Robust Intelligence, an AI startup that helps businesses stress test their AI models and prevent them from failing, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B funding round led by Tiger Global. Previous investor Sequoia, which led the company’s Series A round, as well as Harpoon Venture Capital and Engineering Capital also participated in this oversubscribed round.

The company was co-founded by Yaron Singer, a tenured Professor of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University, and his former student Kojin Oshiba.

Robust Intelligence CEO Yaron Singer.

“AI has been this academic endeavor,” said Singer. “When I was doing grad school, it was an academic discipline — it was a vision. And then came the internet, data, Google and data processing — and then it realized its potential in the span of seven, eight years. Now we’re trying to be as rigorous as we are with software development, which humanity has been doing for 60 years, right? We’re trying to play catch up with AI and it’s a whole different animal.”

As Singer noted, given its statistical nature, AI can exhibit unexpected behavior. At its core, the mission of Robust Intelligence then is to eliminate these AI mistakes.

To do so, the company offers its users what it calls the Robust Intelligence Model Engine (RIME), with what is essentially an AI firewall at its core. This firewall wraps around a company’s AI models and protects it from making mistakes by constantly stress testing these models.

“If you have an AI model and you have data, with a click of a button you run stress testing. We automatically test data and your AI models, both before the model goes into production, as well as while it is in production,” said Singer. The idea here is to automatically find the failure modes of any given model, but also to catch issues like data drift and related issues.

Image Credits: Robust Intelligence

What’s interesting here is that the AI firewall itself is an AI model that predicts whether a data point will lead to a wrong prediction. “This is one of the hardest problems that we’re solving in AI and machine learning,” Singer explained.

“I was first exposed to Robust Intelligence’s capabilities in the company’s early development,” said Tiger Global Partner, John Curtius. “After seeing the company and its product grow over the past year it became obvious that Robust Intelligence’s offerings are changing the face of AI reliability, and I knew Tiger Global could help provide key resources.”

The company plans to use the new funding to scale its sales operations, but the majority will go to product and engineering.

Mio, a startup that helps enterprise teams collaborate across apps like Zoom Chat, Microsoft Teams, Slack and Cisco’s Webex, today announced that it has raised an $8.7 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Zoom and Cisco Investments. In total, Austin-based Mio, which was founded in 2016 and participated in the Y Combinator Winter 2016 class, has now raised $17 million. Other investors include Goldcrest Capital, Eniac Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, and Capital Factory.

While being able to chat across platforms isn’t usually a problem that comes up inside a company, it does become an issue when you’re working across organizations. Traditionally, those kinds of conversations used to happen in pre-planned meetings, whether in-person or virtually, but the pandemic only accelerated the move toward enterprise messaging services for this use case, too.

Image Credits: Mio

As Mio CEO and co-founder Tom Hadfield told me, you may think that the different players in this field would want to keep their walled gardens closed off from competitors, but the fact that Zoom and Cisco are investing in Mio shows that interoperability is very much on their minds. He also noted that Microsoft and Meta recently partnered on an integration between Teams and Facebook Workplace, while Slack and Teams have also long partnered around VoIP integrations.

“Microsoft Teams is akin to a Local Area Network, because Microsoft will always deliver messages between Microsoft users,” said Hadfield. “When a Teams user wants to send a message to a Slack user, it will go over the Wide Area Network for workplace communications. That’s what we’re building at Mio.”

Hadfield, who co-founded the company together with CTO James Cundle, tells me that the team spent the last few years on addressing technical challenges like managing the basic differences between messaging clients (like Slack’s support for custom emoji) and how they handle channels, for example. Different platforms also place different limits on their users and their APIs are always in flux, too.

Image Credits: Mio

“The collaboration industry has come a long way from the ‘multi-headed clients’ like Trillian that connected AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo! Messenger in the early 2000’s,” explained Hadfield. “A decade ago, there was a big push for open standards like XMPP and SIP, but the standards bodies failed to keep up with the rapid pace of innovation in team collaboration. Mio solves this by federating publicly available API’s, so each platform can innovate at their own pace.”

