Year: 2018

At the Identiverse conference in Boston today, Ping Identity announced that it has acquired Elastic Beam, a pre-Series A startup that uses artificial intelligence to monitor APIs and help understand when they have been compromised.

Ping also announced a new product, PingIntelligence for APIs, based on the Elastic Beam technology. They did not disclose the sale price.

The product itself is a pretty nifty piece of technology. It automatically detects all the API IP addresses and URLs running inside a customer. It then uses artificial intelligence to search for anomalous behavior and report back when it finds it (or it can automatically shut down access depending on how it’s configured).

“APIs are defined either in the API gateway because that facilitates creation or implemented on an application server like node.js. We created a platform that could bring a level of protection to both,” company founder Bernard Harguindeguy told TechCrunch.

It may seem like an odd match for Ping, which after all, is an enterprise identity company, but there are reasonable connections here. Perhaps the biggest is that CEO Andre Durand wants to see his company making increasing use of AI and machine learning for identity security in general. It’s also worth noting that his company has had an API security product in its portfolio for over five years, so it’s not a huge stretch to buy Elastic Beam.

With this purchase, Ping has not only acquired some advanced technology, it has also acqui-hired a team of AI and machine learning experts that could help inject the entire Ping product line with AI and machine learning smarts. “Nobody should be surprised who has been watching that Ping will drive machine learning AI and general intelligence into our identity platform,” Durand said.

Harguindeguy certainly sees the potential here. “I think we can over time bring a high level of monitoring and intelligence to Ping to understand whether an identity may have been used by someone else or being misused somehow,” he said.

Harguindeguy will join Ping Identity as Senior Vice President of Intelligence along with his entire team. Neither company would divulge the exact number of employees, but Durand did acknowledge it fell somewhere between the 11 and 50 mentioned in the company Crunchbase profile. The original team consisted of around 10 according to  Harguindeguy and they have been hiring for some time, so fair to say more than 11, but less than 50.

Harguindeguy says they were pursued by more than one company (although he wouldn’t say who those other companies were), but he felt that Ping provided a good cultural match for his company and could take them where they wanted to go faster than they could on their own, even with Series A money.

“We realized this is going to be really big. How do we go after the market really strongly really fast? We saw that we could could fuse this really fast with Ping and have strong go- to market with with them,” he said.

Durand acknowledged that Ping, which was itself acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $600 million two years ago, couldn’t have made such an acquisition without the backing of a larger firm like this. “There was there was no chance we could have done either UnboundID (which the company acquired in August 2016) or Elastic Beam on our own. This was purely an artifact of being part of the Vista family portfolio,” he said.

PingIntelligence for APIs, the product based on Elastic Beam’s technology, is currently in private preview. It should be generally available some time later this year.

Online fraud detection startup CashShield, whose clients include Alibaba and Razer, announced today that it has raised a $20 million Series B led by Temasek Holdings and returning investor GGV Capital. Participants also included Next co-founder Tony Fadell, another returning investor, Wavemaker Partners and Tao Zhang.

CashShield says it has now raised a total of $25.5 million, including a Series A announced last September. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Singapore, CashShield also has offices in Europe, China and the United States, where it launched last year and now counts Yamibuy and Scalefast among its users. CashShield claims its technology currently secures about 10 million user accounts and $500 million GMV in transactions each month.

The startup says personal account data is much more valuable than credit card information, because it can sell for 60 times more. Some of the Series B will be spent on research and development to develop new tools.

“Currently CashShield caters to securing against payment and account fraud, but is also working on adding on different fraud screening abilities to secure all vulnerable entries to fraud, including click fraud, IoT authentication, claims fraud and KYT [know your transaction],” founder and chief executive officer Justin Lie told TechCrunch in an email. “As such, we are looking to invest further efforts to build our R&D capabilities to enhance the core technology while scaling more aggressively in the markets we are targeting globally.”

CashShield’s fraud management competitors include Signifyd, Riskified and Forter. Lie said his company differentiates because it combines several approaches, including artificial intelligence and proprietary high frequency trading algorithms and is “fully-machine operated and able to function without the need for human intervention.”

“Other solutions such as Signifyd, Riskified and Forter still need to deploy humans to complete their fraud screening process, but is easy for fraudsters to get ahead of as fraudsters themselves are using machine learning to launch sophisticated coordinated fraud attacks,” he said.

The company’s verticals currently include e-commerce, digital products, telecommunications and online travel, though Lie has said in the past that its tools can also potentially be used to verify social media accounts and fight the proliferation of fake news. Lie explained that CashShield’s current fraud prevention technology detects and prevents the creation of mass accounts and it is also able to detect mass account takeovers of genuine user accounts, which is often used to spread fake news.

