Year: 2019

Sensitive data leakage is one of the biggest negative side-effects of cloud-based apps and services. Today, a startup that has built an AI-based platform that can detect and take action on that data is coming out of stealth with funding to tackle the issue head-on. Nightfall — which integrates with and then automatically scans structured and unstructured data that appears in apps like Slack, GitHub, AWS and hundreds more for sensitive information, which it then acts to secure — is launching publicly today with $20.3 million in funding.

Nightfall’s CEO Isaac Madan said the startup will use the money to expand the scope of what it can detect and where, and to build out its business overall. The company bills itself as the industry’s first cloud-native data loss prevention platform and while in stealth it started out working with high-growth startups like Grofers and Exabeam, later expanding its customer base to Fortune 500 companies.

The company originally launched as Watchtower AI — a name that Madan, who co-founded the company with Rohan Sathe, said was changed to reflect the expanded scope of the company, not just identifying unstructured data but being able to take actions on it. It had raised angel funding of just under $5 million that previously had not been disclosed. Bain Capital Ventures and Venrock have co-led this latest, bigger round of $15.5 million, with Pear VC (Pejman Nozad); Sri Viswanath, CTO of Atlassian; and Kelvin Beachum, Jr. of the New York Jets all also participating.

If $20.3 million sounds like a sizeable investment for a company that had yet to build up a public profile, that’s partly because of the nature of what the company is doing, and the people behind it.

Madan studied computer science and specifically worked on machine learning research at Stanford, focusing on HR and recruitment data, and has one exit already under his belt (a networking and advice platform called Chalky) while also working as an investor at Venrock and analyst at Pejman Mar Ventures, while Sathe was the lead engineer who had built and scaled Uber Eats.

Between the two of them, their experience spans a range of use-cases of where teams are handling many petabytes of data across multiple applications, which many opportunities for data leaks. The lack of any products on the market to address this was what led them to building Nightfall, Madan said in an interview.

Nightfall is tackling a specific issue in the market. Cloud-based collaboration platforms have been the making of distributed teams, which can use them to communicate with each other and work together, sharing data from different apps to get things done even when they are not in the same physical space. But they have also opened the door to a potential problem when it comes to data protection: the information shared on these platforms can contain sensitive data, so having it on there becomes a security risk.

“Business-critical data exists across different systems like Slack, Github, AWS and other apps, and that means sensitive and financial information can proliferate broadly across an organization’s systems,” Madan said. “We leverage machine learning to discover and classify that data” — which is often unstructured when it appears on these platforms.

Of course, each platform in itself can be secure, “but they don’t account for how users of these apps store and use data,” said Madan.

And this is a big big-data task: there are petabytes of data at play covering hundreds of different applications. Nightfall has built machine learning models to scan all of this, detect the data, and then either provide automatic or options for manual actions to take on it: typically, the options are either to delete, redact or quarantine the data, or notify the relevant teams of it to take appropriate actions. 

As part of this latest round Enrique Salem — notably, the former CEO of Symantec and a partner at Bain Capital Ventures — is joining Nightfall’s Board of Directors.

“Isaac, Rohan, and the Nightfall team are addressing a deep and profound need in the world of information security, where I have spent nearly three decades of my career,” he said. “With the proliferation of data across the cloud, high accuracy content inspection that is easy to operationalize is more important than ever. Nightfall has built a powerful and elegant solution to this problem. We are delighted to have been investors since the very beginning and to continue deepening our partnership with the team.”

Add another one to the list of companies piloting small wheeled autonomous robots for small package and food delivery: Yandex . Russia’s search and services giant has expanded its ambitions in the world of autonomous transportation, building on its work with self-driving cars to deploy a six-wheeled robot that adopts the popular cooler on wheels style pioneered by Starship Robotics.

The small autonomous robot, appropriately dubbed ‘Rover,’ has a suite of sensors, including that prominent lidar array on top, and it moves at “average walking speed” according to the company. It includes software that can help it avoid people walking in its path, pets, and just about any other objects that might block the sidewalk while it’s in motion on its way to its destination.

The initial pilot includes testing on the main Yandex corporate campus in Moscow, across a range of weather conditions, and during both the day and at night. The Moscow HQ hosts over 7,000 employees, and spans both office buildings, restaurants and parking garages. Ynadex is providing food deliveries and groceries from its own Yandex.Eats and Yandex.Lavka platforms, respectively, and also small goods transportation is another area of potential expansion, since Yandex owns and operates its own e-commerce platform Beru. The company also says Rover could find a home within its warehouses and data centres for in-office transportation.

