TechCrunch
Lastline Raises $10M From Redpoint Ventures And E.Ventures For Its Malware Protection Service
Lastline, a service that offers a range of solutions for protecting businesses from malware, just announced that it has raised a $10 million funding round led by Redpoint Ventures and e.ventures. The service, which provides organizations with a way to protect themselves from “persistent threats (APTs),targeted attacks and zero-day threats in real time,” was founded in 2012 by a team of computer science professors from the University of California, Santa Barbara and Northeastern University. Redpoint Ventures partner John Welecka will join the Lastline board.
The company sees itself as a direct competitor to FireEye, a security company that recently raised a $50 million round and which seems to be on its way to an IPO.
“This round of funding and the addition of John to our board of directors will further propel our business to new levels as we continue to focus on our products in the channel and continue our research to develop even more solutions to help organizations protect their networks from rapidly evolving threats,” said Jens Andreassen, Lastline’s CEO in a statement today.
The company plans to use this new round of funding to focus on its sales strategy and to further develop the malware and threat detection technology at the core of its products.
As the company notes in its announcement today, it believes that malware authors are getting increasingly sophisticated about evading automated malware analysis systems and signature-based tools to ensure that their attacks are successful. The company argues that its “correlation engine” allows it to defend against these threats and provides “unparalleled correlation engine provides situational awareness and actionable threat intelligence by correlating, aggregating and prioritizing security events based on severity.”
Biba Comes Out Of Stealth With $15M In Funding For Mobile-First, Password-Free Conferencing And Messaging Service
The smartphone is changing how people work but so far the applications for web conferencing have not taken much of a mobile-first approach. Biba, a new company coming out of stealth, has spent more than a year and $5 million in a Series A investment to quietly build a service that offers a lightweight way to use your iPhone, iPad or Android device to do conference calls or message people in your network.
Today the service is launching with $15 million in a Series B round led by InterWest Partners, with participation from previous investors Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures. Other investors include Enrique Salem, former CEO of Symantec and Gary Griffiths, CEO of Trapit and the former President of WebEx.
The core of the service revolves around the user’s contact list. Events are scheduled and attendees notified. In contrast to conferencing call services, Biba takes an active approach once meetings are scheduled. Attendees are reminded to register for the Biba service and again two hours before the meeting begins.
At the time of the call, Biba calls the user. There is no need for a user name or password.Those that do not register receive a toll-free number five minutes prior to the call.
Biba’s features are all built on this concept of automating the conference call and offering ways to make it as easy as possible for people to participate. For example, it show if the user can’t take the call or if they are going to be late.
A person who has a lot of background noise can be muted. If the call drops, the user gets automatically reconnected.
The messaging platform allow people to be contacted from their contact list without the need for any phone number. Messages are synced across mobile and desktop platforms. The user can see if the person they are trying to reach is available and if they have opened the message itself. They can also see when the other person is responding.
Biba is what Co-Founder Carlin Wiegner calls Freemium 2.0. In the Freemium 1.0 world, services were free. If someone using a service left the company then the IT group would have to pay a subscription fee to have that ongoing capability. In Freemium 2.0, the customer pays for granular services such as auditing of call duration.
Wiegner made his mark with CubeTree, which he sold to SuccessFactors in 2010, during those buzzy years when Yammer, Socialcast and a host of other players were competing in the fresh enterprise social networking market. Those days are over — the category is well-defined. Microsoft bought Yammer for $1.2 billion and Socialcast sold to VMware. Salesforce.com launched Chatter and has since made it core to to its service. Last year, SAP bought SuccessFactors for $2.5 billion and made CubeTree its standard for its activity stream service.
He said the idea for a more streamlined way to do conference calls came at SAP when he lead the engineering team under the SuccessFactors umbrella. He spent a lot of time using Polycom conferencing and saw an opportunity to try and make the process less painful and mobile-centric.
Wiegner comes into a space that has competition such as Lync from Microsoft. Lync is a unified communications platform, offering a deep set of features. Biba is lightweight, more similar to a Google Docs in its simpleness and easy-to-use feaures.
