Meta plans to cut its workforce by another 10,000 people and withdraw around 5,000 open roles that it had yet to fill, company co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday, confirming recent rumors that another round of layoffs was imminent.

Zuckerberg also said that the company will cancel “lower priority projects,” adding that he “underestimated the indirect costs” associated with these initiatives.

The announcement comes just four months after Meta revealed that it was eliminating about 11,000 roles as the social networking giant pushes ahead with what it’s calling a “year of efficiency.” Combined, this means that Meta has effectively laid off — or plans to lay-off — roughly one-quarter of its workforce since the tail-end of last year.

Facebook’s parent firm said it expects the latest restructuring efforts to start in its tech groups in April, followed by its business groups in May.

“In a small number of cases, it may take through the end of the year to complete these changes,” Zuckerberg wrote in a memo to staff that was subsequently published to the public. “Our timelines for international teams will also look different, and local leaders will follow up with more details. This will be tough and there’s no way around that.”

In a separate SEC filing, Meta said that it expects its full-year 2023 expenses to be in the $86 billion to $92 billion range, a figure that it lowered from a previous estimate that ran up to around $95 billion. Much of this is down to “cost-reduction measures” associated with the restructuring, including severance payouts.

Zuckerberg added that after the latest restructuring efforts are complete, the company will lift its hiring freeze across its various groups.

Flattening

While Zuckerberg didn’t go much into the specifics around what types of roles or “lower priority projects” will be eliminated, Meta did reveal yesterday that it was winding down support for NFTs on Instagram and Facebook to focus on other monetization initiatives. In his memo today, Zuckerberg also talked about “flattening” the various organizations and divisions that constitute Meta Platforms Inc. corporation, which will mean removing some of the management layers.

“It’s well-understood that every layer of a hierarchy adds latency and risk aversion in information flow and decision-making,” he wrote. “Every manager typically reviews work and polishes off some rough edges before sending it further up the chain. In our Year of Efficiency, we will make our organization flatter by removing multiple layers of management. As part of this, we will ask many managers to become individual contributors. We’ll also have individual contributors report into almost every level — not just the bottom — so information flow between people doing the work and management will be faster.”

Similar to the messaging around its previously-announced round of layoffs in November, Zuckerberg was quick to stress that it was building for the long-term, with a continued focus on AI and the metaverse. Indeed, while its pivot to the metaverse back in 2021 has largely been viewed as a massive mis-step by many, one that is nowhere near ready go generate the kinds of rewards its shareholders might like, there is little to indicate that Zuckerberg’s unwavering metaverse conviction will change any time soon.

“Our single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of our products,” Zuckerbeg wrote. “We have the infrastructure to do this at unprecedented scale and I think the experiences it enables will be amazing. Our leading work building the metaverse and shaping the next generation of computing platforms also remains central to defining the future of social connection.”

Meta to cut another 10,000 jobs and cancel ‘low priority projects’ by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/14/meta-to-cut-another-10000-jobs-zuckerberg-says/

In a keynote address at the annual Google for Game Developers Summit, Google said its Google Play Games for PC service, which brings Android games to Windows users, will roll out to Japan and other European markets, and gain new titles and tools for game developers. Of note, the service over the next couple of months will add several popular games, including Garena Free Fire, Ludo King (a popular board game in India), and MapleStory M. Meanwhile, Google Play is introducing early access to Machine Translation in the Play Console that will allow game developers to translate their game in more than eight languages within minutes for free, the company said.

Launched into beta testing in January 2022, Google Play Games is designed to expand the reach of Android gaming by allowing consumers to play the mobile titles on their Windows computers, in addition to supported platforms like Android mobile and tablet and ChromeOS. With the service, gamers can pick up where they left off on one device when switching to another — something many Apple-focused game titles already offer when users switch between iPhone, iPad and Mac devices, for instance.

Initially available in overseas markets like Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan, the service expanded into the U.S. and other countries in November and is now live in 13 markets, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Now, Google says the service will come to Japan and several European countries over the new couple of months.

It’s also introducing a range of features aimed at game developers, including an emulator offering a developer-focused build of
Google Play Games that’s designed for the debug and build process. This tool allows developers to deploy games directly, including by sideloading APKs via ADB command, and lets them use Android Studio to adjust graphics and hardware settings to validate different player configurations. (Developers will have to sign up here by first expressing interest in the service.)

