Technology

Dreamit Ventures, a Philadelphia-based early stage investor and accelerator, announced it was moving into security today. To that end, it also announced it was bringing on Bob Stasio, an industry vet with roots in startups, IBM and work in the military and the NSA to run the new division.

The company is adding security to its existing verticals, health technology and urban technology. In fact, the news comes just weeks after announcing that Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik has invested $12 million in the company to move the urban vertical forward.

As for SecureTech, the company sees a big opening in this area as Fortune 500 organizations struggle with security in a constantly changing landscape. They want to find early stage startups wherever they are in the world with creative ideas on how to solve security problems.

Dreamit wants to connect these young startups with companies looking for solutions they can trust. Bringing in Stasio should help. His most recent job was Chief of Operations at IBM X-Force Command Center and prior to that he was global head of threat intelligence at Bloomberg and chief of operations branch at the Cyber Center, a branch of the NSA. That kind of background has built up connections and as his colleagues have moved into CISO positions at prominent companies, he can use his network to help his charges at Dreamit.

Stasio, who had his own attempts at the startup life, knows itnot always easy for technically minded folks with a good idea to get in front of an executive at a big company and hit a home run. It takes coaching and practice.

&The really hot agile startups with really good tech tend to fail when they get in front of front of an enterprise CISO (chief information security officer) because they don&t know how to pitch. They don&t know the kinds of problems and trials and tribulations that go on at an enterprise. So we&re going to help coach them to get them to that point, so that their business model and what they&re doing, how they&re going to implement their solution is ready for a large company,& Stasio told TechCrunch.

The company is looking at security in three areas: logical, physical and social. Logical is the more traditional kind of cybersecurity software and hardware approaches with artificial intelligence, threat hunting and threat intelligence, but they also want to look at areas that are frequently ignored involving the physical side of security. That could include drones, imagery analysis, physical security of buildings, protection of people and places, VIP security and so forth. The social side is looking how to protect against dissemination of false information, a growing problem.

They run a couple of cohorts a year for each vertical. Typically they take no more than 10 companies and thatout of about 300 applications per vertical, so itvery selective, says Steve Barsh, partner and chief innovation officer at Dreamit. The companies go through a 14 week program, after which they can choose to write a check or not (and the company still gets the benefit of having been in the accelerator).

&They give us an investor right to write a check for up to $500,000 at a 20% discount, the 20% discount, which is the value we think of the 14 weeks of going through Dreamit. And we only get the discount if we write the check,& Barsh explained. Their goal is getting the participants to the next funding round, which is well aligned with the goal of the startup itself. If they get that round, then Dreamit writes a check too with the 20 percent discount.

They said being Philadelphia, allows them to bring their charges in for the program, and then allow them to present to executives in New York and DC, where a huge chunk of business is going to be.

TheSkimm, the female-led media company best known for its newsletter that summarizes, in plain language, the top news and highlights from the day before, is today launching a mobile app for Android devices. Previously available on the iPhone, theSkimmnew app combines a mobile version of its newsletter, along with a calendar of important events, immediate updates on events happening now, weekly audio episodes focused on complex topics, and a new feature called &Text theSkimm.&

As you may have guessed by the name, Text theSkimm allows mobile app subscribers to text the company directly to receive information about important decisions they&re making, like those about investing, asking for a raise, or their healthcare options.

On this front, theSkimm competes with other self improvement-via-text services, including Shine, another female-founded startup which recently raised $5 million for its own suite of apps and services.

TheSkimm, meanwhile, is backed by $29 million in outside capital.

Founded by former TV news producers,Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg, what makes theSkimm compelling is the conversational tone it uses to discuss the key news events and provide the richer background on more complex topics. That makes it easier for people to understand whatreally going on in the world, and why it matters & even when they&re not good about turning on the TV news every day. (And really, can you blame &em)

The tone of the newsletter is not exactly full-on snark, but instead aims to be more humorous, as appropriate.

For example, todaytheSkimm was titled &One does not simply walk into Mordor,& with the lead story being, of course, President Trumpmeeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

But it doesn&t joke its way through the explanations, which are concise summaries written using clear language and a shorter sentence structure. Itvery readable.

While theSkimmcore product is its email newsletter & which is how the company got its start & it has later expanded to native apps and even audio programming.

The mobile app provides a home to the newsletter content, as well as theSkimmother news and information services.

Of particular use, is theSkimmCalendar which syncs up with your phonecalendar so you won&t miss important events & like voting day or the start of the World Cup, for example.

The app also includes the texting service, Skimm Nowbreaking news, and Skimm Notes, topic-focused audio episodes that dive deeper into a single subject in 10 minutes or less.

However, unlike the newsletter, theSkimmapp is not free. While you can try it out via a free preview, the full service is available as a $2.99 per month subscription, or $29.99 if you pay annually.

This isn&t the only source theSkimmrevenue & other sources include native ads, affiliate, content licensing and distribution. However, subscriptions are proving to be a big revenue driver for mobile apps, as more consumers grow comfortable with the model popularized by streaming services, like Netflix.

In May, theSkimm closed on its $12 million Series C with the addition of notable, mostly female, investors joining, includingShonda Rhimes and Tyra Banks. At the time, the company had a reportedseven million subscribers.

80 percent of its audience is female, and over half are millennials, theSkimm today says. Its highly engaged &Skimm&bassador& community has over 30,000 members, and 2 million follow theSkimm on social media.

While iOS is the preferred mobile platform among its user base, theSkimm says that 25 percent of its users are on Android. And that audience is growing & it doubled over the past 3 years, in fact.

Thatwhy the company needed to launch a native Android app.

The app quietly launched on June 11, ahead of todayofficial announcement, but already has over 5,000 downloads on Google Play. The download is free with the option to preview the service before paying.

If you are a developer and you want to use the Google Maps Platform to power direction or other location-basedfeatures in your applications, things can quickly get expensive. Mapfit, which today announced that it has raised a $5.5 million funding round, promises to challenge Google on price while offering geocoding services and vector-based maps that are just as accurate as Google(and sometimes even better).

Among other things, Mapfitpromises that it can figure out the correct entrances of buildings for 95 percent of addresses, making door-to-door navigation easier, for example. Mapfit also argues that its new vector-based maps are 95 percent smaller than the map tiles that other services often use. The service does offer those traditional tiles, too, though, and they include support for 3D buildings and public transit info.

The company was founded in 2015 and gets its data from a variety of sources, including both commercial and open data sets. It then takes this data and runs it through a number of steps to validate it and enhance it with its own algorithms for aligning addresses with pedestrian and vehicle entrances, for example.

Mapfit offers a free plan for non-commercialprojects and developers who simply want to kick the servicetires, as well as a $49/month &growth& plan for startups that comes with 250,000 map views, 150,000 geocode requests and 150,000 directions requests. There is no limit to the number of mobile SDK and web users under thisplan. For users who need more API requests, Mapfitcharges $0.50 per 1,000 additional requests or users can opt for the $1,499/month enterprise plan, which includes 5 million map views.

The companyfunding comes from a group of entrepreneurs and investors that include Cavalry Ventures,Weihua Yan (Diapers.com, Quidsi), Roderick Thompson (ePlanet Capital, Baidu, Skype), Auren Hoffman (SafeGraph, LiveRamp), Daniel Waterhouse (Balderton), Jeroen Seghers (Sourcepoint), Matias de Tezanos (Hoteles.com, PeopleFund) and Joost de Valk (Yoast).