Jeff Wilkins, CEO of Motili, has turned $1 million of personal investment, along with his co-founder, into $80 million in revenue. Pretty capital-efficient, this entrepreneur’s journey! Sramana...

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African on-demand trucking logistics company Lori Systems has raised a Series A round led by Chinese investors Hillhouse Capital and Crystal Stream Capital.

Other participating investors included Nigeria and U.S.-based EchoVC, Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen and Nigerian founder Iyinoluwa Aboyeji.

Lori Systems is not disclosing the amount of the Series A. DealStreet Asia reported the round amount at $30 million earlier Friday, but Lori Systems’ CEO Josh Sandler would not confirm that. That figure was “something lost in translation” and “a mischaracterization of the raise,” he told TecCrunch on a call.

The company issued a clarification to initial reporting in a Medium post. On the reason for the non-disclosure, “Lori has never released fundraising details as we feel it is a vanity metric that distracts from what matters most: our mission of lowering the cost of goods in frontier markets,” Lori Systems co-founder Jean-Claude Homawoo told TechCrunch.

A recent Financial Times piece pegged Lori’s total funding raise at $20 million. In an SEC Form D filing in June Lori Systems issued $29 million in equity, though details weren’t given to which parties.

Founded in Kenya in 2016, the company provides mobile-based on-demand trucking logistics services through an Uber -like network of drivers and merchant partners. Lori Systems has operations in East Africa in Kenya and Uganda.

The company expanded to Nigeria in September 2019, where it faces a competitor in trucking logistics company Kobo360.

“We are using the round to ramp up operations, build up our technology, and hire a best in class team…that can drive a global revolutions in logistics,” Lori Systems CEO Josh Sandler said.

The company recently hired Nigerian Uche Ogboi from EchoVC to become its CFO and former Quona Capital associate Efayomi Carr.

Lori Systems won Startup Battlefield Africa in 2017.

Bumble, the popular and profitable dating and networking app built around the ethos of women calling the shots on how connections get made and developed, has made a deal for some independence of its own, and its founder, Whitney Wolfe Herd, is coming out of it as CEO of an even bigger dating empire.

Andrey Andreev, the founder of Badoo, the controversial London-based company that owns a series of dating apps and was the main backer and builder of Bumble, is selling his entire stake in MagicLab, the company that owned both Bumble and Badoo (and other dating apps), to Blackstone. He will step away from the business in the process, and Wolfe Herd, Bumble’s founder, becomes the CEO of the whole company, retaining much of her stake in the business in the process. We understand that stake is at about 19%.

The deal values Bumble and the wider business — which is profitable — at $3 billion.

Blackstone also will be making an investment in the company as part of the deal.

“This transaction is an incredibly important and exciting moment for Bumble and the MagicLab group of brands and team members. Blackstone is world-class at maximizing the success of entrepreneur-led companies, which presents a tremendous opportunity. We are very excited to build the next chapter with them,” said Wolfe Herd in a statement. “I am honored to take on the role of CEO of the group. I will strive to lead the group with a continued values-based and mission-first focus, the same one that has been core to Bumble since I founded the company five years ago. We will keep working towards our goal of recalibrating gender norms and empowering people to connect globally, and now at a much faster pace with our new partner.”

Bumble is consistently in the top 10 of lifestyle apps in the U.S., according to App Annie data. The WSJ reports that Bumble now has some 75 million users, although Apptopia’s figures are a little more conservative: it notes that aggregated, lifetime downloads of Bumble are about 52 million, while lifetime in-app purchase revenue is about $335 million. March 2019 was its best month ever for IAP revenue with $14.1 million, and over the past six months, Bumble has averaged 1.5 million downloads per month, Apptopia’s Adam Blacker told TechCrunch. (The download figure doesn’t include web-based signups.)

But while Bumble has been growing at a healthy clip — in addition to being profitable, MagicLab had revenue growth of 40% annually — the transaction caps off a tumultuous time at the corporate level for the company.

Almost exactly a year ago, Andrey Andreev had been talking about a future IPO for Badoo in the U.S., listing on Nasdaq. The bigger company at the time also included the eponymous Badoo app, which itself now has 450 million users, as well as a number of others targeting more specific communities (for example, older people), and it was altogether expecting to make some $400 million in revenues in 2018.

