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Alan introduces Alan Blue, a high-end health insurance product
French startup Alan has been mostly focused on its main health insurance product — a standard package for companies of all sizes and shapes. The company is launching a second offering on this market with Alan Blue.
Companies can now choose between two levels of insurance — Alan Green and Alan Blue. Alan Green is the existing health insurance product with a new name. It still costs the same and offers the same level of coverage. Alan Blue is a higher-end product with better coverage for companies who want to retain talent using better benefits.
French employees automatically get basic coverage from the national healthcare system. But companies also need to provide a health insurance from a private company to pay for part of the health expenses. It’s a hybrid system with a strong legal framework.
This is where Alan comes along as your employer signs a deal with an insurance company to cover all their employees. Usually, insurance companies provide multiple offerings. But Alan has historically focused on a single plan.
With Alan Green, you get good coverage starting at $59 (€50) per month per employee if you’re under 36 years old. It gets more expensive if you’re over 36, and then over 45, and then over 56 years old. Plans for employees over 56 cost $100 per month (€85).
Companies have to pay at least 50 percent of those plans. The rest is deducted from your pay. Some companies also choose to pay 100 percent of everyone’s health insurance to show that they really care about their employees.
Employees can also choose to cover their spouse and kids with Alan. Plans for a second adult cost the same as plans for employees. And you can cover all your kids for a $47 flat monthly fee (€40).
While you won’t pay anything if you see a normal medial practitioner, Alan Green couldn’t necessarily cover an expensive pair of glasses or extensive dental work.
Alan Blue is a second option for companies looking for a premium health insurance product. Companies now have to decide between the two plans for the entire staff. You can’t let employees decide between one plan or the other.
Alan Blue starts at $82 per month (€70) for young employees and also gets more expensive depending on the age of the employee. While there’s only a €20 difference between the two offerings for employees under 36 years old, the price difference is higher the older you get. Similarly, you can cover all your kids for a slightly more expensive $64 flat monthly fee (€55).
For companies that choose to fully pay for health insurance, it depends if you’re willing to spend more to provide better insurance. But some companies only pay part of the health insurance package. Employees will end up paying more if their companies switch from Alan Green to Alan Blue.
“Overall, companies that are growing rapidly tend to invest a lot for their employees and switch to Alan Blue,” co-founder and CEO Jean-Charles Samuelian told me. “We already noticed that with companies in our existing clients. Some companies are also switching to Alan because they wanted something very high end before switching.”
Alan still plans to target small companies. The startup thinks that small companies are underserved by big insurance companies and tend to pay more for health insurance.
Alan Green is not going away anytime soon. Samuelian thinks you can combine Alan Green with Alan Map to find the perfect doctor around you and get fully reimbursed.
Alan Blue is already available to selected Alan customers. All companies will be able to sign up in September. You can already view all pricing and insurance details on Alan’s website.
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Facial recognition startup Kairos acquires Emotion Reader
Kairos, the face recognition technology used for brand marketing, has announced the acquisition of EmotionReader.
EmotionReader is a Limerick, Ireland-based startup that uses algorithms to analyze facial expressions around video content. The startup allows brands and marketers to measure viewers emotional response to video, analyze viewer response via an analytics dashboard, and make different decisions around media spend based on viewer response.
The acquisition makes sense considering that Kairos core business is focused on facial identification for enterprise clients. Knowing who someone is, paired with how they feel about your content, is a powerful tool for brands and marketers.
The idea for Kairos started when founder Brian Brackeen was making HR time-clocking systems for Apple. People were cheating the system, so he decided to implement facial recognition to ensure that employees were actually clocking in and out when they said they were.
That premise spun out into Kairos, and Brackeen soon realized that facial identification as a service was much more powerful than any niche time clocking service.
But Brackeen is very cautious with the technology Kairos has built.
While Kairos aims to make facial recognition technology (and all the powerful insights that come with it) accessible and available to all businesses, Brackeen has been very clear about the fact that Kairos isn’t interested in selling this technology to government agencies.
Brackeen recently contributed a post right here on TechCrunch outlining the various reasons why governments aren’t ready for this type of technology. Alongside the outstanding invasion of personal privacy, there are also serious issues around bias against people of color.