Given the obvious need for a service like this, it’s no surprise that there is a bit of competition here. Nextplane offers somewhat similar capabilities and with Matrix, there is an open-source protocol for decentralized messaging with bridges to Slack, Discord and others (but not Teams, Zoom and Webex). “We plan to work closely with Matrix and Nextplane to advance our shared vision for a unified messaging ecosystem,” said Hadfield.

Mio plans to use the new funds to enhance its service by adding support for additional services like Google Chat, Meta’s Workplace and Symphony. The company also plans to launch a new unified presence feature that will allow users to synchronize their presence status across services.

“This investment, by two of the largest players in the collaboration industry, ushers in a new era for interoperability,” said Hadfield. “It brings us one step closer to ‘Collaboration Nirvana’ where everyone on the planet can collaborate with each other, regardless of which chat app they are using.”

Meet Collective, a French startup that wants to redefine what it means to work as a freelancer in development, product design, digital marketing, data strategy and more. The company has built a platform so that multiple freelancers can team up and work together on the same project.

The trick is that those teams remain independent freelancers. They’re not working for the same company, they’re just working on the same project. Everyone then gets their cut of the invoice when the job is done.

Originally backed by startup studio eFounders, Collective has raised an $8 million seed round led by Blossom Capital. Many business angels are also investing in the startup. Some freelancers who use Collective for their freelancing jobs have also invested in Collective — they’re putting their money where their mouth is.

Platforms for freelancers aren’t new. Many developers based in France are probably already familiar with Malt or Comet. But Collective doesn’t want to go head to head with these marketplaces. Instead, Collective only accepts teams of freelancers — it can be a squad, a studio, a flash team, a community…

“We are creating the first SaaS platform dedicated to independent collectives,” co-founder and CEO Jean de Rauglaudre told me. He listed the advantages of a collective versus a more traditional development agency company.

According to him, a team of freelancers is usually cheaper than an agency because there are some fixed costs with the agency. While this is true, freelancers still have to pay for health insurance, pension contributions, etc. Essentially, it’s a more individualistic way of thinking about a group of colleagues as collectives don’t share the same benefits.

But if you’re okay with that, there are some more obvious advantages with collectives. For instance, participating in a collective is a more flexible way of working as you can still work on your own projects on the side. You can also choose to participate in multiple collectives at once.

The startup offers you some much needed tools. For instance, if you choose to manage your collective on the platform, you can create a single invoice and send it to your customer. The customer only has to pay the invoice once. Collective takes care of splitting payments and topping up individual accounts.

Behind the scenes, Collective uses a special status called ‘portage administratif’. With this trick, Collective can legally issue invoices and represent teams. On the other side, freelancers can choose their own incorporation status.

In addition to administrative stuff, Collective also wants to provide some marketing tools. For instance, the company wants to develop a lightweight content platform so that each Collective can create their own branding, showcase their portfolio of work and more.

The startup takes a small cut on bills. If clients come from Collective directly, the company then asks for a bigger cut. And it seems to be working well as hundreds of companies have worked with a collective already.

Figuring out the governance system of those collectives is also going to be interesting. Unlike traditional private companies, nobody “owns” the collective, which means that everybody has a say when it comes to choosing the next job or the remuneration system.

Many DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) rely on tokens on a blockchain to make important decisions. With Collective, there’s no blockchain involved. And the startup proves that you don’t always need a blockchain to reach a consensus.

Image Credits: Collective

The venture capital market is on a tear, pumping capital into a host of startups around the world. It’s generally considered a great time to raise capital and build a technology-centered, disruptive business.

For some, that is. While the venture capital boom of the last few years has helped a great number of founders, the capital is not landing equally. Women remain underinvested in, despite some recent gains. Black founders are raising more capital than ever, but still just a fraction of a fraction of what others have managed in recent years.

Black Ops Ventures wants to shake up the norm and invest in Black founders as its focus.

TechCrunch caught wind of Black Ops’ founding and recent first close thanks to our familiarity with one of its partners, James Norman. He’s the founder of Pilot.ly, a technology platform built to collect audience insights regarding video content, and a partner at the Transparent Collective.

