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News: Dodge Challenges: Can the automaker bring muscle into the electric future?

  • July 8, 2021
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The term muscle car has always been a euphemism for concessions. Want the most power for the money? Forget about a sports car from Porsche or Lotus. Buy a muscle car and just take corners a bit slower. Today Dodge announced it’s making an electric muscle car and it will be available in 2024. The

The term muscle car has always been a euphemism for concessions. Want the most power for the money? Forget about a sports car from Porsche or Lotus. Buy a muscle car and just take corners a bit slower. Today Dodge announced it’s making an electric muscle car and it will be available in 2024. The first question that comes to mind: well, if it’s a muscle car, what’s missing?

There’s a difference between a muscle car and a sports car, and Dodge is uniquely suited to know the differences. The brand has long been associated with horsepower and going fast in a straight line. The Dodge Viper. The Dodge Challenger. Even the Dodge Durango, a lumbering SUV, is available with a tricked-out V8 capable of putting out 710 hp — more power than most Porches, though no one is about to pit a Durango against a 911 on the track.

Part of the draw of electric vehicles revolves around their mechanical simplicity. That was the original sales pitch for the muscle car, too. But, instead of offering a sports car with a tuned chassis and remarkable aerodynamics, which adds significant development cost, American car companies just stuffed larger engines in everyday family cars. Bam. Muscle cars, baby.

Let’s assume Dodge uses the muscle car mold and makes a low-cost, high-power, straight-line electric racer — think Dodge Challenger rather than Toyota Supra. This mold has several distinct characteristics.

One, burnouts. Muscle cars are known for their burnouts, which themselves are a byproduct of an overabundance of power, lack of chassis refinement and utter disregard for your tires’ tread. Dodge teased this capability in its announcement tweet, showing a vehicle smoking all four tires. Dodge knows its audience.

Muscle car owners expect to be able to tune, tweak and modify their vehicles at home. That’s one of the main appeals to this type of vehicle. Straight from the factory, muscle cars are capable, but the buyer understands the automaker omitted certain parts to keep the sticker price as low as possible. Want better traction? Swap out the tires. Want better cornering? Add stiffer sway bars. An electric muscle car must be modifiable — something that’s increasingly rare as performance is more often optimized through software tweaks than mechanical upgrades.

Tesla has long been criticized for its aversion to vehicle modifications and at-home repairs. This is an opportunity for Dodge and others. A large swath of car buyers expect to be able to wrench on their vehicles, and I’ll wager this demographic is critical to Dodge’s future growth.

These unique characteristics of muscle cars are what make the segment so appealing for Dodge. The auto brand struggles to keep up with the market with a stable of stale vehicles, and the muscle car’s low-cost formula could allow for cheaper development costs.

And keeping development costs low is what Dodge needs right now.

Dodge is owned by Stellantis, a new automobile conglomerate formed when FCA, Dodge’s old owner, merged with the Dutch automaker PSA Group. It gets more confusing when Dodge’s previous owner is mentioned. Once always mentioned along with the giants of GM and Ford, Chrysler previously owned Dodge but is now just another brand in the Stellantis family. Together, Dodge and Chrysler offer only six vehicles, and none have seen significant updates in years.

An electric muscle car could revitalize the brand in the same way the Bronco is revitalizing Ford.

Look at Ford. The 2021 Bronco is a hit because it lines up nicely with consumer’s expectations of a Bronco. People hardly remember the engine and chassis issues that were long associated with the Bronco. Instead, people remember a durable off-roader (and slow car chases), so Ford made a durable off-roader loaded with modern conveniences.

Dodge should do the same with its upcoming electric muscle car. But, of course, calling a vehicle a muscle car sets certain expectations that Dodge would be wise to deliver.

Likewise, Ford is also selling a four-door electric Mustang, and its heavily rumored Chevrolet is preparing a similar electric SUV Corvette. While most people love the electric Mustang (I don’t), they also concede the Mustang naming muddles the branding.

