RiskIQ, a startup providing application security, risk assessment and vulnerability management services, has added National Grid Partners as a strategic investor. 

The funding from the investment arm of National Grid, a multinational energy provider, is part of a $15 million new round of financing designed to take the company’s technology into critical industrial infrastructure — with National Grid as a point of entry.

More than 6,000 companies use the company’s services, and the roster list and technology on offer has attracted some of the biggest names in investing, including Summit Partners, Battery Ventures, Georgian Partners and MassMutual Ventures.

“We view NGP’s show of support as an incredible opportunity to help customers in new markets thrive as their attack surfaces expand outside the firewall, especially now amid the COVID-19 pandemic,” RiskIQ chief executive Lou Manousos said in a statement. 

RiskIQ has spent the past 10 years spidering the internet looking for all of the exploits that hackers use to penetrate networks and have built that into a database of threats. This inventory gives the company an ability to identify which assets within a company present the most obvious threats. Its automated services constantly scan third-party code, internet-connected devices and mobile applications for potential vulnerabilities, the company said.

“As a staple platform in their core security environment, our cyber threat analysts use RiskIQ regularly to enrich and identify incoming threats,” said Lisa Lambert, president of National Grid Partners and chief technology and innovation officer of National Grid, in a statement.

National Grid’s investment is a piece of a deeper partnership that will see NGP providing strategic advice for the security company as it looks to expand its commercial operations among industrial and utility customers.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | RiskIQ adds National Grid Partners as securing data becomes a strategic priority for utilities

For developers looking to quickly build identity management into their platforms, the most readily available options don’t stray far from the internet’s biggest, most data-hungry platforms.

Magic, a small SF startup building a decentralized blockchain-based identity solution, wants to create a seamless experience that feels similar to login workflows from apps like Slack and Medium, where users are sent a link to they can click to immediately log in. Magic’s SDK allows developers to craft similar experiences to Medium and Slack without building them from scratch, leveraging authentication via blockchain key pairs that allows users to securely log in across devices.

“Our identity these days is mostly controlled by Facebook and Google; what’s cool about this identity solution is that it’s a decentralized identity,” Magic CEO Sean Li says.

The startup is launching out of stealth, rebranding from its previous company name Fortmatic, and announcing that they’ve raised $4 million in a seed funding round led by Placeholder. A host of other investors participated in the company’s funding, including Lightspeed Ventures, SV Angel, Social Capital, Cherubic Ventures, Volt Capital, Refactor Capital, Unusual Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Guillermo Rauch and Roham Gharegozlou.

Li has largely sought to minimize the blockchain aspect of the company’s tech in an attempt to keep the appeal more mass market, but Magic’s early customers are largely in the blockchain world, specifically Ethereum applications. The company is free for customers with less than 250 users, and past that subscription pricing scales from a $79/mo plan to custom pricing for full white-labeled enterprise roll-outs with custom integrations. Li says the Magic platform is SOC 2 compliant.

In the company’s security documentation, they note that any user keys completely bypass Magic servers and are stored encrypted on AWS’s Key Management Service, ensuring that Magic never sees private user keys. The company is currently building out their SDK to support authenticator apps and hardware-based authentication through YubiKeys

“One big difference that we have compared with something like Medium, is if you’re trying to log into your laptop and click on the link on your phone, you’d be logged in on your phone and that’s not the ideal place to edit an article,” Li says. “But with our Magic link login you’re logged into the laptop and you can click your magic link from anywhere.”

Alongside the funding news, Magic announced partnerships with front-end developer platform Vercel, Cryptokitties-maker Dapper Labs and the Max Planck Society research institute.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Decentralized identity management platform Magic launches from stealth with M

Remote work has changed the tools offices need for communicating asynchronously across meetings and chat, but not all collaboration takes place in neat little chat bubbles.

Anvil is a San Francisco startup that’s aiming to transform how businesses collaborate around the humble PDF. Anvil’s automation platform levels up Google Forms and allows customers to digitize tiresome PDFs through dynamic forms that unify processes customers might have typically needed to use several pieces of software to access previously. Users can leverage the platform to create, share, fill in, sign and download completed docs without picking up a pen.

Anvil announced today that it had raised $5 million in a seed funding round led by Google’s Gradient Ventures .