The Black Ops team, apart from Norman, includes managing partner Heather Hiles (Udemy, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), partner Sean Green (ARTERNAL), and principal Ebony Peay Ramirez (Oculus, Plum2.0).

The first Black Ops fund is worth $13 million to date, though we expect that number to rise after it completes a second close. The group’s first capital pool was sourced from corporations (Northwestern Mutual, Bank of America) and well-known technology denizens, including Drew Houston and Ben Horowitz.

TechCrunch spoke with Norman about the fund, curious about its general strategy. Per the founding member, Black Ops will invest at the seed stage, writing checks into rounds worth a few million dollars. The group’s intention, according to Norman, is to lead seed rounds, solving an issue that he’s seen with Black founders, namely that they wind up with interest from investors but no venture group willing to take point on their round.

Black Ops intends to solve that by leading, allowing other capital pools to play catch-up with their own checkbooks.

The firm’s investments may also help overlooked founders hire folks that fall outside the networks of some more established venture capital groups. “If I went and raised a big round from some top-tier VC, do you think that those people can help me hire other people of color?” Norman asked TechCrunch rhetorically before supplying his own answer: No.

“It’s hard to build team [and] culture and scale a company in a way that’s sustainable over time and that fits the founder’s vision,” he said, adding that “the pieces of the [startup] puzzle that we’re gonna bring together are not available to Black founders anywhere else.”

The thesis at Black Ops — investing in Black founders — is pretty darn smart. There’s essentially infinite competition for white male founders coming out of a handful of U.S. schools. That dynamic leads to silly pricing at times, with investors competing with one another to get their capital into “hot” startups. Black founders rarely find themselves in a similar situation. That means that Black Ops will be investing in deals that, I presume, will both prove accretive for Black founders generally and lucrative for the firm itself.

Norman touched on this, saying that “nobody we ever pitched this [idea to] has ever heard the story that we pitched. We really detailed why this group of people is the biggest arbitrage opportunity to tech. [To] not invest in these people is crazy because you’re missing out on all the money.”

Black Ops itself won’t be able to create parity in the venture capital world for Black founders, but it can make a dent in a problem that — despite all their wealth and putative brilliance — many venture groups have failed to tackle in any meaningful capacity.

Digital identity startup Passbase, which offers SDKs for running remote identity checks, has raised $10 million in Series A funding as it dials up attention on crypto compliance — touting tools to help fintechs with rapidly evolving regulatory requirements.

The funding is led by Costanoa Ventures, with participation from Lakestar, Eniac Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, and Seedcamp.

It follows an unannounced $3.5M seed round — which almost doubled the $3.6M in seed funding that Passbase raised back in 2019. So the 2018-founded startup’s total raised to date is around $17.7M.

The digital identity space is a crowded one but on the crypto compliance front Passbase is keen to point back to early experience and claim it as a differentiator — the team having started out building a cryptocurrency wallet before pivoting to identity authentication — which it argues helps it understand the needs of that particular (and some might say peculiar) industry.

“Our primary focus is on crypto,” says the startup, describing the typical customer for its SDKs as a “fast growing digital first financial services product, particularly fiat to crypto onramp services”.

Passbase’s subscription developer product provides tools to create a verification flow and back-office compliance for regulatory needs such as AML (anti-money laundering), KYC (Know Your Customer), and age restrictions — with different tiers targeted at startups, growth and enterprise users.

Its top-line claim is the product can be integrated in as little as 30 minutes, and covers more than 6,000 IDs across 190 countries and 15 languages.

Passbase says it has around 180 customers for the dev product at this stage.

While, over the last year, it says revenue has grown 8x.

While the (hyper frothy) crypto market is where Passbase spies the biggest opportunity for its regulatory support tech, it also says it’s keeping an eye on developments around online age verification — an area that’s seeing rising attention from regulators in certain markets (such as the UK) as a result of concerns around child safety.

“Age verification is secondary priority but we have a few use cases such as online gaming, digital cannabis, online sale of e-cigarettes, and online sales of alcohol… but we do continue to track regulations in age verification such as COPPA, the Preventing Online Sales of E-Cigarettes to Children Act, and others,” it told us.

