We are very excited to announce that we have backed Nym Technologies as part of their $6m round together with our co-investors Polychain (lead), Eden Block, Tioga Capital, 1kx and Maven 11.

At Greenfield One, we are backing developer teams building towards an open, decentralized, and more robust architecture of tomorrow’s internet and the team around the co-founders Harry Halpin, Dave Hrycyszyn, Claudia Diaz and Ania Piotrowska couldn’t be more spot on to this vision.

Today we are living more and more in the digital world. The internet has become the backbone of everyday life of humans in both our home as well as work life. And this trend is taking on further acceleration as we are turning ever more towards technology and pushing the boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds.

In its original design, the internet is not private. This leaves users with little protection. Protocol upgrades like the introduction of SSL and TLS have enabled client-server encryption, so that applications like ecommerce, where credit card information is shared, became possible. However, metadata e.g. of what services are used and how long, is exposing the behavior of all internet users online today. This metadata is a primary source for private, nationwide and global actors collecting this information in bulk to scan for trends, predict outcomes, or target individuals such as journalists and whistleblowers.

A cry for privacy on the web

In a study published in 2019, roughly six-in-ten Americans believed it’s not possible to go through daily life without having their data collected. Furthermore, eight in ten people feel that they have no control over the data collected; and six in ten people have concerns about how nation-actors use the collected data. This shows that the trend towards end user privacy is inevitable. Apple is a great example of how this has led to commercial opportunities with the introduction of their major iOS 15 upgrade that is centered around privacy. Among other features was the Privacy Relay which anonymizes browsing the internet. Apple claims it cannot read the data, so that ultimately the user has to decide, similar to VPNs, whether or not to trust a central party.

Privacy without central control

With decentralized technologies however we can and are reshaping the internet and Nym is taking a very holistic approach towards universal privacy from the network layer upwards. The Nym network is a decentralized peer-to-peer network, based on the original idea of David Chaum’s mix network. However, the team did lots of modifications to protect against a nationwide, global actor threat model that has the ability to read any network traffic globally.

It solves this by weaving a decentralized ledger, the utility token NYM, and an incentivized permissionless peer-to-peer network of mixnodes, and a unique proof-of-mixing algorithm into a design that ensures ultimate privacy as well as scalability and elasticity for coming demand. And the team is not stopping here:

It strives to build a non-custodial identity/credential system to allow payment, universal authentication and authorization of permissions without having to trust a single central entity.

At the moment the project is in its testnet phase. The last testnet (Finney) finished recently with over 9000 mixnet nodes running Nym software (already more than the Tor network). We’ve been proud to be part of the set of validators, which are validating payments and proof-of-mixing payouts. The next step is the transition to the next testnet Milhon.

We are extremely thrilled to back the team and be part of the mission of Nym Technologies.

If you want to learn more about Nym or get involved check them out on Medium, Twitter or Telegram.

Credit also for this post to my Greenfield One team mates and especially Jendrik Poloczek as well as Felix Machart!

Greenfield One is backing Nym Technologies in their $6m round towards building next generation… was originally published in Greenfield Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Detection of a threat is great but what do I do if I can’t defeat the security breach effectively going forward!

At Dedrone I talk daily with customers, partners and potential investors about their concerns when it comes to this new threat of drones flying into their airspace up above their heads. And to be honest most people struggle. They struggle because they look for easy fixes that are not there yet. They are starting to understand this new threat that drones are posing but they think the only way to effectively mitigate this threat is to actively repel it.

Well, in other parts of life it seems very simple. Fencing off burglars there are in almost all cases no automatic shotgun systems connected to sensors but more passive means are used and triggered: I can upgrade my lock or buy other equipment like cameras, motion detectors or alarm systems and connect those to cloud services or even law enforcement for notification purposes and initiation of individual operating procedures.

What we tend to forget easily in this example is that the fix for this type of problem has gone through many cycles with the result being that the maturity of security solutions for traditional trespassing has pretty much been solved.

In parallel threats have come from new angles. It is no longer that attacks are of only physical nature. Organizations have seen for a while more and more attackers go in and out of an enterprise by means of cyber hacking. With malicious intends they are using vulnerabilities in the IT network to “walk” in and out. As a result organizations have been upgrading their IT systems through firewalls, proxy servers, and by other means of the million cybersecurity products you see annually at security conferences like RSA, etc.

Enter the era of a new threat vector…from up above

The case of drones attacking organizations is still perceived very new despite that we are seeing tons of incidences daily at increasing velocity. Most are however not made public.

How do organizations respond to this new threat?

The first reaction we get from audiences is an interesting one. Almost everyone’s first response is about the desire to shoot down the drone or to force it to fly home by setting off jamming equipment. So let’s look at the practicality for a moment.

