AWS gets data clean rooms for analytics data

AWS today launched a new service that will help users inside an advertising or marketing organization share data with other employees inside their company or with outside partners, all without running the risk of inadvertently sharing personal data.

This new service is part of Amazon’s new AWS for Advertising & Marketing initiative, which aims to leverage existing AWS services — and those from its partners — to provide purpose-built services for them. Clean Rooms is the first major new product of this initiative.

“Data clean rooms are protected environments where multiple parties can analyze combined data without ever exposing the raw data have emerged as a solution,” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky explained in today’s keynotes. “The clean rooms are hard to build. Their complex requirements take months to develop and once you’ve built a clean room you have to continuously update the data all the while meeting requests for new collaborators and data types.”

A company that has a customer’s loyalty data, for example, could collaborate with another that has data on a user’s ad-clicking behavior to create new insights into a user’s behavior, all without every sharing that user’s raw and identifiable data, Selipsky argued.

“With these insights, we can produce even more relevant ads while maintaining privacy for everyone to get started,” he said. “Brands and media publishers use the clean room console or the API and they set up a clean room and start collaborating with other companies in just a few clicks. So instead of spending months of development time to customize the types of queries and restrictions, you just need to allow partners to run these clean rooms with you.”

The idea here is to provide a single service that companies can use to collaborate on data while still protecting the underlying data, using a set of configurable controls. All collaborators can contribute their own data, be it in plain text, hashed, or pre-encrypted. Then, they can use these clean rooms to collaborate on this data, all without revealing the raw data to each other.

In total, there can be up to five collaborators and their data is stored in an AWS Glue Data Catalog. When anyone runs a query over this data, Clean Rooms will read it, wherever it lives, and then the service will automatically apply the pre-set rules to protect each participant’s raw data. Each table can have its own rules, which restrict the type of query that is allowed. Encrypted data will remain encrypted when these queries are run.

“Customers in the advertising and marketing industry have been seeking new ways to interoperate with their partners while protecting consumer data and reducing heavy lifting from their engineering teams,” said Tim Barnes, director of solutions for advertising & marketing technology at AWS. “With the launch of AWS Clean Rooms and AWS for Advertising & Marketing, AWS customers now have a broad set of solutions that make it easier for them to securely collaborate together, operate cost-effectively at petabyte scale and millisecond latency, and innovate more quickly in areas like advertising measurement and customer experience.”

Read more about AWS re:Invent 2022 on TechCrunch

AWS gets data clean rooms for analytics data by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/aws-gets-data-clean-rooms-for-analytics-data/

We review Abby, a sleek one-plant weed farm for your apartment

Abby started its journey selling 120 or so of its “All-In-One Smart Hydroponic Grow Box” on Kickstarter, with a relatively modest $100,000 raised on the crowdfunding platform. The device promises to help you make growing your favorite plants more or less foolproof, especially if your “favorite plants” are marijuana. In its marketing, the company is careful to share that you can grow any plant you like, but realistically, there are not a lot of plants that need “replacement carbon filters delivered to your house every 3 months,” and the website issues a “you must be 21 or older to enter this site” warning. The community is eager and ardent about its love for smokable plants. Let’s just say that if you’re going to spend $1,000 on a single-plant hydroponic box, you’d really have to love tomatoes for it to make sense; most of its users appear to be growing a more, er, valuable crop.

Being based in California, where these things are legal, I figured I’d give it a whirl. I bought some seeds, got the plant to about 3 inches in height, and planted it in the Abby to see what would happen.

On paper, the product should be such a solid solution. The device features a water culture system with advanced automatic intelligent lighting with Samsung’s LM301H Full Spectrum Plant Lights and high-power LEDs that are specifically designed to maximize plant photosynthesis growth potential. It supposedly has “advanced sensors to consistently track growth, with ultrasonic, temperature/humidity, water temperature, water level, and 5.8G radar sensors so you never have to worry about plant growth again.”

