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Verbit, a transcription startup with offices in Tel Aviv and New York, today announced that it has raised a $23 million Series A round led by Viola Ventures. Vertex Ventures, HV Ventures, Oryzn Capital, Vintage Venture Partners and ClalTech also participated in this round. The company, which currently focuses on the legal and academic sector, uses both its custom machine learning models and freelancers to offer an accuracy guarantee of over 99 percent. In total, the company has now raised $34 million.

Tom Livne, Verbit’s CEO and co-founder, told me that he used to be a lawyer and saw how the quality and turnaround time of traditional transcription services could be improved with the help of machine learning. While this is a huge but very fragmented market, Livne argues there hasn’t been a lot of innovation here. “There is no innovation and technology in this market,” he said. “So we came up with this idea to build a technological transcription company.”

The company started out with the three founders, but today, Verbit has more than 70 employees and more than 100 customers. These include a number of law firms, but Livne also found that there is a big market for good transcription in academia, where accessibility laws often require these institutions to provide transcriptions of their classes and lectures. Coursera, Stanford and Harvard now use its service. Livne says Verbit now has millions of dollars in revenue, and by the end of the year he hopes to get to tens of millions of dollars.

Today, Verbit’s automated system — which the company customizes and retrains for all new customers based on their specific needs and contexts — gets to about 90 percent accuracy. Then, its army of freelancers sets to work on those automated transcripts to look for mistakes — and fixes them. All of those fixes then flow back into the model, which then (ideally) gets better over time.

Livne stressed that he believes that his company is not setting out to destroy jobs but that Verbit is creating thousands of new jobs for the freelancers that support its service. “We are not here to replace the human,” he said. “We are here to give them tools to make their job better and easier and we are actually reducing the barrier to entry to be a transcriber. Think about Verbit as an Uber for transcription.”

Recently, Verbit also launched a live transcription service for media firms that also uses a human-in-the-loop process to offer transcriptions with a delay of only a few seconds. It’s no surprise, then, that the company plans to add new verticals to its lineup as well, though it’s still considering its options. Livne noted that the company is looking at insurance and financial firms, as well as media and medical use cases. “But right now, we have very high demand from academia and law, so we need to support it on a larger scale,” he said. The company is also looking at adding support for other languages.

That’s where the new funding comes in. Verbit plans to hire aggressively, especially in its New York office, with a focus on sales, marketing and customer success.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2HD073M

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A little over two years after Lyndra Therapeutics Inc. first unveiled its technology for time-delayed drug delivery through a simple pill, the company has raised $55 million to continue developing the technology for public consumption.

By creating a new kind of ultra long-acting drug-delivery mechanism in pills, the company claims it can remove the need for patients to follow strict guidelines for taking their medication.

Following doctors’ prescriptions for medication is a problem in emerging markets and among elderly patients, and the new technology has implications for treating pretty much everything.

Developed in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology laboratory of Dr. Robert Langer, Lyndra was co-founded by Langer and Amy Schulman, a former lawyer for the pharmaceutical industry and a partner recruited to run the LS Polaris Innovation fund established by Polaris Partners in 2014 to invest in healthcare companies.

Polaris led the company’s most recent round of financing, which also included new investors like the Chinese private equity giant HOPU Investments, Gilead Sciences, Invus, Orient Life and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (which initially provided funding for Dr. Langer’s research out of MIT).

Lyndra has raised the money as it continues along the path toward developing a pill to treat schizophrenia. Phase II trials for the pill, which are required before it can be approved by U.S. regulators, are expected to begin next year. The company said it also will be developing other drug candidates that are developed internally and through partnerships over the coming years.

“Lyndra’s long-acting therapies have the potential to address a diversity of disease states,” said Robert Langer, co-founder and Board Member of Lyndra Therapeutics. “The ability to move from daily to weekly administration of an oral drug is groundbreaking. I believe Lyndra’s long-acting oral pill will be truly transformative.”

For investors like the Gates Foundation it was the company’s early work around anti-malarial drugs and HIV that likely attracted attention.

When the company first unveiled its technology back in 2016, publications like The Guardian hailed it as a breakthrough in drug delivery.

