Author: azeeadmin

Investors’ love affair with new, plant-based alternatives to animal products continues as Blackstone Growth, a (newish) investment vehicle from one of the world’s largest financial services firms, said it led a $200 million into the colossus of oat-milk brands, Oatly.

The Malmö based company also attracted some of the biggest names in entertainment, consumer business, and international finance as Oprah Winfrey, Roc Nation, Natalie Portman, former Starbucks Chairman and chief executive Howard Schultz, Orkila Capital, and Rabo Corporate Investments, the investment arm of Rabobank, joined in to finance the company’s latest round.

For Blackstone’s newly minted head of growth investments, Jon Korngold, the deal for Oatly is representative of the types of commitments his firm will make into growth companies. It’s a company that has proven to be a leader in its category, there’s very little technology risk left in the business, but Oatly can benefit from the network of logistics, supply chain, and consumer companies that the investment firm owns.

It’s also a company whose mass adoption can potentially help move the needle on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “Oatly is one of those companies that does well by doing good,” said Korngold in an interview.

While the same can’t be said for all of Blackstone’s investments (Blackstone was criticized by former Presidential candidate, Senator Elizabeth Warren, for its stake in Hidrovias do Brasil, an infrastructure company reportedly linked to deforestation in the rainforest), Oatly does have significant environmental benefits. The company’s product makes for a more environmentally friendly milk substitute than almond milk (almonds are a hugely water intensive crop) and aren’t processed like the genetically modified milk replacements coming to market. Oats also require less fertilizer which has ancillary benefits for the water table and other forms of pollution.

With the Oatly investment, Blackstone Growth is riding a wave of investor support for the creation of an alternative, more sustainable food system driven by increasing consumer demand for these more sustainable goods. One investor has called the coming tidal wave of innovation around changing food production the biggest entrepreneurial opportunity in a generation.

https://us.oatly.com/

https://us.oatly.com/

https://us.oatly.com/

RealityEngines.AI, the machine learning startup co-founded by former AWS and Google exec Bindu Reddy, today announced that it is rebranding as Abacus.AI and launching its autonomous AI service into general availability.

In addition, the company also today disclosed that it has raised a $13 million Series A round led by Index Ventures’ Mike Volpi, who will also join the company’s board. Seed investors Eric Schmidt, Jerry Yang and Ram Shriram also participated in this oversubscribed round, with Shriram also joining the company’s board. New investors include Mariam Naficy, Erica Shultz, Neha Narkhede, Xuezhao Lan and Jeannette Furstenberg. 

This new round brings the company’s total funding to $18.25 million.

Abacus.AI’s co-founders Bindu Reddy, Arvind Sundararajan and Siddartha Naidu (Image Credits: Abacus.AI)

At its core, RealityEngines.AI’s Abacus.AI’s mission is to help businesses implement modern deep learning systems into their customer experience and business processes without having to do the heavy lifting of learning how to train models themselves. Instead, Abacus takes care of the data pipelines and model training for them.

The company worked with 1,200 beta testers and in recent months, the team mostly focused on not just helping businesses build their models but also put them into production. Current Abacus.AI customers include 1-800-Flowers, Flex, DailyLook and Prodege.

“My guess would be that out of the hundred projects which are started in ML, one percent succeeds because of so many moving parts,” Reddy told me. “You have to build the model, then you have to test it in production — and then you have to build data pipelines and have to put in training pipelines. So over the last few weeks even, we’ve added a whole bunch of features to enable putting these things to go into production more smoothly — and we continue to add to it.”

Image Credits: Abacus.AI

In recent months, the team also added new unsupervised learning tools to its lineup of pre-built solutions to help users build systems for anomaly detection around transaction fraud and account takeovers, for example.

The company also today released new tools for debiasing data sets that can be used on already trained algorithms. Automatically building training sets — even with relatively small data sets — is one of the areas on which the Abacus team has long focused, and it is now using some of these same techniques to tackle this problem. In its experiments, the company’s facial recognition algorithm was able to greatly improve its ability to detect whether a Black celebrity was smiling or not, for example, even though the training data set featured 22 times more white people.

