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When Constantin Robertz was working at Zalora, he was involved in moving warehouses six times as the e-commerce company outgrew its logistics infrastructure. This inspired him to co-found Locad, a logistics provider for omnichannel e-commerce companies that connects its network of third-party warehouses and shipping carriers with a cloud-based platform referred to its “logistics engine.”

Founded in Singapore and Manila by Robertz, fellow Zalora alumni Jannis Dargel and former Grab lead product manager of maps Shrey Jain, Locad announced today it has raised $11 million in Series A funding led by Reefknot Investments, a joint venture between Temasek and logistics company Kuehne + Nagel. Returning investors Sequoia India and Southeast Asia’s Surge, Febe Ventures and Antler also participated, along with new backers Access Ventures, JG Summit and WTI.

TechCrunch last covered Locad when it raised its $4.5 million seed round in 2021.

Locad can handle almost every part of the delivery process, from inventory storage and packing to shipping and tracking. So far, Locad has provided order fulfillment for 200 brands, including Havaians, Levi’s Reckitt Benckisder and Emma Sleep. Its customers are spread across Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong and Australia, and typically ship about 25 to 5,000 orders a day. Last year, Locad was used to ship more than two million orders and it claims a 99% same-day order fulfillment rate.

Its new funding will be used to add more warehouses and transport operators to Locad’s network and on hiring in Southeast Asia and Australia, with the goal of building the region’s largest network of warehouses over the next five years.

Robertz said helping Zalora scale up its logistics infrastructure “planted the seed of how a cloud approach to supply chain, with a scalable logistics infrastructure as a service, would be a better way.” During their time at Zalora, Robertz and Dargel also worked with brands that had to set up their own e-commerce fulfillment capabilities and tech stack in order to support multiple sales channels.

Legacy logistics infrastructure, originally created for B2B wholesale distribution, couldn’t keep up with direct-to-consumer brands as their sales channels multiplied. It also meant they could no longer rely on “walled garden” fulfillment networks run by e-commerce platforms, like Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), as they scaled up.

At the same time, consumers want faster and cheaper delivery, and offering multiple options like same day, next day or economy shipment is important for conversions at checkout. Robertz said that to deliver more quickly without paying more, retailers need to store products closer to customers to enable shorter and faster last-mile deliveries. This requires a network of warehouses and integration between sales channels, warehouses and shipping carriers. That is what Locad’s tech enables.

Locad’s logistics engine syncs inventory from multiple sales channels, including Shopify, Lazada, Shopee and TikTok Shops, and manages storage and delivery through its network of warehouses and shipping carriers. Many of Locad’s customers first approach the startup while phasing out their inhouse logistics operations. Brands often start with one warehouse to consolidate their inventory and order fulfillment across sales channels, before putting inventory into additional warehouses based where its customers are located.

As it expands across Southeast Asia and Australia, Locad also plans to increase the number of warehouses in Tier 1 to Tier 3 cities in the region, with the goal of enabling same-day delivery in all of them.

In a statement about the funding, Reefknot Investments vice president Ervin Lim said, “Locad’s unique operating model of localizing warehouses into the cities ensures that inventory is kept close to the customers thereby enabling significant cost and time savings for both brand and consumer. We believe that Locad’s logistics engine will spur greater participation in the digital economy as consumers outside of Tier-1 cities can now receive their orders 2-3x faster at a fraction of the usual cost.”

Locad lands Series A to expand its “logistics engine” across Southeast Asia and Australia by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

During the pandemic, Tita Ardiati and Bayu Puspito Bhaskoro began developing life coaching content to support employees who were increasingly burned out by working from home. They got a good enough reception that they decided to develop their product into an employee assistance program called Mindtera, which now serves more than 10,000 employees in Indonesia.

Today, the startup announced total seed funding of $850,000 led by East Ventures, with participation from Seedstars International Ventures and angel investors.

Bhaskoro told TechCrunch that the startup is focused on B2B markets, including mid- to large enterprises. It also provides a self-service platform for small- to medium enterprises. Its main sectors are finance, consulting and retail, and its typical client has more than 200 employees.

Mindtera aims to support employees with challenges related to their work, and also in their personal lives like finances, family and relationships. Companies, on the other hand, get insights about what employees want and how to create a more engaged and productive workforce.

Mindtera includes two platforms. The first, called Mindtera Pro, is an analytics dashboard and app with assessment tools to collect employee feedback, which is then used for insights about the well-being and engagement of a company’s workforce. This includes surveys that let employees participate anonymously or use their names. They can provide suggestions, criticism and other opinions about their work and employer.

