PreIPO INTELLI™ Weekly Insights | Series 46
Friday, August 25th 2023 | Volume 1 Series 46 | New platform for tracking growth, Spotify Podcast Tools, and some funding updates.
Hey there! As the week winds down, we're thrilled to bring you a batch of exciting updates from the INTELLI™ team. This week we talk about Panobi, a growth-tracking platform to cater to growth managers' needs, offering insights and collaboration features. Spotify announces new tools for podcasters, including customized show pages, analytics, and automated ads, aiming to enhance the podcast creation and discovery experience. Additionally, Hugging Face secures $235 million in a Series D funding round, showcasing strong industry interest in AI platforms, while international privacy regulators advocate for social media platforms to address data-scraping privacy risks, emphasizing the importance of safeguarding user data in the digital age.
The ex-leader of growth at Slack is constructing a platform for monitoring growth
Image Credits: Getty Images
When Merci Grace, co-founder of Panobi, assumed the role of overseeing growth at Slack in 2015, she was instrumental in expanding the user base from 50,000 to over 3 million within a short span. This experience underscored the importance of tracking growth metrics and the complexity of extracting such data from various sources.
In 2021, Grace leveraged this insight to establish Panobi, a growth-tracking platform she wished had existed during her time at Slack. The company has just announced a $5 million seed funding round and the commencement of a closed beta for their product.
Grace, in collaboration with her co-founder Jason Klym, was surprised to discover that numerous growth professionals were still utilizing spreadsheets or project management tools like Notion to track vital metrics. Recognizing the absence of a dedicated tool for growth managers, they decided to address this gap by creating Panobi.
The platform primarily monitors crucial user metrics like daily and monthly active users by integrating with data warehouses such as Snowflake, offering real-time updates and a historical timeline view for performance evaluation.
Panobi's solution also emphasizes collaboration, enabling users to share information within the product itself, as well as through platforms like Slack and eventually Microsoft Teams.
Grace emphasized that growth is inherently cross-functional, necessitating the participation of various departments. Panobi aims to provide understandable data that caters to different timelines and expertise levels, bridging the gap between departments like sales and growth.
While Panobi is currently not generating revenue, the future plan involves charging for product interaction with paid editor seats, while offering free viewer seats for those requiring data access without direct involvement in product development. This approach aims to maintain cost efficiency for clients.
Panobi, currently employing 11 individuals, aligns with Grace's previous experience at Slack, where she cultivated a diverse 50-person growth team. This commitment to diversity remains a focal point as she builds her new venture.
The recent investment round was led by Index Ventures' Nina Achadjian and Paris Heymann, with notable angel investors including Slack's co-founders, Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson.
Spotify launches a range of tools for podcasters 🎙️
After Apple's recent podcast subscription creator tools announcement, Spotify is stepping up its podcast game with a slew of new features for creators. The updates include enhanced podcast show page customization options, impression analytics, podcast preview editing tools, expanded automated ads, and a Spotify Audience Network Performance Dashboard for Megaphone enterprise publishers.
One notable addition is the ability for podcasters to personalize their show pages, where they can add a bio and link to their social media handles. Creators can also highlight a "best place to start" episode and curate up to two "host recommendations." Impression analytics are introduced to help creators understand how their shows are being discovered, providing insights into the total number of impressions and their sources.
Monetization analytics are also being introduced to help creators track earnings and measure ad campaign performance and subscriptions. Podcasters can also gain more control over their previews in Spotify's home feed, selecting the part of their show they want to be included. Additionally, Spotify's Automated Ads program, which connects creators with global advertisers, will expand to the UK and Australia.
Megaphone, Spotify's podcast hosting platform, will feature an Audience Network Performance Dashboard, showing average CPM and impressions data to help publishers tailor their engagement with Spotify's audio advertising marketplace. These updates signal Spotify's commitment to improving the podcasting experience for both creators and listeners.
Recent Funding Recap 🤝
Cypago - $13 Million Seed Round
Cypago harnesses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to simplify tasks involving the collection and analysis of security, compliance, and privacy control data. The platform enables companies to assess their security programs against prevailing standards and frameworks, offering an edge in an evolving compliance landscape.
Beyond automation, Cypago introduces a proprietary AI model tailored to the realm of cybersecurity governance, risk, and compliance. This unique capability allows the platform to comprehend and even generate complex textual content from various documents and policies.
