SAN FRANCISCO, June 8, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Tuesday Capital (formerly Crunchfund) today announces the launch of Fund IV, which will continue Tuesday’s mission of identifying and investing in the next generation of world-changing companies. Fund IV will be utilized for early-stage, industry-agnostic startup investments. The new fund will allow Tuesday to continue broadening its global investment reach into Latin America and Europe, lead a greater number of funding rounds and expand the Tuesday x frog partnership announced last year. Tuesday has a long track record of investing in high growth startups like Uber, Airbnb, Airtable, Gitlab, OpenDoor, DigitalOcean and Cruise Automation at early stages and Fund IV will continue that legacy.

Since launching in 2011, Tuesday Capital has provided funders a unique source of both the capital and innovative services startups need to succeed. Tuesday is committed to providing entrepreneurs with resources that are out of reach for many startups, and Fund IV enables the firm to continue to assist its founders with a diverse array of offerings tailored to help them grow their companies. This thesis is crystallized in Tuesday’s recent partnership with renowned design house, frog, which provides Tuesday’s portfolio companies access to an array of services from branding and design to marketing and public relations. Notable Tuesday x frog collaborative investments include Companion, Kolors and Alto.

“We are very proud to announce Tuesday’s Fund IV. Our mission is to give the best founders tailored support to help their companies take flight and we are excited to bring this new fund to the market to do just that. It’s been an unprecedented year, but founders and investors have found some amazing opportunities despite the uncertainty. This new fund marks a continuation of the legacy we’ve built at Tuesday,” said Founder and Managing Partner Patrick Gallagher.

“It’s an amazing time for venture capital and we are seeing enormous inflows of capital into the market. There’s also a vibrant entrepreneurial and startup ecosystem that has taken root across the country as talent spread out during the pandemic. As a digital nomad myself, I’ve been able to meet with founders in up and coming startup hubs like Roanoke, Tulum, Nosara and Costa Rica. Travelling has helped extend Tuesday’s reach by unlocking new investment opportunities and relationships with amazing founders. I’m excited for the future and this new fund will allow us to help bring the next generation of household names to life,” said Partner Prashant Fonseka.

As Tuesday continues to expand its portfolio in a consistent and scalable way, this newly launched fund will increase the Tuesday global footprint in Latin America and Europe. Under Fund IV, startup founders outside of the traditional VC capital cities will be able to leverage the unparalleled access to capital, services and guidance from Tuesday. With competition increasing rapidly in the VC world, Tuesday’s unique offerings, investment approach and founder-first mindset will continue to guide Fund IV through 2021 and beyond.

Tuesday Capital
Founded in 2011, Tuesday Capital is an early-stage, sector-agnostic venture capital firm based in San Francisco and New York. Tuesday maintains a variety of relationships with other VC firms and works alongside them to help propel the companies of tomorrow. The firm has made hundreds of investments over the last eight years, backing many startups that have gone on to be Silicon Valley standouts and household names, including Airtable, Airbnb, Uber, Cruise, Digital Ocean, GitLab, Rover, Good Eggs, Instawork, Zipline and many others.

Is Google powerful? Very powerful! If you ask any tech insider, they will tell you that Google knows more about you than your family, the government or your pastor. In terms of percentage of usage share of web browsers, Chrome is the clear winner, with Safari and Microsoft Edge trailing behind. Over 70% of search advertising is done on Google Search. Google’s YouTube is the world’s biggest video content site, Gmail is a top email service, and Google Maps is probably the map that most people use to get from point A to B. As of January 2021, Google’s Android OS powers 71.9% of the world’s mobile phones. Google permeates our daily lives – from the news and entertainment we consume, to the way we work and communicate, shop, choose restaurants and go places.

If you were to ask governments and regulators if Google is powerful, the answer might be that more policing and regulation is needed for it not to abuse its power. This is in fact the case here in Europe, where since 2010, the European Union has launched three separate antitrust investigations into Google for violating the EU’s competition laws due to its dominant position in the market. These cases have resulted in formal charges against Google related to Google Shopping, Google AdSense and the Android operating system. To date, Google has been found guilty of antitrust behaviour in the cases related to Google AdSense and Android and has been fined over €8 billion. The latest slap on the wrist was in March 2019, to the tune of €1.49 billion, was in relation to unfair competition in online advertising. The US is catching-up with three governmental anti-trust lawsuits filed against Google in last quarter of 2020. Calls for its break-up became a campaign agenda by then 2020 US presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Dubbed as the “Breakup of Big Tech”, the campaign was not limited to Google but also to other tech behemoths like Facebook, Amazon and Apple.

Here we examine the three antitrust lawsuits lobbed by the EU, for unfair shopping comparisons, abusing its dominance in Android to unfairly favour its own services and stifling competition in online advertising. You can think of Google as the internet shop window; it displays its own stuff right at the front. This leaves competitors’ services languishing in the stockroom equivalent of page two of the search results. In all of these lawsuits and in the arguments for its breakup, you will see the phrases “unfair competition” and “stifling competition/innovation”. Collection of personal data and getting first-hand knowledge (and therefore, first leverage) of global trends are also cited as reasons to regulate or hold Google more accountable.

