Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Adam Draper, the son of that Draper, is changing things up a bit at his accelerator.

Boost VC has been living life on the fringe of Bay Area accelerators, chasing trends like VR and crypto (and sometimes a combo of the two) hard while courting outliers including a “robot fish platform” and a “cold metal fusion printer”.

While Boost VC’s investments have varied in feasibility, Draper says most of them fit into his particular vision of emerging tech that he calls “sci-fi tech,” something he says is more about finding technologies that give humans “superpowers,” a term he seems to be giving a pretty broad definition with a sci-fi portfolio that includes a jetpack startup and a hotel booking site.

Canvassing frothy sectors hasn’t always been a particularly strong recipe for sustained success; both VR/AR and blockchain startups have endured bear markets in the past couple years. Draper encourages his bets to stay lean and low-profile; the accelerator’s official slogan was, at one point, “be the cockroach.”

Adam Draper isn’t planning to shift away from long-shots, but he is turning the seven-year-old Boost VC into a more codified accelerator in an aim to provide a more compelling pitch to savvy entrepreneurs that need more money early-on.

The headline changes are that Boost VC is halving the number of companies in its accelerator classes to 7-10 companies, and is increasing the checks that it’s writing to $500k while taking a bigger slice of its portfolio startups (15 percent). The accelerator is still giving the same perks and is hoping to up the programming to make the smaller group more close-knit.

The numbers may be shifting, but the biggest change is that there are hard numbers to begin with. Boost VC has at times looked like a club for Draper’s early angel investments, largely because the check sizes and valuations varied so heavily — investments ranged from $50k to $500k.

“Standardizing everything just makes it all way, way better,” Draper told TechCrunch. “YC is awesome, and that’s why I forked their model. I think programming-based VC is the best model in venture capital.”

With this change towards deal uniformity, Draper may be stripping some of the volume but also focusing more on quality, rather than breadth. This is undoubtedly a necessary step as accelerator behemoth Y Combinator continues to surge in size, now betting on nearly 400 companies per year while sucking up a pretty sizable pool of accelerator applicants from other institutions.

Last year, Draper announced the close of Boost’s third fund, which clocked in at $38.6 million. The team is about to take applications for its 13th “tribe” of accelerator startups.

“If you are a consumer or enterprise-based business, YC is fantastic and they have repeated success. If you are in this ‘sci-fi’ category than I think specialization is very important and it’s also slightly more expensive,” he says.

A major question will be whether the higher valuations and check sizes will shift Boost away from some of the riskier and stranger “Hogwarts-inspired” VR and crypto investments that it’s been making. At the same time 15% is a pretty sizable portion of equity for founders to offload so early in their life cycle, though Draper believes plenty of teams will be interested in landing a $500k investment.

“Boost isn’t going to be for everyone, and I’m okay with that,” Draper says.

Before there was the Nest Home — heck, before there was even the Google Home Hub — there was the Lenovo Smart Display. The smart screen was far and away the nicest of the original Google Assistant screens, and the partnership between the two companies continues to be a fruitful, including the recent Smart Clock, a purpose-built bedside alarm clock.

With the Smart Display 7, announced today at IFA in Berlin, the company has slimmed down both the screen size and overall device footprint. At seven inches, it’s smaller than both of the original models (eight and 10 inches, for the record). It’s a rare step down in screen size for a new generation, but given the relative freshness of the category, there’s probably a fair amount of trial and error here.

The design language looks nice enough — perhaps a bit more generic than the first generation with its faux wood panel backing but the fabric speaker grille is a nice touch that fits in nicely with the rest of the Google Home line. Feature wise, you’re getting pretty much what you’ll get with the rest of the Assistant smart displays — Youtube, answers, smart home control.

Of course, Lenovo’s got more direct competition this time out from Google itself, in the form of the Nest Hub Max. And when it comes to products like these, it’s can be tough to compete with first parties. That said, at $130, it’s a full $100 cheaper than Google’s version, which is compelling in and of itself. The device ships next month.

Front, the company that lets you manage your inboxes as a team, is adding one more channel, WhatsApp. Starting today, you can read and reply to people contacting you through WhatsApp.

This feature is specifically targeted at users of WhatsApp Business. You can get a business phone number through Twilio and then hand out that number to your customers.

After that, you can see the messages coming in Front and treat them like any Front message. In particular, you can assign conversations to a specific team members so that your customers get a relevant answer as quickly as possible. If you need more information, Front integrates with popular CRMs, such as Salesforce, Pipedrive and HubSpot.

