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Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.
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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.
Airbnb’s summer release is usually a grand affair with tons of updates for guests and a few for hosts. This time, however, the company is introducing just a few updates for group booking along with a new category called icons, which are experiences hosted by celebrated names in music, film, TV and sports.
Group booking features, which are probably the only update that will reach all users, allow people to create shared wishlists, a messages tab for the group with the host, and trip invitations for the group with details of the property.
Users can now invite friends or family to a wishlist through contacts on their phone or a link. Group members can add properties to a list, leave notes about a property, or vote on them to decide on the booking.
Image Credits: Airbnb
After the primary member books the property, they have to invite people to travel with them again on the trip with a postcard. The invitation card also has details like address, check-in instructions, and Wi-Fi passwords.
Airbnb is also introducing a new message tab where all travelers can chat with the host and react to messages. Hosts can use AI-powered suggestions to reply to questions, such as sending the guests the property’s checkout guide.
Image Credits: Airbnb
Nathan Blecharczyk, Airbnb’s co-founder and chief strategy officer, said that the company built group features as more than 80% of trips on the platform involve more than one person. Plus, there is a lot of back and forth between the group members in terms of taking decisions.
Apart from group features, Airbnb is releasing a new earnings dashboard for hosts with better insights and an experience category called Icons, which features properties like the X-Men mansion, the Ferrari museum, Prince’s Purple Rain House, and living room sessions with Doja Cat. These experiences will be available for a short time, and users will need to apply for them to get in. Airbnb is planning to accept 4,000 people across 11 experiences.
Last November, in a conversation with TechCrunch, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky mentioned that the company is testing generative AI-powered review summaries. While Airbnb hasn’t made public announcements in this area, Blecharczyk told TechCrunch that the platform plans to use AI in multiple areas, including customer support.
“We are increasingly using AI to streamline our customer support to make sure that customers are routed to the right agents or to have tickets automatically resolved with AI-generated responses,” Blecharczyk said.
The Airbnb co-founder noted that AI-powered responses are applicable only to certain scenarios, and the company has been testing them in limited production.
“I think there is a lot of potential for applying AI to the business. We think a lot about how AI is going to change the experience at the consumer layer over time,” Blecharczyk said without sharing specifics of the company’s roadmap.
“We have a lot of reviews, and we sit on top of a lot of customer service data. So we are thinking about how we can use AI to succinctly give a better picture of a listing and its information.”
In November 2023, Airbnb acquired a stealth startup called Gameplanner, which was launched by Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer. Earlier this year, Chesky mentioned that the Gameplanner acquisition was part of the travel platform’s plan to create an “ultimate concierge.” Using AI-powered replies to solve customer queries is probably the first step toward that.
Microsoft, it seems, is hedging its bets when it comes to general-purpose robotics AI. At the end of February, the Windows maker spearheaded a massive $675 million Series B in Bay Area-based Figure. Today, the tech giant announced a collaboration with Figure competitor Sanctuary AI, best known for its humanoid robot, Phoenix.
The Sanctuary partnership really gets to the heart of Microsoft’s interest in the category: artificial general intelligence. It’s a concept that comes up a lot when discussing humanoid robots — too often, I would argue, given the state of things. While such breakthroughs are likely several years off (at least), they’re required for humanoid robots to reach the long promised “general-purpose status.”
In essence, that means robots that can learn and reason like humans. That represents a potential quantum leap for robotic capabilities, which have traditionally been limited to one or two tasks. The humanoid form factor opens these systems to a far broader range of motion than single-purpose systems, but they will ultimately need the intelligence to match.
“Creating systems that think like, and understand us, is one of the biggest civilization-level technical problems and opportunities that we will ever face,” Sanctuary co-founder and CEO Geordie Rose notes. “A challenge like this requires the best global minds to work together. We’re excited to be working with Microsoft to unlock the next generation of AI models that will power general-purpose robots.”
Such a partnership deepens Microsoft’s commitment to AI development and delivers a partner who can design hardware to those specifications. Sanctuary has been operating in the space for some time now, and recently scored a pilot partnership with Magna, which will bring the latest version of Phoenix to car plants.
