OnCall Health Raises CAD$2M in Seed Funding

OnCall Health, a Toronto, Canada-based platform that provides secure virtual care technology and services for healthcare providers, raised $2 million CAD ($1.5M USD) in seed funding.

The round was led by Ripple Ventures with participation from Panache Ventures, Stout Street Capital, and Maple Leaf Angels.

The company intends to use the funds to expand its operations in North America.

Led by Nicholas Chepesiuk, CEO and Founder, OnCall provides a secure virtual care (telemedicine) technology platform that facilitates video or text-based consultations for healthcare practices, and streamlines procedures required to maintain patient privacy. Through its encryption and dedicated technical support, healthcare practitioners like doctors, nurses or counsellors can effectively expand and improve access to their services.

Currently, OnCall facilitates over 10,000 healthcare video appointments per month and works with more than 300 healthcare organizations across North America including Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs), hospitals, mental health and addictions treatment centres, medical cannabis clinics and disability management firms. Notable clients include the Centre for Addiction & Mental Health (CAMH), Calgary West Central Primary Care Network, GrowWise Health and Wellpoint in Canada, and Pyramid Healthcare and ACI Specialty Benefits in the United States.

Source. FinSMEs, Staff, April 16, 2019

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Restaurant website builder BentoBox raises $16.4M

By Anthony Ha

BentoBox, which helps restaurant owners build mobile-friendly websites, has raised $16.4 million in Series B funding.

This might not seem like the biggest opportunity, particularly because consumers are connecting with restaurants in so many other places online — reading reviews on Yelp, making reservations on OpenTable, ordering delivery on GrubHub and so on — but founder and CEO Krystle Mobayeni said that’s exactly why BentoBox  is important.

“Unfortunately, the technology that has over time become more important in dining out has [also] threatened restaurants’ business models,” Mobayeni told me. “Restaurants have lost that direct relationship with their guests, which is the most important thing in hospitality.”

So BentoBox started out with restaurant websites because it’s “the only place online where they had control,” she said. Since then, it’s also added features allowing those restaurants to push the content and information from their websites to other platforms, like Google and Facebook.

Mobayeni also said that it’s crucial for BentoBox to be a revenue generator for restaurants, rather than just another cost. So it charges a straightforward subscription fee (rather than taking a transaction fee that eats into a restaurant’s already thin margins), and it’s added potential moneymakers to the website platform, like selling gift cards, booking private events and taking orders for catering.In fact, Mobayeni said restaurants are already looking at the catering feature and “wanting to use that as on-demand online ordering.”

“That’s a really easy leap for us to make, because we have a lot of that technology built already,” she said.

BentoBox says it works with more than 4,000 restaurants across all 50 states and in 16 countries, including Union Square Hospitality Group, Eleven Madison Park and José Andrés’ Think Food Group.

The company has now raised a total of $23.6 million, according to Crunchbase. The new round was led by Threshold Ventures (formerly DFJ Venture), with participation from Bullpen Capital, Haystack and Female Founders Fund, as well as restaurateur Will Guidara of Make it Nice and Eleven Madison Park.

“Krystle and her team have demonstrated impressive growth driven by their keen sense of how the restaurant industry is evolving as well as a deep understanding for how these customers use technology in their day-to-day operations,” said Threshold’s Chirag Chotalia in a statement.

Besides adding on-demand ordering, Mobayeni said the new funding will allow BentoBox to start working with larger restaurant chains, and to build more features, like a point-of-sale and reservation system for restaurants.

“Really our vision over time is to power every interaction between the restaurant and their guest,” she said. “We want to continue to help restaurants drive revenue through their most popular revenue streams — ordering online and booking — and doing that in a way that the restaurant owns.”

Source. Techcrunch,  Anthony Ha, April 9, 2019

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Fincad Secures US$12m in Growth Financing

Fincad, a Vancouver, BC, Canada-based provider of enterprise solutions for derivative and fixed income portfolios, secured US$12m in growth financing.

The round was led by Vistara Capital Partners with a senior bank facility from the CIBC Innovation Banking team. In conjunction with the funding, Randy Garg, Founder and Managing Partner of Vistara Capital Partners, will also become an Observer on Fincad’s Board of Directors.

