Nick Vidal

Vanta just raised a $150M Series D at a $4.15B valuation — a big milestone for the company, which helps over 12,000 businesses earn and prove trust through better security and compliance. Founded by Christina Cacioppo, Vanta started by solving a simple problem: making SOC 2 compliance easier for startups. As security expectations grew, so did Vanta’s platform. What began as a tool to automate audit prep has become an all-in-one system for continuous security monitoring, access reviews, vendor management, and real-time trust reporting. Today, Vanta tracks 200M+ assets, manages 1.5M employees and 33K vendors, and has helped remediate 1.7B vulnerabilities. Customers like Duolingo, Atlassian, Ramp, and Mistral AI use Vanta to move faster and reduce risk — from completing vendor reviews in minutes to replacing spreadsheets with always-on monitoring. The company’s latest push: AI-powered tools that automate security questionnaires, generate audit-ready policy updates, and help teams fix issues by just asking a question. Vanta’s AI Agent now handles 80% of questionnaire answers and helps teams save hours every week. With its new funding, Vanta plans to double down on this vision: turning trust from a slow, manual process into something continuous, automated, and AI-native. Congrats to Christina and the entire Vanta team on their Series D! https://lnkd.in/efRubcnH

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🚨 Don't miss out: We're releasing the founder’s playbook for scaling to $1 million ARR this week. In this guide for early-stage entrepreneurs, we provide practical guidelines for startups to generate their first seven figures in annual recurring revenue. ✨ WHAT FOUNDERS WILL LEARN ✨ ✅ How to go from $0 to $1M ARR – Land your first customers and build a repeatable sales process. ✅ Why founder-led sales matters – Sell effectively, validate product-market fit, and avoid false signals. ✅ How to structure your sales strategy – Nail your ICP, choose the right sales motion, and scale smartly. ✅ When and who to hire – The right time for sales hires (and why a VP of Sales isn’t first). ✅ High-impact sales tactics – Network selling, webinars, LinkedIn outreach, and AI-powered research. Sneak peek below 👀 Subscribe today and be the first to get the guide when we launch >>> https://lnkd.in/g_A8CTb9 #TechonLinkedIn #startups #venturecapital #vc #startups #entrepreneurship #sales

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Trupeer.ai, the AI-driven platform revolutionizing product video creation, has raised $3 million in seed funding, led by RTP Global with participation from Salesforce Ventures and over 20 angel investors, including CIOs and CTOs from Fortune 500 firms. The funding aims to streamline the way teams create tutorials, walkthroughs, and product videos from a single screen recording. “Software should be easy to explain. But until now, making good product videos meant spending hours editing or thousands of dollars on production,” said Shivali Goyal, CEO and co-founder of Trupeer. “We built Trupeer so anyone can turn a simple recording into a polished video that’s clear, searchable, and ready to scale.” Already adopted by over 10,000 teams globally, Trupeer’s AI engine removes filler words, adds zooms and subtitles, and generates studio-quality narration, multilingual voiceovers, and humanlike avatars. It also auto-generates step-by-step documentation complete with screenshots and summaries. Backing the startup’s vision, Madhur Makkar of RTP Global said, “Trupeer is reimagining content creation by turning what was once complex, costly, and manual into a fast, automated, and scalable process.” With future plans to generate videos from documents and integrate with CRMs and learning tools, Trupeer aims to become the knowledge infrastructure system for modern enterprises.

