Year: 2019

Peltarion, a Swedish startup founded by former execs from companies like Spotify, Skype, King, TrueCaller and Google, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A funding round led by Euclidean Capital, the family office for hedge fund billionaire James Simons. Previous investors FAM and EQT Ventures also participated, and this round brings the company’s total funding to $35 million.

There is obviously no dearth of AI platforms these days. Peltarion focus on what it calls “operational AI.” The service offers an end-to-end platform that lets you do everything from pre-processing your data to building models and putting them into production. All of this runs in the cloud and developers get access to a graphical user interface for building and testing their models. All of this, the company stresses, ensures that Peltarion’s users don’t have to deal with any of the low-level hardware or software and can instead focus on building their models.

“The speed at which AI systems can be built and deployed on the operational platform is orders of magnitude faster compared to the industry standard tools such as TensorFlow and require far fewer people and decreases the level of technical expertise needed,” Luka Crnkovic-Friis, of Peltarion’s CEO and co-founder, tells me. “All this results in more organizations being able to operationalize AI and focusing on solving problems and creating change.”

In a world where businesses have a plethora of choices, though, why use Peltarion over more established players? “Almost all of our clients are worried about lock-in to any single cloud provider,” Crnkovic-Friis said. “They tend to be fine using storage and compute as they are relatively similar across all the providers and moving to another cloud provider is possible. Equally, they are very wary of the higher-level services that AWS, GCP, Azure, and others provide as it means a complete lock-in.”

Peltarion, of course, argues that its platform doesn’t lock in its users and that other platforms take far more AI expertise to produce commercially viable AI services. The company rightly notes that, outside of the tech giants, most companies still struggle with how to use AI at scale. “They are stuck on the starting blocks, held back by two primary barriers to progress: immature patchwork technology and skills shortage,” said Crnkovic-Friis.

The company will use the new funding to expand its development team and its teams working with its community and partners. It’ll also use the new funding for growth initiatives in the U.S. and other markets.

A hacker who stole close to 620 million user records from 16 websites has stolen another 127 million records from 8 more websites, TechCrunch has learned.

The hacker, whose listing was the previously disclosed data for about $20,000 in bitcoin on a dark web marketplace, stole the data last year from several major sites — some that had already been disclosed, like over 151 million records from MyFitnessPal and 25 million records from Animoto. But several other hacked sites on the marketplace listing didn’t know or hadn’t disclosed yet — such as 500px and Coffee Meets Bagel.

The Register, which first reported the story, said the data included names, email addresses, and scrambled passwords, and in some cases other login and account data — though no financial data was included.

Now the same hacker has eight additional marketplace entries after their original listings were pulled offline, including:

• 18 million records from travel booking site Ixigo
• Live video streaming site YouNow had 40 million records stolen
• Houzz, which recently disclosed a data breach, is listed with 57 million records stolen
• Ge.tt had 1.8 million accounts stolen
• 450,000 records from cryptocurrency site Coinmama.
• Roll20, a gaming site, had 4 million records listed
• Stronghold Kingdoms, a multiplayer online game, had 5 million records listed
• 1 million records from pet delivery service Petflow

According to the hacker’s listings, Ixigo and Petflow used the old and outdated MD5 hashing algorithm to scramble passwords, which these days is easy to unscramble. YouNow is said to have not scrambled user passwords at all.

In all, the hacker is selling the hacked data for about $14,500 in bitcoin.

Ariel Ainhoren, research team leader at Israeli security firm IntSights, said that the hacker may have used the same security flaw to target vulnerable sites.

Six of the 16 databases were running the same back-end PostgreSQL database software, said Ainhoren in an email to TechCrunch. In successfully exploiting the bug, the hacker was able to “dump” the database to a file and download it.

“We’re still analyzing it, but it could have been that he used some kind of vulnerability that surfaced around that time and wasn’t patched by these companies or a totally new unknown vulnerability,” he said. “As most of these sites were not known breaches, it seems we’re dealing here with a hacker that did the hacks by himself, and not just someone who obtained it from somewhere else and now just resold it.”

When reached, Jonathan Katz, a contributor for PostgreSQL, said the open-source project was “currently unaware of any patched or unpatched vulnerabilities that could have caused these breaches.”

