Data breaches have become a part of life. They impact hospitals, universities, government agencies, charitable organizations and commercial enterprises. In healthcare alone, 2020 saw 640 breaches, exposing 30 million personal records, a 25% increase over 2019 that equates to roughly two breaches per day, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. On a global basis, 2.3 billion records were breached in February 2021.

It’s painfully clear that existing data loss prevention (DLP) tools are struggling to deal with the data sprawl, ubiquitous cloud services, device diversity and human behaviors that constitute our virtual world.

Conventional DLP solutions are built on a castle-and-moat framework in which data centers and cloud platforms are the castles holding sensitive data. They’re surrounded by networks, endpoint devices and human beings that serve as moats, defining the defensive security perimeters of every organization. Conventional solutions assign sensitivity ratings to individual data assets and monitor these perimeters to detect the unauthorized movement of sensitive data.

Unfortunately, these historical security boundaries are becoming increasingly ambiguous and somewhat irrelevant as bots, APIs and collaboration tools become the primary conduits for sharing and exchanging data.

In reality, data loss is only half the problem confronting a modern enterprise. Corporations are routinely exposed to financial, legal and ethical risks associated with the mishandling or misuse of sensitive information within the corporation itself. The risks associated with the misuse of personally identifiable information have been widely publicized.

However, risks of similar or greater severity can result from the mishandling of intellectual property, material nonpublic information, or any type of data that was obtained through a formal agreement that placed explicit restrictions on its use.

Conventional DLP frameworks are incapable of addressing these challenges. We believe they need to be replaced by a new data misuse protection (DMP) framework that safeguards data from unauthorized or inappropriate use within a corporate environment in addition to its outright theft or inadvertent loss. DMP solutions will provide data assets with more sophisticated self-defense mechanisms instead of relying on the surveillance of traditional security perimeters.

JFrog, the company best known for a platform that helps developers continuously manage software delivery and updates, is making a deal to help it expand its presence and expertise in an area that has become increasingly connected to DevOps: security. The company is acquiring Vdoo, which has built an AI-based platform that can be used to detect and fix vulnerabilities in the software systems that work with and sit on IoT and connected devices. The deal — in a mix of cash and stock — is valued at approximately $300 million, JFrog confirmed to me.

Sunnyvale-based, Israeli-founded JFrog is publicly traded on Nasdaq, where it went public last September, and currently it has a market cap of $4.65 billion. Vdoo, meanwhile, had raised about $70 million from investors that include NTT, Dell, GGV and Verizon (disclaimer: Verizon owns TechCrunch), and when we covered its most recent funding round, we estimated that the valuation was somewhere between $100 million and $200 million, making this a decent return.

Shlomi Ben Haim, JFrog’s co-founder and CEO, said that his company’s turn to focusing deeper on security, and making this acquisition in particular to fill out that strategy, are a natural progression in its aim to build out an end-to-end platform for the DevOps team.

“When we started JFrog, the main challenge was to educate the market on what we saw as most important priorities when it comes to building, testing and deploying software,” he said. Then sometime around 2015-2016 he said they started to realize there was a “crack” in the system, “a crack called security.” InfoSec engineers and developers sometimes work at cross purposes, as “developers became too fast” the work they were doing has inadvertently led to a lot of security vulnerabilities.

JFrog has been building a number of tools since then to address that and to bring the collective priorities together, such as its X-ray product. And indeed, Vdoo is not JFrog’s first foray into security, but it represents a significant step deeper into the hardware and systems that are being run on software. “It’s a very important leap forward,” Ben Haim said.

For its part, Vdoo was born out of a realization as well as a challenging mission: IoT and other connected devices — a universe of some 50 billion pieces of hardware as of last year — represents a massive security headache, and not just because of the volume of devices: Each object uses and interacts with software in the cloud and so each instance represents a potential vulnerability, with zero-day vulnerabilities, CVEs, configuration and hardening issues, and standard non-compliance among some of the most common.

While connected-device security up to now has typically focused on monitoring activity on the hardware, how data is moving in and out of it, Vdoo’s approach has been to build a platform that monitors the behavior of the devices themselves on top of that, using AI to compare that behavior to identify when something is not working as it should. Interestingly, this mirrors the kind of binary analysis that JFrog provides in its DevOps platform, making the two complementary to each other.

