Category: UNCATEGORIZED

As companies continue to shift more quickly to the cloud, pushed by the pandemic, startups like Armory that work in the cloud native space are seeing an uptick in interest. Armory is a company built to be commercial layer on top of the open source continuous delivery project Spinnaker. Today, it announced a $40 million Series C.

B Capital led the round with help from new investors Lead Edge Capital and Marc Benioff along with previous investors Insight Partners, Crosslink Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Mango Capital, Y Combinator and Javelin Venture Partners. Today’s investment brings the total raised to more than $82 million.

“Spinnaker is an open source project that came out of Netflix and Google, and it is a very sophisticated multi-cloud and software delivery platform,” company co-founder and CEO Daniel R. Odio told TechCrunch.

Odio points out that this project has the backing of industry leaders including the three leading public cloud infrastructure vendors Amazon, Microsoft and Google, as well as other cloud players like CloudFoundry and HashiCorp. “The fact that there is a lot of open source community support for this project means that it is becoming the new standard for cloud native software delivery,” he said.

In the days before the notion of continuous delivery, companies moved forward slowly, releasing large updates over months or years. As software moved to the cloud, this approach no longer made sense and companies began delivering updates more incrementally adding features when they were ready. Adding a continuous delivery layer helped facilitate this move.

As Odio describes it, Armory extends the Spinnaker project to help implement complex use cases at large organizations including around compliance and governance and security. It is also in the early stages of implementing a SaaS version of the solution, which should be available next year.

While he didn’t want to discuss customer numbers, he mentioned JPMorgan Chase and Autodesk as customers along with less specific allusions to a “a Fortune Five technology company, a Fortune 20 Bank, a Fortune 50 retailer and a Fortune 100 technology company.

The company currently has 75 employees, but Odio says business has been booming and he plans to double the team in the next year. As he does, he says that he is deeply committed to diversity and inclusion.

“There’s actually a really big difference between diversity and inclusion, and there’s a great Vernā Myers quote that diversity is being asked to the party and inclusion is being asked to dance, and so it’s actually important for us not only to focus on diversity, but also focus on inclusion because that’s how we win. By having a heterogeneous company, we will outperform a homogeneous company,” he said.

While the company has moved to remote work during COVID, Odio says they intend to remain that way, even after the current crisis is over. “Now obviously COVID been a real challenge for the world including us. We’ve gone to a fully remote-first model, and we are going to stay remote first even after COVID. And it’s really important for us to be taking care of our people, so there’s a lot of human empathy here,” he said.

But at the same time, he sees COVID opening up businesses to move to the cloud and that represents an opportunity for his business, one that he will focus on with new capital at his disposal. “In terms of the business opportunity, we exist to help power the transformation that these enterprises are undergoing right now, and there’s a lot of urgency for us to execute on our vision and mission because there is a lot of demand for this right now,” he said.

Facebook Messenger is getting a visual update and a number of new features, including support for chat themes, custom reactions, and soon, selfie stickers and vanish mode. The changes are a part of Facebook’s overhauled messaging platform, announced in late September, which introduced the ability for Instagram users to communicate with people on Facebook for the first time.

While Instagram users had to opt-in to the upgraded new feature set in order to also gain access to the cross-platform communication capabilities, Messenger users don’t have to make a similar choice.

Instead, Facebook says this morning that cross-app communication with Instagram will be rolled out soon to users across North America. (At the time of the Instagram announcement, Facebook hadn’t yet confirmed which markets would receive the update first.)

Messenger users won’t need to take action to gain the new feature set either. These will also be rolled out to users automatically, as they become available in the user’s region.

On the visual side, one noticeable change — meant to be reflective of Messenger’s cross-platform messaging capabilities — is the updated Messenger logo. It now looks more Instagram-esque with shades of blues, purples and pinks, instead of being Facebook blue.

Messenger’s default chat color will be changed to match the new style, as well.

New chat themes, including love and tie-dye, will also now begin to roll out to users, as well as custom reactions, which allow you to react with a variety of emoji instead of the standard set offered today.

