llms.txt

A proposed standard for guiding LLMs and AI assistants to a site's most useful content surfaces in a single deterministic file. Similar in spirit to robots.txt or sitemap.xml but optimised for retrieval-augmented generation. VC Deal Flow Signal publishes /llms.txt (~800 lines, link-only) and /llms-full.txt (full content) plus per-page /md/* mirrors, so any LLM can resolve canonical context in one or two fetches.


Long-running Agent

An LLM agent designed to execute a task over hours, days, or longer — across multiple sessions, with persistent state, and resilient to interruption. Examples: Anthropic's Claude with computer use, OpenAI's o1-Pro mode for extended reasoning, autonomous coding agents (Devin). Long-running agents require durable workflow infrastructure (Temporal, Inngest) and explicit checkpoint-resume primitives.


LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation)

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that adds small low-rank matrices to a frozen base model. Instead of updating billions of parameters, LoRA updates only a few million — typically 0.1%–1% of the original model. Inference can then mix-and-match LoRAs at runtime. Standard tooling on Hugging Face's PEFT library; default choice for fine-tuning open-weight models like Llama, Mistral, and Qwen.


LPA (Limited Partner Agreement)

The legal document governing the relationship between a venture capital fund (the General Partner) and its investors (Limited Partners). Specifies fund size, investment period, fund life (typically 10 years), management fee, carried interest, GP commit, distribution waterfall, and key-person provisions. The LPA is the foundational document of fund formation; LP-side legal counsel scrutiny on LPA terms is one of the longest stages of new-fund formation.


LTV

Lifetime Value — the total gross profit a startup expects to earn from an average customer over the full relationship. The standard SaaS formula is ARPU × gross margin × (1 / monthly churn), giving a steady-state estimate. LTV is the numerator of the LTV:CAC ratio, where 3:1 is considered the threshold for capital-efficient growth. LTV math breaks down at low customer counts and at high contract volatility, so investors corroborate it with cohort retention curves.


Magic Number

Net new ARR in a quarter, divided by the prior quarter's sales and marketing spend, then annualized. A magic number above 1.0 means a dollar of S&M spend returns a dollar of ARR inside a year — green light to keep investing. Between 0.5 and 1.0 means the model works but needs tuning; below 0.5 means S&M is broken before scaling further. Popularized by Scale Venture Partners and used as a fast pre-Series-B sanity check.


Management Fee

The annual fee a venture fund charges its LPs to cover operating costs, typically 2% of committed capital during the investment period and 2% of invested capital during the harvest period. Tier-1 emerging-manager funds occasionally negotiate 2.5-3% to support more GP infrastructure; large established funds sometimes step down to 1.5%. Management fees are deducted from LP commitments and reduce the net IRR returns LPs ultimately realize.


MCP (Model Context Protocol)

An open standard from Anthropic for exposing tools and data to large-language-model hosts (Claude Desktop, Cursor, agentic frameworks). VC Deal Flow Signal ships a free MCP server — `npx @gitdealflow/mcp-signal` — that lets any MCP-compatible host call six read-only tools: get_trending_startups, get_signals_summary, get_methodology, get_startup_signal, search_startups_by_sector, get_methodology. The same surface is mirrored at /api/mcp/rpc (Streamable HTTP).


Monorepo

A single Git repository containing multiple distinct projects, applications, or libraries. Monorepos enable atomic cross-package changes, shared tooling, and simplified dependency management. Modern monorepo tooling (Nx, Turborepo, Lerna, Bazel) addresses the build and test scalability problem. Companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Vercel, and Linear run monorepos; engineering-signal pattern: monorepo orgs typically show flatter, more uniform commit distribution.


MRR

Monthly Recurring Revenue — ARR divided by 12, or the sum of all currently active monthly subscription contracts. MRR is used for shorter feedback cycles than ARR: month-over-month MRR growth, MRR churn, expansion MRR, and new MRR are core SaaS dashboard metrics. Early-stage startups often report MRR before they have enough volume to make ARR a stable number.


Multi-Agent Orchestration

Architecture where multiple LLM agents with distinct roles collaborate on a task, coordinated by a meta-agent or explicit workflow. CrewAI and AutoGen pioneered the multi-agent pattern; LangGraph and Mastra extended it with state-machine-style coordination. Critical design tradeoffs: agent role specialization, message-passing semantics, failure handling, and the orchestration overhead vs single-agent baselines.