Passbase says the Series A funding will be used for launching a new no-code policy system to allow customers to design their own onboarding flows for multiple regions and regulatory requirements — with the startup saying it has a big focus on scaling companies that are looking for compliance support as they expand into new markets and geographies.

“This will solve the need for companies to both understand what they need to do to comply in different markets (i.e. through policy templates) and manage how to do it (i.e. workflows within our verification product),” Passbase suggests of the incoming policy tools.

Expanding the system’s capabilities to provide what it bills as “market-optimized onboarding solutions for different geographies and use cases”, is another slated aim.

Its overarching vision is to be a key player in a digital identity network comprised of a sharable KYC token and verifiable credential model — which it argues will enable “a privacy preserving identity ecosystem”, as envisaged by the decentralized identity model now being hyped as ‘Web3’.

However there are a number of (rather better) resourced startups also selling identity verification tools — Passbase names Jumio, Onfido, Persona and Veriff as its closest competitors.

Notably Stripe also recently added ID checks — launching into the space this summer and creating a fresh layer of competition for AI-powered verification via a self-serve tool.

Stripe’s arrival obviously causes a big headaches for all the startups founded on dreams of becoming ‘Stripe for identity verification‘ (which was literally how Passbase was talking about its business back in 2019).

But despite fierce competition on core ID checks, Passbase isn’t throwing in the towel — it’s just betting on specializing in crypto compliance needs (and there being a market for specialized crypto compliance tools) instead. Hence its marketing thrust now talks about bringing ‘KYC to crypto’ — and stays silent on the arrival of Stripe on its turf — again arguing that its early experience in crypto and Web3 provides a competitive edge for the crypto niche it’s now zeroing in on.

“It’s important to remember, our team came from the Web3 & Crypto space with Coinance. We understand the needs of Web3 better than anyone in the IDV [identity verification] space. These competitors existed when we were looking for solutions and there is a reason we didn’t choose them,” it argues, dialling up the crypto hype.

“Our seed round got us to table stakes to be a competitive solution in IDV, with improvements such as more flexible pricing for scaling companies, a more user-friendly verification flow, deeper customization for product leaders, and better documentation so developers can integrate in minutes, not weeks. The Series A is about taking the next step towards an accessible global compliance solution and the decentralized identity model Web3 was built to facilitate.”

Synthesia, a startup using AI to create synthetic videos, is walking a fine, but thus far prosperous, line between being creepy and being pretty freakin’ cool.

Today, it announced the close of a $50 million Series B funding round led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from GV and existing investors Firstmark Capital, LDV Capital, Seedcamp and MMC Ventures.

Synthesia allows anyone to turn text or a slide deck presentation into a video, complete with a talking avatar. Customers can leverage existing avatars, created from the performance of actors, or create their own in minutes by uploading some video. Users can also upload a recording of their voice which can be transformed to say just about anything under the sun.

The startup, aware of the fact that almost any powerful tool on the internet can be used for evil, is focusing exclusively on enterprise clients, rather than allowing anyone and everyone to hop on the platform. These customers predominantly use the tool for training videos, it said, but also use Synthesia for monthly updates to the broader team or delivering information that would normally come via email.

Interestingly, founder Victor Riparbelli said that user behavior didn’t necessarily match up to his earlier expectations. Rather than seeing tons of usage from video production departments, other folks inside the organization are the power users of the tool.

“Anyone who, before Synthesia, could produce a slide deck or write a Word document can now actually create video content,” said Riparbelli. “I think that’s the key thing that is making us grow so fast from an AI perspective.”

Since raising a $12.5 million Series A in April, Synthesia has added features that make it even easier for users to create their own animated talkers, and the platform now has 1000 custom avatars in use. Riparbelli cited Ernst & Young as an example customer. The law firm has 35 partners with their own avatars, creating videos for both internal comms and client communication.

The ‘anyone can make video’ concept gives me very strong Canva vibes. The $40 billion Australian startup shot up like a rocket after unlocking the ability to design — anything — for the rest of the organization outside of the design department. Canva also launched its own video product recently, focusing more on turning existing designs and slide decks into animated, lively videos.

