Author : zebethcontrol

Laika laps up $50M for its automated security compliance platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in compliance, data protection, Enterprise, laika, SecurityNo Comments

Compliance with privacy and security frameworks like SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR has become a central component not just of how organizations build trust with their users, but of how organizations work together these days: fail to meet the requirements of these frameworks, and you might lose your business relationship. Today, Laika — one of the bigger startups providing tools to help meet those compliance demands — is announcing $50 million in funding, underscoring the growth in this space. Laika will be using the equity, a Series C, to continue expanding the functionality of its platform and its wider business funnel. Laika today has some 500 customers, with that number growing four-fold in the last 12 months; and it provides integrations for some 100 different software packages to measure how client compliance stacks up across them, with tools including integrated audits, penetration testing and security questionnaires (which are using in RFPs and due diligence ahead of securing contracts). In an interview, Austin Ogilvie, Laika’s co-founder and co-CEO, said the plan will be to expand in both customer numbers and the number of sources Laika can tap to measure data protection and other compliance metrics across an organization’s wider digital footprint. Fin Capital is leading this round, with new backers Centana Growth Partners and previous investors J.P. Morgan Growth Equity Partners, Canapi, and ThirdPrime all also participating, among others not being named. Other notable past investors have included some very big names in the world of fintech, including PayPal, and fintech specialist VCs NYCA and Dash Fund — a fuller list that points to Laika’s traction in financial services in particular. The finance sector has for years at this point been a significant user of compliance software for regulatory and business reasons. But, as Ogilvie pointed out to me, we are long past the point of financial companies being the primary users of compliance tools: that is one reason why growth is motoring along for companies like Laika right now, and why Laika specifically is able to raise a decent round at a time when funding is much harder to come by for startups. On top of this, combined with Laika’s other co-founders Sam Li and Eva Pittas (respectively the co-CEO and COO, with all three pictured above), the three have collective exposure and experience across insurance, data science and risk protection that speaks to the bigger opportunity that the company is tackling. Including this latest Series C, Laika has now raised $98 million in total. While it’s not disclosing valuation, Ogilvie confirmed it was a “healthy step up” from its Series B, which PitchBook notes was $235 million post-money when that closed in 2021. (In other words it’s now more than $335 million.) For a little more context, two of Laika’s close competitors in the world of monitoring data protection compliance, Vanta and Drata, each raised rounds this year that valued them at or just above $1 billion. (See here and here.) Laika’s growing coffers come at a timely moment, and that’s not just because its competitors are also raising. First, the number of compliance frameworks being formed globally is growing; and second, the bigger an organization or its operations, the more complicated the task of ensuring compliance becomes. “Compliance has been a top for at least the last 10 years, but it’s really dialed up in the last three, where there has been just an explosion of these, some regulatory but others like PCI just a non-option when it comes to compliance,” Ogilvie said. “If you sell or work with any brand of consequence, they will do due diligence that includes security assessments, and you also have to demonstrate that you are continuously operating according to those principles.” The biggest customers might have as many as 5,000 vendors that need to be assessed and regularly audited, a task in itself that necessitates automation and a platform approach. But smaller organizations need software, too, often for a slightly different set of reasons, he said. “Some come to us having never needed to look at this. Using Laika will be the first time seeing security assessment document,” Ogilvie said. Others might be using Laika in place of having adequate staff or infosec teams in-house to monitor and maintain these data relationships. Covid, he added, increased the need for these tools, with more working remotely and in the cloud typically needing more apps and more generally a different kind of security and data protection environment. There are a number of compliance tools in the market today — no surprise considering the ever-persistent cybersecurity threats and a growing awareness among regulators and the general public of data protection. Even before Covid really became a vector, the industry was already worth some $32 billion annually. That number is projected to reach nearly $75 billion by 2028. Investors say that Laika — named after the Russian dog, the first non-human sent into space, and a “gentle nod towards pioneering and exploration,” said Ogilvie — stands out by being one of the easier tools to adopt and regularly use. “Laika has filled a unique gap in the rapidly-growing compliance automation and audit management space, by providing the only comprehensive, centralized compliance platform,” said Christian Ostberg, a partner at Fin Capital, in a statement. “By combining automation of InfoSec workflows with the integrated, tech-enabled audits, Laika has set themselves as the clear market leader shaping this fast-growing category.”

