Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

The insurance industry, sleepy and ancient, is ripe for disruption. We’ve seen companies like Lemonade, Hippo and Rhino get in on that opportunity. Today, an insurtech company focused on small business insurance has raised $18 million to keep growing.

Meet Huckleberry, whose Series A was led by Tribe Capital, with participation from Amaranthine, Crosslink Capital and Uncork Capital.

Huckleberry launched in 2017 to offer business insurance, including workers’ compensation and general liability, all through an online portal.

Small business insurance coverage is not like car insurance or renters insurance. It’s not as simple as filling out a few forms and getting a quote. Even if a few platforms do have algorithms for providing quotes, you can’t really close the deal unless you get on the phone.

It’s an incredibly tedious and stressful process. In fact, Huckleberry co-founders Bryan O’Connell and Steve Au first came up with the idea for Huckleberry when they were seeking out their own small business coverage for a previous startup idea.

The industry itself is incredibly fragmented, which is caused in part by the fact that small business coverage underwriting varies wildly from business to business. For example, the policy for three or four restaurants might look relatively similar. However, a fast food restaurant might be identified as a higher risk with regards to workers’ compensation than a Michelin-star restaurant, where workers might be more eager to get back to work and take home their tip money. These differences come in the form of location, operations and many other factors, as well as business vertical.

Huckleberry has worked to build out myriad coverage verticals, including food and beverage, fitness, retail, legal, healthcare, hair and beauty and more.

The firm offers worker’s comp, as well as a package policy that includes general liability, property and business interruption insurance. Customers also can purchase add-ons like hired and non-owned auto insurance, employment practices liability insurance (EPLI), liquor liability insurance, employee dishonesty coverage, professional liability insurance, equipment breakdown coverage and spoilage coverage.

Huckleberry isn’t itself an insurance carrier, but does have the authority to underwrite and sell policies on behalf of the carrier. That said, Huckleberry’s expansion both by vertical and geography is more difficult than your average software startup. The regulatory landscape of insurance in the U.S. goes state by state.

“Our biggest challenge is navigating 50 states’ worth of extremely complicated regulations on something that is much more complicated than a software product,” said O’Connell. “We’re trying to protect individual workers and businesses all while staying fully compliant in every market.”

Sapphire Ventures, the former corporate venture arm of SAP, has raised $1.4 billion for growth investments, including a $150 million opportunity fund to support larger deals.

The firm, which focuses primarily on enterprise tech companies in the U.S., Europe and Israel, writes checks to Series B through pre-IPO businesses. Its portfolio includes 23andMe, Sumo Logic and TransferWise.

The new funds brings Sapphire Ventures, which became independent from the German software company SAP in 2011, assets under management to north of $4 billion. Sapphire will write checks sized between $5 million and $100 million with the new funds, allowing the team “to do any financing we need to or want to,” chief executive officer and managing director Nino Marakovic tells TechCrunch. Sapphire’s fourth growth fund is the firm’s largest to date, at more than double the size of their $700 million Fund III. 

“We need this fund because companies are staying private much longer because they want to get to a $200 million revenue run rate before they go public,” Sapphire Ventures president and co-founder Jai Das (pictured) tells TechCrunch. “We want to have the capital to support these companies as they keep growing.”

News of the fund comes nearly one year after Sapphire Ventures lassoed $115 million from new limited partners to invest at the intersection of tech, sports, media and entertainment. Sapphire Sport has ties to the sports industry, from City Football Group, which owns English Premier League team Manchester City, to Adidas, the owners of the Indiana Pacers, New York Jets, San Jose Sharks and Tampa Bay Lightning, among others.

Before that, the firm closed on $1 billion for its third flagship venture fund.

With seven check writers and another seven investment professionals focused on growth-stage investments, Sapphire has had a number of recent wins, counting a total of 21 initial public offerings and 55 exits since the firm’s inception.

“We’re excited to have now reached critical mass with $4 billion under management,” Marakovic said. “We are the right size to take advantage of our target area of early and later-stage enterprise software companies. We are innovating on the model by adding value-add LPs and trying to align our whole model of services to the target companies to serve them as best as possible.”

Over the years, Google’s various whitepapers, detailing how the company solves specific problems at scale, have regularly spawned new startup ecosystems and changed how other enterprises think about scaling their own tools. Today, the company is publishing a new security whitepaper that details how it keeps its cloud-native architecture safe.

The name, BeyondProd, already indicates that this is an extension of the BeyondCorp zero trust system the company first introduced a few years ago. While BeyondCorp is about shifting security away from VPNs and firewalls on the perimeter to the individual users and devices, BeyondProd focuses on Google’s zero trust approach to how it connects machines, workloads and services.

