft Ignite conference, the CEOs of Microsoft, Adobe and SAP took the stage to announce the launch of the Open Data Initiative. The idea behind this effort was to make it easier for their customers to move data between each others’ services by standardizing on a common data format and helping them move their data out of their respective silos and into a single customer-chosen data lake. At this week’s Adobe Summit, the three companies today announced how they plan to expand this program as they look to bring in additional partners.

“The intent of the companies joining forces was really to solve a common customer problem that we hear time and time again, which is that there are high-value business data tends to be very siloed in a variety of different applications,” Alysa Taylor, Microsoft’s corporate vice president, Business Applications & Global Industry, told me. “Being able to extract that data, reason over that data, garner intelligence from that data, is very cost-prohibitive and it’s very manual and time-consuming.”

The core principle of the alliance is that the customers own their data and they should be able to get as much value out of it as they can. Ideally, having this common data schema means that the customer doesn’t have to figure out ways to transform the data from these vendors and can simply flow all of it into a single data lake that then in turn feeds the various analytics services, machine learning systems and other tools that these companies offer.

At the Adobe Summit today, the three companies showed their first customer use case based on how Unilever is making use of this common data standard. More importantly, though, they also stressed that the Open Data Initiative is indeed open to others. As a first step, the three companies today announced the formation of a partner advisory council.

“What this basically means is that we’ve extended it out to key participants in the ecosystem to come and join us as part of this ODI effort,” Adobe’s VP of Ecosystem Development Amit Ahuja told me. “What we’re starting with is really a focus around two big groups of partners. Number one is, who are the other really interesting ISVs who have a lot of this core data that we want to make sure we can bring into this kind of single unified view. And the second piece is who are the major players out there that are trying to help these customers around their enterprise architecture.”

The first 12 partners that are joining this new council include Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Change Healthcare, Cognizant, EY, Finastra, Genesys, Hootsuite, Inmobi, Sprinklr and WPP . This is very much a first step, though. Over time, the group expects to expand far beyond this first set of partners and include a much larger group of stakeholders.

“We really want to make this really broad in a way that we can quickly make progress and demonstrate that what we’re talking about from a conceptual process has really hard customer benefits attached to it,” Abhay Kumar, SAP’s global vice president, Global Business Development & Ecosystem, noted. The use cases the alliance has identified focus on market intelligence, sales intelligence and services intelligence, he added.

Today, as enterprises often pull in data from dozens of disparate systems, making sense of all that information is hard enough, but to even get to this point, enterprises first have to transform it and make it usable. To do so, they then have to deploy another set of applications that massages the data. “I don’t want to go and buy another 15 or 20 applications to make that work,” Ahuja said. “I want to realize the investment and the ROI of the applications that I’ve already bought.”

All three stressed that this is very much a collaborative effort that spans the engineering, sales and product marketing groups.

There are better employee perks than a ping-pong table. Seventy percent of Americans graduate college with student loan debt. That’s 45 million people who owe $1.6 trillion. So when employers use Goodly to offer $100 per month in student loan payback for a $6 fee, talent sticks around. The startup found 86 percent of employees said they’d stay with a company for at least five years if their employer helped pay down their student loans. Yet employers break even if workers stay just two extra months, and get a 5X return if they stay an extra year because it costs so much to hire and train replacement staff.

Now, Y Combinator-backed Goodly has raised a $1.3 million seed round led by Norwest. The startup hopes to capitalize on corporate America waking up to student loan payback as a benefit, which is expected to grow from being offered by 4 percent of companies today to 32 percent by 2021.

Goodly co-founder and CEO Greg Poulin knows the student loan crisis personally. “When I was in school, my father passed away very unexpectedly due to a heart attack. I had to borrow $80,000 for college at Dartmouth,” he tells me. His monthly payment is now $900. The stress that debt creates can poison the rest of your life. He says 21 percent of employees with student loan debt have delayed marriage, 28 percent have put off starting a family and 1 out of 8 divorces is now directly attributed to student loan debt. “I’ve seen first-hand how challenging it is for employees to save for retirement or start a family” when they’re strapped with debt, Poulin says.

He met his co-founder and CTO Hemant Verma when they started working at Zenefits’ founder Parker Conrad’s new employee onboarding startup, Rippling, in 2017. That taught them how simplifying the benefits sign-up process could become its own business. Typically it requires that benefits be integrated with a company’s financial software, like payroll, and be set up with proper provisioning access. It’s enough of a chore that companies don’t go to the trouble of offering student loan repayment.

