Category: UNCATEGORIZED

We are T-minus one week until TC Sessions: Space 2020 lifts off on December 16-17. Join the global space community’s leading experts, brightest visionaries and rising stars for two days dedicated to space technology and exploration — and the opportunities they offer.

Speaking of opportunity, you don’t want to miss our University Showcase sessions featuring the latest research from top universities, hosted by The Aerospace Corporation. Hold up now, what’s that? You don’t have a pass yet? Don’t fret, simply buy a late registration ticket or take advantage of our discounts for groups, students and active military/government employees. Want even more visibility? Get a Space Startup Exhibitor Package and gain global exposure for your business.

Okay, back to the University Showcase sessions. Up until now, space exploration and technology has always been tied to orbiting, observing and reporting back to earth. But it’s time to take on a new, expanded commitment — to boldly go into space — and stay there, i.e. space exploration, commerce and habitation. It means moving humans beyond planet Earth and out into the solar system. That requires bold people building new technology and forging the next generation of space capabilities. Talk about a galactic-sized goal.

The University Showcase sessions — in two parts, one on each day of the conference — will feature scientists and academics from USC, MIT, UCLA, ASU and Caltech, Aerospace Corporation’s partners, sharing insights on their space research and highlighting a range of emerging space technologies.

Through partnership with the Aerospace Corporation, emerging capabilities — in communication, navigation and space exploration — can be evaluated and integrated into government missions with NASA, NOAA and the Air Force.

As always, TechCrunch delivers the top experts, and this University Showcase sessions are no exception. Over the course of the two sessions, you’ll hear from Randy Villahermosa (General Manager & Executive Director of Innovation, The Aerospace Corporation), Dr. Richard Linares (Co-Director, Space Systems Lab, MIT), David A Barnhart (Director, Space Engineering Research Center; Research Professor, USC), Kerri Cahoy (Associate Professor, Aeronautics & Astronautics, MIT), Bethany Ehlmann (Professor of Planetary Science, Caltech – Lunar Trailblazer Mission), Craig Hardgrove, (Assistant Professor, School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University) and Dr. James M. Weygand (Space Physicist, Department of Earth, Planetary & Space Science, UCLA).

Click here to learn more about our university partners, their specific areas of expertise and the emerging technologies they will discuss.

TC Sessions: Space 2020 promises two days of connection, education, inspiration and lots of opportunity. Don’t have a pass? Get yours right here. Join other bold visionaries, check the program-packed agenda and plan your schedule now.

Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Space 2020? Click here to talk with us about available opportunities.

Google announced this morning it’s adding support for Apple Music to its Google Nest smart speakers, and other Google Assistant-enabled smart speakers and displays in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Japan. This means Google’s flagship smart speaker devices, including Nest Audio, Nest Hub Max, and Nest Mini, will now be able to play Apple Music songs, albums and playlists by way of voice commands, as will others.

The update makes Google’s own smart speakers more competitive with both Apple’s HomePod and newer HomePod Mini, as well as Alexa-enabled smart speakers like the Echo, which has supported Apple Music since late 2018.

To stream from Apple Music, Google device owners will need to first link their Apple Music account in the Google Home app then optionally set it as their default music service. After doing so, they’ll be able to use voice commands like “Hey Google, play New Music Daily playlist” or “Hey Google, play Rap Life playlist,” for example, or ask for any other specific song, artist or playlist the service offers.

Users will also be able to ask Google Assistant to stream music based on genre, mood, or activity, or they can request Apple Music to stream from their own library of songs by saying, “Hey Google, play my library.”

Apple Music will also work in multi-device households, allowing Google device owners to stream across all their speakers at once, or to move music from one device to the others.

Today, many Google smart speakers owners may use a third-party service like Spotify, Pandora or Deezer — which are already supported in the Google Home app. But those who had been longtime Google Play Music customers have more recently had to make a decision as to whether to jump ship to a new service or stay within Google’s ecosystem, following the Google Play Music service shut down which saw the service merge with YouTube Music. As a result, some former Google Play Music customers moved to Apple Music to leverage its library feature.

