ServiceNow acquires conversational AI startup Passage AI

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ServiceNow announced this morning that it has acquired Passage AI, a startup that helps customers build chatbots in multiple languages, something that should come in handy as ServiceNow continues to modernize its digital service platform. The companies did not share terms of the deal.

With Passage AI, ServiceNow gets a bushel of AI talent, which in itself has value, but it also gets AI technology, which should fit in nicely with ServiceNow’s mission. For starters, the company’s chatbot solutions gives ServiceNow an automated way to respond to customer/user inquiries.

Even more interesting for ServiceNow, Passage includes an IT automation component that uses ” a conversational interface to submit tickets, handle queries, and take direct action through APIs,” according to the company website. It also gets an HR automation piece, giving the company an intelligent tool it could incorporate across its Now Platform in tools like ServiceNow Virtual Agent and Service Portal, Workspaces in multiple languages.

The multilingual support was an aspect of the deal that appeals to Debu Chatterjee, senior director of AI Engineering at ServiceNow. “Building deep learning, conversational AI capabilities into the Now Platform will enable a work request initiated in German or a customer inquiry initiated in Japanese to be solved by Virtual Agent,” he said in a statement.

Companies are increasingly looking for ways to solve common customer problems using chatbots, while only bringing humans into the loop when the bot can’t answer the query. Passage AI gives ServiceNow much deeper knowledge in this growing area.

Passage AI, which launched in 2016, has raised $10.3 million, according to Crunchbase data. The company website lists a variety of large customers including MasterCard, Shell, Mercedes Benz and SoftBank. The acquisition comes less than a week after the company purchased another AI-focused startup, Loom Systems, one that concentrates on automating operations data.

The deal is expected to close this quarter. ServiceNow will be announcing earnings on Wednesday afternoon.

ServiceNow acquires Loom Systems to expand AIOps coverage

Cooks Venture raises $4 million from Golden West Food Group to ramp up distribution

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Cooks Venture, the agtech company looking to revolutionize the chicken industry, has today announced the close of a $4 million funding round led by Golden West Food Group.

Cooks Venture has been working in stealth for many years, but launched onto the scene in 2018 with a plan to reshape agriculture from the ground up. And the key to that strategy? Chickens.

Cooks Venture geneticists and scientists have spent years isolating genetic lines of chickens to create a new, proprietary breed, called the Pioneer, a type of heirloom chicken. Most folks don’t know that, no matter what brand of chicken you buy at the store, chances are that it’s one of two breeds, the Cobb 500 or the Ross 308, which are produced by Cobb and Aviagen respectively.

Both of these breeds of broilers are fast-growing (they’re ready to be processed in just over five weeks) and use a three-phase feed system for growth. This system, and these breeds, are a big reason why animal activist groups express so much concern over the wellbeing of chicken livestock, often explaining that the birds are too young to carry around all the weight they put on so quickly.

Cooks Venture looked to science to solve the problem. The company’s Pioneer chicken can eat a highly diverse diet, and can be raised in 60 to 65 days. This means that the Pioneer chickens are truly free range, wandering around the farm. It also means that these chickens, with a digestive track that can handle a diverse diet and the ability to exercise, live a healthier life, are higher in Omega-3, and taste better than your average Cobb 500 or Ross 308, according to the company.

But the chickens themselves are only part of the solution. A byproduct of the proliferation of these fast-growing chickens produced by Cobb and Aviagen is that they have to eat, and their diet is very specific. That means that farmers must produce a great deal of one or two crops to feed the millions of chickens out there. The result is that our agricultural land is not being used in an efficient or eco-friendly way.

In fact, Cooks Venture founder Matt Wadiak says that the vast majority of our crop production in the United States is used for ethanol or animal feed, which indexes towards corn and soy. The USDA says, of feed grains, that corn accounts for more than 95 percent of total production and use in the country.

Many farmers would love to implement regenerative agricultural practices, a big part of which includes creating a biodiverse ecosystem with many different crops, but who would they sell the extra, low-demand crops to?