What is it going to be called? Automakers are increasingly turning to their back catalog for new branding. GM revived the Hummer for its first electric truck, and Ford brought back the Bronco and F-150 Lightning. Dodge has a lot of history with muscle cars. There’s the legendary Charger Daytona (perfect if the upcoming car is built on the current Charger or Challenger), the low cost Coronet and its upgraded sibling Coronet Super Bee, the Dodge Stealth, or Dodge Polara — though maybe Polara is too close to the EV maker, Polestar. Or Dodge could turn to names used by Plymouth, another brand previously owned by Chrysler. So there’s the Plymouth Roadrunner, Duster, Fury, and Barracuda, too.

Last question: How will Dodge make the car sound like a muscle car? Hopefully, they won’t. I’m here for feeling performance rather than hearing it — and I drive a big F-150 with a custom exhaust.

#StellantisEVDay2021 | Timothy Kuniskis: “@Dodge will not sell electric cars, it will sell American eMuscle” https://t.co/adpUdnY5hy

— Stellantis (@Stellantis) July 8, 2021

News: Auto giant Stellantis to invest €30B in electrification through 2025

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Stellantis, the global automaker born out of a merger between Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and French automaker Groupe PSA, will invest €30 billion ($35.5 billion) in electric vehicles and new software over the next four years as part of a major push to transition away from internal combustion engines. The world’s fourth-largest automaker joins rivals such

Stellantis, the global automaker born out of a merger between Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and French automaker Groupe PSA, will invest €30 billion ($35.5 billion) in electric vehicles and new software over the next four years as part of a major push to transition away from internal combustion engines.

The world’s fourth-largest automaker joins rivals such as General Motors and Volkswagen in earmarking billions toward EV investments through the first part of the decade. Among the company’s plans are manufacturing an electric Dodge muscle car and an electric Ram pickup truck, both by 2024. Stellantis also said it would offer an electric or plug-in model in every vehicle segment under its Jeep brand by 2025.

The ultimate aim, CEO Carlos Tavares said during the company’s inaugural EV Day event on Thursday, is to hit sales targets for low-emission vehicles (including plug-ins) of 70% in Europe and 40% in the U.S. by 2030.

Stellantis has been slower to electrify than some of its rivals, perhaps due in part to its lineup’s best-sellers skewing toward performance and heavy-duty models. The company designs and manufactures cars across over a dozen brands, including Jeep, Chrysler, Ram Trucks and Dodge. Its major brands in Europe include Peugeot, Vauxhall, Citroen and Fiat.

In order to deliver on its electrification strategy, Stellantis executives said that the company will also manufacture 130 gigawatt hours of battery capacity by 2025 and around 260 gigawatt hours across five factories in North America and Europe by 2030. The company will use two battery chemistries by 2024, with the goal of developing solid-state battery technology by 2026.

The car giant is also developing a portfolio of four dedicated electric vehicle platforms: Small, for city driving; Medium, for premium vehicles; Large, for performance and muscle models; and Frame, for trucks and heavy-duty vehicles. The platforms will have a range of up to 300 miles for Small and 500 miles for Large and Frame. The aim is to decrease battery costs by 40% by 2024, Stellantis CFO Richard Palmer said.

News: The Accellion data breach continues to get messier

  • July 8, 2021
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Morgan Stanley has joined the growing list of Accellion hack victims — more than six months after attackers first breached the vendor’s 20-year-old file-sharing product.  The investment banking firm — which is no stranger to data breaches — confirmed in a letter this week that attackers stole personal information belonging to its customers by hacking

Morgan Stanley has joined the growing list of Accellion hack victims — more than six months after attackers first breached the vendor’s 20-year-old file-sharing product. 

