Monthly Archives: July 2021

News: Discord rolls out threads, side conversations that auto-archive

• July 27, 2021
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After announcing that threads were on the way earlier this year, Discord is now introducing the long-requested way to make conversations in bustling servers more comprehensible. Starting today, any server with “community” features enabled will be able to transform messages into threaded conversations. Threads are designated by their own subject name, making it easy to

After announcing that threads were on the way earlier this year, Discord is now introducing the long-requested way to make conversations in bustling servers more comprehensible.

Starting today, any server with “community” features enabled will be able to transform messages into threaded conversations. Threads are designated by their own subject name, making it easy to compartmentalize an off-topic idea into its own mini-conversation.

Channel members can create a thread by selecting a new hashtag symbol that now appears in the contextual menu when hovering over messages or pressing the plus sign in the chat bar and and choosing “create thread.” The feature will be enabled in all servers automatically by August 17.

“… We wanted to help communities stay engaged while avoiding having to shut down conversation to maintain organization,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the feature, noting that hopping into a busy new channel can “feel like walking into the middle of three different movies.” Discord introduced replies last year to help the flow of conversations and threads is an expansion of that same idea.

From the flow of a channel, Discord’s new threads open up into a split-view pane instead of taking over the full screen, serving their function as side conversations naturally. Threaded topics will also show up in the list of channels and will open to the full screen if selected from the channel list.

Threads will auto-archive after 24 hours of inactivity — a nice way to keep channels from being clogged up with off-topic or time-sensitive chat. Boosted servers can keep a thread around for a week instead of a single day, giving a channel’s members more time to hop into relevant side conversations.

Servers that are boosted through Discord’s premium features will also be able to create private threads that don’t show up in the channel list. Private threads only appear to users who are manually added into them or mentioned by name within a thread.

Discord designed private threads so that users could hold group conversations without adding each person in the conversation as a friend, a feature that may be a boon to moderators looking to have one-on-one or small group chats more easily.

Moderators will also be able to designate who can create threads within a channel. Channel members can be given permissions to use private threads, manage threads or just be allowed to use public threads (“send messages” must be toggled on to allow them to create new threads). Threads will work the same way regular channels do for moderation bots.

News: Sony’s ZV-E10 brings interchangeable lenses to its vlogging camera series

• July 27, 2021
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Sony has launched its first vlogging-specific mirrorless camera, the ZV-E10, that borrows a number of features from ZV-1 compact vlogging model.

Sony has launched its first vlogging-specific mirrorless camera, the ZV-E10, that borrows a number of features from ZV-1 compact vlogging model. At the same time, it’s roughly based on the A5000 and A6000-series APS-C mirrorless cameras, with all the good (and bad) that entails.

The two biggest advantages of the ZV-E10 over the ZV-1 are the larger 24-megapixel APS-C sensor and interchangeable mirrorless mount. The latter feature opens Sony’s range of 60-plus E-mount lenses to vloggers, making the ZV-E10 much more versatile than the fixed-lens ZV-1. The larger sensor, meanwhile, will deliver improved light sensitivity and a shallower depth of field.

Sony

The ZV-E10 uses the aging 24-megapixel APS-C sensor found in the A6100 and other recent Sony models. While that delivers sharp, downsampled 4K video at up to 30 fps (or 120 fps 1080p), it’s likely to have a serious amount of rolling shutter that’s not ideal for its intended purpose.

On the more positive side, it offers optical and active electronic image stabilization, just like the ZV-1. That should smooth out handheld shooting pretty well, though don’t expect miracles for walk-and-talk type vlogging — especially if rolling sensor wobble proves to be an issue.

Size-wise, the ZV-E10 is smaller than any of the A6000-series cameras at 343 grams and isn’t much larger and heavier than the ZV-1. It lacks an electronic viewfinder, but it’s Sony’s first APS-C mirrorless camera with a fully-articulating flip-out screen — a basic requirement on any vlogging camera these days.

Sony

The ZV-E10 comes with Sony’s latest phase-detect autofocus system, both for video and still shooting. That means you should get incredibly quick subject tracking, along with reliable eye, face and head detect autofocus. It also has an S&Q (slow & quick) feature that lets you record time-lapse and slow motion footage in-camera without the need for any post processing work.

