Year: 2018

Vulcan Cyber, a Tel Aviv-based security startup that helps enterprises quickly detect and fix vulnerabilities in their software stack and code, is coming out of stealth today and announcing a $4 million seed round led by YL Ventures with participation from r a number of other cybersecurity investors.

The general idea behind Vulcan Cyber is that as businesses continue to increase the pace at which they build and adopt new software, the risk of introducing vulnerabilities only increases. But at the same time, most companies don’t have the tools in place to automatically detect and mitigate these issues, meaning that it can often take weeks before a patch rolls out.

The company argues that its position in the cybersecurity space is somewhat unique because it doesn’t just focus on detecting vulnerabilities but also helps businesses remediate them. All users have to do is give Vulcan access to the APIs of their existing vulnerability, DevOps and IT tools and the service will simply take over from there. It then watches over both the infrastructure as well as the code that runs on it.

“It might sound more glamorous to talk about zero-day and next-generation threats, but vulnerability remediation is truly where the rubber meets the road,” said Yaniv Bar-Dayan, Vulcan Cyber’s CEO and co-founder. “The only way to deal with this continuous risk exposure is through continuous remediation, achieved with robust data collection, advanced analytics, automation, and closed-loop remediation planning, orchestration and validation. This is exactly what we are delivering to IT security teams with Vulcan Cyber.”

Vulcan cyber plays nicely with all o the major cloud platforms, as well as tools like Puppet, Chef and Ansible, as well as GitHub and Bitbucket. It also integrates with a number of major security testing tools and vulnerability scanners, including Black Duck, Nessus, Fortify, Tripwire, Checkmarx, Rapid7 and Veracode.

Skydio‘s first major update to their crazy cool self-flying drone fixes its 13 eyes on a new object to follow at high speeds: cars.

The Bay Area startup has expanded following capabilities of its R1 drone beyond just humans, with cars now firmly within their sights. Now, you’ll still be limited by the devices 25mph so this won’t be shooting any Nascar races, but the self-flying drone will be able to track and follow vehicles as they move through challenging terrain that would be impossible to film previously without a skilled drone pilot.

Just don’t send this thing following after a self-driving car — unless you want the two to probably run away together and come back with a vengeance at a later date.

In our review of the R1 drone, we were struck by the strength of its core tech and excited by the promise offered by future software updates. Well, less than two months later, new functionality is already coming to the device with this big new update.

In addition to the new car mode, Skydio has also updated its Lead mode which aims to plot a user’s path before they take it and shoot footage accordingly. The company says that the new update will bring “more intelligent behavior” when it comes to navigating obstacles. New “quarter lead” and “quarter follow” modes also shift the perspective from only allowing straight-on or profile shots.

The Skydio R1 Frontier Edition goes for a decently pricey $2,499 and the new update goes live today .

At CES in January, TechCrunch broke the news that media software maker Plex was planning to expand its service with the addition of new media content, starting with podcasts. Today, it’s making good on that promise by launching support for podcasts into beta, along with a whole new look and more customization options for its Plex mobile apps.

While Plex got its start as a software application for organizing people’s home media collections, it’s been expanding over the past couple of years to add new features in support of cord cutters who want to watch TV via their antenna, and record those shows. It also acquired the streaming news startup Watchup in order to add a dedicated news hub within its app.

Earlier this year, the company spoke of its ambitions to continue adding more types of content to its media center software, including audio and video podcasts, followed by digital, web-first and other longer-form creator content. (It had originally expected to add podcasts in Q1 2018, so this nearly-June launch is a bit of a delay.)

The larger goal, on Plex’s part, is to organize all your media content in one place – from live and recorded TV to your personal media collections of music, photos, and videos, and your news and information – including, now, your favorite podcasts.

The feature, live today in beta, is available on the Plex web platform, Roku, and iOS and Android, with other device support coming soon.

You can browse and search across Plex’s podcast library, filter podcasts by categories, or click into a title to see the details, episode lists, and related podcasts. To follow that podcast, you click the “Add to My Podcasts” button. This will add the podcast to your “On Deck” dashboard, as well.

If the podcast you like isn’t in the Plex catalog, you can add it by entering the feed URL, and Plex will treat it as if it is – it will retrieve all its metadata, related podcasts, and make it searchable. (That’s useful because Plex’s catalog isn’t as robust as others at launch.)

