Israeli startup Soluto has closed a healthy $6.2 million second round of financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners and joined by Giza Venture Capital. This is on top of the $1.6 million round the company raised a year ago from Proxima, bringing the total amount of capital invested in the company close to $8 million.
The company, which is aggressively keeping its operations hidden from the public eye for now, is only willing to describe itself as being in the ‘anti-PC frustration software’ business. Our man in Israel, Roi Carthy, says the company is one of the hottest in Israel at present day, so let’s take a closer look at what they’re building over there.
Soluto’s stated objective is to resolve common end-users’ PC frustrations (e.g. sluggishness, application/OS freezes and long boots). Granted, there are literally hundreds of software applications that claim to deal with these issues, including registry cleaners and a plethora of ‘PC performance boosting’ applications but Soluto claims they all miss the point.
The startup doesn’t see the crux of the problem in buggy software but in the way applications behave when running alongside each other and the manner in which they interact with the hardware. In its research, Soluto claims to have uncovered the number one cause for slow PCs: the fact that legitimate software is hogging resources with no apparent reason. For example, software that loads at boot and performs indexing could also perform its chore when the machine is idle. Seeing as it does not, the user has to wait—needlessly—for the process to complete, and voilà , frustration.
Soluto believes it can tackle the nature of the issues that result in PC frustrations by employing a crowd-sourced approach to ‘map the PC genome’, which is the term the company uses to denominate the collection of data that can be determined about application behavior, processing requirements, hardware and performance. Obviously, the specifics of this modus operandi are hazy at best, so we’ll have to wait for the company to launch something in public beta to see how it stacks up.
Along with the round of financing, Soluto is also announcing that Naftali Bennett has been appointed CEO of the fledgling company. Bennett, a well-known entrepreneur in Israel, is the former founder and CEO of Cyota, an anti-fraud company which was acquired by RSA Security in 2005 for $145 million. Bennett joins Soluto’s original co-founders Ishay Green and Tomer Dvir on the management team.
Soluto remains in stealth / closed alpha, but intrigued PC users can sign up for the company’s upcoming public beta product right here.
Well done Ishay!
i met the team in techaviv event great guys i wish the only luck
Just go Mac…
Words can’t describe how much I loathe comments like this one.
Honestly, isn’t it supposed to be the job of the OS ?
What’s wrong with that comment? Switching to a mac might be a genuine solution.
If they switch to mac, then they would have to wait years for someone to release the software they need. Got chrome? Comming any year now!
But what if I use my computer for work and not just dicking around ?
You’re not helping!
Yeah, I’ll install Soluto to optimize my apps, and then I’ll have to install something else to optimize Soluto, and then something else to optimize the previous something else…
Congrats Ishay and the guys.
It’s not an easy task to raise such amounts of funding these days.
Congrats on the funding! What an interesting, smart application. I have a frustrated PC that I’d be interested in trying it on…
Congrats to raise any type of $ in this economy.
Yes, they’re giving the “super-finger” to slow PCs. (Am I the only one who sees that in their logo?) Congrats on the funding!
call me old fashioned but… doesn’t the business model deserve a mention as well?
i mean… if people are expected to pay to get their machines running faster/better…
will there be any sort of guarantee / SLA ?
if i install a new app, do i void soluto’s guarantee?
it’s great people are getting funded, but i expect techcrunch to be more than a PR broadcaster.
Dan–The company isn’t ready to discuss these issues yet. I can assure you that once it’s ready to ship out it’s product we’ll be there asking these questions.
R.
I have a solution to make PCs run a lot better (and I’m serious): migrate to Windows 7. It boots quickly and it seems to run faster than Leopard (using Bootcamp on my Mac). Unless Soluto can deliver *at least* a *sustainable* 25% improvement in Windows 7 boot and normal operational performance, I question the value.
I would not invest $1 in this company:
1) Boot time: PCs sleep modes are more and more efficient. You can spend weeks without having to reboot your PC (months for Macs
). Optimizing the boot time will be less and less important.
