Thanks to advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) we’re at an inflection point in the evolution of enterprise software. Early applications of AI in the enterprise are starting to deliver on the promise of helping companies automate, analyze and act on insights to improve their business.  One area particularly ripe for disruption is in back office business operations, a function that still relies heavily on expensive and inefficient manual business processes.  

Two veteran technologists, Anant Kale and Kunal Verma saw this as an opportunity and co-founded a company called AppZen to modernize the back office combining their expertise in enterprise software and AI.  Since launching AppZen some of the biggest enterprises in the world including Amazon, Comcast, Hitachi and Intuit have become customers.

AppZen’s product audits and ensures compliance for expense reports using Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing machine learning algorithms. The way expense audits work today is still pretty archaic and relies in large part on manual labor. Roughly 19% of all expenses are fraudulent either intentionally or unintentionally which increases costs and compliance risk to the company. And meanwhile the experience for both employees who are submitting expenses and managers who have to approve them is a frustrating one.

AppZen works by automatically reading and understanding expense reports, receipts and travel documents.  The software cross-checks these with thousands of data sources in real-time to determine the accuracy of every expense. This lets companies detect compliance problems in real-time which protects them from fines and worse. Employees get reimbursed faster and it’s easier for managers to approve expense reports.

AppZen has earned an incredible level of customer loyalty and momentum for a company at still a relatively early stage. It’s not every day a customer calls an enterprise software solution “freakin’ awesome”. But that is exactly how one T+E expense manager described AppZen to me when I was learning more about the product. Then again AppZen is not the type of company that you get to see every day as an investor.  

The team, vision and incredible customer momentum are why I am so excited to announce that Redpoint has led the Series A investment to fuel the growth of AppZen.  As part of the investment I will be joining the board.  You can read thoughts from Anant on AppZen’s own blog here.

The post Our Investment in AppZen appeared first on Redpoint Ventures.

As a VC you invest in people for the long-term and you never know where the journey will take you. Through working with the eBureau team, I’ve come to appreciate the quality of grit as one of the most critical personality traits of a successful entrepreneur. Wikipedia defines grit as “a positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual’s passion for a particular long-term goal or end state, coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their respective objective.”

And Gordy is as gritty an entrepreneur as they come.  I will spare the blow-by-blow account, but along the way to building a highly profitable business and strategic technology platform, Gordy persevered through some epic challenges that included:

• Navigating the 2008 recession, which had a dramatic and prolonged effect on eBureau’s core financial services customer base;
• Surviving two independent instances of government regulatory change that severely impacted eBureau’s customers, in each case resulting in a 30%+ loss in eBureau revenue, and requiring the business to refocus energies in new markets;
• Making the required difficult calls to cut staff and expenses to survive these setbacks; and finally,
• Patiently investing excess cash flow into Tru-Signal over 6 years as we waited for its market to (finally!) develop.

In between fending off some near-fatal blows were prolonged periods of monotonous grinding forward, customer by customer, platform enhancement by enhancement, until it became clear to the data ecosystem just how strategic eBureau could be.  Through it all, Gordy kept the team motivated and focused on the hard work of building and growing the business.  We are deeply appreciative of Gordy, his team, his resilience, and his grit.

And as luck would have it, the extended timing could not have been better because just as eBureau’s strategic value is being realized, the company’s steady investment in Tru-Signal is paying off in a major way.  Tru-Signal has raised a fresh round of capital and is seeing strong customer traction based on the strength of its product and ability to provide immense value to advertisers. We expect that Tru-Signal will also prove itself to be equally strategic over time and through the good times and the tough moments, carry forward some of that eBureau-infused grit.

The post A Profile in Grit: the Reality of What It Takes to Succeed as an Entrepreneur appeared first on Redpoint Ventures.

As all companies become software companies, programmer productivity becomes mission critical for driving economic growth. Unfortunately, even with code reuse through open source software, and the emergence of powerful collaborative development repositories like Github, the core software development process remains antiquated and is increasingly a bottleneck to innovation.  Each project is a bespoke effort that is largely crafted from scratch by hand.  The concept of collaborating on code itself is a cumbersome process as team members lack context of code and it is difficult to share knowledge from one project to another. One might hope that just throwing more developers at problems would help (if you can find them), but with today’s interconnected code bases, this doesn’t yield the efficiencies we need to see.  Bottom line is we need to think differently about how software is created if we hope to realize the full potential of the digital economy.

This is where Sourcegraph’s code intelligence comes into play.  Sourcegraph’s platform analyzes your code and develops a semantic understanding of what is written.  Through this understanding, it can make code searchable across all your software by all members of your team. It allows developers to see, in real time, usage examples of how software components work,facilitates conversations and code review by linking directly to code, and allows developers to see who and what will be impacted by changes to code used in multiple places throughout the organization.  No longer is code a bunch of text, but built from intelligent components with context and metadata that can be shared throughout software teams.  Through this code intelligence, Sourcegraph hopes to dramatically improve the software development process and eventually deliver on the promise of changing how software is built (more to come in the future on this last point).

