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Livestorm raises $30M for its browser-based meeting and webinar platform

Published November 12, 2020

Video communication startup Livestorm announced today that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding.

Co-founder and CEO Gilles Bertaux told me that the company started out with a focus on webinars before launching a video meeting product as well (which we used for our interview).

“The way we think about it is, webinars and meetings are not use cases,” Bertaux said.

He argued that it’s more meaningful to talk about whether you’re having a team meeting or a training demo or whatever else, and then how many people you want to attend, with Livestorm supporting all of those use cases and meeting sizes through different templates: “We’re trying to remove the semantic distinction of meeting and webinar out of the equation.”

Among other things, Livestorm is distinguished from other video conferencing tools because it’s purely browser based, without requiring presenters or attendees to install any software. The company says it has grown revenue 8x since it raised its €4.6 million Series A last fall, with a customer base that now includes 3,500 customers such as Shopify, Honda and Sephora.

Image Credits: Livestorm

Of course, you’d expect a video communication product to do well in 2020. At the same time, Zoom has dominated the remote work conversation this year — in fact, Bertaux acknowledged that Zoom may have built “the best video meeting technology.”

But he also suggested that the landscape is changing: “The thing is, we’re entering a period where video is becoming a commodity.”

So the Livestorm team is less focused on the core video technology and more on the experience around the video, with in-meeting features like screen sharing and virtual background, as well as a broader suite of marketing tools that allow customers to continue delivering targeted messages to event attendees.

Bertaux compared Livestorm to HubSpot, which he said “didn’t reinvent landing pages,” but put the different pieces of the marketing stack together around those landing pages.

The Livestorm executive team. Image Credits: Livestorm

“In 2021, we want to have the biggest ecosystem of integrations on a video product,” he said.

The round was led by Aglaé Ventures and Bpifrance Digital Venture, with participation from Raise Ventures and IDInvest.

In a statement, Aglaé Ventures partner Cyril Guenoun similarly described Livestorm “the HubSpot for video communications,” adding, “Video and online events have become essential in 2020, and are here to stay. The Livestorm platform thrives in this environment, providing a seamless solution for meetings and events with all the connectors that marketing, sales, customer service and HR pros need to make video a tightly integrated part of their communications strategies.”

Bertaux said the new funding will allow Paris-headquartered Livestorm to continue expanding into North America — apparently, the U.S. already represents one-third of its customer base and is the company’s fastest-growing region.

Zoom launches end-to-end encryption for free meetings — with a catch

Menlo Security announces $100M Series E on $800M valuation

Published November 12, 2020

Menlo Security, a malware and phishing prevention startup, announced a $100 million Series E today on an $800 million valuation. The round was led by Vista Equity Partners with help from Neuberger Berman, General Catalyst, JP Morgan and other unnamed existing investors. The company has now raised approximately $250 million.

CEO and co-founder Amir Ben-Efraim says that while the platform has expanded over the years, the company stays mostly focused on web and email as major attack vectors for customers. “We really focused on a better kind of security outcome relative to the major threat factors of web and email. So web and email is really how most of the world or the enterprise world at least does its work, and these channels remain forever vulnerable to the latest attack,” Ben-Efraim explained.

He says that to protect those attack surfaces, the company pioneered a technology called web isolation to disconnect the user from the content and send only safe visuals. “When they click a link or engage with a website, the safe visuals are guaranteed to be malware-free, no matter where you go or you end up,” Ben-Efraim said.

Menlo Security Emerges From Stealth With $25M And Plan To Defeat Malware

With a valuation of $800 million, he’s proud having built his company from the ground up to this point. He’s not quite ready to discuss an IPO yet, but he expects to take this large influx of cash and continue to grow an independent company with an IPO perhaps three years out.

With an increase in business and the new capital, the company, which has 270 employees of which around 70 came on board this year, hopes to continue to grow at that pace in 2021. He says that as that happens the security startup has been paying close attention to the social justice movements.

