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Ditto raises $1.5 million to help teams collaborate on copy
Even as remote software uptake has boomed during the pandemic, certain workflows have gotten prioritized for specialized toolsets while other team members have been left piecemealing their productivity. Employees designing the copy that directs users and encapsulates company messaging have been particularly forgotten at times, say the founders of Ditto, a young startup building software focused on finding a “single source of truth” for copy.
The startup was in Y Combinator’s winter 2020 batch (we selected it as one of our favorites from the class); now Ditto’s founders tell TechCrunch the team has raised a $1.5 million seed round from investors including Greycroft, Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Decent Capital, Twenty Two VC, Holly Liu and Scott Tong, among others.
While copy workflows are often very messy when it comes to design and implementation, even the most-organized teams are often left scouring through meandering email threads, screenshot dumps and slack DMs with disparate teams. The founders behind Ditto hope that their software can give copy teams the home they deserve to keep everything organized and synced across projects and applications, ensuring that language is actually finalized and ready to ship when the time comes.
The company’s founders Jessica Ouyang and Jolena Ma were Stanford roommates who saw a lingering opportunity to build a toolset that prioritized copy as its own vertical.
“It’s so easy to couple text with where it lives, like you may think of it as part of the design so a lot of writers have to manage it inside toolsets for design or you may already think of it as part of development so writers end up having to go into the codebase and figure out how to code or manage JSON even though they’re content designers,” Ouyang tells TechCrunch.
Out of the gate, Ditto has been built for Figma, meaning users can easily export text blocks from designs in the app and rework them inside the Ditto web app, pushing updates without having to dig through the designs themselves. The founders say they are currently working on building out integrations for Sketch and Adobe XD as well. Inside the Ditto web app users can access change logs and update the status of particular pieces of text inside a project so that approvals are always certain.
“We find there’s a lot more opportunity to integrate into all of the places where copy is being worked on,” Ma tells us. “We have a lot more we’re hoping to do with our developer integrations and just integrating to all of those places where copy lives, places like A/B testing, internationalization, localization and other workflows.”
Copy development has plenty of stakeholders and the team is looking to experiment with pricing tiers that address that. For now they split up users into editors and commenters paying $15 and $10 monthly (priced annually), respectively, on the startup’s Teams plan. Ditto has a free tier for teams of two, as well as pricing designed for larger enterprise clients.
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Fylamynt raises $6.5M for its cloud workflow automation platform
Fylamynt, a new service that helps businesses automate their cloud workflows, today announced both the official launch of its platform as well as a $6.5 million seed round. The funding round was led by Google’s AI-focused Gradient Ventures fund. Mango Capital and Point72 Ventures also participated.
At first glance, the idea behind Fylamynt may sound familiar. Workflow automation has become a pretty competitive space, after all, and the service helps developers connect their various cloud tools to create repeatable workflows. We’re not talking about your standard IFTTT- or Zapier -like integrations between SaaS products, though. The focus of Fylamynt is squarely on building infrastructure workflows. While that may sound familiar, too, with tools like Ansible and Terraform automating a lot of that already, Fylamynt sits on top of those and integrates with them.
Image Credits: Fylamynt
“Some time ago, we used to do Bash and scripting — and then [ … ] came Chef and Puppet in 2006, 2007. SaltStack, as well. Then Terraform and Ansible,” Fylamynt co-founder and CEO Pradeep Padala told me. “They have all done an extremely good job of making it easier to simplify infrastructure operations so you don’t have to write low-level code. You can write a slightly higher-level language. We are not replacing that. What we are doing is connecting that code.”
So if you have a Terraform template, an Ansible playbook and maybe a Python script, you can now use Fylamynt to connect those. In the end, Fylamynt becomes the orchestration engine to run all of your infrastructure code — and then allows you to connect all of that to the likes of DataDog, Splunk, PagerDuty Slack and ServiceNow.
Image Credits: Fylamynt
The service currently connects to Terraform, Ansible, Datadog, Jira, Slack, Instance, CloudWatch, CloudFormation and your Kubernetes clusters. The company notes that some of the standard use cases for its service are automated remediation, governance and compliance, as well as cost and performance management.
The company is already working with a number of design partners, including Snowflake.
Fylamynt CEO Padala has quite a bit of experience in the infrastructure space. He co-founded ContainerX, an early container-management platform, which later sold to Cisco. Before starting ContainerX, he was at VMWare and DOCOMO Labs. His co-founders, VP of Engineering Xiaoyun Zhu and CTO David Lee, also have deep expertise in building out cloud infrastructure and operating it.
“If you look at any company — any company building a product — let’s say a SaaS product, and they want to run their operations, infrastructure operations very efficiently,” Padala said. “But there are always challenges. You need a lot of people, it takes time. So what is the bottleneck? If you ask that question and dig deeper, you’ll find that there is one bottleneck for automation: that’s code. Someone has to write code to automate. Everything revolves around that.”
Fylamynt aims to take the effort out of that by allowing developers to either write Python and JSON to automate their workflows (think “infrastructure as code” but for workflows) or to use Fylamynt’s visual no-code drag-and-drop tool. As Padala noted, this gives developers a lot of flexibility in how they want to use the service. If you never want to see the Fylamynt UI, you can go about your merry coding ways, but chances are the UI will allow you to get everything done as well.