Every investment for us begins with the team and Sourcegraph’s founders, Quinn Slack and Beyang Liu are exceptional.  They have built a great team and impressed us with their ability to tackle the immense technical challenges of scaling code intelligence.  We can’t wait to see where they go from here.  Sourcegraph is on a mission to change software development – it is a big audacious goal, but one that could help the future get here sooner.     

The post Helping the Future Get Here Sooner: Our Investment in Sourcegraph appeared first on Redpoint Ventures.

It’s no secret that good engineering talent is hard to find. Diverse industries from retail and transportation to banking and insurance have one thing in common: today they are all tech companies themselves and require highly skilled software teams for mission-critical technical projects. Done well, these projects serve as a competitive advantage, done poorly they risk becoming a liability and can hinder the company’s growth. But outsourced development has fatal flaws: offshore and services firms don’t get access to the best talent, they require a large amount of time managing the project and they almost always cost exponentially more.

On the talent side, freelance engineers want access to a steady stream of interesting projects and usually don’t want to manage clients.  And while highly skilled engineers have more opportunity than ever with job reqs outpacing available talent 5:1, full time positions don’t provide the level of flexibility and independence many developers want. Top engineers often want the ability to work from anywhere, to chose their own hours and to select the projects they want, as well as the ability to determine their income based on the amount of work they take on.  

Enter Gigster, a marketplace built to manage the two sides of the software development equation. Co-founders Roger Dickey and Debo Olaosebikan saw an opportunity to better align the needs of software developers with companies who need access to the best engineering talent. They started Gigster with the vision to build the world’s engineering department and for the past 2 ½ years have built customer relationships across a range of industries from Fortune 500 to SMBs and mid-range enterprises.

At the center of Gigster’s advantage is its extensive network of 1000+ world class engineers who are aided by the platform’s system of tools that automate many of the mundane coding and project management tasks to ensure a high quality product on time and on budget. This system was a core part of our investment thesis as it learns over time and drives more and more efficiencies across the system.

It’s amazing that in 2017 coding is still such a bespoke process. We think Gigster’s managed marketplace model has the opportunity to disrupt the already enormous and rapidly growing IT services market while re-imagining the future of work for engineers, PMs and designers.

The post Gigster and the Future of Work appeared first on Redpoint Ventures.

I am thrilled to announce that Alex Bard is joining Redpoint as a partner and early stage investor. I personally got to know Alex in 2011 when he was raising capital for his company Assistly.  Over the last 6 years, we have witnessed Alex’s commitment to building companies based on integrity and conviction, his passion for bringing together world-class talent and developing winning teams, and his gift for making awesome products that simplify complex problems.

Alex has a diverse background which includes co-founding 4 enterprise startups (3 with successful exits including one to AOL and one to Salesforce), running a billion dollar business at Salesforce, and most recently serving as CEO of Campaign Monitor, a global email marketing and automation company used by more than 100,000 businesses.  We also appreciated his genuine excitement for helping founders as an angel investor and advisor where he has worked with many great entrepreneurs and companies at various stages of growth.

We know Alex will be an invaluable asset to our founders as they build and scale their companies. He understands the complexities of growing a startup at various stages and brings a profound level of empathy to entrepreneurs as well as advice that comes from hands-on experience. And importantly, Alex shares our strongly held belief that every startup is its founder’s journey not ours.

We are in the early days of building the next generation of Redpoint and we are committed to recruiting amazing people that share our passion for helping founders change the world, and share our values of teamwork and respect.  Along with recent hires, Medha Agarwal, Astasia Myers and Jamin Ball, Alex will build upon our great heritage and help us define the future.

Venture firms and startups are made up of people, and at the end of the day you want the right people by your side for the good times and the bad. We are lucky to now count Alex as part of our team.

The post Welcome Alex Bard appeared first on Redpoint Ventures.

We covered a range of topics including:

• Why it’s good that startup funding has been down six quarters in a row, and what this means for startups trying to raise
• How the decision-making process works best for a VC partnership
• The milestones startups need to reach in order to be attractive from an investment perspective

The post The Twenty Minute VC with Scott Raney appeared first on Redpoint Ventures.

The student debt epidemic has been well documented, with the typical graduating student leaving college with an average of $37,000 of debt.  One reason for this predicament is the ironic fact that when they apply to college, prospective students and their parents don’t have access to one of the most important decision criteria – what it will cost.  