The feature also includes the standard media controls you’d expect, like forward and back and support for variable speed playback, as well as a “mark as played” option, all available through Plex’s upgraded media player. That option can help you transition to Plex’s podcast platform from another app, as you won’t have to lose your place, in terms of what you’ve listened to, and what you’ve not. And it lets you continually mark off any episodes you may have caught elsewhere, or just otherwise want to skip.

Your listening progress is also synced across Plex’s suite of apps.

The feature wasn’t perfect in brief testing, but it was in a pre-launch state, and today it’s only arriving in beta – so it’s too soon to speak to how well it performs as a publicly-facing product.

In a few weeks, Plex will roll out a handful of other features for podcasts, including smart downloading with granular controls for managing the episodes you want to keep on a per show basis (e.g. keep the last three); additional metadata for richer show pages and better discovery options; and podcasts import and export (OPML) so you can move your current subscriptions more easily into Plex.

Along with the launch of podcasts, Plex is updating its mobile apps, too, to offer better customization options.

Now, if you want to listen to your podcasts and news while you’re on the go, on mobile, you can configure the app to show that media on your home screen. Or, if you use the app more for casting your videos to your living room TV, you could bring those favorite shows to the front of the experience instead. And so on.

On this new, customizable home screen you can re-order you content, remove any of its sections (like “Recently Added” or “On Deck,”), or add new ones from elsewhere in the app, including across servers (like Plex Cloud or your local server such as your home PC.)

Plex has also added tabs at the bottom of the screen for switching between your media type (e.g. movies, TV, podcasts, etc.), which are fully customizable, too. You can even customize the default source for each media type.

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The addition of podcasts to this more personalized media experience makes sense not only because of how popular podcasts have become, but also because many are tied to the shows you watch – they’re creator commentaries, roundtable discussions, fan chats, critic reviews, and more. It’s easy to imagine, then, moving from watching a show on the TV then heading out and launching the Plex app to listen to the podcast discussing the last episode.

That’s the vision Plex has, at least. However, even with these additions, Plex’s software overall still caters more to the DIY crowd – those who want set up their own antenna, rather than pay for an online TV service like YouTube TV or Sling. And it hasn’t yet solved the problem of media that’s all over the place – favorite shows and movies are strewn across services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Amazon, and it’s hard to know where the things you want to watch reside. Those are still challenges Plex could attack in the future, by becoming a hub that jumps you into streaming catalogs, too.

It’s unclear how well Plex’s expansions have been working to attract new users and paying subscribers.

The company doesn’t break out the latter figure. and it still claims today the same 15 million registered users it had at the beginning of the year. Becoming a podcast player could help bump that number up, though, and introduce more people to Plex’s software, as a result.

Podcasts are in beta on web, mobile and Roku, and the mobile apps are rolling out starting today.

As the worlds of health and technology continue to knit closer together through advances in hardware and big data analytics, a startup called Ava, which has built a $199 wearable device and app to help women track their fertility cycles, has raised $30 million to expand into other aspects of female health.

The funding — led by unnamed existing investors plus new backers btov and SVC — comes at a time of fast growth for the company. Ava says it has now enabled 10,000 pregnancies, or “Ava babies” as they have sometimes been called. As a point of reference, in late 2016, around when the company — founded in Zurich and now co-based also in San Francisco — had raised a Series A round of $9.7 million, the company had tracked only 7 Ava babies due in 2017.

Lea von Bidder, Ava’s CEO and co-founder holding down the fort in SF (her co-founders Pascal Koenig, Peter Stein, and Philipp Tholen are based in Zurich) says that the company is not disclosing its valuation with this round. It brings the total raised by the company to $42.3 million since 2014 (showing off its device for the first time as part of our Battlefield competition in 2015), with previous investors including Khosla Ventures, Swisscom, DCM and more.

For some more context, other leading fertility startups (coincidentally also out of Europe) Clue and Natural Cycles have raised $30 million and $37.5 million respectively.

While Clue and Natural Cycles have focused on software — specifically, apps that track different markers that are either collected by the user inputting information directly, or by way of tapping diagnostics from other wearables (Clue, for example, has a Fitbit integration) — Ava’s unique selling point has been how it has married hardware development with advanced analytical software to read multiple diagnostics from its wearable and to use those analytics to help draw conclusions about what a woman’s body is doing.

“Everything we do is artificial intelligence,” Von Bidder said of the analytics part. “We are clearly an AI company in the end. It’s just a fancy term for big data analytics and that is exactly what we do. When you think about what Ava does, we are measuring your body and understanding it, and the only way we could do that is with AI.”

