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Author: Frederic Lardinois

Visualping raises $6M to make its website change monitoring service smarter

by Frederic Lardinois

Visualping, a service that can help you monitor websites for changes like price drops or other updates, announced that it has raised a $6 million extension to the $2 million seed round it announced earlier this year. The round was led by Seattle-based FUSE Ventures, a relatively new firm with investors who spun out of Ignition Partners last year. Prior investors Mistral Venture Partners and N49P also participated.

The Vancouver-based company is part of the current Google for Startups Accelerator class in Canada. This program focuses on services that leverage AI and machine learning, and, while website monitoring may not seem like an obvious area where machine learning can add a lot of value, if you’ve ever used one of these services, you know that they can often unleash a plethora of false alerts. For the most part, after all, these tools simply look for something in a website’s underlying code to change and then trigger an alert based on that (and maybe some other parameters you’ve set).

Image Credits: Visualping

Earlier this week, Visualping launched its first machine learning-based tools to avoid just that. The company argues that it can eliminate up to 80% of false alerts by combining feedback from its more than 1.5 million users with its new ML algorithms. Thanks to this, Visualping can now learn the best configuration for how to monitor a site when users set up a new alert.

“Visualping has the hearts of over a million people across the (Read more...)

Vercel raises $102M Series C for its front-end development platform

by Frederic Lardinois

Vercel, the company behind the popular open-source Next.js React framework, today announced that it has raised a $102 million Series C funding round led by Bedrock Capital. Existing investors Accel, CRV,
Geodesic Capital, Greenoaks Capital and GV also participated in this round, together with new investors 8VC, Flex Capital, GGV, Latacora, Salesforce Ventures and Tiger Global. In total, the company has now raised $163 million and its current valuation is $1.1 billion.

As Vercel notes, the company saw strong growth in recent months, with traffic to all sites and apps on its network doubling since October 2020. About half of the world’s largest 10,000 websites now use Next.js . Given the open-source nature of the Next.js framework, not all of these users are obviously Vercel customers, but its current paying customers include the likes of Carhartt, Github, IBM, McDonald’s and Uber.

Image Credits: Vercel

“For us, it all starts with a front-end developer,” Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch told me. “Our goal is to create and empower those developers — and their teams — to create delightful, immersive web experiences for their customers.”

With Vercel, Rauch and his team took the Next.js framework and then built a serverless platform that specifically caters to this framework and allows developers to focus on building their front ends without having to worry about scaling and performance.

Older solutions, Rauch argues, were built in isolation from the cloud platforms and serverless technologies, leaving it up to the developers to deploy and scale their solutions. (Read more...)

Iterative raises $20M for its MLOps platform

by Frederic Lardinois

Iterative, an open-source startup that is building an enterprise AI platform to help companies operationalize their models, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A round led by 468 Capital and Mesosphere co-founder Florian Leibert. Previous investors True Ventures and Afore Capital also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $25 million.

The core idea behind Iterative is to provide data scientists and data engineers with a platform that closely resembles a modern GitOps-driven development stack.

After spending time in academia, Iterative co-founder and CEO Dmitry Petrov joined Microsoft as a data scientist on the Bing team in 2013. He noted that the industry has changed quite a bit since then. While early on, the questions were about how to build machine learning models, today the problem is how to build predictable processes around machine learning, especially in large organizations with sizable teams. “How can we make the team productive not the person? This is a new challenge for the entire industry,” he said.

Big companies (like Microsoft) were able to build their own proprietary tooling and processes to build their AI operations, Petrov noted, but that’s not an option for smaller companies.

Currently, Iterative’s stack consists of a couple of different components that sit on top of tools like GitLab and GitHub. These include DVC for running experiments and data and model versioning, CML, the company’s CI/CD platform for machine learning, and the company’s newest product, Studio, its SaaS (Read more...)

