Year: 2019

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has agreed to hear a legal challenge to the use of bulk data collection surveillance powers by UK intelligence agencies.

Last September a lower chamber of the ECHR ruled that UK surveillance practices violated human rights law but did not find bulk collection itself to be in violation of the convention.

The civil and digital groups and charities behind the challenge, which include Liberty, Privacy International and Amnesty International, are hoping for a definitive judgement against bulk collection from Europe’s highest human rights court.

The legal challenge dates back around five years, and stems from the 2013 disclosures of government surveillance programs revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden .

The ECHR’s lower court heard an amalgam of complaints from three cases. And in a landmark judgement last fall it found the UK’s bulk interception regime had violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (a right to respect for private and family life/communications); and Article 10 (the right to freedom of expression and information).

The court found there was insufficient oversight of the Internet infrastructure and communications selected for interception and searching; and also insufficient safeguards for journalistic material.

The court also ruled against the government’s regime for obtaining data from communications service providers, finding it violated both articles.

But the judges declined to find the state surveillance regime unlawful on the grounds that it constituted “general and indiscriminate” retention of data.

This is important because the legal framework around surveillance in the UK had already been superseded — with the Investigatory Powers Act, which was passed in 2016 — enshrining a number of bulk powers in law, alongside what the government bills as an adequate oversight framework. (Though it has since been forced by domestic courts to rework certain aspects of the legislation judged to be disproportionate.)

The groups behind the human rights challenge argue the lower court’s judgment “did not go far enough with regard to the unlawfulness of bulk interception powers and the fundamental shortcomings in inter-state intelligence sharing based on communications intercepts”.

Hence now pushing for an overarching judgement from judges in the Grand Chamber which — if it goes their way — could force the UK to radically rethink its approach to intelligence capabilities and put a check on the creeping encroachment of state surveillance.

Commenting in a statement, Caroline Wilson Palow, general counsel at Privacy International, said: “The UK Government continues to intercept enormous volumes of internet traffic flowing across its borders. And it continues to have access to similarly vast troves of information intercepted by the US Government. We call on the Court to reject these mass surveillance practices and find that they are fundamentally incompatible with the rights to privacy and freedom of expression enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.”

“The surveillance regime that the UK Government has built seriously undermines our freedom. Spying on vast numbers of people without suspicion of wrongdoing violates everyone’s rights to privacy and free expression, and can never be lawful,” added Megan Goulding, lawyer for Liberty, in another statement. “We welcome the opportunity from the Court to prove that indiscriminate state snooping is incompatible with our rights.  We need a rights-respecting and targeted surveillance system — not one where everyone is treated as a suspect as they go about their everyday lives.”

Also commenting in a statement, Lucy Claridge, director of strategic litigation at Amnesty International, said: “Industrial scale mass surveillance makes it incredibly difficult for organisations such as Amnesty International to carry out their vital human rights work. It’s critical that they are able to seek and receive information of public interest from their confidential sources, free from government intrusion.”

There’s little prospect of an imminent check on the UK’s current bulk-based surveillance modus operandi via this legal route, with what could be a wait of several years before the Grand Chamber even hears the case. 

Add to that, at that unknown future time it’s still anyone’s guess whether the UK — which is in the process of trying to determine how it will exit the European Union — will still be a party to the European Convention on Human Rights or not.

While the ECHR is attached to the Council of Europe, rather than the EU itself, some elements of the Conservative Party have been pushing to pull the UK out of the convention too. Which throws a potential future spanner in the works of this rights based challenge.

Bots are ruining the internet.

When they’re not pummeling a website with usernames and passwords from a long list of stolen credentials, they’re scraping the price of hotels or train tickets and odds from betting sites to get the best data. Or, they’re just trying to knock a website offline for hours at a time. There’s an entire underground economy where bots are the primary tools used in automating fraudulent purchases, scraping content and launching cyberattacks. Bots are costing legitimate businesses money by stealing data, but also hogging system resources and costly bandwidth.

Clearly, the existing approach of playing bot Whac-A-Mole isn’t working.

“Until now you just had to suck it up as a cost of doing business,” said Johnny Xmas, director of field engineering at Kasada, an anti-bot startup that strikes at the heart of the bot economy itself by frustrating bots with complex tasks.

