Category: UNCATEGORIZED

With the new MacBook, Apple closes one of the more unfortunate product chapters in its history. The upgraded 13-inch mercifully marks the end of the failed five-year experiment that was the butterfly switch.

I won’t go into too much detail here. If you’ve purchased a MacBook in the past several years, you almost certainly know what I’m talking about — the keys that stuck, the others that seemed to fire at random. I had at least one compressed air emergency myself, while setting up to liveblog at a competitor’s press event.

After a few attempts to salvage the technology, Apple finally scrapped it, going back to basics and returning to the trusty old scissor switch. I’m typing on it now, and it’s seriously making me reconsider upgrading my four-year-old machine. Honestly, the laptop is in perfect shape otherwise, but man, those keys. It always felt too much like typing on a flat surface.

With this week’s news, the 13-inch becomes the third and final member of the MacBook family to get the new keyboard. It’s not “Magic” as the name implies (Apple really does love the M-word), but improvements are immediate and vast. The experience is considerably softer to the touch and quieter than previous versions, and the one millimeter of key travel is much easier on the hands.

There are other nice touches, here, including the addition of a dedicated Escape key. It’s a small but welcome consolation that the Touch Bar can’t do everything.

I realize I’ve just spent the first several paragraphs focusing on the keyboard. Silly, I know, but why bury the lede? After all, without it, the new MacBook would be a fairly standard MacBook upgrade (nothing wrong with that, but that’s just how these things work). With it, it’s a far more compelling invite for those who have been on the fence about an upgrade.

The system is visually identical to earlier models. Same familiar unibody metal design in silver or space gray. Same 13.3-inch, 2560 x 1600 Retina display. It’s also, for that matter, same as you’ll find on the Air, though the 13-inch’s is 500 nits vs. the Air’s 400. It’s brighter and easier on the eyes, if a bit tougher on battery life. Rumors had the company upgrading the device to a 14-inch, inline with the larger 16-inch model and further distinguishing it from the Air, but that was not to be this generation.

Same ports (4x Thunderbolt 3/USB and headphone jack). It’s a solid laptop that’s become a daily driver for so many of us. Really, the only complaint I would level against it is that the company hasn’t done a lot to distinguish the outside of the machine from the $300 cheaper Air (the Air starts at $999, the Pro at $1,299), beyond port count.

Of course, it’s what’s inside that counts. That’s what my mom tells me, at least. Curiously, the Air ships with a 10th-gen Core i7, which the entry-level pro has an 8th gen, upgradable to 10th gen. Of course, the Pro’s processor is quad-core by default (versus the Air’s dual) and 1.7GHz (to the Air’s 1.2). Our system as configured sported the 2 GHz 10th-gen quad-core i5. 

That’s $500 more than the entry-level model, at $1,799. For another $200, you can bump that up to 2.3GHz. Our  system clocked 5520 and 18228 on GeekBench 4’s single and double-core tests. That’s a nice bump over the Air’s 5244 and 14672. 

The system also sports 16GB of RAM and 500GB of storage. The lines are a bit more blurred between the Air and the 13-inch Pro on this front, with both systems starting at 8GB and 256GB. The Pro, however, goes all the way up to 32GB and 4TB, while the Air stalls out at 16GB and 2TB.

In a lot of ways, the systems start from a similar place, but the the Pro can be specced out for better performance more befitting the Pro moniker. If you’re opting for the Pro over the Air, it’s likely you need more processing power for things like video editing or perhaps some gaming, so you’ll want to upgrade over the base-level to make sure you’re covered. The Pro’s battery life is rated at up to 10 hours, to the Air’s 11. Out of the box, I got several hours of life, doing work and listening to music, but like the Air’s claims, 10 hours is definitely a stretch here with everyday usage.

Again, the biggest drawback of the 13-inch Pro is that the improved Air blurs the product lines in a number of ways. But that device is thinner, lighter and $300 cheaper. The case for choosing the pricier device isn’t as clear as, say, the decision between the 13-inch and 16-inch models.

For most users, the Air should be plenty for most tasks. For those who need more power without breaking their backs or banks, however, the 13-inch model is still a strong and safe bet that’s now much easier on the fingers.

When the shutdown began six weeks ago, the powers that be at Box sat down for a meeting to discuss the situation. They weren’t in the same room of course. They were like everyone else, separated by the virus, but they saw this as a key moment for Box as a company.

