Year: 2021

With a lot of us spending more time at home these days, home improvement has continued to be a booming market. Now, one of the big players in that space — ServiceTitan, which builds software that today is used by over 100,000 contractors to manage their work — is getting a little bigger.

The company — which also works with contractors that work on business properties — is acquiring Aspire Software, a software provider specifically for commercial landscapers. Along with that, ServiceTitan is announcing another $200 million in funding, a Series G that values that company at $9.5 billion.

The funding is being led by a new backer, Thoma Bravo, with other unnamed existing investors participating. (That list includes Sequoia, Tiger Global, Dragoneer, T. Rowe Price, Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and ICONIQ Capital.)

Los Angeles-based ServiceTitan is not disclosing the financial terms of the deal, but it comes on the heels of the company raising $500 million only in March (when it was valued at $8.3 billion) — money that it earmarked at the time for acquisitions.

ServiceTitan also confirmed that this is its biggest acquisition yet, which roughly puts this deal in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Aspire will stay based in Missouri to build out the company further from there.

Aspire itself has some 50,000 customers and sees $4 billion in annualized transactions on its platform across areas like landscaping, snow and ice management, and construction. It has never disclosed a valuation, nor how much money it has raised. The St Louis, MO company was previously backed by growth equity firm Mainsail Partners.

The deal underscores not just how much scale and opportunity remains in building technology to serve the home services space, but also what might be a consolidating trend within that, where a smaller number of companies are building technology for contractors and others in the space working across a number of adjacent and related verticals.

ServiceTitan is already bringing in annual recurring revenues of $250 million — a figure it shared in March and hasn’t updated — and as of that month, it had grown 50% over the preceding year. Part of that growth is based on simply more usage of and demand for its software, but part of it also has to do with the company expanding what it covers.

ServiceTitan got its start in residential plumbing, HVAC and electrical — the areas where the the two founders Ara Mahdessian (CEO) and Vahe Kuzoyan (president) went first because they knew them best from their own family businesses — but expanded into areas like garage door, chimney and other areas, as well as commercial property, on its own steam.

In other markets like landscaping or pest control, the expertise is more specialized, however, so it makes sense to make acquisitions in those areas to bring in that software, and teams to manage and build it, to further diversify the company. (ServicePro, a pest control company, was acquired in February.)

ServiceTitan said that its contractor customers have made more than $20 billion in transactions in the last year, but with the wider industry of contracting repair and maintenance services estimated to be worth $1 trillion, there is obviously a lot more potential. Hence expanding the range of areas covered in the industry.

“Both Aspire and ServiceTitan were born out of a desire to improve the lives of contractors who work tirelessly to serve their communities, but who have historically been underserved by technology,” said Mahdessian in a statement. “Mark and his team at Aspire have more than 500 years of combined experience in the commercial landscaping industry. Just like we built ServiceTitan to solve the problems our fathers faced, it’s that first-hand industry knowledge that has enabled Aspire to build the most powerful software in the industry with the highest customer satisfaction.”

Thoma Bravo has been making some prolific moves to take majority positions in a number of older tech companies in recent weeks (see QAD, Proofpoint and Talend for three examples among others). This, however, is a growth investment that is coming as many wonder when and if ServiceTitan might go public.

I’ll hopefully get a chance to ask Mahdessian about that later but in March he hinted that an IPO might come later this year or latest by the end of 2022, depending on market conditions. This Series G round implies perhaps stretching to the later part of that timeframe.

“As the fastest-growing software solution for the trades with an unrelenting focus on customer success, ServiceTitan is poised to extend its leadership and capture increased market share as the industry exceeds $1 trillion globally,” said Robert (Tre) Sayle, a partner at Thoma Bravo, in a statement. “ServiceTitan’s expansion into landscaping, a more than $100 billion market in the US alone, is an important step on its path to provide all home and commercial tradesmen with the tools they need to grow and manage a successful business. We are excited to partner with ServiceTitan and to leverage our software and operational expertise to accelerate the company’s growth and build upon its strong momentum.”

There are a number of companies playing in the wider home services market that speak to the opportunity ahead. Companies like Thumbtack are digging deeper into home management, providing a bridge to contractors to fill out the work needed (and also providing them with the software to do so), while companies like Jobber and BigChange, which have also raised recently, are also looking to build better software to manage individual and fleets of contractors and their fleets.

ServiceTitan, the biggest of the software players now, is likely going to continue making more deals to grow its own empire, but it added that it will also be using the funding to expand more organically, with investments into customer service, R&D, and to hire more people across the board.

The Pittsburgh Strip District, once home to Industrial Age giants Alcoa, Heinz, U.S. Steel and Westinghouse, has evolved over the past decade into a technology and robotics hub, and notably, a testbed of autonomous vehicles.  That activity has more recently spilled out beyond Smallman Street, so-called Robotics Row, past the confines of the Strip District and Lower Lawrenceville and into adjoining neighborhoods to the north and south.

And while, Argo AI, Aurora Innovation (as well as its newly acquired addition Uber ATG) and Motional are the most visible examples of autonomous vehicle testing and development in the city, numerous other AV startups have popped up in the past six years — each one betting that its application will provide the quickest path to commercialization.

