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Symantec’s Sheila Jordan named to Slack’s board of directors

Published September 25, 2019

Workplace collaboration software business Slack (NYSE: WORK) has added Sheila Jordan, a senior vice president and chief information officer of Symantec, as an independent member of its board of directors. The hiring comes three months after the business completed a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

Jordan, responsible for driving information technology strategy and operations for Symantec, brings significant cybersecurity expertise to Slack’s board. Prior to joining Symantec in 2014, Jordan was a senior vice president of IT at Cisco and an executive at Disney Destination for nearly 15 years.

With the new appointment, Slack appears to be doubling down on security. In addition to the board announcement, Slack recently published a blog post outlining the company’s latest security strategy in what was likely part of a greater attempt to sway potential customers — particularly those in highly regulated industries — wary of the company’s security processes. The post introduced new features, including the ability to allow teams to work remotely while maintaining compliance to industry and company-specific requirements.

Slack makes some key security enhancements

Jordan joins Slack co-founder and chief executive officer Stewart Butterfield, former Goldman Sachs executive Edith Cooper, Accel general partner Andrew Braccia, Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar, Andreessen Horowitz general partner John O’Farrell, Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya and former Salesforce chief financial officer Graham Smith on Slack’s board of directors.

“I believe there is nothing more critical than driving organizational alignment and agility within enterprises today,” Jordan said in a statement. “Slack has developed a new category of enterprise software to help unlock this potential and I’m thrilled to now be a part of their story.”

Slack closed up nearly 50% on its first day of trading in June but has since stumbled amid reports of increased competition from Microsoft, which operates a Slack-like product called Teams.

Slack co-founder and chief technology officer Cal Henderson will join us onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco next week to discuss the company’s founding, road to the public markets and path forward. Buy tickets here.

Slack co-founder Cal Henderson and Spark Capital’s Megan Quinn are coming to Disrupt SF

Oculus and Respawn announce a Nazi-killing VR shooter

Published September 25, 2019

Two years ago, Oculus announced a radical departure in how they were funding virtual reality developers. Instead of partnering with a ton of upstart teams looking to explore the medium and help fund their low-budget pursuits, the company would be pursuing fewer, more expensive projects with established studios. Their crown jewel would be a made-for-VR first-person-shooter coming in 2019 done in partnership with Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment.

After two years with no further details, today, at its Oculus Connect 6 developer conference, it was announced that Respawn will be releasing a World War II shooter titled “Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond” on the Rift platform next year. That release is pushed back from the original 2019 timeline; Respawn wouldn’t nail down the release date any further than “2020.”

The game disappointingly will not be launching on Quest, the company’s all-in-one headset, but with the newly announced Oculus Link software feature launching in November, it seems you’ll be able to play the title, albeit in tethered mode.

It’s not at all clear how much Oculus invested in this title, thought it was clear from the press event that the scope of the title’s development was extensive and expensive. Oculus has pumped hundreds of million getting developers to bring their products exclusively to their VR platform, though, at this point, exclusivity is less of a concern as the company’s VR competitors have largely either folded, shifted to higher-end price points or moved to the enterprise market.

On to the game itself, I had a chance to demo several levels of “Above and Beyond,” and it’s clear that the title will be a hit among Rift and Rift S users. It very much seems to be a full game, with around a dozen hours of campaign in single-player, as well as a robust multi-player mode, which I was not able to demo.

The mechanics are crafted for VR — every time you empty a clip you have to eject it from the gun you’re holding and insert a new magazine into the gun, then cock your weapon all with the Touch controllers.

So many of the games made for VR haven’t had direct comparisons to console titles, but diving through bunkers shooting up Nazis kind of showcased where Oculus pushes boundaries and where it falters. Interaction mechanisms are rich and immersive and where the Rift and Quest shine, but Oculus keeping the recommended PC system specs largely the same since launch hasn’t aged well. The Rift just can’t push pixels with outdated PCs, and “Above and Beyond” showcases the max capabilities of the recommended spec systems, but it seems like this generation is fully smashed against the glass wall — which was the risk Oculus took when it launched the Rift S rather than a fully upgraded class of hardware.

