Vital Software comes out of stealth to make ER visits less terrible

After two years operating in stealth, Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer’s new startup Vital Software is open for business.

Patzer made the announcement Wednesday while on the Next Stage at Disrupt SF.

Patzer’s company, which he co-founded with Dr. Justin Schrager of Emory University, is an enterprise software business that aims to make emergency rooms visits easier and more efficient for patients and doctors. The company is tackling the ER experience first and sees opportunity for the software in a hospital or health care faiclity, Patzer said.

“It’s a terrible experience, and not just because of the emergency,” Patzer said while on stage.

The software features an easy patient check-in system and uses AI natural language processing to find out more from the incoming patient. The system is dynamic, meaning it can ask follow up questions to the incoming patient to gather more information. By the time nurses see the patient, they’re already equipped with the information they need. The software also provides updates to the patient, such as possible wait times.

The idea is to give doctors and nurses software that is useable, Patzer said, noting that software found in hospitals is outdated. “It’s literally Windows 98 software.”

The company is self-funded, although Patzer noted off stage that they plan to raise funds next year. The company has one customer, a large hospital system he couldn’t name, that is now trialing the software.

In his view, software is constant need for disruption. His timeline: about every 10 years. That just happens to put Mint.com, he said, in a spot ripe disruption.

German mobility startup Wunder Mobility raises $30M Series B

Wunder Mobility, the Hamburg-based startup that provides a range of mobility services, from carpooling to electric scooter rentals, has raised $30 million in Series B funding. The round was led by KCK Group, with participation from previous backer Blumberg Capital and other non-disclosed investors.

The German company says the investment will be used to expand the company’s engineering team in its home country and to establish an international B2B sales organisation. Currently, Wunder Mobility has 70 employees working from four offices in Asia, Germany, and South America. The aim is to add another 100 employees over the next twelve months in the areas of product development and B2B sales.

Founded in Hamburg in 2014, but now with an international focus, including emerging markets, Wunder Mobility supplies software, hardware, and operational services for various “future-oriented” mobility concepts. These span smart shuttles, fleet management and carpooling, reaching more than two million users in a dozen countries, including France, Germany, Spain, Brazil, India, and the Philippines.

“We are enabling communities on four continents to address the global traffic challenge and to deploy more sustainable mobility options faster by hosting a full-stack urban mobility tech platform,” explains founder and CEO Gunnar Froh.

“Our three product lines either allow private people to share empty seats with people headed in the same direction (Wunder Carpool), match professional drivers with passengers in 6-10 seater vans (Wunder Shuttle), or give travellers the option to rent vehicles (electric scooters, cars) by the minute (Wunder Fleet)”.

In recent months, transport companies as well as customers from the automotive industry in Japan, Europe and America have committed to using Wunder technology. The company is already processing around one million trips per month worldwide.

To that end, Froh describes Wunder Mobility’s typical B2C customers as the emerging middle class in mega cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Manila or Dehli.

“Many of these customers commute to work every day for several hours, are often first-time car owners and are open to sharing empty seats in their cars in order save on gas and car expenses,” he says.

On the B2B side, the startup’s customers are large OEMs, and public transit companies or suppliers, such as the Japanese conglomerate Marubeni. “We are working with Marubeni on ambitious new mobility services worldwide,” adds Froh.

Meanwhile, Wunder Mobility’s competitors are cited as Via in New York on the shuttle side. In Europe it perhaps competes most directly with Berlin’s Door2Door, and Vulog in Paris.

Thoma Bravo buys majority stake in Apttus in unexpected ending

Apttus, a quote-to-cash vendor built on top of the Salesforce platform that looked to be heading toward an IPO in recent years has taken a different tack, instead being acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo today.

The company did not reveal the purchase price, but said it could be ready to share more details about the arrangement after the deal closes, probably next month. “What we can say is that Apttus views this development positively and believes Thoma Bravo can instill greater operational excellence, strengthen our market leadership and allow us to continue providing indispensable value to our customers,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.

