With Airbnb’s IPO, I thought the time was right to take a look back at the past decade (Greylock led Airbnb’s Series A in November 2010) and reflect on what I learned from the journey. This essay is based on a Greymatter podcast episode.
Portfolio news.
Our Investment in Gretel
We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Gretel, an open platform that enables developers to build quickly with data and safely share it with others. Gretel aspires to be the GitHub of data. The team believes that privacy is an engineering problem and is on a mission to solve it.
Our Investment in Wealthsimple
Here in the U.S. the finance sector, we’ve seen a boom in consumer financial technology companies that modernize the way people save, spend, and invest. Yet in neighboring Canada, the consumer financial sector continues to largely be dominated by a handful of legacy financial institutions. These institutions haven’t changed much in decades -- they have high costs, opaque fee structures, and have been slow to leverage technology to modernize the way they engage customers.
Our Investment in apiiro
Today, we are excited to share our investment in apiiro, which is coming out of stealth and announcing the launch of their Code Risk Platform. apiiro’s platform enables enterprises to accelerate application and infrastructure delivery by automatically remediating risk with every change.
Our Investment in Remotion
The best measure of any product is change in human behavior. Remotion is the first tool we've seen whose customers say it has changed how they work together while distributed. Remotion-native teams make faster decisions, have fewer scheduled meetings, and feel more connected, creative and focused. It reduces the cost of communication in a team, and increases the likelihood of that communication.
The Truth is in The Network
Congratulations to Awake Security and Arista Networks, on their merger announced today. Arista’s acquisition of Awake combines Awake’s network detection and response (NDR) with Arista’s cognitive cloud networking solutions. This combination brings together some of the most sophisticated talent in cloud networking and security, with an ambitious vision for the future.
Greylock’s Partnership with Sumo Logic
Over the past decade, Sumo has established itself as the leader in continuous intelligence. With a cloud-native platform, Sumo has redefined the scale, elasticity and reliability of security, business and operational intelligence. We are excited for the next phase of their journey.
Our Investment In Truera
Companies and governments want high quality AI models that are trusted, fair, safe and compliant, and work in the real world. But that is really hard to do if these large organizations don't understand their own AI models. Truera provides the first Model Intelligence platform that enables data scientists and non-data scientists alike to understand exactly why a model makes a prediction.
Our Investment in Gem
A company is as good as the people who work there. That’s why companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year looking for top talent. Yet many companies are not able to comprehensively track recruiting activities and ROI on time or dollars spent. That’s why Greylock is excited to announce that we led the Series B investment in Gem, an amazing three year-old-company revolutionizing how talent teams source, engage and optimize their recruiting activities across multiple channels.
Our Investment in Snorkel
Today, we’re thrilled to announce our investment in Snorkel AI, which is coming out of stealth and announcing Snorkel Flow, their end-to-end, data-first AI platform. Snorkel Flow solves the training data problem with a fundamentally new programmatic approach developed over years at the Stanford AI lab.
Our Investment in Neeva
Today we are excited to announce our investment in Neeva, an ad-free and deeply personal consumer-focused search service built with privacy at the foundation.
Experts on Day One:
Our Investment in Cresta
With the personal computer and then the mobile phone, the past 40+ years have brought incredible technological advances to office work around the world. But despite these new computing…
Our Investment in Clubhouse
Better Tools to Enable the Software Revolution: Software is deep into a multi-decade process of invading every industry. Building great software and integrating that software with...
Our Investment in Abnormal Security
We are excited to announce that Greylock led a $24M Series A investment in Abnormal Security, a company initiated and incubated in 2018 at Greylock offices.
Our Investment in Chronosphere
Today, Chronosphere is bringing their first product, a hosted cloud service, to market. Chronosphere supports the most demanding enterprises that need deep insights from their metrics at global scale and reliability, while at a fraction of the cost of equivalent technologies.
Our Investment in Instabase
In a 1990 documentary for the Library of Congress, Steve Jobs said, “What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”...
Our Investment in Utmost
Every company today is an evolving network of work and talent that goes far beyond their own employees — they have an extended workforce of contractors, vendors, staffing firms, freelancers and more.
Time for Clockwise
I never seem to have enough time. Nobody I know does, really. We’re are living in a golden age of productivity tools: Slack and Zoom and Figma and Dropbox and Quip and Crew and many more.
Our Investment In PayJoy
When I moved to my new home in Bangalore, India in 2005 to help launch Google’s first international product and engineering center, I was astounded at the lack of infrastructure.
Our Investment in Sqreen
Every company is increasingly a software company, but every company — large and small — struggles to secure their software. The dominant industry narrative has been that the application security problem “can’t be solved with technology.” ...
Our Investment in Rockset
The ascent of mobile and cloud computing has created an explosion of data types and data sources. We can now track real time data from our cars, phones, toasters, and combine that with customer information and transaction data...
Our Investment in Demisto
Breach after breach, we hear about organizations failing in their defense against the bad guys. If you hunt down the cause — in the vast majority of those cases, the attacker didn’t compromise the company by designing an exotic new piece of malware.