Apple Music allow users to have up to 100,000 songs in their music library, which appeals to some of Google Play Music’s past customers. It also offers over 70 million songs for on-demand, ad-free streaming.

Google says the new Apple Music support is rolling out starting today to supported devices.

Tecton.ai, the startup founded by three former Uber engineers who wanted to bring the machine learning feature store idea to the masses, announced a $35 million Series B today, just seven months after announcing their $20 million Series A.

When we spoke to the company in April, it was working with early customers in a beta version of the product, but today, in addition to the funding they are also announcing the general availability of the platform.

As with their Series A, this round has Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital coming back to co-lead the investment. The company has now raised $60 million.

The reason these two firms are so committed to Tecton is the specific problem around machine learning the company is trying to solve. “We help organizations put machine learning into production. That’s the whole goal of our company, helping someone build an operational machine learning application, meaning an application that’s powering their fraud system or something real for them […] and making it easy for them to build and deploy and maintain,” company CEO and co-founder Mike Del Balso explained.

They do this by providing the concept of a feature store, an idea they came up with and which is becoming a machine learning category unto itself. Just last week, AWS announced the Sagemaker Feature store, which the company saw as major validation of their idea.

As Tecton defines it, a feature store is an end-to-end machine learning management system that includes the pipelines to transform the data into what are called feature values, then it stores and manages all of that feature data and finally it serves a consistent set of data.

Del Balso says this works hand-in-hand with the other layers of a machine learning stack. “When you build a machine learning application, you use a machine learning stack that could include a model training system, maybe a model serving system or an MLOps kind of layer that does all the model management, and then you have a feature management layer, a feature store which is us — and so we’re an end-to-end lifecycle for the data pipelines,” he said.

With so much money behind the company it is growing fast, going from 17 employees to 26 since we spoke in April with plans to more than double that number by the end of next year. Del Balso says he and his co-founders are committed to building a diverse and inclusive company, but he acknowledges it’s not easy to do.

“It’s actually something that we have a primary recruiting initiative on. It’s very hard, and it takes a lot of effort, it’s not something that you can just make like a second priority and not take it seriously,” he said. To that end, the company has sponsored and attended diversity hiring conferences and has focused its recruiting efforts on finding a diverse set of candidates, he said.

Unlike a lot of startups we’ve spoken to, Del Balso wants to return to an office setup as soon as it is feasible to do so, seeing it as a way to build more personal connections between employees.

Last month, Bumble introduced a new feature that would prevent bad actors from using the dating app’s “unmatch” feature to hide from victims. Now Tinder has done something similar. The company announced on Friday it will soon roll out an update to its app that will make it easier for users to report someone who has used the unmatch feature in an effort to get away with their abuse. But in Tinder’s case, it’s only making it easier for users to learn how to report the violation, rather than giving the victims a button in the chat interface to report the abuse more directly.

Tinder parent Match on Monday also announced a partnership with anti-sexual violence organization, RAINN, to review its features and suggest changes.

Tinder notes that users have always been able to report anyone on the app at any time — even if the person had used the unmatch feature. But few users likely knew how to do so, since there weren’t obvious explanations in the app’s user interface about how to report a chat after it disappeared.

With the update, Tinder says it will soon add its “Safety Center” shield icon within the Match List, where the chats take place. This will direct users to the Safety Center in the app, where they can learn how to report users who aren’t displayed on the Match List because they used the unmatch feature.

Image Credits: Tinder

The updates to both Tinder and Bumble came about following an investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which found that 48 out of 231 survey respondents who had used Tinder said they had reported other users for some kind of sexual offense. But only 11 of those reports had received any replies, and even fewer offered specific information about what was being done.

The story had also explained how bad actors would take advantage of the dating app’s “unmatch” feature to hide from their victims. After unmatching, their chat history would disappear from the victim’s phone, which would have allowed the user to more easily report the abuse to Tinder or even to law enforcement, if needed.