It borrows several vlogging features directly from the ZV-1. The first is called “product showcase,” a setting that allows it to instantly focus away from your face and onto an object placed in front of the camera. That’s particularly handy for vloggers reviewing products, devices, etc.

The other is a bokeh switch that instantly sets the lowest f-stop available for lighting conditions. That way, you can have the background as defocused as possible, allowing your subject to stand out clearly.

The ZV-E10 has a built-in, high-quality three-way microphone (left, right and central channels) that’s designed to pick out your voice. That means you can vlog without the need to buy a microphone, though it still won’t match the quality and voice isolation of a dedicated shotgun or lapel mic. It also comes with a hotshoe-attached muff to help block wind noise, and if that’s not enough, a wind noise reduction setting. It also comes with a microphone input, though not a headphone output.

Finally, if you’re into live streaming, you can connect the ZV-E10 directly to a smartphone and stream directly to YouTube or other services — much as you can with Panasonic’s latest GH5-II. It will also work directly as a webcam, streaming both video and audio (not just video like other cameras) so you can take advantage of its high-quality microphone.

The ZV-E10 will be available in either black or white by the end of August and will cost $700 for the body, or $800 in a bundle including Sony’s 16-50mm F/3.5-5.6 power zoom lens.

This post originally appeared on Engadget.

News: TikTok expands LIVE platform with new features, including events, co-hosts, Q&A’s and more

• July 27, 2021
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TikTok announced this morning it’s expanding its TikTok LIVE platform which today allows creators livestream to fans, while also responding to viewer comments and questions, and accept virtual gifts. Now, the LIVE experience will include a number of new features for creators to make it more competitive with competing platforms, like Instagram Live, including the

TikTok announced this morning it’s expanding its TikTok LIVE platform which today allows creators livestream to fans, while also responding to viewer comments and questions, and accept virtual gifts. Now, the LIVE experience will include a number of new features for creators to make it more competitive with competing platforms, like Instagram Live, including the ability to go live with others, host Q&As, use moderators and improved keyword filters, and more.

For viewers, TikTok is also adding new discovery and viewing tools, among other changes.

The company recently teased some of the LIVE updates to creators across social media ahead of today’s announcement.

According to TikTok, select markets have already had access to LIVE Events, which is a new tool that lets creators better plan their upcoming LIVE sessions.

Creators can schedule and promote their event in advance to build anticipation across their community, while fans can discover, register and then get notifications and reminders when the LIVE Event is about to begin. Scheduling tools are a fairly common baseline feature for livestreaming platforms to offer, so it makes sense that TikTok would now add this.  

Image Credits: TikTok

To use this feature, creators can select the LIVE Events icon from the top-right corner of their profile page, then name the event, list the start time and write a brief description. Once they hit create, the LIVE event will go through a brief review process before being visible to the rest of TikTok.

After the event is scheduled, creators can share it through in-app messages, promote with a TikTok video using a LIVE countdown sticker, or promote it outside of TikTok. They can also make changes or even delete event at any time, if need be. As they plan for their event, TikTok will show how many people have already registered to attend to better inform creators’ promotional efforts.

This feature had already become available in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but is now testing in other global markets, the company tells us.

Creators can also now go live with others in order to benefit from the combined audience to gain exposure with each other’s community. Currently, the ability to go live with one other co-host is available worldwide, but TikTok is testing going live with multiple hosts in select regions. For comparison, Instagram this year launched the ability for creators to go live with up to four others in Live Rooms.

Meanwhile, TikTok’s LIVE Q&As allow audience members to ask questions during the creator’s livestreams. Creators can view these questions in their stream chat from a separate panel, and have the option to show the questions to all viewers and answer them formally through the existing Q&A tools.

Image Credits: TikTok

Another new tool allows creators to assign trusted moderators to manage their streams before a livestream starts. These moderators will have the ability to mute and block users from the chat, as needed. The keyword filtering tool, which blocks words the creators doesn’t want to appear in their chats, has also been expanded to support up to 200 terms.

Over the next few weeks, TikTok will also introduce a way for hosts and moderators to temporarily mute viewers and remove comments.

For viewers, meanwhile, TikTok will make it easier to find LIVE videos to watch. Soon, users will be able to tune into LIVE videos directly from the For You Feed and Following pages, by tapping on the new LIVE button (which some may already have), then the “Explore” button which launches a side panel where they can browse through the various LIVE videos available now.

