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Quixey Raises $50M From Alibaba & Others To Build The Search Engine For The Mobile Era
Mobile app search engine Quixey, which has built a search engine to tackle app discovery by allowing consumers to find apps by searching for the kind of functionality they’re looking for, has closed a $50 million Series C funding round, led by Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba Group.
Others participating in the round include new investor GGV Capital, and existing investors Innovation Endeavors, TransLink Capital and U.S. Venture Partners in the U.S., as well as Atlantic Bridge in London and Dublin and WI Harper in Beijing. The new funding round brings Quixey’s total raised to-date to $74.2 million.
Quixey, which powers app search for a number of companies, including Sprint, Ask.com, browser makers, and OEMs, told TechCrunch it is now fielding more than 100 million queries per month. But its ambitions go beyond pure-play app discovery to app content discovery.
“We think our company’s mission is to get people into apps, which doesn’t just mean finding you a new app, it means we should be able to find you the content within apps,” said Quixey co-founder and CEO Tomer Kagan. An example use-case could be a user searching for Thai food — and being returned results across apps, as well as things like Yelp reviews and a current Groupon deal for a restaurant, for instance.
Kagan is not keen on Quixey being compared to Google — i.e. as a ‘Google for apps’ — arguing that Google’s openness in the mobile space is questionable. “I don’t really think of it as this free, open [platform], I think of it as ‘how can we start owning users’,” he said. “In the mobile space, apps haven’t been given the opportunity to shine and reach users on an equal footing, Quixey wants to change that.”
Asked if it plans to launch a more consumer-facing search service, with the help of its new funding round, Kagan told TechCrunch: “We definitely have something pretty major in that realm coming out in a few weeks.”
One possibility is an Android app that will allow Quixey’s app search to get baked in directly into the OS of the device. “Android is best place to start doing something unique and different because of the flexibility of the operating system,” he said. ”We want to go deeper into the apps — something that Android lets us do. That’s the whole point of why we raised this money — so that we can explore that…how can we find the best answer inside of the apps.”
The funding will also be funnelled into ramping up its 80-strong headcount. Kagan said it’s looking to expand its engineering team to ‘double down on search’, and is casting its net pretty wide in the search for talent, looking to Europe, India and Israel — as it gears up to expand internationally and build local presences in new regions.
Alibaba’s interest in Quixey isn’t surprising when you consider it’s been working to strengthen its hand in mobile, with the need to adapt its traditional ecommerce platform for a mobile-obsessed age. However Kagan said there’s no strategic deal in place as a result of the investment.
“The way we view developers is how they view ecommerce. They believe in being sort of a flat platform for ecommerce. They don’t charge a listing fee, they don’t have their own warehouses, they don’t believe in competing with the inventory of their stores — they really believe in providing the easiest and most supportive way of allowing commerce to happen. That really drew us to them,” he added.
Commenting on the funding in a statement, Jeff Richards, Partner at GGV Capital, added: “Consumer adoption of smartphone devices and applications across the Android and iOS ecosystems is changing the game on a global basis. The Quixey team has an incredible vision for the role that search will play in the mobile ecosystem, and we are thrilled to be part of such a dynamic company.”
Quixey also recently launched a sponsored ads feature — similar in function to Google Adwords — to start producing revenue. Kagan said around 100 companies have signed up so far, with developers ranging in size from five person teams to Zynga.
Tulip Raises $2.4M from SoftTech VC And Others To Provide Connected Online, Mobile And In-Store Software And Hardware To Retailers
Tulip Retail, which develops an end to end technology platform for in-store and online sales for retailers, has raised $2.4 million in funding led by SoftTech VC with Founder Collective, BoxGroup, Lerer Ventures, iNovia, Promus Ventures, KIMA Ventures, Matt Mullenweg, the founders of Bufferbox, and Greg Kidd participating.
The company’s founder Ali Asaria previously founded and launched Well.ca, Canada’s largest online health, baby and beauty store (as he explains it, Canada’s equivalent of Diapers.com). He was also a software and hardware developer at BlackBerry, and attended the University of Waterloo. Asaria stepped down earlier this year to focus on Tulip.
Tulip wants to help retailers to own multiple channels of retail. By pulling product, customer, and transactional information into a single, cloud-based hub, the Tulip Commerce engine allows large retailers provide a similar purchasing experience in-stores, and on the retailer’s website, and mobile storefronts. By owning all of these channels for a retailer, Tulip can allow features like ordering online but fulfilling orders from the store, or ordering in the store in but shipping to the customer’s home.
Asaria tells me that companies like Square have provided this in some ways to small retailers, but he’s going after large retailers than need one backend solution that powers online, mobile, and in-store purchases. Part of the value of Tulip vs. old school enterprise options for retailers is that it’s option is lightweight and easy to use. And it comes at a much less expensive price point.
With the end to end offering, Tulip specifically offers both the hardware and software (which is particularly interesting coming from Ansar’s background at Blackberry). This includes software and hardware that allows retailers to work with their existing barcode scanner, UPC codes and debit/credit card terminals, while using Tulip’s touch-screen POS terminal. Tulip also offers an in-store kiosk for sales, and online technologies that will power mobile and web-based storefront and fulfillment. In addition, Tulip promises retailers in-depth analytics and we’re told that Tulip works alongside existing retail ERP and data-stores (SAP, Oracle, other).
It’s an ambitious project–and Tulip is up against a number of well-known competitors. PayPal is also is looking at owning online and in-store payments and commerce, it wouldn’t be surprising if Square entered online commerce and payments as well. But that doesn’t mean that Tulip can’t disrupt these companies and others, and may even have some acquisition interest along the way.