The technology depends in part on the novel structure of the pill itself. Encapsulated within a digestible pill is a star-shaped structure that has six arms folded in on itself. As stomach acid dissolves the casing for the pill the arms unfold and release their payload over time. As the star unfolds it expands in size so it can remain in the stomach rather than being pushed down the digestive tract. Eventually the arms break off and the remaining pieces of the pill are naturally expelled — like undigested food.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2G8Faep

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British startup venture builder Entrepreneur First is eyeing additional expansion in Asia, where its operation is now as large as it is in Europe, as it expands its reach in 2019. But despite serving a varied mixture of markets, the company said its founders are a fairly unified breed.

The Entrepreneur First (EF) program is billed as a “talent investor.” It matches prospective founders and, through an accelerator program, it encourages them to start and build companies that it backs with financing. The organization started in London in 2011, and today it is also present in Paris and Berlin in Europe and, in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong and (soon) Bangalore. To date, it says it has graduated more than 1,200 founders who have created more than 200 companies, estimated at a cumulative $1.5 billion on paper.

Those six cities cover a spread of unique cultures — both in general life and startup ecosystems — but, despite that, co-founder Matthew Clifford believes there’s actually many commonalities among its global founder base.

“It’s really striking to me how little adjustment of the model has been necessary to make it work in each location,” Clifford — who started EF with Alice Bentinck — told TechCrunch in an interview. “The outliers in each country have more in common with each other and their fellow compatriots… we’re uncovering this global community of outliers.”

Despite the common traits, EF’s Asia expansion has added a new dimension to the program after it announced a tie-in with HAX, one of the world’s best-known hardware-focused accelerator programs, that will see the duo co-invest in hardware startups via a new joint program.

“We saw early that hardware was a much more viable part of the market in Asia than it is traditionally seen in Europe [and] needed a partner to accelerate the talent,” Clifford said.

Already, the first four beneficiaries of that partnership have been announced — AIMS, BIOPSIN, Neptune Robotics and SEPPURE — each of which graduated the first EF cohort in Hong Kong, its fourth in Asia so far. Going forward, Clifford expects that around three to five startups from each batch will move from EF into the joint initiative with HAX. The program covers Asia first but it is slated to expand to EF’s European sites “soon.”

Entrepreneur First held its first investor day in Hong Kong this month

Another impending expansion is EF’s first foray into India via Bangalore, which starts this month, and there could be other new launches in 2019.

“We’ll continue to grow by adding sites, but we are not in a rush,” Clifford said. “The most important thing is retraining quality of talent. It may be six months until we add another site in Asia, but there’s no shortage of places we think it will work.

“We operate a single global fund,” he added. “We’re a talent investor and we believe there are strong network effects in that. The people who back us are really betting on the model… [that it’s] an asset class with great returns.

While it appears that its global expansion drive is a little more gradual than what was previously envisaged — backer and board member Reid Hoffman told TechCrunch in 2016 that he could imagine it in 50 cities — Clifford said EF isn’t raising more capital presently. That previous investment coupled with management fees is enough fuel in the tank, he said. The organization also operates a follow-on fund, but it has one major exit to date, Pony Technology, the AI startup bought by Twitter for a reported $150 million.

Still, with hundreds of companies in the world with EF on the cap table, Clifford said he is bullish that his organization can target an international-minded breed of entrepreneur worldwide. The impact he sees is one that will work regardless of any local constraints placed on them.

“With our global network of capital, we always want capital, not talent, to be the limiting factor. Our goal is to make being ‘an EF company’ more relevant to your identity as a startup regardless of your location,” he told TechCrunch.

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Despite a number of well-publicized hiccups, venture capitalists are betting another $500 million on health insurance provider Clover Health, TechCrunch has learned.

Existing investor Greenoaks Capital led the round, according to the startup, which confirmed it was closing a new round of capital in the coming weeks. Clover Health has raised a total of $925 million to date, garnering a valuation of $1.2 billion with a $130 million Series D funding in 2017. The company, backed by Alphabet’s venture arm GV, Sequoia Capital, Floodgate, Bracket Capital, First Round Capital and more, declined to disclose its latest valuation.

San Francisco-based Clover Health was founded in 2014 by chief executive officer Vivek Garipalli, the former founder of New Jersey healthcare system CarePoint Health; and Kris Gale, who served as the startup’s chief technology officer until transitioning into an adviser role in December 2017. As part of its latest funding round, the company told TechCrunch it’s promoting Andrew Toy, its chief technology officer since early 2018, to the role of president and CTO. He will also join its board of directors.