Cooks Venture picks up $12 million to rethink agriculture from the ground up

The answer now can be Cooks Venture. With strong digestive systems, Cooks Venture chickens can eat a diet that comes from a more biodiverse farm. Moreover, when Cooks Venture is ready to expand globally, the chickens are able to eat crops local to the ecosystems of emerging nations, such as yucca and quinoa.

Cooks Venture has its own farm, and works with farm partners to set up regenerative agricultural practices around producing Pioneer chicken feed. Cooks also does its own processing at its own plant.

Golden West Food Group is a manufacturer of meat products and value-add food products like marinated chicken, such as Jack Daniels pulled pork. It’s worth noting that GWFG is not a competitor to Cooks Venture, as it produces no meat products whatsoever, but rather an important distribution partner for the brand.

Through the partnership with GWFG, Cooks can start to ramp up commercialization of its chickens, which are currently sold through some retailers, on the Cooks website, and on FreshDirect.

As part of the announcement, Cooks Venture is also bringing on Ankur Agrawal as Chief Financial Officer. Wadiak, a cofounder at Blue Apron, worked with Agrawal back in the Blue Apron days and says that his understanding of agricultural finance is top of the line.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article misidentified the Pioneer chicken and mistook HelloFresh for Fresh Direct. It has been updated for accuracy.

Nutanix execs discuss how they built their 2016 IPO roadshow deck

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Bringing a startup from idea to IPO isn’t an easy task, but if you can build something successful, one major milestone is to go public. Before your Nasdaq debut, however, there’s a major step — building a deck and taking it on the road for investors.

Cloud computing company Nutanix went public in 2016, so we spoke to CEO Dheeraj Pandey and CFO Duston Williams, both of whom were with the company for the big event, to learn about how a company should define itself for investors as it seeks to go public.

Who are you?

Building a roadshow deck is an exercise in communications as founders attempt to carefully lay out their company’s core purpose and how they built it, along with their ethics, aspirations, financials and value proposition. In a nutshell, an effective roadshow deck summarizes who you are, what you stand for and why your company will make a good investment.

CEO Pandey says that in addition to investment bank Goldman Sachs, a number of people from the company helped craft the presentation. “Fifteen people across different functions were involved in building the deck. That included product and marketing, to finance and corporate communications, to legal. I think there were at least six different departments,” he said.

RealityEngines launches its autonomous AI service

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RealityEngines.AI, an AI and machine learning startup founded by a number of former Google executives and engineers, is coming out of stealth today and announcing its first set of products.

When the company first announced its $5.25 million seed round last year, CEO Bindu Reddy wasn’t quite ready to disclose RealityEngines’ mission beyond saying that it planned to make machine learning easier for enterprises. With today’s launch, the team is putting this into practice by launching a set of tools that specifically tackle a number of standard enterprise use cases for ML, including user churn predictions, fraud detection, sales lead forecasting, security threat detection and cloud spend optimization. For use cases that don’t fit neatly into these buckets, the service also offers a more general predictive modeling service.

Before co-founding RealiyEngines, Reddy was the head of product for Google Apps and general manager for AI verticals at AWS. Her co-founders are Arvind Sundararajan (formerly at Google and Uber) and Siddartha Naidu (who founded BigQuery at Google). Investors in the company include Eric Schmidt, Ram Shriram, Khosla Ventures and Paul Buchheit.

As Reddy noted, the idea behind this first set of products from RealityEngines is to give businesses an easy entry into machine learning, even if they don’t have data scientists on staff.

Besides talent, another issue that businesses often face is that they don’t always have massive amounts of data to train their networks effectively. That has long been a roadblock for many companies that want to see what AI can do for them but that didn’t have the right resources to do so. RealityEngines overcomes this by creating realistic synthetic data that it can then use to augment a company’s existing data. In its tests, this creates models that are up to 15 percent more accurate than models that were trained without the synthetic data.

“The most prominent use of generative adversarial networks  — GANS — has been to create deep fakes,” said Reddy. “Deepfakes have captured the public’s imagination by highlighting how easy it to spread misinformation with these doctored videos and images. However, GANS can also be applied to productive and good use. They can be used to create synthetic datasets which when then be combined with the original data, to produce robust AI models even when a business doesn’t have much training data.”

