Ethan Choi’s Post

Today, we at Khosla Ventures, are thrilled to announce we have co-led an investment in Cyberhaven, as part of their $88M Series C! Every decade or so, a platform shift results in a new set of vulnerabilities, and as a result, the creation of a few immensely valuable security companies that are the leaders in securing the new threat vectors. This is true for the cloud and mobile, and it will be no less true for AI. With prior platform shifts, most of the focus was on securing enterprise from outside threats and breaches. However, in this AI-era, CISOs are focused on securing IP and highly confidential data from threats inside their physical and remote networks, primarily driven by 3 main trends… 1. Insider threats are increasing (anywhere between 50-70% of security breaches) and increasingly sophisticated as AI is used transform or mask data 2. New modes of data exfiltration increasingly rapidly, as employees are knowingly or unknowingly inputting sensitive data into ChatGPT and other AI applications 3. As more enterprises train their own AI models, they want a deep understanding of the provenance and quality of their training data to protect themselves from poor models, or even worse, model poisoning Enter Cyberhaven, and their unique approach to data security using AI-based data lineage. Instead of content scanning which becomes difficult when data is encrypted or modified or top-down scanning of data stores which has limitations in providing full context, Cyberhaven provides a full and accurate accounting of the origin, movement, actors and actions taken on a file or piece of data. This bottoms-up, granular view of every single file and piece of data helps drive the accuracy (and often zero false positives) we kept on hearing about from Cyberhaven’s incredible customer base, which includes the world’s most innovative LLM providers, software companies, law firms, consulting firms, pharma and bio companies, and manufacturers. These customers were effusive about Cyberhaven’s efficacy in uncovering insider threats that other solutions weren’t detecting, the ability to stop data exfiltration in real-time vs. discovering after the fact, as well as non-security use cases such as understanding the most utilized and shared files and work across the company. Thank you to Howard, Volodymyr, Radu, Cristian, Vitaly, George, John, Rickie, Gary, Cameron, and the rest of the Cyberhaven team for trusting us to join the journey. Thrilled to be joining forces with our friends at Adams Street Partners, Redpoint, Vertex Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, Wing Venture Capital, Crane Venture Partners and some incredible security and tech leaders... Amol K., former CPO at CrowdStrike Gerhard Eschelbeck, former CISO at Google, Aurora and other great co's Ash Devata, former GM of Duo at Cisco, CEO at Greynoise Yee Jiun (YJ) Song, VP Eng at Meta cc Sven Strohband, Jai Sajnani, Brian Byun

We at Khosla Ventures are thrilled to co-lead an investment in Ramp and support our partner, Keith, in his continued partnership with this special company since the seed. Eric Glyman, Karim Atiyeh, and the rest of the Ramp team are building the all-in-one financial suite, bringing delight to 25,000 finance teams. With all the data for expenses, travel, and bill pay in one-place and a world-class engineering team delivering products at an impressive pace, Ramp is bringing AI-powered automation to free finance teams from the mundane (such as expense reports!) and enable them to focus on their most impactful work. Great to partner with friends at Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, Greylock, and 8VC. cc Jai Sajnani

"Nothing is certain except death and taxes" - Benjamin Franklin While that's a morbid way to think about themes to invest behind =), it doesn't make that saying nonetheless true. Anrok, is making the government mandated requirement of collecting and remitting sales tax for software, AI, and digital services companies go from an absolute PAIN to absolute JOY, via automation and AI. Many remember when they didn't have to pay sales tax on our eCommerce purchases until 2018, when what has become the "Wayfair" rule came into effect and Amazon and other merchants started collecting sales tax. Avalara, which was the biggest beneficiary of this tax ruling, grew to $1B in revenue before it was taken private for $8.4B by Vista Equity. Michelle Valentine and Kannan Goundan had the foresight that this same pattern was going to play out for software and digital services companies. As software is eating the world and AI is woven through the fabric of every part of our lives, Anrok is growing rapidly and aligned with the rapid growth of their customers like Notion, Anthropic, Vanta and many others. Thrilled to partner with Michelle, Kannan, Brad, Devon, Tahirih, and the rest of the Anrok team. Grateful to be joined by some incredible execs... Karen Peacock, Board member at Dropbox and former CEO at Intercom David Faugno, President at 1Password and former CFO of Qualtrics C. Alex Estevez, Former CFO at Atlassian Pedro Canahuati, CTO at 1Password and former VP Eng at Meta Bryant Lee, Head of Partnerships at Postman and former VP, Global Head of Partnerships at Atlassian Elad Gil And excited to join our friends at Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital, and others to be announced in the near future! cc Jai Sajnani

