The SaaS News Roundup: Recent Episodes
SaaS Industry
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Jscrambler has announced the completion of a $15M Series A funding round led by Ace Capital Ventures. The funds will be used to augment marketing and sales resources in the United States and Europe and strengthen and accelerate the product roadmap.
DataDome, a SaaS bot protection solution for e-commerce and classifieds businesses, has released an updated version of its product. This improved solution gives businesses even more specific, actionable insight into the threats they face.
Huobi Technology Holdings Limited (Huobi Tech) has announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the DIAE. Both parties intend to pool their resources and enter into definitive agreements regarding the potential business collaboration contemplated by the MOU.
VETRO Inc joins hands with Tilson to leverage its broadband intelligence platform and Tilson’s consulting expertise to provide integrated support for infrastructure grants management and mapping services.
Clearhaven Partners closes an oversubscribed debut private equity fund, Clearhaven Fund I, to invest in software and technology companies and focus on the lower middle-order market software and technology inputs.
Quantifind has joined forces with Matrix-IFS. Quantifind’s Graphyte platform complements Matrix-IFS’ comprehensive KYC/CDD/EDD, transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, and case management services with best-in-class risk assessment and entity resolution accuracy.
Bigeye raised $45M in Series B to scale its data observability platform, continue building its product, trust and save expensive engineering hours by assisting data teams in preventing customer-centric outages.
Ocrolus raises $80M in Series C at $500M valuation. It said it would use the proceeds from the funding to aggressively build products for the mortgage lending and banking industries, expand its US operations, ramp up hiring into 2022
Panorays, a provider of third-party security risk management, announced a $42 million Series B funding round led by Greenfield Partners. The investment will help the company strengthen its position as the global benchmark for transforming third-party security risk management.
Sternum, an endpoint security builder for IoT devices, raised $27 million in a Series B funding round led by Spark Capital to bolster its research and development and advance its scalable platform.
Pronto, a partner ecosystem management company, has announced a $4 million seed funding round led by Work-Bench. Pronto will use this investment to expand its team and accelerate the delivery of its product roadmap and innovation.
Progress, a global software company, has announced that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Kemp, a provider of always-on application experience (AX) for its customers, in a $258 million all-cash deal. Progress is a global software company that makes it easier to develop, deploy, and manage business applications.
Content automation company Turtl raised $17M in Series A funding from Octopus Ventures to expand its team and double its headcount. This Series A funding is Turtl's first institutional raise and stated that with this, the startup would double its headcount using the proceeds from the fund.
Osano raises $11M in funding from Jump Capital to support its international expansion and hire for sales marketing and engineering. It witnessed significant growth and has over 10 percent of the Fortune 500 as paying customers.
Genially raised $20M in a Series B funding round led by 645 Ventures and Owl Ventures to accelerate its global content aspirations and focus on growing its community alongside the constant evolution of its product.
SaaS companies Molecule Software and Fidectus team-up. Molecule Software stated that the partnership is aimed at developing the integration between the two software platforms, which would be available in the first half of 2022.
Sinch, a cloud communication company, recently announced the acquisition of MessengerPeople. Sinch will pay a total enterprise value of $ 56.2 million, consisting of $ 39.4 million in cash and $ 16.8 million in new Sinch shares.
Freshworks, a provider of SaaS customer engagement solutions, debuted on the Nasdaq on Wednesday after a billion-dollar IPO. Freshworks stock increased by 32% after the company raised $1 billion in an IPO priced above the marketed range.
Lio, a SaaS startup, received $5M in seed funding from Lightspeed India Partners and Sequoia Capital India. The funds will be used to hire more engineers and increase the number of users of the company's mobile app.
Pentathlon Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage B2B SaaS, has announced the final close of its INR 76 crore first Fund. Pentathlon plans to invest in 20+ B2B SaaS startups each year, with average investments ranging from INR 75 lakh to INR 3 crore.
Data integration software Fivetran acquires data replication technology HVR. Customers of Fivetran now have access to a broader set of high-performance data replication solutions, including HVR’s change data capture connectors. Fivetran also raised a funding round of $565M.
Business Canvas, the company document management SaaS behind Typed, has announced a $2.5M seed round led by Mirae Asset Venture Investment. The seed funding will be used to speed up product development and the global open beta launch of its AI-powered document management platform.
Salesforce has announced new Slack features just a few months after announcing integrations with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Tableau. According to the company, the features are intended to “build a digital HQ” at enterprises that are embracing hybrid work.
Salesforce has declared a significant victory in the fight against global climate change. Utilizing 100 percent renewable energy and purchasing carbon offsets has effectively achieved Net Zero energy usage across its value chain.
project44 acquires customer experience provider Convey for $255M to become a definitive global leader in modern digital supply chain technology. It said that the new AI capabilities from Convey would improve collaboration, bolster workflow automation and defend against business disruption with end-to-end visibility and predictive order intelligence.
Mirakl raised $555M in Series E funding from Silver Lake to accelerate the growth of leading enterprises and online marketplaces. The company said it targets hiring 350 engineers, growing its team to 500 by 2023, expanding its geographic reach, with a dual focus on growing its Paris and Boston headquarters.
Package management SaaS provider Cloudsmith raised $15M in Series A from Tiger Global and others to grow its team, deliver on its product roadmap and continue expanding into international markets.
DeepFactor raises $15M in Series A from Insight partners and others to continue developing its AppSec observability platform, automatically observing billions of live telemetry events to detach anomalies without making code changes.
Blackbird.AI, an AI-powered platform that combats disinformation, raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Dorilton Ventures to support hiring, scale-up engineering and sales teams.
Wipro has launched Wipro-Google Cloud Innovation Arena with a partnership with Google Cloud. This collaboration will aid in in-residence technical information, assist in seamlessly adapting to the cloud, and enhance innovation.
F5, a cloud edge security software, has acquired the cloud security monitoring software Threat Stack for $68M. F5’s application and API protection solutions combined with Threat Stack’s cloud security capabilities can enhance visibility across the application infrastructure.
Indeni, a security infrastructure automation company, has announced that it has partnered with TD SYNNEX. With the addition of Indeni to its portfolio, SYNNEX will be able to provide even more comprehensive solutions to its customers
Flippa, a global online marketplace for buying and selling online businesses and digital assets, has raised $11M in Series A funding. The funds will be used to enhance the functionality of Flippa’s platform products and scale the company’s industry-leading business valuation tool.
Check joins hands with Procare Solutions to improve how childcare centers carry out their payroll operations. The partnership is aimed at enabling Procare to integrate payroll capabilities into its platform fully.
FloBiz, a neobank builder for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB), raised $35 million in a Series B funding round co-led by Sequoia Capital India and Think Investments to expand its team, develop its product and scale its distribution.
Atlanta AI raises $15M in a Series A funding round led by GV to develop its AI systems and launch machine learning, network analytics tools. Its platform connects with numerous supply chain data points and answers questions about products, shipments, companies and networks, filtering out illicit trade, targeting bad actors and security threats across global commerce networks
RateGain Technologies, a company offering solutions for the hospitality and travel industry, recently launched Demand.AI, a SaaS solution leveraging AI to help businesses track hyper-local city demand
Explorium launches Explorium Starters to help businesses start analytics programs from scratch, enable small and medium-sized businesses, looking to enter new markets or territories to identify their audiences, pilot new analytics programs
CDNetworks, a content delivery network (CDN) provider, has announced the official release of its new live-streaming technology called Cloud Live. It’s made to provide a smooth streaming experience while also making video streaming professional and efficient.
Kolide, a user-centric endpoint security system, has raised $17M in a Series B round to help with its go-to-market strategy and hiring more engineers and developers. Kolide presently manages 250 customers, thousands of users, and 23,000 devices with an eight-person staff.
eShipz raised $700K in funding led by Indian Angel Network. The company provides shipping automation in the B2B segment and helps companies manage orders from multiple sources, via numerous courier companies using an integrated dashboard.
Mirantis launches Mirantis Flow to integrate numerous open-source technologies flexibly and package them as subscription services. It can also utilize existing computing hardware and includes Mirantis Container Cloud for providing deployment and lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters across different infrastructure platforms.
Ketch, a data control platform that manages compliance, raised an additional $20 million to its Series A funding round that closed in March this year, where it came out of stealth. This extension, AI funding, was led by Acrew Capital.
Aircover, a sales tools and intelligence platform for in-person meetings, has raised $3M in a seed round to fund product development. Aircover’s conversational AI platform integrates with Zoom and automates parts of the sales process, resulting in more successful conversations.
Limelight Networks Inc., a provider of content delivery services, has completed its acquisition of Layer0. The acquisition will help clients use the edge platform to sample content and install apps without compromising security.
Data Center Inc. (DCI), a developer of core bank processing software, has announced a partnership with DataVisor, an AI-powered fraud detection startup. Because of the partnership, DCI’s customer community banks will benefit from real-time fraud detection and prevention capabilities.
FMG Suite, a marketing and advertising SaaS provider, has announced the expansion of its strategic partnership with LPL Financial. LPL financial advisers may now submit email, social media, and website campaigns using FMG Suite’s all-in-one marketing platform.
Bidgely, an energy analytics business, has received $26 million in an oversubscribed fundraising round from Moore Strategic Ventures. Bidgely will use the funds to create customized solutions to suit India’s most critical utility needs.
Skello a French startup, has raised $47.3 million (€40 million) in a Series B funding round from Partech. Skello is working on a SaaS platform to help organizations manage their work schedules. At every level of the scheduling process, Skello keeps track of legal responsibilities.
Tyk an open-source API gateway and management platform, has raised $35 million in a Series B funding round from Scottish Equity Partners. The money will be utilized to hire more people and improve and expand the tools available to users.
strongDM, an infrastructure access platform, revealed a US$54 million increase in Series B fundraising round led by Tiger Global. Authentication, permission, networking, and observability are included in the strongDM platform itself.
The Netherlands-based startup Sendcloud stated that the Series C fundraising round of the Softbank Vision Fund 2 had raised $177M. With its long e-commerce technology suppliers, Sendcloud comprises Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and Amazement, with over 50 integrated distributors.
Quolum launches a card called Quolum SaaS card to purchase and manage Saas subscriptions. According to the company, software visibility, invoice aggregation, and control are some of the card's characteristics.
Matillion attained the unicorn status with a $150M Series E funding from General Atlantic at a valuation of $1.5B. The funding came on the heels of accelerated growth and Matillion’s Series D funding in 2021.
Constructor raised $55M in a Series A funding round. The funding came amid a record 23 percent revenue growth (YoY), with the annual recurring revenue having more than tripled.
Rewind raised $65M in a Series B funding round led by Insight Partners to build its new backup solutions for SaaS and hire the talent required to get the products to market.
Pyxis One raises $17M in a Series B funding round to expand into new markets and double down on its product development. The company witnessed over 550 percent growth since its inception and has a customer base spread across retail, automotive, healthcare, finance and food tech.
Trustmary, a testimonial marketing platform, has raised $2.2 million in funding to support the company’s marketing and development teams, as well as market entry initiatives. Trustmary began as a global video testimonial service in 2016, but by 2020, it had evolved into a SaaS startup.
STORD a cloud supply chain services provider, has announced that it has raised $90M in a Series D round from Kleiner Perkins at a valuation of $1.125B and has turned unicorn. Other than the funding, it has announced its acquisition of FulfillmentWorks in an undisclosed deal.
PassFort, a turnkey compliance solution, has announced that it has raised $16.2M in a Series A funding round led by Level Equity. Other participants include OpenOcean, Episode 1, Entrepreneur First, and Shard Credit Partners.
Prosperity7 Ventures led a $23.7 million Series A funding round for StreamNative, a real-time data streaming platform. Pulsar plans to use the funds to hire more people, speed up its R&D efforts, and expand its capacity to solve new use cases.
Satori raised $20M in Series A funding to fuel its research and development processes and accelerate go-to-market strategies and expansion in the US and accelerate the adoption of cloud data platforms with DataSecOps.
Strike Graph raised $8M in Series A from Information Venture Partners and others to drive global expansion and expand its offerings to support other customer third-party frameworks and establish a global presence in areas like Canada, and ramp up hiring for engineering, marketing and product roles.
Deep Vision, Inc. has raised $35M in a Series B funding round led by Tiger Global to accelerate product innovation. It expects to grow from its current headcount of 57 to 75 by the end of 2021 and plans to begin the sampling of ARA-2 in 2022.
SkyKick raises $130M in a debt financing round to fuel its platform innovation and help meet IT Service Providers’ demand for cloud automation solutions and accelerate cloud automation across the globe.
R3 Score has entered a partnership with Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC), enabling the BDC to extend its commitment to Baltimore’s lending ecosystem using R3 Holdings’ SaaS technology.
ALLO Communications has announced the launch of a 10 Gigabit fiber-to-the-premises project valued at $50M in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. After finalizing the remaining city agreements, ALLO hopes to begin construction in Lake Havasu in the following months.
Freshworks, a SaaS customer interaction solutions provider, is planning an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States that could raise $912 million. Freshworks claims to have over 52,000 customers and generated $308 million in revenue last year, a 40% increase despite a $10 million net loss.
BitSight will acquire VisibleRisk, a Moody’s and Team8 cyber risk ratings joint venture, and Moody’s will invest $250 million in BitSight. BitSight’s ability to analyze and evaluate a company’s financial exposure to cyber risk has been enhanced by the purchase of VisibleRisk.
SpotOn, a provider of integrated software and payment solutions, has raised $300 million in Series E fundraising, valuing the firm at $3.15 billion. SpotOn will be able to quickly expand its presence in the middle market due to the acquisition.
JFrog acquires Upswift to provide a single pane of glass for DevOps engineers and developers to securely manage the complete device software release cycle, reduce the deployment time and operational pain.
Cloud directory platform JumpCloud raised $159M in Series F at a valuation of $2.56B from Sapphire Ventures and others. It came at a time of rapid growth, fueled by its cloud directory and delivery of innovations that expand the number of use cases of IT and other teams.
Copado, a development and operations (DevOps) platform that enables digital transformation on Salesforce and SaaS clouds, attained the unicorn status, raising $140 million in Series C from Insight Partners at a valuation of approximately $1.2 billion to expand its end-to-end DevOps solution.
Tenable enters a definitive agreement with Accurics to acquire the latter for $160M in cash. Accurics’ solutions will integrate with Tenable.io® Container Security and Tenable.io Web Application Scanning and extend Tenable’s broader cloud strategy.
LevaData raises $47M in a Series C funding round. It plans to invest in improving its integrated platform capabilities, strive towards a deeper physical presence in key global markets and enable the creation of new jobs.
EverAfter, a no-code collaborative platform, has announced that it has raised $13 million in a seed funding round co-led by TLV Partners and Vertex Ventures. Other participants include angel investors Benny Shneider, Zohar Gilon, and Amit Gilon.
Guggenheim Investments led a $30M Series A financing for cloud workload protection platform Rezilion. The funds will be used to accelerate Rezilion's go-to-market strategy, including collaboration with other DevSecOps solution providers.
Fin, a work insights platform, has announced a $20M Series A funding round led by Coatue to accelerate its expansion into new countries by investing in sales, marketing, and R&D. Fin employs technology to evaluate critical staff workflows and find more efficient ways for operations teams to work.
Freight Tiger, a SaaS-based digital freight network provider, raised $6.5 million from Florintree Infra with participation from Aroa Ventures, the Family office fund of OYO Founder Ritesh Agarwal.
Accruit launches the SaaS version of its Exchange Manager Pro(SM) software to simplify and centralize the administrative functions and challenges of processing 1031 exchanges.
Amagi Media Labs, a cloud-based SaaS technology startup specializing in broadcast and connected TV, has raised more than $100 million in funding. With distribution in 40 countries across cable, connected TV, and OTT, Amagi has grown to become one of the world’s largest cloud deployment partners.
Novi Connect, a B2B marketplace that helps firms create and manufacture transparent products, has raised $10.3 million in funding. Novi is a data-rich marketplace for transparent sourcing and purchase of ingredients, fragrances, and packaging.
Delaget has teamed up with Payactiv, a financial wellness software company. Payactiv and other Delaget partners provide Easy-to-use interfaces to restaurant partners. Delaget’s API Partnerships offer access to over 100,000 restaurants, eliminating the need for costly, one-time data integrations.
Mavenick Consulting, KlearStack’s parent business, has announced a strategic funding round. Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), a KlearStack SaaS platform, delivers AI-driven solutions for processing data from documents and images.
Unanet, a SaaS-project-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) provider, has announced its partnership with OpenAsset, a project-based digital asset management solution for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction industries (AEC), to expand its Unanet Connect platform’s integration capabilities.
Graphy recently launched a $14M Graphy Grant for highly ambitious creators looking to establish their learning communities. Graphy provides a single all-in-one platform to cater to the needs of creators who aspire to grow their audience and monetize their skills.
Supabase, a developers’ suite creator for repetitive workflows, raised $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Coatue with participation from angel investors.
Snyk raised $530M in a Series F round, which valued the company at $8.5B. The company would use the proceeds to fuel its product innovation and development and introduce enhancements to its developer security platform, workflow integrations and improved functionality alongside new features.
Affinity raised $80M in a Series C funding round led by Menlo Ventures and others to expand its sales and marketing reach into sectors such as investment banking, private equity, real estate and professional services like accounting, management consulting and law firms.
SingleStore raises $80M in Series F to innovate and expand its footprint and team to offer customers more resources and a better choice. The company revealed a 150 percent increase in cloud revenue and a 300 percent growth in customer acquisitions for its cloud service.
Zeotap, a SaaS customer intelligence platform, announced a second extension of $11 million to its Series C funding, where it received $18.5 million from SignalFire in the first extension last year. The new extension involved the backing of Liberty Global Ventures.
myCOI raised $5M in debt financing from SaaS Capital, a provider of growth debt for B2B SaaS companies. The proceeds would be used to continue innovation, improve customer experience and hire primarily for sales, marketing, product and development departments.
ThinkIQ, a digital manufacturing transformation SaaS, has announced the launch of the Alliance Partner Program to assist customers in getting the most out of their strategic technology investments with the firm.
PolyAI, a conversational AI company, raised $14 million in a Series B funding round led by Khosla Ventures. PolyAI, according to the company, creates and installs voice assistants for customer service automation that sound like actual people.
TrueFort, a company that safeguards zero-trust apps, has secured $30 million in a Series B investment led by Shasta Ventures. The funds will be used to improve company-wide recruiting, go-to-market operations, and a variety of R&D projects.
Duda, a professional web development platform for SaaS enterprises and digital agencies, has acquired Snipcart. Duda intends to put a lot of money into expanding the team and improving the basic Snipcart platform’s capabilities and features.
To further its vision for hybrid work environments, Google announced a series of innovations in the Google Workspace to help employees collaborate equally regardless of location, device preferences, role or language, a press release from Google said. The updates on the G Suite include a rollout of Spaces in the Google Chat for all users, in addition to new meeting enhancements and conferencing hardware for organizations to bridge the gap while navigating hybrid work environments.
Sumo Logic, a log management and analytics provider, and IBM announced the availability of Sumo Logic’s continuous intelligence platform on the open cloud Red Hat Marketplace to help companies running on the Red Hat OpenShift platform achieve insights into their cloud and hybrid infrastructure.
Hi there, and welcome to the SaaS news round up by SaaS Industry. My name is Thomas, and I'll be sharing with you the latest from the SaaS world.
Microsoft announced that it acquired Clipchamp, an in-browser video creation startup founded in Brisbane, Australia. While the terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, Chris Pratley, CVP of Microsoft’s office media group, said that the purchase would enable Microsoft to incorporate Clipchamp’s technology with Windows.
Virtual meeting platform called Vowel has announced that it raised $13.5 million in a series A round led by Lobby Capital. During the pandemic, videoconferencing saw a 535% rise in daily traffic. The virtual meeting software market is expected to reach $41.58 billion by 2027. The fund will be put toward product development and expanding the size of Vowel’s team.
DigitalOcean, a cloud infrastructure company has announced the acquisition of Nimbella, a three-year-old startup which simplifies multicloud serverless software development. DigitalOcean, best known for its infrastructure-as-a-service platform, that helps software developers deploy and scale applications across multiple cloud servers. With the acquisition, DigitalOcean will be able complement its current PaaS and IaaS offerings with Nimbella’s serverless compute tools.
Leading web accessibility company UserWay has brought its AI Powered Accessibility Widget to the Duda app store. The Addition of the UserWay AI widget, will enhance the professional website building platform, by altering any website to make it accessible and ADA compliant. This is done by modifying both elements on the site and any inaccessible code that would otherwise limit visitors with disabilities. This creates a more user-friendly experience for the one billion people living with disabilities worldwide.
IBM has announced the new IBM Power E1080 server, designed specifically for hybrid cloud environments. First in a new series of servers based on the new IBM Power 10 processor, the Power E1080 is engineered to be one of the most secured server platforms and is designed to help clients operate a secured, frictionless hybrid cloud experience across their entire IT infrastructure.
Flipspaces, a technology-enabled interior designer for office spaces, has announced a fund raise of $2 million. The funding was led by former IIFL AMC CEO Prashasta Seth. The capital will be used to grow the US business, where the Mumbai-based startup claims to have seen 25X growth and expand its newly launched software-as-a-service vertical.
RainFocus, the next-generation enterprise event marketing platform, today announced that it has closed its Series C funding round led by KKR, a leading global investment firm. RainFocus provides a premier end-to-end solution for setting up, running, and promoting events.
“Indonesia-only” investment firm Intudo Ventures, closed its third fund, totaling $115 million. Intudo intends to invest in about 12 to 14 startups, in sectors like agriculture, B2B and enterprise, education, finance and insurance, healthcare and logistics. Initial check sizes will range from $1 million to $10 million.
Seqera Labs, a Barcelona-based data orchestration and workflow platform, has raised $5.5 million in seed funding. The company’s technology treats each source of data across different clouds, without that data ever leaving the boundaries of the infrastructure where it already exists.
Kissflow Inc., a work management SaaS business, is the first to move into Chennai’s World Trade Centre (WTC). Kissflow’s 350 employees who have accepted the company’s industry-first Remote+ hybrid work style will be housed at WTC Chennai.
IHL Group, a retail and hotel research and advising organization, has partnered with Content Catalyst, a technology company. Subscribers will be able to search all information, store, share, and export data into MS Office formats through an interactive experience.
NeuroPixel.ai raises $825K from Inflection Point Ventures to scale its research and development. The proceeds from the funding would additionally be used to expand NeuroPixel’s training set, a crucial piece of the puzzle for machine learning algorithms.
Fieldproxy, a no-code SaaS platform for improving field worker efficiency, has raised Rs 2 crore in a seed round (about USD 0.2M). Fieldproxy is a web-based no-code builder that lets companies create bespoke templates to connect with their field workers.
LifeWorks partners with Corestream to provide digital mental health therapy as a voluntary benefit for users. The internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy (iCBT) program is available to organizations across the United States.
Portcast raises $3.2M in a pre-Series A funding round led by Newtown Partners and others to fuel its international expansion efforts, doubling its workforce and transit towards a prescriptive AI from a predictive AI approach.
Spotshare, a new parking solution from ParkOffice, a parking software for smart offices. On a supply-demand basis, Spotshare analyses the needs of other tenants and allows businesses to swap parking spaces.
Simba Chain raised $25M in Series A from Valley Capital Partners. The company provides a cloud enterprise platform to help universities, industry, governments and individual programmers quickly develop and deploy Web 3.0 distributed applications (dApps) across blockchain platforms
Platform9 recently joined Intel’s Open Retail Initiative and launched a new software-defined store solution to help retailers accelerate the rollout of store applications, simplify store IT infrastructure and application management.
Clootrack, a customer experience company, just raised $4M in a Series A investment led by Inventus Capital India. Clootrack is a real-time customer experience analytics tool that assists organizations in determining why customers stay or leave.
Botify raised $55M in Series C to fuel its product innovation in organic search automation, grow its global presence specifically in APAC and other regions, and support its partner ecosystem development.
CareAR, a Xerox company, raised $10M from ServiceNow at a post-money valuation of $700M. Xerox, with the acquisition of CareAR, announced that CareAR would be a part of CareAR Holdings, which comprise of CareAR, Inc., DocuShare® and XMPie, and deliver high-quality service experiences for service employees and end-customers.
Pixalate raised $18.1M in growth funding from investors to expand its product offering globally without compromising emerging international regulatory obligations.
Jeeves raises $57M in Series B to scale its all-in-one-expense management platform, launch in the UK, Europe and Colombia. It has raised over $180M in about 90 days, with the last funding coming in the form of debt and equity from a.16.z.
Skit raised $23M in Series B funding from WestBridge Capital and others to expand in markets like the US and enhance its voice technology. The company provides a suite of speech and language solutions that enable enterprises to automate their call center operations.
Constant Contact completed the acquisition of SharpSpring, initially announced in June this year and met yesterday with the shareholders’ approval. It provides a SaaS solution for marketing automation to help SMBs.
Google Cloud and C3 AI enter partnership to help organizations spanning industries such as financial, healthcare, manufacturing, supply chain and telecommunications, solve real-world challenges.
Crownpeak, a digital experience platform, has formed a strategic agreement with Webscale, a multi-cloud SaaS solution. Webscale will become Crownpeak’s preferred cloud delivery engine for its global brands due to the partnership.
Corelight, an open network detection and response (NDR) platform, has raised $75M in a Series D round from Energy Impact Partners (EIP). With the latest round of funding, Corelight will be able to expand its global market presence and develop new data and cloud services.
Humane Inc., a platform that produces and sells consumer hardware, software, and services, has received a $100M investment from Tiger Global Management. Humane will be able to scale its operations while pursuing the next step in human-computer interaction.
Stravito, a knowledge management platform, has raised €12.4 million (about $14.6 million) from Endeit Capital in a Series B round. Stravito will use the new funds to speed up product development and grow globally, emphasizing the US market.
Revenue Grid, an AI-based Guided Selling platform for sales teams, raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by W3 Capital to transform the B2B sales process through AI-based revenue insights and its Guided Selling strategies.
Code Climate raised $50M in a Series C funding round led by PSG to further its vision of helping engineers align initiatives with data-driven insights, drive continuous improvement and help advance its product vision, and extend its sales reach and customer success.
Salesforce announced three Sales Cloud innovations weeks after its new slack integration announcement. They aim to empower sales teams to accelerate their growth through AI-powered insights, integrated sales enablement and subscription-based self-service that helps customers.
Two companies, AxiomSL, a data management platform, and Calypso Technology, integrated trading, risk, and processing platform that merged in July this year, have formed a new company that will operate under the new name Adenza.
Drift, a revenue acceleration platform, has formed a strategic partnership with Vista Equity Partners. Drift will benefit from Vista’s industry experience, best practices, and large ecosystem as its portfolio business. Drift becomes a unicorn with Vista’s growth investment.
Trengo, an omnichannel communications platform, has announced that it has raised $36 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Insight Partners and Peak Capital.
CoachHub, a digital coaching platform, has raised $80M in a Series B2 round, bringing its Series B fundraising total to $110M. CoachHub connects people with over 2,500 qualified business and well-being coaches in 70 countries across six continents using artificial intelligence.
ICONIQ Growth has invested $50M in Vic.ai, an artificial intelligence platform for accounting firms and corporate finance departments. Vic.ai will use the new capital to grow its enterprise offering and provide further AI capabilities to customers in the US and Europe.
Contentsquare announced the acquisition of Hotjar to help businesses of all sizes to build better digital experiences. The companies would operate independently for some time, with Hotjar learning from Contentsquare’s technology and resources and Contentsquare benefiting from Hotjar’s reach and product-led approach.
Databricks has raised $1.6B at a valuation of $38B from Counterpoint Global and others. The company aspires to build on its lead by investing in innovations that simplify AI and establish lakehouse as a modern replacement for traditional data warehousing.
Walnut, a company helping sales teams manage their demo experience and reinvent sales experience, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Eight Roads Ventures to improve product demonstrations.
OwnBackup, a cloud data protection platform provider, has acquired RevCult, a provider of Salesforce security and governance solutions and SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM), to enhance its platform with proactive data security.
Peak raises $75M in Series C from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 to fuel global expansion, open offices in the US and India and invest in R&D of its platform. Peak’s Decision Intelligence software enables companies to embed AI into the core of their decision making to boost their operational efficiency across sales, marketing, demand management and supply chains .
Rafay Systems raises $25M in Series B to hire engineers, grow sales, marketing and customer success teams and accelerate its strategic vision for its Kubernetes platform. It helps platform teams move beyond traditional Kubernetes cluster management to streamlined Kubernetes operations for modern applications.
Apna, a job-search and professional networking site, is on the cusp of becoming India’s fastest tech firm first unicorn. Apna is building a scalable networking infrastructure to connect low-skilled workers with relevant employers and help them find work.
Rattle, a BizOps automation & orchestration platform, has announced that it has raised $2.8 million in a seed funding round co-led by Lightspeed and Sequoia Capital India.
Octane, a software billing firm, has secured $2M at a valuation of $10M post-money. The funds will be used to hire engineers and product, marketing & sales personnel. Octane collaborates with a wide range of businesses, notably in the infrastructure and depth gauge industries.
Harri, a service-oriented employee experience platform, has received growth funding from Golub Capital as part of a bigger funding round. Harri plans to use the capital to capitalize on the excellent momentum in the large corporate market and expand into other markets.
HackerU, a cybersecurity technology solutions, services, and knowledge transfer company, has acquired Cybint. The combined entity’s global reach will expand following the purchase, and it will be known as ThriveDX, which stands for digital transformation.
Dataiku, a platform for everyday AI, raised $300M in a Series E round led by Tiger Global, valuing the business at $4.6B. This funding will aid Dataiku in achieving its aim of systematizing data utilization for exceptional business results. Over 450 organizations use Dataiku globally.
Correlated, a product-led revenue startup, has raised $8.3M in a seed round led by NextView Ventures and Harrison Metal. To assist the firm in exiting beta, the cash will acquire expertise in areas like engineering and go-to-market.
Google Workspace and Miro have teamed together to make it easier for teams to collaborate, whether in person or remotely. Teams will be able to brainstorm and communicate in real-time and asynchronously with the help of Google Workspace and Miro.
HubSpot has announced that its Co-founder and CEO Brian Halligan, would move to the position of the company’s executive chairman and Yamini Rangan, its chief customer officer, has been promoted to the position of CEO.
MakerSights has raised $25M in a Series B funding round to rebuild the profitability and sustainability of the retail industry. It would also use the proceeds from the funding to support its key executive hires and global expansion aspirations.
STW Technic and Elevāt enter partnership to offer mobile machine IoT solution to users, allowing the extension of the value of every machine asset that Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) deploy, fleet operators utilize, and dealers deliver.
Tsingyuan Ventures has now rebranded itself as Foothill Ventures to better reflect its vision of elevating entrepreneurs from the very first step (foothills to above). It has also closed an oversubscribed fund of $100M, initially targeting $70M.
Digital experience intelligence (DXI) provider FullStory has raised $103M in an oversubscribed Series D round at $1.8B valuation to expand internationally and enhance its DXI platform to help companies in building their digital products and services across various teams, ranging from customer success to product.
Rapyd, a Fintech-as-a-Service company, has closed a $300M Series E round led by Target Global. Rapyd intends to use the funds to undertake a number of strategic acquisitions to assist growth in important sectors. Rapyd is currently valued at $8.75B, according to reports.
Advanced Technology Ventures (ATV), a VC firm based in Silicon Valley that was hit by a ransomware attack in July, has sent a letter to the Maine attorney’s office. The attackers had obtained personal information from the company’s private investors, or limited partners (LPs), in the assault.
Marvell Technology Inc., an infrastructure semiconductor solutions provider, and Innovium Inc., a provider of networking solutions for cloud and edge data centers, announced that they had entered a definitive agreement. As per the agreement, Marvell will acquire Innovium in an all-stock deal amounting to $1.1 billion.
Moderne Ventures, an early-stage venture financing firm, has announced the closing of a $200M second fund, which was oversubscribed. Moderne Ventures invests in businesses with sales of $2M to $10M and makes initial payments of $4M to $7M.
VMware announces new updates to its VDI and DaaS platform, VMWare Horizon, enabling IT departments to easily manage it from anywhere, across the cloud and on-premise deployments. The new features are aimed at increasing management efficiency and improving employee productivity amid a high adoption of cloud-deployed VMware Horizon desktops.
Presto Company Ahana has raised $20M in a Series A funding round to redefine open data lake analytics amid high growth and adoption of Presto. It would use the proceeds from the funding to accelerate the expansion of its go-to-market and transform open data lake analytics.
Workiva, a cloud-based platform for enterprises to manage business-critical data in real-time, has announced its acquisition of OneCloud, an integration platform-as-a-service provider (iPaaS), for an undisclosed sum to accelerate digital transformation in enterprises
Nektar.ai, a B2B productivity startup, has raised an additional $6 million seed funding round led by B Capital Group, 3One4 Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners. Several well-known Go To Market players in the US-Asia cross-border SaaS ecosystem took part in the round.
