Verbit, a Tel Aviv- and New York-based AI-powered transcription and captioning service platform, has acquired Take Note — the U.K.-based company that provides transcription, captioning and note-taking services for the market research sector. This acquisition marks Verbit’s entrance into the market research space and increases its presence in Europe.
The company did not disclose the terms of the deal. Verbit told TechCrunch at the time of its most recent $250 million Series E funding in November that it would double down on its acquisition strategy with the proceeds to consolidate the fragmented $30 billion transcription industry. Last year, it acquired captioning product and solution provider VITAC for $50 million and education and government transcription company Automatic Sync Technologies for an undisclosed amount.
Tom Livne, founder and chief executive officer of Verbit, said in an email interview with TechCrunch that Take Note’s current CEO David Abbott will remain in his position to lead the company and support continued growth and integration efforts. Also, Take Note’s 28 employees will join the team. With the acquisition of Take Note, Verbit will now serve more than 2,500 customers, Livne noted.
Since 2006, Take Note has offered efficient, accurate and general data protection regulation (GDPR) compliance service.
“Take Note’s niche, high-end audience appeal through its market research dialect and subject matter expertise made the company a natural fit to join the Verbit Group as we continue to grow our specialized teams and technologies,” Livne told TechCrunch. “The deal was also attractive to Verbit as it expands our corporate service portfolio with Take Note’s note-taking and meeting minutes services, furthering our goal of becoming a one-stop-shop for all voice AI needs.”
Verbit is familiar with the market research sector and already serves several customers in the space, Livne said, adding that it wanted to solidify its service by bringing in the expertise of a leading market research transcription company. Verbit says the acquisition will allow Verbit to enhance its performance and delivery of U.K. English language requests.
“We’re thrilled to join forces with Verbit and add our Market Research transcription and live note-taking solutions to its broad portfolio for captioning and transcription,” Abbot said in a statement. “We’ll also now have access to the Verbit company’s technologies and capabilities, which our customers will benefit from as well.”
Verbit says it will accelerate its growth with additional strategic acquisitions to expand into new verticals, geographies and functionalities.
The company will use Take Note’s office in the U.K. to support all customers in Europe. Verbit has more than 470 employees in New York, Colorado, Pittsburg, Palo Alto, Canada, Tel Aviv and Kyiv, with 35,000 freelancer transcribers and 600 professional captioners globally.
When asked about its staff safety in Ukraine, Livne said that out of 37 employees in Kyiv, 10 employees have evacuated, and one employee has joined the army. The rest chose to relocate to safer countries in Europe and Israel.
“Our team has been given full flexibility and time off, and we are in direct contact with each employee daily to understand their needs so we can best support them while they focus on the safety of themselves and their loved ones,” Livne told TechCrunch.
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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, February 28, 2022. Today we are bringing exclamation points back. Because it’s Monday, we need the boost, and a startup whose name includes a “!” just raised north of $400 million in a single round. 2022! It’s a whole thing. – Alex
What’s your BNPL startup really worth? News of a deal between Zap and Sezzle in the BNPL market had us crunching numbers to figure out what smaller buy now, pay later (BNPL) companies are worth. Why do we care? Because a huge number of startups are building companies around the consumer and business credit model. The news is not great.
Wee! Weee! has raised a huge round! SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 has led a $425 million Series E into Weee!, which provides a way for consumers to buy ingredients for different cuisines, so if you need to find pieces of different “Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian and Latin” dishes, well, it probably has them. The deal doubles the value of the startup to more than $4 billion, and indicates that SoftBank is still a risk-on operation.
Catching you up, OneCard is a consumer credit card startup in India that also provides credit scoring services.
Moving along, Y Combinator’s push to fund startups around the world is paying off. Data from the well-known startup accelerator indicates that one in six, or about 16% of the companies it has incubated that are now worth $150 million or more – some 267 now – are headquartered outside of the United States.
I’m not surprised at the ratio, and the rising tally of international companies that it implies. My question is how quickly the portion of high-value Y Combinator-backed startups moves towards being majority international.
