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V7 Labs raises $3M to help AI teams ‘automate’ training data workflows

Published December 18, 2020

V7 Labs, the makers of a computer vision platform that helps AI teams “automate” and future-proof their training data workflows as advances in AI continue, has picked up $3 million in funding. Leading the seed round is Amadeus Capital Partners, with participation from Partech, Nathan Benaich’s Air Street Capital and Miele Venture.

Founded in 2018 by Singularity University alumnus Alberto Rizzoli and former R&D lead at RSI, Simon Edwardsson (the same team behind “seeing” app Aipoly), the V7 Labs platform promises to accelerate the creation of high-quality training data by 10-100x. It does this by giving users the ability to build automated image and video data pipelines, organize and version complex data sets, and train and deploy “state-of-the-art” vision AI models.

“For companies to build computer vision solutions that deliver business value, they must continuously collect, label and retrain their models,” explains V7 Labs’ Rizzoli. “When we built Aipoly in 2015, we needed to build and maintain our own tools, whilst keeping up with the rapid state of the art of AI, because no third-party SaaS products were available”.

Fast-forward to today and Rizzoli says that many of the best computer vision companies are now turning to SaaS platforms like V7 to solve this problem. “There’s a lot to think of when building an AI startup, and ‘how can we efficiently store and query 100 different video data sets’ is something you only think of when you’re mid-flight in trying to deliver your service.

“V7 codifies industry best-practices for organizing data, labelling and launching computer vision models for real-world problems”.

Image Credits: V7 Labs

The browser and cloud-based platform claims the ability to quickly upload and render large image/video data sets “without lag,” and enable labelling to be automated (to varying degrees) without the need for prior training data. V7 has also been designed to make it possible to keep track of a very large number of labels per image/video, supporting thousands of annotations per image and millions of images per data set. Crucially, Rizzoli tells me it is possible to train, deploy and run computer vision models within the platform “in a few clicks without having to worry about DevOps”.

“Customers will soon be able to audit those models — and their corresponding training sets — to debug, test data quality, discover failure cases and eliminate any unwanted bias,” he adds, noting that these are all huge unsolved pain-points in the AI industry.

To that end, V7 Labs’ existing 100 or so customers include Tractable, GE Healthcare and Merck. It is growing fastest within medical imaging, in part because it offers support for DICOM annotation and HIPAA compliance, both must-haves in healthcare.

However, measured by the quantity of data processed on the platform, Rizzoli tells me that routine “expert inspections” are the most popular tasks. “These include dozens of companies using AI to look for damage or anomalies in cars, oil rigs, power lines, pipelines or roads,” he says.

Mental wellness platform Lyra Health is raising up to $175M at a $2.25B valuation

Published December 17, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic has underscored, and often exacerbated, the mental health crisis that exists across the world. Even the spread of remote work is part of the problem: As everyone stays at home, the lack of interaction and watercooler chat has left employees without in-person interaction.

The need for a solution has helped tech-powered mental health solutions raise funding to meet increased demand. In the latest development, it emerged that Lyra Health, a platform that focuses on providing workforces with mental health care, has filed paperwork to raise a $175 million Series E at a $2.25 billion valuation.

The paperwork was uncovered by Prime Unicorn Index. While it is not clear whether the company has closed the round, filings in Delaware usually appear after part or all of the funding has been secured. Prime Unicorn Index notes that the terms surrounding this Series E round include a “pari passu liquidation preference with all other preferred, and conventional convertible, meaning they will not participate with common stock if there are remaining proceeds.” It also noted that Lyra Health’s most recent price per share is $27.47, an up round from the Series D, which priced shares at $14.21.

We are reaching out to the company and investors for a response to the filing. One investor noted that the round has not closed yet.

Past backers of the company include Adams Street Partners, Tenaya Capital, Meritech Capital Partners, IVP and Greylock.

We seem to be in a period of rapid growth rounds getting raised in quick succession for the most promising startups. As with Discord — which confirmed a $100 million round just six months after raising $100 million — Lyra Health also recently raised funding — specifically a $110 million Series D that catapulted it above a $1 billion valuation.