Image Credits: Abacus

With today’s launch, Abacus is also launching a new section on its website to showcase models from its community. “You can go build a model, tweak your model if you want, use your own data sets — and then you can actually share the model with the community,” Reddy explained, and noted that this is now possible because of Abacus’ new pricing model. The company has decided to only charge customers when they put models into production.

Image Credits: Abacus.ai

The next major item on the Abacus roadmap is to build more connectors to third-party systems so that users can easily import data from Salesforce and Segment, for example. In addition, Reddy notes that the team will build out more of its pre-built solutions, including more work on language understanding and vision use cases.

To do this, Abacus has already hired more research scientists to work on some of its fundamental research projects, something Reddy says its funders are quite comfortable with, and more engineers to put that work into practice. She expects the team will grow from 22 employees today to about 35 by the end of the year.

Sentry, the Accel-backed company that creates bug-monitoring software for app developers, announced its latest product today. Called Performance Monitoring, it is frontend performance monitoring software for Python and Javascript.

The company, whose investors also include New Enterprise Associates, said the feature can reduce the amount of time spent fixing errors to a few minutes by tracing underperforming API calls and other errors back to their source.

Fixing errors quickly is important because slow-performing apps can cost revenue (for example, if an online shopping cart is taking too long to load, a frustrated customer might give up and switch to a competing app or website). Sentry also said that work related to tracking issues and fixing bugs costs companies around $4.6 million a year.

Sentry has raised $66.5 million in funding so far and says it is now used by 60,000 organizations.

Chief executive officer Milin Desai told TechCrunch that over the past four months, Sentry’s customers in all verticals have been relying on its tools more as the COVID-19 pandemic increased usage of work, education and e-commerce apps.

[gallery ids="2016192,2016193,2016194"]

The new Performance Monitoring tool means developers can “trace slow load times to poor-performing API calls and slow database queries in real time instead of trying to decipher spikes on a wallboard,” Desaid said. “So while companies are being forced to undertake massive operational changes, they are finding that Sentry is keeping their developers available to support the new demand and is mission-critical in shipping performant software.”

Spotify is today introducing a new feature aimed at helping people discover interesting and popular podcasts. The company this morning announced the launch of two brand-new podcast charts, Top Podcasts and Trending Podcasts, which will showcase both the overall most-listened to and the biggest movers, respectively. The new feature will arrive in the Spotify mobile app across 26 markets. In addition, category-level charts will be available in 7 of the 26, including the U.S., U.K., Mexico, Brazil, Sweden, Germany and Australia.

The new charts will replace the existing “Top Shows” chart to offer a better discovery experience that separates popular from trending and offers, in some cases, category-level detail.

Music services have long since used top charts to help users find new music and discover artists, and Spotify hopes the same will be true for podcasts. Like its music charts, Spotify’s podcast charts will also be updated regularly to help users keep up with which podcasts are seeing the most engagement and growth.

Image Credits: Spotify

The Top Podcasts charts will include the overall most popular audio programs, geared for stability and integrity, as determined by recent listener numbers, Spotify explains. This chart will be updated on a monthly basis, giving users a look at which shows have longer-lasting influence. Users will also be able to view the top podcasts for any market where they’re available, not just their own.

Meanwhile, the Trending Podcasts charts use an algorithm that will blend for discovery of newly-launched shows along with the fastest-climbing shows. This will be focused more on helping creators secure a place on the charts to help reach a new audience.

In the seven markets where category-level data is available, Spotify will also separate out the Top and Trending Podcasts by genre — like True Crime, Comedy, News, Lifestyle & Health, TV, Educational, Business & Technology, Celebrities, Sports & Recreation, and others. At the category level, the Top Podcasts charts will list the top 200 overall shows in the selected region and the Trending chart will show the top 50 rapidly rising shows.

