Monthly Archives: April 2021

News: WayUp’s new dashboard helps employers see where their recruiting process loses diverse candidates

• April 20, 2021
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WayUp started out as a platform to help college graduates find jobs and internships, but over time, it has increasingly focused on helping employers find diverse job candidates. And it recently introduced a new feature to help those employers see exactly where their diversity and inclusion efforts may be falling short. Co-founder and CEO Liz

WayUp started out as a platform to help college graduates find jobs and internships, but over time, it has increasingly focused on helping employers find diverse job candidates. And it recently introduced a new feature to help those employers see exactly where their diversity and inclusion efforts may be falling short.

Co-founder and CEO Liz Wessel explained that when companies aren’t hiring enough employees from diverse backgrounds, recruiters and executives often assume “we’re not getting enough of those candidates at the top of our funnel.” That idea, she suggested, is exemplified by Wells Fargo CEO Charles Schlarf’s controversial remarks last fall, when he said the company wasn’t reaching its diversity goals because there simply aren’t enough qualified candidates.

Wessel suggested that when you take a look closer look at the data, you find that the initial outreach and recruiting is only part of the problem. WayUp’s new dashboard allows employers to track this, because it shows the demographic (race and gender) breakdown of the candidate pool at each part of the funnel.

For example, Wessel said that many employers hiring for technical roles discover that they’re reaching a relatively diverse candidate pool during their initial outreach, and that the pool stays diverse during the first interviews — only to become much more white and male after the technical assessments/programming tests.

Image Credits: WayUp

“Similar to the SATs, many technical assessments have high correlation to socioeconomics status,” she said.

Upon discovering this, some recruiters may choose to stop requiring these tests. Others may choose to keep them — but thanks to WayUp, at least they know where the breakdown is really happening.

After Wessel showed me the dashboard, I wondered why other hiring platforms didn’t offer something similar. In a follow-up email, she suggested that many platforms don’t realize that achieving these goals requires about more than just getting a diverse diverse pool of candidates. Plus, she said WayUp is “one of the only sourcing/job platforms that I know of that has candidates self-report their race/ethnicity, gender and veteran status (in an EEOC/OFCCP compliant way).”

She added, “We really are focusing on having our platform make it so your entire hiring process is equitable and optimizes for employers hiring a diverse workforce, [versus] putting a Band-Aid or quick fix on the issue by just sourcing more diverse candidates at the top of your funnel.”

News: Hustle Fund backs Fintor, which wants to make it easier to invest in real estate

• April 20, 2021
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Farshad Yousefi and Masoud Jalali used to drive through Palo Alto neighborhoods and marvel at the outrageous home prices. But the drives sparked an idea. They were not in a financial position to purchase a home in those neighborhoods (to be clear, not many people are) either for investment or to live. But what if

Farshad Yousefi and Masoud Jalali used to drive through Palo Alto neighborhoods and marvel at the outrageous home prices. But the drives sparked an idea. They were not in a financial position to purchase a home in those neighborhoods (to be clear, not many people are) either for investment or to live. But what if they could invest in homes in up and coming cities throughout the U.S.?

Then they realized that even that might be a challenge considering that with all their student debt, affording a down payment would be impossible.

“There was nothing available out there besides a crowdfunding platform, which when we first signed up, took away $1,000 from our account that we didn’t have, and then our capital would be locked up for 3 to 10 years,” recalls Yousefi.

So the pair started doing research and spoke to 1,000 individuals under the age of 35. Eight out of 10 said they would like to invest in real estate but were deterred by all the barriers to entry.

“There is clearly a large demand for access to real estate,” Yousefi said. “And we wanted to give people a way to invest in it like they can in stocks, via a mobile app.”

And so the idea for Fintor was born.

Yousefi and Jalali founded the company in 2020 with the goal of purchasing homes via an LLC, and turning each into shares through a SEC-approved broker dealer. Individuals can then buy shares of the homes via Fintor’s platform. Its next step is to sign agreements with individual real estate investors or bigger real estate development firms to list their properties on the platform and give people the opportunity to buy shares.

