The company seeks to replace outdated government systems with efficient, accessible, and user-friendly technology.

Led by NEA, with participation from 776, Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, and Carpenter Capital, the round follows an $11 million seed funding co-led by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism practice, bringing Kaizen’s total funding to $35 million.

Kaizen’s technology is already in use across more than 50 government agencies in 17 states, reaching over 30 million residents. From state parks and DMVs to court systems and tax portals, the company is bolstering how people access essential services. 

Instead of fragmented systems that charge taxpayers billions through maintenance contracts and outdated software, Kaizen offers a single, unified platform. Governments can deploy new services within weeks, and residents can interact with them through a modern, intuitive interface.

“Kaizen is focused on the most fundamental American services that we use every day – the parks, transit, licensing, the everyday systems that quietly hold our communities together. 

“That clarity of mission has accelerated their growth and embodies exactly what the American Dynamism movement stands for to ensure our government is working at the speed of technology and serving our national interests,” said Katherine Boyle, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

For Kaizen’s CEO and co-founder, Nikhil Reddy, the company’s mission is a personal one. He believes Americans have settled for less when it comes to public service technology. 

“American citizens have been worn down into accepting second-class solutions when it comes to public service technology,” Reddy said. “Think about it, when was the last time you had a delightful experience booking a DMV appointment or reserving a campsite at a state park?”

He added, “If we raise our expectations of what public service technology can and should be, we can transform not just someone’s day or weekend, but how millions of people experience the impact of their taxpayer dollars.”

The timing of Kaizen’s rise coincides with a national push for digital reform. The federal government recently established a National Design Office to oversee a $10 billion effort aimed at modernising more than 25,000 public service portals. 

Kaizen’s tools align closely with this agenda, providing governments with the digital infrastructure to serve citizens with the same ease as private-sector platforms.

“In so many places around the world, public services run on technology that’s every bit as good as what we use in our daily lives — sometimes better. There’s no reason America shouldn’t aim just as high,” said Alexis Ohanian, founder and general partner at Seven Seven Six. 

“Kaizen is building the backbone for public services that reflect the beauty, ambition, and potential of the society they serve.”

Co-founder KJ Shah, who began his career in mergers and acquisitions, saw how legacy systems affected public-sector efficiency. “For decades, public servants have been forced to use stagnant software built through acquisitions, not product innovation. Our agencies need and deserve a platform built natively and designed to grow with them,” he stated.

Kaizen’s results are already visible. In Maryland, the company launched a new state park day-pass system in less than two months, a full month ahead of schedule. 

On Independence Day weekend, state parks operated at full capacity without major check-in delays, eliminating long-standing traffic jams and cutting overtime costs. Wildlife even began returning to calmer park environments.

“As a career public servant with 30 years at the Department of Natural Resources, I can say without hesitation that this initiative is one of the most meaningful changes we’ve implemented to expand and safeguard public access while ensuring equitable access to our public lands,” said Paul Peditto, assistant secretary of Land Resources, Maryland DNR.

Since early 2024, Kaizen’s customer base has expanded tenfold, while annual recurring revenue has surged ninefold year-on-year. The company has recently partnered with Maricopa County, Arizona; San Bernardino County, California; Suffolk County, New York; and the Cherokee Nation. 

Its workforce is expected to grow from 30 to 50 by early next year as it targets federal agencies and new sectors such as courts and licensing.

“Kaizen is tackling one of the toughest areas in technology and doing it with precision and purpose,” said Amit Kumar, partner at Accel. “Nikhil sees opportunity where others see complexity, and his team is proving that public services can be modern, efficient, and built around the people they serve.”

Andrew Schoen, Partner at NEA, added: “Public services impact hundreds of millions of people every day in the US alone, yet their technologies often lag far behind the seamless digital experiences modern consumers expect. We’re thrilled to back Nikhil, KJ, and the Kaizen team as they bring streamlined, thoughtfully-designed, AI-native experiences to government services, already reaching more than 30 million residents across 17 states and 50 agencies.”

Kaizen’s long-term goal is to become the primary technology partner for public institutions, one that creates reliable, beautifully designed systems citizens can trust.

The new capital will support the expansion of its global operations, strengthen its regulatory presence, and enhance its institutional banking infrastructure.