Explains Google, its partnership with Intel enables it to make it easier for developers to join Google Play Games on PC with their existing mobile builds. If the mobile game already plays well on the desktop, they can now apply to join the service.

The company is also publishing a new release checklist to help game developers verify that they’ve completed all the necessary steps
before submitting their build for approval, and it added more metrics for games in Android vitals. The latter includes recently launched frame rate metrics in Play Console — or through the Developer Reporting API — that allow developers to check if their games offer at least 30 frames per second — the technical quality required for the Google Play Games for PC service. Other technical upgrades aimed at performance and user acquisition were also rolled out, in addition to the new Machine Translation feature that will use Google Translate and transformer-based language models to translate games in over eight languages, including Simplified Chinese and Japanese.

Google additionally teased the coming release of Next Generation Player IDs which will keep a user’s Player ID consistent across platforms for any given games, while still allowing them to be unique across different games. This feature, powered by Play Games Services, will arrive later this year.

Still considered a beta, Google Play Games on PC requires users to run Windows 10 on a PC with 10 GB of available storage on a solid state drive (SSD), with an Intel UHD Graphics 630 GPU or comparable, 4 CPU physical cores, and 8 GB of RAM. The company has not yet shared an official release date for a public launch.

Google Play Games for PC to roll out to Europe and Japan, add new titles including Garena Free Fire by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/14/google-play-games-for-pc-to-roll-out-to-europe-and-japan-add-new-titles-including-garena-free-fire/

“Today, the way people transact has evolved,” newly appointed chief business officer (CBO) of Tilia Catherine Porter told me in an interview. “The rise of user-generated content (UGC) across gaming worlds, social platforms and beyond means that we need a way for users to pay other users, users to pay creators, and creators to pay their collaborators — even if you don’t know the real identity of the person you’re paying.”

This contrasts with traditional online payment infrastructure designed for one-way transactions between users and merchants.

Tilia wants to make it easy for companies that need financial services in a digital economy world (including the metaverse) to pay and transact with anyone in a regulated way.

The company, which has built a payment platform intended for gaming platforms, virtual world publishers, mobile application developers and NFT providers, said Tuesday it has secured another strategic investment from its returning backer, J.P Morgan Payments, and new investor Dunamu, a Seoul-based operator of crypto exchange Upbit. 

With the latest round, Tilia has raised a total of $22 million since its spin-off from Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, in 2022 (it didn’t share how much was raised this time vs. in its first tranch from 2022). The goal of the startup is to help platform operators capture more of the value of all the transactions made related to their product.

“These kinds of transactions are happening in a grey market, where users move off your platform to send payments to strangers via Venmo or Cash App, and they have no protection,” Porter said. “The only way [most companies] can pay their users and creators is if they turn them into 1099 contractors and that isn’t scalable.” 

In 2019, Linden Lab officially launched Tilia, which “allowed users to buy Linden Dollars to use them to pay other people within Second Life and cash them out,” Porter said, adding that using money seamlessly “between physical and digital life was game-changing.”

After the payment platform took off, regulators interfered and “required a business to secure money transmitter licenses (MTLs) for every state and territory,” Porter said. Instead of shutting down, Tilia worked hard to get the necessary MTLs, which took seven years and $35 million.

The company plans to use its new capital to increase the size of the team, which currently has more than 70 people, to meet the needs of its growing business and to continue to scale its platform. 

“We are working with J.P Morgan Payments to enhance its current capabilities throughout its processing platform, including providing increased payment and payout methods, expanding payout currencies and support services,” Porter said. 

In addition, the outfit will use the funding to build new partnerships across all the verticals it serves, Porter told TechCrunch.  

Porter said that Tilia’s payment products can be used individually or as a fully integrated end-to-end solution. Tilia declined to share how many users are active on the payment platform today, but says it is “powering millions of transactions, including Second Life’s $650 million economy.” 

Aside from the financing, the startup has appointed a new chief executive officer (CEO), Brad Oberwager, an industry veteran who has served as executive chair at Tilia and led tech and consumer-focused companies including More.com, Blue Tiger Network and Bare Snacks. Tilia also has appointed its first CBO, Porter, who previously led global partnerships and fintech innovation at Meta, and who worked for other tech companies like OpenTable, LinkedIn, Google and Oracle. Finally, Tilia also has appointed Aston Waldman as chief financial officer (CFO). 

