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Databricks, the company behind the Apache Spark big data analytics engine, today announced that it has raised a $250 million Series E round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Coatue Management, Microsoft and NEA, also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $498.5 million. Microsoft’s involvement here is probably a bit of a surprise, but it’s worth noting that it also worked with Databricks on the launch of Azure Databricks as a first-party service on the platform, something that’s still a rarity in the Azure cloud.

As Databricks also today announced, its annual recurring revenue now exceeds $100 million. The company didn’t share whether it’s cash flow-positive at this point, but Databricks CEO and co-founder Ali Ghodsi shared that the company’s valuation is now $2.75 billion.

Current customers, which the company says number around 2,000, include the likes of Nielsen, Hotels.com, Overstock, Bechtel, Shell and HP.

While Databricks is obviously known for its contributions to Apache Spark, the company itself monetizes that work by offering its Unified Analytics platform on top of it. This platform allows enterprises to build their data pipelines across data storage systems and prepare data sets for data scientists and engineers. To do this, Databricks offers shared notebooks and tools for building, managing and monitoring data pipelines, and then uses that data to build machine learning models, for example. Indeed, training and deploying these models is one of the company’s focus areas these days, which makes sense, given that this is one of the main use cases for big data, after all.

On top of that, Databricks also offers a fully managed service for hosting all of these tools.

“Databricks is the clear winner in the big data platform race,” said Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, in today’s announcement. “In addition, they have created a new category atop their world-beating Apache Spark platform called Unified Analytics that is growing even faster. As a result, we are thrilled to invest in this round.”

Ghodsi told me that Horowitz was also instrumental in getting the company to re-focus on growth. The company was already growing fast, of course, but Horowitz asked him why Databricks wasn’t growing faster. Unsurprisingly, given that it’s an enterprise company, that means aggressively hiring a larger sales force — and that’s costly. Hence the company’s need to raise at this point.

As Ghodsi told me, one of the areas the company wants to focus on is the Asia Pacific region, where overall cloud usage is growing fast. The other area the company is focusing on is support for more verticals like mass media and entertainment, federal agencies and fintech firms, which also comes with its own cost, given that the experts there don’t come cheap.

Ghodsi likes to call this “boring AI,” since it’s not as exciting as self-driving cars. In his view, though, the enterprise companies that don’t start using machine learning now will inevitably be left behind in the long run. “If you don’t get there, there’ll be no place for you in the next 20 years,” he said.

Engineering, of course, will also get a chunk of this new funding, with an emphasis on relatively new products like MLFlow and Delta, two tools Databricks recently developed and that make it easier to manage the life cycle of machine learning models and build the necessary data pipelines to feed them.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2UET8J5

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Festicket, the U.K.-headquartered festival booking platform, has picked up another $4.6 million in funding, an extension of the startup’s $10.5 million Series D late last year. The new backing comes from Edge Investments, the creative industries investor that counts music industry veteran Harvey Goldsmith as a director.

Edge joins an existing roster of Series D investors that includes venture capital firm Beringea, Jaguar Land Rover’s venture capital fund InMotion Ventures, Channel 4’s Commercial Growth Fund, Lepe Partners, U-Start, and ex Spinnin’ Records CEO Eelko Van Kooten. The company has also been previously backed by Lepe Partners, Wellington Partners, PROfounders, and Playfair Capital, amongst others.

Founded in 2012, Festicket set out to make booking various festival experience across Europe as easy as booking a package holiday. The platform — or marketplace — lets you discover and book festival tickets and the related travel itinerary. Fast forward to today, the company works with over 1,200 festivals and 4,500 suppliers across 50 countries, serving more than 2.5 million customers worldwide.

Most recently, Festicket integrated with Spotify to help you discover music festivals based on the music you listen to. Dubbed “Festival Finder,” the new feature requires you to connect your Spotify account to Festicket using Spotify login. After doing so, the platform pulls in data on your favourite artists and displays 10 upcoming festivals that it deems will match your music tastes.

Meanwhile, Festicket says the additional capital will be used to support Festicket’s entrance into new markets, primarily North America and Asia. The company is also planning to invest in its underlying tech platform and grow its “community” of passionate festival fans around the world,. Notably, this will include building an exclusive membership tier with added benefits in 2019.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2RC3WFX

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French startup Lunchr is raising a $34 million funding round (€30 million) from Index Ventures, with existing investors Daphni, Idinvest and Kima Ventures also participating. The company had already raised $13 million 7 months ago (€11 million).

In France, companies of a certain size have to support employees in one way or another when it comes to their lunch break. Big companies usually build out a cafeteria while small companies hand out meal vouchers.