The game is tons of fun, and was clearly thought out to extreme lengths, but one wonders whether Oculus would have invested so much energy into a PC-first title again had they known that two years later they would be pushing standalone experiences with Quest publicly with such fervor.

Facebook announces Horizon, a VR massive-multiplayer world

Published September 25, 2019

Facebook today announced it’s building its own Ready Player One Oasis. Facebook Horizon is a virtual reality sandbox universe where you can build your own environments and games, play and socialize with friends or just explore the user-generated landscapes. This is Facebook’s take on Second Life.

Launching in early 2020 in closed beta, Facebook Horizon will allow users to design their own diverse avatars and hop between virtual locales through portals called Telepods, watch movies and consume other media with friends and play multiplayer games together, like Wing Strikers. It also will include human guides, known as Horizon Locals, who can give users assistance and protect their safety in the VR world so trolls can’t run rampant.

Users interested in early access can apply for the beta here.

As part of the launch, Facebook will on October 25 shut down its existing social VR experiences Facebook Spaces and Oculus Rooms, leaving a bit of a gap until Horizon launches. Oculus Rooms debuted in 2016 as your decoratable private VR apartment, while Spaces first launched in 2017 to let users chat, watch movies and take VR selfies with friends. But both felt more like lobby waiting rooms with a few social features that were merely meant as a preamble to full-fledged VR games. In contrast, Horizon is designed to be a destination, not a novelty, where users could spend tons of time.

How Facebook Horizon works

At first glance, Horizon seems like a modernized Second Life, a first-person Sims, a fulfillment of the intentions of AltspaceVR and a competitor to PlayStation’s PSVR Dreams and cross-platfrom kids’ favorite Roblox. Back in 2016, Facebook was giving every new Oculus employee a copy of the Ready Player One novel. It seems they’ve been busy building that world since then.

Facebook Horizon will start centralized around a town square. Before people step in, they can choose how they look and what they wear from an expansive and inclusive set of avatar tools. From inside VR, users will be able to use the Horizon World Builder to create gaming arenas, vacation chillspots and activities to fill them without the need to know how to code.

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Facebook Horizon lets you build objects from scratch

You could design a tropical island, then invite friends to hang out with you on your virtual private beach. An object creator akin to the Oculus Medium sculpting feature lets you make anything, even a custom t-shirt your avatar could wear. Visual scripting tools let more serious developers create interactive and reactive experiences.

Facebook details its Horizon safety features on its “Citizenship” page that explains that “As citizens of Facebook Horizon, it is all of our responsibility to create a culture that’s respectful and comfortable . . . A Horizon citizen is friendly, inclusive, and curious.” Horizon Locals will wander the VR landscapes to answer questions or aid users if they’re having technical or safety issues. They seem poised to be part customer support, part in-world police.

Facebook Horizon will include human Locals who provide safety and technical support

If things get overwhelming, you can tap a shield button to pause and dip into a private space parallel to Horizon. Users can define their personal space boundaries so no one can get in their face or appear to touch them. And traditional tools like muting, blocking and reporting will all be available. It’s smart that Facebook outlined the community tone and defined these protections.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Horizon today at the Oculus Connect 6 conference in San Jose. He discussed how “Horizon is going to have this property where it just expands and gets better” as Facebook and the community build more experiences for the VR sandbox.

Facebook lets you build your own islands and other locales in Horizon

Horizon makes perfect sense for a business obsessed with facilitating social interaction while monetized through ad views based on time-spent. It’s easy to imagine Horizon including virtual billboards for brands, Facebook-run shops for buying toys or home furnishings, third-party malls full of branded Nikes or Supreme shirts that score Zuckerberg a revenue cut or subscriptions to access certain gaming worlds or premium planets to explore.

As Facebook starts to grow stale after 15 years on the market, users are looking for new ways to socialize. Many have already ditched the status updates and smarmy Life Events of Facebook for the pretty pictures of Instagram and silliness of Snapchat. Facebook risked being cast aside if it didn’t build its own VR successor. And by offering a world where users can escape their real lives instead of having to enviously compare them to their friends, Horizon could appeal to those bored or claustrophobic on Facebook.

