Author : zebethcontrol

Palo Alto Networks is buying Cider Security for up to $300M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in application security, cider security, palo alto networks, SecurityNo Comments

More consolidation is afoot in the world of cyber security. ZebethMedia has learned from sources that Palo Alto Networks is going to be announcing the acquisition of Cider Security for $200 million in cash and a further $100 million in shares. The deal has been rumored for weeks, but we understand that investors have now been informed, and staff is also being looped in on the deal, which will be made official when Palo Alto reports its earnings later today. Palo Alto has not responded to our request for comment. Cider Security, based out of Israel, is one of a number of companies that focuses on application security, which includes not just technology to monitor malicious or suspicious activity around live applications in the cloud, but observability of the full ecosystem around those applications, specifically code deployments and other kinds of modifications and updates, covering code, CI/CD and the wider supply chain around those apps. The company had raised $44 million from investors that included Tiger Global and Glilot Capital Partners — representing a decent exit for them at a time when valuations are seeing a lot of pressure, and many investors (including Tiger) have made drastic mark-downs in some of their holdings. That’s not to say that prices are buoyant here: one source tells us that Palo Alto may well publicize this as a $200 million cash deal, with the $100 million share part disclosed later in order not to alarm the market. Palo Alto Networks currently has a market cap of close to $47 billion. Relatively speaking, while it has been hit, like other tech companies, by a dropping share price, it has seen significantly less volatility and decline than some of its more valuable, bigger, consumer-facing counterparts. The company has made a number of acquisitions over the years to expand its reach in the market, but this appears to be the first and only one in 2022 (the two most recent before this are Expanse and BridgeCrew, respectively for $800 million in 2020 and $156 million in 2021). Palo Alto already has a division that focuses on application security, which was in part formed by way of acquisitions. Evident.io, which it acquired in 2018 for $300 million, forms the basis of its Prisma Cloud business, which is focused on end-to-end application security. Cider will bring Palo Alto a product built from the ground up envisioning more holistic observability and communication between engineers and security teams. Notably, along with the rumors of this Cider deal, it had been reported that Palo Alto Networks had been eyeing up another application security startup, Apiiro Security; however, reports claim that PA “walked away” due to a much higher price tag of $600 million. Interestingly, Apiiro looks like it is set to go it alone for now: just earlier this month, it announced a $100 million round of funding. Cloud security, and application security specifically, continue to be hot areas in the enterprise IT world, not least because the high amount of network activity and systems exposure both make the space vulnerable to attacks. It was estimated to be a market worth some $6.2 billion in 2020, and it’s growing fast. We will upate this post as we learn more.

OpsHelm emerges from stealth to automatically correct your security blunders • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Enterprise, OpsHelm, Security, security opsNo Comments

