Year: 2018

Fintech startup YayPay just raised another $8.4 million for its software-as-a-service solution focused on collecting money from outstanding invoices. The company participated in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield several years ago.

Information Venture Partners led today’s funding round with existing investors Birchmere, QED, Fifth Third Capital, Gaingels and 500 Fintech Fund also participating.

YayPay targets large companies with an accounting department. The startup provides the perfect service to handle unpaid invoices. YayPay analyzes previous invoices and predicts when you’re supposed to get paid depending on the client and the nature of the invoice. This way, you know which account needs your attention right now.

Teams can collaborate to send reminders and make sure everyone is on the same page. You also can view information about your client directly in YayPay thanks to CRM and ERP integrations.

YayPay also eliminates a bunch of pesky tasks, such as gentle email reminders. You can create automated workflows so that your clients get an email a few days before a payment deadline. If they don’t open the email, you can receive a notification telling you to call them. Customers also can pay invoices directly using YayPay. The platform supports ACH and credit cards.

While this seems like a niche product, the company has managed to attract 480 clients that have generated more than $7 billion in accounts receivables. This represents a 500 percent user base increase over the last 12 months.

Accenture announced today that it’s reached an agreement to acquire Adaptly.

The digital advertising company launched in 2010 with self-serve tools for running ads across different social networks. In a blog post about the acquisition, co-founder and CEO Nikhil Sethi wrote that the company’s mission hasn’t changed, but it has expanded to support Google and Amazon’s ad platforms, while also introducing “several creative technology solutions that make our media buying work harder.”

While Adaptly has mostly stayed out of the headlines for the past few years, the company now has nearly 150 employees and works with advertisers like Chico’s, Mazda, Prudential and Sprint. Once the deal closes, it will become part of Accenture’s digital marketing arm, Accenture Interactive Operations.

“As new consumer experiences emerge and new digital platforms are born, our mission has always been to help brands connect with people in new and powerful ways,” Sethi said in the acquisition release, adding, “Being a part of Accenture is really exciting as, together, we’ll have an amazing opportunity to supercharge our key platform partnerships, drive more transparency and effectiveness for our clients, and enable them to deliver more relevant, high impact experiences.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. It looks like Adaptly hasn’t raised outside funding (or at least hasn’t announced any funding) from investors since 2012. Those investors include Valhalla Partners, Time Warner Investments, First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures and Lerer Hippeau.

Tigera, a startup that offers security and compliance solutions for Kubernetes container deployments, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round led by Insight Partners. Existing investors Madrona, NEA and Wing also participated in this round.

Like everybody in the Kubernetes ecosystem, Tigera is exhibiting at KubeCon this week, so I caught up with the team to talk about the state of the company and its plans for this new raise.

“We are in a very exciting position,” Tigera president and CEO Ratan Tipirneni told me. “All the four public cloud players [AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud] have adopted us for their public Kubernetes service. The large Kubernetes distros like Red Hat and Docker are using us.” In addition, the team has signed up other enterprises, often in the healthcare and financial industry, and SaaS players (all of which it isn’t allowed to name) that use its service directly.

The company says that it didn’t need to raise right now. “We didn’t need the money right now, but we had a lot of incoming interest,” Tipirneni said. The company will use the funding to expand its engineering, marketing and customer success teams. In total, it plans to quadruple its sales force. In addition, it plans to set up a large office in Vancouver, Canada, mostly because of the availability of talent there.

In the legacy IT world, security and compliance solutions could rely on the knowledge that the underlying infrastructure was relatively stable. Now, though, with the advent of containers and DevOps, workloads are highly dynamic, but that also makes the challenge of securing them and ensuring compliance with regulations like HIPAA or standards like PCI more complex, too. The promise of Tigera’s solution is that it allows enterprises to ensure compliance by using a zero-trust model that authorizes each service on the network, encrypts all the traffic and enforces the policies the admins have set for their company and needs. All of this data is logged in detail and, if necessary, enterprises can pull it for incident management or forensic analysis. 

Non-tracking search engine, DuckDuckGo, is now a little easier to find online after the company acquired the premium generic domain name  duck.com — thereby shaving a few letters off its usual URL.

This means browsing to duck.com now automatically redirects to DuckDuckGo .com.

The twist in this tale is that duck.com’s prior owner was Google. And DDG had accused the search giant of anti-competitive behavior — by pointing duck.com to its own search engine, Google.com, and thus “consistently” confusing DDG users (duck.co having long pointed to the DDG community page.)…

The domain name transfer was spotted earlier by namePros which got confirmation from DDG founder Gabriel Weinberg.

