Cybersecurity threats are an increasing challenge for any organization that relies on technology to conduct its business. Bad actors are going after everyone – federal agencies, large enterprises and SMEs, including oil pipelines and hospitals. While the shift to cloud, remote work, adoption of SaaS applications and many other innovative solutions have major benefits to businesses, they also increase attack surfaces. At a recent House Judiciary Committee hearing, FBI director Christopher Wray said “We think the cyber threat is increasing almost exponentially. Ransomware alone, the total volume of amounts paid in ransomware has tripled over the last year, we’re investigating 100 different ransomware variants.”

Along with the increased vulnerability of organizations, the cost of attacks has been going up too. We hear about costly data breaches of 10s millions of people’s private records or a ransomware incident that locks down a hospital or a large enterprise. A comprehensive cyber insurance with a preventive approach is the key to provide protection against such potential breaches. This is where Measured Insurance comes in.

We already observe a fast-growing demand for cyber insurance products. This market is estimated to triple, growing to over $20b in the next few years. Yet, most customers go through a manual process with a transactional approach today. We believe that the market reached an inflection point, requiring a comprehensive digital platform that can assess / model risk in real time. This requires processing large sets (proprietary & 3rd party) of threat intelligence and enterprise security posture data that are still relevant in the dynamic cyber risk landscape. Measured has built this product and is already seeing how well it performs in action.

Measured brings together an outstanding team of experts from intelligence agencies, security, and insurance companies. Years of experience in critical risk analysis in noisy and dynamic real world environments, and modeling such risk help the company better underwrite the cyber exposure of an enterprise. This accuracy in premiums will lead to lower prices for customers as they improve their security posture.

The team at Measured believes that increasing cyber security risks could only be addressed by a strong ecosystem of partnerships, already partnering with a key cyber insurance partner: Syndicates at Lloyd’s of London.

We are very excited to be supporting the Measured Insurance team’s vision to help enterprises in the increasingly complex cyber insurance world.

Mobile’s inflection point was long coming, and now its dominance has been well established. This new mobile-dominant landscape will need specific tools to enable the millions of mobile apps that have taken over the world. In the last decade, a similar shift in the cloud led to many well-established cloud infrastructure unicorns, such as HashiCorp, Snowflake, Confluent, etc.

Source: eMarketer.

Source: Hootsuite.

Following suit, I think the mobile infrastructure unicorns are hatching right now.

The reason is that mobile is already mission-critical for many large enterprises, and many developers are building highly scalable applications that will be used by millions across the world. Gone are the days of simple early mobile apps. There’s now an army of mobile engineers building sophisticated applications—Snap, Airbnb, Facebook, etc. Mobile is now more than front-end only. Your backend infrastructure needs to be mobile aware i.e. connectivity is not always guaranteed. The cost of an hour of downtime ranges from a few thousand dollars to millions for companies like Uber. When stakes get this high, enterprises start to establish proper processes to deploy, manage, monitor and automate their development cycles.

Driven by this shift toward mobile tooling, we will see more demand for mobile infrastructure products/startups. Specialized products are necessary because mobile has fundamental technical differences compared to web/cloud infrastructure. The current tools fall short of automating the mobile backend for many reasons:

• First of all, mobile runs on Android or iOS, whereas web/cloud applications live on Linux and Windows. Those apps are built by different sets of languages—Swift, etc. These differences create a non-overlapping set of tools to configure, provision and manage the application infrastructure.
• Web/cloud apps are hardware agnostic, as most run on the browser, but mobile applications depend on the device (iPhone, iPad, android, etc.) and must share scarce resources with other apps to run smoothly. It becomes increasingly difficult to deploy and maintain high-performance mobile apps across the highly fragmented OS, device and form factor landscape.
• Mobile apps are hosted on the App Store or Play Store (or distributed via MDM.Not to mention the even larger app stores in Asia.), but you don’t get the broad set of solutions you’d get on AWS/GCP/Azure to manage, monitor, and update the mobile application. The app store approval process doesn’t allow for continuous delivery.
• There are mature telemetry technologies to extract all kinds of data to better monitor/observe your application in cloud/web environments. This is very complicated in the mobile world. Major cloud vendors can’t handle the cardinalities and scale of the time-stamped data.

In other words, as these apps increasingly serve millions of users across the globe, mobile development life cycles will need sophisticated tools, similar to web/cloud.

