Watching Elon Musk and others attempt to buy Twitter got me thinking about the time Salesforce wanted to purchase the social media platform.

Back in 2016, around the time of Salesforce’s Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco, rumors ran rampant that the company was ready to spend $20 billion to purchase Twitter. It would eventually back off when investors balked.

Salesforce was a much smaller company back then, and the deal would have been a huge stretch. Perhaps the company’s interest stemmed from the fact that Microsoft had recently bought LinkedIn for $26 billion, and Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff wanted to add a social component to his cloud CRM company.

Other companies were rumored to be interested back then, including Microsoft, Google, and Verizon (TechCrunch’s owner at the time). But Salesforce emerged from the pack as the most interested buyer.

Why Twitter? The idea was to combine the social component of Twitter with sales and service on the Salesforce platform. But it was not to be, which the company made official on October 14, 2016, when Benioff told the Financial Times that it wasn’t the right fit.

Salesforce would eventually buy Mulesoft in 2018 for $6.5 billion and Tableau for $15.7 billion in 2019, two deals that were worth almost as much and were, arguably, a much better fit for the CRM giant than Twitter would have been.

Twitter thus remained an independent platform and there was little known M&A interest in it until recently.

But what if history went a bit differently and Salesforce acquired the company? We spoke to some analysts who cover the CRM industry to get their thoughts.

Maintaining focus

To start with, Salesforce investors didn’t like the idea, and Benioff had to acquiesce eventually. Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, said investors were straight up against the deal.

“I think at the time it was hard to justify the price tag, but I’ve always thought the right buyer could’ve done something significant with Twitter,” he said. “If Salesforce had pulled the trigger, it would’ve been interesting to see what that combination could’ve done, especially now with Salesforce+ (the company’s media arm) being in the mix.”

The medium is the message more than ever these days, and brands are faced with a challenge — but also opportunity — to capture what consumers think about them and their products if they can harness and better understand those messages, via whichever medium is being used to deliver them. Today, a company called BlueOcean that has built an artificial intelligence-powered platform that it says can produce those insights is announcing $30 million in funding, money that it will be using to continue expanding its technology on the heels of rapid growth.

Insight Partners led the round, with FJ Labs also participating. Valuation is not being disclosed.

Digital life as it plays out these days has created a perfect storm (heh) for BlueOcean. We spend more time online than ever before, and the number of places where we might encounter a product or service has grown along with that: social media feeds are noisy with ads, content that feels like ads, lots of opinions; we do most of our news, information and entertainment sourcing online; we shop there, too; and many of us also spend our days working in cyberspace as well.

That’s a lot of real estate where a brand (or a brand’s competitors) might potentially appear, either intentionally or inadvertently, and more likely than not in a form that is outside of that brand’s control.

“Fragmentation is a huge driver,” Grant McDougall, the CEO who co-founded the company with president Liza Nebel, said in an interview. “There are silos all over the business and what we do sits over the top of that, to provide a common language to understand and talk to, for example, both to the CFO about revenue team as well as loyalty teams about messaging.”

At the same time, the tech industry that has built all of those online experiences has also built an enormous amount of tools to better parse what is going on in that universe. AI is playing a huge role in that navigation game: it’s too much for a single human, or even a large team of humans, to parse; and so a company like BlueOcean building tech to do some of that work for marketing professionals and others to have better data to work with becomes very valuable.

That has played out as a very significant evolution for the startup.

We last covered BlueOcean in 2020 when it was focused on a more narrow concept of digital brand identity: a company provided its website and a list of competitors, and one week later, for a price of $17,000, BlueOcean provided customers with brand audits that included lists of actionable items to improve or completely change. (As a point of contrast, typically brand audits for large brands can cost millions of dollars and typically do not come with specific pointers for improvement.)

Fast forward to today, and the company has expanded the scope of what it does for customers, and its overall engagement: its AI algorithms and big-data ingestion engine are now focused on providing continuous feedback to its customers, which subscribe to the service at fees starting at $100,000 per year. They use BlueOcean not just to measure their overall brand recognition in the market, but to track how specific products are performing; which launch strategies are working, and which are not; and the impact of different campaigns in different markets in real time so that they can change and respond more quickly.