TikTok says top LIVE categories to date have included Chat/Q&A, gaming, talents, fashion, and daily life.

Viewers will also be prompted to reconsider their comments during livestream if the system detects they’re about to post something potentially harmful or abusive. TikTok has used prompts before to flag unsubstantiated claims in videos its fact-checkers couldn’t verify and it has used a similar prompt to address potentially bullying comments. 

Image Credits: TikTok

Livestream viewers can also now use picture-in-picture mode on iOS and Android to watch LIVE videos while continuing to use their phone.

The TikTok LIVE experience became particularly popular during the pandemic. And while the company declined to share exact viewer metrics for its livestreams, it would say that the number of people going LIVE and the number of people watching LIVE videos had doubled over the last year. These LIVE videos may be helping to fuel demand for the app as well, as a recent report from Sensor Tower noted TikTok became the first non-Facebook app to reach 3 billion downloads worldwide, despite being banned in India. 

The report also noted that in Q2 2021 the app saw its greatest quarter-over-quarter growth in consumer spending in a year’s time, climbing 39% to $534.6 million up from $384.7 million in the previous quarter. This could signal an increased interest in livestreams, as that’s where creators tend generate revenue through the virtual gifts.

TikTok’s LIVE platform is only open to users over the age of 16, and it regularly removes those who the system detects may be underage. (Asked about a recent purge, TikTok said it’s just enforcing its existing guidelines.). It also bans accounts that impersonate or mislead the community about their identity, it says.

All of the new features are available, in some form, to global audiences as of now.

News: Edtech’s venture-backed globalization pauses at China

• July 27, 2021
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Edtech investors are increasingly going global, but regulatory crackdowns in China, which instructed K-12 tutoring startups to go non-profit, have led to a chill among check-writers in the country.

U.S.-based edtech investors are increasingly going global, but recent regulatory crackdowns in China, which instructed local K-12 tutoring startups to go non-profit, have led to a chill among check-writers looking at the country.

When I first started reporting on edtech over a year ago, U.S.-based investors often cited China as validation of the opportunity for direct-to-consumer businesses in the K-12 world. The success of Chinese edtech was used to predict the surge of U.S.-based consumer edtech, which saw parent adoption surge during the pandemic.

On Saturday, however, the Chinese government rolled out legislation aimed at easing the financial burden of education services on families, at the cost of venture-backed startups. The reactions were mixed: One founder told me they doubled their personal stake in every publicly traded Chinese edtech startup, considering the present issues a blip in the timeline, but another told me that they were glad they sold their investments in China just last month.

And everyone seems to be looking to India as the next geographic testing ground.

‘We didn’t think we were smart enough’

Reuters reported last week that China is barring for-profit tutoring platforms on core school subjects. The country has also introduced time caps and tutoring curfews, and notably, forbade the platforms from raising capital through IPOs as well as advertising their programs. The news sent Chinese edtech stocks tumbling — NYSE-listed TAL Education’s shares, for instance, closed at $4.47 per share on Monday, down nearly 80% from $20.52 per share last Thursday before the news broke.

Owl Ventures, which has one of the largest edtech-focused funds at $585 million, has been actively investing globally over the past few years. Investor Ian Chiu said last October that he views K-12 tutoring in China as “the biggest market right now in education”.

News: Joby Aviation, aiming to go to market in 2024, completes 154 mile test flight

• July 27, 2021
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Santa Cruz, California-based Joby Aviation has completed the longest test flight of an eVTOL to date, as its unnamed full-sized prototype aircraft concluded a trip of over 150 miles on a single charge, the company said Monday. The test was completed at Joby’s Electric Flight Base in Big Sur, California earlier this month. It’s the

Santa Cruz, California-based Joby Aviation has completed the longest test flight of an eVTOL to date, as its unnamed full-sized prototype aircraft concluded a trip of over 150 miles on a single charge, the company said Monday.

The test was completed at Joby’s Electric Flight Base in Big Sur, California earlier this month. It’s the latest in a succession of secretive tests the company’s been conducting, all part of its goal to achieve certification with the Federal Aviation Administration and start commercial operations.

