Spotnist has made a living finding budget resources on cloud platforms and reselling them to developers at a deep discount over cloud vendor retail pricing. Today, it announced a new budget serverless product for containerized workloads.
The new product called Ocean gives developers deploying containers a cheaper option. Much like any serverless product, you deploy your application and the cloud vendor determines the correct resources to run it, but in this case Spotnist directs the workload to cheaper Spot, Reserved, and On-Demand instances.
Amazon offers a similar serverless container service called Fargate, but Spotinst co-founder and CEO Amiram Shachar says there is a key difference between this and Ocean. “Ocean is 70-85% cheaper than Fargate, and is available on all cloud platforms, while Fargate is AWS-specific,” Shachar told TechCrunch. That ability to run on multiple clouds is also a key differentiator.
Spotnist takes advantage of excess capacity offered at a discount by all of the cloud vendors. The catch is these budget resources can go away when the cloud vendor needs them. To keep your application from shutting down in the middle of of an operation, Spotnist uses machine learning algorithms to understand when this is going to happen, shifting you to other available resources as needed on the fly.
“We are reusing our technology to reliably leverage excess cloud capacity in the backend and therefore are able to provide a much lower price for running these containers. It is transparent to the container and to the end user — the developer or DevOps. They simply deploy the containers, and infrastructure pops up only when they need it,” Shachar explained.
Chatbots and other AI-based tools have firmly found footing in the world of customer service, used either to augment or completely replace the role of a human responding to questions and complaints, or (sometimes, annoyingly, at the same time as the previous two functions) sell more products to users.
Today, an Israeli startup called TechSee is announcing $16 million in funding to help build out its own twist on that innovation: an AI-based video service, which uses computer vision, augmented reality and a customer’s own smartphone camera to provide tech support to customers, either alongside assistance from live agents, or as part of a standalone customer service ‘bot.’
Led by Scale Venture Partners — the storied investor that has been behind some of the bigger enterprise plays of the last several years (including Box, Chef, Cloudhealth, DataStax, Demandbase, DocuSign, ExactTarget, HubSpot, JFrog, and fellow Israeli AI assistance startup WalkMe) the Series B also includes participation from Planven Investments, OurCrowd, Comdata Group and Salesforce Ventures. (Salesforce was actually announced as a backer in October.)
The funding will be used both to expand the company’s current business as well as move into new product areas like sales.
Eitan Cohen, the CEO and co-founder, said that the company today provides tools to some 15,000 customer service agents and counts companies like Samsung and Vodafone among its customers across verticals like financial services, tech, telecoms and insurance.
The potential opportunity is big: Cohen estimates that there are about 2 million customer service agents in the US, and about 14 million globally.
TechSee is not disclosing its valuation. It has raised around $23 million to date.
While TechSee provides support for software and apps, its sweet spot up to now has been providing video-based assistance to customers calling with questions about the long tail of hardware out in the world, used for example in a broadband home WiFi service.
In fact, Cohen said he came up with the idea for the service when his parents phoned him up to help them get their cable service back up, and he found himself challenged to do it without being able to see the set top box to talk them through what to do.
So he thought about all the how-to videos that are on platforms like YouTube and decided that there was an opportunity to harness that in a more organised way for the companies providing an increasing array of kit that may never get the vlogger treatment.
“We are trying to bring that YouTube experience for all hardware,” he said in an interview.
The thinking is that this will become a bigger opportunity over time as more services get digitised, the cost of components continues to come down and everything becomes “hardware.”
“Tech may become more of a commodity, but customer service does not,” he added. “Solutions like ours allow companies to provide low-cost technology without having to hire more people to solve issues [that might arise with it.]”
The product today is sold along two main trajectories: assisting customer reps; and providing unmanned video assistance to replace some of the easier and more common questions that get asked.
In cases where live video support is provided, the customer opts in for the service, similar to how she or he might for a support service that “takes over” the device in question to diagnose and try to fix an issue. Here, the camera for the service becomes a customer’s own phone.
Over time, that live assistance is used in two ways that are directly linked to TechSee’s artificial intelligence play. First, it helps to build up TechSee’s larger back catalogue of videos, where all identifying characteristics removed with the focus solely on the device or problem in question. Second, the experience in the video is also used to build TechSee’s algorithms for future interactions. Cohen said that there are now “millions” of media files — images and videos — now in the company’s catalogue.
The effectiveness of its system so far has been pretty impressive. TechSee’s customers — the companies running the customer support — say they have on average seen a 40 percent increase in customer satisfaction (NPS scores), a 17 percent decrease in technician dispatches, between 20 and 30 percent increase in first call resolutions, depending on the industry.
