At Cisco, we seek out innovative technology startups that revolutionize industries with their cutting-edge solutions. Our dynamic investment portfolio adapts to the evolving needs of the digital era, ensuring our customers have the latest and most impactful solutions for maintaining a competitive advantage in the tech landscape.
Congratulations to Cohesity, Gong, Mistral AI, Scale AI, and Island, for their inclusion in Forbes’ Cloud 100 list, highlighting the top private cloud companies, globally.
New AI Investments
Groq specializes in developing high-performance, custom-designed processors, particularly focused on accelerating machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. Read more about their latest $640M Series D round.
Halcyon was founded in 2021 with a singular mission: build an end-to-end and bespoke ransomware readiness, prevention and recovery platform. Halcyon’s path-breaking platform, which leverages AI micro-models to identify and prevent ransomware attacks, represents a robust response to an endemic problem. In our blog, “Halcyon AI: ‘Attacker Led’ Ransomware Protection and Recovery,” we break down our investment in Halcyon.
Collaboration
Voiceitt celebrated the anniversary of the Voiceitt2 web application in August. Its team of speech therapists supported their fellow clinicians with 30 Days to Greater Impact, a clinician's guide to successful trials. Voiceitt's product team pushed an increase in the speed of speech recognition by employing a combination of streaming and non-streaming technology.
Networking
Aliro and NIST published a research paper titled “Entanglement Routing in Quantum Networks,” exploring how routing protocols can be adapted for quantum communication networks. The paper addresses unique challenges in quantum routing, such as optical loss and fidelity decay, and surveys strategies to optimize entanglement distribution for more efficient and reliable quantum network architectures.
Aviz ONES expanded its capabilities to offer comprehensive AI fabric solutions, supporting GPUs, DPUs, and Cisco 8000 series routers running SONiC, positioning itself as the only vendor-agnostic controller for these technologies. Additionally, Network Copilot can now be trained on end-to-end AI flows, serving as an AI assistant for managing the AI fabric.
Observability and DevOps
Nobl9 was recognized in nine Gartner Hype Cycle reports in 2024, reflecting its leadership and innovation in Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and reliability engineering. This recognition underscores Nobl9's critical role in helping organizations manage and optimize their infrastructure, operations, and development processes.
Security
AppOmni's released a new SaaS-aware identity threat detection and response solution enhances security by monitoring and analyzing identity-related activities across SaaS applications. This innovation helps organizations identify and address potential threats and vulnerabilities specific to their SaaS environments, improving overall security and compliance.
Binalyze achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance, highlighting its commitment to maintaining high standards of data security and privacy. This certification underscores Binalyze's dedication to implementing rigorous controls and practices to protect client data and ensure robust security measures.
Island issued a guide on SaaS data loss prevention, offering strategies to protect sensitive information across various SaaS applications by implementing robust security measures. It emphasizes the importance of monitoring, controlling access, and applying data protection policies to prevent unauthorized data access and breaches.
RangeForce was featured in the Forrester Wave report on cybersecurity skills and training platforms, showcasing its effectiveness in providing hands-on, interactive cybersecurity training. The report highlights RangeForce's comprehensive approach to developing practical skills and enhancing security capabilities for organizations.
Tidelift reported a new story showing how its customers uniquely benefit from the work open-source maintainer Gary Gregory is doing to keep the Apache Commons libraries secure and well maintained, and to document the secure development practices he follows.