Female founders: Apply to the All Raise AMA to win a free Expo Pass to Disrupt SF
Shouting out to all the fierce female founders. Have you applied to participate in the All Raise “ask me anything” (AMA) sessions at Disrupt SF 2019? No? Women, it’s time to act. Apply for an AMA session by the August 30 deadline and you could win a free Expo Only Pass.
You heard that right. We have 30 free Expo Only passes, and we’ll give them away at random to women founders who get accepted to the All Raise program at Disrupt SF 2019.
All Raise, a startup nonprofit committed to accelerating female founder success, will host a day-long AMA event in a dedicated area in Startup Alley (aka the Disrupt expo floor). They’ll schedule a series of 30-minute sessions throughout the day for roughly 100 women founders.
Each session consists of three founders and one of the All Raise community’s leading VCs. You’ll have the opportunity to ask in-depth questions about the next raise, key hires, the competition or any other business issues that keep you up at night. You can learn plenty from experienced, successful investors like these:
- Dayna Grayson, NEA
- Susan Lyne, BBG
- Shauntel Garvey, Reach Capital
- Eurie Kim, Forerunner
- Jess Lee, Sequoia
- Kara Nortman, Upfront
- Sara Guo, Greylock,
- Anarghya Vardhana, Maveron
- Eva Ho, Fika Ventures
- Sarah Smith, Bain Capital Ventures
- Jess Lin, Work-Bench
If you’re a U.S.-based woman founder — and you’ve raised at least $250,000 in a seed, A or B round — you can apply for an AMA session. All Raise gives special consideration to founders from underrepresented groups (e.g. Black, Latinx or LGBTQIA women).
All Raise will review the applications and notify the founders. Acceptance is based on availability for session spots, investor fit with industry sector and company stage, as well as demand for certain categories.
If All Raise selects you to participate — and you don’t happen to win a free Expo Only pass — simply buy any pass to Disrupt SF (including Expo Only). All Raise will send an email to let you know what time they’ve scheduled your session.
Don’t miss this rare opportunity to get answers and advice from some of the best investors around. Free admission to Disrupt SF 2019 and free investor advice — that’s a potent combination. Beat the August 30 deadline and apply for an All Raise AMA session today!
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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Ousted founder Julia Angwin returns to The Markup
The yet-to-launch tech journalism site The Markup has had a bumpy 2019 — co-founder and editor-in-chief Julia Angwin was fired, prompting the departure of the majority of the editorial staff. Soon after, The Markup’s other founders (whose disputes with Angwin apparently led to her ouster) left the company themselves.
Now things may be back on track, with Angwin returning to the EIC role, and the six staffers who’d quit in protest returning, as well.
In fact, a New York Times story about Angwin’s reinstatement suggests that there’s been a surprising amount of continuity behind the scenes, with The Markup continuing to pay Angwin and her staff while they continued to work on articles and meet in Angwin’s living room.
In addition to announcing Angwin’s return, The Markup says it has hired former BuzzFeed vice president and associate general counsel Nabiha Syed to serve as president, along with Evelyn Larrubia, who will become managing editor for investigations.
“Technology is shaping our world faster than most people can keep up, before we can digest the implications of any of it,” Angwin said in the announcement. “We believe our data-driven approach to tech accountability journalism will bring facts to this emotional debate. And I can’t think of two more accomplished leaders in their fields than Nabiha and Evelyn to join me in the venture.”
The plan is for Angwin and Syed to report to a not-yet-appointed independent board of directors, and for the site to start publishing by the end of 2019.
When The Markup made a splash with its kickoff last year, it wasn’t just for the involvement of Angwin (a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter from The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica), but also because its funding included a $20 million donation from Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.
The recent controversy prompted the site’s backers to declare that it had become “necessary to reassess our support,” but today’s announcement closes with this note: “The Markup remains supported by a coalition of major foundations, including Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Edwin Barbey Charitable Trust, the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative, and the Open Society Foundations.”