2) App optimization: apps will run more and more in the cloud. Eventually you’ll need one browser and that’s all.
The product might be useful in the short run, but I don’t thing it will bring a lot of value in the future.
Remember, there are 300 million consumers hungry to buy things they don’t need.
Even if this software works well, your analysis is still true – but you count out hundreds of millions of people to whom “app in the cloud” is like saying “Boogoo boogoo wawa”. Few infomercials with Billy Mays look-a-like playing with his now-so-much-faster-because-of-[insert highest paying software provider] computer full of joy and these guys can turn millionaires.
Cheers, the application looks very promising. Well done
Definitely a big market for this. Most users have no idea how to optimize their computers to run well, and as a result, they turn to software to do it for them. It’s always best to get the “middle-of-the-road” user, not geeks.
Every time your computer touches a file the desktop search indexer scans it, the virus protector scans it, the spyware scanner scans it, the music player scans it to auto find music for your collection, some people might have more than one of each running without knowing, add to that the fact that hard drives are used as virtual memory, and people don’t bother defragmenting their hard drive regularly because it takes a long time, means your super fast hard drive slows down to a snails pace whenever it does anything.
Your computer also runs a lot of useless programs in the background that most people don’t know about which also scans files, looks for software updates, schedules processes, updates the registry, slows boot time, takes up memory and processing power. Many of those programs can be turned off and your computer will still function normally.
Most of this is the e fault of software vendors like Microsoft, Apple, Norton, Adobe, Google, etc. It seems this piece of software adds a layer of common sense to this chaos. It sounds like it delays a lot of the file scanning actions until the computer is idle, and it also might give simple options to turn off a lot of useless background programs that are not needed. Maybe it also schedules the auto updaters to run when idle rather than all the time from startup to shutdown.
The arrogance of companies like Adobe, Apple, etc. is staggering. They each think their own software is more important than everyone elses, so important that people won’t mind their updater programs running 24/7 when all they need to do is look for updates when the program is started.
Their arrogance extends to also thinking their software is so important that everyones computer must have their software bootup silently in the background when they start their computer, running in the background forever wasting resources waiting for the single moment when the user clicks the icon. The result being their software loads a bit quicker because it is already running silently in the background and it just needs to open the user interface.
+1 Stupid stupid stupid ignorant software vendors…Gosh !
How about an app that does not let any process consume more than 20% of the CPU, unless the user gives permission.
The app you’re looking for is called an operating system.
Hi,
I wanted to take a minute and congratulate the Soluto team for the outstanding research and dedication.
Thanks,
Mukul
Well…..
I see and use so many diffrent solutions to do the above, I will vote for them but they do have long line of dead look alikes around the world….
My the force be with them!
Nimrod
Umm, Soluto sounds redundant.
Windows users can just download and install something like the excellent Process Lasso:
http://www.bits...om/prolasso.php
There’s a freeware version and a paid one too. It works wonderfully in keeping your PC responsive and taming/controlling all your running apps so that none become hogs.
And many other utilities already exist with the same functions.
Another example of VC’s without a clue.
my thoughts exactly.
Mine too. No wonder the VC business is cratering. I think I’m going to go to this VC and get funding to ship canisters of winter air down from Canada as a green alternative to air conditioning.
Mine too.
BTW this VC (Bessemer) passed on Google 10 years ago.
Wow. I never realised most TC posters were completely clueless about tech.
There are literally 100s of scam programs that promise to optimise PC performance, I don’t see how this one is going to be any different.
TC, this post should probably be stuck in your Scamville section. Shame on you.
The biggest enemy of PC performance is stupidity. Stupid people click on things they don’t understand and end up overflowing with bloatware. So then they buy more bloatware from Soluto to attack the bloatware they already have. It’s like selling sand to people who live in the desert.
Wow very interesing. I will keep my eye out for them
congrats!