Others

Nextdata is building data meshes for the enterprise

September 28, 2023
The concept of a data mesh has been around for a few years. At a high level, it’s a data platform architecture that allows users to access data without transferring it to one of two places: a data lake, or a centralized repository for storing data at scale; or a data warehouse, an enterprise system […]

AlphaSense, an AI-based market intel firm, snaps up $150M at a $2.5B valuation

September 28, 2023
Market intelligence — where organizations gather information about industries, other businesses, trends, and more in order to use that data to help make business decisions — has become a huge industry in itself over the last few decades, projected to be worth nearly $84 billion in revenues this year. Now, as newer innovations like ChatGPT […]

Indian music label giant Saregama acquires Pocket Aces

September 28, 2023
Saregama has agreed to acquire a 51.82% stake in the startup Pocket Aces as the oldest Indian music label makes deeper push into videos. Saregama is paying about $20 million for the 51.82% stake in Pocket Aces and plans to invest an additional $1.8 million in the startup, the Kolkata-headquartered firm disclosed in a stock […]

KSOC says it’s tackling cloud-native security in a way that is Kubernetes-first

September 28, 2023
The take-up of Kubernetes, a tool for managing containerized workloads, is only expected to increase as demand for cloud-native architectures and containerization continues. In terms of security, this can mean a boon or a major blind spot for them, according to Kubernetes Security Operation Center (KSOC), a Bay Area startup — a boon, in that […]

Adobe launches Photoshop’s web version with Firefly-powered AI tools

September 28, 2023
Adobe officially launched Photoshop for the web on Wednesday for all users with paid plans. The web version, which was in beta for almost two years, is now available with Firefly-powered AI tools such as generative fill and generative expand. The company said that the tools in the toolbar on the web is based group […]

Investors taking 30% of a startup in a round are short-sighted

September 28, 2023
Over the last couple of months I’ve spoken to a number of early-stage investors — both angels and VCs — who seem to be proud of having been able to take 25-30% of a startup’s equity in an early-stage funding round. In one case, an angel investor patted themselves on the back for “managing to […]

African VC firm Enza Capital launches founder partner program as it closes $58M across funds

September 28, 2023
Enza Capital, a venture capital firm that backs startups “organizing the offline online” and “digitizing key African industries,” has closed $58 million across two funds. In 2019, the company launched an early-stage fund to “find, back, and help build category-defining startups” in the pre-seed and seed stages. The fund is still active and has invested […]