Intro

Good morning! Happy Tuesday! 🥳

How about adding a power nap here and there this week? A nap a day keeps the doctor away. Check out the health benefits of napping right here →.

Topics today: #startupfraud; #softwaremarketplace

Snippets

💩 Fraud Charges: The married founders of the San Francisco-based startup uBiome have been charged in a $60M fraud scheme. Charges include money laundering, securities fraud and health care fraud. At its peak, the gut health testing company was valued $600M+ and was one of the most hyped heath disruptors in Silicon Valley. Deep Dive here →

⛔ No More Boomer Tech: There is a growing movement to motivate companies to stop supporting ‘grandfather software’ and to shift their focus to intuitive and user-friendly ‘Millennial and GenZ’ applications. Both generations are the main customers and employees of the future, and demand cutting-edge technology and software. Deep Dive here →

Startup of the Day

Tackle, Boise (USA)

Source: IBM

What’s the deal: The Boise (Idaho)-based startup Tackle.io supports cloud software companies in generating revenue on the AWS, Azure and Google Cloud marketplaces. The cloud software market works a little bit like the app market, where mobile apps can be listed on the app store, but in this case on cloud marketplaces. Tackle facilitates for companies the listing and selling of software through these marketplaces.

Why? Adding a product/service to a cloud marketplace creates headaches for many CTOs and business developers in software startups. The user guide alone is a 700-page-long pdf, not to mention the various API calls that need to get connected. Tackle is now heavily facilitating the process by automating all the tedious tasks.

As a result, companies can expect to list their products within two months compared to 6-10 months. The cherry on top is that 0 engineering is required.

Our Take: The saying ‘when there is a gold rush, sell shovels’ seems to fit very well in this case. While the space for software companies is getting more and more competitive, Tackle offers these companies a solution to generate more sales and essentially be the ‘shovel’.

It seems to be working pretty well. The startup tripled its annual recurring revenue last year. Last week, Andreesen Horrowitz invested $35M in a Series B to increase the headcount and double down on sales. Companies like Snowflake and GitHub are already using Tackle’s solutions.

The enterprise cloud market is growing steadily at a compound annual growth rate of 6.1%, and we believe there is plenty more room for startups simplifying the entire cloud product cycle.