“Most recommend relying on two factor authentication to prevent account takeovers, but other than creating friction to user experience, many users are also unwilling to store more personal information (e.g. phone numbers) in the system,” said Lie. “Rather, CashShield uses real-time surveillance to detect if login behavior is of a genuine person or part of a coordinated fraud attack, and is able to block fraudsters from accessing stolen accounts instantly, and prevent them from using the accounts to spread fake news.”

In a press statement, GGV Capital managing partner Jenny Lee said “Justin is a strong leader with a clear vision. The growth CashShield has shown over the past year has boosted our confidence in their potential and the quality of their technology.”

TourRadar, the online travel agency (OTA) that targets the multi-day touring market, continues to be on a roll. The Vienna, Austria-headquartered company, which also has offices in Brisbane and Toronto, has raised $50 million in Series C funding.

Consisting mostly of primary funding, the round is led by the Silicon Valley growth VC firm TCV, with participation from existing investors Cherry Ventures, Endeit Capital, Hoxton Ventures, and Speedinvest. Notably, TCV previously backed Expedia and Airbnb and so has a very decent track record in travel.

Erik Blachford, a venture partner at TCV and already an angel investor in TourRadar, has joined the company’s supervisory board. Blachford was previously President and CEO of IAC Travel, managing all of IAC’s travel assets including Expedia and Hotels.com. Again, a very good fit for TourRadar as it looks to scale up going forward.

In a call, TourRadar co-founder and CEO Travis Pittman — who founded the company with his brother — told me he was glad to have finally got Blachford on his board. The pair first met at a conference a few years back when Pittman heard the ex-Expedia CEO wax lyrical about the need for an OTA that serviced the group multi-day tour industry. He approached him afterwards to say that TourRadar wanted to be that company.

Not to be confused with something like GetYourGuide, which focuses more on travel experiences that take up part or all of a single day, TourRadar is a place to book a multi-day tour in the same way you might book a package holiday. To deliver this, the company works with more than 600 large and small local tour operators across Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. These include well-known operators such as G Adventures, Contiki, and Collette, and hundreds of specialty operators that otherwise would rely purely on local agents and word of mouth. In total, TourRadar offers more than 25,000 tours in 200 countries.

In fact, Pittman says TourRadar’s main competitor is large incumbent tour package companies, and that multi-day tours are one of the last areas of the travel industry that has not fully moved online. Another interesting tidbit regards TourRadar’s potential for growth: the company so far only targets english speaking consumers. Next on the roadmap is a lot more localisation, says the TourRadar CEO, with Germany, for example, a huge travel market.

To that end, TourRadar says it intends to use the funding to expand its team globally and to invest in the technology platform “to provide a personalized user experience for customers in new and existing source markets across the globe”. One area of focus will be developing a proper TourRadar mobile app — yes, really! — as Pittman reckons mobile, thus so far neglected, is a great platform for inspiration and discovery when deciding where to book your next tour.

More broadly, the platform supports operator partners in various ways, including offering instant bookings and tour review functionality, but there is room to go a lot further. This could include re-introducing community features to enable people who are planning to be in the same tour cohort to get in touch with one another before, during and after a tour.

Because autonomous delivery drones are undoubtedly coming, Boeing HorizonX Ventures, the aviation company’s venture arm, led a $16 million round in drone startup Matternet . Other investors include Swiss Post, Sony Innovation Fund and Levitate Capital. With this funding, Matternet’s plan is to further expand throughout the U.S. and internationally in urban environments.

“Matternet’s technology and proven track record make the development of a safe, global autonomous air mobility system a near-term reality,” Boeing HorizonX Ventures Managing Director Brian Schettler said in a statement. “Between the company’s success in Switzerland and being selected by the FAA to test unmanned aerial networks in the U.S., we are excited to work together to reimagine how the world connects and shape the next generation of transportation solutions.”

Just last month, the Federal Aviation Administration selected, among others, Matternet for drone logistics operations for U.S. hospitals as part of its Unmanned Aircraft System pilot program. In 2015, Matternet started testing the first drone delivery system in Zurich, Switzerland to transport blood and pathology samples to labs.

Matternet has since expanded its operations in Switzerland, and has conducted more than 1,700 flights over densely populated areas to make more than 850 deliveries of patient samples.

Ecommerce giants Alibaba, Amazon, eBay and Rakuten have agreed to speed up the removal of dangerous goods being sold on their online marketplaces within the European Union.