Poulin and Verma started Goodly to create a “set it and forget it” system that automates everything. They charge $6 per month per participating employee and typically see adoption by 30 percent to 40 percent of employees. Rather than help with their monthly payment that includes interest, Goodly clients pay down their employees’ core debt so they can escape more quickly. Employees get a dashboard where they can track their debt and all of the contributions their company has made. Goodly hasn’t had a single customer churn since launch, demonstrating how badly employers want to keep job-hopping talent in their roles.

“We found that our people put off contributing to their 401ks and buying a house because of their student loan debt. We thought that offering a Student Loan Repayment Benefit would be a great low-cost and high-impact benefit to attract and retain talent while alleviating some of the stress and the financial burden on our employees,” says Kim Alessi, an HR generalist.

Goodly’s founders and first employees

The business opportunity here is relatively young, but there are a few competitors. Boston-based Gratify was acquired by First Republic, which Santa Monica’s Tuition.io pivoted to offering student loan benefits. But Goodly’s connection to so many potential clients plus its new funding could help it make student loan repayment a ubiquitous perk. Along with Norwest and YC, the funding comes from ACE & Company, Arab Angel, Zeno Ventures and angel investors, including Optimizely’s Pete Koomen, DreamHost’s Josh Jones, ShipStation’s Jason Hodges, Fairy’s Avlok Kohli and Telly’s Mo Al Adham.

Beyond improving talent retention, Goodly may also help erase some of the systematic discrimination against minorities in our country. Women hold 66 percent of all student loan debt, black and Latinx Americans have 31 percent more student debt than their peers and LGBTQ borrowers owe $16,000 more than an average member of the population. Convincing employers to address student loan debt could give everyone more freedom of choice when it comes to what they work on and how they live their lives.

We started hosting Percona University a few years back with the aim of sharing knowledge with the open source database community. The events are held in cities across the world. The next Percona University days will visiting Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil, in a lightning tour at the end of April.

• Montevideo, Tuesday, April 23 2019 from 8.30am to 6.30pm
• Buenos Aires, Thursday, April 25 2019 from 1.30pm to 10.3pm
• São Paulo, Saturday, April 27 2019 from 9.30am to 7.30pm

What is Percona University?

It is a technical educational event. We encourage people to join us at any point during these talks – we understand that not everyone can take off a half a day from their work or studies. As long as you register – that’s essential.

What is on the agenda for each of the events?

Full agendas and registration forms for the Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo events can be accessed at their respective links.

Does the word “University” mean that we won’t cover any in-depth topics, and these events would only interest college/university students?

No, it doesn’t. We designed Percona University presentations for all kinds of “students,” including professionals with years of database industry experience. The word “University” means that this event series is about educating attendees on technical topics (it’s not a sales-oriented event, it’s about sharing knowledge with the community).

Does Percona University cover only Percona technology?

We will definitely mention Percona technology, but we will also focus on real-world technical issues and recommend solutions that work (regardless of whether Percona developed them).

Are there other Percona University events coming up besides these in South America?

We will hold more Percona University events in different locations in the future. Our newsletter is a good source of information about when and where they will occur. If you’d like to partner with Percona in organizing a Percona University event, contact Tom Basil who leads our community team… or Lorraine Pocklington our Community Manager. You can also check our list of technical webinars to get further educational insights.

These events are free and low-key! They aren’t meant to look like a full conference (like our Percona Live series). Percona University has a different format. We make it informal, so it’s designed to be perfect for learning and networking. This is an in-person database community gathering, so feel free to come with interesting cases and tricky questions!

Kespry, a company that offers industrial users a subscription-based drone service, today announced that it has raised funding from Salesforce Ventures, marking that firm’s first hardware investment. With this, Salesforce and Kespry are also partnering around bringing Kespry’s drone services for the insurance industry to Salesforce’s own tools for this vertical. Sadly, the companies did not disclose the actual funding amount, but our understanding is that it’s a substantial amount that’s comparable to other Salesforce Ventures investments.

With its focus on industrial use cases, the company, which was founded in 2013, has developed a strong foothold in the mining and aggregates space, where it offers tools for doing volumetric measurements of stockpiles based on the imagery it captures from its drones, for example. In addition, though, the company also focuses on the construction, insurance and — most recently — energy sector.