One area the team is currently focusing on — and will use the new funding for — is building out its analytics capabilities that can help developers debug their workflows. The service already provides log and audit trails, but the plan is to expand its AI capabilities to also recommend the right workflows based on the alerts you are getting.
“The eventual goal is to help people automate any service and connect any code. That’s the holy grail. And AI is an enabler in that,” Padala said.
Gradient Ventures partner Muzzammil “MZ” Zaveri echoed this. “Fylamynt is at the intersection of applied AI and workflow automation,” he said. “We’re excited to support the Fylamynt team in this uniquely positioned product with a deep bench of integrations and a nonprescriptive builder approach. The vision of automating every part of a cloud workflow is just the beginning.”
The team, which now includes about 20 employees, plans to use the new round of funding, which closed in September, to focus on its R&D, build out its product and expand its go-to-market team. On the product side, that specifically means building more connectors.
The company offers both a free plan as well as enterprise pricing and its platform is now generally available.
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MongoDB gets a data lake, new security features and more
MongoDB is hosting its developer conference today and, unsurprisingly, the company has quite a few announcements to make. Some are straightforward, like the launch of MongoDB 4.2 with some important new security features, while others, like the launch of the company’s Atlas Data Lake, point the company beyond its core database product.
“Our new offerings radically expand the ways developers can use MongoDB to better work with data,” said Dev Ittycheria, the CEO and president of MongoDB. “We strive to help developers be more productive and remove infrastructure headaches — with additional features along with adjunct capabilities like full-text search and data lake. IDC predicts that by 2025 global data will reach 175 Zettabytes and 49% of it will reside in the public cloud. It’s our mission to give developers better ways to work with data wherever it resides, including in public and private clouds.”
The highlight of today’s set of announcements is probably the launch of MongoDB Atlas Data Lake. Atlas Data Lake allows users to query data, using the MongoDB Query Language, on AWS S3, no matter their format, including JSON, BSON, CSV, TSV, Parquet and Avro. To get started, users only need to point the service at their existing S3 buckets. They don’t have to manage servers or other infrastructure. Support for Data Lake on Google Cloud Storage and Azure Storage is in the works and will launch in the future.
Also new is Full-Text Search, which gives users access to advanced text search features based on the open-source Apache Lucene 8.
In addition, MongoDB is also now starting to bring together Realm, the mobile database product it acquired earlier this year, and the rest of its product lineup. Using the Realm brand, Mongo is merging its serverless platform, MongoDB Stitch, and Realm’s mobile database and synchronization platform. Realm’s synchronization protocol will now connect to MongoDB Atlas’ cloud database, while Realm Sync will allow developers to bring this data to their applications.
“By combining Realm’s wildly popular mobile database and synchronization platform with the strengths of Stitch, we will eliminate a lot of work for developers by making it natural and easy to work with data at every layer of the stack, and to seamlessly move data between devices at the edge to the core backend,” explained Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of MongoDB.
As for the latest release of MongoDB, the highlight of the release is a set of new security features. With this release, Mongo is implementing client-side Field Level Encryption. Traditionally, database security has always relied on server-side trust. This typically leaves the data accessible to administrators, even if they don’t have client access. If an attacker breaches the server, that’s almost automatically a catastrophic event.
With this new security model, Mongo is shifting access to the client and to the local drivers. It provides multiple encryption options; for developers to make use of this, they will use a new “encrypt” JSON scheme attribute.
This ensures that all application code can generally run unmodified, and even the admins won’t get access to the database or its logs and backups unless they get client access rights themselves. Because the logic resides in the drivers, the encryption is also handled totally separate from the actual database.
Other new features in MongoDB 4.2 include support for distributed transactions and the ability to manage MongoDB deployments from a single Kubernetes control plane.
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How to handle dark data compliance risk at your company
Lisa Hawke is VP of Security and Compliance at Everlaw, and Vice Chair of Women in Security and Privacy.
Slack and other consumer-grade productivity tools have been taking off in workplaces large and small — and data governance hasn’t caught up.
Whether it’s litigation, compliance with regulations like GDPR or concerns about data breaches, legal teams need to account for new types of employee communication. And that’s hard when work is happening across the latest messaging apps and SaaS products, which make data searchability and accessibility more complex.
Here’s a quick look at the problem, followed by our suggestions for best practices at your company.
Problems
The increasing frequency of reported data breaches and expanding jurisdiction of new privacy laws are prompting conversations about dark data and risks at companies of all sizes, even small startups. Data risk discussions necessarily include the risk of a data breach, as well as preservation of data. Just two weeks ago it was reported that Jared Kushner used WhatsApp for official communications and screenshots of those messages for preservation, which commentators say complies with record keeping laws but raises questions about potential admissibility as evidence.
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MongoLab Changes Its Name To mLab As It looks Beyond Database Management
MongoLab has long been the de facto service for deploying and managing MongoDB databases, but now that the company has cornered this market, it’s looking to expand into new areas. Before launching any new products, though, the company decided to change its name from MongoLab to mLab. MongoLab/mLab CEO and co-founder Will Shulman tells me that he always saw MongoLab as the first part of… Read More
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