The crush of traffic going into training and running AI has quickly turned into a major cost and resource headache for organizations. Today, Cast AI, a startup building tools to ease and optimize workloads for AI and other tasks with automation, is raising a major round of funding on the back of strong growth and partnerships with major players in the space. The company has raised a $108 million Series C that it will be using for more R&D and to expand its business in core markets like the U.S. and elsewhere. Sources familiar with the deal told TechCrunch that the round has the company at 'near unicorn' valuation, post-money ' close to $900 million from what I understand. 'It's all about GPU, compute, and electricity,' said Yuri Frayman, Cast's CEO and co-founder. 'Our play is to ensure that we create efficiency, to be able to promote more workloads across GPUs. That is what we are about.' For context, when Cast last raised capital, $35 million in November 2023, it was valued at $300 million post-money, per PitchBook. Prior to this latest round, the startup had raised just over $86 million....

Bob Wise joined Heroku as GM from Amazon Web Services, where he was Kubernetes GM and head of the open source program office. Wise was promoted to CEO of Heroku in 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. Wise's rise to CEO came over a decade after Salesforce acquired Heroku for $212 million in cash. The platform allows programmers to build, run, and scale apps across a number of programming languages, including Java, PHP, and Go. Under Salesforce ' and Wise's ' management, Heroku has faced a number of setbacks, including a security breach where attackers were able to obtain an access token for a Heroku account that was used for automation purposes. In August 2022, Heroku announced that its free plans would be discontinued, citing fraud and abuse as reasons for the change. Some users weren't pleased, understandably ' and made their opinions known on social media. 'Our product, engineering, and security teams are spending an extraordinary amount of effort to manage fraud and abuse of the Heroku free product plans,' Wise said in a blog post at the time. 'We will continue to provide low-cost solutions for compute and data resources.'...

WSO2's products include an open source API manager, comparable to something like Google's Apigee, which businesses use for building and integrating all their digital services, either in the cloud or on-premises. The company offers tangential services such as API management specifically for Kubernetes, as well as its flagship Identity Server ' a little something like Okta ' that companies use for managing identity and access functionality in their apps, such as single sign-on (SSO). WSO2, which was founded out of Sri Lanka in 2005, had raised around $130 million in funding from the likes of Intel, Cisco and Goldman Sachs, with its most recent tranche coming via a $93 million Series E round in 2022. An official valuation was never announced, but articles from some outlets at the time reported a valuation of more than $600 million. So that would mean WSO2 has remained somewhat stagnant, though the 'more than' facet here could disguise some movement in the company's valuation. WSO2 co-founder and CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana has a strong track record in the open source sphere, particularly among Apache Software Foundation projects, and he was one of the main designers of the cloud-native Ballerina programming language. Since 2017, Weerawarana also drives for Uber, which he says is designed to 'challenge the norm' and make it more socially acceptable in his native Sri Lanka....

Aqua Security, an Israeli cybersecurity startup that helps companies protect their cloud services, has raised $60 million in funding, extending its previously announced $135 million Series E round of funding to $195 million. Founded in 2015, Tel Aviv- and Boston-based Aqua Security claims customers such as PayPal, Netflix, and Samsung, who use the Aqua platform for services spanning cloud workload protection (CWPP); cloud security posture management; Kubernetes security posture management; software supply chain security; risk and vulnerability scanning; malware protection; and more. The company has now raised around $325 million since its inception, and with its Series E extension round Aqua ushers in lead investor Evolution Equity Partners, a venture capital firm substantively focused on the cybersecurity industry and which launched a new $400 million fund two years ago. In an arid funding landscape where much beyond low single-digit seed rounds are hard to come by, Aqua's latest cash injection could indicate a degree of investor confidence as the company seeks new capital to power growth. However, Aqua Security's valuation has seemingly remained the same as it was some three years ago when its Series E round was first announced. In March, 2021, Aqua Security said its valuation was 'in excess of $1 billion,' and today it says its valuation is 'above' $1 billion....