All told, Sanctuary robots “have been tested across 400 customer-defined tasks across 15 different industries.” Of course, we’re still in the very early stages of all of this.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates spoke about his own interest in humanoids earlier this year. Neither Sanctuary nor Figure got a mention, though he did spend some time discussing competitors Agility and Apptronik.
Microsoft isn’t alone in hedging its bets in the category. OpenAI (another Microsoft partner) has made its own investments in both Figure and competitor 1X.
Automation continues to be a major theme in the enterprise — underscored not least by the rise of AI as a tool to help fix some of the more routine, resource-intensive and fragmented aspects of how security and other IT functions operate. To capitalize on that trend, one of the bigger startups in the space, the Dublin-founded Tines, is announcing $50 million in funding. Tines started with its roots in security workflow automation but has seen adoption across other parts of the IT landscape. Now, on the back of revenues growing 200% in the last 18 months, it plans to use the new capital to expand its automation platform play deeper into applications in infrastructure, engineering and product.
The funding — co-led by existing investors Accel and Felicis — is being described as an extension of the company’s Series B rather than a Series C.
“We weren’t proactively trying to raise and were focused on building the business,” Tines’ CEO and co-founder Eoin Hinchy said in an interview. “Our existing investors saw our execution and approached us. We went from discussing what a round could look like to it being wrapped up in a couple of weeks.” He confirmed that it is not profitable currently by choice, to focus on growth.
This actually makes this the second extension to Tines’ Series B in three years, with the original round appearing in 2021 (at $26 million), and the first extension coming in October 2022 ($55 million).
But it’s not without a valuation bump. Hinchy declined to disclose the numbers but other sources close to the company confirmed it’s now valued post-money at close to $600 million. (As a point of comparison, PitchBook data notes that it was valued at $423 million at the first extension.) Others in this round include Addition, strategic backer CrowdStrike Falcon Fund and SVCI — all existing investors in Tines.
It has now raised some $146.2 million in total.
As we have previously described, the gap in the market that Tines is targeting comes from Hinchy’s and his co-founder Thomas Kinsella’s own direct experience. Hinchy is a classic technical founder. He and Kinsella (now chief customer officer) both spent around a decade working in leading roles in cybersecurity for companies like DocuSign, eBay and Deloitte, where they found major gaps in the market for tools to help better manage the large number of services they used to track data and network activity for his companies.
All of that was compounded by not just the explosion of new cybersecurity techniques but also hacking risks that grew out of the rise of cloud computing and related innovations. Hinchy estimated to me that the average security team manages some 77 different products, with “some in the hundreds.”
“By 2017 we desperately needed a workflow automation tool, and really nothing out there came close to what we wanted, so we decided to build what we wish we had,” Hinchy said. Tines covers what he describes as “mission critical workflows” which in security include tools to monitor and track security alerts, compliance alerts and increasingly areas that are adjacent to where security teams need to have visibility such as employee onboarding and offboarding, patch management in IT and more.
“We are the plumbing between these systems,” he said.
Although Hinchy is technical himself, he saw that another gap was that a lot of the need for monitoring was best served by not having to be a technical solution in itself. The whole of Tines is conceptualized in a drag-and-drop, no-code framework, building blocks that aim to reduce the amount of time it takes to create and manage workflows on the platform.
That is where the opportunity lies also for Tines’ investors. Although there are definite and very large competitors in the market including Splunk (and now Cisco by virtue of having acquired Splunk this year), Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow and Microsoft, Tines and its backers and its users would contend that their focused and more context-aware approach are more useful and effective.
“Customer satisfaction is typically abysmally low in security,” Jake Storm, the partner at Felicis who led the deal, said in an interview. He said that he was surprised, when making due diligence calls when weighing up this latest deal, how different that was for Tines. “That’s just unheard of. It was just glaringly obvious that Tines was years ahead of its competitors back in 2022 and we just feel that gap has continued to widen.”