The investment banking firm — which is no stranger to data breaches — confirmed in a letter this week that attackers stole personal information belonging to its customers by hacking into the Accellion FTA server of its third-party vendor, Guidehouse. In a letter sent to those affected, first reported by Bleeping Computer, Morgan Stanley admitted that threat actors stole an unknown number of documents containing customers’ addresses and Social Security numbers.

The documents were encrypted, but the letter said that the hackers also obtained the decryption key, though Morgan Stanley said the files did not contain passwords that could be used to access customers’ financial accounts.

“The protection of client data is of the utmost importance and is something we take very seriously,” a Morgan Stanley spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We are in close contact with Guidehouse and are taking steps to mitigate potential risks to clients.”

Just days before news of the Morgan Stanley data breach came to light, an Arkansas-based healthcare provider confirmed it had also suffered a data breach as a result of the Accellion attack. Just weeks before that, so did UC Berkely. While data breaches tend to grow past initially reported figures, the fact that organizations are still coming out as Accellion victims more than six months later shows that the business software provider still hasn’t managed to get a handle on it. 

The cyberattack was first uncovered on December 23, and Accellion initially claimed the FTA vulnerability was patched within 72 hours before it was later forced to explain that new vulnerabilities were discovered. Accellion’s next (and final) update came in March, when the company claimed that all known FTA vulnerabilities — which authorities say were exploited by the FIN11 and the Clop ransomware gang — have been remediated.

But incident responders said Accellion’s response to the incident wasn’t as smooth as the company let on, claiming the company was slow to raise the alarm in regards to the potential danger to FTA customers.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand, for example, raised concerns about the timeliness of alerts it received from Accellion. In a statement, the bank said it was reliant on Accellion to alert it to any vulnerabilities in the system — but never received any warnings in December or January.

“In this instance, their notifications to us did not leave their system and hence did not reach the Reserve Bank in advance of the breach. We received no advance warning,” said RBNZ governor Adrian Orr.

This, according to a discovery made by KPMG International, was due to the fact that the email tool used by Accellion failed to work: “Software updates to address the issue were released by the vendor in December 2020 soon after it discovered the vulnerability. The email tool used by the vendor, however, failed to send the email notifications and consequently the Bank was not notified until 6 January 2021,” the KPMG’s assessment said. 

“We have not sighted evidence that the vendor informed the Bank that the System vulnerability was being actively exploited at other customers. This information, if provided in a timely manner is highly likely to have significantly influenced key decisions that were being made by the Bank at the time.”

In March, back when it was releasing updates about the ongoing breach, Accellion was keen to emphasize that it was planning to retire the 20-year-old FTA product in April and that it had been working for three years to transition clients onto its new platform, Kiteworks. A press release from the company in May says 75% of Accellion customers have already migrated to Kiteworks, a figure that also highlights the fact that 25% are still clinging to its now-retired FTA product. 

This, along with Accellion now taking a more hands-off approach to the incident, means that the list of victims could keep growing. It’s currently unclear how many the attack has claimed so far, though recent tallies put the list at around 300. This list includes Qualys, Bombardier, Shell, Singtel, the University of Colorado, the University of California, Transport for New South Wales, Office of the Washington State Auditor, grocery giant Kroger and law firm Jones Day.

“When a patch is issued for software that has been actively exploited, simply patching the software and moving on isn’t the best path,” Tim Mackey, principal security strategist at the Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center, told TechCrunch. “Since the goal of patch management is protecting systems from compromise, patch management strategies should include reviews for indications of previous compromise.”

Accellion declined to comment.

News: PowerZ raises $8.3 million for its video game focused on education

  • July 8, 2021
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French startup PowerZ has raised another $8.3 million (€7 million at today’s exchange rate) including $1.2 million (€1 million) in debt — the rest is a traditional equity round. The company is both an edtech startup and a video game studio with an ambitious goal — it wants to build a game that is as

French startup PowerZ has raised another $8.3 million (€7 million at today’s exchange rate) including $1.2 million (€1 million) in debt — the rest is a traditional equity round. The company is both an edtech startup and a video game studio with an ambitious goal — it wants to build a game that is as engaging as Minecraft or Fortnite, but with a focus on education.