McAfee Enterprise has announced the launch of MVISION Private Access, an integrated strategy for granular ‘Zero Trust’ access and extending data and threat security capabilities to private apps hosted across hybrid IT environments.
Baxter International Inc., a global medical products firm, is partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS). As part of a company-wide push to increase cloud usage, Baxter has extended its multi-year strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services.
Bridgestone Americas enters a definitive agreement to purchase Azuga Holdings for $391M from shareholders to strengthen its Silicon Valley presence and accelerate its progress towards delivering sustainable tire-centric and mobility solutions.
Salesforce announced a definitive acquisition agreement with Servicetrace (financials undisclosed) to integrate it with a previously acquired company, MuleSoft. The transaction would close this October and the new Robotics Process Automation (RPA) capabilities of Servicetrace would enhance Salesforce’s Einstein Automate solution and enable end-to-end workflow automation.
Nozomi Networks has announced a $100M in Series D and a pre-IPO funding round led by Triangle Peak Partners. It states that this has been a year of record growth, topping a 110 percent increase in annual recurring revenue and a two-fold increase in customer base.
Cloud identity solutions provider Saviynt has announced that its risk analytics, identity governance and other technologies would now be available as a managed service via Deloitte’s Identity+ Platform as it expands its strategic partnership with the latter to offer cloud identity solutions to enterprises.
Square, a payments software firm, has bought Afterpay, an Australian “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) startup, for $29 million. Square’s existing Seller and Cash App business divisions will be linked with Afterpay, allowing even the “smallest of businesses” to accept BNPL.
Germany’s Mambu has unveiled an all-digital product for small and medium enterprises (SME) to help them cut down costs and time to market. It states that the pressure on SME lenders to offer an all-digital customer experience has increased today, driving the need for the new decision.
Odoo, an open-source all-in-one business software, has announced that it has raised $ 215 million from Summit Partners, a growth equity investor. Odoo is one of the most popular company management software systems globally, with over 7 million users.
MoEngage, a provider of AI-leveraged and cloud-based customer engagement platform, has recently announced a fresh fundraise of $32.5 million in a Series C1 funding round led by Multiples Alternate Asset Management.
vEstonia’s Outvio, a provider of white-label SaaS fulfillment solutions to online shops, has raised $3 million in an early-stage funding round led by Change Ventures, ending its bootstrap spree since its inception in 2018, a TechCrunch report said.
GoCoach, a B2B SaaS talent development platform, has received $120,000 in investment from Panoramic Ventures after being declared the winner of a monthly-pitch competition Startup Showdown, a press release from Panoramic Ventures said.
Murf.ai, an AI-enabled SaaS-based voiceover company, received a $1.5 million seed round from Elevation Capital. Murf.ai is a text-based voiceover company that plans to use the cash to grow its market, improve its product, and add more staff.
OneDay, a SaaS company, has announced that it has raised $19 million in a Series B funding round led by Volition Capital. OneDay is a SaaS startup located in Texas that uses video storytelling technology to help businesses increase revenue and consumer engagement.
Google Cloud has strengthened its relations with SAP by becoming a strategic cloud partner for SAP’s RISE with SAP program. The two businesses will work under the terms of the new agreement to help clients with cloud migrations and business process transformations.
AppOmni, a SaaS security management provider, has extended the breadth of the SaaS platforms it covers with enhanced security, revealed a new product functionality in AppOmni Insights and increased its customer base, a press release from the company said.
Datadog has announced that it will be available on the Google Cloud Marketplace to allow customers to purchase its product, monitor their applications and infrastructure health across their Google Cloud environment. Those purchasing Datadog from the Google Cloud Marketplace would benefit from consolidated billing and streamlined procurement.
Tenderly, a cryptocurrency startup, has raised $15.3M in a Series A investment led by Accel Ventures. The money will go toward expanding the company’s worldwide reach and hiring engineers and businesspeople in new locations. Tenderly is a small company with 14 employees based in Serbia.
Algolia attains the unicorn tag, raising $150M in Series D from Lone Pine Capital. The round quadrupled its valuation achieved during its Series C in 2019, taking it to $2.25B. The company plans to address the increased demand for its search and recommendation products, continue its product expansion using the fund.
Limelight Networks has announced its definitive acquisition agreement with Layer0, to purchase the latter in a cash and stock deal. The acquisition is aimed at making Limelight meaningfully transform into an edge SaaS provider and also driving its revenue, margins and EBITDA.
Dixa has raised $105M in Series C funding from General Atlantic and aspires to inject funds into product development, potential acquisitions in the future, hiring for engineering teams and scaling its global presence. The company’s total funding raised to date crossed $157M with this round of funding.
LogicGate has raised $113M in a Series C funding round and aims to use the proceeds to fuel all elements of its business, including product development, notably targeted at its risk quantification solution that is likely to be released later this year. The company’s total funding raised to date touched $156M.
A group of SaaS pioneers in India has announced the forming of the Together Fund. With an initial capital of $85 million, the fund would support young Indian software-as-a-service startups. The group consists of Girish Mathrubootham of Freshworks; Shubham Gupta, formerly with investment firm Matrix; Avinash Raghava, formerly with Nasscom, iSPIRT, and SaaS BOOMi; and Manav Garg of Eka Corporation. Together Fund aims to invest in 20 to 25 businesses at various stages from pre-seed to Series B. In an interview with TechCrunch, Mr. Garg stated that the firm’s check size would vary from $250,000 to $3 million.
QuotaPath, a commission-tracking solution for sales and revenue teams, raised $21.3M in a Series A round led by Insight Partners. QuotaPath intends to grow its staff by the end of the year with the new fund. The company has raised a total of $26.3M since its inception, including this round.
Contentful, a content platform, raised $175M in a Series F round, valuing the company at over $3B, making it a unicorn. The funds will be used to extend Contentful’s global marketing and sales reach and to continue investing in its growth.
Airwallex, a major worldwide payments network, has launched Capital 49, a new venture capital fund run by the company’s founders. The new fund is anticipated to receive $200M from Airwallex’s founders and other investors. So far, Capital 49 has invested in two fintech firms.
Loopin, a SaaS company, has acquired $820K from Venture Highway in a seed round. The additional cash received in this round will be used to grow the staff and develop the platform. Loopin is a calendar-based productivity application designed for professionals.
Gumlet, a SaaS company that automates the publishing process for media, has raised $1.6M in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge. Gumlet enables developers worldwide to scale and optimize their pictures and videos to fit the device or browser of the end-user.
Pendo has raised $150M in Series F at a $2.6B valuation to help companies deliver software that meets customer expectations. The company has also reached $100M in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). It plans to further its aggressive global expansion using the proceeds from the funding.
Yoco has raised $83M (R1.23 billion) in a Series C funding round led by Dragoneer Investment Group to accelerate product development. It aspires to move beyond South Africa and help one million merchants in the next four years using its services.
Google has announced Google Cloud Retail Search, a new tool aimed at helping merchants enhance their e-commerce systems’ product search capabilities. Retail Search is a fully managed service that complements Google’s Retail Product Discovery Solutions.
Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, has acquired Nimbix, high-performance computing (HPC) cloud platform provider. The combined solution, which incorporates multi-cloud bursting and hybrid capabilities, boosts self-service and automation and enhances Atos’ capabilities.
Wiliot has raised $200M in Series C funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 to accelerate its mission of creating a new IoT era where intelligence and connectivity are brought to trillions of products that move the global supply chains.
DataRobot has raised $300M in Series G funding and announced its acquisition of Algorithmia. The company said that the funding alongside the acquisition would bolster its augmented intelligence platform and help extract value from AI better and faster, and allow customers to run machine learning models reliably.
Nium, a global B2B payments network, has raised more than $200M in a Series A round, at a valuation of more than $1B, making it a unicorn. The money will be used to expand the company’s payments network infrastructure, develop new products, and recruit top industry personnel.
Tekmetric has established a partnership with AutoVitals, a shop management software for vehicle repair companies. The two auto repair company systems are now working together, allowing for easier two-way communication and a better customer experience.
Vision Quest Velocity LLP, a virtual cycling company, has raised $3.4M in a seed funding round led by strategic financial partners. The strategic investment will be used by Velocity to develop ground-breaking software, new technologies, and platform awareness.
Marble Financial, an AI-based financial solution business, has inked a formal credit facility agreement with CHP Agent Services Inc. Under the Credit Agreement, Marble will receive a $10 million credit facility through its wholly-owned Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) subsidiary.
Dover has acquired CDS Visual Inc., a provider of SaaS solutions. Dover’s Engineered Products business will house CDS Visual as an operational unit. CDS Visual’s software is built on a patented unique technology that enables for “live” 3D setup.
Sila has announced its fundraise of $13M in a Series A funding round led by Revolution Partners and others. Its total funding has crossed $20.7M with this round, and it said that it would continue to bridge the gap between outdated banking systems and emerging financial systems built using blockchain
Solarisbank attains the unicorn tag after raising €190M ($224M) in an oversubscribed funding round led by Decisive Capital Management. It has also announced that it would acquire Contis to fulfill its aspirations of providing banking-as-a-service across Europe.
King River Capital (KRC) has announced the first close of its second fund, raising $95M from a range of existing and new investors. It would continue supporting founders in scaling their products and platform, and its aspirations of building innovative technology companies in the US and Australia.
Deloitte has made two acquisitions – TransientX and Sentek Global – for an undisclosed sum to bolster secure networking and cybersecurity offerings to clients. TransientX’s services would benefit Deloitte’s zero-trust offerings and Sentek Global would beef up its system engineering and cybersecurity offerings.
Magic, a decentralized identity authentication platform, raised $27 million in a Series A round. Magic’s aims to build the infrastructure needed to replace password-based Authentication with decentralized identity management. Magic employs a decentralized approach based on key-based encryption.
Oktopost, a B2B social management platform, received a $20 million expansion financing round from Expedition Expansion Capital. The money will be used to accelerate the company’s development pipeline, boost customer happiness, boost marketing and sales, and seek strategic acquisitions.
AxiomSL and Calypso Technology have merged, announces Thoma Bravo. Didier Bouillard, the current CEO of Calypso, will lead the new firm. Calypso and AxiomSL will form one of the most comprehensive cloud-based solution providers in the financial industry when they join forces.
Hyreo, a provider of candidate relationship management tool, has raised an undisclosed amount in pre-Series A funding from Callapina Capital, other investors. It aims to expand its team size, doubling its headcount in the subsequent year and eyes international expansion using the amount raised.
Paystand has raised $50M in Series C funding to redefine B2B payments. The company leverages cloud and blockchain technology to provide payments-as-a-service and looks to accelerate its shift towards business-centric payments infrastructure using the proceeds from the funding.
Blueprint Equity and ScOp Venture Capital led an $8 million Series A investment in Tovuti LMS Inc., a SaaS LMS. Tovuti LMS was built on the belief that creating learning management systems should be simple for administrators to set up and effectively use.
Prodigal, a debt management and collection firm, has acquired $12M in Series A funding to expand its suite of cognitive workflow and optimization solutions, which enable businesses to boost efficiency, improve customer care, and boost profitability.
DataGrail integrates with HubSpot to help enterprises manage privacy compliance efficiently, complying with the emerging data privacy laws, saving them time, money, and engineering resources.
YOOBIC has raised $50M in Series C funding from Highland Capital to continue its growth, increase its headcount to 350 by 2020 by hiring across technology, sales and engineering, and enhance its R7D efforts to cement its position as a leader in the market.
Interos, a supply chain risk management SaaS provider, has turned unicorn raising $100M in Series C funding from NightDragon. It works towards mitigating supply chain disruptions, both cyber and physical.
AuthenticID has raised $100M in minority growth investment from Long Ridge Equity Partners to support the development of solutions for extended identity verification and fraud detection use cases.
Israel’s Tailor Brands, which provides a platform for automating brand design and marketing processes for small businesses, has raised $50 million in Series C funding led by GoDaddy, reports state.
Galvanize, a software platform for SaaS governance, risk, and compliance (GRC), has announced a strategic partnership with Waymark Tech, a regulatory and legal intelligence supplier to financial services.
TPG Capital will get $2.25 billion from Uber Freight for Transplace. Uber Freight’s company will grow due to this purchase as it seeks to carve out market share in existing regions and expand into Mexico. According to the company, Uber Freight’s brokerage would be kept independent from Transplace’s services.
Gravitee dot i o an open-source API management platform, has raised $11M in a Series A round, led by Oxx and AlbionVC, to expand its development, sales, and marketing teams. Tide, Auchan, and other firms use Gravitee dot i o’s main API administration tool.
CloudServer, a SaaS-based, cloud-hosted RPA service, has been introduced by OpenBots, an open-source RPA platform. The new CloudServer is cloud-based, making it a dependable, scalable, and secure option. Its usage-based approach saves clients money by charging per-minute use rather than per-bot or per number of machines or users.
Mailmodo, a no-code email marketing company, has raised $2 million in early funding to help with product development and market expansion. Mailmodo was one of the companies in the fifth batch of Sequoia Capital India’s Surge program. According to Mailmodo, using AMP emails shortens the user experience.
Yapily, an open-banking infrastructure provider, raised $51 million in a Series B investment to assist the company in expanding its commercial footprint across Europe. By focusing on approved APIs, Yapily can deliver a quicker and more reliable experience.
Vitally has announced the raise of $9M in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz to continue its mission of helping organizations implement personalized customer success and scale their customer success efforts.
Dozee raised around $6M in a Series A round to conduct research and development to develop new products and improve the platform’s capabilities. Dozee’s Remote Patient Monitoring system is gaining traction, with over 216 hospitals in India partnering with the company in the last six months.
i80 Group, an investment firm, has committed more than $1 billion in loans to more than 15 firms. I80 focuses on the financial and proptech industries. It conducts quarterly calls with venture capitalists, which is how it obtains the majority of its transaction flow for the time being.
Outplay has announced a $7.3 million Series A round to invest in technology and employ specialists from all around the world. The platform also provides assistance to guarantee that software adoption across client teams is completed in a matter of days.
Sonatus has raised $35 million in Series A funding led by Translink Capital to fuel growth and drive its mission of empowering automakers with cloud-based software solutions to transform vehicles into “data centers” on wheels.
Salesforce has completed the acquisition of Slack, eight months after it entered the definitive agreement to acquire the latter for $27.7B in a cash and stock deal. The acquisition would combine Slack with its Customer 360 tool, creating an operating system that allows companies to succeed in an all-digital world.
Microsoft has acquired cloud infrastructure management and security provider CloudKnox Security to provide unified privileged access to its customers. The CloudKnox software would work with Azure public cloud and align with Microsoft’s cloud security goals.
Spendesk, a provider of all-in-one Spend management SaaS platform, has raised €100M ($118M) in Series C to increase hiring, accelerate product innovation and introduce spend management automation and insights to every finance team in Europe.
Soldo raised $180M in an oversubscribed Series C round led by Temasek. Soldo is a platform that allows employers to give their workers prepaid business cards that are linked to an automatic expense management system.
Vector Solutions has purchased the higher education sector of EVERFI for $100 million. Vector currently has 2,200 higher education clients, representing over half of all degree-granting schools and universities in the United States. Some of the world’s most well-known companies are among EVERFI’s clients.
Zenput, a company focused on operational execution, has raised $27M in a Series C round led by Golub Capital. Zenput has been utilized by Chipotle, Domino’s, P.F. Chang’s, Five Guys, Smart & Final, and 7-Eleven, among others.
Zafin and Codat team up to help financial institutions with detailed cash flow data to assist them in offering more suitable products and pricing. The partnership would help them provide better personalized services to their clients and SMBs.
Pillar VC has announced the close of $192M for two of its funds – $169M for Pillar III, its third fund and $23M for Pillar Select. The venture capital firm would typically make pre-seed investments ranging between $50–500K and seed round investments worth $2M to $6M.
AppOmni, a provider of SaaS security management, has announced that it would provide its services to the ServiceNow platform to help its customers get better visibility into Sas security posture, help its IT and security teams to remediate risks and configure security better.
Wipro has announced the launch of its FullStride Cloud Services and commitment to invest $1B in cloud technologies, partnerships and acquisitions to create a comprehensive cloud transformation capability for its mutual clients, partners and customers.
Limeade, an employee engagement software provider, has announced the acquisition of Seattle-based TINYpulse, a SaaS employee listening provider, to create healthy employee experiences. Under the terms of the deal, likely to close by the end of July 2021, Limeade would merge with TINYpulse in an all-cash deal of $8.8 million for 100 percent of the issued capital of TINYpulse. In a press release, Henry Albrecht, founder and CEO of Limeade, stated that the Covid 19 pandemic had reinforced the company’s vision of creating healthy employee experiences, generating better business results for customers.
Go1, a platform helping companies upscale their workforce via on-demand training, has turned unicorn, raising $200 million in Series D at a valuation of $1B in a round co-led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, AirTree Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. Go1’s Series C funding round came last year where it netted $40 million from Madrona Venture Group. The total funding raised by Go1 crosses $283 million as per Crunchbase. Other and existing investors - Blue Cloud Ventures, Larsen Ventures, Scott Shleifer and John Curtius from Tiger Global, TEN13, Microsoft’s venture fund M12, Madrona Venture Group, SEEK, and Y Combinator participated in the funding round.
Kdan Mobile, a Taiwanese startup, has raised $16 million in a Series B funding round led by Dattoz Partners. Yeon Su Kim, CEO of Dattoz Partners, will be joining Kdan's board. Other participants in the round include Taiwania Capital, Golden Asia Fund Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, and WI Harper Group. Kdan Mobile specializes in cloud-based applications for workplace mobility. Kdan Mobile's enterprise products, such as Document AI, its data processing and filtering technology, and SaaS products like e-signature service DottedSign, PDF software Document 365, and Creativity 365 for multimedia content creation, including animations and video editing, will receive part of the funding.
Productiv, an enterprise SaaS management platform, has announced it is collaborating with Miro, an online whiteboard tool. This collaboration will enhance how people communicate inside the organization and maximize the usefulness of communication apps like Miro.The partnership will provide corporate teams more visibility into how they're using Miro for new collaborative practices, such as real-time feature utilization.
Dover, a recruiting platform, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round led by Tiger Global Management. Other participants include Founders Fund, Abstract Ventures, and Y Combinator. Dover, which has created a "recruitment orchestration platform" geared at recruiters, lets them juggle and combine numerous applicant pools to automatically locate appropriate job prospects and then manage the outreach process, according to CEO and co-founder Max Kolysh.
Treblle, a real-time Application Program Interface (API) monitoring and analytics platform provider, has raised €1.2M ($1.4 million) in seed funding from Pan-European Venture Capital firm, Nauta Capital that predominantly invests in early-stage tech companies.
Zoom enters definitive agreement to acquire Five9 in an all-stock deal, approximately worth $14.7 billion. It would integrate the latter’s contact center-as-a-service solutions, into its communications platform to build better customer engagement in the future and accelerate long-term growth aspirations.
AllCloud acquires Integress for an undisclosed amount to help companies in their cloud transit journey. With Integress accelerators that can expand, into AWS and Salesforce with data and analytics offerings, organizations would be able to accelerate their cloud journey.
Publicis Groupe has announced its acquisition of CitrusAd, a Sas retail media platform for optimizing brands’ marketing performances, for an
undisclosed amount. The acquisition would help it in three major areas of growth, customer understanding and consolidated measurement.
Kamereo, a purchasing platform and Tech-veggie supply for restaurants in Vietnam, has raised $4.6 million co-led by CPF Group, Quest
Ventures, and Genesia Ventures. The funds will be used to hire additional employees, create a new warehouse management system, update the user interface, and expand into Hanoi next year.
Razorpay, a fintech startup, has acquired TERA Finlabs, a Bengaluru-based sas startup, in an undisclosed deal. TERA Finlabs enables embedded finance solutions for organizations by providing technology, risk, and capital solutions. TERA Finlabs is a subsidiary of GAIN Credit, a digital lender located in the United Kingdom.
Accel Partners and Matrix Partners India led a $12 Million Series A financing round for Captain Fresh. The fresh funds will be used to continue investing more heavily in supply-side technologies, increase distribution globally, and invest in the company’s employees.
Teikametrics, a Sas platform for Amazon and Walmart sellers, has raised $ 40 million in Series B funding from Intel Capital, to drive the expansion of its AI-powered Sas platform, to support its mission of bringing, cutting-edge decision-making capabilities, to every online seller in the world.
Shopmonkey has raised $75 million in a Series C investment led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Index Ventures. The funds will continue to expand and grow, while also delivering top-notch service, to the auto repair industry with additional finances.
Workiva recently became the first SaaS company to gain entry to the UN Global Compact CFO Taskforce, as a part of which its CFO Jill Klindt, joined the task force. Workiva now aims to help companies in aligning their sustainability goals and commitments with credible corporate finance strategies.
NirogGyan, a SaaS company focusing on the healthcare industry, has raised an undisclosed amount in a seed funding round led by industry veterans. Participants in the round include Arindam Haldar, Teji HS, Sumit Bagaria, and others like BITS Pilani’s startup incubator PIEDS (Pilani Innovation & Entrepreneurship Development Society).
Google Assistant Investments Program and 100x Entrepreneurs have invested an unknown sum in Slang Labs. Slang Labs, which was formed in 2017, claims to be one of the first Google-funded companies in the global In-App Voice Assistant market.
NRG Systems, a developer and manufacturer of decision support tools, has announced the launch of NRG Cloud. To make data retrieval and storage operations easier, NRG Cloud offers a suite of data management services. NRG Systems has made the NRG Cloud Standard Connect Package accessible for free.
ServiceMax, a field service management SaaS provider, has recently announced its entry into a business combination agreement with Pathfinder Acquisition Corporation, a publicly-traded Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC). The close of this transaction would list ServiceMax on Nasdaq as a public company.
ServiceMax, a field service management software provider, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire LiquidFrameworks from a private equity investor Luminate Capital Partners. The financial terms of the transaction remain undisclosed. Luminate Capital Partners had acquired LiquidFrameworks in 2019. In a press release, ServiceMax announced that the deal would expand its field service management solutions, to address unique challenges in the energy sector. Additionally, the acquisition would better position ServiceMax to meet digital service execution demand in the industry and facilitate its expansion of portfolio and go-to-market strategies.
Netradyne, a startup using AI to build fleet safety solutions, has announced its Series C fundraise of $150 million from SoftBank Vision Fund 2. with participation from existing investors Point72 Ventures and M12.
Amazon Web Services has announced the general availability of Amazon Health Lake, which is a cloud service that allows healthcare companies to centralize their medical data from various systems, and utilize it to improve patient care. According to AWS, utilizing HealthLake to consolidate different records into a single data repository makes information more accessible. This information includes medical information, such as clinician notes, lab reports, and insurance claims, stored in several databases.
LearnWorlds, a platform for creating and selling online courses, has announced that it has raised $32 million in a minority investment led by Insight Partners, global venture capital and private equity firm.
Google Cloud India has announced the launch of its new cloud region in Delhi-NCR. This would enable the firm to better their services to clients in various industries, particularly the public sector in India and the Asia-Pacific. The financial details have not been disclosed.
Daloopa, a company providing AI-powered document automation and data extraction, has announced its $20 million Series A funding in a round led by Credit Suisse Asset Management’s NEXT Investors.
Lightyear, a software provider for network infrastructure procurement and management, has announced its Series A fundraise of $13.1 million from Ridge Ventures to boost hiring and resources in development, enhance go-to-market strategies, the company said in a press release. Lightyear had raised its seed round funding in 2020, netting $3.7 million from Amplo. With the close of Series A, the total funding raised by the company crossed 17 million $, as per Crunchbase.
Singapore-based Easy Eat, a startup transforming restaurants into tech companies, has announced a raise of $5 million to expand into deeper Southeast Asia. The round involved participation from Aroa Ventures, family office of Ritesh Agarwal, founder and CEO of OYO; Reddy Futures Family Office; Prophetic Ventures; Maninder Gulati, global chief strategy officer of OYO; Cem Garih, managing Partner at Alarko Ventures, Fethi Sabancı Kamışlı, founder and managing partner of Esas Ventures and a few Silicon Valley-based VCs and angels, as per reports.
SecurEnds, a cloud-based identity governance company, has announced a $21 million in Series A funding led by Elephant, one of the largest Series A investments in Atlanta’s cybersecurity and tech startup ecosystem, the company stated in a press release.
Lantronix has announced the introduction of True Zero-Touch Automation updates for provisioning remotely deployed IoT devices. Lantronix Inc. is a global provider of secure turnkey solutions for the Internet of Things and Remote Environment Management , including SaaS, connectivity, engineering, and intelligent hardware.
Tinvio, a Singapore-based startup, has announced that it has raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by AppWorks Ventures. The startup’s strategic investor MUFG Innovation Partners (MUIP), also participated in the round. Other participants include Tinvio’s existing investors, Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Global Founders Capital, and Partech Ventures.
Digantara, a spacetech startup, has raised $2.5 million as part of their seed funding round led by Kalaari Capital. Digantara plans to utilize the funds to expedite product development and launch its first satellite (technology demonstration mission) into low-Earth orbit, according to the official announcement.
MedPay, an API platform, has raised $1.2 million in a seed funding round led by Talent Investor Entrepreneur First and GrowX Ventures. The funds will be used to meet rising demand and enhance the company’s current product offerings.
Invite-only social audio app, Clubhouse, has launched its direct messaging feature- Backchannel- for all users, which allows them to slide into a one-on-one chat mode or a group text format.
Microsoft has unveiled Windows 365 that takes the OS to the cloud to offer a personalized PC experience for users and organizations, a new approach to cloud computing amid hybrid working.
Simpplr has raised a $32M Series C from Tola Capital. Simpplr will use the new funds to develop its platform, expand its development team, and scale up to serve worldwide commercial clients.
Crayhill Capital Management invests $300 million in Unybrands as growth capital. Unybrands is an eCommerce platform that helps Amazon fulfill and direct-to-consumer businesses scale.
Deskimo, a Y Combinator’s S21 batch startup providing on-demand access to work desks in professional workspaces, has launched in Singapore and Hong Kong after its inception in February this year, reports state.
Cybereason, an end-point detection and response platform has raised $275 million in a crossover Series F funding round led by Liberty Strategic Capital, with participation from Irving Investors, certain funds advised by Neuberger Berman Investment Advisers LLC and Softbank Vision Fund 2*, it said in a press release.
Bevy, an enterprise-grade virtual conference and community events platform, has acquired Eventtus, an engagement platform managing events for an undisclosed amount to offer a comprehensive end-to-end management solution and a seamless experience for event attendees.
Flymachine, an organizer of digital live events, has raised $21 million in a round co-led by Greycroft Partners and SignalFire, with participation from Primary Venture Partners, Contour Venture Partners, Red Sea Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank.
Untitled Ventures has announced its second fund of USD 118.3 million. It will collaborate with InnMind to deliver high-quality deep tech startup deal-flow to the fund’s pipeline.
Railsbank, a provider of APIs for fintech services, has raised $70 million in equity funding led by Anthos Capital. Other participants include Central Capital, Cohen and Company, and Chris Adelsbach’s new fund Outrun Ventures.
Cardless, a platform developer for companies launching credit cards, has raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Activant Capital. Other participants include Accomplice, Pear VC, and the owners and management of NBA teams Phoenix Suns and Boston Celtics. The funding increases the company’s total raised since its debut in 2019 to $50 million.
The Moot Group (TMG), an eCommerce technology startup, has raised €5 million (approx. USD 6.9 million) in a seed funding round led by Fuel Ventures. The new funds will be used for the company’s next growth stage.
Great Question raises $2.5 million in a seed funding round. Great Question is an online platform that provides product managers, designers, researchers, and research operations with UX research services. Great Question was part of Y Combinator’s winter program of 2021.
BHyve, a future of work platform, has raised $300,000 in a JITO Angel Network, LetsVenture, and other angel investors. BHyve is a platform for disseminating tacit employee knowledge and allowing peer learning networks in the future of work.
Mobile.dev, a startup providing pre-production workflows to help mobile teams automatically detect problems, has raised $3 million in seed round funding from Cowboy Ventures.
Acelerate, a software company helping restaurants operate efficiently, has announced the raise of $14.4 million in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital. Taking the announcement to its LinkedIn handle, the company expressed delight at the investment after a year of bootstrapping.
Stytch has raised $30 million in Series A funding led by Thrive Capital with participation from Coatue and existing investors, Benchmark and Index, the company wrote in an official blog.
Multiplier, a Professional Employment Organization (PEO) platform, raises a $4 million investment round. It provides complete solutions that enable businesses to hire individuals globally.
Proper, a property accounting services provider for the real estate industry, has announced the raise of $9M in Series A from QED Investors, with participation from our partners at MetaProp, Expa, and Bling Capital.
SimplyDelivery secured €10 million in a Series A funding round led by Cusp Capital (about USD 11.8 million). SimplyDelivery software reintroduces restaurateurs to direct contact with customers, and it identifies repeat clients. In the previous three years, SimplyDelivery’s annual revenues have tripled while remaining profitable.
Logical Clocks secured €5M (approx. USD 5.9M in a Series A round sponsored by Industrifonden. The money will go toward expanding the company’s commercial activities and footprint, particularly in the United States. Hopsworks, the world’s first enterprise and open-source Feature Store with a full machine learning platform, was established and is operated by Logical Works.
Fortive Corporation, a technology provider for connected workflows, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire ServiceChannel, a leading SaaS-based multi-site facilities maintenance service provider. The deal, approximately worth $1.2 billion, would primarily be funded with available cash, Fortive said in a press release.
In a series of seed and Series A investment rounds, Endgame has raised a total of $17 million. Endgame is up against in-house developers who are splicing together various apps to create a solution that works for them. Endgame is currently in the early phases of development and is pre-revenue, but it already has a group of beta clients.
In a Series D financing led by Warburg Pincus, Quantexa raised $153 million. Quantexa plans to use the cash to enhance its product line and expedite its regional market growth plans. Quantexa works with blue-chip banks, insurers, and government agencies worldwide, including seven of the top ten banks in the United Kingdom and Australia.
Sourcegraph has raised $125M in Series D from a16z and others. The total funding raised by the company crosses $225M with this round and it aims to make its search engine easier to set up and add more features to help developers with the funding.
Eka Ventures, a UK-based venture capital firm, has completed its $95 million (£68 million) fund. Eka’s goal is to invest in consumer technology firms that promote sustainable consumption, consumer health, and the “inclusive economy.” Eka also has the backing of 24 entrepreneurs, 12 of whom were previously supported by Eka Ventures, either through a fund or directly.
Pantheon, a SaaS platform for WebOps developers, marketers and designers, attains the unicorn tag, raising $100 million in Series E funding from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 at a valuation of over $1 billion. This round takes the company’s total funding raised to over $200 million.
Motorola Solutions has announced its entry into a definitive acquisition agreement to acquire Openpath Security solutions, a mobile and cloud-based access control system provider for businesses. The financial details of the deal were undisclosed but Motorola expects the deal to close by the end of July 2021.
San Diego-based AttackIQ, a security optimization platform and a Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) system vendor, has raised $44 million in a Series C funding round led by Atlantic Bridge, taking its total funding raised to over $79 million.
Impact, a global management platform, has raised $105 million in a $1.5 billion funding round led by Qatar Investment Authority. The additional funds will be used to increase partnership automation, strengthen channel relationships, and expand Impact’s go-to-market operations. Leading companies such as Shopify, Uber, and Walmart use Impact’s marketplace.
Miami-based Marco Financial, a trade finance platform providing access to working capital for LATAM small and medium enterprises, has raised $82 million in a combination of seed and debt financing round, reports state.
Discord, an online voice, video and text service platform, is set to acquire Sentropy, an AI-powered tool preventing digital communities from harassment for an undisclosed amount. It is reported that Discord would integrate Sentropy’s products into its existing toolkit, also bringing the latter’s leadership aboard its platform.
Arctic Wolf, a cybersecurity operations firm, has raised $150 million in a Series F funding round, valuing the firm at $4.3 billion. The additional funds will be utilized to keep the company on track and improve its mergers and acquisitions strategy. Arctic Wolf’s cloud security operations platform provides small and mid-sized enterprises with round-the-clock security monitoring.
Remote has raised $150M in a Series B funding round led by Accel at a valuation of over $1 billion. Other participants include Sequoia, Index Ventures, Two Sigma, General Catalyst, and Day One Ventures. Employees and contractors can use Remote’s worldwide payroll, benefits, and compliance services. With this round, Remote attains the unicorn status.
Amperity, an intelligent customer data platform (CDP) for consumer brands, has turned a unicorn, raising $100 million in Series D funding at a valuation of over $1 billion in a round led by HighSage Ventures. Other investors – Tiger Global Management, Declaration Partners, Madrona Venture Group and Madera Technology Partners – participated in the round.
Bookee, a SaaS platform for the fitness industry, has announced the raise of its pre-seed funding (amount undisclosed) from Antler India. Pallav Nadhani, founder of Charts.com and FusionCharts, and Abhishek Rungta, founder and CEO of Indus Net Technologies, participated in the round, reports state.
