Posted by Richy George on 18 April, 2018

Cloud Foundry is among the most successful open source project in the enterprise right now. It’s a cloud-agnostic platform-as-a-service offering that helps businesses develop and run their software more efficiently. In many enterprises, it’s now the standard platform for writing new applications. Indeed, half of the Fortune 500 companies now use it in one form or another.

With the imminent IPO of Pivotal, which helped birth the project and still sits at the core of its ecosystem, Cloud Foundry is about to gets its first major moment in the spotlight outside of its core audience. Over the course of the last few years, though, the project and the foundation that manages it have also received the sponsorship of  companies like Cisco, IBM, SAP, SUSE, Google, Microsoft, Ford, Volkswagen and Huawei.

Today, China’s Alibaba Group is joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation as a gold member. Compared to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, the Alibaba Cloud gets relatively little press, but it’s among the largest clouds in the world. Starting today, Cloud Foundry is also available on the Alibaba Cloud, with support for both the Cloud Foundry application and container runtimes.

Cloud Foundry CTO Chip Childers told me that he expects Alibaba to become an active participant in the open source community. He also noted that Cloud Foundry is seeing quite a bit of growth in China — a sentiment that I’ve seen echoed by other large open source projects, including the likes of OpenStack.

Open source is being heavily adopted in China and many companies are now trying to figure out how to best contribute to these kind of projects. Joining a foundation is an obvious first step. Childers also noted that many traditional enterprises in China are now starting down the path of digital transformation, which is driving the adoption of both open source tools and cloud in general.

Posted by Richy George on 18 April, 2018

At the Cloud Foundry Summit in Boston, the team behind the U.S. government’s cloud.gov application platform announced that it is now a certified Cloud Foundry platform that is guaranteed to be compatible with other certified providers like Huawei, IBM, Pivotal, SAP and — also starting today — Suse. With this, cloud.gov becomes the first government agency to become Cloud Foundry certified.

The point behind the certification is to ensure that all of the various platforms that support Cloud Foundry are compatible with each other. In the government context, this means that agencies can easily move their workloads between clouds (assuming they have all the necessary government certifications in place). But what’s maybe even more important is that it also ensures skills portability, which should make hiring and finding contractors easier for these agencies. Given that the open source Cloud Foundry project has seen quite a bit of adoption in the private sector, with half of the Fortune 500 companies using it, that’s often an important factor for deciding which platform to built on.

From the outset, cloud.gov, which was launched by the General Services Administration’s 18F office to improve the U.S. government’s public-facing websites and applications, was built on top of Cloud Foundry. Similar agencies in Australia and the U.K. have made the same decision to standardize on the Cloud Foundry platform. Cloud Foundry launched its certification program a few years ago and last year, it also added another program for certifying the skills of individual developers.

To be able to run government workloads, a cloud platform has to offer a certain set of security requirements. As Cloud Foundry Foundation CTO Chip Childers told me, the work 18F did to get the FedRAMP authorization for cloud.gov helped bring better controls to the upstream project, too, and he stressed that all of the governments that have adopted the platform have contributed to the overall project.

Posted by Richy George on 18 April, 2018

While smaller companies are seeing a lot of new options for distributed office space, or can pick up a couple offices in a WeWork, eventually they get big enough and have to find a bigger office — but that can end up as one of the weirdest and most annoying challenges for an early-stage CEO.

Finding that space is a whole other story, outside of just searching on Google and crossing your fingers. It’s why Jonathan Wasserstrum started Squarefoot, which looks to not only create a hub for these vacant offices, but also have the systems in place — including brokers — to help companies eventually land that office space. Eventually companies as they grow have to graduate into increasingly larger and larger spots, but there’s a missing sweet spot for mid-stage companies that are looking for space but don’t necessarily have the relationships with those big office brokers just yet, and instead are just looking through a friend of a friend. The company said today that it has raised $7 million in a new financing round led by Rosecliff Ventures, with RRE Ventures, Triangle Peak Partners, Armory Square Ventures, and others participating.

“If you talk to any CEO and you ask what they think about commercial real estate brokers, they’ll say, ‘oh, the guys that send an email every week,’” co-founder Jonathan Wasserstrum said. “The industry has been slow to adopt because the average person who owns the building is fine. They don’t wake up every morning and say this process sucks. But the people who wake up and say the process sucks are looking for space. That was kind of one fo the early things that we kind of figured out and focused a lot of attention on aggregating that tenant demand.