That’s what most differentiates the Yandex wheeled delivery bot from most of the other ones current in service or in development: At Yandex, there are a lot of other businesses in-house that could benefit from autonomous last-mile transportation. Companies like Postmates and Amazon also have primary businesses that benefit, while Starship and other dedicated companies need to sell to clients to stand up their revenue generation. Yandex might be unique in the breadth of in-house businesses for which an autonomous wheeled small parcel robot could have knock-on benefits.

Salesforce has its fingers in a lot of parts of the customer experience, so why not content management? Today, the company announced a brand new tool called Salesforce Content Management System, which it says is designed from the ground up to deliver a quality customer experience across multiple channels.

The idea is to provide a way for customers to create, manage and deliver more meaningful content across multiple channels from within the Salesforce family of products. The company claims it doesn’t require any kind of deep technical knowledge to do it, meaning marketers and product people should be able to create and deliver content without the help of IT, once the system is properly set up.

Anna Rosenman, Salesforce’s VP of product marketing for Community Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Salesforce CMS says the company created the new CMS to answer a customer demand. “Our customers have been asking for a dedicated CMS. The systems that they’ve been relying on so far tend to be legacy tools that are hard to use and built for a single-channel or site,” she said.

Photo: Salesforce

While users can create more personalized content based on what they know about the customer based on Salesforce data, Rosenman says the key differentiator here is the ability to connect to third-party systems. “A hybrid CMS provides a native experience channel or touchpoint, but also gives you the flexibility to present content to any touchpoint built on a third-party system,” she explained.

Tony Byrne, founder and principal analyst at Real Story Group, who has followed the Web CMS space for two decades, says this isn’t the first time that Salesforce has tried content management. The previous iteration was called Salesforce Sites. “They made big promises around that platform, got some major customers on board and then dropped it,” Byrne said.

He says that because it’s a major challenge to build a sophisticated multi-channel CMS. “It’s easy to build a simple CMS. It’s much harder to build an extensible, enterprise platform,” he said. He added, “There’s a lot of work they still need to do to feed other platforms around things like connectors, simulation, tracking, very advanced asset management (e.g., compound assets), object-oriented storage, etc.”

But Rosenman says that the system’s built-in flexibility is designed to provide that, and even be used in conjunction with existing legacy tools if need be.

What’s interesting here is that Salesforce decided to build this tool, rather than buying a company and integrating it into the Salesforce family, an approach it has not been afraid to take in the past. In fact, the company pursues an aggressive acquisition strategy. This year alone it spent more than $15 billion to buy Tableau and another $1.35 billion to buy ClickSoftware.

In this case, in the tension between building and buying, it decided to build instead. Time will tell if that was a good decision or not.

Earlier this year, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft announced the second generation of its HoloLens augmented reality visor. Today, the $3,500 HoloLens 2 is going on sale in the United States, Japan, China, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Australia and New Zealand, the same countries where it was previously available for pre-order.

Ahead of the launch, I got to spend some time with the latest model, after a brief demo in Barcelona earlier this year. Users will immediately notice the larger field of view, which still doesn’t cover your full field of view, but offers a far better experience compared to the first version (where you often felt like you were looking at the virtual objects through a stamp-sized window).

The team also greatly enhanced the overall feel of wearing the device. It’s not light, at 1.3 pounds, but with the front visor that flips up and the new mounting system that is far more comfortable.

In regular use, existing users will also immediately notice the new gestures for opening up the Start menu (this is Windows 10, after all). Instead of a ‘bloom’ gesture, which often resulted in false positives, you now simply tap on the palm of your hand, where a Microsoft logo now appears when you look at it.

Eye tracking, too, has been greatly improved and works well, even over large distances, and the new machine learning model also does a far better job at tracking all of your fingers. All of this is powered by a lot of custom hardware, including Microsoft’s second-generation ‘holographic processing unit.’

Microsoft has also enhanced some of the cloud tools it built for HoloLens, including Azure Spatial Anchors that allow for persistent holograms in a given space that anybody else who is using a holographic app can then see in the same spot.

