Tag Archives: Venture Capital

Sustainable Use of Electric Vehicle Batteries – Voltfang Secures €5 Million Financing

Helen Ventures

Voltfang, the clean-tech startup for energy storage from second-life electric vehicle batteries, has secured €5 million in new capital to scale its production. The consortium is led by the lead investor PT1 – PropTech1 Ventures. Other investors include Helen Ventures, Aurum Impact, Eviny, and the existing investor AENU.

Helen Ventures has been following the fast-growing trend of batteries closely over the past years. “We are excited about our investment in Voltfang. It is evident that a huge uptake of batteries is underway in the electricity system, and it is also evident that second-life batteries will be an important part of this in solving sustainability and cost hurdles,” says Mikael Myllymäki, Vice President and Head of Helen Ventures. “We are very impressed by the agility and customer-focus of the Voltfang team as they have brought their solution to market. It is a privilege to join supporting the team together with such a quality group of investors.”

Voltfang provides a solution to both the battery recycling problem and the energy transition with its high-quality energy storage systems made from used electric vehicle batteries. The Aachen-based startup enables the reuse of EV batteries through a specially developed AI-based software that evaluates battery longevity. “We give the battery a second life in stationary operations. With the help of our operating systems and continuous monitoring, we can make our batteries just as durable as new batteries. We guarantee this with our 10-year Batteryflat,” says David Oudsandji, Co-CEO of Voltfang. The company has already conducted several successful pilot projects in Germany and has won major customers such as ALDI Nord and Schaltbau.

“In ten years, there will be no new batteries in the commercial sector,” says Roman Alberti, Co-CEO of Voltfang. This is not only about the sustainable recycling of batteries but also about saving on material imports and, above all, costs. “With the help of our energy management system, our storage systems can be intelligently deployed, allowing the battery to be amortized as quickly as possible,” explains Roman Alberti.

“We can connect urgently needed capacities to the grid in the coming years to ensure grid stability. This is not only an advantage for our customers but for anyone who wants to avoid blackouts,” explains Afshin Doostdar, CTO of Voltfang. “The grids are not designed for the energy transition. Electric mobility, heat pumps, and fluctuating renewable energies require cost-effective and sustainable intermediate storage solutions that can be deployed in the short term. With our energy storage systems, we achieve this and reach a milestone in addressing the fundamental challenges of the energy transition.”

Voltfang was founded in 2021 and has already brought a certified and market-ready product to market. As a spin-off from RWTH Aachen, the startup now employs 50 people and operates a production site in Aachen. Voltfang aims to deliver more than 40 MWh of storage capacity in its products by the end of 2024.

Fabian Heilemann (AENU): “Stationary battery storage systems will play a central role in the energy system of the future by aligning electricity generation and consumption over time. Since Voltfang’s energy storage systems are made from reused electric vehicle batteries, they not only contribute to the energy transition but also reduce dependence on and consumption of resources compared to the production of new batteries. With their academic and practical expertise, the Voltfang team has the optimal DNA to build a European champion in the field of second-life batteries.”

Niko Samios (PT1): “There is no question that the market opportunity for energy storage will be enormous in the coming years. Sustainable energy production is becoming increasingly affordable, but it needs to be stored somewhere due to the grid structure, and decentralization is the best approach. Future regulatory requirements will further emphasize this process. Voltfang offers the most interesting product in this field that we have seen because they combine a cost advantage with a sustainability bonus.”

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Opsys Tech tops up latest venture effort with additional $36.5M

83North logo

Israeli developer of automotive lidar eyes production ramp after closing $51.5M series C round.

 

VCSEL array lidarVCSEL array lidar

Opsys Tech, one of several startups developing automotive lidar technology out of Israel, says it has raised an additional $36.5 million in its latest venture funding round.

 

The additional cash, which brought total series C funding to $51.5 million, will be used to ramp production of commercial devices built around its solid-state platform.

Last year the company agreed deals with major auto part suppliers including China’s Hasco and SL Corporation in South Korea.

A recent update to the Hasco collaboration is expected to see the Chinese firm manufacture the Opsys lidar units domestically, with mass production slated to start in 2024.

VCSEL array
Taking part in Opsys’ latest round of financing round were the likes of 83North, Osage University Partners, Translink Capital, and Saban Ventures.

“The series C financing will support the ramp of commercial automotive production quantities of Opsys Tech’s lidar sensor solutions,” announced the Israeli startup.

The firm claims to have developed a lidar sensor that is uniquely capable of high performance and reliability coupled with low cost that is able to meet all user requirements and requires no moving parts.

