mmhmm, the communications platform developed by Phil Libin and the All Turtles team, is getting a variety of new features. According to Libin, there are parts of video communication today that can not only match what we get in the real world, but exceed it.

That’s how this next iteration of mmhmm is meant to deliver.

The new headline feature is mmhmm Chunky, which allows the presenter to break up their script and presentation into “chunks.” Think of the presenter the same way you think of slides in a deck. Each one gets the full edit treatment and final polish. With Chunky, mmhmm users can break up their presentation into chunks to perfect each individual bit of information.

A presenter can switch between live and pre-recorded chunks in a presentation. So you can imagine a salesman making a pitch and switching over to his explanation of the pricing as a pre-recorded piece of his pitch, or a teacher who has a pre-recorded chunk on a particular topic can throw to that mid-class.

But mmhmm didn’t just think about the creation side, but also the consumption side. Folks in the audience can jump around between chunks and slides to catch up, or even view in a sped-up mode to consume more quickly. Presenters can see where folks in the audience are as they present or later on.

Libin sees this feature as a way to supercharge time.

“At mmhmm, we stopped doing synchronous updates with our fully distributed team,” said Libin. “We don’t have meetings anymore where people take turns updating each other because it’s not very efficient. Now the team just sends around their quick presentations, and I can watch it in double speed because people can listen faster than people can talk. But we don’t have to do it at the same time. Then, when we actually talk synchronously, it’s reserved for that live back-and-forth about the important stuff.”

mmhmm is also announcing that it has developed its own video player, allowing folks to stream their mmhmm presentations to whichever website they’d like. As per usual, mmhmm will still work with Zoom, Google Meet, etc.

The new features list also includes an updated version of Copilot. For folks who remember, Copilot allowed one person to present and another person to “drive,” or art direct, the presentation from the background. Copilot 2.0 lets two people essentially video chat side by side, in whatever environment they’d like.

Libin showed me a presentation/conversation he did with a friend where they were both framed up in Libin’s house. He clarified that this feature works best with one-on-one conversations, or, one-on-one conversations in front of a large audience, such as a fireside chat.

Alongside mmhmm Chunky, streaming and Copilot 2.0, the platform is also doing a bit of spring cleaning with regards to organization. Users will have a Presentation Library where they can save and organize their best takes, and organizations can also use “Loaf” to store all the best videos and presentations company-wide for consumption later. The team also revamped Presets to make it easier to apply a preset to a bunch of slides at once or switch between presets more easily.

A couple other notes: mmhmm is working to bring the app to both iOS and Android very soon, and launch out of beta on Windows.

Libin explained that not every single feature described here will launch today, but rather you’ll see features trickle out each week as we head into summer. He’ll be giving a keynote on the new features here at 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET.

Box executives have been dealing with activist investor Starboard Value over the last year, along with fighting through the pandemic like the rest of us. Today the company reported earnings for the first quarter of its fiscal 2022. Overall, it was a good quarter for the cloud content management company.

The firm reported revenue of $202.4 million, up 10% compared to its year-ago result, numbers that beat Box projections of between $200 million to $201 million. Yahoo Finance reports the analyst consensus was $200.5 million, so the company also bested street expectations.

The company has faced strong headwinds the past year, in spite of a climate that has been generally favorable to cloud companies like Box. A report like this was badly needed by the company as it faces a board fight with Starboard over its direction and leadership.

Company co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie is hoping this report will mark the beginning of a positive trend. “I think you’ve got a better economic climate right now for IT investment. And then secondarily, I think the trends of hybrid work, and the sort of long-term trends of digital transformation are very much supportive of our strategy,” he told TechCrunch in a post-earnings interview.

While Box acquired e-signature startup SignRequest in February, it won’t actually be incorporating that functionality into the platform until this summer. Levie said that what’s been driving the modest revenue growth is Box Shield, the company’s content security product and the platform tools, which enable customers to customize workflows and build applications on top of Box.

The company is also seeing success with large accounts. Levie says that he saw the number of customers spending more than $100,000 with it grow by nearly 50% compared to the year-ago quarter. One of Box’s growth strategies has been to expand the platform and then upsell additional platform services over time, and those numbers suggest that the effort is working.

