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ServiceNow takes RPA plunge by acquiring India-based startup Intellibot

Published March 23, 2021

ServiceNow became the latest company to take the robotic process automation (RPA) plunge when it announced it was acquiring Intellibot, an RPA startup based in Hyderabad, India. The companies did not reveal the purchase price.

The purchase comes at a time where companies are looking to automate workflows across the organization. RPA provides a way to automate a set of legacy processes, which often involve humans dealing with mundane repetitive work.

The announcement comes on the heels of the company’s no-code workflow announcements earlier this month and is part of the company’s broader workflow strategy, according to Josh Kahn, SVP of Creator Workflow Products at ServiceNow.

“RPA enhances ServiceNow’s current automation capabilities including low code tools, workflow, playbooks, integrations with over 150 out of the box connectors, machine learning, process mining and predictive analytics,” Kahn explained. He says that the company can now bring RPA natively to the platform with this acquisition, yet still use RPA bots from other vendors if that’s what the customer requires.

Looking ahead after 2020’s epic M&A spree

“ServiceNow customers can build workflows that incorporate bots from the pure play RPA vendors such as Automation Anywhere, UiPath and Blue Prism, and we will continue to partner with those companies. There will be many instances where customers want to use our native RPA capabilities alongside those from our partners as they build intelligent, end-to-end automation workflows on the Now Platform,” Kahn explained.

The company is making this purchase as other enterprise vendors enter the RPA market. SAP announced a new RPA tool at the end of December and acquired process automation startup Signavio in January. Meanwhile Microsoft announced a free RPA tool earlier this month, as the space is clearly getting the attention of these larger vendors.

ServiceNow has been on a buying spree over the last year or so buying five companies including Element AI, Loom Systems, Passage AI and Sweagle. Kahn says the acquisitions are all in the service of helping companies create automation across the organization.

“As we bring all of these technologies into the Now Platform, we will accelerate our ability to automate more and more sophisticated use cases. Things like better handling of unstructured data from documents such as written forms, emails and PDFs, and more resilient automations such as larger data sets and non-routine tasks,” Kahn said.

Intellibot was founded in 2015 and will provide the added bonus of giving ServiceNow a stronger foothold in India. The companies expect to close the deal no later than June.

ServiceNow adds new no-code capabilities

Early Stage is the premier ‘how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first-hand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company-building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in – there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE” at checkout to get 20 percent off tickets right here.

Orca Security raises $210M Series C at a unicorn valuation

Published March 23, 2021

Orca Security, an Israeli cybersecurity startup that offers an agent-less security platform for protecting cloud-based assets, today announced that it has raised a $210 million Series C round at a $1.2 billion valuation. The round was led by Alphabet’s independent growth fund CapitalG and Redpoint Ventures. Existing investors GGV Capital, ICONIQ Growth and angel syndicate Silicon Valley CISO Investment also participated. YL Ventures, which led Orca’s seed round and participated in previous rounds, is not participating in this round — and it’s worth noting that the firm recently sold its stake in Axonius after that company reached unicorn status.

If all of this sounds familiar, that may be because Orca only raised its $55 million Series B round in December, after it announced its $20.5 million Series A round in May. That’s a lot of funding rounds in a short amount of time, but something we’ve been seeing more often in the last year or so.

Orca Security co-founders Gil Geron (left) and Avi Shua (right). Image Credits: Orca Security

As Orca co-founder and CEO Avi Shua told me, the company is seeing impressive growth and it — and its investors — want to capitalize on this. The company ended last year beating its own forecast from a few months before, which he noted was already aggressive, by more than 50%. Its current slate of customers includes Robinhood, Databricks, Unity, Live Oak Bank, Lemonade and BeyondTrust.

“We are growing at an unprecedented speed,” Shua said. “We were 20-something people last year. We are now closer to a hundred and we are going to double that by the end of the year. And yes, we’re using this funding to accelerate on every front, from dramatically increasing the product organization to add more capabilities to our platform, for post-breach capabilities, for identity access management and many other areas. And, of course, to increase our go-to-market activities.”