Huge congrats to Andrew Bialecki, Ed Hallen and the rest of the Klaviyo team on their IPO today! We are grateful to be your partners and thank you for letting Accel be a part of the journey.

Over the course of our partnership with Pismo, we’ve had the pleasure of watching this team persevere and sacrifice endlessly. They worked hard to form a culture of humility, hard work, and integrity. As a result, they’ve become a category-defining company for banking, card issuing, and payments. Today they serve the largest global banks and some of the most ambitious global fintechs. Congratulations on today’s milestone, thank you for letting us be part of the journey, Ricardo Josua, Daniela Binatti, Juliana Binatti Motta, Marcelo Parise, Rodrigo Melato, Vishal Dalal, Débora Fortes, Bruno De Souza! cc John Locke, David Waltcher

Thrilled to announce our investment in Pluang, the leading investing super app for Southeast Asia, and our partnership with Marcellina Claudia Kolonas, Richard Chua and the rest of the Pluang team in their mission to help bring financial inclusion and wealth-building products to the more than 100 million first-time investors that will come online over the next few years. Similar to what Latam experienced in 2021, the fintech boom in Southeast Asia is happening and no other fintech category grew faster in the region than consumer investing. We believe being multi-asset class is critical to building the category-defining consumer investing company in the region and Pluang is the only player that enables its user base to invest across multiple asset classes, including gold, equities, crypto, indexes, and mutual funds. We’re thrilled to be joined by the following amazing leaders: Trung Nguyen, Andy Ho, Aleksander Larsen, & Jeffrey Zirlin (Axie Infinity founders) Alexa von Tobel (former Learnvest CEO) Daniela Binatti (Pismo CTO) Sujata Bhatia (Monzo Bank COO) Jannick Malling and Leif Abraham (Public.com co-CEOs) Raghu Yarlagadda (FalconX CEO) Sergio Jimenez Amozurrutia (Flink México CEO) C. Alex Estevez (former Atlassian CFO) David Faugno (former Qualtrics CFO) Ash Devata (CPO @ Duo Security) Yee Jiun Song (SVP of Eng @ Instabase) Pedro Canahuati (CTO @ 1Password) The Chainsmokers BRI Ventures Gold House cc Andrew Braccia, Rachit Parekh, David Waltcher, Yashwini Bansal

"Amongst the best technologists in Brazil" is what we heard over and over again as we did our homework and references on the Pismo founders (Ricardo Josua, Daniela Binatti, Juliana Binatti Motta, and Marcelo Parise). Not only are they brilliant tech founders, they are just such good people! The most innovative and discerning fintechs, financial institutions, and consumer companies have recognized that Pismo is the most powerful, robust, and flexible infrastructure platform to build their innovative financial products and services on top of. Excited for not only the road ahead for Pismo but what this company will enable the very best fintech minds in LatAm and globally to achieve, using the building blocks they are providing. Excited to partner with Carlos Medeiros and Alex Szapiro @ Softbank, Alex Ceballos and Rahul Kewalramani @ Amazon, King Goh @ Headline, and Romero Rodrigues @ Redpoint. Thanks to Mary Ann Azevedo @ TechCrunch for her thoughtful piece on the round! cc David Waltcher, John Locke Welcome to the #AccelFamily