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Application security platform NeuraLegion raises $4.7 million seed led by DNX Ventures
A video call group photo of NeuraLegion’s team working remotely around the world
Application security platform NeuraLegion announced today it has raised a $4.7 million seed round led by DNX Ventures, an enterprise-focused investment firm. The funding included participation from Fusion Fund, J-Ventures and Incubate Fund. The startup also announced the launch of a new self-serve, community version that allows developers to sign up on their own for the platform and start performing scans within a few minutes.
Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, NeuraLegion also has offices in San Francisco, London and Mostar, Bosnia. It currently offers NexDAST for dynamic application security testing, and NexPLOIT to integrate application security into SDLC (software development life cycle). It was launched last year by a founding team that includes chief executive Shoham Cohen, chief technology officer Bar Hofesh, chief scientist Art Linkov and president and chief commercial officer Gadi Bashvitz.
When asked who NeuraLegion views as its closest competitors, Bashvitz said Invicti Security and WhiteHat Security. Both are known primarily for their static application security testing (SAST) solutions, which Bashvitz said complements DAST products like NeuraLegion’s.
“These are complementary solutions and in fact we have some information partnerships with some of these companies,” he said.
Where NeuraLegion differentiates from other application security solutions, however, is that it was created specifically for developers, quality assurance and DevOps workers, so even though it can also be used by security professionals, it allows scans to be run much earlier in the development process than usual while lowering costs.
Bashvitz added that NeuraLegion is now used by thousands of developers through their organizations, but it is releasing its self-serve, community product to make its solutions more accessible to developers, who can sign up on their own, run their first scans and get results within 15 minutes.
In a statement about the funding, DNX Ventures managing partner Hiro Rio Maeda said, “The DAST market has been long stalled without any innovative approaches. NeuraLegion’s next-generation platform introduces a new way of conducting robust testing in today’s modern CI/CD environment.”
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Sanity, a platform to build and manage content flows on sites, raises $9.3M from Ev Williams, Threshold and more
There are more than 2 billion websites in existence in the world today, millions of apps and a growing range of digital screens where people and businesses present constantly changing arrays of information to each other. But all that opportunity also has a flip side: How can you say what you want, just how you want to say it, without technical hurdle after hurdle getting in your way?
A startup called Sanity has built a platform to help businesses (and their people) do that more easily with a SaaS platform that lets developers create code and systems to manage content. Now, after picking up some 25,000 customers, from “traditional” publishers like Conde Nast and National Geographic through to hundreds of others like Sonos, Brex, Figma, Cloudflare, Mux, Remarkable, Kleiner Perkins, Tablet Magazine, MIT, Universal Health Services, Eurostar and Nike, it is announcing funding of $9.3 million to fuel its growth.
The funding, a Series A, is being led by Threshold Ventures (the VC formerly known as Draper Fisher Jurvetson, rebranded in 2019 after none of the namesakes remained at the firm), with an interesting cast of others also participating.
They include Ev Williams (who knows a thing or two about “content” as the co-founder of Blogger, Twitter and most recently Medium); Adam Gross, ex-CEO of Heroku; Guillermo Rauch, inventor of NextJS and CEO and co-founder of Vercel; Stephanie Friedman (ex-Xamarin and Microsoft); and Monochrome Capital, the new firm launched by Ben Metcalfe (the co-founder of WP Engine, among many other roles).
Heavybit and Alliance Venture, which led its seed round of $2.4 million last year, also participated. Other existing investors include Mathias Biilman and Chris Bach, co-founders of Netlify; Jon Dahl, CEO and co-founder of Mux; and Edvard Engesæth, co-founder of NURX.
Sanity bills itself as a “content platform”, and the open-ended idea of what that could possibly mean is essentially the essence of what the company is about.
Led by co-founder and CEO Magnus Hillestad, it has crafted a set of tools that can help developers structure how and where content gets created, input and eventually presented to people, with its target audience being any organization or person that might be putting together a digital experience whose content is regularly updated and is not static.