Building a wearable can pose many challenges in the form of manufacturing, capital outlay, and simply getting people to buy them — hardware, as the tech world likes to say, is indeed hard. But when a company gets it right, building a vertically integrated business that brings in both together can prove to be a compelling business.

In the case of Eva, all the measurements — there are nine diagnostics being collected, including heartrate, body fat, heat loss, and sleep movement, all of which are lined up with indicators of other physiological changes — are taken while a person is sleeping every night, removing some of the possibility for human error in the collection phase. And when you consider that many of the current products to measure your fertility are based either on a thermometer or a urine test, a wristband you need to remember to slip on at night might seem like a significantly cleaner and easier alternative.

While Eva continues to build out its existing operations, the bigger picture, Von Bidder said, is the company’s plans for where it plans to take its business next.

Today, the company’s “sweet spot” for customers are women who are trying to conceive a child but have not been immediately successful, yet have not yet passed the one-year mark of trying, which is typically when those women might start to turn to medical help to get pregnant.

Eva is currently running a host of clinical trials not only to extend the kind of help it can offer other categories of women who want to get pregnant — for example those with pre-existing complications, and those who have been trying for more than a year — but also women who might not want to get pregnant at all. That is, helping with contraception, or with other phases of women’s reproductive health, such as menopause.

“The overall vision of the app is to become a companion for all of a woman’s different life stages, including trying to prevent pregnancy and menopause,” said Von Bidder.

A large part of the investment being announced today will be going funding more clinical trials, which are based at the University Hospital of Zurich with Professor Brigitte Leeners and cover areas like fertility challenges and pregnancy complications (which itself is another huge area, and leads Ava into one of the least understood aspects of pregnancy: miscarriage, especially those that happen in the first trimester). Other parts of the investment will be used to help fund the other very complex part of being a medical startup, which is navigating regulatory approvals after the trials have been completed, in order to build new products. (This part is overseen by the company’s chief medical officer, Dr Maureen Cronin, is a vet of Bayer Schering, one of the world’s biggest contraceptive companies.)

“It’s exciting to work with a company that is literally reshaping the way we think about menstrual cycles, hormones and women’s health,” said Prof. Leeners in a statement. “Combining the best in science, data insights and technology is not only  helping to create families, but improving women’s lives around the world.”

SQream, the GPU database developer, will deepen its focus on China after raising a $26.4 million Series B led by Alibaba Group. The round also included investors Hanaco Venture Capital, Sistema.vc, World Trade Ventures, Paradiso Ventures, Glory Ventures and Silvertech Ventures.

The startup describes the funding, which brings its total raised to a little over $40 million, as a strategic investment from Alibaba. Earlier this year, SQream and Alibaba Cloud announced a new agreement that will give Alibaba Cloud users access to the GPU database starting in October.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Chaoqun Zhan, director of Alibaba Database Business, said “Alibaba Cloud and SQream announced a collaboration in February and this investment deepens our relationship, and together we aim to provide the best cloud solutions to all kinds of businesses to enable their success in this digital age.”

Based in Tel Aviv, SQream was founded in 2010. Its SQL analytical database, called SQream DB, uses thousands of parallel processing cores in NVIDIA GPUs to allow large companies to perform big data analytics more quickly and cheaply (SQream claims its clients can “analyze up to 20 times more data, up to 100 times faster, at as little 10% of the cost”).

SQream co-founder and CEO Ami Gal told TechCrunch that one of SQream’s main differentiators from other GPU databases, like Kinetica and MapD, is its ability to adapt to increasingly massive hoards of data. Kinetica and MapD use in-memory storage, so while they can analyze up to about 5 terabytes of data extremely quickly, their scalability is limited. On the other hand, SQream was created to handle data stores of up to hundreds of terabytes.

The company’s Series B capital is being used to add new feature to SQream DB and grow its sales, marketing and delivery teams as it focuses on the Chinese market and other regions. In addition to Alibaba Cloud, SQream’s other new customers in Asia include Thai mobile operator AIS and India’s ACL Mobile, an enterprise messaging service.

Hey startup aficionados, do you want to experience all the excitement, innovation and opportunity that TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2018 has to offer? Of course, you do. The only question is, will you act quickly enough to get there for the best possible price? We just released a very limited number of Innovator passes at an outstanding value: two passes for just €695 + VAT. These passes won’t last long, so buy your 2-4-1 passes before they’re gone.