From the post:
There is no place in America for facial recognition that supports false arrests and murder. In a social climate wracked with protests and angst around disproportionate prison populations and police misconduct, engaging software that is clearly not ready for civil use in law enforcement activities does not serve citizens, and will only lead to further unrest.
As part of the deal, EmotionReader CTO Dr. Stephen Moore will run Kairos’ new Singapore-based R&D center, allowing for upcoming APAC expansion.
Kairos has raised approximately $8 million from investors New World Angels, Kapor Capital, 500 Startups, Backstage Capital, Morgan Stanley, Caerus Ventures, and Florida Institute, and is now closing on its $30 million crowd sale.
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Pinterest is adding a way for users to collaborate on boards
Pinterest is trying to further tap its popularity as a place to plan events, this time adding ways for users to collaborate across boards that are baked directly into the app.
Group boards will have their own designated feed, where users will be able to communicate with others collaborating on that board and also get updates on new member additions or added pins. There are also the other typical social structures you’d expect on an app these days, including @-mentions or liking comments. It’s another step to get people onto Pinterest and sticking around as they look to plan events, and create more ways to make the platform more and more sticky. It’s also another quality-of-life improvement that Pinterest seems to have needed for quite some time.
It’s those kinds of events — weddings, parties and others — that propelled Pinterest initially to become one of the larger social networks in the early 2010s. The company late last year said it had more than 200 million monthly active users, which while small compared to the likes of Instagram or Facebook, serves as a hub for a different kind of user behavior than you might find on those other platforms. The majority of the content on Pinterest is high-resolution products from businesses, where people will search for or save those products as they look to plan future life events.
Pinterest has tried to position itself as one of the best ways to discover new ideas, whether that’s stumbling upon something in a primary feed or finding something through searching. Over time, it’s added more and more tools to try to get people to come back more regularly, and if it continues to improve those recommendation engines, it can continue to run that feedback loop and keep users more and more attached to the platform. Adding a sort of light social pressure from friends that are sharing ideas and looking for feedback is one way to do that, in addition to it generally being useful.
All that is good for its pitch to advertisers as well. Pinterest, in addition to trying to cater to that unique kind of user behavior, is also trying to sell itself to advertisers as a platform where they can reach potential customers through ways they wouldn’t be able to with primary advertising channels like Facebook or Google. By making the platform more sticky, it can go back to those advertisers and offer them better engagement metrics and show that users stick around and are paying closer attention to content on Pinterest, which can in turn drive that additional value to advertisers.
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GrubMarket gobbles up $32M led by GGV for its healthy grocery ordering and delivery service
As consumers become more discerning about the food they are eating, a wave of startups has emerged that are catering to that demand with convenient alternatives to the more ubiquitous options that are available today. One of these, GrubMarket — which sources organic and healthy food directly from producers and then delivers it to other businesses (Whole Foods is a customer) as well as consumers at a discount of 20-60 percent over other channels — is today announcing a $32 million round to grow its already profitable business, including making acquisitions and expanding on its own steam as it eyes a public listing.
“We are looking to buy companies to make more revenues ahead of an upcoming IPO,” said Mike Xu, the founder and CEO. He said GrubMarket is “in proactive steps” to expand from its home base in California to the East Coast, starting in New York and New Jersey, by October this year. The plan, he said, will be to file with the SEC sometime between the end of this year and early 2019, with the IPO taking place in the second half of 2019.
E-commerce, and in particular food-related businesses with perishable items and associated waste, can be tricky when it comes to margins, and indeed, there have been many casualties in the world of food startups. Xu said in an interview that GrubMarket is already profitable and working at a $100 million run rate.
One of the reasons it’s profitable may also be the same reason you may have never heard of GrubMarket. Currently, between 60 and 70 percent of its business is in the B2B space. Xu says that customers number in the thousands and include offices, grocery stores and restaurants across the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego.
And so, if you don’t know GrubMarket, you might know some of its customers, which include all WeWorks between San Diego and San Francisco, Whole Foods, Blue Apron, Hello Fresh and Chipotle. GrubMarket has also cornered some very specific niches: It has become the biggest mushroom supplier in all of Northern California, and it’s the biggest supplier of Hawaiian farm produce in the Bay Area.