The round saw participation from Tether Investments, Quona Capital, Wintermute, Helios Digital Ventures, Financial Technology Partners, Yolo Investments, Kazea Fund, and GC&H Investments. With this latest injection, Pave Bank’s total funding now exceeds $44 million.

Founded on the belief that the future of money is programmable, Pave Bank aims to provide a single, regulated platform for institutions managing both fiat and digital assets. 

The bank integrates commercial banking services, such as deposits, payments, foreign exchange liquidity, and treasury management, with digital asset solutions including instant settlements and OTC trading.

“The global financial system is moving towards regulated on-chain finance, and institutions need a trusted bridge between the old and the new,” said Salim Dhanani, co-founder and CEO of Pave Bank. 

“We have built a multi-asset bank that merges the stability and prudential oversight of traditional finance with the automation, speed, and intelligence of digital assets. This is about redefining how money moves safely, transparently, and automatically across the world’s financial systems.”

Through its unified interface, businesses can manage fiat and digital assets in real time, automate treasury operations, and eliminate the inefficiencies of multiple intermediaries. Exchanges, corporates, and institutional investors can streamline operations, optimise liquidity, and ensure compliance, all under a single regulatory framework.

Since its inception, Pave Bank has prioritised sustainable growth and operational efficiency over rapid expansion. In its first nine months, the company recorded profitability in seven, supported by automation and technology-driven systems across compliance, treasury, and engineering functions. 

Despite a lean team of just over fifty professionals, Pave Bank maintains a focus on intelligent scaling while safeguarding risk management.

“The companies we serve are large, sophisticated corporations and institutions operating across markets,” Dhanani added. “They expect their bank to be as fast and adaptive as the technology companies they partner with, but with the security, compliance, and oversight of a regulated financial institution. That’s the gap we’re closing.”

Investors share this long-term vision. “As digital assets become an integral part of the global financial ecosystem, there is a strong need for a well-regulated, full reserve approach to banking at the intersection of fiat and digital assets. Pave Bank is at the forefront of this fundamental shift in how financial infrastructure operates and we are excited to partner with them,” said Rachit Parekh, partner at Accel.

Ganesh Rengaswamy, partner at Quona Capital, also noted the potential of Pave’s model. “By powering mainstream fintechs and digital platforms through its programmable banking infrastructure, Pave is leading the new age transformation in financial services and enhancing the experience for end-users. 

“Pave’s programmable, full-reserve approach combines the best of traditional banking and digital assets and has the potential to catalyse widespread adoption of stablecoins, deepening financial inclusion across markets. It’s an ambitious vision grounded in real-world execution.”

The funding shows institutional trust in programmable and regulated finance is growing. Pave Bank’s hybrid model stands out as one of the few that can handle stablecoins, bitcoin, and traditional currencies under the same prudential standards. 

The company will continually work closely with regulators to ensure compliance and interoperability across different jurisdictions.

Pave Bank plans to expand its licences, enhance its programmable treasury and institutional products, and strengthen ties with major financial and digital asset networks. Its long-term goal is to become the global financial institution where the traditional and digital economies converge.

The company, founded by Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, both of whom previously worked on Google’s Safe Browsing and reCAPTCHA projects, seeks to ensure autonomous AI agents outsmart today’s phishing, malware, and business email compromise (BEC) attacks. 

Unlike rule-based systems, which attackers usually bypass, AegisAI’s system learns in real-time and adapts to evolving threats.

Email is still the easiest entry point for attackers. Traditional filters struggle against AI-powered phishing campaigns, which are more convincing than ever. 

A 2024 study found that phishing emails written by large language models had a 54% click-through rate, compared to 12% for human-written messages. This gap reveals how much more effective AI-powered lures have become, and how ill-prepared most defences are.

Attackers are no longer just relying on domains, they now exploit trusted services such as Salesforce, Zoom, and Google, making their content appear legitimate enough to bypass conventional filters. This has left enterprises exposed, with security teams overwhelmed by alerts and false positives.

AegisAI’s Pitch

Instead of static rules or user training manuals, AegisAI brings what it calls a network of AI agents that inspect and neutralise threats automatically. The company says customers are already seeing up to 90% fewer false positives compared to traditional solutions.

