Providing emergency and security services to employees, Base Operations raises $1M

Published October 28, 2019

In 2017, when a destructive earthquake struck Puebla, Mexico, sending shock waves to Mexico City and destroying buildings in the nation’s megalopolis and its surrounding suburbs, both public and private emergency services sprung into action.

For multinational corporations operating in the city it was a test of their internal support services, which were established to meet the “duty of care” requirements that multinationals have to their foreign employees. That’s a minimum threshold which companies must meet to ensure the safety of their employees.

After the Mexico City earthquake, at least one Fortune 500 insurance company found its services lacking. It took two weeks for the company to contact all of its employees and account for everyone.

So the company turned to a new Washington-based startup called Base Operations to see if they could do a better job.

Founded by a former security and risk management consultant, Cory Siskind, Base Operations uses a suite of hosted software services and mobile applications to provide security updates to corporate customers and their employees.

The insurance company tested Base Operations’ check-in feature to see how it would perform in a simulated natural disaster and Siskind said that Base Operations had identified the location of 80% of the company’s workforce in less than two days. More than half of the company’s employees checked in within the first 24 hours.

Base Operations offers a dashboard for corporate customers to monitor their employees’ locations and for staff traveling abroad, the company has an app that provides geo-tagged alerts on potential risks based on an individual’s location.

“This is a compliance situation for companies… They have to do it,” says Siskind. “We work with a company’s chief security officers and travel security. If you send people off into an emerging market with a risk PDF… It’s not dynamic information and it just sits in a report and nobody reads it.”

Companies with a sales or marketing team traveling around need to have some sort of tool to meet their compliance regulations and duty of care standards, says Siskind.

“We have a whole set of features that nudge towards safer behaviors so that you don’t end up getting mugged and so that you don’t end up in a situation that would be damaging to you,” she says.

Siskind recently raised $1 million for Base Operations from investors including Glasswing Ventures, Spiro Ventures, the Latin American early-stage investment firm Magma Partners and Good Growth Capital. Base Operations graduated from Techstars Impact Accelerator in 2018.

The money from the company’s most recent round will be used to expand the company’s sales and marketing efforts and continue its research and development.

So far, the company has three customers, including the undisclosed insurance provider, the energy company Enel and another, yet unnamed, corporation.

Base Operations provides its services in 15 cities, including: Mexico City, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago, San Juan (Puerto Rico) and San Jose (Costa Rica).

Tim Berners-Lee is on a mission to decentralize the web

Published October 9, 2018

“I’ve always believed the web is for everyone,” wrote Tim Berners-Lee, the well-known (and knighted) creator of the World Wide Web.

“The web has evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas,” he added. “Today, I believe we’ve reached a critical tipping point, and that powerful change for the better is possible — and necessary.”

Late last month, he published the above in a blog post announcing inrupt, a startup that would finally execute on his vision for the information superhighway he built nearly 30 years ago. Backed with an undisclosed amount of funding from Glasswing Ventures, the startup is emerging from stealth today with a plan to decentralize the web and restore power to the people rather than the companies that have exploited user trust for their own financial gains.

How to save your privacy from the Internet’s clutches

The timing couldn’t be better. The last year has been plagued with scandals, from Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm that used Facebook data to target voters for President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, to most recently a data-exposing hack on Google+ that relinquished the private information of hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting users.

Internet privacy and security are hot-button issues, to say the least. Users are rapidly losing trust in the companies that became institutions in the digital age — and they’re demanding solutions.

The race to restore control of data and the web at large has begun; inrupt is looking to the finish line.

The father of the World Wide Web

Berners-Lee is a British engineer and professor of computer science who famously gave away the web, which allows anyone with a computer to access the internet, for free.

For the past few years, he’s been quietly working on a project called Solid with a small team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Solid is an open-source project built on the existing web meant to give people control over their own data. Using Solid, users can keep their data wherever they choose, rather than being forced to store it on centralized servers.

The world we’ve created on the web [is] not the right one. — John Bruce, co-founder of inrupt.

Despite its populist ambitions, Solid had failed to garner the momentum necessary to truly disrupt the web.

Berners-Lee realized Solid needed commercial backing, a real business behind it to earn the interests of open-source developers who have to build decentralized apps on the Solid platform for it to be useful.

Thus, inrupt was born. Berners-Lee tapped John Bruce, a fellow British engineer and serial entrepreneur, to lead the company as its chief executive officer. Most recently, Bruce co-founded Resilient, an incident response platform later acquired by IBM. Before that, he was the chairman and CEO of Quickcomm and the vice president of Symantec.

Bruce resigned from IBM in April to focus on inrupt full time.

“The world we’ve created on the web [is] not the right one,” Bruce told TechCrunch. “Maybe, just maybe, we can put it in the place it was originally intended to be.”

“Inrupt’s mission, at this point, is to bring resources, process and skills to galvanize the open-source effort that Tim was leading out of MIT to help [Solid] become, truly, a force to be reckoned with,” he added. “We are at the stage of the new web that Tim was at when he first started the World Wide Web.”

Bruce says that since Berners-Lee announced inrupt in late September, open-source developers have poured into the Solid platform in droves.

Now, the pair are gearing up to raise another round of funding, hire, expand the Solid platform and work on a digital assistant tool called Charlie, which the company describes as a “decentralized version of Alexa.”

For Berners-Lee, inrupt is Act II of a much larger story. For Bruce, it’s the opportunity to work with a legend.

“This is a man that understands the web truly better than anyone else on the planet,” Bruce said. “And the wheels of innovation have really just started to turn.”