Security-as-code startup Jit comes out of stealth with $38.5M in seed funding

Jit, a startup that helps developers automate product security by codifying their security plans and workflows as code that can then be managed in a code repository like GitHub, today announced that it has raised a $38.5 million seed round led by boldstart ventures, with Insight Partners, Tiger Global, TeachAviv and a number of strategic angel investors also participating. The company was incubated by FXP, a Boston-Israel startup venture studio

With this announcement, Jit is also coming out of stealth and announcing the addition of former Puppet CTO and Cloud Foundry Foundation executive director Abby Kearns to its advisory board.

“Cybersecurity leaders are adding more tools, faster than their teams are able to implement, tune and configure them — increasing risk spend,” said Jit CTO David Melamed. “Creating a security plan or program is too time-consuming for high-velocity dev and product teams. Jit streamlines technical security for engineering teams over compliance checkboxes all while reducing spend. We deliver the simplest approach to implementing DevSecOps where product security is built into the software from the start along with a way to continuously maintain it in a language developers understand — code.”

Image Credits: Jit

The idea behind Jit is to offer what the company calls “minimal viable security” (MVS). Out of the box, the service offers developers MVS plans that have already codified a minimum set of tools and workflows that they’ll need to secure their apps and the infrastructure they run on.

“Instead of having to research, configure, implement and do the work to integrate open source security tools into your stacks and CI/CD pipelines, the security research team at Jit has taken the time to curate and select the tools that will provide the first line of defense for your applications, without having to figure it out yourself,” the company explains.

The company argues that its approach also means developers will only get alerts if there are important vulnerabilities they have to react to right away — and can then remediate them from inside their existing workflows. The tool will create automatic security reviews inside of pull requests or find AWS misconfigurations or issues with security controls for third-party services like npm-audit.

With this, the service can also make it easier for businesses to start their gap analysis for a number of compliance programs like SOC2 or ISO 27001 by giving them a dashboard that lays out their current status.

“With the rapid increase in the number of applications being developed and managed, product security needs to be simple and easy to use as code, as well as work within current CI/CD pipelines,” said Ed Sim, founder and managing partner at boldstart ventures. “Jit ensures that modern engineering teams can build secure cloud-based applications by design, all while simplifying continuous security. Jit is unique in that it unifies a variety of open source security tools while natively integrating the entire security as code experience into the current developer workflow.”

Image Credits: Jit

SaaS’ future will be open sourced

Over the course of the last decade or so, open source changed dramatically. What was once mostly a philosophical discussion about cathedrals, bazaars and the evils of Microsoft — which in turn lead to the people building compilers and the likes of the Linux kernel — became the de facto standard for how even traditional enterprises build modern software in the open. With that came new business models that now range from selling professional services for open source users to adding proprietary paid extensions with additional “enterprise” features and, increasingly, launching fully managed hosted SaaS versions of open source products.

Unsurprisingly, at our TC Sessions: SaaS 2021 event on October 27, we will talk about exactly that: how to build successful SaaS products on top of open source. To do so, Puppet CTO Abby Kearns, Kong CEO, president and co-founder Augusto “Aghi” Marietti and Redpoint Ventures managing director Jason Warner will join us.

Kearns is currently the CTO of IT automation service Puppet, which offers and open source version of its core tools, as well as a large ecosystem of open sourced modules that extend its services. But before joining the company, she was also the executive director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, where she helped shepherd one of the largest and most active enterprise-focused open source projects through a time of change. Cloud Foundry, which was first developed inside of VMware, itself formed the basis of a number of SaaS-like offerings from the likes of Pivotal and SUSE.

Kong, previously known as Mashape, is somewhat of a posterchild of open source commercialization. A lot of the core services of its API and microservices management tools are available under an open source license today. Back in 2015, the company first open-sourced the Kong API management service, and it has kept this focus on open source going. The company recently launched new open source projects like its Kuma control plane (which it then donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation), for example. Meanwhile, the company now has raised over $171 million in funding and was most recently valued at $1.4 billion. Its customers range from the likes of Deutsche Telekom to Papa John’s and Siemens. Italy-born Marietti founded the company back in 2009 and the team actually showed a first prototype at what was then the TechCrunch50 conference.