Though Tinder was the focus of the story, Bumble quickly followed up to say it was changing how unmatching on its app would work. Instead of having the chat disappear when unmatched, Bumble users are now shown a message that says the other person has ended the chat. Here, they’re given the option to also either delete the chat or report it.

The ability to report the chat directly from the messaging inbox is what makes Bumble’s solution more useful. Tinder, on the other hand, is just redirecting users to what’s essentially its help documentation — the Tinder Safety Center — to learn how to go about making such a report. The addition of this extra step could end up being a deterrent to making these reports, as it’s less straightforward than simply clicking a button that reads “Report.”

Tinder also didn’t address the other issues raised by the investigation, which said many reports lacked follow-up or clear information about what actions Tinder was taking to address the issues.

Instead, the company says that it will continue to acknowledge when reports are received to let the member making the report know an appropriate action will be taken. Tinder added it will also direct users to trained resources for crisis counseling and survivor support; remove accounts it finds have been reported for violent crimes; and will continue to work with law enforcement on investigations, when required. These actions, however, should be baseline features for any dating app, not points of pride.

Tinder stressed, too, that it would not remove the unmatch feature, which is necessary for safety and privacy of its members. That seems to miss the point of what users’ complaints were about. Tinder users were not angry or concerned that an unmatching feature existed in the first place, but that it was being used by bad actors to avoid repercussions for their abuse.

The company didn’t say precisely when the changes to the dating app would roll out, beyond the “coming weeks.”

Today, Tinder parent company also announced a partnership with RAINN, a large anti-sexual violence organization, to conduct “a comprehensive review of sexual misconduct reporting, moderation, and response across Match Group’s dating platforms” and “to work together to improve current safety systems and tools.”

Last month, Bumble introduced a new feature that would prevent bad actors from using the dating app’s “unmatch” feature to hide from victims. Now Tinder has done something similar. The company announced on Friday it will soon roll out an update to its app that will make it easier for users to report someone who has used the unmatch feature in an effort to get away with their abuse. But in Tinder’s case, it’s only making it easier for users to learn how to report the violation, rather than giving the victims a button in the chat interface to report the abuse more directly.

Tinder parent Match on Monday also announced a partnership with anti-sexual violence organization, RAINN, to review its features and suggest changes.

Tinder notes that users have always been able to report anyone on the app at any time — even if the person had used the unmatch feature. But few users likely knew how to do so, since there weren’t obvious explanations in the app’s user interface about how to report a chat after it disappeared.

With the update, Tinder says it will soon add its “Safety Center” shield icon within the Match List, where the chats take place. This will direct users to the Safety Center in the app, where they can learn how to report users who aren’t displayed on the Match List because they used the unmatch feature.

Image Credits: Tinder

The updates to both Tinder and Bumble came about following an investigation by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which found that 48 out of 231 survey respondents who had used Tinder said they had reported other users for some kind of sexual offense. But only 11 of those reports had received any replies, and even fewer offered specific information about what was being done.

The story had also explained how bad actors would take advantage of the dating app’s “unmatch” feature to hide from their victims. After unmatching, their chat history would disappear from the victim’s phone, which would have allowed the user to more easily report the abuse to Tinder or even to law enforcement, if needed.

Though Tinder was the focus of the story, Bumble quickly followed up to say it was changing how unmatching on its app would work. Instead of having the chat disappear when unmatched, Bumble users are now shown a message that says the other person has ended the chat. Here, they’re given the option to also either delete the chat or report it.

The ability to report the chat directly from the messaging inbox is what makes Bumble’s solution more useful. Tinder, on the other hand, is just redirecting users to what’s essentially its help documentation — the Tinder Safety Center — to learn how to go about making such a report. The addition of this extra step could end up being a deterrent to making these reports, as it’s less straightforward than simply clicking a button that reads “Report.”

Tinder also didn’t address the other issues raised by the investigation, which said many reports lacked follow-up or clear information about what actions Tinder was taking to address the issues.

Instead, the company says that it will continue to acknowledge when reports are received to let the member making the report know an appropriate action will be taken. Tinder added it will also direct users to trained resources for crisis counseling and survivor support; remove accounts it finds have been reported for violent crimes; and will continue to work with law enforcement on investigations, when required. These actions, however, should be baseline features for any dating app, not points of pride.