In February, PowerZ launched the first version of its game on computers. It doesn’t have a lot of content, but the company wanted to start iterating as quickly as possible. Aimed at kids who are 6 years old and over, PowerZ teleports the player into a fantasy world with cute dragons and magic spells.

“The idea is really to build a sort of Harry Potter,” co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Freund told me. “You have this world that is super nice and very interesting. Like with Hogwarts, you want to come back regularly. And the story will progress over a very long time.”

15,000 children tried out the first chapter. On average, they spent 4 hours in the game. I asked whether Freund was satisfied with those metrics. He told me he thought his company’s vision was “completely validated.”

Bpifrance Digital Venture, RAISE Ventures and Bayard are investing in today’s round. Existing investors Educapital, Hachette Livres, Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet and Michaël Benabou are also investing once again.

Image Credits: PowerZ

Now, it’s time to add content, expand to other platforms and launch new languages. When it comes to content, the company wants to partner with other game studios. They’re going to create new islands and design games that make you learn new stuff. Zero Games, Opal Games and ArkRep are the first third-party studios to contribute to PowerZ.

When those new chapters are available, kids will be able to practice mental calculation, geometry, vocabulary, foreign languages, sign language, but also astronomy, photography, architecture, sculpture, cooking, wildlife, yoga, etc.

“Basically we want to position ourselves as a publisher,” Freund said. “The only thing we want to keep in-house is the main storyline.”

As for new platforms, PowerZ is launching its game on the iPad this week. The company realized that launching on computers was a mistake. Adults are already using computers or don’t want to leave your kid on the computer. That’s why PowerZ is starting with the iPad and the iPhone will follow suite. In 2022, the company expects to release its game on the Nintendo Switch and potentially other game consoles.

While the game is only available in French for now, the startup is also thinking about launching an English version soon.

“The game is completely free right now. We have an idea to monetize it. We’ll copy every other games with in-app purchases for visual items,” Freund said.

When you look further down the roadmap, PowerZ has some radically ambitious goals. Freund believes that educational games will become mainstream really quickly. Many companies don’t want to develop this kind of stuff because screens are bad for kids.

“If we just say that screens are bad, we’ll end up with an Amazon product to learn math. I feel a sense of urgency to develop an educational platform for screens that can scale,” Freund told me.

PowerZ wants to reach hundreds of thousands of children as quickly as possible. And just like Fortnite or Minecraft, the company believes its game can act as a platform for other stuff that can evolve over time.

News: Robotic funding doesn’t grow on trees

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As I mentioned at the close of last week’s roundup, the biggest issue in writing this roundup on Wednesday is that sometimes news breaks on Thursday morning. Again, I’m asking the robotics community to try not make any big headlines on Thursdays. That would really help a guy out. Last week, news broke that Zebra

As I mentioned at the close of last week’s roundup, the biggest issue in writing this roundup on Wednesday is that sometimes news breaks on Thursday morning. Again, I’m asking the robotics community to try not make any big headlines on Thursdays. That would really help a guy out.

Last week, news broke that Zebra Technologies had purchased Fetch. I’ve written about the latter several times over the past couple years, and spoken to founder Melonee Wise a number of times, as well. Ultimately, it’s not much of a surprise Fetch went the acquisition route. If I were a better man, however, I would have leaned heavily toward an acquisition by some mega-retailer like Walmart or Target.

