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Media technology company Amagi announced Friday $100 million to further develop its cloud-based SaaS technology for broadcast and connected televisions.

Accel, Avataar Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners joined existing investor Premji Invest in the funding round, which included buying out stakes held by Emerald Media and Mayfield Fund. Nadathur Holdings continues as an existing investor. The latest round gives Amagi total funding raised to date of $150 million, Baskar Subramanian, co-founder and CEO of Amagi, told TechCrunch.

Bangalore-based Amagi provides cloud broadcast and targeted advertising software so that customers can create content that can be created and monetized to be distributed via broadcast TV and streaming TV platforms like The Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus and Pluto TV. The company already supports more than 2,000 channels on its platform across over 40 countries.

“Video is a complex technology to manage — there are large files and a lot of computing,” Subramanian said. “What Amagi does is enable a content owner with zero technology knowledge to simplify that complex workflow and scalable infrastructure. We want to make it easy to plug in and start targeting and monetizing advertising.”

As a result, Amagi customers see operational cost savings on average of up to 40% compared to traditional delivery models and their ad impressions grow between five and 10 times.

The new funding comes at a time when the company is experiencing rapid growth. For example, Amagi grew 30 times in the United States alone over the past few years, Subramanian said. Amagi commands an audience of over 2 billion people, and the U.S. is its largest market. The company also sees growth potential in both Latin America and Europe.

In addition, in the last year, revenue grew 136%, while new customer year over year growth was 44%, including NBCUniversal — Subramanian said the Tokyo Olympics were run on Amagi’s platform for NBC, USA Today and ABS-CBN.

As more of a shift happens with video content being developed for connected television experiences, which he said is a $50 billion market, the company plans to use the new funding for sales expansion, R&D to invest in the company’s product pipeline and potential M&A opportunities. The company has not made any acquisitions yet, Subramanian added.

In addition to the broadcast operations in New Delhi, Amagi also has an innovation center in Bangalore and offices in New York, Los Angeles and London.

“Consumer behavior and infrastructure needs have reached a critical mass and new companies are bringing in the next generation of media, and we are a large part of that growth,” Subramanian said. “Sports will come on quicker, while live news and events are going to be one of the biggest growth areas.”

Shekhar Kirani, partner at Accel, said Amagi is taking a unique approach to enterprise SaaS due to that $50 billion industry shift happening in video content, where he sees half of the spend moving to connected television platforms quickly.

Some of the legacy players like Viacom and NBCUniversal created their own streaming platforms, where Netflix and Amazon have also been leading, but not many SaaS companies are enabling the transition, he said.

When Kirani met Subramanian five years ago, Amagi was already well funded, but Kirani was excited about the platform and wanted to help the company scale. He believes the company has a long tailwind because it is saving people time and enabling new content providers to move faster to get their content distributed.

“Amagi is creating a new category and will grow fast,” Kirani added. “They are already growing and doubling each year with phenomenal SaaS metrics because they are helping content providers to connect to any audience.

 

Barely more than eight months after announcing a $37 million funding round, Mux has another $105 million.

The Series D was led by Coatue and values the company at more than $1 billion (Mux isn’t disclosing the specific valuation). Existing investors Accel, Andreessen Horowitz and Cobalt also participated, as did new investor Dragoneer.

Co-founder and CEO Jon Dahl told me that Mux didn’t need to raise more funding. But after last year’s Series C, the company’s leadership kept in touch with Coatue and other investors who’d expressed interest, and they ultimately decided that more money could help fuel faster growth during “this inflection moment in video.”

Building on the thesis popularized by a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen, Dahl said, “I think video’s eating software, the same way software was eating the world 10 years ago.” In other words, where video was once something we watched at our desks and on our sofas, it’s now everywhere, whether we’re scrolling through our social media feeds or exercising on our Pelotons.

“We’re at the early days of a five- or 10-year major transition, where video is moving into being a first-class part of every software project,” he said.

Dahl argued that Mux is well-suited for this transition because it’s “a video platform for developers,” with an API-centric approach that results in faster publishing and reliable streaming for viewers. Its first product was a monitoring and analytics tool called Mux Data, followed by its streaming video product Mux Video.

“If you’re going to build a video platform and do it data-first, you need heavy data and monitoring and analytics,” Dahl explained. “We built the data layer [and then] we built the streaming platform.”

