Enterprise

Four years after being acquired by Microsoft, GitHub keeps doing its thing • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in acquisition, Enterprise, GitHub, Microsoft, Thomas DohmkeNo Comments

It’s been four years to the day since Microsoft closed its acquisition of GitHub, which at the time was mostly a code repository. Today’s GitHub looks quite a bit different, now that it added CI/CD tools with GitHub Actions and Codespaces as an online editor and compute platform, as well as various security tools and more. But according to GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, who took over from Nat Friedman a year ago, Microsoft has very much allowed GitHub to do what it does best. “We kept GitHub GitHub and it remains this independent entity within Microsoft similar to LinkedIn,” he told me. “I think we did a fantastic job with doing this and kept GitHub in its original form. You don’t see more Microsoft in GitHub.com than you saw four years ago and that has helped us to continue to grow and we’re very excited where this is going.” He noted that GitHub has continued to receive the same support from Microsoft’s leadership team, including CEO Satya Nadella, over the years. “Microsoft has not forgotten why we did the deal in the first place and what the important pillars of the deal are. The first and foremost principle is to put developers first. And that is what we do every day,” Dohmke said. But, he also acknowledged that Microsoft is a big company and that people sometimes have their own ideas of what the Microsoft/GitHub relationship should be like. So far, though, it seems like the leadership on both sides has been able to keep those ideas at bay. Dohmke noted that GitHub has obviously benefited from Microsoft’s sales prowess, which helped it land a number of big accounts. That surely also helped the company get to the $1 billion annual recurrent revenue it announced yesterday. Dohmke said that he believes GitHub would’ve likely reached this milestone as an independent company, too. “I’m generally an optimistic person,” he said. “So any company can get there if they just stay focused on their mission. The biggest challenge that companies have once they get to a certain size is focus.” Today’s GitHub is obviously in a different position than the GitHub of four years ago. Its product portfolio, for one, has expanded quite a bit with projects like CodeSpaces and, most recently, Copilot. “I think I will have achieved my mission as CEO if we generate happy developers — happy developers who enjoy doing their job and that don’t see security, compliance and accessibility as a burden but as part of what makes them happy and what gets them to perform in their life,” Dohmke said. And projects like this are clearly a part of that. “I think, what we’re doing here is we’re disrupting ourselves with AI, with Copilot and with Codespaces, he added. “Those are all new investments that are away from the traditional GitHub — the old-school GitHub that had repos and issues and wikis — and keep pushing the boundary of what we believe is possible.” But, he also stressed, this isn’t just about big announcements and flashy events, but also focusing on the little fixes and features that may be just as important to keep developers happy. “I think that’s our superpower: that we can balance the tiny bits with big wins and the big disruptions to our own business.”

Sigstore launches free software signing and verification service for open source projects • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Enterprise, kubecon detroit 2022, open source, sigstore, software security, supply chainNo Comments

Software supply chain quickly became a hot topic in the last few years, especially as the number of high-profile attacks increased and the White House got involved. Sigstore, an open source project supported by the likes of Google, GitHub, Chainguard and RedHat, has become somewhat of a standard for signing, verifying and protecting software projects — and the dependencies they use — to make sure that the software you install and run on your machines hasn’t been manipulated. These days, after all, there aren’t many software projects that don’t rely on at least one — and usually multiple — open-source libraries, which themselves probably rely on other libraries, too. And with many of these projects maintained by volunteers, they make for an easy target for hackers. Today, at SigstoreCon, a co-located event at the CNCF’s KubeCon/CloudNativeCon conference in Detroit, the Sigstore community announced the general availability of its free software signing service for open source projects. Sigstore is already one of the fasted adopted open source projects ever, with more than 4 million signatures logged so far. Both the Kubernetes and Python communities use it to sign their releases. And npm, the popular JavaScript package manager, is currently in the process of integrating Sigstore to ensure the provenance of its packages. Image Credits: Sigstore “Sigstore has rapidly become the standard for signing, verifying, and protecting software, so it’s great to announce the general availability to remove one last barrier for more widespread adoption during a time when software supply chain security is more important than ever,” said Priya Wadhwa, a member of the Sigstore Technical Steering Committee and software engineer at Chainguard. “It is our hope that this next phase of Sigstore will empower the rest of the open source software ecosystem to gain increased confidence in adopting this technology and benefit from its reliable and stable experience.” The Sigstore community promises a 99.5% uptime and pager support — more than most free projects can offer. Sigstore, it’s worth noting, is a nonprofit project that is funded under the Open Source Security Foundation. Sigstore itself consists of a number of projects for signing containers, saving that information in an immutable ledger and, of course, creating those certificates in the first place.