Redpoint’s Jason Warner made a name for himself during his time at Heroku and than as GitHub’s CEO, but even before he decamped to the VC world this summer, he was already a very active angel investor whose name kept popping up in the press releases about some of the most interesting startups in recent years. Over the course of the last year or so, he invested in companies like Magic, Census, Jam and Sym, for example. Some of these build a lot of open source themselves, some only consume it, but either way, Warner will be able to give us the VC perspective on the state of the open source industry and what makes him want to invest (or not) in open source centric startups.

In addition to our discussion on open source, the conference will also include Google’s Javier Soltero, as well as investors Kobie Fuller and Casey Aylward, among others. We hope you’ll join us. It’s going to be a thought-provoking lineup.

Buy your pass now to save before prices go up at the door. We can’t wait to see you!

Announcing the final agenda for TechCrunch Sessions: SaaS 2021

TechCrunch Sessions is back!

On October 27, we’re taking on the ferociously competitive field of software as a service (SaaS), and we’re thrilled to announce our final packed agenda, overflowing with some of the biggest names and most exciting startups in the industry. And you’re in luck, because $75 early-bird tickets are still on sale — make sure you book yours so you can enjoy all the agenda has to offer and save $100 bucks before prices go up!

Throughout the day, you can expect to hear from industry experts, and take part in discussions about the potential of new advances in data, open source, how to deal with the onslaught of security threats, investing in early-stage startups and plenty more.

We’ll be joined by some of the biggest names and the smartest and most prescient people in the industry, including Javier Soltero at Google, Kathy Baxter at Salesforce, Jared Spataro at Microsoft, Jay Kreps at Confluent, Sarah Guo at Greylock and Daniel Dines at UiPath.

You’ll be able to find and engage with people from all around the world through world-class networking on our virtual platform — all for $75 and under for a limited time, with even deeper discounts for nonprofits and government agencies, students and up-and-coming founders!

Our agenda showcases some of the powerhouses in the space, but also plenty of smaller teams that are building and debunking fundamental technologies in the industry. Check it out!

Survival of the Fittest: Investing in Today’s SaaS Market
with Casey Aylward (Costanoa Ventures), Kobie Fuller (Upfront) and Sarah Guo (Greylock)

  • The venture capital world is faster and more competitive than ever. For investors hoping to get into the hottest SaaS deal, things are even crazier. With more nontraditional money pouring into the sector, remote dealmaking now the norm and an increasingly global market for software startups, venture capitalists are being forced to shake up their own operations — and expectations. TechCrunch sits down with three leading investors to discuss how they are fighting for allocation in hot deals, what they’ve changed in their own processes, and what today’s best founders are demanding.

Three Easy Steps to Capture Global Opportunities (Sponsored by KUDO)
with Fardad Zabetian (KUDO)

  • As our economy becomes increasingly global, is your business prepared to succeed? KUDO Co-Founder and CEO Fardad Zabetian shares his insights on how to capture global opportunities.

Data, Data Everywhere
with Ali Ghodsi (Databricks)

  • As companies struggle to manage and share increasingly large amounts of data, it’s no wonder that Databricks, whose primary product is a data lake, was valued at a whopping $28 billion for its most recent funding round. We’re going to talk to CEO Ali Ghodsi about why his startup is so hot, and what comes next.

SaaS Security, Today and Tomorrow
with Edna Conway (Microsoft), Wendy Nather (Cisco) and Olivia Rose (Amplitude)

  • Enterprises face a constant stream of threats, from nation states to cybercriminals and corporate insiders. After a year where billions worked from home and the cloud reigned supreme, startups and corporations alike can’t afford to stay off the security pulse. Find out what SaaS startups need to know about security now, and in the future.

Data Warehouse: The Foundation of the Modern Data Stack (Sponsored by RudderStack)
with Soumyadeb Mitra (RudderStack), Ben Gotfredson (Snowflake)

  • The modern data stack is changing rapidly, with new technology emerging everyday. Increasingly, though, architectures are being built around the data warehouse. In this panel discussion, experts will discuss why this new architecture has emerged, what specific technologies are driving the trend and what the data stack of the future looks like.

Automation’s Moment Is Now
with Daniel Dines (UiPath), Laela Sturdy (CapitalG) and Dave Wright (ServiceNow)

  • One thing we learned during the pandemic is the importance of automation, and that’s only likely to be more pronounced as we move forward. We’ll be talking to UiPath CEO Daniel Dines, Laela Sturdy, an investor at CapitalG and Dave Wright from ServiceNow about why this is automation’s moment.