Iterative raises $20M for its MLOps platform

by Frederic Lardinois

Iterative, an open-source startup that is building an enterprise AI platform to help companies operationalize their models, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A round led by 468 Capital and Mesosphere co-founder Florian Leibert. Previous investors True Ventures and Afore Capital also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $25 million.

The core idea behind Iterative is to provide data scientists and data engineers with a platform that closely resembles a modern GitOps-driven development stack.

After spending time in academia, Iterative co-founder and CEO Dmitry Petrov joined Microsoft as a data scientist on the Bing team in 2013. He noted that the industry has changed quite a bit since then. While early on, the questions were about how to build machine learning models, today the problem is how to build predictable processes around machine learning, especially in large organizations with sizable teams. “How can we make the team productive not the person? This is a new challenge for the entire industry,” he said.

Big companies (like Microsoft) were able to build their own proprietary tooling and processes to build their AI operations, Petrov noted, but that’s not an option for smaller companies.

Currently, Iterative’s stack consists of a couple of different components that sit on top of tools like GitLab and GitHub. These include DVC for running experiments and data and model versioning, CML, the company’s CI/CD platform for machine learning, and the company’s newest product, Studio, its SaaS (Read more...)

DealHub raises $20M Series B for its sales platform

by Frederic Lardinois

DealHub.io, an Austin-based platform that helps businesses manage the entire process of their sales engagements, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B funding round. The round was led by Israel Growth Partners, with participation from existing investor Cornerstone Venture Partners. This brings DealHub’s total funding to $24.5 million.

The company describes itself as a ‘revenue amplification’ platform (or ‘RevAmp,’ as DealHub likes to call it) that represents the next generation of existing sales and revenue operations tools. It’s meant to give businesses a more complete view of buyers and their intent, and streamline the sales processes from proposal to pricing quotes, subscription management and (electronic) signatures.

“Yesterday’s siloed sales tools no longer cut it in the new Work from Anywhere era,” said Eyal Elbahary, CEO & Co-founder of DealHub.io. “Sales has undergone the largest disruption it has ever seen. Not only have sales teams needed to adapt to more sophisticated and informed buyers, but remote selling and digital transformation have compelled them to evolve the traditional sales process into a unique human-to-human interaction.”

The platform integrates with virtually all of the standard CRM tools, including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics and Freshworks, as well as e-signature platforms like DocuSign.

The company didn’t share any revenue data, but it notes that the new funding round follows “continued multi-year hyper-growth.” In part, the company argues, demand for its platform has been driven by sales teams that need new tools, given that they — for the (Read more...)

Cycode raises $20M to secure DevOps pipelines

by Frederic Lardinois

Israeli security startup Cycode, which specializes in helping enterprises secure their DevOps pipelines and prevent code tampering, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series A funding round led by Insight Partners. Seed investor YL Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the total funding in the company to $24.6 million.

Cycode’s focus was squarely on securing source code in its early days, but thanks to the advent of infrastructure as code (IaC), policies as code and similar processes, it has expanded its scope. In this context, it’s worth noting that Cycode’s tools are language and use case agnostic. To its tools, code is code.

“This ‘everything as code’ notion creates an opportunity because the code repositories, they become a single source of truth of what the operation should look like and how everything should function, Cycode CTO and co-founder Ronin Slavin told me. “So if we look at that and we understand it — the next phase is to verify this is indeed what’s happening, and then whenever something deviates from it, it’s probably something that you should look at and investigate.”

Cycode Dashboard

Cycode Dashboard. Image Credits: Cycode

The company’s service already provides the tools for managing code governance, leak detection, secret detection and access management. Recently it added its features for securing code that defines a business’ infrastructure; looking ahead, the team plans to add features like drift detection, integrity monitoring and alert prioritization.

“Cycode is here to protect the entire CI/CD pipeline — (Read more...)

