Augment

Ireland’s data regulator has given Facebook six weeks to respond to an investigation that may trigger a ban on the social media giant’s transatlantic data transfers following a High Court ruling that the probe could resume. The case stems from European Union concerns that U.S. government surveillance may not respect the privacy rights of EU citizens when their personal data is sent to the United States for commercial use.IBM’s AI research division , has released a 14-million-sample dataset , to develop machine learning models that can help in programming tasks. The model is called Project CodeNet, the dataset takes its name after ImageNet, the famous repository of labeled photos that triggered a revolution in computer vision and deep learning. With Project CodeNet, the researchers at IBM have tried to create a multi-purpose dataset that can be used to train machine learning models for various tasks.Ocean Network Express (ONE), which owns the sixth largest fleet of containerships in the world, is working with Google Cloud to advance its digital transformation and data cloud strategy. The next-generation shipping company is enhancing its operational efficiency by running its mission critical SAP systems on Google Cloud, unlocking business insights and accelerating time to insight leveraging data analytics services like BigQuery, and enhancing employee collaboration with Google Workspace.

Bain Capital Ventures raises $1.3 billion to fund young startups, and young VC firms. The venture arm of the 37-year-old private equity firm Bain Capital, announced this morning that it has $1.3 billion more to invest across two funds, a $950 million fund for seed and Series A deals and a $350 million fund for growth-stage opportunities.Mio, a social commerce startup focused on smaller cities and rural areas in Vietnam, raises $1M seed. The startup, currently focuses on fresh groceries and plans to expand into more categories. Founded in June 2020, Mio now claims it has hundreds of agents, or resellers on it’s platform. Mio is among a crop of social commerce startups across Asia that leverage the buying power of areas where major e-commerce players haven’t reached dominance yet. 

Mapping and logistics startup NextBillion, a geospatial data startup that provides software-as-a-service products for enterprises, raises $6.25 million from Microsoft venture fund M12. The firm’s investment extends NextBillion’s $7 million series A round. . NextBillion’s platform lets customers build custom maps for different users, as well as for unique use cases and geographies.Wejo is in talks to go public through a reverse merger with blank-check company Virtuoso Acquisition in a deal that would value the British connected car data start-up at more than $1 billion.Immuta, which provides a cloud-native data governance platform to help organizations automate data access control, security, privacy, and compliance, raises $90 million in series D funding. Immuta says it will use the investment to expand the size of its workforce, acquire new customers, and further develop its products. This brings the startup’s total raise to date to $169 million.

Chicago-based Spot Meetings raises $5 million in seed funding led by Ilya Fushman at Kleiner Perkins. That follows a $1.9 million pre-seed round led by Chapter One earlier this year. Spot Meetings wants to reinvigorate our meetings and displace Zoom as the default meeting medium at the same time.Esper, raises  $30 million in Series B round. Esper builds tools to enable developers and engineers to deploy and manage fleets of Android-based edge devices. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Root Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures and Haystack.Portside, an aviation startup that is building a platform for managing the backend of a corporate flight department, charter operation, government fleet and fractional ownership operation, raises  $17 million funding round led by Tiger Global Management. Alek Vernitsky, co-founder and CEO of Portside stated that the new capital will be used to accelerate investment in product innovation, support further engagement with large enterprise customers and grow their global engineering and customer success teams.Enterprise app configuration platform Salto today raises $42 million in series B funding, bringing its total raised to $69 million. The company says the funds will be used to expand its capacity while growing the size of its workforce.Cognite, an industrial software-as-a-service  company raises $150 million in an equity funding round led by TCV at a $1.6 billion post-money valuation. Cognite says this investment marks one of the largest funding rounds for a SaaS company in Europe and will be used to expand its platform and support hiring efforts.