Squarefoot starts off on the buyer side as an aggregation platform that localizes open office space into one spot. While companies used to have to Google search something along the lines of “Chelsea office space” in New York — especially for early-stage companies that are just starting to outgrow their early offices — the goal is to always have Squarefoot come up as a result for that. It already happens thanks to a lot of efforts on the marketing front, but eventually with enough inventory and demand the hope is that building owners will be coming to Squarefoot in the first place. (That you see an ad for Squarefoot as a result for a lot of these searches already is, for example, no accident.)

Squarefoot is also another company that is adopting a sort of hybrid model that includes both a set of tools and algorithms to aggregate together all that space into one spot, but keep consultants and brokers in the mix in order to actually close those deals. It’s a stance that the venture community seems to be increasingly softening on as more and more companies launch with the idea that the biggest deals need to have an actual human on the other end in order to manage that relationship.

“We’re not trying to remove brokers, we have them on staff, we think there’s a much better way to go through the process,” Wasserstrum said. “When I am buying a ticket to Chicago, I’m fine going to Kayak and I don’t need a travel agent. But when I’m the CEO of a company and about to sign a three-year lease that’s a $1.5 million liability, and I’ve never done this before, shouldn’t I want someone to help me out? I do not see in the near future this e-commerce experience for commercial real estate. You don’t put it in your shopping cart.”

And, to be sure, there are a lot of platforms that already focus on the consumer side, like Redfin for home search. But this is a big market, and there already is some activity — it just hasn’t picked up a ton of traction just yet because it is a slog to get everything all in one place. One of the original examples is 42Floors, but even then that company early on faced a lot of troubles trying to get the model working and in 2015 cut its brokerage team. That’s not a group of people Wasserstrum is looking to leave behind, simply because the end goal is to actually get these companies signing leases and not just serving as a search engine.

Posted by Richy George on 18 April, 2018

AJ Brustein was out spending time with a member of his merchandising team when a nearby store ran out of stock of some goods — but there was no one on staff responsible for that location. Fortunately, the employee he was with had already showed him how to restock the shelves, and he offered to peel off and do it himself.

But that gap in the workforce may have just continued, leading directly to potential lost revenue for companies that sell products in those stores. That’s why Brustein and Yong Kim started Wonolo, a tool to connect companies with temporary workers in order to fill the unexpected demand those companies might face in those same out-of-stock situations. Wonolo employees sign up for the platform, and the companies that partner with the startup have an opportunity to grab the necessary workers they need on a more flexible basis. Wonolo today said it has raised $13 million in a new financing round led by Sequoia Capital, including existing investors PivotNorth and Crunchfund, and new investor Base10. Sequoia Capital’s Jess Lee is joining the company’s board of directors as part of the financing.

“There’s a big opportunity  helping people fill in their schedule with shifts,” Brustein said. “We really found there’s this huge untapped market of people who are looking for work who are underemployed. Let’s say Mary is a great worker and has a great job at the Home Depot, but no matter how good she, is she can only get 29 hours of work. It’s hard to manage schedules between different employers that want you to work the same hours. That’s the market we’ve really focused on, the underemployed market, which is a growing unfortunate trend in the U.S. That’s changed a little bit about the types of jobs we have on the platform.”

Wonolo is essentially looking to replace the typical temp agency experience, which helps workers find positions with companies that need a more limited amount of time. Meanwhile, those workers get an opportunity to fill in extra shifts that they might need for additional income on a more flexible schedule. Once a company posts a job to Wonolo, employees will get notified that it’s available and then get a chance to pick up those shifts, and when the job is approved those workers get paid right away.

While the jobs that Wonolo is suited for are more along the lines of merchandising, events staff, or more general labor, the hope is that the service will also expose those employees to a variety of companies who may actually end up wanting to hire them at some point. It allows them to get a good snapshot of all the work that’s available, and theoretically would help offer them an additional step on a career path that could get them to a direct full-time job with any of the companies from which they might end up accepting jobs.

“We thought we could address [the idea of being able to deal with unpredictability] better than temp staffing, and we realized the antidote was flexibility on the worker side,” Brustein said. “We could match them with these jobs that would unpredictably pop up. When we dug into it, we realized flexibility was something that was just completely lacking for workers. We took a very different approach to the way that people will often recruit talent for staffing agencies or their own employees. We are looking at character traits.”

