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JupiterOne raises $19M Series A to automate cyber asset management
Asset management might not be the most exciting talking topic, but it’s often an overlooked area of cyber-defenses. By knowing exactly what assets your company has makes it easier to know where the security weak spots are.
That’s the problem JupiterOne is trying to fix.
“We built JupiterOne because we saw a gap in how organizations manage the security and compliance of their cyber assets day to day,” said Erkang Zheng, the company’s founder and chief executive.
The Morrisville, North Carolina-based startup, which spun out from healthcare cloud firm LifeOmic in 2018, helps companies see all of their digital and cloud assets by integrating with dozens of services and tools, including Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare and GitLab, and centralizing the results into a single monitoring tool.
JupiterOne says it makes it easier for companies to spot security issues and maintain compliance, with an aim of helping companies prevent security lapses and data breaches by catching issues early on.
The company already has Reddit, Databricks and Auth0 as customers, and just secured $19 million in its Series A, led by Bain Capital Ventures and with participation from Rain Capital and its parent company LifeOmic.
As part of the deal, Bain partner Enrique Salem will join JupiterOne’s board. “We see a large multi-billion-dollar market opportunity for this technology across mid-market and enterprise customers,” he said. Asset management is slated to be a $8.5 billion market by 2024.
Zheng told TechCrunch the company plans to use the funds to accelerate its engineering efforts and its go-to-market strategy, with new product features to come.
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Zwift, maker of a popular indoor training app, just landed a whopping $450 million in funding led by KKR
Zwift, a 350-person, Long Beach, California-based online fitness platform that immerses cyclists and runners in 3D-generated worlds, just raised a hefty $450 million in funding led by the investment firm KKR in exchange for a minority stake in its business.
Permira, the Amazon Alexa Fund and Specialized Bicycle’s venture capital fund, Zone 5 Ventures, also joined the round, alongside earlier backers Highland Europe, Novator, Causeway Media and True, which is a Europe-based consumer specialist firm.
Zwift has now raised $620 million altogether and is valued at north of $1 billion.
Why such a big round? Right now, the company just makes an app, albeit a popular one.
Since its 2015 founding, 2.5 million people have signed up to enter a world that, as Outside magazine once described it, is “part social-media platform, part personal trainer, part computer game.” That particular combination makes Zwift’s app appealing to both recreational riders and pros looking to train no matter the conditions outside.
The company declined to share its active subscriber numbers with us — Zwift charges $15 per month for its service — but it seemingly has a loyal base of users. For example, 117,000 of them competed in a virtual version of the Tour de France that Zwift hosted in July after it was chosen by the official race organizer of the real tour as its partner on the event.
Which leads us back to this giant round and what it will be used for. Today, in order to use the app, Zwift’s biking adherents need to buy their own smart trainers, which can cost anywhere from $300 to $700 and are made by brands like Elite and Wahoo. Meanwhile, runners use Zwift’s app with their own treadmills.
Now, Zwift is jumping headfirst into the hardware business itself. Though a spokesman for the company said it can’t discuss any particulars — “It takes time to develop hardware properly, and COVID has placed increased pressure on production” — it is hoping to bring its first product to market “as soon as possible.”
He added that the hardware will make Zwift a “more immersive and seamless experience for users.”
Either way, the direction isn’t a surprising one for the company, and we don’t say that merely because Specialized participated in this round as a strategic backer. Co-founder and CEO Eric Min has told us in the past that the company hoped to produce its own trainers some day.
Given the runaway success of the in-home fitness company Peloton, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a treadmill follow, or even a different product entirely. Said the Zwift spokesman, “In the future, it’s possible that we could bring in other disciplines or a more gamified experience.” (It will have expert advice in this area if it does, given that Zwift just brought aboard Ilkka Paananen, the co-founder and CEO of Finnish gaming company Supercell, as an investor and board member.)
In the meantime, the company tells us not to expect the kind of classes that have proven so successful for Peloton, tempting as it may be to draw parallels.
