Monthly Archives: February 2021

News: Geothermal home heating gets a $30 million boost from Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures

• February 17, 2021
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There’s a low energy solution to home heating and cooling sitting right underneath most houses, but until recently no one has been able to tap it. That solution is geothermal energy, using the earth’s own heat to provide temperature controlled comfort to homeowners is the mission that Kathy Hannun set for herself while working at

There’s a low energy solution to home heating and cooling sitting right underneath most houses, but until recently no one has been able to tap it.

That solution is geothermal energy, using the earth’s own heat to provide temperature controlled comfort to homeowners is the mission that Kathy Hannun set for herself while working at Google X (the skunkworks division within Google) and it’s been her goal when she spun out her technology as the startup Dandelion Energy.

Her company is now helmed by chief executive Michael Sachse, a former entrepreneur in residence at the venture firm NEA and a longtime executive at the energy management company, Opower, so Hannun can focus on pushing the technology she developed forward.

Helping her advance the geothermal tech is a new $30 million cash infusion from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the fund backed by Bill Gates and a slew of other billionaires to provide financing that can commercialize the new sustainable technologies needed to help the world respond and adapt to global warming.

In Dandelion’s case that means driving down the cost of installing geothermal systems from over $50,000 to roughly $18,000 to $20,000. The company partnered with Con Edison back in 2019 to offer Westchester homeowners $5,000 off their installations, and that project accounts for some of the 500 homes that are already using Dandelion’s system.

While the number of installations is small Sachse and Hannun have ambitious goals and some other strategic financial backers that may help them meet their targets.

Chiefly, the U.S. homebuilding giant Lennar is an investor in the company’s latest round and their presence on the cap table could mean big things if Dandelion can get its systems installed in any planned new construction.

“Our goal is to be able to do 10,000 homes per year. When we think about getting to 10,000 homes per year what that requires is for us to expand geographically,” Sachse said. “Lennar, which depending on how you measure it either the second largest or the largest homebuilder — they are not just an investor but we are working with them on developing communities.”

For now Dandeliion’s technology is only used by folks in very specific situations who could loosely be described as upper middle class.

“We think of our typical customer as someone who is interested in making a sound economic choice. They’re in their 40s or 50s, with a college degree and good credit,” Sachse said. “Living in a home that is 2000 to 2500 square feet that is by definition a little bit removed from the traditional urban infrastructure. Upper middle class product in the same way that solar has found traction in homes like that.” 

Currently, the company focuses on the retrofit market and is confining its operations to the Northeast where there are roughly 5.6 million homes that use fuel oil or propane where installing a Dandelion system can make economic sense given the current costs for the tech.

“The core target customer is someone who is using fuel oil or propane to heat their home. The reason to target them is because we think the payback or them is most attractive,” Sachse said. “Typically the customers who are investing in a Dandelion system and paying cash are going to see a five to seven year payback. Customers who are financing are going to see a lower energy bill  from day one.”

Dandelion’s innovations touch on three different aspects of making geothermal systems work, the drill, the heat exchanger, and the monitoring and management system for the heating and cooling system once it’s installed.

First, the company designed a drill that could give installation operations a smaller footprint. Installers need about 7 feet of space to drill down the 300 feet to 500 feet the company needs to access the 55 degree temperatures necessary to create the Dandelion heat loop.

The company then connects that loop to a novel heat exchanger located in a mechanical room of the house. That heat pump is connected to several sensors allowing the company to integrate with things like the Nest Thermostat to enable homeowners to have more control of the temperature n their homes through their smart phones.

Dandelion Energy heating and cooling system. Image Credit: Dandelion Energy

Dandelion’s system also includes a smart remote monitoring system that collects and stores data. The data is then uploaded about every 10 seconds and is monitored by Dandelion engineers, the company said. This means any potential problems will be caught immediately and a repair man can be sent to the homeowner’s house before the customer is even aware there might be an issue. 

The company’s executives argue that massive adoption of their home heating and cooling systems represent a vital part of any energy transition away from fossil fuels, chiefly because electric heating systems are inefficient.

“If we had a grid that was large enough to renewable supply electricity and not worry about the efficiency of the electricity demand we’d be in an amazing spot,” Sachse said. “Realistically to electrify the grid we need to triple our capacity while becoming more efficient. I don’t see how we get there without as part of that journey finding more sustainable ways to heat our homes.”

Geothermal home heating would certainly go a long way toward stabilizing the grid, according to Hannun

“Already air conditioners that are more efficient are putting enormous strain on the grid. Drives fuel use and transition challenges. The benefits of geothermal because of that connection to the ground is really moving out the demand peak,” she said. “The technology has a lot of benefits that it confers to the grid and help it operate much better. Which is one reason why we’ve seen utilities in New York embrace this technology and really become its champion.”

Breakthrough Energy Ventures is wholeheartedly on board with Dandelion’s solution.

“Through a combination of technology, data and operations, Dandelion is making geothermal heating and cooling cost-effective for the residential market, and working to solve a critical need for homeowners and our energy ecosystem,” said Carmichael Roberts, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, in a statement. “Dandelion’s geothermal heat pumps provide an efficient electric heating and cooling system that lowers the cost of heating and cooling for homeowners, no matter their region or climate. We’re looking forward to working with Dandelion as they look to fully displace fossil fuels from the home’s heating and cooling systems.”