ZoomInfo is set to acquire conversational intelligence provider Chorus.ai in a $575M all-cash deal. The move is aimed to allow customers to make excellent, data-driven decisions through their sales funnel by combining ZoomInfo’s top-of-the-funnel strength with insights, driven from customer conversations that Chorus captures.
The $57 million Fund III of the Female Founders Fund (FFF) has been completed. The new fund expands on FFF’s current investing approach in women, women of color, and LGBTQ+owned businesses. Climate change and education are two topics that have recently gotten a lot of attention.
Elevate Brands, a company that acquires and operates Amazon third-party business, has announced an additional fundraise of $250 million. The majority of the fund came from its existing investors and a global group of technology, fintech and e-commerce business leaders, the company said in a press release.
Vaayu, an automated platform to help retailers cut down their carbon emissions, has raised $1.57 million in its pre-seed funding round led by CapitalT. A number of angel investors, including Atomico’s Angel Program, Planet Positive LP, Saarbrücker 21, Expedite Ventures and NP-Hard Ventures- participated in the funding round, reports state.
Microsoft has announced a definitive agreement to acquire RiskIQ, a security company providing digital threat management solutions for software vendors. The deal is aimed to help customers build a comprehensive view of the global threats, better understand vulnerable internet-facing assets, and build world-class threat intelligence.
Gembah has raised $11M in a Series A funding round led by ATX Venture Partners. The total funding raised by the company now crosses $14M and it looks to use the proceeds from this funding towards expanding its engineering and marketing team, develop UX/UI.
HelloFlow, a fintech business, has raised € 1.3 million (about USD 1.5 million) in a seed round from PreSeed Ventures and Seedcamp. The cash will be utilized to strengthen the platform’s advanced capabilities and speed up product development. HelloFlow is a no-code platform that connects with local ID authentication providers to change client onboarding and identity verification in local markets and in banks.
Tide, a fintech firm, has raised $100 million in a $650 million Series C investment. The round’s leader was Apax Digital. Tide will use the extra funds to strengthen its business finance platform, expand internationally, and expand its market share. While Tide’s user base has gradually increased since its inception, in 2020, the number of users in the United Kingdom more than doubled.
Vara, a staff-management platform for Southeast Asian small and medium enterprises (SME), has announced the raise of $4.8 million in a seed round from Go Ventures, RTP Global, AlphaJWC, Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, FEBE Ventures and Taurus Ventures, reports state.
Robin AI has raised USD 2.42 million in a funding round led by Episode 1. The increased funds will be used to expand the firm’s client base. Robin AI will receive $2 million from the Google Black Founders Fund in addition to the funding round. Robin AI’s software solution combines machine learning and human intelligence to automate legal labor. Richard Robinson is a Black attorney-turned-entrepreneur who is passionate about promoting diversity in the workplace.
Dovetail studios, a full-service venture capital business, has raised AUD 10 million (USD 7.5 million) for a new fund. One of Dovetail’s goals is to train entrepreneurs to approach other VCs for funding. Dovetail is a full-service venture studio based in Sydney and Auckland that works with entrepreneurs who have a great idea but lack technical knowledge. Afterpay enlisted Dovetail’s help to build its digital infrastructure and create consumer-facing solutions.
Wobot.ai has announced the launch of a SaaS-based version of its product with a range of features to revolutionize how one perceives cameras and the information derived from them. Having announced its entry into the US market, the company would also look to solidify its position as a one-stop video analytics platform there.
Didomi has raised $40M in a Series B funding round co-led by Elephant and Breega, a round which takes its total funding to $46M. The company plans to invest in technology, expand into the US and European home markets using the funding.
Netskope has raised $300M in an additional round. The company’s total funding to date crossed $1B as per Crunchbase and valuation has increased to $7.5B post this round. It plans to use the fresh capital to expand its platform and go-to-market aspirations rapidly.
In a Series B financing led by Tiger Global Management, Flash has raised $22 million. It’s a platform that offers firms and employees in Brazil a variety of flexible perks. Flash is on a mission to modernize what it perceives as an old-fashioned manner of offering employee perks in South America’s largest country.
Frontier has received $2.8 million in a funding round led by NFX. Frontier calls itself a “vertically integrated” job market. Frontier’s concept is that it pre-screens candidates, selects the best, and allows them to schedule interviews with companies directly, saving time and money.
Smile Identity received a $7 million Series A investment from Costanoa Ventures and CRE Venture Capital. Smile Identity intends to utilize the extra funds to strengthen its services, expand into new locations, and serve a larger range of ID kinds. John Cowgill, a Costanoa partner, will join Smile Identity’s board of directors. Smile Identity provides ID solutions in Africa and throughout the world for banking, telecoms, financial services, and shared economy applications.
IBM plans to acquire BoxBoat Technologies, a well-known DevOps consulting firm and Kubernetes-certified enterprise service provider. BoxBoat will join IBM Global Business Services’ Hybrid Cloud Services business, which is constantly growing. BoxBoat provides a wide range of services, including customized Kubernetes and Enterprise Container Platform adoption strategies, application containerization, and DevSecOp training and facilitation.
Peter Boyce II, a General Catalyst partner, has left the company to form his own firm called Stellation Capital. He plans to raise $40M for his company’s fund. Mr. Boyce joined GC in 2013 and is in charge of Ro, Macro, towerIQ, and Atom investments.
Switzerland’s national postal service has acquired a major stake in the end-to-end cloud-based file synchronization and management software provider, Tresorit. It said that the move falls in line with its broader aspirations of supporting the Swiss economy in times of digital transformation.
Rootly, a startup helping companies recover and learn from incidents, has announced the raise of $3.2 million in seed round funding led by Ross Fubini at XYZ Venture Capital with participation from 8VC (investors in Asana, Palantir) and Y Combinator.
Toronto-based Clearco, a fintech capital provider, has raised $215 million in new funding round, just months after it turned unicorn, rebranding itself from Clearbanc, raising Canadian Dollars (CAD) $125 million ($100 million) in Series C at $2 billion valuation.
Nairobi-based MarketForce, a B2B end-to-end platform that helps customer brands deliver essential goods and services, has announced the raise of $2 million in a pre-Series A funding round.With this round, its total funding stands at $2.5 million. Investors who participated in this round were – Y-Combinator and P1 Ventures joined by V8 Capital, Future Africa, Greenhouse Capital, Launch Africa, Rebel Fund, Remapped Ventures, and a couple of strategic angels.
Botman, a cybersecurity software-as-a-service business, has received $200K from Modulor Capital and Pentathlon Venture in a seed round. The funds will be used to grow the company’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for the digital advertising supply chain. The company wants to get rid of IVT (invalid traffic) from the digital ad ecosystem.
Avataar Ventures and Ascent Capital led a Series B investment of $16 million for CRMNEXT. Avataar Ventures and Ascent Capital lead a $16 million Series B investment for CRMNEXT. Across 100 major banking and insurance firms around the world currently use the startup’s services.
Outbrain, a recommendation platform connecting advertisers with open web consumers, has announced its raise of $200 million in a private equity round from The Baupost Group at an undisclosed valuation. The fundraising comes a week after it filed a proposal for the IPO of its common stock with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
Lidya, a digital financial services platform, has raised $8.3 million in a pre-Series B funding round led by Alitheia Capital with participation from Bamboo Capital Partners, Accion Venture Lab and Flourish Ventures, reports state.
Localyze, a Y-Combinator-backed startup aiding cross-border employee relocation, has raised €10M ($12M) from Blossom Capital in Series A. Its previous round (Seed) was closed in 2020, and with this funding, Localyze plans to accelerate expanding into other markets besides its base, Germany.
Juni, an e-commerce platform, has announced the raise of $21.5M in a Series A funding round, co-led by DST Global and Felix Capital. The company had only launched in 2020 and raised its seed round funding around November last year. The proceeds from this funding would be used in product development and hiring across teams.
San Francisco’s mmhmm has announced the raise of $100 million in its Series B funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, exactly a year after its private beta launch. Since its launch in 2020, mmhmm has raised about $136 million in four funding rounds in less than a year, with the most recent Series A and debt financing round in October 2020, where it raised $35 million collectively, as per Crunchbase. Sequoia Capital, Mubadala Capital, Human Capital, World Innovation Lab (WiL), and many earlier investors participated in the round.
Dataminr has bought WatchKeeper, a situational awareness platform, for an unknown sum. With the purchase of WatchKeeper and its integration with Dataminr Pulse, Dataminr will grow its global corporate customer base. As part of an early access program, business customers will be able to utilize the integrated version of Dataminr Pulse later this year. The broader release is slated for early 2022.
ZeroFox, external threat intelligence and security firm, has bought Vigilante, a dark web threat intelligence firm. Vigilante will be incorporated into ZeroFox right away, giving customers a one-of-a-kind Dark Ops solution. Vigilante will provide clients with information and security resources, allowing them to make better decisions.
Hopin, a platform for event management, has announced the purchase of Attendify to strengthen and expand its event marketing capabilities. Hopin will soon provide Campaign Manager with Attendify, allowing event marketers to leverage a strong email engine. Attendify’s products, such as Audience CRM, a complete attendance data platform, will enhance Hopin’s portfolio in various ways.
Unit21, a no-code risk, fraud, and compliance software, received a $34 million Series B investment round led by Tiger Global Management. The money will be utilized to expand the engineering, R&D, and go-to-market teams within the firm. Unit21 was formed because the current method of fraud prevention and detection, which relied on “black box” machine learning, was flawed.
Opaque, a company that helps businesses analyze encrypted cloud data, has received $9.5 million in a seed round sponsored by Intel Capital. With Opaque, clients can work with secure data on the cloud while guaranteeing that the data isn’t exposed. Secure hardware enclaves and cryptographic fortification are part of Opaque, which is a mix of two essential technologies built on top of state-of-the-art cloud security.
Repeat has secured $6 million in a Series A round of funding led by Battery Capital. The funds will be used to grow the company’s operations. Client purchasing patterns are tracked by the platform, which alerts them when it’s time to repurchase. It then builds a personalized shopping basket for each, which makes replenishing a breeze.
Cloverly has raised $2.1 million from TechSquare Ventures in a seed round. Customers may purchase carbon offsets from public markets to offset their carbon footprints while also utilizing technology to develop solutions. Cloverly monitors the offset market to ensure that the providers are trustworthy and continuously looking for new ones.
Fountain9, an AI-driven company that focuses on predictive inventory planning, has raised $1.9 million in a seed round. The money will be used to improve the intelligence of the startup’s demand sensing engine, increase its product offerings, and expand into new areas.
San Francisco’s r2C, a software security startup, has announced the raise of $27 million in a Series B funding led by Felicis Ventures with participation from existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Alongside the funding, it announced on its official blog that its open-source product, Semgrep, would now integrate with GitLab.
Seattle’s WellSaid Labs has announced the raise of $10 million Series A funding led by FUSE, with participation from Voyager, Qualcomm Ventures LLC and GoodFriends. The company would use the fresh capital to enhance its AI-generated synthetic voice business.
San Francisco’s Renegade Partners has announced the close of its first fund, $100 million, to partner with companies going through a critical inflection point, which it cites as a supercritical stage, in their venture and help them become outliers. The VC firm made its announcement in a series of tweets.
Copenhagen-based Pleo, which offers smart payment cards for employees, attained unicorn status, raising $150 million in Series C funding at a $1.7 billion valuation from Bain Capital Ventures and Thrive Capital. Pleo said that this is the largest Series C investment raised by any Danish-headquartered company.
The US Department of Defense (DoD) has announced the cancellation of the ten-year JEDI contract with Microsoft. The move comes after US Federal Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith rejects the DoD and Microsoft’s motions to dismiss Amazon’s challenge of awarding the contract to Microsoft. Alongside the termination of JEDI, The Pentagon has announced a new JWCC contract, considering evolving cloud requirements
Magic Fund, a global collective of founders backing other founders, has raised $30 million in its second dedicated fund, Magic Fund II, to continue its mission of supporting early-stage startups across Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.In an official announcement, Magic Fund stated that it would be writing checks between $100K and $300K in early-stage companies across different sectors and geographies and enunciated its aspirations and vision behind supporting them.
Tata Consultancy Services has released Jile 5.0, a SaaS-based solution. Jile 5.0 is available in two versions. The Standard edition and the Enterprise edition. Jile 5.0 gives organizations a unified picture of their portfolios and programs, allowing them to align execution with strategy better. This will help business stakeholders, and teams collaborate more effectively and reduce the time it takes to launch new software.
TravelPerk, a business trip booking website, has purchased the UK-based Click Travel. Click Travel oversees £300 million in business travel for its clients, which will help TravelPerk expand in the future. With the addition of Click Travel’s 2,000+ SME clients, TravelPerk’s UK and European business has been reinforced, increasing the total number of customers to little more than 5,000 after the acquisition.
Hubble, an online marketplace for flexible office space, has announced that it has raised €2.7 million (approx. USD 2.7 million) in a funding round led by Pi Labs. Other participants include JLL Spark and Starwood Capital.The new funds will help in launching Hubble’s new suite of solutions geared at facilitating hybrid working.
Toqio, a provider of SaaS global financial platform, has announced its raise of €8 million ($9.4 million) seed round funding led by Seaya Ventures and Speedinvest, with participation from SIX FinTech Ventures. The company would use the proceeds to scale its platform. Taking the announcement to its official LinkedIn and Twitter Handle, Toqio thanked the investors and enunciated its vision.
Vienna’s byrd, a global e-commerce fulfillment network providing online shops logistics solutions on Monday, announced the close of its Series B fundraise of €16 million, roughly $19M from Mouro Capital. The company had raised €5 million ($5.9 million) in Series A funding in July last year and with the close of Series B, its total amount raised has crossed €26 million ($30.7 million). Existing investors – Speedinvest, Verve Ventures, Rider Global and VentureFriends- participated in the funding round, the company said in a press release.
Speciale Invest, a deep-tech venture capital firm, invested $375K in Neverinstall’s seed round. To improve the platform, the money will be utilized to hire a world-class technical staff. Neverinstall is a startup developing a cloud platform for bringing any graphical user interface (GUI) program to the browser, independent of OS or device type. The startup intends to give free and open access to software programs without any fees or limitations imposed by the hardware of the user’s device.
CanBank Venture Capital Fund Ltd has invested an undisclosed sum in CoRover, a conversational AI startup. CoRover plans to use the funds to grow its business and invest in research and development to improve its AI-based platform. People from all around the world utilize CoRover. It claims to have the largest user base in India.
VC Holdings has signed a sale and purchase agreement to acquire some of IDreamSky’s SaaS-related software and the entire issued share-capital of Dream Impression Holdings, IDreamSky’s indirectly owned subsidiary, in an $11.23 million deal (HK $87.32 million).
Obviously AI, a no-code platform helping people without a technical platform build and run AI models, has announced an extension of its $3.6 million seed round that it raised in May this year. With the close of this extension round, led by a deep tech investment firm, University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners (UTEC), the company’s seed funding raised to $4.7 million.
ExpenseOut, Infiniti Software Solutions’ flagship product, has been reintroduced by the company, which provides travel technology service. The product scans invoices automatically and assesses them for accuracy, policy compliance, and legitimacy using artificial intelligence. The program offers options for accurately collecting and reimbursing mileage data using GPS.
Antler India has provided early-stage funding to PeakPerformer, a leadership development company. As it builds its AI platform and expands its client base, the funds will be used to hire engineering expertise. PeakPerformer is a tech-enabled executive development platform that helps companies upskill their executives at all levels.
TWID, a rewards-based payment network, has raised $2.5 million in a round led by BEENXT and the Surge Fund of Sequoia Capital India. The firm, which is located in Singapore and India, links clients with merchants to pay using points earned through a “Point Issuer” scheme. Surge’s fifth batch of 23 companies includes TWID, which has developed unique digital solutions to assist businesses and individuals.
In a pre-Series A financing led by IIFL Securities Capital Enhancer Fund, Leegality, a platform for document execution, received an undisclosed sum. The additional funds will be used to recruit more individuals in critical roles, speed up product development, and expand the company’s operations. Leegality’s e-sign, e-stamp, and document processing technology, launched in 2016, enables Indian businesses to sign and manage documents.
MyMobiForce, an AI-powered crowdsourcing platform, has raised ₹10 crores ($1.42 million) in a pre-Series A funding round led by Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund, reports state. The round witnessed participation from angel investors led by Manu Iyer of Bluehill Capital, Acsys Investments, and Ashutosh Agrawal (ex- Urban Company).
Du and Wipro have announced the launch of their multi-cloud platform that aims to simplify, accelerate digital transformation and cloud adoption across the UAE. It is set to help organizations reimagine their infrastructure, create new cost inefficiencies and deliver more secure solutions.
Huawei and Temenos have teamed up to allow Temeonos’ cloud-native core banking solution on Huawei’s public cloud. It would focus on the APAC region, with a focus on China and other areas. With the move, banks would be able to achieve their go-to-market strategy and open up new business models.
REvil, a cybercriminal group, used flaws in Kaseya’s update system to target hundreds of businesses in a devastating ransomware attack. The ransom demand is the highest in recent memory, and if paid, it will be the most expensive ransom ever paid in response to a cyberattack. The attackers hit MSPs’ Kaseya infrastructure, then the MSPs inadvertently distributed malware to their clients by seeding their ransomware using Kaseya’s trusted distribution method.
Intervue, an Indian SaaS hiring platform, has completed a seed round led by Titan Capital for an undisclosed amount. The funds will be used to grow the product and strengthen the core staff. Intervue combines live coding and video conferencing with other tools like whiteboarding, take-home projects, a question bank, and more to enable a company to hire better employees faster.
Cairo-based MaxAB, a B2B e-commerce platform connecting food and grocery retailers to suppliers, has raised $40M in Series A funding from North Africa’s investor RMBV. The company would look to expand its market other regions, especially the MENA, and scale its recently launched business verticals
Locad, an eCommerce logistics business, has raised $4.9 million in a seed round led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge program. The funds will be used to develop the startup’s courier and distribution networks. Locad is a company that offers an “end-to-end solution” to cross-border e-commerce businesses.
Shenzhen-based Kingdee International Software Group Company recently signed an official contract. It held a kick-off meeting for a cooperation project with the Shagang Group, a leading provider of iron and steel material manufacturers and integrated service providers. In a statement to the press, Kingdee enunciated that both companies have reached a consensus to work in tandem to mobilize all internal and external resources for the digital transformation of the iron and steel industry, setting a benchmark with a great significance in a demonstration.
Siemens has decided to move a substantial portion of its software business to SaaS. According to Siemens, the new SaaS services will help users accelerate their digital transformation by delivering greater accessibility, easier collaboration, and limitless scalability.
Rapyd, a Fintech-as-a-Service (FaaS) company, has agreed to buy Valitor, a payments technology company, for $100 million from Arion Bank. SMB traders in Iceland, the United Kingdom and Ireland, and throughout Europe use the Icelandic Valitor. Rapyd plans to minimize FX fees, simplify omnichannel payment integration, and expand into new areas, allowing it to tap into revenue and growth possibilities that might otherwise be unavailable.
In a funding round, Your FLOCK, a remote work software company, received $ 0.3 million from GC Angels and a private angel. The cash will be utilized to enhance the company’s technological capabilities as well as its staff. Your FLOCK assists employees in becoming more engaged and businesses in being more productive and lucrative.
Santa Monica-based Frame, a startup providing an all-in-one portal for therapists and clients to create a multifaceted approach to mental wellness and therapy, has raised $3M in seed round funding from Maven Ventures, with participation from Sugar Capital, Struck Capital, Alpha Edison and January Ventures, reports state.
TeamApt has raised an undisclosed Series B funding from Novastar Ventures. Being a fintech company serving the financially underserved market in Nigeria, the company looks to expand its services beyond Nigeria, into Africa’s other markets.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has acquired Zerto in a $374 million all-cash deal, expected to close by the end of HPE’s fourth quarter. The move is aimed at expanding HPE GreenLake cloud services.
Hypersonix, an enterprise AI platform for commerce, has announced that it has raised $35 million at a valuation of $200 million in a Series B funding round led by B Capital Group. Other participants include Intel Capital, Firebolt Ventures, Magicus Ventures, and Gokul Rajaram, among others.
Monisnap, a remittance fintech company, has raised $11.8 million in a fresh round of funding. The funds will be used to expand the company’s global client base, quadruple its technical staff, strengthen its B2B service, and improve its mobile money product. Currently, the Monisnap platform is used by over 200,000 people to send money to developing countries through over 100,000 local partners in over 100 countries.
Codat gets $40 million in a Series B financing round led by Tiger Global. Codat intends to utilize the cash to expand in the United States, provide more data products to its API, recruit faster, and onboard more clients. Codat’s goal is to assist small businesses by allowing suppliers to interact with all software packages that SMEs use using a single standardized API.
Montreal-based Paper, a software provider of high-dosage tutoring, has announced its Series C fundraise of $100 million in a round led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP). The company said in a press release that it would use the proceeds from the fund to scale its business and increase investments in its Educational Support Systems (ESS).
Online-learning SaaS provider Articulate Global has raised $1.5 billion in a Series A funding round at a valuation of $3.75 billion. Bootstrapped since its inception, this round marks Articulate’s first-ever fundraise, led by General Atlantic with participation from Blackstone Growth (BXG) and ICONIQ Growth.
Nowports has raised $16M in Series A funding from Mouro Capital and plans to streamline its process, solidify important routes and expand its logistics and financial operations, adding value as a digital freight forwarder for Latin American Companies.
Karat Financial, a black card and financial services platform specifically tailored for digital creators has announced $26 million in funding, including $15 million in a debt financing round and $11 million in Series A. The funding round was led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from GGV Capital and SignalFire.
zip24 has recently raised $1.2M in a pre-series round to fund its expansion in tech, product and operations teams. It aspires to strengthen operations by deploying direct sales and support personnel in Dubai, UAE expand to the UK in this year’s second half.
Barracuda Networks has signed a definitive agreement to acquire SKOUT Cybersecurity. With the close of the deal (in July), Barracuda would enter the extended detection and response (XDR) platform and offer proactive real-time continuous security monitoring and response services.
Desana, a hybrid workplace platform, raised $4M in a seed round headed by PropTech1 Ventures and Techstart Ventures. The firm plans to expand quickly with additional investment due to the high demand for its hybrid workplace solution.
In a seed round led by AdvantEdge Founders, TyrePlex, an aftermarket tyre B2B eCommerce firm, earned an undisclosed sum. TyrePlex has over 1,700 dealers onboarded over 600+ locations and is quickly expanding at a rate of 30% month over month.
A venture capital firm, Inflexor Ventures, has announced the closure of its second fund, which is valued at about USD 80.2 million. The tech fund will primarily invest in B2B/enterprise companies that use deeptech, technical IP, and innovation. The fund would invest in pre-Series A through Series B rounds, with initial investments ranging from $ 0.6 million to $ 2.6 million and follow-on rounds dependent on the performance of portfolio companies and their fundraising stage.
Detect Technologies, a company specializing in industrial AI, has raised $12 million in a round led by Accel Partners and Elevation Capital. According to the company’s statement, the money will be used to enhance worldwide industrial efficiency and extend the company’s position as a leader in industrial digitalization. The firm provides a wide range of AI and IoT solutions for the industrial sector.
BMW i Ventures announce their second sustainability-focused fund for early to mid-stage startups in the industries of transportation, manufacturing, supply chain and others. Previously, investments of the VC firm’s first fund, BMW i Ventures Fund 1, had helped companies in their journey to public.
ServiceTitan, a software company built to accelerate the home and commercial service industries, has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Aspire Software, a landscaping business management software provider. Alongside the acquisition, the company announced its $200 million Series G funding from Thoma Bravo at a valuation of $9.5 billion. This acquisition marks ServiceTitan’s second investment in the last twelve months (previously ServicePro) and its largest to date.
Slack launches Huddles, a feature to encourage casual conversations that get missed out due to remote working, and new video sharing and recording capabilities to help users share their thoughts ahead of a scheduled meeting, as per their convenience. These features would be rolled out for paid teams.
Device42 has developed a new solution that analyses your infrastructure and provides recommendations for cost-effective cloud migration. The program uses machine learning to assist in the discovery of the optimum configuration. Device42 is a software business founded in 2012 that specializes in hybrid IT discovery and application dependency mapping.
Ably, a synchronized digital experience platform provider has announced that it has raised $70 million in a Series B funding round led by Insight Partners and Dawn Capital LLP. Other participants include Digital Horizon, Forward Partners, and MMC Ventures, Triple Point. The new funds will help Ably continue developing and innovating its platform, giving businesses a comprehensive solution for offloading the rising complexity of real-time data synchronization at scale for distributed applications, devices, and hybrid cloud environments.
A pan-European venture capital firm, Nauta Capital, has announced ambitions to invest in pre-seed deeptech businesses across Europe. The specialized venture program will provide funding to pre-seed B2B deeptech businesses in order to help them develop and thrive. Nauta Funding’s new initiative, motivated by a shortage of capital available for pre-seed and pre-revenue B2B deeptech enterprises, will support 12-16 startups for the next 12 months to close the gap and propel Europe’s next generation of deeptech entrepreneurs.
Shogun has raised $67.5 million in a $575 million Series C funding round led by Insight Partners. The cash will improve the company’s two major products, Shogun Frontend and Page Builder. Frontend, Shogun’s newest offering, is a “headless” solution aimed at web designers and others who want to create more personalized experiences. It caters to the midmarket to the corporate consumers and has hundreds of clients.
ARIADNEXT, French remote identity verification, and digital identity creation company, has been bought by IDnow, a German identity verification startup. As a result of the acquisition, IDNow is now on a level with OnFido, Europe’s other major participant. IDnow will keep ARIADNEXT’s offices in Rennes, Paris, Madrid, Bucharest, Iasi, Warsaw, and its approximately 125 employees.
Mandolin, a concert live stream platform to help artists, venues, and fans connect through live music, has raised $12 million in its Series A fundraise in an oversubscribed round co-led by 645 Ventures and Foundry Group. Existing investors, High Alpha and TIME Ventures, participated in the round.
Pietra, a platform providing Creators business-building tools, has announced its Series A fundraise of $15 million in a round led by Founders Fund with participation from its existing investor, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), TQ Ventures, Abstract Ventures and other strategic investors.
Nodes & Links, a startup offering AI and cloud tools for engineering projects to be delivered on time and budget, has announced its Series A fundraise of €9.3 million ($11 million roughly). The round was led by urban sustainability-focused fund 2150, alongside Zigg Capital and Westerly Winds.
FloLive, an IoT company, has raised an additional $15.5 million in a Series B investment round led by Intel Capital. The additional money will be used to improve the company’s service and invest in and develop the company’s technology stack and upgrade its network to 5G. Rather than creating new infrastructure, FloLive’s approach is to stitch together networks from several places and run them as a single network.
Gusto, a unicorn company developing web-based payroll solutions for small and medium-sized businesses, has announced the launch of its new product, Gusto Embedded Payroll (GEP), which facilitates software developers to embed and customize payroll directly into their software.
Noname Security, an enterprise API security business, raised $60M in a Series B funding round headed by Insight Partners. The company offers a security platform that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to assist businesses in monitoring and securing both managed and uncontrolled APIs. Since its launch, the firm has recruited 40 technical, reseller, and channel partners in six months.
Hyperexponential (hx), a mathematical software provider for the insurance sector, raised $18 million in a funding round headed by Highland Europe. According to the company, actuaries, data scientists, and underwriters may use Hx’s Renew SaaS platform to create, deploy, and update insurance pricing models more quickly.
Communications platform Zoom has announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire real-time machine translations (MT) solutions developer Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions – Kites. The terms of the transactions remain undisclosed.
Cloud-based multi-channel commerce platform Shopify has brought down app store commission rates to zero for developers making their first $1M in revenue. Commission rates are cut for other developers (earning over $1M/year) as well, from 20 to 15 percent. This new revenue share model is extended to Theme Store developers as well.
Sequoia Capital India has welcomed 23 startups for the fifth cohort of Surge, its scale-up accelerator program for Indian and Southeast Asian startups. Surge 05, as the VC firm calls it, comprises 40 percent of SaaS and DevTools companies that have been building products for global markets ever since their inception.
Visier, a cloud-based analytics platform, has secured $125 million in a Series E investment round, valuing the company at $1 billion and has turned unicorn. Visier is a Canadian company that has created a big-data engine that can consume and analyze data from various HR and related apps. It offers a big-data engine it developed that can connect to any of those apps, absorb the data they contain, and match it up to provide current-state representations and increasingly predictive insights.
Peak, a venture capital firm located in Amsterdam, has joined the German market. It has announced the launch of its fourth €66 million fund (approx. USD 78.5M). Peak’s initial investments vary from €250K (about USD 0.2 million) to €4 million (approx. USD 4.7 million ). A large portion of the VC’s new fund has been set aside for follow-on rounds, which will assist portfolio entrepreneurs from pre-seed to Series B and beyond.
Nansen, a blockchain analytics platform, has raised $12M in Series A funding from a16z. The company was launched in 2020 and has shared details of its revenue figures, team size alongside the announcement. The proceeds from this funding would be used to build its data platform, enhance user experience, among others.
JFrog, a DevOps platform, paid $300 million for Vdoo. The purchase will be made using a mix of cash and stock. Vdoo will remain a distinct SaaS offering for the time being, according to JFrog. New updates will aid in support of the JFrog platform, and by 2022, the two businesses will have a completely integrated solution.
Forum Brands, a platform for growing and acquiring consumer brands, has announced its raise of $27 million equity funding in a round led by Norwest Venture Partners. Existing investors NFX and Concrete Rose participated in the financing round.
ShipBob, a global logistics company, has raised $200 million in a Series E funding round, making it a unicorn. The company then provides its clients with a merchant application that allows them to keep track of inventory and connect with warehouses to choose which goods to pick and ship to fulfill orders. It works with several shipping companies to deliver products to customers. It claims to work with over 40 firms, including Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix, Square, and Squarespace.
The assets of edX have been acquired by 2U, Inc., a global leader in education technology. Through one of the most comprehensive free-to-degree online education systems, 2U and edX will reach over 50 million learners worldwide. Combining 2U’s industry-leading marketing capabilities and edX.org’s burgeoning marketplace, which saw over 120 million visitors in 2020, is expected to provide a scalable and sustainable marketing advantage.
Virti, an interactive and immersive training platform, has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by IQ Capital with participation from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Descenture Capital, reports indicate. Virti, founded in 2018, provides a platform to help companies train their employees via virtual training modules and simulations. With Virti, companies could build their own training modules and simulations without the need for coding and use AI, natural language processing to analyze a user’s performance and provide feedback. In 2020, it was included on TIME magazine’s annual best innovation list.
GitHub and Open AI have collaborated to launch GitHub Copilot, which leverages artificial intelligence to help one write code efficiently, reports state. The product is currently available for limited technical preview, available on its website.
San Francisco-based co-op, announced its close of seed funding round, where it raised $5.8 million led by Sugar Capital. Shopify, Bessemer Venture Partners, Indicator Ventures and RiverPark Ventures participated in the round.
Gympass, the $2.2 billion corporate health unicorn, has received $220 million in a Series E investment. Gympass exclusively works with companies who pay a one-time charge for a platform (app) that lets their employees pick from a choice of wellness programs.
10club, an Indian startup similar to Thrasio, has raised $40 million in a seed funding round. The round was led by Fireside Ventures and an unnamed investor. In India, 10club is one of a few dozen companies aiming to duplicate what is known as the Thrasio-model. Several companies, like Thrasio, are attempting to buy brands that offer midrange to high-end items in markets with little competition.
In a seed round, Jetstream, an African supply chain network, received $3M. Jetstream was founded by Miishe Addy and Solomon Torgbor to monitor and regulate their own cross-border supply chains. Jetstream’s business model is straightforward. It charges for all of its services, including freight, clearing, and banking. Customs clearance is charged at a set rate that changes depending on the tax type and location of the shipment.
Acceleprise has officially rebranded itself as Forum Ventures, a name more fitting to its aspirations and activities, it states. Simultaneously, it has announced the launch of its $13.2M seed and $17.2M fourth fund for pre-seed B2B SaaS startups respectively.
Ramco Systems’ software would be used by Aden Ports Development Company. Its ERP software for APDC’s container terminal aims to reduce the manual tasks involved in its HR and finance operations via digitization. The software comes with a set of new, upgraded features and technologies.
Wonderflow, an AI-based customer feedback data startup, has announced that it has raised €16.5 million (approx. USD 19.6 million) in a Series B funding round led by Klass Capital. Other participants include P101, ITALIA 500, and Dutch top manager Jan Bennink.
Los Angeles-based Arrows, a software provider helping companies onboard customers, has announced its raise of $2.75 million seed funding from Google’s AI-focused venture fund, Gradient Ventures, and 47 other angel investors. The company has listed the investors on its website.
Boundless, a remote employment platform, has raised €2.5 million (USD 2.9 million) in a seed funding round led by Ada Ventures and FYRFLY. This platform enables businesses to compliantly hire people globally while providing their employees with perks and opportunities in the nation where they work.
