Technology

DevOps — the branch of enterprise IT that involves both products and best-practices for developers to build, test and run apps and other software — is on track to be worth nearly $13 billion by 2025. Now, a startup that is building DevOps tools is announcing a significant funding round to capitalise on that opportunity. Porland, Oregon-based Puppet (formerly Puppet Labs) has raised $42 million in funding in a venture round with a number of strategic and key financial investors.

The company isn&t readily disclosing its valuation — although we are trying to find out — but according to Pitchbook, its last disclosed valuation was in 2014, when it raised $40 million and was valued at $652 million post-money.

But Puppet has grown more than two-fold in the last four years: back then, it had 18,000 customers, including the likes of Google, Twitter, Salesforce and AT-T. Now, it says it has over 40,000 companies as customers, &including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100& using both its open source and commercial products—usePuppetopen source and commercial DevOps solutions, and itexpanded internationally and has made a couple of acquisitions (including the startup Reflect earlier this month).

All this would imply that Puppet, which now has raised $150 million to date, is likely valued at significantly more than $700 million, and may well be approaching the $1 billion-mark.

&Our rapid growth and international expansion is a testament to the rising demand for DevOps transformation, software automation and the pressing need for enterprises to navigate the new world of software delivery. Thatwhy we&ve been so focused on expanding our product portfolio—to empower customers to discover, deliver and operate software across their cloud and containerized environments,& said Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO,Puppet, in a statement. &I&m thrilled by the momentum we&re experiencing. It helps us better support our customers& journey to pervasive automation.&

The growth of cloud services, and the ubiquity of digitization, have led to a wide slate of functions in a business falling under the category of developer-led operations.

This has, in turn, driven a bigger demand for better processes to run these operations and the infrastructure that they touch. Puppet is not the only company in this area: in addition to large players like Cisco and CA Technologies and EMC, there are startups like Docker, Chef and more.

Puppetsolutions cover applications, cloud services, containerised services and networking devices, and that mix is part of what is attractive about the company, since many businesses today are not all-in on modern architectures, but are grappling with hybrids of old and new, cloud and on-premises, and so on. (Indeed, the ‘Puppet& name is a reference to how it works: developers can control the actions of the their applications over the network as puppeteers control puppets, without being seen).

&ServiceChannel has an aggressive technology roadmap. One that not only takes advantage of cloud native capabilities and containerized applications, but also requires modernization of existing, critical systems. Automation is necessary to help us deliver on that roadmap within the constraints of business—safely and at scale,& said Mark Trumpbour, VP of DevOps at ServiceChannel, in a statement.

The funding was led by Cisco, with Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures, SingaporeEDBI and VMWare also participating. Cisco and VMWare are themselves already key players in the area of DevOps (and Cisco already works with Puppet), while EDBI holds investments in a number of companies that are potential customers for the startup.

&Businesses put increasingly massive pressure on enterprise IT—so, itimportant that those IT organizations partner with technology providers with compelling innovation, world-class support and a global community of experts.Puppethas a track record of empowering its customers with all of these critical elements,& said Rob Salvagno, VP of Corporate Development and Cisco Investments, in a statement. &We look forward to working even more withPuppetas the global demand for automation technology and innovation continues to accelerate.&

&In todaydigital age, companies face increasing complex IT challenges dealing with their dynamic and diverse IT infrastructure.Puppetautomation and management platform transforms how companies manage and improve the efficiency of their IT assets and can help companies in Singapore realize productivity gains while ensuring compliance,& said Swee-Yeok CHU, CEO and President EDBI, in an additional statement. &Leveraging our network, we look forward to helpingPuppetscale up its local talent pool to address the regionopportunities through its APAC Regional HQ in Singapore and to augment Singaporedigital transformation strategy.&

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We&ll update when ASAP arrives.

Signal Media has closed a $16 million Series B funding round for an AI-fueled approach to media monitoring and b2b market intelligence. The UK startup uses machine learning techniques to filter through external information at scale — generating real-time insights for its customers, including for reputation management and decision support purposes.

Its system analyzes more than 2.8M global online, print, television, radio and regulatory sources, translated in real time in over 100 languages from 200 markets — serving up a customized overview of public conversations, market movements and issues pertinent to the client.

The Series B funding round was led by GMG Ventures, an independent VC fund whose limited partner is The Scott Trust, owner of The Guardian news organisation; although MMC Ventures was the largest investor. The round also included a debt facility from Kreos Capital.Other investors include Frontline, Hearst Ventures, Reed Elsevier Ventures and LocalGlobe.

Signal Media announced a £5.8M Series A at the end of 2016. It also took in debt financing last year, and seed funding back in 2015. And says the total raised to date is north of $27M.

On the customer side, Signal Media has more than 200 clients at this point — including the likes ofAllen - Overy, Amnesty International, British Airways, E.ON, TalkTalk, Thomas Cook and Whitbread. While its headcount has doubled to almost 100 people in a year, and it notes itmore than quadrupled revenues since its Series A raise in September 2016 — claiming 300 per cent year-on-year growth in 2017-18.