How do High-Growth Companies use Technology to Inform Strategy and Drive Results? (Sponsored by SAP)

  • Fast-growing companies are in a constant state of transition, as high performance and growth can lead to ever-changing business priorities and challenges. Hear from a couple of SAP’s hypergrowth customers about how they use technology to inform their strategy and ultimately drive business results. SAP Managing Director, Midmarket and Ecosystem Greg Petraetis will share how businesses grow from being innovators to disruptors to category leaders and how the technology they choose can impact the future of their business productivity.

Was the Pandemic Cloud Productivity’s Spark?
with Javier Soltero (Google)

  • One big aspect of SaaS is productivity apps like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive. We’ll talk with executive Javier Soltero about the role Google Workspace plays in the Google cloud strategy.

AI Ethics at Enterprise Scale
with Kathy Baxter (Salesforce) and Nashlie Sephus (AWS)

  • Keeping AI models fair and unbiased is a tough enough job in the lab or with a single product. How can it be accomplished at the scale of business being done by Amazon and Salesforce? Amazon AI Applied Science manager Nashlie Sephus and Principle Architect of AI Practice Kathy Baxter will discuss the responsibilities as opportunities of putting ethical practices to work in enterprise applications.

Optimizing SaaS Productivity: Why SaaS Sprawl Prohibits Growth? (Sponsored by LeanIX)
with André Christ (LeanIX)

  • SaaS represents an increasing share of the installed software estate – in cloud-born companies, often 100%. If not managed and optimized, an uncontrolled adoption leads to SaaS Sprawl, sometimes called “Shadow IT”. Sub-optimized usage of SaaS subscriptions, increased risk, and audit exposures will become a headache when scaling a business. This talk illustrates frequent pitfalls and proposes the needed processes, skills and capabilities of the emerging SaaS Management discipline for CEOs, CFOs and CIOs.

The Future Is Wide Open
with Abby Kearns (Puppet), Aghi Marietti (Kong) and Jason Warner (Redpoint)

  • Many startups today have an open-source component, and it’s no wonder. It builds an audience and helps drive sales. We’ll talk with Abby Kearns from Puppet, Augusto “Aghi” Marietti from Kong and Jason Warner, an investor at Redpoint, about why open source is such a popular way to build a business.

How Microsoft Shifted from On-Prem to the Cloud
with Jared Spataro (Microsoft)

  • Jared Spataro has been with Microsoft for over 15 years and he was a part of the shift from strictly on-prem software to that which is dominated by the cloud. Today he runs one of the most successful SaaS products out there, and we’ll talk to him about how Microsoft made that shift and what it’s meant to the company.

How Startups are Turning Data into Software Gold
with Jenn Knight (Agentsync), Barr Moses (Monte Carlo) and Dan Wright (DataRobot)

  • The era of big data is behind us. Today’s leading SaaS startups are working with data, instead of merely fighting to help customers collect information. We’ve collected three leaders from three data-focused startups that are forging new markets to get their insight on how today’s SaaS companies are leveraging data to build new companies, attack new problems and, of course, scale like mad.

Taking Your People from Startup to Scale (Sponsored by SAP)
with Max Wessel (SAP)

  • As your business grows, you need to help your people grow with you. And, in a world that is transforming faster than ever, the methods of developing your team don’t cut it. In this session you’ll hear from Max Wessel, Chief Learning Officer at SAP, about how to build a culture and workforce that is flexible, adaptable, and fit for a rocket ship.

Building a Hypergrowth SaaS Startup in a Remote World
with Deidre Paknad, Workboard

  • It’s hard to stand out in today’s startup market, given the sheer number of companies building, launching, and fundraising. But despite all the busyness, Workboard has made waves. Competing in a crowded niche, Deidre Paknad’s upstart tech company has posted huge growth despite COVID-19’s disruptions. We’ll sit down with the CEO to dig into how she managed to scale her company in both revenue, and human terms, despite the global pandemic. Founders, expect to learn something!

What Happens After Your Startup Is Acquired?
with Jyoti Bansal (Harness), Nick Mehta (GainSight) and Monica Sarbu (Xata.io)

  • We’ll speak to three founders about the emotional upheaval of being acquired and what happens after the check clears and the sale closes. Our panel includes Jyoti Bansal who founded AppDynamics, Nick Mehta from GainSight and Monica Sarbu who founded Elastic.

Setting Data in Motion
with Jay Kreps (Confluent)

  • Confluent, the streaming platform built on top of Apache Kafka, was born out of a project at LinkedIn, and rode that from startup to IPO. We’ll speak to co-founder and CEO Jay Kreps to learn about what that journey was like.