Today, Kespry has more than 300 customers, the company’s CEO George Mathew tells me. More than 200 of those are in the mining and aggregates business and more than 40 of these signed up for the company’s services in the last 12 months alone.

So while drones may not be at the top of the hype cycle right now, those companies that found their niche early on are clearly thriving. “Drones are very much a vibrant and moving landscape in terms of how much activity has gone on,” he said. “For us, we’ve been largely and continuously focused on the commercial aspects of the market that we can solve for really difficult industrial challenges. […] But I think others have had some challenges because it’s not the most straightforward thing to figure out a viable business model for scale in the drone space.”

Mathew argues that Kespry’s subscription model and the fact that it offers an end-to-end hardware and software solution is one of the reasons the company is thriving today.

The Salesforce investment came about thanks to a chance encounter with that company’s CEO, Marc Benioff, at an industry event. As Salesforce was looking to offer more vertically oriented applications for the insurance industry, there was clearly a role for Kespry in this business. “We saw a lot of need in the insurance space to get a claim processed when it comes to physical damage that may have occurred after a catastrophic event,” Mathew said. In those cases, Salesforce’s tools may be used to dispatch adjudicators already and these claims adjusters often also use Kespry’s services to fly the drones to assess roof damage, for example.

Kespry also signed on to Saleforce’s Pledge 1% program; as part of this, it contributes one percent of its employees’ time to corporate social responsibility and charitable endeavors.

Qupital, a fintech startup that bills itself as Hong Kong’s largest trade financing platform for SMEs, has closed a $15 million Series A led by CreditEase FinTech Investment Fund (CEFIF), with participation from returning investors Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund and MindWorks Ventures, both participants in its seed round. To date, Qupital has raised $17 million, including a seed round two years ago, and will use its latest funding to expand its supply chain financing products, launch in mainland Chinese cities and hire more people for its tech development and risk management teams.

CreditEase, which provides loans and other financial services for SMEs in China, will act as a strategic investor, aiding with Qupital’s geographic expansion. Existing investor Alibaba has already helped Qupital reach small businesses on its platform. Qupital will open branches in Chinese cities, including Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, along with setting up a new technology center in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area for talent and tech development. In total, it will hire about 100 people for its Hong Kong office this year.

Founded in 2016, Qupital offers lending for SMEs that frequently have cash flow issues because they are in a cycle of waiting for invoices to be paid. Qupital’s loans cover most of the value of an invoice, then matches that with investors and funders who cover the cash with the expectation of a return. The company makes money by charging SMEs a service fee that is a fixed percentage of the total invoice value and then a discount fee, and taking a percentage of net gains made by investors.

Qupital has now processed 8,000 trades, totaling HKD $2 billion in value. It won’t disclose how many SMEs it has worked with, but co-founder and chairman Andy Chan says that number is in the hundreds.

Chan tells TechCrunch that in China, Qupital will not compete directly against traditional financial institutions, because it focuses on financing the Hong Kong business entities of Chinese companies in U.S. and Hong Kong currency, instead of onshore renminbi. It also will target SMEs underserved by traditional lenders, by using alternative data sources to determine their creditworthiness.

In a prepared statement, CEFIF managing director Dennis Cong said, “The growing volume of SME and cross-border trading drives a huge demand for alternative financing for SME’s who are underserved in the market and opportunities for investors to earn a decent risk-adjusted return. We look forward to working with Qupital to broaden its source of capital base and create unparalleled investment opportunities for CreditEase.”

Microsoft and Adobe have been building a relationship for some time, and today at Adobe Summit in Las Vegas the two companies announced a deeper integration between the two platforms.

It involves sharing Marketo data, the company that Adobe acquired last September for $4.75 billion. Because it’s marketers, they were duty-bound to give it a new name. This data-sharing approach is being dubbed Account Based Experience, or ABX for short. The two companies are sharing data account data between a number of sources, including Marketo Engage in Adobe Experience Cloud and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, as well as the LinkedIn, the business social platform Microsoft bought in 2016 for a whopping $26.2 billion.

Microsoft has been trying to find ways to put that LinkedIn data to work, and tools like Marketo can use the data in LinkedIn to understand their account contacts better. Steve Lucas, former CEO at Marketo, who is now senior vice president and head of the Marketo team at Adobe, says accounts tend to be much more complex sales than selling to individuals, involving multiple decision makers. It’s a sales cycle that can stretch on for months, and having access to additional data about the account contacts can have a big impact.

