The BVP (Bessemer Venture Partners) Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index tracks the performance of selected publicly traded Cloud companies .Its performance has far exceeded other major indexes as shown on the above graph. Lately, its growth has been explosive.
The Index trades on Nasdaq under the name EMCLOUD.
The Average Price-to-Revenue multiple is 19.1 The Average Revenue Growth Rate is 39.9%.
Here is the data on the companies that compose the index. Some readers may not follow financial news that closely, but its good to know how companies you may work or partner with are performing, who has the the economic power to buy or dominate others, or who the up & coming stars are. I follow this stuff closely, but am often surprised myself by some changing relative values portrayed in the Index.
One thing you might notice is that there are no Philly-area based companies in the Index, although there are bits & pieces of a few in the region.
Also helpful is the Cloud 100, a list of still-private companies put together by BVP with Forbes and Salesforce Ventures. The Cloud 100 is only published once. per year, so it is more static Several of these companies have already gone public since the end of 2020 when the Cloud 100 was published. No Philly companies here either.
Its just remarkable to see the results these three companies are producing, and you could cetainly add Facebook and Amazon to the list. You’ll see smaller niche players produce margins like these, but rarely such large ones.
Its a testament to the tremendous market power they have.
rideOS’ proprietary technology and team of experts will accelerate innovation as Gopuff expands globally
June 17, 2021 03:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time
PHILADELPHIA & SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Gopuff, the go-to solution for immediate everyday needs, today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire rideOS, an enterprise start-up that builds cutting-edge proprietary technology for advanced routing, on-demand dispatch and fleet optimization for the fast-growing delivery and logistics industries. As Gopuff launches in more complex and high-density cities, accelerates geographic expansion and enters into new verticals, rideOS’ proprietary technology and team of industry-leading experts will enable the company to innovate faster, power multi-modal deliveries, and continually reduce delivery times to continue to deliver a best-in-class customer experience.
“Gopuff’s mission and global ambition to be the world’s go-to solution for immediate everyday needs is a natural extension of the rideOS’ vision to build software that efficiently moves people and things throughout the world”Tweet this
Sharad Sundaresan, Gopuff’s SVP, Product & Growth, said, “rideOS is among the best mapping, dispatching and routing technology firms in the industry and we are thrilled to have them lead innovation in key sectors for Gopuff. This investment will enable Gopuff to continually improve the customer experience in more complex geographies as we lead and define the Instant Needs category worldwide.”
Acquiring rideOS, a company created and led by mapping and ride-hailing pioneers from Uber, Google, Apple and others, will afford Gopuff several strategic advantages, including:
Provide Gopuff with a team of global experts dedicated to optimizing and innovating its logistics and operations technology
Bring Gopuff immediate access to proprietary delivery, routing, and logistics technology and the ability to accelerate the rate of innovation in these sectors
Position Gopuff to further improve its industry-leading delivery times and superior unit economics
Quickly develop technology to power multi-modal deliveries and other advancements, to excel in more complex, high-density cities
Enable Gopuff to develop new tools for its field organization and delivery-partners that both improve their experience and enable greater efficiencies
“Gopuff’s mission and global ambition to be the world’s go-to solution for immediate everyday needs is a natural extension of the rideOS’ vision to build software that efficiently moves people and things throughout the world,” said Justin Ho, co-founder and CEO of rideOS. “We see this as a unique opportunity to scale our culture, values, team, products and technology, with a company at the forefront of defining the Instant Needs economy. Given Gopuff’s exponential growth, we expect to significantly increase our headcount by the end of this year, expanding our presence in Silicon Valley, Pittsburgh, and Berlin.”
Gopuff and rideOS are each currently seeking senior software engineers focused on optimization, routing, and maps, backend engineers, product managers, data scientists and product designers in Berlin, San Francisco and Pittsburgh. For more information about open roles at rideOS, visit https://rideos.ai/company/careers.
About Gopuff
Gopuff is the go-to solution for immediate everyday needs, fulfilling customer orders of cleaning and home products, over-the-counter medications, baby and pet products, food and drinks, and in some markets, alcohol – in just minutes. With micro-fulfillment centers in every market it serves, the company delivers thousands of products quickly for a flat $1.95 delivery charge. Gopuff is open 24/7 in many markets and late night everywhere else to bring customers what they need, when they need it most.