The EU’s executive body, the Commission, said the four companies have committed to responding to notifications on dangerous products from Member State authorities within 2 working days, and to take action on notices from customers within 5 working days.

Although the pledge is not legally binding. But the Commission is clearly hoping that companies can be persuaded to self-regulate in the first instance, given the ever-present possibility of laws being drafted to more tightly legally rule their activities.

In a statement welcoming the move, the EU commissioner for justice, consumers and gender equality, Vĕra Jourová, called on other other marketplace to join the initiative, saying: “More and more people in the EU are shopping online. E-commerce has opened up new possibilities for consumers, offering them more choice at lower prices. Consumers should be just as safe when they buy online, as when they buy in a shop.”

The Commission says online sales in the EU represented a fifth of the total sales in 2016 — a percentage that’s expected to increase in the coming years.

The Product Safety Pledge covers non-food consumer products being sold by third parties on online marketplaces, and includes a commitment to provide a clear way for customers to report dangerous product listings and also have an internal mechanism for take-down procedures.

“The ultimate goal is to improve the detection of unsafe products marketed in the EU before they are sold to consumers or as soon thereafter as possible, and to improve consumer protection,” it writes. “These commitments will go beyond what is already established in the EU legislation, including those on product safety.”

Other components of the pledge state the companies will:

• Cooperate with authorities and set up a process aimed at proactively removing banned product groups as appropriate
• Put in place measures to act against repeat offenders offering dangerous products in cooperation with authorities
• Take measures aimed at preventing the reappearance of dangerous product listings already removed
• Explore the potential use of new technologies and innovation to improve the detection of unsafe products

So there are potentially some startup opportunities around enhancing detection systems.

While the Commission making efforts to limit access to dangerous goods online is unlikely to be too controversial, it has generally been pushing for proactive or radically rapid removals of various types of problem content, and wading into controversy as a result.

Its approach to copyrighted content has attracted the most controversy, with critics arguing it’s regressive and wildly disproportionate.

Yet despite vocal opposition from multiple corners of the digital ecosystem, earlier this month EU lawmakers moved a step closer to requiring all user generated content be copyright pre-filtered prior to being uploaded — apparently comfortable with the idea that meme-makers might have to go through an appeals process just to get their remixed snark unblocked. 

However support for the Commission’s approach to regulating online content generally seems widespread among EU member states.

And on the terrorist propaganda content front, the UK government has been pushing even harder, for proactive removals — unveiling an AI tool in February that it said could be used to automatically detect ISIS propaganda. (Though it has not forced any companies to use it.)

The Commission hasn’t gone so far where terrorist content is concerned — but it’s one-hour rule-of-thumb for terrorist takedowns is getting pretty close. On hate speech content generally it continues to apply pressure on platforms to respond more quickly, with the omnipresent threat that if they don’t keep up it could step in and legislate — as Germany already has.

As companies get bigger and bigger, all the critical information about a company — even its mission and culture statements — can get lost in a massive pile of Google Docs or files strewn across dozens of collaboration tools, making it nearly impossible to find. That’s where the team behind EveryTeam hopes to step in and clean things up.

EveryTeam serves as a sort of hub for all of the documents and core information about a company — a kind of living library that adapts over time and can easily suck in new information as it comes about. The idea is that employees might not necessarily be going to the same internal portal for that information, or might not be updating that portal, and the information continues to sit across multiple different buckets within a company. The company came about from former GitHubbers Todd Berman, Connor Sears, and Scott Goldman, which are looking to bring that same level of collaboration and simplicity to access to internal employee information. The startup said it has raised $3 million in a seed round from Harrison Metal, Upside Partnership, Index Ventures and Greylock Partners.

“People end up creating content in them but struggling to maintain content in these [internal communications] tools,” CEO Todd Berman said. “Whether they’re using a combination of Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper, or Confluence, there’s tons of people trying to do a lot of different things here. A lot of these tools are focused on the creation, where people felt there was a lot of opportunity. But for our potential customers, the issue is that their content is all over the place. it’s not in one spot.”

EVERYTEAM TOP

 

EveryTeam works to surface up those kinds of critical employee documents that are probably fine to just exist in some Google Drive somewhere very early on — which might include the information for the WiFi or the schedule for office snacks. But as more and more docs flow in, EveryTeam has to parse through all of those and ensure that the right important ones are surfaced up in front of everyone, especially as they become more and more important over time. For larger and large companies, that content management can get out of control and devolve into a lot of messages across the organization just to find a single document. EveryTeam integrates with GitHub, Google Drive, Dropbox, Figma, and Airtable among others.