Hillestad said that thinking of content as a separate and dynamic element in digital experiences represents a “paradigm shift” in terms of how the web and other content experiences are developing. The idea, he said, is for an organization “not to be held back by features but to have the code to make the components they want.” He described it as a progression along the same trajectories of “what Twilio did by coming in with APIs for communications, and Figma did with its concept of collaboration.”
While e-commerce has typically been a major customer of such “headless” platforms — they will use services like these to help design and manage the front end, with another service like Shopify to manage the commerce at the back end — it’s actually a basic framework that has been applied to a pretty wide range of use cases at Sanity.
They do include e-commerce experiences, but also companies building interactive tools for customers to look at, mix and match various light fixtures from a lighting consultancy; more standard publishing services; and for helping tailor materials for emergency medical training services.
These days, the medium, as they say, is the message, and in that regard “publishing” has taken on a new meaning in the digital age. Whereas in the past it only referred to materials prepared for print, such as books, magazines and newspapers, these days it can be any kind of content prepared for the web or any other endpoint where it will not only be “read” but potentially manipulated in some way, and likely also changed by the producers as well. The very un-static nature of that content makes it fun and interesting, but also a pain to manage.
Sanity has a notable origin that speaks to how it has always given a wide berth and prime positioning to the sanctity of content. It was built originally by an agency in Oslo, Norway, as part of a remit to rethink and recast how to present works for a new website for OMA, the architecture firm co-founded by the iconic Dutch designer Rem Koolhaas.
The information matrix and content management system concept that they put together was strong enough to use the agency to build more sites using the CMS, and eventually the firm spun Sanity out as its own independent firm, founded by Even Westvang, Hillestad, Oyvind Rostad and Simen Svale Skogsrud.
Part of the team, including Hillestad, relocated to the Bay Area to build the startup and integrate it deeper with the bigger tech ecosystem in the region and build out the concept under a SaaS model, while others remained in Oslo.
In its move to the U.S., Sanity has over the past few years been tapping into a growing market for services to enable those who rely on the web to do business do it in a more creative and dynamic way.
“A decade ago, I co-founded WP Engine with the goal of bringing the power of WordPress to the enterprise and small business buyer,” said Metcalfe in a statement. “Not only are we moving away from monolithic codebases to API-driven services, but the way we think about content is changing; as we create once and expect it to appear across web, apps and even IoT devices. Sanity has reimagined the headless CMS, bringing content closer to the developer where it can exist as the defacto content system of record across an entire organization. With CMS so close to my roots, I couldn’t be more delighted that Sanity is the inaugural investment for Monochrome Capital.”
It is not the only company in this wider area getting a lot of attention. Last week, Shogun — which focuses only on e-commerce and front-end design, raised $35 million. Others include Commercetools, Commerce Layer, Strapi, Contentful and ContentStack. Sanity stands out partly by keeping its focus wider than e-commerce and by not using the words “content” or “commerce” in its name.
“We’re seeing a tidal wave of companies transform and digitize every aspect of their business, but the tools they use limit their progress,” said Josh Stein, partner, Threshold Ventures, in a statement. “Sanity’s content platform liberates content and content owners by enabling a truly collaborative and customizable experience, while treating content as data to maximize content velocity across all customer touchpoints and surfaces. We’re excited to back the Sanity team and their impressive developer-focused content management platform.”
Stein and Jesse Robbins, a partner at Heavybit, are both joining Sanity’s board of directors with this round.
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Plenty has raised over $500 million to grow fruits and veggies indoors
Plenty Unlimited has raised $140 million in new funding to build more vertical farms around the U.S.
The new funding, which brings the company’s total cash haul to an abundant $500 million, was led by existing investor SoftBank Vision Fund and included the berry farming giant Driscoll’s. It’s a move that will give Driscoll’s exposure to Plenty’s technology for growing and harvesting fruits and vegetables indoors.
The funding comes as Plenty has inked agreements with both its new berry-interested investor and the Albertsons grocery chain. The company also announced plans to build a new farm in Compton, California.
The financing provides plenty of cash for a company that’s seeing a cornucopia of competition in the tech-enabled cultivated crop market raising a plethora of private and public capital.