WiteSand, a startup that aims to take enterprise networking to cloud, has emerged from stealth mode, announcing its raise of $12.5 million in seed funding to date from institutions and angels. WiteSand, founded in 2019, consolidates on-premise networking tools into a unified cloud-delivered service and enables companies to monitor, secure and manage their enterprise network infrastructure. In a statement to the press, WiteSand enunciated the complications that medium to large enterprises face in networking due to employee mobility and hybrid work environments. Managing networking solutions on-premise is also tedious and time-consuming, it added.
San Francisco-based Side, a real estate technology company, helping independent brokerages turn into brands and business, has announced an additional $50 million fundraise to its $150 million Series D funding that it raised in March 2021. The additional funding values the company at $2.5 billion, which is more than a two-fold increase from its $1 billion valuation attained during Series D.
Elo7, a Brazilian online marketplace, will be acquired by Etsy, an American eCommerce company, for $217 million. Elo7, one of Latin America’s most popular e-commerce sites, would provide Etsy a far wider market presence, with 1.9 million active customers, 56,000 active merchants, and around 8 million items for sale. With its existing management team located in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Elo7 will continue to function independently.
Dell has released Omnia, an open-source software suite aimed at making AI and compute-intensive job deployment and administration easier. The program consists of an Ansible playbook for deploying convergent workloads with Slurm and containers and library frameworks, services, and apps. Omnia may utilize Slurm or Kubernetes to build workload management clusters, and it attempts to reuse existing projects rather than starting from scratch.
Camions Logistics Solutions Private Limited (“GoBOLT“), a tech-based logistics startup, has announced that it has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Paragon Partners Growth Fund II and existing investor Aavishkaar Capital. Small supplementary components, as well as debt lines from private banks, are included in the round.
Mastercard has made a strategic equity investment in Instamojo, payments, and online commerce platform. Sampad Swain, Akash Gehani, and Aditya Sengupta established Instamojo as a small business payment processor in 2012. According to the two firms, the investment would benefit MSMEs as well as gig economy workers such as small food and beverage operators, electricians, tutors, and others.
Fleet management solutions provider LocoNav has announced its Series B fundraise of $37 million, led by Quiet Capital, Anthemis Group and Sequoia Capital India, reports state. The proceeds from the fund would be used for expanding into the US and other emerging markets, building partnerships, and making strategic acquisitions.
Tapcart, a SaaS platform enabling e-commerce merchants to launch and manage mobile apps for their brands, has announced its Series B fundraise of $50 million in a round led by Left Lane Capital. Shopify, SignalFire, Greycroft, Act One Ventures and Amplify LA, participated in the round. The company had raised $10 million in Series A funding led by SignalFire last year. With the current funding, the total amount raised by Tapcart crosses $65 million, as per Crunchbase.
LegalPay, a tech-based litigation platform, has raised an undisclosed sum of money with Ashwini Kakkar, the former CEO of Thomas Cook. With the extra capital, the company plans to expand its product and service offerings and has entered into a new kind of financing known as Interim Financing under the IBC, 2016.
Mercuryo, a global fintech company, has raised $7.5 million in a Series A round led by Target Global. The London-based company describes itself as a “crypto infrastructure company.” Its “digital asset payment gateway” aims to make blockchain useful for businesses. Mercuryo began onboarding clients in January 2019 and has had tremendous development since then, with ARR surpassing $50 million in April.
IBM, at the Mobile World Congress 2021, has announced a new hybrid cloud AI-powered automation tools for communications service providers (CSPs) to help them deliver on the promise of 5G, which includes zero-touch operations, lower costs and faster delivery of innovative services to clients. CSPs can leverage AI-powered automation to swiftly set up and manage networks in various contexts with IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation, which is designed to scale new services in days rather than months.
The migration from the offline world to the virtual business model has been immense. Many companies were faced with problems to which there were no simple solutions. According to a recent study from Accenture, 81 percent of supply chain leaders believe the pandemic has been their organization’s toughest stress test, and they’re dealing with technology change at a record pace and scale. Many supply chain operations are still restricted by old legacy technology, requiring a patchwork of digital and non-digital systems to function. Businesses should increase cloud spending to support digital supply chains and foster ecosystem partnerships.
Windows 11 is Microsoft’s first significant operating system (OS) upgrade since 2015. By the end of the year, the update will be available. Microsoft’s latest approach contrasts sharply with Apple’s “walled garden” policy, in which the iPhone maker restricts customers to download apps via the App Store. In addition, Microsoft has announced that the Windows 11 operating system would include additional tipping options for content creators, including local news sites.
Lenovo has launched an enhanced version of its SaaS-based health management tool, Lenovo Device Intelligence, in India on Thursday, reports state. The Lenovo Device Intelligence Plus, as it is called, is an enhanced extension of Lenovo’s AI-driven predictive analytics and also brings to the table, increased functionalities and proactive data insights.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced its acquisition of the top-secret message servicing app Wickr, used by government agencies, on Friday. The transactions of the deal remain undisclosed and AWS would be offering Wickr services with immediate effect for customers.
Edge Delta has announced the completion of a $15 million Series A financing round headed by Menlo Ventures. The Edge Delta team will use the new funds to expand their personnel and help new clients who have shown interest in the product. Edge Delta claims to deliver all of the features of the centralized approach by allowing organizations to examine logs, metrics, traces, and other data directly at the source.
Andreessen Horowitz has launched its Crypto Fund III, a dedicated $2.2B fund for blockchain startups in their early to late stages. The VC firm has been investing in crypto since 2013 from its dedicated crypto fund. The previous crypto fund, Crypto Fund II, had come out last year.
JW Player has raised $100M in a Series E funding round. Last month, this video software and data insights platform acquired live and on-demand video streaming provider Vualto. The proceeds from this fund would be used to accelerate its product innovation and to build its team.
Tonkean, a business operation automation startup, has announced its $50 million Series B funding, led by Accel. The company would use its proceeds to scale its hiring process across engineering and go-to-market teams and invest in its no-code orchestration platform for business operations.
Firebolt, an Israeli cloud data warehousing platform, raised $127 million in a Series B financing round. According to the company, its SQL-based solution is up to 182 times faster than existing data warehouses and is based on academic research that has yet to be applied. Its clients are already cloud-native, Big Data organizations, so it’s not trying to convert them; instead, it’s collaborating with those who are already there.
California-based env0, a self-service cloud management platform for collaborative remote-run workflow management, has announced its $17 million Series A fundraise, led by Microsoft’s Venture Fund – M12. Existing investors, Boldstart Ventures, Grove Ventures, and Crescendo Ventures, participated in the funding round. In a statement to the press, env0 stated that the funds would be used to expand its infrastructure as Code (IaC) platform, accelerate visibility, predictability and governance of cloud deployments. The funding comes amid growing demand for IaC.
San Francisco-based Sanity, a structured content platform provider, has announced a $39 million Series B funding, led by ICONIQ Growth. Lead Edge Capital and existing investors – Threshold Ventures, Heavybit Industries, Alliance Venture, and Monochrome Capital- participated in the round.
Illumio, a SaaS startup that provides automated cyberattack enforcement, has received $225 million in a Series F round headed by Thoma Bravo. The money will be used to grow the company’s field operations and network of channel partners and develop, engineer, and produce new products. Illumio’s solution is used by more than 10% of Fortune 100 companies, including Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas SA, and Salesforce, to secure their data centers, networks, and other applications.
Legatics, a legal IT firm located in London, has received a USD 4.2 million growth capital investment from Mobeus. Legatics will welcome Joe Krancki, a Mobeus investor, to its board of directors. Mr. Seale launched Legatics in 2015 to revolutionize legal transactions by allowing deal teams to collaborate and close agreements in an interactive online environment. Since its inception, Legatics has been utilized by over 1,500 organizations, with more than half of the world’s leading banking and finance law firms purchasing the software.
Unicorn India Ventures led a $500,000 seed funding round for WINDO, a social commerce startup. WINDO is an Instagram commerce software company that assists small businesses and solopreneurs leverage consumer migration to Instagram. The Bengaluru-based company wants to be a one-stop-shop for businesses, letting them handle everything from the WINDO app, including centralization.
ApnaKlub, a social commerce platform, has announced that it has raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-Series A round led by Whiteboard Capital and Blume Ventures. The Bengaluru-based business, founded in 2020 by Harvard Business School alumni Shruti and Manish Kumar. ApanKlub claims to have served 2500+ partners over 4500 pin codes in just seven months.
Classplus, a B2B educational technology firm, has secured $65 million in a Series C investment round headed by Tiger Global. Classplus, located in Noida, is a mobile-first SaaS platform that uses an app to make material distribution, payments, communication, and online assessments easier for private coaching schools and their teachers. With over 80% of users originating from Tier-II India, the firm claims that educators’ total profitability rises by 2x to 3x after six months of joining the network.
Gotrade, a company that aims to remove cost barriers involved in investing in US stocks, has come out of its stealth mode, raising $7 million in a seed round fund led by LocalGlobe. Social Leverage, Y Combinator, Picus Capital and Raptor Group, participated in the round. Gotrade is now available to users from 150 countries.
Channext, a software-as-a-service platform connecting vendors and business partners, has raised USD 0.8 million in a seed round. Channext will use the funds received in this round to extend its European footprint in countries such as Italy, the Nordics, and Spain. Despite the difficulties of starting a business during a pandemic, he continued, their company has expanded significantly in the last year.
Pathfndr.io, a no-code SaaS startup, has raised an undisclosed amount in pre-Series A round led by Arali Ventures. Other participants include SEA Fund, Wayfare Ventures, KPB Family Trust, Acsys Investments, and Capital A, JAZFund LLC, Shravan Gupta, and founders of unicorns Freshworks and Chargebee. Pathfinder.io is the operating name of Bengaluru-based MeTripping Technologies Pvt Ltd. The firm said in a statement that the additional money would be used to continue investing in product innovation at scale and expand its worldwide sales force.
Tomi.ai, an AI-powered platform optimizing digital ads, has announced its seed fundraise of $1 million from Begin Capital and Phystech Leadership Fund. Konstantin Bayandin, founder and CEO of Tomi.ai, on his LinkedIn handle, announced the funding and thanked the investors. According to reports, Mr. Bayndin would use the proceeds from the fund to expand the company’s platform
Hyderabad-based BigLeap has raised ₹5 crores ($0.67 million) in a debt fund from Anup Kumar Yama, a roller skater athlete from India and the CEO of Yama Skating Academy. Reports state that the funding was raised for the startup’s initiative, BigLeap.AI, a stealth-mode HR product aimed at simplifying the job search experience. According to the Times of India, The BigLeap.AI app is expected to be rolled out in September this year and would help job seekers to tap into active vacant jobs in different sectors.
New York-based Batch has raised $5 million in a seed round funding co-led by Coatue Seven Seven Six as per reports. The round witnessed participation from the Weekend Fund, Shrug Capital, and the Chainsmokers, among others. The startup provides QR codes to help retailers selling to customers, make re-ordering of their products fast and simple. Currently, the startup uses Apple’s App Clip technology assisting the users in loading a small part of the app on demand but plans to make it work on both iOS and Android eventually.
Acryl Data has come out of stealth mode, raising $9 million in a seed round led by 8VC, with LinkedIn and Insight Partners’ participation to help companies use their tools for their big data requirements.
Golden Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, has raised its fourth fund of $100M. The funds will be utilized to invest in new companies and follow-on investments in businesses outside of Golden Ventures’ portfolio. At this time, the fund’s primary goal is to profit from the growing trend of increased opportunity in the Canadian environment.
Mitiga, a cloud security startup, has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by DNX, ClearSky Security, and Atlantic Bridge. According to the Israeli firm, the money will be used to “continue to disrupt how incident preparation and response is delivered,” as well as to “significantly” increase its cybersecurity, engineering, sales, and marketing employees.
Pequity, a compensation software builder for equitable pay, has raised $19 million in a Series A funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners. Other participants include Scribble Ventures, First Round Capital, and Designer Fund. The funds will be used to invest in products as well as hiring. The firm now has 20 employees on its payroll and plans to double that number by the end of the year, after favorable market feedback.
Frumtak Ventures has launched its third fund, Frumtak III, to invest in post-seed and Series A startups. The $57M fund would have a ticket size ranging from one to five million dollars for the companies it would invest in. The VC firm targets early-stage companies having a high growth potential.
Embark Trucks Inc. and Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp II have jointly announced that both the companies will be entering a definitive business combination agreement that will make Embark Trucks go public. This deal will give Embark Trucks a market value of $5.2 billion. Embark Trucks is an autonomous software technology developer for the trucking industry.
Aircall, a cloud-based call center software firm with a $1.1 billion value, has raised $120 million in a Series D round, making it a unicorn. The business plans to hold an enormous technology stack and collaborate with large telecom companies to use their networks.
Vercel, a platform for creating, evaluating, and deploying Jamstack sites, has received $102 million in a Series C round with a valuation of $1.1 billion, making it a unicorn. Vercel is the open-source Next.js React framework’s creator. Traffic to all of the company’s websites and applications has tripled since October 2020, indicating significant growth. Carhartt, Github, IBM, McDonald’s, and Uber are among Vercel’s clients.
PlanetScale, the pioneer of Vitess, a database clustering system for MySQL, has announced its Series B fundraise of $30 million, led by Insight Partners. Andreessen Horowitz and SignalFire participated in the round.
Forto, a provider of digital logistics technology, digitized freight forwarding supply chain solutions, has turned a unicorn, raising $240 million in a Series C round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The company’s valuation now stands at $1.2 billion.
In a move to unify developer experiences, providing intelligent applications, Amazon Web Services, and Salesforce have announced the expansion of their strategic partnership. The move would facilitate customers to use Salesforce and AWS capabilities in tandem to deploy robust and new business applications accelerating digital transformation quickly.
Drata, a compliance and security automation company, has announced its Series A fundraise of $25 million in a round led by GGV Capital. Angel and other investors – SVCI (Silicon Valley CISO Investments), Okta Ventures, Basis Set Ventures- participated in the funding round.
Rocketlane, a B2B SaaS, received $3 million in initial investment from Matrix Partners India and Nexus Venture Partners. According to a senior corporate executive, the cash will be used to grow the company and hire more employees. Srikrishnan Ganesan, Vignesh Girishankar, and Deepak Bala established Rocketlane in 2020 as a purpose-built unified workplace for interacting with clients on onboarding efforts.
Boston’s Transmit Security, which provides workforces risk management and passwordless identity solutions, has announced its Series A fundraise of $543 million, led by Insight Partners and General Atlantic. Additional investors include Cyberstarts, Geodesic, SYN Ventures, Vintage, and Artisanal Ventures. The company’s pre-investment valuation was $2.2B, and it looks to work towards passwordless protection and identity risk management.
Oyster, a software HR platform to address hiring problems in companies, announced its Series B fundraise of $50M, led by Stripes. The funding comes on the heels of its Series A funding, which it raised in February this year from San Mateo-based Emergence Capital.
Chicago-based G2, a marketplace for business organizations to buy, research and manage their software, has attained unicorn status, raising $157M in a Series D funding round led by Permira and bags the unicorn tag. The round has valued the startup at $1.1 Billion.
Insilico Medicine, an AI-based platform for medication discovery and research, has raised $255 million in a Series C round. It is a Hong Kong-based company founded in 2014 to discover novel drug targets for currently untreatable illnesses. In 2020, the firm identified a novel therapeutic target for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a disease in which the tiny air sacs in the lungs scar and make breathing difficult.
Splunk, a company that develops operational intelligence software, has secured $1 billion in funding from private equity firm Silver Lake. Silverlake’s chair and managing partner, Ken Hao, will join the Splunk board of directors. The San Francisco-based company has introduced Splunk Security Cloud. Splunk also announced the completion of its acquisition of TruStar, a developer of security software.
Mollie, a unicorn payments service provider in Europe, has announced its Series C fundraise of €665 million ($800 million) in a round led by Blackstone’s growth equity investing business- Blackstone Growth (BXG). The company revealed that its valuation has touched €5.5 billion ($6.5 billion) post this round, making it one of the top five most valued privately held fintech companies in Europe.
Merlyn Mind, an AI assistant for teachers, has received $29 million as initial funding from edtech investor Learn Capital and other undisclosed investors. With this announcement, Merlyn Mind has come out of stealth. It spent nearly three years developing its first version and, more recently, piloting the service in more than 50 classes across more than 20 schools.
Zeller, a fintech company based in Melbourne that serves SMBs, has announced that it has raised AUD 50 million at an AUD 400 million valuation. The round was led by Spark Capital. Other participants include Square Peg, Apex Capital Partners, and Addition. The funds will be used to expand Zeller’s research and engineering centre, including hiring 18 new engineering positions to help the company achieve its goal of being a fully regulated business bank.
Memory.ai, a company that creates AI-based applications, has received $14 million in a round headed by Melesio and Sanden. The money will be utilized to develop new apps that will aid individuals in becoming more productive. Dewo and Glue are two applications that are in the works. Both of these apps will be available in the second half of this year.
Toronto-based Joyride, offering solutions for micromobility operators, has announced that it has raised an oversubscribed amount, $3.7M as demand and popularity for e-scooters, bikes and mopeds go up. Its software platform enables businesses to launch, manage and scale their scooter-sharing and bike-sharing businesses all in one place. Joyride stated that the funding would enable it to take its micromobility software to the next level, to thousands of new markets
London-based Ezbob, a provider of customer acquisition technology for financial services, has launched its new modular SaaS platform, Ezbob Express, to address the key challenges in the sector. In its statement to the press, Ezbob elucidated the three important features that Ezbob Express provides- helping financial service providers fill gaps in their digital transformation journeys, assist them in taking precise, complex credit and risk decisions, and enabling the furtherance of embedded finance growth.
Via, a Bay Area-based SaaS startup powering mobile commerce for brands and retailers, has raised its Series A investment worth $15 million from the venture firm Footwork. The company also announced its Peterson Ventures-led seed round investment (undisclosed earlier) and stated that its total fund raised in the last year had crossed $20 million.
DataRails, a financial solutions provider for SMEs, has raised $25 million additional funds in its Series A funding round. With the round, the company closed its Series A, which raised $18.5 million in April. Vintage Investment Partners joins Zeev Ventures, Vertex Ventures Israel, and Innovation Endeavors in the round. The new funding will continue developing a platform that allows small businesses to utilize Excel to perform financial planning and analytics in the same way that bigger companies do. The total amount raised through Series A is $43.5 million.
GrowSari, a company that digitizes sari-sari businesses, has secured an unknown amount in a Series B round of funding. The additional financing will expand the company’s user base to 300,000 new stores in the Philippines. GrowSari was founded in 2016 and claims to have over 50,000 locations in more than 100 municipalities. GrowSari will be a new addition to Asia’s B2B platforms, focusing on servicing micro and small businesses.
Hong Kong-based one-stop crypto finance provider, Amber Group, has turned a unicorn, raising $100 million in Series B funding from the Chinese investment firm, China Renaissance. The round valued the startup at $1 billion, a ten-fold increase from the previously achieved value.
Bengaluru-based multilingual conversational enterprise AI platform, Saarthi.ai, has raised an undisclosed amount from Lead Angels Network in a seed round investment recently, reports on the fundraising said. Its previous investments were an angel round in May 2020 and non-equity assistance in 2019.
Foundries.io, a cloud development and deployment solutions provider for secure IoT and Edge devices, has announced that it has raised $8 million in a Series A funding round led by IQ Capital. Other participants include Crane Venture Partners and Backed VC. The funds will go toward Foundries.io’s development plans, which include talent recruiting and marketing, to provide this platform to more creative firms worldwide.
CYPHER LEARNING, a provider of learning management systems (LMS) for enterprises and educational institutions, has announced that it has raised $40 million in growth equity round from Invictus Growth Partners. The funds will be used to boost sales, marketing, and development of the company’s cutting-edge learning platform and increase profitability. This round marks the company’s first funding from an external source.
Meltwater, a SaaS provider of media intelligence and social listening tools, has announced its acquisition of business information company, Owler, in a $24.5M million cash and equity deal. This agreement is reported to be a part of Meltwater’s growth strategy, involving investments and acquisitions in the social media segment.
Samaaro, an innovative virtual event platform provider, has raised $125,000 in an angel funding round. The participants include Richa Kar, Founder of Zivame; Naman Gupta, AVP of Swiggy; and Kedar Gavane, Senior VP of Comscore; and other senior executives from Google, Flipkart, Swiggy, Adda52, and High Radius.The funds will be used to scale the product, increase the team through key hires, and expand the company’s market reach.
MSMEx, an edtech company for small businesses, has received $1 million in a pre-Series A investment. The money will be used to develop new smart technologies for the edtech business, including a deep learning-based recommender system and an intelligent LIVE chat system. MSMEx connects small business owners with industry experts.
Alpine Investors a private equity firm, has announced its exit as an investor in Cleo Communications a provider of integration solutions, after the latter announced its strategic investment from H.I.G Capital last week.
Neo4j, a provider of graph database platform for organizations, has announced its raise of $325 million in a Series F round led by Eurazeo, at a valuation of $2 billion. According to the company, this transaction represents the largest investment in any private database firm.
KeepTruckin, a unicorn company helping trucking companies in fleet management to increase their productivity, safety, and efficiency, has netted $190M in Series E funding. This round raises its valuation from a previously achieved billion to $2.3B. The proceeds will be used to scale its engineering team.
Bulgarian-based Vitosha Venture Partners has launched its €26 million ($30 million) fund to invest in about 100 early to growth-stage companies based in or related to Bulgaria, as reports. The amount would range from low to up to a million.
Nylas, a communications API (Application Programming Interface) platform, has raised $120M in a Series C funding round led by Tiger Global Management. The new funds will be used to continue extending the types of APIs it offers, emphasizing AI and associated technologies to bring more automation into workflows rather than merely productivity apps.
Beamery, a digital recruitment service, has raised $138 million in a Series C funding round led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board’s Teachers’ Innovation Platform (TIP). Other participants include strategic investors who are also users of Beamery: M12, Workday Ventures, Accenture Ventures, EQT Ventures, and Index Ventures.
Claroty, an industrial cybersecurity startup, has raised $140M in a Series D funding round co-led by Bessemer and 40 North. The company plans to expand into new areas such as transportation and government-owned businesses and hire more people globally. According to its CEO, the company is planning to go public.
Video chat startup Twine has announced its raise of $3.3M in venture funding from Moment Ventures. This takes its total seed funding raised to $4.7M. Other investors- Coelius Capital, AltaIR Capital, AltaClub, Mentors Fund, Rosecliff Ventures, and Bloom Venture Partners- had participated in the funding round.
Unit raises $52 million in a Series B funding round led by Accel. Unit is a platform developer that lets third-party companies incorporate financial services into their operations. With this round, its total funding raised since its inception goes up to nearly $70 million.
Internxt, a decentralized cloud storage service, has raised $1 million in a seed round funding co-led by Angels Capital, a European VC fund, and Miami-based The Venture City. A token sale has previously raised about half a million dollars to help fund early development. The funds will go into the company’s next phase of expansion, its month-to-month growth rate is 30%, and it says it’s certain it can at least maintain that, which will include hiring a large number of people to speed up product development.
Akur8, a SaaS insurtech platform, has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round led by an undisclosed investor. This makes the total amount of money raised to $42 million. Actuaries and pricing teams use Akur8 to make faster insurance pricing decisions.
Eqtble, a platform that provides HR teams with detailed analytics, has raised $2.7 million in its seed round funding from Initialized Capital. SB Opportunity Fund, RS Ventures, and other venture capital firms and angel investors, participated in the funding round.
Transform, a centralized metrics store helping data analysts deliver accurate, timely, confident, and fast insights has announced its raise of $24.5M, which includes a $20M in Series A and $4.5M in seed funding. Both fundings were led by Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Fathom Capital and Work-Life Ventures participated in the round.
BrowserStack, a software testing platform, has announced its Series B fundraise of $200 million from BOND, at a valuation of $4 billion, making it the highest for any Indian SaaS unicorn. Insight Partners and existing investor Accel participated in the funding. The Series B fundraising makes BrowserStack India’s second SaaS unicorn this year, after Chargebee, which attained the tag in April. In its press release, BrowserStack stated that the funding would be used to support its acquisitions, expand its product offerings, and scale growth.
Miami-based Novo, a digital banking platform for small businesses, has raised $40.7 million in a Valar Ventures-led Series A funding round. Other investors – Crosslink Capital, Rainfall Ventures, Red Sea Ventures, and BoxGroup – participated in the funding round, the company said in its press release. The company stated that it would use the proceeds from the investment to introduce new capabilities for assisting small businesses save time and money by optimizing their cash flow.
Tel Aviv-based Bringg, a cloud platform that helps retailers and logistics providers in last-mile delivery operations, has announced its Series E fundraise worth $100 million, led by Insight Partners at a valuation of $1 billion. The Series E fundraising grants it the unicorn status, making it the first company in last-mile delivery and fulfillment cloud technology to attain the status, its press release said.
Vianai Systems, an AI startup, has announced that it has raised $140 million in a Series B funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The Palo Alto-headquartered startup said that many industry stalwarts participated in this round. The new round takes the total to at least $190 million.
20 minute VC podcaster Harry Stebbings has raised funding for 20VC. The current raise represents a 15-fold increase over the $8.3 million initial funds, which was launched less than a year ago. Mr. Stebbings’ early-stage fund, 20VC Early, will invest $250,000 to $750,000, while his growth-stage fund, 20VC Explorer, will invest $1 million to $5 million.
DuckDuckGo, an online privacy startup, has claimed a $100M revenue increase. This growth is attributed to secondary investment from existing and new investors. In the last year, its apps have been downloaded over 50 million times. The company intends to extend its operations throughout Europe and other parts of the world.
Copenhagen-based Templafy, a B2B business document creation SaaS platform, has raised $60 million in its Series D funding round led by Blue Cloud Ventures. Existing investors – Insight Partners, Seed Capital, Dawn Capital, and Damgaard Company – had participated in the round, reports state.
Gloat, a talent marketplace platform helping enterprises worldwide harness talent, has announced its Series C fundraise worth $57 million, led by Accel. Existing investors – Eight Roads Ventures, Intel Capital, Magma Venture Partners, and PICO Partners-participated in the funding round.
Trigo, a retail checkout system developer, has raised $10M (the exact amount is undisclosed). Its total funding has crossed $100M with this funding, and it looks to partner with Germany’s REWE Group to help them set up a ‘grab and go’ shopping experience for its new store in Cologne.
Brella, a hybrid event platform, has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Connected Capital. The platform, previously utilized as an offline networking tool, shifted from live events to a virtual event platform once the pandemic struck.
Introhive, AI-powered sales, and revenue acceleration platform, has raised $100 million in a Series C funding round led by PSG, a growth equity firm. Other investors include Mavan Capital Partners, The Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), and Evergreen Capital.
Meron Capital, an early-stage VC fund, has announced its second fund of $50 million. The fund will invest in Israeli companies developing software-based solutions for enterprise, cybersecurity, digital health, finance, DevOps, and other areas. Ten firms have received further funding, with Immunai, Solugen, and Armory alone revealing total investments of more than $300 million so far.
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has officially launched a new website, an a16z subdomain, for publications called Future. The publication will initially focus on themes relevant to the firm’s investment sectors. Still, it will grow over time with the help of a mix of their employees, paid writers, and industry insiders such as founders, professors, and entrepreneurs.
Flexmoney, a full-lifecycle digital credit network platform for lenders and merchants, has raised $4.8 million in a Series A funding round led by Pravega Ventures. Other participants include Z5 Capital and other marquee investors. The fund will be used to expand the Mumbai-based startup’s credit network reach to include many more lenders and merchants and introduce several new products and solidify its position as India’s premier digital credit and BNPL infrastructure, the company said.
Crate.io, a database platform developer, has received an extra $10M in financing. According to the firm, it has raised around $31M in total funding. CrateDB Edge extends the capability of CrateDB Cloud to clients’ remote and offline locations. CrateDB is available in the cloud, at the edge, and on-premise, giving Crate.io complete flexibility in digital transformation.
Iterable, a cross-channel customer experience platform, has secured $200 million in a Series E investment round. Glynn Capital, Silver Lake, Adams Street, and Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners are among the participants. Post-money, the firm is valued at $2 billion. Big data analytics are used in Iterable’s solutions to assess user behavior and enhance engagement time, channel, and frequency.
OCR Labs, an Australian digital id verification company, has raised $15M (€12.5 million) in Series A funding led by Oyak Group amid growing demand for digital id verification. Reports state that the ID verification market is expected to be worth $15.8 billion by 2025. OCR Labs will use the proceeds in expansion.
Multi-channel commerce platform Shopify has announced that it will extend its one-click checkout product, Shop Pay, to businesses and other non-Shopify merchants selling on Facebook, Instagram and Google. This marks the first time that a Shopify product is made available to non-Shopify users.
10x Future Technologies, a London-based digital banking platform helping financial providers transform the way they operate, has raised $187 million in a Series C round co-led by BlackRock and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), reports state.
Uberall, a company that helps enterprise resellers to deliver memorable ‘Near Me’ (location-based search) brand and marketing SaaS solutions, has announced its raise of $115 million in funding led by Bregal Milestone. Alongside its fundraising, Uberall, as a part of its growth strategy, has also announced its acquisition of MomentFeed, a provider of proximity search operations in North America.
Duda, a responsive website builder for digital marketing agencies, hosting companies, and SaaS companies, has announced its %50 million Series D funding led by Claridge IL and its existing investors- Susquehanna Growth Equity and Vintage Investment Partners. The company stated that this is its largest-ever fund raised, taking the total amount to over $100 million.
San Jose-based Elisity, which provides identity and behavior-based enterprise security, has announced the close of its Series A funding, where it raised $26 million from Two Bear Capital and AllegisCyber Capital. Previous investor Atlantic Bridge participated in the round.
Bengaluru-based Apna. a professional networking platform working towards solving India’s unemployment at the grassroots level, has raised $70 million in a Series B funding round co-led by Insight Partners and Tiger Global, reports state. Apna’s valuation post the funding stands at $570 million.
Upflow, a French startup, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round. The business wants to assist you in pursuing late payments. Other participants include 9yards Capital, existing investor eFounders, N26 co-founder Maximilian Tayenthal, auxmoney co-founder and CEO Raffael Johnen, Uber SVP of Delivery Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty. The firm intends to expand to the United States as a result of the fundraising round.
Macrometa, an edge computing startup, has announced that it has raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Pelion Venture Partners. Other participants include DNX Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), Partech Partners, Shasta Ventures, Fusion Fund, and Sway Ventures.
Cord, a startup automating annotation processes for computer vision, has announced that it has raised $4.5 million in a CRV-led seed round. As the firm prepares to hire more staff, the funds will be used to grow Cord’s client base, and platform.
Dropshop, a platform for FMCG distribution, has secured Rs. 9.3 crore in a pre-Series A investment round headed by Inflection Point Ventures (IPV). The Bengaluru-based company is a full-stack platform that enables FMCG companies to digitize last-mile distribution, sales, logistics, and credit to retailers. The funds will be utilized to develop the product and expand the company’s operations.
Jumbotail, a food, and grocery retail platform and B2B marketplace, has secured Rs. 35 crore ($4.8 million) in a loan round from Alteria Capital. The money will be utilized to expand the business across the country. Ashish Jhina and S Karthik Venkateswaran, Stanford MBA classmates, started the company. The company claims that its new retail technology turns kiranas into modern omnichannel convenience food outlets under the J24 brand in as little as 24-48 hours.
SimpliContract, an AI and SaaS-based contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform, has raised $1.8 million in a seed round funding led by Kalaari Capital. Other participants include Picus Capital, Arka Venture Labs, and Digital Sparrow Capital.This fund will support the startup’s engineering, AI research, and marketing activities.
Enterprise AI and Machine Learning (ML) platform, Dataiku, which helps businesses turn raw data into analytics, has launched Dataiku Online, with the same features as that of its on-premise and the cloud product, but cuts down on the complexity of setup processes involved in the other two.
Automattic, the company behind content management systems like WordPress and other publishing platforms, has announced that it has acquired the private journaling app Day One. The financial details of the transactions remain undisclosed. In its blog post, Automattic stated that with this acquisition, Day One would continue to create beautifully designed and innovative experiences having features such as end-to-end encrypted cloud synchronization, rich text formatting with markdown, daily prompts, and much more. Even post the acquisition, Paul Mayne will remain the CEO.
Israel’s fraud detection startup, nSure.AI which helps digital retailers discern fraudulent and legitimate transactions, has raised $6.8M in a seed funding round led by Disruptive AI and others. Reports state that usually, detecting fraud is more difficult in the sale of non-physical goods as opposed to physical goods, which receive ample buffer time to detect and trace one. nSure.AI shall invest more in its AI and ML technology, using the proceeds
Convosight, a community creator monetization platform, has said that it has raised $9 million in a Qualgro-led Series A funding round. Other participants include existing investors IvyCap Ventures and Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, as well as Unilever Ventures and Ajay Gupta.