“We’re pleased Google has chosen to transfer ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo. Having Duck.com will make it easier for people to use DuckDuckGo,” he told it.

We reached out to DDG and to Google with questions — because, well, we have a few.

Google has agreed with DuckDuckGo, Inc. to transfer ownership and rights of the duck.com domain to DuckDuckGo.

DDG also would not comment beyond Weinberg’s earlier statement.

But in an interview with the TNW back in 2012, Weinberg said he first enquired about trying to buy duck.com on 11/4/09 — only to be told shortly afterwards that “management” didn’t want to sell.

He also made the point then that while the URL of the company Google had acquired the duck.com domain from (On2) pointed to a Google explanation page about that acquisition, http://duck.com/ pointed “directly to Google search”.

So, well, … 

The timing of the transfer certainly looks interesting, with Google CEO Sundar Pichai only yesterday facing some competition-flavored questions from policymakers in Congress. (Though it’s not clear exactly when the duck.com domain name was transferred.)

In recent years Google has faced some major antitrust scrutiny and enforcement internationally, including in the European Union — where it has had to make changes to how it displays search results for products after a 2017 Commission decision that found it had abused its dominance in general Internet search to give itself an illegal advantage.

This summer the EC also found Google’s Android OS to be in breach of its competition rules, leading to further regional tweaks — in that case to licensing terms.

Google is appealing both antitrust decisions.

But the Commission has another competition probe (into Google AdSense) ongoing, and continues to eye other Google product verticals with concerns.

Meanwhile, calls for antitrust scrutiny of tech giants have been rising in the US. And Google’s dominant position in Internet search and smartphone platforms, along with its pincer grip (along with Facebook) on the online ad market, position it for some special attention on that front.

So the company quietly passing off duck.com now — after using it to redirect to Google.com for close to a decade — to a pro-privacy search rival smacks of concern over competition optics, at the very least.

Additionally, yesterday an even more sustained line of questioning from Congress to Google’s CEO was around privacy, with Pichai fielding questions such as whether Google’s own settings are clear enough for users to understand.

You can imagine some awkward questions could also have been asked by lawmakers about why Google.com was squatting on a domain name containing the word “duck”.

A word that not only means a waterfowl or to crouch down to avoid something but which has been intrinsic to the branding of its non-tracking rival, DuckDuckGo, since that company was founded all the way back in 2008.

So, well, if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck… 

Non-tracking search engine, DuckDuckGo, is now a little easier to find online after the company acquired the premium generic domain name  duck.com — thereby shaving a few letters off its usual URL.

This means browsing to duck.com now automatically redirects to DuckDuckGo .com.

The twist in this tale is that duck.com’s prior owner was Google. And DDG had accused the search giant of anti-competitive behavior — by pointing duck.com to its own search engine, Google.com, and thus “consistently” confusing DDG users (duck.co having long pointed to the DDG community page.)…

The domain name transfer was spotted earlier by namePros which got confirmation from DDG founder Gabriel Weinberg.

“We’re pleased Google has chosen to transfer ownership of Duck.com to DuckDuckGo. Having Duck.com will make it easier for people to use DuckDuckGo,” he told it.

We reached out to DDG and to Google with questions — because, well, we have a few.

Google has agreed with DuckDuckGo, Inc. to transfer ownership and rights of the duck.com domain to DuckDuckGo.

DDG also would not comment beyond Weinberg’s earlier statement.

But in an interview with the TNW back in 2012, Weinberg said he first enquired about trying to buy duck.com on 11/4/09 — only to be told shortly afterwards that “management” didn’t want to sell.

He also made the point then that while the URL of the company Google had acquired the duck.com domain from (On2) pointed to a Google explanation page about that acquisition, http://duck.com/ pointed “directly to Google search”.

So, well, … 

The timing of the transfer certainly looks interesting, with Google CEO Sundar Pichai only yesterday facing some competition-flavored questions from policymakers in Congress. (Though it’s not clear exactly when the duck.com domain name was transferred.)

In recent years Google has faced some major antitrust scrutiny and enforcement internationally, including in the European Union — where it has had to make changes to how it displays search results for products after a 2017 Commission decision that found it had abused its dominance in general Internet search to give itself an illegal advantage.

