New add-on to Telesign’s Identity product family enables customers to know if and when a phone number—and any associated data—has been compromised

Telesign, the leading provider of customer identity and engagement solutions, today announced the launch of Breached Data, the newest addition to the company’s Identity products. Breached Data gives customers the ability to identify when a phone number and its associated data attributes have been compromised in a data breach, helping proactively prevent account takeovers, fake users, and synthetic identity fraud.

In today’s digitally connected world, in which the average person spends nearly seven hours online daily, safeguarding sensitive information is a top priority. From sign-ups and sign-ins to likes and comments, every digital interaction creates a dataset, contributing to the trillions of gigabytes of data on the internet. In the wrong hands, this data can wreak havoc, leading to unauthorized account takeovers, identity theft, fraudulent transactions, and more. Businesses that fail to protect themselves and their customers from data breaches can experience severe financial, operational, and reputational loss.

Breached Data protects against the ramifications of compromised data. Across the customer journey, the new solution conducts a rapid analysis of submitted phone number data against a comprehensive global dataset. This provides near real-time confirmation of breach status and any associated compromised attributes. If a submitted phone number is found in a recent data breach, it delivers a timestamp for when the phone number and associated attributes were compromised.

“In an era of escalating data breaches, which inflict reputational and financial damage to organizations everywhere, Telesign innovates to protect both businesses and consumers,” said Telesign Product & Portfolio Vice President Chris Thompson. “Breached Data is our most recent effort to protect against the consequences of data theft by bad actors.”

“Breached Data is a game-changer in today’s digital landscape, helping to keep businesses and their customers safe while also expanding Telesign’s global presence,” said Steven Dickens, Vice President and Practice Leader, The Futurum Group. “With data breaches on the rise, this new solution gives businesses the power to mitigate fraud and create safer digital experiences. This is crucial because the onus is now squarely on companies to elevate digital privacy measures, not just as a fiduciary duty but as a cornerstone of customer trust.”

Key features of Breached Data

Global Comprehensive Coverage: The solution meticulously compares the submitted data against more than 166 billion breached data records across emails, passwords, IP addresses, usernames, PII, geographic locations, phone numbers, financial details, and more. The extensive scope of Breached Data ensures that global data breaches are vigilantly accounted for and shielded against.

Continuous Protection: In 2022, over 422 million people had their data exposed on the dark web, up 128 million from the previous year. Breached Data is updated daily to ensure every data breach is accounted for in order to avert potential harm.

New Use Cases for Breached Data

• Account Takeover: Businesses can be notified when user data has been compromised to enable the prevention of unauthorized access, protecting their end-users and ecosystem.
• Synthetic Identity Fraud: Businesses can help stop synthetic identity fraud by balancing the right amount of authentication without alienating legitimate users. Breached Data notifies businesses during sign-up when a user is registering with a recently breached PII.

European data teams can now build and automate data pipelines with the ease of a managed SaaS offering while meeting stringent data sovereignty requirements.

Ascend.io, the leader in data pipeline automation, today announced the availability of its cloud-based data engineering platform in the European region. Now, data engineers, data architects and analytics engineers can build intelligent data pipelines for Snowflake, Databricks, and Google BigQuery through Ascend's fully managed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform.  Data will never be exported or processed outside of the EU, allowing enterprises to meet strict data sovereignty requirements without having to host their own deployment of the software. Ascend's EU-based cloud offering is generally available to all customers today.

Ascend is bringing this cloud offering to Europe in response to rapidly growing demand driven by large digital transformations and new digital native business models. Ascend already supports customers in the region including News Corp and Maytronics, and regularly fields requests from digital natives for more accelerated deployment options. As Ascend's partners Snowflake and Databricks continue to expand in the region, the demand for scalable data pipeline solutions has skyrocketed. Snowflake reports growing FY23 revenue in the region by 72% YoY, and Databricks has grown its team size 75% in the region over a similar period.

Ascend's native cloud offering provides a lower barrier to its intelligent data pipeline controller that reduces up to 91% of repetitive data engineering tasks, reduces data software costs by 68% and can lower ETL cloud consumption bills by up to 30%. Now, even the leanest data engineering teams can meet data privacy, security and sovereignty requirements in their local regions.