While Levie was keeping his M&A cards close to the vest, he did say if the right opportunity came along to fuel additional growth through acquisition, he would definitely give strong consideration to further inorganic growth. “We’re going to continue to be very thoughtful on M&A. So we will only do M&A that we think is attractive in terms of price and the ability to accelerate our roadmap, or the ability to get into a part of a market that we’re not currently in,” Levie said.

A closer look at the financials

Box managed modest growth acceleration for the quarter, existing only if we consider the company’s results on a sequential basis. In simpler terms, Box’s newly reported 10% growth in the first quarter of its fiscal 2022 was better than the 8% growth it earned during the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2021, but worse than the 13% growth it managed in its year-ago Q1.

With Box, however, instead of judging it by normal rules, we’re hunting in its numbers each quarter for signs of promised acceleration. By that standard, Box met its own goals.

How did investors react? Shares of the company were mixed after-hours, including a sharp dip and recovery in the value of its equity. The street appears to be confused by the results, weighing the report and working out whether its moderately accelerating growth is sufficiently enticing to warrant holding onto its equity, or more perversely if its growth is not expansive enough to fend off external parties hunting for more dramatic changes at the firm.

Sticking to a high-level view of Box’s results, apart from its growth numbers Box has done a good job shaking fluff out of its operations. The company’s operating margins (GAAP and not) improved, and cash generation also picked up.

Perhaps most importantly, Box raised its guidance from “the range of $840 million to $848 million” to “$845 to $853 million.” Is that a lot? No. It’s +$5 million to both the lower and upper-bounds of its targets. But if you squint, the company’s Q4 to Q1 revenue acceleration, and upgraded guidance, could be an early indicator of a return to form.

Levie admitted that 2020 was a tough year for Box. “Obviously, last year was a complicated year in terms of the macro environment, the pandemic, just lots of different variables to deal with…” he said. But the CEO continues to think that his organization is set up for future growth.

Will Box manage to perform well enough to keep activist shareholders content? Levie thinks if he can string together more quarters like this one, he can keep Starboard at bay. “I think when you look at the next three quarters, the ability to guide up on revenue, the ability to guide up on profitability. We think it’s a very very strong earnings report and we think it shows a lot of the momentum in the business that we have right now.”

E-commerce is on the rise, but that also means the risk, and occurrence, of e-commerce fraud is, too. Now, Forter, one of the startups building a business to tackle that malicious activity, has closed $300 million in funding — a sign both of the size of the issue and its success in tackling it to date.

The new funding, a Series F, values Forter at $3 billion — notable not least because the funding is coming only about six months since Forter’s previous round, a $125 million Series E that valued it at over $1.3 billion.

Tiger Global Management is leading this latest equity infusion, with new backers Third Point Ventures and Adage Capital Management, and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, March Capital, NewView Capital, Salesforce Ventures and Scale Venture Partners, also involved.

The plan will be to use to the money to expand Forter — founded in Tel Aviv and now based in New York — geographically, bring more functionality into its product and explore adjacent areas where Forter might expand its capabilities, either organically or by way of acquisition.

Forter today focuses mainly on identifying fraud at the point of transaction and building an AI-based platform that “learns” more behaviors to improve its accuracy; it also builds models that keep more people transacting and helps bring down the number of “false positives” where activity that appears suspicious actually is not.

One area on its roadmap for expansion is remediation after the fraud occurs, said Liron Damri, Forter’s co-founder and president.

“Our vision is to serve the merchant as the go-to trusted partner for everything, so remediation is definitely on our roadmap,” he said of potential acquisition targets.

Damri, who co-founded the company with Michael Reitblat, CEO, and Alon Shemesh, chief analyst, said in an interview that the startup — which works with some 350 large customers like Priceline and Instacart and a growing number of service providers like FreedomPay and Flutterwave, altogether seeing some $250 billion worth of transactions globally last year — wasn’t proactively looking for more money.