This summer the EC also found Google’s Android OS to be in breach of its competition rules, leading to further regional tweaks — in that case to licensing terms.

Google is appealing both antitrust decisions.

But the Commission has another competition probe (into Google AdSense) ongoing, and continues to eye other Google product verticals with concerns.

Meanwhile, calls for antitrust scrutiny of tech giants have been rising in the US. And Google’s dominant position in Internet search and smartphone platforms, along with its pincer grip (along with Facebook) on the online ad market, position it for some special attention on that front.

So the company quietly passing off duck.com now — after using it to redirect to Google.com for close to a decade — to a pro-privacy search rival smacks of concern over competition optics, at the very least.

Additionally, yesterday an even more sustained line of questioning from Congress to Google’s CEO was around privacy, with Pichai fielding questions such as whether Google’s own settings are clear enough for users to understand.

You can imagine some awkward questions could also have been asked by lawmakers about why Google.com was squatting on a domain name containing the word “duck”.

A word that not only means a waterfowl or to crouch down to avoid something but which has been intrinsic to the branding of its non-tracking rival, DuckDuckGo, since that company was founded all the way back in 2008.

So, well, if it walks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck… 

West Owens, Future Family CFO, and Claire Tomkins, CEO

Future Family is a startup (and a Disrupt Startup Battlefield alum!) that helps families more easily afford fertility services like IVF and egg freezing. They work with fertility clinics to get the often unpredictable costs set in stone, then cover said costs and convert them into a more approachable monthly payment plan.

But covering those costs up front isn’t cheap, which lead to long waitlists for those looking to Future Family for help. With that in mind, the company has locked in a $100 million credit line to help them power through their waitlist and immediately offer their services to more people.

The capital is coming from Atalaya, a capital management firm that specializes in funding specialty finance companies like Future Family (or Point, a startup that provides capital to home buyers in exchange for equity in the home, in which Atalaya invested $150 million earlier this year.)

So what does this mean? Most immediately, it means that Future Family will be able to clear up its waitlists before moving on to offering same-day approval/financing to new customers.

Claire Tomkins founded Future Family after seeing for herself just how complicated and expensive the fertility care process could be. After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the fertility care involved with having her first child, she set out to make it less complicated and more accessible.

This news comes a little less than two months after Future Family raised $10 million in a Series A round. A few weeks before that, the company adjusted its model to work more like a monthly subscription than a loan, allowing additional costs (like genetic testing and travel) to be wrapped in should the need arise.

West Owens, Future Family CFO, and Claire Tomkins, CEO

Future Family is a startup (and a Disrupt Startup Battlefield alum!) that helps families more easily afford fertility services like IVF and egg freezing. They work with fertility clinics to get the often unpredictable costs set in stone, then cover said costs and convert them into a more approachable monthly payment plan.

But covering those costs up front isn’t cheap, which lead to long waitlists for those looking to Future Family for help. With that in mind, the company has locked in a $100 million credit line to help them power through their waitlist and immediately offer their services to more people.

The capital is coming from Atalaya, a capital management firm that specializes in funding specialty finance companies like Future Family (or Point, a startup that provides capital to home buyers in exchange for equity in the home, in which Atalaya invested $150 million earlier this year.)

So what does this mean? Most immediately, it means that Future Family will be able to clear up its waitlists before moving on to offering same-day approval/financing to new customers.

Claire Tomkins founded Future Family after seeing for herself just how complicated and expensive the fertility care process could be. After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the fertility care involved with having her first child, she set out to make it less complicated and more accessible.

This news comes a little less than two months after Future Family raised $10 million in a Series A round. A few weeks before that, the company adjusted its model to work more like a monthly subscription than a loan, allowing additional costs (like genetic testing and travel) to be wrapped in should the need arise.

Google’s annual Year in Search is more than a digital record of the events, stories and phenomena that captured our attention over 12 months. It’s a reckoning, or computation, on what mattered to society in any given year — and sometimes even signal where it’s headed. And 2018 showed a world transfixed on one sporting event, one wedding, celebrity deaths, natural disasters and politics.

In 2018, the global community was locked in on the World Cup. The final match was between France and Croatia; we’ll let you Google who won. The world was also transfixed on high-profile deaths of musicians, scientists and artists. Seven of the 10 top Google searches globally were of people who died in 2018, including theoretical physicist and author Stephen Hawking, rapper Mac Miller, the DJ Avicii, comic book creator and icon Stan Lee, celebrity chef, author and TV personality Anthony Bourdain, and fashion designer Kate Spade.

