Author: azeeadmin

On the heels of a lively conversation with Precursor Ventures partner Charles Hudson last week, we’re gearing up to chat with Kapor Capital’s Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor in a few hours. Today at 10 a.m. PT, Extra Crunch Live returns for a conversation about maintaining diversity, inclusion and equity during a global pandemic.

Kapor Klein has been a longtime advocate for diversity and inclusion in the tech industry. The author of “Giving Notice,” a book about the dangers of hidden biases, she is a founding partner at Kapor Capital, co-chair at the Kapor Center for Social Impact and co-founding member of Project Include.

Kapor, co-founder of The Electronic Frontier Foundation and founding chair of Mozilla, has worked with Kapor Klein for the last 10-plus years at Kapor Capital. Together, they invest in startups focused on closing access gaps and addressing social injustice.

During today’s call, we’ll explore the topics of layoffs, executive pay cuts, decision-making around ceasing or continuing operations in underserved communities, H-1B visas and more.

Beyond that, Mitch and Freada will discuss how they’re advising their portfolio startups during these unprecedented times, as well as what areas are begging for innovation right now.

During the call, audience members will be able to ask questions, but to join the conversation, you’ll need to be an Extra Crunch member — if you’re not already a subscriber, please sign up here.

Identity giant Okta has hired its newest chief security officer, David Bradbury.

Bradbury, a security veteran with more than two-decades of security experience who most recently served as chief security officer at Symantec, takes over from Yassir Abousselham, who departed for Splunk in February.

Okta chief executive Todd McKinnon said his new direct report will “continue to drive our security strategy and further identity’s role in a zero-trust approach at scale, both here at Okta and for all of our customers.”

Bradbury’s move to Okta could not come at a more critical time. The San Francisco-based company, which provides identity verification services like multi-factor authentication for companies and organizations, says it’s seen an increase in usage as the coronavirus pandemic has forced large swathes of the world to work from home.

Hackers are also seizing on the pandemic to ramp up their attacks.

“We’re seeing an elevation in opportunistic attacks against those who have not invested heavily into cybersecurity in the last decade — particularly those who are vulnerable to and are susceptible to being more in the spotlight of the consequence of COVID-19,” Bradbury told TechCrunch in a call last week.

Bradbury joined the company shy of three weeks ago at the peak of the outbreak, forcing him and two-dozen other new hires to onboard virtually, he said.

“Security needs to be the conversation starter across the board,” he said. “The culture of security within the organization is really like fitness. There are areas and pockets that will constantly be thinking and breathing security, but there are others that perhaps aren’t in shape.”

“We’re going to have to continue to work at that,” he said. ”

Cloudflare today announced a new partnership with JD Cloud & AI that will see the company expand its network in Chinato an additional 150 data centers. Currently, Cloudflare is available in 17 data centers in mainland China, thanks to a long-standing partnership with Baidu, but this new deal is obviously significantly larger.

CloudFlare’s original partnership with Baidu launched in 2015. The idea then, as now, was to give Cloudflare a foothold in one of the fastest-growing internet markets by providing Chinese companies better reach customers inside and outside of the country, but also — and maybe more importantly — to allow foreign companies to better reach the vast Chinese market.

“I think there are very few Western technology companies that have figured out how to operate in China,” Matthew Prince, the CEO and co-founder Cloudflare told me. “And I think we’re really proud of the fact that we’ve done that. What I’ve learned about China — certainly in the last six years that we’ve been directly working with partners there, […] has been that while it’s an enormous market and an enormous opportunity […], it’s still a very tight-knot technology community there — and one with a very long memory.”

He attributes the fact that Cloudflare was a good partner to Baidu for so many years to JD’s interest in working with the company as well. That partnership with Baidu will continue (Prince called them a “terrific partner”). This new deal with JD, however, will now also give Cloudflare the ability to reach another set of Chinese enterprises, too, that are currently betting on that company’s cloud.

“As we got to know them, JD really stood out,” Prince said. “I think they’re first of all really one of the up and coming cloud providers in China. And I think that then means that marrying Cloudflare’s services with JD’s services makes their overall cloud platform much more robust for Chinese customers.” He also noted that JD has relationships with many large Chinese businesses that are increasingly looking to go global.

To put this deal into perspective, today, Cloudflare operates in about 200 cities. Adding another 150 to this — even if it’s through a partner — marks a major expansion for the company.