While mobile applications may continue to use some cloud-based services such as storage and compute, developers will need a specific set of mobile infrastructure solutions to deliver elaborate, scalable and reliable mobile applications. As a result, we’ll see a version of what happened with cloud infrastructure shortly happen with mobile infrastructure. There will be many tool companies to better serve growing mobile development teams at enterprises. Those teams will expect tools for CI/CD, continuous testing, orchestration, deployment and monitoring similar to what cloud/web environments have. We need the mobile corollaries to HashiCorp, Cloudbees, Datadog, and all the rest.

To see how big this opportunity truly is, look at the parallels between cloud adoption and mobile adoption, and compare the timelines side by side. Since the initial beta release of AWS (back then Amazon.com Web Service) in 2002 and shortly after its public launch in 2006, the cloud market led to an impressive amount of value creation across public cloud providers and the companies empowering them.

Source: BVP, 2021

A few years after cloud’s AWS moment, Steve Jobs changed the mobile landscape forever with the launch of the iPhone in 2007. Google followed quickly with the initial release of Android in 2008. Since then, there have been a number of highly valuable company creations—see the table. These are mainly US / EU companies that have substantial parts of their businesses derived from mobile apps or mobile web. Asia has even more skewed results with successfully mobile-first or mobile-only company exits.

This is great, and there will be many others. However, the lack of large mobile infrastructure companies surprises me. How come cloud led to many infrastructure unicorns, whereas mobile, with its peculiar tech stack, hasn’t generated any? I believe it’s just a matter of time. We’re now about to see fast-growing startups that power the mobile infrastructure of all those mobile-first/mobile-only unicorns. Put another way: the mobile infrastructure unicorns are already here, hidden in plain sight. Here are some of the early movers that are showing the way:

1. Mobile Data Platforms: Data has become the core element of running any business. Data-centric enterprises utilize all kinds of data (customer, employee, financial, etc.) for analytics, business intelligence or machine learning purposes. The enterprise data stack has gone through an amazing transformation over the past few years, leading to the formation of impressive companies such as Snowflake, Segment, Confluent, Datadog, etc. In discussions with analytics or ML teams at various enterprises, I was surprised to hear the lack of mobile data used in AI or analytics or even observability use cases. The main reason is that mobile data is complex, and difficult to extract and transform. We invested in Embrace to address this growing blindspot in organizations. Embrace provides not only a comprehensive platform to extract and transform complex mobile data, but also an observability solution to help mobile teams handle unknown unknowns in their applications. This space will get more attention soon.
2. Mobile Devops: I talked about the increasing need to automate the mobile development life cycle. Considering the growing complexity of the application and how much work it takes to maintain those, I believe we’ll see a growing ecosystem of players automating the mobile backend processes in addition to incumbents like Google Firebase. I like what Esper and Bitrise are doing here. Test automation , especially on the physical devices (vs simulator), could help uncover issues early. Headspin is an interesting company to watch here.
3. Mobile AI: Running machine learning models on a highly fragmented device/OS landscape isn’t trivial. Today, developers rely mainly on the cloud to train and deploy those models. Companies like Fritz can enable mobile developers to run such models on the device so that users can experience AI services offline, fast and privately. In addition to mobile, we’ll see a growing number of smart edge devices that need to run ML models in various use cases ranging from security to connected cars to healthcare. Edgify is working on a compelling solution here.
4. Mobile Front-end: Last but not least, UI/UX design for mobile applications is as important as the backend technology, if not more. Design becomes the core determinant of success for many of these mobile applications. This shift in the market will invite more automation and collaboration to the design process in the enterprises. Figma (designer tool) and Canva (graphic design for non-designers) have done an incredible job in enabling collaboration. We invested in Uizard that enables both design automation and collaboration for non-designers. They use their magical deep-learning powered technology to convert your scribbles and mockups into prototypes and apps.

I’m excited to see the emergence of new enabling technology players in the mobile development lifecycle. We’d love to support founders who are building innovative solutions in this evolving ecosystem. Please comment below if you have thoughts about this!

At the time, APIs were almost a nonexistent idea. Jeff Bezos seemed crazy for implementing this mandate. But in hindsight, this looks like the obvious move—today, APIs are everywhere! Recently, the number of public APIs hit 24,000. McKinsey estimates that this number will triple over the next 12 months.