RealityEngines currently has about 20 employees, most of whom have a deep background in ML/AI, both as researchers and practitioners.

 

Russian Cybercrime Boss Burkov Pleads Guilty

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Aleksei Burkov, an ultra-connected Russian hacker once described as “an asset of supreme importance” to Moscow, has pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to running a site that sold stolen payment card data and to administering a highly secretive crime forum that counted among its members some of the most elite Russian cybercrooks.

Aleksei Burkov, seated second from right, attends a hearing in Jerusalem in 2015. Andrei Shirokov / Tass via Getty Images.

Burkov, 29, admitted to running CardPlanet, a site that sold more than 150,000 stolen credit card accounts, and to being the founder and administrator of DirectConnection — a closely guarded underground community that attracted some of the world’s most-wanted Russian hackers. He pleaded guilty last week in a Virginia court to access device fraud and conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, identity theft, wire fraud and money laundering.

As KrebsOnSecurity noted in a November 2019 profile of Burkov’s hacker nickname ‘k0pa,’ “a deep dive into the various pseudonyms allegedly used by Burkov suggests this individual may be one of the most connected and skilled malicious hackers ever apprehended by U.S. authorities, and that the Russian government is probably concerned that he simply knows too much.”

Membership in the DirectConnection fraud forum was heavily restricted. New members had to be native Russian speakers, provide a $5,000 deposit, and be vouched for by three existing crime forum members. Also, members needed to have a special encryption certificate installed in their Web browser before the forum’s login page would even load.

DirectConnection was something of a Who’s Who of major cybercriminals, and many of its most well-known members have likewise been extradited to and prosecuted by the United States. Those include Sergey “Fly” Vovnenko, who was sentenced to 41 months in prison for operating a botnet and stealing login and payment card data. Vovnenko also served as administrator of his own cybercrime forum, which he used in 2013 to carry out a plan to have Yours Truly framed for heroin possession.

As noted in last year’s profile of Burkov, an early and important member of DirectConnection was a hacker who went by the moniker “aqua” and ran the banking sub-forum on Burkov’s site. In December 2019, the FBI offered a $5 million bounty leading to the arrest and conviction of aqua, who’s been identified as Maksim Viktorovich Yakubets. The Justice Department says Yakubets/aqua ran a transnational cybercrime organization called “Evil Corp.” that stole roughly $100 million from victims.

In this 2011 screenshot of DirectConnection, we can see the nickname of “aqua,” who ran the “banking” sub-forum on DirectConecttion. Aqua, a.k.a. Maksim V. Yakubets of Russia, now has a $5 million bounty on his head from the FBI.

According to a statement of facts in Burkov’s case, the author of the infamous SpyEye banking trojan — Aleksandr “Gribodemon” Panin — was personally vouched for by Burkov. Panin was sentenced in 2016 to more than nine years in prison.

Other top DirectConnection members include convicted credit card fraudsters Vladislav “Badb” Horohorin and Sergey “zo0mer” Kozerev, as well as the infamous spammer and botnet master Peter “Severa” Levashov.

Burkov was arrested in 2015 on an international warrant while he was visiting Israel, and over the ensuing four years the Russian government aggressively sought to keep him from being extradited to the United States. When Israeli authorities turned down requests to send him back to Russia — supposedly to face separate hacking charges there — the Russians then imprisoned a young Israeli woman on trumped-up drug charges in a bid to trade prisoners.

As the news outlet Haaretz reported in October, Naama Issachar was arrested while changing planes in Russia on her way home from a yoga course in India. Russian police said they found approximately 10 grams of marijuana in Issachar’s bag. Issachar denied smuggling drugs, saying she had not sought to enter Russia during her layover and had no access to her luggage during her brief stay in the Russian airport.

Haaretz noted that the Russian government pressed Israel to exchange Burkov for Issachar. When Israel’s supreme court cleared the way for Burkov’s extradition to the United States, Issachar was found guilty of drug smuggling and sentenced to 7.5 years in jail.