Unsurprisingly, BeyondProd is based on pretty much the same principles as BeyondCorp, including network protection at the end, no mutual trust between services, trusted machines running known code, automated and standardized change rollout and isolated workloads. All of this, of course, focuses on securing cloud-native applications that generally communicate over APIs and run on modern infrastructure.

“Altogether, these controls mean that containers and the microservices running inside can be deployed, communicate with each other, and run next to each other, securely; without burdening individual microservice developers with the security and implementation details of the underlying infrastructure,” Google explains.

Google, of course, notes that it is making all of these features available to developers through its own services like GKE and Anthos, its hybrid cloud platform. In addition, though, the company also stresses that a lot of its open-source tools also allow enterprises to build systems that adhere to the same platforms, including the likes of Envoy, Istio, gVisor and others.

“In the same way that BeyondCorp helped us to evolve beyond a perimeter-based security model, BeyondProd represents a similar leap forward in our approach to production security,” Google says. “By applying the security principles in the BeyondProd model to your own cloud-native infrastructure, you can benefit from our experience, to strengthen the deployment of your workloads, how your their communications are secured, and how they affect other workloads.”

You can read the full whitepaper here.

Belgium-based all-in-one business software maker Odoo, which offers an open source version as well as subscription-based enterprise software and SaaS, has taken in $90 million led by a new investor: Global growth equity investor Summit Partners.

The funds have been raised via a secondary share sale. Odoo’s executive management team and existing investor SRIW and its affiliate Noshaq also participated in the share sale by buying stock — with VC firms Sofinnova and XAnge selling part of their shares to Summit Partners and others.

“Odoo is largely profitable and grows at 60% per year with an 83% gross margin product; so, we don’t need to raise money,” a spokeswoman told us. “Our bottleneck is not the cash but the recruitment of new developers, and the development of the partner network.

“What’s unusual in the deal is that existing managers, instead of cashing out, purchased part of the shares using a loan with banks.”

The 2005-founded company — which used to go by the name of OpenERP before transitioning to its current open core model in 2015 — last took in a $10M Series B back in 2014, per Crunchbase.

Odoo offers some 30 applications via its Enterprise platform — including ERP, accounting, stock, manufacturing, CRM, project management, marketing, human resources, website, eCommerce and point-of-sale apps — while a community of ~20,000 active members has contributed 16,000+ apps to the open source version of its software, addressing a broader swathe of business needs.

It focuses on the SME business apps segment, competing with the likes of Oracle, SAP and Zoho, to name a few. Odoo says it has in excess of 4.5 million users worldwide at this point, and touts revenue growth “consistently above 50% over the last ten years”.

Summit Partners told us funds from the secondary sale will be used to accelerate product development — and for continued global expansion.

“In our experience, traditional ERP is expensive and frequently fails to adapt to the unique needs of dynamic businesses. With its flexible suite of applications and a relentless focus on product, we believe Odoo is ideally positioned to capture this large and compelling market opportunity,” said Antony Clavel, a Summit Partners principal who has joined the Odoo board, in a supporting statement.

Odoo’s spokeswoman added that part of the expansion plan includes opening an office in Mexico in January, and another in Antwerpen, Belgium, in Q3.

This report was updated with additional comment

The amount of data that most companies now store — and the places they store it — continues to increase rapidly. With that, the risk of the wrong people managing to get access to this data also increases, so it’s no surprise that we’re now seeing a number of startups that focus on protecting this data and how it flows between clouds and on-premises servers. Satori Cyber, which focuses on data protecting and governance, today announced that it has raised a $5.25 million seed round led by YL Ventures.

“We believe in the transformative power of data to drive innovation and competitive advantage for businesses,” the company says. “We are also aware of the security, privacy and operational challenges data-driven organizations face in their journey to enable broad and optimized data access for their teams, partners and customers. This is especially true for companies leveraging cloud data technologies.”

Satori is officially coming out of stealth mode today and launching its first product, the Satori Cyber Secure Data Access Cloud. This service provides enterprises with the tools to provide access controls for their data, but maybe just as importantly, it also offers these companies and their security teams visibility into their data flows across cloud and hybrid environments. The company argues that data is “a moving target” because it’s often hard to know how exactly it moves between services and who actually has access to it. With most companies now splitting their data between lots of different data stores, that problem only becomes more prevalent over time and continuous visibility becomes harder to come by.

“Until now, security teams have relied on a combination of highly segregated and restrictive data access and one-off technology-specific access controls within each data store, which has only slowed enterprises down,” said Satori Cyber CEO and co-founder Eldad Chai. “The Satori Cyber platform streamlines this process, accelerates data access and provides a holistic view across all organizational data flows, data stores and access, as well as granular access controls, to accelerate an organization’s data strategy without those constraints.”

