Author: azeeadmin

Apple this morning announced that it will be returning to an all-virtual format for a second year. The company went online-only for the first time in 2020, as Covid-19 ground in-person events to a halt. While vaccine rollouts have begun in much of the world, the return of the in-person event industry still seems iffy for most of the rest of the year. The event will run June 7-11.

“We are working to make WWDC21 our biggest and best yet, and are excited to offer Apple developers new tools to support them as they create apps that change the way we live, work, and play,” Developer Relations VP Susan Prescott said in a release tied to the news.

The virtual format certainly has its advantage — accessibility being at the top of the list. Apple said last year’s was its “biggest ever,” and expects roughly 28 million developers from around the world at this one. In addition to not having to deal with traveling — not to mention the South Bay hotel crunch — the company offers up free access to the event for all qualified developers.

The event spans Apple’s different operating systems, bringing new versions of iOS/iPadOS, macOS and watchOS. Last year also delivered the big, long awaited arrival of Apple’s transition to first-part silicon for its Macs.

Developing…

AI has become a fundamental cornerstone of how tech companies are building tools for salespeople: they are useful for supercharging (and complementing) the abilities of talented humans, or helping them keep themselves significantly more organised; even if in some cases — as with chatbots — they are replacing them altogether. In the latest development, 6sense, one of the companies helping in the first of these categories is announcing a major round of funding that underscores the traction AI tools are seeing in the sales realm.

The startup has raised $125 million at a valuation of $2.1 billion, a Series D being led by D1 Capital Partners, with Sapphire Ventures, Tiger Global and previous backer Insight Partners also participating.

The company plans to use the funding to expand its platform and its predictive capabilities across a wider range of sources.

For some context, this is a huge jump for the company compared to its last fundraise: at the end of 2019, when it raised $40 million, it was valued at a mere $300 million, according to data from PitchBook. It’s also not a huge surprise: at a time when a lot of companies are going through “digital transformation” and investing in better tools for their employees to work more efficiently remotely (especially important for sales people who might have previously worked together in physical teams), 6sense is on track for its fourth year of more than 100% growth, adding 100 new customers in the fourth quarter alone.

The company’s approach speaks to a classic problem that AI tools are often tasked with solving: the data that sales people need to use and keep up to date on customer accounts, and critically targets, lives in a number of different silos — they can include CRM systems, or large databases outside of the company, or signals on social media.

While some tools are being built to handle all of that from the ground up, 6sense takes a different approach, providing a way of ingesting and utilising all of it to get a complete picture of a company and the individuals a salesperson might want to target within it. It takes into account some of the harder nuts to crack in the market, such as how to track “anonymous buying behavior” to a more concrete customer name; how to prioritizes accounts according to those most likely to buy; and planning for multi-channel campaigns.

6sense has patented the technology it uses to achieve this and calls its approach building an “ID graph.” (Which you can think of as the sales equivalent of the social graph of Facebook, or the knowledge graph that LinkedIn has aimed to build mapping skills and jobs globally.) The key with 6sense is that it is building a set of tools that not just sales people can use, but marketers too — useful since the two sit much closer together at companies these days.

Jason Zintak, the company’s CEO (who worked for many years as a salesperson himself, so gets the pain points very well), referred to the approach and concept behind 6sense as “revtech”: aimed at organizations in the business whose work generates revenue for the company.

“Our AI is focused on signal, identifying companies that are in the market to buy something,” said Zintak in an interview. “Once you have that you can sell to them.”

That focus and traction with customers is one reason investors are interested.

“Customer conversations are a critical part of our due diligence process, and the feedback from 6sense customers is among the best we’ve heard,” said Dan Sundheim, founder and chief investment officer at D1 Capital Partners, in a statement. “Improving revenue results is a goal for every business, but it’s easier said than done. The way 6sense consistently creates value for customers made it clear that they deliver a unique, must-have solution for B2B revenue teams.”

SpaceX conducted yet another high-altitude test flight of its Starship prototype spacecraft on Tuesday, the fourth of these so far. Like all the flight testing and construction of Starship prototypes, this one took off from SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas development facility – a location recently renamed ‘Starbase’ by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Unfortunately, things didn’t go great for SpaceX — the SN11 prototype was lost mid-flight during its descent.