Varsha Rao, Airbnb’s former chief operating officer, joined the company in September 2017 as COO.

The tech-enabled health insurer differentiates itself from incumbents by collecting and analyzing health and behavioral data to lower costs and improve medical outcomes for its members. It’s part of a new cohort of heavily funded insurtech startups, including Devoted Health and Bright Health, both of which similarly provide Medicare Advantage plans. Devoted Health, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, raised a $300 million Series B funding round three months ago. Bright Health, for its part, brought in a $200 million Series C in late November at a $950 million valuation. It’s backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Greycroft, NEA and Redpoint Ventures, among others.

Founded in 2014, Clover Health is years older than its aforementioned counterparts. The business, though supported by top-tier investors and plenty of capital, has struggled in the past to shrink its losses. In 2015, Clover Health posted a net loss of $4.9 million only to increase it 7x the following year to $34.6 million, according to financial documents obtained by Axios. At the time, Clover Health had 20,600 Medicare Advantage members, earning it $184 million in taxpayer revenue. According to reporting from CNBC, the company had initially planned to double its membership base each year but was only able to expand from 20,000 in 2016 to 27,000 in September 2017.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2TkY9GH

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Sandbox’s magic happens in a largely empty room. The gear mounted onto the walls (VR headsets, PC backpacks and tracked toy assault rifles) gives more than a little indication that there’s more afoot, but nothing really clicks until your team is strapped in and the headsets shove you into a fast-paced wave shooter.

The startup, which has seven locations in Asia and North America, has taken plenty of people through the sweat-inducing experience, including quite a few high-profile investors who are ready to buy into Sandbox’s vision for VR.

Sandbox VR just closed a $68 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with further participation from Floodgate, Stanford University, TriplePoint Capital, CRCM and Alibaba, as reported by Business Insider.

Andreessen Horowitz’s investment in Sandbox VR comes more than five years after the firm made a big bet on Oculus VR. At the time, Oculus helped stroke enthusiasm behind the idea that regular consumers would soon be strapping into their own VR gear. While the company has seen some major progress toward that vision beneath Facebook, it still hasn’t entirely kept pace with the white-hot expectations that some investors had set toward that vision.

In 2019, Andreessen Horowitz’s Andrew Chen still sees plenty of opportunity in the home, but is excited about what can be enabled when VR can break free of some of its constraints.

“I think we’ve run the experiment that in-home needs to actually have a kind of different form factor, you want the hardware to be more like $200 or the same as a console,” Chen tells TechCrunch. “I think we’re going to see location-based VR split off and be its own form factor with larger spaces that are intrinsically multi-social with real people there and premium hardware like motion capture and haptic vests.”

The Hong Kong-founded company is hardly the first VR startup to bet on premium experiences in retail locations; startups like The Void have also raised significant capital with high-profile partners like Disney thrusting them into highly trafficked locations, but Sandbox’s investors see the company’s strengths in its scalability.

“We tried everything, what we really liked about [Sandbox] was that really though about archetyping this as modest-sized rooms that you could really put anywhere,” Chen said. “So it’s this really scalable thing that you could imagine putting inside of a mall or a boutique retail location. You could scale a single location to having 10 or 20 rooms the way a movie theater might have 12 screens.”

Sandbox’s $68 million round comes in the midst of a general market cool-down around VR, but as more and more investors look to adjacent technologies like augmented reality, the startup’s backers see its strengths in terms of the bond with users. For Mike Maples, a partner at Floodgate, the investment represents his first in the virtual reality space.

“A lot of AR startups are getting more attention because people say, AR can be on all the phones and it has broader distribution,” Maples said. “When I experienced this product I felt like people are going to say, ‘This product rocks my world.’” 

You can read more about how Sandbox VR linked up with its investors in this Medium post from the company’s chief product officer (hint: the story involves In-N-Out).

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2MEx3b0

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Game engine maker Unity believes voice communications are going to grow to become a critical part of gaming across platforms and it’s buying one of the top companies in the space to bolster what its customers can build on the its platform.

Unity has acquired Vivox, a company that powers voice and text chat for the world’s most massive gaming titles from Fortnite to PUBG to League of Legends. The company’s positional voice chat enable gamers to hear other players chatting around them directionally in 3D space. The company also provides text-based chat. No details on deal terms.