Innovator passes provide access to everything that makes a Disrupt event awesome. World-class speakers — titans and rising stars of tech — will hold forth from three different platforms: the Main Stage, the Next Stage and the Q&A Stage. We’re still finalizing our list of speakers, so if there’s someone you’d love to hear speak, let us know on the speaker nomination page.

Innovator pass holders can use the Disrupt Mobile App to connect with attendees, including media outlets (yup, you get access to the full media list). Attend workshops, meet potential partners and collaborators as you network your way through Startup Alley, and then go hang out and relax at the TC After Party. Don’t stress if you miss an event; after the conference, you’ll receive access to our library of exclusive event video content.

Take in the thrill of Startup Battlefield or heck, why not take part in the competition? You have to apply if you want to compete, so sign up for our newsletter, and we’ll let you know when applications open. Who knows, your early-stage startup might even win the whole shooting match. Bet that $50,000 prize could provide a much-needed boost to your bottom line.

Disrupt Berlin takes place on November 29-30 at Arena Berlin. A limited quantity of two Innovator passes for €695 + VAT are available right now. Buy ‘em right now before this deal disappears.

We hope you saved the date because June 7 is right around the corner, and we’re ready to kick off TechCrunch Tel Aviv. Our inaugural one-day conference focuses on the boundary-pushing mobile technology coming out of Israel. It promises to be an information-packed affair — just take a look at the agenda. But hold the mobile phone — we have even more exciting news to share.

In conjunction with The Builders, TechCrunch is co-hosting the first ever Tel Aviv Innovation Week. Starting June 3 and culminating in the TC Tel Aviv conference on June 7, we’re organizing a series of events for the public focused on various technologies and startups highlighting mobility innovation in Israel and around the world.

Here’s just a taste of the numerous events you can attend during Innovation Week in Tel Aviv:

• Aleph, an early-stage venture capital fund that helps Israeli entrepreneurs scale into large, meaningful companies and globally recognized brands, will discuss scaling immigrant talent to build a global ecosystem.
• Cyabra, a cyber startup created to protect brands and public identities against online disinformation threats, will host an event to discuss ways to fight propaganda and fake news.
• Deloitte’s Innovation Tech Terminal, a collaboration between Deloitte’s US and Israeli practices focusing on innovation and facilitating relationships with the Israeli startup ecosystem, will host the Deloitte Storytelling Workshop.
• Join Verizon Ventures & Deutsche Telekom to hear from partners of leading VCs what Israel’s cybersecurity landscape foreshadows for 2018/19 and for a discussion with the CEOs of the hottest IOT Security startups in Israel.
• The Platform Urban Entrepreneurship Center, part of Tel Aviv Global, will host an event to discuss Smart Cities and urban innovation.
• Yazamiyot, the leading community for Israeli women entrepreneurs, will host an event to discuss technology and social impact.

TechCrunch is proud to be a founding partner of Tel Aviv Innovation Week, and our writers will attend select events to discover the rising stars of the Israeli mobility startup community. Head on over to our website for a full list of events scheduled throughout the week and sign up before the registration slots disappear.

And remember, TechCrunch Tel Aviv takes place on June 7, 2018, at the Tel Aviv Convention Center, Pavilion 10. Buy your tickets right here. We can’t wait to see you there!

Amazon introduced 10 percent savings at Whole Foods for Prime members earlier this month, and today it kicked off a nationwide expansion of the initiative.

The Prime Whole Foods discount — one of a number of measures following Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods — has expanded to 12 more states, including northern California, Colorado and Texas, with more set to follow soon.

The collaboration is yet another reason to subscribe to Amazon Prime, and the compelling package for consumers gives retailers — both online and offline — further reason to fear Amazon.

The offer was launched in Florida first but this expansion is the first of a wave that are designed to allow Prime customers across the entire U.S. to get discounts at Whole Foods and Whole Foods Market 365 stores by the end of this summer. Whole Foods currently has over 470 stores in the U.S., Canada and U.K. combined, but the majority — 463 to be precise — are in the U.S so there’s plenty of work to cover that entire patch.

The discount is also possible for customers who use the Whole Foods delivery service, which is also part of the Amazon app. Prime members get free delivery if their order is $35 or more, and there’s a two-hour delivery window.

