Lightspeed Venture Partners is a venture capital firm that engages in consumer, enterprise, technology, and cleantech markets. It focuses on seed, early-stage, later-stage, expansion-stage, start-ups, growth companies, and incubation, and specializes in debt financing for start-ups and growth companies. Lightspeed Venture Partners invests in various sectors that include enterprise, consumer, big data, bitcoin, enterprise technology, cleantech, mobile, internet, financial technology, cloud solutions, e-commerce, storage, media, networking, energy, and software, software-as-a-service, information technology, biotechnology, and social. It mainly invests in countries such as the United States, Europe, Israel, China, and India.

Lightspeed Venture Partners

Morgenthaler Ventures has been in the venture capital business for more than 45 years, steadily investing through every market cycle.   Select past and present portfolio companies in the IT space include: Evernote, Lending Club, Siri, MuleSoft, Practice Fusion, Adara Media, Check, Doximity, PeopleMatter, Socrata, NuoDB, Jaspersoft, Voltage Security, Rhythm NewMedia, Nominum, Wize Commerce (NexTag) and back in the day, Apple.

Morgenthaler Ventures

Founded in 1989 by John Hummer and Ann Winblad, HWVP pioneered the idea of a venture capital firm investing exclusively in enterprise software companies. From their earliest funds focused on the disruptive shift away from mainframes to client/server computing, through the commodity-driven cloud data centers of today, they have remained true to their software-only roots. Through their deep understanding of the technology landscape, they have helped drive companies to success by supporting those at the forefront of disruptive advances in the software industry. Entrepreneurs themselves, their team has deep technology roots and a passion for building successful companies. Having started their careers as engineers and programmers, they understand the challenges inherent in creating a scalable and economically viable company. From the complexities of product launches, building sales teams, making payroll, and raising capital, to running public companies - they have been where you are and taken companies where you want to go.

Hummer Winblad Venture Partners

Meritech Capital provides late-stage venture capital to technology companies. It specializes in the fields of finance, venture capital, and late-stage investment management.  It was founded in 1999 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Meritech Capital Partners

Bay Partners is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California. Founded by John Freidenrich in 1976, it has funded over 200 information technology and healthcare businesses.

Bay Partners

New Enterprise Associates is a prominent venture capital firm focusing on investments in technology and healthcare startups. They help entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors, and geographies. With over $19 billion in cumulative committed capital since the firm’s founding in 1977, NEA invests in technology and healthcare companies at all stages in a company’s lifecycle, from the seed stage through the IPO. The firm's long track record of successful investing includes more than 210 portfolio company IPOs and more than 360 acquisitions.

New Enterprise Associates

Cisco Investments is an active investor with more than 40 investment professionals with deep market and technology expertise located in major geographies, including US, Canada, China, India, Israel, and Europe. Over the last 20 years, Cisco Investments has invested in hundreds of companies across different segments and helped them build to successful IPOs or acquisitions. They currently have an active portfolio of $2B with over 80 direct investments around the world, and they also hold Limited Partner positions in over 35 funds globally.

Cisco Investments

Salesforce Ventures helps enterprising founders build companies that reinvent the way the world works. Since 2009, they’ve invested in and partnered with more than 400 of the world's tenacious enterprise software companies from seed to IPO, including Airtable, Databricks, DocuSign, Guild Education, Hopin, Monday.com, nCino, Snowflake, Snyk, Stripe, Tanium, and Zoom. Salesforce Ventures leverages decades of expertise in the cloud and long-term relationships with key decision-makers at thousands of businesses around the world to give portfolio companies an unfair advantage, help them build credibility, and accelerate growth.

Salesforce Ventures

Sapphire is a global software venture capital firm with more than $11 billion in AUM and team members across Austin, London, Menlo Park and San Francisco. For over a decade, Sapphire has partnered with visionary management teams and venture funds to back companies of consequence. Since its founding, Sapphire has invested in more than 170 companies globally resulting in more than 30 Public Listings and 45 acquisitions. The firm’s investment strategies — Sapphire Ventures, Sapphire Partners and Sapphire Sport — are focused on scaling companies and venture funds, elevating them to become category leaders. Sapphire’s Portfolio Growth team of experienced operators delivers a strategic blend of value-add services, tools and resources designed to support portfolio company leaders as they scale.

