Electric Cloud Closes $12M Series E Round For Its Continuous Delivery Service

Electric Cloud, a company that offers continuous delivery products, services and support to businesses that want to adapt this software design practice, today announced that it has closed a $12 million Series E round with participation from Siemens’ Venture Capital, US Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, RRE Ventures and Rembrandt Venture Partners. The company previously disclosed this as an $8 million round in September 2013, but today announced that it has added an additional $4 million to this over-subscribed round.

Steve Brodie, Electric Cloud’s CEO, said in a statement announcing the funding that closing the over-subscribed Series E round will help to accelerate company growth and create new ways to help customers deliver better software more efficiently.

The company says the additional funding reflects its “continued growth and market leadership.” Electric Cloud’s services are currently in use by a wide variety of businesses, ranging from Shell Oil to Epic Games, Panasonic Automotive Services, Splunk and SpaceX. Its staff has now grown to 120 employees, and its products include services for agile software development, Android life-cycle management and automotive software.

Continuous integration (that is, ensuring that all developers are synced up by checking on their code regularly) has been commonplace since the 90s. Continuous delivery, however, which goes beyond integration and focuses on the deployment pipeline, is only now really catching on in the enterprise. Already, though, it is a surprisingly competitive field; incumbents like HP to ThoughtWorks and startups like CloudBees’ Jenkins and the increasingly popular Chef are vying for users.

Airbnb Has Closed Its $500M Round Of Funding At A $10B Valuation, Led By TPG

TechCrunch has learned that Airbnb, the fast-growing site that lets people become hoteliers by renting out sofas, rooms or entire private homes, has now closed its latest round of funding: $500 million, led by private equity firm TPG, at a $10 billion valuation, according to our sources. This brings the total raised by Airbnb to $826 million.

Negotiations around the funding were previously reported by the Wall Street Journal, which reported that TPG and Dragoneer Investment Group were leading the round, and that mutual funds including T. Rowe Price were also involved. Update: WSJ is reporting that it’s a $450 million round, same valuation, with Dragoneer, Sequoia and T. Rowe Price also named as investors.

We understand from sources that Allen & Co. — known for its recent work advising Facebook on its $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp, working on Twitter’s IPO, and helping Dropbox with its latest, $350 million round — has been helping to orchestrate this round for Airbnb.

The deal is an interesting one for TPG. Its TPG Growth division is a key investor in Uber, another startup innovating at “the edge of the forest” (Yammer’s David Sacks’ description of the group of companies applying tech to disrupt non-technical fields). Through TPG Capital, it has extensive holdings in the property and travel markets already, specifically through its ownership of RentPath; and part-ownership of Sabre/Travelocity.

It’s not clear how and if any of TPG’s holdings will come into play in relation to Airbnb, but it’s tempting to think of how they could.

Airbnb’s previous, $326 million of backing came from a fairly large pool of investors: Y-Combinator (where it was incubated in 2009), Sequoia Capital, Youniversity Ventures, Greylock Partners, SV Angel, Keith Rabois, Elad Gil, Jeremy Stoppelman, Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst Partners, Jeff Bezos, Digital Sky Technologies, CrunchFund (run by Michael Arrington, who founded TechCrunch), Ashton Kutcher, Eniac Ventures and Founders Fund.

We understand that some past investors are also part of this latest round.

Since opening for business five years ago, Airbnb has taken the travel accommodation industry by storm. Effectively, it created and now dominates a new market segment — private homeowners use its cloud-based platform to list and collect payments for their rooms and houses, with mobile apps and social integrations all greasing the wheels of the Airbnb machine.

Airbnb now has over 600,000 listings across nearly 200 countries. The WSJ reported earlier this month that revenues in 2013 were about $250 million, more than double what it made the year before. Like Uber and other companies that have disrupted older and more established industries, that rapid growth has drawn a lot of heat from incumbent competitors — in Airbnb’s case from the hotel industry — which have been played out on legal and regulatory fronts in different cities.

Airbnb is not always fast to reveal what it is doing on the fundraising front. A $250 million round led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, which Airbnb raised in 2012, was only disclosed publicly in 2013 (at TC Disrupt in Berlin, as it happened). In other words, it isn’t clear when the company when the company will announce this round, either.

What it will mean is that Airbnb, now at a $10 billion valuation, may be less quick to run for the public markets. That’s perhaps a sign of the times, with many pointing to an impending “closing” of the IPO window for tech companies, evidenced by a trend among listing companies pricing their offerings below their expected ranges.

Update: The WSJ and Re/Code are reporting the total raise to be $450 million instead of the $500 million we’ve heard. While we’re not sure of the exact reason for the reporting discrepancy, the last time we broke funding news like this, with an overage in raise amount, was Snapchat. In Snapchat’s case, the missing $20 million in other outlets’ coverage was due to a secondary sale of stock by the founders, which we had included in our total.

Image via Frontback.

Vicarious Grabs A Huge, New $40M Growth Round To Advance Artificial Intelligence

Vicarious, a San Francisco-based company that developed technology to solve Captcha queries last fall, just raised a big new $40 million round from investors including Joe Lonsdale’s Formation 8, Mark Zuckerberg, Vinod Khosla and Peter Thiel.

Zuckerberg invested personally while others like Dustin Moskovitz and Ashton Kutcher invested through their funds. Aydin Senkut’s Felicis Ventures, Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian’s Initialized Capital, Bryan Johnston of Braintree, Box.com CEO Aaron Levie, Sam Altman, Open Field Capital, Zarco Investment Group and Metaplanet Holdings filled out the rest of the round.

