Author: azeeadmin

While the property market in the US appears headed for a slowdown, a startup that’s honing in on rentals is doubling down on growth. Zumper, a San Francisco-based startup that has built an end-to-end platform to source, rent out and help service apartments across the US, has raised another $46 million in funding — money it plans to use to continue enhancing the services it offers to renters and landlords; and to continue its growth nationally. The funding comes on the back of a strong period of growth for the company, which has around 1 million listings on offer and sees 8 million visitors in an average month, with one-quarter of a million landlords using Zumper to connect to them.

This Series C was led by media giant Axel Springer and growth-stage investor Stereo Capital, with participation also from previous investors Dawn Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), Breyer Capital, Scott Cook, Goodwater Capital and xfund. Zumper has raised $90 million to date. It’s not revealing its valuation, but a source tells me it’s more than double its previous valuation, which was just over $100 million two years ago. That likely puts it at over $200 million (but probably less than $300 million).

Axel Springer, with its vast experience in media, and specifically publishing and classifieds, is an obvious strategic backer here. But Blackstone, I’ll note, is a strategic investor of sorts, too. “As a client of Zumper and one of the largest landlords in the US, Blackstone is keenly focused on technological innovation to improve the rental process for both renters and landlords,” said Sean Muellers of Blackstone who will act as a board observer, in a statement. “Partnering with the best-in-class Zumper team to effectuate this industry change is the definition of a win-win situation.”

Anthemos Georgiades, CEO and cofounder of Zumper, says that the company was built in 2014 on the premise that there were already too many portals online that helped people search for apartments. “Everyone had done that already,” he said, so instead the startup decided that it would focus on simplifying, speeding up and overall improving the whole process of renting.

As anyone who has rented, or rents out, an apartment knows, search aimed at apartment seekers (and “lead generation” for the landlords) is just the beginning of the process. There are many hoops to jump through after that with credit checks, lease signing, moving out of your old place, moving into a new one, and signing up for local services in the new place.

With that in mind, in addition to basic apartment searches, the Zumper platform has been gradually trying to address all of that. Today, it includes a prequalification tool that runs credit checks on would-be tenants, and Zumper is also running a beta in which would-be tenants can leave a deposit instantly on a place while touring it to take it off the market. It’s currently building one tool that will let landlords generate leases to have them signed via Zumper; and another tool so that tenants can also pay rent through the platform.

Further on down the line, Georgiades said that the plan will be to add on more “transactional” services to increase its margins further, such as helping tenants sign up for utilities and other services, and perhaps buy or rent things for their apartments. He said that there are already talks in the works with “half a dozen” companies to integrate these kinds of services, but he wouldn’t say when they would come online.

Interestingly, Zumper’s focus on taking a different approach to tackling the rental market is not without precedent. Zillow is offering an increasing range of services beyond basic search, and other startups like Compass have also focused on how it can provide more than simple listings to would-be tenants to attract top clients on both sides of the marketplace. (Compass, however, puts more more of an emphasis on the broker experience.) Others in Europe like Homelike are also looking at more innovative ways of providing an online platform for renters.

Zumper’s typical and target is a tenant is someone looking for a one-year lease, which it feels has not really been addressed well enough yet in the US.

“Airbnb has improved the experience in short-term, but no one is doing this in long-term rental,” Georgiades said.

 

The goal of any accelerator is to back startups that are reaching exponential growth. Sometimes, though, the accelerator itself hits that inflection point.

Techstars, which was founded in 2006, has expanded aggressively over the past twelve years. Once a single accelerator program for a handful of early-stage startups in Boulder, the program now encompasses 44 separate programs covering six continents and a large number of industry verticals. The firm has hundreds of employees across its headquarters and member programs, and more than 1,600 portfolio companies.

Along the way, the mission of Techstars has evolved, from purely accelerating a cohort of startups to championing a culture of “entrepreneurship anywhere.” Co-CEO David Cohen, who co-founded Techstars along with Brad Feld, David Brown, and Jared Polis, said that “Techstars is the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed,” adding that “the product we are offering is really not an accelerator, but a network.”

The key insight for Techstars was that startups needed to talk to large companies in order to drive sales and ultimately revenues, while at the same time, large companies were looking to talk with startups in order to learn more about innovation and take advantage of it in their operations.