Customers include Robinhood, PBS, ViacomCBS, Equinox Media and VSCO — Dahl said that while Mux works with digital media companies, “our core market is software.” He suggested that back when the company was founded in 2015, video was largely seen as a “niche,” or “something you needed if you were ESPN or Netflix.” But the last few years have illustrated that “video is a fundamental part of how we communicate” and that “every software company should have video as a core part of its products.”

Not surprisingly, demand increased dramatically during the pandemic. During the past year, on-demand streaming via the Mux platform grew by 300%, while live video streaming grew 3,700% and revenue quadrupled.

“Which is a lot of work,” Dahl said with a laugh. “We definitely spent a lot of the last year ramping and scaling and investing in the platform.”

This new funding will allow Mux (which has now raised a total of $175 million) to continue that investment. Dahl said he plans to grow the team from 80 to 200 employees and to explore potential acquisitions.

“We were impressed by Mux’s laser focus on the developer community, and saw impressive customer retention and expansion indicative of the strong value their solutions provide,” said Coatue General Partner David Schneider in a statement. “This funding will enable Mux to continue to build on their customer-centric platform and we are proud to partner with Mux as it leads the way to this hybrid future.”

Significant funding news today for one of the startups making a business out of tapping huge, noisy troves of publicly available data across social media, news sites, undisclosed filings and more. Dataminr, which ingests information from a mix of 100,000 public data sources, and then based on that provides customers real-time insights into ongoing events and new developments, has closed on $475 million in new funding. Dataminr has confirmed that this Series F values the company at $4.1 billion as it gears up for an IPO in 2023.

This Series F is coming from a mix of investors including Eldridge (a firm that owns the LA Dodgers but also makes a bunch of other sports, media, tech and other investments), Valor Equity Partners (the firm behind Tesla and many tech startups), MSD Capital (Michael Dell’s fund), Reinvent Capital (Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman’s firm), ArrowMark Partners, IVP, Eden Global and investment funds managed by Morgan Stanley Tactical Value, among others.

To put its valuation into some context, the New York-based company last raised money in 2018 at a $1.6 billion valuation. And with this latest round, it has now raised over $1 billion in outside funding, based on PitchBook data. This latest round has been in the works for a while and was rumored last week at a lower valuation than what Dataminr ultimately got.

The funding is coming at a critical moment, both for the company and for the world at large.

In terms of the company, Dataminr has been seeing a huge surge of business.

Ted Bailey, the founder and CEO, said in an interview that it will be using the money to continue growing its business in existing areas: adding more corporate customers, expanding in international sales and expanding its AI platform as it gears up for an IPO, most likely in 2023. In addition to being used journalists and newsrooms, NGOs and other public organizations, its corporate business today, Bailey said, includes half of the Fortune 50 and a number of large public sector organizations. Over the last year that large enterprise segment of its customers doubled in revenue growth.

“Whether it’s for physical safety, reputation risk or crisis management, or business intelligence or cybersecurity, we’re providing critical insights on a daily basis,” he said. “All of the events of the recent year have created a sense of urgency, and demand has really surged.”

Activity on the many platforms that Dataminr taps to ingest information has been on the rise for years, but it has grown exponentially in the last year especially as more people spend more time at home and online and away from physically interacting with each other: that means more data for Dataminr to crawl, but also, quite possibly, more at stake for all of us as a result: there is so much more out there than before, and as a result so much more to be gleaned out of that information.

That also means that the wider context of Dataminr’s growth is not quite so clear cut.

The company’s data tools have indeed usefully helped first responders react in crisis situations, feeding them data faster than even their own channels might do; and it provides a number of useful, market-impacting insights to businesses.

But Dataminr’s role in helping its customers — which include policing forces — connect the dots on certain issues has not always been seen as a positive. One controversial accusation made last year was that Dataminr data was being used by police for racial profiling. In years past, it has been barred by specific partners like Twitter from sharing data with intelligence agencies. Twitter used to be a 5% shareholder in the company. Bailey confirmed to me that it no longer is but remains a key partner for data. I’ve contacted Twitter to see if I can get more detail on this and will update the story if and when I learn more. Twitter made $509 million in revenues from services like data licensing in 2020, up by about $45 million on the year before.