Taken together, all of the changes result in a more comfortable and smarter device, with reduced latencies when you look at the various objects around you and interact with them.

Small satellite startup Kepler has done something never before accomplished with satellite-based broadband connectivity: providing a high-bandwidth the Arctic. Kepler’s nanosatellites have successfully demonstrated achieving over 100Mbps of network speed to a German icebreaker sea vessel that acts as a mobile lab for the MOSAiC research expedition.

This is the first time ever that there’s been a high-bandwidth satellite network for any central Arctic ground-based use, Kepler says, and this connection isn’t just a technical demo: It’s being used for the researchers in the MOSAiC team, which I made up of hundreds of individuals, to transfer data back and forth between the ship, and shore-based research stations, which improves all aspects of working with the considerable quantities of data being gathered by the team.

Bulk data transfer has been a challenge for a long time for science expeditions at either of the Earth’s poles. It’s impractical to do terrestrial high-bandwitch networks in these locations, and traditional satellite-based networking has not been able to achieve these kinds of speeds in these locales, either. Kepler is uniquely servicing the poles with two low-Earth orbit satellites are on a polar orbital trajectory, which means they can provide these scientists, which include a multidisciplinary team intent on studying the impact of climate change up close at the location where its effects are perhaps most dramatic, or at least felt earliest.

On the icrebreaker floating research ship, Kepler has demonstrated 38Mbps down, and 120Mbps up, which is coincidentally above the max recommended specs that Google has posted for its highest quality Stadia game streaming. But this is for science, not gaming. For science.

Wrench, the Seattle-based on demand vehicle maintenance and repair service for consumers and fleets, has raised $20 million in its latest round of financing.

The company’s round was led by Vulcan Capital with additional participation from Madrona Venture Group, Tenaya Capital and Marubeni Corp.

Wrench is one of a growing number of companies that are using technology to adapt what had previously been infrastructure-heavy services closer to a more consumer-friendly, convenient business model. Other companies operating in a similar vein (and in automotive) include the refueling and car wash on-demand startups like Filld, Yoshi, and Booster Fuels for gassing up and Spiffy, Wype, Washos and Washé for washing.

Equipped with diagnostic software that can assess problems with vehicles based on their owners descriptions and service trucks that can handle most maintenance and repair work, Wrench meets fleet operators and consumers at their vehicle’s to provide servicing and repairs.

It’s a model that’s attracted some competitors with big backing. RepairSmith, which operates a similar service out of Los Angeles and San Francisco, is backed by Daimler to provide much the same on-demand repair services.

Given the competition coming into the market, it’s no wonder that Wrench is raising additional capital to expand its footprint into new markets. The company also said it intends to use the financing to make some key hires.

“Busy consumers need a simple scheduling and vehicle diagnosis system to deliver repair and maintenance services without the hassle of the waiting room,” said Ed Petersen, the company’s chief executive, in a statement.

Wrench has already serviced around 100,000 vehicles, according to Petersen and all of the company’s repair and servicing visits come with a 12,000-mile warranty and a vehicle inspection with the results delivered to a customer.

“Consumers are embracing on-demand services that make their lives better.  Wrench’s technology-enabled mobile mechanic service saves customers time and money – resulting in high customer satisfaction and lifetime value,” said Stuart Nagae, Director of Venture Capital at Vulcan Capital. “With more than 270 million vehicles in the United States, the opportunity is enormous.”

Wrench has already begun its process of geographic expansion with the acquisition earlier this year of the Canadian mobile automotive mechanic startup Fiix, which provided mobile mechanic services to around 80,000 customers across North America.

Wrench raised $4 million in its first round of financing, which TechCrunch covered back in 2017.

Wrench, the Seattle-based on demand vehicle maintenance and repair service for consumers and fleets, has raised $20 million in its latest round of financing.

The company’s round was led by Vulcan Capital with additional participation from Madrona Venture Group, Tenaya Capital and Marubeni Corp.

Wrench is one of a growing number of companies that are using technology to adapt what had previously been infrastructure-heavy services closer to a more consumer-friendly, convenient business model. Other companies operating in a similar vein (and in automotive) include the refueling and car wash on-demand startups like Filld, Yoshi, and Booster Fuels for gassing up and Spiffy, Wype, Washos and Washé for washing.

