Remark trains AI models on human product experts to create personas that can answer questions with the same style of their human counterparts.
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Silo, a Bay Area food supply chain startup, has hit a rough patch. TechCrunch has learned that the company on Tuesday laid off roughly 30% of its staff, or north of two dozen employees. Silo has confirmed the headcount reductions, clarifying the cuts were across the board and not focused on individual departments. Silo shared […]
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When the founders of Sagetap, Sahil Khanna and Kevin Hughes, started working at early-stage enterprise software startups, they were surprised to find that the companies they worked at were trying to sell their innovative tech through old-school methods like repeated cold emails and calls. Khanna, a former product marketer, and Hughes, a former sales manager, […]
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The restaurant industry in the U.S. is expected to pass $1 trillion in sales for the first time this year, despite wider economic pressures on consumers. Now Restaurant365, a startup building tech to manage those businesses, has raised a hot round of $175 million to capitalize on that growth. The funding is being led by […]
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Digital banking startup Mercury is layering software onto its bank accounts, giving its business customers the ability to pay bills, invoice customers and reimburse employees, the company has told TechCrunch exclusively. The additional features puts the company in even more direct competition with the likes of Brex and Ramp, two rival fintechs that have for […]
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Entrepreneurs Al Yang and Adar Arnon met at Harvard Business School and quickly realized that they had an interest in common: cybersecurity.
“We’ve witnessed an evolving business climate that brought along with it an unprecedented need for improved security processes,” Arnon told TechCrunch. “Security’s importance has increased exponentially … [it’s] non-negotiable for technology buyers.”
Yang and Arnon decided to turn this interest into something more, so they started SafeBase, which was accepted into Y Combinator’s accelerator program during the pandemic.
SafeBase on Tuesday announced that it raised $33 million in a Series B round led by Touring Capital. The company helps customers fill out security questionnaires, which are reviews organizations normally kick off before buying a new piece of software. It’s a governance and compliance thing.
Security questionnaires can be painstaking, taking teams weeks to months to complete for more complex pieces of software. But Arnon makes the case that SafeBase can save time through automation — and AI.
SafeBase employs AI models “specifically trained on security documentation use cases” to read, interpret security information and questions and then automatically respond to security questionnaires. “[Our platform] takes the pain out of the cumbersome security review process by empowering security, governance, risk and compliance and revenue teams,” he said.
Image Credits: SafeBase
Being the cynic about AI I am, I asked Arnon about the accuracy of these models; AI is a notorious liar, after all. He claimed that it’s superior thanks to a “mix of large and small language models” that deliver “greater answer coverage.” Take that how you will.
Beyond the custom models, SafeBase provides an engine that allows a company to assign “rules-based behavior” for customer access, as well as dashboards that show insights and analytics on the company’s security posture.
SafeBase isn’t the only vendor out there offering tools to automate security questionnaires and reviews. Rivals include Conveyor, which recently raised $12.5 million; Kintent; and Quilt, which claims that it can also automate due diligence reviews in addition to security reviews.
Arnon didn’t seem too worried. Perhaps that’s because of SafeBase’s 700-company-strong customer roster, which includes Palantir, LinkedIn, Asana and Instacart.
“SafeBase saw massive growth in the past couple of years,” Arnon said. “Customers love the product and adoption continues to accelerate. The company benefits from increased visibility across its vendor network as more and more high-volume customers launch trust centers that replace the need for tens of thousands of manual security reviews.”
SafeBase, which is based in San Francisco, has 55 employees.
The company’s Series B had the participation of strategic investor Zoom Ventures (Zoom’s corporate venture arm), NEA, Y Combinator, Comcast Ventures and Cerca Partners as well as angels including former Salesforce chief trust officer Jim Alkove. It brings SafeBase’s total raised to over $50 million; Arnon says a significant portion will be put toward expanding the team.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we’re looking at Mercury’s latest expansions, wallet-as-a-service startup Ansa’s raise and more!
To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important fintech stories delivered to your inbox every Tuesday at 8 a.m. PT, subscribe here. (New day and time, same awesome newsletter!)
Digital banking startup Mercury is layering software onto its bank accounts, giving its business customers the ability to pay bills, invoice customers and reimburse employees, the company has told TechCrunch exclusively. The additional features put the company in even more direct competition with the likes of Brex and Ramp, two rival fintechs that have for years been fighting for market share in an increasingly crowded space. Mercury says that it has over 200,000 customers sending $4 billion in outgoing payments every month via its platform and that this move is a natural one for the seven-year-old company.
