InsightFinder, a startup from North Carolina based on 15 years of academic research, wants to bring machine learning to system monitoring to automatically identify and fix common issues. Today, the company announced a $2 million seed round.
IDEA Fund Partners, a VC out of Durham, North Carolina, led the round with participation from Eight Roads Ventures and Acadia Woods Partners. The company was founded by North Carolina State professor Helen Gu, who spent 15 years researching this problem before launching the startup in 2015.
Gu also announced that she had brought on former Distil Networks co-founder and CEO Rami Essaid to be Chief Operating Officer. Essaid, who sold his company earlier this year, says his new company focuses on taking a proactive approach to application and infrastructure monitoring.
“We found that these problems happen to be repeatable, and the signals are there. We use artificial intelligence to predict and get out ahead of these issues,” he said. He adds that it’s about using technology to be proactive, and he says that today the software can prevent about half of the issues before they even become problems.
If you’re thinking that this sounds a lot like what Splunk, New Relic and DataDog are doing, you wouldn’t be wrong, but Essaid says that these products take a siloed look at one part of the company technology stack, whereas InsightFinder can act as a layer on top of these solutions to help companies reduce alert noise, track a problem when there are multiple alerts flashing, and completely automate issue resolution when possible.
“It’s the only company that can actually take a lot of signals and use them to predict when something’s going to go bad. It doesn’t just help you reduce the alerts and help you find the problem faster, it actually takes all of that data and can crunch it using artificial intelligence to predict and prevent [problems], which nobody else right now is able to do,” Essaid said.
For now, the software is installed on-prem at its current set of customers, but the startup plans to create a SaaS version of the product in 2020 to make it accessible to more customers.
The company launched in 2015, and has been building out the product using a couple of National Science Foundation grants before this investment. Essaid says the product is in use today in 10 large companies (which he can’t name yet), but it doesn’t have any true go-to-market motion. The startup intends to use this investment to begin to develop that in 2020.
Digital attackers compromised an email server owned by Special Olympics NY and then abused it to target donors with phishing emails. The attack emails told recipients that an automatic donation transaction of $1,942.49 would register on their accounts within the next two hours. The email then asked recipients to review a PDF statement to confirm […]… Read More
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It’s been another fantastic year on The State of Security blog. With over 350 blogs published from all walks of the security community, we like to think of the blog as more of an industry resource that caters to not only experienced security professionals but also to those who are new to the community. To […]… Read More
The post The Top 10 State of Security Blog Posts from 2019 appeared first on The State of Security.
VMware is closing the year with a significant new component in its arsenal. Today it announced it has closed the $2.7 billion Pivotal acquisition it originally announced in August.
The acquisition gives VMware another component in its march to transform from a pure virtual machine company into a cloud native vendor that can manage infrastructure wherever it lives. It fits alongside other recent deals like buying Heptio and Bitnami, two other deals that closed this year.
They hope this all fits neatly into VMware Tanzu, which is designed to bring Kubernetes containers and VMware virtual machines together in a single management platform.
“VMware Tanzu is built upon our recognized infrastructure products and further expanded with the technologies that Pivotal, Heptio, Bitnami and many other VMware teams bring to this new portfolio of products and services,” Ray O’Farrell, executive vice president and general manager of the Modern Application Platforms Business Unit at VMware, wrote in a blog post announcing the deal had closed.
Craig McLuckie, who came over in the Heptio deal, and is now VP of R&D at VMware, told TechCrunch in November at KubeCon, that while the deal hadn’t closed at that point, he saw a future where Pivotal could help at a professional services level, as well.
“In the future when Pivotal is a part of this story, they won’t be just delivering technology, but also deep expertise to support application transformation initiatives,” he said.
Up until the closing, the company had been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, but as of today Pivotal becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of VMware. It’s important to note that this transaction didn’t happen in a vacuum where two random companies came together.
In fact, VMware and Pivotal were part of the consortium of companies that Dell purchased when it acquired EMC in 2015 for $67 billion. While both were part of EMC and then Dell, each one operated separately and independently. At the time of the sale to Dell, Pivotal was considered a key piece, one that could stand strongly on its own.
Pivotal and VMware had another strong connection. Pivotal was originally created by a combination of EMC, VMware and GE (which owned a 10% stake for a time) to give these large organizations a separate company to undertake transformation initiatives.
It raised a hefty $1.7 billion before going public in 2018. A big chunk of that came in one heady day in 2016 when it announced $650 million in funding led by Ford’s $180 million investment.