Another point in the company’s favor is the technology it uses. Working directly with farmers and other producers, GrubMarket has built apps that allow it and its partners to manage the logistics of the business in an efficient way. The idea will be to bring more AI to the platform over time: for example, to be able to run better modelling to figure out how much fruit and veg might sell during a given season, and how to price items.
GrubMarket also is dabbling in areas that you might not normally associate with a grocery-on-demand delivery company: it built an educational app called Farmbox, which — when you play it — can be used to collect points to spend on GrubMarket; and it’s also exploring how blockchain technology can be used in a “next-generation open platform for direct farm-to-table.”
Xu says that as the company continues to grow, it will shift more into direct-to-consumer deliveries to complement its wholesale business.
This latest round is a mixture of equity and debt and is being led by GGV with other previous investors Fusion Fund (formerly New Gen Capital) and Great Oaks Venture Capital participating, along with new investors Max Ventures, Castor Ventures, Bascom Ventures, Millennium Technology Value Partner, Trinity Capital Investment, Investwide Capital and others. The company is not publicly disclosing its valuation; it has raised around $64 million to date.
Many eyes are on Amazon these days, and what moves it might make next in groceries after acquiring Whole Foods, ramping up its own Pantry offerings, courting restaurants for delivery and making its own meal kits. This is not a question that keeps up Xu at night, however.
“Food is the largest and biggest opportunity in e-commerce,” he said, estimating that today the total value for the global food and agricultural industry is around $9 trillion (versus $8 trillion in 2017), with only about one percent of buying done online. “That’s a big enough opportunity to have a few giant companies, and not just Amazon.”
It’s also an opportunity that could sustain some slightly smaller companies, too: One of my favorite e-commerce businesses in England is a service that I’ve been using for years, an organic grocery delivery called Abel & Cole that brings us a box of organic fruit and vegetables (and whatever else I order on top of that) each week. Like GrubMarket, it’s working directly with smaller producers who might have otherwise found it hard-going to find a way of selling their produce directly to buyers (and buyers would have found it hard-going to ever buy directly from these producers). Unlike GrubMarket, it takes a more modest approach that doesn’t involve eventually becoming a leviathan itself. May they all be around for years to come.
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The Nudge is a planner app packaged as an SMS subscription service
How do you fix digital information overload and the resulting life-attention deficit that’s apparently afflicting smartphone owners everywhere — and even leading some very large tech giants to unbox “digital wellness” tools lately?
San Francisco-based startup The Nudge reckons the answer to getting millennials to spend less time sucked into screens, and more time out and about actually doing things, is — you guessed it — another technology service! Albeit one that delivers inspirational plan ideas for stuff to do in your free time, delivered via the traditional text message conduit of SMS.
The sibling duo behind the startup, John and Sarah Peterson, have bagged $540,000 in pre-seed funding for their text planner idea, after running a year-long public beta of the service in San Francisco. The investment is led by seed-stage VC firm NextView Ventures, with Sequoia’s scout fund also participating.
Peterson says the idea to send plans via SMS evolved out of his earlier (and first) startup, called Livday: Also a planner app for friends to share their favorite ideas for weekend hikes and so on. But being just another app meant having to compete for attention with noisy social content, so the siblings hit on the idea of using SMS — as a sort of artisanal reversion of current state consumer tech — to “find a way to rise above the noise,” as they put it. Or, well, attempt to circumvent app notification fatigue/mute buttons.
As is often the case in fashion-led consumer tech, old ways can get polished up to feel shiny and new again once whatever displaced them has lost enough sheen to start to look old.
The Nudge has garnered around 10,000 active weekly users at this point, launching out of its year-long public beta. Peterson describes the typical user as “an active millennial woman,” with the community skewing 70 percent female at this point.
For the active user metric the team defines an active user as someone who is reading and engaging with the text messages they’re sending — either by clicking a link or replying.
They further claim to have signed up 5 percent of San Francisco’s millennials to their lifestyle “nudges.”
“While our new rebrand has a somewhat feminine aesthetic it’s interesting that we initially were targeting men. It just really resonated with millennial women,” says Peterson.
