Databricks open-sources Delta Lake to make data lakes more reliable
Databricks, the company founded by the original developers of the Apache Spark big data analytics engine, today announced that it has open-sourced Delta Lake, a storage layer that makes it easier to ensure data integrity as new data flows into an enterprise’s data lake by bringing ACID transactions to these vast data repositories.
Delta Lake, which has long been a proprietary part of Databrick’s offering, is already in production use by companies like Viacom, Edmunds, Riot Games and McGraw Hill.
The tool provides the ability to enforce specific schemas (which can be changed as necessary), to create snapshots and to ingest streaming data or backfill the lake as a batch job. Delta Lake also uses the Spark engine to handle the metadata of the data lake (which by itself is often a big data problem). Over time, Databricks also plans to add an audit trail, among other things.
“Today nearly every company has a data lake they are trying to gain insights from, but data lakes have proven to lack data reliability. Delta Lake has eliminated these challenges for hundreds of enterprises. By making Delta Lake open source, developers will be able to easily build reliable data lakes and turn them into ‘Delta Lakes’,” said Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO at Databricks.
What’s important to note here is that Delta lake runs on top of existing data lakes and is compatible with the Apache spark APIs.
The company is still looking at how the project will be governed in the future. “We are still exploring different models of open source project governance, but the GitHub model is well understood and presents a good trade-off between the ability to accept contributions and governance overhead,” Ghodsi said. “One thing we know for sure is we want to foster a vibrant community, as we see this as a critical piece of technology for increasing data reliability on data lakes. This is why we chose to go with a permissive open source license model: Apache License v2, same license that Apache Spark uses.”
To invite this community, Databricks plans to take outside contributions, just like the Spark project.
“We want Delta Lake technology to be used everywhere on-prem and in the cloud by small and large enterprises,” said Ghodsi. “This approach is the fastest way to build something that can become a standard by having the community provide direction and contribute to the development efforts.” That’s also why the company decided against a Commons Clause licenses that some open-source companies now use to prevent others (and especially large clouds) from using their open source tools in their own commercial SaaS offerings. “We believe the Commons Clause license is restrictive and will discourage adoption. Our primary goal with Delta Lake is to drive adoption on-prem as well as in the cloud.”
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VDOO secures $32M for a platform that uses AI to detect and fix vulnerabilities on IoT devices
Our universe of connected things is expanding by the day: the number of objects with embedded processors now exceeds the number of smartphones globally and is projected to reach some 18 billion devices by 2022. But just as that number is growing, so are the opportunities for malicious hackers to use these embedded devices to crack into networks, disrupting how these objects work and stealing information, a problem that analysts estimate will cost $18.3 billion to address by 2023. Now, an Israeli startup called VDOO has raised $32 million to address this, with a platform that identifies and fixes security vulnerabilities in IoT devices, and then tests to make sure that the fixes work.
The funding is being led by WRVI Capital and GGV Capital and also includes strategic investments from NTT DOCOMO (which works with VDOO), MS&AD Ventures (the venture arm of the global cyber insurance firm), and Avigdor Willenz (who founded both Galileo Technologies and Annapurna Labs, respectively acquired by Marvell and Amazon). 83North, Dell Technology Capital and David Strohm, who backed VDOO in its previous round of $13 million in January 2018, also participated, bringing the total raised by VDOO now to $45 million.
VDOO — a reference to the Hebrew word that sounds like “vee-doo” and means “making sure” — was cofounded by Netanel Davidi (co-CEO), Uri Alter (also co-CEO) and Asaf Karas (CTO). Davidi and Alter previously co-founded Cyvera, a pioneer in endpoint security that was acquired by Palo Alto Networks and became the basis for its own endpoint security product; Karas meanwhile has extensive experience coming to VDOO of working, among other places, for the Israeli Defense Forces.
In an interview, Davidi noted that the company was created out of one of the biggest shortfalls of IoT.
“Many embedded systems have a low threshold for security because they were not created with security in mind,” he said, noting that this is partly due to concerns of how typical security fixes might impact performance, and the fact that this has typically not been a core competency for hardware makers, but something that is considered after devices are in the market. At the same time, a lot of security solutions today in the IoT space have focused on monitoring, but not fixing, he added. “Most companies have good solutions for the visibility of their systems, and are able to identify vulnerabilities on the network, but are not sufficient at protecting devices themselves.”
