When Spotinst rebranded to Spot in March, it seemed big changes were afoot for the startup, which originally helped companies find and manage cheap infrastructure known as spot instances (hence its original name). We had no idea how big at the time. Today, NetApp announced plans to acquire the startup.

The companies did not share the price, but Israeli publication CTECH pegged the deal at $450 million. NetApp would not confirm that price.

It may seem like a strange pairing, a storage company and a startup that helps companies find bargain infrastructure and monitor cloud costs, but NetApp sees the acquisition as a way for its customers to bridge storage and infrastructure requirements.

“The combination of NetApp’s leading shared storage platform for block, file and object and Spot’s compute platform will deliver a leading solution for the continuous optimization of cost for all workloads, both cloud native and legacy,” Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager for public cloud services at NetApp said in a statement.

Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research says the deal makes sense on that level, but it depends on how well NetApp incorporates the Spot technology into its stack. “At the end of the day to run next generation applications successfully in the cloud you need to be efficient on compute and storage usage. NetApp is doing great on the latter but needed way to monitor and automate compute consultation. This is what Spot brings to the table, so the combination makes sense, but as in all acquisitions execution is key now,” Mueller told TechCrunch.

Spot helps companies do a couple of things. First of all it manages spot and reserved instances for customers in the cloud. Spot instances in particular, are extremely cheap because they represent unused capacity at the cloud provider. The catch is that the vendor can take the resources back when they need them, and Spot helps safely move workloads around these requirements.

Reserved instances are cloud infrastructure you buy in advance for a discounted price. The cloud vendor gives a break on pricing, knowing that it can count on the customer to use a certain amount of infrastructure resources.

At the time it rebranded, the company also had gotten into monitoring cloud spending and usage across clouds. Amiram Shachar, co-founder and CEO at Spot, told TechCrunch in March, “With this new product we’re providing a more holistic platform that lets customers see all of their cloud spending in one place — all of their usage, all of their costs, what they are spending and doing across multiple clouds — and then what they can actually do [to deploy resources more efficiently],” he said at the time.

Shachar writing in a blog post today announcing the deal indicated the company will continue to support its products as part of the NetApp family, and as startup CEOs typically say at a time like this, move much faster as part of a large organization.

“Spot will continue to offer and fully support our products, both now and as part of NetApp when the transaction closes. In fact, joining forces with NetApp will bring additional resources to Spot that you’ll see in our ability to deliver our roadmap and new innovation even faster and more broadly,” he wrote in the post.

NetApp has been quite acquisitive this year. It acquired Talon Storage in early March and CloudJumper at the end of April. This represents the twentieth acquisition overall for the company, according to Crunchbase data.

Spot was founded in 2015 in Tel Aviv. It has raised over $52 million, according to Crunchbase data. The deal is expected to close later this year, assuming it passes typical regulatory hurdles.

Searchable.ai is an early-stage startup in the alpha phase of testing its initial product, but it has an idea compelling enough to attract investment, even during a pandemic. Today the company announced an additional $4 million in seed capital to continue building its AI-driven search solution.

Susquehanna International Group and Omicron Media co-led the round with participation by Defy Partners, NextView Ventures and a group of unnamed angel investors. Today’s investment comes on top of the $2 million in seed money the startup announced in October.

Company co-founder and CEO Brian Shin said that when he presented to his investors in early March at the last event he attended before everything shut down, they approached him about additional money, and given the economic uncertainty he decided to take it.

“Honestly we probably would not have taken additional money if it was not for the uncertainty around the macro environment right now,” he told TechCrunch.

The company is trying to solve enterprise search and being pre-revenue, Shin recognized that having additional capital would give them more room to build the product and get it to market.

“We are trying to solve this problem where people just can’t find information that they need in order to do their jobs. When you look within the workplace, this problem is just getting worse and worse with the proliferation of different formats and people storing their information in many different places, local networks, cloud repositories, email and Slack,” he explained.

They have a few thousand people in the alpha program right now testing a personal desktop version of the application that helps individual users find their content wherever it happens to be. The plan is to open that up to a wider group soon.

The road map calls for a teams version where groups of employees can search among their different individual repositories, a developer version to build the search technology into other operations and eventually an enterprise tool. They also want to add voice search starting with an Alexa skill with the general belief that we need to move beyond keyword searches to more natural language approaches.