While PR and communications is where the company has focused its initial product push, it wants tobroaden out into risk management for tax and compliance, and business development in financial and legal services — using the latest investorcash injection to train its AIs on more tasks.

Specifically, says CEO and founder David Benigson, it will be using the funding to build out the AI-driven features of the product.

&Alongside our topics and entities, we&ve built a range of product features, from quote detection, to automatic clustering and auto-translation. We&re already working on a sentiment system that explores the meaning behind entire articles, mentions within an article and tone. We think itmad to try and put a numerical -1 to +1 score of ‘sentiment& around an article — because depending on the readercontext, a quote in an article could be good and the article could be bad, yet for another reader, the reverse might be true! We&re going beyond this kind of thinking. What kind of good is it What impact will it have These are the questions we&re trying to give answers to,& he tells TechCrunch.

&We&re also working on an entirely new way to deliver information to our users by understanding more about their world up front, so the AI can automatically surface contextual articles that are of interest — but that haven&t been actively searched for. Imagine the system itself saying ‘hey, you should really read this, itreally worth reading considering your interest in X&. Thatwhat we mean when we talk about the ‘unknown unknowns& we&re trying to help people see.&

&We&re working with researchers to automate some of the lower-level research work like producing biographies, or company ‘cheat-sheets&,& he adds. &What does this all boil down to We&re confident we can get to a point relatively quickly where you could be shown an article you didn&t know about, with a competitor or M-A opportunity you haven&t been aware of, give you an immediate idea of what other people think about that competitor, and then give you an instant 2-page summary of that company with all their key information, coupled with some insight into where they sit in a market. Itreally exciting!&

Another focus for the funding is expandingfurther into the US — where it sees growth potential.

Benigson says a fifth of its revenue currently comes from the market, but he touts the number as &improving daily as we build the team out there&.

The typical Signal Media buyer is currently the head of PR or head of comms in a professional services, financial or legal firm — whoafter reputation management software. But Benigson says increasingly the CEO or wider leadership team is wants to tap into real-time updates for business decision support purposes.

&We always had a vision that Signal would be used horizontally to surface business intelligence,& he says — citing regulation tracking as one of the nascent use-cases itinterested in. &How does public sentiment and policy impact regulation down the line&

And itcertainly true that political risk has stepped up for businesses in all sorts of sectors in recent years — as tech-fueled disruption has generated societal and political pressures, alongside a range of volatile geopolitical events.

On the regulatory tracking front,Benigson says it&sworking with a major consultancy on an enterprise-wide application of the service aimed at surfacing global regulatory information.

&The idea is to help risk professionals provide high-quality analysis and insight in real-time, so clients can stay ahead of the change by planning for regulation before iteven announced. How is regulation X or Y going to unfold What are the different ways that you could adopt or implement that particular change in regulation& he explains. &We&re not there yet, but the aspiration of the business is to augment those professionals with decision support.&

Some existing clients have also been using the service to source new business — including for spotting potential M-A targets — and this is another area Signal Media wants to nurture and grow.

&For example, we trained the system to source content on financially distressed firms, and itused by the M-A teams at several banks to build their pipeline. For these kinds of clients, the first-mover advantage is crucial and can result in seven- or eight-figure deals, so the real-time alerts from Signal are very important if you&re going to beat your competitors to the punch,& he says.

&Imagine being able to see that the M-A rumors around a prospect are ramping over the course of a morning — calling at 1130 instead of 1201 when they make their announcement public might make all the difference.&

Another business intelligence use-case it wants to serve relates to executive moves — andBenigson says it&ramping the training of our AI& to help customers get wind of key job changes before rivals do.

In the reputation management space Signal Media is competing with a range of incumbents — such asKantar and Cision — plus some newer approachesfrom the likes of Meltwater and RiskEye, though Benigson argues none of its rivals have &machine learning at their heart&. He names that as its &real differentiator& (vs, for example, the keyword based monitoring used by others).

He also argues it&s&sitting uniquely in the market offering decision support&. &The scope of what we are now able to do in terms of ‘real& sentiment, automated, readable summaries and contextual analysis is far beyond the traditional scope of reputation management,& he claims.

&We&re also interested in so much more than just reputation and the value of earned media for a CMO (although this is certainly something we help track). My dream is that ultimately we will consolidate insights across risk, reputation, and opportunity back into a single real time dashboard for any C-level professional so that a CEO has as much transparency, clarity, granularity as to whathappening outside of their organization as inside it.&

While not yet profitable — owing to its focus to date on growth, Benigson expresses confidence in being able to scale the business and achieve profitability down the line.&When we look at the dashboard of AOV, quota, lead time, conversion rate, all of them are trending in the right direction,& he says. &Therea clear unit-economic pathway to profitability, and we&ll go for it when we&re comfortable about our market position.&

Commenting in a statement, Simon Menashy, partner at MMC Ventures, adds: &We first backed Signal to develop their market-leading AI media monitoring tool, innovating in a space where every large company has a solution but few are happy with it. Itnow become clear that their technology can be applied to solve all kinds of other information problems businesses face. We&re delighted to be significantly increasing our investment and backing Signalnext phase of growth.&