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The pandemic and the world’s big shift to doing (even) more online has put an unprecedented amount of pressure on cybersecurity. Now, it looks like one of the big public players in that space, Palo Alto Networks, has made an acquisition that will help it address that challenge, specifically with security tools designed for those working in DevOps to handle vast volumes of security data more efficiently.

According to our sources and reports, the company is acquiring Bridgecrew, a startup out of Israel that automates the process of network monitoring and security remediation by translating the feedback into code. Its tools are used by fast-scaling, internet-based businesses like Robinhood, BetterHelp and OneMain Financial.

The acquisition was first rumored earlier this month in Israeli press as a deal worth more than $100 million. Two sources confirmed the talks to us at the time but said the deal had not yet been closed. Then, a report this morning in Israel’s Calcalist said the acquisition is now valued at around $200 million, possibly more if you count earn-outs.

Sources close to the startup’s investors confirm to us that the papers have indeed now been signed on the deal, so expect an official announcement soon.

Spokespeople for both companies previously declined to comment on any deal when we asked earlier this month. We are reaching out to both again.

A $200 million price tag would represent a strong return for Bridgecrew and its investors.

The startup, backed by the likes of Battery Ventures, Operator Partners and more than a dozen others, has only raised around $18 million, including a Series A of $14 million last year. According to PitchBook data, Bridgecrew had a valuation of about $40 million at the time of that last round.

Cybersecurity — specifically the need for better and more sophisticated solutions in the face of an increasing amount of breaches in an ever-growing threat landscape — has seen an increasing focus for years. Indeed, it’s one of the rising tides that has lifted Palo Alto Networks’ boat.

But in the last year, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought more attention to cybersecurity and the need for more automation in it than ever before.

The reason is fairly obvious but is worth repeating: as more organizations migrate operations into distributed, digital-only, cloud-based environments, architectures have become more fragmented, complex and simply bigger and more of an exploitation target.

That’s presented a challenge for those provisioning security for these operations, and that has led to a new wave of companies over the last several years building automated solutions, merging DevOps with security monitoring.

“We founded Bridgecrew because we saw that there was a huge bottleneck in security engineering, in DevSecOps, and how engineers were running cloud infrastructure security,” Bridgecrew CEO and co-founder Idan Tendler told TechCrunch last year. Others in this wider space include PortShift (which was acquired by Cisco last year), Tines and many others.

Palo Alto Networks has also been building its own tools for DevOps security, namely with Prisma, which it introduced in 2019 and updated last year.

It’s not clear why Palo Alto would choose to supplement that with an outside acquisition, but it’s notable that Bridgecrew focuses on DevOps security specifically and it has seen a lot of traction in that area.

Its sweet spot appears to be customers who are building huge businesses themselves on cloud infrastructure and are using automation as part of bigger efforts to ensure better cybersecurity practices.

It counts customers like Databricks for its flagship Bridgecrew platform product, which provides security scanning and remediation in the form of code across a wide range of infrastructure environments. The company recently said that its customer base and monthly sign ups both tripled in the second half of last year.

It has also seen a lot of pick-up of Checkov, its open source infrastrcuture-as-code (IaC) scanner that it says works across cloud infrastructure in Terraform, Cloudformation, Kubernetes, Arm templates or Serverless Framework to detect misconfigurations.

Checkov passed a milestone of 1 million downloads last quarter, speaking to the company’s reputation and traction with the very customers that Palo Alto is looking to reach.

Notably, Bridgecrew says it’s working on other open source projects, so that could also be a focus for Palo Alto here.

Another takeaway from this news is how Israel continues to be fertile ground for hatching and growing cybersecurity businesses.

“Palo Alto Networks was established by Israeli founders, and Bridgecrew will be the seventh Israeli cybersecurity company acquired by Palo Alto in the recent years,” said Avihai Michaeli, a Tel Aviv-based senior investment banker and startup advisor.

We will update this story as we learn more.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/16/sources-palo-alto-networks-acquired-devops-security-startup-bridgecrew-for-around-200m/

Carl Pei, co-founder of OnePlus, knows a thing or two about communities. At the Chinese smartphone maker, Pei fielded product and feature ideas from fans and held frequent gatherings to hear their feedback. At his new venture, Nothing, Pei is going a step further.

