industryterm:venture capital arm

Keywords Studios reveals new venture capital arm
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-07-05-keywords-studios-reveals-new-venture-capital-arm

Keywords Ventures launches with initial £300,000 investment into GDPR compliance app developer

#Financial

#Google to create European venture capital arm (Murad Ahmed, FT.com, 10/07/14) ▻http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/cb19852a-0783-11e4-b1b0-00144feab7de.html

The move adds to the capital that has started to flood into the European tech scene. In June, Index Ventures launched a €400m fund dedicated to early-stage technology companies in #Europe. In 2013, the London offices of Silicon Valley group Accel Partners unveiled a similar fund worth $475m. Google Ventures said the initial investment of $100m could rise over time depending on its success.

#startup

Palantir : Unlocking Secrets, if Not Its Own Value - NYTimes.com
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/business/unlocking-secrets-if-not-its-own-value.html

Founded in 2004, in part with $2 million from the Central Intelligence Agency’s (#CIA) venture capital arm (#IN-Q-Tel), #Palantir makes software that has illuminated terror networks and figured out safe driving routes through a war-torn Baghdad. It has also tracked car thieves, helped in disaster recovery and traced salmonella outbreaks. United States attorneys deployed its technology against the hedge fund SAC Capital, which was also an early investor in the company.

(...) Its advisers include James Carville, the Democratic strategist; Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state; George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director; and Michael Ovitz, the former head of Disney Studios and Hollywood superagent.

(...) difficile de faire plus #silicon_army que ça, mais ce sont quand même des « idéalistes » qui veulent « sauver le monde » :

“When you are saving the world, fighting fraud and slave labor, you can do great things,” Mr. Karp said. Palantir does not charge for most humanitarian work, which is a source of internal pride. “What concerns me,” he said, “is working with commercial entities, and non-U.S. governments.”

(...) Palantir has worked to recover from its own ethical lapses, but Mr. Karp acknowledges that it cannot control the ethics of its customers.

(...) Palantir is not the first company dealing with big data that has been conflicted between ideals and commerce.

Palantir began in the mind of Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor and PayPal founder

sur l’affaire Anonymous :

In 2011, the world got a taste of what could go wrong with Palantir’s confluence of commerce and surveillance. Along with two Beltway intelligence firms, a Palantir employee had pitched a Washington law firm on ways that it could expose the workings of WikiLeaks, the group that publishes secret government and private-sector information. The pitch included the idea of using disinformation and cyberattacks.

The idea fizzled, but Anonymous, the loosely associated network of cyberactivists, posted both the pitch and emails indicating that Palantir also proposed creating misinformation about journalists, including Glenn Greenwald, who wrote in support of WikiLeaks and who recently shared a Pulitzer Prize for his articles on Edward J. Snowden’s leaking of National Security Agency spying documents.

Mr. Karp publicly apologized to Mr. Greenwald. On the recommendation of an outside law firm, the employee was suspended for a while, but still works at Palantir.

et encore, à propos des capacités de google :

Courtney Bowman, a former Google employee, works at a Palantir as a “civil liberties engineer,” (...): “I was a quantitative analyst at Google, doing ad auction design and targeting,” he says. “I had access to ways of deriving personal identity information without breaking any laws. It was a constant anxiety to me.”

#fichage #surveillance #privacy #data-mining et un article que @cryptome juge (à mon avis à juste titre) grotesque. En lien aussi avec Barrett Brown

Google VC invests in former NSA analysts’ start-up
FT.com Hannah Kuchler 24/04/14
▻http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/5a5a9e22-cb1b-11e3-ba95-00144feabdc0.html

Google’s venture capital arm and Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins have invested in a start-up run by two former National Security Agency analysts, which promises to give large companies access to some of the world’s best cyber security researchers.

Jay Kaplan, chief executive, and his co-founder Mark Kuhr, left the #NSA last year – just before Edward Snowden revealed a mass US surveillance programme – to launch Synack.

Synack has vetted a pool of security researchers before letting them loose to try to find security vulnerabilities on the sites of major corporations, who are increasingly worried about the potential for cyber attacks.

The model follows the “bug bounty” schemes run by technology companies such as #Google and Facebook who offer cash to those who report flaws in their software, which they then fix. The company aims to make such knowhow accessible to less tech-savvy corporate customers.

#cybersécurité #silicon_army

#Google_Ventures, the internet company’s VC arm, has been eager to invest in cyber security start ups so far this year. Synack follows investments in Shape Security, Ionic Security and Threatstream, all part of a new generation of cyber security companies that promise new innovations to thwart hackers.

• Shape Security: Shape has developed constantly morphing computer code to evade cyber criminals by never looking the same twice. This “real time polymorphism” should break botnets which are responsible for billions of dollars of fraud. Google Ventures’ investment was part of $26m fundraising round including money from Kleiner Perkins, Venrock and executives from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Ionic Security: The start-up aims to help companies keep track of their data as it flows out of the doors to suppliers and contractors and ensure they maintain control over who accesses it. Google Ventures funded the company as part of a $25.5m round in conjunction with Jafco Ventures and Kleiner Perkins.

• ThreatStream: ThreatStream’s Optic platform aims to aggregate threat intelligence so organisations can connect the dots and take action more quickly. Sold as a software-as-a-service model, it claims to be the “first ever crowd-sourced cyber security intelligence solution”. Google Ventures funded its first fundraising round, of $4m, earlier this year in conjunction with Paladin Capital Group and executives and former executives of Cloudera.