“Today’s payments infrastructure was built for traditional commerce — it hasn’t caught up with the new way of living and working in a digital, creator-driven economy,” said Oberwager in a statement. “At Tilia, we have a massive opportunity to unlock new revenue streams for both online creators and the platforms they build in, whether they are gaming worlds, social platforms, or next-generation marketplaces.”

Metaverse payment platform Tilia gets new strategic investment from J.P. Morgan by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/14/metaverse-payment-platform-tilia-gets-new-strategic-investment-from-j-p-morgan/

YouTube TV is today announcing a new feature that may help the live TV service attract more subscribers — and particularly those who like to watch live sports. The company says it’s launching early access to “multiview,” an option that allows viewers to watch up to four different preselected streams at the same time. Initially, only select users in the U.S. will gain access to multiview on TV devices, YouTube notes.

The company was rumored to be working on multiview last August when it was then being referred to as “Mosaic Mode.” Though not practical for watching typical TV programs, the feature would be useful to sports fans who want to watch multiple games and keep up with scores without having to constantly change channels. To date, some traditional TVs have offered a picture-in-picture mode to address this problem but YouTube TV’s digital platform now allows for even more concurrent streams.

At launch, YouTube TV says multiview is only being offered on sports content, so watching your usual programs or the news alongside the games isn’t an option. However, the company says it’s “exploring” different ways for members to use its features across the variety of content it offers.

To use the feature, subscribers will select the new multiview option, if available, from their “Top Picks for You” section in the YouTube TV app on their television. (Subscribers will also receive an email and see an alert if they’ve been opted in.)

After enabling the feature, they’ll be able to switch audio and captions between streams, as well as jump in and out of a fullscreen view of a game, YouTube says.

To bring the feature to life, the company had to get creative with its use of technology. Typically, a multiview experience would rely on a high-end user device to process and play back multiple streams at once, then show them as one cohesive view, the company explained in a blog post. But YouTube TV doesn’t require high-end equipment to run, which meant it had to find a way to do more of the processing on the server side instead.

What’s interesting is that the company was able to repurpose technology the YouTube Live team had already built to enable multiple creators to go live together. This allowed it to bring the feature to market faster. Plus, YouTube says that multiview could present new opportunities for creators in the future — like being able to add their own commentary to videos, for example.

The company says this slower rollout of multiview will allow the company to collect feedback from subscribers before it becomes more broadly available, hopefully by NFL football season later this fall. Over time, YouTube will also add more functionality to multiview, including the option to customize your own multiview streams. It plans to expand multiview to the main YouTube app, as well.

Multiview is the latest in a line of new features and technologies YouTube TV has rolled out in an effort to appeal to sports fans, including key plays, fantasy view (for viewing your fantasy sports teams) and 4K streaming.

Most recently, it announced a landmark streaming deal with NFL Sunday Ticket, which has previously only been available through DirecTV in the U.S. The multiyear deal is worth $2 billion per season, reports said. That will likely help YouTube TV attract more sports fans than a four-up stream would do. But combined, the sports-friendly options could make for a compelling offering compared with rivals, like Hulu Live TV.

YouTube TV launches early access to a ‘multiview’ feature for watching four streams at once by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/14/youtube-tv-launches-early-access-to-a-multiview-feature-for-watching-four-streams-at-once/

Google and Microsoft are locked in a head-to-head competition to bring as much generative AI to their productivity services as possible. Only days ahead of Microsoft’s “Future of Work” event, Google today announced a sweeping update to Workspace that will bring its generative AI models to virtually every part of its productivity suite, in addition to new developer solutions that will make Google’s foundation models, including its 540 billion-parameter PaLM large language model for multiturn chats, available to developers through an API and new low-code tools.

The caveats worth mentioning up front: For the time being, these new features will only be available for what Google calls “Trusted Testers.” It’s unclear when they will roll out to a wider audience. There’s also no pricing information available yet, though it sounds like at least a subset of these features will be available to consumers — including those on Google One plans. Basically, this is akin to Google’s LaMDA announcements a few weeks ago: they sound great, but it’ll be a while before you can try any of this in practice.