Other features are expected to arrive “soon” thereafter, including selfie stickers, which let you decorate your own photo to use a sticker, and a vanish mode to make chats disappear.

These are the same features Instagram users received in their latest update, too.

Before today, Messenger had received a number of new features, including most recently, the ability to co-watch videos with friends and family in Messenger or in Messenger Rooms.

Facebook’s decision to lock users into a new messaging platform with cross-app communication capabilities will make it more difficult for users to defect to other competitive messaging apps. After all, why bother when one app can reach two of the largest social networks? And one day, possibly, it will incorporate WhatsApp, too.

It will also make it more difficult for Facebook to unwind its separate businesses, if required to do so by regulars in the future.

 

 

 

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin launched its first mission of 2020 today, flying a New Shepard sub-orbital rocket from its West Texas testing facility. This particular rocket has flown a total of seven times including today, and this is now the 13th flight of a New Shepard vehicle overall. Today’s launch included a test of NASA’s active landing sensor system, which will be used to build an autonomous, precise and flexible landing system for future Moon landing vehicles.

The NASA landing system test also marks a first for Blue Origin – the first time it has tested flying a payload on the outside of New Shepard. To date, all New Shepard payloads have traveled inside the capsule atop the booster, but the external test here was necessary in order to perform measurements of the instruments that will be used to provide repeatable, precision landing capabilities to future spacecraft.

While NASA was obviously previously able to land on the surface of the Moon, it’s looking to upgrade the technology it uses to do so in order to be able to handle the challenging task with full automation, and with much higher precision for hitting very specific targets on the lunar surface – and providing spacecraft the ability to do so over and over again, reliably, since NASA’s goal with its Artemis generation of Moon missions is to establish a more permanent human research presence on our large natural satellite.

A number of experiments are also on board that capsule, which returned to Earth with a soft, parachute-aided landing. This launch also included a new heat shield used on the rocket as part of testing for future New Glenn flights, the next generation of Blue Origin spacecraft which will be able to handle orbital payload launches, adding to Blue Origin’s current suborbital capabilities with New Shepard.

On-orbit service and logistics startup Astroscale has raised a $51 million Series E funding round, bringing its total raised to date to $191 million thus far. The Japan-based company has been focused on delivering new solutions for orbital end-of-life – meaning ways to make orbital operations more sustainable by offering easy to safely de-orbit spacecraft after the end of their useful service life, clearing up some of the growing orbital debris problem that’s emerging as more companies create satellites and constellations.

Astroscale has since expanded its mission to also include extending the life of geostationary satellites – another key ingredient in making the orbital operating environment more sustainable as we look towards a projected exponential explosion in orbital activity. The startup announced earlier this year that it was acquiring the staff and IP of a company called Effective Space Soulutions which was in the process of developing a ‘space drone’ that could launch to provide on-orbit servicing to large, existing geostationary satellite infrastructure, handling tasks like refuelling and repairs.

ESS has formed the basis for Astroscale Israel, a new international office for the globe-spanning Astroscale that will be focused on geostationary life extension. Today’s funding was led by aSTART, and will be used to help the company continue to establish its global offices and increase the team to more than 140 people.

Astroscale’s end-of-life orbital debris removal technology is set to get its first demonstration mission sometime in the second half of this year, with a launch aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket. The system uses two spacecraft which find and latch on to target debris to be de-orbited.

Kayhan Space, the Boulder, Colo. and Atlanta-based company launched from Techstars virtual space-focused accelerator, wants nothing more than to be the air traffic control service for satellites in space.

Founded by two childhood friends, Araz Feyzi and Siamak Hesar, who grew up in Iran and immigrated to the U.S. for college, Kayhan is tackling one of the toughest problems that the space industry will confront in the coming years — how to manage the exponentially increasing traffic that will soon crowd outer space.

There are currently around 8,000 satellites in orbit around the earth, but over the next several years, Amazon will launch 3,236 satellites for its Kuiper Network, while SpaceX filed paperwork last year to launch up to 30,000 satellites. That’s… a lot of metal flying around.

And somebody needs to make sure that those satellites don’t crash into each other, because space junk has a whole other set of problems.