Sapphire Ventures

They design, implement, and manage custom tailored portfolios of liquid assets for high net worth investors.  In order to avoid the potential conflict of interest found in most of the financial industry, they do not accept commissions on any transactions in client accounts. They sell no assets.  Instead, they charge a management fee that is based on the market value of the account.  That fee ranges from 1.5% per year down to 0.5%, depending on the size of the account.   For the safety of the clientâ€™s assets, they do not hold cash or securities at Brookside Capital, Inc.  Assets are held at a brokerage firm or bank custodian of the clientâ€™s choice.  The minimum account size is generally $1 million.   There is a wide range of issues to consider when designing a portfolio strategy for a client.  Among these issues are age, other assets held, income requirements, taxes, specific funding goals, and personal preferences.  However, the most important consideration is defining the acceptable level of risk for each client.  They have found that this is both a financial and comfort level that varies broadly by client.  Through financial modeling and some proprietary questionnaires, they help the client understand their specific acceptable risk level, and then design a strategy that optimizes the potential rate of return without exceeding that risk limit.    Stated simply, all clients want to make as much money as they canâ€”without exceeding their own unique risk level.   In selecting assets, they start the decision process at what they call the â€œSEPâ€ level.  SEP stands for â€œSocial, Economic, and Politicalâ€ themes.  Their research has unquestionably shown that understanding these global, long-term themes is the most essential element in determining investment success or failure.  Their Board of Advisors is the key group in helping them understanding these themes.  Some examples include The Revolution in Healthcare, Homeland Security, Consumer Value, The Information Age: Part 3, Nanometrics, and The Education Failure.  There are many others, and the list is fluid and always evolving.   They meet with their clients often to keep them up to date on their portfolios and their outlook.  This also gives them the opportunity to keep their current on any changes in their lives so that they can make any necessary adjustments in their portfolio strategy.

Brookside Capital

ServiceNow provides cloud-based solutions that define, structure, manage, and automate services for enterprise operations in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia Pacific, and other countries. The company offers service management solutions, including incident, problem, change, request, and cost management as well as service catalogs; and IT, HR, facilities, and field service management solutions. It also provides IT operations management solutions covering service mapping, delivery, and assurance solutions; business management solutions such as financial management, project portfolio suite, vendor performance management, and performance analytics as well as governance, risk, and compliance; and application development services.

ServiceNow

Adage Capital Management is a Boston-based $8.9B Money Management firm focused on managing S&P 500 assets predominantly for Endowments and Foundations such as Harvard University, Northwestern University, Dartmouth College, the American Red Cross and the Getty Foundation. Adage and its predecessor, the Select Equity Group at the Harvard Management Company, has outperformed the S&P index in each of the last 15 years by an average of 3.5%.   The fund is run by Phill Gross, who prior to founding Adage, was a Healthcare and Retail analyst, equity research director and partner at the Harvard Management Company for 18 years..

Adage Capital Management

Sands Capital is an active, long-term investor in innovative growth businesses. The approach combines rigorous fundamental analysis with inspired thinking to seek out businesses that are creating the future. They operate through two affiliates: Sands Capital Management, which focuses on investing in companies in the public market, and Sands Capital Ventures, which focuses on investing in companies in the private market. By enabling clients to participate in the growth of these businesses, its mission is to add value and enhance their wealth with prudence over time.

Sands Capital Ventures

Green Bay Ventures (''GBV'') is a San Francisco based venture capital firm. The Firm is led by C. Richard ''Dick'' Kramlich and Anthony Schiller, who co-own and co-manage the Firm. Since 2012, Dick and Anthony have originated and made investments in world-class companies including Lyft, Dropbox, Xiaomi, MuleSoft, Databricks, Spotify, TransferWise, and DocuSign plus other leading early-stage venture capital deals. Dick and Anthony have designed GBV to build on the same instinct and vision which helped Dick and the firm he co-founded, NEA, pioneer investment in and commercialization of Ethernet (3Com), high capacity networking (Juniper Networks), balloon angioplasty (Advanced Cardiovascular), web-based remittances (Xoom) and graphics processing (Silicon Graphics) — but at a scale where the team can focus on a small number of high conviction opportunities and support a select group of visionary entrepreneurs working to create breakthrough technologies and transform industries. The Firm’s existing investors include some of the world’s most prominent families, top-tier venture capital investors, entrepreneurs, and Silicon Valley CEOs whose active engagement with portfolio companies provides deep domain expertise and direct access to target markets.  GBV believes that by leveraging the networks and businesses of the Firm’s investors, its portfolio companies gain an advantage — helping the growth of their businesses and the deployment of their technologies.