But what’s notable is that this will give JFrog a bigger play at the edge, since part of Vdoo’s platform works on devices themselves, “micro agents” as the company has described them to me previously, to detect and repair vulnerabilities on endpoints.

While JFrog has built a lot of its own business from the ground up, it has made a number of acquisitions to bolt on technology (one example: Shippable, which it used to bring continuous integration and delivery into its DevOps platform). In this case, Netanel Davidi, the co-founder and CEO of Vdoo (who previously co-founded and sold another security startup, Cyvera, to Palo Alto Networks) said that this was a good fit because the two companies are fundamentally taking the same approaches in their work (another synergy and justification for DevOps and InfoSec being more closely knitted together too I might add).

“In terms of the fit between the companies, it’s about our approach to binaries,” Davidi said in an interview, noting that the two being on the same page with this approach was fundamental to the deal. “That’s only the way to cover the entire pipeline from the very beginning, when they go you develop something, all the way to the device or to the server or to the application or to the mobile phone. That’s the only way to truly understand the context and contextual risk.”

He also made a note not just of the tech but of the talent that is coming on with the acquisition: 100 people joining JFrog’s 800.

“If JFrog chose to build something like this themselves, they could have done it,” he said. “But the uniqueness here is that we have built the best security team, the best security researchers, the best vulnerability researchers, the best reverse engineers, which focus not only on embedded systems, and IoT, which is considered to be the hardest thing to learn and to analyze, but also in software artifacts. We are bringing this knowledge along with us.”

JFrog said that Vdoo will continue to operate as a standalone SaaS product for the time being. Updates that are made will be in aid of supporting the JFrog platform and the two aim to have a fully integrated, “holistic” product by 2022.

Along with the deal, JFrog reiterated financial guidance for the next quarter that will end June 30, 2021. It expects revenues of $47.6 million to $48.6 million, with non-GAAP operating income of $0.5 million to $1.5 million and non-GAAP EPS of $0.00 to $0.01, assuming approximately 104 million weighted average diluted shares outstanding. For Full Year 2021, revenues are expected to be $198 million to $204 million, with non-GAAP operating income between $5 million and $7 million and an approximately 3% increase in weighted average diluted shares. JFrog anticipates consolidated operating expenses to increase by approximately $9-10 million for the remainder of 2021, subject to the acquisition closing.

With a lot of us spending more time at home these days, home improvement has continued to be a booming market. Now, one of the big players in that space — ServiceTitan, which builds software that today is used by over 100,000 contractors to manage their work — is getting a little bigger.

The company — which also works with contractors that work on business properties — is acquiring Aspire Software, a software provider specifically for commercial landscapers. Along with that, ServiceTitan is announcing another $200 million in funding, a Series G that values that company at $9.5 billion.

The funding is being led by a new backer, Thoma Bravo, with other unnamed existing investors participating. (That list includes Sequoia, Tiger Global, Index Ventures, Dragoneer, T. Rowe Price, Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and ICONIQ Capital.)

Los Angeles-based ServiceTitan is not disclosing the financial terms of the deal, but it comes on the heels of the company raising $500 million only in March (when it was valued at $8.3 billion) — money that it earmarked at the time for acquisitions.

ServiceTitan also confirmed that this is its biggest acquisition yet, which roughly puts this deal in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Aspire will stay based in Missouri to build out the company further from there.

Aspire itself has some 50,000 users and sees $4 billion in annualized transactions on its platform across areas like landscaping, snow and ice management, and construction. It has never disclosed a valuation, nor how much money it has raised. The St Louis, MO company was previously backed by growth equity firm Mainsail Partners.

The deal underscores not just how much scale and opportunity remains in building technology to serve the home services space, but also what might be a consolidating trend within that, where a smaller number of companies are building technology for contractors and others in the space working across a number of adjacent and related verticals.

ServiceTitan is already bringing in annual recurring revenues of $250 million — a figure it shared in March and hasn’t updated — and as of that month, it had grown 50% over the preceding year. Part of that growth is based on simply more usage of and demand for its software, but part of it also has to do with the company expanding what it covers.

ServiceTitan got its start in residential plumbing, HVAC and electrical — the areas where the the two founders Ara Mahdessian (CEO) and Vahe Kuzoyan (president) went first because they knew them best from their own family businesses — but expanded into areas like garage door, chimney and other areas, as well as commercial property, on its own steam.

