Redpoint

Kustomer just raised a $30M Series B to scale their AI-native platform and bring full-cycle resolution to modern CX. We’re excited to double down alongside Norwest, Battery Ventures, and boldstart ventures. This team has spent the last two years building deep AI infrastructure leading to true agentic systems that drive real outcomes across voice, chat, SMS, and email. Proud to continue backing Brad Birnbaum and Jeremy Suriel as they reshape how businesses deliver support.

Today, private market revenue multiples are nearly 10x those in the public markets (for infra companies). What does the gap mean for founders? Here’s a few takes from Sai Senthilkumar and Jordan Segall: ➡️ The private market ARR multiples should get you excited, but the public market multiples should give you pause because there’s a potential danger zone when you take that attractive term sheet. Your valuation eventually needs to converge to those grey bars, because that’s how you will be traded in the public markets. ➡️ Maximize your TAM. You need to be in a big market that will allow you to grow and expand. It's normal for your initial product and market opportunity to be modest, but it's crucial that you develop additional products and have the foresight to launch them at the right time to build a true platform. ➡️ By the time you go public, you need to converge to ~40% in terms of the rule of 40, ensuring a clear path to profitability. This doesn't mean sacrificing growth for profitability in the earlier stages if you are outperforming your plan. ➡️ We’re not here to tell you to get to cash flow break-even and cut costs. But we do want you to understand that the bar is really high now and getting even higher. ➡️ You can either sell directly or expand your product suite with a use case that targets an existing market characterized by a lot of human labor / services work. Or, up-level your existing product with AI-native features. You’re collecting critical data from your customers and their workflows - you can leverage this data in very unique ways with the model providers to extend your existing products with AI and delight your customers. ➡️ Finally, it’s never been so competitive in startup land. You have to be aggressive, all the time - The teams that ship first often set the narrative - The best companies are obsessed with their customers and build in tight feedback loops with users - Being the first to form strategic partnerships is a huge advantage - Brand and first mover advantage compound over time - Early dominance tends to snowball and sucks the oxygen out of the room in dynamic, extremely competitive markets

Anam makes AI personas who finally feel human. We'll let you know how it goes in September!

Join us in welcoming our two newest investors to the Redpoint Early team: Matan Roet and Priscilla Russo! 🔐 Matan brings deep technical experience to our Infra, AI, and Security investing. He’s shipped large-scale AI and cyber features at Google and Microsoft, and holds both an MBA and MS in Engineering from Harvard. 🚀 Priscilla joins us to back bold founders building in enterprise applications. Before Redpoint, she worked in business development at Mastercard and started her career in equity research at Morgan Stanley. She recently earned her MBA at Stanford GSB, where she led the VC Club. We’re thrilled to have them on board and feel incredibly lucky to work alongside them!

Figma IPO’d at $33 - and peaked over $120 during Day 1. The long-awaited IPO didn’t just meet expectations, it blew past them. Erica Brescia joined Bloomberg to break down the moment and what it means for the broader market. A few key takeaways from the segment: ➡️ We expected a strong debut, but early performance has exceeded even very bullish predictions. Public markets have been hungry for high-growth software companies, and Figma now stands alongside just one other public software business - Palantir - growing over 30% YoY. Figma has long proven they are an exceptional company, but the scale of the day 1 pop still impressed. ➡️ Regarding the rest of the private company pipeline… Many strong companies (think Databricks, Stripe, and SpaceX) have remained private thanks to ample access to capital, allowing them to delay IPOs and go public only when it aligns with long-term strategy. They likely won’t stay private forever, as there are still compelling reasons to go public, from boosting employee morale to unlocking new fundraising options. More from Erica here 👇

Palo Alto Networks just paid $25B to fill one critical gap: identity. A couple takeaways from Jordan Segall and Sai Senthilkumar on the CyberArk acquisition announcement. 1. The CyberArk deal is Palo Alto’s big bet to become a core player in identity. As AI agents and machine identities multiply inside enterprises, securing identity will be a crucial part of any comprehensive security program. Palo Alto has been completely absent in identity, so it’s no surprise they are paying a premium to acquire CyberArk. 2. Integration will be challenging. Integrating CyberArk’s 25-year-old technology with Palo Alto’s broader suite will be quite challenging. User experience will be clunky in the beginning, so this presents a great opportunity for upstarts building in and around identity. 

