Monthly Archives: October 2020

News: Cisco acquires PortShift to raise its game in DevOps and Kubernetes security

• October 1, 2020
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Cisco is making another acquisition to expand its reach in security solutions, this time specifically targeting DevOps and the world of container management. It is acquiring PortShift, an Israeli startup that has built a Kubernetes-native security platform. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. PortShift had raised about $5.3 million from Team8, an incubator

Cisco is making another acquisition to expand its reach in security solutions, this time specifically targeting DevOps and the world of container management. It is acquiring PortShift, an Israeli startup that has built a Kubernetes-native security platform.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. PortShift had raised about $5.3 million from Team8, an incubator and backer of security startups in Israel founded by a group of cybersecurity vets. Cisco, along with Microsoft and Walmart, are among the large corporates that back Team8. (Indeed, their participation is in part a way of getting an early look and inside scoop on some of the more cutting edge technologies being built, and in part a way to help founders understand what corporates’ security needs are these days.)

The deal underscores not just how containerization, and specifically Kubernetes, has taken hold of the enterprise world, but also how those working in this area, and building businesses around containerization and Kubernetes, are paying increasing attention to security around them.

Others are also sharpening their focus on containers and how they are secured. Earlier this year, Venafi acquired Jetstack, which runs a certificate controller for Kubernetes; and last month StackRox raised funding for its own approach to Kubernetes security.

Cisco has been a longtime partner of Google’s around cloud services, and it has made a number of acquisitions in the area of cybersecurity in recent years. They have included Duo for $2.35 billion, OpenDNS for $635 million, and most recently Babble Labs (which helps reduce background noise in video calls, something that both improves quality but also helps users ensure unwanted or private chatter doesn’t inadvertently get heard by unintended listeners).

But as Liz Centoni, the SVP of the Emerging Technologies and Incubation (ET&I) Group, notes in a blog post, Cisco is now turning its attention also to how it can help customers better secure applications and workloads, alongside the investments that it has made to help secure people.

In the area of containers, security issues can arise around container architecture in a number of ways: it can be due to misconfiguration; or because of how applications are monitored; or how developers use open-source libraries; and how companies implement regulatory compliance. Other security vulnerabilities include the use of insecure container images; problems with how containers interact with each other; the use of containers that have been infected with rogue processes; and having containers not isolated properly from their hosts.

Centoni notes that PortShift interested them because it provides an all-in-one platform covering the many aspects of Kubernetes security:

“Today, the application security space is highly fragmented with many vendors addressing only part of the problem,” she writes. “The Portshift team is building capabilities that span a large portion of the lifecycle of the cloud-native application.”

PortShift provides tools for better container configuration visibility, vulnerability management, configuration management, segmentation, encryption, compliance and automation.

The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of Cisco’s 2021 fiscal year, when the team will join Cisco’s ET&I Group.

News: Altinity grabs $4M seed to build cloud version of ClickHouse open source data warehouse

• October 1, 2020
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Earlier this month, cloud data warehouse Snowflake turned heads when it debuted on the stock market. Today, Altinity, the commercial company behind the open source ClickHouse data warehouse announced a $4 million seed round from Accel along with a new cloud service, Altinity.Cloud. “Fundamentally, the company started out as an open source services bureau offering

Earlier this month, cloud data warehouse Snowflake turned heads when it debuted on the stock market. Today, Altinity, the commercial company behind the open source ClickHouse data warehouse announced a $4 million seed round from Accel along with a new cloud service, Altinity.Cloud.

“Fundamentally, the company started out as an open source services bureau offering support, training and [custom] engineering features into ClickHouse. And what we’re doing now with this investment from Accel is we’re extending it to offer a cloud platform in addition to the other things that we already have,” CEO Robert Hodges told TechCrunch.

As the company describes it, “Altinity.Cloud offers immediate access to production-ready ClickHouse clusters with expert enterprise support during every aspect of the application lifecycle.” It also helps with application design and implementation and production assistance in essence combining the consulting side of the house with the cloud service.

The company was launched in 2017 by CTO Alexander Zaitsev, who was one of the early adopters of ClickHouse. Up until now the startup has been bootstrapped with revenue from the services business.

Hodges came on board last year after a stint at VMware because he saw a company with tremendous potential, and his background in cloud services made him a good person to lead the company as it built the cloud product and moved into its next phase.

ClickHouse at its core is a relational database that can run in the cloud or on-prem with big improvements in performance, Hodges says. And he says that developers are enamored with it because you can start a project on a laptop and scale it up from there.