In defense of Dataminr, Bailey that the negative spins on what it does result from “misperceptions,” since it can’t track people or do anything proactive. “We deliver alerts on events and it’s [about] a time advantage,” he said, likening it to the Associated Press, but “just earlier.”

“The product can’t be used for surveillance,” Bailey added. “It is prohibited.”

Of course, in the ongoing debate about surveillance, it’s more about how Dataminr’s customers might ultimately use the data that they get through Dataminr’s tools, so the criticism is more about what it might enable rather than what it does directly.

Despite some of those persistent questions about the ethics of AI and other tools and how they are implemented by end users, backers are bullish on the opportunities for Dataminr to continue growing.

Eden Global Partners served as strategic partner for the Series F capital round.

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The team at Reduct.Video is hoping to dramatically increase the amount of videos created by businesses.

The startup’s technology is already used by customers including Intuit, Autodesk, Facebook, Dell, Spotify, Indeed, Superhuman and IDEO. And today, Reduct is announcing that it has raised a $4 million round led by Greylock and South Park Commons, with participation from Figma CEO Dylan Field, Hopin Chief Business Officer Armando Mann and former Twitter exec Elad Gil.

Reduct was founded by CEO Prabhas Pokharel and CTO Robert Ochshorn (both pictured above). Pokharel argued that despite the proliferation of streaming video platforms and social media apps on the consumer side, video remains “underutilized” in a business context, because it simply takes so much time to sort through video footage, much less edit it down into something watchable.

As Pokharel demonstrated for me, Reduct uses artificial intelligence, natural language processing and other technologies to simplify the process by automatically transcribing video footage (users can also pay for professional transcription), then tying that transcript to the video.

“The magic starts there: Once the transcription has been made, every single word is connected to the [corresponding] moment in the video,” he said.

That means editing a video is as simple as editing text. (I’ve taken advantage of a similar linkage between text and media in Otter, but Otter is focused on audio and I’ve treated it more as a transcription tool.) It also means you can search through hours of footage for every time a topic is mentioned, then organize, tag and share it.

Pokharel said that AI allows Reduct to simplify parts of the sorting and editing process, like understanding how different search terms might be related. But he doesn’t think the process will ever become fully automated — instead, he compared the product to an “Iron Man suit,” which makes a human editor more powerful.

He also suggested that this approach changes businesses’ perspective on video, and not just by making editing faster and easier.

“Users on Reduct emphasize authenticity over polish, where it’s much more the content of the video that matters,” Pokharel said. He added that Reduct has been “learning from our customers” about what they can do with the product — user research teams can now easily organize and share hundreds of hours of user footage, while marketers can turn customer testimonials and webinars into short, shareable videos.

“Video has been so supply constrained, it’s crazy,” he continued. “There are all these use cases for asynchronous video that [companies] haven’t even bothered with.”

For example, he recalled one customer who said that she used to insist that team members attend a meeting even if there was only two minutes of it that they needed to hear. With Reduct, she can “give them that time back” and just share the parts they need.

 

Automattic, the for-profit company tied to open-source web publishing platform WordPress, is announcing that it has acquired analytics provider Parse.ly.

Specifically, Parse.ly is now part of WPVIP, the organization within Automattic that offers enterprise hosting and support to publishers, including TechCrunch. (We use Parse.ly, too.)

WPVIP CEO Nick Gernert described this as the organization’s first large enterprise software acquisition, reflecting a strategy that has expanded beyond news and media organizations — businesses like Salesforce (whose venture arm invested $300 million in Automattic back in 2019), the NBA, Condé Nast, Facebook and Microsoft now use WPVIP for their content and marketing needs.

Both companies, Gernert said, come from similar backgrounds, with “roots” in digital publishing and a “heavy focus on understanding the impact of content.”

“We’ve really started to shift more towards content marketing and starting to think more deeply beyond just what traditional page analytics provide,” he continued. That means doing more than measuring pageviews and time on site and “really starting to look more deeply at things like conversation, attribution, areas … that from a marketer’s perspective are impactful.”

WordPress and Parse.ly already work well together, but the plan is to make WPVIP features available to Parse.ly customers while also making more Parse.ly data available to WPVIP publishers. And Gernert said there are also opportunities to add more commerce-related data to Parse.ly, since Automattic also owns WooCommerce.

The goal, he said, is to “make Parse.ly better for WordPress and best for WPVIP.”

