Daniel Karp

We are thrilled to announce that Andreessen Horowitz is investing in Wiz - the global cloud security platform revolutionizing the way companies secure everything they build and run in the cloud. Wiz is already one of the fastest growing companies we’ve ever seen, but we believe the best is yet to come.   The opportunity to build the next iconic security company is here. Wiz sits at the interaction of two massive tailwinds: more workloads and data shifting to the cloud and generative AI taking over the enterprise. With both shifts, the sheer magnitude of digital threats has exploded and threat vectors have become increasingly sophisticated. No one is better positioned than Wiz to build a true platform at this intersection (and their customers agree!).  It's only fitting we announce this during RSA, years after Zane Lackey and I first grabbed coffee with Assaf Rappaport and Ami Luttwak. Zane, David George, Justin Kahl and I couldn’t be more excited to finally partner with the incredible Wiz team!  Read more about why we think the next phase of growth is even more exciting than the last 👇 https://lnkd.in/gzh9t5u6

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USB drive. Cell phones. VoiP. Microsoft Windows. Intel PC computer chips. Instant messaging. Drip irrigation. Pillcam (capsule endoscopy). Iron Dome. These are just a few of the world-changing technologies that have been developed in Israel. As my involvement with connecting investors, global companies, and executives with the tech industry in Israel has grown over the past year through the Israel Tech Mission, I have found that simply providing data and information about the sector is usually enough to generate substantial interest. And for good reason. Israeli high-tech and it's presence and impact on the tiny country, and in fact, on the world, is far greater than even that of Silicon Valley. The numbers tell the story. The high-tech industry in Israel accounts for 20% of its GDP, By comparison, in the United States, the high-tech comprises only 9% of the economy. Or from a different perspective, the high-tech field, at 20% of GDP, is more important to Israel than the oil and gas industry, at 16%, is to Russia. "It is true that we have grown, but less than in previous years, and investments have also decreased. The growth in hiring new workers has also decreased. Everyone has significant concerns for the future of the country and the economy. The entrepreneurs feel it, and so do the investors." - Dror Bin, CEO of the Israel Innovation Authority רשות החדשנות According to the annual report released by the Israel Innovation Authority, there are approximately 515 multinational companies in Israel, which employ around 90,000 workers in Israel (roughly 25% of Israeli high-tech employment), concentrated in software (40%), semiconductors (30%), and life sciences (10%). The importance of private sector investment into Israeli high-tech cannot be underestimated, as government spending on the sector is lower than the average of the 37 other OECD countries. This is not surprising, given the combination of military spending requirements as well as the highly entrepreneurial nature of the high-tech sector in Israel. Perhaps the most unique - and valuable - quality of the Israel tech sector is it's ability to effectively partner with private investors and multinational companies with limited government assistance or intervention. The level and pace of technological investment today in Israel is truly unparalleled anywhere in the world. From AI, fintech, and cybersecurity to biotech, medical, and industrial automation, Israeli innovation is having a major global impact in just about every area of high-tech. If you are interested in attending a future Israel Tech Mission to see firsthand the tech investment and development opportunities in Startup Nation while networking at the highest levels within the Israeli tech community, please reach out. David Siegel David Nakar Avigail Goldglancz David Malton Adi Y. Segal Ron Miasnik #israel #startupnation #israeltech #israeltechmission #tech4israel #innovation #standwithisrael #venturecapital