As for the deal itself, Prince said that its structure is similar to the deal it made with Baidu. “We contribute the technology and the know-how to build a network out across China. They introduce capital in order to build that network out and also have some financial guarantees to us and then we share in the upside of what happens as we’re both able to sell the China network or as JD is able to sell Cloudflare’s services outside of China.”

When the company first went to China through Baidu, it was criticized for going into a market where there some obvious issues around free speech. Prince, who has been pretty outspoken about free speech issues, seems to be taking a rather pragmatic approach here.

“[Free speech] is certainly something we thought about a lot when we first made the decision to go into China in 2014,” he said. “And I think we’ve learned a lot about it. Around the world, whether it’s China or Turkey or Egypt or the United Kingdom or Brazil or increasingly even the United States, there are rules about what content can be accessed there. Regardless of what my personal feelings might be — and I grew up as a son of a journalist and in the United States and have seen the power of having a very free press and really, really, really strong freedom of expression protection. But I also think that every country doesn’t have the same tradition and the same laws as the United States. And I think that what we have tried to do everywhere that we operate, is comply with whatever the regional laws are. And it’s hard to do anything else.”

Cloudflare expects that it will take three years before all of the data centers will go online.

“I’m thrilled to establish this strategic collaboration with Cloudflare,” said Dr. Bowen Zhou, President of JD Cloud & AI. “Cloudflare’s mission of ‘helping to build a better Internet,’ closely aligns with JD Cloud & AI’s commitment to provide the best service possible to global partners. Leveraging JD.com’s rich experience across vast business scenarios, as well as its logistics and technological capabilities, we believe that this collaboration will provide valuable services that will transform how business is done for users inside and outside of China.”

Checkly, a Berlin-based startup that is developing a monitoring and testing platform for DevOps teams, today announced that it has raised a $2.25 million seed round led by Accel. A number of angel investors, including Instana CEO Mirko Novakovic, Zeit CEO Guillermo Rauch and former Twilio CTO Ott Kaukver, also participated in this round.

The company’s SaaS platform allows developers to monitor their API endpoints and web apps — and it obviously alerts you when something goes awry. The transaction monitoring tool makes it easy to regularly test interactions with front-end websites without having to actually write any code. The test software is based on Google’s open-source Puppeteer framework and to build its commercial platform, Checkly also developed Puppeteer Recorder for creating these end-to-end testing scripts in a low-code tool that developers access through a Chrome extension.

The team believes that it’s the combination of end-to-end testing and active monitoring, as well as its focus on modern DevOps teams, that makes Checkly stand out in what is already a pretty crowded market for monitoring tools.

“As a customer in the monitoring market, I thought it had long been stuck in the 90s and I needed a tool that could support teams in JavaScript and work for all the different roles within a DevOps team. I set out to build it, quickly realizing that testing was equally important to address,” said Tim Nolet, who founded the company in 2018. “At Checkly, we’ve created a market-defining tool that our customers have been demanding, and we’ve already seen strong traction through word of mouth. We’re delighted to partner with Accel on building out our vision to become the active reliability platform for DevOps teams.”

Nolet’s co-founders are Hannes Lenke, who founded TestObject (which was later acquired by Sauce Labs), and Timo Euteneuer, who was previously Director Sales EMEA at Sauce Labs.

Tthe company says that it currently has about 125 paying customers who run about 1 million checks per day on its platform. Pricing for its services starts at $7 per month for individual developers, with plans for small teams starting at $29 per month.

Even as oil companies are getting crushed by the collapse of demand for energy in the wake of international shutdowns responding to the global pandemic, investors representing one of the world’s savviest financiers are placing a small bet on electric charging as the future of transportation.

Soros Fund Management, the financial investment vehicle led by famed investor George Soros, is placing a small, $13.2 million bet, alongside Siemens and a host of other investors into the Los Angeles-based electric charging startup, Amply Power.

“To be quite honest I never would have thought in a million years that Soros would jump into our industry so early in its development,” said Vic Shao, Amply’s founder, chairman and chief executive.

And despite the collapse in fossil fuel energy prices, Shao said that Amply’s value proposition still makes sense.

“Raw electric energy is half the price on average as fossil fuels,” Shao said. “As economics go by, solar will continue to get cheaper and wind too. The lowest price of extracting a barrel of oil right now is $20… and then you need to add processing and distilling.”

Shao is the former chief executive of Green Charge, a distributed energy storage company acquired by the world’s largest international energy supplier, ENGIE.