Stämm Biotech raises $17M: Have you heard of bioreactors? They are new to me, but are apparently a key piece of kit in the biomanufacturing world. Stämm, which is based in Buenos Aires, just raised a large Series A for its bioreactor product. It looks something like a big, expensive gaming PC. Regardless, if there is enough market demand for a startup to raise to build more bioreactors, I presume that biology is going to be lit in the coming years.
The Conductor team are building a company around the project: It’s a tale as old as time. A company creates a tool, and later open-sources it. Then some folks build a hosted version of the product as a startup. In this case, the tool is Conductor, which Netflix built. The team that wrote the code at the streaming giant have now cleaved off to build Orkes, which offers, you guessed, a hosted version of Conductor.
Robin.io sells to Rakuten telco arm: A few things are going on here. First, Rakuten has a telco-focused business called Rakuten Symphony. It’s pretty recent. Also, the group has purchased Robin.io, which TechCrunch describes as a “startup that offers a Kubernetes platform optimized for storage solutions and complex network applications.”
TikTok raises video length limit: TikTok is owned by Bytedance, which is technically still a private company. So, I guess, TikTok news belongs in this part of the newsletter. Regardless, you can now make 10-minute TikToks. Which, idk, does seem a bit counter to what the service is known for. Perhaps everything becomes YouTube in the end.
Oribi sells to LinkedIn for $80M-$90M: Another deal for your eyes today, this time involving Oribi, which we write is “a Tel Aviv startup that specializes in marketing attribution technology.” LinkedIn, of course, is a portal where folks in the sales industry can workshop their slam poetry.
Flashfood is a good startup name: What does Flashfood do? It sells food that is nearly expired, to help combat food waste. Remember flashmobs? The idea was that they were quickly forming gatherings, back when Twitter was New and Cool. Anyway, between flashmobs, and flashfreezing, we can add flashfood to the flash- category. The company just raised $12.3 million.
Leverage early investors when raising a Series A, says DeepScribe’s Akilesh Bapu
Image Credits: Index Ventures / DeepScribe
While raising a Series A for AI-powered medical transcription platform DeepScribe, CEO and co-founder Akilesh Bapu set clear timelines for the investors he approached.
Index Ventures partner Nina Achadjian received Bapu’s pitch deck while she was still on vacation, but the founder wouldn’t let her schedule a meeting for the following week.
As it turned out, Bapu’s instincts served him well. “When I walked out of the meeting, I went immediately to one of my partners, and was like, ‘Finally, I found the company that is following the right approach,” said Achadjian.
Apple will accrete Dutch fines until the heat death of the universe: That’s our takeaway from the news that Apple has been hit with a sixth penalty from the country’s government over a ruling regarding in-app payments, and dating apps inside its borders. Apple, an American company, is seemingly blasé at the Dutch Authority for Consumers & Market charging it another €5 million. It now owes the country some €30 million, and the fines could stretch to €50 million. Apple might have too much money, I think.
Google disables live traffic data in Ukraine: The Russian invasion of Ukraine is unearthing a host of interesting technology situations, including how some are using live traffic data to track troop movements. Google has cut off certain maps data in the country, though directions will remain accessible.
The EU wants to ban Russian media: Sputnik and Russia Today are under the ban-hammer in the European Union. TechCrunch writes that that particular regulatory choice means that “social media firms face pressure to act” in a similar fashion.
Cruise founder back at the wheel: After a GM exec left the CEO role, Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt is back in charge. And he’s also the CTO, so expect him to be a little busy in the coming quarters. Self-driving is nearing the point of commercialization, so it will be interesting to see how Cruise evolves from technology to business.
TechCrunch Experts
Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images
TechCrunch is recruiting recruiters for TechCrunch Experts, an ongoing project where we ask top professionals about problems and challenges that are common in early-stage startups. If that’s you or someone you know, you can let us know here.
LinkedIn — the social network for people looking to connect with others in their professional fields and find work with upwards of 810 million users — has a long-standing business in marketing and advertising on its own platform; today it is announcing an acquisition that could points to its ambitions to provide more analytics and insights across the wider internet. The Microsoft-owned networking platform has acquired Oribi, a Tel Aviv startup that specializes in marketing attribution technology. The deal will see LinkedIn establish its first office in Israel.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed in the blog post announcing the acquisition but sources confirm to us that LinkedIn paid between $80 million and $90 million for Oribi, a figure it seems other outlets are also reporting. As a startup, Oribi had raised just under $28 million in funding, according to PitchBook data, from investors that included Sequoia, TLV Parnters, Ibex and others (including taking a bit of funding from Google as part of a local accelerator run by the search giant).