The company intends to use the funds for the rapid growth of its advanced F3 enterprise analytics solutions business.

Led by president and CEO Bob Park, Fincad provides an F3 enterprise analytics platform providing industrial strength support for modeling, pricing, valuation, and risk management of portfolios in all asset classes. It combines built-in functionality and off-the-shelf software with flexibility to customize to a firm’s specific trading strategy, workflow and reporting requirements.
The platform also integrates with existing systems and data sources.

Clients include global asset managers, hedge funds, insurance companies, pension funds, banks and auditors.

Source. FinSMES, Staff, April 11, 2019

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Synapse Closes US$2.5M Seed Funding Round

Synapse, a Toronto, Canada-based provider of technology for the Learning and Development market, closed a US$2.5m seed financing.

The round was led by Generation Ventures with participation from Ripple Ventures, Differential Ventures, CEAS Investments, Cathexis Ventures, Ideal Ventures and Venture Capitalist Neal Dempsey. As part of the financing, Laura Lenz of Generation Ventures will join the board.

The company intends to use the funds to accelerate in sales, marketing and product expansion and to hire key personnel.

Led by CEO Ryan Austin, Synapse provides a platform that automates the instructional design process, allowing organizations to transform institutional knowledge into on-demand training. It enables planning and collaboration between subject matter experts (SMEs), instructional designers and training departments so that learning programs can be developed and deployed quickly. Learning teams are able to align learning objectives with assessment and activities to enable rapid instructional design.

Founded in 2016, Synapse has clients across numerous sectors including financial services, oil and gas, retail, healthcare, technology and manufacturing.

Sources FinSMES, Staff, April 10, 2019

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Diameter Health Announces $9.6 Million in Series A-1 Funding Round

Press Release

Strategic Investment Led by Optum Ventures Will Support Company Mission to Unlock Full Potential of Clinical Data

April 09, 2019 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

FARMINGTON, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Diameter Health, a market leader in clinical data integration, today announced a $9.6 million Series A-1 funding round. The investment is led by new investor Optum Ventures, the independent venture fund of Optum. Optum Ventures joins existing Diameter Health investors Activate Venture Partners, Connecticut Innovations, Excelerate Health Ventures and LRV Health.

“Our partnership with Optum Ventures will accelerate our ability to meet the industry demand for technology that makes clinical data actionable at scale.”

Diameter Health has developed a leading-edge technology that cleanses multisource clinical data with the focus toward actionable insight for health care organizations. The technology is certified by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Healthcare IT (ONC). The new funding will support Diameter Health’s continued growth with additional development, cloud delivery and commercial resources.

“The volume of clinical data being exchanged has grown exponentially over the last decade, and players across the health care ecosystem are grappling with how to make this influx a useful and valuable asset,” said Eric Rosow, CEO of Diameter Health. “Our partnership with Optum Ventures will accelerate our ability to meet the industry demand for technology that makes clinical data actionable at scale.”

Tripp Peake, General Partner at LRV Health, an original venture investor in Diameter Health, said: “We are excited to have Optum Ventures as part of the Diameter Health team. We all know that access to clinical data has limited value if the data isn’t reliable. Diameter Health is capitalizing on the market need for clean, normalized, actionable data from disparate systems and sources. We believe that need will continue to grow as clinical data is increasingly leveraged throughout the health care system.”

About Diameter Health

Diameter Health enables clinical insight through the normalization, cleansing, deduplication and enrichment of clinical data from across the care continuum. This creates a single, unified source of longitudinal structured patient information for improved care and actionable analytics. The Diameter Health platform empowers organizations that depend on multi-source data streams, such as Health Information Exchanges (HIEs), Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), health systems and health plans, to realize greater value from their data. For more information, visit the website www.diameterhealth.com or email us at info@diameterhealth.com.

About Optum Ventures

Optum Ventures is the independent venture fund of Optum, a leading information and technology-enabled health services business dedicated to helping make the health system work better for everyone. Optum Ventures invests in digital health companies that use data and insights to help improve consumers' access to health care services and how care is delivered and paid for, and that make the health care system more reliable and easier to navigate. For more information, visit www.optumventures.com.