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Everyone is looking for a competitive advantage against Amazon, including those big names. And, of course, they’ve got the deep pockets to purchase a head start. Ultimately, I think a deal like this is better for the industry, at large, given how Amazon’s acquisitions tend to go. The company loves to buy up startups and keep all of that cool technology to itself. I spoke to Wise about the deal, late last week. Some excerpts:

As we were fundraising for our Series D, this opportunity came out of that. I think when you look at it, over the last couple of years, we’ve had a good relationship with them. With the pandemic, there’s been a huge draw for more and more automation technology. Before the pandemic, there were already labor shortages for warehouse and logistics, and the pandemic only exacerbated it. One of the other great things about us joining Zebra is they have a strong go-to-market engine, and they can amplify our sales capability. They’re already in all of the customers we want to be working with. It helps us reach a much broader, wider and deeper audience.

I think it’s complicated. When I started the company, I never really planned on anything. I just wanted to go build something. I mean that in the most sincere way. I wanted to go build something and not fail. And the question is, what does not failing look like? I think the facts are that in the last 20-something years, almost no robotics company has IPO’ed. Now we’re starting to see SPACS, but there hasn’t been a robotics company that’s IPO’ed through the traditional route.

In terms of vision of how we’re thinking about it, Zebra is very excited to kind of make Fetch the centerpiece of this whole new offering that they’re building out. It’s a high strategic priority for them.

Image Credits: Abundant

On the whole, this week marked a pretty substantial slow down in terms of funding announcements. We did get one big bummer news item, as Abundant Robotics is shutting down. Good Fruit Grower got the following statement from CEO Dan Steere,

After a series of promising commercial trials with prototype apple harvesters, the company was unable to raise enough investment funding to continue development and launch a production system.

We’ve reached out for further comment, but the company’s understandably not champing at the bit to discuss where things went wrong. It’s easier, of course, to celebrate the successes than it is to dissect the failures, the latter happens much more often than we can to admit in this field. Often they arrive early in the process and don’t really warrant a lot of ink.

Abundant’s different. From the outside, the Bay Area company appeared to be on the right track toward becoming a dominant name in robotic fruit harvesting. The company had raised a total of $12 million, including Series A in 2017. Granted, that’s not an insignificant amount of time to go between raises and bringing robotics to production is extraordinarily difficult.

What’s more surprising is that the company couldn’t drum up enough interest to get it across the finish line during the pandemic, when, anecdotally, interest in robotics and automation seems to be heating up. Certainly that applies to farming, which has experienced series labor shortages over the past year. More insight into that soon, I hope.

Sarcos, meanwhile, keeps finding its way into the news cycle. This week, it’s the launch of the teleoperated Guardian XT. The company’s exoskeletons get all the love (thanks in no small part to some high profile partnerships), but company also produces non-body mounted robotics. Per the company,

The SenSuit controller enables the Guardian XT robot to mimic the operator’s movements in real-time. It is an inertial measurement unit (IMU)-based motion tracker that communicates with the robot and leverages Sarcos’ proprietary force feedback technologies. The company also plans to integrate a VR- or AR-based HMD to provide remote visual and situational awareness to the operator. The Guardian XT robot is equipped with 3-degrees of freedom end effectors that enable dexterous control of trade tools and materials, including hand-held power tools, welding and cutting equipment, inspection and test equipment, parts and components, hazardous materials, and retail inventory goods, amongst others.

The system is capable of lifting and moving up to 200 pounds and will hit the market by the end of next year.

Image Credits: Fusion

Meanwhile, robotic surgery company Fusion Robotics announced this week announced plans to merge with Adaptive Geometry, another tech company specializing in spinal surgery technology. The two companies will combine to create the perfectly nondescript Accelus (frankly, Fusion is a pretty good name for two combined companies, but maybe that’s just me).

“Accelus will create opportunities for wide-scale adoption of robotics in spine surgery—both in hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs)—by addressing previous constraints related to cost and efficiency,” Accelus Chris Walsh said in a release. “Both Fusion Robotics and Integrity Implants have built enabling technology platforms that create a force multiplier for spinal care. Our products and culture create accessibility to fit each patient’s anatomy, each surgeon’s preferred approach, and each healthcare facility’s space and budget limitations, embodying our core principle of access without compromise.”