“Lots has changed,” said McDougall. “We’re an AI powered brand intelligence platform. Access to insights and what competitors are doing are more relevant today than it’s ever been. What we do is collect information about brands out in public and help them understand performance relative to competitors, to help them take action to improve their brands to get market share.”

Interestingly, just as the Covid-19 pandemic has been a huge fillip to e-commerce and more generally online consumption of everything, so too has it played a strong role in the growth of BlueOcean and the approach that it takes. In the world of fast-paced and constantly changing and refreshed information, big-picture insights can be more meaningful than no picture at all, or one delayed for the sake of more detail.

“Covid has surfaced that speed is more important than accuracy,” noted Nebel. “We have data [to shape better] inclinations right now. It’s about making changes to capture opportunity.”

That concept has also clicked with its investors.

“Having invested in hundreds of the world’s most well-known brands, we know that having accurate and fast data is vital to brand health. We have extreme faith in BlueOcean and we’re excited to bring them into our investment portfolio,” said Fabrice Grinda, founding partner of FJ Labs, in a statement.

BlueOcean still also provides all-important competitive analysis but builds those lists of other companies and the data produced about them in conjunction with its customers, based in part on where the customer sees itself and would like to see itself; and also where it is as a brand in the real world.

It has also expanded its customer list: it now works with 84 brands, which may not sound like much except that these are some of the biggest companies in the world — they include Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Diageo, Cisco, Bloomingdales and Juniper Networks (and others that it cannot name) — and collectively represent what BlueOcean describes as $18 trillion in value and more than 6,000 brands — a list investors believe is poised to grow in line with how the internet itself is growing.

“After leading BlueOcean’s Series A round, we are proud to also lead their Series B to help them scale and serve even more brands,” said Whitney Bouck, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. “As a former CMO myself, I know that marketing is constantly challenged to provide true ROI on brand marketing. BlueOcean gives marketing leaders quantifiable and actionable insights on brand performance for the first time, which we know is game-changing.”

Public travel systems provider Amadeus opened for business way back in 1987 when four airlines wanted to offer a centralized booking system. Today, the company facilitates booking and inventory management for 216 airlines, as well as hotels, trains, airports, online travel companies and even corporations. In short, it covers just about every aspect of travel IT imaginable.

As an IT-heavy company scales, its computing, software and systems requirements change as well. For Amadeus, those pressures came to a head in 2015, when the company realized it needed to move beyond the private cloud it had been running. Embracing a public cloud infrastructure would give the organization greater flexibility to react to customer needs much faster than it could with a homegrown tech stack.

The challenge Amadeus faces isn’t uncommon: Like many companies of its size, it has to pay off massive technical debt, which is the idea that as you make certain technology decisions, you end up pushing modernization down the road, and the “interest” builds up, making it harder to modernize. Eventually, competition and wider market forces pressure you to pay off that debt, and interest, by updating your entire code base, infrastructure and even the way you produce software.

It’s not just giants like Amadeus that face tech debt. Even much smaller companies have to deal with technical debt eventually and come to terms with massive technology changes.

To learn why and how Amadeus has begun such a dramatic change, we spoke with Fredrik Odeen, lead for public cloud transformation and corporate strategy, and Sébastien Pellisé, deputy lead for public cloud transformation. Odeen and Pellisé also explained how the company went about implementing the new processes and tech stack, what the changes mean for the future of the company and what smaller companies can learn from Amadeus.

Why tech debt accumulates

When you launch a company and make key decisions about your technology stack, you probably don’t stop to think about the impact those decisions might have on your company in the future. You want to get the business going, and most early-stage companies don’t have the luxury to consider their tech stack all that carefully.

Over the years, Amadeus slowly began to realize that there was a downside to running its own infrastructure. Its homegrown cloud stack was causing a huge lag in its ability to update its software and systems, react to customer needs and experiment. The company knew that to improve its customer experience, it had to update its systems and how it produced software, or eventually these problems were going to catch up.

