A couple of weeks ago SentinelOne announced it was acquiring high-speed logging platform Scalyr for $155 million. Just this morning CrowdStrike struck next, announcing it was buying unlimited logging tool Humio for $400 million.

In Humio, CrowdStrike gets a company that will provide it with the ability to collect unlimited logging information. Most companies have to pick and choose what to log and how long to keep it, but with Humio, they don’t have to make these choices, with customers processing multiple terabytes of data every single day.

Humio CEO Geeta Schmidt writing in a company blog post announcing the deal described her company in similar terms to Scalyr, a data lake for log information:

“Humio had become the data lake for these enterprises enabling searches for longer periods of time and from more data sources allowing them to understand their entire environment, prepare for the unknown, proactively prevent issues, recover quickly from incidents, and get to the root cause,” she wrote.

That means with Humio in the fold, CrowdStrike can use this massive amount of data to help deal with threats and attacks in real time as they are happening, rather than reacting to them and trying to figure out what happened later, a point by the way that SentinelOne also made when it purchased Scalyr.

“The combination of real-time analytics and smart filtering built into CrowdStrike’s proprietary Threat Graph and Humio’s blazing-fast log management and index-free data ingestion dramatically accelerates our [eXtended Detection and Response (XDR)] capabilities beyond anything the market has seen to date,” CrowdStrike CEO and co-founder George Kurtz said in a statement.

While two acquisitions don’t necessarily make a trend, it’s clear that security platform players are suddenly seeing the value of being able to process the large amounts of information found in logs, and they are willing to put up some cash to get that capability. It will be interesting to see if any other security companies react with a similar move in the coming months.

Humio was founded in 2016 and raised just over $31 million, according to Pitchbook Data. Its most recent funding round came in March 2020, a $20 million Series B led by Dell Technologies Capital. It would appear to be a decent exit for the startup.

CrowdStrike was founded in 2011 and raised over $480 million before going public in 2019. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter, and is subject to typical regulatory oversight.

When Wendell Brooks stepped down as managing partner and head of Intel Capital last August, Anthony Lin was named to replace him on an interim basis. At the time, it wasn’t clear if he would be given the role permanently, but today, six months later, the answer is known.

In a letter to the firm’s portfolio CEOs published on the company website, Lin mentioned, almost casually, that he had taken on the two roles on a permanent basis. “Personally, I want to share that I have been appointed to managing partner and head of Intel Capital. I have been a member of the investment committee for the past several years and am humbly awed by the talent of our entrepreneurs and our team,” he wrote.

Lin takes over in a time of turmoil for Intel as the company struggles to regain its place in the semiconductor business that it dominated for decades. Meanwhile, Intel itself has a new CEO with Pat Gelsinger returning in January from VMware to lead the organization.

As the corporate investment arm of Intel, it looks for companies that can help the parent company understand where to invest resources in the future. If that is its goal, perhaps it hasn’t done a great job, as Intel has lost some of its edge when it comes to innovation.

Lin, who was formerly head of mergers and acquisitions and international investing at the firm, can use the power of the firm’s investment dollars to try to help point the parent company in the right direction and help find new ways to build innovative solutions on the Intel platform.

Lin acknowledged how challenging 2020 was for everyone, and his company was no exception, but the firm invested in 75 startups, including 35 new deals and 40 deals involving companies in which it had previously invested. It has also made a commitment to invest in companies with more diverse founders. To that end, 30% of new venture-stage dollars went to startups led by diverse leaders, according to Lin.

What’s more, the company made a five-year commitment that 15% of all its deals would go to companies with Black founders. It made some progress toward that goal, but there is still a ways to go. “At the end of 2020, 9% of our new venture deals and 15% of our venture dollars committed were in companies led by Black founders. We know there is more progress to be made and we will continue to encourage, foster and invest in diverse and inclusive teams,” he wrote.

Lin faces a big challenge ahead as he takes over a role that had the same leader for the first 28 years in Arvind Sodhani. His predecessor, Brooks, was there for five years. Now it passes to Lin, and he needs to use the firm’s investment might to help Gelsinger advance the goals of the broader firm, while making sound investments.