Update: Discord confirms raising $100M, sources say at a valuation of up to $7B

That effectively means the startup doubled its valuation in a handful of months, suggesting rapid growth or key validation. As reported by Forbes, Lyra Health was set to bring in around $100 million in revenue by the end of the year at the time of its prior fundraise.

There have been a number of categories of technology that have seen a bump of usage and interest during this coronavirus pandemic, and sadly — or perhaps usefully, depending on how you look at it — mental health and wellness startups, aimed at helping our well-being in this trying time, have been one of them. Just last week, the meditation app Calm raised $75 million at a $2 billion valuation.

Calm raises $75M more at $2B valuation

Burlingame, California-based Lyra Health wants to live in offices everywhere. The company helps employers give their employees a suite of safe and confidential tools to support their mental health needs. This is a tricky space to play in, considering that mental health can still feel taboo in workplaces and employees might feel uncomfortable turning to their employers for support. Still, in a world where in-office perks are no longer available, mental health might be a key investment to help startup retention.

Once an employee joins Lyra, the company creates a set of recommendations for the now-patient based on a survey. Lyra Health then can connect patients to its network of thousands of therapists for appointments, consultations and check-ins. The flywheel continues.

During the pandemic, Lyra Health has brought on 80,000 new users, to a total of 1.5 million users last reported.

Tech-enabled mental health care has found tailwinds as the coronavirus pandemic leads to a surge of telehealth, as in-person doctor’s appointments could leave patients at risk. Indeed, Lyra Health started Lyra Blended Care, which pairs video therapy with online lessons and exercises rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy.

Daily Crunch: Discord raises $100M

Published December 17, 2020

Discord announces a big funding round, Google gets European approval to acquire Fitbit and Twitter launches a new voice-based feature. This is your Daily Crunch for December 17, 2020.

Discord raises $100M

The popular gaming chat platform confirmed today that it has raised $100 million and also announced that it has 140 million monthly active users, twice as many as a year ago.

“We are humbled and honored by the growth we’ve seen among so many incredible and diverse communities that have made Discord their place to hang out,” said CEO Jason Citron in a statement. “As we look to 2021, we are excited about what we have in store and plan to use this funding to help make Discord even better — both for our free service and our Nitro subscribers.”

The confirmation comes after TechCrunch reported that the company was raising up to $140 million at a valuation that could be as high as $7 billion.

The tech giants

Europe clears Google-Fitbit with a ten-year ban on using health data for ads — Under the terms of the EU’s clearance for the deal, Google has committed to not use Fitbit user data in the European Economic Area for ad targeting purposes for a 10-year period.

Twitter launches its voice-based ‘Spaces’ social networking feature into beta testing — During this initial testing period, the product will be limited to select individuals, largely from underrepresented backgrounds, Twitter says.

Google slammed for ‘monopoly power’ in new antitrust lawsuit from 35 states — Compared to the Texas-led suit against Google announced yesterday, the second lawsuit represents a broader coalition of 35 states.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Coinbase files to go public confidentially and we’re hyped — To be clear, I don’t consider myself part of the “we” that’s hyped, but Alex Wilhelm definitely is.

Spryker raises $130M at a $500M+ valuation to provide B2Bs with agile e-commerce tools — Spryker offers a platform to bring a company’s inventory online, as well as tools to analyze and measure how that inventory is selling and where.

Health insurer Oscar adds another $140M in what’s likely a pre-IPO round — The new capital means that Oscar has raised what would be the equivalent of $1 million a day for the entirety of 2020.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Virgin Orbit, Relativity Space and Astra dish on the economics and efficiencies of space launches — Relativity Space CEO Tim Ellis, Astra CEO Chris Kemp and Virgin Orbit’s VOX Space President Mandy Vaughn all joined us at TC Sessions: Space to discuss their approaches to the small spacecraft launch market.

Just how bad is that hack that hit US government agencies? — Spoiler: It’s a nightmare scenario.

