A couple of weeks ago, TechCrunch broke the news that Akamai was in discussions to acquire Noname Security, a specialist in API security, for around $500 million. Today, the deal has been confirmed, though at a slightly lower price. Akamai on Tuesday said it has agreed to buy Noname in a $450 million deal. The […]
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Uber Technologies announced Tuesday that it will buy the Taiwan unit of Delivery Hero’s Foodpanda for $950 million in cash. The deal is part of Uber Eats’ strategy to expand in Asia, specifically by strengthening its position in Taiwan. On the other hand, it also underscores Delivery Hero’s ongoing retreat from that same market: the sale […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Samsung Medison, a medical device unit of Samsung Electronics that specializes in developing diagnostic imaging devices, said on Wednesday it plans to acquire Sonio, a Paris-based startup that makes AI-powered software for ultrasound workflows, for about $92.7 million (KRW 126 billion).
The French startup’s AI assistant is aimed at helping obstetricians and gynecologists with the evaluation and documentation of ultrasound exams, and it has also received regulatory clearance in the United States (FDA 510(k)) for Sonio Detect, a product that uses deep learning algorithms to improve the image quality of ultrasound scans in real time.
Samsung Medison said Sonio’s software would help it bring better AI-driven imaging workflows to the market. Samsung Electronics, which owns a 68.45% stake in the medical device unit, acquired Medison for $22 million in 2011.
Samsung said in a statement that following the acquisition, Sonio will remain an independent company and continue to grow commercially and offer products and services in France.
Co-founded by Cecile Brosset (CEO) and Remi Besson (CSO) in 2020, Sonio most recently secured $14 million in a Series A led by Cross Border Impact Ventures in August 2023. The company has raised a total of $27.2 million, according to Tracxn, and its investors include Elaia, Bpifrance French Tech Seed, OneRagtime, and a few angel investors.
“Through the acquisition of Sonio, Samsung Medison will continue to deliver upon our promise to improve the quality of people’s lives with technology,” said Yong Kwan Kim, CEO of Samsung Medison. “Collaboration with Sonio will bring together best-in-class ultrasound AI technology and reporting capabilities to bring a paradigm shift in the prenatal ultrasound exam.”
“Samsung Medison’s established global ultrasound business combined with Sonio’s advanced AI creates an exciting growth opportunity for both sides,” said Brosset, CEO of Sonio. “We have found in Samsung Medison an amazing, trusting partner to pursue and accelerate our roadmap and mission. In addition to close collaboration with Samsung Medison, as an independent company, Sonio will continue to advance medical reporting technology and diagnostic software globally, including for underserved areas in healthcare.”
As DocuSign reportedly explores a sale to private equity, it’s acquiring a company itself.
On Monday, DocuSign announced that it’s buying Lexion, a contract workflow automation startup, for $165 million. The purchase comes as DocuSign makes increasing investments in the contract management space, most recently launching DocuSign IAM, a service aimed at connecting different components of the corporate agreement creation and negotiation process.
Lexion was incubated at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), the AI-focused research arm of the nonprofit Allen Institute. Oberoi founded the company together with former Microsoft research software development engineering lead Emad Elwany and engineering veteran James Baird; Oberoi previously co-founded survey platform Precision Polling, which SurveyMonkey acquired shortly after it launched.
Lexion began as a “smart” repository for contracts, letting legal teams ask natural language questions about documents. But it slowly expanded with tools to address various use cases and challenges in document creation for teams across not only legal departments, but sales, IT, HR and finance.
Lexion had raised $35.2 million in venture capital prior to the acquisition from investors including Khosla Ventures, Madrona, and Point72 Ventures.
According to DocuSign CEO Allan Thygesen, Legion’s technology will enable DocuSign customers to gain a “more granular” understanding of their contract structures and data, as well as better identify insights and potential risks. DocuSign will tap Lexion’s AI models for contract creation and negotiations, while Lexion will build integrations with DocuSign’s products and solutions.
The purchase comes at a pivotal moment for DocuSign, valued at about $12.5 billion, which is said to be in the process of selling itself to a private equity firm. Perhaps in a bid to make its books more attractive to suitors, DocuSign in February announced plans to lay off ~6% of its workforce — some 400 jobs.