Big Tech falls short in the first salvos of the Q3 earnings cycle • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in big tech, earnings, EC Consumer Applications, EC Enterprise, EC Newsletter, Enterprise, google earnings, microsoft earnings, The ExchangeNo Comments

If you are a believer in the endless concentration of corporate power, the work of major tech companies to extend their reach into all areas of the digital economy must bring you joy. If you are more in favor of upstart companies attacking and bringing to heel incumbent wealth by the (figurative) sword, it’s probably less welcome. Big Tech companies, once they reach a certain scale, often have the wealth and influence to buy, build or bury their smaller competition. But no matter on which side of the platform wars you stand, the sprawl of the major tech companies means that they regularly off-gas a plethora of statistics that we can use to better understand the world. Given the ever-changing state of the world’s economy this year, the information that Big Tech earnings provide is even more important than usual. As we noted earlier this week, ZebethMedia+ has several questions that we want to be answered during this particular earnings cycle, and yesterday, thanks to Alphabet and Microsoft, we can begin to remedy our own queries. Today, we’re talking through the advertising, enterprise software, cloud and consumer-related inquiries. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on ZebethMedia+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. For broad-based looks at how Google etc. and Redmond fared in aggregated numerical terms, head here and here, respectively.

Devtron raises fresh capital for its cloud DevOps platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Apps, Dev, devops, Enterprise, funding, Insight Partners, StartupsNo Comments

The cloud-native market has seen the introduction of a range of open source DevOps tools — tools that combine software development and IT operations — built to address very specific use cases. As a result, DevOps teams today have too many narrow choices that don’t work together seamlessly or that can’t be integrated into a single platform. At least, that’s the opinion of Prashant Ghildiyal, one of the co-founders of Devtron, a startup offering a platform to address what he believes are the top challenges facing the DevOps space. A container management system, Devtron offers a low-code delivery platform optimized for Kubernetes. (“Containers” are packages of software that contain the necessary elements to run in any environment.) The platform handles app management, security and more, providing an interface that abstracts away the underlying infrastructure. To Ghildiyal’s point, there’s evidence to suggest that there’s a gap between DevOps adoption and success. In a 2019 Harvard Business Review survey, only 10% of developers said that their companies were successful at building and deploying software quickly, with less than half (48%) saying their organization always relies on DevOps methodologies. A separate, more recent poll by infrastructure automation company Puppet found that companies were hitting a number of DevOps speed bumps in the race to be cloud native, including a skills shortage, issues with legacy architecture, organizational resistance to change and limited or lack of automation. Investors are keen on Devtron, as evidenced by the company today closing a $12 million funding round led by Insight Partners. “Devtron integrates with products across the lifecycle of microservices, and in particular Kubernetes, enabling its users to deploy faster and automate their CI/CD pipelines without worrying about Kubernetes knowhow,” Insight Partners principal Josh Zelman told ZebethMedia via email. Ghildiyal says that he and Devtron’s other co-founders, Nishant Kumar and Rajesh Razdan, experienced the challenges of scaling DevOps firsthand in their previous roles as heads of technology and software architects at various startups. Their experiences informed Devtron’s design, which Ghildiyal describes as “DevOps in a box,” with tools that provide audit logs and metrics showing the state of an organization’s DevOps maturity. Devtron also provides tools for access controls and policy management, as well as environment orchestration, software delivery workflow and cost. “This saves significant time and resources to build and deploy in production,” Zelman added. Ghildiyal sees Devtron competing against formidable incumbent vendors like GitLab and Harness in a DevOps market that was worth an estimated $4 billion in 2020, according to Global Market Insights. (That’s not to mention startups like Render, which raised $20 million last November after winning our Disrupt SF 2019 Startup Battlefield.) When asked about clients, Ghildiyal said Devtron has “several” unicorns and growth-stage companies as commercial customers, but he declined to reveal names — or Devtron’s revenue. Ghildiyal said that India-based Devtron’s principal focuses post-fundraise will be resources and cost optimizations to “enable DevOps automation and efficiency at scale.”