YL Ventures sells its stake in cybersecurity unicorn Axonius for $270M

Shua argues that most current cloud security tools don’t really work in this new environment. Many, because they are driven by metadata, can only detect a small fraction of the risks, and agent-based solutions may take months to deploy and still not cover a business’ entire cloud estate. The promise of Orca Security is that it can not only cover a company’s entire range of cloud assets but that it is also able to help security teams prioritize the risks they need to focus on. It does so by using what the company calls its “SideScanning” technology, which allows it to map out a company’s entire cloud environment and file systems.

“Almost all tools are essentially just looking at discrete risk trees and not the forest. The risk is not just about how pickable the lock is, it’s also where the lock resides and what’s inside the box. But most tools just look at the issues themselves and prioritize the most pickable lock, ignoring the business impact and exposure — and we change that.”

It’s no secret that there isn’t a lot of love lost between Orca and some of its competitors. Last year, Palo Alto Networks sent Orca Security a sternly worded letter (PDF) to stop it from comparing the two services. Shua was not amused at the time and decided to fight it. “I completely believe there is space in the markets for many vendors, and they’ve created a lot of great products. But I think the thing that simply cannot be overlooked, is a large company that simply tries to silence competition. This is something that I believe is counterproductive to the industry. It tries to harm competition, it’s illegal, it’s unconstitutional. You can’t use lawyers to take your competitors out of the media.”

Currently, though, it doesn’t look like Orca needs to worry too much about the competition. As GGV Capital managing partner Glenn Solomon told me, as the company continues to grow and bring in new customers — and learn from the data it pulls in from them — it is also able to improve its technology.

2020 was a record year for Israel’s security startup ecosystem

“Because of the novel technology that Avi and [Orca Security co-founder and CPO] Gil [Geron] have developed — and that Orca is now based on — they see so much. They’re just discovering more and more ways and have more and more plans to continue to expand the value that Orca is going to provide to customers. They sit in a very good spot to be able to continue to leverage information that they have and help DevOps teams and security teams really execute on good hygiene in every imaginable way going forward. I’m super excited about that future.”

As for this funding round, Shua noted that he found CapitalG to be a “huge believer” in this space and an investor that is looking to invest into the company for the long run (and not just trying to make a quick buck). The fact that CapitalG is associated with Alphabet was obviously also a draw.

“Being associated with Alphabet, which is one of the three major cloud providers, allowed us to strengthen the relationship, which is definitely a benefit for Orca,” he said. “During the evaluation, they essentially put Orca in front of the security leadership at Google. Definitely, they’ve done their own very deep due diligence as part of that.”

Jumio raises $150M as its all-in-one ID authentication platform crosses 300M verified identities

Published March 23, 2021

Digital identity services — used as a key link between organizations to verify that you are who you say you are online and individuals logging into those services — have come into their own in this past year. Now, one of the companies providing digital identity products is announcing a large round of funding, underscoring both the market size and its ambitions to be a central player in that space.

Jumio, which has built a platform that provides a variety of digital identity tools and technology — using biometrics, machine learning, computer vision, big data and more to run checks on ID documents, log-ins, to help prevent suspicious financial activity, identity theft and more — has closed a $150 million round of funding. The Palo Alto-based company says it will use the funds to build more tools on its platform, and to double down on customer growth after a big year.

Currently, Jumio’s primary business is B2B: It provides tools to enterprise customers like HSBC to manage digital identity verification. Some of the areas where it will be investing include expanding its AI capabilities to do more anti-money laundering work, and to look at building a B2C product, using the data, tools and network of customers that it has to help individuals better manage their identities online.

“I think the big thing is that the foundation of the internet is identity not anonymity,” said CEO Robert Prigge in an interview, who said the trend of digital transformation has spurred that change. “It’s been a big shift over the last couple of years. People wanted to originally hide behind anonymity, but now identify is the keystone. Whether it’s online banking or social networks, you need to be able to establish trust remotely.”