Tinder stressed, too, that it would not remove the unmatch feature, which is necessary for safety and privacy of its members. That seems to miss the point of what users’ complaints were about. Tinder users were not angry or concerned that an unmatching feature existed in the first place, but that it was being used by bad actors to avoid repercussions for their abuse.

The company didn’t say precisely when the changes to the dating app would roll out, beyond the “coming weeks.”

Today, Tinder parent company also announced a partnership with RAINN, a large anti-sexual violence organization, to conduct “a comprehensive review of sexual misconduct reporting, moderation, and response across Match Group’s dating platforms” and “to work together to improve current safety systems and tools.”

Only eight months after getting acquired for $180 million, Avira is changing hands again, for double the value: NortonLifeLock today announced that it would acquire the German security firm for around $360 million in an all-cash deal.

The M&A deal is the latest of a series of consolidations and shifts in ownership around both companies: NortonLifeLock came into existence as a standalone company only last year after Symantec’s enterprise security business was acquired by Broadcom for nearly $11 billion. NortonLifeLock is itself today a publicly traded company with a market cap of about $11.5 billion.

Avira, meanwhile, was until April of this year a bootstrapped tech business focusing mainly on security software for consumers. Its products include — like Norton itself — anti-virus software. In Avira’s case (as with Norton’s) that software has been resold by the likes of Facebook (as part of its now-dormant antivirus marketplace). In more recent years, Avira’s clocked up more customers via the white-label deals it makes with big names. Strategic partners today include NTT, Deutsche Telekom, IBM, Canonical and more. Avira has a customer base of millions, covering about 30 million secured devices and 1.5 million paying customers (and many more taking free services); combining that with its white-label partners, it says its software touches about 500 million devices globally today.

Notably, Avira has built its business around a freemium model that Norton said it plans to keep.

Investcorp Technology Partners, the PE division of Investcorp Bank, acquired a majority stake in the company giving it an enterprise valuation of $180 million in April in part to inject some money into the business to give it more firepower to make acquisitions of its own. At the time, it was a notable acquisition not only for putting Avira on the map as a consolidator, but as a signal that the M&A market was picking up after it went dormant in the early days of the coronavirus gripping the global economy.

Ultimately, it looks like Avira became one of the consolidated, instead of a consolidator. NortonLifeLock is likely to use the asset to help it grow specifically in Europe, where Avira has a strong customer base.

“I am delighted to welcome Avira to the Norton family,” said Vincent Pilette, CEO, NortonLifeLock, in a statement. “We strive to bring Cyber Safety to everyone, and acquiring Avira adds a growing business to our portfolio, accelerates our international growth and expands our go-to-market model with a leading freemium solution. Culturally, we are a great match. We share a relentless focus on delivering innovative products to customers and we always think customer-first. We cannot wait to get started with Avira.”

Travis Witteveen, who has been the CEO of Avira through its many phases of ownership, said in a statement that he is “thrilled” with the deal, which has effectively doubled the valuation of his company (in the earlier sale to Investcorp, Avira founder Tjark Auerbach retained a “significant” stake of the company, so that gives him a tidy sum, too).

“NortonLifeLock and Avira are fiercely dedicated to helping protect consumers’ digital lives,” said Witteveen in a statement. “We are thrilled to become part of NortonLifeLock – a company that is synonymous with trust and leadership in Cyber Safety. By leveraging the scale of NortonLifeLock, we can reach and protect more consumers around the globe.”

After the deal closes — which is expected to happen in Q4 2021 — Witteveen and Avira’s CTO Matthias Ollig will join the NortonLifeLock leadership team, NortonLifeLock said.

Only eight months after getting acquired for $180 million, Avira is changing hands again, for double the value: NortonLifeLock today announced that it would acquire the German security firm for around $360 million in an all-cash deal.