The product is an elegantly designed cabinet. Sleek and white, with wooden legs and a wooden top, with a bunch of smart features on the inside of the device: water pumps, lighting and what it claims are “advanced algorithms, state-of-the-art sensors” and more. Measuring around 16x16x48 inches (40x40x122 cm), it’s sleek and you could probably find a spot for it in any home.

The exploded view of the Abby shows how much thought went into the device. This is legitimately a well-designed hardware product. Image Credits: Abby

When the device arrived at my house, it had a dented door and a missing door hinge (!) which could presumably be attributed to shipping rather than poor QA. The Abby team was quick to get a replacement door shipped out, along with replacement instructions for the door, which involved unscrewing and re-screwing nine screws. I’m no stranger to taking tools to equipment, but it wasn’t the best first impression. On the whole, the hardware seems very well designed, which makes it all the more painful that, at every turn, the product’s software tries to prevent you from being able to grow efficiently. The list of issues is as long as my arm; there wasn’t an Android app for starters (the company did finally release an Android app last month), and from there, it just got worse.

The app and integration with Abby is so bad that I originally had just given up on writing a review altogether, but when the cabinet flooded my apartment floors due to a software error, I figured it might be best to write up some of my experiences…

One thing after another

Connecting to the device in the first place was impossible, and it took a fair chunk of troubleshooting to figure out what was going on; it turns out that the Abby only supports 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi, which I didn’t have set up in my house.

The app supposedly is able to give you 1-on-1 expert live support from the company, but the first few times I tried to submit a photo on my (admittedly old) iOS device, the app kept crashing. When I was finally able to upload a message, the message simply vanished. I don’t believe I ever got a reply from Abby. The app itself is riddled with typos and bugs, and I’d almost be able to look past that if it hadn’t been for the fact that the device itself doesn’t seem to have any interest in notifying me about what I need to do with the plants.

The Abby occasionally chimes at me, and pulses a pretty green light, but whenever it does that, the app doesn’t seem to have an opinion on what I need to do, and the display on the device itself — which would have been such a good place to communicate what the device needs — just shows the Abby logo.

The Abby controller feels great and looks good, and the display is awesome. It’s a shame it doesn’t actually do anything other than opening the door. Image Credits: Abby.

The water needs changing every once in a while, but the app never notified me when that needed to happen. The Abby box itself has a small display on it, which rotates left and right, and has a button — much like a Nest thermostat. However, the display never shows anything useful. Such as “hey, you need to change the water,” for example.

When I finally did figure out that I needed to change the water manually, the app gives you simple instructions: Take the hose out of the box, and put it in a “minimum 1-gallon container.” Which I did, but it didn’t stop automatically after a gallon, and the app crashed when I pressed the “stop pumping water” button, which meant that the pump just kept going and sent the full amount of water in the device’s tank all over my floor as I was running to the sink with my overflowing one-gallon container. Not… ideal.

Water all over the floor

Step 1: Get a one-gallon container. Step 2: The machine never stopped pumping, and there was water everywhere. Well, crap. Image CreditsHaje Kamps / TechCrunch

The box comes with a really clever nutrient system: It has two spots where you can place the “silver” and “gold’ nutrient packs. It does this because one of the packs needs to dissolve fully before the other one is added, to avoid a chemical reaction between the two packs. Unfortunately, this only worked the very first time I set up the machine: After that, it never asked for additional nutrition packs, so the packs I had so diligently placed in the supply holes eventually just dissolved in place, and made a sticky mess all over the machine.

Toward the end of my review period, the plant had grown quite a bit — I eventually just resorted to dumping the nutrition packets in manually, since the cabinet and app never asked for nutrients. Which seemed suspect; for my own, home-built hydroponic system, I have to balance and add more nutrients every few weeks at least. Unfortunately, because Abby never warned me that the thirsty plant drank almost all of the water, the plant went for a few days with almost all of its roots out of the water, leading to a lot of the leaves on the plant dying. Not great, and another strike against the “foolproof” nature of the Abby cabinet.