At this point in the program, SpaceX’s aim is to fly Starship to a high altitude (roughly 32,000 – 40,000 feet), execute a ‘belly flop’ maneuver and then bring it back to Earth with a controlled re-orientation to vertical, followed by a soft landing on its feet. Before today, SpaceX has made progress towards that goal, with the first two attempts exploding on a harder-than-landing impact, and the third landing vertically, before also exploding just under 10 minutes later after resting apparently secure before that.

SpaceX’s stated specific goals at this point are around testing is to gather data on the control flaps that Starship uses to control its orientation and prepare for that soft landing. SpaceX wants to study this with low altitude flights so that it has the data it needs to make it more likely to pull this off once it starts orbital flight testing later on.

Because of foggy conditions this AM in Texas at the launch site, SpaceX didn’t have great views of the flight test, and the company hasn’t yet revealed what went wrong during the mission, but will be investigating and sharing details later on.

Cybersecurity training is one of those things that everyone has to do but not something everyone necessarily looks forward to.

Living Security is an Austin-based startup out to change cybersecurity training something you look forward to, not dread. And the company has just closed on a $14 million Series B to continue its expansion beyond cybersecurity awareness training into human risk management.

Washington, D.C. based-Updata Partners led the financing, which also included participation from existing backers previous investors Silverton Partners, Active Capital, Rain Capital and SaaS Venture Partners. The investment comes after $5 million series A, led by Austin-based Silverton, raised last April.

Husband and wife Drew and Ashley Rose founded Living Security in June 2017 with the mission of making cybersecurity training less boring and more effective via gamified learning with live action immersive storylines, role-based micro modules and reporting.

Living Security launched with its flagship product — Cyber Escape Room. When the pandemic hit, the startup brought its in-person training sessions online through the launch of CyberEscape Online.

With more people working remotely, the need for the type of offering Living Security provides has become even more paramount, considering how many people use personal devices for professional reasons, among other things. Employees are more vulnerable than ever to inadvertently providing entry points into the networks of the enterprises where they work — whether through social engineering, phishing or other methods.

Today, Living Security works with over 100 large enterprises to train their global workforces to better protect sensitive data and secure their organizations. The startup’s customer list is impressive, and includes large enterprises such as CVS Health, Mastercard, Verizon, MassMutual, Biogen, AmerisourceBergen, Hewlett Packard, JPMorgan and Target.

So it’s not a big surprise that in 2020, Living Security tripled its revenue and employee headcount and more than doubled its customer count. The company declined to provide hard revenue figures, saying only that ARR grew nearly 200% last year.

“We have seen a significant increase in account growth and expansion in existing accounts..largely in part due to the scalability of our digital solution,” CEO Ashley Rose said.

With the success of its escape rooms and gamified training, Living Security’s team then asked themselves how they could make their efforts “more predictable.”

“We added risk management and scoring so program and security owners could become more targeted and focused on the delivery of their training,” Rose said.

So now Living Security aims to use behavioral data and analytics to measure and manage human risk. It plans to take that data and provide “predictive interventions” to employees. 

“We’re focused on ‘How do we turn people from our greatest risk, to our greatest assets in cybersecurity?” Rose said. “That’s our big vision for the company.”

With its “Unify” human risk management platform, Living Security wants to provide an even more scalable solution. The company also plans to use its new capital toward expanding its geographic reach and scaling both direct and channel sales efforts.

Currently, Living Security has 55 employees with the goal of having 90 by year’s end.

Deb Walter, director of information security training and awareness at AmerisourceBergen, said she first engaged with Living Security in 2017 when she requested its CyberSecurity Card game. 

“I wanted to gamify how I presented training,” she recalls.

Introducing episodic gamification and its “bingeable” content into her training program was a big hit with employees, according to Walter.

“Their new platform is enabling us to deploy an ‘Information security academy’ to encourage associates and contractors to use several modes of training to earn points and track themselves on a leaderboard,” she said.

Updata General Partner Jon Seeber, who is taking a seat on Living Security’s board with the funding, said his firm saw “breakout potential” in the startup’s platform.

