◈ Homepage — https://www.delltechnologiescapital.com/About Team Companies News & Resources WITH YOU Leading investments in the enterprise since 2012. FROM  START TO SCALE LayerX joins Akamai AI Powering AKKA's Breakout Moment Sri Viswanath's Sycamore: Building the Agent OS for the Future OpenObserve: Modern Observability for Cloud Infrastructure Enterprise GTM Foundations: Everything You Need to Scale Early-stage Sales How AI Infra's "Messy Middle" technologies found its stride DTC is a team of investors, technologists, and operators working with people building foundational technologies. Meet DTC $ 0 B+ Invested to date 0 IPOs 0 + Acquisitions We invest early and stay committed, offering our portfolio companies deep domain expertise, operational know-how, and real customer connections. Frequently Asked Questions About us How we invest How we help Connecting with DTC Who is Dell Technologies Capital? Dell Tech Capital (DTC) is the venture investment team of Dell Technologies. We invest in the early-stage companies that are building what’s next in enterprise tech across the U.S., Israel, and Europe. Since coming together in 2012, we’ve put more than $1.8B to work. As a team, we go beyond just the financial investment to offer market fit & pricing analysis, deck reviews, sales leadership coaching, pipeline benchmarking, media relations and announcement support, and direct customer introductions. Is Dell Tech Capital a financial VC or a CVC? We are a financial returns-driven VC practice with returns performance that is consistently in the 95th percentile when compared against early-stage venture investment firms. We also have the great fortune to be connected to one of the most notable technology platforms in the world: Dell Technologies. Being a part of Dell Technologies gives us the potential to access F1000 customers, world-class technologists, and partnerships to help drive human progress through enterprise technology innovation. WHO WE INVEST IN See the full portfolio FEATURED LayerX joins Akamai Or Eshed and David Vaisbrud started LayerX with a clear view of where enterprise work was heading: the browser. No longer just a window to the internet, it was becoming the de facto workspace. And now they're bringing that vision and their LayerX platform to Akamai. Read more Stay in the loop with our newsletter. Subscribe here Company About Team Companies Connect LinkedIn X Get in Touch News & Resources Resources DTC Podcast © 2024 Dell Inc. Privacy Terms of Service Accessibility Legal Dell Technology ◈ Interior Pages — 16 pages crawledDTC | Resources -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast NEWS & RESOURCES News, hard-earned insights, strategies, and approaches to starting and scaling enterprise technology companies from the people who’ve done it. Featured LayerX joins Akamai Or Eshed and David Vaisbrud started LayerX with a clear view of where enterprise work was heading: the browser. No longer just a window to the internet, it was becoming the de facto workspace. And now they're bringing that vision and their LayerX platform to Akamai. Read more All GTM Foundations Blog Posts Case Studies Podcasts Tags Acquisitions & IPOs Funding GTM Foundations Perspectives Portfolio Spotlight Strategies The DTC Podcast Clear All Thank you! Your submission has been received! Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form. 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Please, try different filters. Stay in the loop with our newsletter. Subscribe here Company About Team Companies Connect LinkedIn X Get in Touch News & Resources Resources DTC Podcast © 2024 Dell Inc. Privacy Terms of Service Accessibility Legal Dell Technology DTC | AI Powering AKKA's Breakout Moment -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast Back to content AI Powering AKKA's Breakout Moment Written by DTC Team Published April 27, 2026 Perspectives Table of Contents Example H2 Example H3 Example H4 Example H5 Example H6 Company journey ‍ Perspectives https://www.delltechnologiescapital.com/resources/ai-powering-akkas-breakout-moment For startups, timing is everything. Too early to market and users are overwhelmed by the technology. Too late, and the first-mover advantage is gone. Most have only a small window of opportunity to best rivals and win over early customers. That is, unless you’re Akka. Akka's story is emblematic of what sometimes happens with foundational innovations in tech: they often take years—or even decades—to find their scaled market fit. Virtualization technology, which underpins modern cloud computing, was first developed in the 1960s by IBM but didn’t achieve mainstream adoption until the mid-2000s with the rise of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Similarly, artificial intelligence (AI) research began in the 1950s, yet it’s taken significant advancements in computational power, large datasets, and deep learning algorithms to unlock the potential we are seeing right now. In Akka’s case, its distributed computing architecture was ahead of its time, solving problems that many industries hadn’t yet encountered at scale. The AI revolution has now revealed the true value of Akka’s technology, as the same principles that made it a leader in distributed systems—scalability, fault tolerance, and real-time processing—are now critical for building reliable AI platforms. A Long Road to the Cutting Edge For the past 20 years, the distributed computing pioneer used by Walmart, Apple, and Starbucks was unknowingly waiting for its breakout moment: the AI revolution. Or as current CEO Tyler Jewell puts it: Akka creator Jonas Bonér has been “building an AI platform for 20 years, he just didn't realize it until AI came.” Jonas built the Akka platform around the Actor Model, a computational framework originally created way back in 1973 by Carl Hewitt. The Actor Model revolutionized distributed computing by enabling systems to handle concurrency and fault tolerance through lightweight, isolated "actors" that communicate asynchronously. This foundational approach allowed Akka to address the challenges of distributed systems for applications at scale long before AI became a focus for every company in the Fortune 2000. “Companies as old as us, they have a tendency to be slow to change,” Tyler said, commenting on the sea change in a recent interview. “Right now, we’re on the cutting edge.” ‍ Skepticism to Obsession Akka almost didn’t make it. Several years ago, the company nearly filed for bankruptcy. But a $25 million funding round led by Tyler as an investor at Dell Technologies Capital kept it alive. At the time, Akka “didn’t have a commercial product, didn’t have market share, but the technology itself was so widely used,” Tyler said, that it warranted one last shot at success. Soon after, customers started bringing up AI and the challenges of building systems to support this old-is-new-again technology. Initially, both Jonas and Tyler were skeptical that the hype would translate to commercial use for Akka. But after exploring the technology himself, Tyler was quickly convinced of the opportunity. The Akka team kept hearing from companies how unreliable AI systems were. Dissatisfied with the options available, some were even building their own internal AI development platforms. It was clear the market needed a more robust solution, and Tyler knew Akka was the answer. Akka's bend towards AI was not a sudden shift but a natural evolution of its distributed computing expertise. The same principles that made Akka a leader in distributed systems—scalability, fault tolerance, and real-time processing—are now critical for AI platforms. By consolidating orchestration, memory, and streaming into a unified system — one that delivers self-protecting and self-governing runtimes — Akka has transitioned from solving distributed computing challenges to addressing the complexities of AI. Within a few weeks, Akka released its first AI product, signaling the seriousness with which the company was taking this pivot: “We took a couple of people offline for a week … and we realized AI systems are distributed systems. It was a perfect pairing,” he said. ‍ An AI Beacon It’s not just Akka’s technology that’s meeting the AI moment. Internally, the company is embodying the AI mentality throughout operations. Employees are expected to spend their days in agentic interfaces, not toggling through various applications. New hires are evaluated based on their ability to use AI tools. The company is planning to “vibe coding” its own internal software to reduce the reliance on external vendors. Akka is even redesigning its website for an era where people talk to AI agents, not search engines. As a testament to that energy, at a recent sales kickoff non-technical teams even used Akka to build their own software. “Not only are we this reliable AI platform but we also have to be a beacon for how you use AI to run a business,” said Tyler. “We’re 20 years old, but you can’t let that 20-year history hold you back. You have to have a ‘Series A’ mindset.” We talked to Tyler to learn more about how the self-described “middle-age” startup is preparing for its AI moment. ‍ ‘We can put outcomes in writing’ Today, companies are experimenting with different AI tools, but haven’t yet settled on their preferred set-up. In fact, the majority of CIOs report regret over their early AI buying decisions. The problem? Many of the nascent AI solutions lack important proof points. Without extensive customer use, early kinks