Opsys also claims a detection range of 300 meters at 10 per cent object reflectivity with its sensors, which are based around an array of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) operating at 850-980 nm and single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detectors.

Gertel, the former CEO of major VCSEL manufacturer Finisar (now part of the giant Coherent photonics company), co-founded the startup and is now its executive chairman.

Commenting on the latest funding round, he said: “We are gratified by the validation of our unique technology and our demonstrated commercialization progress.

“Customer feedback on the best-in-class overall performance of our sensor has been incredible and our customer engagement levels have never been higher.

“Based on customer feedback, we believe we have developed the only lidar sensor available on the market that can meet all customer requirements at all times to enable a complete automotive lidar solution.”

Mass production in Asia
Gertel believes that the solid-state sensor is capable of meeting all automotive reliability requirements and performance specifications required for every level of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomy, adding:

“With the closing of this financing round, we can complete the full production ramp of our True Solid-State Scanning lidar product line, and we are looking forward to supplying our customers with production quantities of our lidar sensors.”

Opsys is also exhibiting at this week’s CES 2023 in Las Vegas – now a key event for automotive lidar companies – and used the occasion to announce the update to its agreement with Hasco.

Company CEO Rafi Harel, who was the general manager of Finisar Israel for several years, said of that deal:

“This major milestone…marks our entrance into the market for mass production quantities of automotive lidar systems in Asia.

“The use of Opsys lidar technology will increase the safety of vehicles on the road while enabling the evolution of autonomous functionality at all levels, including L5.”

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Strata Identity Partners With HYPR to Accelerate Elimination of Passwords

.406 Venture

BOULDER, CO and New YORK, NY – December 15, 2022 — Strata Identity, the Identity Orchestration Company, and HYPR, the Passwordless CompanyTM, today announced a partnership that enables phishing-resistant MFA to be added to any modern, legacy, or custom application without rewriting the source code. This unique capability is made possible via an abstraction layer that decouples identity and authentication from the identity system and applications to deliver the strongest levels of authentication security.

According to a 2022 Forrester survey, 67 percent of respondents are in the process of adopting passwordless security in their organizations. Passwordless protection is needed across all access points, including legacy applications that may have been neglected or overlooked in the past. Now, through this integration with HYPR and Strata, organizations with older, outdated systems will be able to get the benefits of passwordless authentication security assurance and a frictionless, password-free user experience. This agreement brings together Strata’s specialization in Identity and Policy Orchestration with HYPR’s proven True Passwordless™ authentication expertise. Together, Strata and Hypr customers can overcome the traditionally challenging hurdle of adding MFA to legacy applications — even those tied to directory-based passwords.

Passwordless authentication has been identified as the gold standard for authentication. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a new “Phishing Resistant MFA Fact Sheet” that calls out the immediate need for fully passwordless protection of every app in critical risk sector organizations, regardless of app type. It also recommended this level of authentication security for organizations in every sector and every application in their organization’s environment, regardless of whether it speaks modern authentication protocols.

“Legacy MFA technologies are failing, at scale, and leaving serious security gaps due to insecure authentication methods costing organizations an average of $2.19M per year as detailed in the latest State of Authentication report, ” said Bojan Simic, CEO and CTO at HYPR. “To get the highest levels of authentication security, organizations need to adopt passwordless MFA. HYPR’s integration with Strata technology is exciting because it now enables customers to extend HYPR’s passwordless authentication solution to legacy applications without coding, radically simplifying and accelerating an organization’s passwordless deployment.”

As part of the joint integration, Strata’s Maverics identity orchestration platform enables HYPR’s True Passwordless security platform to function as the passwordless authenticator with any combination of IdPs and support both on-premises and cloud identity systems. In addition, HYPR can be used with any app, including modern, legacy, and custom-developed programs, without making any modifications to its source code. Maverics also provides transparent journey-time orchestration that allows HYPR registration and user onboarding to be inserted within existing application access workflows.

“Forward-looking organizations are moving to passwordless authentication to protect their web applications in the cloud, but what about their legacy and custom applications? They must be modernized first, which traditionally means manually re-coding each app one by one,” said Eric Olden, CEO of Strata Identity. “This partnership with HYPR removes the need to rewrite legacy applications and systems to support passwordless simplifying the process for deploying modern authentication across a company’s entire environment.”

Availability

The integrated Strata Identity and HYPR passwordless solution is available immediately from both Strata and HYPR.