The platform integrates with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, with minimal setup required. Security teams can view real-time dashboards showing attempted intrusions, from AI-generated spear phishing to fuzzing attempts.

Co-founder and CEO Cy Khormaee explained the motivation, “We’ve spent almost a decade each protecting billions of users at Google, we’ve seen firsthand how enterprise email defences are falling behind. We’re seeing the sophistication of AI powered attacks increase rapidly while existing email security defences are standing still. This leaves security leaders without the tools they need to defend their organisations.”

Ryan Luo, co-founder and CTO, added, “We don’t believe in creating more alerts — we believe in creating better security outcomes. Our mission is to protect organisations without adding operational burden and to give security teams the reliable intelligence they need to focus on what matters most.”

Pilot customers say the results have been decisive. Bam Azizi, CEO of Mesh, stated, “As a former security founder, I’ve seen the cat-and-mouse game play out for decades—especially in email security, where attackers constantly evolve to trick employees. Aegis is the first solution that truly changes the game.

“They came into Mesh and stopped attackers in their tracks. Our dashboard shows everything from fuzzing attempts to AI-generated spear phishing and BEC, and Aegis catches them all—without my team wasting time managing rules.”

At Lokker, CEO Ian Cohen said the system immediately flagged threats aimed at critical teams, “We immediately saw threats to our accounting, engineering, and executive teams in the dashboard. Aegis enabled us to see and stop these threats without our team manually hunting them down.”

Backed by Accel and Foundation Capital

The $13 million seed round was co-led by Accel and Foundation Capital. The funds will drive product development, expand engineering talent, and accelerate go-to-market efforts.

According to Eric Wolford, Partner at Accel: “The AI era will inevitably drive disruption in email—the easiest attack vector. We were looking for a team that was AI-native—people who didn’t just whitewash with AI—people who had the DNA and career investments in the development of AI. Cy and Ryan were that right team. They are both AI-native and have spent an enormous amount of time in email security at Google.”

Following a stealth phase with fintech and tech companies, AegisAI is now moving into wider commercial deployment. Its founders argue that the industry doesn’t need more alerts or user training but tools that stop threats before they reach employees’ inboxes.

With both the scale of AI-driven attacks rising and traditional defences falling short, AegisAI is aiming to be a timely safeguard in one of cybersecurity’s biggest challenges.

In specialty chemicals – the essential ingredients powering everything from pharmaceuticals to agriculture – this disruption is even more acute due to a fragmented and inflexible supply base.

Today, Scimplify announces a $40 million Series B funding round to scale its revolutionary platform that’s fundamentally transforming how specialty chemicals are developed, manufactured, and distributed worldwide.

The $40m series B funding round was co-led by Accel and Bertelsmann with participation from UMI and existing investors including Omnivore and 3one4 Capital.

This latest round brings Scimplify’s total funding to $54 million, following $13.5 million raised across seed and Series A rounds.

The investment will supercharge the company’s already impressive international growth, with exports currently reaching 16 countries and plans to aggressively expand both geographically and into new industry segments.

Founded in mid-2023, the company’s co-founders include Salil Srivastava, Sachin Santhosh, and Dheeraj Dhingra. 

These veterans spent the previous decade bringing Indian factories to a global customer base, Scimplify brings specialty chemical manufacturing under one roof. 

Their breakthrough approach: a full-stack solution that combines in-house scientific expertise with a massive network of over 200 specialized manufacturing plants across low-cost regions. 

This creates a true ‘plug and play’ alternative to traditional manufacturing – customers simply bring their chemical needs, and Scimplify handles everything from R&D to specialized production, leveraging the perfect manufacturing partner for each specific chemistry without the capital investment or operational complexity of traditional approaches.

“Global supply chains are shifting like never before,” says Sachin Santhosh, co-founder at Scimplify. “For decades, specialty chemical manufacturers have invested millions in facilities that can only produce a handful of compounds, often running at partial capacity while lacking R&D capabilities.

“This creates a paradox: excess capacity alongside supply shortages. We’ve flipped this model, connecting our scientific teams with hundreds of manufacturing plants to create a responsive ecosystem that can adapt as market needs shift.”