Source. Company Press Release, April 9, 2019

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ShopBack secures US$45m in oversubscribed funding round co-led by Rakuten, EV Growth

SINGAPORE - Homegrown cashback platform ShopBack has raised US$45 million in an equity funding round, with new investors including co-leads Rakuten Capital and EV Growth, as well as EDBI, the investment arm of Singapore's Economic Development Board.

The round was over-subscribed, ShopBack told The Business Times.

Willson Cuaca, managing partner of EV Growth, and Amit Patel, CEO of Ebates Inc, which is a Rakuten company, will join ShopBack's board of directors. Rakuten Capital is the investment arm of the Japanese e-commerce giant, while EV Growth is a joint venture between Sinar Mas, East Ventures and Yahoo! Japan.

The latest capital injection brings ShopBack's total funding to US$83 million.

ShopBack, which is also backed by SoftBank Ventures Asia, said its new round of funding will be used to simplify shopping experiences, expand data capabilities to fuel personalisation and business insights, as well as accelerate growth in key markets.

"The company remains focused on building rewards and discovery features to enhance both online and offline shopping experiences for consumers across the Asia Pacific," ShopBack said in a press statement on Wednesday.

Besides rewarding users with cash back for making online purchases, ShopBack has also created features to improve users' buying experiences. For instance, its latest product, ShopBack GO, launched in partnership with Visa and Mastercard, enables users to dine out and get paid, the company said.

ShopBack said it saw a 250 per cent year-on-year growth in orders and sales in 2018.

The company facilitated over 2.5 million monthly transactions for more than 7 million users across seven Asia Pacific countries,and delivered close to US$1 billion sales for over 2,000 merchant partners in both the online and offline spaces, it said.

In the same year, ShopBack entered Australia, its first market outside Asia. It also opened research and development hubs in Vietnam and Taiwan, driving a threefold increase in its engineering, data, and product management talent pool.

EDBI chief executive Chu Swee Yeok said in a statement: "ShopBack is well-poised to be a leading digital rewards and discovery platform in the Asia-Pacific region, enhancing online brands and merchants' reach to consumers while delivering seamless personalised experience to consumers with its data science capabilities. There is tremendous opportunity for the company to extend its impressive platform to offline merchants and other business areas.

"As a strategic investor which is actively nurturing promising Singapore companies, EDBI is excited to support ShopBack as the company expands aggressively in the region, riding on Asia's exciting growth."

Source. The Straitstimes, Staff, April 10, 2019

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Make School raises $15 million for its pay-for-performance computer science program

By Kyle Wiggers

Make School, a unique pay-for-performance college that only requires students to make tuition payments if their income exceeds $60,000 after graduation, today announced that it has raised $15 million in series B funding led by Venrock, with participation from Learn Capital and Kapor Capital. It follows on the heels of a roughly $10 million round in October 2017 and brings the San Francisco startup’s total raised to $30 million, and will fuel its expansion into New York in the coming years.

“We’re rethinking what it means to be an elite institution — rooted in the progressive value system that inspires the diverse community of learners and makers we serve,” cofounder Ashu Desai said in a statement. “To realize that vision, we’ve designed an inclusive admissions process eschewing SAT scores and traditional metrics, we’ve ensured every student can afford to attend, and we’ve built an education that has enabled our students to outcompete their peers at schools like Stanford and Berkeley for careers at top tech companies.”

Make School, which launched a coding bootcamp for university and high school students in 2012, began offering a two-year bachelor’s degree in computer science last year in partnership with Dominican University. Through an incubation policy offered by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, the accrediting body that oversees institutions in Northern California, Make School instructors teach courses for Dominican students toward the goal of helping the university launch a new computer science minor, and in return, Make School students enroll in Dominican’s liberal arts courses.

Students have the option of paying for tuition up-front, which costs $70,000, or paying back 20 percent of their salary for 60 months after completing the degree program. Within the next three to five years, Make School plans to spin off as its own accredited college and introduce new degree programs, including several in computational biology.