And now Fintor has raised $2.5 million in seed money to continue building out its fractional real estate investing platform. The startup aims to “fractionalize” houses and other residential property, giving people in the U.S. access to investment opportunities “starting with as little as $5.” The company attracted the interest of investors such as 500 Startups, Hustle Fund, Graphene Ventures, Houston-based real estate investor Manny Khoshbin, Mana Ventures and other angel investors such as Cindy Bi, Skyler Fernandes, VU Venture Partners, Minal Hasan, Andrew Zalasin, Alluxo CEO and Founder Safa Mahzari, SquareFoot CEO and founder Jonathan Wasserstrum and Teachable CEO and founder Ankur Nagpal.

Image Credits: Fintor

Fintor is eying markets such as Kansas City, South Carolina, and Houston, Texas, where it already has some properties. It’s looking for homes in the $80,000 to $350,000 price range, and millennials and GenZers are its target demographic.

“Fintor can give the same return as the stock market, but at half the risk,” Yousefi said. “As two [Iranian] immigrants, we’ve seen how much this country has to offer and how real estate sits at the top of everything, yet is so inaccessible.”

The pair had originally set out to raise just $1 million but the round was quickly “way oversubscribed,” according to Yousefi, and they ended up raising $2.5 million at triple the original valuation.

Jalali said the company will use machine learning technology to filter and rate properties as it scales its business model.

“We’ll use ML to categorize neighborhoods and to come up with the price of properties to offer to potential sellers,” he added. “Our ultimate goal is to create indexes so that people can invest in multiple properties in a given city. That creates diversification right away.”

.Elizabeth Yin, co-founder and general partner of Hustle Fund, believes that Fintor is solving a generational problem with real estate.

“Retail investors have almost no access to great real estate investments today and the best opportunities are reserved for the select few,” she told TechCrunch. “Not to mention that in addition to access, retail investors often need a lot of capital in order to have a diversified portfolio or be accredited to join funds.”

Fintor’s approach to securitize real estate assets will give millions of investors who are not accredited investors access they would otherwise not have had, Yin added. 

“Simultaneously, it provides increased liquidity to property owners, while improving the user experience for both parties,” she said. “Effectively this becomes a new asset class, because it’s entirely turnkey and is fractionalized, which opens up many new pockets of investors.”

News: Leo AR, user-facing marketplace for 3D objects, raises $3 million seed round

• April 20, 2021
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Apple’s introduction of ARKit changed the game for entrepreneurs, not unlike the App Store did on a much, much larger scale back in 2008. One entrepreneur, Dana Loberg, has capitalized on the launch of ARKit with her startup Leo AR. Leo is the result of a few pivots. The company first started out as MojiLala,

Apple’s introduction of ARKit changed the game for entrepreneurs, not unlike the App Store did on a much, much larger scale back in 2008.

One entrepreneur, Dana Loberg, has capitalized on the launch of ARKit with her startup Leo AR.

Leo is the result of a few pivots. The company first started out as MojiLala, which launched out of betaworks. It was a hassle-free sticker marketplace that allowed artists to upload their stickers and sell them through the platform for end-users to use in a number of locations.

In 2017, MojiLala released a new app called Surreal, which allowed artists to sell virtual objects to end users and lay them over their camera to record fun content. Now as Leo AR, the company is focused on 3D augmented reality objects without losing focus on giving artists an easy-to-use outlet for their virtual wares.

Today, Leo is announcing the raise of a $3 million seed round led by Great Oaks Ventures, with participation from Dennis Phelps of IVP, betaworks, Deutsch Telekom, Quake Capital, and other angel investors.

Image Credits: Leo AR

The app operates on a freemium basis, letting end users subscribe to certain artists they like on the platform. Leo takes a 30 percent cut on those purchases, but Loberg said that her main priority beyond generating revenue is ensuring that artists get paid well and are incentivized to create and sell through her platform.

Loberg also shared that the app has exploded in popularity among children, who enjoy creating videos with dinosaurs or dragons in them.

In fact, Leo users have created more than 8 million videos on the platform, and active users add more than 85 3D objects to their scenes and average 10+ minutes in the app when they use it.

Leo not only lets users distribute their content out to other platforms like Instagram, but it also has a feed of the best videos created in Leo for others to check out.

News: Synthesia’s AI video generation platform hooks $12.5 million Series A led by FirstMark

• April 20, 2021
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As AI improves, the possibilities of what we can do with the technology grow exponentially (for better or worse). Synthesia, an AI video generation platform, is looking to make video content creation as simple and efficient as possible, and FirstMark is taking a bet on it making the world better, and not worse. The company

As AI improves, the possibilities of what we can do with the technology grow exponentially (for better or worse). Synthesia, an AI video generation platform, is looking to make video content creation as simple and efficient as possible, and FirstMark is taking a bet on it making the world better, and not worse.