Lunchr focuses on meal vouchers. Originally, employees received paper vouchers at the beginning of each month. But meal voucher companies, such as Edenred or Sodexo, now also provide an alternative to paper vouchers. You can get a payment card to pay some or all of your food using a card reader.

While this is a a good idea on paper, many restaurants and supermarkets still don’t accept meal voucher cards as you have to update your card terminals. Apps also don’t work that well so it’s hard to know if you have money left on your account.

Lunchr wants to provide a better experience. And it starts with a card that works in more places. Restaurants don’t need to do anything as long as they already accept paper meal vouchers. Lunchr currently supports 200,000 places in France.

The company also takes advantage of the fact that a company is going to switch everyone to Lunchr, not just some employees. It means that everyone has a Lunchr account, the Lunchr app and a Lunchr card.

That’s why you can also use the Lunchr app to order food around your office. Other employees can add stuff to your order and one employee can pick up the order for everyone. Lunchr has negotiated discounts with restaurants — you unlock discount on big orders. On average, people who order food via the app get an 18 percent discount.

With today’s funding round, the company wants to attract 200,000 by the end of 2019. Redbull in France, LeLynx.fr, Spotify in France, Qonto and Payfit use Lunchr already.

While Lunchr is competing with bigger companies, 85 percent of meal vouchers in France are still paper vouchers. Companies will consider switching to payment cards in the coming years and it presents a big opportunity for Lunchr.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2WK3Hwf

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As Airbnb adds more features to court business users, a smaller startup has raised some funding to challenge it in the $18 billion business travel market. 2nd Address, an Airbnb-style platform for business travellers looking for home rentals that extend beyond 30 days — as an alternative to staying in hotels — is announcing funding of $10 million from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Foundation Capital, along with Amicus and Pierre Lamond.

The startup says it will be investing the money to improve its technology as well as expand to more cities. Its current footprint covers the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and Washington, DC — where it claims that a property on its platform typically comes in about 40 percent cheaper on a per-night basis compared to a business or extended stay hotel — and the plan is to extend that to 17 more markets in 2019.

“We’ve seen a big change in the way people travel for business. They want the same experience they have as consumers,” said 2nd Address CEO Chung-Man Tam. “There have been many platforms built for consumers, but not specifically for business travel.”

Scale will be the name of the game for the startup, which today works with just 650 hosts covering some 3,200 listings.

Customers that have already signed on as users include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Google, SAP, Deloitte, KLM and Stanford and Northwestern University.

2nd Address has raised $42 million to date, with a portion of that dating back to when it was a rentals platform called HomeSuite.

HomeSuite focused on providing a quick way to find and secure short-term rentals for people moving to new cities and interested in trying out different neighborhoods before committing to a housing arrangement longer-term. The original pitch was that HomeSuite handled all the paperwork and other painful processes to make it easy both to list a place and to rent it.

When it failed to find enough traction with people who were relocating, the startup changed its name to 2nd Address in 2017 and shifted to business travellers, where it saw a gap in the market. (And that backend technology, in turn, got repurposed.)

Aimed at people who stay between 30 days and nine months, Tam — who took over as CEO after founder David Adams stepped away from the role — said a lot of business travellers are looking for something more when staying in a city for an extended period, with the option of a kitchen, more living space and other personalised home effects beyond what you get in a typical business hotel or extended-stay suite.

At the same time, 2nd Address saw an opportunity to target hosts, as well.

Regulation is making it tougher in some markets to work with short-term letting platforms like Airbnb, Tam noted, adding that 2nd Address, operating in “what’s legally defined as the rentals market” because of the length of stay, is able to understand how to handle this. “Underneath the transaction we are making sure the booking is complying with all the rental regulations.”

That’s on top of the work that needs to be done to tidy up and maintain a property when guests are staying for as little as one or two nights. “And of course you can have a large variety of guests, from those who are well-behaved to those who are not,” he added.

That “variability,” he said, “has come to a head” for some hosts who are looking for more predictable guests staying for longer than a night or two. “They would rather take a business traveller staying for a whole month any day,” he said.

But 2nd Address is not the only company that has identified the opportunity to provide an Airbnb-style platform catering to business users and those who want to host them.

Chief among its competitors is Airbnb itself.

As it inches closer to an IPO, Airbnb has been working on diversifying and expanding its operations, and part of that has been to expand Airbnb for Work, which targets business users. In January, Airbnb made its latest move in that area by acquiring Gaest, a startup from Denmark that lets people book rooms, homes and other venues for meetings and off-sites.

It has also tailored the wider Airbnb experience for Airbnb for Work in other ways, offering team-building experiences, a searchable database of homes and boutique hotels meeting criteria like “homes for family relocation,” “work-ready homes” and “homes verified for comfort.” Within this, it guarantees a specific check-list of amenities in the accommodations that match many of the standards of typical business hotels and might be a cut above the a typical basic Airbnb property.