Founded in 2013 by co-founders and co-CEOs Rafael Ilishayev and Yakir Gola, Gopuff currently operates more than 400 sites, including 275 micro-fulfillment centers and the recently acquired 160+ BevMo! and Fancy sites across the US and UK. To learn more, visit www.Gopuff.com or follow Gopuff on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Download the Gopuff app on iOS and Android.
About rideOS
rideOS is an enterprise software company powering mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) technologies designed to support a variety of complex dispatch and optimization use cases for heterogeneous delivery fleets. rideOS was founded in 2017 by Justin Ho (CEO) and Chris Blumenberg (CTO) who both came from years of working in the mobility industry at Uber. The team is composed of talent from Uber, Google, Apple, Facebook. rideOS’s Routing, Optimization, and Dispatch products are uniquely capable of supporting both autonomous and human-driven vehicles; and can be used for a variety of use-cases including on-demand ride-hailing, meal delivery, and last-mile logistics. Our products help our partners increase utilization and efficiency, improve profitability, and drive growth. rideOS is backed by leading global venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital and Next47. The Company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in Pittsburgh and Berlin. rideOS is accelerating the safe, global roll-out of next-generation transport.
There is almost a kind of meme for anticipating a Gopuff IPO, which possibly could come later this year. This is was what Reuters reported at the time of Gopuff’s new billion dollar round in March:
“A source close to the matter told Reuters that GoPuff has already started discussions with financial advisers and banks and are mulling whether to go forward through a traditional initial public offering or a merger with a special-purpose acquisition company.”
if Gopuff, now valued at $8.9 billion, can stay roughly on track with its goal of tripling revenue this year (again) while keeping operating losses under control, and demonstrating profitability in its longest established markets, then it would probably be a go. The biggest risk could be a slow down in the market and its receptivity to highly valued IPOs, which indeed is possible later this year (in my opinion).
But the nature of Gopuff’s business adds to the allure. Unlike some enterprise software product, the Gopuff brand is becoming known widely as it expands across the nation. And the people who like the brand or at least appreciate its convenience, may become enamored with the idea of owning a piece. The rumor mills on the web are heating up.
It could be that the only thing that may slow Gopuff down in the short term would be a shortage of drivers.
DoorDash’s December IPO was a huge positive to SoftBank’s market value (although its becoming more of a direct competitor to Gopuff as it adds dark stores), so I can only imagine that SoftBank anxiously anticipates an eventual Gopuff offering.
Also, people should be prepared for efforts to acquire Gopuff that could come at any time.
Different strokes for different folks – that summarizes the varying stratagies of large tech companies on returning to the office post-pandemic policies. Some are still in flux.
Amazon updated its policy today, backing off from its March statement which implied back to the office full-time for all by the Fall. The adjusted policy will require in-office attendence at least three times per week. Obviously, this would not apply to warehouse and. fulfillment workers, who need to be where the action is.
In an interview on Monday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said 20% of its employees were already working away from the office prior to the pandemic. Benioff predicts 50% to 60& will work away from the office post-pandemic.
“The past is gone,” Benioff said. “We’ve created a whole new world, a new digital future, and you can see it playing out today.”
But like Comcast, Salesforce has a gigantic new tower in San Francisco, as well as expensive space in other cities like New York and Indiannopolis to account for.
It took a $216 million writedown for excess space last year.
SAP, which has its North American headquarters in Newtown Square, declared employees would not be required to return to the office. The software vendor sent an e-mail to all of its 100,000 employees on June 1, promising a “100% flexible and trust-based workplace as the norm, not the exception.” I haven’t seen many large companies take this approach.
Comcast hasn’t yet declared a policy yet, a spokesperson told me. As of now, a few select high-level or essential employees have returned to the office.
Comcast invested a huge amount in real estate to get more employees in the same space to foster collaboration, and I doubt it will want to give that up.
I was going to mention Cerner, which probably has over 1,000 employees in Malvern. But the Kansas City-based company, which has been the subject of takeover rumors lately, announced hundreds of layoff today(550), at least some in Malvern. So I figured the subject was moot for the moment, since these people won’t be returning period. But Cerner decided on a hybrid approach.
