Author : zebethcontrol

Thanks to AI, you can now create automations in Power Automate by simply describing them • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Automation, Enterprise, Microsoft, Microsoft Ignite 2022, openai codex, power platform, Robotics & AINo Comments

Power Automate, Microsoft’s Power Platform service that helps users create workflows between apps, is getting new AI smarts. During its Ignite conference, Microsoft rolled out capabilities powered by OpenAI’s Codex, the code-generating machine learning system underpinning GitHub Copilot. Starting today (in public preview), Power Automate users can write what they want to automate in natural language and have Codex generate suggestions to jumpstart the flow creation. It’s Microsoft’s latest move to more tightly integrate the various technologies from OpenAI, the San Francisco AI startup in which it has invested $1 billion, into its family of products. Two years ago, Microsoft introduced a Power Apps feature that used GPT-3, OpenAI’s text-generating system, to create formulas in Power Fx, Power Platform’s programming language. Microsoft also continues to evolve Azure OpenAI Service, a fully managed, enterprise-focused platform designed to give businesses access to OpenAI innovations with governance features. “Our goal is that anywhere in the ecosystem that a person would need to write code they have the flexibility to start with natural language too, and Codex is core to that strategy,” Stephen Siciliano, VP of Power Automate, told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “[These are] new tools that will help users eliminate tedious work and free up time for workers to focus on more high value projects.” Image Credits: Microsoft Using the new Codex-powered tool, Power Automate users can describe the type of workflow automation they’d like to create in a sentence. Codex will then translate this into flow recommendations, which — when set up with the appropriate connectors — can be fine-tuned within Power Automate’s flow designer to create an automated workflow. Siciliano says that the feature will support “key” Microsoft 365 connectors at launch, and that there will be additional integrations in the coming months. “We have fine-tuned Codex primarily with the thousands of templates that we have for Power Automate cloud flows today,” he added. Originally, Codex was trained on billions of lines of public code in languages like Python and JavaScript to suggest new lines of code and functions given a few snippets of existing code. “These templates are a combination of Microsoft-built and community submitted scenarios, so they cover a breadth of use cases and everything from very simple to more advanced flows.” When asked about the longer-term roadmap, Siciliano declined to reveal much. But he suggested that Codex might come to more places within Power Platform in the future. “[T]here are many different places in the Power Platform where natural language may be useful, so you’ll see a broader rollout,” he continued. “Moreover, we will continue to enhance the accuracy of the [system] over time as well.” The new Codex-Power Automate integration dovetails with enhancements to AI Builder, which also landed this morning. (AI Builder, a built-in Power Automate feature, lets users add AI capabilities and models to automated flows.) AI Builder now offers users the ability to train AI systems on the data they might want to extract from documents, allowing Power Automate to pull data in freeform documents such as contracts, statements of work and letters, even from tables that span several pages. Microsoft says the document-processing capabilities of AI Builder now support 164 languages, including handwritten Japanese.

Refinements are perfectly fine • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Gadgets, Google, Google Fall Event 2022, Hardware, PIXEL, pixel 7, Pixel 7 ProNo Comments

