Disrupt 2020 offers an unprecedented opportunity to introduce your pre-series A, early-stage startup to thousands of potential investors, customers, journalists, technologists and other influential movers and shakers around the world. How? Read on.

Grab yourself a Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package and get ready to virtually showcase your innovative products, platforms or services in front of a global audience. Startup Alley is the heart and soul of every Disrupt conference. It’s high-octane networking and opportunity on steroids. It’s where crucial relationships begin and startup dreams move to the next level.

Sounds great, right? But what really happens when you exhibit in Startup Alley? Is it worth the time, energy and money?  We asked Felicia Jackson, inventor and founder of CPRWrap, to share her experience in Startup Alley.

A medical professional trained in CPR, Felicia Jackson froze when her two-year-old son suddenly stopped breathing. “In my panic, I forgot everything I had been taught. Fortunately, my husband stepped in and eventually saved our son.”

That incident inspired Jackson to invent CPRWrap — a patented single-use CPR template that guides you through the American Heart Association’s four recommended steps during respiratory or cardiac emergencies. Initially nervous about attending Disrupt because her product was low-tech, Jackson exhibited in a Startup Alley pavilion as part of a Nashville-based incubator called Launch Tennessee.

“TechCrunch is all about innovative startups, and CPRWrap is highly innovative. Exhibiting in Startup Alley validated my product, my mission and my company,” said Jackson.

Exhibiting at Disrupt introduced Jackson to engineers, investors, manufacturers and new technologies she says she never would have learned about or met back in Tennessee.

I learned about materials to make a better product for less money. I met investors, I met engineers who expressed interest in collaborating with me to create an app for my product. How cool is that for an inventor?

Exhibitors in Startup Alley can meet all kinds of influencers — investors, R&D teams, advisors, potential customers — and form connections that can, when nurtured, result in exciting partnerships. Disrupt offers so many opportunities to connect but, as Jackson notes, it’s up to you to foster those relationships.

As a direct result of the connections she made in Startup Alley, Jackson is working on collaborations with Gustavo Rodriguez of Baby Spark, an early childhood development app with more than one million users, and Erik Bast of Bee Intelligence. She’s also in ongoing negotiations with Kaiser Permenente.

The connections I made at Disrupt offer long-term benefits. Investors willing to put forth capital, engineers offering tech expertise and manufacturers to help me streamline… Fostering these relationships will help me grow my company and my bottom line.

Still not sure whether a Digital Startup Alley Package, which costs $445, is right for you? We will host an Ask Me Anything session on the TechCrunch LinkedIn page July 15.  Join TechCrunch staff along with Felicia Jackson and other Startup Alley exhibitors to get answers to all your burning questions. More info to come, but if you have any questions, you can email startupalley@techcrunch.com.

In the meantime, sign up for our third installment of Pitchers and Pitches on July 1. Five startups that are a part of this year’s Digital Startup Alley will give their best elevator pitch to TC Editors and VCs from Construct Capital and Betaworks Ventures.

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

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Founders can reap long-term benefits after exhibiting in Disrupt’s Startup Alley

There is a darker side to cybersecurity that’s frequently overlooked.

Just as you have an entire industry of people working to keep systems and networks safe from threats, commercial adversaries are working to exploit them. We’re not talking about red-teamers, who work to ethically hack companies from within. We’re referring to exploit markets that sell details of security vulnerabilities and the commercial spyware companies that use those exploits to help governments and hackers spy on their targets.

These for-profit surveillance companies flew under the radar for years, but have only recently gained notoriety. But now, they’re getting unwanted attention from U.S. lawmakers.

In this week’s Decrypted, we look at the technologies police use against the public.

THE BIG PICTURE

Secrecy over protest surveillance prompts call for transparency

Last week we looked at how the Justice Department granted the Drug Enforcement Administration new powers to covertly spy on protesters. But that leaves a big question: What kind of surveillance do federal agencies have, and what happens to people’s data once it is collected?

