Seven Tech Trailblazers alumni making the news Founders on Fire NEWSFLASH Posted by rax lakhani | 24/07/2026 From major funding and strategic customer agreements to international expansion, production AI, cloud partnerships and identity intelligence Here at Tech Trailblazers, we’re proud to champion the enterprise technology companies and leaders that continue blazing a trail long after their Awards moment. This week, the team here at Tech Trailblazers Towers has been cheering on seven alumni whose latest developments span supply chain cyber security, AI infrastructure, semiconductor connectivity, API security, cloud storage, enterprise data access and digital identity. From Risk Ledger securing major new investment and Baya Systems helping Kandou AI address the AI memory wall to Spectro Cloud launching locally managed inference infrastructure, Salt Security expanding into Australia, Wasabi partnering with Megaport, Qumulo integrating with Databricks and SpyCloud passing a remarkable identity-intelligence milestone, there is plenty to celebrate across the Tech Trailblazers alumni community. Risk Ledger raises $32 million in Series B funding First up, a huge Trailblazers congratulations goes to Risk Ledger, our 2024 Security Trailblazers winner. Risk Ledger has raised £24 million, approximately $32 million, in Series B funding. The investment was led by Axiom Equity, with additional support from existing investor Mercia Ventures. The company plans to use the funding to deepen its customer network in the UK, develop a new generation of AI-powered supply chain security tools and support its expansion into the United States. Risk Ledger has built a network-first platform designed to move organisations beyond traditional third-party risk management and towards what it calls Active Supply Chain Security. Each supplier completes one standardised assessment and maintains it across the network in real time, replacing repeated point-in-time questionnaires with a single, current profile that connected organisations can access. More than 16,000 organisations across financial services, insurance, government and critical national infrastructure are now part of the network. As supply chains become more interconnected, the risk that matters most may sit several steps away inside a supplier’s supplier. Risk Ledger’s collaborative approach is designed to give organisations a clearer view of those connections and help them share intelligence about systemic risks. It is fantastic to see Risk Ledger securing significant new backing to expand internationally, advance its AI capabilities and continue developing a more collaborative approach to supply chain defence. There is also a Founders on Fire connection. Rose Ross previously sat down with Emily Hodges and Haydn Brooks to discuss Risk Ledger’s journey and its mission to transform supply chain cyber security. Revisit the Founders on Fire episode here. The team here at Tech Trailblazers Towers sends its warmest congratulations to Haydn, Emily and everyone at Risk Ledger. Risk Ledger’s Tech Trailblazers recognition: 2024 Security Trailblazers winner. Baya Systems and Kandou AI take aim at the AI memory wall Next up, a special Trailblazers congratulations to Baya Systems, connected to our alumni community through founder and CEO Dr Sailesh Kumar, a 2025 Male CxO Trailblazers runner-up. Kandou AI has selected Baya Systems to support the development of its next generation of high-speed connectivity platforms through a strategic intellectual-property licensing agreement. Kandou has licensed Baya’s WeaveIP™ fabric and WeaverPro™ software platform and is deploying both across its architecture and development workflow for its 448G copper AI connectivity technology. The collaboration brings together two complementary elements of AI infrastructure. Kandou’s Copper MIMO technology addresses high-speed connectivity at the physical layer, while Baya’s software-defined fabric platform is designed to optimise data movement between compute, memory and input-output components, both on the chip and across multiple chiplets. Kandou is also using WeaverPro to explore and validate on-chip interconnect configurations, including traffic-class partitioning, quality-of-service policies and protocol adaptation, before reaching the critical Register-Transfer Level stage of development. This matters because the continued growth of AI is not solely a question of increasing compute capacity. Data must also move between processors, memory and other components quickly and efficiently enough to keep those systems productive. As AI architectures become more complex and increasingly modular, the interconnect and fabric layers are becoming fundamental to performance, scalability and time to market. It is fantastic to see Baya Systems securing a customer agreement that validates both its technology and its role in the development of next-generation AI infrastructure. Our warmest congratulations go to Dr Kumar and the whole Baya Systems team. Baya Systems’ Tech Trailblazers recognition: Dr Sailesh Kumar, founder and CEO of Baya Systems, was a 2025 Male CxO Trailblazers runner-up. Spectro Cloud launches PaletteAI Inference Launchpad A huge Trailblazers congratulations also goes to Spectro Cloud, our 2022 Containers Trailblazers runner-up. Spectro Cloud has launched PaletteAI Inference Launchpad, a turnkey, locally managed platform designed to help enterprises run AI inference closer to their data, applications and users. The platform can intelligently route requests between locally operated and external models, meter token consumption and apply governance and quota policies. Depending on the workload and deployment, Spectro Cloud says organisations may be able to reduce token costs by as much as 70%. The announcement also expands PaletteAI support across AMD-powered infrastructure, giving organisations more choice between GPUs, models, runtimes and deployment environments. This development is a natural evolution for a Containers Trailblazers alumnus. Kubernetes and container orchestration have become important building blocks for operating AI workloads, but organisations now need to govern far more than an individual model or application. They need to manage the infrastructure, GPUs, runtimes, inference services, policies and costs surrounding production AI – often across cloud, on-premises, sovereign and edge environments. It is brilliant to see Spectro Cloud applying its container and cloud-native heritage to one of the most pressing operational challenges surrounding enterprise AI. Spectro Cloud’s Tech Trailblazers recognition: 2022 Containers Trailblazers runner-up. Salt Security establishes its first dedicated Asia-Pacific presence A very warm Trailblazers congratulations goes to Salt Security, our 2021 Security Trailblazers winner. Salt Security has officially entered the Australian market with infrastructure hosted in the AWS Sydney region and a dedicated in-country sales and technical team. The local deployment gives Australian customers access to Salt’s Agentic Security