While Zwift prides itself on users’ ability to organize group rides and runs and workouts, classes, says its spokesman, are “not in the offing.”
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Data virtualization service Varada raises $12M
Varada, a Tel Aviv-based startup that focuses on making it easier for businesses to query data across services, today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series A round led by Israeli early-stage fund MizMaa Ventures, with participation by Gefen Capital.
“If you look at the storage aspect for big data, there’s always innovation, but we can put a lot of data in one place,” Varada CEO and co-founder Eran Vanounou told me. “But translating data into insight? It’s so hard. It’s costly. It’s slow. It’s complicated.”
That’s a lesson he learned during his time as CTO of LivePerson, which he described as a classic big data company. And just like at LivePerson, where the team had to reinvent the wheel to solve its data problems, again and again, every company — and not just the large enterprises — now struggles with managing their data and getting insights out of it, Vanounou argued.
Image Credits: Varada
The rest of the founding team, David Krakov, Roman Vainbrand and Tal Ben-Moshe, already had a lot of experience in dealing with these problems, too, with Ben-Moshe having served at the chief software architect of Dell EMC’s XtremIO flash array unit, for example. They built the system for indexing big data that’s at the core of Varada’s platform (with the open-source Presto SQL query engine being one of the other cornerstones).
Image Credits: Varada
Essentially, Varada embraces the idea of data lakes and enriches that with its indexing capabilities. And those indexing capabilities is where Varada’s smarts can be found. As Vanounou explained, the company is using a machine learning system to understand when users tend to run certain workloads, and then caches the data ahead of time, making the system far faster than its competitors.
“If you think about big organizations and think about the workloads and the queries, what happens during the morning time is different from evening time. What happened yesterday is not what happened today. What happened on a rainy day is not what happened on a shiny day. […] We listen to what’s going on and we optimize. We leverage the indexing technology. We index what is needed when it is needed.”
That helps speed up queries, but it also means less data has to be replicated, which also brings down the cost. As MizMaa’s Aaron Applbaum noted, since Varada is not a SaaS solution, the buyers still get all of the discounts from their cloud providers, too.
In addition, the system can allocate resources intelligently so that different users can tap into different amounts of bandwidth. You can tell it to give customers more bandwidth than your financial analysts, for example.
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“Data is growing like crazy: in volume, in scale, in complexity, in who requires it and what the business intelligence uses are, what the API uses are,” Applbaum said when I asked him why he decided to invest. “And compute is getting slightly cheaper, but not really, and storage is getting cheaper. So if you can make the trade-off to store more stuff, and access things more intelligently, more quickly, more agile — that was the basis of our thesis, as long as you can do it without compromising performance.”
Varada, with its team of experienced executives, architects and engineers, ticked a lot of the company’s boxes in this regard, but he also noted that unlike some other Israeli startups, the team understood that it had to listen to customers and understand their needs, too.
“In Israel, you have a history — and it’s become less and less the case — but historically, there’s a joke that it’s ‘ready, fire, aim.’ You build a technology, you’ve got this beautiful thing and you’re like, ‘alright, we did it,’ but without listening to the needs of the customer,” he explained.
The Varada team is not afraid to compare itself to Snowflake, which at least at first glance seems to make similar promises. Vananou praised the company for opening up the data warehousing market and proving that people are willing to pay for good analytics. But he argues that Varada’s approach is fundamentally different.
“We embrace the data lake. So if you are Mr. Customer, your data is your data. We’re not going to take it, move it, copy it. This is your single source of truth,” he said. And in addition, the data can stay in the company’s virtual private cloud. He also argues that Varada isn’t so much focused on the business users but the technologists inside a company.
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Airtable raises $185M and launches new low-code and automation features
The spreadsheet-centric database and no-code platform Airtable today announced that it has raised a $185 million Series D funding round, putting the company at a $2.585 billion post-money valuation.