The deal is interesting on two levels. First, it’s a signal of LinkedIn continuing to invest in its marketing and advertising services, an area that is growing at a fast clip for the company. Chief product officer Tomer Cohen noted in the blog post today that marketing services revenues have grown 43% year-over-year. But with some 57 million businesses “building their brands on Pages” and over 24,000 virtual events being created weekly on LinkedIn, there is clearly lot more growth that can be tapped here if those businesses are given more functionality, and tools to realize that. This is only the second acquisition that LinkedIn has made in recent years to expand that part of the business, the other being acquiring Drawbridge in 2019.
Second, the acquisition of Oribi specifically points to a sea change in what LinkedIn is setting out to do in marketing. Oribi’s mission — as we have described previously — has been to democratize web analytics. In other words, it wants to make it easier for smaller companies to build and run customized analytics to measure the impact of their marketing strategies, something that larger companies might have teams to execute but smaller organizations typically have to forego because they lack the resources.
“A lot of companies are more focused on the high end,” Iris Shoor told TechCrunch previously. “Usually these solutions are very much based on a lot of technical resources and integrations — these are the Mixpanels and Heap Analytics and Adobe Marketing Clouds.”
Notably, Oribi competes with the likes of Google Analytics, which means that now LinkedIn (and by association Microsoft) is also squaring up against one aspect of the formidable Google digital advertising and marketing machine.
“Through the integration of Oribi’s technology into our marketing solutions platform, our customers will benefit from enhanced campaign attribution to optimize the ROI of their advertising strategies,” Cohen wrote today. “This means that our customers will be able to more easily measure website conversions with automated tags and code-free technology, as well as build more effective audiences, all in a way that is privacy-first by design.”
LinkedIn has not specified how many people from Oribi are joining except to note that “several members of the Oribi team, including founder and veteran entrepreneur, Iris Shoor,” are expected to join the bigger company and work out of the new LinkedIn Tel Aviv office.
Aporia, a Tel Aviv-based startup that helps businesses monitor and explain their AI-based services, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global. New investor Samsung Next, as well as previous investors TLV Partners and Vertex Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total amount raised to $30 million.
When the service launched last year, its focus was squarely on being an observability platform. Since then, the team has widened its net a bit more to become more of a full-stack ML monitoring platform.
“When I’m looking at our solution right now, it includes four main pillars,” Aporia co-founder and CEO Liran Hason explained. “The first one would be visibility — like dashboarding, being able to see the predictions and so on. The second one, which is pretty new, is explainability. We have some users using that already. Then the monitoring and finally automation, which is also new.”
Automation, of course, is a pretty obvious next step for any monitoring service, given that users typically want to take some action on the alerts they are getting. Since Aporia already featured a drag-and-drop tool for its monitoring service, the team was able to quickly add this feature, too, and Hason noted that he wants to expand these automation capabilities to cover more complex user cases.
Explainability, too, is a feature set the company added based on customer feedback. Increasingly, companies are under regulatory pressure to be able to explain what their models are doing. Aporia now helps its users understand why a model makes the predictions it does and how different input parameters contribute to them.
The mission to become a more full-stack ML observability platform seems to be resonating with customers. Aporia says the number of customers that use its services grew 600% in the last six months alone. Its customers now include the likes of New Relic, Lemonade and Armis.
“Aporia has demonstrated unbelievable growth since its launch and has amazing momentum, quickly becoming a leader in the space of ML observability,” said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global. “Executives at global enterprises understand the benefits of artificial intelligence and how it’s impacting virtually every industry but the risks keep them awake at night. Aporia is positioned to be the solution every organization turns to for ensuring their responsible use of AI.”
