Microsoft-supported effort to advise female-led software startups reveals new cohort

The first Saas Launch Lab cohort includes two Seattle-area tech leaders: Advocat Tech CEO Pradnya Desh (left), and Automaton CEO M.H. Lines.

SaaS Launch Lab, a new effort to boost female-led enterprise software companies, announced the 12 companies selected to participate in the program, including two from the Seattle area.

SaaS Launch Lab is a joint project of Microsoft’s venture fund, M12, and Project W, a Davis Wright Tremaine initiative to support female founders.

The lab is holding five virtual workshops for the pre-seed companies. The topics covered include refining a proof of concept, finding a product-market fit, building a team, creating a deck for making your VC pitch and a seed round how-to. The workshops wrap up in October with 1-on-1 pitches with M12 investors.

Participating Northwest companies include:

Advocat Technologies, a Bellevue-based platform addressing legal needs by using AI to create documents from attorney conversations. The CEO is Pradnya Desh.Automaton, Seattle software platform that provides automated testing for sales and marketing technology. The co-founder and CEO is M.H. Lines.

The organizers have not decided if this will become an annual event.

M12 will also be a program partner for Project W’s Women Entrepreneurs Boot Camp that’s taking place in early October. The event targets women founders in fintech, cybersecurity/data management, and plant-based protein. Companies need to apply by Sept. 11 to be considered for participation in the virtual boot camp.

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Barn2Door raises $6M as demand rises for its software used by farmers to sell food online

Barn2Door CEO Janelle Maiocco. (Barn2Door Photo)

The pandemic is increasing demand for grocery and food delivery. Seattle startup Barn2Door is riding this trend and just raised $6 million to support its growth.

Barn2Door serves thousands of farmers across the U.S., helping them sell food directly to consumers with e-commerce software that manages sales, inventory, logistics, and more.

“Barn2Door was enjoying strong growth prior to the pandemic as farmers were looking to move to direct-to-market to capture more margin and own the customer relationship,” said CEO Janelle Maiocco. “The pandemic has simply added a tailwind to our growth.”

More people are shopping for groceries online as they get groceries delivered versus going to a physical store amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amazon, for example, said online grocery sales tripled year-over-year during the second quarter. Instacart is handling huge demand. Seattle startup Crowd Cow is seeing more interest for its online meat marketplace. And Portland, Ore.-based farm-to-doorstep delivery service Milk Run — which just launched in Seattle — said demand increased by 12 times since the outset of the pandemic.

Barn2Door is Maiocco’s second take on a startup for farmers. Barn2Door was founded soon after Maiocco pulled the plug on Farmstr, an organic food marketplace that connected consumers with farmers. Farmstr had a much larger scope: aggregating products, acquiring and marketing to customers, and managing and fulfilling food orders. Maiocco said previously that the model was too expensive to be profitable.

Barn2Door takes a narrower approach, focusing exclusively on making software that helps farmers connect with and sell to customers. The farmers are responsible for the rest of the process, including fulfilling and delivering orders.

Bullpen Capital led the Series A round, with participation from Quiet Capital, RAINE Ventures, Lead Edge Capital, Global Founders Capital, Sugar Mountain Capital, and others.

Total funding to date is $11.6 million.

Other Pacific Northwest-based food-related startups are also raising cash. Minnow raised $2.2 million for its contactless food delivery pickup stations; Shelf Engine raised $12 million to help retailers manage orders and reduce waste; and Dumpling raised $6.5 million for its technology that help entrepreneurs establish their own, independent grocery businesses.

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SAP plans to spin out Qualtrics with an IPO, two years after acquiring software company for $8B

(GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

SAP announced Sunday that it will spin out its Qualtrics unit with an IPO, less than two years after acquiring the experience management company for $8 billion.

SAP plans to maintain majority ownership of Qualtrics, which is co-headquartered in Provo, Utah, and Seattle. Qualtrics’ leadership team intends to remain in place, including founder Ryan Smith, who will be the largest individual shareholder.

“SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics has been a great success and has outperformed our expectations with 2019 cloud growth in excess of 40 percent, demonstrating very strong performance in the current setup,” SAP CEO Christian Klein said in a statement. “As Ryan Smith, [SAP President] Zig Serafin and I worked together, we decided that an IPO would provide the greatest opportunity for Qualtrics to grow the Experience Management category, serve its customers, explore its own acquisition strategy, and continue building the best talent.”

