All News (Page 304)

Jensen Huang’s Nvidia GTC is kind of like tech’s Super Bowl Halftime Show. 

Everyone wants to be there, and if you’re not there, you inevitably end up hearing about it. And on Monday afternoon, Huang hit on agentic AI, the fast-approaching future of compute, offered a chip demand outlook, and emphasized the idea of “AI factories.” For startups and growing private companies, here are a few things to consider:

Talk to Nvidia’s agent. First, say hello to NemoClaw: The perennially leather-jacket-clad Huang unveiled NemoClaw, a new open source platform focused on agentic AI. The name is seemingly intentional, likely referencing the recent success of viral AI agent OpenClaw, while giving companies enterprise-grade privacy and security controls. “Every company in the world today needs to have an OpenClaw strategy, an agentic system strategy,” Huang told the audience. “This is the new computer.”

Physical AI has arrived. Huang emphasized that physical AI, especially robotics, is Nvidia’s next major market, perhaps worth one trillion or more. Many VCs would agree with Huang’s assessment, as billions of venture dollars have flowed into AI-era robotics companies like industrial-focused Skild AI and humanoid builder Apptronik. 

Nvidia wants to do it all. Fortune’s Sharon Goldman says it all comes down to how Nvidia sees its own future. She writes: “Nvidia made it clear at GTC that it is positioning itself not just as a chipmaker but as the provider of entire AI computing systems powering the new “inference” phase of AI. (Inference is about powering AI outputs, not just training, and it will require an enormous new round of infrastructure investment.) That ambition goes beyond Nvidia’s traditional “picks and shovels” role.”

Read on Sharon’s take about why Nvidia hasn’t seen more AI-fueled backlash here.

Term Sheet Podcast… This week’s guest is someone I’ve been wanting to meet in person for some time: Winston Weinberg, Harvey CEO and cofounder. Harvey’s a legal AI leader, and the company’s 3.5 years old with an $11 billion valuation. Winston and I talked about Harvey’s rise, AI’s “partner and compete” paradigm, and his formula for finding focus. Watch the episode here.

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com

Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here

RunSybil, an AI cybersecurity startup that uses AI agents to automatically hack company software to find security weaknesses, has secured $40 million in venture capital funding.

The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from S32, the Anthology Fund from Anthropic and Menlo Ventures, Conviction and Elad Gil, along with angel investors including Nikesh Arora, Amit Agarwal, Jeff Dean, and other founders and leaders from companies including OpenAI, Palo Alto Networks, Stripe and Google. 

The company did not disclose the valuation it achieved in the new funding round.

The company’s AI agent, Sybil, conducts continuous autonomous penetration tests against live applications—finding, exploiting and documenting real security vulnerabilities without humans in the loop. That’s different from other security tools currently making headlines, such as Claude Code Security, which analyzes source code in applications for known vulnerabilities before it is deployed.

RunSybil instead tests software that is already running, probing live systems the way a hacker would—by exploring systems, chaining vulnerabilities together and testing authentication boundaries to find paths to sensitive data.

Automating ‘ethical hacking’

Companies have long relied on a mix of penetration tests—where outside security experts, or “ethical hackers,” try to break into their systems; bug bounty programs that reward independent hackers for reporting flaws; and internal “red teams” that simulate real cyberattacks. RunSybil says its AI system can automate much of that work, continuously probing applications for vulnerabilities as new code is deployed.

RunSybil argues this kind of automation is becoming necessary as AI reshapes how companies operate. Procurement, legal, finance, engineering and operations are all being rebuilt with AI—including the growing use of AI agents. Yet security testing is still often treated as a discrete, scheduled event managed by a separate team on its own timeline. That mismatch can be especially challenging for highly regulated industries such as finance, insurance and health care, which face strict legal and audit requirements around cybersecurity.

RunSybil was co-founded in 2023 by Ari Herbert-Voss, who joined OpenAI as its first security research hire in 2019, and Vlad Ionescu, who previously led offensive security red teams at Meta. Together, they say they represent a rare intersection: people who understand how to build frontier AI systems and how to hack into complex software.

“We check every box that needs to be checked—for auditors, regulators and compliance teams,” Herbert-Voss said. But the real work, he said is transforming where, when and how customers discover and fix security issues: “Not as a project, but as a permanent capability embedded in how they build.”