About Strata

Strata Identity is the leader in Identity Orchestration for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The orchestration recipe-powered Maverics platform enables organizations to connect and control incompatible identity systems without changing the user access experience. By decoupling applications from identity, Maverics makes it possible to implement modern authentication like passwordless and enforce consistent access policies without refactoring source code. The company’s founders created the IDQL (Identity Query Language) standard and Hexa open-source software for multi-cloud policy orchestration and are co-authors of the SAML standard for SSO federation. For more information, visit us on the Web and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

About HYPR

HYPR fixes the way the world logs in. HYPR’s True Passwordless™ MFA platform decouples authentication from the organization’s identity providers and eliminates the traditional trade-off between security and user experience by providing uncompromising assurance and consumer-grade experience. By eliminating the password and deployments taking hours rather than weeks or months, organizations decrease the risk of a cyber attack, increase positive user experience, and lower operational costs.

Welcome to The Passwordless Company®. Additional information is available at https://www.hypr.com

Contact

Marc Gendron
Marc Gendron PR for Strata
+1-617-877-7480
marc@mgpr.net

HYPR
Carol Dullmeyer
Vice President, Brand and Corporate Communications
carol.dullmeyer@hypr.com

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retrain.ai Named to Globes’ Most Promising Israeli Startups and Reaches Total Funding of $34M

.406 Venture

NYC / December 14, 2022 – retrain.ai, a leading AI-driven Talent Intelligence Platform, has been honored as one of the top 10 most promising startups for 2022 by Globes, as designated by Israel’s premier venture capital firms. The company is also reporting today it has closed an additional $14 million investment round led by AI-focused Radical Ventures, bringing their total funding raised to $34M.

“We are incredibly honored to be recognized by Globes as a standout among the thousands of other tech companies surveyed. Our position as a startup primed for global impact is the reason we’re able to attract forward-thinking investors like Radical Ventures,” said retrain.ai Co-founder and CEO Dr. Shay David. “Radical’s investment will help accelerate immediate value, with proceeds fueling retrain.ai’s growth into international markets where we will continue to pursue our vision of helping millions of people find their place in the job market by gaining 21st century skills.”

Radical Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in entrepreneurs applying deep technology to transform massive industries. They focus their investments on people who are using Artificial Intelligence to disrupt different market segments.

“retrain.ai is helping businesses navigate an economy and workforce in the midst of a generational transition,” said Jordan Jacobs, Managing Partner of Radical Ventures who also joins the retrain.ai board. “By leveraging powerful AI models, retrain.ai is reducing both the time-to-hire and increasing employee performance and retention.”

Radical Ventures joins other retrain.ai investors including Square Peg, Hetz Ventures, TechAviv, .406 Ventures, Schusterman Family Investments and Splunk Ventures.

“AI has the potential to dramatically improve how businesses manage their most essential resource, their talent,” says retrain.ai Co-founder and COO Isabelle Bichler-Eliasaf.  “Our Talent Acquisition and Talent Management modules are powered by Responsible AI helping unveil skills and capabilities for job candidates and employees alike, revealing maximum potential and new career opportunities so HR leaders can make data-driven decisions. Being named to the Globes Top Ten list is further recognition of the impact our technology is having on the future of work.”

Globes, Israel’s number one economic newspaper, publishes a list of the ten most promising start-ups annually based on selection by leading global investment funds in the Israeli high-tech market. VC participants were asked to name startups that have demonstrated proven impact and who may be the next unicorns. Past awardees included companies like Monday.com and Fivver, who have gone on to do multi-billion dollar IPOs.

Out of the 4,000 tech firms analyzed by Globes, retrain.ai was recognized for its cutting-edge AI and its potential impact in helping millions of people gain in-demand, emerging skills for a more productive, fulfilling and lasting career.

 

About retrain.ai

retrain.ai is a leading Talent Intelligence Platform designed to help enterprises hire, retain, and develop their workforce, intelligently. Leveraging Responsible AI and the industry’s largest skills architecture, enterprises unlock talent insights and optimize their workforce effectively with retrain.ai’s Talent Acquisition and Talent Management modules in order to lower attrition, win the war for talent and the great resignation in one, data-driven solution. To learn more, visit www.retrain.ai

 

About Radical Ventures

Radical Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in people applying artificial intelligence to shape the future of how we live, work and play. From healthcare and financial services to infrastructure and manufacturing, Radical partners with entrepreneurs who understand the transformational power of AI. Learn more at www.radical.vc.