The second, Mindtera Plus, connects companies to coaching and development consultants for help with management and workplace culture issues. Employers have the option of either subscribing to Mindtera Plus for a continuous action plan, or working with consultants on demand. Mindtera Plus uses internal consultants, external certified consultants and curated partners, who provide strategic program plans and monthly or quarterly progress reports for clients.

Bhaskoro said Mindtera’s main competitors are EAPs based outside of Indonesia, and traditional workforce consulting agencies. The main way that Mindtera differentiates is by giving employers real-time monitoring on how engaged employees are, instead of making them wait for reports. Mindtera Pro also gives them more visibility into spending on activities, vendors or platforms that they use as interventions to improve productivity and performance.

The newunding will be used to expand Mindtera’s B2B platform, with the goal of becoming Indonesia’s top employee assistance program platform.

In a statement about the funding, Seedstars International Ventures general partner Patricia Sosrodjojo, said, “The world has seen a major shift in the understanding of how integral mental health and well-being are for businesses, but there is still much work to be done in order to effectively address this. Mindtera is at the forefront of foundational changes in the workplace and has been able to rapidly expand its reach in Indonesia’s HR space.”

Jakarta-based Mindtera helps companies keep an eye on employee morale by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

The website for ODIN Intelligence, a company that provides technology and tools for law enforcement and police departments, was defaced on Sunday.

The apparent hack comes days after Wired reported that an app developed by the company, SweepWizard, which allows police to manage and coordinate multi-agency raids, had a significant security vulnerability that exposed personal information of police suspects and sensitive details of upcoming police operations to the open web.

ODIN provides apps, like SweepWizard and other technologies, to law enforcement departments. It also provides a service called SONAR, or the Sex Offender Notification and Registration system, used by state and local law enforcement to remotely manage registered sex offenders. But the company has also been the subject of controversy. Last year, ODIN was found to be marketing its facial recognition technology for identifying homeless people and describing those capabilities in callous and degrading terms.

It’s not clear who defaced ODIN’s website or how the intruders broke in, but a message left behind quoted ODIN founder and chief executive Erik McCauley, who largely dismissed Wired’s recent reporting that found the SweepWizard app was insecure and spilling data.

“And so, we decided to hack them,” the message left on ODIN’s website said.

The text of the defacement is ambiguous as to whether the hackers exfiltrated data from ODIN’s systems or if, as it claims, “all data and backups have been shredded,” suggesting that there may have been an attempt to erase the company’s stores of data. But the defacement note made note of three large archive files, totaling more than 16 gigabytes of data, each named in relation to ODIN, the sex offenders’ data, and the SweepWizard app, suggesting that the hackers may have at least had access to the company’s data.

The defacement also included a set of Amazon Web Services keys, apparently belonging to ODIN. TechCrunch could not immediately confirm that the keys belong to ODIN, but the keys apparently correspond with an instance on AWS’ GovCloud, which houses more sensitive police and law enforcement data.

ODIN chief executive Erik McCauley did not return emails from TechCrunch with questions about the defacement and apparent breach, but ODIN’s defaced website was pulled offline a short time later.

ODIN Intelligence website is defaced as hackers claim breach by Zack Whittaker originally published on TechCrunch

Thousands of Norton LifeLock customers had their accounts compromised in recent weeks, potentially allowing criminal hackers access to customer password managers, the company revealed in a recent data breach notice.

In a notice to customers, Gen Digital, the parent company of Norton LifeLock, said that the likely culprit was a credential stuffing attack — where previously exposed or breached credentials are used to break into accounts on different sites and services that share the same passwords — rather than a compromise of its systems. It’s why two-factor authentication, which Norton LifeLock offers, is recommended, as it blocks attackers from accessing someone’s account with just their password.

The company said it found that the intruders had compromised accounts as far back as December 1, close to two weeks before its systems detected a “large volume” of failed logins to customer accounts on December 12.

“In accessing your account with your username and password, the unauthorized third party may have viewed your first name, last name, phone number, and mailing address,” the data breach notice said. The notice was sent to customers that it believes use its password manager feature, because the company cannot rule out that the intruders also accessed customers’ saved passwords.

Gen Digital said it sent notices to about 6,450 customers whose accounts were compromised.

Norton LifeLock provides identity protection and cybersecurity services. It’s the latest incident involving the theft of customer passwords of late. Earlier this year, password manager giant LastPass confirmed a data breach in which intruders compromised its cloud storage and stole millions of customers’ encrypted password vaults. In 2021, the company behind a popular enterprise password manager called Passwordstate was hacked to push a tainted software update to its customers, allowing the cybercriminals to steal customers’ passwords.

That said, password managers are still widely recommended by security professionals for generating and storing unique passwords, so long as the appropriate precautions and protections are put in place to limit the fallout in the event of a compromise.

Norton LifeLock says thousands of customer accounts breached by Zack Whittaker originally published on TechCrunch