Author: Techtime

Vontier acquired the Israeli Driivz

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Vontier, a U.S-based corporation focused on smart transportation and mobility solutions, aquired the israeli Driivz, a provider an EV charging management software platform for EV charging operations, energy management, advanced billing capabilities and driver self-service tool.  Pursuant to the transaction, Driivz will continue to be run as an independent company , a wholly owned subsidiary of Vontier and managed by founder and CEO Doron Frenkel. Since its establishment in 2013, Drives has raised about $ 33 million from industrial entities, including the energy company Centrica and Volvo. The relationships with Vontier started early in 2020 with the first investment of the corporation in Driivz.

Mark Morelli, President and CEO of Vontier say the acquisition is intended to accelerate the company’s portfolio diversification in the EV market. “Vontier believes the next decade could bring the most significant changes to global mobility since the invention of the automobile. The acquisition is part of our strategic goal to be a complete solution provider for the smart EV market, and therefore we commit that during the five next years we will invest more than $500 million in crafting these solutions”.

According to Morelli, Driivz Company provides a hardware agnostic, cutting edge software technology in the world of EVCI (Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure). Driivz’s platform includes tools for management of the charging grids’ operational system, billing, drivers’ interfaces, EV fleet management and charging in commercial and condos. Among the prominent clients of the company are Centrica, EVgo, Volvo Group and eMobility Power. The platform currently serves about 800,000 users in 20 countries. It manages about 100,000 charging stations that are based on a variety of 500 hardware systems. The company employs 70 employees in Israel, Europe and the USA and is going to add 30 more employees by the end of the year.

Hunters Secures $68 Million in Series C Funding for a Security Operations Platform

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Hunters announced a $68 million Series C round led by growth equity firm Stripes, with participation from new investors DTCP, Cisco Investments and Databricks, and existing investors YL Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Microsoft’s venture fund M12, U.S. Venture Partners, Blumberg Capital and Snowflake Ventures. The new funding brings the total investment in Hunters to $118 million.

Hunters’ SOC Platform empowers security teams to automatically identify and respond to incidents that matter across the entire attack surface. Global enterprises, including leading Fortune 500 companies in financial services, media, retail and manufacturing choose Hunters as their main SOC platform, replacing their SIEM.

Hunters’ ability to ingest and normalize data from all security data sources at a predictable cost is key to seeing and stopping attacks. Its built-in detection engineering, data correlation and automatic investigation helps security teams overcome volume, complexity and false positives.

“The SIEM market is worth $4.3 billion and is ripe for disruption since it drives limited security outcomes for its customers,” said Uri May, CEO and co-founder of Hunters. “Players in this category focus on data ingestion and leave customers to build their own detection engineering and investigation capabilities or have significant gaps in scale and pricing models. Hunters was purpose built to help the overly stressed security teams mitigate real security incidents faster and more effectively.”

“After meeting the Hunters team and hearing customers rave about the product, we have strong conviction that they are poised to conquer one of the biggest markets in security as customers are seeking a modern solution that makes life easier for security teams,” said Ken Fox, founder and partner at Stripes and board member at Hunters.

“2021 was a huge year for Hunters as the company grew ARR by more than 4x, and we are excited for them to build on this momentum in the coming year.”

“This new round of funding, coming only a few months after our previous round, underscores the opportunity for Hunters to become a market leader and the centerpiece of Security Operations. Our strategic investors Cisco Investments, Snowflake, Databricks and Okta are a force-multiplier for our outreach to world’s largest organizations. The funding will be used to further innovate in our platform and services, to strengthen our sales and partnerships across North America and EMEA and to help us continue to invest in exceptional talent that fits our company culture, which is driving our company to new frontiers and to conquering the market,” May said, noting that Hunters’ growing team has doubled in size over the past year.

[Pictured above: Humters’ founders. Credit founders: Yanai Yechiel]

Talon Extends Funding to $43M

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Talon Cyber Security, the leader in browser-based cybersecurity solutions, today announced a total funding of $43M, adding SAFE investments of $17M prior to an upcoming A-Round of funding.

Sorenson Ventures and Evolution Equity Partners are joining earlier Talon’s investors, venture capital firms Lightspeed and Team8, and cybersecurity leaders such as George Kurtz, CEO of CrowdStrike, Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael, Co-founders of Armis, Michael Shaulov, Co-founder & CEO of Fireblocks, Avi Shua, Co-founder & CEO of Orca Security and Assaf Rappaport, Co-founder & CEO of Wiz.