2020’s top 10 enterprise M&A deals totaled a staggering $165B — It was a blockbuster year for enterprise M&A.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

HBO Max finally lands on Roku devices — “Finally” gets overused in headlines, but it absolutely applies here.

You can now securely submit tips to TechCrunch using SecureDrop — We’re making it easier and more secure for you to contact TechCrunch reporters and editors.

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.

UiPath files confidential IPO paperwork with SEC

Published December 17, 2020

UiPath, the robotic process automation startup that has been growing like gangbusters, filed confidential paperwork with the SEC today ahead of a potential IPO.

“UiPath, Inc. today announced that it has submitted a draft registration statement on a confidential basis to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) for a proposed public offering of its Class A common stock. The number of shares of Class A common stock to be sold and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. UiPath intends to commence the public offering following completion of the SEC review process, subject to market and other conditions,” the company said in a statement.

The company has raised more than $1.2 billion from investors like Accel, CapitalG, Sequoia and others. Its biggest raise was $568 million led by Coatue on an impressive $7 billion valuation in April 2019. It raised another $225 million led by Alkeon Capital last July when its valuation soared to $10.2 billion.

UiPath nabs $568M at a $7B valuation to bring robotic process automation to the front office

At the time of the July raise, CEO and co-founder Daniel Dines did not shy away from the idea of an IPO, telling me:

We’re evaluating the market conditions and I wouldn’t say this to be vague, but we haven’t chosen a day that says on this day we’re going public. We’re really in the mindset that says we should be prepared when the market is ready, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s in the next 12-18 months.

This definitely falls within that window. RPA helps companies take highly repetitive manual tasks and automate them. So for example, it could pull a number from an invoice, fill in a number in a spreadsheet and send an email to accounts payable, all without a human touching it.

It is a technology that has great appeal right now because it enables companies to take advantage of automation without ripping and replacing their legacy systems. While the company has raised a ton of money, and seen its valuation take off, it will be interesting to see if it will get the same positive reception as companies like Airbnb, C3.ai and Snowflake.

UiPath reels in another $225M as valuation soars to $10.2B

Social gaming platform Rec Room scores $20 million Series C

Published December 17, 2020

Social gaming platform Rec Room has scored some new funding as it aims to bring its once VR-centric world to every major gaming platform out there.

The startup has closed a $20 million Series C led by Madrona Venture Group . Existing investors, including First Round Capital, Index, Sequoia and DAG, also participated in the round. They’ve raised just shy of $50 million to date.

The platform has been around for years serving as a social hub and gaming platform for virtual reality users. In recent years, the company has tried to scale its ambitions past being known as the “Roblox of VR” and scale its capabilities to meet its young user base. This year was big for the platform doing just that.

CEO Nick Fajt estimates that the company has tripled its total audience since this time last year as the company has made a concerted drive on new platforms. While a substantial portion of Rec Room’s audience still comes from its bread-and-butter VR audience, the platform’s base of console users has grown substantially in 2020 and, by the end of next year, Fajt expects that mobile will have grown to be Rec Room’s most common point of entry. Meanwhile, mobile Android remains one of the last major gaming platforms on which Rec Room still doesn’t have a home.

Against Gravity is building a VR world that won’t stop growing

One of the company’s big aims heading into the new year is scaling their creation tools, which allow players to build their own experiences inside the game. More than 1 million of the platform’s 10 million registered users have engaged with creator tools, building 4 million distinct rooms on the platform. Next year, Fajt plans to scale up creator payments estimating that by the end of 2021 they’ll have paid out $1 million to their network.

Fajt says he wants creation tools on Rec Room to be more accessible to the general player base than other platforms, including Roblox, aiming to keep tools simple for now and push everyday users to invest time in the creation platform.

Image via Rec Room

“Roblox has an incredible business, that’s certainly no secret,” Fajt tells TechCrunch. “We want breadth of expression over depth of expression; we want anyone who comes into to Rec Room to be able to build.”

Despite the slow maturation of the VR market, Fajt says the company doesn’t plan on moving away from its VR roots anytime soon. The company has just updated its popular battle royale mode Rec Royale for the new Quest 2, as well as on iOS.