Of course, anonymity still is there, just in a different form: data protection regulations are all about making sure that we can stay private if we so choose as we use the tools that are now the norm, and countries like the U.K. are fleshing that out further with regulations in the works to make sure that services that use or manage digital identities are carried out on a common framework and with adequate oversight from users themselves. That presents the challenge and opportunity for a company like Jumio: how to navigate the push for identity while still providing a way to do that with privacy protections in mind.

Identity verification startup Jumio files for bankruptcy, will sell assets to early backer Eduardo Saverin

The funding is coming from a single investor, Great Hill Partners, which will be joining Centana and Millennium as shareholders in the company. The valuation is not being disclosed, but Prigge noted a few details that he believes point to the company’s position right now.

He confirmed that Jumio made $100 million in revenues last year; this is the first money the company has raised in nearly five years after bringing in a modest $16 million in 2016; and this looks to be the largest single round ever raised for a digital identity company.

However, given the market environment and the advances of tech, there has been quite a lot of momentum in the space, and a number of other digital identity and anti-money laundering (AML) prevention startups have been launching, growing and raising money. Just in the last year, they have included ForgeRock ($96 million round), Onfido ($100 million), Payfone ($100 million), ComplyAdvantage ($50 million), Ripjar ($36.8 million) Truework ($30 million), Zeotap ($18 million) and Persona ($17.5 million) — so I wouldn’t be surprised if this is not an outlier at the end of the day.

Acquisitions like Equifax buying Kount earlier this year, and Okta acquiring Auth0 for $6.5 billion, meanwhile, point to encroaching competition from other areas of the market such as credit rating agencies and those providing login services for corporates, as well as the bigger consolidation trends.

The pandemic has precipitated a shift where many services we might have used in person are now accessible via the web and apps, but at the same time, the amount of cybercrime aimed at abusing that environment is on the rise, and both trends fuel a stronger demand for ID verification tools.

Jumio is notable among the group of companies providing those services both for being one of the bigger and older players. Prigge said that currently has around 1,000 customers, including some of the very biggest enterprises like the banking group HSBC, United Airlines and the telecoms operator Singtel, and it is active in 200 countries.

It’s also distinctive for having developed a platform approach, where it offers a range of different kinds of tools. This is in contrast to many others, which — partly as newer entrants — are focusing on more specific technology or addressing a narrower aspect of what is a pretty complex problem. That said, the company’s earliest work seems to still be the mainstay of what it does. The number of documents that it can “read” to begin the process of verifying users now numbers about 3,500. That has propelled more than 300 million verifications made on Jumio’s platform.

“Almost all vendors verify you are who you say you are, not that it’s really you. That is why the biometrics is so important. In our case we see it as a holistic onboarding,” Prigge said. “We are one of the only AML and KYC [know your customer] providers.” The AML tools came by way of an acquisition the company made last year, of Beam Solutions.

This funding round, nevertheless, is a big step up for a company that has, in fact, seen a lot of ups and downs.

To be clear, Prigge is very explicit when he says that the Jumio he runs has nothing to do with an older incarnation of the company.

Jumio the first came into existence around a decade ago and raised nearly $40 million in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Eduardo Saverin as an early player in mobile payments, with technology that could use the camera on a phone to scan cards and IDs to enable the payments. That business ran into a lot of hot water for misstating financial results and mostly likely other related things, and eventually it filed for bankruptcy in March 2016. Saverin apparently wanted to buy the business — if only to encourage other buyers to come out of the woodwork — eventually Centana did, at a bargain price of $850,000.

Address cybersecurity challenges before rolling out robotic process automation

While that took a portion of the business (mainly branding, a business concept and some employees) out of bankruptcy, the legacy Jumio remained in a bankruptcy process that is, almost exactly five years to the date, still ongoing, partly because the original founder is being accused of destroying documents needed to finally conclude that mess.

