Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The three founders of York IE have a vision about how to change the way early stage startups get funding. They have experience shattering norms, having built a successful startup, Dyn, in Manchester, New Hampshire, which is not exactly a hot-bed of startup activity.

The founders want to take that same spirit and apply it to investing, while maintaining its headquarters in New Hampshire (and Boston). In fact, the three founders — Kyle York, Joe Raczka and Adam Coughlin — launched Dyn and built it to $30 million in ARR before taking a dime in venture funding. They went onto raise $88 million before being acquired by Oracle in 2016. They believe they can apply the lessons that they learned to other early stage startups.

“We think, especially in B2B and SaaS, there is a way to build a scalable, effective and efficient business without chasing massive fund raises, diluting your company, bringing on traditional venture investors and chasing those kind of on-paper vanity metrics,” company CEO and co-founder Kyle York told TechCrunch.

For the past five years, while working at Oracle after the acquisition, the founders have been testing their theories while advising startups and acting as angel investors. They believed it was time to take all of those learnings and apply it to their own firm.

“I started thinking about how to transition out of Oracle, and what I wanted to do from a career perspective and we wanted to build a modern investment firm less focused on how to deploy as much capital as possible for the limited partners, and more on working with the entrepreneurs to help coach them on a path to success,” York said.

The company still wants to act as investors, and to make money along the way, but they want to help build more solid, grounded companies. York says that they want the founders truly understand that they are selling a part of their company in exchange for those dollars, and that it makes sense to have a strong foundation before taking on money.

York wants to change this culture of fund raising for fund raising’s sake. He acknowledges that some companies with deep tech or deep infrastructure require that kind of substantial up-front investment to get off the ground, but SaaS companies are supposed to be able to take advantage of modern technology to build companies more easily, and he wants to see them build solid companies first and foremost.

“The goal shouldn’t be to raise more capital. The goal should be to build a healthy successful, scalable company,” he said.

To put their money where their mouth is, the new firm will not take management fees. “We are investing like a normal investor and coming through with equity position, but we are betting on the future. In essence, if the startup wins, then we win.”

A growing number of IT breaches has led to security becoming a critical and central aspect of how computing systems are run and maintained. Today, a startup that focuses on one specific area — developing security tools aimed at developers and the work they do — has closed a major funding round that underscores the growth of that area.

Snyk — a London and Boston-based company that got its start identifying and developing security solutions for developers working on open source code — is today announcing that it has raised $70 million, funding that it will be using to continue expanding its capabilities and overall business. For example, the company has more recently expanded to building security solutions to help developers identify and fix vulnerabilities around containers, an increasingly standard unit of software used to package up and run code across different computing environments.

Open source — Snyk works as an integration into existing developer workflows, compatible with the likes of GitHub, Bitbucket and GitLab, as well as CI/CD pipelines — was an easy target to hit. It’s used in 95% of all enterprises, with up to 77% of open source components liable to have vulnerabilities, by Snyk’s estimates. Containers are a different issue.

“The security concerns around containers are almost more about ownership than technology,” Guy Podjarny, the president who co-founded the company with Assaf Hefetz and Danny Grander, explained in an interview. “They are in a twilight zone between infrastructure and code. They look like virtual machines and suffer many of same concerns such as being unpatched or having permissions that are too permissive.”

While containers are present in fewer than 30% of computing environments today, their growth is on the rise, according to Gartner, which forecasts that by 2022, over 75% of global organizations will run containerized applications. Snyk estimates that a full 44% of Docker image scans (Docker being one of the major container vendors) have known vulnerabilities.

This latest round is being led by Accel with participation from existing investors GV and Boldstart Ventures. These three, along with a fourth investor (Heavybit) also put $22 million into the company as recently as September 2018. That round was made at a valuation of $100 million, and from what we understand from a source close to the startup, it’s now in the “range” of $500 million.

“Accel has a long history in the security market and we believe Snyk is bringing a truly unique, developer-first approach to security in the enterprise,” said Matt Weigand of Accel said in a statement. “The strength of Snyk’s customer base, rapidly growing free user community, leadership team and innovative product development prove the company is ready for this next exciting phase of growth and execution.”