CB Insights took it upon itself to identify 85 potential acquisition targets for Ramp “given its heightened interest in M&A.” Here are a few examples: Greycroft-backed Streamlined, which does accounts receivable (AR) automation and whose $4 million raise TechCrunch covered here; Oddr, which is focused on invoice-to-cash management for the legal sector; Pactum, which does AI vendor negotiation; and OpStart, a startup valued at $10 million in 2022 that offers “financial operations for startups.” So far Ramp has acquired Cohere, Buyer and Venue.
We first covered Ansa in 2023 when they came out of stealth announcing a $5.4 million raise. Last week, the buzzy fintech shared with TC exclusively that it had raised another $14 million to grow its “wallet-as-a-service” business. We were impressed with the fact that 95.6% of the investors in its Series A round were female and by the company’s traction. Read more here.
Flipping houses is not for the faint of heart, no matter how fun or easy HGTV might make it seem. One startup wants to make the process less complicated by offering a different way to borrow money to fund such a purchase. Backflip offers a service to real estate investors for securing short-term loans. Beyond helping users secure financing, Backflip’s tech also helps investors source, track, comp and evaluate potential investments. Think of it as a cross between Zillow and Shopify. And it just raised $15 million.
Hans Tung, a managing partner at Notable Capital, formerly GGV Capital, has a lot of thoughts on the state of venture capital today. We recently brought him on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast to discuss valuations, why founders need to play the long game and the reason some VC firms are struggling more than others. We also delved deep into the reasons he’s still bullish on fintech, and which sectors in the fintech space have him especially excited. Check out interview excerpts and the actual podcast here.
The inside story of Chime, America’s biggest digital bank
Marqeta expands Uber Eats partnership
Nayax acquires VMtecnologia, expands in Latin America
Federal prosecutors are examining financial transactions at Block, owner of Cash App and Square
RIA custodian Altruist valued at over $1.5 bln in latest funding round
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Lucid Motors’ senior vice president of digital Mike Bell has resigned from his position. The company said in a filing Monday that the longtime Apple and Intel executive’s resignation is “effective immediately, in order to pursue other opportunities.”
Lucid says Bell will serve in an advisory role through mid-August to help “transition” his duties at the company, and has agreed to provide him with severance a $125,000 consulting fee. Bell, who was in charge of the company’s software development, is leaving as the company struggles to find consistent demand for its luxury Air while also pushing forward with production of its next vehicle, the Gravity SUV.
Bell joined Lucid in 2021 after about six months consulting with the EV startup. Before that, Bell had a brief stint as Rivian’s first chief technology officer. He has a long history in the mobile tech world. He previously ran Intel’s mobile division, helped launch the Palm Pre, and spent nearly two decades at Apple where he helped bring the iPhone into the world. Lucid says Bell will be replaced on an interim basis by Derrick Carty, Lucid’s vice president of platform software and an Apple veteran.
Lucid announced the news of Bell’s departure alongside its earnings results for the first quarter of 2024, where the company lost $680 million on 1,967 deliveries of its luxury electric sedan.
WSO2, a company that provides API management and identity and access management (IAM) services for enterprises, has been acquired by Swedish investment giant EQT.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but TechCrunch has learned via sources that the deal values WSO2 at “more than” $600 million, with EQT attaining a “significant majority” stake for the price.
WSO2’s products include an open-source API manager, comparable to something like Google’s Apigee, which businesses use for building and integrating all their digital services, either in the cloud or on-premises. The company offers tangential services such as API management specifically for Kubernetes, as well as its flagship Identity Server — a little something like Okta — that companies use for managing identity and access functionality in their apps, such as single sign-on (SSO).
WSO2, which was founded out of Sri Lanka in 2005, had raised around $130 million in funding from the likes of Intel, Cisco and Goldman Sachs, with its most recent tranche coming via a $93 million Series E round in 2022. An official valuation was never announced, but articles from some outlets at the time reported a valuation of more than $600 million. So that would mean WSO2 has remained somewhat stagnant, though the “more than” facet here could disguise some movement in the company’s valuation.
WSO2 co-founder and CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana has a strong tack record in the open-source sphere, particularly among Apache Software Foundation projects, and he was one of the main designers of the cloud-native Ballerina programming language. Since 2017, Weerawarana also drives for Uber, which he says is designed to “challenge the norm” and make it more socially acceptable in his native Sri Lanka.
WSO2 is a fairly well-distributed company, in keeping with the ethos of other businesses founded around open source. While the company counts a U.S. HQ in Santa Clara, and many of its senior leadership team are spread across the U.S., its center of gravity lies in Sri Lanka where much of its workforce is based — including Weerawarana, who’s based in the capital Colombo.