Green Bay Ventures

MuleSoft

MuleSoft makes it easy to connect the world’s applications, data, and devices. They provide a software platform that enables organizations to easily build application networks using APIs. APIs are the digital glue that allows applications to talk to each other and exchange data. Their flexible, unified platform connects nearly any application or system by leveraging APIs to quickly and securely share data, regardless of format or source, in application networks. It was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California,.

MuleSoft is an API and integration platform provider.

Building future-ready applications in the cloud

Cloud-native Tech

Mulesoft

Salesforce’s MuleSoft helps businesses create real-time AI agents with AsyncAPI support

Set up a Quantum computing laboratory, Capgemini Q-Lab. The facility will be available in the UK, Portugal and India, and will work as research facilities to help build quantum applications.

Quantum information processing is slowly becoming a reality, ushering in a new technological era.

Quantum Computing

Developers of quantum algorithms and software programs for specific industries such as pharmaceuticals or finance.

MuleSoft plans to extend its Anypoint Runtime Fabric, a container service for multi-cloud and hybrid deployments, to run on Red Hat OpenShift, the industry's leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. IBM and MuleSoft plan to deliver increased integrations and solutions around the IBM Z product family

IBM and MuleSoft formed a global relationship to enhance integrations and solutions for the IBM Z product family. MuleSoft's Anypoint Runtime Fabric will be extended to run on Red Hat OpenShift, enabling easier deployment of APIs and automations across public and private clouds.

Vendors offering orchestration and management solutions including tools to handle running and connecting cloud-native applications.

Wipro

To provide digital integration solutions that allow businesses to enhance the value and versatility of their customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

Salesforce

Salesforce acquired MuleSoft, a developer of the “Anypoint Platform," an integration platform for building application networks. Anypoint Platform provides a holistic approach to API design and development and supports almost 300 connectors, enabling integrations with databases, SaaS platforms, storage resources, and network services

Automation to improve business efficiency

Workflow Automation Platforms

Platforms that offer a range of workflow automation and RPA bots that are not specifically targeted at any business function

Salesforce expects to empower its "Salesforce Integration Cloud" via this acquisition

The acquisition aims to accelerate customers' digital transformations by unlocking data across different systems and creating connected customer experiences.

MuleSoft is an API and integration platform provider.MuleSoft’s primary product is the Anypoint platform, an API and integration platform that allows users to build APIs, deploy in any environment and architecture, automate security, and manage and monitor APIs. It provides pre-built APIs and other integration assets. The platform’s API management features include API Governance, API Manager, Monitoring, and Flex Gateway. Its integration features include API Designer, Anypoint Studio, Anypoint Connectors, Anypoint Exchange, Anypoint DataGraph, Anypoint Partner Manager, Anypoint MQ, and Anypoint Code Builder. Among MuleSoft’s other products are MuleSoft Composer, which connects applications and data instantly, and MuleSoft RPA, which automates tasks with bots.In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/22757">October 2023 </a>, Mulesoft announced the general availability of Anypoint Code Builder, an integrated development environment that allows developers to build APIs and integrations using modern tools.MuleSoft follows a direct sales model.In August 2021, MuleSoft acquired Servicetrace, a robotics solutions provider, which was absorbed into the company.In 2018, MuleSoft was acquired by Salesforce, a cloud-based software company. The company continues to operate under its brand.Key customers and partnershipsMuleSoft’s customers operate in industries and sectors such as consumer goods, education, energy, financial services, government, healthcare, and technology. Among Mulesoft’s customers are ASICS, Unilever, Cisco Meraki, AT&amp;T, Watchbox, Splunk, Hologic, Siemens, New Relic, Wells Fargo, and Cox Automotive.MuleSoft’s partners include Accenture, AWS, Bluesoft, Coupa, Datacom, Fujitsu, HCL, IBM, Infosys, Ipswitch, KPMG, MTX, Nexus, Oracle, PayPal, SAP, Tech Mahindra, Virtusa, and Zennify.