“We thought, I thought, that voice is just one of those things that we should offer our customers,” Unity CEO John Riccitiello tells TechCrunch. “There are just a lot of places to innovate there and I was excited by the roadmap of Vivox.”

Unity plans to use its cross-platform support expertise to make it easier for developers on platforms traditionally underserved by voice chat tools, like mobile, to take advantage of the deeper communication that’s made possible by Vivox. As Unity looks towards new customers beyond gaming, this acquisition has broader reach as well.

“We’re increasingly supporting industries like architecture, engineering, construction and the auto industry and they talk a lot about collaborating and communicating,” Riccitiello says.

Vivox was originally founded in 2005 and raised over $22 million in venture funding from firms like Benchmark and Canaan Partners before it struck hard times some time after its last reported funding in 2010. The startup’s name and some of its assets were acquired by a new entity, Mercer Road Corp, we are told. The company has maintained much of the original leadership during this time; founder and CEO Rob Seaver will continue on with the company after its acquisition.

For his part, Riccitiello doesn’t seem to have immediate plans to shake things up at the Framebridge, Massachusetts-based company, which will maintain its offices and 50+ employees situated in The Bay State. Seaver will report directly to Riccitiello.

Though the company’s previous customers include studios like Unity-rival Epic Games that used the tool to bolster voice chat in Fortnite, there doesn’t seem to be any plans to cut off non-Unity customers from using the service, “nothing is changing,” Riccitiello tells TechCrunch.

“It can be nerve-racking to count on something from a smaller company when they might get acquired by a competitor or might go out of business,” he says. “I don’t think anyone is worried about Unity going out of business and I don’t think anyone is worried about Unity being bad hands, we’re sort of Switzerland in our world, we support all platforms and virtually every publisher in the world.”

Asked whether he felt the company’s status as an open platform had been harmed by recent feuds with UK-based cloud gaming startup Improbable, Riccitiello minimized the issue saying it was a skirmish based on “them claiming a partnership that didn’t exist,” reiterating that “relative to developers, I think they can count on us morning, noon, and night to do the right things for them.”

Unity has raised more than $600 million and is valued at north of $3 billion.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2UrkhiF

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Game engine maker Unity believes voice communications are going to grow to become a critical part of gaming across platforms and it’s buying one of the top companies in the space to bolster what its customers can build on the its platform.

Unity has acquired Vivox, a company that powers voice and text chat for the world’s most massive gaming titles from Fortnite to PUBG to League of Legends. The company’s positional voice chat enable gamers to hear other players chatting around them directionally in 3D space. The company also provides text-based chat. No details on deal terms.

“We thought, I thought, that voice is just one of those things that we should offer our customers,” Unity CEO John Riccitiello tells TechCrunch. “There are just a lot of places to innovate there and I was excited by the roadmap of Vivox.”

Unity plans to use its cross-platform support expertise to make it easier for developers on platforms traditionally underserved by voice chat tools, like mobile, to take advantage of the deeper communication that’s made possible by Vivox. As Unity looks towards new customers beyond gaming, this acquisition has broader reach as well.

“We’re increasingly supporting industries like architecture, engineering, construction and the auto industry and they talk a lot about collaborating and communicating,” Riccitiello says.

Vivox was originally founded in 2005 and raised over $22 million in venture funding from firms like Benchmark and Canaan Partners before it struck hard times some time after its last reported funding in 2010. The startup’s name and some of its assets were acquired by a new entity, Mercer Road Corp, we are told. The company has maintained much of the original leadership during this time; founder and CEO Rob Seaver will continue on with the company after its acquisition.

For his part, Riccitiello doesn’t seem to have immediate plans to shake things up at the Framebridge, Massachusetts-based company, which will maintain its offices and 50+ employees situated in The Bay State. Seaver will report directly to Riccitiello.

Though the company’s previous customers include studios like Unity-rival Epic Games that used the tool to bolster voice chat in Fortnite, there doesn’t seem to be any plans to cut off non-Unity customers from using the service, “nothing is changing,” Riccitiello tells TechCrunch.

“It can be nerve-racking to count on something from a smaller company when they might get acquired by a competitor or might go out of business,” he says. “I don’t think anyone is worried about Unity going out of business and I don’t think anyone is worried about Unity being bad hands, we’re sort of Switzerland in our world, we support all platforms and virtually every publisher in the world.”