The move comes as several companies test the public markets after an initial slowdown due to the global pandemic, and despite the ongoing economic and health crisis. Earlier this month, healthcare company Accolade was the first Seattle-area company to go public in 2020.

SAP’s $8 billion acquisition in 2018 came just four days before Qualtrics was set to go public as a standalone company.

Founded in 2002, Qualtrics is in the customer-experience management business, helping companies measure, understand, and improve the ways customers and employees experience products, services, and their roles inside companies. It competes against Medallia; SurveyMonkey; and marketing research firms such as Aon Hewitt and Towers Watson.

The company first set down roots in Seattle five years ago and has been growing rapidly ever since. It grew so fast in Seattle that in 2017 it designated the office as its co-headquarters.

This past November, Qualtrics leased 275,000 square feet across 13 stories at the new “Qualtrics Tower” in Seattle, with plans to quadruple its workforce to more than 2,000 people in the region in the years ahead. The company was set to open the office this year; we’ve reached out for the latest updates.

Qualtrics Tower is also home to job search engine Indeed, Dropbox and co-working company Spaces.

SAP previously acquired Bellevue, Wash.-based expense management company Concur Technologies for $8.3 billion back in 2014.

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LinkedIn cuts 960 jobs, or 6% of workforce, as demand dips for hiring software due to pandemic

LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky. (LinkedIn Photo)

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is laying off 6% of its employee base as fewer companies use its platform due to a reduced need for hiring amid the pandemic.

The cuts affect 6% of the company’s workforce, LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky wrote in a note to employees.

“LinkedIn is not immune to the effects of the global pandemic,” he wrote. “Our Talent Solutions business continues to be impacted as fewer companies, including ours, need to hire at the same volume they did previously.”

San Francisco, Calif.-based LinkedIn has adapted over the past few months during the economic crisis, rolling out virtual event products and other new features. Roslansky cited a “record numbers of hours spent learning on the platform” and “strong member engagement,” but the company still was forced to cut staff.

The layoffs affected the company’s Global Sales and Talent Acquisition organizations. Roslansky, who replaced Jeff Weiner last month, said there are no other layoffs planned.

“In GSO and GTO, there are roles that are no longer needed as we adjust to the reduced demand in our internal hiring and for our talent products globally,” he wrote.

LinkedIn is offering laid off employees a minimum of 10 weeks severance pay, 12 months of health insurance, tech equipment, and more. It will also look to place affected workers in newly-created roles across the company.

“This is painful to go through as an organization, but a company with a vision as bold as ours will have to make difficult decisions,” Roslansky wrote. “And since our vision is more important than it ever has been given all that’s going on in the world, I’m confident we’ll emerge more resilient and stronger than ever.”

Microsoft paid $26.2 billion to acquire LinkedIn in 2016.

The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant made major cuts to its MSN editorial team earlier this month and has slashed jobs across the company as part of its annual fiscal year-end business review. Its fiscal year ends June 30, and it’s common for Microsoft to restructure some of its operations in conjunction with the annual milestone. Overall, the cutbacks this year appear much smaller than the thousands of employees laid off by the company in some years past.

While the pandemic has forced hundreds of tech startups to trim staff, giants such as Microsoft and Amazon have mostly avoided large layoffs thus far.

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Fintech startup Jirav raises $8.3M for financial planning and analysis software

San Francisco-based startup Jirav raised $8.3 million for its cloud-based financial planning software.

Founded in 2015, the company helps more than 1,400 customers monitor, analyze, and forecast their finances. The startup has 30 employees, including five people in Seattle.

Information Venture Partners led the round, which included participation from Bend, Ore.-based Seven Peaks Ventures and others. Total funding to date is $13.6 million.

“Good technology should remove friction and make our jobs easier. Jirav is doing that for finance,” Tom Gonser, DocuSign co-founder and general partner at Seven Peaks.

Jirav is led by co-founder and CEO Martin Zych, a University of Washington grad who was previously worked at Atlas Accelerator, Limeade, and Zephyr Health. He co-founded the company with Steven Turner. a veteran of Genesys, Alcatel-Lucent, LiveVox, and Zephyr Health.

Celebrate the leading innovators, entrepreneurs, and technologists at the 2020 GeekWire Awards, livestreaming on GeekWire.com starting at 4 p.m. on Thursday, July 23. 

Don’t miss one of the region’s most-anticipated and hotly-contested tech events. 

Thanks to presenting sponsor Wave Business for supporting us as we’ve transitioned to a virtual event. 

Register today

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