“There are many factors that need to be taken into consideration when securing a database system that go beyond the database software. We have often found that data breaches into a PostgreSQL database involve an indirect attack attack vector, such as a flaw in an application accessing PostgreSQL or a suboptimal policy around data management,” he said. “When it comes to vulnerabilities, the PostgreSQL community has a dedicated security team that evaluates and fixes issues and, in the spirit of open source collaboration, transparently reports on and educates our users about them.”

None of the other companies immediately returned a request for comment, except YouNow, which said that its “security experts are looking into this situation but we cannot respond until we have more information.”

We’ll have more as we get it.

Amazon’s plans to invest in New York area engineering training programs and other local educational initiatives are not being canceled, despite Amazon’s announcement today that it will no longer open one of its HQ2 locations in New York City. The retailer decided to end its plans for the New York headquarters after significant backlash from local politicians and citizens alike who, as Amazon put it, “have made it clear that they oppose our presence.”

The deal Amazon had brokered with New York politicians had included up to $1.5 billion in grants and tax breaks in the state, in exchange for bringing 25,000 new jobs to the NYC area.

But Amazon jobs weren’t all the company was investing in – the company had also recently said it would fund educational programs and training at New York area high schools and colleges.

Specifically, Amazon said it would fund computer science classes in more than 130 New York City area high schools, including both introductory and Advanced Placement (AP) classes. The classes would be offered across all five NYC boroughs, including more than 30 schools in Queens – the planned location for the new headquarters.

These classes were to be funded by Amazon’s Future Engineer program, which works to bring computer science courses to over 100,000 underprivileged kids in 2,000 low-income high schools in the U.S.

In addition, Amazon said it was teaming up with area colleges and universities, including LaGuardia Community College (LAGCC), the City University of New York (CUNY) and the State University of New York (SUNY) to create a cloud computing certificate program for students across New York.

This program was supported by Amazon’s AWS Educate program.

The Educate program is currently used by more than 1,500 institutions to train students in cloud computing by offering them hands-on experience in AWS technology. The students can then apply for jobs at Amazon and elsewhere, upon completion.

Amazon has not officially commented on how the HQ2 news will impact these programs in New York, but sources familiar with the situation told TechCrunch that both educational programs are continuing – regardless of what’s happened with HQ2.

Though obviously meant to help build a pipeline for the NYC HQ2, the programs’ larger goals are about creating new engineering talent who know how to work with Amazon’s cloud computing platform, AWS.

Though these students will now not have a direct exit to a New York-area HQ2, Amazon still has over 5,000 employees in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Staten Island, the company said today in its HQ2 announcement – and it plans to grow those teams in the years ahead.

That means it can’t hurt to continue to build the talent pipeline in New York. After all, Amazon could still woo program grads to other East Coast locations, including Northern Virginia and Nashville, as well as to its other 17 offices and hubs across the U.S. and Canada.

 

Amazon has secured some retail space in the heart of London, according to a report from The Grocer spotted by Reuters. This is significant as Amazon has yet to open an Amazon Go store outside of the U.S.

There are now ten Amazon Go stores in the U.S. — four in Seattle, four in Chicago and two in San Francisco. Based on this pattern, the company doesn’t want to spread itself too thin. When Amazon decides on a city, the company launches multiple Amazon Go stores. Let’s see if the same thing happens in London.

Amazon Go stores are a bit different from your usual grocery store. When you walk into the store, you open the Amazon app and scan a QR code on your phone. You can then pick up whatever you want in the store and leave.

Amazon has equipped its stores with a ton of cameras and sensors so that it knows what you’re buying at all times. It sounds a little creepy, but it can help you save time. It’s going to be interesting to see if privacy watchdogs in Europe will let this concept fly.

According to another report, the company could also be working on securing retail space in U.S. airports. Amazon could open small cashier-free Go stores to showcase its technology in these high-traffic areas.

Nobody knows for sure what Amazon plans on doing next. Are Amazon Go stores just a way to promote Amazon’s brands and generate a bit of revenue, or is there a bigger goal there? The company also owns Whole Foods, and you can still find cashiers in Whole Foods stores across the U.S.

Atrium, the legal startup co-founder by Justin Kan of Twitch fame, is jumping into the blockchain space today.

