Accel

The Information posted this morning sharing that Cinder is among a shortlist of OpenAI's software providers entrusted with their customer data. Cinder is listed among impressive company, speaking to the caliber of the team and the robustness of the solution they've built. OpenAI is just one of many scaled implementations of their technology to ensure that cutting edge AI can be deployed safely without compromising innovation speed. Cinder is utilized by other leading consumer AI companies to ensure compliance with their Acceptable Use Policies. If you are building with AI, and concerned about everything from detection through to taking action on safety issues that arise in non-deterministic user-facing AI solutions, you should take a look at Cinder. Kudos to the Cinder team on being entrusted with this important work, proving that this "little-known" company won't be little-known for long. 😊 https://lnkd.in/g9WxkcEC

The way we learn to speak new languages is undergoing a fundamental shift. For thousands of years, humans have sought tools to unlock the secrets of language learning. From carving inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone to selling language lessons on late-night infomercials and creating gamified apps for our phones, we’ve tried nearly everything. Yet, despite these efforts, most of us are left with only a handful of memorized phrases—not true fluency. Speak is proving that AI changes everything. Their AI tutor replicates the personalized, interactive experience of learning to speak a new language in conversation with a native speaker—and makes it accessible to anyone motivated to start. In Asia, Speak’s impact has been extraordinary: ⏩ 10M app downloads ⏩ 6% of Koreans have achieved fluency with Speak ⏩ 1 billion sentences spoken on the app this year alone We’re excited to partner with Connor Zwick, Andrew Hsu, and the incredible Speak team as they turn their sights to the rest of the world. Our Series C investment will help fuel their launches across Europe, Latin America, and the US and the continued growth of their thriving business offering.

📣 We’re proud to announce that the editors of Cybercrime Magazine have named George Kurtz, #CrowdStrike Founder and CEO, Cybersecurity Person of the Year “for his outstanding contributions to the industry in 2024.” 🔗 Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/eHrCfKPf #Leadership #CrowdStrike #Cybersecurity

We’re thrilled to share that Donut has acquired Gatheround! We’ve long admired what they’ve built: an engaging, powerful product that delivers a delightful user experience, a world class team, and a large, devoted community of customers. We also have long shared values and customers, plus complementary product offerings. We couldn’t be more excited to build on their success and bring our products together to offer an even more complete suite of tools for anyone building employee experience programs. Huge shoutout and thank you to Lisa Conn and the whole Gatheround team for everything they’ve accomplished! More in our post below:

Probably unbeknownst to most, while consumer fintech was "in a jam" over the last couple of years, Public has grown pretty much every metric, every single quarter since the end of 2021. Many of them exponentially so. (More on this in the post, but spoiler alert: there's a near-perfect correlation between customer deposits and sheer product velocity.)) Super proud of the Public team for keeping their heads down and executing with great discipline through all the different phases and shifts in the markets over the past few years -- and thankful to Accel for being a great partner once again.

Today, we’re excited to share our investment in Nebius, a full-stack AI platform built for intensive AI & ML workloads. As AI reshapes industries and drives innovation, reliable, scalable infrastructure has become paramount. Nebius, with its years-long expertise in building one of the top tech infrastructures, delivers a vertically integrated AI-native solution optimized from data center to cloud platform. We’ve been fortunate to know the Nebius team since its early days, and we’re thrilled to partner with founder Arkady Volozh and the entire team in fueling this era of rapid AI innovation. Read more from our partner, Matt Weigand, on today’s news #AccelFamily https://lnkd.in/gHr52M2t

Congratulations Rajesh, Chanakya, Ramasubramanian, and the team at BlackBuck (Zinka Logistics Solutions Ltd), on taking your company public today. BlackBuck epitomises what it means to tackle truly ‘real’ problems, and is a great example of the impact one can deliver to the industry and society at large. It’s been our privilege at Accel to partner with this exceptional team from their Seed round in 2015. Since Day 1, BlackBuck’s unwavering commitment to understand and solve transportation problems faced by truckers, fleet owners, and shippers has been inspiring. Their commitment and empathy-driven approach has contributed significantly to the Indian logistics ecosystem over the past decade.  BlackBuck’s goal wasn’t about simply matching trucks with loads—it was about creating an ecosystem where truckers and businesses could thrive. Being a small part of this journey has been nothing short of humbling. I’ve shared my reflections on the BlackBuck journey, here: https://lnkd.in/gZvWudSD #AccelFamily #CelebratingBlackBuck

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Over the last year, Cyera has proven itself to be the most innovative player in data #security, earning the trust of many Fortune 500 organizations. Yotam Segev and Tamar Bar-Ilan are building a platform to support customers in securing data assets across multiple vectors – Posture Management, Identity, Data Loss Prevention, to name just a few – and are leveraging the latest technologies, like AI and large language models, to do so. With the announcement of this new $300M Series D, we're thrilled to continue building on our partnership with Yotam, Tamar and the team https://lnkd.in/e4zBRhJm

Welcome to the Accel family, Kristo Ovaska and the Taito.ai team! We're delighted to be joining your journey.