Security automation startup Veriti launches out of stealth with $18.5M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in AI, cybersecurity, Enterprise, funding, Security, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Veriti, a platform for unifying cybersecurity infrastructure, today emerged from stealth with $18.5 million in funding, a combination of $12 million from Insight Partners and a $6.5 million round led by NFX and Amiti. According to CEO Adi Ikan, the newly announced capital is being put toward scaling Veriti’s business operations and developing its product suite. Veriti’s launch comes as VCs continue to show enthusiasm for cybersecurity startups despite the generally unfavorable funding climate. According to PitchBook data, venture capital investments in the security sector this year eclipsed $13.66 billion — up from $11.47 billion in 2020. And the global cybersecurity market is projected to be worth over $500 billion by 2030. Founded in 2021 by Ikan and Oren Koren — both ex-Check Point executives — Veriti integrates with a company’s existing security stack to evaluate risk posture by analyzing security configurations, logs, sensor telemetries and threat intelligence feeds. The platform taps AI to identify which events might be impacting business uptime and present the root cause, as well as which security policy improvements need to be taken to remediate the impacts. “Enterprise security posture is usually sub-optimal. This is due to many reasons, including tool sprawl, increased complexity, massive amounts of data and limited resources,” Koren told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “This is what inspired us to build Veriti’s platform — to address these complexities and help IT and security stay on top of this challenge.” Koren makes the case that Veriti can augment security teams’ efforts in spotting security gaps, ultimately reducing the time spent on monitoring and maintenance tasks. The growing number of security solutions in organizations can introduce complexity because each solution has its own functions and tools to learn, he argues, while the volume of alerts issued by the solutions end up creating murky visibility into the actual security posture. Koren isn’t exactly an unbiased source. But he’s not the only one who’s observed these troubling trends in enterprise security. One recent survey of over 800 IT professionals found that almost 60% were receiving over 500 cloud security alerts per day, and that the alert fatigue created by the volume caused 55% to miss critical alerts on either a daily or weekly basis. “While affording more expansive security capabilities, the proliferation of security solutions creates room for misconfigurations that can result in inadvertent security gaps and adversely impact the business by blocking legitimate applications and users,” Ikan said via email. “IT and security leadership today have a poor idea of the true utilization of security investments and of the effective security posture of their organizations.” Veriti’s challenge will be demonstrating that its approach is superior to the other security posture-analyzing platforms on the market. Rival vendor Secureframe provides a service that integrates with cloud providers and apps to understand its customers’ security postures. Hunters, another competitor, aims to automate the threat-hunting process by taking in data from networking and security tools to detect stealth attacks. It’s very early days for Veriti — Koren wouldn’t reveal the size of the company’s customer base or current revenue. But he’s betting that Veriti’s tech expertise will help it stand out from the pack. “By leveraging modern techniques like machine learning, focusing on automation, we aim to provide a way for modern teams to maximize security posture while minimizing issues that impact business uptime,” he said. As the idiom goes: time will tell.

Ransomware gang threatens to publish thousands of Australians’ health data • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in data breach, medibank breach, ransomware, SecurityNo Comments