Future Forward: How Machine Learning and Human-in-the-Loop Approaches Are Expanding the Capabilities of Automation (sponsored by Akasa)
with Varun Ganapathi (Akasa)

  • Digital transformation efforts in a number of industries have driven massive adoption of robotic process automation (RPA) over the past decade. The hard truth is that RPA is a decades-old technology that is brittle with real limits to its capabilities. It will always have some value in automating work that is simple, discrete, and linear. However, the reason automation efforts often fall short of their aspirations is because so much of life is complex and constantly evolving – too much work falls outside of the capabilities of RPA. In this talk, Varun Ganapathi, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of AKASA will discuss how exceptions and outliers can actually make automation stronger and how emerging machine-learning-based technology platforms combined with human-in-the-loop approaches are already expanding what it is possible to automate across a number of industries.

Pro tip: Keep your finger on the pulse of TC Sessions: SaaS. Get updates when we announce new speakers, add events and offer ticket discounts.

Why should you carve a day out of your hectic schedule to attend TC Sessions: SaaS? This may be the first year we’ve focused on SaaS, but this ain’t our first rodeo. Here’s what other attendees have to say about their TC Sessions experience.

“TC Sessions: Mobility offers several big benefits. First, networking opportunities that result in concrete partnerships. Second, the chance to learn the latest trends and how mobility will evolve. Third, the opportunity for unknown startups to connect with other mobility companies and build brand awareness.” — Karin Maake, senior director of communications at FlashParking.

“People want to be around what’s interesting and learn what trends and issues they need to pay attention to. Even large companies like GM and Ford were there, because they’re starting to see the trend move toward mobility. They want to learn from the experts, and TC Sessions: Mobility has all the experts.” — Melika Jahangiri, vice president at Wunder Mobility.

TC Sessions: SaaS 2021 takes place on October 27. Grab your team, join your community and create opportunity. Don’t wait — jump on the early bird ticket sale right now.

Last day for early-bird savings on TC Sessions: SaaS 2021

All good things must come to an end, and this proverb totally applies to our early-bird price on passes to TC Sessions: SaaS 2021. Today’s the final day you can save $100 on the price of admission, folks. Join the global SaaS community to connect, inspire, network and learn how to build a stronger startup — without reinventing the wheel.

Buy your TC Sessions: SaaS pass by 11:59 pm (PT) tonight to score the early-bird price and save $100.

You’ll hear from and engage with the top leaders in a sector that’s both evolving and expanding at a rapid pace. These presentations and breakout sessions are interactive, so bring your questions and opinions (we know you have plenty of both) and shape the conversation as you learn more about the direction of the next generation of SaaS products, platforms and technology.

The TC Sessions: SaaS agenda covers a range of topics. This discussion on open source is just one great example:

  • The Future Is Wide Open: Many startups today have an open source component, and it’s no wonder. It builds an audience and helps drive sales. We’ll talk with Abby Kearns from Puppet, Augusto “Aghi” Marietti from Kong and Jason Warner, an investor at Redpoint, about why open source is such a popular way to build a business.

Automation is an essential SaaS element, and these two panel discussions take a deep dive into the role it plays now and in the future:

  • Automation’s Moment Is Now: One thing we learned during the pandemic is the importance of automation, and that’s only likely to be more pronounced as we move forward. We’ll talk with UiPath CEO Daniel Dines, Laela Sturdy, an investor at CapitalG, and Dave Wright from ServiceNow about why this is automation’s moment.
  • Future Forward — How Machine Learning and Human-in-the-Loop Approaches Are Expanding the Capabilities of Automation: Digital transformation efforts in a number of industries have driven massive adoption of robotic process automation (RPA) over the past decade. The hard truth is that RPA is a decades-old technology that is brittle, with real limits to its capabilities. It will always have some value in automating work that is simple, discrete and linear. However, the reason automation efforts often fall short of their aspirations is because so much of life is complex and constantly evolving — too much work falls outside of the capabilities of RPA. In this talk, Varun Ganapathi, AKASA co-founder and CTO, will discuss how exceptions and outliers can actually make automation stronger and how emerging machine-learning-based technology platforms combined with human-in-the-loop approaches are already expanding what it is possible to automate across a number of industries. Presented by AKASA.