TechSee is not the only company that has built a video-based customer engagement platform: others include Stryng, CallVU and Vee24. And you could image companies like Amazon — which is already dabbling in providing advice to customers based on what its Echo Look can see — might be interested in providing such services to users across the millions of products that it sells, as well as provide that as a service to third parties.
According to Cohen, What TechSee has going for it compared to those startups, and also the potential entry of companies like Microsoft or Amazon into the mix, is a headstart on raw data and a vision of how it will be used by the startup’s AI to build the business.
“We believe that anyone who wants to build this would have a challenge making it from scratch,” he said. “This is where we have strong content, millions of images, down to specific model numbers, where we can provide assistance and instructions on the spot.”
Salesforce’s interest in the company, he said, is a natural progression of where that data and customer relationship can take a business beyond responsive support into areas like quick warranty verification (for all those times people have neglected to do a product registration), snapping fender benders for insurance claims, and of course upselling to other products and services.
“Salesforce sees the synergies between the sales cloud and the service cloud,” Cohen said.
“TechSee recognized the great potential for combining computer vision AI with augmented reality in customer engagement,” said Andy Vitus, Partner at Scale Venture Partners, who joins the board with this round. “Electronic devices become more complex with every generation, making their adoption a perennial challenge. TechSee is solving a massive problem for brands with a technology solution that simplifies the customer experience via visual and interactive guidance.”
Three dimensional modeling used to be hard. It used to require something at least as big as the Xbox Kinect to get really high quality scans you needed high-powered laser sensor systems. Now all you need is your phone and Capture.
Capture is a proof-of-concept for a company called Standard Cyborg led by Jeff Huber and Garrett Spiegel. These YCombinator grads have worked in a number of high-profile vision startups and raised $2.4 million in seed from folks like Scott Banister, Trevor Blackwell, and Jeff Huber.
They launched the app on December 3 and it’s already making 3D waves. The tool, which uses the iPhone X’s front camera and laser scanning system to create a live color point cloud, can create 3D models that you can view inside the app or in an AR setting. You can also export them into a USDZ file for use elsewhere. The app is actually a Trojan horse for the company’s other applications including a programming framework for 3D scanning.
“We are at the bleeding edge – deploying 3D dense reconstruction and point cloud deep learning on mobile devices,” said Huber. “We package up this core technology for developers, abstracting away all the math and GPU acceleration, and giving them superpowers in just 3 lines of code.”
I’ve tried the app a few times and the resulting scans are still a little iffy. You have to take special care to slowly scan all facets of an object and if you move, as you see below, you end up with two noses. That said it’s an amazingly cool use of the iPhone’s powerful front-facing sensors.
“Standard Cyborg is building the API for the physical world,” said Huber. “We make it easy for developers to build 3D scanning, analysis, and design into their applications. Our Capture app is a showcase of our technology that makes it easy for anyone with a FaceID-enabled iPhone to play with the technology and share scans with their friends. Our scanning SDK is launching in January and is currently in beta with a few enterprise-level sporting goods companies.”
While you won’t be scanning your loved ones into a TRON remake with this thing just yet it’s cool to think about how far we’ve come from flailing around in our living rooms with a clunky Kinect next to our TV.
“The screen is becoming the most important place in the world,” says InVision CEO and founder Clark Valberg . In fact, it’s hard to get through a conversation with him without hearing it. And, considering that his company has grown to $100 million in annual recurring revenue, he has reason to believe his own affirmation.
InVision, the startup looking to be the Salesforce of design, has officially achieved unicorn status with the close of a $115 million Series F round, bringing the company’s total funding to $350 million. This deal values InVision at $1.9 billion, which is nearly double its valuation as of mid-2017 on the heels of its $100 million Series E financing.
Spark Capital led the round with participation from Goldman Sachs, as well as existing investors Battery Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, Tiger Global Management, FirstMark and Geodesic Capital. Atlassian also participated in the round. Earlier this year, Atlassian and InVision built out much deeper integrations, allowing Jira, Confluence and Trello users to instantly collaborate via InVision.
As part of the deal, Spark Capital’s Megan Quinn will be joining the board alongside existing board members, Amish Jani, Vas Natarajan, Simon Nebel, Lee Fixel, and Mark Hastings.
InVision started out back in 2011 as a simple prototyping tool. It let designers build out their experience without asking the engineering/dev team to actually build it, to then send to the engineering and product and marketing and executive teams for collaboration and/or approval.