Update: Discord confirms raising $100M, sources say at a valuation of up to $7B

Published December 17, 2020

The world of virtual communications continues to hold a central place in our socially-distanced lives, and today it looks like one of the companies reaping some of the spoils is also reaping some funding out of it. Discord, the chat and communications platform wildly popular with gamers and, increasingly, many others, has confirmed to us today that it has raised $100 million more in funding as it hits 140 million monthly active users, double the number it had a year ago.

“We are humbled and honored by the growth we’ve seen among so many incredible and diverse communities that have made Discord their place to hang out,” said co-founder and CEO Jason Citron in a statement. “As we look to 2021, we are excited about what we have in store and plan to use this funding to help make Discord even better – both for our free service and our Nitro subscribers.”

Greenoaks Capital is leading this round, and we’ve confirmed with sources that Index Ventures is also participating.

“Discord is the best place to gather with your communities, whether to play video games, swap recipes, or collaborate on a project,” said Neil Mehta, founder and managing partner at Greenoaks Capital, in a statement. “We believe Discord will evolve and grow alongside the endless innovation in the ways people interact, ultimately connecting billions of people around the world. We are lucky to continue our long-term partnership with Jason, Stan and the entire Discord team.”

Earlier today, we reported that the company was in the process of raising up to $140 million in a Series H round, at a valuation that could be as high as $7 billion, according to paperwork filed by the company and unearthed by Prime Unicorn Index.

We have attached the documentation at the end of this article. Given the discrepancy between how much it’s announcing today, and how much it’s filed to raise, we have asked to see if the round is still open.

The analysts’ report appears to confirm our own reporting from some weeks ago. At the end of November, sources had confirmed to us that the company was raising at a valuation of up to $7 billion.

We also are trying to confirm if that is indeed the valuation with this round.

This latest fundraising had been rumored for a while, and some have described it as a “pre-IPO round” for the privately-backed startup. Prime Unicorn notes that Discord’s most recent price per share in the documentation is $280.2487, with the Series G priced at $144.1809.

Previous investors in the company have included Greylock, IVP, Spark Capital, Tencent and Benchmark, among others. With an extra $140 million, the total amount raised by the startup would stand at $420 million.

The fundraise, and the size of it, is a testament not just to how virtual communications tools continue to be an important part of our lives these days; but to the growth of Discord itself.

Discord made its name originally as a communications channel that could exist in an easy way alongside popular online games — a byproduct, perhaps, of how it first came into existence. Discord was started by Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy as part of their Hammer & Chisel gaming studio as a way for them and their teams to communicate tactics and other details to each other while playing games (their own games, other people’s games, all games).

It proceeded to get lots of traction on Twitch and with e-sports players, environments where it might be especially interesting for both players and spectators to have a place to provide running commentary on what is going on.

But just as the biggest games and gameplay has mass-market, even casual, appeal, so can the platforms that gamers use to communicate. Discord’s growth has exploded in recent years, with monthly active users doubling to 140 million this year with 800,000 downloads a day.

That’s in part down to Discord’s use alongside newly, virally popular games like Among Us; but also because it’s being used for more than just games.

The company had already raised $100 million on a $3.5 billion valuation earlier this year, and at the time Citron and Vishnevskiy noted that the platform had already outgrown — or at least made room for much more than — its gaming roots:

“It turns out that, for a lot of you, it wasn’t just about video games anymore,” they noted, describing Discord as “a place designed to hang out and talk in the comfort of your own communities and friends… a place to have genuine conversations and spend quality time with people, whether catching up, learning something or sharing ideas.”

That growth among “communities” hasn’t been without its teething pains. Discord has had a high profile, ongoing battle with unsavory elements like white supremacism on its platform. The company claims that this is on the wane, and that the platform is also a home for Black Lives Matter organizers, less politicised social media influencers, and more. Some are not so convinced, so perhaps it’s a problem that not a finished story and will continue to need to be tackled, much as it is on any social platform.