I had the Abby plugged into a power meter to see how much power it was consuming during my review. Over the course of 108 days, it burned through 198 KwH, which translates to around $50 spent for a crop of weed.

The final complaint I have about Abby is that the charcoal filters aren’t as efficient as they might need to be; especially toward the end there, my apartment stank to high heaven of weed. Not the best first impression for my landlord and a plumber when they came by to repair something. I did manage to stammer “Er, it’s for work?” which was true, of course, but… yeah. Not great.

I should add that the app is in active development, and a lot of the original complaints I had about the device have been addressed, at least partially. The company launched an Android version, and the process for changing water was “optimized” last month. How-tos and troubleshooting instructions are built in to the app, and more detailed instructions are being added. The company is also adding a growing calendar, metric units and later batches of the device are quieter than the one I reviewed (the company claims it hums along at 40 dB now, which is an improvement).

All in all, you’d have to be very interested in growing a plant indoors if you’re willing to drop a grand for the admittedly neat hardware that’s so heavily hampered by impossible-to-use, buggy software) and $50 worth of power to keep it all growing. It’s frustrating; I really wanted to love Abby, but ultimately it needed way too much manual babysitting to warrant the cost. If someone launches a product that actually delivers on Abby’s promises, I can imagine it being a great buy. This ain’t it yet.

We review Abby, a sleek one-plant weed farm for your apartment by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/abby-hydroponic-review/

Twitter Under Elon Musk Abandons Covid-19 Misinformation Policy

The platform is an outlier among social-media companies in giving up policing false and misleading information about Covid-19.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-under-elon-musk-abandons-covid-19-misinformation-policy-11669747116?mod=rss_Technology

See you in Boston for TechCrunch’s Annual Founder Summit

TechCrunch Early Stage — our premier event designed for budding entrepreneurs and founders at the very start of their startup journey — returns by popular demand on April 20, 2023. And we’re excited to announce that this year, we’re taking it on the road to Boston, Massachusetts.

We’re mixing the East Coast vibe with unparalleled opportunity. This is our only event where you get hands-on training with top industry experts to help you build a successful business.

Register, save and secure your place: We have a limited number of passes available for a special launch price. They’re here until they’re not — get ’em while they’re hot. Buy your TC Early Stage pass now, and reserve your seat for just $149.

During small group sessions, roundtables and workshops, you’ll learn best practices and gain valuable insights from successful startup founders, subject-matter experts and seasoned investors. We’re talking core topics that anyone interested in building their own business needs to know. TC Early Stage has your name written all over it if you:

  • Dream of starting your own business and want to learn how to turn your idea into a viable startup.
  • Work your startup on the side and need to figure out the next steps that will move you closer to being your own boss.
  • Code, develop and engineer new products and wonder what it takes to monetize your ideas.
  • Need to move beyond friends-and-family financing and learn how to attract institutional investors.
  • Want to join a supportive community of like-minded businesspeople sharing a similar path.

You’ll engage with the experts and other founders and get real-time feedback about issues facing your company. Plus, you’ll walk away with actionable strategies and advice. We’re talking tips that you can use now — when you need them most.

TC Early Stage, which takes place on April 20, 2023, in Boston, Massachusetts, provides access to essential information, resources and community connection to help you realize your entrepreneurial potential. Buy your $149 pass now, and shift your startup dream into high gear.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Early Stage 2023? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

See you in Boston for TechCrunch’s Annual Founder Summit by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/see-you-in-boston-for-techcrunchs-annual-founder-summit/

AWS SimSpace Weaver can run city-sized simulations in the Cloud

Read more about AWS re:Invent 2022 on TechCrunch

At this morning’s Re:Invent keynote in Las Vegas, Amazon unveiled AWS SimSpace Weaver, a computing service that allows developers to run city-sized simulations at scale in the cloud. The service is designed to free simulation developers from the constraints of their own hardware.