“We’re very simple to operate, just a single binary. You can start from a Docker image. You can run it anywhere, literally anywhere that Linux runs from an Intel Nuc all the way up to clusters with hundreds of nodes,” Hodges explained.

The investment from Accel should help them finish building the cloud product, which has been in private beta since July, while helping them build a sales and marketing operation to help sell it to the target enterprise market. The startup currently has 27 people with plans to hire 15 more.

Hodges says that he wants to build a diverse and inclusive company, something he says the tech industry in general has failed at achieving. He believes that one of the reasons for that is the requirement of a computer science degree, which he says has created “a gate for women and people of color,” and he thinks by hiring people with more diverse backgrounds, you can build a more diverse company.

“So one of the things that’s high up on my list is to get back to a more equitable and diverse population of people working on this thing,” he said.

Over time, the company sees the cloud business overtaking the consulting arm in terms of revenue, but that aspect of the business will always have a role in the revenue mix because this is complex by its nature even with a cloud service.

“Customers can’t just do it entirely by having a push button interface. They will actually need humans that work with them, and help them understand how to frame problems, help them understand how to build applications that take care of that […] And then finally, help them deal with problems that naturally arise when you’re when you’re in production,” he said.

News: Microsoft adds the $549 Laptop Go to its growing Surface lineup

• October 1, 2020
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Microsoft just added a couple of key additions to its ever-growing lineup of Surface devices. There are a bunch of new accessories and an update to the Surface Pro X, which you can read about here. The biggest news of the morning, however, is the arrival of the Surface Laptop Go — an affordable take

Microsoft just added a couple of key additions to its ever-growing lineup of Surface devices. There are a bunch of new accessories and an update to the Surface Pro X, which you can read about here. The biggest news of the morning, however, is the arrival of the Surface Laptop Go — an affordable take on the company’s well-received Surface Laptop.

The device borrows the naming convention from the Surface Go, a lightweight and cheap entry point into the line. At $549, the Laptop Go is $50 more than that tablet, but is still an extremely affordable take on the category — and if its predecessor is any precedent, you should be getting a pretty decent bang for your buck here.

The specs aren’t exactly exciting. The device ships with either 4 or 8GB of RAM, paired with an 10th gen quad-core Intel i4 processor and 64, 128 or 256GB of storage. Most customers are going to want to pump things up from those base-level specs for all but the most basic applications, which is obviously going to start driving that price up a bit.

Image Credits: Microsoft

The display is an inch and half larger that than the Surface Go 2 at 12 inches and smaller either the 13.5 or 15-inch you get on the standard Laptop. The screen generally is a pretty sizable downgrade from the Laptop, at 1536 x 1024 (148 PPI) to the flagship’s 2256 x 1504 (201 PPI). That’s to be expected, of course, for a product that runs around half the price.

Microsoft is quick to point out the inclusion of a full-size keyboard with 1.3mm of key travel. That’s no doubt designed to contrast it with tablet keyboard cases that are a kind of direct competitor here, not to mention all of the issues Apple has run into with its own laptop keyboards in recent years.

Image Credits: Microsoft

The device weighs 2.45 pounds — making it the lightest Surface Laptop thus far. The ports are, unsurprisingly, fairly limited. There’s a USB-A, USB-C and, of course, that proprietary Surface port the company just can’t quit, on account of all of the existing accessories. The on-board battery can be fast charged and should get about 13 hours of life, per MS’s numbers.

It goes up for pre-order today alongside the new Pro X and will start shipping October 13. Microsoft is also bringing Surface devices to a number of new European countries, including, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.

News: Microsoft updates its Arm-based Surface Pro X tablet with a faster CPU

• October 1, 2020
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Microsoft today announced the second generation of its Arm-based Surface Pro X tablet. The first generation of the Pro X launched last October and since then, Microsoft worked with Qualcomm to design the second generation of the SQ2 processor that powers it. The SQ2 doesn’t fully replace the first-generation SQ1 chip, though. Instead, Microsoft is

Microsoft today announced the second generation of its Arm-based Surface Pro X tablet. The first generation of the Pro X launched last October and since then, Microsoft worked with Qualcomm to design the second generation of the SQ2 processor that powers it. The SQ2 doesn’t fully replace the first-generation SQ1 chip, though. Instead, Microsoft is only using it for the top-end SKUs of the Pro X.

Except for the new processor, we’re still pretty much talking about the same Pro X here that launched last year, with built-in LTE connectivity, two USB-C ports and a 13-inch touchscreen.

Image Credits: Microsoft

Microsoft is also introducing a new color in the form of a new platinum finish, in addition to the existing matte black finish. It’s also launching three new colors for the Pro X keyboards: Ice Blue, Poppy Red and Platinum.