“Make School is tackling the three big issues in higher education: cost, relevance, and equity,” said Venrock partner Tom Willerer. “It’s obliterating the historic distinction between in-demand technical skills and the value of a degree. By de-risking a student’s investment in a rigorous, computer science education, they’re also expanding access in ways that have profound potential to close equity gaps for tech employers.”

Willerer makes a good point: There’s a tangible talent gap in STEM fields. According to a recent Deloitte report, more than 20 percent of respondents said they’re seeing a shortage in AI software developers, data scientists, user-experience designers, change-management experts, project managers, business leaders, and subject-matter experts. Meanwhile, about 54 percent of survey respondents told Gartner researchers that they considered the skills gap the biggest challenge facing their organization.

For its part, Make School claims that about 202 students have enrolled since 2014, and that alumni — some of whom have landed jobs at Google, Apple, and Tesla — earn a $95,000 starting salary on average.

Source. Venture Beat, Kyle Wiggers, April 9, 2019

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Deep Lens wraps up $14M Series A round to improve digital pathology platform

By Erin Dietsche

Deep Lens, a digital pathology company that emerged from stealth mode with $3.2 million last fall, has closed a $14 million Series A round of financing. The company said this brings its total funding to $17.5 million.

Northpond Ventures led the Series A round, and existing investors Rev1 Ventures, Sierra Ventures and Tamarind-Hill Partners also participated.

The Columbus, Ohio-based company said it intends to use the money to advance its AI-driven platform and scale its sales and marketing efforts to support continued growth.

“We will also add to the software development team to ensure that VIPER is the premier platform for AI-driven, digital pathology workflows and clinical trial recruitment,” Deep Lens co-founder and president Simon Arkell said via email.

The aforementioned VIPER (Virtual Imaging for Pathology Education and Research) tool is the company’s flagship technology. It is a cloud-based digital pathology platform that unites AI and advanced pathology workflows while also enabling peer-to-peer and pathologist-to-patient collaboration.

The platform was originally developed for research purposes. Over the course of a decade, the technology was used and refined by various pathologists. Eventually, Deep Lens exclusively licensed VIPER and its image analysis methods.

The goal of VIPER is to help pathologists during clinical trial recruitment. VIPER can pinpoint eligible patients at the time of their diagnosis, thereby increasing the speed of trial recruitment.
The tool has been used on various research projects and at institutions like Mayo Clinic, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Cleveland Clinic. It is now freely available to pathologists across the globe.

Arkell noted that his startup has signed on multiple institutional customers who will deploy VIPER. The Ohio company has also launched agreements with biopharma clients who can utilize VIPER for clinical trial purposes.

“We are making VIPER free of charge and entering into partnership agreements with all of our institutional users so that we, and they, can benefit from the value add we will provide to the biopharma industry together,” Arkell noted. “Our biopharma customers are prepared to pay to have us help solve problems associated with drug development and clinical trial recruitment, and Deep Lens is on the forefront of that initiative.”

Source. Techcrunch, Erin Dietsche, April 8, 2019

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Blockskye, a travel industry-focused blockchain solution developer, raised Series A funding from Airlines Reporting Corp

PRESS RELEASE

ARC Invests in Travel Industry Blockchain Developer Blockskye

Investment Solidifies Company’s Relationship with Cutting-Edge Technology Company

April 04, 2019 01:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time

ARLINGTON, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Airlines Reporting Corp. (ARC) is pleased to announce an investment in Blockskye, a travel industry-focused blockchain solution developer. The Series A investment marks ARC’s first significant round of venture capital financing.

“Our recent collaboration with Blockskye, a major U.S. airline, and one of their largest corporate accounts makes us optimistic that there are near-term use cases for blockchain that drive strategic benefits and pull these already close relationships even closer,” said ARC President and CEO Mike Premo. “We’re delighted to make ARC’s first ever outside investment in Blockskye to support the development of this forward-thinking company and assure customers that the benefits of the industry ecosystem that ARC provides will be easily accessible even as new platforms like blockchain are deployed.”

