Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Factorial, a startup out of Barcelona that has built a platform that lets SMBs run human resources functions with the same kind of tools that typically are used by much bigger companies, is today announcing some funding to bulk up its own position: the company has raised $80 million, funding that it will be using to expand its operations geographically — specifically deeper into Latin American markets — and to continue to augment its product with more features.

CEO Jordi Romero, who co-founded the startup with Pau Ramon and Bernat Farrero — said in an interview that Factorial has seen a huge boom of growth in the last 18 months and counts more than anything 75,000 customers across 65 countries, with the average size of each customer in the range of 100 employees, although they can be significantly (single-digit) smaller or potentially up to 1,000 (the “M” of SMB, or SME as it’s often called in Europe).

“We have a generous definition of SME,” Romero said of how the company first started with a target of 10-15 employees but is now working in the size bracket that it is. “But that is the limit. This is the segment that needs the most help. We see other competitors of ours are trying to move into SME and they are screwing up their product by making it too complex. SMEs want solutions that have as much data as possible in one single place. That is unique to the SME.” Customers can include smaller franchises of much larger organizations, too: KFC, Booking.com, and Whisbi are among those that fall into this category for Factorial.

Factorial offers a one-stop shop to manage hiring, onboarding, payroll management, time off, performance management, internal communications and more. Other services such as the actual process of payroll or sourcing candidates, it partners and integrates closely with more localized third parties.

The Series B is being led by Tiger Global, and past investors CRV, Creandum, Point Nine and K Fund also participating, at a valuation we understand from sources close to the deal to be around $530 million post-money. Factorial has raised $100 million to date, including a $16 million Series A round in early 2020, just ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic really taking hold of the world.

That timing turned out to be significant: Factorial, as you might expect of an HR startup, was shaped by Covid-19 in a pretty powerful way.

The pandemic, as we have seen, massively changed how — and where — many of us work. In the world of desk jobs, offices largely disappeared overnight, with people shifting to working at home in compliance with shelter-in-place orders to curb the spread of the virus, and then in many cases staying there even after those were lifted as companies grappled both with balancing the best (and least infectious) way forward and their own employees’ demands for safety and productivity. Front-line workers, meanwhile, faced a completely new set of challenges in doing their jobs, whether it was to minimize exposure to the coronavirus, or dealing with giant volumes of demand for their services. Across both, organizations were facing economics-based contractions, furloughs, and in other cases, hiring pushes, despite being office-less to carry all that out.

All of this had an impact on HR. People who needed to manage others, and those working for organizations, suddenly needed — and were willing to pay for — new kinds of tools to carry out their roles.

But it wasn’t always like this. In the early days, Romero said the company had to quickly adjust to what the market was doing.

“We target HR leaders and they are currently very distracted with furloughs and layoffs right now, so we turned around and focused on how we could provide the best value to them,” Romero said to me during the Series A back in early 2020. Then, Factorial made its product free to use and found new interest from businesses that had never used cloud-based services before but needed to get something quickly up and running to use while working from home (and that cloud migration turned out to be a much bigger trend played out across a number of sectors). Those turning to Factorial had previously kept all their records in local files or at best a “Dropbox folder, but nothing else,” Romero said.

It also provided tools specifically to address the most pressing needs HR people had at the time, such as guidance on how to implement furloughs and layoffs, best practices for communication policies and more. “We had to get creative,” Romero said.

But it wasn’t all simple. “We did suffer at the beginning,” Romero now says. “People were doing furloughs and [frankly] less attention was being paid to software purchasing. People were just surviving. Then gradually, people realized they needed to improve their systems in the cloud, to manage remote people better, and so on.” So after a couple of very slow months, things started to take off, he said.

Factorial’s rise is part of a much, longer-term bigger trend in which the enterprise technology world has at long last started to turn its attention to how to take the tools that originally were built for larger organizations, and right size them for smaller customers.

The metrics are completely different: large enterprises are harder to win as customers, but represent a giant payoff when they do sign up; smaller enterprises represent genuine scale since there are so many of them globally — 400 million, accounting for 95% of all firms worldwide. But so are the product demands, as Romero pointed out previously: SMBs also want powerful tools, but they need to work in a more efficient, and out-of-the-box way.

Factorial is not the only HR startup that has been honing in on this, of course. Among the wider field are PeopleHR, Workday, Infor, ADP, Zenefits, Gusto, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Rippling; and a very close competitor out of Europe, Germany’s Personio, raised $125 million on a $1.7 billion valuation earlier this year, speaking not just to the opportunity but the success it is seeing in it.