The M&A deal is the latest of a series of consolidations and shifts in ownership around both companies: NortonLifeLock came into existence as a standalone company only last year after Symantec’s enterprise security business was acquired by Broadcom for nearly $11 billion. NortonLifeLock is itself today a publicly traded company with a market cap of about $11.5 billion.

Avira, meanwhile, was until April of this year a bootstrapped tech business focusing mainly on security software for consumers. Its products include — like Norton itself — anti-virus software. In Avira’s case (as with Norton’s) that software has been resold by the likes of Facebook (as part of its now-dormant antivirus marketplace). In more recent years, Avira’s clocked up more customers via the white-label deals it makes with big names. Strategic partners today include NTT, Deutsche Telekom, IBM, Canonical and more. Avira has a customer base of millions, covering about 30 million secured devices and 1.5 million paying customers (and many more taking free services); combining that with its white-label partners, it says its software touches about 500 million devices globally today.

Notably, Avira has built its business around a freemium model that Norton said it plans to keep.

Investcorp Technology Partners, the PE division of Investcorp Bank, acquired a majority stake in the company giving it an enterprise valuation of $180 million in April in part to inject some money into the business to give it more firepower to make acquisitions of its own. At the time, it was a notable acquisition not only for putting Avira on the map as a consolidator, but as a signal that the M&A market was picking up after it went dormant in the early days of the coronavirus gripping the global economy.

Ultimately, it looks like Avira became one of the consolidated, instead of a consolidator. NortonLifeLock is likely to use the asset to help it grow specifically in Europe, where Avira has a strong customer base.

“I am delighted to welcome Avira to the Norton family,” said Vincent Pilette, CEO, NortonLifeLock, in a statement. “We strive to bring Cyber Safety to everyone, and acquiring Avira adds a growing business to our portfolio, accelerates our international growth and expands our go-to-market model with a leading freemium solution. Culturally, we are a great match. We share a relentless focus on delivering innovative products to customers and we always think customer-first. We cannot wait to get started with Avira.”

Travis Witteveen, who has been the CEO of Avira through its many phases of ownership, said in a statement that he is “thrilled” with the deal, which has effectively doubled the valuation of his company (in the earlier sale to Investcorp, Avira founder Tjark Auerbach retained a “significant” stake of the company, so that gives him a tidy sum, too).

“NortonLifeLock and Avira are fiercely dedicated to helping protect consumers’ digital lives,” said Witteveen in a statement. “We are thrilled to become part of NortonLifeLock – a company that is synonymous with trust and leadership in Cyber Safety. By leveraging the scale of NortonLifeLock, we can reach and protect more consumers around the globe.”

After the deal closes — which is expected to happen in Q4 2021 — Witteveen and Avira’s CTO Matthias Ollig will join the NortonLifeLock leadership team, NortonLifeLock said.

When one of AWS’s east coast data centers went down at the end of last month, it had an impact on countless companies relying on its services including Roku, Adobe and Shipt. When the incident was resolved, the company had to analyze what happened. For most companies, that involves manually pulling together information from various internal tools, not a focused incident platform.

Jeli.io wants to change that by providing one central place for incident analysis, and today the company announced a $4 million seed round led by Boldstart Ventures with participation by Harrison Metal and Heavybit.

Jeli CEO and founder Nora Jones knows a thing or two about incident analysis. She helped build the chaos engineering tools at Netflix, and later headed chaos engineering at Slack. While chaos engineering helps simulate possible incidents by stress testing systems, incidents still happen, of course. She knew that there was a lot to learn from them, but there wasn’t a way to pull together all of the data around an incident automatically. She created Jeli to do that.

“While I was at Netflix pre pandemic, I discovered the secret that looking at incidents when they happen — like when Netflix goes down, when Slack goes down or when any other organization goes down — that’s actually a catalyst for understanding the delta between how you think your org works and how your org actually works,” Jones told me.

She began to see that there would be great value in trying to figure out the decision-making processes, the people and tools involved, and what companies could learn from how they reacted in these highly stressful situations, how they resolved them and what they could do to prevent similar outages from happening again in the future. With no products to help, Jones began building tooling herself at her previous jobs, but she believed that there needed to be a broader solution.