“Blockskye is turning to ARC to provide marketplace leadership, carrier neutrality and trusted governance for new distribution strategies among ARC’s airline members and customers,” said Jerry Behrens, Blockskye’s chief relationship officer and co-founder.

Michael Share, Blockskye’s president and co-founder, commented, “Valuable corporate customers are increasingly demanding new ways to book and account for travel. We are focused on doing better for corporate buyers — and our partnership with ARC is a big step forward in that direction. Corporate buyers, TMCs and airlines all win.”

“Blockchain and shared ledger technology present a real opportunity to address a number of the inefficiencies and bottlenecks endemic to travel distribution. We are excited to continue our partnership with ARC,” said Blockskye CEO and Co-Founder Brook Armstrong.

ARC first announced a partnership with Blockskye in January upon the successful completion of a joint proof of concept to determine the viability of using blockchain technology, with the ARC settlement system, to facilitate the reporting and settlement of United Airlines tickets.

About ARC:

An industry leader in air travel distribution and intelligence, ARC settled $94.8 billion in ticket transactions in 2018 between airlines and travel agencies, representing more than 295 million passenger trips. ARC provides flexible distribution solutions, innovative technology and access to the world’s most comprehensive air ticket transaction data, helping the global air travel community connect, grow and thrive. For more information, please visit www.arccorp.com.

About Blockskye:

Blockskye is the founding travel member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Our solutions are custom, scalable, and designed for integration. We are bringing travel industry intelligence, know-how, and credibility to blockchain and new distribution. For more information, please contact info@blockskye.com.

Source. Company Press Release, April 4, 2019

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Good Dog Raises $6.7M to Help you find a pup

By Megan Rose Dickey

I’m in the process of looking for a pup friend to bring home with me, but I quickly found that it’s not an easy process. There are tons of places offering up pups, including breeders, shelters and rescues. But it’s not always clear if these places are legitimate.

This is where Good Dog, a startup that just raised $6.7 million from David Tisch’s BoxGroup, Felicis, Slow Ventures and others, can be helpful. Good Dog, launching today, is a marketplace that pre-vets breeders, shelters and rescues and centralizes the dog-search process.

“I’ve been fortunate to be involved with Josh and Lauren since the inception of Good Dog,” Tisch said in a statement. “As I was embarking on my own dog search, it quickly became clear that this was a totally broken process, opening up a massive opportunity within the $72 billion dollar pet market.”

Good Dog co-founders Lauren McDevitt and Josh Wais, former early Jet employees, came up with the idea while they were looking for a pup to add to their family. What was most troubling in their search, McDevitt told TechCrunch, was that there was a lack of standard and expertise.

“It was hard to determine the good from the bad,” she said. “It was hard to identify who was doing the right thing. Some put dogs in harm’s way and made it hard for well-intentioned people to find the right dog.”

Good Dog focuses on educating people about what it takes to take care of a dog, as well as what kind of dog may be best for them. The startup then enables those looking for dogs to explore profiles from trusted, vetted providers and then facilitates connections.

You can search by location and shelter, or simply by breed.

“Our mission is to help connect good with good to weed out the bad,” Wais said. “The industry is broken and we see an opportunity in connecting prospective dog owners with responsible sources to help weed out the irresponsible sources.”

So far, Good Dog showcases pups from more than 1,000 responsible sources across the U.S. Before adding a source to the platform, Good Dog’s team uses its own proprietary standards to ensure the source cares for its dogs in a way its advisory team has determined is acceptable. That entails making sure the source cares for each dog’s respective health needs, socializes them properly and houses them in safe environments.

Good Dog makes money by charging a fee (around $100) once you’ve decided to go ahead and purchase a dog. Good Dog does not charge breeders, shelters or rescues. It’s worth noting that providers also cannot pay to be featured on Good Dog.

Source, Techcrunch, Megan Rose Dickey, April 2, 2019

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DFW Capital Partners Closes it's 5th Fund at $360M.