“It ends up looking in a lot of cases like how GitHub works — GitHub is a tool to maintain, curate and publish software. You’re publishing source code, but a lot of the workflows feel very natural and feel very similar. Ultimately, where we ended up from a product perspective is, it’s more about being a layer on top of these services [like Box] to provide a plane of organization.”

EveryTeam isn’t the only startup looking to rethink the internal employee wiki. Slite, another startup looking to create an intelligent internal notes tool that can serve as a hub of information for employees, also said it raised $4.4 million earlier this year. The idea there is to bring the Slack-like simplicity that has become popular among employees — at least, at the startup level — to a variety of different areas that haven’t changed in a while. Internal note-taking, and that Wiki functionality, is one. EveryTeam decided to work with the idea that content is just going to exist all over the place anyway, and try to fit into the employee workflow that way.

“You want to curate and expose content that exists in ten to 12 different tools you use every day,” Berman said. “Ultimately, that’s part of my day-to-day flow. I’m usually in four to five web apps. When [some tools] take the Slack model they often get very focused on recency, and that determines an arbiter of value.[You have to think], what is the desire path for a document that becomes load-bearing in the company. It starts off a little weird, people edit it, it ideates and matures, and it stands the test of time. How do you create an application that helps that happen.”

As companies get bigger and bigger, all the critical information about a company — even its mission and culture statements — can get lost in a massive pile of Google Docs or files strewn across dozens of collaboration tools, making it nearly impossible to find. That’s where the team behind EveryTeam hopes to step in and clean things up.

EveryTeam serves as a sort of hub for all of the documents and core information about a company — a kind of living library that adapts over time and can easily suck in new information as it comes about. The idea is that employees might not necessarily be going to the same internal portal for that information, or might not be updating that portal, and the information continues to sit across multiple different buckets within a company. The company came about from former GitHubbers Todd Berman, Connor Sears, and Scott Goldman, which are looking to bring that same level of collaboration and simplicity to access to internal employee information. The startup said it has raised $3 million in a seed round from Harrison Metal, Upside Partnership, Index Ventures and Greylock Partners.

“People end up creating content in them but struggling to maintain content in these [internal communications] tools,” CEO Todd Berman said. “Whether they’re using a combination of Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper, or Confluence, there’s tons of people trying to do a lot of different things here. A lot of these tools are focused on the creation, where people felt there was a lot of opportunity. But for our potential customers, the issue is that their content is all over the place. it’s not in one spot.”

EVERYTEAM TOP

 

EveryTeam works to surface up those kinds of critical employee documents that are probably fine to just exist in some Google Drive somewhere very early on — which might include the information for the WiFi or the schedule for office snacks. But as more and more docs flow in, EveryTeam has to parse through all of those and ensure that the right important ones are surfaced up in front of everyone, especially as they become more and more important over time. For larger and large companies, that content management can get out of control and devolve into a lot of messages across the organization just to find a single document. EveryTeam integrates with GitHub, Google Drive, Dropbox, Figma, and Airtable among others.

“It ends up looking in a lot of cases like how GitHub works — GitHub is a tool to maintain, curate and publish software. You’re publishing source code, but a lot of the workflows feel very natural and feel very similar. Ultimately, where we ended up from a product perspective is, it’s more about being a layer on top of these services [like Box] to provide a plane of organization.”

EveryTeam isn’t the only startup looking to rethink the internal employee wiki. Slite, another startup looking to create an intelligent internal notes tool that can serve as a hub of information for employees, also said it raised $4.4 million earlier this year. The idea there is to bring the Slack-like simplicity that has become popular among employees — at least, at the startup level — to a variety of different areas that haven’t changed in a while. Internal note-taking, and that Wiki functionality, is one. EveryTeam decided to work with the idea that content is just going to exist all over the place anyway, and try to fit into the employee workflow that way.

“You want to curate and expose content that exists in ten to 12 different tools you use every day,” Berman said. “Ultimately, that’s part of my day-to-day flow. I’m usually in four to five web apps. When [some tools] take the Slack model they often get very focused on recency, and that determines an arbiter of value.[You have to think], what is the desire path for a document that becomes load-bearing in the company. It starts off a little weird, people edit it, it ideates and matures, and it stands the test of time. How do you create an application that helps that happen.”

Aclima, a San Francisco-based company which builds Internet-connected air quality sensors and runs a software platform to analyze the extracted intel, has closed a $24 million Series A to grow the business including by expanding its headcount and securing more fleet partnerships to build out the reach and depth of its pollution maps.

The Series A is led by Social Capital which is joining the board. Also participating in the round: The Schmidt Family Foundation, Emerson Collective, Radicle Impact, Rethink Impact, Plum Alley, Kapor Capital and First Philippine Holdings.

