Technology

French startup Zenaton raised $2.35 million from Accel and Point Nine Capital, with the Slack Fund, Kima Ventures, Julien Lemoine and Francis Nappez also participating. The company wants to take care of the most tedious part of your application — asynchronous jobs and background tasks.

While it has never been easier to develop a simple web-based service with a database, building and scaling workflows that handle tasks based on different events still sucks.

Sometimes your background task fails and itgoing to take you days before you notice that your workflow stopped working. Some workflows might require so much resources that you&ll end up paying a huge server bill to get more RAM to handle those daily cron jobs and performance spikes.

And yet, many small companies would greatly benefit from adding asynchronous jobs. For instance, you could improve your retention rate by sending email reminders. You could try to upsell your customers with accessories if you&re running an e-commerce website. You could ask for reviews a few hours after a user found a restaurant through your app.

&We work hard to make it super easy & as a developer, you just have to install the Zenaton agent on your worker servers. Thatall. Specifically, you&ll no longer have to maintain a queuing system for your background jobs, thereno more cron, no more database migrations to store transient states,& co-founder and CEO Gilles Barbier told me. Barbier previously worked at The Family and Zenaton is part of The Familyportfolio.

Zenaton is already working with a big client and handles millions of workflow instances for them. You can try Zenaton for free if you execute less than 250,000 tasks per month. After that, plans start at $49 per month and you&ll pay more depending on how much RAM you consume with your workflows.

For now, you can integrate Zenaton with a PHP and a Node application, but the company is working on more languages, starting with Python, Ruby and Java. Itclear that the product is still young.

But it sounds like a promising start. If you have a small development team, it could make sense to use Zenaton and a workflow-as-a-service approach.

The ongoing shift of emphasis in the cyber security industry from defensive, reactive actions towards pro-active detection and response has fueled veteran Finnish security company F-Secure acquisition of MWR InfoSecurity, announced today.

F-Secure is paying £80 million(€91,6M) in cash to purchase all outstanding shares in MWR InfoSecurity, funding the transaction with its own cash reserves and a five-year bank loan.In addition, the terms include an earn-out of a maximum of £25M (€28,6M) in cash to be paid after 18 months of the completion subject to the achievement of agreed business targets for the period from1 July, 2018, until31 December, 2019.

F-Secure says the acquisition will enable it to offer its customers access to the more offensive skillsets needed to combat targeted attacks — specialist capabilities that most companies are not likely to have in-house.

It points to detection and response solutions (EDR) and managed detection and response services (MDR) as one of the fastest growing market segments in the security space. And says the acquisition makes it the largest European single source ofcyber security services and detection and response solutions, positioning it to cater to both mid-market companies and large enterprises globally.

&The acquisition brings MWR InfoSecurityindustry-renowned technologies to F-Secure making our detection and response offering unrivaled,& said F-Secure CEOSamu Konttinen in a statement. &Their threat hunting platform (Countercept) is one of the most advanced in the market and is an excellent complement to our existing technologies.&

As well as having experts in-house skilled in offensive techniques, MWR InfoSecurity — a UK company that was founded in 2002 — is well known for its technical expertise and research.

And F-Secure says it expects learnings from major incident investigations and targeted attack simulations to provide insights that can be fed directly back into product creation, as well as be used to upgrade its offerings to reflect the latest security threats.

MWR InfoSecurity also has a suite of managed phishing protection services (phishd) which F-Secure also says will also enhance its offering.

The acquisition is expected to close in early July, and will add around 400 employees to F-Secureheadcount. MWR InfoSecuritymain offices are located in theUK, the US,South AfricaandSingapore.

&I&m thrilled to welcome MWR InfoSecurityemployees to F-Secure. With their vast experience and hundreds of experts performing cyber security services on four continents, we will have unparalleled visibility into real-life cyber attacks 24/7,& added Konttinen. &This enables us to detect indicators across an incredible breadth of attacks so we can protect our customers effectively. As most companies currently lack these capabilities, this represents a significant opportunity to accelerate F-Securegrowth.&

&We&ve always relied on research-driven innovations executed by the best people and technology. This approach has earned MWR InfoSecurity the trust of some of the largest organizations in the world,& added MWR InfoSecurity CEO,Ian Shaw, who will be joining F-Secureleadership team after the transaction closes. &We see this approach thriving atF-Secure, and we look forward to working together so that we can break new ground in the cyber security industry.&

The companies will be holding a webcast to provide more detail on the news for investors and analysts later today, at13:30 EEST.

Weeks after French President Emmanuel Macronunveiled a $76M African startup fundat VivaTech 2018, TechCrunch paid a visit to theFrench Development Agency(AFD) — who will administer the new fund — to get more details on howle noveau fondswill work.

The $76M (or€65M) will divvy up into three parts, according to AFD Digital Task Team LeaderChristine Ha.

&There are €10M [$11.7M] for technical assistance to support the African ecosystem… €5M will be available as interest free loans to high potential, pre seed startups…and…€50M [$58M] will be for equity-based investments in series A to C startups,& explained Ha during a meeting in Paris.

The technical assistance will distribute in the form of grants to accelerators, hubs, incubators, and coding programs. The pre-seed startup loans will issue in amounts up to $100K &as early, early funding to allow entrepreneurs to prototype, launch, and experiment,& said Ha.

The $58M in VC startup funding will be administered throughProparco, a development finance institution—orDFI—partially owned by the AFD. The money will come &from Proparcobalance sheet&…and a portion &will be invested in VC funds active on the continent,& said Ha.

Proparco already invests in Africa focused funds such asTLcom CapitalandPartech Ventures. &Proparco will take equity stakes, and will be a limited partner when investing in VC funds,& said Ha.

Startups from all African countries can apply for a piece of the $58M by contacting any ofProparcoAfrica offices(including in Casablanca, Abidjan, Douala, Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg).

And what will AFD (and Proparco) look for in African startup candidates &We are targeting young and innovative companies able to solve problems in terms of job creation, access to financial services, energy, health, education and affordable goods and services…[and] able to scale up their venture on the continent,& said Ha.

The $11.7M technical assistance and $5.8M loan portions of Francenew fund will be available starting 2019. On implementation, AFD is still &reviewing several options…such as relying on local actors through [France&s] Digital Africa platform,& said Ha.

Digital Africa­—a broader French government initiative to support the African tech ecosystem—will launch a new online platform in November 2018 with resources for startup entrepreneurs.

So thatthe skinny on Francenew Africa fund. It adds to a load of VC announced for the continent in less than 15 months, including$70 for Partech Ventures, TPG Growth$2BN Rise Fund, and$40M at TLcom Capital

Though $75M (and these other amounts) may pale compared to Silicon Valley VC values, ita lot for a startup scene that — at rough estimate—attracted only$400M four years ago.African tech entrepreneurs, you now have a lot more global funding options, including from France.