Techstars is looking to intensify that synergy through two new programs the company is announcing today. The first is a Network Engagement Program that offers new concierge-style connections for corporations looking to build relationships with startups. The other is a 54-hour Innovation Bootcamp that will teach corporate employees innovation skills in a rapid learning environment with involvement from Techstars alumni.

The larger story here though is how Techstars is increasingly leveraging startups and corporations together to improve both. Techstars runs a number of corporate-backed accelerators with companies like Barclays, Rakuten, MetLife, and Comcast NBCU, with each accelerator focusing on areas relevant to their sponsoring companies. Barclays, which has sponsored accelerators in New York City, London, and Tel Aviv, focuses on fintech, for instance.

These companies accrue a number of benefits from the relationship. They get to meet startups that might not have otherwise shown up in their milieu, allowing them to build early relationships. Those early connections can then lead to new purchases and possibly even an investment.

Cohen provided the example of Sphero, which launched out of a Disney co-branded Techstars accelerator and led to the startup’s famed BB-8 product, which drove “$100 million in sales.“ Every company approaches the network differently he said, and “part of the beauty is that they have that choice.” Disney has since parted ways with Techstars, however.

Beyond investment and sales growth from corporations, startups can also use their relationships to help with finding an exit when they are ready for one, helping them get through the corporate development gauntlet. Cohen says that “we have an M&A group of 6-7 people” whose full-time job is to maximize the value of a startup’s return.

Beyond these transactional components though, Techstars hopes to change the culture around companies and how they interact with startups. Cohen says that “for our corporations, one of the meta impacts we are learning is how to help them behave better…How to give first to the startup community, versus the classic corporation, how do I take advantage of a startup.”

Obviously, there are a lot of positives when building connections between incumbents and upstarts, but there is also a dark side — challenges around stealthiness and conflicts of interest. After all, some of the startups in Techstars almost certainly want to dislodge the incumbents who may be sponsoring their very program. Cohen even brought this up in the context of the company’s mobility accelerator and the benefits companies receive: “Next time an Uber comes along, Ford isn’t surprised by it.”

Cohen argues against this line of thought in a couple of different ways. First, all decisions are “always up to the startup” and emphasized that “our large company partners don’t have the rights to invest in companies…they don’t have the right to acquire them or frankly do business with them.” Plus, even when co-branded, accelerators are exclusively run by Techstars staff, and the plethora of programs allows startups to avoid potential competitors. “Let’s say you want to go up against Ford, you can still be in the Techstars network, but not in the Ford program,” Cohen explained.

For startup founders, the key ultimately is to be mindful of who they partner with and what information they share with them. That is true as much in Techstars as it is in any other context. As Techstars continues to spread its message of entrepreneurship far and wide in the enterprise world through its new programs, the benefits of closer cooperation — and its attendant downsides — should be thoughtfully evaluated on that well-trodden road to exponential growth.

Comcast and Ticketmaster are rolling out a feature to let Xfinity X1 customers search tour dates and begin the ticket buying process directly through their televisions — using voice search on their remotes.

The feature’s launch coincides with the first tickets going on sale for Kelly Clarkson’s new tour.

If users speak “Kelly Clarkson tour” into their voice remote, they’re sent to a dedicated Kelly Clarkson destination (which, surprisingly, isn’t a purgatory of bland pop power ballads).

To be clear, customers can’t actually complete an order using the voice tool. Instead they can get set to this destination where they will receive a prompt to buy tickets and then opt in to receive a text with a code that will enable them to buy tickets online.

If that sounds like an incredibly circuitous and unwieldy process to find tickets to concerts nearby for artists someone likes, that’s because it is.

Customers will see a promotional tile with an option to “get tickets” which will let them find a list of performances and corresponding dates at venues — powered by Ticketmaster’s API. Those customers can then opt to receive a text message with a code that they can use to complete the purchase online.

“Our team is always thinking of new ways to reach more fans by extending Ticketmaster’s open platform,” said Dan Armstrong, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Distributed Commerce for Ticketmaster in a statement. “This partnership with Comcast is a groundbreaking way to discover events and buy tickets.”

The new feature is certainly groundbreaking. It also seems extremely unnecessary.

For the Kelly Clarkson superfan, the X1 “experience” also includes the ability to stream her music through Pandora, watch music videos, and the singer’s appearances on The Voice — as well as watching clips from previous tours and see her web series A Glass of Wine.