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🚀 Exciting Announcement! 🎙️ I'm thrilled to share that I was recently interviewed for the first episode of a new podcast series by "People & Computers," hosted by the insightful yehudak konfortes; As one of the few Israeli experts in AI standardization and its integration with local regulation, I have been spearheading Israel's efforts globally since 2017. In this inaugural episode, we delve into critical discussions on the international AI arms race, focusing particularly on the regulatory elements where AI standardization plays a pivotal role in global-local dynamics. We explore the regulatory landscape intertwined with AI advancements, offering a unique perspective on how nations are navigating this complex terrain. As Head of Delegation to both SC42 (International AI Standards) and JTC21 (EU AI ACT Standards), as well as a Contributor to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) (US) and Standards Council of Canada (SCC) (Canada), I hope to add value by bringing a fresh and unique perspective. 🎧 Tune in to the podcast on Spotify: https://lnkd.in/duhjdvxb While my podcast under ISRAI.AI (link in comments) is in English and geared towards a professional audience, the "People & Computers" series is in Hebrew and aimed at the general public. Hope you enjoy this short episode and, as always, be in touch and let me know your thoughts! Join us as we unpack the dynamic and ever-evolving world of AI! #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Podcast #AIStandardization #InternationalRelations #TechRegulation #SC42 #PeopleAndComputers European Commission ISO - International Organization for Standardization IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission)

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Google’s record-breaking $23 billion acquisition of Wiz is a game changer for Israeli tech. This is not just a landmark deal for Israel, but a powerful statement by Google in supporting the Israeli tech ecosystem. This is huge news during regular times… not to mention during a time of war where many VCs and corporates are shying away from investing in Israel. It is the largest acquisition in Israeli history, and Google’s largest acquisition ever. Yes... EVER! Wiz was swinging for the fences from day one. The team scaled the business to $100 million in ARR within 18 months, becoming the fastest-growing software company ever. And yet… selling it for $23 billion at this point in time? This is a game changer.   I believe this acquisition signals a turning point for Israeli tech, and that this deal will undoubtedly have a ripple effect, encouraging more investment in Israeli startups. In a way, it reminds me of the acquisition of Waze by Google (do you see a pattern here?🙂) Outside of this being great news for Israeli #founders, it’s some good news for the people of #Israel, who after close to 10 months of war, get validation that the world appreciates Israeli innovation, and provides a sense of hope… We’re going to see tremendous momentum in the Israeli tech ecosystem going into the fall. It’s an exciting time to be an Israeli founder. 97212 Ventures #startupnation #venturecapital #israelinnovation

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Excited to share that we’ve been featured in People & Computers magazine! 🎉 The article covers our joint customer event with Beecon Security and ReviveSec, where we discussed how our AI-based solutions are enhancing firewall protection in these challenging times. Check out the full piece to see how we’re fortifying cybersecurity together.

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Transform Your Business: The Impact of AI on Modern Entrepreneurship Discover how AI is revolutionizing the business world in my latest article published on Walla. Learn how entrepreneurs can leverage AI tools to operate more efficiently, cost-effectively, and achieve remarkable results in today's technological landscape. #ai #artificialintelligence

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On June 4, join Nadav Tovias, GM Israel at DevRev for his talk: AgentOS - The Foundation for Next-Generation AI Agents at The Customer Conference ISRAEL 2024! We believe the future of work will be about doing more, by doing less. In the past, SaaS 1.0 demanded more: more time from your teams, more operational overhead, and more supplementary apps to fill in gap. At DevRev, we're defining SaaS 2.0, where artificial intelligence and design converge to create solutions that work for you, not the other way around. This new era is about enhancing customer experiences, facilitating team collaboration, and simplifying the execution of daily tasks. Register TODAY! https://lnkd.in/gm9_P_ah #ai #agentos #nextgenai #aiagents #customersupport #teamwork #customerexperience

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Google's BIGGEST acquisition: Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz. Despite recent doubts, Israel's tech scene is thriving. VCs and big tech see this too. Remember when Intel announced its $25 BILLION chip factory in Israel in late December 2023? It's clear—Israel is still a hotbed for innovation and talent. Here are the stunning reported facts: - Wiz boasts about $500 million in ARR, making this deal’s multiples mind-blowing. - It reached $100m in revenues ONLY 18 months after launch. - Just two months ago, they raised $1 billion at a $12 billion valuation. This deal is a massive win for the global tech ecosystem. It injects much-needed liquidity (a great point made by Harry Stebbings) and boosts Israel's tech landscape during a difficult time for the country. The skeptics can step aside. Israel remains one of the best places in the world to build, invest in and acquire tech companies. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ UPDATE JULY 23, 2024: Reports that Wiz has turned down the acquisition offer! Relevant article in the comments #startups #venturecapital #investing #Israel