There are some other key updates here, though. Thanks to some software improvements, the Surface Pro X now promises up to 15 hours of battery life.

Image Credits:

But more importantly, Microsoft notes that more software partners are now optimizing their Windows apps for the Arm architecture (Microsoft still spells it ARM in its materials, but Arm PR will surely reach out to them and correct them). When it launched the first iteration, Microsoft saw its fair share of negative reviews because support for third-party drivers was lacking and with that, some apps also failed, while others were simply running slow because they had to rely on emulation – unless their developers released Arm-compatible versions.

Earlier this week, the company already noted that its Edge browser on Arm was getting an update to make it less battery hungry. In addition, Microsoft also noted that it would increase support for running x64 apps with a new x64 emulation rolling out to Windows Insiders in November. Visual Studio, too, has been updated and optimized for Windows 10 on Arm.

News: Imperva to acquire database security startup jSonar

• October 1, 2020
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Cybersecurity giant Imperva will acquire jSonar, a database security startup that recently landed $50 million from Goldman Sachs. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. The acquisition of jSonar, which provides security and compliance to databases on-premise or in the cloud, will help bolster Imperva’s data security business. As part of the deal, jSonar founder

Cybersecurity giant Imperva will acquire jSonar, a database security startup that recently landed $50 million from Goldman Sachs.

Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The acquisition of jSonar, which provides security and compliance to databases on-premise or in the cloud, will help bolster Imperva’s data security business. As part of the deal, jSonar founder Ron Bennatan will join Imperva to lead its new data security division.

Imperva provides enterprise security, including distributed denial-of-service attacks, to more than 6,200 companies. Earlier this year the company acquired Distil Networks, adding bot protection to its security roster.

“Enterprises have shifted focus from compliance to data security while demanding lower costs and more measurable benefits,” said Imperva chief executive Pam Murphy. “This combination of two uniquely qualified trailblazers will signal a new approach to data security that puts an emphasis on usability and value with sustained and complete coverage for three initiatives organizations need to implement – security, compliance and privacy.”

Last year, private equity firm Thoma Bravo bought Imperva in a $2.1 billion deal to take the company private.

The Imperva-jSonar acquisition is expected to close by mid-October.

News: Combining machine learning tools for medical imaging with genetic sequencing nets Sophia Genetics $110M

• October 1, 2020
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SOPHiA GENETICS, the shoutily and poorly capitalized named startup that’s combining machine learning tools for medical imaging and genetic sequencing to come up with a more holistic view of diseases for better patient care, has raised $110 million in new funding. The Series F round for the company was led by aMoon an Israeli healthcare

News: Jüsto adds another $5 million in funding to build its online, delivery-only grocery store for Latin America

• October 1, 2020
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As it begins expanding beyond its home base in Mexico City, the on-demand, online only grocery store Jüsto has  added another $5 million in early stage funding. The new money came from Bimbo Ventures, the strategic investment arm of one of the world’s largest bakery companies, Bimbo, and Sweet Capital, the investment fund from the

As it begins expanding beyond its home base in Mexico City, the on-demand, online only grocery store Jüsto has  added another $5 million in early stage funding.

The new money came from Bimbo Ventures, the strategic investment arm of one of the world’s largest bakery companies, Bimbo, and Sweet Capital, the investment fund from the founders of King.com.

Over the summer, the company expanded its services beyond Mexico City to Carretaro and saw explosive growth. According to Jüsto co-founder and company spokesman Manolo Fernandez. With sales in the first week equaling what had taken the company 200 days to achieve in Mexico City. Tavarez said it was an indicator of the demand for the company’s service across the country.

The $5 million top-up comes only a few months after Jüsto raised $12 million in funding from a slew of well-known global and Latin American investors and shows just how robust the early stage investment scene in Latin America is becoming.

As the company expands it may look to engage in some joint ventures with delivery services in other countries to expand its footprint, according to Fernandez, but for now, the focus is on growing its footprint independently.

The company will look to open operations in cities in Colombia, Peru, and potentially Ecuador in the next year, Fernandez said.

News: Google to pay out $1B to publishers to license content for new Google News Showcase

• October 1, 2020
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Google has long had a frenemy position with regards to the world of news: it can direct a lot of traffic to online publishers, but that’s only if people bother to click on links after getting the gist of the story from Google itself (and that’s before considering Google’s AMP approach on mobile that keeps

Google has long had a frenemy position with regards to the world of news: it can direct a lot of traffic to online publishers, but that’s only if people bother to click on links after getting the gist of the story from Google itself (and that’s before considering Google’s AMP approach on mobile that keeps users on Google URLs after they click). Publications built around advertising have felt beholden to the search and ad giant, leading those that have survived over the years to try to forge alternative revenue models around paid content, events, and more to offset that dependency.