A ransomware group with suspected links to the notorious Russia-speaking REvil gang has threatened to release the personal information of millions of Medibank customers after the Australian private health insurance giant pledged it would not pay the cybercriminals’ ransom demand. Medibank, Australia’s largest health insurance provider, first disclosed a “cyber incident” on October 13, saying at the time that it detected unusual activity on its network and took immediate steps to contain the incident. Days later, the company said that customer data might have been exfiltrated. In an update posted this week, the Melbourne-based Medibank admitted that the attackers accessed roughly 9.7 million customers’ personal information, including names, birth dates, email addresses, and passport numbers. The cybercriminals also accessed health claims data for almost 500,000 customers, including service provider names and locations, where customers received certain medical services, and codes associated with diagnosis and procedures administered. For 5,200 users of Medibank’s My Home Hospital app, the cybercriminals accessed some personal and health claims data and, for some, next of kin contact details. Medibank CEO David Koczkar said that while the health insurance giant believes that the attackers likely exfiltrated all of the data they were able to access, the organization would not pay the ransom demand. “Based on the extensive advice we have received from cybercrime experts, we believe there is only a limited chance paying a ransom would ensure the return of our customers’ data and prevent it from being published,” Koczkar said. The chief executive added that paying could even encourage the hackers to adopt a triple-extortion tactic by attempting to extort customers directly. Following Koczkar’s announcement, a ransomware gang believed to be a rebrand of the defunct REvil group threatened to leak the stolen Medibank data. The new dark web leak site, seen by ZebethMedia, listed Medibank as one of its victims and said it planned to release the exfiltrated data publicly. The gang did not say how much data it exfiltrated from Medibank’s network, and did not share evidence of its claims. The links between the new leak site and REvil, which went dark after U.S. authorities pushed the operation offline in October after the gang targeted ransomware attacks against Colonial Pipeline, JBS Foods and U.S. technology firm Kaseya, remains unclear. Brett Callow, a ransomware expert and threat analyst at Emsisoft, said that the new operation uses a variant of REvil’s file-encrypting website and that REvil’s old website now redirects to the new leak site. Medibank described the gang’s threats as a “distressing development,” in a second update published on Tuesday, and urged customers to be vigilant with all online communications and transactions. “We unreservedly apologise to our customers. We take seriously our responsibility to safeguard our customers and support them,” said Koczkar. “The weaponization of their private information is malicious, and it is an attack on the most vulnerable members of our community.” Medibank added that it is working with the Australian Government, including the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Australian Federal Police, in order to try and prevent the sharing and sale of customer data. News of the Medibank attack comes just weeks after Australia’s second largest telco Optus was breached. The Australian government confirmed an upcoming legislative change that would see companies that fail to adequately protect people’s data face fines of $50 million or more.

Here’s what founders and executives need to focus on • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Column, downturn, EC Column, EC How To, Mergers and Acquisitions, StartupsNo Comments

Matt Armanino Contributor Matt Armanino serves as the CEO of national consulting and accounting firm Armanino, where he focuses on driving firmwide growth and innovation. Recent economic headlines have been dominated by the declining stock market, rampant inflation and widespread talk of recession. At Armanino, we use the term “VUCA” to describe such broadly adverse market conditions. Standing for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, VUCA illustrates the many challenges currently facing business owners and operators. Times like these can separate well-run companies from those with directional or operational flaws. Forward-looking owners and C-suite executives who provide strong direction are more likely to steer their companies through the storm. Facing a sea of challenges, leaders have clear opportunities to implement critical changes and prepare for better times ahead. As a business owner and CEO, anticipating and managing through VUCA is a constant focus for me. We have helped thousands of companies — ranging from seed-round startups and late-stage unicorns to mature public companies — navigate it by implementing practices that can allow them to survive and thrive. Having helped build a startup and gone under the hood with many unicorns over the past few decades, I’ve seen how some of the best founders and executives position their companies in times of stress to flourish on the other side, whether through a successful IPO, SPAC exit or just stable growth. It might seem counterintuitive, but the ability of AI to assess the quality of client relationships can actually help companies become more “human.” As I look back on what these businesses have done to succeed, my best tips for company leaders encountering VUCA now are to empower their operations, invest in digital transformation and seek M&A opportunities. Empower operations to capitalize on better market conditions in the future Companies are increasingly focused on running their businesses better during adverse market conditions so they can come out stronger when the economic environment improves. In some cases, companies that had been targeting IPOs or funding transactions for 2022 are now postponing until Q1 or Q2 of 2023, if not later. Empowering operations includes understanding and communicating relevant metrics. First, does your team grasp the metrics on which success is based for your company? Second, do your employees understand those numbers and how to impact them? When times are tough, everyone in the organization should understand the most important metrics and how to potentially improve them so they can better recognize what to do and why their roles matter. We’ve also noticed companies increasingly emphasizing the idea of reaching a cash-flow-positive state. In the past, a “revenue at all costs” approach often took precedence. But now it’s more about identifying the best revenue and focusing on how to manage costs to achieve some level of cash-flow positivity or at least a clear trajectory toward it. During lucrative times, companies have historically focused on growing top-line revenue by aggressively adding new accounts. During a downturn, it’s critical to be laser-focused on your most engaged customers and invest in building deeper relationships with less steady clients. Businesses should take a closer look at key accounts to analyze relationship strength and work to bolster these relationships. In fact, many companies are now hiring more account managers instead of salespeople to improve client relations and promote additional services to paying customers. Invest in digital transformation to make your data actionable If becoming cash-flow positive and developing deeper client relationships are important goals, then focusing on technology and digital transformation is vital. Businesses need to assess how they can become more efficient with their infrastructure and leverage more valuable information from their data collection.