They had been talking about digital transformation for years, trying to help customers get there with their cloud content management platform, and this was a pivotal moment with millions of employees working at home.

Box CEO Aaron Levie says the company’s executives had to decide if the change in work style they were seeing at that moment was going to be a temporary event or something that changed work forever.

After some debate, they concluded that it was going to change things for the long term, and that meant accelerating the product road map. “We made the bet six weeks ago that this was going to be a long-term change about how business works, and even if offices opened back up, we thought that companies were going to want to be resilient for this type of event in the future,” Levie explained.

From Box’s perspective, they saw this playing it in three crucial ways. Employees would need to be able to share files securely (their sweet spot). They would need to collaborate with folks inside and outside the organization. Finally, as you are working inside other cloud applications, what is the best way to interact with files stored in Box?

These are all scenarios that Levie has been talking about for years, and to some extent Box offered already, but they wanted to tighten everything up, while adding some new functionality. For starters, they are offering a cleaner interface to make it easier for users to interact with and share files.

They are also helping users organize those files with a new feature called Collections, which lets them group their files and folders in ways that make sense to them. For starters, this is on an individual basis, but Levie says they are already hearing requests to be able to publish collections inside the organization, something that could come down the road.

Next, they are adding an annotations capability that makes it easy to add comments either as a single editor or in a group discussion about a file. Think Google Docs collaboration tools, but for any document, allowing an individual or group to comment on a file remotely in real time, something many folks need to do right now.

Finally, external partners and customers can share files in Box from a special landing page. Levie says that this is working in conjunction with Box Shield, and the malware detection capability announced last month to make sure these files are shared in a secure fashion.

“Companies are going to need to make sure that no matter what happens — in the fall, next year or 10 years from now — that they can be resilient to an event where people can’t transact physically, where you don’t have  manual processes, where employees can go work from home instantaneously, and so that’s going to change dramatically how you adjust your company’s priorities from a technology standpoint,” Levie said.

These new features may not answer all of those huge strategic questions, but this is a case where Box saw an opening for the company to address this change in how people work more directly, and they sped up the roadmap to seize it.

These features will be rolling out starting today, and over the next weeks.

DJI took the wraps off its latest drone today. Targeting industrial users, the Matrice 300 builds on the company’s Matrice platform, and sports a host of improvements from longer battery life, object detection sensors on all six sides and a 15 km video transmission range.

The Matrice line has long been DJI’s all-in-one industrial product offering. These models are much larger and more utilitarian than its consumer or prosumer line and feature capabilities than align with those markets. Where consumers use drones for photography, industries and public service operations are increasingly looking to drones to gather data.

The Matrice 300 is designed for data collection and aerial surveys. The drone is available with two different camera modules. The H20 features a 20MP camera with a 23x hybrid optical zoom, a 12MP wide-angle camera, and a laser range finder that can read distances from 3m to 1200m. The H20T adds a radiometric thermal camera to the sensor array, giving the drone additional functions.

Integrated functions give the drone automated features such as the ability to automate routine photos — just mark the item on the controller’s screen, and when instructed, the drone will return to the area and take another photo of the object in the same location and angle. Other functions include the ability to track items while they’re moving.

Like some of DJI’s other high-end drones, the Matrice 300 has a dual operator mode allowing two people to control the drone. Or, if needed, operators can switch control to another pilot located on the other end of the Matrice 300’s range, which should dramatically improve its range and safety.

DJI stuffed this latest drone with additional improvements. Collision detection sensors are located on all six sides of the drone giving it 360 degrees of protection. A new controller ships with the Matrice 300, too, that’s loaded with updated flight software that appears to improve pilot control.

Battery life is greatly improved too. DJI says the Matrice 300 has a flight time of 55 minutes, which is up from the Matrice 200’s 38-minute battery life and the 27-minute life found on the prosumer Inspire 2. Dual batteries power the device and allow for hot-swapping packs while the drone is on the ground, but not powered off.

Pricing wasn’t released. The Matrice 300 will ship from DJI dealers in the second half of 2020.

Apple has awarded $10 million from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund to COPAN Diagnostics, a company focused on producing sample collection kits for testing COVID-19 to hospitals in the U.S. The money comes from the fund that Apple established to support the development and growth of U.S.-based manufacturing, but is particularly notable because to date, the fund has been used to support companies tied more directly to its own supply chain.

