Thus, SaaS startups are not category-specific, instead sharing a business model approach more than any particular industry focus.
Among myriad SaaS startups, those focused on selling to business clients — a group often called enterprise SaaS — are a magnet for venture capital.
Since then, investment into enterprise SaaS startups has slowed.
Enterprise SaaS startups raised $21.9 billion, $45.0 billion, $55.1 billion and $58.3 billion in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively.
Perhaps a rate cut or two and a strong enterprise IPO are the tonic required to really reignite venture investment into enterprise SaaS.
Sunnyvale-based Brevian wants to make it easier for business users to build custom AI agents.
“When I saw ChatGPT and other things, for me, it was just: how is this applicable in the enterprise?
Then he went to LinkedIn, where he headed up the AI trust team before leaving in late 2022 to join Wagh in founding Brevian as its CTO.
“Our vision was to enable business users in the enterprise to be able to use AI to simplify their daily tasks.
2024 is the year of AI apps — and we just felt like they were so far ahead,” he told me.
A lot has changed at HTC in the decade since a small team broke off to form its mixed reality division.
These days, the mixed reality business comprises the “vast majority” of HTC’s global business, says Dan O’Brien.
Ultimately, however, the consumer business has shrunk dramatically relative to its enterprise offerings.
In recent years, Vive has expanded from a VR focus to mixed reality, utilizing passthrough technology similar to the kind found on the Vision Pro.
We’re not there yet, but we definitely see that helping to develop the virtual reality space.
GitHub today announced the general availability of Copilot Enterprise, the $39/month version of its code completion tool and developer-centric chatbot for large businesses.
Many teams already keep their documentation in GitHub repositories today, making it relatively easy for Copilot to reason over it.
On top of talking about today’s release, I also asked Dohmke about his high-level thinking of where Copilot is going next.
“Different use cases require different models.
We will continue going down that path of using the best models for the different pieces of the Copilot experience,” Dohmke said.
Glean wants to beat ChatGPT at its own game — in the enterpriseGenAI has its issues.
Enter Glean, whose software connects to enterprise first- and third-party databases to field plain-English requests (e.g.
In 2019, Jain — along with a small founding team — built Glean as an AI-powered search app geared toward enterprise customers.
But Jain asserts that Glean is “secure” and “private” — at least to the extent a cloud-based GenAI platform can be.
“Glean [can recommend the] documents users might need for their day-to-day work by learning from past work patterns,” Jain said.
Prompt Security was founded by Itamar Golan (CEO) and Lior Drihem (CTO), who both previously worked at Check Point and Orca Security.
The company’s tools automatically detect patterns related to GenAI usage and then layers an enforcement policy on top of that.
Golan stressed that the company is trying to build an entire platform here by covering various aspects of an organization’s GenAI usage.
“We are trying to build a one-stop solution for GenAI security.
Over time, the company plans to launch more services that help its customers increase their GenAI security posture.
After failing to find any, he — along with Roboflow’s head of machine learning Jacob Salowetz and Benedict — developed a platform from the ground up to let organizations build and train GenAI models within a secure compute environment.
“Arcee revolutionizes AI for highly regulated industries such as legal, healthcare, insurance and financial services,” McQuade said.
Contextual AI, for example, offers tools to tailor GenAI models — specifically large language models (LLMs) along the lines of OpenAI’s ChatGPT — to business use cases.
First, Arcee’s platform is end-to-end, employing an “adaptive” system for training, deploying and monitoring GenAI models.
This booming AI market, particularly in industry-specific solutions, positions Arcee uniquely as a standout player.
Although Ripple has been around since 2012, it and the XRP Ledger are doubling down on its global payments journey.
At the same time, it’s also aiming to become the go-to enterprise infrastructure provider, the company’s president, Monica Long, said on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast.
Distinct from the Ripple network and protocol, the XRP Ledger is a decentralized public ledger with an open source code base that anyone can contribute to or use, Long said.
“Foreign exchange is pretty concentrated in terms of the players who actually have enough capital to provide liquidity for those transactions,” Long said.
“And so when you have a lot of concentration, you have a lack of competitiveness for the pricing.”
OpenAI has its first higher education customer: Arizona State University (ASU).
Today, ASU announced that it’s collaborating with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, to the university’s researchers, staff and faculty.
Since then, some have reversed their bans, while others have begun hosting workshops on generative AI tools and their potential for learning.
Launched in August, ChatGPT Enterprise can perform the same tasks as ChatGPT, such as writing emails, debugging computer code and drafting essays.
“Right now, we’re hyper-focused on putting ChatGPT Enterprise into the hands of our knowledge core … to be at the forefront of discovery and implementation.”
Consumer tech is bound for a comeback among unicorns, but maybe not just yetTen years after Cowboy Ventures’ founder Aileen Lee gave unicorns their nickname, she and her team are back with fresh analysis on private companies worth more than $1 billion.
As the number of unicorns boomed from 39 to more than 532, Cowboy found that their very nature also changed.
“The pendulum swung hard to enterprise, with 78% of unicorns today focused on B2B, the inverse of 2013,” Lee and her team member Allegra Simon wrote.
But spending more than a decade in tech teaches you something: to be ready for the pendulum to swing back.
Hence Cowboy’s prediction that “given the hard shift to enterprise,” we can “hope and expect more exciting consumer unicorns will be born in coming years.”