An early-stage start-up, Britive, that brings privileged access control to a multi-cloud world, has announced a $10 million Series A. The investment was led by Crosslink Capital, with participation from previous investors, Upfront Ventures, and One Way Ventures. The company helps automate permission-ing across multiple cloud vendors, and software services, whether that involves a human or a machine, that is seeking permission. The company currently has 40 employees, a number that Britive expects to double, in the next 12 months, as they put this capital to work. Unbounce, a Vancouver start-up known for helping marketers create automated landing pages, announced that it has acquired Snazzy dot AI, an early-stage automated copywriting start-up. Unbounce’s Chief Strategy Officer, Tamara Grominsky, says that her company focuses on helping customers convert their customers into sales, and with Snazzy, it gets some pretty nifty technology, based on GPT-3 artificial intelligence technology. The product is aimed at the marketing generalist, charged with overseeing landing pages, and who is responsible for a range of tasks including writing copy. Upstream, a new professional networking platform, just closed a $2.75 million seed round, bringing their total raised to $3.25 million. The round was led by Ibex Investors, and managing partner Nicole Priel. The investment also includes participation from 8-Bit Capital, Human Ventures, NYVP, Converge Venture Partners, and a few angel investors. Unlike LinkedIn, Upstream focuses on generating meaningful connections between its members, and one way they go about it, is by hosting digital events, that start with a speaker, followed by breakout matched sessions, that are five minutes each.Fintech start-up Pipe, which aims to be the “Nasdaq for revenue”  had raised $150 million in a round of funding that was closed in March. Now, the Miami-based Start-up confirms that it has actually raised, $250 million at a $2 billion valuation in a round that was massively oversubscribed. More than 4,000 companies have signed up on the Pipe trading platform since its public launch in June 2020, with just over 1,000 of those signing up since its March raise. Pipe’s platform assesses a customer’s key metrics, by integrating with its accounting, payment processing, and banking systems. It then instantly rates the performance of the business and qualifies them for a trading limit. Forecast, a start-up that uses artificial intelligence to both reads, and integrates data from different enterprise applications, to build a bigger picture of the project, and potential outcomes have raised $19 million. Headquartered in London, the company plans to use some of the funding to expand to the U.S., and some to continue building out its platform and business. This funding, a Series A, comes less than a year after the start-up’s commercial launch, and it was led by Balderton Capital, with previous investors Crane Ventures Partners, SEED Capital, and Heartcore also participating. Düsseldorf-based prop-tech start-up, Dabbel, is using AI to drive energy efficiency savings in commercial buildings. It’s developed cloud-based self-learning building management software, that plugs into the existing building management systems, taking over control of heating and cooling systems, in a way that’s more dynamic than legacy systems, based on fixed set-point resets. Dabbel says its AI considers factors such as building orientation, and thermal insulation, and reviews calibration decisions every five minutes, meaning it can respond dynamically to changes in outdoor and indoor conditions. Founded in 2018, the start-up claims this approach of layering AI-powered predictive modeling, atop legacy BMS to power next-gen building automation, is able to generate substantial energy savings, touting reductions in energy consumption of up to 40%. European start-up studio, e-Founders states that the portfolio companies have reached a valuation of $2 billion together — only 18 months after reaching $1 billion. E-Founders says it is focused on building the future of work. In practical terms, it means the company is building B2B SaaS start-ups, with a focus on productivity, and workflows. For instance, Front, Aircall, and Spendesk all started with e-Founders. When e-Founders comes up with a new project, they act as a sort of third co-founder. The start-up studio tries to find a CEO and a CTO. In exchange for a third of equity, the e-Founders core team helps take the project off the ground. When the start-up raises a seed round, e-Founders move on from day-to-day activities and focuses on new projects. And it has been working well. With 30 portfolio companies, there are now 1,500 people working for an e-Founders-backed company. Combined, they generate $131 million in annual recurring revenue.

BukuKas, a startup focused on digitizing Indonesia’s small businesses, raises $50 million in Series B funding. The round included participation from Gokul Rajaram, the DoorDash executive, and Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder and CEO of Transfer-Wise. BukuKas, the digital bookkeeping application, will use its Series B, to hire for its engineering, and product teams in Jakarta and Bangalore, and launch new services for merchants. Singapore-based Thunes, a fintech, focused on making cross-border money transfers easier, announced today it raises $60 million in a growth round led by Insight Partners. The round included participation from existing shareholders. Founded in 2016, Thunes’ customers include Grab, PayPal, MPesa, the Commercial Bank of Dubai, Western Union, Remitly, and the Singaporean insurance firm, NTUC Income. Fintech startup, StudentFinance, which allows educational institutions to offer success-based financing for students, raises a $5.3 million seed round, co-led by Giant Ventures, and Armilar Venture Partners. The startup, which launched at the beginning of 2020, provides the tech back end for institutions, to offer flexible payment plans, in the form of income-share agreements. It’s now raised $6.6 million total, to date. Styra, the startup behind Open Policy Agent, has picked up $40 million in a Series B round of funding, led by Battery Ventures. Styra will use the funding, to continue evolving its product, specifically by creating better, and more efficient ways to apply authorization policies, by way of code; and by bringing in more partners to expand the scope, of what can be covered by its technology. Google Cloud announced Vertex AI, a new managed machine learning platform, that is meant to make it easier for developers, to deploy and maintain their AI models. The focus of Vertex is on mobile and web developers. The service is also integrated with Vizier, Google’s AI optimizer that can automatically tune hyper-parameters in machine learning models. Artificial, which has built a software platform for laboratories to assist with, or in some cases fully automate, research and development work, raises $21.5 million. It plans to use the funding, to continue building out its software and its capabilities, to hire more people, and for business development, Artificial’s technology can both orchestrate, and manage robotic machines that labs might be using to handle some work; and help assist scientists when they are carrying out the work themselves.