Locomation, a startup founded in 2018 that is working on autonomous trucks, is one of them. The co-founders, who met at the National Robotics Engineering Center, an operating unit within Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, believe the smoothest, fastest route to autonomous trucks is to use a human-guided convoy system first. 

Locomation contends that autonomous trucks that can operate without a human safety driver behind the wheel will happen eventually and after considerable validation. But until then, the company is pitching a convoy system, in which a lead driver pilots a truck and another truck follows it autonomously. The autonomous one will also have a driver, but that individual will be resting and is considered a passenger.

“We decided that we needed to expose the (autonomous) system to the real world in a safe and profitable way,” co-founder and CEO Çetin Meriçli told TechCrunch in a recent interview, adding that is how the idea of human-guided autonomous driving came about. “We are still building a Level 4 system with an extremely narrow operational design domain that can drive itself and it doesn’t require a driver in the seat as long as there is a human driven lead track right in front of it.”

Locomation’s starting point is a two-driver, two-truck system for long haul routes. When the lead driver is in place, the following driver is resting in the other vehicle. Both trucks are equipped with a self-driving system so they can periodically swap positions.  However, Meriçli noted that while the lead driver is operating the vehicle, the autonomous system is only assisting the person.

Pittsburgh-area readers: Save 25% on a 1- or 2- year Extra Crunch membership.
Enter discount code ALLEGHENY, expires 7/31/2020.

“There is some automation there, but we don’t think it is a good idea to automate the lead truck so much that the lead driver can actually become complacent,” he said. “Keeping the driver engaged enough and at the same time trying to reduce the cognitive load as much as possible is a very delicate balance to hit there.”

The drivers then take over manual driving once they leave the interstate.

The next phase is what Locomation calls the drone follower system designed for shorter haul routes of 250 miles or less. This system involves one driver and two trucks, one lead and one following behind autonomously.

These two human guided convoy concepts will help the company progress to an autonomous system in which trucks operate without humans between hubs on an interstate and then eventually to dock to dock, which would include non-interstate roads.

Locomation has a contract to equip 1,120 Wilson Logistics trucks with its autonomous relay convoy technology over the next five years. The first trucks are expected to be delivered in 2022. The company recently signed an eight-year agreement to supply PGT Trucking with the systems for 1,000 trucks.

Today, Locomation is in test mode, although it has hauled some freight. That means safety drivers are always behind the wheel. Eventually, it will transition to a commercial operation, which Meriçli said the company is aiming to launch in the second half of 2022.

To reach that goal, Locomation is doing what some many others are aiming for: raising money, recruiting talent and expanding. Locomation, which currently operates across the Alleghany River from Pittsburgh’s Strip District, will soon move to larger facility in the Tech Forge section.

Mericli said there are at least two dozen startups working on autonomous vehicle technology in Pittsburgh.

“Most of them are really little hole in the wall operations, maybe a couple of folks,” Mericli said. ” Many of them are actually the second generation or third generation; they started their careers in one of these larger companies, worked there for a number of years, identified a few pain points and either got frustrated with the slow progress or got bit by the entrepreneurship bug.”

“It’s not quite like Silicon Valley, just yet,” Mericli said, adding that it is getting closer to that West Coast hub of tech. “What I see here, which was not the case a couple of years ago, is that now there are some role models, some success stories, some big achievers, like the Argos and Auroras of the world. Hopefully, Locomation is climbing those ladders too. Now young people and new entrepreneurs coming out of the CMU ecosystem, the way they are thinking about their business and their aspirations, it’s getting closer to the Silicon Valley mindset.”

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie,

My husband and I are both U.S. permanent residents.

Given what we’ve gone through this past year being isolated from loved ones during the pandemic, we’d like to bring my parents and my sister to the U.S. to be close to our family and help out with our children.

Is that possible?

— Symbiotic in Sunnyvale

Dear Symbiotic,

Thanks for your question! Yes, it’s possible to bring your parents and sister to the United States! We have a lot of clients like you who are looking to reunite with their families. My law partner, Anita Koumriqian, and I discussed in a podcast episode what U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents should know about bringing family members to the United States. In that episode, we also discuss certificates of citizenship for individuals who are U.S. citizens born abroad.

As always, I suggest you consult with an experienced immigration attorney in petitioning for green cards for your parents and sister. An immigration attorney can also discuss alternative immigration options for your sister.

Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window)

Who can I sponsor as a permanent resident? As a U.S. citizen?

U.S. permanent residents — or green card holders — can only sponsor a spouse or unmarried children for a green card. But if you have lived in the U.S. for at least five years as a green card holder, you are eligible to become a U.S. citizen. U.S. citizens who are at least 21 years old can sponsor a broader list of family members for green cards: parents, spouses, children and stepchildren, brothers and sisters.

Online electric micromobility dealership Ridepanda has announced a raise of $3.75 million that the startup will use to build out its engineering, product and design teams to boost its e-commerce and B2B solutions. The company also wants to double down on strategic partnerships with delivery fleets and businesses offering employees commuter benefits if they purchase an electric vehicle. 

