Browsing Tag: Startups

Sila Technologies, the battery materials company that has partnered with BMW and Daimler, landed $45 million in new funding and hired two high-profile executives, including Kurt Kelty, who led the battery cell team at Tesla for more than a decade.

Kelty, who was on Sila Nano’s advisory board, has been appointed vice president of automotive, according to Sina Nanotechnologies. The company also hired Bill Mulligan, the former executive vice president of global operations at SunPower, as its first COO.

Kelty was most recently senior vice president of operations at indoor vertical farming company Plenty . But he was best known for his time at Tesla, where he was considered a critical link between the automaker and battery cell partner Panasonic.

“As part of Sila Nano’s advisory board, I’ve seen the results of the breakthrough battery chemistry firsthand and I could not pass up the opportunity to take it a step further and lead the company’s automotive partnership efforts,” Kelty said in a statement.

The company said Monday that an additional $45 million in investment came from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, bringing its total funding to $340 million. Earlier this year, Sila Nano secured $170 million in Series E funding led by Daimler AG.

This latest investment and expanded leadership team comes as the company, which is valued at more than $1 billion, aims to bring its first batteries to market.

Sila Nanotechnologies has developed a drop-in silicon-based anode that replaces graphite in lithium-ion batteries without requiring changes to the manufacturing process. The company claims that its materials can improve the energy density of batteries by 20% and has the potential to reach 40% improvement over traditional li-ion.

Here’s what that all means.

A battery contains two electrodes. There’s an anode (negative) on one side and a cathode (positive) on the other. An electrolyte sits in the middle and acts as the courier that moves ions between the electrodes when charging and discharging. Graphite is commonly used as the anode in commercial lithium-ion batteries. However, a silicon anode can store a lot more lithium ions.

The basic premise — and one that others are working on — is this: by replacing graphite in the cell with silicon, there would be more space to add more active material. This would theoretically allow you to increase the energy density — or the amount of energy that can be stored in a battery per its volume — of the cell.

Using silicon also helps reduce costs. In the end, the battery would be cheaper and have more energy packed in the same space.

The company says its innovative approach can be used in consumer electronics like wireless earbuds and smartwatches as well as electric vehicles — and even energy storage for the grid.

The company started building the first production lines for its battery materials in 2018. That first line is capable of producing the material to supply the equivalent of 50 megawatts of lithium-ion batteries, Sila Nanotechnologies CEO Gene Berdichevsky, an early employee at Tesla who led the technical development of the automaker’s Roadster battery system, told TechCrunch back in April.

Sila Nanotechnologies said Monday that it will continue to ramp up production volume and plans to supply its first commercial customers in consumer electronics within the next year. The company also said it plans to go to market with battery partner Amperex Technology Limited and automotive partners BMW and Daimler.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Battery tech startup Sila Nano lands million and Tesla veteran Kurt Kelty

There’s too much hype about mythical “10X developers.” Everyone’s desperate to hire these “ninja rockstars.” In reality, it’s smarter to find ways of deleting annoying chores for the coders you already have. That’s where CTO.ai comes in.

Emerging from stealth today, CTO.ai lets developers build and borrow DevOps shortcuts. These automate long series of steps they usually have to do manually, thanks to integrations with GitHub, AWS, Slack and more. CTO.ai claims it can turn a days-long process like setting up a Kubernetes cluster into a 15-minute task even sales people can handle. The startup offers both a platform for engineering and sharing shortcuts, and a service where it can custom build shortcuts for big customers.

What’s remarkable about CTO.ai is that amidst a frothy funding environment, the 60-person team quietly bootstrapped its way to profitability over the past two years. Why take funding when revenue was up 400% in 18 months? But after a chance meeting aboard a plane connected its high school dropout founder Kyle Campbell with Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, CTO.ai just raised a $7.5 million seed round led by Slack Fund and Tiger Global.

“Building tools that streamline software development is really expensive for companies, especially when they need their developers focused on building features and shipping to customers,” Campbell tells me. The same way startups don’t build their own cloud infrastructure and just use AWS, or don’t build their own telecom APIs and just use Twilio, he wants CTO.ai to be the “easy button” for developer tools.