“It comes as close as you can to closing the loop between people and the systems on which they’re operating,” he said. 

Plus, he said, it does it in a way that avoids the compliance-focused, “check-the-box” mindset that so often dominates employee-focused cybersecurity solutions.

Michael Cohn became a celebrity in the Atlanta startup ecosystem when the company he co-founded was sold to Accenture in a deal valued somewhere between $350 million and $400 million nearly six years ago.

That same year, Sean O’Brien also made waves in the community when he helped shepherd the sale of the  collaboration software vendor, PGi, to a private equity firm for $1.5 billion.

The two men are now looking to become fixtures in the city’s burgeoning new tech community with the close of their seed-stage venture capital firm’s first fund, a $27.4 million investment vehicle.

Overline’s first fund has already made commitments to companies that are expanding the parameters of what’s investible in the Southeast broadly and Atlanta’s startup scene locally.

These are companies like Grubbly Farms, which sells insect-based chicken feed for backyard farmers, or Kayhan Space, which is aiming to be the air traffic control service for the space industry. Others, like Padsplit, an Atlanta-based flexible housing marketplace, are tackling America’s low income housing crisis. 

“Our business model is very different from that of a traditional software startup, and the Overline team’s unique strengths and operator mindset have been invaluable in helping us grow the company,” said Sean Warner, CEO and co-founder of Grubbly Farms. 

That’s on top of investments into companies building on Atlanta’s natural strengths as a financial services, payments and business software powerhouse.

For all of the activity in Atlanta these days, the city and the broader southeastern region is still massively underfunded, according to O’brien and Cohn. The region only received less than 10 percent of all the institutional venture investments that were committed in 2020. Indeed, only seven percent of Atlanta founders raise money locally when they’re first starting out, an Overline survey suggested.

“The data reflects what we have seen throughout our careers building, growing, and investing in startups. There is no shortage of phenomenal founders and businesses coming out of Atlanta and the Southeast, but they often struggle to find institutional capital at their earliest stages,” said O’Brien, in a statement. “Overline will lead as the first institutional check for these companies and be a true partner to the Founders throughout their lifecycle—supporting them on the strategic and operational business initiatives and decisions that are critical to a company’s success.” 

The limited partners in Overline’s first fund also reflects the firm’s emphasis on regional roots. The privately held email marketing behemoth Mailchimp anchored the fund, which also included partners like Cox Enterprises, Social Leverage,

Overline is supported by a bench of impressive partners that reflects the firm’s roots in the Southeast. Anchored by marketing platform, Mailchimp, additional partners include Cox Enterprises, Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Social Leverage, Wilmington, Del.-based Hallett Capital, and Atlanta Tech Village founder David Cummings, along with Techstars co-founder David Cohen. 

“At Mailchimp, we love our hometown of Atlanta, and are proud of the robust startup ecosystem that’s growing in our city. The Overline founding team’s vision of deploying smart, local capital into startups in Atlanta and the Southeast aligns with our goals of promoting and advancing local innovation,” said Rick Lynch, CFO, Mailchimp, in a statement.

The firm expects to make investments of between $250,000 to $1.5 million into seed stage companies and has already backed 11 companies including, Relay Payments, a logistics fintech company that has raised over $40 million from top-tier investors. 

“When we set out to build Atlanta Tech Village almost a decade ago, one of our primary goals was to help Atlanta develop into a top 10 startup city, where all entrepreneurs would thrive. We’re making tremendous strides as a community, as evidenced by the number of newly minted unicorns,” said serial entrepreneur and Atlanta Tech Village founder David Cummings. “I believe in Overline’s thesis that value-add institutional early-stage capital is critical to the ecosystem’s continued development. Since the early days, Michael and Sean have been an active presence in our community in a way that goes far beyond being a source of capital—as mentors, advisors, and champions of Atlanta founders. I am proud to be one of their first investors.”

Two-and-a-half years later, the Nest Home Hub remains one of my favorite smart screens on the market. Maybe that’s a commentary on the rate of improvement in the category, or maybe Google just got things pretty right the first time out. It remains one of the best-looking products on the market, built from solid but understated material. The size is right and Google clearly put a lot of thought into the functionality.