But the major fragmentation in the market, the fact that there are so many potential customers, and Factorial’s own rapid traction are three reasons why investors approached the startup, which was not proactively seeking funding when it decided to go ahead with this Series B.

“The HR software market opportunity is very large in Europe, and Factorial is incredibly well positioned to capitalize on it,” said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global, in a statement. “Our diligence found a product that delighted customers and a world-class team well-positioned to achieve Factorial’s potential.”

“It is now clear that labor markets around the world have shifted over the past 18 months,” added Reid Christian, general partner at CRV, which led its previous round, which had been CRV’s first investment in Spain. “This has strained employers who need to manage their HR processes and properly serve their employees. Factorial was always architected to support employers across geographies with their HR and payroll needs, and this has only accelerated the demand for their platform. We are excited to continue to support the company through this funding round and the next phase of growth for the business.”

Notably, Romero told me that the fundraising process really evolved between the two rounds, with the first needing him flying around the world to meet people, and the second happening over video links, while he was recovering himself from Covid-19. Given that it was not too long ago that the most ambitious startups in Europe were encouraged to relocate to the U.S. if they wanted to succeed, it seems that it’s not just the world of HR that is rapidly shifting in line with new global conditions.

Companies like Stripe and Twilio have put APIs front and center as an effective way to integrate complex functionality that may not be core to your own technology stack but is a necessary part of your wider business. Today, a company that has taken that model to create an effective way to integrate email, calendars and other tools into other apps using APIs is announcing a big round of funding to expand its business.

Nylas, which describes itself as a communications API platform — enabling more automation particularly in business apps by integrating productivity tools through a few lines of code — has raised $120 million in funding, money that it will be using to continue expanding the kinds of APIs that it offers, with a focus in particular not just on productivity apps, but AI and related tools to bring more automation into workflows.

Nylas is not disclosing its valuation, but this is a very significant step up for the company at a time when it is seeing strong traction.

This is more than double what Nylas had raised up to now ($55 million since being founded in 2015), and when it last raised — a $16 million Series B in 2018 — it said it had “thousands of developers” among its users. Now, that number has ballooned to 80,000, with Nylas processing some 1.2 billion API requests each day, working out to 20 terabytes of data, daily. It also said that revenue growth tripled in the last 12 months.

The Series C is bringing a number of interesting names to Nylas’s cap table. New investor Tiger Global Management is leading the round, with previous backers Citi Ventures, Slack Fund, 8VC and Round13 Capital also participating. Other new backers in this round include Owl Rock Capital, a division of Blue Owl; Stripe co-founders Patrick Collison and John Collison; Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski; and Tony Fadell.

As with other companies in the so-called API economy, the gap and opportunity that Nylas has identified is that there are a lot of productivity tools that largely exist in their own silos — meaning when a person wants to use them when working in an application, they have to open a separate application to do so. At the same time, building new, say, tools, or building a bridge to integrate an existing application, can be time-consuming and complex.

Nylas first identified this issue with email. An integration to make it easier to use email and the data housed in it — which works with emails from major providers like Microsoft and Google, as well as other services built with the IMAP protocol — in other apps picked up a lot of followers, leading the company to expand into other areas that today include scheduling and calendaring, a neural API to build in tools like sentiment analysis or productivity or workflow automation; and security integrations to streamline the Google OAuth security review process (used for example in an app geared at developers).

“The fundamental shift towards digital communications and connectivity has resulted in companies across all industries increasingly leaning on developers to solve critical business challenges and build unique and engaging products and experiences. As a result, APIs have become core to modern software development and digital transformation,” Gleb Polyakov, co-founder and CEO of Nylas, said in statement.

“Through our suite of powerful APIs, we’re arming developers with the tools and applications needed to meet customer and market needs faster, create competitive differentiation through powerful and customized user experiences, and generate operational ROI through more productive and intelligently automated processes and development cycles. We’re thrilled to continue advancing our mission to make the world more productive and are honored to have the backing of distinguished investors and entrepreneurs.”

Indeed, the rise of Nylas and the function it fulfills is part of a bigger shift we’ve seen in businesses overall: as organizations become more digitized and use more cloud-based apps to get work done, developers have emerged as key mechanics to help that machine run. A bigger emphasis on APIs to integrate services together is part of their much-used toolkit, one of the defining reasons for investors backing Nylas today.

“Companies are rapidly adopting APIs as a way to automate productivity and find new and innovative ways to support modern work and collaboration,” said John Curtius, a partner at Tiger, in a statement. “This trend has become critical to creating frictionless and meaningful data-driven communications that power digital transformation. We believe Nylas is uniquely positioned to lead the future of the API economy.” Curtius is joining the board with this round.