Indeed, the company has hit some big milestones in the last year that could explain that hike. It now has some 300,000 developers using it around the globe, with its customer base growing some 200 percent this year and including the likes of Google, Microsoft, Salesforce and ASOS (sidenote: you know that if developers at developer-centric places themselves working at the vanguard of computing, like Google and Microsoft, are using your product, that is a good sign). Notably, that has largely come by word of mouth — inbound interest.

The company in July of this year took on a new CEO, Peter McKay, who replaced Podjarny. McKay was the company’s first investor and has a track record in helping to grow large enterprise security businesses, a sign of the trajectory that Snyk is hoping to follow.

“Today, every business, from manufacturing to retail and finance, is becoming a software business,” said McKay. “There is an immediate and fast growing need for software security solutions that scale at the same pace as software development. This investment helps us continue to bring Snyk’s product-led and developer-focused solutions to more companies across the globe, helping them stay secure as they embrace digital innovation – without slowing down.”

McDonald’s is increasingly looking at tech acquisitions as a way to reinvent the fast-food experience. Today, it’s announcing that it’s buying  Apprente, a startup building conversational agents that can automate voice-based ordering in multiple languages.

If that sounds like a good fit for fast-food drive thru, that’s exactly what McDonald’s leadership has in mind. In fact, the company has already been testing Apprente’s technology in select locations, creating voice-activated drive-thrus (along with robot fryers) that it said will offer “faster, simpler and more accurate order taking.”

McDonald’s said the technology could also be used in mobile and kiosk ordering. Presumably, besides lowering wait times, this could allow restaurants to operate with smaller staffs.

Earlier this year, McDonald’s acquired online personalization startup Dynamic Yield for more than $300 million, with the goal of creating a drive-thru experience that’s customized based on things like weather and restaurant traffic. It also invested in mobile app company Plexure.

Now the company is looking to double down on its tech investments by creating a new Silicon Valley-based group called McD Tech Labs, which the Apprente team becoming the the group’s founding members, and Apprente co-founder Itamar Arel becoming vice president of McD Tech Labs. McDonald’s said it will expand the team by hiring more engineers, data scientists and other tech experts.

“Building our technology infrastructure and digital capabilities are fundamental to our Velocity Growth Plan and enable us to meet rising expectations from our customers, while making it simpler and even more enjoyable for crew members to serve guests” said McDonald’s President and CEO Steve Easterbrook in a statement. “Apprente’s gifted team, and the technology they have developed, will form McD Tech Labs, a new group integrated in our Global Technology team that will take our culture of innovation one step further.”

Apprent was founded in 2017 and raised a total of $4.8 million from investors including AME Cloud Ventures, Morado Ventures, Pathbreaker Ventures, Point72 Ventures, Greylock Partners and StageOne Ventures, according to Crunchbase. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

As hardware makers continue to work on ways of making wide-scale quantum computing a reality, a startup out of Australia that is building software to help reduce noise and errors on quantum computing machines has raised a round of funding to fuel its U.S. expansion.

Q-CTRL is designing firmware for computers and other machines (such as quantum sensors) that perform quantum calculations to identify the potential for errors, making them more resistant and able to stay working for longer (the Q in its name is a reference to qubits, the basic building block of quantum computing). The startup is today announcing that it has raised $15 million, money that it plans to use to double its team (currently numbering 25) and set up shop on the West Coast, specifically Los Angeles.

This Series A is coming from a list of backers that speaks to the startup’s success to date in courting quantum hardware companies as customers. Led by Square Peg Capital — a prolific Australian VC that has backed homegrown startups like Bugcrowd and Canva, but also those further afield such as Stripe — it also includes new investor Sierra Ventures as well as Sequoia Capital, Main Sequence Ventures, and Horizons Ventures.

Q-CTRL’s customers are some of the bigger names in quantum computing and IT such as Rigetti, Bleximo and Accenture, among others. IBM — which earlier this year unveiled its first commercial quantum computer — singled it out last year for its work in advancing quantum technology.

The problem that Q-CTRL is aiming to address is basic but arguably critical to solving if quantum computing ever hopes to make the leap out of the lab and into wider use in the real world.