Thrive Capital led the round, with additional funding by existing investors Benchmark, Coatue, Caffeinated Capital and CRV, as well as new investor D1 Capital. With this, Airtable, which says it now has 200,000 companies using its service, has raised a total of about $350 million. Current customers include Netflix, HBO, Condé Nast Entertainment, TIME, City of Los Angeles, MIT Media Lab and IBM.
In addition, the company is also launching one of its largest feature updates today, which starts to execute on the company’s overall platform vision that goes beyond its current no-code capabilities and brings tools to the service more low-code features, as well new automation (think IFTTT for Airtable) and data management.
As Airtable founder and CEO Howie Liu told me, a number of investors approached the company since it raised its Series C round in 2018, in part because the market clearly realized the potential size of the low-code/no-code market.
“I think there’s this increasing market recognition that the space is real, and the space is very large […],” he told me. “While we didn’t strictly need the funding, it allowed us to continue to invest aggressively into furthering our platform, vision and really executing aggressively, […] without having to worry about, ‘well, what happens with COVID?’ There’s a lot of uncertainty, right? And I think even today there’s still a lot of uncertainty about what the next year will bear.”
The company started opening the round a couple of months after the first shelter in place orders in California, and for most investors, this was a purely digital process.
Liu has always been open about the fact that he wants to build this company for the long haul — especially after he sold his last company to Salesforce at an early stage. As a founder, that likely means he is trying to keep his stake in the company high, even as Airtable continues to raise more money. He argues, though, that more so than the legal and structural controls, being aligned with his investors is what matters most.
“I think actually, what’s more important in my view, is having philosophical alignment and expectations alignment with the investors,” he said. “Because I don’t want to be in a position where it comes down to a legal right or structural debate over the future of the company. That almost feels to me like the last resort where it’s already gotten to a place where things are ugly. I’d much rather be in a position where all the investors around the table, whether they have legal say or not, are fully aligned with what we’re trying to do with this business.”
Just as important as the new funding though, are the various new features the company is launching today. Maybe the most important of these is Airtable Apps. Previously, Airtable users could use pre-built blocks to add maps, Gantt charts and other features to their tables. But while being a no-code service surely helped Airtable’s users get started, there’s always an inevitable point where the pre-built functionality just isn’t enough and users need more custom tools (Liu calls this an escape valve). So with Airtable Apps, more sophisticated users can now build additional functionality in JavaScript — and if they choose to do so, they can then share those new capabilities with other users in the new Airtable Marketplace.
Image Credits: Airtable
“You may or may not need an escape valve and obviously, we’ve gotten this far with 200,000 organizations using Airtable without that kind of escape valve,” he noted. “But I think that we open up a lot more use cases when you can say, well, Airtable by itself is 99% there, but that last 1% is make or break. You need it. And then, just having that outlet and making it much more leveraged to build that use case on Airtable with 1% effort, rather than building the full-stack application as a custom built application is all the difference.”
Image Credits: Airtable
The other major new feature is Airtable Automations. With this, you can build custom, automated workflows to generate reports or perform other repetitive steps. You can do a lot of that through the service’s graphical interface or use JavaScript to build your own custom flows and integrations, too. For now, this feature is available for free, but the team is looking into how to charge for it over time, given that these automated flows may become costly if you run them often.
The last new feature is Airtable Sync. With this, teams can more easily share data across an organization, while also providing controls for who can see what. “The goal is to enable people who built software with Airtable to make that software interconnected and to be able to share a source of truth table between different instances of our tables,” Liu explained.
Image Credits: Airtable
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DCM is poised to make roughly $1 billion off its $26 million bet on Bill.com
David Chao, the cofounder of the cross-border venture firm DCM, speaks English, Japanese, and Mandarin. But he also knows how to talk to founders.