Teaching snakes to eat elephants

“I’ve been a software engineer since the age of 8,” Campbell recalls. In skate-punk attire with a snapback hat, the young man meeting me in a San Francisco Mission District cafe almost looked too chill to be a prolific coder. But that’s kind of the point. His startup makes being a developer more accessible.

After spending his 20s in software engineering groups in the Bay, Campbell started his own company, Retsly, that bridged developers to real estate listings. In 2014, it was acquired by property tech giant Zillow, where he worked for a few years.

That’s when he discovered the difficulty of building dev tools inside companies with other priorities. “It’s the equivalent of a snake swallowing an elephant,” he jokes. Yet given these tools determine how much time expensive engineers waste on tasks below their skill level, their absence can drag down big enterprises or keep startups from rising.

CTO.ai shrinks the elephant. For example, the busywork of creating a Kubernetes cluster such as having to the create EC2 instances, provision on those instances and then provision a master node gets slimmed down to just running a shortcut. Campbell writes that “tedious tasks like running reports can be reduced from 1,000 steps down to 10,” through standardization of workflows that turn confusing code essays into simple fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice questions.

The CTO.ai platform offers a wide range of pre-made shortcuts that clients can piggyback on, or they can make and publish their own through a flexible JavaScript environment for the rest of their team or the whole community to use. Companies that need extra help can pay for its DevOps-as-a-Service and reliability offerings to get shortcuts made to solve their biggest problems while keeping everything running smoothly.

5(2X) = 10X

Campbell envisions a new way to create a 10X engineer that doesn’t depend on widely mocked advice on how to spot and capture them like trophy animals. Instead, he believes one developer can make five others 2X more efficient by building them shortcuts. And it doesn’t require indulging bad workplace or collaboration habits.

With the new funding that also comes from Yaletown Partners, Pallasite Ventures, Panache Ventures and Jonathan Bixby, CTO.ai wants to build deeper integrations with Slack so developers can run more commands right from the messaging app. The less coding required for use, the broader the set of employees that can use the startup’s tools. CTO.ai may also build a self-service tier to augment its seats, plus a complexity model for enterprise pricing.

Now it’s time to ramp up community outreach to drive adoption. CTO.ai recently released a podcast that saw 15,000 downloads in its first three weeks, and it’s planning some conference appearances. It also sees virality through its shortcut author pages, which, like GitHub profiles, let developers show off their contributions and find their next gig.

One risk is that GitHub or another core developer infrastructure provider could try to barge directly into CTO.ai’s business. Google already has Cloud Composer, while GitHub launched Actions last year. Campbell says its defense comes through neutrally integrating with everyone, thereby turning potential competitors into partners.

The funding firepower could help CTO.ai build a lead. With every company embracing software, employers battling to keep developers happy and teams looking to get more of their staff working with code, the startup sits at the intersection of some lucrative trends of technological empowerment.

“I have a three-year-old at home and I think about what it will be like when he comes into creating things online,” Campbell concludes. “We want to create an amazing future for software developers, introducing automation so they can focus on what makes them such an important aspect. Devs are defining society!”

[Image Credit: Disney/Pixar via WallHere Goodfon]

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | CTO.ai’s developer shortcuts eliminate coding busywork

Danielle Bernstein is just 27 years old, but she’s been running her own business for 10 years. First it was street-style photography, then came the launch of her popular fashion blog WeWoreWhat. Next she took to Instagram, a new social media platform that quickly became the most effective tool in a blogger’s toolkit. With new followers — today her account, @weworewhat, has 2.2 million — came opportunities to monetize her influence. She created and launched an overall brand and a swim collection, then came the book deal (“This is Not a Fashion Story: Taking Chances, Breaking Rules, and Being a Boss in the Big City” is expected out May 2020). Naturally, the next step in Bernstein’s evolution from blogger to businesswoman was a technology startup.

Her newest venture, Moe Assist, claims to be the first project management and payments tool for influencers. Last month, the product launched with $1.2 million in funding from Rebecca Minkoff and other unnamed investors. Creators and influencers like Bernstein are forging a path from content creator to full-fledged business, with multiple revenue streams via podcasts, licensing deals, branded merchandise and even software products.