The timing for this couldn’t be more critical. As countries move to secure their supply chains and reduce dependencies on single regions, the specialty chemicals sector faces a once-in-a-generation transformation. 

The impact of Scimplify’s approach is being felt immediately. US customers previously locked into Chinese supply chains for critical specialty chemicals are now accessing superior alternatives from India without the headaches of establishing ground teams or navigating complex onboarding processes. 

This allows them to accelerate innovation while building more resilient and cost-effective supply networks. Scimplify offers a full stack model to its customers where they can entrust end to end supply responsibilities for key products under one umbrella. 

The company now serves leading innovators and manufacturers across life sciences, crop sciences, and industrial chemicals in major markets including the US, Europe and Japan.

What separates Scimplify from traditional manufacturers is its speed and flexibility. While competitors remain anchored to fixed assets and limited chemistries, Scimplify can rapidly pivot across different chemical processes and scale production based on real-time customer needs.

Their R&D capabilities provide expertise typically inaccessible to individual manufacturers, allowing them to solve complex chemical challenges that others simply cannot address.

“Each specialty chemical requires significant scientific know-how and R&D investment,” adds Sachin Santhosh. “We’ve built a model that brings together the best scientific minds with hundreds of highly specialized manufacturing plants, creating a chemistry powerhouse that can tackle virtually any chemical challenge across critical industries.”

Rachit Parekh, principal at Accel said, “The global supply chain for specialty chemicals is at an inflection point. Traditional manufacturing supply chains lack the flexibility required in today’s geopolitical environment as well as the rapid changes in end customer requirements. Scimplify is building an R&D led global manufacturing network which allows for flexibility coupled with innovation. 

“At Accel, we have had a long standing thesis that R&D led speciality chemical companies which take advantage of the deep pool of manufacturing capabilities in India and globally can create global giants. We have been following the Scimplify journey from day 0 and their execution has been impressive. We look forward to this partnership and working with the team over the next decade.”

Rohit Sood, partner at Bertelsmann India Investments added: “We are excited to significantly double down on our commitment to Scimplify, after our initial investment last year. Their execution on the ground has been among the best we’ve seen, driving not just impressive topline growth but also a rapid multi-country export scale-up and the establishment of a cutting-edge R&D facility in Hyderabad.

“Scimplify is uniquely positioned to harness India’s strengths in specialty chemicals and capitalize on the evolving dynamics of global procurement in this sector.”

Looking ahead, Scimplify plans to aggressively expand its international footprint while continually adding new industry segments through enhanced R&D capabilities. 

The company is positioning itself at the center of a fundamental shift in global chemical manufacturing, building the infrastructure for a more resilient, innovative, and responsive industry.

This means companies lack both historical data to learn from, and access to experts who have seen similar cases. Bridgetown Research is changing that. 

The AI decision science startup has raised $19 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed and Accel, with participation from a leading research university.

Bridgetown Research has developed AI agents that autonomously execute research. Most notable amongst these agents are voice bots trained to recruit and interview industry experts, gathering primary data that can be analyzed alongside alternative data sourced from their partners. 

Founded by Harsh Sahai, who previously led machine learning teams at Amazon before leading strategy engagements at McKinsey & Co., Bridgetown Research was born from a simple observation: the majority of business analyses are a permutation of a small number of automatable tasks. 

The founding team, comprising former professionals from McKinsey, Bain, Amazon, and leading tech startups, brings together extensive experience across strategy consulting and technology.

“We are excited to be a catalyst for change. We are working with multiple private equity firms, management consulting firms, and corporate teams to help make strategic decisions better and faster. This in turn is driving up demand for advisory and information services downstream. 

“We enable $10+ of advisory and information services revenue for every $1 we make. Together with leading institutions, we’re building something bigger than ourselves—an ecosystem where everyone thrives,” commented Harsh Sahai, CEO & founder of Bridgetown Research.

While many AI solutions focus on searching and summarizing information using LLMs, real-world business decisions require much more than synthesising the open web.

They need proprietary data such as primary data from experts and customer surveys, along with frameworks to understand markets, what Harsh Sahai calls “ontologies”. 

Moreover, outputs need to be repeatable and auditable for a business to use them to make decisions with tens of millions of dollars at stake. Bridgetown Research is the only player using agents to gather primary data and systematically find patterns in it to generate original insights. 