Are AI coding assistants making code worse? According to our latest Redpoint survey with dozens of technology leaders, only 22% of developers believe AI assistants have NOT hurt code quality. Many teams report more duplicated and less refactored code. Speed has increased, but reliability has dropped. AI coding is far from flawless, but coding assistants are already changing how developers approach day-to-day work. Of all the new gen AI applications, coding assistants may have found the fastest path to true product-market fit, not just adoption, but sustained usage at scale. - Amazon credits AI with saving 4,500 developer-years and $260M in efficiency gains. - Meta says today’s models can now operate as mid-level engineers - Currently, computer engineering grads face double the unemployment rate relative to art history majors - Cursor, Windsurf, and GitHub Copilot are used daily by millions of developers - And we’re seeing the emergence of agentic tools like Cognition’s Devin and Sourcegraph’s Amp that can work autonomously in the background This means the opportunity ahead is massive. There are tens of millions of developers globally. While copilots have proven the value of assistance, the next wave will tackle every part of the software development lifecycle.

Great to see RunLLM v2 out in the world 🚀 With v2, they’re now deflecting 99% of support questions for vLLM, reducing workload by 30% at Corelight, and saving DataHub over $1M in engineering time. Congrats to the team on a monumental launch!

For too long, security training has been an exercise in futility. Legacy vendors built compliance-first products that bored people into disengagement—long videos, outdated examples, clunky LMS integrations. It all added up to a box-checking ritual that did little to actually reduce risk. But the threats we face today—supercharged by AI—don’t care whether training was “completed.” Attackers are moving faster, getting more sophisticated, and targeting the human layer with increasing precision. What organizations need now is behavioral impact, not compliance theater. That’s why we’re so excited to lead the Series A in Fable Security. Fable is fundamentally rethinking what security enablement should look like in a modern org. Rather than relying on static training modules, Fable delivers timely, contextual interventions—in Slack, in Chrome, in the tools people actually use—driven by AI and informed by real behavioral risk. The result is a product that feels more like a coach than a course—engaging, relevant, and remarkably effective. The traction speaks volumes: * Customers are opting in to roll out training—something that used to feel like a punishment now feels like a value-add. * Employees say the content is “the best they’ve ever seen”—not just in security, but across all L&D tools. * CISOs are reporting measurable improvements in phishing resilience and risky behavior reduction within weeks of deployment. Fable isn’t just modernizing the category. They’re making people care about it again—and that’s the unlock. You could not imagine a more perfect partnership in Nicole Jiang and Sanny Liao to build something as important as Fable Security. I could not be more thrilled and honored to be on this journey with you both, along with my partner Jordan Segall and our great friends Saam Motamedi and Corinne Marie Riley at Greylock Partners! More in Forbes: https://lnkd.in/g47ivk3C

Most security awareness training feels like a box to check - long, dull, and easy to forget. Fable Security is taking the exact opposite approach. Founders Nicole Jiang and Sanny Liao are building a human risk platform that’s highly personalized and actually engaging. Think "lane assist" for employee behavior, using AI and LLMs to deliver real-time, security nudges that help people stay on course with safe behavior. They’re already seeing impact: 📉 Lower phishing click rates 🔒 Fewer exposed credentials 👀 Employees asking for more training Nicole and Sanny’s journey has been impressive since their early days at Abnormal AI, where they helped grow the company from pre-product to over $100M in revenue. We’ve seen firsthand their rare mix of grit, product intuition, and ambition. With early traction and an A+ team from Palantir, Zscaler, Rippling, and more, they’re now poised to build something category-defining. We’re proud to be leading Fable Security $31M Series A to redefine how companies tackle the biggest vulnerability in cybersecurity today: humans.