The company has just announced the close of a $12.5 million Series A funding round led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from angels Christian Bach (CEO, Netlify) and Michael Buckley (VP Communications, Twilio), as well as existing investors LDV Capital, MMC Ventures, Seedcamp, Mark Cuban, Taavet Hinrikus, Martin Varsavsky, and TinyVC.

Though Synthesia’s technology could be applied to dozens of use cases, the startup is focused initially on educational content for organizations and enterprises. Think training videos and company- or department-wide video updates.

Here’s how it works: Users can choose from a library of existing actors (who get paid per video they appear in) or upload their own video to create an avatar. To use their own voice and avatar, Synthesia walks them through instructions on what type of video and audio they should send in.

Users can then type in a script, add other components like text, images, shapes, etc. and ultimately generate the video without any video creation or editing skills whatsoever. It’s also super easy to update or edit the video without having to do any traditional video editing.

The startup is well aware of how this platform could be used nefariously, and has built in multiple layers of security and authentication to ensure that users are aware of how their avatar is being used in videos, with the ability to check the script or the video before it’s generated or published.

Not only can this platform be used for the dozen or so training and educational videos that a company deploys each year, but it can be used in more creative ways. The general principle is that video content is more compelling and engaging than text or other content. So imagine, say, that the weekly emails that come from your manager or CEO with updates on the business came in the form of video. With Synthesia, it’s super easy and low-cost to create that video quickly.

Synthesia has an entry-level plan, which costs $30 per month per seat and offers 10 minutes of video per month. The startup also has an enterprise level plan that starts at $500 per month and comes with more video minutes and extra functionality.

The company plans on using the funding to fuel customer growth and product development.

Beyond the enterprise video platform, Synthesia is also working on an API that would allow organizations to hook the Synthesia tech into their own systems and distribute that video. Cofounder and CEO Victor Riparbelli showed an example where users could choose a stock and plug in a phone number that would automatically create a video with a daily stock price update and distribute that video to the specified phone number.

The enterprise product, called STUDIO, launched into public beta in the summer of 2020 and has since amassed more than 1000 companies as users.

News: Gaming infrastructure startup Pragma raises $12M from Greylock, Mark Pincus and others

• April 20, 2021
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Pragma is building what it calls a “backend as a service,” providing ready-made infrastructure to developers of online, live service games. And it’s announcing today that it has raised $12 million in Series A funding. The round was led by David Thacker at Greylock, with participation from Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Oculus founder Nate Mitchell

Pragma is building what it calls a “backend as a service,” providing ready-made infrastructure to developers of online, live service games. And it’s announcing today that it has raised $12 million in Series A funding.

The round was led by David Thacker at Greylock, with participation from Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Oculus founder Nate Mitchell and Cloudera founder Amr Awadallah, along with previous investors Upfront Ventures and Advancit Capital. Amy Chang, who sold her business intelligence startup Accompany to Cisco, is joining Pragma’s board of directors.

Co-founder and CEO Eden Chen told me that where Unity and Unreal have built popular frontend game engines, he and his co-founder Chris Cobb (former engineering lead at Riot Games) are hoping Pragma will fill the void for a “de facto backend game engine.”

And while “many companies tried to do this” over the past decade, Chen suggested that this is the right time to launch the platform, thanks to the continued rise of live service games (like League of Legends) that have to be treated as “living, breathing products,” as well as improved tooling around infrastructure platforms like Amazon Web Services.

Image Credits: Pragma

Pragma is launching a starter kit today designed to allow developers to quickly set up and test game loops. Meanwhile, the broader platform is currently in private beta testing with studios including One More Game (started by started by Pat Wyatt, one of Blizzard’s first employees) and Mitchell’s Mountain Top Studios.

Chen said the platform’s features fall into three broad categories — player accounts/social, game loops (including lobbies and matchmaking) and player/game data. Pragma isn’t building all of this from scratch; in some cases, it’s “acting as the integrator” for other platforms like Discord. Chen also noted that while the team plans to build a fully managed solution in the future, the current version is on-premise: “We’re building an instance of Pragma on the studio’s own infrastructure, [so they can] so they can take our code base and customize it to their own preferences.”