The pandemic drove that point home. As the industry suffered from big cut backs in travel, finding ways to operate more efficiently, and reacting to customer needs faster became even more crucial — the company needed to find a way to save money as revenue dried up.

A little over a year after its initial release, a digital note-taking app called Journal is making the leap from being an experimental project housed with Microsoft’s internal incubator, Microsoft Garage, to becoming a full-fledged Microsoft Windows application. The company this week announced the new note-taking app will now be available as “Microsoft Journal,” allowing users to capture their thoughts and create drawings using their digital pen on Windows tablets, 2-in-1s and other pen-capable devices.

The original idea behind Journal was to offer users an alternative to grabbing a pen and paper when inspiration strikes, while still allowing them to express themselves through writing. The concept was familiar to the company, which had first launched an ink-focused application called Journal back on its Tablet PC in 2002 and continued to release “ink” capabilities across apps like Whiteboard, OneNote, PowerPoint and more, the company explained at the time.

Journal, however, wanted to push the concept forward by combining the digital ink input with AI technologies.

The team trained the app’s AI to automatically recognize and categorize the things users write, including headings, starred items, keywords and even drawings. For some of the drawings and headings, the app puts a cue on the side of the page that users can tap to select the content and then take other actions like “move” or “copy.”

The AI also helped to improve the app’s search capabilities so you could pull up your old notes, lists, sketches and more, based on its understanding of your inked notes and content. And the AI helped to power new gestures, like scratch out and instant lasso — tools you could move between more easily, without mode switches.

Image Credits: Microsoft

Beyond its AI focus, Journal included drag-and-drop support for moving content to other pages or different applications; the ability to markup PDFs; keyword search with filters; Microsoft 365 integration for meeting notes; using touch to scroll through pages or tap ink to select text; and more.

“We are entering an age of computer-aided reasoning, where AI accelerates the tasks that people do, and makes us all more productive,” said Stevie Bathiche, technical fellow and leader of Microsoft’s Applied Sciences, speaking about the app’s exit from Garage. “Journal shows just how powerful an experience can be when software anticipates your intentions. This is just the beginning.”

During its time as a Garage project, the team learned that users have their own individual preferences for how they interact with content using touch and a digital pen, but there wasn’t a clear winner as to the most preferred method. They also found that annotating documents was one of Journal’s biggest use cases, with PDF imports accounting for over half the pages created in the app.

With the app’s official launch, Journal has been updated with a Windows 11 look and feel, with new colors and materials. The team says its focus in the near term is to now address user feedback and a backlog of new features. The app is rolling out to users from April 5 through April 8 but can be downloaded directly from the Microsoft Store. It works on both Windows 10 and 11 devices.

At its Team ’22 conference today, Atlassian announced the launch of Atlas, a new service for cross-functional team updates it previously offered as a beta under the name ‘Team Central.’ The service is meant to be a central repository for what teams are working on — with those updates limited to a Twitter-like 280 characters.

“When the pandemic hit, this digital acceleration that we were already experiencing went into super high gear. People adopted whatever tools they needed to get their job done in this incredibly chaotic manner, but it kept people working, I think it probably kept people safe and alive — but it introduced an accelerated amount of chaos,” said Erika Trautman, the VP of Product, Work Management for Atlas.

Image Credits: Atlassian

Because of this chaos, information often ends up all over the place and nobody really knows who is doing what anymore. As Trautman noted, a lot of companies tried to get everybody on a single platform to bring more structure into their processes, but in her view, that’s just not how people work. At best, you end up with a compliant workforce and average outcomes, she noted, with teams using tools that may not offer the specialized capabilities they need to do their best work.

So with Atlas, Atlassian built a tool that can connect teams and rein in this chaos but still allows them to work with the best tools for their jobs. The idea is to provide teams with information about what everybody is working on and connect those updates to specific cross-team goals (like Epics in Jira Software). Users can post their updates in Atlas itself but also connect to the likes of Jira or Trello to post them. There are also integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams, both for sharing updates, getting reminders and receiving digests of what everybody is doing.

