Tag Archives: artificial intelligence (AI)

myKaarma Accelerates AI-Enabled Service Lane Solutions with Warburg Pincus Investment

Warburg Pincus logo

Long Beach, CA – January 14, 2026 – myKaarma, a leading provider of end-to-end service lane solutions for automotive dealerships, today announced a strategic investment from Warburg Pincus, the pioneer of global growth investing. The investment will accelerate myKaarma’s growth, as the company expands its portfolio of AI-driven fixed ops and payments solutions that help dealerships streamline operations, improve customer experience, and drive revenue. The transaction includes a partial sale by H.I.G. Growth Partners (“H.I.G. Growth”), with Warburg Pincus joining myKaarma’s Board of Directors as part of the transaction.

“myKaarma has more than tripled in size since 2022, and we are thrilled to now have Warburg Pincus as a strategic partner as we continue to expand our AI-enabled service lane and fixed operations solutions,” said Ujj Nath, CEO of myKaarma. “With both H.I.G. and Warburg’s operational support and experience, we are further positioned to help dealerships maximize efficiency, revenue, and customer satisfaction across their service lanes.”

myKaarma offers a comprehensive, cloud-native Workflow AI platform built for franchise auto dealerships. Its suite of solutions helps dealers streamline service leads, operations and payments, enhance customer experience, and improve service advisor and technician efficiency to drive measurable revenue improvement. Since H.I.G.’s initial investment, myKaarma has experienced strong growth through product innovation, category expansion, operational execution, and expansion of its loyal and growing customer base.

“We are proud of the transformation and growth myKaarma has achieved,” said Evan Karp, Managing Director at H.I.G. Capital. “We believe Warburg Pincus is the right long-term partner to support the company’s continued innovation and expansion, given their deep domain expertise and strong history of scaling software businesses.”

“myKaarma is the market leader in service marketing, service lane technology, and dealership payments, distinguished by its exceptional customer advocacy. Fixed operations remains a critical profit engine for dealerships and OEMs, and myKaarma leverages innovative AI and embedded finance solutions to help clients deliver best-in-class consumer outcomes. We look forward to applying our expertise in automotive technology, integrated payments, and generative AI to support the company’s continued growth,” said Michael Ding, Managing Director, Warburg Pincus. “We are excited about myKaarma’s long-term growth trajectory, and our investment will help scale the company’s offerings to enable auto dealerships across the country to optimize their service center profitability and unlock additional value,” added Allison Ross, Principal, Warburg Pincus.

The equity for the transaction is being provided by Warburg Pincus Capital Solutions Founders Fund (“WPCS FF”), which closed in September 2024 with over $4 billion in commitments.

myKaarma was advised by Houlihan Lokey and TD Securities.

RBC Capital Markets served as financial advisor to Warburg Pincus.

About myKaarma

myKaarma is a leading provider of cloud-based software solutions that transform the after-sales service experience at automotive dealerships. Its integrated platform includes communications, appointment scheduling, payments, video inspections, and analytics tools used by thousands of dealers to increase efficiency, customer satisfaction, and profitability. For more information, visit mykaarma.com.

About H.I.G. Growth Partners

H.I.G. Growth Partners is the dedicated growth capital investment affiliate of H.I.G. Capital, a leading global alternative investment firm with $74 billion of capital under management.* H.I.G. Growth seeks to make both majority and minority investments in strong, growth-oriented businesses located throughout North America, Europe, and Latin America. H.I.G. Growth Partners considers investments across all industries but focuses on certain high-growth sectors where it has extensive in-house expertise, such as technology, healthcare, internet and media, consumer products and technology-enabled financial and business services. H.I.G. Growth strives to work closely with its management teams to serve as an experienced resource, providing broad-based strategic, operational, recruiting, and financial management services from a vast in-house team and a substantial network of third-party relationships. For more information, please refer to the H.I.G. website at HIGgrowth.com.

About Warburg Pincus

Warburg Pincus LLC is the pioneer of global growth investing. A private partnership since 1966, the firm has the flexibility and experience to focus on helping investors and management teams achieve enduring success across market cycles. Today, the firm has more than $100 billion in assets under management, and more than 215 companies in their active portfolio, diversified across stages, sectors, and geographies. Warburg Pincus has invested in more than 1,100 companies across its private equity, real estate, and capital solutions strategies.

Warburg Pincus’ Capital Solutions team collaborates closely with the firm’s 290+ investment professionals and approximately 75 value creation executives across Warburg Pincus’ global industry verticals, critical to sourcing and underwriting differentiated, attractive investments. In addition to a long and successful track record of investing in capital solutions-like transactions historically, the Warburg Pincus Capital Solutions Founders Fund portfolio consists of investments including DriveCentric, Excelitas Technologies, MB2 Dental, MIAX, Nord Security, Service Compression, and United Trust Bank.