Of course, these consumer electronics have spent a few decades training us to expect big, annual updates to product categories (gotta keep that demand up). By that measure, the second-gen device is something of a disappointment. There’s not really a lot new here. The product now does sleep tracking and the speaker’s bass is a bit more full. And that’s honestly pretty much it.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the new version is how Google’s engineers worked within their own self-imposed limitations. I recall very distinctly seeing original Google Home Hub at a pre-release event and asking the company about the decision not to include a camera. Surely companies like Google and Amazon were committed to collecting as much information as possible on devices like these.

I gave the company kudos at the time for keeping the camera off the device — and I’m happy to say it continued to do so with gen 2 (of course, that was made easier with the subsequent release of the camera-sporting Nest Hub Max). And I have to say, having tested the new Echo Hub, which actually physically moves to follow you around the room, only cemented my appreciation of the intentional omission.

That decision was, no doubt, an integral part of why the Nest Hub has become a popular bedside device. Most of us don’t want a camera trained on us while we sleep and do…all of the other things people do in bed (eat crackers, watch scary movies, etc.).

Designing a second-generation version of what has become a popular bedside product made sleep tracking a no brainer. But there’s a problem: A camera seems like a pretty obvious way to do sleep tracking. But adding a camera would almost certainly make people less inclined to invite the product into their bedrooms. So, what do you do? If you’re lucky, you find a technology lying around that some company spent a bunch of money on, but ultimately had no idea what to do with.

So, what are the odds of something like that happening? If you’re Google, surprisingly high, it turns out.

Project Soli is one of those weird Google anomalies. It was a cool technology in search of a problem. The initial problem the team designated was, I suppose, that we touch our touchscreens too much. So it built the tech into the Pixel 4, allowing users to interact with a bespoke Pokémon game and a few other things. By the time the Pixel 5 rolled around, the technology was basically forgotten.

On the face of it, camera-free sleep tracking is a much more logical implementation of the Soli tech (assuming you can get around the initial strangeness of having essentially miniature radar in the electronic device sitting next to your bed). Here’s the breakdown from Google’s product page:

Sleep Sensing uses Motion Sense to track the sleep of the person closest to the display. With a low-energy radar, Motion Sense detects movement and breathing. Other sensors in Nest Hub detect sounds like snoring and coughing, and environmental factors like light and temperature in the room. That’s how Sleep Sensing determines not just when you went to bed and how long you slept, but also the quality of your sleep.

Certainly the inclusion of sleep tracking doesn’t make the product unique among consumer electronics. It seems like every company is racing to get into sleep — understandably so. Most of us aren’t getting anywhere near enough — a trend that dates back well before COVID-19 made insomniacs out of many of us. What makes the product relatively unique, however, is that it promises to do so without making contact with either you or the bed.

As someone who has tested dozens of fitness trackers and smartwatches over the years, I can attest that sleeping with a wearable around your wrist kind of sucks. I mean, I have enough trouble getting to sleep without one on (if I didn’t, I probably wouldn’t be that interested in sleep tracking in the first place).

For my money, if you’re looking for a pure sleep tracker, I would however, take a look at something like Withings Sleep Tracking Mat, which sits under your mattress. It’s minimally invasive and doesn’t require having a screen near your bed. I can’t recommend the new Nest Hub based purely on sleep tracking, but if you were already considering sticking a smart display next to your bed, this makes one of the best models on the market that much more compelling.

One of the downsides of the Soli tracking is that there isn’t a ton of flexibility in where you can put the device. I don’t presently have a nightstand, for instance, so I had to improvise with a chair for testing. The device needs to be on the side of the bed (not the head or foot) and level with you on the mattress. The screen should be about one or two feet from you while you sleep.

There’s a calibration process, too, though it’s quite quick and you only really need to do it the once, assuming you’re not going to be moving the product around. This was the one time I found myself missing one of the Echo Show’s new features: specifically, a screen that you can manually tilt up and down. It would be a great feature to see in all of the products, going forward.