“AI is causing widespread disruptions across many enterprise functions, and Bridgetown Research is riding that wave by assisting executives in making important strategic decisions. We are pleased to see Bridgetown serving several marquee customers, with users likening its platform to having a team of top-tier consultants at their fingertips. 

“We are excited to partner with Harsh, who, with his background as an ace AI research scientist turned management consultant, blends a unique combination of skills and insight needed to imagine this whole new category of applied AI,” said Anagh Prasad, investor at Accel.

Bridgetown Research started with a focus on private equity deal screening diligence. Multiple top-tier PE & VC firms already use Bridgetown Research for deal screening and deeper commercial diligence. 

They’re able to screen their pipeline much faster with initial analysis taking 24 hours instead of weeks without Bridgetown enabling teams to focus on actual decision-making instead of research and analysis. 

For other customers, Bridgetown has enabled voice-of-customer conversations that cover hundreds of respondents in parallel, and within days. 

Ishaan Preet Singh, investor at Lightspeed added “Companies are built on the quality of strategic decisions, and the research and analysis behind it. Bridgetown Research enables the smartest executives and investors to make these decisions with an order of magnitude more information, and at a pace that was earlier impossible. Harsh and Bridgetown are already creating immense value for their customers, but are still just scratching the surface of the leverage that AI can create.”

As global markets become increasingly complex, the demand for efficient and effective decision-making tools continues to rise. 

With this funding round, Bridgetown Research plans to invest further in training its AI agents to perform a broader set of analyses across a broader range of domains, and deepening industry partnerships to enhance access to domain-specific intelligence.

Yet, most companies struggle to deploy large AI models in production. With the steep costs and complexities involved, nearly 90% of machine learning projects are estimated never to make it to production. 

Addressing this pressing issue, Simplismart is today announcing a $7m funding round for its infrastructure that enables organisations to deploy AI models seamlessly. 

Like the shift to cloud computing, which relied on tools like Terraform and mobile app development fueled by Android, Simplismart is positioning itself as the critical enabler for AI’s transition into mainstream enterprise operations. 

The series A funding round was led by Accel with participation from Shastra VC, Titan Capital, and high-profile angels, including Akshay Kothari, Co-Founder of Notion. This tranche, more than ten times the size of their previous round, will fuel R&D and growth for their enterprise-focused MLOps orchestration platform.

The company was co-founded in 2022 by Amritanshu Jain, who tackled cloud infrastructure challenges at Oracle Cloud, and Devansh Ghatak, who honed his expertise on search algorithms at Google Search. 

In just two years, with under $1m in initial funding, Simplismart has outperformed public benchmarks by building the world’s fastest inference engine. This engine allows organisations to run machine learning models at lightning speed, significantly boosting performance while driving down costs.

Simplismart’s fast inference engine allows users to leverage optimised performance for all their model deployments. For example, Its software-level optimisation helps run Llama3.1 (8B) at an impressive throughput of >440 tokens per second. 

While most competitors focus on hardware optimisations or cloud computing, Simplismart has engineered this breakthrough in speed within a comprehensive MLOps platform tailored for on-prem enterprise deployments – agnostic towards choice of model and cloud platform.

“Building generative AI applications is a core need for enterprises today. However, the adoption of generative AI is far behind the rate of new developments. It’s because enterprises struggle with four bottlenecks: lack of standardised workflows, high costs leading to poor ROI, data privacy, and the need to control and customise the system to avoid downtime and limits from other services,” said Amritanshu Jain, co-founder and CEO at Simplismart

Simplismart’s platform offers organisations a declarative language (similar to Terraform) that simplifies fine-tuning, deploying, and monitoring genAI models at scale. 

Third-party APIs often bring concerns around data security, rate limits, and utter lack of flexibility, while deploying AI in-house comes with its own set of hurdles: access to computing power, model optimisation, scaling infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and cost efficiency, all requiring highly skilled machine learning engineers. 

Simplismart’s end-to-end MLOps platform standardises these orchestration workflows, allowing the teams to focus on their core product needs rather than spending numerous manhours building this infrastructure.