At the same time, he added, “There’s no plans here to make Parse.ly the only analytics solution that runs on our platform. We want to preserve the flexibility and interoperability [of WordPress], and we want to make sure from a Parse.ly perspective that it still exists as a standalone product. That’s key to its future and we will continue to invest in it.”

Parse.ly was founded in 2009 and has raised $12.9 million in funding from investors including Grotech Ventures and Blumberg Capital, according to Crunchbase. Parse.ly founders Sachin Kamdar and Andrew Montalenti are joining WPVIP, with Kamdar leading go-to-market strategy for Parse.ly and Montalenti leading product.

“We’ve always had deep admiration for WPVIP’s market position as the gold standard for enterprise content teams, and we’re thrilled to be able to join together,” Kamdar said in a statement. “From the culture and people, to the product, market and vision, we’re in lockstep to create more value for our customers. This powerful combination of content and intelligence will push the industry forward at an accelerated pace.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Marketing software company HubSpot is acquiring The Hustle, the business and tech media startup behind the popular newsletter of the same name

Axios broke the news of the deal and reported that it values the startup at around $27 million. HubSpot declined to comment on the deal price, and while tweeting about the acquisition, The Hustle CEO Sam Parr wrote, “Early in my career I was transparent with money. But I didn’t like the result of sharing that stuff. So we’re not disclosing the price and HubSpot has agreed. I’m taking it to the grave!”

In its press release about the acquisition, HubSpot noted that customers are finding its products through content like its YouTube videos and HubSpot Academy.

“By acquiring The Hustle, we’ll be able to better meet the needs of these scaling companies by delivering educational, business, and tech trend content in their preferred formats,” said HubSpot’s senior vice president of marketing Kieran Flanagan in a statement. “Sam and his team have a proven ability to create content that entrepreneurs, startups, and scaling companies are deeply passionate about, and I’m excited to bring them on board to take that work to the next level.”

HubSpot says The Hustle’s flagship newsletter has 1.5 million subscribers. It also has a subscription offering called Trends and a podcast called My First Million.

“The goal is to build the largest business content network in the world,” Parr tweeted. “Soon, we’ll expand to a variety of mediums on a bunch of different topics and will have really innovative products coming out. We’re also going to hire the best content creators in the world.”

Events — when they haven’t been cancelled altogether in the last 12 months due to the global health pandemic — have gone virtual and online, and a wave of startups that are helping people create and participate in those experiences are seeing a surge of attention — and funding.

In the latest development, New York video startup TouchCast — which has developed a platform aimed at companies to produce lifelike, virtual conferences and other events without much technical heavy-lifting — has picked up funding of $55 million, money that co-founder and CEO Edo Segal said the startup will use to build out its services and teams after being “overrun by demand” in the wake of COVID-19.

The funding is being led by a strategic investor, Accenture Ventures — the investment arm of the systems integrator and consultancy behemoth — with Alexander Capital Ventures, Saatchi Invest, Ronald Lauder and other unnamed investors also participating. The startup up to now has been largely self-funded, and while Segal isn’t disclosing the valuation, he said it was definitely in the nine-figures (that is, somewhere in the large region of hundreds of millions of dollars).

Accenture has been using TouchCast’s technology for its own events, but that is likely just one part of its interest: Accenture also has a lot of corporate customers that tap it to build and implement interactive services, so potentially this could lead to more customers in TouchCast’s pipeline.

(Case in point: My interview with Segal, over Zoom, found me speaking to him in the middle of a vast aircraft hangar, with a 747 from one of the big airlines of the world — I won’t say which — parked behind him. He said he’d just come from a business pitch with the airline in question.)

A lot of what we have seen in virtual events, and in particular conferences, has to date been, effectively, a managed version of a group call on one of the established videoconferencing platforms like Zoom, Google’s Hangout, Microsoft’s Teams, Webex and so on.

You get a screen with participants’ individual video streams presented to you in a grid more reminiscent of the opening credits of the Brady Bunch or Hollywood Squares than an actual stage or venue.

There are some, of course, that are taking a much different route. Witness Apple’s online events in the last year, productions that have elevated what a virtual event can mean, with more detail and information, and less awkwardness, than an actual live event.

The problem is that not every company is Apple, unable to afford much less execute Hollywood-level presentations.