Last year, e-bike and e-scooter sales skyrocketed. A Bicycle Association report detailing the impact of COVID-19 on the U.K. cycling economy from January to October 2020 revealed sales of e-bikes more than doubled. Between April and September, they saw a 92% YoY rise in sales. Deloitte has predicted that in 2023, e-bike sales will top 40 million units worldwide, generating over $22 billion. In a market increasingly favorable to electric micromobility options, Ridepanda’s business could lead sales of electric bikes, scooters and mopeds for both consumers and fleets.

“60% of in-car trips take place within zero to five miles, and we think there is a better way to go,” CEO and co-founder of Ridepanda, Chinmay Malaviya, told TechCrunch. “Electric cars is one solution, but we think that our vehicles are cheaper, a lot more accessible, more affordable, more practical, better for traffic congestion, easy to store, easy to park, easy to charge, environmentally friendly and a lot more fun because of the added health benefits.”

Ridepanda, which is based in San Francisco but ships to 48 U.S. states, offers a suite of light electric vehicles, from Segway-Ninebot e-scooters to Aventon e-bikes to Niu e-mopeds. The company would not reveal how many vehicles it’s sold since its founding in 2019, but Malaviya told TechCrunch it’s a four-digit number.

Co-founder and CTO Charlie Depman says e-bikes are the most popular, directly followed by scooters. Mopeds still have some room for growth, but Depman suspects part of the reason for the lower sales in that category are ongoing pandemic-related, supply-chain issues. 

Ridepanda vets each vehicle on its site upfront, ensuring all parts are high quality and easy to repair and replace, something that’s very useful if you’ve ever had the frustrating experience of taking your malfunctioning e-scooter to a traditional bike shop. 

When a user comes to Ridepanda’s site, they can use the refined recommendation engine which helps customers choose the right vehicle for their particular use case, whether that’s commuting in the city or leisure rides in the suburbs and everything in between. 

“A fifth of our customers don’t know what type of vehicle they want when they come to our site,” Depman told TechCrunch. “We give you a ranked set of recommendations for your use case and feature preferences, and you’ll be taken to the vehicle page where we show you more about our dealership and offer maintenance plans, roadside assistance, et cetera to make ownership easy. Basically it’s as easy as it is to own a car, but a lot of this infrastructure isn’t in place for light electric vehicle ownership.”

Vehicles are mailed directly to the customer, who can choose to assemble it or have a trained technician come to the house for home assembly.

It’s this hands-on approach that the company wants to improve with the fresh funding, specifically automating the post-purchase fulfillment process and building out after sales service in the form of its PandaCare app.

“PandaCare has been our flagship dealership offering that has all of the maintenance and roadside assistance and extended warranty,” said Depman. “So ideally this app would entail having access to all those services and being able to call a mechanic to come work on your vehicle. It could also notify you about doing preventative maintenance, or notify us about doing preventative maintenance, so we can help extend the vehicle’s lifetime.” 

Ridepanda is also working on creating a more personalized geographic approach on the product side. Laws and regulations around these vehicles differ from state to state, as do potential rebates and purchase incentives. 

In February, Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon introduced the Electric Bicycle Incentive Kickstart for the Environment (E-BIKE) Act, which would give a 30% refundable tax credit on the purchase of a new e-bike. The bill hasn’t yet made its way through Congress, but if it passes, and there’s good reason to think it might, Ridepanda hopes to be able to help facilitate the corresponding rise in sales. 

Malaviya said Ridepanda is also partnering with the county of San Mateo’s utility provider Peninsula Clean Energy to roll out local e-bike rebates, helping low income communities access them at the point of purchase. 

“We are very excited to see how we can play a role as a tech partner, as well as a choice platform for consumers in terms of integrating and making it very seamless and easy for folks to take advantage of these rebates and subsidies out there,” said Malaviya.

The $3.75 million round, which is an extension of the company’s seed funding last year, is led by Porsche Ventures, Yamaha and Proeza Ventures, with participation from angel investor Toby Sun, co-founder of Lime, and Silicon Valley VC General Catalyst, according to Malaviya. 

“There’s a lot we can gain from these partnerships,” said Malaviya. “From Yamaha, how do you manage dealerships to supply chains to even actually getting access to the bikes and mopeds? Same with Porsche. They also released a high-end e-bike and we’re excited to also work with them in accessing dealerships and the product, and also the branding piece. And Proeza, we’re pretty excited for all the supply chain expertise we can gain. What is also key about these folks is Porshe’s HQ is in Germany, Yamaha in Japan and Proeza in Latin America. As we look to go outside of the U.S., this could be very helpful.”

Ro, a direct-to-consumer virtual care company, has scooped up Kit, an at-home diagnostics company with an array of customizable products, from finger prick blood tests to weight measurement tools. The price was undisclosed.

Ro co-founder Zachariah Reitano said that he first approached Kit as a potential customer, hoping to integrate its quality testing into its platform. Him and Kit’s co-founders, Philip Fung and Erik Salazar, bonded over shared missions to become a vertically-integrated primary care platform, as well as the current issues that stop consumers from accessing care. The synergy eventually drove Ro to scoop up the 17-month old business.