Image Credits: Atlassian

Those digests are a key feature, by the way. By default, Atlas will ask teams to post updates on their work every week and update their goals every month (and if they feel like it, they can include videos, images and GIFs, too). Every Monday, users will receive personalized digests in the channel of their choice with updates on the projects they follow.

Every user also gets a personalized profile with their own projects and goals so other employees can see what they are working on — and there is a team profile, too.

Sherif Mansour, a distinguished product manager at Atlassian, noted that the company has already been working with the likes of Warby Parker, Canva, LaunchDarkly and a ‘popular streaming company’ on testing Atlas. At many of these companies, a marketing team may be working in Trello and the software team in Jira and the HR team may use yet another service. “It actually doesn’t matter anymore, because they all say what they’re working on, how it’s connected to the other piece of work and they all have a common vocabulary,” he explained.

As an added bonus, he said, a tool like Atlas also replaces “a crap ton of status meetings that nobody likes” and the annoying spreadsheets that product managers often send out to teams to fill out (only for them the mysteriously disappear).

Image Credits: Atlassian

The terminal often feels like an afterthought, and there hasn’t been a lot of innovation in this space for a very long time. Warp, which is launching its public beta today and announcing $23 million in funding, is trying to change this by building a new command-line terminal that aims to make developers more productive. For now, the Warp public beta is only available on macOS, but the company promises Windows and Linux versions in the future, too.

As the company announced today, it previously raised a $6 million seed round led by GV, with participation from Neo and BoxGroup. It has now also raised a $17 million Series A round led by Dylan Field, the co-founder and CEO of Figma. Other participants in this (somewhat unusual) entrepreneur-led round include Elad Gil, former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and Salesforce’s co-founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff.

“I’ve been a developer now, for 20 years,” Warp co-founder and CEO Zach Lloyd, who was previously a principal engineer at Google and the interim CTO for Time, told me. “I’ve always been a terminal user. I’ve always thought it was kind of a weird app, to be honest. […] But it’s an interesting app in the sense that it’s ubiquitous. You walk by any developer’s desk and they’re going to have a terminal open. There are only a couple apps like that: the terminal and the code editor. So I thought it was an interesting leverage point for doing something that would have an impact across all developers. And then, if you can get really good at it you actually get a lot of real productivity gains.”

Image Credits: Warp

Out of the box, Warp works with shells like zsh, fish and bash. In many ways, the user experience feels reminiscent of a modern text editor, with code completion autosuggestions and menus, for example. But there are also features like cursor positioning, the ability to move back through your terminal history command to command and then copy the output with a single click, built-in documentation and more. Those are features that may seem obvious at first but aren’t really available in today’s terminals. Being able to move the cursor wherever you need it shouldn’t be a new thing in terminals in 2022, but it is.

The Warp terminal does, of course, feature standards like tabs, split panes, keyboard shortcuts and built-in SSH support. With Warp, developers can also share their workflows with the rest of their teams.

While at Google, Lloyd worked on Google Docs and he noted that something he took away from that is that anytime you can take an existing desktop app and add collaboration and teamwork on top of it, you can unlock quite a bit of extra productivity.

Image Credits: Warp

It’s maybe no surprise then that collaboration is part of what he hopes will make Warp stand out and be part of the company’s monetization strategy. Currently, the collaboration features mostly center around the ability to easily share commands and their output, as well as workflows, but soon, Warp will also introduce the ability to share.

It’s worth noting that for Warp, the terminal is only the beginning. As Lloyd noted, the company’s mission is to “elevate developer productivity. It’s not to build the best terminal that’s ever existed.” The idea here is to build a platform, with the terminal at the center but also as something akin to a distribution point for doing other things. That may be a code editor, a platform for building apps or for cloud-based development. “But those aren’t the focus to start. I think those are opportunities that open up if we execute really well on Warp,” Lloyd said.