Younger employees may often prefer the structure and social atmosphere of being present in the office. One person told me he feared not being in the office so he could protect himself politically. Some people just need a reason to get out of the house.
Word came last month that Axtria (Berkeley Heights), a high-growth technology company founded in 2010, had received $150 million in a funding round from the Bain Capital Tech Opportunities Fund ( Boston).
The investment raised Axtria’s valuation to almost a billion dollars, Jassi Chadha, CEO and president, confirmed in a recent interview.
Axtria is a global provider of cloud software, data analytics and artificial-intelligence technology to the life sciences industry. The company has grown tremendously over the years, and has gone through several rounds of financing, but Bain Capital is new to the company’s capitalization table, and represents the largest investment to-date.
Essentially, Axtria’s vision is to build an ecosystem for the life sciences industry, so pharma and medical-device companies can run all their commercial operations on a cloud platform.
Axtria has about 500 employees in New Jersey and more than 2,000 world-wide. The company has appeared on many “fastest growing” lists over the last 10 years. Right now, for example, it is one of the top 100 privately held companies in New Jersey.
The company has not only grown fast, however. It has also grown in the right way, keeping the health and needs of its employees in mind, and maintaining a carefully designed cultural ecosystem, Chadha told us. So, Axtria is also to be found on many “best companies to work for” lists. According to the company’s website, “Our values are all about doing the ‘RIGHT’ thing — any time, all the time — for our employees and customers, even when no one is watching.”
Almost all the company’s executives are based in New Jersey, as are the company’s solution-architecture, product-management and product-engineering teams. Also here are all the company’s customer delivery teams for the pharmaceutical companies located in New Jersey.
Axtria recruits graduates from top schools like Stanford, Lehigh, Michigan, Purdue, Penn State and Cornell. They are engineers, mathematical statisticians and computer science majors. They come to New Jersey, and they train here. Also, the company looks for experienced professionals who know the pharma industry well.
Our interview begins here:
How did Axtria become acquainted with Bain Capital?
JC: This is the first investment that Bain Capital has made in Axtria. …We’ve been talking to them for a number of years. It’s a classic thing. When you are growing and make news in terms of high growth rates or new customer wins or new product launches, all investment groups have marketing and sales teams that will knock on the door. We get a lot of inbound calls from large U.S. private equity firms and large venture capital funds and even some foreign funds. A lot of them we know because we’ve participated in conferences run by private equity or investment bankers. We participated in one last year that was run by William Blair [New York], an investment banking firm. We met with Bain Capital again, along with a lot of other companies. We decided to only meet with seven, but there were 17 or 18 companies that were options, and a wait list of over 40 companies who wanted to talk to us, so we were highly sought after. There are very few tech companies like us that are of scale; growing very, very rapidly; and who have not taken a lot of outside investment.
Why was Axtria able to attract so many suitors?
JC: A lot of companies, as you know, think of an idea and they want to raise $100 million. They often spend that $100 million to get their first revenues. After that, they usually remain unprofitable for many years. We, on the other hand, have been very disciplined about raising capital and leveraging capital. At the same time, we’ve been able to build scale, build amazing products and be profitable. And we have done that largely without institutional investment.
Technically, we did have one institutional investor in the company prior to Bain — a small venture capital firm called Helion Venture Partners [Port Louis, Mauritius, and Gurgaon, India]. Most of the funding that we have had so far before Bain Capital came in has come from some really smart entrepreneurs like Richard Braddock, Fred Khosravi, Amarpreet Sawhney, Desh Deshpande, and Sanjeev Aggarwal, who built some very successful large companies. Obviously, a lot of people can offer money, but very few people can add value. So far, we have done well with the strategic and investment partners we have worked with. Bain Capital is the first institutional investor coming in, 10 years into our growth journey.
What was it about Bain that prompted you to accept their capital, since you were able to choose?
JC: At some point it does become harder to distinguish between investors. And it also sometimes comes down to personal chemistry. For us, the culture in the industry is very important, and it’s not only about the company, but also about the investors. Before we actually went into the financial diligence process with Bain, we requested that the person who was going to be our primary contact to come in and meet our board. We have a proud culture among our board members. So, we did as much due diligence on them as they did on us.