Press Contact:
Karen Sackowitz
E: karen.sackowitz@retrain.ai
P: +1 978.697.3845

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Oyster Raises $3.6 Million Seed Funding to Modernize Personal Insurance

New Stack Ventures

New Stack Ventures leads round alongside Conversion Capital, GFC

Today, we’re excited to announce that Oyster has raised $3.6 million in Seed funding to launch a modern personal insurance platform for seamless point-of-sale and post-purchase experiences.

We’re grateful to be supported by an incredible group of angels and investors, led by New Stack Ventures alongside Global Founders Capital, Conversion Capital, Cambrian Ventures, Kearny Jackson, Valia Ventures, Interlace Ventures, V1 VC, Polymath Capital, Position Ventures, Kevin Mahaffey (Founder of Lookout), Garrett Koehn (President of CRC Insurance), Gokul Rajaram (executive at DoorDash), Eugene Marinelli (Founder of Blend), Joe Schmidt (Partner at a16z), and Tanay Jaipuria (Partner at Wing).

Together, we’re working to build a better customer experience from the ground-up in the world of personal insurance, anchored by a strong belief in the potential of technology.

Insurance doesn’t work for consumers

Over the last two decades, the world has seen a boom in the investment of technology that powers finance. The development and success of entirely new capabilities, like instant stock trading, to new purchasing paradigms, like buy-now-pay-later, teaches us two lessons: (1) across industries, consumer expectations are rising when it comes to the way they interact with everyday facets of their lives; and (2) the successful application of technology can have a transformational impact on both an entire industry and the way consumers interact with that industry.

Today, insurance is one of the remaining financial sectors that has yet to see the same kind of impact from all of the technological advances of the last two decades. Understanding of insurance remains low amongst consumers, every process from discovery to application to claims remains arduously manual and opaque, and incumbents in an inherently risk-averse industry have been unsuccessful in changing the status quo.

For many of our most valuable possessions, a service that protects against theft, damage, and loss is invaluable. However, the decoupling of the insurance-buying journey from the actual purchase of the item drives issues of discoverability, unclear coverages and processes, pricing and underwriting inefficiencies, and higher loss ratios, which all ultimately lead to a poor customer experience and widespread coverage gaps.

 

Introducing Oyster

Oyster was founded to solve these problems from first principles, bringing innovation to the P&C insurance industry through technology and underwriting.

Oyster’s omni-channel platform allows merchants to offer insurance to their customers at the point-of-sale. With a focus on point-of-sale underwriting, technology, and partnerships with retailers, we’re solving each of these issues while simultaneously helping customer-centric merchants offer better protection to their customers, open new revenue streams, and most importantly, provide a differentiated customer experience in an increasingly competitive market.

The new investment will propel the launch of our point-of-sale insurance platform and expand our merchant partnership network to make personal insurance accessible to more consumers at the point-of-sale. At the same time, we’re ensuring that personal property in any category can be covered by rolling out a comprehensive suite of insurance products that cover bikes, eBikes, jewelry, collectibles, phones, electronics and more.

Retailers such as Bulls Bikes, Jewels by Grace, Zooz Bikes, Bario Neal, Area 13 Ebikes, The New Wheel, and more rely on Oyster to provide a seamless insurance experience both online and in-store for their customers. But the journey for Oyster has just begun. We have a lot of challenging problems to solve, and if we can do so, an immense opportunity to change the way people interact with insurance.

The insurance industry is still in the early innings of digital transformation. As such, we’re accelerating the speed of innovation in order to provide the best-in-class products and services to our customers and partners. If you’re interested in building a future of insurance that is powered by technology and data, reach out to us and share your big ideas.

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Trilio Raises $17M and Appoints Massood Zarrabian as CEO

.406 Venture
FRAMINGHAM, Mass.—December 12, 2022—Trilio, a leading provider of cloud-native data protection, announced today that it has secured $17 million in funding to drive further innovation and growth in the cloud-native application resiliency market. The company also announced the appointment of enterprise software executive Massood Zarrabian as CEO. Zarrabian was formerly Chairman and CEO of BA Insight.
“Trilio is a trusted partner for organizations that are driving digital transformation leveraging cloud-native technologies,” said Massood Zarrabian, CEO of Trilio. “The company has established a leading position in the new growth category of Kubernetes with unique application resiliency technology, strong partnerships and a passionate team. Our goal is to leverage those resources to help customers meet their mandates for multi-cloud application mobility, ransomware protection and compliance with disaster recovery protocols. We’re pleased to have the continued confidence of SKK Ventures and added support from leading innovators such as Telefonica and T-Mobile, who are also valued customers.”The company will leverage the capital to increase focus on product development, engineering and customer operations. The additional funding is part of the company’s Series B round and was led by SKK Ventures with participation from T-Mobile Ventures, Wayra Telefónica Innovation, Raiven Capital, Genesis Accel, .406 Ventures and Jack Egan. This brings Trilio’s total capital raised to $36M million.