One movie, Black Panther, made the top 10 global list, as well Meghan Markle, the former actress who became  Duchess of Sussex when she married Prince Henry.

In the U.S., the top overall searches followed a similar pattern, with a few other disruptive moments thrown in the mix, including the elections results, Hurricane Florence and Mega Millions results.

A scan of other search categories that Google tracked reveals that U.S. users were obsessed with eyelashes in 2018, 1980s fashion, how to vote and how to register to vote, Unicorn cake and the Keto diet. Our top news search in the U.S. was led by the World Cup, followed by Hurricane Florence, Mega Millions, election results and Hurricane Michael. The Kavanaugh confirmation was the sixth most searched news story in 2018. The Florida shooting, the Royal Wedding, Olympic medal count and government shutdown rounded out the top 10 news searches in the U.S., according to Google.

One of the more insightful metrics that Google tracks is the “What is ___ ?” list. In the U.S., people typing in that “what is” question into Google search asked most often about Bitcoin, racketeering, DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), government shutdown and Good Friday. U.S. Google users also wanted explanations for Fortnite, the “Yanny or Laurel” auditory illusion and what a nationalist is.

Speaking of Fortnite, it was the most searched video game, according to Google’s annual Year in Search. The video game Fortnite was also the most searched GIF followed by “Default Dance,” “Dilly Dilly” and “Orange Justice” and “Black Panther.”

Other top searched video games included Red Dead Redemption 2, Fallout 76, Far Cry 5 and God of War.

Google’s annual Year in Search is more than a digital record of the events, stories and phenomena that captured our attention over 12 months. It’s a reckoning, or computation, on what mattered to society in any given year — and sometimes even signal where it’s headed. And 2018 showed a world transfixed on one sporting event, one wedding, celebrity deaths, natural disasters and politics.

In 2018, the global community was locked in on the World Cup. The final match was between France and Croatia; we’ll let you Google who won. The world was also transfixed on high-profile deaths of musicians, scientists and artists. Seven of the 10 top Google searches globally were of people who died in 2018, including theoretical physicist and author Stephen Hawking, rapper Mac Miller, the DJ Avicii, comic book creator and icon Stan Lee, celebrity chef, author and TV personality Anthony Bourdain, and fashion designer Kate Spade.

One movie, Black Panther, made the top 10 global list, as well Meghan Markle, the former actress who became  Duchess of Sussex when she married Prince Henry.

In the U.S., the top overall searches followed a similar pattern, with a few other disruptive moments thrown in the mix, including the elections results, Hurricane Florence and Mega Millions results.

A scan of other search categories that Google tracked reveals that U.S. users were obsessed with eyelashes in 2018, 1980s fashion, how to vote and how to register to vote, Unicorn cake and the Keto diet. Our top news search in the U.S. was led by the World Cup, followed by Hurricane Florence, Mega Millions, election results and Hurricane Michael. The Kavanaugh confirmation was the sixth most searched news story in 2018. The Florida shooting, the Royal Wedding, Olympic medal count and government shutdown rounded out the top 10 news searches in the U.S., according to Google.

One of the more insightful metrics that Google tracks is the “What is ___ ?” list. In the U.S., people typing in that “what is” question into Google search asked most often about Bitcoin, racketeering, DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), government shutdown and Good Friday. U.S. Google users also wanted explanations for Fortnite, the “Yanny or Laurel” auditory illusion and what a nationalist is.

Speaking of Fortnite, it was the most searched video game, according to Google’s annual Year in Search. The video game Fortnite was also the most searched GIF followed by “Default Dance,” “Dilly Dilly” and “Orange Justice” and “Black Panther.”

Other top searched video games included Red Dead Redemption 2, Fallout 76, Far Cry 5 and God of War.

Nvidia is a company that has reached the highest highs and the lowest lows, all in the span of a couple of weeks.

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Over the past two months, Nvidia’s stock has dropped from a closing price of $289.36 on Oct. 1 to today’s opening of $148.42, a decline of 48.8%.

It takes a lot for a company to lose nearly half its value in such a short period of time, but Nvidia is proving that an otherwise strong technology business can disappear in a blink of an eye. The company faces an almost perfect barrage of headwinds to its core products that is stalling its plans for long-term chip domination.

