Kraken acquires Crypto Facilities

Kraken closed its biggest acquisition to date on our portfolio company Crypto Facilities.

Crypto Facilities is an exchange and index provider regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in the U.K. Crypto Facilities lets you trade futures on multiple cryptocurrency pairs. It was the first ever crypto exchange regulated by a FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) and it was the official index provider to the CME Group, World’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace.

Kraken currently has 4 million users who traded the equivalent of $90 billion in 2018. Following this acquisition, Kraken users will now have access to both spot and futures trading.

ServiceNow acquired our portfolio company FriendlyData

FriendlyData is a natural language search interface for Enterprise Data, powered by Machine Learning and NLP, got acquired by ServiceNow. ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), Forbes’ No.1 World’s Most Innovative Company, has decided to acquire FriendlyData, which makes it easy for non-technical users to ask quantitative questions in plain English and get fast results through direct answers or data visualizations.

For ServiceNow, FriendlyData’s natural language query (NLQ) technology will help reduce the amount of time spent figuring out how to ask questions technically. NLQ allows users to just ask a question and then act.
When used within ServiceNow, the technology will reduce some of the complexity that slows down work, including:
• Outdated customer and employee work experiences that are not intuitive and easy to use like the ones people experience as consumers.
• Inability to act due to reliance on time-consuming manual processes.
• Burdens on business analysts and data engineers who can’t keep pace with the increasing volume of requests coming from non-technical users within their company.

“ServiceNow is bringing NLQ capabilities to the Now Platform, enabling companies to ask technical questions in plain English and receive direct answers,” said Pat Casey, senior vice president, development and operations at ServiceNow. “With this technical enhancement, our goal is to allow anyone to easily make data-driven decisions, increasing productivity and driving businesses forward faster.”

ServiceNow plans to re-platform FriendlyData’s NLQ technology, extending the Now Platform’s intelligence capabilities by making NLQ interfaces available across ServiceNow applications for IT, Human Resources, Security Operations, Customer Service Management, partner products and for developers.

CB INSIGHTS select Geen among the most disruptive 60+ Synthetic Biology Startups

According to CB INSIGHTS, our portfolio company Geen is among the most disruptive 60+ SyntheticBiology Startups.

CB INSIGHTS mapped 67 Synthetic Biology startups under 9 categories, where Geen was selected among the most disruptive startups under Organism engineering & automation platforms.

Geen is building an operating system to make cells programmable. GeenOS introduces a new Universal and Computable genetic coding language upon integration to any host cell.

Click For CB INSIGHTS Synthetic Biology Market Map

İTÜ Ginova ÇetinCeviz 2016 Demo-Day

Today, we completed the İTÜ Ginova ÇetinCeviz 2016 bootcamp with the participation of seven brilliant teams.

İTÜ or Istanbul Technical University is an international technical university located in Istanbul, Turkey. It is the world’s third oldest technical university dedicated to engineering sciences, and İTÜ GINOVA is the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation established for university’s more than 35,000 students.

ÇetinCeviz is held for the second time. Programme’s name ÇetinCeviz means “Hard Nut to Crack” in English, it symbolises the desire of İTÜ Ginova participants to solve the hardest problems of the World.