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Adaptive Shield raises $4M for its SaaS security platform

This post is by Frederic Lardinois from SaaS – TechCrunch


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Adaptive Shield, a Tel Aviv-based security startup, is coming out of stealth today and announcing its $4 million seed round led by Vertex Ventures Israel. The company’s platform helps businesses protect their SaaS applications by regularly scanning their various setting for security issues.

The company’s co-founders met in the Israeli Defense Forces, where they were trained on cybersecurity, and then worked at a number of other security companies before starting their own venture. Adaptive Shield CEO Maor Bin, who previously led cloud research at Proofpoint, told me the team decided to look at SaaS security because they believe this is an urgent problem few other companies are addressing.

Pictured is a representative sample of nine apps being monitored by the Adaptive Shield platform, including the total score of each application, affected categories and affected security frameworks and standards. (Image Credits: Adaptive Shield)

“When you look at the problems that Continue reading "Adaptive Shield raises $4M for its SaaS security platform"
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Emergence’s Jason Green thinks some of the tech backlash is justified, but the B2B opportunities still outweigh the challenges

This post is by Ingrid Lunden from SaaS – TechCrunch


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Jason Green, co-founder and partner at Emergence, is one of the leading VCs investing in enterprise startups at the moment. But even with the focus on B2B, many of their companies have become household names — Zoom, Yammer, Box and Salesforce among them.

Now, we’re all living in a climate where everything has been turned upside down. Meetings are virtual, the future economy and collective health of the world are unknowns, and being an investor — or a founder — comes with completely new parameters and rules of engagement. We sat down with Green for an enlightening hour to talk about the challenges of all that, plus making deals, running a business, and suddenly finding your quiet, B2B name being turned into a verb. It was an interesting conversation, worth a read for enterprise startups and investors, but — similar to how B2B can spill into consumer — equally insightful Continue reading "Emergence’s Jason Green thinks some of the tech backlash is justified, but the B2B opportunities still outweigh the challenges"
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Dell’s debt hangover from $67B EMC deal could put VMware stock in play

This post is by Ron Miller from SaaS – TechCrunch


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When Dell bought EMC in 2016 for $67 billion it was one of the biggest acquisitions in tech history, and it brought with it a boatload of debt. Since then Dell has been working on ways to mitigate that debt by selling off various pieces of the corporate empire and going public again, but one of its most valuable assets remains VMware, a company that came over as part of the huge EMC deal.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Dell is considering selling part of its stake in VMware. The news sent the stock of both companies soaring. It’s important to understand that even though VMware is part of the Dell family, it runs as a separate company, with its own stock and operations, just as it did when it was part of EMC. Still, Dell owns 81% of that stock, so it could sell a Continue reading "Dell’s debt hangover from $67B EMC deal could put VMware stock in play"
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Slack announces Connect, an improved way for companies to talk to one another

This post is by Alex Wilhelm from SaaS – TechCrunch


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Virtual events are the new norm for product rollouts in 2020, with Slack taking to the internet earlier today to talk about a new part of its service called Slack Connect.

On the heels of Apple’s lengthy and pretty good virtual WWDC that took place earlier this week, Slack’s event, part experiment and part press conference, was called to detail the firm’s new Slack Connect capability, which will allow companies to better link together and communicate inside of their Slack instance than what was possible with its shared channels feature. The product was described inside of a business-to-business context, including examples about companies needing to chat with agencies and other external vendors. In its most basic form, Slack is well-known for internal chat functionality, helping teams talk amongst themselves. Slack Connect appears to be a progression past that idea, pushing internal communications tooling to allow companies to plug their private comms Continue reading "Slack announces Connect, an improved way for companies to talk to one another"
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11 VCs share their thoughts on enterprise startup trends and opportunities

This post is by Ron Miller from SaaS – TechCrunch


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Compared to other tech firms, enterprise companies have held up well during the pandemic.

If anything, the problems enterprises were facing prior to the economic downturn have become even more pronounced; if you were thinking about moving to the cloud or just dabbling in it, you’re probably accelerating that motion. If you were trying to move off of legacy systems, that has become even more imperative. And if you were attempting to modernize processes and workflows, whether engineer- and developer-related, or across other parts of the organization, chances are good that you are giving that a much closer look. We won’t be locked down forever and employees will eventually return to offices, but it’s likely that many companies will take the lessons they learned during this era and put them to work inside their organizations. Startups are uniquely positioned to help companies solve these new modern kinds of problems, much Continue reading "11 VCs share their thoughts on enterprise startup trends and opportunities"
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BetterCloud scores $75M Series F as SaaS management needs grow

This post is by Ron Miller from SaaS – TechCrunch


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BetterCloud gives IT visibility into its SaaS tools providing the means to discover, manage and secure those tools. In the middle of a crisis that has forced most companies to move workers home, being able to manage SaaS usage in this way is growing increasingly significant.