Acquia jumps on headless CMS bandwagon with open source starter kit • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Acquia, content management, drupal, Enterprise, headless CMS, open sourceNo Comments

Over the last decade or so, content management systems have evolved from monolithic systems managed by IT to a set of services made available to developers through an API. The more modern approach separates the presentation layer on the front end from the management on the back end. Today, Acquia, the company behind the open source Drupal project, announced its official entry into the headless CMS market, and not surprisingly it’s based on Drupal and open source. The company is calling this offering a “starter kit,” a way to take advantage of headless features as needed, says Jim Shaw, SVP and GM for Drupal at Acquia. “If you come to Acquia and you’re starting a digital experience project, we normally offer you Acquia CMS as the starting point to start with Drupal. But now we’re also offering a headless kit inside of that, so that you can use headless features to move content through an API,” Shaw told ZebethMedia. He points out that while it is releasing the headless kit, the company sees this as part of a hybrid strategy that includes the full-blown Acquia CMS working together with the headless piece. “And for us this is less about having a dedicated headless product that only does headless. It’s about having those capabilities available from the platform that allows you to do hybrid as well as headless,” he said. In fact, Shaw doesn’t see many customers going full-on headless. “I think it’s unlikely that people will go 100% headless, that they will have only headless use cases. I think what we see is people doing both, and as a result what we’re doing is we’re we’re building these capabilities inside the Acquia platform,” he said. In addition to the headless starter kit, the company is also introducing a kit for next.js, an open source web development framework, to help developers build a front end too. “[We’re also offering] a starter kit for next.js that primes the pump in terms of getting a next.js front end working with a headless back end,” he said. He says some customers have been taking this approach on their own, and the company wanted to build something to make it easier to do this without building a full-blown product. “So that’s why we offering these are starter kits, not entire new product. They are layers inside, things that we have that then allow our customers — and hopefully new customers — to accelerate those headless projects on our platform and still have all the options available to them in terms of having a hybrid approach available as well.” The two kits are being announced today at Acquia Engage, the company’s customer conference taking place in Miami this week. The kits will be available for download today.

Valence Security raises fresh capital to secure the SaaS app supply chain • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Enterprise, M12, Microsoft, SaaS, startup, Startups, Valence SecurityNo Comments