Reuters reported in January that Bain and Hellman & Friedman are among the final bidders in an auction for DocuSign, which could be one of the biggest leveraged buyouts in 2024.
DocuSign’s other acquisitions include SpringCM (in July 2018 for $220 million), a cloud platform for sales contract management, and Seal Software (in February 2020 for $188 million), a company specializing in AI-driven contract analytics.
IBM wisely gravitated away from trying to be a pure cloud infrastructure vendor years ago, recognizing that it could never compete with the big three: Amazon, Microsoft and Google. It has since moved onto helping IT departments manage complex hybrid environments, using its financial clout to acquire a portfolio of high-profile companies.
It began with the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition in 2018, continued with the Apptio acquisition last year, and it kept it going on Wednesday when the company announced that it would be acquiring cloud management vendor HashiCorp for $6.4 billion.
With HashiCorp, Big Blue gets a set of cloud lifecycle management and security tools, and a company that is growing considerably faster than any of IBM’s other businesses — although the revenue is small by IBM standards: $155 million last quarter, up 15% over the prior year. That still makes it a healthy and growing business for IBM to add to its growing stable of hybrid cloud tools.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna certainly sees the value of this piece to his company’s hybrid strategy, and he even threw in an AI reference for good measure. “HashiCorp has a proven track record of enabling clients to manage the complexity of today’s infrastructure and application sprawl. Combining IBM’s portfolio and expertise with HashiCorp’s capabilities and talent will create a comprehensive hybrid cloud platform designed for the AI era,” he said in a statement.
HashiCorp made headlines last year when it changed the license on its open source Terraform tool to be more friendly to the company. The community that helped build Terraform wasn’t happy and responded by launching a new open-source alternative called OpenTofu. HashiCorp recently accused the new community of misusing Terraform’s open-source code when it created the OpenTofu fork. Now that the company is part of IBM, it will be interesting to see if they continue to pursue this line of thinking.
It’s worth noting that Red Hat also made headlines last year when it changed its open-source licensing terms, also causing consternation in the open-source community. Perhaps these companies will fit well together, both from a software perspective and their shifting views on open source.
Just this week, the company introduced a new platform concept with the release of the Infrastructure Cloud, a concept that should fit nicely inside IBM’s hybrid cloud product catalog. While they didn’t add much in terms of functionality, it did unify the offerings under a single umbrella making it easier for sales and marketing to present to customers.
If IBM treats HashiCorp in a similar way to Red Hat, the company would maintain its independence inside the IBM family of products. AVOA, a research firm run by former CIO Tim Crawford, says the company would be wise to keep it neutral.
“My reservation would be if IBM moves away from Hashicorp’s neutral stance in working with multiple cloud providers and focuses on IBM Cloud. I suspect that would not be the case as IBM has recently shown how they are more open with other cloud providers,” Crawford wrote in a recent blog post.
HashiCorp was founded in 2012 and raised almost $350 million before going public in 2021.
Nvidia is acquiring Run:ai, a Tel Aviv-based company that makes it easier for developers and operations teams to manage and optimize their AI hardware infrastructure, for an undisclosed sum.
Ctech reported earlier this morning the companies were in “advanced negotiations” that could see Nvidia pay upwards of $1 billion for Run:ai. Evidently, those negotiations went without a hitch.
Nvidia says that it’ll continue to offer Run:ai’s products “under the same business model” for the immediate future, and invest in Run:ai’s product roadmap as part of Nvidia’s DGX Cloud AI platform.
“Run:ai has been a close collaborator with Nvidia since 2020 and we share a passion for helping our customers make the most of their infrastructure,” Omri Geller, Run:ai’s CEO, said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to join Nvidia and look forward to continuing our journey together.”
Geller co-founded Run:ai with Ronen Dar several years ago after the two studied together at Tel Aviv University under professor Meir Feder, Run:ai’s third co-founder. Geller, Dar and Feder sought to build a platform that could “break up” AI models into fragments that run in parallel across hardware, whether on-premises, on clouds or at the edge.
While Run:AI has relatively few direct competitors, other startups are applying the concept of dynamic hardware allocation to AI workloads. For example, Grid.ai offers software that allows data scientists to train AI models across GPUs, processors and more in parallel.