The startup takes that a step further with the ability to create videos featuring an avatar that looks and feels like a real person, either an unknown actor or the CEO of your own company.

Synthesia isn’t the only company doing work in its problem space. An Israeli company called D-ID actually demo’d their tech at Disrupt 2021, showing how they can take a still image of a person and turn it into video content.

In other words, the race is on, in a few ways. Companies looking to make video creation easier through AI and avatars must not only race to increase realism and add in a sliding scale for emotional expression, etc., but they must also ensure the safety of users and the credibility of their own platforms.

It’s plain as day to see how these types of tools could be used to mislead or do harm to large numbers of people, and it’s up to the companies creating these tools to ensure they’re used in an above board fashion.

For Synthesia’s part, the company is pretty clear about not synthesizing anyone without explicit consent and the tech is only accessible via an on-rails experience fully controlled by the company.

All that said, don’t be surprised to see a video from your department head or CEO, but not quite them, in the near future.

With the Samsara IPO heading toward pricing, it’s a good moment to spend a little more time digging into the IoT market. There’s a lot more going on than merely the liquidity point of one of its players, it turns out.

Afero, for example, closed a $50 million Series C today, led by Crosspoint Capital Partners. The new capital raise is roughly equivalent to all the capital that Afero raised prior to its latest round, per Crunchbase data, implying that the startup now has more cash on hand than at any point prior.

After being slightly surprised at how large Samsara’s own IoT-focused business had grown while we weren’t watching, TechCrunch got ahold of Afero CEO Joe Britt and Crosspoint’s Hugh Thompson to chat more about its business and why it chose this moment to raise.

What does Afero do?

Per Britt, when his team was putting Afero together, they noted projections indicating that the number of connected devices in the world was going to scale by an order of magnitude.

Given that anticipated boom in connected gadgets, sensors and the like, Afero’s IoT platform was built with security in mind. That might sound intuitive, but Britt argues that the web was not initially compiled with security as a top priority, which has led to round after round of issues surrounding breaches and hacks.

If we’re going to connect our lives and businesses to the internet on an ambient basis, security is going to be a pretty darn big deal. Else your toaster or production is going to get hacked.

Thompson, who has a background in security work, stressed how important that stance was to his interest in investing in the company, saying that the startup is “rare” in having “built things right [in security terms] from the very beginning.” (Thanks to TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker, I am more aware than ever of how frequently major companies are compromised, making me sympathetic to arguments of the importance of building with a security-first mindset.)

Afero’s IoT platform also includes a software development toolkit (SDK) for customer companies to build mobile apps on top of, as well as the ability to tailor itself to customer use cases.

In practice, the startup works with companies like Home Depot to bring connected devices to markets like the smart home segment. According to Britt and Thompson, the company’s platform can also support offline items like tagged physical goods to help track supply chains.

Why raise now?

Of all the startups that I have spoken to after raising a Series C, Afero is the smallest in terms of full-time staffing with just 24 people. Obviously, the company is going to do some hiring with its new capital. It also plans to invest in its go-to-market efforts — more spending on marketing, sales and so forth.

Asked by TechCrunch how large the company’s in-market footprint is today, Afero’s CEO declined to share a specific number, and after trying to find a way to explain general scale without being too precise, he simply said that there are “a lot” of Afero-connected devices in the world. Normally we’d complain a bit about a lack of hard numbers, but given that the startup’s customers might not want it to disclose how many of their devices sit atop Afero’s platform, it makes some sense.

In time, when Afero has a wider customer base, we’ll expect more specificity.

A few years back, we might have been skeptical of the scale of the market that Afero is tackling, but Samsara’s growth changed our general perspective.

The soon-to-be public company’s platform collects IoT data from real-world business operations, allowing for the creation of an application layer atop data sourced from sensors. Samsara’s revenues of $113.8 million last quarter provide proof of market demand for IoT platforms more generally.

Afero’s best-known partnership has more of a consumer flavor — Home Depot’s HubSpace line is geared toward the public — than what Samsara has built, so the two are not direct competitors today. We’re not trying to say that Afero is coming after Samsara or the other way around. At least not yet.