haven’t been worked out. As a result, customers are struggling to actually deliver value from the technology. That’s not the case at Akka. With a long list of real-world proof points, the company can confidently promise outcomes others can’t: a secure, consolidated foundation for secure, trustworthy, and cost-effective AI agents. “Many of these AI platforms are young technologies. They often demo really well, but companies quickly find out that getting and keeping the systems in production is complex and expensive,” said Tyler. “When companies experience those pains, we come in and do everything they do with none of the pain, and have a 20-year track record that proves it.” It’s a powerful sales pitch for C-suite leaders eager to show progress on AI, but concerned over releasing embryonic technology into their IT environments. While other point solutions lack critical, enterprise-grade features, like security and governance, Akka customers get a battle-tested platform with guarantees around availability, performance, accuracy, and safety. “We can put outcomes in writing, to the point where there are severe financial penalties for us if we don't deliver,” Tyler said. Industry is responding to both the tech and those performance guarantees. Akka’s technologies power more than 100,000 systems across a third of the Fortune 500. Its AI platform has tripled in growth annually in the last two years running. ‍ The Akka advantage Akka’s platform was built around the concept of distributed computing, an architecture that improves the speed, accuracy, and the overall quality of the AI system. AI agents must be able to process large amounts of real-time contextual data at ultra-fast latency, and maintain this reliability as the number of concurrent users grows. Otherwise, users will face long lag times, inaccurate responses and AI agents that suddenly stall. Once in production, companies must also guard against unexpec DTC | Leading investments in the enterprise. No items found. Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast With you Leading investments in the enterprise since 2012. from start to scale Leading investments in the enterprise since 2012. Featured Episode Featured case study LayerX joins Akamai Featured Episode Featured case study Featured Episode Featured case study AI Powering AKKA's Breakout Moment Featured Episode Featured case study Sri Viswanath's Sycamore: Building the Agent OS for the Future Featured Episode Featured case study OpenObserve: Modern Observability for Cloud Infrastructure Featured Episode Featured case study Enterprise GTM Foundations: Everything You Need to Scale Early-stage Sales Featured Episode Featured case study How AI Infra's "Messy Middle" technologies found its stride DTC is a team of investors, technologists, and operators working with people building foundational technologies. Meet DTC $ 1.8 B+ Invested to date 10 IPOs 85 + Acquisitions We invest early and stay committed, offering our portfolio companies deep domain expertise, operational know-how, and real customer connections. Frequently Asked Questions About us How we invest How we help Connecting with DTC Who is Dell Technologies Capital? Dell Tech Capital (DTC) is the venture investment team of Dell Technologies. We invest in the early-stage companies that are building what’s next in enterprise tech across the U.S., Israel, and Europe. Since coming together in 2012, we’ve put more than $1.8B to work. As a team, we go beyond just the financial investment to offer market fit & pricing analysis, deck reviews, sales leadership coaching, pipeline benchmarking, media relations and announcement support, and direct customer introductions. Is Dell Tech Capital a financial VC or a CVC? We are a financial returns-driven VC practice with returns performance that is consistently in the 95th percentile when compared against early-stage venture investment firms. We also have the great fortune to be connected to one of the most notable technology platforms in the world: Dell Technologies. Being a part of Dell Technologies gives us the potential to access F1000 customers, world-class technologists, and partnerships to help drive human progress through enterprise technology innovation. What type of investments does Dell Tech Capital make? We lead early-stage investment rounds and typically make our first investment in a company in the Seed or Series A. We take board seats and endeavor to stay engaged all the way through an exit. We invest across the U.S., Israel, and Europe. Core investment areas include cybersecurity, AI/ML, edge & logistics, data & analytics, developer tools, infrastructure, and silicon. What does DTC look for in founders and their companies? We look for leadership teams that are subject matter experts and who demonstrate deep customer empathy. They are the folks who lean into challenging technical problems that exist now and the ones that will emerge as macro shifts such as cloud, occur. The founders we invest in introduce industry-leading technologies and define entire categories. What’s DTC’s track record? Since the team’s inception in 2012, we’ve invested more than $1.7B in enterprise tech companies. Our returns performance is consistently in the 95th percentile as compared to financial VCs. Nine of our investments have gone on to IPO, and more than 85 of them have been acquired. Notable exited IPOs and acquisitions include Arista Networks, DocuSign, Humio, JFrog, MongoDB, RedLock, Xometry, and Zscaler. What is the DTC Portfolio Development Team? We are a team of seasoned operations and sales leaders who are dedicated to helping our portfolio companies achieve their maximum potential. Our focus is on enabling our early-stage companies to hit their growth targets and build highly effective go-to-market (GTM) teams and strategies. How does the Portfolio Development Team help companies? We provide 360-degree GTM support, including product market fit & pricing analysis, deck reviews, sales leadership coaching, pipeline benchmarking, and direct customer introductions. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to growth. Our team spends time getting to know each portfolio company on a personal level. We dive into your positioning, target customer persona(s), pricing, and competition to help you identify the best routes to market and ways to scale your business effectively. How does DTC connect companies to F500 customers? With access to over 98% of the F500 ecosystem, the portfolio development team connects portfolio companies with potential enterprise-scale customers via in-person executive briefings, virtual pitch sessions, and through events such as topical dinners and casual happy hours that take place alongside prominent industry conferences. We continually host events throughout the year to bring together DTC portfolio companies with industry leaders, keeping them top of mind with the most relevant buyers. How do I pitch my idea or company to DTC? The best way to pitch the DTC investment team is to find the investor or investors that focus on the area you are building in. DMs on LinkedIn are open across the investment team. Or, reach out via email at [email protected]. When should I get in touch with DTC? We believe in building longterm relationships with founders, innovators, and interesting people. It’s never too early to start a conversation with us. Who WE INVEST IN YOUR LOGO HERE See the full portfolio Featured LayerX joins Akamai Or Eshed and David Vaisbrud started LayerX with a clear view of where enterprise work was heading: the browser. No longer just a window to the internet, it was becoming the de facto workspace. And now they're bringing that vision and their LayerX platform to Akamai. Read more Stay in the loop with our newsletter. Subscribe here Company About Team Companies Connect LinkedIn X Get in Touch News & Resources Resources DTC Podcast © 2024 Dell Inc. Privacy Terms of Service Accessibility Legal Dell Technology DTC | OpenObserve: Modern Observability for Cloud Infrastructure -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast Back to content OpenObserve: Modern Observability for Cloud Infrastructure Written by Deepak Jeevankumar Published April 29, 2026 Funding Table of Contents Example H2 Example H3 Example H4 Example H5 Example H6 Company journey ‍ Funding https://www.delltechnologiescapital.com/resources/openobserve-seriesa Modern IT infrastructure has become increasingly complex. Cloud‑native architectures generate massive volumes of logs, metrics, and traces, while teams juggle a patchwork of expensive, disconnected observability tools just to keep systems running. The result is rising costs, alert fatigue, and often, slower incident response. OpenObserve was built to fix this. We co‑led the company’s seed round and doubled down to co‑lead the $10 million Series A with Nexus Venture Partners because OpenObserve delivers what infrastructure teams actually need: a single, modern observability platform that unifies telemetry data across the stack while reducing both operational overhead and cost. OpenObserve is already used by a Fortune 10 enterprise, multinational financial institutions, and thousands of teams running production infrastructure at scale. Its open‑source foundation has driven strong adoption with developers who want more flexibility and control without taking on unnecessary complexity. Rather than forcing teams to manage separate tools for logs, metrics, traces, and monitoring, OpenObserve brings everything together in one