“A company like Moe will help legitimize the industry,” Bernstein tells TechCrunch. “I feel this responsibility to my industry to put the best business practices I’ve learned along the way into a platform so I can help other influencers.”

Tech entrepreneurs, quick to pounce on any emerging economy, have also begun building services for creators and influencers from marketplaces that connect individuals with brands, financial solutions that help capitalize burgeoning influencer-led businesses, tailored monetization platforms and even a “LinkedIn for Influencers” intended to foster connections between influencers and brands.

“We are in phase three of the influencer economy,” Bain Capital Ventures senior principal Jamison Hill, who led the firm’s investment in the influencer shoutout marketplace Cameo, tells TechCrunch. “The first phase was the rise of the media platforms: YouTube, Instagram, etcetera, that allowed creatives to build audiences. The second phase was the emergence of influencer marketing, or connecting those influencers to brands to leverage their audiences … Now that influencer marketing has become an established part of the marketing playbook, we are in phase three: tools to help influencers further monetize their influence, like Cameo, and then manage their lives.”

While some businesses, like Cameo, have successfully raised venture financing, VCs have yet to fully tackle the influencer and creator economy. Founders and investors circling the space suspect a wave of Silicon Valley interest is coming, however, and that it will alter the category entirely.

“2020 will be a watershed year for investment in businesses around the creator economy,” Neil Robertson tells TechCrunch. Robertson is the founder of Influence, a networking tool for influencers that’s expected to announce its Series A financing in the coming weeks. “Influencers and creators are small businesses and if you think about all the things that small businesses need these days to succeed, they will be repurposed for the influencer marketing space.”

CEO of Patreon Jack Conte attends VidCon 2019 at Anaheim Convention Center on July 12, 2019 in Anaheim, California (Photo by Jerod Harris/Getty Images)

‘People say we’re crazy’

As venture capitalists wake up to the business opportunity, they’re seeding startups that help influencers go from hobbyists to professionals.

Karat, a startup expected to enter Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch, is building a “bank for creators,” with its debut product focused on lending to individuals through a revenue-share agreement. The company was co-founded by Eric Lei, a former product manager at Instagram who focused on the creator and influencer side of the business.

The startup has already secured a seed investment from Maveron and CRV, TechCrunch has learned, and will receive another $150,000 in exchange for 7% equity upon entering YC next year. The company plans to give creators and influencers more independence from existing platforms by allowing them access to funding from a team well-versed in their unique capital needs.

Banks won’t underwrite an individual based on qualifications like their Instagram following, of course, and given that influencers don’t typically have a consistent income or a W2 statement to showcase their earnings, they may not be able to receive a bank loan to invest in their own brand. Imagine receiving a loan based on the size of your TikTok or YouTube following? Karat and other new startups focused on monetization could accelerate an influencer’s path to entrepreneurship.

“People say we’re crazy, but we know creators are legit businesses,” Karat writes on its website — the company didn’t respond to a request to chat about what they’re working on. “And just like any other business, you need capital to grow faster, services to make you more money, tools to manage it all.”

Karat’s approach to treating individual digital content creators as future “unicorns” is not isolated. Podfund, for example, writes checks sized between $25,000 to $50,000 to emerging podcasters. The company asks for 7% to 15% of revenue for three to five years depending on current traction, revenue and projected growth. Patreon, one of the first businesses to develop a tech solution for artists and creators seeking consistent income, recently announced Super Patron, a $50,000-per-year grant for creators, according to The Verge.

Influence, the “LinkedIn for influencers,” doesn’t directly invest in influencers or creators; rather, gives them a central meeting point to land gigs, learn about production, gain insights into brand deals and communicate with or befriend other influencers. Indeed, 175,000 people are using the platform, 30,000 of which are businesses, which pay between $229 and $600 in annual fees to reach influencers on the platform. Influencers, for their part, pay $48 per year for access to the company’s premium features.

“Think of the old days when a young woman got off the bus at Hollywood & Vine and said ‘where do I go to be a star?,’” Robertson, the chief executive officer of Influence, said. “That’s happening in the influencer marketing space, but there’s no answer to that question. People in the industry need a place to go and figure it out, to talk about it and learn about it.”

