So, you just had a big milestone in the last couple of months. You raised 5 billion in equity at a $134 billion valuation. We're kind of lucky because we have an opportunity to talk to you as you're making decisions, and maybe you've already made them, about how to allocate this big windfall, if you will. Can you walk us through and name several things that you want to do that you would plan to do with that? There was giving employees exits, there's development of your products. You mentioned Lakebase in particular, which is your database purpose-built for AI, Accelerate Genie, your conversational AI that lets people have conversations with their data. You mentioned AI research, a handful of other things. Tell us about how, give us kind of a mental picture of how you're thinking about prioritizing that important milestone, $5 billion.
Yeah, that's a great question. And thanks for having me. Excited to be here. So, you know, we're just seeing acceleration in all of our business. Like, I really mean like we see acceleration in our core business. And what are we? Why are we seeing acceleration in the business? We slice it by Europe, by United States, Latin America, Asia, everything is. And we slice it by different clouds, no matter how we look at it. It's just, you know, the business is growing. So that requires you to invest, you know, to keep up. So we're investing in the core business. So that's the data platform, the security and all of that. So that's the huge investments going in there. On the AI side, I think that the biggest, and maybe we'll get into it later, is that, you know, I think the biggest opportunities, I think guys here. So I think we don't need more intelligence. We need context for the AI. The AIs without context are useless. So that's our Genie product. So, you know, there's a big research team that just does research on reinforcement learning and advanced AI techniques. My researchers, we're hiring hundreds and they're very expensive, you know, so it's almost like thousands. It feels like it, like other employees that you would otherwise hire. And then, you know, then GPUs. You know, so there's a lot of investment goes into that. So we're very excited about that. Happy to talk about that. That's the thing I'm most excited about. And then we're getting into new markets because what's happening basically is that the thing that people call SaaS apocalypse. You know, people interpret that in extremes. But really what's happening is that the barriers to entry for other people to come in and compete in any business in software is just lowered. So we're getting into new markets as well.
So talk about what that looks like, what new markets, where.
Yeah, I mean, we launched Lake Watch which brings us into the security market. And the security market is itself going through a big revolution because what's happening is that, I mean, we all heard it, but Mythos. But actually it started before Mythos. You know, it's already the case that the number one attacker, according to Hacker One's top list, is, you know, this person called Expo. But if you look behind it, it's actually all automated agents, and it's been dominating charts even before Mythos. They found, you know, they used OpenAI's 003 model to hack the kernel of Linux. So like this has been going on. So there's an swath of agents coming attacking these businesses. So cyber is a big risk. And the existing businesses that do security protection, they're sort of in this legacy model where you have to ingest certain data. It's very expensive. They're not going to be able to keep up with agents. Right. So, you know, we got into that market now, maybe we would have gotten into that market anyway. But with AI, it's compressing almost the time it takes for us to build. It's making it a lot easier for you to come in and try to disrupt.
Yeah. For multiple reasons. Right. Writing that software is ten times faster now thanks to AI. So we can just produce the competing software very quickly. We could not have done that five years ago if it wasn't for AI. So that's like one. But the second is that the AI threats themselves have changed the landscape. So the way the incumbents were actually approaching security, you need to change those assumptions. So that also always opens up an entry point for existing. And then thirdly, it's not, you know, specific to this time we don't have any security business. So we don't have any innovator's dilemma. We don't have to protect some revenue. We can just, you know, launch something and we can, you know, it's sort of your margin is my opportunity as well. It's used to say.
Do you have a target for the number of people because you're going to have to hire researchers, engineers. You're gonna have to build up your capability in that area. You can't just rely on agents and Mythos.
Yeah. No, we've stepped up a whole team. You know, a whole team.
How big do you envision that coming?
I mean, unfortunately, I think it's going to be in the hundreds. But, you know, the way you want to operate in this area is actually very small team that can move very fast. It's actually preferable. So actually it's a, you know, so if it was 1000 it would be a terrible answer. That would be we would go nowhere. You know, I think it's going to get to the hundreds. But you want to keep it small and fast and nimble and execute quickly, because in this AI era, big teams slow you down because it requires coordination between lots of people. And that then becomes the actually, you know, slowest or lowest common denominator for progress. You want to unleash the agents and let them go fast.
