Technology

Sonos opened its first day of trading at $15 a share though quickly gained 20% as trading began. As of publication, Sonos, trading under SONO, is around $18.50 a share.

Sonos priced its initial shares at $15 a share, below the expected range of $17 to $19. At this price Sonos is valued at just under $1.5 billion and will raise $208.5 million by going public. If the stock price maintains its current levels, Sonos will end its first day of trading up and in the expected range. Pricing their initial shares under the expected range resulted in the company raising as much money, but it also provided a bit of cushion in case Wall Street traders disagreed with the pricing. Itnever a good look to end a companyfirst day of trading in the red.

Sonos& Michael Groeninger, VP of Corporate Finance, tells me the company priced its IPO price under the expected range in response to recent market movement. As examples he pointed to the volatile market environment caused by multiple down days including Facebookbig drop in stock price. Sonos, Giannetto said, is more concerned about where the stock price is in three to five years rather than on the first day of trading.

To celebrate its Nasdaq listing, Sonos updated the sound of the Nasdaq bell where it will be used going forward to open and close the daytrading.

Sonos is nicely positioned as a third-party option in an ecosystem thatgetting increasingly crowded by proprietary speakers from the larger companies that own voice assistants like the Echo, HomePod and Google Home. But Sonos has been around for a considerable amount of time and has clearly built up a significant following to ensure that it could find itself operating as an independent public company. In its fiscal 2017 year, Sonos said it brought in nearly $1 billion in revenue, an increase of 10 percent year-over-year. The initial filing indicated that the company had sold a total of 19 million products in 6.9 million households, with customers listening to 70 hours of content each month.

I spoke briefly with long-time Sonos employee Nick Millington who is now the companyChief Product Office. He sees Sonos as a unique offering in todayconsumer market. He explained that the companythree pillars of focus — openness, quality, and cohesive product family (he called it systemness) — is what makes Sonos unique. He pointed out that because of those three areas of focus, 90% of the products Sonos ever sold are still in operation today. Sonos& biggest competitor isn&t speakers from Amazon or Apple, but rather a silent home, he said. Because the company has long worked with outside services, it is committed to brining Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant to its products.

Still, ithard to ignore the facing increasing competition from the electronic giants of Apple, Google and Amazon — all which want a spot for their own speaker in peoplehomes. Sonos responded by building-in AmazonAlexa personal assistant into several products. Its most recent product, the $399 Beam sound bar, has Alexa built-in and lets users ask AppleSiri to control music on Sonos systems. Google Assistant compatibility is expected to come later this year.

Stampli, an invoice management platform, announced today the closing of a $6.7 million Series A funding roundled by SignalFire, with participation from Bloomberg Beta, Hillsven Capital and UpWest Labs.

If you&ve ever freelanced for a company, you know that the long, instant ramen-filled days between filing an invoice and having it completed can be grueling. Brothers Eyal and Ofer Feldman launched Stampli in 2015 to help solve this problem and bridge the communication gap between accountants, related internal departments and vendors. Aimed at mid to large-size companies, to date Stampli has helped a wide range of companies (from fashion to tech) manage more than $4 billion in invoices through its AI-driven interface.

&Invoice management is like an elephant,& co-founder and CEO Eyal Feldman told TechCrunch. &One person sees the head, one person sees the tail, one person sees the legs. Ita process that different people see different versions of but the whole picture should include everybody. The ability for all of these people to be involved is really the core of the process.&

Traditional invoice management between vendors and internal departments in a company can be a tangled mess of email exchanges, lost messages and ultimately delayed payments. But, Stampliinterface (which can be integrated directly into a companyenterprise resource planning software likeNetSuite, Intuit QuickBooks or SAP) allows for every step of the invoicejourney to have a central landing page on which every relevant party can collaborate.

&We found that 85 percent of our users are not accounting people,& said Feldman. &[They] are all the managers around and all the other people involved. What we found in our research is that when the process works for them is when accounting is happy.&

This landing page not only provides easy access to pertinent information between departments, but Stamplibuilt-in AI, Billy the Bot, helps invoice managers fill in relevant information by first learning the structure of the invoice and then learning through observation the userbehavior and work flow. When Billy passes an 80 percent confidence threshold for its decision, it goes ahead and auto-fills the information. But, if itfeeling unsure about its choice, Billy will leave it as a suggestion instead to avoid introducing any errors to the paperwork.

The more invoices users process through Stampli, the more Billy learns how to best streamline the process for that company.

In the arena of invoice management, Stampli faces competition from companies like Determine and Concur, which also offer all-in-one platforms for invoice management and, in the case of Concur, also incorporate machine learning to capture invoices.

According to Feldman, what helps Stampli stand apart from the competition is its emphasis on company collaboration and its no-fee installation of the software. With no upfront cost, the company only charges per invoice.

Rent the Runway today announced that it has partnered with Temasek for a $200 million credit facility.

Founded in 2009, Rent the Runway lets users rent items of clothing for special events or occasions, bringing runway styles to folks without the cash to purchase the clothing outright.

Rent the Runway started out by letting users rent their wares for about 10 percent of the itemprice. But in 2017, RTR introduced a subscription model, giving users unlimited rentals for $89/month.

The model has already been proven by other businesses. RTR started giving users access to fashion in the same way that Netflix gives users access to video, Spotify gives access to music, or even the way ClassPass gives users access to studio fitness classes.

Since the subscription launch, RTRsubscription business is up 150 percent year over year, and represents 50 percent of the companyoverall revenue.

According to the release, RTR will use the new funds to continue growing its subscription business, expand operations, and refinance its existing debt facility. As part of the deal, Temasek has received an observer seat on the board of directors.

In response to the question around why Rent The Runway chose a credit facility over traditional VC investment, CFO Scarlett O&Sullivan had this to say via email:

We are very pleased that the company has demonstrated the kind of business model, growth prospects and financial discipline that make it possible to access a credit facility of this size with an equity-minded long-term partner like Temasek & they have a proven track record of supporting disruptive high-growth companies.

We were specifically looking for debt for three key reasons:

1 & This facility gives us the ability to access more financing & we can draw capital as we need to, giving us flexibility to grow our subscription business more quickly

2 & We improved the terms of our prior facility which we refinanced with a portion of these funds — and debt for us is a lower cost option to finance the business

3 & It is less dilutive to our existing shareholders & we believe there will be significant value creation over the next several years as we continue to change consume behavior and help women put their closet in the cloud

Before this latest deal, Rent the Runway had raised more than $200 million in funding from investors such as Bain Capital, KPCB, Highland Capital, TCV, and more.