Author: azeeadmin

Immersive Games Lab, a new venture from Tough Mudder co-founder and Chairman Will Dean, has picked up around £2.5 million in seed funding, TechCrunch has learned. According to sources, London-based Index Ventures has led the round.

In a call confirming the close, Dean told me Sweet Capital, and JamJar Investments (the VC fund set up by the 3 Innocent Drinks founders) also participated.

Developing the “next generation” of immersive group gaming, Immersive Games Lab describes itself as “part indoor theme park, part video game, part escape room” and says it will launch a new breed of “captivating group experiences” in London in early 2019.

Little else is known regarding what Immersive Games Lab’s first experience will be, although Dean told me it will be sold in retail spaces, in ticket form, and will be a blend of technology and in-person group activity. It is currently being prototyped and tested in a warehouse in North London.

More broadly, he said the idea of creating a new kind of immersive gaming experience is partly based on the sentiment that we spend too much screen time on our devices, consuming social media in a way that isn’t always good for our mental health.

His previous and hugely successful venture Tough Mudder was all about creating a new, fun experience around exercise — and ultimately helping people become more physically active. Dean says he is keen for Immersive Games Lab to also make a positive dent on people’s lives.

The new venture also builds nicely on Dean’s track record of creating an experience and community-led consumer proposition — and implementing the type of go-to market strategy that requires. Which is undoubtedly what caught the interest of Index and other investors, in what I understand was an oversubscribed round.

Immersive Games Lab’s other co-founder is David Spindler, who also played a key role at Tough Mudder.

All most of us will see from Jeff Bezos’s secretive MARS conference are a few photo shoots of the world’s richest man attempting to look as cool as possible around some very cool robotics. This summer, however, Amazon will be spinning the event out into a more public facing conference.

Re:MARS retains the original event’s acronymic focus of Machine learning, Automation, Robotics and Space, bringing them to a larger scale for three days in Vegas. It’s a pretty solid looking lineup, though admittedly somewhat self-serving. Per Amazon, already announced speakers include

Jeff Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer at Amazon; Andrew Lo, the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering; Ken Goldberg, William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering, UC Berkeley; Tom Soderstrom, IT Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Kate Darling, Research Specialist at the MIT Media Lab.

Beyond those sessions, the event will also feature sessions focusing on a number of Amazon’s offerings, including Alexa, AWS, Robotics, Go and Prime Air. Notably, astronauts will have free admission, so you’ve got about six months to train for space if you don’t want to foot the bill.

Word about the next member of the Pixel family started leaking out just after Christmas. Now the rumored Pixel 3 Lite is getting some more time to shine, courtesy of a three minute YouTube video that highlights what appears to be a budget addition to Google’s flagship hardware line.

Perhaps most interesting here (aside from the mere existence of a third Pixel 3 model) is the apparent return of the headphone jack. After making a stink about including the port on the first Pixel, the company quickly reversed course for its predecessor.

The addition of a mid-range handset would, however, be the ideal reason to bring back the port (likely for a limited time). After all, while bluetooth headset have become far more accessible in recent years, specialized headphone are still a big ask for folks looking to save a few (or few hundred) bucks.

There are some cost cutting measures throughout, including a Snapdragon 670, plastic body and no second selfie-camera. In all, the device is a bit like Google’s take on the iPhone XR, though it notably appears to have roughly the same rear-facing camera configuration as its more expensive siblings. That could well owe to the fact that AI — not hardware — is doing most of the heavy imaging lifting on the new handsets.

Notably, Pixel devices are generally already lower cost than flagships from Apple and Samsung, but a new addition could be a nice opportunity for Google to show how Android can shine on lower cost devices.

IBM is one of the world’s biggest system integrators, but to get closer to where enterprises are actually doing their work, it’s been inking partnerships with companies that build devices and run the networks enterprises are using for their IT, and today comes the latest development on that front.

IBM is announcing a new venture with mobile carrier Vodafone, in a deal that will comes in two parts. First, IBM will supply Vodafone’s B2B unit Vodafone Business with managed services in the areas of cloud and hosting. And second, the two will together work on building and delivering solutions in areas like AI, cloud, 5G, IoT and software defined networking to enterprise customers.