While some surveillance is noticeable — from overhead drones and police helicopters overhead — others are worried that law enforcement are using less than obvious technologies, like facial recognition and access to phone records, CNBC reports. Many police departments around the U.S. also use “stingray” devices that spoof cell towers to trick cell phones into turning over their call, message and location data.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Decrypted: The tech police use against the public

How do you decide what tools and languages to use to build your concept into a company? How can the tech stack decisions you make in the early days affect you down the road — and how might your needs evolve over time?

Find out at TC Early Stage, where HappyFunCorp CEO Ben Schippers and CTO Jon Evans will break it all down in a breakout session on building “a tech stack that can go the distance.”

HappyFunCorp is a Brooklyn-based product engineering firm. Founded in 2009, they’ve helped companies like Twitter, Audible, Gatorade, Disney, AMC and many more bring their app ideas into reality.

Schippers is a revered product architect with a focus on “helping companies and brands build more mindful and thoughtful products for the next-generation consumer,” and has previously written for TechCrunch about the process of design and the different things apps do to keep us addicted. Jon Evans is a journalist and award-winning novelist — and, as it happens, a long-time columnist here at TechCrunch.

TC Early Stage is our brand-new virtual event series that focuses on getting new founders the information, insight and advice directly from the experts — the founders, investors and lawyers who’ve been down these roads many times before. Schippers and Evans are joining an already incredible list of speakers, with sessions and talks from folks like Reid Hoffman, Brooke Hammerling, Dalton Caldwell, Garry Tan, Charles Hudson and Cyan Banister.

One catch: Each of the 50+ breakout sessions at TC Early Stage will be capped at just 100 people and will be filled on a first-come, first-serve basis. Buy your ticket today (starting at $199) and you’ll be able to sign up for any breakout sessions we announce, plus any we’ve already announced that still have room. Prices increase in a few short days so secure your seat today.

It all goes down on July 21-22. The best news? This two-day event is all virtual, so you can tune in from the comforts of your couch. Want to know more? Find all the details you could ever want right here.

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Source: Tech Crunch Startups | HappyFunCorp’s Ben Schippers and Jon Evans will talk tech stacks at TC Early Stage

Your company’s one metric that matters (OMTM) shouldn’t be return on investment (ROI), return on ad spend (ROAS), net promoter score (NPS), brand affinity or one of the other sophisticated-sounding acronyms marketers use to gauge success.

Your company’s one metric that matters should be long-term profitability.

Put another way, your business should be singularly focused on how much money it can return to its owners, investors and shareholders. Sounds obvious, right?

You’d be surprised: A majority of Fortune 500 and Silicon Valley startup marketing budgets aren’t optimized for long-term profitability.

Instead, budgets are often optimized for secondary or upper-funnel metrics. Besides tracking ROI, ROAS, NPS and brand affinity, many marketers monitor key performance indicators (KPI) like net revenue, customer acquisition cost (CAC), cost per thousand (CPM) and brand recall — none of which directly correlate with long-term profitability.

In fact, many brands’ marketing departments frequently omit the word “profit” all together from the line items and KPIs in their monthly performance reports.

A good way to think about the futility of the KPI status quo is the following fictional scenario, which reflects the marketing and advertising playbooks of a shockingly large segment of American businesses: Main Street Shoes spends $100 on a Facebook ad campaign to promote a new line of sneakers to Jack and Andrew. As a result of the retailer’s Facebook ad campaign, Jack and Andrew each spend $100 to buy new sneakers.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Long-term profitability is the only growth metric that matters

Podcasting continues to see a strong trajectory in the world of streamed audio content, and today comes the latest development on that front. SiriusXM, owner of Pandora and backer of SoundCloud, said that it is acquiring Simplecast, a podcast management platform used by creators to publish and distribute podcasts, and subsequently analyse how they are consumed. SiriusXM plans to integrate Simplecast with AdsWizz, a digital audio advertising company that it acquired in 2018 for $66.3 million in cash plus shares to power ads on Pandora .

The company is not disclosing any of the financial terms for the Simplecast acquisition but we have asked and will update if we learn more. As a startup, New York-based Simplecast, which will continue to be led by its founder and CEO Brad Smith, had raised a modest $7.87 million in funding from investors since launching in 2013, per PitchBook data.