The fact that Great Hill Partners is doing the investing here is notable. It’s mostly a PE firm that has been doing an increasing amount of investing in tech companies, part of a bigger trend where more PE firms are getting involved in rounds for later-stage startups. Its interest is in backing a company that has emerged as a leader in a crowded space but one targeting a big opportunity in digital identity, forecast to be worth some $12.8 billion by 2024, from $6 billion in 2019.

“Jumio has an incredible foundation – an expert management team, deep product roadmap and a global reach that is positioning the company for significant growth as the volume of online transactions and interactions, and associated fraud, is reaching record-highs. In particular, we have deep conviction in the company’s AI-enabled identity verification solution Jumio Go and KYC orchestration platform,” said Nick Cayer, partner at Great Hill Partners, in an emailed interview. “Jumio will need to both keep pace with incredible demand for online identity verification services, and of course outlast new and evolving competition in the space. We have strong conviction that Jumio has the right management team, innovative product roadmap and group of supporting investors to maintain leadership in the space.”

Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE” at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.

Do we need so many virtual HQ platforms?

Published March 22, 2021

Teamflow, founded by ex-Uber manager Flo Crivello, has raised an $11 million Series A just three months after raising a $3.9 million seed for its virtual HQ platform. The latest round in the startup was led by Battery Ventures, with Menlo Ventures leading its previous financing event.

Teamflow’s raise comes just days after competitor Gather announced a $26 million Series A round led by Sequoia Capital. Another company, Branch, has raised a $1.5 million seed round from investors such as Homebrew and Gumroad’s Sahil Lavingia and is currently raising its Series A.

All these startups want to bring into the mainstream a game-like interface for people to toggle through during their work day. The reality is, all three companies (and dozens of others) likely can’t win. The winning difference lies in strategy, Teamflow’s Crivello tells me.

“I think in the early days, the biggest differentiator is going to be UX and our aesthetic,” he said. “A lot of the other players have a very gamified approach, and we’re big fans of that, but we think that people don’t want to have their [work] meetings in a Pokémon game.”

A tour through Teamflow’s office shows that the company is more focused on productivity than gamification. Integrations include a Slack-like chat feature as well as file and image sharing. It is working on an in-platform app store so users can download the integrations that work best with their team, Crivello said. There are games too.

Teamflow’s virtual HQ platform.

This focus has helped Teamflow gain traction with employers instead of event organizers, a more stable source of revenue per the founder. The company currently hosts thousands of teams within startups on its platform, wracking in “hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.” Gather, a competitor, recently told TechCrunch that it gets the majority of its revenue from one-off events. Gather’s monthly revenue is currently $400,000, according to founder Philip Wang.

Gather, alternatively, looks and feels very different from Teamflow in that it is closer to the feel of Sims.

Gather’s virtual HQ platform.

Branch’s Dayton Mills said that it has been able to stay competitive through becoming “much more gamified.” It has added levels, in-game currencies and XP to encourage employees to customize their office space.

“Productivity isn’t broken, but culture, fun and social interaction is,” Mills told TechCrunch. “So when it comes to work and play we’re aiming to fix the play part, not the work. Work comes as a side effect.” Branch has not made revenue yet.

How to do remote work right, from the teams that know it best

The next ambition for Teamflow is expanding its customer base beyond the hip experimental team at startups. Crivello noted that Zoom brings in about 40% of its revenue through enterprise sales, and Teamflow is resultedly “doubling down on enterprise readiness.”

The company will work on being compliant and upholding privacy standards so it can onboard healthcare and biotech companies, what it views as “buttoned up verticals” that might not want the other gamified approaches.

Crivello is clear about his vision for the startup: He wants to make it harder to move out of a virtual office than a physical office. If Teamflow can become an operating system of sorts long-term, adding on applications and bringing in a high quality of standards, it might be able to bring on a broader set of clients.