In October, Talon launched the first secure browser for enterprises, TalonWork, which enables enterprise companies to effectively manage a hybrid workforce without having to compromise security, employee experience or privacy. In a few clicks, this secure bubble-like workspace can be created on any device, together with its built-in enterprise-grade security that provides advanced data leakage protection and high granularity of control into all web in-app activities.

“We are thrilled to be backing a tremendous team at Talon led by Ofer Ben Noon,” said Richard Seewald, Founder and Managing Partner at Evolution. “Enterprises have shifted rapidly to distributed work models and, in the process, have complicated the security stack and altered the cost benefit analysis of legacy solutions. Talon delivers a solution that ameliorates this and enables enterprises to operate a hybrid workforce securely and effectively.”

This additional funding is focused on bringing onboard top cybersecurity investors that will support Talon’s accelerated commercialization process, and further expanding the development efforts to support high demand from the market. Talon’s growth is rapid, adding 45 people to the team in less than a year as well as recently opening offices in the US.

Talon is mitigating two of the biggest cybersecurity concerns for security leaders operating a modern distributed workforce; ransomware and insider threat. TalonWork combines advanced data isolation techniques such as screenshot prevention and clipboard restrictions with workspace security including policy enforcements and protection against browser vulnerabilities. TalonWork for Mac was recently released, expanding the coverage of Talon’s endpoint agnostic solution. It is already up and running in dozens of companies, including some of the largest employers in the US.

In today’s modern workforce, enterprises are required to protect their resources across different locations, devices, SaaS services and employment models (ie. external workers accessing company assets). Trying to secure and control this dynamic environment has led corporates to adapt existing security solutions, such as VDI/DaaS or VPN, resulting in a complex and costly security stack. Enabling secure distributed work is a business driver in industries such as retail, healthcare, tech, insurance and more.

“What excites me about Talon is that their technology simplifies enterprise-grade security, which we heard consistently from customers. Compared to other approaches, the time to value combined with the depth of the solution makes this a true game-changer,” said Ken Elefant, Partner at Sorenson Ventures.

Electreon and Ford will deploy first wireless EV charging road in the U.S

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Electreon Company won, together with Ford, the State of Michigan RFP to build a wireless Electric Road System (ERS) in Detroit. The project includes deploying a 1 mile wireless charging road and stationary wireless charging stations, in a central mobility innovation district supported by Ford Motor Co. and others. The road is planned to be operational by 2023, and it will be the first wireless EV charging road in the United States.

At the end of 2020 Ford revealed it plan of restoring Corktown district, Detroit’s oldest neighborhood, including the iconic Michigan Central Station, which also be renovated. The purpose of the project is to craft an ecosystem that demonstrates the future global mobility, and allow companies and start-up all over the world to demonstrate their technologies. For this reason, Electreon estimates that the Michigan project might be major component in introducing their technology to the American market, and in generating strategic joint ventures with leading companies in the market.

In addition to Ford Motor Co., other renowned American companies are taking part, to include Jacobs Engineering, which will lead the road design and will support project management and the energy company DTE, which will provide the connection of the new road to the power grid. Other companies in this project are KIEWIT Company, one of the largest infrastructure companies in the USA, which will support infrastructure works’ planning and execution and CleanTech ROUSH Company, specialized in converting industrial vehicles to alternative fuel vehicles, and will provide an electric truck for the project. Electreon will be the provider of its wireless electronic charging technology and will lead the planning, execution and operation of the project.

Electreon Wireless developed an electric road technology that charges the batteries of electric vehicles during their drive on the electrical section. It is based on the use of magnetic coils that are placed under the traffic lanes and charge the vehicles’ chargers wirelessly, using magnetic induction. This helps to reduce the weight of the electric vehicles, since a relatively small battery is needed. The system includes a management unit located on the sides of the traffic lanes of the electric road, and a receiver unit located in the vehicle’s undercarriage.

Datumate wins German Railroad Company’s tender

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Datumate Company, the developer of DatuBIM, won Deutsche Bahn AG, Germany’s national railroad company’s tender. DatuBIM is a cloud-based data analytics platform, providing capabilities for tracking work progress in infrastructure and construction projects. The railroad company awarded Datumate with a two-year term, with an optional additional two years, of using the Israeli company’s platform to track maintenance and construction works.