Quantum computers and other machines like quantum sensors, which are built on quantum physics architecture, are able to perform computations that go well beyond what can be done by normal computers today, with the applications for such technology including cryptography, biosciences, advanced geological exploration and much more. But quantum computing machines are known to be unstable, in part because of the fragility of the quantum state, which introduces a lot of noise and subsequent errors.

As Frederic pointed out recently, scientists are confident that this is ultimately a solvable issue. Q-CTRL is one of the hopefuls working on that, by providing a set of tools that runs on quantum machines, visualises noise and decoherence, and then deploys controls to “defeat” those errors.

Q-CTRL currently has four products it offers to the market, Black Opal, Boulder Opal, Open Controls and Devkit — aimed respectively at students/those exploring quantum computing, hardware makers, the research community, and end users/algorithm developers.

Q-CTRL was founded in 2017 by Michael Biercuk, a Professor of Quantum Physics & Quantum Technology at the University of Sydney and a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems, who studied in the U.S., with a PhD in physics from Harvard.

“Being at the vanguard of the birth of a new industry is extraordinary,” he said in a statement. “We’re also thrilled to be assembling one of the most impressive investor syndicates in quantum technology. Finding investors who understand and embrace both the promise and the challenge of building quantum computers is almost magical.”

Why choose Los Angeles for building out a U.S. presence, you might ask? Southern California, it turns out, has shaped up to be a key area for quantum research and development, with several of the universities in the region building out labs dedicated to the area, and companies like Lockheed Martin and Google also contributing to the ecosystem. This means a strong pipeline of talent and conversation in what is still a nascent area.

Given that it is still early days for quantum computing technology, that gives a lot of potential options to a company  like Q-CTRL longer-term: the company might continue to build a business as it does today, selling its technology to a plethora of hardware makers and researchers in the field; or it might get snapped up by a specific hardware company to integrate Q-CTRL’s solutions more closely onto its machines (and keep them away from competitors). Or, it could make like a quantum particle and follow both of those paths at the same time.

“Q-CTRL impressed us with their strategy; by providing infrastructure software to improve quantum computers for R&D teams and end-users, they’re able to be a central player in bringing this technology to reality,” said Tushar Roy, a partner at Square Peg. “Their technology also has applications beyond quantum computing, including in quantum-based sensing, which is a rapidly-growing market. In Q-CTRL we found a rare combination of world-leading technical expertise with an understanding of customers, products and what it takes to build an impactful business.”

The moment is finally here, Apple fans. This morning at 10AM PT/1PM ET, the company will unveil the latest version of the iPhone. You can read up on all of the latest rumors here (or watch this handy video). You can also watch the live stream right here.

The iPhone could well present a shift in the way the company positions its products amid slowing sales. The line is believed to include both a standard and “pro” version, the latter of which will include a fully revamped triple-camera system.

Also expected is a new version of the Apple Watch with sleep tracking, dates for the latest versions of iOS and macOS and a key update on content plays, including Apple TV+ and Arcade.

As always, we’ll be arriving in Cupertino bright and early to bring you all of the latest. Just bookmark this here post and we’ll see you soon.

Adobe has a lot going on with Analytics and the Customer Experience Platform, a place to gather data to understand customers better. Today, it announced a new analytics tool that enables employees to work directly with customer journey data to help deliver a better customer experience.

The customer journey involves a lot of different systems from a company data lake to CRM to point of sale. This tool pulls all of that data together from across multiple systems and various channels and brings it into the data analysis workspace, announced in July.

Nate Smith, group manager for product marketing for Adobe Analytics, says the idea is to give access to this data in a standard way across the organization, whether it’s a data scientist, an analyst with SQL skills or a marketing pro simply looking for insight.

“When you think about organizations that are trying to do omni-channel analysis or trying to get that next channel of data in, they now have the platform to do that, where the data can come in and we standardize it on an academic model,” he said. They then layer this ability to continuously query the data in a visual way to get additional insight they might not have seen.

Screenshot: Adobe

Adobe is trying to be as flexible as possible in every step of the process, and openness was a guiding principle here, Smith said. That means that data can come from any source, and users can visualize it using Adobe tools or an external tool like Tableau or Looker. What’s more, they can get data in or out as needed, or even use your their own models, Smith said.

