Lucidworks Nets $100M For AI-Powered Search

AI-powered search venture Lucidworks has raised $100 million from Francisco Partners and TPG Sixth Street Partners, the company announced today (first reported by Fortune’s Term Sheet).

The funding amounts to nearly as much (a combined $109 million) as the twelve-year-old company has raised since it was founded in 2007, according to Crunchbase data. Its last raise took place in May 2018 – a $50 million Series E led by Top Tier Capital Partners. So this round is precisely double its last raise.

In a press release, Lucidworks was clear about the fact that the latest financing was not a secondary or partial exit, noting that “no existing investors sold shares as part of this financing and all proceeds will be used to fund Lucidworks’ continued growth and expansion.”

Besides Top Tier, previous backers include Shasta Ventures and AllegisCyber.

The company’s AI-powered solutions aim to  “augment human intelligence by automating tedious, time-consuming tasks to provide richer insights and real-time recommendations.” Specifically, per its website, the company works to help enterprises “make their most valuable data work for their customers and employees.” Essentially what this means, according to CEO Will Hayes, is that Lucidworks has developed a search engine that gets deployed by companies either internally or on their website. For example, Lucidworks powers the search experience for large retailers such as REI to provide “a more personalized and productive” experience for a consumer, said Hayes.

In a blog, the CEO shared some impressive growth metrics, such as the fact that the company quadrupled its value in the past year, and that its flagship “Fusion” product doubled revenue year-over-year over the last three years. He also told me via phone this morning that they company’s headcount has grown from about 125 a year ago to close to 300 today. Lucidworks pivoted in 2014 to focus on its Fusion product, which has increasingly become more of a SaaS offering, but still has a legacy open-source business that supports existing customers.

On a combined basis, the company saw 70 percent ARR growth in 2018 compared to the year prior, according to Hayes. Moving forward, Lucidworks is particularly focused on a “go-to-market” strategy around its Fusion software and enhancing its AI and data science platform, he said.

Users of its “Fusion” product include AT&T, Honeywell, Morgan Stanley, Red Hat, Reddit, Staples, Uber, and the U.S. Census Bureau, among others (according to the company, 400 of the Fortune 1000 use the offering). Lucidworks has recently expanded into the Asia-Pacific region as well as in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa).

Source. Techcrunch, Mary Ann Azevedo, August 12, 2019

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Tile Raises $45M To Help The Modern World Find Its Darn Phone

This morning, Tile announced it has raised $45 million in a Series C led by Francisco Partners, a San Francisco-based technology-focused private equity fund.

Existing investors GGV Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in the round, as well as new backers Bryant Stibel and SVB Financial Group.

Tile is perhaps best known for its small dongle, which users can attach to their goods which help them later locate the item. (This is especially cool if you’re one of those people who are always losing your keys). The company also provides an application that allows users to see where their items are.

The company’s product lineup is changing over time. Tile noted in its release that it is working with partners (headphone shops, and chip companies) to embed its tech into their goods. Such partnerships could grant Tile a far larger install base, and thus a larger potential userbase; revenue, a lagging indicator, follows usage in most cases. So, the partnerships are bullish.

Its new investors seem to think so. Andrew Kowal, a partner with Francisco Partners, believes Tile’s ability to provide “an embedded finding solution” made it a particularly attractive investment.

The company has now raised $104 million during its life as a private company. The company raised its Series A in late 2014, led by GGV Capital. Tile’s Series B, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, was put together in two parts. The first $18 million landed in 2016, and the second Series B tranche of $25 million came in 2017.

In 2016, when Tile expanded its Series B, the company announced two key milestones. As TechCrunch reported, the firm reached “$100 million in revenue in 2016, and 10 million total units sold.” Given the age of that datapoint, and the new funding that Tile was able to raise, we can presume the firm has grown since. (You can check out some of its app ranking here, which is always a good thing to do.)

In a press release, Tile said it plans to use the new capital “to grow more aggressively internationally, expand into new product categories, and enhance its Premium service.” So far this year, the company said it saw improved results in Europe. We’ve reached out to find out more details about the raise and we’ll update this post once we get them.

The company was said to be worth around $165 million, after raising its $25 million Series B tranche.

Source. Crunchbase News, Alex Wilhelm, Ann Azevedo, July 24, 2019


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Redis Labs: $60M Series E To Scale Out Its In-Memory Data Store

By Jason D. Rowley

Today, Redis Labs announces that it raised $60 million in a Series E round. Francisco Partners (“FP”), a global late-stage technology investment firm, led the round, taking a position in Redis Labs for the first time. Prior investors—including Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing, Bain Capital Ventures, Viola Ventures, and Dell Technologies Capital—participated in the funding round.

As part of the transaction, Francisco Partners’ chief investment officer David Golob will take a seat on the company’s board of directors and FP operating partner Eran Gorev will join as a board observer, according to a statement from the company.

Including this round, Redis Labs has raised $146.6 million in venture funding. The company did not disclose its new valuation. Redis Labs says it will use its new funding to accelerate business expansion globally and to “invest further in the enthusiastic Redis community.”

What Is Redis?

Redis Labs is the company behind Redis Enterprise and Redis, an open-source in-memory data structure store, which can be implemented as a database, cache, or message brokerage. According to industry tracking site DB-Engines, Redis is the seventh-most-popular database system overall, and the most popular key-value store in production use today. Redis has been deployed in nearly 1.38 billion Docker containers at the time of writing, according to its website.

Redis stores data in memory, which has the benefit of being terrifically fast but somewhat expensive to run at scale. Almost all computing hardware components (from CPUs to hard drives to solid-state storage) have gotten cheaper over the years, but RAM prices can be volatile and remain high relative to other parts.

In conjunction with a trend of bigger companies turning to managed services instead of in-house development using open source software infrastructure, the high memory requirements of Redis drove its adoption through cloud computing platforms, which offer their own versions of Redis’s key-value store as another commoditized computing service.

To an extent, this has been good for the broad adoption of open source Redis, but perhaps less good for Redis Labs itself. Financially, much of the benefit redounded to the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud computing platforms offering Redis as a software service running on platform-managed hardware. Accordingly, Redis Labs has attempted to capture more value from its software, all while trying to reconcile business needs with its roots in community-driven software.

According to a licencing page on the Redis Labs website, the core Redis database software is available via open source license (BSD). Redis Enterprise, an optimized, more full-featured database engine, is closed-source and available via commercial license through Redis Labs. There is a space in between the two offerings though, which is filled with software modules that enhance or extend the functionality of open-source Redis. Some of these modules are produced by the Redis development community, while others are produced by Redis Labs itself.

In a move that ruffled feathers of some in the open source software community back in August 2018, Redis Labs announced it would move some of the modules it developed in-house off the open source AGPL license to an Apache v2.0 license modified with a Commons Clause, which technically isn’t open source, but rather “source available.”

Proponents of the Commons Clause says it prevents massive cloud computing platforms from simply re-selling the Commons Clause-protected software as a service. Critics say it’s a way for private, for-profit companies to financially benefit from community-developed software. Licencing battles are nothing new in open source software development and the Commons Clause is one of its new fronts.

In the funding announcement Redis Labs shared with Crunchbase News, the company says its commercial products feature “a variety of data modeling techniques, such as Streams, Graph, Document and Machine Learning, with a real-time search engine.” The modules which facilitate some of those value-added services—RediSearch, RedisGraph, ReJSON, Redis-ML, and ReBloom—were the ones Redis Labs released under the new license.

Source. Techcrunch, Jason D. Rowley February 19, 2019