Amritanshu Jain added: “Until now, enterprises could leverage off-the-shelf capabilities to orchestrate their MLOps workloads since the quantum of workloads, be it the size of data, model or compute required, was small. As the models get larger and the workload increases, it will be imperative to have command over the orchestration workflows. Every new technology goes through the same cycle: exactly what Terraform did for cloud, android studio for mobile, and Databricks/Snowflake did for data.”

“As GenAI undergoes its Cambrian explosion moment, developers are starting to realise that customising & deploying open-source models on their infrastructure carries significant merit; it unlocks control over performance, costs, customisability over proprietary data, flexibility in the backend stack, and high levels of privacy/security”, said Anand Daniel, partner at Accel. 

“We were happy to see that Simplismart’s team saw this opportunity quite early, but what blew us away was how their tiny team had already begun serving some of the fastest-growing GenAI companies in production. It furthered our belief that Simplismart has a shot at winning in the massive but fiercely competitive global AI infrastructure market.”

Solving MLOps workflows will allow more enterprises to deploy genAI applications with more control. They want to manage the tradeoff between performance and cost to suit their needs.

Simplismart believes that providing enterprises with granular Lego blocks to assemble their inference engine and deployment environments is key to driving adoption. 

As organizations face these ever-expanding data volumes and workloads, e6data is stepping in with a breakthrough solution. 

The company has announced a $10 million Series A funding round, led by Accel, which will ensure its mission to help businesses significantly reduce their data processing expenses while maximizing the value of their analytics and AI capabilities.

Data intelligence platforms are critical to enterprises seeking to extract value from their hundreds of data sources through essential workloads like data engineering, BI and analytics, machine learning, and now generative AI. 

As the imperative to extract maximum value from this data intensifies, enterprises face constant overruns and acute performance tradeoffs as they seek to effectively utilize their data. 

The total addressable market (TAM) for data and AI solutions is slated to touch $230 billion in 2025, with 60% of CXOs expecting to increase their spend over the next year.

Vishnu Vasanth, co-founder and CEO commented: “This rapid increase has made data intelligence platforms the second largest IT spending category – behind only cloud spend for operational systems and application infrastructure. 

It’s fueling the meteoric rise of data warehouse and data lakehouse companies such as Snowflake and Databricks, and the rapid growth of corresponding offerings from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud”.

However, as the spending grows, ROI concerns are reaching a boiling point. Enterprise technology leaders need a way to simultaneously increase performance and access new capabilities, while simultaneously controlling costs. 

They increasingly find there are no compelling alternatives to the status quo and are wary of emerging forms of ecosystem lock-in.

“Legitimate ROI concerns stand in the way of enterprises realizing the full potential of data & AI. Moreover, organizations cannot freely move lakehouse table formats, data catalogs, compute providers, and cloud providers without adverse price-performance impacts, the need for data movement, and cumbersome application migrations. We aim to address this through our work at e6data” added Vishnu Vasanth.

To address these challenges, e6data has developed a new breed of “compute engine” for data intelligence platforms that helps enterprises amplify ROI on their existing platforms and architectures and escape ecosystem lock-in; all with zero friction to adoption in the form of zero data movement, zero application migration, and zero down-time.

e6data plans to expand access to its Design Partner Program, which offers the e6data solution as a managed service for the heaviest or most pressing use-cases of enterprise customers, complete with production support and professional services.

Data intelligence platforms like data lakehouses and warehouses are the foundation of all analytics and AI. At their core, they use distributed “compute engines”, whether open-source or vendor-backed, for every form of processing spanning ingestion, transformation, dashboards, reports, ML model training and inference, as well as RAG-based generative AI applications.

However, existing compute engines are built on monolithic architectures with centralized components for most aspects of a query or job’s life cycle. 

This creates challenges with respect to cost, performance, concurrency handling, and scalability – particularly on compute-intensive heavy workloads that enterprises increasingly encounter as they operate at production scale.

e6data’s founding team saw an opportunity to address these gaps with a new engine architecture and distributed processing model that is disaggregated, decentralized, dynamic, and Kubernetes-native. 

The e6data engine outperforms leading commercial and open-source solutions across real-world heavy workloads and popular benchmarks: 5x higher performance, total cost of ownership (TCO) savings of more than 50%, and a truly format-neutral approach that negates ecosystem lock-in. 