Following last week’s Google event, a colleague commented to me that the Pixel 7 wasn’t as big an upgrade as the Pixel 6. This is an objectively true statement. But also, it’s fine. Whatever you think about the yearly refresh cycle hardware makers are locked into, we’ve all come to accept that some upgrades are going to be more incremental than others. In fact, most years are going to be iterative. That’s how this works. The contrast is strong here, because last year was anything but. The Pixel 6 was Google’s breakout phone. Last year was the year Google finally answered the “why,” marrying excellent hardware and software with an affordable price point. It’s a question the Pixel Watch may spend another generation or two addressing. But last year the Pixel smartphone line broke out of the cycle, and all it took was a massive restructuring of Google’s hardware division. The Pixel 6 changed the conversation around Google’s smartphone efforts. The Pixel 7 is, by and large, an iteration on last year’s model. And that’s totally fine. In 2021, the company worked to catch up with the rest of the flagship market, and now it’s about keeping that pace. The truth about the way the category is structured currently is that it seems likely that any one will change the conversation completely. Image Credits: Brian Heater So many of these devices revolve around same or similar components powering the same operating system. At present, Google’s biggest differentiator is software. The Pixel may have been developed as a method for showcasing new Android features, but these days, those features are precisely what distinguishes the product from the pack. The other big (and related tentpole) are the company’s advances in machine learning. Those are present in a number of spots, but most primarily imaging, where this thing really shines. I opted to review the 7 Pro instead of the 7 this time out because we’re finally getting some nice fall weather here and I really wanted to take some good photos. Is that selfish? I mean, yeah, for sure, but photography is the battlefield on which the smartphone wars are currently waged. There’s a third potential plank for some differentiation: processing. Like Apple, Google has broken out of the Qualcomm mold that powers a majority of flagships these days, instead opting to build its own chips in-house. Unfortunately, there’s really not a big leap from original Tensor chip to the G2 — certainly nothing worth dwelling on here. The benchmarks do get a small uptick, but for day-to-day use, it seems unlikely you’ll notice much there. Image Credits: Brian Heater The hardware is refined over last year’s model. It’s a nice looking phone (the camera bar has proven somewhat polarizing, but I like it). It’s slim, slick and shiny, and the phone doesn’t feel as outsized as its 6.7-inch screen (though single-handed use is largely a no-go for me). The 1,000 nit display is nice and bright, and the 1440 x 3120 512 ppi resolution looks great coupled with the smooth 120Hz refresh rate. Like the new Pixel Watch, it’s got an always-on option, though again, that’s going to have an impact on battery life. Also like the Pixel Watch, I wasn’t particularly impressed with the on-board battery. Rated at 5,000 mAh (a slight downgrade from the 6 Pro’s 5,003), I’m looking at around 25% capacity nine hours in. Once again, imaging is where this thing really shines. One of the earliest hard-learned lessons for the line is that computational photography alone isn’t enough. Google felt it had something to prove in those early days, with a single camera sensor, but it ultimately came up short. Computational photography, coupled with good camera hardware, on the other hand, is a force to be reckoned with. The standard 7 sports a 50-megapixel wide camera and 12-megapixel ultrawide, while the Pro adds a 48-megapixel telephoto into the camera bar. I’m not permanently packing up my SLR any time soon, but as far as a frictionless, out of the box experience goes, it’s tough to beat the Pixel 7 Pro. Generations of camera software updates have made taking a good photo dead simple, and recent upgrades have brought dramatic improvements to things like zoom. [Insert: Full zoom]The phone will only get you up to 5x with optical zoom, but it does an impressive job beyond that, all things considered. When you really push things to 20-30x, you’re going to see clear noise on the image, but the result is still impressive, particularly when shooting in direct sunlight. Image stabilization also does a good job minimizing some of the unavoidable handshaking that comes with telephoto shots. Light also makes a world of difference for macro shots. Holding the camera around one to two inches from a subject will surface the setting automatically. There’s no specific macro lens built in (as we’ve seen on a smattering of other models). Instead, the feature relies on the ultrawide, and the results are impressive, nonetheless. Coupled with upgrades to features like Real Tone for more authentic skin tones and Night Sight and you’ve got an extremely well-rounded and impressive little camera in your pocket. Image Credits: Brian Heater The biggest exclusive (for now, at least) software updates arrive on the Speech side of things. These have long been top of the list of Pixel standout features, so it’s no surprise to see that they’re still a focus this time around. Voice Recorder adds Canadian English, American Spanish and Hindi English to a list that also includes German, French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese. Google’s longstanding quest to make automated phone menus less annoying continues in earnest with the addition of pressable menu options that populate even before the robot voice speaks them. Much like the phone itself nothing there is a true breakthrough, so much as a refinement on an already good thing. With a starting price of $599 for the 7 and $899 for the 7 Pro, Google is more

Polestar steers towards the mass market with its first electric SUV • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in EV, Geely, Polestar, Polestar 3, Transportation, volvoNo Comments