Now Google is offering another, complementary, option to these publishers, or at least some of them.

Today the company unveiled its latest effort to claw back more credibility in the news publishing world, launching the Google News Showcase. Sundar Pichai, CEO of the search giant, said in a blog post that it would collectively pay some $1 billion to news publishers in licensing fees “to create and curate high-quality content” for new story panels that will appear on Google News. Initially, these will appear on Android devices and eventually also on Google News on iOS.

The new initiative is going live today, after it was initially unveiled by Google in broad strokes earlier this summer.

Google News Showcase is rolling out first in Germany and Brazil before expanding to other markets, according to Pichai. The company has already inked deals with 200 publications in Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, the U.K. and Australia. The first publications to launch will be Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Zeit, Folha de S.Paulo,Band, Infobae, El Litoral, GZH, WAZ and SooToday. India, Belgium and the Netherlands will be next on the list for expansions after the other countries go live, Pichai said.

As you can see here, Google News Showcase seems primarily to be focused on how news is consumed on mobile devices rather than desktop computers.

Like Apple with its efforts around Apple News, as a major mobile platform operator Google has worked on a number of ways to play nice with publishers and the news publishing industry over the years, some on its own steam and some in response to pressure from outside.

They have included funding local news research initiatives; its $300 million news initiative that includes providing grants to journalists and journals, as well as research; emergency grants to publications in hot water; and building tools to help journalists do their work.

Picking Germany as one of the first markets to roll this out is notable, given that publishers in the country were involved in a years-long lawsuit over copyright fees related to how their content was repurposed in Google.

Google ultimately won that case in court, but arguably, it didn’t win in the court of public opinion. Given that Google continues to face a lot of antitrust scrutiny in Europe and elsewhere, it’s important that it works (or at least appear to work!) on rehabilitating its image as too-powerful and uninterested in the fate of institutions that are central to how democratic society works — like the free press.

As Pichai notes, this latest effort is different from what Google has built before because it’s based on publishers doing the curating and creating themselves.

News: Cazoo, the UK used car sales portal, raises another $311M, now valued at over $2B

• October 1, 2020
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A lot of people are opting to use cars instead of taking public transportation in the UK at the moment, as a way of ensuring more social distancing, and today one of the startups that’s built a more efficient way of selling and buying cars is announcing a big round of funding. Cazoo, which provides

A lot of people are opting to use cars instead of taking public transportation in the UK at the moment, as a way of ensuring more social distancing, and today one of the startups that’s built a more efficient way of selling and buying cars is announcing a big round of funding. Cazoo, which provides an app-based way to browse and buy used cars (it’s modeled on the likes of Vroom in the US), has picked up £240 million ($311 million).

The funding comes only six months after the company raised $116 million. Cazoo is now valued at over $2 billion, double its previous valuation a year ago, it confirmed. (For some context, the company had never confirmed its valuation prior to now and it was estimated at a much lower amount.)

This latest funding is being led by General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners and funds managed by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Blackrock, with other new and existing investors participating. The list includes L Catterton, Durable Capital Partners, The Spruce House Partnership, Novator, Mubadala Capital and dmg ventures. It brings the total raised by the company to date to £450 million ($582 million).

We have reached out to the company to get more details on what portion of the funding is equity and what is debt, and we will update as we learn more. (Debt plays a big role in funding for companies that need to take on a lot of assets, like cars, in order for the business model to function. As we’ve seen with others in the same category of disrupting car sales, like Fair, sometimes the debt far outstrips equity funding, and as we’ve seen with Fair, sometimes even a lot of money cannot help a business work.)

Founded by Alex Chesterman, who had also founded LoveFilm (acquired by Amazon and used as the first step in its move into building its Netflix competitor, Amazon Prime Video) and the property sales site Zoopla, Cazoo says that it has hit £100 million in revenues since launching less than a year ago, selling and delivering “thousands” of cars every month. It does not disclose whether it is profitable.

The company’s boost comes from a new surge of interest not just from more people having a car for getting from A to B — and I’ll say as a London resident that traffic definitely feels worse these days — but also from people looking for online, virtual ways of doing this to avoid the physical contact that typically comes with more traditional ways of buying vehicles.

“Over the past few months we have seen an acceleration in the shift from offline to online car buying as UK consumers have continued to embrace our unique and market-leading proposition,” said Chesterman in a statement. “This latest funding demonstrates the conviction of some of the world’s best investors in both our business model and team as well as the UK market and gives Cazoo the firepower to deliver on our plans to provide the best possible car buying experience for UK consumers.”