A chronic problem of the construction world is non-compliance with pre-determined schedules and budget. Datumate’s platform is intended to provide construction site’s work management optimization, using smart analytic based on big-data, machine learning, computerized vision and artificial intelligence technologies. In order to track work progress, Datumate’s platform creates a “digital twin” of the site based on drones’ aerial photos. The digital twin allows for successive comparison of the work progress at the field against original working plans – and to identify deviations. Based on the drones’ photos, the platform generates real-time data and engineering reports, something that traditionally takes weeks to prepare. In addition, the platform is capable of managing supply chain.

The platform is intended to be used in buildings’ construction sites, railroads laying, water, gas and oil infrastructure works and more. At the railroad field, Datumate’s platform addresses one of the major bottlenecks of delaying works. Laying railroads is a linear process – it’s impossible to go ahead with the next segment before current segment is ready. Completing a segment requires a supervisor’s inspection at the field, to approve the segment’s completeness. Since railroad operators usually lacks sufficient amount of supervisors, significant delays are common. Datumate’s platform provides the ability of remotely perform these supervision processes using aerial photos, shortening work schedules significantly. The company offers its platform service in SaaS method. Among its clients in Israel are Mekorot, Israel’s national water carrier and Netivei Israel – National Transport Infrastructure Company. 

Converting Streetlights into a Wireless Connectivity Grid

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Siklu and Signify announced a strategic partnership agreement to combine Siklu’s wireless connectivity technology with Signify’s streetlights portfolio, in order to convert streetlights into a wireless connectivity grid which can facilitate digital city services such as IoT, security and traffic monitoring, 4G/5G small cells, municipal Wi-Fi and broadband access.

This combination will result in an addition to the Signify’s BrightSites portfolio, which will be known as Broadband luminaires.  Equipped with Siklu’s MultiHaul 60 GHz point-to-multipoint wireless connectivity it will significantly reduce the dependency on fiber deployment and enable municipalities to create a wireless mesh network by replacing their luminaires with Broadband luminaires.

Both companies have collaborated over the past year in the development of the Broadband luminaire portfolio. Following successful market validation, the two companies have decided to expand the collaboration to jointly develop and commercialize solutions for street lighting infrastructure.

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands-based Signify is a European leader in lighting solutions with 2020 sales of EUR 6.5 billion, we have approximately 37,000 employees. Israel-based Siklu provides wide range of mmWave solutions in 60GHz (V-Band) and 70/80GHz (E-Band) in PtP, PtMP and Mesh configurations for end to end multi Gigabit wireless networks.

Mobileye’s EyeQ Ultra Targets Consumer AVs

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Mobileye’s new EyeQ Ultra system-on-chip (SoC) for autonomous driving is optimized for low cost vehicles . The company said that at only 176 TOPS, it can handle all the needs and applications of Level 4 (L4) autonomous driving without the power consumption and costs related to integrating multiple SoCs together. “Consumer AV is the end game for the industry,” said Prof. Amnon Shashua, Mobileye president and CEO. “By developing the entire self-driving solution – from hardware and software to mapping and service models – we can reach the performance-and-cost optimization that will make consumer AVs a reality.”

EyeQ Ultra packs the performance of 10 EyeQ5s in a single package. Leveraging 5 nanometer process technology, EyeQ Ultra can handle all the needs and applications of Level 4 (L4) autonomous driving without the power consumption and costs related to integrating multiple SoCs together. Like its EyeQ predecessors, EyeQ Ultra has been engineered in tandem with Mobileye software, enabling extreme power efficiency with zero performance sacrifices.

First silicon is expected at the end of 2023

EyeQ Ultra (photo above) utilizes an array of four classes of proprietary accelerators, each built for a specific task. They are paired with additional CPU cores, ISPs (Image Signal Processors) and GPUs, and is capable of processing input from two sensing subsystems – one camera-only system and the other radar and lidar combined – as well as the vehicle’s central computing system, the high-definition map and driving policy software.

First silicon for the EyeQ Ultra SoC is expected at the end of 2023, with full automotive-grade production in 2025.  The new AV solution is supported by some 200 petabytes dataset that helps the AV and computer vision system handle edge cases and thereby achieve the very high mean time between failure (MTBF) needed in self-driving vehicles.

The compute engine relies on 500,000 peak CPU cores at the AWS cloud to crunch 50 million datasets monthly – the equivalent to 100 petabytes being processed every month related to 500,000 hours of driving. “The sheer size of Mobileye’s dataset makes the company one of AWS’s largest customers by volume stored globally.”