So, does Google have “the curse of bigness”? Is it right to call for its breakup? Is curtailing its “unbridled power” warranted? What will a breakup accomplish? How will it affect the tech innovation ecosystem? What could it mean for startups, not just in Europe but globally?

Google’s Product Integration

There is a whole ecosystem of Google products that captures the majority of internet traffic and keeps that traffic by putting in place a tight integration among Google products. Google search is integrated with Google Flights, Google Analytics, Google AdSense, YouTube, etc.

The unbundling of Google’s integrated products and allowing them to interface with third parties will help level the playing field for new players in the market. For example, Google Flights search results may no longer be prioritized in flight searches. YouTube videos will no longer be automatically highlighted in song searches, giving other video platforms a fighting chance.

Let us look closer at YouTube. YouTube is not only a video delivery platform but is also an advertisement and monetization platform. If you are a video content provider, YouTube’s monetization may not be favourable to you and you might want to monetize via other platforms. But YouTube does not allow integration of third-party advertising and monetization platforms, so this constrains the content provider and keeps at bay third-party platforms for advertising (e.g. Criteo) and monetization (e.g. Patreon).

Edging out existing competing platforms and keeping out potential new players stifles both competition and innovation. Competitors and new players always start as challenger startup companies – Patreon for example came out of one musician’s desire to make a living from his YouTube videos. Now you can see the same scenario playing out with other bundled Google products – Google Search with Google Maps, Google Search with Google Flights, etc.

Google has the capability (and resources) to easily reproduce fledgling startups services or products. The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for example, is a major provider of cloud computing infrastructure which is used by startups. Imagine that there is a startup that wants to offer speech to text processing using AI who uses GCP and discovers that now Google Cloud has a similar (and competing product) under its ”AI and Machine Learning” product offering. From a technology enabler, Google is now a competitor. And what a mighty competitor it is! The ease at which Google can integrate or add a new product is astounding. This has something to do with Google’s massive resources and buying power.

Google’s Massive Resources and Buying Power

Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company is one of the largest technology companies by revenue and one of the world’s most valuable companies in terms of market capitalization. That being said, Google has the cash to gobble up any company it fancies. And it has been doing so since its foundation in 1998. Here is a list of 241 mergers and acquisition by Google, dating back to its early days. If you examine the list, the acquisitions range from web search engines, to blogging, to map analysis and you will see that they are either integrated or used under current Google products. Google (and other big tech like Apple, Facebook and Amazon) is also known to acquire startups to expand its knowledge and technology in “hot” or cutting-edge tech.

Since 2009, Google has acquired the most number of AI startups – a total of 30 according to a compilation by research firm Crunchbase. Among its notable acquisitions is Nest Labs in 2014 (for around 2.6 billion), which heralded Google’s foray into the connected home. Nest Labs is now ‘Google Nest’. Another 2014 major acquisition is London-based AI startup DeepMind (for around 419 million). Its latest recorded acquisition was in 2019 with a customer service automation startup Onward. The record AI acquisitions by big tech prompted an FTC query into underreported acquisitions and the mounting concerns over big tech’s overall role in tech monopolization.

This is perhaps the most important effect of breaking up a big tech like Google. The reduction of its capability to buy out potential competitors, because the assets of, say, YouTube as a single company is way less compared to Google’s holding company, Alphabet.

When a big tech company sees an innovative startup, and they feel that the startup’s product or technology poses a threat to the big tech’s existing product, they can quickly raise capital to acquire that startup. That startup’s innovative technology either becomes an enabling technology to enhance the big tech’s existing product or this technology (and by extension innovation) gets suppressed. The same stifling effect on innovation can be said about its ability to absorb players in new tech – potentially altering the direction or swaying it in the direction beneficial only to them.

Google has appealed against all of the antitrust penalties handed down by the EU. These lawsuits, including the ones in the US and around the world, have not dampened Google’s revenue, though. Shares of its parent company Alphabet have rocketed nearly 30% in 2020. On January 16, 2020, Alphabet became the fourth US company to reach $1 trillion market value entering the trillion dollar companies club (along with Apple, Microsoft and Amazon) for the first time.

If you are a startup in Europe (or anywhere else, for that matter) and your exit strategy is to get acquired by Google, it is probably better for you that things stay the same. Google can very well afford it! On the flip side, if you do not want to get acquired, want to genuinely innovate, or want an ‘IN’ into its tightly integrated product portfolio to scale – then watch out for Google!

Cloud Computing’s Startup Boom

By 2017, cloud adoption had moved from a niche IT strategy to a mainstream business imperative. Nearly every enterprise — from mid-market companies to global corporations — was either beginning its cloud journey or accelerating it. That demand created fertile ground for a new generation of startups, each competing to solve a specific pain point: hybrid data management, cloud security, desktop delivery, hyper-scale storage, or simplified public cloud operations.