Amply has more than its fair share of competitors vying to give the electric vehicle fleet management charging market a jolt. Companies like Electriphi, EVConnnect, GreenLots, and GreenFlux are all offering somewhat similar services.

The company said it would use the money to expand its team and customer deployments to compete with its market adversaries. Right now Amply is managing charging operations for customers including: East Contra Costa County’s Tri Delta Transit, and an electric school bus fleet demonstration in New York City with Logan Bus.

AMPLY is the preferred partner of BYD and a subsidiary of Hawaiian Electric Company, Pacific Current, the company said.

Amply makes its money by owning and operating charging infrastructure and setting up fixed price agreements with its customers. “There are a lot of vendors out there selling hardware or selling software fleet management in software product but at the end customer owns the risk. They have to implement these tools and make it work for their fleet… or vendors,” said Shao. 

Despite slowdowns, Shao said that his business is relatively recession proof, because of its availability to government funds and the status of public transportation as a vital part of a city’s infrastructure.

“It’s really really helpful for the business to have a stable subscription revenue base that will fit the people who will pay you,” said Shao. “Ridershp is down and routes are getting cut… but transit agencies and school districts are not about to go out of business… what has slowed down a bit for us are our customers in the private sector.”

Joining Siemens and Soros in the new financing are previous seed round investors, including Congruent Ventures, PeopleFund, and Obvious Ventures.  

While human travel has become severely restricted in recent months, the movement of goods has remained a constant priority — and in some cases, has become even more urgent. Today, a startup out of Switzerland that builds hardware and operates a logistics network designed to transport one item in particular — pharmaceuticals — is announcing a significant round to fuel its growth.

SkyCell — a designer of “smart containters” powered by software to maintain constant conditions for drugs that need to be kept at strict temperatures, humidity levels, and levels of vibration, which are in turn used to transport pharmaceuticals around the globe on behalf of drug companies — is today announcing. that it has raised $62 million in growth funding.

This latest round is being led by healthcare investor MVM Partners, with participation also from family offices, a Swiss insurance company that declined to be named, as well as previous investors the Swiss Entrepreneurs Fund (managed by Credit Suisse and UBS), and the BCGE Bank’s growth fund.

The company was founded in 2012 Switzerland when Richard Ettl and Nico Ros were tasked to design a storage facility for one of the big Swiss pharma giants. The exec charged with overseeing the project brainstormed that the work they were putting in could potentially be applied to transportation containers, and thus SkyCell was born.

Today, Ettl (who is the CEO, while Ros is the CTO), said in an interview that the company now works with eight of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies and has been in validation trials with a further seven. These use SkyCell’s network of some 22,000 air freight pallets to move their products around the world.

The new capital will be used to expand that reach further, specifically in the U.S. and Asia, and to double its fleet to become the biggest pharmaceutical transportation company globally. With 30 of the 50 biggest-selling drugs in the world being temperature sensitive (and some generics for one of the biggest-selling, the arthritis medication Humira, now also coming out), this makes for a huge opportunity.

And unsurprisingly, several of SkyCell’s customers are working on COVID-19 medications, Ettl said, either to help ease symptoms or potentially to vaccinate or eradicate the virus, and so it’s standing at the ready to play a role in getting drugs to where they need to be.

“We are well positioned in case there is a vaccine developed. Out of the six pharma companies developing these right now, four of them are our customers, so there is a high likelihood we would transport something,” Ettl said.

For now, he said SkyCell has been involved in helping to transport “supportive” medications related to the outbreak, such as flu shots to make sure people are not falling ill with other viral infections at the same time.

SkyCell is not disclosing its valuation but we understand that it’s in the many hundreds of millions of dollars. The company had raised some $36 million in equity and debt before this, bringing the total outside funding now to $98 million.

In a market that’s estimated to be worth some $2.8 billion annually and growing at a rate of between 15% and 20% each year, there are a number of freight businesses that focus on the transportation of pharmaceuticals. They include not only freight companies but airlines themselves, which often buy in containers from third parties. (And for some more context, one of its competitors, Envirotainer, was acquired for over $1 billion in 2918; while another, CSafe, has raised significantly more funding.)

But there was virtually no innovation in the market, and most pharmaceutical companies factored in failure rates of between 4% and 12% depending on where the drugs were headed.

One key differentiator with SkyCell has been its containers, which are able to withstand temperatures as high as 60 degrees Celsius or as low as negative 10 degrees Celsius, and have tracking on them to better monitor their movements from A to B.