Corrected to note that Blue Owl is not connected to State Farm.

E-commerce is on the rise, but that also means the risk, and occurrence, of e-commerce fraud is, too. Now, Forter, one of the startups building a business to tackle that malicious activity, has closed $300 million in funding — a sign both of the size of the issue and its success in tackling it to date.

The new funding, a Series F, values Forter at $3 billion — notable not least because the funding is coming only about six months since Forter’s previous round, a $125 million Series E that valued it at over $1.3 billion.

Tiger Global Management is leading this latest equity infusion, with new backers Third Point Ventures and Adage Capital Management, and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, March Capital, NewView Capital, Salesforce Ventures and Scale Venture Partners, also involved.

The plan will be to use to the money to expand Forter — founded in Tel Aviv and now based in New York — geographically, bring more functionality into its product and explore adjacent areas where Forter might expand its capabilities, either organically or by way of acquisition.

Forter today focuses mainly on identifying fraud at the point of transaction and building an AI-based platform that “learns” more behaviors to improve its accuracy; it also builds models that keep more people transacting and helps bring down the number of “false positives” where activity that appears suspicious actually is not.

One area on its roadmap for expansion is remediation after the fraud occurs, said Liron Damri, Forter’s co-founder and president.

“Our vision is to serve the merchant as the go-to trusted partner for everything, so remediation is definitely on our roadmap,” he said of potential acquisition targets.

Damri, who co-founded the company with Michael Reitblat, CEO, and Alon Shemesh, chief analyst, said in an interview that the startup — which works with some 350 large customers like Priceline and Instacart and a growing number of service providers like FreedomPay and Flutterwave, altogether seeing some $250 billion worth of transactions globally last year — wasn’t proactively looking for more money.

“All we wanted to do was go back to run the company,” he said. “But in the past six months we’ve seen such a great momentum, doubling revenue and ARR, and seeing our customer volumes grow.”

That led to a lot of investors proactively reaching out and asking questions, he continued. He described Tiger as a “kingmaker” in the category of e-commerce, so it was an easy decision to make, and gave it the “gas” it needed to take its next growth steps.

E-commerce has been one of the major technology growth stories of the last year, fueled by a rush of consumers and businesses playing out their lives online at a time when it has been harder, and in some cases impossible, to transact in person.

While we have definitely seen a lot of growth, and growing sophistication, in the number of tools on the market to combat cybercrime, it’s in some ways an ouroboros of a problem: The more transactions that are made, the more there are that need to be monitored for suspicious activity. And in any case, fraud in e-commerce is not exactly going away. It’s estimated that it will cost retailers some $20 billion in 2021 and is always on the rise.

Forter got its start in 2013 focusing first on monitoring activity on sites wherever customers happened to be to identify suspicious behavior — a sign that it might be a bot or someone on an illicit spending spree racking up a lot of items in quick succession — with the bigger concept being to build a network of activity from which to learn and help make more informed decisions over time.

In more recent years, the essence of the issue has expanded somewhat, and also grown more sophisticated. As companies have grown their businesses to reach beyond early adopters and core audiences, and into a more “omnichannel” environment beyond basic check-outs on their own sites, so too have the kinds of consumers coming to shop.

This has meant that traditional “signals” of legitimate buyers no longer were the same as before — a predicament that really rose in profile in the last year, as many newcomers came to e-commerce for the first time during the pandemic. In fact, Damri told me that in 2020 there were seven times more “newcomers” to sites than in 2019.

So with most of the flagging of suspicious activity coming up at the point of transaction, Forter expanded to analyzing activity there.

As with a recent acquisition of Stripe’s, Bouncer, to build out its own anti-fraud product, a large part of Forter’s attention these days is on providing tools to companies to identify suspicious purchasing, but even more than that, to make sure that the many occasions that might look suspicious are not, to help reduce the amount of “cart abandonment” and increase conversions.

The old way of doing things, Damri said, involved “thousands of rules and applying suspicion on everyone. You were guilty unless proved otherwise.”

Using its AI engine and some risk analysis (not unlike the kind that, say, an insurance or loan provider might apply in their businesses), Forter turned the proposition on its head.

“We wanted to approve as much as possible. We wanted to gradually increase the trust you have of your own customers. We changed the sentiment and approach… especially in areas that were neglected, such as those who saw significant changes in life,” Damri said. “This was extremely important as COVID-19 hit.”