Image Credits: Spotify

Related to this, podcasters will also see an updated experience in Spotify’s online dashboard, Spotify for Podcasters, which will now alert them when their podcast is charting. They can then turn this notification into a visual card to share across social media to help further market their podcast.

Podcasts have been of significant interest to all streaming services, and particularly Spotify, in recent years. The company has acquired podcasting software and studios, made deals to secure exclusive and original content (including Joe Rogan) and it has invested in software features like podcast playlists and algorithmic recommendations to introduce podcasts to Spotify’s millions of users.

Today, the service offers over 1 million podcasts, up from the 700,000-plus it was reporting in March. And despite the coronavirus impact on where users listen to podcasts, Spotify said podcast consumption was up by “triple digits” in the first quarter of the year, compared with Q1 2019.

Smokers and pellet grills are growing in popularity, likely because a lot more people are cooking at home – and looking for other ways to up their home chef game. The Asmoke Pellet Grill, which is currently in the final stretch of a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, has a price point that’s far below most other options out there – but don’t let the price tag fool you, the grill packs more punch than its cost and portable size might suggest.

Basics

If you’re not familiar with pellet grills, they’re a combination of smoker and BBQ that burn condensed hardwood pellets feed by an auger to create smoke and heat. The most popular options out there include Traeger’s grills, as well as Camp Chef, Pit Boss, and others. The Smoke Pellet Grill is a new, portable pellet grill that features a lot of the same features you’d see in higher-priced brand name options, but at a much lower cost when you factor in their accessories – particularly now, during the tail end of their crowdfunding campaign.

Asmoke’s $176 USD backer price includes one grill, a meat injector, a thermometer, grill gloves, shredding tools for breaking down smoked meat, tongs and a 5lb bag of their applewood pellets to get you started cooking right away. That’s over half-off their estimated retail price once the campaign ends. Even at the full final price you’re still going to come out cheaper than the closest brand name competitor – the Traeger Ranger – once you factor in all the included accessories.

The Asmoke is electrically-powered, so you can use it outside anywhere you have access to an outlet. It includes a larger cooking surface that can fit up to 8 burgers at once, or one full rack of ribs. As mentioned, there’s a temperature probe included that plugs into the front and displays the internal temp of any meat you insert it into within the grill itself while cooking. A dial on the front provides the only control you need, enabling setting temp from 180 all the way up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.

Design

The Asmoke Pellet Grill is designed to be portable, at just over 2 feet by around 1.5 feet, and 14.45 inches tall. It weights around 45 lbs, which is heavy, but that’s still portable compared to most pellet smokers, which tend to be very large and essentially designed to sit in a fixed location. The Asmoke is also made from steel and stainless steel primarily, so that weight represents durability, which is good for an appliance designed to be used exclusively outside.

Construction of the grill feels very sturdy and high-quality, with good fittings and finishes across the board. The heat resistant paint comes in four different colors, including the red and blue shown below, as well as an aquamarine green and black. Latches secure the lid while cooking, and there’s an insulating gasket that runs the length and width of the edge to keep the heat in while giving you a secure closure. A large handle opens and closes the lid, and four feet elevate the grill off whatever surface you’re resting it on.

Inside, there’s a hopper where you put the pellets on the left which is separated from the cooking area on the right. The cooking area includes a large grill surface, and an optional raised rack for a small second level cooking area. A stainless steel grease slide installs over the cup where pellets are driven by the auger to burn and smoke, and a second slide goes over that – giving you the ability to keep it closed for smoking and grilling, or opening it up to allow flame through for char-broiling.

On the front, you can see the control unit, which includes a large, readable display that uses a few different colors to clearly present information including the set temperature of the drill, auger speed, and sensor temperature when cooking with the probe. The large, single dial is your only control mechanism, providing temperature setting and letting you turn the grill on and off.