The prototype spent more than an hour and 17 minutes in the air and covered 154.6 statute miles on a single battery charge, traveling along a predefined circuit. While the test flight was remotely piloted by Joby’s chief test pilot, Justin Paines, the company plans to have pilots in the aircraft when it opens its ridesharing service for customers.

Image Credits: Joby Aviation (opens in a new window)

Headed by JoeBen Bevirt, Joby Aviation has spent the past twelve years designing eVTOL – an electric vertical take-off and landing craft that ascends like a helicopter but flies like an airplane, and is magnitudes quieter than both.

Joby is one of a suite of startups looking to make electric air travel a reality for the average American. The company’s website features a handy graphic showing a proposed trip from Los Angeles airport to Newport Beach – over an hour and 44 miles by car, but only 15 minutes and 35 miles with Joby. Joby aims to make such trips a reality by 2024, and tests like these are a major sign to the public, investors and regulators that it is on-track to meet that timeline.

Significantly, the company uses commercially available lithium-ion batteries that its adapted for air travel, so this test flight is also proof that its battery tech is up for the challenge. It’s a tricky challenge: the battery must have enough energy density to fly around 150 miles while also having enough power to take-off and land vertically. But Joby says its nailed a specific combination of cathode and graphite anode to achieve these goals.

Besides being one of the oldest eVTOL developers, Joby is also the best-funded, raising nearly $800 million in funding to date. That includes a $75 million investment from Uber after Joby bought its air taxi arm, Elevate, and a $400 million investment from Toyota Motor Corp. Joby is going to go public via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Reinvent Technology Partners, a business combination that will inject the startup with an additional $1.6 billion in capital.

It’s a lot of money, but designing and commercializing a novel aircraft is an expensive business: according to some estimates, costing up to $1 billion all told.

“We’ve achieved something that many thought impossible with today’s battery technology,” Bevirt said in a statement. “By doing so we’ve taken the first step towards making convenient, emissions-free air travel between places like San Francisco and Lake Tahoe, Houston and Austin, or Los Angeles and San Diego an everyday reality.”

Watch a video on the test flight here:

News: Here’s Nothing’s $99 Ear (1) buds

• July 27, 2021
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It’s been just over five months since Carl Pei first told the world about Nothing. Perhaps it’s just the way time moves these days or maybe it’s the fact that the company has trickled out information in the intervening months. Whatever the case, it feels like we’ve been waiting on today’s full Ear (1) reveal

It’s been just over five months since Carl Pei first told the world about Nothing. Perhaps it’s just the way time moves these days or maybe it’s the fact that the company has trickled out information in the intervening months. Whatever the case, it feels like we’ve been waiting on today’s full Ear (1) reveal forever.

It’s been a pretty savvy strategy for a brand-new consumer hardware startup, building on the built-in buzz/anticipation from Pei’s connection to OnePlus. We’ve covered a number (but certainly not all) of the announcements between February and now and gotten most of the jokes about its name out of our system.

Image Credits: Nothing (Note the…friendly insect marketing theme). 

Frankly, the sheer volume of news Nothing has released hasn’t left a lot to the imagination. Our interview with Pei revealed the pricing of the buds ($99 USD), along with their noise canceling. We recently caught an image of the transparent charging case and battery life (24 hours, all told, with the case and ANC turned on, 36 hours without) via a StockX auction. In fact, the only thing left to reveal was the buds themselves (a pretty big piece, admittedly).

In conversations I’ve had with Pei, the founder has emphasized aesthetics as a key differentiator. The message has, admittedly, been somewhat muddled by the imagery Nothing has chosen to release. The first image associated with the company and product was actually the silhouette of the device’s PCB (printed circuit board). The second was an early concept Pei said was inspired by his grandmother’s tobacco pipe.

Image Credits: Nothing

It’s clear that Nothing was keen to highlight how much it iterated on this project before launch. In fact, Pei told me that such iterations were part of the reason the product’s original launch was pushed back by a few months. For one thing, the company wanted the Ear (1) to look distinct from anything else on the market. For another, there’s an added level of complications when making your gadget at least partially transparent. That means the insides — the components and the glue that gold them together — need to look as good as the outside.