There are so many preventable cybersecurity incidents each year if only you were aware of the problem. It could be the classic exposed Amazon S3 bucket or a firewall vulnerability. These are what many security experts might call rookie mistakes, but which hit companies all the time because of the sheer complexity tracking security along your entire IT stack. OpsHelm, an early stage startup from a group of long-time cybersecurity professionals, wants to strip away the complexity and automatically correct a lot of the most common security mistakes, the kind that can cause big problems if they go undetected. Today, the company emerged from stealth to make the product more widely available in a public beta with GA expected early next year. “What we’re trying to do is automate a lot of what’s currently a fairly manual, interrupt-driven workflow where security tools push an alert to you. And then you’ll have to go fix the problem that they’ve identified or decide whether it’s not an issue,” company co-founder and CEO Bill Gambardella told ZebethMedia. Prior to founding OpsHelm Gambardella was COO at Leviathan Security Group, and previously ran security at Sprout Social. His three other co-founders have similar pedigrees, and that means they have experienced these kinds of issues first hand that they are trying to fix with OpsHelm. He said what he and his co-founders saw was the same mistakes and issues occurring over and over again resulting in late night or weekend meetings to try and fix a problem that could have been preventable in the first place. OpsHelm dashboard Image Credits: OpsHelm “What I saw from both ends of that spectrum was that these little misconfigurations, little cloud problems, little cloud issues, somebody innocently committed at one point, cascading into big, big problems on let’s say, Saturday night, where we all were on an all-hands-on-deck call dealing with an incident. And then you need an expensive consultancy to help you clean it up. Not an ideal place to be, but it did keep happening over and over again,” he said. OpsHelm monitors your security landscape looking for those issues, and letting you know in a common communications tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams where you can accept or reject the fix, and whatever action you take, the system learns about how to handle it next time. Gambardella says this is not based on so-called best practices so much as learning from the environment in which your company is operating, and helping teams move on without a lot of discussion, while leaving room for auditing later if it’s required. “We’re trying to move away from ‘Here’s here’s an alert you need to go investigate, drop what you’re doing, and spend 15 minutes talking to people,’ to more of ‘at 3:04 pm Tim on the Ops team, said he is OK that this S3 bucket can be on the internet and publicly exposed,’” he said. Security ops can track all of this in an operations dashboard, and could still decide to talk to the person who green lighted the exception to find out if there was a justifiable reason for this particular action, but the idea is to empower people to deal with these issues in the moment. The very stealthy startup launched earlier this year, and has raised $1.3 million seed. The

ReadySpaces, which offers co-warehousing spaces to corporate customers, secures $20M in debt • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Commerce, funding, startup, Startups, warehouseNo Comments

Jon Zimmerman — the co-founder of ReadySpaces, a warehouse storage provider for small businesses — was working in the self-storage market when he had the idea for a product with the flexibility of self-storage but the capabilities of a traditional warehouse, aimed primarily at enterprise customers. His partner, Kevin Petrovic, had a different company that was a customer of Jon’s at his first “beta” location, in the ’90s. The two started working together to grow ReadySpaces — formerly CustomSpace — into a nationwide business. Today, ReadySpaces operates 32 warehouses and services a customer base of over 2,000 businesses. That impressed investors, evidently, who pledged $20 million in the startup as a part of an all-debt funding round that closed today. Bringing ReadySpaces’ total raised to $40 million, the new funding will fuel expansion, Petrovic says, as ReadySpaces prepares to roll out new services. Why opt for debt as opposed to equity? Petrovic claims that it was “the most efficient capital structure for growth” given the current financial environment. It’s definitely true that equity is harder to come by these days, with valuations dropping and debt financing slowly gaining in popularity. “We have an ambitious growth plan for 2023 and this capital will allow us to remain the leader in the co-warehousing space,” Petrovic told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Certain pandemic-related pressures, such as backups in major ports, have eased, but we see our business model continuing to resonate every day for both established businesses and small companies just starting off.” While ReadySpaces has been around in some form since 2013, it’s only in recent years that co-warehousing has become a hot trend. The pandemic supercharged co-warehousing, which allowed physical goods businesses (e.g., manufacturers of household products and construction materials) dealing with supply chain challenges to store inventory without having to purchase a facility. In a co-warehousing setup, multiple companies can use the same warehouse space — eliminating the need for the companies to invest in the infrastructure themselves. For example, ReadySpaces offers co-located units in sizes ranging from 200 to 5,000 square feet, each equipped with power units, loading docks and forklifts, Wi-Fi, industrial workspaces, and private offices and conference rooms. A view of a ReadySpaces facility in Tukwila, Washington, where the startup has a sizable hub. Image Credits: ReadySpaces Petrovic posits that co-warehousing lets businesses insure against economic uncertainty and busy periods, such as holidays, by providing affordable, scalable storage for reserve inventory. “The need for small warehouse space isn’t constrained to small businesses,” Petrovic said. “We’ve worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies to provide short-term overflow space. The key is that we take an asset class that moves slowly and is generally difficult to operate in and make it absolutely seamless.” Certainly, ReadySpaces’ competitors have demonstrated the demand for co-warehousing. Saltbox, a company providing co-working and warehousing space for up-and-coming e-commerce businesses, recently attracted a $128 million investment from real estate investment platform Fundrise to expand its footprint. And last year, private equity real estate firm Capstone Equities launched Portal Warehousing, a flexible warehouse solution offering smaller spaces and share amenities, which plans to expand to cities, including Los Angeles, Brooklyn and Las Vegas, in the coming months. As for ReadySpaces, Petrovic claims that the Los Angeles–based company — which employs around 50 people — is “comfortably profitable,” with revenue growing approximately 50% year over year. “Since our last announcement, we have opened numerous new locations and in a few new markets as well. For example, Queens, New York; Kearny, New Jersey; Saddle Brook, New Jersey; and Round Rock, Texas, are all recent new sites,” Petrovic said. “We don’t have a burn rate … Nationally, we’ve seen demand skyrocket by 375% over the last three years.” One point of concern is a slowdown in consumer spending related to inflation, which could depress sales in retail and, by extension, the demand for warehouse space. The warehouse industry is running the risk of oversupply, some experts say, as developers heavily invest in warehouse expansion. Q2 2022 saw a record 613 million square feet of warehouse space built in the U.S. — almost double the construction pipeline in 2019. Petrovic acknowledged the headwinds, but insisted that ReadySpaces is in a position to weather them. “There are numerous major shifts in the industrial real estate market happening now due to robust demand and high development costs,” he added. “Our focus is on navigating these market changes successfully so we can continue to provide the product that we know customers love.”