To step back a bit first though, Nvidia has traditionally made graphical processing units (GPUs) that are excellent at the kinds of parallel computation required for gaming and applications like computer-assisted design (CAD). It’s a durable and repeatable business, and one that Nvidia has a commanding market share in.

Yet, these markets are also fairly narrow, and so Nvidia has endeavored over the past few years to expand its product offerings to encompass new applications like artificial intelligence / machine learning, autonomous automotive, and crypto hashing. These applications all need strong parallelized processing, which Nvidia specializes in.

At least part of that story has worked well. Nvidia’s chips were extremely popular in the crypto run-up over the past few years, causing widespread shortages of the chips (and annoying its core gaming fans in the process).

This was huge for Nvidia. The company had revenues of $1.05 billion for the quarter ending Oct 31, 2013, and $1.31 billion two years later in 2015 — a fairly slow rate of growth as would be expected for a dominant player in a mature market. As the company expanded its horizons though, Nvidia engorged on growth in new applications like crypto, growing to $3.2 billion in revenue in its last reported quarter. As can be expected, the stock soared.

Now, Nvidia’s growth story is being hammered on multiple fronts. First and foremost, the huge sales of its chips into the crypto space have dried up as crypto prices have crashed in recent months. This is a pattern we are seeing with other companies, namely Bitmain, which has made specialized crypto chips a major part of its business but has lost an enormous amount of its momentum in the crypto bust. It announced it was shuttering its Israel office this week.

That bust is obvious in Nvidia’s revenues this year: they are essentially flat for three quarters now, hovering between $3.1 and $3.2 billion. Some have called this Nvidia’s “crypto hangover.” But crypto is just one facet of the challenges that Nvidia faces.

When it comes to owning next-generation application workflows, Nvidia is facing robust competition from startups and established players who want access to this potentially gigantic market. Even its potential customers are competing with it. Facebook is reportedly designing its own chips, Apple has been doing so for years, Google has been in the game a while, and Amazon is getting into the game fast. Nvidia has the know-how to compete, but these companies also understand the nuances of their applications really, really well. It’s a tough market position to be in.

If the challenges around applications weren’t enough, geopolitical tensions are also causing Nvidia serious harm. As Dan Strumpf and Wenxin Fan wrote in the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago in a deep dive, the company is emblematic of the challenge Silicon Valley firms face in the US / China trade standoff:

Nvidia executives are watching the trade fight with growing unease over whether it will curb its access to Chinese customers, according to a person familiar with the matter. Almost 20% of Nvidia’s $9.7 billion in revenue last year came from China. Many of its chips are used there for assembly into other products, and it has invested heavily to tap China’s burgeoning AI industries.

The company also is concerned that deteriorating relations between the world’s two biggest economies are causing Beijing to double down on efforts to reduce reliance on U.S. suppliers of key hardware such as chips by nurturing homegrown competitors, eating into Nvidia’s long-term business.

Crypto, customers, and China. That’s how you lose half your company’s value in two months.

Quick Bites

Hạ Long Bay, Vietnam. Photo by Andrea Schaffer via Flickr used under Creative Commons.

Google ‘studying steps’ to open headquarters in Vietnam in accordance with cybersecurity laws Following the testimony yesterday from Sundar Pichai on Capitol Hill, it’s interesting to see Google reportedly attempting to open this office in Vietnam, where it faces many of the same challenges as its expansion into China. Vietnam, like many other nations around the world, has recently passed a data sovereignty law that requires that local data be stored locally, forcing Google’s hand. China may be the bogeyman du jour, but the market access challenges posed by China are hardly unique.

Japan’s top 3 telcos to exclude Huawei, ZTE network equipment, according to Japanese news reports – Huawei’s bad news continues, this time with Japanese telcos supposedly vowing not to use the company’s equipment. This is something of a major development if it pans out — so far, the blocks on Huawei equipment have originated from the group of five nations known as the Five Eyes, who share intelligence information. Japan is not a member of that network, and could set the tone for other nations in Asia.

Baidu among 80 plus companies found faking corporate information – Baidu was censured for erroneous information in its Chinese corporate filings. That’s bad news for Baidu, which has hit rock bottom in its share price in the past few days, declining from a 52-week high of $284.22 to today’s opening of $180.50.

What’s next

Arman and I are still investigating the next-generation silicon space. Some good conversations the past few days with investors and supply-chain folks to learn more about this space. Nvidia’s analysis above is the tip of the iceberg. Have thoughts? Give me a ring: danny@techcrunch.com.

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York