That’s a lot of business talk this week, so here’s a fun video of Boston Dynamics doing fun Boston Dynamics stuff, presumably to welcome their new Hyundai overlords:

 

News: Circle is a good example of why SPACs can be useful

  • July 8, 2021
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Circle is the sort of business that is correct for a SPAC-led debut. It could not go public in a traditional manner in its current state of maturity.

In the wake of Coinbase’s direct listing earlier this year, other crypto companies may be looking to go public sooner than later. That appears to be the case with Circle, a Boston-based technology company that provides API-delivered financial services and a stablecoin.

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Circle will not direct list or pursue a traditional IPO. Instead, the company is combining with Concord Acquisition Corp., a SPAC, or blank-check company. The transaction values the crypto shop at an enterprise value of $4.5 billion and an equity value of around $5.4 billion.

The offering marks an interesting moment for the crypto market. Unlike Coinbase, which operates a trading platform and generates fees in a manner that is widely understood by public-market investors, Circle’s offerings are a bit more exotic.

Circle’s SPAC presentation details a company whose core business deals with a stablecoin — a crypto asset pegged to an external currency, in this case, the U.S. dollar — and a set of APIs that provide crypto-powered financial services to other companies. It also owns SeedInvest, an equity crowdfunding platform, though Circle appears to generate the bulk of its anticipated revenues from its other businesses.

For more on the deal itself, TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet has a piece focused on the transaction. Here, we’ll dig into the company’s investor presentation, talk about its business model, and riff on its historical and anticipated results and valuation multiples.

In short, we get to have a little fun. Let’s begin.

How Circle’s business works

As noted above, Circle has three main business operations. Here’s how it describes them in its deck:

Image Credits: Circle investor presentation

Let’s consider each one, starting with USDC.

Stablecoins have become popular in recent quarters. Because they are pegged to an external currency, they operate as an interesting form of cash inside the crypto world. If you want to have on-chain buying power, but don’t want to have all your value stored in more volatile, and tax-inducing, cryptos that you might have to sell to buy anything else, stablecoins can operate as a more stable sort of liquid currency. They can combine the stability of the U.S. dollar, say, and the crypto world’s interesting financial web.

News: Rootly nabs $3.2M seed to build SRE incident management solution inside Slack

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As companies look for ways to respond to incidents in their complex micro services-driven software stacks, SREs or site reliability engineers are left to deal with the issues involved in making everything work and keeping the application up and running. Rootly, a new early stage startup wants to help by building an incident response solution

As companies look for ways to respond to incidents in their complex micro services-driven software stacks, SREs or site reliability engineers are left to deal with the issues involved in making everything work and keeping the application up and running. Rootly, a new early stage startup wants to help by building an incident response solution inside of Slack.

Today the company emerged from stealth with a $3.2 million seed investment. XYZ Venture Capital led the round with participation from 8VC, Y Combinator and several individual tech executives.

Rootly co-founder and CEO Quentin Rousseau says that he cut his SRE teeth working at Instacart. When he joined in 2015, the company was processing hundreds of order a day, and when he left in 2018 it was processing thousands. It was his job to make sure the app was up and running for shoppers, consumers and stores even as it scaled.

He said that while he was at Instacart, he learned to see patterns in the way people responded to an issue and he had begun working on a side project after he left looking to bring the incident response process under control inside of Slack. He connected with co-founder JJ Tang, who had started at Instacart after Rousseau left in 2018, and the two of them decided to start Rootly to help solve these unique problems that SREs face around incident response.

“Basically we want people to manage and resolve incidents directly in Slack. We don’t want to add another layer of complexity on top of that. We feel like there are already so many tools out there and when things are chaotic and things are on fire, you really want to focus quickly on the resolution part of it. So we’re really trying to be focused on the Slack experience,” Rousseau explained.