So far, the higher-margin Airbnb for Work has had an impact: last August Airbnb said business bookings accounted for 15 percent of all its business.

But even putting Airbnb to one side, there are a number of other competitors also providing platforms for hosts to list apartments aimed at business users, as well as corporate travel people to rent them.

Sonder has raised more than $130 million to build out a network of its own apartments that provide experiences on par with hotels (but with a personalised apartment feel); Domio has also been targeting urban visitors (and also raising funding to do it). Meanwhile in Europe there are also several startups also vying to tackle the same market. They include MagicStay and AtHomeHotel out of France and Homelike from Germany, which has also been attracting the attention of VCs from the Valley.

But despite all of this, Tam and his investors believe that 2nd Address still has an advantage over the rest of the field.

On the topic of Airbnb, the claim is that providing properties to both consumer and business users, using the same backend, can be problematic.

“If you are looking to book a place in February, a whole property can be out of the running if another guest had already booked that property for just one night in that month,” Tam said. “It’s hard to combine long-term and short-term rentals at the same time.” He added that for this reason, “we have a lot of inventory where Airbnb does not.”

Investors additionally think that while 2nd Address is benefiting from the overall opportunity, it also has unique and better technology. “We saw an acute shortage of vendors for monthly stays overall, but specifically also for business people,” said Paul Holland, a general partner at Foundation. “2nd Address not only proved the concept but are in a perfect position to take the market. Yes, rising tides lift all boats, including Airbnb, but it’s a very large opportunity.” He added that some of 2nd Address’s (unnamed) competitors are even using its backend and listings to power their own efforts.

On the tech front, 2nd Address plans to add more tools for hosts to help with home management, and beyond that planning for how they tailor properties in the future. Specifically, it sees an opportunity in providing analytics and business intelligence around guest preferences in terms of locations, pricing, detailing the interiors and more.

It’s also planning to add more integrations with the tools that corporates are using to book travel today. These include not just platforms like Concur for searching and booking places, but reporting and billing services to manage aspects beyond the actual stay.

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

//

As Airbnb adds more features to court business users, a smaller startup has raised some funding to challenge it in the $18 billion business travel market. 2nd Address, an Airbnb-style platform for business travellers looking for home rentals that extend beyond 30 days — as an alternative to staying in hotels — is announcing funding of $10 million from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Foundation Capital, along with Amicus and Pierre Lamond.

The startup says it will be investing the money to improve its technology as well as expand to more cities. Its current footprint covers the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and Washington, DC — where it claims that a property on its platform typically comes in about 40 percent cheaper on a per-night basis compared to a business or extended stay hotel — and the plan is to extend that to 17 more markets in 2019.

“We’ve seen a big change in the way people travel for business. They want the same experience they have as consumers,” said 2nd Address CEO Chung-Man Tam. “There have been many platforms built for consumers, but not specifically for business travel.”

Scale will be the name of the game for the startup, which today works with just 650 hosts covering some 3,200 listings.

Customers that have already signed on as users include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Google, SAP, Deloitte, KLM and Stanford and Northwestern University.

2nd Address has raised $42 million to date, with a portion of that dating back to when it was a rentals platform called HomeSuite.

HomeSuite focused on providing a quick way to find and secure short-term rentals for people moving to new cities and interested in trying out different neighborhoods before committing to a housing arrangement longer-term. The original pitch was that HomeSuite handled all the paperwork and other painful processes to make it easy both to list a place and to rent it.

When it failed to find enough traction with people who were relocating, the startup changed its name to 2nd Address in 2017 and shifted to business travellers, where it saw a gap in the market. (And that backend technology, in turn, got repurposed.)

Aimed at people who stay between 30 days and nine months, Tam — who took over as CEO after founder David Adams stepped away from the role — said a lot of business travellers are looking for something more when staying in a city for an extended period, with the option of a kitchen, more living space and other personalised home effects beyond what you get in a typical business hotel or extended-stay suite.

At the same time, 2nd Address saw an opportunity to target hosts, as well.

Regulation is making it tougher in some markets to work with short-term letting platforms like Airbnb, Tam noted, adding that 2nd Address, operating in “what’s legally defined as the rentals market” because of the length of stay, is able to understand how to handle this. “Underneath the transaction we are making sure the booking is complying with all the rental regulations.”

That’s on top of the work that needs to be done to tidy up and maintain a property when guests are staying for as little as one or two nights. “And of course you can have a large variety of guests, from those who are well-behaved to those who are not,” he added.

That “variability,” he said, “has come to a head” for some hosts who are looking for more predictable guests staying for longer than a night or two. “They would rather take a business traveller staying for a whole month any day,” he said.

