Author: azeeadmin

Rachel Blank has a history with hormones. The entrepreneur left her investment job at General Catalyst to join a portfolio company they had been backing since its seed round: Ro. Blank was tasked with growing Rory, a product line for menopausal women.

But Blank left her director position at the health tech unicorn, last valued at $5 billion, to start her own company in women’s hormonal health. Today, that startup is launching out of stealth with millions in venture-backing and more than 35,000 women in its community.

Allara is an early-stage, New York-based startup that wants to help women better manage polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS. The reproductive and hormonal condition can cause irregular periods, infertility or gestational diabetes in women, as well as acne, weight gain and excessive hair growth. And it’s far from rare, affecting some one in 10 women of childbearing age.

Along with launching today, the company told TechCrunch that it has raised $2.5 million in a seed round led by Global Founders Capital, with participation from Great Oaks and Humbition.

Allara bundles a suite of services needed to address PCOS — such as gynecologists, nutrition plans or mental health support — and gives consumers one spot to access all of the above. The company describes it as a “collaborative care management model.”

When a consumer first joins the platform, Allara asks them to go through a virtual on-boarding visit with a medical provider. That provider can arrange for labs, then review the lab work and medical history to better understand a patient’s background. Lab work, and any prescriptions, are paid for by the consumer through traditional insurance.

Then, the rest of Allara moves out of pocket. Allara charges $100 a month for access to its care team. Patients get quarterly check-ins with their providers, and have ongoing text-based access to registered dietitians to help with eating and lifestyle goals. Blank explained how Allara wants to make sure all services find ways to talk to each other, creating a patient experience where a nutritionist already knows what your OB-GYN told you and vice-versa so a care plan is centralized.

If it pulls it off, this is where the heart of Allara’s innovation lies: creative ways to take care of people.

One hurdle for Allara, and any company working on a solution for this condition, is that PCOS is hard to diagnose, and impossible to fully cure. Like many hormonal conditions, the condition looks different in everyone, which is part of the reason it’s so hard for doctors to identify. There is no blood test, and there is no pill to pop.

PCOS is currently diagnosed with the Rotterdam criteria, which means a patient must have two of the following three conditions: irregular period, excess androgen or polycystic ovaries. Some research argues that the criteria is controversial and not fully inclusive of the spectrum of how PCOS presents. For now, the Rotterdam criteria is the best method toward diagnosing.

Blank says that Allara’s goal is all about “managing risk.”

“It’s not that women with these conditions weren’t looking for a solution,” Blank said. “It’s that they’re all desperately looking for solutions, but the solutions haven’t existed yet.”

Over the past few months, Allara has been operating under a different name — Astrid — to build up interest and get feedback needed to iterate its product. Blank claims that more than 35,000 women are part of its community, either directly or on a waitlist, underscoring the demand for explicit attention on this condition. The startup recently began seeing patients.

Hormonal health grows bigger

Allara is the latest startup to bet that hormonal health is a key wedge into the digital health boom. Companies like Adyn, Modern Fertility, Tia, Veera Health and Perla Health are all working on different ways to better serve hormonal disorders.

Still, the sector remains relatively nascent compared to other health conditions. Blank chalks up part of this truth to stigma.

“There’s been a lack of understanding what women’s health means,” Blank said, explaining how society often views it as a fertility or reproductive health condition. Blank thinks that PCOS is a common thread between a multitude of conditions, from fertility, diabetes, increased risk of uterus and endometrial cancer, heartsease, anxiety and depression.

When she explains this, she said, people are able to get the market opportunity.

“How do we treat women’s healthcare in a way that their entire healthcare outcomes become better but we’re taking on the nuances of them being women?” Blank said.

Blank herself was diagnosed with PCOS at the age of 21, which came as a surprise to her.

“I think what made it more surprising is that my dad is actually an OB-GYN,” she said. “So even though I had grown up around women’s healthcare, and had access to the best of women’s health specialists, I even struggled with getting a process and understanding what was going on in my body.”

Blank initially joined Ro because of her passion for polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS. Allara is a return to, and doubling down on, her belief in the condition needing a better standard of care.