Their system is simple enough. Bots, said Xmas, are the “white noise” of the internet. Once a bot is started, they keep going until they’re told to stop or their job is done. Kasada tricks bots into thinking that their job is never done. By serving up a small but difficult math puzzle before the site even loads, it tricks the bot into spending its time solving the puzzle and not scraping the site as it thinks it’s doing.

Weeks earlier, Xmas tweeted a photo of Kasada’s proprietary platform Polyform. A single bot made close to four million requests to a website in a single day. Instead of loading the target website, Kasada pushed its randomly generated JavaScript code that loads silently in the browser to the bot instead. For more than 24 hours, the bot was sinking all of the cloud processing resources into trying to solve an impossible math challenge.

“This guy’s [cloud] bill is going to be nuts,” he tweeted.

The company’s aim isn’t to defeat the bot, but the reason for starting it in the first place, said Sam Crowther, Kasada’s co-founder, in a call with TechCrunch. “We cost them money, making their projects not fiscally viable,” he said.

Here’s how it works. Each time someone — or something — visits a website, Kasada accurately fingerprints the requester, using several methods to determine if it’s a bot or not. If not, the site loads as if nothing happened, taking only a few milliseconds off the load time. If it’s a bot, Kasada throws the bot the puzzle, keeping it busy. The bot thinks the website has loaded and doesn’t trigger any warnings on the back-end, all while busy plunging its resources into trying to understand and solve the math problem. “You don’t want to alert the person behind the bot, or they’ll just keep trying,” said Crowther. That’s when the bot starts churning more and more of its resources, and eventually topping out. “The human launches the bot and walks away,” he said. “Often the account maxes out and runs out of money long before the human comes back.” Even if the bot is automatically adding more resources, it won’t ever solve the puzzle. All while the processor usage is spiking, the bots don’t have the resources to target other sites — whether it’s a paying customer or not, said Crowther.

“We’re cleaning up the internet,” said Xmas. “We want to disenfranchise bots from operating to begin.”

Bot authors take weeks or even months to develop code that will target specific kinds of sites hoping for a big eventual payoff, Crowther explained. Retail outlets, hotels, major financial institutions, and realty listings — all revenue-making customers in the company’s portfolio — are at risk of bots that, if successful, could reap a huge reward.

“One bot targeted a betting company we protected, grabbing odds so that the most cost-effective bets are being placed at the micro-level — like stock trading,” said Xmas. “They’ll put months into a bot that’ll defeat every bot detection system.”

But already the team is finding some bot owners meeting their match.

In one case, Crowther and Xmas — both based in the company’s Chicago office — said they had one company, which they declined to name, was the target of account fraud and scraping. The company came in and stopped the automated logins and scraping of identity documents — preventing a wider attack hitting some 30,000 consumers from identity theft.

“One case we had a betting site where 95 percent of the traffic was bots,” said Xmas. “Think of that. You’re paying for tons of servers, tons of bandwidth because you think you’re doing a ton of business — and you’re making a lot of money so it seems rational,” he said. “Then you find out that 95 percent of that was trash.”

“At first we thought, ‘oh shit, what did we break?’,” he said. “It turns out we broke an insane botnet.”

The two recalled how one suspected bot operator was so frustrated by the company’s anti-bot countermeasures, he sent an abusive note to the company.

“The guy who was running some bots figured out it was us who was stopping them,” said Xmas. “And he went to our website, hit the contact us button, and wrote a very angry letter.” Crowther said that the company caught the bot controller’s IP address because he submitted the “not very nice email” through its contact form. “We found one that he was located that was in Sydney,” where one of the company’s offices is located. Xmas joked that he told Crowther, knowing who the bot operator was, to “send him a t-shirt.”

Or, better yet, Xmas said, “take that angry email, blow it up, and make it the wallpaper in our Sydney office.”

Football fans didn’t tune into this year’s Super Bowl coverage on TV in as large numbers as in years past. According to Nielsen, the big game drew an average televised audience of around 98.2 million viewers. CBS, however, said the big game was watched across all platforms – including digital and streaming – by a combined total of 100.7 million viewers. In addition, the streaming coverage of the game broke new records this year, which helped to make up for the TV audience decline.

The network said the streamed event was watched across 7.5 million unique devices, up more than 20 percent from last year. Streaming viewers watched over 560 million total hours of live game coverage, up more than 19 percent from 2017. And the average minute audience of 2.6 million viewers during the game window was up over 31 percent year-over-year.

