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Distru, a maker of supply chain software for the cannabis industry, has raised $3 million led by Felicis

This post is by Connie Loizos from SaaS – TechCrunch


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Distru, a nearly three-year-old, Oakland-based startup whose platform aims to help track cannabis through its seed-to-sale process, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Felicis Ventures, with participation from Village Global, Global Founders Capital, and numerous notable angel investors, including Elad Gil, Katie Stanton, and Avichal Garg.

The deal is an interesting one for numerous reasons, including that it marks Felicis’s first investment in the cannabis space after many months spent looking at a wide array of related startups, says Niki Pezeshki, a principal with the firm. Indeed, though interest in cannabis-related products and services is growing among traditional venture firms as a growing number of states move to legalize and regulate marijuana, there’s lingering concern about what will happen and when at the federal level. Distru is also entering into a space that tech investors can grok: it’s a software as a service company, one Continue reading "Distru, a maker of supply chain software for the cannabis industry, has raised $3 million led by Felicis"
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CEO Jennifer Tejada just took PagerDuty public; we talked now about the roadshow, the IPO, and what comes next

This post is by Connie Loizos from SaaS – TechCrunch


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PagerDuty debuted on the New York Stock Exchange today, and as we type, shares of the nine-year-old, San Francisco-based incident response software company are trading at nearly $39.

That’s up more than 60 percent above their IPO range of $24 per share, which was itself adjusted from the range of $21 to $23 that had been expected earlier and gives the company a valuation of close to $3 billion. That’s an awful lot for a company whose software helps technical teams at 11,000 companies spot problems with applications and respond to incidents. Though it’s growing quickly — revenue was up 48 percent last year  — it still pulled in just $117.8 million in 2018. Meanwhile, its net loss widened last year to $40.7 million from $38.1 million in 2017. Certainly, its performance has to make the company’s investors —  who last assigned the company a valuation of Continue reading "CEO Jennifer Tejada just took PagerDuty public; we talked now about the roadshow, the IPO, and what comes next"
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CEO Jennifer Tejada just took PagerDuty public; we talked about the roadshow, the IPO and what comes next

This post is by Connie Loizos from SaaS – TechCrunch


Click here to view on the original site: Original Post



PagerDuty debuted on the New York Stock Exchange today, and as we type, shares of the nine-year-old, San Francisco-based incident response software company are trading at nearly $39.

That’s up more than 60 percent above their IPO range of $24 per share, which was itself adjusted from the range of $21 to $23 that had been expected earlier and gives the company a valuation of close to $3 billion. That’s an awful lot for a company whose software helps technical teams at 11,000 companies spot problems with applications and respond to incidents. Though it’s growing quickly — revenue was up 48 percent last year — it still pulled in just $117.8 million in 2018. Meanwhile, its net loss widened last year, to $40.7 million from $38.1 million in 2017. Certainly, its performance has to make the company’s investors — who last assigned the company a valuation of Continue reading "CEO Jennifer Tejada just took PagerDuty public; we talked about the roadshow, the IPO and what comes next"
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Moka raises $27M led by Hillhouse to make hiring more data-driven in China

This post is by Rita Liao from SaaS – TechCrunch


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Moka, a startup that wants to make talent acquisition a little more data-driven for China-based companies that range from smartphone giant Xiaomi to Burger King’s local business, announced Monday that it has raised a 180 million yuan ($27 million) Series B round of funding.

The deal was led by Hillhouse Capital, an investor in top Chinese technology companies such as Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Pinduoduo — just to name a few. Other investors who took part include Xianghe Capital, an investment firm founded by two former Baidu executives, Chinese private equity firm GSR Ventures and GGV Capital. Moka claims more than 500 enterprise customers were paying for its services by the end of 2018. Other notable clients are McDonalds and one of China’s top livestreaming services YY. It plans to use its new capital to hire staff, build new products and expand the scope of its business. Founded Continue reading "Moka raises $27M led by Hillhouse to make hiring more data-driven in China"
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Moka raises $27M led by Hillhouse to make hiring more data-driven in China

This post is by Rita Liao from SaaS – TechCrunch


Click here to view on the original site: Original Post



Moka, a startup that wants to make talent acquisition a little more data-driven for China-based companies that range from smartphone giant Xiaomi to Burger King’s local business, announced Monday that it has raised a 180 million yuan ($27 million) Series B round of funding.