“They need this because taking the initiative is the essential yet hardest part of living our lives to the fullest, and that’s what we give them,” he adds. “A nudge. We’re laser-focused on that demo right now but have plans to help other demographics long-term. My empty nest parents badly need this.”
Nudges take the form of — initially — an SMS text message, containing a handwritten brunch idea or a hike plan, or details of a hip coffee venue or volunteering opportunity which the startup reckons will appeal to its SF community.
The texts may also contain a link to a more fully fledged plan (with photos, address, logistics etc.). You can see some of their sample plans here.
While the core delivery mechanism is SMS, there also is a Nudge app where plans can be saved for later perusal, and subscribers to the service can mark Nudges as “done” (presumably to avoid being spammed with the same plan later).
Currently, the startup has an editorial team of three people coming up with plan ideas to inspire subscribers — writing in a friendly, narrative style that’s intended to complement the cozy SMS delivery medium.
They’re also working with local social media influencers to hit on trendy ideas that resonate with their target millennial users.
Convincing information-overloaded consumers to willingly hand over their mobile digits to get random texts might seem a bit of a counter-intuitive “fix” for digital information overload. But Peterson reckons it boils down to getting the tone of voice right. (And, clearly, being careful not to send too many texts that you end up coming across as spam.)
“We want people to really feel like The Nudge is just another one of their (ridiculously resourceful and fun) friends texting them, and I think we’ve succeeded there so far,” he tells TechCrunch. “Nearly all of our growth has come from word of mouth. You’re right that text messaging is a sacred space, and we’re very sensitive about that.”
Peterson claims that unsubscribe rates are less than 1 percent each week — though they’re also limiting themselves to sending three “personalized” lifestyle “nudges” per week at this point.
On the personalization front, they say plan ideas are customized based on factors such as the current weather and local trends. They are not, as a rule, customized per user though — beyond being personalized with the subscriber’s name. So it’s more “Nudge Club” than VIP personalized lifestyle advisor.
“In general, everyone is getting the same content, as we’ve found that there’s a lot of power in the shared experience (you know your friend just got the same text at that moment),” he says. “That said, we do sometimes create a dialogue where we ask you a question and depending upon your answer, we recommend something specific for you.
“We’re carefully not taking this part too far, as we really don’t view ourselves as a bot.”
Given they are (usually) sending ~10,000 people pretty much the same idea of what to do at the weekend or of an evening, Peterson admits that venue overcrowding has been a problem they inadvertently ended up creating — for example he says they recommended a free event that ended up getting 10x overbooked and had to cancel some tickets.
“Our answer is to only recommend small venues as a general suggestion (do this date idea this summer), and recommend larger venues specifically (do this hike tomorrow),” he says, explaining how they’ve tweaked the service to try to workaround creating unintended flash mobs of demand.
On the business model side, the plan is to make The Nudge a subscription service. Though they’re not going into details at this stage as they’re still experimenting with different options. (And they’re not currently charging for the service.)
But Peterson says the intention is not to make money via the specific things they’re recommending — which, in theory, frees them from needing to operate a creepy, privacy-hostile data-harvesting surveillance operation to determine whether an SMS can be linked to a specific bar bill or restaurant check for them to take a cut, for example.
Though, to be clear, Peterson says they’re gathering “as much data as we can about people doing a Nudge” — presumably so the team can better tailor the content and recommendations they’re making by figuring out what their users really like doing.
“We don’t promote any products or services,” he emphasizes. “Selling tickets or products or ads is tempting, and a lot of lifestyle services do that, but it would ruin or credibility. This is ultimately a subscription service based on trust.”
Despite that reassuring claim, it is worth noting that their current privacy policy states they “may periodically send promotional emails about new products/special offers/info etc via provided email addresses.” So be aware you are at least agreeing to theoretical email spam if you hand over your details.
What’s next for The Nudge now that the team has raised their first tranche of VC? Peterson says they’re planning to expand the service to LA this year — which he confirms will mean hiring a team on the ground to produce the custom content needed to power the service.
Albeit, he concedes, “right now our process is very manual.” And it’s not at all clear whether their concept could sustain much automation-based scaling — at least not if they don’t want to risk generating yet more impersonal noise versus the friendly digital lifestyle advisor tone they’re aiming to strike as a strategy to stand out.