Wonolo was born out of Brustein and Kim’s experience at Coca-Cola, where they had an opportunity to work with a major brand for a number of years. After a while, they got an opportunity to start working on a more entrepreneurial project, and that’s when that whole merchandising scenario played out and prompted them to start working on Wonolo. That part about character traits is an important part for Wonolo, Brustein said — because as long as someone can complete a job, they don’t have to be an absolute expert, as long as they are there ready and good to go.

There are, of course, companies trying to create platforms for temporary workers, like TrueBlue, and Brustein said Wonolo will inevitably have to compete with more local players as it looks to expand. But the hope is that aiming to tap the same kind of flexibility that made Uber so popular for temporary staffers — and potentially that pathway to a big career opportunity — will be one that attracts them to their service.

Posted by Richy George on 17 April, 2018

This year, artificial intelligence will further elevate the enterprise by transforming the way we work, securing digital assets, increasing collaboration and ushering in a new era of AI-powered innovation. Enterprise AI is rapidly moving beyond hype and into reality, and is primed to become one of the most consequential technological segments. Although startups have already realized AI’s power in redefining industries, enterprise executives are still in the process of understanding how it will transform their business and reshape their teams across all departments.

Throughout the past year, early adopting businesses of all sizes and industries began to reap benefits. AI applications with AI-powered capabilities introduced opportunities to change the way the enterprise engaged customers, segmented markets, assessed sales leads and engaged influencers. Enterprises are on the edge of taking this a step further because of the amount of knowledge and tools leveraging the potential of AI within their entire organization.

“New breakthroughs in AI, enabled by new hardware architectures, will create new intelligent business models for enterprises,” says Nigel Toon, co-founder and CEO at U.K.-based Graphcore. “Companies that can build an initial knowledge model and launch an initial intelligent service or product, then use this first product to capture new data and improve the knowledge model on a continuing basis, will quickly create clear class-leading products and services that competitors will struggle to keep up with.”

The category is evolving, and large companies are finding distinct ways to innovate. They can uniquely tap into decades of industry experience to develop horizontal AI, built for specific industries like healthcare, financial services, automotive, retail and more. These implementations, though, require deep industry expertise and industry-specific design, training, monitoring, security and implementation to meet the high-stakes IT requirements of global organizations.

“In 2018, AI is entering the enterprise. I believe we will see many enterprises adopt AI technology, but the (few) leaders will be those that can align AI with their strategic business goals,” says Ronny Fehling, associate director of Gamma Artificial Intelligence at BCG.

2018: AI will start separating the winners from the losers

Early industry successes (and failures) proved AI’s inevitability, but also the reality that wide-scale adoption would come through incremental progress only. This year, we’ll see AI move from influencing product or business functions to an organization-wide AI strategy. Expect the winners to move fast and remain nimble to keep implementing off-the-shelf and proprietary AI.

Hans-Christian Boos, CEO and founder of Germany-based Arago, adds: “2018 will be a make or break year for enterprise and the established economy in general. I believe AI is the only viable path for innovation, new business models and digital disruption in companies from the industrial era. General AI can enable these enterprises to finally make use of the only advantage they have in the battle against new business models and giants from the Silicon Valley, or rather giants from the new age of knowledge based business models.”

The AI talent challenge

A boon in enterprise AI will also mean a further shortage of talent. Industries like telecommunications, financial services and manufacturing will feel the talent squeeze the most. The companies that win the AI talent war will gain exponential advantages, given the category’s rapid growth.

Hence, enterprises will try to attract talent by offering a powerful vision, a track record of product success, a bench of early client implementations and the potential to impact the masses. It’s about developing high-functioning and reliable solutions that become a new foundation for clients.

Developers and data scientists, however, are only the beginning. Winning enterprises must adopt their organizational structures that attract a new generation of product managers, sales, marketing, communications and other delivery teams that understand AI. This requires an informed, passionate and forward-thinking group of professionals that will help customers understand the future of work and customer engagement powered by AI.

AI adoption and employee training

Digital transformation, powered in large part by new AI capabilities, requires enterprises to understand how to extract data and utilize data-driven intelligence. Data is one of the greatest assets and essentials in maximizing the value in an AI application, yet data is often underutilized and misunderstood. Executives must establish teams and hold individuals across departments accountable for the successful and ongoing implementation of digital tools that extract full value from available internal and external data.

This transformation into an AI-native organization requires it to hire, train and re-skill all levels of employees, and provide the resources for individuals to adopt AI-powered disciplines that enhance their performance. Most workforce, from top to bottom, should be encouraged to rethink and evolve their role by incorporating new digital tools, often enabled by AI itself.