With a multi-disciplinary mix of distributed systems engineers, database builders, open source committers, and go-to-market leaders from Microsoft, IBM DB2, Cisco, SAP, and Thoughtworks, the e6data team’s prior experiences in over 100+ large-scale data intelligence platforms gave them a first-hand view of the changing technology landscape, and the challenges facing enterprises as they scaled their data & AI needs. 

e6data has already signed up publicly listed Fortune 500 enterprises as well as high growth companies as customers.

It is anticipating explosive growth due to rising demand for compute-intensive heavy workloads across high-volume data products (e.g. customer-facing and business dashboards, reports), advanced analytics on near real-time data (personalization, fraud/risk, inventory planning), and production-grade generative AI applications (e.g. RAG for search, recommendation, customer support).

Data platform spend is already the top 2 CXO spend. However, the largest and fastest-growing spend drivers are typically from strategically important, nondiscretionary workloads.

According to Gartner, more than 80% of enterprises will be gen AI in production by 2026 which will further fuel the need for e6data’s high-efficiency, format-neutral compute infrastructure offering. 

Rajaraman Santhanam, COO of Chargebee added: “We’ve been collaborating with e6data across several internal and external-facing analytics use cases, all built on Chargebee’s multi-purpose, scalable data lakehouse platform. We are seeing exciting opportunities to innovate for our customers. We have successfully supported concurrencies of over 1,000 QPS on near real-time (NRT) data and complex queries while maintaining client latencies of less than 2 seconds. Other lakehouse engines we evaluated struggled to achieve this level of performance and scalability, despite being more resource intensive.”

While Rajeev Purohit, head of Platform Engineering at Freshworks said: “We have been impressed with e6data’s performance, concurrency, and scalability on some of our heaviest use cases as part of our evaluation and co-creation of a next-generation data platform. Their team has been knowledgeable and responsive to our product needs through our collaboration on cutting-edge open lakehouse architectures.”

With its unique offering, e6data hopes to level the playing field for customers by negating the immense pricing power a handful of vendors enjoy due to various new forms of compute ecosystem lock-in at different layers of the data stack. 

Organizations cannot freely move lakehouse table formats, data catalogs, compute providers, and cloud providers without adverse price-performance impacts, the need for data movement, and cumbersome application migrations.

Shekhar Kirani, partner at Accel, commented: “With GenAI, enterprises are seeing a surge in analytics use cases. Over the next few years, we expect every individual in an organization to be a power data consumer, implying a higher load on analytics and compute infrastructure. We believe e6data is primed to leverage and accelerate this movement.”

Swypex, an all-in-one financial management platform with corporate cards and spending management tools designed specifically for businesses, will leverage the fund to enhance corporate finance in Egypt.

Unlike traditional options, Swypex allows companies to issue an “unlimited” number of cards for employees and set granular spending controls. The platform integrates with the government’s e-invoicing system, providing businesses with a consolidated view of all expenses and spending data.

“We saw a gap in the market for a comprehensive B2B solution,” said Ahmad Mokhtar, CEO of Swypex, who co-founded the company with Tarek Mokhtar (CPO) and Sasan Hezarkhani (CTO). “Businesses were stuck using outdated banking services or relying heavily on cash, leading to inefficiencies and lack of visibility over spending.”

Swypex’s entry into the market coincides with a push by the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) to reduce cash-based transactions and encourage digital payments. Initiatives like the Instant Payment Network (IPN) have created a favourable environment for fintech companies like Swypex to offer innovative financial solutions.

The $4 million funding, along with the founders’ experience in developing products for global tech giants like Twitter and PlayStation, positions Swypex for efficient growth.

The company is targeting a slice of the Egyptian card and payments market valued at over $10 billion, which is expected to grow 10% annually for the next three years.

With its focus on user experience, advanced spending controls, and data-driven insights, Swypex seeks to disrupt the corporate card industry in Egypt and potentially become the go-to company across the Middle East.

Businesses are facing mounting pressure to prioritize security risks and ensure compliance with leading security and privacy standards. 

Non-adherence can result in loss of business, hefty regulatory fines, and damage to reputation. However, despite the critical importance of these activities, they struggle to build a robust, responsive risk and compliance program due to the amount of manual work involved and the limited availability of resources.