Our Investment in Roblox
Roblox has built the first next-generation gaming platform at scale. The traditional game company model relies on internal or contracted developers building titles to be published primarily as standalone games.
Why We’re Betting on Notable Health
When my colleague Saam Motamedi and I heard that Pranay Kapadia, Justin White, and Adam Ting decided to start Notable Health, Greylock was lucky enough to have the opportunity to become one of...
Our Investment in Cleo
Becoming a parent is both one of the steepest learning curves and wobbliest balancing acts that most of us encounter. In the past few decades, parents have been left to face that challenge with heavier career responsibilities and less support structure.
Our Investment in Solv: Health Care in the Last-Second Economy
A huge part of the value of the consumer internet has been driven by network businesses that connect people together. How we transact has changed dramatically over the past decade, and these shifts continue to accelerate.
Our Investment in Aurora — a Safe Path to Scale Autonomous Vehicles
Autonomous vehicles promise to address one of the most challenging, important and interesting evolutions of our time: the complete transformation of the way people and goods move.
Our Investment in Caffeine
For the past decade, we’ve seen a massive shift in the way we consume, interact with, and share media. We all stream more and more video content online, of course.
Our Investment in Mammoth Media
There are probably 1 billion phones in the world that people have looked at in the past hour. 98% of millennials in the United States have a smartphone. While some people say “mobile is dead” (for new investments / startups) ...
Introducing Nuro, Robotics for Everyday Life
I couldn’t be more excited to announce our Series A investment in Nuro and that I have joined the Board of Directors. Nuro is as compelling of an opportunity as I’ve ever seen in transportation.
Our Investment in Coda
Coda offers a new way of working together allowing individuals and teams to build whatever they need in order to effectively and efficiently run their business. Coda has created a new, unique productivity platform, with live networked data that can support any work flow.
Our Investment in Blend
Blend is growing quickly, having doubled their customers and headcount so far this year, and will use this financing round in part to open new offices in both San Francisco and New York. We look forward to partnering with Nima and the entire Blend team to deliver modern lending experiences and build the next-generation financial cloud.
Our Investment in Coinbase
Digital currencies have network effects at scale when they are used as a medium of exchange, but need widespread adoption to be useful. That’s why Coinbase has built the easiest to use and most trusted brokerage to allow users to buy and hold digital currencies, bringing digital currency investment to the mainstream.
Our Investment in Nauto
If you are a professional driver, Nauto gives you great driving assistance by alerting you to some dangers that you might not otherwise see on the road. If you are a commercial fleet, Nauto gives you both great safety tools for your drivers, and networked fleet management. If you are an insurer, then Nauto gives you unique information to improve your risk assessment and tools to improve your risk position.
Our Investment in Obsidian Security
Security is a large, growing concern in our digital, connected world. As data and applications move into hybrid cloud environments, the surface area that enterprises need to protect continues to increase in both complexity and size. Employees, contractors and partners require dynamic access that keeps up with the pace of their business, and enterprises need security offerings that are more automated and require less work from defenders to fit this new reality.
Our Investment in Cato Networks
With Cato, a company can connect each branch office, data center, and HQ, along with its mobile users directly to the Cato Cloud. This provides the connectivity between corporate data centers and branch offices as well as security and other network services. In short, Cato Networks is unifying the network and security stack, and offering a turnkey cloud-based solution. Since launch, Cato has already begun to capture the imagination of customers and security analysts alike as a potential “game changer” in how companies think about managing security.
Customer Service Reinvented
What does it mean to build a system around people? While virtually all existing systems route tickets, Gladly routes customers and keep every interaction, regardless of channel, in one open conversation. If a customer emails one day and calls the next, the agent handling the phone call sees the customer’s email from the day before — along with every other contact they’ve made with the company.
Our Investment in Innovium: Next-Generation Cloud Data Center Networks
Today Innovium is announcing that the company has raised over $50 million in funding, across two over-subscribed rounds. Greylock Partners led Innovium’s Series B financing in October 2015, and we joined their board of directors.
Our Investment in Convoy
Convoy is solving a true pain point by offering a platform that makes business more efficient and everyone’s lives much easier. Growth in Washington has come along at a strong clip. Given the high customer demand and positive market response, Convoy has opened up another region, Oregon, to expand their network for other truckers and shippers.
Our Investment in Discord
I’m very happy to announce that we’ve invested in Discord and I am joining the board. Greylock led this first round of funding since the team shifted their focus to this product. I’m very excited to work with Jason and his team. Together, they have deep experience building social platforms for games — having founded and built OpenFeint, one of the early and largest social platforms for mobile games before GREE acquired it in 2011.
Our Investment In Lyra Health
We’re excited about today’s announcement that we’re co-leading the Series A financing round for Lyra Health. We love backing great people early, and helping them tackle big, important problems. When we get a chance to do this, it’s the best part of our job.
Our Investment in Rubrik: Apple-like Simplicity and Delight for Your Data Center
Rubrik today is announcing their partnership with Greylock, and the general availability of their initial appliance offering. The initial release provides backup and recovery for VMware virtualized server infrastructures, and is seeing strong early demand from channel partners and customers.