The sheer number of devices on the market and their spread across a range of deployments from manufacturing and other industrial scenarios, through to in-home systems that can be vulnerable even when not connected to the internet, also makes for a complicated and uneven landscape.
VDOO’s approach was to conceive of a very lightweight implementation that sits on a small group of devices — “small” is relative here: the set was 16,000 objects — applying machine learning to “learn” how different security vulnerabilities might behave to discover adjacent hacks that hadn’t yet been identified.
“For any kind of vulnerability, using deep binary analysis capabilities, we try to understand the broader idea, to figure out how a similar vulnerability can emerge,” he said.
Part of the approach is to pare down security requirements and solutions to those pertinent to the device in question, and providing clear guidance to vendors for how to best avoid problems in the first place at the development stage. VDOO then also generates specific “tailor-made on-device micro-agents” to continue the detection and repair process. (Davidi likened it to a modern approach to some cancer care: preventive measures such as periodic monitoring checks; followed by a “tailored immunotherapy” based on prior analysis of DNA.)
It currently supports Linux- and Android-based operating systems, as well as FreeRTOS and support for more systems coming soon, Davidi said. It sells its services primarily to device makers, who can make over the air updates to their devices after they have been purchased and implemented to keep them up to date with the latest fixes. Typical devices currently secured with VDOO tech include safety and security devices such as surveillance cameras, NVRs & DVRs, fire alarm systems, access controls, routers, switches and access points, Davidi said.
It’s the focus on providing security services for hardware makers, in fact, that helps VDOO stand out from the others in the field.
“Among all startups for embedded systems, VDOO is the first to introduce a unique, holistic approach focusing on the device vendors which are the focal enabler in truly securing devices,” said Lip-Bu Tan, founding partner of WRVI Capital. “We are delighted to back VDOO’s technology, and the exceptional team that has created advanced tools to allow vendors to secure devices as much as possible without in-house security know-how, for the first time in many decades, I see a clear demand for security, as being raised constantly in many meetings with leading OEMs worldwide, as well as software giants.”
Over the last 18 months, as VDOO has continued to expand its own reach, it has picked up customers along the way after identifying vulnerabilities in their devices. Its dataset covers some 70 million embedded systems’ binaries and more than 16,000 versions of embedded systems, and it has worked with customers to identify and address 150 zero-day vulnerabilities and 100,000 security issues that would have potentially impacted 1.5 billion devices.
Interestingly, while VDOO is building its own IP, it is also working with a number of vendors to provide many of the fixes. Davidi says that VDOO and those vendors go through fairly rigorous screening processes before integrating, and the hope is that down the line there will more automation brought in for the “fixing” element using third-party solutions.
“VDOO brings a unique end-to-end security platform, answering the global connectivity trend and the emerging threats targeting embedded devices, to provide security as an essential enabler of extensive connected devices adoption. With its differentiated capabilities, VDOO has succeeded in acquiring global customers, including many top-tier brands. Moreover, VDOO’s ability to uncover and mitigate weaknesses created by external suppliers fits perfectly into our Supply Chain Security investment strategy,” said Glenn Solomon, managing partner at GGV Capital, in a statement. “This funding, together with the company’s great technology, skilled entrepreneurs and one of the best teams we have seen, will allow VDOO to maintain its leadership position in IoT security and expand geographies while continuing to develop its state-of-the-art technology.”
Valuation is currently not being disclosed.
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UK gives Huawei an amber light to supply 5G
The U.K. government will allow Huawei to be a supplier for some non-core parts of the country’s 5G networks, despite concerns that the involvement of the Chinese telecoms vendor could pose a risk to national security. But it will be excluded from core parts of the networks, according to reports in national press.
The news of prime minister Theresa May’s decision made during a meeting of the National Security Council yesterday was reported earlier by The Telegraph. The newspaper said multiple ministers raised concerns about her approach — including the Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Defence Secretary, International Trade Secretary and International Development Secretary.
The FT reports that heavy constraints on Huawei’s involvement in U.K. 5G networks reflect the level of concern raised by ministers.
May’s decision to give an amber light to Huawei’s involvement in building next-gen 5G networks comes a month after a damning report by a U.K. oversight body set up to evaluate the Chinese company’s approach to security.