‘On the edge’ of the AI security frontier

Vinod Khosla, who made an early bet on OpenAI in 2019 and often invests in companies he considers to be on the technological frontier, told Fortune that “what it takes to add security and penetration testing to the AI world is definitely frontier—RunSybil is on the edge.” There is currently little competition in this part of the offensive security market, he said, though security incumbents such as Palo Alto Networks may eventually move into the space.

For now, “nobody’s really knowledgeable about it except individuals like [Herbert-Voss],” he said, adding that he has long been concerned about AI’s cyber capabilities falling into the hands of adversaries such as China. “We invest in founders who tackle large, unsolved problems with technically ambitious solutions,” he added. “[Herbert-Voss and Ionsecu] are building exactly the kind of platform security teams will need as software complexity and AI-driven development accelerate.”

Herbert-Voss has long been steeped in both hacking and AI. Growing up in a mostly Mormon community in Utah, he said he was drawn to the online hacker scene in middle and high school but pivoted away after friends “started getting arrested.” While pursuing a Ph.D. at Harvard University studying machine learning and ways to make algorithms more efficient, he first heard about OpenAI.

He dropped out of Harvard, he said, after becoming convinced that the rapid scaling of AI models—training larger systems with more data and computing power—would unlock powerful new capabilities.

Evolving cyber capabilities with LLMs

“Once OpenAI dropped GPT-2, I said wow, this changes everything about the economics of what it would take to run a cyber campaign,” he explained. He sent a couple of hacker demos to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Jack Clark, then-head of policy at OpenAI who went on to co-found Anthropic. Both of them expressed their concerns about the potential misuse of LLMs and asked Herbert-Voss to come on to do security research.

But by 2022, Herbert-Voss said he also began to see how quickly offensive cyber capabilities could evolve once powerful language models became widely available, including to malicious actors. Those same advances, he said, could dramatically expand cyber threats. That led to Herbert-Voss’s decision to leave OpenAI and start RunSybil as a research project.

RunSybil currently works with startups including Cursor, Turbopuffer, Notion, Baseten, and Thinking Machines Lab, as well as what the company says are major financial institutions and Fortune 500 companies. (The company declined to name any of those Fortune 500 or financial customers.) Herbert-Voss said that customers have already reported finding critical vulnerabilities that had gone undetected using traditional methods.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here

• In today’s CEO Daily: How CEOs are protecting their pay packages by lowering their goals
• The big leadership story: Whether Meta’s reported 20% layoffs will encourage a new wave of job cuts
• The markets: A big Asia rebound
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. Call it the Hall of Blame. One time-honored tradition in business is to take credit for what goes well, blame disappointing results on factors beyond your control and lower the bar in tough times to be able to clear it so that your pay package remains intact.

When Apple set performance targets for fiscal 2025 for CEO Tim Cook and his executive team last year, the board set goals at or below the prior year’s result, citing “trade policy” and an “uncertain macroeconomic outlook.” As my colleague Amanda Gerut points out, that essentially guaranteed that Cook would take home a $12 million bonus, no matter how well he did. (Apple handily surpassed the modest targets.)

With wobbly markets, rising oil prices, war and fears of a global recession, keep an eye on compensation packages. What I look for:

Reduced targets—In an analysis of 50 public companies by Compensation Advisory Partners (CAP), published Friday, researchers found that boards set lower targets, wider performance curves and flatter payout ranges to protect CEO pay last year. The result: Pay rose 8% and bonuses were up 4% in the group while revenue rose slightly and earnings were down. CEOs collected 87% of their target bonuses, up from 77% in 2024.

Selfless rhetoric—While good times are ‘me’ time, bad times are all about ‘we.’ When taxpayers rescued big banks during the 2008 financial crisis, some characterized this as privatizing the gains and socializing the pain. But in bad times, few are above turning to the government for support. If you’re not too big to fail, you might be mission-critical, a social good or a bulwark against China. Masters of the universe become ordinary people blown by the winds of fate when those winds are in their face.