In his most recent role, Zarrabian led BA Insight’s transformation and growth into a multi-platform enterprise search software company leading to its acquisition by Upland in 2022. Prior to BA Insight, Zarrabian was President and CEO of OutStart where he established the company as a market leader with hundreds of customers. He also served as President of the eService Division of Broadbase Software, a leading provider of eCRM solutions.

David Safaii, who has been CEO since 2014, has transitioned to the role of Executive Chairman of the Board, focusing on the strategic needs of the organization, including corporate and business development.

“Trilio has earned notable success under David’s leadership, including building brand awareness, a strong team of dedicated professionals, and a roster of Tier 1 enterprise-class customers from around the world. His expertise will play a vital role going forward as the executive chairman,” said Rob Scott, Member of the Trilio Board of Directors.

Scott continued, “We’re equally excited to bring on Massood Zarrabian as CEO. Massood is a seasoned operator with experience in driving and scaling software companies like Trilio to the next level. Massood’s track record of building teams, culture, and outcomes makes him a great fit for our organization as we move forward into this next chapter.”

Additionally, the company announced Christina Lattuca as CFO and VP of Operations. Lattuca joins Trilio to lead the company’s finance, accounting, business intelligence, legal and human resources functions. She was most recently CFO of Cygilant, a leading provider of cybersecurity-as-a-service, prior to its acquisition by SilverSky. She has more than 25 years of financial management expertise developing and implementing financial planning, controls, and reporting for international high-tech companies.

Investor Quotes

Stephen Brackett, President and Managing Member of SKK

“SKK believes in the Trilio mission, and we are encouraged by the company’s continued progress in the fast-growing market for cloud-native application resiliency. The growth in the company’s technology and partner ecosystem is a strong indicator of how the leadership team has elevated the Trilio brand as both a technology innovator and a trusted go-to-market partner.”

Jeff Pellegrini, VP of Investments, T-Mobile Ventures

“Our enthusiasm for Trilio’s technology, product and customer-centric approach is driven not just by the due diligence of an investor but by the intensive research of a customer. T-Mobile did an extensive investigation of the players in this space before selecting TrilioVault as its cloud-native application resiliency service. As a result, we became convinced that backing the company strategically was the right move. We’re happy to participate in this funding round and support the company’s next phase of innovation and growth.”

TrilioVault for Kubernetes is a leading cloud-native data protection platform helping organizations migrate to new cloud infrastructure, recover quickly from ransomware attacks and comply with disaster recovery mandates. Trilio is well positioned to capitalize on a rapidly growing market for cloud-native management solutions. According to IDC, 70% of all net-new apps in production will be cloud-native by 2024, up from just 10% in 2020. This momentous shift to containerized applications means enterprises need robust and reliable data protection for Kubernetes-based applications.

Recent Milestones

About Trilio

Trilio is a leader in cloud-native data protection and management for applications using Kubernetes and OpenStack. Our TrilioVault technology is trusted by cloud architects and DevOps engineers for backup and recovery, migration, ransomware protection and application mobility. Customers in telecom, defense, automotive and financial services leverage TrilioVault to easily migrate to new cloud infrastructure, recover quickly from ransomware attacks and comply with disaster recovery protocols. Trilio.io, Twitter and LinkedIn.

# # #

Media Contact:
Robert Cathey
Cathey.co for Trilio
robert@cathey.com
+1 865-386-6118

Tags: Cloud Native, Continuous Restore, Data Management, Data Protection, Red Hat,

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Blume Ventures closes its Fourth Fund at upwards of $250 million to back visionary tech founders

Blume ventures

Blume Ventures, India’s leading homegrown venture fund has announced the close of its Fund IV at over $250million bringing the firm’s AUM to over $600 million. Blume focuses on early-stage, innovative technology-led startups. Blume backs entrepreneurs either building to solve large impactful Indian problems or taking the best of Indian innovation to global markets. The diverse mandate extends from edtech, fintech, health, commerce and consumer internet in the former to robotics and AI to SaaS and enterprise software in the latter category.  These themes have been consistent through Blume’s 12 years of existence.

Blume has received emphatic support from all its previous supporters. Blume’s Fund IV investors include some of India’s finest family offices, global family offices, sovereign wealth funds (India and overseas), and emerging market Fund of Funds. The oversubscription on the $200 million target and the support from both existing and new investors is a testament to the track record that continues to grow stronger.