Amazon’s nationwide expansion of Prime discounts at Whole Foods has begun

“From delicious dinner options like shrimp or rotisserie chicken to fresh organic raspberries, we’re offering savings on products customers love and can enjoy with their families. Exclusive deals like the sustainably-caught halibut were a huge hit in Florida, and we’re excited to partner with our suppliers to bring Prime members even more discounts on seasonal favorites and everyday staples,” A.C. Gallo, Whole Foods Market president and COO, said in a statement.

Scoot, the electric moped company that first launched in San Francisco, is deploying two new modes of transportation in Barcelona. The first is an upgrade of its original scooter that the company deploys in San Francisco. Instead of maxing out at 30 mph, this new moped can go up to 60 mph. The second mode of transportation is a good old-fashioned pedal assist bicycle. To support Scoot’s ambitions in Barcelona, the company has a team of 20 people based in the European city.

Specifically, Scoot will deploy 1,000 bicycles that can lock to bike locks and other city infrastructure. Scoot will also deploy 500 electric scooters, designed by Silence. These mopeds are designed to not only drive faster, but also be more durable and carry up to two people. But Scoot won’t be the only shared electric moped and bicycle service in Barcelona. Instead, it will join the likes of moped startups Yugo and eCooltra, and bike-share startup Bicing.

Scoot is hoping to also launch its stationless bikes in San Francisco, but can’t for a little while due to the fact the city has an exclusive permit with bike-share service JUMP (now owned by Uber) until next June. However, Scoot founder and CEO Michael Keating told me he’s hopeful the city will change it’s mind, saying, “we would like to think we’d be able to convince the city to let us do it before the JUMP pilot ends.”

That’s because Scoot has been working with the city since 2012, and has, in Keating’s mind, proven its ability to work well with cities. Scoot was quite early to the concept of shared mobility that you can leave and pickup anywhere. Fast forward a few years and now we see Lime, Bird, Spin and JUMP hitting the streets with electric scooters and bikes. Despite the entrance of several new mobility players in San Francisco, Keating said Scoot hasn’t seen any dips in ridership.

Whether Scoot gets into stand-on scooters remains to be seen. Keating said he recognizes they’re a “cool product” but he has an issue with how often people ride them on sidewalks. You may also remember when Scoot launched ten of those mini electric cars that could hold up to two people. Scoot has since pulled them from the streets, but Keating said the company is currently looking for the right electric car for San Francisco.

A Tesla sedan running on Autopilot mode collided with a parked vehicle belonging to the Laguna Beach Police Department today. No one was in the police car and the Tesla driver had only minor injuries, reports the Los Angeles Times, but the police car was “totaled,” Laguna Beach police sergeant Jim Cota told the newspaper.

Cota also said that a year ago, there had been another incident involving a Tesla colliding with a semi-truck in the same area. “Why do these vehicles keep doing that?” he told the LA Times. “We’re just lucky that people aren’t getting injured.”

This morning a Tesla sedan driving outbound Laguna Canyon Road in “autopilot” collides with a parked @LagunaBeachPD unit. Officer was not in the unit at the time of the crash and minor injuries were sustained to the Tesla driver. #lagunabeach #police #tesla pic.twitter.com/7sAs8VgVQ3

— Laguna Beach PD PIO (@LBPD_PIO_45) May 29, 2018

In an emailed statement, a Tesla spokesperson said:

“When using Autopilot, drivers are continuously reminded of their responsibility to keep their hands on the wheel and maintain control of the vehicle at all times. Tesla has always been clear that Autopilot doesn’t make the car impervious to all accidents, and before a driver can use Autopilot, they must accept a dialogue box which states that ‘Autopilot is designed for use on highways that have a center divider and clear lane markings.’”

This is the latest in several accidents involving a Tesla vehicle in Autopilot mode. These include a crash in Utah earlier this month that occurred while the driver was looking at her phone and two fatal crashes, one in California two months ago and another in 2016 that happened in Florida.

Launched in late 2015, Tesla’s Autopilot feature is meant to “relieve drivers of the most tedious and potentially dangerous aspects of road travel” and includes standard safety features like automatic emergency braking and collision warnings, but it is not meant to replace navigation by a human driver.

Despite Tesla’s instructions to drivers before they start using Autopilot, the automaker’s critics have called on the company to disable the feature until it can be made safer. For example, Consumer Reports said the name Autopilot gives drivers a “false sense of security” and that “these two messages—your vehicle can drive itself, but you may need to take over the controls at a moment’s notice—create potential for driver confusion.”