Austin Lau

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The Equity team at TechCrunch put together one of the better breakdowns I've heard on the Google-Wiz close this week. If you're in enterprise tech and haven't listened yet, make 20 minutes for it. Shardul Shah (Index Ventures, early Wiz backer) reframed the deal in a way most coverage hasn't. He didn't position it as a cybersecurity story. He positioned it as what happens when AI, cloud, and security spend all converge on one company at the right moment. The part that landed hardest for me: Wiz became a $32B company because most enterprises moved to cloud faster than they built the controls to manage it. The governance layer got skipped. And then they had to buy it back at a price that made history. I support the teams who see this playing out with AI every week. Agents shipping, copilots rolling out, automation programmes kicking off — while governance, observability, and compliance are still somewhere between "next quarter" and "whose budget is that?" EU AI Act enforcement starts in August. That's not theoretical. The Wiz story is a reminder that the unsexy work — assurance, operating models, the governance no one puts in a keynote — is consistently where the value ends up. It's exactly the gap we're focused on at @OnStak. 🎧 https://lnkd.in/eE2ycW3s

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Last year’s Series A was a milestone, but it wasn’t a stopping point. As proof that we’ve only been moving faster than before, I’m excited to share that Numeric raised a $51M Series B, led by investors like IVP, Menlo Ventures, Founders Fund, and more. Over the past year, we've launched AI-powered flux analysis that accountants actually trust, built out cash management tooling, and worked with some of the best finance teams in the industry. This raise funds what’s next: more AI agent capabilities, building a strong finance data layer, and expanding the team. If you're interested in working on hard problems in finance infrastructure, let's talk. More on the round: https://lnkd.in/gvkWqiDx

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Funding: WisdomAI just raised $50M. The message behind it is bigger than the round. Not saying investors always get it right, but I see takeaways for data/AI leaders: 1. Analytics teams to extend from dashboarding to “decision readiness.” The BI/analytics category is moving toward real-time, context-aware decision support and increasingly, automation. Data leaders: Shift KPIs from “time-to-insight” to time-to-decision and evaluate tools on their ability to support agents with semantic modeling, workflows, and closed-loop learning. 2. BI isn’t going away-it's evolving. Dashboards aren't dying. BI/analytics insights are still selling, but insights give way to fast growth in decision loop solutions built on context that can be verified. Data leaders: As analytics move into governance, expect your BI/ Semantics / catalog ecosystems to converge. Plan your architecture accordingly. 3. Context is the make-or-break factor for AI. WisdomAI's Enterprise Context Layer is a key part of how they provide the queries to answer prompted questions. Data/AI leaders: invest in the semantic layer, unify metadata and policy-as-code to govern reasoning. This is where the next competitive gap will open. WisdomAI grew on the bet that context + trust will power the next generation of AI-driven action. The bigger story? We’re moving from AI that answers → to AI that actually understands and acts—safely. That’s why this raise matters. Read WisdomAI's release here: https://lnkd.in/gnkssiFU #DataToDecision #DecisionVelocity #EnterpriseAI #SemanticLayer #BITransformation #CDAO #AnalyticsModernization

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✨ A very fun start to Frameworks for Growth - a new video series from Vanta. "Frameworks" are core to who Vanta is: -We support 40 different compliance frameworks within the product -One of our principles is "Decide with frameworks," and a common question in meetings at Vanta is, "what framework did you use for deciding [x]?" -And now, we're hoping to provide founders and early operators with some frameworks *they* can use for scaling their businesses in the age of AI. Thanks to Garry Tan and Christina Cacioppo for this awesome first conversation. You should watch the whole thing, but tldw - one framework for growth: learn an industry deeply and vibe code towards something people want.

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Prediction: Over the year we’re going to see the “Solo Vengeance Founder” story arc play out. Casualties of mass lay offs, who walked out the door with... - your company secrets - good ideas that stalled under bureaucracy - your weak spots, and internal failures - access to the same insane builder tool set you cut them for - and a motivation that's bigger than money The companies who are cutting, are creating hero (or villain) origin stories. They are going to carve you apart slowly, and have a motivation bigger than any equity package. #Startups #AI #Entrepreneurship #FutureOfWork

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Stripe released MPP - Machine Payments Protocol. Every API call an agent makes to a paid service, it gets a 402 back, pays for it, and gets access to the resource. Pay per call, programmatically, no human involved. Before this agents were stuck. To pay for something they had to create an account, navigate a pricing page, pick a subscription tier, enter payment details - steps that basically always needed a human to step in. Browserbase now lets agents spin up headless browsers and pay per session. PostalForm lets agents pay to send physical mail. Parallel lets agents pay per API call for web access. All mid execution, by themselves. The actual bottleneck for autonomous agents was never intelligence. It was that every single service they needed to use during a task was built for a human to pay for it. MPP fixes the payment primitive. The question now is what comes after - what does auth and identity for agents actually look like at this scale?

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