Kit partners with health insurers, clinical trials, self-insured employers and telehealth platforms to create customizable at-home diagnostic tests. It essentially serves as a white-label solution for physicians, giving them an ordering portal for them to request and tweak the tests that can eventually be delivered to consumers. The company’s in-network approach comes as a contrast to Ro’s vision of direct-to-consumer healthcare, so it will be key to see how Kit customers are impacted by the transaction and if You can bring down prices to hit consumer-friendly benchmarks.

Reitano stressed Kit’s consumer-friendly UX. Consumers will receive a Kit box on their doorstep, with steps to download the Kit app so they can get step-by-step guidance on how to self-administer their test. There’s other bits within the box, such as a hand warmer to increase blood flow or a piece of foam to practice on (instead of skin).

Image Credits: Ro/Kit

“When I first used Kit, I genuinely felt like I was living in the future,” Reitano said. “And that doesn’t happen very frequently.” He declined to name specific competitors, but said that other at-home diagnostic companies have “processes that feel very antiquated” with pamphlets and confusing instructions. Two of the leading players in the at-home testing space are Everlywell and LetsGetChecked, which both have raised hundreds of millions in venture capital. Kit raised only a $3.3 million seed round before getting acquired, with investments from Sherpalo Ventures, South Park Commons, Slow Ventures and Village Global, per Crunchbase. 

“There’s a fragmentation of care, fragmentation of data and providers aren’t kept in the loop,” Reitano said. “And we have so much work to do, but Kit is such an important and essential piece in that infrastructure to again bring more and more of a patient’s care under the same roof.”

As part of the acquisition, Ro has added its first lab to its brand. It will now have access to Kit’s CLIA-certified and CAP-accredited lab, which it owns and operates in San Francisco, CA.

Ro’s acquisition of Kit is its third acquisition in the past 12 months. In December 2020, it acquired Workpath, an in-home care API that allows it to send professionals to a patient’s home or conduct diagnostic tests – which will eventually be broadened by Kit’s product. In May 2021, Ro bought Modern Fertility for north of $225 million, which will help it add fertility testing and proactive, reproductive health services to its women’s health offerings. Modern Fertility offers a $129 hormone test for consumers to take at home, a product that will jive with Kit’s host of services.

Becoming a mass consolidator in the digital health space was a hope, not an expectation, says Reitano. From a technical perspective, Ro is now juggling the integration of three startups into its service -with perhaps even more acquisitions on the way. Naturally, the company could face friction when trying to integrate new and existing customers without breaking service – and it could similarly find that lowering costs of high quality, high touch products like diagnostics may not be as possible as generic drugs.

Still, Reitano thinks that the big opportunity for any company that joins his company is that Ro has scale, with millions of patients across 50 states. Scale can reduce costs, and in this case, supercharge an 16-month old company into a brand that is most recently valued at $5 billion.

Fresh off the heels of a $650 million Series E funding round, 3D printed rocket startup Relativity Space is now preparing to increase production capacity by a factor of ten, with the opening of a 1 million square-foot factory headquarters in Long Beach, California.

Relativity’s current factory, a 150,000 square-foot facility also in Long Beach, will remain in production. That factory will continue to focus on the company’s first rocket, the expendable Terran 1 that’s designed for smaller payloads. The new facility is aimed at building out the development and production of Terran R, Relativity’s heavy-lift, fully-reusable two stage rocket. Neither rocket has seen orbit yet, but Relativity aims to launch Terran 1 in June 2022 and Terran R as early as 2024.

Along with the factory opening, which is slated for January 2022, the company is also planning a hiring push – Relativity hopes to add at least 200 employees by the end of this year, CEO Tim Ellis told TechCrunch. The new facility has a labor force capacity of over 2,000, so “we’re certainly going to get into the thousands [of new hires] as we’re launching Terran One and then kicking off Terran R development as well,” Ellis said.

Image Credits: Relativity Space (opens in a new window)

The company’s proprietary 3D printers, Stargate, can print either of the company’s two rockets. But they’re capable of much more than that – theoretically, at least. The Terran R is reusable, so the company will likely need to manufacture far fewer rockets than what the massive new facility will be capable of producing. So that begs the question: what are all those printers going to make?

Ellis alluded to other possibilities. “While it’s building Terran R, and doing Terran R development initially, certainly over time we’ll be able to continually upgrade and reconfigure this factory of the future to be able to build whatever else in aerospace that we’d go into next,” he said. But he stayed mum on exactly what that might look like.

“We will actually have a lot of extra print capacity over time, because we’ll be reusing Terran R. So at that point, we’ll have a ton of printers with a bunch of free time. You could imagine what one does, once you have that capability, you just keep diving into the next product to disrupt.”

In addition to the Stargate printers, the space will also house customized DMLS metal printers, a metallurgical laboratory, machine shop, and a mission control center. In the mission control center, true to its name, engineers and mission operators will be able to monitor and manage launches that take place in Cape Canaveral, Florida or Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

Relativity is leasing the space “for a long period of time” from property owner Goodman Group, Ellis said. The site was previously being used by Boeing to manufacture C-17 cargo military planes.

