1Password, the AgileBits-owned password management software developer, today announced that it has acquired Kolide, an endpoint security platform, for an undisclosed amount.
According to 1Password CEO Jeff Shiner, Kolide founder and CEO Jason Meller and all of Kolide’s 30 employees will join 1Password “as an intact team.” Meller has taken on the role of VP of product at 1Password.
Kolide’s platform, which Meller co-launched in 2016 with Mike Arpaia and Zach Wasserman, offers security-related endpoint alerts, remediation and more delivered via Slack.
Kolide attempts to prevent unknown endpoint devices from accessing corporate apps.
Prior to the acquisition, Kolide managed to pull in $26.6 million in venture capital from OpenView, Matrix and other VCs and angels.
Tiger Global and a16z-backed productivity company ClickUp has acquired the calendar app Hypercal to boost its platform offering, TechCrunch has learned.
As part of the acquisition, the app’s founder Ricardo Clerigo is also joining ClickUp as Head of Calendar.
Hypercal also had a paid tier costing $10 per month for unlimited calendar and task integrations.
We’ve already eliminated the need for many apps by building docs, whiteboards, dashboards, tasks, and AI natively into our platform.
The calendar apps space has been busy in the last few months.
When HPE announced its intention to acquire Juniper Networks for $14 billion in cold, hard cash earlier this month, it was a bit of a shock.
In fact, in a blog post announcing the deal, Juniper CEO Rami Rahim suggested it was more about AI.
“This combination with HPE is expected to enable us to deliver more comprehensive, more competitive, truly end-to-end experience-first AI-native solutions,” he wrote.
Assuming regulators don’t object — not exactly a given these days — this deal could close later this year or early next.
Since the deal was announced on January 12, HPE investors seem lukewarm about it; that is, if the stock price is any indication of their sentiment.
Allianz Direct, a digital-first German subsidiary of the insurance giant, has acquired the French home insurance business of ailing insurtech Luko for €4.3 million (around $4.65 million).
This was both expected and unexpected: The two companies were hoping to get the green light on a deal in November.
After all, Luko ambitioned to become a European insurtech unicorn on its own, and maybe it’s now paying the price for it.
But there’s also relief for some in knowing that the company won’t be sold for parts after all — and the business unit that will live on is arguably what it should have stuck to all along.
Along the way, things became more complicated and debt mounted as it expanded in other markets and made acquisitions: German startup Coya and fellow French startup Unkle, both in 2022.
Three months after completing its $68.7 billion acquisition of gaming company Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is laying off 1,900 employees in its gaming divisions.
This amounts to about 8.6% of 22,000 Microsoft employees in gaming.
Blizzard president Mike Ybarra also announced he will step down, now that the acquisition is finalized.
According to game developer and consultant Rami Ismail, about 5,600 gaming employees have been laid off so far in 2024.
Thats more than half of all gaming layoffs from 2023.
ZestMoney, the Goldman Sachs-backed Indian fintech startup once valued at $450 million, has sold itself to financial services firm DMI Group, the two said late Wednesday, in a fire sale that caps 12 tumultuous months for the once-hot new age lender.
In a statement, DMI Group said the deal grants it with the exclusive right to the use of all Zest brands and make the NBFC arm DMI Finance a preferred lender on the Zest platform.
“DMI will also bring its customer base, balance-sheet strength and significant risk-management experience to drive growth across Zest’s online and offline merchant network,” DMI said in a statement.
ZestMoney founders quit the startup in May last year after acquisition talks with fintech giant PhonePe didn’t materialize.
We firmly believe that this acquisition will be an important step in our journey to provide digital financial inclusion at scale across India.”
Look at your startup’s CAC to decide if you should launch another productUntil recently, it was widely accepted that startups, constrained by limited resources, should primarily concentrate on a single product.
Investing in customer acquisition is justified when the net present value of the profits from the acquisition exceeds the customer’s customer acquisition cost (CAC).
Customer acquisition and product development stand out as a startup’s most important investments.
Customer acquisition and product development stand out as a startup’s most important investments.
With the rise in CAC, the relative value of customer acquisition remains the same compared to new product development.
“Samooha customers will benefit from the many built-in platform capabilities of Snowflake, as well as the powerful network of Snowflake data cloud.
Snowflake customers, meanwhile, will be able to more quickly and easily build, connect and use data clean rooms where their data already lives, directly in Snowflake.”Los Altos-based Samooha, which Sivaramakrishnan and Bhowmick co-founded in 2022, competes in an increasingly crowded data clean room field.
AWS has a data clean room product, as do startups like Herb.
A native app on Snowflake, Samooha provides a no-code UI customers can use to access and build clean room apps.
According to Gartner, 80% of advertisers spending more than $1 billion a year on media will have used data clean rooms for applications such as analytics, measuring campaign results and easing data integration by the end of the year.
Adobe’s $20 billion mega-bid to buy rival Figma is now officially dead, after the companies said today that regulatory pushback in Europe had caused them to put an end to the acquisition plans.
First announced in September last year, the deal was always going to attract regulatory scrutiny due to the size of the transaction and the fact that it took one of Adobe’s major rivals out of the picture.
Irrespective of that outcome, the two companies were already facing significant headwinds in Europe.
As a result of all this, Adobe will now have to pay Figma a termination fee of $1 billion, which was contractually payable in the event of the transaction failing to attain regulatory clearance — or if it failed to close within 18 months of the acquisition’s announcement last September.
That 18-month stipulation hadn’t yet been reached, and no regulatory body had actually announced their final findings — but Adobe and Figma clearly saw no way through this, and with the DoJ also weighing up regulatory action, in the end it just made more sense to pull the plug on the deal entirely.
ServiceNow announced this morning that it was acquiring Czech Republic task mining company UltimateSuite, giving the company a new way to capture and understand how work flows through a business.
Task mining is a part of process mining, a growing worldwide market that helps companies understand how work flows through an organization, looking for bottlenecks in order to increase efficiency.
UltimateSuite is substantially smaller, having raised less than $1 million, but it gives ServiceNow another tool in its task mining arsenal, says Eduardo Chiocconi, VP and GM for process mining at ServiceNow.
Prior to acquisition of UltimateSuite, the company had the ability to drill down into a workflow, but lacked the ability to get down to the user task level.
And that’s exactly what UltimateSuite task mining is coming in to help us with,” Chiocconi told TechCrunch.