As for going solo, and not building it within Ro’s blanket of brands and massive footprint, Blank explained how her vision of specialty care and services is different from what Ro focuses on, which is largely primary care and prescription focus. Notably, Ro did acquire Modern Fertility, a hormonal health company, for north of $225 million, last month.

“PCOS was just part of my personal story — not the vision for Rory,” she said. “Allara is not a primary care platform — it’s a specialty care platform, developing new clinical care models for complex women’s health conditions like PCOS. Imagine it as a place a primary care platform might refer a patient to if they discover she has more complex needs than they can currently serve.”

It’s game day for mobility tech mavens around the world. Well, at least for the ones who made the savvy decision to attend TC Sessions: Mobility 2021. Are you ready for a day packed with potential, overflowing with opportunity and focused on the future of transportation? Yeah, you are, and so are we!

No FOMO zone: Did you wait until the last minute? We don’t judge — simply purchase a pass at the virtual door.

Let’s take a look at just some of the speakers, presentations and breakout sessions on tap today. We’re talking about leading visionaries, founders and makers of mobility tech. They just might have info you need to know, amirite? The times listed below are EDT, but the event agenda will automatically reflect your time zone,

Throughout the course of the day: Be sure to make time to meet, greet and network with the 28 early-stage startups exhibiting in our virtual expo area (seriously, they’re an impressive bunch). The platform lets exhibitors present live demos, host Q&As about their products or hold private 1:1 meetings. Go mining for opportunities!

2:05 pm – 2:15 pm

EV Founders in Focus: We sit down with Ben Schippers, co-founder and CEO of TezLab, an app that operates like a Fitbit for Tesla vehicles (and soon other EVs) and allows drivers to go deep into their driving data. The app also breaks down the exact types and percentages of fossil fuels and renewable energy coming from charging locations.

2:40 pm – 3:10 pm

Equity, Accessibility and Cities: Can mobility be accessible, equitable and remain profitable? We have brought together community organizer, transportation consultant and lawyer Tamika L. Butler; Remix by Via co-founder and CEO Tiffany Chu and Revel co-founder and CEO Frank Reig to discuss how (and if) shared mobility can provide equity in cities, while still remaining a viable and even profitable business. The trio will also dig into the challenges facing cities and how policy may affect startups.

3:10 pm – 3:40 pm

The Rise of Robotaxis in China: Silicon Valley has long been viewed as a hub for autonomous vehicle development. But another country is also leading the charge. Executives from three leading Chinese robotaxi companies (WeRide, AutoX and Momenta) — that also have operations in Europe or the U.S. — will join us to provide insight into the unique challenges of developing and deploying the technology in China and how it compares to other countries.

That’s just a tiny taste of what today has in store for you. Choosing which of the 20 presentations and breakout sessions to attend could be tough. The good news is that you can catch anything you missed — or want to review again — with video-on-demand.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 kicks off today — go drive this opportunity-packed day like you stole it.

This morning Terra, a recent Y Combinator graduate building an API for fitness and health data, announced that it has closed a $2.8 million round. The investment includes capital from General Catalyst, Samsung Next, and NEXT VENTURES.

The company intends to hire with its new capital, from a team of four today — the co-founders and two other engineers — to seven this month. Terra expects to staff up to 10 people inside the quarter.

More folks makes sense given the scope of what Terra is building. The company’s APIs allow developers to hook into fitness and health data generated by software and hardware. In order-of-operations terms, Terra CEO and co-founder Kyriakos Eleftheriou told TechCrunch that his company is targeting integration points first with companies that offer APIs, then SDKs and, later, Bluetooth-enabled health wearables. That’s a lot of possible connections, so having more hands on-deck will help the company code up its integration points makes sense.

Sure, providing connective tissue between fitness and health data is neat, but only as cool as the technology that is built using the now-unlocked data. With Terra having attracted around early 100 developers or so to its product according to Eleftheriou, the startup should be starting to form an idea of what’s possible. During an interview with TechCrunch Eleftheriou brought up a neat idea of linking music selection to heart rate. So, as your heart rate goes up — say, from exercise — your music player could read that data from your wearable and shake up its shuffle.

Or the opposite, I’d add. Say you are like myself, a Nervous Person. I might want Spotify to move deeper into the Chopin the higher my heart rate during work hours.