In other markets like landscaping or pest control, the expertise is more specialized, however, so it makes sense to make acquisitions in those areas to bring in that software, and teams to manage and build it, to further diversify the company. (ServicePro, a pest control company, was acquired in February.)

ServiceTitan said that its contractor customers have made more than $20 billion in transactions in the last year, but with the wider industry of contracting repair and maintenance services estimated to be worth $1 trillion, there is obviously a lot more potential. Hence expanding the range of areas covered in the industry.

“Both Aspire and ServiceTitan were born out of a desire to improve the lives of contractors who work tirelessly to serve their communities, but who have historically been underserved by technology,” said Mahdessian in a statement. “Mark and his team at Aspire have more than 500 years of combined experience in the commercial landscaping industry. Just like we built ServiceTitan to solve the problems our fathers faced, it’s that first-hand industry knowledge that has enabled Aspire to build the most powerful software in the industry with the highest customer satisfaction.”

Thoma Bravo has been making some prolific moves to take majority positions in a number of older tech companies in recent weeks (see QAD, Proofpoint and Talend for three examples among others). This, however, is a growth investment that is coming as many wonder when and if ServiceTitan might go public.

I’ll hopefully get a chance to ask Mahdessian about that later but in March he hinted that an IPO might come later this year or latest by the end of 2022, depending on market conditions. This Series G round implies perhaps stretching to the later part of that timeframe.

“As the fastest-growing software solution for the trades with an unrelenting focus on customer success, ServiceTitan is poised to extend its leadership and capture increased market share as the industry exceeds $1 trillion globally,” said Robert (Tre) Sayle, a partner at Thoma Bravo, in a statement. “ServiceTitan’s expansion into landscaping, a more than $100 billion market in the US alone, is an important step on its path to provide all home and commercial tradesmen with the tools they need to grow and manage a successful business. We are excited to partner with ServiceTitan and to leverage our software and operational expertise to accelerate the company’s growth and build upon its strong momentum.”

There are a number of companies playing in the wider home services market that speak to the opportunity ahead. Companies like Thumbtack are digging deeper into home management, providing a bridge to contractors to fill out the work needed (and also providing them with the software to do so), while companies like Jobber and BigChange, which have also raised recently, are also looking to build better software to manage individual and fleets of contractors and their fleets.

ServiceTitan, the biggest of the software players now, is likely going to continue making more deals to grow its own empire, but it added that it will also be using the funding to expand more organically, with investments into customer service, R&D, and to hire more people across the board.

Slack started talking about a new set of communications tools to enhance the text-based channels at the end of last year. Today the company released a new audio tool called Slack Huddles and gave more details on a couple of other new tools including the ability to leave a video message and an enhanced employee directory, which you can access from inside Slack. All of these appear to have been designed with the changing nature of work in mind.

Let’s start with Slack Huddles, the audio tool that lets you have a real-time conversation with someone in Slack instead of typing out all of your thoughts. This will be much easier for people who find typing challenging, but the company also believes it will allow more spontaneous discussion, which mimics being in the office, at least to some degree.

“Huddles is a light-weight, audio-first way of communicating right in Slack. [It] recreates the spontaneous and serendipitous interactions that happen outside of scheduled meetings,” Tamar Yehoshua, chief product officer at Slack explained in a press briefing yesterday.

As companies continue to introduce more flexible working models, they will have to adjust how they work. Huddles is one way of thinking about that, says Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield.

“Some things can be synchronous, but only take three minutes. Instead of [scheduling a meeting for] next Tuesdays from 11:30 to 12 and [using] the whole half hour because that’s what we scheduled, it’s two or three minutes, right now, And if the conversation fizzles out in the Huddle you leave it open, maybe someone joins later and says something, which you wouldn’t do on a call,” Butterfield said.

And recognizing that not everyone will be able to hear, the new tool includes real-time transcription.

The company has also been talking about providing some kind of video message capability since last year. The idea is almost like a video voicemail or an Instagram Story where you shoot a short video and post it in Slack. “We’ve been thinking about it and we believe that by giving people a way to expressively and asynchronously share and consume information we can enable people to be more flexible in how they work, and reduce the need for video meetings,” Yehoshua said.

The new feature will enable Slack users to play back video, voice and screen recordings natively in Slack. People can record and upload short clips into a channel or DM, “enabling others to watch and respond on their own schedule,” she explained.  While this feature isn’t ready to release yet, Yehoshua reported it is being piloted and will be available to paid teams some time in the coming months.