As enterprises and carriers gear up for operating and scaling IoT services and monitoring the activity of their devices, machines and more globally, a startup that is building technology to make this easier and cheaper to implement is announcing some funding.

FloLive, which has built a cloud-based solution to stitch together private, local cellular networks to create private global IoT 5G networks for its customers, has raised $15 million, funding that it will be using to continue expanding its service, both through investing and building out its tech stack, upgrading its network to 5G where it’s being used, and building a global SIM2Cloud offering in partnership with an as-yet unnamed global cloud provider.

Intel Capital, the investment arm of the chip giant, is leading the investment, with Qualcomm Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, 83North and Saban Ventures also participating. Intel, Qualcomm and Dell are all strategic backers here: the three work with carriers and enterprises to power and manage services and devices, and this will give them potentially a better way of integrating a much more flexible, global technology and network to provision those services more seamlessly across different geographies.

This is an extension to a $21.5 million round that London-based FloLive raised last year, bringing the total for the Series B to $36.5 million. From what we understand, the startup is also now working on its Series C.

As we move towards more ubiquitous 5G networks and services that use them, the challenge in the market that FloLive is addressing is a critical one to get right.

In a nutshell, enterprises and carriers that are building networks for managing IoT and other connected devices face a scaling issue. Typically, IoT networks to cover services like these are built on national or even more localized footprints, making it a challenge — if not completely impossible — to control or monitor devices in a global network in a centralized way.

“If you look on high level at tier one networks, you see two main things,” Nir Shalom, FloLive’s CEO, said in an interview. “These networks are built for local footprints, and they are mainly built for consumers. What we do is different in that we think about the global, not local, footprint; and our data networks are for IoT, not only people.”

Of course there are some carriers that might look at building their own networks to rival this, but they will often lack the scaled use cases to do so, and may in any case work with providers like FloLive to build these anyway. The bigger picture is that there are 900 larger mobile network operators globally, Shalom said, and the majority of that group is far from being able to do this themselves.

FloLive’s approach to fixing this is not to build completely new infrastructure, but to stitch together networks from different localities and to run them as a single network. It does this by way of its software-defined connectivity built and implemented in the cloud, which stitches together not just 5G networks but whatever cellular technology happens to be in use (eg 4G, 3G or even 2G) in a particular locale.

FloLive’s tech lives in the core network, where it builds a private radio access network that it can integrate with carriers and their capacity in different markets, while then managing the network for customers as a single service.

This is somewhat similar to what you might get with a enterprise virtual private network except that this is focused specifically on the kinds of use cases that might use connected objects — FloLive cites manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and utilities as four areas — rather than laptops for employees.

The resulting network, however, also becomes a viable alternative for companies that might otherwise use a VPN for connectivity, too, as well as carriers themselves needing to extend their network for a customer. In addition to its IoT focused core network, it also provides business support systems for IoT, device management, and solutions targeted for specific verticals. FloLive supports devices that use SIM or eSIM or “softSIM” technology to connect to networks. That’s one part that likely interested those strategic investors as it allows for significantly easier integration.

“We are truly excited about floLIVE’s unique cloud-native approach to IoT connectivity,” said David Johnson, MD at Intel Capital, in a statement. “Cloud-native architectures bring efficiency, scalability and flexibility which are important for IoT services. In addition, floLIVE’s cloud-based core can provide consistency of features across many independent private and public networks. We look forward to the expansion of floLIVE’s products and services enabled by this investment.”

For a glimpse of the security and privacy dystopia the UK government has in store for its highly regulated ‘British Internet’, look no further than guidance put out by the Department of Digital, Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS) yesterday — aimed at social media platforms and private messaging services — which includes the suggestion that the latter should “prevent’ the use of end-to-end encryption on “child accounts”.

That’s right, the UK government is saying: ‘No end-to-end encryption for our kids please, they’re British’.

And while this is merely guidance for now, the chill is real — because legislation is already on the table.

The UK’s Online Safety Bill was published back in May, with Boris Johnson’s government setting out a sweeping plan to force platforms to regulate user generated content by imposing a legal duty to protect users from illegal (or merely just “harmful”) content.

The bill controversially bundles up requirements to report illegal stuff like child sexual exploitation content to law enforcement with far fuzzier mandates that platforms take action against a range of much-harder-to-define ‘harms’ (from cyber bullying to romance scams).

The end result looks like a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Except the ‘nut’ that could get smashed to pieces in this ministerial vice is UK Internet users’ digital security and privacy. (Not to mention any UK startups and digital businesses that aren’t on board with mass-surveillance-as-a-service.)

That’s the danger if the government follows through on its wonky idea that — on the Internet — ‘safety’ means security must be replaced with blanket surveillance in order to ‘keep kids safe’.

The Online Safety Bill is not the first wonky tech policy plan the UK has come up with. An earlier bid to force adult content providers to age verify users was dropped in 2019, having been widely criticized as unworkable as well as a massive privacy intrusion and security risk.