The latter part of the deal appears to be a classic JV that will see both sides bringing something to the table — employees from both companies will be moving into a separate office together very soon that will essentially be “neutral” territory. The former part, meanwhile, will see Vodafone paying IBM some $550 million in an eight-year agreement.

That price tag alone is a strong indicator that this deal is a big one for both companies.

The agreement follows along the lines of what IBM inked with Apple several years ago, where the two would work together to develop enterprise solutions that would have been more challenging to do on their own.

Indeed, while IBM does provide systems integration services, it hasn’t moved as deeply into mobile-specific solutions for businesses, even as its other operational units — doing research and other work in AI, cloud, quantum computing and other areas — are making strong headway on specific projects, some of which involve mobile technology.

What the Vodafone deal will tap is taking more of those cutting-edge developments that IBM has built and worked on in specific projects, and productise them for a wider audience of businesses and other organisations, which might already be Vodafone customers.

“To deliver multi-cloud strategies in the real world, enterprises need to invest at many levels, ranging from cloud connectivity to cloud governance and management. This new venture between Vodafone and IBM addresses the ‘full stack’ of real-world multi-cloud concerns with a powerful combination of capabilities that should enable customers to deliver multi-cloud strategies in all layers of their organizations,” noted Carla Arend, senior program director for European software at IDC.

The Apple / IBM deal is more than instructive in this case; it will help fuel this new venture. From what I understand, several fruits of that labor will be making their way into the IBM / Vodafone deal, too, which makes sense, considering Vodafone’s position as a mobile carrier and the iPhone making some strong headway into the business market.

“IBM has built industry-leading hybrid cloud, AI and security capabilities underpinned by deep industry expertise,” said IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty in a statement. “Together, IBM and Vodafone will use the power of the hybrid cloud to securely integrate critical business applications, driving business innovation – from agriculture to next- generation retail.”

“Vodafone has successfully established its cloud business to help our customers succeed in a digital world,” said Vodafone CEO Nick Read, in the statement. “This strategic venture with IBM allows us to focus on our strengths in fixed and mobile technologies, whilst leveraging IBM’s expertise in multicloud, AI and services. Through this new venture we’ll accelerate our growth and deepen engagement with our customers while driving radical simplification and efficiency in our business.”

I’ve been told that the first joint “customer engagements” are already happening with an unnamed energy company. Thinking about what kinds of services Vodafone may be providing to end users today — they will cover mobile data and voice connectivity, mobile broadband, IoT and 5G services — this first deal will involve tapping all four, with an emphasis on 5G and IoT.

Coursera, the online learning startup valued at $850 million, has made its name primarily around its classes and degrees in information technology, data science and business. Now nearly seven years into its life, it’s tackling a new vertical. To tap into shifting economic and societal trends, Coursera is moving into health, with around 100 courses in 30 areas, along with two master’s degrees in public health, to help train people to fill current and future talent shortages in health informatics, healthcare management, public health and related roles.

Universities that will be offering courses include top schools like Columbia University, Emory University, Imperial College London, Johns Hopkins University, University of Colorado, University of Michigan and University of Minnesota, with Imperial and the University of Michigan offering the first masters degrees with applications opening this month. Subscriptions to take courses will range from $39 to $79 per month, depending on the specialization.

Daphne Koller, Coursera’s co-founder, is leading the company’s move into this area. “This is an area I’ve been involved with for many years,” she said in an interview. “We need more trained health professionals, and we think Coursera can help with amazing content to train new health workers and those who are already in this area.”

While Koller may be known best for her work in AI and computer science — it was while working in the computer science labs at Stanford, where she is a professor, that she first paired up with Andrew Ng to co-found the company — she is also a professor of pathology there and has in recent years worked as a chief computing officer at health tech startup Calico labs and has now founded a drug discovery startup called Insitro.

But this isn’t just about Koller promoting a subject she is interested in; there is a clear need and Coursera thinks it can fill it.

The big talent gap in the area of healthcare work is fuelled by a number of developments.

They include a population that is living longer, and in some countries growing at a fast pace; and a corresponding rising number of health issues, since even as we find cures and treatments for viruses and other diseases and conditions, new ones arise.