But according to a story today in The Times of Israel, the Kremlin has signaled that Russian President Vladimir Putin may make a decision “in the near future,” on a possible pardon for Issachar, whose mother reportedly met with Putin while the Russian leader was visiting Israel last week.

Burkov currently is scheduled to be sentenced on May 8. He faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

CISO Essentials | How Remote Access Trojans Affect the Enterprise

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The Chinese Lunar year 2020 is the Year of the Rat, and people born in the Year of the Rat are supposed to be optimistic and likable. But in cybersecurity, RAT (Remote Access Trojan) stands for the opposite of likable: a nasty tool leveraged by bad actors. For many years, RATs have been used as a means to control victims’ computers remotely and surreptitiously. The sneaky RAT can access computer users’ files and hardware resources like webcams and microphones, as well as function as a keylogger, data stealer and springboard for launching other malware attacks. Worse, use of RATs in attacks against the enterprise is on the increase. In this post, we take a look at the latest developments in the use of Remote Access Trojans.

image how rats affect enterprise

What is a Remote Access Trojan?

Sometimes referred to as a “remote administration tool” due to their similarity to legitimate IT admin tools like TeamViewer and LogMeIn, a remote access trojan is essentially a hidden backdoor into another user’s computer. This backdoor gives the person operating the RAT a whole range of different functions that can be used for malicious purposes, depending on which particular RAT platform they’re utilizing. 

Some well-known RATS from the past and present include:

  • Adwind jRAT
  • Blackshades RAT
  • CalypsoRAT
  • DanBot RAT
  • DarkComet
  • FlawedAmmyy RAT
  • FlawedGrace RAT
  • Orcus RAT
  • PupyRat

Like genuine tools used by organizations to manage endpoints remotely, RATs give their operators powerful control over the system they are installed on. The difference, of course, is that a RAT is both hidden and unwanted.

How Do Remote Access Trojans Spread?

As with most malware infections, RATs typically come through malspam, phishing and spearphishing campaigns. For example, a user may receive a phishing email carrying a malicious pdf or Word document, or the mail may contain a URL that takes the victim to a webpage for a fake software plugin and a message that a required tool is missing or needs updating. Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader and similar popular products are often spoofed for just this kind of trick due to their wide adoption across platforms. 

Other threat actors have been more creative. For example, hackers have hidden the PyXie RAT in a Tetris game, used Facebook to deliver FlawedAmmyy RAT, and have even used a fake WebEx meeting invitation to infect an unsuspecting victim.

How Do RATs Evade Detection?

For your organization, the main danger with RATS is that they make illegitimate use of perfectly legitimate functionality that your admins need. No modern business can run an effective IT support service without the ability to remotely login to users’ computers for troubleshooting and other support tasks. RATS piggyback on the same remote access services that legitimate tools like TeamViewer use, exploiting Windows Remote Desktop (RDP) and TCP networking protocols to install a backdoor to the attacker’s own machine. 

In the eyes of legacy AV suites, such activity may not seem suspicious at all. This ability to blend in with normal or expected traffic can allow a RAT to go undetected for months or years, which makes the RAT a perfect tool for all kinds of malicious actors, from APT and nation-state hackers to criminals looking for financial reward.

How Do Threat Actors Use RATs Against The Enterprise?

A RAT’s primary objective is to operate without the target’s awareness. While there’s certainly been cases of “lone wolf” actors targeting individuals and organizations and remaining undetected for over a decade, until recently the main threat to enterprise from RATs came from APT campaigns, including those targeting the most sensitive of installations such as a nuclear power plant in India (targeted by the DTrack RAT), oil and gas companies in the Middle East, telecoms across Africa and Asia (DanBot RAT), government agencies around the globe (Calypso RAT), and most recently an energy-sector organization in Europe (PupyRAT).

Using these RATs, hackers were able to take complete control over victims’ machines, gain access to entire networks, exfiltrate troves of sensitive corporate data and avoid detection until after they had realized all their goals.

Are Remote Access Trojans Becoming More Common?