One thing you can say almost immediately about the Ear (1): Nothing looks quite like them. From a form factor standpoint, they most closely resemble AirPods, with a long stem that drops down from the buds. The stems themselves feature the majority of the product’s transparency (putting aside the case for a moment). The bud segment is an opaque white, likely owing to the fact that the those insides are frankly more unsightly.

Each stem features a touch panel single color dot — red and white — to distinguish right from left. That’s a subtle nod to RCA cables, with red for right and white for left. Another nice aesthetic touch is the Nothing logo printed down the lengths of the stem. The dotted text is an homage to printing on circuit boards — it’s an aesthetic the company is using across its press material. Around the other side are two magnetic dots that connect to the charging pins in the case.

Image Credits: Nothing

The case is made of transparent plastic, with a pair of dots that keep the buds in place. A third, large concave circle further secures the case and doubles as a spot for your thumb while holding it. A white swath runs through the center of the case, again presumably covering up some unsightly electronics.

The buds themselves feature 11.6mm drivers and audio tuned by Teenage Engineering, which also served as the design team. There’s Bluetooth 5.2 onboard and a trio of listening modes: Active Nose Canceling, Light Mode and Active Transparency. Some other features worth, including a built-in chirp for locating lost buds via the app.

They go on sale July 31 for $99. Stay tuned for a review.

News: Crypto infra startup Fireblocks raises $310M, triples valuation to $2.2B

• July 27, 2021
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Fireblocks, an infrastructure provider for digital assets, has raised $310 million in a Series D round of funding that tripled the company’s valuation to $2.2 billion in just over five months. Sequoia Capital, Stripes and Spark Capital co-led Fireblocks’ latest round, which also included participation from Coatue, DRW VC  and SCB 10X – the venture

Fireblocks, an infrastructure provider for digital assets, has raised $310 million in a Series D round of funding that tripled the company’s valuation to $2.2 billion in just over five months.

Sequoia Capital, Stripes and Spark Capital co-led Fireblocks’ latest round, which also included participation from Coatue, DRW VC  and SCB 10X – the venture arm of Thailand’s oldest bank – and Siam Commercial Bank. The latter is the third global bank to invest in Fireblocks in addition to the Bank of New York (BNY) Mellon and SVB Capital. 

In February, the New York-based startup raised $133 million in a Series C round at a $700 million valuation. The latest financing brings Fireblocks’ total raised since its 2018 inception to $489 million. And as for Fireblocks’ valuation boost, the growth correlates with its increase in customers and ARR this year, according to CEO and co-founder Michael Shaulov. 

Since January, Fireblocks has seen its customer base increase to about 500 compared to 150 in January. Its ARR (annual recurring revenue) is also up – by 350% so far in 2021 compared to 2020. Last year, ARR rose by 450% compared to 2019.

“We expect to end the year up 500%,” Shaulov said. “We’ve already adjusted our revenue predictions for 2021 three times.”

Put simply, Fireblocks aims to offer financial institutions an all-in-one platform to run a digital asset business, providing them with infrastructure to store, transfer and issue digital assets. In particular, Fireblocks provides custody to institutional investors and has secured the transfer of over $1 trillion in digital assets over time. 

Fireblocks launched out of stealth mode in June of 2019 and has since opened offices in the United Kingdom, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore, France and the DACH region. Today, it has over 500 financial institutions as customers – a mix of businesses that already support crypto and digital assets and those that are considering entering the space. Customers include global banks, crypto-native exchanges, lending desks, hedge funds, OTC desks as well as companies such as Revolut, BlockFi, Celsius, PrimeTrust, Galaxy Digital, Genesis Trading, crypto.com and eToro among others. 

Of those 500 institutions, Fireblocks is working with 70 banks that are looking to join the cryptocurrency space, and start platforming their infrastructure, according to Shaulov. Siam Commercial bank, for example, is using the company’s infrastructure to transform into a blockchain-based bank.

“Our platform creates highly secure wallets for cryptocurrencies and digital assets, where institutions can store their funds or their customer funds, and also get security insurance,” he said.

Fireblocks’ issuance and tokenization platform allows for the creation of asset-backed tokens.

“We handle all the security or compliance, all the policies and workflows,” Shaulov said. “Basically all the complicated stuff you need to do as a business when you want to start working with this new technology. So it’s a bit like ‘Shopify for crypto.’ ”

Sequoia Partner Ravi Gupta is naturally bullish on the company, describing Fireblocks as “the leading back-end infrastructure for crypto products.”