“We recognize that as much as we’d love to have everyone go all in on the Adobe stack, we understand that there is existing significant investment in other tech and that integration and interoperability really needs to happen, as well,” he said.

Ultimately this is about giving marketers access to a full picture of the customer data to deliver the best experience possible based on what you know about them. “Being able to have insight and engagement points to help with the moments that matter and provide great experience is really what we’re aiming to do with this,” he said.

This product will be generally available next month.

When all of us are carrying phones that can snap a thousand photos a minute and are connected to cloud systems that can store millions, there’s an undeniable charm to physical photos. The ones deemed worthy; the ones so special that they must be transformed from bit to atom.

While photo printers are nothing new, Polaroid is twisting up the concept (and rebooting an idea from a few years back) with the “Polaroid Lab”. It’s a $129 tower that uses the light from your phone’s screen, bounced off a series of mirrors, to make a proper Polaroid from the photos you’ve already taken.

Open your photo in Polaroid’s companion app, place your phone (any iPhone after the 6S, and ‘current models of Samsung, Huawei, Google Pixel, and One Plus’ Android handsets) on top of the tower, and push the red button. A few seconds later, out pops a grey Polaroid. Did it work? You’ll have to wait a few minutes for it to develop, just like the good (?) ol’ days.

Is using light and mirrors better than just sending a picture to a printer over Bluetooth or WiFi and blasting the ink out from a cartridge? Maybe not. But it’s neat! It’s physical and sciencey and fun — and, arguably, as close as you can get to having a “true” Polaroid picture of a moment that’s already happened.

The company says that the Polaroid Lab works with its existing I-Type and 600 series films… which, as any enthusiast could tell you, doesn’t come cheap. Expect each photo printed here to cost you a buck or two. That’s a bit steeper than many at-home printers and definitely pricier than just blasting out some 4x6s at Costco, but this thing will almost certainly still find its audience amongst those going for a certain look.

There’s also a way to “blow up” one photo across a bunch of Polaroids, if you’ve got the film to spare. Here’s a demo video of what that looks like:

If the whole concept seems familiar, you might be remembering the Impossible Instant Lab — a product of a veeeery similar vein that raised over half a million dollars on Kickstarter back in 2012. The Impossible Instant Lab was discontinued in July of 2017… just a few months after the team behind it acquired the rights to the Polaroid brand. This seems to be a reboot of the concept, now with the added weight and officialness of the Polaroid name thrown behind it.

The team behind the Polaroid Lab says it should hit the shelves by October 10th.

Glance, a subsidiary of Indian mobile ad business firm InMobi, said today it has raised $45 million as it prepares to scale its business outside of India and expand its product offerings.

The unnamed, maiden financing round for Glance was funded by Mithril Capital, a growth stage investment firm co-founded by Silicon Valley investors Peter Thiel and Ajay Royan.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO of InMobi Group, said the current round has not closed and could bag another $30 million to $55 million in the next two months.

Glance operates an eponymous service that shows media content in local languages on the lock screen of Android-powered smartphones. InMobi has partnered with a number of top smartphone vendors including Xaomi, Samsung, and Gionee to integrate Glance into their operating systems.

Glance, which was launched in September last year and supports English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu, has amassed 50 million monthly active users in India, its primary market. Users are spending an average of 22 minutes with Glance each day, he said.

“All the new smartphone models launched by Samsung, Xiaomi, and a handful of other vendors have launched with Glance on them,” Tiwari said.

In a statement, Mithril Capital’s Rohan, said, “We share Glance’s global vision of breaking through the constraints of application architectures and linguistic markets to deliver rich, frictionless, and engaging experiences across a myriad of cultures and languages.” As part of the financing round, he is joining Glance’s board.

Glance does not show traditional ads, something it intends to never change, but shows a certain kind of content to drive engagement for brands.

In the months to come, Glance plans to expand the platform and bring short-form videos (Glance TV), and mini games (Glance Games) to the lock screen. It is also working on a feature dubbed Glance Location that will enable brands to court users in their vicinity, and Glance Shopping to explore ways to bring commerce around content.