It’s worth a lot. Consider that DCM could see more than $1 billion from the $26.4 million it invested across 14 years in the cloud-based business-to-business payments company Bill.com, starting with its A round. Indeed, by the time Bill.com went public last December, when its shares priced at $22 apiece, DCM’s stake — which was 16% sailing into the IPO — was worth a not-so-small fortune.
Since then, Wall Street’s lust for both digital payments and subscription-based revenue models has driven Bill.com’s shares to roughly $90 each. Little wonder that in recent weeks, DCM has sold roughly 70 percent of a stake that’s currently valued at roughly $900 million and was worth more than $1 billion a few weeks ago. (It still owns 30 percent of its position and says the shares are free and clear to trade.)
We talked with Chao earlier today about Bill.com, on whose board he sits and whose founder, René Lacerte, is someone Chao backed previously. We also talked about another very lucrative stake DCM holds right now, about DCM’s newest fund, and about how Chao navigates between the U.S. and China as relations between the two countries worsen. Our conversation has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
TC: I’m seeing you owned about 33% of Bill.com after the first round. How did that initial check come to pass? Had you invested before in Lacerte?
DC: That’s right. René started [an online payroll] company called PayCycle and we’d backed him and it sold to Intuit [in 2009] and René made good money and we made money. And when he wanted to start this next thing, he said, ‘Look, I want to do something that’s a bigger outcome. I don’t want to sell the company along the way. I just want this time to do a big public company.’
TC: Why did he sell PayCycle if that was his ambition?
DC: It was largely because when you’re a first-time CEO and entrepreneur and a large company offers you the chance to make millions and millions of dollars, you’re a bit more tempted to sell the company. And it was a good price. For where the company was, it was a decent price.
Bill.com was a little bit different. We had good offers before going public. We even had an offer right before we went public. But René said, ‘No, this time, I want to go all the way.’ And he fulfilled that promise he’d made to himself. It’s a 14-year success story.
TC: You’ve sold most of your stake in recent weeks; how does that outcome compare with other recent exits for DCM?
DC: We actually have another recent one that’s phenomenal. We invested in a company called Kuaishou in China. It’s the largest competitor to Bytedance’s TikTok in China. We’ve invested $49.3 million altogether and now that stake is worth $3.8 billion. The company is still private held, but we actually cashed out around 15% of our holdings. and with just that sale alone we’ve already [seen 10 times] that $30 million.
TC: How do you think about selling off your holdings, particularly once a company has gone public?
DC: It’s really case by case. In general, once a company goes public, we probably spend somewhere between 18 months to three years [unwinding our position]. We had two big IPOs in Japan last year. One company [has] a $1.6 billion market cap; the other is a $2.6 billion company. There are some [cases] that are 12 months and there are some [where we own some shares] for four or five years.
TC: What types of businesses are these newly public companies in Japan?
DC: They’re both B2B. One is pretty much the Bill.com of Japan. The other makes contact management software
TC: Isn’t DCM also an investor in Blued, the LGBTQ dating app that went public in the U.S. in July?
DC: Yes, our stake wasn’t very big, but we were probably the first major VC to jump in because it was controversial.
TC: I also saw that you closed a new $880 million early stage fund this summer.
DC: Yes, that’s right. It was largely driven by the fact that many of our funds have done well. We’re now on fund nine, but our fund seven is on paper today 9x, and even the fund that Bill.com is in, fund four, is now more than 3x. So is fund five. So we’re in a good spot.
TC: As a cross-border fund, what does the growing tension between the U.S and China mean for your team and how it operates?
DC: It’s not a huge impact. If we were currently investing in semiconductor companies, for example, I think it would be a pretty rough period, because [the U.S.] restricts all the money coming from any foreign sources. At least, you’d be under strong scrutiny. And if we invested in a semiconductor company in China, you might not be able to go public in the U.S.
But the kinds of deals that we do, which are largely B2B and B2C — more on the software and services side — they aren’t as impacted. I’d say 90% of our deals in China focus on the domestic market. And so it doesn’t really impact us as much.