In the past month, AppHarvest has agreed to be taken public by a special purpose acquisition company in a deal that would value that greenhouse tomato-grower at a little under $1 billion. And another leafy green grower, Revol Greens, has raised $68 million for its own greenhouse-based bid to be part of the new green revolution.
Meanwhile, Plenty’s more direct competitor, Bowery Farming, is expanding its retail footprint to 650 stores, even as Plenty touts its deal with Albertsons to provide greens to 431 stores in California.
Discoll’s seemed convinced by Plenty’s technology, although the terms of the agreement with the company weren’t disclosed.
“We looked at other vertical farms, and Plenty’s technology was one of the most compelling systems we’d seen for growing berries,” said J. Miles Reiter, Driscoll’s chairman and CEO, in a statement. “We got to know Plenty while working on a joint development agreement to grow strawberries. We were so impressed with their technology, we decided to invest.”
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M1 Finance closes $45M Series C mere months after it raised its $33M Series B
Just months after it announced a $33 million Series B, Chicago-based M1 Finance today disclosed a $45 Series C.
The new financing event was led by Left Lane Capital, the same investor that led M1’s Series B. Bear in mind that so-called inside rounds are now a bullish sign in 2020, as opposed to in prior VC eras when they were viewed more cooly. Other M1 investors include Jump Capital, Clocktower Technology Ventures and Chicago Ventures, though only the first two appear to have taken part in this round.
Per M1, the Series C comes just 120 days after it raised a Series B. A good question is why M1 has raised more capital, and why Left Lane Capital wanted to lead two rounds for the consumer-focused fintech provider. Going back to our prior coverage, we can figure it out.
In February, we reported that M1 Finance had reached the $1 billion assets under management mark, or AUM.
The startup combines three different traditional fintech services into one (roboadvising, neobanking and lending), allowing it to price the package aggressively. The model appears to be working. When M1 raised its Series B a few months later in June, it had reached the $1.45 billion AUM, or about 45% growth in just over a quarter. That’s very good.
Today, the company announced that it has surpassed the $2 billion AUM mark, up more than 38% in the last four months.
M1 posted slower AUM growth in percentage terms and greater growth in raw AUM over a similar time frame heading into its Series C. But regardless of that nuance, the company’s AUM grew quickly.
That fact helps explain its new round. If you were Left Lane Capital, had just led a round into the company, and then watched it keep growing rapidly, you’d want to double-down quickly. Not only to buy more of the company, but also to get the round done before another investor could show up and buy its own piece of M1, diluting you and nabbing your ascendant position as the startup’s most recent lead investor.
So Left Lane led the Series C, hoping that M1 keeps growing like the proverbial garden irritant.
Revenue, growth
Something fun about M1 is that it shared a revenue target as a percent of AUM earlier in the year, namely that it aims to generate around 1% of its AUM in revenue each year. The company’s CEO Brian Barnes re-confirmed the number for TechCrunch this week.
So, with more than $2 billion in AUM, we can see that M1’s revenues are probably on a run rate of more than $20 million today, and could crest a $25 million run rate by the end of the year, provided that growth continues as it has for the startup.
How is M1 adding so much capital to its platform? Barnes told TechCrunch that M1 has tripled its userbase since the start of the year, and that its current users are bringing more funds in from other financial platforms. The combination is making M1 larger, and quickly.
To wrap, our notes above about Left Lane probably wanting to lead the Series C to keep some other firm from doing it — pre-emption is a regular thing in today’s hot VC market — weren’t mere idle speculation. Barnes told TechCrunch in response to a question about its Series C that his company was “fortunate to have significant investor demand for our Series C, partly due to hitting milestones as quickly” as it has. That sounds like the possibility of competing lead investors to us, at least from our present remove.
The M1 round continues the savings and investing boom we’ve tracked this year. And the round is a win for the Midwest at the same time. More when M1 reaches $3 billion in AUM. Start your countdown.
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Dataloop raises $11M Series A round for its AI data management platform
Dataloop, a Tel Aviv-based startup that specializes in helping businesses manage the entire data life cycle for their AI projects, including helping them annotate their data sets, today announced that it has now raised a total of $16 million. This includes a $5 seed round that was previously unreported, as well as an $11 million Series A round that recently closed.
