Spotify said Monday it paid more than $100 million to podcast publishers and podcasters worldwide in the first quarter of 2025.

The figure includes all creators on the platform across all formats and agreements, including the platform’s biggest fish, Joe Rogan, Alex Cooper and Theo Von, the company said.

Rogan, host of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Cooper of “Call Her Daddy” and “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von” were among the top podcasts on Spotify globally in 2024.

Rogan and Cooper’s exclusivity deals with Spotify have ended, and while Rogan signed a new Spotify deal last year worth up to $250 million, including revenue sharing and the ability to post on YouTube, Cooper inked a SiriusXM deal in August.

Even when shows are no longer exclusive to Spotify, they are still uploaded to the platform and qualify for the Spotify Partner Program, which launched in January in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia.

The program allows creators to earn revenue every time an ad monetized by Spotify plays in the episode, as well as revenue when Premium subscribers watch dynamic ads on videos.

Competing platform Patreon said it paid out over $472 million to podcasters from over 6.7 million paid memberships in 2024.

YouTube’s payouts are massive by comparison but include more than just podcasts. The company said it paid $70 billion to creators between 2021 and 2024 with payouts rising each year, according to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan.

Spotify reports first-quarter earnings on Tuesday.

Palo Alto Networks announced on Monday its intent to acquire Protect AI, a startup specializing in securing artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, for an undisclosed sum.

The deal is set to close by the first quarter of fiscal year 2026.

“By extending our AI security capabilities to include Protect AI’s innovative solutions for Securing for AI, businesses will be able to build AI applications with comprehensive security,” said Anand Oswal, senior vice president and general manager of network security at Palo Alto Networks, in a release.

Palo Alto has been steadily bolstering its artificial intelligence systems to confront increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. The use of rapidly built ecosystems of AI models by large enterprises and government organizations has created new vulnerabilities. The company said those risks require purpose-built defenses beyond conventional cybersecurity.

The acquisition would fold Protect AI’s solutions and team into Palo Alto’s newly announced Prisma AIRS platform. Palo Alto said Protect AI has established itself as a key player in what it called a “critical new area of security.”

Protect AI’s CEO Ian Swanson said joining Palo Alto would allow the company to “scale our mission of making the AI landscape more secure for users and organizations of all sizes.”

The company’s stock price is up 23% in the past year lifting its market cap close to $120 billion. Palo Alto reports third-quarter earnings on May 21.

Tech giants like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia have captured headlines in recent years for their massive investments in artificial intelligence startups like OpenAI and Anthropic.

But when it comes to corporate investing by tech companies, cloud software vendors are getting aggressive as well. And in some cases they’re banding together.

Veza, whose software helps companies manage the various internal technologies that employees can access, has just raised $108 million in a financing round that included participation from software vendors Atlassian, Snowflake and Workday.

New Enterprise Associates led the round, which values Veza at just over $800 million, including the fresh capital.

For two years, Snowflake’s managers have used Veza to check who has read and write access, Harsha Kapre, director of the data analytics software company’s venture group told CNBC. It sits alongside a host of other cloud solutions the company uses.

“We have Workday, we have Salesforce — we have all these things,” Kapre said. “What Veza really unlocks for us is understanding who has access and determining who should have access.”

Kapre said that “over-provisioning,” or allowing too many people access to too much stuff, “raises the odds of an attack, because there’s just a lot of stuff that no one is even paying attention to.”

With Veza, administrators can check which employees and automated accounts have authorization to see corporate data, while managing policies for new hires and departures. Managers can approve or reject existing permissions in the software.

Veza says it has built hooks into more than 250 technologies, including Snowflake.

The funding lands at a challenging time for traditional venture firms. Since inflation started soaring in late 2021 and was followed by rising interest rates, startup exits have cooled dramatically, meaning venture firms are struggling to generate returns.

Wall Street was banking on a revival in the initial public offering market with President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, but the president’s sweeping tariff proposals led several companies to delay their offerings.

That all means startup investors have to preserve their cash as well.

In the first quarter, venture firms made 7,551 deals, down from more than 11,000 in the same quarter a year ago, according to a report from researcher PitchBook.

Corporate venture operates differently as the capital comes from the parent company and many investments are strategic, not just about generating financial returns.

Atlassian’s standard agreement asks that portfolio companies disclose each quarter the percentage of a startup’s customers that integrate with Atlassian. Snowflake looks at how much extra product consumption of its own technology occurs as a result of its startup investments, Kapre said, adding that the company has increased its pace of deal-making in the past year.

On the public markets, the First Trust Nasdaq Cybersecurity ETF, which includes CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks, is up 3% so far this year, compared with a 10% drop in the Nasdaq.

Veza’s technology runs across a variety of security areas tied to identity and access. In access management, Microsoft is the leader, and Okta is the challenger. Veza isn’t directly competing there, and is instead focused on visibility, an area where other players in and around the space lack technology, said Brian Guthrie, an analyst at Gartner.

Tarun Thakur, Veza’s co-founder and CEO, said his company’s software has become a key part of the ecosystem as other security vendors have started seeing permissions and entitlements as a place to gain broad access to corporate networks.

“We have woken up a sleeping industry,” Thakur, who helped start the company in 2020, said in an interview.

Thakur’s home in Los Gatos, California, doubles as headquarters for the startup, which employs 200 people. It isn’t disclosing revenue figures but says sales more than doubled in the fiscal year that ended in January. Customers include AMD, CrowdStrike and Intuit.

Guthrie said enterprises started recognizing that they needed stronger visibility about two years ago.

“I think it’s because of the number of identities,” he said. Companies realized they had an audit problem or “an account that got compromised,” Guthrie said.

AI agents create a new challenge. Last week Microsoft published a report that advised organizations to figure out the proper ratio of agents to humans.

Veza is building enhancements to enable richer support for agent identities, Thakur said. The new funding will also help Veza expand in the U.S. government and internationally and build more integrations, he said.

Peter Lenke, head of Atlassian’s venture arm, said his company isn’t yet a paying Veza client.

“There’s always potential down the road,” he said. Lenke said he heard about Veza from another investor well before the new round and decided to pursue a stake when the opportunity arose.

Lenke said that startups benefit from Atlassian investments because the company “has a large footprint” inside of enterprises.

“I think there’s a great symbiotic match there,” he said.