News: TigerGraph raises $105M Series C for its enterprise graph database

• February 17, 2021
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TigerGraph, a well-funded enterprise startup that provides a graph database and analytics platform, today announced that it has raised a $105 million Series C funding round. The round was led by Tiger Global and brings the company’s total funding to over $170 million. “TigerGraph is leading the paradigm shift in connecting and analyzing data via

TigerGraph, a well-funded enterprise startup that provides a graph database and analytics platform, today announced that it has raised a $105 million Series C funding round. The round was led by Tiger Global and brings the company’s total funding to over $170 million.

“TigerGraph is leading the paradigm shift in connecting and analyzing data via scalable and native graph technology with pre-connected entities versus the traditional way of joining large tables with rows and columns,” said TigerGraph found and CEO, Yu Xu. “This funding will allow us to expand our offering and bring it to many more markets, enabling more customers to realize the benefits of graph analytics and AI.”

Current TigerGraph customers include the likes of Amgen, Citrix, Intuit, Jaguar Land Rover and UnitedHealth Group. Using a SQL-like query language (GSQL), these customers can use the company’s services to store and quickly query their graph databases. At the core of its offerings is the TigerGraphDB database and analytics platform, but the company also offers a hosted service, TigerGraph Cloud, with pay-as-you-go pricing, hosted either on AWS or Azure. With GraphStudio, the company also offers a graphical UI for creating data models and visually analyzing them.

The promise for the company’s database services is that they can scale to tens of terabytes of data with billions of edges. Its customers use the technology for a wide variety of use cases, including fraud detection, customer 360, IoT, AI, and machine learning.

Like so many other companies in this space, TigerGraph is facing some tailwind thanks to the fact that many enterprises have accelerated their digital transformation projects during the pandemic.

“Over the last 12 months with the COVID-19 pandemic, companies have embraced digital transformation at a faster pace driving an urgent need to find new insights about their customers, products, services, and suppliers,” the company explains in today’s announcement. “Graph technology connects these domains from the relational databases, offering the opportunity to shrink development cycles for data preparation, improve data quality, identify new insights such as similarity patterns to deliver the next best action recommendation.”

News: Fictiv nabs $35M to build out the ‘AWS of hardware manufacturing’

• February 17, 2021
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Hardware may indeed be hard, but a startup that’s built a platform that might help buck that idea by making hardware a little easier to produce has announced some more funding to continue building out its platform. Fictiv, which positions itself as the “AWS of hardware”, providing a platform for those wanting to design and

Hardware may indeed be hard, but a startup that’s built a platform that might help buck that idea by making hardware a little easier to produce has announced some more funding to continue building out its platform.

Fictiv, which positions itself as the “AWS of hardware”, providing a platform for those wanting to design and manufacture items, to easily evaluate and order the manufacturing, and subsequent movement of those goods, has raised $35 million.

It will be using the money to continue building out its platform and the supply chain that underpins Fictiv’s business, which the startup describes as the “Digital Manufacturing Ecosystem.”

David Evans, the CEO and founder, said that the focus of the company has been and will continue to be jobs that are highly specialised, and ultimately not mass-produced items, such as prototypes or objects that are specialised and by their nature not aimed at mass markets, such as particular medical devices.

“We are focused on 1,000 to 10,000,” he said in an interview. “This is the range where most products still die.”

The round — a Series D — is coming from a mix of strategic and financial investors. Led by 40 North Ventures, it also includes Honeywell, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp., Adit Ventures, and M20 (Microsoft’s strategic investment arm), as well as past backers Accel, G2VP, and Bill Gates.

The round brings the total raised by Fictiv to $92 million, and its valuation is not being disclosed

Evans said that the last couple of years since its previous round ($33 million raised in early 2019) have well and truly tested the business concept that he envisioned when first establishing the startup.

Even before the pandemic, “we had no idea what the trade wars between the U.S. and China would do.”

Quite abruptly, the supply chain got completely “crunched, with everything shut down” in China over those disputes, at which point, Fictiv shifted manufacturing to other parts of Asia such as India, and to the U.S. That ended up helping the company when the first wave of Covid-19 hit, initially in China.

Then came the global outbreak, and Fictiv found itself shifting yet again as plants shut down in the countries where it had recently opened. Then, with trade issues cooled down, Fictiv again reignited relationships and operations in China, where Covid had been contained early, to continue working there.

“I guess we were just in the right places at the right time,” he said.

The startup made its name early on with building prototypes for tech companies neighboring it in the Bay Area, startups build VR and other gadgets, with services that included injection molding, CNC machining, 3D printing and urethane casting, with customers using cloud-based software to design and order parts, which then were routed by Fictiv to the plants best suited to make them.

These days, while that business continues, Fictiv is also working with very large global multinationals on their efforts with smaller-scale manufacturing, products that are either new or unable to be tooled as efficiently in their existing factories.