Chrome For iOS Bug Shows Private Browsing Search History In Google Mobile Search Bar
A new update for Chrome for iOS adds iOS 7 support, but there’s also a big flaw as discovered by UK development and design firm Parallax. It turns out that when you use the search/address bar in Incognito mode in Chrome, that history will show up when you return to standard browsing in Google’s mobile website search bar.
The Parallax team has provided a look at this in action via a simple video walkthrough of the behaviour, and TechCrunch was able to replicate this with our own devices. Note that if you try to search from the combined address/URL bar in non-Incognito mode, you won’t see your search history from when you were browsing in private – you need to navigate to Google.com (or Google.co.uk, etc.) in order to see the history of terms you looked up while supposedly keeping your data and history off the books.
The implications are obvious here, as this is a big gap in a feature designed to give users a way of browsing secure in the knowledge that any information they’ve looked up will be limited only to that specific session. If you’re sharing a device and don’t want the other person you’re sharing with to be able to follow your search history breadcrumbs, this pretty much throws any sense of privacy you may have had out the window.
We’ve reached out to Google to find out if they’re aware of this bug, and if they’re doing anything to fix it, and will update if we hear back.
Netskope Comes Out Of Stealth With $21M From Social+Capital And Lightspeed And A Cloud Platform To Manage Enterpise Apps
The double rise of cloud-based services and consumerization have been two of the biggest developments in enterprise IT, but they have also led to one of the biggest conundrums: IT managers and CIOs happy to see employees switched on and working are also facing big headaches around managing and monitoring potentially thousands of apps that their people are now using.
Today, a new startup called Netskope is launching out of stealth to try to meet that challenge head on, with a new platform that lets companies monitor all of the cloud-based apps that employees use, and then set security policies to protect against data breaches and more. “Our solution allows you to go rogue, but in a safe and compliant way,” CEO Sanjay Beri tells me.
Netskope is not your ordinary startup. Out of the gates, it’s launching with $21.4 million in funding from Social+Capital Partnership and Lightspeed Venture Partners. And that’s not all. It also has what Beri described to me as a “dream team” of engineers and others from some of the most impressive enterprise IT startups that Silicon Valley has produced — Palo Alto Networks, McAfee, and PayPal among them — some 55 employees in all, many of them 15-20 year veterans of the industry.
“We’re the anti-startup,” Beri says. “These are people who were fed up with complacency and entrenched attitudes at their past employers.” A fitting start for a company that is also trying to tackle a similar challenge at the enterprise level.
That $21 million has come in two tranches, both raised while Netskope was still in stealth mode. The first was a $5.5 million seed round from Social + Capital; the second, a $15.9 million round closed earlier this year from Lightspeed.
That’s not the only ammunition that the company has: while still under the radar, it was running a private beta with a number of companies, with sizes ranging from 5,000 to 25,000 employees. This has produced several paying customers. Two that are being named today are Vegas.com and Universal Music Group, although Beri notes that there are more in the Fortune 500 category, some of which will be revealed in the coming weeks.
The idea behind Netskope is that it assumes that both consumerization — the idea that employees will keep bringing their own ideas to the table in terms of what devices and services they use at work, and many of these will be riffs on what they use at home — and cloud services are inevitable trends. That leads to a messy landscape of services getting used, often to share sensitive information. “If you’re a CIO or CSO, frankly you don’t even know what’s going on the cloud. You are blindfolded,” Beri says. “But what do you do? Tell them to stop using these applications? You are going to be the villain if you do that. These apps are brought in for a reason: for productivity.”
And so, rather than trying to tailor IT policy to try to mimic these, Netskope’s premise is that the best thing to do is to go along with whatever the employees want to do — to “eliminate the Catch-22,” in Beri’s words. Netskope’s platform is currently is able to support some 3,000 different applications in its service — from the most popular to those less-well-known. What it does, Beri tells me, is that after it is turned on by the IT department, it scans the network and devices on it to detect different apps. It starts monitoring from there, in real time. IT managers can in turn use the Netskope dashboard to track how information moves, and to set policies to limit usage, warn users of bad practices and so on.
“We are look at any transactions that are happen between users and applications,” Beri says. “For any activity where data traverses between you and a server, Netskope can perform data analysis on that.”
Netskope currently works across what it has organized as 50 different categories of apps — around areas like workforce collaboration, CRM, accounting, sales and so on. That fact that there is so much fragmentation among them — even within services from single vendors like Microsoft, or Oracle or Salesforce — is almost a blessing for Netskope.
Like other SaaS offerings, Netskope’s platform is sold at a yearly subscription. With many other SaaS apps turning to monthly and even pay-as-you-go services, it will be interesting to see if these tiers also get added to Netskope’s plans, especially as it grows out and perhaps extends more into the small-business segment.
For all the impact that companies like Amazon Web Services has had on the growth of cloud-based services, Beri says Netskope is “absolutely not” relying on it or other third-party providers as its own infrastructure provider. “We are very focused on security,” he says. The company, instead has gone into partnership with the carrier-neutral data center provider Equinix, with whom it’s chosen to build its own high performance, high security cloud. “Large enterprises really need to invest in certified infrastructure,” he says. (That’s only part of where this investment is going, though: the rest is to sales and general employee retention, no small thing when you have such a senior staff.)
That “anti-startup” positioning has also helped on another front: that of intellectual property. Beri says Netskope has already filed some 36 patents, a benefit of having as its founding employees “some of the principle architects of some of the major enterprise companies out there today.”
To kick off its launch, Netskope’s also produced a report on some of the stats that it has amassed about enterprise app usage so far — a testament to some of the big data credentials of the startup, and perhaps even a sign of how it might be able to leverage that kind of data in the future. Here’s the what the company found to be the top ten most popular enterprise cloud apps. Not too many surprises among them.
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