With that in mind, it’s worth noting that the acquisition was actually made by an EQT subsidiary called EQT Private Capital Asia, formerly known as Baring Private Equity Asia, which EQT procured in 2022 for €6.8 billion to serve as its private equity vehicle for Asia.
With a global spread of customers that include AT&T, Honda and Axa, this is something that EQT Private Capital Asia partner Hari Gopalakrishnan says was a key part of its decision to invest. Moreover, with cloud computing and AI driving demand for security infrastructure, WSO2 was a particularly appealing proposition for an investment firm with recent form in the enterprise software space.
“Software is a key focus sector for EQT, and WSO2 is a strong company that has scaled globally with an enterprise customer base spread across the US and Europe,” Gopalakrishnan said in a statement. “[We] believe that the company is well-positioned to capitalize on long-term trends such as digital transformation and rising GenAI adoption.”
EQT say that it expects the acquisition to close in the second half of 2024.
At its Team ’24 event in Las Vegas, Atlassian today announced that it is combining Jira Software with Jira Service Management into a single product under the ‘Jira’ brand.
The origins of Jira, Atlassian’s flagship project management tool, are in software development and issue tracking for developers, but throughout the past few years, the company started to launch Jira versions for other teams as well. These included Jira Work Management for business teams like marketing, sales and human resources, which launched in 2021 and replaced a previous product called Jira Core.
“We believe great teams are built on a foundation of shared goals, coordinated work, and free-flowing information across functions,” writes Dave Meyer, the head of product for Jira, in today’s announcement. “That’s why the latest evolution of Jira offers a shared place for every team to align on goals and priorities, track and collaborate on work, and get the insights they need to build something incredible, together. We’ve taken the best of Jira Work Management and Jira Software to make a single project management tool ready to help any team go from good to great.”
The idea here is to offer a cross-functional tool that allows different teams inside a company to more easily collaborate and track their work. While there were already connections between Jira Software and Jira Work Management (plus Work Management is already included in every Jira subscription for free), Atlassian says that this combined version will reduce friction and help different teams align on common goals, no matter whether they are engineers, marketers or designers, for example.
It’s worth noting that Jira Service Management for IT teams is not affected by this change.
With this change, Atlassian is also bringing a number of new features to Jira to enable this kind of collaboration. Unsurprisingly, these include several new AI-based tools.
Maybe the most interesting of these is the new AI work breakdown (coming to Jira and Jira Premium users soon), which can help teams break down their epics into individual issues (or issues into sub-tasks) automatically — with the ability to edit them manually, too, of course. That takes away some of the grunt project management work and will free up project managers to focus on the bigger-picture items on their to-do lists.
Soon, Jira will also be able to sum up issue comments automatically. This capability will also come to Confluence, Atlassian’s wiki-like workspace tool.
Currently, to become a Jira power user, you’ll need to learn the Jira Query Language (JQL) to search for issues on the platform. Now, thanks to the power of large language models, users will be able to use natural language to create these JQL queries.
And for those occasions where you don’t know exactly what to write, Atlassian is also introducing a new generative AI writing tool to Jira that can create, summarize and improve descriptions and comments. These same capabilities are also coming to Atlassian’s Trello and Bitbucket, with Jira Product Discovery and Confluence following soon.
Since the entire purpose of combining these two tools is to make collaboration easier, Jira is also getting a few new features that help teams align on their overall goals. That feature, imaginatively dubbed ‘Goals,’ will roll out in the coming month and aims to help users to “create goals in Jira’s list and issue views to visualize how each task maps to a higher objective.” There will also be a directory of goals and goal progress charts “where goals can be viewed in the context of your projects.”
Jira is also introducing a few new ways to work with issues and visualize them. You can now see every project in a spreadsheet-like list view, for example, and make in-line edits. Atlassian notes that this will also make bulk edits easier.
To better track complex projects, Jira Premium and Enterprise users now get access to the new ‘Plans’ feature, which allows users to track issues from different boards and projects in a single view.
“Now everyone – from leaders to program managers to team members – can estimate release dates for cross-team projects, answer staffing and resource questions, or map out yearly goals, all in a single view,” Meyer explains in today’s announcement.
Speaking of time, there is now also a new calendar view for tracking business projects with issues organized by due date. This, Meyer notes, will help business teams more easily align their work in sync with upcoming software releases. The full launch of this calendar feature is still a few months out, though.
Founded in 2017, Atoms Lanka Solutions is a provider of IT consulting and software development services. Throughout the company’s history, we have worked with over 160 customers from 5+ countries..