Blume Fund IV will be managed by its 15+ member investment team led by Sajith Pai, Arpit Agarwal, Ashish Fafadia, Sanjay Nath and Karthik Reddy. Investing in 30-35 companies across different technology verticals, Blume will discover and nurture another generation of industry-defining companies built in this cycle.

 Blume was established in 2010 by Karthik Reddy and Sanjay Nath.  Blume is now over 35 professionals strong (outside of Constellation Blu and Metamorph, our two sister concerns), the leadership team has grown to 10, and they collectively grow and mentor a roster of young emerging stars on the team.

Sanjay Nath added, “We are grateful to our anchor supporters and new believers who have emphatically backed Blume IV. Whether building domestically or for global markets, the best founders and LPs would like to work with a Fund that can be considered world-class, which has spurred us to keep institutionalizing and bolstering our platform, team and capabilities. Thanks to an increasing reality of IPO and M&A exits, there is a resurgence of 2x founders and operators, as well as higher quality first-time founders. We’re excited for Blume to become the preferred seed partner of choice for both categories.”

Some key milestones:

  • Launched as a “Superangel” fund in 2011, Blume raised $20 million in Fund I and invested in over 60 startups, pioneering the idea of home-grown micro VCs, with domestic investor participation playing an important role in each of its funds. The first fund vintage has many winners that are incredibly stable after a decade of persistence. These include Purplle, Grey Orange, Turtlemint, Carbon Clean, Exotel, Cashify, Zopper, Webengage, and IDfy.

  • Blume raised successor Funds in 2015-16 and 2018-19, growing to a $60 million Fund II and a $102 million Fund III, maturing into a fund with increased reserves to deploy into the best breakout companies. The Blume stars born from the 2015 to 2020 era are Unacademy, Slice, Spinny, dunzo, Classplus, Servify, Lambdatest, Koo, Locus, Healthifyme, smallcase, Euler, Jai Kisan and Pixxel, amongst others.

The strength of the platform makes Blume an ideal partner in the founders’ journey, bringing value far beyond the capital in the bank. Some of these platform value additions are powered by Capital and Market Networks teams, the depth of reserves between its own funds and its diverse set of vibrant LPs, and the platform partners in Constellation (finance and legal) and MetaMorph (talent).

Blume is also a market leader in emerging market segments where technology shapes new business models or disrupts older ones. It has dozens of category creators or category winners in its portfolio across its three fund portfolios: Grey Orange and Carbon Clean in deep tech; Slice, Turtlemint and Smallcase in Fintech; Exotel and Lambdatest in Software; Unacademy and Classplus in Edtech; Purplle and dunzo in commerce; Healthifyme, BeatO and Tricog in Healthtech; Euler, Yulu and BatterySmart in EV Mobility.

Blume manages Continuity funds in addition to the above funds. These include secondary funds (Fund I winners), opportunity funds (Fund I and II winners) and SPVs.

Shivkumar Ganesan, CEO and co-founder of Exotel, endorses this full stack and deeper approach from Blume in their journey. “Blume has been a great partner for us. They were the first ones to bet on us and continued to do so through thick and thin! Without their support, I cannot imagine Exotel to have become the company it is today.”

Manish Taneja, CEO and co-founder of Purplle, exemplifies what is now a classic Blume relationship. “My relationship with Blume Ventures dates back to 2010-11, when Karthik and Sanjay were raising their first fund. Blume invested in Purplle in 2013 and has been a strong partner for us ever since. Ashish (our Board Member from Blume), has been on our Board since 2013 and has played a key role in guiding us, helping us with Board dynamics and also introducing us to key future investors. Blume is truly a founder’s first VC and Blume’s partners are best in class. I wish Blume a lot of success and I also wish more firms get access to Blume’s capital.”

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HYPR, the Leader in Phishing-Resistant MFA, Raises $25M

.406 Venture

NEW YORK, NY – December 1, 2022 — HYPR, the Passwordless Company, today announced a $25 million Series C1 led by Advent International through Advent Tech, the firm’s dedicated global technology fund. The investment brings HYPR’s total funds raised to $97 million and includes participation from existing investors including .406 Ventures, RRE Ventures, Top Tier Capital, and Comcast Ventures. The new injection of capital will be used to expand HYPR’s go-to-market strategy and R&D efforts and to accelerate its mission Fix the Way the World Logs In.

