The 12 months was 2020 and Nicolas Orban, Stéphane Derosiaux and Stéphane Maarek were extremely frustrated with Apache Kafka. The real-time data stream tool simply couldn’t sustain with the engineering needs of the three — especially through the pandemic, when corporations were rushing to use cloud services.

“Many companies have had difficulty scaling their data operations,” Orban told TechCrunch. “And they have struggled to realize the full potential of their data, leaving vast amounts unused or sent to silos.”

After some thought, Orban, Derosiaux and Maarek got here to the conclusion that Kafka, although burdensome, was not an entire failure. This could work, they thought, if it could possibly be improved with some instrumentation.

So they decided to construct the instrumentation.

The trio named the tool Conductorand through the years, it has evolved right into a full-fledged streaming data management platform – one which can capture and filter data according to company policy before it reaches its destination.

Conductor essentially acts as an information gatekeeper, Orban (the startup’s CEO) said, stopping end-applications from being contaminated with “bad data” – corrupted, warped or otherwise incomplete. For example, this could possibly be data for real-time analytics or predictive maintenance.

“Customers are struggling with data explosion, data underutilization and technical hurdles to scaling data in real time,” Orban said. “We are currently working with some of the largest companies in the world because they are the ones feeling these challenges the most.”

Companies can monitor their data streams using Conduktor or share them with third parties through Conduktor Share, which allows organizations to share specific streams externally for data licensing.

The tool runs on a company’s infrastructure and may implement data masking and access controls to be certain that a company’s data practices comply with regulations equivalent to GDPR.

This month, Conduktor closed a $30 million Series B financing round led by RTP Global, with participation from Ansa, M12 (Microsoft’s enterprise fund) and Accel.

Conduktor has competition on this market (as does Immerok), however the startup is growing at a rapid pace, tripling its annual recurring revenue last 12 months. The startup counts DraftKings and Lufthansa as customers and expects to double its 60-person team by 2026.

“As streaming is inevitable in digital innovation, the need for an enterprise data management platform continues to grow,” Orban said, citing a Fortune Business Insights report that estimates the streaming market will grow to $185 billion by 2032.

The fresh money, which is able to bring the New York company’s total capital to $52 million, will go toward overall expansion and product development, Orban said.

TozeroA Munich-based startup that recovers helpful raw materials from recycled lithium-ion batteries is preparing to scale. The startup just closed an oversubscribed €11 million (roughly $11.7 million) seed round to scale up production by constructing its first industrial-scale implementation facility (first of its kind, or FOAK).

Currently, Tozero’s pilot plant processes nine tons of used lithium-ion batteries a day, however the startup is aiming for unlimited capability in what it hopes can be just just a few years of scaling up its operations.

“Other competitors are raising much more money to get into an industrial plant. But because our process and our technology are so lean and efficient, we don’t need more than that to achieve our first industrial deployment or what the investing world would call a “first-of-its-kind” factory. This is what we intend to build,” co-founder and CEO Dr. Sarah Fleischer (pictured above, left) told TechCrunch.

The startup claims that after the Tozero process gains industrial speed and functionality, there can be no hard limits on what it may well achieve when it comes to battery recycling, so long as it has access to waste streams.

“The goal of FOAK is actually to get into the actual, continuous production – manufacturing – of the product,” added co-founder and managing director, Dr. Ksenija Milicevic Neumann.

“After that, unlimited, infinite, exponential growth will be possible,” Fleischer said. “Our idea is to independently run plants around the world. We’re focusing on Germany, Europe, and then moving on to North America. But once we get to this plant (FOAK), we will be able to expand Tozero into multiple dimensions around the world. This will therefore be a key milestone in the next phase of growth.”

The startup pointed to forecasts that global demand for lithium is it is anticipated to quadruple to three.1 million metric tons by 2030, driven by the rapid uptake of electrical vehicles and growing demand for large-scale renewable energy batteries. By comparison, lithium mining produced just 180,000 metric tons last 12 months, so recycling can have a key role to play in meeting this demand.

The EU Battery Directive will even introduce an obligation to get better not less than 80% of lithium from batteries by 2031.

“The technology works… So the core part of our technology is already in place. Now we just have to industrialize it,” Fleischer said.

Eliminating bottlenecks in recycling

The startup seeks to eliminate bottlenecks in lithium battery recycling with: water-based carbonation a recovery process that’s more environmentally friendly than conventional pyrometallurgy (smelting). Its lithium recovery method doesn’t involve using harsh acids, as would be the case with other battery recycling processes.

Tozero claims its method also leads to significantly lower emissions – 70% lower – in comparison with mining.

“Commodity security is, in a sense, national security,” Fleischer said. “There are so many underdeveloped industries in Europe that are starving for this material because Europe does not produce lithium carbonate; we import. If you look at (European Commission President) Ursula von der Leyen, she states that we import over 97% of lithium carbonate from China. We are therefore highly dependent on the Eastern Front and the mining industry.”

Access to black pulp, a by-product of the mechanical recycling of lithium batteries processed by Tozero, shouldn’t be restricted across borders. In terms of competition, Fleischer describes the market as a “completely blue ocean market” by which battery recycling efforts are largely focused elsewhere. The startup says it may well use black pulp from any style of lithium-ion batteries in order that waste streams may be mixed.