Segment’s new privacy portal helps companies comply with expanding regulations

Published September 25, 2019

With the EU’s sweeping GDPR privacy laws and the upcoming California Consumer Privacy ACT (CCPA), companies have to figure out how to deal with keeping private data private — or face massive fines. Segment announced a new Privacy Portal today that could help companies trying to remain in compliance.

Segment CEO and co-founder Peter Reinhardt says companies have built a false dichotomy between personalization and privacy, and he says that it doesn’t have to be that way. “We’ve noticed that a lot of companies feel this tension between privacy and growth. They basically see a paradox between being either privacy-respectful versus providing a very personalized experience,” he said.

The new Privacy Portal is designed to be a central place where customers can sort their data in an automated way and create an inventory of what data they have inside the company. “By introducing a single point of collection for all the data, it creates a choke point on the data collection to allow you to actually govern that, a single place to inspect, monitor, alert and have an inventory of all the data that you’re collecting, so that you can ensure that it’s compliant, and so that you can ensure that you’ve got consent, and all of those things,” he said.

The way this works is that as the data comes into the portal, it automatically gets put into a bucket based on the level of concern about it. “We are basically giving customers monitoring and a consolidated view over all of the different data points that are coming in. So we have matches that basically look for things that might be PII, and we automatically grade most of them with green, yellow or red in terms of the level of potential concern,” Reinhardt explained.

On top of that, companies can apply policies, based on the grades, say letting anything that’s green or yellow through, but preventing any red data (PII) from being shared with other applications.

In addition, to make sure that the product can connect to as many marketing tools as possible to get the most complete data picture, the company is releasing a new feature called Functions, which lets customers build their own custom data connectors. With thousands of marketing technology tools, it’s impossible for Segment to build connectors for all of them. Functions lets companies build custom connectors in a low-code way in instances where Segment doesn’t provide it out of the box.

The two tools are available to Segment customers starting today.

Why Flexport built a slick Slack SaaS for shipping

Published September 25, 2019

“Make their metrics your metrics” is one of Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen’s mantras. Sometimes that means building free software for your clients. It can be frustrating aligning your fates with a fellow business if they operate on email, phone and fax like much of the freight-forwarding industry that gets pallets of goods across the world from factories to retailer’s floors. So today, the new Flexport Platform launches, allowing brand clients, their factories and their Flexport logistics reps to all team up to get stuff where it belongs on time.

The software could further stoke Flexport‘s growth by locking in customers to work with the shipping startup that was valued at $3.2 billion after raising $1 billion from SoftBank in February (to bring it to $1.3 billion in funding). Flexport’s revenue was up 95%, to $441 million in 2018, Forbes’s Alex Konrad reported. Yet there’s plenty of green field to conquer given even Flexport’s largest competitor Kuehne & Nagel only holds 2.5% market share while the whole freight-forwarding industry grows 4% per year.

The Flexboard Platform dashboard offers maps, notifications, task lists, and chat for Flexport clients and their factory suppliers.

The Flexport Platform lets 10,000 clients, like Bombas socks, invite their suppliers to collaborate on managing shipments together. An integrated calendar makes shipping timelines clear. A map gives clients a god-view of their freight criss-crossing the globe. Pre-filled forms expedite compliance. Tagging lets users group shipments and filter or search their dashboards, and flag something for extra care — like a pallet of goods critical for a marketing launch event. Collaborators also can sync up via a Facebook Wall-style feature, or direct message the team with threaded conversations, much like Slack.

Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen

“There’s infinite demand for a job well done,” Petersen says about his industry. “The hard part has always been doing a good job.” Taking the confusion out communication scattered across email chains means clients get shipping documentation filled out 50% faster with 4X more accurate data. Flexport is on the tip of the tongue as software eats the world, with antiquated sectors suddenly leveling up.

Petersen saw the inefficiency first-hand growing up running his own import/export and customs business. He is part of a wave of entrepreneurs attacking unsexy businesses that the typical Silicon Valley enterprise exec might never stumble across. But three years after we profiled his scrappy company, when it had raised just $26 million in funding and had 700 clients, Petersen tells me “We’re trying to retire the word ‘startup.’ ”

It turns out top global brands like Sonos and Klean Kanteen don’t like the second half of “move fast and break things” when those things are boats and planes full of their products. “They want a company that will help them grow, not the fly-by-night startup,” Petersen explains. But with competitors trying to chase it and incumbents trying to adopt similar technologies, Flexport must maintain its agility to avoid being subsumed by the pack.