Within that bigger picture, Bumble was easily the high-profile jewel in the crown, especially in the high-visibility market of the U.S., where Badoo had hoped to list.

Badoo prior to that had reportedly turned down a $450 million offer for Bumble from Match (some have reported that Match might have offered as much as $1 billion or more for it) — a strange twist in a long saga between the two. (In brief: Match is the company that owns Tinder and had been locked a series of different lawsuits with Bumble: Wolfe Herd had previously been a Tinder co-founder and left under acrimonious circumstances. Andreev had previously met Wolfe Herd and then approached her to start Bumble under his wing in the wake of that departure.)

While a bold IPO was an interesting prospect, things took a turn for the worse this summer, when an expose in Forbes painted a bleak picture of misogyny and sleaze at the parent company, headed by an eccentric and oblique leader — not the image that Bumble wanted to project, and definitely not the image that would have read well on Wall Street.

“We’re excited to invest in MagicLab, which is a pioneer in the fast-growing online dating industry. They have a highly talented team and strong set of platforms, including Bumble, which was built on a commitment to inclusion and female empowerment,” said Jon Korngold, head of Blackstone Growth (BXG), in a statement. “This partnership is a perfect example of Blackstone’s ability to use its scale, long-term investment horizon, and deep bench of operational resources to help entrepreneurs take advantage of transformational growth opportunities in order to create global industry leaders over time.”

As with Wolfe Herd and Blackstone, Andreev does not address this aspect of the story in his statement on the sale, focusing instead on making a good return on his investment to fuel building more apps ahead.

“Blackstone presented MagicLab with a great opportunity to further develop the brands and platform, and I am confident Blackstone will take MagicLab to the next level in terms of growth and expansion. I am incredibly proud of the company, and of how we have connected millions of people around the world,” he said. “At MagicLab, I have had the pleasure of working with some of the best and most talented entrepreneurs. My aim now is to ensure a smooth and successful transition before I embark on a new business venture in search of innovative leaders with new and exciting ideas. I am grateful for all the support of my partners and employees over the years as we couldn’t have gotten to this point without them. I wish MagicLab and Blackstone every success.”

Wolfe Herd defended Badoo and Andreev through the bad press, but now with the divestment, it seems that there was more at play with a bid to extricate Bumble out of that relationship.

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 465th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, November 14, 2019, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Francisco Jardim, Founding Partner, SP Ventures, a Brazilian firm focused on AgTech in Latin America. We learnt a lot about what’s happening in the...

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Last month, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) general partner Chris Dixon announced at TechCrunch Disrupt that the VC firm would run a free crypto startup school. And the company is officially launching its school today. Applications are now open and you have four weeks to apply.

With this initiative, a16z wants to democratize cryptocurrencies. Dixon and the a16z team has been involved in the cryptocurrency/blockchain space for seven years, and the firm now wants to share some of its learnings with entrepreneurs.

This way, it could give a boost to the crypto community, which could create investment opportunities for a16z down the road — a16z says clearly that participating in the crypto startup school doesn’t mean you’ll receive an investment from a16z. It also positions a16z as a thoughtful investor when it comes to crypto startup investments — not just for participants of the crypto startup school but for the crypto community at large.

The a16z Crypto Startup School will be a seven-week program that starts February 21, 2020. The program is free and a16z doesn’t take any equity.

Lectures will take place in Menlo Park, so you have to be based in Silicon Valley or willing to spend a couple of months there. And because a16z knows that it can be challenging to move to another country just to attend this program, the firm will also be recording all lectures. Anyone will be able to watch videos and download curriculum materials later.

Here’s a sneak peek of the course outline:

As you can, it’s a mix of lectures purely focused on cryptocurrencies as well as broader startup 101 lessons (fundraising, go-to-market strategy, etc.).

The program is looking for 20 to 25 teams, which should represent approximately 40 participants. You should have prior experience when it comes to building software products, but you don’t need to be a crytpo expert. Participants can expect 12 to 15 hours of lectures, workshops, mentorship and networking opportunities per week.

At the end of the course, participants will showcase a project idea or a prototype during a demo day.

Helpdesk automation service provider Zendesk (NYSE: ZEN) recently announced its third quarter results that surpassed market expectations. The company continues to invest in growing its market reach...