“We believe that there’ll be a whole new category of search, search companies and search products that are more conversational. […] Being able to interact with your information more naturally, more and more conversationally, that’s where we think the markets is going,” he said.

The company now has more money in the bank to help achieve that vision.

It was perhaps not until the COVID-19 pandemic hit the planet that most of us had ever heard or uttered the phrase “supply chain”. But in a global economy that had become drunk and lazy on ‘just in time ordering’ and similar, the threat to supply chains of things like, oh, food, from that pesky virus has become real and visceral. That why automation of ‘the supply chain’ has become such a huge issue. So it’s not a huge surprise that startups aimed at tackling this are suddenly thrust into the limelight.

Step forward, Cork, Ireland-based Keelvar, strategic sourcing software company, which today announces that it has raised $18 million in Series A funding led by Elephant and Mosaic Ventures with participation from Paua Ventures, enabling the company to further expand into enterprise markets.

The investment will support Keelvar’s expansion plans for Europe and the US, amid the rapidly-growing need for supply chain automation solutions, which has been further accelerated by the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

Keelvar provides large enterprises with ‘Advanced Sourcing Optimization’ software and ‘Intelligent Sourcing Automation’ that uses AI to fully automate tactical buying processes.

It competes with Coupa and Jaggaer in terms of all three offering sophisticated eSourcing software. Keelvar says its key competitive advantage is that it provide intelligent bots to autopilot the sourcing projects, thus making the whole process easier, faster and cheaper.

It also currently manages over $90bn in spend annually for enterprises in all major industries. Customers include Siemens, Coca-Cola, Novartis, BMW, and Samsung.

With COVID-19 disrupting supply chains globally, Keelvar expects the demand for automation to further increase.

In a statement Alan Holland, CEO of Keelvar said:”The Future of Work in procurement is changing quickly, with COVID19 acting as a catalyst. We have witnessed an escalation in demand from enterprises seeking intelligent systems to automate complex processes as teams became overburdened with disrupted supply chains. Keelvar has proven that Sourcing Bots can relieve that burden enormously. Now it’s time to hit the accelerator and scale-up.”

Speaking about the investment, Peter Fallon, partner at Elephant noted: “Keelvar’s sourcing optimization and automation software delivers meaningful ROI to enterprise sourcing and procurement organizations globally. We are excited to partner with Alan Holland and the team at Keelvar as the company continues to emerge as a leader in this market.”

Private sector companies alone spend trillions annually buying from third-party suppliers. External sourcing is usually the largest expense category and on average it is 43% of total costs (Bain & Company). The global procurement software market is currently growing at a CAGR of 9.1%, and expected to reach $7.3 billion by 2022 (IDC).

Speaking about the funding, Toby Coppel, co-founder, and partner at Mosaic Ventures said: “Keelvar is a brilliant example of machine learning in action, giving superpower to procurement teams in every large enterprise. With COVID-19 pushing businesses to embrace these new technologies, we’re excited to partner with Keelvar on the next phase of growth.”

Atlassian today launched a slew of DevOps-centric updates to a variety of its services, ranging from Bitbucket Cloud and Pipelines to Jira and others. While it’s quite a grab-bag of announcements, the overall idea behind them is to make it easier for teams to collaborate across functions as companies adopt DevOps as their development practice of choice.

“I’ve seen a lot of these tech companies go through their agile and DevOps transformations over the years,” Tiffany To, the head of agile and DevOps solutions at Atlassian told me. “Everyone wants the benefits of DevOps, but — we know it — it gets complicated when we mix these teams together, we add all these tools. As we’ve talked with a lot of our users, for them to succeed in DevOps, they actually need a lot more than just the toolset. They have to enable the teams. And so that’s what a lot of these features are focused on.”

As To stressed, the company also worked with several ecosystem partners, for example, to extend the automation features in Jira Software Cloud, which can now also be triggered by commits and pull requests in GitHub, GitLab and other code repositories that are integrated into Jira Software Cloud. “Now you get these really nice integrations for DevOps where we are enabling these developers to not spend time updating the issues,” To noted.

Indeed, a lot of the announcements focus on integrations with third-party tools. This, To said, is meant to allow Atlassian to meet developers where they are. If your code editor of choice is VS Code, for example, you can now try Atlassian’s now VS Code extension, which brings your task like from Jira Software Cloud to the editor, as well as a code review experience and CI/CD tracking from Bitbucket Pipelines.