As his company has grown to 1,700 employees, he’s dedicated a ton of his time to keeping its culture in check — especially after a certain other logistics giant startup had some uber-painful troubles with workplace toxicity. “You either have too much bureaucracy or not enough process, and no one knows what to do. The English language lacks a positive word for bureaucracy — just the right amount of process so people can move quickly.”

That’s what Flexport wanted to give clients with the new platform. From a dedicated tasks queue to a notifications pane, it’s built to take the guesswork out of what to do next while being as approachable as consumer software for new users. That also why it’s free. It’s not supposed to be some chore you’re forced to complete, product lead Frank te Pas tells me. “As you move your first shipment you get onboarded onto this system” says te Pas. “It’s our way of helping.”

That’s meant a ton of personal growth, too. Petersen is still enthusiastic, curious and charmingly rough around the edges, but he carries it all with more dignity and gravity than a few years back. “The only way I get to stay in this role is if I learn faster than anybody else. Being the CEO of a 1,700-person company is not something I knew how to do four to five years ago, or even last year,” he tells me. “I’ve changed and become more self-aware. It’s been really important to take care of myself — sleeping a lot, I quit drinking alcohol, I lost 30 pounds. I feel great.”

With plenty of cash in the bank, industry talent taking it seriously and new businesses like Flexport Capital freight financing and its cargo insurance offered in partnership with Marsh, the company might not be a startup for long. It looks like a hot candidate for a coming season of IPOs. And while this company has its own plane (the leading entry for the naming contest is “Weird Flex But OK”), it’s actually part of its shipping fleet.

Netdata, a monitoring startup with 50-year-old founder, announces $17M Series A

Published September 25, 2019

Nearly everything about Netdata, makers of an open-source monitoring tool, defies standard thinking about startups. Consider that the founder is a polished, experienced 50-year-old executive who started his company several years ago when he became frustrated by what he was seeing in the monitoring tools space. Like any good founder, he decided to build his own, and today the company announced a $17 million Series A led by Bain Capital.

Marathon Ventures also participated in the round. The company received a $3.7 million seed round earlier this year, which was led by Marathon.

Costa Tsaousis, the company’s founder and CEO, was working as an executive for a company in Greece in 2014 when he decided he had had enough of the monitoring tools he was seeing. “At that time, I decided to do something about it myself — actually, I was pissed off by the industry. So I started writing a tool at night and on weekends to simplify monitoring significantly, and also provide a lot more insights,” Tsaousis told TechCrunch.

Mind you, he was a 45-year-old executive who hadn’t done much coding in years, but he was determined, as any startup founder tends to be, and he took two years to create his monitoring tool. As he tells it, he released it to open source in 2016 and it just took off. “In 2016, I released this project to the public, and it went viral, I wrote a single Reddit post, and immediately started building a huge community. It grew up about 10,000 GitHub stars in a matter of a week,” he said. Even today, he says that it gets a half million downloads every single day, and hundreds of people are contributing to the open-source version of the product, relieving him of the burden of supporting the product himself.

Panos Papadopoulos, who led the investment at Marathon, says Tsaousis is not your typical early-stage startup founder. “He is not following many norms. He is 50 years old, and he was a C-level executive. His presentation and the depth of his thinking, and even his core materials, are unlike anything else have seen in an early-stage startup,” he said.

What he created was an open-source monitoring tool, one that he says simplifies monitoring significantly, and also provides a lot more insights, offering hundreds of metrics as soon as you install it. He says it is also much faster, providing those insights every second, and it’s distributed, meaning Netdata doesn’t actually collect the data, just provides insights on it wherever it lives.

Live dashboard on the Netdata website

Today, the company has 24 employees and Tsaousis has set up shop in San Francisco. In addition, to the open-source version of the product, there is a SaaS version, which also has what he calls a “massively free plan.” He says the open-source monitoring agent is “a gift to the world.” The SaaS tool is about democratizing monitoring and the pay version is even different from most monitoring tools, charging by the seat instead of by the amount of infrastructure you are monitoring.