Virtual HQs race to win over a remote-work-fatigued market

Daily Crunch: Investors back away from Dispo

Published March 22, 2021

Dispo is in the midst of a sexual assault controversy, Zoom introduces an SDK and Android owners will have to continue waiting for Clubhouse access. This is your Daily Crunch for March 22, 2021.

The big story: Investors back away from Dispo

After a recent story in Business Insider brought allegations to light that a member of David Dobrik’s vlog squad had sexually assaulted an extra during a shoot, Spark Capital announced that it would “sever all ties” with Dobrik’s photo-sharing startup Dispo, as did fellow investors Unshackled Ventures and Seven Seven Six.

“We have stepped down from our position on the board and we are in the process of making arrangements to ensure we do not profit from our recent investment in Dispo,” said Spark, which led a $20 million Series A in Dispo less than a month ago. That means any potential profits will be donated to organizations supporting survivors of sexual assault.

Dobrik, meanwhile, has stepped down from the Dispo board and left the company.

The tech giants

Zoom introduces new SDK to help developers tap into video services — The company envisions application developers embedding video in social, gaming or retail applications.

Next Billion Users head Caesar Sengupta is leaving Google — Sengupta, who also led the company’s payments business, is leaving the firm after nearly 15 years.

Tim Cook and Tim Sweeney among potential witnesses for Apple/Epic trial — A proposed witness list filed by Apple for its upcoming trial against game-maker Epic reads like a who’s who of executives from the two companies.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Side raises $150M at $1B valuation to help real estate agents go it alone — Side works to turn agents and independent brokerages into boutique brands and businesses.

Indonesian savings and investment app Pluang gets $20M in pre-Series B funding — The company offers proprietary savings and investment products that allow users to make contributions starting from 50 cents USD.

Clubhouse says its Android launch will take ‘a couple of months’ — Clubhouse co-founder Paul Davison said the company is working “really hard” to come to Android, but said it’s going to take a “couple of months” to make that happen.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

NFTs could bridge video games and the fashion industry — Real-life fashion brands use NFTs for marketing in virtual worlds like Minecraft, as well as in several Atari and Microsoft video games.

ironSource is going public via a SPAC and its numbers are pretty good — Before you tune out to avoid reading about yet another blank-check company taking a private company public, you’ll want to pay attention to this one.

Where is the e-commerce app ecosystem headed in 2021? — Superapps are likely to emerge, according to PipeCandy’s Ashwin Ramasamy.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

US privacy, consumer, competition and civil rights groups urge ban on ‘surveillance advertising’ — Nearly 40 organizations expressed their concern in an open letter.

Five reasons you should attend TC Early Stage 2021 in April — We’re just days away from kicking off TC Early Stage 2021: Operations & Fundraising on April 1-2.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Coursera set to roughly double its private valuation in impending IPO

Published March 22, 2021

In a new S-1/A filing, Coursera set an initial IPO price range between $30 and $33 a share, signaling the market views its edtech business warmly ahead of its impending public offering.

Coursera will have 130,271,466 shares outstanding after its IPO, or 132,630,966 including its underwriters’ option. At $30 per share, the low end of the company’s IPO range and a share count inclusive of 2,359,500 shares reserved for its underwriting banks, the firm would be worth $3.98 billion. That number rises to $4.38 billion at $33 per share.

Coursera is being valued as a software company, likely a breathe-easy moment for still-private edtech companies, since the debut could be an industry bellwether.

This is a solid increase from Coursera’s last private-market valuation, which was around $2.4 billion when it raised a Series F round in October 2020.

For the bulls in the room, there’s a bigger valuation if you tinker with the numbers. In a fully diluted accounting, including in our calculation, shares that are issuable upon vested options and RSUs, Coursera’s share count rises to 166,006,474, or 168,365,974 if we count its underwriters’ option. At its most generous share count and highest projected price, Coursera’s valuation could reach $5.56 billion.

However, IPO-watching group Renaissance Capital comes to a smaller $5.1 billion figure for a midpoint-range, fully diluted valuation. That result excludes shares reserved for underwriters and equity currently present in vested RSUs.

