These startups are jumping in where most established security vendors have yet to go.

Fractl Inc., developer of a programming language for building generative artificial intelligence applications, today said it has raised $1.025 million in a pre-seed funding round and released its namesake language under an open-source license.

Nick Damiano, a seasoned entrepreneur and visionary in the field of healthcare technology, shared his journey from being born into a medical family to becoming a founder of groundbreaking startups. His experiences, setbacks, and triumphs offer valuable lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs and healthcare innovators.

Primer for IT Security Professionals

Pittsburgh, PA-based insurtech Koop Technologies announced strategic funding from Hyundai Motor Company and Kia Corporation, a leading global automotive OEM conglomerate, to focus on pioneering insurance and risk control technologies for autonomous vehicles and robotics.

The 2023 MB100 are an outstanding group of leaders combining profit and purpose to help achieve the UN Global Goals.

Secuvy, the pioneer in unified data security and privacy, today announced that seasoned sales executive Ediz Ertekin has been appointed Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), and cybersecurity executive Doug Vinson has been appointed Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Reporting to Secuvy CEO Vaibhav Mehrotra, Ediz and Doug will assume their new roles in Secuvy’s Leadership Team immediately to power the company’s next phase of growth.

If your organization uses servers that are equipped with baseboard management controllers from Supermicro, it may be time, once again, to patch seven high-severity vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to gain control of them. And sorry, but the fixes must be installed manually.

CellTrust Corporation, a leading provider of secure and compliant mobile communication for government and enterprise, announced today its SL2™ product integration with Theta Lake, a leader in digital communications governance, providing compliance and security protection solutions. This strategic partnership aims to provide organizations with a comprehensive solution for managing compliance and mitigating risks associated with mobile communications such as WhatsApp.

OLOID will showcase its passwordless authentication platform at the 11th edition of Oktane 2023 at Moscone West, San Francisco, from October 3rd to 5th.

Theta Lake adds support for RingCentral Contact Center to its existing RingCentral MVP integration to deliver the most comprehensive compliance and security solution to RingCentral customers.

Sai Venkataraman, the co-founder and CEO of Discern Security, believes a large part of the problem is that after spending all that money on a patchwork quilt of cybersecurity solutions, many organisations simply don’t know how to use them properly. Discern, which is today announcing the successful completion of a $3 million seed funding round, thinks artificial intelligence is the answer.

Spectro Cloud today announced Palette EdgeAI to simplify how organizations deploy and manage AI workloads at scale across simple to complex edge locations, such as retail, healthcare, industrial automation, oil and gas, automotive/connected cars, and more.

Spectro Cloud, a leading platform provider of modern Kubernetes management, today announced an investment led by Qualcomm Ventures. Spectro Cloud is a leader in helping organizations realize the true potential of Kubernetes and its related ecosystem across any datacenter, cloud, or edge environment, at scale.

OLOID Inc., a leading physical identity and access technology provider, will showcase AI-powered integration Workflows at the Global Security Exchange (GSX) 2023. This workflow automation tool is designed to leverage the new and improved generation of AI models to address the needs of the security industry.

Article featuring Binarly CEO Alex Matrosov.

Fullcast, the industry's only RevOps platform for GTM planning and execution, today announced it has been named a spotlight vendor in a report from analyst firm GTM Partners.

The Railway Engineering-Maintenance Suppliers Association (REMSA) has named KONUX a 2023 Innovation Award Winner in the Technology Category for its Switch predictive maintenance system.

Numerous early stage companies—including in fast-growing areas such as code security and cloud security—unveiled new products or had other major announcements at Black Hat USA this week.

Binarly is one of only a few startups focused on highlighting security issues in firmware. The company has discovered a remarkable number of vulnerabilities in firmware in a very short time. Its' founder, Alex Matrosov, joins us to discuss insights discovered along his company's journey to convince vendors that firmware is worth securing.

What every privacy & legal team needs to know.

Theta Lake Wins Best Compliance Product at UC Awards and Recognized in two Gartner Hype Cycles

We have witnessed the remarkable rise of generative AI, powered by vast amounts of pre-trained data within large language models (LLMs). Chat-based interfaces have democratized AI for the general public, which has led us to where we are today. With these capabilities, customer data can be easily misused as private conversations. Activity and logs can now be combined with user cookies to allow privacy and security breaches within a simple prompt. As we do not yet have data governance controls for LLMs, a malicious actor can request and receive sensitive data related to a business or person with relative ease.