Some assembly is required to get the Asmoke ready to cook, but it’s actually super easy to do. Basically you just install the legs and front handle, and then remove all the internal components from their packaging and put them back in the grill. It took me about 20 minutes start to finish. The grill needs to be primed upon first use (and any time you run out of pellets), but that’s only a few more minutes. And the first time you ever use it, there’s a burn-off procedure that involves running the grill at higher temps for around 30 to 40 minutes, but it’s very easy to do.

Performance

The Asmoke punches above its weight class. In testing, I did an extended, 7-hour smoke of a pork shoulder blade roast using the provided Applewood pellets, and the results were fantastic. I’ve smoked a lot of meat using a Traeger Pro 575, and this was easily on par with the best results I’ve had out of that cooker in terms of the quality and flavor of the finished product.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington

Best of all, the Asmoke is small enough to work on my condo deck, which is not somewhere I’ve typically been able to consider using a smoker cooker. The grill does put off a lot of smoke through its exhaust, particularly when it’s first heating up to reach temperature, but it also dissipates rather quickly, especially if you’re on a higher floor. Just be aware that especially in close proximity, the smoke produced from cookers like these will be powerful and strong-smelling – which is a benefit for me, but which might not be what you’re after if you’re living in a dense city environment.

Actually using the Asmoke is very simple. You can find smoker cooker recipes available readily on the internet, and then it’s a matter of just following those instructions. The Asmoke gets up to target temperature quickly, and is good at maintaining a constant temp throughout a cook once it reaches those levels. If you need to refill the hopper mid-cook, it’s simple enough to open the box and do so, and you won’t lose all that much temperature so long as you do it quickly. And since the hopper compartment is insulated separately from the cooking area, you can do it without fear of burning yourself, too.

Because the Asmoke offers such a wide temperature range, it’s also good or grilling, and even baking. I also made burgers on it at a much higher temp, and those results were fantastic, too – far exceeding standard BBQs in terms of retaining juices and adding subtle smoke flavor.

One thing to consider is that post-cook, especially after long ones like the pork roast I did, there’s a fair amount of cleaning up involved. It’s not difficult, but it is time consuming, and includes scraping the grease tray, cleaning the cooking grate, and vacuuming out the leftover ash from the pellet pot and the bottom of the cooking box. This isn’t specific to Asmoke: It’s part and parcel of operation any pellet cooker, and I found that Asmoke’s high quality materials ensured it was relatively easy to clean.

Bottom line

If you’re looking to bump up your outdoor cooking game, the Asmoke Portable Pellet Grill is a remarkably affordable way to do so, especially during this crowdfunding effort. Normally, I’d advise caution in any crowdfunding scenario, but in this case, grills are already in the process of shipping to customers, and they work exactly as advertised, providing high-quality results.

This is a category where top-brand incumbents rightly earn a lot of respect and customer loyalty for their long history of delivery reliable products, so it’s hard for a newcomer to break in. But Asmoke’s product and results far exceed their newcomer status.

Smokers and pellet grills are growing in popularity, likely because a lot more people are cooking at home – and looking for other ways to up their home chef game. The Asmoke Pellet Grill, which is currently in the final stretch of a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, has a price point that’s far below most other options out there – but don’t let the price tag fool you, the grill packs more punch than its cost and portable size might suggest.

Basics

If you’re not familiar with pellet grills, they’re a combination of smoker and BBQ that burn condensed hardwood pellets feed by an auger to create smoke and heat. The most popular options out there include Traeger’s grills, as well as Camp Chef, Pit Boss, and others. The Smoke Pellet Grill is a new, portable pellet grill that features a lot of the same features you’d see in higher-priced brand name options, but at a much lower cost when you factor in their accessories – particularly now, during the tail end of their crowdfunding campaign.

Asmoke’s $176 USD backer price includes one grill, a meat injector, a thermometer, grill gloves, shredding tools for breaking down smoked meat, tongs and a 5lb bag of their applewood pellets to get you started cooking right away. That’s over half-off their estimated retail price once the campaign ends. Even at the full final price you’re still going to come out cheaper than the closest brand name competitor – the Traeger Ranger – once you factor in all the included accessories.