What’s lacking are the sophisticated capabilties and rich, deep presence that a user gets with a service like WebEx.
But sservices like Lync and WebEx are also not mobile-first. Can they catch up? Yes, but that can also take some time when enterprise heavyweights are involved.
Greylock Deepens Enterprise Bench, Adds VMware Cloud And App VP Jerry Chen As General Partner
Greylock continues to staff up on enterprise-focused investment partners. Today, the venture firm is announcing that former VMware VP Jerry Chen is joining Greylock’s enterprise investment team as a general partner. In his new role, he will focus investing in cloud and application infrastructure and new enterprise applications.
Until December, Chen was the vice president of cloud and application services at virtualization giant VMware (he joined in 2004). He was part of the executive team that scaled the business from 400 to over 15,000 employees and $5 billion in revenue, helping VMware grow from a virtualization software company to cloud and software-focused data center giant.
Chen was also instrumental in creating Cloud Foundry, the open source platform as a service developed by VMware. Chen was on the product management and marketing teams responsible for VMware’s application infrastructure products, including vFabric and the Spring Java framework, as well as its big-data projects. He also held investment roles at Accel Partners and AEA Investors.
Chen’s addition to the firm’s team only strengthens the deep bench of enterprise talent Greylock has been able to draw. Last year the firm added former BladeLogic CEO Dev Ittycheria as a venture partner, and Joseph Ansanelli as an investment partner. Greylock has strong bets on recent enterprise companies, including Workday, Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, Cloudera, AppDynamics, Pure TStorage, Imperva and many others.
Greylock Partner David Sze tells us in an interview that the firm is draw to operators who specifically have a product background, especially in startups and companies that have seen excellence and are defining in their sector. “Jerry has all of this, he’s a deep product person who understands cloud infrastructure and more,” he says.
Chen says that in his nearly ten years at VMware, he experienced the changes in how apps are being built within the enterprise and the infrastructure layer upon which these business applications are being built upon.
In terms of what he is specifically excited about, Chen explains that there is over $150 billion of annual spend on data center and app infrastructure. That means, he says further, that there is a huge area for disruption at the storage, network and app layers in the post-server era.
OUYA Gets Its Official Retail Release, But The $99 Game Console Still Hasn't Reached Every Early Backer
The Android-powered OUYA gaming console is celebrating its official first day of general retail availability today, a major milestone to be sure for the Kickstarter-funded piece of hardware. Many thought it would never make it this far, and that it would be vaporware before anyone actually got a chance to go and purchase one, but founder Julie Uhrman and her team have made good on making sure it hit store shelves in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, listed right alongside the marquee consoles by Sony, Xbox and Nintendo.
The $99 device offers over 170 games, all of which must have some kind of free-to-try component, along with media apps like Plex and TuneIn. OUYA also touts its large committed developer base, which has over 17,000 studios and game creators signed on to deliver content for the console, including Double Fine Productions. The console ships with one controller, and you can add another for $49.99. As of this writing, the launch seems to be going decently well, as Amazon.com is already showing the console as out of stock.
So far, OUYA hasn’t received the best of early reviews. Most have found its user experience lacking, and the pre-release version was definitely a “beta” release. Virtually everyone who got their hands on a backer edition expressed hope that the console would receive more polish, along with hardware fixes when it actually shipped. And now that it has, critics are going to go back to the well for a second drink, in the hopes that the OUYA team has made some considerable advances in the ensuing two month period.
Yet not all backers could even form an early opinion about the console. OUYA employed a staggered shipping strategy to reach all of its backers, with a timeline that was supposed to ensure everyone got a console before they become generally available. OUYA’s Uhrman sent out an update to backers this morning apologizing for not getting the console in backer hands before the public release, and shifting blame to their distribution partner, to DHL, and to backers being located in international destinations.
Delays for backer reward shipments on Kickstarter are nothing new, but it is very rare to see a product hit general market availability before getting out to the project’s first supporters. OUYA appears to be stumbling out of the gate in more ways than one, but at least now the product is out there in non-beta form, and ready to prove itself as a real consumer product, or, alternatively, to fail in the court of public opinion.
No comments:
Post a Comment