Latest news with #PaloAlto-based
Economic Times
31-07-2025
- Business
- Economic Times
Cybersecurity startup Safe Security raises $70 million from Avataar Ventures, others
ETtech Safe Security cofounder Saket Modi Cybersecurity intelligence startup Safe Security has raised $70 million in a funding round led by Avataar Ventures, with participation from Susquehanna Asia Venture Capital, NextEquity Partners and Prosperity7 Ventures. Existing investors, including Eight Roads, John Chambers, and Sorenson Capital, also participated in the round. The Palo Alto-based company said the fresh capital will be used to invest in research and development initiatives, strengthen its presence in the cyber-risk management space, and develop agentic AI-based reasoning models as it works toward building cyberAGI, artificial general intelligence designed to manage cybersecurity autonomously. Founded in 2012 by Saket Modi, Viditkumar Baxi and Rahul Tyagi, Safe Security helps large enterprises measure and manage their cyber risks in real-time using artificial intelligence (AI). The company's software continuously assesses an organisation's internal systems and third-party partners, quantifies how exposed an organisation is to potential cyber threats, simulates the impact of possible breaches, and recommends where companies should focus their security efforts.'We are the layer of intelligence on top of pretty much the entire cyber security stack of a company, which translates tactical findings into business risk and then enables action on that,' Modi, who is the chief executive officer, told added that the company, which was incubated at IIT Bombay, offers over 100 application programming interfaces (APIs) that integrate with commonly used enterprise security Security was bootstrapped for its first four years. Modi, a computer science engineer, and his team were also involved in the security assessment of Bhim, the digital payments app developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). The company recently launched a new product in the continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) space, which it claims is the first fully autonomous solution in the category. It said that unlike existing tools that rely on static risk scores, Safe's version uses dozens of AI agents to scan an organisation's attack surface in real-time and simulate how adversaries might exploit different vulnerabilities. Safe Security currently has around 200 employees, with its research and development team of 100 based in India. It counts companies such as Google, Netflix, Fidelity, Victoria's Secret, T-Mobile, and Chevron among its 2023, Safe Security raised $50 million in a round led by Sorenson Capital. With the latest fundraise, the company has now raised a total of $170 million.'Most cybersecurity sub-sectors we've evaluated are either overcrowded or limited to tactical, widget-like solutions. But cybersecurity today is a boardroom and CEO-level priority, and that's not changing anytime soon,' said Nishant Rao, founding partner at Avataar Ventures. 'What makes Safe stand out is its positioning — not as another detection tool, but as a strategic intelligence layer across the entire cybersecurity stack.' Elevate your knowledge and leadership skills at a cost cheaper than your daily tea. Zomato delivered, but did the other listed unicorns? Tata Motors' INR38k crore Iveco buy: Factors that can make investors nervous Trump tariffs: End of road or a new journey ending Russia reliance? As rates slide, who will grab the savings pie? MFs, insurers? Is it time for Tim Cook to bid bye to Apple? Regulators promote exchanges; can they stifle one? Watch IEX Stock Radar: Down over 20% from highs! Varun Beverages stock showing signs of trend reversal – time to buy? History tells us 'Hold' is equal to wealth creation: 11 large- and mid-cap stocks from different sectors with upside potential of up to 37% In some cases parentage equals 'management with ability': 5 mid-caps from different sectors, which tick the right box Multibagger or IBC - Part 17: Margins are slim. Promoters are all in. Is this small cap the ultimate contrarian bet?