The future looked bright at that point, but life as a public company was rough and after a catastrophic June earnings report, things began to fall apart. The stock dropped 42 percent in one day. As I wrote in an analysis of the deal:
The stock price plunged from a high of $21.44 on May 30th to a low of $8.30 on August 14th. The company’s market cap plunged in that same time period falling from $5.828 billion on May 30th to $2.257 billion on August 14th. That’s when VMware admitted it was thinking about buying the struggling company.
VMware came to the rescue and offered $15.00 a share, a substantial premium above that August low point. As of today, it’s part of VMware.
Wyze implemented a token refresh for all of its users after learning of a security incident that allegedly leaked user data. On December 26, Twelve Security reported that smart home camera provider Wyze had left its production servers open to the web. The security stated that the misconfiguration had exposed the sensitive information of 2.4 […]… Read More
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Honeypots are not a new idea. They have been part of the cybersecurity world for decades and have frequently gone in and out of “fashion” over that period. Recently, though, they have become an increasingly important part of vulnerability management. That’s for a couple of reasons. Honeypots offer real-world data on the types of threats […]… Read More
The post Honeypots: A Guide To Increasing Security appeared first on The State of Security.
When mainstream cloud computing first began to appear on the horizon, (Amazon launched its Elastic Compute Cloud product in 2006.) many organizations were initially hesitant to entrust their most valuable data and processes to a technological innovation named after something that appears so delicate. Oh, how times have changed. Today, an estimated 96% of organizations […]… Read More
The post AWS vs. Azure vs. Google – What’s the Difference from a Cloud Security Standpoint? appeared first on The State of Security.
Researchers identified more than 100 apps that used a common code package named “Soraka” to perform ad fraud on users’ Android devices. The White Ops Threat Intelligence team observed that many of the apps did not have a suspicious reputation at the time of discovery. For instance, the “Best Fortune Explorer” registered no red flags […]… Read More
The post Over 100 Android Apps Used ‘Soraka’ Package to Perform Ad Fraud appeared first on The State of Security.
TikTok, the popular video posting app, has come under increased scrutiny. Recently, two lawsuits filed against the platform accused TikTok of privacy violations. According to a report from Reuters, a plaintiff accused TikTok of creating an account without her knowledge or consent in one lawsuit filed in California. The lawsuit accused TikTok of creating a […]… Read More
The post TikTok Lawsuits Show The Need For Increased Scrutiny of Apps appeared first on The State of Security.
At some point in the past, I began making new year’s resolutions for doing a bit of personal privacy and security maintenance on New Year’s Day or thereabouts. I would usually have a bit of downtime to finally get around to doing the things I’d been putting off all year. It’s become a fun habit […]… Read More
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Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Today, something short. Continuing our loose collection of look backs of the past year, it’s worth remembering two related facts. First, that this time last year SaaS stocks were getting beat up. And, second, that in the ensuing year they’ve risen mightily.
If you are in a hurry, the gist of our point is that the recovery in value of SaaS stocks probably made a number of 2019 IPOs possible. And, given that SaaS shares have recovered well as a group, that the 2020 IPO season should be active as all heck, provided that things don’t change.
Let’s not forget how slack the public markets were a year ago for a startup category vital to venture capital returns.
We’re depending on Bessemer’s cloud index today, renamed the “BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index” when it was rebuilt in October. The Cloud Index is a collection of SaaS and cloud companies that are trackable as a unit, helping provide good data on the value of modern software and tooling concerns.
If the index rises, it’s generally good news for startups as it implies that investors are bidding up the value of SaaS companies as they grow; if the index falls, it implies that revenue multiples are contracting amongst the public comps of SaaS startups.1
Ultimately, startups want public companies that look like them (comps) to have sky-high revenue multiples (price/sales multiples, basically). That helps startups argue for a better valuation during their next round; or it helps them defend their current valuation as they grow.
Given that it’s Christmas Eve, I’m going to present you with a somewhat ugly chart. Today I can do no better. Please excuse the annotation fidelity as well:
A marketing agency announced just days before Christmas that it would be temporarily suspending operations as it works to recover from a ransomware attack. Sandra Franecke, CEO of the Heritage Company, sent a letter to employees that the company would temporarily be suspending its operations. She went on to ask the agency’s more than 300 […]… Read More
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I recently wrote about phishing around the holidays and while I was working on the piece, I noticed a couple of friends posting recent emails on Facebook. I thought it might be fun to dig a bit deeper into those emails and look at the telltale signs that indicate these are phishing attempts. Signs of […]… Read More
The post Signs of Phishing: Protecting Yourself During the Holidays appeared first on The State of Security.
This is now the third and last blog I will write for State of Security on the topic of the groundbreaking, maverick TV series ‘Mr Robot.’ As this week, the credits rolled one final time on the shows mind bending and utterly bizarre (even by its own standards) conclusion. A lot has changed since the […]… Read More
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