The startup will use the fresh investment to accelerate its go-to-market strategy and to expand its platform.
The post StrongestLayer Raises $4.1 Million in Seed Funding Extension appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Using AI, the startup provides adaptive prevention through environment mapping, risk analysis, and automated policy enforcement.
The post Endpoint Security Firm Glow Launches With $180M in Funding at $1.2B Valuation appeared first on SecurityWeek.
The startup will use the investment to accelerate the development of its threat prediction and discovery products.
The post Empirical Security Raises $25 Million in Series A Funding appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Neo raised money across seed and Series A funding rounds from Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and others.
The post Neo Emerges From Stealth With $100M to Control and Secure Enterprise AI Software appeared first on SecurityWeek.
The startup helps organizations detect, hunt, and protect their assets across environments at machine speed.
The post Beacon Security Raises $13 Million for Security Data Platform appeared first on SecurityWeek.
The British firm has built a collaborative platform to help organizations address supply chain security risks.
The post Risk Ledger Raises $32 Million in Series B Funding appeared first on SecurityWeek.
The past two years have transformed the world of software development, but there’s at least one area that remains largely untouched by artificial intelligence: the operating-system layer inside phones, vehicles, and other connected devices.
A Seattle startup called logcat.ai has raised $2.55 million to change that.
Co-founded by CEO Varun Chitre and CTO Tarun Vashisth, two engineers with years of experience building device software, logcat.ai is developing a system of AI agents that autonomously hunt down bugs across the kernel, modem, and firmware of devices running Android or Linux.
The pre-seed round was led by Founders’ Co-op, with participation from Act One Ventures, TheFounderVC, Shorewind Capital, Clayoquot Capital, and Alumni Ventures.
“It’s one of the toughest areas of software engineering, and it doesn’t get a lot of exposure. Operating-system engineering is virtually hidden today,” Chitre said in an interview.
It’s also a challenge for many companies given a shortage of engineers who specialize in the field, compared to the much larger population of developers who build apps and software that run on top of the operating system.
How it works: An engineer using logcat.ai uploads the log files a device generates when something goes wrong — such as bug reports and kernel logs — and logcat.ai’s software analyzes them together to find the root cause and point to where in the code to fix it. Each finding cites the exact log line it came from, so an engineer can check the work.
Currently, logcat.ai finds the root cause and recommends a fix. The larger plan is to have the AI write the fixes, test them, and eventually build new features on its own, with engineers approving the work before it’s deployed.
The long-term goal, Chitre said, is to become the standard tool for building and maintaining operating systems on new and existing hardware — from smartphones to cars to robots and other embedded systems — so a company can ship without a full-stack specialist on staff.
“We’re moving toward a world where software and intelligence extend far beyond our laptops and phones, yet the tooling to build high-quality products for that world is still missing,” said Aviel Ginzburg, general partner at Founders’ Co-op, in a statement.
He called Chitre and Vashisth “one of the only teams in the world truly up for the challenge.”
Traction: The company says it has served hundreds of engineering teams in a public beta, analyzed more than 10 billion lines of trace data, and run thousands of automated investigations. It’s generating revenue but isn’t ready to disclose numbers or customers.
Competitive landscape: Chitre said logcat.ai’s main competition isn’t another product but in-house scripts and the knowledge locked in a few senior engineers’ heads. App-level crash tools like Google’s Crashlytics and Sentry stop at the app layer and don’t do the deeper system debugging.
Specialist vendors and the contract manufacturers that build devices are potential partners more than rivals, Chitre said, since they face the same engineer shortage.
GeekWire first reported on logcat.ai in March, in a Startup Radar roundup.
The team: Chitre and Vashisth met at Esper, the Bellevue, Wash.-based device-management company, where they worked together for more than seven years. They started logcat.ai because they had spent years doing debugging by hand and knew what was missing.
Chitre has spent more than 13 years in the field, getting operating systems to boot and run on new hardware and porting new Android releases and Linux kernels onto older devices. He was also a maintainer of LineageOS, a widely used open-source version of Android.
Vashisth has led engineering teams working across Android, Linux, and iOS, and brings a background in large-scale distributed systems. At Esper, he rose to senior software engineering manager. His prior experience includes platform-architecture engineering at Target.
For now, the company is just the two founders: Chitre in the Seattle area, Vashisth in Bengaluru, India. They plan to hire about 10 people over the next year, with a distributed team working remotely from wherever they can find the specialized talent.
