Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

One of the huge challenges companies like enterprise SaaS vendors face with new customers is getting customer data into their service. It’s a problem that Flatfile founders faced firsthand in their jobs, and they decided to solve it. Today, the company announced a healthy $7.6 million seed investment to expand on that vision.

The company also announced the release of its latest product, called Concierge.

Two Sigma Ventures led the investment, with participation from previous investors Afore Capital, Designer Fund and Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused venture fund).

Company CEO David Boskovic says he and co-founder Eric Crane recognized that this is a problem just about every company faces. Let’s say you sign up for a CRM tool like HubSpot (which is a Flatfile customer). Your first step is to get your customer data into the new service.

As Boskovic points out, if you have thousands of existing customers that can be a real problem, often involving days or even weeks to prepare the data, depending on the size of your customer base. It typically includes importing your data from an existing source, then manually moving it to an Excel spreadsheet.

“What we’re trying to solve for at Flatfile is automating that entire process. You can drop in any data that you have and get it into a new product, and what that solves from a market perspective is the speed of adopting new software,” Boskovic told TechCrunch.

Image Credit: Flatfile

He says they have automated the process to the point it usually takes just a few minutes to process the data, If there are problems that Flatfile can’t solve, it presents the issue to the user who can fix it and move on.

The founders realized that not every use case is going to involve a simple one-to-one data transfer, so they created their new product called Concierge to help companies manage more complex data integration scenarios for their customers.

“What we do is we provide a bridge between disparate data formats that are a little bit more complex and let our customers collaborate with their new customers that they are onboarding to bring the data to the right state to use it in the new system,” Boskovic explained.

Whatever they are doing, it seems to be working. The company launched in 2018 and today has 160 customers with 300 sitting on a waiting list. It has increased that customer count by 5x since the beginning of the year in the middle of a pandemic.

Any product that reduces labor and increases efficiency and collaboration in a digital context is going to get the attention of customers right now, and Flatfile is seeing a huge spike in interest in spite of the current economy. “We’re helping onboard customers quickly and more efficiently. And our Concierge service can also help reduce in-person touch points by reducing this long, typical data onboarding process,” Boskovic said.

The company has not had to change the way it has worked because of the pandemic, as it has been a distributed workforce from day one. In fact, Boskovic is in Denver and co-founder Eric Crane is based in Atlanta. The startup currently has 14 employees, but plans to fill at least 10 roles this year.

“We’ve got a pretty aggressive hiring map. Our pipeline is bigger than we can handle from a sales perspective,” he said. That means they will be looking to fill sales, marketing and product jobs.

In 2016, Serkan Piantino packed up his desk at Facebook with hopes to move on to something new. The former director of Engineering for Facebook AI Research had every intention to keep working on AI, but quickly realized a huge issue.

Unless you’re under the umbrella of one of these big tech companies like Facebook, it can be very difficult and incredibly expensive to get your hands on the hardware necessary to run machine learning experiments.

So he built Spell, which today received $15 million in Series A funding led by Eclipse Ventures and Two Sigma Ventures.

Spell is a collaborative platform that lets anyone run machine learning experiments. The company connects clients with the best, newest hardware hosted by Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure and gives them the software interface they need to run, collaborate and build with AI.

“We spent decades getting to a laptop powerful enough to develop a mobile app or a website, but we’re struggling with things we develop in AI that we haven’t struggled with since the 70s,” said Piantino. “Before PCs existed, the computers filled the whole room at a university or NASA and people used terminals to log into a single main frame. It’s why Unix was invented, and that’s kind of what AI needs right now.”

In a meeting with Piantino this week, TechCrunch got a peek at the product. First, Piantino pulled out his MacBook and opened up Terminal. He began to run his own code against MNIST, which is a database of handwritten digits commonly used to train image detection algorithms.

He started the program and then moved over to the Spell platform. While the original program was just getting started, Spell’s cloud computing platform had completed the test in less than a minute.

The advantage here is obvious. Engineers who want to work on AI, either on their own or for a company, have a huge task in front of them. They essentially have to build their own computer, complete with the high-powered GPUs necessary to run their tests.

With Spell, the newest GPUs from Nvidia and Google are virtually available for anyone to run their tests.

Individual users can get on for free, specify the type of GPU they need to compute their experiment and simply let it run. Corporate users, on the other hand, are able to view the runs taking place on Spell and compare experiments, allowing users to collaborate on their projects from within the platform.

Enterprise clients can set up their own cluster, and keep all of their programs private on the Spell platform, rather than running tests on the public cluster.

Spell also offers enterprise customers a “spell hyper” command that offers built-in support for hyperparameter optimization. Folks can track their models and results and deploy them to Kubernetes/Kubeflow in a single click.

But perhaps most importantly, Spell allows an organization to instantly transform their model into an API that can be used more broadly throughout the organization, or used directly within an app or website.

The implications here are huge. Small companies and startups looking to get into AI now have a much lower barrier to entry, whereas large traditional companies can build out their own proprietary machine learning algorithms for use within the organization without an outrageous upfront investment.

Individual users can get on the platform for free, whereas enterprise clients can get started for $99/month per host you use over the course of a month. Piantino explains that Spell charges based on concurrent usage, so if the customer has 10 concurrent things running, the company considers that the “size” of the Spell cluster and charges based on that.