Spectral raises $6.2M for its DevSecOps service

by Frederic Lardinois

Tel Aviv-based Spectral is bringing its new DevSecOps code scanner out of stealth today and announcing a $6.2 million funding round. The startup’s programming language-agnostic service aims to automated code security development teams to help them detect potential security issues in their codebases and logs, for example. Those issues could be hardcoded API keys and other credentials, but also security misconfiguration and shadow IT assets.

The four-person founding team has a deep background in building AI, monitoring and security tools. CEO Dotan Nahum was a Chief Architect at Klarna and Conduit (now Como, though you may remember Conduit from its infamous toolbar that was later spun off), and the CTO at Como and HiredScore, for example. Other founders worked on building monitoring tools at Elastic and HP and on security at Akamai. As Nahum told me, the idea for Spectral came to him and co-founder and COO Idan Didi during their shared time at mobile application build Conduit/Como.

Image Credits: Spectral

“We basically stored certificates for every client that we had, so we could submit their apps to the various marketplaces,” Nahum told me of his experience at Counduit/Como. “That certificate really proves that you are who you are and it’s super sensitive. And at each point at these companies, I really didn’t have the right tools to actually make sure that we’re storing, handling, detecting [this information] and making sure that it doesn’t leak anywhere.”

Nahum decided to quit his current job and started to build a prototype (Read more...)

Nobl9 raises $21M Series B for its SLO management platform

by Frederic Lardinois

SLAs, SLOs, SLIs. If there’s one thing everybody in the business of managing software development loves, it’s acronyms. And while everyone probably knows what a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is, Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) may not be quite as well known. The idea, though, is straightforward, with SLOs being the overall goals a team must hit to meet the promises of its SLA agreements, and SLIs being the actual measurements that back up those other two numbers. With the advent of DevOps, these ideas, which are typically part of a company’s overall Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) efforts, are becoming more mainstream, but putting them into practice isn’t always straightforward.

Nobl9 aims to provide enterprises with the tools they need to build SLO-centric operations and the right feedback loops inside an organization to help it hit its SLOs without making too many trade-offs between the cost of engineering, feature development and reliability.

The company today announced that it has raised a $21 million Series B round led by its Series A investors Battery Ventures and CRV. In addition, Series A investors Bonfire Ventures and Resolute Ventures also participated, together with new investors Harmony Partners and Sorenson Ventures.

Before starting Nobl9, co-founders Marcin Kurc (CEO) and Brian Singer (CPO) spent time together at Orbitera, where Singer was the co-founder and COO and Kurc the CEO, and then at Google Cloud, after it acquired Orbitera in 2016. In the process, the team got to work (Read more...)

NeuReality raises $8M for its novel AI inferencing platform

by Frederic Lardinois

NeuReality, an Israeli AI hardware startup that is working on a novel approach to improving AI inferencing platforms by doing away with the current CPU-centric model, is coming out of stealth today and announcing an $8 million seed round. The group of investors includes Cardumen Capital, crowdfunding platform OurCrowd and Varana Capital. The company also today announced that Naveen Rao, the GM of Intel’s AI Products Group and former CEO of Nervana System (which Intel acquired), is joining the company’s board of directors.

The founding team, CEO Moshe Tanach, VP of operations Tzvika Shmueli and VP for very large-scale integration Yossi Kasus, has a background in AI but also networking, with Tanach spending time at Marvell and Intel, for example, Shmueli at Mellanox and Habana Labs and Kasus at Mellanox, too.

It’s the team’s networking and storage knowledge and seeing how that industry built its hardware that now informs how NeuReality is thinking about building its own AI platform. In an interview ahead of today’s announcement, Tanach wasn’t quite ready to delve into the details of NeuReality’s architecture, but the general idea here is to build a platform that will allow hyperscale clouds and other data center owners to offload their ML models to a far more performant architecture where the CPU doesn’t become a bottleneck.

“We kind of combined a lot of techniques that we brought from the storage and networking world,” Tanach explained. Think about traffic manager and what it does for Ethernet packets. And we applied (Read more...)