Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Sumo Logic, a cloud data analytics and log analysis company, announced a $110 million Series G investment today. The company indicated that its valuation was “north of a billion dollars,” but wouldn’t give an exact figure.

Today’s round was led by Battery Ventures with participation from new investors Tiger Global Management and Franklin Templeton. Other unnamed existing investors also participated according to the company. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $340 million.

When we spoke to Sumo Logic CEO Ramin Sayer at the time of its $75 million Series F in 2017, he indicated the company was on its way to becoming a public company. While that hasn’t happened yet, he says it is still the goal for the company, and investors wanted in on that before it happened.

“We don’t need to capital. We had plenty of capital already, but when you bring on crossover investors and others in this this stage of a company, they have minimum check sizes and they have a lot of appetite to help you as you get ready to address a lot of the challenges and opportunities as you become a public company,” he said.

He says the company will be investing the money in continuing to develop the platform, whether that’s through acquisitions, which of course the money would help with, or through the company’s own engineering efforts.

The IPO idea remains a goal, but Sayer was not willing or able to commit to when that might happen. The company clearly has plenty of runway now to last for quite some time.

“We could go out now if we wanted to, but we made a decision that that’s not what we’re going to do, and we’re going to continue to double down and invest, and therefore bring some more capital in to give us more optionality for strategic tuck-ins and product IP expansion, international expansion — and then look to the public markets [after] we do that,” he said.

Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at investor, Battery Ventures says his firm likes Sumo Logic’s approach and sees a big opportunity ahead with this investment. “We have been tracking the Sumo Logic team for some time, and admire the company’s early understanding of the massive cloud-native opportunity and the rise of new, modern application architectures,” he said in a statement.

The company crossed the $100 million revenue mark last year and has 2000 customers including Airbnb, Anheuser-Busch and Samsung. It competes with companies like Splunk, Scaylr and Loggly.

Founders in Seattle recently bemoaned a lack of capital and support when compared to Silicon Valley — what about those building startups in more remote markets?

Kargo, a company that takes the spirit of Uber and brings it to the disorganized world of trucking, has raised a SG$800,000 (US$580,000) round of funding, giving TechCrunch an excuse to delve into the world of startup development in Myanmar, one of the world’s most curious countries.

Ostracized from the world until its first free general election in 2015, Myanmar — which was previously known as Burma — has seen the world’s most radical digitization. Ruled by the military from 1962 until 2011, the price of a SIM card in the country was $250 as recently as 2013 (a big jump on $3,000-odd in the early 2000s) but that all change around the elections in 2015 when the country opened its doors to outside investment and global companies. Telecom companies rushed in, reducing the price of a SIM card to mere dollars, in U.S. terms, and giving those who bought them gigabits of data to use each month.

That rush saw services like Facebook go from non-existent to the key digital space overnight as Myanmar’s 55 million people poured online — the U.S. social network has failed to cope with that crazy growth. Today, some 46 million people are estimated to be online in the country, with mobile the dominant platform and Facebook the top browser — yep, the social network is that big.

Myanmar is getting its first 4G rollouts and the seeds have been sown for internet businesses and startups.

Simplifying logistics

Kargo — which is not to be confused by the Indonesia company of the same name that’s backed by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick — was started in 2016 by Alexander Wicks, an Australian expat who had previously run digital marketing businesses.

The young company initially joined Phandeeyar, a tech accelerator in major city Yangon, before dropping out due to a disagreement on terms, CEO and founder Wicks said. He told TechCrunch that he valued the organization, but decided to “fly solo” with the business.

That is a bet that appeared to pay off, so far at least. Kargo won a grant from the GSM Association Ecosystem Accelerator Fund, a unit associated with the GSMA, and it represented Myanmar at the world Seedstars Summit last year. Now, it has secured this new funding led by Singapore-based early-stage specialist Cocoon Capital.