Blame—Dexin Zhou of Emory University published a fascinating study in 2014 called The Blame Game, in which he analyzed 70,000 earnings transcripts to track leaders who blamed factors in the economy or their industry for poor results. Those who blamed external factors deflected attention from themselves were less likely to be fired than those who held themselves accountable for the results. When times are bad, it seems, the pain doesn’t start at the top.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here

Giving away billions sounds easy. Write a check and change the world. But Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, admitted last year that, actually, “it is very difficult to give money away for the reality of goodness.” And perhaps surprisingly, a nonprofit boss has said he’s not wrong.

Liz Baker, the CEO of Greater Good Charities—a global nonprofit that has distributed more than $1 billion in impact across 121 countries since 2006—has been navigating the complexity of giving away other people’s money for over a decade. And she’ll tell you Musk is only scratching the surface of how hard it really is.

“I wish I had a billion dollars to give away, but as somebody who’s responsible for giving away money, yeah, it’s hard, because there’s a really big responsibility that goes with that,” Baker exclusively told Fortune. “If you give me $1, I’m going to spend it the way that you want it spent. But there’s all this stuff that goes into it—geopolitical stuff, you don’t want to create dependencies in communities—like, what is the right avenue, and what are things that are really needed?”

Baker, who has led Greater Good Charities since 2012, oversees an organization that spans crisis and disaster response, humanitarian relief, biodiversity, and animal health and well-being across more than 120 countries. Under her watch, it has earned a 100/100 score from Charity Navigator and a Platinum Rating from GuideStar for transparency—the nonprofit equivalent of straight A’s.

Her critique isn’t that giving is impossible—it’s that most people dramatically underestimate what it requires. 

Unlike a normal transaction—where a donor gets something tangible in return, a product, a deliverable, a number they can point to—philanthropy asks you to fund a vision: here’s the problem, here’s the solution, here’s the hoped-for outcome. And then you have to wait years to see if you were actually right.”You can’t just go at a problem and be like, here’s a billion dollars, figure out the problem,” Baker said. “It’s too complicated. It doesn’t work like that.”

Essentially, it’s one thing to sign away a big paycheck, but as Musk says, it’s another thing to actually create tangible change for good with that money.

The antidote? Perhaps a more trial-and-error approach. What doesn’t happen enough, in her view, is the kind of nimble, honest reckoning with failure that good philanthropy demands. “Being able to pivot and being able to say, okay, this didn’t work—what do we do differently? A lot of testing,” she said. “You can’t just go at a problem, it’s too complicated.”

Stop waiting for billionaires. Do something yourself.

Billionaire pledges are great—in theory. 

“A pledge is a promise, right?” Baker said, when asked whether such commitments mean anything in practice. “Our experience with pledges is that most of the time donors will come through—not all of the time, though.”

Indeed, many remain little more than a name on an open letter. Just look at The Giving Pledge—the commitment, co-founded by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett, that asks the ultra-wealthy to donate at least 50% of their fortunes—has attracted more than 250 signatories since its launch in 2010.

The number who have actually followed through? A handful—less than 10. Most only fulfilled the pledge after their deaths. Out of the U.S. signatories, just one couple, John and Laura Arnold, fully complied with the commitment they signed. 

It’s why Baker doesn’t think we can wait on billionaires to solve the world’s problems. “I think if everybody did something to help in their community, we wouldn’t have the issues that we have.”

How can everyday people be more philanthropic right now?

Baker’s not naive about most people’s economic reality. Cost-of-living pressures have squeezed household budgets to the point where even six-figure earners report struggling to afford basics. 

But making a difference doesn’t have to come at a cost. “Everybody can chip in—and it doesn’t even have to be money. Like, do something.”

“Even if you’re like, I have one hour a week to solve this problem in my community that I care about,” Baker said. “Figure out how to do that. Most local nonprofits need help.”

The worst thing you can do, in her eyes, is just complain. “There are people that are just like, well, I don’t like to see homeless people sitting on the corner, but I’m not willing to do anything about it except complain,” she said. “Innovate, people. Come on. Everybody’s good at something. Everybody cares about something.”

And she practices what she preaches. Despite running a multimillion-dollar organization and being a mother, Baker volunteers outside of her CEO role—showing up not as an executive but simply as someone with something to give back. “I volunteer—not as a CEO—as a person who has something to give back,” she said. “In a way, that’s like showing up and doing the work very differently than what I do here.”

“If everybody did that, we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This post was originally published here