Pragma is initially targeting game studios with about 10 to 50 team members. Eventually, Chen hopes the platform could serve larger studios while also supporting “the democratization of these tools, so that a one- to five-person team can really leverage [them] to launch a networked, online game.”

He added, “The vision for us long term is that we really want to be innovating on the social side, creating social features that improve the game and build stronger connections.”

News: Scale AI founder and CEO Alexandr Wang will join us at TC Sessions: Mobility on June 9

• April 20, 2021
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Last week, Scale AI announced a massive $325 million Series E. Led by Dragoneer, Greenoaks Capital and Tiger Global, the raise gives the San Francisco data labeling startup a $7 billion valuation. Alexandr Wang founded the company back in 2016, while still at MIT. A veteran of Quora and Addepar, Wang built the startup to

Last week, Scale AI announced a massive $325 million Series E. Led by Dragoneer, Greenoaks Capital and Tiger Global, the raise gives the San Francisco data labeling startup a $7 billion valuation.

Alexandr Wang founded the company back in 2016, while still at MIT. A veteran of Quora and Addepar, Wang built the startup to curate information for AI applications. The company is now a break-even business, with a wide range of top-notch clients, including General Motors, NVIDIA, Nuro and Zoox.

Backed by a ton of venture capital, the company plans a large-scale increase in its headcount, as it builds out new products and expands into additional markets. “One thing that we saw, especially in the course of the past year, was that AI is going to be used for so many different things,” Wang told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “It’s like we’re just sort of really at the beginning of this and we want to be prepared for that as it happens.”

The executive will join us on stage at TC Sessions: Mobility on June 9 to discuss how the company has made a major impact on the industry in its short four years of existence, the role AI is playing in the world of transportation and what the future looks like for Scale AI.

In addition to Wang, TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 will feature an incredible lineup of speakers, presentations, fireside chats and breakouts all focused on the current and future state of mobility — like EVs, micromobility and smart cities for starters — and the investment trends that influence them all.

Investors like Clara Brenner (Urban Innovation Fund), Quin Garcia (Autotech Ventures) and Rachel Holt (Construct Capital) — all of whom will grace our virtual stage. They’ll have plenty of insight and advice to share, including the challenges that startup founders will face as they break into the transportation arena.

You’ll hear from CEOs like Starship Technologies’ Ahti Heinla. The company’s been busy testing delivery robots in real-world markets. Don’t miss his discussion touching on challenges ranging from technology to red tape and what it might take to make last-mile robotic delivery a mainstream reality.

Grab your early bird pass today and save $100 on tickets before prices go up in less than a month.

News: Amazon is opening a London hair salon to test AR and other retail technologies

• April 20, 2021
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Amazon announced this morning it’s opening Amazon Salon, the retailer’s first hair salon and a place where Amazon aims to test new technologies with the general public. The salon will occupy over 1,500 sq. ft on Brushfield Street in London’s Spitalfields, where Amazon says it will initially be trialing the use of augmented reality (AR)

Amazon announced this morning it’s opening Amazon Salon, the retailer’s first hair salon and a place where Amazon aims to test new technologies with the general public. The salon will occupy over 1,500 sq. ft on Brushfield Street in London’s Spitalfields, where Amazon says it will initially be trialing the use of augmented reality (AR) and “point-and-learn” technology — the latter being a system that allow customers to point to products on a display shelf in order to learn more through videos and other content that then appears on a display screen.

To then order the products, the customers will scan the QR code on the shelf, which takes them to the Amazon.co.uk shopping page for the item where they can add it to their cart and check out.

Image Credits: Amazon

The salon’s AR technology, meanwhile, will be used to allow customers to experiment by virtually trying on different hair colors before making a commitment to a new shade.

Amazon has already entered the convenience store market, grocery business and other physical retail, where it’s innovating with new technologies like cashierless checkout, smart grocery carts, and biometric systems. But it’s not clear that Amazon actually has ambitions to be in the salon business itself. Instead, it seems the salon will largely serve as a testing ground for new technologies that Amazon will likely want to sell to other retail clients in the future, or perhaps implement in its own stores. And in the case of AR, Amazon may want to gather data on customers’ experiences it can use on its own shopping site, too.

Hinting that its goals are not about the salon business itself, Amazon today describes the salon as an “experiential venue where we showcase new products and technology,” and notes that it has no other plans to open more salons at this time.

