Boston Tech Watch: Tufin, Facebook, RightHand, Diameter & Jebbit

April 16, 2019

A cybersecurity IPO could raise up to $124 million for an Israeli-based company with its US headquarters in Boston. Facebook’s Boston office wants to map the world’s population in high def, starting with Africa. More venture cash is flowing into Bay State startups. Read all this and much more in this week’s roundup of local tech news.

—Tufin Software Technologies, a cybersecurity company based in Israel with its US headquarters in Boston, went public this week and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange as TUFN. Its shares priced at $14 apiece, the top of the price range it outlined in SEC filings. The sale to the public markets will raise $124 million if underwriters exhaust all their share-buying options. During its first day of trading Thursday, Tufin’s share price jumped to just shy of $20 and closed the day at $19.10.

Tufin’s investors from Catalyst Private Equity Partners will have 20 percent; entities affiliated with Marker LLC—which merged with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors in August 2017—will have 21.9 percent; state-owned Russian bank Sberbank will own 5 percent; and Israeli venture firm Vintage Investment Partners will own about 7.9 percent.

Tufin—which says it competes with products offered by AlgoSec, FireMon, Skybox Security, Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC), and Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO)—reported $85 million in sales in 2018 and a net loss of $4.3 million. The company has 424 employees, with 217 based in Israel and 121 in the US at offices in Boston and Akron, Ohio.

—Researchers and data scientists at Facebook’s (NASDAQ: FB) offices in Cambridge, MA, have released high-resolution maps of population density for the whole African continent. The information—not based on any data collected by Facebook’s social media platform, the tech giant says—is designed to assist relief agencies responding to disasters. The company says it used “machine learning techniques, high-resolution satellite imagery, and population data” to map “hundreds of millions of structures distributed across vast areas, and then used that to extrapolate the local population density.” Facebook says it intends to map all of the world’s population this way.

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