Today the company announced a $75 million Series F. Warburg Pincus led the way with participation from existing investors Bain Capital Ventures, Accel, Greycroft Partners, Flybridge Capital Partners, New Amsterdam Growth Capital and e.ventures. Today’s round brings the total raised to $187 million, according to the company. While CEO David Politis acknowledges the gravity of the current situation, he also recognizes that giving companies a way to manage their SaaS usage is more pertinent than ever. “What has happened in the last two months has been terrible for the world, but in some crazy way it has just made what we do a Continue reading "BetterCloud scores $75M Series F as SaaS management needs grow"
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Checkly raises $2.25M seed round for its monitoring and testing platform

This post is by Frederic Lardinois from SaaS – TechCrunch


Click here to view on the original site: Original Post



Checkly, a Berlin-based startup that is developing a monitoring and testing platform for DevOps teams, today announced that it has raised a $2.25 million seed round led by Accel. A number of angel investors, including Instana CEO Mirko Novakovic, Zeit CEO Guillermo Rauch and former Twilio CTO Ott Kaukver, also participated in this round.

The company’s SaaS platform allows developers to monitor their API endpoints and web apps — and it obviously alerts you when something goes awry. The transaction monitoring tool makes it easy to regularly test interactions with front-end websites without having to actually write any code. The test software is based on Google’s open-source Puppeteer framework and to build its commercial platform, Checkly also developed Puppeteer Recorder for creating these end-to-end testing scripts in a low-code tool that developers access through a Chrome extension.
The team believes that it’s the combination of end-to-end testing and
Continue reading "Checkly raises $2.25M seed round for its monitoring and testing platform"
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Checkly raises $2.25M seed round for its monitoring and testing platform

This post is by Frederic Lardinois from SaaS – TechCrunch


Click here to view on the original site: Original Post



Checkly, a Berlin-based startup that is developing a monitoring and testing platform for DevOps teams, today announced that it has raised a $2.25 million seed round led by Accel. A number of angel investors, including Instana CEO Mirko Novakovic, Zeit CEO Guillermo Rauch and former Twilio CTO Ott Kaukver, also participated in this round.

The company’s SaaS platform allows developers to monitor their API endpoints and web apps — and it obviously alerts you when something goes awry. The transaction monitoring tool makes it easy to regularly test interactions with front-end websites without having to actually write any code. The test software is based on Google’s open-source Puppeteer framework and to build its commercial platform, Checkly also developed Puppeteer Recorder for creating these end-to-end testing scripts in a low-code tool that developers access through a Chrome extension.
The team believes that it’s the combination of end-to-end testing and
Continue reading "Checkly raises $2.25M seed round for its monitoring and testing platform"
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Talking venture, B2B and thesis-driven investment with Work-Bench’s Jon Lehr

This post is by Alex Wilhelm from SaaS – TechCrunch


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Earlier this week, the Equity crew caught up with Work-Bench investor Jon Lehr to get his take on the current market, and how his firm goes about making investment decisions.

The conversation was a treat, so we cut a piece of it off for everyone to listen to. The full audio and a loose transcript are also available after the jump. What did Danny and Alex learn while talking to Lehr? A few things, including what Seed II-level investments need these days to be attractive (Hint: It’s not a raw ARR threshold), and what’s going on in SaaS today (deals slowing, but not for select founders; relationships are key to doing deals today), and why being a VC is actually work. But what stood out the most was how Lehr thinks about finding investment opportunities. While some VCs like to cultivate images of being gut-investors, cutting checks based on first Continue reading "Talking venture, B2B and thesis-driven investment with Work-Bench’s Jon Lehr"
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What Nutanix got right (and wrong) in its IPO roadshow

This post is by Ron Miller from SaaS – TechCrunch


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Back in 2016, Nutanix decided to take the big step of going public. Part of that process was creating a pitch deck and presenting it during its roadshow, a coming-out party when a company goes on tour prior to its IPO and pitches itself to investors of all stripes.

It’s a huge moment in the life of any company, and after talking to CEO Dheeraj Pandey and CFO Duston Williams, one we better understood. They spoke about how every detail helped define their company and demonstrate its long-term investment value to investors who might not have been entirely familiar with the startup or its technology. Pandey and Williams reported going through more than 100 versions of the deck before they finished the one they took on the road. Pandey said they had a data room checking every fact, every number — which they then checked yet again. In a Continue reading "What Nutanix got right (and wrong) in its IPO roadshow"