Valence Security, a company securing business app infrastructure, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series A round led by M12, Microsoft’s corporate venture arm, with participation from YL Ventures, Porsche Ventures, Akamai Technologies, Alumni Ventures and former Symantec CEO Michael Fey. The new capital brings the company’s total raised to $32 million, and co-founder Shlomi Matichin says it’ll be put toward product development and doubling Valence’s 25-person headcount by the end of the year. Matichin co-founded Valence Security with Yoni Shohet in 2021. A two-time entrepreneur, Shohet previously co-launched SCADAfence, an industrial Internet of Things security startup. Matichin, for his part, was one of the founding members of Capester, a platform for cataloging videos of civic violations. “In recent years, malicious actors have placed their focus on the interconnectivity between software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, leveraging its potential for their attack campaigns, as we saw in the SolarWinds breach,” Matichin told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Organizations struggle to secure this [app] mesh — a growing, complex and interconnected environment of SaaS apps, third-party integrations, identities, privileges and data.” Matichin and Shohet built Valence to address these challenges around visibility into the SaaS supply chain, including misconfigurations, risk prioritization and remediation. The platform attempts to detect all of a company’s SaaS apps and contextualize them with vendor risk assessments, offering tools to spot improperly configured security controls and drifts from established policies. Valence can also help manage risky, inactive and overprivileged authentication keys, third-party integrations and no- and low-code workflows, Matichin says — in addition to potentially insecure public-facing files and emails forwarded externally. Identity security flows within Valence, meanwhile, aim to ensure users are managed by a central identity provider, using multi-factor authentication and are properly offboarded. According to Matichin, driving the demand for these services is the increasing threats companies face — and general SaaS app sprawl. The average enterprise uses around 80 SaaS apps, with BetterCloud estimating that businesses with more than 1,000 employees use more than 150 apps. This opens firms to attack. According to a Dimensional Research survey commissioned by ReversingLabs, a cybersecurity vendor, just over half (51%) of IT security teams report being able to protect their software from supply chain attacks. The impact of such attacks can be devastating. In a recent paper, Kaspersky estimated the cost of a supply chain software attack to an enterprise at $1.4 million. That doesn’t factor in the lost revenue from additional downtime arising during remediation, which can substantially add to costs (to the tune of thousands to millions of dollars) and affect a firm’s reputation. “Beyond security concerns, the repercussions of SaaS supply chain attacks are at the top of business priorities in light of the growing number of high-profile SaaS supply breaches over the past two years,” Matichin said. “These breaches can expose multiple interconnected SaaS applications for a single organization as well as threaten the business-critical data stored in those applications. This risk to business objectives, as well as to business continuity and efficiency due to the significant impact these breaches have on SaaS use, should be top-of-mind for the C-suite.” Tel Aviv-based Valence competes with a number of vendors in the supply chain SaaS app security space, including Canonic Security, Atmosec (which has raised $6 million), Astrix Security ($15 million), Wing Security ($26 million), AppOmni ($123 million), Obsidian Security ($119.5 million) and Adaptive Shield ($34 million). When asked whether that concerned him, Matichin responded by highlighting what he sees as a growing need for visibility and control over SaaS assets and remediation of the risks. “As remote working conditions accelerated the adoption and use of SaaS applications, a unique and unaddressed risk surface uncovered a growing need for SaaS security solutions targeting the sprawling SaaS mesh,” Matichin said. “In this respect, Valence was strongly positioned to address the unique security and business needs at the height of the pandemic, [and] Valence will continue to set the standard for SaaS security going forward.” Matichin didn’t reveal the size of Valence’s customer base or projected revenue. But even if it’s lower than that of the company’s close competitors, VCs seem ready and willing to throw their weight behind security vendors. In the first half of 2022, there was $12.5 billion in venture capital invested across more than 530 deals, according to a report from investment firm Momentum Cyber — in line with H1 2021’s $12.6 billion invested.

Unito, a platform for managing SaaS apps, raises $30M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Apps, Enterprise, funding, SaaS, software as a service, startup, Startups, UnitoNo Comments