Cigent Technology, Inc., a cybersecurity solutions provider, this week unveiled Cigent Data Defense Pre-Boot Authentication, which Enables a TCG Opal 2.0 Self Encrypting Drive to be fully encrypted, preventing adversaries from being able to access the data if they get physical access to the PC or storage device.

Seed-stage investing is the riskiest — and potentially most rewarding — venture-capital round and the choice of seed investor can make or break a startup. Great ones help with everything from mentoring to securing follow-on rounds of capital.

Savant Labs, an Analytics Automation platform for data analysts, announced Savant Copilot to accelerate creating analytic outcomes. The announcement was made at the Cota Connect summit in San Francisco, hosted by Savant Labs investor Cota Capital.

Spring 2023 Undergraduate Commencement Ceremony

Stack Identity’s patent-pending algorithm detects and eliminates unauthorized, invisible shadow access to prevent cloud data WestWave Capital and Benhamou Global Ventures co-led the seed funding round Silicon Valley startup was founded by cybersecurity industry veterans with decades of industry experience across Symantec, McAfee, IBM, Netskope and BlueCoat

Sonet Io is a cloud service that can enable secure zero-trust access from any device without requiring any agents to be installed. The architecture is based on its unique approach to zero trust defined in its Trusted Access cloud service. It’s noteworthy from a zero-trust perspective because of its adaptability and flexibility, allowing enterprises to control access to SaaS and web applications and servers, prevent sensitive data theft and monitor user activity from any device without requiring any software installations.

Bunny Weiss recognized as Distinguished Alumnus

SENA is an enterprise-ready solution architecture built on zero-trust principles, to effectively deploy, provision, operate and manage Kubernetes edge environments at scale.

Binarly today announced the general release of the Binarly Transparency Platform, delivering unprecedented transparency for device supply chains enabling device manufacturers and endpoint protection products to comprehensively analyze both firmware and hardware to identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and malicious code implantation.

Carahsoft Technology Corp., The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider®, today announced that Seagate Government Solutions’ Barracuda 515 M.2 solid state drive (SSD) - embedded with Cigent® Technology’s built in cybersecurity enhancements is now available to Government agencies through Carahsoft’s resellers and its Federal, State and Local Government contract vehicles.

UC Today's David Dungay hosts Dan Nadir, Chief Product Officer at Theta Lake

OLOID announces launch of no-code integration workflows for physical identity and access management for automating physical security processes.

Theta Lake was selected Overall Best for the latest release of its Risk and Compliance Suite, which provides compliance and security for collaboration platforms and enables organizations to expand their use of communication platforms for video, voice, documents and chat content.

Secuvy, the cloud-native, contextual data privacy & security platform, has announced the successful completion of its funding round from investors. The funding will be used in accelerating company growth plans, expanding the team, and further developing and enhancing the Secuvy privacy & security platform. The latest funding round was led by Dell Technologies Capital & WestWave Capital, with participation from Z5 Capital.

Indianapolis-based software startup Elate Inc., which launched its first product in August 2021, has closed on a $4.9 million venture capital investment, the company announced Tuesday. The Series A funding round was led by Palo Alto, California-based WestWave Capital, with participation from other new investors: Pritzker Group and Hyde Park Angels, both based in Chicago; and Capital Midwest Fund, based in Mequon, Wisconsin.

Idit Levine, is the founder and CEO of the unicorn service mesh platform, Solo.io. Some say that it was her professional basketball career that gave her the drive to develop such a successful enterprise. Others report her success should be attributed to her ability to self-teach solution-based skills. Likely, it’s both. Idit’s dialed-in focus for how enterprises can connect hard-to-change, tested applications with more modern, flexible microservices and service mesh is worthy of her organisation’s $1B Valuation.

Chitrang Shah, founder and CEO at Savant Labs, says people charged with dealing with data spend too much time doing manual tasks to wrangle the data they need, and they do this repeatedly. He saw an area that was ripe for automation, which he sees as a key differentiator for the startup. “So we are building a platform for [business users], and the main impetus behind it is the amount of manual work that goes on in doing analytics and reporting is staggering. You go and talk to these people and they will tell you that half their time, more than half their time sometimes, is spent just doing manual stuff over and over again. And that’s where we are out there to change. We are the first platform that brings automation to analytics,” Shah told TechCrunch.