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72 hours left on early-bird pricing to TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019
Synchronize your Fitbits, people. You have 72 hours left to get your fiscal fitness on. Three days to save $100 on tickets to TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 in San Francisco on September 5. Buy your early-bird ticket by August 9 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) and then go back to counting your steps.
We say with confidence that no tech category’s more competitive than enterprise software. The gigantic, $500 billion market generates a constant flow of multibillion-dollar acquisitions every year. And it takes a special kind of fierce early-stage enterprise startup to jump in, invent new services and shake up old-school incumbents.
More than 1,000 attendees will be in the house to explore this rich, complex topic, TechCrunch-style. Our editors will interview top titans in the enterprise world — like SAP CEO, Bill McDermott; Atlassian co-founder, Scott Farquhar; and Jocelyn Goldfein, managing director at Zetta Venture Partners. They’ll also tap rising founders of upstart startups.
The enterprise just can’t get enough of AI, but large companies face a huge challenge: packaging all that data in machine learning models — a necessary element for using AI to automate processes. That’s why we’re especially excited that Bindu Reddy, co-founder and CEO at RealityEngines, will join us onstage.
Her company aims to create research-driven cloud services to reduce some of the inherent complexity of working with AI tools. Reddy, along with investor Jocelyn Goldfein, a managing director at Zetta Venture Partners, and others will talk about the growing role of AI in the enterprise.
That’s just the tip of the Enterprise iceberg. More than 20 interviews, panel discussions, Q&As and breakout sessions will cover a wide range of technologies, including intelligent marketing automation, the cloud, Kubernetes and even quantum and blockchain. Peruse the agenda to see what else we have in store for you.
Early-bird pricing for TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 ends in just 72 hours. Buy your ticket by August 9 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) and you’ll save $100. But wait, there’s more — for every ticket you buy, we’ll register you for a free Expo-only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019. Now that’s fiscal fitness.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Enterprise? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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Nissan and EVgo to add 200 fast chargers as more electric vehicles hit US roads
Nissan and EVgo said Tuesday they will install another 200 DC fast chargers in the United States to support the growing number of consumers who are buying electric vehicles, including the new Nissan Leaf e+ that came to market earlier this year.
The 100 kilowatt DC fast-charging stations will have both CHAdeMO and CCS connectors, making them accessible to more EV drivers. The inclusion of both charger connectors is logical; it’s also notable for Nissan, once the primary advocates for CHAdeMO chargers.
The announcement builds off of the companies’ six-year partnership, which included building out a corridor of EV chargers along Interstate 95 on the East Coast, as well as between Monterey, Calif., and Lake Tahoe.
Nissan says it has installed more than 2,000 quick-charge connectors across the country since 2010.
Plans to add another 200 fast chargers follows the launch of the 2019 Nissan Leaf e+. The Nissan Leaf e+, which came to the U.S. and Canada this spring, has a range of 226 miles and fast-charging capability.
This new version of the Leaf all-electric hatchback has 40% more range than other versions thanks to a 62 kilowatt-hour battery pack. That 226-mile range puts the Leaf e+ just under the Chevy Bolt EV, which has a 238-mile range, the Kia Niro EV with 239 miles and the Tesla Model 3 standard range plus with 240 miles.
“Given the tremendous driver response to the 2019 long-range all-electric LEAF, Nissan and EVgo will accelerate fast charging by committing to a multi-year charger construction program that will continue to expand fast-charging options for EV drivers across the country,” Aditya Jairaj, director, EV Sales and Marketing, Nissan North America said in a statement.
The companies also plan to partner on a marketing campaign to sell consumers on the benefits of EVs, and for Nissan, hopefully persuade more to buy its Nissan Leaf Plus. Nissan’s July sales figures were down compared to the same month last year, a slump that has affected the Leaf, as well.
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Slack makes some key security enhancements
As Slack makes its way deeper into the enterprise, it needs to layer on more sophisticated security measures like the encryption key management feature it released last year. Today, the company published a blog post outlining its latest security strategy, and while it still doesn’t include end-to-end encryption of Slack messaging, it is a big step forward.