Recent HYPR research revealed that 89% of organizations experienced at least one phishing attack within the past year at an average cost of $2.19M. Legacy authentication solutions have failed to keep pace with the industrial-grade tooling easily available to attackers. In response, industry officials, including CISA, have urgently advised organizations to eliminate passwords and adopt phishing-resistant MFA such as HYPR’s passwordless solution.

“Passwords and Legacy MFA solutions that are supposed to keep organizations safe are actually putting them at tremendous risk, “ said Bojan Simic, CEO of HYPR.  “These outdated technologies make organizations an easy target for hackers using readily-available online tools to automate and scale attacks. Furthermore, the user experience with these legacy methods is so frustrating that users bypass the security controls, which gives hackers further vulnerabilities to exploit.  The new investments will advance our efforts to help organizations keep their employees and customers safe while significantly reducing the astronomical costs of passwords.”

HYPR is a pioneer in passwordless authentication and has demonstrated tremendous momentum over the past 24 months.  HYPR’s solution offers a consistent passwordless authentication experience regardless of the heterogeneity of a customer’s infrastructure. Enterprises who have deployed HYPR’s phishing-resistant MFA on a worldwide basis include 2 of the 4 largest US banks, Fortune 500 manufacturing conglomerates, and global insurance providers.

“As a Fintech institution, we face an increasingly complicated threat landscape,” said Dawn Watters, SVP of Identity & Data Protection at Fiserv.  “We selected HYPR for the completeness of their passwordless authentication solution and the overall user experience. Working with HYPR will significantly reduce our exposure to phishing attacks and improve our overall enterprise security while using the latest FIDO standards.”

HYPR is deploying passwordless solutions to hundreds of thousands workforce users per quarter while also rapidly enabling the adoption of passwordless technologies in the consumer identity space.

“The HYPR team has built one of the most significant phishing-resistant MFA solutions that is deployed at scale globally,” said Eric Noeth, Partner at Advent International. “The growing deployment momentum demonstrates HYPR’s ability to give organizations a proven passwordless alternative to replace failing systems based on the password. We continue to be impressed by the pace of HYPR’s innovation and leadership in the passwordless authentication space and we’re excited to continue our partnership with the HYPR team in this next phase of their journey.”

HYPR’s market leadership has grown based on the company’s early adoption of the FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) standard, which has garnered broad industry acceptance.  Earlier this year, platform leaders including Google, Apple and Microsoft committed to expand their support of the FIDO standards to accelerate the availability of passwordless logins.

“HYPR has been a long-time supporter of the FIDO Alliance, and their FIDO Certified products have underpinned some of the industry’s flagship FIDO implementations with leading enterprises around the world,” said Andrew Shikiar, Executive Director and CMO of the FIDO Alliance.  “As a member of FIDO’s Board of Directors for the past five years, HYPR has played a critical role in developing and advancing the FIDO standards – working alongside other leading companies in the Alliance to fulfill our collective mission of reducing reliance on passwords in favor of simpler, stronger user authentication.”

About HYPR

HYPR fixes the way the world logs in. HYPR’s True Passwordless™ MFA platform decouples authentication from the organization’s identity providers and eliminates the traditional trade-off between security and user experience by providing uncompromising assurance and consumer-grade experience. By eliminating the password and deployments taking hours rather than weeks or months, organizations decrease the risk of a cyber attack, increase positive user experience, and lower operational costs.

Welcome to The Passwordless Company®. Additional information is available at https://www.hypr.com

About Advent International

Founded in 1984, Advent International is one of the largest and most experienced global private equity investors. The firm has invested in over 400 private equity investments across 41 countries, and as of June 30, 2022, had $96 billion in assets under management. With 15 offices in 12 countries, Advent has established a globally integrated team of over 285 private equity investment professionals across North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia. The firm focuses on investments in five core sectors, including business and financial services; health care; industrial; retail, consumer and leisure; and technology. For over 35 years, Advent has been dedicated to international investing and remains committed to partnering with management teams to deliver sustained revenue and earnings growth for its portfolio companies.

For more information, visit

Website: www.adventinternational.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/advent-international

Contact

Carol Dullmeyer
Vice President, Brand and Corporate Communications
carol.dullmeyer@hypr.com

Sophia Templin or Amanda Muccio
FGS Global for Advent International
AdventInternational-US@fgsglobal.com

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ZS and Abacus Insights Announce Partnership To Bring Innovative Data and Analytics Solutions to Health Plans

.406 Venture

EVANSTON, Ill. and BOSTON, Mass. – November 29, 2022 –  As ZS continues to help health plans evolve and transform, the firm announced today an investment in and partnership with Abacus Insights, a healthcare technology leader with a groundbreaking offering in data usability that rapidly accelerates the achievement of key health plan goals including efficiency, equity, health services and member outcomes.