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London-based energy tech startup Boldr has raised an oversubscribed $3.2 million seed round to advance its mission of turning homes into active participants in the energy grid. The platform helps homeowners cut costs while supporting grid operators amid rising electricity demand. Madi A | Toma P. | Matheus Marotzke 🔗 Read full article link in comment #BoldrEnergy #SmartHomes #EnergyTech #GridFlexibility #CleanEnergy #HomeEnergyManagement #ClimateTech #EnergyInnovation #eustartups #news

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Welcome to Founder Fridays — a new video series from Notion. We’re sitting down with builders to talk shop: product, design, and the lessons you only learn by doing. Ep 1 features Cron founder Raphael Schaad and Notion PMM Owais Khan. From Chrome extension → beloved calendar app → Notion acquisition. Watch the full episode ↓ https://lnkd.in/eEqDtg9j

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What if founders didn’t have to choose between building a startup and paying their rent? 💸 At Hexa, we believe that founders don't have to choose. That’s why we introduced the Minimum Viable Salary (MVS): a modest income for founders during the early (and often financially brutal) days of building. MVS is our way of saying: focus on your startup, not your survival. It’s also a commitment to making entrepreneurship more accessible, especially for people who might otherwise be excluded. In our latest piece, we break down: ✅ What MVS really is ✅ Who it’s for ✅ How it helps founders focus and move fast Link in the comments.

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Pre-seed fundraising is… it’s… complicated. If you’re out there trying to raise your first check, you already know how tough it feels. But how bad is it, really? And where *are* founders still closing solid rounds? We dug into the data, and here’s what we found: 💸 Total pre-seed funding stayed flat year over year. Startups raised $4 billion in pre-seed rounds, spread across 25,000+ SAFEs and convertible notes on Carta. Not terrible, but not the roaring comeback many were hoping for. 📉 Round sizes trended smaller. In Q4 2024, 44% of priced rounds were under $250,000, up from 30% a year prior. Big rounds still happened, but they were the exception, not the rule. 📍 Regionally, California still leads, but other states are rising. While 39% of pre-seed cash went to California, states like New York, Texas, Florida, and Washington (all above 3%) are carving out meaningful shares. Want to see how different metro areas stack up? Click through the interactive map in this report 👀 📉 Convertible note interest rates dipped. The median rate slid from 8% to 7.5% in Q4, following federal rate cuts. So, what’s the verdict? While pre-seed funding didn’t exactly bounce back, it also didn’t collapse. The market is still moving—it’s just a bit more selective (and maybe a little stingier). Check out the full report at c a r t a . c o m / d a t a #preseed #startupfundraising #cartadata

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DevAssure, the dev‑tools startup reimagining software quality through autonomous test orchestration, has closed a pre‑seed funding round led by Eximius Ventures. The startup will use the raised capital to accelerate go‑to‑market expansion and deepen its multi‑agent architecture, which converts Figma mock‑ups and live code into executable tests that repair themselves as the product evolves, without hand‑coded scripts, heavyweight frameworks, or mandatory cloud migration. Read the full story here:👇 https://lnkd.in/df2pkuEH #devtools #software #ai #autonomous #engineers #funding #investors #investment #startup #indianstartupnews

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Bootstrapped SaaS founders are quietly outperforming their VC-backed peers. Here’s how. Many assume external funding is the only way to grow fast in SaaS. But the “bootstrapper’s blueprint” tells a different story. When resources are limited, strategy sharpens. Execution gets cleaner. And customer needs become the compass. Bootstrapped SaaS companies: - Achieve 2.3x higher revenue-per-employee - Deliver higher CLTV/CAC ratios - Rely on monthly cohort analysis, tiered pricing, and laser-focused buyer targeting Software Finder platform data shows: 34% higher lead-to-customer conversion among bootstrapped vendors Stronger PQL scoring and better alignment of value props The outcome? Faster sales cycles. Leaner ops. Products with sharper market positioning. The lean approach is not a limitation but a strategic advantage for building enduring, profitable SaaS businesses. What’s your take, is bootstrapping becoming the smarter default in 2025? #SaaS #Bootstrapping #GoToMarket #SaaSMarketing #FounderStrategy #SoftwareFinder

