Author: abubakar

Continuous integration and continuous delivery, aka CI/CD, is a modern development concept where code is being constantly updated and delivered to a central repository, rather than waiting for a set of features to be completed and releasing it all at once. It’s a fairly recent construct, but Earthly Technologies, an early stage startup, believes that
Earthly wants to reinvent continuous integration to make it faster and cheaper by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

Continuous integration and continuous delivery, aka CI/CD, is a modern development concept where code is being constantly updated and delivered to a central repository, rather than waiting for a set of features to be completed and releasing it all at once. It’s a fairly recent construct, but Earthly Technologies, an early stage startup, believes that CI is ripe for updating to make it faster and more efficient.

The company has had an open source CI product for some time, but today it announced that is releasing a SaaS version, Earthly CI, which users can sign up for. It also made public a previously unannounced $6.5 million seed plus round that closed in 2021. The company was loathe to reveal the exact closing date for some reason.

Earthly founder and CEO Vlad A. Ionescu explained that traditional CI suffers from being poky, slowing down developers waiting for the code to integrate. What’s more, he says the software is difficult to run and debug on a local laptop. Finally, it’s expensive, and he believes that it’s costly by design because it’s traditionally billed by the build minute, an approach that discourages companies from building a faster system.

He says he started his company to solve these problems.

“Our CI reinvents continuous integration by giving you really, really fast CI pipelines, I’m talking an order of magnitude faster than ever before possible. We’re talking like two to 20x speed improvement, and that unlocks a level of productivity for the engineering team that you’ve never seen before,” he claimed.

They do this by only running what’s changed instead of running the whole setup every time. “So if you look at the traditional CI, the typical workflow is such that the developer first commits code to GitHub, and then they wait for the CI to kick in. And then there are a bunch of steps like reinstalling programming languages, then reinstalling application dependencies and rebuilding components that have not changed.”

“And everything up to this point is stuff that is exactly the same every single time. Our technology allows you to reuse that computation from previous runs, so you only rebuild what has actually changed,” he said.

The open source project can be downloaded for free, but he says it lacks the speed boost of the pay version, Earthly CI.

The company has 15 employees, up from 4 when they got the funding, and is hiring slowly for select roles. In particular, he is looking to build a go-to-market team.

Ionescu says it’s challenging to find diverse technical personnel as he builds his team, but he will look to fill other roles with more diverse candidates. “It is not easy, especially when you have a very DevOps-CI type of product. The statistics are such that there are very few diverse candidates for those particular roles. It is tough, but as we continue to build a team where we can include more junior [roles] as well, that’s where we see more diversity coming in,” he said.

The $6.5 million funding was led by Innovation Endeavors with participation from existing investors 468 Capital and Uncorrelated Ventures.

Earthly wants to reinvent continuous integration to make it faster and cheaper by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

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Supply chain management software startup Slync, which was at one point valued at $240 million, hasn’t had the easiest go of it lately. Slync’s founder, Christopher Kirchner, was charged by the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this month for misappropriating $20 million from the company to fund a lavish lifestyle, including a
Logistics startup Slync raises $24M, attempts to distance itself from disgraced founder by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Supply chain management software startup Slync, which was at one point valued at $240 million, hasn’t had the easiest go of it lately.

Slync’s founder, Christopher Kirchner, was charged by the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) this month for misappropriating $20 million from the company to fund a lavish lifestyle, including a $16 million private Gulfstream jet, pro golf tournaments, a $495,000 luxury suite at a local sports stadium and failed bids for English soccer clubs. He told private bankers that the $20 million, which amounted to 40% of the $50 million Slync raised from angels and venture firms, represented “a distribution from my company” — a distribution that Slync’s board of directors never authorized.

Meanwhile, some of Slync’s staff went months without pay. The company fell behind on payments to vendors, as well as the NHL’s Dallas Stars, which Slync was sponsoring at the time. During all this, the startup lost its chief marketing officer, chief revenue officer and chief financial officer.