Beyond LA, Peterson says they plan to expand “pretty aggressively” in 2019. “The Nudge as it stands now would work in any urban market as I believe it’s a solution to a fundamental human problem,” he says.
The Nudge’s spare time plans by text is by no means the only SMS-based lifestyle subscription service hoping to cut itself a slice of the attention economy.
In 2016 a startup called Shine launched on-demand life coaching by text messaging, for example.
And let’s not forget Magic — the “get anything via a text message” service that had a viral moment in 2015 — and now bills itself as a “24/7 virtual assistant.”
Google has also tried texting people shopping deals. And Microsoft has dabbled in event planning specifically — outing an iMessage app for social event planning last year.
Meanwhile Facebook added “M,” a text-based assistant app (which was itself human-assisted), to its Messenger platform back in 2015 — but went on to shutter the service in January this year, apparently never having found a way to scale M into a fully fledged AI assistant.
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Is insurance a rich enough game to disrupt?
Martha Notaras
Contributor
Contributor
Martha Notaras is a partner at XL Innovate.
For the last decade, the largest technology companies have increasingly looked outside of tech to grow their operations. From automotive to retail to groceries, these companies use massive competitive advantages in the form of data, consumer relationships and software engineers to fundamentally change markets.
Now, companies like Apple and Google and Amazon are eyeing innovation across the insurance landscape. For example, Amazon is teaming with JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway to create a new way to approach health insurance, focusing first on the group’s own employees. On the retail side, Amazon is selling product insurance and extended warranties at the point of sale and investing in insurtech startups. Meanwhile, Tesla is developing an insurance product specific to the Model S. Waymo, Uber and Lyft are certainly having similar conversations internally.
Obviously, these are all preliminary steps. Insurance is a complex, multifaceted and, yes, risky business. In the end, whether or not companies like Amazon become insurers themselves depends on their appetite for risk, their ability to innovate and the potential pay off.
To start, let’s look at the reasons why tech giants are well-suited to upend the space.
They have direct consumer relationships
Like many businesses, a large aspect of a successful insurance business is distribution. Just look at brokers, which are a major means of distribution for insurers today — their cut can be up to 30 percent of the cost of an insurance policy. Brokers also see better margins than insurers themselves, usually around 10 percent net margins. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google (FAAMG) possess direct relationship with billions of consumers and could, over time, disrupt the broker business.
They have deep data and analytics
The big secret in insurance is that insurers are actually terrible at using their data. Different departments (marketing, underwriting, claims) rarely work together, and their data tends to be siloed. FAAMG, on the other hand, has put data at the core of their offering; they know how to leverage analytics and AI to create better products.
Tech giants may be tempted to use their troves of data to compete with insurers directly.
They also have access to data that insurers can only dream of having: global geospatial imagery of homes, infrastructure and buildings; location, browsing and advertising data; even real-world behavioral data from smartphones and IoT devices. Combining all these signals can create a very complete picture of human behavior, interests and risk profile.
They have an army of software engineers and a monopoly of AI talent
Tech innovation has long been a challenge for insurance incumbents. Old systems are difficult to displace in any industry, but the complexity of insurance, tradition of relying on the past to predict the future and silos of data can make it a Herculean effort. Tech giants, on the other hand, regularly cannibalize their own revenue with new products and can enlist tens of thousands of engineers to develop fantastic digital customer experiences and bring large-scale efficiencies to back-end insurance systems through better software and AI.
So, yes, FAAMG has a number of major advantages over insurance incumbents. But for tech giants, new verticals and initiatives are also longer-term decisions around margins and market scope. It’s an obvious point, but if FAAMG wants to jump into insurance, they’ll want a decent return. Can they find that in insurance?
There are a number of reasons why it might be a tough sell.
Ultra-low margins
Average insurance net margins are 3-8 percent, and 25-30 percent gross margins, which are meager for tech standards. Software companies average around 80 percent gross margins and around 15 percent net margins. Even consumer hardware like the iPhone — a costly endeavor by software standards — sees 55-60 percent gross margins.
