Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

As companies try to navigate an ever-changing security landscape, it can be challenging to protect everything. Security startup TrueFort has built a zero trust solution focusing on protecting enterprise applications. Today, the company announced a $30 million Series B.

Shasta Ventures led today’s round with participation from new firms Canaan and Ericsson Ventures along with existing investors Evolution Equity Partners, Lytical Ventures and Emerald Development Managers. Under the terms of the agreement Nitin Chopra, managing director at Shasta Ventures, will be joining the company board. Today’s investment brings the total raised to almost $48 million.

CEO and co-founder Sameer Malhotra says that TrueFort protects customers by analyzing at each application and figuring out what normal behavior looks like. Once it understands that, it will flag anything that falls outside of the norm. The company achieves this by gathering data from partners like CrowdStrike and from multiple points within the application and infrastructure.

“Once we get this telemetry, whether it’s networks, endpoints, servers or third-party partners, we then help the customer build a picture of what those applications are doing and what’s normal behavior. We then help them baseline that, and monitor that in real time with response and real-time controls to continue those applications through their normal life cycle,” he said.

Zero trust is a concept where as a matter of policy you assume that you cannot trust any individual or device until the entity proves it belongs on your systems. Malhotra says that customers are becoming more comfortable with the concept and in 2020 the company saw massive 650% YoY revenue growth, with it up 120% YoY this year so far.

“We are seeing the demand, especially as zero trust is becoming a more familiar vernacular amongst the security community […]. Again, it’s having the visibility and understanding, and then being able to then reduce it to the limited number of acceptable relationships or executions,” he said. And he believes that it all comes down to understanding your applications and how they operate.

TrueFort co-founders Nazario Parsacala and Sameer Malhotra. Image Credits: TrueFort

The company currently has 60 employees, with hopes of reaching 85 or 90 by the end of the year. Malhotra says that as they build the employee base, they are driving to make it diverse at every level.

“We look at diversity across our whole management team, all the way from the board down to our different levels. We are quite aggressive in hiring diverse candidates, whether they’re women or LGBTQ or people of color. And we have focused programs where we work with different universities […] to bring on new employees from a diverse talent pool. We also work with different recruiters from that perspective, and our focus is always to look at a different palette and to make sure that we’re as diverse an organization as we can,” he said.

The company was founded in 2015 by Malhotra and his partner Nazario Parsacala, both of whom spent more than 20 years working at big financial services companies — Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. They worked for a couple of years building the program, launching the first beta in 2017 before bringing the first generally available product to market the following year.

Currently customers can install the solution on prem or in the cloud of their choice, but the company has a SaaS solution in the works as well, that will be ready in the next couple of months.

Kapwing is a laymen’s Adobe Creative Suite built for what people actually do on the internet: make memes and remix media. Need to resize a video? Add text or subtitles to a video? Trim or crop or loop or frame or rotate or soundtrack or… then you need Kapwing. The free web and mobile tool is built for everyone, not just designers. No software download or tutorials to slog through. Just efficient creativity.

In a year since coming out of stealth with 100,000 users, Kapwing has grown 10X, to more than 1 million. Now it going pro, building out its $20/month collaboration tools for social media managers and scrappy teams. But it won’t forget its roots with teens, so it has dropped its pay-$6-to-remove-watermarks tier while keeping its core features free.

Eager to capitalize on the meme and mobile content business, CRV has just led an $11 million Series A round for Kapwing. It’s joined by follow-on cash from Village Global, Sinai and Shasta Ventures, plus new investors Jane VC, Harry Stebbings, Vector and the Xoogler Syndicate. CRV partners “the venture twins” Justine and Olivia Moore actually met Kapwing co-founder and CEO Julia Enthoven while they all worked at The Stanford Daily newspaper in 2012.

“As a team, we love memes. We talk about internet fads almost every day at lunch and pay close attention to digital media trends,” says Enthoven, who started the company with fellow Googler Eric Lu. “One of our cultural tenets is to respect the importance of design, art and culture in the world, and another one is to not take ourselves too seriously.” But it is taking on serious clients.

As Kapwing’s toolset has grown, it has seen paying customers coming from Amazon, Sony, Netflix and Spotify. Now only 13% of what’s made with it are traditional text-plus-media memes. “Kapwing will always be designed for creators first: the students, artists, influencers, entrepreneurs, etc. who define and spread culture,” says Enthoven. “But we make money from the creative professionals, marketers, media teams and office workers who need to create content for work.”

That’s why in addition to plenty of templates for employing the latest trending memes, Kapwing now helps Pro subscribers with permanent hosting, saving throughout the creation process and re-editing after export. Eventually it plans to sell enterprise licenses to let whole companies use Kapwing.

Copycats are trying to chip away at its business, but Kapwing will use its new funding to keep up a breakneck pace of development. Pronounced “Ka-Pwing,” like a bullet ricochet, it’s trying to stay ahead of Imgflip, ILoveIMG, Imgur’s on-site tool and more robust apps like Canva.