The Asmoke is electrically-powered, so you can use it outside anywhere you have access to an outlet. It includes a larger cooking surface that can fit up to 8 burgers at once, or one full rack of ribs. As mentioned, there’s a temperature probe included that plugs into the front and displays the internal temp of any meat you insert it into within the grill itself while cooking. A dial on the front provides the only control you need, enabling setting temp from 180 all the way up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.

Design

The Asmoke Pellet Grill is designed to be portable, at just over 2 feet by around 1.5 feet, and 14.45 inches tall. It weights around 45 lbs, which is heavy, but that’s still portable compared to most pellet smokers, which tend to be very large and essentially designed to sit in a fixed location. The Asmoke is also made from steel and stainless steel primarily, so that weight represents durability, which is good for an appliance designed to be used exclusively outside.

Construction of the grill feels very sturdy and high-quality, with good fittings and finishes across the board. The heat resistant paint comes in four different colors, including the red and blue shown below, as well as an aquamarine green and black. Latches secure the lid while cooking, and there’s an insulating gasket that runs the length and width of the edge to keep the heat in while giving you a secure closure. A large handle opens and closes the lid, and four feet elevate the grill off whatever surface you’re resting it on.

Inside, there’s a hopper where you put the pellets on the left which is separated from the cooking area on the right. The cooking area includes a large grill surface, and an optional raised rack for a small second level cooking area. A stainless steel grease slide installs over the cup where pellets are driven by the auger to burn and smoke, and a second slide goes over that – giving you the ability to keep it closed for smoking and grilling, or opening it up to allow flame through for char-broiling.

On the front, you can see the control unit, which includes a large, readable display that uses a few different colors to clearly present information including the set temperature of the drill, auger speed, and sensor temperature when cooking with the probe. The large, single dial is your only control mechanism, providing temperature setting and letting you turn the grill on and off.

Some assembly is required to get the Asmoke ready to cook, but it’s actually super easy to do. Basically you just install the legs and front handle, and then remove all the internal components from their packaging and put them back in the grill. It took me about 20 minutes start to finish. The grill needs to be primed upon first use (and any time you run out of pellets), but that’s only a few more minutes. And the first time you ever use it, there’s a burn-off procedure that involves running the grill at higher temps for around 30 to 40 minutes, but it’s very easy to do.

Performance

The Asmoke punches above its weight class. In testing, I did an extended, 7-hour smoke of a pork shoulder blade roast using the provided Applewood pellets, and the results were fantastic. I’ve smoked a lot of meat using a Traeger Pro 575, and this was easily on par with the best results I’ve had out of that cooker in terms of the quality and flavor of the finished product.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington

Best of all, the Asmoke is small enough to work on my condo deck, which is not somewhere I’ve typically been able to consider using a smoker cooker. The grill does put off a lot of smoke through its exhaust, particularly when it’s first heating up to reach temperature, but it also dissipates rather quickly, especially if you’re on a higher floor. Just be aware that especially in close proximity, the smoke produced from cookers like these will be powerful and strong-smelling – which is a benefit for me, but which might not be what you’re after if you’re living in a dense city environment.

Actually using the Asmoke is very simple. You can find smoker cooker recipes available readily on the internet, and then it’s a matter of just following those instructions. The Asmoke gets up to target temperature quickly, and is good at maintaining a constant temp throughout a cook once it reaches those levels. If you need to refill the hopper mid-cook, it’s simple enough to open the box and do so, and you won’t lose all that much temperature so long as you do it quickly. And since the hopper compartment is insulated separately from the cooking area, you can do it without fear of burning yourself, too.

Because the Asmoke offers such a wide temperature range, it’s also good or grilling, and even baking. I also made burgers on it at a much higher temp, and those results were fantastic, too – far exceeding standard BBQs in terms of retaining juices and adding subtle smoke flavor.

