Summit Partners

Also in the US, Socure posted forty-two point seven million dollars in new bookings for the third quarter of this year, doubling its customer base to more than six thousand organizations.

Following a five point two billion dollar valuation round led by Summit Partners, the company says it's on track to reach four hundred and fifty million dollars in annual recurring revenue by year-end, driven by demand for its new DocV Omega verification engine and autonomous fraud agents.

Over in Identity Tech, Proof has launched X401, an open protocol that lets websites verify which real person, uh, an AI agent is acting on the behalf of and then confirm exactly what they are approved to do.

Connecting directly to AI assistants via the Model Context Protocol, the system uses on-device biometrics and hardware keys to sign specific transaction terms, stopping autonomous bots from making changes, purchases, or payments without user permission.

Um, went to Brandeis for undergrad, so, uh, Massachusetts was kind of became some of my, my learning ground, and Leo and I went to school together, so we go way back from undergrad.

Um, I, I studied economics and politics there, later worked at Goldman for some years, and then from Goldman, I worked at a private equity firm called Summit Partners.

Uh, around that time, you know, I really began to think about just seeing the significant pools of capital that we were investing in, in those industries, um, began to realize that a lot of those, that capital was going to men, and mostly white men.

So I said, "Well, I know so many incredible people, diverse people who are smart, are building, but they don't have access to the capital pools that I'm seeing, and I'm actually helping raise and deploy," so I wanted to do something about it.

Okay, Walter, I want to start with your career because you are such a legend in the industry.

So you have worked for like over 37 years at Summit Partners and you helped kind of like started with Chris for like SignalFire.

And obviously now you are investing on your own, which... you have like done a lot of amazing deals from like Stripe, SpaceX, OpenAthropic, just to name a few.

And you were on the Midas list for like multiple years back in time.

I mean, one, just incredibly grateful and proud, frankly, that our existing investors are continuing on the path.

We've had such a phenomenal experience with Summit partners, Carlyle and Nasdaq as our investors, starting with Carlyle and Nasdaq in 2019.

In 2022, really, as the overall SaaS environment was beginning to change, we brought in Summit partners, and I can't speak highly enough of that relationship.

They have just been phenomenal advisors, mentors, just everything you really want in an investor-investee relationship.

I mean, certainly they challenge us, they hold us to very rigorous quantitative standards, but in the end, I think we're all focused on the same thing, which is fundamental value creation in the right way.

Before we connected, you had a whole career.

I know you were with Summit Partners.

You were intimately under the hood of seeing brands like Dr.

Squash, Ruggable, Brooklinen.

I've never really gotten to ask you, what do you feel like you gleaned from that experience, which I'm sure is a ton, that you took into launching Groons and the way you decided to do that?

Love it.

So Summit Partners, private equity firm, at the time, $4.9 billion fund.

So that's the amount of money you can put to work into companies.