The company has also recruited an existing salon owner, Elena Lavagni of Neville Hair & Beauty Salon, to help with this project, instead of hiring a new staff to run it long-term. Lavagni and her team have previously provided hairdressing services for other events, like Paris Fashion Week and the Cannes Film Festival.

Image Credits: Amazon

Amazon has not detailed what sort of data it will collect from customers who use the salon, but it’s clearly there to learn about how new retail technologies would work in a real-world environment. But the fact that Amazon is capturing customer images for its hair color virtual try-on should raise questions about what it plans to do with the data it collects from the new salon. Will it only be used to learn about the specific technology being tested, or will it be put to other uses, too?

As many recall, Amazon has a complicated history with its use of technologies like facial recognition and biometrics, having sold biometric facial recognition services to law enforcement in the U.S., while its facial recognition technology was the subject of a data privacy lawsuit. And its Ring camera company continues to work in partnership with police. Customers should be told if they’re participating in an Amazon research project, not just having fun with new tech products.

Like other Amazon physical stores, the salon will first be open to Amazon employees only before offering bookings to the wider public in the weeks to come.

News: Watch Apple’s Spring Loaded event light right here

• April 20, 2021
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Today, Apple is holding a (virtual) keynote at 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 6 PM in London, 7 PM in Paris). And you’ll be able to watch the event right here as the company is streaming it live. Rumor has it that Apple plans to unveil a brand new iPad Pro. In

Today, Apple is holding a (virtual) keynote at 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 6 PM in London, 7 PM in Paris). And you’ll be able to watch the event right here as the company is streaming it live.

Rumor has it that Apple plans to unveil a brand new iPad Pro. In particular, Apple’s tablet could get a big display update as the company could switch to mini-LED displays. You can expect some better specifications as well.

But that’s not all, we expect to see a refreshed iPad mini. Apple could also be ready to release AirTags after many months of rumors and leaks. As always, the only way to find out is by watching the event.

You can watch the live stream directly on this page, as Apple is streaming its conference on YouTube.

If you have an Apple TV, you don’t need to download a new app. You can open the Apple TV app and find the Apple Events section. It lets you stream today’s event and rewatch old ones.

And if you don’t have an Apple TV and don’t want to use YouTube, the company also lets you live stream the event from the Apple Events section on its website. This video feed now works in all major browsers — Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.

News: Cape Privacy announces $20M Series A to help companies securely share data

• April 20, 2021
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Cape Privacy, the early stage startup that wants to make it easier for companies to share sensitive data in a secure and encrypted way, announced a $20 million Series A today. Evolution Equity Partners led the round with participation from new investors Tiger Global Management, Ridgeline Partners and Downing Lane. Existing investors Boldstart Ventures, Version

Cape Privacy, the early stage startup that wants to make it easier for companies to share sensitive data in a secure and encrypted way, announced a $20 million Series A today.

Evolution Equity Partners led the round with participation from new investors Tiger Global Management, Ridgeline Partners and Downing Lane. Existing investors Boldstart Ventures, Version One Ventures, Haystack, Radical Ventures and a slew of individual investors also participated. The company has now raised approximately $25 million including a $5 million seed investment we covered last June..

Cape Privacy CEO Ché Wijesinghe says that the product has evolved quite a bit since we last spoke. “We have really focused our efforts on encrypted learning, which is really the core technology, which was fundamental to allowing the multi-party compute capabilities between two organizations or two departments to work and build machine learning models on encrypted data,” Wijesinghe told me.

Wijesinghe says that a key business case involves a retail company owned by a private equity firm sharing data with a large financial services company, which is using the data to feed its machine learning models. In this case, sharing customer data, it’s essential to do it in a secure way and that is what Cape Privacy claims is its primary value prop.

He said that while the data sharing piece is the main focus of the company, it has data governance and compliance components to be sure that entities sharing data are doing so in a way that complies with internal and external rules and regulations related to the type of data.

While the company is concentrating on financial services for now because Wijesinghe has been working with these companies for years, he sees uses cases far beyond a single vertical including pharmaceuticals, government, healthcare telco and manufacturing.

“Every single industry needs this and so we look at the value of what Cape’s encrypted learning can provide as really being something that can be as transformative and be as impactful as what SSL was for the adoption of the web browser,” he said.

Richard Seewald, founding and managing partner at lead investor Evolution Equity Partners likes that ability to expand the product’s markets. “The application in Financial Services is only the beginning. Cape has big plans in life sciences and government where machine learning will help make incredible advances in clinical trials and counter-terrorism for example. We anticipate wide adoption of Cape’s technology across many use cases and industries,” he said.

