Rally Updates

We were thrilled to have Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, join us at this year’s Annual Meeting to give a talk about Khan Academy’s educational chatbot, Khanmigo. You can watch Sal’s TED Talk below.

Rally Venture Partner Ben Fried recently put together a Large Language Model overview and recommended reading list for those of us interested in learning more about how it works, what it’s good at (and not good at) and where the technology is going. We’ve never seen a technology move this fast, and we’re both excited about the opportunities it will bring and cautious about implementing LLMs responsibly.

SailPoint Technologies Inc. today announced it has acquired identity solutions startup SecZetta Inc. for an undisclosed sum.

Toluna, the leading consumer insights provider and parent company of Harris Interactive and KuRunData, today announced the acquisition of GutCheck, the leading agile market research agency based in North America.

We were glad to gather in person with the Rally community recently! Below are short recaps from our Annual Meeting and RSA.

Rally Ventures launched a job board! There are hundreds of exciting open roles across our portfolio in AI/ML, cybersecurity, fintech, HRtech, SaaS+ and more.

We’re excited to share that Bbot, the leading contactless order and pay solution for the hospitality industry, entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by DoorDash on March 1st.

Last month we celebrated Braze becoming a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: BRZE). Rally Ventures led Braze’s Series A financing in 2013, and we’ve been proud to partner with the company on its entrepreneurial journey ever since that initial investment.

I recently dug into the Backtrace story with Founders Abel Mathew and Samy Al Bahra. We covered everything from our first meeting in South Philly to Backtrace’s successful sale to Sauce Labs earlier this year. In part two of the Backtrace story, I’m taking a deep dive into four questions with Co-Founder and CEO Abel Mathew.

I first met the Backtrace co-founders at a sports bar in South Philly during the 2014 World Cup. Abel Mathew and Samy Al Bahra rented a car and drove down from New York City to meet me while I was in town for a family reunion. I doubt they had planned to pitch the company to my entire family over beers before watching the US narrowly lose to the Netherlands, but there we were.