Following from these, there is a not-insubstantial administrative and management layer to healthcare: as we gain more advanced knowledge and technology to treat more people, the systems surrounding those treatments — from delivering them to figuring out how to pay for them — become more complex.

These areas require specific skill sets that other educational disciplines do not teach, and in some cases smart people in the job market are overlooking as lucrative jobs in tech and other emerging areas beckon. (We’re starting even to see examples of schools even offering degrees for free.)

But that doesn’t mean that the demand goes away: Coursera cites research from McKinsey that estimates the healthcare job market could grow to 130 million by 2030, from 80 million today.

To be clear, Coursera’s health vertical does not include medicine and courses that a would-be doctor or nurse or other front-line health worker might take. These newer jobs are also seeing a critical talent crunch, globally and not just in the US according to the World Health Organization. For now at least, these areas have large practical components that require students to have hands-on interactions. But kicking off health courses opens the door to considering what Coursera could offer to complement practical learning segments.

“There is a tremendous opportunity in content that surrounds a basic medical degree whether it’s for a doctor or nurse or other front-line professional,” Koller said, citing non-clinical studies alongside those degrees or continuing education for those already in the workforce to give them access to new learnings as two examples. “I think there is multiple uses of our platform.”

Coursera’s big product developments over the last few years have been more about expanding the kinds of students it targets. That’s included adding an enterprise vertical for corporate e-learning and teaming up more with third parties like Google to expand its reach to more captive audiences. This move into health is a sign that it could be looking for new content expansion now, too.

Health, of course, is a big one, especially if Coursera adds on courses for clinical professionals as well (and starts to see competition from other online education providers; for example, Lambda School has said that it wants to move into nursing courses alongside coding). But there are other areas in its sites as well. Koller, for example, said another subject that is of big interest is cognition.

“Basic cognitive skills are something that our education system doesn’t teach as it should,” she said. “One of our most successful courses is learning how to learn, and I do think we’ve put too much emphasis on content versus thinking skills. That may be a need.”

On Coursera as a startup business, she notes the company — which is backed by the likes of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, NEA, GSV and Learn Capital and last raised money back in 2017, first grabbing $64 million and then quietly supplementing that with another $20 million later in the year according to PitchBook, bringing its total raised to $230 million — is “doing well, growing rapidly, and starting to see serious revenue.”

That said, she declined to comment on whether it’s going to raise a new round to compete more with Udacity, LinkedIn, Khan Academy and the rest.

“It’s like that expression you hear,” she said. “We’re always fundraising but never raising a round.”

In 2016, Serkan Piantino packed up his desk at Facebook with hopes to move on to something new. The former Director of Engineering for Faceboook AI Research had every intention to keep working on AI, but quickly realized a huge issue.

Unless you’re under the umbrella of one of these big tech companies like Facebook, it can be very difficult and incredibly expensive to get your hands on the hardware necessary to run machine learning experiments.

So he built Spell, which today received $15 million in Series A funding led by Eclipse Ventures and Two Sigma Ventures.

Spell is a collaborative platform that lets anyone run machine learning experiments. The company connects clients with the best, newest hardware hosted by Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure and gives them the software interface they need to run, collaborate, and build with AI.

“We spent decades getting to a laptop powerful enough to develop a mobile app or a website, but we’re struggling with things we develop in AI that we haven’t struggled with since the 70s,” said Piantino. “Before PCs existed, the computers filled the whole room at a university or NASA and people used terminals to log into a single main frame. It’s why Unix was invented, and that’s kind of what AI needs right now.”

In a meeting with Piantino this week, TechCrunch got a peek at the product. First, Piantino pulled out his MacBook and opened up Terminal. He began to run his own code against MNIST, which is a database of handwritten digits commonly used to train image detection algorithms.

He started the program and then moved over to the Spell platform. While the original program was just getting started, Spell’s cloud computing platform had completed the test in under a minute.

The advantage here is obvious. Engineers who want to work on AI, either on their own or for a company, have a huge task in front of them. They essentially have to build their own computer, complete with the high-powered GPUs necessary to run their tests.

