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.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears at the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta won its high-profile antitrust case against the Federal Trade Commission, which had accused the company of holding a monopoly in social networking.
In a memorandum opinion released Tuesday, Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., said the FTC failed to prove its argument. The case, initially filed by the FTC five years ago, centered on Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
“Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now,” Boasberg said in the filing. “The Court’s verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so. A judgment so stating shall issue this day.”
Boasberg dismissed the case in 2021, saying the agency didn’t have enough evidence to prove “Facebook holds market power.” In August of that year, the FTC filed an amended complaint with more details about the company’s user numbers and metrics relative to competitors like Snapchat, the now-defunct Google+ social network and Myspace.
After reviewing the amendments, Boasberg in 2022 ruled that the case could proceed, saying the FTC had presented more details than before.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former operating chief Sheryl Sandberg, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom and other current and former Meta executives all testified in the trial, which began in April.
Meta shares were little changed on Tuesday. The stock is up about 2% for the year, badly underperforming broader indexes and most of its megacap tech peers.
“The Court’s decision today recognizes that Meta faces fierce competition,” the company said in a statement. “Our products are beneficial for people and businesses and exemplify American innovation and economic growth. We look forward to continuing to partner with the Administration and to invest in America.”
The FTC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The ruling comes a little over two months after Google avoided the harshest possible penalty from an antitrust case it lost last year. While Google was found to hold an illegal monopoly in its core market of internet search, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta decided the company would not be forced to sell its Chrome browser, bucking the Department of Justice’s request. Google was, however, ordered to loosen its hold on search data.
In the Meta case, the FTC claimed the company shouldn’t have been allowed to buy Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, and the agency called for those units to be divested. The commission also alleged that there were no major alternatives for apps like Facebook and Instagram that people use to communicate with friends and family in a online, social space.
However, a major challenge for the FTC, according to the judge, was in proving that Meta is breaking antitrust law today, not years ago when the primary use of social networks was very different and based on sharing other kinds of content.
“To win the permanent injunction that it seeks here, the FTC must prove a current or imminent legal violation,” he wrote.
Boasberg ultimately sided with Meta’s argument that the technology industry has evolved since the early days of Facebook, and the company now faces a wide variety of competitors like TikTok.
“While each of Meta’s empirical showings can be quibbled with, they all tell a consistent story: people treat TikTok and YouTube as substitutes for Facebook and Instagram, and the amount of competitive overlap is economically important,” Boasberg wrote. “Against that unmistakable pattern, the FTC offers no empirical evidence of substitution whatsoever.”
Big changes in social
Much of Judge Boasberg’s conclusion was built on the transformation that’s taken place in the social media market in recent years and Meta’s changing position within it. User trends have moved heavily in the direction of video, where TikTok and YouTube have massive user bases and huge network effects.
“The most-used part of Meta’s apps is thus indistinguishable from the offerings on TikTok and YouTube,” Boasberg wrote.
Boasberg explained that there was enough evidence to show “that consumers are reallocating massive amounts of time from Meta’s apps” to those services and others, which has “forced Meta to invest gobs of cash to keep up.”
“Meta is not a monopolist insulated from competition,” he wrote. “The Court finds the evidence favoring Meta on this issue both credible and convincing.”
Boasberg also cited various documents and testimony from “industry insiders” that show how other tech companies like TikTok and YouTube viewed Meta as serious competition.
“TikTok and YouTube tracked Meta’s products as competitive threats,” Boasberg wrote.
WATCH: FTC chair on independence
A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar taxi drives along a street on March 14, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.
Mario Tama | Getty Images
Waymo on Tuesday said it will bring its robotaxi service to new cities in Texas and Florida in 2026.
The Alphabet-owned company said it plans to start operating its vehicles with no human driver assistants in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Miami and Orlando in the coming weeks before opening service in those markets to the public next year, the company said in a blog.
“Waymo has entered a new phase of commercial scale, doubling the number of cities we operate without a human specialist in the car,” Waymo Chief Product Officer Saswat Panigrahi said in an emailed statement Tuesday.
Waymo had previously announced plans to launch its robotaxi service in Dallas and Miami in 2026, but Tuesday was the first time the company said it planned to launch service next year in the other cities. Waymo will first offer fully autonomous trips to its employees in those markets, a spokesperson said.
The company has been gearing up to expand its paid robotaxis service in 2026. The company previously announced plans to expand to Detroit, Las Vegas, Nashville, San Diego, Washington, D.C., and London in 2026.
Waymo has also begun testing vehicles in New York City and Tokyo.
Last week, Waymo began offering freeway routes in the San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles markets. The Google sister company will gradually extend freeway trips to more riders and locations over time.
Already, Waymo operates its paid robotaxi service in Austin, San Francisco, Phoenix, Atlanta and Los Angeles. The company has provided more than 10 million paid rides since first launching in 2020, the company said in May.
Waymo’s Florida and Texas expansion announcement comes the same day that Amazon-owned Zoox began allowing select San Francisco users to hail its driverless vehicles. San Francisco is the second market where Zoox now offers a free service, after its launch in Las Vegas in September. Zoox has deployed a fleet of 50 robotaxis between San Francisco and Las Vegas, the company told CNBC in September.
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