The live stream’s record-breaking numbers were aided by the fact that the stream itself was available unauthenticated across CBSSports.com, the CBS Sports app, NFL.com, the NFL app, and Verizon mobile properties – including Yahoo Sports, Yahoo, AOL, AOL Sports, and Tumblr. (Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Verizon.)

The live stream was also made available on CBS’s subscription streaming service, CBS All Access, which saw a record number of new subscriber sign-ups, unique viewers and time spent on Super Bowl Sunday – following the service’s recent record-breaking weekend attributed to the Season 2 premiere of Star Trek: Discovery and the AFC Championship Game.

CBS All Access sign-ups were up 84+ percent on Super Bowl Sunday, while unique viewers were up over 46 percent, and time spent was up over 76 percent, CBS said.

Streaming, combined with TV viewers and CBS digital properties like CBS Interactive, NFL digital properties, Verizon Media mobile properties, and ESPN Deportes TV and digital properties, brought the total audience to 100.7 million, as noted above. But 149.0 million watched the game either all or in part (meaning they watched at least 6 minutes of the TV broadcast), according to Nielsen data cited by CBS.

However, Nielsen also pointed out that TV viewership saw a massive drop this year for what was generally thought to be a pretty boring game (and boring halftime show.)

According to the measurement firm’s preliminary results released Monday evening, the telecast of Super Bowl LIII on CBS drew an average TV audience of about 98.2 million viewers.

That’s down 5 percent from last year, when 103.4 million people watched the Super Bowl on NBC, and a 12 percent drop from 2017’s game on Fox. The New York Times noted, attributing the declines to the forgettable game, New Orleans fans tuning out, NFL boycotts over Colin Kaepernick’s treatment, and other factors. It’s also the smallest TV audience since 2008, when the Giants beat the Patriots.

Little Spoon, a startup producing modular packages of nutritional, direct-to-consumer baby food, has raised a $7 million round of funding lead by Vaultier7.

The subscription-based service delivers meals — a fixed $3 apiece — to customers’ doorsteps. To date, Little Spoon said it has delivered 1 million meals. Other investors in the round include Kairos, Chobani’s executive vice president of sales Kyle O’Brien, Tinder founders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, Interplay Ventures, the San Francisco 49ers and SoGal Ventures.

Among the business’s co-founders are Michelle Muller, chief executive officer Ben Lewis, chief product officer Angela Vranich and chief marketing officer Lisa Barnett, a former partner at Dorm Room Fund and Sherpa Foundry. The four launched the company a little over a year ago out of New York. Today, the site offers a rotating menu of 50 different recipes and 80 different ingredients.

“Our success is a testament to what we are seeing more broadly in the parenting space,” Barnett told TechCrunch. “There are a lot of demands for brands from this generation of parents.”

As an investor privy to rising trends within the technology and entrepreneurship space, Barnett became interested in the growing parenting tech sector.

“There has definitely been an eruption in the space,” she said. “I think there’s going to be the next big brand in this parenting space and I think that is what Little Spoon can be and is working toward becoming.”

Little Spoon members are given a personalized meal plan when they register with the service. The startup’s packaging is 100 percent recyclable, spoon included, which they say is a “developmentally advantageous form factor that promotes improved motor skills and mindful eating habits.”

The startup plans to use the capital to expand its line of baby meals.

And if you’re wondering why the 49ers invested in a baby food startup… “The 49ers were looking to partner with startups that drive innovation in and access to healthier lifestyles,” Lewis told TechCrunch. “They look for companies making it easier for the average American to live a healthier life, and we found a shared passion in our vision to make quality nutrition accessible to children everywhere.”

Signal Sciences, an LA-based firm that helps customer secure their web applications, announced a $35 million Series C investment today.

Leading Edge Capital led the round (which seems appropriate, given its name). CRV, Index Ventures, Harrison Metal and OATV also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to around $52 million, according to the company.

The company helps protect web applications like online banking, shopping carts, email or any application you access online. It acts as a protection layer or firewall around the application, Andrew Peterson, CEO and company co-founder told TechCrunch.

“We protect people’s websites or mobile sites. We have software that actually fits in line between the internet and traffic coming into those web application and all of the data that are behind it,” Petersen explained. It sounds simple enough, but given the onslaught of breaches we have seen across the internet, it’s obviously a difficult problem to solve.