Over the years, the company has stretched its efforts both up and downstream in the process, building out a full collaboration suite called InVision Cloud (so that every member of the organization can be involved in the design process), Studio, a design platform meant to take on the likes of Adobe and Sketch, and InVision Design System Manager, where design teams can manage their assets and best practices from one place.
But perhaps more impressive than InVision’s ability to build design products for designers is its ability to attract users that aren’t designers.
“Originally, I don’t think we appreciated how much the freemium model acted as a fly wheel internally within an organization,” said Megan Quinn. “Those designers weren’t just inviting designers from their own team or other teams, but PMs and Marketing and Customer Service and executives to collaborate and approve the designs. From the outside, InVision looks like a design company. But really, they start with the designer as a core customer and spread virally within an organization to serve a multitude.”
InVision has simply dominated prototyping and collaboration, today announcing it has surpassed 5 million users. What’s more, InVision has a wide variety of customers. The startup has a long and impressive list of digital first customers — including Netflix, Uber, Airbnb and Twitter — but also serves 97 percent of the Fortune 100, with customers like Adidas, General Electric, NASA, IKEA, Starbucks, and Toyota.
Part of that can be attributed to the quality of the products, but the fundamental shift to digital (as predicted by Valberg) is most certainly under way. Whether brands like it or not, customers are interacting with them more and more from behind a screen, and digital customer experience is becoming more and more important to all companies.
In fact, a McKinsey study showed that companies that are in the top quartile scores of the McKinsey Design Index outperformed their counterparts in both revenues and total returns to shareholders by as much as a factor of two.
But as with any transition, some folks are adverse to change. Valberg identifies industry education and evangelism as two big challenges for InVision.
“Organizations are not quick to change on things like design, which is why we’ve built out a Design Transformation Team,” said Valberg. “The team goes in and gets hands on with brands to help them with new practices and to achieve design maturity within the organization.”
With a fresh $115 million and 5 million users, InVision has just about everything it needs to step into a new tier of competition. Even amongst behemoths like Adobe, which pulled in $2.29 billion in revenue in Q3 alone, InVision has provided products that can both compliment and compete.
But Quinn believes that the future of InVision rests on execution.
“As with most companies, the biggest challenge will be continued excellence in execution,” said Quinn. “InVision has all the right tail winds with the right team, a great product, and excellent customers. It’s all about building and executing ahead of where the pack is going.”
Supermicro has sent a letter to its customers saying that it has found no evidence of malicious chips on its motherboards. The company asked third-party company Nardello & Co to audit Super Micro’s hardware.
On October 4, a Bloomberg report claimed that China’s spies managed to conceal tiny malicious chips on Supermicro motherboards. Those chips would then end up in data centers operated by Supermicro customers, such as Amazon and Apple.
The article quickly became controversial as nobody could corroborate the story. Both Apple and Amazon issued multiple rebuttals, putting their own reputation on the line.
Supermicro instantly denied the report and hired an outside investigations firm. Many customers also conducted multiple audits. Nardello tested motherboards that are currently in production as well as models that have been sold to Apple and Amazon in the past. The firm also looked at suspicious software activities.
Today, Nardello concluded that there’s no evidence of malicious hardware on the motherboards.
“As we have stated repeatedly since these allegations were reported, no government agency has ever informed us that it has found malicious hardware on our products; no customer has ever informed us that it found malicious hardware on our products; and we have never seen any evidence of malicious hardware on our products,” Supermicro executives wrote in the letter.
Bloomberg hasn’t published any retraction or irrefutable proof since then. But the damage is done and Supermicro shares took a nosedive, dropping over 41 percent right after the initial report was published.
In the latest instalment of VC revolving doors, Carolina Brochado, a Partner at European venture capital firm Atomico, is joining Softbank’s Vision Fund.
According to sources, Brochado informed Atomico portfolio companies earlier this week that she was joining Softbank where she’ll be based at the mega-fund‘s London office.
Noteworthy, Brochado came to prominence in the European startup ecosystem when she was made a Partner at Atomico in 2016 but had actually been with associated with the firm for 6 years, having first interned at Atomico in 2012 while studying for her MBA at Columbia. She then re-joined the VC firm as Principle in 2014 after a stint as COO at now defunct London e-commerce startup ThePresent.Co. Prior to that she had spent time in the U.S. in corporate finance and private equity.
Meanwhile, at Atomico, Brochado led multiple investments as a Partner, where she was originally recruited for her expertise and experience in financial services, and consumer/retail, particularly marketplaces. Those investments include food marketplace place Farmdrop, logistics company OnTruck, rental marketplace Fat Lama, market research company Streetbees, and health tech company Hinge Health.