“As a management team and for myself as a CEO, it’s an important topic. So we were paying close attention to our own diversification goals. We want Menlo to become a more diversified company,” Ben-Efraim said. He believes the way to get there is to prioritize recruiting channels where they can tap into a wider variety of potential recruits for the company.

While he wouldn’t discuss revenue, he did say in spite of the pandemic, the business is growing rapidly and sales are up 155% in terms of net new sales over last year. “The momentum for that being customers specifically in critical infrastructure, financial services, government and the like are seeing an uptick in attacks associated with COVID, and are looking at security as essential in an area that they need to double down on. So despite the financial difficulties, that’s created a bit of a tailwind for us strangely in 2020, even though the world economy as a whole is clearly being challenged by this epidemic,” he said.

Menlo Security secures $40 million Series C to keep malware at bay

Gaming startup Statespace raises $29 million, tops 1.5 million MAUs

Published November 12, 2020

Statespace, the training platform for gamers, has today announced the close of a $29 million Series B financing led by Khosla Ventures. This comes just six months after the announcement of a $15 million Series A funding, also led by Khosla.

Founder and CEO Wayne Mackey described the funding as pre-emptive as the company experiences a growth spurt alongside the broader gaming industry. Statespace has jumped from 2 million registered users and 500,000 monthly active users in May to 5 million total registered users and 1.5 million monthly active users today.

Statespace launched out of stealth in 2017 with a product called Aim Lab. Aim Lab runs on Steam and replicates the physics of popular video games to give users a training environment to practice their aim. Moreover, Aim Lab (which was developed by neuroscientists) measures visual acuity and lets users know their strengths and weaknesses.

Image Credits: Statespace

The company also has plans to launch a product called The Academy, which lets users pay for courses that are taught by top streamers and players. These players include KingGeorge (Rainbox Six Siege), SypherPK (Fortnite), Valkia (Overwatch), Drift0r (CoD) and Launders (CS:GO).

The tech behind Aim Lab can be applied to a number of use cases in the gaming world. For one, pro esports organizations don’t necessarily have the breadth of data they want to make decisions on roster formation, recruiting, etc. Statespace partnered with the Pro Football Hall of Fame to develop a “Cognitive Combine,” giving players an overall score based on a wide range of skills outside of any specific game.

Statespace picks up $2.5M to help gamers train

There are also medical applications for the tech. The company has applied for a grant alongside several universities to work on a commercial application for stroke rehabilitation, and believes that its tech can be used to help with cerebral palsy rehabilitation.

Statespace has also grown its team to more than 40 people, and interestingly around one quarter of those people do not have a college degree.

“Internally, we talk about being like the island of misfit toys as a company,” said Mackey. “Give us all the underdogs and weirdos and people that traditionally wouldn’t have this type of career or a shot and let’s put them all together and win.”

The Statespace team is 30% female, 28% people of color and 5% Black.

Mackey explained that growth is the number-one priority of the company, which has yet to determine a primary revenue channel. Statespace is currently partnering with teams and big streamers to develop skins that are for sale, but Aim Lab is free to use.

Statespace, the platform that trains gamers, raises $15 million

Solo.io announces service mesh platform aimed at enterprise customers

Published November 12, 2020

Solo.io, a Cambridge, Massachusetts service mesh startup, announced some big changes to its approach today with a full-stack platform of services aimed squarely at the enterprise. The culmination of this will be Gloo Mesh Enterprise, a new product that will be available in beta by the end of the year.

Service meshes are part of a cloud native, containerized approach to development that enable micro services to communicate with one another.

Idit Levine, founder and CEO at Solo, says that she began by creating individual components since launching the company in 2017 because she knew that it was early for service meshes. Today’s announcement is about bringing all of these components the company has created into a more coherent and connected enterprise product.