In some ways, Feyzi and Hesar are a perfect pair to solve the problem.

Hesar, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, has spent years studying space travel, receiving a master’s degree from the University of Southern California in aeronautics, and a doctorate in astronautical engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He interned at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and spent three years at Colorado-based satellite situational awareness and systems control technology developers like SpaceNav and Blue Canyon Technologies.

Meanwhile Feyzi is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded a company in the Atlanta area called Syfer, which developed technologies to secure internet-enabled consumer devices. Using Hesar’s proprietary algorithms based on research from his doctoral days at UC Boulder and Feyzi’s expertise in cloud computing, the company has developed a system that can predict and alert the operators of satellite networks when there’s the potential for a collision and suggest alternative paths to avoid an accident.

It’s a problem that the two founders say can’t be solved by automation on satellites alone, thanks to the complexity and multidimensional nature of the work. “Imagine that a US commercial satellite is on a collision course with a Russian military satellite,” Feyzi said. “Who needs to maneuver? We make sure the satellite operator has all the information available to them [including] here’s what we know about the collision about to happen here and here are the recommendations and options to avoid it.”

Satellites today aren’t equipped to visualize their surroundings and autonomy won’t solve a problem that includes geopolitical complexities and dumb space debris all creating a morass that requires human intervention to navigate, the founders said.

“Today it’s too complex to resolve and because of the different nations and lack of standards and policy … today you need human input,” Hesar said.

And in the future, if satellites are equipped with sensors to make collision avoidance more autonomous, then Kayhan Space already has the algorithms that can provide that service. “If you think of the system and the sensors and the decision-making and [execution controls] actually performing that action… we are that,” Hesar said. “We have the algorithm whether it uses the ground-based sensor or the space-based sensor.”

Over the next eight years the space situational market is expected to reach $3.9 billion and there are very few companies equipped to provide the kind of traffic control systems that satellite network operators will need, the founders said.

Their argument was compelling enough to gain admission to the Techstars Allied Space Accelerator, an early stage investment and mentoring program developed by Techstars and the U.S. Air Force, the Netherlands Ministry of Defence, the Norwegian Ministry of Defence and the Norwegian Space Agency. And, as first reported in Hypeotamus, the company has now raised $600,000 in a pre-seed funding from investors including the Atlanta-based pre-seed investment firm, Overline, to grow its business.

And the company realizes that money and technology can’t solve the problem alone.

“We believe that technology alone can help but can’t solve this problem. We need the US to take the lead [on policy] globally,” said Feyzi. “Unlike airspace… which is controlled by countries. Space is space.” Hesar agreed. “There needs to be a focused effort on this problem.”

 

Fertility tracking has seen an explosion of startup activity in recent years. Femtech startup Lady Technologies is adding to this rich mix with the full U.S. launch of a dual-purpose device, called kegg, that’s designed to measure hormonal changes in a woman’s cervical fluid to help her determine the chance of conception on a given day.

The egg-shaped gizmo, which features a gold-plated steel cap and band ringing its tip, as well as a silicone tail to house its Bluetooth radio (so it can chat to the companion app), doubles as a connected pelvic floor trainer (the ‘k’ in kegg is for ‘kegels’) — taking a leaf out of UK femtech pioneer Elvie’s playbook. Though the two-in-one function is a new twist.

Kegg relies on a technology called impedance to sense electrolyte levels in a woman’s cervical fluid in order to detect the hormonal switch from estrogen to progesterone dominance that accompanies ovulation — via a daily test that’s touted as taking just two minutes. (If you’re also using it for the optional kegal exercises that would take a bit longer.)

“A minute electrical impulse at a specific frequency is emitted from the gold plated electrodes on the kegg and received by the other (this process is then reversed). By sensing the changing trends in the impedance, we’re able to detect the hormonal change and make a prediction to the user,” explains CEO and founder Kristina Cahojova. “Since every woman’s fluids are slightly different, kegg needs to record at least one fertile window to provide personalized predictions.”

“We have numerous patents on the underlying design of kegg and key aspects of how it operates,” she adds.