“With these new account-based capabilities, marketing and sales teams will have increased alignment around the people and accounts they are engaging, and new ways to measure that business impact,” Lucas explained in a statement.

Brent Leary, principal at CRM Essentials, who has been working in CRM, customer service and marketing for years, sees this as a useful partnership for customers from both vendors. “Integrating Microsoft Dynamics and LinkedIn more closely with Marketo gives Adobe’s Experience Cloud some great data to leverage in order to have a more complete picture of B2B customers,” Leary told TechCrunch.

The goal is to close complex sales, and having access to more complete data across the two product sets can help achieve that.

Please join Percona’s Product Manager, Michael Coburn, as he presents his talk Monitoring PostgreSQL with Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) on March 27th, 2019 at 11:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 2:00 PM EDT (UTC-4).

Register Now

In this webinar, learn how to monitor PostgreSQL using Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) so that you can:

Gain greater visibility of performance and bottlenecks for PostgreSQL
Consolidate your PostgreSQL servers into the same monitoring platform you already use for MySQL and MongoDB
Respond more quickly and efficiently in Severity 1 issues

We’ll also show how using PMM’s External Exporters can help you integrate PostgreSQL in only minutes!

In order to learn more, register for this webinar on how to monitor PostgreSQL with PMM.

Business customers continue to be a huge target for the travel industry, and today a startup has raised a tidy sum to help it double down on the $1.7 trillion opportunity. Lola.com — a platform for business users to book and manage trips — has raised $37 million to continue building out its technology and hire more talent as it takes on incumbents like SAP targeting the corporate sector.

The Series C is led by General Catalyst and Accel, with participation from CRV, Tenaya Capital and GV. All are previous investors. We are asking about the valuation but it looks like prior to this, the company had raised just under $65 million, and its last post-money valuation, in 2017, was $100 million, according to PitchBook.

There are signs that the valuation will have had a bump in this round. The company said in 2018, its bookings have gone up by 423 percent, with revenues up 786 percent, although it’s not disclosing what the actual figures are for either.

“As business travelers have become increasingly mobile, Lola.com’s mission is to completely transform the landscape of corporate travel management,” said Mike Volpe, CEO of Lola.com, who took the top role at the company last year. “The continued support of our investors underscores the market potential, which is leading us to expand our partner ecosystem and double our headcount across engineering, sales and marketing. At the core, we continue to invest in building the best, simplest corporate travel management platform in the industry.”

Co-founded by Paul English and Bill O’Donnell — respectively, the former CTO/co-founder and chief architect of the wildly successful consumer travel booking platform Kayak — Lola originally tried to fix the very thing that Kayak and others like it had disrupted: it was designed as a platform for people to connect to live agents to help them organise their travel. That larger cruise ship might have already said, however (so to speak), and so the company later made a pivot to cater to a more specific demographic in the market that often needs and expects the human touch when arranging logistics: the business user.

Its unique selling point has not been just to provide a pain-free “agile” platform to make bookings, but for the platform’s human agents to be proactively pinging business users when there are modifications to a booking (for example because of flight delays), and offering help when needed to sort out the many aspects of modern travel that can be painful and time consuming for busy working people, such as technical issues around a frequent flyer program.

Lola.com is not the only one to spot the opportunity there. To further diversify its business and to move into higher-margin, bigger-ticket offerings, Airbnb has also been slowly building out its own travel platform targeting business customers by adding in hotels and room bookings.

There are others that are either hoping to bypass or complement existing services with their own takes on how to improve business travel such as TravelPerk (most recent raise: $44 million), Travelstop (an Asia-focused spin), and TripActions (most recently valued at $1 billion), to name a few. That speaks to an increasingly crowded market of players that are competing against incumbents like SAP, which owns Concur, Hipmunk and a plethora of other older services.

Lola.com has made some interesting headway in its own approach to the market, by partnering with one of the names most synonymous with corporate spending, American Express, and specifically a JV it is involved in called American Express Global Business Travel.

“Lola.com offers an incredibly simple solution to corporate travel management, which enables American Express Global Business Travel to take our value proposition to even more companies across the middle market,” said Evan Konwiser, VP of Product Strategy and Marketing for American Express GBT, in a statement.