CHAPTER 4 - 6 June 2023: Another week of Enterprise tech funding leaning heavily towards AI is just another signal that the next industrial revolution is well upon us.

Hyro, a company dedicated to improving chatbot and IVR systems with powerful conversational AI, recently secured a $20M Series B. Seems to be dozens of these getting funding at the moment, plenty of consolidation and acquisitions to occur in this space in the near future.

CoreWeave, a specialised cloud provider offering large-scale GPU compute resources on top of a highly flexible infrastructure, raised $200M. In total the company has raised $571 million. That's some serious funding, however, that level of capital is important when you're up against AWS, GCP and Azure in the GPUaaS space!

In another cloudy round Cortex, a developer of visibility, automation and orchestration software focusing on DevOps alignment, raised $35M in a Series B funding.

Still a little quiet on the Cyber security front.

CHAPTER 3 - 30 May 2023: I find it incredibly insightful where the investment and funding money is flowing in the enterprise tech space. I'm getting better at aggregating these news and updates (thanks to AI tools) based on my interests and focus and what I think is relevant for the ecosystem that NEXTGEN Group is part of. Here's another snapshot of the last week in funding.

The financial services industry continues to get a whole lot of attention after Aussie start-up Constantinople's big Series A last week. Nymbus secured a $70M Series D round (small for a series D really). They help banks migrate their legacy technology and create an easier SaaS-based platform to launch neo-bank sub-brands like ubank (NAB) or Up (Bendigo Bank). We also saw FLOWX.AI secure a huge series A round at $35M. With the help of AI they help organisation modernise their complex legacy applications, and have been mainly operating in the financial services industry to date, however, broader use cases will likely follow following the funding.

In other areas, Builder.ai raised a massive $250M in Series D funding, the tech apparently allows citizen developers to build applications without any tech knowledge by using a combination of templates and AI. Along the same AI focus Anthropic raised a massive $450M Series C round, an AI assistant for your digital product and platforms user. Very keen to try both of the tools out!

Finally DataOps.live raised a decent $17.5M in Series A. Interesting to see this type of funding now flowing around an ecosystem company based on a Snowflake value proposition.

There was plenty more funding last week but these are the ones that caught my eye. Heavy on the financial services and AI space, less so on security or cloud. Let's see what the next week brings.

CHAPTER 2 - 23 May 2023: Spent a bit of time this last week following the money to see where the VCs are spending. High industry-specific focus, which is in line with what we're seeing broadly across the tech scene, and some big seed rounds too. Obviously, AI getting a lot of attention. Also, an Aussie banking start-up with an ambitious value prop. Here's a quick summary:

Constantinople Sydney HQ'd SaaS-based all-in-one software and operational platform for banks. Raised a HUGE seed round of $32M AUD.

Meta has spun out Kustomer (which it bought for ~$1B in 2020). Kustomer was Meta's attempt at getting into the enterprise CRM space. The new company comes with a fresh $60M USD funding round to get it going on its own.

Together is a decentralized cloud platform aimed at making AI accessible to anyone, anywhere, by enabling researchers, developers, and companies to leverage and improve artificial intelligence with an intuitive platform that combines data, models, and computation​​. In its latest funding round, the company raised $20M USD, a considerable amount for a seed round.

And along a similar path Union.ai  an open-source startup, offers a cloud-native automation platform to assist businesses in building and orchestrating their AI and data workflows. The company recently announced a $19.1M USD Series A funding round.

CHAPTER 1 - 16 May 2023:  A few weeks have gone by now since NEXTGEN's pivotal agreement with NightDragon so it's a good time to look into the tech that NightDragon  invests in. Some interesting vendors for those in the enterprise space:

Immuta  a data security platform that offers sensitive data discovery, access control, and data use tracking, secured $100M in a Series E funding round in June '22, bringing their total funding to $267M.

Interos Inc  uses AI to map and model supply chains, providing real-time indicators of supply chain vulnerability and monitoring business relationships globally, helping businesses manage cyber threats, regulatory compliance, and supplier relationships. They closed a $100M Series C funding round in July '22, increasing its valuation to over $1B.

Onapsis Interesting one for our Oracle ecosystem... a cybersecurity company that integrates business application security for SAP and Oracle into existing security and compliance programs. Total Funding at $115M, last funding round in October 2020 for $55M.

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