Early-bird savings come to an end tonight at 11:59 pm (PT). Buy your TC Sessions: SaaS pass before the deadline, and you’ll save $100.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: SaaS 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Announcing the agenda for TechCrunch Sessions: SaaS

TechCrunch Sessions is back!

On October 27, we’re taking on the ferociously competitive field of software as a service (SaaS), and we’re thrilled to announce our packed agenda, overflowing with some of the biggest names and most exciting startups in the industry. And you’re in luck, because $75 early-bird tickets are still on sale — make sure you book yours so you can enjoy all the agenda has to offer and save $100 bucks before prices go up!

Throughout the day, you can expect to hear from industry experts, and take part in discussions about the potential of new advances in data, open source, how to deal with the onslaught of security threats, investing in early-stage startups and plenty more.

We’ll be joined by some of the biggest names and the smartest and most prescient people in the industry, including Javier Soltero at Google, Kathy Baxter at Salesforce, Jared Spataro at Microsoft, Jay Kreps at Confluent, Sarah Guo at Greylock and Daniel Dines at UiPath.

You’ll be able to find and engage with people from all around the world through world-class networking on our virtual platform — all for $75 and under for a limited time with even deeper discounts for nonprofits and government agencies, students and up-and-coming founders!

Our agenda showcases some of the powerhouses in the space, but also plenty of smaller teams that are building and debunking fundamental technologies in the industry. We still have a few tricks up our sleeves and will be adding some new names to the agenda over the next month, so keep your eyes open.

In the meantime, check out these agenda highlights:

Survival of the Fittest: Investing in Today’s SaaS Market
with Casey Aylward (Costanoa Ventures), Kobie Fuller (Upfront) and Sarah Guo (Greylock)

  • The venture capital world is faster, and more competitive than ever. For investors hoping to get into the hottest SaaS deal, things are even crazier. With more non-traditional money pouring into the sector, remote dealmaking now the norm, and an increasingly global market for software startups, venture capitalists are being forced to shake up their own operations, and expectations. TechCrunch sits down with three leading investors to discuss how they are fighting for allocation in hot deals, what they’ve changed in their own processes, and what today’s best founders are demanding.

Data, Data Everywhere
with Ali Ghodsi (Databricks)

  • As companies struggle to manage and share increasingly large amounts of data, it’s no wonder that Databricks, whose primary product is a data lake, was valued at a whopping $28 billion for its most recent funding round. We’re going to talk to CEO Ali Ghodsi about why his startup is so hot and what comes next.

SaaS Security, Today and Tomorrow
with Edna Conway (Microsoft), Olivia Rose (Amplitude)

  • Enterprises face a constant stream of threats, from nation states to cybercriminals and corporate insiders. After a year where billions worked from home and the cloud reigned supreme, startups and corporations alike can’t afford to stay off the security pulse. Find out what SaaS startups need to know about security now, and in the future.

Automation’s Moment Is Now
with Daniel Dines (UiPath), Laela Sturdy (CapitalG), and Dave Wright (ServiceNow)

  • One thing we learned during the pandemic is the importance of automation, and that’s only likely to be more pronounced as we move forward. We’ll be talking to UiPath CEO Daniel Dines, Laela Sturdy, an investor at CapitalG and Dave Wright from ServiceNow about why this is automation’s moment.

Was the Pandemic Cloud Productivity’s Spark
with Javier Soltero (Google)

  • One big aspect of SaaS is productivity apps like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive. We’ll talk with executive Javier Soltero about the role Google Workspace plays in the Google cloud strategy.

The Future is Wide Open
with Abby Kearns (Puppet), Aghi Marietti (Kong), and Jason Warner (Redpoint)

  • Many startups today have an open source component, and it’s no wonder. It builds an audience and helps drive sales. We’ll talk with Abby Kearns from Puppet, Augusto “Aghi” Marietti from Kong and Jason Warner an investor at Redpoint about why open source is such a popular way to build a business.

How Microsoft Shifted from on Prem to the Cloud
with Jared Spataro (Microsoft)

  • Jared Spataro has been with Microsoft for over 15 years and he was a part of the shift from strictly on prem software to one that is dominated by the cloud. Today he runs one of the most successful SaaS products out there, and we’ll talk to him about how Microsoft made that shift and what it’s meant to the company.