But 2nd Address is not the only company that has identified the opportunity to provide an Airbnb-style platform catering to business users and those who want to host them.

Chief among its competitors is Airbnb itself.

As it inches closer to an IPO, Airbnb has been working on diversifying and expanding its operations, and part of that has been to expand Airbnb for Work, which targets business users. In January, Airbnb made its latest move in that area by acquiring Gaest, a startup from Denmark that lets people book rooms, homes and other venues for meetings and off-sites.

It has also tailored the wider Airbnb experience for Airbnb for Work in other ways, offering team-building experiences, a searchable database of homes and boutique hotels meeting criteria like “homes for family relocation,” “work-ready homes” and “homes verified for comfort.” Within this, it guarantees a specific check-list of amenities in the accommodations that match many of the standards of typical business hotels and might be a cut above the a typical basic Airbnb property.

So far, the higher-margin Airbnb for Work has had an impact: last August Airbnb said business bookings accounted for 15 percent of all its business.

But even putting Airbnb to one side, there are a number of other competitors also providing platforms for hosts to list apartments aimed at business users, as well as corporate travel people to rent them.

Sonder has raised more than $130 million to build out a network of its own apartments that provide experiences on par with hotels (but with a personalised apartment feel); Domio has also been targeting urban visitors (and also raising funding to do it). Meanwhile in Europe there are also several startups also vying to tackle the same market. They include MagicStay and AtHomeHotel out of France and Homelike from Germany, which has also been attracting the attention of VCs from the Valley.

But despite all of this, Tam and his investors believe that 2nd Address still has an advantage over the rest of the field.

On the topic of Airbnb, the claim is that providing properties to both consumer and business users, using the same backend, can be problematic.

“If you are looking to book a place in February, a whole property can be out of the running if another guest had already booked that property for just one night in that month,” Tam said. “It’s hard to combine long-term and short-term rentals at the same time.” He added that for this reason, “we have a lot of inventory where Airbnb does not.”

Investors additionally think that while 2nd Address is benefiting from the overall opportunity, it also has unique and better technology. “We saw an acute shortage of vendors for monthly stays overall, but specifically also for business people,” said Paul Holland, a general partner at Foundation. “2nd Address not only proved the concept but are in a perfect position to take the market. Yes, rising tides lift all boats, including Airbnb, but it’s a very large opportunity.” He added that some of 2nd Address’s (unnamed) competitors are even using its backend and listings to power their own efforts.

On the tech front, 2nd Address plans to add more tools for hosts to help with home management, and beyond that planning for how they tailor properties in the future. Specifically, it sees an opportunity in providing analytics and business intelligence around guest preferences in terms of locations, pricing, detailing the interiors and more.

It’s also planning to add more integrations with the tools that corporates are using to book travel today. These include not just platforms like Concur for searching and booking places, but reporting and billing services to manage aspects beyond the actual stay.

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

//

As Airbnb adds more features to court business users, a smaller startup has raised some funding to challenge it in the $18 billion business travel market. 2nd Address, an Airbnb-style platform for business travellers looking for home rentals that extend beyond 30 days — as an alternative to staying in hotels — is announcing funding of $10 million from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Foundation Capital, along with Amicus and Pierre Lamond.

The startup says it will be investing the money to improve its technology as well as expand to more cities. Its current footprint covers the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and Washington, DC — where it claims that a property on its platform typically comes in about 40 percent cheaper on a per-night basis compared to a business or extended stay hotel — and the plan is to extend that to 17 more markets in 2019.

“We’ve seen a big change in the way people travel for business. They want the same experience they have as consumers,” said 2nd Address CEO Chung-Man Tam. “There have been many platforms built for consumers, but not specifically for business travel.”

Scale will be the name of the game for the startup, which today works with just 650 hosts covering some 3,200 listings.

Customers that have already signed on as users include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Google, SAP, Deloitte, KLM and Stanford and Northwestern University.

2nd Address has raised $42 million to date, with a portion of that dating back to when it was a rentals platform called HomeSuite.

HomeSuite focused on providing a quick way to find and secure short-term rentals for people moving to new cities and interested in trying out different neighborhoods before committing to a housing arrangement longer-term. The original pitch was that HomeSuite handled all the paperwork and other painful processes to make it easy both to list a place and to rent it.

When it failed to find enough traction with people who were relocating, the startup changed its name to 2nd Address in 2017 and shifted to business travellers, where it saw a gap in the market. (And that backend technology, in turn, got repurposed.)

Aimed at people who stay between 30 days and nine months, Tam — who took over as CEO after founder David Adams stepped away from the role — said a lot of business travellers are looking for something more when staying in a city for an extended period, with the option of a kitchen, more living space and other personalised home effects beyond what you get in a typical business hotel or extended-stay suite.

