Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Frontegg, a Tel Aviv-based startup that helps SaaS companies build their products faster by giving them access to a set of enterprise-ready building blocks for often-used features like authentication and notifications, today announced that it has raised a $5 million seed round. The round was led by Pitango, with backing from i3 Equity and Global Founders Capital.

The founders of Frontegg, Sagi Rodin (CEO) and Aviad Mizrachi (CTO), met during their time at security company Check Point, where Mizrachi managed an R&D group and Rodin’s last role was that of director in its cloud security organization. Both have extensive experience in various management and engineering roles at other companies.

“Most of the SaaS products today kind of feel and act the same,” Rodin explained. “They provide the same capabilities and the same user experience around things like authentication, security, notification, reporting dashboards and capabilities like that. These are capabilities that have become the facto standard in the landscape of modern SaaS products.”

Frontegg, he hopes, can become the new standard for SaaS companies to build these kinds of features into their products.

“Over the last decade, the SaaS market has matured and customer expectations for SaaS features have become firmly established,” said Ayal Itzkovitz, managing partner at Pitango Early Stage, who will join the company’s board of directors. “SaaS companies building products powered by the Frontegg platform can supercharge SaaS innovation, simplifying the development process while delivering solutions with the confidence they will be secure, stable and scalable, all the while meeting high customer expectations for experience and performance.”

For the most part, these are also table stakes that take a long time to develop — or involve bringing in expensive third-party services — but that don’t help these companies differentiate and that take focus away from developing their own products. The idea behind Frontegg is to give dev teams the building blocks to integrate all of these capabilities into their own products.

Right now, the team is focusing on building out tools around three main areas: security, connectivity and engagement. That includes the ability to add enterprise-level authentication through third-party identity providers, setting up roles and permissions for users and audit logs, for example, as well as features like in-app alerts, push notifications and various reporting capabilities.

In part, the company’s philosophy is also to give these companies the ability to allow their own customers to self-manage everything on their own, so a lot of these building blocks focus on giving SaaS companies the ability to build these self-service capabilities into their products.

Interestingly, Rodin noted that a lot of companies that are using the service today aren’t starting from zero but are looking to integrate new capabilities quickly because their users are demanding them.

Right now, the one-year-old company has 16 employees, with plans to use the new funding to expand the team and build out the product.

A cultured meat research program led by a Spanish biotech firm has been awarded a €2.7M grant under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 R&D funding framework. The consortium project, called ‘Meat4All’, says it’s the first lab-grown meat research effort to get public investment by the EU — which it’s taking as a sign that regional lawmakers are “effectively” committing to cultured meat.

EU president Ursula von der Leyen has made a Green Deal a key plank of her policy plan for the bloc — with the long term aim of the region being “climate-neutral” by 2050. At the same time factory farming remains a massive contributor of greenhouse gases — meaning there’s an imperative to rethink how Europe produces food and what people eat. Boosting investment in renewable energy and improving building insulation (which the Commission has also pledged to do) won’t be enough to meet key climate targets. So there’s growing opportunity for regional businesses to innovate around meat alternatives — whether that’s lab-grown meat or plant-based proteins.

The Meat4All project was awarded the Horizon 2020 grant at the start of August but it’s just being announced now. San Sebastián-based BioTech Foods, which has been producing a slaughter-free pork-cell based product called Ethicameat sicne 2017, is leading the consortium.

French firm Organotechnie, a biotech supplier, is also participating.

The aim of the project is the “Industrialization and commercialization of a competitive, sustainable and consumer oriented alternative animal protein source”, with their proposal focused on increasing cultured meat production technology; working on market acceptance; and testing to assess safety to bring more cultured meat products to market.

Commenting in a statement, Iñigo Charola, CEO of BioTech Foods, said: “It is hugely satisfying for the entire team at BioTech Foods, and for our partners at Organotechnie, to obtain this backing from the European Union for our ‘Meat4All’ project. This is the first time that Europe has effectively committed to cultured meat. Cultured meat will be a key ingredient of our future diet, and now we have it confirmed also by the institutions.”

Key aims for the consortium include scaling up production of cultured meat from kilograms to tonnes; maintaining the nutritional value for large-scale amounts; obtaining the means to culture cells free from animal serum; and the use of animal cells that have not been genetically modified.

Other stated aims include developing a competitive product and performing taste tests to determine and predict market demand.