How Startups are Turning Data into Software Gold
with Jenn Knight (Agentsync), Barr Moses (Monte Carlo), and Dan Wright (DataRobot)

  • The era of big data is behind us. Today’s leading SaaS startups are working with data, instead of merely fighting to help customers collect information. We’ve collected three leaders from three data-focused startups that are forging new markets to get their insight on how today’s SaaS companies are leveraging data to build new companies, attack new problems, and, of course, scale like mad.

What Happens After Your Startup is Acquired
with Jyoti Bansal (Harness), Nick Mehta (GainSight)

  • We’ll speak to three founders about the emotional upheaval of being acquired and what happens after the check clears and the sale closes. Our panel includes Jyoti Bansal who founded AppDynamics, Jewel Burkes Solomon, who founded Partpic and Nick Mehta from GainSight.

How Confluent Rode the Open Source Wave to IPO
with Jay Kreps (Confluent)

  • Confluent, the streaming platform built on top of Apache Kafka, was born out of a project at LinkedIn and rode that from startup to IPO. We’ll speak to co-founder and CEO Jay Kreps to learn about what that journey was like.

We’ll have more sessions and names shortly, so stay tuned. But get excited in the meantime, we certainly are.

Pro tip: Keep your finger on the pulse of TC Sessions: SaaS. Get updates when we announce new speakers, add events and offer ticket discounts.

Why should you carve a day out of your hectic schedule to attend TC Sessions: SaaS? This may be the first year we’ve focused on SaaS, but this ain’t our first rodeo. Here’s what other attendees have to say about their TC Sessions experience.

“TC Sessions: Mobility offers several big benefits. First, networking opportunities that result in concrete partnerships. Second, the chance to learn the latest trends and how mhttps://techcrunch.com/2021/06/24/databricks-co-founder-and-ceo-ali-ghodsi-is-coming-to-tc-sessions-saas/obility will evolve. Third, the opportunity for unknown startups to connect with other mobility companies and build brand awareness.” — Karin Maake, senior director of communications at FlashParking.

“People want to be around what’s interesting and learn what trends and issues they need to pay attention to. Even large companies like GM and Ford were there, because they’re starting to see the trend move toward mobility. They want to learn from the experts, and TC Sessions: Mobility has all the experts.” — Melika Jahangiri, vice president at Wunder Mobility.

TC Sessions: SaaS 2021 takes place on October 27. Grab your team, join your community and create opportunity. Don’t wait — jump on the early bird ticket sale right now.

UIPath CEO Daniel Dines is coming to TC Sessions: SaaS to talk RPA and automation

UIPath came seemingly out of nowhere in the last several years, going public last year in a successful IPO during which it raised over $527 million. It raised $2 billion in private money prior to that with its final private valuation coming in at an amazing $35 billion. UIPath CEO Daniel Dines will be joining us on a panel on automation at TC Sessions: Saas on October 27th.

The company has been able capture all this investor attention doing something called Robotic Process Automation, which provides a way to automate a series of highly mundane tasks. It has become quite popular, especially to help bring a level of automation to legacy systems that might not be able to handle more modern approaches to automation involving artificial intelligence and machine learning. In 2019 Gartner found that RPA was the fastest growing category in enterprise software.

In point of fact,  UIPath didn’t actually come out of nowhere. It was founded in 2005 as a consulting company and transitioned to software over the years. The company took its first VC funding, a modest $1.5 million seed round in 2015, according to Crunchbase data.

As RPA found its market, the startup began to take off, raising gobs of money including a $568 million round in April 2019 and $750 million in its final private raise in February 2021.

Dines will be appearing on a panel discussing the role of automation in the enterprise. Certainly, the pandemic drove home the need for increased automation as masses of office workers moved to work from home, a trend that is likely to continue even after the pandemic slows.

As the RPA market leader, he is uniquely positioned to discuss how this software and other similar types will evolve in the coming years and how it could combine with related trends like no-code and process mapping. Dines will be joined on the panel by investor Laela Sturdy from Capital G and ServiceNow’s Dave Wright where they will discuss the state of the automation market, why it’s so hot and where the next opportunities could be.

In addition to our discussion with Dines, the conference will also include Databricks’ Ali Ghodsi, Salesforce’s Kathy Baxter and Puppet’s Abby Kearns, as well as investors Casey Aylward and Sarah Guo, among others. We hope you’ll join us. It’s going to be a stimulating day.

Buy your pass now to save up to $100. We can’t wait to see you in October!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: SaaS 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Affordable student passes available for TC Sessions: SaaS 2021

If you’re a current student or a recent grad with a burning passion for data, software and artificial intelligence, we want you to join us on October 27 for TC Sessions: SaaS 2021. The software-as-a-service sector keeps growing rapidly — both in size and sophistication, and it’s going to require a deep bench of thinkers, makers and technologists to create and wrangle a data-driven future.