One thing to consider is that post-cook, especially after long ones like the pork roast I did, there’s a fair amount of cleaning up involved. It’s not difficult, but it is time consuming, and includes scraping the grease tray, cleaning the cooking grate, and vacuuming out the leftover ash from the pellet pot and the bottom of the cooking box. This isn’t specific to Asmoke: It’s part and parcel of operation any pellet cooker, and I found that Asmoke’s high quality materials ensured it was relatively easy to clean.

Bottom line

If you’re looking to bump up your outdoor cooking game, the Asmoke Portable Pellet Grill is a remarkably affordable way to do so, especially during this crowdfunding effort. Normally, I’d advise caution in any crowdfunding scenario, but in this case, grills are already in the process of shipping to customers, and they work exactly as advertised, providing high-quality results.

This is a category where top-brand incumbents rightly earn a lot of respect and customer loyalty for their long history of delivery reliable products, so it’s hard for a newcomer to break in. But Asmoke’s product and results far exceed their newcomer status.

Working these days is not what it used to be. To enforce social distancing and slow the spread of the COVID-19 health pandemic, many of us have decamped from our offices to our homes, we only connect with colleagues and others virtually, and it’s all too easy to lose sight of our focus and strategy in the midst of it all.

But in the grand tradition of enterprise IT, that creates an opportunity, and today, a startup called Lattice, whose platform helps track, reward and set goal achievement in the workplace, has closed a round of $45 million to help address some of those issues.

The funding, a Series D, is being led by Tiger Global with participation from Frontline Ventures, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Thrive Capital Partners, Fuel Capital, and Y Combinator. It values the company at around $400 million, CEO and co-founder Jack Altman (whose brother Sam used to run Y Combinator and is now at OpenAI…) said in an interview. It doubles Lattice’s valuation since October 2019, when the startup closed a Series C of $25 million, also led by Tiger Global.

The healthy bump in valuation is a sign of the times: while the novel coronavirus spread has led to a lot of strain on certain sectors of the world of tech (and more generally certain industries like travel), others have found themselves seeing big surges of demand. Lattice has bumped up its own customers numbers to 1,900 businesses, from 1,400 in October (with their size in the 50-1,500 range generally) and Altman says that Lattice’s employee count, which now numbers around 200, has grown at the same rate.

The reason for the good growth? Lattice, along with companies like it, have taken on a key role — that of providing structure in an organisation — at a time when we have lost a lot of that.

“In March and April our customers were transferring to remote and business slowed down, a lot,” he said. “Now, it’s picked up.”

Indeed, “workplace” has taken on a very different meaning for many of us in these COVID-19 days, but some might argue that as the workplace concept stretches and is tested, it’s more important than ever for individuals to have a sense of how they are doing within it.

Lattice’s product covers a spectrum of tools that both tap into the idea of proactive usage, and more passive data flow, both to help build up a picture of how employees are doing, and also to help provide better communication of goals achieved between those employees and their managers.

It includes software to give and get feedback and run reviews, set goals for employees, deliver praise, and get updates on what people are working on. It also features integrations with other platforms like Slack that help communicate “wins” but also track these milestones so that they can feed into an analytics engine to help facilitate the process of taking stock during review time, both for employees themselves as well as their managers.

All of these are great, but even so probably still only scratch the tip of the iceberg in terms of how productivity can be better managed longer term using new innovations such as artificial intelligence.

Altman (Jack, not Sam) says that he believes we are at least five years away from realistically building AI platforms that can seamlessly track all our work activity, both within our work apps and in a wider network of digital activity — to provide us with real time updates on how we are doing, what we’re doing well but also how we could be doing better.

That’s before considering whether we are ready to accept that kind of concept as helpful and not dystopian. Lattice, he added, is definitely interested in that long-term goal even as it continues to build products that can address performance management as it’s known and identified as a business area today.