“Fans can now go to Kelly Clarkson’s dedicated destination on X1 to enjoy her music and shop for tickets to her much-anticipated tour right on the TV via this seamless integration with Ticketmaster,” said Nancy Spears,  Vice President, Strategy & Execution at Comcast Cable, in a statement. “X1 enables us to unveil new and innovative experiences that complement and elevate content across the plaform and to add more value for customers by giving them more ways to interact with the events, entertainment, performers and brands they love.”

Singular, a startup working to unify data for marketers, is announcing that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding.

The company was founded by former Onavo executives, including Gadi Eliashiv, Eran Friedman and Susan Kuo — who now serve, respectively, as Singular’s CEO, CTO and COO.

Eliashiv explained that Singular was created in response to “this trend of data explosion in the marketing stack,” which require marketers to pull data from hundreds or thousands of different systems.

“Essentially what we see is the creation of this new category of marketing intelligence, where the complexity of the marketing stack has created the need for this layer that sits on top,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you use a marketing cloud like Adobe that’s bundling five products together — at the end of the day, you need a layer on top on making sense of it, helping you make better decisions.”

Eliashiv said Singular is able to go from a high-level dashboard summary for CMOs to “the finest level of detail.” He also noted that while the company is designed to integrate with existing marketing tools, it will “oftentimes displace smaller point solutions.”

“Our principal is, it has to be relevant for data, meaning we’re never going to displace your ad-buying tool,” he added. “It’s not what we do. We’re an intelligence platform.”

The idea of unifying marketing data is one that I hear a lot, but Eliashiv’s claims seem weightier when you see that Singular is already working with a number of big names, including Lyft, Yelp, Airbnb, Linkedin, Symantec, Zynga, Match and Twitter.

Singular previously raised $20 million in funding. Norwest Venture Partners led the new round, with partner Scott Beechuk joining the board of directors.

Beechuk told me that he’d been studying marketing analytics market for quite some time, and he argued, “There is something really unique and special about Singular. It’s the bridge between mobile, web and offline, all on a single platform.”

“What you’re going to find is, there are going to be a lot of technologies that Singular replaces,” Beechuck continued. “Let’s say a CMO or [chief growth officer] has 300 different outlets where they are advertising … Every one of those systems tends to have their own analytics built in. The first thing Singular does, it replaces all of those analytics systems with a single pane of glass.”

General Catalyst, Method Capital, Telstra Ventures, Translink Capital and Thomvest also participated in the new funding.

Brie Larson’s cosmic superhero couldn’t have asked for a better setup than Avengers: Infinity War (Caution — minor spoilers ahead, naturally). Revealed via Nick Fury’s (Samuel L. Jackson) period-inappropriate pager in the end credits, the scene showed off very little in the way of detail, save for the fact that superhuman is apparently the last and best hope for (half) of the universe, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Entertainment Weekly gave us our first real images of Larson as the good Cap’n a few weeks back, and now here we are with the first trailer. The films creators have noted the movie won’t be an origin story proper, though we do seem to have some lost memory to grapple with as we travel back in time a couple of decades prior to Infinity Wars’ events.

There’s a perfect scene setting opening shot, as the trailer opens with a ship crash landing through the top of a Blockbuster video. The sub-two-minute preview, thankfully, doesn’t lean too heavily on the era’s cliches beyond that, though we do get a few other reminders, like Fury’s reappearing hairline.

The trailer focuses pretty heavily on alter ego Carol Danvers’ time in the Air Force, along with a reluctant awakening as a superhero, with a little nudging from Fury — who we already know will need her to pay back the favor a few Infinity Stones later. We’ve also got a brief cameo from those mischief making shapeshifting Skrulls.

Plenty of time to find out more. The film hits theaters March 8, 2019.

UiPath is bringing automation to repetitive processes inside large organizations and it seems to have landed on a huge pain point. Today it announced a massive $225 million Series C on a $3 billion valuation.

The round was led by CapitalG and Sequoia Capital. Accel, which invested in the companies A and B rounds also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $408 million, according to Crunchbase, and comes just months after a $153 million Series B we reported on last March. At that time, it had a valuation of over $1 billion, meaning the valuation has tripled in less than six months.

There’s a reason this company you might have never heard of is garnering this level of investment so quickly. For starters, it’s growing in leaps in bounds. Consider that it went from $1 million to $100 million in annual recurring revenue in under 21 months, according to the company. It currently has 1800 enterprise customers and claims to be adding 6 new ones a day, an astonishing rate of customer acquisition.

