Henry Mason

Autonomous QA testing is accelerating product velocity

Published: 5th March 2026 • Latest from Dawn • By Henry Mason, Roméo Walter, Andrea Guariglia

There is an unwritten law in software engineering: never deploy on a Friday. Not because the code is worse on Fridays, but because nobody wants to spend their weekend finding out that it is broken. The entire ritual – the deploy freezes, the nervous Slack messages, the ‘let’s just push it to Monday’ – is …

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26-04-2021

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Onum x CrowdStrike: Building to Last in a Fast-Fashion World

Published: 3rd September 2025 • Latest from Dawn • By Henry Mason, Daniela Raffel

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Global Muscle, Startup Hustle: Secrets from Quantexa’s Series F

Published: 6th March 2025 • Latest from Dawn • By Henry Mason

After crossing $100m ARR in 2024, Quantexa has just reached another milestone by closing its Series F at a multi-billion valuation. What’s been going on in the engine room to make this possible? With almost a thousand employees and many offices around the world, it would be reasonable to call Quantexa a “company” these days, …

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26-04-2021

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AI Agents – a new form of automation

Published: 25th July 2024 • Dawn Horizons • By Henry Mason, Norman Fiore, Shamillah Bankiya, AI Agents – a new form of automation, Zoe Qin

AI agents present a new iteration of automation. Founders are rapidly standing up agentic applications that can solve specific needs in functions like sales and customer success – without a human in the loop. Meanwhile, software buyers seeing real opportunity to quickly improve their P&L are quickly building or purchasing agentic products. In recent months, …

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The CrowdStrike outage — preparing for ‘unprecedented’ events

Published: 24th July 2024 • Latest from Dawn • By Henry Mason

Although most had never heard of it before last week, it’s now obvious to everyone that CrowdStrike’s software is deeply woven into the fabric of our society. One botched update disrupted healthcare, grounded flights, and stalled businesses worldwide — despite affecting less than 1% of all Windows devices. But in these so-called ‘unprecedented’ times, it’s …

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Hedgehog unleashed: Why we invested in Raito

Published: 18th October 2022 • Latest from Dawn • By Henry Mason

Here at Dawn, we’re big believers in focus. In an early-stage startup the possibilities truly are endless, and so it’s essential to do one thing better than anyone else. In this domain, hedgehogs usually beat foxes. Following that philosophy, the past few years have seen an explosion in the tooling for the data stack. First-generation data …

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The art of category creation: Our partnership with Quantexa

Published: 13th July 2021 • Latest from Dawn • By Henry Mason

Salesforce, Shopify, Atlassian: the world’s most iconic and valuable SaaS companies are the ones that pioneered a category and have become synonymous with it. Category creation is notoriously difficult, as it involves forging one’s own path and educating buyers about a new concept. So at Dawn we get very excited when we see a business …

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In 2021, the last thing we need is another security tech hero

Published: 25th May 2021 • Latest from Dawn • By Henry Mason

Buzz in the cyber space tends to be focused on shiny new tech that promises to provide a silver bullet. At Dawn, we see a gap for a new generation of cyber champions focused on using tech to supercharge security processes, not reinvent them. Today’s world is a hacker’s dream. With millions of employees across …

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26-04-2021

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Why we invested in Vulcan

Published: 18th March 2021 • Latest from Dawn • By Henry Mason

“In an ideal world, a security vulnerability is flagged, then resolved as quickly as possible by the relevant security, IT or DevOps teams.” We couldn’t disagree more. The problem–solution structure of the traditional security paradigm goes like this: Commercial software is plagued by vulnerabilities, and IT and security departments, already flooded with potential risks, are …

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The power of community. Lessons from enterprise AI powerhouse, Dataiku

Published: 8th February 2021 • Latest from Dawn • By Henry Mason

We’ve all heard of customer success — making sure that the person who’s bought your software and who will make the decision on renewal is happy and well looked after. SaaS businesses add customer service early on in their journey, ideally as soon as they have live deployments. But as a next phase of maturity, …

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26-04-2021

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A framework for navigating venture debt in a Covid-19 world

Published: 22nd May 2020 • Latest from Dawn • By Henry Mason

The venture debt industry has seen eye-watering growth over a decade-long bull run. In the US alone, volumes rose from $6bn in 2015 to $10bn in 2019, according to research from Kruze. And on the back of this, a vibrant ecosystem of lenders, advisors, brokers and service providers has sprung up to support this rapidly growing …

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How software startups are shaping the age of democratic surveillance

Published: 20th May 2020 • Latest from Dawn • By Henry Mason

If just three months ago anyone had suggested that Western governments would be launching apps to track the movements of their citizens and record who they had met, the reaction would have ranged from hilarity to outright revolution. And yet these apps are arriving with hardly a ripple. These unprecedented and devastating times put the …

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