But relatively early in its life, Run:AI managed to establish a large customer base of Fortune 500 companies — which in turn attracted VC investment. Prior to the acquisition, Run:ai had raised $118 million in capital from backers including Insight Partners, Tiger Global, S Capital and TLV Partners.
Webflow, a web design and hosting platform that’s raised over $330 million at a $4 billion valuation, is expanding into a new sector: marketing optimization.
Today, Webflow announced that it acquired Intellimize, a startup leveraging AI to personalize websites for unique visitors. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. But a source familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch that the purchase price was in the “eight-figure” range.
The majority of the Intellimize team — around 50 people — will join Webflow. But some staffers either took outplacement packages or were let go and given severance; Webflow wouldn’t say how many.
Vlad Magdalin, the CEO of Webflow, said Intellimize was a natural fit for Webflow’s first-ever acquisition because its product meets a need many Webflow customers share: personalizing and optimizing their websites.
“The common thread among our many customer segments is that they’re building professional websites that are meant not only to look great, but ultimately to drive business results — and tons of our customers and partners have been asking us to help them improve how well their websites are able to bring them new customers beyond the initial build phase,” Magdalin said. “Intellimize quickly emerged as a really impressive product in this space that many marketing and growth leaders raved about — and it soon became very evident that combining the forces of our respective products and our teams can create a much more powerful combination.”
Guy Yalif, former head of vertical marketing at Twitter, co-founded Intellimize in 2016 with Brian Webb and Jin Lim. While in a previous exec role at Yahoo, Yalif worked with Lim, Yahoo’s VP of engineering at the time, and Webb, who was an architect on Yahoo’s personalized content recommendation team. (Full disclosure: Yahoo is TechCrunch’s corporate parent.)
With Intellimize, Yalif, Webb and Lim — drawing on their combined marketing know-how — set out to build a platform that could generate personalized webpages for visitors on demand.
The motivation? Seventy-four percent of customers feel frustrated when a website’s content isn’t customized, according to stats cited by Porch Group Media. Companies that do personalize report not only increased revenue, but more efficient marketing spend.
Intellimize taps AI to generate pages, automatically making adjustments in response to how users behave (and where they’re coming from). Companies create a website template, then Intellimize’s AI runs experiments, fiddling with various knobs and dials is it were before delivering the top-performing results to visitors.
Now, Intellimize isn’t the only one doing this.
Amazon’s Personalize can drive tailored product and search recommendations on the web. Sstartups such as Evolv AI and Episerver-owned Optimizely automate certain forms of A/B web testing with algorithms. That’s not to mention generative AI-driven platforms like Adobe’s GenStudio, Movable Ink, Mutiny and Blend, which are hastening in new and novel forms of experience personalization.
But Intellimize — whether on the strength of its tech, partnerships or advertising — manage to establish a sizeable foothold in the market for AI-powered marketing.
At the time of the acquisition, Intellimize — which had raised over $50 million from investors like Cobalt Capital, Addition, Amplify Partners and Homebrew — had several tentpole customers including Sumo Logic, Dermalogica and ZoomInfo.
“The Intellimize team had already built most of the personalization and optimization tools that we were considering building in-house, and had an impressive roster of enterprise customers using their solution,” Magdalin said. “Their team and product demonstrated world-class expertise in machine learning and AI to power website personalization and conversion rate optimization, which we believe would be a very powerful addition to Webflow’s existing platform.”
So what changes can Intellimize customers expect as the company joins the Webflow fold? Not many disruptive ones, Yalif stressed. Intellimize will continue to be sold standalone to non-Webflow customers, but it’ll increasingly link to — and integrate with — Webflow services. Yalif, meanwhile, will join Webflow as “head of personalization,” guiding — what else? — personalization product efforts at Webflow.
“Joining Webflow allows us to scale and significantly accelerate our forward momentum,” Yalif said. “Webflow is building out its integrated solution for website building, design and optimization. Intellimize is the foundation of the personalization and optimization pieces of that vision. Together, we can take on larger, much more expensive, harder-to-use players in the digital experience space.”
Here’s Magdalin’s take:
“Integrating Intellimize expands our primary audience beyond designers and developers … For the initial phase [of the merger], we’re focusing on natively integrating both of our products together — so customers should expect the best of Webflow and the best of Intellimize to be available as one unified product experience later this year.”