Time of India
31-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Cybersecurity startup Safe Security raises $70 million from Avataar Ventures, others
Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills Cybersecurity intelligence startup Safe Security has raised $70 million in a funding round led by Avataar Ventures , with participation from Susquehanna Asia Venture Capital, NextEquity Partners and Prosperity7 investors, including Eight Roads, John Chambers, and Sorenson Capital, also participated in the Palo Alto-based company said the fresh capital will be used to invest in research and development initiatives, strengthen its presence in the cyber-risk management space, and develop agentic AI-based reasoning models as it works toward building cyberAGI, artificial general intelligence designed to manage cybersecurity in 2012 by Saket Modi, Viditkumar Baxi and Rahul Tyagi, Safe Security helps large enterprises measure and manage their cyber risks in real-time using artificial intelligence (AI).The company's software continuously assesses an organisation's internal systems and third-party partners, quantifies how exposed an organisation is to potential cyber threats, simulates the impact of possible breaches, and recommends where companies should focus their security efforts.'We are the layer of intelligence on top of pretty much the entire cyber security stack of a company, which translates tactical findings into business risk and then enables action on that,' Modi, who is the chief executive officer, told added that the company, which was incubated at IIT Bombay, offers over 100 application programming interfaces (APIs) that integrate with commonly used enterprise security Security was bootstrapped for its first four years. Modi, a computer science engineer, and his team were also involved in the security assessment of Bhim, the digital payments app developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI).The company recently launched a new product in the continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) space, which it claims is the first fully autonomous solution in the category. It said that unlike existing tools that rely on static risk scores, Safe's version uses dozens of AI agents to scan an organisation's attack surface in real-time and simulate how adversaries might exploit different Security currently has around 200 employees, with its research and development team of 100 based in India. It counts companies such as Google, Netflix, Fidelity, Victoria's Secret, T-Mobile, and Chevron among its 2023, Safe Security raised $50 million in a round led by Sorenson Capital. With the latest fundraise, the company has now raised a total of $170 million.'Most cybersecurity sub-sectors we've evaluated are either overcrowded or limited to tactical, widget-like solutions. But cybersecurity today is a boardroom and CEO-level priority, and that's not changing anytime soon,' said Nishant Rao, founding partner at Avataar Ventures. 'What makes Safe stand out is its positioning — not as another detection tool, but as a strategic intelligence layer across the entire cybersecurity stack.'
NDTV
12-07-2025
- Business
- NDTV
All About Elon Musk's Educational Background And His Journey To Top
Elon Musk Journey 2025: Elon Reeve Musk, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of leading tech companies such as Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter), recently led the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)-an initiative under the second Trump administration aimed at reducing excessive spending and regulations. As of July 12, 2025, Musk is the richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of US dollar 404.2 billion, according to Forbes. Widely regarded as resilient and exceptionally hardworking, Musk has demonstrated immense dedication to his companies. He once revealed about how he stayed in the company's office for three-four days continuously and did not even go outside. Elon Musk's Educational Background Elon Musk completed his high school from Pretoria Boys High School, a public, tuition-charging English medium high school in South Africa. Musk applied for a Canadian passport to avoid South Africa's mandatory military service and ease his immigration to the United States and while waiting for his application to be processed, he studied at the University of Pretoria, South Africa for five months. He moved to Canada in June 1989 and took on various odd jobs, including working on a farm and in a lumber mill. He completed his Bachelors of Arts in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Science in economics from the university's Wharton School in 1995. He did not receive his degrees from the university until 1997. During his college years, he did two internships in Silicon Valley-one at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic supercapacitors for energy storage, and another at Palo Alto-based startup Rocket Science Games. In 1995, Musk was accepted into Stanford University's graduate program in Materials Science, but he chose not to enroll. He also applied for a job at Netscape Communications Corporation but did not receive a response. Elon Musk's Entrepreneurial Journey After his studies, he and his brother, Kimbal founded Zip2, an Internet city guide for the newspaper publishing industry, with maps, directions, and yellow pages, sold for 307 million dollars. He then founded an online financial services and e-mail payment company, which was later merged with Paypal and sold for 1.5 billion dollars. Musk acquired the domain from Paypal which is now the domain of Twitter. In 2002, using $100 million from his earlier ventures, Musk founded SpaceX with the goal of building affordable rockets. He serves as its CEO and Chief Engineer. In 2015, Elon started the development of Starlink constellation of low Earth orbit satellites to provide satellite Internet access and deployed his first large constellation in 2019. Over 7,600 Starlink satellites are operational as of 2025. Musk invested 6.35 million dollars in the Tesla in 2004, becoming the chairman of its board of directors. He became the CEO of the company in 2008. Tesla began the delivery of Roadster, an electric sports car, in 2008 and sold over 2,500 vehicles. Under Elon, Tesla has launched several high-selling vehicles like four-door sedan Model S (2012), the crossover Model X (2015), the mass-market sedan Model 3 (2017), the crossover Model Y (2020), and the pickup truck Cybertruck (2023). He also co-founded Neuralink, founded the Boring Company and acquired twitter, now known as and launched Grok, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot.