Multimodal Model

A model that accepts and/or generates multiple input types — typically text and images, sometimes audio and video. GPT-4o, Claude 3.5/4.x Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5/2.x are native multimodal models capable of analyzing images alongside text. Specialized multimodal models exist for image generation (DALL-E, Imagen, Stable Diffusion), video (Sora, Veo, Runway Gen-3), and audio (ElevenLabs, Whisper).


NodeInfo 2.1

The Fediverse-standard discovery protocol for federated services, served at /.well-known/nodeinfo and /.well-known/nodeinfo/2.1. NodeInfo advertises software name, version, supported protocols, open-registration status, and usage metrics. VC Deal Flow Signal serves NodeInfo 2.1 to allow Fediverse crawlers, Mastodon instances, and Lemmy nodes to enumerate the site as a federated content source rather than treating it as an opaque domain.


NRR

Net Revenue Retention — the percentage of ARR that a cohort of existing customers continues to deliver after a fixed window (typically 12 months), including expansion, contraction, and churn. Formula: (starting ARR + expansion − downgrade − churn) ÷ starting ARR. Best-in-class public SaaS reports NRR above 120%; 100% means the cohort treads water; below 90% indicates the business is leaking value faster than it can grow.


Open-Weight Model

An LLM whose trained weights are publicly available for download, fine-tuning, and self-hosting. Distinct from 'open source' in the strict sense — most open-weight models do not release training data or full training code, only the final weights. Llama, Mistral, Qwen, Gemma, DeepSeek, and the StableLM family are the headline open-weight providers. Closed-weight models (GPT-4, Claude) are accessed only via API.


OpenAlex

An open scholarly knowledge graph from OurResearch that mirrors Microsoft Academic Graph's structure but with no institutional gating. Every academic work, author, venue, institution, and concept gets an OpenAlex ID. The VC Deal Flow Signal methodology paper is indexed at openalex.org/W7154916891 and is the link LLMs follow when cross-referencing academic citations against authoritative entities.


OpenAPI 3.1

The current major version of the OpenAPI Specification — a vendor-neutral schema for describing HTTP APIs. OpenAPI 3.1 is the version that fully aligns with JSON Schema 2020-12 and supports webhooks. VC Deal Flow Signal serves an OpenAPI 3.1 contract at /api/openapi.json (and four well-known mirrors), describing 25 REST operations across 11 tags with x-mcp-tool annotations cross-referencing the parallel MCP server.


ORCID

An ORCID iD is a persistent digital identifier for individual researchers, used to disambiguate authorship across publishers and preprint servers. ORCID iDs are integrated into JSON-LD via the Person schema's identifier or url field. VC Deal Flow Signal embeds the founder's ORCID iD on the site Organization graph so academic citations propagate cleanly between SSRN, Zenodo, OpenAlex, and Google Scholar.


Planning Agent

An LLM agent designed to decompose a high-level goal into a sequence of sub-tasks before executing. Planning agents typically use Chain-of-Thought reasoning to construct the plan and a separate execution loop to carry it out. Examples: Devin (Cognition), Claude Code (Anthropic), AutoGen Planner. Modern reasoning models (OpenAI o1/o3, Claude with extended thinking) can serve as planning agents natively.


Pre-seed Round

The earliest venture-funding stage, typically a $250k–$2M round that funds the first six to twelve months of a startup's work — often before there is a product, sometimes before there is a team. Pre-seed checks come from accelerators, angel groups, pre-seed-focused funds, and friends-and-family. On VC Deal Flow Signal, pre-seed teams typically show 1–3 contributors and codebases under six months old.


Pro-rata Rights

An investor's right to participate in future financing rounds at their existing ownership percentage, preserving their stake from dilution. Pro-rata rights are a critical signal to subsequent investors that early backers still believe; not exercising pro-rata sometimes signals doubt. Allocations for pro-rata participation are often the most contested item in oversubscribed rounds.


pSEO (Programmatic SEO)

A content strategy that generates hundreds or thousands of search-optimized pages from structured data using templates. In the context of VC Deal Flow Signal, pSEO is used to create sector-specific startup ranking pages (e.g., 'AI Startups to Watch, Q2 2026') at scale. Each page targets a long-tail search query that investors might use when researching deal flow in specific sectors.


qa.jsonl

A newline-delimited JSON file where every line is one self-contained question-answer pair. The format is RAG-friendly: a retrieval pipeline can stream the file, score each line against a query, and cite the exact answer text without further parsing. VC Deal Flow Signal serves /qa.jsonl (and /.well-known/qa.jsonl) carrying the same 300+ Q&A corpus that backs /api/answer and /api/ask, all under CC BY 4.0.