Tsaousis wants no less than to lead the monitoring space eventually, and believes that the free tiers will lead the way. “I think Netdata can change the way people perceive and understand monitoring, but in order to do this, I think that offering free services in a massive way is essential. Otherwise, it will not work. So my aim is to lead monitoring. This may sound arrogant, and Netdata is not there yet, but I think it can be,” he said.

How founder and CTO Dries Buytaert sold Acquia for $1B

Published September 25, 2019

Acquia announced yesterday that Vista Equity Partners was going to buy a majority stake in the company worth a $1 billion. That would seem to be reason enough to sell the company. That’s a good amount a dough, but as co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert told Extra Crunch, he’s also happy to be taking care of his early investors and his long-time, loyal employees who stuck by him all these years.

Vista is actually buying out early investors as part of the deal, while providing some liquidity for employee equity holders. “I feel proud that we are able to reward our employees, especially those that have been so loyal to the company and worked so hard for so many years. It makes me feel good that we can do that for our employees,” he said.

Image via TechCrunch

Arceo.ai raises $37 million to expand cyber insurance coverage and access

Published September 25, 2019

Critical cyber attacks on both businesses and individuals have been grabbing headlines at an alarming rate. Cybersecurity has moved from a background risk for enterprises to a critical day-to-day threat to business operations, forcing executive teams to pour time and hundreds of billions in capital into monitoring and prevention efforts.

Yet even as investment in security ticks up, the frequency and cost of cybercrime to businesses continues to rapidly accelerate, with the World Economic Forum estimating the economic loss due to cybercrime could reach $3 trillion by 2020.

More companies are now turning to cyber insurance as a means of mitigating financial exposure. However, for traditional insurers, cybersecurity remains a relatively nascent and unfamiliar issue, requiring risk-assessment data points and methodologies largely different from those seen in traditional insurance products. As a result, businesses often struggle to get the scale of cybersecurity coverage they require.

Arceo.ai is hoping to expand the size and scope of the cyber insurance market for both insurers and companies, by providing insurers with effective real-time data, analytics and context, necessary for safely and efficiently underwrite cyber risk.

This morning, Arceo took a major step in achieving that goal, announcing the company has raised a $37 million round of funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Founders Fund with participation from CRV and UL Ventures.

Using an expansive set of global sources across a customer’s digital footprint, Arceo.AI collects internal, external and macro cyber risk data which it uses to evaluate a company’s security and cyber risk management behavior. By automating the data collection process and connecting it with insurer underwriting processes, Arceo is able to keep its data and policy assessments up to date in real-time and enable faster, more efficient quotes.

A vital component of Arceo’s platform is its analytics offering. Using patented data science and cyber risk models, Arceo generates analytics-driven insights for insurance carriers, brokers and end-insured customers. For end-insured customers, Arceo helps companies understand whether they’re using the best mitigation strategies by providing policy recommendations and industry benchmarking to help contextualize day-to-day cyber behavior and hygiene. For underwriters, Arceo can provide specific insurance recommendations based on particular policy coverages.

Ultimately, Arceo looks to provide both insurers and the insured with actionable answers to key questions such as how one assesses cyber risk, how one determines what risks can be mitigated with technology alone, how one knows which systems are best and whether those systems are being used appropriately.

Arceo.ai Chairman Raj Shah. Image via Arceo.ai

In an interview with TechCrunch, Arceo Chairman Raj Shah explained that the company’s background expertise, proprietary data systems, and deep pedigree in both the security and insurance truly differentiate Arceo from competing solutions. For starters, both Shah and Arceo co-founder and CEO Vishaal Hariprasad have spent close to the entirety of their careers in national security and cybersecurity. Hariprasad started his career in the Airforce’s first cohort of cyber warfare officers, before teaming up with Shah to start Morta Security in 2012, a security startup the two sold to Palo Alto networks in just roughly two years.

After selling the company, Shah and Hariprasad remained in the security world before realizing that there was a natural intersection between security and insurance, and a real opportunity for risk transfer solutions.