I think some of the Western institutions putting money into the Chinese market — that might be decreasing, or at least they’re a little bit more on the sidelines, trying to figure out whether they should be continuing to invest in China. And maybe for Chinese companies, less companies will go public in the U.S., etcetera. But some of these companies can go public in Hong Kong.
TC: How you feel about the U.S. administration’s policies? Do you understand them? Are you frustrated by them?
DC: I think it requires patience, because what [is announced and] goes on the news, versus what is really implemented and how it truly affects the industry, there’s a huge gap.
[Correction: This story originally reported that DCM had sold nearly $900 worth of shares and maintains another 30%; the firm’s entire position is currently worth $900 million, with 30% of those shares still held.]
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Toucan raises $3M to teach you new languages as you browse the web
Toucan has developed a Chrome browser extension designed for anyone who wants to learn a new language but hasn’t found the motivation or the time.
Once installed, the extension scans the text of any (English-language) website you’re visiting and will automatically translate some of the words into the language you’re trying to learn. If you mouse over the word, you’ll see the original English word. Think of it as a browser-based version of language flashcards.
The startup was founded by CEO Taylor Nieman, CTO Shaun Merritt and CPO Brandon Dietz. Today, it’s announcing that it has raised $3 million in seed funding led by GSV Ventures, with participation from Amplifyher Ventures, Wonder Ventures, Golden Ventures, Halogen Ventures, Vitalize Ventures and strategic angel investors.
Nieman’s past roles include business development roles at Headspace (where Dietz was a senior product manager), startup studio Science and car leasing startup Fair.com (where Merritt was an iOS developer). She told me that one thing she learned from across all those experiences is “habit formation — how hard it actually is to do anything that steals people’s time.”
Dietz made a similar point, arguing that while language learning software like Rosetta Stone and Duolingo has had its share of success, “It’s just such a high ask to get people to change their behavior and go to this one website,” particularly on a daily basis.
So Toucan is designed to help users learn a new language (it currently supports Spanish, French, Italian, German and Portuguese) while they browse the web as they normally would, without having to change their behavior.
Image Credits: Toucan
Nieman said the extension can be used to solidify and expand your vocabulary as you take digital or in-person classes. Or if you’re not taking classes, you can still use Toucan on its own, and it can help you achieve (as Dietz put it) “that magic moment of realizing you know a few words in other people’s languages.”
To ensure accuracy, the company works with teams of translators, including college professors and students, while also employing natural language processing to understand the context in which words are appearing. Users can also report words that are incorrectly translated.
And Toucan is experimenting with fun ways to promote itself, including the ability to “own” a word, so that for a week, your name appears anytime a word is translated by Toucan. In fact, the Toucan team has gifted me the word “writer” — but since ownership is currently free, I guess it’s not a bribe?
Eventually, the company could charge people and businesses to own (a.k.a. sponsor) certain words. In addition, users can sign up for a premium subscription that gives them access to additional vocabulary. Dietz suggested that Toucan will continue exploring different business models, but he said the team is committed to “accessible” education and will keep “a large chunk” of the offering free.
Looking ahead, Toucan is planning to add new languages and to launch browser extensions for Firefox and Safari. And eventually, Nieman said the startup could apply the same approach to other subjects, “history or science or math or general knowledge.”
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Podcast analytics and attribution startup Chartable raises $2.25M
Chartable, a startup known for its authoritative podcast download charts, is announcing that it has raised $2.25 million in seed funding.
Founders Dave Zohrob and Harish Agarwal previously worked together at AngelList, and they also created Hacker Daily, a podcast recapping the headlines from Hacker News. Zohrob (Chartable’s CEO) told me their experience hosting a podcast convinced the pair to create an analytics product.
“Podcasting is a weird market,” he said. “One day, our downloads went from 4,000 a day to 5,000 a day. Why did that happen? We had no idea.”
So they built Chartable to give publishers and advertisers the insights they need to understand their audience and their business.