Amazon’s proposed applications here are city managers simulating a natural disaster to test emergency response systems, as well the impact of sports games on traffic flow. These are  complex situations with a lot of moving parts, which shouldn’t require watching a real life instance to gain insight. Among the other advantages to running this in the cloud is the ability to have multiple external parties view and interact with the simulation remotely in real-time.

Image Credits: Amazon

“Simulating these events requires modeling hundreds of thousands of independent dynamic entities to represent the people and vehicles,” AWS Principal Developer Advocate, Marcia Villalba, notes in a blog post. “Each entity has its own set of behaviors that need to be modeled as it moves throughout the world and interacts with other entities. Simulating this at a real-world scale requires CPU and memory beyond what you can have in one instance.”

The system works by portioning the space into instances and partions, creating the kind of grip design you see above. SimSpace Weaver’s data replication system manages memory management and networking for transferring entities across partitions. The company notes that, while SimSpace Weaver is not, itself a simulator. Instead, it creates a basis on which a simulator can be built across instances, effectively weaving (hence the name) multiple instances together into a single experience.

Unity and Unreal Engine 5 developers can access the system through SimSpace Weaver plug-ins. It’s available starting today in the U.S. East, U.S. West, Asia-Pacific and Europe AWS Regions. There’s no licensing fee, instead the pricing depends on the number of instances a developer integrates into the simulation.

AWS SimSpace Weaver can run city-sized simulations in the Cloud by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/aws-simspace-weaver-can-run-city-sized-simulations-in-the-cloud/

BlockFi ‘Shocked’ by Fraud Allegations Against FTX, Lawyer Says

The cryptocurrency lender reiterated in bankruptcy-court hearing that it is different from FTX and is working to return client funds as soon as possible

https://www.wsj.com/articles/blockfi-shocked-by-fraud-allegations-against-ftx-lawyer-says-11669746867?mod=rss_Technology

AWS now supports natural language forecasting queries in QuickSight Q

Read more about AWS re:Invent 2022 on TechCrunch

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced some notable new natural language querying capabilities that enable non-analysts to forecast future business outcomes.

By way of a quick recap, AWS first introduced its QuickSight business intelligence service back in 2015, allowing customers to visualize their data through dashboards and reports without requiring the technical prowess of a developer. Fast-forward to 2020, and AWS introduced natural language queries to the mix via QuickSight Q, enabling users to find answers simply by typing plain-English questions into a search bar, such as “show me this month’s sales by segment.”

Todays’ announcement builds on that, by serving answers to future-gazing questions.

ML-powered forecasting with Q, as AWS CEO Adam Selipsky referred to the new feature on stage at AWS re:Invent today, allows users to view business performance forecasts without involving any analysts or data scientists. All they have to do is enter “forecast” or “show me a forecast” into the search bar, followed by up to three metrics (e.g. “sales”), and Q will deliver the appropriate visualizations for that query.

On top of that, users can include filters, for example if they want to see sales for a specific region over a specific timeframe.

QuickSight Q: Forecasts with filters

Additionally, QuickSight Q will also now support natural language “why” questions, allowing non-analysts to drill down into the data and figure out what factors led to a particular outcome.

For example, if a graph shows that enrolment in a course dropped, the user might also want to know why it dropped. So they would start such a query with the word “why,” and then follow it up with a metric and a timeframe. In this case, the question could be: “Why did enrollment drop in 2021“?

QuickSight Q: “Why” questions

Both forecasting and “why” questions are available to users from today.

AWS now supports natural language forecasting queries in QuickSight Q by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/aws-brings-natural-language-forecasting-queries-to-quicksight-q/

Amazon announces preview of new Inf2 instances designed for larger models

Read more about AWS re:Invent 2022 on TechCrunch

As companies build more complex machine learning models, the cost of training and running these models becomes a real issue. AWS has created a series of custom instances to help bring down the cost, and today it introduced a preview of an all-new Inf2 instance for EC2 designed to process data from larger workloads more efficiently.