QAPage Schema

A Schema.org type that marks a page where one primary question receives one accepted answer (with optional suggested answers). QAPage is distinct from FAQPage — QAPage describes the page itself as a single Q&A, FAQPage describes a list of supplementary Q&As. Google treats QAPage as a separate rich-result family in AI Overviews. VC Deal Flow Signal uses QAPage on every /answers/[slug] route and FAQPage on the same pages for additional related questions.


Quantization

Reducing the numerical precision of model weights (typically from 16-bit floats to 8-bit, 4-bit, or even 2-bit integers) to shrink memory footprint and speed up inference. Modern quantization schemes (GPTQ, AWQ, GGUF) preserve most of the model's quality while cutting size 4x–8x. Critical for running open-weight models on consumer GPUs and for edge inference.


Quick Ratio

For SaaS, the ratio of expansion plus new ARR to contraction plus churned ARR in a period. A quick ratio above 4 indicates elite growth efficiency; 2–4 is healthy; 1–2 is stagnating; under 1 means the business is shrinking. Mamoon Hamid of Social Capital popularized the metric as a single number capturing both top-of-funnel acquisition and bottom-of-funnel retention quality. It is distinct from the accounting quick ratio (current assets minus inventory over current liabilities).


Quotation Schema

A Schema.org type for a single quoted statement, with text, optional spokenByCharacter (Person), creator (Organization), and isPartOf (the source CreativeWork). Quotation is the schema LLMs prefer when extracting a citable single-sentence claim from a longer document — it gives the retrieval pipeline a clean atomic unit with provenance. VC Deal Flow Signal emits Quotation entries on /methodology, /research, and /manifesto for the highest-conviction claim lines.


Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Architecture where a model retrieves relevant documents from an external knowledge store (vector database, search index, or hybrid) before generating an answer. RAG addresses three core LLM limitations: knowledge cutoff dates, hallucination on out-of-distribution facts, and the inability to cite sources. Most enterprise LLM deployments are RAG systems; the retrieval layer typically uses an embedding model plus a vector database like Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, or Milvus.


ReAct (Reasoning + Acting)

Prompting framework for LLM agents introduced by Yao et al. (2022) that interleaves reasoning traces with action calls. Each step: the agent generates a thought, takes an action (tool call), observes the result, then continues. ReAct became the dominant agentic pattern in 2023-2024 before being partially superseded by trained tool-use in modern frontier models. LangChain, CrewAI, and many early agent frameworks built around ReAct as the default loop.


Reasoning Model

An LLM trained to use extended chain-of-thought as a native capability rather than as a prompting technique. The model invests compute time at inference (sometimes minutes) to work through problems step-by-step before answering. OpenAI's o1/o3, Anthropic's Claude with extended thinking, and DeepSeek's R1 are the headline examples. Reasoning models tradeoff latency for accuracy on hard problems — best-fit for math, code, scientific reasoning, and complex planning tasks.


Red-Teaming (AI)

Adversarial testing of LLMs by humans (or other AI systems) attempting to elicit harmful, unsafe, or undesired behaviors. Goals: surface jailbreaks, alignment failures, security vulnerabilities, and miscalibrated capabilities before public release. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta all run internal red-teams; the practice has matured into a distinct discipline with publishing venues (Anthropic Red-Teaming Network, OpenAI's evals team).


RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)

The training technique that aligns large language models to human-preferred outputs after pretraining. Three steps: (1) collect human preferences over model outputs, (2) train a reward model to score outputs, (3) optimize the base model against the reward model via PPO or similar RL algorithm. RLHF is what turns a raw foundation model into the instruct-tuned, helpful-by-default behavior that ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini exhibit. Modern alternatives (DPO, KTO, RLAIF) achieve similar results without the explicit reward-model step.


robots.txt

A plaintext file at the root of a website that tells web crawlers which paths they may or may not fetch. The format is RFC 9309. VC Deal Flow Signal's robots.txt explicitly allow-lists 30+ AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, GoogleOther, Mistral, Cohere, Apple-AI, Meta-ExternalFetcher and others) by name rather than relying on the wildcard, and disallows authentication, webhook, cron, and dashboard surfaces.