A beginner’s guide to Mastodon, the open-source Twitter alternative • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in mastodon, Social, TwitterNo Comments

As Twitter users fret over the direction that new owner Elon Musk is taking the company, masses of users have hopped over to Mastodon, an open-source Twitter alternative. Since October 27, when the SpaceX and Tesla CEO formalized his Twitter takeover, Mastodon has gained nearly 500,000 new users, effectively doubling its user base. But what is Mastodon anyway, and should we all be getting our accounts set up? If you’re a Twitter purist who likes to use basic functionality like private DMing, quote-tweeting and user-friendly onboarding, Mastodon might not be for you. But if you’re looking to try something new on the social internet, then why not give Mastodon a whirl? Elon Musk isn’t there! What is Mastodon? Mastodon was founded in 2016 by German software developer Eugen Rochko. Unlike Twitter, Facebook, Reddit or any other popular social media site, Mastodon is a non-profit, meaning that, ideally, its goal is to benefit the public, rather than shareholders. “Unlike the past 5 years that I’ve been running Mastodon operations as a sole proprietor, where Mastodon’s income was my personal income (minus all the expenses), I am now an employee with a fixed wage,” Rochko wrote in a blog post last year. “My personal income will thus be lower but I was willing to go this route because I want Mastodon to have more resources for things like hiring extra developers, UX designers, developing official apps and so on, and I want there to be a clear boundary between fundraising for that cause and my personal income.” Mastodon might look like a Twitter clone at first glance, but the underlying system behind the microblogging platform is far more complex. The service is decentralized (no, not in a blockchain way), describing itself as a “federated network which operates in a similar way to email.” When you first create your account, you choose a server — similar to how you choose to open an email account on Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo or wherever — which generates your profile’s address. So, for example, if you sign up for Mastodon via the climate justice server, then your address will be @[your username]@climatejustice.social. But no matter what server you sign up with, you will be able to communicate with users from any other server, just like how Gmail users email Hotmail users and vice versa. However, some servers might have blocked other servers (perhaps if it’s an unsavory group), which would mean you can’t communicate with anyone from the blocked server. The Mastodon lingo Mastodon users generally refer to individual communities as “instances” or servers. These Mastodon servers can be run by individuals, groups or organizations that each have their own set of rules regarding how users can sign up, as well as their own moderation policies. Some servers let anyone join, while others are invite-only or require approval by an admin. For example, a server for professional scientists asks applicants to include a link to their research to demonstrate that they are, indeed, professionals. Choosing which server to register your account with might seem stressful, but it’s possible to move your account later, so don’t worry. Plus, you can follow people regardless of what server they’re on. You may also hear Mastodon described as part of the “Fediverse,” or an interconnected web of various social media services. You know how having a Twitter account doesn’t mean you can use that account on Instagram? Through the Fediverse, your single Mastodon account also grants you access to other decentralized social networks, if that interests you. You may also see Mastodon’s equivalent of tweets being referred to as “toots,” but this is fading out of favor (since it’s kind of silly!). Many people are just calling them “posts” these days but “toot” is often found referenced in older third-party clients. Mastodon supports a number of Twitter conventions like replies, retweets, favorites, bookmarks, and hashtags. But its retweets are called “boosts” and it doesn’t support the concept of quote tweets. This was an intentional choice on the part of the founder who said it encourages speaking “at your audience” instead of “with the person you’re talking to.” In addition, Mastodon lists work slightly differently from Twitter as you can only add people to a list if you’re already following them. And Direct messages on Mastodon are just @username posts, not private messages coming to a DM inbox. Image Credits: Fediverse (opens in a new window) What does it mean that Mastodon is open-source? Anyone can download, modify and install Mastodon on their own server — plus, the developers of the platform don’t own the copyright. That doesn’t mean that you can grab Mastodon’s code without acknowledging the source, though. Former president Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social initially launched with Mastodon code and passed it off as if it were original software. Mastodon did not take kindly to that. How do you create a Mastodon account? When you arrive on the Mastodon website, you can click a button called “create account,” which directs you to a page listing servers to choose from. You can filter these by various factors, like region, language, topic, sign-up speed and more. There, find a server that piques your interest and join — if it’s a server that requires you to be approved, you might need to wait a bit. From there, you can start finding people to follow, regardless of whether they’re registered via your same server. How do you decide what Mastodon server to join? Mastodon’s website has helpful resources — but it’s still a bit overwhelming and challenging to find a home base that aligns with your interests. Ask friends who are already on Mastodon if they have suggestions! Or just join somewhere random, because you can always change your server affiliation later once you get into the swing of things. Can you talk to people on other Mastodon servers besides your own? Yes, you can follow people outside of your local server and reply to their posts. However, when you