"Ensuring data remains within a country's geographic borders while providing a self-managing SaaS experience for data pipelines is no small feat. This expansion ensures that European data professionals can focus on building intelligent data pipelines 10x faster without worrying about compliance or technical backends," said Sean Knapp, CEO of Ascend.io.

Data teams in Europe can now enjoy:

Instant Access & Setup: Just enter credentials and immediately tap into the world of intelligent data pipeline automation.

Complete Data Sovereignty: Uncompromising compliance with European data sovereignty regulations, ensuring data remains strictly within national boundaries.

Stellar Savings & Efficiency: As endorsed by industry giants like News Corp, and Maytronics, Ascend's users report up to 91% less effort in data prep and transformation, a 68% cost reduction in their data stack, and up to 30% less cloud resource consumption.

Seize the Future of Data Pipeline Automation: Embrace the future of data pipelines with Ascend's free trial of the new SaaS offering, perfectly complementing the trusted, fully dedicated tenant deployment that's been at the forefront of progressive data engineering teams for years.

• The refreshed logo signifies a renewed and strong focus on consumer privacy and enhanced safety in communication

• The overall design maintains the signature ‘True blue’ colour with an icon that establishes a distinct identity, thereby protecting our users from copycat and imposter apps

Truecaller today announced a corporate rebranding and launch of a brand new app icon that will be instantly recognisable on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. The timing of the new brand identity aligns with a significant transformation taking place in the digital space. At the heart of this rebranding is Truecaller’s renewed sense of purpose, energy, and enthusiasm.

Commenting on the announcement, Alan Mamedi, Co-founder and CEO, Truecaller said, “We are excited to unveil our new brand identity and logo. It signifies our continued commitment to our users and our focus to constantly evolve and improve, every day.”

“Our mission, to protect communication for all, is what guides us to develop new anti-fraud solutions like Search Context and engineer improvements to improve user privacy,” he added.

As part of this refreshed identity, Truecaller users also get powerful new anti-fraud feature called Search Context, as a part of the Truecaller AI Identity engine. While looking at the search results for any number, Truecaller users will be instantly notified if the name for the number has been recently changed or is being changed frequently. The app also classifies this contextual message into three colour categories: blue, for a neutral change, yellow, which could be potentially suspicious if the name has changed more than 3 times in the past 7 days and finally red, indicating multiple and frequent name changes which are highly indicative of fraudulent and scammer activity. This message will be shown to all Truecaller users on all search results across Android, iPhone and Truecaller web.

The new branding identity is orchestrated by leading global brand consultancy, Interbrand and it will be rolled out across the globe over the coming weeks. To see the new app icon and changes, users need to update to app version 13.34 or newer on Android and version 12.58 or newer on iOS. Read more on our blog here and download press assets here.

The new platform features the first universal B2B tracking pixel to bring transparency to the efficiency of B2B advertising, social, video and other popular channels

Channel99, the pioneer in B2B performance marketing technology, today announced its next-generation platform for optimizing marketing investments and uncovering financial inefficiencies. The new solution features a revolutionary verification pixel created exclusively for B2B to make it possible for marketers to understand how well their programs are reaching, engaging and converting the accounts in their target markets. The pixel provides B2B marketers with the first closed-loop view-through technology that can be applied to advertising, social, video, email, CTV and other channels.

"Combining the digital signals from our customers on and off our website with our investment data and financial outcomes in our CRM is brilliant," said Nick Panayi, CMO of Inovalon. "I can finally understand the performance of a variety of vendors on a level playing field. Channel99 also made the right investments to make it possible for any new client to go live and realize benefits on day one."

The First Verification Pixel Technology for B2B Marketing
B2B businesses spend $20 billion a year to drive digital engagement on the web through paid and organic channels, often making digital the largest portion of a marketing budget. However, digital marketing teams are plagued by misattribution. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of website traffic has an unknown source and is labeled "Direct" when it would be more accurately attributed to another channel and vendor.

Channel99 offers the first universal verification pixel to make it possible for B2B marketers to understand how well their programs are reaching, engaging and converting the accounts in their target markets. By tracking the digital engagement of accounts both on and off the website with a 360-degree view of buyer engagement, Channel99 monitors "view-through" to reveal the patterns that lead to actual deals and brings transparency to the efficiency of B2B advertising, social, video and other popular channels. The pixel is also privacy-friendly and free of cookies or other personal tracking mechanisms.