That means creating industry-wide charts, but also helping publishers aggregate their listening data across different podcast apps and launching products like SmartAds (to measure the effectiveness of podcast advertising), SmartLinks (to track the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns at driving podcast downloads) and SmartPromos (an attribution product for cross-podcast promotional campaigns).
Founded in 2018, Chartable says it’s now tracking 1 billion podcast downloads and ad impressions every month, compared to 100 million downloads a year ago. While the startup offers a free version for independent podcasters, Zohrob noted it’s currently working with eight of the 10 biggest podcast publishers globally.
Chartable founders Harish Agarwal and Dave Zohrob (Image Credits: Chartable)
He argued that in some ways, history is repeating itself, and that Chartable serves a similar function for podcasts as analytics companies like App Annie do for the App Store. At the same time, he suggested that podcasting is a very different market.
“It’s more fragmented, it’s not just Apple and Android, and there’s a billion different business models,” Zohrob said. “There’s a lot more complexity.”
As for whether upcoming privacy changes in iOS could affect Chartable’s attribution tools, Zohrob said it shouldn’t make “a huge difference,” because the data for podcast attribution is so limited already.
“Ultimately what’s happening with the rest of digital advertising is that it’s going to start to look like podcast advertising, which is kind of funny,” he said. “Maybe they’ll end up meeting somewhere in the middle.”
The funding was led by Initialized Capital, which also contributed to Chartable’s $1.5 million round last year. Other investors include Naval Ravikant, Greycroft Partners, The Fund, Weekend Fund, Jim Young and Lukas Biewald.
“Chartable is the authority on podcast analytics and attribution,” said Initialized co-founder Alexis Ohanian in a statement. (He led the Chartable investment before leaving Initialized.) “We couldn’t be happier to support them as they build the tools that brands and publishers need to advance the podcast industry.”
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Wildtype is opening up a pre-order list for select chefs as it focuses on lab-grown, sushi-grade salmon
Wildtype, the startup making lab-grown salmon, is opening up a pre-order list for select chefs.
Although the company is as much as five years out from commercial production, according to founders, the company is looking to partner with select chefs around the country who want to incorporate their sushi-grade salmon product into their menus.
“We’re not launching right now. We’re releasing the news that we have the next iteration of the product,” said co-founder Justin Kolbeck, a former U.S. diplomat who launched the company to address issues of food insecurity he’d seen firsthand while stationed in Afghanistan.
“[It’s] sushi or nigiri or sashimi that you would order at a sushi restaurant,” he said. So the product that Wildtype hopes to ship will be equivalent to the saku blocks of fish meat that sushi chefs carve to prepare salmon. “Chefs will take a fish apart into saku blocks which are 10 to 14 ounces of fish,” said Kolbeck. “They’ll cut out bits that go on nigiri and the bits that are left over are made into rolls. We’ve designed an initial product release that can serve all three of those form factors.”
The process is more difficult than simply culturing cells. According to Kolbeck and Wildtype’s other co-founder Arye Elfenbein, the company has developed its own technology for developing the scaffolding on which both the muscle tissue and fats can grow to replicate the taste and texture of wild-caught salmon.
“We’re developing the cell lines ourselves, we’re developing the scaffolding and we’re developing the nutrients that we need to grow and we’re developing the cultivators that the cells need to grow in,” said Kolbeck.
Image of Wildtype’s sushi-grade, lab-grown salmon (Image Credit: Arye Elfenbein/Wildtype)
For the cultivated meat industry to reach its full potential, companies may need to differentiate their businesses to focus on a single element of the supply chain going forward, the founders said.
Already, companies like Future Fields are raising money to focus on specific examples of the cultivated food supply chain, and Wildtype considered going down that road itself, according to Elfenbein.
“What we’ve created is special in its ability to provide cells with the right signals to organize and mature,” said Elfenbein. “This is applicable to other species than the salmon that we have worked on… we basically create a scaffold that provides the right guidance in different places for cells to take up fats in different places or become more striated.”