EV maker Polestar has unveiled the Polestar 3, its first SUV designed to help propel the startup to bona fide mass market automaker. Priced from $83,900, the 489-horsepower Polestar 3 will achieve an estimated 300-mile range, according to Polestar – a competitive set of figures designed to compete with a forthcoming crop of battery-electric luxury SUVs from Mercedes-Benz, Maserati, and the like. Polestar’s five-passenger SUV is also available with a Performance Pack that raises output to 517 horsepower. The Swedish electric performance car company is still small by any measurement – delivering just 6,638 cars in the U.S. for the first nine months of the year, compared with Tesla’s 390,814. But so far the company seems to be one of the few EV SPACs still going strong, in part due to support from its largest shareholders, Volvo and Geely. Image Credits: Polestar Polestar went public in a SPAC deal with Gores Guggenheim in June. It has managed to avoid the pitfalls facing most other EV manufacturers that have opted to go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company rather than completing an initial public offering – namely cash crunches, investor lawsuits, federal investigations and bankruptcies. It’s also one of the few EV SPACs with actual production vehicles on the road and more coming. Polestar has said it’s on track to deliver 50,000 cars worldwide this year, and plans to scale up to 290,000 cars annually by 2025 — about 10 times the automaker’s 2021 sales. Those are impressive targets given that the brand currently sells just one model, the 270-mile range Polestar 2 battery-electric sedan. Its debut model, 600-horsepower Polestar 1 plug-in hybrid, was discontinued in December. The arrival of the Polestar 3 SUV, a new entrant in a profitable, fast-growing segment, could be a game-changer, as it was for Maserati, Porsche, Lamborghini and other staunch sedan brands that took the leap into utility vehicles. Polestar 3 details Image Credits: Polestar The company will begin building the Polestar 3 at Volvo Cars’ plant in Chengdu, China, next summer and Ridgeville, South Carolina facility in mid-2024. The SUV is expected to arrive in showrooms in the U.S., Europe and China late next year, followed by the Middle East and Asia Pacific. All told, the automaker hopes to have showrooms in 30 countries by the end of 2023. Polestar plans to continue launching new models at a steady clip, starting with the 2024 arrival of the Polestar 4 SUV coupe. The Polestar 5 4-door GT and Polestar 6, an 884-horsepower hard-top convertible, are slated to follow. Polestar plans to sway SUV customers to the new brand with a cutting-edge technology palette, which includes hardware from lidar supplier Luminar and software from Zenseact, Volvo’s division for advanced driver assistance systems. Analysts note that certain new Volvo safety features may debut in Polestar models first. The Polestar 3 will share some equipment and features with Volvo’s upcoming EX90 battery-electric SUV, including bidirectional charging, which allows the car’s battery to feed power back to the grid when not in use. Polestar said the SUV will use centralized computing from Nvidia as its “AI brain,” processing data from its five radar modules, five external cameras and twelve external ultrasonic sensors to power its advanced safety features. An optional Pilot Pack features a lidar system lets the Polestar 3 scan its surroundings in greater detail, allowing for over-the-air updates as Level 3 and Level 4 autonomous driving becomes legal on public roads.

Microsoft announces Syntex, a set of automated document and data processing services • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in AI, artificial intelligence, Automation, Microsoft, Microsoft Ignite 2022, Robotics & AI, StartupsNo Comments

