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Apple has acquired Fleetsmith, a startup that helps IT manage Apple devices remotely
At a time when IT has to help employees set up and manage devices remotely, a service that simplifies those processes could certainly come in handy. Apple recognized that, and acquired Fleetsmith today, a startup that helps companies do precisely that with Apple devices.
While Apple didn’t publicize the acquisition, it has confirmed the deal with TechCrunch, while Fleetsmith announced the deal in a company blog post. Neither company was sharing the purchase price.
The startup has built technology that takes advantage of Apple’s Device Enrollment Program, allowing IT departments to bring devices online as soon as the employee takes it out of the box and powers it up.
At the time of its $30 million Series B funding last year, CEO Zack Blum explained the company’s core value proposition: “From a customer perspective, they can ship devices directly to their employees. The employee unwraps it, connects to Wi-Fi and the device is enrolled automatically in Fleetsmith,” Blum explained at that time.
Over time, the company has layered on other useful pieces beyond automating device registration, like updating devices automatically with OS and security updates, while letting IT see a dashboard of the status of all devices under management, all in a pretty slick interface.
While Apple will in all likelihood continue to work with Jamf, the leader in the Apple device management space, this acquisition gives the company a remote management option at a time when it’s essential with so many employees working from home.
Fleetsmith, which has raised more than $40 million from investors, like Menlo Ventures, Tiger Global Management, Upfront Ventures and Harrison Metal, will continue to sell the product through the company website, according to the blog post.
The founders put a happy face on the deal, as founders tend to do. “We’re thrilled to join Apple. Our shared values of putting the customer at the center of everything we do without sacrificing privacy and security, means we can truly meet our mission, delivering Fleetsmith to businesses and institutions of all sizes, around the world,” they wrote.
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Airtable’s Howie Liu to join us at Disrupt 2020
Collaborative enterprise software is absolutely booming, and Airtable is riding that wave in a very real way.
The company, which offers a flexible, collaborative database product, has raised more than $170 million in funding from investors like CRV, Benchmark, Coatue Management and Thrive Capital. So it should come as no surprise that we’re simply thrilled to have Airtable co-founder and CEO Howie Liu join us at Disrupt 2020.
Liu went to Duke University before starting his first company, eTacts, which was an automated CRM system that received investment from the founders of YouTube, Powerset and Delicious, as well as investors like Ron Conway and Ashton Kutcher.
Liu then went on to lead the social CRM product for Salesforce before leaving to set his own course once again with Airtable .
Airtable was founded back in 2012 with a broad mission of democratizing software. At its essence, Airtable is a relational database. Laymen can think of it as a Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel on steroids, but it actually goes much deeper than that.
Software is built on data — organized data, to be exact — and while many of us can compile and organize data into a spreadsheet, few can make it sing its way to a software product. Airtable aims to make that possible for anyone, even a non-developer.
That said, the company faces several hurdles. Airtable is a product that can be used in many, many ways, from tracking sales goals to organizing product road maps to managing workflows. With this type of open-ended product, it can be difficult to educate the end-user on how to make the most of it, or how to use it to begin with.
We’ll talk with Liu about how to build a very complex product in the most user-friendly way possible. We’ll also ask him about the state of enterprise software sales at a time when most large companies are freezing or decreasing spending, the future of no- and low-code software and how he thinks about hyper-growth.
Disrupt is all virtual in 2020 and runs September 14 to September 18, and we have several Digital Pass options to be part of the action or to exhibit virtually, which you can check out here.
Liu joins a stellar roster of speakers, including Roelof Botha, Cyan Banister, Charles Hudson and Mike Cannon-Brookes, with more speakers to be announced soon!
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Privacy assistant Jumbo raises $8 million and releases major update
A year after its initial release, Jumbo has two important pieces of news to announce. First, the company has released a major update of its app that protects your privacy on online services. Second, the company has raised an $8 million Series A funding round.
If you’re not familiar with Jumbo, the app wants to fix what’s broken with online privacy today. Complicated terms of services combined with customer-hostile default settings have made it really hard to understand what personal information is out there. Due to recent regulatory changes, it’s now possible to change privacy settings on many services.
While it is possible, it doesn’t mean it is easy. If you’ve tried to adjust your privacy settings on Facebook or LinkedIn, you know that it’s a convoluted process with a lot of sub-menus and non-descriptive text.
Similarly, social networks have been around for more than a decade. While you were comfortable sharing photos and public messages with a small group of friends 10 years ago, you don’t necessarily want to leave this content accessible to hundreds or even thousands of “friends” today.
