Ed Sim

Thread Lands $18M Growth Financing: NEW YORK, NY, Thread, an AI service desk platform for managed service providers (MSPs), announced an $18 million growth equity investment from Susquehanna Growth Equity. 💡IdeaFire™️🔥 #IdeaFire #VC #VentureCapital

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#Penetrationtesting once every few years assumes your environment hasn't changed. Cloud migrations, new integrations, #API expansions constantly reshape your attack surface. So do attacker tactics. Organizations that stay ahead test annually. This creates a repeatable cycle that compounds. Each year brings better visibility, stronger deal documentation, and the kind of security discipline that insurers and customers actually recognize. Testing becomes a business advantage, not just a compliance checkbox. See how strategic organizations build this into operations. https://cstu.io/62e042

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🌪️ SaaS sprawl is real—and it’s worse than you think. In this clip from The Professional CISO Show, Valence CEO & Co-founder Yoni Shohet explore the hidden risks of hyperconnected SaaS environments with David Malicoat at CISO XC DFW. The takeaway? It's not just about how many apps you're using—it's about how they're connected, what they're exposing, and how easily that can spiral out of control. 📺 https://lnkd.in/eAzHnJ5K 🎧 Full episode: https://lnkd.in/eaDnvpYh  #saassecurity #sspm #ciso #cybersecurity #infosec #thpc

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In tech M&A, retention is one of the first signals buyers look at. It tells them if your revenue base is solid, if customers truly value your product and how much risk they’re taking. Metrics like NRR, GRR, and churn don’t measure only performance but directly influence valuation. Retention is not just about keeping customers, it shows to buyers that your revenue is resilient and your business has the foundations to sustain long-term value. Our latest article shares 4 strategies to improve your business valuation. Read it through the link: https://lnkd.in/dspHinPB

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.@TechCrunch How to build a GTM strategy that actually drives results at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025: At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, GTM pros Max Altschuler, Alison Wagonfeld, and Marc Manara take the Builders Stage to show founders how to build a go-to-market engine that doesn’t just support the product, but also scales with it. http://dlvr.it/TNGcr4 #tech #startups #VC

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What if the real opportunity isn’t in existing demand, but in creating it? Sometimes the market only becomes obvious after someone builds for it. At Peak XV & Surge Immersion, Vanta Co-founder & CEO Christina Cacioppo spoke with Rajan Anandan about building in a space where startup demand for SOC 2 compliance was practically non-existent. Vanta realized compliance was broken: the process was slow, complex, and expensive. Addressing these thoughtfully helped create a new market. And in the early days, the company didn’t even have a website. Much of the growth came through word of mouth as they scaled. Here's a short sneak peek from the session. We'll be sharing the talks soon.

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Cloudflare Acquires #AstroTechnology to Advance Web Development Protecting and investing in open source tools is critical to the health of a functioning, free, and open Internet, said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. By acquiring this talented team and committing to one of the most impactful frameworks when it comes to speed and performance, we’re going to ensure Astro continues to be the best web framework for content-driven websites, not only as it is today but for years to come. 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐞: https://lnkd.in/dbrvQRaq #AstroJavaScript #AstroTechnology #CIOFirst #Cloudflare #DevOps #framework #News #opensourcetools #webdevelopment

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SaaS raised the bar on how fast business is supposed to move. We expect dashboards to update in real time, approvals to route automatically, and data to sync across systems without anyone touching a thing. Speed is no longer a luxury feature. It is the baseline. And yet, in a lot of companies, the signature process still acts like a speed bump in an otherwise automated highway. The deal is aligned, stakeholders are on board, momentum is high, and then everything pauses while people chase emails, resend documents, or fix tiny errors that should have been caught upstream. It is a small step in theory, but in practice it quietly drags on revenue velocity and pulls ops teams into manual follow-up mode instead of strategic work. The real shift happening now is that signatures are moving from being a “final task” to being part of core workflow architecture. The teams that treat them as infrastructure, not admin, are the ones reducing cycle time, tightening operations, and scaling without adding process chaos. Here is the real question: if signing a document were as seamless as sending a message, where in your process would you suddenly start moving a lot faster? 🚀 #SaaS #eSignature #RevenueOps #SalesOps #DigitalWorkflow #BusinessOperations