We want to foster the next generation, and we’ve set aside discounted, budget-friendly passes especially for students. Register for your $35 student pass and get ready to meet, network with and learn from the global SaaS community’s most influential founders, makers and investors.

Your student pass provides full access to all the day’s events — main stage presentations, panel discussions, breakout sessions and networking with CrunchMatch. Video-on-demand takes care of any schedule conflicts — you don’t have to miss a single presentation.

A quick word about networking at TC Sessions: SaaS. Whether you’re hunting for internships, employment, mentorship, a co-founder or investors, you won’t find a better place or opportunity to meet the people who can help you launch your dreams.

Deal Sweetener: Your pass includes a free, one-month subscription to Extra Crunch, our members-only program featuring exclusive daily articles for founders and startup teams.

While we’re not quite ready to reveal the full agenda, we can share some of the speakers we have lined up. And (not-so-humble-brag) what a group it is so far.

We’re talking folks like investors Casey Aylward (Costanoa Ventures) and Sarah Guo (Greylock), Databricks’ Ali Ghodsi, Javier Soltero, Google’s head of Workspace, UiPath’s Daniel Dines, Puppet’s Abby Kearns and Monte Carlo co-founder, CEO and data junkie extraordinaire, Barr Moses.

Who would you love to hear from at TC Sessions: SaaS? The TechCrunch editorial team is accepting recommendations for speakers. Submit your recommendations here no later than 11:59 pm (PT) on September 29.

Register here for updates and keep your fingers on the pulse of this event as we announce new speakers, events and ticket discounts.

TC Sessions: SaaS 2021 takes place on October 27. Jump on this student discount, join the global SaaS community and take advantage of every opportunity.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: SaaS 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Salesforce’s Kathy Baxter is coming to TC Sessions: SaaS to talk AI

As the use of AI has grown and developed over the last several years, companies like Salesforce have tried to tap into it to improve their software and help customers operate faster and more efficiently. Kathy Baxter, principal architect for the ethical AI practice at Salesforce will be joining us at TechCrunch Sessions: SaaS on October 27th to talk about the impact of AI on SaaS.

Baxter, who has more than 20 years of experience as a software architect, joined Salesforce in 2017 after more than a decade at Google in a similar role. We’re going to tap into her expertise on a panel discussing AI’s growing role in software.

Salesforce was one of the earlier SaaS adherents to AI, announcing its artificial intelligence tooling, which the company dubbed Einstein, in 2016. While the positioning makes it sound like a product, it’s actually much more than a single entity. It’s a platform component, which the various pieces of the Salesforce platform can tap into to take advantage of various types of AI to help improve the user experience.

That could involve feeding information to customer service reps on Service Cloud to make the call move along more efficiently, helping salespeople find the customers most likely to close a deal soon in the Sales Cloud or helping marketing understand the optimal time to send an email in the Marketing Cloud.

The company began building out its AI tooling early on with the help of 175 data scientists and has been expanding on that initial idea since. Other companies, both startups and established companies like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft have continued to build AI into their platforms as Salesforce has. Today, many SaaS companies have some underlying AI built into their service.

Baxter will join us to discuss the role of AI in software today and how that helps improve the operations of the service itself, and what the implications are of using AI in your software service as it becomes a mainstream part of the SaaS development process.

In addition to our discussion with Baxter, the conference will also include Databricks’ Ali Ghodsi, UiPath’s Daniel Dines, Puppet’s Abby Kearns, and investors Casey Aylward and Sarah Guo, among others. We hope you’ll join us. It’s going to be a stimulating day.

Buy your pass now to save up to $100, and use CrunchMatch to make expanding your empire quick, easy and efficient. We can’t wait to see you in October!

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Cloud Foundry coalesces around Kubernetes

In a normal year, the Cloud Foundry project would be hosting its annual European Summit in Dublin this week. But this is 2020, so it’s a virtual event. This year, however, has been a bit of a transformative year for the open-source Platform-as-a-Service project — in more ways than one. With Cloud Foundry executive director Abby Kearns leaving earlier this year, the organizations’ former CTO Chip Childers stepped into the role. Maybe just as importantly, though, the project’s move to Kubernetes as its container orchestration tool of choice — and a renewed focus on the Cloud Foundry developer experience — is now starting to bear fruit.

