Abnormal Security, a startup selling email security software to companies, said on Wednesday that it’s hired former ServiceNow finance executive Lisa Banks as chief financial officer as the company gears up to prepare for an IPO.

Abnormal is going after a longstanding market, which includes incumbents Mimecast and Proofpoint, adding a layer of artificial intelligence that spots attacks in email messages. Other startups such as Material Security and Sublime Security offer competing email tools.

“We’re disrupting the legacy market, and the approach around AI and human behavior is very unique,” Banks said in an interview.

With Donald Trump returning to the White House this week, investors are bullish that they’ll see a strengthening initial public offering market, particularly for technology, after a three-year dry spell. Among the few tech IPOs last year were Reddit, Rubrik and ServiceTitan. AI chipmaker Cerebras filed IPO paperwork but has yet to float shares on the Nasdaq as planned.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, whose Wall Street firm tends to compete with Morgan Stanley when it comes to leading high-profile offerings, said last week that IPOs are “going to pick up.” At an event hosted by Cisco, Solomon said that the mood is changing and that there’s a “more constructive kind of optimism” when it comes to the overall market.

Banks said Abnormal doesn’t have a specific timeline for its IPO, but she said a year and a half should be enough time to prepare. Revenue is already predictable, thanks to the company’s multiyear deals and healthy renewal rates, she said.

“We will be profitable in the future,” Banks said.

Abnormal said in August that it had achieved more than $200 million in annualized revenue, with year-over-year growth above 100%. At that time, Abnormal said the company was valued at $5.1 billion. Investors include CrowdStrike, Greylock Partners, Insight Partners, Menlo Ventures and Wellington Management.

After seven years at ServiceNow, where she eventually became senior vice president of finance, Banks spent almost three years at restaurant payments startup SpotOn. Banks said she was eager to get back into enterprise software.

Abnormal is led by Evan Reiser, who co-founded the company in 2018 after almost three years in product management at Twitter. Banks said that Reiser is obsessed with customers and that he spends loads of time with chief information officers and security heads. She said that over time Abnormal expects to expand beyond email security.

In her role, Banks intends to work with bankers and learn from CFOs who have taken companies public. She said her finance group is busy implementing a forecasting tool, which is likely to be critical once the company is public and in the habit of providing guidance to investors.

Abnormal operates remotely, with offices in San Francisco and Las Vegas and in a WeWork space in San Jose, California, Banks said. The company reached 1,000 employees earlier this month, a spokesperson said.

Banks’s predecessor was Smita Sanadhya, who joined Abnormal from Okta in February 2024, and left the role after seven months. Sanadhya is now an advisor.

Data analytics software startup Databricks said Wednesday that Meta has signed on as an investor.

As the company that trains the popular Llama open-source large language models, or LLMs, that Databricks builds on, Meta plays an important role in the artificial intelligence. Databricks works closely with Meta’s Llama team, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, Ali Ghodsi, said in an interview this week.

The relationship goes all the way up to Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“We’ve discussed open-source software in the past, and he cares a lot about open-source models and Llama,” Ghodsi said.

Meta doesn’t invest in nearly as many startups as technology peers Alphabet and Microsoft. But Databricks has been a fast-growing company on a path to a major initial public offering. Meta invested in a $10 billion round for Databricks, one of the largest investments in the history of venture capital. Databricks has now raised $14 billion in venture funding.

The new money will go toward global expansion and liquidity for current and former employees.

On Wednesday Databricks also announced a $5.25 billion credit facility led by JPMorgan Chase. Credit can be a much better option than spending with stock and diluting existing shareholders, even with a high interest rate, Ghodsi said.

The money in the bank did enable Databricks last year to train its own open-source LLM called DBRX, at a cost of about $10 million. DBRX performed better than Meta’s Llama and other alternatives in some tests at the time, but other models quickly surpassed it.

That’s one reason it was reasonable for Databricks to ally itself with the most prominent open model builder. Meta has plenty of money to spend on capital expenditures to train models, and Databricks can use its money in other ways, Ghodsi said.

He wouldn’t specify whether Meta is a client.

San Francisco-based Databricks now employs 8,000 people. Ghodsi said it would not be “a huge surprise to me if we were public” a year from now.

Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, the Qatar Investment Authority, participated in the $10 billion round alongside Meta. Ghodsi said Databricks is open to allowing its software to run on data centers from major operators in the Middle East. Today, it’s only available through the Amazon, Google and Microsoft clouds.

LONDON — The British competition regulator tapped a top former Amazon executive as its new chair after facing accusations from Prime Minister Keir Starmer of stifling growth.

The Competition and Markets Authority announced late Tuesday that Doug Gurr, who was previously country manager for Amazon U.K. and president of Amazon China, would serve as its interim chair replacing Marcus Bokkerink.

The move follows a meeting between CMA Chief Executive Sarah Cardell and other regulators with British Finance Minister Rachel Reeves to deliver ideas on how to stimulate growth. Regulators were told to “tear down the barriers hindering business and refocus their efforts on promoting growth.”

Cardell thanked Bokkerink for his leadership since taking the role of chair in 2022, telling CNBC Wednesday: “He has tirelessly championed consumers, competition and a level playing field for business, as well being steadfastly committed to openness and stakeholder engagement across the U.K.”

“The CMA has a critical role to play supporting the government’s growth mission. I welcome the appointment of Doug Gurr as the CMA’s new interim chair and look forward to working closely with him as we drive growth, opportunity and prosperity for the U.K.,” she added via emailed comments.

The government wants to see regulators like the CMA “supercharging the economy with pro-business decisions that will drive prosperity and growth, putting more money in people’s pockets,” U.K. Business and Trade Minister Jonathan Reynolds said in a statement.

Reeves said the decision to replace Bokkerink was taken because the CMA needed to be led by someone who shared the government’s “strategic direction.”

“He recognised it was time for him to move on and make way for somebody who does share the mission and the strategic direction that this government are taking,” she said, speaking at a Bloomberg event Wednesday at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

The U.K. has faced criticisms more broadly from technology executives and investors over a number of regulatory decisions, including an intervention into Microsoft’s takeover of video game publisher Activision Blizzard and its decision to force Meta’s Facebook to divest GIF database Giphy. 

“The announcement of the new Chair of the CMA cannot be pure coincidence, coming as it does at the same time as the UK Government is banging the drum for its growth agenda and calling regulators to account for their own policies on stimulating growth,” said Alex Haffner, a competition partner at Fladgate.

“Mr Gurr has been appointed on an interim basis suggesting this is not about succession planning and far more a reaction to current events. His background is also unashamedly commercial as opposed to the consulting one of his predecessor,” Haffner added.

Gurr’s appointment as the CMA’s chair comes after the regulator received new powers to regulate large technology firms under the new Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCC), which seeks to prevent anti-competitive behavior in digital markets.

It can designate large companies that have a significant amount of market power in a certain digital activity as having “Strategic Market Status.” The CMA now has the power to impose changes to prevent potential anti-competitive behavior from any firm that is given Strategic Market Status.