Kegg was unveiled on the TechCrunch Disrupt SF stage, back in 2018, as part of our startup battlefield competition (though it didn’t go on to win). Fast forward two years and it’s now officially launching out of beta to offer the FDA-registered gizmo to the U.S. market — priced at $275.

It’s announcing a $1.5M seed round too, with investors including Crescent Ridge Partners, SOSV, Texas Halo Fund, Fermata Fund and MegaForce, as well as some unnamed angel investors.

Commenting in a statement, Samina Hydery, kegg advisor and women’s health investor, said: “Investor interest in femtech and fertility has accelerated over the last few years. While I’ve seen an influx of ovulation prediction kits, at-home blood tests, menstrual tracking apps, and temperature monitors in the consumer market, kegg’s value proposition became clear once I spoke with women about their experiences trying to conceive and medical researchers in the field. It’s hard not to get excited by the various growth vectors that can expand kegg’s market in the future — from being used as a tool for natural family planning to helping monitor postpartum/perimenopausal health.”

“We pride ourselves in having almost half of our investors women,” notes Cahojova — whose inspiration for building kegg was personal; having suffered from irregular menstrual cycles herself.

“I didn’t want to be treated with hormones. When I talked to fertility instructors or a specialized fertility doctor, all they wanted to know about was my patterns of cervical fluid. Why? Because the fertile window is defined only by the presence of fertile cervical fluid, having a positive LH [luteinizing hormone] test is nice but it won’t help you get information to fix your cycles. That’s why so many fertility doctors are interested in cervical fluid and that is why so many women are told to track it with their fingers,” she explains.

“How on earth are you supposed to be able to track objectively something so important, yet, private without the help of technology? I was frustrated and angry that every company that I talked to didn’t have a solution and didn’t want to make this so needed product because it ‘would have to go into the vagina’. So I set out to make a product that would help me and women like me.”

Thus far kegg has been hitting a chord with U.S. women of reproductive age who are trying for a baby, according to Cahojova — who says her startup has built a 2,000-strong community of fertility-tracking women over kegg’s beta period.

“Our typical user is a woman in her reproductive age,” she says. “Our users are in long-term relationships or married and they likely have been actively trying to conceive for more than three months. Fifty percent are trying to conceive their first child, while the remaining are already mothers.

“Our customers have experience with BBT (body basal temperature charting) or LH tests (ovulation tests) and they are overall interested in holistic fertility and wellness, not in medication. They also prefer the convenience of kegg over other methods that either need to be worn throughout the night or used more frequently.”

“Each woman is unique and so are her cycles,” she adds. “Unlike ovulation trackers, kegg helps women understand their fertile window and cyclical fertility and follow their own patterns. Usually women take up to six months to learn how to read cervical fluid patterns. Our customers report that kegg gives them confidence and they feel empowered. Many keggsters conceived with kegg after years of trying because kegg gave them trends beyond ovulation. Nothing makes me more happy than an email from a customer whose life changed thanks to my work and kegg.” (On that it says “several” women have reported successful pregnancies using kegg since the beta launch in 2018.)

The startup also has its eye on international expansion, including to Asia (with the support of its Japanese-market focused investor Fermata) — with a plan to launch kegg in Singapore in late October, and in Japan and Canada next year.

While the kegg has a core focus on fertility tracking (and a secondary feature as a connected pelvic floor trainer), Cahojova is excited about wider possibilities for women’s health that she hopes will be opened up as they’re able to take in and crunch more data.

Kegg users’ impedance readings are uploaded to the startup’s cloud for analysis, so its algorithms can make a personalized fertility prediction. But its website also notes it uses ‘anonymized/pseudonymized’ data for research into women’s health. (Cahojova specifies users’ personal data is never shared outside the company. “Any data we offer to researchers we work with is completed anonymized,” is her privacy promise.)

Asked what areas of research she’s hoping kegg will help advance, she tells us: “Researchers have noted that health issues can affect typical electrolyte cycles. In many of our internal studies we’ve seen examples where readings were ‘out of norm’ for the user. In case after case we found evidence of underlying health issues (for example infections) were the cause. In the future our goal is to understand how kegg can help monitor overall cervical health.”