These came to the market at a time when incumbents were only able to (and some still are only able to) guarantee insulation for temperatures as high as 40 degrees, which was not as pressing an issue in the past as it is today, in part because of rising temperatures around the globe, and in part because of the growing sophistication of pharmaceuticals.

“We’ve found that the number of days where [one has to consider] temperature extremes has been going up,” Ettl said. “Last year, we had 30 days where it was warmer than 40 degrees Celsius across our network of countries.”

On top of the containers themselves, SkyCell has built a software platform that taps into the kind of big data analytics that are now part and parcel of how modern companies in the logistics industry work today, in order to optimise movement and best routing for packages.

The conditions it considers include not only the obvious ones around temperature, humidity and vibration, but distance and time of travel, as well as overall carbon emissions. SkyCell claims that its failure rate comes out at less than 0.1%, with CO2 emissions reduced by almost half on a typical shipment.

Together, the hardware and software are covered by some 100 patents, the company says.

While Shopify is best-known for powering the online stores of more than 1 million businesses, the company is launching a consumer shopping app of its own today, simply called Shop.

The app is actually an update and rebrand of Arrive, an app for tracking packages for Shopify merchants and other retailers, which the company says has been used by 16 million consumers already.

Shop includes those same package tracking capabilities, but it also allows consumers to browse a feed of recommended products, learn more about each brand and make purchases using the one-click Shop Pay checkout process.

Carl Rivera, the general manager of Shop, told me that the app is a response to a broader shift — not just from desktop to mobile commerce, but also from mobile web to native mobile apps. The challenge, he suggested, is that most of us only download and shop from a handful of native apps, so it can be hard for an independent brand to launch an app of their own.

“What we want to do with Shop is give them a place to call their own,” Rivera said.

Shop provides customized product recommendations to each shopper, but Rivera noted that these recommendations all come from brands that you’ve already shown an interested in, either by purchasing a product from their Shopify store or by following their profiles in the app.

He contrasted this with product recommendations on other online stores, which he said offer “a feed of products from brands you don’t know, brands you don’t care about — most these platforms are driven by advertising.” Shop, Rivera said, will not include any ads, and it will be available for free to both shoppers and brands.

He added that he’s been working on Shop “basically since I came on-board” in late 2018. However, the current COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis prompted his team (and Shopify at large) to ask “What are the things we can today to best support merchants?”

One of their answers: a feature that allows shoppers to browse local merchants, see which ones currently support delivery and in-store purchase, then make purchases to support them.

Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia and B2B agtech startup Twiga Foods are partnering to deliver produce in Kenya using adaptive measures during COVID-19.

In 2019, Jumia became the first VC funded tech company in Africa to list on a major exchange, the NYSE. Based in Nairobi, Twiga raised a $30 million Series B round in October and announced plans to expand its food supply-chain business to West Africa.

Both companies are backed by venture capital from U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs .

Per the partnership, Jumia will sell bundles of Twiga’s fresh produce on its e-commerce website. Jumia’s delivery fleet will pick up orders from Twiga’s sorting and distribution centers and then complete last mile, contact free delivery. The transactions will be cash only using Jumia’s JumiaPay app, according to Jumia Kenya CEO Sam Chappatte.

The arrangement is meant to leverage the strengths of both companies, while providing a safer and more affordable way for households to obtain foodstuffs through the coronavirus crisis, which started to hit East Africa last month.

Co-founded in Nairobi in 2014 by Peter Njonjo and Grant Brooke, Twiga Foods is focused primarily on connecting the produce of Kenya’s farmers more efficiently to pricing and marketplaces. The company serves around 3,000 outlets a day with produce through a network of 17,000 farmers and 8,000 vendors.

Twiga will benefit from Jumia’s B2C e-commerce platform and Twiga from Jumia’s B2B produce network, according to Jumia’s Kenya CEO.

On the product offerings, “We pulled together the core basics that a family would need for a week or two weeks,” Chappatte told TechCrunch on a call from Nairobi.

“It’s 28 kilograms of fruit and vegetables. It’s delivered in an hour and a half and they save 50% versus supermarkets.”

The partnership comes as the coronavirus has hit Africa and actors across the continent’s tech ecosystem have begun to develop practices to maintain operations and stem the spread.

By WHO stats Tuesday there were 21,388 COVID-19 cases in Africa and 877 confirmed virus related deaths, up from 345 cases and 7 deaths on March 18. Kenya ranks 13th in coronavirus cases on the continent.