The deal is interesting because it is bringing one of the more popular independent platforms and set of tools used by streamers under the wing of a platform. Simplecast’s many podcasts and users today include Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, Netflix, Maximum Fun, Cloud10, QCODE, Anna Faris is Unqualified, Blue Wire, Revision Path and (disclaimer) TechCrunch, who use it to distribute content over multiple, and sometimes competing, networks, including Apple, Spotify, Google and Overcast. (Business plans currently range in price and start at $15/month and go up to $85/month or more depending on podcast size, number of users and features that you need.)

Pandora (with help from SiriusXM, which has a large and popular stable of talk radio shows on its channels) has been building up its own spoken-word content, of course, so there is a direct opportunity to push more on-demand podcasts to that platform in particular, as well as offer more interesting terms for doing so, as well as bring in a much wider spectrum of podcasts to run AdsWizz’s inventory, which currently is seen by more than 100 million people each month across the U.S. and Canada (SiriusXM’s and Pandora’s footprint in vehicles, online and more).

We have asked SiriusXM if the plan will be to keep all of Simplecast’s services as-is after the deal closes.

What’s clearer is that, with SiriusXM also making a key investment in SoundCloud last year, the company is — like Spotify (which acquired a Simplecast competitor, Anchor, last year) — building up its music-business tools to complement its position as a content provider: This is a key role to play in the brave new world of digital music, where monetisation remains a challenge for most, and the tools to distribute, analyse and (yes) monetise one’s creative content continue to get more sophisticated, so much so that getting that part of the equation right can make or break an artist or wider creative or media endeavour.

“Our goal is to provide audio publishers with state-of-the-art platforms and give them everything they need to be successful,” said Alexis van de Wyer, CEO of AdsWizz, in a statement. “Empowering podcasters of any size to create, distribute, analyze, and monetize their work is the next natural step in pursuing our vision.”

“From the beginning, Simplecast’s mantra and mission was to remain laser-focused on podcast creators – building the best tools for publishing and insights,” said Brad Smith, the founder & CEO of Simplecast, in a statement of his own. “The opportunity and alignment with AdsWizz allows our product — and our customers — access to a powerful monetization platform. Two best-in-class platforms are now able to align with the shared mission of helping publishers succeed, while each team continues to focus on their respective areas of expertise.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | SiriusXM acquires Simplecast to double down on podcasts with distribution and analytics tools

Finding somewhere in a Slack conversation, or stored in Box, Dropbox, Google Docs or Office 365, that one document you want to attach to an email is a huge challenge as we find ourselves spreading our content across a variety of cloud services. It’s one challenge that Cloudtenna has been trying to solve, and today the company announced a $2.5 million funding round along with the release of a new mobile search tool.

The funding comes from a variety of unnamed investors, along with Blazar Ventures, and brings the total raised to $6.5 million, according to the company.

Cloudtenna co-founder Aaron Ganek says that by using AI and document metadata, his company can find content wherever it lives. “What we’re really focused on is helping companies bring order to file chaos. Files are scattered everywhere across the cloud, and we have developed AI-powered applications that help users find files, no matter where they’re stored,” he said.

The company introduced a desktop search application in 2018 and today it’s announcing a mobile search tool called Workspace to go with it. Ganek says they built this app from the ground up to take advantage of the mobile context.

“Today, we’re bringing the search technology to smartphones and tablets. And just to be clear, this is not just a mobile version of our desktop product, but a complete case study in how people collaborate on the go,” he said.

Image Credit: Cloudtenna

The AI component helps find files wherever they are based on your user history, who you tend to collaborate with and so forth. That helps the tool find the files that are most relevant to you, regardless of where they happen to be stored.

He says that raising money during a pandemic was certainly interesting, but the company has seen an uptick in usage due to the general increase in SaaS usage during this time, and investors saw that too, he said.

The company launched in 2016 and currently has nine employees, but Ganek said there aren’t any plans to expand on that number at this time, or at least any number he was ready to discuss.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Cloudtenna raises .5M, launches mobile search app to find content across cloud services

Onna, the “knowledge integration platform” (KIP) that counts Dropbox and Slack as backers, has raised $27 million in Series B funding.

Leading the round is Atomico, with participation from Glynn Capital. Previous investors Dawn Capital, Nauta Capital and Slack Fund also followed on.