“Discord is always on and always present among these groups on the far-right,” Joan Donovan, the lead researcher on media manipulation at the Data & Society Research Institute, told Slate some years ago. “It’s the place where they do most of the organizing of doxing and harassment campaigns.”

It’s interesting that this latest $140 million of funding — that is if it closes — is coming so swiftly on the heels of the last round, just six months later. The company and its investors have some clear ambitions to build out not just more, better and efficient tools for gamers, but for people online at large, and that’s not cheap.

Some of that is happening already: witness yesterday’s news of Discord’s screen share functionality getting extended finally beyond desktop to iOS and Android (an interesting area, considering Twitter’s recent acquisition of Squad).

“Rather than throwing raw content at you, like Facebook, [Discord] provides a shared experience for you and your friends,” said Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, which led the $100 million round earlier this year. “We’ll come to appreciate that Discord does for social conversation what Slack has done for professional conversation.”

Prime Unicorn note that the terms in the Series H include “a pari passu liquidation preference with all other preferred, and conventional convertible meaning they will not participate with common stock if there are remaining proceeds.”

PrimeUnicornIndex_Discord_COI_12112020

Updated with confirmation from Discord

Spryker raises $130M at a $500M+ valuation to provide B2Bs with agile e-commerce tools

Published December 17, 2020

Businesses today feel, more than ever, the imperative to have flexible e-commerce strategies in place, able to connect with would-be customers wherever they might be. That market driver has now led to a significant growth round for a startup that is helping the larger of these businesses, including those targeting the B2B market, build out their digital sales operations with more agile, responsive e-commerce solutions.

Spryker, which provides a full suite of e-commerce tools for businesses — starting with a platform to bring a company’s inventory online, through to tools to analyse and measure how that inventory is selling and where, and then adding voice commerce, subscriptions, click & collect, IoT commerce and other new features and channels to improve the mix — has closed a round of $130 million.

It plans to use the funding to expand its own technology tools, as well as grow internationally. The company makes revenues in the mid-eight figures (so, around $50 million annually) and some 10% of its revenues currently come from the U.S. The plan will be to grow that business as part of its wider expansion, tackling a market for e-commerce software that is estimated to be worth some $7 billion annually.

The Series C was led by TCV — the storied investor that has backed giants like Facebook, Airbnb, Netflix, Spotify and Splunk, as well as interesting, up-and-coming e-commerce “plumbing” startups like Spryker, Relex and more. Previous backers One Peak and Project A Ventures also participated.

We understand that this latest funding values Berlin -based Spryker at more than $500 million.

Spryker today has around 150 customers, global businesses that run the gamut from recognised fashion brands through to companies that, as Boris Lokschin, who co-founded the company with Alexander Graf (the two share the title of co-CEOs) put it, are “hidden champions, leaders and brands you have never heard about doing things like selling silicone isolations for windows.” The roster includes Metro, Aldi Süd, Toyota and many others.

The plan will be to continue to support and grow its wider business building e-commerce tools for all kinds of larger companies, but in particular Spryker plans to use this tranche of funding to double down specifically on the B2B opportunity, building more agile e-commerce storefronts and in some cases also developing marketplaces around that.

One might assume that in the world of e-commerce, consumer-facing companies need to be the most dynamic and responsive, not least because they are facing a mass market and all the whims and competitive forces that might drive users to abandon shopping carts, look for better deals elsewhere or simply get distracted by the latest notification of a TikTok video or direct message.

For consumer-facing businesses, making sure they have the latest adtech, marketing tech and tools to improve discovery and conversion is a must.

It turns out that business-facing businesses are no less immune to their own set of customer distractions and challenges — particularly in the current market, buffeted as it is by the global health pandemic and its economic reverberations. They, too, could benefit from testing out new channels and techniques to attract customers, help them with discovery and more.

“We’ve discovered that the model for success for B2B businesses online is not about different people, and not about money. They just don’t have the tooling,” said Graf. “Those that have proven to be more successful are those that are able to move faster, to test out everything that comes to mind.”

Spryker positions itself as the company to help larger businesses do this, much in the way that smaller merchants have adopted solutions from the likes of Shopify .