Google’s plan is to bring its generative AI models to virtually every part of Workspace, be that writing emails for you in Gmail, helping you write (or rewrite) documents in Docs, formula generation in Sheets, capturing notes in Meet, or creating text, images, audio and video in Slides. If I had to take a guess, chances are Microsoft will announce very similar updates later this week.

“Google Workspace has been a longtime pioneer in enabling real-time collaboration, where human beings work together in real time in our products,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said during a press briefing ahead of today’s announcements. “This next phase is where we’re bringing human beings to be supported with an AI collaborator who is working in real time in concert with them.”

Kurian said the company plans to rapidly roll out new features “every couple of weeks.” Throughout the year, trusted testers will get access to the first phase now, which will include getting help in writing emails in Gmail and documents in Docs. The core features here, for now, are getting help with writing and adjusting the tone and style of text. But as Google stressed, that’s just the start (at least for the Trusted Tester group).

The promise here is that Google will eventually infuse AI into virtually every workflow in Workspace. This may mean summarizing an email conversation or brainstorming a Docs document. Of course, because so much of this is chat-based, Google Chat will also get support for some of these features, but so far, Google has only said that it will “enable workflows for getting things done in Chat.”

Image Credits: Google

Maybe the most impressive demo Google showed, though, was combining a lot of this text-based work with generative AI models for image and music generation — and using that to create a full-fledged presentation around it. “With Slides, we’re helping you generate insights and images from text in slides,” Kurian explained. “So you can use images from your rich content library, your brand images — if you’ve got your own company’s images — and private repositories, to generate these images and superpower every person building with slides, including generating soundtracks.”

Image Credits: Google

When asked about pricing, Kurian noted that the company plans to make “these solutions available broadly to our enterprises, to small businesses, to consumers — and even to people who subscribe to Google One.” And that’s pretty much all we know for now, though the mention of Google One is an interesting one, given that Google has been pushing its subscription service — which offers additional cloud storage space as its main benefit — to slowly include more features over time, including its VPN service.

It’s been no secret that Google was going all out with bringing generative AI to the widest possible range of its product. It’s just a bit of a shame that many of today’s announcements feel like vaporware, with only a select number of users getting access to it for now. And while features like Smart Compose and Smart Reply are obviously widely available (and quite useful) Google seemingly remains hesitant to put its latest AI technology into the hands of everyday users.

The strategy here, though, feels right. Google Workspace provides the largest canvas for the company to bring its various AI technologies to users and Gmail and Docs are the lowest-hanging fruit here, so it makes sense for Google to start there. It’s also where large text models shine, all while Google gets to sidestep the issues that Bing and ChatGPT face with their chatbots going off script (though Microsoft seems to have gotten this under control for now) and without any risk to its search business.

Google goes all-in on bringing AI to Workspace by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/14/google-goes-all-in-on-bringing-ai-to-workspace/

Meetings and events management software provider Cvent is to be taken private yet again, as part of a $4.6 billion transaction involving two of the biggest players in the private equity sphere.

Today’s announcement continues a recent trend that has seen myriad companies retreating from the public markets, driven by opportunistic private equity firms looking to make a fast buck from nervous stockholders.

Dotcom survivor

Founded way back in 1999, Cvent could be described as something of a Dotcom era survivor, raising bucketloads of venture capital cash ahead of a bumper IPO in 2013 that valued the company at around $1.5 billion on its opening day. Three years later, Vista Equity Partners swooped in with a $1.65 billion bid to take the company private, before returning to the public markets via a special purchase acquisition company (SPAC) a little more than a year ago.

In the intervening months, Cvent’s market cap has generally been on the descendancy, falling from its opening peak of around $4.7 billion to an average of around $2.5 billion for much of 2022.

Now, Vista Equity Partners has said that it will be selling all its remaining shares in Nasdaq-listed Cvent to Blackstone, though a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) will also be a “significant minority investor.” Cvent said that it expects the deal to close in mid-2023, after which it will be a privately-listed company once more.

In the first half of 2022, private equity firms spent nearly $300 billion on such deals, some 39% higher than the corresponding period from the previous year, with signs these past few months suggesting a similar trajectory will continue. Just yesterday, experience management software company Qualtrics accepted a $12.5 billion all-cash offer from private equity firm Silver Lake and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), while news emerged in December that spend management software firm Coupa was set to go private in a $8 billion deal spearheaded by Thoma Bravo.

