Cloud software vendors Atlassian, Snowflake and Workday are betting on security startup Veza
From left, Veza founders Rob Whitcher, Tarun Thakur and Maohua Lu.
Veza
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.
‘Sleeping industry’
Within the tech startup world, Veza is also in a relatively advantageous spot, because the proliferation of cyberattacks has lifted the importance of next-generation security software.
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.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.
Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images
The Google Doodle is Alphabet’s most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote “AI Mode,” its latest AI search product.
Google’s Chrome browser landing pages and Google’s home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company’s latest search product. The doodle image also includes a share button.
The promotion of AI Mode on the Google Doodle comes as the tech company makes efforts to expose more users to its latest AI features amid pressure from artificial intelligence startups. That includes OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, Anthropic which makes Claude and Perplexity AI, which bills itself as an “AI-powered answer engine.”
Google’s “Doodle” Tuesday directed users to its search chatbot-like experience “AI Mode”
AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-like experience for complex user questions. The company began displaying AI Mode alongside its search results page in March.
“Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses,” the product description reads when clicked from the home page.
AI Mode is powered by Google’s flagship AI model Gemini, and the tool has rolled out to more U.S. users since its launch. Users can ask AI Mode questions using text, voice or images. Google says AI Mode makes it easier to find answers to complex questions that might have previously required multiple searches.
In May, Google tested the AI Mode feature directly beneath the Google search bar, replacing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget — a place where Google rarely makes changes.
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Disposable diapers are a massive environmental offender. Roughly 300,000 of them are sent to landfills or incinerated every minute, according to the World Economic Forum, and they take hundreds of years to decompose. It’s a $60 billion business.
One alternative approach has been compostable diapers, which can be made out of wood pulp or bamboo. But composting services aren’t universally available and some of the products are less absorbent than normal nappies, critics say.
A growing number of parents are also turning to cloth diapers, but they only make up about 20% of the U.S. market.
ZymoChem is attacking the diaper problem from a different angle. Harshal Chokhawala, CEO of ZymoChem, said that 60% to 80% of a typical diaper consists of fossil-based plastics. And half of that is an ingredient called super absorbent polymer, or SAP.
“What we have created is a low carbon footprint bio-based and biodegradable version of this super absorbent polymer,” Chokhawala said.
ZymoChem, with operations in San Leandro, California, and Burlington, Vermont, invented this new type of absorbent by using a fermentation process to convert a renewable resource — sugar — from corn into biodegradable materials. It’s similar to making beer.
“We’re at a point now where we’re very close to being at cost parity with fossil based manufacturing of super absorbents,” said Chokhawala.
The company’s drop-in absorbents can be added into other diapers, which makes it different from environmentally conscious companies like Charlie Banana, Kudos and Hiro, which sell their own brand of diapers.
ZymoChem doesn’t yet have a diaper product on the market. But Lindy Fishburne, managing partner at Breakout Ventures and an investor in the company, says it’s a scalable model.
“Being able to build and grow with biology allows us to unlock a circular economy and a supply chain that is no longer petro-derived, which opens up the opportunities of where you can manufacture and how you secure supply chains,” Fishburne said.
Other investors include Toyota Ventures, GS Futures, KDT Ventures, Cavallo Ventures and Lululemon. The company has raised a total of $35 million.
The Lululemon partnership shows that it’s not just about diapers. ZymoChem’s bio-based materials can also be used in other hygiene products and in bio-based nylon. Lululemon recently said it will use it in some of its leggings, which were traditionally made with petroleum.
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Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, appears at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco on May 9, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Design software company Figma filed for an IPO on Tuesday, and plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker symbol “FIG.”
The offering would be one of the hotly anticipated IPOs in recent years given Figma’s growth rate and its high private market valuation. In late 2023, a $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped due to regulatory concerns in the U.K. That led Adobe to pay Figma a $1 billion termination fee.
Revenue in the first quarter increased 46% to $228.2 million from $156.2 million in the same period a year ago, according to Figma’s prospectus. The company recorded a net income of $44.9 million, compared to $13.5 million a year earlier.
As of March 31, Figma had around 450,000 customers. Of those, 1,031 were contributing at least $100,000 a year to annual revenue, up 47% from a year earlier. Clients include Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Netflix. More than half of revenue comes from outside the U.S.
Figma didn’t say how many shares it plans to sell in the IPO. The company was valued at $12.5 billion in a tender offer last year, and in April it announced that it had confidentially filed for an IPO with the SEC.
Wall Street banks predicted a rush of IPOs after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election in November following a dry spell dating back to late 2021, when soaring inflation and rising interest rates pushed investors out of risky assets. While President Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs in April roiled markets and led a number of companies to delay their plans, activity has been picking up of late.
Stablecoin issuer Circle doubled in value in its early June debut and is now up more than sixfold from its IPO price for a market cap of almost $43 billion. Online banking company Chime also debuted in June, following Hinge Health’s IPO in May. Artificial infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which went public in March, jumped 46% in June and has quadrupled since its offering.
Buy now, pay later company Klarna, based in the U.K., filed for a U.S. IPO in March, as did ticket marketplace StubHub.
Figma was founded in 2012 by CEO Dylan Field, 33, and Evan Wallace, and is based in San Francisco. The company had 1,646 employees as of March 31.
Before establishing Figma, Field spent over two years at Brown University, where he met Wallace. Field then took a Thiel Fellowship “to pursue entrepreneurial projects,” according to the filing. The two-year program that Founders Fund partner Peter Thiel established in 2011 gives young entrepreneurs a $200,000 grant along with support from founders and investors, according to an online description.
Field is the biggest individual owner of Figma, with 56.6 million Class B shares and 51.1% of voting power ahead of the IPO. He said in a letter to investors that it was time for Figma to buck the “trend of many amazing companies staying privately indefinitely.”
Databricks, SpaceX and Stripe are among high-valued companies that are still private.
“Some of the obvious benefits such as good corporate hygiene, brand awareness, liquidity, stronger currency and access to capital markets apply,” he wrote, explaining the decision. “More importantly, I like the idea of our community sharing in the ownership of Figma — and the best way to accomplish this is through public markets.”
Field added that as a public company, investors should “expect us to take big swings,” including through acquisitions. In April Figma bought the assets and team of an unnamed technology company for $14 million, according to the filing.
The IPO will also mark another much-needed win for Silicon Valley venture firms, which are in need of returns after the multi-year slump. Index Ventures is the largest outside shareholder, with a 17% stake before the offering, according to the filing. Greylock owns 16%, Kleiner Perkins controls 14% and Sequoia has a stake of 8.7%.
Figma said it faces “intense competition” and that loss of market share would “adversely affect our business,” but didn’t name any specific competitors.
Over 13 million people use Figma per month, and only one-third of them are designers, according to the filing. In March the company announced Figma Sites, a tool that turns designs into working websites. It’s one of a few new products that diversify the company away from its collaborative service for crafting app and website designs.
As of March 31, Figma had $1.54 billion in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities.
Using its cash, Figma has begun investing in digital currencies. In 2024, Figma’s board authorized a $55 million investment into a Bitwise Bitcoin exchange-traded fund. As of March 31, the holding was worth $69.5 million, according to the filing. In May, the board approved a $30 million investment in Bitcoin, and Figma spent the money on USD Coin, which is a stablecoin.
Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are leading the deal along with Allen and Co. and JPMorgan Chase.
Correction: A prior version of this story had the incorrect stock exchange in the headline.
— CNBC’s Ari Levy and Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.
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