Sometimes, surprises are lurking in everyday data.
Take a category of consumers that Doug Rubin’s startup, Northwind Climate, calls “climate doers.” They’re concerned about climate change and tend to prioritize climate-friendly purchases, the sort of identifiers who might be stereotypically associated with things like buying organic foods or prioritizing local businesses.
“Turns out that the climate doers category actually are the consumers who most frequent fast-food restaurants,” Rubin told TechCrunch. What’s more, some 30% of climate doers are Republicans, he added.
Northwind Climate evolved from Rubin’s work in the political world, where surveys are vital to understanding shifts in public sentiment and identifying likely voters. The startup has raised a $1.05 million pre-seed round, it exclusively told TechCrunch, with participation from angel investors, including Tom Steyer, former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, and Alexander Hoffmann of Susty Ventures.
Rather than divide people into demographic buckets that might segment along political, generational, or regional lines, Northwind Climate analyzes survey responses for behavioral clues that can be used to classify consumers.
In addition to climate doers, who comprise about 15% of all U.S. consumers, Northwind Climate has identified four other behavioral groups, ranging from “climate distressed,” or people who are slightly less concerned about climate change and aren’t as financially secure as the climate doers, to the climate deniers, who tend to be retirees who think the media is exaggerating the problem.
But, Rubin adds, “even in that [climate deniers] bucket, there are messages and ways that work with them.”
Take some analysis Northwind did on electric vehicles. For climate doers and “climate distressed,” two categories of consumers who are most likely to buy an EV, the startup suggests that automakers frame the cars as matter of choice. “We’re providing choices for those who care about reducing pollution, saving money on gas, and helping address climate change,” reads one of Northwind’s suggested pitches.
But for climate doubters and deniers, who are less likely to buy one, the focus of the pitch shifts from choice to freedom: “Americans should have the freedom to drive what they want. We want to make electric vehicles clean, affordable, and practical for the millions of Americans who want one.”
The startup has built a database that consists of 20,000 survey respondents across eight surveys, and Rubin says it’s growing by 2,500 respondents per month. Every three months, Northwind also runs an industry-specific survey to capture deeper insights for different customers.
Companies that subscribe to the service, which costs $10,000 per quarter or $40,000 per year for a typical customer, can add up to four of their own questions every quarter, which Rubin said is less than what they’d shell out for one annual survey.
Within the platform, customers get access to the data Northwind has collected, questions it has asked, and some basic analyses like cross tabulations. The startup is building a chatbot to allow users to ask for more specific analyses using plain language queries.
Concerned consumers might cast a wary eye on such a platform, worried that it might help companies greenwash their businesses. But Rubin isn’t concerned, saying surveys have shown that consumers are pretty savvy. “Our data shows there is a clear risk to brands and their reputations from making claims that are exaggerated or otherwise untrue,” Rubin said.
Rubin said that Northwind is also developing what he calls a virtual focus group. It’s essentially an AI model, trained on survey responses, that can analyze a company’s marketing materials like TV spots or social media ads and provide feedback, just like a human focus group would. The startup hopes to have it available in the next four to five months, Rubin said, though it will use new data to continually refine the model.
Rubin is convinced that companies have been missing opportunities to connect with climate-conscious consumers. “If you look at the data and where consumers are — and it’s across the board, it’s not just Democrats or Independents — they really want this, and they will reward companies who are willing to be smart about it,” he said.
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API testing firm APIsec has confirmed it secured an exposed internal database containing customer data, which was connected to the internet for several days without a password.
The exposed APIsec database stored records dating back to 2018, including names and email addresses of its customers’ employees and users, as well as details about the security posture of APIsec’s corporate customers.
Much of the data was generated by APIsec as it monitors its customers’ APIs for security weaknesses, according to UpGuard, the security research firm that found the database.
UpGuard found the leaked data on March 5 and notified APIsec the same day. APIsec secured the database soon after.
APIsec, which claims to have worked with Fortune 500 companies, bills itself as a company that tests APIs for its various customers. APIs allow two things or more on the internet to communicate with each other, such as a company’s back-end systems with users accessing its app and website. Insecure APIs can be exploited to siphon sensitive data from a company’s systems.
In a now-published report, which was shared with TechCrunch prior to its release, UpGuard said the exposed data included information about attack surfaces of APIsec’s customers, such as details about whether multi-factor authentication was enabled on a customer’s account. UpGuard said this information could provide useful technical intelligence to a malicious adversary.
When reached for comment by TechCrunch, APIsec founder Faizel Lakhani initially downplayed the security lapse, saying that the database contained “test data” that APIsec uses to test and debug its product. Lakhani added that the database was “not our production database” and “no customer data was in the database.” Lakhani confirmed that the exposure was due to “human mistake,” and not a malicious incident.