The firm is headquartered in New York with more than 15 offices globally. For more information, please visit warburgpincus.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

Media Contact:

Laurie Halter

Charisma! Communications

503-816-2474

Laurie@charismacommunications.com

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Majesco Closes Acquisition of Vitech, Advancing Cloud and AI-Native Innovation for Insurance and Pension & Retirement

Thomabravo

MORRISTOWN, NEW JERSEY — Majesco, a leader in cloud-native and AI-native insurance technology for the P&C and L&AH markets, today announced the close of its previously announced acquisition of Vitech, a provider of cloud-native pension and benefits administration solutions. The transaction expands Majesco’s leadership into the Group & Benefits and Pension & Retirement segments and strengthens its position as the category leader for next-generation core platforms.

“We are thrilled to officially welcome Vitech to Majesco,” said Adam Elster, CEO of Majesco. “This is a powerful moment for our customers as we significantly expand into new markets and add capabilities and expertise to drive innovation, growth, and efficiency. We’re bringing unmatched AI-leadership and expertise across P&C, Group & Benefits, and Pension & Retirement to support our customers and the market in the new era.”

With the addition of Vitech, Majesco now offers an even broader product portfolio with expansion into the Pension & Retirement market. The broader and more innovative portfolio of solutions help Majesco customers lower expense ratios, streamline complex operations, accelerate product innovation, and respond faster to evolving regulatory and customer demands. Together, Majesco’s intelligent, cloud and AI-native solutions provide a future-ready platform to drive operational optimization, innovation, and growth.

“This marks an important milestone for both organizations,” said James Ousley, CEO of Vitech. “Our combined talent and solutions portfolio create a powerful foundation to improve efficiency, extend capabilities, and prepare for a rapidly evolving market. We’re excited to join Majesco and about the unique possibilities it brings to our customer base.”

Today’s close marks the start of Majesco’s next phase of growth, focused on delivering industry-leading, AI-native innovation and strengthening the technology foundation to the P&C and L&AH insurance and Retirement & Pension markets to adapt, innovate, and compete in an increasingly complex landscape. Majesco recently announced it is quadrupling its AI investment to accelerate its P&C roadmap and extend customer value for the P&C market.

Additionally, CVC Funds have completed a minority investment in Majesco as part of this transaction. The additional resources will support the ongoing expansion and innovation across Majesco’s AI-native product portfolio.

Kirkland & Ellis LLP served as legal advisor to Majesco and Thoma Bravo. White & Case LLP served as legal advisor to CVC Capital Partners. RBC Capital Markets acted as financial advisor to Vitech.

About Majesco

Majesco isn’t just riding the AI wave – we’re leading it for the P&C and L&AH insurance industry. Born in the cloud and built with an AI-native vision, we’ve reimagined the insurance core as a platform that lets insurers move faster, see farther, and operate smarter. As leaders in intelligent SaaS solutions, we’ve embedded AI and Agentic AI throughout our robust product portfolio of core, underwriting, loss control, distribution, and digital solutions so our customers can reimagine their business with real-time business insights, optimized operations, and enhanced business outcomes. Everything we build is designed to strip away complexity and let our clients focus on what matters: delivering exceptional products, experiences, and outcomes.

In a world where change is constant, our native-cloud SaaS platform empowers insurers the agility to adapt to market and risk shifts quickly, reshape their operational cost structure, accelerate innovation readiness, and rethink how insurance can be done with the intelligence to stay ahead. With 1000+ implementations, we are the AI insurance leader that over 350 insurers, reinsurers, MGAs rely on to rethink how insurance can be done in today’s modern era of insurance. Break free from the past and build the future of insurance at www.majesco.com.

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Accenture to acquire Faculty, an Apax Digital Fund I portfolio company, to scale AI capabilities

Apax

Accenture has agreed to acquire Faculty, a leading UK-based AI native services and products business built on highly technical applied AI skills and a unique decision intelligence product that features advanced simulation and optimization capabilities. The acquisition will expand Accenture’s capabilities to help its clients reinvent core and critical business processes with safe and secure AI solutions that result in tangible outcomes.

Founded in 2014, Faculty has a strong track record working with public and private sector clients to deploy AI solutions in the U.K. and other key markets. Its services – which include AI strategy, AI safety and the design, build and implementation of high-performance AI systems – support the scaled and safe adoption of AI by client organizations.

Faculty has built a distinctive market position by pairing deep technical capability with an ability to attract and retain top-tier data science talent in the UK. This is driven by its thought leadership, fellowship programme, and work on high-profile, mission-critical projects, including the NHS Early Warning System. Most recently, Faculty became OpenAI’s first global technical partner, underlining its credentials in advanced and generative AI.

Since 2021, with the support of Apax Digital and LocalGlobe, Faculty has more than quadrupled in size, evolving from an applied AI services provider into a business with a differentiated, scalable software platform at its core. Investment in Frontier, Faculty’s software platform, has also unlocked significant growth opportunities, particularly in life sciences, where Faculty’s decision intelligence capabilities address complex regulatory and operational challenges.