The essence of what TouchCast has built, as Segal describes it, is a platform that combines computer vision, video streaming technology and natural language processing to let other organizations create experiences that are closer to that of the iPhone giant’s than they are to a game show.

“We have created a platform so that all companies can create events like Apple’s,” Segal said. “We’re taking them on a journey beyond people sitting in their home offices.”

Yet “home office” remains the operative phrase. With TouchCast, people (the organizers and the onstage participants) still use basic videoconferencing solutions like Zoom and Teams — in their homes, even — to produce the action. But behind the scenes, TouchCast is taking those videos, using computer vision to trim out the people and place them into virtual “venues” so that they appear as if they are on stage in an actual conference.

These venues come from a selection of templates, or the organiser can arrange for a specific venue to be shot and used. And in addition to the actual event, TouchCast then also provides tools for audience members to participate with questions and to chat to each other. As the event is progressing, TouchCast also produces transcriptions and summaries of the key points for those who want them.

Segal said that TouchCast is not planning to make this a consumer-focused product, not even on the B2B2C side, but it’s preparing a feature so that when business conference organisers do want to hold a music segment with a special guest, those can be incorporated, too. (In all honesty, it seems like a small leap to use this for more consumer-focused events, too.)

TouchCast’s growth into a startup serving an audience of hungry and anxious event planners has been an interesting pivot that is a reminder to founders (and investors) that the right opportunities might not be the ones you think they are.

You might recall that the company first came out of stealth back in 2013, with former TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld one of the co-founders.

Back then, the company’s concept was to supercharge online video, by making it easier for creators to bring in interactive elements and media widgets into their work, to essentially make videos closer to the kind of interactivity and busy media mix that we find on web pages themselves.

All that might have been too clever by half. Or, it was simply not the right time for that technology. The service never made many waves, and one of my colleagues even assumed it had deadpooled at some point.

Not at all, it turns out. Segal (a serial entrepreneur who also used to work at AOL as VP of emerging platforms — AOL being the company that acquired TechCrunch and eventually became a part of Verizon) notes that the technology that TouchCast is using for its conferencing solution is essentially the same as what it built for its original video product.

After launching an earlier, less feature-rich version of what it has on the market today, it took the company about six months to retool it, adding in more mixed reality customization via the use of Unreal Engine, to make it what it is now, and to meet the demand it started to see from customers, who approached the startup for their own events after attending conferences held by others using TouchCast.

“It took us eight years to get to our overnight success story,” Segal joked.

Figures from Grand View Research cited by TouchCast estimate that virtual events will be a $400 billion business by 2027, and that has made for a pretty large array of companies building out experiences that will make those events worth attending, and putting on.

They include the likes of Hopin and Bizzabo — both of which have recently also raised big rounds — but also more enhanced services from the big, established players in videoconferencing like Zoom, Google, Microsoft, Cisco and more.

It’s no surprise to see Accenture throwing its hat into that ring as a backer of what it has decided is one of the more interesting technology players in that mix.

The reason is because many understand and now accept that — similar to working life in general — it’s very likely that even when we do return to “live” events, the virtual component, and the expectation that it will work well and be compelling enough to watch, is here to stay.

“Digital disruption, distributed workforces, and customer experience are the driving forces behind the need for companies to transform how they do business and move toward the future of work,” said Tom Lounibos, managing director, Accenture Ventures, in a statement. “For organizations to harness the power of virtual experiences to deliver business impact, the pandemic has shown that quality interactions and insights are needed. Our investment in Touchcast demonstrates our commitment to identifying the latest technologies that help address our clients’ critical business needs.”

Edtech is so widespread, we already need more consumer-friendly nomenclature to describe the products, services and tools it encompasses.

I know someone who reads stories to their grandchildren on two continents via Zoom each weekend. Is that “edtech?”

Similarly, many Netflix subscribers sought out online chess instructors after watching “The Queen’s Gambit,” but I doubt if they all ran searches for “remote learning” first.

Edtech needs to reach beyond underfunded public school systems to become more sustainable, which is why more investors and founders are focusing on lifelong learning.

Besides serving traditional students with field trips and art classes, a maturing sector is now branching out to offer software tutors, cooking classes and singing lessons.

For our latest investor survey, Natasha Mascarenhas polled 13 edtech VCs to learn more about how “employer-led up-skilling and a renewed interest in self-improvement” is expanding the sector’s TAM.