Equipped with diagnostic software that can assess problems with vehicles based on their owners descriptions and service trucks that can handle most maintenance and repair work, Wrench meets fleet operators and consumers at their vehicle’s to provide servicing and repairs.

It’s a model that’s attracted some competitors with big backing. RepairSmith, which operates a similar service out of Los Angeles and San Francisco, is backed by Daimler to provide much the same on-demand repair services.

Given the competition coming into the market, it’s no wonder that Wrench is raising additional capital to expand its footprint into new markets. The company also said it intends to use the financing to make some key hires.

“Busy consumers need a simple scheduling and vehicle diagnosis system to deliver repair and maintenance services without the hassle of the waiting room,” said Ed Petersen, the company’s chief executive, in a statement.

Wrench has already serviced around 100,000 vehicles, according to Petersen and all of the company’s repair and servicing visits come with a 12,000-mile warranty and a vehicle inspection with the results delivered to a customer.

“Consumers are embracing on-demand services that make their lives better.  Wrench’s technology-enabled mobile mechanic service saves customers time and money – resulting in high customer satisfaction and lifetime value,” said Stuart Nagae, Director of Venture Capital at Vulcan Capital. “With more than 270 million vehicles in the United States, the opportunity is enormous.”

Wrench has already begun its process of geographic expansion with the acquisition earlier this year of the Canadian mobile automotive mechanic startup Fiix, which provided mobile mechanic services to around 80,000 customers across North America.

Wrench raised $4 million in its first round of financing, which TechCrunch covered back in 2017.

Opportunity’s still knocking, but it’s on a very short leash. We’re T-minus 48 hours remaining on early bird prices to Disrupt Berlin 2019. And if you want to talk opportunity, you won’t find a better one than attending this two-day international conference focused on early-stage startups.

Right now, savvy startuppers can reap significant savings — up to €500 depending on which pass level you purchase. But the countdown is on. Don’t let procrastination — or any other obstacle — sideline your chance to get the best price. Buy your early bird passes to Disrupt Berlin before the clock runs out tomorrow, 8 November, at 11:59 p.m. (CEST).

What kind of opportunities await you at Disrupt? Opportunities to network. Startup Alley, the pulsing heart of every Disrupt, will be home base to hundreds of early-stage startups. This is where you’ll find some of the most innovative technology — products and platforms, services and talent. No matter what part of the startup ecosystem they occupy — founders, investors, media, marketers, engineers — everyone heads to the Alley.

While you’re exploring Startup Alley, be sure to check out our TC Top Picks. We hand-picked this cohort of roughly 30-50 exemplary startups representing these tech categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, CRM/Enterprise and Education.

Disrupt Berlin packs a lot of programming into two short days. Pro tip: Use CrunchMatch, our free business match-making platform that helps you find, connect and schedule meetings with people based on mutual business goals and interests. No more wasting time or shoe leather trying to find and schedule meetings with the right people.

Now that you’re set to network with greater efficiency, don’t miss out on the opportunity to learn from a terrific lineup of speakers — founders, investors and tech icons ready to address the most challenging issues facing the startup community. Check the Disrupt Berlin agenda and plan your strategy before you even pack your bags.

Startup Battlefield is an opportunity to witness the birth of tomorrow’s tech giants — potential unicorns in the making. Since 2007, Startup Battlefield pitch competitions have launched 857 tech companies — like Vurb, Dropbox, Mint, Yammer and many others — that have collectively raised $8.9 billion and produced 112 exits.

Watch as 15-20 impressive early-stage startups pitch and demo to a tough panel of seasoned VCs and technologists. All the fast-paced action takes place live on the Main Stage. Be there to see which startup claims the Disrupt Cup and $50,000 prize.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. So much untapped opportunity awaits, but your opportunity to pay early bird prices ends tomorrow, 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Buy your early-bird pass to Disrupt Berlin today and keep the opportunities coming.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

South African internet company Naspers isn’t a particularly well-known name in the startup community. And yet, the company made an early investment in a small Chinese company called… Tencent. Naspers still retains a 31% stake in Tencent that is valued at around $100 billion (with a B). That’s why I’m excited to announce that Naspers CEO Bob van Dijk is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

It’s hard to talk about Naspers without talking about SoftBank, another company that made an early bet on Alibaba, another small Chinese company back then. But Naspers doesn’t want to be compared to SoftBank as it doesn’t have the same approach.