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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week we did something just a little bit new. Kate was in studio at TechCrunch’s SF HQ. Alex was in his dork cave in Providence. And we had a guest in the studio as well. We’ve done similar setups before, but never with video all around. So, welcome to a slightly new chapter in Equity’s production history (all praise to Chris for making it work, video will be out today on TechCrunch’s YouTube page).

Our guest this week was the excellent Sarah Smith from Bain Capital Ventures. Before she turned to writing checks, Smith worked for both Quora and Facebook. Her fun fact? She’s an avid and competitive player of board games.

First up we dug into one of Kate’s latest, a piece looking at the influencer space, venture investments into it and what’s next for the power of the Instagram-famous. She highlights startups like Influence, Cameo, Karat and more.

Next up, Deserve raised $50 million from Goldman Sachs, making the round something that was worth touching on. Later, Alex spoke with the company’s CEO and picked up more context, but what matters for today is that Deserve is doubling-down on its credit card fintech service, not doing what other companies that handle money are up to — namely, trying to become neobanks at high speed.

Speaking of which, why is every fintech or finservices startup becoming a bank? Partially because they can, partially because it can be lucrative and partially because, we found out, it’s a way to juice customers that they’ve already paid to acquire. Want to make your CAC expenses look more efficient? Stretch out that LTV!

And then we spent a minute on Uber’s results, which proved better than expected but wound up being poorly received.

Glad you guys came back for another episode, we’ll see you soon.

Sramana Mitra: What stage are you at? How many customers? What kind of adoption are you seeing and what are you hearing from the customers? Amos Stern: We have north of 70 enterprise customers. We...

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We get it. You’re deep in the weeds starting your startup, building your business, expanding your empire. Startuppers are frequently overworked, prone to procrastination and last-minute decision making.

We’re here to tell you today’s the last day you can score early bird savings to Disrupt Berlin 2019. The early bird deadline ends tonight at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Don’t pay more than necessary. Beat the deadline, and buy your early bird pass to Disrupt Berlin right now.

As usual, we have a great lineup of speakers, and you’ll learn from the best at Disrupt. Here are just a few examples of what’s on tap. For more detail, go study the Disrupt Berlin 2019 agenda.

Growing from a humble garage project into a global competitor may be possible, but easy? Not so much. Learn the fine art of scaling your startup from a panel of experts who’ve been to the mountaintop. You’ll hear from Holger Seim, founder and CEO of Blinkist, Karoli Hindriks, founder and CEO of Jobbatical and Sophie Alcorn, founding partner of Alcorn Immigration Law.

Brexit — the mere word strikes uncertainty in the hearts of U.K. and European startups. Talk about jangled nerves. We’ll hear three experts discuss decision making in the face of Brexit’s chaotic landscape. Investor Bindi Karia, founder Glenn Shoosmith and VC Volker Hirsch offer their unique perspectives on how to make the right decisions in the face of these obstacles.

If you’re into rapidly changing landscapes, don’t miss eToro’s Yoni Assia and Charlie Delingpole of ComplyAdvantage as they talk fintech. You’ll hear lessons they learned along the way and how today’s startups can change the future of finance.

Hiroki Takeuchi, GoCardless co-founder, CEO and fintech expert, has led the eight-year-old company to the point where it has a shot at becoming a global leader in direct debit payments. He’ll join us to talk about resilience and why he sees a big opportunity for B2B use cases.

There’s so much more to take in at Disrupt Berlin. What happens when you mix creativity and raw talent and then subject it to intense pressure? Head on over to the Extra Crunch Stage to watch the Hackathon finalists pitch products they designed, coded and created in 24 hours. Who will win the individual sponsored challenges and who will win $5,000 from TechCrunch editors for best overall hack?

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December, and you have just a few hours left to take advantage of early bird pricing. Buy your early bird pass before 11:59 p.m. (CEST) tonight and save up to €500.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Octopus Interactive, a startup bringing an interactive TV and ad experience into Uber and Lyft rides, has raised a $10.3 million funding round led by Sinclair Digital Group.

Backseat TVs mixing show snippets and commercials have become a common part of the taxi experience in New York City and elsewhere. Octopus is offering something of a more interactive version of this concept to rideshare drivers, who can use it to keep their passengers entertained and also earn extra money.