Founded in 2015, Barcelona and New York-based Onna integrates with a plethora of workplace apps, including Slack, Dropbox, G Suite, Microsoft 365 and Salesforce, to help unlock the proprietary knowledge stored in a company’s various cloud and on-premise software. Typical applications for a KIP include compliance, governance, archiving and “eDiscovery.”

From communication apps to cloud storage to HR platforms, the idea is to unify all of this data and make it searchable but in a way that is secure and protects existing permissions and privacy. In fact, another way to think of Onna is like Apple’s Spotlight functionality but for the enterprise. However, pitched as a platform not just a feature, Onna also offers an API of its own so that various use cases can be built on top of this “single source of truth.”

“Onna’s knowledge integration platform is a centralised, searchable and secure hub that connects company data wherever it resides and makes it easier and faster to make informed decisions,” Onna founder and CEO Salim Elkhou tells TechCrunch. “It is a productivity tool built for the way businesses work today… something that didn’t exist before, creating a new industry standard which benefits all companies within the ecosystem.”

Citing a report by single sign-in provider Okta, Elkhou notes that companies today use an average of 88 different apps across their workforce, a 21% increase from three years ago.

“The reason apps have become so popular is that they’re very effective for tackling specific challenges, or even a broad range of tasks. But the problem large organisations were coming up against is that their knowledge was spread across a wide range of apps that weren’t necessarily designed to work together.”

For example, a legal counsel could be looking to find contracts company-wide to assess a company’s exposure. The problem is that contracts may be saved in Salesforce, sent by email, shared over Slack or even saved on desktops. “Your company may have acquired another company, which has its own ways of saving information, so now the simple task of finding contracts can be a heavy lifting exercise, involving everyone’s time. With Onna, being the connective tissue across these applications, this search would take a split second,” claims Elkhou.

But the potential power of a KIP goes well beyond search alone. Elkhou says a more ambitious use case is unifying knowledge across apps and using Onna as infrastructure. “We believe that the next generation of workplace apps will be built on top of a knowledge integration platform like Onna,” he explains. “Due to our plug and play integrations with most enterprise apps and our open API, you can now build your own bespoke workflows on top of your company’s knowledge. More importantly, we handle all the heavy lifting on the back end when it comes to processing the right contextual information across multiple systems securely, which means you can get on with creatively building a more efficient workplace.”

“In Onna, we saw a product in a new and complementary category, providing a solution not at the data level but at the ‘knowledge level,’ ” adds Atomico’s Ben Blume, who has also joined the Onna board. “Onna’s core solution integrates with any tools in an organisation where knowledge resides, [and] ingests, indexes and classifies the knowledge inside, enabling it to power applications in many areas.”

Blume also points to the belief that some of the cloud tools vendors themselves have in Onna, with both Slack and Dropbox “investing, using and promoting” Onna’s solution. “As they look to grow their own penetration in organisations with a wider range of needs and demands, we saw partnering with Onna as a recognition of its best in class nature to their customers,” he says.

Meanwhile, I understand the new round of funding was done remotely due to lockdown, even though Atomico and Onna had already met and stayed in touch after the VC firm ended up not participating in the startup’s Series A.

Recalls Elkhou: “We had met with our investors in person over a year ago, and have had many video calls since and prior to the pandemic. However, soon after the lockdowns took effect, the need for remote collaboration tools skyrocketed which only accelerated the critical role Onna has in helping people within organisations access and share knowledge that was spread across an ever growing number of apps. If anything, it brought new urgency to the problem we were solving, because workplace serendipity no longer existed. You couldn’t answer questions over a coffee or by the water cooler, but these new remote workers still needed to access knowledge and share it securely.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Onna, the ‘knowledge integration platform’ for workplace apps, raises M Series B

Landing page optimization company Unbounce is announcing that it has raised $52 million Canadian (approximately $38.4 million in U.S. dollars).

Unbounce was founded back in 2009 with what co-founder and CEO Rick Perreault described as a goal of helping small and medium businesses easily create different landing pages where they can direct potential customers after they’ve engaged with their ad and marketing campaigns. (Apparently some Unbounce customers are successful with just a “handful” of landing pages, while others create “hundreds and hundreds.”)