Netflix’s Korean drama “Squid Game” was one of the most-watched dubbed series of all time, proving the massive potential for foreign-language programming to become a hit in overseas markets. Now, a startup called Deepdub is capitalizing on the growing demand for localized content by automating parts of the dubbing process using AI technology. With its end-to-end platform, Deepdub can decrease the time it takes to complete a dubbing project, allowing content owners and studios to have results in weeks instead of months.
What’s more, it does this by using just a few minutes of the actors’ voices — so the dubbed version sounds more like the original.
The Tel Aviv startup has now closed on $20 million in Series A funding for its efforts, led by New York-based investment firm Insight Partners.
Existing investors Booster Ventures and Stardom Ventures also participated in the round, alongside new investors at Swift VC. Deepdub was additionally backed by several angels, including Emiliano Calemzuk, former president of Fox Television Studios; Kevin Reilly, former CCO of HBO Max; Danny Grander, co-founder of Snyk; Roi Tiger VP, Engineering at Meta; plus Gideon Marks and Daniel Chadash.
The company was founded in 2019 by two brothers, Ofir and Nir Krakowski, whose backgrounds included machine learning and AI expertise.
The older brother, Ofir, “basically founded the machine learning division of the Israeli Air Force,” explains his younger brother Oz Krakowski, who’s also Deepdub’s CRO, having joined the startup at a later stage. (Ofir had held positions in the IAF Ofek unit, including head of data science and integration, chief architect and CTO of the AI branch, plus AI research and innovation manager.)
The team’s youngest brother, Nir, meanwhile, has some 25 years of technology R&D expertise, including in cybersecurity roles, and had previously co-founded the Y Combinator-backed web gateway Metapacket.
Entrepreneurial in nature, the brothers had been looking for a new business where they could leverage the knowledge they acquired over the years in a way that would bring the most value to consumers, says Oz. They landed on what became Deepdub after having conversations with several people in the industry.
With Deepdub, the aim is to bridge the language barrier and cultural gaps of entertainment experiences using advanced AI technologies with an end-to-end platform for content creators, content owners, and distributors. That means Deepdub isn’t just involved in the actual dubbing process itself — it supports all other aspects of a dubbing project, including the translation, the adapting, and the mix. In other words, it’s not just an AI platform, it’s a full business that includes human experts at every step along the way to help oversee the work and make corrections, as needed.
But Deepdub’s use of AI and machine learning is what makes it a unique solution in this space.
Where a traditional dubbing process may take 15 to 20 weeks to convert a two-hour movie into another language, Deepdub can wrap the same project in just about four weeks. To accomplish this, Deepdub first takes two to three minutes of the original actors’ voice data and uses that to create a model that translates the characteristics of the original voices into the target language. And, notes Oz, Deepdub’s AI voices can “scream, shout, and do all those things that are very complicated for AI voices in general,” he says.
“We basically cracked something that has not been done so far,” Oz adds. “You and I will not be able to tell this is a machine. This will entirely sound like a human voice.”
The details as to how this process is being accomplished are the startup’s secret sauce — in other words, they’re not saying, beyond noting they’ve jumped ahead of the published academic research on the matter. The proof, Deepdub claims, is in the output, the investor backing and the studio relationships it’s gathered.
For example, Deepdub recently entered into a multi-series partnership with streaming service Topic.com to dub their catalog of foreign TV shows into English. Deepdub also became the first company to dub an entire feature-length film into Latin American Spanish utilizing AI voices (“Every Time I Die“). And now, Deepdub says it’s working with both small and large Hollywood studios on projects, but isn’t able to say which ones due to non-disclosure agreements.
There is, however, much debate over whether viewers should enjoy foreign language films and shows in their original language with subtitles, or the dubbed version. Netflix’s “Squid Game,” for example, may have seen a lot of dubbed streams, but there was controversy around how the dubbed version lacked accuracy when compared with the original Korean dialogue. Even “Squid Game’s” creator recommended that viewers watch the subtitled version instead.
One of the issues is that dubbed versions try to match the language to the movement of the actors’ lips so as not to detract from the viewing experience. But there’s an art to this — and it can be complicated to get right. Some dubs have to be stretched out or cut shorter using different words and phrases so that the dubbed speech is in line with the actor’s mouth movement, and this can slightly change the meaning of what was said as a result.
Oz, of course, argues that the dubbed version is better than reading subtitles.
