Inrupt, the startup from World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee, announced an enterprise version of the Solid privacy platform today, which allows large organizations and governments to build applications that put users in control of their data.

Berners-Lee has always believed that the web should be free and open, but large organizations have grown up over the last 20 years that make their money using our data. He wanted to put people back in charge of their data, and the Solid open source project, developed at MIT, was the first step in that process.

Three years ago he launched Inrupt, a startup built on top of the open source project, and hired John Bruce to run the company. The two shared the same vision of shifting data ownership without changing the way websites get developed. With Solid, developers use the same standards and methods of building sites, and these applications will work in any browser. What Solid aims to do is alter the balance of data power and redirect it to the user.

“Fast forward to today, and we’re releasing the first significant technology as the fruits of our labor, which is an enterprise version of Solid to be deployed at scale by large organizations,” Bruce explained.

The core idea behind this approach is that users control their data in online storage entities called Personal Online Data Stores or Pods for short. The enterprise version consists of Solid Server to manage the Pods, and developers can build applications using an SDK to take advantage of the Pods and access the data they need to do a particular job like pay taxes or interact with a healthcare provider. Bruce points out that the enterprise version is fully compatible with the open source Solid project specifications.

The company has been working with some major organizations prior to today’s release including the BBC and National Health Service in the UK and the Government of Flanders in Belgium as they have been working to bring this to market.

To give you a sense of how this works, the National Health Service has been building an application for patients interacting with them, who using Solid can control their health data. “Patients will be able to permit doctors, family or at-home caregivers to read certain data from their Solid Pods, and add caretaking notes or observations that doctors can then read in order to improve patient care,” the company explained.

The difference between this and more conventional web or phone apps is that it is up to the user who can access this information and the application owner has to ask the user for permission and the user has to explicitly grant it and under what conditions.

The startup launched in 2017 and has raised about $20 million so far. Bruce and Berners-Lee understand that for this to take root, it has to be easy to use, be standards-based and and have the capacity to handle massive scale. Anyone can download and use the open source version of Solid, but by having an enterprise version, it gives large organizations like the ones they have been working with the support, security and scale that these companies require.

As 5G slowly moves from being a theoretical to an active part of the coverage map for the mobile industry — if not for consumers themselves — companies that are helping carriers make the migration less painful and less costly are seeing a boost of attention.

In the latest development, Cellwize, a startup that’s built a platform to automate and optimize data for carriers to run 5G networks within multi-vendor environments, has raised $32 million — funding that it will use to continue expanding its business into more geographies and investing in R&D to bring more capabilities to its flagship CHIME platform.

The funding is notable because of the list of strategic companies doing the investing, as well as because of the amount of traction that Cellwize has had to date.

The Series B round is being co-led Intel Capital and Qualcomm Ventures LLC, and Verizon Ventures (which is part of Verizon, which also owns TechCrunch by way of Verizon Media) and Samsung Next, with existing shareholders also participating. That list includes Deutsche Telekom and Sonae, a Portuguese conglomerate that owns multiple brands in retail, financial services, telecoms and more.

That backing underscores Cellwize’s growth. The company — which is based in Israel with operations also in Dallas and Singapore — says it currently provides services to some 40 carriers (including Verizon, Telefonica and more), covering 16 countries, 3 million cell sites, and 800 million subscribers.

Cellwize is not disclosing its valuation but it has raised $56.5 million from investors to date.

5G holds a lot of promise for carriers, their vendors, handset makers and others in the mobile ecosystem: the belief is that faster and more efficient speeds for wireless data will unlock a new wave of services and usage and revenues from services for consumers and business, covering not just people but IoT networks, too.

Notwithstanding the concerns some have had with health risks, despite much of that theory being debunked over the years, one of the technical issues with 5G has been implementing it.

Migrating can be costly and laborious, not least because carriers need to deploy more equipment at closer distances, and because they will likely be running hybrid systems in the Radio Access Network (RAN, which controls how devices interface with carriers’ networks); and they will be managing legacy networks (eg, 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE) alongside 5G, and working with multiple vendors within 5G itself.

Cellwize positions its CHIME platform — which works as an all-in-one tool that leverages AI and other tech in the cloud, and covers configuring new 5G networks, optimizing and monitoring data on them, and also providing APIs for third-party developers to integrate with it — as the bridge to letting carriers operate in the more open-shop approach that marks the move to 5G.

“While large companies have traditionally been more dominant in the RAN market, 5G is changing the landscape for how the entire mobile industry operates,” said Ofir Zemer, Cellwize’s CEO. “These traditional vendors usually offer solutions which plug into their own equipment, while not allowing third parties to connect, and this creates a closed and limited ecosystem. [But] the large operators also are not interested in being tied to one vendor: not technology-wise and not on the business side – as they identify this as an inhibitor to their own innovation.”