While RATs have long been a popular tool for advanced targeted attacks, a new trend has emerged over the last 18 months or so. In this time, RATs have become more prevalent and now appear to be attractive to financially-motivated hackers. This has led to an increase in the number of RAT victims, who are unequipped to detect and mitigate this malware threat. This rise is in large part due to the fact that RAT developers have made their malware less expensive and more readily accessible. As a result, more criminals have started experimenting with these tools, and with this proliferation, the number of infected victims has risen.

A recent example of a RAT becoming a commercial, “off the shelf” tool for criminals in this way was the Imminent Monitor Remote Access Trojan (IM-RAT). IM-RAT provided cybercriminals easy access to victims’ machines. It was clever enough to bypass legacy anti-virus and malware detection software, carry out commands such as recording keystrokes, steal data and passwords, and watch victims via their webcams – all for a measly $25 per license. This made IM-RAT very popular, very fast. IM-RAT was used in 124 countries and sold to more than 14,500 buyers before being taken down by a joint action of the Australian Federal Police (AFP), Europol and Eurojust. 

But price alone is not the only reason RATs have grown in popularity. RATs are very versatile, and their use is limited only by the imagination of those who develop and deploy them. They have been used to collect payment card details, to collect military and diplomatic intelligence, to grab the personal details of hotel guests and even to satisfy the sexual needs of voyeurs. 

How Can CISOs Protect Against Remote Access Trojans?

In the past, RATs were difficult to develop and required a high degree of proficiency to operate. They were anything but “fire-and-forget” tools. They required threat actors to invest time and effort in inserting the malware into victims’ systems, manually operate the connection and then carry out whatever nefarious activities they had planned. As we have seen, things have changed more recently, and like other crimeware such as ransomware as a service, malware developers have seen and grasped the opportunity to make profit by selling easy access to tools that others do not have the skill to make for themselves.

For defenders, the increase in RAT activity means there is both a requirement to stop attacks dead at the initial stage, and to have visibility over your entire network to detect any threats that might have escaped your first layer of security. Implementing firewall control and network traffic policies can help you monitor and block unwanted connections and ports that will help thwart attackers.

Aside from that, disable Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and any similar remote access protocols across your fleet where they are not needed. Except for machines that require a constant remote connection, endpoints are typically better off only enabling RDP and similar services on a temporary “as needed” basis. 

Conclusion

Researchers have noted that 2019 was a watershed year in the history of RATs, when, for the first time, they became a common weapon in the arsenal of financially-motivated hackers. It is highly likely that the popularity of RATs will increase in 2020, making it both the Lunar and the Cyber year of the Rat. Fortunately, a trusted next-gen behavioral AI security solution like SentinelOne can identify and block RATs both on installation and during execution. If you’d like to learn more about how SentinelOne can protect your organization, contact us today or request a free demo.

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Google Cloud lands Lufthansa Group and Sabre as new customers

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Google’s strategy for bringing new customers to its cloud is to focus on the enterprise and specific verticals like healthcare, energy, financial service and retail, among others. Its healthcare efforts recently experienced a bit of a setback, with Epic now telling its customers that it is not moving forward with its plans to support Google Cloud, but in return, Google now got to announce two new customers in the travel business: Lufthansa Group, the world’s largest airline group by revenue, and Sabre, a company that provides backend services to airlines, hotels and travel aggregators.

For Sabre, Google Cloud is now the preferred cloud provider. Like a lot of companies in the travel (and especially the airline) industry, Sabre runs plenty of legacy systems and is currently in the process of modernizing its infrastructure. To do so, it has now entered a 10-year strategic partnership with Google “to improve operational agility while developing new services and creating a new marketplace for its airline,  hospitality and travel agency customers.” The promise, here, too, is that these new technologies will allow the company to offer new travel tools for its customers.

When you hear about airline systems going down, it’s often Sabre’s fault, so just being able to avoid that would already bring a lot of value to its customers.

“At Google we build tools to help others, so a big part of our mission is helping other companies realize theirs. We’re so glad that Sabre has chosen to work with us to further their mission of building the future of travel,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai . “Travelers seek convenience, choice and value. Our capabilities in AI and cloud computing will help Sabre deliver more of what consumers want.”

The same holds true for Google’s deal with Lufthansa Group, which includes German flag carrier Lufthansa itself, but also subsidiaries like Austrian, Swiss, Eurowings and Brussels Airlines, as well as a number of technical and logistics companies that provide services to various airlines.