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🎙️ LEADERSHIP INSIGHTS Our CEO,Renan Devillieres, recently appeared on the Life Self Mastery Podcast discussing entrepreneurship, innovation, and the future of tech! In this enlightening conversation, Renan shares: 🔹His journey building OSS Ventures from the ground up 🔹How we're approaching challenges in today's rapidly evolving tech landscape 🔹Practical wisdom for aspiring entrepreneurs and tech leaders "The most successful innovators don't just create solutions; they anticipate problems before they emerge." - Renan Devillieres Watch the full episode to gain valuable insights that can transform your approach to business and technology leadership. Full episode: https://lnkd.in/eGyacF7w #TechLeadership #Innovation #Entrepreneurship #OSSVentures #PodcastHighlights

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Startups that track key metrics like CAC, LTV, burn rate, and revenue growth have a better chance of attracting investors and scaling successfully. 📊🚀 Swipe to read the key metrics! 👉 #StartupGrowth #VentureCapital #Inflexor

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Former YC CEO Michael Seibel explains the goals of a pre-launch startup Your first goal should be to launch quickly: “This is something that’s been part of the YC ethos from the very beginning. It’s been great advice for 10 years, and it continues to be great advice. If you walk away with one thing from this presentation, it’s launch something bad quickly.” The second goal is to get some initial customers: “Get anyone interacting with your product and seeing if they can get value out of it… You’d be surprised at how many founder’s journeys end before a single user has actually interacted with a product they’ve created. It’s very, very common. So please get past this step. It’s extremely important.” The third goal is to talk to your users: “This one is also an extremely common mistake because most founders have in their heads an idea of what they want to build. So they have this weird feeling that if they haven’t built the full thing, getting feedback on the initial thing is kind of useless.” The reality is that the idea you have in your end might turn out to be something customers don’t want at all. Michael has a saying: “Hold the problem you’re solving tightly. Hold the customer tightly. Hold the solution you’re building loosely.” The last step is to iterate and make sure you don’t fall in love with your solution. He gives an example of founders trying to build a screwdriver for a mechanic. If the screwdriver isn’t good, don’t ask yourself what other problems it can solve (e.g. “maybe I can use it to cook or to clean?”): “If your screwdriver doesn’t help the mechanic solve the problem, keep the mechanic, keep the problem. Fix the screwdriver! That’s the thing that’s broken… Continue improving on your solution until it actually solves the problem.” Video source: Y Combinator (2019)

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Palantir, a Jabroni Capital portfolio company, has made great strides in DaaS (Deportation as a Service) technology. According to ICE, the latest software package has been a game changer. In contrast to traditional SaaS, DaaS allows users to: 🧑‍🧒‍🧒 Disrupt immigrant families with proprietary "BorderCrash" software 🖥️ Utilize Drag and Drop deportation dashboards 🛩️ Gamify border security with "Border Ops" that allows drone piloting from the comfort of air-conditioned offices. While some are bearish regarding the ethical implications of such technology, we couldn't care less as long as Palantir keeps winning government contracts. 🫡 Subscribe to our newsletter for the funniest business and tech news: https://lnkd.in/dwZigYJM

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It’s not typical that one of a company’s founders steps into the chief AI officer (CAIO) role, but that’s exactly what Nick (Nikhil) Ganju has done at Zocdoc, an online platform for booking medical appointments. As companies increasingly create the CAIO role, they’re typically tapping internal product directors, vice presidents of data analytics, or outside hires. Zocdoc, however, sees a range of benefits in having a core leader in the position—in particular, the signaling of AI as the company’s strategic focus. “If we hired some new person that came in like, ‘AI this’ and ‘AI that,’ it would have less of an impact than one of the guys who made the company now thinking it’s important,” said Ganju. “It sounds immodest, but you can see the difference that creates.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/eemtXCDx

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We’re happy to introduce our newest partner, Auth0 for Startups, an identity solution built for founders who want to scale faster and more securely. The Startup Grind community gets 12 months free of Auth0's B2B Professional plan with the Auth0 for Startups program. Designed for early-stage founders, it helps secure apps and AI agents with simple, scalable login. Integrate secure login in days, not weeks, and get enterprise-grade privacy and features like SSO, MFA, and breached password detection from day one.

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