place. Logs, metrics, traces, real user monitoring, pipelines, and visualization all live in a single system. Agentic automation helps teams reduce alert noise, spot issues sooner, and resolve incidents faster while keeping observability spend in check. We’ve long believed that open source is one of the best ways to build enduring, developer‑led companies. As early backers of Redis, MongoDB, Yugabyte, MinIO, and Tetrate, we’ve seen how powerful an open foundation can be—and how challenging it is to translate adoption into a scalable business. Observability only raises the stakes, with too many tools and costs that tend to spike as companies grow. Founder Prabhat Sharma understands these challenges firsthand. Before starting OpenObserve, he spent years at AWS as a solutions architect, working closely with fast‑growing startups and large enterprises to scale complex cloud environments. That experience shaped OpenObserve into a product built around how infrastructure teams actually operate, with a strong open‑source core and thoughtful defaults where they matter most. The team’s momentum has only strengthened our conviction, which is why we leaned in early and preemptively funded this round. We’re excited to partner with OpenObserve as they continue building the next generation of modern, cost‑efficient infrastructure observability. ‍ Related Posts Blog Post Sri Viswanath's Sycamore: Building the Agent OS for the Future March 30, 2026 | Deepak Jeevankumar | min Blog Post Augment: Next Generation of Freight Logistics October 3, 2025 | Gregg Adkin | min Blog Post Descope: Masterclass in Skating Ahead of the Puck September 30, 2025 | Deepak Jeevankumar | min LayerX joins Akamai May 14, 2026 | Yair Snir | min GTM Foundations Enterprise GTM Foundations: Everything You Need to Scale Early-stage Sales April 28, 2026 | Chris Hillock | 2 min Blog Post AI Powering AKKA's Breakout Moment April 27, 2026 | DTC Team | 3 min Blog Post Cartesia: AI comes for Voice March 11, 2025 | Radhika Malik | 2 min Blog Post Augment: Next Generation of Freight Logistics October 3, 2025 | Gregg Adkin | min Blog Post A Milestone Series B for MinIO January 27, 2022 | Gregg Adkin | 2 min Stay in the loop with our newsletter. Subscribe here Company About Team Companies Connect LinkedIn X Get in Touch News & Resources Resources DTC Podcast © 2024 Dell Inc. Privacy Terms of Service Accessibility Legal Dell Technology DTC | Leading investments in the enterprise. No items found. Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast With you Leading investments in the enterprise since 2012. from start to scale Leading investments in the enterprise since 2012. Featured Episode Featured case study LayerX joins Akamai Featured Episode Featured case study Featured Episode Featured case study AI Powering AKKA's Breakout Moment Featured Episode Featured case study Sri Viswanath's Sycamore: Building the Agent OS for the Future Featured Episode Featured case study OpenObserve: Modern Observability for Cloud Infrastructure Featured Episode Featured case study Enterprise GTM Foundations: Everything You Need to Scale Early-stage Sales Featured Episode Featured case study How AI Infra's "Messy Middle" technologies found its stride DTC is a team of investors, technologists, and operators working with people building foundational technologies. Meet DTC $ 1.8 B+ Invested to date 10 IPOs 85 + Acquisitions We invest early and stay committed, offering our portfolio companies deep domain expertise, operational know-how, and real customer connections. Frequently Asked Questions About us How we invest How we help Connecting with DTC Who is Dell Technologies Capital? Dell Tech Capital (DTC) is the venture investment team of Dell Technologies. We invest in the early-stage companies that are building what’s next in enterprise tech across the U.S., Israel, and Europe. Since coming together in 2012, we’ve put more than $1.8B to work. As a team, we go beyond just the financial investment to offer market fit & pricing analysis, deck reviews, sales leadership coaching, pipeline benchmarking, media relations and announcement support, and direct customer introductions. Is Dell Tech Capital a financial VC or a CVC? We are a financial returns-driven VC practice with returns performance that is consistently in the 95th percentile when compared against early-stage venture investment firms. We also have the great fortune to be connected to one of the most notable technology platforms in the world: Dell Technologies. Being a part of Dell Technologies gives us the potential to access F1000 customers, world-class technologists, and partnerships to help drive human progress through enterprise technology innovation. What type of investments does Dell Tech Capital make? We lead early-stage investment rounds and typically make our first investment in a company in the Seed or Series A. We take board seats and endeavor to stay engaged all the way through an exit. We invest across the U.S., Israel, and Europe. Core investment areas include cybersecurity, AI/ML, edge & logistics, data & analytics, developer tools, infrastructure, and silicon. What does DTC look for in founders and their companies? We look for leadership teams that are subject matter experts and who demonstrate deep customer empathy. They are the folks who lean into challenging technical problems that exist now and the ones that will emerge as macro shifts such as cloud, occur. The founders we invest in introduce industry-leading technologies and define entire categories. What’s DTC’s track record? Since the team’s inception in 2012, we’ve invested more than $1.7B in enterprise tech companies. Our returns performance is consistently in the 95th percentile as compared to financial VCs. Nine of our investments have gone on to IPO, and more than 85 of them have been acquired. Notable exited IPOs and acquisitions include Arista Networks, DocuSign, Humio, JFrog, MongoDB, RedLock, Xometry, and Zscaler. What is the DTC Portfolio Development Team? We are a team of seasoned operations and sales leaders who are dedicated to helping our portfolio companies achieve their maximum potential. Our focus is on enabling our early-stage companies to hit their growth targets and build highly effective go-to-market (GTM) teams and strategies. How does the Portfolio Development Team help companies? We provide 360-degree GTM support, including product market fit & pricing analysis, deck reviews, sales leadership coaching, pipeline benchmarking, and direct customer introductions. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to growth. Our team spends time getting to know each portfolio company on a personal level. We dive into your positioning, target customer persona(s), pricing, and competition to help you identify the best routes to market and ways to scale your business effectively. How does DTC connect companies to F500 customers? With access to over 98% of the F500 ecosystem, the portfolio development team connects portfolio companies with potential enterprise-scale customers via in-person executive briefings, virtual pitch sessions, and through events such as topical dinners and casual happy hours that take place alongside prominent industry conferences. We continually host events throughout the year to bring together DTC portfolio companies with industry leaders, keeping them top of mind with the most relevant buyers. How do I pitch my idea or company to DTC? The best way to pitch the DTC investment team is to find the investor or investors that focus on the area you are building in. DMs on LinkedIn are open across the investment team. Or, reach out via email at [email protected]. When should I get in touch with DTC? We believe in building longterm relationships with founders, innovators, and interesting people. It’s never too early to start a conversation with us. Who WE INVEST IN YOUR LOGO HERE See the full portfolio Featured LayerX joins Akamai Or Eshed and David Vaisbrud started LayerX with a clear view of where enterprise work was heading: the browser. No longer just a window to the internet, it was becoming the de facto workspace. And now they're bringing that vision and their LayerX platform to Akamai. Read more Stay in the loop with our newsletter. Subscribe here Company About Team Companies Connect LinkedIn X Get in Touch News & Resources Resources DTC Podcast © 2024 Dell Inc. Privacy Terms of Service Accessibility Legal Dell Technology DTC | Leading investments in the enterprise. No items found. Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast With you Leading investments in the enterprise since 2012. from start to scale Leading investments in the enterprise since 2012. Featured Episode Featured case study LayerX joins Akamai Featured Episode Featured case study Featured Episode Featured case study AI Powering AKKA's Breakout Moment Featured Episode Featured case study Sri Viswanath's Sycamore: Building the Agent OS for the Future Featured Episode Featured case study OpenObserve: Modern Observability for Cloud Infrastructure Featured Episode Featured case study Enterprise GTM Foundations: Everything You Need to Scale Early-stage Sales Featured Episode Featured case study How AI Infra's "Messy Middle" technologies found its stride DTC is a team of investors, technologists, and operators working with people building foundational technologies. Meet DTC $ 1.8 B+ Invested to date 10 IPOs 85 + Acquisitions We invest early and stay committed, offering our portfolio companies deep domain expertise, operational know-how, and real customer connections. Frequently Asked Questions About us How we invest How we help Connecting with DTC Who is Dell Technologies Capital? Dell Tech Capital (DTC) is the venture investment team of Dell Technologies. We invest in the early-stage companies that are building what’s next in enterprise tech across the U.S., Israel, and Europe. Since coming together in 2012, we’ve put more than $1.8B to work. As a team, we go beyond just the financial investment to offer market fit & pricing analysis, deck reviews, sales leadership coaching, pipeline benchmarking, media relations and announcement support, and direct customer introductions. Is Dell Tech Capital a financial VC or a CVC? We are a financial returns-driven VC practice with returns performance that is consistently in the 95th percentile when compared against early-stage venture investment firms. We also have the great fortune to be connected to one of the most notable technology platforms in the world: Dell Technologies. Being a part of Dell Technologies gives us the potential to access F1000 customers, world-class technologists, and partnerships to help drive human progress through enterprise technology innovation. What type of investments does Dell Tech Capital make? We lead early-stage investment rounds and typically make our first investment in a company in the Seed or Series A. We take board seats and endeavor to stay engaged all the way through an exit. We invest across the U.S., Israel, and Europe. Core investment areas include cybersecurity, AI/ML, edge & logistics, data & analytics, developer tools, infrastructure, and silicon. What does DTC look for in founders and their companies? We look for leadership teams that are subject matter experts and who demonstrate deep customer empathy. They are the folks who lean into challenging technical problems that exist now and the ones that will emerge as macro shifts such as cloud, occur. The founders we invest in introduce industry-leading technologies and define entire categories. What’s DTC’s track record? Since the team’s inception in 2012, we’ve invested more than $1.7B in enterprise tech companies. Our returns performance is consistently in the 95th percentile as compared to financial VCs. Nine of our investments have gone on to IPO, and more than 85 of them have been acquired. Notable exited IPOs and acquisitions include Arista Networks, DocuSign, Humio, JFrog, MongoDB, RedLock, Xometry, and Zscaler. What is the DTC Portfolio Development Team? We are a team of seasoned operations and sales leaders who are dedicated to helping our portfolio companies achieve their maximum potential. Our focus is on enabling our early-stage companies to hit their growth targets and build highly effective go-to-market (GTM) teams and strategies. How does the Portfolio Development Team help companies? We provide 360-degree GTM support, including product market fit & pricing analysis, deck reviews, sales leadership coaching, pipeline benchmarking, and direct customer introductions. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to growth. Our team spends time getting to know each portfolio company on a personal level. We dive into your positioning, target customer persona(s), pricing, and competition to help you identify the best routes to market and ways to scale your business effectively. How does DTC connect companies to F500 customers? With access to over 98% of the F500 ecosystem, the portfolio development team connects portfolio companies with potential enterprise-scale customers via in-person executive briefings, virtual pitch sessions, and through events such as topical dinners and casual happy hours that take place alongside prominent industry conferences. We continually host events throughout the year to bring together DTC portfolio companies with industry leaders, keeping them top of mind with the most relevant buyers. How do I pitch my idea or company to DTC? The best way to pitch the DTC investment team is to find the investor or investors that focus on the area you are building in. DMs on LinkedIn are open across the investment team. Or, reach out via email at [email protected]. When should I get in touch with DTC? We believe in building longterm relationships with founders, innovators, and interesting people. It’s never too early to start a conversation with us. Who WE INVEST IN YOUR LOGO HERE See the full portfolio Featured LayerX joins Akamai Or Eshed and David Vaisbrud started LayerX with a clear view of where enterprise work was heading: the browser. No longer just a window to the internet, it was becoming the de facto workspace. And now they're bringing that vision and their LayerX platform to Akamai. Read more Stay in the loop with our newsletter. Subscribe here Company About Team Companies Connect LinkedIn X Get in Touch News & Resources Resources DTC Podcast © 2024 Dell Inc. Privacy Terms of Service Accessibility Legal Dell Technology DTC | Sri Viswanath's Sycamore: Building the Agent OS for the Future -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast Back to content Sri Viswanath's Sycamore: Building the Agent OS for the Future Written by Deepak Jeevankumar Published March 30, 2026 Funding Table of Contents Example H2 Example H3 Example H4 Example H5 Example H6 Company journey ‍ Funding https://www.delltechnologiescapital.com/resources/sycamore-building-the-agent-os-for-the-future AI buzz won’t translate into true enterprise adoption unless it can operate autonomously, securely, and at scale. To get there, organizations need a platform where trust, governance, and adaptability are built in from the ground up. That’s exactly what Sri Viswanath is building with Sycamore. As the former CTO of Atlassian, Sri was tasked with the digital transformation of that company to take advantage of the then-new promise of cloud computing. He earned his stripes firsthand from that experience plus a couple of additional decades in enterprise tech leadership and investment. He's got the technical chops and the practitioner empathy to lead Sycamore in aligning AI solutions with enterprise goals while addressing operational complexities of governance and security. Sri is why Fortune 500 companies are choosing to build with Sycamore just months after the company's inception. And he's a big part of why we jumped at the chance to invest this early alongside Coatue, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and a number of other notable early and angel investors. The pace of enterprise AI adoption is accelerating. Sycamore is moving with the urgency the market requires, and we are proud to support Sri and the team as they build the foundational platform for this new era. ‍ Related Posts Blog Post OpenObserve: Modern Observability for Cloud Infrastructure April 29, 2026 | Deepak Jeevankumar | min Blog Post Augment: Next Generation of Freight Logistics October 3, 2025 | Gregg Adkin | min Blog Post Descope: Masterclass in Skating Ahead of the Puck September 30, 2025 | Deepak Jeevankumar | min LayerX joins Akamai May 14, 2026 | Yair Snir | min Blog Post OpenObserve: Modern Observability for Cloud Infrastructure April 29, 2026 | Deepak Jeevankumar | min GTM Foundations Enterprise GTM Foundations: Everything You Need to Scale Early-stage Sales April 28, 2026 | Chris Hillock | 2 min Blog Post Augment: Next Generation of Freight Logistics October 3, 2025 | Gregg Adkin | min Blog Post MaxIQ: Reimagining Enterprise Sales Execution with AI March 5, 2025 | Chris Hillock | 3 min Blog Post How Maven’s Enterprise-ready AI Agents are Transforming Customer Experience June 18, 2025 | Elana Lian | 3 min Stay in the loop with our newsletter. Subscribe here Company About Team Companies Connect LinkedIn X Get in Touch News & Resources Resources DTC Podcast © 2024 Dell Inc. Privacy Terms of Service Accessibility Legal Dell Technology DTC | Leading investments in the enterprise. No items found. Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast With you Leading investments in the enterprise since 2012. from start to scale Leading investments in the enterprise since 2012. Featured Episode Featured case study LayerX joins Akamai Featured Episode Featured case study Featured Episode Featured case study AI Powering AKKA's Breakout Moment Featured Episode Featured case study Sri Viswanath's Sycamore: Building the Agent OS for the Future Featured Episode Featured case study OpenObserve: Modern Observability for Cloud Infrastructure Featured Episode Featured case study Enterprise GTM Foundations: Everything You Need to Scale Early-stage Sales Featured Episode Featured case study How AI Infra's "Messy Middle" technologies found its stride DTC is a team of investors, technologists, and operators working with people building foundational technologies. Meet DTC $ 1.8 B+ Invested to date 10 IPOs 85 + Acquisitions We invest early and stay committed, offering our portfolio companies deep domain expertise, operational know-how, and real customer connections. Frequently Asked Questions About us How we invest How we help Connecting with DTC Who is Dell Technologies Capital? Dell Tech Capital (DTC) is the venture investment team of Dell Technologies. We invest in the early-stage companies that are building what’s next in enterprise tech across the U.S., Israel, and Europe. Since coming together in 2012, we’ve put more than $1.8B to work. As a team, we go beyond just the financial investment to offer market fit & pricing analysis, deck reviews, sales leadership coaching, pipeline