The Series A round was led by Amiti Ventures, with participation from F2 Venture Capital, crowdfunding platform OurCrowd, NextLeap Ventures and SeedIL Ventures.
“Many organizations continue to struggle with moving their AI and ML projects into production as a result of data labeling limitations and a lack of real-time validation that can only be achieved with human input into the system,” said Dataloop CEO Eran Shlomo. “With this investment, we are committed, along with our partners, to overcoming these roadblocks and providing next generation data management tools that will transform the AI industry and meet the rising demand for innovation in global markets.”
Image Credits: Dataloop
For the most part, Dataloop specializes in helping businesses manage and annotate their visual data. It’s agnostic to the vertical its customers are in, but we’re talking about anything from robotics and drones to retail and autonomous driving.
The platform itself centers around the “humans in the loop” model that complements the automated systems, with the ability for humans to train and correct the model as needed. It combines the hosted annotation platform with a Python SDK and REST API for developers, as well as a serverless Functions-as-a-Service environment that runs on top of a Kubernetes cluster for automating dataflows.
Image Credits: Dataloop
The company was founded in 2017. It’ll use the new funding to grow its presence in the U.S. and European markets, something that’s pretty standard for Israeli startups, and build out its engineering team as well.
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Vivun announces $18M Series A to keep growing pre-sales platform
Vivun’s co-founder and CEO, Matt Darrow used to run pre-sales at Zuora and he saw that pre-sales team members had a lot of insight into customers. He believed if he could capture that insight, it would turn into valuable data to be shared across the company. He launched Vivun to build upon that idea in 2018, and today the company announced an $18 million Series A.
Accel led the round with participation from existing investor Unusual Ventures. With today’s investment, Vivun has raised a total of $21 million, according to the company.
Darrow says that the company has caught the attention of investors because this is a unique product category and there has been a lot of demand for it. “It turns out that businesses of all sizes, startups and enterprises, are really craving a solution like Vivun, which is dedicated to pre-sales. It’s a big, expensive department, and there’s never been software for it before,” Darrow told TechCrunch.
He says that a couple of numbers stand out in the company’s first year in business. First of all, the startup grew annual recurring revenue (ARR) six fold (although he wouldn’t share specific numbers) and tripled the workforce growing from 10 to 30, all while doing business as an early stage startup in the midst of a pandemic.
Darrow said while the business has grown this year, he found smaller businesses in the pipeline were cutting back due to the impact of COVID’s, but larger businesses like Okta, Autodesk and Dell Secureworks have filled in nicely, and he says the product actually fits well in larger enterprise organizations.
“If we look at our value proposition and what we do, it increases exponentially with the size of the company. So the larger the team, the larger the silos are, the larger the organization is, the bigger the value of solving the problem for pre-sales becomes,” he said.
After going from a team of 10 to 30 employees in the last year, Darrow wants to double the head count to reach around 60 employees in the next year, fueled in part by the new investment dollars. As he builds the company, the founding team, which is made up of two men and two women, is focused on building a diverse and inclusive employee base.
“It is something that’s really important to us, and we’ve been working at it. Even as we went from 10 to 30, we’ve worked to pay close attention to [diversity and inclusion], and we continue to do so just as part of the culture of how we build the business,” he said.
He’s been having to build that workforce in the middle of COVID, but he says that even before the pandemic shut down offices, he and his founding partners were big on flexibility in terms of time spent in the office versus working from home. “We knew that for mental health strength and stability, that being in the office nine to five, five days a week wasn’t really a modern model that would cut it,” he said.
Even pre-COVID the company was offering two quiet periods a year to let people refresh their batteries. In the midst of COVID, he’s trying to give people Friday afternoons off to go out and exercise and relax their minds.
As the startup grows, those types of things may be harder to do, but it’s the kind of culture Darrow and his founding partners hope to continue to foster as they build the company.
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Edge computing startup Edgify secures $6.5M seed from Octopus, Mangrove and semiconductor
Edgify, which builds AI for edge computing, has secured a $6.5 million seed funding round backed by Octopus Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners and an unnamed semiconductor giant. The name was not released but TechCrunch understands it may be Intel Corp. or Qualcomm Inc.