Helping businesses to address these challenges, leading automated risk and compliance platform Sprinto is today announcing a $20m funding round. 

Accel led the series B funding round with participation from existing investors Elevation Capital and Blume Ventures. Including this round, Sprinto has raised $31.8 million to date. 

Sprinto will use the fresh funds for R&D, with a sharp focus on intelligent automation and AI, and expanding into new markets. 

To empower businesses in navigating risk and compliance with clarity and confidence, Sprinto has pioneered technology rooted in intelligent automation that eliminates barriers to establishing trust. The platform plugs into a company’s processes to create intelligent workflows using AI. 

By doing so, Sprinto tears down silos and produces a connected view of assets, risks, controls, and compliance. This structured approach enhances security programs, fostering seamless operations and tangible results.   

Founded in 2020 by Girish Redekar and Raghuveer Kancherla, Sprinto marks their second entrepreneurial endeavor. The company has amassed thousands of customers and extended its reach to more than 75 countries. 

The co-founders observed first-hand the challenges of dealing with compliance with their first venture Recruiterbox (acquired in 2018). They found it to be tedious, manual, confusing, and costly. Sprinto was born out of this frustration, designed and engineered to help other companies eliminate busywork through intelligent automation, liberating themselves from compliance drudgery and reclaiming time to do business.

Girish Redekar, co-founder and CEO of Sprinto, said: “Companies are increasingly dependent on third and fourth parties to provide mission-critical services – from payroll processing to managed web hosting. It’s inevitable that this will expose them to vulnerabilities. They are doing their best to follow best practices for cybersecurity, but less than a quarter of execs believe they are meeting the bar (Bain & Company). 

Compliance serves as a way of seeding good security behaviors that help maintain security while ensuring high operating standards, high service levels, and risks under control. I’ve seen how CEOs are now increasingly engaged in risk and compliance-related projects, transitioning from viewing it solely as a monitoring and reporting mechanism for regulators to recognizing its potential as a driver of growth. 

Trust is the currency of any business transaction. Removing barriers to establishing trust can hyper-accelerate the GDP growth of B2B commerce. We are committed to building the technology that enables this mission.”

Sprinto customer Alessio Panni, Partner and Head of Cloud & Platforms practice at Prometeia commented: “As a leading company in the field of consulting services and software solutions for the financial sector, we firmly believe security and compliance lie at the very heart of our SaaS Cloud offering for risk management and wealth management. 

Sprinto is our trusted security and compliance platform, enabling us from the early days to enhance protection for our client’s assets and to accelerate the path towards secure growth and compliance goals.”

The Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) market is undergoing unprecedented changes. Total spending reached $54.61 billion in 2023, and it’s expected to climb to $134.86 billion in 2030 (source: Grandview Research). With its automation-first, intelligent, and adaptive risk and compliance platform, Sprinto is primed to succeed. 

The founding team and core leadership bring together decades of collective SaaS experience, drawing from diverse backgrounds as former founders, investors, and senior management professionals at companies like IBM, McKinsey, LinkedIn, Tata Consultancy Services, and BrowserStack. 

Shekhar Kirani, Partner at Accel, commented: “With the proliferation of data across digital platforms, the secular shift to the cloud, and the growing adoption of SaaS tools, information security is gaining central importance in the enterprise. Every company – whether tech-enabled or traditional, large or mid-sized – is increasingly required to comply with standard frameworks and protocols. 

“Sprinto is doing an incredible job of helping companies focus on their core business by making compliance low-touch, automated, and efficient. With a deep understanding of the product and a sharp focus on execution, Sprinto has been on a rare growth trajectory. We are thrilled to partner with Girish, Raghuveer, and their team at Sprinto in their mission to ensure that compliance becomes a driver of growth for businesses.

“We are thrilled to deepen our partnership with Sprinto as they continue to disrupt cloud security and compliance. Girish, Raghu, and the team have created a superior and comprehensive product, enabling hundreds of customers to achieve their compliance necessities. 

“Sprinto’s reviews and customer feedback are a testament to the product quality, which has enabled the company to grow over twenty times in a highly capital-efficient way since we led their Series A fundraising in 2021.” Ravi Adusumalli, Co-managing Partner, Elevation Capital.