Forter’s risk tolerance model, it seems, has so far proven out. Damri said that its algorithms applied reduce the total number of declines by 80%, but also reduce the number of chargebacks — one indicator of a mistake — by 60%.

This implies that it’s blocking more of the “wrong” kind of purchases, and letting through more of the legitimate ones. (That is, he pointed out, in addition to a few bad actors Forter intentionally lets buy things, just to learn how they operate. Damri referred to this as “paid-tuition.”)

Risk-based approvals, coupled with algorithms to learn what is truly bad, has resonated with customers, and investors.

“With the unprecedented rate of digital transformation and the fierce competition in creating the slickest user experience, superior fraud prevention plays an ever more critical role in e-commerce revenue growth” said John Curtius, a partner at Tiger Global Management, in a statement. “After we talked with dozens of customers of every relevant solution in this space, it was very clear to us that Forter is the clear leader in performance and scale.”

“As a longtime investor, it’s been incredible to see Forter’s ascent,” added Ravi Viswanathan, NewView Capital. “It’s a testament to the leadership team’s vision and execution in allowing merchants to provide the seamless experiences customers expect and to be able to accept as many transactions as possible, while still accurately identifying and blocking fraud.”

BigID has been on the investment fast track, raising $94 million over three rounds that started in January 2018. Today, that investment train kept rolling as the company announced a $70 million Series D on a valuation of $1 billion.

Salesforce Ventures and Tiger Global co-led the round with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners and Boldstart Ventures. The company has raised almost $165 million in just over two years.

BigID is attracting this kind of investment by building a security and privacy platform. When I first spoke to CEO and co-founder Dimitri Sirota in 2018, he was developing a data discovery product aimed at helping companies coping with GDPR find the most sensitive data, but since then the startup has greatly expanded the vision and the mission.

“We started shifting I think when we spoke back in September from being this kind of best of breed data discovery privacy to being a platform anchored in data intelligence through our kind of unique approach to discovery and insight,” he said.

That includes the ability for BigID and third parties to build applications on top of the platform they have built, something that might have attracted investor Salesforce Ventures. Salesforce was the first cloud company to offer the ability for third parties to build applications on its platform and sell them in a marketplace. Sirota says that so far their marketplace includes just apps built by BigID, but the plan is to expand it to third-party developers in 2021.

While he wasn’t ready to talk about specific revenue growth, he said he expects a material uplift in revenue for this year, and he believes that his investors are looking at the vast market potential here.

He has 235 employees today with plans to boost it to 300 next year. While he stopped hiring for a time in Q2 this year as the pandemic took hold, he says that he never had to resort to layoffs. As he continues hiring in 2021, he is looking at diversity at all levels from the makeup of his board to the executive level to the general staff.

He says that the ability to use the early investments to expand internationally has given them the opportunity to build a more diverse workforce. “We have staff around the world and we did very early […] so we do have diversity within our broader company. But clearly not enough when it came to the board of directors and the executives. So we realized that, and we are trying to change that,” he said.

As for this round, Sirota says like his previous rounds in this cycle he wasn’t necessarily looking for additional money, but with the pandemic economy still precarious, he took it to keep building out the BigID platform. “We actually have not purposely gone out to raise money since our seed. Every round we’ve done has been preemptive. So it’s been fairly easy,” he told me. In fact, he reports that he now has five years of runway and a much more fully developed platform. He is aiming to accelerate sales and marketing in 2021.

The company’s previous rounds included a $14 million Series A in January 2018, a $30 million B in June that year and a $50 million C in September 2019.

Organizations today are sitting on mountains of data that they amass and use in their own businesses, but many are also looking to share those troves with other parties to expand their prospects — a model that comes with challenges (privacy and data protection being two key ones); and, these days (due to COVID-19 and the push to more digital transformation), with urgency; but also big rewards if you can pull it off well.

Today, a new London startup called Harbr, which has built a secure platform to enable big data exchange, is announcing a big round of funding to tap into that demand.

The company has raised $38.5 million in a Series A round of funding, just six months since emerging from stealth mode. It plans to use the money to hire more people to meet the demand of serving more enterprise customers, and for R&D.

Led jointly by new backers Dawn Capital and Tiger Global Management, the round also had participation from past investors Mike Chalfen, Boldstart Ventures, Crane Venture Partners, Backed and Seedcamp, alongside UiPath’s founder and CEO Daniel Dines and head of strategy Brandon Deer. Harbr has now raised over $50 million, and it’s not disclosing its valuation.