Raise.me is changing  that through its micro-scholarships platform.  As a marketplace for students and colleges, Raise.me uses technology to create a more transparent and empowering system that’s a win for all parties. Students and parents get transparency into financial aid prior to application, high school educators have a new tool to help shape students for success, and colleges get to build relationships with students earlier and better match financial aid to the right students.

The company is well on its way to achieving its vision, having partnered with more than more than 225 colleges and universities such as NYU, Carnegie Mellon, Penn State and ASU.  There are over 650,000 students from all 50 states already benefiting from the platform. Cumulatively students have earned an estimated $1 billion to date through the Raise.me platform.  This year, students will access on average $20,000 in financial aid to a college through the Raise.me platform, which they earn as if they apply and are accepted.  Longer term, Raise.me has the opportunity to reshape how colleges and prospective students connect with one another.  Colleges spend $9 billion per year on recruiting and enrollment marketing and award nearly $50 billion per year in scholarships.  

Raise.me is led by three compelling founders, Preston Silverman, George Kirkland, and Dave Schuman, who are focused on making a significant social impact while  building Raise.me into a substantial company.  We are excited to partner with Preston, George, Dave and the rest of the Raise.me team to ultimately transform how the future generation prepares, chooses and pays for the best possible college education.  Can’t think of a more worthy goal than that.

The post Announcing Our Investment in Raise.me appeared first on Redpoint Ventures.

Astro uses natural language processing and machine learning to access the back office of businesses coupled with a great UI (be it chat or voice), all of which makes the enterprise immensely more productive. And what better place to start with than email as it offers an enormous source of data (essential to any ML platform) to discern the real social graphs of professionals, understand the relative importance of specific relationships and ultimately provide a smart platform that helps connect people in their work lives in better and more interesting ways.

The launch of Astro’s first beta product is the first step to realizing their broader vision. I have been using Astro the last 6 months and it has made me immensely more productive. I’m excited to see where they take this product and company but most importantly, I am excited to work with this team whom I respect and enjoy. Sign up for the public beta here and see how it helps you become more productive.

The post Introducing Astro appeared first on Redpoint Ventures.

Consumer buying behavior has massively shifted but the big brands and retailers are struggling to keep up. Today’s consumers think differently, act differently and they consume differently. The stats speak for themselves. Millennials cite value and price as their number one buying consideration. 77% say they won’t buy the brands their parents use. 88% of people consider private labels to be just as good as national brands. 75% of youth in the United States expect brands to behave in a socially responsible way. Simply put: this generation doesn’t buy into the legacy establishment and they don’t have a connection with traditional CPG brands.

Meanwhile the CPG business is a $775B industry that has uniquely evolved since it began in the 1950’s. It has developed a complex labyrinth of middlemen, recursive and inefficient economics and promotion, and calcified channels, all of which add costly markups and result in high consumer prices for the most basic products.

Brandless aims to give people a better approach to modern consumption with value-driven, simple and authentic products. This means healthy, natural ingredients, sustainable sourcing, convenient distribution and packaging and a personalized customer experience. By streamlining the way products are sourced, distributed, merchandised, promoted, and delivered, Brandless will help people escape “the Brand Tax”, a phrase they coined, which is the aggregation of legacy costs that are excessive and unnecessary when value, quality, and social responsibility are prioritized from inception.

The company plans to launch in the first half of 2017 with a collection of everyday essentials ranging from household goods to food to beauty items. Each item is handpicked by the Brandless team to be the highest quality and 100% of the items are as good or better than leading national brands. They will be available to people at the fairest possible price and sold online and through the Brandless mobile app–and perhaps at a few places that will surprise you.

Which brings us to the real reason we invested in Brandless: co-founders Tina Sharkey and Ido Leffler are the kind of team that investors are lucky to work with. They bring a formidable combination of operating experience and inside knowledge of the CPG industry coupled with a profound sense of social purpose.  

As CEO, Tina brings tremendous vision and experience to Brandless. She has a deep understanding of the consumer mindset and an innate ability to build companies and communities that serve and inspire them. Her accomplishments and resume are extensive: CEO of Sherpa Foundry, Venture Partner at Sherpa Capital, senior leader at Johnson & Johnson, Chairman and Global President of BabyCenter, and Co-Founder of iVillage.  

Ido has founded and operated several successful consumer product companies and his knowledge of the CPG supply chain and retail models are unparalleled. He has dedicated his career to building products people love around cause-centered companies. He founded Yes To Inc., Cheeky, and Yoobi, which has provided free school supplies to over 2 million kids to date. As Chairman of Brandless, Ido’s experience and connections will be indispensable to bringing this vision to life.

We are privileged to support Tina and Ido as they introduce Brandless to the world.  Be sure to check out Brandless.com to sign up for updates and join the movement.   

The post Reimagining CPG: Why We Invested in Brandless appeared first on Redpoint Ventures.