The company has raised plenty of money — including $65 million from A16z last September — so rather than an ICO or token sale, this is a consultancy business. Atrium uses machine learning to digitize legal documents and develops applications for client use, and now it is officially applying that to fintech and blockchain businesses.

The division has been operating quietly for months and the scope of work that it covers includes the legality and regulatory concerns around tokens, but also business-focused areas including token utility, tokenomics and general blockchain tech.

“We have a bunch of clients wanting to do token offerings and looking into the legality,” Kan told TechCrunch in an interview. “A lot of our advisory work is around the token offering and how it operates.”

The commitment is such that the company is even accepting Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash for payments through crypto processing service BitPay.

While the ICO market has quietened over the past year following to huge valuation losses market-wide, up to 90 percent in some cases with many ICO tokens now effectively worthless, there’s a new anticipation around regulatory-friendly security token offering (STO) options. Coinbase, for one, has backed STO platforms and its CEO Brian Armstrong has spoken of his belief that the cap table of the future is tokenized, allowing company tokens to be freely traded worldwide.

According to Armstrong, Coinbase could potentially host “millions” of STOs in the future.

If even a fraction of that number is to exist, companies will need advisors to help with structure and regulatory compliance. Many legal firms are already making a proverbial killing and, just like its core business, Atrium wants to use its tech-centric platform to offer a more efficient and cheaper alternative to expensive legal firms.

“People are doing private offerings, but the number of ICOs has definitely dropped,” Kan admitted. “Interest, though, has continued to grow, as people try to navigate this new regulatory regime. We spend a lot of time trying to focus on only taking on high-quality clients.”

Atrium Fintech and Blockchain also includes fintech work — as the name implies — but blockchain is likely to account of the majority of client work, so said Ross Barbash, who leads the 10-person team.

“We currently work with a mix of companies across the U.S, with some in Asia and Europe,” he said.

The fintech work has tended to be more U.S-centric at this point, Barbash said, because Atrium’s expertise is particular to licenses at federal and state level in America.

Regulation is, of course, far trickier when it comes to blockchain as it remains a work in progress. The SEC has made periodic statements, often taking legal action to establish expectations and boundaries as it decides exactly how to respond to the explosion of blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

“The level of challenge and regulatory frameworks have evaluated blockchain analysis to business level” work rather than simply legal counsel, Barbash explained. “We’re working closely with some regulators to better understand some elements of the ecosystem.”

“With the shift from HODL to BUIDL, we are finding it easier to identify and collaborate with the teams that both have the necessary dev chops and are committed to compliance,” he added via a statement.

Some of Atrium’s disclosed clients include credit card startup Final (which was bought by Goldman Sachs) and solar financial services firm Wunder Capital.

More generally, Kan said that the blockchain and fintech division serves as a blueprint for how Atrium will go after specific verticals. He said that the startup, which now has 150 staff, will spin out different units for specific legal practices.

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1. Facebook mulled multi-billion-dollar acquisition of gaming giant Unity, book claims

Less than a year after making a $3 billion investment into the future of virtual reality with the purchase of Oculus VR, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was considering another multi-billion-dollar bet by buying Unity, the popular game engine that’s used to build half of all gaming titles.

At least, that’s the claim made in a new book, “The History of the Future,” by Blake Harris, which digs deep into the founding story of Oculus and the drama surrounding the Facebook acquisition, subsequent lawsuits and personal politics of founder Palmer Luckey.

2. Alibaba’s Ant Financial buys UK currency exchange giant WorldFirst reportedly for around $700M

Although the companies were relatively quiet about the deal, it could end up being pretty significant, showing both the market connections between China and Europe and the margin pressures that many smaller remittance companies are under in the wake of larger companies like Amazon building their own money-moving services.

3. Nintendo makes the old new again with Mario, Zelda, Tetris titles for Switch

We round up everything Nintendo announced yesterday, from Super Mario Maker 2 to the unexpected remake of Game Boy classic Link’s Awakening.

4. Tesla ‘Dog mode’ and ‘Sentry mode’ are now live to guard your car and pets

Dog mode is meant to accomplish two things: to keep dogs (or perhaps a hamster or cat) in a climate-controlled environment if left unattended in a vehicle, and to let passersby know their status.