For many companies, there is a minimum level of security they will require before they use a tool like Slack company-wide, and this is particularly true for regulated industries. Slack is trying to answer some of these concerns with today’s post.
As for end-to-end (E2E) encryption, Slack believes it would adversely affect the user experience and says there hasn’t been a lot of customer demand for it so far. “If we were to add E2E encryption, it would result in limited functionality in Slack. With EKM (encryption key management), you gain cryptographic controls, providing visibility and opportunity for key revocation with granularity, control and no sacrifice to user experience,” a Slack spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Today, the company provides the ability for admins to require Touch ID or Face ID or to enter a passcode on a mobile device. In addition, if a user reports a device stolen, admins can wipe Slack conversations remotely, although this is currently only available through an API.
What they have coming soon is a new administrative dashboard, where admins can manage all of this kind of security in a single place. They will even be able to detect if a person is using a jail-broken phone and shut down access to the phone. In addition, they will be able to force upgrades to the latest version of Slack by not allowing access until the person downloads the latest version.
Later this year, admins will be able to block files downloaded from Slack desktop that come from outside of a set of pre-approved IP addresses. And on the mobile side, they will be able to force file links to open in an approved browser.
All of these features are designed to make administrators feel more comfortable using Slack in a secure and reliable way. One of Slack’s big strengths is its ability to integrate with other pieces of the enterprise software ecosystem, but companies still want control over what files are shared and how they open across devices. These new tools go a long way toward easing those types of concerns.
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AT&T rolls out (limited) 5G in (parts of) New York City
Both Verizon and Sprint have been promising 5G coverage in the nation’s largest city for some time now. AT&T this morning, however, said it’s starting to do just that. The U.S.’s largest carrier by subscribers announced limited availability of 5G coverage in New York City.
The typical not-so-fine print applies to the news this morning. The service will be limited to business users at launch — and only available in a select number of areas. In other words, don’t go running out and buying a 5G phone just yet if you’re an AT&T customer in the five boroughs.
On the plus side, 5G+ is the real deal, unlike the deceptively named 5GE that came before it. And AT&T’s being reasonably transparent about the limited nature of the roll out.
“As a densely-populated, global business and entertainment hub, New York City stands to benefit greatly from having access to 5G, and we’ve been eager to introduce the service here,” AT&T’s New York President Amy Kramer said in a release. “While our initial availability in NYC is a limited introduction at launch, we’re committed to working closely with the City to extend coverage to more neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs.”
Per CNET, the rollout is limited to a small section of Manhattan for the time being, including, “near and around East Village, Greenwich Village and Gramercy Park.” Business users can access the service using Samsung’s Galaxy S10 5G on the carrier’s Business Unlimited Preferred plan.
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Apple subsidiary FileMaker Inc. changes its name (back) to Claris
Remember Claris, the 1987 Apple spin-off that made applications like MacWrite, MacPaint and FileMaker? In 1998, Apple brought all of those products in-house again, with the exception of the low-code application platform FileMaker . With that move, Claris changed its name to FileMaker Inc. Today, however, the Claris name rises from the dead, as FileMaker Inc. is changing its name to Claris International. The name of the FileMaker product itself, though, remains the same.
As FileMaker Claris CEO Brad Freitag, who recently took over this role from Dominique Goupil, told me, the reason for this move is because the company is starting to look beyond its core FileMaker product. “We’re accelerating our vision and our strategy,” he said. “We’ve described our vision for a long time as making powerful technology accessible to everyone. And with the leadership change, we are really asserting a more aggressive posture in bringing that product roadmap to life.”
Claris CEO Brad Freitag
To put a point on this and clarify its strategy, Claris is also using today’s announcement to launch Claris Connect, a tool for integrating various cloud services and automating workflows between them. With this, Claris also confirmed the previously reported acquisition of Stamplay, a small Italian startup that makes tools for connecting the APIs of various enterprise tools. Claris Connect is going to be the second product in Claris’ lineup, with FileMaker remaining its flagship product.