Work that it does for Honeywell, for example, includes mostly hardware for its aerospace division. Medical devices and robotics are two other big areas for the company currently, it said.

But Evans and his investors are careful not to describe what they do as specifically industrial technology.

“Industrial tech is a misnomer. I think of this as digital transformation, cloud-based SaaS and AI,” said Marianne Wu, the MD of 40 North. “The baggage of industrial tech tells you everything about the opportunity.”

Fictiv’s pitch is that by taking on the supply-chain management of producing hardware for a business, it can produce hardware using its platform in a week, a process that might have previously taken 3 months to complete, which can mean lower costs and more efficiency.

“And when you speed up development, you see more products getting introduced,” he said.

There is still a lot of work to be done, however. One of the big sticking points in manufacturing has been the carbon footprint that it creates in production, and also in terms of the resulting goods that are produced.

That will likely become even more of an issue, if the Biden Administration follows through on its own commitments to reduce emissions and to lean more on companies to follow through for those ends.

Evans is all too aware of that issue and accepts that manufacturing may be one of the hardest to shift.

“Sustainability and manufacturing are not synonymous,” he admits. And while materials and manufacturing will take longer to evolve, for now, he said the focus has been on how to implement better private and public and carbon credits programs. He envisions a better market for carbon credits, he said, with Fictiv doing its part with the launch of its own tool for measuring this.

“Sustainability is ripe for disruption, and we hope to have the first carbon-neutral shipping program, giving customers better choice for more sustainability. It’s on the shoulders of companies like us to drive this.”

News: SeedFi closes on $65M to help financially struggling Americans get ahead

• February 17, 2021
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Millions of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and struggle to get out of a debt cycle. One startup is developing financial products targeted toward this segment of the population, with the goal of helping them build credit, save money, access funds and plan for the future. That startup, SeedFi, announced Wednesday it has raised $50

Millions of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and struggle to get out of a debt cycle.

One startup is developing financial products targeted toward this segment of the population, with the goal of helping them build credit, save money, access funds and plan for the future.

That startup, SeedFi, announced Wednesday it has raised $50 million in debt and $15 million in an equity funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z. The VC firm also led SeedFi’s $4 million seed funding when it was founded in March of 2019.

Flourish, Core Innovation Capital and Quiet Capital also participated in the latest financing.

SeedFi was founded on the premise that it is difficult for many Americans to get ahead financially. Its founding team has worked at both startups and big banks, such as JPMorgan Chase and Capital One, and operates under the premise that many legacy financial institutions are simply not designed to help Americans who are struggling financially to get ahead. 

“We’ve seen firsthand how the system has been designed for underprivileged Americans to fail,” said Jim McGinley, co-founder and CEO of SeedFi. “Our average customer earns $50,000 a year, yet they pay $460 a year in overdraft fees and payday loan companies charge them APRs of 400% or more. They barely make enough to cover their expenses and any misstep can set them back for years.”

In previous roles, McGinley was responsible for payday loans for underserved communities.

“There I got insights to the financial difficulties they had and the need for better products to help them get a step up,” he told TechCrunch.

Co-founder Eric Burton said he can relate because he grew up in Central Texas as part of “a super poor family.”

“I experienced all the struggles of being low income and the necessity of taking on high-priced credit to get through day to day,” he recalled. “I personally was trapped in a debt cycle for a long time.”

In fact, a job offer he got from Capital One was temporarily rescinded because the company said he had “bad credit,” which turned out to be a result of unpaid medical bills he’d incurred at the age of 18.

“I didn’t know about them, but was able to get the job after using my signing bonus to pay off that debt,” he said. “So I can understand how a certain starting point makes it very hard to progress.”

SeedFi’s goal is to tackle the root of the problem. It launched in private beta in 2019, and helped its initial customers build more than $500,000 in savings — even during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, it’s launching to the public with two offerings. One is a credit building product that is designed to “create important long-term savings habits.” Customers save as little as $10 from every paycheck, which is reported to the credit bureaus to build their credit history, and are then able to generate $500 in savings in six months’ time.

After six months of on-time payments, SeedFi customers with no credit history were able to establish a credit score of 600, while customers with existing credit scores and less than three credit accounts boosted their scores by 45 points, according to the company.

The concept of enabling consumers to build credit history beyond traditional methods is becoming increasingly more common. Just last week, we wrote about Tomo Credit, which provides customers with a debit card so they can build credit based on their cash flow.

SeedFi’s other offering, the Borrow & Grow Plan, is designed to be a more affordable alternative to installment or payday loans. It provides consumers with “immediate access” to funds while also helping them build savings and credit. 

Andreessen Horowitz general partner Angela Strange , who has joined SeedFi’s board with the financing, believes there’s “a massive business opportunity for new financial services entrants to reach historically underserved populations through better product experiences, underwriting and technology.”

In a blog post, she shares an example of how SeedFi works. The company evaluates risk and extends credit to a customer that might be traditionally hard to underwrite. It determines how much to lend, as well as the proportion of dollars to give as money now versus savings. 

“For instance, a typical SeedFi plan might be structured as $500 right now and $500 reserved in a savings account. The borrower pays off $1,000 over time, and at the end of the plan, he or she has $500 in a savings account. Not only has the borrower paid a lower interest rate, he or she is in a better financial position after making the decision to borrow money,” Strange writes.