Wicks said the round is a pre-Series A deal and he hopes that Kargo can go on to raise a Series A to fuel overseas growth within the next year or 18 months.

Kargo works with multinational companies, including Coke and Nestle, to help them navigate the complicated world of logistics in Myanmar. By aggregating multiple fleets through its platform, Kargo becomes a single point of contact for companies moving product, thus simplifying the process massively. In the past, they’d deal with copious numbers of middlemen, who would liaise with truck fleets to add unnecessary levels of complication and cost.

“The market is very big, its a core part of how the whole country runs,” he explained, adding that Myanmar’s freight industry is expected to triple in the coming years.

Wicks said Kargo works with some 2,000-odd drivers mostly via fleet owners, who typically operate 5-50 trucks through their business. It disintermediates the aforementioned brokers and middlemen, to help drivers and fleet owners recoup a higher portion of each order and gain access to potential new clients. A partnership with Yoma Bank will also give the startup access to an SME loan that’ll enable it to make daily payouts to drivers that need more immediate cash flow than its regularly weekly deposits.

Kargo is currently close to $200,000 in monthly order volume, with 20-30 percent growth month-to-month during 2019, Wicks shared.

It is now exploring its first steps outside of Myanmar by covering ‘logistics corridors’ into Thailand. Wicks said the company has seen a high level of requests to move overseas from existing clients, and he intends to use those relationships to begin to step into new markets tentatively, starting with Thailand.

The new funding will also go towards developing Kargo’s new — and particularly improving the web app used by drivers — as well as increased education and training for truck operators and drivers.

“It’s very much a product for Myanmar,” Wicks said in an interview. “It’s an old industry being built with a new mindset.”

Finally, hiring is a key focus for the capital, too.

Kargo currently has a team of 32, most of whom are located in Yangon, and that headcount is forecast to rise to as many as 60 this year. Business development, fleet management and operations are the core areas where the startup plans to hire, and that will include beefing up its new office in Mandalay.

Building a startup in Myanmar

When asked what the hardest part of operating a startup in Myanmar is, Wicks claimed that dealing with the government is just ahead of raising investment money.

“Bureaucracy… there are no stats or systems here,” he said. “We have to deal with a lot of government issues.”

Still, he said, the arrival of Uber and its regional competitor Grab — which ultimately acquired the U.S. firm’s regional business — in Myanmar in 2017 gave Kargo and other on-demand startups in the country a real foothold in working with governments by educating them on new business models.

“They made it clear what a platform is for the government,” Wicks said.

He believes that their arrival, coupled with growing internet usage and increased speed, have also helped get investors comfortable with the idea of investing in tech in Myanmar, although he insisted that they must still be “patient” over growth.

“It’s certainly a much more positive landscape for founders today,” Wicks said. “That trust has changed for investors, there are a few of us building companies across the country.”

That’s certainly true for Cocoon Capital — which is currently raising for a $20 million fund having completed a first close last year.

Managing partner Michael Blakey told TechCrunch that Kargo is the firm’s second investment from that new fund. He’s equally bullish that Kargo is well placed to take advantage of both digital growth and the development of logistics as Myanmar continues to appeal to overseas businesses.

“Myanmar is the fastest growing economy in Southeast Asia and logistics is a key industry to support this growth,” Blakey said in a statement. “We believe the Kargo platform has the potential to disrupt the trucking industry, not only in Myanmar, but in the region.”

If ‘Myanmar 1.0’ was the establishment of credible startups, then the second chapter will be the cream of that crop venturing overseas. Kargo is one of the early contenders that is intent on making that move.

Iguazio, an end-to-end platform that allows data scientists to take machine learning models from data ingestion to training, testing and production, today announced that it is bringing its solution to Microsoft’s Azure cloud and Azure Stack on-premises platform.

The 80-person company, which has received a total of $48 million in funding to date, aims to make it easier for data scientists to do the work they are actually paid to do. The company argues that a lot of the work that data scientists do today is about managing the infrastructure and handling integrations, not building the machine learning models.