Using the more modest $5.1 billion midpoint figure, Coursera would be worth around 17.5 times its 2020 revenue of $293.5 million. Using a run-rate figure calculated from the company’s Q4 2020 results, its multiple falls to just over 15x.

Coursera is therefore being valued as a software company, likely a breathe-easy moment for still-private edtech companies, since the debut could be an industry bellwether.

The valuation is also a vote of confidence that Coursera’s rising deficits are not even a valuation risk, let alone an existential threat to its business. In the four quarters of 2020, the edtech giant lost $14.3 million, $13.9 million, $11.9 million and $26.7 million, the final Q4 net loss being the largest among the time interval for which we have data.

From all appearances, investors are valuing Coursera on its growth, not its profitability — or lack thereof.

Helping push its losses higher are rising sales and marketing costs, something TechCrunch has written about in the past. In Q4 2019, for example, the company spent $16.7 million on sales and marketing activities. That figure rose to $35 million in Q4 2020.

Box shares rise on report company is exploring sale

Published March 22, 2021

Shares of Box, a well-known content-and-collaboration company that went public in 2015, rose today after Reuters reported that the company is exploring a sale. TechCrunch previously discussed rising investor pressure for Box to ignite its share price after years in the public-market wilderness.

At the close today Box’s equity was worth $23.65 per share, up around 5% from its opening value, but lower than its intraday peak of $26.47, reached after the news broke. The company went public a little over five years ago at $14 per share, only to see its share price rise to around the same level it returned today during its first day’s trading.

Box, famous during its startup phase thanks in part to its ubiquitous CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie, has continued to grow while public, albeit at a declining pace. Dropbox, a long-term rival, has also seen its growth rate decline since going public. Both have stressed rising profitability over revenue expansion in recent quarters.

As activist investors loom, what’s next for Box?

But the problem that Box has encountered while public, namely hyper-scale platform companies with competing offerings, could also prove a lifeline; Google and Microsoft could be a future home for Levie’s company, after years of the duo challenging Box for deals.

As recently as last week, Box announced a deal for tighter integration with Microsoft Office 365. Given the timing of the release, it was easy to speculate the news could be landing ahead of a potential deal. The Reuters article adds fuel to the possibility.

While we can’t know for sure if the Reuters article is accurate, the possible sale of Box makes sense.

The article indicated that one of the possible acquisition options for Box could be taking it private again via private equity. Perhaps a firm like Vista or Thoma Bravo, two firms that tend to like mature SaaS companies with decent revenue and some issues, could swoop in to buy the struggling SaaS company. By taking companies off the market, reducing investor pressure and giving them room to maneuver, software companies can at times find new vigor.

Consider the case of Marketo, a company that Vista purchased in 2016 for $1.6 billion before turning it around and selling to Adobe in 2018 for $4.75 billion. The end result generated a strong profit for Vista, and a final landing for Marketo as part of a company with a broader platform of marketing tools.

If there are expenses at Box that could be trimmed, or a sales process that could be improved, is not clear. But Box’s market value of $3.78 billion could put it within grasp of larger private-equity funds. Or well within the reaches of a host of larger enterprise software companies that might covet its list of business customers, technology or both.

If the rumors are true, it could be a startling fall from grace for the company, moving from Silicon Valley startup darling to IPO to sold entity in just six years. While it’s important to note these are just rumors, the writing could be on the wall for the company, and it could just be a matter of when and not if.

Private equity firms can offer enterprise startups a viable exit option

Google Cloud hires Intel veteran to head its custom chip efforts

Published March 22, 2021

There has been a growing industry trend in recent years for large-scale companies to build their own chips. As part of that, Google announced today that it has hired long-time Intel executive Uri Frank as vice president to run its custom chip division.

“The future of cloud infrastructure is bright, and it’s changing fast. As we continue to work to meet computing demands from around the world, today we are thrilled to welcome Uri Frank as our VP of Engineering for server chip design,” Amin Vahdat, Google Fellow and VP of systems infrastructure wrote in a blog post announcing the hire.