Terzo lands $16M to extract key data from contracts • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in AI, Enterprise, funding, Robotics & AI, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Contract governance is the steps taken to make sure agreed-upon terms between a company and its suppliers are met. It’s an essential part of doing business, and the consequences for getting it wrong can be steep. McKinsey estimates that poor contract governance can cost organizations up to 9% of their total revenue, which equates to $1.4 trillion for the Fortune 500 alone and $6.4 trillion across all enterprise business-to-business companies. Challenges around contract governance have fueled the rise of startups like Icertis, which recently secured $150 million at a $3.2 billion valuation to build out its contracting tools. LinkSquares in April landed $100 million for its AI-powered contract analysis platform, while ContractPodAi, a close competitor, has raised tens of millions to digitize contract reviews. A relatively new entrant in the space is Terzo, which was co-founded by Brandon Card, Al Giocondi and Pradeep Thangavel in 2020. A suite of contract processing software, Terzo uses AI to extract data in contracts related to a company’s spend and revenue across their supplier and customer relationships. In a sign investor interest in contract management startups hasn’t waned, Terzo today closed a $16 million Series A round led by Align Ventures with participation from TYH Ventures, Engage Ventures, Human Capital and other unnamed institutional investors. The proceeds bring the company’s total raised to more than $18f million, and Card, who serves at Terzo’s CEO, says they’ll be put toward Terzo’s sales and marketing initiatives as well as enhancing the platform’s AI capabilities. “As our technology evolves, we aim to deliver advanced insights around financials and budgeting,” Card said. “Contract systems were built for legal use cases and legal teams to focus on drafting and clauses. There are no analytics or financial insights for leaders to make smarter decisions. Terzo was founded to solve that problem.” Image Credits: Terzo Card says his experiences at Microsoft, where he was an enterprise portfolio manager at Microsoft Cloud, inspired him to co-found Terzo. Giocondi came from account manager roles at Oracle and IBM. As for Thangavel, he spent nearly seven years on the engineering side at Freshworks prior to joining alongside Card and Giocondi. Card says that Terzo’s AI was trained using real-world business contracts to extract data such as inventory and costs, supervised by a quality assurance team to ensure baseline accuracy. Terzo integrates with enterprise resource platforms like SAP and Oracle to track contractual obligations and expiration dates, including metrics related to environmental, social and governance policies. “Terzo is valuable to the IT audience because it allows them to see data faster,” Card said. “We’ve created a platform that combines data management, automation and AI, but also keeps people in the loop.” VCs see promise in contract management legal tech like Terzo’s, perhaps in part because of the high customer adoption rate. According to a 2020 Bloomberg Law survey, more than half (56%) of in-house lawyers said that they’re using contract management programs. (That’s despite the fact that the legal industry is notoriously slow to adopt new tech.) If the current trend holds, Markets and Markets predicts the contract management life cycle market will grow from $1.5 billion in 2019 to $2.9 billion by 2024. Card says that Terzo has “over a dozen” customers, including a Fortune 50 retailer and the largest financial transaction processor in the world. The plan into the next year is to drive revenue at over 50% of Terzo’s overall expenses, he says, and to break even in 2024. “We are positioned to be a profitable business by 2025,” Card added. “Both the pandemic and current tech slowdown has taught us how to run a lean business that is focused on efficient growth. The current downturn has caused our customers to prioritize spending and budgeting so we look at this as a positive tailwind heading into 2023.”