“Some people are not as fluent in reading,” he points out. “And reading subtitles makes you look at the bottom of the screen…with subtitles, you find yourself sometimes rewinding just to watch what really happened because you missed it,” he says.
In addition, the demand for dubbed content is growing as the streaming industry becomes more competitive. Being able to more easily convert titles into other languages can help expand a platform’s offerings without requiring direct investment in the production of new, original content or in the acquisition or licensing of other studios’ titles. It can provide more value from an existing catalog by allowing titles to reach global audiences.
This trend is on the rise, too. Recently, Netflix COO and Chief Product Officer Greg Peters noted the streamer had dubbed some 5 million run-time minutes of content in 2021 and had subtitled 7 million. “At that scale, we’re learning […] how to make that localization more compelling to our members,” he said.
“We are accelerating to a world where AI is now augmenting humanity’s creative potential,” said George Mathew, managing partner at Insight Partners, who’s joining Deepdub’s board of directors with this round. “As the media industry continues to globalize, we see Deepdub’s AI/NLP-based dubbing platform as essential in scaling great content to audiences everywhere. We believe Deepdub represents the next great leap forward in global content distribution, engagement and consumption,” he added.
The startup said it will use the funds to double its current team of 30 full-time employees, most of whom are based in Tel Aviv. It’s hiring in sales and marketing to help increase brand awareness and global market reach, as well as researchers and engineers to improve its AI engine and further develop its platform.
Eureka, a Tel Aviv-based startup that provides enterprises with tools to manage security risks across their various data stores, today announced that it has raised an $8 million seed round led by YL Ventures.
The company was founded by Liat Hayun (CEO), a former VP of Product Management at Palo Alto Networks, and Asaf Weiss (CTO), who was formerly a Director of Engineering at Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks. During their time at these companies, they noticed the need for better cloud data security and management tools as businesses continued to amass more data spread across a wider range of clouds and services.
“Data is a valuable asset for helping businesses operate and compete. However, it has spiraled well beyond the feasible control and management of enterprise security leaders, leaving it exposed and at risk of leaks and loss as well as destruction and exfiltration by bad actors,” Hayun said.
A lot of companies are only now realizing the magnitude of this problem, she noted, in part because they are still going through their transitions to the cloud and because sensitive data is often the last asset to make this move.
The idea behind Eureka then is to give these businesses insights into all the cloud data stores that are connected to their systems and help them manage access policies and discover configuration issues and policy violations. While many organizations have clear ideas about how they think about data protection, implementing those policies across different data stores, all with their own settings and capabilities, is often a challenge.
“Security leaders are especially excited about Eureka’s policy translation engine,” Hayun explained. “The engine automatically translates data protection policies around privacy, risk, compliance and security into platform-specific controls that can be implemented into each cloud data store. It is currently very difficult to translate one into the other, especially as these translation results will vary across different data stores.”
The team tells me that it believes products from competitors like Imperva and IBM are mostly trying to apply an on-prem approach to a cloud native problem, while platform-specific solutions aren’t able to address the larger problem of managing access across data environments.
“By offering security leaders the operational powers they require without causing friction to business interests, Liat and Asaf are ushering in an entirely new kind of digital transformation in the coming years,” says John Brennan, Partner at YL Ventures. They’re enabling companies to leverage any cloud data store they wish while ensuring that security teams maintain full visibility and understanding into the organization’s entire cloud footprint and can easily evolve and manage policy whenever needed.”
Grip Security, a Tel Aviv-based startup that helps enterprises protect their data in SaaS applications, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series A funding round led by Intel Capital. YL Ventures, which led the company’s $6 million seed round earlier this year, also participated in this round.
As Grip CEO and co-founder Lior Yaari told me, while Grip may still be a young company — and selling into the enterprise tends to be a slow process — the team was still able to show investors significant growth, especially for a company that was only officially founded in February. He noted, for example, that the number of users that the product covers grew tenfold every quarter. Over the course of the last nine months, Grip also signed up a wide range of customers that includes Fortune 500 enterprises and small startups.