Every year, Time Magazine issues a list of the 200 best inventions of the past 12 months. Frankly, I don’t know how the editors do it. The dirty secret of this job is that true, game-changing inventions rarely cross your desk. In fact, you’re extraordinarily lucky if you average one a year.
Oculus’ Rift prototype felt like just such a device when it first crossed my radar more than a decade ago. More than anything, the system resembled a hastily duct-taped ski mask. It was a remarkable presentation, in hindsight — an all-too-rare glimpse into a plucky entrepreneurial tech spirit. It evokes a flood of romanticized images of Homebrew Computer Club nerds soldering together circuit boards in South Bay garages.
A decade has now passed since Meta (née Facebook) announced plans to acquire the startup for $2 billion. A decade after the deal was announced, it’s safe to say that the VR headset hasn’t changed the world we live in. But there’s always that little-discussed middle ground between transforming the human condition and just being an abject dumpster fire of failure. So, where, as of April 2024, does the Facebook/Oculus deal rank?
“Immersive gaming will be the first, and Oculus already has big plans here that won’t be changing and we hope to accelerate,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote at the time. “After games, we’re going to make Oculus a platform for many other experiences. Imagine enjoying a court side seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.”
Image Credits: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile / Getty Images
Facebook’s founder referred to the Oculus Rift as a “new communication platform,” comparing it to computers, the internet and smartphones before it. He suggested that the “dream of science fiction” was now a reality — one that Facebook had suddenly cornered. It’s hard to overstate how transformative Zuckerberg believed the technology to be. It was, after all, the gateway to the metaverse.
Should anyone doubt the company’s commitment to the concept, in late 2021, it rebranded itself as “Meta,” killing off the Oculus brand the same afternoon. Surely social media platforms wouldn’t dominate online discourse forever. They would eventually give way to something wholly new. Except that despite that $500 billion rebrand, Zuckerberg and company never did a particularly good job of defining the metaverse. They simply insisted that it was an exciting thing that you should be excited about.
Image Credits: Facebook
I suspect that were you to perform a blind poll, the majority of people who are familiar with the term meta would describe something like Second Life, the virtual world that to be on its fifth or sixth life by now. Mark Zuckerberg is probably as guilty as any single person for perpetuating that perception, happily working his hardest to make the company’s Horizon Worlds platform synonymous with conceptions of the metaverse. Remember what a big deal it was when its avatars finally got legs?
So where are we now? It’s complicated, obviously. From a purely financial standpoint (the only language shareholders speak), things are bleak. Between the end of 2020 and the first quarter of 2024, the company’s metaverse division lost $42 billion. That’s roughly 21x the price it paid for Oculus, not adjusting for inflation. That’s a little over one-fourth a Zuckerberg (not adjusted for inflation — i.e., BJJ-related bulking).
Why is Meta hemorrhaging that much money? The simple and cynical answer is, because it can. The corporation made $134 billion in revenue and $39.1 billion in net income last year. That’s not to say that having a division that’s $42 billion in the red over four years doesn’t impact its bottom line, of course. But Facebook believes it’s playing the long game here.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
It’s widely believed that Meta sells its Quest headsets at a loss. This is despite the fact that the company has easily the best manufacturing scale in the industry. It doesn’t take an MBA to understand that this is a terrible short-term strategy, but again, Meta believes it’s playing the long game. The end game is getting enough of these devices into people’s hands to reach a critical mass of adoption, word of mouth and developer content. If you can’t do that while turning a profit, well, you gotta spend money to make money, right?
It continues to be a massive bet. How long the company is willing to play the long game here, however, largely comes down to how much patience Meta’s shareholders have. If it can truly saturate the market and corner content, it will be better positioned to capitalize on mixed reality’s hypothetical exponential growth.
It has already edged the competition out of the market and generally sucked the air out of the room. As an HTC Vive exec told me back in February at MWC, “I think Meta has adjusted the market perception of what this technology should cost.” Other companies can’t compete on price and content in the customer space, so the savviest of the bunch have moved over to enterprise, where clients have much deeper pockets.