The startup is competing directly with rivals like DocuSign, a product that Anvil CEO Mang-Git Ng believes is “great for completing and executing a document,” but is “lacking when it comes to actually creating the document.” Anvil integrates directly with DocuSign for customers that have already integrated the service into their workflows, but Anvil is also replicating some of the service’s functionality as they look to build out an end-to-end solution for document automation.

Anvil is focusing early efforts on courting customers in the wealth and banking space. On the pricing side, they have both per-project and subscription plans, which start at $99 per month.

Anvil’s team

The startup recently tested their own abilities to get up-and-running quickly as they partnered with a bank to create an online portal for filling out applications for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). Ng says the startup helped Sunrise Bank customers apply for $127 million worth of PPP loans. “It was a whirlwind experience for us. We pretty much went from first conversation to deploying with them in six days,” Ng told TechCrunch.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the digitization of paper processes, Ng says that the company has seen a bump in interest as more companies have gone remote and discovered new needs around making paperwork more collaborative and more digital-friendly, especially when it comes to areas like onboarding, compliance and internal applications.

“The overall trend that we’ve been seeing is that people in these industries are thinking about going more digital, but generally speaking, the people who are at the forefront of that tend to be in larger organizations where squeezing a little bit more operational efficiency will save a ton of money,” Ng says. “But as we’ve gone into lockdown, everybody has to figure out how to do things remotely and the solutions that help people do things remotely are definitely pushing to the forefront.”

Citi Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Financial Venture Studio and 122 West also participated in Anvil’s seed round.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Paperwork automation platform Anvil raises million from Google’s Gradient Ventures

COVID-19 has transformed the global business landscape.

So much so that in a matter of weeks after the onset of the pandemic in the United States, Congress provided more than $1.1 trillion in fiscal stimulus directly to businesses and distressed industries — four times more than was distributed during the 2008-09 financial crisis.

It came as no surprise when, at the start of COVID-19, venture capital investors largely went pencils-down for several weeks and shifted their focus to their existing portfolio companies. Extending company runways, preparing for longer funding cycles and managing operations in a novel business environment became the crux of company resilience. Now, moving into May, we can see this shift reflected in both the decline in number of early-stage companies funded and total capital invested.

As investors begin acclimating to this new normal, they have begun wading into new opportunities in time-proven, healthy industries and new emerging industries that are positioned to succeed during the pandemic. While we are seeing lower valuations, we believe certain B2B technology companies may be uniquely poised to thrive, and are pursuing investment opportunities in this space with a renewed focus.

Image Credits: Crunchbase Data via Tableau Public

*Excluding Biotech & Pharmaceuticals (Source: Crunchbase Data via Tableau Public)

Prior to COVID-19, early-stage B2B investors wanted to see strong growth and healthy unit economics; 3X year-over-year sales growth or 10% monthly growth was the gold standard. An LTV-to-CAC ratio over 3X signified a healthy payback cycle. There was less focus on capital efficiency; for every $1 million invested, investors were happy with $500,000 in generated revenues. Get to these numbers and your next funding round was guaranteed — but no longer.

During COVID, and likely beyond, company expectations and goalposts have been adjusted; 2X year-over-year growth may be the new 3X. While growth and unit economics are important, there are now new health indicators that will determine if a B2B company will thrive in a post-COVID world. With that in mind, we have put together a COVID reslience test that startups can use as a north star to grow their business in this new world.

This COVID-19 test is meant to be a gated checklist that will indicate where efforts should be focused, whether it be sales, product or finance. Before we leave you to your own devices, we wanted to walk through a couple of these new post-COVID questions that you should try to answer (and why they are relevant).

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | A COVID-19 resilience test for B2B companies

When Spotinst rebranded to Spot in March, it seemed big changes were afoot for the startup, which originally helped companies find and manage cheap infrastructure known as spot instances (hence its original name). We had no idea how big at the time. Today, NetApp announced plans to acquire the startup.

The companies did not share the price, but Israeli publication CTECH pegged the deal at $450 million. NetApp would not confirm that price.

It may seem like a strange pairing, a storage company and a startup that helps companies find bargain infrastructure and monitor cloud costs, but NetApp sees the acquisition as a way for its customers to bridge storage and infrastructure requirements.