The last piece is based on the Rimeto acquisition, which Slack bought last year with an eye toward upping their corporate directory piece. The Rimeto product has in fact been repurposed as Slack Atlas, a corporate directory that users can access right in Slack, rather than moving to another program to find that information. It’s another way Slack can keep users in Slack to find the information that they need, while avoiding context switching. This is currently in limited customer testing, but should be available some time later this year, according to the company.

Slack first announced these tools last year, initially saying they were experimental, but quickly shifting them to the product road map. Butterfield appeared in a Clubhouse interview in March with former TechCrunch reporter Josh Constine, who is now a SignalFire investor ostensibly to talk about the future of work, but he also went into more detail about these tools for the first time.

It’s hard not to wrap this discussion into the future of work, and indeed Slack’s future as part of Salesforce, which bought the communications tool for $27 billion last year. Work is changing and Slack is looking to be a broader part of that solution, whatever the future holds.

It’s easy to forget, but Salesforce bought Slack at the end of last year for almost $28 billion, a deal that has yet to close. We don’t know exactly when that will happen, but Slack continues to develop its product roadmap adding new functionality, even while waiting to become part of Salesforce eventually.

Just this morning, the company made official some new tools it had been talking about for some time, including a new voice tool called Slack Huddles, which is available starting today, along with video messaging and a directory service called Slack Atlas.

These tools enhance the functionality of the platform in ways that should prove useful as it becomes part of Salesforce whenever that happens. It’s not hard to envision how integrating Huddles or the video tools (or even Slack Atlas for both internal and external company organizational views) could work when integrated into the Salesforce platform.

Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield says the companies aren’t working together yet because of regulatory limits on communications, but he could definitely see how these tools could work in tandem with Salesforce Service Cloud and Sales Cloud among others and how you can start to merge the data in Salesforce with Slack’s communications capabilities.

“[There’s] this excitement around workflows from the big system of record [in Salesforce] into the communication [in Slack] and having the data show up where the conversations are happening. And I think there’s a lot of potential here for leveraging these indirectly in customer interactions, whether that’s sales, marketing, support or whatever,” he said.

He said that he could also see Salesforce taking advantage of Slack Connect, a capability introduced last year that enables companies to communicate with people outside the company.

“We have all this stuff working inside of Slack Connect, and you get all the same benefits that you would get using Huddles to properly start a conversation, solve some problem or use video as a better way of communicating with [customers],” he said.

These announcements seem to fall into two main categories: the future of work and in the context of the acquisition. Bret Taylor, Salesforce president and COO certainly seemed to recognize that when discussing the deal with TechCrunch when it was announced back in December. He sees the two companies directly addressing the changing face of work:

“When we say we really want Slack to be this next generation interface for Customer 360, what we mean is we’re pulling together all these systems. How do you rally your teams around these systems in this digital work-anywhere world that we’re in right now where these teams are distributed and collaboration is more important than ever,” Taylor said.

Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials says that there is clearly a future of work angle at play as the two companies come together. “I think moves like [today’s Slack announcements] are in response to where things are trending with respect to the future of work as we all find ourselves spending an increasing amount of time in front of webcams and microphones in our home offices meeting and collaborating with others,” he said.

Huddles is an example of how the company is trying to fix that screen fatigue from too many meetings or typing our thoughts. “This kind of ‘audio-first’ capability takes the emphasis off trying to type what we mean in the way we think will get the point across to just being able to say it without the additional effort to make it look right,” he said.

Leary added, “And not only will it allow people to just speak, but also allows us to get a better understanding of the sentiment and emotion that also comes with speaking to people and not having to guess what the intent/emotion is behind the text in a chat.”

As Karissa Bell pointed out on Engadget, Huddles also works like Discord’s chat feature in a business context, which could have great utility for Salesforce tools when it’s integrated with the Salesforce platform

While the regulatory machinations grind on, Slack continues to develop its platform and products. It will of course continue to operate as a stand-lone company, even when the mega deal finally closes, but there will certainly be plenty of cross-platform integrations.

Even if executives can’t discuss what those integrations could look like openly, there has to be a lot of excitement at Salesforce and Slack about the possibilities that these new tools bring to the table — and to the future of work in general — whenever the deal crosses the finish line.