“In April, I took over the job. I said: ‘Listen, our community has a new North Star. It’s to go take the Cloud Foundry developer experience and get that thing re-platformed onto Kubernetes . No more delay, no more diversity of thought here. It’s time to make the move,’ ” Childers said (with a chuckle). “And here we are. It’s October, we have our ecosystem aligned, we have major project releases that are fulfilling that vision. And we’ve got a community that’s very energized around it continuing the work of progressing this integration with a bunch of cloud-native projects.”

Developers who use Cloud Foundry, Childers argued, love it, but the project now has an opportunity to show a wider range of potential use that it can offer a smoother developer experience on top of virtually any Kubernetes cluster.

One of the projects that is working on making this happen — and which hit its 1.0 release today, is cf-for-k8s. Traditionally, getting up and running with Cloud Foundry was a heavy lift — and something that most companies left to third-party vendors to handle. This new project, which launched in April, allows developers to spin up a relatively light-weight Cloud Foundry distribution on top of a Kubernetes cluster — using projects like Istio and Fluentd, in addition to Kubernetes — and to do so within minutes.

“It comes along with the whole process of reimagining our architecture to pull in other projects a lot more aggressively and allows us to get to feature parity [with the classic VM-focused Cloud Foundry experience] using a lot more complementary open-source projects,” Childers said about the larger role of this project in the overall ecosystem. “That lets our community focus less on building the underlying plumbing and [spend] more time thinking about how to speed up innovation and the developer experience.”

This wouldn’t be open source if there wasn’t another project that does something quite similar — at least at first glance. That’s KubeCF, which hit its 2.5 launch today. This is an open-source distribution of the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime that, as Childers explained, is meant for production use and that was originally meant to provide existing users a bridge onto the Kubernetes bandwagon. Over time, these two projects will likely merge. “Everyone’s collaborating on what this shared vision looks like. They’re just, they’re just two different distributions that handle the different use cases today,” Childers explained.

After six months in his new position, Childers noted that he’s seeing a lot of energy in the community right now. The job is hard, he said, when there’s unhealthy disagreement, but right now, what he’s seeing is “a beautiful harmony of agreement.”

Cloud Foundry renews its focus on developer experience as it looks beyond the enterprise

The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) just went through a major leadership change, with executive director Abby Kearns stepping down after five years (and becoming a CTO at Puppet) and the CFF’s CTO Chip Childers stepping into the top leadership role in the organization. For the most part, though, these changes are only accelerating some of the strategic moves the organization already made in the last few years.

If you’re unfamiliar with the open-source Cloud Foundry project, it’s a Platform-as-a-Service that’s in use by the majority of Fortune 500 enterprises. After a lot of technical changes, which essentially involved building out support for containers and adding Kubernetes as an option for container orchestration next to the container tools Cloud Foundry built long before the rise of Google’s open-source tool, the technical underpinnings of the project are now stable. And as Childers has noted before, that now allows the project to refocus its efforts on developer experience.

That, after all, was always the selling point of Cloud Foundry. Developers stick to a few rules and, in return, they can easily push their apps to Cloud Foundry with a single command (“cf push”) and know that it will run, while the enterprises that employ them get the benefits of faster development cycles.

On the flip side, though, actually managing that Cloud Foundry install was never easy, and required either a heavy lift from internal infrastructure teams or the help of outside firms like Pivotal, IBM, SAP, Suse and others to run and manage the platform. That pretty much excluded smaller companies, and especially startups, from using the platform. As Childers noted, some still did use it, but that was never the project’s focus.

Now, with the Kubernetes underpinnings in place, he believes that it will become easier for non-enterprise users to also get started with the platform. And projects like KubeCF and CF for K8s now offers a full Cloud Foundry distribution for Kubernetes, which makes it relatively easy to use the platform on top of modern infrastructure.

To highlight some of these changes, the CFF today unveiled its new tutorial hub that will not just explain what Cloud Foundry is, but also feature tutorials to get started. Some of these will be hosted and written by the Foundation itself, while community members will contribute others.

“Our community has created a learning hub, curated by the Cloud Foundry Foundation, of open-source tutorials for folks to learn Cloud Foundry and related cloud native technologies,” said Childers. “The hub includes an interactive hands-on lab for first-time Cloud Foundry users to experience how easy the platform makes deploying applications to Kubernetes, and is open for the community to contribute.”