YouTuber Caspar Lee, the co-founder of a startup called Influencer, attends the UK Gala Screening of “Wonder Park” in London, England (Photo by David M. Benett/Dave Benett/WireImage)

Rethinking value

While angel investors like Rebecca Minkoff might be savvy to the business proposition of influencers, many investors have remained skeptical. Influence’s Robertson tells us venture capitalists were initially uncertain of his latest startup despite his track record, which includes the sale of multiple software businesses, including the affiliate marketing company VigLink.

“We had to explain that there was a very different way to create value in the marketing economy,” Robertson said. “We needed VCs to rethink how value could be created in the influencer marketing space.”

The first businesses to crop up in the space were traditional two-sided marketplaces: influencers on one side, companies and brands on the other. Naturally, these were also the first business to get funded. Ben Jeffries launched his startup, Influencer, in London in 2014 after his close friend matched with Caspar Lee, a YouTuber with 7.3 million followers, on Tinder. Once Jeffries and Lee were introduced, the pair begin brainstorming what became Influencer, a marketing platform that helps brands and influencers build more meaningful relationships. The business has attracted about $4.5 million in funding to date, including a recent $3.6 million Series A led by Puma Private Equity, a U.K.-focused fund.

“There’s money coming into the industry and with this influx of money is more companies entering the market,” Influencer co-founder and CEO Jeffries tells TechCrunch. “Attached to that, brands are becoming much more savvy in how to run influencer campaigns.”

The company has used its new cash to open an office in New York City and expand its American clientele. Another company, Tribe, has similarly raised VC to grow its American footprint. The Australian startup, which connects brands to “micro-influencers,” or every-day people with more than 3,000 followers on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, raised a $7.5 million Series A in March. But even these straightforward marketplaces had trouble explaining their market to investors.

“What we used to always say to investors was ‘I guarantee if you ask your kids about influencers, that will spark a conversation and help you understand the industry and how crazy it’s going to become,’ ” Jeffries said. “When I was younger, everyone wanted to become a famous sports star. Now, everyone wants to become an influencer.”

Los Angeles-based funds, in closer proximity to the entertainment industry, have been quicker to invest in the creator economy. In fact, new funds have launched there with expertise in the category. Next 10 Ventures, an LA-based $50 million venture capital fund founded by Benjamin Grubbs, YouTube’s former global director of top creator partnerships and Paul Condolora, the former co-head of the Harry Potter franchise at Warner Bros., invests exclusively in the space. The firm even launched an accelerator for YouTube personalities in late 2018. The program, called The EduCator Incubator, planned to seed 25 to 40 “emerging video creators” with $25,000 to $75,000 in seed funding. Similar to Karat and PodFund, Next 10 signs a revenue-share agreement with participants of the accelerator, with a possibility for an equity investment in the future.

Rx3 Ventures, a new venture fund led by long-time Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, is helping influencers in sports and entertainment get stakes in the companies for which they are hired to be spokespeople. The SoCal outfit has tapped influencers to become limited partners in their fund, giving them the opportunity to develop equitable relationships with the brands requesting their promotion.

“If I am going to support something, why don’t I take an equity position and benefit from the upside?,” Rx3 Ventures vice president Ryan McGuigan tells TechCrunch. “It’s all about getting a stake in these brands as opposed to signing some sort of endorsement.”

Lil Miquela, a virtual influencer created by the venture-backed startup Brud, poses for a selfie

When anyone can be an influencer

This year, companies are expected to spend a total of $8 billion on influencer marketing campaigns, a figure that should swell to $15 billion by 2022, per data collected by Mediakix, an influencer marketing agency.

Factors including the onset of shoppable video and live shopping — a category still in its infancy led by startups like Tiltsta — will give more autonomy to influencers, who have proven an ability to transform browsers to buyers time and time again. CGI influencers like Lil Miquela, a digital avatar with 1.7 million followers created by the venture-backed startup Brud, or the lifelike personalized avatars that Genies, SuperPlastic and Toonstar have cooked up, should drum up more dollars. Plus, efforts to democratize the path to influencer, including courses on how to become an influencer and marketing channels that allow for people with only a few thousand followers to earn money, should expand the market size and fuel growth.