While she was worried at first that the pandemic would have a negative impact on business, she says that her company has been busier than ever and today’s announcement is really about giving customers what they have been asking for throughout this tumultuous year.

Most of Solo’s customers are running Kubernetes and they needed some missing pieces that Solo was happy to provide for them. The first problem is the primary reason the company started, which was to manage service meshes, and Gloo Mesh, which is based on the open-source Istio service mesh, helps developers manage their service mesh clusters.

Solo.io wants to bring order to service meshes with centralized management hub

Another problem involved running containers at the edge, which required an API gateway. To that end, the company announced Gloo Edge, an API gateway built on the Envoy Proxy, an edge service proxy. Running applications at the edge means they get the resources they need to improve performance and save bandwidth.

The third piece is called Gloo Portal. This provides a centralized, self-service catalog of services that developers can tap into as they are building their applications. The final piece is Gloo Extensions, which provides a way for developers to access or build extensions called web assembly modules.

All of these pieces are available as open source, but companies that want additional functionality and support and a way to connect all of these pieces will need to buy the enterprise product. Among the additional features in the enterprise version is the ability to apply roles to the APIs in Gloo Edge to control who has access. Gloo Mesh users get production Istio support including updates and patches. It also includes a dashboard for managing clusters and developer tools for building web assembly pieces in Gloo Extension.

The company has raised more than $36 million, according to PitchBook data. The most recent deal was $23 million in September. Levine says the startup has several dozen large customers at this point, and 35 employees. She said she is actively hiring and expects to be at 50 soon.

How Kubernetes came to rule the world

mmhmm videochat software is now available to all for Mac

Published November 12, 2020

mmhmm, the presentation software developed by Evernote founder Phil Libin, is today coming out of beta. The mmhmm app is now officially available for Mac.

The software allows folks to spice up their video calls with the ability to add different backgrounds, play videos, add images and use filters, among other cool effects. The app has been invite-only since its inception, but today it becomes available to all.

Alongside the launch of the free app, mmhmm is also introducing Premium Tools.

This includes customizable rooms, presenter controls and extra add-ons like laser pointers. Users can get a free seven-day trial of the Premium Tools, and after the trial will have access to these tools for one hour per day. The Premium Tools will cost $99/year or $9.99/month, but free users will still be able to video chat, record, collaborate and use the basic present with a default background and simple presenter mode.

Another important note: mmhmm has decided to make its Premium Tools free to students and educators for one year.

The public launch also brings a handful of new features, including Big Hand Mode (which lets folks in the video call visually react), improvements to the appearance of mmhmm’s virtual green screen and mmhmm Creative Services.

Image Credits: mmhmm

Big Hand Mode is only available on Apple’s new M1-powered Macs.

Creative Services represent another revenue channel for the company, which will now offer white-glove bespoke services to folks running large events or experiences.

For now, mmhmm is only available on MacOS, but the company is working on a Windows beta as we speak.

iOS apps can run on Apple’s new Apple Silicon Macs

PUBG announces India return plan with new game and $100 million investment

Published November 12, 2020

PUBG Mobile plans to return in India in a new avatar, parent company PUBG Corporation said on Thursday. TechCrunch reported last week that the South Korean gaming firm was plotting its return to the world’s second largest internet market two months after its marquee title was banned by the country.

The new game, called PUBG Mobile India, has been specially created for users in India, PUBG Corporation said. It did not share when it plans to release the title.

Additionally, the company — and its parent firm, KRAFTON — said they plan to make an investment worth $100 million in India, one of the largest markets of PUBG Mobile, to cultivate the local video game, esports, entertainment and IT industries ecosystems. It also plans for more than 100 employees in the country.

India bans PUBG Mobile, and over 100 other Chinese apps

“Thanks to overwhelming community enthusiasm for PUBG esports in India, the company also plans to make investments by hosting India-exclusive esports events, which will feature the biggest tournaments, the largest prize pools, and the best tournament productions,” it said in a statement.