Three years ago Aclima came out of stealth, detailing a collaboration with Google on mapping air quality in its offices and also outdoors, by putting sensors on StreetView cars.

Though it has actually been working on the core problem of environmental sensing and intelligence for about a decade at this point, according to co-founder Davida Herzl.

“What we’ve really been doing over the course of the last few years is solving the really difficult technical challenges in generating this kind of data. Which is a revolution of air quality and climate change emissions data that hasn’t existed before,” she tells TechCrunch.

“Last year we announced the results of our state wide demonstration project in California where we mapped the Bay Area, the Central Valley, Los Angeles. And really demonstrated the power of the data to drive new science, decision making across the private and public sector.”

Also last year it published a study in collaboration with the University of Texas showing that pollution is hyperlocal — thereby supporting its thesis that effective air quality mapping requires dense networks of sensors if you’re going to truly reflect the variable reality on the ground.

“You can have the best air quality and the worst air quality on the same street,” says Herzl. “And that really gives us a new view — a new understanding of emissions but actually demonstrated the need for hyperlocal measurement to protect human health but also to manage those emissions.

“That data set has been applied across a variety of scientific research including studies that really showed the linkages between hyperlocal data and cardiovascular risk. In LA our black carbon data was used to support increased filtration in schools to protect school children.”

“Our technology is really a proof point for emerging and new legislation in California that’s going to require community based monitoring across the entire state,” she adds. “So all of that work in California has really demonstrated the power of our platform — and that has really set us up to scale, and the funding round is going to enable us to take this to a lot more cities and regions and users.”

Asked about potential international expansion — given the presence of strategic investors from south east Asia backing the round — Herzl says Aclima has had a “global view” for the business from the beginning, even while much of its early work has focused on California, adding: “We definitely have global ambitions and we will be making more announcements about that soon.”

Its strategy for growing the reach and depth of its air quality maps is focused on increasing its partnerships with fleets — so there’s a slight irony there given the vehicles being repurposed as air quality sensing nodes might themselves be contributing to the problem (Herzl sidestepped a question of whether Uber might be an interesting fleet partner for it, given the company’s current attempts to reinvent itself as a socially responsible corporate — including encouraging its drivers to go electric).

“Our mapping capabilities are amplified through our partnerships with fleets,” she says, pointing to Google’s StreetView cars as one current example (though this is not an exclusive partnership arrangement; a London air quality mapping project involving StreetView cars which was announced earlier this month is using hardware from a rival UK air quality sensor company, called Air Monitors, for example).

But flush with fresh Series A funding Aclima will be working on getting its kit on board more fleets — relying on third parties to build out the utility of its software platform for policymakers and communities.

“There’s a number of fleets that we are going to be speaking about our partnerships with but our platform can be integrated with any fleet type and we believe that is an incredible advantage and position for the company in really achieving our vision of creating a global platform for environmental intelligence to help cities and entire countries really manage climate risk at a scale that really hasn’t been possible before,” she adds.

“Our technology provides 100,000x greater spacial resolution than existing approaches and we do it at 100-1,000x cost reduction so our vision is to be the GPS of the environment — a new layer of environmental awareness and intelligence that really informs day to day decisions.

“We’re really excited because it’s taken really years of work. I incorporated Aclima 10 years ago and started really working on the technology around 2010. So this has taken… a tremendous amount of technical development and scientific rigor with partners… to really have the technology at a place where it’s really set up to scale.”

It finances (or part financies) the deployment of its sensors on the vehicles of fleet partners — with Aclima’s business model focused on monetizing the interpretation of the data provided by its SaaS platform. So a chunk of the Series A will be going to help pay for more sensor rollouts.

In terms of what fleet partners get back from agreeing for their vehicles to become mobile air quality sensing nodes, Herzl says it’s dependent on the partner. And Aclima’s isn’t naming any additional names on that front yet.

“It’s specific to each fleet. But I can say that in the case of Google we’re working with Google Earth outreach and the team at StreetView… to really reflect their commitment to sustainability but also to expand access to this kind of information,” she says of the perks for fleets, adding: “We’ll be talking more about that as we make announcement about our other partners.”

The Series A financing will also go on funding continued product development, with Aclima hoping to keep adding to the tally of pollutants it can identify and map — building on a list which includes the likes of CO2, methane and particulate matter.

“We have a very ambitious roadmap. And our roadmap is expansive — ultimately our vision is to make the invisible visible, across all of the pollutants and factors in the invisible layer of air that supports life. We want to make all of that visible — that’s our long term vision,” she says.

