San Francisco tech has big plans for 2021.
Whether it’s to increase data protection for remote workers, scale globally, automate and streamline processes, or acquire and retain new customers, companies have their sights set high.
So, in order to gain some insight into what to expect in tech this year, Built In San Francisco checked in with five local companies. Leaders from Digit, Egnyte, Granular, Liftoff and AfterPay shared what they’re working on in 2021 and the impact they think it’ll have on their respective industries.
This year, Digit, a data-based financial health platform, is focusing its efforts on launching an updated version of its current product that includes integration with more banks and financial institutions as well as a machine-learning-based arm that increases automation, Chief Product Officer Rushabh Doshi said.
What is one of the most important focuses for Digit in 2021?
Our mission at Digit is to make people financially healthy. We built an intelligent, automated money manager, which can evaluate a member’s financial picture to automate savings.
We already started extending this core concept of automating our members’ money to other pieces of financial life, outside of savings. For example, we launched our investment and retirement products allowing our members to save money wisely for the long term.
We’re in the early alpha stages of our next-generation product, which is a unique way to step-change our members’ financial health journey. This product will change the way people think about their money. We are excited to build and bring this product out to market this year and it is our highest focus.
Building intelligent financial features requires solving some challenging engineering problems. For example, we need to integrate with a number of banks and financial institutions to govern retrieval of financial data as well as move money between financial institutions, bill payers and credit card providers. We need to build a machine-learning-based financial insight and intelligence platform to make smart decisions for our members.
We want to automate away the complex financial tasks that occupy so much of our lives.”
What impact will this have on Digit and your industry?
Consumer banks aren’t working for the people they are meant to serve. Banks should be working for consumers, helping them get financially healthier, reducing anxiety and helping them hit their goals. Most — if not all — are not. Instead, according to Forbes, banks reaped $11 billion in overdraft fees in 2020.
At Digit, we want to change that. We want to build financial services that are customer-first, with a north star of individualized financial health. We want to be transparent about prices and fees and reduce them as much as possible. We want to automate away the complex financial tasks that occupy so much of our lives.
Our upcoming launches are only the beginning of our foray into redoing the consumer financial industry from the ground up. We are excited beyond belief to serve our members, build the next generation of services and build an enduring company.
As workforces continue to operate remotely, Chief Strategy and Product Officer Ramin Farassat said that development teams at Egnyte, a cloud content governance platform, are focused on inventing new ways to share, classify and protect users’ content while also providing the necessary analytics and reports.
What is one of the most important focuses for Egnyte in 2021?
The events of the past months have proved that employees need secure access to their content from anywhere, anytime and on any device. Companies have to deal with more applications, devices and information distributed across more locations than ever before and users expect easy and fast access without having to worry about potential risks, regardless of where the content is stored and how it reaches their device.
As workforces continue to become increasingly distributed and the security threats grow more prevalent, our focus will be to continue to expand our data governance capabilities. We will do this by providing the most secure remote working solution where we constantly control risks through automated detection of threats and govern content across not just our own clouds, but also on-premise, other third-party cloud solutions and content in applications repositories. Egnyte’s machine learning development teams and data scientists will be focused on continuously inventing new ways to share, search, secure, classify and protect content while providing the analytics and reports needed by IT professionals to manage their ever-growing content.
Egnyte’s vision is to give organizations one secure platform to access, govern and gain insight into all their content.”
What impact will this have on the Egnyte and your industry?
In mid-2020, a survey of more than 400 IT leaders told Egnyte that their top concerns are around insider data security threats. However, many companies simply cannot shoulder the cost or administrative burden of layering various new tools over their existing content infrastructure to address these issues.
Egnyte solves this problem by integrating behavioral intelligence, ransomware detection and other data security controls directly into our platform. Egnyte’s vision is to give organizations one secure platform to access, govern and gain insight into all their content, across cloud office suites, on-premise infrastructure, personal and work devices, public clouds and business apps. With our strong focus on governance and privacy solutions, policy-based automation and integration of more capabilities in our platform, we will help our customers by reducing their IT spends while increasing their business agility.
Granular CEO Tamar Rosati said that the software company is focused on enhancing its product in 2021 so that farmers and their advisors can more easily reference data and insights into their operations.
What is one of the most important focuses for Granular in 2021?
One of the most important focuses for us in 2021 is to help farmers collaborate more effectively with their trusted advisors. Granular was founded with the vision that the future of agriculture would be driven by the digitization of the farm.