In some ways, it almost feels like the case of Walmart versus Amazon playing itself out across multiple verticals, and now in the world of B2B.

“One of our biggest DIY customers [which would have previously served a mainly trade-only clientele] had to build a marketplace because of restrictions in their brick and mortar assortment, and in how it could be accessed,” Lokschin said. “You might ask yourself, who really needs more selection? But there are new providers like Mano Mano and Amazon, both offering millions of products. Older companies then have to become marketplaces themselves to remain competitive.”

It seems that even Spryker itself is not immune from that marketplace trend: Part of the funding will be to develop a technology AppStore, where it can itself offer third-party tools to companies to complement what it provides in terms of e-commerce tools.

“We integrate with hundreds of tech providers, including 30-40 payment providers, all of the essential logistics networks,” Lokschin said.

Spryker is part of that category of e-commerce businesses known as “headless” providers — by which they mean those using the tools do so by way of API-based architecture and other easy-to-integrate modules delivered through a “PaaS” (clould-based Platform as a Service) model.

It is not alone in that category: There have been a number of others playing on the same concept to emerge both in Europe and the U.S. They include Commerce Layer in Italy; another startup out of Germany called Commercetools; and Shogun in the U.S.

Italy’s Commerce Layer raises $6M led by Benchmark for its headless e-commerce platform

Spryker’s argument is that by being a newer company (founded in 2018) it has a more up-to-date stack that puts it ahead of older startups and more incumbent players like SAP and Oracle.

That is part of what attracted TCV and others in this round, which was closed earlier than Spryker had even planned to raise (it was aiming for Q2 of next year) but came on good terms.

“The commerce infrastructure market has been a high priority for TCV over the years. It is a large market that is growing rapidly on the back of e-commerce growth,” said Muz Ashraf, a principal at TCV, to TechCrunch. “We have invested across other areas of the commerce stack, including payments (Mollie, Klarna), underlying infrastructure (Redis Labs) as well as systems of engagement (ExactTarget, Sitecore). Traditional offline vendors are increasingly rethinking their digital commerce strategy, more so given what we are living through, and that further acts as a market accelerant.

“Having tracked Spryker for a while now, we think their solution meets the needs of enterprises who are increasingly looking for modern solutions that allow them to live in a best-of-breed world, future-proofing their commerce offerings and allowing them to provide innovative experiences to their consumers.”

Shogun raises $35M to help brands take on Amazon with faster and better sites of their own

2020’s top 10 enterprise M&A deals totaled a staggering $165B

Published December 17, 2020

While 2020 won’t be remembered fondly by many of us for much of anything, it was a blockbuster year for enterprise M&A with the top 10 deals totaling an astounding $165.2 billion.

This is the third straight year I’ve done this compilation. Last year the number was $40 billion. The year prior it was $87 billion. Those numbers pale in comparison to 2020’s result.

Last year’s biggest deal — Salesforce buying Tableau for $15.7 billion — would have only been good for fifth place on this year’s list. And last year’s fourth largest deal, where VMware bought Pivotal for $2.7 billion, wouldn’t have even made this year’s list at all.

The 2020 number was lifted by four chip company deals totaling $106 billion alone. Consider that the largest of these deals at $40 billion matched last year’s entire list. But let’s not forget the software company acquisitions, which accounted for the remainder, three of which were via private equity deals.

It’s worth noting that the $165.2 billion figure doesn’t include the Oracle-TikTok debacle, which remains for now in regulatory limbo and may never emerge from it. Nor does it include two purely fintech deals — Morgan Stanley acquiring E-Trade for $13 billion or Intuit snagging Credit Karma for $7.1 billion — but we did include the $5.3 billion Visa-Plaid deal because as it involved an enterprise-y API company we felt like it fit our criteria.

Keep in mind as you go through this year’s list that it appears to be an outlier year in terms of total deal flow. Most years have maybe one or two megadeals, which I would define as over $10 billion. There were six this year. And there were a host of unlisted deals worth between $1 billion and $3.2 billion, several of which would have made it to the list in quieter years.