The Vancouver-headquartered company now has a 200-person team, with customers including Hootsuite, Zola and World Vision. It also says it recently passed the milestone of having powered 1 billion conversions.

Aside from a small seed round back in 2011, Perreault said the company has not taken on any outside funding. Apparently it raised a big round now in order to invest in technology that can bring more automation to the process.

Perreault said the ultimate goal is to allow a business to “set it and forget it through machine learning” — so that they no longer have to create landing pages at all, because the Unbounce platform is doing all the optimization and personalization for them. As a first step in that direction, Unbounce has created a Smart Traffic product that will automatically use visitor data to send visitors to the best landing page, resulting in an average conversion lift of 20%.

Rick Perreault

“As more and more millennials become the SMB owners, and they’re much more savvy with computers and comfortable with online and digital marketing … landing pages are becoming more critical than ever,” he added.

The funding was led by Denver-based equity firm Crest Rock Partners, with Crest Rock’s Steve Johnson and Jeff Carnes joining Unbounce’s board of directors.

“Unbounce is the clear market leader in conversion optimization today — a world-class team, well-respected brand and the company’s conversion intelligence strategy will together dramatically increase the distance between Unbounce and its competitors,” Johnson said in a statement.

Perreault said he was also pleased that Crest Rock was on-board with Unbounce’s “people first” culture, which includes a commitment to diversity. In fact, the company says it recently reached gender parity, with 50% of employees (and 56% of the senior leadership team) identifying as women. In addition, 34% of employees are visible ethnic minorities.

Unbounce is also announcing that Chief Revenue Officer Felicia Bochicchio has been appointed the company’s president.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Unbounce raises .4M to build better landing pages with automation

Every company today is struggling to deal with security and understanding what is happening on their systems. This is even more pronounced as companies have had to move their employees to work from home. Uptycs, a Boston-area security analytics startup, announced a $30 million Series B today to help companies detect and understand breaches when they happen.

Sapphire Ventures led the round with help from Comcast Ventures and ForgePoint Capital. The startup has now raised a total of $43 million, according to the company. Under the terms of today’s deal, Sapphire Ventures’ president and managing director Jai Das will be joining the company’s board.

Company co-founder and CEO Ganesh Pai says he and his co-founders previously worked at Akamai, where they observed Akamai’s debugging and diagnostic tools, which were designed to work at massive scale. The founders believed they could use a similar approach to building a security analytics platform, and in 2016 the group launched Uptycs .

“We help people to solve intrusion detection, compliance and audit and incident investigation. These are table stakes requirements [for security solutions] that most large scale organizations have, and of course with their scale the challenges vary. What we at Uptycs do is provide a solution for that,” Pai told TechCrunch.

The company uses a flight recorder approach to security, giving security operations teams the ability to sift through the data and review exactly how a detection happened and how the intruder got through the company’s defenses.

He recognizes his company is fortunate to get a round this large right now, but he says the solution has attracted a number of customers signing seven-digit contracts and this in turn got the attention of investors. “That customer engagement, their experience and this commitment from our customers led to this substantial round of funding,” he said.

The company currently has 65 employees spread across offices in Waltham, a Boston suburb, as well as two offices in India. Pai says the plan is to double that number in the next 12 months. “Between the cash flow from our existing customers and the pipeline for us and the funding, we are planning to grow in a meaningful way. If everything aligns with our expectation we will double our team size in the next 12 months,” he said.

As he grows his company in this way, Pai says they are talking to their investors about how to build a diverse workforce. “We’ve thought long and hard about it, both in terms of diversity and inclusion. It is a lot harder to execute because at the end of the day, there is a finite talent pool, but we are having conversations with our investors, who have seen patterns of success in terms of implementing such plans from growth stage ventures,” he said.

He added, “And of course we are a very early-stage company, but we are extremely cognizant, and given the current circumstances are acutely aware that we need to do our very best and make a difference.”

As the company has moved to work from home across its operations, he says it has benefited from working in the cloud from the start. “As an organization we are very fortunate that we built our organization so that everything runs in the cloud and everyone has been able to remain very productive,” he said.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Uptycs lands M Series B to keep building security analytics platform