Day: October 8, 2025

• Cybersecurity company Tanium is one of the latest companies enforcing its return-to-office policy.
• Employees who violate the RTO policy can be denied some equity grants.
• Leadership hasn’t announced companywide that RTO would be tied to equity grants, sources said.

The $9 billion cybersecurity company Tanium is cracking down on its return-to-office policy this year in an unconventional way: it is withholding a form of compensation from those who don’t comply.

As of this summer, Tanium employees who violate the RTO policy risk not getting an “equity refresh,” according to three people familiar with the matter. Tanium employees typically receive shares as part of their compensation package when they first join the company, and they may be eligible for an “equity refresh” or additional equity after a specified period of time at the company.

While Tanium CEO Dan Streetman has said at companywide meetings that going to the office was important, leadership hasn’t verbally or in written communication announced to the company that RTO may be tied to equity grants, sources said.

Stock options and other forms of equity-based compensation are a crucial part of the startup ecosystem. They entice early startup employees with the promise of owning a stake in what could be the next big thing. Those shares can lead to a big payday down the line if the company goes public or gets acquired. Not receiving additional equity grants can significantly reduce a startup employee’s compensation package.

Tanium did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Many companies across the US, including AT&T, Microsoft, and Amazon, have been attempting to reduce remote work. Some companies have terminated employees who don’t comply with their policies. Withholding a form of compensation for those who don’t return to the office is relatively rare, experts say.

“Most companies will say, ‘Look, you need to come in,'” said Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economics professor who conducts research on remote work. “They’re sanctioned, and then later they’re terminated.”

Bloom said he had not heard of companies denying employees additional equity for balking at RTO mandates. He said that some law firms have cut pay for those who don’t come into the office.

Tanium was founded in 2007 by father and son David and Orion Hindawi. It offers a range of cybersecurity products for securing and managing devices on an organization’s network, serving customers from large businesses to government agencies. It has nearly 2,000 employees worldwide.

Tanium first announced its RTO policy in late 2023, stating that employees within a 50-mile radius of an office are required to work there on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, with a third day to be determined by their team leaders. Initially, this policy was loosely enforced, said people familiar with the matter.

The company’s latest policy reduced the radius to 35 miles, a current and a former employee said. To determine how often employees are going to the office, Tanium is reviewing badge scans, according to the sources.

This is not the first time Tanium has found its stock-option practices under the spotlight. In 2020, Business Insider reported that Tanium used a “clawback clause” to buy back employees’ equity in the company, whether they wanted to sell or not. Bloomberg had also previously reported that Tanium fired employees right before their stock vested.

Prior to Tanium announcing its RTO policy, the company was known for its remote-friendly culture. In recent years, the culture has shifted to an in-office-first approach. New hires are expected to be within commuting distance of the office, three current and former employees said.

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• Heidi Health just nabbed a $65 million Series B for its free AI medical scribe.
• It’s competing with ambient tech from hot startups like Abridge and formidable incumbents like Epic.
• Heidi wants to build an AI medical search tool to compete with the likes of OpenEvidence.

The medical AI scribe space has been red-hot this year, with new unicorns emerging and incumbent giants digging in. Startup Heidi Health just raised fresh funding in a late bid to take them on.

The Australian healthcare AI company raised $65 million in a Series B round led by hedge fund manager Steve Cohen’s Point72 Private Investments. The round values Heidi Health at $465 million post-money and brings its total funding to about $97 million to date.

The Series B raise comes just seven months after Heidi raised its $16.6 million Series A, led by Headline and including Anthology, Anthropic, and Menlo Ventures’ $100 million partnership fund.

Heidi is gaining traction despite how crowded the ambient documentation space has become. It’s competing against AI scribe startups like $5.3 billion Abridge and Ambience Healthcare, as well as behemoths like medical records company Epic, which said in August it would release its own AI clinical documentation product.

Cofounder and CEO Dr. Thomas Kelly, a former vascular surgery resident, founded Heidi Health in 2019 under the name Oscer with tech to help medical students study for their exams. Two years later, seeing a bigger opportunity to ease doctors’ administrative burdens, he rebranded the company and pivoted toward automating clinical documentation.

One of Heidi’s biggest differentiators, Kelly said, is prioritizing physician adoption over rigid integration with electronic health records.

Roughly half of Heidi’s sales come from physicians signing up for its product directly, Kelly said, rather than through outpatient clinic or health system contracts. Heidi offers its core AI scribe product for free, with a $70-per-month premium tier that gives clinicians more personalized features like custom clinical note templates.

