CIBC Innovation Banking to Provide Karbon with Credit Facility to Support its Growth Plans

CIBC Innovation Banking, in a recent press meet, has announced that it has provided a $5 million credit facility to Nevada-based Karbon Inc. ("Karbon"), which predominantly offers industry-leading practice management software for various accounting firms. The company plans to use this facility to support its hiring plans and to further improve and invest in its diverse product set.

Founded in 2014, Karbon's cloud-based solution enables accounting practices to manage internal workflows and communications more efficiently. It currently has employees across the USA with extensive experience in the accounting and software development industries and offices in New Zealand, the UK, and Sydney, Australia.

Desktop legacy solutions have historically dominated the workflow software market, and the immediate shift to 'work from home' provided an opportunity for Karbon, which saw its active users double in 2020. Accounting practices with cloud-based workflow versus legacy desktop solutions immediately realized the value of having the flexibility to work from anywhere efficiently. With the support of the CIBC Innovation Banking team, Karbon will continue building its product set and become the premium cloud-based workflow solution for accountants.

 

 

The software supply chain security provider, Dustico, has been acquired by Checkmarx, the global leader in developer-centric application security testing (AST) solutions. Through this acquisition, Checkmarx will combine its AST capabilities with Dustico’s behavioral analysis technology to give customers a unified view into the risk, reputation, and behavior of open source packages, resulting in a more comprehensive approach to preventing supply chain attacks.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Dustico and its team to Checkmarx as the Israeli tech ecosystem continues to push the boundaries of cybersecurity innovation and talent,” said Emmanuel Benzaquen, CEO, Checkmarx. “Blending Dustico’s differentiated approach to open source analysis with Checkmarx’s best-of-breed security testing capabilities will bring disruptive value to our customers as they manage the challenges with securing software supply chains.”

The financial terms of the acquisition were not made public. But with Dustico, Checkmarx will be building on its mission to secure open source by enabling customers to perform vulnerability, behavioral, and reputational analysis from a single solution.

“This is a very exciting time for Dustico and our community,” said Tzachi Zornstain, Co-Founder and CEO, Dustico. “We founded Dustico to help organizations cope with the explosion in supply chain and dependency attacks and fortify their trust in open source software, and we’re thrilled to join Checkmarx to further execute on this vision and bring our capabilities to a global set of customers.”

 

Microsoft Enhances Neural Network Model to Improve the Bing Searches

In a recent announcement, Microsoft has stated that it has detailed a large neural network model in order to improve the relevance of Bing searches. The company has said that the model, called a "sparse" neural network, will be complementing the currently existing large Transformer-based networks like OpenAI's GPT-3. Transformer-based models have been gaining a lot of attention in the machine learning world. These models excel at understanding semantic relationships, and thereby they have been used to enhance Bing search.

Microsoft's new Make Every feature Binary (MEB) model is used to improve the Bing Searches. The sparse model has 135 billion parameters and space for over 200 billion binary features. Microsoft has stated that this new MEB can map single facts to features, which allows the model to gain a more nuanced understanding of individual facts.

The company also added that the MEB, trained on more than 500 billion queries for over three years of Bing searches, runs in production for 100 percent of Bing searches in all regions and languages. It's now the largest universal language model the company is serving to date. The model occupies 720GB when loaded into memory and sustain 35 million feature lookups during peak traffic time.

 

 

Skybox Security to Continue Expansion in EMEA and Asia Pacific Japan

San Jose, CA-based Skybox Security has announced accelerated global expansion across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, APAC, and Japan. This news comes as a follow up to the recent surge in high-profile cyberattacks that put the spotlight on the importance of data-driven, risk-based approach to Vulnerability Management

“Business and government leaders globally are leaning into the importance of proactively addressing cyber risk to prevent ransomware and supply chain attacks. Vulnerability Management is now taking center stage even at the top levels of government, as highlighted by the recent Biden Executive Order,” said Gidi Cohen, CEO and founder, Skybox Security. “The criticality of preventative cybersecurity has become more than a fear of being held for ransom. Cybersecurity is now impacting the daily lives and safety of global citizens – even putting our water, food, and energy supplies at risk.”

Skybox Security has experienced a big rise on demand and good growth in the EMEA, where it has seen its deals increase by 33% and average annual contract value increase 64% over the first half of 2021. The company has said that it will be making big investments to expand its presence in EMEA and Asia Pacific and Japan.

Skybox Security is highly regarded in the security community as over 500 of the largest and most security-conscious enterprises in the world rely on Skybox for the insights and assurance required to stay ahead of dynamically changing attack surfaces.

 

Yellow.ai Raises $78.15M in Series C Financing

After having grown a fantastic 470% in revenues since its last funding round, Yellow.ai has announced that it has raised $78.15 million in its Series C round of financing. The round was led by Westbridge Capital joined by Sapphire Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Since its last funding round in April 2020, Yellow.ai has added hundreds of new clients across the world. The company has also grown and expanded across the USA, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, UAE, and India.

“There are miles to go before we rest, but I’d like to pause and thank all our esteemed customers, partners who believe in our vision and product. And to all the team members, across the globe, who have built a platform and GTM to help us reach here. We’re still scratching the surface of what’s possible and we couldn’t be more excited to be joined by our investors in helping us reach the next milestone, and the next,” said Raghu Ravinutala, CEO of Yellow.ai, in a statement.

Yellow.ai is a Total CX Automation Platform that was established to connect with customers and resolve their queries, automatically, across 35+ channels on text and voice. With CX becoming increasingly relevant with times, Yellow.ai’s services have become extremely important. The funding will give the company further motivation to carry on with its good work.

 

Black & Veatch is joining hands with Big Blue to work on AI-driven solutions

Black & Veatch, an engineering and construction company from Kansas, has recently made an announcement that it is partnering with the Big Blue IBM to market APM solutions. This also includes remote monitoring techs that make use of real-time data analytics with AI to help consumers maintain their assets and equipment. By using the marketed solutions, customers can keep their assets at peak performance and reliability. The main motto of the recent collaboration is to combine IBM’s Maximo App Suite with Black & Veatch’s AMS services. These solutions are expected to help organizations support more demanding operations for energy, utilities, and industrial assets.

 Black & Veatch is well-known for its four diagnostics and monitoring centers used for real-time analysis and detection of upcoming issues by running many scenarios and models to accurately predict the changes in asset performance. IBM application’s Monitor, Predict, Assist, Visual, and Health inspection capabilities will combine with Black & Veatch’s diagnostics and monitoring capabilities to bring them on to a field where the gathered insights can be applied. Dave Brill, Black & Veatch’s VP of Asset Management Services, has stated that digital twins are an integral part of the industrial segment’s digital future. This is mainly because they can provide a brief understanding of complex assets.