Both co-founders (Chai and CTO Yoav Cohen) previously spent nine years building security solutions at Imperva and Incapsula (which acquired Imperva in 2014). Based on this experience, they understood that onboarding had to be as easy as possible and that operations would have to be transparent to the users. “We built Satori’s Secure Data Access Cloud with that in mind, and have designed the onboarding process to be just as quick, easy and painless. On-boarding Satori involves a simple host name change and does not require any changes in how your organizational data is accessed or used,” they explain.

Cisco today announced that it has acquired Exablaze, an Australia-based company that designs and builds advanced networking gear based on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The company focuses on solutions for businesses that need ultra-low latency networking, with a special emphasis on high-frequency trading. Cisco plans to integrate Exablaze’s technology into its own product portfolio.

“By adding Exablaze’s segment leading ultra-low latency devices and FPGA-based applications to our portfolio, financial and HFT customers will be better positioned to achieve their business objectives and deliver on their customer value proposition,” writes Cisco’s head of corporate development Rob Salvagno.

Founded in 2013, Exablaze has offices in Sydney, New York, London and Shanghai. While financial trading is an obvious application for its solutions, the company also notes that it has users in the big data analytics, high-performance computing and telecom space.

Cisco plans to add Exablaze to its Nexus portfolio of data center switches. The company also argues that in addition to integrating Exablaze’s current portfolio, the two companies will work on next-generation switches, with an emphasis on creating opportunities for expanding its solutions into AI and ML segments.

“The acquisition will bring together Cisco’s global reach, extensive sales and support teams, and broad technology and manufacturing base, with Exablaze’s cutting-edge low-latency networking, layer 1 switching, timing and time synchronization technologies, and low-latency FPGA expertise,” explains Exablaze co-founder and chairman Greg Robinson.

Cisco, which has always been quite acquisitive, has now made six acquisitions this year. Most of these were software companies, but with Acacia Communications, it also recently announced its intention to acquire another fabless semiconductor company that builds optical interconnects.

OneConnect’s U.S.-listed IPO flew under our radar last week, which won’t do. The company’s public offering is both interesting and important, so let’s take a few minutes this morning to understand what we missed and why we care.

The now-public company sells financial technology that banks in China and select foreign countries can use to bring their services into the modern era. OneConnect charges mostly for usage of its products, driving over three-quarters of its revenue from transactions, including API calls.

After pricing its shares at $10 apiece, the SoftBank Vision Fund-backed company wrapped last week worth the same: $10 per share.

One one hand, OneConnect is merely another China-based IPO listing domestically here in the United States, making it merely one member of a crowd. So, why do we care about its listing?

A few reasons. We care because the listing is another liquidity event for SoftBank and its Vision Fund. As the Japanese conglomerate revs up its second Vision Fund cycle (Vision Fund 2, more here), returns and proof of its ability to pick winners and fuel them with capital are key. OneConnect’s success as a public company, therefore, matters.

And for us market observers, the debut is doubly exciting from a financial perspective. No, OneConnect doesn’t make money (very much the opposite). What’s curious about the company is that it brought huge losses to sale when it was pitching its equity. Which, in a post-WeWork world, are supposed to be out of style. Let’s see how well it priced.

What’s it worth?

OneConnect targeted a $9 to $10 per-share IPO price. That makes its final, $10 per-share pricing the top of its range. That said, given how narrow its range was, the result doesn’t look like much of a coup for the company. That’s doubly true when we recall that OneConnect lowered its IPO price range from $12 to $14 per share (a more standard price band) to the lower figures. So, the company managed to price at the top of its expectations, but only after those were cut to size.

When it all wrapped, OneConnect was worth about $3.7 billion at its IPO price, according to math from The New York Times. TechCrunch’s own calculations value the firm at a slightly richer $3.8 billion. Regardless, the figure was a disappointment.

When OneConnect raised from SoftBank’s Vision Fund in early 2018, $650 million was invested at a $6.8 billion pre-money valuation, according to Crunchbase data. That put a $7.45 billion post-money price tag on the Ping An-sourced business. To see the company forced to cut its IPO valuation so far is difficult for OneConnect itself, its parent Ping An and its backer SoftBank.

Why so little?

I promised to be brief when we started, so let’s stay curt: OneConnect’s business was worth far less than expected because while it posted impressive revenue gains, the company’s deep unprofitability made it less palatable than expected to public investors.