The $10 million award also includes Apple employing its sourcing resources to find equipment and materials for COPAN Diagnostics, including new advanced equipment the iPhone-maker is helping design itself. Funds will also be used by COPAN to expand to a larger production facility in Southern California that can output more supply, growing its run rate from around several thousand currently, to over one million kits weekly by July, according to Apple. Apple notes that it will also result in the creation of around 50 new U.S. jobs.

COPAN is a pioneer in the diagnostics world, having previously invented flocked swabs in 2003, and it currently offers the world’s leading transport medium for virus-containing clinical specimens. The investment here from Apple is focused primarily on scale, taking the existing expertise of COPAN and making it into something that can operate somewhere closer to the amazing production volumes that Apple can accomplish, in order to help address the urgent need for more testing supplies to prevent that being the bottleneck to widespread COVID-19 diagnostics in the U.S.

Apple has redirected many of its resources, including monetary donations, protective equipment sourcing, and software development resources for both symptom-checking apps and the forthcoming partnership with Google on exposure notification software, to combatting the global coronavirus crisis. This deployment of the Advanced Manufacturing Fund is yet another example of how the company can address the pandemic in a variety of ways that are unique to its global position, expertise and relationships.

The regulators said “NO” when Telefonica tried to combine its O2 operations in the UK with rival carrier, Hutchison-owned Three, back in 2015. But Telefonica didn’t let go of the idea of divestment, and five years later, in the middle of a health pandemic with related threats of a global economic depression looming over us, comes the latest effort on that front.

Telefonica and Liberty Global today announced a plan to merge the Spanish telco’s UK mobile carrier O2 with Virgin Media, a pay-TV and broadband provider in the country owned by Liberty.

The deal is huge. Based on a valuation of £12.7 billion for O2 and £18.7 billion for Virgin media, it works out to a combined enterprise valuation of £31.4 billion, or nearly $39 billion at current rates. It will create a business with 46 million video, broadband and mobile subscribers and £11 billion of revenue, the companies said.

As a point of reference, BT — one of Virgin’s and O2’s biggest competitors on the fixed-line, broadband and TV front, which long ago used to own O2 before spinning it out — is valued at only £10.4 billion, or $12.8   billion. Vodafone — a big competitor mostly on mobile — is valued at $358.95 billion, or $456 billion, although it has vast international holdings; its UK business would represent a fraction of that.

O2 is coming into the deal on a debt-free basis while Virgin Media is bringing “£11.3 billion of net debt and debt-like items” into the marriage. The transaction, they said, is expected to close around the middle of 2021 and is subject to regulatory approvals.

The deal underscores the bigger consolidation trend that has been playing out for years, where smaller and more narrowly focused businesses are coming together with those that offer either complementary services to offer better bundles, or overlapping ones for more economies of scale.

But its timing is also very notable. As we’ve pointed out before, M&A activity has largely slowed down in the current market, but we’re still seeing deals (and funding rounds) in cases where the price is right or a business is worth keeping around and bolstering.

This deal ticks both of those boxes, but you could add a third line of reasoning, which is that we may be in a more likely moment to see these deals get a nod when they might have been scrutinised more in the past. Both Telefonica and Liberty Global have had tastes of costly M&A efforts thwarted after regulators put up flags over antitrust violations.

Vodafone’s efforts to buy Liberty Global assets some years ago pointedly did not include Virgin Media in the UK as a result of that, and of course Telefonica’s previous efforts to divest O2 in a merger with Three went nowhere, also out of competition concerns.

However, we are seeing a different tack at the moment from regulators, who have pointedly said that not only are they aiming to approve and clear faster a backlog of deals, but to give them a more open-minded treatment given the current state of the market, to keep the economy turning.

The Competition and Markets Authority outlined its updated approach in its recent decision to approve a merger between Takeaway.com and JustEat, a deal that had been in the works for months:

Eight glasses of water a day. That’s the old recommendation you and I have heard growing up. And while we all know the importance of hydration to our health, some methods of hydration are more efficient than others. At least, that’s the premise that Hydrant was built on.

The company, a wellness brand that launched out of New York in 2018, has today announced the close of a $5.7 million Series A financing to grow wellness business. The round was led by Coefficient Capital, with participation from Rx3 Ventures. This brings total funding to $8.8 million for the company, who was previously backed by Soma Capital, Sixers Innovation Lab, as well as several angels and other funds.

Hydrant offers two products: Rapid Hydration and Rapid Hydration + Caffeine. They come in powder form, in packets, and are to be added to water.