Luca Bocchio at Accel sees workflow as the key missing link, one that gives Tines a lot of potential to position itself further as a platform, not a service.
“If anything over the last few years, the growth of security needs has led to more security products and tools and that boils down to more workflow needs. That means Tines is becoming more relevant. With security being part of broader IT and business operations, it naturally needs to engage with the rest of the organization.”
The mixed reality operating system that powers Meta Quest headsets can officially be used by third-party device makers, the company announced on Monday. Now called “Meta Horizon OS,” the open system allows developers to access technologies like eye, face, hand, and body tracking, high-resolution passthrough, and more.
Three major tech players—Asus, Lenovo and Microsoft’s Xbox—are the first companies to confirm they’ll be developing new devices that run the software. Most notably, Microsoft is teaming up with Meta to build a “limited-edition Meta Quest, inspired by Xbox,” according to the announcement. Asus and Lenovo, on the other hand, are building headsets designed for specific use cases. Asus is developing a headset dedicated to gaming whereas Lenovo wants its device to be for “productivity, learning, and entertainment.”
The company says all future headsets can connect via the same Meta Quest app on iOS and Android. Plus, the Meta Quest Store, which the company renamed the Meta Horizon Store, is open to third-party developers, allowing them to use Meta’s frameworks and tools to create new mixed-reality experiences.
Meta Horizon OS is a strategic move for the company and comes at a time when the VR/AR headset wars between Meta, Apple and Sony continue to heat up.
Artificial intelligence can find hidden signals in data across healthcare, and companies like Nvidia are leaning into what this can mean. For example, it announced two dozen new AI-powered tools last week for areas including biotechnology and drug discovery. And Nvidia is not alone.
Century Health is a new startup also getting in on the action. It’s applying AI to clinical data to uncover new applications for drugs. It’s working with pharmaceutical companies and researchers, initially at Yale and UC San Diego, to identify and commercialize the next breakthrough for diseases, like Alzheimer’s, that affect tens of millions of patients.
The mission is a personal one for Century Health’s co-founder and CEO, Vish Srivastava. He watched his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s get to the point where he didn’t recognize Srivastava anymore.
“That sent me down a rabbit hole,” said Srivastava, whose background is in healthcare product development and data. “One of the biggest issues around innovation for new treatments is efficient access to good patient data. This is now only possible because of generative AI. That data sat around for decades because it takes manual effort to normalize and extract insight from it.”
That’s when he teamed up with friend Sanjay Hariharan, a data scientist and applied AI engineer, to form Century Health. They built a platform to extract that hidden data and aggregate it. Researchers and pharma companies subscribe to the platform and can then use that data on approved drugs; to expand to new drugs; or to find insights to expand access to drugs that have already been approved.
The ultimate goal is accelerating access to treatments, Srivastava said.
“Drug development is massively expensive, and on average, takes $1 billion to $2 billion to develop a new drug,” he said. “From the pharma company’s perspective, when their drug is now approved, the mission is to get it to patients as quickly as possible. For us, that also means as affordably as possible with access to good real-world data.”
Now with $2 million pre-seed funding, Century Health will run three to five pilots over the next several months. The goal is to validate the initial technology that collects the data and, most importantly, to see the impact the insights from those data sets can bring, Srivastava said.
He sees these pilots as design partnerships and a way to get feedback on the benefits of drugs, for example, which patient subpopulation might be underrepresented. In addition to the validated technology, another milestone will be to secure early revenue from the pilots, which Century Health can leverage to go after another round of venture capital.
The investment was led by 2048 Ventures with participation from LifeX, Everywhere, Alumni Ventures and a group of angel investors, including Datavant founder Travis May and Evidation founder and CEO Christine Lemke.
Alex Iskold, managing partner of 2048 Ventures, said in a statement, “At 2048 Ventures we have a strong thesis around real-time data, in healthcare and beyond. Vish and Sanjay have a vision to leverage AI and real world patient data to unlock a better feedback loop and ultimately faster and more efficient drug development and commercialization.”
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