Two years ago, Microsoft debuted SharePoint Syntex, which leverages AI to automate the capture and classification of data from documents — building on SharePoint’s existing services. Today marks the expansion of the platform into Microsoft Syntex, a set of new products and capabilities including file annotation and data extraction. Syntex reads, tags and indexes document content — whether digital or physical — making it searchable and available within Microsoft 365 apps and helping manage the content lifecycle with security and retention settings. According to Chris McNulty, the director of Microsoft Syntex, driving the launch was customers’ increasing desire to “do more with less,” particularly as a recession looms. A 2021 survey from Dimensional Research found that more than two-thirds of companies leave valuable data untapped, largely because of problems building pipelines to access that data. “Just as business intelligence transformed the way companies use data to drive business decisions, Microsoft Syntex unlocks the value of the massive amount of content that resides within an organization,” McNulty told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Virtually any industry with large scale content and processes will see benefits from adopting Microsoft Syntex. In particular, we see the greatest alignment with industries that work with a higher volume of technically dense and regulated content – financial services, manufacturing, health care, life sciences, and retail among them.” Syntex offers backup, arc1hiving, analytics and management tools for documents as well as a viewer to add annotations and redactions to files. Containers enable developers to store content in a managed sandbox, while “scenario accelerators” provide workflows for use cases like contract management, accounts payable and so on. “The Syntex content processor lets you build simple rules to trigger the next action, whether it’s a transaction, an alert, a workflow or just filing your content in the right libraries and folders,” McNulty explained. “[Meanwhile,] the advanced viewer adds an annotation and inking layer on top of any content viewable in Microsoft 365. Annotations can be made securely, with different permissions than the underlying content, and also without modifying the underlying content.” McNulty says that customers like TaylorMade are exploring ways to use Syntex for contract management and assembly, standardizing contracts with common clauses around financial terms. The company is also piloting the service to process orders, receipts and other transactional documents for accounts payable and finance teams, in addition to organizing and securing emails, attachments and other documents for intellectual property and patent filings. “One of the fastest-growing content transactions is e-signature,” McNulty said. “[With Syntex, you] can send electronic signature requests using Syntex, Adobe Acrobat Sign, DocuSign or any of our other e-signature partner solutions and your content stays in Microsoft 365 while it’s being reviewed and signed.” Intelligent document processing of the type Syntex does is often touted as a solution to the problem of file management and orchestration at scale. According to one source, 15% of a company’s revenue is spent creating, managing and distributing documents. Documents aren’t just costly — they’re time-wasting and error-prone. More than nine in 10 employees responding to a 2021 ABBY survey said that they waste up to eight hours each week looking through documents to find data, and using traditional methods to create a new document takes on average three hours and incurs six errors in punctuation, spellings, omissions or printing. A number of startups offer products to tackle this, including Hypatos, which applies deep learning to power a wide range of back-office automation with a focus on industries with heavy financial document processing needs. Flatfile automatically learns how imported data from files should be structured and cleaned, while another vendor, Klarity, aims to replace humans for tasks that require large-scale document review, including accounting order forms, purchase orders and agreements. As with many of its services announced today, Microsoft, evidently, is betting scale will work in its favor. “Syntex uses AI and automation technologies from across Microsoft, including summarization, translation and optical character recognition,” McNulty said. “Many of these services are being made available to Microsoft 365 commercial accounts with no additional upfront licensing under a new pay-as-you-go business model.” Syntex is beginning to roll out today and will continue to roll out in early 2023. Microsoft says it’ll have additional details on service pricing and packaging published on the Microsoft 365 message center and through licensing disclosure documentation in the coming months.

Oh look, TripActions raised at a $9.2B valuation after reported $12B IPO filing • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Startups, tripactionsNo Comments

TripActions, a corporate travel and expenses company, has raised a combination of equity and debt at a post-money valuation of $9.2 billion, up from its prior valuation of $7.5 billion. The funding is a $154 million equity round from investors including returning investors Andreessen Horowitz and Premji Invest, and a $150 million structured financing deal from Coatue. The deal comes weeks after the Palo Alto-based company was said to have filed confidentially to go public in the second quarter of next year at a $12 billion valuation. Totaling $304 million, the Series G financing has been in the works since at least May, confirming earlier Bloomberg reports that the travel company was seeking financing at a higher valuation. Other investors in the company include Base Partners, Elad Gil, Greenoaks Capital Management, Zeev Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures and Addition Ventures. As part of the transaction, Premji Invest’s Sandesh Patnam will join TripActions board of directors. Coatue Ventures’ Dan Rose will join as a board observer. In a release announcing the deal, TripActions noted that the funding will be used for global expansion, building off of its expense management launch in Europe and new offices in Portugal, Germany, France and the UK. The company also acquired a number of travel management businesses, adding to its now more than 2,500 employees. Why the deal now, ahead of a looming IPO? TripActions didn’t comment on any public listing plans, but its not unique to see a company raise ahead of a financial event of that scale. IPOs take a long time, and are expensive; so TripActions could be bringing on strategic investors to help guide the process, or just land cash to give it buffer room in case its timeline change due to market volatility. As we know from this past year, big valuations and lots of cash don’t mean much as a signal of business stability. That said, travel startups had it especially hard in the beginning of the pandemic, and a recovery shown through investor capital is clearly worth noting. The company expanded its business travel platform by bringing on fintech and expenses into the mix, a diversified yet competitive world to dig into. TripActions didn’t share any specific financials, but stated in the release that its expense management platform had more than a 7.5X spend volume growth last quarter, and that gross bookings for business travel are up more than 5X year over year. ZebethMedia reached out to TripActions for more information regarding the raise and IPO, as well as expansion plans, but has not yet heard back as of time of publication.