The challenges of today, in any case, are no less massive and already a big shift, considering the move many of us have made to new work environments, which for some will take a long time to return to “normal” or at least start to feel “normal” and routine again.

That’s the bigger opportunity for companies like Lattice, which compete not only against other pure-play platforms like BetterWorks or 15Five, but also those that integrate performance management into wider human resources platforms like Workday. While the two may co-exist for a long time, it means that for a company like Lattice, it has both opportunities to continue and grow as a standalone service, as well as one that might potentially get snapped up in that wider consolidation trend.

“In the migration to a more remote world, the tools for organizations to help manage, engage, and develop their teams are more important than ever,” said Miles Grimshaw, Partner at Thrive Capital, in a statement. “We’re excited to further advance the impact of Lattice’s employee success platform.”

Acquia, the commercial company built on top of the open source Drupal content management system has pushed to be more than a publishing platform in recent years, using several strategic acquisitions to move into managing customer experience, and today the company announced a new approach to developing and marketing on the Drupal Cloud.

This involves bringing together developers and marketers under the umbrella of the new Acquia Open DXP platform. This approach has two main components: “What we’ve been working on is deep integration across our suite and pulling together our new foundational Drupal Cloud offering, and our new foundational Marketing Cloud offering,” Kevin Cochrane, senior vice president of product marketing at Acquia said.

The offerings bring together a set of acquisitions the company made over the last year including Mautic for marketing automation in May 2019, Cohesion for low-code developing in September and AgileOne in December for a customer data platform (CDP).

Cochrane says that the company is leveraging these acquisitions along with tools they developed internally and the upcoming release of Drupal 9 to offer a platform approach for customers where they can build content on the Drupal Cloud side and leverage customer data on the Marketing Cloud side.

On the Drupal Cloud, the company is offering a set of tools that includes an integrated development environment (IDE) where developers can build services, while marketers get a low code offering, where they can drag and drop content and design components from a library of offerings that could come from internal sources or the open source community. It also includes other components like security and content management.

The Marketing Cloud is the data layer where companies collect and manage data about customers with the goal of offering a more personalized and meaningful experience in a digital context.

Marketing automation tooling has shifted in recent years with the goal of providing customers with a unique and meaningful experience using the vast amount of data available to build a more complete picture of the customer and give them what they need, when they need it in a digital context. This has involved building a digital experience platform (DXP) and a customer data platform (CDP).

By pulling together these different elements, Acquia is attempting to put itself in a position to compete directly with big players in this space like Adobe and Salesforce offering a similar unified approach.

Vista Equity Partners bought Acquia last September for $1 billion. At the time, company founder Dries Buytaert said one of the advantages of being part of Vista was to get the resources to compete with larger companies in this space, and today’s announcement could be seen in that light.

At its virtual Cloud Next ’20 event, Google Cloud today announced Confidential VMs, a new type of virtual machine that makes use of the company’s work around confidential computing to ensure that data isn’t just encrypted at rest but also while it is in memory.

“We already employ a variety of isolation and sandboxing techniques as part of our cloud infrastructure to help make our multi-tenant architecture secure,” the company notes in today’s announcement. “Confidential VMs take this to the next level by offering memory encryption so that you can further isolate your workloads in the cloud. Confidential VMs can help all our customers protect sensitive data, but we think it will be especially interesting to those in regulated industries.”

In the backend, Confidential VMs make use of AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization feature, available in its second-generation EPYC CPUs. With that, the data will stay encrypted when used and the encryption keys to make this happen are automatically generated in hardware and can’t be exported — and with that, even Google doesn’t have access to the keys either.

Image Credits: Google

Developers who want to shift their existing VMs to a Confidential VM can do so with just a few clicks. Google notes that it built Confidential VMs on top of its Shielded VMs, which already provide protection against rootkits and other exploits.