Faculty’s team of more than 400 AI native professionals, including highly qualified data scientists and AI engineers, will integrate with Accenture’s teams to scale world class AI capabilities for clients.

Marc Warner, CEO of Faculty, said, “Our vision has always been a world in which safe AI delivers widespread benefits to humanity. We have spent the last ten years supporting our clients to bring this world about, step by step. As AI advances rapidly, the ambition of our clients is now, rightly, no less than the reinvention of their business. I am delighted that by teaming up with Accenture, we have everything in place to support AI transformation from start to finish.”

Faculty is known for their ability to apply AI in mission-critical settings. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Faculty built the UK National Health Service’s (NHS) Early Warning System. This was used daily by NHS Gold Command to accurately predict patient demand across the country, and to optimally allocate critical care resources to where they were needed most.

Saul Klein, Co-founder and Executive Chairman at Phoenix Court, home of LocalGlobe, said: “We are proud to have invested in Faculty in January 2016, when they were a small team of around 10 people, together with the other early stage investors in the company. We extend our warmest congratulations to Marc, Andy, Angie and the whole Faculty team as they embark on this exciting next stage of their journey, together with Accenture.”

Mark Beith, Partner at Apax Digital, said: “Faculty has built the UK’s standout applied AI business, pairing serious technical depth with the discipline to deploy AI safely in the real world. We met Faculty in 2017 and became a client early on. It has been a privilege to partner with Marc, Angie, Andy, John and their world-class team, as well as LocalGlobe. Quadrupling revenues in four years, launching a successful AI software offering and becoming a unicorn – this is a great outcome for Faculty and showcases the strength of the UK’s AI ecosystem. Accenture now gives Faculty a global platform to industrialise applied AI for the world’s largest organisations.”

Faculty would like to extend our deep gratitude to Apax, LocalGlobe, our seed stage investors – Mercuri, Metaplanet, and RockSpring, and our long list of angel investors, who have all helped us along the way.

Goldman Sachs International served as sole financial advisor and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP as legal advisor to Faculty, and Slaughter and May as legal advisor to management.

Completion of the acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including required regulatory approvals. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

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Graphite + Cursor: One Engineering Platform for the AI Era

Accel

Today Graphite is joining forces with Cursor to build the ultimate engineering platform for the AI era.

When we first partnered with Merrill, Tomas, and Greg, we saw a massive opportunity to re-imagine code collaboration, starting with review. Code review’s core primitives had not been re-thought for decades, and the pressure on this “outer loop” was made obvious as AI increased code volume tenfold. Graphite was tackling these problems head-on with infrastructure that supported the fastest-moving engineering organizations at scale.

Similarly, our conviction in Cursor came from the belief that owning the core flywheel of code generation would be the richest source of intent and context for downstream workflows. We believed this “inner loop” would continue to compound, evolving from a mere text editor to an AI-native operating system engineers would live in every day.

Graphite + Cursor: One Engineering Platform for the AI Era

Fast forward to today, and these theses have converged. Code generation and review are rapidly blending together, and collaboration is becoming fluid across teams of humans and agents.

The refrain we now hear from engineering leaders is simple: the “inner loop” and “outer loop” should be connected.The ultimate software engineering platform will combine the raw horsepower of code generation with the reliability, contextual understanding, and collaboration of a code review platform. This combination is exactly what Graphite and Cursor make possible together.

From our time working with both teams, we see a lot of shared DNA: distinctive product taste, exceptional talent density across New York and San Francisco, and a relentless commitment to building tools developers absolutely love. Together, these qualities form a uniquely powerful foundation that is hard to replicate, and even harder to beat.

Congratulations to the entire Graphite team on this milestone. We couldn’t be more excited to continue to partner and build the platform to define engineering in the years to come.

written by

Christine Esserman

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HBox Receives Strategic Growth Investment from Charlesbank Technology Opportunities Fund

Charlesbank

Boston, MA – December 19, 2025: HBox (“HBox” or the “Company”), a leading virtual care platform for specialty practices, announced that it has received a growth investment from Charlesbank’s Technology Opportunities Fund (“TOF”) II. Amid rising chronic disease prevalence, expanding reimbursement for outcome-focused virtual care and innovative new ways for treating patients between visits, specialty practices are seeking scalable ways to extend treatment beyond the clinic. Charlesbank’s investment provides capital to help HBox advance key initiatives, including expanding its virtual care capabilities, furthering its mission to transform care delivery for patients with high-risk chronic conditions, and positioning itself as the virtual care partner to the specialty practice of the future. The transaction closed on December 17, 2025.

HBox is led by BanuPrasad Dhanakoti (Chief Executive Officer), Sandeep Subramanya (Chief Operating Officer) and Mohammed Ali (Chief Revenue Officer), who co-founded the Company. HBox delivers an integrated, AI-powered virtual care platform that leverages connected medical devices, next-generation patient-engagement tools and care services that create a virtual clinic within a clinic, enabling cardiology, pulmonology, nephrology and other specialty clinics to continue care seamlessly outside of in-person care settings. HBox aggregates real-time vitals, patient actions and clinical documentation into a unified system that allows physicians to efficiently manage large chronic populations while maintaining high-touch patient care.

