Aug
18
2021
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Apeel bites into another $250M funding round, at a $2B valuation, to accelerate fresh food supply chains

Apeel Sciences, a food system innovation company, is out to prevent food produced globally from ending up in the landfill, especially as pressures from the global pandemic affect the food supply chain.

The company just added $250 million in Series E funding, giving it a valuation of $2 billion, to speed up the availability of its longer-lasting produce in the U.S. (where approximately 40% of food is wasted), the U.K. and Europe.

Existing investor Temasek led the round and was joined by a group of new and existing investors, including Mirae Asset Global Investments, GIC, Viking Global Investors, Disruptive, Andreessen Horowitz, Tenere Capital, Sweetwater Private Equity, Tao Capital Partners, K3 Ventures, David Barber of Almanac Insights, Michael Ovitz of Creative Artists Agency, Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe, Susan Wojcicki of YouTube and Katy Perry.

With the new funding, Apeel has now raised over $635 million since the company was founded in 2012. Prior to this round, the company brought in $250 million in Series D funding in May 2020.

Santa Barbara-based Apeel developed a plant-based layer for the surface of fruits and vegetables that is tasteless and odorless and that keeps moisture in while letting oxygen out. It is those two factors in particular that lead to grocery produce lasting twice as long, James Rogers, CEO of Apeel, told TechCrunch.

Apeel installs its application at the supplier facilities where the produce is packed into boxes. In addition to that technology, the company acquired ImpactVision earlier this year to add another layer of quality by integrating imaging systems on individual pieces as they move through the supply chain to optimize routing so more produce that is grown is eaten.

“One in nine people are going hungry, and if three in nine pieces of produce are being thrown away, we can be better stewards of the food we are throwing away,” Rogers said. “This is a solvable problem, we just have to get the pieces to the right place at the right time.”

The company is not alone in tackling food waste. For example, Shelf Engine, Imperfect Foods, Mori and Phood Solutions are all working to improve the food supply chain and have attracted venture dollars to go after that mission.

Prior to the pandemic, the amount of food people were eating was growing each year, but that trend is reversed, Rogers explained. Consumers are more aware of the food they eat, they are shopping less frequently, buying more per visit and more online. At the same time, grocery stores are trying to sort through all of that.

“We can’t create these supply networks alone, we do it in concert with supply and retail partners,” he said. “Grocery stores are looking at the way shoppers want to buy things, while we look at how to partner to empower the supply chain. What started with longer-lasting fruits and vegetables, is becoming how we provide information to empower them to do it without adding to food waste.”

Since 2019, Apeel has prevented 42 million pieces of fruit from going to waste at retail locations; that includes up to 50% reduction in avocado food waste with corresponding sales growth. Those 42 million pieces of saved fruit also helped conserve nearly 4.7 billion liters of water, Rogers said.

Meanwhile, over the past year, Apeel has amassed a presence in eight countries, operating 30 supply networks and  distributing produce to 40 retail partners, which then goes out to tens of thousands of stores around the world.

The new funding will accelerate the rollout of those systems, as well as co-create another 10 supply networks with retail and supply partnerships by the end of the year. Rogers also expects to use the funding to advance Apeel’s data and insights offerings and future acquisitions.

Thomas Park, president and head of alternative investments at Mirae Asset Global Investments, said his firm has been investing in environmental, social and governance-related companies for awhile, targeting companies that “make a huge impact globally and in a way that is easy for us to understand.”

The firm, which is part of Mirae Asset Financial Group, often partners with other investors on venture rounds, and in Apeel’s case with Temasek. It also invested with Temasek in Impossible Foods, leading its Series F round last year.

“When we saw them double-down on their investment, it gave us confidence to invest in Apeel and an opportunity to do so,” Park said. “Food waste is a global problem, and after listening to James, we definitely feel like Apeel is the next wave of how to attack these huge problems in an impactful way.”

 

Aug
12
2021
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Talkdesk’s valuation jumps to $10B with Series D for smart contact centers

Talkdesk, a provider of cloud-based contact center software, announced $230 million in new Series D funding that more than triples the company’s valuation to $10 billion, Talkdesk founder CEO Tiago Paiva confirmed to TechCrunch.