Understandably, Slync has made a concerted effort to distance itself from Kirchner — and it’s had some success, seemingly. According to filings with the SEC, Slync raised around $24 million — a combination of equity and debt — in January. We reached out to the company for more information, and Greg Kefer, the chief marketing officer, agreed to an email interview.

Off the bat, Kefer refused to answer questions pertaining to Kirchner, save that he was suspended from his position as Slync’s CEO in 2022. Kefer referred me to this statement:

We are aware of FBI activities related to an ongoing federal investigation into the personal activities of Slync’s former CEO, Christopher S. Kirchner … Slync is cooperating with the government in its investigations and, as a victim of Christopher Kirchner’s actions, looks forward to a just resolution of this matter. This investigation is not the company’s primary focus. We have moved on with our new CEO, John Urban, and are focused on delivering next-generation technology to the global logistics industry.

Kefer disclosed that Goldman Sachs led Slync’s latest round (with participation from Blumberg Capital, ACME Ventures, Gaingels) and “remains committed to the Slync value proposition,” despite the recent turmoil. He also said that the company has plans to expand the team “substantially” over the next year and that annual recurring revenue is “growing rapidly,” although he wouldn’t divulge the size of Slync’s customer base.

Kefer claims that the new cash will be primarily put toward “expanding the scope” of Slync’s technology beyond containerized freight, air freight and specialty cargo processes — its current focuses. To date, Slync has raised a total of more than $100 million in venture debt and equity, excepting a loan it received as a part of the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program.

“Obviously the fact that we just raised $24 million helps us weather a lot in the coming months,” Kefer said. “But this infusion of funds is also an indication that our investment partners see the potential in Slync’s technology.”

So what is Slync’s technology?

At a high level, Slync connects disparate shipping and logistics systems, ingesting and processing data to (ideally) automate various repetitive processes. Drawing on a range of data sources including enterprise resource management systems, customer relationship management systems, and transport management systems, visibility service providers, email, PDFs and spreadsheets, Slync attempts to highlight key information for users, offering collaboration tools and “role-based” workflows for communicating and sharing that info.

“Slync provides a technology platform that allows large global shippers to finally do away with manual processes that continue to plague the logistics industry. There’s a lot of tech out there, and that’s part of the problem, because it’s created disconnected silos of data and operational tools,” Kefer said.

But lots of startups do the same. By one estimate, the market for supply chain management software was valued at $15.8 billion in 2022.

Tive and Altana, firms developing supply chain visibility tools, recently raised $54 million and $100 million, respectively. Supplier experience management platform HICX landed $30 million not long after, and FourKites — which helps manage global freight shipments — nabbed its own recent $30 million tranche as part of an earlier-announced, strategic partnership with FedEx.

Kefer argues that Slync can stand out — and succeed — in the crowded field, but color me skeptical. Setting aside the fact that hiring might be a challenge, given the company’s historical payroll issues, Slync’s latest funding tranche was only a fraction of the size of the previous, all-equity tranche — suggesting Kirchner casts a long shadow. And while logistics companies were the VC darlings of 2021 into mid-2022, funding has slowed considerably since then.

For what it’s worth (and to Kefer’s earlier point), Goldman Sachs hasn’t stepped away. Darren Cohen, a partner there, had this to say when contacted for comment:

“During the COVID pandemic, loaded container ships anchored offshore and empty store shelves showed everyone what happens when the international supply chain breaks down. We believe the Slync platform provides an innovative solution that brings the global logistics industry fully into the digital realm. The value of this technology is significant in our opinion.”

Logistics startup Slync raises $24M, attempts to distance itself from disgraced founder by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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The cloud is growing expensive. According to a recent survey from ESG, more than half of companies say that their spending on public cloud apps will increase in 2023 while 56% expect their public cloud infrastructure services spending will go up this year. A separate report from Gartner forecasts that worldwide spending on public cloud
Cloud optimization startup ProsperOps lands $72M investment by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

The cloud is growing expensive. According to a recent survey from ESG, more than half of companies say that their spending on public cloud apps will increase in 2023 while 56% expect their public cloud infrastructure services spending will go up this year. A separate report from Gartner forecasts that worldwide spending on public cloud services will grow to total $591.8 billion in 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022.