Octopus says it provides drivers with tablets that combine games (which can include cash prizes, and can also be sponsored), ride information (like maps and weather) and advertising in a 13-minute loop. Even if the passenger doesn’t win anything, this could help keep them occupied during a long ride, which could lead to higher driver ratings. And if the passenger isn’t interested, they can just mute the screen.

The company says it’s deploying technology to make the advertising smarter, for example with geofences to target ads or increase their frequency in a certain neighborhood, and by offering real-time analytics to advertisers. It also monitors the seat to confirm that there’s actually a passenger sitting there when an ad plays.

After launching in 2018, Octopus says it’s now reaching more than 3 million people each month across 10,000 screens in markets like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C. By working with Sinclair Digital Group — an affiliate of TV giant Sinclair — the startup can bring content from local TV stations onto the platform.

“What we see here is an untapped medium with a truly captive audience that is buckled in and looking to engage,” said Sinclair Executive Chairman David Smith in a statement. “We invested in Octopus because the team has successfully created an innovative and differentiated branding opportunity that we can help scale further.”

MathCapital, an investment firm partnered with programmatic advertising company MediaMath, also participated in the funding.

For entrepreneurs interested to meet and chat with Sramana Mitra in person, please join us for our bi-monthly and informal group meetups. If you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area or are just...

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Today’s 464th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, November 7, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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Today’s 464th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, November 7, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join....

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The property industry — covering people and businesses that invest in, build, purchase or rent and maintain property — is hugely fragmented when it comes both to data sources and the companies that work within it. Today, a New York-based startup that is building a database that helps bring all of that together is raising a round of growth funding to help it expand outside of the U.S.

Reonomy — a startup that ingests some 100 sources of data, including multiple public and proprietary data feeds and crowdsourced information, and then uses artificial intelligence to crunch it to provide market intelligence that is used by developers, investors, acquirers and anyone else who works in the area of commercial property (otherwise known as commercial real estate, CRE, ranging from buildings zoned for business through to multi-dwelling units, but not single private homes) — has closed a Series D round of $60 million.

Today, the company has more than 100,000 customers — with single customers sometimes covering multiple users — along with a database covering some 50 million properties, accounting for some 99% of the commercial inventory in the country. In all, the database also has 80 million companies, 300 million people (those affiliated with the properties), 38 million mortgages and 68 million property sales.

It’s also continuing to add more data sources: along with this round, Reonomy is announcing new partnerships with CoreLogic, Black Knight and Dun & Bradstreet.

The money comes from a mix of financial and strategic backers — underscoring both the company’s potential, and also the calibre of its current customers. Led by Georgian Partners, the funding also included Wells Fargo Strategic Capital and Citi Ventures (both Reonomy users, as part of its property financing activities), Untitled Investments and previous investors Sapphire Ventures, Bain Capital and Primary Venture Partners.

Reonomy is not disclosing its valuation, but Rich Sarkis, the founder and CEO, said that it is “definitely an up round.” The startup, founded in 2013, has raised $128 million to date, and according to PitchBook data, it was valued at $153 million post-money in its last round (in 2018). This likely means the valuation is well above $200 million now.

The expression “safe as houses” was born out of the idea that property is a strong bet, because the price eventually always goes up. But the wider development of the market in modern times has shown that it can be a significantly more volatile area — where arcane algorithms created by quants, a lot of greed and a dose of corruption and world economics can have much stronger impacts, resulting in huge booms and crushing busts of global proportions.

In that context, Reonomy positions itself both as a tool not just to get a better picture of what is going on now, but to better predict what might happen. Given the many disparate sources of information that are compiled into its bigger database, the pitch is that this is a must-have, but the alternative way to get it — building on your own — might otherwise require many man-hours and dollars of investment to achieve and understand.

While some database platforms require technical knowledge to shape and query, the idea here is to “lead users to the water” and make the proposition very non-technical.

The potential usefulness of Reonomy’s insights can have many endpoints, Sarkis said. While one obvious area is in sales, it’s also just as used in areas of research and more. Its customers include not just mortgage lenders and property acquirers, but those who work in the property industry in a more hands-on way, such as roofers who might want to get a list of buildings developed in a certain range of years as a way of building a list of leads for properties that might need a roof replacement.

“What our customers have in common is that they are looking for a solution to understand something about the property market,” he said. “We take the mess of data out there and make sense of it, whether the person using Reonomy is an investor or a roofer or someone that is underwriting loans.”