Weekend Special Edition 

April 6, 2019

VC Deals

With the advent of electric vehicles—from scooters to Teslas—there are a lot of batteries that need charging, and ChargeWheel wants to make doing so as convenient as possible. The SF-based startup, which just announced that it raised $1 million in seed funding, said that it can top off “four electric vehicles or up to 400 e-bikes and e-scooters” with fast charging. It does so by carting around what the company calls “energy trailers” by van. More

Lucid Sight said that it has raised $6 million in funding to expand its MLB Champions and Crypto Space Commander blockchain games to traditional game platforms. More

Two years after Fusion Pharmaceuticals raised a modest $25 million series A, the targeted radiotherapy player has reeled in $105 million in new capital to push a clinical-stage program and build a pipeline of new treatments and combination therapies. More

Philadelphia-based HealthVerity raised $25 million in a Series C round, the data-focused digital health startup announced Wednesday. The new funding comes after an initial $7.1 million Series A in 2016 and $10.1 million Series B in 2017, bringing its total venture capital funding to $42.3 million. More

PE Deals

Goldman Sachs Group Inc invested money from China's sovereign wealth fund in a California-based industrial company and is looking for more U.S. deals, three sources familiar with the matter said, even after increased scrutiny from Washington all but stopped U.S.-China deals last year. More

Sponsor/ PE Markets & Startups

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M&As

Airbnb is continuing to widen its focus beyond “unconventional” hotels as it gets ready for a much-anticipated IPO. Following its acquisition of HotelTonight last month, the company has picked today to confirm that it invested in India’s OYO — a startup that manages budget hotels and other stays. More

IPOs

Lyft Inc was valued at $24.3 billion in the first initial public offering (IPO) of a ride-hailing startup on Thursday, raising more than it had set off to do as investors overlooked uncertainty over its path to becoming a profitable company. More

Ruhnn, a company that enables influencers to sell through e-commerce and is plotting to change the face of China’s fashion industry, has raised $125 million after it listed on the Nasdaq on Wednesday. The company sold 10 million American Depositary Shares at $12.5 a pop, the midpoint of its expected range. More

Shares of Silk Road Medical Inc. rocketed up 81 percent in its first day of trading Thursday after the medical device company raised $120 million in an upsized IPO. The Sunnyvale-based company sold 6 million shares at $20 each, instead of the 4.7 million shares it originally planned to sell for between $15 and $17 apiece. It could get another $18 million if underwriters buy up the shares allotted to them. More

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Exits

Yahoo spin-out Altaba is selling its entire Alibaba stake and closing down. The Yahoo spin-out created to house Yahoo’s lucrative stake in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan announced today that it will sell its lucrative stake in Alibaba and shut up shop. More

New Funds

DFW Capital Partners, a Teaneck, New Jersey based private equity firm closed its 5th fund at $360M. DFW Capital Partners VI, LP, is an investment partnership dedicated to making control investments in lower middle market service companies. More

For SoftBank Group Corp., $100 billion isn’t enough. The Japanese conglomerate, which has reshaped the technology startup landscape with its Saudi-backed Vision Fund, is in talks with investors to add as much as $15 billion more to its already-massive fund, said people familiar with the discussions. More

Healthcare News

Mount Sinai Health System and the Hasso Plattner Institute have teamed up to launch a digital health institute, which will focus on developing products with predictive and preventive capabilities that improve health outcomes. More

Container security startup Aqua lands $62M Series C

By Ron Miller

Aqua Security, a startup that helps customers launch containers securely, announced a $62 million Series C investment today led by Insight Partners.

Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), TLV Partners and Shlomo Kramer also participated. With today’s investment, the startup’s investments since inception now total over $100 million, according to the company.

Early investors took a chance on the company when it was founded in 2015. Containers were barely a thing back then, but the founders had a vision of what was coming down the pike and their bet has paid off in a big way as the company now has first-mover advantage. As more companies turn to Kubernetes and containers, the need for a security product built from the ground up to secure this kind of environment is essential.

While co-founder and CEO Dror Davidoff says the company has 60 Fortune 500 customers, he’s unable to share names, but he can provide some clues like five of the world’s top banks. As companies like that turn to new technology like containers, they aren’t going to go whole hog without a solid security option. Aqua gives them that.

“Our customers are all taking very dramatic steps towards adoption of those new technologies, and they know that existing security tools that they have in place will not solve the problems,” Davidoff told TechCrunch. He said that most customers have started small, but then have expanded as container adoption increases.