In addition to external/public APIs, there’s even a bigger chunk of growing internal / private APIs. Usage across all industries is increasing. Take a look at the RapidAPI chart below, showing increasing demand compared to prior year in every major industry:

While this growth is impressive, there’s still a lot of room to grow. Most enterprises don’t take advantage of the vast trove of assets and capabilities within their organization, leaving the rest in siloes and hardwired. They still rely on people (instead of APIs—hence the rise of RPA companies) to free up those assets to other teams to build new products on top of them. Migration to the cloud and shifting to dynamic networks of microservices architecture (no more monoliths) will accelerate the transition from legacy applications to self-service composable services, just like what Bezos required in 2002.

Younger companies, like the ones we see at AV8 Ventures, have an advantage here because they can strategically adopt APIs from the beginning, with an API-first mentality. This means creating modular products with microservices architecture. To do this, companies first identify core competencies of their business. They then build in-house only those that differentiate them in the eyes of their customers. They use 3rd-party APIs for all the non-core areas. Gone are the days of building the full stack in-house. They can’t afford to build a payment stack, but they don’t have to: Stripe already hired an army of developers to perfect that function. Likewise, they can’t afford to build a map solution, but they don’t have to: Google already spent billions of dollars building the Google Maps API that everyone (including Tesla) is using.

Ease of use of such powerful services through a single API has led to a Cambrian explosion of startups that take advantage of 3rd-party APIs for non-core features to speed up product development cycles. Stripe has more than 2 million customers, the majority of which are smaller companies using its API to process payments.

Now, value creation has hit an inflection point, creating many API-first unicorns/decacorns in the last decade:

This is just the beginning. As APIs become the connective tissue of any enterprise, there will be many more opportunities. Here are a few things I’m watching out for.

• API Development & Management: While 3rd party APIs are empowering developers, there’s a similar-sized opportunity with the internal APIs within an enterprise. This is what Jeff Bezos’ API mandate was about. Most enterprises still don’t have an API-first mentality when it comes to interactions among internal components and teams. Companies like Mulesoft – now Salesforce (management), Kong (management) and Postman (development / testing) are making great progress on those challenges. Other startups such as Speedscale (testing) and Tyk (open-source gateway) are interesting. Orchestrating the growing network of APIs may end up requiring stand-alone solutions. Today, backend API management tools seem to address that. A quick way to get to a solid documentation for APIs would have a huge impact in API adoption within an enterprise. Anyone know innovative approaches here?

• API Monitoring & Visibility: Teams want to have visibility and then monitor their API footprints. This was easier when they had few APIs to manage. Complexity significantly increased with the dynamic world of more internal and 3rd party APIs. In order to avoid costly downtimes (avg downtime costs $5600 per minute) and ensure availability/performance, continuous visibility into API metrics is critical. Apart from traditional APM vendors (Datadog, Splunk, etc.), exciting startups to watch include APImetrics, Checkly and Moesif.

• API Security & Compliance:With the expanding API footprint, there will be growing demand for API security as more surface area will be exposed through APIs. Gartner forecasts that API abuses will become the most frequent attack vector in a few years. Companies such as Salt, Noname and Traceble provide solutions to cover growing API exposure. CloudVector (recently acquired by Imperva) addresses the crucial step of discovery/API cataloging i.e. what APIs do I have?

• API-first business functions: There is a long list of successful API-first companies today. There are still many business functions—horizontal (security) or vertical (insuretech, fintech, proptech, etc.)—that could be delivered through an API. I’m interested in innovative API-first models addressing large markets. Innovative APIs I like include: Planck Data (for P&C insurance), Veriff (identity verification), Hubuc (banking-as-a-service), Duffel (Flight sales), and Contentful (Headless CMS).

• International:We have seen many impressive success stories in the US. Plaid. Stripe. Twilio, and many others. While these players have some international footprint, there’s room for local innovation (e.g. KYC in India, AML in Europe, Payments in Africa, etc).

APIs are one of the most exciting trends in software development we are presently tracking at AV8 Ventures. There are still massive amounts (billions of dollars) of annual IT spend that could be productized through APIs. We’re excited to support founders who are building innovative solutions in this evolving ecosystem, so if you’re working on an exciting API company, please get in touch. Also, please comment below if you have thoughts about this space.