You've talked very eloquently about how the idea that many businesses over-indexed early on on chatbots, we sort of went a little nuts on that. You've obviously thrown yourself, your resources behind this age of agentic AI. Curious about how we protect against the downsides. Harvard Business School put out some research that talked about how agentic AI, particularly when we humanize it, can result in shifting accountability away from individuals, reducing review quality, eroding trust. They talk about brain fry. I mean, it's a little bit of a doomsday scenario, but how do we protect against that? How do we avoid the risk of over-indexing on agentic AI?
Buy our new security product, like Watch. Just kidding, just kidding, just kidding. But actually, only half kidding. So, you know, these things are merging, right? So we were a data and AI company, we're focused on that, and we were not doing security before. And people would tell us like, oh, make sure that no one breaks into the data and make sure that the data in the AI is. But now people are saying, hey, how do we know that the agents are also not doing something weird? So actually whole markets are collapsing. So us getting into security is not just happenstance. That market is kind of collapsing with the data and AI market that we used to be in itself. So all those things that they say is absolutely true. So, you know, you unleash agents. Well, should agents act on behalf of you? How do you know that they're not going to do something that they're not supposed to do? So, you know, I think that ultimately, this is why I think actual humans are going to continue to be in the loop for a very long time. You know, a lot of people talk about like, you know, AI disruption is going to, you know, displace jobs, 20% unemployment. So I actually think it's not at all the case. I think that we're going to, we need to be firmly in the loop because many of accountability to your point. So we're going to ask, you know, if there's a, you go to the doctor and they say that, oh, you know, we have to amputate your arm. You want to know who? Like, if that was a mistake. Who approved it? Oh, some agents, you know. Sorry. It's like, oh, well, I lost my arm. Like, that's not cool. So, you know, so I do think that there needs to be like, okay, well, it was actually signed by this doctor. Did they look through the result? Do they looked at the traces? Do they understand what was going on? Why did they sign off on this? Same thing with our kids. We send them to school. We don't want, like, oh, you know, they were trained in the wrong stuff. And now your kid just went crazy because some agent thought it that. Okay, I'm okay with that. No, we don't know. Who was the teacher. Who was the person in the room? Why didn't I oversee this? Why didn't they? So I think we can have humans in the loop, and we need to have this. And it comes also oftentimes down to the legal issue of, you know, we took the legal risk here. So this is going to continue. One way to think about this is just to look at the past. You know, we could solve self-driving kind of airplanes a long time ago. You know. But if I told you all that, I'm going to give you, like, a huge discount, 90% discount. And, you know, you can go with all these airline. We just have, you know, one slightly drunk pilot that only has like 50 hours of, you know, flying experience, but it's really cheap. None of you will get on it. You would say, oh, that's terrifying. But, you know, we already have these autopilots in the planes. So why do we still want humans in the plane? Because we still want someone to sit there, and we don't want to just delegate everything to the, you know, to the sort of box, to the box. So yeah, I think that and that's one of the focus areas with our security product. Yeah. And I don't think it's solved by the way if you. I was joking when I said, just buy our product and we'll solve itself. This is going to be a journey we go through together. As humanity, as AI permeates society. Just like when internet came and there was all these, you know, Nigeria letters and fraud and all of those kind of things, we learned how to deal with it and we figured out how to handle payments. You know, I was a kid in college and they were saying, no one's going to ever swipe a credit card online because, you know, that could just disappear. And they could. Now we only shop things, so we figure out techniques to deal with it. We'll have to go through that together.
I want to talk about numbers a little bit. Bloomberg being Bloomberg, going to Bloomberg. You talked in February about your ARR being at about 5.4 billion for Q4. We're well past Q1. Can you update that for us and give us a sense of kind of where the ARR is now?
Yeah. You know, my financing would kill me if I do that a lot. You know, this isn't a, there's no quiet period when you're a private company and you have no plans to IPO, as you told my colleagues, this is what I keep telling my financing. But, you know, they still give me a hard time after these meetings. So, let's just say that's significant acceleration that we never would have thought we would have acceleration from the 40, 65% Y-o-Y increase. So there was, it was faster than 65% in Q1 over the year earlier.