You may think that an ephemeral concept like a container would be less of a security threat, but Davidoff says that the open nature of containerization actually leaves them vulnerable to tampering. “Container lives long enough to be dangerous,” he said. He added, “They are structured in an open way, making it simple to hack, and once in, to do lateral movement. If the container holds sensitive info, it’s easy to have access to that information.”

Aqua scans container images for malware and makes sure only certified images can run, making it difficult for a bad actor to insert an insecure image, but the ephemeral nature of containers also helps if something slips through. DevOp can simply take down the faulty container and put a newly certified clean one quickly.

The company has 150 employees with offices in the Boston area and R&D in Tel Aviv in Israel. With the new influx of cash, the company plans to expand quickly, growing sales and marketing, customer support and expanding the platform into areas to cover emerging areas like serverless computing. Davidoff says the company could double in size in the next 12-18 months and he’s expecting 3x to 4x customer growth.

All of that money should provide fuel to grow the company as containerization spreads and companies look for a security solution to keep containers in production safe.

Source. Techcrunch, Ron Miller, April 3, 2019

Note. This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Run.AI raises $13M for its distributed machine learning platform

By Frederic Lardinois

Aviv’s Run.AI, a startup that is building a new virtualization and acceleration platform for deep learning, is coming out of stealth today. As a part of this announcement, the company also announced that it has now raised a total of $13 million. This includes a $3 million seed round from TLV Partners and a $10 million Series A round led by Haim Sadger’s S Capital and TLV Partners.

It’s no secret that building deep learning models take a hefty amount of GPU power or access to specialized AI chips. Run.AI argues that the virtualization layers that worked so well for in the past don’t quite cut it for training today’s AI models.

“We believe that we’re only scratching the surface of the full potential of deep learning,” Run.AI CEO and co-founder Omri Geller told me. “But the computational infrastructure needs of deep learning are a totally different ballgame. […] The rise of deep learning is triggering a new era of compute.”

Traditionally, Geller argues, virtualization was all about being generous and sharing the resources of a single machine for workloads that typically only run for a short time or use a small amount of resources. Deep learning workloads, however, are very different and are essentially selfish in that they want to take over all the available compute resources of a given machine. These training sessions also typically run for hours or days. At its core, what Run.AI offers is a new virtualization layer for distributed machine learning tasks that can across a large number of machines.

“We built a compute abstraction layer that bridges the gap between the new form of workloads and the new hardware that is evolving,” said Geller. “By using this abstraction layer, we can achieve 100x faster compute using distributed computing. We can double the resource utilization of the hardware and we can bring to companies the control over time and cost regarding deep learning.” That’s 100x faster than using a single resource, though that’s a bit aspirational as Geller also tells me that the team is seeing about a 10x speedup in production right now, though he’s confident that the team will get to 100x over time. Either way, though, the promise here is that the service will allow you to optimize the utilization of your deep learning workloads.

That’s only one part of the company’s solution, though. In addition, the company’s tools also analyze the model in order to break it down into smaller models that can then run in parallel across these servers. With that, the service can understand how many resources a workload would need and what machines to best send the given workloads to. In doing this, the system takes into account everything from available compute resources to network bandwidth, as well as the data pipeline and size.

The company also argues that this allows it to train large models that are bigger than the individual GPU memory capacity of a single machine.

There’s a financial aspect to this, too, because users can determine whether they want the service to prioritize cost savings over training speed, for example. The platform supports both private and public cloud deployments. In private clouds, cost savings are obviously less of a factor but the premise of increased utlization of the existing hardware investment will likely be a draw for many of these users.

The company, which was founded by Geller, Dr. Ronen Dar and Prof. Meir Feder, was founded in 2018. While still in stealth, it signed a number of early customers and opened a U.S. office. 

