Technology

In the age of digital transformation, itimportant to understand your business processes and find improvements quickly, but itnot always easy to do without bringing in expensive consultants to help. Celonis, a New York City enterprise startup, created a sophisticated software solution to help solve this problem, and today it announced a $50 million Series B investment from Accel and 83North on a $1 billion valuation.

Itnot typical for an enterprise startup to have such a lofty valuation so early in its funding cycle, but Celonis is not a typical enterprise startup. It launched in 2011 in Munich with this idea of helping companies understand their processes, which they call process mining.

&Celonis is an intelligent system using logs created by IT systems such as SAP, Salesforce, Oracle and Netsuite, and automatically understands how these processes work and then recommends intelligently how they can be improved,&Celonis CEO and co-founder Alexander Rinke explained.

The software isn&t magic, but helps customers visualize each business process, and then looks at different ways of shifting how and where humans interact with the process or bringing in technology like robotics process automation (RPA) when it makes sense.

Celonis process flow. Photo: Celonis

Rinke says the software doesn&t simply find a solution and thatthe end of the story. Ita continuous process loop of searching for ways to help customers operate more efficiently. This doesn&t have to be a big change, but often involves lots incremental ones.

&We tell them there are lots of answers. We don&t think there is one solution. All these little things don&t execute well. We point out these things. Typically we find iteasy to implement, & he said.

Screenshot: Celonis

It seems to be working. Customers include the likes of Exxon-Mobile, 3M, Merck, Lockheed-Martin and Uber. Rinke reports deals are often seven figures. The company has grown an astonishing 5,000 percent in the past 4 years and 300 percent in the past year alone.Whatmore, it has been profitable every year since it started. (How many enterprise startups can say that)

The company currently has 400 employees, but unlike most Series B investments, they aren&t looking at this money to grow operationally. They wanted to have the money for strategic purposes, so if the opportunity came along to make an acquisition or expand into a new market, they would be in a position to do that.

&I see the funding as a confirmation and commitment, a sign from our investors and an indicator about what we&ve built and the traction we have. But for us itmore important, and our investors share this, what they really invested in was the future of the company,& Rinke said. Hesees an on-going commitment to help his customers as far more important than a billion valuation.

But that doesn&t hurt either as it moves rapidly forward.

At the Identiverse conference in Boston today, Ping Identityannounced that it has acquired Elastic Beam, a pre-Series A startup that uses artificial intelligence to monitor APIs and help understand when they have been compromised.

Ping also announced a new product, PingIntelligence for APIs, based on the Elastic Beam technology. They did not disclose the sale price.

The product itself is a pretty nifty piece of technology. It automatically detects all the API IP addresses and URLs running inside a customer. It then uses artificial intelligence to search for anomalous behavior and report back when it finds it (or it can automatically shut down access depending on how itconfigured).

&APIs are defined either in the API gateway because that facilitates creation or implemented on an application server like node.js. We created a platform that could bring a level of protection to both,& company founder Bernard Harguindeguy told TechCrunch.

It may seem like an odd match for Ping, which after all, is an enterprise identity company, but there are reasonable connections here. Perhaps the biggest is that CEO Andre Durand wants to see his company making increasing use of AI and machine learning for identity security in general. Italso worth noting that his company has had an API security product in its portfolio for over five years, so itnot a huge stretch to buy Elastic Beam.

With this purchase, Ping has not only acquired some advanced technology, it has also acqui-hired a team of AI and machine learning experts that could help inject the entire Ping product line with AI and machine learning smarts. &Nobody should be surprised who has been watching that Ping will drive machine learning AI and general intelligence into our identity platform,& Durand said.

Harguindeguy certainly sees the potential here. &I think we can over time bring a high level of monitoring and intelligence to Ping to understand whether an identity may have been used by someone else or being misused somehow,& he said.

Elastic Beam interface. Photo: Elastic Beam website

Harguindeguy will join Ping Identity as Senior Vice President of Intelligence along with his entire team. Neither company would divulge the exact number of employees, but Durand did acknowledge it fell somewhere between the 11 and 50 mentioned in the company Crunchbase profile. The original team consisted of around 10 according to Harguindeguy and they have been hiring for some time, so fair to say more than 11, but less than 50.

Harguindeguy says they were pursued by more than one company (although he wouldn&t say who those other companies were), but he felt that Ping provided a good cultural match for his company and could take them where they wanted to go faster than they could on their own, even with Series A money.

&We realized this is going to be really big. How do we go after the market really strongly really fast We saw that we could could fuse this really fast with Ping and have strong go- to market with with them,& he said.

Durand acknowledged that Ping, which was itself acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $600 million two years ago, couldn&t have made such an acquisition without the backing of a larger firm like this. &There was there was no chance we could have done either UnboundID (which the company acquired in August 2016) or Elastic Beam on our own. This was purely an artifact of being part of the Vista family portfolio,& he said.

PingIntelligence for APIs, the product based on Elastic Beamtechnology, is currently in private preview. It should be generally available some time later this year.

Online fraud detection startup CashShield, whose clients include Alibaba and Razer, announced today that it has raised a $20 million Series B led by Temasek Holdings and returning investor GGV Capital. Participants also included Next co-founder Tony Fadell, another returning investor, Wavemaker Partners and Tao Zhang.

CashShield says it has now raised a total of $25.5 million, including a Series A announced last September. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Singapore, CashShield also has offices in Europe, China and the United States, where it launched last year and now counts Yamibuy and Scalefast among its users. CashShield claims its technology currently secures about 10 million user accounts and $500 million GMV in transactions each month.

The startup says personal account data is much more valuable than credit card information, because it can sell for 60 times more. Some of the Series B will be spent on research and development to develop new tools.

&Currently CashShield caters to securing against payment and account fraud, but is also working on adding on different fraud screening abilities to secure all vulnerable entries to fraud, including click fraud, IoT authentication, claims fraud and KYT [know your transaction],& founder and chief executive officer Justin Lie told TechCrunch in an email. &As such, we are looking to invest further efforts to build our R-D capabilities to enhance the core technology while scaling more aggressively in the markets we are targeting globally.&

CashShieldfraud management competitors include Signifyd, Riskified and Forter. Lie said his company differentiates because it combines several approaches, including artificial intelligence and proprietary high frequency trading algorithms and is &fully-machine operated and able to function without the need for human intervention.&

&Other solutions such as Signifyd, Riskified and Forter still need to deploy humans to complete their fraud screening process, but is easy for fraudsters to get ahead of as fraudsters themselves are using machine learning to launch sophisticated coordinated fraud attacks,& he said.

The companyverticals currently include e-commerce, digital products, telecommunications and online travel, though Lie has said in the past that its tools can also potentially be used to verify social media accounts and fight the proliferation of fake news. Lie explained that CashShieldcurrent fraud prevention technology detects and prevents the creation of mass accounts and it is also able to detect mass account takeovers of genuine user accounts, which is often used to spread fake news.

&Most recommend relying on two factor authentication to prevent account takeovers, but other than creating friction to user experience, many users are also unwilling to store more personal information (e.g. phone numbers) in the system,& said Lie. &Rather, CashShield uses real-time surveillance to detect if login behavior is of a genuine person or part of a coordinated fraud attack, and is able to block fraudsters from accessing stolen accounts instantly, and prevent them from using the accounts to spread fake news.&

In a press statement, GGV Capital managing partner Jenny Lee said &Justin is a strong leader with a clear vision. The growth CashShield has shown over the past year has boosted our confidence in their potential and the quality of their technology.&