Confirming her departure, Atomico provided TechCrunch with the following statement:
“Our first principle at Atomico is to hire and develop the next generation of leadership in European VC, and Carolina is the perfect example. She joined us as a summer MBA intern five years ago, came back as a Senior Associate after she graduated, [and] worked her way up to Partner… We are deeply grateful for the substantial contribution she has made to Atomico in the time she has spent with us. We are proud of her, and we look forward to working with her in her new role across the street at Softbank Vision Fund.”
I’ve reached out to Brochado for further comment and will update this post if and when I hear back. I’m also contacting Softbank but have been unable to get confirmation from the Vision Fund at the time of publication.
A string of bugs when chained together created the perfect attack to gain access to someone’s Microsoft account — simply by tricking a user into clicking a link.
Sahad Nk, an India-based bug hunter, discovered that a Microsoft subdomain, “success.office.com,” had not been properly configured, allowing him to take it over. He used a CNAME record, a canonical record used to link one domain to another, to point the unconfigured subdomain to his own Azure instance. In doing so, he controlled the subdomain — and any data sent to it, he said in a write-up, shared with TechCrunch prior to publication.
That wouldn’t be much of a problem on its own, but Nk also found that Microsoft Office, Store and Sway apps could be tricked into sending their authenticated login tokens to his newly controlled domain after a user logs in through Microsoft’s Live login system.
That’s because the vulnerable apps use a wildcard certificate, allowing all office.com — including his newly controlled subdomain — to be trusted.
Once the victim clicks on a specially crafted link sent in an email, for example, the user will log in through Microsoft’s login system using their username and password — and two-factor code, if set up — which creates an account access token to keep the user logged in without having to enter their password again and again. Obtaining an account access token is the equivalent of having someone’s credentials — and allows an attacker to break into that user’s account seamlessly, often without raising any alarms or triggering any warnings. (They’re the same kind-of account tokens that put more than 30 million Facebook accounts at risk earlier this year.)
But the malicious URL is crafted in a way that instructs Microsoft’s login system to pass the account token to Nk’s controlled subdomain — which, if it were controlled by a malicious attacker, could have put countless accounts at risk. Worse of all, the malicious URL looks legitimate — because the user still logs in through Microsoft’s systems, and the “wreply” parameter in the URL also doesn’t look suspect because it’s an Office subdomain.
In other words: anyone’s Office account — even enterprise and corporate accounts, including their email, documents and other files, could have been easily accessed by a malicious attacker — and it would have been near-impossible to discern from a legitimate user.
Nk, with the help of Paulos Yibelo, reported the bug to Microsoft, which fixed the vulnerability.
“The Microsoft Security Response Center mitigated the case in November 2018,” a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed in an email to TechCrunch. The bug was remediated by removing the CNAME record pointing to Nk’s Azure instance, he explained.
Apple’s mobile payment technology has finally launched in Germany, some four years after it debuted in the U.S.
On its newly launched Apple Pay website for Germany, Apple lists partner banks and credit card companies at launch, with customers from the likes of Deutsche Bank, O2 Banking, N26, Comdirect, HypoVerensbank, Bunq and Boon able to tap up the payment method directly.
Some fifteen banks and services are supported at launch. A further nine banks are slated as adding support in 2019, including DKB, INK and Revolut.
iOS users in the country can now add supported debit or credit cards to Apple Pay to make contactless payments with their device, rather than having to carry cash. Apple’s Face ID and Touch ID biometrics are used to a security layer to the payment system.
The local Apple Pay site also lists a selection of retailers, with Apple writing: “Apple Pay works in supermarkets, boutiques, restaurants, hotels and many other places. You can also use Apple Pay in many apps — and on participating websites with Safari on your Mac, iPhone or iPad.”
Aside from convenience, the other consumer advantage Apple touts for the system is privacy, with Apple Pay using a device-specific number and unique transaction code — and the user’s actual card numbers never stored on their device or on Apple’s servers — which means trackable card numbers aren’t shared with merchants, so purchases can’t be tied back to the individual.
While that might sound like an abstract concern, a Bloomberg report this summer revealed details of a multi-million deal in which Google pays for transaction data from Mastercard — in order to try to link online ad views with offline purchases in the US.
Facebook has also long been known to buy offline data to supplement the interest signals it collects on users from inside (and outside) its social network — further fleshing out ad-targeting profiles.