“The team has the potential to build a large, enduring business serving crypto-native companies, consumer fintech companies, and traditional financial institutions alike,” he told TechCrunch. “Their growth has been tremendous, and the quality of their product and customer sentiment are remarkable.”

Image Credits: Left to right: Fireblocks co-founders Idan Ofrat, Michael Shaulov and Pavel Berengoltz / Fireblocks

Fireblocks has also started to see businesses outside of what would be identified as fintech or finance show interest in its platform such as e-commerce websites that are looking to create NFTs on the back of their merchandise. 

The Fireblocks platform, Shaulov said, helps spread the expansion of digital asset use cases beyond bitcoin into payments, gaming, NFTs, digital securities and “ultimately allows any business to become a digital asset business.”

What that means is that Fireblocks’ technology can be white labeled for crypto custody offerings, “so that new and established financial institutions can implement direct custody on their own without having to rely on third parties,” the company says.

Shaulov emphasizes Fireblocks’ commitment to staying an independent company after a wave of consolidation in the space. Earlier this year, PayPal announced its plans to acquire Curv, a cryptocurrency startup based in Tel Aviv, Israel. Then in early May, bitcoin-focused Galaxy Digital Holdings Ltd. said it agreed to buy BitGo Inc. for $1.2 billion in cash and stock in the first $1 billion deal in the cryptocurrency industry.

“Consolidation can be painful for clients,” he told TechCrunch. “It’s Important for us that we stay independent and that’s part of the purpose of this round.

The company will also use the funds to increase its engineering and customer success operations, and expand geographically, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region.  

“Fireblocks provides the most secure and flexible platform for a wide range of customer needs,” said Sequoia’s Gupta. “It uses world-class multi-party computation technology to secure digital assets in storage and in transit, and has the most flexible platform with controls for product teams to be able to build on and manage Fireblocks effectively.”

News: Accel doubles down on 1Password, which just raised $100M more at a $2B valuation

• July 27, 2021
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The previously bootstrapped 1Password raised its first round of external capital in 2019, a $200 million Series A led by Accel that represented the VC firm’s largest single investment in its 35 years.

Toronto-based 1Password is one of those rare companies that is a) profitable and b) transparent enough to share financials.

And today, the company announced that it raised $100 million in a Series B round of funding that doubles the company’s valuation to $2 billion.

You may recall that the previously bootstrapped 1Password only raised its first round of external capital in 2019 – a $200 million Series A led by Accel that represented the venture firm’s largest single investment in its 35-year history. At the time, 1Password was hardly a startup, having been founded in 2005. 

Accel also led its latest round, which notably included participation from Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, Kim Jackson’s Skip Capital and a slew of tech executives including Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify; Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify; Stewart Butterfield, co-founder and CEO of Slack; Anthony Caselena, founder and CEO of Squarespace; Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, co-CEOs of Atlassian; and Kevin Hartz, co-founder and chairman of Eventbrite, among others.

Profitable since day one, 1Password recently crossed the $120 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue) mark, according to CEO Jeff Shiner. Over 90,000 businesses use its SaaS platform, including a number of big names such as Under Armour, Shopify, the PGA, IBM, GitLab, Slack and PagerDuty. That’s up from 50,000 customers at the time of its November 2019 raise.

Founding couples Dave and Sara Teare and Roustem and Natalia Karimov came up with the idea for 1Password while they were growing another company that built websites and realized the struggle of keeping up with passwords.

It started out focused on consumers only. Over time, it evolved and began offering its password management services to businesses. This move took an already successful company to another level. 

It also caught the attention of Accel, which has a history of investing in bootstrapped and profitable businesses. In both its Series A and B rounds, the venture firm approached the company about investing.

Accel partner Arun Mathew, who drove his firm’s investment in 1Password in both rounds, noted that “1Password has a very unique company profile. To see a company riding all these market tailwinds with fundamentals and metrics like this is really, really unusual. Our hope is this [latest round] allows the entire company to be even more aggressive about winning this market.”

Since its last raise, 1Password has continued to evolve — a testament to its self-proclaimed intent to never sit on its laurels, said Shiner. For one thing, it has increased its headcount from 174 employees to about 475 today, including the formation of a go-to-market team, which the company never really had before.