The idea is that water obviously hydrates the human body on its own, but can take some time to do so, slowing getting absorbed as it travels most of the way through the digestive system before feeding the most significant portion of that water into the blood stream to nourish other organs, muscles, etc.

Other hydration products on the market, according to founders John Sherwin and Jai Jung Kim, were either too sugary, tasted bad from artificial flavoring or coloring, or didn’t offer the right mix of electrolytes to rapidly hydrate the body.

That’s where Hydrant comes in. The product was designed with a specific ratio of electrolytes and a small bit of sugar to speed up the absorption of water in the digestive system. Sherwin, cofounder at Hydrant, studied at Oxford and graduated with a BA in biological sciences before Hydrant. With the right mix of electrolytes and sugar molecules — in Hydrant’s case, those come from a bit of powdered fruit juice — the body shortcuts water’s usual absorption rate in the body.

A mechanism in the small intestine, called the sodium glucose co-transport mechanism, detects the presence of glucose molecules alongside sodium molecules. When the body detects that combination in a certain ration, it creates a ‘pump’, said Sherwin (describing his air quotes) that pushes those molecules into the bloodstream. The water follows those sodium molecules into the bloodstream as well, hydrating the body faster than with your average glass of water.

Alongside selling the product on its own website, Hydrant also has retail partnerships with Whole Foods and sells via Amazon, with more retail partnerships in the works.

The company says that the pandemic has slowed its conversations with retail partners, but that the company is reallocating its resources to focus on its own ecommerce channel. Retail is a profitable channel for Hydrant. The founders said that the company works hard to focus on retail partners that fit with the brand and maximize profitability.

All Hydrant manufacturing is done in the U.S.

Hydrant offers both a subscription and an a la carte option. Folks can buy a 30-pack of the Rapid Hydration mix for $37.50, and the caffeinated hydration mix for $43.75. People who buy as a subscription get a 20 percent discount from that. Subscription accounts for 50 percent of the company’s business, according to the founders.

Like many startups, Hydrant says its biggest challenge is competing on talent.

“We believe one of the most important drivers of success for our business is finding the right people,” said Kim. “We actually care less about direct industry experience. As a matter of fact, from our entire team, only one person comes from a directly relevant industry. The rest of the team members don’t have direct CPG or food and beverage experience. We care about people who are smart, hard workers, really curious, and who enjoy solving problems. There’s intense competition for good talent, and we’re doing everything we can to recruit that talent and pitch that we’re the right business for them to join.”

Hydrant plans on using this latest funding round to invest in talent, foster new product innovation, and invest in analytics to “double down on the data-driven DNA” of the company.

YouTube TV is expanding its lineup of channels thanks to a new, multi-year distribution agreement with ViacomCBS, announced this morning. The Google-owned streaming TV service is gaining 14 new ViacomCBS channels as a result of the deal, including news, sports, and entertainment offerings. It will also continue to carry CBS broadcast stations, CBS Sports Network, Pop TV, Smithsonian Channel, and The CW.

New channels including BET, CMT, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, Paramount Network, TV Land and VH1 will arrive on YouTube TV this summer, where they’ll reach the service’s over 2 million subscribers.

Other channels, such as BET Her, MTV2, Nick Jr., NickToons, TeenNick and MTV Classic, will roll out at a later time as part of YouTube TV’s base package.

In addition, YouTube TV will continue to offer ViacomCBS’ premium subscription services, including Showtime, on its YouTube TV service and as an extended partnership on YouTube’s broader platforms.

The YouTube TV service today costs $49.99/month for a lineup of over 70 networks, including live and local sports, news, shows, movies and more, as well as an unlimited cloud DVR for recording favorites.

“We are thrilled to have reached an expanded agreement with YouTube TV that recognizes the full power of our newly combined portfolio as ViacomCBS,” said Ray Hopkins, President, U.S. Networks Distribution, ViacomCBS, in a statement about the deal. “Google has been an excellent partner, and we look forward to bringing even more of our entertainment networks to YouTube TV subscribers for the first time.”

The YouTube TV deal follows a series of distribution agreements ViacomCBS has secured over the past six months, including a new agreement with Verizon FiOS (disclosure: TechCrunch parent’s parent company is Verizon). The Verizon deal was its first carriage deal for ViacomCBS’ full portfolio of networks since the merger between Viacom and CBS closed in December.