“Having studied the market, we saw that people are spending more and more dollars on cybersecurity products… There are hundreds of thousands of new vendors every year… Spend is going up, but we don’t feel any safer!” Shah told TechCrunch.

“That’s when we said ‘Hey, we need to move beyond just thinking about technology points and products, and think about holistic cyber risk management.’ And this is where insurance has historically done a great job. Putting a price on behavior and making people think and letting them take risks… From life and death and health to buyers and property and casualty. And so cyber is that next class risk… So that’s really why we started the business. We wanted to provide a real way to manage the cyber stress that they’re facing and that will impact every single one of our digital lives.”

Since the company’s founding, Raj and Vishaal have been joined by a deep network of cyber and insurance experts. Today, Arceo also announced that Hemant Shah, founder and former CEO of catastrophe risk modeling company RMS has joined Arceo’s Board of Directors. Additionally, earlier this month, the company announced that Mario Vitale, the former CEO of publically-traded insurance companies Willis Towers Watson and Zurich Insurance Group, would be joining the Arceo team as the company’s President.

The company noted that participation from high-profile industry vets like Hemant and Mario not only further advance Arceo’s competitive advantage but also acts as another major validation of the company’s future and work to date.

According to Arceo Chairman Raj Shah, after years of investing in R&D, the latest funds will be used towards expansion efforts and scaling Arceo to the broader ecosystem of insurance and brokers. Longer-term, the company hopes to offer the most complete combined cybersecurity and risk transfer solution to insurers and the insured, easing the stress around cyber threats for both enterprises and individuals and ultimately improving broader cyber resiliency.

If you’d like to hear more from Arceo’s Raj Shah, Raj will also be joining us this year on the Extra Crunch stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, where he’ll discuss how founders and companies should think about potential US government investment. Grab tickets here and we hope to see you there!

QC Ware Forge will give developers access to quantum hardware and simulators across vendors

Published September 25, 2019

Quantum computing is almost ready for prime time, and, according to most experts, now is the time to start learning how to best develop for this new and less than intuitive technology. With multiple vendors like D-Wave, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Rigetti offering commercial and open-source hardware solutions, simulators and other tools, there’s already a lot of fragmentation in this business. QC Ware, which is launching its Forge cloud platform into beta today, wants to become the go-to middleman for accessing the quantum computing hardware and simulators of these vendors.

Forge, which like the rest of QC Ware’s efforts is aimed at enterprise users, will give developers the ability to run their algorithms on a variety of hardware platforms and simulators. The company argues that developers won’t need to have any previous expertise in quantum computing, though having a bit of background surely isn’t going to hurt. From Forge’s user interface, developers will be able to run algorithms for binary optimization, chemistry simulation and machine learning.

“Practical quantum advantage will occur. Most experts agree that it’s a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if.’ The way to pull that horizon closer is by having the user community fully engaged in quantum computing application discovery. The objective of Forge is to allow those users to access the full range of quantum computing resources through a single platform,” said Matt Johnson, CEO, QC Ware. “To assist our customers in that exploration, we are spending all of our cycles working on ways to squeeze as much power as possible out of near-term quantum computers, and to bake those methods into Forge.”

Currently, QC Ware Forge offers access to hardware from D-Wave, as well as open-source simulators running on Google’s and IBM’s clouds, with plans to support a wider variety of platforms in the near future.

Initially, QC Ware also told me that it offered direct access to IBM’s hardware, but that’s not yet the case. “We currently have the integration complete and actively utilized by QC Ware developers and quantum experts,” QC Ware’s head of business development Yianni Gamvros told me. “However, we are still working with IBM to put an agreement in place in order for our end-users to directly access IBM hardware. We expect that to be available in our next major release. For users, this makes it easier for them to deal with the churn. We expect different hardware vendors will lead at different times and that will keep changing every six months. And for our quantum computing hardware vendors, they have a channel partner they can sell through.”

Users who sign up for the beta will receive 30 days of access to the platform and one minute of actual Quantum Computing Time to evaluate the platform.

Vannevar Labs comes out of stealth to bring best-in-class AI tech to national security agencies

Published September 25, 2019

Few organizations have the complex data and analytics problems that challenge the defense and intelligence communities every single day. Whether it is managing petabytes of text, audio, or video data, finding extraordinarily small patterns in the noise, or processing multilingual analytics, the agencies at the heart of America’s national security system confront cutting-edge problems every day.