You can also discuss with other teammates before sending a reply to your customer. It works like any chat interface — you can at-mention your coworkers and start an in-line chat in the middle of a WhatsApp thread. When you’re ready to answer, you can hit reply and send a WhatsApp message.

Front started with generic email addresses, such as sales@yourcompany or jobs@yourcompany. But the company has added more channels over time, such as Facebook, Twitter, website chat and text messages.

If you’ve already been using Front with text messages, you can now easily add WhatsApp and use the same service for that new channel.

The Porsche Taycan is here — actually two flavors, the Turbo S and the Turbo — in case you haven’t seen the deluge of media coverage. The upshot: the “lower” priced Turbo starts at $150,900 while the Turbo S begins at $185,000.

While Porsche is promising cheaper variants of the Taycan next year, well-heeled drivers of the world will have to make do with these two options for now. But why limit yourself? It’s a Porsche, it’s a sports car,  it’s a status symbol and it’s electric. Let’s get to work on some dual vice and virtue signaling.

Luckily, the configurator is here, giving potential customers, Tesla fans and critics, or just regular folks dreaming of Porsche’s first electric car, a chance to design their very own Taycan. No strings attached.

TechCrunch dove into the configurator. What we found were lots of opportunity to customize the vehicle, right down to the headlights, wheels and even the badge. Some of them are even “free.” Here are the most interesting options.

For the purposes of this exercise, I’m going with the more frugal option, the Taycan Turbo. (And yes, the fact that an electric car has the word turbo attached to it, has not escaped me or TechCrunch. I’ll remind everyone we live in a world where a four-door car is called a coupe.)

And I’m looking for all of the opportunities to get the free stuff, unless it’s super cool, and then I’ll theoretically (because this is a game of pretend) spring for the add on.

1. Record scratch

Before I can even dive in, I am forced to choose a mobile charger for $1,120. There’s another more expensive charging option that includes a home energy manager for $1,660, but it’s not available yet.

And now, I see another option that I am forced to pay for. The fixed panoramic roof in glass is $1,490. For now, the Turbo S and Turbo come with the glass roof, but instead of making it standard, this is a required add on.

That $150,900 car now costs $153,510.

2. The free colors and the one you’ll pay for

Customers entering the configurator are given two options: Turbo or the pricier Turbo S. Regardless of which one a customer chooses, there are 10 colors to choose from. Nine of those are gratis, meaning there is no extra fee. These “free” colors include white, black, and six metallic colors such as Carrera White, Jet Black, Volcano Grey, Dolomite Silver, Gentian Blue, Frozen Blue and Mamba Green.

One color comes with a price. The Carmine Red, pictured below, costs another $3,150.

The Carmine Red doesn’t fall into my subjective no-cost-unless it’s too cool category. (don’t @ me) So, instead I opt for the $0 added cost Gentian Blue Metallic.

Actually scratch that. I live in the desert. Let’s go with Carrera White Metallic.

3. Wheels

I could spend as much as another $7,650 for 21-inch exclusive design wheels with carbon fiber aero blades. But not this time. Instead, I go with the one $0 option, 20-inch Turbo Aero wheels. (See even the wheels are called Turbo). All season tires are $0.

But wait, what is this? For the bargain price of $1,290, I can paint the wheels to match the exterior color or pick from a few other custom options including wheels are fully painted in Satin Aurum (a champagne, rose gold color), high-gloss black, jet black, or satin platinum.

I pick the exterior color and then I’m met with a terrible reality. To get the exterior color on the wheels I have to opt for the 21-inch Mission E or Taycan design wheels, which cost $3,570. I swallow hard, pick the Mission E design wheels and move on.

For those who are counting, that base Taycan Turbo is now $xxx,xxx, a price that includes the charger, the design wheels and the painted wheel option.

Here’s an example of the Carrera White Metallic with the Satin Aurum.

And another example of the matching exterior wheels.

 

4. Interior colors

Back in my frugal mindset, I scroll down to the configurator. There are three options for no additional cost, the all-black leather or two leather-free options, the race tex in black or graphite blue.

I pick the leather-free option of graphite blue. There six other options ranging between $570 and $3,070 of additional cost. I ignore these.

5. Seats

I have sat in the Turbo S. The seats are nice and snug and well made. In the configurator, the two options are standard and there is no extra cost. I can choose between power seats with 14 different functions and adaptive sport seats with 18-way operation. I go with the sporty option.