Indeed, Thoma Bravo closed a new $32 billion buyout fund in December, which was followed last week by Permira’s new $17.7 billion fund. Vista Equity Partners, meanwhile, is reportedly halfway toward raising a new $20 billion fund.

Terms of the Cvent deal will see its shareholders receive around $8.50 per share, representing a premium of around 52% on the volume-weighted average price (VWAP) in the three-month period leading to the end of January, when reports first surfaced that Cvent was the subject of a fresh acquisition bid.

Cvent to go private again in $4.6B Blackstone deal by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/14/cvent-to-go-private-again-in-4-6b-blackstone-deal/

Pet ownership has steadily increased through the years, with many people bringing pets into their families during the past three years. That, in turn, boosted the pet industry itself, with the market’s value increasing from $90 billion in 2018 to over $120 billion in 2021.

Of that, $50 billion was spent in the U.S. on food and treats. This opened up a space for startups to offer similar subscription box conveniences that people had for food and other products, with companies like Chewy and Barkbox being some of the biggest.

Many are direct-to-consumer, including pet care startup Bundle x Joy, but founder and CEO Jessica Berger told TechCrunch that she quickly realized that “a true DTC play was not how the consumer necessarily wants to engage.”

“They’re excited to get back into stores,” Berger said. “They’re excited to touch and feel and discover new products. Our brand is very disruptive on the shelf, and so we believe that retail is important in our discovery. DTC is going to be a much smaller portion than we expected while we use retail as more of the beginning of a funnel.”

Berger started Bundle x Joy in 2022 after spending the past 15 years in the pet industry, most notably at PetSmart and Nestlé, where she ran Castor & Pollux’s organic dog and cat food line.

The company provides premium superfood nutrition and curated product bundles of supplements and treats for dogs at a subscription rate of $2 per day. It also has a 3% give-back to help fund women in entrepreneurship and local communities.

A year later, Bundle x Joy is in more than 450 retail locations of Sprouts, Whole Foods and some specialty stores, and will double that footprint this summer, including in another major national retailer yet to be announced. It is also available direct-to-consumer through its website and Amazon.com.

The company also has $1 million in new seed funding, which closed this week. Leap Venture Studio led the round and was joined by a group that included Mars Petcare Companion Fund, R/GA Ventures, Michelson Found Animals Foundation and Cloyes Ventures.

“I’m a first-generation Latina, and we’re really trying to bring more diversity into this space,” Berger said. “A lot of founders struggle with getting into retailers, but we tell them that we bring a lot of innovation and a new customer into your pet set. We’ll also provide a lot of value outside of the store.”

For example, the company took to TikTok with a set of interviews from Sprouts customers. “We align with them and use our customer base and our digital to drive, and it has been very successful,” Berger added.

From a nutrition perspective, Bundle x Joy curates its boxes from 15 products and a proprietary “Pup Quiz” for customers to assess what products to offer and the personality of their dog. In fact, the company assigns fun personalities to each pet, including “Golden,” “Vibrant” and “Brave.”

In addition, the quiz enables the company to output the right bundle for the pet, including formulation, size and frequency of food and supplements, based on the specific needs of the pet.

“If your pet is ‘Golden,’ throughout your experience on the website, it’ll say #goldenaf, so it’s just a more fun way of focusing less on the chore of pet food and more on the joy that comes with engaging with our pets. I really thought that was missing,” Berger told TechCrunch.

Meanwhile, Berger started raising the seed round in October 2021 and just closed it this week — yes, a long time, she noted. Berger explained that Bundle x Joy was a finalist to get into a venture studio, so she knew if she had an open round during that time, investors would come in on Berger’s terms.

Well, she didn’t get into that particular cohort, but it did provide an opportunity for some flexibility to go out and raise funds as needed versus the entire $1 million all at once. Berger recalls talking to hundreds of investors over that year-and-a-half, and while many liked what she was doing, many told her to call them when she was selling $1 million a month.

Instead, Berger went the friends-and-family route with her father as her first investor.

“I think he knew that if he invested first, it would make me really fight to make it work,” she said. “I could see that investors weren’t necessarily willing to bet on me that early, but fast-forward five months, and they are coming to me. We’ve also been very lucky: I have no debt, which is something that was really important to me.”