The company today, Sarkis said, covers about 99% of all commercial real estate in the U.S., and the plan is now to take that concept to international markets, including Canada, Asia, Australia and the U.K. and Europe, markets that are more similar to the U.S. than they are different, he added.

“Reonomy has developed a powerful platform to integrate and resolve sources of commercial real estate data into a single, unique identifier for every CRE asset in the United States,” said Emily Walsh, principal at Georgian Partners, in a statement. “This unique identifier is being leveraged by some of the largest enterprises in the world to tie together their public, proprietary and 3rd party data sources and to create a level of visibility into real estate assets that was previously unattainable.”

Aircam is a new startup that allows anyone to get instant access to pictures taken by professional photographers at weddings, parties and other events.

The company was founded by brothers Evan and Ryan Rifkin, who previously co-founded Burstly, the company behind mobile app-testing service TestFlight (which was acquired by Apple).

In addition to officially launching Aircam today, they’re also announcing that the company has raised $6.5 million in seed funding led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Comcast Ventures.

“The process of finding a great photographer still sucks and the tools photographers use to share photos are antiquated for an industry worth over $10 billion,” said Upfront Ventures Managing Partner Mark Suster in a statement. “Aircam provides real-time, location-aware and enhanced photos that today’s consumers expect with booking simplicity that will change the current playing field.”

The Rifkin brothers are pitching Aircam as “a real-time photo-sharing platform for professional and consumer photos.” To try out the technology, I visited the Aircam website and hit a button to see nearby photos. Then, as the Rifkins took photos with a DSLR camera, those photos appeared on the site nearly instantaneously. I, in turn, could send the photos to a printer in their office, or share photos from my phone.

Manufacturers already offer software to transfer photos wirelessly from their cameras to your computer. But with Aircam, the photos became accessible to everyone at an event, without requiring anyone except the photographer to install an app.

Ryan explained that the company is taking advantage of cameras’ Wi-Fi connections (it currently works with Canon, Nikon and Sony devices) to send the photos to an app on the photographer’s phone, which then uploads the photos to the cloud.

He also said the team initially believed that Aircam would become the repository for photos taken by everyone attending an event. But in early testing, they saw that “the opposite is happening — people are putting their phones away.”

In other words, once attendees realize that they have access to professional-quality photos, they can spend less time worrying about taking their own pictures with their phones and instead focus on being present at the event.

This should also make life easier for photographers, particularly since Aircam includes automated photo editing — the photos are color corrected (with nice touches like teeth whitening) without requiring any extra work from the photographer.

“If you ask photographers what’s their least favorite part of photography — one, it’s finding new business, and two, it’s the edits,” Ryan said. “Some people limit the number of events they’ll accept because of the editing work … With automatic edits, they shoot and they’re done.”

As for finding new business, Evan said that the company tested this out by allowing photographers to offer Aircam as an additional option for their customers. (The company charges the photographers $50 per event.)

But once customers had seen Aircam in action, they wanted to order it again, so Aircam is also launching its own marketplace (currently focused on Southern California) where you can book professional photographers for $99 per hour, with the Aircam service included as part of the package.

Or, if you want to try it out without hiring a pro photographer, you’ll be able to upload photos from your iPhone for free.

The Rifkins told me they haven’t had any issues around privacy or content moderation so far, but they also noted that customers who are concerned about these issues can limit their guests’ upload capabilities. They also can create a custom URL for their event rather than making it discoverable to anyone nearby.

LogRocket is a startup on a mission to help companies root out and fix website app errors quickly and efficiently, and it seems to be going well. Today, the company announced a $15 million Series B investment led by Battery Ventures.

The company also announced a new tool called LogRocket Metrics to help developers understand how widespread a particular problem might be. It’s no secret that people tend to be impatient when an app or website isn’t working right, and you can lose a customer over a bad experience.

LogRocket CEO and co-founder Matthew Arbesfeld says the new tool provides deep analytics across the customer experience. “With this new functionality called LogRocket Metrics, the developer can search across all their customers to determine the frequency and the impact of a problem to see if it affected your conversion rate, how many people were affected and who was affected,” Arbesfeld explained.

He says this will work like an error search engine, and in fact, they are actually indexing every interaction to help the developer find wherever that error has occurred. “Let’s say you’re using a site and you see a specific error message on the screen. The developer who’s working on that site can actually search, kind of like Google, across every customer that saw that specific error message,” he said.