Signal Sciences looks at behavior and tries to determine if it’s malicious. “We combine attack information with behavior about what attacker is doing.” He says this gives customers a real understanding of the behavior of the attacker and what they’re trying to do against their site, instead of trying to randomly trying to determine if each suspicious activity is an attack or not.

Petersen won’t identify a specific number of customers. He feels it’s a misleading metric because some of his large enterprise customers have multiple business units running almost as independent entities and it doesn’t necessarily reflect the size of the business. He will say that Signal Sciences is protecting over 10,000 applications involving 1 trillion requests every month from companies like Adobe, Under Armour and WeWork.

The company is up to 150 employees, a number Petersen says has been doubling every year. That trend is expected to continue with this new influx of money. The company wants to get the word out to more customers and help people understand there is a way to attack this problem.

“We started this company to build an innovative technology. We want to continue to drive the bar up for what customers should be expecting from their web protection in the future,” Petersen said.

Single-use plastics are the scourge of the environment, which is why many lawmakers are working to eliminate them.

Today, a new brand is launching to try and eliminate single-use plastic in the area of personal care. With $4 million in seed funding led by Lerer Hippeau (with participation from Red Sea Ventures, BoxGroup, SV Angel, Great Oaks, SoulCycle Co-founder Elizabeth Cutler, and CPO of Adobe, Scott Belsky, among others), By Humankind offers deodorant, shampoo and mouthwash.

But unlike your typical personal care products, the By Humankind portfolio products are rethought from the ground up to eliminate single-use plastic and be kind to the environment.

For example, the mouthwash doesn’t come in a big plastic container, but rather in tablet form. Users can drop a tablet into a small cup of water and the mouthwash, which is alcohol-free, dissolves into a liquid. With the shampoo, the By Humankind team decided to eliminate the plastic bottle by simply taking a page out of the old’ soap bar playbook, creating a shampoo bar.

Meanwhile, the By Humankind deodorant comes in a refillable plastic roller, with paper-pod refills (which the company calls KindFills).

The company says that its products eliminate single-use plastic by 90 percent when compared to other products in their respective categories. Moreover, By Humankind has designed its shipping packages with biodegradable, bamboo fiber-based materials.

“Keeping our packaging footprint to a minimum is an extension of our mission, which is enabling our customers to reduce their single-use plastic waste, while not sacrificing quality or convenience,” said cofounder and CEO Brian Bushell.

Bushnell came from Baked By Melissa, where he was co-founder and CEO. A couple years after leaving the company, Bushnell went on a trip with his girlfriend to Southeast Asia. On a scuba excursion, he noticed a large amount of plastic trash in the ocean, which took him by surprise as he believed to be in one of the few untouched, idyllic parts of the planet.

“We went to the hotel into the bathroom and looked at the stuff we brought on the trip and realized that we were part of the problem,” said Bushnell. “That’s when the idea was hatched to build a personal care brand that not only cared about ingredients but about the containers they come in.”

But Bushnell knew that the mission would only be successful if the products performed well. That’s why the company spent time and resources creating high-performance formulas for its products, such as the By Humankind deodorant which the company says kills odor-causing bacteria 40 percent faster than other leading natural deodorants.

According to By Humankind, customers that switch from their current products to all three By Humankind products, with normal usage, will save five pounds of single-use plastic over the course of a year.

A year ago, renowned investor Roger McNamee had much of Silicon Valley baffled.

McNamee had made his name as a tech investor in the ’80s and ’90s before cofounding the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners, then cofounding the venture capital firm Elevation Partners with singer Bono.

A musician himself, McNamee had taken to spending more and more time playing with his band, Moonalice, and performing in other gigs across the country. Yet suddenly, he was seemingly on every media outlet after writing a 6,000-word piece in Washington Monthly that outlined his growing concern that that Facebook’s business model was increasingly dangerous, to both the U.S. economy and our democracy.

Given that McNamee had been an advisor to Mark Zuckerberg early in the company’s life and profited from an early investment in the company, reporters wanted to know exactly what he saw as the problem — and he was happy to tell them. He saw bad actors on the Facebook. He saw data being scraped and sold. He was frustrated, he said, and users needed to get frustrated, too. He’d tried to talk privately to both Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg — who he says he helped connect with Zuckerberg years ago — and they treated his concerns not as a legitimate threat to their users but as a PR crisis. When he wrote them again, he was passed along to other executives at Facebook who similarly, politely, gave him the brush-off.