New investors Whale Rock Capital Management, TI Platform Management and Alpha Square Group came on board for this round and were joined by existing investors Amity Ventures, Franklin Templeton, Top Tier Capital Partners, Viking Global Investors and Willoughby Capital.

Talkdesk uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve customer service for midmarket and enterprise businesses. It counts over 1,800 companies as customers, including IBM, Acxiom, Trivago and Fujitsu.

“The global pandemic was a big part of how customers interact and how we interacted with our customers, all working from home,” Paiva said. “When you think about ordering things online, call, chat and email interactions became more important, and contact centers became core in every company.”

San Francisco-based Talkdesk now has $498 million in total funding since its inception in 2011. It was a Startup Battlefield contestant at TechCrunch Disrupt NY in 2012. The new funding follows a $143 million Series C raised last July that gave it a $3 billion valuation. Prior to that, Talkdesk brought in $100 million in 2018.

The 2020 round was planned to buoy the company’s growth and expansion to nearly 2,000 employees, Paiva said. For the Series D, there was much interest from investors, including a lot of inbound interest, he said.

“We were not looking for new money, and finished last year with more money in the bank that we raised in the last round, but the investors were great and wanted to make it work,” Paiva said.

Half of Talkdesk’s staff is in product and engineering, an area he intends to double down in with the new funding as well as adding to the headcount to support customers. The company also has plans to expand in areas where it is already operating — Latin America, Europe, Asia and Australia.

This year, the company unveiled new features, including Talkdesk Workspace, a customizable interface for contact center teams, and Talkdesk Builder, a set of tools for customization across workspaces, routing, reporting and integrations. It also launched contact center tools designed specifically for financial services and healthcare organizations and what it is touting as the “industry’s first human-in-the-loop tool for contact centers and continues to lower the barrier to adopting artificial intelligence solutions.”

In addition to the funding, Talkdesk appointed its first chief financial officer, Sydney Carey, giving the company an executive team of 50% women, Paiva said. Carey has a SaaS background and joins the company from Sumo Logic, where she led the organization through an initial public offering in 2020.

“We were hiring our executive team over the past couple of years, and were looking for a CFO, but with no specific timeline, just looking for the right person,” Paiva added. “Sydney was the person we wanted to hire.”

Though Paiva didn’t hint at any upcoming IPO plans, TI Platform Management co-founders Trang Nguyen and Alex Bangash have followed Paiva since he started the company and said they anticipate the company heading in that direction in the future.

“Talkdesk is an example of what can happen when a strong team is assembled behind a winning idea,” they said in a written statement. “Today, Talkdesk has become near ubiquitous as a SaaS product with adoption across a broad array of industries and integrations with the most popular enterprise cloud platforms, including Salesforce, Zendesk and Slack.”

 

Jun
20
2019
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SaaS data protection provider Druva nabs $130M, now at a $1B+ valuation, acquiring CloudLanes

As businesses continue to move more of their computing and data to the cloud, one of the startups that has made a name for itself as a provider of cloud-based solutions to protect and manage those IT assets has raised a big round of funding to build its business.

Druva, which provides software-as-a-service-based data protection, backup and management solutions, has raised $130 million in a round of funding that CEO and founder Jaspreet Singh says takes the company “well past the $1 billion mark” in terms of its valuation.

Alongside this news, it’s making an acquisition to continue building out the storage part of its business (one of several product areas that it’s developing): it’s acquiring CloudLanes, a startup that was backed by Microsoft and others, for an undisclosed sum, in a deal that will likely be formally announced in early July.

The funding is being led by Viking Global Investors, the hedge fund and investment firm, with participation from two other new investors, Neuberger Berman and Atreides Capital, and existing investors Riverwood Capital, Tenaya Capital and Nexus Venture Partners (which were part of Druva’s last round of $80 million in 2017). The company, Singh said, is now nearly at a $100 million annual run rate. And although he would not disclose revenues, he said it’s now in a strong position to consider going public as its next step (or finally entertaining one of the many acquisition offers Singh admitted Druva gets).