Cloud-communications firm, Twilio Inc, plans to buy a toll-free messaging provider, Zip-whip, for about $850 million in cash and stock. Zip-whip, which provides a platform for businesses to use their landline or toll-free numbers to send text messages to customers, will become part of Twilio's messaging business unit once the deal closes. The deal is expected to modestly add to Twilio's gross margin and revenue, according to the company. Merge, a start-up that provides an integration platform for product development has raised $4.5 million in a seed round funding led by New Enterprise Associates. Launched in 2020, Merge aspires to provide a unified API for B2B to integrate seamlessly, which explains their up-front investment in their product. They plan to expand into other areas, likely CRM, as per reports. The French Government has stated that Google, and Microsoft's cloud technologies, can be utilized to store France's sensitive data, securely. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon—the market leader in data storage dominate the global industry, raising worries in Europe about the possibility of US surveillance following the passage of the US CLOUD Act of 2018.Adalo, formerly known as Foundry, has raised an $8 million series A round with Oceans Ventures, and OldSlip Group participation. Adalo is a no-code platform, for creating cross-platform mobile, and web applications. The firm provides drag-and-drop design tools, for consumers to create apps. Users can choose from pre-configured modules, or create their own, integrating with existing systems, via database setups, and APIs. It can assist update, and track user data as well as add entries to databases. Furthermore, the platform can construct native apps for both iOS and Android.IBM has updated its open-source web Accessibility Checker tool, to make it easier to discover, and address accessibility issues. The update is planned to take place on May 20, to coincide with Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Last May, IBM released the Equal Access Toolkit, which is essentially a set of rules that provides enterprise developers, with all of the information they need, to include accessibility into their apps. With the newly added multi-scan report functionality, users can automatically scan an entire website or application and collect all of the information into a single Excel spreadsheet. It is vital to make internet services accessible to as many people as possible, given how the epidemic has forced businesses, to embrace digital transformation.

Appian, launches the latest version of Appian low-code automation platform, for enterprises to unify enterprise data, using low-code, and a code-free approach. In a released statement to the press, Appian discussed the features available on the latest version, which include an A I driven Intelligent Document Processing, new design guidance, and enhanced Development, Security, and operations, among others. The platform also provides a single workflow for automation, team orchestration, existing systems, data, bots, and more. Reports state that, the launch comes amid enterprises scouting for quick solutions to AI-powered applications, and smooth workflow automation across departments.

The breach at SolarWinds in the December of 2020, underlined the vulnerabilities that businesses faced, and exposed severe hybrid cloud, and authentication weaknesses.  Reports have highlighted how hybrid multi-clouds provide enterprises a ‘Promising path’ to digital transformation, driving new revenue models. However, it also leaves a chance for bad actors to access an organization’s valuable data when they err badly. The breach becomes pertinent because SolarWinds Orion is used to managing on-premises and hosted infrastructures in hybrid cloud environments, calling a need for enhanced multi-cloud security. A troublesome combination of hybrid cloud security gaps and lack of authentication on SolarWinds accounts had made the trace undetectable for months.

Vai Le, has been appointed the first channel alliance manager, for the Asia Pacific region by Emersion, an automation network provider. He has been tasked with "aggressively" increasing the company's partner count. At Emersion, Le will be responsible for driving revenue, and development in APAC through distributor recruitment, retailer partnerships, and delivery coordination. 

Marlin Equity Partners, a California-based investment firm, has made a significant investment in Abbyy, a provider of document conversion and data capture software. This investment by Marlin makes it one of the largest shareholders in Abbyy, and this could also aid in the growth in the expansion of the IPA market. This support will aid Abbyy's attempts to become a leading vendor in the digital intelligence sector. Abbyy's mission is to provide digital intelligence that is network and vendor agnostic, which is why it is collaborating with various companies.

Fidelis Cybersecurity acquires CloudPassage to increase detection and response to threats, in short- to enhance their XDR platform. San-Francisco-based CloudPassage specializes in cloud security, and compliance, and protects cloud infrastructure, for some of the world’s most recognized brands, in domains such as e-commerce, finance, B2B SaaS, healthcare, and others. Founded in 2010 and having over 70 employees, Cloud-Passage’s team will be integrated into the Fidelis Cybersecurity organization.

Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV) led a $3.6 million seed round for Divibank, a Brazilian finance platform. Divibank is a place, where Latin American companies, can get growth capital through revenue-share funding. The funds raised, will be used to speed up Divibank's innovation plan, and expand its workforce. Clients will be able to properly plan their digital marketing strategies and maximize their investment gains with the app.

Stripe has acquired the Oakland-based, online transitions fraud detection start-up, Bouncer.  The terms of the deal remain undisclosed, but reports have stated that Bouncer’s team and technology will be integrated into Radar, Stripe’s A.I.-based anti-fraud technology toolset. Radar essentially focuses on preventing fraudulent, and malicious transactions, on Stripe’s platform. With Bouncer's integration into Stripe’s Radar, those buying services from Stripe, will benefit, as the tools' effectiveness will increase.

Marqueta Inc, a payments card company, revealed a doubling of its revenue in 2020, in an IPO. In 2020, the company's sales increased to $290.3 million, up from $143.3 million the previous year. As the pandemic fueled a boom in internet shopping, and food ordering purchases by homebound consumers, Marqeta, a company that helps businesses issue credit and debit cards to their employees, has benefited.