“Today we’re measuring all of the core gaseous pollutants that are regulated as well as the core climate change gases… We are not only deploying and expanding our platform’s availability but in our R&D efforts investing in next generation sensing technologies, whether it’s the tiniest PM2.5 sensor in the world to on our roadmap really having the ability to speciate COC [chlorinated organic compounds].

“We can’t do that today but are working on it and that is an area that is really important for specific communities but for industry and for policy makers as well.”

A key part of its ongoing engineering work is focused on shrinking certain sensing technologies — both in size and cost. As that’s the key to the sought for ubiquity, says Herzl.

“There’s a lot of hard work happening there to shrink [sensors],” she notes. “We’re talking about sensors that are the size of a thumb tack. Traditional technologies for this are very large, very difficult to deploy… so it’s not that capabilities don’t exist today but we’re working on shrinking those capabilities down into really, really tiny components so that we can achieve ubiquity… You have to shrink down the size but also reduce the cost so that you can deploy thousands, millions of these things.”

Commenting on the funding round in a supporting statement, Jay Zaveri, partner at Social Capital, added: “Aclima has successfully opened up an entirely new market domain with their innovative approach, tackling one of the biggest global challenges of our time. With a proven ability to quantify emissions and human exposure to pollution at global resolutions previously impossible, Aclima creates enormous opportunities for industry, cities and society.”

Aclima, a San Francisco-based company which builds Internet-connected air quality sensors and runs a software platform to analyze the extracted intel, has closed a $24 million Series A to grow the business including by expanding its headcount and securing more fleet partnerships to build out the reach and depth of its pollution maps.

The Series A is led by Social Capital which is joining the board. Also participating in the round: The Schmidt Family Foundation, Emerson Collective, Radicle Impact, Rethink Impact, Plum Alley, Kapor Capital and First Philippine Holdings.

Three years ago Aclima came out of stealth, detailing a collaboration with Google on mapping air quality in its offices and also outdoors, by putting sensors on StreetView cars.

Though it has actually been working on the core problem of environmental sensing and intelligence for about a decade at this point, according to co-founder Davida Herzl.

“What we’ve really been doing over the course of the last few years is solving the really difficult technical challenges in generating this kind of data. Which is a revolution of air quality and climate change emissions data that hasn’t existed before,” she tells TechCrunch.

“Last year we announced the results of our state wide demonstration project in California where we mapped the Bay Area, the Central Valley, Los Angeles. And really demonstrated the power of the data to drive new science, decision making across the private and public sector.”

Also last year it published a study in collaboration with the University of Texas showing that pollution is hyperlocal — thereby supporting its thesis that effective air quality mapping requires dense networks of sensors if you’re going to truly reflect the variable reality on the ground.

“You can have the best air quality and the worst air quality on the same street,” says Herzl. “And that really gives us a new view — a new understanding of emissions but actually demonstrated the need for hyperlocal measurement to protect human health but also to manage those emissions.

“That data set has been applied across a variety of scientific research including studies that really showed the linkages between hyperlocal data and cardiovascular risk. In LA our black carbon data was used to support increased filtration in schools to protect school children.”

“Our technology is really a proof point for emerging and new legislation in California that’s going to require community based monitoring across the entire state,” she adds. “So all of that work in California has really demonstrated the power of our platform — and that has really set us up to scale, and the funding round is going to enable us to take this to a lot more cities and regions and users.”

Asked about potential international expansion — given the presence of strategic investors from south east Asia backing the round — Herzl says Aclima has had a “global view” for the business from the beginning, even while much of its early work has focused on California, adding: “We definitely have global ambitions and we will be making more announcements about that soon.”

Its strategy for growing the reach and depth of its air quality maps is focused on increasing its partnerships with fleets — so there’s a slight irony there given the vehicles being repurposed as air quality sensing nodes might themselves be contributing to the problem (Herzl sidestepped a question of whether Uber might be an interesting fleet partner for it, given the company’s current attempts to reinvent itself as a socially responsible corporate — including encouraging its drivers to go electric).

“Our mapping capabilities are amplified through our partnerships with fleets,” she says, pointing to Google’s StreetView cars as one current example (though this is not an exclusive partnership arrangement; a London air quality mapping project involving StreetView cars which was announced earlier this month is using hardware from a rival UK air quality sensor company, called Air Monitors, for example).

But flush with fresh Series A funding Aclima will be working on getting its kit on board more fleets — relying on third parties to build out the utility of its software platform for policymakers and communities.

