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Rapid7, the Boston-based security operations company, has been making moves into the cloud recently and this morning it announced that it has acquired Kubernetes security startup Alcide for $50 million.
As the world shifts to cloud native using Kubernetes to manage containerized workloads, it’s tricky ensuring that the containers are configured correctly to keep them safe. What’s more, Kubernetes is designed to automate the management of containers, taking humans out of the loop and making it even more imperative that the security protocols are applied in an automated fashion as well.
Brian Johnson, SVP of Cloud Security at Rapid7 says that this requires a specialized kind of security product and that’s why his company is buying Alcide. “Companies operating in the cloud need to be able to identify and respond to risk in real time, and looking at cloud infrastructure or containers independently simply doesn’t provide enough context to truly understand where you are vulnerable,” he explained.
“With the addition of Alcide, we can help organizations obtain comprehensive, unified visibility across their entire cloud infrastructure and cloud native applications so that they can continue to rapidly innovate while still remaining secure,” he added.
Today’s purchase builds on the company’s acquisition of DivvyCloud last April for $145 million. That’s almost $200 million for the two companies that allow the company to help protect cloud workloads in a fairy broad way.
It’s also part of an industry trend with a number of Kubernetes security startups coming off the board in the last year as bigger companies look to enhance their container security chops by buying the talent and technology. This includes VMWare nabbing Octarine last May, Cisco getting PortShift in October and RedHat buying StackRox last month.
Alcide was founded in 2016 in Tel Aviv, part of the active Israeli security startup scene. It raised about $12 million along the way, according to Crunchbase data.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/rapid7-acquires-kubernetes-security-startup-alcide-for-50m/
DesignCrowd announced today it has raised $10 million AUD (about $7.6 billion USD) in pre-IPO funding. The capital will be used on hiring and product development, with the goal of accelerating the growth of BrandCrowd, its DIY platform.
The new funding comes as DesignCrowd gets ready for a potential initial public offering on the Australian Securities Exchange. The round’s investors include Perennial Value Management, Alium Capital, Ellerston Capital, Regal Funds Managemetn and CVC, along with returning backers Starfish Ventures and AirTree Ventures. DesignCrowd has now raised more than $22 million AUD in total.
Founded in 2007 and based in Sydney, Australia, DesignCrowd built its reputation as a design crowdsourcing platform, allowing users to get proposals from designers around the world. BrandCrowd was launched to complement DesignCrowd’s crowdsourcing/marketplace model, expanding its potential user base and differentiating it from other sites people use to find designers, like 99designs and Fiverr.
While there are other DIY logo makers aimed at entrepreneurs and small brands, including tools from Design Hill, Canva and Tailor Brands, BrandCrowd had an advantage from the start because it already has access to more than 800,000 designers through DesignCrowd, allowing the company to find the best logo designers from around the world for its library, said co-founder and chief executive officer Alec Lynch. BrandCrowd prefers to buy designs upfront before publishing them, since all logos are exclusive to the platform (users can pay an extra fee to remove logos from its library).
BrandCrowd customers pay a one-off fee to download a logo and can sign up for monthly or annual subscriptions. Many use both platforms, Lynch said.
“For example, if a small business wants to start by getting a custom logo design from a designer on DesignCrowd, we then allow them to use that logo in our DIY design tools on BrandCrowd to make everything else they might need, from business card designs to Instagram posts and email signature,” said Lynch. “They can even make modifications to their logo on BrandCrowd using our logo editor tool.”
DesignCrowd’s net revenues in 2020 grew 54% year-over-year, due primarily to BrandCrowd. The company says BrandCrowd saw over five million sign-ups over the past 12 months, with more than half of its revenue from the United States.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company experienced some headwinds in March and April 2020, Lynch said, but then global demand for online design rebounded and began increasing.
“Our hypothesis is that the pandemic led to more people starting new businesses in the second half of 2020 and more people needing design for those businesses, which was helpful for us,” he added. “In addition to this small ‘boom’ in small businesses starting, we think the pandemic has probably accelerated an existing trend of businesses sourcing design online rather than offline.”
In 2018, Carbon, a Nigerian fintech startup, made its financials public for the first time. Although typical for foreign private startups, it’s almost an anomaly in Africa. There have been rare cases in the past, for instance, when Rocket Internet had to include Jumia’s financials in its yearly reports after going public. At the time, the German investment outfit was a founding shareholder in the African-based unicorn.
While Carbon has been hailed for transparency and openness, it remains to be seen if it’s a trend other African startups are willing to follow. Posting audited financials can prove detrimental for a private African company for several reasons ranging from bad marketing and PR if huge losses are incurred to regulatory clampdown if the company performs well.