Eliyan raises $40M from Intel and Micron to build chiplet interconnects • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in chips, funding, Hardware, Intel, Micron, semiconductor, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Increasingly, as Moore’s law rears its ugly head, computer chip developers are adopting “chiplet” architectures to scale their hardware’s processing power. Chiplets are Lego-like integrated circuit blocks designed to work with other, similar chiplets to form complex, stackable chips that boost performance while maintaining a similar physical footprint. Chiplets offer a number of advantages over conventional designs. But assembly issues — as well as challenges in balancing cost, performance, power consumption and time to market — often plague them in the early phases. Aiming to overcome the hurdles in chiplet creation, Ramin Fajadrad, Syrus Ziai and Patrick Soheili founded Eliyan, a chiplet interconnect startup, in 2021. Eliyan’s technology — dubbed NuLink — connects chiplet components using standard chip packaging, leading to what the company claims are faster-performing and more energy-efficient chips. “The focus is on developing a way to enable a more high-performance, lower-power and lower-latency interconnect for chiplet architectures, which experts agree is the only path to continuing to scale Moore’s law,” Farjadrad told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “We use our technology in standard packaging, thus saving time, cost and development effort compared to more advanced packing that other interconnect schemes require. In addition, our approach has sustainability benefits by reducing material costs and waste in the manufacturing process and lowering energy consumption for high-performance compute chips.” Eliyan’s roots are in a previous startup, Aquantia, that Marvell acquired in 2019. Farjadrad says the technology has been under development since 2017; he co-started Aquantia and served as the startup’s chief engineer for nearly 15 years. Prior to co-founding Eliyan, Farjadrad spent several years at Marvell as CTO and VP of the company’s networking and automotive division. Ziai is a former Qualcomm engineering VP, while Soheili was previously VP of business development at semiconductor firm eSilicon. While Eliyan hasn’t launched its technology commercially yet — it expects the first silicon to hit the market in Q2 2023 — the company claims to have achieved the last step before manufacturing, a tape-out, using semiconductor manufacturer TSMC’s 5 nm process. “Process” in chip lingo refers to an architectural platform; TSMC began mass-producing 5 nm chips in 2020. “Eliyan’s technology enables processors by allowing them to scale in performance and power to be more readily and practically manufacturable,” Farjadrad said. “The world will always need more computing power, and Eliyan is enabling a critical aspect of making sure scaling will happen for any type of high-performance computing application.” The fact that Eliyan’s tech has yet to reach market might give some would-be customers pause. But the startup has notable investors in the chip world behind it, including Intel and Micron, who alongside Cerberus and Celestra contributed to Eliyan’s $40 million Series A tranche that closed today. With the capital, Eliyan plans to continue chasing after a chiplet market that could be worth $50 billion in 2024 — specifically by ramping up testing and implementation. Farjadrad wouldn’t name clients, but said that Eliyan, which currently has a 21-person staff, is in discussions with “big semi companies, hyperscalers and AI processor startups.” “We’re dealing with the challenges and realities of physics in designing and manufacturing advanced chips … [but we’re] in a high-demand market,” Farjadrad said. “Our technology will ultimately lead to faster, more efficient and cheaper high-performance computing to run data centers, cloud computing AI, graphics and more.”