The problems cybersecurity startups attempt to solve are often a bit ahead of the mainstream. They can move faster than most established companies to fill gaps or emerging needs. Startups can often innovative faster because they are unfettered by an installed base.

Alex Matrosov, founder and CEO of Binarly, told SecurityWeek that they discovered a total of nine vulnerabilities while analyzing the firmware for Lenovo Thinkpad X13s laptops powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon system-on-a-chip (SoC).

WestWave Capital’s Rohan Puranik on Investing in Security, Robotics, and Enterprise Deep Tech

Qualcomm on Tuesday released patches to address multiple security flaws in its chipsets, some of which could be exploited to cause information disclosure and memory corruption. The five vulnerabilities -- tracked from CVE-2022-40516 through CVE-2022-40520 -- also impact Lenovo ThinkPad X13s laptops, prompting the Chinese PC maker to issue BIOS updates to plug the security holes.

“We opened Pandora’s box of ARM devices UEFI firmware vulnerabilities impacting enterprise vendors,” Alex Matrosov, founder and CEO of Binarly told SC Media. “The big part of vulnerabilities [we reported] related to Qualcomm’s reference code for Snapdragon chips. The vulnerabilities in reference code are usually one of the most impactful since they tend to affect the whole ecosystem and not just a single vendor. Due to the complexity of the UEFI firmware supply chain, these vulnerabilities often create additional impact.” 

Prezent, the AI-powered presentation platform for enterprise teams, announced today that it has promoted three members of its leadership team and added three new leaders to support the company's exponential growth. The company has also established an Advisory Board with three new members. These changes will support the 2023 growth plans after Prezent's $20M Series A (led by Greycroft) in April 2022, Zoom Ventures investment in September 2022, and 300%+ growth in 2022.

Affectionately as “Bunny,” Warren Weiss has had decades of success uncovering tech giants in their emerging stages. His work on SilverSpring Networks earned him a spot on the Forbes Midas List of Technology’s Top Investors. He’s a four-time CEO of venture backed companies, and worked with Steve Jobs at NeXT. Bunny serves on the Board of Binarly for WestWave Capital. He remains a General Partner on past fundsat Foundation Capital (where he no longer makes new investments) and serves on the boards of ForgeRock (IPO) and Visier. Bunny is also on the board of the Weiss Scholarship Foundation, a charity that provides education to children in Kenya. With Warren’s experience and perspective, we figured this would be a quick and insightful read as we head into the new year.

OLOID Inc, a Sunnyvale-based technology company that provides retrofit solutions for modernizing workplace identity and access management, will present its facial authentication solutions for modern enterprise at the 10th edition of Oktane, an annual identity event hosted by Okta in the heart of San Francisco city. Oktane is being held at Moscone West from November 8th-10th, 2022 this year.

Theta Lake, a leader in modern collaboration compliance and security solutions, today announced Meetings Risk Manager (MRM), its sixth Zoom-certified module in the Zoom App Marketplace, and the only patented solution for Zoom meeting safety, security posture and configuration drift monitoring, alerting, and remediation.

A new company from one of the original creators of the open source Node-RED project is setting out to make it easier for companies to bridge the gap between incompatible IoT ecosystems at scale.

Estimating developer work is more art than science. Devs typically use story points or hours for their estimations, or sometimes they’ll use a “planning poker” exercise to determine what they can accomplish in a given sprint.

Two-thirds of respondents believe their employees are using unmonitored communication channels, increasing the need for compliance and security tools.

Immigrant entrepreneurs play a crucial role in innovation and job creation in the United States. “Immigrants have started more than half (319 of 582, or 55%) of America’s startup companies valued at $1 billion or more,” according to a recent report from the National Foundation for American Policy. Veev, a successful housing technology firm, is one of those companies. To learn more about Veev, I interviewed CEO Amit Haller, who responded in writing. Haller, an immigrant from Israel, discussed his experience in America and provided advice to new entrepreneurs.

Mediafly, the leading revenue enablement platform, has acquired Aptology, the talent intelligence platform specializing in assessing and predicting sales rep performance. Aptology is Mediafly’s sixth acquisition and the latest addition to the company’s modular Revenue360 platform, which includes sales enablement, content management, coaching, value selling and revenue intelligence.

With Theta Lake’s Selective Archiving, firms can turn on the functionality that staff need to run effective, profitable meetings. Yet compliance leaders can still extract the meeting elements (i.e. chat, polls, and whiteboards) they want to retain and review.