The fifth annual report by the Huawei Cyber Security Evaluation Centre Oversight Board blasted “serious and systematic defects” in its software engineering and cyber security competence.
Though the oversight board stopped short of calling for an outright ban — despite saying it could provide “only limited assurance that all risks to U.K. national security from Huawei’s involvement in the U.K.’s critical networks can be sufficiently mitigated long-term.”
But speaking at a cybersecurity conference in Brussels in February, Ciaran Martin, the CEO of the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), expressed confidence U.K. authorities can mitigate any risk posed by Huawei.
The NCSC is part of the domestic GCHQ signals intelligence agency.
Dr. Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity advisor and research associate at the Center for Technology and Global Affairs at Oxford University, told TechCrunch he’s not surprised by the government’s decision to work with Huawei.
“It’s a message that was long-expected,” he said. “U.K. officials have been carefully sending signals in the previous months. In a sense, this makes us closer to the end of the 5G drama.”
“With proper management most risk can be mitigated. It all depends on the strategic planning,” he added.
“I believe the level of [security] responsibility at telecoms will remain similar to today’s. The main message expected by telecoms is clarity to enable them to move on with infrastructure.”
The heaviest international pressure to exclude the Chinese vendor from next-gen 5G networks has been coming from the U.S., where President Trump has been leaning on key intelligence-sharing allies to act on espionage fears and shut out Huawei — with some success.
Last year Australia and New Zealand both announced bans on Chinese kit vendors citing national security fears.
But in Europe governments appear to be leaning in another direction: toward managing and mitigating potential risks rather than shutting the door completely.
The European Commission has also eschewed pushing for a pan-EU ban — instead issuing recommendations encouraging member states to step up individual and collective attention on network security to mitigate potential risks.
It has warned too — and conversely — of the risk of fragmentation to its flagship “digital single market” project if member state governments decide to slam doors on their own. So, at the pan-EU level, security considerations are very clearly being weighed against strategic commercial imperatives and technology priorities.
Equally, individual European governments appear to have little appetite to throw a spanner in the 5G works, given the risk of being left lagging as cellular connectivity evolves and transforms — an upgrade that’s expected to fuel and underpin developments in artificial intelligence and big data analysis, among other myriad and much-hyped benefits.
In the U.K.’s case, national security concerns have been repeatedly brandished as justification for driving through domestic surveillance legislation so draconian that parts of it have later been unpicked by both U.K. and EU courts. Even if the same security concerns are here, where 5G networks are concerned, being deemed “manageable” — rather than grounds for a similarly draconian approach to technology procurement.
It’s not clear at this stage how extensively Huawei will be involved in supplying and building U.K. 5G networks.
The NCSC sent us the following statement in response to questions:
National Security Council discussions are confidential. Decisions from those meetings are made and announced at the appropriate time through the established processes.
The security and resilience of the UK’s telecoms networks is of paramount importance.
As part of our plans to provide world class digital connectivity, including 5G, we have conducted an evidence based review of the supply chain to ensure a diverse and secure supply base, now and into the future. This is a thorough review into a complex area and will report with its conclusions in due course.
“How ‘non-core’ will be defined is anyone’s guess but it would have to be clearly defined and publicly communicated,” Olejnik also told us. “I would assume this refers to government and military networks, but what about safety communication or industrial systems, such as that of power plants or railroad? That’s why we should expect more clarity.”
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Postmates has launched in 1,000 new cities since December
Postmates is expanding like crazy ahead of an initial public offering expected later this year. The food delivery business has launched in 1,000 new cities since December, the company announced today.
San Francisco-based Postmates now operates its on-demand delivery platform, powered by a network of local gig economy workers, in 3,500 cities across all 50 states. Postmates does not yet operate in any international markets aside from Mexico City.
“We want to enable anyone to have anything delivered on demand and this latest expansion allows us to deliver on that promise across all 50 states in the US,” Postmates co-founder and chief executive officer Bastian Lehmann said in a statement.
The company says it now reaches 70 percent of U.S. households and delivers food from some 500,000 restaurants, helping it to compete with food-delivery powerhouses Uber Eats and DoorDash. Additionally, Postmates recently launched Postmates Party, a new feature that lets customers within the same neighborhood pool their orders.
Postmates is poised to follow Uber into the public markets. The company — which has raised more than $670 million in venture capital funding, including a $100 million pre-IPO financing in January that valued the business at $1.85 billion — filed confidentially for a U.S. IPO in February.