Harbr has been around since 2017, but it only came out of stealth mode earlier this year, in May. Its approach has mirrored that of a lot of other enterprise startups that spend a long time building their product under wraps. Identifying the market opportunity when it was still nascent, Harbr then worked directly (and quietly) with enterprises to figure out what they needed and built it, before launching it as a commercial product (with customers already in hand).

“Back in 2017 no one was talking about enterprise data exchanges,” Harbr’s CSO Anthony Cosgrove (who co-founded the company with Gary Butler, the CEO) told me in an interview. “So we worked with big companies to understand their needs and built Harbr based on that.”

Customers include those in financial and enterprise services such as Moody’s Analytics and WinterCorp, as well as governments. Cosgrove noted that nearly 100% of Harbr’s clients are in the U.S., where the startup’s chairman Leo Spiegel is based. Spiegel is also an investor, with an extensive enterprise data services resume to his name.

“This is a team that has worked together for a long time,” Spiegel said in an interview. “Gary [the CEO] and I have worked together for 20 years before Harbr. I have been in data a very long time, and we have a lot of relationships with U.S. companies.” (That is one sign of why this enterprise startup has raised a substantial amount of funding so early in its public life.)

Cosgrove, an MBE, himself has a background in banking and before that U.K. government.

The platform today provides enterprises with a way to tap into data that an organization may already have in data lakes and warehouses, which it already uses for analytics and business intelligence. The idea is to make that data ready and secure for enterprise data exchange, either with other parts of your own large organization, or with third parties. That involves creating a “clean room”, providing tools for making it accessible by third parties, and potentially turning it into a data marketplace, if that is your goal.

Image Credits: Harbr

The challenges that Harbr addresses come from a couple of different angles. The first of these is technical: putting data troves from disparate sources into a format that can be usable by others. The second of these is commercial: creating something that you can then provide to others, but also making that marketplace findable and usable. The third of these is security.

Cosgrove said that he doesn’t think of Harbr as a security company first, but he points out that these days this has become as much of a concern (if not more) than simply making a data product usable. Being able to protect your data as valuable IP is important, but on top of that, you have the roles of privacy and data protection.

These have moved from being fringe concerns to a priority for many users, and, in an increasing number of cases, a legal requirement. So, as companies look for ways to tap into the big data opportunity while keeping those principles in mind, they are looking for companies built with privacy and data protection from the ground up.

“We’re really focused on helping people to treat data as a product. They bring assets into a platform and turn them into data products that are easy to consume, use and merge,” said Cosgrove. “We see security as a by-product of that: you have to consider security as part of it.” Harbr the name is a play on Harbor, which itself is a reference to safe harbor principles and regulations.

Harbr is not the only company looking at this opportunity. InfoSum, also out of the U.K., is also tackling the concept of a privacy-first approach to federated data, providing a way to share data across organizations without compromising data protection in any way. DataFleets out of the Bay Area is another startup also building a platform and tools to help enterprises with this challenge and opportunity.

“For data to become truly powerful, we need more automation and collaboration. Today, human efforts are consumed by finding and preparing data, rather than focused on high-value activities that drive real productivity gains,” said Evgenia Plotnikova, partner at Dawn Capital, in a statement. “Harbr is in the vanguard of companies changing this reality, and we are incredibly excited to be partnering with them. Customers we’ve spoken to find Harbr’s enterprise data exchange transformative, and their engagement across Fortune 1000 companies substantiates this.”

Retailers and consumer brands are focused more than ever in their histories on using e-commerce channels to connect with customers: the global health pandemic has disrupted much of their traditional business in places like physical stores, event venues and restaurants, and vending machines, and accelerated the hunt for newer ways to sell goods and services. Today, a startup that’s been helping them build those bridges, specifically to expand into newer markets, is announcing a huge round of funding, underscoring the demand.

VTEX, which builds e-commerce solutions and strategies for retailers like Walmart and huge consumer names like AB InBev, Motorola, Stanley Black & Decker, Sony, Walmart, Whirlpool, Coca-Cola and Nestlé, has raised $225 million in new funding, valuing the company at $1.7 billion post-money.

The funding is being co-led by two investors, Tiger Global and Lone Pine Capital, with Constellation, Endeavour Catalyst and SoftBank also participating. It’s a mix of investors, with two leads, that offers a “signal” of what might come next for the startup, said Amit Shah, the company’s chief strategy officer and general manager for North America.

“We’ve seen them invest in big rounds right before companies go public,” he said. “Now, that’s not necessarily happening here right now, but it’s a signal.” The company has been profitable and plans to continue to be, Shah said (making it one example of a SoftBank investment that hasn’t gone sour). Revenues this year are up 114% with $8 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV) processed over platforms it’s built.