Facebook might have hoped McNamee would disappear after his media tour. Instead, he sat down and began writing a book, “Zucked,” which hits bookshelves, both real and virtual, today. The reason, he told us in sit-down late last week, is simple. Facebook – – and Google — grow more dangerous by the day. And while he might not be the right messenger to convey why, someone has to do it.

“I may be the wrong messenger, but i don’t see a lot of other volunteers at the moment,” he told us, going so far as to say that he thinks the boards of both Google and Facebook have “committed malpractice” by remaining steadfastly quiet while one scandal after another has grabbed the headlines, then dissipated into the background.

For what it’s worth, we read the book and we recommend it to anyone interested in Silicon Valley’s rich history. It also provides the clearest understanding we’ve read to date of why Facebook sprang into existence when it did, and why it has flourished in ways that are unprecedented, economically and politically. “They dominate the public square in every place where they operate, and there has been no election that put them in power,” notes McNamee — and no accountability, either.

The book is a useful reminder, too, that we do have power as users, and that the ways that we’ve begun changing our collective behavior is beginning, and can continue, to impact these companies, the reach of which we’ve never before experienced and are still grappling to understand.

You can check out a review of “Zucked” here. You can also get a better understanding of McNamee’s thought process by listening to our interview with him.

In the era of #spirtual and #physical #wellness, everything needs to be Instagrammable, even dietary supplements.

Ritual, a subscription-based service that charges customers $30 per month for shipments of its women’s daily or prenatal vitamins, has effectively tapped into that Instagram crowd. The company admits its social media strategy has been key to harnessing a cult following of wellness enthusiasts. Since it was founded in 2015, the business has sold 1 million bottles of vitamins; today, it’s announcing a $25 million Series B funding led by Lisa Wu at Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Kirsten Green at Forerunner Ventures and Brian Singerman at Founders Fund.

Wu, as part of the round, will join Ritual’s board of directors.

“We were the first to market in our space to have really built a direct-to-consumer brand in the vitamin supplement industry,” founder and chief executive officer Katerina Schneider told TechCrunch. “For us, that was about having direct touch points with customers online and, for instance, responding to every single question and statement on platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter with depth and purpose … There’s no comparing our product to any product out there. We have reimagined the formulation.”

The Los Angeles-based company, which launched during TechCrunch Disrupt New York three years ago, brought in a $10 million Series A financing in 2017. Including a seed round, Ritual has raised $41.5 million to date. Schneider declined to disclose its valuation but shared the startup has used the latest investment to make key additions to the management team, including hiring of chief scientific officer Nima Alamdari, a Harvard-trained physiologist, and director of scientific and clinic affairs Mastaneh Sharafi.

Ritual also plans to launch two new products, a postnatal and a post-menopausal vitamin, in 2019: “Our vision is to be that single vitamin that she needs,” Schneider said.

The Ritual team has “reimagined the vitamin from the ground up,” Schneider says, sourcing new and different ingredients to create a best-in-class supplement. To distinguish its product from competitors and justify its $30 per month price tag, Ritual provides absolute transparency of its ingredients and benefits of the vitamins and cites multiple scientific studies on web pages created for each individual ingredient.

Ingredients found in Ritual’s women’s multivitamin.

“Women deserve to know what they are putting in their bodies and why,” Schneider said.

For reference, a container of 150 Walgreens-branded women’s daily multi-vitamin is $11, significantly less than Ritual’s. Care/of, however, another venture-backed vitamin startup, charges $25 per month for packages of its women’s prenatal vitamin.

“If you were to bring together these individual ingredients together it would cost over $200 but because we are direct-to-consumer, we are able to stomach the costs of a product that wouldn’t otherwise be accessible to most women,” Schneider explained. “We are trying to create an iconic brand that is accessible for most women and we believe $30 a month — $1 a day — is an investment in your health and your long term future.”

$30 per month, however, isn’t accessible to most women. It is, however, comparable to other vitamin makers with high-quality ingredients. Ritual’s target audience, women interested in paying for subscription-based vitamins — an item that’s pretty easily accessible at your neighborhood grocery market — are less likely to be deterred by a $360 annual price tag. After all, the service will also send you a calendar invite to remind you to take your vitamins — the grocery market will certainly not provide that level of service.

