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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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).

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.

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.