“We quickly closed public access. The data in the database is not usable,” said Lakhani.
But UpGuard said it found evidence of information in the database relating to real-world corporate customers of APIsec, including the results of scans from its customers’ API endpoints for security issues.
The data also included some personal information of its customers’ employees and users, including names and email addresses, UpGuard said.
Lakhani backtracked when TechCrunch provided the company with evidence of leaked customer data. In a later email, the founder said the company completed an investigation on the day of UpGuard’s report and “went back and redid the investigation again this week.”
Lakhani said the company subsequently notified customers whose personal information was in the database that was publicly accessible. Lakhani would not provide TechCrunch, when asked, a copy of the data breach notice that the company allegedly sent to customers.
Lakhani declined to comment further when asked if the company plans to notify state attorneys general as required by data breach notification laws.
UpGuard also found a set of private keys for AWS and credentials for a Slack account and GitHub account in the dataset, but the researchers could not determine if the credentials were active, as using the credentials without permission would be unlawful. APIsec said the keys belonged to a former employee who left the company two years ago and were disabled upon their departure. It’s not clear why the AWS keys were left in the database.
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Seattle-based Temporal has made its name over the last several years in the world of microservices — specifically providing a platform to orchestrate the messy business of building and operating integrations and updates across disparate services and apps in the cloud. But the AI boom has come at the company fast. Now, Temporal has raised a growth round of $146 million to build what it believes the next chapter will be in its space: AI, and specifically building microservices to support newer areas like agentic AI.
A chunk of the investment will be going into R&D. At the end of 2024, the company launched a new feature called Nexus in its Temporal Cloud platform to improve security, fault isolation and modularity, and it says it’s going to continue developing that, alongside public cloud availability for Azure, enabling more cross-cloud work, and “R&D for AI use cases.” Temporal will also be using some of the funds to invest in sales and marketing.
Tiger Global is leading the round, with participation from previous backers that include Index Ventures (who led the Series B) and Sequoia Capital (who led the Series A ). With this Series C, Temporal has now raised $350 million.
The round is sizeable, but the devil is in the details. TechCrunch understands that the company’s valuation with this round is $1.72 billion post-money — “a little bit up — a very little bit,” in the words of CEO and co-founder Samar Abbas said.
The company’s previous funding — a $75 million Series B extension announced February 2023 — was made at a flat valuation of $1.5 billion. And ahead of that, there was a report in Prime Unicorn Index that the valuation had dipped as low as $880 million, a figure the company has not confirmed.
Abbas and his co-founder Maxim Fateev (CTO) started Temporal after the pair worked together at Uber, where they jointly developed Cadence, Uber’s open source orchestration engine designed to route requests and mediate interactions between different microservices.
Knowing that the need for better microservices management extended to many organizations, the pair saw an opportunity to strike out on their own, and Temporal was born.
Temporal’s microservices orchestration platform predates the hype around AI. Customers have been using it since 2019 to help manage functions and actions that bring together data from numerous, disparate apps — payment processing, customer onboarding, order management, ID verification, and infrastructure management among them.
More recently, though, services built on AI, and specifically to fill out the promise of agentic AI — which bring together language models to work with and across data from a number of other services in AI ‘agents’ tailored for specific use cases — have emerged as a prime use case for microservices.
The company’s current client list speaks not only to which companies are using Temporal’s platform to manage any microservice, legacy or otherwise, but also which ones are already using it for AI specifically. The list includes Box, Instacart, Snap and Stripe, as well as Nvidia.
Nvidia is a notable name in that big-name list. A year ago, the GPU giant announced a microservices software platform called NIM to streamline the deployment of AI models (both custom and pre-trained) in production environments. One of the latest developments in that microservices platform has included helping its customers develop AI agents to address trust and safety.
Temporal is still growing, albeit not at the pace it used to in the past. The company told TechCrunch that revenues are up 4.4x in the past 18 months; that’s compared to more than 20x growth the company claimed in the 12 months to Feburary 2023. Meanwhile, the company says that its Temporal.io open source platform now has 183,000 active users; and its enterprise managed service Temporal Cloud now claims 2,500 customers.
There’s no debate that “durable execution,” the category that Abbas and Fateev pioneered, is less buzzy than Ghibli-style AI image generators. But the need to execute long workflows reliably is real, and other teams have entered the field since then, such as workflows-as-code startup Restate and Orkes.
Abbas has been Temporal’s CEO since he and Fateev swapped their roles in April of last year. With “zero reports,” Fateev is now in charge of technology and setting the long term vision. “I am the one who is figuring out what steps we need to take to deliver on that mission,” Abbas said.
These steps include growing headcount from some 250 employees to over 300 in the coming months, as well as “doing a big push in EMEA and [Asia-Pacific & Japan],” he said.
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