San Francisco-based Anrok, a startup that provides modern sales tax solutions for SaaS businesses, has announced the launch of its platform and its $4.3 million seed round fundraise from a Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures-led round.
Instadapp, a blockchain startup, has announced that it has raised $10 million in a funding round led by Standard Crypto. Other participants include DeFi Alliance, Longhash Ventures, and Yearn Founder Andre Cronje. The fund will be used to finish the startup’s move into the middleware layers for DeFi (Decentralized Finance) and support the ecosystem project built on top of the Instadapp protocol.
UK’s cybersecurity trainer Immersive Labs, which helps enterprises increase their human capabilities in cybersecurity, has netted $75M in Series C. The proceeds would be used to scale its presence in the US and for increasing its headcount, as per reports.
Global VC firm SOSV has closed its special fund, which it calls a growth-stage fund to invest in startups in their Series B and beyond stages. Using these funds, it aspires to invest up to $5M in about 20-30 startups. Also, it aims to deploy its SOSV IV select fund, which was oversubscribed in 2019, for deep-tech startups.
Info Edge India has announced that it has acquired Zwayam Digital, a recruitment management SaaS platform, for Rs 61 crore. Info Edge India operates companies like Naukri.com, Jeevansathi.com, and 99acres.com. Zwayam, through the acquisition, hopes to make the most of the ecosystem, expertise, and resources that Info Edge has to offer. According to the press release, Zwayam will have its own independent identity.
American investment firm, Tiger Global Management, which focuses on public and private companies in industries such as software consumer and fintech, is reported to be in talks with Classplus, an Indian Edtech startup, as per an Entracker report.The investment in Classplus will range between $20 million to $25 million and could potentially push Classplus’s valuation to over $200 million. It will mark the fourth investment of Tiger Global in an Indian edtech company, after BYJUS, Unacademy and Vedantu, sources told Entracker, stating that both companies have been in talks for several weeks and that the outline of the transaction has been finalized.
Kale Logistics, a logistics tech startup, has said that it has raised $5 million in a Series A funding round led by Inflexor Ventures. Existing investors also attended the funding round. The funds will be used to strengthen the company’s goods and increase its global reach. Kale Logistics’ cloud-native integrated platform and ERP solutions for all logistics stakeholders aim to reduce the challenges that come with cargo logistics processing.
HB NEXT Corporation teams up with Vacmobile, a healthcare SaaS and enterprise software solution providing digital access to the storage of vaccination and COVID-19 tests. The move shall enhance HB NEXT’s own healthcare management solution, Clear2, by simplifying and mitigating risks in assisting enterprises to tackle COVID-19
Chqbook.com is a small business marketplace that provides loans, credit cards, insurance, accounts, and incentives to small business owners, raises $1 million in a funding round from InnoVen Capital. The new funds will be utilized to enhance the company’s lending portfolio. According to the firm, Chqbook intends to raise $30 million in debt over the next two years to extend its loan book.
Talent intelligence platform provider Eightfold AI, which helps enterprises recruit the right talent, has raised $200M in Series E round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. With this round, its total funding goes over $400M, and valuation shoots up over two times since it achieved a $1B valuation and unicorn tag during its Series D funding last October.
Time is Ltd, a SaaS provider for improving workplace productivity and collaboration within teams, has raised $5.6M in a late seed funding round led by Mike Chalfen and others. Ulf Zetterberg will now join the startup as president and co-founder.
SurveyMonkey is rebranding itself as Momentive, an agile experience management company. Momentive will allow decision-makers to respond with speed and agility by using SurveyMonkey’s experience. IBM, KLM, LG Electronics, Nasdaq, and PUMA are among the company’s 8,800 enterprise customers. The company’s wholly-owned subsidiary, SurveyMonkeys Inc., will begin operating under the name Momentive Inc. in 2021.
PostHog, an open-source product analytics provider, has raised $15 million in a Series B round from Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund and GV, Google’s venture capital division. The firm said that the funds would be used to meet increased demand for its product, with ambitions to quadruple its personnel by the end of this year and then again by 2022.
Osome, a digital business assistant, has raised $16 million in a Series A funding round. Target Global, AltaIR Capital, and Phystech Ventures were among the returning investors; new investors include S16VC and venture capitalist Peng T. Ong, who joined as an angel investor. Its Series A will be utilized to expand internationally and integrate products.
Yousign, a provider of electronic signatures, has secured $36.6 million (€30 million) in a Series A fundraising round headed by Lead Edge Capital. Yousign intends to compete in Europe with DocuSign, Adobe Sign, SignNow, and HelloSign, all located in the United States. In 2020, the business grew from 35 to 120 employees.
Balderton Capital, the European VC firm, has launched its dedicated growth fund of $680M to help tech companies emerging out of Europe. The launch comes amid its predictions of $50 billion growth potential in Europe over the next three years. It will invest in about 15 companies, both in primary and secondary investments, ranging between $25 to $50 million in each.
Recorded Future, a threat intelligence organization, is launching a $20 million Intelligence Fund. Startups who have already obtained venture capital investment will be eligible for seed and Series A investment from the fund. Insight Partners, a private equity fund, bought Recorded Future in 2019 for $780 million.
TestBox, the startup which helps enterprises solve software buying problems by aiding in decision-making through its product, has launched its product today, raising a $2.7M seed fund from SignalFire, Firstminute Capital.
Seven Seven Six, a venture capital firm, has announced that it has raised $150 million for its first fund, said its founder Alexis Ohanian. Seven Seven Six has equity and inclusivity in its DNA. Women make up half of the firm’s limited partners, while Black or indigenous people make up 15%. One distinguishing feature of Seven Seven Six is introducing a 2% “Growth and Caregiving Commitment.”
Slintel, a buyer intelligence platform, has netted $20M in a Series A investment led by GGV Capital amid a rapidly increasing digital transaction in B2B businesses. Slintel’s tools, with the help of data, helps businesses understand buyer intelligence. It aims to emerge as a leader in this market.
Fuel Ventures has announced an early-stage VC fund to invest in 60 tech companies in the UK, having high-growth potential, in the next 12 months. Since its founding in the UK, Fuel Ventures has focused on technology companies, marketplaces, SaaS startups, and platforms, identifying investments in seed and growth stages.
ZoomInfo, a market intelligence company, has acquired Insent, a conversational platform provider for businesses, in an undisclosed deal.With the acquisition of Insent, companies, ZoomInfo’s clients, will use the chat at a large scale.
Marqeta, a payments service company, has gained a market capitalization of over $17.2 billion on its debut. This is due to the company’s share rise of more than 20%. Marqeta’s clients include Uber Technologies and DoorDash, Inc. The shares of the financial technology firm started at $32.50, up from its initial public offering (IPO) price of $27 per share.
Genasys Inc. has acquired Zonehaven. First responders, public safety organizations, and communities can use Zonehaven’s planning, training, and resources to handle evacuations and repopulations successfully. Zonehaven’s services are trusted by more than 170 fire districts, 140 law enforcement agencies, and 200 communities.
Zenoti is an all-in-one cloud-based platform for salons, spas, and medi-spas founded in 2010 by Sudheer Koneru and Dheeraj Koneru has raised an additional $80 million in its Series D round. This additional funding was led by TPG, a global alternative asset fund. Appointment scheduling, online booking, billing, built-in marketing, inventory management, CRM, and loyalty functions are included.
ChartHop, an organization management platform that builds the data-driven status of a company to help them design their future, has announced its raise of $35 million in a Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Elad Gil, Cowboy Ventures, and SemperVirens had participated in the round. ChartHop will use the proceeds from the investment to accelerate its roadmap, build and improve its existing features, and in growing its team.
Vancouver, Canada-based Commit, which works with remote-first startups, connecting engineers to founders, has raised its first round of funding worth $6 million in a seed round led by Accomplice, with participation from Kensington Capital Partners, Inovia, and Garage Capital.
BukuWarung, an Indonesian fintech focused on digitizing business for MSME merchants, has raised its Series A funding worth $60M. The proceeds shall be used to double the workforce, improve payment infrastructure. The total funding for the startup now crosses over $80M, and before Series A, in February this year, BukuWarung had raised $20M from rocketship.vc
Unified experience management (UXM) software solutions provider 1E has announced that global investment firm Carlyle Group has acquired a majority stake in it in a deal that reportedly values the company at $270 million. Other financial details of the transaction were not disclosed by either of the companies. According to Carlyle’s press release, Sumir Karayi, founder and CEO of 1E, will retain a significant minority stake in the company now and shall remain the CEO. Most of 1E’s senior management staff will be retained, while Cormac Whelan will be appointed as the chairman. Employees will own a portion of the business and share in the company’s future growth.
Sinch, a Swedish cloud communications company, has acquired MessageMedia, a messaging service provider for businesses, for $1.3 billion. The $1.3 billion transaction comprises $1.1 billion in cash and the remaining in shares. The transaction would be completed in this year’s second half.
Pennylane, a full-stack financial management platform, has raised $18.3 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital.The company has been working on an accounting platform that would benefit both clients and their accountants. The organization, which focuses on small and medium businesses, has already attracted hundreds of clients.
Contentstack, a headless content management system provider, has raised $57.5 million in a Series B round led by Insight Partners. Other participants include new investor Georgian and existing investors Illuminate Ventures and GingerBread Capital. With this round, the company’s total has gone up to $89 million.The new fund will be used to accelerate the company’s investments in this technology, drive its worldwide expansion, and extend its partner network.
Cash flow problems that stem from the payments cycle of an organization continues to be a major problem for businesses today, Jesse Ghansah, co-founder and CEO of Float, said in an interview with TechCrunch. Float solves the problem with its credit solution. Originally named Swipe, Float aims to tackle cash flow problems for small and medium-sized businesses in the African region. According to Mr. Ghansah, cash flow problems occur, typically after the product is serviced, when businesses have to wait for 30-90 days to receive payments for service. This causes them to fall behind in meeting their own expenses.
Aserto, a cloud-native authorization service that provides enterprise-ready permissions for SaaS applications, has raised $5.1 million in its first seed round funding led by Costanoa Ventures and Heavybit Industries. Aserto creates a sophisticated service for developers, giving them fine-grained control over roles access control based on policies that it calls “policy-as-code approach to authoring, editing, storing, versioning, building, deploying and managing authorization rule”.
Digital adoption SaaS platform Whatfix has closed $90 million in Series D funding from Tokyo-based SoftBank Vision Fund II, nearly two months after talks of this probable fundraising surfaced online. With the close of Series D, Whatfix’s total funding stands at $139.8 million, raised in nine investment rounds, as per Crunchbase, and its valuation has tripled in the last 15 months as per its statements. Other investors – Eight Roads Ventures, Sequoia Capital India, Dragoneer Investment Group, F-Prime Capital, and Cisco Investments- had participated in this round.
Heavy construction logistics platform Trux, which builds tech solutions for construction companies, has unveiled its new subscription-based SaaS offering to provide a more flexible and reliable logistics solution in the construction industry. Bart Ronan, CEO of Trux, in the company’s statement to the press, explained that the easy-to-use SaaS platform has been updated with features to efficiently take into account the way workers operate in the field, in the office, and behind the wheel. With the platform’s help, Trux aims to help its customers working in silos by helping their workers stay connected while handling their respective operations, thereby adding accountability and visibility into the workflow.
Sydney’s Cirralto Limited, which supplies B2B payment services for industries, has recently merged with its long-term licensing partner, Appstablishment, the Perth-based software developer, to provide optimized business and payment solutions to the global market, reports state. Cirralto revealed that with the merger, that will trade under the name of Cirrato Limited, it would also gain access to Appstablishment’s ‘Spenda business solutions,’- its flagship product that provides software to support points of sale, inventory management, debt collection, payment services, e-commerce, and catalog sharing.
Airbase, a corporate spend startup, has announced that it has raised $60 million in a Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures. Other investors include new investor Craft Ventures, existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, First Round Capital, Quiet Capital, Webb Investment Network, and BoxGroup. The additional funds will be used to solidify Airbase’s position as the most comprehensive spend management solution in its class, as well as to drive product improvements and innovation that will continue to define the category, transform the way businesses spend money and elevate employees’ roles to focus on the value-added work that makes businesses successful.
ExtraHop, a cloud-native network detection and response company, has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Bain Capital and Crosspoint Capital. The deal is strategically valued at $900 million.Bain Capital is a technology investor and one of the multi-asset alternative investment firms in the world. Crosspoint Capital is a private equity firm specializing in cybersecurity, privacy, and infrastructure software.
Brinqa, a Cyber Risk Management company, has announced that it has secured $110 million as growth capital from Insight Partners, global venture capital and private equity firm. Brinqa, which has been bootstrapped and founder-backed since 2009, has received its first institutional investment to help it scale its company and expand its market. As a result of this new funding, Brinqa will be better positioned to meet the growing need for flawlessly integrated, highly automated, and risk-based cybersecurity products.
Deloitte, an audit, consulting, tax, and advisory services provider, has announced that it has acquired CloudQuest Inc., a cloud security posture management (CSPM) provider, for an undisclosed sum. Deloitte’s existing cloud cybersecurity products will be bolstered by CloudQuest’s cloud-native security capabilities, allowing them to manage security workflows more easily, minimize risk, and increase data protection.
Fintech company Nubank has announced a $750 million extension to its Series G fundraising, the last round of which closed in January with a $400 million funding. In two press releases, Nubank has announced the extension of its Series G funding, which now has touched $1.5 billion. The first extension of $500 million was raised from Berkshire Hathaway, and the second extension worth $250 million, was led by Sands Capital and witnessed participation from other Brazilian investors – Absoluto Partners, asset manager co-founded by José Zitelmann and Gustavo Hungria, and Verde Asset Management, the manager led by Luis Stuhlberger.
Microsoft’s Windows Virtual Desktop will now be known as Azure Virtual Desktop. A set of new features will be launched to provide a flexible, virtually accessible cloud VDI platform for all end-users with different use cases. Some features include a QuickStart service and new pricing options for remote app streaming.
Mumbai-based QuickSell, a B2B mobile commerce suite platform, has raised $2M in a pre-Series A round co-led by InfoEdge Venture Fund and BEE NEXT, reports state. The proceeds raised shall be used to scale its business, expand its team, and enhance its product features. According to Deepak Bhagchandani, founder and CEO of QuickSell, when a product evokes solid and positive emotions from people, it grows in popularity, which has led the QuickSell team to set up a global customer base in over a hundred countries without the need to spend on marketing its product.
Bengaluru-based payments and banking technology company Cashfree has announced its new investor, State Bank of India (SBI), who has invested an undisclosed amount in Cashfree on Monday. The investment reinforces their shared vision of promoting digital modes of payments, Cashfree’s statement to the press read. The proceeds would be utilized on Cashfree’s growth strategy to improve customer experience and product innovation. As per Crunchbase, Cashfree has raised $40.9M so far, and the latest funding comes from SBI in a debt financing round (financial details undisclosed). Preceding it is the $35.3M Series B funding raised from Apis Partners.
Trulioo, a Canada-based online verification company, has announced that it has raised $394 million in a Series D funding round led by TVC, a venture capital firm. With its valuation reaching $1.75 billion, the company turns unicorn. Other participants in the round include existing investors Amex Ventures, Citi Ventures, Blumberg Capital, and Mouro Capital. The massive funding round comes as the epidemic has spurred business digitalization, and e-commerce and banking institutions want new ways to authenticate consumers’ identities to conduct secure transactions.
Lightspeed, a provider of point-of-sale and eCommerce solutions for shops and restaurateurs, has announced its intention to purchase Shopify rival Ecwid and NuORDER. The acquisition occurs when every company in the world is attempting to transition to the internet sphere and establish a digital presence. Clients of Lightspeed will get access to more digital economy entry points, unrivaled supply chain management, and more capacity to build extraordinary online consumer experiences.
Teemyco, a virtual office service located in Stockholm, has secured $3.2 million in a fundraising round headed by 42CAP. Teemyco intends to use the capital to expand its personnel, focus on new product development, and expand its sales and marketing efforts. Upstreet, Hack your Closet, eHealthApp, Greenely, and Mr. Lee’s noodles are among its clients.
London’s Vault Platform netted $8.2M in Series A funding led by Google’s Gradient Ventures. Vault Platform provides SaaS tools to enterprises to report workplace misconduct incidents and assist them in proactively maintaining internal ethics and integrity issues. In an interview with TechCrunch, Neta Meidav, co-founder and CEO of Vault Platform, revealed that Gradient Ventures had expressed interest in the potential of applying AI to strengthen Vault’s SaaS-based misconduct reporting tool. The proceeds shall be used to expand its team, enhance its platform’s features.
Sharpen Technologies, a player in the contact center as a service, had closed its growth financing round, netting $14M from Bridge Bank, Multiplier Capital, and other investors. Mr.Gildea stated that raising funding from investment partners such as Bridge Bank and Multiplier Capital showed their vote of confidence in Sharpen’s business model. The proceeds will be used in all its departments, owing to Sharpen’ rapid growth.
The United Kingdom government has announced that it is partnering with IBM for a five-year, £210 million ($ 297.5 million) collaboration. It’s a quantum computing and artificial intelligence partnership founded to produce breakthrough discoveries and build sustainable solutions in disciplines spanning life sciences to manufacturing. There will be 60 scientists working on the project, as well as interns and students. The HNCDI program will support a variety of industry projects. The initiative is part of the company’s Discovery Accelerator initiative, which aims to accelerate discovery and innovation via the convergence of advanced technologies.
GoodData launches its enterprise edition of its headless Business Intelligence service, called GoodData CN Production. The platform is based on a microservices design that is accessed using application programming interfaces. Enterprises can give scalable, real-time data to everyone inside a company and their consumers with GoodData CN Production.
Outreach, a sales engagement platform, has secured $200 million in a Series G fundraising round. The company’s valuation has increased to $4.4 billion due to this financing, making it a Unicorn. The fund will be used to grow Outreach’s sales and marketing teams and invest in creating, acquiring, and delivering new innovative technologies. In the previous year, Outreach has grown to over 800 employees worldwide, and it has launched two new global offices in London and Prague.
Kochi-based Abdul Salah and Muhammed Migdad noticed that most restaurants use four to five applications to manage their delivery operations. Lasper Technologies released Foaps in April 2021. With services in Kochi, Calicut, and Trivandrum, the company now takes orders from Zomato, Swiggy, Foodpanda, Amazon Restaurant, and Dunzo. Foaps claims to have processed 300,000 orders since its inception.
New Delhi-based Holisol Logistics, a supply chain logistics company providing end-to-end (E2E) supply chain management solutions, has announced its raise of $3M in a debt financing round led by Northern Arc Capital. From what started as a supply chain management consulting firm, today, Holisol provides E2E solutions due to customer demands for supply chain logistics. The proceeds shall be used for the company’s growth and to increase demand.
Gong, the revenue intelligence leader, leveraging artificial intelligence to transform revenue teams, has raised $250 million in Series E funding. The round was led by Franklin Templeton, bringing Gong's total funding to $584 million.
LeoLabs raises $65M Series B, for its satellite monitoring and collision detection service. The round was jointly led by Insight Partners, and Velvet Sea Ventures. This latest round brings the company’s total funding to more than $100 million. With the recent funds, the company is looking to expand the number of radar sites around the world, and scale its software-as-a-service business.
Twitter launches its new subscription service, Twitter Blue, in Australia, and Canada. The paid-for extra service will add features such as an undo tweet button, bookmarks, and a reader mode. The limited launch is designed to gain a deeper understanding of what customers are looking for. The company also said the free-to-use version of the platform would also remain. It will cost $3.49 Canadian, and $4.49 Australian per month.
Google selects 30 start ups, to receive a share of its $2 million Black Founders Fund in Europe. Google provides these companies with a spot of cash, some valuable cloud services and a bit of good old-fashioned networking among the Google crew. The fund was announced last fall, as part of a company-wide effort toward building a more equitable future for everyone, alongside grants and new sponsorships. Each company will receive up to $100,000, in non-dilutive funding, and up to $120,000 in Ads grants, and $100,000 in Cloud credits.
Blackstone acquires tech publisher IDG for $1.3B, as private equity strikes again. With IDG, Blackstone gets tech analyst firm, IDC along with a collection of tech publications that includes CIO, Computerworld, InfoWorld, Macworld, Network World, PC World, and Tech Hive. The company has also been making some additions to the platform more recently, with a stronger focus on data and analytics.
Exabeam, a late-stage startup that helps organizations detect advanced cybersecurity threats, has landed a new $200 million funding round, that values the company at $2.4 billion. The Series F growth round was led by the Owl Rock division of Blue Owl Capital. Exabeam, which has now raised $390 million in six rounds of outside funding, says it expects to use the new money to fuel scale, innovate, and extend the company’s leadership. The company adds that it has made significant investments in its partner program over the last 12 months, which now includes more than 400 reseller, distributor, systems integrator, MSSP, MDR, and consulting partners globally.
Jeeves, which is building an all in one expense management platform, for global start-ups, is emerging from stealth today, with $131 million in total funding, including $31 million in equity, and $100 million in debt financing. The $31 million in equity, consists of a new $26 million Series A, and a previously unannounced $5 million seed round. Andreessen Horowitz led the Series A funding. Jeeves claims, that by using its platform, any company can spin up their finance function in minutes, and get access to 30 days of credit on a true corporate card, noncard payment rails, as well as cross-border payments. Customers can also pay back in multiple currencies, reducing foreign transaction fees.
DevOps platform GitLab, acquires Un-Review, a machine learning-based tool, that helps software teams recommend the best reviewers, for when developers want to check in their latest code. GitLab, which is looking to bring more of these machine learning capabilities to its platform, will integrate Un-Review’s capabilities, into its own code review workflow. The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition.
Cybersecurity giant, FireEye has agreed to sell its products business, to a consortium led by private equity firm, Symphony Technology Group - STG, for $1.2 billion. The all-cash deal will split FireEye, the maker of network, and email cybersecurity products, from its digital forensics and incident response arm, Mandiant. The move to split the two companies comes almost a decade after FireEye acquired Mandiant. FireEye becomes the latest cybersecurity giant in STG’s portfolio.
Microsoft has acquired firmware security start-up, Re-Firm Labs, to boost its security capabilities for protecting internet of things, and intelligent edge devices. Microsoft declined to disclose the terms of the acquisition. Re-Firm software will allow Microsoft to assess all the code running on the device, and provide a security rating before you connect the device.
Germany-based software company, Celonis, raises $1 billion, from investors to give the company a post-fundraising valuation, of more than $11 billion, extending a record-stretching series of mega funding rounds, by German technology startups. Munich-based Celonis, founded a decade ago, has consistently doubled revenue from year to year, and recently launched its Execution Management System product, that crunches data to tackle problems, and automate decision-making.
Iterative dot AI, an MLOps company, developing data science and AI engineering workflows, raises $20 million. The funding will support the launch of its first commercial product, Data Version Control Studio, a dashboard aimed at simplifying machine learning model development, based on data and metrics.
SignalWire, a software-defined telecom, that uses distributed infrastructure that runs in the cloud, raises $30 million. The company says the funds will be put toward expanding its workforce, and supporting product R and D. The firm offers an elastic cloud network, that lets companies integrate messaging and video capabilities, into their apps or infrastructure.
Logistics start-up, Locus, raises $50 million in Series C funding, led by GIC, and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. Locus uses ML, and proprietary algorithms, to offer smart supply chain solutions to customers. The start-up will use the funding to improve its geographical reach, and build its research and development team to expand the product line. Locus had also raised $30 million across multiple rounds, earlier.
San Franciso-based robotic process automation platform ElectroNeek, raises $20 million in Series A funding, led by investment advisory firm, Baring Vostok, with participation from AICPA. This round will help push ElectroNeek's valuation, over $100 million. The start-up will use the funds to expand its engineering, product, and support teams in India, North America, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East.
Cloud-based browser testing platform LambdaTest, raises Series B funding of $16 million, led by Sequoia Capital India, with participation from Telstra Ventures. The start-up will use the latest funding towards scaling the testing ecosystem, and building next-generation cloud infrastructure for users. It also plans to broaden its reach with the tester community, by engaging with developers with a new suite of products set to launch.
Confluent became the latest company to announce its intent to take the IPO route, officially filing its S-1 paperwork, with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week. The company, which has raised over $455 million since it launched in 2014, was most recently valued at just over $4.5 billion, when it raised $250 million last April.
X to 10x, an India-based consulting firm and SaaS provider, established by Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal, has acquired human resources SaaS platform Dockabl. The firm provides technology tools and consulting solutions, to help start-ups scale their business. It counts more than 150 start-ups as clients, including social commerce firm Meesho, fintech unicorn Cred, and online fresh meat seller Licious.
Global aviation software provider Ramco Systems, announces that it will implement its Aviation M and E MRO Software V5.8, to digitally transform the maintenance and engineering operations, of US-based Bristow Group Inc. Bristow Group is one of the world's largest helicopter operators, providing offshore transportation, search and rescue, and aircraft support services to government, and civil organizations worldwide. The implementation of Ramco Aviation Software, will enable Bristow to achieve smart inventory, maintenance management, and streamline organization-wide warranty tracking processes.
Cognigy raises $44M, to scale its enterprise-focused conversational AI platform. The firm provides a low-code conversational AI platform, that notably can be used flexibly across a range of applications and geographies, and it supports 120 languages. Insight Partners lead the Series B investment.
Goldman Sachs leads $202M investment, in project44, doubling its valuation to $1.2B in a matter of months. The seven year old Chicago based company has built an API-based platform, that it says acts as the connective tissue between transportation providers, third-party logistics companies, shippers, and their supply chain systems. Project44 plans to use its new capital, in part to continue its global expansion. Project44 recently announced its expansion into China, and has plans to grow in the Asia-Pacific, Australia - New Zealand, and Latin American markets.
Cloudera to go private, as KKR, and CD and R grab it for $5.3B. The Cloudera deal includes a brief go shop provision, that allows it to continue to look for a better deal.
Ditto raises $1.5 million, in seed round, to help teams collaborate on copy. The round was led by Greycroft, Y Combinator, and Soma Capital. The software aims to give copy teams, the home they deserve, to keep everything organized and synced, across projects and applications.
Cloud based logistics company, E2open Parent Holdings, acquires software company BluJay, from private equity company Francisco Partners, for an implied enterprise value of & 1.7 billion. BluJay, a software-as-a-service platform in the logistics space, will roll over approximately 60% of its shareholding in the company to the merged entity. It will own an approximate 22% stake in the combined company.
Alithya Group won an information resources project management contract, with a Québec government ministry, worth $ 12.4 million, Canadian. This is one of the largest government contracts Alithya has been awarded in Québec in recent years. As part of this five-year contract, Alithya's professionals will offer leading-edge expertise and support to the client, and provide their teams with the response capability to fully carry out their major responsibilities in managing information resources projects.
Conversation intelligence platform, Convin, raises Rs 2.5Cr from Titan Capital, and 9 Unicorns. Convin enables sales professionals to learn from their own conversations. Bengaluru-based start-up Convin will use the funds to develop its products and build the core team to achieve product-market fit.
Plum, the Bengaluru based employee health insurance start-up, that provides health benefits to SMEs, corporates, and startups raises $15.6 million in Series A funding, led by Tiger Global. The start-up said it will use the funds to further scale its engineering, business development, and operations teams. Plum is building newer insurance products for SMEs, who have teams as small as seven employees, and cannot afford to pay annual premiums.
Disruptium, a consultancy platform for startups, raises pre-seed funding of $200,000 from Pravesh Mehta, and Chokhani Ventures. Owned and operated by Disruptworkz Infolabs Private Limited, the recently launched company would deploy the funds towards developing tech, hiring key resources, and building alliances and partnerships.
Ikon Science, a 20-year global provider of geo-prediction, and knowledge management software and services, announces the launch of Curate, a scalable, cloud-enabled knowledge management solution, designed to provide cost efficiencies along with faster, and more accurate decision making. Curate, enables energy companies to collaborate within a single workspace to access all subsurface data with streamlined workflows, allowing for data democratization, and business learnings that drive action.
Grid Dynamics Holdings, a leader in enterprise-level digital transformation, acquires Tacit Knowledge, a Pitney Bowes owned company, and leading provider of end-to-end digital commerce solutions for global brands. Founded in 2002, Tacit Knowledge, is a global provider of digital commerce solutions, serving customers across the UK, North America, Continental Europe, and Asia.
360insights, the leading Channel Incentives Management provider, and creator of the Channel Success Platform, which includes the new industry-specific, incentive automation clouds, acquires channel-central dot net, a leading software provider for organizations in the IT Channel. The purchase broadens 360insights' Channel Success Platform's capabilities.
Ramco Systems surges 5%, as Iraqi Airways decides to adopt its aviation software. The cloud-based software will automate the operations of the Iraqi national carrier, manage complete records of its aircraft, and enable the airway’s staff to manage their operations, and receive alerts on the go through its mobility module.
Mavenir to Deliver Cloud-based 5G Solutions, on AWS. Mavenir’s collaboration with AWS, allows Communications Service Providers, to deploy Mavenir’s market leading 4G and 5G products, and applications with AWS’s computing infrastructure. The solution is designed to scale, and leverages the same tools and technologies offered by AWS to enterprise applications.
Dell to sell its cloud business, Boomi, to Francisco Partners, and TPG, for $4 billion. The company has stated the deal was expected to close by the end of this year, but has not disclosed additional terms of the transaction.
Alibaba is making its cloud OS compatible with multiple chip architectures. Alibaba Cloud, is one of the fastest-growing businesses for the Chinese e-commerce giant, and the world’s fourth-largest public cloud service in the second half of 2020.
Twitter Blue, a $3 monthly subscription service, could be coming soon. Along with existing twitter features, Twitter Blue subscribers can also organize tweets into Collections. This feature looks like an updated version of Bookmarks, but with the added ability to organize tweets into folders. Currently, Twitter ads make up 85% of the company’s revenue.
Imperva launches tool, to automate enterprise data privacy compliance. The tool is based on its Sonar Platform technology, that’s aimed at helping enterprises better navigate privacy compliance, called Imperva Data Privacy. The release streamlines the process of identifying where personal data is stored in an environment, and who is accessing it, minimizing the manual processes required to maintain continuous compliance.
RevenueCat, a start-up offering a series of tools for developers of subscription-based apps, raises $40 million in Series B funding, valuing its business at $300 million, post-money. The funding round was led by Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund. With the additional funding, the company will lower its pricing, to put its tools in reach of more developers
Utah DOT, now pilots Blyncsy’s AI-powered road maintenance technology. The movement and data intelligence company, is launching an AI-powered technology, called Payver, that will use crowd-sourced video data, to give transport agencies up-to-date information, on which roads require maintenance and improvements. Blyncsy is offering this service to governments at a reduced cost, and with no long-term commitment.
Breinify announces $11M seed, to bring data science to the marketing team. The firm is working to apply data science to personalization, and do it in a way that makes it accessible to non-technical marketing employees, to build more meaningful customer experiences. The investment was led by Gutbrain Ventures, and PBJ Capital.
Australian start-up Pyn, raises $8M seed, to bring targeted communication in-house. Andreessen Horowitz led the investment. The start-up, which launched in 2019, currently has 10 employees, with teams working in Australia, and the Bay Area in California. Jon Williams, the co-founder of Pyn says that, already half the team is female, and the plan is to continue to put diversity front and center, as they build the company.
Boston-based Filtered dot AI, raises $7 million in a funding round, to accelerate its hiring cadence, and built out the go-to-market model for its engineering, and developer-focused hiring service. Filtered dot AI claims, that its system can get companies to the point of making offers more quickly.
Spot-On, raises $125M in Series D. The round triples the company’s valuation to $1.875 billion, compared to its $625 million valuation, at the time of its Series C raise, last September. It also marks San Francisco-based Spot-On’s third funding event since March 2020, and brings the startup’s total funding to $328 million, since its 2017 inception.
Lightrun, a start-up that helps developers debug their live production code, raises $23 million in Series A round, led by Insight Partners. The company doubled its employee count, over the course of the last year. It will continue to use the new funding, to expand its developer community, and hire across functions. The company also plans to expand its U.S. presence.
Uptycs, a Boston-area start-up that uses data to help understand, and prevent security attacks, raises $50 million in Series C today. Norwest Venture Partners led the round.
Rewatch raises $20M to index, transcribe, and store enterprise video content. This latest round is a Series A, and is being led by Andreessen Horowitz. Rewatch has built a system that plugs into Zoom, and Google Meet, two of the most-used video tools in the workplace, and automatically imports all of your office’s, or team’s video chats into a system.
Open AI is launching a $100 million start-up fund, which it calls, the Open AI Start-up Fund, through which it, and its partners will invest in early-stage AI companies, tackling major problems. They will be looking for companies that are taking on serious issues, like healthcare, climate change, and education, where AI-powered applications or approaches, could benefit all of humanity.
Italy’s Commerce Layer, raises $16M, led by Coatue, for its headless commerce platform. The firm provides a set of APIs for businesses to build e-commerce apps, with their own customized front ends. The funding money will be used to continue expanding its business, and adding more commerce tools into its API library.