And in the past few months, 1Password has expanded its business offerings, launching Secrets Automation in April and more recently, 1Password Events,  an enterprise offering aimed at protecting “critical”  business information. It has also launched a Linux Desktop Application and integrations with Slack and Rippling. 

Image Credits: 1Password

Secrets Automation, Shiner said, allows 1Password to protect a business’ infrastructure secrets “machine to machine.”

“Password management is usually human to machine, so it’s a huge win for us and expands what we do into the broader infrastructure,” he added. It was able to launch Secrets Automation with the help of the acquisition of a Dutch company, SecretHub. 

The company is planning to use some of its new capital for further acquisitions as the number of startups in the cybersecurity space continues to grow.

“Having a stronger balance sheet only helps the company take calculated risks and be opportunistic about potential M&A or investing even more aggressively where we see opportunity,” Accel’s Mathew said. “For almost 16 years, this company has been one of the best-kept secrets, no pun intended, for businesses and consumers alike.”

The COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting work-from-home shift only led to more demand for 1Password’s offering. In fact, with each business account, 1Password is giving each employee a free family account to use at home. 

“As work and home have mixed, it’s been a huge benefit for users,” Shiner said.

That line-blurring is one of the reasons that Accel sees even more potential in 1Password. The firm has 24 active security investments across its portfolio, according to Accel partner Ethan Choi.

“This doubling down [on 1Password] signifies our belief that this is one of the most important areas of security today,” Choi said. “CIOs and CISOs want their employees to be productive and get into the applications they need to, but they also need them to be secure.”

For its part, 1Password believes that despite being around for 16 years, it’s only “just scratching the surface,” according to Shiner.

“I think that’s what gets us excited, is just this incredible opportunity that we see in front of us,” he said. “We need to keep moving forward, with urgency.”

Gaining the insight of so many experienced tech execs was also a factor in raising more capital, Shiner said.

“We already had a great relationship with Accel, but being able to bring in those additional folks and the experience they bring along with them is tremendously valuable,” he added.

News: Blameless raises $30M to guide companies through their software lifecycle

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Blameless’ platform provides the context, guardrails and automated workflows so engineering teams are unified in the way they communicate and interact while building their software systems.

Site reliability engineering platform Blameless announced Tuesday it raised $30 million in a Series B funding round, led by Third Point Ventures with participation from Accel, Decibel and Lightspeed Venture Partners, to bring total funding to over $50 million.

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is an extension of DevOps designed for more complex environments.

Blameless, based in San Mateo, California, emerged from stealth in 2019 after raising both a seed and Series A round, totaling $20 million. Since then, it has turned its business into a blossoming software platform.

Blameless’ platform provides the context, guardrails and automated workflows so engineering teams are unified in the way they communicate and interact, especially to resolve issues quicker as they build their software systems.

It originally worked with tech-forward teams at large companies, like Home Depot, that were “dipping [their toes] into the space and now [want] to double down,” co-founder and CEO Lyon Wong told TechCrunch.

The company still works with those tech-forward teams, but in the past two years, more companies sought out resident SRE architect Kurt Anderson to advise them, causing Blameless to change up its business approach, Wong said.

Other companies are also seeing a trend of customers asking for support — for example, in March, Google Cloud unveiled its Mission Critical Services support option for SRE to serve in a similar role as a consultant as companies move toward readiness with their systems. And in February, Nobl9 raised a $21 million Series B to provide enterprises with the tools they need to build service-level-objective-centric operations, which is part of a company’s SRE efforts.

Blameless now has interest from more mainstream companies in the areas of enterprise, logistics and healthcare. These companies aren’t necessarily focused on technology, but see a need for SRE.

“Companies recognize the shortfall in reliability, and then the question they come to us with is how do they get from where they are to where they want to be,” Anderson said. “Often companies that don’t have a process respond with ‘all hands on deck’ all the time, but instead need to shift to the right people responding.”

Lyon plans to use the new funding to fill key leadership roles, the company’s go-to-market strategy and product development to enable the company to go after larger enterprises.

Blameless doubled its revenue in the last year and will expand to service all customer segments, adding small and emerging businesses to its roster of midmarket and large companies. The company also expects to double headcount in the next three quarters.