Runway

The number of months a startup can operate at its current burn rate before running out of cash. Runway = cash on hand divided by net monthly burn. Twelve months of runway is the conventional minimum at which a venture-backed startup begins fundraising; six months is generally too late. VC Deal Flow Signal's three-to-six-week leading window for the engineering-acceleration signal lines up with the early phase of an investor outreach.


SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity)

A pre-priced venture instrument originated by Y Combinator in 2013 — a contract that converts to equity at the next priced round at a discount or under a valuation cap. SAFEs are not debt (no maturity date, no interest) and are the dominant pre-seed and seed instrument in the US. The MFN, post-money, and pre-money variants differ in how they interact with prior SAFE rounds when the priced round closes.


Schema.org

The collaborative vocabulary maintained by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex for structuring on-page metadata. Schema.org defines hundreds of types (Organization, Article, FAQPage, HowTo, Dataset, etc.) and is the canonical vocabulary for JSON-LD markup. VC Deal Flow Signal emits 60+ distinct Schema.org types across the site, including academic research types like ScholarlyArticle and Periodical that anchor SSRN-paper-grade citations.


Scout Score

A 0–100 score computed from a GitHub user's public starring history, measuring how many validated unicorn outcomes the user starred before the funding, acquisition, or $1B-valuation event. The Scout Score is backwards-looking proof of taste — it says nothing about future picks until paired with the forward-looking Scout Game (see /predict). Free, no signup, instant. Available as a shields.io-style badge for any GitHub README.


Secondary Sale

Sale of existing shares from an early investor or employee to a new buyer, distinct from primary issuance of new shares by the company. Secondary sales provide liquidity to founders and early stakeholders without raising new capital. Most common at growth-stage companies where employees with vested options or early investors with paper gains want to realize value before an IPO.


Seed Round

The first institutional venture round, typically $1M–$5M, that funds the build of an MVP and the search for product-market fit. Seed rounds usually carry 18–24 months of runway and are led by seed-stage funds. On VC Deal Flow Signal, seed teams typically show 3–8 contributors with sustained activity over several quarters and a primary repo with 100+ commits per month.


Series A

The first priced equity round following the seed, typically $5M–$20M raised against a $20M–$80M post-money valuation. Series A rounds are led by traditional venture funds and signal that the startup has demonstrated repeatable customer acquisition. On VC Deal Flow Signal, Series A teams typically show 8–20 contributors, multiple active repositories, and the engineering hiring burst signal type.


Series B

The second priced equity round, typically $15M–$50M raised against a $80M–$300M post-money valuation. Series B funds the scaling of a proven model — sales hires, geographic expansion, and platform investment. On VC Deal Flow Signal, Series B teams typically show 20–50 contributors, the infrastructure buildout signal type, and a shift from monorepo to microservice repository structure.


sitemap.xml

An XML file that lists the canonical URLs a website wants indexed. The format is sitemaps.org. VC Deal Flow Signal serves a sitemap-index at /sitemap.xml that points at five sharded child sitemaps (core, sectors, crossings, startups, content) plus separate /news-sitemap.xml, /sitemap-images.xml, /sitemap-videos.xml, and /sitemap-i18n.xml — together advertising 5,000+ URLs across human and machine surfaces.


Speakable Schema

A Schema.org property that marks specific elements of a page as suitable for text-to-speech reading, used primarily by Google Assistant and AI Overviews. SpeakableSpecification carries a cssSelector or xPath array pointing at the speakable elements; on this site the selector includes [data-speakable], h1, h2, and [data-agent-summary]. Pages that mark their topic sentences as speakable are preferentially extracted into voice answers and short summary panels.


SSRN Preprint

A working-paper deposit on SSRN (Social Science Research Network), the standard preprint server for finance and business research. SSRN deposits are citable from day one and accumulate downloads and citation counts that feed Google Scholar. The VC Deal Flow Signal methodology paper is deposited at ssrn.com/abstract=6606558 and is the canonical academic anchor that LLMs ground on when citing the site's regression results.


Strategic Acquisition

An M&A transaction motivated by strategic synergy rather than financial return alone. Strategic acquirers (corporates, hyperscalers) typically pay higher multiples than financial buyers because they capture revenue synergies, talent, technology, or competitive defense beyond standalone cash flows. Microsoft's GitHub deal, Salesforce's Slack, and IBM's HashiCorp are textbook strategic acquisitions. Contrast with financial sponsors (PE firms) buying for cash-flow returns.