With Spell, the newest GPUs from NVIDIA and Google are virtually available for anyone to run their test.

Individual users can get on for free, specify the type of GPU they need to compute their experiment, and simply let it run. Corporate users, on the other hand, are able to view the runs taking place on Spell and compare experiments, allowing users to collaborate on their projects from within the platform.

Enterprise clients can set up their own cluster, and keep all of their programs private on the Spell platform, rather than running tests on the public cluster.

Spell also offers enterprise customers a ‘spell hyper’ command that offers built-in support for hyperparameter optimization. Folks can track their models and results and deploy them to Kubernetes/Kubeflow in a single click.

But, perhaps most importantly, Spell allows an organization to instantly transform their model into an API that can be used more broadly throughout the organization, or or used directly within an app or website.

The implications here are huge. Small companies and startups looking to get into AI now have a much lower barrier to entry, whereas large traditional companies can build out their own proprietary machine learning algorithms for use within the organization without an outrageous upfront investment.

Individual users can get on the platform for free, whereas enterprise clients can get started for $99/month per host you use over the course of a month. Piantino explains that Spell charges based on concurrent usage, so if the customer has 10 concurrent things running, the company considers that the ‘size’ of the Spell cluster and charges based on that.

Piantino sees Spell’s model as the key to defensibility. Whereas many cloud platforms try to lock customers in to their entire suite of products, Spell works with any language framework and lets users plug and play on the platforms of their choice by simply commodifying the hardware. In fact, Spell doesn’t even share with clients which cloud cluster (Microsoft Azure, Google, or AWS) they’re on.

So, on the one hand the speed of the tests themselves goes up based on access to new hardware, but, because Spell is an agnostic platform, there is also a huge advantage in how quickly one can get set up and start working.

The company plans to use the funding to further grow the team and the product, and Piantino says he has his eye out for top-tier engineering talent as well as a designer.

Breather’s new CEO Bryan Murphy / Breather Press Kit

Breather, the platform that provides on-demand private workspace, announced today that it has appointed Bryan Murphy as its new CEO.

Before joining Breather, Murphy was the founder and President of direct-to-consumer mattress startup, Tomorrow Sleep. Prior to Tomorrow Sleep, Murphy held posts as an advisor to investment firms and as an executive at eBay after the company acquired his previous company, WHI Solutions – an e-commerce platform for aftermarket auto parts – where Murphy was the co-founder and CEO.

Breather believes Murphy’s extensive background scaling e-commerce and SaaS platforms, as well as his experience working with incumbents across a number of traditional industries, can help it execute through its next stage of global growth.

Murphy is filling the vacancy left by co-founder and former CEO Julien Smith, who stepped down as chief executive this past September, just three months after the company completed its $45 million Series C round, which was led by Menlo Ventures and saw participation from RRE Ventures, Temasek Holdings, Ascendas-Singbridge, and Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec.

In a past statement on his transition, Smith said: “As I reflect on my strengths and consider what it will take for the company to reach its full potential, I realize bringing on an executive with experience scaling a company through the next level of growth is the best thing for the business.”

Smith, who remains with the company as Chairman of the Board, believes Murphy more than fits the bill. “Bryan’s record of scaling brands in competitive markets makes him an ideal leader to support this momentum, and I’m excited to see where he takes us next,” Smith said.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, Murphy explained that Breather’s next growth phase will ultimately come down to its ability to continue the global expansion of its network of locations and partner landlords while striking the optimal balance between rental economics and employee utility, productivity and performance. With new spaces and ramped marketing efforts, Murphy and the company expect 2019 to be a big year for Breather – “I think this year, you’re going to start hearing a lot about Breather and it really being in a leadership role for the industry.”

Breather’s workspace at 900 Broadway in New York City is one of 500+ network locations accessible to users.

On Breather’s platform, users are currently able to access a network of over 500 private workspaces across ten major cities around the world, which can be booked as meeting space or short-term private office space.

Meeting spaces can be reserved for as little as 30 minutes, while office space can be booked on a month-to-month basis, providing businesses with financial flexibility, private and more spacious alternatives to coworking options, and the ability to easily change offices as they grow. For landlords, Breather allows property owners to generate value from underutilized space by providing a turnkey digital booking system, as well as expertise in the short-term rental space.