Despite the desire for better tools though, intelligence analysts are often stymied to procure up-to-date software due to the byzantine rules that drive Pentagon and intelligence procurement.

That’s why a former intelligence official and former intelligence investor are looking to build a new platform that connects the best minds in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing and bundling it together into a service purchasable by these government agencies.

Through Palo Alto-based Vannevar, co-founders Brett Granberg and Nini Moorhead are hoping to launch their first product, which is focused on bringing NLP technologies like feature detection to international counterterrorism missions.

Co-founders Nimi Moorhead and Brett Granberg of Vannevar Labs. Photo via Vannevar Labs.

The company is named for Vannevar Bush, who is often credited with inventing an early form of the computer, putting together the Manhattan Project which led to the atom bomb, and for writing a seminal essay that sort of predicted the internet decades before its inception.

The two chose this particular product as an entrée because of their past experiences. Before beginning Vannevar, Granberg spent two years at In-Q-Tel, the non-profit VC firm that works deeply with the intelligence community to supply agencies with the best in startup technology. He also was an advisor at Lilt, a real-time deep learning translation product that spun out of Chris Manning’s famed Stanford NLP research lab.

Meanwhile, Moorhead spent seven years working as a counterterrorism officer within the intelligence community, working to disrupt terrorist networks.

The two met while they overlapped at Stanford GSB and realized they had seen similar problems that they both wanted to solve. While in business school, “top of mind for me was some of the technological challenges that I encountered as an end user [and] analyst in the intelligence community,” Moorhead said. “We immediately connected and shared a lot of experiences in common in terms of seeing gaps between the really hard domain problems that I’d been working on in my career as an analyst and some of the technology that was available to me,” she said. The two actually met the first day of school.

Their approach is to take proven techniques and attempt to translate them into government use cases. “We’re not sort of inventing new math to solve these problems, we’re more taking cutting-edge approaches and just applying them to specific use cases,” Granberg said.

While the project is early, the team raised a $4.5 million seed venture capital funding from fellow GSB alum Katherine Boyle of General Catalyst and Costanoa Ventures. Boyle has made a big push into defense and highly-regulated industries as part of her investment practice, where she previously funded Anduril, the company started by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey that has attempted to apply ML technology to security issues such as battlefield awareness and border control (and gotten into some controversy along the way as well).

She is particularly excited about new ways for startups to secure government contracts at a speed faster than the sun burning out. Talking to me about the potential in this industry, she said:

We’ve been spending a lot of time with companies that are going after what’s known as Other Transaction Authorities, which are a new type of contracting vehicle that was developed in 2015 by former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, to help tech companies work very quickly with the Department of Defense and with the intelligence community. So what historically might have taken 18 months to get a contract now takes 30 to 60 days for critical pieces of technology

Boyle explained that Vannevar fits directly into her thesis for the future of government procurement. “Our view is that the companies that do best in the space are people who have worked in government or understand how to sell to governments,” she said. She noted that the company is very early, and her investment was primarily focused on the team.

I asked about recent controversies that have hit companies like Google, which saw a revolt by some employees over its involvement with a defense program called Project Maven, which attempted to use machine learning technology and apply that to the battlefield, so that, for instance, drones could increase their effectiveness during strikes.

Granberg said that “we think that the people that defend our country should have access to the best tools and technologies to do their job. We know these people, we used to work with them, and we want to help them.”

He understands the concerns of critics though, and says that Vannevar intends to work with the government to ensure ethics remains core to its product. “We believe it’s our responsibility to sort of shape that technology and help the government think about putting in place policies that … prevent the misuse from happening.”

Boyle agreed. “One of the things that we’ve noticed is that if you’re very transparent and upfront about the types of products you’re going to be building in the beginning, it’s not a recruitment problem, it’s not an ethics problem.” Unlike Google, which had a six-figure large workforce with many employees who don’t want to touch defense-related code, the hope for Granberg and Moorhead is that a company like Vannevar can build a coalition of the willing, as it were, and maybe solve some serious security problems as well.