Typically the error will come to the attention of the development team after a person reports a problem through the site or by contacting customer service, and this provides a means to find out just how many other people might be seeing the same error.

As for the money, the company has raised more than $30 million now. Arbesfeld says it still has most of its $11 million Series A in the bank, but as it grows they wanted to be well-capitalized to take advantage, especially as it begins working with larger and larger customers.

He says he will be investing in areas you expect, like engineering and sales and marketing, but also wants to start hiring more data scientists to take advantage of the data the company collects as a by-product of their business to build additional features like LogRocket Metrics.

Earlier this week, inbound marketing specialist HubSpot (NYSE:HUBS) reported its third quarter results. While the quarter’s performance outpaced market expectations, a rather lackluster outlook...

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Sensitive data leakage is one of the biggest negative side-effects of cloud-based apps and services. Today, a startup that has built an AI-based platform that can detect and take action on that data is coming out of stealth with funding to tackle the issue head-on. Nightfall — which integrates with and then automatically scans structured and unstructured data that appears in apps like Slack, GitHub, AWS and hundreds more for sensitive information, which it then acts to secure — is launching publicly today with $20.3 million in funding.

Nightfall’s CEO Isaac Madan said the startup will use the money to expand the scope of what it can detect and where, and to build out its business overall. The company bills itself as the industry’s first cloud-native data loss prevention platform. While in stealth it started out working with high-growth startups like Grofers and Exabeam, later expanding its customer base to Fortune 500 companies.

The company originally launched as Watchtower AI — a name that Madan, who co-founded the company with Rohan Sathe, said was changed to reflect the expanded scope of the company, not just identifying unstructured data but being able to take actions on it. It had raised angel funding of just under $5 million that previously had not been disclosed. Bain Capital Ventures and Venrock have co-led this latest, bigger round of $15.5 million, with Pear VC (Pejman Nozad); Sri Viswanath, CTO of Atlassian; and Kelvin Beachum, Jr. of the New York Jets also participating.

If $20.3 million sounds like a sizeable investment for a company that had yet to build up a public profile, that’s partly because of the nature of what the company is doing, and the people behind it.

Madan studied computer science and specifically worked on machine learning research at Stanford, focusing on HR and recruitment data, and has one exit already under his belt (a networking and advice platform called Chalky) while also working as an investor at Venrock and as an analyst at Pejman Mar Ventures, while Sathe was the lead engineer who built and scaled Uber Eats.

Between the two of them, their experience spans a range of use cases of where teams are handling many petabytes of data across multiple applications, which presents many opportunities for data leaks. The lack of any products on the market to address this was what led them to building Nightfall, Madan said in an interview.

Nightfall is tackling a specific issue in the market. Cloud-based collaboration platforms have been the making of distributed teams, which can use them to communicate with each other and work together, sharing data from different apps to get things done even when they are not in the same physical space. But they have also opened the door to a potential problem when it comes to data protection: the information shared on these platforms can contain sensitive data, so having it on there becomes a security risk.

“Business-critical data exists across different systems like Slack, GitHub, AWS and other apps, and that means sensitive and financial information can proliferate broadly across an organization’s systems,” Madan said. “We leverage machine learning to discover and classify that data” — which is often unstructured when it appears on these platforms.

Of course, each platform in itself can be secure, “but they don’t account for how users of these apps store and use data,” said Madan.

And this is a big big-data task: there are petabytes of data at play covering hundreds of different applications. Nightfall has built machine learning models to scan all of this, detect the data and then either provide automatic actions or options for manual actions to take on it: typically, the options are either to delete, redact or quarantine the data, or notify the relevant teams to take appropriate actions. 

As part of this latest round, Enrique Salem — notably, the former CEO of Symantec and a partner at Bain Capital Ventures — is joining Nightfall’s board of directors.

“Isaac, Rohan and the Nightfall team are addressing a deep and profound need in the world of information security, where I have spent nearly three decades of my career,” he said. “With the proliferation of data across the cloud, high-accuracy content inspection that is easy to operationalize is more important than ever. Nightfall has built a powerful and elegant solution to this problem. We are delighted to have been investors since the very beginning and to continue deepening our partnership with the team.”