“We see that machine learning pipelines are way more complex than people think,” Iguazio CEO Asaf Somekh told me. “People think this is good stuff, but it’s actually horrible. We’re trying to simplify that.”

To do this, Iguazio is betting on open source. It uses standard tools and API to pull in data from a wide variety of sources, which is then stored in its real-time in-memory database, which can handle streaming data, as well as time series data, tables and files. It also uses standard Jupyter notebooks instead of some form of proprietary format, but what’s maybe most interesting is that the company also built and open-platform for building data science pipelines. To build the models, Iguazio also uses KubeFlow, a machine learning toolkit for the Kubernetes container platform.

Given that Azure and Azure Stack are essentially the same platform, as far as the APIs are concerned, Iguazio can then take its software and run it both in the cloud and on premises. Soon, it’ll also bring its service to Microsoft’s Azure Data Box Edge, Microsoft’s hardware solution for storing and analyzing data at the edge, which can be equipped with FPGAs for deploying machine learning models.

“Partnering with Iguazio, we can offer additional options for AI applications in the cloud to also run on the edge. Iguazio provides an additional path to run AI on the edge beyond our current Microsoft Azure Machine Learning inferencing on the edge,” said Henry Jerez, Principal Group Product Manager at Microsoft’s Intelligent Edge Solutions Platform Group. “This new marketplace option provides an additional alternate path for our customers to bring intelligence close to the data sources for applications such as predictive maintenance and real-time recommendation engines.”

The Azure solution joins Iguazio’s existing options to deploy its services on top of AWS and Google Cloud Platform.

China’s new rules on video games, introduced last month, are having an effect on the country’s gamers. Today, Tencent replaced hugely popular battle royale shooter game PUBG with a more government-friendly alternative that seems primed to pull in significant revenue.

The company introduced ‘Game for Peace’ in a Weibo post at the same time as PUBG — which stands for Player Unknown Battlegrounds — was delisted from China. The title had been in wide testing but without revenue, and now it seems Tencent gave up on securing a license to monetize the title.

In its place, Game for Peace is very much the type of game that will pass the demands of China’s game censorship body. Last month, the country’s State Administration of Press and Publication released a series of demands for new titles, including bans on corpses and blood, references of imperial history and gambling. The new Tencent title bears a striking resemblance to PUBG but there are no dead bodies, while it plays up to a nationalist theme with a focus on China’s air force — or, per the Weibo message, “the blue sky warriors that guard our country’s airspace” — and their battle against terrorists.

Game for Peace was developed by Krafton, the Korea-based publisher formerly known as BlueHole which made PUBG. Beyond visual similarities, Reuters reported that the games are twinned since some player found that their progress and achievements on PUBG had transferred over to the new game.

Tencent representatives declined to comment on the new game or the end of PUBG’s ‘beta testing’ period in China when contacted by TechCrunch. But a company rep apparently told Reuters that “they are very different genres of games.”

Fortnite may have grabbed the attention for its explosive growth — we previously reported that the game helped publisher Epic Games bank a profit of $3 billion last year — but PUBG has more quietly become a fixture among mobile gamers, particularly in Asia.

At the end of last year, Krafton told The Verge that it was past 200 million registered gamers, with 30 million players each day. According to app analytics company Sensor Tower, PUBG grossed more than $65 million from mobile players in March thanks to 83 percent growth which saw it even beat Fortnite. There is also a desktop version.

That is really the point of Tencent’s switcheroo: to make money.

The company suffered at the hands of China’s gaming license freeze last year, and a regulatory-compliant title like Game for Peace has a good shot at getting the green light for monetization — through the sale of virtual items and seasonal memberships.

Indeed, analysts at China Renaissance believe the new title could rake in as much as $1.5 billion in annual revenue, according to the Reuters report. That’s a lot to get excited about and resuscitating gaming will be an important part of Tencent’s strategy this year — which has already seen it restructure its business to focus emerging units like cloud computing, and pledge to use its technology to “do good.”