Microsoft expands Azure OpenAI Service with DALL-E 2 in preview • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in dall-e 2, Enterprise, Microsoft, Robotics & AINo Comments

When Azure OpenAI Service launched in 2021, the service — a part of Azure Cognitive Services — provided enterprise-tailored access to OpenAI’s API through the Azure platform for applications like language translation and text autocompletion. That’s not changing. But after expanding the service in May with fine-tuning features, Microsoft is today introducing invite-only access to DALL-E 2 for select Azure OpenAI Service customers. Customers can use DALL-E 2 to generate custom images using either text or images. In line with the consumer DALL-E 2 service, they can leverage inpainting and outpainting — capabilities that generate new content within a portion of an image or push an image beyond its original confines, respectively — in addition to a feature that generates variations on an existing image. Content for podcasts custom-generated by DALL-E 2, through the Azure OpenAI Service. Image Credits: Microsoft Early adopters include brands like Mattel, which used DALL-E 2 to come up with ideas for a new Hot Wheels model car. German media conglomerate RTL Deutschland, another pilot customer, is considering combining streaming content metadata with DALL-E 2 to generate visuals for podcast episodes and scenes in audiobooks. To prevent misuse, as with Designer and Image Creator, Microsoft says it’s implemented filters to reject DALL-E 2 prompts from Azure OpenAI Service customers that violate content policy. The company also claims it’s integrated techniques to prevent DALL-E 2 from creating images of religious objects and celebrities, plus objects commonly used to try to trick the system into generating sexual or violent content. And Microsoft says it’s added models that remove AI-generated images appearing to contain adult, gore and other types of “inappropriate” content. Generations from Mattel using DALL-E 2. Image Credits: Microsoft “Microsoft is making access available by invitation-only to give us the opportunity to collaborate with customers and create safeguards to prevent harmful uses and unwanted outcomes as customers bring their applications to production,” a Microsoft spokesperson told ZebethMedia via email. “Collaborations with these early customers will help us make sure the responsible AI safeguards are working in practice.” Beyond DALL-E 2, Microsoft gave a general update on Azure OpenAI Service’s growth since its launch roughly a year ago. Companies using the service now span industries including financial services, insurance and healthcare, the company said, including brands like Accenture, Avanade, Autodesk, BMW Group, CarMax, EY and PwC. Some of the most common use cases include writing assistance, natural language-to-code generation and parsing data to generate insights. For example, PwC is leveraging Azure OpenAI Service to classify various news articles into environment, social and governance topics for benchmarking purposes, while CarMax is using the service to generate new marketing content based on customer reviews.

Microsoft’s Edge browser gets shared Workspaces, new security features and more • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Apps, browsers, Microsoft, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Ignite 2022No Comments