“As we look at growth and the potential of what we are doing, the next obvious step is to look at public markets in the next 12 to 18 months,” he said in an interview.

The strong numbers (in terms of funding raised, valuation and performance) are a sign not just of Druva’s own business health, but of the opportunity it is tackling.

Spurred by a number of factors — the unfortunate rise of malicious hacking and data breaches, a massive wave of computing services that are creating mountains of data that can now be parsed for insights and a big move to cloud computing — the data protection industry is booming, with IDC predicting that it will collectively cost some $55 billion by 2020 to store and manage “copy data” (backups of the data), and that the data protection market will likely see revenues of $8 billion by 2020. Druva itself works with some 4,000 organizations today, with many in the mid-market in terms of size, with customers ranging across a number of verticals and including the likes of Build Group, American Cancer Society and Port of New Orleans — but as a measure of the opportunity, IDC notes that as of 2017 it had only about a 1% share (it doesn’t have more updated figures yet).

With a huge opportunity like this, it’s also an unsurprisingly crowded area in terms of competition. Singh points out that others looking to provide services in the same area include huge incumbents like CommVault and IBM, as well as newer entrants like Rubrik (itself on something of a fundraising tear in the last few years to capitalise on the same opportunity).

Singh notes that Druva stands out from these because it is the only one in the pack that started that remains an exclusively cloud-based, SaaS offering, meaning a company requires no hardware changes or appliance purchases in order to use it. While that’s an area that everyone is now moving into, his argument is that having started out here gives Druva a level of expertise and experience that cannot be matched by others — an important point when data protection is at stake.

The reality of today’s enterprise world is that there are a number of companies that are very far from being “in the cloud.” Despite the song and dance that we hear all the time about how cloud is the future, they are more often than not either relying entirely still on on-premises computing, or a hybrid solution. As Singh talks about it, this is almost irrelevant to what Druva is offering, and is in fact a segue to helping those companies come to trust and move more off premises, by giving them a strong example of how a cloud-based solution not only works, but can be less expensive and better than on-premise alternatives.

The CloudLanes acquisition fits in with this strategy, too: the company’s solution stack includes cloud storage that leverages on-premise data as a cache; ransomware protection; audit logs and more. “It will help us cover the gap between the data center and cloud more effectively,” Singh said.

This is also the belief that is propelling Druva to expanding into newer areas of business. Singh noted that business intelligence is going to be a big focus for the company, which makes sense: now that there is a lot of data being stored and managed by Druva, the next obvious move is to help parse it for insights. Security and making a wider move to secure endpoints are also areas that the company is considering, he said.

“We invest in companies based on a thorough assessment of their business models and fundamentals, the quality of their management teams, and cyclical and secular industry trends,” said Harish Belur, managing director, Riverwood Capital, in a statement. “Druva is doing something unique and special and, as a result, has grown at a phenomenal rate over recent years, all while keeping the trust and loyalty of its enterprise customers around the globe. We know this market is taking off and we continue to invest in Druva because we are sure it has the right product, executive team, and market execution to maintain leadership in the industry.”

I asked if companies like Amazon or Microsoft are friends, or frenemies, considering that they have a big part to play in cloud services. Singh said that so far, so good, since they are all more focused on infrastructure — or at least that’s where most of their strength has been up to now. Amazon, in particular, is a strong partner to the company he said, where Druva is often an early adopter of new tools of Amazon’s, and the AWS sales team regularly suggests Druva to customers for data protection and management services. Druva even happened to include a quote from the company in its news release:

“Druva is a leading Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network,” said Mike Clayville, vice president Worldwide Commercial Sales and Business Development, Amazon Web Services, Inc., in a statement. “Druva’s solutions powered by AWS are changing the way data is managed and protected at thousands of companies globally. We’d like to congratulate Druva on its latest fund raise, and look forward to innovating with Druva to create new solutions that benefit our customers.”

Seems like that could be one to watch, as well, as both companies continue their cloud expansion, both independently and in competition with others.

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