Within insurance, health tends to have the highest margins, followed by property and casualty (i.e. home and auto insurance), followed by life insurance. So if anything, healthcare is probably the closest thing to “low-hanging fruit” — but it’s not exactly attractive to most companies outside insurance.
High risk
Such low margin also means that one major event can destroy a company’s balance sheet for an entire fiscal year (think disasters like hurricanes, fire, flood, etc.). In addition, tech companies don’t have the historical data and actuarial scientists that insurers have spent decades building up, so they might be more prone to misjudging their overall risk exposure.
Complex administration
For insurers, evaluating and underwriting policies is an expensive endeavor. Claims, customer support and back-end are costly and complex. That said, most insurance companies are already outsourcing the development of core administration software to companies like GuideWire and Duck Creek, and then customizing the software to meet their specific needs at the last mile. So it’s not as huge of a leap as it once was to think that the likes of Amazon or Google could develop similar infrastructure in-house to rival incumbent systems. Or, they could easily buy one of the development companies outright and subsume that expertise.
Amazon makes a big move
Still, the creation and underwriting of policies is something tech giants have avoided to date. Amazon has been working on warranties for certain products as an add-on to their margins — but these were backed and administered by The Warranty Group rather than Amazon itself. Before that, Amazon acted as a sales channel for SquareTrade and built up an understanding of the warranty business before diving in deeper. Tesla, as another example, announced it was selling Tesla-branded tailor-made policies for its vehicle owners, but those policies were backed by Liberty Mutual.
What role will tech giants in the U.S. play in the insurance landscape?
Then, in January, Amazon made a well-publicized announcement, in tandem with Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan, around its intention to create a private healthcare option for their workers. We don’t know much about the initiative, but Amazon has been working on a healthcare technology project codenamed 1492 for some time. Rumors point to a “platform for electronic medical record data, telemedicine, and health apps.” Amazon’s technology paired with Berkshire Hathaway’s insurance knowledge and JPMorgan’s financial expertise makes the creation of a new health insurance entity more likely. If so, this would be a significant shot across the bow of U.S. healthcare insurers.
Of all the tech giants, it would not be a surprise if Amazon were the first to jump into insurance. Amazon has mastered the art of building massive businesses off of razor-thin margins. They’re also targeting health insurance, which presents the best margin opportunity. They can test their offering within the company first and then scale across their massive consumer base. Finally, they have a history of building out complex back-end services for their own purposes before offering it to their customers — just look at AWS.
Will other tech companies follow Amazon’s lead?
Signs point to yes. Recently, Google’s sister company, Verily, “has been in talks with insurers about jointly bidding for contracts that would involve taking on risk for hundreds of thousands of patients.” In addition, Apple will be opening a network of medical clinics for its employees.
It may not stop at health insurance. There’s no question technology is changing human behavior and society, and as the developers of much of this new tech, FAAMG will inevitably be pushed closer to other sectors of insurance, as well, including home and auto.
Autonomous vehicle fleets will make companies like Tesla, Google and Uber the owners of tens of thousands of cars, subjecting them to the risk that comes with that. Meanwhile, IoT hardware and accompanying services are bringing tech giants into the living room. That’s a literal statement when it comes to Amazon Key. Nest, Google Home and Amazon Echo are more innocuous, but provide all sorts of data about what’s going on inside the home and could, someday, help inform the creation of real-time home insurance policies.
East Asia as a leading indicator?
It also can be instructive to look at markets outside the U.S. In East Asia, businesses are taking a more aggressive posture vis-à-vis insurance. Baidu, Alibaba, Rakuten, Tencent and LINE have all shown some level of appetite for offering their own insurance products. These companies can verify identities, enforce trust and access the behavioral and financial data necessary to provide better policies than many insurance incumbents in those countries.
They also are exploring new ways of looking at risk and changing user behavior: Tencent’s WeSure is paying users to stay healthy by walking more, while Yongqianbao, a lending company, tracks unconventional digital data to determine credit risk, such as phone brand (iPhone users are less likely to default) and whether they let their phone batteries run down.
Still, the question remains: What role will tech giants in the U.S. play in the insurance landscape? Will they act as a channel for existing insurers, as a provider of data and analytics to those insurers or even as a provider of direct insurance themselves?