HeyJobs, a three year-old Berlin startup that helps large employers scale recruitment, has raised $12 million in Series A funding.

The round id led by Notion Capital, with participation from existing investors Creathor Ventures, Rocket Internet’s GFC, and newly re-branded Heartcore Capital.

Founded in 2016 and launched the following year, HeyJobs aims to tackle the recruitment problem European employers are facing due to steep declines in available workforce as the so-called the “boomer” generation nears retirement (this is seeing Germany alone losing 500,000 workers annually, apparently).

The HeyJobs platform leverages machine learning in an attempt to make high skilled recruitment more scalable. It promises to match talent with job profiles and draw in the best candidates via targeted marketing and a “personalized application and assessment flow”.

“We use a fully automated technological approach to help candidates find jobs and companies find employees,” says HeyJobs co-founder and CEO Marius Luther.

“For example, we deploy multiple machine learning algorithms to find the right potential candidates for a specific role (asking ‘who are the most likely candidates for an intensive care nurse role in East London?’). Our technology then makes sure candidates see the job proposal on channels such as Facebook, Instagram, job platforms and across the web”.

In addition, Luther says that HeyJobs’ personalized assessment ensures that the company only delivers high quality, hireable candidates to employers, something he dubs as “predictable hiring” at scale.

“Our clients are typically the talent acquisition teams of employers with high volume recruitment needs,” he explains. “In Germany, 8/10 largest employers (by headcount) are our clients. Typical industries would be logistics (i.e. DPD, UPS), retail (i.e. Vodafone) & hospitality (i.e. h-hotels, Five Guys). However our real customer is the non-academic job seeker who is looking for a job that will help him/her live a more fulfilling life — be it by being paid more, switching to better employment conditions or finding a job closer to home”.

To that end, HeyJobs says it is now serving over 500 enterprise clients including United Parcel Service, PayPal, FiveGuys, Vodafone, and Securitas. The company generates revenue via a range of business models, from subscription to per-hire success fees.

“The cost per hire is typically a fraction of what clients would pay job boards on a per-post basis or what they would pay to staffing firms on a per hire basis,” adds the HeyJobs CEO.

Match Group’s revenue saw solid growth in the first quarter thanks to an increase in Tinder subscribers. The company, whose portfolio of dating apps also includes Match.com, PlentyOfFish, OkCupid and Hinge, among others, said in its earnings report today that total quarterly revenue grew 14% year over year to $465 million. If the effects of foreign exchange aren’t included, growth would have been 18%.

Net earnings attributable to shareholders grew 23% to $123 million, or 42 cents per share, from $99.7 million, or 33 cents in the same period a year ago. Operating income increased 6% to $119 million from $112 million. During the first quarter of 2019 and 2018, Match Group recorded an income tax benefit of $28 million and $12 million, respectively, related to the exercise of vesting of stock-based awards.

During the first quarter, Tinder average subscribers were 4.7 million, up from 384,000 in the previous quarter and 1.3 million year over year. In total, Match Group’s average subscribers increased 16% to 8.6 million, up from 7.4 million a year ago. Match Group said the growth in subscribers and increase in average revenue per user (ARPU) at Tinder boosted its revenue, but it was partially offset by foreign exchange effects. ARPU was flat year-over-year, but without foreign exchange effects, it would have increased by 4% to 60 cents.

The company said its adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization) growth was impacted by the higher cost of generating revenue, specifically in-app purchase fees because revenue increasingly comes through mobile app stores, and higher legal costs, but offset by lower selling and marketing expenses. Adjusted EBITDA grew 13% to $155 million from $138 million.