Here’s who she spoke to:

• Deborah Quazzo, managing partner, GSV Ventures
• Ashley Bittner, founding partner, Firework Ventures (a future of work fund with portfolio companies LearnIn and TransfrVR)
• Jomayra Herrera, principal, Cowboy Ventures (a generalist fund with portfolio companies Hone and Guild Education)
• John Danner, managing partner, Dunce Capital (an edtech and future of work fund with portfolio companies Lambda School and Outschool)
• Mercedes Bent and Bradley Twohig, partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners (a multistage generalist fund with investments including Forage, Clever and Outschool)
• Ian Chiu, managing director, Owl Ventures (a large edtech-focused fund backing highly valued companies including Byju’s, Newsela and Masterclass)
• Jan Lynn-Matern, founder and partner, Emerge Education (a leading edtech seed fund in Europe with portfolio companies like Aula, Unibuddy and BibliU)
• Benoit Wirz, partner, Brighteye Ventures (an active edtech-focused venture capital fund in Europe that backs YouSchool, Lightneer and Aula)
• Charles Birnbaum, partner, Bessemer Venture Partners (a generalist fund with portfolio companies including Guild Education and Brightwheel)
• Daniel Pianko, co-founder and managing director, University Ventures (a higher ed and future of work fund that is backing Imbellus and Admithub)
• Rebecca Kaden, managing partner, Union Square Ventures (a generalist fund with portfolio companies including TopHat, Quizlet, Duolingo)
• Andreata Muforo, partner, TLCom Capital (a generalist fund backing uLesson)

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In other news: Extra Crunch Live, a series of interviews with leading investors and entrepreneurs, returns next month with a full slate of guests. This year, we’re adding a new feature: Our guests will analyze pitch decks submitted by members of the audience to identify their strengths and weaknesses.

If you’d like an expert eye on your deck, please sign up for Extra Crunch and join the conversation.

Thanks very much for reading! I hope you have a fantastic weekend — we’ve all earned it.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

13 investors say lifelong learning is taking edtech mainstream

Rising African venture investment powers fintech, clean tech bets in 2020

After falling into yesterday’s wild news cycle, Alex Wilhelm returned to The Exchange this morning with a close look at venture capital activity across Africa in 2020.

“Comparing aggregate 2020 figures to 2019 results, it appears that last year was a somewhat robust year for African startups, albeit one with fewer large rounds,” he found.

For more context, he interviewed Dario Giuliani, the director of research firm Briter Bridges, which focuses on emerging markets in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Talent and capital are shifting cybersecurity investors’ focus away from Silicon Valley

New cybersecurity ecosystems are popping up in different parts of the world.

Some of of that growth has been fueled by an exodus from the Bay Area, but many early-stage security startups already have deep roots in East Coast cities like Boston and New York.

In the United Kingdom and Europe, government innovation programs have helped entrepreneurs close higher numbers of Series A and B rounds.

Investor interest and expertise is migrating out of Silicon Valley: This post will help you understand where it’s going.

Will Apple’s spectacular iPhone 12 sales figures boost the smartphone industry in 2021?

Today’s smartphones are unfathomably feature-rich and durable, so it’s logical that sales have slowed.

A phone purchased 18 months ago is probably “good enough” for many consumers, especially in times of economic uncertainty.

Then again, of the record $111.4 billion in revenue Apple earned last quarter, $65.68 billion came from phone sales, largely driven by the release of the iPhone 12.

Even though “Apple’s success this quarter was kind of a perfect storm,” writes Hardware Editor Brian Heater, “it’s safe to project a rebound for the industry at large in 2021.”

The 5 biggest mistakes I made as a first-time startup founder

Finmark co-founder and CEO Rami Essaid wrote a post for Extra Crunch that candidly describes the traps he laid for himself that made him a less-effective entrepreneur.

As someone who’s worked closely with founders at several startups, each of the points he raised resonated deeply with me.

In my experience, many founders have a hard time delegating, which can quickly create cultural and operational problems. Rami’s experience bears this out:

“I became a human GPS: People could follow my directions, but they struggled to find the way themselves. Independent thinking suffered.”

Dear Sophie: How can I sponsor my mom and stepdad for green cards?

Dear Sophie:

I just got my U.S. citizenship! My husband and I want to bring my mom and her husband to the U.S. to help us take care of our preschooler and toddler.