6. Dozens of options

From here, it can get expensive. There are dozens of options for the exterior and performance. The first item is under the label “options.” There are two, both of which cost more money. The premium package of $4,340 includes the addition of a fixed panoramic glass roof (which I’m already paying for), park assist and “storage.” It’s unclear what storage means.

The performance package is $5,400 and is focused on the way the vehicle can be manipulated. This is a sports car after all. This option includes rear axle steering, the company’s  Porsche Dynamic Chassis Control Sport and something called “electric sport sound.”

I skip all of these and continue to scroll for the free options.

7. No badge, no problem

I continue to scroll down and there are so many places to spend more money, including the window trim and the logo. But two items stand out. For no additional cost, I can remove the Taycan turbo” logo on the rear and I can add/remove the “electric logo” on the front doors in high gloss silver.

I’m told Porsche has had a long standing policy of letting customers remove the badge. And so, it seems Porsche is continuing this with the Taycan.

This seems cool, or maybe it’s that $0 figure next to. I opt to remove the Turbo badge.

8. Performance

There are a number of different packages, but only one is “free.” That’s the two-speed transmission, which comes standard.

9. Lights

Sadly, there are no freebies here. But there is one fun item. One option, which costs $580, is the addition of LED lights in glacier blue.

This seems cool, but nah. Nothing flashy. Let’s keep this sports car under budget.

10. Smoking package?

I head into the interiors section, where I’m confronted with an array of choices to further customize the Turbo. I’m looking for the $0 options and come across the only one, a smoking package. This package includes a plug-in ashtray for the front cup holder.

I pass.

11. Final $0 items

There are dozens more options that could take the Taycan Turbo into the pricing stratosphere. But for this experiment, I’m looking for value. I spot one more item that can be added for no extra cost. Door-sill guards in black brushed aluminum.

The remaining $0 items including charging cables.

Final rundown: Porsche Taycan Turbo with the glass roof, in metallic Carrera white and the special Mission E design wheels and matching exterior color, plus the no cost add-ons are $159,720. Next time, we’ll shoot for how high we can get the price.

French startup Upflow has raised a $2.7 million funding round (€2.5 million) from Kima Ventures, eFounders and various business angels. The company tracks your outstanding invoices and makes sure you get paid on time.

If you’re running a small company, chances are you’re using Excel spreadsheets to enter invoice information, check your company’s bank account every day and manually tag invoices that have been paid.

Microsoft Excel has been such a powerful tool for so many different use cases that plenty of startups are trying to replace it — I call this phenomenon The Great Unbundling of Excel. And Upflow is one of those startups.

If you want to replace a system that works well, you need to make it radically better. In order to do that, Upflow has created a payment brick that sits between your bank account and your customers.

Every time you send an invoice, you can write an email from the Upflow interface so that the entire sales team is on the same page. Making this experience collaborative with a software-as-a-service approach is already a big improvement over Excel spreadsheets.

Your invoice features banking information for your Upflow account. When your customer transfers the money, Upflow can instantly mark an invoice as paid. The startup transfers money back to your company’s bank account every day.

Over time, you get insights about your recurring customers, you can see how much money your clients collectively owe you and you can send reminders to late clients.

If you want to read more about Upflow, you can read my profile of the company.

Facebook’s lead data protection regulator in Europe has confirmed it’s put questions to the company about a major security breach that we reported on yesterday.

“The DPC became aware of this issue through the recent media coverage and we immediately made contact with Facebook and we have asked them a series of questions. We are awaiting Facebook’s responses to those questions,” a spokeswoman for the Irish Data Protection Commission told us.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for a response.

As we reported earlier, a security research discovered an unsecured database of hundreds of millions of phone numbers linked to Facebook accounts.

The exposed server contained more than 419 million records over several databases on Facebook users from multiple countries, including 18 million records of users in the U.K.

We were able to verify a number of records in the database — including UK Facebook users’ data.

The presence of Europeans’ data in the scraped stash makes the breach a clear matter of interest to the region’s data watchdogs.

Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes stiff penalties for compliance failures such as security breaches — with fines that can scale as high as 4% of a company’s annual turnover.

Ireland’s DPC is Facebook’s lead data protection regulator in Europe under GDPR’s one-stop shop mechanism — meaning it leads on cross-border actions, though other concerned DPAs can contribute to cases and may also chip in views on any formal outcomes that result.