New Delhi has banned more than 200 apps with links to China — including PUBG Mobile and TikTok — in recent months because of cybersecurity concerns. The ban was enforced as tensions escalated on the nations’ disputed border.

To allay concerns of the Indian government, PUBG Mobile cut ties with Chinese internet giant Tencent — which is its publisher in many markets — in India days after the order. Last week it inked a global deal with Microsoft to move all PUBG Mobile data — as well as data from its other properties — to Azure. Microsoft operates three cloud regions in India.

PUBG cuts publishing ties with Tencent Games in India a week after ban

In a statement today, PUBG Corporation said, “privacy and security of Indian player data being a top priority for PUBG Corporation, the company will conduct regular audits and verifications on the storage systems holding Indian users’ personally identifiable information to reinforce security and ensure that their data is safely managed.”

Prior to the ban in early September, PUBG Mobile had amassed over 50 million monthly active users in India, more than any other mobile game in the country. It helped establish an entire ecosystem of esports organisations and even a cottage industry of streamers that made the most of its spectator sport-friendly gameplay, said Rishi Alwani, a longtime analyst of the Indian gaming market and publisher of news outlet The Mako Reactor.

PUBG Corporation’s move today could also set a precedence for other impacted apps to chart their returns to the country. One thing — and perhaps the most crucial element in all of this — that remains unclear for now is whether the Indian government has approved PUBG Corporation’s move.

Not surprising to see PUBG Corp take this route.

PUBG Mobile was the #1 grossing mobile game in India, and its ban was felt by both the developers and players.

This new custom version will aim to satisfy regulators, but it remains to be seen if this will be enough. https://t.co/uQDc2qK5B5

— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) November 12, 2020

Databricks launches SQL Analytics

Published November 12, 2020

AI and data analytics company Databricks today announced the launch of SQL Analytics, a new service that makes it easier for data analysts to run their standard SQL queries directly on data lakes. And with that, enterprises can now easily connect their business intelligence tools like Tableau and Microsoft’s Power BI to these data repositories as well.

SQL Analytics will be available in public preview on November 18.

In many ways, SQL Analytics is the product Databricks has long been looking to build and that brings its concept of a “lake house” to life. It combines the performance of a data warehouse, where you store data after it has already been transformed and cleaned, with a data lake, where you store all of your data in its raw form. The data in the data lake, a concept that Databricks’ co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi has long championed, is typically only transformed when it gets used. That makes data lakes cheaper, but also a bit harder to handle for users.

Image Credits: Databricks

“We’ve been saying Unified Data Analytics, which means unify the data with the analytics. So data processing and analytics, those two should be merged. But no one picked that up,” Ghodsi told me. But “lake house” caught on as a term.

“Databricks has always offered data science, machine learning. We’ve talked about that for years. And with Spark, we provide the data processing capability. You can do [extract, transform, load]. That has always been possible. SQL Analytics enables you to now do the data warehousing workloads directly, and concretely, the business intelligence and reporting workloads, directly on the data lake.”

Databricks open-sources Delta Lake to make data lakes more reliable

The general idea here is that with just one copy of the data, you can enable both traditional data analyst use cases (think BI) and the data science workloads (think AI) Databricks was already known for. Ideally, that makes both use cases cheaper and simpler.

The service sits on top of an optimized version of Databricks’ open-source Delta Lake storage layer to enable the service to quickly complete queries. In addition, Delta Lake also provides auto-scaling endpoints to keep the query latency consistent, even under high loads.

While data analysts can query these data sets directly, using standard SQL, the company also built a set of connectors to BI tools. Its BI partners include Tableau, Qlik, Looker and ThoughtSpot, as well as ingest partners like Fivetran, Fishtown Analytics, Talend and Matillion.