The DIGISTOR Citadel C Series Advanced SSD is set to become the first commercial off-the-shelf solid-state drive (SSD) that includes Cigent's advanced firmware level security capabilities to be on the NIAP Compliant list for use by military and government agencies, critical infrastructure, and enterprises requiring the highest data security levels. Cigent focuses on protecting data, not the device or the network.

Prezent, the AI-powered presentation productivity platform for enterprise teams, announced today that it has added Zoom Ventures as an investor. This comes after the $20 million raised in a Series A funding round in April 2022 and the $4.3 million raised in seed capital in August 2021.

Vendia, founded by Tim Wagner and Shruthi Rao, wants to help companies build real-time, decentralized data applications. Its product allows enterprises to more easily share code and data across clouds, regions, companies, accounts, and technology stacks.

Fullcast, the industry's only RevOps platform for GTM planning and execution, today announced that it has been recognized as a Cool Vendor in the Sept. 15, 2022, report, entitled, "Cool Vendors™ in RevOps Data Automation," by Dan Gottlieb and Steve Rietberg at Gartner.

Blueshift Cybersecurity, which spun off from Cigent Technology nearly a year ago, is helping MSP and MSSP partners beef up their cybersecurity with its full-service extended detection and response (XDR).

Veev uses modular-construction techniques to build prefabricated homes while simultaneously reducing waste in the construction process.

The communications compliance company has seen year-over-year triple-digit percentage growth in annual recurring revenue for the first half of the fiscal year, gaining new customers in North America, Europe, and the UK. Theta Lake has now met the objectives it set out following series B financing it received in March from UC companies, which include Cisco, Zoom, Salesforce, and RingCentral.

Koop Technologies, an insurance technology company specializing in autonomous vehicles and robotics risks, has launched an industry-first Robotics General Liability and Errors & Omissions insurance product in partnership with CJ Coleman and leading Lloyd's of London syndicates. The new coverage is designed for off-road autonomous vehicles and robotics developers, operators, and service providers across various industries.

DIGISTOR, a CRU Data Security Group (CDSG) brand, has added to its innovative line of secure DIGISTOR Citadel™ self-encrypting drives with pre-boot authentication by introducing PBA to its Citadel C Series lineup. The new drives, powered by Cigent®, add the critical PBA function to their existing DIGISTOR C Series of self-encrypting drives.

Although the access control market historically has been slow to adapt to larger tech trends that affect other product segments across the security industry, the past decade has ushered in a new era in how end users think about and deploy these solutions. From the proliferation of cloud-based management systems to the use of mobile phones as credentials, how people enter secure facilities has been changed fundamentally by technology evolution.

Google and Solo.io today announced the next evolution of the Istio service mesh. Dubbed the “Ambient Mesh,” this new framework does away with Istio’s sidecar-centric architecture and replaces it with a sidecar-less approach that promises to improve the service’s security posture and make it easier for new users to adopt the technology by reducing the resources needed to run it.

In this special guest feature, Dr. Tim Wagner, CEO and Co-founder, Vendia, discusses why traditional blockchains are failing businesses and how enterprise companies should be thinking about data sharing solutions instead.

In this episode of Chips & Salsa, Jerry and CRob talk to industry experts Vincent Zimmer, Sr. Principal Engineer at Intel, and Alex Matrosov, CEO and Founder, Binarly, about the state of firmware security in the industry today and get their thoughts on how the industry needs to improve.

Netskope, the leader in Security Service Edge (SSE) and Zero Trust, today announced it has acquired Infiot, a pioneer in enabling secure, reliable access with zero trust security, network and application optimization, and AI-driven operations.

The best way to stop ransomware from occurring in your company is to protect the data. Tom Ricoy, VP Sales, Public Sector and Alliances with Cigent discussed with Don Witt of The Channel Daily News, a TR publication, how Cigent makes the data invisible.

Theta Lake, a communication compliance and security solution developer, has teamed up with fellow communication security solution Movius to help companies improve compliance with collaboration tools.

Binarly executives, CEO Alex Matrosov and CTO Claudiu Teodorescu, will present research at the Black Hat 2022 conference to discuss expanding attack surfaces in the modern system firmware boot process and major gaps in the way SIEMs and EDRs monitor endpoints for signs of attacks.