Edgify’s technology allows “edge devices” (devices at the edge of the internet) to interpret vast amounts of data, train an AI model locally and then share that learning across its network of similar devices. This then trains all the other devices in anything from computer vision, NLP, voice recognition or any other form of AI.
The technology can be applied to anything from MRI machines, connected cars, checkout lanes, mobile devices and anything that has a CPU, GPU or NPU. Edgify’s technology is already being used in supermarkets, for instance.
Ofri Ben-Porat, CEO and co-founder of Edgify, commented in a statement: “Edgify allows companies, from any industry, to train complete deep learning and machine learning models, directly on their own edge devices. This mitigates the need for any data transfer to the Cloud and also grants them close to perfect accuracy every time, and without the need to retrain centrally.”
Mangrove partner Hans-Jürgen Schmitz, who will join Edgify’s Board comments: “We expect a surge in AI adoption across multiple industries with significant long-term potential for Edgify in medical and manufacturing, just to name a few.”
Simon King, partner and Deep Tech Investor at Octopus Ventures added: “As the interconnected world we live in produces more and more data, AI at the edge is becoming increasingly important to process large volumes of information.”
So-called “edge computing” is seen as being one of the forefronts of deep tech right now.
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Nym Health raises $16.5 million for its auditable machine learning tools for automating hospital billing
A little less than two years after raising its seed round, the Israeli-based Nym Health has added another $16.5 million to its cash haul so it can roll out its technology developing auditable machine learning tools for automating hospital billing.
The new financing came from investors, including GV (the investment arm of Google previously known as Google Ventures), and will be used by the company to expand its technology development and sales and marketing efforts across the U.S.
Billing has been a huge problem for healthcare systems in the U.S., thanks to complicated coding that needs to be entered to ensure insurance providers pay for the services medical professionals give to patients.
Nym claims to have solved the problem by developing technologies that can convert medical charts and electronic medical records from physician’s consultations into proper billing codes automatically. The company uses natural language processing and taxonomies that were specifically developed to understand clinical language to determine the optimal charge for each procedure, examination and diagnostic conducted for a patient, according to Nym.
The company was founded in 2018 by two former members of Israel’s 8200 cybersecurity unit of the army. Adam Rimon and Amihai Neiderman both wanted to work on something together and Neiderman was set on doing something in the medical space involving natural language processing. Rimon had just finished a doctorate in computational linguistics, so the move into charting and medical coding seemed natural.
“Because of our approach we can generate full audit trails,” said Neiderman. “We can explain how we understood everything in patient charts.”
Having automated processes that are also auditable is important for healthcare providers in case they need to provide justification to insurance companies for the services they performed.
Nym’s software can’t address fraud if physicians are padding their bills with services they didn’t offer, but it can provide an audit and justification for the services that a hospital coded for — and potentially wring more money for hospitals that lose out thanks to improperly coded bills. “On the medical decision-making we never intervene. We assume that the physician is trying to do their best and they’re sticking to the protocol,” said Neiderman.
Interest in developing better billing systems for healthcare is high among venture investors, considering that coding related denials of payment can cost hospitals $15 billion, according to Nym. It’s a service that brought attention not just from GV, but Bessemer Venture Partners, Dynamic Loop Capital, Lightspeed, Tiger Global, and angel investors including Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner from Flatiron Health.
“Inaccurate coding is bad for everybody,” says Ben Robbins, a venture partner at GV.
Nym charges between $1 and $4 per chart it analyzes, and is already working with around 40 medical providers in the U.S., according to the company.
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Genemod raises cash for its lab inventory management service used by research institutions around the US
Genemod, a software for laboratory inventory management used by institutions like the University of Washington School of Medicine; the University of California, Berkeley; and the National Institutes of Health; has raised $1.7 million from a clutch of top venture investors.
The small seed round came from Defy.vc, with additional commitments from Omicron, Unpopular Ventures, Underdog Labs and Canaan Partners.
With the capital, the company said it would develop a product management software to complement its existing inventory management service.
These are small stepping stones on the way to paving a new road to pharmaceutical development based on collaborative data-sharing technology, the company said.