The Rootly solution helps SREs connect quickly to their various tools inside Slack, whether that’s Jira or Zendesk or DataDog or PagerDuty, and it compiles an incident report in the background based on the conversation that’s happening inside of Slack around resolving the incident. That will help when the team meets for an incident post-mortem after the issue is resolved.

The company is small at the moment with fewer than 10 employees, but it plans to hire some engineers and sales people over the next year as they put this capital to work.

Tang says that they have built diversity as a core component of the company culture, and it helps that they are working with investor Ross Fubini, managing partner at lead investor XYZ Venture Capital. “That’s also one of the reasons why we picked Ross as our lead investor. [His firm] has probably one of the deepest focuses around [diversity], not only as a fund, but also how they influence their portfolio companies,” he said.

Fubini says there are two main focuses in building diverse companies including building a system to look for diverse pools of talent, and then building an environment to help people from under-represented groups feel welcome once they are hired.
“One of our early conversations we had with Rootly was how do we both bring a diverse group in and benefit from a diverse set of people, and what’s going to both attract them, and when they come in make them feel like this is a place that they belong,” Fubini explained.

The company is fully remote right now with Rousseau in San Francisco and Tang in Toronto, and the plan is to remain remote whenever offices can fully reopen. It’s worth noting that Rousseau and Tang are members of the current Y Combinator batch.

 

News: The NS1 EC-1

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There are excruciatingly high stakes for software today. Trillions of dollars of market cap, billions of consumers, hundreds of billions of revenue, and limitless hours of usage are dependent on software working in real time, all the time, without downtime. As the sophistication of software delivery has increased, every layer of the tech stack has

There are excruciatingly high stakes for software today. Trillions of dollars of market cap, billions of consumers, hundreds of billions of revenue, and limitless hours of usage are dependent on software working in real time, all the time, without downtime.

As the sophistication of software delivery has increased, every layer of the tech stack has been rewritten — an accelerated evolution has led to a bevy of multibillion-dollar, up-and-coming unicorns and multiple massive public market debuts.

However, today we’re talking about one of the most integral pillars holding up the internet. The Domain Name System, otherwise known as DNS, is the key addressing system that connects browsers, users, devices and servers together. Type in “www.techcrunch.com” in your browser, and DNS finds the address linked to that name and tells routers and switches across the world which server to connect to and how to send data back to you.

Unlike physical postal addresses, innovation around DNS addressing has flourished in recent years. Traffic management, performance scaling, and cost shaping have turned DNS from a basic directory into a vital layer for guaranteeing the reliability of all software in use on the internet today while protecting the bottom line.

Few companies have parlayed internet infrastructure experience into a world-class engineering company quite like NS1. The New York City-based startup has raised more than $100 million as it builds a strategic node at the core of the modern web delivery tech stack. Customers are flocking: 760 at latest count (up from 600 a year ago), with year-over-year bookings growth well into the triple digits.

How did the company take a slumbering and dreary yet reliable aspect of the internet and turn it into a strategic moat and an enterprise win? And what lessons can we learn about the future of the enterprise infrastructure layer from one of its leading lights? That’s what we’re here to find out.

The lead writer of this EC-1 is Sean Michael Kerner. Kerner has been covering the IT and enterprise infrastructure market for more than a decade as a tech journalist (or, @TechJournalist as he is known on Twitter). Perhaps most importantly, he’s also partially fluent in Klingon, which has no bearing on this EC-1, but is one of those cool facts we wanted to include anyway. The lead editor for this package was Danny Crichton, the assistant editor was Ram Iyer, the copy editor was Richard Dal Porto, and illustrations were drawn by Nigel Sussman.

NS1 had no say in the content of this analysis and did not get advance access to it. Kerner has no financial ties to NS1 or other conflicts of interest to disclose.

The NS1 EC-1 comprises four main articles numbering 10,300 words and a reading time of 41 minutes. Here’s what we’ll be (DNS) addressing:

We’re always iterating on the EC-1 format. If you have questions, comments or ideas, please send an email to TechCrunch Managing Editor Danny Crichton at danny@techcrunch.com.