“We all have that friend that somehow has 10,000 followers,” McGuigan of Rx3 Ventures said. “Giving them the tools to monetize that reach is going to be important and also a valuable angle to approach influencer marketing for brands.”

“Now, more and more, we are seeing that anyone can turn into a “micro-influencer,” he adds. “Anyone with a decent following or free time can post about products — why can’t they be an influencer as well?”

With the expected influx of venture cash, entrepreneurship from creators themselves and startups looking to capitalize on the phenomenon, the creator and influencer economy is poised for a boom.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Venture capitalists ‘like and subscribe’ to influencers

Volterra is an early-stage startup that has been quietly working on a comprehensive solution to help companies manage applications in hybrid environments. The company emerged from stealth today with a $50 million investment and a set of products.

Investors include Khosla Ventures and Mayfield, along with strategic investors M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm), Itochu Technology Ventures and Samsung NEXT. The company, which was founded in 2017, already has 100 employees and more than 30 customers.

What attracted these investors and customers is a full-stack solution that includes both hardware and software to manage applications in the cloud or on-prem. Volterra founder and CEO Ankur Singla says when he was at his previous company, Contrail Systems, which was acquired by Juniper Networks in 2012 for $176 million, he saw first-hand how large companies were struggling with the transition to hybrid.

“The big problem we saw was in building and operating applications that scale is a really hard problem. They were adopting multiple hybrid cloud strategies, and none of them solved the problem of unifying the application and the infrastructure layer, so that the application developers and DevOps teams don’t have to worry about that,” Singla explained.

He says the Volterra solution includes three main products — VoltStack​, VoltMesh and VoltConsole — to help solve this scaling and management problem. As Volterra describes the total solution, “Volterra has innovated a consistent, cloud-native environment that can be deployed across multiple public clouds and edge sites — a distributed cloud platform. Within this SaaS-based offering, Volterra integrates a broad range of services that have normally been siloed across many point products and network or cloud providers.” This includes not only the single management plane, but security, management and operations components.

Diagram: Volterra

The money has come over a couple of rounds, helping to build the solution to this point, and it required a complex combination of hardware and software to do it. They are hoping organizations that have been looking for a cloud-native approach to large-scale applications, such as industrial automation, will adopt this approach.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Volterra announces M investment to manage apps in hybrid environment

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been a hot commodity in recent years as it helps automate tedious manual workflows inside large organizations. Robocorp, a San Francisco startup, wants to bring open source and RPA together. Today it announced a $5.6 million seed investment.

Benchmark led the round, with participation from Slow Ventures, firstminute Capital, Bret Taylor (president and chief product officer at Salesforce) and Docker CEO Rob Bearden. In addition, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton will be joining the company’s board.

Robocorp co-founder and CEO Antti Karjalainen has been around open-source projects for years, and he saw an enterprise software category that was lacking in open-source options. “We actually have a unique angle on RPA, where we are introducing open source and cloud native technology into the market and focusing on developer-led technologies,” Karjalainen said.

He sees a market that’s top-down and focused on heavy sales cycles. He wants to bring the focus back to the developers who will be using the tools. “We are all about removing friction from developers. So, we are focused on giving developers tools that they like to use, and want to use for RPA, and doing it in an open-source model where the tools themselves are free to use,” he said.

The company is built on the open-source Robot Framework project, which was originally developed as an open-source software testing environment, but he sees RPA having a lot in common with testing, and his team has been able to take the project and apply it to RPA.

If you’re wondering how the company will make money, they are offering a cloud service to reduce the complexity even further of using the open-source tools, and that includes the kinds of features enterprises tend to demand from these projects, like security, identity and access management, and so forth.

Benchmark’s Peter Fenton, who has invested in several successful open-source startups, including JBoss, SpringSource and Elastic, sees RPA as an area that’s ripe for a developer-focused open-source option. “We’re living in the era of the developer, where cloud-native and open source provide the freedom to innovate without constraint. Robocorp’s RPA approach provides developers the cloud native, open-source tools to bring RPA into their organizations without the burdensome constraints of existing offerings,” Fenton said.