“Today marks an important step forward for HBox and for the patients and clinicians we support,” said Banu Dhanakoti. “For cardiac patients in particular, timely monitoring and personalized care plans can help prevent hospitalizations and provide families with greater confidence in day-to-day condition management. With Charlesbank’s TOF team behind us, we can continue strengthening our offering and advancing a virtual care model that seeks to bring the cardiology clinic of the future into today’s specialty practices – enhancing quality and continuity of care without adding burden to clinics.”

Since its founding, HBox has delivered a fast pace of innovation and high service quality to customers, resulting in rapid customer growth and high patient compliance rates. Today, HBox is a mission-critical partner to independent specialty practices across the country.

“Preventative, virtual and continuous care is the future of healthcare for both improving outcomes and managing costs,” said Michael Zirngibl, Principal at Charlesbank. “We are excited to back Banu, Sandeep, Mo and the team as they continue to expand HBox’s innovative virtual ‘clinic within a clinic’ offering.”

“Remote monitoring and virtual care are becoming standard in many specialties, yet most practices lack the technology and staff to run these programs on their own,” added Hiren Mankodi, Co-Head of Charlesbank’s Technology Opportunities team. “HBox’s combination of software, services and specialty focus positions the Company to be that infrastructure at scale.”

Kaizen Equity Partners served as exclusive financial advisor to HBox, with K&L Gates serving as its counsel. Brown Gibbons Lang & Company served as financial advisor to Charlesbank, with Mintz and McDermott Will & Schulte as counsel.

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Chai Discovery Announces $130 Million Series B To Transform Molecular Discovery

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Oak HC FT

Chai Discovery, the AI company that predicts and reprograms the interactions between biochemical molecules, today announced its $130 million Series B financing round co-led by Oak HC/FT and General Catalyst. This round of financing values the company at $1.3 billion.

The news comes on the heels of Chai’s most recent announcement, where the company showed their latest models can now design molecules with important “developability” properties and tackle “hard-to-drug” targets that have historically been challenging for traditional techniques.

The round also comes just months after Chai Discovery announced a $70 million Series A and revealed Chai 2, the first zero-shot generative platform that achieves double digit experimental success rates in de novo antibody design – a 100-fold improvement over previous computational methods.

“We’re standing on the precipice of a new era for the biopharmaceutical industry,” said Josh Meier, co-founder and CEO of Chai Discovery. “We’re in awe of the rate of progress on the models – what looked like five-year problems just months ago are now getting solved in weeks. Our latest models can design molecules that have properties we’d want from actual drugs, and tackle challenging targets that have been out of reach. These models will unleash a new wave of first-in-class and best-in-class therapeutics, and the early adopters in pharma will be the big winners.”

The fundraise was co-led by Oak HC/FT and General Catalyst, with participation from Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Dimension, Menlo Ventures, Lachy Groom, Yosemite, Neo, and SV Angel. New investors Emerson Collective and Glade Brook also joined the round.

“We believe biology is becoming programmable, rewiring what was once an empirical art into an engineered discipline,” said Elena Viboch, Managing Director at General Catalyst. “Chai’s team is leading this transformation – advancing the technical frontier and expanding what’s possible in therapeutics.”

By converting what has traditionally been a lengthy iteration cycle into a computational process, Chai can materially compress the time to first-in-human studies, tackle hard to drug and “undruggable” targets, and accelerate the overall time to commercialization.

“Nowhere is AI transformation more needed than in drug development – the process is slow, expensive, and imprecise,” said Annie Lamont, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Oak HC/FT. “It can take over a decade and cost upwards of a billion dollars to bring a medicine from bench to bedside. The Chai Discovery team is rewriting that story, fusing world-class AI and biological expertise to dramatically accelerate how medicines are discovered. We’re thrilled to support them as they push the boundaries of what’s possible in this field.”

The company will use the funding to accelerate research and product development, and expand commercialization efforts as they continue to execute on the vision of building a “computer-aided design suite” for molecules.

The Series B round brings Chai’s total funding to more than $225 million. As part of the fundraise, Annie Lamont from Oak HC/FT and Hemant Taneja from General Catalyst will be joining the board.

For more information on Chai Discovery and its platform, visit https://www.chaidiscovery.com.

About Chai Discovery

Chai Discovery builds frontier artificial intelligence to predict and reprogram the interactions between biochemical molecules, the fundamental building blocks of life. Its mission is to transform biology from science into engineering. The team hails from pioneering research and applied AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta FAIR, Stripe, and Google X, and is backed by top investors including OpenAI, Thrive Capital, Menlo Ventures, and Dimension.