Mozilla looks to its next chapter • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Internet, mitchell baker, Mozilla, Mozilla Foundation, non-profit, policy, Privacy, webNo Comments

Mozilla today released its annual “State of Mozilla” report and for the most part, the news here is positive. Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit side of the overall Mozilla organization, generated $585 million from its search partnerships, subscriptions and ad revenue in 2021 — up 25% from the year before. And while Mozilla continues to mostly rely on its search partnerships, revenue from its new products like the Mozilla VPN, Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) Plus, Pocket and others now accounts for $57 million of its revenue, up 125% compared to the previous year. For the most part, that’s driven by ads on the New Tab in Firefox and in Pocket, but the security products now also have an annual revenue of $4 million. With the launch of this year’s report, the Mozilla leadership team is also taking some time to look ahead, because in many ways, this is an inflection point for Mozilla. When Mozilla was founded, the internet was essentially the web and the browser was the way to access it. Since then, the way we experience the internet has changed dramatically and while the browser is still one of the most important tools around, it’s not the only one. With that, Mozilla, too, has to change. Its Firefox browser has gone from dominating the space to being something of a niche product, but the organization’s mission (“to ensure the internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all”) is just as important today — and maybe more so — as it was almost 25 years ago when Mozilla was founded. To talk about the state of the business and to look ahead to what’s next for Mozilla, I sat down with its executive chairwoman and CEO Mitchell Baker, Mozilla chief product officer Steve Teixeira (who recently joined Mozilla after leaving Twitter), and Mozilla Foundation executive director Mark Surman. Mozilla’s executive chairperson Mitchell Baker. In talking about the state of the business, Baker noted that given the pandemic, 2021 was obviously not a normal year. For the first half of 2022, with the war in Ukraine and the overall economic headwind, Mozilla’s financials looked somewhat similar, she noted. But more importantly, Mozilla’s attempts at diversification are starting to pay off. “There are some things in 2021 that I think are our doing and that we intend to continue — multi-product, different business models, engaging with consumers — […] that do represent the future and our very early steps of making this new chapter of Mozilla,” she explained. With Mozilla’s three business models (privacy-preserving ads, subscriptions and search partnerships), the organization is now a bit more dependent on the overall ad market. But as Teixeira stressed, the market may be softer, but this has mostly manifested itself in slower growth, not a drop in the market. “For us, as a non-public company, that’s okay,” he said. “We can we can do great. Since we don’t have to manage a public market perception, all we need to have is a great business to run and that keeps us happy. ” He also believes that while its security products are a small portion of Mozilla’s overall revenue so far (with the VPN driving virtually all of that), there is still a lot of upside there. Mozilla is looking at how it can add more features and products to its overall security suite going forward, both as part of Firefox and as stand-alone products. Earlier this year, Mozilla introduced paid subscriptions for its Mozilla Developer Network (MDN). Teixeira said it was meeting the organization’s “modest expectations,” but also represented Mozilla’s willingness to experiment with these business models. With a product like MDN, which has a very long history, Mozilla has to be careful about how it manages an experiment like this, because it can easily backfire and tarnish its brand, too, something Baker acknowledged. “We were really determined to honor MDN for what it is and make sure that what we’re adding is truly a premium service,” she said. Yet while Mozilla continues to expand its product offerings, for a lot of people, its brand remains synonymous with Firefox. Both Baker and Teixeira stressed that Mozilla will continue to invest in Firefox and Teixeira especially stressed that he sees a lot of opportunity for growth on mobile. But Baker also noted that she wants Mozilla to stand for something more universal than that. “What I find about the Mozilla brandis that inspires hope, it represents aspiration,” she said. “I’ve been testing that the last few years, because we knew that Firefox was a global brand — which is hard to get, especially one that’s lasted 20 years — but I’ve been testing the Mozilla brand globally and found a couple things: it is a global brand, it’s not as well-known as Firefox, but it’s more well-known than you would expect.” But people want more from Mozilla, she argued. It’s one thing, after all, to fix Firefox (which Mozilla has arguably done) and compete with Edge and Chrome, it’s another to compete against Microsoft and Google and return a sense of agency to users when it’s so hard to preserve your privacy and security online. “[The internet] is controlled by a handful of organizations aimed at me, designed to get me to do something, buy something, believe something, take some kind of action,” she said about the current state of the internet. “What we don’t currently have, and why I spend my life energy here at Mozilla — we don’t have that power working on my behalf, reaching out into the world, looking for what I’m looking for or influencing the world, or finding the things I want or representing me. It’s aimed at me and no individual human has the resources to really understand or respond or take care of what’s going on.” Yet without solving for privacy and security online, it’s hard to see what’s next. “Privacy and security are necessary. We need them right now. People are aware of