Unito, a startup offering a service to bring together disparate software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms — for example, Jira and Trello — today announced it raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by CDPQ’s Equity 253 fund with participation from Rainfall Ventures, Investissement Québec, Bessemer Venture Partners, Tom Williams and Mistral Venture Partners. The new cash brings the company’s total raised to $33 million, which CEO Marc Boscher says is being put toward product development and expanding Unito’s headcount from 65 people to 70 by the end of the year. SaaS tool usage is on the rise, with corporate teams now using 40 to 60 tools on average; a 2019 report from Blissfully found companies were spending around $343,000 per year on SaaS. But while SaaS apps have become the lifeblood of organizations, they can often be unwieldy. In a 2021 survey, enterprise architecture startup LeanIX found that businesses rarely have common standards when it comes to responsibility for SaaS management. On a mission to uncover a solution — or invent a new one — Boscher and Eryk Warren joined Montreal’s Founder Institute program in 2015. Boscher hails from the IT industry, while Warren has software engineering experience, having worked at startups in Montreal, including events ticketing system Outbox Technology and Fluential. Boscher and Warren founded Unito that same year, in late 2015, as they finally arrived at a way to help companies manage SaaS sprawl. Rather than build a new project management or collaboration platform, the two co-founders created two-way integrations with automatic syncing between existing SaaS tools. “The massive proliferation of online tools is causing nearly as many headaches as it solves,” Boscher told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “[T]ools made for collaboration can actually hinder collaboration, as they become virtual information silos … There are more SaaS tools than ever before and remote work is forcing companies to adopt these digital solutions, which leads to fragmentation and less control over tools as people work from anywhere on any device.” Configuring workflows using Unito’s cloud platform. Image Credits: Unito Unito attempts to ease this fragmentation by letting IT teams choose which apps they wish to connect — supported apps include GitLab, HubSpot, Google Sheets, ClickUp, Salesforce and Wrike — and authorize the Unito service to access them. Users with admin access can then map how other users, lists, custom fields and more travel among and leverage the various connected tools. On the back end, Unito provides analytics, including usage statistics and executive reporting for IT resource planning. The platform also acts as a secure gateway, limiting access to SaaS apps to only authorized users. Boscher argues that Unito can even save companies money by reducing seat requirements and “optimizing” software licensing. “Two-way syncing means developers can stay in their software development tools, and business teams in their project management tools — no doubling up on licenses to allow collaboration,” he added. “Eliminating hours of manual copying and pasting and always having the right information in your tools is key for agile and high-velocity teams.” True or not, many vendors claim to achieve this with their own tools for SaaS app management. Beamy recently raised $9 million to further develop its platform to detect and orchestrate SaaS apps. Torri, which is also venture backed, aims to bring businesses together around the cloud apps they use so they can discover all the apps they have — and automatically take action on those most appropriate for return on investment. Those are just the tip of the SaaS management iceberg — see BetterCloud, Lumos and Paragon for other examples. But Boscher believes there’s breathing room yet in the budding market. He points to findings from Gartner, which suggest 50% of organizations using multiple SaaS apps will centralize orchestration and usage of these apps using a SaaS management platform — an increase from less than 20% in 2021. “Unito’s competitors include integration software-as-a-service players like Zapier and its copycats, which boast thousands of easy to use but shallow one-way connectors, and integration platform-as-a-service players like Workato and Tray.io, which offer deeper one-way integrations but are difficult to use and need professional services and/or developers for implementation,” Boscher said, touting the ostensible advantages of Unito’s two-way syncing tech. “Unito’s two-way sync provides users with the most recent data from any work app and shares it in real-time based on customized fields and rules set by the user.” Boscher claims Unito has more than 50,000 users across 7,000 companies, including Atlassian, Corpay, Teamwork, the Cincinnati Reds and Wrike, with workflows in IT, project management, sales, spreadsheets and the software development domains. This year alone, Unito’s inbound monthly sign-ups doubled in six months, he says. And while Boscher wouldn’t reveal revenue, he noted that Unito is still hiring. “Having taken startups through two recessions before, Unito founders are taking hiring slow and keeping the bar high … Unito has always kept burn in line with growth,” Boscher said. “Unito aims to become the universal translator for enterprises by letting any team or department set up deep integrations on their own, while keeping IT in control at the governance and security level.”

SwiftConnect, which lets employees use their phones to access the office, raises $17M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Enterprise, Jamf, JLL Spark Global Ventures, navitas capital, startup, Startups, SwiftConnectNo Comments