It’s Microsoft Ignite this week and while a lot of the announcements this week target the kinds of IT professionals and admins who really need more deployment options for Azure Kubernetes Service through Azure Arc, the company is also announcing a few user-facing updates to its Edge browser. The most important of these is likely Edge Workspaces, a new feature (currently in preview) that will allow teams to share browser tabs. Microsoft argues that this feature can be useful when bringing on new team members to an existing project. Instead of sharing lots of links and files, the team can simply share a single like to an Edge Workspace (which will then likely consist of lots of links and files, but hey, at least it’s just one link to share). As the project evolves, the tabs are updated in real time. I guess that’s a use case. We’ve seen our share of extensions that do similar things, none of which ever get very popular. Meanwhile, teams share these links and files in other ways (think Confluent, etc.). Image Credits: Microsoft On the security front, Microsoft is bringing typo protection for website URLs to the browser, promising to protect “users from accidentally navigating to online fraud sites after misspelling the website address by suggesting the website that the user intended.” Nothing too complicated here, and a useful feature for sure. Also new is an opt-in enhanced security mode that automatically applies the most conservative settings when you surf to unfamiliar websites. It disables just-in-time JavaScript compilation, for example. The idea here is that users and admins can set off often a user has to visit a site before it’s considered ‘familiar’ and set the level of security accordingly. That won’t help if a familiar site is hacked and somebody introduces malicious code, but it should prevent quite a few security issues. Finally, Microsoft is also introducing a number of new accessibility features. Edge now features live captions when audio is playing (taking a cue from Google’s playbook on Android) and an enhanced narrator experience now provides more contextual information about fields and buttons for visually impaired users. With this update, screen readers can now also read Edge’s Instant Answers for queries like “Seattle weather.” And with page colors, users will soon be able to change — you guess it — page colors to improve readability and color contrast.

Microsoft launches new security services aimed at protecting code in the cloud • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in devops, Enterprise, Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Ignite 2022, SecurityNo Comments

At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced Defender Cloud Security Posture Management and Defender for DevOps, two new offerings within the company’s Defender for Cloud service (previously Cloud App Security) aimed at managing software development and runtime security across multicloud, multiple-pipeline environments. Currently available in public preview, they work with GitHub and Azure DevOps to start, with additional product integrations to come down the line. In a conversation with ZebethMedia, Microsoft CVP of cloud security Shawn Bice said that Defender for DevOps and Defender Cloud Security Posture Management (or Defender CSPM, to refer to it by its more wieldy acronym) arose from the challenges companies are increasingly facing as they use cloud-native services to deploy and manage applications. These customers often have incomplete visibility and a lack of prioritized mitigations, he said, making their security reactive as opposed to proactive. There’s truth to that. According to a 2020 report from Orca Security, 59% of cybersecurity teams report receiving more than 500 alerts about cloud security per day — a large portion of which are false positives. Tool sprawl is often cited as a challenge in maintaining code security. Responding to a GitLab survey from August, 41% of DevOps teams said that they used between six to 10 tools in their development toolchains, leading them to miss security issues. “The accelerated cloud transformation journey for our customers has created an urgent need for a unified solution to manage security from development to runtime in multicloud and multiple pipeline environments,” Bice said via email. Image Credits: Microsoft To this end, Defender CSPM leverages AI algorithms to perform contextual risk analyses of software dev environments. Resulting recommendations and insights are piped into source code management platforms like GitHub and Azure DevOps to drive remediation efforts; alternatively, users can create workflows connected to security recommendations to trigger automated remediation. Defender CSPM also provides “attack queries” that security teams can use to explore risk and threat data, as well as a dashboard showing all the rules implemented across dev environments and tools that allow security admins to define new rules. As for Defender for DevOps, it shows the security posture of pre-production app code and resource configurations. Security teams can use the service to enable templates and container images designed to minimize the chance that cloud misconfigurations reach production environments. “Leveraging [insights] within Defender for Cloud, security admins can help developers prioritize critical code fixes with actionable remediation and assign developer ownership by triggering custom workflows,” Bice explained. With the rollout of Defender CSPM and Defender for Cloud, it’s clear Microsoft is angling for a larger slice of the enormous and growing DevSecOps segment. Grand View Research estimates that the market for DevSecOps — which spans tools that automate security practices at every step of software development — was worth $2.79 billion in 2020. Startups including Spectral, which aims to detect potential security issues in codebases and logs, and Cycode, which offers tools to secure DevOps pipelines, might be perceived as competitors. But Microsoft’s scale — and the fact that both Defender CSPM and Defender for Cloud are free for Defender for Cloud customers during the preview period — give it an advantage. “Microsoft is committed to enabling security for all,” Bice added, “[with] a comprehensive cloud security benchmark across multiple clouds.”