So escaping the surveillance net of one flavor of big tech can require buying into another. Or else going low tech and paying in cash.
Apple does not say what took it so long to add Germany to its now pretty long list of Apple Pay countries but Apple Insider suggests the relatively late adoption was down to pushback from local banks over fees, noting that it’s four months after the official announcement of a German launch.
It’s also true that paying by plastic isn’t always an option in Germany, as cash remains the dominant payment method of choice — also, seemingly, for privacy purposes. So Apple Pay is at least aligned with those concerns.
Southeast Asia is a growing digital marketplace and increasingly a focus for startups across the world but there haven’t been many exits.
So it’s notable, then, that struggling Chinese discount e-commerce service LightInTheBox has closed its acquisition of Singapore-based Ezbuy, which operates a cross-border selling service in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Pakistan.
The all-stock deal was first announced in November and it sees LightInTheBox, which operates worldwide, take 100 percent ownership of the company for $85.55 million as it bids to turn its business around.
LightInTheBox could certainly do with a boost. The company went public in 2013 with its shares priced at $9.50, but it has spent most the last few months priced under $1. As of today, the stock is worth $0.64, having been as high as $1.35 a month ago.
The company’s Q2 results showed revenue was down by 29 percent year-on-year, with net loss for the quarter at $9.5 million up from $1.8 million one year previous.
Indeed, that’s where the Ezbuy deal will inject new blood beyond its markets. As announced last month, Ezbuy CEO Jian He has become CEO of LightInTheBox while Meng Lian, a partner with IDG Ventures, has joined as a director. Alan Guo, LightInTheBox’s founder, stepped down from his role as CEO and chairman this past June.
Founded in 2010, Ezbuy raised just under $40 million from IDG Ventures, Sky9 Capital and others. It claims to cater to three million customers using its service which sources product from sellers in countries like China, Taiwan, the U.S, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore.
That fits with LightInTheBox’s focus on enabling cross-border commerce. Southeast Asia’s digital economy tipped to triple in size to reach $240 billion by 2025 with e-commerce alone predicted to cross $100 billion, the company has decided to dive in headfirst.
Vroom has raised $146 million in Series G funding, an expansion to a $30 million investment we reported in early September. U.S. automotive retailer AutoNation led the round for the startup, with participation from existing investors T. Rowe Price, L Catterton, General Catalyst and Fraser McCombs Capital.
The company declined to disclose the valuation, but says it was an up round. Vroom was valued at $440 million in 2016 with a $50 million financing, according to PitchBook.
Led by chief executive officer Paul Hennessy, the former CEO of Priceline.com, Vroom is an online platform for buying and selling refurbished, pre-owned cars. The company purchases used vehicles, then includes them in its online catalog, which currently lists just over 3,200 cars. Once it finds a buyer, it provides financing support through a number of lending partners, including CapitalOne and Ally, and delivers the vehicle directly to customers’ doorsteps in the U.S. To date, the company says it has sold 250,000 cars.
Founded in 2013, the company has raised $440 million in equity funding to date, but it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Earlier this year, Vroom laid off roughly 30 percent of its staff after a futile attempt at building brick-and-mortar car dealerships. As a result, Vroom shut down its Dallas dealership, which was where most of the layoffs occurred, Hennessy said. Its Houston dealership is the only in-person effort still up and running.
“Clearly our investors were supportive of the strategic steps we took,” Hennessy told TechCrunch.
Since the layoffs, Vroom has been focused on building out its leadership team. Dave Jones, who spent over a decade at Penske Automotive Group, joined as the company’s chief financial officer; Mitch Berg, who was most recently the senior vice president of technology at dailymotion, was brought on as chief technology officer; and Dennis Looney, a veteran in supply chain management, was tapped as chief supply chain officer.
The infusion of capital is necessary for the five-year-old business, which operates in a capital-intensive industry. Carvana, perhaps its largest competitor in the space, raised $300 million in equity funding and hundreds of millions in debt before going public in 2017. Auto1, a German car trading platform, has raised more than $1 billion, including a significant investment from SoftBank’s Vision Fund earlier this year.
Other digitally native vehicle retailers have fallen on hard times despite venture backing. British startups Hellocar and Carspring both shut down in 2017, and Beepi, a Silicon Valley peer-to-peer used car marketplace, brought in $150 million in VC backing before going out of business last year. Vroom acquired some of Beepi’s software as the company went under.
Vroom’s decision to halt the operations of its physical dealership looks to have satisfied investors, but whether it’s built a sustainable business that can operate without a consistent influx of VC support remains to be seen.