How hard is it to link to fitness and health data sources? Per Eleftheriou, the fitness-tech world is more connection-ready than we might have expected. Polar, which makes wearables like fitness trackers, already has an API that Terra can plug into for example, the CEO said.

TechCrunch was curious about third-party hesitancy regarding allowing Terra to plug into various health, and fitness tech hardware and software. But Eleftheriou said that that hasn’t been a large problem for his startup, and that some companies — like those who sell wearables — have a natural incentive to make their hardware as useful as possible.

Calling Terra the Plaid for fitness data is not merely a useful comparison to help ourselves understand what it’s building; the company is pursuing a consumption-pricing model, meaning that its economics will scale akin to Plaid’s, or perhaps Twilio’s own.

But what matters more than where Terra sees health and fitness data fitting into the world is watching what developers actually build with its service. Now flush with a few million dollars, the company has to now prove that it has material market demand for its APIs. If so, we might see a more connected, integrated health and fitness data environment in the future. I’m here for that.

Google today announced its plans to build a new subsea cable that will connect the East Coast of the U.S. and Las Toninas, Argentina — with additional landings in Brazil and Uruguay. The idea here is to provide users in South America with improved low-latency access to Google’s portfolio of consumer and cloud services.

The closest Google data center in the region (and its only one in South America) can be found near Santiago, Chile, which is connected to the U.S. West Coast through Google’s Curie cable.

The Firmina cable, named after Brazilian abolitionist and author Maria Firmina dos Reis, will augment Google’s existing cable investments in the region. The Tannat cable, a joint venture between Antel Uruguay and Google, for example, already connects the same locations while the Monet cable connects the U.S. and Brazil, where Google’s Junior cable already connects various parts of the country.

The new cable doesn’t just add capacity but also resilience to Google’s existing network. Specifically, one technical feat that makes this new cable, which consists of 12 fiver pairs, stand out is the system’s ability to power the cable from a single-end power source.

“With submarine cables, data travels as pulses of light inside the cable’s optical fibers,” Google explains. “That light signal is amplified every 100 km with a high-voltage electrical current supplied at landing stations in each country. While shorter cable systems can enjoy the higher availability of power feeding from a single end, recent longer cables with large fiber pair count have made this harder and harder.” To achieve this, the Firmina cable is supplied by a cable with a voltage that is 20% higher than previous cables.

 

 

 

Human resources is generally a salient cornerstone of any organization, but digitization has democratized a lot of the work that goes into HR, and that’s meant more people in businesses interested in, and using, the kind of data that HR people build and typically manage. Today, a startup called ChartHop that’s built a platform to cater to that trend is announcing $35 million in funding on the heels of strong growth.

The Series B is being led by Andreessen Horowitz, a past backer, with Elad Gil and previous investors Cowboy Ventures and SemperVirens also participating. We understand from sources close to the company that the round values ChartHop at between $300 million and $400 million.

ChartHop was founded in New York by Ian White, now the CEO, who first started building the tools to fill what he felt were gaps in his own knowledge when he founded, ran and eventually sold his previous company, Sailthru (which was acquired by CampaignMonitor).

He said he realized the company could build “all the tech we wanted,” but when it came down to thinking about how to run and scale the business, that was at its heart actually a people question, and also understanding how departments, and the entire organization, looked and worked as a whole.

“It was not as important as hiring, structuring a ‘single you’ of the organization,” he said. (Ian’s pictured here to the right.) Similar to the great analytics tools that have been built for developers, sales teams and others, “What I wanted was people analytics,” he said. “I wanted to understand my team.”

That’s actually a very multifaceted question. It’s not just a matter of an org chart — a big enough task in its own right that the very day that ChartHop came out of stealth in early 2020, another org chart startup, The Org, launched, too. It’s also retention strategy, employee satisfaction, turnover statistics, diversity statistics, predictive visualizations on finances one area was compensated differently, or if hiring were frozen, etc. “All of those problems became mine and there was no great software out there to solve for it,” White said.

The ChartHop platform is built like all strong structures these days in the world of tech: tons of integrations to feed data into ChartHop to make it richer; tons of integrations also to export and use that data in more dedicated applications when needed; and an easy way for everyone to update data but also put in place easy and strong protections to keep confidential data as it should be.

And while HR still “owns” the platform, White said, it can be accessed and used by anyone in the organization, and it is.