The company is part of the growing field of robotic process automation or RPA . While the robotics part of the name could be considered a bit of a misnomer, the software helps automate a series of mundane tasks that were typically handled by humans. It allows companies to bring a level of automation to legacy processes like accounts payable, employee onboarding, procurement and reconciliation without actually having to replace legacy systems.

Phil Fersht, CEO and chief analyst at HfS, a firm that watches the RPA market, says RPA isn’t actually that intelligent. “It’s about taking manual work, work-arounds and integrated processes built on legacy technology and finding way to stitch them together,” he told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this year.

It isn’t quite as simple as the old macro recorders that used to record a series of tasks and execute them with a keystroke, but it is somewhat analogous to that approach. Today, it’s more akin to a bot that may help you complete a task in Slack. RPA is a bit more sophisticated moving through a workflow in an automated fashion.

Ian Barkin from Symphony Ventures, a firm that used to do outsourcing, has embraced RPA. He says while most organizations have a hard time getting a handle on AI, RPA allows them to institute fundamental change around desktop routines without having to understand AI.

If you’re worrying about this technology replacing humans, it is somewhat valid, but Barkin says the technology is replacing jobs that most humans don’t enjoy doing. “The work people enjoy doing is exceptions and judgment based, which isn’t the sweet spot of RPA. It frees them from mundaneness of routine,” he said in an interview last year.

Whatever it is, it’s resonating inside large organizations and UiPath, is benefiting from the growing need by offering its own flavor of RPA. Today its customers include the likes of Autodesk, BMW Group and Huawei.

As it has grown over the last year, the number of employees has increased 3x  and the company expects to reach 1700 employees by the end of the year.

The large, legacy car industry has pinned a lot of hopes and dreams on innovative startups to build the next generation of automotive technology, and today the latest chapter in that story was revealed. WayRay, a Zurich-based developer of holographic augmented reality technology and hardware — used in head-up displays that project images into a driver’s field of vision — has raised $80 million of funding, a Series C led by Porsche, with Hyundai Motor, previous investor Alibaba Group, China Merchants Capital, JVCKENWOOD, and several sovereign wealth funds also participating.

WayRay says it will be using the funds to bring its display technology to market by way of OEM deals with carmakers, projected for next year, with longer term plans including building tech for other kinds of displays like windows:

WayRay has been around for five years and its products are still only in the prototype stage — albeit being widely shown off — but its valuation has seen a significant bump, with a source close to WayRay telling us it is now $500 million. Meanwhile, in an interview, WayRay’s founder and CEO, Vitaly Ponomarev, projects that when commercial rollout commences on its products — which it expects to do next year — that figure will likely double.

“The lifecycle of our product is pretty long,” Ponomarev said. “We are just now becoming a certified supplier to the automotive industry but that takes time. We are aiming to become a tier-two supplier by next year. The contracts should be signed beginning of next year and that should help with valuation.” He said that the company has been contacted by “all the major car manufacturers.”

(For some more financing context, the company has officially raised $110 million, but our source said that unofficially, it’s actually raised $140 million, with some investors asking to keep their backing quiet for now.)

The market for automotive head-up displays was estimated to be worth as much as $560 million last year, with that number growing to over $1 billion by 2023. Companies like WayRay are going head-to-head with the likes of Continental, Panasonic and others to meet a demand for these systems, which will serve a couple of different purposes: providing assistance to drivers of vehicles, and providing additional information and entertainment to passengers (and potentially drivers in autonomous cars).

Ponomarev said that his company will be launching an SDK in two weeks to help build apps for both of these use cases.

WayRay as a company is spread across two countries that have been strong for AI, specifically computer vision talent, and in-car safety systems. A large part of WayRay’s R&D and its first factory (for prototyping) are in Moscow, Russia, and it also has a second base in Switzerland, currently Zurich — recently relocated from Lausanne to be closer to the German border and the automotive companies that are based there. Germany will also be where it builds its first factory to produce commercial parts. The second is planned for Shanghai, where there is currently only a sales office.

We gave a little rundown of WayRay’s technology when we came across it last year at CES and said it restored our faith in the potential of a head-up display because of its clarity and range. There have been a number of HUD makers on the market — and, I should add, a number of disappointments such as Navdy and iScout — but WayRay is taking a different approach from many of these, by focusing on holographic AR technologies rather than screen-reflections or in-built displays.