“By combining Google Cloud’s technology with Lufthansa Group’s operational expertise, we are driving the digitization of our operation even further,” said Dr. Detlef Kayser, member of the executive board of the Lufthansa Group. “This will enable us to identify possible flight irregularities even earlier and implement countermeasures at an early stage.”

Lufthansa Group has selected Google as a strategic partner to “optimized its operations performance.” A team from Google will work directly with Lufthansa to bring this project to life. The idea here is to use Google Cloud to build tools that help the company run its operations as smoothly as possible and to provide recommendations when things go awry due to bad weather, airspace congestion or a strike (which seems to happen rather regularly at Lufthansa these days).

Delta recently launched a similar platform to help its employees.

Delta Air Lines bets on AI to help its operations run smoothly in bad weather

Delta Air Lines’ startup partnerships are fueling innovation

Canonical’s Anbox Cloud puts Android in the cloud

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Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, today announced the launch of Anbox Cloud, a new platform that allows enterprises to run Android in the cloud.

On Anbox Cloud, Android becomes the guest operating system that runs containerized applications. This opens up a range of use cases, ranging from bespoke enterprise apps to cloud gaming solutions.

The result is similar to what Google does with Android apps on Chrome OS, though the implementation is quite different and is based on the LXD container manager, as well as a number of Canonical projects like Juju and MAAS for provisioning the containers and automating the deployment. “LXD containers are lightweight, resulting in at least twice the container density compared to Android emulation in virtual machines – depending on streaming quality and/or workload complexity,” the company points out in its announcements.

Anbox itself, it’s worth noting, is an open-source project that came out of Canonical and the wider Ubuntu ecosystem. Launched by Canonical engineer Simon Fels in 2017, Anbox runs the full Android system in a container, which in turn allows you to run Android application on any Linux-based platform.

What’s the point of all of this? Canonical argues that it allows enterprises to offload mobile workloads to the cloud and then stream those applications to their employees’ mobile devices. But Canonical is also betting on 5G to enable more use cases, less because of the available bandwidth but more because of the low latencies it enables.

“Driven by emerging 5G networks and edge computing, millions of users will benefit from access to ultra-rich, on-demand Android applications on a platform of their choice,” said Stephan Fabel, director of Product at Canonical, in today’s announcement. “Enterprises are now empowered to deliver high performance, high density computing to any device remotely, with reduced power consumption and in an economical manner.”

Outside of the enterprise, one of the use cases that Canonical seems to be focusing on is gaming and game streaming. A server in the cloud is generally more powerful than a smartphone, after all, though that gap is closing.

Canonical also cites app testing as another use case, given that the platform would allow developers to test apps on thousands of Android devices in parallel. Most developers, though, prefer to test their apps in real — not emulated — devices, given the fragmentation of the Android ecosystem.

Anbox Cloud can run in the public cloud, though Canonical is specifically partnering with edge computing specialist Packet to host it on the edge or on-premise. Silicon partners for the project are Ampere and Intel .

Placer.ai, a location data analytics startup, raises $12 million Series A

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Placer.ai, a startup that analyzes location and foot traffic analytics for retailers and other businesses, announced today that it has closed a $12 million Series A. The round was led by JBV Capital, with participation from investors including Aleph, Reciprocal Ventures and OCA Ventures.

The funding will be used on research and development of new features and to expand Placer.ai’s operation in the United States.

Launched in 2016, Placer.ai’s SaaS platform gives its clients real-time data that helps them make decisions like where to rent or buy properties, when to hold sales and promotions and how to manage assets.

Placer.ai analyzes foot traffic and also creates consumer profiles to help clients make marketing and ad spending decisions. It does this by collecting geolocation and proximity data from devices that are enabled to share that information. Placer.ai’s co-founder and CEO Noam Ben-Zvi says the company protects privacy and follows regulation by displaying aggregated, anonymous data and does not collect personally identifiable data. It also does not sell advertising or raw data.