"It's incredibly frustrating for advertisers, marketers and agencies to invest so much time and money into a multitude of programs, yet have so little proof to show that it is working," said Chris Golec, Founder & CEO of Channel99 and previous Founder & CEO of Demandbase. "Our new pixel technology was built for B2B and will finally bring the transparency, uniform KPIs and attribution the industry needs."

Valued at $400M, MotherDuck removes the waitlist from its platform, announces new product features, and adds 11 more partners to its growing ecosystem

MotherDuck, builder of a serverless, easy to use data analytics platform based on open source database DuckDB, today announced a $52.5 million round of funding. Led by Felicis, the round puts MotherDuck at a $400M post-money valuation and brings their total funding to date to $100M. New and existing investors like a16z, Madrona, Amplify Partners, Altimeter, Redpoint, Zero Prime, and more participated in the round as well. Felicis General Partner Viviana Faga will join MotherDuck's Board of Directors.

As part of today's announcement, MotherDuck will no longer have a waitlist for those interested in trying the platform. Anyone who wants to start leveraging the power of DuckDB at scale immediately can sign up at motherduck.com. The company also announced feedback-driven improvements to the analyst experience including faster data import, a better notebook interface with SQL auto-complete, optimized hybrid query planning, and improved database sharing.

"We're proud of what we've been able to achieve over the last year alongside the DuckDB community and the DuckDB Labs team," said Jordan Tigani, CEO and Co-Founder of MotherDuck. "Our initial funding allowed us to grow our engineering team to get our platform launched and in use by almost 2,000 analysts. With this funding and the momentum surrounding our platform and DuckDB's adoption, the sky's the limit. The key is a simplified scale-up approach to SQL analytics; for the 95% of us who do not have petabyte-scale data, a scale-up approach to analytics based on an engine like DuckDB can be faster, cheaper and more user-friendly than distributed architectures. Spending the last week in Amsterdam with the DuckDB team has solidified that DuckDB is the future. We're excited about bringing the power of its simplicity to organizations at scale and improving the analyst experience across the board."

As the popularity of DuckDB skyrockets across the data community - thanks to its ability to run everywhere (including in the browser), query data from anywhere without preloading it, and its super-fast execution of analytical queries - early adoption of MotherDuck has validated the belief that data technology needs to focus on analyst experience. As the DuckDB team continues to rapidly evolve the open source database engine and its close ties to cutting-edge academic research, MotherDuck has been able to add collaboration and scalability of the cloud for organizations who want to use DuckDB at a larger scale.

The partnership between the two teams has led to more than 2,000 users already finding success with MotherDuck across a multitude of use cases to include: 

• A cloud data warehouse for the rest of us: MotherDuck provides a simplified, performant and efficient data warehouse based on the lightweight DuckDB engine for the majority of data warehouses that don't need petabyte scale. 
• A data lake query engine: MotherDuck uses DuckDB to query your data where it sits as parquet, iceberg, or CSV files.
• A serverless backend for data apps: Customers of SaaS applications like SaaSWorks and Dexibit need fast and fresh analytics on their data to make better decisions. Developers often tackle this with analytics queries running on the transactional database, which are not designed for the task. MotherDuck uses DuckDB to provide a better solution.

"We looked at various OLAP platforms that could serve our broad and demanding data platform that serves the modern CFO as we were hitting scale limits (price and performance) with Postgres on RDS. MotherDuck with DuckDB was by far the fastest - both in the cloud and run on our developer's machines - bridging price and performance and greatly increasing productivity. We feel we have partnered with the future of Cloud and desktop-based OLAP providers with MotherDuck." - Jim O'Neill, CTO & Co-Founder, SaaSWorks.

MotherDuck's ecosystem also continues to grow. Following their initial product launch in June, the company announced 16 integrations with the platform. Today, MotherDuck is announcing 11 more: Cube, dltHub, Evidence, GoodData, Kestra, Metabase, InfinyOn, LlamaIndex, Sling, Streamlit, and Voltron Data. Airbyte will be available to users today, while integrations with Fivetran and Tableau are both underway.

"We are excited to partner with Jordan and the MotherDuck team as they build a platform designed to seamlessly blend speed and user-friendliness, thereby simplifying and making analytics widely accessible. Analysts clearly need the speed of working with data at the edge, as well as the flexibility to query cloud-based data. The era of serverless data analytics is here." - Viviana Faga, General Partner, Felicis.