At the same time, 2nd Address saw an opportunity to target hosts, as well.

Regulation is making it tougher in some markets to work with short-term letting platforms like Airbnb, Tam noted, adding that 2nd Address, operating in “what’s legally defined as the rentals market” because of the length of stay, is able to understand how to handle this. “Underneath the transaction we are making sure the booking is complying with all the rental regulations.”

That’s on top of the work that needs to be done to tidy up and maintain a property when guests are staying for as little as one or two nights. “And of course you can have a large variety of guests, from those who are well-behaved to those who are not,” he added.

That “variability,” he said, “has come to a head” for some hosts who are looking for more predictable guests staying for longer than a night or two. “They would rather take a business traveller staying for a whole month any day,” he said.

But 2nd Address is not the only company that has identified the opportunity to provide an Airbnb-style platform catering to business users and those who want to host them.

Chief among its competitors is Airbnb itself.

As it inches closer to an IPO, Airbnb has been working on diversifying and expanding its operations, and part of that has been to expand Airbnb for Work, which targets business users. In January, Airbnb made its latest move in that area by acquiring Gaest, a startup from Denmark that lets people book rooms, homes and other venues for meetings and off-sites.

It has also tailored the wider Airbnb experience for Airbnb for Work in other ways, offering team-building experiences, a searchable database of homes and boutique hotels meeting criteria like “homes for family relocation,” “work-ready homes” and “homes verified for comfort.” Within this, it guarantees a specific check-list of amenities in the accommodations that match many of the standards of typical business hotels and might be a cut above the a typical basic Airbnb property.

So far, the higher-margin Airbnb for Work has had an impact: last August Airbnb said business bookings accounted for 15 percent of all its business.

But even putting Airbnb to one side, there are a number of other competitors also providing platforms for hosts to list apartments aimed at business users, as well as corporate travel people to rent them.

Sonder has raised more than $130 million to build out a network of its own apartments that provide experiences on par with hotels (but with a personalised apartment feel); Domio has also been targeting urban visitors (and also raising funding to do it). Meanwhile in Europe there are also several startups also vying to tackle the same market. They include MagicStay and AtHomeHotel out of France and Homelike from Germany, which has also been attracting the attention of VCs from the Valley.

But despite all of this, Tam and his investors believe that 2nd Address still has an advantage over the rest of the field.

On the topic of Airbnb, the claim is that providing properties to both consumer and business users, using the same backend, can be problematic.

“If you are looking to book a place in February, a whole property can be out of the running if another guest had already booked that property for just one night in that month,” Tam said. “It’s hard to combine long-term and short-term rentals at the same time.” He added that for this reason, “we have a lot of inventory where Airbnb does not.”

Investors additionally think that while 2nd Address is benefiting from the overall opportunity, it also has unique and better technology. “We saw an acute shortage of vendors for monthly stays overall, but specifically also for business people,” said Paul Holland, a general partner at Foundation. “2nd Address not only proved the concept but are in a perfect position to take the market. Yes, rising tides lift all boats, including Airbnb, but it’s a very large opportunity.” He added that some of 2nd Address’s (unnamed) competitors are even using its backend and listings to power their own efforts.

On the tech front, 2nd Address plans to add more tools for hosts to help with home management, and beyond that planning for how they tailor properties in the future. Specifically, it sees an opportunity in providing analytics and business intelligence around guest preferences in terms of locations, pricing, detailing the interiors and more.

It’s also planning to add more integrations with the tools that corporates are using to book travel today. These include not just platforms like Concur for searching and booking places, but reporting and billing services to manage aspects beyond the actual stay.

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

//

As Airbnb adds more features to court business users, a smaller startup has raised some funding to challenge it in the $18 billion business travel market. 2nd Address, an Airbnb-style platform for business travellers looking for home rentals that extend beyond 30 days — as an alternative to staying in hotels — is announcing funding of $10 million from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Foundation Capital, along with Amicus and Pierre Lamond.

The startup says it will be investing the money to improve its technology as well as expand to more cities. Its current footprint covers the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and Washington, DC — where it claims that a property on its platform typically comes in about 40 percent cheaper on a per-night basis compared to a business or extended stay hotel — and the plan is to extend that to 17 more markets in 2019.

“We’ve seen a big change in the way people travel for business. They want the same experience they have as consumers,” said 2nd Address CEO Chung-Man Tam. “There have been many platforms built for consumers, but not specifically for business travel.”

Scale will be the name of the game for the startup, which today works with just 650 hosts covering some 3,200 listings.

Customers that have already signed on as users include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Google, SAP, Deloitte, KLM and Stanford and Northwestern University.

2nd Address has raised $42 million to date, with a portion of that dating back to when it was a rentals platform called HomeSuite.