The company intends to use the money to add new employees and continue scaling the cloud product, while working to build the underlying open-source community.

While UIPath, a fast-growing startup with a hefty $7.1 billion valuation recently announced it was laying off 400 people, Gartner published a study in June showing that RPA is the fastest growing enterprise software category.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Robocorp announces .6M seed to bring open-source option to RPA

Babbel, the popular Berlin-based language learning service, today announced that its founder and current co-CEO Markus Witte is stepping down from his CEO role but that he will remain the executive chairman of the company’s board. The company’s current co-CEO Arne Schepker will become Babbel’s sole CEO.

In addition to these leadership changes, the company also today announced that it has appointed Katherine Melchior Ray, who held previous executive positions with luxury consumer brands like Japan’s Shiseido, Hyatt Hotels, Tommy Hilfiger, Gucci and Louis Vuitton, as its new chief marketing officer.

All of these changes come as Babbel hits €100 million in revenue for its 2018 financial year.

As Witte and Schepker told me in an interview ahead of today’s official announcement, there were a few reasons why the team decided this would be the best way forward. And while it’s unusual for U.S. founders to step back from their CEO role, especially as a company is hitting a new growth phase, Witte argues that going forward, being the chairman of the board will put him in the best position to ensure the company’s future going forward.

“Being CEO and chairman of the board has pros and cons,” Witte told me. “To say that the founder and chairman are one and the same person, that’s the West Coast model — and every now and then, that has its advantages. But it’s not what people would consider good governance in Europe and at times, it makes things harder because it creates a conflict of interest in board meetings.”

Those conflicts, Witte argues, made him less effective in the chairman role and, in addition, he believes that Babbel has now reached a point where the chairman and CEO just can’t be the same person anymore. And so he decided that if he had to choose, he’d stay as chairman of the board because that’s the role where he can ensure that Babbel remains true to its mission.

He also admitted that as the company grew, the workload became a bit too much. “CEOs like to overestimate themselves and I’m no exception,” said Witte. “But you get to the point where you have to say: I can’t fill all of these roles anymore.”

With Schepker, Babbel had brought on an outsider as CMO a few years ago who proved himself in the co-CEO role and was, in Witte’s view, ready for the CEO role, making his decision easier.

Schepker tells me that the company doesn’t plan to change its overall strategy going forward. “We have a clear strategy and we plan to implement that even faster — but that’s independent of these leadership changes,” he told me. “The focus is on how we can create more value for our customers, our learners, by looking at how we can better guide them through their personal learning journey. The problem that most learners face is that, unless they studied it in college, they never learned how to effectively learn a new language.”

In practical terms, this means that Babbel will look at expanding the range of language learning opportunities for its users to better guide them through their learning experience (and for longer).

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Founder of language learning platform Babbel steps down as co-CEO to focus on board role

Esports are the Wild West right now. There’s clearly a huge potential for the industry to become incredibly lucrative, but everything from the infrastructure of competition to the overall culture isn’t quite ready for prime time.

This introduces a huge opportunity for the tech world to get in on the action. We’ve seen traditional VC money start to sniff around esports in ways big and small. Bessemer Venture Partners has invested in Team SoloMid, while Sequoia has invested in 100 Thieves.

Today, Gen.G has announced that it has accepted investment from the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, a longstanding New York City-based accelerator program.

Gen.G started as KSV (Korea plus Silicon Valley) in mid-2017 with a debut in the Overwatch League. In 2018, after expanding to other games, including Heroes of the Storm, PUBG and League of Legends, KSV eSports rebranded to Generation Gaming (Gen.G) and launched a Clash Royale esports team.

At the end of 2018, Gen.G made yet another huge move. They lured Chris Park from his position as executive vice president in charge of product and marketing at Major League Baseball to join Gen.G as CEO.

Since then, Park has been thinking about the long-term opportunities for the esports org and the industry as a whole. He secured $46 million in funding from Los Angeles Clippers minority owner Dennis Wong, Will Smith’s Dreamers Fund, NEA, Battery Ventures, Canaan Partners, SVB Capital and Stanford University, among others.

And  he signed a partnership with dating app Bumble to create Team Bumble, an all-female professional Fortnite squad.