Parametrix Insurance raises $17.5 million, to offer cloud downtime insurance. First Mark Capital, and F2 Venture Capital led this round. The firm offers insurance policies for companies, that rely on third-party cloud providers, e-commerce services, payment gateways, and CRM systems.
Salt Security lands $70M, for tech to protect APIs, from malicious abuse. The funding is being led by Advent International. The firm is building a network of services, to help companies using, and producing APIs to identify and eradicate risks.
Indonesian crypto exchange, Pintu, gets $6M Series A, led by Pantera, Intudo, and Coinbase Ventures. According to Pintu’s internal estimates, last year Indonesia processed $10 billion USD, in crypto-assets transactions, mostly through retail investors. Pintu’s new funding will be used on marketing, hiring, and product development.
Software-as-a-service bot protection start-up Data-Dome, announced a raise of $35 million, in new funding, to allow it to scale up its global sales, marketing, delivery, and research and development teams. The Series B round was led by Elephant, and included ISAI.
Bengaluru-based electric mobility start-up, Lithium Urban Technologies, buys out employment transportation software platform, Smart Commute, for an unknown sum. With the acquisition, Lithium would be able to provide a full range of transportation solutions, across all vehicle categories including, the conventional internal combustion engine vehicles.
FarEye, an Indian SaaS start-up that helps firms globally optimize their supply chain, and logistics operations, raises $100 million in its Series E round. The funding was co-led by high-profile backers TCV, and Dragoneer Investment Group. FarEye helps companies orchestrate, track, and optimize their logistics operations. With it’s funds, the firm is looking to further expand the team, and is also open to exploring acquisition of smaller firms, in international markets.
B Capital Group, the six-year-old venture capital fund formed by Facebook co-founder, Eduardo Saverin, and Bain Capital veteran, Raj Ganguly, is doubling down on China as it looks to allocate $500 million to $1 billion of its fund, into Chinese tech companies over the next few years. With $1.9 billion assets under management, B Capital is going after enterprise software providers in China, an area that has seen explosive growth, but is still only a fraction the size of the U.S. SaaS market.
Resolve , a San Francisco-based start-up, in the space specializing in buy now, pay later capabilities for B2B transactions, raises $60 million in funding. Initialized Capital, led the funding round. This is the company’s first funding since its 2019 inception. The funding is a combination of equity, and asset funding. The San Francisco start-up is using the money primarily to grow its embedded billing platform.
Interactio, a remote interpretation platform whose customers include massive institutions like the United Nations, European Commission, and the Parliament, along with corporates like BMW, JP Morgan, and Microsoft, raises $30 million Series A. The Series A funding was led by Eight Roads Ventures, and Silicon Valley based - Storm Ventures. The funds will be used for enhancing its tech, and UX - UI, with a focus on ensuring ease of access and simplicity, and on upgrading the tools it provides to interpreters.
EYs3D Microelectronics, a fabless design house, that focuses on end-to-end software, and hardware systems for computer vision technology, raises $7 million in Series A. The new funding will be used to expand eYs3D’s product development, and launch a series of 3D computer vision modules. It also will work with new business partners to expand its platform and hire more talent.
AcuityMD raises $7M, to better track the evolving world of medical hardware. AcuityMD, is a data platform that tracks the entire medical device lifecycle from the sale of an item, to a patient’s outcome after a surgery.
Microsoft, today announced Py-Torch Enterprise, a new Azure service that provides developers with additional support, when using Py-Torch on Azure. Py-Torch is a Python-centric open-source machine learning framework, with a focus on computer vision and natural language processing.
French start-up Matera, raises a new $43 million Series B funding round, led by Mubadala Capital, to turn residential building management, into SaaS. The company is building a vertical SaaS, for residential property management. With the funding round, Matera plans to expand to Germany.
Solidus Labs, surveillance and risk-monitoring software that can detect manipulation across cryptocurrency trading platforms, raises $20 million in Series A. The firm in total has raised $23.75 million and stated that its funding will be used to double its headcount to address growing demand. This funding was led by Equity Partners.Fireflies.ai raises $14M for its meeting transcription and automation service. This round was led by Khosla ventures. In individual usage terms, around 35,000 organizations are represented amongst its user base. The firm’s model is a hybrid of SaaS and usage-based pricing. Aurora Solar raises $250M in series C and aims to power the growing solar industry. The funding round was led by Coatue. With the firm Historically being a design solution; the next phase, according to CEO Chis Hopper is to broaden that into a platform that covers more of the process of going solar. Zeta, a startup that helps banks and fintech firms launch products, raises $250 million in Series C and is the newest to attain the coveted unicorn status after closing a financing round. The round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The new round valued the startup, which has offices in Bangalore and Dubai, at $1.45 billion. Zeta is the 14th Indian startup to become a unicorn this year as Tiger Global, Falcon Edge, and SoftBank accelerate their pace of funding in India, the world’s second-largest internet market. Mobile app market intelligence firm Sensor Tower has made its first acquisition. The company is acquiring Pathmatics, a market intelligence company that will now combine its paid digital and social media platform with Sensor Tower’s business. Deal terms were not detailed but include an undisclosed growth investment from Riverwood Capital into Pathmatics. The acquisition will allow the companies to offer an expanded set of digital and mobile advertising insights to their respective customers, including new social insights for TikTok, YouTube mobile, and Snap this year, powered by Sensor Tower. Salon-focused SaaS platform Glamplus on Monday raises Rs 2 crore in a pre-Series A round led by Inflection Point Ventures. Glamplus will use the fresh funds to enhance its product and tech capabilities and expand its business. It will also use it to scale to 3,000 partners in the next six months, along with a vertical expansion of its business line. Edtech startup Tekie raises $1.5M in a seed round led by GSV, Multiply Ventures. Tekie is a live coding platform that brings the art of storytelling to make learning a movie-like experience. The edtech startup has created the world’s first animated series on coding to teach text-based coding to kids. The firm plans to utilize the funds to scale its operation to support increasing demand and build a strong team to unlock the next level of growth.
Ireland’s data regulator has given Facebook six weeks to respond to an investigation that may trigger a ban on the social media giant’s transatlantic data transfers following a High Court ruling that the probe could resume. The case stems from European Union concerns that U.S. government surveillance may not respect the privacy rights of EU citizens when their personal data is sent to the United States for commercial use.IBM’s AI research division , has released a 14-million-sample dataset , to develop machine learning models that can help in programming tasks. The model is called Project CodeNet, the dataset takes its name after ImageNet, the famous repository of labeled photos that triggered a revolution in computer vision and deep learning. With Project CodeNet, the researchers at IBM have tried to create a multi-purpose dataset that can be used to train machine learning models for various tasks.Ocean Network Express (ONE), which owns the sixth largest fleet of containerships in the world, is working with Google Cloud to advance its digital transformation and data cloud strategy. The next-generation shipping company is enhancing its operational efficiency by running its mission critical SAP systems on Google Cloud, unlocking business insights and accelerating time to insight leveraging data analytics services like BigQuery, and enhancing employee collaboration with Google Workspace.
Bain Capital Ventures raises $1.3 billion to fund young startups, and young VC firms. The venture arm of the 37-year-old private equity firm Bain Capital, announced this morning that it has $1.3 billion more to invest across two funds, a $950 million fund for seed and Series A deals and a $350 million fund for growth-stage opportunities.Mio, a social commerce startup focused on smaller cities and rural areas in Vietnam, raises $1M seed. The startup, currently focuses on fresh groceries and plans to expand into more categories. Founded in June 2020, Mio now claims it has hundreds of agents, or resellers on it’s platform. Mio is among a crop of social commerce startups across Asia that leverage the buying power of areas where major e-commerce players haven’t reached dominance yet.
Mapping and logistics startup NextBillion, a geospatial data startup that provides software-as-a-service products for enterprises, raises $6.25 million from Microsoft venture fund M12. The firm’s investment extends NextBillion’s $7 million series A round. . NextBillion’s platform lets customers build custom maps for different users, as well as for unique use cases and geographies.Wejo is in talks to go public through a reverse merger with blank-check company Virtuoso Acquisition in a deal that would value the British connected car data start-up at more than $1 billion.Immuta, which provides a cloud-native data governance platform to help organizations automate data access control, security, privacy, and compliance, raises $90 million in series D funding. Immuta says it will use the investment to expand the size of its workforce, acquire new customers, and further develop its products. This brings the startup’s total raise to date to $169 million.
Chicago-based Spot Meetings raises $5 million in seed funding led by Ilya Fushman at Kleiner Perkins. That follows a $1.9 million pre-seed round led by Chapter One earlier this year. Spot Meetings wants to reinvigorate our meetings and displace Zoom as the default meeting medium at the same time.Esper, raises $30 million in Series B round. Esper builds tools to enable developers and engineers to deploy and manage fleets of Android-based edge devices. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Root Ventures, Ubiquity Ventures and Haystack.Portside, an aviation startup that is building a platform for managing the backend of a corporate flight department, charter operation, government fleet and fractional ownership operation, raises $17 million funding round led by Tiger Global Management. Alek Vernitsky, co-founder and CEO of Portside stated that the new capital will be used to accelerate investment in product innovation, support further engagement with large enterprise customers and grow their global engineering and customer success teams.Enterprise app configuration platform Salto today raises $42 million in series B funding, bringing its total raised to $69 million. The company says the funds will be used to expand its capacity while growing the size of its workforce.Cognite, an industrial software-as-a-service company raises $150 million in an equity funding round led by TCV at a $1.6 billion post-money valuation. Cognite says this investment marks one of the largest funding rounds for a SaaS company in Europe and will be used to expand its platform and support hiring efforts.
An early-stage start-up, Britive, that brings privileged access control to a multi-cloud world, has announced a $10 million Series A. The investment was led by Crosslink Capital, with participation from previous investors, Upfront Ventures, and One Way Ventures. The company helps automate permission-ing across multiple cloud vendors, and software services, whether that involves a human or a machine, that is seeking permission. The company currently has 40 employees, a number that Britive expects to double, in the next 12 months, as they put this capital to work. Unbounce, a Vancouver start-up known for helping marketers create automated landing pages, announced that it has acquired Snazzy dot AI, an early-stage automated copywriting start-up. Unbounce’s Chief Strategy Officer, Tamara Grominsky, says that her company focuses on helping customers convert their customers into sales, and with Snazzy, it gets some pretty nifty technology, based on GPT-3 artificial intelligence technology. The product is aimed at the marketing generalist, charged with overseeing landing pages, and who is responsible for a range of tasks including writing copy. Upstream, a new professional networking platform, just closed a $2.75 million seed round, bringing their total raised to $3.25 million. The round was led by Ibex Investors, and managing partner Nicole Priel. The investment also includes participation from 8-Bit Capital, Human Ventures, NYVP, Converge Venture Partners, and a few angel investors. Unlike LinkedIn, Upstream focuses on generating meaningful connections between its members, and one way they go about it, is by hosting digital events, that start with a speaker, followed by breakout matched sessions, that are five minutes each.Fintech start-up Pipe, which aims to be the “Nasdaq for revenue” had raised $150 million in a round of funding that was closed in March. Now, the Miami-based Start-up confirms that it has actually raised, $250 million at a $2 billion valuation in a round that was massively oversubscribed. More than 4,000 companies have signed up on the Pipe trading platform since its public launch in June 2020, with just over 1,000 of those signing up since its March raise. Pipe’s platform assesses a customer’s key metrics, by integrating with its accounting, payment processing, and banking systems. It then instantly rates the performance of the business and qualifies them for a trading limit. Forecast, a start-up that uses artificial intelligence to both reads, and integrates data from different enterprise applications, to build a bigger picture of the project, and potential outcomes have raised $19 million. Headquartered in London, the company plans to use some of the funding to expand to the U.S., and some to continue building out its platform and business. This funding, a Series A, comes less than a year after the start-up’s commercial launch, and it was led by Balderton Capital, with previous investors Crane Ventures Partners, SEED Capital, and Heartcore also participating. Düsseldorf-based prop-tech start-up, Dabbel, is using AI to drive energy efficiency savings in commercial buildings. It’s developed cloud-based self-learning building management software, that plugs into the existing building management systems, taking over control of heating and cooling systems, in a way that’s more dynamic than legacy systems, based on fixed set-point resets. Dabbel says its AI considers factors such as building orientation, and thermal insulation, and reviews calibration decisions every five minutes, meaning it can respond dynamically to changes in outdoor and indoor conditions. Founded in 2018, the start-up claims this approach of layering AI-powered predictive modeling, atop legacy BMS to power next-gen building automation, is able to generate substantial energy savings, touting reductions in energy consumption of up to 40%. European start-up studio, e-Founders states that the portfolio companies have reached a valuation of $2 billion together — only 18 months after reaching $1 billion. E-Founders says it is focused on building the future of work. In practical terms, it means the company is building B2B SaaS start-ups, with a focus on productivity, and workflows. For instance, Front, Aircall, and Spendesk all started with e-Founders. When e-Founders comes up with a new project, they act as a sort of third co-founder. The start-up studio tries to find a CEO and a CTO. In exchange for a third of equity, the e-Founders core team helps take the project off the ground. When the start-up raises a seed round, e-Founders move on from day-to-day activities and focuses on new projects. And it has been working well. With 30 portfolio companies, there are now 1,500 people working for an e-Founders-backed company. Combined, they generate $131 million in annual recurring revenue.
BukuKas, a startup focused on digitizing Indonesia’s small businesses, raises $50 million in Series B funding. The round included participation from Gokul Rajaram, the DoorDash executive, and Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder and CEO of Transfer-Wise. BukuKas, the digital bookkeeping application, will use its Series B, to hire for its engineering, and product teams in Jakarta and Bangalore, and launch new services for merchants. Singapore-based Thunes, a fintech, focused on making cross-border money transfers easier, announced today it raises $60 million in a growth round led by Insight Partners. The round included participation from existing shareholders. Founded in 2016, Thunes’ customers include Grab, PayPal, MPesa, the Commercial Bank of Dubai, Western Union, Remitly, and the Singaporean insurance firm, NTUC Income. Fintech startup, StudentFinance, which allows educational institutions to offer success-based financing for students, raises a $5.3 million seed round, co-led by Giant Ventures, and Armilar Venture Partners. The startup, which launched at the beginning of 2020, provides the tech back end for institutions, to offer flexible payment plans, in the form of income-share agreements. It’s now raised $6.6 million total, to date. Styra, the startup behind Open Policy Agent, has picked up $40 million in a Series B round of funding, led by Battery Ventures. Styra will use the funding, to continue evolving its product, specifically by creating better, and more efficient ways to apply authorization policies, by way of code; and by bringing in more partners to expand the scope, of what can be covered by its technology. Google Cloud announced Vertex AI, a new managed machine learning platform, that is meant to make it easier for developers, to deploy and maintain their AI models. The focus of Vertex is on mobile and web developers. The service is also integrated with Vizier, Google’s AI optimizer that can automatically tune hyper-parameters in machine learning models. Artificial, which has built a software platform for laboratories to assist with, or in some cases fully automate, research and development work, raises $21.5 million. It plans to use the funding, to continue building out its software and its capabilities, to hire more people, and for business development, Artificial’s technology can both orchestrate, and manage robotic machines that labs might be using to handle some work; and help assist scientists when they are carrying out the work themselves.
Cloud-communications firm, Twilio Inc, plans to buy a toll-free messaging provider, Zip-whip, for about $850 million in cash and stock. Zip-whip, which provides a platform for businesses to use their landline or toll-free numbers to send text messages to customers, will become part of Twilio's messaging business unit once the deal closes. The deal is expected to modestly add to Twilio's gross margin and revenue, according to the company. Merge, a start-up that provides an integration platform for product development has raised $4.5 million in a seed round funding led by New Enterprise Associates. Launched in 2020, Merge aspires to provide a unified API for B2B to integrate seamlessly, which explains their up-front investment in their product. They plan to expand into other areas, likely CRM, as per reports. The French Government has stated that Google, and Microsoft's cloud technologies, can be utilized to store France's sensitive data, securely. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon—the market leader in data storage dominate the global industry, raising worries in Europe about the possibility of US surveillance following the passage of the US CLOUD Act of 2018.Adalo, formerly known as Foundry, has raised an $8 million series A round with Oceans Ventures, and OldSlip Group participation. Adalo is a no-code platform, for creating cross-platform mobile, and web applications. The firm provides drag-and-drop design tools, for consumers to create apps. Users can choose from pre-configured modules, or create their own, integrating with existing systems, via database setups, and APIs. It can assist update, and track user data as well as add entries to databases. Furthermore, the platform can construct native apps for both iOS and Android.IBM has updated its open-source web Accessibility Checker tool, to make it easier to discover, and address accessibility issues. The update is planned to take place on May 20, to coincide with Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Last May, IBM released the Equal Access Toolkit, which is essentially a set of rules that provides enterprise developers, with all of the information they need, to include accessibility into their apps. With the newly added multi-scan report functionality, users can automatically scan an entire website or application and collect all of the information into a single Excel spreadsheet. It is vital to make internet services accessible to as many people as possible, given how the epidemic has forced businesses, to embrace digital transformation.
Appian, launches the latest version of Appian low-code automation platform, for enterprises to unify enterprise data, using low-code, and a code-free approach. In a released statement to the press, Appian discussed the features available on the latest version, which include an A I driven Intelligent Document Processing, new design guidance, and enhanced Development, Security, and operations, among others. The platform also provides a single workflow for automation, team orchestration, existing systems, data, bots, and more. Reports state that, the launch comes amid enterprises scouting for quick solutions to AI-powered applications, and smooth workflow automation across departments.
The breach at SolarWinds in the December of 2020, underlined the vulnerabilities that businesses faced, and exposed severe hybrid cloud, and authentication weaknesses. Reports have highlighted how hybrid multi-clouds provide enterprises a ‘Promising path’ to digital transformation, driving new revenue models. However, it also leaves a chance for bad actors to access an organization’s valuable data when they err badly. The breach becomes pertinent because SolarWinds Orion is used to managing on-premises and hosted infrastructures in hybrid cloud environments, calling a need for enhanced multi-cloud security. A troublesome combination of hybrid cloud security gaps and lack of authentication on SolarWinds accounts had made the trace undetectable for months.
Vai Le, has been appointed the first channel alliance manager, for the Asia Pacific region by Emersion, an automation network provider. He has been tasked with "aggressively" increasing the company's partner count. At Emersion, Le will be responsible for driving revenue, and development in APAC through distributor recruitment, retailer partnerships, and delivery coordination.
Marlin Equity Partners, a California-based investment firm, has made a significant investment in Abbyy, a provider of document conversion and data capture software. This investment by Marlin makes it one of the largest shareholders in Abbyy, and this could also aid in the growth in the expansion of the IPA market. This support will aid Abbyy's attempts to become a leading vendor in the digital intelligence sector. Abbyy's mission is to provide digital intelligence that is network and vendor agnostic, which is why it is collaborating with various companies.
Fidelis Cybersecurity acquires CloudPassage to increase detection and response to threats, in short- to enhance their XDR platform. San-Francisco-based CloudPassage specializes in cloud security, and compliance, and protects cloud infrastructure, for some of the world’s most recognized brands, in domains such as e-commerce, finance, B2B SaaS, healthcare, and others. Founded in 2010 and having over 70 employees, Cloud-Passage’s team will be integrated into the Fidelis Cybersecurity organization.
Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV) led a $3.6 million seed round for Divibank, a Brazilian finance platform. Divibank is a place, where Latin American companies, can get growth capital through revenue-share funding. The funds raised, will be used to speed up Divibank's innovation plan, and expand its workforce. Clients will be able to properly plan their digital marketing strategies and maximize their investment gains with the app.
Stripe has acquired the Oakland-based, online transitions fraud detection start-up, Bouncer. The terms of the deal remain undisclosed, but reports have stated that Bouncer’s team and technology will be integrated into Radar, Stripe’s A.I.-based anti-fraud technology toolset. Radar essentially focuses on preventing fraudulent, and malicious transactions, on Stripe’s platform. With Bouncer's integration into Stripe’s Radar, those buying services from Stripe, will benefit, as the tools' effectiveness will increase.
Marqueta Inc, a payments card company, revealed a doubling of its revenue in 2020, in an IPO. In 2020, the company's sales increased to $290.3 million, up from $143.3 million the previous year. As the pandemic fueled a boom in internet shopping, and food ordering purchases by homebound consumers, Marqeta, a company that helps businesses issue credit and debit cards to their employees, has benefited.
Google cloud, teams up with SpaceX’s starlink, for enterprise connectivity at networks edge. Starlink’s entire aim, is to provide reliable, broadband-quality connections to areas that have typically been hard or impossible to reach, with legacy ground-based network infrastructure, including cellular networks. The tie-up with Google means, that not only will business and public sector customers taking advantage of that new network, but also to cloud-based infrastructure and applications, including AI and machine learning capabilities, analytics, and more. Google and Starlink expect to become available to enterprise customers soon.
Risk defense startup, SpecTrust, raises a $4.3 million seed investment. The funding round was led by Cyber Mentor Fund. Using its platform, the firm states that an organization’s risk team, can review and investigate everything a customer doe,s from its first page view to its last click with unified behavior, identity, history, and risk data. SpecTrust aims to fix the economics of fighting fraud with a no-code platform, that will potentially cut 90% of a business’ risk infrastructure spend.
Worksome, raises $13 million in Series A funding round, for its freelance talent platform. The platform connects freelancers looking for professional roles, with employers needing tools to find and manage freelancer talent. Worksome has 550 active clients, and over 30,000 freelancers in its marketplace. Its largest customers are found in the creative industries, tech and IT, pharma, and consumer goods. And its biggest markets are the U.K., and U.S.
Agnostiq Inc., a quantum computing SaaS start-up, has raised $2 million in seed funding . The funding will be used to support the continued development of its software platform. The financing was led by Differential Ventures. The company previously raised $830,000 in pre-Seed funding.
Tata Consultation Services, launches a cloud-based Intelligent Subscription solution, leveraging SAP Business Technology Platform, to help the media and publishing industry, transform customer experience and shift to subscription-based, order-to-cash processes for physical, and digital content. The solution enables greater cross selling, or up selling to consumers, resulting in enhanced revenue growth.
Cloud-based authorization start-up, Authomize, raises $16 million in series A. The funding was led by Innovation Endeavours. This brings the start-up’s total raise, to $22 million to date. The capital will be used to support Authomize’s R and D, and hiring efforts this year, as expansion ramps up.
Data security and governance start-up, Cyral, raises $26 million. Cyral monitors activity across popular databases, pipelines, and data warehouses. This brings its total raise to $41.1 million. The company plans to put the funds toward expanding its platform, and global workforce.
Code security start-up, BluBracket, raises $12 million in a series A. The platform can monitor real-time risk scores across codebases, Git configurations, infrastructure as code, code copies, detecting passwords, and over 50 different types of tokens, keys, and IDs. The round was led by Evolution Equity Partners. The capital will be used to further develop BluBracket’s products, and grow its sales team.
Container observability start-up, Sosivio, raises $4 million in seed. The round was led by Seamans Holdings. Sosivio’s platform, provides visibility into cloud-native environments, as well as proactive failure prediction, automated resolution, and contextual analysis of signals. The proceeds will be used to support product launches, and allow the company to scale over the next few years.
Treasury Prime, a banking-as-a-service startup that delivers its product via APIs, raises $20 million in Series B. Deciens Capital, and QED Investors co-led the round. The firm plans to use the funds to invest, aggressively in its business.The capital comes in at around a year, since the startup announced its Series A. Treasury Prime was valued at just over $40 million at the time of its Series A, and current valuation has not been disclosed yet.
Amazon Web Services, announces it’s release of AWS SaaS Boost, as open source, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. The tool is designed to help companies transform their on-prem software, into cloud-based software as a service.The goal of AWS SaaS Boost, is to foster an open environment for developing, and sharing reusable code, that accelerates the ability to deliver and operate, multi-tenant SaaS solutions on AWS. This announcement comes just a couple of weeks, after the company open-sourced its Deep Racer device software, which runs its machine-learning fuelled, mini race cars.
Healthcare SaaS provider, Dr. First, raises an additional $50 million equity investment from Sixth Street Growth, following the firm’s $35 million investment from last year. The company provides a range of software solutions for stakeholders, across the healthcare spectrum.The investment from Six Street Growth, will go towards continuing its business growth. Dr. First’s tools are used by nearly 300,000 healthcare professionals, today.
Singapore-based fintech firm, Aleta Planet, announces a joint venture, called AP Studios , with SaaS solution startup, Fooyo. The joint venture will offer digital marketing, and ecommerce solutions for the Singaporean businesses, preparing to target Chinese tourists, once Covid-19 travel restrictions are lifted. AP Studios will develop digital tools to enable merchants in Singapore, to cater to Chinese tourists and business travelers who visit the city-state annually.The new business is looking to develop tools such as payment checkout webpages, chatbots, WeChat and Alipay mini programs, crowd-control monitoring solutions, and interactive tourism apps.
SuperOps dot A.I., a professional services automation, and remote monitoring and management platform, raises $3 million in seed funding. The funding round was led by Elevation Capital, and Matrix Partners India. SuperOps dot A.I.’s platform, is tailored to cater to various segments of the MSP market, and intends to build a truly unified PSA, RMM solution powered by intelligent automation.
VisibleRisk, a joint venture between Moody’s Investors Service, and the VC firm Team8, raises $25 million for its cyber risk evaluation platform. VisibleRisk offers real-time monitoring, custom reporting, and analysis, as well as transparency into the variables that determine a cyber rating. VisibleRisk claims that its cyber ratings are based on cyber risk quantification, which allows companies to benchmark their risks, against those of peers. The funding will be used to expand the company’s workforce.
Big Time Studios, raises $21 million to bring non fungible tokens to the biggest game economies.The Los Angeles company, was started by CEO Ari Meilich, and game designer Thor Alexander. The funding comes in two parts.The first $10.3 million in a round led by FBG Capital, And Big Time Studios is in the process of closing an $11 million fund, that it will use to invest in game companies, that adopt its technology. Big Time Studios’ team includes alumni of Epic Games, Riot Games, Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, and Decentraland.
SaaS-maker Birdie, raises $11.5 million in Series A round of funding, led by Index Ventures. The UK-based caretech startup, has raised a total of $22.9M. The firm is focused on building tools for social care providers, to drive efficiencies in a chronically under resourced sector.To date, Birdie has partnered with almost 500 providers across the U.K., and currently its platform is being used to support the care of more than 20,000 older people, every week.
SightCall raises $42M, for its AR-based visual assistance platform. The core of its service is AR technology, which comes embedded in their apps, or the service apps its customers use. SightCall’s range of verticals includes insurance, telecoms, transportation, telehealth, manufacturing, utilities, and life science and medical devices. The funding is being led by InfraVia, an European private equity firm. The valuation of this round is not being disclosed. SightCall’s Series B marks the largest funding round yet, in this sector.
Munich-based parcelLab, which offers a final-mile fulfillment service for online retailers, raises $112 million in Series C. The funding round was led by the U.S. VC firm, Insight Partners. The new funding will be used for parcelLab’s global expansion plans, and new product development. ParcelLab’s main competitor is U.S.-based Narvar, which has raised $64 million, with its last round being a Series C funding.
SaaS platform Locobuzz, raises Rs 9Cr in pre-Series A, from SIDBI Venture. Locobuzz helps clients streamline their customer experience processes, leading them to create long-lasting relationships with their customers, and position themselves as thought leaders in their domain.The SaaS startup will utilise the funds, to enhance its platform's technological capabilities, scale up its team across functions, and marketing and sales efforts. Their business verticals range from BFSI, telecom, automobile, retail, FMCG, ecommerce, and more.
Redwood Software raises $379M, for enterprise process automation. The funds will be put towards accelerating product development, as it looks to grow its customer base. Founded in 1993, Netherlands-based Redwood aims to orchestrate, and automate business processes across hybrid IT environments. The company claims it serves over 3,000 enterprise customers, in over 150 countries.
Cold-chain startup Celcius, raises seed round from Eaglewings Ventures. The firm is focused on building a technology-driven solution, to the problems of the conventional cold-chain network in India. According to the firm, there has been an increase in demand for cold chain solutions in the country, in the wake of the pandemic. The COVID-19 vaccine requirement is heavily dependent on a robust, and seamless cold-chain network, for effective distribution.
Ahmedabad-based App-it-simple, better known for its digitalproducts CallHippo, and SoftwareSuggest, invests $200,000 in Enthu dot A I. Ankit Dudhwewala, Founder of App-it-simple, has also invested in his personal capacity. Enthu dot A is an agent evaluation, and performance management software, that helps contact centers improve the quality of their customer conversations. The funding will help Enthu dot A I, accelerate its engineering and sales efforts, and move a step forward towards its vision of enabling contact centres, to deliver better customer outcomes.
Social enterprise startup, Haqdarshak, raises Rs 6.65 Cr in pre-Series A round. Haqdarshak ensures citizens at the last mile, get access to government, and private welfare schemes and services. This is done through a mobile and web SaaS platform for corporate partners, complemented by a training platform, used by community women entrepreneurs. Haqdarshak recently launched its app, on the Google Play Store. The funds will be used for hiring quality talent in execution and tech teams, and strengthening the current monitoring and evaluation process. It will also use the funds to launch, and expand vaccination plus health insurance coverage-focused services, at the last mile with a digital push, and invest in plug-and-play tech tools.
Bengaluru-based telemedicine, and mobile health startup, Practo, is looking to raise about Rs 60 crore in debt funding, from Trifecta Venture Debt Fund - II, in six tranches. According to the MCA filings, Practo has already received the first tranche, amounting to Rs 15 crore. The company last raised $32 million in August 2020, in a round led by A1A Company. This development comes at a time, when the company recently announced its ‘Corporate Suraksha’, a corporate vaccination programme, for companies across India
Bengaluru-based telemedicine, and mobile health startup, Practo, is looking to raise about Rs 60 crore in debt funding, from Trifecta Venture Debt Fund - II, in six tranches. According to the MCA filings, Practo has already received the first tranche, amounting to Rs 15 crore. The company last raised $32 million in August 2020, in a round led by A1A Company. This development comes at a time, when the company recently announced its ‘Corporate Suraksha’, a corporate vaccination programme, for companies across India
Deeptech AI start-up, thingsTHINKING, has raised €4.5 million in a funding round led by Early-bird and a number of angel investors. The company’s propriety tool ‘Semantha’, offers textual processing by providing out-of-the-box functionality, bypassing the dreaded training phase for AI-based applications. Earlybird co-founder, Dr. Hendrik Brandis said, “With semantha, domain experts can finally educate an AI system as if it were a co-worker, using just a few and simple examples”. The current funding allows would help them grow their technological advantage, and market faster, while supporting their international partners.
Google LLC, collaborates with CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., to deliver half a dozen of their cybersecurity tools, to make it easier for IT teams to spot malware. CrowdStrike’s flagship product is a platform called Falcon, that companies use to protect systems such as servers, and employee devices. The platform can now send security information, from a company’s environment to Google’s cloud-based Chronicle, an analytics platform. Chronicle can store and analyzing petabytes of security data at once. Google and CrowdStrike’s collaboration focuses on securing public cloud environments. According to the companies, they will work together, to make it easier to set up Falcon, inside Google Cloud virtual machines.
Data-logics, Inc., a source for Adobe PDF, and enterprise document management technologies, announces the launch of Data-logics Cloud, a suite of cloud-based PDF processing products, which includes a free app on Zapier, and a robust API on Amazon Web Services. This exciting next-generation move for the company, provides Data logics users with the same enterprise-grade capabilities to create, edit and convert PDFs. Based in Chicago, IL, they support hundreds of customers worldwide, who are using document management technology in diverse applications. With the addition of these new cloud offerings, that customer base will be able to become even more expansive.
Leading digital workflow company, Service now, announced it has signed an agreement to acquire next-generation observability leader, Light step. Acquisition will help ServiceNow customers accelerate digital transformation with insight-driven, action-oriented workflows. ServiceNow is already a recognized market leader in IT service management, IT operations management, and digital workflows. With Lightstep, an emerging pioneer in next-generation application monitoring and observability, ServiceNow will help DevOps engineers build, deploy, run, and monitor state-of-the-art, cloud-native applications.
Infor, the industry cloud company, today announced that Norgesmøllene A.S., part of Cernova, the Norway-based flour milling and industrial group, has deployed Infor Cloud Suite Food & Beverage, to support its digital transformation process. Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage, which also incorporates Eye Share, to manage the workflow of inbound supplier invoices, is expected to streamline processes, and boost visibility for Norgesmøllene A.S.
Clubhouse, finally launches its Android app. The voice-based social network, launched its beta Android app on Play Store for users in the U.S., and said it will gradually make the new app available in other English-speaking countries, and then to the rest of the world. Clubhouse began developing the Android app early this year, and started to test the beta version externally - earlier this month. Clubhouse’s launch on Android comes at a time when scores of technology giants including Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Spotify, Reddit, and Microsoft’s LinkedIn, have either launched their similar offerings, or announced plans to do so.