Asked whether he felt the company’s status as an open platform had been harmed by recent feuds with UK-based cloud gaming startup Improbable, Riccitiello minimized the issue saying it was a skirmish based on “them claiming a partnership that didn’t exist,” reiterating that “relative to developers, I think they can count on us morning, noon, and night to do the right things for them.”

Unity has raised more than $600 million and is valued at north of $3 billion.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2UrkhiF

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Few things are easy in our financial system if you don’t have regular employment. It’s hard to prove (regular) income, which makes applying for a credit card or personal loan much more difficult and time-consuming. That’s particularly tough, since freelancer income is variable, and these sort of income smoothing tools can be critical to make ends meet. Despite those challenges, freelancing is the new normal: if current trends hold true, a majority of the workforce in America could be freelancers within ten years.

SF-based startup Oxygen hopes to give those freelancers some breathing room in their financial lives. Through a digital banking app and a membership program, the startup offers freelancers simple access to credit that can be pulled down or paid off instantly at any time.

The company has raised $2.3 million in the first close of its seed round from investors including Digital Horizon Capital and Cynthia Chen. It participated in Y Combinator’s accelerator program last summer.

Hussein Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Oxygen, is used to breaking down old institutions and understands the acute pain of freelancers. A single founder originally from Egypt, Ahmed worked as a consultant in the Bay Area after getting his MBA at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and his PhD in Computer Science at Virginia Tech. “I tried to take a loan out from LendingClub” and they couldn’t verify his income, he explained to me. They then “asked for 10 pages of documentation” since he was a freelancer.

That experience would eventually lead to the core offering of Oxygen, which is efficient and on-going access to a credit line. “When you have this cash flow problem, you can just make one tap,” Ahmed said. “Open the app, take the money out, and repay it whenever you can.”

Oxygen is unique in that it doesn’t charge fees for taking out a loan, but instead assesses a monthly membership fee of $29.99 if a user draws down their credit limit. “If you aren’t using the cash reserve then you aren’t paying the monthly fee,” he said. That model seems attractive to at least some freelancers as Oxygen has seen 80% month-over-month growth since its November launch according to Ahmed.

The company has also taken advantage of some key growth hacks. Oxygen bought advertising on the back of SF Muni buses, which is significantly less visible and popular than advertising on the side of a bus where pedestrians on sidewalks are more likely to see them. Ahmed though saw opportunity. We “decided to go for the back of the bus which is 10x cheaper than the side of the bus, but if you are working for Instagram or DoorDash, then you are actually spending your day behind the bus,” he explained.

The back of the bus is where the working freelancer looks for ads.

In addition to Digital Horizon Capital and Cynthia Chen, Oxygen received funding from ZMT Capital (China), Locus Ventures, Endure Capital, PioneerFund, Magic City, Light Bridge, Strawberry Creek, Base Ventures, The House Fund and Sam Yam.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2RVBbcy

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Credit cards are a relatively new invention that have entered into something of an innovation rut. Reward programs seem stale, mobile apps remain mired in early-2000s UX paradigms, and all too often, critical financial decisions (and their expensive associated fees) are hidden like booby-traps for users. Little wonder then that consumers are fed up with their credit card providers.

Worse, credit cards are not accessible to millions of people, whether due to a lack of credit history, immigration status, or because they are unlikely to be profitable since they often won’t use certain fee-based services.

Credit card issuer Petal wants to change that status quo, and now has another $30 million to do it.

The New York-based startup announced today that it raised a series B equity round from Valar Ventures, which also led the company’s $13 million series A round almost exactly a year ago (bringing the company’s total to $46.6 million including its seed round). Petal had previously announced in October that it raised a $34 million credit facility to power its product. It was founded in 2016 by a quad of founders including CEO Jason Gross, and currently has 60 employees.

Petal uses a more holistic and comprehensive underwriting model to determine the creditworthiness of credit card applicants compared to traditional banks that rely predominantly on an applicant’s FICO score. The goal is to focus more on cash flows rather than a static score, since that measure provides a more accurate assessment of a potential user’s payback capability. The hope for Petal is that its modern data models will allow more customers to qualify for credit, and for customers who qualify to receive a higher credit line.