Chesterman’s pedigree as a founder helps with raising money and opening doors.

“I have known Alex for seventeen years since our days building LoveFilm,” said Adam Valkin, MD of General Catalyst, in a statement. “He has made a career out of identifying large consumer markets where technology can drive change and then leading that transformation by focusing on the customer and delivering value, convenience and a trusted service. With Cazoo, Alex is taking his proven playbook to perhaps his largest opportunity yet for the benefit of used car buyers across the UK.”

Dan Sundheim, Founder of D1 Capital added, “We’re excited to partner with Alex and the team at Cazoo. They have generated enormous value for customers and shareholders in their previous internet ventures and we are confident that Cazoo will greatly accelerate the digital transformation of the used car industry and dramatically improve the car buying experience for consumers in the UK.”

News: France’s Sendinblue, an all-in-one digital marketing platform, raises $160M

• October 1, 2020
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As more companies and brands put the internet at the core of how they run their businesses these days, it’s giving a strong push to the growth of startups that are building tools to help them. In the latest development, Sendinblue, an eight-year-old French startup that has built a platform to help small and medium

As more companies and brands put the internet at the core of how they run their businesses these days, it’s giving a strong push to the growth of startups that are building tools to help them. In the latest development, Sendinblue, an eight-year-old French startup that has built a platform to help small and medium organizations run all of their marketing — from email, SMS and chat marketing through to automation services, Facebook ads and retargeting — has picked up $160 million in funding.

Bridgepoint, Bpifrance, Blackrock, and previous investor Partech (which led Sendinblue’s $35 million in Series A in 2017) all invested in the round.

The money will be used to help the company build out its presence in North America — where it grew 100% last year — and to continue to add more tools to the mix, both organically and by positioning itself as a consolidator, acquiring smaller marketing tech startups. The company is also building CRM tools and other adjacent areas in the SMB back office so you can see how it might evolve. It’s profitable and is active already in some 60 countries with some 180,000 customers on its books.

The huge funding, for a startup that may not have been on many people’s radar — you could say Sendinblue has come out of the blue — is a sign of the times.

SMBs (like retailers and brands doubling down on e-commerce) have long used the internet for marketing, but the recent pandemic, with its social distancing measures, has highlighted just how many people are spending time (and spending money) online, which has led to a boost in how organizations are using the internet to communicate with customers.

“The whole covid pandemic has accelerated our business,” said Steffen Schebesta, who runs the company’s North American operations (and joined the company when his startup, Newsletter2Go, was acquired several years ago). “We’ve seen a lot of SMBs finding that they need to digitize in order to survive.”

It’s also notable that it’s a French startup raising a large growth round: it’s a signal of how companies from the country are scaling, filling out a mission that French President Emmanuel Macron set out to see the country produce (and invest in) more unicorns.

Sendinblue’s funding news comes on the heels of another French martech company, Sarbacane, also raising a lot of money in recent weeks (France has been known for adtech, but seems that it also has a strong line in marketing tech). Further afield, we’ve seen a number of other startups in the space raising significant rounds this year, including Yotpo, Movable Ink, Adverity, and more.

There seems to be room for all of these, and more. Schebesta described a typical customer for Sendinblue — whose primary goal is to “enable small and medium businesses to be on equal footing with bigger companies in terms of the tools they can use, having access to everything in one platform at an affordable price — as one that may have “outgrown” Mailchimp with a need for more tools and more sophistication. 

While the company’s bread and butter and focus will always be SMBs, in the meantime it’s also picked up a number of high-profile and high-end customers too, including Louis Vuitton, the candy giant Haribo, Fujitsu, Amnesty International and Greenpeace. 

“Sendinblue is positioned in a growing market as more and more SMBs are going digital, especially in the past few months of lockdown,” said Olivier Nemsguern, Partner at Bridgepoint, in a statement. “We seek investments that meet a critical market need. Sendinblue is the perfect example of a company that will make an impact.”

“We have invested in Sendinblue because the company offers innovative solutions for SMBs and has a strong track record of achieving high growth in the U.S. and European market,” added Louis Molis, investment director at Bpifrance. “We’ve seen that Sendinblue’s value is globally extensible and will increase in importance as integrated marketing becomes more important.”

“Sendinblue has quickly become the leading digital-marketing platform for SMBs,” said Bruno Crémel, General Partner at Partech. “As demand for all in one platforms increases, Sendinblue has a unique ability to succeed. We are thrilled to continue to support Sendinblue as the company accelerates its next phase of international growth.”