Icon News

Icon Ventures, a leading venture capital firm, today announced Icon VI, a $265 million fund. Icon VI is the firm’s largest fund to date, a testament to the venture firm’s experienced team, disciplined approach to investing and amazing track record of success. Of particular note with regard to Icon’s performance are several outstanding exits in the cybersecurity sector including FireEye, 41st Parameter, Palo Alto Networks, and Proofpoint in addition to other formidable exits such as Aster Data, ClairMail, MoPub, Teladoc and Yodle.

Today Bill.com, the largest U.S. business payments network, announced it has secured $100 million in financing with the goal of finally eliminating all paper from business payments. The round, led by JPMorgan Chase and Temasek, includes participation from the lead investors in each of the previous rounds and brings the total amount secured by the company to-date to over $200 million.

“The last chasm to cross in digital payments is business payments. Eighty percent of all payments made by U.S. businesses today involve paper checks, and it’s about time we change that,” said René Lacerte, CEO and founder of Bill.com. “Businesses deserve the same digital payment experience we have come to expect as consumers. With this capital, we will double down on our efforts to shift digital payments from early adoption to major, widespread market acceptance.”

Alation Inc., the collaborative data company, today announced deeper support for cataloging data lakes deployed both on-premises and in the cloud, including data lakes built with Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). The Alation Data Catalog is the first data catalog to enable data consumers with a complete view into the modern data pipeline. Alation 5.0 delivers governed data within the data lake with increased transparency, empowering self-service analytics users to achieve rapid return on investment through insight discovery.

“For many organizations, data lakes have become a standard, low-cost way to store data in the cloud and on-premises. But, this technological innovation managed to push the cost of organizing data from the data creator to the data consumer. Wading through data lake complexity makes successful self-service analytics nearly impossible,” said Venky Ganti, co-founder and chief technology officer, Alation. “With a data catalog, analysts can drive thoughtful insights from their data lake, immediately.”

Ever, maker of a consumer app for storing and organizing digital photos, is getting into the enterprise market. Today, the company announced Ever AI, a set of APIs that are supposed to provide a wide variety of visual intelligence capabilities to companies that need them.

Companies will be able to use Ever AI for tasks like face verification (showing that one face matches another face), face identification (scoring how likely it is that one face matches other labeled faces), age detection, gender detection, and emotion detection.

The capabilities are available both through a self-hosted API that lets organizations use Ever’s software on their own infrastructure and through a mobile SDK that can bring those models to a smartphone. The latter is important because it allows for fast performance without sending image data to an outside service — all of the processing takes place on-device.

Enhancing its digital banking platform for businesses with a new solution in collaboration with Bill.com

JPMorgan Chase announced today its plans to deliver a simpler and faster way for businesses to send and receive invoices and payments. This new automated payments solution will be part of Chase’s enhanced digital platform, and it will help clients save time and improve cash flow.

Expectations are high for data management platforms – customers expect more than just backup or disaster recovery from providers, and are now looking for advanced offerings that take an application-centric view to data management while providing innovative features such as masking. In turn, Delphix has revamped its data management platform with a focus on DevOps and ensuring that data is not just easy to manage, but also easy to access and distribute to relevant users, with its new data pod functionality being the enabler.

Delphix is perhaps best known for its data virtualization. In 2015 it acquired Axis Technology to add data-masking to its platform. The following year it appointed Chris Cook, former COO of performance monitoring and management vendor New Relic, as president and CEO, taking over for founding CEO Jedidiah Yueh in mid-2016. Yueh now serves as executive chairman. Delphix has approximately 350 employees across its offices, of which it has five in the US, including its headquarters in Redwood City, California; two in the UK; and one each in Tokyo and Frankfurt. Delphix’s last round of funding was in 2015, led by Fidelity Investments, which brought its total to $119.5m. Its customer count is slightly less than 300, and includes top brands like JPMorgan Chase, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Verizon, Blue Cross Blue Shield and StubHub.

In order to strengthen its collection of developer tools, IDERA, a provider of database, development and test management tools, will acquire Sencha. Sencha is a web application development platform, and with this acquisition, it will be integrated with Embarcadero, IDERA’s developer tools division.

Sencha’s Web Application Development Platform lets companies seamlessly design, develop and test cross-platform web applications for desktops, tablets, and smartphones. According to recent studies, Sencha’s enterprise solution was able to increase productivity for customers as compared to other web application frameworks.

Excerpted from PharmaVOICE’s July/August 2017 issue celebrating their PharmaVOICE 100.

After a long career in the pharmaceutical industry, Lance Scott realized there was another way to help life-sciences companies achieve their goals: developing technology that helps companies make smart decisions using reliable data insights.
Today, instead of searching for that signal within the data noise to help a brand, he is now providing the technology that connects data and delivers dynamic insights for life-sciences teams tasked with creating go-to market strategies for new brands.

Area 1 Security was named one of 20 rising stars as part of Forbes second annual Cloud 100 list – Check it out: https://buff.ly/2wJQPZv 

Alation Inc.,the collaborative data company, today announced its debut as a Leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Metadata Management Solutions. Alation premiered in the Leaders quadrant evaluated among 14 companies for both “ability to execute” and “completeness of vision.”

The complete report, including the quadrant graphic, is available at: http://go.alation.com/gartner-mq-2017-aug16