Cahojova also says the device is being used by fertility instructors and doctors to help with monitoring their patients. “The beauty of kegg is that by having a user friendly and modern device that women like to use we can get data on changes of vaginal fluids on a large scale. With kegg data we also hope to help doctors finally answer their billion dollar question — how can they improve the quality of cervical fluid.”

“We are supportive of science and are open for research collaborations,” she adds. “We provided kegg for independent peer-reviewed clinical study under Dr.Gabriela López Armas, MD, PhD, for her research on kegg and other fertility trackers. All the participants finished the protocols in summer of 2020 and the study is to be published independently in the near future.”

While the business model for kegg is currently fixed price hardware sales, Cahojova says the startup is looking at offering subscription packages in future. “In the future, we want to offer more to our users, e.g.: connecting them to specialists to review their cycles or view of additional layers of information. Once we have enhanced services ready, we’ll look at switching to a subscription model,” she adds.

Chicago-based serial entrepreneur Dan Pinto has raised new cash and launched a new company looking to commercialize a years-old open source project that purports to solve one of the web’s hardest problems — fraud prevention.

The company he launched in January, FingerprintJS, touts itself as a new kind of toolkit offering browser fingerprinting as a service for any application.

The company, based on an open source project that already has 5 million downloads and 8,000 websites using the service (and hundreds of paying customers, according to the company), is a variation on the browser fingerprinting technology that companies have been using for years.

FingerprintJS uses the same canvas fingerprinting, audio sampling, WebGL fingerprinting, font detection and browser plugin probing tech that’s available on the market, but de-identifies the fingerprint from a specific device by generating a unique identifier of a browser without using cookies. Companies can store the identifier in their database and then track its behavior, the company said on its website.

The open source project was actually started five years ago by Valentin Vasilyev, according to the project’s Github page. Vasilyev and Pinto worked together at Pinto’s last startup, Machinio, which was sold back in 2018. The two men launched a business around Vailyev’s project in January and have raised $4 million in financing to support the commercialization of the project.

“The open source community was pivotal to our success thus far,” said Vasilyev, in a statement. “We will continue to build upon that base and focus on selling to developers first. Software engineers understand technology and are starting to recognize how effective our product is to help stop fraud.”

Funding came from Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Hack VC, the Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator’s Remarkable Ventures fund and angel investors like Rony Kahan, the chair and co-founder of Indeed, according to a statement from FingerprintJS.

“We have a unique opportunity to disrupt the fraud technology market by enabling our customers to build fraud prevention in their applications rather than it being an afterthought just as Stripe has done with payment processing,” he said in a statement provided by the company. “Think of online fraud as a shell game where malicious users are constantly trying to hide themselves in order to commit fraud. Existing solutions try to generate a fraud score for each visitor without trying to understand who they are. We focus on uniquely identifying malicious users which directly solves the underlying fraud problem.” 

Blue Origin is set to return to active flight today, after a hiatus of nearly a year since its last launch in December 2019. Today’s launch is a mission for the company’s New Shepard reusable sub-orbital rocket – a record-setting sixth flight for this particular rocket, which first flew and landed back in December 2017. Today’s launch includes a system design to test elements of NASA’s Deorbit, Descent and Landing Sensor technology, which will provide key automation for use in future landers for the Moon and Mars that will be able to intelligently identify and avoid potential hazards on target landing zones.

This test will include recover of both the rocket and the capsule for the New Shepard launch vehicle. The Rocket will land back at the West Texas launch and landing site with a controlled, engine-powered descent, and the capsule will descend via parachute. The capsule will contain a variety of experiments and other payloads, including postcards from Blue Origin’s nonprofit organization Club for the Future provided by children from across the country.

The launch is set to take place at 8:35 AM CDT (9:35 AM EDT/6:35 AM PDT), with the livestream above beginning at around 9:05 AM EDT (6:05 AM PDT). The stream will include a message from NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. Blue Origin is increasingly working closely with NASA, including on a human landing system that could be the means for getting the next human astronauts to the surface of the Moon.