Namecoach raises cash to teach users how to correctly pronounce names • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in AI, Enterprise, funding, Robotics & AI, startup, StartupsNo Comments

We’ve all been faced with a name that’s difficult to pronounce. But not everyone considers the consequences of their mispronunciations. In a piece for Fast Company, Madhumita Mallick, the head of inclusion, equity and impact at Carta, recalls how her name became a source of anxiety even when she was a grade-school student. Studies have indeed found that when peers and teachers incorrectly pronounce or change the names of students of color, those students participate less in class and becoming socially withdrawn to avoid associating with their name. As the co-authors of one wrote in 2012: “actions and attitudes [students] experienced in K-12 schools highlight a type of cultural ‘othering’ that contradicts our goals for multicultural school environments .. even just stumbling over a name they had never seen before, the tone set by a teacher about a student’s name [is] something significant.” Praveen Shanbhag, the CEO of Namecoach, heard a speaker at his sister’s alma mater flub her name during her college graduation. That, along with his experiences as a first-generation immigrant to the U.S., inspired him to co-found Namecoach, which develops name pronunciation tools that can be embedded in existing platforms like Salesforce, Canvas and Gmail. “We are on a mission to make name mispronunciation a thing of the past for everyone,” Shanbhag told ZebethMedia via email. Shanbhag started dabbling in programming while working on his Ph.D. in philosophy at Stanford. He decided to code an app that would collect recordings of students saying their names and deliver them to name readers for graduation, which became Namecoach. By 2016, Shanbhag says that hundreds of schools were using Namecoach’s software and services. Namecoach — which eventually broadened its customer base to client brands — isn’t alone in the market. NameShouts offers a robust set of name pronunciation tools, as does Facebook, Slack and LinkedIn. But Shanbhag tells me that early on, he sought to differentiate Namecoach by investing heavily in AI and integrations. Image Credits: Namecoach For example, Namecoach uses an AI system to predict the correct pronunciation when someone’s name has multiple correct pronunciations based on factors like nationality, ethnicity, gender and location. Another of the platform’s systems synthesizes speech in situations where an audio recording of a name isn’t available. At a high level, Namecoach shows name pronunciations both user-generated and drawn from a database of audio name pronunciations. When asked about the system’s accuracy and whether users can remedy mistakes that might make their way onto the database, Shanbhag said that Namecoach consults with linguistic experts and offers a submission form for corrections. It’s not yet live, but Shanbhag says that Namecoach is developing a AI to provide pronunciations that take the speaker’s native language into account — not just the name-owner’s language. “Your name is central to your identity, and accurate pronunciation sets the tone for a positive interaction for both parties,” he said. Namecoach’s platform works out-of-the-box with services including Microsoft Teams, Outlook and Google Workspace and offers an API and software development kit to let third parties build Namecoach’s functionality into their products. But the focus over the next few months will be the startup’s first-ever consumer app, Shanbhag says, which will be made available as a Chrome extension next year. Namecoach — which today closed an $8 million Series A round led by Impact America Fund with participation from Authentic Ventures, Metaplanet, Engage.VC, Founders Fund, Bisk Ventures and others — also plans to ramp up its sales and marketing efforts and expand the platform’s collection of connectors. Shanbhag hinted at capabilities beyond pronunciation guidance coming down the pipeline, including prompts to enable warm interactions in sales scenarios and feedback to help users improve their conversations more generally. Leaning into sales applications makes sense given Namecoach’s marquee customers — Salesforce, Netjets and PwC. Beyond those three, the 30-person startup claims to have more than 300 education and corporate clients worldwide. “The Series A funding enables us to accelerate our goal of integrating novel voice technology into every communication workflow to solve name pronunciation across a wide spectrum of use cases during any voice interaction,” said Shanbhag, who wouldn’t Namecoach’s disclose revenue figures when asked. “Namecoach has customers across a very wide range of verticals, use cases and organization size, which means that we are not reliant on any subsegment to thrive in a downturn.” To date, Palo Alto-based Namecoach has raised $15 million in venture capital.