About Oak HC/FT

Oak HC/FT is a venture and growth equity firm specializing in investments in fintech and healthcare. Using partnership as a foundation, Oak HC/FT guides companies and founders at every stage, from seed to growth, to create businesses that make a measurable and lasting impact. Founded in 2014, Oak HC/FT has invested in more than 100 portfolio companies and has over $5.3 billion in assets under management. Oak HC/FT is headquartered in Stamford, CT, with an office in San Francisco, CA. Follow Oak HC/FT on LinkedIn and X and learn more at https://www.oakhcft.com/.

About General Catalyst

General Catalyst is a global investment and transformation company that partners with the world’s most ambitious entrepreneurs to drive resilience and applied AI.

We support founders with a long-term view who challenge the status quo, partnering with them from seed to growth stage and beyond.

With offices in the U.S., Europe, and India, we have supported the growth of 800+ businesses, including Airbnb, Anduril, Anthropic, Applied Intuition, Commure, Glean, Gusto, Helsing, Hubspot, Kayak, Livongo, Mistral, Ramp, Samsara, Snap, Stripe, Sword, and Zepto.

For more: www.generalcatalyst.com, @generalcatalyst

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From Plans to Progress: Announcing the 8VC-Bobyard Partnership

8VC

We’re proud to announce our support of Bobyard: as lead investors in their $35mm Series A and as partners pursuing an American building renaissance.

The building trades turn design into reality, are integral to our civilization, and remain vastly underserved by technology. The chart below tells the story: US labor productivity has nearly tripled since 1950, while construction has flatlined, and then declined. This creates a natural win-win opportunity: the trades need modern tools, and Silicon Valley needs meaningful, real-world missions.

‍Bobyard addresses a defining challenge of construction: adding intelligence to plans and drawings in order to build faster. This requires pushing the state of the art forward – clever applications of existing AI aren’t enough. Bobyard is a deep talent bet, conducting foundational computer vision research and solving problems not well-articulated in literature today.

Specifically, Bobyard brings previously unheard-of speed and accuracy to takeoff (calculating material, labor, and equipment quantities from project plans) and estimation (using those quantities to assign costs and create project bids). Drawings are the source of truth for every project, but they’re inconsistent & non-standard, hard to interpret, and prone to errors that compound as they pass from GCs to subs.

Conventional takeoff + estimation requires headcount, and takes hours, often days, to complete. For smaller firms, this means stretched employees juggling too many hats; for larger ones, it caps bid volume and growth. Bobyard resets the timeline by optimizing for what modern AI does best (counting materials; extracting structured information; synthesizing data into decisions) and what humans do best (coordinating with subs and GCs; high-end labor; customer relationships).

Bobyard’s first focus is commercial landscaping, one of the toughest trades for takeoff and estimation. These drawings are dense and non-standard: planting sheets can include thousands of shrubs across dozens of species, with arbitrary symbols that vary from project to project. Estimators have traditionally placed color-coded dots on each item by hand, tracing polygons for sod, mulch, and pavers, measuring irrigation lines, and plugging it all into spreadsheets.

Bobyard replaces that workflow entirely. Contractors upload a PDF, select a legend, run analysis, and receive takeoff quantities in seconds. Under the hood, the platform runs dozens of proprietary computer vision models simultaneously—symbol counting, linear measurement, area detection, text parsing—each built from scratch and optimized for construction drawings. First-run accuracy exceeds 95%+ and automates 90%+ of the task, with fast inference times. Results are displayed visually for instant review, editing, or adjustment, keeping users in control.

The platform also handles the full estimation workflow: material costs, labor, customizable templates, and flexible export formats. Historical costs, vendor quotes, and completed assemblies are stored and organized for easy querying, replacing the paper-chasing that’s long defined document management in the trades.

The results speak for themselves: Bobyard customers see a 50–70% reduction in takeoff time, submit 5x more bids per estimator, and unlock an average of $1.1 million in additional revenue per employee annually.

Customers like Chopper Landscaping project manager/estimator John Barrett immediately see fewer mistakes, more accurate quantities, and more consistent margins. These advantages add up quickly, helping contractors win more bids, prevent costly change orders, and increase revenue an average of 27%, with no additional headcount.

Bobyard has scaled to hundreds of customers, with thousands more in sight. Contractors stay because the product automates their most tedious work, slashes errors, and frees them to spend time where it matters: onsite and with clients. Superusers log 30+ hours a week on the platform, and Bobyard has become their core workspace.

From landscaping, Bobyard will expand to framing, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, drywall, and more. The playbook mirrors Bedrock, another 8VC investment: win the hardest problem first, then use that technical and operational edge to scale across verticals. Each new trade is a greenfield opportunity, and a chance to compound network effects between subs and GCs.

At 8VC, we’ve long believed that building well is a moral responsibility. “The world is broken. Let’s fix it” is both a practical and aesthetic commitment: elevated spaces and elevated ideals are inseparable. As people who’ve built homes, offices, and a university, we’ve wanted a platform like Bobyard for years. Early in the AI wave, we explored building something ourselves, but CV capabilities weren’t ready, and we hadn’t yet found the right leader.