The company currently serves clients in the retail (including large shopping centers), commercial real estate and hospitality verticals, including JLL, Regency, SRS, Brixmor, Verizon* and Caesars Entertainment.

“Up until now, we’ve been heavily focused on the commercial real estate sector, but this has very organically led us into retail, hospitality, municipalities and even [consumer packaged goods],” Ben-Zvi told TechCrunch in an email. “This presents us with a massive market, so we’re just focused on building out the types of features that will directly address the different needs of our core audience.”

He adds that lack of data has hurt retail businesses with major offline operations, but that “by effectively addressing this gap, we’re helping drive more sustainable growth or larger players or minimizing the risk for smaller companies to drive expansion plans that are strategically aggressive.”

Others startups in the same space include Dor, Aislelabs, RetailNext, ShopperTrak and Density. Ben-Zvi says Placer.ai wants to differentiate by providing more types of real-time data analysis.

“While there are a lot of companies touching the location analytics space, we’re in a unique situation as the only company providing these deep and actionable insights for any location in the country in a real-time platform with a wide array of functionality,” he said.

*Disclosure: Verizon Media is the parent company of TechCrunch.

LumApps raises $70M Series C led by Goldman Sachs

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LumApps, the cloud-based social intranet for the enterprise, has closed $70 million in Series C funding. Leading the round is Goldman Sachs Growth, with participation from Bpifrance via its Growth Fund Large Venture.

Others participating include Idinvest Partners, Iris Capital, and Famille C (the family office of Courtin-Clarins). The round brings the total raised by the French company to around $100 million.

Founded in Paris back in 2012, before launching today’s proposition in 2015, LumApps has developed what it describes as a “social intranet” for enterprises to enable employees to better informed, connect and collaborate. The SaaS integrates with other enterprise software such as G Suite, Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft SharePoint, to centralize access to corporate content, business applications and social features under a single platform. The central premise is to help companies “break down silos” and streamline internal communication.

LumApps customers include Airbus, Veolia, Valeo, Air Liquide, Colgate-Palmolive, The Economist, Schibsted, EA, Logitech, Toto, and Japan Airlines, and the company claims to have achieved year-on-year revenue growth of 100%.

“Our dream was to enable access to useful information in one click, from one place and for everyone,” LumApps founder and CEO Sébastien Ricard told TechCrunch when the company raised its Series B early last year. “We wanted to build a solution that bridged [an] intranet and social network, with the latest new technologies. A place that users will love.”

Since then, LumApps has added several new offices and has seven worldwide: Lyon, Paris, London, New York, Austin, San Francisco, and Tokyo. Armed with additional funding, the company will continue adding significant headcount, hiring across engineering, product, sales and marketing. There are also plans to expand to Canada, more of Asia Pacific, and Germany.

“We’re actually looking at hiring 200 people minimum,” Ricard tells me. “We’re growing fast and have ambitious plans to take the product to new heights, including fulfilling our vision of making LumApps a personal assistant powered by AI. This will require a significant investment in top engineering/AI talent globally”.

Asked to elaborate on what machine learning and AI could bring to a social intranet, Ricard says the vision is to make LumApps a personal assistant for all communications and workflows in the enterprise.

“We see a future where this personal assistant can make predictive suggestions based on historical data and actions. Applying AI to prompt authors with suggested content, flagging important items that demand attention, and auto-archiving old content, are a few examples. Managing the massive troves of content and data companies have today is critical”.

Ricard also sees AI playing a big role in data security. “Employees have a high-degree of control with regard to data sharing and AI can help manage what employees can share in the workplace. This is more long-term but it’s where we’re headed,” he says.

“In the short-term, we’re making investments in automating as many workflows as possible with the goal of reducing or eliminating administrative tasks that keep employees from more productive tasks, including team collaboration and knowledge sharing”.

Meanwhile, LumApps says it may also use part of the Series C for M&A activity. “We’re growing fast and we’re looking at different areas for expansion opportunities,” Ricard says. “This includes retail and manufacturing and some business functions like HR, marketing and communications. We don’t have concrete plans to acquire any companies at the moment but we are keeping our options open as acquiring best-in-breed technologies often makes more sense from a business perspective than building it yourself”.