In addition to expanding into new stores, Bundle x Joy intends on using the proceeds from the raise to expand its team: Berger said the company brought on a full-time marketing director, which is a new focus for the company. It will also increase its inventory and product development.

Mars-backed Bundle x Joy bags $1M to double its pet care footprint in retailers by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/14/bundle-x-joy-pet-care-commerce/

Companies moved en masse to the cloud during the pandemic, under pressure to digitally transform. According to a 2021 survey from O’Reilly, cloud adoption steadily rose across industries, with 90% of organizations using cloud computing compared to 88% in 2020.

The accelerated cloud adoption led to a rise in security issues. In a recent poll of U.K. executives by PwC, cloud-related risks were top of the cybersecurity agenda, with 39% respondents expecting such security risks to “significantly affect” their organization in the coming months.

For some startups, that’s been good for business. SeeMitiga, a cloud security firm that offers a subscription-based service to help companies prepare for cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) attacks. Mitiga today announced that it raised $45 million in a Series A round led by ClearSky Security with participation from Samsung Next, Blackstone, Atlantic Bridge and DNX.

Co-founder and CEO Tal Mozes says that the fresh cash will be put toward product development and expanding Mitiga’s 56-person workforce. To date, the company has raised $77 million in venture capital, with the Series A valuing Mitiga at over $100 million.

“The pandemic accelerated cloud and SaaS adoption without growing organizations’ capabilities and talent at the same rates, in order to successfully handle a rising tide of cloud and SaaS incidents,” Mozes told TechCrunch in an email interview. “This inequity created a huge need to build a scaled solution — and that’s exactly what we did. The company is well-positioned today to run for years without additional funds if needed.”

Tel Aviv-based Mitiga was founded in 2019 by Mozes, Ofer Maor and Ariel Parnes, a retired colonel from Israel Defense Forces. Mozes and Maor previously spearheaded Hacktics, a penetration test company that was acquired by Ernst & Young over a decade ago, and Seeker Security, an app security automation product Synopsys bought in 2015.

Mozes says that the team was initially motivated by a desire to fill what they saw as a gap in the incident response industry: solutions designed for cloud and SaaS. The segment, he avers, is still dominated today by professional services companies applying old-school approaches to cloud cybersecurity.

Mitiga’s different in that it takes a “modern” approach to cloud incident response, Mozes asserts. The service analyzes cloud forensics data for investigation, storing forensics data from various clouds and software-as-a-service apps. Using a library of cloud attack scenarios, Mitiga hunts for attacks in the forensics data, managing and orchestrating the response in real time.

“We’ve built a module we call ‘forensics as code” that enables our researchers to automate the work of incident response and threat hunts,” Mozes said. “Partnering with Mitiga enables teams to do more, extending their capabilities without hiring expensive, hard-to-find new talent.”

It’s not strictly hype, necessarily. There’s real, documented benefits to adopting any kind of cloud security solution. In a survey by Palo Alto Networks, 80% of organizations with strong cloud security postures noted increased workforce productivity while 85% of those with low “friction” between security and development and DevOps teams reported the same.

Of course, even if Mitiga’s solution is as good as Mozes claims, there’s no shortage of rival vendors offering services to secure organizations’ cloud assets. The competition’s growing fiercer.

Cloud security startup Wiz raised $300 million at a $10 billion valuation just in February. Sentra, which finds data in the cloud and offers remediation plans for data security teams, nabbed $30 million in January. There’s also Dig Security, Laminar and Opus Security — cloud security orchestration and remediation platforms that have between them raised tens of millions of dollars in capital.

According to Insight Partners, the global market for cloud security could grow from $48.57 billion in 2022 to $116.25 billion in 2028.

For his part, Mozes — no surprise — expressed confidence in Mitiga’s current growth trajectory. Somewhat suspiciously, however, he wouldn’t disclose the size of the company’s customer base or any concrete revenue numbers. Mozes cited competitive reasons for the secrecy. But from where we’re standing, it certainly makes it harder to get a sense of the state of Mitiga’s business.

“When the success of so many of today’s enterprises hinges on what happens in their cloud and SaaS environments, the new levels of readiness and investigation speed we deliver equate to record response times for the security leaders and business value for the C-Suite,” Mozes said. “In the cloud and SaaS era, companies that can recover from breaches quickly possess a significant advantage.”