Then we met Michael Ding: a mathematician, scholar of history, and one of the youngest students to complete Stanford’s advanced AI coursework. He obsesses over details that conceal enormous value, and he’s assembled a team of CV PhDs, top-tier engineers, and high-performing salespeople that rivals the best AI companies.

This funding will allow Michael and the Bobyard team to advance their models, deepen landscaping capabilities, and expand into new trades. What’s needed now is talent to match these ambitions. If you’re passionate about solving hard problems at the intersection of AI and the physical world, Bobyard is hiring in engineering, sales, and customer success. And if you’re a contractor ready to transform how you bid and build, you can see it for yourself.

By mastering the critical stages between design and dirt, Bobyard is helping to reverse a 70-year productivity decline, and proving that the trades and technology can move forward together.

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KKR Leads $700M Round Valuing Saviynt at ~$3B to Advance Identity Security for the AI Era

KKR

KKR joined by Sixth Street Growth, TenEleven, and Carrick Capital as Principal Investors

LOS ANGELES and NEW YORK, Dec. 9, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Saviynt, a leading identity security company, today announced a $700M Series B Growth Equity Financing at a valuation of approximately $3 billion. Funds managed by KKR, a leading global investment firm, led the round with participation from Sixth Street Growth and TenEleven, as well as new funding from existing Series A investor Carrick Capital Partners. The multi-firm investment underscores a shared conviction that identity management is the foundational infrastructure for organizations deploying AI at scale.

Saviynt’s AI-powered platform manages, secures, and governs access for human, non-human, and AI agent identities across an organization’s applications, data, and infrastructure. By converging identity management and governance (IGA), privileged access management (PAM), application access governance (AAG), identity security posture management (ISPM), and access gateways across all types of identities, Saviynt simplifies compliance, reduces risk, and improves efficiency for companies moving to cloud and AI-driven infrastructure.

As enterprises adopt copilots, autonomous agents, MCP servers, and AI-driven workflows, the need for an AI-driven Identity Security platform that addresses all posture, lifecycle, access, and privilege use cases across these non-human identities and their interactions with human identities is foundational.

“This is a defining moment for Saviynt and the industry,” said Sachin Nayyar, Founder & CEO of Saviynt. “The demand for secure, governed identity has never been greater, and this growth investment gives us the resources to meet it head-on. We chose to strategically partner with KKR and Sixth Street Growth because they understand how central identity has become to enterprise AI strategies, and they have long track records of helping category leaders scale globally. We’re excited to work with them to accelerate innovation and bring identity security to every organization operating in the AI era.”

AI Has Accelerated Identity’s Scale Problem

Legacy identity and access management tools were designed for human users and static access patterns. Today’s enterprises must govern:

  • Employees and contractors
  • Machine identities and workloads
  • Service accounts, certificates, keys, secrets
  • Partners, contractors, and other supply chain identities
  • And now, AI agents that operate continuously and make real-time decisions

AI-generated identities are the newest and fastest-growing type of identity class, and the one with the greatest potential to reshape how work, productivity, and operations function across the enterprise.

Identity security provides AI the important guardrails it needs to deliver real value and control risk. This shift has transformed identity governance from a security and compliance function into a strategic requirement for AI adoption.

“Saviynt has built one of the most advanced and comprehensive identity security platforms in the market, purpose-built for the AI era,” said Ben Pederson, Managing Director at KKR. “The Company is redefining how organizations secure their digital ecosystems, and we look forward to strategically partnering with Sachin and the Saviynt team to help further scale their platform globally, advance their next-generation AI capabilities, and leverage KKR’s proven experience supporting leading cybersecurity businesses to accelerate growth and innovation.”

Saviynt’s Market Momentum

Saviynt’s growth reflects the rising urgency around governing human, machine, and AI-agent identities at scale. Recent events driving momentum include:

  • Expanded to 600+ global enterprise customers, representing more than 20% of Fortune 100 companies
  • Extended its platform, adding innovative new products for AI Agent Identity Management, Non-Human Identity Management, Privileged Access Management, and Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM)
  • Added AI-enabled intelligence across its core Identity platform, resulting in significant efficiency gains in application onboarding, access certification, access reviews, and provisioning / deprovisioning processes
  • Delivered significant integrations with major ecosystem players, including AWS, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Wiz, and Cyera

Capital to Accelerate Research & Development

The funding will be used as growth capital to increase, expand, and accelerate product development; generate additional AI-based utilities, methodologies, and programs that facilitate the migration from legacy solutions to Saviynt’s platform; and enable deeper integration with hyper-scalers, software/SaaS platforms, professional services firms, and value-added resellers.