ViacomCBS also did distribution deals with Comcast in January, and with News Corp-controlled Australian pay TV company Foxtel in March.

Meanwhile, the ViacomCBS free streaming service Pluto TV has also recently confirmed new distribution deals with TiVo and Verizon, the latter across Verizon’s wireless network, on connected TV platforms like Stream TV, and on its pay TV service, FiOS.

“We’re excited to launch ViacomCBS’ portfolio on YouTube TV this summer, ” said Lori Conkling, Global Head of Partnerships at YouTube TV, in an announcement. “Our expanded partnership delivers on our promise to offer a premium portfolio of content to our YouTube TV subscribers, as well as across the YouTube platforms.”

The UK may be rethinking its decision to shun Apple and Google’s API for its national coronavirus contacts tracing app, according to the Financial Times, which reported yesterday that the government is paying an IT supplier to investigate whether it can integrate the tech giants’ approach after all.

As we’ve reported before coronavirus contacts tracing apps are a new technology which aims to repurpose smartphones’ Bluetooth signals and device proximity to try to estimate individuals’ infection risk.

The UK’s forthcoming app, called NHS COVID-19, has faced controversy because it’s being designed to use a centralized app architecture. This means developers are having to come up with workarounds for platform limitations on background access to Bluetooth as the Apple-Google cross-platform API only works with decentralized systems.

The choice of a centralized app architecture has also raised concerns about the impact of such an unprecedented state data grab on citizens’ privacy and human rights, and the risk of state ‘mission creep‘.

The UK also looks increasingly isolated in its choice in Europe after the German government opted to switch to a decentralized model, joining several other European countries that have said they will opt for a p2p approach, including Estonia, Ireland and Switzerland.

In the region, France remains the other major backer of a centralized system for its forthcoming coronavirus contacts tracing app, StopCovid.

Apple and Google, meanwhile, are collaborating on a so-called “exposure notification” API for national coronavirus contacts tracing apps. The API is slated to launch this month and is designed to remove restrictions that could interfere with how contact events are logged. However it’s only available for apps that don’t hold users’ personal data on central servers and prohibits location tracking, with the pair emphasizing that their system is designed to put privacy at the core.

Yesterday the FT reported that NHSX, the digital transformation branch of UK’s National Health Service, has awarded a £3.8M contract to the London office of Zuhlke Engineering, a Switzerland-based IT development firm which was involved in developing the initial version of the NHS COVID-19 app.

The contract includes a requirement to “investigate the complexity, performance and feasibility of implementing native Apple and Google contact tracing APIs within the existing proximity mobile application and platform”, per the newspaper’s report.

The work is also described as a “two week timeboxed technical spike”, which the FT suggests means it’s still at a preliminary phase — thought it also notes the contract includes a deadline of mid-May.

The contracted work was due to begin yesterday, per the report.

We’ve reached out to Zuhlke for comment. Its website describes the company as “a strong solutions partner” that’s focused on projects related to digital product delivery; cloud migration; scaling digital platforms; and the Internet of Things.

We also put questions arising from the FT report to NHSX.

At the time of writing the unit had not responded but yesterday a spokesperson told the newspaper: “We’ve been working with Apple and Google throughout the app’s development and it’s quite right and normal to continue to refine the app.”

The specific technical issue that appears to be causing concern relates to a workaround the developers have devised to try to circumvent platform limitations on Bluetooth that’s intended to wake up phones when the app itself is not being actively used in order that the proximity handshakes can still be carried out (and contacts events properly logged).

Thing is, if any of the devices fail to wake up and emit their identifiers so other nearby devices can log their presence there will be gaps in the data. Which, in plainer language, means the app might miss some close encounters between users — and therefore fail to notify some people of potential infection risk.

Recent reports have suggested the NHSX workaround has a particular problem with iPhones not being able to wake up other iPhones. And while Google’s Android OS is the more dominant platform in the UK (running on circa ~60% of smartphones, per Kantar) there will still be plenty of instances of two or more iPhone users passing near each other. So if their apps fail to wake up they won’t exchange data and those encounters won’t be logged.

On this, the FT quotes one person familiar with the NHS testing process who told it the app was able to work in the background in most cases, except when two iPhones were locked and left unused for around 30 minutes, and without any Android devices coming within 60m of the devices. The source also told it that bringing an Android device running the app close to the iPhone would “wake up” its Bluetooth connection.

Clearly, the government having to tell everyone in the UK to use an Android smartphone not an iPhone wouldn’t be a particularly palatable political message.