London-headquartered firm said on Tuesday it will allow its community to invest $1.5 million in the company through a community equity round early next month. One community member will be elected to Nothing’s board of directors to always keep the firm in “check” and remind it of ‘what users want,” said Pei.

The startup, which recently raised a $15 million Series A round from Alphabet’s GV, said it will raise money from the community at the same valuation as implied in the Series A round. (The startup has raised an additional $7 million from high-profile executives including Kunal Shah of Cred, Tony Fadell, principal at Future Shape and inventor of the iPod, well-known YouTuber Casey Neistat, Kevin Lin, co-founder of Twitch, Steve Huffman, chief executive of Reddit, and Kim Fai Kok of Truecaller.)

“We want our community to be part of our journey from the very start and play an active role in it.” said Pei, who serves as the chief executive of Nothing. Pre-registrations to the financing option will open on February 16 at 10AM GMT, and the campaign will go live on March 2 at 10AM GMT.

Pei has yet to share what all products he wants to tackle at his new venture. So far he has said the startup plans to develop a pair of wireless headphones and smart and connected consumer electronics devices.

TechCrunch asked him why he couldn’t do all of this at OnePlus. “When you want to build something new and different, the best way is to start-off on a clean sheet and with a change of environment,” he said.

This week, 9to5Google reported that Nothing had acquired some trademarks from Android creator Andy Rubin’s now-defunct Essential.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/16/want-to-invest-in-nothing-carl-pei-opens-investment-opportunity-to-community/

Revent — a new European early stage (pre-seed to series A) venture capital fund with an ‘impact’ focus — is coming out of the gate today, and is poised to reach its target of a €50m ($60m) fund, with the first close of that already completed. Focusing on environmental and societal problems, Revent will be looking to fund startups with both ‘purpose and profit’. Headquartered in Berlin and investing across Europe it will hone in on companies in Climate-Tech, health and wellbeing, and economic empowerment.

The founding partners are Otto Birnbaum, who was previously with French VC Partech, but also worked at HelloFresh; Dr. Lauren Lentz formality of McKinsey and an expert in impact measurement; Emily Brooke MBE, founder of Beryl, a micromobiilty startup; and Henrik Grosse Hokamp who worked previously for Partech’s late-stage fund.

Revent’s founder LP is Benjamin Otto, managing Partner at the Otto Group. Otto is part of the influential and powerful Otto family in Hamburg, founders of the Otto Group. Benjamin Otto also backed the launch of two other German VCs, e.ventures and Project A. Other investors in the fund include Max Tayenthal (N26), Sascha Konietzke (Contentful), Verena Pausder (Fox & Sheep), Luis Hanemann (e.ventures), Benjamin Roth (Urban Sports Club) and Dr. Florian Heinemann (Project A).

Revent has so far made four investments: Tomorrow Bank, a sustainable challenger bank based in Hamburg
; Sylvera, a London-based company that developed AI-enabled monitoring of nature-based carbon offsetting projects; Tmrow, a Denmark-based team building technology products for consumers and companies to understand and reduce their carbon footprint; and net purpose, an impact datastream for asset managers to understand the quantitative net impact of their portfolio, acting like a “Bloomberg” terminal of impact.


Commenting on the launch, Otto Birnbaum, Revent General Partner said: “We’re not acting as philanthropists, but rather aim to demonstrate that achieving very attractive financial returns is possible precisely because of the positive impact these companies will achieve.”

Benjamin Otto, Revent Anchor Investor said: “Social and ecological challenges have reached a new level of urgency. We depend on entrepreneurial innovation to find new solutions. With Revent, we want to create a platform for founders that not only provides them with optimal support but also contributes to a change in mindset: Entrepreneurial success and social-ecological impact can reinforce each other.”

Speaking to TechCrunch, Brooke and Lentz said the “purpose economy” has been accelerated by the Covid pandemic, which has amplified many of the planet’s systemic problems, such as inequality of access to healthcare, EdTech, creating massive changes in the world of work. Their mission, they tell me, is to positively affect the lives of 1 million people and to abate 5 million tons of C02. In order to achieve this, the fund will link fund carry to its impact goals.

They also say they are seeing a new wave of founders who want to tackle these problems. While overall VC investment is up only by about 2%, investment in ‘impact’ spaces such as ed-tech and mental health is booming.

As Brooke told me on a call: “We want to build a new version of venture capital, that authentically and genuinely prioritizes environmental returns and societal returns, along with commercial.”

