The week gone by continued the frenetic pace of funding activities in the SaaS space, and there was some significant news otherwise as well. So, without wasting any more time, let’s just jump right in.
Table of Contents
News
Zoom makes a ton of announcements at Zoomtopia, including an event marketplace and apps for Zoom
Zoom held its all-virtual event dubbed Zoomtopia earlier last week. The video conferencing software has been on a tear amidst the pandemic, and it’s bringing more features to maintain its dominance. Along with the rollout of the end-to-end encryption to free and paid users worldwide, the company introduced Zapps (apps for Zoom) with support for apps like Asana, Box, PagerDuty, and more, which can be accessed directly from Zoom. It has also launched OnZoom, an event marketplace where paid Zoom users can create, host, and monetize events like online classes, concerts, fundraisers, and more.
Atlassian Smarts adds machine learning layer across the company’s platform of services
Atlassian has a slew of collaboration software on offer, and now it’s bringing the machine learning smarts to all of them (literally indeed) with Smarts. The aim of the feature is to speed up repetitive, time-intensive tasks.
The latest on Google Hangouts and the upgrade to Google Chat
While it comes as no surprise (for those who’ve been following Google closely and its habit of rebranding or retiring products), it certainly is baffling for the end users. The search giant has now announced that it’ll be moving Google Hangout users to Google Chat next year.
ServiceNow, IBM to integrate Watson AIOps, IT service management
ITSM software ServiceNow has announced that it’s integrating IBM’s Watson software to automate IT operations. As part of the partnership, the companies will launch a software users ServiceNow’s IT Service Management data to train Watston AIops algorithms.
Celonis acquires Integromat, an industry leading online automation platform
Celonis, an Execution Management System (EMS), has acquired Czech startup Integromat for over $100million. Often dubbed as an enterprise version of Zapier, Integromat has more than 375,000 users and is growing at 400\% y-o-y.
Related read: Interview with Arpit Choudhury, Head of Growth at Integromat
Exclusive: SoftBank in talks to back SaaS startup Mindtickle, valuation to double in a year
Sales enablement software Mindtickle is reportedly in discussion with Softbank for leading a $100million round. This would take the valuation of the company to $500-600million, twice of what it was last year.
SaaS funding
Kahoot picks up $215million from SoftBank for its user-generated, gamified e-learning platform
Gamification platform Kahoot has closed a $215million funding round from Softbank. The company has been growing quite fast amidst the ongoing crisis, and announced a revenue of $11.6million in Q3, which is 240\% more than the same period last year.
Announcing Razorpay’s $100million Series D funding
Payment gateway software Razorpay has raised $100million Series D financing. Led by GIC and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, the company has now become a unicorn.
Snapdocs raises $60million to manage the mortgage process in the cloud
Snapdocs, a product used by over 130,000 real estate professionals to manage the mortgage process and other paperwork which is concerned with buying a home in the US, has received a $60million funding. The Series C financing was led by YC Continuity.
Multicloud networking startup Alkira raises $54million funding round
Alkira, a startup that offers networking-as-a-service, has gotten $54million Series B funding. Billing itself as a “unified, on-demand multicloud offering”, Alkira, connects companies to their public cloud providers and then those providers to each other, which ensures efficient data exchange.
Apiiro aims to weed out risky code with $35million A Round
Tel Aviv and New York-based Apiiro has nabbed a $35million Series A funding from Kleiner Perkins and Greylock. The company helps organizations find insecure code and risky application development practices.
Nuvemshop, a Latin American answer to Shopify, raises $30 million
With the world moving towards online sales, it’s not only Shopify that’s raking in the moolah. Latin America’s Nuvemshop has raised $30million led by Qualcomm Ventures, and it’ll be investing the money in launching a payment processing and logistics gateway solution.
Enterprise AI software co BlackSwan raises $28million
Only time will tell whether it’s playing with buzzwords or there’s some weight behind the idea of “the world’s first enterprise AI operating system”, but the company behind the same has gotten $28million funding to make this a reality. BlackSwan claims that it’ll disrupt the enterprise software market by enabling its users to leverage the advanced AI for operational efficiency and data-driven decision making.
Must reads
Twilio’s $3.2B Segment acquisition is about helping developers build data-fueled apps
The inside story of how Trello’s marketing team evolved after the Atlassian acquisition
Listen to
A guide to SaaS customer success: reduce churn & grow revenue – with Nick Mehta
Gainsight coined the term customer success, but if you’re wondering what exactly it means and why should you care about it, then this episode acts as a primer. Listen to Gainsight’s CEO Nick Mehta talk about how businesses can retain customers and drive growth.
How to approach core product decisions in SaaS, why storytelling is a lost art in SaaS & how product and marketing can work together most efficiently with Paul Rosania, Founder & CEO @ Balsa
Balsa is SaaS startup that’s building a second screen for builders by integration tools like Jira, GitHub, and Figma. It just came out of stealth and announced its seed round. In this podcast, its founder and CEO Paul Rosania shares his journey to start a company, how companies approach product decisions, bottoms-up vs top down approach and more.
The journey to build a large, profitable business with Aleem Mawani of Streak
Streak, a CRM tool purpose-built for Gmail, has an unusual story. The company raised some money during its inception, but then instead of raising more, its founder Aleem Mawani aimed to build a large and profitable software business. In this episode, he shares his insights, how the company evolved over the years and more.
Check out
The B2B SaaS pricing masterclass
Pricing is among the most contentious issues in the SaaS industry. Should your product be freemium, should it charge per month / per user, or should the pricing be on other parameters? Well, it’s not easy to decide that, and that’s why this guide acts as a quintessential resource for deciding the pricing strategy.