Gender inclusion is one of the biggest misses in the esports world right now. Data shows that 46% of gamers are female (ESA) and that nearly one in four esports viewers are female (Nielsen). Despite no physical differentiators between men and women, women are severely underrepresented in the esports world.

Not one female competed in the Fortnite World Cup in 2019, despite the fact that qualifiers were completely open to any player. A big reason for the disparity here is that the gaming community isn’t generally a safe environment for female gamers, in big and small ways. Many female gamers experience abuse while playing games, like this streamer, and it’s gotten bad enough to push a small percentage of female gamers away from playing entirely.

But exclusion comes in many forms. Ninja announced in August 2018 that he won’t be streaming with female gamers, which you can read about here.

Beyond general principles about equality, the female gamer is a lucrative demographic that has yet to be properly tapped by any particular esports org, publisher or otherwise. Gen.G is now ahead in the race to acquire female gamers as fans, customers and future talent.

Another forward-thinking move by Gen.G is its recent partnership with the University of Kentucky to help create and manage its esports program. We’ve seen startups like PlayVS look to build out the infrastructure and connective tissue that will eventually bind education and professional sports, as has been the case with traditional sports for generations. Gen.G is now tackling that ever-important bridge from academia to professional life by looking at universities.

The funding from ERA, the amount of which has not been disclosed, not only allows Gen.G to grow its foothold on the East Coast — it also gives the esports org a strategic partnership with ERA, which invests in super early-stage tech startups. As more founders tackle the mounting challenges in esports, Gen.G is now in a prime position to watch over those deals closely and potentially tap into some of the solutions and services sure to sprout up in the next five to 10 years.

“We are focused on ways to make it easier for people in the gaming community to connect,” said Park, hinting at some of the technology in which Gen.G is interested. “My hope is that over time, platforms as well as teams treat fans and athletes as more than just users, and more like collaborators and partners.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | New York’s ERA invests in esports org Gen.G

Sumo Logic, a mature security event management startup with a valuation over $1 billion, announced today that it has acquired JASK, a security operations startup that raised almost $40 million. The companies did not share the terms of the deal.

Sumo’s CEO Ramin Sayar says the combined companies give customers a complete security solution. Sumo offers what’s known in industry parlance as a security information and event management (SIEM) tool, while JASK provides a security operations center or SOC (pronounced “sock“). Both are focused on securing workloads in a cloud native environment and can work in tandem.

Sayar says that as companies shift workloads to the cloud they need to reevaluate their security tools. “The interesting thing about the market today is that the traditional enterprises are much more aggressively taking a security-first posture as they start to plan for new workloads in the cloud, let alone workloads that they are migrating. Part of that requires them to evaluate their tools, teams and, more importantly, a lot of their processes that they’ve built in and around their legacy systems as well as their SOC,” he said.

He says that combining the two organizations helps customers moving to the cloud automate a lot of their security requirements, something that’s increasingly important due to the lack of highly skilled security personnel. That means the more that software can do, the better.

“We see a lot of dysfunction in the marketplace and the whole movement towards automation really complements and supplements the gap that we have in the workforce, particularly in terms of security folks. This is what JASK has been trying to do for four-plus years, and it’s what Sumo has been trying to do for nearly 10 years in terms of using various algorithms and machine learning techniques to suppress a lot of false alerts, triage the process and help drive efficiency and more automation,” he said.

JASK CEO and co-founder Greg Martin says the shift to the cloud has also precipitated two major changes in the security space that have driven this growing need for security automation. “The perimeter is disappearing and that fundamentally changes how we have to perform cybersecurity. The second is that the footprint of threats and data are so large now that security operations is no longer a human scalable problem,” he said. Echoing Sayar, he says that requires a much higher level of automation.

JASK was founded in 2015, raising $39 million, according to Crunchbase data. Investors included Battery Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, TenEleven Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. Its last round was a $25 million Series B led by Kleiner in June 2018.

Deepak Jeevankumar, managing director at Dell Technologies Capital, whose company was part of JASK’s Series A investment and who invests frequently in security startups, sees the two companies joining forces as a strong combination.