A list of features Elon Musk has promised to bring to Twitter • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Apps, elon buys twitter, Elon Musk, Features, TwitterNo Comments

Elon Musk has completed his takeover of Twitter, and he has lofty plans for this platform. In the short time, he has been at the helm of the platform he has promised things like a new verification system, revamped subscription program, and better creator monetization. Musk has a knack for announcing these features on a whim through Twitter. But it’s hard to know in what form and when they would make their way to the public release. So here is a handy list of things Musk has announced that’s coming to Twitter: After taking over Twitter, the first product change Musk announced was revamping the verification system. Days later, he posted more details that included new features for Twitter Blue paid plan. Musk said the new system will cost $8 per month and have fewer ads, priority in replies (something which verified handles get through the “Verified” notification channel), mentions and search, and the ability to post longer videos. At this moment, paid users can post 10-minute long videos and other users have a time limit of two minutes and 20 seconds on videos. The company has already been experimenting with things like moving the verified notification tab to appear as the default screen in the notification screen. While the new Twitter Blue plan will cost $8 in the U.S., Musk has said that he will adjust the pricing for different regions according to purchasing power parity. In a reply to a user, he also said that revamped subscription will roll out to India by the end of the month. This means Twitter will soon expand Twitter Blue beyond existing markets — the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Musk has already got the Twitter Blue team working on a better video experience, too. He said that with the new paid plan, users will be able to upload 42 minutes of video at 1080p resolution. The Tesla CEO said that the platform is working on removing the 42-minute limit as well. The new Twitter CEO said that the company is working on attaching long text to the tweet. This announcement is strange as the platform debuted Notes, its program for long-form content, in June. Under this test, a set of writers from the U.S., Canada, Ghana, and the UK got access to tools to write long posts. A Twitter employee, who was part of a mass layoff at the company, pointed out that Musk fired the team who built and shipped the Notes feature. The Twitter CEO said that the platform’s search reminds him of “Infoseek in ’98” and wants to fix the experience. But we don’t know what improvements to expect. Search within Twitter reminds me of Infoseek in ‘98! That will also get a lot better pronto. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 5, 2022 In his short tenure as the head of the social network, Musk has promised to implement better payouts for creators. In a reply to YouTuber Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), he claimed that Twitter can become an S-tier (Super tier) network. In another tweet, the SpaceX CEO said that he can beat YouTube’s 55% ad-revenue share rate with creators. But that revenue might not be significant if major ad spenders don’t splash big bucks on the platform. Trust and Saftey Apart from announcing a ton of product changes, Twitter’s new head is also making some critical policy decisions. However, it’s unclear when these rules will come into effect and how they will play with various international laws. Just after taking charge of Twitter, Musk said that the company will form a content moderation council that will have people sharing diverse sets of views. At this moment, there is no clarity about who will participate in this council, how many members it might have, and what kind of powers it might wield. Notably, Twitter already has a Trust & Safety Council consisting of more than 100 organizations, but members are not sure if there is a future for them. After a ton of accounts changed their account name and details like profile photo and bio to mimic Musk, the billionaire said that Twitter Blue users won’t be allowed to impersonate anyone unless they specify that it is a parody account. He noted that accounts violating will be permanently suspended. He added that any change in name would result in accounts losing the verification mark temporarily. Currently, there are no written rules about this, so we don’t know how it will work in practice and what guidelines parody accounts might have to follow. Any name change at all will cause temporary loss of verified checkmark — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2022 Musk has also promised to make changes to Birdwatch, Twitter’s crowdsourced fact-checking program. But he has only said that it will be renamed to “Community Notes” — and Jack Dorsey didn’t like it. All these changes have very aggressive deadlines so it won’t be surprising if we don’t see these changes being rolled out in the promised timeframe. We will keep this piece updated to track these promises.

Teamraderie, a B2B Masterclass-style platform for team building, raises $7M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Enterprise, Media & EntertainmentNo Comments