The UK’s data protection watchdog, the ICO, told us it is aware of the Facebook security incident.

“We are in contact with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), as they are the lead supervisory authority for Facebook Ireland Limited. The ICO will continue to liaise with the IDPC to establish the details of the incident and to determine if UK residents have been affected,” an ICO spokeswoman also told us.

It’s not yet clear whether the Irish DPC will open a formal investigation of the incident.

It does already have a large number of open investigations on its desk into Facebook and Facebook-owned businesses since GDPR’s one-stop mechanism came into force — including one into a major token security breach last year, and many, many more.

In the latest breach instance, it’s not clear exactly when Facebook users phone numbers were scraped from the platform.

In a response yesterday Facebook said the data-set is “old”, adding that it “appears to have information obtained before we made changes last year to remove people’s ability to find others using their phone numbers”.

If that’s correct, the data breach is likely to pre-date April 2018 — which was when Facebook announced it was making changes to its account search and recovery feature, after finding it had been abused by what it dubbed “malicious actors”.

“Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way,” Facebook said at the time.

It would also therefore pre-date GDPR coming into force, in May 2018, so would likely fall under earlier EU data protection laws — which carry less stringent penalties.

Image and video manipulation powered by deep learning, or so-called “deepfakes,” represent a strange and horrifying facet of a promising new field. If we’re going to crack down on these creepy creations, we’ll need to fight fire with fire; Facebook, Microsoft, and many others are banding together to help make machine learning capable of detecting deepfakes — and they want you to help.

Though the phenomenon is still new, we are nevertheless in an arms race where the methods of detection vie with the methods of creation. Ever more convincing fakes appear regularly, and though while they are frequently benign, the possibility of having your face flawlessly grafted into a compromising position is very much there — and many a celebrity has already had it done to them.

Facebook, as part of a coalition with Microsoft, the Partnership for AI, and several universities including Oxford, Berkeley, and MIT, is working to empower the side of good with better detection techniques.

“The most interesting advances in AI have happened when there’s a clear benchmark on a dataset to write papers against,” said Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer in a media call yesterday. The dataset for object recognition might be millions of images of ordinary objects, while the dataset for voice transcription would be hours of different kinds of speech. But there’s no such set for deepfakes.

We talked about this challenge at our Robotics and AI event earlier this year in what I thought was a very interesting discussion:

Fortunately Facebook is planning on dedicating around $10 million in resources to make this Deepfake Detection Challenge happen.

“Creation of these datasets can be challenging, because you want to make sure that everyone participating in it is clear and gives consent so they aren’t surprised by the usage of it,” Schroepfer continued. And since most deepfakes are made without any consent whatsoever, they’re not really permissible for usage in an academic context.

So Facebook and its partners are making the deepfake content out of whole cloth, he said. “You want a dataset of source video, and then a dataset of personalities you can map onto that. Then we’re spending engineering time implementing the latest most advanced deepfake techniques to generate altered videos as part of the dataset.”

And while you’re entirely justified in wondering, no, they aren’t using Facebook data to do this. They’ve got paid actors.

This dataset will be provided to interested parties, who will be able to build solutions and test them, putting the results on a leaderboard. At some point there will be cash prizes given out, though the details are a ways off. With luck this will spur serious competition among academics and researchers.

“We need the full involvement of the research community in an open environment to develop methods and systems that can detect and mitigate the ill-effects of manipulated multimedia,” said the University of Maryland’s Rama Chellappa in a news release. “By making available a large corpus of genuine and manipulated media, the proposed challenge will excite and enable the research community to collectively address this looming crisis.​”

Initial tests of the dataset are planned for the International Conference on Computer Vision in October, with the full launch happening at NeurIPS in December.

A year ago we broke the news that payment giant Stripe was quietly making its first move into business finance by testing a service for advancing cash to existing customers. Now, nearly 12 months on to the day, the company is finally unveiling an official product: today, starting first in the US, it is launching Stripe Capital, a service for advancing cash to customers that in turn gets repaid out of their future sales made through Stripe’s payment platform, with loan amounts and repayments based on the customer’s transaction activity on Stripe itself.

The launch of Stripe Capital is coming at a key time for the company: we understand that Stripe is gearing up for a bigger push to diversify into other financial services, specifically with the launch of its first business credit card product (akin to Brex, from what we understand). The company is holding its Sessions user conference in San Francisco next week, which is likely to bring more product news.