After raising $690 million from SoftBank in December to make acquisitions, the Sweden-based cloud communications company Sinch has followed through on its strategy in that department. Today the company announced that it is acquiring Inteliquent, an interconnection provider for voice communications in the U.S. currently owned by private equity firm GTCR, for $1.14 billion in cash.

And to finance the deal, Sinch said it has raised financing totaling SEK8.2 billion — $986 million — from Handelsbanken and Danske Bank, along with other facilities it had in place.

The deal will give Sinch — a competitor to Twilio with a range of messaging, calling and marketing (engagement) APIs for those building communications into their services in mobile apps and other services — a significant foothold in the U.S. market.

Inteliquent — a profitable company with 500 employees and revenues of $533 million, gross profit of $256 million and EBITDA of $135 million in 2020 — claims to be one of the biggest voice carriers in North America, serving both other service providers and enterprises. Its network connects to all the major telcos, covering 94% of the U.S. population, with more than 300 billion minutes of voice calls and 100 million phone numbers handled annually for customers.

Sinch is publicly traded in Sweden — where its market cap is currently at $13 billion (just over 108 billion Swedish krona) — and the acquisition begs the question of whether the company plans to establish more of a financial presence in the U.S., for example with a listing there. We have asked the company what its next steps might be and will update this post as and when we learn more.

“Becoming a leader in the U.S. voice market is key to establish Sinch as the leading global cloud communications platform,” said Oscar Werner, Sinch CEO, in a statement. “Inteliquent serves the largest and most demanding voice customers in America with superior quality backed by a fully-owned network across the entire U.S.. Our joint strengths in voice and messaging provide a unique position to grow our business and power a superior customer experience for our customers.”

Inteliquent provides two main areas of service, Communications-Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) for API-based services to provide voice calling and phone numbers; and more legacy Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) products for telcos such as off-net call termination (when a call is handed off from one carrier to another) and toll-free numbers. These each account for roughly half of the total business although — unsurprisingly — the CPaaS business is growing at twice the rate of IaaS.

Its business, like many others focusing on services for people who are relying more on communications services as they are seeing each other in person less — saw a surge of use this past year, it said. (Revenues adjusted without COVID lift, it noted, would have been $499 million, so still healthy.)

As for Sinch, since being founded by CLX in 2008 (its name was a rebrand after CLX acquired Sinch, which spun out from Rebtel in 2014) to take on the business of providing communications tools to developers, it has been on an acquisition roll to bulk up its geographical reach and the services that it provides to those customers.

Deals have included, most recently, buying ACL in India for $70 million and SAP’s digital interconnect business for $250 million. The deals — combined with Twilio’s own acquisitions of companies like SendGrid for $2 billion and last year’s Segment for $3.2 billon, speak both to the bigger trend of consolidation in the digital (API-based) communications space, as well as the huge value that is contained within it.

Inteliquent itself had been in private equity hands before this, controlled by GTCR based in Chicago, like Inteliquent itself. According to PitchBook, its most recent financing was a mezzanine loan from Oaktree Capital in 2018 for just under $19 million.

Interestingly, Inteliquent itself has been an investor in innovative communications startups, participating in a Series B for Zipwhip, a startup that is building better ways to integrate mobile messaging tools into landline services.

“We’re excited about the tremendous opportunities this combination unlocks, expanding the services we can provide to our customers. Combining our leading voice offering with Sinch’s global messaging capabilities truly positions us for leadership in the rapidly developing market for cloud communications“, comments Ed O’Hara, Inteliquent CEO, in a statement.

One of the biggest challenges for organizations in modern times is deciding where, when and how to use the advances of technology, when the organizations are not technology companies themselves. Today, a startup out of Manchester, England, is announcing some funding for a platform that it believes can help.

Peak AI, which has built technology that it says can help enterprises — specifically those that work with physical products such as retailers, consumer goods companies and manufacturing organizations — make better, AI-based evaluations and decisions, has closed a round of $21 million.