Commonwealth Bank is partnering with global e commerce platform provider, Big Commerce. The bank says that, this move will make it easier for businesses of all sizes, to launch and grow their online stores. Big Commerce, one of the world’s largest SaaS e commerce platforms, helps businesses to build their online store, market to customers, and drive sales through various channels such as Instagram, Facebook and eBay. The partnership will provide the bank’s business customers with an integrated offering that allows them to establish and grow their online presence, and ensure a best in class online shopping experience for their customers.
UAE - based Crescent Enterprises, announced doubling its venture capital investments in start-ups, to $272 million by 2022. Founded in 2017, CE-Ventures has already invested over $136 million in 32 start-ups and VC funds across ME and A, the US, India and Southeast Asia. CE-Ventures plans to focus investments in the fin-tech, food-tech, B2B SaaS, and energy technology sectors. CE-Ventures extends its support beyond funding, by helping international start-ups expand into the ME and A region, and likewise helps local start-ups expand into global markets.
U.S. pipeline company halts operations after cyber-attack. Colonial Pipeline did not say what was demanded or by whom, but ransomware attacks are typically carried out by criminal hackers, who seize data and demand a large payment, in order to release it. The attack on a pipeline operator, which says it delivers roughly 45% of all fuel consumed on the East Coast of the USA, underscored again the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure to cyber attacks both by criminal hackers and U.S. adversaries. The attack on a pipeline operator, which says it delivers roughly 45% of all fuel consumed on the East Coast, underscored again the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure to cyber attacks both by criminal hackers and U.S. adversaries. The company said it hired a cyber-security firm to investigate the nature and scope of the attack and has also contacted law enforcement and federal agencies.
France-based Shift Technology, a SaaS provider, of AI-enhanced decision automation and optimization solutions for the insurance sector, raises $220 million in Series D funding round. Shift Technology‘s latest investment round, brings total investment in the company, to $320 million along with a market valuation, of over $1 billion. This investment reportedly marks Advent’s sixth growth equity investment in 2021. Shift’s round was led by Advent International, via Advent Tech, along with contributions from Avenir, and other investors. With this latest funding, Shift said it would use the capital to expand its business operations into the US, Europe, and Asia as well. The funds raised by Shift Technology, will also be used to support research and development work, in the implementation of new solutions, to cater to innovative decision automation and optimization needs, for insurers.
Corporate finance software provider, Bill dot com LLC has signed a $2.5 billion deal, to acquire Divvy-Pay Inc., better known as Divvy, whose cloud service enables companies to issue business credit cards to their employees. Publicly traded Bill dot com said on Thursday, that it’s financing the transaction with $625 million in cash, and $1.875 billion worth of common stock. For Bill dot com, the rationale behind the acquisition is that it will allow businesses to make their finance operations more centralized. Bill dot com provides a single pane of glass for paying suppliers and sending invoices that, with the addition of Divvy’s technology, will also enable businesses to manage corporate credit cards, in the same place.
Neu-Reality, an Israeli AI start-up that's developing high performance AI compute platforms for cloud data centres and edge nodes, has unveiled NR1-P, a new AI-centric inference platform. NR1-P is NeuReality’s first implementation of this new AI-centric architecture, with other implementations to follow. This prototype platform validates the technology, and allows customers to integrate it in orchestrated data centres, and other facilities. The prototype platform aims to accelerate the growth of real-life AI applications, such as public safety, e-commerce, social networks, medical use-cases, digital assistants, recommendation systems and Natural Language Processing.
Comforte AG, a global leader in enterprise data security, has announced a new partnership with the UK-based data security consultancy firm, Rakatu. Modern enterprises both large and small, must look beyond traditional perimeter security and encryption, to keep sensitive data safe. Rakatu and comforte, will enable more organizations to leverage cloud technologies, while keeping sensitive data safe.
Houston SaaS startup, Molecule, closes its $12M series A funding round, with support from a local VC, Mercury Fund. The company has a cloud-based energy trading, and risk management solution for the energy industry, and supports power, natural gas, crude or refined products, chemicals, agricultural commodities, softs, metals, cryptocurrencies, and more. The company will use its new funds to further build out its product, as well as introduce offerings to manage renewable credits, according to the release.
Enterprise security firm Aurion-pro Solutions, is set to sell its cybersecurity business to Austin-based software company,y Forcepoint LLC, for $9.6 million. Aurion-pro said, cash proceeds from the deal will help its plan to become “debt-free”, sometime after the second quarter this year. The deal will also help its balance sheet to significantly improve KPIs, in the coming quarters.
Timescale grabs $40M Series B, as it goes all in on cloud version of time series database. Redpoint Ventures led the round, with help from existing investors Benchmark, New Enterprise Associates, Icon Ventures and Two Sigma Ventures. The company reports that, it has now raised approximately $70 million. Timescale is based in New York City, but it’s a truly remote organization, with 60 employees spread across 20 countries and every continent, except Antarctica.
Kahoot acquires Clever, the US-based ed-tech portal, for up to $500M. The plan will be to continue growing Clever’s business in the U.S., which currently employs 175 people, as well as give it a lever for expanding globally, alongside Kahoot’s wider stable of ed-tech software and services. The deal is a combination of cash and shares, and gives Clever an enterprise value of between $435 million and $500 million.
SoftBank leads $15 Million round for China’s industrial robot maker, You-i-bot. Youibot, has raised over 200 million yuan to date. Youibot plans to spend the fresh proceeds, on research and development in its mobile robots and proprietary software, team building, and market expansion.
ReCharge, a provider of subscription management software for e-commerce, raises $227 million in a Series B growth round, at a $2.1 billion valuation. Summit Partners, ICONIQ Growth, and Bain Capital Ventures led the funding. ReCharge, plans to use its fresh capital to accelerate hiring in both R-and-D, and go-to-market functions such as sales, marketing, and customer success. The start-up now has 15,000 customers, and 20 million subscribers across 180 countries on its platform.
Upstream Works, Announces Amazon Connect Cloud Contact Centre Solutions, for Enterprises. Upstream Works Software Ltd., a provider of Omnichannel Contact Centre solutions, debuts Upstream Works for Amazon Connect, now on the AWS Marketplace. UWA offers cloud contact centre solutions, that are optimized for enterprises, and enable contact centres to personalize engagements, and increase efficiency with a scalable, and cost-effective platform.
Text Blaze, which was a part of the recent Winter 2021 Y Combinator accelerator, raises $3.3 million in seed round. The company’s investment was led by Two Sigma Ventures, and Susa Ventures. With it’s new funding , they are planning to expand it’s staff from four, to ten. Text Blaze’s speed-writing automation service has a freemium model, and a consumer paid offering that costs just $2.99 monthly.
Cymulate raises $45 Million in Series C, to test and improve cybersecurity defenses via attack simulations. The funding was led by London-based One Peak Partners. Cymulate, lets organizations and their partners, run machine-based attack simulations on their networks to determine vulnerabilities, and automatically receive guidance on how to fix what is not working. Co-headquartered in Israel and New York, the firm will be using to continue investing in its platform, and to ramp up its operations. Cymulate doubled its revenues last year, on the back of a customer list, that now upwards of 300 large enterprises and mid-market companies, including the Euronext stock exchange network, as well as service providers such as NTT and Telit.
Rainforest raises seed funding of $36 million led by Nordstar, with participation from Insignia Venture Partners. This includes equity financing of $6.5 million, and a $30 million debt facility, from an undisclosed American debt fund. Rainforest’s portfolio currently includes three brands, which it acquired for about $1 million each. The company wants to wait until its portfolio is larger, before disclosing what brands it owns.
FPT Corporation, Vietnam’s largest technology and IT services group, has acquired SaaS startup, ‘Base.vn’, for an undisclosed sum. The deal was announced at an event held in Ho Chi Minh City today. FPT’s offer came at a time that Base.vn was trying to raise a new funding round. The SaaS firm says that its client base includes more than 5,000 Vietnamese corporations, as well as small and medium-sized enterprises.
Obviously.AI Raises $3.6 Million From TMV, B Capital Group, Arka Venture Labs, Golden Gate Ventures, and other VCs. With this round of funding, the platform is reshaping how the modern business user works with Artificial Intelligence.Obviously. AI will use the funding to grow the company’s Research and Development, introduce time series, and other new-age algorithms, expand its sales and marketing team, and build an ecosystem that can further automate the predictive AI capabilities.
Software firm, ‘SUSE’ seeks valuation of nearly $7 billion in IPO. Enterprise software company SUSE, set the price range for its initial public offering in Frankfurt, at 29 to 34 euros per share on Wednesday, implying a market capitalisation of between 4.9 and 5.7 billion euros. SUSE, whose open-source software helps run applications on cloud servers, mainframe computers, and devices at the edges of networks, said it was seeking to raise around 1 billion euros from investors.
B2B retail SaaS platform ‘6 Degree’ raises $1M from SucSEED Indovation Fund, and other angel investors as a part of series A. 6 Degree is a fashion network, with over 15,000 professionals, and home to over 4,000 fashion designers. The startup has long-standing partnerships with over 100 multi-brand stores, and leading fashion platforms, including Lakme Fashion Week, and The Fashion Design Council of India. 6 Degree will use the funds, to ramp up operations for its flagship product. Honeycomb, a B2B retail SaaS platform, catering to the fashion and lifestyle sector. 6 Degree claims to be on track to grow another 5X this year, enabling over 3,000 brands to scale with it.
Acronis raises $250 Million, at a $2.5 Billion valuation, to double down on cyber protection services. The funding was led by CVC. Integrating with a range of popular enterprise software packages, Acronis now have over 10,000 managed service providers, and 500,000 businesses using their services. The funding will be used on engineers, and M and A, to complement their cyber protection services. The company is also focussing on its next steps, which could involve a public listing, or a sale in the next 12 to 24 months.
HoneyBook, a client experience and financial management platform, for service-based small businesses and freelancers, raises $155 million in a Series D round, led by Durable Capital Partners LP. With the latest round, HoneyBook has now raised $248 million since its inception in 2013. The company plans to use its new capital toward continued product development, and to boost its 103-person headcount, across its San Francisco and Tel Aviv offices.
Thentia, a global leader in GovTech Software-as-a-Service, raises $10 million in Series B investment, led by New York City-based Spring Mountain Capital, with participation from BDC Capital. Thentia was developed by subject matter experts, with a mission to transform GovTech through best-in-class technological capabilities. Thentia will use this equity financing to accelerate its go-to-market strategy, and grow its position across the U.S., as the industry-leading SaaS platform for the government technology sector.
IoT platform ‘Thingsup’, raises $100,000 from GSF Accelerator. Launched in 2020, Thingsup is a low-code, SaaS-based platform that comes with ready to use, wireless IoT sensors, and enables businesses to digitalise their entire supply chain operations, within a few days, instead of months. The Parent company iobot stated that, the investment will be used to cater to the demand for digitalising cold chain logistics, the market for which, is rapidly expanding due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Remote work is no longer a new topic, as much of the world has now been doing it for a year or more because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote working platforms have evolved with Gatheround gaining traction. Gatheround’s video conversations aim to be a refreshing complement to Slack conversations. Gatheround raised $3.5million last year to build their platform. Gatheround customer base, includes 28 Fortune 500s, 11 of the biggest U.S. tech companies, 26 top universities and more than 700 educational institutions. Gatheround is not the only company attempting to tackle this space. Ireland-based Workvivo last year raised $16 million and earlier this year, Microsoft launched Viva, its new employee experience platform.
Basecamp sees mass employee exits after CEO bans political discussions. The company employs around 60 people, and roughly a third of the company appears to have accepted buyouts to leave, many citing new company policies. The no-politics rule at Basecamp follows a similar stance to Coinbase. Basecamp was immediately criticized for muzzling its employees over important issues, many of which disproportionately impact marginalized employees.
Sony announces investment and partnership with Discord to bring the chat app to PlayStation. that will integrate the latter’s popular gaming-focused chat app with PlayStation’s own built-in social tools. Sony appears to have offered a better deal than Microsoft, taking an undisclosed minority stake in the company ahead of a rumored IPO. Sony has done its part, financially speaking, by taking part in Discord’s recent $100 million H round.
Clubhouse begins externally testing its Android app. The voice-based networking app that’s now being knocked off by every major tech platform, is bringing its service to Android. The company has announced that its Android version has entered beta testing with a handful of non-employees who will provide the company with early feedback ahead of a public launch. The lack of an Android client combined with its invite system initially gave Clubhouse an aura of exclusivity. But the delay to provide access to Android users also gave larger competitors time to catch up with Clubhouse. Clubhouse didn’t give a specific time frame as to when its Android app would reach more testers or the wider public, only noting that it’s looking forward to welcoming more Android users in the coming weeks.
Tunisian-French SaaS startup Expensya raises $20 million in fresh funds from Paris-based MAIF Avenir and Amman-based Silicon Badia. The Series B round takes Expensya’s total raise to date to over $25 million, making it the best-funded Tunisian startup and one of the best-funded SaaS startups of the Middle East & North Africa. Founded in 2014 by Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani, Expensya’s online software automates expense management for businesses, Expensya currently serves over 5,000 customers in over 100 countries.
Cornerstone Venture Partners Fund of Mumbai comes out with the CGES Index, seeking to position it as the country’s first global enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) index. The SEBI-approved fund, which has been investing in early-stage and high-growth SaaS firms, believes this to be a game changing index, given that $20 billion is the global revenue estimated from enterprise SaaS firms. The index, is composed of the top 30 globally-listed public Enterprise SaaS companies, such as Salesforce, Zoom, Shopify, and tracks the movement of these stocks on global stock exchanges real-time. The Index tracks comparative performance with Nasdaq Composite, S&P 500, and the Dow Jones Index, and has shown tremendous growth over the last 24 months.
Chargebee sets sights on new verticals, global expansion. With the pandemic, there has been a global shift towards subscription models and billing solutions at scale. To capitalise on this, Chargebee is investing in acquiring customers from other verticals such as Internet of Things (IoT), ed-tech, and e-commerce, said Santhanam. As the company works at acquiring new customers, it also expects to invest in research and development to introduce new services and tools. This could include developing analytics tools to help companies make better decisions.
Gurugram SaaS startup HyperTest is building software by automating the entire QA process. HyperTest integrates with any application or product and monitors every user interaction to automatically build, run, and maintain end-to-end tests, which updates itself with new features without prompting QA team to write a single line of code. Last year , HyperTest raised $400,000 in a seed round from Axilor, Touchstone, and a clutch of angels from Lead Angels. The startup is using the funds to build products and improve its sales and marketing functions.
Eka Unveils E-Sourcing, A Cloud-Based Source-To-Pay Solution To Drive A New Era Of Digitalization In Supplier Management. Cloud-based software provider Eka aims to transform legacy-based supply chain workflows with the unveiling of its platform driven E-Sourcing solution that delivers a new standard in collaboration, transparency, efficiency and quality assurance across a wide range of business functions and industries. Eka’s strength in harnessing the power of cloud platform, coupled with its ongoing investment into research and development, means the company is focused on building solutions that are continually enhanced.
IBM and NeuVector extend container security partnership. NeuVector announced that the Kubernetes-native, end-to-end container security solution is now available to IBM Cloud customers through the IBM Cloud catalog. NeuVector is also announcing platform integration with IBM Security QRadar, IBM’s security information and event management solution. IBM Cloud customers can find NeuVector in the Security section of the IBM Cloud catalog, and then initiate a free trial or paid subscription.
Amazon’s cloud division reports 32% revenue growth. AWS has come to play a crucial role at Amazon as its most reliable source of income. “We have firm confidence that we offer a lot of advantages to AWS customers, from functionality to a vibrant and robust partner ecosystem,” said Brian Olsavsky, Amazon’s finance chief.
Wunderite, Boston-based software startup, raises $3M to build software for indie insurance agencies. The early-stage round was led by Spark Capital. Wunderite builds and sells software designed to help insurance agencies more rapidly process insurance applications, and automate some of their processes. The funding will be used to build their sales team and expand.
Cloud infrastructure market keeps rolling in Q1 with almost $40B in revenue. Conventional wisdom over the last year has suggested that the pandemic has driven companies to the cloud much faster than they ever would have gone without that forcing event, with some suggesting it has compressed years of transformation into months.Cloud gaming service Shadow get acquired by OVHcloud founder. Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. People can pay a monthly subscription fee and gain access to a gaming PC in a data center. Subscriptions currently start at €12.99 per month in Europe or $11.99 per month in the U.S. It’s unclear whether Shadow will remain available at this price point, how specifications are going to evolve if the company is going to spin up more servers to attract new clients.
RapidDeploy, which provides computer-aided dispatch technology as a cloud-based service for 911 centers, raises $29 million in Series B round of funding. The firm states that the funding will be used both to grow its business and continue expanding the SaaS tools that it provides to its customers. In the startup’s point of view, the cloud is essential to running emergency response in the most efficient manner.
Gr4vy a cloud-native payments company with a payment orchestration platform that merges a cloud platform with payments infrastructure raises a Series A funding round of $11.1 million, led by Nyca Partners (a VC with a bench of partners who are ex-Visa ), with participation from Activant Capital (a fintech investor), Global Founders Capital and Firestartr, bringing its total funding to $12.2 million. Gr4vy, acts as a conduit between retailers’ shopping carts and payment providers. By offering instances it can give retailers individualized infrastructure in the cloud. The launch of Gr4vy comes at a key time for online retailers as the world moves from part online shopping to almost 100% online because of the pandemic.IBM is acquiring cloud app and network management firm Turbonomic for up to $2B. Turbonomic, provides tools to manage application performance along with Kubernetes and network performance. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Turbonomic was valued at nearly $1 billion in its last funding round in September 2019. Together Red Hat and IBM have been developing a range of cloud-based tools addressing telco, edge and enterprise use cases.This latest deal will help extend that further. Last November IBM acquired another company called Instana to bring application performance management into its stable, and it pointed out today that the Turbonomic deal will complement that and the two technologies’ tools will be integrated together.Wasabi raises $112M Series C on $700M valuation to take on cloud storage hyperscalers. Fidelity Management & Research Company led the round. Wasabi storage starts at $5.99 per terabyte per month, a lot cheaper than Amazon S3, which starts at 0.23 per gigabyte for the first 50 terabytes or $23.00 a terabyte, considerably more than Wasabi’s offering.Firstbase a software-and-hardware solution to get remote workers the tools and support they need raises $13 million in Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. B Capital Group and Alpaca VC. The company will focus on building more enterprise-friendly software features with its new capital, allowing it to target larger customers.
Thiruvananthapuram-based cloud dental software startup CareStack raises $22.5 Mn from Steadview Capital, Delta Dental of California, Accel Partners, Eight Roads and F-Prime Capital. CareStack’s single all-in-one SaaS platform on the cloud combines dental practice management, patient engagement, practice marketing, and data analytics. The company claims to have doubled its revenue last year and has stated that its workforce has grown from 200 employees at the beginning of the year to 370 employees at present. In 2019, the company had raised $28 Mn from the same investors. With the recent funding, CareStack’s total funding raised is over $60 Mn.Ivorian startup Afrikrea partners with DHL and Visa to launch SaaS e-commerce platform ANKA. Ivorian e-commerce startup Afrikrea started as a marketplace for African-based and inspired clothing, accessories, arts, and crafts. Over the past five years, Afrikrea has been serving more than 7,000 sellers from 47 African countries and buyers from 170 countries. Last year, Afrikrea began testing an all-in-one SaaS e-commerce platform for these merchants. With it’s launch, the platform called ANKA will allow users to sell from Africa, ship products to anywhere in the world and get paid through local and international African payment methods.BoostUp.ai, provider of a software-as-a-service platform for managing revenue operations infused with AI capabilities raises $6 million in series A funding, bringing its total raised to $14 million, after an initial seed round last year.The company is part of a growing cadre of startups attempting to unify sales, marketing, and customer service processes in a way that enables organizations to boost sales and increase overall profitability. BoostUp claims its revenue has increased by more than 1,000% in fiscal 2020, with an active contribution to its revenue through customers such as Udemy, Degreed, Plume, and Windstream.Opsera, a startup that’s building an orchestration platform for DevOps teams raises $15 million Series A funding round led by Felicis Ventures. New investor HMG Ventures, as well as existing investors Clear Ventures, Trinity Partners and Firebolt Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $19.3 million. Founded in January 2020, Opsera lets developers provision their CI/CD tools through a single framework. Opsera plans to use the new funding to grow its engineering team and accelerate its go-to-market efforts
Stripe acquires TaxJar to add cloud-based, automated sales tax tools into its payments platform. The privately-held payments company now valued at $95 billion, has made an acquisition to expand the range of tools (and services) that it provides to online businesses. It has acquired TaxJar, a popular provider of a cloud-based suite of tax services, which can be used to automatically calculate, report and file sales taxes. Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Stripe has confirmed that all 200 employees of Woburn, Massachusetts-based TaxJar are joining the company.
Location data analytics startup Placer.ai raises $50M Series B. This was led by Josh Buckley, the chief executive officer of Product Hunt, Todd Goldberg and Rahul Vohra. The new capital will be used on research and development and expanding Placer.ai’s sales and marketing teams. The foot traffic and location analytics startup saw growth in new categories, including consumer packaged goods (CPG) and hedge funds that use its tech to perform due diligence.
Tellius announces $8M Series A to build ML-fueled business data query tool. The raise was led by Sands Capital Ventures, with participation from Grotech. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $17 million, according to the company. CEO and founder Ajay Khanna stated that the company is attempting to merge two technologies that have traditionally lived in silos: business intelligence and artificial intelligence.
Canada’s newest unicorn: Clio raises $110M at a $1.6B valuation for legal tech. Th Series E round was co-led by T. Rowe Price Associates Inc. and OMERS Growth Equity. The company’s platform aims to serve as an operating system for lawyers, offering cloud-based legal practice management, client intake and legal CRM software. Clio has more than 150,000 customers across 100 countries. Many of the lawyers using Clio are smaller and solo practitioners, but the company also serves larger firms such as Locks Law and King Law.
Berlin based n8n raises $12M in Series A for its ‘fair code’ approach to low-code workflow automation. The startup plans to use the money to continue expanding its team, which now numbers 60 people, and to expand its platform and the services it provides to users. Currently, n8n helps link up and integrate data and functions between more than 200 established applications, as well as any custom apps or services that is specific to an organization. The round is being led by Felicis Ventures, with Sequoia Capital, firstminute Capital and Harpoon Ventures. The startup has now raised around $14 million and is not disclosing valuation.
Mighty Networks, a platform designed to give creators and brands a dedicated place to start and grow communities, has closed on $50 million in a Series B funding round led by Owl Ventures. The company’s flagship Business Plan product is aimed at new creators with the goal of giving them an easy way to get started with digital subscriptions. Established brands, organizations and successful creators use the company’s Mighty Pro plan to get everything Mighty Networks offers on their own branded iOS, iPad and Android apps.
Netskope, the leading security cloud, announces the continued expansion of the Netskope NewEdge network across the Asia-Pacific region. Upgrades in Singapore and Australia have already been completed with additional data centers now coming online for new and expanded coverage in Australia, New Zealand, and The Philippines,with more data centers planned for deployment later this year to expand service in China. Netskope's strong presence in Asia-Pacific continues to grow as it addresses remote offices and branch needs for some of the world's largest F100 businesses, as well as locally-headquartered firms like Yamaha in Japan, Virtual Gaming Worlds in Australia, and Ather in India.
Buy now, pay later startup Affirm is looking to acquisitions to gain an edge over its competitors.Affirm announced that it intends to acquire Returnly, a software startup that helps retailers manage returns, for $300 million in cash and equity. The acquisition gives more insight into exactly how Affirm — and some of its other competitors — are mapping out their strategies for what else they can offer retailers, beyond just a digital form of layaway.Online legal service Rocket Lawyer has raised $223 million of financing from an investor group led by Vista Credit Partners to further its international expansion and make acquisitions in a fragmented market.
The company, which has 25 million registered users, already offers online legal documents and virtual attorney meetings to businesses and individuals in the U.S., U.K. and parts of Europe. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has resigned from VMware’s board of directors, effective immediately, two months after leaving the top leadership post at the virtualization giant to lead the chipmaker.Palo Alto, based VMware said in a regulatory filing Friday that Gelsinger notified the company of his resignation two days prior. The company said it was Gelsinger’s “personal decision,” “given the demands of his new position as CEO of Intel.”“We are grateful for his many years of service on the Board and his tenure as CEO of VMware,” VMware said in a statement.
Cisco AppDynamics Expands Global Software-as-a-Service Offering With Five New Locations.The addition of five new locations across Africa, Asia, Europe and South America brings the total number of AppDynamics global SaaS locations to nine. AppDynamics offers customers the broadest scale and reach of global SaaS support of any Application Performance Monitoring and Observability companies. Global expansion further provides AppDynamics customers with increased flexibility, scale and cost efficiencies, as well as greater data residency compliance and security.Qapita raises $5 million in funding round led by MassMutual Ventures. Qapita, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup provides ESOPs and cap table management solutions to private companies.
The Qapita funding round also saw participation of Hyderabad-based venture capital firm Endiya Partners and a clutch of angel investors.The SaaS startup plans to use the funds raised to hire engineering talent, accelerate product development and build clientele in India, Indonesia and Singapore. It currently has more than 30 employees.Ambry Hill Technologies Announced the Launch Of Their Cloud-Based ERP Software, Vista Suite.Traditionally, the process of switching from one ERP system to another included extracting data from the old system and importing it into the new system. This is often expensive, slow, and rarely produces good results.Ambry Hill’s alternative to this approach is to connect to the old dataset and integrate that information into the screens of Vista Suite so that it appears to be part of the system. ALTARA Ventures, a Singapore-based venture firm helmed by Koh Boon Hwee and investment veterans, joined the US$12.6 million Series A fundraise for US software startup FreeAgent. The round was led by Pelion Venture Partners and also joined by existing investor BlueRun Ventures.
With the funding, FreeAgent intends to deepen product development and ramp up go-to-market activities
Hawke Ventures raises $5.6M to back digital marketing startups. The firm is mostly focused on products that can be used by small and medium businesses. The firm’s focus is to build a definitive platform for Conversational Commerce. Hwake is trying to build a different venture firm that does not focus on what we think the next big idea is, but is focused on building actual technology that can be used by consumers.
Introvoke raises $2.7M to power online events that can be embedded anywhere. The funding was led by Struck Capital. The startup offers components like virtual stages, chat rooms and networking hubs, all customizable and embeddable on a customer’s website. Introvoke charges customers based on live event minutes, a model that it says is accessible to companies large and small.At Basis Set Ventures, merging venture capital and software development yields a $165 million new fund. That product development is one reason the firm has managed to stay relatively lean and was two times oversubscribed when it went out to raise its second fund, a $165 million.Currently Basis Set has at least three different programs, all aimed to recruit and nurture talent that typical Bay Area firms haven’t traditionally focused on. The first is its Persistence platform, which is designed to help women developers and founders network and nurture connections and foster ideas. The firm also has a service that it calls Founder Superpowers, to help entrepreneurs identify and develop areas of strength while looking for additional tools to augment their capabilities. Another key factor for the company is trying to find a more diverse set of founders with different backgrounds from the typical Silicon Valley biography.
ActiveCampaign raises $240M at a $3B valuation as marketing and sales automation come into focus for Small and medium businesses. The round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from another new backer Dragoneer, along with Susquehanna Growth Equity and Silversmith Capital Partners. This funding round represents a huge leap for ActiveCampaign.
Fraud prevention platform Sift raises $50M at over $1B valuation. Insight Partners led the financing, which included participation from Union Square Ventures and Stripes. Sift was founded out of Y Combinator in 2011, and has raised a total of $157 million over its lifetime. Sift uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to automatically surmise whether an attempted transaction or interaction with a business online is authentic or potentially problematic.
E-commerce tracking platform AfterShip raises $66M in SeriesB. This was led by Tiger Global, with participation from Hillhouse Capital’s GL Ventures. The company’s software enables sellers to track shipments made through more than 740 carriers and handles more than 6 billion shipments each year.
Podcast recording platform Riverside.fm raises $9.5M. The round is led by Seven Seven Six. Riverside.fm is a remote video and audio platform that records lossless audio and 4K video tracks remotely to each user’s system, saving the end result from the kind of technical hiccups that come with spotty internet connections. The company says it plans to use the money to increase headcount and build out more features for the service.
BigID boosts Series D to $100M at $1.25B valuation, With $30M extension. The investment comes from private equity firm Advent International, and brings the total raised to more than $200 million across four rounds. The late-stage startup is attracting all of this capital by building a security and privacy platform.
Era Software raises $15.25M for enterprise data management. EraDB officially rebranded as Era Software as part of the Series A announcement. The new round of funding was led by Playground Global and brings total funding to Era Software up to $22 million. AppOmni raises $40 million in a Series B. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with Salesforce Ventures and ServiceNow Ventures, as well as previous backers ClearSky, Costanoa Ventures, Inner Loop Capital and Silicon Valley Data Capital.The company today integrates with more than 100 connectors, platforms used by developers and IT teams at companies to manage the apps that their businesses use, such as tools like Splunk and Sumo Logic. Through this, AppOmni is able to aggregate and normalize event data around those apps, in addition to deeper monitoring in cases where it can integrate with apps themselves.Per Diem raises $2.3M to help local businesses build subscription programs. The round of seed funding was led by Two Sigma Ventures. The startup is currently focused on New York, but it’s already working with businesses in Phoenix and Washington, D.C.
Enterprise software firm Chargebee raises $125 million at a valuation of $1.4 Billion, making it India's newest unicorn, signaling the funding boom underway in India and continuing the wave of software unicorns.The round was co-led by Sapphire Ventures and existing investors Tiger Global, Insight Venture Partners and Steadview Capital. This also makes Chargebee the 11th unicorn to emerge from India in just four months of 2021.Grip Security raises $6 million seed round led by cybersecurity-focused YL Ventures, with participation from CrowdStrike CEO and co-founder George Kurtz and a group of other angel investors with deep roots in the cybersecurity industry. Grip Security currently has about 15 employees and plans to use the new funding to build out its platform with additional capabilities, especially around providing access governance and data governance to applications. The plan is to grow to 20 to 25 employees within the next year.Tel Aviv’s developer of financial planning and analysis tools, DataRails raises $18.5 million in a Series A round.The round was Led by Zeev Ventures Fund along with existing investors Vertex Ventures Israel and Innovation Endeavors , alongside undisclosed private investors. To date, the company has raised $28.5 million.Cape Privacy , a startup that allows companies to share sensitive data in a secure and encrypted way raises $20 million in Series. Evolution Equity Partners led the round with participation from new investors Tiger Global Management, Ridgeline Partners and Downing Lane. Existing investors Boldstart Ventures, Version One Ventures, Haystack, Radical Ventures and a slew of individual investors also participated. The company has now raised approximately $25 million, including a $5 million seed investment.RippleMatch, a career recruiting platform, raises $23.5M funding.The round was led by Invus Opportunities with participation from Renegade Partners and Gaingels along with existing investors G20, Work-Bench, Alleycorp, Bullpen Capital and Accomplice. The company intends to use the funds to continue building out its intelligent hiring platform.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup Whatfix is in active talks to raise $80-90 million as a part of its Series D round, led by SoftBank Vision Fund II, at a valuation of $500-550 million.The talks with US-based Whatfix come a year after the startup raised $32 million as a part of its Series C round led by Sequoia Capital India. Existing investors, including Sequoia India, are expected to participate in the round, said the people mentioned above.Druva, a data-protection startup that counts US space agency NASA and drugmaker Pfizer among its customers, has received $147 million investment as it rapidly scales in response to accelerated demand for its platform. The fundraise was led by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), a global investment group, The round has increased the Pune and California-based company’s valuation above $2 billion. The financing round also included participation from existing investors Viking Global Investors and Atreides Management.Virdee, an Austin, Texas-based SaaS company delivering digital check-in and virtual concierge services to the hospitality and commercial real estate industries, received a strategic financing from SaaS investors, bringing total seed funding to $4M. Backers included Silverton Partners, LiveOak Venture Partners, and DJR Advisors.As online identity management grows in importance, Mastercard swooped in and bought identity verification company Ekata for $850 million. Mastercard certainly sees the rapid digital transformation that is happening in online commerce, a move that was accelerated by COVID. It’s a transformation that once started isn’t likely to change back to the old ways of doing business, even when we get past the pandemic.Atlassian today announced that it has acquired Brisbane, Australia-based ThinkTilt, the company behind the popular Jira-centric no-code/low-code form builder ProForma. The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition. The acquisition is meant to help strengthen Jira Service Management, Atlassian’s version of Jira that focuses on IT service management (ITSM).