Looking ahead, SeedFi plans to use its new capital to build out its product suite and grow its customer base. 

“We will be able to more efficiently fund our growing loan portfolio and serve more customers,” McGinley said.

News: Certific, a health tech startup from the founder of TransferWise, aims to be the rails for certified home testing

• February 17, 2021
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Certific, a health tech startup co-founded by TransferWise’s Taavet Hinrikus, is breaking cover today with the launch of what it claims is the first “certified” remote COVID-19 testing service. The British-Estonian company is using techniques borrowed from the worlds of fintech and telemedicine, including asking users to film themselves while taking the at-home test, in

Certific, a health tech startup co-founded by TransferWise’s Taavet Hinrikus, is breaking cover today with the launch of what it claims is the first “certified” remote COVID-19 testing service.

The British-Estonian company is using techniques borrowed from the worlds of fintech and telemedicine, including asking users to film themselves while taking the at-home test, in a bold attempt to solve remote testing’s adherence and trust problem.

Initially targeting private individuals and businesses in the U.K., with other markets to follow, tests can be ordered online and are carried out remotely with the promise of a certified result the following day for PCR tests and in under 90 minutes for antigen tests.

More broadly, the Certific app and user journey is designed to increase trust in remote testing and ensure that self-performed tests reach the same standard as those carried out in a clinical setting.

“When the pandemic hit, we started toying around with the first finger prick tests to see if you have antibodies, and thinking, ‘hey, is there a way to make use of these to help the world along,’ ” Hinrikus told me during an interview earlier this week. “[But] then it turned out that these kind of antibody tests, and the end immunity, was a very unclear concept. And so we kind of put it on hold, but we kept on thinking about what better things we can do to make testing more trustworthy and easier”.

Then late last year he and Certific’s other co-founders — physician Dr. Jack Kreindler and CEO Liis Narusk — realised that there were things “that we can and should be doing to come up with a more democratised way of medical testing, and apply this to the pandemic”.

Hinrikus doesn’t quite say it, but as the founder of TransferWise and a prolific angel investor, including backing Estonian verification platform Veriff, there’s little doubt that Certific is partly inspired by the authentication techniques that have gained prominence in fintech, such as video selfies used to onboard new customers at digital banks. In addition, medical director Kreindler has experience with anti-doping in close-combat sports.

Coupled with more traditional identity checks, the Certific app asks you to film yourself while you take the test. The recording and test result is securely uploaded to Certific and checked by a qualified physician to ensure you have adhered to the manufacturer’s instructions properly. A medical certification containing the test result is then delivered back to the app. PCR tests cost £64, and the soon to be available rapid antigen tests will be sold in 12-packs for £249 (making the price of a single antigen test £20.75).

But how easy would it be to cheat the test and therefore fake a result? “That’s one thing we definitely are very, very focused on solving,” says Certific CEO Narusk. “Our experience in all the anti-fraud and anti-cheat areas means that we went far and beyond to make sure that you can’t actually tamper with the process. So when you record the video, and after you have recorded the video, it is checked by our test verification officers who make sure that you haven’t moved the tests away from the screen”.

In addition, Certific ensures that the test you have used is actually the test that you ordered and contains the same unique ID, and that you are the person who was supposed to do the test.

That in itself isn’t entirely fraud proof, and Hinrikus clarifies that Certific is initially focusing on ensuring that a test is carried out medically correctly. He says that a higher-priced tier will be offered at a later stage with enhanced video verification, such as a live operator acting as a witness.

This could be particularly useful for businesses, such as live events or travel, where there could be incentives for individuals to cheat and where operators may be required to prove to insurance companies or government authorities that they are COVID-19 safe.

Kreindler, Certific’s medical director, contrasts this with key workers that are currently permitted by U.K. authorities to carry out coronavirus home-testing without any additional verification, but who aren’t nearly as likely to want to fake a result.

“If you think about it, those public servants are not at a great disadvantage if they test positive, because they still get paid. So there’s less of an incentive to cheat. And the challenge comes where you are doing point of care testing in an environment where there actually is some incentive or a big disadvantage [to testing positive]”.

Kreindler also says it’s not just about individuals and that Certific has worked with academics in Estonia, North America and in the U.K. to develop a computational risk model for mass testing for “super spreader” environments, such as large events. People will not only be able to take a test at home before attending, but a risk model that continually learns and takes into account “democratised decentralised testing” and an understanding of vaccination and immunity, could enable further mitigations to be put in place to make sure there’s no net spread of the virus back into the community. “That’s very core to our thinking going forward,” he says. “It’s not just about certifying testing, it’s also about certifying crowds”.

Zooming out even further — and beyond the current coronavirus pandemic — Certific has been built to be entirely test agnostic. Combining speed, convenience, adherence and trust, the company aims to be the rails on which existing and future home tests can run (my words, not theirs). In the future, this could span testing for sexually transmitted diseases (SDIs) to anti-doping tests in sports. And, of course, new types of COVID-19 tests as they come on stream.