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Everyone wants NVIDIA AI chips but there aren't enough for everyone. And so the companies are fighting over every chip, and meanwhile Nvidia's business results are skyrocketing. The last victim was Elon Musk, owner of xAI and also of Tesla. Last week he rerouted a shipment of 12,000 Nvidia AI chips from Tesla to xAI. Musk is in a conflict of interest, and prefering winning the AI competiton over his promises to Tesla's investors to become "leader in AI and robotics".   More than anything, Musk's decision clarifies Nvidia's role in the story: It cannot be done without it. Thus, there is a battle for every chip it produces. As far as Nvidia is concerned, the young men can play before it, as long as the hardware is Nvidia's #GPU chips. This is truly an inexplicable anomaly: almost two years into the battle of the titans over #AI, and still Nvidia's platform has the undisputed control of AI hardware, with a market share of more than 70%. But can it last? Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang @jenhsunhuang said last month that the company is having trouble keeping up with demand. "Customers are consuming all the GPU chips that exist," he said in an investor call. Nvidia is the third company in the world in terms of value, reaching about 2.7 trillion dollars in the last month. In the last five years, Nvidia's stock has registered an increase of 3,174%. Analysts predict that if this rate of growth continues, Nvidia will overtake Apple in the second place and even Microsoft in the first. Last week Huang presented its next-generation AI chips at the COMPUTEX TAIPEI conference. It included a new AI platform - #Rubin - which will replace the current #Blackwell platform, that was was shipped to the market only in March of this year. Can competitors like Intel Corporation or AMD challenge this rate of innovation? And what about the competition in the #cloud services AI chips, against costomers like Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon and Oracle? And the competition the may emerge from initiatives like Sam Altman's to establish a new giant chip company ("Tigris") or Softbank's Masiyoshi San initiative ("Izangi")? Huang would likely be the first to acknowledge that competition is expected to intensify over time. Even IBM was once an undisputed leader of the world of computers, until the competitors overcame it. But that doesn't mean Nvidia shouldn't do as much as it can to make it difficult for the competition. Read the whole story (in Hebrew) in ynet https://lnkd.in/dCDmVnjQ

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Tomorrow at #AWSSummit Tel Aviv: Visit us at booth B17 for a live demo of Firebolt’s latest features. Learn how Firebolt delivers insanely fast data analytics on AWS - while cutting your monthly bill. We'll demo: ✔️Millisecond query performance on terabytes of data ✔️Low latency with unparalleled price-for-performance ✔️High query throughput without performance degradation ✔️Simplicity and familiarity of SQL that follows PostgreSQL dialect closely #datawarehouse #dataanalytics #dataengineering

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Big news in the tech world in Israel - there may be the largest tech M&A in history, during a war no less! Google in talks to buy Wiz for $23 billion: https://lnkd.in/d24Z7hip I have a slightly controversial thought, and would like to hear your feedback...since I am not sure that I am correct in my thinking: Assaf Rappaport and his team have clearly created something unbelievable in a very short time frame as well. They have created value that is hard to fathom. It is not an exaggeration to say that Wiz shares were one of the hottest tech private shares in the global market for a couple of years now. But I don't think they should sell. I am assuming that the Wiz founding team, and even some of the broader team, are independently wealthy by now. So I don't feel bad saying this. But we are in a state of global uncertainty that I have not seen in my lifetime. And I believe that we as a country need to be less reliant on foreign companies and countries to survive. If the deal value was $23 million, of even $230 million - I would say sell. That can be quite meaningful to the team, and less meaningful to the broader economy. But Wiz - if they have what they seem to have - can be a monster company in Israel for many years to come! And that will add to our economy and security. If they sell to Google, who knows if Wiz will remain in Israel for much longer. There are many headwinds that would say - not for long. So Wiz - don't sell! Stay Israeli. Thoughts? #startupnation #wiz #google #israel #scaleupnation #thrivecapital