Source. Techcrunch, By Frederic Lardinois, April 2, 2019

Note. This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Onfido, which verifies IDs using AI, nabs $50M from SoftBank, Salesforce, Microsoft and more

By Ingrid Lunden

Security breaches, where malicious hackers obtain snippets of information that then get used to impersonate individuals in order to gain access to individuals’ and businesses’ sensitive financial and other private information, have become par for the course in the world of digital services. More than 2.7 billion records were  breached in a single incident this year in the US, and overall the damage from incidents like these potentially runs into the trillions of dollars globally.

Today, a startup called Onfido, which uses AI techniques combined with human verifiers to efficiently verify people are who they say they are when using digital services — is today announcing $50 million in funding to help address that ongoing — and growing — problem.

The funding comes on the heels of some very strong growth for the startup, which was founded in London but now operates most of its business out of San Francisco. In an interview, co-founder and CEO Husayn Kassai said that more than half of its customers, and most of its new growth, is coming out of the US.

Onfido uses computer vision and a number of other AI-based technologies to verify against some 4,500 different types of identity documents, using techniques like “facial liveness testing,” to see patterns invisible to the human eye, now has 1,500 businesses as customers, primarily in categories like marketplaces and communities, gaming and financial services, including companies like Remitly, Zipcar and Europcar; and in the last year, it had sales growth of 342 percent. Kassai said that it has to date verified “tens of millions” of IDs.

The money — a Series C2, technically — is coming from a group that includes top strategic tech investors. The round is being co-led by SoftBank Investment (SBI)and Salesforce Ventures, with M12 (the new name for Microsoft Ventures), FinVC and other unnamed new and previous investors are also participating. That’s a signal not just of how the biggest companies in that sector today are grappling with this problem, but also what approach they are using to solve it.

For SoftBank, the investment is separate from the Vision fund, founder and CEO Husayn Kassai noted, but it’s notable that a lot of the businesses that have been backed out of that fund — companies like Didi, Uber, Oyo, Lemonade, and others — fundamentally rely on people trusting that they are handling personal details securely while also carefully vetting suppliers on the platform (meaning, they need and use services like Onfido’s).

Meanwhile, both Microsoft and Salesforce have extensive enterprise businesses that could see multiple benefits from working with an identity verification provider, not just for their own purposes, but as a service that is sold on to its customers as part of a larger identity management and security offering.

The company is not revealing its valuation but has raised around $100 million to date and Kassai confirmed that it was an upround, with “a lot of happy investors.”

“We have strong metrics, and we have a long way to go in our growth,” he added.

There are a lot of companies today offering services to help offer secure services to authenticate users, for example, to help them log on to their work accounts or to access their online banking services. Onfido’s business focuses on the first step in all of this — customer onboarding — specifically around services geared towards consumers.

The opportunity that has opened up for it has been the result of more than just a rise in breaches. There’s also been a growing realization that a lot of the existing services that had been used for verification are simply not fit for purpose: either they too have been breached — as in the case of some of the bigger credit agencies like Equifax — or are not realistically efficient enough for how many online services run today, such as in the case of in-person verifications. (Onfido claims that its system can make a verification in as little as 15 seconds.)

Or, they are part of the new guard that has shifted its approach to the business of ID verificiation, either by choice or force. One would-be competitor from the past, Checkr, is now a partner of Onfido’s, Kassai noted. Others like Jumio — which is still grappling with the fallout from major illegal missteps from previous management — seem to still be trying to find their feet as standalone businesses.

“Fraud is rising and not going anywhere,” Kassai — who co-founded the company with Ruhul Amin and Eamon Jubbawy — said. “And the problem is that there are a dozen other companies that have not done a good enough job to detect it so far.” While no service is perfect — Onfido says that its “risk exposure” is 0.0195 percent — he says that the advantage of building its service on top of AI means that the algorithms use every experience to continue honing its accuracy. “What we learn from one client gets applied everywhere,” he notes.

“There has never been a more important time for companies to build trust with their customers by showing they are one step ahead of fraudsters,” said Frank van Veenendaal, the ex-vice chairman of Salesforce, who is joining the board with this round. “I believe Onfido has the unique opportunity to transform the digital identity market and deliver robust and scalable authentication-as-a-service, similar to how Salesforce transformed customer relationship management.”

Source. Techcrunch, Ingrid Lunden, April 2, 2019

Note. This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.