New and Existing Investor Alignment Signals Category Definition

KKR’s investment builds on its extensive experience supporting leading businesses across the cybersecurity landscape, including identity and access management, threat detection, and security software. With a 20-year track record, KKR has backed category-defining cybersecurity platforms such as Darktrace, ReliaQuest, and KnowBe4, and has deep identity-security expertise through its work investing in and partnering with industry leaders like Ping Identity, ForgeRock, and Semperis. This breadth of experience, combined with KKR’s technical insight and industry relationships, provides strong validation of Saviynt’s platform and positions KKR to help the company scale its identity security offering globally. The investment will be made primarily through KKR’s Next Generation Technology Growth Fund III.

Piper Sandler served as exclusive financial advisor to Saviynt, and Cooley LLP served as legal counsel to Saviynt. Latham & Watkins LLP served as legal advisor to Carrick Capital Partners. Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP served as legal advisor to KKR & Co. Inc. Moelis & Co served as financial advisor to Sixth Street Growth, and Kirkland & Ellis LLP served as legal advisor to Sixth Street Growth.

About Saviynt

Saviynt’s AI-powered identity platform manages and governs human and non-human access to all of an organization’s applications, data, and business processes. Customers trust Saviynt to safeguard their digital assets, drive operational efficiency, and reduce compliance costs. Built for the AI age, Saviynt is helping organizations safely accelerate their deployment and usage of AI today. Saviynt is recognized as the leader in identity security, with solutions that protect and empower the world’s leading brands, Fortune 500 companies, and government institutions. For more information, please visit www.saviynt.com.

About KKR

KKR is a leading global investment firm that offers alternative asset management as well as capital markets and insurance solutions. KKR aims to generate attractive investment returns by following a patient and disciplined investment approach, employing world-class people, and supporting growth in its portfolio companies and communities. KKR sponsors investment funds that invest in private equity, credit and real assets and has strategic partners that manage hedge funds. KKR’s insurance subsidiaries offer retirement, life and reinsurance products under the management of Global Atlantic Financial Group. References to KKR’s investments may include the activities of its sponsored funds and insurance subsidiaries. For additional information about KKR & Co. Inc. (NYSE: KKR), please visit KKR’s website at www.kkr.com. For additional information about Global Atlantic Financial Group, please visit Global Atlantic Financial Group’s website at www.globalatlantic.com.

About Sixth Street Growth

Sixth Street Growth makes investments in mid- and late-stage technology companies. Sixth Street Growth is the dedicated growth investing platform of Sixth Street, a leading global investment firm with over $115 billion in assets under management and committed capital. Sixth Street has invested over $10 billion in more than 70 companies through its Growth franchise since inception. For more information, and additional disclosures, visit www.sixthstreet.com/growth, and follow Sixth Street on LinkedIn.

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Valcon acquires Bricobomba Consultancy to expand Nordic footprint

Rivean

Utrecht/ Stockholm: Valcon, a leading European consultancy specialising in AI and data-driven business transformation, is pleased to announce it has signed a binding agreement to acquire Bricobomba, a Stockholm-based Swedish firm specialising in data and AI. The acquisition will significantly strengthen Valcon’s capabilities in the Nordics, enhancing its ability to deliver end-to-end data and AI-enabled transformation services across Europe.

Bricobomba, founded in 2019 and headquartered in Stockholm, brings deep expertise in data infrastructure, cloud-based platforms, business intelligence, data analytics and machine learning. Its ‘data platform framework’ supports cloud native architecture, spanning Azure, AWS and GCP and enables clients to build scalable, cost efficient and future proof data foundations.

With an established consulting base in Sweden, the integration of the Bricobomba team, technology and frameworks into Valcon’s broader data and AI capabilities will significantly expand the company’s offering in the Nordic region and bolster its pan European reach, to support its goal of accelerating growth across Europe.

The acquisition marks the first add-on since Rivean completed its controlling investment in Valcon in February 2025. Completion of the transaction is still subject to approval by competent authorities.

Geert van den Goor, CEO of Valcon commented: “This agreement marks an important milestone in Valcon’s strategic growth journey. By joining forces with Bricobomba, we are combining their sharp technical expertise and innovative cloud-native data platforms with Valcon’s proven track record in delivering enterprise-scale transformation. This union strengthens our ability to help organisations across Europe to build future proof, AI-ready data foundations and derive real business impact and value.”

Björn Leufstedt, CEO of Bricobomba commented: “We are very excited to become part of Valcon’s European organisation. Our team believes in delivering value add to clients, giving them the tools and knowledge they need to transform how they use data. Valcon’s scale, resources and ambition make it the right moment for us to take the next step, and we look forward to combining nimble Nordic innovation with pan-European delivery capability.”