With Frank, Google gets an experienced chip industry executive, who spent more than two decades at Intel rising from engineering roles to corporate vice president at the Design Engineering Group, his final role before leaving the company earlier this month.

Frank will lead the custom chip division in Israel as part of Google. As he said in his announcement on LinkedIn, this was a big step to join a company with a long history of building custom silicon.

“Google has designed and built some of the world’s largest and most efficient computing systems. For a long time, custom chips have been an important part of this strategy. I look forward to growing a team here in Israel while accelerating Google Cloud’s innovations in compute infrastructure,” Frank wrote.

Google launches OpenTitan, an open-source secure chip design project

Google’s history of building its own chips dates back to 2015 when it launched the first TensorFlow chips. It moved into video processing chips in 2018 and added OpenTitan , an open-source chip with a security angle in 2019.

Frank’s job will be to continue to build on this previous experience to work with customers and partners to build new custom chip architectures. The company wants to move away from buying motherboard components from different vendors to building its own “system on a chip” or SoC, which it says will be drastically more efficient.

“Instead of integrating components on a motherboard where they are separated by inches of wires, we are turning to “Systems on Chip” (SoC) designs where multiple functions sit on the same chip, or on multiple chips inside one package. In other words, the SoC is the new motherboard,” Vahdat wrote.

While Google was early to the “Build Your Own Chip” movement, we’ve seen other large scale companies like Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft begin building their own custom chips in recent years to meet each company’s unique needs and give more precise control over the relationship between the hardware and software.

It will be Frank’s job to lead Google’s custom chip unit and help bring it to the next level.

2021 will be a calmer year for semiconductors and chips (except for Intel)

NFTs could bridge video games and the fashion industry

Published March 22, 2021

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) offer new ways for consumers to collect, wear and trade fashion online, and now that most fashion shows have scaled back or gone virtual, they may become an important tool for the industry.

Because some of the most profitable NFTs are produced by celebrities with teams, it makes sense that music corporations, fashion brands and designers are venturing into the NFT market as well. Just this month, sneaker brand RTFKT Studios garnered $3.1 million in seven minutes by selling crypto collectibles. In December 2020, NFT startup Enjin partnered with Netherlands-based fashion house The Fabricant on a virtual collection. Real-life fashion brands use NFTs for marketing in virtual worlds like Minecraft, plus several Atari and Microsoft video games.

The fundamental value NFTs offer to bridge virtual fashion items with video games is the option to secure custody of the item for use in other games or mobile apps.

“Brands are coming up with some creative solutions because the pandemic is persistent, and fashion is something that is so close to our identities,” said Bryana Kortendick, Enjin’s VP of operations and communications. “You can snap a photo of yourself wearing your Atari-branded NFTs. You’ll also be able to wear them in video games.”

Breakout NFT star Beeple said he imagines a future where fashion NFTs could be redeemed for specific items in physical stores, especially at luxury retailers like his former client Louis Vuitton.

“You can relate NFTs to clothing in new and interesting ways,” he said. “This will be seen as the next chapter of digital art history. This is a continuation of digital art history that started decades ago, by that I mean art made on a computer and distributed through the internet.”

Fashion designers like Schirin Negahbani are already creating NFTs that represent actual clothing. Precisely because multimillion-dollar NFT sales are breaking records, spectators have been prompted to question the role speculative trading plays in this trend.

Textile designer Amber J. Dickinson says fashionable NFTs shouldn’t primarily be viewed as speculative trading opportunities. “The way I think fashion translates to the digital world is to view an NFT as a collectible piece of the garment for history,” said Dickinson, known for hand-made silk scarves and her work with Alexander McQueen. “I would only buy art as a piece that I liked. Whether digital or in the real world, I don’t take an investor’s point of view.”