The company completes 5 million deliveries per month and was reportedly expected to record $400 million in revenue in 2018 on food sales of $1.2 billion. Uber Eats, for its part, was expected to begin reaching 70 percent of the U.S. households by the end of 2018 and reportedly has plans in the works to use drones to deliver food by 2021.
DoorDash, meanwhile, is a rocketship. The food delivery company is active in 3,300 cities and claims to be growing 325 percent year-over-year. The company recently closed a $400 million Series F financing at a $7.1 billion valuation. It’s likely to go public in the next year, too.
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Singapore’s SalesWhale raises $5.3M to bring AI to sales and marketing teams
SalesWhale, a Singapore-based startup that uses AI to help marketers and salespeople generate leads, has announced a Series A round worth $5.3 million.
The investment is led by Monk’s Hill Ventures — the Southeast Asia-focused firm that led SalesWhale’s seed round in 2017 — with participation from existing backers GREE Ventures, Wavemaker Partners and Y Combinator. That’s right, SalesWhale is one a select few Southeast Asian startups to have been through YC, it graduated back in summer 2016.
SalesWhale — which calls itself “a conversational email marketing platform” — uses AI-powered “bots” to handle email. In this case, its digital workforce is trained for sales leads. That means both covering the menial parts of arranging meetings and coordination, and the more proactive side of engaging old and new leads.
Back when we last wrote about the startup in 2017, it had just half a dozen staff. Fast-forward two years and that number has grown to 28, CEO Gabriel Lim explained in an interview. The company is going after more growth with this Series A money, and Lim expects headcount to jump past 70; SalesWhale is deliberating opening an office in California. That location would be primarily to encourage new business and increase communication and support for existing clients, most of whom are located in the U.S., according to Lim. Other hires will be tasked with increasing integration with third-party platforms, and particularly sales and enterprise services.
The past two years have also seen SalesWhale switch gears and go from targeting startups as customers, to working with mid-market and enterprise firms. SalesWhale’s “hundreds” of customers include recruiter Randstad, educational company General Assembly and enterprise service business Unit4. As it has added greater complexity to its service, so the income has jumped from an initial $39-$99 per seat all those years ago to more than $1,000 per month for enterprise customers.
SalesWhale’s founding team (left to right): Venus Wong, Ethan Lee and Gabriel Lim
While AI is a (genuine) threat to many human jobs, SalesWhale sits on the opposite side of that problem in that it actually helps human employees get more work done. That’s to say that SalesWhale’s service can get stuck into a pile (or spreadsheet) of leads that human staff don’t have time for, begin reaching out, qualifying leads and sending them on to living and breathing colleagues to take forward.
“A lot of potential leads aren’t touched” by existing human teams, Lim reflected.
But when SalesWhale reps do get involved, they are often not recognized as the bots they are.
“Customers are often so convinced they are chatting with a human — who is sending collateral, PDFs and arranging meetings — that they’ll say things like ‘I’d love to come by and visit someday,’ ” Lim joked in an interview.
“Indeed, a lot of times, sales team refer to [SalesWale-powered] sales assistant like they are a real human colleague,” he added.
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Snapchat fully rolls out reengineered Android app, boosting usage
After a year of its user count shrinking or staying flat, Snapchat is finally growing again, and more growth is likely on the way. That’s because it’s finally completed the rollout of Project Mushroom, aka a backend overhaul of its Android app that’s 25 percent smaller and 20 percent faster. Designed for India and other emerging markets where iPhones are too expensive, Snapchat saw an immediate 6 percent increase in the number of people on low-end devices sending Snaps within the first week of upgrading to the new Android app.
Snapchat grew from 186 million daily active users in Q4 2018 to 190 million in Q1 2019, adding 1 million in North America, 1 million in Europe and 2 million in the Rest of World, where the Android app makes the biggest difference despite rolling out near the end of the quarter. It has been a long wait, as Snap first announced the Android reengineering project in November 2017.
“As of the end of Q1, our new Android application is available to everyone,” Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in his prepared remarks for today’s estimate-beating earnings report. “While these early results are promising, improvements in performance and new user retention will take time to compound and meaningfully impact our top-line metrics. There are billions of Android devices in the world that now have access to an improved Snapchat experience, and we look forward to being able to grow our Snapchat community in new markets.”