Already Wildtype has created sushi-grade salmon that achieves equivalence when it comes to nutrition and when it comes to the healthy omega 3 fats that make salmon a healthier option for consumers.
Wildtype is already working with restaurants in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle and is looking for chefs in other parts of the country.
Kolbeck thinks the timing is right for the company’s cultivated product. Consumers right now are coming to the realization that the supply chain for seafood is broken even as more shoppers are gravitating from the meat aisle to seafood in greater numbers.
From mislabeling of fish to the problems associated with factory fish farming, aquaculture and environmental degradation — along with the risks of chemically contaminated fish — shoppers who want seafood are also increasingly looking for more information about the provenance of the food they’re eating.
“The news is that we’re placing our bet on sushi as an industry where we can launch and make a big splash… pun intended,” said Kolbeck.
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Willo, a freemium video interview SaaS, scores ~$320K during the remote work boom
Glasgow, Scotland-based video interview startup Willo has scored a £250,000 (~$320k) seed round of funding after watching demand for its asynchronous Q&A style video platform leap up during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Guernsey-based VC firm 1818 Venture Capital is investing in the seed round, with Willo board members Steve Perry, Stefan Ciecierski and Peter Preston also kicking in a smaller chunk of the capital.
The 2018-founded startup says usage of its SaaS platform has grown at least 80% each month since April, after the UK went into a nationwide lockdown to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Customers have also been finding new uses for the product beyond video interviews — such as for reviews, training, and learning and development — as remote working has been supercharged by the pandemic.
“We have over 1,000 users in 60+ countries — growing 2x faster this month than previous months!” says CEO and founder, Euan Cameron. “Core industries are recruitment, customer research, learning and development and non-profits for volunteers etc.”
The seed funding will be put towards accelerating Willo’s international growth — with a recruitment drive that will add 24 members of staff planned, in addition to spending on further product development.
Cameron confirms it’s working on adding real-time video to the platform, when we ask — so it’s gunning to go after a slice of Zoom (et al)’s lunch.
“Our core product offering is simple, affordable async video communication. However, we are currently in development of a realtime (Live) interviewing option so that organisations can seamlessly flip from an asynchronous video into a realtime one,” he says.
Currently Willo offers an interface that let employers pose questions for candidates/staff to respond to by recording a video response. The platform stores all videos in a dashboard for easy reviewing and sharing.
For the recruitment use-case it also offers a question bank — letting employers choose from “hundreds” of pre-written questions to shave a little friction off the recruitment process.
Expanding on some of the additional uses customers have been finding for the platform during the pandemic, Cameron tells TechCrunch: “We have an education charity in the UK (Worktree) who use Willo to ask people in successful careers around the world about their job and their career path. Worktree then provides these videos to kids in schools to help them make career choices.
“A business in Europe uses Willo to identify niche influencers who have potential and bring them on board a training and development program.”
Another example he gives is a university in India that’s using it to find and enrol software engineers for a degree course. Businesses are also using it to obtain customer testimonials and for customer research. And of course Willo’s own VC investor is a user — having adopted the platform for all new business pitches.
“Every new business must go through Willo as part of what they have branded their ‘Ten Minute Pitch’. They connect Willo to Calendy to automate this workflow which is cool,” he notes, adding: “What is most interesting is that all of these examples previously used to rely on face-to-face meetings or video calls, but they had to adapt.”
Willo is also putting a tentative toe into the waters of artificial intelligence for the hiring use-case, although he says its roadmap has shifted to focus more on chasing growth as a result of the pandemic lockdown effect.
Its website trails an “AI-powered” beta feature that’s doing keyword analysis with the aim of identifying personality and behavioral traits, based on how candidates speak.
Asked about this, Cameron says: “Currently, our AI which is in beta is purely focused on the transcription of the audio, we are working hard on not only transcribing accurately but also creating keyword trends. For example, if you are an analytical person we can identify that and call it out to the organisation by looking at common words and themes within your interview.”