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Based on above, we derive: (1) dollar content per rack across different configurations, (2) value TAM opportunities (dollar content per rack * number of server racks), and (3) implication to supply chain EPS. Key takeaways: (1) Rubin Ultra brings dollar content increases across scale up and scale out compared to GB300, (2) Rubin Ultra scale up brings dollar content increases across copper cables, PCB midplane, and CPO switch, (3) pluggable optical modules would continue to increase dollar content increase per rack in scale out compared to GB300 despite our assumption of 25-29% CPO switch penetration rate, (4) CPO appears costly considering 3D packaging, high integration, and the need to upgrade devices to semiconductor processing levels; however, the total cost of ownership (TCO) is attractive especially in high bandwidth requirement (e.g. 6.4T, 12.8T) considering the constraints of pluggable optical module and the power efficiency and energy savings, and (5) On the EPS opportunity, we see most suppliers benefiting from strong EPS contribution from a single configuration that is higher than their 2025 full year EPS, given the AI server racks shipment ramp up and specification upgrades driving the dollar content increase.

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Security software firm Datadog is in talks to purchase Israeli-founded cybersecurity startup Upwind Security in a $1 billion deal 💸 Based in #SanFrancisco, Upwind was founded by entrepreneur Amiram Shachar, together with Liran Polak, Lavi Ferdman and Tal Zuri. The team previously founded #Israeli startup Spot.io, which sold to NetApp for $450 million in 2020. 👉Read more from The Times of Israel: https://lnkd.in/gB-Xk2jc 📸 Upwind #StartupNation #IsraeliTech

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For rapidly scaling SaaS companies, landing those crucial enterprise clients is the ultimate growth accelerator. But there's a gatekeeper: SOC 2 compliance. For major corporations, demonstrating robust data security is a fundamental requirement. A clean SOC 2 report proves your commitment to protecting sensitive data, building essential trust, and unlocking significant new revenue streams. Don't let compliance be a hurdle; let it be your competitive edge. Is your SaaS ready to secure those high-value enterprise deals? Learn how SOC 2 paves the way. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gcQvWnwb 📞 888-341-7149 #SaaSGrowth #EnterpriseSales #SOC2Compliance #TechBusiness #ClientTrust #AuditAdvantage #ScaleUp #DataSecurity

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Thanks to NYSE for having Evolution Equity Partners’ founder and managing partner Richard Seewald on to discuss the AI x cybersecurity crossover during RSA Conference. A lot of the market is framing this moment as an “AI gold rush.” While it's certainly a cycle in VC, in cybersecurity it's not only about the technology. AI changes the mechanics of how work gets done, but humans remain the control surface. The “man in the middle” is where accountability sits: judgment calls, escalation paths, governance, and the decision to trust or override an automated action. As workflows become more agentic, that human layer becomes more important, not less. The winners will design for that reality, with clear oversight, auditability, and integration readiness. #Cybersecurity #ArtificialIntelligence #defendandprotect #AI

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The $32B acquisition that one VC is calling the ‘Deal of the Decade’According to Index Ventures Partner Shardul Shah, cybersecurity startup Wiz sits “at the center of three tailwinds: AI, cloud, and security spend.” Those tailwinds powered what just became the largest venture-backed acquisition in history — Google’s $32 billion deal, finalized after a declined 2024 offer, antitrust review on both sides of the Atlantic, and an […] https://lnkd.in/eWRk3XVB

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The best AI apps today are being built like infrastructure companies. Great breakdown from the awesome 💡 Yazan "Yaz" El-Baba on why technical depth, rapid iteration, and margin-aware architectures are becoming table stakes for AI startups. Definitely worth a read: https://lnkd.in/gMVFFXgH 

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Scanner, a San Francisco-based developer of a security data platform, has raised $22 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Mantis VC and strategic angel investors, including the CEO of Vanta and the former GM of Splunk Security. Led by CEO Cliff Crosland, the company plans to use the funding to scale its engineering team, accelerate development of its AI-native search index, and expand its platform to support agentic threat hunting across massive log datasets. Scanner’s specialized security data lake enables sub-second queries across petabytes of historical logs, offering SIEM-level speed at a fraction of the cost, and is already used by high-growth enterprises like Notion, Ramp, BeyondTrust, and Lemonade to detect and investigate complex threats. FOUNDER: Cliff Crosland INVESTORS: Sequoia Capital & Mantis VC ROUND: Series A AMOUNT: $22,000,000 HQ: San Francisco, California #VentureCapital #Scanner #CliffCrosland #TradedVC

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🔒 Is “Trust but verify” enough? Paul Davis, Field CISO at JFrog explains why software pipelines demand relentless scrutiny, and how “verify, verify, verify, then maybe trust” is reshaping secure app development from the inside out. Listen to the episode ⬇️ https://lnkd.in/eGYC3R_t #kbi #thevoiceofcyber #kbkast #Vanta #kbimedia

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