There are many fashion fans who disagree with Dickinson, preferring to invest through assets like Birkin bags. They may have a different approach to NFTs. The DIGITALAX crypto fashion platform, for example, is being built with a plethora of trading features. As for Dickinson, she said she is still looking for her tribe of crypto-savvy artists on Twitter.

No-code business intelligence service y42 raises $2.9M seed round

Published March 22, 2021

Berlin-based y42 (formerly known as Datos Intelligence), a data warehouse-centric business intelligence service that promises to give businesses access to an enterprise-level data stack that’s as simple to use as a spreadsheet, today announced that it has raised a $2.9 million seed funding round led by La Famiglia VC. Additional investors include the co-founders of Foodspring, Personio and Petlab.

The service, which was founded in 2020, integrates with more than 100 data sources, covering all the standard B2B SaaS tools, from Airtable to Shopify and Zendesk, as well as database services like Google’s BigQuery. Users can then transform and visualize this data, orchestrate their data pipelines and trigger automated workflows based on this data (think sending Slack notifications when revenue drops or emailing customers based on your own custom criteria).

Like similar startups, y42 extends the idea data warehouse, which was traditionally used for analytics, and helps businesses operationalize this data. At the core of the service is a lot of open source and the company, for example, contributes to GitLabs’ Meltano platform for building data pipelines.

y42 founder and CEO Hung Dang. Image Credits: y42

“We’re taking the best of breed open-source software. What we really want to accomplish is to create a tool that is so easy to understand and that enables everyone to work with their data effectively,” Y42 founder and CEO Hung Dang told me. “We’re extremely UX obsessed and I would describe us as a no-code/low-code BI tool — but with the power of an enterprise-level data stack and the simplicity of Google Sheets.”

Before y42, Vietnam-born Dang co-founded a major events company that operated in more than 10 countries and made millions in revenue (but with very thin margins), all while finishing up his studies with a focus on business analytics. And that in turn led him to also found a second company that focused on B2B data analytics.

Image Credits: y42

Even while building his events company, he noted, he was always very product- and data-driven. “I was implementing data pipelines to collect customer feedback and merge it with operational data — and it was really a big pain at that time,” he said. “I was using tools like Tableau and Alteryx, and it was really hard to glue them together — and they were quite expensive. So out of that frustration, I decided to develop an internal tool that was actually quite usable and in 2016, I decided to turn it into an actual company. ”

He then sold this company to a major publicly listed German company. An NDA prevents him from talking about the details of this transaction, but maybe you can draw some conclusions from the fact that he spent time at Eventim before founding y42.

Given his background, it’s maybe no surprise that y42’s focus is on making life easier for data engineers and, at the same time, putting the power of these platforms in the hands of business analysts. Dang noted that y42 typically provides some consulting work when it onboards new clients, but that’s mostly to give them a head start. Given the no-code/low-code nature of the product, most analysts are able to get started pretty quickly — and for more complex queries, customers can opt to drop down from the graphical interface to y42’s low-code level and write queries in the service’s SQL dialect.

The service itself runs on Google Cloud and the 25-people team manages about 50,000 jobs per day for its clients. The company’s customers include the likes of LifeMD, Petlab and Everdrop.

Until raising this round, Dang self-funded the company and had also raised some money from angel investors. But La Famiglia felt like the right fit for y42, especially due to its focus on connecting startups with more traditional enterprise companies.

“When we first saw the product demo, it struck us how on top of analytical excellence, a lot of product development has gone into the y42 platform,” said Judith Dada, general partner at LaFamiglia VC. “More and more work with data today means that data silos within organizations multiply, resulting in chaos or incorrect data. y42 is a powerful single source of truth for data experts and non-data experts alike. As former data scientists and analysts, we wish that we had y42 capabilities back then.”

Dang tells me he could have raised more but decided that he didn’t want to dilute the team’s stake too much at this point. “It’s a small round, but this round forces us to set up the right structure. For the Series A, which we plan to be towards the end of this year, we’re talking about a dimension which is 10x,” he told me.

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