It’s a road that companies like Owkin and Within3 have raised big dollars to pave already. They’re just two companies in the market that are building collaborative software for the pharmaceutical industries.
Genemod’s pitch is that it can increase productivity by giving researchers a better window into the tools they have and the tools they need to accelerate the process of experimentation without downtime while waiting for supplies.
“While the life sciences industry is known for developing inventive solutions to some of the world’s biggest health problems, many scientists are working with manual, siloed and inefficient processes,” said Jacob Lee, the company’s chief executive.
Alongside the funding, Defy.vc will serve as a growth partner for Genemod, supporting the company as it works to roll out its product road map for the latter half of the year. Neil Sequeira, co-founder and managing director of Defy.vc, will join Genemod’s board of directors.
Founded in 2018, Genemod was part of the first cohort of Venture Out Startups, a pre-seed investment program designed to encourage entrepreneurs to start their own businesses.
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Nuvemshop, a Latin American answer to Shopify, raises $30 million
After several failed startup attempts and nine years spent building Nuvemshop into Latin America’s answer to Shopify, the four co-founders of the company have managed to raise $30 million in venture capital funding as they look to expand their business.
The new funding came from previous investor Kaszek Ventures and new lead investor Qualcomm, with participation from FJ Labs, IGNIA, Elevar Equity and Kevin Efrusy, from the longtime Accel Partners investor’s personal wealth.
It’s been a long road since Santiago Sosa, Alejandro Vazquez, Martin Palombo and Alejandro Alfonso first began working together in Buenos Aires. The quartet started on their entrepreneurial journey trying to develop a marketplace software product for Latin America, but when that didn’t take off, they turned their attention to a more basic problem — how to get small and medium-sized businesses selling online.
Now the company boasts 65,000 businesses that use its platform providing everything from billing and payment processing to logistics and shipping solutions transacting over $100 million per month in sales. Operating as Nuvemshop in Brazil and Tiendanube in the rest of the region, the company has offices in São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Mexico City, with plans to expand into Colombia and Peru in 2021.
Nuvemshop began as more of a consulting business and evolved into the suite of software tools that have managed to attract attention from investors like Qualcomm Ventures.
“Nuvemshop’s platform accelerates a company’s digital transformation and has enabled thousands of SMBs across Latin America to go digital by tapping into the company’s one-stop shop of seamlessly integrated solutions,” said Alexandre Villela, senior director of Qualcomm Technologies Inc. and managing director at Qualcomm Ventures Latin America. “We share their strong engineering focus and look forward to helping them scale their business with our investment.”
Nuvemshop raised its first money in 2015 from Kaszek Ventures (a $5 million investment), and, as the business picked up steam, raised $7 million more from local investors.
It makes money by charging a subscription fee that begins at $3 per month and a transaction fee that decreases as customers buy more expensive subscription packages.
Now that the company has an established footprint in the region, it’s going to focus on three new areas of growth, according to chief executive, Santiago Sosa.
Nuvemshop chief executive, Santiago Sosa. Image credit: Nuvemshop
The company plans to launch a payment processing and logistics gateway of its own. That marketplace will give customers access to more robust shipping solutions thanks to the power of bundling lower demand into a single delivery and ordering system. Nuvemshop also pitches its customers an app store for connecting them to new developer tools.
Finally, the company intends to offer a broader array of financial services. It already offers payment processing, but will look to develop additional services around lending based on revenue.
Like Shopify, Nuvemshop provides a necessary ballast to the big e-commerce aggregation sites like MercadoLibre and Amazon. “Everything they do they try to optimize for the buyer,” Sosa said. That places incredible pricing pressure on retailers and Nuvemshop offers a direct sales alternative, with lower fees, according to Sosa.
The pent-up demand that Sosa sees, is fairly astonishing.
“People are talking about e-commerce penetration going from [roughly] 10% over total retail sales to [roughly] 20%, as it has happened in other countries. We see it differently, as we envision a massive disruption around commerce in the next 15 years, and are pretty confident that [roughly] 90% of retail will be somehow tech-enabled,” said Sosa, in a statement.
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