Hijacking a company’s DNS or injecting code into third-party tools are the kind of attacks that many companies aren’t equipped to handle. Cyberpion, a new security startup founded by a number of experienced security experts, aims to help enterprises identify and neutralize these kinds of risks that typically stem from connections to their infrastructure assets, especially now that most companies rely on a variety of assets that sit beyond their security perimeters.

The company today announced that it has raised an $8.25 million seed round, co-led by Team8 Capital and Hyperwise Ventures. The company, which already has teams in the U.S. and Israel in place, plans to use the new funding to expand its sales and marketing efforts and accelerate product development.

Cyberpion was co-founded by Nethanel Gelernter, the company’s CEO, who previously spent time at Microsoft and as a security researcher, and its CBO Ran Nahmias, the former head of cloud security at Check Point, who also spent time at Aqua Security and as director of enterprise strategy at Microsoft.

“What was mostly fascinating to me is that everything Cyberpion is doing is so different from what you think about and deal with day in, day out with the traditional security tools,” Nahmias said. “That was very refreshing for me, who likes going to new things and learning new things on the fly. And Cyberpion presented an amazing challenge, a very complicated problem and an opportunity for me to learn more about that.”

Nahmias noted that today, most companies focus on protecting and defending the environment that is directly owned and managed by them. But those companies don’t operate in a vacuum, and building their businesses involves an ecosystem of third-party suppliers. “With that comes a far-reaching ecosystem of potential benefits and potential threats that becomes the whole attack surface area — and that is not attended to by what people think about and by the tools we all have.”

What’s interesting here is that the service analyzes a company’s security stance with regard to these attacks by looking at the connections it makes across the public infrastructure of the internet — and with that it can look at how a company connects to one vendor, but also how they are connected to others, as well.

With that, Cyberpion is able to discover the inventory of known and unknown assets a company has across its ecosystem and can continuously scan for security vulnerabilities and, of course, provide alerts and recommendations for how to remedy these issues.

“Attacks on external digital assets of enterprises are becoming a prominent vector for sophisticated cyber criminals,” said Hyperwise Ventures’ managing partner, Nathan Shuchami. “In the face of hackers finding vulnerabilities in new and wider attack surfaces, Cyberpion offers unparalleled detection and protection capabilities, providing comprehensive security across the organization’s entire online ecosystem. Hyperwise Ventures is thrilled to co-lead the seed funding round in Cyberpion.”

The South Korean government has made no secret of its ambition to be a key player in the global artificial intelligence industry, including making the semiconductors powering AI functionalities.

This week, the country’s information and communications technology regulator announced plans to develop up to 50 types of AI -focused system semiconductors by 2030, Yonhap News Agency reported. The government will be on the hunt for thousands of local experts to lead the new wave of innovation.

South Korean has made several promises to support next-generation chip companies in recent times. Earlier this year, for example, it announced plans to spend about 1 trillion won ($870 million) on AI chips commercialization and production before 2029. Last year, President Moon Jae-in announced his “Presidential Initiative for AI” to raise public awareness on the industry.

These efforts come amid growing demand for AI-related chips, which, by McKinsey estimates, could account for almost 20% of all semiconductor demand and generate about $67 billion in revenue by 2025.

South Korea is already home to two of the world’s largest memory chip makers — Samsung and SK hynix. While that’s a lucrative industry, it’s one relying more on “the manufacturing process rather than core technologies,” observed Seewan Toong, an independent IT industry expert.

“It’s about making the chip smaller, denser, more efficient, and putting more memory on one chip,” he added.

The country wants to make its semiconductors smarter and vow to own 20% of the global AI chip market by 2030, according to Yonhap.

Samsung dabbled in next-gen chips as it became the mass-production partner for Baidu’s AI chips late last year. In July, the conglomerate announced hiring 1,000 new staff to work on chips and AI. SK hynix has picked its own Chinese ally by backing Horizon Robotics, an AI chip designer last valued at $3 billion.

China, which has long focused on the application of AI rather than fundamental research, has similarly shelled out state funds for home-grown semiconductor companies as the country suffers from U.S. sanctions on core technologies. The question is how many startups, under state support, will survive to compete with global behemoths like Nvidia and Qualcomm.