During the first quarter, Match Group restructured its executive team, appointing three new general managers to oversee regions in Asia in order to gain more users there and focus on international growth. Its first-quarter earnings presentation highlighted opportunities in India, where Tinder is the highest-grossing Android app according to App Annie; Japan, where Match Group now owns two of the top five dating apps (Pairs is number one in Japan, while Tinder is ranks at fourth); and Southeast Asia, where Tinder is now within the top 10 grossing apps in six countries.

The company did not break down earnings by country, but during the first quarter, it had a total of 8,613,000 million average subscribers, with 4,361,000 in North America and 4,252,000 internationally. Total ARPU was 58 cents: 60 cents in North America and 56 cents internationally. Total revenue was $ $464.6 million, and of that $454 million was direct revenue, split between $237.8 million from North America and $216.2 million from international (indirect revenue is revenue that does not come directly from Match Group’s end users, and most of that is advertising revenue.

Indian edtech startup CollegeDekho, which helps students connect with prospective colleges and keep track of exams, has raised $8 million in Series B round.

The new financing round for the four-year-old Gurgaon-based startup was led by its parent company Girnarsoft Education and London-based private equity investor Man Capital, which also participated in the startup’s Series A round last year.

Ruchir Arora, founder and CEO of CollegeDekho told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup will use the capital to expand its presence in more schools and also begin connecting students with international educational institutions. The startup, which has raised $13 million to date, will also ramp up its research and development efforts.

CollegeDekho, hindi for search for college, maintains a website that helps students identify the right career choices for them. The website has a chatbot that answers some of the questions students have while logging their responses and other website activities such as the kind of colleges they are searching for on the platform, their preferred location and budget.

Arora said the startup, which also has about 3,000 call centre representatives and counsellors, builds profiles of students to make college recommendations. He said each month the site observes more than five million sessions from students. Last year, more than 8,000 students used CollegeDekho to take admission in a college.

Parents in India, a country of 1.3 billion people with not the best literacy record, see education as an upward mobility for their children. Each year, more than six to seven million students go to a college. But because of a range of factors that can include cultural stigma, many students end up choosing wrong path and thus don’t excel in college. Indeed, many students ultimately don’t pursue the subject they are best suited for, Arora said, and that’s where CollegeDekho aims to make an impact.

Most high school students in India often gravitate toward engineering or medical college, as a result of which, each year India produces many engineers and doctors who struggle for years to find a job. Arora said his startup looks at more than 2,000 career paths a student could pursue.

What works in favor of Arora is that the country will continue to turn out millions of students each year who will be looking to go to a college soon. It also helps that CollegeDekho is operationally profitable, Arora said, adding that it generates about $3.2 million in revenue in a year. Any additional cash that the startup raises will go into its expansion, he said.

CollegeDekho charges a nominal fee from students, and also takes a cut when they join a college. More than 36,000 educational institutes are listed on CollegeDekho. The startup also works with more than 400 colleges to conduct an exam for direct admission, and there too it earns a cut.

India’s education market, estimated to be grow to $5.7 billion by next year, has emerged as a lucrative opportunity for startups and VCs alike. Bangalore-based Byju’s, which helps millions of students in India prepare for competitive exams, raised $540 million from Naspers and others late last year. Unacademy, which like Byju’s offers online tutoring to students, has raised more than $38.5 million to date.

A legion of other education startups today are vying for the attention of students in the nation. Noida-based AskIITians, not much far from the offices of CollegeDekho, aims to help school-going students prepare for medical and engineering exams. Extramarks, also based in Noida, operates in the same space as AskIITians. Reliance Industries, owned and controlled by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, bought 38.5 percent stake in the startup three years ago.

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance has confirmed a “large scale” data breach, in which hackers stole more than $40 million in cryptocurrency

In a statement, the company said hackers stole API keys, two-factor codes and other information in the attack.

Binance traced the cryptocurrency theft — more than 7,000 bitcoins at the time of writing — to a single wallet after the hackers stole the contents of the company’s bitcoin hot wallet. Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, said the theft impacted about 2 percent of its total bitcoin holdings.