Cyber training platform pulls in another $66M after post-pandemic remote working increases cyber threats • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in cybersecurity, SecurityNo Comments

It was only in June last year when we reported how Immersive Labs, a platform which teaches cybersecurity skills to employees in a “gamified” way, had closed a $75 million Series C funding round. As of today, the company just pulled in another $66 Million, taking the total raised to $189 million. And it can perhaps put its success partly to COVID-19. The company has previously said the new wave of interest in cyber security by organizations has been caused by so many people shifting to working remotely, a habit which was acquired during the pandemic and which now increasingly companies implement by default. Ten Eleven Ventures led the latest raise, while existing investors Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Summit Partners, Insight Partners, Menlo Ventures, and Citi Ventures all participated in the round. Immersive Labs originated from the CYLON cyber accelerator in London, an idea borne of founder James Hadley, a former GCHQ security researcher, and trainer, who realized ordinary employees needed a better way to learn cyber security as they were the weakest links in most organizations. The capital will be used to boost its “Cyber Workforce Resilience” category and deliver solutions to enterprise customers like Citi, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Pfizer, Daimler, Humana, Atos, and the UK National Health Service. In a statement Hadely said: “Attracting new investment during a difficult time overall for the tech sector underscores the incredible demand for Immersive Labs’ disruptive, people-centric approach to cybersecurity. Proving cyber resilience has increasingly become a Board and C-level consideration.” Immersive has also beefed-up its executive team, adding Sandra McDevitt as Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) and Lucian Lui as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Dave Palmer (Ten Eleven General Partner and Darktrace Founder and former Chief Product Officer) will join the company’s Board, while Jack Huffard (Tenable Co-Founder and current Non-Executive Director of Immersive) becomes Chair. Palmer added: “As we see more focus on proving cyber resilience across public and private sectors, Immersive Labs stands to play a key role in the future of cybersecurity.

72 hours left to save on ZebethMedia Disrupt passes • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 12, 2022Posted in Disrupt, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

That sound you hear is the countdown clock on your chance to attend ZebethMedia Disrupt on October 18–20 — and keep extra cheddar in your bank account. Set aside any distractions and get ’er done. Buy your pass before October 14 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT), and you’ll save $700. The four stages at Disrupt offer a wide range of programming, and they’re a big reason this top-notch tech conference is where startups go to grow. Pro tip: Head to the event agenda, where you can use filters to see the speakers, session descriptions and times for each day. The Disrupt stage: Hear from the likes of Toyin Ajayi, Parker Conrad, Chris Dixon, Johanna Faries, Amy Gan, Draymond Green, Kevin Hart, Marc Lore, Serena Williams and so many more. The ZebethMedia+ stage: You’ll find topics all startup founders need to understand. Like what? Like these. What Does Product-Market Fit Mean When Hype Tanks? How to Secure Those Hard to Find Hires Taking the BS Out of Your TAM The Discovery stage: ZebethMedia partners share their expertise on essential startup issues. You’ll also find fab speaker Q&As. Like what? Like these. From Capital and Counsel, to Partnerships and Profits: How to Maximize Your Investor Relationships What the Startup World Is Really Like for Underrepresented People Speaker Q&A: How to Get into Y Combinator The Showcase stage: You’ll find two groups — Startup Battlefield 200 companies and Pavilion startups — delivering live, fast-pitch sessions on every day of Disrupt. If you love watching startups pitch, you’ll find plenty of action going down on the expo floor. What else can you do at Disrupt? Check out all the breakout sessions and more than 50 roundtable discussions. Get networking with the event app. Find people, schedule meetings, make valuable connections and try your hand at speed networking. Time-sensitive opportunity: Today, October 12, is the last day you can sign up for Dinner for 6 to get matched with like-minded folks and enjoy dinner at a local restaurant on Tuesday, October 18. Buy your pass today, and you’ll be able to register for dinner through a link in the event app. There’s plenty more activity and opportunity waiting for you at ZebethMedia Disrupt. Don’t miss out on your last chance to save $700. Buy your Disrupt pass before October 14 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT) and join us in San Francisco! Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.