It seems that others have found the talent management software market lacking for it, too. Since 2019 it went from a team of one — White himself — to 75, with 130 corporates now using its services. The list has a strong list of household company names with a heavy emphasis in tech, from what White showed me. Revenues in the last 12 months — a time when the spread-out nature of many of our workplaces has meant an even greater need for a platform to manage all the information has possibly reached a high water mark — have grown at a rate of 17% month-by-month.

“With HR and people functions so crucial to the growth and success of businesses, it’s unfortunate that most HR teams lack the critical people data to drive organizational decision making,” said David Ulevitch, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, in a statement. “ChartHop is the solution to this all-too-common problem, and is built by company leaders who have felt this pain personally. ChartHop’s visual approach to people analytics allows leaders to make organizational planning and strategy decisions with confidence. We’re thrilled to lead ChartHop’s Series B because of their impressive growth, the company’s vision, and the terrific, mission-oriented team they’ve assembled.” He also led the company’s seed round in February 2020.

“Since implementing ChartHop earlier this year, we’ve seen significant improvement in our engagement with talent routines as they’re managed via ChartHop,” said Sara Howe, vice president human resources at ZoomInfo, a customer of ChartHop, in a statement. “Our employees have found the simple user interface and the centralized view of their data as the most helpful features. Leaders across ZoomInfo have also leveraged ChartHop to ensure that their organizations are well structured to support our continued rapid growth.”

Remote work was the order of the day for the past 16 months, but as we (fingers crossed) move out of the pandemic, it’s looking like a lot of people may move into a new era of hybrid work: less focus being present in offices to feel like you are getting things done, less time commuting, and more time to be productive. To help better address that opportunity, a company called 1e, which builds solutions for companies to enable hybrid working along with managing the wider space of endpoint management, has been acquired by Carlyle on the heels of a strong year of business.

The private equity firm has picked up the London-based company in a $270 million deal.

The acquisition is coming in the form of a majority stake with CEO and co-founder Sumir Karayi maintaining a significant minority stake, along with employees of the company. The firm is completely bootstrapped — no outside investors, no VCs on the cap table prior to this deal — and profitable, with growth of 28% in the last year.

The birth and now exit of 1e is an interesting counterpoint to that of most of the enterprise startups that you will read about on the pages of TechCrunch, or maybe in tech press overall.

The company was started in 1997 when Karayi and co-founders Phil Wilcock and Mark Blackburn were at Microsoft working as in-house consultants helping enterprises adopt and adapt to Microsoft software. Karayi decided he wanted to start something of his own, rather than, in his words, “working for Microsoft forever.”

Given his background, his business started first as a consultancy, but he said that it didn’t take long to pivot, since “We realized that the problems we were looking to solve we needed to build technology to do that, so we started to write our own software.”

The company got its start as a Microsoft shop, building endpoint technology management, along with tools to help companies manage their computer terminals and networks better. That included products like NightWatchman, a power management tool for PCs and servers that helped save energy consumption for businesses; Nomad, a bandwidth management tool that helps reduce server usage; and Shopping, a platform for companies to build app-store-like experiences for internal employees or customer-facing tools.

Over time — years before the Covid-19 pandemic — that also evolved into software to enable hybrid working environments, which were already emerging as a thing and already posing challenges to businesses and users.

“The challenge was that remote working was a second-class experience,” he said, with technical support, software usage, network connectivity, device issues and just about everything harder to sort out when problems arose for workers not working in the office. So 1e — a play on the last two characters of the error message you get on a failing PC, “STOP 0x0000001E” — built software to address that, too.

Overall the company amassed some 40 patents on its technology, which now is used across more than 11 million devices among 500 large enterprise customers, including AT&T, Nestle, and a number of big banks that can’t be named.

It’s been the remote working software that has seen the company through an especially strong year — no surprise there, given the environment many of us have been working in — where businesses have been buying its tools as part of their “digital transformation” efforts, and it was this that got Karayi thinking that the company — which had largely built the business it had today on an employee base of people who just like building new things, and word-of-mouth between end users — could finally do with an outside investment and cash injection to take the business to the next level.