Lentz said: “We think that there is this generation of founders who are looking for an investor who really brings both financing and an impact mindset. So not a classical impact-first impact investor, or a classic VC that is only looking at the growth trajectory and the financial upside returns. And we think that this founder is looking for an investor who really believes that these two things reinforce each other, and that the returns are going to be generated by positive societal impact, and that there needs to be a European home for this kind of founder.”

The main question is, how are they going to measure the impact?

Lentz said: “We view this holistically, and we start very early, so when we’re in diligence we go through a structured process of basically trying to assess the team, the founder DNA, how committed are they to achieving positive impact. We’re investing very early, usually pre-product, so we need to understand what is the motivation for this team. And then we try to systemically look at the different dimensions of impacts or how deep the impact, how many people will they reach, what additionality are they offering. We go through a structured exercise during the due diligence. And then we do something a bit unique which is we do an impact forecast. And so before we pull the trigger and invest we basically take what the founders have told us, and what we have learned through our conversations about possible growth trajectories, and we try to make some estimates and assumptions around the depth of the impact that the company will have. So it might be how much carbon do we think that the company will be able to beat or avert over the next eight years, or how many lives would they be able to significantly affect and to what extent… We’re not building a 20,000 line model, but we are trying to put some rigour around what we expect to happen on the impact side. Only if we anticipate that the company is going to have very significant potential upside from a commercial point of view and also very significant impact upside would we invest.”

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/16/new-european-early-stage-vc-revent-launches-with-its-sights-set-on-a-60m-first-close/

Fronted, the London-based fintech aiming to make life easier for renters, including lending the cash needed for a deposit, has finally launched.

In March, its founders took the decision to “hibernate” the nascent business after the first lockdown and with the pandemic taking hold. But, now with regulatory approval from the FCA and rents falling in London, the startup is officially opening.

“We had a lot of great momentum and then when lockdown came it was like getting headshot from across the map,” Fronted co-founder and CEO Jamie Campbell tells me. “It was when we heard that people weren’t able to move [that] we knew it would be impossible to find early testers for the product and that is when we decided to look at different options. We knew lockdown would delay launching and the furlough scheme gave us options and time. In the end, it was an easy decision and, looking back, it was the right one”.

Founded by Campbell, Simon Vans-Colina and Anthony Mann — former employees at Bud, Monzo and Apple, respectively — and backed by Passion Capital, Fronted is using open banking and other financial technology to offer a credit product designed to finance deposits directly. The pitch is that Fronted can lend more cheaply than existing options, such as credit cards, pay-day lenders and overdrafts, or insurance-backed membership schemes. And, crucially, at lower risk.

“Renting sucks — anyone who rents knows it,” Campbell told me last year. “There are so many problems to solve and we intend to tackle them all bit by bit. But first, we are going to pay people’s rent deposits for them so they can pay us back in bite-size manageable amounts”.

To be able to apply for a Fronted rental deposit loan, you’ll need to be U.K. citizen, have a bank account with more than six months of transaction data and minimum income of £12,000. You are then asked to securely link your bank account data to Fronted via open banking, in order to assess your affordability beyond a simple credit score.

“We believe [this] is a fairer way to determine whether or not someone qualifies for a deposit from us,” explains Campbell. “We are confident we are launching with a fair approach. We don’t, for instance, turn people away who are on benefits or furloughed”.

Fronted loans last 12 months and carry a 12.5% interest rate. However, there are no early repayment fees. Once a loan is agreed, the startup sends the money directly to the estate agent to be placed in the U.K.’s Deposit Protection Scheme, meaning that the loan never touches the renter’s hands (or wallet).

Meanwhile, the timing looks good. Fronted says that 60% of all renters have no savings and are therefore not in a great position to move. Meanwhile, rents are falling as much as 12% in London, meaning that renters could save huge amounts of money simply by moving.

“Deposits are a huge impediment to social mobility; the amount of people who don’t move because they don’t have the money on hand is staggering,” adds the Fronted CEO, noting customers don’t just include those that have already found a place, but also those who are still looking.

“People who haven’t found a place, they are coming to us to see what deposit they could get and then going to find a property… For those people, we give them a maximum which is valid for 30 days so they can shop around knowing they have Fronted in their back pocket”.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/16/fronted-launched/