I’ve been using the sleep tracking for several nights now and have found it pretty accurate — particularly for a product that sits a couple of feet away from the edge of my bed. (Spoiler: I sleep like crap). The on-board wellness feature drills down on the information, as well. In addition to standard info like duration and overall quality, it will tell you how many times you coughed in the night, how many minutes you spent snoring and what your average respiratory rate was throughout the night.

Other info is available, including room temperature (which utilizes a still relatively underused built-in thermometer) and sleep quality, broken down by wake/sleep/restlessness. It’s fairly basic, and it will be interesting to see how much detail the company is ultimately able to drill down on with the given hardware. Given the focus on respiratory health, sleep apnea seems like a no-brainer, but that will likely require some updates, coupled with regulatory scrutiny.

It seems that, as far as sleep is concerned, there’s likely a good deal of room for improvement using the existing hardware. That’s doubly the case, now that Google’s Fitbit acquisition has officially closed. Expect some tighter integration on that front. For now, there’s still some thoughtful sleep integration with things like wake alarms and bedroom smart light functionality.

At $99, Google’s dropped the asking price by a full $50, which certainly softens the blow of what is ultimately a fairly minor update. Two and half years after its introduction, the Nest Hub is still one of the best smart screens you can buy, bolstered by Google’s solid Assistant and software offerings. The new version wouldn’t be the first on my list of sleep trackers, but if you’re looking for a beside smart display/alarm clock, it’s a nice bonus.

Motional will integrate its driverless technology into Hyundai’s new all-electric SUV to create the company’s first robotaxi. At the start of 2023, customers in certain markets will be able to book the fully electric, fully autonomous taxi through the Lyft app.

The Hyundai IONIQ 5, which was revealed in February with a consumer release date expected later this year, will be fully integrated with Motional’s driverless system. The vehicles will be equipped with the hardware and software needed for Level 4 autonomous driving capabilities, including LiDAR, radar and cameras to provide the vehicle’s sensing system with 360 degrees of vision, and the ability to see up to 300 meters away. This level of driverless technology means a human will not be required to take over driving.

The interior living space will be similar to the consumer model, but additionally equipped with features needed for robotaxi operation, according to a Motional spokesperson. Motional did not reveal whether or not the vehicle would still have a steering wheel, and images of the robotaxi aren’t yet available.

Motional’s IONIQ 5 robotaxis have already begun testing on public roads and closed courses, and they’ll be put through more months of testing and real-world experience before being deployed on Lyft’s platform. The company says it’ll complete testing only once it’s confident that the taxis are safer than a human driver.

Motional, the Aptiv-Hyundai $4 billion joint venture aimed at commercializing driverless cars, announced its partnership with Lyft in December, signaling the ride-hailing company’s primary involvement in Motional’s plans. The company recently announced that it began testing its driverless tech on public roads in Las Vegas. Hyundai’s IONIQ 5 is Motional’s second platform to go driverless on public roads.

We now know the names of all four individuals who will fly on the historic Inspiration4 mission, the first all-civilian spaceflight in history. In addition to previously revealed crew members Jared Isaacman (who’s footing the entire bill) and St. Jude Children’s Hospital employee Haley Arceneaux, Inspiration4 will include Dr. Sian Proctor and Christopher Sembroski as the final two civilian astronauts. The mission will use a SpaceX Dragon capsule and is set to fly no earlier than September 15, with a total duration of three days.

Dr. Proctor takes the state reserved for the online business competition portion of the crew selection process, which saw entrants taken from submissions based on people who had created businesses on Isaacman’s Shift4Shop e-commerce platform. Sembroski won his seat by contributing to the ongoing St. Jude fundraising drive Isaacman is hosting as part of the mission’s promotional campaign.

Both Proctor and Sembroski have specific sets of skills relative to spaceflight that seem likely to have factored Ito their selection for the crew. Proctor is a trained pilot, for instance, and Sembroski is a veteran aerospace employee, most recently at Lockheed Martin, and also a literal veteran, having served in the U.S. Air Force.

As part of this final crew reveal, Inspiration4 also shared how many entries it received in each category. Somewhat surprisingly, the Shift4Shop e-commerce platform competition only drew a total of “approximately” 200 entries — and use of ‘approximately’ suggests fewer — while the charity drive drew 72,000 entries, and has raised around $113 million to date. That’s still short of the campaign’s $200 million goal, and includes Isaacman’s personal commitment of $100 million, but the drive continues and there are additional awards to be one, even if the top prize of the trip to space is gone.