My biological dad passed away several years ago when I was an adult and my mom has since remarried.

Can they get green cards?

— Appreciative in Aptos

Check out the amazing speakers joining us on Extra Crunch Live in February

Next month, Extra Crunch Live returns with a lineup of guests who are extremely well-qualified to discuss early-stage startups.

Each Wednesday at noon PPST/3 p.m. EST, join a conversation with founders and the investors who backed their companies:

February 3:

Gaurav Gupta (Lightspeed Venture Partners) + Raj Dutt (Grafana Labs)

February 10:

Aydin Senkut (Felicis Ventures) + Kevin Busque (Guideline)

February 17:

Steve Loughlin (Accel) + Jason Boehmig (Ironclad)

February 24:

Matt Harris (Bain Capital) + Isaac Oates (Justworks)

Also, we’re adding a new feature to Extra Crunch Live — our guests will offer advice and feedback on pitch decks submitted by Extra Crunch members in the audience!

10 VCs say interactivity, regulation and independent creators will reshape digital media in 2021

Since the pandemic disrupted the social rhythms of work and school, many of us have compensated by changing our relationship to digital media.

For instance, I purchased a new sofa and thicker living room curtains several months ago when I realized we have no idea when movie theaters will reopen.

Last year, podcast sponsors spent almost $800 million to reach listeners, but ad revenue is estimated to surpass $1 billion this year. Clearly, I’m not the only person who used a discount code to buy a new product in 2020.

At this point, I can scarcely keep track of the multiple streaming platforms I’m subscribed to, but a new voice-activated remote control that comes with my basic cable plan makes it easier to browse my options.

Media reporter Anthony Ha spoke to10 VCs who invest in media startups to learn more about where they see digital media heading in the months ahead. For starters, how much longer can we expect traditional advertising models to persist?

And in a world with hundreds of channels, how are creators supposed to compete for our attention? What sort of discovery tools can we expect to help us navigate between a police procedural set in a Scandinavian village and a 90s sitcom reboot?

Here’s who Anthony interviewed:

• Daniel Gulati, founding partner, Forecast Fund
• Alex Gurevich, managing director, Javelin Venture Partners
• Matthew Hartman, partner, Betaworks Ventures
• Jerry Lu, senior associate, Maveron
• Jana Messerschmidt, partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Michael Palank, general partner, MaC Venture Capital (with additional commentary from MaC’s Marlon Nichols)
• Pär-Jörgen Pärson, general partner, Northzone
• M.G. Siegler, general partner, GV
• Laurel Touby, managing director, Supernode Ventures
• Hans Tung, managing partner, GGV Capital

Normally, we list each investor’s responses separately, but for this survey, we grouped their responses by question. Some readers say they use our surveys to study up on an individual VC before pitching them, so let us know which format you prefer.

Does a $27 billion or $29 billion valuation make sense for Databricks?

Data analytics platform Databricks is reportedly raising new capital that could value the company between $27 billion and $29 billion.

By the end of Q3 2020, Databricks had surpassed a $350 million run rate — a $150 million YoY increase, reports Alex Wilhelm.

At the time, he described the company as “an obvious IPO candidate” with “broad private-market options.”

Which begs the question: “Can we come up with a set of numbers that help make sense of Databricks at $27 billion?”

End-to-end operators are the next generation of consumer business

Rapid shifts in the way we buy goods and services disrupted old-school marketplaces like local newspapers and the Yellow Pages.

Today, I can use my phone to summon a plumber, a week’s worth of groceries or a ride to a doctor’s office.

End-to-end operators like Netflix, Peloton and Lemonade take a lot of time and energy to reach scale, but “the additional capital required is often outweighed by the value captured from owning the entire experience.”

Unpacking Chamath Palihapitiya’s SPAC deals for Latch and Sunlight Financial

On January 25, Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya tweeted that he was making two blank-check deals.

Enterprise SaaS company Latch makes keyless entry systems; Sunlight Financial helps consumers finance residential solar power installations.

“There are nearly 300 SPACs in the market today looking for deals,” noted Alex Wilhelm, who unpacked both transactions.

“There’s no escaping SPACs for a bit, so if you are tired of watching blind pools rip private companies into the public markets, you are not going to have a very good next few months.”