Physical security and smart buildings software, Spintly raises Rs 4.6 crore in an extended seed round of funding led by Silicon Valley-based Riso Capital, along with SucSEED Indovation Fund from Hyderabad, Chicago-based Nikhan Investments and Keiretsu Forum angel network . Spintly provides SaaS-based physical security solutions which enable smartphone-based door access eliminating the need for key cards and elaborate wiring for access control. They will utilise these funds to boost sales, marketing and research activities in order to enhance their position.C2i, a genomics SaaS product to detect traces of cancer, raises $100M Series B. Using C2i’s technology, doctors can order a liquid biopsy, which is essentially a blood draw that looks for DNA. This round of funding will be used to accelerate clinical development and commercialization of the company’s C2-Intelligence Platform. Investors that participated in the round include NFX, Duquesne Family Office, Section 32 (Singapore), iGlobe Partners and Driehaus Capital.IBM is acquiring myInvenio, a business automation software provider that specializes in process mining as part of the hyperautomation trend. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition aligns with IBM CEO Arvind Krishna’s effort to pivot the business toward multi-cloud software that drives business automation. The efforts span process mining, RPA, document processing, workflow automation and more. Those various software components integrate with IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation, and run atop Red Hat OpenShift. The OpenShift software allows IBM’s automation packages to run on any public, private cloud or hybrid cloud.
Paddle, the Revenue Delivery Platform for B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies appoints software industry veteran Jimmy Fitzgerald to the position of President and Chief Operating Officer. In his new role, Fitzgerald will help Paddle with its mission to supercharge the growth of fast-scaling software businesses everywhere. Fitzgerald was COO at SaaS price optimization startup SignalDemand (acquired by PROS) and held senior leadership positions at customer relationship management (CRM) pioneer Siebel Systems (later acquired by Oracle). Caller-identification application Truecaller announces a new solution for enterprises, which will allow businesses to verify their identity on the platform. With this feature, verified businesses will get a green caller ID and a verified business badge, and can also lock their brand name and profile photo. However, consumers will continue to see the number of spam markings as usual and they retain the right to mark verified numbers as spam or block them completely. E-commerce investor Upper90 raises $55M for equity investments. Upper90 is led by CEO Billy Libby, former head of quantitative education sales at Goldman Sachs, and Chairman Jason Finger co-founder of Seamless, and it was the first investor in both Thrasio and Clearbanc. The firm offers debt and equity funding, and it just closed a $195 million fund in December. Chili Piper, a sophisticated SaaS appointment scheduling platform for sales teams, raises a $33 million B round led by Tiger Global. Existing investors Base10 Partners and Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused VC, also participated. This brings the company’s total financing to $54 million. The company will use the capital raised to accelerate product development. The previous $18 million A round was led by Base10 and Google’s Gradient Ventures nine months ago. Substack announces a $1M initiative to fund local journalists. The startup described Substack Local as a $1 million initiative that will fund independent writers creating local news publications. Similar to the Substack Pro program, the company will offer cash advances of up to $100,000, as well as mentorship and subsidized access to health insurance and design services. In exchange, Substack will take 85% of subscription revenue for a year.UserZoom raises $100M and acquires EnjoyHQ, to grow its platform to improve UX and other interactive design elements. It has built a platform used by companies like Google, Microsoft, PayPal, Salesforce, and many others to help them stay off the bad design radar with tools to evaluate their design and identify where and when it doesn’t work.MedChron LLC Launches Its Innovative New SaaS for Small to Mid Size Medical Practices, Optimizing CCM, CCP, and MWV Medicare Billing. MedChron was founded to fix problems and deliver an affordable web-based software solution that quickly, efficiently, and neatly organizes all contacts and interactions with patients.
Mowies Expands On-Demand Platform with Harmonic's VOS Cloud Streaming SaaS. Mowies expanded offering allows consumers to purchase on-demand content directly from filmmakers, musicians and storytellers. The VOS360 SaaS provides Mowies with an easy-to-use, end-to-end solution for media processing and delivery, optimizing bandwidth usage and enabling an exceptional viewing experience for viewers.
London-based multi-store, mutli-vendor e-commerce solution for global scaling platform Techsembly raises £1 million from SuperSeed Ventures and a number of undisclosed private investors.The funding is expected to be used to assemble a cross-marketing team that will initially target European and Asian markets.
Uber Offers SaaS To Three New Public Transit Agencies. Denver’s Regional Transportation District will begin employing Uber’s management software on its fleet of wheelchair-accessible vehicles this week, with Cecil Transit and Porterville Transit following in the weeks to come. These agencies will pay a fee to use Uber’s technology. Uber made its first transit deal in June of last year, offering residents of Marin County, population 250,000, a chance to use Uber’s app to book minibus rides. The deal allowed the county transit agency to charge riders $4 per mile, with a dollar discount for every mile for travelers with disabilities or mobility issues. Uber earns a flat fee for managing the service, capped at $80,000.
Aras Announces Expansion of Subscription Offerings with Enterprise SaaS. Enterprise Edition delivers full customization capabilities in an all-inclusive SaaS format with DevOps processes specifically designed to meet the mission-critical demands of the most complex scenarios. The new subscription offer from Aras provides unmatched cloud capabilities for the largest enterprise deployments.
Aiven, a provider of open-source software for managing cloud data infrastructure, raises $100 million from investors led by venture capital fund Atomico and would use the proceeds to expand internationally. Helsinki-based Aiven stated that the Series C funding round valued the business at more than $800 million. It was also backed by new investors Salesforce Ventures and World Innovation Lab.
Huler Launches Its Human Experience SaaS Platform, The HulerHub. HulerHub transforms the way businesses engage with their teams by introducing a people-centric and time-saving digital solution. The much-anticipated flagship SaaS offering has already registered interest from global household names within the UK, USA and Canada, following an initial $7 million dollar investment.
Flipkart Group is close to buying travel and hotel booking platform Cleartrip in a distress sale, as the Walmart-owned e-commerce giant strengthens its operations in the hospitality segment.The cash-and-stock deal valuing Cleartrip at almost $40 million may close in the next 10 days. The deal comes at a time the hospitality industry continues to reel from the onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic.
Risk and compliance startup LogicGate confirms a data breach. An unauthorized third party has obtained credentials to its Amazon Web Services-hosted cloud storage servers storing customer backup files for its flagship platform Risk Cloud, which helps companies to identify and manage their risk and compliance with data protection and security standards. LogicGate has not stated how the AWS credentials were compromised. LogicGate has not made any public statement about the breach.
Clubhouse is rapidly expanding access to payments, its first revenue-generating feature for creators, since its launch into testing earlier this month. At the beginning of April, Clubhouse said it would give a small test group of creators the ability to accept payments from their fans and supporters through the social audio app. Clubhouse this weekend rolled out payments to 60,000-plus users in the U.S.and it expects to have payments roll out to everyone over the next few weeks.
1Password acquires SecretHub and launches new enterprise secrets management tool. 1Password has not disclosed the price of the acquisition. 1Password is currently in use by more then 80,000 businesses worldwide. In addition to the acquisition 1Password has also announced a new partnership with GitHub.
Deeplite raises $6M seed to deploy ML. Deeplite, a startup based in Montreal, wants to change the way ML is provided at very high price by providing a way to reduce the overall size of the model, allowing it to run on hardware with far fewer resources.The investment was led by Boston-based venture capital firm PJC led the round, with help from Innospark Ventures, Differential Ventures and Smart Global Holdings. Somel Investments, BDC Capital and Desjardins Capital also participated.. .
Growth equity firm PSG has acquires a majority stake in Nalanda Global, a Spanish provider of supplier risk management software solutions to companies across 10 countries. The deal marks the eighth investment from PSG's Europe-focused fund, which closed on €1.25 billion in February.
Datadog Completes Acquisition of Sqreen. The acquisition will accelerate the way they build security tools that automate application protection, threat detection, and security monitoring.The closing of this deal will boost Datadog's existing APM functionality and move the company closer to providing customers with a robust, full-stack security monitoring solution for the cloud age.
NVIDIA and Global Computer Makers Launch Industry-Standard Enterprise Server Platforms for AI. NVIDIA and VMware’s collaboration provides customers an AI-ready enterprise platform to accelerate AI, container-based and traditional enterprise workloads. Among the first incorporating these systems into their data centres are Lockheed Martin and Mass General Brigham.
Commvault announces that Metallic Backup-as-a-Service solutions are now available in the UAE and wider Middle East region. The solutions include Metallic’s enterprise-grade offerings including Metallic Office 365 Backup and Recovery, Metallic Endpoint Backup and Recovery and Metallic Core Backup and Recovery. With this expanded availability, the firm claims that customers can now seamlessly address growing business concerns around cost, scalability, and security as they protect critical data.
SaaS security startup DoControl raises $10 million in Series A funding to help customers safeguard SaaS applications from Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, and others. Key financial backers include RTP Global, CrowdStrike Falcon Fund, StageOne Ventures and Cardumen Capital. DoControl is the latest in a growing list of security startups focused specifically on safeguarding SaaS applications.
Tiger Global goes super aggressive with Investments in India. The Early backer of Flipkart and Ola, Tiger Global is close to concluding over two dozen deals in India this year alone. The New York-headquartered firm, has recently closed a $6.7 billion fund. They last week led investments in social network ShareChat, business messaging platform Gupshup, and investment app Groww, and participated in fintech app CRED’s round, helping all of these startups attain the much sought after unicorn status.
Microsoft Corp. is in advanced talks to buy artificial intelligence and speech technology company Nuance Communications Inc. The price being discussed could value Nuance at about $56 a share. This would give Nuance an equity value of about $16 billion.
Google has confirmed that it’s ending support for the Google Shopping apps on Android and iOS. The focus is now more on Google web shopping. It comes as Google has been expanding shopping functionality in Search, Image Search, and YouTube, while increasingly leveraging augmented reality. This change lets Google conserve engineering resources.
Clubhouse data has been leaked, days after scraped data from more than a billion Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, was put for sale online. The upstart platform seems to have experienced the same fate, with an SQL database containing 1.3 million scraped Clubhouse user records leaked for free on a popular hacker forum. Clubhouse has responded saying they have not experienced a breach of their systems and said that the data is already publicly available and that it can be accessed via their API which raises some questions about the privacy stance of the company allowing for anyone to gather even public profile information on a mass scale.
Vi Business forays into integrated IoT, plans expansion of cloud services. The announcement from Vodafone Idea comes a day after Bharti Airtel announced the launch of Airtel IoT - an end-to-end platform with the capability to connect and manage billions of devices and applications. There are three specific fields Vi will be getting into. One IoT and integrated space. Second one is on collaboration which includes a host of SaaS and third will be cloud services. From being a traditional connectivity player, they will be connectivity plus collaboration plus IoT and integrated IoT and a cloud platform, said Kishore, chief enterprise business officer, Vi Business
Coupa Announces Strategic Partnership with Japan Cloud to Establish Coupa K.K. This joint venture will enable Coupa to scale to support the growing number of Japanese companies looking to gain greater efficiency and agility through Business Spend Management. Japan Cloud has a demonstrated track record of scaling U.S. enterprise software companies in the Japanese market, including Salesforce, Marketo, and most recently New Relic, BlackLine, WalkMe, nCino, and Braze.
IBM drives innovation with new Cloud for Financial Services. With the general availability of IBM Cloud for Financial Services, the financial services industry, including technology partners, can now build applications with Red Hat OpenShift, migrate virtual machine workloads, and establish compliance profiles across their workloads to help support their continuous compliance needs. Financial services institutions can now accelerate their cloud journeys with IBM Cloud for Financial Services' built-in security and compliance controls for both cloud-native and VMware workload.
Speciale Invest announces first close of second fund at ₹140 crore. Through the new fund raise, Speciale Invest expects to invest in about 18-20 startups in the space of enterprise software products, developers tools and frontier technologies
No-code publishing platform Shorthand raises $8M. Shorthand allows publishers and brands to create multimedia stories. The raise was led by Fortitude Investment Partners. The company also says that demand has only increased during the pandemic, with usage quadrupling in the fourth quarter of 2020 and subscription revenue up 8.8% month-over-month in February of this year.
Cleo Capital raises 20 million for its second fund. A recent SEC filing shows that Cleo Capital has already raised $6.7 million of that goal, bringing total assets under management to around $10 million. Like many firms, Cleo Capital has turned to creative measures to diversify deal flow in the era of Zoom investing and pandemic business. For example, Cleo Capital launched a fellowship program for laid-off workers during COVID-19 to promote entrepreneurship
FE International, Inc., the global market leader in mid-market technology mergers and acquisitions (M&A), announces the acquisition of Txt2Give, the first-of-its-kind mobile donation platform, by LTV SaaS Growth VII, LLC (LTV Fund).
A SaaS platform company in the Solar Power Industry, Prescinto, has raised $3.5M in seed funding. Prescinto is looking at revolutionizing the solar power industry by improving efficiency of solar plants using AI and Machine Learning driven platforms that will help Solar Plants identify their root issues for underperformance. The Funding round was led by Inflection Point Ventures along with Venture Catalysts, Mumbai Angels and Lets Venture. This infusion of finances will help realize Prescinto’s goals of improving Solar Power plants globally.
UK based Home Care SaaS company that uses Machine learning has raised £4.5 million pre-Series A funding. The funding round organized by West Hill Capital was 50% oversubscribed. The funds will be used to roll out Machine Learning enabled care solutions for those in independent living conditions to help in efficiency of care given.
As one of the most happening occurrences currently in the world, NFT marketplaces are exploding in popularity as collectors wade into the trading of nonfungible tokens on the blockchain. OpenSea, a startup in the field that was launched in 2017, has announced that it has bagged its latest funding round of $23M led by Andreessen Horowitz along with participation from other angels and firms including Naval Ravikant, Mark Cuban, Alexis Ohanian, Dylan Field and Linda Xie.
Slapdash, is seeking to increase performance in the workplace by aiming to carve out a new niche for itself among workplace software tools. Sources say that slapdash has raised $3.7 million in seed funding from investors that include S28 Capital, Quiet Capital, Quarry Ventures, UP2398 and Twenty Two Ventures. Angels participating in the round include co-founders at companies like Patreon, Docker and Zynga.
Kuda Technologies, has just announced that it has received $25M in Series A funds.
The round was led by Peter Theil’s, Valar Ventures, along with Target Global and other unnamed investors. Valar, a company that has invested in a number of fintech startups, is funding an African Startup for the first time. Kuda had raised a seed round of $10M led by Target Global just four months ago and is estimated to be the largest ever seed round raised by a startup out of Africa. Kuda’s CEO, Ogundeyi said in an interview that they plan to use the new funds to continue expanding its credit offerings, and add more integrations as well as move into other markets.
Fortify raises $20 M in Series B funding towards its composite manufacturing 3D Printing. Other companies in the field including Markforged, Desktop Metal and new-comer Mantel have all made big announcements recently. Now Fortify is making the round with a significant raise of a $20 million dollar Series B equity round. This round was led by Cota Capital with participation from Accel Partners, Neotribe Ventures and Prelude Ventures.
Founded in 2018, Fort Robotics today announced a $13 million raise. Led by Prime Movers Lab, the round also features Prologis Ventures, Quiet Capital, Lemnos Labs, Creative Ventures, Ahoy Capital, Compound, FundersClub and Mark Cuban.
Airtable has bagged its Series E funding to push it’s valuation to $5.77B. Airtable, with more than 200,000 organisational customers is a no-code relational database that has announced the close of $270 million in Series E funding. This funding round has doubled the valuation of the company from its last round in September 2020 when it raised $185 million in Series D funding. This latest funding amount means that Airtable has raised approximately $617 million since inception. This latest round was led by Greenoaks Capital, with participation from WndrCo, as well as existing investors Caffeinated Capital, CRV and Thrive. The company says it plans to use the funding to accelerate the development of its enterprise product and growing the team.
Dubai-based company Grubtech has raised $3.4 million in pre-Series A funding for its software platform that helps ghost kitchens and delivery-only restaurants. The investors are yet to be confirmed, however, a large regional family and a US Based Venture capital firm along with Investors seem to be most likely to match. They are looking to use the new funding to expand across the MENA region as well as Europe and the Americas. They are also looking to use the funding to develop their product. Built specifically for cloud kitchen operations or restaurants that are multi-brand but operate from a single kitchen, the epidemic has forced many to adopt Grub-Tech, as the majority of sales moved from over the counter to delivery or pickup orders.
iCrowdNewswire powered by Google launched a fully reworked and revamped SaaS platform including industry leading vertical newswires for Legal, Real Estate, Research Marketing, Content Marketing, and general press release distribution. Since shaking hands with Google in 2017, icrowdnewswire has become the prominent press release distribution tech company focusing on paid advertising distribution from a Geographic perspective.
Signiant Inc. today announced the acquisition of the German company Lesspain Software, the provider of Kyno the desktop application and embedded media processing software. Signiant looks forward to tapping into Lesspain’s talent and technology, which would be used to extend Signiant’s Software Defined Content Exchange SaaS Platform, commonly known as SDCX. The software connects more than 50,000 media and Entertainment companies across the globe in varying sizes.
The startup, UpCodes, which develops building-code compliance tools, has announced today that it has raised pre-series A funding, totaling $3.36 million dollars. The company has now raised $4.15 million as funding since its inception. Having started their journey in 2016, they took part in Y Combinator’s accelerator program in 2017. This new round was led by Point Nine Capital, a Berlin-based company that primarily invests in online marketplaces and SaaS products. Other investors include the co-founder Ryan Sutton-Fee, Ralph Gootee, Tracy Young, and Kenny Stone; Bragiel Brothers; Capital X; Flex Capital and liquid 2 Ventures.
Indian based Tata Consultancy Services or also known as TCS has announced the launch of it’s SaaS-based automatic suite of security services for cognitive threat management, identity and access management, governance, risk and compliance, data privacy and protection, digital forensics, and incident response. Board-level executives, as well as C-suite’s, can get real-time insights to review and fine-tune their risk strategies.
Otarkie, a Zimbabwean startup has launched a SaaS platform focusing on retailers seeking omni-channel ways to sell online. Otarkie, aim’s to support potential customers and headless e-commerce to launch and manage their own retail operations across multiple sales channels with a singular back end office. Customers can pick and integrate modules based on their requirements as well, which helps them integrate and transition into the platform smoothly. Otarkie is looking to address a gap in the market where payment gateways and solutions are not catered to the local market, which is Southern Africa. The company looks to expand its operations into neighbouring Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zambia.
SaaS Alerts, a company that was started in 2020 has raised $1.2 million in early stage seed funding. The company’s CEO mentioned that they wanted to reach out and get investors from the MSP software and IT services industry that they have succeeded in. The investor line up includes Gary Pica a former owner, David Bellini the co-founder of ConnectOn, Adam Slutskin the CRO at Liongard, Paul Cissel former CEO of Internet & Telephone, Pete Peterson CEO of Merit Solutions, Kevin Lancaster Executive VP of Kaseya, Paul Brady CEO of Gtms, John Barrows CEO of JBarrows Sales training and Michael France, Managing Partner at Taylor Business Group. The funding arrives at a key time for SaaS Alerts and the MSP software industry as a whole.
VERB Technology Company, Inc. today announced that CEO Rory Cutaia is presenting at the Emerging Growth Conference on Wednesday, March 17, to a live, online audience. VERB, a rapidly emerging market leader in business-focused interactive video sales and marketing tools, including livestream ecommerce, CRM, and content management applications makes software-as-a-service (SaaS) products that are cloud-based, accessible on all mobile and desktop devices, and are available by subscription for individual and enterprise users. Rory’s presentation will highlight the Company’s SaaS sales enablement solutions and its interactive video technology.
Stripe is looking to use the funds to expand their European business and focus on their European HeadQuarters. It is looking to bolster its treasury network and global payments as well. The funding round was backed by the likes of Allianz X fund, Axa, both from the insurance world as well as Baillie Gifford, Fidelity, Sequoia and Investors from Ireland, namely Ireland's National Treasury Management Agency.
ESB, an Indonesian based company has just raised US$3 million in a series A funding. This funding round was led by Beenext, AC Ventures and Skystar Capital. ESB is looking to use part of its latest round of funding to onboard suppliers for their B2B supply chain. During the Lockdown of last year, ESB launched a delivery platform that helped companies offer contactless dining and deliver independently. They completely outmatched their competition by competitively pricing their offering. The platform became the buzz when it onboarded 20 Million annual orders for customers within just 6 months.
Credit Suisse reports that India has 100 startup unicorns and not just the often mentioned number of 30-35. The report states that over 60% of these companies were started after 2005. These unicorns cover various sectors however, SaaS companies though classified as non-conventional companies, are ranked as some of the fastest growing industries in the country.
Indian Startups seems to have taken the lead in the most number of companies funded, with a total of 19 startups that have raised funding. Many of these are SaaS companies. 196 Million dollars was pushed to 16 of the 19 companies. Of these companies, Icertis raked in approximately $80 Million followed by Ecom Express at about $40 Million Dollars. Other companies that were funded include Quizizz, Riskcovry, Awfis and Nordwin to name but a few. The complete list of companies will be shared in our post on Linkedin. Of the 19 companies funded, 3 companies are yet to disclose the amounts.
Israeli company, Optibus picks up $107M for an AI-based planning and operations platform aimed at the mass transportation sector. Mass transportation is an essential part of how metropolitan areas are kept moving and connected. Optibus is a platform that helps to analyze how vehicles and people move in and around cities so as to provide scheduling, navigation and driver rostering towards mass transportation providers. The company has raised $107M as Series C funding and it looks to expand its solutions and services with the infusion of the funds. Though the valuation of the company has not been announced yet, it is estimated that Optibus is valued at nearly $500 Million dollars after this round of funding which boosts it by nearly 4 times its previous valuation and round from 2018.
Valor Ventures Fund 2 has announced a $1.75 million Series Seed funding of Allelica, Inc. Valor General Partner Gary Peat joins the Allelica board of directors. The round, led by Valor Ventures also had Pi Campus, an AI-focused venture fund and Medical Genetics Center (MGZ), a prestigious genetics research institution, as strategic investors.
SailPoint Technologies has announced that it is going to acquire ERP Maestro, a SaaS Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Solution. SailPoint is looking to use ERP Maestro’s flexible agile approach to automate and ensure robust monitoring for an organisations’ most complex business critical systems. With ERP Maestro, the company will unite identity security with ERP Maestro’s Separation-of-Duty controls monitoring for an organization’s most critical applications, like SAP.
Privacera has recently announced a successful funding round. They raised $50 million in a Series B funding round where Insight Partners led the funding round. In May of last year, the solution provider had already raised Series A funding round for $13.5 million. The latest investment was led by Insight Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Battery Ventures, and earlier investors.
According to Gartner’s forecasts, SaaS revenues are set to grow from $121 billion in 2021 to $141 billion in 2022. The SaaS economy has been steadily growing with more companies offering their products or services under the software-as-a-service model. The one issue that SaaS companies face is getting better qualified Leads in an uphill battle to ensure they can onboard as many clients as possible in the shortest time, thus keeping costs to a minimum. The latest trend shows organizations turning to AI to automate these processes that would usually take us a longer period to attend so that time to customer acquisition is reduced significantly. AI helps them not only speed up their process, but also helps filter and qualify leads so that the sales team works at a higher efficiency.
SaaS startup Icertis raises $80 million in Series F funding; valuation triples to $2.8 billion. This year's funding was led by existing investor B Capital Group, with participation from Greycroft, Meritech Capital Partners, Premji Invest, PSP Growth, and e.ventures.The company will use this funding to invest in accelerating its AI and Blockchain development, expanding its sales and marketing footprint, and building out its global partner network. It also has plans to expand across Japan, South East Asia, and northern Europe. The funding round makes Icertis the second most valuable SaaS unicorn in the Indian startup circuit after Freshworks, which was valued at $3.5 billion in their last funding round in 2020.
Pipe Raises $50 Million Through Latest Investment Round Led By Raptor Group & Siemens Next47Pipe stated it gives SaaS companies access to the full annual value of their subscriptions, upfront. Since launching its SaaS financing platform in February 2020, Pipe claims it has seen overwhelming demand from early and growth-stage SaaS companies. Speaking about the platform, Harry Hurst, Co-Founder, and Co-CEO of Pipe stated: “When we were approached by such incredible companies with aligned missions to form partnerships, the conversations quickly evolved. We felt it made sense to have the broader ecosystem that powers growth-oriented companies join forces to invest together in the future of revenue as a tradable asset class.”
Legl gets $7M to help law firms upgrade to digital workflows. B2B SaaS startup Legl has bagged $7M in Series A funding led by Octopus Ventures for its platform for law firms which offers tools to streamline core business processes such as customer onboarding, due diligence, and payments. The UK startup was founded just over a year ago by Julia Salasky, a lawyer by background, who previously founded the public interest legal crowdsourcing campaign platform, CrowdJustice.Legl says it’s now working with around 100 UK-based law firms, including around a dozen of the top 200. Series A will be used to expand Legl’s team and grow its UK user base as well as for further development of the product.
Oracle, a leading integrated cloud applications and platform services provider, is looking to strengthen their presence in China and to do that, have decided to collaborate with iClick Interactive Asia Group limited. iClick is a Chinese independent online marketing and enterprise data solutions provider and a member of Oracle Partner Network. This collaboration will help Oracle to launch tailored SaaS offering that will empower brands to better serve and connect with consumers.
Mainspring Services, a Title and escrow software company announced the release of their SaaS Platform, “titleLOOK”. This Platform streamlines your title production process. The first SaaS product by the company, titleLOOK addresses a major pain point for lenders, underwriters and consumers. The software will help users automatically publish preliminary documentation and reports which can then be shared with customers and stakeholders instantly.
The Governance, Risk and Compliance giant, Diligent Corporation, that is used by nearly 19,000 clients, has announced that it will be acquiring Galvanize, a global leader in SaaS GRC software. Diligent Corporation has signed a contract towards this, however, the financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. This transaction follows Diligent’s planned acquisition of Steele Compliance Solutions Inc. a leader in ethics and compliance SaaS, which was signed earlier this year in February. Both these transactions are expected to come to a conclusion in March. With this acquisition, Diligent will become the largest SaaS GRC provider globally.
ThinkIQ, a pioneer of digital manufacturing transformation SaaS, today announced an expansion in their suite. The new SaaS solutions by the manufacturing platform, features four new areas of data functionality, included with ThinkIQ's Visualize, Insight, Transform and Enterprise solutions. This will help manufacturers make sense of data surfacing actions that enhance safety, reliability and efficiency. The new platform components integrate with existing IoT infrastructure to help manage everything from supply chains to manufacturing processes and beyond.
Networking giant Cisco is looking to invest $3 million to $5 million in Indian enterprise SaaS start-ups for a minority stake. The company has a portfolio of about 10 start-ups that it has already invested in directly or through investment partnerships with VC funds.Whatfix, Videonetics, Mobikwik, Mobstac and CloudCherry are some of the start-ups in its portfolio in India.
Tackle.io, a software company dedicated to helping software providers generate revenue through the Cloud Marketplaces, today announced it has raised $35 million in Series B funding, in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners. This round of funding will be used to further Tackle’s platform innovation and mission to transform the experience of selling and buying enterprise software.
Vindicia, part of the AmdocsMedia Division and a provider in business-to-consumer digital services monetisation, has extended its long-standing engagement with Vimeo.Vindicia provides Vimeo with a complete subscription management and retention solution to maximise customer lifetime value and business agility.
Sydney-based SaaS provider Alcami Interactive has been acquired by US-based Criteria, a SaaS people analytics platform vendor.
Alcami was founded by chief executive Jane Bianchini in 2014 and provides an on-demand video interviewing platform.
Security firm McAfee announced this morning that it will be selling its enterprise business to a consortium led by the private equity firm Symphony Technology Group for $4 billion.McAfee President and Chief Executive Officer Peter Leav says that his company has decided to direct the firm’s resources to the consumer side of the business. “This transaction will allow McAfee to singularly focus on our consumer business and to accelerate our strategy to be a leader in personal security for consumers,” he said in a statement.
The New York based company, Olo, that provides a SaaS platform to restaurants for online ordering and delivery, has announced the terms for its IPO. Olo is looking to raise $306 million by offering 18 million shares at a price range of $16 to $18. Olo would have a fully diluted market value of $3.1 billion at the midpoint of the proposed range. By the end of last year, Chilli’s, Wingstop, Shake shack were all using Olo’s platform for their business’. Olo helps restaurants with an enterprise grade saas platform to manage their digital business’K2fly, a new type of global software company that delivers enterprise-wide technical assurance solutions for environment, social and governance (ESG) performance has announced that it has closed a 5-year resource inventory management software SaaS contract with Coeur Mining Inc. which will be rolled out to all five of its locations. Coeur is a precious metals mining company listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
Survey Sparrow, An Omni-channel Experience Management Platform, decided to go the extra mile as part of their women’s day recruitment initiative. They announced a joining bonus of 50,000 rupees (Just over 700 dollars) to women who have applied for jobs in product development, quality assurance and technical writing roles on or before March 15 and ready to join the company by April 15th. They are looking to fill up to 50 vacancies. CEO of Survey Sparrow said that as a company, they have tried to bridge the gender gap in the organisation and hope this initiative will help them reach a 50:50 ratio from the current 70:30 favouring men at the moment.
SaaS And Enterprise Software Veteran Lisa Schreiber joins BlackLine as chief customer officer. With over 20 years experience in SaaS and Enterprise Software, the company is looking towards Lisa to oversee it’s Implementation, Strategic Innovation, Customer Success, Support and Training teams as the accounting automation software leader continues to transform the way Finance and Accounting departments work.
Vendr has announced a $60 million Series A funding round. This funding round was led by Tiger Global, along with existing investors, Y Combinator, Sound Ventures, Craft Ventures, F-Prime Capital and Garage Capital. This comes after Vendr has successfully raised a Seed round of just over 6 Million Dollars by the middle of 2020.
Over 6500 servers of the enterprise software VMware are currently exposed due to a security vulnerability. This vulnerability exposes servers and allows malware to be slipped into unpatched devices to take over companies’ entire networks. The situation has been classified as “Highly Critical” and was reported to VMware, who have released official patches and are urging all customers to update their systems as soon as possible.
Salesforce has been getting into a string of amazing investments over the last financial year.They have declared a whopping 2.17-Billion-dollar gain on Investments made. This is primarily due to investments in companies like snowflake and nCino. Snowflake had an amazing Q4 where their revenue rose by 117% raking in 190 Million dollars.
Tel Aviv based payroll and management cloud platform company, Papaya Global, raised its Series C funding round of over $100 Million last week. This brings their valuation to over $1Billion dollars. In total, Papaya has now raised $190 million from Series B and C since October last year. Papaya will use the new funding to meet the strong demand for its global workforce management platform, reinforce its market leadership, as well as invest in its product, engineering and go-to-market teams.
Austin Texas based company, Jungle Scout, raised $110m in growth funding led by Summit Partners and Jungle Scout Founder & CEO Greg Mercer. The company intends to use the funds to expand its technology suite by acquiring Seattle-based Downstream Impact, an Amazon advertising technology company founded by former Amazon employees Connor and Salim in 2017. This acquisition is aimed at extending Jungle Scout’s SaaS platform to support Walmart, and continue to scale its capabilities in advertising and full-scale ecommerce brand management.
Having moved over the last 5 years from a hardware company to a hardware-enabled SaaS platform, Airtame has a change in leadership. With Co-founder and CEO Jonas Gyalokay moving on to become the chairman of the board, Current CFO, Martin Wagner will fill his boots and take over as CEO of the company. Martin said, and I quote “With a strategic mindset and sharp operational management, we’re now preparing to fulfill our growth potential in a post-COVID world, where schools will return and businesses will reopen. I look forward to leading the team as we prepare for an exciting year ahead”.
The Irish-American financial services and SaaS company, known to help startups and enterprises alike to accept payments and manage their online business has struck a deal with Atlassian. Atlassian, known for its project management tool Jira and collaboration tools Trello and Confluence, help large numbers of companies to stay organised and focused. In a strategic effort to serve customers better, their CIO Archana Rao said in an announcement that, and I Quote, “We’re leaving all things payments to Stripe so our teams remain focused on strengthening our unique sales motion to bring products to markets for our customers,”
By exploiting a set of flaws in Microsoft’s Exchange software to break into email accounts and read messages without authorization, A network of Chinese hackers are suspected of hacking thousands of emails. Small businesses, government offices and schools in the U.S. as well as state and local governments were affected as a result of the targeted hack. The flaws further allowed the hackers to install unauthorized software on systems.
In Mergers and Acquisitions, Canadian company, Wecommerce is acquiring Stamped, a Singapore-based startup known for software that lets online sellers implement loyalty programs and manage customer reviews, for 110 million Dollars. WeCommerce is a listed Canadian company worth over $700 million that owns several Shopify-related services and softwares.
Co-founder of Optimizely Dan Siroker has a new startup and it transcribes what you say in your Zoom meeting. The startup is called Scribe, and though it is currently only available with Zoom, Dan and the team are looking to get it working with Google Meet and Microsoft teams and other meeting apps. Their goal, to get a “hive mind” set up for organisations, where ideas and thoughts that are voiced can be searched.
SaaS subscriptions make and take an all-time high over the last year while funding of Indian unicorns has doubled over the last year.
Ireland-based online learning company Olive Group has acquired Thiruvananthapuram-based edtech SaaS platform Ofabee for an undisclosed amount in yet another international acquisition of an Indian enterprise tech startup. We also cover Highland cloud, SPAC, and Quest's funding.