That “open plan” approach, as Kelly puts it, isn’t popular with other AI scribe startups.

“For the startups that sell top-down, the open-plan structure can be scary because they’re thinking about clinical documentation integrity and revenue cycle management, where you want some level of standardization. But the problem with AI tools is, you need activation and adoption,” Kelly said. “You can have the best of the best worlds, where clinicians can still build what they like and get the utility, and then structure it as a secondary thing.”

Heidi can afford to stray from standardization in part because its ultimate goal differs from that of its peers: The startup wants to build an all-in-one AI clinical assistant capable of handling some patient care tasks under a doctor’s supervision. Alongside the Series B, Heidi launched a tool that calls patients on behalf of doctors to automate tasks like follow-up scheduling and reminders.

Other AI scribes are digging further into healthcare back-office workflows, a strategy that’s gotten some companies into muddy waters as of late, like Abridge, which has relied heavily on its integration with shareholder-turned-competitor Epic.

“It’s never been our value proposition to be the most integrated scribe with Epic, because we always thought that was the path to short-term sugar highs,” Kelly said of AI scribe startups that prioritized EHR integration. “Yeah, you’ll get lots of adoption, but then you’ll probably just churn everyone and die when they replace you.”

Heidi is also establishing a significant international presence, with physician users in 116 countries. Peers Abridge and Ambience have sold their tech exclusively in North America.

Kelly said the startup plans to use the Series B funding to help expand its office locations and accelerate hiring, especially in the US, UK, and Canada, while digging further into markets where clinicians have already picked up Heidi’s product, like France, South Africa, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

Heidi Health’s next bet will introduce a fresh set of formidable competitors. The startup wants to build AI medical search features in a bid that will pit Heidi against $3.5 billion startup OpenEvidence and public healthtech Doximity.

Kelly said Heidi is still considering whether to partner with another company or build the AI search engine itself. But he said the startup will draw some boundaries that companies like OpenEvidence and Doximity, which let pharmaceutical companies advertise to doctors on their platforms, have not.

“We will never monetize with pharma. I just think that’s a red line, incompatible with being a tool that physicians can trust,” he said.

Check out the 9-slide pitch deck Heidi Health used to raise $65 million for its AI scribe.

• Some AI executives have been predicting big job losses due to the technology.
• Yet, many AI companies are hiring huge numbers of human employees.
• That’s driving an unlikely resurgence in Silicon Valley’s office market.

Eric Simons, CEO of AI startup StackBlitz, recently announced a new office lease in San Francisco. It’s in Levi’s Plaza, a swanky location near the water. The buildout is underway, and employees are expected to move in around January.

A few years ago, this was unheard of. Tech offices across Silicon Valley shut down as employees transitioned to remote work during the pandemic. The region’s commercial real estate market plunged, and vacancies soared.

Now, though, the artificial intelligence boom is fueling a recovery. It’s a strange phenomenon. Generative AI is supposed to automate many tasks, with some industry executives predicting huge job losses. However, if you examine the actions of AI companies, rather than their words, a different future begins to emerge.

The reality is that many AI companies are hiring a huge number of human employees. These are experts at putting AI to work, so they should be shedding staff, right? Instead, it’s a hiring frenzy, and these growing workforces are now being housed in fancy offices across Silicon Valley and other urban, educated locations.

“AI companies are leasing because they’re hiring,” researchers at commercial real estate firm Colliers told Business Insider. “Generative AI is reshaping the workforce, but it’s also fueling new job creation that drives office demand.”

A recent report from Colliers concluded that the tech industry has become a major driver of the US office market.

In Silicon Valley, the average size of these leases has grown consistently over the past three years. So far in 2025, the office market there has reached its highest average lease size since 2020, according to Colliers data.

Since 2020, there have been 5.2 million square feet of office lease transactions by AI and AI-infrastructure companies in Silicon Valley (excluding Apple, Alphabet, or Meta). 2025 has already surpassed the full-year total for 2024 of 1.3 million square feet, according to Colliers’ data.

The firm has seen significant office leasing activity in Sunnyvale, California, for pure AI companies and in Fremont, California, for AI-infrastructure companies, due to the high prevalence of advanced manufacturing in these areas. While most of the companies already have a presence in this market, many of the new firms specialize in robotics.

The takeaway from this activity: Take predictions of an AI job apocalypse with a large grain of salt. If AI companies themselves are hiring a lot of humans, then perhaps other employers will follow suit.

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