Cellwize provides an open platform that allows a carrier to plan, deploy and manage the RAN in that kind of multi-vendor ecosystem. “We have seen an extremely high demand for our solution and as 5G rollouts continue to increase globally, we expect the demand for our product will only continue to grow,” he added.

Previously, Zemer said that carriers would build their own products internally to manage data in the RAN, but these “struggle to support 5G.”

The competition element is not just lip service: the fact that both Intel and Qualcomm — competitors in key respects — are investing in this round underscores how Cellwize sees itself as a kind of Switzerland in mobile architecture. It also underscores that both view easy and deep integrations with its tech as something worth backing, given the priorities of each of their carrier customers.

“Over the last decade, Intel technologies have been instrumental in enabling the communications industry to transform networks with an agile and scalable infrastructure,” said David Flanagan, VP and senior MD at Intel Capital, in a statement. “With the challenges in managing the high complexity of radio access networks, we are encouraged by the opportunity in front of Cellwize to explore ways to utilize their AI-based automation capabilities as Intel brings the benefits of cloud architectures to service provider and private networks.”

“Qualcomm is at the forefront of 5G expansion, creating a robust ecosystem of technologies that will usher in the new era of connectivity,” added Merav Weinryb, Senior Director of Qualcomm Israel Ltd. and MD of Qualcomm Ventures Israel and Europe. “As a leader in RAN automation and orchestration, Cellwize plays an important role in 5G deployment. We are excited to support Cellwize through the Qualcomm Ventures’ 5G global ecosystem fund as they scale and expedite 5G adoption worldwide.”

And that is the key point. Right now there are precious few 5G deployments, and sometimes, when you read some the less shiny reports of 5G rollouts, you might be forgiven for feeling like it’s more marketing than reality at this point. But Zemer — who is not a co-founder (both of them have left the company) but has been with it since 2013, almost from the start — is sitting in on the meetings with carriers, and he believes that it won’t be long before all that tips.

“Within the next five years, approximately 75% of mobile connections will be powered by 5G, and 2.6 billion 5G mobile subscriptions will be serving 65% of the world’s population,” he said. “While 5G technology holds a tremendous amount of promise, the reality is that it is also hyper-complex, comprised of multiple technologies, architectures, bands, layers, and RAN/vRAN players. We are working with network operators around the world to help them overcome the challenges of rolling out and managing these next generation networks, by automating their entire RAN processes, allowing them to successfully deliver 5G to their customers.”

The race is on to build more efficient chip technology for faster and less power-intensive computing, and today an innovative startup that’s built one solution based on in-package optical interconnect (optical I/O) technology is announcing a round of growth funding from a number of strategic investors that speaks to how its approach is getting traction.

Ayar Labs, which makes chip solutions based on optical networking principals — architecture that promises both faster computing speeds and far less power consumption (and heat) in the process — has picked up $35 million in a Series B round of funding. Co-led by Downing Ventures and BlueSky Capital, the round also includes Applied Ventures (the VC arm of Applied Materials), Castor Ventures and SGInnovate (the Singaporean government’s deep tech fund), with participation also from existing investors Founders Fund, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Intel Capital, Lockheed Martin Ventures and Playground Global.

Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs,<span style=”letter-spacing: -0.1px; font-size: 1.125rem;”> said that the funding will be used to continue developing its product as well as working on further commercialization. “The main application area for our technology is next-generation computing, anywhere that there is massive movement of data,” he said.

That includes aerospace and government applications, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, telecoms and cloud applications, and lidar for self-driving car and other autonomous systems. Currently Wuischpard said that most of Ayar’s work is in the areas of AI and HPC — it’s a key partner of Intel’s in its work on AI computers for Darpa (see here and here) — and in telecoms/cloud.

Ayar’s focus on optical technology — specifically using silicon photonics and processing to build an optical communication device that can be built into a CPU — is emerging as a key area for chipmakers. Just last week, Marvell announced that it would buy Inphi, an optical networking specialist, for $10 billion.

As Wuischpard describes it, the big breakthrough that Ayar has brought to bear has been bringing down the size and scale of the technology to work within a computer’s core chip architecture, its CPU, which impacts and controls memory, control unit and processing/logic, helping to speed up computing for the most demanding applications.

(The company was co-founded by Mark Wade, Chen Sun, Vladimir Stojanovic and Alexandra Wright-Gladstein based on work at MIT, and they brought in Wuischpard, an engineer by training and also a veteran exec from Intel, to help figure out how to build a commercialised business around that.)