They know those hires won’t be easy to find, given the scarcity of people in the field. “That’s the same shortage our product exists to address,” Chitre said, “and we’re not exempt from it.”
The startup has built an AI-powered Identity Operating System that governs all identities across an organization’s environment.
The post Oak Emerges From Stealth Mode With $60 Million in Funding appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Tether’s Pact Labs Round Shows Stablecoin Issuers Are Still Building Compliance Rails is a useful reminder that crypto coverage is not only about token prices. Sometimes the more important story is the infrastructure, regulation, security, or product layer sitting underneath the market noise.
The immediate point is straightforward: tether led a $7 million funding round in Pact Labs. That gives readers something concrete to work with, rather than another vague sentiment update.
The timing matters because Tether is already part of a wider conversation across the market. Traders want to know whether the development changes liquidity or risk. Builders want to know whether it changes what can be deployed. Compliance teams want to know whether it changes how platforms operate.
In that sense, the story is bigger than one headline. It sits inside the ongoing shift from speculative crypto cycles toward more practical questions: who can use these systems, how safe are they, and whether the underlying incentives actually work.
The best way to read it is with discipline. It is not a guarantee of immediate upside, and it should not be treated as one. But it does add a fresh data point to the way the market is thinking about Tether.
For Tether, the important part is the specific mechanism. If this is a security issue, the risk sits in dependencies and user protection. If it is a listing or product launch, the question is access and liquidity. If it is a governance or research proposal, the question is whether the idea can survive implementation.
That is where this update becomes useful. It is not just a label attached to a trend. It gives readers a way to understand what might actually change if the development gains traction.
Crypto has a habit of turning every announcement into a broad market claim. This one deserves a narrower read. The value is in seeing how it affects the users, developers, institutions, or traders closest to the issue.
There is also a caution attached. Source material can confirm that a development exists, but it cannot prove that adoption will follow. A proposal still needs support. A product still needs users. A chart still needs confirmation. A compliance tool still needs integration.
That is why the responsible reading is not to oversell the story. The stronger takeaway is that this adds to a pattern. The crypto market is steadily becoming more professional, more technical, and more sensitive to real operational details.
Readers should also watch for follow-up signals. That could mean developer feedback, exchange support, regulatory response, wallet adoption, liquidity data, or simply whether market participants continue reacting after the first headline fades.
The next stage will decide whether this remains a narrow update or becomes part of a larger market theme. In crypto, that difference matters. Plenty of stories look important for a few hours and then disappear. The ones that last usually show up again through usage, liquidity, enforcement, governance, or developer adoption.
For now, this gives the market another piece of information to weigh. It is specific enough to be useful, but still early enough that readers should keep the caveats in view.
That makes it worth covering without pretending it settles anything. The story is a signal, not a final verdict.
The key is not to confuse coverage with certainty. Tether stories can move quickly, especially when they touch security, regulation, listings, infrastructure, or price levels. The useful approach is to track the next confirming detail rather than assume the first update carries the whole market story. That is how traders avoid chasing noise and how readers separate a genuine development from another passing headline.
This report is based on information from theblock.co.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
UK-based cybersecurity firm Valarian has raised a total of $70 million for its ACRA technology.
The post Valarian Raises $50 Million for Sovereign Infrastructure Control Layer appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Augmodo, the Seattle startup that straps AI-powered cameras onto retail workers to track store shelves, has raised $21 million as it pushes its technology beyond grocery aisles and into warehouses, factories, and other physical workplaces.
The new funding, led by existing investor TQ Ventures, values Augmodo at $350 million.
CEO Ross Finman, who told GeekWire he wasn’t even looking to raise fresh capital, said he was motivated by interest in the startup’s technology from customers beyond retail, including automotive settings and hospitals.
“Fundamentally, someone grabbing a wrench at an automotive factory isn’t that different from someone grabbing a Cheerios box,” Finman said. “Turns out the algorithms work pretty well across all of those.”
Founded in 2023, Augmodo builds AI-powered “Smartbadges” — lightweight wearable devices with dual cameras — that store employees wear passively as they move through aisles. The badges use computer vision, 3D mapping, and spatial computing to track shelf inventory in real time, building what the company calls a digital “Realogram” of each store.