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About Valcon
Valcon is a leading European consultancy specialising in AI and data-driven business transformation. A trusted partner for multiple European enterprises, Valcon’s 1700 skilled consultants are experts at connecting the critical links between strategy and operations, helping organisations create value in their transformation programmes. Valcon’s four core capabilities are data, AI, technology and consulting. Valcon’s clients include large organisations across multiple sectors, including financial services, retail, public sector, industrials and infrastructure. Valcon is backed by private equity firm, Rivean Capital. For more information, please visit: www.valcon.com

About Bricobomba
Bricobomba is a Stockholm-based AI and data consultancy, founded in 2019. With a growing team of 35 data professionals, Bricobomba specialises in data engineering, cloud data platform architecture, business intelligence, analytics and machine learning. Building end to end data solutions, Bricoboma focuses on helping clients unlock actionable insights and create value from their data. For more information please visit: https://www.bricobomba.se/en

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Orq.ai Closes €5M in Seed Funding to Help Enterprises Deploy AI Agents at Scale

Curiosity VC

Our portfolio company Orq.ai, a generative AI collaboration startup built for companies to model, deploy, and manage enterprise-grade AI applications, has raised €5 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round led by seed + speed Ventures and Galion.exe, with continued backing from Curiosity and other existing investors Spacetime, XO Ventures, xdeck ventures, Waves Capital, and GoldenEggCheck. The round brings Orq.ai’s total funding to €7.3 million.

The investment marks a strong vote of confidence in Orq.ai’s mission to help enterprises build and deploy AI agents efficiently, maintain control over workflows and data, and scale across any infrastructure. With the launch of its new Agent Studio, Orq.ai now enables businesses to design agents in their own way, configuring behaviors, workflows, and decision rules while the platform handles the entire execution layer. Orq.ai already supports forward-thinking organizations across Europe and the US, including Afas, Moneybird Keyrus, and Helloprint, as they move from isolated experiments to operational AI systems running at scale.

With the new capital, Orq.ai will expand its 25-person team across engineering, enterprise sales, and customer success, while deepening its presence in key European markets and accelerating its North American growth.  The round also introduces new strategic angels and advisors such as  Sam Bourton, co-founder of QuantumBlack/McKinsey, Adriaan Mol, founder of Mollie, and Daniel Gebler, CTO of Picnic, who will support Orq.ai’s expansion into more advanced enterprise and data governance capabilities.

“Enterprises are no longer experimenting with AI for curiosity. They want to implement it fast, but most of them are stuck passing real systems into production. We believe Orq.ai is the solution for their needs, as it for us. it accelerates our development process daily and is even used by non-technical profiles. Orq.ai’s unified agent lifecycle platform shortens iteration time, reduces friction and brings stability to deploy agents at scale.” says Kevin Kuipers, Founding Partner of Galion.exe.

“AI agents are becoming a foundational layer of enterprise and B2B software, much like cloud infrastructure in the last technology cycle. Companies will need a reliable way to orchestrate, govern, and scale these agents across operations, and Orq.ai is building the platform that will enable that shift.“ says Alexander Kölpin, Managing Director, seed + speed Ventures.

The investment comes at a pivotal moment for enterprise AI.  Despite growing interest, many companies remain stuck at the prototype stage due to fragmented tools and the lack of governance needed to operate AI reliably in production, a gap Orq.ai directly addresses. “Most companies can build a great demo. The real challenge is getting that demo into production without losing control over quality, compliance, or costs,” said Sohrab Hosseini, Co-founder of Orq.ai. “Orq.ai exists to close that gap.”

Once AI systems encounter real-world data, regulatory obligations, and operational complexity, performance and control often break down. Orq.ai provides a full enterprise control layer to manage, secure, and scale AI systems across teams and environments. It is the only platform that combines experimentation, evaluation, observability, AI gateway, governance, and agent runtime into a single environment.

“Leading enterprises have moved past AI experimentation. Their focus now is production,” said Herman Kienhuis from early investor Curiosity VC. “Orq.ai supports that transition by reducing iteration time, cutting operational friction, and giving engineering teams a stable foundation for scaling agents.”

With stricter requirements under the EU AI Act, GDPR, and broader data governance rules, European companies increasingly need AI systems that can run securely within their own infrastructure. Orq.ai’s infrastructure-agnostic design, spanning cloud, hybrid, and fully on-prem deployments, provides a practical path to meeting sovereignty and residency needs. US organizations benefit from the same flexibility, allowing easier integration with existing architectures and compliance frameworks.

Orq.ai’s unified platform includes an AI gateway with access to more than 300 models, built-in evaluation and monitoring, knowledge-base integration, and collaboration tools that reduce agent development time by 67% and free more than 10% of engineering capacity.

The funding coincides with a full rebrand and redesigned platform experience, reflecting Orq.ai’s evolution from a developer-focused tool into a comprehensive enterprise solution trusted across industries. More than 100 organizations now rely on Orq.ai as they operationalize AI at scale.

About Orq.ai
‍Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Amsterdam, Orq.ai is the enterprise control platform for the full AI agent lifecycle. The company’s Platform 4.0 enables organizations to experiment, evaluate, deploy, observe, and optimize AI agents through a unified interface that prioritizes safety, collaboration, and scalability. Orq.ai supports over 300+ LLM models and offers flexible deployment options, including cloud, hybrid, and on-premises configurations, to meet enterprise data sovereignty requirements. The company serves forward-thinking enterprises and AI-native startups across Europe and the United States. For more information, visit orq.ai.

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