“All we wanted to do was go back to run the company,” he said. “But in the past six months we’ve seen such a great momentum, doubling revenue and ARR, and seeing our customer volumes grow.”

That led to a lot of investors proactively reaching out and asking questions, he continued. He described Tiger as a “kingmaker” in the category of e-commerce, so it was an easy decision to make, and gave it the “gas” it needed to take its next growth steps.

E-commerce has been one of the major technology growth stories of the last year, fueled by a rush of consumers and businesses playing out their lives online at a time when it has been harder, and in some cases impossible, to transact in person.

While we have definitely seen a lot of growth, and growing sophistication, in the number of tools on the market to combat cybercrime, it’s in some ways an ouroboros of a problem: The more transactions that are made, the more there are that need to be monitored for suspicious activity. And in any case, fraud in e-commerce is not exactly going away. It’s estimated that it will cost retailers some $20 billion in 2021 and is always on the rise.

Forter got its start in 2013 focusing first on monitoring activity on sites wherever customers happened to be to identify suspicious behavior — a sign that it might be a bot or someone on an illicit spending spree racking up a lot of items in quick succession — with the bigger concept being to build a network of activity from which to learn and help make more informed decisions over time.

In more recent years, the essence of the issue has expanded somewhat, and also grown more sophisticated. As companies have grown their businesses to reach beyond early adopters and core audiences, and into a more “omnichannel” environment beyond basic check-outs on their own sites, so too have the kinds of consumers coming to shop.

This has meant that traditional “signals” of legitimate buyers no longer were the same as before — a predicament that really rose in profile in the last year, as many newcomers came to e-commerce for the first time during the pandemic. In fact, Damri told me that in 2020 there were seven times more “newcomers” to sites than in 2019.

So with most of the flagging of suspicious activity coming up at the point of transaction, Forter expanded to analyzing activity there.

As with a recent acquisition of Stripe’s, Bouncer, to build out its own anti-fraud product, a large part of Forter’s attention these days is on providing tools to companies to identify suspicious purchasing, but even more than that, to make sure that the many occasions that might look suspicious are not, to help reduce the amount of “cart abandonment” and increase conversions.

The old way of doing things, Damri said, involved “thousands of rules and applying suspicion on everyone. You were guilty unless proved otherwise.”

Using its AI engine and some risk analysis (not unlike the kind that, say, an insurance or loan provider might apply in their businesses), Forter turned the proposition on its head.

“We wanted to approve as much as possible. We wanted to gradually increase the trust you have of your own customers. We changed the sentiment and approach… especially in areas that were neglected, such as those who saw significant changes in life,” Damri said. “This was extremely important as COVID-19 hit.”

Forter’s risk tolerance model, it seems, has so far proven out. Damri said that its algorithms applied reduce the total number of declines by 80%, but also reduce the number of chargebacks — one indicator of a mistake — by 60%.

This implies that it’s blocking more of the “wrong” kind of purchases, and letting through more of the legitimate ones. (That is, he pointed out, in addition to a few bad actors Forter intentionally lets buy things, just to learn how they operate. Damri referred to this as “paid-tuition.”)

Risk-based approvals, coupled with algorithms to learn what is truly bad, has resonated with customers, and investors.

“With the unprecedented rate of digital transformation and the fierce competition in creating the slickest user experience, superior fraud prevention plays an ever more critical role in e-commerce revenue growth” said John Curtius, a partner at Tiger Global Management, in a statement. “After we talked with dozens of customers of every relevant solution in this space, it was very clear to us that Forter is the clear leader in performance and scale.”

“As a longtime investor, it’s been incredible to see Forter’s ascent,” added Ravi Viswanathan, NewView Capital. “It’s a testament to the leadership team’s vision and execution in allowing merchants to provide the seamless experiences customers expect and to be able to accept as many transactions as possible, while still accurately identifying and blocking fraud.”

Hyro, formerly Airbud, is today announcing the close of a $10.5 million Series A financing round led by Spero Ventures, with participation from Twilio and Mindset Ventures. Existing investors Hanaco Ventures, Spider Capital and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator also participated in the round.

