Touring Capital, with participation from Zoom Ventures, led the latest funding round for SafeBase, investing between $15 and $20 million in the software company. Other investors, like Y Combinator and Comcast Ventures, brought the total Series B funding to $33 million. SafeBase, headquartered in San Francisco, offers a trust center platform that “automates the security review process between buyers and sellers,” according to the company’s blog.
But what does that mean in practice? SafeBase allows enterprises like OpenAI, Asana, LinkedIn, Hootsuite, and HubSpot to share security information with customers and buyers. This enables companies to share pen test reports, responses to incidents and breaches, network diagrams, and more.
CEO and co-founder Al Yang told IT Brew in an email that IT and security pros use the platform to “help streamline and bring transparency to the tech sales process,” noting that “security reviews have become a broken, inconsistent process.”
“SafeBase’s Trust Center provides a centralized, accessible platform for IT and security professionals to showcase their organization’s security posture,” he said. “What truly separates SafeBase is our focus on enterprise-grade features and reducing friction in the security review process.”
IT Brew caught up with Priya Saiprasad, a co-founder and general partner at Touring Capital, to chat about the investment and to discuss what the future may look like for founders tapping into the security, AI, and software spaces.
Why did you decide to invest in this trust center platform?
“I had actually spent a lot of time thinking through what the future of compliance looks like—what the future of privacy looks like, as well as general regulation in that sector for almost two, three years now. So developing a thesis, talking to a bunch of CIOs as well as CISOs [in] this space, and I had talked to a bunch of folks who are tackling it from a SOC2 compliance angle…also folks who are tackling it from a GRC and privacy type of an angle,” she told IT Brew.
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While working at SoftBank and leading an investment in a SaaS buying and management platform called Vendr, she came across an interesting stat: “SafeBase was one of the few Series A stage companies that was the most requested on the Vendr platform.”
“That stat was very fascinating for me, so I ended up connecting with the founder and ended up learning a little bit more about what they’re building—and it just clicked,” she said. “When you’ve been building a thesis for two to three years, and you passed on a lot of companies in the space, and then finally, you see—this was the missing link.”
Tell me a bit about Touring Capital’s investments in AI, security, and software and how these may overlap?
“We sit at the nexus of it all,” she said. “Because fundamentally, at the core, we love software. Pretty much every business that we invest in will be some form of software and some B2B application use case…But having said that, the future of software touches AI. Because I think in the next decade, most software companies are going to be AI-enabled in some way, shape, or form.”
“If I were to predict the other part of security-meets-AI-meets-software that I’m really excited about is identity, and how do you protect employee identity, customer identity—and how do you bridge the gap in identity access management, as a whole, in an AI-first world?”