News: Peak AI nabs $21M for a platform to help non-tech companies make AI-based decisions

• February 17, 2021
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One of the biggest challenges for organizations in modern times is deciding where, when, and how to use the advances of technology, when the organizations are not technology companies themselves. Today, a startup out of Manchester, England, is announcing some funding for a platform that it believes can help. Peak AI, which has built technology

One of the biggest challenges for organizations in modern times is deciding where, when, and how to use the advances of technology, when the organizations are not technology companies themselves. Today, a startup out of Manchester, England, is announcing some funding for a platform that it believes can help.

Peak AI, which has built technology that it says can help enterprises — specifically those that work with physical products such as retailers, consumer goods companies, and manufacturing organizations — make better, AI-based evaluations and decisions, has closed a round of $21 million.

The Series B is being led by Oxx, with participation from past investors MMC Ventures and Praetura Ventures, as well as new backer Arete. It has raised $43 million to date and is not disclosing its valuation.

Richard Potter, the CEO who co-founded the company with Atul Sharma and David Leitch, said that the funding will be used to continue expanding the the functionality of its platform, adding offices in the U.S. and India, and growing its customer base.

Its list of clients today is an impressive one, including the retailer PrettyLittleThing, KFC, PepsiCo, Marshalls and Speedy Hire.

As Potter describes it, Peak identified its opportunity early on. It was founded in 2014, a time non-tech enterprises were just starting to grasp how the concept of AI could apply to their businesses but felt it was out of their reach.

Indeed, the larger landscape for AI services at that time was largely one focused on technology companies, specifically companies like Google, Amazon and Apple that were building AI products to power their own services, and often snapping up the most interesting talent in the field as it manifested through smaller startups and universities.

Peak’s basic premise was to build AI not as a business goal for itself but as a business service. Its platform sits within an organization and ingests any data source that a company might wish to feed into it.

While initial integration needs technical know-how — either at the company itself or via a systems integrator — using Peak day-to-day can be done by both technical and non-technical workers.

Peak says it can help answer a variety of questions that those people might have, such as how much of an item to produce, and where to ship it, based on a complex mix of sales data; how to manage stock better; or when to ramp up or ramp down headcount in a warehouse. The platform can also be used to help companies with marketing and advertising, figuring out how to better target campaigns to the right audiences, and so on.

Peak is not the first company that has seized on the concept of using a “general” AI to give non-tech organizations the same kinds of superpowers that the likes of big tech now use in their own businesses everyday.

Sometimes the ambition has outstripped the returns, however.

Witness Element AI, a highly-touted startup backed by a long list of top-shelf strategic and financial investors to build, essentially, an AI services business for non-tech companies to use as they might these days use Accenture. It never quite got there, though, and was acquired by ServiceNow last year at a devalued price of $500 million, the customer deals it had were wound down, and the tech was integrated into the bigger company’s stack.

Other efforts within hugely successful tech companies have not fared that well either.

“Einsten’s features are essentially useless, and you can quote me on that,” said Potter of Salesforce’s in-house CRM AI business. “Because it is too generic, it doesn’t predict anything useful.”

And that is perhaps the crux of why Peak AI is working for now: it has remained focused for now on a limited number of segments of the market, in particular those with physical objects as the end product, giving the AI that it has built a more targeted end point. In other words, it’s “general” but only for specific industries.

And it claims that this is paying off. Peak’s customers have reported a 5% increase in total company revenues, a doubling of return on advertising spend, a 12% reduction in inventory holdings, and a 5% reduction in supply chain costs, according to the company (although it doesn’t specify which companies, which products, or anything that points to who or what is being described).

“Richard and the excellent Peak team have a compelling vision to optimize entire businesses through Decision Intelligence and they’re delivering real-world benefits to a raft of household name customers already,” said Richard Anton, a general partner at Oxx, in a statement. “The pandemic has meant digitization is no longer a choice; it’s a requirement. Peak has made it easier for businesses to get started and see rapid results from AI-enabled decision making. We are delighted to support Peak on their way to becoming the category-defining global leader in Decision Intelligence.” Anton is joining the board with this round.

News: Epic Games takes its Apple App Store fight to Europe

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Epic Games has taken its fight against Apple’s App Store rules to the European Union where it’s lodged a complaint with the bloc’s antitrust regulators. In a blog post today the maker of the popular online game Fortnite said it’s extending its battle for what it dubbed “fairer digital platform practices for developers and consumers”

Epic Games has taken its fight against Apple’s App Store rules to the European Union where it’s lodged a complaint with the bloc’s antitrust regulators.

In a blog post today the maker of the popular online game Fortnite said it’s extending its battle for what it dubbed “fairer digital platform practices for developers and consumers” to Europe, noting the bloc is already looking into competition concerns attached to the Apple App Store (and its payment service, Apple Pay).

The EU opened a formal probe into certain Apple practices last year.

Regional lawmakers have also recently set out a plan to expand platform regulation to put specific strictures on ‘gatekeeper’ platforms with the aim of ensuring fairness and accountability vis-a-vis third parties. And the issue of platform power is certainly one that’s now under close scrutiny by regulators and lawmakers around the world.