They are describing this not as a full on acquisition, but as ‘taking a majority stake’. However you describe it, it probably wasn’t the ending the company envisioned after taking $404 million in investment since launching in 2006, one of the earliest startups to build a business on top of the Salesforce platform.

If the company believed that Salesforce would eventually buy it, that never happened. In fact, that dream probably went out the window when Salesforce bought SteelBrick, a similar company also built on Salesforce, at the end of 2015 for $360 million.

In spite of this, in an interview in 2016, CEO Kirk Krappe still was confident that an exit was coming, either by IPO or a possibly a Salesforce acquisition.

“We will be IPOing this year. That may be a function to figure what Salesforce wants to do and they may think about that [after purchasing SteelBrick at the end of last year]. There’s no reason they can’t buy us too. For me, I have to run the business, and we’re growing 100 percent year on year. If Salesforce came to the table, that would be great if the numbers work. If not, we have an amazingly strong business,” he said at the time.

That never came to pass of course, and the company tried to separate itself from Salesforce in April of 2016 when it released a version of Apttus that would work on Microsoft Dynamics. Krappe saw this as a way to show investors he wasn’t completely married to the Salesforce platform.

While Salesforce provided a system of record around the customer information and all that involved, once the salesperson actually closed in on a sale, that’s when software like Apttus came into play, allowing the company to generate a detailed proposal, a contract once the deal was agreed upon and finally collecting and recording the money from the sale.

Apttus took its last funding rounds in Sept 2017 for $55 million and later a debt financing round for another $75 million in February this year, according to data on Crunchbase.

Thoma Bravo has bought a number of enterprise software products over the years including Qlik, Sailpoint, Dynatrace, Solar Winds and others. Apttus should fit in well with that family of companies.

Atlassian launches Jira Ops for managing incidents

Atlassian today announced the first beta of a new edition of its flagship Jira project and issue tracking tool that is meant to help ops teams handle incidents faster and more efficiently.

Jira Ops integrates with tools like OpsGenie, PagerDuty, xMatters, Statuspage, Slack and others. Many teams already use these tools when their services go down, but Atlassian argues that most companies currently use a rather ad hoc approach to working with them. Jira Ops aims to be the glue that keeps everybody on the same page and provides visibility into ongoing incidents.

This is obviously not the first time Atlassian is using Jira to branch out from its core developer audience. Jira Service Desk and Jira Core, for example, aim at a far broader audience. Ops, however, goes after a very specific vertical.

“Service Desk was the first step,” Jens Schumacher, Head of Software Teams at Atlassian, told me. And we were looking at what are the other verticals that we can attack with Jira.” Schumacher also noted that Atlassian built a lot of tools for its internal ops teams over the years to glue together all the different pieces that are necessary to track and manage incidents. With Jira Ops, the company is essentially turning its own playbook into a product.

In a way, though, using Jira Ops adds yet another piece to the puzzle. Schumacher, however, argues that the idea here is to have a single place to manage the process. “The is that when an incident happens, you have a central place where you can go, where you can find out everything about the incident,” he said. “You can see who has been paged and alerted; you can alert more people if you need to right from there; you know what Slack channel the incident is being discussed in.”

Unlike some of Atlassian’s other products, the company doesn’t currently have any plans to launch a self-hosted version of Jira Ops. The argument here is pretty straightforward: if your infrastructure goes down, then Jira Opes could also go do down — and then you don’t have a tool for managing that downtime.

Jira Ops is now available for free for early access beta users. The company expects to launch version 1.0 in early 2019. By then Atlassian will surely also have figured out a pricing plan, something it didn’t announce today.

Encrypted cloud storage and collaboration company Tresorit secures €11.5M Series B

Tresorit, the Swiss-Hungarian company that provides end-to-end encrypted “file sync and sharing” for businesses, has closed €11.5 million in Series B financing. The round is led by European growth capital investor 3TS Capital Partners, alongside PortfoLion, a Central European venture capital.

A number of existing investors also participated, such as Andreas Kemi, an early investor in LogMeIn and co-founder of Scala Business Solutions, and Márton Anka, founder of LogMeIn. I also understand the round included some secondary funding, meaning not all of the cash has entered Tresorit’s balance sheet.