After testing its model privately, Petal publicly introduced its Petal credit card product this past October, which is on the Visa network. Among its key features are eliminating many of the fees that credit card issuers have tacked on over the years, including the overdraft fee, late fee, international fee, and annual fees. Petal makes money through interest rates and through the transaction fees charged with use.

The company has seen success with customers so far: more than 100,000 potential applicants signed up during the company’s private beta phase according to Petal, and since then thousands of customers have gotten a Petal card following its public release.

Petal shows options for how to pay a credit card balance, and tries to transparently show the cost of interest when borrowers don’t pay off their whole statement.

Petal’s CEO Gross told me that one of the big goals for this new round of capital was to expand the product to more customers while also offering more features. “The card is really simple, but there is a lot more we want to do over time … and this funding allows us to reach that next level of what we can offer to consumers,” he said. Gross also noted that while there are adjacent opportunities to help consumers around their financial lives, Petal is heads down focused on the credit card market.

Valar Ventures has now led two equity rounds in the company. Gross explained that “the insiders have a lot more information … and they took a look at it and they decided they would rather do it themselves.” Valar has built up an unusually strong consumer fintech portfolio that includes money transfer business TransferWise, smartphone banking service N26, digital investment platform Stash, mobile tax filer Taxfix, and paycheck smoothing / budgeting app Even.

Greyhound Capital joins Petal’s cap table as a new investor in this round. Greyhound is focused on fintech, particularly in Europe. Gross said that he thinks bringing European financial innovation to the U.S. will be critical for Petal’s success. “We are hoping to learn a lot about best practices globally,” he said.

Credit cards have been getting more attention from venture investors recently. In addition to Petal’s series of rounds, Brex, a startup based in Silicon Valley that targets the corporate credit card market, has seen a slew of equity rounds, raising $182.1 million according to Crunchbase.

In addition to Valar and Greyhound, previous investors Third Prime Capital, Rosecliff Ventures, Story Ventures, RiverPark Ventures and Afore Capital joined the round.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Scn5CM

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It’s a big day for Timescale, makers of the open source time series database, TimescaleDB. The company announced a $15 million investment and a new enterprise version of the product.

The investment is technically an extension of the $12.4 million Series A it raised last January, which it’s referring to as A1. Today’s round is led by Icon Ventures with existing investors Benchmark, NEA and Two Sigma Ventures also participating. With today’s funding, the startup has raised $31 million.

Timescale makes a time series database. That means it can ingest large amounts of data and measure how it changes over time. This comes in handy for a variety of use cases from financial services to smart homes to self-driving cars — or any data-intensive activity  you want to measure over time.

While there are a number of time scale database offerings on the market, Timescale co-founder and CEO Ajay Kulkarni says that what makes his company’s approach unique is that it uses SQL, one of the most popular languages in the world. Timescale wanted to take advantage of that penetration and build its product on top of Postgres, the popular open source SQL database. This gave it an offering that is based on SQL and highly scalable.

Timescale admittedly came late to the market in 2017, but by offering a unique approach and making it open source, it has been able to gain traction quickly. “Despite entering into what is a very crowded database market, we’ve seen quite a bit of community growth because of this message of SQL and scale for time series,” Kulkarni told TechCrunch.

In just over 22 months, the company has over a million downloads and a range of users from older guard companies like Charter, Comcast and Hexagon Mining to more modern companies like Nutanix and and TransferWise.

With a strong base community in place, the company believes that it’s now time to commercialize its offering, and in addition to an open source license, it’s introducing a commercial license.”Up until today, our main business model has been through support and deployment assistance. With this new release, we will be also will have enterprise features that are available with a commercial license,” Kulkarni explained.

The commercial version will offer a more sophisticated automation layer for larger companies with greater scale requirements. It will also provide better lifecycle management, so companies can get rid of older data or move it to cheaper long-term storage to reduce costs. It’s also offering the ability to reorder data in an automated fashion when that’s required, and finally, it’s making it easier to turn the time series data into a series of data points for analytics purposes. The company also hinted that a managed cloud version is on the road map for later this year.

The new money should help Timescale continue fueling the growth and development of the product, especially as it builds out the commercial offering. Timescale, which was founded in 2015 in NYC, currently has 30 employees. With the new influx of cash, it expects to double that over the next year.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Scn2H6