Platform while allowing relevant security data to be processed and stored within the country. It represents Salt Security’s first dedicated presence in the Asia-Pacific region and reflects growing enterprise demand for security technology capable of monitoring and governing APIs, AI agents and Model Context Protocol servers. APIs already connect an enormous proportion of enterprise applications, services and data. As organisations introduce autonomous agents and increasingly complex machine-to-machine interactions, understanding what each API and agent is doing – and whether that behaviour is legitimate – becomes even more important. International expansion supported by local infrastructure is a significant milestone for any security company, particularly in markets where data residency and sovereignty requirements affect purchasing and deployment decisions. Congratulations to everyone at Salt Security on this exciting next phase of global growth. Salt Security’s Tech Trailblazers recognition: 2021 Security Trailblazers winner. Wasabi and Megaport partner on AI-ready cloud infrastructure Congratulations to Wasabi Cloud Storage, which was named a 2020 Cloud Trailblazers runner-up and Storage Trailblazers runner-up. Wasabi has announced a strategic partnership with Megaport that will see its cloud object-storage technology power the storage layer of Megaport Storage. The companies are bringing together Wasabi’s object storage and Megaport’s global software-defined networking platform to support AI data platforms, analytics, cloud-native applications, media repositories, backup and cyber-resilience workloads. They also plan to collaborate on further technical integrations, joint go-to-market activities and services connecting Wasabi’s cloud storage with Megaport’s networking and AI infrastructure. This is an especially fitting development for a company recognised in both our Cloud and Storage categories. Modern AI infrastructure depends not only on compute capacity, but also on the ability to store, connect, transfer and access very large datasets predictably across distributed environments. By combining specialist networking and object-storage services, Wasabi and Megaport are addressing the demand for more flexible infrastructure designed around data-intensive and AI workloads. The team here at Tech Trailblazers Towers sends its warmest congratulations to Wasabi and everyone involved in the partnership. Wasabi’s Tech Trailblazers recognition: 2020 Cloud Trailblazers runner-up and 2020 Storage Trailblazers runner-up. Qumulo integrates NeuralSearch with Databricks A big Trailblazers congratulations to Qumulo, our 2015 Storage Trailblazers runner-up. Qumulo has announced a partnership with Databricks that integrates Qumulo NeuralSearch with Databricks OpenSharing. The integration is intended to help customers discover, query and collaborate on data held across core, cloud and edge environments without having to replicate or relocate it first. NeuralSearch turns unstructured information into searchable intelligence using SQL, natural-language queries and semantic search. Through the Databricks integration, organisations can bring distributed data under centralised governance through Unity Catalog while retaining the information in its existing environment. It is remarkable to see a company first recognised by the Tech Trailblazers judges more than a decade ago continuing to innovate as enterprise infrastructure enters the agentic AI era. Storage has evolved from somewhere information simply resides into an active component of enterprise analytics and AI architecture. Making distributed data discoverable and usable while retaining governance and avoiding unnecessary movement addresses a very current operational challenge. Congratulations to the Qumulo team on another important industry partnership. Qumulo’s Tech Trailblazers recognition: 2015 Storage Trailblazers runner-up. SpyCloud passes one trillion recaptured identity assets Congratulations to SpyCloud, our 2023 Security Trailblazers runner-up, on reaching a major company milestone. SpyCloud has announced that its identity-intelligence repository has surpassed one trillion recaptured identity assets gathered from criminal sources. The company reports that stolen session cookies and authentication tokens now represent nearly half of those assets, illustrating how attackers are increasingly moving beyond passwords and attempting to hijack sessions that have already been authenticated. SpyCloud also says it recaptured 25 billion identity assets during the preceding 30 days alone. Although one trillion stolen identity assets is a sobering measure of the scale of cybercrime, it is also an extraordinary operational milestone for the SpyCloud team. Turning information gathered from criminal sources into intelligence that defenders can use to identify and remediate exposure is increasingly important as phishing, infostealers and session theft become more sophisticated. The announcement also demonstrates exactly why identity protection captured the attention of our Security Trailblazers judges. Our congratulations go to the whole SpyCloud team as it continues helping organisations understand and disrupt identity-based attacks. SpyCloud’s Tech Trailblazers recognition: 2023 Security Trailblazers runner-up. Celebrating alumni momentum – and the next generation of Trailblazers We congratulate all of our previous Tech Trailblazer Awards winners and runners-up who continue to build, partner, launch, scale and lead across enterprise technology. From Risk Ledger’s major Series B funding and Baya Systems’ new customer agreement to Spectro Cloud’s production AI launch, Salt Security’s Australian expansion, Wasabi’s Megaport partnership, Qumulo’s Databricks integration and SpyCloud’s identity-intelligence milestone, this week’s stories provide another fantastic snapshot of the ambition and staying power within the Tech Trailblazers community. As Chief Trail Blazer and Founder, it is enormously rewarding to see companies and leaders we recognised at very different stages of their journeys continuing to shape their industries and make news around the world. Could your company be next? Entries for the Tech Trailblazers Awards 2026 are open, and we would love to hear from eligible startups and scaleups working in AI, cloud, containers, developer technology, cyber security, storage, digital identity, semiconductor infrastructure and the other Tech Trailblazers Awards categories. Eligible entrants should be: Privately held technology startups or scaleups Generally at C-series funding or below Less than ten years old at the time of entry Operating in, or relevant to, one of the Tech Trailblazers Awards categories Find out more about the Tech Trailblazers Awards 2026 and enter here. Rose Ross Chief Trail Blazer and Founder Tech Trailblazers Awards If your company has previously been named as either a Tech Trailblazers Awards winner or runner-up and you would like to share recent or upcoming news with us, please email innovate@techtrailblazers.com.