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Is it shopping season for Israeli technology? The recent surge in M&A activity in Israel is the most significant sign of hope and optimism I’ve seen since October 7th. It demonstrates the potential of Israeli tech and the faith placed in it by top global companies. When technology leaders choose to further expand into Israel and acquire local teams, you know financial outlooks are positive. In cybersecurity - often the poster-child of Israeli tech - we’ve seen five acquisitions in quick succession totaling more than $1Bn. Flow Security by CrowdStrike (~$200M), Avalor Security, a Zscaler Company ($350M), Gem Security (acquired by Wiz) ($350M), Silk Security by Armis ($150M) and Entitle by BeyondTrust (~150M). All are led by exceptional individuals, well done! Perhaps more telling is the emerging AI industry. Last week NVIDIA announced its acquisition of two companies for a combined value of $1Bn. Congratulations RunAI ($700M) and Deci AI ($300M). Mainstream media is so focused on the voices of a racist minority calling for boycotts and divestments that they fail to capture actual news. Antisemites might yell the loudest, but the actions of multinational corporations speak louder than words. I am optimistic about the future. Are you?

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  Tel Aviv and IBM teams question the conventional benchmarking practices, which typically involve training models from scratch with random initialization as modeling long-range dependencies in sequences has led to notable architectural advancements, with state space models (SSMs) emerging as a significant alternative to Transformers. According to the team, this method may overestimate the differences between architectures.   The researchers propose pretraining models using standard denoising objectives with downstream task data, a method they term selfpretraining (SPT). This approach significantly narrows the performance gap between Transformers and SSMs. For example, pretrained vanilla Transformers can match the performance of advanced SSMs like S4 on benchmarks such as the Long Range Arena (LRA). Specifically, SPT improved the best reported results of SSMs on the PathX-256 task by 20 points.   Key findings from the study include:   1. Transformers vs. SSMs: Properly pretrained vanilla Transformers can achieve performance comparable to S4 on LRA tasks, challenging the notion that Transformers are less capable of modeling long-range dependencies. 2. Redundancy of Structured Parameterizations: Structured parameterizations in SSMs become mostly redundant with data-driven initialization through pretraining, suggesting that simpler models can match the performance of more complex architectures. 3. Effectiveness Across Data Scales: SPT is particularly beneficial when training data is scarce, with relative gains more pronounced with smaller datasets. 4. Adaptability of Convolution Kernels: Data-driven kernels learned via SPT adapt to specific task distributions, enhancing performance on long-sequence tasks.   The study emphasizes the importance of incorporating a pretraining stage in model evaluation to ensure accurate performance estimation and simplify architecture design. This approach not only provides a fair comparison between different architectures but also highlights the efficiency of pretraining in leveraging task data.    Arxiv: https://lnkd.in/enaH3mhu

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Oren Koren is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Veriti. Oren brings 19 years of experience in cybersecurity, advanced threat analysis, and product management. Prior to founding Veriti, Oren was a Senior Product Manager at Check Point Software Technologies, where he led AI-based innovations and advanced data analytics projects redefining threat hunting and SIEM applications. Before Check Point, Oren served for 14 years in the prestigious 8200 unit and was responsible for various cybersecurity activities and research. Oren’s allocades include the Israeli Security Award and 3 MoD (Ministry of Defense) awards for cutting-edge innovations in cyber security. X (Twitter): @orenkorenCLO Verified for Business Continuity: How to Remediate Risk Safely Across the Enterprise (<– add to your schedule) Remediation can feel like a high-wire act, balancing the need to close exposures against the imperative of maintaining business continuity. This talk addresses the quintessential challenge: how can organizations utilize their existing arsenal of security tools to remediate vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and exposures without halting the business engine? Glean insights from a seasoned industry expert on leveraging security logs, configurations, and threat intelligence to unearth exposures, teaching CISOs to navigate this delicate balance.