Given that VTEX last raised money less than a year ago — a $140 million round led by SoftBank’s Latin American Innovation Fund — the valuation jump for the startup is huge. Shah confirmed to us that it represents a 4x increase on its previous valuation (which would have been $425 million).

The interest back in November from SoftBank’s Latin American fund stemmed from VTEX’s beginnings.

The company got its start building e-commerce storefronts and strategies for businesses that were hoping to break into Brazil — the B of the world’s biggest emerging “BRIC” markets — and the rest of Latin America. It made its name building Walmart in the region, and has continued to help run and develop that operation even after Walmart divested the asset, and it’s working with Walmart now in other regions outside the US, too, he added.

But since then, while the Latin American arm of the business has continued to thrive, the company has capitalized both on the funding it had picked up, and the current global climate for e-commerce solutions, to expand its business into more markets, specifically North America, EMEA and most recently Asia.

“We are today even more impressed by the quality and energy of the VTEX team than we were when we invested in the previous round,” said Marcello Silva at Constellation. “The best is yet to come. VTEX’s team is stronger than ever, VTEX’s product is stronger than ever, and we are still in the early stages of ecommerce penetration. We could not miss the opportunity to increase our exposure.”

Revenues were growing at a rate of 50% a year before the pandemic ahead of it’s more recent growth this year of 114%, Shah said. “Of course, we would prefer Covid-19 not to be here, but it has had a good effect on our business. The arc of e-commerce has grown has impacted revenues and created that additional level of investor interest.”

VTEX’s success has hinged not just on catering to companies that have up to now not prioritized their online channels, but in doing so in a way that is more unified.

Consumer packaged goods have been in a multi-faceted bind because of the fragmented way in which they have grown. A drinks brand will not only manufacture on a local level (and sometimes, as in the case of, say, Coca-Cola, use different ingredient formulations), but they will often have products that are only sold in select markets, and because the audiences are different, they’ve devise marketing and distribution strategies on a local level, too.

On top of all that, products like these have long relied on channels like retailers, restaurants, vending machines and more to get their products into the hands of consumers.

These days, of course, all of that has been disrupted: all the traditional channels they would have used to sell things are now either closed or seeing greatly reduced custom. And as for marketing: the rise of social networks has led to a globalization in messaging, where something can go viral all over the world and marketing therefore knows no regional boundaries.

So, all of this means that brands have to rethink everything around how they sell their products, and that’s where a company like VTEX steps in, building strategies and solutions that can be used in multiple regions. Among typical deals, it’s been working with AB InBev to develop a global commerce platform covering 50 countries (replacing multiple products from other vendors, typically competitors to VTEX include SAP, Shopify and Magento, and giving brands and others a viable route to market that doesn’t cut in the likes of Amazon).

“CPG companies are seeking to standardize and make their businesses and lives a little easier,” Shah said. Typical work that it does includes building marketplaces for retailers, or new e-commerce interfaces so that brands can better supply online and offline retailers, or sell directly to customers — for example, with new ways of ordering products to get delivered by others. Shah said that some 200 marketplaces have now been built by VTEX for its customers.

(Shah himself, it’s worth pointing out, has a pedigree in startups and in e-commerce. He founded an e-commerce analytics company called Jirafe, which was acquired by SAP, where he then became the chief revenue officer of SAP Hybris.)

“We are excited to grow quickly in new and existing markets, and offer even more brands a platform that embraces the future of commerce, which is about being collaborative, leveraging marketplaces, and delivering customer experiences that are second-to-none,” said Mariano Gomide de Faria, VTEX co-founder and co-CEO, in a statement. “This injection of funding will undoubtedly support us in achieving our mission to accelerate digital commerce transformation around the world.”

As cybercrime continues to evolve and expand, a startup that is building a business focused on endpoint security has raised a big round of funding. SentinelOne — which provides a machine learning-based solution for monitoring and securing laptops, phones, containerised applications and the many other devices and services connected to a network — has picked up $200 million, a Series E round of funding that it says catapults its valuation to $1.1 billion.

The funding is notable not just for its size but for its velocity: it comes just eight months after SentinelOne announced a Series D of $120 million, which at the time valued the company around $500 million. In other words, the company has more than doubled its valuation in less than a year — a sign of the cybersecurity times.

This latest round is being led by Insight Partners, with Tiger Global Management, Qualcomm Ventures LLC, Vista Public Strategies of Vista Equity Partners, Third Point Ventures and other undisclosed previous investors all participating.