Traditionally, these companies would use a cloud access security broker (CASB) that act as intermediaries between the employee and the service they use. Ideally, this helps a business’s IT team to know exactly who has access to these tools and how they use these services. But in reality, employees often route around these tools, making data governance hard or even impossible.
“I remember the old days, in our pitch, we explained the problem space and how SaaS is growing — and it shifted to a point where we only ask: how do you solve it today? Everyone I meet has an answer,” Yaari said. “It makes the discussion much easier, because if the answer is, ‘I manage an Excel spreadsheet — and an Excel sheet, the moment something is written, it’s outdated. Seconds later, someone signed up for a new application and the document is outdated. So either they do that or use legacy technologies to do so, but they are full of false positives, very hard to work with and not actionable enough. And then we show them our dashboard and the discussion goes forward.”
Grip promises that within 15 minutes of installing the service, without any agents or proxies, the service can provide businesses with a full SaaS inventory. And while that alone is already extremely useful for its users, the team learned quite a bit from working with its early customers, Yaari said.
“As we interacted with customers and as we saw the problems that they’re seeing and the challenges that they are facing — not from the side, but as a partner that helps them solve them — we expanded our vision into the daily struggles of security teams,” he explained. Specifically, this means helping businesses with more of the day-to-day access management issues they have when, for example, an employee leaves the company. “As we look at the next step, we want to build an enforceable, comprehensive access management solution,” he said. “A user of a SaaS application today can theoretically go back home, open his private laptop and access the application itself. For years, we’ve based SaaS security solutions on the network security paradigm, placing a proxy on the organization’s networks. But when someone goes back home, it doesn’t cover them again malicious actors that access applications if they stole a password from one of the employees.”
Because Grip knows of every application in use by a given company, it believes that it can also now help these companies enforce access based on company policy. The current plan is for Grip to launch this new solution in the coming months.
“Grip has identified what SaaS security teams were lacking and has provided them with a viable, accessible and impactful solution,” said Sunil Kurkure, managing director at Intel Capital. “With existing products taking months to deploy and interfering with innovation and scale, Grip’s quick and easy deployment process has the potential to change the way SaaS security interacts with business workflows.”
Frontegg, a Tel Aviv-based startup that provides SaaS companies with the core user management tools they need to build their own services, today announced that it has raised a $25 million Series A funding round led by Insight Partners. Existing investors Pitango, which led the company’s $5 million seed round, and Global Founders Capital also participated in this round.
The service describes itself as “the modern user management platform for the product-led era.” While every online service needs these capabilities, they are obviously not a real differentiator for most businesses, but at the same time, they are also a hassle to build.
Current customers include Materialize, Pay.com, Medigate, Talon Cyber Security and Hunters.AI.
As the company’s co-founder and CEO Sagi Rodin noted, its service is able to provide customers with all of the day-one tools necessary to build their user management systems, including enterprise features like single sign-on, security policies and audit logs. But it also wants to do more than that.
Image Credits: Frontegg
“We aren’t stopping at solving day-one problems, but rather providing a solution that can help companies achieve full product maturity very fast,” he said. “A good example of that is our customer-facing admin portal that contains a rich set of self-serve capabilities that you can enable within your product with a toggle-in experience. In the past, it could take years to develop self-served user management. Now, with Frontegg, a single full-stack developer can make it happen within a few days.”
Frontegg which was founded in 2019, says it will use the new funding to grow its overall engineering team as it looks to accelerate its platform development efforts to cover more use cases, as well as to build out its sales and marketing teams, especially in the United States. Rodin also noted that the company is looking to accelerate its marketplace and channel opportunities with the help of this new round.
All of this hiring is also one of Frontegg’s biggest challenges, Rodin said. That has always been a challenge for Israeli startups, but based on the conversations I’m having with Israeli founders, it is only getting harder as an ever-growing pool of startups and established players is vying for a relatively small pool of candidates.
“In the product-led era, the ever-evolving demands of users and their expectations for a whole set of self-served capabilities within apps are resulting in a continuous drain on engineering resources,” said Praveen Akkiraju, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “The Frontegg team has built a unique solution that handles the heavy lifting of User Management, allowing teams to remain laser-focused on their core product and mission.”