The result is an iPhone and Android app that puts you in charge of your privacy. It’s essentially a dashboard that lets you control your privacy on the web. You first connect the app to various online services and you can then control those services from Jumbo. Jumbo doesn’t limit itself to what you can do with APIs, as it can mimic JavaScript calls on web pages that are unaccessible to the APIs.
For instance, if you connect your Facebook account, you can remove your profile from advertising lists, delete past searches, change the visibility of posts you’re tagged in and more. On Google, you can delete your history across multiple services — web searches, Chrome history, YouTube searches, Google Map activities, location history, etc.
More fundamentally, Jumbo challenges the fact that everything should remain online forever. Conversations you had six months ago might not be relevant today, so why can’t you delete those conversations?
Jumbo lets you delete and archive old tweets, Messenger conversations and old Facebook posts. The app can regularly scan your accounts and delete everything that is older than a certain threshold — it can be a month, a year or whatever you want.
While your friends will no longer be able to see that content, Jumbo archives everything in a tab called Vault.
With today’s update, everything has been refined. The main tab has been redesigned to inform you of what Jumbo has been doing over the past week. The company now uses background notifications to perform some tasks even if you’re not launching the app every day.
The data-breach monitoring has been improved. Jumbo now uses SpyCloud to tell you exactly what has been leaked in a data breach — your phone number, your email address, your password, your address, etc.
It’s also much easier to understand the settings you can change for each service thanks to simple toggles and recommendations that you can accept or ignore.
Image Credits: Jumbo
A clear business model
Jumbo’s basic features are free, but you’ll need to buy a subscription to access the most advanced features. Jumbo Plus lets you scan and archive your Instagram account, delete your Alexa voice recordings, manage your Reddit and Dropbox accounts and track more than one email address for data breaches.
Jumbo Pro lets you manage your LinkedIn account (and you know that LinkedIn’s privacy settings are a mess). You can also track more information as part of the data breach feature — your ID, your credit card number and your Social Security number. It also lets you activate a tracker blocker.
This new feature in the second version of Jumbo replaces default DNS settings on your phone. All DNS requests are routed through a Jumbo-managed networking profile on your phone. If you’re trying to access a tracker, the request is blocked; if you’re trying to access some legit content, the request goes through. It works in the browser and in native apps.
You can pay what you want for Jumbo Plus, from $3 per month to $8 per month. Similarly, you can pick what you want to pay for Jumbo Pro, between $9 per month and $15 per month.
You might think that you’re giving a ton of personal information to a small startup. Jumbo is well aware of that and tries to reassure its user base with radical design choices, transparency and a clear business model.
Jumbo doesn’t want to mine your data. Your archived data isn’t stored on Jumbo’s servers. It remains on your phone and optionally on your iCloud or Dropbox account as a backup.
Jumbo doesn’t even have user accounts. When you first open the app, the app assigns you a unique ID in order to send you push notifications, but that’s about it. The company has also hired companies for security audits.
“We don’t store email addresses so we don’t know why people subscribe,” Jumbo CEO Pierre Valade told me.
Profitable by 2022
Jumbo has raised an $8 million funding round. It had previously raised a $3.5 million seed round. This time, Balderton Capital is leading the round. The firm had already invested in Valade’s previous startup, Sunrise.
A lot of business angels participated in the round as well, and Jumbo is listing them all on its website. This is all about being transparent again.
Interestingly, Jumbo isn’t betting on explosive growth and eyeballs. The company says it has enough funding until February 2022. By then, the startup hopes it can attract 100,000 subscribers to reach profitability.
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Lightrun raises $4M for its continuous debugging and observability platform
Lightrun, a Tel Aviv-based startup that makes it easier for developers to debug their production code, today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed round led by Glilot Capital Partners, with participation from a number of engineering executives from several Fortune 500 firms.
The company was co-founded by Ilan Peleg (who, in a previous life, was a competitive 800m runner) and Leonid Blouvshtein, with Peleg taking the CEO role and Blouvshtein the CTO position.
The overall idea behind Lightrun is that it’s too hard for developers to debug their production code. “In today’s world, whenever a developer issues a new software version and deploys it into production, the only way to understand the application’s behavior is based on log lines or metrics which were defined during the development stage,” Peleg explained. “The thing is, that is simply not enough. We’ve all encountered cases of missing a very specific log line when trying to troubleshoot production issues, then having to release a new hotfix version in order to add this specific logline, or — alternatively — reproduce the bug locally to better understand the application’s behavior.”