Some of the growth stemmed from tweaks to Snapchat’s ruinous redesign, including better personalized ranking of Stories and Discover content, as well as new premium video Shows. Now with the Android app humming, though, we might see significant growth in the Rest of World region in Q2.
Unfortunately, since Snapchat uses bandwidth and storage-heavy video, more usage also means more Amazon AWS and Google Cloud expenditures. That’s partly why Snapchat is predicting a slight increase in adjusted EBITDA losses from $123 million in Q1 to between $125 million and $150 million in Q2. Rest of World users only earn Snap about one-third as much money as North American users, but cost nearly as much to support.
We first highlighted Snap’s neglect of the international teen Android market when Instagram Stories launched in August 2016. Spiegel and Snap were too focused on cool American teens, squandering this market that was snapped up by Facebook’s Instagram and WhatsApp. Now Snapchat will have a much harder time winning emerging markets as they’re not the first to bring Stories there. But if it can double-down on ephemeral messaging, premium video and its augmented reality platform that are leagues ahead of Facebook’s offerings, it could finally creep toward that 200 million DAU milestone.
Come see Snap CEO Evan Spiegel speak at TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2nd-4th. Get your tickets here.
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New Sesame Street-themed PSA encourages kids to reduce mobile device use
Device addiction plagues us all — even Apple CEO Tim Cook. But children with phones and tablets are even more susceptible to the lures of apps and games, which often use psychological tricks to keep users logging in and regularly returning. A new PSA from Sesame Workshop and advocacy organization Common Sense aims to address kids’ unhealthy use of mobile devices by focusing on one particular problem: devices at the dinner table.
This is not the first time the #DeviceFreeDinner campaign has run — previous years’ spots featured Will Ferrell as a “distracted dad” on his phone at the table, ignoring his family’s conversations.
But this time around, the organization is teaming up with Sesame Workshop, which is lending its characters to a new PSA. The spot will feature the “Sesame Street” muppets modeling healthy mobile phone behavior by putting their devices away.
Phones are shut up in drawers, tablets placed on shelves, other devices are put in handbags — and, you know, thrown into garbage cans and stashed in pumpkins, as the case may be.
The muppets then gather around a table and happily chatter until they notice Cookie Monster is still on his phone, texting. (Don’t worry, their disapproval sees him eating the device in the end.)
The idea, explains kids advocacy organization Common Sense, is to raise awareness around media balance and encourage families to make the most of their time together.
It comes at a time when now one-third of kids ages 0 to 8 “frequently” use mobile devices, the nonprofit explains. But taking a break from devices is shown to have positive benefits, ranging from better nutrition and focus at home to fewer problems at school, Common Sense says.
Plus, it notes, simply putting the phone down is not enough — it shouldn’t be at the table at all, as research has shown that even the presence of a phone on the table can hurt the quality of conversations.
While Common Sense puts out a lot of material for children and families like this, Sesame Workshop’s involvement on the new PSA is particularly interesting given the company’s recent connection with Apple.
A new Sesame Workshop-produced show set to air on Apple’s soon-to-launch streaming service will teach kids coding basics — an agenda Apple regularly pushes to get its programming language, Swift, into the hands of the next generation of coders.
In the show, the same “Sesame Street” characters who today are telling kids to put down their phones will instead tout the joys of coding to the preschool set.
The juxtaposition of a programming-focused Apple kids’ show and the new PSA are a perfect example of how complicated the issues around kids on devices have become. On the one hand, parents want to encourage their children to pursue STEM subjects — which often requires kids to regularly use computers and other devices to practice new skills, like coding with MIT’s Scratch or building for Minecraft. But on the other hand, parents see that when kids are given devices, addiction soon follows.
The real question for parents may be, instead, whether kids should have devices at all — or whether they should take their cues from tech billionaires and Silicon Valley parents who are ripping devices from their own children’s hands like they’re the modern-day equivalent of sugary breakfast cereal.
Perhaps Sesame Workshop should have chosen a side on this issue, rather than teaming with the billion-dollar company that’s now trying to distance itself from fault with regard to the device addiction problem at the same time it runs PSAs about kids’ device addiction.
Or maybe it’s just as confused at the rest of us are over where to draw the line.