“At ZS, we believe the future of healthcare is connected, with providers, health plans, pharma companies and other stakeholders working together,” said ZS CEO Pratap Khedkar. “Usable data from Abacus Insights is a key enabler and connecter, and we take seriously our role in helping health plans innovate and excel. Partnerships like this one between ZS and Abacus Insights will be increasingly important in a connected health ecosystem.”

Abacus Insights offers the capability to consolidate and clean billions of pieces of structured and unstructured data from payers, providers, labs, digital apps and many more sources, providing end users with complete, current and accurate data sets that drive both operational and analytical uses. Through this partnership, health plans working with ZS gain access to usable data and a full suite of analytics and digital tools, unlocking insights from sales to operations to health outcomes and accelerating a path to decisions and actions.

“Abacus Insights is proud to have the support of ZS both as an investor and partner. ZS recognizes that data usability is a game-changer in creating and scaling big performance advances for health plans,” said Minal Patel, Abacus Insights CEO. “Our companies share a common purpose to improve healthcare. Our combined health plan-specific expertise will accelerate our ability to help clients achieve their key transformational goals of better serving their members and leading healthcare change.”

Usable data from Abacus Insights is already powering better quality reporting, more accurate risk adjustment and improved value-based contracting, care and payments. ZS Managing Principal Adam Siskind, who leads the firm’s health plan and provider vertical, said the partnership aims to help unlock use cases that health plans can leverage to fully realize the benefits of their analytics transformations.

“There is no shortage of health plan challenges to solve, and it seems there is never enough capacity to unravel them. Our partnership with Abacus Insights will help our clients access the solutions they need to not only reach their goals but to do so efficiently and with scale,” Siskind said. “At ZS, we are proud to be the leading firm at the intersection of healthcare and analytics, so it only made sense to join forces with Abacus Insights, a company already recognized as the leader in health plan data usability in the U.S. Our combined capabilities allow us to achieve a new level of impact that all of our health plan clients seek—and all of their members deserve.”

About ZS

ZS is a management consulting and technology firm focused on transforming global healthcare and beyond. We leverage our leading-edge analytics, plus the power of data, science and products to help our clients make more intelligent decisions, deliver innovative solutions and improve outcomes for all. Founded in 1983, ZS has more than 12,000 employees in 35 offices worldwide. To learn more, visit www.zs.com.

About Abacus Insights

Abacus Insights is a healthcare technology leader with the only data transformation platform and solutions built specifically for health plans. Focused on data quality and usefulness, Abacus Insights gives payers a new level of control and flexibility with their data by developing accurate, timely, and robust ecosystems that can support any analytics or other applications. Managing data for 21 million members, Abacus Insights partners with payers to deliver scalable solutions that drive strategic initiatives, control costs, and improve member lives and experiences.

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Openbravo joins DL Software

Adara

We are delighted to share that Adara portfolio company, Openbravo, is joining DL Software, a leading France-based group of vertical software providers, as part of its ambitious path to internationalize its business footprint.

Founded in 2001 in Pamplona, Spain, Openbravo helps brands and retailers looking to accelerate their unified commerce strategy and increase the agility of their operations. The fully-modular platform integrates online and offline channels, provides intelligent order management, real-time views of customers and inventory, and a complete store solution to deliver more personalized experiences.

Openbravo’s all-in-one cloud-based solution is used by international companies such as Decathlon, Flunch, Norauto, Sharaf DG, BUT, Toys ‘R’ Us Iberia, and Zôdio – reaching over 50 countries and more than 10,000 back office users and 40,000 customer touchpoints, such as point of sale and self-service terminals, kiosks, and others.

The acquisition is part of DL Software’s pan-European growth strategy to position itself as an international specialist in multi-sector vertical software.

“We are extremely excited to become part of a larger company ready to help us accelerate on our growth strategy. DL Software has an excellent reputation, and this acquisition represents an important recognition of our solutions, the team, and our achievements to date,” said Marco de Vries, CEO of Openbravo.

“This will help us take our business to the next level and that will benefit our existing and future employees, customers, and partners. I would also like to thank, in the name of all our employees, our previous shareholders Amadeus Capital, Adara Ventures and SODENA, for their fantastic support and guidance over the past years.”

We wish the entire Openbravo team the best as they start this new chapter!

Learn more here: https://www.prnewswire.com/in/news-releases/openbravo-announces-its-acquisition-by-leading-french-group-dl-software-822078251.html 

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