Image Credits: Lightrun
With Lightrun, as the co-founders showed me in a demo, developers can easily add new logs and metrics to their code from their IDE and then receive real-time data from their real production or development environments. For that to work, they need to have the Lightrun agent installed, but the overhead here is generally low because the agent sits idle until it is needed. In the IDE, the experience isn’t all that different from setting a traditional breakpoint in a debugger — only that there is no break. Lightrun can also use existing logging tools like Datadog to pipe its logging data to them.
While the service’s agent is agnostic about the environment it runs in, the company currently only supports JVM languages. Blouvshtein noted that building JVM language support was likely harder than building support for other languages and the company plans to launch support for more languages in the future.
“We make a point of investing in technologies that transform big industries,” said Kobi Samboursky, founder and managing partner at Glilot Capital Partners . “Lightrun is spearheading Continuous Debugging and Continuous Observability, picking up where CI/CD ends, turning observability into a real-time process instead of the iterative process it is today. We’re confident that this will become DevOps and development best practices, enabling I&O leaders to react faster to production issues.”
For now, there is still a bit of an onboarding process to get started with Lightrun, though that’s generally a very short process, the team tells me. Over time, the company plans to make this a self-service process. At that point, Lightrun will likely also become more interesting to smaller teams and individual developers, though the company is mostly focused on enterprise users and, despite only really launching out of stealth today and offering limited language support, the company already has a number of paying customers, including major enterprises.
“Our strategy is based on two approaches: bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up, we’re targeting developers, they are the end-users and we want to ensure they get a quality product they can trust to help them. We put a lot of effort into reaching out through the developer channels and communities, as well as enabling usage and getting feedback. […] Top-down approach, we are approaching R&D management like VP of R&D, R&D directors in bigger companies and then we show them how Lightrun saves company development resources and improves customer satisfaction.”
Unsurprisingly, the company, which currently has about a dozen employees, plans to use the new funding to add support for more languages and improve its service with new features, including support for tracing.
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Cape Privacy launches data science collaboration platform with $5.06M seed investment
Cape Privacy emerged from stealth today after spending two years building a platform for data scientists to privately share encrypted data. The startup also announced $2.95 million in new funding and $2.11 million in funding it got when the business launched in 2018, for a total of $5.06 million raised.
Boldstart Ventures and Version One led the round, with participation from Haystack, Radical Ventures and Faktory Ventures.
Company CEO Ché Wijesinghe says that data science teams often have to deal with data sets that contain sensitive data and share data internally or externally for collaboration purposes. It creates a legal and regulatory data privacy conundrum that Cape Privacy is trying to solve.
“Cape Privacy is a collaboration platform designed to help focus on data privacy for data scientists. So the biggest challenge that people have today from a business perspective is managing privacy policies for machine learning and data science,” Wijesinghe told TechCrunch.
The product breaks down that problem into a couple of key areas. First of all it can take language from lawyers and compliance teams and convert that into code that automatically generates policies about who can see the different types of data in a given data set. What’s more, it has machine learning underpinnings so it also learns about company rules and preferences over time.
It also has a cryptographic privacy component. By wrapping the data with a cryptographic cypher, it lets teams share sensitive data in a safe way without exposing the data to people who shouldn’t be seeing it because of legal or regulatory compliance reasons.
“You can send something to a competitor as an example that’s encrypted, and they’re able to process that encrypted data without decrypting it, so they can train their model on encrypted data,” company co-founder and CTO Gavin Uhma explained.
The company closed the new round in April, which means they were raising in the middle of a pandemic, but it didn’t hurt that they had built the product already and were ready to go to market, and that Uhma and his co-founders had already built a successful startup, GoInstant, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2012. (It’s worth noting that GoInstant debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2011.)
Uhma and his team brought Wijesinghe on board to build the sales and marketing team because, as a technical team, they wanted someone with go-to-market experience running the company so they could concentrate on building product.
The company has 14 employees and is already an all-remote team, so the team didn’t have to adjust at all when the pandemic hit. While it plans to keep hiring fairly limited for the foreseeable future, the company has had a diversity and inclusion plan from the start.
“You have to be intentional about about seeking diversity, so it’s something that when we sit down and map out our hiring and work with recruiters in terms of our pipeline, we really make sure that diversity is one of our objectives. You just have it as a goal, as part of your culture, and it’s something that when we see the picture of the team, we want to see diversity,” he said.
Wijesinghe adds, “As a person of color myself, I’m very sensitive to making sure that we have a very diverse team, not just from a color perspective, but a gender perspective as well.”
The company is gearing up to sell the product and has paid pilots starting in the coming weeks.
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Zopa granted full UK bank license as it gears up to launch savings account and credit card
Zopa, the 15-year-old peer-to-peer lending company, is announcing that it has been awarded its full U.K. bank licence, as it gears up to launch a fixed-term savings account, followed by a credit card.