5. Happy Valentine’s Day: your dating app account was hacked, says Coffee Meets Bagel

Users of the dating app Coffee Meets Bagel woke up this morning to find an email in their inboxes warning that their account information had been stolen by a third-party who gained unauthorized access to the company’s systems.

6. Apple is selling the iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 in Germany again

Apple was forced to pull the iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 models from shelves in the country last month, after chipmaker Qualcomm posted security bonds to enforce a December court injunction.

7. Malt raises $28.6M for its freelancer platform

Malt has created a marketplace for companies and engineers working as freelancers. There are currently 100,000 freelancers on the platform and 15,000 companies using Malt regularly.

With more industries and organizations recognizing design as a pillar of business, a battle is brewing among makers of design tools. And with a fresh $40 million in Series C funding, Figma is ready to fight.

Cofounder and CEO Dylan Field explains that when he and cofounder Evan Wallace started the company, in 2012, IBM employed one designer for every 72 engineers. Today, IBM has eight engineers to every designer, and that ratio goes to 3:1 on mobile.

This shift, which is reflected more broadly across various industries, has led more people within their organizations to want to be involved in the design process. Which means that tools that once ‘got the job done’ for small design teams and individual freelancers working in a silo stopped being useful.

Field saw the need for real-time collaborative design tools, and dropped out of Brown to join the Thiel fellowship to build Figma . Since launch, the company has grown to 1 million sign-ups, with a total of $82.9 million raised on a $440 million post-money valuation.

Figma offers a freemium model, with the product remaining free up to three editors. From there you bump into the Pro tier, which offers unlimited version history and the ability to create a Design System for $15/month/editor. The org tier bundles in an extra layer of security and content control for $45/month/editor.

A big part of what sets Figma apart is its home on the web. Figma allows designers and collaborators to take care of every part of the process — from initial design to collaboration to storage to prototyping — right within a web app.

“We set out to make a cloud version of these traditional design tools,” said Field. “And what we realized is that once you put it all in the cloud, and make it so that the entire workflow across design and storage and prototyping and developer handoff and version control… once you connect all that, you’re not actually creating all those different products. You’re creating one integrated system.”

Because of this, common design problems like file versioning and real-time collaboration aren’t really an issue for Figma. Designers can work together, or make changes on their own, and those changes are reflected across the file in real time with a complete revision history. To share something new, they can simply send over a link.

Adobe and InVision, the two other big players in the ring, have both built native apps to handle the same full-stack problem of bundling design tools, collaborative prototyping, and file versioning together. Adobe has addressed its growing competition through its collaborative design tool Adobe XD. InVision, which started out as a collaborative prototyping platform in 2011, has either built or bought its products that expand up and downstream in the workflow.

And it seems that, for some big design teams, Figma’s web app has prevailed.

Which explains why Sequoia partner Andrew Reed changed his mind. Figma actually went to Sequoia when raising their Series B in 2018, and the VC firm passed up the opportunity.

“At the time, the product was interesting but the people we talk to about these products weren’t pointing to Figma as transforming their companies,” said Reed. “Over the past 12 months, things changed. We called people to ask their opinions and people were calling us proactively and telling us how impactful it was in their companies.”

After looking at the data, Reed said he discovered that there were Figma users at half of Sequoia’s portfolio companies. He reached out to Field, sent over a cap table in Figma, and within a week Figma closed on what could be seen as an opportunistic round, considering how recently Figma picked up its Series B.

But one perk of the deal is Reed’s experience from investing in GitHub, which is a great exemplar for design tool companies looking to bring some level of cohesiveness to a fragmented landscape.

“Collaboration is going to be embedded in the future of software,” said Reed.

App and web developers are always trying to figure out better ways of keeping their users engaged on their platforms for longer. Today, Amazon is launching a service that it hopes those developers will use to do just that. Amazon Moments — as it is called — will let developers create actions — “moments” — that it wants users to perform, such as watching several episodes of a series if its a streaming service; or taking out a subscription if its a news site — and giving users actual physical gifts in exchange for doing so.

The service is going live in 100 countries today, Amazon said. Items that are eligible to be gifted as part of the Moments scheme will come in a catalogue — Amazon said that there are “millions” of products in it already, both from Amazon and select third-party vendors — and will sit alongside other kinds of products that incentivize users to be more engaged in apps, games and other digital services such as virtual currencies and gift cards.

