All posts tagged: opal

Opal Security, which helps companies manage access and identities, raises M

Opal Security, which helps companies manage access and identities, raises $22M

Published by skeptic

VC investment trends in the cybersecurity market suggest a sector in decline — at least within the context of recent months. According to Crunchbase, cybersecurity deal count fell during Q3 to 153 deals from 181 in Q2. In a more detailed report, Crunchbase suggests that, with Q3 cybersecurity venture funding down 30% compared to the year-ago period, investment in the category could fall to its lowest level since 2019. Some cybersecurity startups are escaping the industry downturn somehow, however — like Opal Security. Today, Opal, a vendor taking an automated approach to identity access management, announced that it raised $22 million in a Series B round led by Battery Ventures with participation from Greylock and Box Group. Brining Opal’s warchest to $32 million, the new tranche will be put toward doubling Opal’s 30-person team by the end of 2024, scaling its enterprise customer support org and ramping up product development, founder and CEO Umaimah Khan told TechCrunch in an email interview. The product ramp-up, he added, will include a new suite of visualization and AI-powered …

Two years after launching the C1 webcam, Opal is still committed to hardware

Two years after launching the C1 webcam, Opal is still committed to hardware

Published by skeptic

December 14 marks two years since Opal launched the C1 after accruing a 16,000-person waitlist. In some respect, one couldn’t ask for a better time to launch a webcam than a global pandemic. Our relationship to work has transformed a good deal over the last 3.5 years, but for the most part, webcams haven’t been up to the task. Ahead of launch, the C1 received good marks for hardware design and picture quality, with many reviewers referring to the camera as a low-cost DSLR webcam alternative. There were, however, some shortcomings, primarily on the software side. The startup acknowledged some of the system’s key issues and promised fixes were coming. “When we launched, we were at four people on the team,” co-founder Stefan Sohlstrom told TechCrunch during an interview this week. “What a typical hardware has is a huge amount of firmware engineers and quality assurance engineers, and you can’t do that with four people. The amount of off-the-shelf code that we were using on the software side that we had to completely rip out …

Is this Australia’s last generation of opal miners? | Australia news

Published by Sam

Think of mining and you may imagine gaping great holes such as the iron ore mines of the Pilbara or cavernous underground workings of the copper mines of Mt Isa. In outback New South Wales, the mining of Australia’s national gemstone looks quite different. Opal mining is the home of the one-man operation, where small-scale miners prise opal from the earth often with no more than a jackhammer and a rickshaw. Opal is not kind to the commercial miners who chase defined resource targets. As one miner puts it “opal doesn’t follow rules, opal is where it wants to be”. Australia supplies 95% of the world’s opal. But mines at Lightning Ridge and White Cliffs, the main opal production hubs in NSW, are currently under threat. In May, the department of mines and regional NSW instructed 858 miners to stop work, after a review found 3,343 mining claims granted between 1 January 2015 and 13 February 2023 were invalid. Opal mining on those 50m by 50m plots of land ground to a sudden halt. “We …