Operating in the enterprise cloud storage and collaboration market, Tresorit provides what it describes as zero-knowledge encryption technology and unique encryption key management. The high level pitch is that the company is able to offer on-premise equivalent security for businesses while offering the type of simple user experience we have come to expect in consumer apps. It serves more than 17,000 customers and says it has grown recurring revenue by an average of 3x every year in the last three years.

Meanwhile, Tresorit will use the new Series B funding to further accelerate this growth by tapping into what it says is rising demand for secure cloud solutions, in light of a plethora of high profiles security breaches seen at major enterprises in recent years. This will include beefing up its management team with the aim of scaling up marketing and sales, and establishing new channel partners.

“We are at an inflection point with our business as awareness regarding data protection and cybersecurity threats is getting stronger and demand is set to grow exponentially for our service in and outside of Europe,” says Tresorit founder and CEO Istvan Lam.

He also says there is large market potential in channeling traditional IT expenditure into the cloud, citing a recent Deloitte survey indicating that traditional IT expenditure still accounts for two-thirds of all IT spending, while only one-third goes towards IT-as-a-service.

“Many enterprises are holding back from migrating to the cloud due to security and privacy concerns. With security guaranteed by end-to-end encryption, more businesses can and will choose Tresorit’s cloud solution,” adds Lam.

To that end, Tresorit recently launched a Beta version of “Tresorit Send,” a standalone file sharing product that offers a secure and encrypted alternative to unreliable file transfer sites and email attachments. The idea, presumably, is for the product to act as a shop window for the Tresorit user experience and the company’s broader end-to-end encryption offering.

Dropbox drops some enhancements to Paper collaboration layer

When you’re primarily a storage company with enterprise aspirations, as Dropbox is, you need a layer to to help people use the content in your system beyond simple file sharing. That’s why Dropbox created Paper, to act as that missing collaboration layer. They announced some enhancements to Paper to keep people working in their collaboration tool without having to switch programs.

“Paper is Dropbox’s collaborative workspace for teams. It includes features where users can work together, assign owners to tasks with due dates and embed rich content like video, sound, photos from Youtube, SoundCloud, Pinterest and others,” a Dropbox spokesperson told TechCrunch.

With today’s enhancements you can paste a number of elements into Paper and get live previews. For starters, they are letting you link to a Dropbox folder in Paper, where you can view the files inside the folder, even navigating any sub-folders. When the documents in the folder change, Paper updates the preview automatically because the folder is actually a live link to the Dropbox folder. This one seems like a table stakes feature for a company like Dropbox.

Gif: Dropbox

In addition, Dropbox now supports Airtables, a kind of souped up spreadsheet. With the new enhancement, you just grab an Airtable embed code and drop it into Paper. From there, you can see a preview in whatever Airtable view you’ve saved the table.

Finally, Paper now supports LucidCharts. As with Airtables and folders, you simply paste the link and you can see a live preview inside Paper. If the original chart changes, updates are reflected automatically in the Paper preview.

By now, it’s clear that workers want to maintain focus and not be constantly switching between programs. It’s why Box created the recently announced Activity Stream and Recommended Apps. It’s why Slack has become so popular inside enterprises. These tools provide a way to share content from different enterprise apps without having to open a bunch of tabs or separate apps.

Dropbox Paper is also about giving workers a central place to do their work where you can pull live content previews from different apps without having to work in a bunch of content silos. Dropbox is trying to push that idea along for its enterprise customers with today’s enhancements.

Amazon is quietly doubling down on cryptographic security

The growth of cloud services — with on-demand access to IT services over the Internet — has become one of the biggest evolutions in enterprise technology, but with it, so has the threat of security breaches and other cybercriminal activity. Now it appears that one of the leading companies in cloud services is looking for more ways to double down and fight the latter. Amazon’s AWS has been working on a range of new cryptographic and AI-based tools to help manage the security around cloud-based enterprise services, and it currently has over 130 vacancies for engineers with cryptography skills to help build and run it all.