The Series B is being led by Oxx, with participation from past investors MMC Ventures and Praetura Ventures, as well as new backer Arete. It has raised $43 million to date and is not disclosing its valuation.

Richard Potter, the CEO who co-founded the company with Atul Sharma and David Leitch, said that the funding will be used to continue expanding the functionality of its platform, adding offices in the U.S. and India, and growing its customer base.

Its list of clients today is an impressive one, including the retailer PrettyLittleThing, KFC, PepsiCo, Marshalls and Speedy Hire.

As Potter describes it, Peak identified its opportunity early on. It was founded in 2014, a time non-tech enterprises were just starting to grasp how the concept of AI could apply to their businesses but felt it was out of their reach.

Indeed, the larger landscape for AI services at that time was primarily one focused on technology companies, specifically companies like Google, Amazon and Apple that were building AI products to power their own services, and often snapping up the most interesting talent in the field as it manifested through smaller startups and universities.

Peak’s basic premise was to build AI not as a business goal for itself but as a business service. Its platform sits within an organization and ingests any data source that a company might wish to feed into it.

While initial integration needs technical know-how — either at the company itself or via a systems integrator — using Peak day-to-day can be done by both technical and non-technical workers.

Peak says it can help answer a variety of questions that those people might have, such as how much of an item to produce, and where to ship it, based on a complex mix of sales data; how to manage stock better; or when to ramp up or ramp down headcount in a warehouse. The platform can also be used to help companies with marketing and advertising, figuring out how to better target campaigns to the right audiences, and so on.

Peak is not the first company that has seized on the concept of using a “general” AI to give non-tech organizations the same kinds of superpowers that the likes of big tech now use in their own businesses everyday.

Sometimes the ambition has outstripped the returns, however.

Witness Element AI, a highly-touted startup backed by a long list of top-shelf strategic and financial investors to build, essentially, an AI services business for non-tech companies to use as they might these days use Accenture. It never quite got there, though, and was acquired by ServiceNow last year at a devalued price of $500 million, the customer deals it had were wound down, and the tech was integrated into the bigger company’s stack.

Other efforts within hugely successful tech companies have not fared that well either.

“Einstein’s features are essentially useless, and you can quote me on that,” said Potter of Salesforce’s in-house CRM AI business. “Because it is too generic, it doesn’t predict anything useful.”

And that is perhaps the crux of why Peak AI is working for now: it has remained focused for now on a limited number of segments of the market, in particular those with physical objects as the end product, giving the AI that it has built a more targeted end point. In other words, it’s “general” but only for specific industries.

And it claims that this is paying off. Peak’s customers have reported a 5% increase in total company revenues, a doubling of return on advertising spend, a 12% reduction in inventory holdings and a 5% reduction in supply chain costs, according to the company (although it doesn’t specify which companies, which products or anything that points to who or what is being described).

“Richard and the excellent Peak team have a compelling vision to optimize entire businesses through Decision Intelligence and they’re delivering real-world benefits to a raft of household name customers already,” said Richard Anton, a general partner at Oxx, in a statement. “The pandemic has meant digitization is no longer a choice; it’s a requirement. Peak has made it easier for businesses to get started and see rapid results from AI-enabled decision making. We are delighted to support Peak on their way to becoming the category-defining global leader in Decision Intelligence.” Anton is joining the board with this round.

Hardware may indeed be hard, but a startup that’s built a platform that might help buck that idea by making hardware a little easier to produce has announced some more funding to continue building out its platform.

Fictiv, which positions itself as the “AWS of hardware” — providing a platform for those needing to produce some hardware, giving them a place to design, price and order those pieces and eventually get them from one place to another — has raised $35 million.

Fictiv will be using the money to continue building out its platform and the supply chain that underpins its business, which the startup describes as a “Digital Manufacturing Ecosystem.”

Dave Evans, the CEO and founder, said that the focus of the company has been and will continue to be not mass-produced items but prototypes and other objects that are specialized and by their nature not aimed at mass markets, such as particular medical devices.