First, in most western jurisdictions a drone is deemed an aircraft. And while an individual or civilian/commercial organization is not allowed to shoot down a jet passenger airplane or disturb it in its flight path the same goes for the right reasons for a drone.

Second, shooting down the drone will not solve for the problem. This is because if the offender is physically losing his means to perform his malicious attack (aka the drone) he can easily come back the next day to try his attack once more and if necessary even do so with several drones if that was not enough before.

But even if we try to ignore the above let’s look thirdly at jamming a drone and the results and implications:

Jamming a drone is basically blasting with amplified RF in the direction of the drone or omnidirectionally into the sky in order to disturb the clear RF reception/communication a drone and RC have of each other. While this will cause the drone to either fly to it’s point of origin or in the worst case trigger the crash of the drone the consequences of such are however also:

1. Possible collateral damage: Other “good” RF devices will lose their RF link. Some of these devices and systems may have vital operating impact in an enterprise environment (e.g. internal communication systems, wireless IoT devices and systems, etc.)
2. Possible hazardous effects on humans: Blasting RF at a certain power level either omnidirectionally or even in a directed way can have massive health impacts on humans if they stand in the way.
3. The intent of jamming is to trigger a fly-to-home mode. However, we have seen drones that were reprogrammed by bad actors so that the “home” location is not the place of original lift off but the actual target which would mean that in this particular case the drone would still hit the target location.

Compounding, jamming MAY be one of many options but is by far not always a practical solution on how to defeat a possible drone attack.

What is more important though is that an organization is starting at first to implement detection technology that enables them to learn about the individual threat they face, gather data and analytics about their airspace and start to embark on a journey to accelerate the learning curve about the overall security threat and exposure levels. It is a journey at which end there are individual operating procedures for each individual facility which may vary according to threat levels. Detection is thus the key and is the starting point to look thoroughly at options, build consensus within the organization about the problem and formulate operating procedures that will certainly change over time. And lastly it is about building out layered defeat mechanisms that definitely include passive mitigation and may (if legally allowed) in the end include active defeat mechanisms.

It has been a year now since we moved with our Dedrone headquarter into our SOMA office in San Francisco. With that we completed the formal move from Germany over to the US. Many European entrepreneurs keep on passing by to ask how we made the transition and what was key to our success so far.

To start off, besides a huge market and product that was ready for that market, there was another equally big factor involved. And that was that we put our network of connections, friends and people we had worked with before to work for and with us. Getting that network vested and also invested in the company was a decisive factor and allowed us to get very relevant and immediate help. Who were those people? Well, these were either individuals that had become friends over time in our previous jobs or that had backed us in prior startups. But it was also people we had invested with or in and that in turn became influential with a strong voice and network in silicon valley. And through those partners and friends we were simply able to be a lot faster in scaling into the next phase of the company. And by going through our network for further introductions, we were passed over with already pre-backed references which allowed for major shortcuts.

But let me take a stab at looking back in a bit more detail as to what worked so well.

First phase: Germany

Dedrone was born in the neck of the woods in Germany in 2014 in a place called Kassel. Our first funding we received with our seed round in 2015 with which we built an MVP product. We were stunned by the results and customer feedback. Given that the founders had already built multiple startups in Germany before, there was this concern in the back of the mind however to eventually see the emergence of a strong competitor rising up in Silicon Valley. But when looking across the pond to the US west coast there wasn’t that one startup with tier-1 VC funding visible. And instead of waiting for that 500 pound gorilla to surface and get funding from one of the big VCs, the founders thought: Why won’t we be that 500 pound gorilla and just move the company to San Francisco…which is exactly when I got more involved and decided to join the team.

When Joerg (CEO) and I set sail westward in Feb 2016, our goal was to establish the company in San Francisco, be perceived and known as a US company while at the same time maintaining our roots in Germany with all the benefits that came along with that. In parallel we wanted to tie knots to the local Silicon Valley ecosystem, raise money from brand name investors, recruit an incredible team and last not least of all to start selling the product in the US market.

Move to the US in early 2016

We started working out of AirBnBs and approached about two dozen VCs in the first week. At the same time we reached out to potential customers in Silicon Valley, namely the big brand internet and IT companies. We received good interest from a handful of the big internet giants, presented our product & vision and gave demos. On the VC side we received after about 2 month our first term sheet and then gathered another two. We ultimately signed with Menlo Ventures who went all out in showing us that they wanted to win the deal. The introduction was easy as I had co-invested with their partner Venky Ganesan previously in my T-Venture days. With that Series A investment we also formally flipped the company to be US headquartered; a pretty complicated and painful undertaking in itself. We formally closed our Series A in May 2016 and started looking for an office and finally moved out of the AirBnBs, as by that time we had transformed the living room in what seemed to be a full fledge outbound call-center, support center, several mini meeting rooms and startup canteen. Through some German friends and partners we finally found our 1099 Folsom St. office in July 2016. So far so good…we now had an office but we still had no real US organization.