Insurance may not be lucrative-enough for tech giants in the short-term, but as real-time data and analytics are used to create insurance policies, tech giants may be tempted to use their troves of data to compete with insurers directly. Until then, we can expect insurers and tech giants to form alliances, as they have in East Asia, with tech companies using insurance and warranties as a value-add for their customers, and insurers using tech companies as a sales channel. Regardless, the story of FAAMG (and others) in insurance is undoubtedly just getting started, and we’ll have to check back in as the landscape develops.
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SolarWinds acquires real-time threat-monitoring service Trusted Metrics
SolarWinds, the company behind tools like Pingdom, Papertrail, Loggly and a number of other IT management tools, today announced it has acquired Trusted Metrics, a company that helps businesses monitor incoming threats to their networks and servers. This move follows SolarWinds’ acquisition of Loggly earlier this year. Among other things, Loggly also provides a number of security tools for enterprises.
Today’s acquisition of Trusted Metrics is clearly part of the company’s strategy to build out its security portfolio, and SolarWinds is actually rolling Trusted Metrics into a new security product called SolarWinds Threat Monitor. Like Trusted Metrics, SolarWinds Threat Monitor helps businesses protect their networks by automatically detecting suspicious activity and malware.
“When we look at the rapidly changing IT security landscape, the proliferation of mass-marketed malware and the non-discriminatory approach of cybercriminals, we believe that real-time threat monitoring and management shouldn’t be a luxury, but an affordable option for everyone,” said SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson in today’s announcement. “The acquisition of Trusted Metrics will allow us to offer a new product in the SolarWinds mold—powerful, easy to use, scalable—that is designed to give businesses the ability to more easily protect IT environments and business operations.”
SolarWinds did not disclose the financial details of the transaction. Trusted Metrics was founded in 2010; although it received some seed funding, it never raised any additional funding rounds after that.
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Box acquires Butter.ai to make search smarter
Box announced today that it has acquired Butter.ai, a startup that helps customers search for content intelligently in the cloud. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the Butter.AI team will be joining Box.
Butter.AI was started by two ex-Evernote employees, Jack Hirsch and Adam Walz. The company was partly funded by Evernote founder and former CEO Phil Libin’s Turtle Studios. The latter is a firm established with a mission to use machine learning to solve real business problems like finding the right document wherever it is.
Box has been adding intelligence to its platform for some time, and this acquisition brings the Butter.AI team on board and gives them more machine learning and artificial intelligence known-how while helping to enhance search inside of the Box product.
“The team from Butter.ai will help Box to bring more intelligence to our Search capabilities, enabling Box’s 85,000 customers to more easily navigate through their unstructured information — making searching for files in Box more contextualized, predictive and personalized,” Box’s Jeetu Patel wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition.
That means taking into account the context of the search and delivering documents that make sense given your role and how you work. For instance, if you are a salesperson and you search for a contract, you probably want a sales contract and not one for a freelancer or business partnership.
For Butter, the chance to have access to all those customers was too good to pass up. “We started Butter.ai to build the best way to find documents at work. As it turns out, Box has 85,000 customers who all need instant access to their content. Joining Box means we get to build on our original mission faster and at a massive scale,” company CEO and co-founder Jack Hirsch said.
The company launched in September 2017, and up until now it has acted as a search assistant inside Slack you can call upon to search for documents and find them wherever they live in the cloud. The company will be winding down that product as it becomes part of the Box team.
As is often the case in these deals, the two companies have been working closely together and it made sense for Box to bring the Butter.AI team into the fold where it can put its technology to bear on the Box platform.
“After launching in September 2017 our customers were loud and clear about wanting us to integrate with Box and we quickly delivered. Since then, our relationship with Box has deepened and now we get to build on our vision for a MUCH larger audience as part of the Box team,” the founders wrote in a Medium post announcing the deal.
The company raised $3.3 million over two seed rounds. Investors included Slack and General Catalyst.
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Slack wants to make search a little easier with search filters
Slack’s search functions are getting another little quality-of-life update today with the introduction of filters, which aims to make search a little more granular to find the right answers.