“We are focused on 1,000 to 10,000,” he said in an interview, which he said was a challenging number of produce as these kinds of jobs fall short of seeing bigger economies of scale, but are still too big to be considered small and inexpensive. “This is the range where most products still die.”

The round — a Series D — is coming from a mix of strategic and financial investors. Led by 40 North Ventures, it also includes Honeywell, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp., Adit Ventures and M20 (Microsoft’s strategic investment arm), as well as past backers Accel, G2VP and Bill Gates.

The funding brings the total raised by Fictiv to $92 million. Its valuation is not being disclosed.

Fictiv last raised money nearly two years ago — a $33 million round in early 2019 — and the interim years have well and truly tested the business concept that he envisioned when first establishing the startup.

Even before the pandemic, “we had no idea what the trade wars between the U.S. and China would do,” he said. Quite abruptly, the supply chain got completely “crunched, with everything shut down” in China over those tariff disputes.

Fictiv’s fix was to shift manufacturing to other parts of Asia such as India, and to the U.S. That, in turn, ended up helping the company when the first wave of COVID-19 hit, initially in China.

Then came the global outbreak, and Fictiv found itself shifting yet again as plants shut down in the countries where it had recently opened.

Then, with trade issues cooled down, Fictiv again reignited relationships and operations in China, where COVID had been contained early, to continue working there.

“I guess we were just in the right places at the right time,” he said.

The startup made its name early on with building prototypes for tech companies neighboring it in the Bay Area, startups build VR and other gadgets, with services that included injection molding, CNC machining, 3D printing and urethane casting, with customers using cloud-based software to design and order parts, which then were routed by Fictiv to the plants best suited to make them.

These days, while that business continues, Fictiv is also working with very large global multinationals on their efforts with smaller-scale manufacturing, products that are either new or unable to be tooled as efficiently in their existing factories.

Work that it does for Honeywell, for example, includes mostly hardware for its aerospace division. Medical devices and robotics are two other big areas for the company currently, it said.

Fictiv is not the only company eyeing up this opportunity. Others that have been building marketplaces that either directly compete with what Fictiv has built, or targets other aspects of the chain such as marketplaces for design, or marketplaces for factories to connect with designers, or materials designers include Geomiq in England, Carbon (which is also backed by 40 North), Fathom in Oakland, Kreatize in Germany, Plethora (backed by the likes of GV and Founders Fund), and Xometry (which also recently raised a significant round).

Evans and his investors are careful not to describe what they do as specifically industrial technology to keep the focus on the bigger opportunities with digital transformation and of course the kinds of applications one might have for the platform that Fictiv has built.

“Industrial tech is a misnomer. I think of this as digital transformation, cloud-based SaaS and AI,” said Marianne Wu, a managing director at 40 North Ventures. “The baggage of industrial tech tells you everything about the opportunity.”

Fictiv’s pitch is that by taking on the supply-chain management of producing hardware for a business, it can produce hardware using its platform in a week, a process that might have previously taken three months to complete, which can mean lower costs and more efficiency.

“And when you speed up development, you see more products getting introduced,” he said.

There is still a lot of work to be done, however. One of the big sticking points in manufacturing has been the carbon footprint that it creates in production, and also in terms of the resulting goods that are produced.

That will likely become even more of an issue, if the Biden administration follows through on its own commitments to reduce emissions and to lean more on companies to follow through for those ends.

Evans is all too aware of that issue and accepts that manufacturing may be one of the hardest to shift.

“Sustainability and manufacturing are not synonymous,” he admits. And while materials and manufacturing will take longer to evolve, for now, he said the focus has been on how to implement better private and public and carbon credits programs. He envisions a better market for carbon credits, he said, with Fictiv doing its part with the launch of its own tool for measuring this.

“Sustainability is ripe for disruption, and we hope to have the first carbon-neutral shipping program, giving customers better choice for more sustainability. It’s on the shoulders of companies like us to drive this.”