“This adds to the variety and lets developers do something they haven’t been able to do before,” said Amir Kabbara, Amazon’s head of Moments, in an interview.

He added that they are providing to be very effective so far in pilots that Amazon has run with a number of publishers and other developers — Washington Post, TikTok, Sony Crackle, Sesame Workshop, USA TODAY, Sago Mini, and Bell Canada were among the early testers — with customers on average two to three times more likely to complete actions versus test using virtual items.

While offering a “gift with purchase” is nothing new in the world of retail, it’s been a trickier proposition when it comes to online commerce, since then the company setting up the promotion has to handle the fulfilment of the gifts, and that may stray far from its core competency as a business. For Amazon, this simply maximises the infrastructure that the e-commerce giant has already built to run its own Marketplace, and it gives and another opportunity to sell items from that Marketplace.

Moments comes in the form of an API that the developer and marketing team can build into an app or website, and for now there are a couple of ways that a company can be flexible in terms of what actually gets gifted.

There can be a specific item as the reward — for example, the Washington Post offered Echo Dots to people who subscribed — or it can be a gift certificate towards the purchase of an item like a book, which then the customer gets to choose.

They pay for the service by way of CPA — cost per “action” — meaning only when the action is completed and the reward is redeemed. Amazon, as a result, gets two different revenue streams from this, as the Marketplace operator and as the exchange selling the marketing unit to the developer/marketer.

Moments can also be segmented by customer types. Amazon notes: “If keeping an active payer engaged is worth $50, you can set a high-value action and offer $40 headphone sets with a comfortable margin of error. In addition, customer targeting allows you to tailor rewards to the lifetime value of each user segment. You could offer a $5 reward to new users, a $25 reward to active payers, and a $200 reward to top spenders.”

Over time, it will be interesting to see if Amazon applies more of its personalisation prowess to the product.

Just as advertising — or visiting Amazon’s homepage — is an exercise in seeing how your interests are tracked and aggregated to present you with what you are most likely to buy, you could imagine Moments promotions that will know that I already own an Echo Dot (or two) and that what I probably really want is an Eero. Given Amazon’s wider ambitions to grow its advertising and adtech businesses, it’s not outside the realm of possibility.

Browser maker Opera has been teasing a new project called R3 or ‘Reborn3’. The new project is now available as a beta version — and it’s a brand new design for the company’s desktop browser.

For now, the new design is only available in the developer version of Opera. But that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it.

The main difference with this new version is that the sidebar and tab bar are now the same color. The sidebar no longer stands out as a black bar with a bunch of buttons. It feels like those buttons are part of the browser instead of an afterthought.

The webpage, active tab and address bar are now a single element. It’s quite visible when you visit a website with a white background and you’re using the light theme. There are subtile shadows that make this unit of content stands out from the rest of the browser.

It’s getting a bit crowded in the top right corner with a snapshot button, a bookmarking button, a ‘My Flow’ button to find your current page across all your devices, etc. Fortunately those buttons don’t take a lot of space and remain discrete.

The company has integrated a cryptocurrency wallet into its mobile browsers, and you’ll now be able to access those wallets from the desktop app as well. it works pretty much like WhatsApp on the desktop. Opera displays a QR code that you scan with your phone. Everything happens on your phone, but the desktop browser acts as an interface for your mobile wallet.

The Windows version of the browser looks exactly like the macOS version, but with standard Windows buttons in the corner.

Sight Diagnostics, an Israeli medical devices startup that’s using AI technology to speed up blood testing, has closed a  $27.8 million Series C funding round.

The company has built a desktop machine, called OLO, that analyzes cartridges manually loaded with drops of the patient’s blood — performing blood counts in situ.

The new funding is led by VC firm Longliv Ventures, also based in Israel, and a member of the multinational conglomerate CK Hutchison Group.

Sight Diagnostics said it was after strategic investment for the Series C — specifically investors that could contribute to its technological and commercial expansion. And on that front CK Hutchison Group’s portfolio includes more than 14,500 health and beauty stores across Europe and Asia, providing a clear go-to-market route for the company’s OLO blood testing device.