What separated the most promising players from the crowd was not simply product novelty, but the ability to deliver disproportionate value in a well-defined niche. Below are ten cloud startups that were drawing attention in 2017 for doing exactly that.

The 10 Cloud Startups to Watch in 2017

1. Apcera

Founded: 2012 | CEO: Derek Collison

Apcera built a container management platform aimed at enterprises operating across cloud environments. Its distinguishing feature was support for both legacy applications and modern cloud-native workloads — a significant advantage for organizations mid-migration. The platform bundled scheduling, orchestration, networking, and storage management into a unified offering, reducing the operational complexity of hybrid deployments.

2. Cazena

Founded: 2015 | Founder: Prat Moghe

Cazena positioned itself in the big data space, offering a Data Platform-as-a-Service (dPaaS) that automated data movement to and within cloud environments. It was designed specifically for Azure and AWS deployments, helping data teams run analytics workloads in the cloud while also handling data migration governance, security controls, and compliance requirements — all through a managed service model.

3. Dizzion

CEO: Steve Prather

Dizzion targeted small and medium-sized businesses with desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solutions. Beyond virtual desktops, its portfolio included endpoint management, application delivery, and cloud storage. The company carved out a particular foothold in regulated, remote-workforce industries such as healthcare and finance, where secure, centrally managed desktops reduce both compliance risk and IT overhead.

4. Elastifile

Founded: 2013 | Founder: Amir Aharoni

Elastifile tackled one of the harder problems in hybrid cloud: unified data management across geographically distributed and architecturally disparate storage systems. Its core product, the Elastifile Cloud File System, was a distributed flash storage solution that presented data from multiple locations as a single, locally accessible file system. This approach simplified data access patterns for applications that span on-premises and cloud infrastructure.

5. Hedvig

Founded: 2012 | Founder: Avinash Lakshman

Hedvig specialized in hyper-scale storage, building its Distributed Storage Platform to replicate and protect data across private and public cloud environments simultaneously. The focus on multi-environment data protection made it attractive to enterprises that needed high availability and disaster recovery without being locked into a single cloud vendor’s storage model.

6. Infinite Ops

Founded: 2015

Infinite Ops aimed to reduce the operational complexity of running workloads in the public cloud. It bundled key IT management capabilities — including workspace management, databases, identity management, and firewall configuration — into a single software package. The goal was to give IT teams a simpler, more consolidated way to deploy and govern cloud resources without stitching together multiple separate tools.

7. Netskope

Founded: 2012 | CEO: Sanjay Beri | Headquarters: Los Altos, CA

Netskope operated in the cloud security space, providing enterprises with deep visibility into cloud workloads and the applications their employees use. Its platform was designed to identify threats, enforce security policy, and reduce the risk of data loss across cloud services. By 2017, cloud-access security brokers (CASBs) were an emerging category, and Netskope was one of the recognized leaders in that segment.

8. Pulseway

Founded: 2011 | CEO & Founder: Marius Mihalec | Parent: MMSOFT Design

Pulseway differentiated itself with a mobile-first approach to IT management. Built for managed service providers (MSPs) and IT administrators, it enabled remote monitoring and management of cloud and on-premises infrastructure from smartphones, tablets, or desktop browsers. Endpoint protection was also part of the core offering. The emphasis on accessibility from any device made it particularly relevant for lean IT teams managing distributed infrastructure.

9. Sapho

Founded: 2014 | CEO & Founder: Fouad ElNaggar

Sapho took a different approach to enterprise productivity, building a platform that allowed organizations to create lightweight micro-apps on top of their existing enterprise systems — ERP, CRM, HRIS, and others. Rather than replacing back-end systems, Sapho surfaced the specific data and actions employees needed most, making those accessible remotely from any device. The result was reduced context switching and faster task completion without requiring a full system overhaul.

10. Skyhigh Networks

Founded: 2011 | CEO: Rajiv Gupta

Skyhigh Networks provided enterprises with real-time visibility into their cloud service usage — a capability often described as cloud access security brokering. Its platform allowed security and IT teams to detect threats, monitor cloud deployments, enforce usage policies, and track the overall health of cloud initiatives. A broad set of third-party integrations expanded its usefulness across existing security toolchains.

What These Startups Had in Common

Looking across these ten companies, a clear pattern emerges: each identified a narrow, well-defined problem within the broader cloud ecosystem and built a focused solution around it. None tried to be a general-purpose cloud provider competing with AWS or Azure. Instead, they targeted the gaps those platforms left open — data governance, endpoint security, distributed storage, desktop delivery, and operational simplicity.

Most were founded within the five years preceding 2017, yet had already built meaningful customer bases in their respective niches. For DevOps and infrastructure teams evaluating tooling in 2017, these companies represented a new class of specialist vendors worth including in any cloud strategy evaluation.

A Note on Current Status

This article reflects the cloud startup landscape as it stood in mid-2017. Several of these companies have since undergone significant changes. Readers researching any of these vendors should verify their current status, product offerings, and ownership before making procurement or architectural decisions.