“By extending this technology, ‘Meat4All’ will create a new development area which will enable the European industry to leverage the high potential of this market, by fostering competitiveness and creating growth throughout the European Union,” they also write in a press release, adding: “The challenge is none other than to reach the production capacity necessary to supply the meat processing industry.”

A cultured meat research program led by a Spanish biotech firm has been awarded a €2.7M grant under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 R&D funding framework. The consortium project, called ‘Meat4All’, says it’s the first lab-grown meat research effort to get public investment by the EU — which it’s taking as a sign that regional lawmakers are “effectively” committing to cultured meat.

EU president Ursula von der Leyen has made a Green Deal a key plank of her policy plan for the bloc — with the long term aim of the region being “climate-neutral” by 2050. At the same time factory farming remains a massive contributor of greenhouse gases — meaning there’s an imperative to rethink how Europe produces food and what people eat. Boosting investment in renewable energy and improving building insulation (which the Commission has also pledged to do) won’t be enough to meet key climate targets. So there’s growing opportunity for regional businesses to innovate around meat alternatives — whether that’s lab-grown meat or plant-based proteins.

The Meat4All project was awarded the Horizon 2020 grant at the start of August but it’s just being announced now. San Sebastián-based BioTech Foods, which has been producing a slaughter-free pork-cell based product called Ethicameat sicne 2017, is leading the consortium.

French firm Organotechnie, a biotech supplier, is also participating.

The aim of the project is the “Industrialization and commercialization of a competitive, sustainable and consumer oriented alternative animal protein source”, with their proposal focused on increasing cultured meat production technology; working on market acceptance; and testing to assess safety to bring more cultured meat products to market.

Commenting in a statement, Iñigo Charola, CEO of BioTech Foods, said: “It is hugely satisfying for the entire team at BioTech Foods, and for our partners at Organotechnie, to obtain this backing from the European Union for our ‘Meat4All’ project. This is the first time that Europe has effectively committed to cultured meat. Cultured meat will be a key ingredient of our future diet, and now we have it confirmed also by the institutions.”

Key aims for the consortium include scaling up production of cultured meat from kilograms to tonnes; maintaining the nutritional value for large-scale amounts; obtaining the means to culture cells free from animal serum; and the use of animal cells that have not been genetically modified.

Other stated aims include developing a competitive product and performing taste tests to determine and predict market demand.

“By extending this technology, ‘Meat4All’ will create a new development area which will enable the European industry to leverage the high potential of this market, by fostering competitiveness and creating growth throughout the European Union,” they also write in a press release, adding: “The challenge is none other than to reach the production capacity necessary to supply the meat processing industry.”

With travel and tourism rising across Latin America, Casai, a startup combining Airbnb single unit rentals with hotel room amenities, has raised $23 million to expand its business across Latin America.

The company, which initially was as hit hard by regional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic as other businesses in the hospitality industry has recovered to reach nearly 90 percent of total capacity on the 200 units it manages around Mexico City.

The company was co-founded by chief executive Nico Barawid, a former head of international expansion at Nova Credit and consultant with BCG, and chief operating officer María del Carmen Herrerías Salazar, who previously worked at one of Mexico’s largest hotel operators, Grupo Presidente.

The two met two years ago at a barbecue in Mexico City and began speaking about ways to update the hospitality industry taking the best of Airbnb’s short term rental model of individual units and pairing it with the quality control and standards that guests expect from a hotel chain.

“I wanted to define a product from a consumer angle,” said Barawid. “I wanted this to exist.”

Before the SARS-Cov-2 outbreak Casai’s units were primarily booked through travel partners like HotelTonight or Expedia. Now the company has a direct brisk direct booking business thanks to the work of its chief technology officer, a former engineer at Google named Andres Martinez.

The company’s new financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included additional commitments from the firm’s Cultural Leadership Fund, Kaszek Ventures, Monashees Capital, Global Founders Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, and individual investors including the founders of Nova Credit, Loft, Kavak and Runa.

Casai also managed to nab a debt facility of up to $25 million from TriplePoint Capital, bringing its total cash haul to $48 million in equity and debt.

The big round is in part thanks to the company’s compelling value proposition, which offers guest not only places to stay equipped with a proprietary smart hardware hub and the Casai app, but also a Google Home, smart lights, and Chromecast-kitted televisions, but also a lounge where guests can stay ahead of their check-in or after check-out.

