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Ransomware hackers are targeting managed service providers, causing chaos for the city governments, medical clinics, and smaller businesses who use them for IT — ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica's Big Story newsletter …
Which Comic Book Artist’s Ashes Were Mixed Into Ink Used To Print Comics? |
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Sourced Group, which helps enterprises in regulated industries migrate their IT infrastructure to the cloud, raises CAD$20M — Sourced Group, a Canadian-owned IT consultancy specializing in large-scale cloud transformations for regulated industries, closed a CAD $20m financing.
DHL expands its DHL Africa eShop to 13 additional markets, upping the presence of the global shipping company's e-commerce platform to 34 African countries — DHL has expanded its DHL Africa eShop business to 13 additional markets, upping the presence of the global shipping company's e-commerce platform to 34 African countries.
CIMCON Lighting, whose smart city platform simplifies the deployment of sensors, cameras, and other devices, such as Wi-Fi access points, raises $33M Series C — Burlington-based smart city solutions maker CIMCON raised $33 million in a Series C round led by Digital Alpha.
ComplianceQuest, which develops cloud-based quality management software for life sciences and manufacturing sectors, raises $36M Series A — ComplianceQuest, a Tampa company with software for life science firms and manufacturers, raised a $36 million Series A round led by Insight Partners.
Caper, which is developing smart grocery carts that use AI and various sensors to let shoppers quickly scan items and checkout, raises $10M Series A — Caper wants to deliver a major update to the self checkout aisle without keeping its dreaded catchphrases, i.e. “Unknown item in the bagging area,” “Please place the item in the bag.”
Researchers: execution errors prevented the Crash Override malware, which took down the Ukrainian power grid for an hour in 2016, from causing lasting damage — A fresh look at the 2016 blackout in Ukraine suggests that the cyberattack behind it was intended to cause far more damage.
In its first half-decade of existence, PopSocket has grown into one of the most popular — and imitated — smartphone accessories on the market. In 2018 alone, the company generated $90 million in profit. Not to bad for a little Colorado-based upstart.
So, where does an utterly dominated accessory maker go from here? Beverages, naturally. Delish was the first to report the existence of the PopThirst line. You may well have missed it in the wake of this week’s iPhone news. I was on a plane with limited WiFi access, I swear. Whatever the case, the weird little retractable phone holder that has captured the world’s imagination $15 at a time is now headed for the lucrative field of refreshments.
It’s an odd evolution of the brand, to be sure. But why not strike while the iron (and coffee) is hot? I know plenty of people who swear by the phone accessory, and the pop-out gripper looks to fit pretty well on a matching koozie for hot and cold beverages, alike. Pop it on a can of LaCroix to find yourself on the cutting edge of the 2016 zeitgeist.
The cupholders feature a wide range of styles, from leopard print to camo. They’re up for pre-order on Popsocket’s page for $15 a pop. They’ll go on sale Sept 15.
Analysis: ~51% of capital invested into US VC-funded companies exiting over the last decade lost money, while less than 4% generated a 10x or greater return — In fact, we are highly skewed. — Most of us know intuitively that venture investing is a hits driven business.
Launched 20 years ago, Wi-Fi nearly lost out to the rival HomeRF standard, which was being promoted by the group of Compaq, HP, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft — Opinion: Launched 20 years ago this week, Wi-Fi nearly hit a dead spot. — We all love Wi-Fi, except when we can't connect.
Research: tech start-ups spent $44B on advertising and cloud computing from Facebook, Google, and Amazon in 2018, making up ~10% of the revenue of tech giants — Technology start-ups spent $44bn on advertising and cloud computing from Facebook, Google and Amazon last year …
Interview with Björk about her album Vulnicura VR, which is arguably the world's first full “VR pop album”, now available on Windows PC via Steam — On VR's doubters: “It's a boring question. Can there be soul in technology? Yes!" — “I often feel like some sort of …
It’s hard to find the expert help you need right at the clutch moment when you’re building your startup. We’re trying to solve that problem through a product we’ve been developing this year, called Verified Experts — and we’d like to get some more input on it from startup people like you.
As in real life, where you ask your professional network for recommendations, we’re asking startup founders to tell us who the lawyers, growth marketers, brand designers and other experts are who have made/are making a big difference for their company. We use these collective recommendations plus our own research to identify the best experts. Then we publish profiles on the site about them, run guest columns from them that readers have been loving, on topics like growth tactics, immigration tips and term sheet issues.