“We’re going through a seismic change right now and we think it’s a big opportunity for 1e,” he noted, adding that while many of us might feel like remote work is everywhere, he believes this is just the beginning of how to enable better remote working. “I think the office boat has sailed,” he said.

1e went with Carlyle among a number of other bidders as it seemed like the right fit: strong support and understanding of the business, combined with a well-recognized name. The plan more generally is to follow the PE playbook if all goes well: four years of growth, with “all later options open.”

“We were attracted to 1E’s fully integrated digital experience technology, which is differentiated by its advanced remediation and automation capabilities, and are delighted to partner with Sumir as we support the company as it enters its next phase of growth,” said Fernando Chueca, an MD in the Carlyle Europe Technology Partners (CETP) advisory team. “With strong industry tailwinds, we believe 1E has significant growth opportunities and we look forward to supporting another founder-backed business to scale through investments in product innovation, commercial operations, and international expansion.”

Other recent deals from Carlyle in Europe have included Eggplant, NetMotion Software, Apama, UC4/Automic Software and ITRS.

Aserto, a new startup from a couple of tech industry vets who want to build an Authorization as a Service solution, announced a $5.1 million seed round today from Costanoa Ventures, Heavybit Industries and several industry luminaries.

The company’s two founders, Omri Gazitt, CEO and Gert Drapers, CTO, have decades of experience building some of the industry’s identity building blocks including SAML, OAuth 2.0 and OpenID. As the two founders considered what to do next last year, they felt that authorization would be a natural extension of their work in identity, and an area where there were few good solutions for developers.

“If you look at authorization, it really hasn’t hasn’t moved forward at all. The access part is really stuck in the world of the 2000s. And we wanted to figure out essentially what authorization would look like in the age of SaaS and cloud. We feel like that’s another 10 year mission with a lot of pain right now, and a lot of value that we can deliver,”Gazitt told me.

While there are other early stage startups attacking a similar problem Gazitt believes their experience gives them a leg up, and he sees it as such a critical area for developers. “If you think about authorization, it really is in the critical path of every application request. Every time I send your SaaS application a request, that authorization system has to be live to 100% availability, and it has to do its work in probably a millisecond of latency budget. Otherwise it’s putting too much burden on the application,” he explained.

What the company is doing is creating a sophisticated service that does much of the work for developers, giving them fine-grained control over roles access control based on policies using what they call a “policy-as-code approach to authoring, editing, storing, versioning, building, deploying and managing authorization rules.” The solution is built using the CNCF Open Policy Agent (OPA) project.

For now, the company is still working with early customers but is also expanding the private beta today. to include additional companies who could benefit from this kind of solution.

Casey Aylward, who is leading the investment at Costanoa, sees a wide open space and an experienced team ready to attack it. “I get really excited thinking about what are these big ecosystem plays in the open source world? Where should we be investing? And I think this is going to be one of them, and the wat Omri and Gert are thinking about the problem and approaching the ecosystem is really, really key,” she said.

The company launched in August 2020, but it was really the culmination of many discussions that Aylward and Gazitt had over the previous couple of years around authorization and how to attack the problem. In addition to the two founders, they have six employees spread across four continents.

When it comes to diversity Gazitt and Drapers are both immigrants and their lead investor is female, bringing an element of diversity to the company from the start, but it’s also something they are thinking about as they build the company. Having Aylward and other women involved certainly helps bring that to the forefront.

“It’s quite frankly super valuable that Casey, [and other women investors on the team Martina Lauchengco GP at Costanoa and Dana Oshiro, GP/GM at Heavybit] that can basically project the point of view that we’re not just a bunch of men sitting around the table with solutions, so that’s super helpful, and […] you can’t start thinking about it too early. There’s no such thing as too early with diversity,” Gazitt said.

While Gazitt and Draper both work in Seattle, their team is spread far and wide, and he says that the plan is to be a remote-first company. In fact, he has spent a lot of time talking to companies like GitLab and HashiCorp, two companies who have successfully built remote companies to learn more about how to do that right.

Contentstack, a startup that offers a headless content management system (or a ‘content experience platform’ in marketing speak), today announced that it has raised a $57.5 million Series B round. The round, which the company says was oversubscribed, was led by Insight Partners, which also led its Series A round. New investor Georgian and existing investors Illuminate Ventures and GingerBread Capital also participated. With this, the company has now raised a total of $89 million.

