massachusetts
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Solo.io raises $11M to help enterprises adopt cloud-native technologies
Solo.io, a Cambridge, Mass-based startup that helps enterprises adopt cloud-native technologies, is coming out of stealth mode today and announcing both its Series A funding round and the launch of its Gloo Enterprise API gateway.
Redpoint Ventures led the $11 million Series A round, with participation from seed investor True Ventures . Like most companies at the Series A state, Solo.io plans to use the money to invest in the product development of its enterprise and open-source tools, as well as to grow its sales and marketing teams.
Solo.io offers a number of open-source tools, like the Gloo function gateway, the Sqoop GraphQL server and the SuperGloo (see a theme here?) service mesh orchestration platform. In addition, the team has also, among others, open-sourced its Kubernetes debugger, a tool for building and running unikernels.
Its first commercial offering, though, is an enterprise version of the Gloo function gateway. Built on top of the Envoy proxy, Gloo can handle the routing necessary to connect incoming API requests to microservices, serverless applications (on the likes of AWS Lambda) and traditional monolithic applications behind the proxy. Gloo handles the load balancing and other functions necessary to aggregate the incoming API requests and route them to their destinations.
“Costumers who use Gloo to connect between microservices and serverless found that invocation of [AWS] Lambda is 350ms faster than the AWS API Gateway,” Idit Levine, the founder and CEO of Solo.io, told me. “Gloo also offers them direct money saving, since AWS bills per invocation. In general, Gloo offers money saving because it allows our clients to use the less expensive technologies — like their legacy apps, and sometimes containers — whenever they can, and limit the use of more expensive stuff to whenever it’s necessary.”
The enterprise version adds features like audit controls, single sign-on and more advanced security tools to the platform.
In addition to broadening its customer base, the company plans to invest heavily into its customer success and support teams, as well as its evangelism and education efforts, Levine tells me.
“Helping enterprises easily adopt innovative technologies like microservices, serverless and service mesh is our goal at Solo.io,” Levine in today’s announcement. “Melding different technologies into one coherent environment, by supplying a suite of tools to route, debug, manage, monitor and secure applications, lets organizations focus on their software without worrying about the complexity of the underlying environment.”
Powered by WPeMatico
uBiome is jumping into therapeutics with a healthy $83 million in Series C financing
23andMe, IBM and now uBiome is the next tech company to jump into the lucrative multi-billion dollar drug discovery market.
The company started out with a consumer gut health test to check whether your intestines carry the right kind of bacteria for healthy digestion but has since expanded to include over 250,000 samples for everything from the microbes on your skin to vaginal health — the largest data set in the world for these types of samples, according to the company.
Founder Jessica Richman now says there’s a wider opportunity to use this data to create value in therapeutics.
To support its new drug discovery efforts, the San Francisco-based startup will be moving its therapeutics unit into new Cambridge, Massachusetts headquarters and appointing former Novartis CEO Joseph Jimenez to the board of directors as well.
The company has a healthy pile of cash to help build out that new HQ, too, with a fresh $83 million Series C, lead by OS Fund and in participation with 8VC, Y Combinator, Dentsu Ventures and others.
The drug discovery market is slated to be worth nearly $86 billion by 2022, according to BCC Research numbers. New technologies — those that solve logistics issues and shorten the time between research and getting a drug to market in particular — are driving the growth and that’s where uBiome thinks it can get into the game.
“This financing allows us to expand our product portfolio, increase our focus on patent assets and further raise our clinical profile, especially as we begin to focus on commercialization of drug discovery and development of our patent assets,” Richman said.
Though its unclear at this time which drug maker the company might partner up with, Richman did say there would be plenty to announce later on that front.
So far, the company has published over 30 peer-reviewed papers on microbiome research, has entered into research partnerships with the likes of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and leading research institutions such as Harvard, MIT and Stanford and has previously raised $22 million in funding. The additional VC cash puts the total amount raised to $105 million to date.
Powered by WPeMatico
Apple Settles Court Case With Battery Maker A123 Systems
Apple has settled a court case with A123 Systems (via BBC), a battery company based in Massachusetts from which Apple hired some senior employees. A123 had filed a claim accusing Apple of poaching its engineers, particularly those leading key projects at the battery firm. The basis of the suit was that A123 claimed Apple was hiring the employees in order to build its own “large-scale… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico
Up Close With Coinbase Exchange
It’s been a few days since Coinbase launched its official Exchange, a dashboard for active bitcoin traders that lets you buy and sell based on real-time pricing. I thought I’d sit down and put it through its paces and see just how usable this tool was for the average BTC fan, as well as folks who might want to add BTC to their trading regimen. Read More
Powered by WPeMatico