Google rolls out new features across Maps, Search and Shopping • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Apps, Google, google search, Google Shopping, Google-MapsNo Comments

Google announced today that it’s introducing a slew of new Maps, Search and Shopping features. The company revealed majority of the new features during its Search On event in September and is now starting to roll them out to users. Search Starting today, users will be able to use Search to find their favorite dish at a restaurant near them. For example, you can search “truffle mac and cheese near me” to see which nearby restaurants carry the dish on their menu. Once you find a specific dish that you’re looking for, you can get more information about its price, ingredients and more. Another new Search functionality lets you use Google’s multisearch feature to find specific food near you. Say you see something tasty looking online, but don’t know what it is or where to find it. You can now use Lens in the Google app for Android or iOS to snap a picture or take a screenshot of a dish and add the words “near me” to find a place that sells it nearby. Image Credits: Google Later this year, Google is going roll out an update to its Lens AR Translate capabilities so users can more seamlessly translate text on complex backgrounds. Instead of covering up the original text like it currently does, Google is going to erase the text and re-create the pixels underneath with an AI-generated background, and then overlay the translated text on top of the image. Maps As for the new Maps features, Google is launching a new visual search experience called Live View in London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, San Francisco and Tokyo. “Say you’re visiting New York with plans to knock out your holiday shopping and catch up with friends,” Google says in a blog post. “Lift your phone and tap on the camera icon in the search bar to see nearby stores and other places like coffee shops, banks and ATMs. With AR-powered directions and arrows, you can see what direction they’re in and how far away they are — and even spot places that aren’t in your immediate view (like a clothing store around the block) to get a true sense of the neighborhood at a glance.” If you want to find other places, you can tap on categories to explore what restaurants, bars, dessert shops, parks and transit stations are nearby. In addition to displaying information about where places are, users will be able to see key information about each spot overlaid, such as whether the location is busy, if its open, what the price range is, etc. Image Credits: Google Another new Maps feature makes it easier for EV owners to find the best charging station for their vehicle. Now, you can search for “EV charging stations” and select the “fast charge” filter. You can also filter for stations that offer your EV’s plug type. Google also announced that it’s expanding its “accessible places” feature globally after initially launching it in the U.S., Australia, Japan and the U.K. in 2020. The feature is designed to help people determine whether a place is wheelchair accessible. You can turn on the “accessible places” setting in the app, after which you will start to see a wheelchair icon on places that are wheelchair accessible. You’ll be able to see if a place has accessible seating, restrooms and parking. Google notes that the feature can also be helpful if you want to avoid stairs because you have a stroller or are using a cart. Shopping Google has announced a new AR shopping feature that is designed to make it easier to find your exact foundation match. The company says its new photo library features 148 models representing a diverse spectrum of skin tones, ages, genders, face shapes, ethnicities and skin types. As a result, it should be easier for shoppers to better visualize what different products will look like on them. Image Credits: Google “Here’s how it works: Search for a foundation shade on Google across a range of prices and brands, like ‘Armani Luminous Silk Foundation’,” Google explained in a blog post. “You’ll see what that foundation looks like on models with a similar skin tone, including before and after shots, to help you decide which one works best for you. Once you’ve found one you like, just select a retailer to buy.” Users can now also shop for shoes using AR. You can start exploring shoes from brands like Saucony, VANS and Merrell starting today. The feature will be compatible with more brands in the future, Google says. You can start by searching for a sneaker type, such as “Shop blue VANS sneakers” and tap “View in my space.” Then, you’ll be able to spin, zoom and see the shoes in your space to make it easier to see if you like the color, laces, tread, etc.