And while the company’s vision is focused on Latin America now, its management team definitely sees the opportunity to create a global brand and business.

The founding team also includes a chief revenue officer, Alberto Ramos, who worked at McKinsey and a chief growth officer, Daniel Hermann, who previously worked at the travel and lifestyle company, Selina. The head of design, Alexa Backal, used to work at GAIA Design, and its vice president of experience, Cristina Crespo, formerly ran WeWork’s international design studio.

“To successfully execute on this opportunity, a team needs to bring together expertise from consumer technology, design, hospitality, real estate and financial services to develop world-class operations needed to deliver on a first-class experience,” said Angela Strange, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who’s taking a seat on the Casai board. “It was obvious when I met Nico and Maricarmen that they are operationally laser-focused and have uniquely blended expertise across verticals, with unique views on the consumer experience.”

On the heels of Amazon about to launch a new enterprise service to detect whether a machine is working well or not based on external physical changes in sound, vibration and temperature, a startup that has already built a big business in the space is announcing a big growth round of funding.

Augury, which works with large enterprises like Colgate and Heineken to maintain machines in their production and distribution lines, has raised $55 million in funding. Co-founder and CEO Saar Yoskovitz said in an interview that the funding will be used to expand the services that it provides to customers, as well as to build out its global customer base, and the ecosystem of companies that it works with so that it can expand the kinds of customers it targets to include smaller businesses and scale-ups.

The Series D is being led by Qumra Capital, a late-stage VC firm based out of Israel (Augury was founded in Haifa and now has a second HQ in New York), with participation also from Insight Venture Partners, Eclipse Ventures, Munich Re Venture Capital, Qualcomm Ventures and Lerer Hippeau Ventures — all past backers of the startup.

Augury, founded in 2011 but out of stealth since 2014, has now raised $106 million, and we understand from a source close to the company that the valuation is in the range of between $200 million and $300 million.

The company’s expansion is coming at an interesting point in the wider world of industrial tech, as well as in terms of the competitive landscape.

A report in September from Business Insider uncovered documents at Amazon and with regulators that pointed to the company working on a new service it’s called AWS Thor, which sounds like it could directly rival Augury in providing a service to businesses to monitor various physical attributes of machines and detect when they might be breaking down, or at least need maintenance. Sources tell us that Thor could launch as soon as this month — making the capital injection into Augury to expand its service to more types of customers, and to provide more analytics on top of the initial diagnostics very well timed indeed.

In terms of the wider industrial market, the funding and Augury’s growth are coming at a key moment. For starters, services like these are, perhaps, one of the first real anchors of a viable business model around the world of IoT — a long-anticipated market that has failed to come good on returns up to now.

Beyond that, and perhaps more immediately, is the state of the world today. Specifically, Covid-19 and the wider repercussions of the global health pandemic have brought more urgency and served as a fillip to the business world, which is accelerating the shift to more digital systems that allow for more remote working processes.

We hear a lot about how that is playing out for “knowledge workers” — the generic term for people who spend their working days in front of computers or at desks — but the same is going for those on the front lines, working on assembly lines, and maintaining production lines.

Augury is not only providing tools to detect when machines are not working at optimal capacity, but is then providing that information to maintenance people to fix them faster before the breakdowns are irreparable. And then, it also has been building a wider ecosystem of partners to order and deliver parts that are needed to fix those machines.

“The shelves are empty in stores, and all of the sudden every manufacturer needs tools for better collaboration and risk management,” said Yoskovitz, who said that machine failures especially when they are working in overdrive can have severe supply knock-on effects.

Augury’s partners include ProPac in Germany, Caverion in Finland and Pluriservice in Italy, Fuse IoT in Latin and South America, and 42 North in North America. And this is also where strategic investors like Munich Re, the insurance giant, also come into play. Other OEMs and services providers include Grundfos, Carrier, Trane, and DSV.

“The Covid-19 crisis has revealed critical failures in the global supply chain,” said Sivan Shamri Dahan, managing Partner at Qumra Capital, in a statement. “The shortage in basic products due to the increased demand, coupled with the inability of manufacturers to meet supply requirements, demonstrated an urgent need to digitally transform the manufacturing world. Augury, which plays a significant role in this digital revolution, is experiencing tremendous growth. Its track record of expansion and execution, positions it to be a world leader in the large IIoT market. We are happy to support Augury and join it on its exciting journey.”