The cost burden is such that many companies end up exceeding their budgets for cloud. Veritas, a cloud data management vendor, found in a 2022 poll that upwards of 94% organizations incur higher costs than anticipated when using a public cloud service provider and overspend by an average of 43%.

It’s no wonder, then, that cloud optimization software is attracting funding. One of the recent vendors to benefit is ProsperOps, which today closed a $72 million funding round led by by H.I.G. Growth Partners with participation from Active Capital and other unnamed investors.

Incredibly, prior to the investment, ProsperOps had only raised around $800,000. Co-founder and CEO Chris Cochran says that the company approached H.I.G. to “scale given the market opportunity.”

“H.I.G. specializes in high growth business-to-business software-as-a-service, is aligned with our goal of high but responsible growth, and has the financial resources to help us go big in the automation space,” Cochran told TechCrunch in an email interview. “This investment allows us to expand the scope of the work we perform for our customers and continue growing our engineering and sales teams.”

ProsperOps’ founding team, including Cochran, takes credit for starting the AWS managed services business at Rackspace. Cochran says that they saw firsthand how hard it was to optimize customer environments without automation.

“It didn’t matter how good the reporting and recommendation tools were. We were frustrated with the outcomes — or lack thereof,” Cochran said. “We started ProsperOps to leverage automation, AI and algorithmic management to help cloud customers generate better savings outcomes.”

To that end, ProsperOps provides software that automatically optimizes cloud resources to deliver savings. It assumes responsibility for reserved and savings plan management; customers configure a few high-level settings after which ProsperOps’ software learns to handle ongoing activities (e.g. day-to-day commit discount management, associated capacity planning, etc.).

Lots of cloud optimization startups claim to do the same, like Sync Computing. But Cochran claims that ProsperOps is one of the only vendors that considers customer return on investment (ROI) in terms of how its AI algorithms and automation operate. It’s also one of the few to focus on committed-use discounts, which provide discounted prices in exchange for a commitment to use a minimum level of resources for a specified term (e.g. a few months).

“Others tend to focus around inputs, which don’t necessarily result in increasing a customer’s ROI,” Cochran added. “Our service watches cloud usage in real time and dynamically optimizes on customers’ behalves.”

ProsperOps — which interestingly enough doesn’t use machine learning; Cochran said it’s unclear it’s superior to other techniques — is focused exclusively on serving AWS customers for now. He claims that the startup currently has “several hundred” customers and that it’s been profitable and debt-free since Q4 2020.

“Our customers tend to be technical and financial leaders,” Cochran said. “For the technical leader, ProsperOps means they can focus on using the cloud in the manner they want to use it and know that behind the scenes our service is monitoring what’s happening and automatically securing the best price. For the financial leader, they know they’re getting the right economics and can see that data as ROI that is trend-able and benchmarked against their peer group.”

Several years ago, the market for cloud optimization software and “FinOps,” while nascent, was consolidating as incumbents in adjacent sectors saw the opportunities presented by cloud cost optimization. Microsoft in 2017 acquired Cloudyn, which provided tools to analyze and forecast cloud spending. Then, in 2019, Apptio snatched up cloud spending management vendor Cloudability, while VMware and NetApp bought CloudHealth and Spot (formerly Spotinst), respectively, within the span of a few years.

The consolidation isn’t necessarily over, as evidenced by Intel’s $650 million purchase of Granulate last April. But ProsperOps and ProsperOps’ investors evidently believe there’s room for growth yet.

Active Capital’s Pat Matthews said in an emailed statement: “As cloud adoption continues to accelerate, tech companies and big enterprises are realizing the costs and complexities associated with AWS and the big cloud providers. ProsperOps helps these businesses save real money by automatically identifying savings opportunities that may otherwise go unnoticed. In an era where the business world races to cut cost and get more efficient, ProsperOps can help just about any business that leverages the cloud for important parts of their infrastructure stack.”

In the near term, ProsperOps plans to grow its 30-person workforce and expand to other clouds, Cochran says.

Cloud optimization startup ProsperOps lands $72M investment by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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