“All of our other wallets are secure and unharmed,” said the statement.

“The hackers had the patience to wait, and execute well-orchestrated actions through multiple seemingly independent accounts at the most opportune time,” the statement read. “The transaction is structured in a way that passed our existing security checks. It was unfortunate that we were not able to block this withdrawal before it was executed.”

“Once executed, the withdrawal triggered various alarms in our system. We stopped all withdrawals immediately after that,” the statement said.

Binance said its secure asset fund for users (SAFU) will cover user losses.

Until the company’s investigation is complete, deposits and withdrawals will remain suspended but trading will remain open.

Binance chief executive Changpeng Zhao is set to hold a Twitter ask-me-anything session in the coming hours. TechCrunch will bring you more once we have it.

Read more:

• Security lapse exposed a Chinese smart city surveillance system
• A leaky database of SMS text messages exposed password resets and two-factor codes
• Chipotle customers are saying their accounts have been hacked
• We found a massive spam operation — and sunk its server
• Dow Jones’ watchlist of 2.4 million high-risk individuals has leaked
• Stop saying, ‘We take your privacy and security seriously’
• Robocaller firm Stratics Networks exposed millions of call recordings
• Massive mortgage and loan data leak gets worse as original documents also exposed

Google announced today it has launched a new page transition experience for the Chrome web browser called “Portals.” The technology is something the company has been developing for some time, and is designed to offer an alternative to using IFrames. In fact, the company described Portals as being more like “IFrames that you can navigate” — because, unlike a traditional IFrame, which gives a window into another website, a Portal actually lets you go through to that other website.

In a demo of Portals’ potential, Google showed off how they could be used on a meal planning website. The example site they used aggregated recipes from other sites around the web. Normally, you’d have to click through to the destination website in order to see the recipe’s details, like the cooking steps, ingredients, and other information. With Portals, however, you could browse the various recipes on the main meal planning website – then, when you found a recipe you wanted to save, you could launch it in a Portal. For example, you could click the main website’s “Share” button which would load the destination website in this pop-up like view of the destination webpage. You could then save the recipe directly to your favorite pinboard or social network.

In the demo, the recipe was being saved to a fake social network called “Nom Nom.” When the user clicked “Share,” Nom Nom’s domain actually opened within the portal, while the original meal planning website persisted in the background, ready for you to return.

This works because a function in Portals allows the origin page to share context with the destination. In other words, it really is like a “portal” to another site, not a view of it.

When the recipe was saved and shared, the user could then close the Portal to return to the original meal planning site and continue to browse for more recipes.

Another function in portals is the ability for the origin site to hand off information to a destination site.

To continue the recipe example, when the user found a recipe they wanted to cook they were able to hand off the ingredients list from recipe site to an online grocery service’s website through the Portal. And while the destination site loads, the Portal can display an animation to offer a more pleasant transition experience for the end user.

Google said it has now launched the Portals API as an experimental feature behind a flag in Canary (#enable-portals), and is looking for developer community feedback.

Stock markets declined today as investors worried about the potential for an escalating trade war with China sold off shares.

Markets had been trading near or above all-time highs before President Donald Trump threatened to significantly increase tariffs on Chinese goods. The news sent stock markets into a free-fall in mid-day trading, but the markets staged a late-day surge to end the day with only modest declines.

The escalating war of words between U.S. and Chinese officials and trade negotiators sent markets plummeting. Roughly $200 billion worth of Chinese imports are at issue, with the President threatening to bump tariffs to 25% up from 10%.

At one point, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down over 600 points before ending the day at 66 points down thanks to a late-day rally, which made up most of the losses.

The heart of the issue between the U.S. and China is American negotiators accusing the Beijing government of reneging on commitments it had already made in trade talks.

Investors were fearful that tariffs on Chinese goods could mean a slowdown in U.S. exports and cause some belt-tightening among consumers who would see prices rise for a number of goods.