PR software giant Cision acquires Factmata, the fake news startup that pivoted to monitoring all kinds of online narratives • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Media & Entertainment, SocialNo Comments

Fake news, and the identification and eradication of it, has long been thought of as the purview of social media platforms, where a lot of that tends to be shared. Today, one of the more ambitious tech startups in the field of fighting fake news is getting acquired — not by a social media platform, but by a player in of the other parties that stands to gain and lose a lot from misinformation, or at least bad press: PR. Factmata — founded by AI specialists with the aim of building an engine to detect when fake news and other false information is shared online, but which had more recently turned to using its tech for social analytics — is being acquired by Cision, a provider of media monitoring and distribution services and products for the public relations industry with some 100,000 customers. The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, both companies tell me. Cision — now privately held after being taken off the public market at a $2.74 billion valuation in 2019 — is one of the bigger companies in the field of public relations services, owning brands like PR Newswire and managing databases provided to PR professionals to better target their pitches (or not, as the case often seems to be). Over time it has expanded beyond engagement and deeper into areas like media monitoring, and it has made a number of acquisitions to bolster that, such as its 2021 acquisition of Brandwatch in the UK for $450 million. It’s very unlikely that this deal was anything close to that. Factmata had raised around $4 million in total, with its investors including a number of high-profile individuals in the world of news, online information and media, including Biz Stone, Craig Newmark and Mark Cuban. The company has a staff of just seven people, and it sounds like will include Factmata’s IP as well as all of of them, including CEO Antony Cousins, who are all joining Cision to build out its existing tools as part of a bigger automation and AI play that Cision is pursuing. The acquisition is notable for a couple of reasons. The first of these is that it gives us a moment to take a pulse check on social media moderation, and how that is being tackled. Fact checking and social media moderation have been hot topics for years. But with layoffs at big platforms like Twitter and Facebook hitting engineers and content moderation teams, a big question has emerged: how effective will these and other companies be at parsing and responding to the waves of content spurred by elections and other big events — especially since their ability to stem the tide of violent, harassing, and misleading posts was never perfect to begin with? For better or worse, that has created an opening — or a responsibility, depending on how you look at it: organizations or individuals who want to understand how the world is talking about them, and to stem the tide of bad conversations, are going out there and finding out for themselves. For its part, Factmata had high hopes when it was first founded by Dhruv Gulati, Sebastian Riedel and Andreas Vlachos (none of whom are working with the company now: Gulati who had been the CEO and then chairman is at Onfido; Riedel — who also founded and sold another news detection startup Bloomsbury AI to Facebook — is at Deepmind, and Vlachos is an academic at Cambridge). It set out to build an engine to find and respond to fake news automatically, with the potential users including not just those social media platforms but also consumers. At one point the company cut a deal with the creators of AdBlock Plus to take investment from them and to take on the operation of their Chrome plug-in Trusted News: the idea was that this would help Factmata develop its go-to-market strategy, by helping it ingest more fake news (and trusted news) data, but also to have a direct line to users. But Cousins tells me that this vision evolved over time. That was in part because it found that targeting a few social media companies was not as scalable as a business model as targeting the wider world of brands and businesses, Cousins said. It was also because Factmata found that there was too much nuance in a lot of content, and ultimately, while an AI system is much better at surfacing clusters of activity and evolving trends, or narratives as the company describes them, a human in the loop, he said, is needed to determine which of these are actionable and which are false flags. “We focused on building tech that could find a narrative but then let users judge for themselves if that narrative is worth watching,” he said, describing it as a “picks and shovels” approach. “It’s scalable and appropriate to have a human making the ultimate decision.” That is what Factmata discovered, and that’s what a lot of others in the field also believe is likely the right route forward. Now, it will be interesting to see how that plays out for companies that are removing content moderation teams now due to cost cutting. Another reason why Factmata’s acquisition is notable is because of the wider startup context. From what we understand, the startup was finding it a challenge to raise money in the current climate, given that it was seeing some growth but not enough, and it was approaching the end of its cash reserves. The company has been working with a number of high-profile companies and their agencies to incorporate its automatic “narrative” detection into their wider monitoring activities, and by April of this year it was “halfway to break even” according to Cousins. “But that was just not enough evidence for VCs,” he continued. “They needed to see evidence of six to nine months of growth. So it wasn’t enough, and we didn’t have the runway for another year.”