Augmodo raised $37.5 million a year ago in a round that came after Australian pharmacy chain Chemist Warehouse — the startup’s first big customer — moved from a pilot to a full contract and validated the technology at scale. Now others want in on the action.
“Our whole mission statement is AI systems for the physical workforce,” Finman said. “Everyone’s focused on the 20% of the workforce that’s knowledge work, and we’re focused on the 80% of the workforce that’s physical work.”
That demand has pulled Augmodo into warehouses, facility maintenance, delivery operations, and even employee training — verticals the company didn’t originally set out to serve. Existing retail customers, Finman said, kept expanding their contracts to cover new parts of their operations, from auditing warehouse pallets to logging maintenance work like HVAC repairs.
The Smartbadge itself has evolved, too. Finman said it’s now lighter than an iPhone Air and has grown into what he calls an “everything device,” adding walkie-talkie capabilities, an opt-in panic button, and a digital ID display, on top of its original inventory-tracking function.
“That’s actually become a really big selling point,” Finman said. “You don’t need to buy five or six different devices, you buy one at cost, and then here’s all the different features that you can get out of it.”
The company says it has grown 10x in revenue over the past year and now maps more than 186 million square feet of retail space monthly — a figure it expects to cross 1 billion square feet per month by year’s end. Augmodo is adding 50 to 100 new store locations a month.
The company’s headcount has grown 5x over the past year to more than 50 employees, including new CTO Bradford Snow, who joined in January after previous stints at Axon, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft.
Augmodo is ranked No. 145 on the GeekWire 200 list of top Pacific Northwest startups and was a finalist in the Hardware, Robotics, and Physical AI of the Year category at the 2026 GeekWire Awards.
Beyond TQ Ventures, backers include Lerer Hippeau, Jefferson River Capital, Arena Holdings, Chemist Warehouse, New Fare, Interlace, and Webb Investment Network.
Andrew Marks, co-founding partner at TQ, called Finman an “exceptional” leader and said every board meeting reinforced that demand for Augmodo’s tech was outpacing the team’s ability to serve it.
“When you pair a truly special founder with customers lining up around the door and pulling you into new markets, it was obvious we should propose putting more fuel on the fire,” Marks said.
Augmodo said it plans to use the new capital to expand its global enterprise footprint, invest further in its core AI models, and grow its engineering team — with a particular focus on hiring for computer vision and machine learning roles as the company scales its data processing beyond retail.
SEC Small Business Meeting Adds Another Regulatory Date For Crypto Firms To Watch is the kind of crypto story that looks simple at headline level but becomes more useful once you place it inside the wider market backdrop. This is not a headline that will move Bitcoin, but it is part of the policy background that shapes how early-stage companies raise money.
The reason it deserves attention today is not that one announcement or filing magically changes the whole market. It is that the update adds another data point to a sector still trying to work out where capital, users, and regulation are actually moving.
For more details, visit the official SEC platform.
The SEC’s small-business agenda often touches capital access and disclosure trade-offs.
Crypto startups operate in that same broad funding environment even when token sales are not explicitly on the agenda.
Regulatory process rarely moves at crypto speed, but it sets the boundaries around what companies can safely build. Personnel, meetings, and procedural updates are not always exciting, yet they can shape how enforcement priorities are executed.
For founders and investors, these meetings can signal where the agency is willing to modernize or tighten rules.
For crypto readers, the useful angle is not to pretend every appointment is a policy revolution. It is to understand which parts of the agency are gaining structure, attention, and operational capacity.
For Bitcoinist readers, the practical takeaway is to avoid treating this as an isolated headline. The stronger read is to connect it with the current market environment: liquidity is still selective, regulatory pressure has not disappeared, and the projects that keep shipping useful updates are the ones most likely to hold attention when the cycle gets noisy.
That does not mean the story should be stretched beyond what the source supports. The cleaner approach is to keep the facts tight, explain the mechanism, and show readers why it may matter if follow-up data confirms the same direction over the next few sessions.
In other words, this is a development to watch rather than a guaranteed turning point. Crypto moves quickly, but the useful signals are usually the ones that still make sense after the first reaction fades.
The important thing for readers is context. A single development rarely defines the market on its own, but a series of source-backed updates can show where momentum is building. That is why this article keeps the focus on the specific mechanism in play, the source behind it, and the reason traders or builders may care today.
This article is based on information from sec.gov.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
This report is based on information from SEC. at SEC
While investors spent much of the spring concerned that frontier AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI would consume the software industry, Dave Clark was closing a funding round for exactly the kind of enterprise software those models are supposedly going to replace.