AWS CEO Adam Selipsky made the announcement today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas

As Selipsky explained, “Inf1 is great for small-to-medium complexity models, but for larger models, customers have often relied on more powerful instances because they don’t actually have the optimal resource configuration for their inference workloads,” he told the AWS re:Invent audience.

They did this because up until now, there simply wasn’t another solution available to help bring down the cost and complexity of processing these larger workloads.

“You want to choose the solution that is the best fit for your specific needs, which is why today I’m excited to announce a preview of the Inf2 instance powered by our new inferential two chip,” he said.

For folks who need that extra power, Inf2 provides it. “Customers can deploy a 175 billion parameter model for inference on a single instrument with four times higher throughput and 1/10 the latency of Inf1 instances,” he said.

The new instances are available in preview starting today.

Amazon announces preview of new Inf2 instances designed for larger models by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/amazon-announces-preview-of-new-inf2-instances-designed-for-larger-models/

TechCrunch+ roundup: Fundraising under scrutiny, optimizing LTV, visa bulletin update

Low valuation caps allow early-stage investors to gain a larger ownership stake and reduce their risk.

However, these caps are increasingly being used as a proxy for the value of the company at the time of the investment, which in turn creates “unnecessary complexity for inexperienced founders and investors,” write attorneys Andrew Ritter, Adam Silverman and Jack Sousa, partners at Wiggin and Dana.

“With the interim rate of return method, you simply negotiate a rate of return (like an interest rate) that applies to the convertible instrument investment solely for purposes of future conversion or the amount payable in a pre-conversion exit.”

Plenty of companies that launched during downturns went on to be phenomenally successful.

During the Great Depression, Stanford grads David Packard and William Hewlett famously set up shop in a Palo Alto garage. Microsoft was founded as the U.S. was recovering from a years-long oil embargo that hobbled the economy. Slack, Airbnb, Uber and Square all rose from the ashes of the Great Recession.

As of September 2022, investors have amassed almost $300 billion in dry powder, and VC funds are still raising money by the boxcar. That’s because even during recessionary times, VC funds tend to outperform public markets.

Which explains why I’ve never heard an investor say it’s a bad time to launch a startup. But ask a few entrepreneurs, and you may get a different story.


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Use discount code TCPLUSROUNDUP to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.


According to a pre-seed report by DocSend, founders took an average of 52 meetings with investors in 2022 compared to 39 last year. At the same time, they are submitting 30% more pitch decks, but VC engagement has fallen 23%.

The idea that there’s a “good” time to launch a startup is just a bedtime story investors tell founders.

In Q4 2022, it takes more time to raise less money.

“Founders may be discouraged in this environment, but they need to remember that they have ‘currency,’ too,” said Russ Heddleston, co-founder and former CEO of DocSend at Dropbox.

Because investors spend less time reviewing pitches, concise, data-driven storytelling is more important than ever. DocSend’s report recommends using no more than 50 words per slide.

The sections of the deck that address purpose, product and business model are the meat in the sandwich, so founders should spend the most time polishing those points.

“Investors spent the third-highest amount of time reviewing the company purpose slide in pre-seed pitch decks, behind only the business model and product slides,” said Heddleston.

The idea that there’s a “good” time to launch a startup is just a bedtime story investors tell founders, and I regret any role I had in promoting it. Starting a company is an uphill slog on an uncertain path, and it’s not for everyone.

But if that’s your path, don’t let anyone talk you out of it.

Thanks for reading.

Walter Thompson
Editorial Manager, TechCrunch+
@yourprotagonist

Interim rate of return: A better approach to valuing early-stage startups

Low valuation caps allow early-stage investors to gain a larger ownership stake and reduce their risk.

However, these caps are increasingly being used as a proxy for the value of the company at the time of the investment, which in turn creates “unnecessary complexity for inexperienced founders and investors,” write attorneys Andrew Ritter, Adam Silverman and Jack Sousa, partners at Wiggin and Dana.

“With the interim rate of return method, you simply negotiate a rate of return (like an interest rate) that applies to the convertible instrument investment solely for purposes of future conversion or the amount payable in a pre-conversion exit.”