Time of India
08-07-2025
- Business
- Time of India
Smarter AI needs smarter humans
Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills ETtech As AI model intelligence peaks, its reliance on complex, human-curated data is only started with microtasks such as transcribing audio files, marking tick boxes, translating language and labelling objects in images. Now, data annotators are correcting software code, checking financial statements and analysing diagnostic reports, as the training needs of artificial intelligence models become more annotation, or simply data labelling, is the most crucial and foundational step for building high-quality datasets to train AI models, enhance accuracy, curtail hallucinations and build safety guardrails against inappropriate or harmful content. And India is fast emerging as a hub for data annotation services with flexible workers, mid-tier business analysts and even skilled data engineers, auditors, radiologists, lawyers, etc., contributing to building high-quality datasets.'Honestly, I think we need to retire the term 'data labelling',' says Jonathan Siddharth, founder of Palo Alto-based talent and AI tools company Turing . 'It's like calling a smartphone a 'portable telephone'.''What we're doing now is fundamentally different. We're not tagging cats and dogs; we're orchestrating teams of Olympiad-level talent to solve highly complex problems across industries,' he said. AI models have got so smart that sometimes you need a physicist, a software engineer, and a data scientist working together just to generate data that challenges them, he Arora, founder and CEO of early-stage startup Macgence, said his company is focussing on curating custom datasets for AI/ML models and agents. 'Businesses now have custom data sourcing needs which capture linguistic and cultural nuances. These datasets are not available on open libraries like Hugging Face,' he global market for data annotation is likely to expand from about $6.5 billion in 2025 to nearly $20 billion by 2030, growing at about 25–30% each year, according to staffing firm TeamLease Digital . In India, the market was worth $80 million in 2023 and is expected to reach nearly $500 million by 2030, growing at almost 30% each year, it this has reflected in the growth of the workforce in this segment from 20,000 in 2022 to 70,000 currently. These include annotators, quality controllers and project managers, who work in startups, IT services and crowdsourcing platforms.'Data annotation has grown more complex with the rise of LLMs, leading to the emergence of specialised, higher-paying roles for domain-specific tasks,' said Kapil Joshi, CEO – Quess IT Staffing, adding that some of its clients have grown 50% year-on-year. With this growth, the sector will soon witness a talent scarcity, said TeamLease Digital CEO Neeti Sharma. 'By 2026, the industry could face a shortage of 40–50% in skilled professionals.''As models evolve, data demands will shift — certain types of data may require lower volumes but others will rapidly expand,' said Ryan Kolln, CEO of Appen, a Washington-based company which has delivered over 15,000 AI data projects , including LLM fine-tuning, evaluation, red teaming, and multimodal annotation. 'A good example of this is LLM work, where elementary math question data is reducing, but data is still growing in demand for more complex STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) problems,' he sector's importance is underscored by Meta's recent $14.3 billion deal to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI, valuing the data company at $29 billion. This has opened a multi-million opportunity for global companies like Turing and Appen as tech giants OpenAI, Google, Microsoft have reportedly terminated their contracts with Scale. Turing's Siddharth said the deal validates that 'data is as strategic as compute in the race to AGI (artificial general intelligence), and signals that the scale of investment here will rival or even exceed billions annually across frontier labs'. In the past weeks, Turing has added potential contracts worth $50 million, the Time companies have long depended on India's talent and scale for servicing global projects. 'The depth of technical expertise — from IIT grads to domain-specific PhDs in math, physics and engineering — is extraordinary. And it's evolving in sync with what AI needs: not just coding talent, but frontier minds who can help push the limits of reasoning, multimodality and agentic workflows,' said Siddharth of Turing, whose 40% workforce is based in added that data labs need the best minds to compete, 'not just recycle the same talent pool in Silicon Valley. When a physicist in Bengaluru helps train a model that might cure diseases, or an engineer in Pune improves an AI that could revolutionise education, that's the democratisation of both intelligence and opportunity'.Appen's Kolln pointed out that logical thinking and problem-solving skills are strong in the Indian education system given the strong emphasis on mathematics and science. The company has a pool of 50,000 contributors from founder and CEO of Indika AI, said: 'Over the past three years, we've seen strong global demand for multilingual, domain-specific data infrastructure which translated into 5X top line growth for us.' The company's freelance platform, Flexibench, has 70,000 registered contributors, 5%-10% of whom are working actively at any given time, he added.