Image Credits: Databricks

“Now more than ever, organizations need a data strategy that enables speed and agility to be adaptable,” said Francois Ajenstat, chief product officer at Tableau. “As organizations are rapidly moving their data to the cloud, we’re seeing growing interest in doing analytics on the data lake. The introduction of SQL Analytics delivers an entirely new experience for customers to tap into insights from massive volumes of data with the performance, reliability and scale they need.”

In a demo, Ghodsi showed me what the new SQL Analytics workspace looks like. It’s essentially a stripped-down version of the standard code-heavy experience with which Databricks users are familiar. Unsurprisingly, SQL Analytics provides a more graphical experience that focuses more on visualizations and not Python code.

While there are already some data analysts on the Databricks platform, this obviously opens up a large new market for the company — something that would surely bolster its plans for an IPO next year.

President-elect Joseph Biden reportedly plucks Revolution’s Ron Klain as new chief of staff

Published November 12, 2020

President-elect Joseph Biden has plucked Ron Klain, a longtime colleague and confidant and the current executive vice president of the venture capital firm Revolution, as his White House chief of staff, reports The New York Times.

Klain was Biden’s chief of staff for two years during the Obama administration and left his post as chief of staff in 2011 to join Revolution, the firm founded by former AOL chief executive and founder Steve Case. Revolution did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If Klain makes his second entrance into the White House, Biden will be bringing on a chief of staff he’s known for more than 35 years. The duo first worked together in 1989, when the president-elect was a senator and Klain was a newly graduated law student from Harvard Law School. He most recently worked as the White House Ebola Response coordinator from October 2014 to February 2015, and helped as a debate advisor to President Obama and President Clinton, as well as nominees Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

Klain’s appointment could pacify some of the presumed tension that could occur between startups and the government under the Biden-Harris administration. Biden has been vocal about pursuing aggressive regulation on the tech industry, which could negatively impact behemoths like Google, Apple and Facebook. Klain has spoken up (in TechCrunch!) about how regulatory hurdles could hinder key innovation in startup-land. Klain also helped lead efforts for Higher Ground Labs, an incubator and accelerator focused on politically-focused (and Democrat-loved) startups. While that likely wouldn’t impact Big Tech, it doesn’t hurt that, reportedly, one of Biden’s closest confidants will have a soft spot for startups.

Join us for a live Q&A with Bessemer’s Byron Deeter next Tuesday at 3 p.m ET, noon PT

Published November 11, 2020

The Extra Crunch Live series rolls along with a big new installment next week as Jordan Crook and Alex Wilhelm will welcome Bessemer Venture Partners‘ Byron Deeter to the conversation.

Deeter is an obvious addition to the collection of investors, founders and tech luminaries that TechCrunch has interviewed so far in the Live series — for a taste, here’s a look at our discussion with Unusual Ventures’ John Vrionis and Sarah Leary, and our chat with Plaid co-founder Zach Perret.

Why talk to a Bessemer partner in the current moment? The firm is well-known for its investments into SaaS and cloud companies, a key startup cohort that has performed well. Recent days have shaken that narrative as Q4 races to the halfway mark, with public investors seeming to rotate into other equities, punishing software firms that had been the market’s favored bet for most of the year.

We’ll dig into what’s changing on the private side of that coin, looking to understand today’s software venture capital dynamics, and what Deeter sees happening in 2021.

But there’s more to Bessemer’s active portfolio than SaaS. The venture group has also dropped dollars into Discord, which is seeing both revenue and usage explode, and Betterment, which plays in the active fintech savings and investing space. There’s lots to get into.

If you are an Extra Crunch Live veteran — you rock star, you! — or a brand-new participant — make sure your Extra Crunch membership is live! — bring a question or two as we’ll try to work in a few from the audience as we go.

Chat with you next Tuesday afternoon! (Oh, and you can now pre-submit questions down below, which is a great improvement over the old system which only allowed for live submissions!)

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Dear Sophie: What does Biden’s win mean for tech immigration?

Published November 11, 2020

Sophie Alcorn
Contributor

Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.