Without further adieu, here is this year’s Top 10 deals in M&A organized from smallest to largest:

10. Vista snags Pluralsight for $3.5B

This deal happened just this week as we were writing the story, vaulting into 10th place past the $3.2 billion Twilio-Segment deal. Vista has been active as always and it has added Pluralsight, an online education platform for IT pros with plans to take it private again. At a time when more people are online, this deal seems like a wise move.

9. KKR acquires Epicor for $4.7B

This was one of those under-the-radar private equity deals, but one with a bushel of money changing hands. Epicor, hardly a household name, is a mature ERP company dating back to the early 1970s. The company has been on a rocky financial road for much of the 21st century. This could be one of those deals where KKR sees a way to squeeze life from maintenance contracts. Otherwise this one is hard to figure.

8. Insight Partners nabs Veeam for $5B

In yet another private equity deal, Insight acquired Veeam, a cloud data backup and recovery startup based in Switzerland for $5 billion. This one was one of the earliest deals of 2020 and set the tone for the year. The firm had previously invested $500 million into Veeam and apparently liked what it saw and bought the company. Unlike the Epicor deal, Insight probably plans to invest in the company with an end goal of going public or flipping it for a profit at some point.

Perigee snares $1.5M seed to secure HVAC and other infrastructure

Published December 17, 2020

It’s been an eventful fall for Perigee CEO and founder Mollie Breen. The former NSA employee participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield in September, and she just closed her first seed round on Thanksgiving, giving her a $1.5 million runway to begin building the company.

Outsiders Fund led the round, with participation from Westport, Contour Venture Partners, BBG Ventures, Innospark Ventures and a couple of individual investors.

Perigee wants to secure areas of the company like HVAC systems or elevators that may interact with the company’s network, but which often fall outside the typical network security monitoring purview. Breen says the company’s value proposition is about bridging the gap between network security and operations security. She said this has been a security blind spot for companies, often caught between these two teams. Perigee provides a set of analytics that gives the security team visibility into this vulnerable area.

As Breen explained when we spoke in September around her Battlefield turn, the solution learns normal behavior from the operations systems as it interacts with the network, collecting data like which systems and individuals normally access it. It can then determine when something seems off and cut off an anomalous act, which may be indicative of hacker activity, before it reaches the network.

She says that as a female founder getting funding, she is acutely aware how rare that is, and part of the reason she wanted to publicize this funding round was to show other women who are thinking about starting a company that it’s possible, even if it remains difficult.

She plans to grow the company to about six people in the next 12 months, and Breen says that she thinks deeply about how to build a diverse organization. She says that starts with her investors, and includes considering diversity in terms of gender, race and age. She believes that it’s crucial to start with the earliest employees, and she actively recruits diverse candidates.

“I write a lot of cold emails, particularly around hiring and that’s partly because with job listings it’s all inbound and you can’t necessarily guarantee that that is going to be diverse. And so by writing cold emails and really following up with those people and having those conversations, I have found a way of actually making sure that I’m talking to people from different perspectives,” she said.

As she looks ahead to 2021, she’s thinking about the best approach to office versus remote and she says it will probably be mostly remote with some in-person. “I’m really balancing at this point in time, how do we really make the connections, and make them strong and genuine with a lot of trust and do that with balancing some elements of remote, knowing that is where the industry is going and if you’re going to be a company and in a post-2020 world, you probably need to adopt to some element of remote working,” she said.

Perigee infrastructure security solution from former NSA employee moves into public beta

Gawq wants to burst your ‘echo chamber’ with its smarter news app

Published December 17, 2020

A new startup called Gawq wants to tackle the problem of fake news and the “echo chamber” problem created by social media, where our view of the world is shaped by manipulative algorithms and personalized feeds. Through Gawq’s newly launched mobile news app, it aims to present news from a range of sources, while allowing users to filter between news, opinion, paid content and more, as well as compare sources, check facts and even review the publication’s content for accuracy.

The idea for Gawq comes from Joshua Dziabiak, co-founder and now board member at the now profitable insurance tech startup The Zebra. Dziabiak stepped down from his day-to-day role this March, and founded Gawq shortly after.