“In the last year, we have helped leading companies in industries such as retail, financial services, gaming and travel to create personalized experiences for their customers in order to drive revenue, improve customer satisfaction and build customer loyalty,” said Neha Sampat, founder and CEO of Contentstack. “This round of financing demonstrates that our strategy is paying off, including our core beliefs around equality, customer care and product innovation. During a remarkably challenging year, our team delivered impressive results and we are excited to continue this growth trajectory by delivering the best agile CMS platform for a digital-first world.”

The company says it saw its customer base grow over 150% since closing its $31.5 million Series A round in October 2019. Among its new customers are Broadcom, Chico’s FAS, HP, La Perla, Leesa Sleep, McDonald’s and NBC.

In recent months, Contentstack launched a new user interface for these customers and the company argues that Georgian’s focus on AI and machine learning will allow it to bring more of these modern technologies to its platform as well.

“We are big believers in Contentstack and the leadership team, especially after our conversations with global brands revealed how important Contentstack is to these organizations and how beloved the product is by both business and technical users,” said Emily Walsh, Lead Investor at Georgian. “Now with access to our technology platform, Contenstack can not only gain operational efficiencies but also supercharge the innovation, experience and support it offers to customers and partners. We are excited to help Contentstack customers leverage AI to gain business advantages through new insights and automation.”

The company plans to use the new funding to accelerate its investments in this technology, fuel its international growth and expand its partner ecosystem.

End-to-end encrypted email service ProtonMail has refreshed its design, updating with a cleaner look and a more customizable user interface — including the ability to pick from a bunch of themes (dark and contrasting versions are both in the mix).

Last month the Swiss company officially announced passing 50M users globally, as it turned seven years old. Over those years privacy tech has come a long way in terms of usability — which in turn has helped drive adoption.

ProtonMail’s full integration of PGP, for example, makes the gold standard of e2e encryption invisibly accessible to a mainstream Internet user, providing them with a technical guarantee that it cannot poke around in their stuff.

Its new look (see screenshot gallery below) is really just a cherry on the cake of that underlying end-to-end encryption — but as usage of its product continues to step up it’s necessarily paying more attention to design and user interface details…

[gallery ids="2163650,2163649,2163648,2163651"]

Proton has also been busy building out a suite of productivity tools which it can cross-promote to webmail users, using the same privacy promise as its sales pitch (it talks about offering an “encrypted ecosystem”).

And while ProtonMail is a freemium product, which can be a red flag for digital privacy, Proton’s business has the credibility of always having had privacy engineering at its core. Its business model is to monetize via paying users — who it says are subsidizing the free tier of its tools.

One notable change to the refreshed ProtonMail web app is an app switcher that lets users quickly switch between (or indeed discover) its other apps: Proton Calendar and Proton Driver (an e2e encrypted cloud storage offering, currently still in beta).

The company also offers a VPN service, although it’s worth emphasizing that while Proton’s pledge is that it doesn’t track users’ web browsing, the service architecture of VPNs is different so there’s no technical ‘zero access’ guarantee here, as there is with Proton’s other products.

A difference of color in the icons Proton displays in the app switcher — where Mail, Calendar and Drive are colored purple like its wider brand livery and only the VPN is tinted green — is perhaps intended to represent that distinction.

Other tweaks to the updated ProtonMail interface include redesigned keyboard shortcuts which the company says makes it easier to check messages and quick filters to sort mails by read or unread status.

The company’s Import-Export app — to help users transfer messages to they can make the switch from another webmail provider — exited beta back in November.

Zooming out, adoption of privacy tech is growing for a number of reasons. As well as the increased accessibility and usability that’s being driven by developers of privacy tech tools like Proton, rising awareness of the risks around digital data breaches and privacy-hostile ad models is a parallel and powerful driver — to the point where iPhone maker Apple now routinely draws attention to rivals’ privacy-hostile digital activity in its marketing for iOS, seeking to put clear blue water between how it treats users’ data vs the data-mining competition.

Proton, the company behind ProtonMail, is positioned to benefit from the same privacy messaging. So it’s no surprise to see it making use of the iOS App Privacy disclosures introduced by Apple last year to highlight its own competitive distinction.