“We started Jeli and began building tooling to help engineers by [serving] the insights to help them know where to look after incidents,” she said. They do this by pulling together all of the data from emails, Slack channels, PagerDuty, Zoom recordings, logs and so forth that captured information about the incident, surfacing insights to help understand what happened without having to manually pull all of this information together.

The startup currently has 8 employees with plans to add people across the board in 2021. As she does this, she is cognizant of the importance of building a diverse workforce. “I am extremely committed to diversity and inclusion. It is something that’s been important and a requirement for me from day one. I’ve been in situations in organizations before where I was the only one represented, and I know how that feels. I want to make sure I’m including that from day one because ultimately it leads to a better product,” she said.

The product is currently in private beta, and the company is working with early customers to refine the platform. The plan is to continue to invite companies in the coming months, then open that up more widely some time next year.

Eliot Durbin, general partner at Boldstart Ventures says that he began talking to Jones a couple of years ago when she was at Netflix just to learn about this space, and when she was ready to start a company, his firm jumped at the chance to write an early check, even while the startup was pre-revenue.

“When we met Nora we realized that she’s on a lifelong mission to make things much more resilient […]. And we had the benefit of getting to know her for years before she started the company, so it was really a natural continuation to a conversation that we were already in,” Durbin explained.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out last Thursday’s epic run of early-stage rounds.

It was busy this morning. So, in blocs, here’s what the show got to:

• This COVID news made me smile, even if the markets are set to open lower this morning after a big end to last week. So much for bad labor data mattering, I suppose.
• Airbnb’s IPO range is set to rise, boosting the company’s valuation to as much as $36 billion, and $41.8 billion on a fully-diluted basis.
• Bloomberg got its hands on some Sequoia returns data. Shockingly the data is good. Who could have imagined.
• Sourcegraph raised even more capital, raising both our eyebrows and its valuation.
• Luko added $60 million to its coffers, showing that the insurtech boom is not merely a United States-phenomenon.
• And in short-form: Highland Europe has a new fund, and Wonder raised.
• Here’s the Extra Crunch piece that I helped write with Danny and Natasha.

And that was our show. Hugs from here, and chat Thursday at the latest.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

While Zoom continues to hold a lot of mindshare in the world of videoconferencing, Cisco’s WebEx division today announced an acquisition to underscore its own intention to keep its hat firmly in the game. It is picking up Slido, the company that lets people moderate questions and interactions from a larger group participating both in virtual conferences, as well as in live events.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed but we are trying to find out. Bratislava, Slovakia-based Slido, according to PitchBook, had only raised about $40,000 in outside funding, but it had a notable profile in the business world, with customers ranging to a plethora of event customers that used it to manage Q&A sessions from the audience (TechCrunch has used it) through to government organizations and many others among its 7 million users.

The deal comes on the same day that Cisco has announced another in what now looks like a mini European acquisition spree in the field of engagement. It’s also paying some $720 million to acquire IMImobile, based in the UK, a specialist in omnichannel customer experience engagement. (And indeed, engagement is the name of the game at the moment: Witness SoftBank’s nearly-$700 million investment into Sinch, another omnichannel engagement specialist; and of course Salesforce acquiring Slack, to help with workforce engagement by way of a chat platform where people come together to talk about what they are working on, or just to chew the fat.)

The company had more recently come into its own as a useful way of engaging and managing engagement during large videoconferences with a number of participants when the “floor” was open to questions from the audience.

Cisco said it will be integrating Slido into its WebEx platform to let people respond to polls, ask questions and provide feedback. “The richness of this audience interaction technology will empower everyone to engage in new ways,” said Abhay Kulkarni, the VP and GM of WebEx, in a blog post announcing the news. “It’s a great mechanism for providing audience engagement in real-time.”

The key with picking up Slido for Cisco is that it will be able to integrate the tool directly into WebEx, making it easier to engage for users of the video platform. It’s not clear if it will remain as a standalone product to use with WebEx competitors. We’re asking and will update as we learn more.

More to come.