Looking ahead, we’ll be curious to see how many new customer companies Afero can land in the next few quarters — and how soon it will scale to the point that it’s comfortable sharing harder metrics.

Just a few weeks after announcing stock and crypto trading, French fintech startup Lydia is announcing that it has raised a $100 million Series C round. With this funding round, the startup has reached a unicorn valuation, which means that it is currently valued at more than $1 billion.

Dragoneer and Echo Street are investing in the startup for the first time, and many of Lydia’s existing investors are putting more money on the table, such as Tencent, Accel and Founders Future.

“What’s really impressive with this round is that it is primarily financed by existing investors,” Lydia co-founder and CEO Cyril Chiche told me.

Times are changing. A few years ago, when a startup chose to raise from its existing investors, it usually meant that the team couldn’t find new investors. So existing investors would accept to put more money in the company in exchange for a lower valuation.

But now, many VC firms have raised huge funds. Hedge funds are now investing in venture rounds. Investing in the most competitive startups have become harder. If a portfolio company is doing well, VC firms now usually want to double down on their previous investment.

And Chiche confirmed that Lydia’s valuation has increased starkly compared to last year’s round.

At first, Lydia was a peer-to-peer payment app. After adding your debit card and your bank details, you could send and receive mobile payments with other Lydia users. It progressively became the dominant mobile payment app in France.

Over the last few years, the app has evolved quite a lot to become a financial super app with a wide range of features and financial products. Users can get a virtual or physical debit card that works on the Visa network. They can also manage their money more easily by creating sub-accounts that they can share with other Lydia users.

Image Credits: Lydia

In addition to daily payments, Lydia also offers small loans from €100 to €3,000, savings accounts, and now trading. In particular, the new crypto and stock trading partnership with Bitpanda makes it much easier to invest small amounts of money whenever you want.

Lydia and Bitpanda are offering fractional shares so that you can buy, for example, €10 worth of Apple share 24/7 — it’s something quite new for the French market. And given the success of trading in Robinhood and Cash App in the U.S., the new trading feature could represent a big opportunity for the future of the French startup.

By adding more products on top of peer-to-peer payments, Lydia wants to drive engagement. The business model is quite clear. When you’re sending and receiving a handful of payments with the app, everything is free. If you want to go further, the company offers premium subscriptions.

Lydia has attracted 5.5 million users so far. Even more important, a third of French people who are 18 to 35 years old have a Lydia account. In other words, things are going well in France. And the startup now wants to go down the same road in other European countries.

Lydia plans to hire 800 people over the coming three years, including 160 people in 2022 alone. By 2025, the company hopes that 10 million customers in Europe will use Lydia as their primary account.

“What we’re experiencing is the reinvention of the banking industry,” Cyril Chiche told me. According to him, people are not going to manage money the same way in a few years. Some companies will get it while others won’t change.

He doesn’t think it’s a duel between neobanks and incumbents. Some legacy players may have what it takes to stay relevant in the future. But, of course, he truly belies that Lydia can simplify retail banking so that it becomes more accessible to more users.

Image Credits: Lydia

Torq, a Portland, Oregon-based no-code security automation startup formerly known as StackPulse, today announced that it has raised a $50 million Series B round led by Insight Partners. New investor SentinelOne, the publicly traded endpoint security platform, also participated in this round, as well as existing investors GGV Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. This brings Torq’s total funding to date to $78 million.

No-code/low-code platforms are obviously all the rage these days, though we tend to see fewer of them in the security space. Torq, which counts the likes of NS1, eToro, Armis and Healthy.io among its users, uses an easy-to-use graphical interface to help security teams automate routing workflows across security products. In that respect, it’s not that different from a Microsoft Power Automate, but with a singular focus on security.

The promise of Torq is that it can bring together the complex jumble of security tools that modern enterprises now deploy to keep their data safe. The service’s workflows can be triggered at regular intervals or from alerts. These can be simple workflows like reacting to Slack requests from employees for privileged access to a cloud resource, for example, or automating the analysis process of a suspicious file.