Ponomarev said this extends the company’s expertise not only into software, but also cutting-edge laser technology and material science (developing new polymers). WayRay is not the only company working in holographic HUD, but he believes it may be the most advanced. “We are the number-one in the world in terms of patents,” he added, with systems that are potentially 20 times smaller than those currently being made.

WayRay’s focus today is on embedded HUD systems — that is, technology and hardware that will be built into vehicles — but that is a somewhat recent focus. Just earlier this year, it was also building a second line of business in aftermarket hardware — that is, systems that can be purchased and used with any vehicle.

One issue with aftermarket is the extreme levels of competition, even if the basic technology is not exactly the same. “There are dozens of companies appearing in countries like China and that is killing the aftermarket HUD business,” Ponomarev said. “The simple reason is because there is no [unique] technology inside.”

Another problem with aftermarket is the need for to build sales channels.

“You lose a lot of margin through the retail chain,” he said. “But if you don’t have any competition in the OEM channel” — as WayRay claims is the case for it right now — “that is a gold mine. Customers are just waiting in line until you have time to work with them. High regulations [from forging into a new area of technology and automotive business] is a downside, but the upside is so high that we made a pivot from the aftermarket to embedded because we have the right technology.”

All the same, there are still hurdles that WayRay will have to surmount in order to realise the success is feels is so within reach. There are still a wide variety of physical layouts for cars that change how a holographic display can behave, and there is a constant tension between building hardware that takes up less space but provides the largest pictures.

Another is taking into account what the cars are already capable of doing. Some models already have advanced driver systems, multiple sensors and the rest that will make rendering pictures on WayRay’s systems very fast. Others do not, and means WayRay will have to figure out how to source that data through its own hardware, making for more complicated and expensive tech.

However, the payoff if these different boxes can be ticked is a big one.

Porsche sees the opportunity to use WayRay’s tech not just to assist drivers and offer them the latest bells and whistles in their already highly-specced vehicles, but also a way to potentially offer more services down the line, for example e-commerce by way of Alibaba.

“We are convinced that by joining forces we will in future be able to offer our customer solutions as standard of what our customers expect of Porsche,” a spokesperson said.

“The WayRay team has unique expertise with a solid background in space engineering, hardware and software development,” said Lutz Meschke, Deputy Chairman of the Executive Board and Member of the Executive Board for Finance and IT at Porsche, in a statement. “Their innovative ideas and products have great potential. We are convinced that on this basis we’ll be able to offer our clients customized Porsche solutions. That is why we have made this strategic investment decision.”

And that extends also to strategic investments for other applications of the tech longer term.

“WayRay has remarkable expertise in both hardware and software development for holographic AR display systems,” said Dr. Youngcho Chi, Chief Innovation Officer and Executive Vice President of Hyundai Motor Group, in a statement. “The Hyundai–WayRay collaboration will help us establish a brand new eco-system that harnesses AR technology to enhance not only navigation systems but establish an AR platform for smart cities and smart buildings, which are Hyundai Motor Group’s new business interests, in the long term, providing innovative customer experiences to our drivers.”

Mozilla’s vision of a VR-first web browser is ready for consumers to download and judge.

Firefox Reality is a browser built entirely for virtual reality. While you may have read about desktop Firefox or Chrome adding WebVR support, Firefox Reality is a web browser that you actually use entirely inside a VR headset. You can visit URLs, search things and otherwise browse the 2D and 3D internet within the new browser all without moving a mouse, just your VR hand controller.

Firefox Reality is available on the Oculus, Viveport and Daydream platforms and is optimized to run on the latest standalone mobile headsets like the Oculus Go and Lenovo Mirage Solo.

This is version 1.0 and the company is still finding its way through some usage questions and issues. It’s VR after all, so perfection is hardly the standard to chase. Being experimental may mean some wonkiness in the UX, but it also could mean giving users upon something that works in a really unique way.

The browser’s first iteration seems to have some cool features like voice search to help users avoid punching in text on a controller character-by-character.

Mozilla has put a lot of effort into the WebVR standard that a good deal of VR developers have grown familiar with.

