Tech:NYC Digest: June 23

Tech:NYC Digest: June 23

June 23, 2021 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

In today’s digest, we round up the state of the races (for now), Sprinklr becomes the latest homegrown tech company to go public, and New York says so long to the state of emergency, and sadly, to-go cocktails too.

  • 🎉 Congrats to Ragy Thomas, Sprinklr’s founder and CEO (and a Tech:NYC board member!), and the entire team on their first day of trading!

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We made it through the primary election season, but while the voting is over, most races remain undecided — and likely will for some weeks.

  • Almost 800,000 votes have been cast and counted, and when absentee ballots are added in, the total vote count could hit one million.

  • The results reported so far are first-round votes —  ranked choice voting selections have been processed yet — and almost no races have candidates surpassing the 50 percent threshold to be already declared the winner.

Here’s the current rundown of all the results, and here’s what we know so far:

For Mayor: Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams is in the lead with almost 32 percent of the vote. He’s trailed by Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia, who are currently battling for second place with 22 percent and almost 20 percent, respectively.

  • Andrew Yang is next in line, but shortly after polls closed, he conceded the race, describing himself as “a numbers guy” who didn't see a path to victory.

  • The eventual winner will face off against Curtis Silwa in November, who won the Republican primary with a landslide 72 percent of the vote. (CNBC)

Here’s a great map breaking down the mayoral primary results by election district. 

For Comptroller: Council Member Brad Lander is ahead with a sizable lead, with more than 31 percent of the vote, despite most polling indicating Council Speaker Corey Johnson was on top. Johnson is currently trailing in second place at a little over 22 percent. (New York Times)

For Manhattan District Attorney: Former New York State Chief Deputy Attorney General Alvin Bragg has maintained a slight lead over presumed favorite Tali Farhadian Weinstein, but just by about three percentage points. (Wall Street Journal)

  • The district attorney race was the only one not conducted with ranked choice voting, so there are no ranked preferences to tabulate, but there are tens of thousands of absentee ballots still to count, making it still too close to call. (THE CITY)

  • If Bragg is able to keep the lead, he’ll become the first Black person to hold the position. If Weinstein is able to surpass him, she’ll become the first woman in the role.

For Borough President: All but the Staten Island primary are very competitive and it’s still too early to determine which candidates will get the required 50 percent of the vote. (City & State)

  • Three percentage points separate Mark Levine and Brad Hoylman in Manhattan; nine separate Antonio Reynoso and Robert Cornegy, Jr. in Brooklyn; five separate Vanessa Gibson and Fernando Cabrera in the Bronx; and just a single percentage point separates Donovan Richards and Elizabeth Crowley in Queens. (Frontrunners in bold.)

For City Council: this year’s election cycle guarantees an overhaul of the body, with all 51 seats on the ballot, 32 of which will be filled by new members replacing term-limited incumbents. (New York Times)

  • Of all the seats, candidates in 15 districts earned at least 50 percent of the vote in the first round, making them the declared winners without going to additional ranked choice voting tabulations. (In many of those, the race was between just two candidates, effectively eliminating the RCV function anyways.)

  • Carlina Rivera, Robert Holden, and Rafael Salamanca are some of the council members who kept their seats, and Gale Brewer has won her spot back in the Council after serving as Manhattan Borough President.

  • And if current results hold steady, the next class of Council Members will include 29 women — more than half the body — up from 14 currently.

What’s next

: Next Tuesday, June 29, the Board of Elections will release unofficial results of the ranked choice voting selections, but only for in-person early voting and Election Day results — we still won’t know absentee ballot results. Still, this will give us significant insight into how RCV will move vote counts and potentially reshuffle the leaderboard.

It’s already been a banner 2021 for New York tech IPOs, and this week was no different. Today, Sprinklr became the latest company to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker $CXM.

  • It joins several other NYC homegrown tech companies — Squarespace, Oscar, DigitalOcean, and UiPath among them — that have gone public this year.

Founder and CEO Ragy Thomas (who also serves on Tech:NYC’s board of directors) memorialized the day in a blog post:

  • “We’ve always said that Unified-CXM is ‘an idea whose time has come.’ Thanks to the hard work of thousands of Sprinklrites, customers, partners, and many others over the years, it’s never been more clear: that time is now. ”

As an immigrant who moved back and forth from India growing up, Thomas started the company in 2009 out of a spare bedroom in his New Jersey home. Fast forward to today, it has established a large headquarters in Midtown Manhattan and employs more than 2,000 people. (Crain’s New York)

At the beginning of 2021, we spoke with Thomas as part of our Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg series (video here) as the company was preparing to file its confidential S-1. He had been public about Spinklr’s next fundraise being an IPO — with room to grow:

  • “We are creating what I think is the world’s first truly modern customer experience management platform for large businesses,” Thomas said, a space he believes is a $100 billion market opportunity.

He’s also been obsessed with doing it all “The Sprinklr Way,” with heavy attention to company culture. The company holds a town hall or all-hands meeting nearly every week, and they’ve hired a full-time wellness coach who hosts meditation sessions and yoga, which has become a crucial part of their effort to improve employee experience during the pandemic.

At the close of trading for its debut, shares jumped 11 percent, to the tune of a $4 billion valuation. (MarketWatch)

Another big day for New York tech in the books!

  • Aircall, a New York-based provider of cloud phone systems for call centers and sales teams, raised $120 million in Series D funding. Goldman Sachs Asset Management led, and was joined by DTCP, eFounders, Draper Esprit, Adam Street Partners, NextWorldCap and Gaia. (TechCrunch)

  • Atom Finance, a New York-based investment research platform, raised $28 million in Series B funding. SoftBank Latin America Fund led, and was joined by General Catalyst and Base Partners. (Wall Street Journal)

  • Merlyn Mind, a New York-based developer of digital assistants for education, raised $29 million led by Learn Capital. (TechCrunch)

  • Moth+Flame, a New York City-based virtual reality training technology maker, raised $2.5 million in seed funding. Bee Partners led the round and was joined by investors including First In, Meeting Street Capital, Service Provider Capital, and Spacecadet. (Road to VR)

  • Vero, a New York-based property leasing infrastructure platform, raised $5 million in Series A funding co-led by Eleven Capital and Bienville Capital. (FinSMEs)

  • June 24: Virtual: The Network Effect: Meaningful Connections for Female Founders, with Ellen Pao, Kara Swisher, Naj Austin, and others. Hosted by New Power Media and TheLi.st. Register here.

  • June 29: Virtual: Redesigning the 9 to 5, with Zoom COO Aparna Bawa, Google Workspace GM Javier Soltero, Gusto Chief People Officer Danielle Brown, and others. Hosted by Protocol. Register here.

New York state’s COVID-19 state of emergency, which has been in place since March 2020, is

, and with more than 70 percent of the state inoculated with at least one shot, the governor will not extend it. That presents one unfortunate catch: bars and restaurants will no longer be permitted to

. We’ll just have to pull up a seat at the bar like old times, which we have all really missed anyways, right?

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