Piantino sees Spell’s model as the key to defensibility. Whereas many cloud platforms try to lock customers in to their entire suite of products, Spell works with any language framework and lets users plug and play on the platforms of their choice by simply commodifying the hardware. In fact, Spell doesn’t even share with clients which cloud cluster (Microsoft Azure, Google or AWS) they’re on.

So, on the one hand the speed of the tests themselves goes up based on access to new hardware, but, because Spell is an agnostic platform, there is also a huge advantage in how quickly one can get set up and start working.

The company plans to use the funding to further grow the team and the product, and Piantino says he has his eye out for top-tier engineering talent, as well as a designer.

Data is the lifeblood of the modern corporation, yet acquiring, storing, processing, and analyzing it remains a remarkably challenging and expensive project. Every time data infrastructure finally catches up with the streams of information pouring in, another source and more demanding decision-making makes the existing technology obsolete.

Few cities rely on data the same way as New York City, nor has any other city so shaped the technology that underpins our data infrastructure. Back in the 1960s, banks and accounting firms helped to drive much of the original computation industry with their massive finance applications. Today, that industry has been supplanted by finance and advertising, both of which need to make microsecond decisions based on petabyte datasets and complex statistical models.

Unsurprisingly, the city’s hunger for data has led to waves of database companies finding their home in the city.

As web applications became increasingly popular in the mid-aughts, SQL databases came under increasing strain to scale, while also proving to be inflexible in terms of their data schemas for the fast-moving startups they served. That problem spawned Manhattan-based MongoDB, whose flexible “NoSQL” schemas and horizontal scaling capabilities made it the default choice for a generation of startups. The company would go on to raise $311 million according to Crunchbase, and debuted late last year on NASDAQ, trading today with a market cap of $2 billion.

At the same time that the NoSQL movement was hitting its stride, academic researchers and entrepreneurs were exploring how to evolve SQL to scale like its NoSQL competitors, while retaining the kinds of features (joining tables, transactions) that make SQL so convenient for developers.

One leading company in this next generation of database tech is New York-based Cockroach Labs, which was founded in 2015 by a trio of former Square, Viewfinder, and Google engineers. The company has gone on to raise more than $50 million according to Crunchbase from a luminary list of investors including Peter Fenton at Benchmark, Mike Volpi at Index, and Satish Dharmaraj at Redpoint, along with GV and Sequoia.

While web applications have their own peculiar data needs, the rise of the internet of things (IoT) created a whole new set of data challenges. How can streams of data from potentially millions of devices be stored in an easily analyzable manner? How could companies build real-time systems to respond to that data?

Mike Freedman and Ajay Kulkarni saw that problem increasingly manifesting itself in 2015. The two had been roommates at MIT in the late 90s, and then went on separate paths into academia and industry respectively. Freedman went to Stanford for a PhD in computer science, and nearly joined the spinout of Nicira, which sold to VMware in 2012 for $1.26 billion. Kulkarni joked that “Mike made the financially wise decision of not joining them,” and Freedman eventually went to Princeton as an assistant professor, and was awarded tenure in 2013. Kulkarni founded and worked at a variety of startups including GroupMe, as well as receiving an MBA from MIT.

The two had startup dreams, and tried building an IoT platform. As they started building it though, they realized they would need a real-time database to process the data streams coming in from devices. “There are a lot of time series databases, [so] let’s grab one off the shelf, and then we evaluated a few,” Kulkarni explained. They realized what they needed was a hybrid of SQL and NoSQL, and nothing they could find offered the feature set they required to power their platform. That challenge became the problem to be solved, and Timescale was born.

In many ways, Timescale is how you build a database in 2018. Rather than starting de novo, the team decided to build on top of Postgres, a popular open-source SQL database. “By building on top of Postgres, we became the more reliable option,” Kulkarni said of their thinking. In addition, the company opted to make the database fully open source. “In this day and age, in order to get wide adoption, you have to be an open source database company,” he said.

Since the project’s first public git commit on October 18, 2016, the company’s database has received nearly 4,500 stars on Github, and it has raised $16.1 million from Benchmark and NEA .

Far more important though are their customers, who are definitely not the typical tech startup roster and include companies from oil and gas, mining, and telecommunications. “You don’t think of them as early adopters, but they have a need, and because we built it on top of Postgres, it integrates into an ecosystem that they know,” Freedman explained. Kulkarni continued, “And the problem they have is that they have all of this time series data, and it isn’t sitting in the corner, it is integrated with their core service.”

New York has been a strong home for the two founders. Freedman continues to be a professor at Princeton, where he has built a pipeline of potential grads for the company. More widely, Kulkarni said, “Some of the most experienced people in databases are in the financial industry, and that’s here.” That’s evident in one of their investors, hedge fund Two Sigma. “Two Sigma had been the only venture firm that we talked to that already had built out their own time series database,” Kulkarni noted.

The two also benefit from paying customers. “I think the Bay Area is great for open source adoption, but a lot of Bay Area companies, they develop their own database tech, or they use an open source project and never pay for it,” Kulkarni said. Being in New York has meant closer collaboration with customers, and ultimately more revenues.

Open source plus revenues. It’s the database way, and the next wave of innovation in the NYC enterprise infrastructure ecosystem.