benchmarking, media relations and announcement support, and direct customer introductions. Is Dell Tech Capital a financial VC or a CVC? We are a financial returns-driven VC practice with returns performance that is consistently in the 95th percentile when compared against early-stage venture investment firms. We also have the great fortune to be connected to one of the most notable technology platforms in the world: Dell Technologies. Being a part of Dell Technologies gives us the potential to access F1000 customers, world-class technologists, and partnerships to help drive human progress through enterprise technology innovation. What type of investments does Dell Tech Capital make? We lead early-stage investment rounds and typically make our first investment in a company in the Seed or Series A. We take board seats and endeavor to stay engaged all the way through an exit. We invest across the U.S., Israel, and Europe. Core investment areas include cybersecurity, AI/ML, edge & logistics, data & analytics, developer tools, infrastructure, and silicon. What does DTC look for in founders and their companies? We look for leadership teams that are subject matter experts and who demonstrate deep customer empathy. They are the folks who lean into challenging technical problems that exist now and the ones that will emerge as macro shifts such as cloud, occur. The founders we invest in introduce industry-leading technologies and define entire categories. What’s DTC’s track record? Since the team’s inception in 2012, we’ve invested more than $1.7B in enterprise tech companies. Our returns performance is consistently in the 95th percentile as compared to financial VCs. Nine of our investments have gone on to IPO, and more than 85 of them have been acquired. Notable exited IPOs and acquisitions include Arista Networks, DocuSign, Humio, JFrog, MongoDB, RedLock, Xometry, and Zscaler. What is the DTC Portfolio Development Team? We are a team of seasoned operations and sales leaders who are dedicated to helping our portfolio companies achieve their maximum potential. Our focus is on enabling our early-stage companies to hit their growth targets and build highly effective go-to-market (GTM) teams and strategies. How does the Portfolio Development Team help companies? We provide 360-degree GTM support, including product market fit & pricing analysis, deck reviews, sales leadership coaching, pipeline benchmarking, and direct customer introductions. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to growth. Our team spends time getting to know each portfolio company on a personal level. We dive into your positioning, target customer persona(s), pricing, and competition to help you identify the best routes to market and ways to scale your business effectively. How does DTC connect companies to F500 customers? With access to over 98% of the F500 ecosystem, the portfolio development team connects portfolio companies with potential enterprise-scale customers via in-person executive briefings, virtual pitch sessions, and through events such as topical dinners and casual happy hours that take place alongside prominent industry conferences. We continually host events throughout the year to bring together DTC portfolio companies with industry leaders, keeping them top of mind with the most relevant buyers. How do I pitch my idea or company to DTC? The best way to pitch the DTC investment team is to find the investor or investors that focus on the area you are building in. DMs on LinkedIn are open across the investment team. Or, reach out via email at [email protected]. When should I get in touch with DTC? We believe in building longterm relationships with founders, innovators, and interesting people. It’s never too early to start a conversation with us. Who WE INVEST IN YOUR LOGO HERE See the full portfolio Featured LayerX joins Akamai Or Eshed and David Vaisbrud started LayerX with a clear view of where enterprise work was heading: the browser. No longer just a window to the internet, it was becoming the de facto workspace. And now they're bringing that vision and their LayerX platform to Akamai. Read more Stay in the loop with our newsletter. Subscribe here Company About Team Companies Connect LinkedIn X Get in Touch News & Resources Resources DTC Podcast © 2024 Dell Inc. Privacy Terms of Service Accessibility Legal Dell Technology DTC | How AI Infra's "Messy Middle" technologies found its stride -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast Back to content How AI Infra's "Messy Middle" technologies found its stride Written by Radhika Malik Published January 8, 2026 Perspectives Table of Contents Example H2 Example H3 Example H4 Example H5 Example H6 Company journey ‍ Perspectives https://www.delltechnologiescapital.com/resources/2026-ai-infrastructure-landscape Opportunity in AI’s “Messy Middle” Infrastructure 2025 was the year of AI’s “Messy Middle”. The ecosystem of tools that lies between models and core infrastructure on one side and end-user applications on the other is emerging as a key driver of innovation and enterprise value. As AI deployments and ROI take center stage, the tooling, platforms, and services that turn AI from concept into production at scale become crucial. Startups in this space have historically faced tough odds: the market wasn’t really there, scaling was difficult and sustained business value was elusive. Now, the landscape is shifting. With new market momentum and notable exits, this part of the stack is firmly on the (market) map. The Messy Middle’s evolution from MLOps to LLMOps and now AgentOps is expanding opportunities for founders and investors. The industry is converging on the need for mature, reliable infrastructure, and a surge of acquisitions signals just how essential this layer has become. ‍ The Early Days: MLOps (2016–2021) Data Science and classical Machine Learning began gaining popularity as a discipline in the mid-2000s, driven by the rise of big data and web-scale companies. By the early 2010s, many enterprises adopted classical ML techniques for use cases such as forecasting, personalization, fraud detection, and optimization. The research breakthroughs in Deep Learning in the early 2010s (e.g. AlexNet in 2012), followed by hyperscalers successfully adopting these architectures (e.g. Google and Facebook’s ad targeting models), put a much sharper focus on the role of data science and ML in an organization. Deep Learning promised to take things to the next level - data became larger and more heterogeneous (including unstructured), models increased in size, and compute infrastructure became a lot more important. As a result, enterprises began to consider making the process of training/operationalizing models a lot more systematic. A new category of software tools, “DevOps for ML” emerged, appropriately termed “MLOps” - tools and software needed to build, deploy, scale, manage and improve the evolving AI systems. Plenty of MLOps startups emerged in response. However, very few were able to build real businesses because they faced two core challenges: Challenging ROI : ROI for large scale predictive ML and even more so for computer vision, or early NLP was very hard to measure for any org other than a few. A fraction of a percent improvement in a recommendation model for Facebook could map to $100M+ in revenue gained. For the average enterprise, use cases and ROI were a lot murkier. Limited Production Deployment : Few machine learning models moved past R&D prototypes. It wasn’t just operational challenges that MLOps promised to solve but training a model for each use case was hard and costly and few firms had the internal ML expertise to execute on proprietary model development. The bottleneck was in building these models, and budgets went into data teams, rather than software tooling. Outside of a few companies like Weights & Biases, few venture-backed startups were able to build large businesses (>$10M ARR). Arguably, the only sector of the market that flourished were the platforms supporting traditional data science and classical ML e.g. the Databricks ecosystem or data science platforms such as DataRobot, Dataiku and Domino Data Labs. This ecosystem got a lift from the new demand for AI. Most of the exits from this era were for team and technology, and the ones that sold for >$200M were handful (e.g. DeePhi/Xilinx, Apple/Lattice Data, Apple/Xnor, Apple/Turi). The LLM Transformation (2022–2025) The rise of Large Language Models changed everything. Accessible LLMs brought advanced AI within reach for a broader set of developers. The market for those building and deploying AI applications expanded as the target persona shifted to software engineers rather than the smaller universe of Data Scientists/ML engineers. Teams could now build production AI applications at speeds previously unheard of. Now, with real AI applications being built and shipped, there finally came a need for a specialist “LLMOps” layer to operationalize these applications and run them at scale. There also emerged budget for these tools, as well as a strong impetus to move applications to production and start showing ROI. The first iteration of LLMOps were focused on putting guardrails around LLMs, feeding them the right prompts through techniques such as RAG, evaluating and observing the outputs and securing models and prompts. As AI models advanced, the toolchain moved quickly as well. Practitioners shifted from manually fiddling with prompts to more mathematical prompt optimization