Murphy explained to TechCrunch that part of what excited him most about his new role was his belief in Breather’s significant product-market fit and the immense addressable market that he sees for flexible workspaces longer-term. With limited penetration to date, Murphy feels the commercial office space industry is in just the third inning of significant transformation. 

Murphy believes that long-term growth for Breather and other flexible space providers will be driven by a heightened focus on employee flexibility and wellness, a growing number of currently underserved companies whose needs fall between coworking and traditional direct leasing, and the need for landlords to support a wider variety of office space options as workforce demographics and behaviors shift. 

Murphy believes that the ease, flexibility and unlocked value Breather provides puts the platform in a great position to win share.

“Breather has built a remarkable commercial real estate e-commerce and services platform that offers one-click access to over 500 workspaces around the world,” said Murphy in a press release. “To our customers, having access to workspace that is turnkey, affordable, beautiful, productive and that can flex up and down based on needs is a total game changer.”

To date, Breather has served over 500,000 customers and has raised over $120 million in investment.

Alation, a startup that helps crawl a company’s databases in order to build a data search catalogue, announced a $50 million Series C investment today.

The round was led by Sapphire Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. Existing investors Costanoa Ventures, DCVC (Data Collective), Harmony Partners and Icon Ventures also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $82 million, according to Crunchbase data.

The participation of Sapphire Ventures, originally launched by SAP, and Salesforce Ventures, the venture arm of Salesforce, is particularly telling. One of the issues these enterprise software companies face when they go inside large enterprises is helping customer access and understand data wherever it lives. It’s one of the reasons that Salesforce bought Mulesoft for $6.5 billion last year.

This is a problem that employees face, as well. It’s simply inefficient to query multiple databases manually, or to even know what databases exist inside a large organization. Alation uses out-of-the-box connectors to connect to common data sources like Oracle, Redshift, Teradata, Spark and Tableau to create a centralized data catalog.

With that catalog in place, employees can search just as they would with any enterprise search engine with the notable difference that this tool is focussed strictly on structured data inside of supported data sources.

The company goes beyond pure matching to find the data an employee is searching for. Company CEO and co-founder Satyen Sangani says they also use a method to analyze usage to display the most likely result. “What differentiates us in particular is that we look at the logs of how people are using that information,” he explained. This is analogous to how Google uses the PageRank algorithm to measure the popularity of a page based on the number of times people link to a page.

Alation catalog page. Screenshot: Alation

It is certainly not alone in the space with competitors like Alteryx and Informatica, but Alation’s approach seems to be resonating. Sangani reports triple-digit growth 4 years running. The company has soared from 89 employees at the end of last year to around 200 today. It boasts 100 large enterprise customers in production including names like BMW, Hilton, American Express and Salesforce (whose investment arm, Salesforce Ventures, notably also helped lead today’s round).

As the company grows rapidly, Sangani says he wants the capital in place to help fuel the increasing interest. The size and scope of his customers means that he will need to hire not just engineers to keep developing the product and building new connectors, but customer support and sales and marketing. In all, he expects add between 100 and 200 employees in the next year.

He also wants to continue building out partnerships. As an example, Teradata is an authorized reseller, and has helped sell the product in global markets where a startup like Alation might lack the resources to enter.

The company, which is based in in Redwood City, California, launched in 2012 and released the first version of the product in 2014. Its most recent round prior to today was a $23 million Series B in 2017.

Sometimes it take a small bug in one thing to find something massive elsewhere.

During an investigation recent, security firm Forcepoint Labs said it found a new kind of malware that was found taking instructions from a hacker sending commands over the encrypted messaging app Telegram .

The researchers described their newly discovered malware, dubbed GoodSender, as a “fairly simple” Windows-based malware that’s about a year old, which uses Telegram as the method to listen and wait for commands. Once the malware infects its target, it creates a new administrator account and enables remote desktop — and waits. As soon as the malware infects, it sends back the username and randomly generated password to the hacker through Telgram.