The growing trends of hiring and running remote workforces, and more recently the major upheaval of restructuring across a number of industries, have redefined and disrupted the concept of teams at work. Even as some return to the office, many of us don’t see each other face-to-face, and even if we have checked in together virtually or in person, our groups of colleagues might be rapidly shifting around. Now, a startup that’s built a platform to run events to help work teams feel more connected to each other is announcing some funding on the back of strong demand for itself services. Teamraderie, which provides short, live virtual classes and other content led by experts across different categories used in team-building events alongside software to manage the experiences and run feedback on the impact of the events, has raised $7 million, funding that it will be using to expand its platform with more content and to more customers. The startup’s roster of stars running 45-minute courses includes the icons like former gymnasts Nadia Comaneci and Bart Conner, Pulitzer Prize winner Marcia Chatelain and Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov; and it counts Google, IBM, Twitter, Cisco, Microsoft and Intuit among its 200 customers, and says that it has run classes covering some 50,000 people to date across some 50 countries. (Pricing for the service starts at $300 and varies depending on the content, number of users, and whether the company is a subscriber or using Teamraderie a la carte.) Founders Fund is leading the round, and Teamraderie said that a raft of more than 12 “Chief Human Resource Officers and Chief People Officers” are also participating (which speaks to who it targets as customers). The company has now raised around $9 million, and from what we understand, this Series A values the company at around $60 million. The rise of Teamraderie is coming at a moment of rapid evolution in the world of work, buffeted as it has been by the forces of Covid, layoffs, and changing consumer habits. The wider category of “productivity software” has definitely had a boost to address the shift in how we work today — Zoom has become a kind of palimpsest for a wide range of video collaboration tools; Slack is one of dozens of virtual chat platforms; workflow and project management have gone well beyond Asana and Trello; and so on and so forth. But even when all the other productivity boxes have been checked, Teamraderie speaks to another challenge that exists in the workplace, specifically the knowledge worker workplace, that of improving our relationships with each other as a route to working better together. At its heart, Teamraderie is a little like Masterclass-meets-LinkedIn Learning, but focused just on business users and potentially used with physical props used as part of the session. As with other team-building concepts, the idea is to place people into unfamiliar environments, and away from discussions related to their actual work, to refocus their attention on working together, thinking collaboratively, and getting to know each other better. (One example: a Nascar presenter who — in the words of Michael McCarroll, Teamraderie’s CEO and co-founder — “reinvented the tire change” will lead a team through a tire change on a car model.) “Our reason for being is to ensure that teams can really collaborate effectively,” McCarroll said in an interview. Teams have a whole range of relationships, and it can be a challenge to really get to know people and understand different perspectives when either your team is shifting around, or you don’t work directly with everyone in a physical environment, he continued: “We want to get teams to a point where every member sees every other member as human. If you feel more connected and understand and care what other people have to say on your team, you get more value.” Alongside the media and content aspect of its platform, Teamraderie also provides tech to measure the effectiveness of the sessions. McCarroll said that this, and the main concepts behind Teamraderie, have been built out of research from Harvard Business School, Stanford University, MIT, and the University of Chicago around productivity, support and inclusiveness in the workplace. But because these will be those, in our quantified workplaces and world, that will need to know the impact and the ROI for all of this, the idea will be to invest in building more tools to help improve those measurements, too, and to use that to continue growing Teamraderie. “We use data to customize and develop the product,” McCarroll said. “We’re not just a content company.” There may also be more investment made in aid of scaling all of this, too. Today the “sweet spot” for the most effective class sizes is 15 or less participants, McCarroll said, with larger groups in general tending to what he referred to as “social loafing” — that is, no longer engaging. This presents an interesting challenge to Teamraderie (and really to any tech product aimed at improving remote productivity): how can you get the same impact while delivering your product to groups larger than this? Keith Rabois, who led the investment for Founders Fund, said in an interview that the funding environment for startups, regardless of whether it is early- or later-stage, is most definitely tightening up. He said that in 2022 so far, he’s offered “only two term sheets to new companies” (not including those already in the portfolio), versus “twelve or thirteen” by this point in 2021. Teamraderie was an easy investment, though, not just because it’s doing something different, and seeing traction with notable customers, but because of the unit economics. “It’s basically breakeven, which is unusual for a company at this stage of growth,” he said.

Quona Capital sinking $332M into startups focused on financial inclusion • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Quona Capital, VentureNo Comments