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Tech debt can bring down even the brightest of startups. Here are three ways we reversed ours at Plivo: 1. We restructured our org chart. Initially we had three specialist teams: backend engineering, infra (CloudOps/SRE/DevOps today), and VoIP engineering. As a CPaaS company we have a complex voice-calling API stack. This worked well when Plivo had 10 employees, but by 2016, we had 40 and multiple products, which led to constant context switching and the exacerbation of our tech debt. To solve this, we switched to a new product-based team structure. The goal of this new structure was to reduce context switching and ensure that each employee could focus on what they were best at. We built teams for our voice API, SMS API, Billing/Payments, and SDKs, and each team had its own developers, QAs, engineering managers, and product owners. When we switched to this new structure we began to notice improvements across the board: bugs were getting fixed faster, latency and uptime were improved, teams had the bandwidth to break down monoliths, and our products were getting better and faster. 2. We built infrastructure for scale. In the early days of Plivo, we were deploying a new AWS EC2 image with each release instead of incremental code upgrades. This gave us the flexibility to access and re-deploy older images, but the process was quite slow and hurt our productivity. It resulted in the rapid accumulation of tech debt because we could not iterate fast. We didn’t have a staging environment either. Services would crash and we had no logic to switch so we created a dedicated AWS account for our staging setup. This dual-account setup was sufficient for a while but when we switched to product-based teams, we chose to replicate this structure for each product within Plivo. This increased our overhead substantially but also gave us much more stability. The addition of QA engineers for each product reduced surprises further. In 2018, we integrated all our operations into Docker, significantly transforming Plivo's development process. We were able to set up a robust CI/CD pipeline with added layers of security, compliance, and immutability. Consequently, our engineers could develop on local setups and accelerate deployment times. 3. We made customer experience our north star metric. As a tech person, I tend to prioritize tech metrics, e.g., our p99 latency. However, during the five months we spent reversing our tech debt, we decided to prioritize the one thing that would improve customer experience the most at any given moment. To determine what that one thing was, we paid attention to the number of incidents, support tickets, and alerts. Rome was ablaze, but we still needed to pick and choose which specific buildings to throw buckets of water at—these metrics informed our firefighting efforts. Our battle against tech debt is ongoing, but we now feel well-equipped to fight it thanks to our scalable org structure, CI/CD pipeline, and customer-centricity!

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eBPF for log collection? 🤯 "eBPF offers a paradigm shift in log collection by enabling custom code execution within the kernel in a safe and efficient manner", says Aviv Zohari, our Founding Engineer, in an article just published on APMdigest: https://lnkd.in/dmeqd3Nv Aviv recently held a 30 mins presentation on this topic at the recent #kubecon 🇫🇷 Paris, in front of a packed room. Audience members lined up to ask follow up questions 🙋‍♂️ 🙋‍♀️ #eBPF is making waves 🌊 And groundcover is the platform to stand on to ride them 🏄‍♂️ 🏄‍♀️

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Millisecond cold starts are a reality at kraft.cloud , as is milliseconds scale to zero. What's new, and available soon, is being able to have 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗳𝘂𝗹 scale to zero in milliseconds 🔥 First, some numbers, using NGINX as an example: ⚡️ Cold start: 24 milliseconds ⚡️ First stateful scale to zero (suspend): 174 ms ⚡️ Scale to one (resume): 3.67 ms ⚡️ Further stateful scale to zero (suspends): 2 ms I'll be writing a blog post to explain this in more detail, but basically the use of unikernels (extremely specialized VMs) allows for fast suspend/resume of their state. The second and subsequent suspends are quick since we do incremental snapshots. Finally, note that this mechanism is agnostic to the workload, so while we used NGINX as an example, this works with more complex apps/langs/frameworks like Node.js .

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