FileMaker, the product, currently serves more than a million end users who work at about 50,000 different companies. The company has great brand recognition and has been profitable for more than 80 consecutive quarters, Freitag said, but with its foray into workflow and business process automation, it was time to look for a different brand name.
Although low-code/no-code has been a growing buzzword in the industry for a few years now, FileMaker didn’t really make any waves. That, too, is going to change a bit, it seems, as Freitag actually hopes to expand the business significantly. “As we look out five years, we see multiplying the user community by at least 3x and there’s a pretty clear path to getting there,” he said. “If you look at our business, we’re over 50% outside of the U.S. The market opportunities for us exist in the Americas, as well as Europe and Asia.”
Freitag admits that FileMaker was “relatively modest” in its go-to-market posture, so it will expand its brand and category awareness efforts. Chances are then, you’ll hear the Claris and FileMaker names a bit more often going forward (and Freitag stressed that the company remains “100% committed to the FileMaker platform”).
Claris also expects to expand its product offerings going forward — and that may include additional acquisitions. “We are investing heavily in organic innovation as we expand the product lines — and we are open to additional acquisitions,” he said.
FileMaker Inc./Claris is making this move while the overall market for products like FileMaker continues to grow. That’s something Freitag hopes to capitalize on as the company looks ahead. What exactly that will look like remains to be seen, but Freitag noted that the kind of next-generation platform will go beyond the kind of database-driven applications FileMaker itself is known for today and focus on services that support workflow applications. He also believes there is an opportunity for IoT solutions under the Claris brand and maybe, in the long run, augmented reality applications.
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OnePlus’ first 5G handset is headed for Sprint
Sprint this morning announced that it will be the first network to get its hands on OnePlus’s long-promised 5G handset [not pictured]. The Shenzhen-based manufacturer announced late last year that it was targeting 2019 for the device, bucking the trend of being slightly behind the curve on the latest smartphone technologies.
Sprint’s not offering much in the way of actual information here — no pricing or availability. Not even specs or a device name were made available via the press release. Rather, the carrier notes that this is its first 5G smartphone, joining three other non-phone 5G devices for the nascent network.
Last year, OnePlus made a device available for the first time through a U.S. carrier, partnering with T-Mobile for the 6T. It’s made the jump to Sprint this time out, though given merger plans, that distinction may soon be moot regardless. Sprint’s 5G network is currently available in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and Kansas City, with Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix and Washington, D.C. arriving in “the coming weeks.”
“We are proud to join with Sprint to bring an ultra-premium smartphone to their network,” OnePlus CMO Kyle Kiang said in a release. “As a community-driven company, we are thrilled to tell OnePlus enthusiasts on the Sprint network that the wait is finally over. This is a tremendous opportunity to expose Sprint customers to the award-winning OnePlus brand.”
The partnership isn’t being listed as an exclusive, but OnePlus has generally taken a measured approach to expansion, so it seems likely the company will only offer a single carrier partner this time out.
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Cockroach Labs announces $55M Series C to battle industry giants
Cockroach Labs, makers of CockroachDB, sits in a tough position in the database market. On one side, it has traditional database vendors like Oracle, and on the other there’s AWS and its family of databases. It takes some good technology and serious dollars to compete with those companies. Cockroach took care of the latter with a $55 million Series C round today.
The round was led by Altimeter Capital and Tiger Global along with existing investor GV. Other existing investors, including Benchmark, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, FirstMark Capital and Work-Bench, also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to more than $110 million, according to the company.
Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO, says the company is building a modern database to compete with these industry giants. “CockroachDB is architected from the ground up as a cloud native database. Fundamentally, what that means is that it’s distributed, not just across nodes in a single data center, which is really table stakes as the database gets bigger, but also across data centers to be resilient. It’s also distributed potentially across the planet in order to give a global customer base what feels like a local experience to keep the data near them,” Kimball explained.