One source with information about the NHSX testing process told us the unit has this week been asking IT suppliers for facilities or input on testing environments with “50-100 Bluetooth devices of mixed origin”, to help with challenges in testing the Bluetooth exchanges — which raises questions about how extensively this core functionality has been tested up to now. (Again, we’ve put questions to the NHSX about testing and will update this report with any response.)

Work on planning and developing the NHS COVID-19 app began March 7, according to evidence given to a UK parliamentary committee by the NHSX CEO’s, Matthew Gould, last month.

Gould has also previously suggested that the app could be “technically” ready to launch in as little as two or three weeks time from now. While a limited geographical trial of the app kicked off this week in the Isle of Wight. Prior to that, an alpha version of the app was tested at an RAF base involving staff carrying out simulations of people going shopping, per a BBC report last month.

Gould faced questions over the choice of centralized vs decentralized app architecture from the human rights committee earlier this week. He suggested then that the government is not “locked” to the choice — telling the committee: “We are constantly reassessing which approach is the right one — and if it becomes clear that the balance of advantage lies in a different approach then we will take that different approach. We’re not irredeemably wedded to one approach; if we need to shift then we will… It’s a very pragmatic decision about what approach is likely to get the results that we need to get.”

However it’s unclear how quickly such a major change to app architecture could be implemented, given centralized vs decentralized systems work in very different ways.

Additionally, such a big shift — more than two months into the NHSX’s project — seems, at such a late stage, as if it would be more closely characterized as a rebuild, rather than a little finessing (as suggested by the NHSX spokesperson’s remark to the FT vis-a-vis ‘refining’ the app).

In related news today, Reuters reports that Colombia has pulled its own coronavirus contacts tracing app after experiencing glitches and inaccuracies. The app had used alternative technology to power contacts logging via Bluetooth and wi-fi. A government official told the news agency it aims to rebuild the system and may now use the Apple-Google API.

Australia has also reported Bluetooth related problems with its national coronavirus app. And has also been reported to be moving towards adopting the Apple-Google API.

While, Singapore, the first country to launch a Bluetooth app for coronavirus contacts tracing, was also the first to run into technical hitches related to platform limits on background access — likely contributing to low download rates for the app (reportedly below 20%).

As investors get cautious about dealmaking in India amid the coronavirus outbreak and their appetite to fund early stage startups begins to evaporate, one venture capital fund is stepping up to make that void smaller.

WaterBridge Ventures, an investor that has cut some of the earliest checks in startups such as edtech firms Unacademy and Doubtnut, and Atlan, which helps enterprises better manage data, and Canadian online pharmacy PocketPills, has launched Fast Forward, a program with a committed $10 million from its second fund to finance Seed and pre-Series A rounds in more than a dozen startups.

Any early-stage startup can apply in Fast Forward by answering 10 questions, and WaterBridge partners will engage with them virtually and conclude whether they want to invest within 10 days, said Manish Kheterpal, founder and managing partner at the VC fund.

“Most young entrepreneurs in India have little to no experience. They have either just graduated, dropped out of college or are first time entrepreneurs. If we put a classic VC lens to evaluate these businesses, they don’t make the cut. Many of these young ideas have the potential to become game changing businesses with sensible and early guidance. We want to back some of those ideas,” said Kheterpal in an interview with TechCrunch.

The launch’s timing is also interesting. Kheterpal, a veteran investor, said WaterBridge began exploring the program last year and the coronavirus crises convinced him to launch it now as it could serve a greater purpose.

Several early-stage startups have told TechCrunch in recent weeks that they are finding it incredibly challenging to get in touch with some VCs in the country amid the coronavirus crises.

Founder of a social commerce startup who requested anonymity said that most VCs he has attempted to reach out are currently only engaging with founders they knew from prior to the outbreak.

“We think it’s exactly the right time to invest. History has shown us that some of the best firms have emerged from the crises,” said Kheterpal.

The startups that are selected in Fast Forward will have the capital in their bank account in 20 days. The check comes in two sizes: $135,000, aimed at startups that have not built the product yet, and $330,000 for those who have some semblance of the product but may not have started to generate revenue yet. WaterBridge Ventures will take 15% equity in the startup in return.

Fast Forward is open to investing in nearly every category, though it is avoiding at least two: Hardware manufacturing and real estate, two areas that have proven challenging for scale in the country.