Countries such as South Africa, Kenya  and Nigeria — which happen to be Africa’s top tech hubs — have imposed social distancing and lockdown practices.

Chappatte believes the virus in Kenya is likely under-counted. Jumia is approaching what could become a worsening COVID-19 scenario in Kenya from two angles.

“One of the ways in which we’re facing up to the crisis and trying be as useful as possible to our communities is to remain an everyday service,” he said.

“The second piece is around the right to operate…engaging the government on how home delivery can be cashless, contactless and safe and therefore a useful service over this period.”

Like many tech ventures in Africa, Jumia needs to adapt to the health and economic realities of the coronavirus to continue to generate revenues. Since going public in April 2019 —  and being required to report quarterly financial performance — the company has faced increased pressure to demonstrate profitability.

Continued losses, a short-sell assault and an employee fraud scandal in 2019 led Jumia’s share price to plummet more than 50% since its April IPO, from  $14.50 on listing to $4.43, as of Monday.

The company weathered these events and CEO Sacha Poignonnec highlighted a bright spot in the 2019 results. Jumia finally got into the black on one key indicator, reaching a gross profit of €1.0 million after deducting fulfillment expenses in Q4 of last year.

The online retailer’s next earnings call is scheduled for May 13. It could provide a unique window into the extent COVID-19 in Africa has impacted the performance of one of the continent’s most visible tech companies.

VC firm Partech has raised a new fund focused on seed investments. Named Partech Entrepreneur III, it is the third seed fund from the VC firm. Partech announced the final closing of its previous seed fund in December 2016.

The firm is looking for companies at the very early stage, from pre-seed to pre-Series A. Partech can invest as little as a few hundred thousands dollars and up to several million dollars depending on the stage of the startup. If the startup is doing well, Partech wants to be able to invest again in follow-on Series A and B rounds.

Partech is focused on six verticals in particular — health, work, commerce, finance, mobility and computing. While it is quite broad, the firm now has a team of 10 investors dedicated to the seed funds. They’re based in Paris, San Francisco and Berlin.

Over the years, Partech has closed 160 investments in 22 countries through its three seed funds. The VC firm manages a community of 400 founders who can give some feedback, make some introductions and help portfolio companies in general. A third of those founders are limited partners in Partech’s seed funds.

Out of those 160 seed investments, 17% of those startups have at least one female co-founder. Over the past two years alone, 29% of Partech-backed startups had a female co-founder at the seed level.

Partech has been raising this fund for a while, which means that it has already invested some of its fund. The firm has invested in 40 startups through the new fund, including 10 startups since the beginning of the coronavirus-related economic crisis.

Previous Partech seed investments include Aiden.ai, Dejbox, Frontier Car Group, Pricematch, Streamroot, Alan, etc.

Personal Genome Diagnostics, the venture-backed developer of a novel diagnostic kit for genomic profiling of different cancers in lab settings, has received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its PGDx elio tissue complete test.

The test’s approval is another step forward for precision therapies that rely on an understanding of the unique genomic profile of an individual patient’s tumor, according to the company.

The test detects single nucleotide variants and the small insertions and deletions known as indels. Single nucleotide variants, indels, and identifying characteristics like the tumor mutation burden can be used by physicians to determine how rapidly a disease like cancer to progress and can provide essential targets for precision therapies to individual tumors.

The information doctors collect from these tests can also be used to help oncologists identify patients for clinical trials.

The new diagnostics test cover 35 different tumor types.

“There has not, until this point, been one standardized test for all kinds of cancer that any lab across the country can perform,” said Dr. Pranil Chandra, Chief Medical Officer of Genomic and Clinical Pathology Services, PathGroup, an early collaborator for PGDx elio tissue complete, in a statement. “With this clearance, labs across the country will for the first time have an option for a regulated, standardized test that examines a broad view of cancer pathways and genomic signatures across advanced cancers.”

To date, Personal Genome Diagnostics has raised over $99 million, according to Crunchbase. The company’s investors include New Enterprise Associates, Bristol Myers Squibb, Inova Strategic Investments, Co-win Healthcare Fund, Helsinn Investment Fund, Windham Venture Partners, Maryland Venture Fund

“We are proud to have led the first institutional round for PGDx,” said Dr. Justin Klein, in a statement when the company raised a $75 million round back in 2018. “Rapid advances in immuno-oncology, targeted agents, and combination cancer therapies are heightening the importance of tumor genome testing that enables treatments to be targeted to those patients most likely to benefit.”