It’s not the first time malware has used a commercial product to communicate with malware. If it’s over the internet, hackers are hiding commands in pictures posted to Twitter or in comments left on celebrity Instagram posts.

But using an encrypted messenger makes it far harder to detect. At least, that’s the theory.

Forcepoint said in its research out Thursday that it only stumbled on the malware after it found a vulnerability in Telegram’s notoriously bad encryption.

End-to-end messages are encrypted using the app’s proprietary MTProto protocol, long slammed by cryptographers for leaking metadata and having flaws, and likened to “being stabbed in the eye with a fork.” Its bots, however, only use traditional TLS — or HTTPS — to communicate. The leaking metadata makes it easy to man-in-the-middle the connection and abuse the bots’ API to read bot sent-and-received messages, but also recover the full messaging history of the target bot, the researchers say.

When the researchers found the hacker using a Telegram bot to communicate with the malware, they dug in to learn more.

Fortunately, they were able to trace back the bot’s entire message history to the malware because each message had a unique message ID that increased incrementally, allowing the researchers to run a simple script to replay and scrape the bot’s conversation history.

The GoodSender malware is active and sends its first victim information. (Image: Forcepoint)

“This meant that we could track [the hacker’s] first steps towards creating and deploying the malware all the way through to current campaigns in the form of communications to and from both victims and test machines,” the researchers said.

Your bot uncovered, your malware discovered — what can make it worse for the hacker? The researchers know who they are.

Because the hacker didn’t have a clear separation between their development and production workspaces, the researchers say they could track the malware author because they used their own computer and didn’t mask their IP address.

The researchers could also see exactly what commands the malware would listen to: take screenshots, remove or download files, get IP address data, copy whatever’s in the clipboard, and even restart the PC.

But the researchers don’t have all the answers. How did the malware get onto victim computers in the first place? They suspect they used the so-called EternalBlue exploit, a hacking tool designed to target Windows computers, developed by and stolen from the National Security Agency, to gain access to unpatched computers. And they don’t know how many victims there are, except that there is likely more than 120 victims in the U.S., followed by Vietnam, India, and Australia.

Forcepoint informed Telegram of the vulnerability. TechCrunch also reached out to Telegram’s founder and chief executive Pavel Durov for comment, but didn’t hear back.

If there’s a lesson to learn? Be careful using bots on Telegram — and certainly don’t use Telegram for your malware.

Cracking the silos of digital health records promises to bring better care to patients by better informing doctors, according to Abhinav Shashank, the chief executive officer of San Francisco-based startup Innovaccer .

Shashank’s company is just wrapping up a $35 million round of financing with a new $11 million commitment from Microsoft’s investment arm M12 (formerly known as Microsoft Ventures).

The corporate investor joins Westbridge, and Lightspeed Partners, who previously committed to the Series B round last year.

Founded in 2014, Innovaccer has been working to roll up data from a number of different healthcare providers including Hartford Healthcare, University of California, Mercy ACO Iowa, UniNet Healthcare Network of Nebraska, Inmediata Health Integrated Solutions of Puerto Rico, and StratiFi Health Network.

Innovaccer estimates that it has saved its customers $400 million in expenses and the company said it will use the funds to build out its software services that connect to lab systems, electronic health records, claims management software and health information exchanges.

“Innovaccer’s approach to data aggregation and analytics fundamentally helps healthcare organizations implement value-based care models and improve care delivery,” said Rashmi Gopinath, partner at M12, in a statement. “We look to invest in startups addressing huge markets with best-in-class deep technology. We are excited to support Innovaccer as they continue to scale and grow in the global healthcare market.”

In addition to providing a unified view into all of the different records that a care provider touches, the company is also looking to layer in prompts to encourage treatment options for future care, according to Shashank.

According to the company’s chief executive, care providers are already incorporating suggestions from the company’s algorithmically based predictive tools in their treatment plans to ensure that patients are getting the best possible outcomes.

“It is rare to see this type of growth in the healthcare industry. Normally, this is only seen in the fastest of enterprise SaaS companies. We think there is tremendous potential to bring the speed and innovation normally associated with enterprise software to the world of healthcare IT,” says Sumir Chadha, Managing Director at Westbridge Capital.