SingleStore is a company that provides a distributed SQL database platform for real-time analytics and operational applications.SingleStore’s platform combines the scalability of NoSQL with the querying capabilities of SQL. It enables organizations to ingest, process, and analyze large volumes of data in real-time, making it ideal for applications that require fast and accurate data processing. SingleStore solves the problem of handling massive amounts of data and delivering real-time insights for use cases such as real-time analytics, operational analytics, and high-velocity transactional applications.SingleStore's competitive advantage is its ability to handle analytical and transactional workloads in a single platform. It allows businesses to consolidate their data infrastructure, simplifying management and reducing operational costs.SingleStore operates with a sales model that includes direct sales and partnerships with technology and solution providers. It offers different pricing and licensing options tailored to the needs of its customers, including subscription-based models.Key customers and partnershipsSingleStore serves some of the largest tech and non-tech enterprises across various industries, including Comcast, Cisco, Akamai Technologies, Fiverr, Goldman Sachs, Sony, Siemens, Hulu.SingleStore partners with all major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud) and has technology partnerships with Dell, Red Hat, Intel, HP Enterprise, and Looker.Funding and financialsAs of June 2023, SingleStore’s latest fundraising was in October 2022 from a USD 30 million Series F round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Prosperity7 Ventures. The funds were slated to fuel SingleStore’s growth and various strategic initiatives.

SingleStore

Platform9 is an open-distributed cloud company that offers solutions for managing hybrid clouds, Kubernetes, and more. Platform9 offers several products and solutions, including Managed Kubernetes, Managed OpenStack, and Managed Bare Metal.Managed Kubernetes allows businesses to deploy and manage Kubernetes clusters across any infrastructure, while Managed OpenStack offers a simplified way to deploy and manage private clouds. Managed Bare Metal enables businesses to run Kubernetes, OpenStack, and other workloads on dedicated hardware with bare-metal performance.Platform9 claims to deliver a seamless Kubernetes experience across any infrastructure. Platform9's SaaS-managed Kubernetes solution offers a single view to manage Kubernetes clusters running on any cloud or on-premises infrastructure, including bare metal servers, vSphere, and public clouds such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure, providing customers with a unified Kubernetes experience. In addition, Platform9 offers automated security patching, on-demand upgrades, self-healing clusters, multi-version support, and audit logging.Platform9 has a subscription-based sales model. It offers its services on a pay-as-you-go basis, with pricing based on the number of managed nodes or instances, with optional add-ons for additional features and support.Key customers and partnershipsPlatform9 targets enterprise customers who run and manage Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies on distributed cloud services, whether on-premises or in the public cloud. Its customers typically include large organizations with complex IT environments, such as financial services, healthcare, technology, and retail companies.As of mid-2022, Platform9 catered to more than 60 enterprise clients and powered 40,000 nodes across private, public, and edge clouds.Platform9 has partnerships with various cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Additionally, in <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/32723">August 2024</a>, Platform9 partnered with Fairwinds, a managed Kubernetes-as-a-Service provider, to tackle issues related to Kubernetes over-provisioning and cost management costs in public cloud deployments.

Platform9

Mirantis is a technology company that provides cloud-native software and services to help businesses modernize their IT infrastructure.Mirantis specializes in open-source software, focusing on Kubernetes, OpenStack, and related technologies. Its core offering is the Mirantis Cloud Native Platform, a managed Kubernetes service that provides a complete set of tools for deploying and managing containerized applications. The platform helps organizations adopt and scale Kubernetes quickly and easily, with features like automated provisioning, integrated monitoring, and self-service access to resources. Mirantis also offers professional services including consulting, training, and support for Kubernetes, OpenStack, and related technologies.Mirantis sells its products and services through a subscription-based model. Customers can choose from various annual subscription plans, depending on their needs.Key customers and partnershipsMirantis focuses on enterprise customers who deploy and manage large-scale private clouds. Some of its high-profile customers include Volkswagen Group, Société Générale, S&amp;P Global, Paypal, Volkswagen, and GSK.Mirantis also has technology partnerships with several companies, including Arm, Cisco, Entrust, and Fujitsu, and hardware vendors like Dell EMC, Intel, and Supermicro.