One significant part of the work has been within a division of AWS called the Automated Reasoning Group, which focuses on identifying security issues and developing new tools to fix them for AWS and its customers based on automated reasoning, a branch of artificial intelligence that covers both computer science and mathematical logic and is aimed at helping computers automatically reason completely or nearly completely.

In recent times, Amazon has registered two new trademarks, Quivela and SideTrail, both of which have connections to ARG.

Classified in its patent application as “computer software for cryptographic protocol specification and verification,” Quivela also has a Github repository within AWS Labs’ profile that describes it as a “prototype tool for proving the security of cryptographic protocols,” developed by the AWS Automated Reasoning Group. (The ARG also has as part of its mission to share code and ideas with the community.)

SideTrail is not on Github, but Byron Cook, an academic who is the founder and director of the AWS Automated Reasoning Group, has co-authored a research paper called “SideTrail: Verifying the Time Balancing of Cryptosystems.” However, the link to the paper, describing what this is about, is no longer working.

The trademark application for SideTrail includes a long list of potential applications (as trademark applications often do). The general idea is cryptography-based security services. Among them: “Computer software, namely, software for monitoring, identifying, tracking, logging, analyzing, verifying, and profiling the health and security of cryptosystems; network encryption software; computer network security software,” “Providing access to hosted operating systems and computer applications through the Internet,” and a smattering of consulting potential: “Consultation in the field of cloud computing; research and development in the field of security and encryption for cryptosystems; research and development in the field of software; research and development in the field of information technology; computer systems analysis.”

Added to this, in July, a customer of AWS started testing out two other new cryptographic tools developed by the ARG also for improving an organization’s cybersecurity. Tiros and Zelkova, as the two tools are called, are math-based techniques that variously evaluate access control schemes, security configurations and feedback based on different setups to help troubleshoot and prove the effectiveness of security systems across storage (S3) buckets.

Amazon has not trademarked Tiros and Zelkova. A Zelkova trademark, for financial services, appears to be registered as an LLC called “Zelkova Acquisition” in Las Vegas, while there is no active trademark listed for Tiros.

Amazon declined to respond to our questions about the trademarks. A selection of people we contacted associated with the projects did not respond to requests for comment.

More generally, cryptography is a central part of how IT services are secured: Amazon’s Automated Reasoning Group has been around since 2014 working in this area. But Amazon appears to be doing more now both to ramp up the tools it produces and consider how it can be applied across the wider business. A quick look on open vacancies at the company shows that there are currently 132 openings at Amazon for people with cryptography skills.

“Cloud is the new computer, the Earth is the motherboard and data centers are the cards,” Cook said in a lecture he delivered recently describing AWS and the work that the ARG is doing to help AWS grow. “The challenge is that as [AWS] scales it needs to be ever more secure… How does AWS continue to scale quickly and securely?

“AWS has made a big bet on our community,” he continued, as one answer to that question. That’s led to an expansion of the group’s activities in areas like formal verification and beyond, as a way of working with customers and encouraging them to move more data to the cloud.

Amazon is also making some key acquisitions also to build up its cloud security footprint, such as Sqrrl and Harvest.ai, two AI-based security startups whose founding teams both happen to have worked at the NSA.

Amazon’s AWS division pulled in over $6 billion in revenues last quarter with $1.6 billion in operating income, a healthy margin that underscores the shift that businesses and other organizations are making to cloud-based services.

Security is an essential component of how that business will continue to grow for Amazon and the wider industry: more trust in the infrastructure, and more proofs that cloud architectures can work better than using and scaling the legacy systems that businesses use today, will bolster the business. And it’s also essential, given the rise of breaches and ever more sophisticated cyber crimes. Gartner estimates that cloud-based security services will be a $6.9 billion market this year, rising to nearly $9 billion by 2020.

Automated tools that help human security specialists do their jobs better is an area that others like Microsoft are also eyeing up. Last year, it acquired Israeli security firm Hexadite, which offers remediation services to complement and bolster the work done by enterprise security specialists.