This whole mission campaign has honestly been one of the most bizarre stories in spaceflight in recent memory, beginning with the big announcement, which included a press conference with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk joining Isaacman to discuss the flight, and seemingly not being aware of any relevant details about mission specifics. Isaacman also dedicated $100 million of his own money to the charity drive for St. Jude, as mentioned, but clearly donations from the community aren’t living up to expectations with around 13% of the total target raised from those to date.

That “approximately 200” entries in the Shift4Payments build-a-business competition might be the most perplexing, since the award was a free trip to space. In retrospect, this seems like it was the path to space with the most likelihood of working out, even if you had to convince an oddly stunt cast panel of judges to select yours as the winner.

LinkedIn, the social network now with 740 million users around the world, has carved out an identity for itself as the place online where professionals go to list their places of work, get headhunted for other work, and look for work. But for years it’s been looking for ways to better leverage that position to move into a plethora of adjacent areas, such as training and education, professional development, networking with others, and news. Today, the company unveiled a series of new features that it will be rolling out over the coming months to play into that strategy, and also, it hopes, increase engagement on the platform:

— The company is bringing more video into people’s profiles, with the launch of a “video Cover Story”, short videos that people can make talking about themselves to live on their home pages. And for people to feel more connected with how they are depicted on LinkedIn, it is also adding a pronoun feature.

— Alongside these, the company is officially launching a new “Creator” mode, a more refined but also more democratic version of the company’s Influencer network (anyone can be a Creator if they so choose, for a start). It’s also carving out more of a solid place for freelancers on the platform, by way of a new Service page attached to your profile.

— LinkedIn’s educational and training efforts are also getting some boost. The program that it launched with Microsoft, which owns LinkedIn, for free online training in 10 different areas, in the wake of the economic shift that Covid-19 brought on the world, is getting extended to the end of this year. And it’s also announcing a new Teams-based app in partnership with Microsoft called Career Coach aimed at students.

Taken together, this seemingly disparate set of announcements all lean into an interesting development for LinkedIn: social media — whether you are a person posting content, or simply looking at posts from others that you feel speak to your situation in life — has a strong undercurrent of empowerment throughout it. Through these different features and products, LinkedIn’s trying in its own way to bring some of that individual identity and voice through to its own platform.

Below are some more detailed thoughts about the various new areas.

The video-based Cover Story plays on the idea of how people create short videos about themselves that they might post as a status on a more consumer-focused social media platform. If the list of places where you work and have worked or studied tell one kind of story about who you are, the idea is that the video selfie can tell another to fill in more gaps.

As LinkedIn’s chief product officer Tomer Cohen describes it, you can use the space to give yourself a more human angle, describing something about your interests or aspirations that might not come across in your resume. These also auto play when people come to visit your profile, which Cohen aptly refers to as a “Harry Potter” effect, in reference to the animated Daily Prophet newspaper in the wizarding world. For now these will only appear in your profile, but in time the animals may also expand to search results.

It all sounds interesting enough, except that it relies quite a lot on people using the format successfully rather than creating something that might actually deter recruiters. Ironically, if the trend is to remove some of what might profile and pigeonhole people too much when job-hunting, adding in these videos could serve to bring some of that kind of judgement back into play. It will depend on how they are adopted and used and viewed, at the end of the day.

LinkedIn’s focus on video comes as part of the company’s bigger engagement with the medium over the last several years, adding services like Live broadcasts into the timeline for example. It’s no surprise, considering how sticky video has been in the bigger realm of social media across services like TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter.

That seems to also be playing out at LinkedIn and areas that align more closely with the company’s business: it said in a survey it conducted, some 61% of job seekers said that recorded video could be the next iteration of the traditional cover letter, and that among hiring managers, nearly 80% say video figures strongly in their candidate vetting. So it’s not a matter of testing the waters, but perhaps just making sure you have the tools to stay afloat.