Also new is the “Your Work” dashboard in Bitbucket Cloud, which can now show you all of your assigned Jira issues, as well as Code Insights in Bitbucket Cloud. Code Insights features integrations with Mabl for test automation, Sentry for monitoring and Snyk for finding security vulnerabilities. These integrations were built on top of an open API, so teams can build their own integrations, too.

“There’s a really important trend to shift left. How do we remove the bugs and the security issues earlier in that dev cycle, because it costs more to fix it later,” said To. “You need to move that whole detection process much earlier in the software lifecycle.”

Jira Service Desk Cloud is getting a new Risk Management Engine that can score the risk of changes and auto-approve low-risk ones, as well as a new change management view to streamline the approval process.

Finally, there is new Opsgenie and Bitbucket Cloud integration that centralizes alerts and promises to filter out the noise, as well as a nice incident investigation dashboard to help teams take a look at the last deployment that happened before the incident occurred.

“The reason why you need all these little features is that as you stitch together a very large number of tools […], there is just lots of these friction points,” said To. “And so there is this balance of, if you bought a single toolchain, all from one vendor, you would have fewer of these friction points, but then you don’t get to choose best of breed. Our mission is to enable you to pick the best tools because it’s not one-size-fits-all.”

Meet Watchful, a Tel Aviv-based startup coming out of stealth that wants to help you learn more about what your competitors are doing when it comes to mobile app development. The company tries to identify features that are being tested before getting rolled out to everyone, giving you an advantage if you’re competing with those apps.

Mobile app development has become a complex task, especially for the biggest consumer apps, from social to e-commerce. Usually, mobile development teams work on a new feature and try it out on a small subset of users. That process is called A/B testing as you separate your customers in two buckets — bucket A or bucket B.

For instance, Twitter is trying out its own version of Stories called Fleets. The company first rolled it out in Brazil to track the reaction and get some data from its user base. If you live anywhere else in the world, you’re not going to see that feature.

There are other ways to select a group of users to try out a new feature — you could even take part in a test because you’ve been randomly picked.

“When you open the app, you’ll probably see a different version from the app I see. You’re in a different region, you have a different device,” co-founder and CEO Itay Kahana told me. He previously founded popular to-do app Any.do.

For product designers, it has become a nightmare as you can’t simply open an app and look at what your competitors are doing. At any point in time, there are many different versions of the same app as there are multiple A/B tests going on at the same time.

Watchful lets you learn from competition by analyzing all those different versions and annotating changes in user flows, flagging unreleased features and uncovering design changes.

It is different from other mobile intelligence startups, such as App Annie or Sensor Tower. Those services mostly let you track downloads and rankings on the App Store and Play store to uncover products that are doing well.

“We’re focused on everything that is open and visible to the users,” Kahana said.

Like other intelligence startups, Watchful needs data. App Annie acquired a VPN app called Distimo and a data usage monitoring app called Mobidia. When you activate those apps, App Annie captures data about your phone usage, such as the number of times you open an app and how much time you spend in those apps.

According to a BuzzFeed News report, Sensor Tower has operated at least 20 apps on iOS and Android to capture data, such as Free and Unlimited VPN, Luna VPN, Mobile Data and Adblock Focus. Some of those apps have been removed from the stores following BuzzFeed’s story.

I asked a lot of questions about Watchful’s source of data. “It’s all real users that give us access to this information. It’s all running on real devices, real users. We extract videos and screenshots from them,” Kahana said.

“It’s more like a panel of users that we have access to their devices. It’s not an SDK that is hidden in some app and collects information and do shady stuff,” he added.

You’ll have to trust him as the company didn’t want to elaborate further. Kahana also said that data is anonymized in order to remove all user information.

Images are then analyzed by a computer vision algorithm focused on differential analysis. The startup has a team in the Philippines that goes through all that data and annotates it. It is then sent to human analysts so that they can track apps and write reports.

Watchful shared one of those reports with TechCrunch earlier this year. Thanks to this process, the startup discovered that TikTok parent company ByteDance has been working on a deepfake maker. The feature was spotted in both TikTok and its Chinese sister app Douyin.

But Watchful’s customers aren’t news organizations. The company sells access to its service to big companies working in the mobile space. Kahana didn’t want to name them, but it said it is already working with “the biggest social network players and the biggest e-commerce players, mainly in the U.S.”

The startup sells annual contracts based on the number of apps that you want to track. It has raised a $3 million seed round led by Vertex Ventures.