The web is a pretty natural fit for VR. It’s understandable but unfortunate that so much of the content available in virtual reality has gotten organized in these big stores across each platform that requires you to sign-in, download and launch from your library. While this model certainly has plenty of advantages to the stakeholders and developers, users might have an easier go if some of the simpler content built for today’s VR headsets were built for WebVR.

It’s clear that plenty of things need to be rethought for the web inside VR. There’s obviously far more 2D web content available right now, but it’ll be interesting to see how much 3D models or live rendered virtual environments grow to become a part of the way sites operate as browser owners like Mozilla, Google and Apple begin heavily pushing their AR/VR plays.

Symantec is the latest private security company to offer its expertise to vulnerable political targets on the house. Today the company announced that it would extend its “Project Dolphin” service (dolphins eat phish, get it) to political campaigns, candidates and election officials, all “prime target[s] for malicious actors seeking to influence the outcome of the upcoming U.S. midterm elections.” The service allows for anyone to run a check on their own website to make sure no illegitimate or “spoofed” versions of it are floating around and luring unsuspecting victims.

Individuals in those qualifying groups can sign up for free for Project Dolphin, Symantec’s AI-powered system that scans for and notifies users of illegitimate websites pretending to be the real thing — just one flavor of the common hacking technique called “spoofing.” Through spoofed sites, much like spoofed email accounts, hackers can steal login credentials and other sensitive data and wreak whatever kind of havoc they want, much like they did with the DNC prior to the 2016 US presidential election.

The company will also offer some educational services on a new dedicated election security site, including best practice for poll workers and election officials, anti-tampering training, and an election security news hub.

Whether the intended audience for these materials and services will actually take note of them remains to be seen, but cobbling together election security guides now could help smooth the path to more secure elections by 2020.

“The issues that plagued the 2016 election are still prevalent today and are likely to continue to persist through the midterm elections, into 2020, and into elections globally,” Symantec CEO Greg Clark said.

“It is important for all parties, public and private, to contribute to protecting the security and integrity of our elections and democracy.”

While it’s quite late to the game — at least for 2018 midterms — Symantec joins a number of security companies that have extended free or deeply discounted services to candidates and election bodies, including Cloudflare, Valimail and Synack.

Bad news first: the internet is broken for a while. The good news is that Cloudflare thinks it can make it slightly less broken.

With “the click of one button,” the networking giant said Tuesday, its users can now switch on DNSSEC in their dashboard. In doing so, Cloudflare hopes it removes a major pain-point in adopting the web security standard, which many haven’t set up — either because it’s so complicated and arduous, or too expensive.

It’s part of a push by the San Francisco-based networking giant to try to make the pipes of the internet more secure — even from the things you can’t see.

For years, you could open up a website and take it’s instant availability for granted. DNS, which translates web addresses into computer-readable IP addresses, has been plagued with vulnerabilities, making it easy to hijack any step of the process to surreptitiously send users to fake or malicious sites.

Take two incidents in the past year — where traffic to and from Amazon and separately Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft were hijacked and rerouted for between minutes and hours at a time. Terabytes of internet traffic were siphoned through Russia for reasons that are still unknown. Any non-encrypted traffic was readable, at least in theory, by the Russian government. Suspicious? It was.

That’s where a security-focused DNS evolution — DNSSEC — is meant to help. It’s like DNS, but it protects requests end-to-end, from computer or mobile device to the web server of the site you’re trying to visit, by cryptographically signing the data so that it’s far tougher — if not impossible — to spoof.

But DNSSEC adoption is woefully low. Just three percent of websites in the Fortune 1000 sign their primary domains, largely because the domain owners can’t be bothered, but also because their DNS operators either don’t support it or charge exorbitant rates for the privilege.

Cloudflare now wants to do the hard work in setting those crucial DS records, a necessary component in setting up DNSSEC, for customers on a supported registrar. Traditionally, setting a DS record has been notoriously difficult, often because the registrars themselves can be problematic.

As of launch, Gandi will be the first registrar to support one-click DNSSEC setup, with more expected to follow.

The more registrars that support the move, the fewer barriers to a safer internet, the company argues. Right now, the company says that services that users should consider switching from providers don’t support DNSSEC and “let them know that was the reason for the switch.”

Just like HTTPS was slow to adopt over the years — but finally took off in 2015 — there’s hope that DNSSEC can follow the same fate. The more companies that adoption the technology will help end users be less vulnerable to DNS attacks on the internet.

And besides the hackers, who doesn’t want that?