Auger, the supply chain technology startup founded in Bellevue, Wash., by the former Amazon executive, has raised $50 million in Series B funding led by Eclipse, with existing investor Oak HC/FT also participating in the new round.
The round brings total funding to $150 million for the company, which has grown to about 130 employees and counts Meta’s virtual and augmented reality division, sports merchandise giant Fanatics, and consumer products maker Kimberly-Clark among its customers.
Clark’s view is that general-purpose AI can generate insights but can’t handle deeply specialized domains like running a supply chain. Making financial and operational decisions and executing them at the scale of big companies requires systems built on strong supply chain expertise — what Auger calls its ontology, essentially a detailed map of how supply chains actually work.
“Many a pure technology company died on the hill of supply chain over the last decade,” said Clark, the company’s CEO, in an interview this week. “You really need to understand the complexity and the contextual requirements.”
Auger sits on top of a company’s existing systems — ERP, warehouse management, transportation management, and demand planning tools — and unifies the data into a single operating layer. Rather than replacing those systems, it connects them, using AI agents and traditional optimization models to make decisions and execute them automatically, as much as possible.
For example, in a recent demo at the company’s Bellevue office, Clark showed how the system would handle a supplier missing a delivery commitment when there isn’t enough product to go around. Auger identifies the shortfall, determines which customers get priority, reallocates inventory, and pushes the updated plan back to the company’s existing systems.
Most supply chain software, Clark said, generates alerts and waits for a person to act. Auger is designed to make routine decisions on its own and flag the exceptions for human review.
“We’re not really a tool,” he said. “We’re really the new employee.”
At Fanatics, the sports merchandise company, Clark said about 85% of decisions in the process Auger manages are happening autonomously, with a goal of reaching the mid-90s soon. In addition to the customers it has named so far, Clark said another eight to 10 companies are in contract negotiations or pilot programs.
Clark spent 23 years at Amazon, rising to lead the company’s worldwide operations and later its worldwide consumer business. He left in 2022 and became CEO of Flexport, the freight forwarding startup, but that tenure lasted less than a year amid a turbulent period for the company.
He launched Auger in 2024 with a team that includes Leigh Anne Clark, his wife, who serves as co-founder and president of the company’s fashion and beauty division, focused on an industry Clark describes as one of the most wasteful supply chains outside of groceries.
Clark moved back to the Seattle area from Texas to tap the region’s talent pool, and raised a $100 million Series A from Oak HC/FT. The company quickly assembled a C-suite drawn heavily from Amazon’s senior ranks, along with leaders from Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Salesforce, spanning supply chain operations, AI, data science, and product development.
In March, Auger was named a premier supply chain partner on Microsoft Fabric, the tech giant’s data platform. Auger’s product is built on Azure, and Microsoft sales reps can earn commission on Auger deals. Clark said the partnership has generated engagement but is still early.
Clark said Auger went out for the Series B early, before the company needed it, to avoid the distraction of fundraising during what he expects to be a busy fall of customer onboarding.
With the investment, Eclipse partner Jiten Behl joined the Auger board, which also includes Clark, president and CFO Alex Ceballos, and Oak HC/FT’s Matt Streisfeld.
Auger hasn’t disclosed revenue or other financial metrics, but Clark said the valuation was roughly double the level set by Auger’s initial round. “We didn’t shoot for the crazy astronomical valuation,” he said. “We sat at a place that we felt really comfortable with.”
That pragmatic approach extends to how Auger operates. In Bellevue, the company works out of an office it subleased after Microsoft vacated the space. Auger kept the desks, monitors, and chairs the tech giant left behind, furnishing its new offices for next to nothing.
But Clark’s ambitions for the company are anything but modest. He said Auger’s goal is to have half of U.S. GDP flowing through its platform by 2030, with revenue exceeding $1 billion.
“That requires a pretty steep curve to get there,” he said. “We’re not playing small.”
The Israeli company has developed a cryptographic posture and post-quantum cryptography management platform.
The post QIZ Security Raises $17 Million for Cryptographic Governance Platform appeared first on SecurityWeek.
The Spanish startup has closed an extended pre-seed funding round two months after launching its digital identity protection platform.
The post 8Layers Raises $2.9 Million for Identity Security Platform appeared first on SecurityWeek.
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