Dubbed “Zopa Bank,” the new challenger bank will sit alongside its existing peer-to-peer lending business, under Zopa Group, creating what the veteran fintech previously described as the first hybrid peer-to-peer and digital bank offering.
Zopa had provisionally acquired a U.K. bank license in December 2018 “with restrictions,” the first major milestone in the licensing process. The full license, which required Zopa to raise a further £140 million late last year in a round led by IAG Capital in order to meet capital required to become a bank, means it can now launch more widely.
“The Zopa Fixed Term Savings Account offers a competitive rate over 1-5 years at a time when rates are at a historic low,” says the upstart bank. “The account can be opened in as little as 7 minutes online and is protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) up to £85,000.”
Next, Zopa says it plans to introduce a credit card in the coming months, which will include “innovative new features designed to put customers in control of their borrowing.”
“The card will address the needs of customers who have had to put up with poor service and unclear pricing from their existing card providers. These new products will sit alongside Zopa’s existing offering of personal and auto loans and investment products,” says Zopa Bank.
Whether or not a new challenger bank, even one with Zopa’s established brand, can cut through the noise this late in the race remains to be seen. The challenger bank space in the U.K. is crowded, to say the least, including burgeoning household names like Monzo and Starling, and to a lesser extent, Tandem, which on the surface looks to be Zopa’s most direct non-legacy competitor.
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Trump’s worker visa ban will hit Silicon Valley hard
Yesterday, President Donald Trump released an executive order that extended an existing ban on immigrant work visas through the end of the year. The move prohibits immigrants who are outside the United States from applying, but because new visas are generally issued in October, the impacts of the new rules will be felt well into 2021.
The proclamation specifically targets H-1B and H-2B visas, as well as J and L visas. As a result, the San Francisco Bay area, with its high concentration of STEM-based industries, could be disproportionately impacted.
To better understand the executive order’s potential impacts on the startup community — and the tech landscape in general — I interviewed TechCrunch contributor Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley-based immigration lawyer.
TechCrunch: How long does the executive order prohibit issuing new work visas?
Sophie Alcorn: The new ban will last until at least December 31, 2020 and may be continued longer “as necessary.” The government plans to revisit this order within the next month. Every 60 days after that, the Departments of State, Labor and Homeland Security will be recommending modifications if necessary.
What will be some of the initial impacts of suspending new H-1B visas?
Beneficiaries of this spring’s H-1B visa lottery (for government fiscal year 2021) will not be able to apply for visas at consulates this year. Normally after the I-129 petition gets approved in the summer, applicants will go for visa interviews at consulates abroad to request H-1Bs and to enter the U.S. before the October 1 typical start date. That will probably not be possible this year.
For individuals with technical, professional and research backgrounds and companies that engage in research, a big effect is that there won’t be new J-1s issued this year either for interns, trainees, researchers and specialists who are currently abroad.
Do you have a sense of how many J-1 visa holders there are in the Bay Area?
I estimate that there are at least 15,000 J-1 visa holders in the Bay Area. In 2018, California had over 35,000 participants across over 600 sponsors according to the State Department. The purpose of the program is to promote cross-cultural exchange.
J-1s are not just au pairs, who are vital to so many families, including those with special-needs children, but many other types of workers as well. Other examples are post-doctoral researchers at universities such as Stanford and Berkeley in myriad fields. J-1 holders are also conducting advanced research at private tech companies in fields such as AI and semiconductors and genomics.
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Plaid’s Zach Perret: ‘Every company is a fintech company’
The fintech revolution is just getting started.
At least that’s the impression we got after a conversation with Plaid co-founder Zach Perret. He appeared on Extra Crunch Live last week to talk about his company’s announced exit to Visa and the larger fintech landscape.
Perret and Plaid announced a deal to sell the company to Visa earlier this year for $5.3 billion, a transaction that highlighted the company’s central position in the fintech world. Plaid provides APIs that link consumer bank accounts to apps and other financial services, making it the connective tissue of the fintech boom.
It’s probably no surprise, then, that Perret is bullish: “You’ve heard it a million times, but the quote of software eating the world [is true], and my corollary to that is [that] every company is a fintech company. And certainly every financial services company should be a fintech company.”
He said there’s lots of room left for fintech and finservices companies to create new products, which is not a bad view of the future if you want to be cheered up. Perret also noted that there are widespread opportunities for fintech companies to help underbanked people in the U.S. and abroad, which indicates a massive, untapped total addressable market.