A $15.8 million VC-backed company, Carbon was founded by Chijioke Dozie and Ngozi Dozie in 2012. The brothers started the company in a niche digital lending market, but now, the company offers a plethora of services from savings to payments and investments.
When Chijioke Dozie, the CEO, spoke to TechCrunch in 2019, he cited recruitment purposes and clientele trust as reasons why the company made its financials public — an exercise it has done every second quarter for two years. It’s a tradition Dozie hopes the company will keep this year.
“Our annual report will be released in the second quarter after our financial audit has been concluded. If you recall, we released a year in review in January 2020 before we released the fiscal year of 2019 report,” he told TechCrunch.
The company’s annual reports reveal numbers on gross earnings, profit/loss before and after-tax, net impairment loss, total assets, liabilities, and equity, among others. The company’s year on review, on the other hand, highlights payments processed, customer base, loans disbursed, and investments made on the platform.
As we wait for its annual report for 2020, its year in review offers a sneak peek into how Carbon grew the past year.
For the fiscal year 2020, the company which has about 659,000 customers said it processed ₦96.54 billion (~$241.35 million), up 89% compared to the same period a year ago. For its lending arm, disbursement volume was ₦25.21 billion (~$63 million), up 9.1% from FY2019. Also, ₦13.02 billion (~$32.55 million) worth of investments was made on the platform, representing a 365% increase from the previous year.
According to the company, factors that influenced these numbers last year included launching an iOS app that drove customer acquisition, introducing its USSD banking feature for lower-income customers; and a social chat feature to enable faster transactions.
Image Credits: Carbon
Also, in its quest to become a digital bank, Carbon acquired a microfinance bank license. According to Dozie, the license means that Carbon’s customers are afforded additional protection through depositors’ insurance via the NDIC. The Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation, a federal insurance agency, protects depositors and guarantees the settlement of insured funds when a financial institution can no longer repay their deposits. With that in place, Dozie says the typical Carbon wallet is now a full-fledged bank account, and customers can perform transactions on the platform as they would with any bank.
Like Carbon, other startups on the continent have followed suit by releasing year-on-year metrics. In recent memory, most of these startups play in the fintech and crypto-exchange space. But Carbon remains unique amongst these crop of companies as it releases both transaction stats and real insights into its financial performance.
Whereas transaction stats tend to highlight a seemingly explosive year-on-year growth of a company, a comprehensive view of financials will likely show a mixed performance. For instance, Carbon generated $17.5 million in revenue for FY2019, up 68% from 2018. For that same period, it recorded a 23% decrease in its profit after tax numbers, a 222% rise in total liabilities and 107% increase in assets finishing the year off with a 6% increase in total equity.
It’ll be interesting to see what these numbers look like for 2020. But that’s not the only event to keep an eye on. In addition to its $10 million Series A from SA-based Net1 UEPS Technologies and a $5million debt financing in 2019 from Lendable, Dozie says the digital bank which also has a presence in Kenya is ramping efforts to raise a Series B round soon to consolidate its position on the continent.
New space startup bluShift wants to bring a new kind of propellant to the small satellite launching market, with rockets powered by bio-derived rocket fuels. These differ from traditional fuels in that they offer safety advantages during handling, and ecological advantages during production and use. The startup has been working on its solid rocket biofuel since its founding in 2014, and has received grants from the Maine Technology Institute and NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to refine its fuel formula and rocket engine design to help it get to this point.
The company achieved a milestone on Sunday with its first rocket launch – a low altitude flight of a small sounding rocket, called Stardust 1.0. It’s a single-stage prototype, which can only carry 18 lbs of payload, and it’s designed to achieve suborbital space. That may not seem like much, but it is enough to put small research equipment up into suborbital space, at costs that put launches within range for small companies and academic institutions.
Image Credits: Knack Factory/Courtesy Aerospace
Stardust 1.0 is designed to be reusable, though it’s still a prototype, and the company is also working on Startdust 2.0 which is a second prototype that’s expected to increase the payload capacity and act as the primary building block for its subsequent production commercial rockets, including Starless Rogue, a two-stage launcher for suborbital missions, and Red Dware, a three-stage, 66-lb capacity launch vehicle that can reach low-Earth orbit.
Sunday’s launch looked like it might not have been on track to go well at first, with an initial attempt seeing the rocket’s ignition light – but without a takeoff. After resetting for a second try, there wasn’t any ignition. Finally the company did take off late in the day, with a flight that it said “went perfectly” on a follow-up call with media.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/blushift-aerospace-launches-its-first-rocket-powered-by-biofuels/