Mirantis

Rafay Systems is a cloud-native platform that automates deployment, life cycle management, and scaling of containerized applications across all cloud infrastructure.Rafay's platform provides enterprises with the tools to deploy and manage containerized applications, microservices, and serverless functions in a scalable and efficient way. The platform provides features including multi-cluster management, automated workload scaling, automated application recovery, and granular application-level access controls. Rafay also provides a Kubernetes-native API gateway that simplifies managing and securing microservices, and includes capabilities to include support for graphics processing unit-based workloads.Additionally, Rafay Systems <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/29580">offers an AI suite</a> to simplify AI application development and deployment. This suite includes pre-configured LLMOps Playgrounds, a turnkey MLOps pipeline, central management of LLM providers and prompts, and AI data source integrations and governance. It also offers a cost optimization suite to help IT professionals manage Kubernetes expenses with dynamic cluster scaling, auto-rightsizing, policy application, and simplified infrastructure.Rafay has a subscription-based sales model and offers its platform as a service. The pricing is based on the number of clusters, nodes per cluster, and the amount of data transferred.Key customers and partnershipsRafay’s target customer segments are enterprises, service providers, and software vendors. Some of its notable clients include Verizon, Equinix, Samsung, Moneygram, and the US Air Force.In 2022, Rafay launched its Technical Alliance Program (TAP), which brings together technology and solutions providers to develop joint solutions to simplify and streamline Kubernetes management and operations. Partners of the program include GitLab Inc., F5 NGINX, MinIO, New Relic, and Sysdig. Meanwhile, Rafay’s public cloud and managed Kubernetes partners include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Oracle.

Rafay Systems

Docker, Inc. is a technology company developing productivity tools centered around Docker, a software container platform that automates the deployment of code inside containers.Docker, Inc's major commercial products include Docker Hub, a central repository for containers, and Docker Desktop, a GUI application that enables Windows and Mac users to manage containers.Docker's ease of use, portability, resource efficiency, scalability, and strong ecosystem has made it a popular solution for deploying and managing applications in various environments.Docker has a subscription-based sales model. Docker also collaborates with various channel partners, including technology resellers, system integrators, and value-added distributors to expand its reach.Moreover, Docker has made several strategic acquisitions to enhance its capabilities: AtomicJar (2023), Nestybox (2022), SocketPlane (2015), and Tutum (2015), among others.Key customers and partnershipsAs of December 2022, the platform was used by more than 18 million developers. As of March 2022, the company served more than 56,000 commercial customers, including Adobe, Netflix, PayPal, Verizon, and Target.In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/27771">March 2024</a>, Docker expanded its partnership with Red Hat to integrate Testcontainers Cloud into the Red Hat OpenShift platform. This partnership aimed to streamline the process of building cloud-native applications and facilitate real-world testing using Docker containers.Docker’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) was more than USD 50 million in 2021.

Docker

Vendors offering cloud-native infrastructure or provisioning, which is the first layer in the cloud-native landscape. It encompasses tools to create and harden the foundation of cloud-native apps.

Vendors offering execution environment (runtime) solutions. This encompasses everything a container needs to run in a cloud-native environment, including the code used to start a container.

Vendors offering solutions for application definition and development. This layer focuses on the tools that enable engineers to build cloud-native applications

Vendors offering observability, including tools to understand a cloud system from its external outputs, measured by CPU time, memory, disk space, latency, errors, etc.

Vendors that bundle different tools from different layers together into a platform, solving a larger problem. These can include an orchestration tool, a container runtime, service discovery, networking, an API gateway, etc.

Provide tools to design and build applications for deployment and operation in cloud environments

Disruptors are using Generative AI for AI-based assistants and help-bots, while others provide the technology for developing and deploying Gen AI applications and models.

Mulesoft

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