“With built-in secure encrypted virtualization, 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors provide an innovative hardware-based security feature that helps secure data in a virtualized environment,” said Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president, Data Center Ecosystem, AMD. “For the new Google Compute Engine Confidential VMs in the N2D series, we worked with Google to help customers both secure their data and achieve performance of their workloads.”

That last part is obviously important, given that the extra encryption and decryption steps do incur at least a minor performance penalty. Google says it worked with AMD and developed new open-source drivers to ensure that “the performance metrics of Confidential VMs are close to those of non-confidential VMs.” At least according to the benchmarks Google itself has disclosed so far, both startup times and memory read and throughput performance are virtually the same for regular VMs and Confidential VMs.

Apparently, the internet is still popular.

With the novel coronavirus marooning people at home for work and play, those “tubes” carrying our data back and forth have become ever more important to our livelihoods. Yet while we often as consumers think of the internet as what we buy from a service provider like Spectrum or TechCrunch’s parent company Verizon, the reality is that businesses need key network services like DNS and IP Address Management in order to optimize their performance and costs.

That’s where New York City-based NS1 has done particularly well. My colleague Ron Miller first covered the company and its founding story for us two years ago, as part of our in-depth look at the New York City enterprise software ecosystem. Fast forward two years, and NS1 couldn’t be doing better: in just the first quarter of this year, new customer bookings were up 159% year over year according to the company, and it currently serves 600 customers.

That traction in a critical infrastructure segment of the market attracted the attention of even more growth capital. Today, the company announced that Energy Impact Partners, which has traditionally invested in sustainable energy startups but has recently expanded into software and internet services, is leading a $40 million Series D round into the startup, bringing its total fundraising to date to $125 million. The round was led by Shawn Cherian, a partner at EIR who just joined the firm at the beginning of June (nothing like getting a deal done your first day on the job).

Kris Beevers, cofounder and CEO of NS1, said that COVID-19 has had a huge impact on the startup’s growth the past few months. “For example, [a] large software customer of ours [said] that our number two KPI for our coronavirus task force is network performance and saturation as managed by NS1.” Customers have made network management significantly higher priority since degradations in latency and reliability can dramatically limit a service’s viability for stay-at-home workers and consumers.

NS1’s Founding Team

“The quip that I have used a few times recently is digital transformation initiatives have compressed from five or ten years down to months or a year at this point. Everybody’s just having to accelerate all of these things,” Beevers said.

The company has doubled down on its key tools like DNS and IP management, but it has also launched new features using feedback from customers. “For example, we launched a VPN steering capability to help our customers optimize their VPN footprints because obviously those suddenly are more important than they’ve ever been,” he said. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) allow employees to login to their company’s network as if they were physically present in the office.

While NS1 had money in the bank and increasing appetite from customers, the company was also starting a fundraise in the middle of a global pandemic. Beevers said that it was hard at first to get momentum. “April was a dead zone,” he said. “All the VCs were sort of turtle up.”

The tide began to turn by early May as VCs got a handle on their portfolios and started to survey where the opportunities were in the market given the lessons of the early days of COVID-19. “We actually started to get a huge amount of inbound interest in early May timeframe,” he said.

“Call it like a true coronavirus fundraise,” Beevers explained. It was “end to end like less than a month getting to know [Cherian] to term sheet, and all virtual. Partner meeting was all virtual, diligence all virtual. Not a single in-person interaction in the whole fundraising process, and that was the case with everybody else who was involved in the round too, so all the folks that didn’t in the end write the winning term sheet.”

What made Cherian stand out was Energy Impact Partners’ portfolio, which touches on energy, industry and IoT — sectors that are increasingly being digitized and need the kind of internet infrastructure services that NS1 provides. Also, Cherian led a round into Packet, which is a fellow NYC enterprise company that sold to Equinox for more than $300 million. Packet’s founder Zac Smith and Beevers worked together at Voxel and are part of the so-called “Voxel mafia” of infrastructure engineers in Manhattan.

With the new funding, NS1 intends to continue to expand its traction in the network layer while also doubling down on new markets like IoT.