“There’s a number of fleets that we are going to be speaking about our partnerships with but our platform can be integrated with any fleet type and we believe that is an incredible advantage and position for the company in really achieving our vision of creating a global platform for environmental intelligence to help cities and entire countries really manage climate risk at a scale that really hasn’t been possible before,” she adds.

“Our technology provides 100,000x greater spacial resolution than existing approaches and we do it at 100-1,000x cost reduction so our vision is to be the GPS of the environment — a new layer of environmental awareness and intelligence that really informs day to day decisions.

“We’re really excited because it’s taken really years of work. I incorporated Aclima 10 years ago and started really working on the technology around 2010. So this has taken… a tremendous amount of technical development and scientific rigor with partners… to really have the technology at a place where it’s really set up to scale.”

It finances (or part financies) the deployment of its sensors on the vehicles of fleet partners — with Aclima’s business model focused on monetizing the interpretation of the data provided by its SaaS platform. So a chunk of the Series A will be going to help pay for more sensor rollouts.

In terms of what fleet partners get back from agreeing for their vehicles to become mobile air quality sensing nodes, Herzl says it’s dependent on the partner. And Aclima’s isn’t naming any additional names on that front yet.

“It’s specific to each fleet. But I can say that in the case of Google we’re working with Google Earth outreach and the team at StreetView… to really reflect their commitment to sustainability but also to expand access to this kind of information,” she says of the perks for fleets, adding: “We’ll be talking more about that as we make announcement about our other partners.”

The Series A financing will also go on funding continued product development, with Aclima hoping to keep adding to the tally of pollutants it can identify and map — building on a list which includes the likes of CO2, methane and particulate matter.

“We have a very ambitious roadmap. And our roadmap is expansive — ultimately our vision is to make the invisible visible, across all of the pollutants and factors in the invisible layer of air that supports life. We want to make all of that visible — that’s our long term vision,” she says.

“Today we’re measuring all of the core gaseous pollutants that are regulated as well as the core climate change gases… We are not only deploying and expanding our platform’s availability but in our R&D efforts investing in next generation sensing technologies, whether it’s the tiniest PM2.5 sensor in the world to on our roadmap really having the ability to speciate COC [chlorinated organic compounds].

“We can’t do that today but are working on it and that is an area that is really important for specific communities but for industry and for policy makers as well.”

A key part of its ongoing engineering work is focused on shrinking certain sensing technologies — both in size and cost. As that’s the key to the sought for ubiquity, says Herzl.

“There’s a lot of hard work happening there to shrink [sensors],” she notes. “We’re talking about sensors that are the size of a thumb tack. Traditional technologies for this are very large, very difficult to deploy… so it’s not that capabilities don’t exist today but we’re working on shrinking those capabilities down into really, really tiny components so that we can achieve ubiquity… You have to shrink down the size but also reduce the cost so that you can deploy thousands, millions of these things.”

Commenting on the funding round in a supporting statement, Jay Zaveri, partner at Social Capital, added: “Aclima has successfully opened up an entirely new market domain with their innovative approach, tackling one of the biggest global challenges of our time. With a proven ability to quantify emissions and human exposure to pollution at global resolutions previously impossible, Aclima creates enormous opportunities for industry, cities and society.”

A report by the UK’s Electoral Commission has called for urgent changes in the law to increase transparency about how digital tools are being used for political campaigning, warning that an atmosphere of mistrust is threatening the democratic process.

The oversight body, which also regulates campaign spending, has spent the past year examining how digital campaigning was used in the UK’s 2016 EU referendum and 2017 general election — as well as researching public opinion to get voters’ views on digital campaigning issues.

Among the changes the Commission wants to see is greater clarity around election spending to try to prevent foreign entities pouring money into domestic campaigns, and beefed up financial regulations including bigger penalties for breaking election spending rules.

It also has an ongoing investigation into whether pro-Brexit campaigns — including the official Vote Leave campaign — broke spending rules. And last week the BBC reported on a leaked draft of the report suggesting the Commission will find the campaigns broke the law.

Last month the Leave.EU Brexit campaign was also fined £70,000 after a Commission investigation found it had breached multiple counts of electoral law during the referendum.

Given the far larger sums now routinely being spent on elections — another pro-Brexit group, Vote Leave, had a £7M spending limit (though it has also been accused of exceeding that) — it’s clear the Commission needs far larger teeth if it’s to have any hope of enforcing the law.

Digital tools have lowered the barrier of entry for election fiddling, while also helping to ramp up democratic participation.

“On digital campaigning, our starting point is that elections depend on participation, which is why we welcome the positive value of online communications. New ways of reaching voters are good for everyone, and we must be careful not to undermine free speech in our search to protect voters. But we also fully recognise the worries of many, the atmosphere of mistrust which is being created, and the urgent need for action to tackle this,” writes commission chair John Holmes.