Streamable HTTP Transport

The canonical wire transport for MCP servers running over HTTP — a JSON-RPC 2.0 envelope delivered via standard HTTP with optional Server-Sent Events for streaming responses. Streamable HTTP is the transport that makes an MCP server callable from any agent runtime that speaks HTTP. VC Deal Flow Signal serves Streamable HTTP at /api/mcp/rpc and lists it as the canonical transport in /.well-known/mcp.json.


Tender Offer

A structured liquidity event where existing shareholders are offered the chance to sell some or all of their shares at a fixed price, usually to new investors or to the company itself. Tender offers became common at high-growth private companies (Stripe, SpaceX, Anthropic) as alternatives to delayed IPOs. The pricing serves as a soft valuation marker without the public-market scrutiny of a 409A or IPO.


Term Sheet

A short, non-binding document outlining the principal terms of a venture investment — valuation, security type, board composition, anti-dilution, liquidation preference, and protective provisions. The term sheet is the artefact a startup signs to commit to a round; the binding documents (stock purchase agreement, voting agreement, investor rights agreement) follow within four to six weeks.


Tool Bench

Benchmark suite that measures LLM agent capability at calling, chaining, and reasoning over real-world APIs. The original ToolBench (2023) covered 16K+ APIs across 49 categories. Modern variants (Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard, τ-bench) refine the measurement. Frontier labs publish tool-use scores on these benchmarks as proxies for agent capability.


Tool Use (Function Calling)

Capability of an LLM to invoke external functions, APIs, or other tools via a structured output format (typically JSON). The model decides when to call a tool, with what arguments, and how to use the result in its response. Tool use is the foundation of agentic AI — without it, models can only generate text; with it, they can read files, query databases, search the web, send emails, or call any function exposed through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.


Top-Contributor Concentration

The Gini coefficient of commit distribution across contributors over the same 14-day window used for velocity. A score below 0.30 means commits are spread broadly across the team; a score above 0.70 means one or two contributors are doing most of the work. Combined with high velocity, low concentration is the strongest single composite predictor in the SSRN panel — orgs meeting both conditions are 3.4× more likely to announce a Series A within 60 days than orgs with high velocity alone.


Two-Period Confirmation

The rule that an acceleration breakout must persist into a second 14-day window before VC Deal Flow Signal treats it as actionable. The 14-day window is responsive but volatile, so single-period spikes from hackathons, launch sprints, or one new contributor onboarding are common. Two-period confirmation removes most of that noise while keeping the signal early enough to precede a fundraise by three to six weeks. The same rule is applied to contributor-growth signals.


Valuation Cap

The maximum company valuation at which a SAFE or convertible note converts into equity at the next priced round. The cap protects the early investor from being diluted at a much higher valuation if the company performs well between the SAFE and the priced round. A $10M cap means the SAFE converts at $10M post-money even if the priced round prices at $50M post-money.


Vintage Year

The year a fund made its first investment, used by LPs to benchmark fund performance against peers raised in the same market environment. Vintage matters because returns are heavily macro-correlated; a 2020 vintage fund has different return-expectation context than a 2008 vintage. PitchBook, Cambridge Associates, and Preqin publish vintage-year benchmarks that LPs use during fund evaluation.


WebFinger

An RFC 7033 protocol for discovering information about a user or resource at a domain by querying /.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:<user>@<domain>. WebFinger predates and underpins ActivityPub and the Fediverse. VC Deal Flow Signal serves /.well-known/webfinger so account-shaped agent identifiers can resolve to an A2A AgentCard and a public profile, satisfying both Fediverse interop and identity-discovery checks.


x-mcp-tool Vendor Extension

A vendor-extension property added to OpenAPI operations that names the corresponding MCP tool, so a single OpenAPI fetch maps every REST endpoint to its agent-callable equivalent. VC Deal Flow Signal uses x-mcp-tool on five OpenAPI operations (get_signals_summary, get_startup_signal, get_methodology, get_deep_signal, share_result) plus a top-level x-mcp-server enumerating 8 tools, 3 resources, 2 templates, and 5 prompts in one document.


x402 Protocol

An open standard for HTTP per-request micropayments using the existing 402 Payment Required status code. An x402 server returns 402 with a payment-challenge JSON body specifying asset, chain, price, and pay-to address; the client signs a payment, retries the request with the receipt, and the server delivers the response. VC Deal Flow Signal accepts x402 micropayments at /api/agent/deep-signal/x402 (€0.19 in USDC on Base mainnet) for the deep-signal endpoint.