“The complaint, filed with the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition, alleges that through a series of carefully designed anti-competitive restrictions, Apple has not just harmed but completely eliminated competition in app distribution and payment processes,” Epic writes, adding: “Apple uses its control of the iOS ecosystem to benefit itself while blocking competitors and its conduct is an abuse of a dominant position and in breach of EU competition law.”

It’s not seeking damages against Apple but wants EU competition authorities to impose remedies against what it describes as the iPhone maker’s “monopoly channels”.

“What’s at stake here is the very future of mobile platforms,” said Epic Games founder and CEO, Tim Sweeney, in a statement. “Consumers have the right to install apps from sources of their choosing and developers have the right to compete in a fair marketplace. We will not stand idly by and allow Apple to use its platform dominance to control what should be a level digital playing field. It’s bad for consumers, who are paying inflated prices due to the complete lack of competition among stores and in-app payment processing. And it’s bad for developers, whose very livelihoods often hinge on Apple’s complete discretion as to who to allow on the iOS platform, and on which terms.”

Epic launched a US lawsuit against Apple last August after Apple banned Fortnite from the App Store.

The tech giant made the move after Epic tried to bypass its in-app purchase framework (and circumvent the cut Apple takes) by adding its own payment mechanism to Fortnite to let users purchase in-game currency directly — in direct contravention of Apple’s rules.

As well as banning Fortnight, Apple said it would go further and revoke Epic’s developer account and access to developer tools for its Unreal Engine — a move that would have affected third party app makers that rely on Epic’s engine. However it was barred from going that far.

A US judge quickly denied Epic’s motion to force Apple to unblock the game but Cupertino was ordered not to block Epic’s ability to provide and distribute its Unreal Engine on iOS — limiting Apple’s ability to take a scorched earth approach to try to shut Epic’s battle down.

Since then Epic has filed legal complaints against Apple in Australia and the UK. It’s now also petitioning EU regulators.

The EU’s antitrust division, meanwhile, opened a formal investigation of Apple last summer — more than a year after the Europe-based music streaming service Spotify had made a similar complaint over ‘restrictive’ App Store rules and the 30% cut Cupertino takes on iOS in-app payments.

The Commission said at the time that an unnamed e-book/audiobook distributor had also complained about the impact of App Store rules on competition.

It confirmed today that it has received a complaint by Epic Games against Apple. “We will assess it based on our standard procedures,” a Commission spokesperson told us. 

Epic’s argument is that Apple is denying Fortnight users on iOS a choice between Apple payment and Epic direct payment — claiming savings would be passed to direct purchasers (although Epic of course stands to gain money if it can open up a channel that bypasses Apple’s cut on in-app payments).

Epic has also tried to push Apple to let it operate an Epic Games Store on iOS — a move Apple refused, citing the “exacting standards for security, privacy, and content” which it argues are predicated on the App Store rules (although Apple’s claims of curation equaling ‘quality’ don’t always live up to the reality of what it allows to operate on its App Store).

Back in 2019, Apple also launched its own gaming distribution service, Apple Arcade — a pure-play content play that offers access to new and exclusive games playable across Apple’s device ecosystem.

That move was perhaps the straw the broke the camel’s back vis-a-vis Epic Games deciding to go all in on an antitrust brawl with Apple. (Its blog post references Apple Arcade, and notes that Apple has barred competitors, including itself, from doing the same).

It’s worth noting that Epic has also squared up to Google, which similarly takes a cut of in-app payments of Android apps distributed via its Play Store — and which also removed Fortnight from the Play Store last year.

However Google’s Android platform allows sideloading of third party apps and alternative app stores, arguably making it harder to make an antitrust case stick vs the tighter restrictions applied by Apple.

At the same time, though, Android dominates smartphone marketshare — while Apple’s cut of the global market is less than a fifth.

News: vArmour the multi-cloud security startup, raises $58M en route to IPO

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Enterprises have been loading more of their operations into cloud — and, more often than not, multi-cloud — environments over the last year, creating vast networks of services that can be complex to manage. Today, vArmour, a startup that provides ways to manage in real time and ultimately secure how applications (and people) work in

Enterprises have been loading more of their operations into cloud — and, more often than not, multi-cloud — environments over the last year, creating vast networks of services that can be complex to manage. Today, vArmour, a startup that provides ways to manage in real time and ultimately secure how applications (and people) work in those fragmented environments is announcing funding to capitalize on the demand for its services.

The Bay Area startup has picked up funding of $58 million in what it described as an oversubscribed round. Co-led by previous backers AllegisCyber Capital and NightDragon, existing investors Standard Chartered Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Australian carrier Telstra, Redline Capital, and EDBI also participated.

CEO Tim Eades (who co-founded the company with Roger Lian) said this round is likely to be its final fundraising ahead of an IPO for the company.

“We had one hell of a year in 2020 with companies rushing to the cloud,” he said in an interview, with net new annual recurring revenue doubing year over year in the last year. It started out, he noted, with perhaps 10% of business processes in the cloud, and ended at more like 50%. “Now the focus for us is to get to the public markets, maybe in two or 2.5 years from now.”