Naspers recently created a new holding company for its tech investments called Prosus NV. A couple of months ago, Prosus went public in Amsterdam — the holding company is currently valued at $114 billion.

This has been a huge deal for Naspers — and also a highly unusual listing. And it should open up a lot of possibilities for more late-stage investments in the future. Prosus isn’t a traditional fund with limited partners that expect returns. It means that it can hold investments for multiple decades.

Naspers has invested in online classifieds business OLX, in fintech startups with PayU and Remitly, in food delivery startups Delivery Hero, iFood and Swiggy, and in dozens of other startups across the globe.

While many venture capital firms are focused on the U.S., Naspers has investments in 90 countries. If you want to learn more about the mega-trends of the tech industry, you have to hear what Bob van Dijk has to say.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion — and many others. The conference will take place December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

Immo Investment Technologies, a London-based fintech startup that purchase homes on behalf of buy-to-let investors, has closed €11M in Series A funding.

Backing the round is Talis Capital and HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, with participation from Tom Stafford and Rahul Mehta of DST Global, Mato Peric of MPGI, among others. In addition, the company is disclosing that it has raised over €100 million in real estate “buyer capital”.

It will use the buyer capital to fund the acquisition of properties — targeting private individuals who want to sell their property quickly. It then refurbishes these properties and puts them on the rental market as part of a fully-managed package, therefore returning a predictable yield to investors.

Immo says it has already evaluated over 10,000 for-sale apartments in the launch city of Hamburg. It claims its technology can accurately predict property sales prices, as well as current and future rental income prices.

“Immo buys residential properties directly from consumers on behalf of professional investors, thereby helping consumers sell their home in a fast, reliable, transparent and convenient way and providing investors with desired residential asset exposure at scale,” explains Hans-Christian Zappel, the startup’s co-founder and CEO.

“Immo tenants enjoy a well invested, fully furnished long-term rental product and a highly standardised and professionally managed lettings experience”.

As well as serving investors and tenants, Immo is also targeting property owners that want to sell their home quickly, with less hassle, and without the expense of using an estate agent. “With Immo, consumers go through one viewing, receive an offer within 24 hours and then sell to us without any agency fees and free of worries about financing risks or changing minds,” says Zappel.

The ability to transact “fast and confidently” is based on the company’s data and tech-driven approach to understanding markets and assets, says the Immo co-founder. “We replace instinct and gut-based valuations, with data; we call this the ‘Immo Intelligence’,” he adds.

In this regard, it echoes similar claims made by Nested, another London-based fintech company aiming to remove the uncertainties surrounding selling a property.

“Using our inspection technology we collect a proprietary set of 281 data points about every property,” continues Zappel. “Everything from ceiling height, decibel noise levels, wall dampness, lumen levels to water pressure gets measured. The resulting asset information is then combined with a hyperlocal market assessment which is based on two automated valuation models that use historical transaction and lettings data as well as environmental data such as traffic flow, crime statistics, average school/restaurant/cafe ratings, average AirBnb ratings in the area, social media activity, distance to supermarkets/places of worship, etc. to come up with the price we are able to offer to the seller”.

Based on its machine learning model, Immo claims to be able to do the financial underwriting of a property “in a matter of minutes,” a process that when done manually can take days.

Meanwhile, traditional real estate brokers are arguably Immo’s most direct competitors, but they tend to charge high fees and don’t provide a standardised experience for sellers. “They sell the hope for a quick and convenient sale to a customer that is helpless. Immo actually delivers on that promise,” says Zappel.

He also argues that Immo isn’t currently competing directly with other “iBuyer” models, such as those operated by OpenDoor, Nested, and Casavo. “We are not in the same country market [yet],” he says, “but fundamentally these players are trying to address a similar problem for the consumer”.

“Immo’s C2B model – buying from consumers, selling to investors – is in our view superior to the C2C model [of] buying from consumers, [and] selling to consumers,” adds Zappel. One reason is that Immo is able to operate a “balance sheet light” model, in which properties don’t sit on its balance sheet and therefore is arguably less exposed than some other “iBuyer” models.

Immo generates revenue from investors that pay the startup a fee for sourcing, assessing and acquiring property assets. In addition, the company receives a subscription fee for ongoing portfolio management. “We don’t take any fees from the seller, nor from tenants,” says Zappel.