“Lithium will always be there (recyclable batteries), but other elements change – with innovations in battery production – so we don’t care if there is nickel, if there is, for example, a few percent less or more cobalt, but lithium is always present,” said Milicevic Neumann.

Tozero also recovers graphite from blackmass waste streams. The startup says its give attention to these two key raw materials is a “key point of difference” in comparison with other battery recycling players.

The give attention to lithium can also be why the startup’s customers are beating their strategy to its doors.

“Customers are just storming the place,” Fleischer said, stating that market demand is “far too high” for many industrial applications in Europe. Tozero has “over a billion dollars worth of clients in the pipeline who are interested in our material,” she said.

Tozero has delivered the primary batch of high-purity processed lithium to business customers this Aprilnine months after opening pilot facility in Germany.

The need for speed

Tozero was only founded in 2022, so how has it achieved something that larger players within the industry have seemingly didn’t do over the previous few a long time? The startup says it comes right down to focus, speed and inventive pondering.

Speed ​​requires creativity when constructing hardware, Fleischer argued, explaining that the most important challenge for hardware startups is the delivery time of the vital hardware to scale.

“We break things quickly, learn, iterate and improve at a very rapid pace — probably along the lines of Elon Musk’s SpaceX principle — we just build things and see (what happens) until something breaks, we learn from it, iterate and we refine into very fast sprints, which is very unfamiliar to hardware companies,” Fleischer said.

“I would say we protect ourselves through speed,” she added, confirming that Tozero’s approach relies on “process innovations” which can be protected as trade secrets, although not patented. “The entire process, stages or parameters, sequence, method of performing specific activities, is completely our recipe for ‘Coca Cola’ (trade secret),” she added.

Tozero believes it might expand its approach to get better other raw materials that may be used as an “energy source”, although it might not specify what materials it might add later.

The overarching mission is to attain zero waste of key raw materials. “We are quite aware of (the broader challenges of decarbonizing in a sustainable way),” Milicevic Neumann told TechCrunch. “That’s why we also want to focus on recycling some other materials in the future.”

But if it wants to attain real impact, would not Tozero must license its trade secrets to others? They each say they have not fully selected their approach yet, but prefer to retain control of the method as they scale – although they’re open to partnerships.

“On the operational side, we believe that we can only truly deliver the highest quality if we operate the plants ourselves,” Fleischer said. “This can also apply to partners. I mean, we’re open to it. So I don’t want to say yes or no to licensing. Partnerships are great in terms of scale if they are helpful, but we will operate our own plants.”

Tozero’s seed round was led by NordicNinja, with participation from recent investors In-Q-Tel (an American strategic public-private fund), Honda and global infrastructure engineering giant JGC Group. The startup’s €3.5 million pre-season round, closed about two years ago, was led by Berlin-based Atlantic Labs. So far, the Tozero project has raised €17 million, which incorporates a €2.5 million grant from the EU’s research and development support body, the European Innovation Council.

“Tozero’s innovative approach to battery recycling is exactly what Europe needs to secure key supplies in the global electrification race, and Japan would like to cooperate,” Shin Nikkuni, co-founder and managing partner at NordicNinja, said in an announcement. “Sarah and Ksenija, two exceptional founders, have the knowledge and desire to transform the landscape towards sustainable battery solutions. We are excited to support the tozero team as they scale their technology and commercial operations and contribute to a more sustainable and independent energy future for all.”

Amazon confirmed that employee data was compromised following a “security event” at a third-party vendor.

In a press release provided to TechCrunch on Monday, Amazon spokesman Adam Montgomery confirmed that employee data had been breached.

“Amazon and AWS systems remain secure and we now have not experienced any security incident. We have been notified of a security incident at certainly one of our property management providers that has impacted several of their clients, including Amazon. The only Amazon information affected was employees’ work contact information, equivalent to work email addresses, landline phone numbers and constructing locations, Montgomery said.

Amazon wouldn’t say what number of employees were affected by the breach. It noted that the anonymous third-party seller doesn’t have access to sensitive data equivalent to Social Security numbers or financial information, and claimed to have fixed the safety flaw accountable for the data breach.

The confirmation comes after the threat actor claimed to have published data stolen from Amazon on the notorious hacking website BreachForums. The individual claims to have over 2.8 million lines of data, which he says was stolen during last yr’s massive MOVEit Transfer mining.

A threat actor operating under the moniker ‘Nam3L3ss’ claims to have released data allegedly stolen from 25 major organizations, cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock reports.

“What you have seen so far is less than 0.001% of the data I have,” the threat actor claims. “I have 1,000 premieres that I have never seen before.”

TechCrunch has reached out to other organizations named by the threat actor but has not yet received any further responses.

The MOVEit hack, through which attackers exploited a zero-day vulnerability in Progress Software’s file transfer software, was the most important hack of 2023.

These breaches, claimed by the notorious ransomware and extortion gang Clop, affected greater than 1,000 organizations, including the Oregon Department of Transportation (3.5 million records stolen), the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (4 million ) and the US government services contract giant Maximus (11 million).