If you judge the company’s journey in terms how much of the VR headset market it controls, it’s been a wild and unprecedented success. According to IDC, Meta had a 50.2% share as of Q2 2023. Of course, we’re not talking about smartphone figures here. As of early 2023, Meta was estimated to have sold 20 million headsets. At the end of the year, the Quest 2 was still outselling the Quest 3. One part of the Meta thesis has absolutely played out: People are looking for an inexpensive on-ramp to the technology.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
When Apple announced the Vision Pro at WWDC 2024, I received a flood of unsolicited comments from VR headset manufacturers all stating they saw the iPhone maker’s headset as validation for the space. You can cynically (and correctly) point out that everyone says some version of that when Apple enters their vertical, and many of them don’t make it out the other side in one piece.
But I concur that Apple throwing its hat in the ring after decades of failed VR attempts does constitute validation. That’s absolutely the case for Meta. Zuckerberg happily used the opportunity to point out that his headsets were (1) significantly less expensive and (2) didn’t require an external battery. Meta also had a large head start in terms of VR-specific content. Naturally, Zuckerberg also insisted that his product was vastly superior in spite of the significantly lower price point.
“It seems like there are a lot of people who just assumed that Vision Pro would be higher quality because it’s Apple and it costs $3,000 more,” he noted in February, “but honestly, I’m pretty surprised that Quest is so much better for the vast majority of things that people use these headsets for, with that price differential.”
Sorry, Zuck, the Vision Pro is the more impressive piece of technology. Whether it’s $3,000 more impressive is a different conversation. What I can tell you right now is that the pricing gulf puts these products into different categories. Apple is targeting business customers at that price point, while Meta is far more committed to democratizing access by — again — losing money on a per-unit basis.
It’s still early days for Vision Pro — and, really, mixed reality in general. If it ever does truly become ubiquitous, it will be the result of countless hard-fought battles. As we mark a decade since the Oculus acquisition, I find myself returning to the above Zuckerberg comment: “Imagine enjoying a courtside seat at a game, studying in a classroom of students and teachers all over the world or consulting with a doctor face-to-face — just by putting on goggles in your home.”
Re-reading this from the vantage point of 2024, it strikes me that he was right about the content, but not necessarily the delivery mechanism. The past four years have dramatically impacted how we interact with each other, the world and day-to-day activities. The pandemic de-stigmatized so many virtual activities. But for the time being, no headsets are required.
DataStax made a name for itself by commercializing the open source Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, but these days, the company’s focus is squarely on using its database chops to build a “one-stop GenAI stack.” One of the first building blocks for this was to bring vector search capabilities to its hosted Astra DB service last summer. Since then, it’s built out more of its stack for building GenAI applications backed by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and today, the company announced the next stop in this direction by announcing that it has acquired Logspace, the company behind Langflow, a low-code tool for building RAG-based applications.
DataStax did not share the price of the acquisition.
Logspace launched in 2022 with a mission to help businesses adopt machine learning. Early on, the company was more of a consultancy than a product company. Logspace co-founder and CEO Rodrigo Nader previously worked on machine learning problems at enterprise AI company Bitvore, together with co-founder and CTO Gabriel Luiz Freitas Almeida. They self-funded the company and by 2023, the founding team had launched Langflow, which quickly gained some traction as an early open source low-code/no-code tool for creating GenAI apps.
“This acquisition will provide current Langflow developers and current DataStax developers additional resources and integrations to elevate their applications to match the scale of their ambitions,” said Chet Kapoor, CEO and chairman of DataStax. “Langflow is focused on democratizing and accelerating generative AI development for any developer or company, and in joining DataStax, we’re working together to enable developers to put their wild new generative AI ideas on a fast path to production.”
The DataStax team argues that this acquisition effectively completes its effort to build a one-stop generative AI stack. After all, it can now offer its users a single tool that combines built-in connections to DataStax’s own Astra DB and tools like the LangChain toolkit and LlamaIndex for connecting different data sources, with an easy-to-use visual editor for building GenAI chatbots for internal and external use.
Langflow will continue to operate as a separate entity, so existing users shouldn’t notice any immediate changes.
“We couldn’t be more excited about joining the DataStax team and supercharging our ability to grow the Langflow platform, bringing it to more researchers, developers, enterprises and entrepreneurs working on generative AI applications,” said Nader. “With DataStax, we will be fully focused on the execution of our product vision, roadmap and community collaboration, and will continue to add to the greatest breadth of integrations across different AI ecosystem projects and products — including more data sources and databases, models, applications and APIs.”
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