Large-scale and mid-sized enterprises and businesses are increasingly adopting — and offering — software-as-a-service platforms as they seek to increase their revenue and parlay their growth into greater efficiency. Now a young startup, Emitrr, is aiming to bring the benefits of this model to small and local businesses in the U.S. Emitrr claims to help small businesses by automating tasks such as appointment reminders and review generations. On Tuesday, the startup, led by two Indian co-founders, announced that it raised $4 million in a Pre-Series A round to widen its automation solution in the U.S. market.

Bengaluru-headquartered Chiratae Ventures led Emitrr’s funding round, which also drew participation from Venture Highway, FortyTwo VC and Axilor Ventures.

“We essentially are a business text messaging software and an automation software for local businesses in the U.S.,” said Anmol Oberoi, founder of Emitrr, in an interview with TechCrunch.

Emitrr, founded by Oberoi and his partner Pulkit Gambhir in December 2020, claims that that over 150 local businesses in the U.S. use its platform. These businesses range from single-location healthcare practices to multi-location home service companies. The startup also has some small business clients in Australia and Canada.

The Delaware-based startup is catering to the global markets and has no customers in India, but it employs a team of 25 people — most of whom work remotely from tier-two and tier-three cities — in the South Asian market.

Emitrr works with over a thousand of vertical CRM platforms that local companies often use to solve customer management operations. Oberoi said that Emitrr has so far built seven to eight different automation models that work over the short messaging service (SMS).

Local healthcare centers, dentists and home service providers can use these automation models to send their customers appointment reminders and follow-ups on services for feedback and reviews. Oberoi told TechCrunch that while Emitrr is targeting healthcare and home services heavily, it has started getting customers from real estate, salons, restaurants and other different verticals.

It’s remarkable that Emitrr is using traditional text messages over WhatsApp for its tasks. Oberoi said that people in many markets including the U.S., Australia and Canada still prefer to use SMSs over any third-party offerings, but added that it’s within reach for the startup to quickly adopt WhatsApp or any other instant messaging service onto the platform.

Emitrr brings automation to business communication

“Our platform can be used by any local business in the world,” he said. “We automate the tasks performed by receptionists that sit in the dental office and the front desk executive that sits in the restaurant.”

Since Emitrr sends and receives messages to customers directly from businesses, it often processes sensitive information. Oberoi said that there is system-wide encryption to ensure the security and safety of data the platform processes.

“Both our inbound and outbound text messages are completely …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/02/emitrr-pre-series-a-funding-chiratae-ventures-4-million-saas-automation-business-text-messages/

As of 2020, the clothing sector lost about $27 billion in annual sales due to counterfeits, an illicit trade that results in huge losses to both brands and buyers. Clothes, accessories and luxury goods are the most popular product items for counterfeiting, according to the 2022 intellectual property crime threat assessment report. But that’s not where the problem starts and ends: the explosion of digital content has also led to a wide number of digital counterfeiters as well.

MarqVision has built an AI-powered intellectual property (IP) protection platform that monitors both e-commerce marketplaces and digital content, automatically detecting counterfeits and removing them from online sales and distribution. And now, the startup has raised $20 million in Series A funding to continue expanding its platform.

The company, based in Los Angeles and originally incubated at Y Combinator, says its customers — which include fashion labels like Ralph Lauren and Kangol, LVMH, crystal icon Baccarat, as well as media behemoth Pokemon — use MarqVision to scan places where their brands are most likely to be misappropriated.

These include the top 1,500 online marketplaces globally, as well as popular social media platforms that are becoming increasingly used for commerce, NFT platforms, gaming sites and other places where counterfeit products might appear. It says that its tech is already leading to more than 20,000 enforcements weekly. Its founding team has roots in Asia — specifically Seoul — and it claims to have the most extensive IP enforcement platform in the region, an important point given that some 90% of counterfeit sales globally are traced back to Asia.

DST Global Partners and Atinum Investment led the latest funding along with its existing backers SoftBank Ventures, Bass Investment and Y Combinator. The Series A funding brings its total raised to $25 million, including a seed round of $5 million in 2021. The company is not disclosing its valuation.

The challenge that MarqVision is tackling is the speed and scale of counterfeit sales.

Millions of counterfeits are traded in real-time, and the opportunity, so to speak, is wide: it impacts both small and large brands and selling platforms. Companies like Amazon have developed extensive IP protection strategies over the years to proactively track and take down fake goods, but the argument here is that even this is not enough (and that’s saying nothing of the thousands of platforms smaller than Amazon that lack the resources to manage this on their own).

In other words, as with any digital challenge, the problem with fake goods — be it products or content — is one of outsized scale, one that is hard, if not impossible, for humans alone to tackle.

Lee and CBO of MarqVision DK Lee, with other friends from Harvard and MIT, founded MarqVision in 2020. Lee approached the problem initially from a legal perspective when he was still a Harvard law student. Interested in the field of IP, he realized that counterfeiting …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/02/marqvision-wants-to-combat-counterfeit-goods-with-its-ai-powered-ip-protection-platform/

The leading autonomous-truck developer blames human error, while analysts say it is the technology. Regulators are investigating. …read more

https://www.wsj.com/articles/self-driving-truck-accident-draws-attention-to-safety-at-tusimple-11659346202?mod=rss_Technology

Microsoft today added two new features to its Microsoft Defender security platformMicrosoft Defender Threat Intelligence and Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management. These features are based on the company’s acquisition of RiskIQ and with this launch, Microsoft is now bringing some of RiskIQ’s core features to its own security platform (all while RiskIQ continues to operate its own services, too).

“Our mission is to build a safer world for all — and threat intelligence is [at] the heart of it,” Microsoft’s Vasu Jakkal told me. “If you don’t know what’s happening in the world around you, it’s very hard to understand what to do about it and how to act on it. Microsoft has the largest breadth and depth of threat signals today — we are tracking, as we just announced in our earnings, 43 trillion signals [each day] which we see from identities, from devices, from platforms, from email, collab tools.”

With Defender Threat Intelligence, Microsoft is using RiskIQ’s technology to scan the internet and provide additional data to the existing Defender real-time service to help security teams proactively secure their infrastructure. Microsoft, of course, already had a large signal map to power its Defender platform, but Jakkal noted that RiskIQ’s data not only helps enrich this existing data set but also enables an additional layer on top of Defender that gives security teams a view of the entire attack chain.

“They can see the entire attack chain, they can act on it and then — combined with their own human intelligence —– they can see where the attack is going and how to proactively prevent it,” Jakkal explained.

The service also provides users with a library of raw threat intelligence and analysis from Microsoft’s security experts, which in turn should help security teams find, remove and block adversary tools that may be hidden within their organization.

Meanwhile, the new external attack surface management service helps these security teams understand how a potential attacker sees their network. Like similar services, it provides security teams with a way to discover all of their resources and find those that are unknown and/or unmanaged. Most businesses that start using a service like this end up being surprised by how many internet-facing unmanaged assets they find.

“All organizations are asking the question: how secure am I? It’s such a simple question but it’s so hard to answer that question. Because the first point is, well, first we need to understand what’s happening in the world of threats. And we need to understand what that looks like. The second thing we need to understand is where our resources are,” Jakkal noted. With these new tools, Microsoft is giving security teams more data to work with to protect their networks and other assets.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/02/microsoft-puts-its-riskiq-acquisition-to-work/