🔥 Hot Takes Tuesday for 2024-08-27
Exploring changes in the VMware community, hot takes on funds, funding, M&A, and the evolving cloud landscape.
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First… an interesting post arrived from VMworld. For perspective, my first VMworld experience was in 2010 and the community I met there would alter the course of my career for the next decade.
I was even a one time vExpert in 2013 within the massive VMware community aka vCommunity… and since then, well, things have changed. Things have changed — drastically.
Mourning Our vCommunity: Navigating Grief After the Broadcom Acquisition
How has the Broadcom acquisition impacted the vCommunity? I think most of us are still in mourning. Why it's important to grieve this loss and what comes next..
And now, back to our regular Hot Takes Tuesday…
Funds, Funding, and M&A
Let’s take a look at where the money is flowing.
Techmeme: Chicago-based G Squared raised $1.1B for a fund to buy secondary startup shares; G Squared bought ~$135M in Anthropic shares from FTX during FTX's bankruptcy (Ivan Levingston/Financial Times)
By Ivan Levingston / Financial Times. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 🥈 The secondary market is interesting but not as interesting as a $1B+ fund intended to take advantage of secondary market bargains.
Techmeme: Data infrastructure startup Cribl raised $200M led by GV, alongside a $119M secondary offering, at a $3.5B valuation, taking its total funding to $600M (Katie Roof/Bloomberg)
By Katie Roof / Bloomberg. View the full context on Techmeme.
💰 + 📊 The hunt for better ways to harness data to deliver IT, security, and observability continues with the displacement of pre-cloud era solutions.
Techmeme: nOps, which helps companies optimize AWS spend, raised a $30M Series A led by Headlight Partners and says its customer base grew 450% over the past 18 months (Kyle Wiggers/TechCrunch)
By Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.
💸 + ☁️ As I’ve said many times before, cloud fiscal responsibility (aka FinOps) is going to become synonymous with cloud excellence within the larger technology business management (TBM) space.
Techmeme: Viggle, which trained 3D video foundation model JST-1, raised a $19M Series A led by a16z; Viggle says the model is trained on public sources, including YouTube (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
By Maxwell Zeff / TechCrunch. View the full context on Techmeme.
📺 + 🤖 Perhaps I’m just not creative enough to be a video creator, but I get a vibe that ethically sourced ingredients is crossing over from food supply chains into A.I. video services training corpus chains.
Techmeme: Seattle-based startup Supio, which uses AI to help lawyers analyze documents, raised a $25M Series A led by Sapphire Ventures (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)
By Taylor Soper / GeekWire. View the full context on Techmeme.
⚖️ + 🤖 Forensic examination of large volumes of materials in discover is arguably a better use case for RAG than attempting to cite a so-called hallucination.
Note: Some images via Unsplash
Disclosure
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