Other strategic investors in the round include Jack Nicklaus II, a healthcare philanthropist and board member of the Nicklaus Children’s Health Care Foundation; Steven Esrick, a healthcare impact investor; and a “major medical equipment manufacturer” — which they’re not naming.

Sight Diagnostics also notes that it’s seeking additional strategic partners who can help it get its device to “major markets throughout the world”.

Commenting in a statement, Yossi Pollak, co-founder and CEO, said: “We sought out groups and individuals who genuinely believe in our mission to improve health for everyone with next-generation diagnostics, and most importantly, who can add significant value beyond financial support. We are already seeing positive traction across Europe and seeking additional strategic partners who can help us deploy OLO to major markets throughout the world.”

The company says it expects that customers across “multiple countries in Europe” will have deployed OLO in actual use this year.

Existing investors OurCrowd, Go Capital, and New Alliance Capital also participated in the Series C. The medtech startup, which was founded back in 2011, has raised more than $50M to date, only disclosing its Series A and B raises last year.

The new funding will be used to further efforts to sell what it bills as its “lab-grade” point-of-care blood diagnostics system, OLO, around the world. Although its initial go-to-market push has focused on Europe — where it has obtained CE Mark registration for OLO (necessary for commercial sale within certain European countries) following a 287-person clinical trial, and went on to launch the device last summer. It’s since signed a distribution agreement for OLO in Italy.

“We have pursued several pilots with potential customers in Europe, specifically in the UK and Italy,” co-founder Danny Levner tells TechCrunch. “In Europe, it is typical for market adoption to begin with pilot studies: Small clinical evaluations that each major customers run at their own facilities, under real-world conditions. This allows users to experience the specific benefits of the technology in their own context. In typical progress, pilot studies are then followed by modest initial orders, and then by broad deployment.”

The funding will also support ongoing regulatory efforts in the U.S., where it’s been conducting a series of trials as part of FDA testing in the hopes of gaining regulatory clearance for OLO. Levner tells us it has now submitted data to the regulator and is waiting for it to be reviewed.

“In December 2018, we completed US clinical trials at three US clinical sites and we are submitting them later this month to the FDA. We are seeking 510(k) FDA clearance for use in US CLIA compliant laboratories, to be followed by a CLIA waiver application that will allow for use at any doctor’s office. We are very pleased with the results of our US trial and we hope to obtain the FDA’s 510(k) clearance within a year’s time,” he says.

“With the current funding, we’re focusing on commercialization in the European market, starting in the UK, Italy and the Nordics,” he adds. “In the US, we’re working to identify new opportunities in oncology and pediatrics.”

Funds will also go on R&D to expand the menu of diagnostic tests the company is able to offer via OLO.

The startup previously told us it envisages developing the device into a platform capable of running a portfolio of blood tests, saying each additional test would be added individually and only after “independent clinical validation”.

The initial test OLO offers is a complete blood count (CBC), with Sight Diagnostics applying machine learning and computer vision technology to digitize and analyze a high resolution photograph of a finger prick’s worth of the patient’s blood on device.

The idea is to offer an alternative to having venous blood drawn and sent away to a lab for analysis — with an OLO-based CBC billed as taking “minutes” to perform, with the startup also claiming it’s simple enough for non-professional to carry out, whereas it says a lab-based blood count can take several days to process and return a result.

On the R&D front, Levner says it sees “enormous potential” for OLO to be used to diagnose blood diseases such as leukemia and sickle cell anemia.

“Also, given the small amount of blood required and the minimally-invasive nature of the test when using finger-prick blood samples, there is an opportunity to use OLO in neonatal screening,” he says. “Accordingly, one of the most important immediate next steps is to tailor the test procedures and algorithms for neonate screening.”

Levner also told us that some of its pilot studies have looked at evaluating “improvements in operator and patient satisfaction”. “Clearly standing out in these studies is the preference for finger-prick-based testing, which OLO provides,” he claims. 

One key point to note: Sight Diagnostics has still yet to publish peer reviewed results of its clinical trials for OLO. Last July it told us it has a publication pending in a peer-reviewed journal.

“With regards to the peer-reviewed publication, we’ve decided to combine the results from the Israel clinical trials with those that we just completed in the US for a more robust publication,” the company says now. “We expect to focus on that publication after we receive FDA approval in the US.”