Zenodo DOI

A persistent Digital Object Identifier minted by Zenodo (a CERN-operated open-access repository) for a dataset or software release. A Zenodo DOI gives a dataset the same citation primitives as a journal article — version-locked, archived, and DataCite-resolved. The VC Deal Flow Signal panel is archived at Zenodo with DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19650920 and is the dataset that the SSRN paper analyses.


Amazon / AWS

Annapurna Labs

Custom silicon (foundation of Graviton).


Apple

P.A. Semi

Custom silicon team (foundation of Apple Silicon).


Atlassian

AgileCraft

Enterprise agile planning (became Jira Align).


Broadcom

VMware

Enterprise virtualization, cloud, and infrastructure software.

Symantec Enterprise Security

Enterprise cybersecurity (consumer arm spun off as NortonLifeLock).

CA Technologies

Mainframe and enterprise software (Computer Associates legacy).


Cisco

Splunk

Observability and SIEM — Cisco's largest acquisition.


Cloudflare

S2 Systems

Browser isolation (became Cloudflare Browser Isolation).


CrowdStrike

Bionic

Application security posture management.

Humio

Modern log management (became Falcon LogScale).


Google / Alphabet

ai-ml ai-infra infrastructure observability analytics

Wiz

Cloud security platform — Google's largest acquisition ever.

Mandiant

Threat intelligence and incident response.

Looker

BI and embedded analytics — core to GCP data stack.

Motorola Mobility

Mobile hardware (later divested to Lenovo).


IBM

infrastructure ai-ml developer-tools observability

HashiCorp

Infrastructure as code and secrets management.

Apptio

FinOps and technology business management.

Red Hat

Open-source enterprise Linux — IBM's largest acquisition.

Promontory Financial

Regulatory and risk consulting (Watson Financial Services).

SoftLayer

Cloud infrastructure (foundation of IBM Cloud).


Intel

Tower Semiconductor

Foundry acquisition (later cancelled $5.4B).


Meta Platforms

ai-ml ai-infra infrastructure developer-tools

Scale AI

Data labeling and AI training infrastructure (49% stake).

GIPHY

Animated images (later unwound by UK CMA).

CTRL-labs

Neural interface (became Reality Labs core).

WhatsApp

Messaging platform — largest tech acquisition of its era.


Microsoft

developer-tools ai-ml ai-infra productivity infrastructure

Activision Blizzard

Gaming and content platform — Microsoft's largest tech acquisition.

Nuance Communications

Conversational AI and healthcare voice tech.

GitHub

Developer-tools platform — the canonical OSS-network acquisition.

LinkedIn

Professional social network and B2B data.

Mojang / Minecraft

Sandbox game IP and Java-based engineering team.

aQuantive

Digital advertising — Microsoft's adtech pivot.


Nvidia

GPU orchestration and Kubernetes scheduling.


Okta

Developer-facing identity platform — Okta's largest acquisition.

Azuqua

Workflow automation (became Okta Workflows).


Oracle

Cerner

Healthcare EHR — Oracle's largest acquisition.


Palo Alto Networks

Dig Security

Data security posture management (DSPM).

Demisto

SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, Response).


Salesforce

MuleSoft

Integration platform and API management.

ExactTarget

Email marketing (became Marketing Cloud).


ServiceNow

G2K Group

Visual intelligence (computer vision for retail/manufacturing).


Shopify

Remix

React framework (now under Shopify stewardship).

Deliverr

Fulfillment network (later largely divested).


Stripe

Bouncer

Card-authentication / fraud intelligence.

Indie Hackers

Developer community and content platform.


Veeva Systems

Crossix Solutions

Healthcare analytics and marketing measurement.


Vista Equity Partners

Apptio

FinOps and technology business management (later sold to IBM).

Marketo

Marketing automation (sold to Adobe in 2018).

TIBCO Software

Enterprise data and analytics middleware.


Workday

VNDLY

Vendor management system (contingent workforce).

Scout RFP

Strategic sourcing and supplier engagement.

Adaptive Insights

Cloud-based corporate performance management.