Expect AI and other digital technologies to become more prevalent in all business disciplines, not only at the application layer, as Vishal Chatrath, co-founder and CEO of U.K.-based Prowler.io emphasises. “Decision-making in enterprise is dominated by expert-systems that are born obsolete. The AI tools available till now that rely on deep-neural nets which are great for classification problems (identifying cats, dogs, words etc.) are not really fit for purpose for decision-making in large, complex and dynamic environments, because they are very data inefficient (needs millions of data points) and effectively act like black-boxes. 2018 will see Enterprise AI move beyond classification to decision-making.”

What’s next

However, the spotlight will shine on data governance as businesses adjust entire departments and workflows around data. In turn, data management and integrity will be an essential component of success as consumers and enterprises gain greater awareness about how companies use customers’ data. This opens a large field of opportunities, but also will require transparency in how companies are using, sharing and building applications on top of customer data to ensure trust.

“Every single industry will be enhanced with AI in the coming years. In the last years there was a lot of foundation work on gathering standardized data and now we can start to use some of the advanced AI techniques to bring huge efficiency and quality gains to enterprise companies,” says Rasmus Rothe, co-founder and CTO of Germany-based research lab and venture builder Merantix. “Enterprises should therefore thoroughly analyze their business units to understand how AI can help them to improve. Partnering with external AI experts instead of trying to build everything yourself is often more capital efficient and also leads to better results.”

The shift toward AI-native enterprises is in a defining phase. The pie of the AI-enabled market will continue to grow and everyone has an opportunity to take a slice. Enterprises need to quickly leverage their assets and extract the value of their data as AI algorithms themselves will become the most valuable part when data has become a commodity. The question is, who will move first, and who will have the biggest appetite.

Posted by Richy George on 17 April, 2018

Building conversational interfaces is a hot new area for developers. Chatbots can be a way to reduce friction in websites and apps and to give customers quick answers to commonly asked questions in a conversational framework. Today, Google announced it was making Dialogflow Enterprise Edition generally available. It had previously been in Beta.

This technology came to them via the API.AI acquisition in 2016. Google wisely decided to change the name of the tool along the way, giving it a moniker that more closely matched what it actually does. The company reports that hundreds of thousands are developers are using the tool already to build conversational interfaces.

This isn’t just an all-Google tool though. It works across voice interface platforms including Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Facebook Messenger, giving developers a tool to develop their chat apps once and use them across several devices without having to change the underlying code in a significant way.

What’s more, with today’s release the company is providing increased functionality and making it easier to transition to the enterprise edition at the same time.

“Starting today, you can combine batch operations that would have required multiple API calls into a single API call, reducing lines of code and shortening development time. Dialogflow API V2 is also now the default for all new agents, integrating with Google Cloud Speech-to-Text, enabling agent management via API, supporting gRPC, and providing an easy transition to Enterprise Edition with no code migration,” Dan Aharon Google’s product manager for Cloud AI wrote in a company blog post announcing the tool.

The company showed off a few new customers using Dialogflow to build chat interfaces for their customers including KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Domino’s and Ticketmaster.

The new tool, which is available today, supports over 30 languages and as a generally available enterprise product comes with a support package and service level agreement (SLA).

Posted by Richy George on 17 April, 2018

Resy launched in the summer of 2014 with a simple premise: If you want a premium reservation at a restaurant on short notice, you should be able to pay for it. Four years and 160 markets later, Resy has changed a lot since then.

But today, the company is about to change things up even more.

This morning, Resy has announced a brand new suite of tools for restaurants, including a new inventory management system called ResyFly.

As it stands now, restaurants have two options when it comes to inventory management for their reservations. They can choose a slot system, where diners are seated at 6pm, 8pm and 10pm, or they can opt for a flex system, where they take reservations as they’re called in and build the night’s reservations based off what comes in first.

Unfortunately, most restaurants have to choose between these two systems, as there are no inventory management systems that offer the ability to do both, according to Resy.

ResyFly uses Resy’s troves of data to determine the best way for restaurants to eliminate gaps in their inventory throughout a given night, taking into account things like date, time, weather, and even the average time spent eating at a given restaurant. The tool gives restaurants the ability to schedule different floor plans, reservation grids and hours of operation for special days like Valentines Day.