Marc Benioff sure seems to be excited about it. “We are delighted to once again partner with a great entrepreneur, Zach Lloyd,” he said. “Developers will greatly benefit from the genius of Warp.dev.” So is Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, who is working at a new startup in stealth. “I have been using Warp every day at work,” he said in a canned statement. “My favorite thing is the speed: both in terms of how fast it works and also how fast you feel while using it, especially the excellent typeahead and search. Warp brings terminals into the modern day and I can’t wait to see where they take Warp.”

Image Credits: Microsoft

Among other updates, Windows 11 is getting an AI-enabled eye contact feature today that will always make it look like you’re looking at the screen. Don’t use it.

There is nothing like staring into the soulless AI-enhanced eyes of a presenter during a video conference to make you question the nature of your reality. The presenter’s eyes unflinchingly focus on the screen, with only the occasional glitch demonstrating that there is still a live human being on the other side, likely reading a pre-written presentation word by word.

Microsoft’s Windows chief Panos Panay says it makes the meeting experience “more human,” bui It looks fake. You’re better off using a cartoon avatar instead. And to be clear, there’s no need for this. You’re great the way you are — eyes on camera or not.

(And yes, Apple does this with FaceTime and has for a couple of years now, but it’s a lot more subtle.)

There are some hardware requirements before you can enable this feature. We asked Microsoft PR what those are yesterday. They are still trying to find an answer, so we will update this post once we hear more.

Microsoft Endpoint Manager is the company’s platform for helping IT teams manage and secure large fleets of devices, something that’s become increasingly complicated since the start of the pandemic. As part of its larger “Future of Hybrid Work” event, the company also today launched some updates to Endpoint Manager that go beyond some of the traditional feature sets for similar services, with the promise to expand on these in the future.

The first new feature Microsoft is adding to the platform under the name of “Microsoft Advanced Management” is remote help. If you’ve ever used Teamviewer to help a family member fix a computer issue, you can basically think of it as that, but with all of the enterprise bells and whistles it takes to make sure a service like this is secure, the devices on both ends are configured correctly and everybody is who they say they are. And that’s why this is part of the overall Endpoint Manager story, because that’s what provides the access and idenity controls through a tight integration with Azure Active Directory and helps verify the users and devices. You wouldn’t just want your employees to be able to give control over their machines to any random social hacker, after all.

“For a long time, we’ve focused heavily on the traditional endpoint management space and we’ve had great success there building an endpoint management business,” said Steve Dispensa, Microsoft’s VP of Enterprise Mobility. “We’re widely acknowledged to be a leader in this space. We have the largest managed device population in the world. And that’s been good but the environment has evolved. We’ve seen massive structural changes with the pandemic and now with hybrid work. […] I’m excited about what we can do here to bring some adjacent management strategies and solutions to market.”

Dispensa described these new services as a “new suite of solutions,” with remote help for Windows as the first new product. “It’s a pretty straightforward value proposition in a world where folks are working from home, where hybrid is here to stay,” he said. “We want to help organizations respond fast to employee needs to provide a safe and secure way for orgs to provide that remote help and ultimately deliver a better user experience.”

For the most part, these are going to be premium add-ons to Microsoft’s endpoint management solution, not free updates to the existing service.

When it comes to accessing devices, entering a password is a hassle, not to mention fast becoming obsolete in terms of providing strong security. Thankfully, Windows 10 and 11 users can use Windows Hello, a feature that provides a convenient and secure way to log in with just a look, a touch, or a PIN code.

How to set up Windows Hello

To get started with Windows Hello, click the Start menu icon and open Settings. From there, choose Accounts, followed by Sign-in options. You should see options for setting your PIN or scanning your face, iris, or fingerprint. Select which method you want to set up and follow the prompts to create a login profile.

You can even save your biometric data or scan more than once to boost accuracy. The system collects more data every time you scan, so it’s better to complete a few scans before enabling the login feature.