The company has recently expanded to 20 people and Wijesinghe, who is half Asian, takes DEI seriously. “We’ve been very, very deliberate about our DEI efforts, and I think one of the things that we pride ourselves in is that we do foster a culture of acceptance, that it’s not just about diversity in terms of color, race, gender, but we just hired our first non binary employee,” he said,

Part of making people feel comfortable and included involves training so that fellow employees have a deeper understanding of the cultural differences. The company certainly has diversity across geographies with employees in 10 different time zones.

The company is obviously remote with a spread like that, but once the pandemic is over, Wijesinghe sees bringing people together on occasion with New York City as the hub for the company where people from all over the world can fly in and get together.

News: Grip Security raises $6M to improve SaaS security

• April 20, 2021
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Many large enterprises now rely on hundreds of third-party SaaS applications to do business, but their security organizations can barely keep pace. Right now, the state of the art for SaaS enterprise security are cloud access security brokers (CASBs) that act as intermediaries between users and the actual service. But they don’t provide the kind

Many large enterprises now rely on hundreds of third-party SaaS applications to do business, but their security organizations can barely keep pace. Right now, the state of the art for SaaS enterprise security are cloud access security brokers (CASBs) that act as intermediaries between users and the actual service. But they don’t provide the kind of visibility that enterprises want since employees will often route around their IT departments. Tel Aviv-based Grip Security aims to make this a lot easier by providing enterprises with full visibility into their SaaS portfolios through enforceable endpoint-centric access controls and new data governance capabilities that work across devices and locations.

Grip Security today announced that it has raised a $6 million seed round led by cybersecurity-focused YL Ventures, with participation from CrowdStrike CEO and co-founder George Kurtz and a group of other angel investors with deep roots in the cybersecurity industry. These include the likes of former Akamai CSO Andy Ellis, former Zscaler CISO Michael Sutton, former Bank of America Chief Security Scientist Sounil Yu and Amazon Whole Foods CISO Sameer Sait.

Image Credits: Grip Security

“The founding team at Grip Security brings deep technical acumen to disrupt the SaaS security market,” said Ofer Schreiber, partner at YL Ventures. “Grip will not only upend antiquated SaaS security solutions, but they’ll also help enterprises implement much needed automated and granular security for SaaS, the fastest growing segment in information technology.”

Before starting Grip Security, co-founder and CEO Lior Yaari actually spent some time as the CTO of YL Ventures (though he says he still had to go through the firm’s standard vetting procedure to get funding). In that role, he talked to a lot of CISOs, and, again and again, they talked to him about the problems with current SaaS security solutions. Like his co-founders, Idan Fast (CTO) and Alon Shenkler (VP R&D), Yaari also has a deep cybersecurity background. But it was during his time YL Ventures that the idea for Grip Security was born.

“Within YL Ventures, we were always looking for the next interesting sub-market and we knew from our conversation with CISOs  […] that people know SaaS is a problem and they did not like the existing solutions — many of them being CASBs,” Yaari told me. “From this view of an investment team that not only talks with customers but also sees some technical teams that try to solve this problem and then go back and look for other solutions because they didn’t find a good fit within the market, I eventually wanted to do it myself. Last July, I actually told [YL Ventures partner Ofer Schreiber] that if no one solved this until October, I will. That was a joke back then — and then, three or four months later, it became reality. It’s hard to look at hard and interesting problems without trying to solve them.”

Most of the popular CASBs today were founded around 2013 and 2014 and then later acquired by other major players like Microsoft, Cisco and Proofpoint. But Yaari argues that the problems with protecting SaaS today is fundamentally different from those 10 years ago. These solutions, he argues, worked for protecting a dozen applications or so.

The promise of Grip Security is that after a quick installation, enterprises get full visibility into which applications their employees actually use. Yaari wasn’t quite ready to give away the secret sauce of how Grip does this, though. But he noted that this is a non-intrusive solution. “We do not install anything on user devices or corporate networks, but we follow the footprints left by SaaS applications and use this data to identify with extreme accuracy what applications were used.” He noted that Grip Security’s solution travels with the users, no matter which device they use.

Grip Security currently has about 15 employees and plans to use the new funding to build out its platform with additional capabilities, especially around providing access governance and data governance to applications. The plan is to grow to 20 to 25 employees within the next year.