approaches like DSPy. RAG evolved into context engineering. Fine-tuning showed success in some use cases. As LLM usage scaled, cost containment became more important. Practitioners began looking for ways to reduce costs by routing queries to lower cost or lower latency smaller models; model routers and AI gateways proliferated. Applications moved into multi-model systems and included new data modalities across text, image and videos. As systems got more complex, stronger observability tools emerged to ensure applications were behaving as expected. Early movers who persevered through the pre-LLM market cycles finally gained momentum, while new post-LLM startups positioned themselves for the next wave of demand. Market Validation Through M&A Recent acquisitions demonstrate the shift from “nice to have” to necessity for the messy middle tech. The pace at which core infrastructure startups are being acquired as strategic assets is increasing and has generated an estimated $10B+ in returns just in the last three years. Notable deals include: Select acquisitions across AI infrastructure's middle layers since 2023. These deals represent lasting value - proof that this layer is producing businesses with staying power beyond any single product cycle. The Opportunity Ahead – LLMOps -> AgentOps With agent development accelerating, operational challenges have expanded further – e.g. building reliable agents, orchestrating across them, monitoring their behavior. Agents are a completely new workload that bring new challenges such as orchestrating multiple models, managing memory, enabling and managing tool use and communicating with other agents. These needs are now central in discussions about effective AI infrastructure and have created opportunities for early-stage companies to build viable businesses. Achieving AI at scale isn’t going to happen without this infrastructure layer. The stack is being defined as we speak, and opportunities lie across the agent lifecycle: Building - enabling enterprises to build agents that leverage their data and embed into their respective workflows, systems and processes. Translating from business processes to AI agent workflows Enabling both technical and business users to build reliable agents Connecting with enterprise data – not just for retrieval but also for taking actions on it. Providing agents a diverse toolset to use such as API access to enterprise systems, browser/computer use for systems not accessible through APIs, code sandboxes Running at scale – running these systems reliably and cost effecti DTC | Resources -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast NEWS & RESOURCES News, hard-earned insights, strategies, and approaches to starting and scaling enterprise technology companies from the people who’ve done it. Featured LayerX joins Akamai Or Eshed and David Vaisbrud started LayerX with a clear view of where enterprise work was heading: the browser. No longer just a window to the internet, it was becoming the de facto workspace. And now they're bringing that vision and their LayerX platform to Akamai. 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Blog Post OpenObserve: Modern Observability for Cloud Infrastructure April 29, 2026 | Deepak Jeevankumar Funding Blog Posts All GTM Foundations Enterprise GTM Foundations: Everything You Need to Scale Early-stage Sales April 28, 2026 | Chris Hillock | 2 min GTM Foundations All Blog Post AI Powering AKKA's Breakout Moment April 27, 2026 | DTC Team | 3 min Perspectives Blog Posts All GTM Foundations Beyond Founder-led Sales: Hiring Your First GTM Leader April 6, 2026 | Chris Hillock | 8 min GTM Foundations All Blog Post Sri Viswanath's Sycamore: Building the Agent OS for the Future March 30, 2026 | Deepak Jeevankumar Funding Blog Posts All Blog Post Supply Chain and Logistics: At an AI Inflection Point February 9, 2026 | DTC Team | 4 min No items found. Blog Posts All Blog Post Vision to Value: Halcyon + Dell Ransomware Resilience February 5, 2026 | Chris Hillock Portfolio Spotlight Blog Posts All Blog Post How AI Infra's "Messy Middle" technologies found its stride January 8, 2026 | Radhika Malik Perspectives Blog Posts All GTM Foundations The real ICP for founder-led sales December 20, 2025 | Chris Hillock | 4 min GTM Foundations All GTM Foundations The Art of Founder-led Sales November 26, 2025 | Chris Hillock | 4 min GTM Foundations All Blog Post Datometry joins Snowflake November 10, 2025 | Scott Darling Acquisitions & IPOs Blog Posts All Blog Post Augment: Next Generation of Freight Logistics October 3, 2025 | Gregg Adkin Funding Blog Posts All Blog Post Descope: Masterclass in Skating Ahead of the Puck September 30, 2025 | Deepak Jeevankumar Funding Blog Posts All Blog Post Terra Security: Reimagining Offensive Security for an Agentic World September 15, 2025 | Barrel Kfir Funding Blog Posts All Blog Post LakeFS is versioning the way to enterprise AI innovation July 29, 2025 | Yair Snir | 3 min Funding Blog Posts All Blog Post How SuperAnnotate is Solving AI’s Data at Scale Challenge July 21, 2025 | Elana Lian Funding Blog Posts All Blog Post Celebrating a Milestone: TheLoops Joins IFS June 26, 2025 | Radhika Malik Acquisitions & IPOs Blog Posts All Next 1 / 6 No results found. Please, try different filters. Stay in the loop with our newsletter. Subscribe here Company About Team Companies Connect LinkedIn X Get in Touch News & Resources Resources DTC Podcast © 2024 Dell Inc. Privacy Terms of Service Accessibility Legal Dell Technology DTC | About -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast An Entrepreneurial DNA Since 2012, we’ve invested more than $1.8B in teams building the technologies the world runs on. Nine of those companies have gone public. 85+ have been acquired by companies including Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft, and VMWare. Michael Dell Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies “Dell Technologies Capital offers a unique blend of expertise. Our partners bring best-in-class technological education and business savvy to the board room table, and will be as dedicated to the growth of your company as any founder.” When You Work With Us 01 We're in It Together Building for the enterprise is hard. The problems are complex; the stakes are high. We work hard to leverage every bit of experience we have to support the founders who work with us. 02 Our Network Is Your Network When you know one of us, you know all of us. Not just the DTC team, but our deep bench of customers, enterprise-at-scale CEOs, advisors, and technology SMEs at Dell. 03 Expect Informed Perspectives We do the homework necessary to stay current and to understand the business you’re in, the technology you’re building, and the customers who need it. 04 We'll Respect Your Story Honoring the founder experience is paramount and drives our every intention. We’ll challenge your assumptions and push for excellence. But ultimately, this is your story. See the Path Ahead with DTC Jay Chaudry Founder & CEO, Zscaler “As a founder, you couldn’t ask for better support from your early investors. DTC became an important part of our story when they led our Series A. And they’re still delivering real value to us even as a public company with Scott Darling on our board.” ‍ Matthew Carroll Co-founder & CEO, Immuta I remember sitting down early on with the DTC team and walking through how Immuta would change the way technologies get built. They instantly understood the potential of what we’re building. Ofer Bengal Founder, Redis The DTC team knows enterprise sales inside and out. They were strong partners to us as we built out our initial sales motion and their intros landed us some of our largest customers in those early days. Zac Smith Founder, Packet (Acq. by Equinix) I can’t overstate how valuable the relationship with Dell has been. Since the early days, Michael Dell and the entire DTC team have supported me as an entrepreneur more than I could have ever hoped for. Geeta Schmidt Co-founder of Humio (Acq. by Cloudstrike) This team’s knowledge and expertise in data, security, and DevOps Is second to none. I highly recommend that any high-growth enterprise startup seek out a partnership with the DTC team. Garima Kapoor Co-founder & COO, MinIO The DTC team has deep experience in the fields we work in. We see them as partners that we could really lean on, especially when it came to early go-to-market and product positioning. Since 2012 And we’re just getting started 2012 Joe Tucci and Pat Gelsinger bring in Scott Darling to form EMC Ventures in Palo Alto DTC makes its first investment: Zscaler Team expands to Boston 2013 Team expands to Israel; adds investors in Palo Alto $100M invested to date 2014 DTC’s first IPO: Arista Networks 2016 Michael Dell acquires EMC; the investment team doubles in size, becomes Dell Technologies Capital and launches out of stealth 2017 MongoDB IPO 2018 Zscaler IPO $500M invested to date DocuSign IPO 2019 DTC portfolio development team introduced 2020 JFrog IPO 2021 Xometry IPO Passes $1B invested to date 2025 Netskope IPO The journey continues! Stay in the loop with our newsletter. Subscribe here Company About Team Companies Connect LinkedIn X Get in Touch News & Resources Resources DTC Podcast © 2024 Dell Inc. Privacy Terms of Service Accessibility Legal Dell Technology DTC | LayerX joins Akamai -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast Back to content LayerX joins Akamai Written by Yair Snir Published May 14, 2026 Acquisitions & IPOs