After setting up your account, you can start adding other trusted users who share the same device. Each of them can set up their own PIN or biometric profile in a separate account. Passwords and PIN codes can be used as backup login options in case the camera or fingerprint scanner aren’t working.

Limited availability

As of this writing, Windows Hello is only available on select Windows 10 and 11 laptops and tablets. To see which devices have Windows Hello, go to the Windows website, scroll down to the “Filter by” section, then select the Windows Hello option under the “Features” column. The resulting selection lists devices that have the infrared camera and/or fingerprint scanner required to enable this feature.

Microsoft’s promise of security

Your Windows Hello login info is saved only on your device and never on Microsoft’s servers. Furthermore, Microsoft assures users that third parties cannot access locally saved PIN codes and biometric data. All of this means that you never need to worry about your login info falling into the wrong hands.

In addition to Windows Hello, there are other Windows features that can make your life easier. Our IT experts can help you get more out of your Windows devices. Contact us today!

Biometric access used to be the stuff of sci-fi movies, but Microsoft has turned it into everyday reality for Windows 10 and 11 users. Thanks to a feature called Windows Hello, users can now log into their devices via face, fingerprint, or iris scan, or PIN code entry. Here’s what you need to know to set this feature up.

How to set up Windows Hello

To get started with Windows Hello, click the Start menu icon and open Settings. From there, choose Accounts, followed by Sign-in options. You should see options for setting your PIN or scanning your face, iris, or fingerprint. Select which method you want to set up and follow the prompts to create a login profile.

You can even save your biometric data or scan more than once to boost accuracy. The system collects more data every time you scan, so it’s better to complete a few scans before enabling the login feature.

After setting up your account, you can start adding other trusted users who share the same device. Each of them can set up their own PIN or biometric profile in a separate account. Passwords and PIN codes can be used as backup login options in case the camera or fingerprint scanner aren’t working.

Limited availability

As of this writing, Windows Hello is only available on select Windows 10 and 11 laptops and tablets. To see which devices have Windows Hello, go to the Windows website, scroll down to the “Filter by” section, then select the Windows Hello option under the “Features” column. The resulting selection lists devices that have the infrared camera and/or fingerprint scanner required to enable this feature.

Microsoft’s promise of security

Your Windows Hello login info is saved only on your device and never on Microsoft’s servers. Furthermore, Microsoft assures users that third parties cannot access locally saved PIN codes and biometric data. All of this means that you never need to worry about your login info falling into the wrong hands.

In addition to Windows Hello, there are other Windows features that can make your life easier. Our IT experts can help you get more out of your Windows devices. Contact us today!

You can now log in faster and more securely to your Windows 10- or 11-powered device with Microsoft’s Windows Hello. This feature allows you to log in to your computer without having to enter a password. All you need is a fingerprint, iris, or facial scan, or a PIN code.

How to set up Windows Hello

To get started with Windows Hello, click the Start menu icon and open Settings. From there, choose Accounts, followed by Sign-in options. You should see options for setting your PIN or scanning your face, iris, or fingerprint. Select which method you want to set up and follow the prompts to create a login profile.

You can even save your biometric data or scan more than once to boost accuracy. The system collects more data every time you scan, so it’s better to complete a few scans before enabling the login feature.

After setting up your account, you can start adding other trusted users who share the same device. Each of them can set up their own PIN or biometric profile in a separate account. Passwords and PIN codes can be used as backup login options in case the camera or fingerprint scanner aren’t working.

Limited availability

As of this writing, Windows Hello is only available on select Windows 10 and 11 laptops and tablets. To see which devices have Windows Hello, go to the Windows website, scroll down to the “Filter by” section, then select the Windows Hello option under the “Features” column. The resulting selection lists devices that have the infrared camera and/or fingerprint scanner required to enable this feature.

Microsoft’s promise of security

Your Windows Hello login info is saved only on your device and never on Microsoft’s servers. Furthermore, Microsoft assures users that third parties cannot access locally saved PIN codes and biometric data. All of this means that you never need to worry about your login info falling into the wrong hands.