Tomer Weingarten, CEO and co-founder of the company, said in an interview that while this round gives SentinelOne the flexibility to remain in “startup” mode (privately funded) for some time — especially since it came so quickly on the heels of the previous large round — an IPO “would be the next logical step” for the company. “But we’re not in any rush,” he added. “We have one to two years of growth left as a private company.”

While cybercrime is proving to be a very expensive business (or very lucrative, I guess, depending on which side of the equation you sit on), it has also meant that the market for cybersecurity has significantly expanded.

Endpoint security, the area where SentinelOne concentrates its efforts, last year was estimated to be around an $8 billion market, and analysts project that it could be worth as much as $18.4 billion by 2024.

Driving it is the single biggest trend that has changed the world of work in the last decade. Everyone — whether a road warrior or a desk-based administrator or strategist, a contractor or full-time employee, a front-line sales assistant or back-end engineer or executive — is now connected to the company network, often with more than one device. And that’s before you consider the various other “endpoints” that might be connected to a network, including machines, containers and more. The result is a spaghetti of a problem. One survey from LogMeIn, disconcertingly, even found that some 30% of IT managers couldn’t identify just how many endpoints they managed.

“The proliferation of devices and the expanding network are the biggest issues today,” said Weingarten. “The landscape is expanding and it is getting very hard to monitor not just what your network looks like but what your attackers are looking for.”

This is where an AI-based solution like SentinelOne’s comes into play. The company has roots in the Israeli cyberintelligence community but is based out of Mountain View, and its platform is built around the idea of working automatically not just to detect endpoints and their vulnerabilities, but to apply behavioral models, and various modes of protection, detection and response in one go — in a product that it calls its Singularity Platform that works across the entire edge of the network.

“We are seeing more automated and real-time attacks that themselves are using more machine learning,” Weingarten said. “That translates to the fact that you need defence that moves in real time as with as much automation as possible.”

SentinelOne is by no means the only company working in the space of endpoint protection. Others in the space include Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec and many others.

But nonetheless, its product has seen strong uptake to date. It currently has some 3,500 customers, including three of the biggest companies in the world, and “hundreds” from the global 2,000 enterprises, with what it says has been 113% year-on-year new bookings growth, revenue growth of 104% year-on-year and 150% growth year-on-year in transactions over $2 million. It has 500 employees today and plans to hire up to 700 by the end of this year.

One of the key differentiators is the focus on using AI, and using it at scale to help mitigate an increasingly complex threat landscape, to take endpoint security to the next level.

“Competition in the endpoint market has cleared with a select few exhibiting the necessary vision and technology to flourish in an increasingly volatile threat landscape,” said Teddie Wardi, managing director of Insight Partners, in a statement. “As evidenced by our ongoing financial commitment to SentinelOne along with the resources of Insight Onsite, our business strategy and ScaleUp division, we are confident that SentinelOne has an enormous opportunity to be a market leader in the cybersecurity space.”

Weingarten said that SentinelOne “gets approached every year” to be acquired, although he didn’t name any names. Nevertheless, that also points to the bigger consolidation trend that will be interesting to watch as the company grows. SentinelOne has never made an acquisition to date, but it’s hard to ignore that, as the company to expand its products and features, that it might tap into the wider market to bring in other kinds of technology into its stack.

“There are definitely a lot of security companies out there,” Weingarten noted. “Those that serve a very specific market are the targets for consolidation.”

Almost exactly 4 months to the day after BigID announced a $50 million Series C, the company was back today with another $50 million round. The Series C extension came entirely from Tiger Global Management. The company has raised a total of $144 million.

What warrants $100 million in interest from investors in just four months is BigID’s mission to understand the data a company has and manage that in the context of increasing privacy regulation including GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California, which went into effect this month.

BigID CEO and co-founder Dimitri Sirota admits that his company formed at the right moment when it launched in 2016, but says he and his co-founders had an inkling that there would be a shift in how governments view data privacy.

“Fortunately for us, some of the requirements that we said were going to be critical, like being able to understand what data you collect on each individual across your entire data landscape, have come to [pass],” Sirota told TechCrunch. While he understands that there are lots of competing companies going after this market, he believes that being early helped his startup establish a brand identity earlier than most.

Meanwhile, the privacy regulation landscape continues to evolve. Even as California privacy legislation is taking effect, many other states and countries are looking at similar regulations. Canada is looking at overhauling its existing privacy regulations.

Sirota says that he wasn’t actually looking to raise either the C or the D, and in fact still has B money in the bank, but when big investors want to give you money on decent terms, you take it while the money is there. These investors clearly see the data privacy landscape expanding and want to get involved. He recognizes that economic conditions can change quickly, and it can’t hurt to have money in the bank for when that happens.