HomeSuite focused on providing a quick way to find and secure short-term rentals for people moving to new cities and interested in trying out different neighborhoods before committing to a housing arrangement longer-term. The original pitch was that HomeSuite handled all the paperwork and other painful processes to make it easy both to list a place and to rent it.

When it failed to find enough traction with people who were relocating, the startup changed its name to 2nd Address in 2017 and shifted to business travellers, where it saw a gap in the market. (And that backend technology, in turn, got repurposed.)

Aimed at people who stay between 30 days and nine months, Tam — who took over as CEO after founder David Adams stepped away from the role — said a lot of business travellers are looking for something more when staying in a city for an extended period, with the option of a kitchen, more living space and other personalised home effects beyond what you get in a typical business hotel or extended-stay suite.

At the same time, 2nd Address saw an opportunity to target hosts, as well.

Regulation is making it tougher in some markets to work with short-term letting platforms like Airbnb, Tam noted, adding that 2nd Address, operating in “what’s legally defined as the rentals market” because of the length of stay, is able to understand how to handle this. “Underneath the transaction we are making sure the booking is complying with all the rental regulations.”

That’s on top of the work that needs to be done to tidy up and maintain a property when guests are staying for as little as one or two nights. “And of course you can have a large variety of guests, from those who are well-behaved to those who are not,” he added.

That “variability,” he said, “has come to a head” for some hosts who are looking for more predictable guests staying for longer than a night or two. “They would rather take a business traveller staying for a whole month any day,” he said.

But 2nd Address is not the only company that has identified the opportunity to provide an Airbnb-style platform catering to business users and those who want to host them.

Chief among its competitors is Airbnb itself.

As it inches closer to an IPO, Airbnb has been working on diversifying and expanding its operations, and part of that has been to expand Airbnb for Work, which targets business users. In January, Airbnb made its latest move in that area by acquiring Gaest, a startup from Denmark that lets people book rooms, homes and other venues for meetings and off-sites.

It has also tailored the wider Airbnb experience for Airbnb for Work in other ways, offering team-building experiences, a searchable database of homes and boutique hotels meeting criteria like “homes for family relocation,” “work-ready homes” and “homes verified for comfort.” Within this, it guarantees a specific check-list of amenities in the accommodations that match many of the standards of typical business hotels and might be a cut above the a typical basic Airbnb property.

So far, the higher-margin Airbnb for Work has had an impact: last August Airbnb said business bookings accounted for 15 percent of all its business.

But even putting Airbnb to one side, there are a number of other competitors also providing platforms for hosts to list apartments aimed at business users, as well as corporate travel people to rent them.

Sonder has raised more than $130 million to build out a network of its own apartments that provide experiences on par with hotels (but with a personalised apartment feel); Domio has also been targeting urban visitors (and also raising funding to do it). Meanwhile in Europe there are also several startups also vying to tackle the same market. They include MagicStay and AtHomeHotel out of France and Homelike from Germany, which has also been attracting the attention of VCs from the Valley.

But despite all of this, Tam and his investors believe that 2nd Address still has an advantage over the rest of the field.

On the topic of Airbnb, the claim is that providing properties to both consumer and business users, using the same backend, can be problematic.

“If you are looking to book a place in February, a whole property can be out of the running if another guest had already booked that property for just one night in that month,” Tam said. “It’s hard to combine long-term and short-term rentals at the same time.” He added that for this reason, “we have a lot of inventory where Airbnb does not.”

Investors additionally think that while 2nd Address is benefiting from the overall opportunity, it also has unique and better technology. “We saw an acute shortage of vendors for monthly stays overall, but specifically also for business people,” said Paul Holland, a general partner at Foundation. “2nd Address not only proved the concept but are in a perfect position to take the market. Yes, rising tides lift all boats, including Airbnb, but it’s a very large opportunity.” He added that some of 2nd Address’s (unnamed) competitors are even using its backend and listings to power their own efforts.

On the tech front, 2nd Address plans to add more tools for hosts to help with home management, and beyond that planning for how they tailor properties in the future. Specifically, it sees an opportunity in providing analytics and business intelligence around guest preferences in terms of locations, pricing, detailing the interiors and more.

It’s also planning to add more integrations with the tools that corporates are using to book travel today. These include not just platforms like Concur for searching and booking places, but reporting and billing services to manage aspects beyond the actual stay.

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As Airbnb adds more features to court business users, a smaller startup has raised some funding to challenge it in the $18 billion business travel market. 2nd Address, an Airbnb-style platform for business travellers looking for home rentals that extend beyond 30 days — as an alternative to staying in hotels — is announcing funding of $10 million from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Foundation Capital, along with Amicus and Pierre Lamond.