Image Credits: Torq

“Torq’s automation has transformed how our team manages security,” said Lemonade CISO Jonathan Jaffe. “As just one example, using Torq to manage web application firewall blocking rules reduced time to block malicious traffic by 70x, and increased coverage to over 90% – a significant improvement.”

As Torq CEO and co-founder Ofer Smadari noted, the company spent the time between its last funding round and today by focusing on the overall user experience. “We’ve made significant investments in the user experience — making it easier for users to connect other systems, create more complex workflows, and enhancing speed and responsiveness of the interface,” he said. “We invested heavily in scalability and resilience from the onset to ensure that Torq supports enterprises at any scale.”

The company plans to use the new funding to support its growing number of customers and prospects as they scale their usage of the service. According to Smadari, the average number of workflows a customer runs on the service is currently growing 2-3x every week. “Once a customer gets started, they’re quick to expand. Making sure we are built to support this growth – before it happens – is essential,” said Smadari.

And while Torq itself was built to help with some of the talent shortage in the security industry by freeing up security teams from routine tasks, Smadari also noted that its company’s biggest challenge right now is hiring.

“Torq’s rapid success is a testament to how the platform makes it easier for security teams to deliver better protection across every aspect of the business,” said Steve Ward, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “With its intuitive product and experienced team, Torq is quickly becoming a leader in the industry. We’re thrilled to partner with the Torq team as they continue to grow.”

Samsara is a company that has raised lots of private capital at rather high prices. Back in 2018, for example, TechCrunch noted that the IoT platform company had raised $100 million at a $3.6 billion valuation.

Now that Samsara is going public, we were curious whether it would manage to best its prior private valuations. The answer appears to be an easy yes.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

According to a new SEC filing that dropped this week, Samsara expects to price its IPO between $20 and $23 per share, likely valuing the San Francisco-based company at a multiple of its final private price set in 2020.

This morning, we’re comparing its private worth and potential public value. Then we’ll do some work to better understand Samsara’s revenue multiples and what its value can tell us about its market. If you want a deeper dive into the mechanics of Samsara’s business, we have you covered here. Today we’re more interested in the resulting numbers, not how they were achieved.

Let’s go!

What’s Samsara worth at $23 per share?

A lot, it turns out. Per the company’s latest S-1/A filing, Samsara expects to have 505,604,713 shares outstanding after selling 35,000,000 shares in its IPO and reserving 5,250,000 shares for its underwriters to purchase if they so choose.

The company’s simple IPO valuation range, then, stretches from $10.1 billion to $11.6 billion.

AgentSync this morning announced that it has closed a $75 million Series B, pushing its valuation to $1.2 billion.

The new unicorn has been on a rapid-fire fundraising clip since TechCrunch first spoke to the company just over a year ago, when it raised a $4.4 million seed round in August 2020. The company stayed busy, raising another $6.7 million that same December.

But the work of bringing modern, digital infrastructure to the U.S. insurance world kept proving to be a growth business. So, AgentSync raised a $25 million Series A in March of this year, increasing its valuation to $220 million. That went up by around 6x in the ensuing few quarters.

Obviously, AgentSync is a startup on the move, so TechCrunch got co-founder and CEO Niji Sabharwal back on the phone to chat through why his company wanted even more capital.

Why AgentSync raised again

Most often when you ask a startup that raised a few times in a year why they added more capital to their accounts, the answer boils down to something along the lines of well, we could. While this rather human answer is understandable, it’s also not very illustrative.

AgentSync was a bit clearer. After getting the company through its 2022 planning process, Sabharwal said it wanted to invest more in its products, which would reduce its runway from five years to two. Hence, AgentSync decided to take on more capital to add staff.

Per the CEO, AgentSync still had around $28 million in the bank when it raised again. By TechCrunch arithmetic, the company closed out its Series B with around $100 million in cash, though that figure may have dipped under the nine-figure threshold since.

What does investment look like for the company? According to Sabharwal, AgentSync is going to double its sales org in the next year, quadruple its marketing team, and double its product and engineering efforts. That’s a lot of folks, and having more cash will make such a hiring ramp simpler.