As part of the funding announcement, Third Point Ventures partner Dan Moskowitz will join Blameless’ board of directors with Wong, Accel partner Vas Natarajan and Lightspeed partner Ravi Mhatre.

“Freeing up engineering to focus on shipping code is exactly what Blameless achieves,” said Moskowitz in a written statement. “The Blameless market opportunity is big as we see teams struggle and resort to creating homegrown playbooks and point solutions that are incomplete and costly.”

News: Norby raises $3.8M for an all-in-one creator marketing platform

• July 27, 2021
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Early in the pandemic, Nick Gerard, Steven Layne, and Samantha Safer Valentine had a hit on their hands. In the era before Zoom fatigue set in, the trio launched Mainstream Live, a website and newsletter that curated live virtual events across platforms and gave people text-based reminders to check them out.  “We started with the

Early in the pandemic, Nick Gerard, Steven Layne, and Samantha Safer Valentine had a hit on their hands. In the era before Zoom fatigue set in, the trio launched Mainstream Live, a website and newsletter that curated live virtual events across platforms and gave people text-based reminders to check them out. 

“We started with the discovery problem of people looking for cool things to do online,” Gerard told TechCrunch. “…Right away we knew that we were tapping into something.” Overnight, tens of thousands of people were on the site, browsing for online events to keep them connected in a period of unprecedented social isolation.

After going viral, the Mainstream Live team found itself inundated with questions about the tools it used to surface events and keep its community in the loop. As the team built more services for its own needs, it eventually opened its custom toolkit, sharing the code to other community leads and content creators who implemented the same set of tools with a rebrand.

“People loved it — more and more people asked for it,” Gerard said. “We got to the point where we were juggling a dozen of [these] for different partners.” By the fall, the team wound down the original community, leaned into the inbound interest in its toolset and built Norby.

The new company rolled together everything that people were asking for: a link-in-bio service, referral tracking, SMS, ticketing and other marketing tools necessary to keep a small brand or creator community humming. 

Gerard says the team at Norby has been “following that signal” ever since. Now, Norby has raised a $3.8M seed round led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s venture AI-focused fund, to grow its team and scale its full-stack marketing platform to new heights. Bungalow Capital, BBG Ventures, Charge VC, and Notation also participated in the funding round. 

Norby’s big idea is to combine services like LinkTree, Eventbrite and MailChimp into a single, affordable, subscription-based service, offering anyone who handles an online community a single solution rather than an expensive patchwork of services that have to be individually set up and managed. Norby is ideal for small brands and solo entrepreneurs and most of its customers run less than 10-person operations. The creator tool suite is purely subscription based and won’t collect any fees like Eventbrite and other popular services.

For brands, it starts at $20 per month and the company has plans in the works for a $5 per month tier for individual use. There’s no free tier, and Gerard prefers to think that Norby’s customers will be excited to save time and money on the company’s bundled offering. “What we found is that people spend an enormous amount of money on these tools,” Gerard said. “We can knock a bunch of tools out of your stack and save you money. But we can also save you time.” 

Norby’s team spends a lot of time talking to creators and small companies. Its customers range from sexual wellness companies to advice columnists and activists — anybody who needs to manage an online community. It counts Sad Girls Club, EVRYMAN and Allbodies among its early customers

The company is growing slowly and organically, bringing new users in through a waitlist and invite system and showing them around the product in group demos. “What’s been really cool for us, we’ll get a new customer for one or two features… then they came into the product and were like ‘oh we’ve always wanted to try SMS’ and then it’s just there and they can start using it,” Gerard said. 

Big picture, Norby views itself as an advocate for creators — and an insulator against the power that big platforms wield. In the long term, Gerard hopes to help creators own their own communities as a kind of “counterbalance” to big platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

Norby hopes to help more people make a reliable living creating content and communities online. “There’s a handful of extreme winners and it’s just barren after that,” Gerard said, citing Li Jin’s ideas on building a creator middle class. 

Helping creators “own the relationship” with their communities is something that big platforms will never have an incentive to do. But those same platforms are realizing that creators wield some very real power — and the ability to pick up their content empires and take them to go if they choose to. 

“Whats exciting about this moment is that right now looking ahead to the next five or ten years, nothing is inevitable,” Gerard said. “These windows don’t come along all the time.”