They have an amazing platform, and are a great firm with a great track record in venture capital and private equity investment. The Bain fund that specifically invested in us is called the “Bain Capital Tech Opportunities Fund.” This is a relatively new fund for them. It has been set up as a separate organization to only invest in tech companies. … The fund is well financed, with about $1.5 billion. The second thing is that Bain knows healthcare and life sciences really well. They invest in a lot of pharma and biotech companies, in both venture capital and private equity; but they also have invested in many healthcare tech companies, so they understand our business case really well. Also, a lot of the private equity and venture capital firms we talked to were based in Silicon Valley. This team is based in Boston, not too far away from our headquarters in Berkley Heights, New Jersey.
Most of the firms we worked with in the past were highly focused on the financials, which is what they should be absolutely focused on. But we also liked that the Bain Tech Opportunities Fund worked with Bain’s management consulting division to do a whole deep dive into our management strategy. They had a more holistic view of our business, while the other firms were almost solely financially oriented.
How did you pull this off during the pandemic?
JC: Well, we actually only had one face-to-face meeting with our investors, and that was after the term sheet was on the table and signed. Both Bain’s representative, Darren Abrahamson, and I were double vaccinated, so we said it was safe enough for us to meet and shake hands before we became financial partners. Otherwise, we ran this entire process virtually, even the investor conferences that we spoke about earlier. What we found was that, for investors who knew us, the process was relatively easy for us to continue interacting with them. We were in some ways fortunate because at scale we grew 50 percent last year, and have always been a fast-growing company. And there is this buzz around us right now. I mean we’ve been adding a lot more people, won a lot of awards and all that, so it’s easier for investors to find us.
How will Axtria make use of the funds?
JC: We have been investing very heavily in products and are investing very heavily in building scale because our target customers are global life sciences companies. We also work with some smaller and medium-sized organizations, but we work primarily with large global companies who license our products all over the world. Our software operates in more than 50 countries, and our customers expect us to actually have operations in a lot of countries where they operate.
The biggest use of capital is going to be to accelerate our investment in products. For example, we have invested more than $50 million in products and we are committing to investing no less than $100 million in our future product evolution.
Today there is not a single life sciences company that can be enabled to run all their commercial operations on a single cloud platform. There are consultants running around doing data analytics and there are ad hoc systems that don’t talk to each other, and become obsolete within a couple of years because no upgrades are made.
In a product-based business, you actually have a product roadmap which is getting better with every release and in the cloud world, you will have a new release about every three to four months, which means your product gets continually upgraded over time.
We also want to scale our delivery centers globally. The third use of the funding is going to be to have a geographic presence in every major market where we operate. North America continues to be our primary target customer market. We just opened a new office in Canada, and we already have people and operations in major European countries like Switzerland, France, Germany and the UK. We want to have our delivery and consulting teams based in China and in Japan, two major pharmaceutical manufacturing areas.
A Bloomberg article entitled “Amazon (AMZN), Gopuff Are Said to Explore Deal for Germany’s Flink ” surfaced today. Not being a subscriber, I’m unable to link to the content.
Flink, which officially launched in January, is a “dark store” home delivery startup like Gopuff. It raised $52 million in March. Flink has operations in ten German cities, and has also entered France and the Netherlands.
In May, Gopuff acquired UK-based Fancy.
If I were an investor in Gopuff, I’d worry a bit about its European expansion strategy. Gopuff’s US rollout seems to be proceeding fairly well, but managing Europe simaltaneously creates more financial risk.
Amazon, on the other hand, must be considered a potential acquirer of any major player in the home delivery space.
I think many people are aware that the Japanese investment giant SoftBank has participated in two billion-dollar rounds into Philly startup Gopuff.
But there’s another area startup that’s received funding from SoftBank, though the initial amount is not as great as Gopuff’s.
Woodlyn, Delaware County-based Vitable Health, a recent Y Combinator grad, was the first publicly announced recipient of capital from a $100 million SoftBank fund set up specifically for people of color. Its founder is Joseph Kitonga, a 23-year-old whose parents immigrated to the U.S. a decade ago.
Built from Kitonga’s experiences within the immigrant community, Vitable Health offers a way to obtain low-cost, in-home medical care. SoftBank’s funding, first announced last fall, was a $1.6 million commitment that also included Y Combinator, DNA Capital, Commerce Ventures, MSA Capital, Coughdrop Capital and assorted angels .