The company appointed a CFO last October as part of its go-public plan, he noted — Chris Dentiste, who previously had been the CFO of RSA. “His job is to help me find the right window. My job is to make sure we have enough fuel in the tank, and we do,” said Eades.

He added that the company is likely also to look at making some acquisitions in the meantime. A recent launch of an AI lab in Calgary, Canada, points to one area where we might see some activity.

The company is not disclosing its valuation, although Eades confirmed it was a significant up-round. We’re also double checking what the total raised to date is now too (we’ll update when we get that information).

For some context, in the last round of funding that we covered — a $44 million round in 2019 led by the same two investors — we mentioned a PitchBook estimate of $420 million from the previous round — a figure that the company did not dispute with us at the time.

vArmour has been around for several years, with the first three spent in stealth mode, quietly building its technology, raising money and amassing early customers. Those customers, Eades said, fall into categories like telecommunications (strategic backer Telstra being one of them), and financial services.

Those industries speak largely to the challenges that vArmour is addressing in its business.

Legacy businesses in critical verticals often pre-date the modern era of business, and while many of them are going through what enterprise people like to refer to as “digital transformation”, the evolution is not a smooth one.

In many cases, adopting new technologies can be slow, and in almost every case, when you are talking about large enterprises, the changes are very piecemeal, affecting one particular service, or region, or department, or even a subsection of any of those.

All of this means that for malicious actors, there are a number of options to tackle when setting out to look for vulnerabilities in a business or its network, and for those on the inside, it makes for a very complicated and fragmented situation when it comes to monitoring those networks and the services running on them, finding vulnerabilities or suspicious activity, and doing something about that. VArmour’s term that it uses for this is “Application Relationship Management.”

Eades — whose background includes working for the likes of IBM but also leading number of startups acquired by bigger technology giants — has first-hand understanding of how that complexity looks from both sides, from the end user end and from the service provider end. That is in essence what his company has identified and is trying to fix.

Having started out in managing application policies and providing insights to protect on that front, the company is expanding the range of tools that it provides with the recent launch of identity access management on top of that.

But that is likely to be just one of the product steps that it takes to tackle what remains a difficult problem to fix, as its growth is related not just to the growth of activity on a network, but further digital migration of services, and the rise of new technology within an organization’s stack.

(And that is also an area that vArmour is not alone in considering, or even the only approach to tackling it: consider yesterday’s news of Palo Alto Networks acquiring Bridgecrew to extend its own ability to provide automated security monitoring services to DevOps teams.)

“Managing risk and resiliency in the hybrid cloud is one of the most significant security challenges for enterprises,” said Bob Ackerman, Founder and Managing Director at AllegisCyber Capital, in a statement. “vArmour’s platform provides the visibility, controls, and accountability necessary to actively manage these challenges and has done this for hundreds of customers. We are ecstatic to be part of their next stage of growth.”

“As applications become more complex, more distributed, and more targeted by attackers, the importance of full visibility into the relationships between applications becomes increasingly important.” added Dave DeWalt, founder of NightDragon. “vArmour’s approach to application relationship management ensures that enterprises of all sizes can continuously audit, respond, and control identity relationships to best protect their important IP, and mitigate risk to the business.”

News: Sinch acquires Inteliquent for $1.14B to take on Twilio in the US

• February 17, 2021
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After raising $690 million from SoftBank in December to make acquisitions, the Sweden-based cloud communications company Sinch has followed through on its strategy in that department. Today the company announced that it is acquiring Inteliquent, an interconnection provider for voice communications in the U.S. currently owned by private equity firm GTCR, for $1.14 billion in

After raising $690 million from SoftBank in December to make acquisitions, the Sweden-based cloud communications company Sinch has followed through on its strategy in that department. Today the company announced that it is acquiring Inteliquent, an interconnection provider for voice communications in the U.S. currently owned by private equity firm GTCR, for $1.14 billion in cash.

And to finance the deal, Sinch said it has raised financing totaling SEK8.2 billion — $986 million — from Handelsbanken and Danske Bank, along with other facilities it had in place.

The deal will give Sinch — a competitor to Twilio with a range of messaging, calling and marketing (engagement) APIs for those building communications into their services in mobile apps and other services — a significant foothold in the U.S. market.

Inteliquent — a profitable company with 500 employees and revenues of $533 million, gross profit of $256 million, and Ebitda of $135 million in 2020 — claims to be one of the biggest voice carriers North America, serving both other service providers and enterprises. Its network connects to all the major telcos, covering 94% of the U.S. population, with more than 300 billion minutes of voice calls and 100 million phone numbers handled annually for customers.

Sinch is publicly traded in Sweden — where its market cap is current at $13 billion (just over 108 billion Swedish krona) — and the acquisition begs the question of whether the company plans to establish more of a financial presence in the U.S., for example with a listing there. We have asked the company what its next steps might be and will update this post as and when we learn more.

“Becoming a leader in the U.S. voice market is key to establish Sinch as the leading global cloud communications platform,” said Oscar Werner, Sinch CEO, in a statement. “Inteliquent serves the largest and most demanding voice customers in America with superior quality backed by a fully-owned network across the entire U.S.. Our joint strengths in voice and messaging provide a unique position to grow our business and power a superior customer experience for our customers.”

