T-Mobile Ventures

AI-based solutions for evolving digital threats

Next-gen Cybersecurity

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 Cequence Security offers a platform for enterprises to safeguard their APIs and web applications from bot attacks by detecting and mitigating them in real-time. The platform also provides protection against account takeover, unauthorized data access, fraudulent transactions, and fake account creation. The company uses its proprietary CQAI analytics engine that leverages artificial intelligence, machine learning, and behavioral analysis to detect malicious traffic and bot attacks.
 
 
 As of June 2021, the company has also partnered with AWS, Fastly, Gigamon, and Okta to enhance its product offerings. These deals allow Cequence to bundle offer API and web application security alongside its partners&rsquo; products.
 
 
 Following the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the company recorded a growth of 2.5x and claims to have recorded a &ldquo;pretty high ARR&rdquo; in 2020. As of December 2021, the company doubled its customer base year-over-year (YoY), and served more than 85 global brands including several Fortune 100 and 500 companies such as T-Mobile, Est&eacute;e Laude, and American Express. The company also had an employee headcount of over 100, which it intends to expand to over 250 by 2022.
 
 
 In December 2021, the company raised USD 60 million in a Series C funding round led by Menlo Ventures. The company expected to utilize the funds to expand its product features, product portfolio (with plans to launch a new self-service subscription solution in 2022), team, co-marketing activities, and global presence in the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
 
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Paladin Cloud offers an open-source cloud security platform that uses a plugin-based architecture to connect to various data sources to identify and eliminate misconfigurations within cloud environments across AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud in real-time.Funding and financialsIn July 2022, the company <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/11585">raised USD 3.3 million </a>in a seed funding round co-led by Okapi Venture Capital and Bowery Capital. The funding was expected to be utilized to expand its team across its development function. The announcement also marked the company’s emergence from stealth as it launched its platform to the public.

The tools that power remote work are define the next generation of enterprise software.

Remote Work Tools

Dialpad is an AI-powered cloud communication platform that offers a unified suite of tools for voice, video, messaging, and contact center solutions. Its key offerings include a business phone system, AI contact center, AI sales tools, AI voice capabilities, and AI-enhanced meeting features.&nbsp;Dialpad's business phone system provides features like call routing, call forwarding, interactive voice response (IVR), and integration with productivity tools like Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. The AI contact center solution offers capabilities such as real-time assistance, sentiment analysis, call analytics, and omnichannel support.The company's AI voice capabilities include features like AI-powered call and voicemail transcriptions, while its AI meetings offering provides transcriptions, call summaries, and note-taking assistance during video conferences. Dialpad's technology is built on its proprietary DialpadGPT, a large language model trained on over six billion minutes of real business conversations.&nbsp;In&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/34970">October 2024,</a> Dialpad acquired Surfboard to offer customers an improved AI-native workforce management solution and enhance user experience. Previously in May 2018, Dialpad acquired TalkIQ to incorporate AI into its platform. In September 2020, Dialpad announced its acquisition of&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/847">video conferencing software and hardware provider, High Five</a> to expand its video communications offering by leveraging High Five’s meeting room hardware and software technology. In December 2021, the company acquired customer experience analytics platform Kare Knowledgeware. In October 2021, Dialpad acquired Koopid, to bring comprehensive omnichannel support to its contact center.The company announced the&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/977">expansion of its software engineering team</a> in India in June 2021. The team is expected to focus on Dialpad’s conferencing capabilities, product integrations, and cloud platform infrastructure.&nbsp;&nbsp;Key customers and partnershipsDialpad's customer base includes innovative brands across various industries, such as Van Horn Automotive Group, which has utilized Dialpad's AI products to improve employee training effectiveness and business functionality.Dialpad has formed strategic partnerships with companies like T-Mobile to bring its AI-powered communication solutions to businesses. In March 2024, Dialpad and T-Mobile announced the general release of AI Recaps and extended their exclusive partnership for three years. This collaboration aims to leverage T-Mobile's 5G network and Dialpad's AI suite to help businesses work smarter and close deals faster through real-time insights from customer interactions.Funding and financials In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/7422">December 2021</a>, Dialpad raised USD 170 million and nearly doubled its valuation to USD 2.2 billion, from its previous funding round in <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/895">December 2020</a>. The funds were allocated to develop Dialpad’s native Voice Intelligence technology and to expand its headcount across data engineering, natural language processing, machine learning, and customer-facing teams.

Riding together toward a sustainable future

Shared Mobility

Halo.Car is a Las Vegas-based car sharing startup that offers a remotely operated vehicle service. Instead of autonomous vehicles, the company utilizes human drivers operating electric vehicles remotely from a central location. Customers can summon an electric vehicle, which is then remotely driven to their location by a remote operator. Once the vehicle arrives, customers can drive it themselves as a regular car. After the trip, customers simply exit the vehicle, and it is remotely driven away by an operator.
This model eliminates the need for customers to locate and return the vehicle themselves, positioning Halo.Car as a competitor to traditional car-sharing services like Zipcar. Initially, the company had human safety operators present in the vehicles to ensure the remote operation system functioned correctly. However, in October 2022, Halo.Car announced plans to remove these in-vehicle operators, marking the final step before its commercial launch.
The remote operation technology relies on T-Mobile's Ultra Capacity midband 5G network and other networks when necessary, transmitting video feeds to remote drivers in simulation rigs. While open to adopting autonomous vehicles in the future, the company currently views remote human drivers as a safer and faster interim solution until the autonomous technology matures.