Stripe Capital is being made available both to direct customers of Stripe’s, and to business customers of platforms and marketplaces that use Stripe Connect. (In other words, the platform and marketplace customers will have access to Stripe Capital themselves, and they in turn can also offer Stripe Capital-based cash advances to their customers.)

In an interview, Stripe co-founder and president John Collison noted that the financing for cash advances in both cases was coming via a single banking partner that the company was not making public at this time.

Although loans can potentially stretch into six-figures (no specific limit has been set), he added that Stripe expects the typical amount — based on financing issued so far — to be more in the region of $10,000-$20,000.

As with credit cards, the idea behind Stripe Capital is to give the company’s customers quick (next-day) access to funds to help both with daily liquidity as well as to invest in growth.

Cash advances more generally have been a lucrative area for competitors like PayPal and Square, which have used the service to complement their payments businesses, provide more touch points to customers and diversify revenue streams. (And more competitors are coming around the corner: Kabbage, which makes loans to small businesses, is moving into payments.)

Square in its last quarterly earnings report noted that Square Capital facilitated 78,000 loans totalling $528 million, up 36% over the year before, and that it had overall loaned more than $5 billion across 800,000 loans since the service launched in May 2014. (Indeed, it looks like Square Capital will stick around for a fair bit longer than other business forays, such as Square’s move into food delivery, with Caviar now sold off to DoorDash.)

Stripe is best known for its slick payments platform — by way of a simple API, e-commerce and other businesses can integrate the ability to take payments into a site or an app. That service has helped to catapult the startup from more modest beginnings to valuation of $22.5 billion earlier this year.

But as it continues to grow and possibly(?) inch closer to a potential public listing — zero comment on that front from Collison this week — it has gradually be diversifying its business, offering companies for example incorporation services, fraud management and more. Stripe Capital has something in common with the fraud protection: it’s building on Stripe’s big data analytics and algorithms to intelligently deduce who might be ripe to take a loan, and how much that customer might be able to pay back.

Stripe and companies like it — startups that are disrupting financial services — are also making this move for another reason. More traditional banks are apparently lending less and less money to small businesses, with Stripe claiming that the amount loaned in the last decade declining by half. Tapping into their trove of customer data and systems that are already tightly integrated with their customers’ finances, Stripe is not only stepping in to provide loans, but to do so in a more efficient way than the banks do.

“We use our data to underwrite the loans,” Collison said. “In the past you had to wait weeks or months while a loan officer reviewed an application, but we can see a customer’s historical performance on Stripe and apply our machine learning models to do the work, analysing with no human intervention.”

The new fall semester is upon us, and at elite private colleges and universities, it’s hard to find a trendier major than Computer Science. It’s also becoming more common for such institutions to prioritize integrating ethics into their CS studies, so students don’t just learn about how to build software, but whether or not they should build it in the first place. Of course, this begs questions about how much the ethics lessons such prestigious schools are teaching are actually making a positive impression on students.

But at a time when demand for qualified computer scientists is skyrocketing around the world and far exceeds supply, another kind of question might be even more important: Can computer science be transformed from a field largely led by elites into a profession that empowers vastly more working people, and one that trains them in a way that promotes ethics and an awareness of their impact on the world around them?

Enter Charles Isbell of Georgia Tech, a humble and unassuming star of inclusive and ethical computer science. Isbell, a longtime CS professor at Georgia Tech, enters this fall as the new Dean and John P. Imlay Chair of Georgia Tech’s rapidly expanding College of Computing.

Isbell’s role is especially given Georgia Tech’s approximately 9,000 online graduate students in Computer Science. This astronomical number of students in the CS field is the result of a philosophical decision made at the university to create an online CS master’s degree treated as completely equal to on-campus training.

Another counterintuitive philosophical decision made at Georgia Tech — for which Isbell proudly evangelized while speaking at conferences like the MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Next, where I met him in June — is to admit every student who has the potential to earn a degree, rather than making any attempt at “exclusivity” by rejecting worthy candidates. In the coming years all of this may lead, Isbell projected at EmTech Next, to a situation in which up to one in eight of all people in the US who hold a graduate degree in CS will have earned it at Georgia Tech.

“What they’ve done is pretty remarkable,” said Casey Feisler, a 3x recent graduate of Georgia Tech and a founding faculty member and CS professor at the University of Colorado’s College of Media, Communication, and Information.