Inteliquen provides two main areas of service, Communications-Platform-as-Service (CPaaS) for API-based services to provide voice calling and phone numbers; and more legacy Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) products for telcos such as off-net call termination (when a call is handed off from one carrier to another) and toll-free numbers. These each account for roughly half of the total business although — unsurprisingly — the CPaaS business is growing at twice the rate of IaaS.

Its business, like many others focusing on services for people who are relying more on communications services as they are seeing each other in person less — saw a surge of use this past year, it said. (Revenues adjusted without Covid lift, it noted, would have been $499 million, so still healthy.)

As for Sinch, since spinning out from Rebtel in 2014 to take on the business of providing comunications tools to developers, it has been on an acquisition roll to bulk up its geographical reach and the services that it provides to those customers.

Deals have included, most recently, buying ACL in India for $70 million and SAP’s digital interconnect business for $250 million. The deals — combined with Twilio’s own acquisitions of companies like Sendgrid for $2 billion and last year’s Segment for $3.2 billon, speak both to the bigger trend of consolidation in the digital (API-based) communications space, as well as the huge value that is contained within it.

Inteliquent itself had been in private equity hands before this, controlled by GTCR based in Chicago, like Inteliquent itself. According to PitchBook, its most recent financing was a mezzanine loan from Oaktree Capital in 2018 for just under $19 million.

Interestingly, Inteliquent itself has been an investor in innovative communications startups, participating in a Series B for Zipwhip, a startup that is building better ways to integrate mobile messaging tools into landline services.

“We’re excited about the tremendous opportunities this combination unlocks, expanding the services we can provide to our customers. Combining our leading voice offering with Sinch’s global messaging capabilities truly positions us for leadership in the rapidly developing market for cloud communications“, comments Ed O’Hara, Inteliquent CEO, in a statement.

News: Dixa acquires Elevio, the ‘knowledge management’ platform helping brands improve customer support

• February 17, 2021
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Dixa, the Danish customer support platform promising more personalised customer support, has acquired Melbourne-based “knowledge management” SaaS Elevio to bolster its product and technology offerings. The deal is said to be worth around $15 million, in a combination of cash and Dixa shares. This sees Elevio’s own VC investors exit, and Elevio’s founders and employees

Dixa, the Danish customer support platform promising more personalised customer support, has acquired Melbourne-based “knowledge management” SaaS Elevio to bolster its product and technology offerings.

The deal is said to be worth around $15 million, in a combination of cash and Dixa shares. This sees Elevio’s own VC investors exit, and Elevio’s founders and employees incentivised as part of the Dixa family, according to Dixa co-founder and CEO, Mads Fosselius.

“We have looked at many partners within this space over the years and ultimately decided to partner with Elevio as they have what we believe is the best solution in the market,” he tells me. “Dixa and Elevio have worked together since 2019 on several customers and great brands through a strong and tight integration between the two platforms. Dixa has also used Elevio’s products internally and to support our own customers for self service, knowledge base and help center”.

Fosselius says that this “close partnership, strong integration, unique tech” and a growing number of mutual customers eventually led to a discussion late last year, and the two companies decided to go on a journey together to “disrupt the world of customer service”.

“The acquisition comes with many interesting opportunities but it has been driven by a product/tech focus and is highly product and platform strategic for us,” he explains. “We long ago acknowledged that they have the best knowledge product in the market. We could have built our own knowledge management system but with such a strong product already out there, built with a similar tech stack as ours and with a very aligned vision and culture fit to Dixa, we felt this was a no brainer”.

Founded in 2015 by Jacob Vous Petersen and Mads Fosselius, Dixa wants to end bad customer service with the help of technology that claims to be able to facilitate more personalised customer support. Originally dubbed a “customer friendship” platform, the Dixa cloud-based software works across multiple channels — including phone, chat, e-mail, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and SMS — and employs a smart routing system so the right support requests reach the right people within an organisation.

Broadly speaking, the platform competes with Zendesk, Freshdesk and Salesforce. However, there’s also overlap with Intercom in relation to live chat and messaging, and perhaps MessageBird with its attempted expansion to become an “Omnichannel Platform-as-a-Service” (OPaaS) to easily enable companies to communicate with customers on any channel of their choosing.

Meanwhile, Elevio is described as bridging the gap between customer support and knowledge management. The platform helps support agents more easily access the right answers when communicating with customers, and simultaneously enables end-users to get information and guidance to resolve common issues for themselves.

Machine learning is employed so that the correct support content is provided based on a user’s query or on-going discussion, whilst also alerting customer support teams when documents need updating. The Australian company also claims that creating user guides using Elevio doesn’t require any technical skills and says its “embeddable assistant” enables support content to be delivered in-product or injected into any area of a website “without involving developers”.

Adds the Dixa CEO : “Customer support agents still spend a lot of time helping customers with the same type of questions over and over again. Together with Elevio we are able to ensure that agents are given the opportunity to quickly replicate best practice answers, ensuring fast, standardised and correct answers for customers. Elevio is the world leader in applying machine learning to solve this problem”.