Nayeem Islam spent nearly 11 years with chipmaker Qualcomm, where he founded its Silicon Valley-based R&D facility, recruited its entire team and oversaw research on all aspects of security, including applying machine learning on mobile devices and in the network to detect threats early.

Islam was nothing if not prolific, developing a system for on-device machine learning for malware detection, libraries for optimizing deep learning algorithms on mobile devices, and systems for parallel compute on mobile devices, among other things.

In fact, because of his work, he also saw a big opportunity in better protecting enterprises from cyberthreats through deep neural networks that are able to process every single raw byte within a file without ignoring anything, and that can uncover complex relations within datasets. So two years ago, Islam and Saumitra Das, a former Qualcomm engineer with 330 patents to his name and another 450 pending, struck out on their own to create Blue Hexagon, a now 30-person Sunnyvale, Ca.-based company that is today disclosing that it has raised $31 million in funding from Benchmark and Altimeter.

The funding comes roughly one year after Benchmark quietly led a $6 million Series A round for the firm.

So what has investors so bullish on the company’s prospects, aside from its credentialed founders? In a word, speed, seemingly. According to Islam, Blue Hexagon has created a real-time, cybersecurity platform that he says can detect known and unknown threats at first encounter, then block them in “sub seconds” so the malware doesn’t have time to spread.

The industry has to move to real-time detection, he says, explaining that four new and unique malware samples is released every second, and arguing that traditional security methods can’t keep pace. He says that sandboxes, for example, meaning restricted environments that quarantine cyber threats and keep them from breaching sensitive files, are no longer state of the art. The same is true of signatures, which are mathematical techniques used to validate the authenticity and integrity of a message, software or digital document but are being bypassed by rapidly evolving new malware.

Only time will tell if Blue Hexagon is far more capable of identifying and stopping attackers, as Islam insists is the case. It is not the only startup to apply deep learning to cybersecurity, though it’s certainly one of the first.

Critics, some who are protecting their own corporate interests, also worry that hackers can foil security algorithms by targeting the warning flags they look for.

Still, with its technology, its team, and its pitch, Blue Hexagon is starting to persuade not only top investors of its merits, but a growing —  and broad — base of customers, says Islam. “Everyone has this issue, from large banks, insurance companies, state and local governments. Nowhere do you find someone who doesn’t need to be protected.”

Blue Hexagon can even help customers that are already under attack, Islam says, even if it isn’t ideal. “Our goal is to catch an attack as early in the kill chain as possible. But if someone is already being attacked, we’ll see that activity and pinpoint it and be able to turn it off.”

Some damage may already be done, of course. It’s another reason to plan ahead, he says. “With automated attacks, you need automated techniques.” Deep learning, he insists, “is one way of leveling the playing field against attackers.”

BetterCloud began life as a way to provide an operations layer for G Suite. More recently, after a platform overhaul, it began layering on a handful of other SaaS applications. Today, the company announced, it is now possible to add any SaaS application to its operations dashboard and monitor usage across applications via an API.

As founder and CEO David Politis explains, a tool like Okta provides a way to authenticate your SaaS app, but once an employee starts using it, BetterCloud gives you visibility into how it’s being used.

“The first order problem was identity, the access, the connections. What we’re doing is we’re solving the second order problem, which is the interactions,” Politis explained. In his view, companies lack the ability to monitor and understand the interactions going on across SaaS applications, as people interact and share information, inside and outside the organization. BetterCloud has been designed to give IT control and security over what is occurring in their environment, he explained.

He says they can provide as much or as little control as a company needs, and they can set controls by application or across a number of applications without actually changing the user’s experience. They do this through a scripting library. BetterCloud comes with a number of scripts and provides log access to give visibility into the scripting activity.

If a customer is looking to use this data more effectively, the solution includes a Graph API for ingesting data and seeing the connections across the data that BetterCloud is collecting. Customers can also set event triggers or actions based on the data being collected as certain conditions are met.

All of this is possible because the company overhauled the platform last year to allow BetterCloud to move beyond G Suite and plug other SaaS applications into it. Today’s announcement is the ultimate manifestation of that capability. Instead of BetterCloud building the connectors, it’s providing an API to let its customers do it.

The company was founded in 2011 and has raised over $106 million, according to Crunchbase.