And it’s promising that Feisler, who has become known in the tech ethics field for her comparative study of curricula and teaching approaches, told me, “ethics can be integrated into online [CS] courses just as easily as it can be into face to face courses,”

Still, it is as daunting as it is impressive to think about how one public school like Georgia Tech might be able to successfully and ethically educate such an enormous percentage of the students in arguably the most influential academic field in the world today. So I was glad to be able to speak to Isbell, an expert on statistical machine learning and artificial intelligence, for this TechCrunch series on the ethics of technology.

Our conversation below covers the difference between equality and equity; cultural issues around women in American CS, and what it would look like for ethics to be so integrated into the discussion of computing that students and practitioners wouldn’t even think of it as ethics.

Greg Epstein: Around 1/8 of Computer Science graduate degrees will be delivered by your school in the coming years; you’re thinking inclusively about providing a relatively huge number of opportunities for people who would not otherwise get the opportunity to become computer scientists. How have you achieved that?

Charles Isbell: There’s an old joke about organizations: don’t tell me what your values are, show me your budget and then I’ll tell you what your values are. Because you spend money on the things that you care about.

At our TC Sessions: Enterprise event, Atlassian co-CEO Scott Farquhar today announced a number of updates to how the company will sell its cloud-based services. These include the launch of new premium plans for more of its products, as well as the addition of a free tier for all of the company’s services that didn’t already offer one. Atlassian now also offers discounted cloud pricing for academic institutions and nonprofit organizations.

The company previously announced its premium plans for Jira Software Cloud and Confluence Cloud. Now, it is adding Jira Service Desk to this lineup, and chances are it’ll add more of its services over time. The premium plan adds a 99.9% update SLA, unlimited storage and additional support. Until now, Atlassian sold these products solely based on the number of users, but didn’t offer a specific enterprise plan.

As Harsh Jawharkar, the head of go-to-market for Cloud Platform at Atlassian, told me, many of its larger customers, who often ran the company’s products on their own servers before, are now looking to move to the cloud and hand over to Atlassian the day-to-day operations of these services. That’s in part because they are more comfortable with the idea of moving to the cloud at this point — and because Atlassian probably knows how to run its own services better than anybody else. 

For these companies, Atlassian is also introducing a number of new features today. Those include soon-to-launch data residency controls for companies that need to ensure that their data stays in a certain geographic region, as well as the ability to run Jira and Confluence Cloud behind customized URLs that align with a company’s brand, which will launch in early access in 2020. Maybe more important, though, are features to Atlassian Access, the company’s command center that helps enterprises manage its cloud products. Access now supports single sign-on with Google Cloud Identity and Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services, for example. The company is also partnering with McAfee and Bitglass to offer additional advanced security features and launch a cross-product audit log. Enterprise admins will also soon get access to a new dashboard that will help them understand how Atlassian’s tools are being used across the organization.

But that’s not all. The company is also launching new tools to make customer migration to its cloud products easier, with initial support for Confluence and Jira support coming later this year. There’s also new extended cloud trial licenses, which a lot of customers have asked for, Jawharkar told me, because the relatively short trial periods the company previously offered weren’t quite long enough for companies to fully understand their needs.

This is a big slew of updates for Atlassian — maybe its biggest enterprise-centric release since the company’s launch. It has clearly reached a point where it had to start offering these enterprise features if it wanted to grow its market and bring more of these large companies on board. In its early days, Atlassian mostly grew by selling directly to teams within a company. These days, it has to focus a bit more on selling to executives as it tries to bring more enterprises on board — and those companies have very specific needs that the company didn’t have to address before. Today’s launches clearly show that it is now doing so — at least for its cloud-based products.

The company isn’t forgetting about other users either, though. It’ll still offer entry-level plans for smaller teams and it’s now adding free tiers to products like Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk and Jira Core. They’ll join Trello, Bitbucket and Opsgenie, which already feature free versions. Going forward, academic institutions will receive 50% off their cloud subscriptions and nonprofits will receive 75% off.

It’s obvious that Atlassian is putting a lot of emphasis on its cloud services. It’s not doing away with its self-hosted products anytime, but its focus is clearly elsewhere. The company itself started this process a few years ago and a lot of this work is now coming to fruition. As Anu Bharadwaj, the head of Cloud Platform at Atlassian, told me, this move to a fully cloud-native stack enabled many of today’s announcements, and she expects that it’ll bring a lot of new customers to its cloud-based services.