Hyro is an enterprise application, currently aimed at the healthcare sector but with eyes on new verticals, that adds an intelligent layer of voice chat or text chat to any application or website.

The company calls itself an adaptive communications platform, which essentially means that customers use plug-and-play tools to get information to end-users in a conversational way, whether that be voice or chat. It can integrate with contact centers, chatbots, SMS and other forms of communication. Essentially, Hyro targets information-heavy industries that often have to communicate with end-users.

This type of scenario, in the words of co-founder Israel Krush, usually leads to a terrible experience for the end user and a costly, inefficient process for the organization. The problem was no more apparent than in the healthcare sector during the pandemic. End users would flood platforms for information regarding the virus, the vaccine, testing, etc., but ask those redundant questions in myriad ways. On the enterprise side, the answers to those questions were changing over time.

Hyro allows these organizations to easily edit and change that information and deliver it to end users in an efficient way. But perhaps most importantly, Hyro scrapes information from the website to set up its own conversational tree, so the client doesn’t have to do a lot of heavy lifting up front.

Krush says that the problem is big, which means that the space is crowded. He views Twilio’s participation in this round of fundraising as a differentiator.

“The market is crowded so it’s really hard to differentiate yourself from the crowd,” said Krush. “Even though we have great technology, everyone says they have great technology. Twilio coming into this round and the partnership we’re trying to develop around contact centers really attests to the differentiation of our approach, to the scalability and the modularity of our approach.”

He added that Hyro is not a healthcare company — “it’s really about serving any enterprise.”

Hyro healthcare customers include Carroll, Wheelpros, Mercy Health, University of Rochester Medical Center and Weill Cornell Medicine, but the company plans to use this new funding to scale into more verticals, with an aim toward real estate, government and other information-heavy industries. 

This latest round brings Hyro’s total funding to $15 million.

Uptycs, a Boston-area startup that uses data to help understand and prevent security attacks, announced a $50 million Series C today, 11 months after announcing a $30 million Series B. Norwest Venture Partners led the round with participation from Sapphire Ventures and ServiceNow Ventures.

Company co-founder and CEO Ganesh Pai says that he was still well capitalized from last year’s investment, and wasn’t actually looking to raise funds, but the investors came looking for him and he saw a way to speed up some aspects of the company’s roadmap.

“It was one of those things where the round came in primarily as a function of execution and success to date, and we decided to capitalize on that because we know the partners and raised the capital so that we could use it meaningfully for a couple of different things, primarily sales and marketing acceleration,” Pai said.

He said that part of the reason for the company’s success over the last year was that the pandemic generated more customer interest as people moved to work from home, the SolarWinds hack happened and companies were moving to the cloud faster. “We provided a solution which was telemetric powered and very insightful when it came to solving their security problems and that’s what led to triple digit growth over the last year,” he said.

But Pai says that the company has not been sitting still in terms of the platform. While last year, he described it primarily as a forensic security data solution, helping customers figure out what happened after a security issue has happened, he says that the company has begun expanding on that vision to include all four main areas of security, including being proactive, reactive, predictive and protective.

The company started primarily in being reactive by figuring what happened in the past, but has begun to expand into these other areas over the last year, and the plan is to continue to build out that functionality.

“In the context of SolarWinds, what everyone is trying to figure out is how soon into the supply chain can you figure out what could be potentially wrong by looking at indications of behavior or indications of compromise, and our ability to ingest telemetry from a diverse set of sources, not as a bolt-on solution, but something which is built from the ground up, resonated really well,” Pai explained.

The company had 65 employees when we spoke last year for the Series B. Today, Pai says that number is approaching 140 and he is adding new people every week, with a goal to get to around 200 people by the end of the year. He says as the company grows, he keeps diversity top of mind.

“As we grow and as we raise capital diversity has been something which has been a high priority and very critical for us,” he said. In fact, he reports that more than 50% of his employees come from under-represented groups whether it’s Latinx, Black or Asian heritage.

Pai says that one of the reasons he has been able to build a diverse workforce is his commitment to a remote workplace, which means he can hire from anywhere, something he will continue to do even after the pandemic ends.