“This is very much in its infancy as COVID-19 has pushed us to focus on delivering what we already do at scale and for the many additional use cases [mentioned previously],” he adds.
Applying algorithms to automate elements of the hiring process is something a growing number of startups have been dabbling in in recent years. Although there can be legal risks around bias/discrimination when applying such tools — given the varied and often complex patchworks of applicable laws in different jurisdictions. (In the UK, for example, equality, employment and data protection law may all need to be considered.)
Asked how Willo is avoiding the risk of AI-powered keyword analysis leading to unfair/unequal effects for interview candidates, Cameron says: “Regarding UK equality law we have been working with organisations on a 1-to-1 basis around training and development of their own staff to ensure that they are using Willo as a tool for good. We believe that the same bias and discrimination would occur in a face-to-face or live video interview so it is a case of eradicating that from the individuals through training. We partner with an HR consultancy to help deliver this training when requested.”
“We are working with an incredibly experienced data and compliance expert to ensure we introduce AI effectively, legally and to the benefit of both interviewer and interviewee,” he adds.
“Our core values are always to be transparent and ensure that we are adding value for all users. One of the challenges with AI at Willo is to ensure that we continue to enhance the human interactions at scale — the number one piece of feedback we receive from users is that they loved seeing and hearing from people — so we never want to automate that out of the product.”
On the competitive front, Cameron lists Sparkhire, Vidcruiter and Recright as “key” competitors though he notes that Willo, which offers a freemium tier, is positioning itself to be accessible for a wider range of users.
“They all focus primarily on recruitment and are prohibitively expensive for most SMEs and start-ups. I believe that video interviewing should benefit everyone, not just large multinationals,” he adds.
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Pitching access management on the fly, Los Angeles-based Britive raises $5.4 million
It seems Los Angeles is becoming an enterprise software hotspot.
LA saw its first big enterprise exit in recent memory with the recent acquisition of Signal Sciences for $775 million, and less than a month later a hometown startup, Britive has raised $5.4 million from LA’s own venture fund, Upfront Ventures and a clutch of security experts.
For chief executive Artyom Poghosyan and chief technology officer Alex Gudanis, Britive is simply the latest initiative in a decades-long effort to reshape security technology.
Both Poghosyan and Gudanis have long histories in identity and access management; back in 2009 Poghosyan founded Advancive Technology Solutions, which was acquired by Optiv in 2015 to bulk up its identity access management service.
Now, he and Gudanis are trying to solve the issues of identity access management that the new, ubiquitous cloud computing model presents for security officers and developers.
“When Optiv acquired us, we were already seeing interesting and strong signals in the technolog space about the disruption that was being driven by cloud technologies,” said Poghosyan.
Those cloud technologies presented new challenges for the kind of privileged access management technologies that Poghosyan had developed.
The solution that Britive pitches is a dynamic model for granting permissions for access, Poghosyan said. Instead of granting permanent access, there are policy-based pre-authorizations that a company can set up defined for specific tasks and roles.
Based on a developer’s role and work, they can request and receive access automatically based on the specific parameters defined by a company or security officer.
The company already has more than a dozen customers using its technology after launching merely two years ago. It’s a customer base that includes one of the world’s largest carmakers and a global clothing brand — companies Poghosyan declined to identify, citing contractual obligations.
The company charges based on the number of users who are requesting permission for access, Poghosyan said.
As more companies move to remote work in the COVID-19 era and distributed teams become the norm, streamlining the provisioning and access management process for companies is going to become even more important.
Undoubtedly, that’s why Britive was able to land investors like Upfront Ventures and why their partner, Kara Nortman, is joining the company’s board of directors. It’s also the reason the company was able to attract some of LA’s leading enterprise executives to back the company, including Andrew Peterson, CEO of Signal Sciences and Dave Cole, CEO of Open Raven.
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