Deriving insights from uncommon data streams

Alternative Data

Pano AI is a company that provides an artificial intelligence (AI) solution for detecting wildfires. Its technology combines ultra-high-definition 360-degree cameras, computer vision, AI, and cloud-based software to detect smoke and fire in real-time. Pano AI's system identifies new ignitions within minutes and alerts fire professionals, enabling a faster response to contain the fires before they escalate. The company's solution is designed to help first responders get to the scene quickly and safely with the necessary equipment and information.
Pano AI operates a network of mountaintop cameras that scan the landscape for signs of fire. The cameras capture high-resolution images, which are analyzed by the company's AI algorithms to detect smoke and flames. Once a potential fire is detected, human analysts verify the incident before issuing alerts to customers, along with real-time situational awareness data such as time-lapse images and the fire's location and movement.
The company's business model involves offering its technology as a fully managed solution to customers, including government agencies, utilities, private landowners, and fire departments. As of July 2023, Pano AI was actively monitoring over 6 million acres of land across six US states (California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana) and two Australian states (New South Wales and Queensland). Notable customers include PacifiCorp, Xcel Energy, Portland General Electric, Holy Cross Energy, Big Sky Fire Department, and various fire protection districts.
In September 2022, Pano AI partnered with T-Mobile and Portland General Electric to deploy 5G-connected, AI-powered cameras for wildfire detection in Portland, Oregon. The company has also announced acquisitions of other companies.
Key customers and partnerships
Pano AI has formed notable partnerships with T-Mobile and Portland General Electric. In September 2022, the company announced a collaboration with these partners to deploy 5G-connected, AI-powered cameras for active wildfire detection in Portland, Oregon. This partnership was expanded in July 2023, with Pano AI and Portland General Electric adding six additional camera locations, bringing the total to 33 across the state.
The company has also established partnerships with various government agencies and private entities in the regions where it operates. Pano AI's key customers included PacifiCorp, Xcel Energy, Portland General Electric (PGE), Holy Cross Energy, Big Sky Fire Department, Aspen Fire Protection District, Telluride Fire Protection District, Boulder County, Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR), Forestry Corporation of NSW (Australia), Southern Cross Forests (Australia), and Noosa Council's FireTech Connect Program (Australia).

Building future-ready applications in the cloud

Cloud-native Tech

Trilio is a technology company providing data protection and recovery, specializing in cloud-native environments. Trilio offers cloud-native data protection solutions, including TrilioVault for Kubernetes and TrilioVault for OpenStack. These products provide application-centric backup and recovery, policy-driven automation, and support for multi-cloud environments. Trilio specializes in safeguarding critical data in cloud-native technologies, catering to Kubernetes and OpenStack deployments with a focus on data resilience. Trilio's competitive advantage lies in its specialization in cloud-native data protection. Unlike traditional backup solutions, Trilio focuses on the unique requirements of cloud-native environments. Its multi-cloud support and policy-driven automation further enhance its value proposition, providing organizations with flexibility and ease of use in ensuring data resilience. Trilio offers its products through a subscription-based model. Key customers and partnerships Trilio’s customers operate in the defense, telecom, automotive, and financial services sectors. They include Shepherd Kaplan Krochuk, 406 Ventures, T-Mobile, Plug and Play, Raiven Capital, Telefonica, and Genesis Accel. Trilio’s primary partners include Red Hat, Canonical, Mirantis, Suse, and Nutanix. Other partners include cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Digital Ocean, OVHcloud, and phoenixNAP and cloud infrastructure partners such as IBM, Rubrik, and Scality. Funding and financials Trilio’s latest funding was in December 2022 from a USD 17 million Series B round led by Shepherd Kaplan Krochuk. The funds were to drive further innovation and growth in the cloud-native application resiliency market.

Pano offers hardware and software technology solutions for fire professionals to detect threats. Pano provides tools to the government, utilities, insurers, and private landowners in order to mitigate wildfire threats and protect lives, property, and the environment. Pano is a unified enterprise solution that combines cutting-edge hardware, artificial intelligence, and software.

Movius Interactive provides cloud-based enterprise mobility solutions. It offers a Software-as-a-Service business mobility solution that addresses various issues by extending enterprise telecommunication services to mobile devices and a platform that provides a set of pre-packaged applications and application programming interfaces for application development needs.  Movius Interactive offers support and training services. It serves telecommunication providers, businesses, and end-users in the United States and internationally. Ahmed Afoz, Art Laursen, David Israel, and Tony Ma founded IP Unity Glenayre in 1999 that became Movius Interactive.  Movius Interactive has its headquarters in Atlanta in Georgia. It has locations in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, Madrid in Spain, Bengaluru in India, and Johannesburg in South Africa.