Alongside ResyFly, the company is also introducing Business Intelligence, a window into important information like KPIs, revenue, and ratings with third-party information from platforms like Foursquare layered in and integrated with POS software providers to offer real-time revenue reporting.

But sometimes you want direct feedback from the customer. To that end, Resy is launching Resy Surveys, which gives a restaurant the opportunity to send a custom survey to customers about their experience. Resy is also integrating with Upserve, giving Resy’s restaurant partners insights into their guests’ preferences and favorite dishes, as well as info on dining companions, frequency of bookings, and historical spend.

And while Resy is focused on refining the product, the company is also focused on growth. That’s why Resy has announced the launch of Resy Global Service, which lets Resy distribute inventory to partners like Airbnb. (It’s worth noting that Airbnb led Resy’s $13 million funding round in 2017.)

Finally, Resy is working on a new membership loyalty program called Resy Select, which will launch at the end of the month. Resy Select is an invite-only program that gives restaurants insights into Resy’s hungriest users, and gives those users benefits such as exclusive booking windows, priority waitlist, early access tickets to events, and other exclusive experiences like meeting the chef or touring the kitchen.

Resy books more than 1 million reservations on the platform each week. The company no longer charges users for reservations, but rather charges restaurants by feature, instead of cover, with three tiers ranging from $189/month to $899/month. That said, the company is not yet self-serve on the restaurant side, but founder and CEO Ben Leventhal said the team is thinking about introducing it in the future.

“The key challenge and key opportunity is to do everything we can to make the right choices about what we build and the order we build it in,” said Leventhal. “Our goal is to stay focused on restaurants, as a significant amount of the tech we build is built in conjunction with our restaurant partners.”

Posted by Richy George on 17 April, 2018

When you’re raising venture capital, it helps if you’ve had “exits.” In other words, if your company has been acquired or you’ve taken one public, investors are more inclined to take a bet on anything you do.

Boston -based serial entrepreneur David Cancel has sold not just one, but four companies.  And after a few years running product for HubSpot, he’s in the midst of building number five.

That startup, Drift, managed to raise $47 million in its first three years. Now it’s announcing another $60 million led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from existing investors CRV and General Catalyst. The valuation is undisclosed.

So what is Drift? It’s “changing the way businesses buy from businesses,” said Cancel. He wants to eventually build an alternative to Amazon to make it easier for companies to make large orders.

Currently, Drift subscribers can use chatbots to help turn web visits into sales. It has 100,000 clients including Zenefits, MongoDB, Zuora and AdRoll.

Drift “turns those conversations into customers,” Cancel explained. He said that technology is comparable to what is commonly used for customer service. It’s the “same messaging that was used for support, but used in the sales context.”

In the long-run, Cancel says he hopes Drift will expand its offerings to compete with Salesforce.

The company wouldn’t disclose revenue, but says it is ten times better compared to whatever it was in the past year. And it’s on track to grow another five times this year. This, of course, means little without hard numbers.

Yet we’re told that the new round means that Drift will have $90 million in the bank. It plans to use some of the funding to make acquisitions in voice and video technology. Drift also plans to expand its teams in both Boston and San Francisco, with new offices for both. The company presently has 130 employees.

Posted by Richy George on 16 April, 2018

Pluralsight, the Utah-based education technology company, has revealed its IPO filing. 

Given the timing of the unveiling, the company is likely targeting a May public debut.

Its core business is online software development courses, helping people improve their skills in categories like IT, data and security. Businesses small and large pay Pluralsight to help train their employees. It also has offerings for individual subscribers.

In the filing, the company acknowledges that it is a competitive landscape, and names Cornerstone OnDemand, Udacity, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning as others in a comparable market. It also mentions General Assembly, which was recently acquired by Adecco for $413 million. 

This is the first glimpse we get at Pluralsight’s financials. For 2017, the company brought in $166.8 million in revenue, up from $131.8 million in 2016 and $108.4 million in 2015.

Losses are growing, however. This is partly due to a sizeable increase in sales and marketing expenditures. For 2017, the company lost $96.5 million. This is up from losses of $20.6 million in 2016 and $26.4 million in 2015.

Pluralsight has been around since 2004.  Like many startups outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, the company bootstrapped its business and didn’t raise significant outside funding until 2013. Pluralsight previously raised nearly $200 million in financing.

The largest shareholder is Insight Venture Partners, which owned 46.1% of the shares prior to the IPO, an unusually high percentage. Co-founder and CEO Aaron Skonnard owned 13.4% and investment group ICONIQ owned 8.1%.

Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan served as lead underwriters. Wilson Sonsini and Goodwin Procter served as counsel.

Pluralsight plans to list on the Nasdaq, under the ticker “PS.”

A provision in the JOBS Act from 2012 helped make it so that companies could file confidentially and then reveal financials and other business information just weeks before making public debuts. This helps companies avoid too much scrutiny in the months leading up to an IPO. There is also a quiet period in this time, meaning that companies are limited in what they can say publicly about their businesses.

Like most tech companies, Pluralsight chose to take advantage of this confidential filing provision. But it also announced that it filed, something that companies don’t usually do. Most choose to stay quiet about IPO plans until they make the filings public, unless reporters break the news first.

It was no surprise to those who have been following Utah’s tech scene that Pluralsight is planning to list on the stock market this year. The venture-backed “unicorn” has been a late-stage company for several years now, with a reported valuation of $1 billion as of 2014. 

After a slow first couple months, there has been a flurry of tech IPO activity in recent weeks. Dropbox, Spotify and Zuora recently debuted. Pivotal, Smartsheet and Carbon Black are amongst the companies expected to list in the coming weeks.

Posted by Richy George on 16 April, 2018

More devices are coming onto the Internet every single day, and that’s especially true within organizations that have a fleet of devices with access to sensitive data — which means there are even more holes for potential security breaches.

That’s the goal of Kolide. The aim is to ensure that companies have access to tools that give them the ability to get a thorough analysis of every bit of data they have — and where they have it. The Kolide Cloud, its initial major rollout for Mac and Linux devices, turns an entire fleet of apps and devices into what’s basically a table that anyone can query to get an up-to-date look at what’s happening within their business. Kolide looks to provide a robust set of tools that help analyze that data. By doing that, companies may have a better shot at detecting security breaches that might come from even mundane miscalculations or employees being careless about the security of that data. The company said today it has raised $8 million in new venture financing in a round led by Matrix Partners.

“It’s not just an independent event,” Kolide CEO Jason Meller said. “The way I think about it, if you look at any organization, there’s a pathway to a massive security incident, and the pathway is rather innocuous. Let’s say I’m a developer that works at one of these organizations and I need to fix a bug, and pull the production database. Now I have a laptop with this data on this, and I did this and didn’t realize my disk wasn’t encrypted. I went from these innocuous activities to something existentially concerning which could have been prevented if you knew which devices weren’t encrypted and had customer data. A lot of organizations are focused on these very rare events, but the reality is the risk that they face is mishandling of customer data or sensitive information and not thinking about the basics.”

Kolide is built on top of Osquery, a toolkit that allows organizations to essentially view all their devices or operations as if it were a single database. That means that companies can query all of these incidents or any changes in the way employees use data or the way that data is structured. You could run a simple select query for, say, apps and see what is installed where. It allows for a level of granularity that could help drill down into those little innocuous incidents Meller talks about, but all that still needs some simpler approach or interface for larger companies that are frantically trying to handle edge cases but may be overlooking the basics.

Like other companies looking to build a business on top of open source technology, the company looks to offer ways to calibrate those tools for a company’s niche needs that they necessarily don’t actively cover. The argument here is that by basing the company and tools on open source software, they’ll be able to lean on that community to rapidly adapt to a changing environment when it comes to security, and that will allow them to be more agile and have a better sales pitch to larger companies.

There’s going to be a lot of competition in terms of application monitoring and management, especially as companies adopt more and more devices in order to handle their operations. That opens up more and more holes for potential breaches, and in the end, Kolide hopes to create a more granular bird’s-eye view of what’s happening rather than just creating a flagging system without actually explaining what’s happening. There are some startups attacking device management tools, like Fleetsmith does for Apple devices (which raised $7.7 million), and to be sure provisioning and management is one part of the equation. But Kolide hopes to provide a strong toolkit that eventually creates a powerful monitoring system for organizations as they get bigger and bigger.

“We believe data collection is an absolute commodity,” Meller said. “That’s a fundamentally different approach, they believe the actual collection tools are proprietary. We feel this is a solved problem. Our goal isn’t to take info and regurgitate it in a fancy user interface. We believe we should be paid based on the insights and help manage their fleet better. We can tell the whole industry is swinging this way due to the traction OSQuery had. It’s not a new trend, it’s really the end point as a result of companies that have suffered from this black box situation.”