Starting today, the new “Sesame Street”-themed PSAs will be distributed across networks and platforms, including NBC, Fox, Xfinity, Comcast, Charter, Cox, National Geographic, NCM, PBS, Univision, Telemundo, HITN and Xfinity Latino.
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The master list of PR DON’Ts (or how not to piss off the writer covering your startup)
When it comes to working with journalists, so many people are, frankly, idiots. I have seen reporters yank stories because founders are assholes, play unfairly, or have PR firms that use ridiculous pressure tactics when they have already committed to a story.
There is so much bad behavior that I thought that it might be time to write up a list of “DON’Ts” on how not to work with journalists.
I compiled this list by polling TechCrunch’s entire writing staff for their pet peeves when it comes to working with PR folks and founders around startup pitches. The result was this list of 16 obnoxious annoyances.
The interesting thread that connects all of them is that these DON’Ts are almost universal across the staff — few of these annoyances seemed to be merely personal preference. Avoiding these behaviors won’t guarantee coverage of your startup, but they certainly will help you avoid killing your news story before it even gets considered for publication.
DON’T change the capitalization of your startup multiple times
SEO is important, and so there are rules about how to capitalize things to maximize your exposure on Google and DDG. That’s important to get right, but for the love of god, figure out what the hell you want your startup’s name to be before you reach out to the press.
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Squarespace makes its first acquisition with Acuity Scheduling
Squarespace is announcing its first acquisition today, a 13-year-old company called Acuity Scheduling that allows businesses to manage their online appointments.
Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena noted that the company has been expanding beyond website building already — he said he now wants to provide tools around online presence (i.e. building a website), commerce and marketing.
To do that, Squarespace has been building its own products, but in this case, Casalena said it made more sense to just bring Acuity on-board, particularly because there’s already an integration between Acuity’s scheduling software and Squarespace’s page-building tools.
“What [CEO Gavin Zuchlinski] had built at Acuity is a great business,” he said. “It’s been growing pretty organically up until this point, with 45 employees who really understand the space and a very customer-centric culture. They have a great product. That would just be faster for us [to acquire them], versus building our own product.”
The plan is to build more integrations over time, while also continuing to support Acuity as a standalone product. The entire Acuity team is joining Squarespace, with Zuchlinski become vice president of Acuity within the larger company.
Asked whether this means we can expect Squarespace to make more acquisitions in the future, Casalena said, “I think we just are able to look at things that are going to be a little more meaningful right now … Our size kind of opened our perspective to what’s possible.”
This also comes as the email marketing product that Squarespace launched last year is coming out of beta with new features like campaign scheduling and improved analytics.
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Group Nine hires Brian Lee to lead its commerce business
Group Nine Media has hired Brian Lee as its first executive vice president of commerce.
Lee held a similar role at Maker Studios before its acquisition by Disney, and he also founded the New York-based accelerator SKIG. Group Nine — which was created by the merger of Thrillist, NowThis Media, The Dodo and Discovery-owned Seeker — says Lee’s job will include licensing, merchandising, affiliate advertising and direct-to-consumer products.
“Group Nine has some of the most loved and impactful brands, coupled with the ability to leverage a host of deeply powerful insights,” Lee said in a statement. “I believe we are uniquely positioned to make huge strides in this space and can’t wait to get started.”
When I met with Group Nine CEO Ben Lerer earlier this year, he laid out his vision for the company moving forward.
“We’re successfully building brands — not to be distributed over a paid TV pipe, not to sit back and watch on your TV passively,” Lerer said. “Instead, we’re building brands for the kind of content consumption that someone who’s grown up with a smartphone in their pocket patronizes. What we’re doing is shows and characters and telling stories that are meant to be delivered via Facebook, via YouTube, via Snapchat, via Twitter.”
That kind of strategy, where a publisher relies on third-party platforms to reach their audience, has been disastrous for other digital media companies, but Lerer sounded pretty confident, particularly as the company gets smarter about which shows to invest in: “We’re making less and less content that is disposable every month than we did the month before.”
That approach seems to tie into Group Nine’s commerce strategy. In today’s announcement, Lerer said, “We have some of the most engaging brands on mobile, built around deeply dedicated communities of loyal fans so it’s imperative that we make the most of the opportunities that presents.”
Citing Nielsen, Group Nine says its content reaches nearly 45 million Americans every day. Business Insider also reported recently that the company is in talks to merge with women’s lifestyle media company Refinery29.
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