Lead Edge Capital, a software-focused venture firm with one office in New York and another in California, was founded just 11 years ago. Yet it’s already managing $3  billion in assets through a process that founder Mitchell Green half-kiddingly refers to as “rinse and repeat.”

As he describes its model, Lead Edge raises money from wealthy, networked individuals, then it claws its way into companies, helps them, turns them into valuable references, and when those companies sell or go public, the firm raises more money from people who like the firm’s returns.

It sounds simple but it isn’t, says Green, who cut his teeth as an associate at Bessemer Venture Partners and at a Tiger Fund-affiliate called Eastern Advisors. Managing 500 investors, which is now the case, is “harder than it looks.”

That’s true even with two partners: Brian Neider, who first crossed paths with Green at Bessemer, and Nimay Mehta, who joined the firm in 2011. That’s true despite a dozen employees who Green says are “zero to five years out of college” and cold-call companies all day,

It’s a lot of work, even with four investors who are also operating partners and who, in that capacity, sometimes serve as board members on behalf of Lead Edge. These are former eBay president Lorrie Norrington, former Netsuite CFO Ron Gill, former Dell CFO Jim Schneider, and former Dell president Paul Bell. (“If you’ve already got a couple of VCs on your board,” says Green, “I think the company gets more benefit from putting operators on the board.”)

Not that anyone is complaining. On the contrary, Lead Edge has been having a very good run, which explains how its fund sizes have so quickly ballooned, from a $52 million debut vehicle to a $138 million fund, a $290 million fund, a $520 million vehicle, and now a $950 million fifth fund. (Lead Edge also spins up special purpose vehicles on the side one to two times a year when it wants an especially big bite of a certain company.)

Some of its largest returns by dollars have come via Alibaba’s IPO, Spotify’s IPO, and the sale of Duo Security to Cisco, companies on which it made big bets. Green has said the firm invested $300 million into Alibaba in the years leading up to its IPO; more than $150 million into Spotify in the years leading up to its IPO; and more than $90 million into Duo.

This year is proving fortuitous to Lead Edge’s backers, too, including thanks to the recent direct listing of Asana and the sale of Signal Sciences to Fastly.

That’s saying nothing about the Alibaba affiliate ANT Group, into which Lead Edge has poured $160 million over the years and that’s now expected to become the world’s largest IPO (although the offering has been delayed for now by China’s securities regulator).

Given these wins, it’s maybe it’s not so surprising that the firm’s investor base would continue to build on itself, and in the process turn into a highly competitive advantage for the firm, according to Green.

Indeed, when asked how Lead Edge differentiates itself from other growth-stage investors, he cites the firm’s pool of backers, which includes former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy, former Charles Schwab CEO David Pottruck, and former ESPN CEO Steve Bornstein, among the hundreds of other individuals who’ve written checks to Lead Edge that range from $250,000 to $50 million.

While he won’t say who some of the biggest of those investors are in terms of dollars committed, he has no qualms in crediting them collectively with the firm’s success — or going out of his way to keep them happy. Last night, for example, he played host to some of them at his Southern California home. He doesn’t seem to mind it.

“People want us for our LP network,” says Green. “That’s what we’re known for, 100%.”

When’s the last time you worked out your soul?

A mid-spin pep talk at SoulCycle might make you shed a tear, but not in the way that the co-founders of Coa, Alexa Meyer and Dr. Emily Anhalt, want. The founders, instead, want people to ask themselves: When was the last time you worked out (just) your soul?

If you stutter in response, that’s the impetus for Coa, a gym for mental health and online emotional fitness classes. The company just raised a $3 million seed round led by Crosslink Ventures, with participation from Red Sea Ventures and Alpaca VC. Other investors include Neil Parikh (the founder of Casper) and professional basketball player Kevin Love.

Coa’s core product, pre-launch, is small-group studio classes taught by licensed therapists. A customer will get onboarded, evaluated and placed into a series of classes spanning how to live alone during a pandemic to how to deal with political anxiety.

The class experience mixes lecture-style teaching with breakout sessions to breed conversations. Broadly, Coa is on a mission to take the small-group fitness culture that makes SoulCycle so successful and apply it to mental health. It makes sense: small-group fitness is easy to schedule into your busy days, breeds camaraderie and creates a sense of community that keeps you coming back for more.