The company also says searches are going to be more personalized. All of this is an attempt to get to the right files or conversations quickly as Slack — a simple collection of group chats and channels that can get out of hand very fast — something a little more palatable. As companies get bigger and bigger, the sheer amount of information that ends up in it will grow faster and faster. That means that the right information will generally be more difficult to access, and if Slack is going to stick to its roots as a simple internal communications product, it’s going to have to lean on improvements under the hood and small changes in front of users. The company says search is now 70 percent faster on the back end.
Users in Slack will now be able to filter search results by channels and also the kinds of results they are looking for, like files. You can go a little more granular than that, but that’s the general gist of it, as Slack tries to limit the changes to what’s happening in front of users. Slack threads, for example, were in development for more than a year before the company finally rolled out the long-awaited feature. (Whether that feature successfully changed things for the better is still not known.)
Slack now has around 8 million daily active users, with 3 million paid users, and is still clearly pretty popular with smaller companies that are looking for something simpler than the more robust — and complex — communications tools on the market. But there are startups trying to pick away at other parts of the employee communications channels, like Slite, which aims to be a simpler notes tool in the same vein as Slack but for different parts of the employee experience. And there are other larger companies looking to tap the demand for these kinds of simpler tools, like Atlassian’s Stride and Microsoft’s Teams.
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Toast raises $115M at a $1.4B valuation to create a one-stop management tool for restaurants
While massive restaurant chains might have resources to build out their own management systems or integrate with larger point-of-sale providers, Toast — a provider of tools for restaurants to manage their business — is raising a big round of funding to go after everyone else.
Now Toast is a business valued at $1.4 billion, thanks to a fresh infusion of $115 million in its latest round of funding. At its core, Toast is a point-of-sale for restaurants, though over time it’s added more and more services on top of that. Now the goal is to be not just a point of sale, but offer a whole system to help restaurants operate efficiently. That can range from the actual point of sale all the way to loyalty programs and reporting on that information. The round was led by T. Rowe Price Associates, with participation from new investor Tiger Global Management and other existing investors.
“We’re just trying to keep our finger on the pulse to what matters to restauranteurs,” CFO Tim Barash said. “We hear a lot about the labor side of the equation. We’re working through what to do there. If you ask restaurants about the number one thing they’re thinking about, most respondents say it’s around labor — that’s a really big one.”
Starting off in 2011 as a point-of-sale business, the company now offers a complete suite of tools that help restaurants streamline both the front and back house of the restaurant. And as Toast collects more and more data on how restaurants are using its tools — like any startup with a lot of inbound data, really — it can start helping those restaurants figure out how to improve their businesses further. That might be modifying menus slightly based on what people are enjoying, or pointing them in the right direction as to when to make slight adjustments to their basic operations.
There’s also an online ordering part of the business. Toast helps restaurants boot up an online ordering part of their business quickly, in addition to offering tools to help streamline that process. A restaurant might deal with a flood of orders or throttle them if necessary. Businesses then get reports on their whole online ordering business, helping them further calibrate what to offer — and what might work better for the in-person experience as well.
The next focus for Toast, Barash said, is figuring out the labor side of the equation. That comes down to helping restaurants not only find new employees, but also figure out how to retain them in an industry with a significant amount of turnover. Attacking the hiring part of the problem is one approach, though there are other approaches like Pared, which looks to turn the labor market for restaurants into an on-demand one. But there’s obvious low-hanging fruit, like making it easier to switch shifts, among other things, Barash said.
“One in 11 working human beings work in restaurants,” Barash said. “I would say we’re still trying to figure out what we can do as a central platform of record, continuing to carry a high quality network of partners or us building some things ourselves. We’re early days in figuring them out. If you go to any restaurant in Boston, and look at all the help wanted signs, you can see the barrier to being successful is a lot of times more on the employee side than on the guest side. Then once you have them hired, you have to think about how you can retain those employees and make sure they’re engaged and successful.”
Toast isn’t the only startup looking to own a point-of-sale and then expand into other elements of running a business, though. Lightspeed POS, which also offers a pretty large set of tools for brick-and-mortar stores — including restaurants — raised $166 million late last year. There are also the obvious point-of-sale competitors like Square that, while designed to be a broad solution and not just target restaurants, are pretty widely adopted and can also try to own that whole restaurant management stack, from clocking in and out to getting reports on what’s selling well.
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