3 mistakes to avoid as an emerging manager

3 mistakes to avoid

Image Credits: Westend61 (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Deep tech VC Champ Suthipongchai is a successful fund manager, but he claims to have made plenty of mistakes along the way.

As co-founder and general partner of Creative Ventures, he raised $65 million “with fewer than 25 LPs.” Looking back, he says he initially wasted too much time chasing investors and failed to use FOMO to his advantage.

“While there’s no one right way to go about fundraising, there are a few wrong ways — and failure is a wonderful teacher,” says Suthipongchai.

Lessons for raising $10M without giving up a board seat

Blackboard showing soccer strategy

Image Credits: Ihor Reshetniak (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Over the last two years, intelligent calendar platform Reclaim.ai raised $10 million “using a more incremental approach,” writes co-founder Henry Shapiro.

“We’ve done all this without giving up a single board seat, and Reclaim employees continue to own over two-thirds of the company’s equity,” rejecting conventional wisdom that founders should “raise as much as you can as fast as you can.”

In a TC+ post, Shapiro reviews the process they used to identify follow-on investors, shares the email template they used to pitch the SAFE and explains why “a larger cap table means more founder control.”

Pitch Deck Teardown: Juro’s $23M Series B deck

Legal tech startup Juro raised a $23 million Series B earlier this year to scale its web-based contract negotiation platform.

Juro’s founders shared their 15-slide pitch deck with TC+ and only “blurred out part of its future road map and the actual numbers for the financials.”

Dear Sophie: Are there any visas or green cards I can get on my own?

lone figure at entrance to maze hedge that has an American flag at the center

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Dear Sophie,

I’m so worried and stressed about all the layoffs! I’m safe for now, but it has made me realize I need to take control of my own destiny.

Are there any visas or green cards that I can apply for on my own without relying on my employer?

— Silicon Stressed

4 ways to use e-commerce data to optimize LTV pre- and post-holiday

Four Gift Boxes

Image Credits: 123ducu(opens in a new window) / Getty Images

E-commerce startups make as much as one-fifth of their yearly revenue in the months after Black Friday/Cyber Monday. But how can brands convert shoppers who respond to a holiday promotion into repeat customers who come back all year long?

In a TC+ post, Dan LeBlanc, CEO and co-founder of data and analytics firm Daasity, provides a detailed strategy guide aimed at helping marketers boost ROI and perform cohort analysis to track lifetime value against customer acquisition cost.

“Consumer brands who know how to use their data to maximize LTV will win the holidays and set their brand up for growth well into the new year.”

Top 3 riskiest misconfigurations on the Salesforce platform

Fisherman foot on broken cracked thin ice at lake. Dangerous fishing

Image Credits: FedBul(opens in a new window) / Getty Images

No-code technology can be a double-edged sword.

Platforms like Zapier and Salesforce make it easy to automate tasks and workflows, but “configuring a low-code platform is so easy that the low-code administrator often does not understand the impact of checking a box,” writes David Brooks, senior vice president of product at Copado.

In a post for TC+, he breaks down the three riskiest Salesforce misconfigurations:

  • Modify All Data (MAD) and View All Data (VAD)
  • Sharing & Sharing Groups
  • Running Apex code without the “runAs” method

Startup founders need to be data-informed, not just ‘data-driven’

Alphabet soup with the word hot spelt out on the spoon

Image Credits: davidf (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

According to Ann Lai, a general partner at Bullpen Capital, many startups that put core metrics front and center during fundraising are sabotaging themselves.

“Using raw, unfiltered data is common at startups that donʼt know how to properly filter their information, and they often end up offloading data irrelevant to their company and mission,” says Lai.

In a post aimed at both investors and founders, Lai offers three strategies that will help “ensure that you arenʼt just data-driven, but data-informed.”

