A decade ago, when we heard the term “retail security” it was likely to evoke images of mall security guards patrolling local shopping centers. But now, it’s 2016 and things have changed. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, ecommerce sales were $341.7B last year (up 14.6% ), with ecommerce as a percent of overall retail sales also continuing a steady climb. With the shift in the way people spend, comes the demand to evolve protection [...]

Chetan Puttagunta and Ravi Viswanathan At NEA, we have been excited about our thesis in vertical clouds, or enterprise cloud software solutions purpose-built for a specific industry or vertical.  The really interesting verticals are typically massive markets that heretofore have had legacy or antiquated software (if any) or have been run very inefficiently.  One such market is the residential real estate market.  Buying a home is the single biggest financial decision that most Americans make in [...]

Ravi Viswanathan, Kittu Kolluri, & Aaron Jacobson At NEA we’ve been privileged to help fuel the evolution of enterprise software from on-premise to the cloud by working with category-defining SaaS companies such as WebEx, Salesforce.com, and Workday. We continue to invest in the SaaS transformation of the enterprise, from emerging big data applications (check out our colleague Scott Sandell’s take on this shift) to the rise of industry-specific or “vertical” SaaS—think utilities (Opower) or education [...]