“Optics has been around for a long time,” he points out, first in subsea cabling, then between data centers and then inside the data center. “We think of ourselves as the last or first mile, bringing optical tech into the CPU.”

As he describes it, the company has devised a new type of modulator to turn electrons into photons, a “microing modulator” as he calls it. “There have been 1,000 research papers on this, but it’s typically difficult to manufacture and operate over a wide range of temperatures, and this is where a lot of our patents come in, to develop that into a single chiplet,” he said. The amount of bandwidth the tech can handle, 2 terabits/second, “would fill a whole server, but we are doing it in 5×9 millimeters.”

He adds that the opportunities here are such that there are others also working on the same kind of technology. “There are bigger companies and one or two smaller ones, but they are all still a couple of years behind us in commercialization,” he said. “It’s one thing to build one, versus a million.” Having GLOBALFOUNDRIES as an investor — it’s also fabricating hardware for Ayar — is key in this regard.

The company seems like it would be a key acquisition target, I pointed out, not least because of the race for having ownership of technology that can give a company a leading edge over another, but also because of the trend of consolidation in the chip industry. (Intel’s acquisition of Habana Labs also underscores the interest it has in optical tech.)

Wuischpard laughs a little ironically and says that COVID-19 has been a “help” in this regard: acquisitions have slowed down, giving the startup more time and less pressure to sell up.

“Ayar Labs represents the future of interconnects which have eventual applicability to every electronic device on earth”, said Warren Rogers, partner and head of Ventures at Downing Ventures, in a statement. “We have the highest confidence that when their optical I/O technology is applied to computing, the industry will finally break away from Moore’s Law and redefine the boundaries of computing.”

“We’ve been an investor in Ayar Labs since the beginning and have been looking for opportunities to increase our ownership in the company” added Madison Hamman, managing director of BlueSky Capital. “We are very excited about Ayar Labs and believe in their patented technology and execution of a plan that makes it a core building block of future computing systems.”

When Alibaba entered the cloud infrastructure market in earnest in 2015 it had ambitious goals, and it has been growing steadily. Today, the Chinese e-commerce giant announced quarterly cloud revenue of $2.194 billion. With that number, it has passed IBM’s $1.65 billion revenue result (according to Synergy Research market share numbers), a significant milestone.

But while $2 billion is a large figure, it’s one worth keeping in perspective. For example, Amazon announced $11.6 billion in cloud infrastructure revenue for its most recent quarter, while Microsoft’s Azure came in second place with $5.9 billion.

Google Cloud has held onto third place, as it has for as long as we’ve been covering the cloud infrastructure market. In its most recent numbers, Synergy pegged Google at 9% market share, or approximately $2.9 billion in revenue.

While Alibaba is still a fair bit behind Google, today’s numbers puts the company firmly in fourth place now, well ahead of IBM . It’s doubtful it could catch Google anytime soon, especially as the company has become more focused under CEO Thomas Kurian, but it is still fairly remarkable that it managed to pass IBM, a stalwart of enterprise computing for decades, as a relative newcomer to the space.

The 60% growth represented a slight increase from the previous quarter’s 59%, but basically means it held steady, something that’s not easy to do as a company reaches a certain revenue plateau. In its earnings call today, Daniel Zhang, chairman and CEO at Alibaba Group, said that in China, which remains the company’s primary market, digital transformation driven by the pandemic was a primary factor in keeping growth steady.

“Cloud is a fast-growing business. If you look at our revenue breakdown, obviously, cloud is enjoying a very, very fast growth. And what we see is that all the industries are in the process of digital transformation. And moving to the cloud is a very important step for the industries,” Zhang said in the call.

He believes eventually that most business will be done in the cloud, and the growth could continue for the medium term, as there are still many companies that haven’t made the switch yet, but will do so over time.

John Dinsdale, an analyst at Synergy Research, says that while China remains its primary market, the company does have a presence outside the country too, and can afford to play the long game in terms of the current geopolitical situation with trade tensions between the U.S. and China.

“Alibaba has already made some strides outside of China and Hong Kong. While the scale is rather small compared with its Chinese operations, Alibaba has established a data center and cloud presence in a range of countries, including six more APAC countries, U.S., U.K. and UAE. Among these, it is the market leader in both Indonesia and Malaysia,” Dinsdale told TechCrunch.

In its most recent data released a couple of weeks ago, prior to today’s numbers, Synergy broke down the market this way: “Amazon 33%, Microsoft 18%, Google 9%, Alibaba 5%, IBM 5%, Salesforce 3%, Tencent 2%, Oracle 2%, NTT 1%, SAP 1% – to the nearest percentage point.”