Top startup news for today, Thursday, March 21, 2019

Good morning! Here are some of the top technology startup news stories for today, Thursday, March 21.

LogRocket raises $15 million in funding to triple its headcount. LogRocket, a Cambridge, MA-based startup provider of front-end application performance management platform, has raised $15m in funding to increase it staff strength. The  new fund, which includes a new $11m Series A funding, led by Battery Ventures, with participation from seed investor Matrix Partners, also includes a previously unannounced $4m seed round. In conjunction with the Series A round, Battery General Partner Neeraj Agrawal has joined Matrix General Partner Stan Reiss on LogRocket’s board of directors.

AppDetex raises $10 million in Series B funding to secure brands’ digital footprint and accelerate growth. As reported earlier this morning, AppDetex, the global digital risk protection startup company that combats the misuse of intellectual property, brand infringement, fraud, and piracy, today announced it has raised $10 million in Series B equity financing to expand national sales and marketing efforts and invest in product development. The round is led by First Analysis, a leading venture capital firm investing in established rapid-growth companies, with participation existing investors including EPIC Ventures and Origin Ventures. The Series B funding rounds out $17.5M in total funding to date.

Facebook employees had access to millions of user passwords, report says. According to latest finding Thursday first reported by cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs, Facebook stored “hundreds of millions” of account passwords without encryption and viewable as plain text to tens of thousands of company employees. The social giant later confirmed the report in a blog post on its website. The incident could have affected as many as 600 million users, a significant portion of Facebook’s user base of 2.7 billion people.

Tesla sues self-driving startup Zoox for allegedly taking secrets. Tesla is suing Zoox, a robotics company pioneering autonomous mobility as-a-service, and and several former Tesla employees for allegedly stealing its company secrets. In a filing in a U.S. District Court in Northern California, Tesla said its former former employees Scott Turner, Sydney Cooper, Christian Dement, and Craig Emigh, “absconded with select proprietary Tesla documents useful to their new employer, and at least one of them used Tesla’s confidential information to target other Tesla employees for hiring by Zoox.”

OneFi Acquires Nigerian fintech startup Amplify. One Finance Limited (OneFi), a consumer lending platform provider, has acquired Amplified Payments Ltd (Amplify), a Lagos, Nigeria-based fintech startup that builds and facilitates payment solutions and digital financial transactions for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will enable OneFi to boost its financial services offering, as the company adds Amplify’s assets, tradements and flagship products, AmplifyPay and mTransfers, to its portfolio. Co-founded in 2015 by Segun Adeyemi and Maxwell Obi, who first met as Entrepreneurs-in-Training at MEST Africa’s Entrepreneurial Training Program in Accra, Ghana, Amplify has become one of Nigeria’s leading online recurring payment processors, supporting over 1,000 merchants and facilitating digital transactions for four of the country’s largest banks.

Axway acquires data startup Streamdata.io to advance event-driven APIs for its customers. Axway has acquired Streamdata.io, a software publisher specializing in event-driven API Management, to bolster both its API Management offer and the technological capabilities of its hybrid integration platform. The total amount of the deal was not disclosed. Axway is a French technology company and a provider of multi-enterprise cloud integration and API and identity management software. Founded in 2008 by Eric Horesnyi, Streamdata.io helps developers turn content into streams of data through event-driven APIs. Based in France and the United States, the startup specializes in real-time data distribution.