“It started as a passion project and then it transformed into a business,” Dziabiak explains. “I wanted to do something that had a larger social impact. And this idea — this problem — has surfaced and been magnified in really big ways over the past year, especially,” he says.

When news is served up through social media channels, people are presented with their own version of reality, as the algorithms begin to filter out the news that doesn’t engage them and show them more of what does. Over time, this system led some publishers to pursue clicks and outrage with over-the-top, sensational headlines, but it also spawned a network of publications that would slant and bias the news in ways that better connected them with an either right or left-leaning audience.

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As a result, the media environment overall began to center itself around eyeballs and not necessarily news quality, Dziabiak says. While there is still quality journalism being created, it can sometimes be hard to find among all the noise.

“I believe journalists and content creators need a new measure for success. One that is based on the core ethics of journalism, and not the number of clicks or shares,” Dziabiak notes.

Image Credits: Gawq

The Gawq name is meant to be a reminder of how today’s headlines often scream for our attention. But it misses the mark for an app about news accuracy. At its core, Gawq is a news aggregator where you are not meant to “gawk” at headlines, but actually read and consider the news with a more critical eye.

At launch, the app organizes more than 150 different top media sources of all types and sizes, including those that lean one way or the other. The publishers cover topics like U.S. and world news, politics, sports, business, tech, entertainment, science, lifestyle news and more.

Gawq also organizes the day’s news without using any sort of algorithms or personalization engines, but instead by topic. As you read, you click to compare coverage of the story with other sources to get a better idea of how different outlets are writing about the same topic. With a clever red and blue slider bar at the top of the screen, you can drag your finger over to the red side to see the coverage from right-leaning sources, or you can drag it to the blue side to see the more left-leaning coverage.

The company says it uses data from three different nonprofits that audit media — AllSides, Media Bias Fact Check and Ad Fontes Media — to determine if sources are “right” or “left.”

Image Credits: Gawq

Just below the slider bar are the related fact checks to the topic at hand, for easy reference.

While Gawq will allow users to toggle some news sources on or off within the app’s settings, it uses language that deters you from doing so by reminding you that it works best when you maintain a “diverse set of media.”

In addition, Gawq introduces a “smart labels” feature to automatically identify and tag non-news — like op-ed’s, sponsored content or even celeb gossip, if you hate that sort of thing. You can toggle these on or off, too, if you want to hide anything that’s not hard news.

Another nice feature — for the news consumer at least, if not the publisher — is that Gawq loads articles by default into a “reader mode” that strips the ads and distractions that tend to fill the pages on news websites these days. You can still click to view the article on the website, if you prefer.

While much of the above is related to how the news is presented to the reader, Gawq’s bigger bet is that it can create a Wikipedia-like community of news reviewers who will rate stories for adherence to journalistic practices. This is a more ambitious and perhaps overly optimistic endeavor.

On every article, users can click a review button that walks them through a short quiz where they’re asked to rate the story’s balance, the details provided and whether the headline was clickbait. Users then add a comment and submit their report. This review process was built off the core ethics of journalism as defined by the Society of Professional Journalists, Dziabiak says.

Image Credits: Gawq

Likely, only a minority of Gawq users would rate the stories. But over time and with scale, the reviews could help give outlets an accurate rating on news accuracy and their tendencies toward sensationalism, in the eyes of news consumers. That data may have external value, but for now, Gawq’s business model is “TBD,” Dziabiak admits.

The problem Gawq aims to tackle is a difficult one. And arguably, those who need to widen their worldview will be least likely to download a new app to do so. They’re often passive news consumers who have sat back ingesting news (and often, outrage and lies) from ever-personalized social media feeds. They then click on one favorite news TV channel for everything else. But there is a growing number of people who want a more neutral media landscape, and Gawq can help them find it with how it positions news as right, left or centered when comparing sources.

The startup is currently self-funded and has a small team of engineers, mostly working on a contract basis. Gawq has not ruled out future investment, however.

The app is a free download on iOS and Android.