Sapphire Ventures will inject $2 billion of newly raised capital into growth-stage enterprise companies from two new funds, Sapphire Ventures Fund VI and Sapphire Ventures Opportunity Fund III.
The new funding represents the venture capital firm’s largest raise to date, Nino Marakovic, CEO of Sapphire, told TechCrunch, giving it more than $8.8 billion in assets under management with team members across Austin, London, New York, Palo Alto and San Francisco.
In all, Sapphire has brought in $3.7 billion in capital in the last 12 months, which includes a separate $1.7 billion announced in February that will go into enterprise technology companies, Marakovic said.
Nino Marakovic, CEO of Sapphire Ventures. Image Credits: Sapphire Ventures
“Companies are raising larger rounds and that requires us to write larger checks to lead and be an active participant,” he added. “We pride ourselves on being an active adviser, and that is our differentiator.”
Marakovic expects both funds to last through the end of 2022. Fund VI will invest in 20 to 30 companies, while the Opportunity Fund targets a smaller number of investments but larger check sizes.
Sapphire was founded in 1996 and invests at the Series B stage to IPO in the U.S., Europe and Israel. The firm is investing in value-added resources and is expanding in Europe and Israel with plans to open an office in Berlin and Tel Aviv.
It has 40 investment professionals investing in areas including enterprise SaaS, infrastructure software, fintech, healthcare IT and crypto-infrastructure. Notable investments by the firm include DocuSign, LinkedIn, Fitbit, Box, Sumo Logic and 23andMe.
So far in 2021, Sapphire invested $990 billion in capital, up from $970 million in 2020, and added 26 new companies into its portfolio. Among the firm’s 165 portfolio companies, there were over 70 exits, including 30 IPOs and 45 acquisitions.
With the new funds, the firm also announced it rounded out its leadership team, including Cristina Hohlman as CFO, Ellie Javadi as CMO and Kevin Burke as vice president of strategy;
Meanwhile, Marakovic called today’s investment environment one where VC firms have to “adapt and do diligence ahead of the fundraise.”
“It used to be that you met with the company first,” he added. “If you are already domain experts, it is easier because you meet with the founders early on, before they raise, and build a relationship with them so you are ready for when they do raise.”
He expects more investments to go into software and business applications, with fintech and health IT also being “great opportunities,” and blockchain across all of those. Marakovic referred to blockchain as “the fundamental new building block we have high hopes for as we invest against web3.”
As more companies adopt low-code/no-code tools to build their line-of-business applications, it’s maybe no surprise that we are now seeing a new crop of services in this ecosystem that focus on keeping these tools secure. These include Tel Aviv-based Zenity, which is coming out of stealth today and announcing a $5 million seed funding round. The round was led by Vertex Ventures and UpWest. A number of angel investors, including the former CISO of Google, Gerhard Eschelbeck, and the former CIO of SuccessFactors, Tom Fisher, also participated in this round.
Zenity argues that as employees start building their own applications and adopt tools like robotic process automation (RPA), this new class of applications also opens up new avenues for potential breaches and ransomware attacks.
Image Credits: Zenity
“Companies are heavily adopting Low-Code/No-Code, without realizing the risks it employs nor their part in the shared responsibility model,” said Zenity co-founder and CEO Ben Kliger. “We empower CIOs and CISOs to seamlessly govern their Low-Code/No-Code applications and prevent unintentional data leaks, disturbance to business continuity, compliance risks or malicious breaches.”
The Zenity platform helps businesses build a catalog of low-code/no-code apps in their organization, mitigate potential issues and set up a governance policy for their organization that can then be automatically enforced. The company argues that the methods of traditional security services don’t transfer to low-code/no-code applications, yet the need for a tool like this is only growing, especially given that most of the developers that use don’t have a security background (or maybe any software development background at all).
The company was founded by CEO Kliger and CTO Michael Bargury, who both previously worked on the Azure and cloud security teams at Microsoft.
“The challenge is mitigating the risks and security threats associated with Low-Code/No- Code solutions without disturbing the business,” said Tom Fisher, Zenity advisor and former CIO of Oracle, Qualcomm, CTO of eBay. “Zenity provides the perfect combination of governance and security tools with a pro-business approach that helps business developers build with confidence.”