Fintechs could see $100 billion of liquidity in 2021

On Monday, we published the Matrix Fintech Index, a three-part study that weighs liquidity, public markets and e-commerce trends to create a snapshot of an industry in perpetual flux.

For four years running, the S&P 500 and incumbent financial services companies have been outperformed by companies like Afterpay, Square and Bill.com.

In light of steady VC investment, increasing consumer adoption and a crowded IPO pipeline, “fintech represents one of the most exciting major innovation cycles of this decade.”

Drupal’s journey from dorm-room project to billion-dollar exit

On January 15, 2001, then-college student Dries Buytaert released Drupal 1.0.0, an open-source content-management platform. At the time, about 7% of the world’s population was online.

After raising more than $180 million, Buytaert exited to Vista Equity Partners for $1 billion in 2019.

Enterprise reporter Ron Miller interviewed Buytaert to learn more about his 18-year journey.

“His story is compelling, but it also offers lessons for startup founders who also want to build something big,” says Ron.

Vimeo has raised $150 million in new equity funding, announced in conjunction with the third quarter earnings of its parent company IAC.

In a letter to shareholders, IAC CEO Joey Levin said the company has “begun contemplating spinning Vimeo off to our shareholders.”

“Given Vimeo’s success, and investor adulation for the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) category generally, we expect Vimeo’s access to capital inside of IAC will be much more expensive than access to capital outside of IAC, and that capital will be helpful to enable Vimeo to achieve its highest ambitions,” Levin continued, adding, “We just tested Vimeo’s ability to access capital with a small private fundraise to bolster Vimeo’s balance sheet and to repay capital to IAC.”

Over the summer, Match Group (which owns a variety of dating services, including Tinder) completed its separation from IAC, with IAC’s ownership distributed to IAC shareholders.

Vimeo, meanwhile, has shifted its focus over the past couple years — instead of trying to compete with YouTube as a consumer video destination, it sells video tools to enterprises and other businesses. For example, it recently launched a free video messaging product called Vimeo Record.

The company says it has 1.5 million paying subscribers and more than 3,500 enterprise clients, including Amazon, Starbucks, Deloitte, Zendesk, Rite Aid and Siemens.

The new funding comes from Thrive Capital and GIC. According to the earnings report, in Q3, Vimeo grew revenue by 44% year-over-year, to $75.1 million. And it had its first quarter of positive EBITDA — $3.4 million.

“Our goal is to radically simplify how businesses create and share video, with tools that are far more intuitive and cost-effective than they’ve been historically,” said Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud in a statement. “We’re energized to access additional capital to pursue this enormous opportunity with the full focus and scale of the Vimeo platform.”

As investors’ appetites sour in the midst of a pandemic, a three-and-a-half-year-old Indian firm has secured $10.3 billion in a month from Facebook and four U.S.-headquartered private equity firms.

The major deals for Reliance Jio Platforms have sparked a sudden interest among analysts, executives and readers at a time when many are skeptical of similar big check sizes that some investors wrote to several young startups, many of which are today struggling to make sense of their finances.

Prominent investors across the globe, including in India, have in recent weeks cautioned startups that they should be prepared for the “worst time” as new checks become elusive.

Elsewhere in India, the world’s second-largest internet market and where all startups together raised a record $14.5 billion last year, firms are witnessing down rounds (where their valuations are slashed). Miten Sampat, an angel investor, said last week that startups should expect a 40%-50% haircut in their valuations if they do get an investment offer.

Facebook’s $5.7 billion investment valued the company at $57 billion. But U.S. private equity firms Silver Lake, Vista, General Atlantic, and KKR — all the other deals announced in the past five weeks — are paying a 12.5% premium for their stake in Jio Platforms, valuing it at $65 billion.

How did an Indian firm become so valuable? What exactly does it do? Is it just as unprofitable as Uber? What does its future look like? Why is it raising so much money? And why is it making so many announcements instead of one.

It’s a long story.

Run up to the launch of Jio

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani gave a rundown of his gigantic Indian empire at a gathering in December 2015 packed with 35,000 people including hundreds of Bollywood celebrities and industry titans.

“Reliance Industries has the second-largest polyester business in the world. We produce one and a half million tons of polyester for fabrics a year, which is enough to give every Indian 5 meters of fabric every year, year-on-year,” said Ambani, who is Asia’s richest man.