Investors are looking for market opportunity, not just size • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in Column, EC Column, pitch deck, Startups, Total Addressable Market, VentureNo Comments

Bill Reichert Contributor More posts by this contributor Interest Rates, Unicorns And What The Fed Means To Silicon Valley Every pitch deck needs to have a “Market” slide. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs get the market slide wrong. That’s not necessarily their fault. The fault lies in the pitch coaching industry that insists that every deck include a slide with TAM, SAM and SOM. (total addressable market, serviceable addressable market, serviceable obtainable market or variations on these terms.) You can find templates for this slide all over the internet. Almost always, the template has three bubbles. Sometimes they appear side by side, like the porridge bowls of the three bears, and sometimes they are elegantly nested within one another, like a matryoshka doll. The mythical market size claim It’s amazing how this three-bubble market size slide has spread. It seems that everywhere I go on the planet, from Stockholm to Shenzhen, entrepreneurs are using a similar slide. Typically, entrepreneurs claim, “Our global TAM is $X billion, but we are going to start out in a certain part of the world, where our SAM is $Y billion. And we conservatively project that our SOM is $Z billion.” At times, they also show a very precise compound annual growth rate (“with a CAGR of 17.65%”) to demonstrate their analytical rigor. The typical market-size slide is obsolete. It’s clear why entrepreneurs try to pump up their market size. They’ve been told that venture capital investors are only interested in unicorns, and so they assume that the best way to become a unicorn is to go after the largest market possible. Presumably, the thinking is that it is easier to get 2% of a very large market than it is to get 20% of a smaller market. So, they earnestly search for market data that allow them to claim that their TAM is perhaps $56 billion, or $256 billion, or even better, $2.5 trillion. When this slide appears, most investors chuckle (or weep). Not only are the numbers always exaggerated, they are also irrelevant. Market size vs. market opportunity