Table of Contents Example H2 Example H3 Example H4 Example H5 Example H6 Company journey ‍ Acquisitions & IPOs https://www.delltechnologiescapital.com/resources/layerx-joins-akamai Or Eshed and David Vaisbrud started LayerX with a clear view of where enterprise work was heading: the browser. No longer just a window to the internet, it was becoming the de facto workspace. That shift has only accelerated. We now spend much of our work day in the browser, accessing apps, collaborating with generative AI tools, experimenting with agentic workflows, and moving sensitive data through interfaces not designed for this level of complexity. This has created a new category of risk and an equally urgent need for a new category of control. From day one, LayerX set out to meet this moment. Or, David, and the team understood the concept of last mile AI security and they built a platform that works across any browser and any device, without forcing behavior change on end users to address just that. In doing so, they gave security leaders something fundamentally new: real-time visibility into how users interact with web content, SaaS apps, and increasingly, AI systems. That vision resonated with customers and with us. Today, it is clear the broader market sees it too. LayerX to join Akamai Akamai announced its intent to acquire LayerX, bringing browser-native security into its Zero Trust portfolio at a moment when AI usage control has become one of the most urgent priorities for enterprises. It’s a natural fit. LayerX delivers visibility and control without disrupting the user experience, while Akamai brings global scale and a deep investment in Zero Trust that spans network access, application security, and infrastructure protection. Together, they are positioned to secure AI usage across the full stack, from the user to the application to the underlying environment. We believed from the beginning that securing the browser would have ripple effects across the broader security landscape. As AI drives more work into browser-based workflows, that thesis is playing out faster than expected. We are incredibly proud to have partnered with Or, David, and the entire LayerX team on this journey. They have built something category-defining in a remarkably short period of time. And now they join DTC’s Cybersecurity Hall of Fame alongside Zscaler, Cylance, Adallom, Guardicore, Netskope and so many others. We are excited to see their vision scale even further as part of Akamai. Onward! ‍ ‍ Yair Snir led DTC's Series A investment in LayerX in April 2025. Related Posts Blog Post Datometry joins Snowflake November 10, 2025 | Scott Darling | min Onward and Upward: Celebrating Rivos' Next Chapter with Meta September 30, 2025 | Scott Darling | min Blog Post Celebrating a Milestone: TheLoops Joins IFS June 26, 2025 | Radhika Malik | min Blog Post OpenObserve: Modern Observability for Cloud Infrastructure April 29, 2026 | Deepak Jeevankumar | min GTM Foundations Enterprise GTM Foundations: Everything You Need to Scale Early-stage Sales April 28, 2026 | Chris Hillock | 2 min Blog Post AI Powering AKKA's Breakout Moment April 27, 2026 | DTC Team | 3 min Blog Post LayerX: Securing Work Where it Happens May 2, 2024 | Yair Snir | 2 min Blog Post AI Powering AKKA's Breakout Moment April 27, 2026 | DTC Team | 3 min Blog Post Descope: Masterclass in Skating Ahead of the Puck September 30, 2025 | Deepak Jeevankumar | min Stay in the loop with our newsletter. Subscribe here Company About Team Companies Connect LinkedIn X Get in Touch News & Resources Resources DTC Podcast © 2024 Dell Inc. Privacy Terms of Service Accessibility Legal Dell Technology DTC | Resources -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast NEWS & RESOURCES News, hard-earned insights, strategies, and approaches to starting and scaling enterprise technology companies from the people who’ve done it. Featured LayerX joins Akamai Or Eshed and David Vaisbrud started LayerX with a clear view of where enterprise work was heading: the browser. No longer just a window to the internet, it was becoming the de facto workspace. And now they're bringing that vision and their LayerX platform to Akamai. Read more All GTM Foundations Blog Posts Case Studies Podcasts Tags Acquisitions & IPOs Funding GTM Foundations Perspectives Portfolio Spotlight Strategies The DTC Podcast Clear All Thank you! Your submission has been received! Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form. Blog Post OpenObserve: Modern Observability for Cloud Infrastructure April 29, 2026 | Deepak Jeevankumar Funding Blog Posts All GTM Foundations Enterprise GTM Foundations: Everything You Need to Scale Early-stage Sales April 28, 2026 | Chris Hillock | 2 min GTM Foundations All Blog Post AI Powering AKKA's Breakout Moment April 27, 2026 | DTC Team | 3 min Perspectives Blog Posts All GTM Foundations Beyond Founder-led Sales: Hiring Your First GTM Leader April 6, 2026 | Chris Hillock | 8 min GTM Foundations All Blog Post Sri Viswanath's Sycamore: Building the Agent OS for the Future March 30, 2026 | Deepak Jeevankumar Funding Blog Posts All Blog Post Supply Chain and Logistics: At an AI Inflection Point February 9, 2026 | DTC Team | 4 min No items found. Blog Posts All Blog Post Vision to Value: Halcyon + Dell Ransomware Resilience February 5, 2026 | Chris Hillock Portfolio Spotlight Blog Posts All Blog Post How AI Infra's "Messy Middle" technologies found its stride January 8, 2026 | Radhika Malik Perspectives Blog Posts All GTM Foundations The real ICP for founder-led sales December 20, 2025 | Chris Hillock | 4 min GTM Foundations All GTM Foundations The Art of Founder-led Sales November 26, 2025 | Chris Hillock | 4 min GTM Foundations All Blog Post Datometry joins Snowflake November 10, 2025 | Scott Darling Acquisitions & IPOs Blog Posts All Blog Post Augment: Next Generation of Freight Logistics October 3, 2025 | Gregg Adkin Funding Blog Posts All Blog Post Descope: Masterclass in Skating Ahead of the Puck September 30, 2025 | Deepak Jeevankumar Funding Blog Posts All Blog Post Terra Security: Reimagining Offensive Security for an Agentic World September 15, 2025 | Barrel Kfir Funding Blog Posts All Blog Post LakeFS is versioning the way to enterprise AI innovation July 29, 2025 | Yair Snir | 3 min Funding Blog Posts All Blog Post How SuperAnnotate is Solving AI’s Data at Scale Challenge July 21, 2025 | Elana Lian Funding Blog Posts All Blog Post Celebrating a Milestone: TheLoops Joins IFS June 26, 2025 | Radhika Malik Acquisitions & IPOs Blog Posts All Next 1 / 6 No results found. Please, try different filters. Stay in the loop with our newsletter. Subscribe here Company About Team Companies Connect LinkedIn X Get in Touch News & Resources Resources DTC Podcast © 2024 Dell Inc. Privacy Terms of Service Accessibility Legal Dell Technology DTC | Team -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast Experienced. Engaged. ‍ Connected. We invest early and stay committed, offering our portfolio companies deep domain expertise, operational know-how, and real customer connections. Scott Darling President Raman Khanna Managing Director Daniel Docter Managing Director Gregg Adkin Managing Director Deepak Jeevankumar Managing Director Yair Snir Managing Director Radhika Malik Partner Elana Lian Partner Barrel Kfir Partner Nina Lu Principal Scott Bevan Business Strategy & Operations Keshav Goel Analyst Chris Hillock VP, Portfolio Development Julia Beech Portfolio Development Chris Falloon Portfolio Development Ronda Scott Marketing & Communications Stay in the loop with our newsletter. Subscribe here Company About Team Companies Connect LinkedIn X Get in Touch News & Resources Resources DTC Podcast © 2024 Dell Inc. Privacy Terms of Service Accessibility Legal Dell Technology DTC | Companies -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast CATEGORY BUILDERS The teams building industry-leading technologies and scaling category-defining businesses. Focus Areas AI Companies building AI-driven technologies deliver operational efficiencies, faster development cycles, and improved customer experiences across the enterprise. Cybersecurity The sun never sets on cybersecurity threats. We back the companies that understand the interdependent modern software stack and can see around corners to secure the enterprise. Data We invest in teams building the tools to collect, process, and analyze data at scale so enterprises can transform their data into competitive advantages. Developer-first The tools and platforms catalyzing build/deploy/scale cycles so enterprise customers can differentiate and innovative faster. Enterprise Software Our portfolio companies deliver scalable, cloud-based tools that are vital for staying competitive in a digital-first world. Infrastructure From silicon to robotics, these companies are reimaging the backbone technologies the drive innovation across our modern world. Logistics The essential next-gen edge, supply chain, and logistics technologies. Filter options Highlights All Filters options Status Exited Active Focus Area AI Cybersecurity Data Developer-first Enterprise Software Infrastructure Logistics Silicon DTC Lead Barrel Kfir Chris Hillock Daniel Docter Deepak Jeevankumar Elana Lian Gregg Adkin Nina Lu Radhika Malik Raman Khanna Scott Bevan Scott Darling Yair Snir Region USA/Canada Europe Israel Clear All Thank you! Your submission has been received! Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form. Company name Status Focus Area DTC Lead Region First INvestment AAI Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area AI dtc lead Yair Snir region Israel First investment Seed in 2025 All All Active Adallom Status Exited Acquired by Microsoft Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Cybersecurity dtc lead region Israel First investment Series C in 2015 All All Exited Agari Status Exited Acquired by Help Systems Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Cybersecurity dtc lead region USA/Canada First investment Series B in 2012 All All Exited Aidaptive Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area AI Enterprise Software dtc lead Daniel Docter region USA/Canada First investment Seed in 2021 All All Active Akka Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area AI Infrastructure dtc lead Scott Darling region USA/Canada First investment Series D in 2020 Highlights All Active Alation Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Infrastructure Data dtc lead Raman Khanna region USA/Canada First investment Series C in 2020 Highlights All Active Alpine Data Status Exited Acquired by TIBCO Software Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Infrastructure Data dtc lead Raman Khanna region USA/Canada First investment Series B in 2013 All All Exited Altiscale Status Exited Acquired by SAP Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Infrastructure Data dtc lead Daniel Docter region USA/Canada First investment Series A in 2014 All All Exited Appdome Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Cybersecurity dtc lead Raman Khanna region Israel First investment Series A in 2013 All All Active AppMap Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Enterprise Software Developer-first dtc lead Gregg Adkin region USA/Canada First investment 2022 All All Active Apteligent Status Exited Acquired by VMware Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Infrastructure dtc lead Raman Khanna region USA/Canada First investment Series C in 2014 All All Exited Archipelo Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Cybersecurity AI Developer-first dtc lead region USA/Canada First investment Seed in 2021 All All Active Aria Systems Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Enterprise Software dtc lead Scott Bevan region USA/Canada First investment Series E in 2011 All All Active Arista Status Exited Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: ANET Focus Area Infrastructure dtc lead Gregg Adkin region USA/Canada First investment 2012 Highlights All Exited Arkin Status Exited Acquired by VMware Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Infrastructure dtc lead Raman Khanna region USA/Canada First investment Series B in 2015 All All Exited Auditoria Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area AI Enterprise Software dtc lead Raman Khanna region USA/Canada First investment All All Active Augment Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Logistics AI dtc lead Gregg Adkin region USA/Canada First investment Series A 2025 Highlights All Active Augtera Status Exited Acquired by Nvidia Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area AI Infrastructure dtc lead Daniel Docter region USA/Canada First investment Series A in 2021 All All Exited BabbleLabs Status Exited Acquired by Cisco Systems Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Infrastructure AI Enterprise Software dtc lead Gregg Adkin region USA/Canada First investment Series A in 2019 All All Exited Barefoot Networks Status Exited Acquired by Intel Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Infrastructure dtc lead Scott Darling region USA/Canada First investment Series B in 2014 All All Exited BastionZero Status Exited Acquired by Cloudflare in 2024 Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Cybersecurity Developer-first dtc lead Deepak Jeevankumar region USA/Canada First investment Seed in 2021 All All Exited Big Switch Networks Status Exited Acquired by Arista Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Infrastructure dtc lead Raman Khanna region USA/Canada First investment Series B in 2012 All All Exited Bluebox Status Exited Acquired by IBM Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Infrastructure dtc lead Daniel Docter region USA/Canada First investment Series B in 2014 All All Exited Bluedata Status Exited Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Infrastructure Data dtc lead Daniel Docter region USA/Canada First investment Series C in 2015 All All Exited Bodo Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area AI Enterprise Software Data dtc lead Daniel Docter region USA/Canada First investment Series A in 2021 All All Active Calamu Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Cybersecurity Data dtc lead Chris Hillock region USA/Canada First investment Seed in 2021 All All Active Cartesia Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area AI dtc lead Radhika Malik region USA/Canada First investment Series A in 2025 Highlights All Active Cequence Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Cybersecurity dtc lead Deepak Jeevankumar region USA/Canada First investment Series B in 2019 Highlights All Active CliQr Status Exited Acquired by Cisco Systems Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Cybersecurity dtc lead Raman Khanna region USA/Canada First investment Series B in 2014 All All Exited Cloud 66 Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Enterprise Software Developer-first dtc lead Daniel Docter region Europe First investment 2015 All All Active CloudEndure Status Exited Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Infrastructure dtc lead Yair Snir region Israel First investment Series B in 2016 All All Exited Cloudknox Status Exited Acquired by Microsoft Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Cybersecurity dtc lead Raman Khanna region USA/Canada First investment Seed in 2017 All All Exited Cloudlink Status Exited Acquired by EMC Corporation Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Infrastructure Developer-first dtc lead Daniel Docter region USA/Canada First investment Series B in 2013 All All Exited Clovyr Status Exited Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Infrastructure dtc lead Gregg Adkin region USA/Canada First investment Seed in 2019 All All Exited CUE Labs Status Active Acquired by Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Infrastructure Developer-first dtc lead Elana Lian region Europe First investment Seed in 2021 All All Active Cylance Status Exited Acquired by Blackberry Nasdaq: NYSE: Focus Area Cybersecurity AI DTC | Enterprise GTM Foundations: Everything You Need to Scale Early-stage Sales -0.6" am-opacity="0" am-position-y="2rem" > -0.6" am-tween="from" am-opacity="0" > Congratulations to the entire Rivos team on their acquisition by Meta! Read more ➡️ About Team Companies News & Resources News & Resources Blog DTC Podcast Back to content Enterprise GTM Foundations: Everything You Need to Scale Early-stage Sales Written by Chris Hillock Published April 28, 2026 Strategies Table of Contents Example H2 Example H3 Example H4 Example H5 Example H6 Company journey ‍ Strategies https://www.delltechnologiescapital.com/resources/enterprise-gtm-foundations Building an enterprise product has never been faster—and getting it to market the right way has never been harder. AI has dramatically increased product velocity, and it’s beginning to reshape how enterprises evaluate, adopt, and scale new technology. For early-stage teams, that gap shows up quickly: momentum stalls, sales cycles stretch, and early wins fail to translate into repeatable growth. That’s why building a durable, intentional go-to-market engine has always mattered—and why it matters more than ever. At Dell Technologies Capital, GTM support has been a core focus of our team since day one. We’ve helped countless companies make their first enterprise sale, expand early accounts, hire and incentivize teams, build forecasting discipline, and ultimately win and take share across the Fortune 2000. We’re in the trenches with our companies—experiencing the same frustrations, celebrating the wins, and learning alongside them in real time. That’s why we created the GTM Foundations series . This series is designed for founders, sales leaders, and product marketers navigating the transition from MVP to a scalable, enterprise-ready sales engine. It focuses on the decisions that matter most early: where to start, what to prioritize, and how to build for repeatability. Charting a course to market adoption demands intentional planning, adaptability, and a strong foundation for scalable growth. GTM Foundations will offer frameworks, insights, and first-hand experiences across all of these areas. We’ve already kicked things off with: The Art of Founder-led Sales — why early customers are buying the founder as much as the product Who’s the Real ICP? — identifying who actually buys in the early days (hint: often not the C-suite) Hiring Your First Sales Lead — what to look for, how to evaluate, and how to measure success in the first 90 days Enterprise GTM success ultimately comes down to three things: timing, intention, and execution. GTM Foundations is built around that window—when early traction needs to become a repeatable motion, teams begin to scale, and complexity starts to creep in. The objective is simple: build a go-to-market foundation strong enough to support real, lasting growth. Let's do this! 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