Beyond studio classes, Coa sells private classes and offers free community classes.

Off the bat, the co-founders are clear about what Coa is not: a replacement for therapy. Instead, Coa wants to be a “therapeutic experience,” and the only people who create or teach content are licensed therapists. For 1:1 services, Coa has a therapist matchmaking service, currently only active in California (soon to be New York and other states). Of course, though, the fact that Coa has therapist connector services means that it will lose some customers, brought in by Coa, once they graduate to real therapy.

Coa seemingly has a grey persona to sell to: people who want to pay for their mental health, but not enough to go to therapy. Coa pricing is key here, and drop-in classes start at $25 to bring some of the accessibility to mental health awareness. The startup’s go to market strategy is currently through free community classes and offering subsidized programs for employees by working directly with employers. Coa currently works with companies including Silicon Valley Bank, Spotify, Asana and Salesforce.

“It’s pretty impossible to replace the magic that can happen between two people meeting consistently every single week and diving deep,” Meyer said. “Our problem that we worked on solving is essentially how do you support people and go deep without asking them to go farther than it’s safe to do in a group setting.” The other hurdle, which again trickles down to the eventual core customers that Coa secures, is that the small-group format requires customers to offer up a certain amount of vulnerability during each class.

“We were warned that people do not want to talk about mental health and don’t want anyone to know they’re signing up for a class,” Anhalt told TechCrunch. “We’ve seen the complete opposite with our community.”

Meyer notes that group therapy does not legally require participants to promise confidentiality, but instead that participants usually follow a shared understanding that privacy is an important asset. Coa follows the same framework, posing a confidentiality agreement upfront. Participants are not required or demanded to share any information beforehand.

“There’s no sort of way to legally mandate people to keep those things private, and so far we have seen that it has not been an issue,” Meyer said.

Privacy, though, continues to be a struggle for therapy startups, as shown by a recent investigation into Talkspace by The New York Times. Talkspace, similar to Coa, has a noble mission: democratize access to mental health and make it more affordable. In Talkspace’s case, the goal was challenged when the company reportedly put the privacy of user conversations at risk.

Coa is optimistic it can make a difference without making an ethical compromise.

“Confidentiality and clinical integrity is everything,” Meyer said. “So we take measures far beyond what we’re legally and ethically required to do.” Some of those measures: a dedicated person who manages patient to therapist information, no post-class surveys or analytics and an internal commitment to not sharing who is participating in which classes.

Coa views its competition broadly as any startup in the therapy space: Talkspace, TwoChairs, Real, Alma and Octave.

Through pop-up gyms, Coa privately offered its emotional fitness curriculum through leaders at Asana, GitHub, Silicon Valley Bank and Spotify. They’re expanding the curriculum to include more demographics at various price points. Right now, they’re sticking to online classes for social distancing purposes. Over 3,500 people have signed up for the Coa waitlist in anticipation.

But the co-founders aren’t shy about the long-term goal: in-person presence in every major city across the country. Think an actual gym for mental health.

“We want the gym for mental health to be visible and accessible,” Meyer said. “That way, when people walk around on the street, they see that there are places to work on their emotional health, the same way they work on their physical health.”

 

Typically, there’s a bit of a delay between when astronauts launch from Earth to the International Space Station, and when they actually dock with the orbital lab. This has to do with the relative orbits of the launch spacecraft and the ISS, as well as their takeoff point from Earth. Expedition 64, which launched today, however, docked with the station just around three hours after leaving Earth from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The Soyuz spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov took off at just before 2 AM EDT, and docked with the ISS at 4:48 AM EDT – three hours and two minutes after liftoff. The hatches between the capsule and the station opened at 7:07 AM EDT, officially beginning the operational duty roster stint for the three new ISS crew members. Coincidentally it’s also Rubins’ birthday.

For a sense of that speed, consider that Demo-2, the last crewed launch to the ISS, docked with the station a full day following its liftoff from Florida in May. Typically, the crew capsule requires a few more orbits to match velocity and altitude with the station, but in this case, the timing and conditions were right to get the spacecraft in the correct spot after just two super fast orbits around the Earth.

There are now six crew members staffing the ISS, including cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, as well as NASA astronaut Christopher Cassidy who were already on the station.