If you’ve ever been stuck with a landscape video that won’t fit in an Instagram Story, a bunch of clips you want to stitch together or the need to subtitle something for accessibility, you’ll know the frustration of lacking a purpose-built tool. And if you’re on mobile, there are even fewer options. Unlike some software suites you have to install on a desktop, Kapwing works right from a browser.

” ‘Memes’ is such a broad category of media nowadays. It could refer to a compilation like the political singalong videos, animations like Shooting Star memes or a change in music like the AOC Dancing memes,” Enthoven explains. “Although they used to be edgy, memes have become more mainstream . . . Memes popularized new types of multimedia formats and made raw, authentic footage more acceptable on social media.”

As communication continues to shift from text to visual media, design can’t only be the domain of designers. Kapwing empowers anyone to storytell and entertain, whether out of whimsy or professional necessity. If big-name creative software from Adobe or Apple don’t simplify and offer easy paths through common use cases, they’ll see themselves usurped by the tools of the people.

Low-code programming is supposed to make things easier on companies, right? Low-code means you can count on trained administrators instead of more expensive software engineers to handle most tasks, but like any issue solved by technology, there are always unintended consequences. While running his former company, Steelbrick, which he sold to Salesforce in 2015 for $360 million, Max Rudman identified a persistent problem with low-code deployments. He decided to fix it with automation and testing, and the idea for his latest venture, Prodly, was born.

The company announced a $3.5 million seed round today, but more important than the money is the customer momentum. In spite of being a very early-stage startup, the company already has 100 customers using the product, a testament to the fact that other people were probably experiencing that same pain point Rudman was feeling, and there is a clear market for his idea.

As Rudman learned with his former company, going live with the data on a platform like Salesforce is just part of the journey. If you are updating configuration and pricing information on a regular basis, that means updating all the tables associated with that information. Sure, it’s been designed to be point and click, but if you have changes across 48 tables, it becomes a very tedious task, indeed.

The idea behind Prodly is to automate much of the configuration, provide a testing environment to be sure all the information is correct and, finally, automate deployment. For now, the company is just concentrating on configuration, but with the funding it plans to expand the product to solve the other problems, as well.

Rudman is careful to point out that his company’s solution is not built strictly for the Salesforce platform. The startup is taking aim at Salesforce admins for its first go-round, but he sees the same problem with other cloud services that make heavy use of trained administrators to make changes.

“The plan is to start with Salesforce, but this problem actually exists on most cloud platforms — ServiceNow, Workday — none of them have the tools we have focused on for admins, and making the admins more productive and building the tooling that they need to efficiently manage a complex application,” Rudman told TechCrunch.

Customers include Nutanix, Johnson & Johnson, Splunk, Tableau and Verizon (which owns this publication). The $3.5 million round was led by Shasta Ventures, with participation from Norwest Venture Partners.

Early-stage venture capital firm Shasta Ventures has brought on three new faces to beef up its enterprise software and security portfolio amid a big push to “go deeper” into cybersecurity, per Shasta’s managing director Doug Pepper.

Balaji Yelamanchili (above left), the former general manager and executive vice president of Symantec’s enterprise security business unit, joins as a venture partner on the firm’s enterprise software team. He was previously a senior vice president at Oracle and Dell EMC. Pepper says Yelamanchili will be sourcing investments and may take board seats in “certain cases.”

The firm has also tapped Salesforce’s former chief information security officer Izak Mutlu (above center) as an executive-in-residence, a role in which he’ll advise Shasta portfolio companies. Mutlu spent 11 years at the cloud computing company managing IT security and compliance.

InterWest board partner Drew Harman, the final new hire, has joined as a board partner and will work closely with the chief executive officers of Shasta’s startups. Harman has worked in enterprise software for 25 years across a number of roles. He is currently on the boards of the cloud-based monetization platform Aria, enterprise content marketing startup NewsCred, customer retention software provider Totango and others.

“There’s no area today that’s more important than cybersecurity,” Pepper told TechCrunch. “The business of venture has gotten increasingly competitive and it demands more focus than ever before. We aren’t looking for generalists, we are looking for domain experts.”

Shasta’s security investments include email authentication service Valimail, which raised a $25 million Series B in May. Airspace Systems, a startup that built “kinetic capture” technologies that can identify offending unmanned aircrafts and take them down, raised a $20 million round with participation from Shasta in March. And four-year-old Stealth Security, a startup that defends companies from automated bot attacks, secured an $8 million investment from Shasta in February.

The Menlo Park-based firm filed to raise $300 million for its fifth flagship VC fund in 2016. A year later, it announced a specialty vehicle geared toward augmented and virtual reality app development. With more than $1 billion under management, the firm also backs consumer, IoT, robotics and space-tech companies across the U.S.

In the last year, Shasta has promoted Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Nitin Chopra and Jacob Mullins from associate to partner, as well as added two new associates, Natalie Sandman and Rachel Star.

 The race to crown a winner in the AI-powered recruiting software space is on. With both Workey and Mya nabbing rounds in the last few weeks, the timing is prime for a few players to seek advantage in the form of growth capital. This seems to be exactly what Entelo, a six year old player in the space, is doing. The company is announcing a $20 million Series C round of financing today led by U.S. Read More