Economic Times
08-07-2025
- Business
- Economic Times
Smarter AI needs smarter humans
ETtech As AI model intelligence peaks, its reliance on complex, human-curated data is only started with microtasks such as transcribing audio files, marking tick boxes, translating language and labelling objects in images. Now, data annotators are correcting software code, checking financial statements and analysing diagnostic reports, as the training needs of artificial intelligence models become more complex. Data annotation, or simply data labelling, is the most crucial and foundational step for building high-quality datasets to train AI models, enhance accuracy, curtail hallucinations and build safety guardrails against inappropriate or harmful content. And India is fast emerging as a hub for data annotation services with flexible workers, mid-tier business analysts and even skilled data engineers, auditors, radiologists, lawyers, etc., contributing to building high-quality datasets. 'Honestly, I think we need to retire the term 'data labelling',' says Jonathan Siddharth, founder of Palo Alto-based talent and AI tools company Turing. 'It's like calling a smartphone a 'portable telephone'.' 'What we're doing now is fundamentally different. We're not tagging cats and dogs; we're orchestrating teams of Olympiad-level talent to solve highly complex problems across industries,' he said. AI models have got so smart that sometimes you need a physicist, a software engineer, and a data scientist working together just to generate data that challenges them, he Arora, founder and CEO of early-stage startup Macgence, said his company is focussing on curating custom datasets for AI/ML models and agents. 'Businesses now have custom data sourcing needs which capture linguistic and cultural nuances. These datasets are not available on open libraries like Hugging Face,' he said. Riding the growth waveThe global market for data annotation is likely to expand from about $6.5 billion in 2025 to nearly $20 billion by 2030, growing at about 25–30% each year, according to staffing firm TeamLease Digital. In India, the market was worth $80 million in 2023 and is expected to reach nearly $500 million by 2030, growing at almost 30% each year, it said. And this has reflected in the growth of the workforce in this segment from 20,000 in 2022 to 70,000 currently. These include annotators, quality controllers and project managers, who work in startups, IT services and crowdsourcing platforms. 'Data annotation has grown more complex with the rise of LLMs, leading to the emergence of specialised, higher-paying roles for domain-specific tasks,' said Kapil Joshi, CEO – Quess IT Staffing, adding that some of its clients have grown 50% year-on-year. With this growth, the sector will soon witness a talent scarcity, said TeamLease Digital CEO Neeti Sharma. 'By 2026, the industry could face a shortage of 40–50% in skilled professionals.' 'As models evolve, data demands will shift — certain types of data may require lower volumes but others will rapidly expand,' said Ryan Kolln, CEO of Appen, a Washington-based company which has delivered over 15,000 AI data projects, including LLM fine-tuning, evaluation, red teaming, and multimodal annotation. 'A good example of this is LLM work, where elementary math question data is reducing, but data is still growing in demand for more complex STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) problems,' he said. The sector's importance is underscored by Meta's recent $14.3 billion deal to acquire a 49% stake in Scale AI, valuing the data company at $29 billion. This has opened a multi-million opportunity for global companies like Turing and Appen as tech giants OpenAI, Google, Microsoft have reportedly terminated their contracts with Scale. Turing's Siddharth said the deal validates that 'data is as strategic as compute in the race to AGI (artificial general intelligence), and signals that the scale of investment here will rival or even exceed billions annually across frontier labs'. In the past weeks, Turing has added potential contracts worth $50 million, the Time reported. The India advantage Data companies have long depended on India's talent and scale for servicing global projects. 'The depth of technical expertise — from IIT grads to domain-specific PhDs in math, physics and engineering — is extraordinary. And it's evolving in sync with what AI needs: not just coding talent, but frontier minds who can help push the limits of reasoning, multimodality and agentic workflows,' said Siddharth of Turing, whose 40% workforce is based in India. He added that data labs need the best minds to compete, 'not just recycle the same talent pool in Silicon Valley. When a physicist in Bengaluru helps train a model that might cure diseases, or an engineer in Pune improves an AI that could revolutionise education, that's the democratisation of both intelligence and opportunity'.Appen's Kolln pointed out that logical thinking and problem-solving skills are strong in the Indian education system given the strong emphasis on mathematics and science. The company has a pool of 50,000 contributors from founder and CEO of Indika AI, said: 'Over the past three years, we've seen strong global demand for multilingual, domain-specific data infrastructure which translated into 5X top line growth for us.' The company's freelance platform, Flexibench, has 70,000 registered contributors, 5%-10% of whom are working actively at any given time, he added. Elevate your knowledge and leadership skills at a cost cheaper than your daily tea. As GenAI puts traditional BPO on life support, survival demands a makeover India Inc is ditching dollar loans. 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