However, at the time, the government said it was only abandoning the ‘porn blocks’ measure because it was planning to bring forward “the most comprehensive approach possible to protecting children”. Hence the Online Safety Bill now stepping forward to push platforms to remove robust encryption in the name of ‘protecting children’.

Age verification technologies — and all sorts of content monitoring solutions (surveillance tech, doubtless badged as ‘safety’ tech) — also look likely to proliferate as a consequence of this approach.

Pushing platforms to proactively police speech and surveil usage in the hopes of preventing an ill-defined grab-bag of ‘harms’ — or, from the platforms’ perspective, to avoid the risk of eye-watering fines from the regulator if it decides they’ve failed in this ‘duty of care’ — also obviously conjures up a nightmare scenario for online freedom of expression.

Aka: ‘Watch what you type, even in the privacy of your private messaging app, because the UK Internet safety thought police are watching/might block you…’

Privacy rights for UK minors appear to be first on the chopping block, via what DCMS’ guidance refers to as “practical steps to manage the risk of online harm if your online platform allows people to interact, and to share text and other content”.

So, pretty much, if your online platform has any kind of communication layer at all then.

Letting kids have their own safe spaces to express themselves is apparently incompatible with ministers’ populist desire to brand the UK ‘the safest place to go online in the world’, as they like to spin it.

How exactly the UK will achieve safety online if government zealots force service providers to strip away robust security (e2e encryption) — torching the standard of data protection and privacy wrapping Brits’ personal information — is quite the burning question.

Albeit, it’s not one the UK government seems to have considered for even a split second.

“We’ve known for a long time that one of government’s goals for the Online Safety Bill is the restriction, if not the outright criminalisation, of the use of end-to-end encryption,” said Heather Burns, a policy manager for the digital rights organization Open Rights Group (ORG), one of many vocal critics of the government’s approach — discussing the wider implications of the policy push with TechCrunch.

“Recent messaging strategies promoted by government and the media have openly sought to associate end-to-end encryption with child abuse, and to imply that companies which use it are aiding and abetting child exploitation. So DCMS’s newly-published guidance advising the voluntary removal of encryption from children’s accounts is a precursor to it becoming a likely legal requirement.

“It’s also part of government’s drive, again as part of the Online Safety Bill, to require all services to implement mandatory age verification on all users, for all content or applications, in order to identify child users, in order to withhold encryption from them, thanks to aggressive lobbying from the age verification industry.”

That ministerial rhetoric around the Online Safety Bill is heavy on tub-thumping emotional appeals (to ‘protect our children from online nasties’) and low on sequential logic or technological coherence is not a surprise: Successive Conservative governments have, after all, had a massive bee in their bonnets about e2e encryption — dating back to the David Cameron years.

Back then ministers were typically taking aim at strong encryption on counter-terrorism grounds, arguing the tech is bad because it prevents law enforcement from catching terrorists. (And they went on to pass beefed up surveillance laws which also include powers to limit the use of robust encryption.)

However, under more recent PMs Theresa May and Boris Johnson, the child protection rhetoric has stepped up too — to the point where messaging channels are now being actively encouraged not to use e2e encryption altogether.

Next stop: State-sanctioned commercial mass surveillance. And massive risks for all UK Internet users subject to this anti-security, anti-privacy ‘safety’ regime.

“Despite government’s claim that the Bill will make the UK ‘the safest place in the world to be online’, restricting or criminalising encryption will actually make the UK an unsafe place for any company to do business,” warned Burns. “We will all need to resort to VPNs and foreign services, as happens in places like China, in order to keep our data safe. It’s likely that many essential services will block UK customers, or leave the UK altogether, rather than be compelled to act as a privatised nanny state over insecure data flows.”

In a section of the DCMS guidance entitled “protect children by limiting functionality”, the government department literally suggests that “private channels” (i.e. services like messaging apps) “prevent end-to-end encryption for child accounts”. And since accurately age identifying online users remains a challenge it follows that in-scope services may simply decide it’s less legally risky if they don’t use e2e at all.

DCMS’s guidance also follows up with an entirely bolded paragraph — in which the government then makes a point of highlighting e2e encryption as a “risk” to users, generally — and, therefore by implication, to future compliance with the forthcoming Online Safety legislation…

“End-to-end encryption makes it more difficult for you to identify illegal and harmful content occurring on private channels. You should consider the risks this might pose to your users,” the UK government writes, emphasis its.

Whether anything can stop this self-destructive policy train now it’s left the Downing Street station is unclear. Johnson has a whopping majority in parliament — and years left before he has to call a general election.

The only thing that could derail the most harmful elements of the Online Safety Bill is if the UK public wakes up to the dangers it poses to everyone’s security and privacy — and if enough MPs take notice and push for amendments.

Earlier this month the ORG, along with some 30 other digital and humans rights groups, called on MPs to do just that and “help keep constituents’ data safe by protecting e2e encryption from legislative threats” — warning that this “basic and essential” security protocol is at risk from clauses in the bill that introduce requirements for companies to scan private and personal messages for evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Zero access encryption is seen by the UK government as a blocker to such scanning.