Here, for example, it’s pointing users’ attention to background data exchanges which underlie Google-owned Gmail and contrasting all those direct lines feeding into Google’s ad targeting business with absolutely no surveillance at all of ProtonMail users’ messages…

Commenting on ProtonMail’s new look in a statement, Andy Yen, founder and CEO, added: “Your email is your life. It’s a record of your purchases, your conversations, your friends and loved ones. If left unprotected it can provide a detailed insight into your private life. We believe users should have a choice on how and with whom their data is shared. With the redesigned ProtonMail, we are offering an even easier way for users to take control of their data.”

Sinch — the Swedish company that provides a suite of services for companies to build communications and specifically “customer engagement” into their services by way of APIs — has made yet another acquisition in its global march to scale up its business and compete more squarely with Twilio. The company today announced that it has acquired MessageMedia, a provider of SMS and other messaging services for businesses to manage customer relations, user authentication, alerts and more.

The acquisition is being made for $1.3 billion — comprised of $1.1 billion in cash and the rest in shares (or in Sweden’s currency, SEK10,745 in total based on Sinch’s share price and yesterdays exchange rate). The deal is expected to close in the second half of this year.

The deal is notable not just for giving Sinch a major inroad into the world of business SMS, but also because of the timing. Less than a month ago, Sinch’s big rival Twilio announced that it would acquire ZipWhip, another big player in the same area of business SMS, for $850 million.

MessageMedia, based out of Melbourne, Australia, is currently operational also in New Zealand, the U.S. and Europe, where it focuses on providing services primarily to the SMB market with a self-service platform where customers can build and operate services, with the option of using a web portal provided by MessageMedia to handle the traffic.

It has some 60,000 customers and handles 5 billion+ messages annually, Sinch said. Growth is particularly strong in the U.S. market, where MessageMedia is adding 1,500 new customers each month. Alongside SMS, it also provides tech for companies to build MMS experiences and mobile landing pages, and it also provides them with tools to integrate other features as well as an API gateway.

For Sinch — which is publicly traded in Sweden and currently has a market cap of $13.6 billion — the deal comes just weeks after the company announced that it would be raising $1.1 billion for more acquisitions, with a big chunk of the money coming from Softbank, one of its major backers.

Given the size of this deal announced today, now we know which deal Sinch had in mind. It would be interesting to know whether Sinch’s move to buy MessageMedia predated Twilio’s for ZipWhip, which definitely do not feel like a coincidence.

“Addressing small and medium-sized businesses opens up a new avenue to growth and dramatically expands our addressable market. With MessageMedia as a part of Sinch, we will have the best team in the industry to capitalize on that opportunity,” said Oscar Werner, Sinch CEO, in a statement.

Since has been on a fast pace of buying up companies in recent times to scale up its existing business, tapping not just into the huge surge of people using phones and the internet to communicate in these pandemic-stricken times, but also to bulk up and have more economies of scale in the communications industry, essentially a business built on aggregating incremental revenues.

That fact has led to a lot of consolidation, with Twilio also buying up strategic, smaller businesses in quick order.

In this regard, MessageMedia is a strong buy for Sinch because it’s generating strong cash. MessageMedia is expected to make $151 million in profits for the year ending June 30, with gross profits of $94 million and Ebitda of $51 million, Sinch said. Sinch itself is also profitable.

Sinch’s other deals have included Inteliquent for $1.14 billion, ACL in India for $70 million and SAP’s digital interconnect business for $250 million.

For its part, MessageMedia very much plays into and is a product of the same API economy that has lifted the likes of Twilio, Stripe and many others built on the premise of knitting together very complex services, which customers can then use by way of simple lines of code that they integrate into their own digital operations, be it websites, apps, or internal systems.

Communications, and specifically messaging API-based systems are estimated to be a $9-13 billion market, Sinch said, with the U.S. accounting for 30% of that, and the global market projected to grow between 25-30% until 2024. SMBs, who might lack the resources to build such tools from the ground up, are a big part of that activity.

“Mobile messaging delivers tremendous ROI but smaller businesses often lack tools that cater to their specific needs,” said Paul Perrett, MessageMedia CEO, in a statement. “Serving these customers presents a tremendous opportunity, and with Sinch we can build a global leader in our field.”