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Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google's former ad chief, has a new startup that he's spun out of his last one.
His latest company, nxyz Inc., has developed a system to index blockchain data and stream the results to software developers. The Mountain view startup startup designed its service to allow blockchain developers to focus on building their apps, rather than having to work on the behind-the-scenes infrastructure needed to support them, Ramaswamy said in a blog post Wednesday.
"Today's infrastructure makes it hard for blockchain applications to reach real scale," he said.
Nxyz's technology was actually designed by a team at Neeva, a privacy-focused search startup Ramaswamy founded in 2018. After Neeva developed the technology, he decided to create a standalone company to offer it. Nxyz's service already supports the Ethereum, Polygon and Binance blockchains.
Pronounced the way it looks, with each letter in its name said — N-X-Y-Z — the startup has already raised $40 million in a Series A deal led by Paradigm. Greylock Partners — where Ramaswamy is a venture investor — Coinbase Ventures and Sequoia Capital also invested in the round
Neeva, meanwhile, has raised $77.5 million in funding to date from Greylock, Sequoia and others. It was valued at $300 million last year as part of its most recent round, according to PitchBook Data.
Here's more Bay Area venture and startup news from midweek:
Fundings
- TripActions Inc., Palo Alto, $154 million: Investors in a late stage equity funding of this business travel and expense management service provider included Andreessen Horowitz and Premji Invest. It came at a valuation of $9.2 billion. The company also arranged a $150 million structured financing from Coatue Management.
- Stairwell Inc., Mountain View, $45 million: Section 32 led the Series B round for this cybersecurity software provider. Sequoia Capital, Accel, Lux Capital and Gradient Ventures also invested.
- Vanta Inc., San Francisco, $40 million: CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. joined a Series B extension funding for this security compliance automation software provider. This brings the total raised in the round whose first tranche came in June up to $150 million.
- Endor Labs Inc., Palo Alto, $25 million: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital and Sierra Ventures invested in the seed round for this provider of a service that helps companies analyze, streamline and reuse their legacy software code.
- Vectara Inc., Santa Clara, $20 million: Vertex Ventures, GTM Capital, Top Harvest Capital, Transform VC, Essence VC, Green Sand Equity, Feld Ventures, Slack Technologies CEO Stewart Butterfield and Google Vice President Bradley Horowitz all invested in the seed round for this developer of an artificial intelligence-based search service.
- Foxglove Technologies Inc., San Francisco, $15 million: Eclipse Ventures led the Series A round for this provider of development software for robotics programmers. Amplify Partners, Cruise LLC co-founders Kyle Vogt and Daniel Kan and Berkeley Robot Learning Lab Director Pieter Abbeel also invested.
- Operator Labs Worldwide Inc. (dba Rye), San Francisco, $14 million: Andreessen Horowitz led the round for this developer of blockchain-based e-commerce checkout and product listing software that was co-founded by Twitch co-founder Justin Kan. L Catterton, Electric Ant, Electric Feel Ventures, Solana Ventures, Goat Capital, Magic Mind founder James Beshar and NBA players Andre Iguodala and JaVale McGee also participated.
- Collab AI Inc. (dba Relay), San Francisco, $5 million: Khosla Ventures led the seed round for this provider of collaborative workflow software. Neo Ventures, BoxGroup Ventures and SV Angel also invested.
- Switch Bioworks Inc., San Francisco, $2.3 million: Emerson Collective, Acre Venture Partners and Astanor Ventures invested in the pre-seed round for developer of nitrogen generating microbes for agriculture.
M&A
- Thoma Bravo has agreed to buy ForgeRock Inc. for $2.3 billion. That tally represents a 53% premium to the San Francisco company's closing price (NYSE:FORG) Monday, the day before the announcement. ForgeRock, which offers digital identity management services, went public last year at $25 a share. Thoma Bravo is a Chicago-based private equity firm.
- Knightscope Inc. acquired Case Emergency Systems Inc. for more than $6 million. Knightscope (Nasdaq: KSCP) is a Mountain View-based provider of security robots. Based in Irvine, Case offers stationary emergency phones.
Cutbacks
- Brex Inc. laid off 136 people, or 11% of its staff, across all departments. An issuer of corporate payment cards, the company abandoned its San Francisco headquarters last year, switching to a fully remote business model. But much of its staff remains in the Bay Area.
Funders in the news
- Versant Ventures is raising $500 million for its ninth flagship fund, per a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The San Francisco firm, which focuses on health care startups, is also raising $250 million for its third overage fund and another $250 million for its third later-stage fund.
- Scribble Ventures raised $55 million for its second fund. The Los Altos firm also raised $29 million for an opportunities fund.
- Jenni Leong joined DFJ Growth as an investor relations partner. Before joining the Menlo Park venture firm, Leong was a partner at with Next Play Capital, a Redwood City venture firm.