Though finance technology startups are having a moment when it comes to decreased venture capital deals and layoffs, Quona Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in emerging markets that accelerate financial inclusion, has found the appetite is still there for fintechs. The firm had its final close on $332 million in capital commitments for its Fund III, which invests in companies in Latin America, India, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Notable exits from its first fund were IndiaMart, which went public in 2019, and Coins.ph, which was acquired, also in 2019, by Gojek. The commitments for Fund III exceed the $250 million target Quona was initially shooting for and brings the firm’s aggregate committed capital to over $745 million, co-founding managing partner Monica Brand Engel told ZebethMedia. She started Quona Capital in 2015 with Jonathan Whittle and Ganesh Rengaswamy. “We got very lucky in that the digital thesis about bringing technology to help affordability, also helps connectivity in a world where we’re more remote, where things are constructed, and we have been very successful,” she added. “So even fundraising is evidence of the results and Fund III being a $332 million fund.” Brand Engel, who leads Quona’s investments in Africa and the Middle East regions, said the fund’s investors include a majority of existing investors from sectors like global asset managers, insurance companies, investment and commercial banks, university endowments, foundations, family offices and development finance institutions. It also includes 20 new investors, the firm said. While speaking with the LPs during the fundraising, she noted that one of their main concerns was investment into emerging markets: how risky it is and how it is being affected by current events, for example the Russia/Ukraine war and the governmental instability in the United Kingdom. “People realize you’re not immune to macro instabilities,” Brand Engel said. “There is an attractiveness of emerging markets, though, and the pent-up demand for basic goods and services that early adopters can adapt with technology.” She noted that the driver for starting the new fund is that financial inclusion “is a huge, powerful lever for impact” for a movement that started with Accion in microfinance and is now having a 2.0 moment with new innovative approaches from startups that are “radically improving access and quality of financial services,” for example, embedded finance or the connecting of financial services with other business models where those services become “the engine to drive growth.” One of the other areas she feels Quona Capital’s thesis “shines” is by being what the firm calls “global local” with offices in over 10 countries. “Part of our value proposition is that we have people who are very much embedded in the local market who speak a language, who were born there and have had children there,” Brand Engel said. Quona Capital funds have made more than 65 investments, and will make 25 to 30 new and follow-on investments from the third fund. While the firm has shied away a bit from consumer finance, it has gone all-in on business-to-business, she added. Some of the first six investments from the new funding have gone into companies including Egyptian financial super app Khazna, MoHash, a decentralized finance protocol, Pillow, which wants to make cryptocurrency saving and investing easier, and nocnoc, helping global sellers connect with marketplaces in Latin America. “We call ourselves an authentic impact investor that is focused on numbers, KPIs and building real business models so that they are profitable and impactful in a way that’s kind of bottoms-up,” Brand Engel added. “Also, the notion that we are operators and have started, scaled and exited financial services and technology companies gives us a really important perspective. Not only do we have empathy because we’ve been entrepreneurs ourselves, but I’m Latina and the daughter of immigrants, and we are building something that really reflects reality.”

Line launches NFT marketplace on its platform DOSI • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Crypto, LineNext, NFT marketplace, NFTsNo Comments

Japanese messaging app Line’s non-fungible token (NFT) unit LineNext said Tuesday that it has launched a consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplace on the NFT platform DOSI. The C2C trading service allows users to buy and sell NFTs globally. The announcement comes nearly a year after Line said it plans to launch an NFT service in 2022 to provide a marketplace for companies and individuals to trade NFTs. The company says anyone can easily trade NFT on its DOSI platform, which offers a simplified transaction process. Once users connect the DOSI wallet to MetaMask, an Ethereum crypto wallet, they can buy or sell NFTs with just a few clicks. Users can pay with Ethereum, credit cards, Naver Pay and more to trade NFTs. LineNext plans to add more crypto assets and mobile payment services in each country. The company claims that DOSI has amassed scores of users from 149 countries and issued more than 100,000 DOSI Wallets with 170,000 membership NFTs since its beta service launch in September. DOSI’s citizen membership service helps users acquire membership points, called DON, by participating in the NFT community activities or purchasing their NFTs. LineNext has released a string of NFT projects partnering with companies, including Korean media mogul CJ ENM and its parent company Naver. The company plans to launch diverse additional NFT projects to help make NFTs more familiar to users in the future. “We are determined to create a new kind of NFT experience for users,” said the chief executive officer of LineNext, Youngsu Ko, in a statement. “It’s not just an investment or a new kind of technology. For us, DOSI is about making NFTs fund and easy to use, creating benefits for our users and building communities.” LineNext, which has offices in the U.S. and South Korea, told ZebethMedia last year its transaction brokerage fees will be the primary source of revenue. DOSI is available in various languages, including English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Bahasa, Spanish and Thai. The company could not be reached for comments when asked in which countries it operates the C2C platform service and the number of DOSI users.