“Funding of online campaigning is already covered by the laws on election spending and donations. But the laws need to ensure more clarity about who is spending what, and where and how, and bigger sanctions for those who break the rules.

“This report is therefore a call to action for the UK’s governments and parliaments to change the rules to make it easier for voters to know who is targeting them online, and to make unacceptable behaviour harder. The public opinion research we publish alongside this report demonstrates the level of concern and confusion amongst voters and the will for new action.”

The Commission’s key recommendations are:

• Each of the UK’s governments and legislatures should change the law so that digital material must have an imprint saying who is behind the campaign and who created it

• Each of the UK’s governments and legislatures should amend the rules for reporting spending. They should make campaigners sub-divide their spending returns into different types of spending. These categories should give more information about the money spent on digital campaigns

• Campaigners should be required to provide more detailed and meaningful invoices from their digital suppliers to improve transparency

• Social media companies should work with us to improve their policies on campaign material and advertising for elections and referendums in the UK

• UK election and referendum adverts on social media platforms should be labelled to make the source clear. Their online databases of political adverts should follow the UK’s rules for elections and referendums

• Each of the UK’s governments and legislatures should clarify that spending on election or referendum campaigns by foreign organisations or individuals is not allowed. They would need to consider how it could be enforced and the impact on free speech

• We will make proposals to campaigners and each of the UK’s governments about how to improve the rules and deadlines for reporting spending. We want information to be available to voters and us more quickly after a campaign, or during
• Each of the UK’s governments and legislatures should increase the maximum fine we can sanction campaigners for breaking the rules, and strengthen our powers to obtain information outside of an investigation

The recommendations follow revelations by Chris Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower (pictured at the top of this post) — who has detailed to journalists and regulators how Facebook users’ personal data was obtained and passed to the now defunct political consultancy for political campaigning activity without people’s knowledge or consent.

In addition to the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, Facebook has also been rocked by earlier revelations of how extensively Kremlin-backed agents used its ad targeting tools to try to sew social division at scale — including targeting the 2016 US presidential election.

The Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has since been called before US and EU lawmakers to answer questions about how his platform operates and the risks it’s posing to democratic processes.

The company has announced a series of changes intended to make it more difficult for third parties to obtain user data, and to increase transparency around political advertising — adding a requirement for such ads to continue details of how has paid for them, for example, and also offering a searchable archive.

Although critics question whether the company is going far enough — asking, for example, how it intends to determine what is and is not a political advert.

Facebook is not offering a searchable archive for all ads on its platform, for example.

Zuckerberg has also been accused of equivocating in the face of lawmakers’ concerns, with politicians on both sides of the Atlantic calling him out for providing evasive, misleading or intentionally obfuscating responses to concerns and questions around how his platform operates.

The Electoral Commission makes a direct call for social media firms to do more to increase transparency around digital political advertising and remove messages which “do not meet the right standards”.

“If this turns out to be insufficient, the UK’s governments and parliaments should be ready to consider direct regulation,” it also warns. 

We’ve reached out to Facebook comment and will update this post with any response.

A Cabinet Office spokeswoman told us it would send the government response to the Electoral Commission report shortly — so we’ll also update this post when we have that.

The UK’s data protection watchdog, the ICO, has an ongoing investigating into the use of social media data for political campaigning — and commissioner Elizabeth Denham recently made a call for stronger disclosure rules around political ads and a code of conduct for social media firms. The body is expected to publish the results of its long-running investigation shortly.

At the same time, a DCMS committee has been running an inquiry into the impact of fake news and disinformation online, including examining the impact on the political process. Though Zuckerberg has declined its requests for him to personally testify — sending a number of minions in his place, including CTO Mike Schroepfer who was grilled for around five hours by irate MPs and his answers still left them dissatisfied.

The committee will set out the results of this inquiry in another report touching on the impact of big tech on democratic processes — likely in the coming months. Committee chair Damian Collins tweeted today to say the inquiry has “also highlighted how out of date our election laws are in a world increasingly dominated by big tech media”.

On its forthcoming Brexit campaign spending report, an Electoral Commission spokesperson told us: “In accordance with its Enforcement Policy, the Electoral Commission has written to Vote Leave, Mr Darren Grimes and Veterans for Britain to advise each campaigner of the outcome of the investigation announced on 20 November 2017. The campaigners have 28 days to make representations before final decisions are taken. The Commission will announce the outcome of the investigation and publish an investigation report once this final decision has been taken.”