And, let’s be clear, like other startups out there that raise two or three rounds inside a single year, AgentSync simply could access more capital while multiplying its worth. It’s hard to say no to that. Underscoring just how hot the market is today for quickly expanding startups, AgentSync raised its new round not off a deck, but a detailed investor update, and got its first term sheet within two days of opening the round, though it didn’t select that investor, its CEO said.

Valor Equity Partners led the Series B, which included capital from the ubiquitous Tiger Global. Craft Ventures, Atreides Management and Anthemis also chipped in capital to the round.

What about that valuation, though

Seeing a new unicorn is akin to waking up in today’s market. Get out of bed, read Twitter, see new unicorn. You get the idea.

But with AgentSync, we have lots more data than we tend to get from startups busy raising capital, so let’s chat through some data points.

The following are cribbed from our reporting and a particular piece from Forbes. Citations included, and ARR stands for annual recurring revenue. Note that we have done some extrapolation from various pieces of shared information where reasonable:

• August 2020: $1.9 million ARR [Source]
• December 2020: ~$3 million to $4 million ARR, 4x growth since March 2020 [TechCrunch estimate based on shared metrics]
• March 2021: <$10 million ARR, 6x growth in 2020 [Source]
• December 2021: ~$10.5 million to $14 million ARR, 3.5x growth year over year [TechCrunch estimate based on prior numbers, shared growth rate]

Some of that is messy and approximate, but it gives us an idea of what the company is managing in growth terms. I wonder if our final numbers are actually a bit low, given that with a $1.2 billion valuation, AgentSync would be worth something around a 100x ARR multiple. Which is pretty hot, even for today’s markets, though certainly not impossible.

Regardless, AgentSync has a few key indicators that investors view as lowering its risk profile. Zero customer churn, for example, which for a company of AgentSync’s age is impressive. And the unicorn reported 169% net dollar retention, indicating that once it lands a customer, it quickly sells more to that client. This lowers the company’s costs of acquiring customers compared to their long-term worth, making it more efficient.

And the company is building new products. We’re best acquainted with AgentSync’s original business of passing broker license data between parties. But the startup has moved into providing recruiting data regarding brokers themselves for carriers, for example. Per Sabharwal, AgentSync has launched three new products in the last year.

Let’s see what the company can do with even more capital. Given that AgentSync as a private company is now worth about what neoinsurance providers Root and MetroMile are valued at together on the public markets, investors are certainly betting that insurtech infra bears out to be a better bet than selling coverage itself.

Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC) announced in a recent filing that it has received questions from the United States government regarding its anticipated combination with Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG). TechCrunch covered the SPAC’s planned combination with the company associated with former U.S. President Donald Trump here.

We were broadly skeptical of the deal, product goals and general vibe. Since then, a few things have happened:

• In late October, The New York Times reported that Trump was in conversation with DWAC CEO Patrick Orlando before the SPAC was put together. “In doing so, Mr. Orlando’s SPAC may have skirted securities laws and stock exchange rules, lawyers said,” per the Times.
• The DWAC and TMTG picked up “subscription agreements for $1 billion in committed capital to be received upon consummation of their business combination” on December 4, per a release.

It’s not surprising, given the two news items, that the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), are asking questions.

According to the new DWAC filing (emphasis added):

The company stresses, as you read, that it has not been accused of wrongdoing. Yet. But that’s a lot of scrutiny for a deal that was hard to parse, which has our heads tilting to one side at a rather sharp angle.

The TMTG/DWAC investor presentation was thin on details. And it quickly became apparent that some of the code being used to build TMTG product TRUTH Social was not properly sourced. It’s all a bit whiffy, frankly.

Why the SPAC would merge with what appeared to be more of a collection of ideas than a company was a question. How the valuation thereof was decided was also a mystery. As was the list of investors putting the $1 billion infusion together for the deal.

The entire affair is not a good look for SPACs, which already earn a goodish bit of side-eye given their somewhat befuddling mechanism that allows a pre-product company to go public via a less mature structure than is generally permitted. This is the sort of deal that gave SPACs — blank-check companies — the name that they had until recently, when they got a rebrand of sorts for a short window of time in the eyes of investors.

More to come on this one.