The startup says it will be investing the money to improve its technology as well as expand to more cities. Its current footprint covers the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and Washington, DC — where it claims that a property on its platform typically comes in about 40 percent cheaper on a per-night basis compared to a business or extended stay hotel — and the plan is to extend that to 17 more markets in 2019.

“We’ve seen a big change in the way people travel for business. They want the same experience they have as consumers,” said 2nd Address CEO Chung-Man Tam. “There have been many platforms built for consumers, but not specifically for business travel.”

Scale will be the name of the game for the startup, which today works with just 650 hosts covering some 3,200 listings.

Customers that have already signed on as users include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Google, SAP, Deloitte, KLM and Stanford and Northwestern University.

2nd Address has raised $42 million to date, with a portion of that dating back to when it was a rentals platform called HomeSuite.

HomeSuite focused on providing a quick way to find and secure short-term rentals for people moving to new cities and interested in trying out different neighborhoods before committing to a housing arrangement longer-term. The original pitch was that HomeSuite handled all the paperwork and other painful processes to make it easy both to list a place and to rent it.

When it failed to find enough traction with people who were relocating, the startup changed its name to 2nd Address in 2017 and shifted to business travellers, where it saw a gap in the market. (And that backend technology, in turn, got repurposed.)

Aimed at people who stay between 30 days and nine months, Tam — who took over as CEO after founder David Adams stepped away from the role — said a lot of business travellers are looking for something more when staying in a city for an extended period, with the option of a kitchen, more living space and other personalised home effects beyond what you get in a typical business hotel or extended-stay suite.

At the same time, 2nd Address saw an opportunity to target hosts, as well.

Regulation is making it tougher in some markets to work with short-term letting platforms like Airbnb, Tam noted, adding that 2nd Address, operating in “what’s legally defined as the rentals market” because of the length of stay, is able to understand how to handle this. “Underneath the transaction we are making sure the booking is complying with all the rental regulations.”

That’s on top of the work that needs to be done to tidy up and maintain a property when guests are staying for as little as one or two nights. “And of course you can have a large variety of guests, from those who are well-behaved to those who are not,” he added.

That “variability,” he said, “has come to a head” for some hosts who are looking for more predictable guests staying for longer than a night or two. “They would rather take a business traveller staying for a whole month any day,” he said.

But 2nd Address is not the only company that has identified the opportunity to provide an Airbnb-style platform catering to business users and those who want to host them.

Chief among its competitors is Airbnb itself.

As it inches closer to an IPO, Airbnb has been working on diversifying and expanding its operations, and part of that has been to expand Airbnb for Work, which targets business users. In January, Airbnb made its latest move in that area by acquiring Gaest, a startup from Denmark that lets people book rooms, homes and other venues for meetings and off-sites.

It has also tailored the wider Airbnb experience for Airbnb for Work in other ways, offering team-building experiences, a searchable database of homes and boutique hotels meeting criteria like “homes for family relocation,” “work-ready homes” and “homes verified for comfort.” Within this, it guarantees a specific check-list of amenities in the accommodations that match many of the standards of typical business hotels and might be a cut above the a typical basic Airbnb property.

So far, the higher-margin Airbnb for Work has had an impact: last August Airbnb said business bookings accounted for 15 percent of all its business.

But even putting Airbnb to one side, there are a number of other competitors also providing platforms for hosts to list apartments aimed at business users, as well as corporate travel people to rent them.

Sonder has raised more than $130 million to build out a network of its own apartments that provide experiences on par with hotels (but with a personalised apartment feel); Domio has also been targeting urban visitors (and also raising funding to do it). Meanwhile in Europe there are also several startups also vying to tackle the same market. They include MagicStay and AtHomeHotel out of France and Homelike from Germany, which has also been attracting the attention of VCs from the Valley.

But despite all of this, Tam and his investors believe that 2nd Address still has an advantage over the rest of the field.

On the topic of Airbnb, the claim is that providing properties to both consumer and business users, using the same backend, can be problematic.

“If you are looking to book a place in February, a whole property can be out of the running if another guest had already booked that property for just one night in that month,” Tam said. “It’s hard to combine long-term and short-term rentals at the same time.” He added that for this reason, “we have a lot of inventory where Airbnb does not.”

Investors additionally think that while 2nd Address is benefiting from the overall opportunity, it also has unique and better technology. “We saw an acute shortage of vendors for monthly stays overall, but specifically also for business people,” said Paul Holland, a general partner at Foundation. “2nd Address not only proved the concept but are in a perfect position to take the market. Yes, rising tides lift all boats, including Airbnb, but it’s a very large opportunity.” He added that some of 2nd Address’s (unnamed) competitors are even using its backend and listings to power their own efforts.