Venky at Menlo Ventures introduced us to a few relevant people from his network and we finally started running full fledge on either interviewing people for some key positions or running after accounts and giving demos. A key intro from him was to Hans Robertson (Meraki co-founder), who over time became a close friend to Dedrone. Through Hans’ help we recruited our incredible VP of Sales Bobby Long and our amazing VP of Marketing Pablo Estrada, who both were at Meraki before — again, introductions that came through trusted partners and with references. We further reached out to our network and by October had gotten incredible operational and customer facing help from a few individuals so that we decided to formally invite these guys to the Series A-round that we had kept open. The people that took part in this were next to Hans Robertson also Dominic Orr (CEO Aruba Networks), Selina Lo (CEO Ruckus Wireless), Trevor Healy (CEO Jajah & Amobee) and Daniel Graf (VP uber), all of whom we had worked with or invested in in our prior lives. Lastly, Tom Noonan had even before the A-round been an incredible supporter of Joerg and Rene (CTO) in prior gigs and was already a seed investor in Dedrone. We thus had a bunch of people close to us that we had an incredible level of trust with.

While we still had most of the Dedrone crew over in Germany we were closing the year-end of 2016 with ramped up sales and a well established sales, marketing, finance as well as BD organization. Dedrone was perceived fully US based but yet able to support customers equally well in Europe and the US.

Eying the next round - Series B

After the A-round with Menlo Ventures we had already received lots of enquiries for top-ups from other VCs but held back until end of the year 2016. We kept people informed to prepare our Series B which we actually really engaged in in January 2017. That was when we had aggregated data for a new pitch deck and also further detailed out the vision for where we wanted to take the business.

For the Series B we again reached out to about a dozen VCs and had asked beforehand our investors for a shortlist of whom to speak with from their point of view. We aggregated that input and sequenced the reaching-out. Early in the process we met Felicis Ventures where two decisive factors came together. The first was that Hans Robertson had reached out to Aydin Senkut (Partner at Felicis Ventures) who was an early Meraki backer while I had reached out to another Felicis partner, Wesley Chan, whom I had known from my Cooliris days. With that we came in as a “known” group and Felicis had assembled the entire partnership in their first meeting which was impressive for us to see. We struck a deal extremely fast and had executed the Series B within 30 days which was amazing for us as we could quickly focus on the business again. At the same time another conversation had come far along which was the one with John Chambers (former CEO and now Executive Chairman of Cisco Systems). We met during Websummit conference in November 2016 in Portugal. He was eager to be part of the round and at the same time we eventually rounded up the Series B with a few other individual investors.

The essence

Looking back at the HQ move and 2 financing rounds there are some important take-aways I want to summarize here:

1. Get introductions to VCs from your network. What helped massively with the speed of the rounds was to get our network involved. When there is trust involved with the people you have worked with in the past you are able to take shortcuts as there is a lot of credibility going in hand. We saw this with the involvement of Menlo Ventures whom I had co-invested with in the past and also with Felicis Ventures where we got an incredible intro from Hans. And by the way, the same was also true as we scaled and are scaling up when it comes to hiring, finding resellers and end-customers for our products.
2. If you lack having the relevant network then perhaps hire a team member for that part who has done it before or have that part taken up by your angel investor.
3. Get individual investors on board not just the VCs. And don’t think this is only restricted to the seed phase of the company. You can do that in each round. The addition of the individual investors (in both of our A and B round) has been helping massively as we had and will have the ability to pick up the phone any time and get incredible support, advice, mentoring and intros from top notch people that have been or are still super successful CEOs.
4. Keeping the financing rounds open for some time to add people was important in the process in order to bring the people on board.
5. A trusted intro is a quick connection to the right decision maker with an included reference call that is indirectly done already. Think about it…those types of references and intros come along with the addition of a pre-baked reference calls. Who would make an intro when they are not convinced of the product, people or team? You simply don’t do that since in the end you want to bring on and tap into that network for future purposes and no one wants to fool around with their network.
6. When wanting to set yourself up for a flip to be a US headquartered company you really have to relocate. It is like an advance down payment. Just coming here for one to two weeks is not going to do the job. People expect you to be here, period. They want to start a relationship, to be able to expose you to their local network, to introduce you to their fellow partners, to watch how you perform as they open up their network to you and all of that is only doable when you are really here and not doing the fly-in-fly-out trips.

So all in all, get your network invested and involved so that they are truly vested and you can fully leverage it.

Going west….and learnings how to leverage your network was originally published in Startups & Venture Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.