At the same time, even while it has a cloud product hosted on AWS, it also competes with several AWS database products, including Amazon Aurora, Redshift and DynamoDB. Much like MongoDB, which changed its open-source licensing structure last year, Cockroach did as well, for many of the same reasons. They both believed bigger players were taking advantage of the open-source nature of their products to undermine their markets.
“If you’re trying to build a business around an open-source product, you have to be careful that a much bigger player doesn’t come along and extract too much of the value out of the open-source product that you’ve been building and maintaining,” Kimball explained.
As the company deals with all of these competitive pressures, it takes a fair bit of money to continue building a piece of technology to beat the competition, while going up against much deeper-pocketed rivals. So far the company has been doing well, with Q1 revenue this year doubling all of last year. Kimball indicated that Q2 could double Q1, but he wants to keep that going, and that takes money.
“We need to accelerate that sales momentum and that’s usually what the Series C is about. Fundamentally, we have, I think, the most advanced capabilities in the market right now. Certainly we do if you look at the differentiator around just global capability. We nevertheless are competing with Oracle on one side, and Amazon on the other side. So a lot of this money is going towards product development too,” he said.
Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015, and is based in New York City.
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India’s Flipkart bets on free video streaming service and Hindi support to win next 200 million internet users
India’s e-commerce giant Flipkart said on Tuesday that it is revamping its shopping app to add support for Hindi language, a video streaming service and an audio-visual assistant, the latest in a series of recent efforts to expand its reach in the country.
The e-commerce firm, which sold a majority stake to Walmart for $16 billion last year and leads the local market, told TechCrunch that it has started to roll out the features on its shopping app and will push it to all its existing users within the next 20 days.
Only 10% of India’s 1.3 billion people speak English. Flipkart said it has been working to customize its entire platform for several months to add support for Hindi. More than 500 million people in India speak Hindi.
As part of the revamp, the company is also introducing an “audio visual guided navigation” feature, also built in Hindi, that is aimed at first-time internet users — and existing online users not comfortable with making transactions online — to make it easier for them to navigate the service and place orders.
Its rival Amazon India added support for Hindi last year, though the feature is limited to basic text translation.
As part of the accessibility push, Flipkart is also introducing an in-app video streaming feature dubbed “Flipkart Videos” that will syndicate movies, shows and other long-form and short-form content from a number of production houses and movie studios, the company said.
The inclusion of the video streaming feature comes as Indians’ appetite for consuming media content on the internet has ballooned in the recent years. Hotstar, a Disney-owned video streaming service, has amassed more than 300 million monthly active users in the country.
Flipkart said the video streaming feature will enable it to invite a new segment of users to its platform who are online but don’t currently shop on the internet. Even as more than 500 million users are connected to the web in India, only tens of millions of them currently shop there.
The streaming feature will be accessible to all users at no charge without any loyalty program, a company spokesperson said, refuting a recent media report that claimed otherwise.
“In the past 10 years our vision and ethos have been to solve for ‘Real India,’ create India specific tech solutions, here in India. What we are rolling out when it comes to addressing the needs of the next 200 million users in our country, is taking forward those founding principles of access and affordability,” said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Group CEO of Flipkart, in a statement.
“We strongly believe that the next phase of our growth is rooted in loyalty, democratizing e-commerce and the country will continue seeing more innovations that stem from our deep understanding of Indian consumers, especially middle India.”
Flipkart said it is also attempting to make it easier for users to discover items on its app. So it is introducing a feed called “Flipkart Ideas” that will populate short-form videos, animated images, polls and quizzes.
For instance, a user may see a short-form video that shows a sportsperson wearing a pair of sneakers, a t-shirt, a pair of jeans and a cap. If they tap on the video, they will see the exact items the person in the video is wearing and other similar items. One more tap, and the user would be able to purchase any of those items.
The company said it is working with more than 400 influencers and 30 brands to create content that will appear on the feed.
All of these features, as well as a gaming section that Flipkart introduced last year, will now appear at the bottom of the screen for easier navigation, the company said. More than half a million users in India play mini-games on Flipkart everyday. The company said it will introduce more games to boost engagement levels and offer loyalty points as incentive to customers.
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