“The combination of NetApp’s leading shared storage platform for block, file and object and Spot’s compute platform will deliver a leading solution for the continuous optimization of cost for all workloads, both cloud native and legacy,” Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager for public cloud services at NetApp said in a statement.

Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research says the deal makes sense on that level, but it depends on how well NetApp incorporates the Spot technology into its stack. “At the end of the day to run next generation applications successfully in the cloud you need to be efficient on compute and storage usage. NetApp is doing great on the latter but needed way to monitor and automate compute consultation. This is what Spot brings to the table, so the combination makes sense, but as in all acquisitions execution is key now,” Mueller told TechCrunch.

Spot helps companies do a couple of things. First of all it manages spot and reserved instances for customers in the cloud. Spot instances in particular, are extremely cheap because they represent unused capacity at the cloud provider. The catch is that the vendor can take the resources back when they need them, and Spot helps safely move workloads around these requirements.

Reserved instances are cloud infrastructure you buy in advance for a discounted price. The cloud vendor gives a break on pricing, knowing that it can count on the customer to use a certain amount of infrastructure resources.

At the time it rebranded, the company also had gotten into monitoring cloud spending and usage across clouds. Amiram Shachar, co-founder and CEO at Spot, told TechCrunch in March, “With this new product we’re providing a more holistic platform that lets customers see all of their cloud spending in one place — all of their usage, all of their costs, what they are spending and doing across multiple clouds — and then what they can actually do [to deploy resources more efficiently],” he said at the time.

Shachar writing in a blog post today announcing the deal indicated the company will continue to support its products as part of the NetApp family, and as startup CEOs typically say at a time like this, move much faster as part of a large organization.

“Spot will continue to offer and fully support our products, both now and as part of NetApp when the transaction closes. In fact, joining forces with NetApp will bring additional resources to Spot that you’ll see in our ability to deliver our roadmap and new innovation even faster and more broadly,” he wrote in the post.

NetApp has been quite acquisitive this year. It acquired Talon Storage in early March and CloudJumper at the end of April. This represents the twentieth acquisition overall for the company, according to Crunchbase data.

Spot was founded in 2015 in Tel Aviv. It has raised over $52 million, according to Crunchbase data. The deal is expected to close later this year, assuming it passes typical regulatory hurdles.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | NetApp to acquire Spot (formerly Spotinst) to gain cloud infrastructure management tools

If you want to capture investor attention, you need a killer pitch. And that’s under normal circumstances. You’ve probably noticed that circumstances are anything but normal. With a global pandemic and the ensuing economic crisis, you’ll need to up your pitching game and get ready to bring the heat. We can help.

Register today for the second installment of our Pitchers & Pitches series. This interactive elevator pitch feedback session will take place on June 10 at 4pm ET / 1pm PT. Pour yourself a refreshing glass of something tasty and get ready to take your pitching game to the next level.

Note: The Pitchers & Pitches webinar series is free and open to all, but only companies that have purchased a Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package get to pitch. If your startup wants to be in the running to pitch, you can purchase a ticket here.

We’ll choose five exhibiting startups at random to give their best 60-second pitch to the panel of judges. Who will hear those pitches and offer their sage advice? Excellent question.

Three people will evaluate each pitch and provide incisive feedback. Amish Jani, managing director at First Mark Capital is our featured VC judge for this session. Amish will join Darrell Etherington and Jordan Crook, two of our TechCrunch editors with years of experience coaching participants in the epic Startup Battlefield pitch competition.

Whether you watch or whether you pitch, you’ll come away with actionable tips, strategies and fresh ideas to improve the way you present your startup to the world.

Oh, and one more thing — there’s a prize package. Who doesn’t love prizes? The winning startup gets a consulting session with cela, an organization that connects early-stage startups to accelerators and incubators that can help them scale their business.

Early-stage startup founders rise to face challenges on the daily. And now you need to rise further and faster than ever before. Take advantage of every tool and every opportunity to adapt and move forward. The next Pitchers & Pitches session kicks off at 4pm ET / 1pm PT on June 10th. Don’t miss out — register today.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Join us to watch five startups pitch off at Pitchers & Pitches on June 10th