Trilio is a leader in cloud-native data protection for Kubernetes, OpenStack and Red Hat Virtualization environments. Our TrilioVault technology is trusted by cloud infrastructure operators and developers for backup and recovery, migration and application mobility. Customers in telecom, defense, automotive and financial services leverage TrilioVault to recover from disasters, migrate workloads, move workloads to new infrastructure and migrate to new software distributions.

Halo. Car is to hasten the world's switch to electric cars by providing incredibly convenient electric car sharing.

Paladin Cloud is an open source, Security-as-Code platform designed to help developers and security teams detect and mitigate threats in cloud environments. The company's open source cloud native Security-as-Code platform offers hundreds of best practice cloud security and governance policies in a modern user interface.

SignalWire is the next stage in the evolution of Software-Defined Telecom started in 2005 with the FreeSWITCH open-source project. The primary goal is to create a worldwide network that can transport real-time communications over secure standards-based channels and make it all accessible to developers and businesses using simple SDKs and programming interfaces designed to be powerful but simple-to-use. Audio/Video applications can be built with SignalWire that run in the mobile browser with no additional software and allow an experience that can unlock communications with a virtual office, AI bots, PSTN termination, gateways to remote call centers, and much more.  With the evolving mobile SDK, rich applications can be built as native apps and the other side of every call is not just a ''room'' but a full-fledged routable telecommunications backend with additional programmable control for every call. SignalWire is founded on the principle of work-from-anywhere dating back to the turn of the century and continues that tradition with a fully distributed workforce spanning 16 US states and 11 countries in nearly every inhabited time zone. This remote culture has helped to shape the way our products and services have evolved and have proved to be invaluable amid the pandemic crisis in 2020. The core of SignalWire is made up of several networked nodes transforming the computing power of its host system into IP-based telecommunications relays that are demand-driven and horizontally scalable. The breadth of the SignalWire technology ranges from mature interfaces like SIP and PSTN to state-of-the-art techniques in live video and HD audio. Unlike many ''video chat'' products and services, SignalWire goes well beyond basic capabilities and has dissected every moving part into programmable components that are on the bleeding edge of what is possible. SignalWire is evolving quickly into the first and only software-powered global telecommunications company delivering that as a service at the Infrastructure, Platform, and Application layer of today's communication stack landscape. Additionally, SignalWire is an active participant in the development and furthering of the standards on which the Internet relies for all of its real-time communications techniques.

Spectro Cloud uniquely enables organizations to deploy and manage Kubernetes in production, at scale. Its Palette enterprise Kubernetes management platform gives Platform Engineering, IT Operations and DevOps teams effortless control of the full Kubernetes lifecycle. With support for both VM and container workloads, Palette is a truly unified management platform across clouds, data centers, bare metal and edge environments. IT Operations teams are empowered to support their developers with curated Kubernetes stacks and tools based on their specific needs, with granular governance and enterprise-grade security. Spectro Cloud is a Gartner Cool Vendor, CRN Tech Innovator, and a ‘leader’ and ‘outperformer’ in GigaOm’s 2024 Radars for Edge Kubernetes and Managed Kubernetes.

Dialpad is an AI-powered cloud communications platform that turns conversations into opportunities and helps teams make smart calls. The communications and contact center provider offers native, real-time transcription, automated note-taking, live sentiment, and voice analytics to market, and with the rising demand for remote collaboration. It offers Dialpad, Dialpad Sell, UberConference, and Dialpad Contact Center solutions that are all powered by VoiceAI. These products cover the full range of modern business communications needs with a range of system software that offers voice, video, group messaging, SMS, MMS, conferencing, screen sharing, and document sharing services that enable employees to collaborate securely from anywhere across any device, in a single platform.

Cequence is a venture-backed cybersecurity software company founded in 2014 and based in Sunnyvale, California. Named a Gartner Cool Vendor in 2018, the company has developed the Cequence Unified API Protection (UAP) Platform, unifying API discovery, compliance, and testing with real-time detection and native prevention to protect customers’ web, mobile, and API applications against attacks, business logic abuse, and fraud. The Cequence UAP solution provides a complete API security platform that allows customers to discover their APIs, ensure they are security compliant, and protect them from attacks in real time. Cequence Security customers include Fortune and Global 500 organizations across multiple vertical markets. The executive team is led by industry veterans that previously held leadership positions at Palo Alto Networks and Symantec.

T-Mobile Ventures is an early-to-mid stage venture fund that invests in companies developing core technologies, products, and services that unlock the power of a nationwide 5G network. Its primary focus areas include Edge Computing, Future of Work, Security, and Industrial IoT. It was founded in 2020 and is based in Bellevue, Washington.

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