“In order to do this, the use of end-to-end encryption is likely to be defined as a violation of the law,” the ORG also warned. “And companies operating in the UK who want to continue to defend user privacy through end-to-end encryption could, under the draft Bill, be threatened with partial shutdowns, being blocked from the UK, or even personal arrests.”

“We call on Parliament to ensure that end-to-end encryption must not be threatened or undermined by the Online Safety Bill, and that services utilising strong encryption are left out of the Bill’s content monitoring and filtering requirements,” it added in the online appeal.

DMCS has been contacted with questions on the logic of the government’s policy toward e2e encryption.

In a statement yesterday, the digital minister Caroline Dinenage said: “We’re helping businesses get their safety standards up to scratch before our new online harms laws are introduced and also making sure they are protecting children and users right now.

“We want businesses of all sizes to step up to a gold standard of safety online and this advice will help them to do so.”

For a glimpse of the security and privacy dystopia the UK government has in store for its highly regulated ‘British Internet’, look no further than guidance put out by the Department of Digital, Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS) yesterday — aimed at social media platforms and private messaging services — which includes the suggestion that the latter should “prevent’ the use of end-to-end encryption on “child accounts”.

That’s right, the UK government is saying: ‘No end-to-end encryption for our kids please, they’re British’.

And while this is merely guidance for now, the chill is real — because legislation is already on the table.

The UK’s Online Safety Bill was published back in May, with Boris Johnson’s government setting out a sweeping plan to force platforms to regulate user generated content by imposing a legal duty to protect users from illegal (or merely just “harmful”) content.

The bill controversially bundles up requirements to report illegal stuff like child sexual exploitation content to law enforcement with far fuzzier mandates that platforms take action against a range of much-harder-to-define ‘harms’ (from cyber bullying to romance scams).

The end result looks like a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Except the ‘nut’ that could get smashed to pieces in this ministerial vice is UK Internet users’ digital security and privacy. (Not to mention any UK startups and digital businesses that aren’t on board with mass-surveillance-as-a-service.)

That’s the danger if the government follows through on its wonky idea that — on the Internet — ‘safety’ means security must be replaced with blanket surveillance in order to ‘keep kids safe’.

The Online Safety Bill is not the first wonky tech policy plan the UK has come up with. An earlier bid to force adult content providers to age verify users was dropped in 2019, having been widely criticized as unworkable as well as a massive privacy intrusion and security risk.

However, at the time, the government said it was only abandoning the ‘porn blocks’ measure because it was planning to bring forward “the most comprehensive approach possible to protecting children”. Hence the Online Safety Bill now stepping forward to push platforms to remove robust encryption in the name of ‘protecting children’.

Age verification technologies — and all sorts of content monitoring solutions (surveillance tech, doubtless badged as ‘safety’ tech) — also look likely to proliferate as a consequence of this approach.

Pushing platforms to proactively police speech and surveil usage in the hopes of preventing an ill-defined grab-bag of ‘harms’ — or, from the platforms’ perspective, to avoid the risk of eye-watering fines from the regulator if it decides they’ve failed in this ‘duty of care’ — also obviously conjures up a nightmare scenario for online freedom of expression.

Aka: ‘Watch what you type, even in the privacy of your private messaging app, because the UK Internet safety thought police are watching/might block you…’

Privacy rights for UK minors appear to be first on the chopping block, via what DCMS’ guidance refers to as “practical steps to manage the risk of online harm if your online platform allows people to interact, and to share text and other content”.

So, pretty much, if your online platform has any kind of communication layer at all then.

Letting kids have their own safe spaces to express themselves is apparently incompatible with ministers’ populist desire to brand the UK ‘the safest place to go online in the world’, as they like to spin it.

How exactly the UK will achieve safety online if government zealots force service providers to strip away robust security (e2e encryption) — torching the standard of data protection and privacy wrapping Brits’ personal information — is quite the burning question.

Albeit, it’s not one the UK government seems to have considered for even a split second.

“We’ve known for a long time that one of government’s goals for the Online Safety Bill is the restriction, if not the outright criminalisation, of the use of end-to-end encryption,” said Heather Burns, a policy manager for the digital rights organization Open Rights Group (ORG), one of many vocal critics of the government’s approach — discussing the wider implications of the policy push with TechCrunch.

“Recent messaging strategies promoted by government and the media have openly sought to associate end-to-end encryption with child abuse, and to imply that companies which use it are aiding and abetting child exploitation. So DCMS’s newly-published guidance advising the voluntary removal of encryption from children’s accounts is a precursor to it becoming a likely legal requirement.

“It’s also part of government’s drive, again as part of the Online Safety Bill, to require all services to implement mandatory age verification on all users, for all content or applications, in order to identify child users, in order to withhold encryption from them, thanks to aggressive lobbying from the age verification industry.”

That ministerial rhetoric around the Online Safety Bill is heavy on tub-thumping emotional appeals (to ‘protect our children from online nasties’) and low on sequential logic or technological coherence is not a surprise: Successive Conservative governments have, after all, had a massive bee in their bonnets about e2e encryption — dating back to the David Cameron years.