As of today, InMobi Group is not monetizing Glance platform, but plans to explore ways to make money from it by early next year, Tiwari said.

The 12-year-old firm said it plans to expand footprints of Glance outside of India. The company plans to take Glance to some Southeast Asian markets like Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. InMobi’s Tiwari said the Glance has already started to find users in these markets.

InMobi Group, which had raised $320 million prior to today’s financing round, has been profitable for several years. But the company decided to raise external funding to accelerate Glance’s growth, Tiwari said.

The firm, which has three subsidiaries including its marquee marketing cloud division, plans to go public in the next few years. But instead of taking the entire group public, Tiwari said the firm is thinking of publicly listing each division as they mature. The marketing cloud division, which brings in the vast majority of revenue for the firm, will go public first, he said.

“The IPO plans remain, and we will evaluate them as we go along. The reality, however, is that the market is so big and there is so much room that we can continue to be private for a few more years,” he said.

Pento, a Danish startup working on a better payroll experience for companies and employees, has raised $2.8 million in seed funding.

Leading the round is Point Nine Capital and Seedcamp, with participation from a number of smaller funds and angel investors, including departing Atomico Partner Mattias Ljungman. The company had previously raised $700,000 from the likes of Preseed Ventures, and Futuristic.vc.

Founded by Jonas Bøgh Larsen (CEO) and Emil Hagbarth (CTO) in 2016, Pento offers a SaaS for companies wanting to automate their payroll and offer complementary features to employees, such as user-friendly access to pay history and personal pay-related data. The startup is live in Denmark with over 400 customers and says a U.K. launch is happening soon.

“Payroll is a very manual process for most companies, which causes errors and is super time-consuming,” Larsen tells me. “The process usually includes a lot of manual tasks like updating spreadsheets, sending emails with personal information, making manual bank transfers, manually keying in data from HR software, and much more. We have built a SaaS product that automates all of this”.

The current feature set of Pento include things like tax reporting, pension reporting, payslip generation, payouts to employees and tax authorities, and bookkeeping. “[This] means payroll admins can run the whole payroll process in one single product, usually in a matter of minutes rather than hours,” claims Larsen.

Typical Pento customers are companies with 1-150 employees, although the startup is also seeing quite a lot of demand from bigger companies too. It operates a classic SaaS model, charging a monthly subscription per seat.

“We currently charge £3 per employee per month for our basic plan, and charge £7 per employee per month for more support and more features,” explains the Pento CEO.

Meanwhile, competitors are said to fall into three camps: Traditional payroll outsourcing; older payroll software products like Sage, Brightpay and MoneySoft; and newer competitors like Payfit and Xero Payroll. (There’s also Duane Jackson’s latest upstart, Staffology Payroll, which looks to be similar to Pento on the pure SaaS side.)

“Contrary to other newer payroll products like Payfit and Xero, Pento has a 100% focus on payroll, not HR or accounting, and we will much rather integrate to other products in the ecosystem than try to build it all ourselves,” adds Larsen.

SimShine, a computer vision startup based in Shenzhen, has raised $8 million in pre-Series A funding for SimCam, its line of home security cameras that use edge computing to keep data on-device. The funding was led by Cheetah Mobile, with participation from Skychee, Skyview Fund and Oak Pacific Investment.

Earlier this year, SimShine raised $310,095 in a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. It will use its pre-Series A round for product development and hiring.

SimShine’s team started off developing computer vision and edge computing software, spending five years working with enterprise clients before launching SimCam.

The company plans to release more smart home products that use edge computing with the ultimate goal of building a IoT platform to connect different devices, co-founder and chief marketing officer Joe Pham tells TechCrunch. SimCam currently integrates with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, with support for Apple Homekit in the works.

Pham says edge computing protects users’ privacy by keeping data, including face recognition data, on device, while also decreasing latency and false alarms, because calculations are performed continuously on the device (cameras connect to Wi-Fi so customers can watch surveillance video on their smartphones). It also means customers don’t have to sign up for the subscription plans that many cloud-based home security cameras require and reduces the price of each device since SimCam does not have to maintain cloud servers.