Farming has always been an on-the-go business and it has also always been and will continue to be a team sport. Year-round, the farmer is collaborating with suppliers, lenders, agronomists and landowners to make the best decisions to profitably and sustainably grow their crop. Software that enables farmers and their advisors to easily reference data and insights into their operation, that’s accessible on-the-go from anywhere, enhances the quality and effectiveness of their interactions and helps them make better decisions together. It also saves farmers time, a luxury that they are characteristically short on. So in 2021, we are really focused on helping farmers leverage our software to collaborate better with their advisors.
Making it easy to collaborate with their advisors and partners is a key area to solve on our path to indispensability.”
What impact will this have on Granular and your industry?
“Indispensable” is the word we use to describe how we want farmers to feel about using our software to run their business. Making it easy to collaborate with their advisors and partners is a key area to solve on our path to indispensability. So we expect that as we achieve that, our software will be more sticky, valuable and increasingly recommended to other farmers, driving the growth of our business.
On the heels of a successful 2020, Liftoff, a mobile app marketing and retargeting company, is focusing on scaling its business globally as well as growing its employee base, Senior Manager of Global Recruiting Yordanos Asmare said.
What is one of the most important focuses for Liftoff in 2021?
Global growth. As signaled by Liftoff’s recently announced strategic partnership with Blackstone, our most important focus in 2021 and onward is fueling our next phase of global growth. We are excited to expand our current 290-person team across our nine regional offices and accelerate our product innovation.
Liftoff’s early success was a result of creating an innovative product by which to truly empower our customers and building a values-driven company culture that centers its employees. As we embark upon 2021, we are very cognizant of the difficult circumstances of present times and the heightened imperative to take care of our people. This will remain a key focus for Liftoff while continuing to scale our business to new heights.
Liftoff is primely positioned to fuel the high-growth mobile app ecosystem as a leader in programmatic user acquisition and retention.”
What impact will this have on the business and your industry?
Our product capabilities and global footprint have already shown Liftoff to be a key partner for many of the world’s leading mobile developers (across regions, verticals, platforms, etc). Liftoff’s 2021 focus and its impact will manifest in three important areas:
- Product innovation. Both in accelerating our product innovation roadmap (e.g. creating a self-serve ad-buying platform) and in expanding the depth of current offerings, our focus on global growth will shape our strategy and execution.
- Team growth. Key to the above product scope and scaled-up services is our team growth. This growth will allow us to be closer to the commercial opportunities in places like Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and beyond. We’re hiring across the board, so check out our openings!
- Industry leadership. Pandemic notwithstanding, there’s an increasing shift to wider mobile use for a variety of services, no longer limited to the industries of early-adoption such as gaming or e-commerce. Given this shift, our success and continued business focus, Liftoff is primely positioned to fuel the high-growth mobile app ecosystem as a leader in programmatic user acquisition and retention.
This year, Afterpay, a buy now pay later service, is focused on growth. Director of Product Management Salim Tarazi said that they’ll achieve this by fine-tuning their customer acquisition strategy to be able to identify the right target audiences through the right marketing channels.
What is one of the most important focuses for Afterpay in 2021?
Growth is our most important business objective for 2021. Consumers have not only changed the way they buy during the pandemic, but they’ve also changed the way they pay. Given the rapid shift to e-commerce, we have seen a surge in demand for buy now pay later (BNPL) as part of every merchant’s experience. The growth team’s focus is to attract, acquire and engage new customers to discover the benefits of using Afterpay.
BNPL has been most popular with millennial and Gen Z shoppers who want to stretch that purchase between paychecks or avoid paying credit card interest. BNPL also increases purchasing power by allowing customers to make larger value purchases knowing that they will have time to make payments. The growth team’s focus is to ensure we have the optimal customer acquisition strategy and tactics to acquire new qualified customers. This involves a mix of identifying the right target audiences and developing new acquisition channels that allow for the discovery of Afterpay on sites like Facebook, Google and other referral channels.
Given the rapid shift to e-commerce, we have seen a surge in demand for buy now pay later as part of every merchant’s experience.”
What impact will this have on Afterpay and your industry?
A shift to BNPL will impact our business in a few ways. First, we’ll be able to achieve new customer acquisition targets through new marketing channels like SEO, SEM, paid social, CRM, affiliates, app marketing and more. As a result, we’ll be able to engage consumers by surfacing the right message to the right person at the right time, allowing us to increase the efficiency of our marketing programs.