In total, they’ve raised $56.1 million for a company with 10 employees.

Why so much? They’re planning grow their headcount significantly. And their vision is far more encompassing than solving Captchas.

D. Scott Phoenix, the company’s CEO, said that other artificial intelligence companies leverage convolutional neural network technology that has been around since the 1980s.

“It’s worked in the past because we’ve had this explosion in computational memory, but it’s not how the brain works,” he said. “It’s a rough approximation. By rethinking these core algorithms, Vicarious has been able to leaps forward in performance.”

Phoenix added, “This is a project that takes a really long time.”

They’re hoping the company’s technology will eventually lead to breakthroughs in areas like robotics, clean energy, and medicine. Also, they’re hoping it will lead to the world’s first intelligent machines.

Round vs square smartwatch designs

When the Moto 360 was unveiled a couple of days ago, pretty much everyone fell in love with Motorola's sophisticated round watch design. The teaser images were beautiful, that spinning GIF was mesmerizing and well, the thing just looked sexy and classy. The old-fashioned skin made the smartwatch look like anything but a smartwatch, especially because it wasn't a chunky square brick. So what does a round watch face offer compared to a square design?

With the Moto 360 you now have a decision to make: round or square smartwatch? / © AndroidPIT/Motorola/LG

I have to admit, when I saw the Moto 360 my first response was that a round face was an awful display format for a smartwatch. Sure, the Google demo video made it look pretty great, and it is definitely impressive to look at, but what about all that wasted space in the corners that a square watch can take advantage of? When I saw the LG G Watch I thought ''that's it!'' because all I really want from a smartwatch is an unassuming slab of display. But there's pros and cons to both options, which we'll lay out for you below.

The LG G Watch uses the same display format we've seen on pretty much every other smartwatch so far. / © LG

Square face

It goes without saying that the Android platform was designed for a rectangular format. Taking a rectangle and squeezing it into a square hardly takes much imagination where design is concerned, but the square format manages to take advantage of as much screen real estate as possible, and is familiar based on what we're already used to with our smartphones and tablets. Icons can be neatly stacked and notifications and messages are easy to read. But with this familiarity comes a certain sense of boredom.

There's no shortage of square-display smartwatches already on the market. / © AndroidPIT/WearIT/Pebble/Intel

Right now there's not too much going on in terms of excitement or wow factor on a square format smartwatch. Square is basically what we've seen from day one, if you ignore the various fitness bands and the new Gear Fit with a curved AMOLED display. As far as watches go though, square has pretty much become the standard format and while it clearly works for obvious reasons, there doesn't seem to be too much innovation going on for the format. At least not yet. Add to this the fact that pretty much every square format smartwatch sticks out like crazy as a smartwatch – they always make me think of calculator watches from the 80s.

360 degrees of classical beauty, the Moto 360 looks pretty fantastic. / © Motorola

Round face

Clearly the engineers at Motorola decided it was time to think outside the box, seeing that the box is square, and come up with something entirely original. So they decided on the bold move of making their first smartwatch with a round design, and the initial response seems to be that consumers can't wait to get their hands on it. Beyond the novelty factor, the Moto 360 design is the first edge-to-edge smartwatch we've seen too, making the interface pretty much everything. The display looks expansive rather than cramped and a circular watch, especially with ''real-world'' skins could easily pass as the modern timepiece Motorola are so keen on.

It's nice to have that ''open'' feeling, but how will apps be optimized for a round format? / © Enrico Ros

A circular format offers up some pretty interesting possibilities too, some tied to convenience, like using a gyroscope to rotate the display to a workable orientation no matter which way you have the watch held, and others just on an interface level – all of a sudden the opportunity to animate traditional watch functions appear. I for one love the circular loading animation demoed in the developer preview video when a message is sent. I was also happy to realize that the Moto 360 format doesn't lose the corners, but extends beyond those corners – if you look closely at the pictures you'll see that the Moto 360 display seems capable of swallowing up the G Watch's screen.

A circular watch face suddenly lets a smartwatch look like a normal watch. / © Motorola

But there's also some issues. If the face is capable of being rotated on a software level, what happens with the flat bezel on the bottom, which most likely houses the various sensors? We're also going to need a new pixel measuring standard for circular devices and it seems likely that many developers will simply expand their square-format apps outwards for a round design, which will hardly be optimizing the space available. The alternative is that square format apps will simply become cropped versions of the round app. And notifications and messages are always going to be centered, which means there's likely to be that wasted space issue anyway. It will probably take some time for the full impact and possibilities of the round format to be felt by users, but there's pros and cons to every new development.

There are still smartwatch display formats open for development. / © SamMobile

What comes next?

Whichever format you prefer, the simple fact remains that with Android Wear, Google has pretty much colonized the wearable space. It seems pretty unlikely that the Tizen horizon will arrive anytime soon, especially when you consider that Samsung was listed as an Android Wear partner in the various press releases, and it will be very hard for smaller forked versions of Android to compete against the Google juggernaut now that it has set its focus on the wearable world. I can't wait to see what incredible new applications appear to take advantage of the new platform (that are not simple ports from standard Android) and especially for the new round format, which I think, ultimately, has more room for innovation.

Which style display do you prefer? What possibilities can you imagine for a round format?

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