The widespread adoption of flexible work has increased the challenge of managing access to physical, commercial buildings, given the dynamic nature of hybrid workspaces. With today’s staffers coming and going to the office on unpredictable timetables, it can be tough to keep track of which have access to rooms and office resources. In a recent survey conducted by HID Global, an independent brand of access control conglomerate Assa Abloy, 41% of businesses said they believed that their current system met requirements — down from 51% in 2021. HID Global, being a vendor, isn’t necessarily impartial. But it’s not inconceivable that there’s truth to the assertion access control has become harder than it once was. Chip Kruger certainly believes so. Hurdles in the access control space spurred him to found SwiftConnect, a platform for handling space booking, visitors and meetings in physical offices. Kruger previously partnered with Matt Copel, SwiftConnect’s other co-founder, to start Waltz, an access control company launched in Copel’s dorm room that was acquired by WeWork in mid-2019. Both Copel and Kruger briefly worked at WeWork, but left to found SwiftConnect in 2020. “We had the idea that the flexibility and on-demand nature of access control that WeWork wanted was now going to be a requirement of every owner and occupier for their own buildings and offices going forward due to changing work patterns, including the increasing number of people working on-site and remotely,” Kruger told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “SwiftConnect also tapped into the fact that administrators were also seeking to use physical space and real estate more efficiently.” SwiftConnect — which today closed a $17 million Series A round co-led by JLL Spark Global Ventures and Navitas Capital — sells access to cloud services that tie together existing credential providers, reader terminals and other business systems. The company provides tools to automate identity, credentialing and permissioning steps for office spaces through mobile devices, for example a dashboard that allows admins to issue credentials to access certain buildings to iOS devices via Apple Wallet. Using SwiftConnect, employees and tenants can add their employee badge to Apple Wallet on the iPhone or Apple Watch after an initial set-up process. Once added, the badge gives them access to enter their office building, office space and shared fitness and amenity spaces secured by NFC-enabled locks. SwiftConnect’s platform allows companies to orchestrate physical access controls. Image Credits: SwiftConnect “As hybrid and flexible work have made the execution of seamless access control ever more challenging, commercial building owners and operators are increasingly seeing it as both an opportunity and a pain point they’re trying to solve,” Kruger said. “On-demand, connected, mobile-first access control is a requirement for most organizations who want their access control system to enable a more dynamic space where access permissions and credentials must change based on space booking or other context.” SwiftConnect isn’t the first to market with a mobile-centric access control management platform. Openpath, which has raised tens of millions of dollars in venture funding, offers a solution that allows workers to replace their physical access cards with the phones they already have. But Kruger emphasizes that — unlike Openpath — SwiftConnect’s system doesn’t require installing any new reader hardware. But what about when your iPhone dies? Well, Kruger doesn’t have the perfect solution to that problem. He notes, though, that Apple Wallet on the Apple Watch works even when the ultra-battery-saving Power Reserve mode is active. As for the all-too-common misplaced phone scenario, he suggests Apple’s Find My app. “For users of office spaces, SwiftConnect’s platform means they can enjoy coming back to the office with a ‘skip-the-wait’ experience that gets them from street-to-seat efficiently and without ever having to worry about a plastic badge again,” Kruger said. The plug-and-play nature of SwiftConnect’s approach seemingly appeals to large real estate clients like Silverstein Properties, which installed it in its 7 World Trade Center office building in February. SwiftConnect more recently announced a collaboration with Microsoft to develop “intuitive, employee-centric” experiences on top of Microsoft Places, Microsoft’s app for managing office workers across hybrid work campuses. That’s surely music to the ears of SwiftConnect’s investors. According to Fortune Business Insights, the global access control market was worth $10.31 billion in 2019 and could reach $20.02 billion by 2027. Kruger said that the Series A, which SwiftConnect plans to put toward growing its professional services and engineering teams as well as expanding its presence across the U.K., Europe and Australia, was raised to “weather any potential economic headwinds.” It brings the startup’s total cash in the bank to $27 million. “We have product-market fit given our traction, deployments, happy customers and growth,” Kruger said, while declining to answer questions about revenue or customer count. “We are receiving significant inbound interest from other verticals and geographies, including financial services and tech companies occupying spaces in premium locations in Europe and Australia.” A mix of real estate and institutional investors including Nuveen, Cushman & Wakefield, Bridge Investment Group, Crow Holdings, World Trade Ventures, 1414 Ventures and JAMF, the Apple device management vendor, also participated in SwiftConnect’s latest equity funding round. SwiftConnect currently has 70 employees, with an expectation to reach 80 by the end of 2022 — a hiring spree largely fueled by the proceeds.

LatticeFlow raises $12M to eliminate computer vision blind spots • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in Atlantic Bridge, Enterprise, funding, LatticeFlow, machine learning, openocean, StartupsNo Comments