OneConnect managed to post revenue growth of more than 70% in the first three quarters of 2019, expanding top line to $217.5 million in the period. However, during that time it generated just $70.9 million in gross profit, the sum it could use to cover its operating costs. The company’s cost structure, however, was far larger than its gross profit.

Over the same nine-month period, OneConnect’s sales and marketing costs alone outstripped its total gross profit. All told, OneConnect posted operating costs of $227.6 million in the first three quarters of 2019, leading to an operating loss of $156.6 million in the period.

The company will, therefore, burn lots of cash as it grows; OneConnect is still deep in its investment motion, and far from the sort of near-profitability that we hear is in vogue. In a sense, OneConnect bears the narrative out. It had to endure a sharp valuation reduction to get out. You can see the market’s changed mood in that fact alone.

Photo by Roberto Júnior on Unsplash

In episode #227 Stephen, John and Nic catch up after on few months hiatus. We talk about Drupal 8.8, Drupal 9 readiness or retiring core modules.

www.talkingdrupal.com/227

Topics

• What we’ve been up to
• Drupal 8.8 Release
• Drupal 9 Readiness
• Drupal core modules that should be contrib

Resources

Breathe Life Back Into Your Late 2013 Or Older Apple Mac With Linux

Mac Mini (mid-2011) on Linux

NEDCamp Session Recordings

Drupal 8.8.0 is available

Drupal 9 Readiness

Oomph: WEBINAR: Upgrading to Drupal 9. When? Why? How?

Hosts

Stephen Cross – www.stephencross.com @stephencross

John Picozzi – www.oomphinc.com @johnpicozzi

Nic Laflin – www.nLighteneddevelopment.com @nicxvan

In episode #228 Kristiaan Van den Eynde tells us about the Group module.

www.talkingdrupal.com/226

Topics

• What is the Group module
• Group use cases
• Basic concepts
• Feature roadmap
• Experience as a maintainer

Resources

Group Module

Guest

Kristiaan Van den Eynde  @Magentix

Hosts

Stephen Cross – www.stephencross.com @s tephencross

John Picozzi – www.oomphinc.com @johnpicozzi

Nic Laflin – www.nLighteneddevelopment.com @nicxvan

As the holiday slowdown looms, the final U.S.-listed technology IPOs have come in and begun to trade.

Three tech, tech-ish or venture-backed companies went public this week: Bill.com, Sprout Social and EHang. Let’s quickly review how each has performed thus far. These are, bear in mind, the last IPOs of the year that we care about, pending something incredible happening. 2020 will bring all sorts of fun, but, for this time ’round the sun, we’re done.

Pricing

Our three companies managed to each price differently. So, we have some variety to discuss. Here’s how each managed during their IPO run:

• EHang priced at the bottom of its range, selling shares for $12.50 apiece
• Sprout Social priced mid-range at $17 per share after targeting a $16 to $18 per-share price interval
• Bill.com priced above its raised range, selling shares at $22 apiece after raising its interval from $16 to $18 to $19 to $21

How do those results stack up against their final private valuations? Doing the best we can, here’s how they compare:

• EHang was worth around $680 million at its IPO price. The company’s final private valuation (likely set during its $42 million Series B) is unknown. However, we’d guess that the IPO was at a higher price, given the time between the private round and the IPO.
• Sprout Social managed to slightly raise its valuation in its IPO. Worth around $814 million in the liquidity event, Sprout had been worth just over $800 million when private.
• Bill.com was valued at around $1.6 billion in its IPO, comfortably above its final private valuation of $1.0 billion.

So EHang priced low and its IPO is hard to vet, as we’re guessing at its final private worth. We’ll give it a passing grade. Sprout Social priced mid-range, and managed a slight valuation bump. We can give that a B, or B+. Bill.com managed to price above its raised range, boosting its valuation sharply in the process. That’s worth an A.

Performance

Trading just wrapped, so how have our companies performed thus far in their nascent lives as public companies? Here’s the scorecard:

• EHang’s Friday closing price: $12.90 (+3.2%)
• Sprout Social’s Friday closing price: $16.60 (-2.35%)
• Bill.com’s Friday closing price: $38.83 (+76.5%)

You can gist out the grades somewhat easily here, with one caveat. The Bill.com IPO’s massive early success has caused the usual complaints that the firm was underpriced by its bankers, and was thus robbed to some degree. This argument makes the assumption that the public market’s initial pricing of the company once it began trading is reasonable (maybe!) and that the company in question could have captured most or all of that value (maybe!).

Bill.com’s CEO’s reaction to the matter puts a new spin on it, but you should at least know that the week’s most successful IPO has attracted criticism for being too successful. So forget any chance of an A+.

Image via Getty Images / Somyot Techapuwapat / EyeEm