The platform also features an AI assistant named Co-Pilot, adept at responding to natural language queries related to a company's cybersecurity posture and governance, risk, and compliance status.
Luxury Presence - $19.2 Million Series B
Navigating the realm of real estate marketing is a complex endeavor, requiring realtors to contend with market volatility and generate compelling marketing experiences within budgetary constraints. Malte Kramer, who faced these challenges as a marketing consultant at Jade Mills, founded Luxury Presence to provide marketing solutions to real estate agents, teams, and brokerages.
Luxury Presence, recently securing $19.2 million in a Series B1 funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Switch Ventures and existing investors, offers an array of tools and services to help realtors effectively market properties to potential buyers.
Their offerings encompass creating real estate websites, content marketing strategies, advertisements, social media engagement, and more. The platform empowers users to develop property webpages and presentations or list properties on Luxury Presence's expanding home search database. Additionally, they introduced Presence Copilot, an AI-powered mobile app for realtors, which is currently in private beta.
With over 10,000 real estate agents as customers and a workforce of around 600, including 300 full-time employees in the U.S., Luxury Presence is on a growth trajectory. The latest funding round, bringing their total raised to $52.5 million, will fuel further product development. Despite the challenges faced by the proptech sector, Luxury Presence aims to manage expenses wisely while continuing to innovate in the real estate marketing space.
Hugging Faces - $235 Million Series D
Hugging Face, an AI startup, has successfully raised a substantial $235 million in a Series D funding round, with strong backing from tech giants like Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, and more. This funding surge has propelled Hugging Face's valuation to an impressive $4.5 billion, marking a significant increase from its valuation just a few months ago in May 2022. This financial boost underscores the heightened interest and confidence in AI and the platforms that drive its growth.
Hugging Face specializes in delivering a suite of data science tools tailored to the unique needs of real estate professionals, enabling effective property marketing. The company's offerings include a platform reminiscent of GitHub, specifically designed for storing AI code repositories, models, and datasets. It also offers user-friendly web applications to showcase AI-powered applications, making it easier for users to visualize and interact with AI capabilities. The startup's services encompass libraries for tasks like dataset processing and model evaluation, along with an enterprise version of the hub supporting both software-as-a-service and on-premises deployment.
Among its paid features, Hugging Face introduces AutoTrain, streamlining the complex task of AI model training. The Inference API empowers developers to host models without managing underlying infrastructure, while Infinity enhances in-production AI model processing speed. CEO Clément Delangue envisions AI as pivotal to software development and positions Hugging Face as an open platform driving this transformative shift. Founded in 2016, the company evolved from a chatbot app to building, testing, and deploying machine learning models, demonstrating its agility and commitment to AI's dynamic landscape.
Hugging Face claims a customer base of 10,000 and over 50,000 organizations on its platform, hosting more than 1 million repositories in its model hub. Strategic alignment with the burgeoning MLOps market positions the startup well to streamline AI model production processes. With this funding, Hugging Face aims to amplify its efforts across research, enterprise, and startup domains, paving the way for further innovation and growth.
Regulators Urge Social Media Giants to Address Data-Scraping Privacy Risks
International privacy regulators, including notable bodies like the UK's ICO and Canada's OPC, have united in urging major social media platforms to tackle the privacy vulnerabilities posed by data scraping. Their joint statement emphasizes that personal information that is publicly accessible on the internet is subject to data protection laws, making data scrapers and platforms accountable for ensuring compliance with these regulations. This comes at a time when concerns are growing over the potential misuse of scraped data to train generative AI models, raising the specter of unauthorized data collection and misuse.
The statement, signed by regulators from a dozen countries, including Australia, Hong Kong, and Switzerland, highlights the risks associated with data scraping, such as targeted cyberattacks, identity fraud, and unauthorized profiling. The regulators recommend platforms take various steps to mitigate these risks, including implementing technical controls against scraping, enforcing terms and conditions to prohibit data scraping, and even taking legal action against scrapers. Users are also advised to exercise caution in sharing personal information online and make use of privacy settings to control the visibility of their posts.
The regulators' collective call to action underscores the need for social media giants to be vigilant about protecting users' information from scraping and potential misuse, especially as generative AI models become more prevalent. The regulators' message aims to drive home the importance of safeguarding user data and taking proactive measures to ensure data privacy and security in the digital age.
As always, stay tuned for more updates and insights from the team at INTELLI™.