LatticeFlow, a startup that was spun out of Zurich’s ETH in 2020, helps machine learning teams improve their AI vision models by automatically diagnosing issues and improving both the data and the models themselves. The company today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series A funding round led by Atlantic Bridge and OpenOcean, with participation from FPV Ventures. Existing investors btov Partners and Global Founders Capital, which led the company’s $2.8 million seed round last year, also participated in this round. As LatticeFlow co-founder and CEO Petar Tsankov told me, the company currently has more than 10 customers in both Europe and the U.S., including a number of large enterprises like Siemens and organizations like the Swiss Federal Railways, and is currently running pilots with quite a few more. It’s this customer demand that led LatticeFlow to raise at this point. “I was in the States and I met with some investors in Palo Alto, Tsankov explained. “They saw the bottleneck that we have with onboarding customers. We literally had machine learning engineers supporting customers and that’s not how you should run the company. And they said: ‘OK, take $12 million, bring these people in and expand.’ That was great timing for sure because when we talked to other investors, we did see that the market has changed.” As Tsankov and his co-founder CTO Pavol Bielik noted, most enterprises today have a hard time bringing their models into production and then, when they do, they often realize that they don’t perform as well as they expected. The promise of LatticeFlow is that it can auto-diagnose the data and models to find potential blind spots. In its work with a major medical company, its tools to analyze their datasets and models quickly found more than half a dozen critical blind spots in their state-of-the-art production models, for example. The team noted that it’s not enough to only look at the training data and ensure that there is a diverse set of images — in the case of the vision models that LatticeFlow specializes in — but also examine the models. LatticeFlow founding team (from left to right): Prof. Andreas Krause (scientific advisor), Dr. Petar Tsankov (CEO), Dr. Pavol Bielik (CTO) and Prof. Martin Vechev (scientific advisor). Image Credits: LatticeFlow “If you only look at the data — and this is a fundamental differentiator for LatticeFlow because we not only find the standard data issues like labeling issues or poor-quality samples, but also model blind spots, which are the scenarios where the models are failing,” Tsankov explained. “Once the model is ready, we can take it, find various data model issues and help companies fix it.” He noted, for example, that models will often find hidden correlations that may confuse the model and skew the results. In working with an insurance customer, for example, who used an ML model to automatically detect dents, scratches and other damage in images of cars, the model would often label an image with a finger in it as a scratch. Why? Because in the training set, customers would often take a close-up picture with a scratch and point at it with their finger. Unsurprisingly, the model would then correlate “finger” with “scratch,” even when there was no scratch on the car. Those are issues, the LatticeFlow teams argues, that go beyond creating better labels and need a service that can look at both the model and the training data. LatticeFlow uncovers a bias in data for training car damage inspection AI models. Because people often point at scratches, this causes models to learn that fingers indicate damage (a spurious feature). This issue is fixed with a custom augmentation that removes fingers from all images. Image Credits: LatticeFlow LatticeFlow itself, it is worth noting, isn’t in the training business. The service works with pre-trained models. For now, it also focuses on offering its service as an on-prem tool, though it may offer a fully managed service in the future, too, as it uses the new funding to hire aggressively, both to better service its existing customers and to build out its product portfolio. “The painful truth is that today, most large-scale AI model deployments simply are not functioning reliably in the real world,” said Sunir Kapoor, operating partner at Atlantic Bridge. “This is largely due to the absence of tools that help engineers efficiently resolve critical AI data and model errors. But, this is also why the Atlantic Bridge team so unambiguously reached the decision to invest in LatticeFlow. We believe that the company is poised for tremendous growth, since it is currently the only company that auto-diagnoses and fixes AI data and model defects at scale.”

Who’s most likely to buy Nutanix? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 25, 2022Posted in EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC News Analysis, Enterprise, hybrid cloud, Mergers and Acquisitions, Nutanix, rumorsNo Comments

Last Friday, The Wall Street Journal quoted sources as saying that Nutanix was looking for a buyer. Some may not find that surprising given Nutanix’s recent financial performance, but the question is if the company were to sell, who would be the most likely to buy it, and would it be a better fit for a large public company or a private equity firm? (At this point we cannot resist noting that, well, we expected this.) Nutanix helps virtualize nearly every piece of hardware required to run a data center, which it calls hyperconverged infrastructure. It actually even sells its own hardware appliance loaded with the company’s set of services as one of its delivery methods. That puts it at the center of the hybrid cloud market. I know, that’s a lot of buzz words there, but the bottom line is that it can help companies bridge the gap between their data centers and public cloud offerings from companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google. That makes Nutanix a pretty valuable commodity these days. In spite of the massive growth of these public cloud companies, much of the world’s workloads still live in private data centers, and finding ways to manage and connect these two worlds is a huge challenge for companies. You would assume a company like Nutanix would be in demand. In fact, it reports that more than 1,800 customers have spent over $1 million on its services. But growth at the company has stalled lately. In Q4 fiscal 2022, revenue declined 1% to $385.5 million from $390.7 million a year earlier. The top line was also lower than the preceding quarter, when the company reported $403 million. The good news is that despite the revenue dip, Nutanix’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) continues to rise — climbing 37% in Q4 2022 from a year earlier. Annual contract value (ACV) was also up 10% in the same period.