In addition to Windows Hello, there are other Windows features that can make your life easier. Our IT experts can help you get more out of your Windows devices. Contact us today!

With SaaS becoming the standard for most business software, the security demands on SaaS companies are constantly increasing. Add users who need their data sandboxed from others or kept in a specific geographic region and the workload for development and security teams only increases. Antimatter, which is coming out of stealth today and launching its service into private beta, offers a different kind of solution to these problems. It provides SaaS companies with the cryptographic infrastructure that can provably guarantee that a service meets their residency, governance and tenancy requirements, using secure enclaves that keeps data encrypted in transit, at rest and during execution.

The company also today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series A round led by NEA, with participation from General Catalyst and UNION Labs. The founders of Snowflake, Okta, Dropbox, VMware, Segment and Databricks also participated in this round.

The company was co-founded by Andrew Krioukov (CEO), the former founder and CEO of workplace management service Comfy (which Siemens acquired in 2018); Michael Andersen (CTO), the group’s cryptography specialist who, like Krioukov, has a PhD in Computer Science from Berkeley; and Beau Trincia (VP of Design), who was also on the founding team at Comfy and spent seven years working on user experience design and product at IDEO.

During the experience of building Comfy, Krioukov and Trincia themselves faced the problem of having to protect the user data of large enterprise customers like Microsoft, BMW, Salesforce and SAP. “That was really hard,” said Krioukov. “It took a lot of engineering time. It took a lot of sales time to try to talk through all this. It delayed — and even killed — some sales for us.” After talking to Andersen, the team realized that they had the right ingredients to solve this problem once and for all, Krioukov explained.

At the same time, companies increasingly want more control over their data, even if it is under the auspice of a SaaS company, but it is very hard for SaaS companies to do that. “We realized we had a breakthrough and we could come up with a new solution that is a really different cloud deployment architecture that gives strong guarantees to the buyers and then allows the SaaS vendors to speed up their sales and offer cryptographic proof,” said Krioukov.

Image Credits: Anitmatter

With Antimatter’s solution, the data sits in secure enclaves within Kubernetes and the company then uses that to give hardware guarantees that the data is always encrypted, even while being processed. “This gives SaaS vendors a way to prove that their customer data is secure — secure to a higher standard than anyone has ever really aimed for before because the app could be malicious, the employees could be malicious, all these things could go wrong — and the customer data would still be provably secure,” explained Andersen.

He also noted that there is no performance impact when the SaaS application works with that private data inside the secure enclave. There is also no need to make code changes to the SaaS app. Antimatter’s service simply slots in underneath the app, as Andersen explained, and provides these guarantees because no unencrypted data can exit the enclave — and the hardware then guarantees that nobody can read the memory of the server either. All of the major clouds now offer some version of secure enclave thanks to the cryptographic features of modern server chips. Though as the team noted, that’s a great primitive to work from but doesn’t provide the kinds of guarantees Antimatter provides to its customers.

Image Credits: Antimatter

It’s worth highlighting that with Beau Trincia, the team has a design-focused co-founder, something we don’t often see for these kinds of highly technical problems. But as Trincia noted, right from the outset, the team wanted to make sure it designed the right experiences for the services’ target audiences. That may be the CTO who makes the final purchase decision but he also noted that the team wanted to build an intuitive user experience for the developers, as well as good user experience for those users inside a company that should (or shouldn’t) have access to this data. He also noted that part of the design challenge here is to show users that their data is indeed secure. “Being able to show people that events did or didn’t happen — and kind of really clearly explaining that and having an awesome dashboard for giving people that visibility [is important],” Trincia said.

Like most companies at this stage, the team plans to use the new funding to expand the development team as it looks to open up its service to a wider audience soon.

“The crypto tech and years of university R&D that serve as Antimatter’s foundation are a gigantic step forward for highly usable — yet provably correct — secure computing and data privacy,” said NEA venture partner Greg Papadopoulos. “We’re super excited to partner with Andrew and the team as they empower companies to definitively secure customer computing and data.”