The deal was led by Hillhouse Capital, an investor in top Chinese technology companies such as Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Pinduoduo — just to name a few. Other investors who took part include Xianghe Capital, an investment firm founded by two former Baidu executives, Chinese private equity firm GSR Ventures and GGV Capital. Moka claims more than 500 enterprise customers were paying for its services by the end of 2018. Other notable clients are McDonalds and one of China’s top livestreaming services YY. It plans to use its new capital to hire staff, build new products and expand the scope of its business. Founded Continue reading "Moka raises $27M led by Hillhouse to make hiring more data-driven in China"
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BetterCloud can now manage any SaaS application

This post is by Ron Miller from SaaS – TechCrunch


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BetterCloud began life as a way to provide an operations layer for G Suite. More recently, after a platform overhaul, it began layering on a handful of other SaaS applications. Today, the company announced, it is now possible to add any SaaS application to its operations dashboard and monitor usage across applications via an API.

As founder and CEO David Politis explains, a tool like Okta provides a way to authenticate your SaaS app, but once an employee starts using it, BetterCloud gives you visibility into how it’s being used. “The first order problem was identity, the access, the connections. What we’re doing is we’re solving the second order problem, which is the interactions,” Politis explained. In his view, companies lack the ability to monitor and understand the interactions going on across SaaS applications, as people interact and share information, inside and outside the organization. BetterCloud has been designed Continue reading "BetterCloud can now manage any SaaS application"
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SaaS stocks are coming back to life

This post is by Ron Miller from SaaS – TechCrunch


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Nasdaq’s BVP Emerging Cloud Index measures the performance of a portfolio of 45 SaaS stocks. Like much of the tech world, and the stock market in general, the final quarter of 2018 was not terribly kind. The good news is that there are signs of life.

On November 19th, SaaS stocks had a noteworthy bad day. Everything was down, way down. As we reported, some examples included:
  • Salesforce was down 8.7 percent to $121.01.
  • Box was down 6.93 percent to $16.66
  • Workday was down 7.57 percent to $124.07
  • Twilio was down 13.76 percent to $76.90
All of these stocks are part of that Emerging Cloud Index. That day, the index hit $792.95. It would not be the lowest point of 2018. That came about a month later, on December 21st, when it plunged to $778.39. Jason Lemkin, managing director at Continue reading "SaaS stocks are coming back to life"
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SAP agrees to buy Qualtrics for $8B in cash, just before the survey software company’s IPO

This post is by Catherine Shu from SaaS – TechCrunch


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Ryan Smith of Qualtrics speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015

Enterprise software giant SAP announced today that it has agreed to acquire Qualtrics for $8 billion in cash, just before the survey and research software company was set to go public. The deal is expected to be completed in the first half of 2019. Qualtrics last round of venture capital funding in 2016 raised $180 million at a $2.5 billion valuation.

This is the second-largest ever acquisition of a SaaS company, after Oracle’s purchase of Netsuite for $9.3 billion in 2016. In a conference call, SAP CEO Bill McDermott said Qualtrics’ IPO was already oversubscribed and that the two companies began discussions a few months ago. SAP claims its software touches 77 percent of the world’s transaction revenue, while Qualtrics’ products include survey software that enables its 9,000 enterprise users to gauge things like customer sentiment and Continue reading "SAP agrees to buy Qualtrics for $8B in cash, just before the survey software company’s IPO"
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Early-stage SaaS VC slip snaps recovery as public software stocks soar

This post is by Alex Wilhelm from SaaS – TechCrunch


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Jason Rowley Contributor
Jason Rowley is a venture capital and technology reporter for Crunchbase News.
More posts by this contributor

A few months ago, Crunchbase News reported that a longstanding period of SaaS investment stagnation had come to an end.

However, the investment boom times didn’t necessarily carry over to the seed and early-stage end of the subscription software businesses. The chart below displays deal and dollar volume of seed and early-stage venture investments1 made into companies from around the world in Crunchbase’s SaaS category. Note that it is subject to historically documented reporting delays, which are most pronounced in seed and early-stage deals. As can be plainly seen that Q3 2018 took quite a turn in terms of investment into SaaS. And it’s a bit bewildering as to why. Overall, the  Continue reading "Early-stage SaaS VC slip snaps recovery as public software stocks soar"
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Seva snares $2.4M seed investment to find info across cloud services

This post is by Ron Miller from SaaS – TechCrunch


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Seva, a New York City startup, that wants to help customers find content wherever it lives across SaaS products, announced a $2.4 million seed round today. Avalon Ventures led the round with participation from Studio VC and Datadog founder and CEO Olivier Pomel.

Company founder and CEO Sanjay Jain says that he started this company because he felt the frustration personally of having to hunt across different cloud services to find the information he was looking for. When he began researching the idea for the company, he found others who also complained about this fragmentation. “Our fundamental vision is to change the way that knowledge workers acquire the information they need to do their jobs from one where they have to spend a ton of time actually seeking it out to one where the Seva platform can prescribe the right information at the right time when and where
Continue reading "Seva snares $2.4M seed investment to find info across cloud services"