Uplevel, the leading engineering insights solution, today announced it has received $20 million in new funding.

Firmware security company Binarly on Wednesday announced that it has raised $3.6 million in a seed funding round led by Westwave Capital and Acrobator Ventures.

Edge computing is a huge and diverse space (a glance at Topio Networks’ latest edge computing landscape map, or a read of LF Edge’s coverage is enough to prove it). As you might expect, every one of us at Spectro Cloud is thrilled and honored to be included in this Gartner report.

Vendia, a blockchain-based platform that makes it easier for businesses to share their code and data with partners across applications, platforms and clouds, today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series B round.

Blueshift Cybersecurity has raised a seed round of $6 million from investors WestWave Capital and CyberJunction.

Docyt, a startup that offers an AI-powered accounting automation platform for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), today announced that it has raised an $11.5 million Series A funding round led by Lobby Capital.

Spectro Cloud, a leading platform provider of a modern Kubernetes (K8s) management platform, today announced the closing of a $40 million Series B funding round, led by New York City-based Stripes, a leading investor in software and consumer products.

Theta Lake, which offers a security and compliance solution for popular collaboration applications, has closed a $50 million series B funding round as the company seeks to help customers uncover risks across their digital communications.

Spectro Cloud, the Bay Area-based modern infrastructure startup, announced the availability of Palette Edge - a comprehensive platform to deploy and manage Kubernetes at scale across multiple edge computing environments.

Veev, a real estate developer turned tech-enabled homebuilder, announced today that it has raised $400 million a Series D round that propels the company to “unicorn status.”

Oloid, creator of the world’s first software-based physical access technology, today announced the close of its $12 million Series A funding round, led by Dell Technologies Capital with participation from Honeywell Ventures, Okta Ventures and other previous investors.

Prevedere, a company developing Intelligent Forecasting software using AI, has completed $25 million in financing.

Today, Mperativ announced it raised $6 million in funding to launch a revenue operations platform.

Mastercard today announced it has completed its acquisition of CipherTrace, a leading cryptocurrency intelligence company that offers digital asset security and fraud solutions for some of the world’s largest banks, exchanges and other financial institutions.

Solo.io, a Cambridge, Massachusetts service mesh startup, announced a $135 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation. Altimeter Capital led today’s round, with participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures and True Ventures.

Fullcast announced that it closed $4M in Series A funding. Fullcast was created specifically to bring together all of the moving pieces of a sales Go-To-Market (GTM) by experts who fully understand both the Salesforce product and the need for smoother integration. Fullcast empowers leading SaaS companies to plan, execute, and analyze their GTM strategy.

A ‘21 Jump Street’ internship experience for Western Illinois University law enforcement alumnus Warren “Bunny” Weiss ’78 paved the way for a job in the 1990s with the granddaddy of the computer world ... the late Steve Jobs.

Cloudentity, a leading provider of modern application authorization and consent solutions, today announced the appointment of Jason Needham as chief executive officer and member of its board of directors. Needham brings over 25 years of leadership experience across application networking, IT automation, cloud security and SaaS solutions to his role at Cloudentity, where he will lead the company during its accelerated growth period.

Conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Spectro Cloud, the report differs from other Kubernetes studies as it has an executive and production focus — surfacing the massive influx of Kubernetes adoption, and the associated challenges organizations still experience

We get to make two important decisions: one is the market we invest in, and the other is the CEO & founding team. If we get either of these wrong, we aren't going to have a good investment.

Data privacy, governance, and compliance platform OneTrust has announced plans to acquire Tugboat Logic, a platform that companies use to garner security certifications such as ISO 27001.

Cyber-exposure company Tenable Inc. has agreed to buy Accurics Inc., which said its platform enables the detection and mitigation of risks in the so-called infrastructure as code, for about $160 million in cash.

Mastercard has agreed to acquire blockchain analytics start-up CipherTrace, in the latest sign of how major companies are warming to cryptocurrencies.

Koop Technologies, an insurance technology startup specializing in autonomous vehicle and robotics risks, has announced its $2.5M seed funding. Koop will use this capital to bring its data-driven insurance platform to more customers in the autonomous vehicle and robotics industries.

Koop Technologies, which is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is developing what it calls an “API-powered” insurance platform for autonomous vehicles, robotics, and “machine-centric” risks.

Podcast discussion with Warren Weiss, founder and partner at WestWave Capital.