Fast funding is not a new idea, though it’s yet to receive wider traction among VC funds. NFX, an investor in early-stage startups, launched a seed-funding initiative last month to invite founders in the U.S. to apply for seed funding of $1 million to $2 million in exchange for 15% of their company.

A lot of enterprise cybersecurity efforts focus on malicious hackers that work on behalf of larger organizations, be they criminal groups or state actors — and for good reason, since the majority of incidents these days come from phishing and other malicious techniques that originate outside the enterprise itself.

But there has also been a persistent, and now growing, focus also on “insider threats” — that is, breaches that start from within organizations themselves. And today a startup that specialises in this area is announcing a round of growth funding to expand its reach.

Dtex, which uses machine learning to monitor network activity within the perimeter and around all endpoints to detect unusual patterns or behaviour around passwords or data movement, is today announcing that it has raised $17.5 million in funding.

The round is being led by new investor Northgate Capital with Norwest Venture Partners and Four Rivers Group, both previous investors, also participating. Prior to this, the San Jose-based startup had raised $57.5 million, according to data from PitchBook, while CrunchBase puts the total raised at $40 million.

CEO Bahman Mahbod said the startup is not disclosing valuation except to say that it’s “very excited” about it.

For some context, the company works with hundreds of large enterprises, primarily in the financial, critical infrastructure, government and defence sectors. The plan is to now extend further into newer verticals where it’s started to see more activity more recently: pharmaceuticals, life sciences and manufacturing. Dtex says that over the past 12 months, 80% of its top customers have been increasing their level of engagement with the startup.

Dtex’s focus on “insider” threats sounds slightly sinister at first: is the implication here that people are more dishonest and nefarious these days and thus need to be policed and monitored much more closely for wrongdoing? The answer is no. There are no more dishonest people today than there ever have been, but there are a lot more opportunities to make mistakes that result in security breaches:

The working world has been on a long-term trend of becoming increasingly digitised in all of its interactions, and bringing on a lot more devices onto those networks. Across both “knowledge” and front-line workers, we now have a vastly larger number of devices being used to help workers do their jobs or just keep in touch with the company as they work, with many of them being brought by the workers themselves rather than being provisioned by the companies. There has also been a huge increase in cloud services,

And in the realm of “knowledge” workers, we’re seeing a lot more remote or peripatetic working, where people don’t have fixed desks and often work outside the office altogether — something that has skyrocketed in recent times with stay-at-home orders put in place to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 cases.

All of this translates into a much wider threat “horizon” within organizations themselves, before even considering the sophistication of external malicious hackers.

And the current state of business has exacerbated that. Mahbod tells us that Dtex is currently seeing spikes in unusual activity from the rise in home workers, who sometimes circumvent VPNs and other security controls, thus committing policy violations; as well as more problems arising from the fact that home networks have been compromised and that is leaving work networks, accessed from home, more vulnerable. These started, he said, with COVID-19 phishing attacks but have progressed to undetected malware from drive-by downloads.

And, inevitably, he added that there has been a rise in intentional data theft and accidental loss arising in cases where organizations have had to lay people off or run a round of furloughs, but might still result from negligence rather than intentional actions.

There are a number of other cybersecurity companies that provide ways to detect insider threats — they include CloudKnox and Obsidian Security, along with a number of larger and established vendors. But Mabhod says that Dtex “is the only company with ‘next-generation’ capabilities that are cloud-first, AI/ML baked-in, and enterprise scalable to millions of users and devices, which it sells as DMAP+.

“Effectively, Next-Gen Insider Threat solutions must replace legacy Insider Threat point solutions which were borne out of the UAM, DLP and UEBA spaces,” he said.

Those providing legacy approaches of that kind include Forcepoint with its SureView product and Proofpoint with its ObserveIT product. Interestingly, CyberX, which is currently in the process of getting acquired by Microsoft (according to reports and also our sources), also includes insider threats in its services.

This is one reason why investors have been interested.

“Dtex has built a highly scalable platform that utilizes a cloud-first, lightweight endpoint architecture, offering clients a number of use cases including insider threat prevention and business operations intelligence,” said Thorsten Claus, partner, Northgate Capital, in a statement. Northgate has a long list of enterprise startups in its portfolio that represent potential customers but also a track record of experience in assessing the problem at hand and building products to address it. “With Dtex, we have found a fast-growing, long-term, investible operation that is not just a band-aid collection of tools, which would be short-lived and replaced.”