Cloud security vendor Mitiga lands $45M, valuing the company at over $100M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/14/mitiga-raises-45m-for-cloud-security/

Trust is fundamentally about a sense of safety, familiarity and assurance that “everything will be fine.” Faith is built as we address our doubts and the questions that make us wonder if we can rely on someone or something to be there when we need them.

The process of vendor selection in cybersecurity is not very different. What’s different are the questions people ask and the clues they are hoping to find.

What problem is this company trying to solve?

The No. 1 question people ask as they learn about a new tool is: “What problem is this company trying to solve?”

It is on this first step that many startups fail. Intentionally or not, cybersecurity marketing rarely makes it easy to understand what the product does, and equally importantly, what it doesn’t do.

In the rare cases when a company is clear and transparent about where it stands, we’ll see security practitioners getting impressed.

Action items

You should make it easy for people to understand where in the security stack the product fits, what it does and what it does not do. Make it easy to access your help center, technical and API documentation and other materials so that people can quickly build a mental model of your offering.

Does it actually solve it?

The fact that someone is trying to solve a problem does not mean they are actually solving it. There is a lot to be said about the importance of social proof, but the tough part is that security teams often do not want to disclose what solutions they are using and how they fit in their environment, as adversaries can use this information to accomplish their goals.

There are, however, other ways to provide real user feedback and prove that the company does what it says it does:

Action items

Collect customer testimonials and make them easily accessible. If you don’t have any paying customers, ask if your design partners would be comfortable going on the record as users of the product.

Make sure that your testimonials are real and truthful, and that the person who provided the quote is prepared to be randomly pinged by prospects with questions. A good security team will do its due diligence and talk to other customers, especially if the startup doesn’t have an established reputation yet.

Have an easily accessible online community where people can ask questions, talk, and send direct messages to one another. It is very common for security professionals to DM their peers to get some unfiltered feedback about the vendor.

Will this company be around a year from now?

It can get incredibly expensive to try and implement new security tools, and organizations are not looking to replace their security stack every year. At the same time, the vast majority of cybersecurity companies are startups, and startups come and go all the time.

Time to trust: Questions cybersecurity customers ask and how to answer them by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/14/time-to-trust-questions-cybersecurity-customers-ask-and-how-to-answer-them/

India’s Enforcement Directorate is investigating “several” crypto cases for money-laundering schemes and has seized $115.5 million to date in such crimes, the Ministry of Finance said, the latest in a series of crackdown by the authorities on the nascent space that is already reeling from the tremulous market conditions.

The Indian crime fighting agency has also arrested five individuals in crimes abetted by cryptocurrency and in the past sent a show cause notice to local exchange WazirX and its directors for crypto transactions exceeding $338 million, the ministry said.

The disclosure comes at a time when India is pushing ahead with rules to better scrutinize the activities of cryptocurrency firms, even as until now New Delhi has resisted formulating a blanket law to regulate the virtual digital assets.

Last week, the Ministry of Finance said (PDF) that crypto will be governed by anti-money laundering rules in the South Asian market. Under the new change, crypto exchanges, NFT providers and custody wallet operators will be responsible for monitoring suspicious financial activities.

Firms operating in the crypto space will be required to perform know your customer verifications. “Exchanges and wallet providers will be required to implement AML/CFT controls, and to be licensed or registered and supervised or monitored by national authorities,” the Ministry of Finance said this week.

India, in its ongoing G20 presidency, has also said that it will priortize the development of a framework for global regulation of unbacked crypto assets, stablecoins and decentralized finance.

Last year, New Delhi took a stringent approach with cryptocurrencies by levying a 30% tax on all gains and a 1% deduction on each crypto transaction. The nation’s move, alongside the market downturn, has severely depleted the transactions that local exchanges CoinSwitch Kuber, backed by Sequoia India and Andreessen Horowitz, and CoinDCX, backed by Pantera, process in the nation.

Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, founder and chief executive of the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance, told TechCrunch last year that the firm doesn’t see India as a “very crypto-friendly environment.” He said the firm is attempting to relay its concerns to the local authority about the local taxation, but asserted that tax policies typically take a long time to change.

India probing ‘several’ crypto cases for money laundering, seizes over $115 million by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/14/india-probing-several-crypto-cases-for-money-laundering-seizes-over-115-million/