That said, Sirota says you don’t raise money to keep it in the bank. At some point, you put it to work. The company has big plans to expand beyond its privacy roots and into other areas of security in the coming year. Although he wouldn’t go into too much detail about that, he said to expect some announcements soon.

For a company that is only four years old, it has been amazingly proficient at raising money with a $14 million Series A and a $30 million Series B in 2018, followed by the $50 million Series C last year, and the $50 million round today. And Sirota said, he didn’t have to even go looking for the latest funding. Investors came to him — no trips to Sand Hill Road, no pitch decks. Sirota wasn’t willing to discuss the company’s valuation, only saying the investment was minimally diluted.

BigID, which is based in New York City, already has some employees in Europe and Asia, but he expects additional international expansion in 2020. Overall the company has around 165 employees at the moment and he sees that going up to 200 by mid-year as they make a push into some new adjacencies.

Splunk, the publicly traded data processing and analytics company, today announced that it has acquired SignalFx for a total price of about $1.05 billion. Approximately 60% of this will be in cash and 40% in Splunk common stock. The companies expect the acquisition to close in the second half of 2020.

SignalFx, which emerged from stealth in 2015, provides real-time cloud monitoring solutions, predictive analytics and more. Upon close, Splunk argues, this acquisition will allow it to become a leader “in observability and APM for organizations at every stage of their cloud journey, from cloud-native apps to homegrown on-premises applications.”

Indeed, the acquisition will likely make Splunk a far stronger player in the cloud space as it expands its support for cloud-native applications and the modern infrastructures and architectures those rely on.

Ahead of the acquisition, SignalFx had raised a total of $178.5 million, according to Crunchbase, including a recent Series E round. Investors include General Catalyst, Tiger Global Management, Andreessen Horowitz and CRV. Its customers include the likes of AthenaHealth, Change.org, Kayak, NBCUniversal and Yelp.

“Data fuels the modern business, and the acquisition of SignalFx squarely puts Splunk in position as a leader in monitoring and observability at massive scale,” said Doug Merritt, president and CEO, Splunk, in today’s announcement. “SignalFx will support our continued commitment to giving customers one platform that can monitor the entire enterprise application lifecycle. We are also incredibly impressed by the SignalFx team and leadership, whose expertise and professionalism are a strong addition to the Splunk family.”

Locus, an Indian startup that uses AI to help businesses map out their logistics, has raised $22 million in Series B funding to expand its operations in international markets.

The financing round for the four-year-old startup was led by Falcon Edge Capital and Tiger Global. Existing investors Exfinity Venture Partners and Blume Ventures also participated in the round. The startup has raised $29 million to date, Nishith Rastogi, co-founder and CEO of Locus, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Locus works with companies that operate in FMCG, logistics and e-commerce spaces. Some of its clients include Tata Group companies, Myntra, BigBasket, Lenskart and Bluedart. It helps these clients automate their logistics workload — tasks such as planning, organizing, transporting and tracking of inventories, and finding the best path to reach a destination — that have traditionally required intensive human labor.

“Say a Lenskart representative is visiting a house or an office to offer an eye checkup, and suddenly two more people there are interested in getting their eyes checked. The representative could attend these two new potential clients, or wrap things up with the first client and take care of his or her next appointment,” said Rastogi.

Locus looks at a client’s past data, identifies patterns and automates these kind of decisions on a large scale. In an example shared earlier with TechCrunch, Rastogi talked about how Locus had built a scanner for e-commerce companies for measuring products.

Rastogi said he will use the fresh capital to develop products and expand Locus in Southeast Asian and North American markets. The startup says half of its 110-person workforce is outside of India. Half of the IP it has built and the revenue it generates comes from its team outside of India.

He said the startup has spent the recent quarters studying these international markets, and has secured some anchor clients to expand the business. Locus is operationally profitable already and any additional capital goes into expanding its business, he added.

The logistics market in India has long been riddled with challenges. A growing number of startups, including BlackBuck — which raised $150 million last week — have emerged in recent years to tackle these problems.

The new funding also illustrates Tiger Global’s new strategy for the Indian market. The VC fund, which has invested in B2C businesses Flipkart and Ola in India, has made a number of investments in B2B startups in recent months. Last month, it invested $90 million in agritech supply chain startup Ninjacart, and weeks later, it gave cloud-based solutions provider Zenoti $50 million. It also participated in customer marketing service ClearTap’s $26 million round.