“Sumo Logic and JASK have the same mission to disrupt today’s security industry, which suffers from legacy security tools, siloed teams and alert fatigue. Both companies are pioneers in cloud-native security and share the same maniacal customer focus. Sumo Logic is therefore a great culture and product fit for JASK to continue its journey,” Jeevankumer told TechCrunch.

Sumo has raised $345 million, according to the company. It was valued at over $1 billion in its most recent funding round last May, when it raised $110 million.

CRN first reported this deal was in the works in an article on October 22.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Sumo Logic acquires JASK to fill security operations gap

Space-based businesses don’t all have to be about communications or Earth observation — European startup Space Cargo Unlimited, for instance, is focused on what operating in a microgravity environment can unlock for research and manufacturing. Accordingly, the company just launched an unusual payload to the International Space Station (ISS) — 12 bottles of wine.

The wine is not leisure-time supplies for the astronauts on board the ISS; instead, it’s part of an experiment that will study how the aging process for wine is affected by a microgravity, space-based environment. Wine samples taken from the same batch will be aged simultaneously on Earth over the same 12-month period, and then the results will be compared when the ISS wine shipment returns on a future cargo craft trip back.

One of the wine samples in its protective container prior to launch

Both the Earth and the ISS wine samples will remain sealed in their glass bottle environments, and they’ll be kept at a constant temperature of around 18 degrees celsius (or around 64 degrees Fahrenheit), undisturbed, to let the interior complex biological environment of the bottles do their work. Researchers predict there will be taste differences that result from the effect that microgravity and space-based radiation will have on physical and chemical reactions, but the only way to find out for sure is to give it a shot.

It sure sounds like this could set up a new line of literally “space-aged” wines that command a pretty premium, but Space Cargo Unlimited says that their work is more “following in the footsteps of Louis Pasteur,” who essentially developed pasteurization though experiments with wine fermentation. To that end, it’s hoping this experiment will produce results that could have broader applications across food preservation and the related technologies.

Space Cargo Unlimited’s wine samples launched aboard a Northrop Grumman Antares rocket, loaded onto a Cygnus cargo spacecraft, which successfully docked with the ISS on Monday morning.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | A startup just launched red wine to the International Space Station to age for 12 months

Barbershops and salons in the U.S. represent a $315 billion industry, counting nearly 3 million small businesses and 4 million independent aestheticians among their ranks. It’s a business that has been slow to adopt modern technologies because it’s both specialized and fragmented, meaning that it’s a huge opportunity for the kind of niche software developers who have cropped up in the Los Angeles tech ecosystem in recent years.

True to form, two former technology executives from the LA ecosystem have launched Boulevard, to be a provider of back-office management software for the salon and spa industry.

Co-founders Matt Danna and Sean Stavropoulos first crossed paths at the Los Angeles startup Fullscreen before rejoining professionally in 2016 to begin working on Boulevard .

In the three years since they formed the company, Boulevard has grown in headcount to more than 50 full-time employees and is processing over $100 million in customer payments.

Those figures attracted the interest of investors and allowed the company to rake in $11 million in its recent Series A round from investors including Index Ventures and Bonfire Ventures. As a result of their new stake in the company, Damir Becirovic from Index Ventures and Jim Andelman of Bonfire will both take seats on the company’s board of directors.

The company said it would use the money from its latest round to expand its headcount across all departments.

Through the company’s software toolkit, salons and spas can handle booking and scheduling, payroll, commissions, inventory management and payments along with customer relationship management to improve the customer experience.

“Competitors in the space have been trying to shoehorn a product that was built for yoga and pilates studios into the beauty industry, but the two have completely different needs,” said Damir Becirovic of Index Ventures. “Boulevard was built specifically for personal care businesses and is a high-tech solution for a high-touch market where no one else comes close.”

Using the company’s software, customers like Chris McMillan the Salon, Ken Paves Salon, MèCHE Salon,  Sev Laser, Spoke & Weal and TONI&GUY have seen results like 16% increases in service booked,18% increases in retail revenue, 24% increases in tips and an 81% decrease in no-shows or late cancellations within the first six months, the company said.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Los Angeles-based Boulevard has raised million for its software to manage salons and spas