On the tech front, 2nd Address plans to add more tools for hosts to help with home management, and beyond that planning for how they tailor properties in the future. Specifically, it sees an opportunity in providing analytics and business intelligence around guest preferences in terms of locations, pricing, detailing the interiors and more.

It’s also planning to add more integrations with the tools that corporates are using to book travel today. These include not just platforms like Concur for searching and booking places, but reporting and billing services to manage aspects beyond the actual stay.

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

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Slack, the provider of workplace communication and collaboration tools, has submitted paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public later this year, the company announced on Monday.

This is its first concrete step toward becoming a publicly-listed company, five years after it launched.

Headquartered in San Francisco, Slack has raised more than $1 billion in venture capital investment, including a $427 million funding round in August. The round valued the business at $7.1 billion, cementing its position as one of the most valuable privately-held businesses in the U.S.

The company counted 10 million daily active users around the world and 85,000 paying users as of January 2019.

Slack’s investors include SoftBank’s Vision Fund, Dragoneer Investment Group, General Atlantic, T. Rowe Price Associates, Wellington Management, Baillie Gifford, Social Capital and IVP, as well as early investors Accel and Andreessen Horowitz.

Slack is one of several tech unicorns on deck to go public this year. Uber and Lyft have both similarly filed confidentially to go public in what are expected to be traditional initial public offerings. Slack, however, is expected to pursue a direct listing, following in Spotify’s footsteps. Instead of issuing new shares, Slack will sell existing shares held by insiders, employees and investors directly to the market, a move that will allow it to bypass a roadshow and some of Wall Street’s exorbitant IPO fees.

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Solar installations are becoming a no-brainer for anyone with a roof in much of the country. But getting an estimate on how much it would cost and how much juice it would generate can be complicated and time consuming. Aurora Solar has made an automated process for doing this, and attracted $20 million in funding as a result.

A big part of the uncertainty anyone has about getting solar installed is the upfront cost and return on investment. An on-site visit may cost hundreds, or thousands for a commercial property, or that cost may be rolled up into the overall charge. But why send someone out when all the data you need can be acquired in bulk from the air?

Aurora uses lidar data for this — but not the kind of lidar where you have to fly a drone with the instrument over the house. That would hardly be less expensive and time-consuming than a normal visit. Instead they use lidar collected by small aircraft making low-altitude passes over the city.

The resulting data (you can see it above) produces detailed 3D models of the terrain and all the buildings on it; the exact size and slope of a roof can be determined with high precision. It’s actually similar in a way to how archaeologists used it to map out an ancient Mayan metropolis.

There are some programs and services out there that do virtual site visits, but many just estimate your roof area and orientation by looking at satellite imagery. That’s good for a basic estimate, but Aurora uses multiple sources of data to create a detailed 3D map of your roof, and its proud of its results.

“From the get go, we have been very ambitious about the way we address the problem, probably since we faced same issues our clients face ourselves,” said co-founder Christopher Hopper in an email to TechCrunch. That would have been in 2012, when he and co-founder Samuel Adeyemo experienced significant friction with a solar install in East Africa. The installation itself was a snap, they found, but the planning and design of the system took months.

“Aurora pioneered the concept of ‘remote site visits,’ which enables solar installers to precisely calculate how many solar panels fit on a property, and how much energy they produce without traveling to the site,” Hopper said. “We have a large dataset of LIDAR data pre-loaded in the application that’s accessible to our users. We estimate that that covers about 2/3 of the US population.”

This and other data lets Aurora create a detailed CAD model of the building in just a few minutes, and generate a basic plan for solar cell placement as well that accounts for slope, exposure, and any shade-producing obstacles like chimneys or trees nearby. (Shade reports are usually done in person, and are necessary to receive certain rebates.)

From there users can go straight into the sales and financing process, even including line diagrams for the electrical system you’ll be building. And theoretically it could all take under an hour, which is probably how much time you’d spend on the phone trying to get a local solar installer to come out.

The A round was led by Energize Ventures, whose managing director Amy Francetic will be joining the board, with S28 and seed investor Pear also contributing.

Once nice thing about companies relying on data and automation: they scale well. So Aurora won’t need to buy a thousand new trucks to get its next few thousand customers — it needs to hire engineers, sales and support people, which is exactly what it plans to do.

“We expect to expand all of the functions in our organization,” said Hopper. “We are particularly excited about all of the things we can do on the product side and in customer success. And finally, this funding means that we are here to stay. For companies [i.e. Aurora’s clients] that rely on a software provider for their day-to-day operations this is important factor.”

Adeyemo notes in the press release announcing the funding that “the solar professional” is the “fastest growing occupation in the U.S.” Hopefully making things easier for the customer will keep it that way for a while.

Disclosure: Former TechCruncher Rahul Nihalani now works for Aurora. Rahul’s great, but this does not affect our coverage.

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