Back then ministers were typically taking aim at strong encryption on counter-terrorism grounds, arguing the tech is bad because it prevents law enforcement from catching terrorists. (And they went on to pass beefed up surveillance laws which also include powers to limit the use of robust encryption.)

However, under more recent PMs Theresa May and Boris Johnson, the child protection rhetoric has stepped up too — to the point where messaging channels are now being actively encouraged not to use e2e encryption altogether.

Next stop: State-sanctioned commercial mass surveillance. And massive risks for all UK Internet users subject to this anti-security, anti-privacy ‘safety’ regime.

“Despite government’s claim that the Bill will make the UK ‘the safest place in the world to be online’, restricting or criminalising encryption will actually make the UK an unsafe place for any company to do business,” warned Burns. “We will all need to resort to VPNs and foreign services, as happens in places like China, in order to keep our data safe. It’s likely that many essential services will block UK customers, or leave the UK altogether, rather than be compelled to act as a privatised nanny state over insecure data flows.”

In a section of the DCMS guidance entitled “protect children by limiting functionality”, the government department literally suggests that “private channels” (i.e. services like messaging apps) “prevent end-to-end encryption for child accounts”. And since accurately age identifying online users remains a challenge it follows that in-scope services may simply decide it’s less legally risky if they don’t use e2e at all.

DCMS’s guidance also follows up with an entirely bolded paragraph — in which the government then makes a point of highlighting e2e encryption as a “risk” to users, generally — and, therefore by implication, to future compliance with the forthcoming Online Safety legislation…

“End-to-end encryption makes it more difficult for you to identify illegal and harmful content occurring on private channels. You should consider the risks this might pose to your users,” the UK government writes, emphasis its.

Whether anything can stop this self-destructive policy train now it’s left the Downing Street station is unclear. Johnson has a whopping majority in parliament — and years left before he has to call a general election.

The only thing that could derail the most harmful elements of the Online Safety Bill is if the UK public wakes up to the dangers it poses to everyone’s security and privacy — and if enough MPs take notice and push for amendments.

Earlier this month the ORG, along with some 30 other digital and humans rights groups, called on MPs to do just that and “help keep constituents’ data safe by protecting e2e encryption from legislative threats” — warning that this “basic and essential” security protocol is at risk from clauses in the bill that introduce requirements for companies to scan private and personal messages for evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Zero access encryption is seen by the UK government as a blocker to such scanning.

“In order to do this, the use of end-to-end encryption is likely to be defined as a violation of the law,” the ORG also warned. “And companies operating in the UK who want to continue to defend user privacy through end-to-end encryption could, under the draft Bill, be threatened with partial shutdowns, being blocked from the UK, or even personal arrests.”

“We call on Parliament to ensure that end-to-end encryption must not be threatened or undermined by the Online Safety Bill, and that services utilising strong encryption are left out of the Bill’s content monitoring and filtering requirements,” it added in the online appeal.

DMCS has been contacted with questions on the logic of the government’s policy toward e2e encryption.

In a statement yesterday, the digital minister Caroline Dinenage said: “We’re helping businesses get their safety standards up to scratch before our new online harms laws are introduced and also making sure they are protecting children and users right now.

“We want businesses of all sizes to step up to a gold standard of safety online and this advice will help them to do so.”

In 2020 lots of workloads shifted to the cloud due to the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean that figuring out how to migrate those workloads got any easier. Device42, a startup that helps companies understand their infrastructure, has a new product that is designed to analyze your infrastructure and make recommendations about the most cost-effective way to migrate to the cloud.

Raj Jalan, CEO and co-founder, says that the tool uses machine learning to help discover the best configuration, and supports four cloud vendors including AWS, Microsoft, Google and Oracle plus VMware running on AWS.

“The [new tool] that’s coming out is a multi-cloud migration and recommendation [engine]. Basically, with machine learning what we have done is in addition to our discovery tool […] is we can constantly update based on your existing utilization of your resources, what it is going to cost you to run these resources across each of these multiple clouds,” Jalan explained.

This capability builds on the company’s core competency, which is providing a map of resources wherever they exist along with the dependencies that exist across the infrastructure, something that’s extremely hard for organizations to understand. “Our focus is on hybrid IT discovery and dependency mapping, [whether the] infrastructure is on prem, in colocation facilities or in the cloud,” he said.

That helps Device42 customers see how all of the different pieces of infrastructure including applications work together. “You can’t find a tool that does everything together, and also gives you a very deep discovery where you can go from the physical layer all the way to the logical layer, and see things like, ‘this is where my storage sits on this web server…’,” Jalan said.

It’s important to note that this isn’t about managing resources or making any changes to allocation. It’s about understanding your entire infrastructure wherever it lives and how the different parts fit together, while the newest piece finds the most cost-effective way to migrate to the cloud it from its current location.

The company has been around since 2012, has around 100 employees. It has raised around $38 million including a $34 million Series A in 2019. It hasn’t required a ton of outside investment as Jalan reports they are cash flow positive with “decent growth.”