News: 1 napkin and 22 lines of code, or how NS1 rewrote the rules of internet infrastructure

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Kris Beevers, John Sullivan and Alex Vayl wanted to rebuild the core addressing system of the internet and transform it from a cost center into a critical tool for software reliability and cost savings.

It’s the most important primary layer in the modern tech stack for internet software, and its most intriguing evolution was written on a napkin in a New York City bar and translated to just shy of two dozen lines of Python code.

Such is the nature of tech innovation today, and such was the birth of NS1. Kris Beevers, along with Jonathan Sullivan and Alex Vayl, wanted to rebuild the core addressing system of the internet — the Domain Name System, or DNS — and transform it from a cost center into a critical tool for software reliability and cost savings. It was a smart idea back in 2012 and gained much steam a few years later when a fortuitous outage at a competitor left hundreds of websites stranded.

It’s the most important primary layer in the modern tech stack for internet software, and its most intriguing evolution was written on a napkin in a New York City bar and translated to just shy of two dozen lines of Python code.

NS1 may make the networks of the internet more reliable. But the story of the company is also built on the back of a durable social network of engineers who met at a little-known NYC startup named Voxel. That startup would go on to become, unintentionally, an incubator for several massive enterprise companies and exits.

Chance encounters, bold engineering and lucky breaks: It’s the quintessential startup tale, and it’s changing the face of software delivery.

“You learn a lot because you’re doing way more than you rightfully should.”

NS1’s story begins back at the turn of the millennium, when Beevers was an undergrad at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in upstate New York and found himself employed at a small file-sharing startup called Aimster with some friends from RPI. Aimster was his first taste of life at an internet startup in the heady days of the dot-com boom and bust, and also where he met an enterprising young engineer by the name of Raj Dutt, who would become a key relationship over the next two decades.

News: WTF is NS1? It’s DNS, DDI, and maybe other TLAs

  • July 8, 2021
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NS1 looks at DNS differently from the competition: It doesn’t consider it as just a conduit to connect traffic; instead, DNS is treated as a routing system that can direct traffic very effectively.

“We are not a DNS company, despite the name, and despite everything we’re talking about,” NS1 founder and CEO Kris Beevers says.

That might sound counter-intuitive, given that the company’s flagship product offering is literally called Managed DNS. The issue and the challenge NS1 actually solves today goes much deeper, and by positioning itself as being about more than DNS, the company helps to differentiate itself against what is, by any measure, a very commoditized technology.

Across its product portfolio, NS1 leverages data and injects software-defined intelligence, automation and real-time decisioning policy to steer and optimize traffic at the DNS layer.

NS1 looks at DNS differently from the competition: It doesn’t consider it as just a conduit to connect traffic; instead, DNS is treated as a routing system that can direct traffic very effectively.

Across its product portfolio, NS1 leverages data and injects software-defined intelligence, automation and real-time decisioning policy to steer and optimize traffic at the DNS layer, Beevers says. It does all this by a core technology known as the filter chain, and it is foundational to NS1’s current success.

In the first part of this EC-1, I spoke about how Beevers wrote 22 lines of code to sketch out that filter chain technology, bringing NS1 to life. I will now look at how the company has expanded beyond DNS into what’s known as DDI, a key technology stack for managing internal networks within companies. We’ll also talk about NS1’s open-source efforts, and why experimentation remains a bedrock principle of the company’s engineering culture.

Managing external traffic: DNS and active traffic management

“Something that I will say very often to our team and to our customers in the market is, we’re not here to make DNS better; we’re not here to make DDI better, which is another realm that we play in now,” Beevers said. “We’re here to turn those technologies into leverage to solve much bigger problems that equate to connecting applications with an audience more effectively, at better scale, driving better performance and experiences with security and reliability.”

  


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