Now, we’re ramping up this effort — and we’d like to get a little more detail from you about the way that you find and work with startup service providers today.
Please take this 2-minute survey and tell us more.
Beyond helping us to create something that can support startup founders everywhere, you’ll also get a discount to Extra Crunch — and two lucky winners will get full-access Innovator Pass tickets to Disrupt in SF next month.
There was a time when brick-and-mortar mom and pops framed their first $1 on the wall, but in the SaaS startup the equivalent milestone is $1 billion revenue run-rate.
Salesforce is the SaaS revenue king reporting $4 billion in revenue for its most recent quarterly report, and there are many other relatively new SaaS companies, such as WorkDay, ServiceNow and Atlassian, that have broken the $1 billion barrier.
This year at TechCrunch Disrupt (tickets here!), we welcome three people to the Extra Crunch stage who know first hand what it takes to join the billion dollar club.
Neeraj Agrawal, a partner at Battery Ventures and seasoned enterprise investor, presented his growth thesis in a widely read article for TechCrunch where he outlined the key milestones for a SaaS company to reach a billion dollars.
Whitney Bouck is COO at HelloSign, a startup that was sold to Dropbox in 2018 for $230 million. Bouck was also an executive at Box, guiding their enterprise business from 2011-2015. Prior to that she was at Documentum, which exited in 2003 to EMC for $1.7 billion.
Jyoti Bansal is currently co-founder & CEO of Harness. Previously, he was founder & CEO of AppDynamics, which Cisco acquired in 2017 for $3.7 billion. Bansal is also an investor as co-founder of venture capital firm Unusual Ventures.
The goal of this panel is to help you understand the tools and strategies that go into ramping to a billion in revenue and beyond. It requires a rare combination of good idea, product-market fit, culture and commitment. It also requires figuring out how to evolve the core idea and recover from inevitable mistakes — all while selling investors on your vision.
We’re amped for this conversation, and we can’t wait to see you there! Buy tickets to Disrupt SF here at an early-bird rate!
Did you know Extra Crunch annual members get 20% off all TechCrunch event tickets? Head over here to get your annual pass, and then email extracrunch@techcrunch.com to get your 20% discount. Please note that it can take up to 24 hours to issue the discount code.
Microsoft will reportedly launch a 15-inch version of the Surface Laptop 3 during its October 2 event — Surface Book 3 probably won't appear next month — Microsoft is planning to refresh its Surface lineup next month, and there could be a bigger version of the Surface Laptop 3 in the cards.
Sex, despite being one of the most fundamental human experiences, is still one of those businesses that some advertisers reject, banks are hesitant to financially support and some investors don’t want to fund.
That’s TechCrunch’s Megan Rose Dickey discussing the rise of “sextech”, a movement among technologists and product designers to open up one of the most fundamental human experiences to technological innovation. Yet, the often puritanical nature of business means that while some innovations are widely received and lushly funded, other startups remain adrift, struggling to advertise and secure funding.
Megan talks with a range of founders and investors in the space, finding the positive stories along with a heap of frustrating ones. There is a lot more work to do here.
But in reality, it’s hard to say how big that market really is, Founders Fund Partner Cyan Banister, who has invested in a handful of sextech startups, tells TechCrunch.
“It’s hard to gauge and the reason why is these businesses aren’t capable of operating at the same scale a normal business could operate at,” Banister says. “They’re kind of cut off at the knees by not being able to advertise. They can’t be on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram in the way other businesses could… It’s hard to know how big these companies could be if we could change the social norms and stigmas associated with these products.”
Banister has invested in O.School using personal funds, and in Unbound via venture firm Founders Fund. Unbound, a sexual wellness startup for women, focuses on sex toys, accessories and jewelry that doubles as pleasure products. In December 2017, Unbound raised $2.7 million from Founders Fund, Slow Ventures and others.
“The objective has always been to take the category mainstream like Viagra,” Unbound CEO Polly Rodriguez tells TechCrunch.
Extra Crunch media columnist Eric Peckham is back with the next part of his three-part EC-1 looking at music infrastructure startup Kobalt. In part one, Eric talked about how a former Swedish saxophonist built and grew what has become one of the most important music industry startups to arise from Europe since Spotify.