Video is playing a bigger role beyond just that of helping everyone with profiles. For the most proactive, LinkedIn is launching a Creator mode, where people who already make LinkedIn Live videos and other content can shift over their profiles to becoming Creators instead of ordinary LinkedIn citizens. This is something you choose yourself, unlike the Influencer tag that LinkedIn confers on a smaller subset of thought leaders, and it means you can be “followed” on LinkedIn for people to watch and stay up to date with what you post.

While it’s hard to think of who might come to LinkedIn for entertainment in the same way that they might come to Instagram to follow a creator, the idea is that creating content for LinkedIn becomes the end in itself for both the person watching and the person being watched.

It looks like the natural progression of the original content that LinkedIn has been building up through its editorial operation led by Dan Roth — indeed the company announced the first steps for its Creator product last month, led by Roth. But unlike creators on platforms like Instagram or YouTube or TikTok, for now it doesn’t look like there are direct routes to monetization when you are a LinkedIn Creator. That might change, however.

“Indirectly we’ve been connecting people to opportunities since we first enabled people to share content on LinkedIn.  Our members get leads and grow their business and following on LinkedIn,” said Keren Baruch, group product manager for LinkedIn’s creator strategy. She cited Quentin Allums, “jobless, broke, and desperate when he started posting LinkedIn videos. Then they started to go viral and he created his own business on LinkedIn from this success.

“As we continue to listen to feedback from our members as we consider future opportunities, we’ll also continue to evolve how we create more value for our creators,” she added.

The Service Pages also appear to be something that is the start of a product and project that LinkedIn started to seed in February, which will comprise a larger freelancer marketplace, reportedly by September.

Weather intelligence platform ClimaCell today announced that it has raised a $77 million Series D funding round led by private equity firm Stonecourt Capital, with participation by Highline Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to about $185 million. In addition to the new funding, ClimaCell announced that it has changed its name to Tomorrow.io, with “The Tomorrow Companies Inc.” as its new legal name.

Today’s announcement comes only a month after the company announced that it would launch a fleet of small radar-equipped weather satellites to improve its weather monitoring and forecasting capabilities. That’s also, at least in part, where the name change comes from.

Originally, ClimaCell/Tomorrow.io built out a novel technology to collect weather data using wireless network infrastructure and IoT devices. That’s where the “cell” in ClimaCell came from. But as the company’s CEO and co-founder Shimon Elkabetz told me, while the company isn’t abandoning this approach, its focus today is much broader.

“The mission is really to help countries, businesses, organizations, to better manage their weather-related challenges,” he said. “And the ambition was always to be that largest weather enterprise in the world, the most disruptive, the most industry-defining. And I think this is the perfect timing for us to come up with a new name, not only because of the funding but because we were able to explain to ourselves that really, we’re helping others take control of tomorrow, today.”

That’s something Stonecourt partner Rock Davis agrees with. “While the company’s growth has been tremendous since launch, there is a larger opportunity at play here,” he said. “What Tomorrow.io is building, corroborated by their recent announcement of launching radar-equipped satellites into space, is only further proof that this company represents the future of weather forecasting for the entire planet. The privatization of the weather industry is now, and that type of vision is what compels the team here at Stonecourt Capital.”

As Elkabetz noted, Tomorrow.io isn’t a typical investment for a private investment firm like Stonecourt. Last year, the firm acquired 365 Data Centers, but it is also backing the Denver-based freight rail company Alpenglow Rail, for example.

And while many of Tomorrow.io’s customers saw their business decline during the pandemic (the company counts Uber and Delta among its users, for example), Elkabetz tells me that its team focused on diversifying its customer base and managed to sign up a number of large logistics companies, including major railways in the U.S. and Mexico, but also smaller companies in the drone, autonomous driving and electric vehicle space. In total, the company says, it saw a 200% net revenue retention rate and its annual contract value grew 850% during the past two years.

The company plans to use the new funding to launch more satellites, but also to improve its overall product and accelerate its go-to-market activities.

“We’re an interesting company because we’re a SaaS company that is now going to space,” Elkabetz said. “A lot of the Earth observations companies are now scratching their heads and saying, ‘Oh, we can’t just sell observations, it’s not monetizable or becoming a commodity. We now need to become a software company and build the platform and do the analytics.’ Good luck.”