Cybersecurity continues to be of great interest to enterprises on the lookout for higher protection against malicious hackers, and VCs wish to be a part of it. In a recent example, TechCrunch learned and confirmed this Against the wind — a specialist in assessing and securing cloud infrastructure — is closing in on a $100 million round at a post-money valuation of $850-900 million.

New and existing investors participating within the round include Craft Ventures, Greylock, CyberStarts, Leaders Fund, Omri Casspi’s Sheva Fund and basketball star Steph Curry’s Penny Jar investment fund. The round is in the ultimate closing phase – this might occur inside a few days – and will include additional investors.

The round, a Series B, comes hot on the heels of the corporate acquiring “dozens” of Fortune 500 corporations and growing its workforce to about 160 people, the source said.

This is a significant step for Upwind, which previously raised just over $77 million, including: $50 million round in September 2023. Upwind’s latest round valuation was $300 million. It will spend part of the funds on research and development, and part on employment, and plans to employ about 100 people in Israel, San Francisco… and Iceland.

Upwind was founded by Amiram Shachar, who sold his previous company, cloud expense management startup Spot.io, to NetApp for $450 million. It is an element of a guard of cybersecurity startups founded in Israel by teams that cut their teeth originally working in areas corresponding to military intelligence.

In this case, it’s also one of many corporations within the industry specializing in cloud vulnerabilities through a platform approach. Specifically, Upwind goals to take care of the flood of alerts which are typically generated by threat detection tools. It claims to cut back the number of these alerts by 90% to focus security operations teams more on understanding real threats and responding to them faster.

The company’s technology includes cloud services (including areas corresponding to vulnerability management and identity security), workloads (including container security and detection and response), and applications (including areas corresponding to API vulnerability management). To some extent, all of these issues are interconnected, which is one of the the explanation why a platform approach is smart.

We will update this post as we learn more.

Nowadays, it looks like every company wants or already offers an AI services or products. It’s a extremely good time for startups constructing an AI product on this space, however it’s not without its challenges – the technology continues to be in its early stages, and while many firms are interested by trying out generative AI solutions, they’re slow to implement them.

There are many reasons, but crucial appears to be the fear of hallucinations of artificial intelligence. “You can’t use (AI) in manufacturing in large enterprises if it lies,” said Pavitar Singh, co-founder and CEO of UnifyApps.

Singh thinks his startup has solution for this: UnifyApps essentially connects an organization’s SaaS applications and data together and allows firms to construct and deploy their very own AI chatbots to speak with all their information. He says this approach minimizes AI hallucinations because UnifyApps agents can essentially confirm one another’s results against the corporate’s data.

UnifyApps is recent to an already crowded space – big firms like Workato and Zapier already offer similar “unification” services, as do tons of other startups. However, Singh believes his startup’s AI-centric approach gives it a bonus because it leverages the power to create AI chatbots. “Enterprises can create as many agents as they want: they can help with HR, sales, marketing, legal or finance,” he said.

Companies could also be hesitant to adopt generative AI, but UnifyApp has already attracted greater than 20 customers, including one among the world’s largest banks and a big telecommunications provider, Singh said.

Good traction is an important search for a young startup, and investors appear to agree on that. The company just raised a $20 million Series A funding round from ICONIQ Growth, lower than six months after UnifyApp closed a $11 million seed round.

Singh founded UnifyApps last yr after spending greater than 11 years as chief technology officer at Sprinklr, a customer experience management platform for global brands that went public in 2021.

ICONIQ Growth doesn’t have many early-stage startups in its portfolio, but on this case, the corporate knew Singh well. “Pavitar was a mad scientist, a genius who built all the amazing products for Sprinklr,” said Matt Jacobson, general partner at ICONIQ.

ICONIQ invested in Sprinklr’s Series D in 2014, and Jacobson spent a few years on the corporate’s board. He says he was so impressed with Singh and what he was doing at UnifyApp that he couldn’t pass up his investment within the startup.

“The stakes are much higher when it comes to AI applications,” Jacobson said.

UnifyApp has 150 employees across offices in Gurgaon, Dubai and New York.

As for why the corporate has such a big team, Singh said UnifyApp desires to ensure that its product is error-free so that giant enterprises can “safely adopt it.”

Jack Dorsey’s Block is reportedly scaling back its investment in TIDAL, the music streaming platform once owned by Jay-Z. shareholder’s letter on Thursday. Block can be shutting down TBD, the corporate’s Bitcoin-focused division that previously got down to construct a decentralized Internet, dubbed “Web5.” These cuts will allow the corporate to speculate in its Bitcoin mining and cryptocurrency portfolio.

“We are reducing our investment in TIDAL and liquidating TBD,” Block said in the letter. “This gives us space to invest in our bitcoin mining initiative, which has good product market fit and a healthy demand pipeline, as well as Bitkey, our bitcoin self-management wallet.”

Here’s the newest effort by the corporate behind the Square and Cash apps to chop costs. According to. Block has laid off employees in recent weeks Fortuneand apparently told employees not to debate board member Jay-Z in emails or Slack messages.