To make sure you can take your own notes, we’ve included the full session below and excerpted a few passages from the transcript. (You can sign up for Extra Crunch here if you need access.)
Zach Perret
First up, here’s the full call:
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How to supercharge your virtual networking at Disrupt 2020
Get ready for five days of education, action and opportunity at Disrupt 2020 on Sept. 14-18. This year the programing and networking may be virtual, but the connections you make and the benefits you derive are very real. If the idea of virtual networking feels somehow less potent, we have great news for you.
We’ve supercharged CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform, to help bridge the physical distance of a virtual conference.
Not familiar with CrunchMatch? The platform helps you zero in on the people who align with your business goals. You create a profile listing your specific criteria, goals and interests. The CrunchMatch algorithm kicks into gear to find like-minded startuppers and influencers. The platform suggests matches and, subject to your approval, proposes meeting times and sends meeting requests.
The CrunchMatch platform is such a smart, useful tool. It lets you see who’s there, find the right people and reach out for a meeting. I scheduled five or six appointments in one day. The meetings were small, intimate and very informative. — Felicia Jackson, inventor and founder of CPRWrap.
What’s so different about this new and improved CrunchMatch? We’ve upgraded the AI engine to make matching and recommendations faster and more precise. It simplifies the onboarding process by taking the preferences you list during registration and matching them to others. Plus, the more you use it, the smarter it gets to take some of the work around finding the right person to chat with.
Everyone who buys a Digital PRO Pass has access to CrunchMatch. Given that Disrupt 2020 will have a global audience, this is the tool you want to make your networking more targeted and efficient.
And now for a big “but wait there’s more” moment — startup founders who purchase a Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package will be able to use the enhanced platform to create a company profile and landing page — promote your products and services, post your pitch deck, embed a marketing video and track leads.
Even better news: CrunchMatch will go live weeks before Disrupt 2020 begins. Translation: More time to showcase your startup, connect and schedule 1:1 video meetings with potential customers, investors and other experts across the startup ecosystem. Highlight your company’s products and services, recruit talent and strut your startup stuff to the world.
Make the most of the opportunities waiting for you at Disrupt 2020. Buy a Digital PRO Pass or a Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package, fire up CrunchMatch and get down to the business of connecting with the people who can move your business forward.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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DriveU.auto, a LiveU spinout, comes out of stealth with $4M
Teleoperators who remotely monitor and control autonomous vehicles rely on high-performance connectivity to transfer 4K video, multiple audio streams and other data. Even a skosh of latency, jitter or packet loss could spell disaster for a teleoperator intervening to help an autonomous sidewalk delivery bot or even a robotaxi.
One Israeli startup, which spun out of video transmission technology company LiveU, has developed a connectivity platform aimed at ending unpredictable network behavior. Now, after a year as an independent company, DriveU.auto is coming out of stealth with $4 million in new funding.
The funding round was led by RAD group co-founder Zohar Zisapel and included participation from Two Lanterns Venture Partners, Yigal Jacoby, Kaedan Capital and other private investors. Francisco Partners is an existing shareholder. Alon Podhurst, who was vice president of sales at Israeli startup Cognata, has joined DriveU.auto as CEO.
The connectivity platform is designed specifically for teleoperations, a burgeoning technology used to support a variety of autonomous vehicle applications, including robotaxis, self-driving trucks and delivery drones.
DriveU.auto uses what it calls cellular bonding technology, 4K video encoding and advanced algorithms to adapt to changes on a network. Podhurst explained that the company’s “secret sauce” is how it fuses dynamic encoding and cellular network bonding to enable the level of connectivity needed for demanding AV use cases.
The platform provides the missing link for AV companies that want to deploy autonomous vehicles without a human safety driver, Podhurst told TechCrunch. It works in the two major use cases of teleoperations. Teleoperations can be used for direct driving, in which a remote human operator controls the autonomous vehicle. That operator can also use a teleoperations system for remote assistance such as providing high-level driving commands.
DriveU.auto started as a unit within LiveU. It was initially part of LiveU’s CTO office. Although it spun out as an independent company late last year and is now a standalone company, some of its shareholders also have stakes in LiveU.
DriveU.auto has demonstrated its platform with AV developers and Tier 1 suppliers on public roads in Europe, Israel, Japan and the United States, according to Prodhurst. The investment followed engagement with several customers that helped confirm market demand for its technology.
DriveU.auto isn’t sharing customer names. However, Podhurst was able to share that its product is being tested by companies developing delivery and robotaxi platforms, autonomous trucking technology as well as a Tier 1 supplier. DriveU.auto also has a long-term proof of concept agreement with another Tier 1 supplier.
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