TechCrunch+ roundup: Fundraising under scrutiny, optimizing LTV, visa bulletin update by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/techcrunch-roundup-fundraising-under-scrutiny-optimizing-ltv-visa-bulletin-update/

Edtech Saasguru wants to fix the cloud talent shortage at scale

Saasguru founders Atif Saad, Amit Choudhary and Prateek Kataria

Cloud tech companies are facing a significant cloud skills shortage, making it hard to hire people and difficult to make sure their current workforce’s skills are up to date. Australia- and US-based Saasguru wants to narrow the gap with an edtech platform designed for new graduates and tech workers who want to become better at using cloud platforms like Salesforce or AWS. The company announced today it has raised a seed round of $4 million AUD (or about $2.7 million USD) led by Square Peg Capital, along with returning investors Black Nova and Antler.

Saasguru’s last funding was nine months ago, when it raised a pre-seed round of $1.3 million AUD. The company was founded in 2021 by Amit Choudhary, Atif Saad and Prateek Kataria. Choudhary and Saad sold their last startup SaaSfocus, a Salesforce consulting company, to Cognizant in in 2018.

So far, Salesguru has been used by 40,000 students in 20 countries, and has worked with 20 cloud consulting companies that want to train new workers, as well as refresh the skills of their existing teams. Its students range from new graduates who are starting their first jobs in cloud tech to professionals who want to earn more training certificates.

The search for people with cloud computing skills in the Asia Pacific region is urgent, with a report by AWS showing that workers needed will triple by 2025, going from 37 million workers in 2020 to 109 million. Saasguru wants to help its learners become ready for cloud tech jobs, while creating more talent at scale.

Saasguru founders Atif Saad, Amit Choudhary and Prateek Kataria

Choudhary told TechCrunch that the idea for Saasguru was planted while he and Saad were still working on SaaSfocus and struggled to compete for talent with large cloud consulting companies.

“This forced us to look at organic talent creation by hiring people from diverse non-technology backgrounds and upskilling them through a homegrown program tailor-made for Salesforce job readiness,” he said. “This became a bit of a ‘secret sauce’ for us and it helped us scale the business to over 360 consultants, with over 80% of them being trained through this program.”

SaaSfocus’ training program included hyper-personalized study plans, “TikTok-like” micro-modules of content, mentoring, peer-to-peer learning and hands-on assignments.

After selling SaaSfocus, Choudhary and Saad used this approach in a pro-bono program to help people get new jobs during COVID by teaching them Salesforce skills. Of the 50 people who took part in the program, almost all got placed in Salesforce-related jobs.

“It was the lightbulb moment when we realized this could be scaled with tech into a global business,” Choudhary said. Saasguru was launched in early 2021, combining the components of the pro-bono program with a deep tech platform.

Saasguru’s 15 programs includes ones for learning Salesforce, ServiceNow, AWS, GCP and Azure. It plans to use its funding to add more cloud certifications. Choudhary said Saasguru personalizes courses, which can take from 30 hours for self-paced cloud certification program to 300 hours for a career bootcamp, by using a two-step process. The first step is an initial assessment that analyzes the readiness of a learner and creates a learning pathway for them. Then as they start taking a course, the platform recommends the next best step to take.

Saasguru acquires customers by running free webinars with its teachers, or gurus. They also offer free one-on-one mentoring sessions on careers, interview tips and certifications, and run a Slack community. Saasguru serves both individuals and cloud consulting companies that want to build the skills of new and existing employees.

In a statement about the funding, Square Peg Capital principal Lucy Tan said, “There is a massive cloud skills shortage in the industry that is slowing down digital transformation initiatives undertaken by businesses. Universities are not well equipped to solve this skills shortage as the skills update so quickly. This means post-university upskilling is critical for continued business growth and Saasguru provides a personalised learning pathway for cloud professionals to embark on, helping them get skilled and certified in cloud technologies. This can make a meaningful impact on people’s lives from either landing them in a new career or getting salary increases.”

Edtech Saasguru wants to fix the cloud talent shortage at scale by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/saasguru-cloud-skills-shortage/