Will Kohler

The “Wiz effect” isn’t just hype - it’s impacting valuations across 30% of our deal flow at StageOne. Wiz was built by operators who had already scaled inside a Fortune 500 company. That context matters more than most investors admit. The $32B Wiz exit was a milestone for Israeli tech (and a masterclass in clarity, execution, and scale). But what fascinates me more is what happened next. From where I sit, the “Wiz effect” is no longer just a headline, it’s become a pricing mechanism. We’re now seeing cybersecurity startups raise $15-20M seed rounds - sometimes pre-product, often pre-revenue - based on the hope of replicating an outlier. But what made Wiz extraordinary wasn’t just the outcome. It was the inputs: a second-time founding team with deep domain credibility, a bold platform vision, and a network that allowed them to raise fast and execute faster. That kind of playbook can’t be copied. It was earned - through hard-won experience and flawless timing. What concerns me now is how distorted the early-stage cybersecurity market has become. Great founders are being benchmarked against a company that was, in every sense, the exception - not the rule. At StageOne Ventures, cybersecurity makes up nearly 30% of our pipeline. We’re not pulling back, but we are raising the bar. Founders: If you’re building in cyber, we want to meet you. But let’s align on ambition and execution, because the market is watching, and timing alone won’t build you a Wiz.

99

4 Comments

DealWire.TECH Deal of the Week Ridgeline $250m Series E Ridgeline has raised $250 million in Series E funding at a $1.425 billion valuation to expand its AI-native investment management platform. The round was led by founder and chairman Dave Duffield, co-founder of PeopleSoft and Workday. Participants included Motley Fool Ventures, associates of Smead Capital Management, and Patrick O’Shaughnessy. What makes this deal interesting is the ambition: bringing portfolio accounting, trading, compliance, reporting, and client servicing onto a unified platform with a shared data foundation and embedded AI. For asset and wealth managers, fragmented systems create significant operational costs. Teams reconcile data, transfer information between applications, and maintain complex integrations. A unified platform could reduce that workload and give AI access to the context needed to support more complete workflows. Three points stand out: • Customer participation in the financing is a meaningful endorsement, although it does not by itself establish broad market adoption. • The capital will support AI development, managed services, product expansion, and growth in Canada and Europe. • Implementation remains the critical test. Replacing core investment systems requires reliable migrations, strong controls, and measurable operational benefits. My view: some of the most valuable enterprise AI businesses will emerge where trusted data and essential workflows come together. Investment management is a compelling market for that approach—but execution will determine who wins. #DealWire #FinTech #ArtificialIntelligence #InvestmentManagement #VentureCapital

2

Big milestone for Firmable. We’ve raised $14m Series A led by Airtree. Sales has moved through a few big waves: intuition-led, CRM-led, data-led. We’re now entering the next one – intelligence-led sales. The opportunity isn’t just better data. It’s turning that data into clear direction and action, without adding more work for sales teams. That’s what we’re building at Firmable: a foundation of trusted external data, layered with intelligence that helps sellers know who to focus on and when. Led by Airtree, this round supports our expansion across Asia and into the US – and accelerates the build-out of AI agents that take the admin work off sales teams so they can focus on what they do best. Proud of the team, grateful to our customers and investors. We’re just getting started. Read the exclusive in the AFR. https://lnkd.in/gr66uknb Leigh Jasper | Tara Salmon | Karthik Venkatasubramanian| Chester Thompson| Chath Widanapathirana

147

19 Comments

Yesterday, two DCVC-backed companies raised about a half billion dollars. In today's funding environment, that's not that exceptional... Together, the two companies just happen to enable gigawatt-scale AI compute, except in the unprecedentedly small space of only about 40 shipping containers, no exotic cooling required. You have to wonder what the US military might do with a gigawatt-equivalent of compute they could fit in a few C5 flights... or a 100MW-compute platform that fits in a single rocket launch... Even that, in DCVC's world, isn't that exceptional. We like to say we help make the impossible and essential, profitable and available. But what is exceptional, and this is a theme with us folks, is that they are each only two of many of our companies delivering robustly on outcomes considered impossible on VC dollars or in reasonable time, at the point when we backed each company from very early on: - a safe, cost-effective, meltdown-proof, truck-portable 1 megawatt nuclear reactor (Radiant, see https://lnkd.in/gF3JAHwS) for American energy dominance - American-made AI semiconductor chips that match or outperform everything else at 100x the energy efficiency, on off-the-shelf models (Mythic, see https://lnkd.in/gWFdvZFT) We were able to make the calls on these, and how they could work together, along with similar calls on all of their brother and sister impossible companies, because of a very deep bench of unified scientific, engineering, operational, and business building experience considered passé by a lot of other folks. It's how we make the exceptional routine.

103

6 Comments